The Turnip in Lightspeed
June’s Lightspeed features the most recent in my Tales of the Great Sweet Sea series, called The Turnip. It is based on the Grimm story of the same name, one of the odder stories in the Grimm canon, which has always fascinated me.
Because The Turnip is much less well-known than some of the other stories I’ve drawn on for this series, and because I feel like it needs very little massaging, this is the closest I’ve come to writing a direct fairy-tale retelling. Normally, when doing fairy tale work, I feel like I should offer the audience new insight or perspective on the story, but in this case I’m working from the assumption that you haven’t heard the story a hundred or a thousand times.
That being said, I could not resist adding a third act which resolves most of the major plot threads, since the original cuts off right in the middle of events. Regardless, I hope you enjoy it!
This will be the last Great Sweet Sea story for a while, since I’m currently working on two half-finished longer pieces and don’t have anything in the publication pipeline. I expect that the series will have at least half a dozen more entries, though, eventually.
A few stray thoughts on pacing and metrical feet
I have been thinking a lot about scene-to-scene structure in fiction and the concept of “scenes and sequels.” In case you hadn’t heard of the concept before, the idea is that scenes in fiction are divided into two types: Scenes, in which events occur and characters take action, and Sequels, which show the aftermath and consequences of the choices in the previous scene as well as setting up the next one.
(Yes, both scenes and sequels are types of scenes. The terminology is incredibly confusing, but it’s also standard. I’m sorry.)
The traditional framing of this, as I understand it, is Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel and so on until the end of the book. Chapter divisions are kind of arbitrary, but they’re often broken down in these pairs as well—a chapter might be a single Scene-sequel pair, or perhaps two or three of them strung together.
At the beginning of the current novel I’m writing, for various reasons, it was useful for me to adopt a different structure. Each of the early chapters is structured like this: Scene-sequel-another sequel. I ended up quite liking this rhythm—it gave the events of the Scenes a little more breathing space and made the character feel more “lived in” rather than rushing from event to event.
When I was describing this to a friend of mine, who is also a poetic, I ended up saying “the novel has a dactyllic structure,” referring to the metrical foot, because that seemed like the simplest way to describe it. That started as a convenience, but it has been rattling around in my head and I think that there may be more to it than that.
Metrical feet are about stressed and unstressed syllables. And, in a way, a scene is a “stressed” scene, and a sequel an “unstressed” scene. Rather than simply assuming that Scenes always come first, and are always followed by one Sequel, it’s interesting to look at what the other possibilities are, and how they feel to read.
The traditional Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel structure is equivalent to trochaic meter, and it has a similar drumbeat feeling—BUM-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-buh—like it’s marching you forward towards the climax of the book. You can practically hear the brass band.
Maybe it’s just in my head, but I also feel like there is some relation between how dactylls give a tripping-off-the-tongue feeling and how Scene-sequel-sequel structure gives a very fluid motion in the plot, less like marching, and more like falling-forward. BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-buh.
Anyway, my thoughts on this have continued to rattle around and arrived at the very natural conclusion of “what about iambs?” Iambic meter—unstressed followed by stressed—is often called the “natural rhythm of English,” so it seems very straightforward to think about it. But what does it mean, in a scene structure, to start with an unstressed scene?
It’s not a “sequel” because it doesn’t come after anything, right? And the more I think about it, the more I think that background (or even the dreaded prologue) can form an unstressed scene at the beginning of a work of fiction. And I think that a lot of stories have this structure, although not most modern stories.
Fairy tales, for instance, often start with a fair amount of table-setting before we get to the first choice. “Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a king with three daughters, each more beautiful than the last” is not really a scene in the “scenes and sequels” sense. No one has taken action; no one has made a choice. It’s just letting you know the context. That, to me, feels very unstressed.
Similarly, if you’re recounting an anecdote to a friend, you might start with similar material. “So my buddy Cameron—you don’t know them, they’re an architect in Cincinnati—is heading into work one day…” again, it’s mostly table-setting.
In a formal fiction context, we might end up cutting this kind of material, or redistributing it throughout the book so we can start with something gripping. But in casual narrative, we’re much more likely to just front-load it.
Similarly, an interesting thing about an “iambic” scene stress pattern is that it ends on the scene, not the sequel. This is, again, something that isn’t terrible common in modern professional fiction, but used to be very common in serialized fiction: you end your narrative unit not with the aftermath of a dramatic choice, but with the dramatic choice itself, saving the aftermath for the beginning of the next unit (and leaving your readers in suspense about what consequences might ensue.)
Anyway this isn’t a fully formed thought, so it doesn’t have a conclusion. It’s just a thing I’ve been thinking about lately. If you have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them. (Including if you think I’m just completely wrong-headed about it, as long as you tell me why you think that.)
A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas forthcoming in Fantasy
I have sold my story A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas, to Fantasy Magazine. It is based on a parable by Rabbi Akiva and also about the events of his life and death. I’m very happy to have sold the story, particularly to Fantasy, a magazine that I love. Also, having sold a story to Fantasy means that I have sold at least one story to each of the Adamant family of publications (Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy), which is exactly the sort of trivial achievement that I love.
I have no idea which issue it will be in.
In general I have a handful of stories awaiting publication—two flash stories in Lightspeed and a short story with Tor.com. In general, I expect 2022 to be a somewhat slower year for my publications than the last two—a result of shifting more towards long-form writing as well as having my short stories become even stranger and thus harder to sell.
"The Turnip" in Lightspeed, some initial thoughts about metrical feet and scene structure, &c
The "scene-and-sequel" thing elicits from me the same reaction as pretty much any structural advice in writing, which is that it illustrates a useful principle -- in this case, "you need to give your characters (and your readers) time to react to things, not just hammer one thing after another without respite" -- and that beyond the level of the principle, it rapidly turns into an unhelpful straitjacket. In the third Rook and Rose book, Alyc and I have an entire *chapter* that's basically "sequel," because it's entirely devoted to the fallout of the previous chapter. Which isn't to say that nothing happens in it; just that what happens are character beats, not the plot as such moving forward.
And that in turn makes me think of the game Prime Time Adventures, which explicitly says that every scene should advance either the plot or the characters. My reaction: "Why not both?" I think the "why not both?" feeling is why I may be more prone to writing scenes that are, in your metrical analogy (which I like), trochaic: I want to *end* them on something that sends them forward into the next beat (advances the plot), but they may well *begin* with a moment of breathing room (advances character). But do I alternate "event reaction event reaction event reaction" the whole way through? No, I do not. Some parts of the story need "event event event." Some, like the chapter I mentioned above, need a lot of reaction time, because *not* including that means the characters will feel thin and underdeveloped. For example, you might want a dactylic foot when an event involves two viewpoint characters, and both of them need a chance to react to it. (Or even if they're not viewpoint.)
So that's a longwinded way of setting myself up to fly the Latin nerd flag high and say that maybe sometimes your narrative meter is dactylic hexameter (which, despite the name, is made up of both dacytls and spondees, the latter being two stressed beats in a row) or hendecasyllabic or something. :-P The principle of "give characters a chance to react" is good, but a story will feel less rigid if the pattern of stressed and unstressed beats flows to fit the needs of the narrative.
(Redacted here: a whooooooole rant about why prologues can be excellent and necessary . . .)
Congratulations on the sale to Fantasy and hitting the Adamant Triple Crown!! Very much looking forward to reading "The Turnip" later today xx