Light Brushstrokes in STATIONS OF THE TIDES

I take a lot of inspiration and instruction from Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide. The book is full of fantastic inventions that he limns with only in the lightest brushstrokes.  I referred to his “surrogate” technology in the post on “Filtering Setting Through Character POV”.  In this post I want to share two other examples: one of the “jug” dwellings in the riverbanks on Miranda; the other of a drug/toxin derived from a bacterium or micro organism.

First, the jugs.

This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff. Halfway down to the water, a walk had been cut into the earth and planked over to serve a warren of jugs and storerooms dug into the banks itself (176).

He doesn’t tell us what a jug is. He just refers to them, because his POV character, the bureaucrat, knows what they are, and would not pay them any particular notice, so we don’ t get to either.  It isn’t until eight paragraphs later when the bureaucrat is inside a cafe that we learn.

…In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the new-dug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottom of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels.  Then the wood packed inside was fired.  Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels.  Nobody noticed it any more.

“The heat required to glaze the walls was—”  The bureaucrat reached over and changed the channel  (176-177).

What I love about this is that he trusts me as a reader enough to let me hang for eight paragraphs before I find out what it means.  Yes, I had to read the first description twice, because I didn’t know what a “jug” was, but there was enough context for me to assume it was some kind of dug-out dwelling space, and that was enough for me to go on till I got some more description.

He could have explained it right away:  …a warren of storerooms and jugs, ceramic-walled rooms carved from the clay and baked in place with massive internal bonfires or something, but that would have bogged down the action at hand.

In the end, was this neat invention relevant to the action at hand?  No. in that regard it’s a throwaway detail.  But in terms of sustaining the protagonist’s sense of alien landscape and people, a kind of stranger-in-a-strange land vulnerability and therefore tension—it was.

Here’s how he introduces the drug/toxin.

Pouffe sat opposite the two of them, his back to the land. His face was puffy and unhealthy in the window light. His eyes were two dim stars, unblinking…

Gregorian walked over to Pouffe, and crouched. He cut a long sliver of flesh from the old shopkeeper’s forehead. It bled hardly at all. The flesh was faintly luminous, not with the bright light of Undine’s iridobacteria but with a softer, greenish quality. It glowed in the magician’s fingers, lit up the inside of his mouth, and disappeared. He chewed noisily.

“The feverdancers are at their peak now. Ten minutes earlier and they’d still be infectious. An hour later and their toxins will begin to break down.’ He spat out the sliver into his palm, and cut it in two with his knife. “Here.” He held one half to the bureaucrat’s lips. “Take. Eat.”

The bureaucrat turned away in disgust.

“Eat!” The flesh had no strong smell; or else the woodsmoke drowned it out…He obeyed (232).

(The bureaucrat then experiences hallucinations, out-of-body experience, into-Gregorian’s memory experience, like the pensieve in Harry Potter, and that’s all we get.)  He could have had Gregorian explain what the toxins do, and how they work—he could have had the bureaucrat muse on what he knew of feverdancers, but he doesn’t. We are left to assume all that from these few clues, and it is enough.

Light brush strokes, carefully limited by the POV character’s POV.

 

Falcon Chick and Reader Imprinting

When a falcon chick hatches, it bonds with its caretaker. In nature, it bonds with the parent falcons. Some falconers prefer parent-raised falcons, but others prefer hawks who have imprinted upon the falconer, so they make sure the first thing the little chick sees when it opens its eyes is the smiling falconer, food in hand.

Readers are like falcon chicks. When we open our eyes in the new world of a novel, we imprint on the first POV character we meet. I do, anyway, and many readers I know do, too: we bond with the first character we meet, and we expect the story to stick with them. If it turns out we bonded with a shill, a throwaway prologue character who never appears again in the book, or with some secondary character whose purpose was to somehow ease me into the world or plot, then I feel cheated. It makes me peevish. Often, I’ll ditch the book right there, as I did with Saberhagen’s immortal swords tome, and Guy Gabriel Kay’sTigana (I know! It’s supposed to be magnificent! I should have skipped the prologue!).

The only way I can explain my reaction to this misplaced imprinting is that the bonding state of my mind at the beginning of a novel is a vulnerable state of receptiveness and trust; it doesn’t last long, and once it’s imprinted on someone/something, it’s done. Any further imprinting is forced and artificial and therefore uncomfortable and second rate.

My Lesson?  Start the Story with my Main Character

I enjoy the watching the literary gymnastics of a story featuring numerous POV characters. Some writers like George R.R. Martin in A Game of Thrones, swap POVs every chapter, and it is truly impossible to tell who the main character is. This is compounded by his willingness to kill off literally any of the twelve main characters he’s created. He’s a master. He can do that. And when he does, he bends the genre and the realm of what readers expect and can handle. Maybe someday that kind of head-hopping will be standard.

As a general rule, however, it’s still best for the rest of us to start with our main POV character in the first chapter, so readers imprint on him or her immediately. Most readers expect that, and to break custom with that can be disorienting.

I used to start one of my novels with a secondary character POV episode that I thought was a fun way to set the world and tone before the main character entered the story. Readers convinced me to move that passage to a later chapter when they were already grounded in their main character POV.

It’s also interesting to note that when a person scans the first pages of a book in a bookstore or on Amazon, part of what they are doing is assessing whether the main character is someone whose head they want to be in for the rest of the book. Having that character up front and center is part of their expectation, and part of what sells the book.