By John Barnes

Hey, Noob, Who Do You Think I Am?

This time around I feel like reaching way back into the ancient bag of lit-crit tricks, and pulling up Wayne Booth's venerable idea that there are always two other characters present in every work of fiction, besides the cast list that is the stuff of ninth-grade quizzes: there's an implied author and an implied reader. Note to the sci fi folk, and you know who you are: Mr. Booth is not the least bit responsible for what I make his concepts do after I chase them down dark alleys and beat them into submission, so complaints should be directed here. Furthermore, if you're composing one-liners for use on convention panels — science fiction being a literature of ideas, we are in constant danger of being overrun with them, so we have instituted convention panels as places to slaughter them wholesale in single smug sentences — you should be sure to take potshots at me, and not at Mr. Booth.

The implied author is an easy concept; it's simply the person we project (or sense) behind whatever it is that we mean when we say "voice." It may or may not differ from the real author; Hemingway famously was not the tough yet caring, knowing and cynical yet tender man's man that his stories sounded as if they were being written by, but he was the obsessive sentence tuner and text-parer. Some authors are so strongly implied that we feel like their work is all of a piece — Fitzgerald, Carver, Chandler, Asimov. Some authors go through phases of being different implied authors — Heinlein the practical romantic, Heinlein the uncle we all should have had, Heinlein the uncle you'd warn your girlfriend about.

There are writers who seem to enjoy working through a variety of different implied authors. I'm one (and I enjoy it), perhaps because in my actor days I was a character actor and took pride in audience members who said "That was you?" after the show. I should probably add that I wasn't a particularly good character actor and I don't manage to put on a different implied author nearly as well as I think I should. In SF, I'd say that Robert Silverberg was the one of the old guard who comes to mind for a diversity of implied authors; Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, and George Alec Effinger all strike me as writers whose books are performed in more than one role.

I was trying pretty hard to think of someone brand new who seems to work through more than one implied author, and suddenly realized I was asking the impossible; you have to have been publishing for a long while, with at least a half dozen or so books or a few dozen short stories published, before there's room enough to really be more than one person. An analogy here: I think that if James Dean or Brandon Lee had lived much longer than they did, we'd think of them the way we came to think of Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando, or Michael Caine, rather than the way we think of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or Humphrey Bogart. (This implies nothing about ability, achievement, or quality, of course — there is great virtue in doing one thing well).

So the current crop of interesting young sf and fantasy writers hasn't yet sorted out into the one-implied-author-forever, a-few-implied-authors-across-a-lifetime, and as-many-implied-authors-as-they-can bins, but they'll do it as they keep writing. Nonetheless, I think there is something I can say about the implied authors of the new crop, or at least about where their implied authors seem to be going and might want to go, and in time-honored fashion, give them advice they probably don't want to hear.

The implied author has one single most important relationship, and that's to the implied reader. That concept is a little tougher, at least for the college students to whom I teach it occasionally. The implied reader is the person to whom the story seems to be addressed — the imaginary being who the implied author seems to be trying to please. So as you read a story, one part of your experience will be whether you are a reasonably close fit to the implied reader — who does the writer seem to think you are?

This goes a long way toward explaining why some competent, smart, omnivorous readers will have an author or two that they just can't learn to like — because they don't want to be the person that the author implies they are. For example, I enjoy Stephen King a great deal, except that he expects me to be such a silly prude; in general it is his bad guys or his hapless victims who have fetishes or just like to get it on without emotional involvement. The experience is not unlike being at a church picnic and talking to your favorite old uncle, enjoying the conversation until he suddenly brings up gay marriage and starts foaming at the mouth, at which point you find yourself trying to decide whether or not to tell Uncle Jack about the great party you went to the night Justin married Jason. Actually it's a bit worse because you can't interrupt the author; you have to do the equivalent of "Uh, I need to refill my drink" and get away. Whenever a guy puts on fishnets or a girl decides to go get laid in a Stephen King novel, I roll my eyes, flip to the next page, and say, "All right, bad guy or victim or both, I'm supposed to disapprove."

Contrast that, with, say, the implied playgoer of Bruce Jay Friedman's Steambath, in which the infinitely entertaining Oldtimer, who seems to be a Friedman mouthpiece, abruptly remarks, "The toughest son of a bitch I ever knew used to dress up like Carmen Miranda," and thereby puts me in the chair of the implied reader who tends to say "Oh, really, tell me more!" And Friedman does, by the way — a line or so later in that very-underrated play, the Oldtimer tells us that they found his body floating in Amsterdam harbor, surrounded by all those bananas. King assumes I-the-Reader feel discomfort or revulsion at the doings of pervs — and you can get to be a perv in a King novel pretty easily; getting your boyfriend off by letting him watch you masturbate in a sailor suit counts in The Stand. Friedman assumes that I-the-Reader am someone more like Utterson the Lawyer in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who

had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy,’ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’

The idea of the implied reader goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of Heinlein juveniles among baby boomers (and the tendency of now middle-aged or old people, who are presumably past their adolescent angst, to read them with such pleasure): Heinlein's implied reader for those books was in a very real sense the kid the baby boomers wished and hoped they were, bright, curious, almost effortlessly competent, with only the character flaws that a very promising kid is apt to have. It's also a part, I suspect, of why Heinlein's juveniles stick in the brain while the often better-written and nearly always better-plotted juveniles of Andre Norton don't. The Heinlein viewpoint character is calculated to appeal to a kid who likes to get into everything, know everything, and go out and raise hell with a good buddy or a best girl; Norton viewpoint characters are generally introspective loners who are more sensitive than the people around them — proto-Emo, if you will — and it's a lot less fun to picture yourself as a sensitive, bewildered kid trying to cope with moral complexity and get your ass moving. Especially if that's what you are.

It's only natural that a generation of writers will tend to address fairly similar implied readers. First of all, they're talking to their own generation — that's what most writers do — and so the implied readers will have some of the common characteristics of that generation. Secondly, the reasons and ways people read do change, slowly, from generation to generation, and so it's not unexpected that, say, The Three Musketeers assumes readers want to read a bit more description than I, the Jury does (to cite two tales of a man competent at violence who tumbles through many layers of deceit), or that the implied reader of The Maltese Falcon has a different idea of what constitutes moral obligation than the implied reader of Less than Zero. (Two novels in which a man who feels obligation more deeply than the other people around him pursues an important question because no one else will).

Thus if you read Strange Horizons regularly, it's noticeable that for their implied reader, sexism, racism, and homophobia are up there with the traditional activity of kicking dogs as an index of being up to no good, and that a genuine indifference to the feelings of others is the implied reader's cue that this person is apt to be a serial killer or worse. This strikes me as more of a measure of progress than anything else. Similarly, this generation is more internally focused than prior ones (as R.D. Rosen famously says, the problem is not that so many people are seeking insight and enlightenment, but that they are finding it), and so it's not surprising that the implied reader is someone who wants to know every nuance of what a character is feeling at a given moment. English-language culture's values are shifting from doing to being, and from being actively hip to being passively chill; the implied reader of the new fiction, especially in the newer short story sites, is a member of the new generation and shares in that. To a great extent the difference in implied readers is only the generational difference that is to be expected (and sometimes welcomed).

However, there's one aspect of the new implied readers that distresses me: nowadays, for many newer writers, the implied reader is a member of a writer's workshop.

I don't mean that it's a specific member, or a small group of members, of the workshop to which the writer belongs. I mean many writers appear to believe that the person who will be reading the story will be reading it in order to workshop it.  And this leads to a number of very unfortunate things about the novels and short stories that cross my desk as an agency reader and book doctor, and that I find more and more actually making it into publication.

First and foremost, there is often too much interest in how a thing is said, and not enough in what is said; I don't demand that all, or even most, stories have any sort of thematic point, and perfectly fine stories can be built around trivial themes like Motherhood involves love and responsibility or People who have lost confidence in a failure of nerve need to try again to heal. But — you knew that but was coming — much of what is crossing my desk and some of what I see in publication seems to assume I want to grade it or write comments in the margin, and that I'm indifferent to what it says but wish to dig out exactly how it says it, in exactly the way that a college comp teacher is supposed to evaluate loose sentences, appositives, and the use of subjunctive mood in conditional sentences, and not care which side of the abortion issue the paper is about — or more to the point, the way a workshopper goes crawling through the text looking for viewpoint violations while not asking, "Should anyone have written a story like this? Would I read it voluntarily if I were not part of a reciprocal story-reading deal?"

This preference for the how over the what of the message means, among other things, that the energy the message could have provided to the story is not available. The writer is too bound up in (for example) showing us that the heroine is properly xenophilic (by scattering instreamed events, recollections, language use, and so forth through the story), and not concerned enough with interrogating the xenophilia itself in action or implication. Contrast the many stories in which a basically good person learns tolerance — or duller still, encounters irrational intolerance — with, say, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", "Her Furry Face," or "Aye, and Gomorrah."

This brings us to a second problem with the implied reader of much contemporary fiction; like a workshopper, the implied reader reads a paragraph or sentence or scene at a time, ignoring the balance and proportion of the story. This is part of why there are so many attacks of Harlan Ellisonesque (or Ellisonoid? It hardly seems fair to Harlan to imply that these things are like him, since in his best work he keeps it on a tight, effective rein) Beeyootiful Writing, in which everything stops for a paragraph or two while the writer constructs something that would surely get an A in creative writing class. (Sometimes they just skip the rest of the story entirely and call it flash fiction). The implied reader is expected to be writing WOW! GREAT DESCRIPTION! in the margin, and getting ready to say, "Wow, I was so blown away by the top paragraph on page seven, it is so lyrical."

The same basic problem also leads to the implied author aiming to please by dishing up more; I recently waded through a first novel by someone with some serious short story credentials where each paragraph appeared to be a textbook demonstration of a literary trope of some kind — alliteration, then anaphora, then apophasis, so that I began to wonder if the tropes were all going to appear in alphabetical order, with the last part of the book written in zeugma. The many literary tropes are amazing, wonderful, glorious tools for hitting a point and making it stick with the reader, and even the plainest writers use them often; but here they were being deployed in a game of "find the trope, identify the trope, notice the trope, and congratulate me on the trope," and with a sinking heart, I realized that the author's workshop had probably praised all of them, not because they served the story, but because it was everyone's chance to show that they knew the concepts. Meanwhile, while the tropes swarmed about on the throne like unruly puppies, the poor story was left shivering in the cold, in a cloak of thin word games. If you noticed the metaphor, I hope you noticed it was weak and mixed; and if the metaphor is all you remember, you are part of the problem.

A final consequence of this narrow-window reading, it seems to me, is that there's no possible balancing for offense. When Mean Fred, the bad bigot, reveals his badness, he does it once, and in a very naked way — uses a racial epithet, sneers at a girl's ambitions, something like that. That's because the implied reader will presumably face one moment of unpleasantness in order to self-gratulate on having recognized foreshadowing, but does not want gratuitous unpleasantness on every page (let alone inventive or surprising unpleasantness). There is also quite a bit of shying away; I don't think many of the current up and coming writers would coin anything as ugly as "hibber" and the other rude slang Michael Bishop imagined ordinary people using for the discovery of living Homo habilis in Ancient of Days. In the new writers, the camera blinks, often and thoroughly, in matters of hatred and bias, and I suspect that is because their implied readers — like workshoppers — tend to read closely but out of context. On the other hand, the viewpoint in contemporary horror seems to be free to dwell on non-offensive but shocking material like gory injuries or rotting corpses, and again you can hear that implied reader nodding, tapping the page with a pencil, and saying, "That's just what I'd imagine a man killed by an exploding sinus would look like."

Yet another way in which a workshoppish implied reader makes for problems in fiction is a sort of perverse Sapir-Whorf rule: if there is a readily-understood pejorative name for a trope or trick in the Turkey City Lexicon (or other writer workshop slang compendium), writers will not go near it. I see writers going to bizarre lengths to avoid being accused of burly detective syndrome, Mary Sue,said-bookisms,calling a rabbit a smeerp, or white room syndrome, to mention just the ones I notice often, generally resulting in many more words to do something for which there was already a simple, efficient technique. I'm not talking about overuse, here, but if there's only one character in the scene for a few pages (sometimes a necessity — think about the first chapter of The Stars My Destination), every sentence beginning with "he" and "Bob" (to avoid the dreaded passive voice), or being a neutral description of what he sees, gets pretty old. If he's a burly detective, really, truly, it's okay to say it now and then. Mary Sue may be obnoxious if she is too transparently the idealization of the implied author, but an occasional Mary Sue who is subtly the implied reader (but better) will keep the reader reading like nothing else; sometimes the manner in which a thing was said is not clear from context, matters a lot, and is easily told; sometimes it's better to just have little timid herbivores on an alien planet where they belong, than write a whole chapter about how rabbits were imported; and if you've ever actually been knocked out, and awakened in a hospital, you may have noticed that the room was white and featureless. I have seen people write, literally, pages, and sometimes whole chapters, trying to avoid a shouted GOTCHA! from the implied reader who they presume is not reading to enjoy the tale, but to one-up the writer.

Finally, and most insidiously, the implied reader being a workshop member means that short stories are gradually losing their ability to connect to people who don't want to be writers. Richard Schechner commented that live theatre was becoming "the string quartet of the twenty-first century," by which he meant eventually it would be an art that played only to other artists (attend a string quartet or a straight play and you'll see what he's talking about; look around the crowd at a performance of a comedy nowadays and many of the people you see will be performing the role of "the person who got the joke"). Something much like that happened to poetry a couple of generations ago, and to the literary short story after about 1970. It would appear to be underway in the science fiction short story; the simple narration of an experience (however improbable or impossible) leading to some moment of realization about the person, or the universe, or even the situation, has been buried under displays of technique, so that to get the story, you must recognize the technique and then evaluate how well it's being done. It's pretty good sax playing, sometimes, but it's not Charlie Parker and with the ambitions it sets for itself, it can't be; the best it can be is a good Charlie Parker cover that can be appreciated by other saxophonists.

William, our grand pooh-bah and chief troublemaker here, reminded me when I discussed this piece with him that back when there was a teacup-sized tempest just after HelixSF first appeared, he encountered a few writers who argued that with our restrictive submission policy, we would have no readers, because no one reads short fiction except would-be writers. This, I think, we may take as another symptom.

The causes of the disease are clear enough; writing, as an activity, is lonely and discouraging, even when you succeed at it, and most of us don't. Writers' workshops, as the workshoppers themselves will tell you, mean having a bunch of friends who care that you are a writer, understand about wanting to write, and all the rest of it. It's like hot-rodders hanging out with hot-rodders, or knitters with knitters; it's so pleasant to be in the company of people who care about the activity as much as you do.

The catch is, writing should not be an activity, but an art; the point is not merely to do but to excel and achieve.

You will usually get the impression that you are the person in the group who cares the least about writing, that you are not the obsessive workshopper in the picture — and that your readers are. As the months and years go by and all of you read each others' stuff, and get better, and perhaps begin to see publication, most of the readers you know will be workshoppers — and all the really intense readers will be. Furthermore, you will tend to see reading short fiction as the central activity in their lives because that is what you see them doing when you are around them, and that is what they talk about with you.

Let me give you a simple example. I see the brother of one of my best friends about four times a year, at big parties that we both attend. He and I are both lifelong martial artists, and when we meet, we are soon engrossed in a martial-artist-only kind of conversation, so much so that it's a standing joke among our many mutual friends.

Now, on the rational level, he knows I'm old, fat, and out of shape. Most of my training these days is literally just going through the motions. He knows I spend a lot more time teaching, writing, book-doctoring, and so forth. I know he has a family and goes hiking and camping with them all summer, that he's a superb chef by trade and a passionate motorcyclist by avocation. Martial arts is not the center of his life anymore, if it ever was, any more than it is of mine. But my subjective impression — the first thing I think of when I think of him — is that he's a dedicated martial artist. I would not be surprised if he had the same impression of me.

The impression that workshops push into the minds of the writers in the room is that the readers out there are people for whom reading fiction is their primary, passionate activity, who have a large critical vocabulary, who play gotcha with various taboo tropes, and so on. The reality is that the readers that matter are mostly people who have little to no critical vocabulary, and just want you to entertain them, and wouldn't know Mary Sue if she bit them on the ass, though some of them might rather enjoy that.

Now, when it comes to writing, I'm solitary, insecure, and arrogant by nature, and would rather show people my genitals than my rough drafts, despite having much more impressive rough drafts. I want to find the story I want to tell, not be helped to tell the story that fits someone else's rules. So I'm quite workshop-immune and haven't been to one in at least fifteen years, even as a guest.

But for the workshoppers among us — and that seems to be some very high fraction of the new generation of sf writers — I wouldn't dream of taking away the many benefits you feel that you're getting. Chances are you are right in your feelings; people generally know what's good for them. But let me just suggest that in your round-ups at the end of workshopping a story, you ask a few more questions, such as:

If you gave this story to the bus driver on the way home, or to your hairdresser, and they knew they'd never see you again, do you suppose they'd finish it?

All right, show of hands — who felt pandered to?

How many pages can we throw out of this story if we do the stuff we're not supposed to do?

Did this story make us all uncomfortable enough, often enough?

I'm sure the idea is clear. The last step in workshopping a story, I think, should probably be to scrape the workshoppiness off of it. If that makes it more difficult, well, there's a fine old Lester Del Rey story — "Virtuoso" — and I commend to you its last line — "It was not meant to be easy."

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