ArtSF – Tony Ballantyne

It’s beginning to look a lot like…

… Bad Christmas Movies

My family love bad Christmas movies.

I don’t mean bad Christmas movies like Love Actually where they have the time and budget to allow the cast to do their thing and then to edit the thing properly at the end. (Many things irritate me about this film, but I love the scene where Rowan Atkinson takes forever to wrap a Christmas present.)

Nor am I talking about bad bad Christmas movies where cast and crew are are just going through the motions.

No, I’m talking about good bad Christmas movies. The sort of movie which has all the ingredients, they just don’t have time and budget to put them together properly. The sort of film where the script talks about the evil Bolton Brothers who run an evil business, but the budget only runs to one of them showing up on screen.

What I love about these films is that they understand what the audience wants and they try to deliver it.

There’s a female lead who hasn’t had a relationship for some time.

She has a best friend who tells her to put herself out there and so she heads off to a small town (possibly her home town, possibly a town in New England or Scotland, occasionally a village near a castle in a small Kingdom in Europe)

The clock starts ticking, counting down to Christmas day.

The lead meets a Prince, a Lord or a Duke in disguise. If none are available she’ll settle for a handsome carpenter who is good with kids.

For some reason there will be a baking competition.

On Christmas Eve, it will start to snow.

And then she will realise she has met her man.

I have no problem with films that follow a structure. The first stories I placed were romances, sold to UK women’s magazines.

I learned a lot by writing them: if two people are going to fall in love in a romance, you have to make them attractive both to the reader and each other. Beginner writers, when confronted by something difficult (and getting your characters right is difficult) have a habit of dodging this by changing the structure.

Changing the structure can be fantastic, but not in this case.

I saw a film called Hot Frosty recently.

In it, a lonely woman builds a snowman who comes to life. He’s a good looking guy, totally ripped with great abs. The other women are jealous of this Hot Frosty.

And all I could think was, why don’t they build their own snowman? What if they did, and the town was suddenly filled with hot snowmen? What would the regular men do?

But this wasn’t a bad SF film. It was a bad Christmas movie. People watching this film (and I include myself in this) didn’t want internal logic. If they did they wouldn’t be watching a film where a snowman came to life.

If you’re looking for some ideas on what to write over the coming weeks, then I would recommend the following: write a straight love story. Or given the time of year, write a Christmas love story. Learn the structure and follow it. It’s excellent practice.

The Arctic-Alpine Pea Mussel

I heard the Arctic-Alpine pea mussel mentioned on Radio 4 earlier this week when they were discussing the three thousand species in Wales that now exist in five places or fewer. I don’t want to diminish the struggles of the pea mussel but I couldn’t help but think it might not be so endangered if it weren’t quite so picky about its choice of ecosystem.

Or maybe not. Thinking about it, I suppose there are lots of cold streams in high up places. The name tells you something about the creature.

Rather like the glutinous snail, which I heard mentioned on the same program. At first, I thought I’d misheard this one so I looked it up. It wasn’t mentioned in the accompanying article, but after a little more googling I found an article about the snail here.

Reading about creatures like these doesn’t make me wonder why writers bother to invent aliens and fantasy creatures. There are very good reasons for this which I’ve talked about elsewhere, and I’m sure I’ll talk about in the future.

But it does make me wonder yet again why writers make up names.

If a group of glutinous snails have just slithered down the ramp of their flying saucer and demanded to be taken to our leader, why would they confidently announce that they were the K’Kzzlia?

They’re snails. They don’t have tongues and teeth. They wouldn’t have the ability to make K and Z sounds. They do, however, have the ability to build a machine that can translate their language into English (assuming they’ve landed in an English speaking country). So why doesn’t that machine just introduce them as the Glutinous Snail People of Betelgeuse 5?

I hate made up names. They’re overused by beginner writers to lend an air of exoticism to their world building. They end up just confusing people. Worse, they muffle the drama.

I quickly become bored reading stories where Oolma rides a Vlurp through the gates of Mlzra in search of the stolen Glevar of the Throom. Wouldn’t it be far more exciting to say that Emma rides a horse through the gates of the dungeon in search of the stolen daughter of the King? Call your smeerp a rabbit and have done with it.

The thing about most exotic names is that they aren’t actually very exotic. I thought that Suidobashi in Tokyo sounded enchantingly strange when I stayed there. It turns out that Suidobashi just means aqueduct bridge.

And as every expectant parent poring over lists of baby names knows, everyday names can have some rather exotic meanings.

For example, Tony means “priceless one” or “highly praiseworthy”.

That seems about right to me.

Why Loving Unfashionable Art Can Lead to Success

I rather like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work.

On the rare occasions I mention this most people feel the need to tell me they don’t like his music. There are two possible subtexts to their comments, either they’re telling me that I’m wrong in liking his stuff, or they’re telling me that they have better taste than I do.

Anyway, I recently read and enjoyed Unmasked, his autobiography. It gave me something to think about.

Near the beginning of the book, Lloyd Webber describes how he was always uncool. He liked musicals when they were out of fashion and, in particular, he liked Rogers and Hammerstein when the critics were slating their work. (I love Richard Rogers’ music even now). As a child, Lloyd Webber’s other interests were Victorian Art and Medieval architecture, both also desperately uncool at the time. At one point he describes the moment he first heard the Beatles and he realises that his street cred had just gone into negative.

Even so, he still loved musicals. You’ve got to really love something to keep pushing yourself on whilst everyone else is turning their nose up at what you’re doing. If you’re just doing something because you think it’s cool you’re never going to be more than half-hearted about it at best.

That thought led me to wonder if people who like unfashionable stuff are more likely to succeed. Not because what they like is unfashionable, but rather because the fact that it’s unfashionable doesn’t bother them.

I love SF and have done as far back as I remember. My mother was a fan, and she introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as Star Trek and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I can’t say my friends ever laughed at me about it when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation back then. I was an SF fan long before I was a writer.

But I think I realised while reading his book that I’ve never loved SF as much as Lloyd Webber loves musicals.

He always loved musicals, he always wanted to write musicals and so he set out to do just that. True, he had the family and connections to help him succeed, but he was single minded in that pursuit.

Good for him.

P.S. The image attached to this post came from Pexels free photos. I searched for cool and stylish and that’s what came up. I don’t want the model thinking I’m calling them uncool. Far from it. That’s their thing. Let them do it.

And through the wire…

A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.

I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.

Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…

I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.

It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.

I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.

The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.

Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.

When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.

Have I mentioned going for a walk recently?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

It’s a good idea in one sense. I read a lot of opening chapters by beginner writers (and to be fair, some very experienced ones) that are nothing more than pages and pages of world building. This is particularly true in Fantasy and SF where the world they are describing is unknown to the reader.

World building is great fun if you’re a writer, it’s deadly dull to the reader. There is no conflict, no action, no story in other words.

So yes, why not start with a fight? It gives you a chance to show off your writing chops, examining the emotions, building the tension, having the bad guys seem to be on the point of victory than the hero turns it around at the last minute and wins through…

Except it usually doesn’t work. To care about a fight, you’ve got to care for the people taking part, and if this is the start of the novel and you’ve only just met them, then you’re not emotionally invested in them yet. You don’t really care who wins.

It’s not so bad in a historical novel when you may have an inkling that you’re on the side of, for example, the Allies and not the Nazis, but what chance have you got in a Fantasy novel where the Alfari are fighting the Volana? (And why have you used those words for their names?)

Even worse, what if the bad guys aren’t bad guys at all, but animals? I’ve read a surprising number of stories which begin with the hero successfully fighting off an attack by wolves (or smeerps). I’m not sure that killing a lot of wolves establishes a character’s hero credentials. Wolves aren’t evil, they’re just doing their job. And all the hero has done is save their own skin. All I’ve learned from such a scene is that the hero is good with a sword. I’m reserving judgement on whether I have any sympathy with them.

If you’re dead set on having a fight at the opening, make sure you establish whose side we’re on. You could give clues of course. The opening of the original Star Wars film does this well. It uses visual clues to establish who the bad guys are: the really big bully spaceship chasing the little one, one side wearing masks and killing without mercy. Then there is the use of trigger words like Empire. Empires in these sorts of stories are nearly always evil. This works, but it’s difficult, and it goes to demonstrate the following point:

It’s really hard to start a novel. Your aim is to establish who is who, what they want and what’s stopping them. A fight may seem attractive, but it’s not the easy option.

AI Made me Redundant

Yesterday, a student asked me to help him with a program he was writing in his own time. It was an impressive project, but it wasn’t working properly.

I quickly spotted what the problem was, but finding exactly where the error lay in the code was a lot more difficult. This is typical in this sort of beginner project: there will be several hundred lines of badly laid out code as the student is still learning their craft.

After about half an hour I went to get a cup off coffee while I gave my mind a chance to reset. When I came back, the student said he’d found the problem. I congratulated him and asked him how he’d found it. He told me, and that’s when I realised I was now obsolete.

The student hadn’t, in fact, found the error himself. Rather he’d put the code into AI and got that to spot the mistake.

AI had just rendered me redundant. If I had a particular skill as a teacher of coding, it was in knowing what mistakes a student would typically make, the sort of mistakes that aren’t obvious to an experienced coder. A big part of teaching is knowing the misconceptions that students are going to have, and I’ve been teaching programming for nearly 30 years. I like to think few others have the same facility as I do for spotting those sort of mistakes.

Well, no more.

A lot of writers have posted about having their work ripped off by LLMs, me included. This is annoying, I know, and I’m as irritated as everyone else by this. Maybe not as irritated by those editors who are having to wade through a slew of AI generated stories, but still annoyed.

But annoyed as I am, I’ve yet to see a decent book created by AI. I like to think I still have some worth as writer.

But as a teacher, and not just a glorified childminder there’s now one less reason to pay my wages. It’s a sobering thought.

My first novels were about a benevolent AI. I hope this is the future I wrote about.

I am not an influencer

As the school holidays approach and I embark on my annual sorting of my notes and resources ready for the new school year, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on why I do this.

By this I mean maintaining three websites. That’s this blog, this site about my writing and this tech/education site. Sometimes the boundaries between the three blur which is why I’m in the process of migrating them across to Obsidian. I’ve started with my teaching notes (hence this post) and I’ll be moving on from there. Expect much more about that another time.

I began to blog about 15 years ago, principally to advertise my books, but it quickly became more than just that. After a couple of years I started my tech site. You can read why here: https://tech.tonyballantyne.com

But that’s not the full story.

I’ve written about blogging as way of getting started as a writer and way of maintaining enthusiasm as a writer, but that’s not the real reason why I blog.

I’m not an influencer. I don’t do product placements. I don’t charge for the resources on my sister sites. I don’t have adverts. I get a lot of requests from people asking if they can monetize my site and I always reply no. I don’t really do social media apart from for genuine social reasons: to keep in touch with old friends.

So why go to all this effort?

The reason why I write is because I enjoy writing. That’s why I’m a writer. And that’s why I do this. The reason why I wrote this post was because it made me happy. It also reminded my just how much I enjoy writing.

And now I’m going to make myself a cup of tea.

If you’re reading this in the northern hemisphere, have a good summer!

Pat Mills Iconoblast

I feel like I’ve spent too many posts recently talking about bad writing. It’s taken Pat Mills’ Iconoblast newsletter dropping into my mailbox to prompt me to comment on good writing instead.

As Wikipedia says, “Pat Mills is an English comics writer and editor who, along with John Wagner, revitalised British boys comics in the 1970s, and has remained a leading light in British comics ever since. He has been called “the godfather of British comics”.”

He’s certainly been a great influence on my writing. If you’ve not heard of him I’d recommend you take a look not just at Slaine, Charley’s War and Nemesis the Warlock, but his writing about writing. (paid links)

Pat Mills is a prolific writer both through natural talent and necessity (Comics don’t pay well).

Principally, he knows what makes a good story. Part of being a writer is developing a feel for this, and you do this by practicing your craft. But Mills has taken this much further. I remember the reader’s polls that used to appear in comics when I was a kid. I didn’t realise then how much the results of these polls shaped the stories that appeared. It’s fascinating and instructive to discover just how much Mills studied the feedback from these polls to tailor the stories to just what the readers wanted.

But rather than me telling you about this, take a look at his post on the stories in Girls Comics.

But what about your artistic vision? Surely it’s important to tell your own stories in your own way?

Well, that’s very true. As Charlie Parker said, learn the changes and then forget them. But you have to learn the changes first, and Pat Mills is a master.

The Minor Reharm

Reharmonization is a musical term for changing the chords in a song while keeping the melody the same.

Jazz musicians do this a lot. There’s also been recent fashion amongst young singers for slowing down fast songs and reharming them in a minor key. One example that sticks in my mind was a reharmed version of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John’s “You’re the One that I want.” The original song had the happy urgency of teenage longing. The new version, at least to my mind, sounded like an obsessive stalker sitting in his van late at night, waiting for his target to walk by.

The minor reharm can be a lazy way for a musician to pump a bit of emotion into a song. I think it’s a good way to describe the process by which writers invest their stories with fake emotion.

The minor reharm is often evident in TV series and box sets. You notice it when characters’ emotions are magnified to fill screen time. They argue and fall out for no reason other than to provide enough plot to take the episode to the break.

This is not only lazy writing, it’s not even accurate. People don’t fall out so easily in real life. When I was growing up in the ’70s, many of the sit coms revolved around farcical misunderstandings. Many of the TV series I give up watching nowadays depend on the same thing, except without the humour.

Of course, the minor reharm is not exclusive to the TV. You see it all the time in stories by authors who should know better. Rather than give examples it’s probably more instructive to refer to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Here the minor reharm that was the gothic novel is parodied to glorious effect.

If you’ve never read it, give it a try. You’ll be astonished how modern the tone feels.

Five Star Reviews

I got to the door quickly and he’d already walked away, he said he didn’t think I was in, a little more patience would be good.

The above is a review of a parcel delivery. I came across it when I was asked to rate my experience of that same person delivering a parcel to me.

I hate those reviews. They give people the illusion of power in their lives. It allows them to take out their frustrations on the world, venting their self righteous anger on the even more powerless. They should pity poor old Ron (I’ve changed his name), struggling to fulfil a job list way too big for the time available. Me? I got my parcel undamaged in the time slot I was given. That’s all I feel entitled to say about the transaction. I certainly didn’t feel I was entitled to a chirpy conversation from a colourful member of the undeserving poor, as another reviewer did.

Why I had to review the poor guy I don’t know.

Actually, I do. It’s not about feedback, it’s about divide and conquer. It’s a distraction. Don’t blame the delivery driver, blame the company that put them in that position. Give them all five star reviews and let businesses sort out their own houses.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about all reviews. Writing is fair game for reviewers. By all means say what you like about my books, good or bad. What you read in my books is all my own work. I stand by what I’ve chosen to put there.

But a parcel delivery guy has very little agency. What exactly are you reviewing?