Inconsistent Tone

May 6, 2000

Oh, beautiful Saturday.

Congrats to John for his sale to the AS&S anthology! Whoo John!

Someone wrote and told me my background color makes reading these entries difficult; so I'm trying a different one. Plain white bores me, and I haven't time to make a fancier page with tables and such (nor, truthfully, do I know how to do that-- I do the HTML equivalent of hunt-and-peck).

This entry will follow my usual digressive mode. You've been warned.

I read Pratchett's Soul Music, his Phantom of the Opera novel. Granny Weatherwax is the best. She joins my (short) list of Other People's Characters About Whom I Would Like To Write A Story (Or Two). (The other characters on that list include Gaiman's Delirium and Howard Waldrop's duo, Bronco Billy and William S.). I'm reading Scott Baker's Night Child now, which is pretty cool (But the cover. Man. It's a Timescape novel, and they sometimes had bad covers, but this one's bad to the nth. It features people covering their nakedness, not with fig leafs, but with giant eyeballs. And that's just a tiny portion of the painting). Simultaneously reading Keyes' A Calculus of Angels. I'll let you know what I think when I've read more of it; I just started it today.

So anyway, what I intended to write about:

Last year at Clarion I undertook many Stylistic Experiments. Normally I write contemporary fantasy, but at Clarion I wanted to try different things, expand my repertoire, as it were. I wrote a science fiction story, of sorts (about which Mike Resnick said "Almost everything about this story is wrong"). I wrote a Sword and Sorcery story about a mean lady magician (ah, my classmates are wincing in rememberance-- they savaged that story, and rightfully so).

I attempted to write a humorous story, too.

I sometimes succeed in writing stories that are funny around the edges-- they have funny moments, funny bits, but they aren't head-on funny. So at Clarion I decided to try a real funny story. I wrote one about a Southern debutante who inadvertently becomes mistress of the Wild Hunt.

Heh. My classmates are prob'ly wincing again in recollection.

I took the rough draft (as if everything I presented at Clarion wasn't rough) to Tom Gerencer, our resident Funny, Funny Man, and he gave me some good advice. The story's failures are entirely my own doing, but I owe Tom a debt for the bits that worked. The class tore the story up, more or less, and I decided comedy was yet another kind of writing I wasn't so good at. That's okay; comedy's hard. I put the story in my trunk (I actually have a file folder on my computer called "Trunk"; I should call it "Malformed Story Heap", but anyway I digress (as promised))

Then last week I got to thinking about the story again. One criticism was that the main character reminded everyone of Cordelia from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. I intended her as a southern deb, not a valley girl, but apparently the similarities were vast (I've never seen Buffy, but I trust them). One suggestion was that I rewrite her with more attention to her Southerness. I dated a deb, I've known people like that all my life, I've been Southern all my life, so I took a lot of stuff for granted and it didn't come across well. I decided I could fix that in a rewrite.

Another complaint concerned the story's horrible, awful beginning. I wanted to get to the good bits when my protagonist becomes the Huntress, so I sort of rushed her into that position. The story's beginning sucked.

I decided this weekend that I could rewrite that, too, and I figured out how, and I did. That's what I did this afternoon-- wrote about 3000 all new words, replacing the whole front half of the story. Then I heavily revised the rest of it.

I think, tentatively, with full awareness of my blindness regarding a work so fresh (and yet so old!) that it's much, much better now. In addition, it's a lot deeper than it used to be; I think it has more resonance. It was intended originally as a pretty shallow, entertaining tale, but it did have some Ur-themes trying to crawl out of the slime (that ain't my line-- I stole it from John Sullivan), and I worked with those themes in the rewrite. The story's still supposed to be funny, but it's not as madcap and absurdist as it was.

See, reading Pratchett makes me want to be funny, too.

"What the hell's all that have to do with Inconsistent Tone?" you ask, pointing accusingly at the name of today's entry.

What indeed. One of the general critiques I received at Clarion concerned a trend in all my work toward inconsistent tone-- that is, I'd be funny on one page, serious on another, horrific on another, and so on.

My almost-reflexive first-reaction to that criticism is "Yeah, well, life has an inconsistent tone. One morning you're making goofball jokes, and that afternoon your dog gets hit by a truck, and that night you get mugged. Not consistent."

And of course that's true. And of course that's not what's meant by the criticism. What's meant is that the following (exaggerated example) is bad:

"Eh, Niles, why've you got a chicken in your pants?" Jethro asked, wondering if the poultry in question was alive or not, and separate from those questions, wondering whether eating it might lead to food poisoning, considering its current unclean location.

Before Niles could answer, a musket ball struck his head, sending fragments of gray matter splattering across the wall. Jethro looked numbly at his fallen friend, took an involuntary half-step toward him, and then turned to flee before the bandits could get him, too.

(But before he fled he picked up the chicken. He'd wipe it off later.)

Well, anyway, you prob'ly get the idea. Inconsistent Tone of a bad sort, there. This bears on the current point in that, by rewriting my Huntress story, I may have gotten some of that dreadful Inconsistent Tone. I think I pulled it off successfully, but not to put too fine a point on it, what the hell do I know? Especially about making things funny but still meaningful?

So I'm a little worried about that (so I had to ramble about how I'm worried about that, so you had to (got to, chose to) read about how I'm worried about that).

But I'm going to send the story out anyway. Because I love it. And because, well, Nothing Ventured and you know the rest.

I'm having a party tonight. I wish y'all could come.