Tony Ballantyne

Year’s Best SF 18 (ed. Hartwell)

My story “If Only… ” appears in this collection. The story originally appeared in Nature 489, 170 (06 September 2012)

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Six Tips on Showing not Telling

Remember, the reader isn’t stupid; you don’t have to explain everything. They’ll probably understand what you’re getting at.
Describe effects, not causes: she shivered not she was cold
Unless you happen to be a Victorian novelist, there’s no need to describe everything in a scene.
Writing about how characters react is often better than simply stating. The smell of the eggs made him feel sick is better than He didn’t like eggs
If you don’t know the meaning of pragmatics, Google it. Now use that when writing conversations.
Finally, don’t tie yourself in knots. Sometimes it’s okay just to tell.

Six tips for Writing Character

Giving a character a colourful hat or a stammer does not make them into a character. It may fix them in the reader’s mind, which can be a good thing, but it won’t give them a character
Don’t be arbitrary. Some people construct characters by putting together a list of contradictions. You end up with a character that is original, but it won’t seem authentic.
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to capture every passing character in detail. Focus on what’s interesting.
Some people accuse others of the faults they see in themselves. Do your characters do that?
Characters come alive in their interactions with other characters. Does one character irritate another, annoy them, make them laugh, make them jealous… ?
Even better: what do your characters think of each other? How do your characters talk about other characters currently off page?

Connoisseurs

Everyone’s a connoisseur nowadays. Patisserie, whiskey, cheese: all the little pleasures in life are seen not be enough, they need to be ranked and properly appreciated. You can’t just enjoy a bar of chocolate any more; it has to be 85% cacao and handmade by a master chocolatier.

When she was about 3, some friends of mine saw my daughter eat a piece of 85% cacao chocolate (they didn’t see her spit it out afterwards) and were impressed by this, for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. If anyone had asked me I would have said I was prouder of the fact that I’d managed to train her to use a knife and fork at the table to eat most of what was given to her. I’d have been more impressed with myself if I’d managed to develop her palate to the point where she’d eat cabbage without complaining.

Being a connoisseur is the new gluttony. CS Lewis wrote about something similar in The Screwtape Letters. Being a connoisseur means rejecting perfectly good pleasures in pursuit of something better.

Worse, though, being a connoisseur means being blown about by the vagaries of fashion. What is regarded as good whiskey today was seen as being second rate 50 years ago. Being a connoisseur isn’t about recognising what’s good and bad – there’s good SF and bad SF, and I hope I write the good stuff – but it’s about identifying the smallest possible subset of the good and rejecting the rest.

Marketing people love this, it allows them to distinguish between brands. Shops love it, it means they can charge higher prices. We’re fools to fall for it.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. We’re snobs to think otherwise.

Working to Deadlines

If you’ve been reading this blog you will be aware that in between Marching to Time I’ve been writing a serial, Cosmopolitan Predators! for Aethernet Magazine.

Aethernet Magazine was launched so that readers could rediscover the joys of serial fiction. One side effect has been that the writers are rediscovering the joys of writing to deadlines. Take, for example, Ian Whates who pulled out all the stops to complete the final part of The Smallest of Things in style, or Juliet E McKenna whose fascinating take on the process of writing The Ties that Bind is detailed here on her blog.

What has my experience been like?

I went into Cosmopolitan Predators! with the story half planned. This is my usual way of writing. I find if I’ve planned a story in too great detail I lose interest in writing it, besides which, my stories tend to have a habit of wandering off course when the characters take on a life of their own. Even so, my original aim was to keep two episodes ahead of the current issue, and I’m now barely one issue ahead. This is not so bad, as I tend not to write stories in a linear fashion but rather in a random order: filling in scenes that interest me here and there and adding them to the finished piece or dropping them as the mood takes me. This means that as deadlines approach I find that I’ve already got half the story written.

But what about the deadlines? I like to follow my subconscious – my muse clearly has a butterfly mind, but nothing focuses her attention like a deadline. Cosmopolitan Predators! is a better story for being written to a deadline, I’m sure of it.

Deadlines are a writer’s friend. Deadlines focus the mind. Deadlines get you writing. Deadlines are the difference between a completed novel and three years spent with nothing more than a file detailing your imaginary world and no actual story to speak of.

I sold my first SF short story ten months after I made an agreement with myself to write one 2000 word story a month. I wrote my first novel after making an agreement with myself to have it completed by the end of 2002. I only wrote Dream London, my first Fantasy novel, after realising that if I didn’t set a deadline I would just keep on piling up ideas indefinitely.

And now the deadlines on Cosmopolitan Predators! are bringing out the best and the worst in me. Have you read the latest episode? I originally had that final line pencilled in for the end of the penultimate episode. But as the deadline for Episode 7 approached something began bubbling inside me and little voice whispered “Do it now! Shoot him now!”

“But that’s too soon!” my sensible self replied.

“No it’s not. Listen to your subconscious. You know you should.”

So I did. And I think it was right. I got Episode 7 finished and I’m now working on Episode 8. All the balls of the plot have been thrown in the air and I’m working to catch them in their new order and go on juggling, but my subconscious is having a great time and my sensible self is reluctantly agreeing that it was right.

I just hope I can rely on it as the next deadline approaches…

21st Century Science Fiction

Featuring “The Waters of Meribah” by Tony Ballantyne (Originally published in Interzone 189)

One of the most creepily memorable stories in modern SF

-David G Hartwell

Buy on Amazon UK | Buy on Amazon US

A bumper crop of 34 stories from authors who first came to prominence in the 21st century, compiled by two of the most highly respected editors in the business….Grab this book. Whether newcomer or old hand, the reader will not be disappointed.

–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In my more than 40 years working in the science fiction publishing industry, I’ve seen this notion crop up every 10 years or so: ‘Science fiction has exhausted itself. There are no good new writers coming along anymore. The genre is finished!’ Tor editors Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden thoroughly refute such claims….Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will certainly be recognized as one of the best reprint science fiction anthologies of the year, and it belongs in the library of anyone who is interested in the evolution of the genre.

–Gardner Dozois

Follow this link for more short stories by Tony Ballantyne

Civillian Reader Interview

In case you missed it: Civilian Reader Interview

Part of the Dream London Blog Tour.

Writing Tools

Charles Stross has written an interesting polemic about Why Microsoft Word must Die over on his blog.

I broadly agree with him. But this post isn’t to dwell on what’s wrong with Word, but rather to look at the alternatives.

Replacing Word is easy. I’ve used LibreOffice (and its predecessor, OpenOffice) Writer for around 7 years now with few problems. Neither my publisher nor my collaborators appear to be aware of the fact that I’m not using Word, which makes me wonder why people say that Word is essential. The sort of demands placed on a Word Processor when producing text based manuscripts are not particularly heavy. I suspect an unwillingness to move away from Word is down to fear of the unknown rather than any solid reason.

The advantages of LibreOffice are that it’s free, it’s Open Source (if that’s important to you), and it’s sufficiently similar to Word to make the transition quite straightforward. As an added bonus is it doesn’t have the Microsoft ribbon toolbar which I find irritating to say the least.

Of course, as Charlie points out, Word and LibreOffice don’t lend themselves to extended pieces of writing. More and more writers are switching to software that allows you to structure your writing, a common example being Scrivener. I’m a great believer in such tools.

Emacs and org-mode is one such tool. I discovered org-mode for Emacs in 2008. I wouldn’t recommend Emacs to everyone, but I find it the ideal application for planning, structuring, writing and editing. I’ve written my last three novels using org-mode, exporting the finished products to odt (Libreoffice) format when I’ve finished. You can find out more about my Emacs writing set up by following this link. Aethernet Magazine is also produced using org-mode. The magazine is marked up using org-mode codes and then exported to html for conversion to mobi format using kindlegen. There’s more about Emacs over on my tech blog.

Finally, I use the Evernote App on my phone to record notes and pictures. I’m a great believer in getting ideas and dialogue down “fresh”. They’re never as good if you try to recreate them later. I’m actually writing nearly fully realised scenes now on Evernote, line by line, as the mood hits me.

Take a look at my monthly series How Writers Write to see other writer’s setups