Better Fiction: The Blog

I don't often plan out what I'm going to write, especially when I'm dealing with a short story. When I do, I'm just as likely to lose interest in the story as I am to actually complete it. Also, I find that I'm more creative once I'm exploring a concept or a scene, when I'm in the thick of a fictional situation and I see the setting, the characters, and the style emerge on the page. Then, I can begin to imagine some new direction the story might take.

I've learned to look back over what I've written and look for the characters, themes, and situations I've already set up to help me move forward. Until that obvious little insight hit me, moving on to the end often meant imagining something totally new--a new character, new location, new problem--which created an overly long story that was getting off track. Look back at where your story has been to see where it is going.

Of course, sometimes I do run into problems this way.

When I started rewriting the several pages of what had been intended as a novel set in China, now with the intent of turning it into a short story, my process worked well. I reordered some events, considered thematically what very different scenes had to do with each other, came to a unifying theme that suggested a direction and a climactic scene. The writing went well and I am happy with the result, expect for one thing. The "climactic scene" is a "come to realize" moment, and the main problems of the story are left unresolved.

I'm convinced now that the story needs a stronger ending--not instead of my "climactic scene" but in addition to it. For me, the story means nothing without that scene. It has to be there. But I also have to finish the story.

I've written two different endings, so far. Neither one works.

At the present, I'm starting a new job and will have to put this off for a few days. In the meantime, I'm hoping I'll unconsciously see the direction the story needs to go. It's already 7,500 words long. I don't have much more room before I write myself out of most markets.

Most of the time those who insist that we ALL need to plot out before we write don't know how the rest of us work. There critiques are misplaced. Not now.

This is that moment you may be right.

Wade

I'm back in China. Not literally, but my fiction has returned there, and it feels good.

After my dramatic blow-up with the speculative genres, I dug out the couple of chapters I had written in what was meant to be a novel set in China. I had abandoned the project but still liked what I had written so far. My current interest in getting back to a mainstream.literary mindset revived a determination to make something of the material, this time as a short story, and so far I think it's going well. It wants to be a crime story, and I'm okay with that.

Speaking of crime: Big Pulp has just purchased my story "Daddy's Will" for their summer issue. "Daddy's Will" is a little mystery I wrote with Roald Dahl in mind. In getting myself interested in a project, style can be as important as anything else, and I often have a goal in mind. With "The Station" (Haruah), I had noticed how Hemingway repeated words, something we usually avoid. In the upcoming "The Foal" (Creative Brothers' Science Fiction), I was pursuing a long-time goal to write something that might be called "agricultural science fiction". That desire grew out of a love for three great animal stories: Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea", Faulkner's "The Bear", and Steinbeck's "The Red Pony". In my estimation, Steinbeck's is the least of three, but it's also the one whose subject matter was most reflected in "The Foal".

I'm also beginning to realize that I have noir-ish feelings about China. "A Picture's Worth" (Distant Passages, volume 1) follows a man's decent toward murder, guided by jealousy and the haunting influence of Feng Shui. "Window Blind" (Mind Flights) had a slightly sci-fi edge to it, and focused on a woman haunted by her own surveillance equipment. As a theme it focused on lives being controlled by fear or love and ends as one of the most blatantly Christian works I've ever written. It is dark and bleak, and I should also not that it is not necessarily set in China. I kept it ambiguous because the point was not to pick on any particular government. My present work, currently titled "Down to the Land of Darkness" is a "Godfather"-esque story of being pulled down (and back) into the world of organized crime.

Can't wait to post the new story at the forum.

Wade Ogletree

I was in Shanghai when I received word that my story, "Window Blind", which is set in an unidentified Asian country, was accepted for publication in the Christian science fiction magazine, "Mindscapes". Though I was happy with the story early on, I have revisited it several times, not so much for artistic purposes as political ones. One of the concerns was the fairly mundane issue of its religious content being unpalatable for secular markets. My other concern was closer to home.

As I write this, my stories are of little consequence to this world, and that might never change. I am aware, however, that the Chinese government is concerned about its image, and the original version of the story would not have been taken well. Since we have family in China and travel back and forth at least every few years, I didn't want to publish something that would cause any difficulty.

The need to adapt the story in this way bothered me. After all, my intent was not to make any particular anti-Chinese government statement. I could have set the story in America's near future, and the point of the story, and it cultural comments, would have remained the same. Still, I knew changes had to be made.

At first, I removed specific references to any particular Asian country, believing I could make the setting more generic. I don't think that was too successful. Eventually, though, I adopted a solution that I think served the story well.

"Window Blind" is a blending of the types of fiction I usually write, being both crime fiction and mundane science fiction. I chose to emphasize the futuristic aspect and bring in Christen speculative standards by setting it at a time when the country in which the story is set is on the brink of joining a fledgling world government referred to as the Global Community. Thus the much of the controversial aspects involved could be shifted off of the local government without jeopardizing my setting or story.

Now I have one more concern. There is so much that I just didn't understand about this country, and so much more that I know I need to learn. I'd made a few trips to Hong Kong, but this was my first mainland experience. Getting their viewpoint of their own history has been eye-opening.

Lately, the news at home as been abuzz with the views of a certain preacher who sees the United States as if nothing had changed in the last forty years. Those of us who have been baffled by his beliefs admit that America is not perfect, but neither are we stuck in the 1960's forever. Just as that is true at home, it is true here. We cannot allow our views of China to be mired in its own history.

As science fiction, the story stands, but any connection with this story and present-day China would be a mistake.

Our guide asked me how I could write stories set in China, if I don't live here. My answer was, "I make mistakes." He talked about his interest in seeing how others saw his country, and I confessed that was probably my biggest concern: people assuming that the view of a location presented in a work of fiction is a good representative of how the author sees that location. In traditional Chinese painting, the artist does not try to correctly reproduce what he sees. Instead, he is trying to capture a feeling. The writer does something similar. The setting for much of fiction is now about holding a mirror up to life. (We often shade the world darker than it is for crime fiction, for example.) Instead, the setting grounds the story and gives it a sense of reality, but reality is selectively presented to give a certain atmosphere to the story.

Perhaps I can only speak for myself, but I do not write to capture a certain area so much as I want to use that area to capture something about humanity. I do not write about the Chinese, Europeans, or any other group, I write about people, and I depend upon the belief that our differences illustrate how we are alike.

Wade Ogletree

This is a reprint from the lost Better Fiction Blog. "Window Blind" can now be read in the archives of Mind Flights.

We had a layover in Tokyo on the way to Hong Kong. As we approached the airport, the plane banked into a turn, giving us a great view of a giant standing Buddha. I plan on focusing on idolatry in the next book, not so much for its own sake, but as my way of approaching religion as a whole and Christianity in particular.

That explains why, on our only full day in Hong Kong, we returned to Lantau Island to visit the Lo Pin Buddhist Monastery and the largest, copper, outdoor, sitting Buddha in the world.

We first visited the Monastery eight or nine years ago. Back then, an old school bus drove us along a cliff-side road which was too narrow for one vehicle but was being used for two-way traffic. Visions of tragic headlines kept popping into my head, and newspapers out here can be fairly graphic in the pictures they publish. The island, when we could forget our fear and enjoy it, was lush and green and beautiful. Largely undeveloped, Lantau Island was the home of fishing villages and a couple of monasteries. Nothing else.

We disembarked from the bus and entered a large court area with a round pavilion at its center. The pavilion faced a hill and 251 steps, plus several plateaus, which led us up to the copper Buddha with the swastika in his chest. The swastika is, of course, an ancient symbol which the Nazis turned around and transformed into something else. Still, considering that the Buddha was built in 1982, I was surprised to find the symbol in such prominent use. It shows, I guess, a people moving forward with their own traditions and not allowing the horrors of the Third Reich to rob that from them.

The view of the valley from the base of the Buddha was breathtaking, and I found it such a shame that this idol should be erected, honored, and worshiped in the midst of the glory of the true God's creation. Beyond the pavilion we could see the public areas of the monastery itself, but we did not venture in that direction.

Instead, once off the hill, we took a meandering path that at times passed beneath a canopy of trees toward the promise of food: the Tea Garden Restaurant. The restaurant turned out to be roughly constructed cement building with outside seating that mostly consisted of Formica relics from the fifties. The location was quiet and attractive though, set against a small tea tree orchard. We enjoyed a tofu dish shaped like a fish, and then braved the bus ride back.

Today, things are different. The monks raised the money for and built the Buddha to attract pilgrims. The tourists were a surprise, but for years the crowds were manageable. Not too many cared to make the journey. In the movie, "The Family Stone", the main character tells his family about the giant Buddha. He had wanted to make the trek out to see it while in Hong Kong, but never did. The writer of the movie definitely had the old journey in mind, when the trip itself could be seen as something of a pilgrimage.

Flash forward to the present. We walked from our hotel to the closest transit station, and bought our tickets for the trip to Lantau. The line parallels the one to the airport for the most part until it ends in Tong Chung, which consists of a large number of sky-scraping apartments, a huge bus terminal, and the cable car depot. You still have the option of taking a bus to the Buddha, although the buses we saw were modern luxury models, not the elementary school leftovers from before. Most people, however, take the cable cars which travel across the small bay between the airport and Lantau and then up the pointed peaks to newly constructed Ngong Ping.

The government has successfully transformed the Buddha into a major tourist attraction. The cable car facility was the first evidence of what I would soon call the Disneyfication of Hong Kong. This Disneyfication will come up again, so I better define it now: modern, clean, industrial-strength, and without reason to exist beyond the tourists it serves with a sterile, safe, durable, cute and maybe even cartoony representation of the culture the masses have come to see and may never realize that they missed. The grossest example of this, however, in Ngong Ping itself, a village-like mall with Siddartha-land shows, a Starbucks, and everything else the lucky tourist could need, including an exit-path gift shops in both cable-car stations. As your gondola enters the Ngong Ping station, a camera takes your picture, like in any theme-park ride.

The whole things is very attractive, and it nearly compelled the monks to leave. In 2002 they threatened to do just that if the government refused to be more responsive to their concerns. That got the government's attention; the promise of compromise was given, and, today, the monks seek enlightenment in a theme park.

Whatever else I say, however, the cable-car ride was wonderful, and it succeeded it bringing me back. If the trip were still made by bus, I never would have risked it a second time.

The sharp range of mountains (or are they hills?) rise up in a green procession until they disappear in the low-lying clouds. The winds were strong, but the car remained stable, despite what I had previously read. On the trip in, we could see a few people wading out far into the shallow bay, but we could not tell what they were collecting. Whatever it was, they searched in the waters by hand and kept their prizes in floating Styrofoam coolers they drug behind them. From our vantage point, we saw the clouds of sediment they stirred up, marking their paths all the way to the shore. On the trip back, the tide had pulled out, and now dozens of people had gathered, doing the same.

Other than Ngong Ping, Lantau remains lush and undeveloped. The trip is breath-taking as you look back at the airport, out across the sea, down to the bay, or at the tree covered hills, catching sight of streams and occasional water falls and marveling at the stone path which provides a walkway for the brave and healthy.

Once you leave Ngong Ping, you cross the bus area and enter the square before you realize it. Once inside, we were in areas still controlled by the monks, and if anything had changed, I could not be certain. This time we entered the base of the Buddha to view the mural-told story of Siddartha. I was tempted to walk upstairs to see the two relics the pilgrims come to worship, but that would have taken the trip beyond my comfort level. We did, however, enter the public areas of the Monastery this time, and saw the faithful light their gigantic sticks of incense. Further inside were more gaudy statues where people knelt and prayed, and then several eating areas.

Longing for something familiar, we took the wisdom path through the same green canopy and along a barb-wired security fence that separated the public and private areas of the monastery until we came to the Tea Garden Restaurant. Not wanting to eat, we stopped and ordered drinks and then tried our hands at the Lucky Pot. The pot is filled with water. If you do it correctly, you can rub the handles and created a splashing water show with the vibrations.

Meanwhile, another family ate the fish-shaped tofu dish we had ordered years before.

Much of the old still remains around the monastery, and by old I do not mean antique. I mean dirty, poor, and falling apart. It was just enough to bring some reality to the time-induced patina that had colored my memory. In the end, I recommend going if you can do so without offending your conscience. Enjoy every touristy bit. Failing to do so won't bring the old ways back.

Things continue to change, which is the hardest aspect of writing about areas beyond your own front door. We must either set our stories in the location and in the time in which we knew it, or we must somehow become reacquainted.

Often, the reader's ability to work with the writer can get me out of a number tight places. For example, the style of the transit cars vary depending on what line your are on. Yet, I do not remember which cars belong to which lines. Does it matter? No. There are aspects that all the Hong Kong transit trains/subways have in common, and aspects they share with similar trains all over the world. The reader will do a marvelous job of filling in the the blanks. The reader who has been here before, will fill in those blanks in a more educated fashion, and probably not realize the blanks were even there. The world the story evokes in his mind is what he will remember of the book, and in the end, he will credit me for accurate descriptions that I never truly made.

Don't believe me? Think of any scene from any book, and then go back to the book and really pay attention to what the words actually say, rather than the image they evoke. As writers, we describe less than most people realize. The reader does half the work for us. When the writer forgets this and believes he has to do all the work, he overburdens the text and loses his readers attention.

Wade Ogletree (reprinted from the lost blog)

I've been getting some hits from old links to my China trip postings. I'm sure that raises the question: What happened to them?

I updated the blog and lost everything.

Still, I've been meaning to post what I was able to save. Let's start here, and I'll plan on posting another China-trip memoir every Sunday.

Somewhere In Time

Suddenly, I'm left to wonder how Stardates worked in the various Star Trek series. Are their Time Zones in space? Is their an Intergalactic Dateline? Perhaps that's what Einstein was referring to as he postulated the relativity of time at speeds approaching the speed of light.

I write this while flying coach somewhere above the Pacific. The man in front of me is reclined, so I have the computer screen in my lap and the keyboard pressed flat against my stomach. It feels less like I'm typing and more like I'm playing the accordion.

It is now 7:30 tomorrow morning. Actually, I have no idea what time it is here, wherever this is. But it's tomorrow where I'm going.

I spent the night in L.A. because we missed our connecting flight to Hong Kong by eight minutes. Some Memphis utility had scheduled the airport for a black out which was supposed to end at 4 AM. When we arrived there around seven, the power was still out. That delayed the flight to L.A., and you know the story from there.

Anyway, my adventures in modern transportation explain the sleep deprivation I wrote about several days ago. I didn't want to mention it then, because I would have still been out of town. Attention thieves: I am now home. This particular post, published May 22nd, was written, is being written, on May 1st.

Time is a funny thing right now.

I'll be keeping a series of journals on this trip, in hopes of feeding my next novel: one handwritten; one for my computer; and another for this blog. I'll save the details of the trip for another post, when I'm actually typing and not playing polka with my Compaq.

Being in Los Angeles for the night gave me some time to check in at Better Fiction. One of the members there asked about screenplays, and, in looking up resources to pass along, I came across the screenplay to Pulp Fiction. I read more than half of it before I had to get ready for the flight.

I remember when the movie came out and was so popular with the critics, the Christian community held it up as Hollywood's obsession with violence—bemoaning the fact that Pulp Fiction got all the attention while the movie the people went to see was The Lion King. I'm not going to defend the violence, drug use, or sexually explicit language of Pulp Fiction. I haven't seen it in years because I don't watch that kind of film, anymore, but I did see it at the time. More than once.

We (now that I would count myself among that "we") never did ourselves any good by comparing Pulp Fiction to Lion King. King may have been the most successful animated film of its time, but artistically, the story structure was a mess. Pulp Fiction, for all its sins, was beautifully constructed. We don't have to approve of all works of art, nor read or view them, but their moral value does not define their artistic worth, especially in this increasingly post-Christian world.

I'll tell you what it's like when we deny the artistic value of a work based on its objectionable moral content. It's like that health guru who tried to tell me that a diet ice cream bar was every bit as good as the Haagen Dazs. Who did he think he was kidding? Now, in the last few years I've discovered an organic bar by Julies' that is a knock out. It's organic, not diet, and it is every bit as good if not better. But the diet bar? Please!

It's not that we, as Christians, cannot make art. We can, but being morally sound does not increase the artistic value. If there is value within the piece, however, its soundness will allow those of moral character to participate in the enjoyment of the work.

(Here, I'm writing from the viewpoint of a shared moral code based in Christianity, but as far as this discussion goes, I believe it holds true for any shared moral basis.)

We need to be honest in judging the merits of art. No, we don't have to watch or read Pulp Fiction. I wouldn't recommend doing so. In the works we do read and view, however, we only hurt ourselves to overstate their artistic value.

Besides, as my mother likes to point out, Lion King is a violent film.

I plan to include some reviews in this blog. Some will be by others, and I will have no control over what they say. For me, I intend to be honest in my reviews. A review that can't be honest isn't a review; it's a commercial.

There is no theory of relativity regarding morality and art—at least not here, somewhere over the Pacific, where it may or may not still be today. If we are going to produce godly works of true artistic merit, we're going to have to work at it, and we're going to have to be honest about the results.

Wade Ogletree