Dear Fiction Writers of Today: Revise!

Dear fiction writers of today,

I love to read, and I would love to read your stories, but I need your help.

When you revise your manuscripts, when you cut out all material that is needlessly repetitive, wastefully superfluous, when you reduce five hundred words to one hundred, please pay a similar attention to grammar and usage, to the sound and meaning of your sentences, and to the unblocked, immersive flow of your narratives.

In too many stories of today, I find ambiguous modifiers, ambiguous antecdents, and even, within multiple clauses, ambiguous subjects.

I see the misapplication of too many present participles, when what you need is the simple past tense. You might also be tempted to support a weak verb with a present participle afterthought, but what you actually need is a lively main verb.

If you choose your nouns and verbs for precision and for vivid clarity, you will find less need for adjectives and adverbs, for subordinate clauses that prop up the main clause in the ways that flying buttresses prop up cathedrals.

Explain when you must, but only when you must. Readers are smart enough to understand implication. They know that when you say 2+2, what you actually mean is four. You can also rely on a reader's empathy. Set up conditions for an emotional response, for epiphany, and a reader will feel it. You have no need to spell out the obvious.

When you place a reader inside your story as a participant guided by a consistently-maintained viewpoint character, when you allow this reader to follow events without interruption, just as your viewpoint character would, when you allow the reader to be disturbed or surprised by the same discoveries made by this character at the same time, then you have a strong chance of hooking this reader's attention. A reader grabbed is a reader who keeps on reading.

Revise with a reader's ear. Revise aloud. This allows you to catch unwanted alliteration, unwanted assonance, end rhymes in clauses or sentences, repetitive rhythms, and ugly, clashing consonants. Always assume that your readers will hear this noise, and run away from it as they would from a mistuned marching band.

Sir Thomas Browne. Line engraving by P. Vanderbank, 1683. Click for a better jpeg.

Please note that these recommendations can apply to any style. You might cut without mercy for a style as naked as the writing of H. E. Bates, Edith Wharton, or Sarah Orne Jewett; you might construct and paint a style as ornate as Clark Ashton Smith's, Elizabeth Bowen's, or William Sansom's. Either way is fine, as long as you control the result. For a non-fiction example, think of Thomas Browne. You might raise an eyebrow at his latinate vocabulary, but notice how he relies on verbs to propel the sentences. Notice how his clauses remain clear despite their boxes-within-boxes complexity. No matter how complicated his prose might become, Browne maintains control.

The means of control are the basic principles mentioned here, and these controls will help you to find and to keep readers.

You will also keep me, with my gratitude.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT: Serial Versus Film

Cover by Bryan Kneale, 1960. Click for a better jpeg.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967) is by no means a bad film, and if accepted on its own terms, it could easily be considered good. Yet despite its virtues, for me, it cannot match the scope and unsettling mood of its television source.

Broadcast in six episodes by the BBC from 1958 to 1959, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT remains one of the best TV serials I have watched; only I, CLAUDIUS and CHERNOBYL have rivalled it.

The Hammer Film adaptation does what it can to honour the source, and at certain points, it compares favourably. Roy Ward Baker directs crowd and panic sequences with all of the skill he had displayed in 1958's A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (by far the best Titanic film I have seen). Lead actors Andrew Keir and James Donald are as good as Andre Morell and Cec Linder, their counterparts in the TV serial, and I would hardly be surprised if many viewers preferred the film leads.

Andrew Keir. Click for a better jpeg.

Yet even with its lower budget and limited technical resources, the TV serial comes across as the "bigger" production, with a huge cast, and with visual effects often better than those used in the film. In particular, the design and construction of the TV aliens go far beyond anything seen in the film, and they come to life more convincingly in the serial's "optic-encephalograph" sequence.

Above all, the TV serial gains from its extended running time of three-and-a-half hours. Nigel Kneale was always at his best when he had room to explore the implications of his ideas. That was true in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT serial, but even more so in the TV version of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. In six episodes, Kneale took a small event and then built upon it, built upon it, built upon it, until it involved nothing less than the fate of humanity. The film version does what it can with Kneale's ideas, but seems rushed and cramped in comparison, with less time to linger on the sinister details. The film is also forced to toss away much of the serial's nuance, those elegant moments when Kneale played with ideas for unexpected results. (A case in point: what Quatermass finds in the serial's pit is intriguingly more elaborate, more strange, than what he finds in the film.)

Andre Morell and Cec Linder. Click for a better jpeg.

The serial brought other advantages. Kneale's Quatermass plays were novels for television, with varied characters from different walks of life squabbling, cooperating, and horribly dying; the film cannot match the scope of Kneale's original. The music of Trevor Duncan works more effectively in the serial than does the music of Tristram Carey in the film. The coda of the serial, which provides a haunting final statement of the story's point, was cut from the film, and the result feels like a missing tooth to a questing tongue.

In the end, viewers who come to the film without knowledge of the TV serial (or of Kneale's published teleplay), will most likely find a lot to appreciate, but I love the scale and sinister details of the TV serial too much to accept the film on its own terms. That is my limitation; it might not be yours.

Chant Of The PMC Media

Under the dripping upas tree,
I scapegoat you, you scapegoat me.
Mired from sea to boiling sea,
We kiss the feet of the DNC.

Biden-Harris, Genocide, and the Failure of Democrats to See Their Own Evils

For me, perhaps the most bizarre and disturbing behaviour of the Democrats is their denial of genocide, their failure to recognize genocide as a crime against humanity, their willingness to shrug off the atrocities of genocide because those in the Biden-Harris administration supporting and arming genocide are "not Trump."

This might be the most appalling evil committed by the Democrats during my lifetime.

Its previous rivals were bad enough. Democrats gave us the National Security Act of 1947. Democrats gave us the war against Vietnam. Democrats approved Reagan's NAFTA and destroyed America's industrial base. Democrats abandoned the American working- and middle-classes to bow before the professional managerial class. Democrats worked with neocon Republicans to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats worked with market-fundamentalist Republicans to financialize the American economy and to wipe out the United States as an economic world power. Democrats armed and supplied cash to the Zelensky regime in a proxy war against Russia. Democrats broke diplomatic ties with Russia, alienated China, and reinforced the necessity of BRICS for countries appalled by American dishonesty and stupidity.

All of these actions have led to political-economic isolation at home, and to a pile of corpses abroad. All of these actions are evil. But now, the Biden-Harris administration has gone even further, and the result is an Israeli genocide that Democrats apparently consider "normal" and "forgivable."

The world will not forgive. Whether American voters will forgive remains to be seen.

"But Trump! But Trump!" the Democrats will cry, as they have in recent years. What they fail to understand is that, to beat Trump and the Republicans, they must offer something more than Trump and the Republicans could even begin to promise: substantial improvements to the material conditions of American's lives; moral and ethical principles worth supporting; hope for a world that is not poised on the abyss of endless wars, unstoppable decline, and a towering stack of dead bodies.

In short, the Democrats would have done well to examine themselves, to correct their own policies and their own failings, but Democrats would rather blame everyone else on the planet than see themselves clearly.

And for this, Americans will suffer.

Trump vs Harris vs Republicans vs Democrats vs Americans

Scylla, meet Charybdis.

Charybdis, meet Scylla.

Americans, meet entropy

And please accept my sympathy.