The Dragon Like Yoda Talks -- Not!

Here I go again, doing what I'm told you absolutely should not do -

Foiling The Dragon by Susan Price

that is, talking back to your critics.

I did it here, when people said my villain in the Sterkarm books, James Windsor, was not believable - and now I'm going to defend my poetry-loving dragon in Foiling The Dragon.

I recently put Foiling The Dragon. out as a paperback and e-book. It is, as the strapline informs you, 'A light-hearted fantasy of poets, sorceresses, dragons — and wrapping paper.' It's not epic fantasy. It's meant to amuse for a few hours, and maybe make you smile.

On Amazon it's collected some positive reviews. J. Mathews says,

 'I enjoyed this book as a child, and have just read it again. I found it equally enjoyable.'

Thank you, J. Mathews. I don't know who you are, but I greatly appreciate your taking the time and trouble to post a positive review.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

D. Lamb says:

Drily funny reversal of the usual medieval fantasy stereotypes... Anti-hero, anti-king and even a bit anti-Shakespeare - what's not to like?  

Thank you, D. Lamb. Again, I've no idea who you are but, for me, you get it. You describe the book wot I wrote.

Of course, I would say that, wouldn't I?

One of the reviews underneath, by 'Aldrea Alien,' makes some good points about wavering point of view (which I know is a besetting sin of mine, and which I have been discussing with my editor, Matrice, as I work on Sterkarm 3. Fair cop, guv.

But Aldrea A does allow that 'the dragon was a hoot' and the book was 'worth reading for the dragon scenes alone.' 

Another review - which may even have inspired D. Lamb and J. Mathews to their good deeds - is headlined: '"Foiling The Dragon" Is Very Very Bad.' Why? Because the 'characters are not particularly likeable' and 'the big scary dragon talks like some kind of dodgy medieval Yoda ("Thou to me the way will show"). Even A. Alien, although thinking the dragon the best thing in the book, says the dragon, 'spoke a little like Yoda.'

Well, I could discuss whether or not characters should always be 'likeable' for hours - and I think it's especially questionable for them to be entirely 'likeable' in something which aims at being funny, since most humour involves telling the truth about ourselves.

Humour isn't about the big, heroic, chivalric, handsome, strong epic fantasy vision of ourselves that we all like to indulge in now and again. Instead, it undercuts all that by telling the truth about how weak, cowardly, selfish, envious, slothful and all those other sinful things we are in reality.

Some people like the shiny heroic version better, but that doesn't mean that the funnier version doesn't have its value. However, that's a matter of taste and opinion. As I said when defending my Sterkarm villain:  

I’m neither surprised nor dismayed that some people dislike some of my books.  I had my reasons for writing it the way I did; but other people would have made different choices, and dislike those I made. Fair enough.

The point I would like to take issue with - and I suppose it's a bit daft of me to be annoyed by it, I admit, but it nevertheless irks - is the suggestion that I based the dragon on Yoda, from Star Wars. That the dragon 'talks like Yoda.' That I copied this from the film.

Here's the dragon:

...in the roofed and dim back of the cave, there was a heap of... gold coins, and plates, gold jugs, gold trays, and something that looked very like a crown. It was these things, sliding down from their heap, that had made the metallic noise.

     It was the reason they had slid that worried Paul more. Lying on top of the heap was — an animal. A very big animal. It was curled up, its back towards Paul. A back covered in scales. And spikes. A long tail, also edged with spikes, trailed down from the heap of gold and along the floor of the cave. The tip of the tail ended in an arrow-shaped point, and twitched slightly.

     Its general colour was greenish, but some of the scales had a reddish, coppery sheen...Its sides rose and fell, and more coins slid down from the heap.

     Paul made a strangled sound as his stifled breath at last escaped him, and he had to gulp for another. After that gulp he thought it was time to edge in a casual, slow, but still pretty nippy way for the cave entrance. He’d got no further than moving one foot when the gold began to cascade in all directions as the dragon’s shoulders twisted. A neck rose, uncoiling, and turning the head towards him. Two eyes — forward-facing, focusing, predator’s eyes — lazily opened in its mask. Two huge, smokily yellow and glowing eyes, with narrow black triangular centres, sharpened on him.

The mouth opened — and opened — and opened, showing a black lining and four long, sharp, dripping wet teeth. A black, forked tongue coiled backwards and then flicked forwards. A gust of smoke blew from the mouth, carrying towards him that stink of damp and smouldering.

    The thing squirmed on its pile of gold, twisting round to face him, scattering coins and crowns and sword-belts. Wings unfolded, rustling against rock, fanning the burning stink towards him. What a size it was! He could feel the strength of those wings from where he stood, His own legs gave way and he sat on the rock, shrank himself down, trying to be small.

     Raised up as he was, on top of the boulder, the dragon’s head was above him. Even if he could have run for the cave entrance, what would have been the use? That long neck would have snaked out… He didn’t want to think any further.

     "Best for thee it would be," said the dragon, "if thou a bard wert.”

      The dragon like a German into English literally translating speaks. This because a Nordic, Germanic dragon it is. Yoda its creator's mind never entered.

     Okay, I'll give the terminating verbs a rest. I can tell you how that phrase 'terminal verbs' got into my vocabulary, though. From my cousin, a fluent German speaker, who explained that German has a different way of ordering its parts of speech from English. German almost always places the verb 'in the terminal postition.'
      And, you see, I was writing about this dragon... It was definately a dragon in the tradition of the North - a fire-breathing, carnivorous beast, red in tooth and claw, bearing little good-will towards anybody or anything. To misquote the much missed Pratchett: 'The nearest a dragon can come to understanding what "friend" means is "an enemy who is still alive."'

      There is also a tradition that these mythical beasts are intelligent and sometimes even talk. It suited me and my plot to have an intelligent, talking dragon. So, if a great Germanic, gold-hoarding worm opens its gob and speaks - what does it sound like?

     Presumably, when it has occasion to speak to its own kind, it speaks in dragon. But it's been alive a long time, and it's picked up a bit of the languages spoken by these pestilential forked vermin that swarm all over the place. And, being a Nordic, Germanic dragon, presumably the first such language it picked up was a Germanic language... So it speaks with a German terminal verb.

     Now this reasoning of mine might have as many holes as a sieve - but it has nothing whatsoever to do with that cuddly little goblin from a futuristic Space Opera.
     Why, when characterising an ancient, ferocious Northern mythological creature, would I have chosen to copy a kindly, cuddly alien from a science-fiction film?

     I probably have to break this gently to 'A Customer', but: the whole world is not encompassed by Star Wars (and I speak as someone who loved Star Wars. Saw it when it first came out.)

     People were thinking and inventing pre-Star Wars. Even post-Star Wars, people can manage to invent without reference to it. Sometimes their ideas have similarities.

     It's sort of like parallell evolution - faced with the same problems, entirely different creatures come up with a similar solutions, and end up looking very alike, even though they are not at all related.

     So it comes down to this:

     If your opinion is that my amusing little fantasy is very very bad, fine. You didn't like it, it wasn't what you were looking for. I'm sorry I didn't succeed in entertaining you. Better luck with your book choices in future. (And strewth, I can sympathise, I've thrown enough books aside myself.)

     But - 

     The dragon like Yoda talks - NOT!

Foiling The Dragon

Paperback    UK   US

Foiling The Dragon

Ebook    UK      US

 

Bad News, I'm afraid...

On Thursday March 12th, 2015, I was at my computer, trying to write, when my brother called and said, "Have you heard the bad news?"
          "What?" I said. "What?"
          He said, "I've just heard - I'm afraid that Terry Pratchett has died."
          And that is bad news - for all lovers of Disc-World, for all lovers of writing.
          No more Disc-world books. No more Commander Vimes. No more Lady Sybil. No more Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg.

Terry Pratchett

          It's not just Pratchett himself we have to mourn for - though we've lost an intelligent, compassionate, witty man of wide-ranging empathy and understanding, who raged against injustice and unfairness, and was able to make it a bed-rock of his writing.
          No, with Pratchett, a whole world dies - the Disc-World. From the crowded, edgy city of Ankh-Morpork, with its benevolent tyrant, its seething streets and its Unseen University of wizards, to the mountains of Lancre with its witches and pragmatic villagers, to forested Uberwald with its vampiric Countess, to the Counterweight Continent and the ancient land of Djelibaby.
          Pratchett's inventiveness couldn't be contained in one city, even one as populous and multicultural as Ankh-Morpork - he needed a whole world. And unlike most other fantasy worlds, Pratchett's was ordinary, in the best possible sense. Even his wizards, witches, werewolves, zombies, dwarfs, goblins, trolls and golems had ordinary lives to live.
          His was not a fantasy populated by warriors and mages - there were also blacksmiths, daughters-in-law, shop-keepers, policemen, psychos, farmers, journalists, con-men, fishermen, thieves... All human life was encapsulated, understood, sympathised with, made fun of.
          We have lost the Thieves' Guild and the Assassin's Guild, Captain Carrot and the ingenious but always discrete tribe of Igors.
          All these places and institutions, all these characters, showed us our own world through a slightly distorting mirror. He didn't write fantasy. He wrote reality with a twist.
          The series may well be continued by another writer, but the books can never be the same now the Arch-Wizard himself has gone...
           I shall be doing a lot of re-reading, I think...

          Of course, Master Pratchett had early-onset Alzheimer's, and had said that he wanted this country's laws to be changed, to allow people with terminal or incurable illnesses to choose when they died. Perhaps, instead of selfishly wishing for more books, we should try to be glad that he died, according to the Guardian, “with his cat sleeping on his bed [he was a famous cat-lover] surrounded by his family,” and that his decline into Alzheimer's is over.
          How I feel for his family. If I feel this sad, when I never met the man except through his writing, how much worse, how much much worse, it must be for them.

          For those who don't understand what Pratchett meant to his fans, here's a link to some of his quotes.

          And here's a link to an article in which Pratchett's friend, Neil Gaiman, contests the view that Pratchett was 'a merry elf.' He wasn't, Gaiman says, he was angry.
          This comes as no surprise to me. No one could encounter Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax - or Vetinari - or Death - and not realise the great fire of angry that was burning underneath them. A great deal of comedy is stoked by anger. See Mel Brooks' The Producers, for example. Much laughter is ridicule, and ridicule is an attack. Brooks himself said that one of the best weapons against thugs like the Nazis is laughter, which cuts them down to size.

          As one of the commentators, 'eastofthesun' says, below the line of Gaiman's article,

"The strength of TP's writing, to me, comes from the tension between his huge compassion and deep cynicism - two seeming opposite traits. And yes, that voice has become stronger over the years... but it's there in all his strongest characters, Vimes and Granny Weatherwax above all but also Death, Susan Sto Helit, Vetinari, Tiffany Aching...All these characters are so different, but that tension runs deep in all of them. The humour is what everyone talks about first, but the passion is what gives it power."

I've no idea who 'eastofthesun' is, but I agree entirely. Couldn't have put it better.

Goodbye, Terry Pratchett, and thank you so much.

TERRY PRATCHETT AND MAKING THINGS UP

Sir Terry Pratchett

  “My job is to make things up, and the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things…”  Terry Pratchett.

          I love Terry Pratchett’s books.  I’ve probably read them all, often several times.  One of the things I love most about his stories is their exuberant inventiveness and imagination  – yet here he is, in his note for I Shall Wear Midnight, saying that he ‘makes them up out of real things’.

          And I love him even more for saying this, because it’s exactly what I think myself.

          Diana Wynne-Jones – another writer I greatly admire – had fun in her ‘Tough Guide to Fantasyland’ with ‘made-up’ worlds populated entirely by heroes and sorcerers, who never wonder how food gets on their plates, or who rears the animals to provide the leather for their jerkins.

Diana Wynne Jones

          It’s a salutary lesson for us fantasy writers, but I doubt that Pratchett ever needed it.  His Discworld is full of farmers, blacksmiths, shop-keepers, cart-drivers and purveyors of dodgy sausages.  The Unseen University has cooks, a housekeeper and maids, besides wizards.  (A librarian too.) 

          One of his greatest creations, Granny Weatherwax – as courageous, strong and honourable as any sword-waving hero – is an old lady who spends much of her time tending to her goats and bees, and to all the aches, pains, expectant mothers and petty squabbles in her village.  Only rarely, in her spare time, does she bother to save the world.

           Pratchett never forgets that heroic fights with dragons and magic-wars don’t interest most of his Discworld population, who simply want to make a quiet living.  As a result, his comic world is far more convincing and solid than that of most ‘heroic fantasy’.

          In my own writing, I never make anything up without taking a firm grip on the closest reality I can find to it.  I have greater confidence in my creation if I can say to myself: ‘Real people really did or thought this.’  If I’m convinced by my writing, then hopefully others will be.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

          Real experience is also hard to beat.  I learned to ride while writing the Sterkarms, so I could write with more conviction about living with horses.  I’ve lived for days by candelight, so I could better describe what that was like.  I’ve scrambled and tramped over rough country, and so, when I describe my characters doing it, I know not to have them strolling over wild moorland with hands in pockets as if it was a park.

          I try hard to remember that, although adventures you read about take place weightlessly in your imagination, most of the things being described take real physical effort.  Helmets are heavy: so are swords and shields.  Longbows take effort to draw – and if the string hits your arm, it hurts – a lot!  Horses are big, solid, hot and sweaty – peat bogs can suck off your boots.  Readers can’t see, touch, hear or smell the things you describe; but given a few details, they imagine all the better.

           ‘The best way to make things up is to make them out of real things…”  Pratchett is a great writer; and this is great advice.

          Oh - and I support his campaign for assisted dying too. Not only a great writer, but a wise, compassionate man.

And he-e-e-re's Blot!

  

Find more Blott at www.susanpriceauthor.com

Susan Price also blogs at Kindle Authors UK

Susan Price is also one of the reviewers on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure