After more than thirty years as a published professional author, I’ve seen more than a few statements, essays, comments, remarks, and unprintable quotations about writers and writing, and, as I noted in an earlier blog, I’ve seen the proliferation of lists of “bests.”

Just recently, Brian Aldiss published an essay in the Times of London that pointed out how neglected and overlooked so many good speculative fiction writers happen to be.

But… is what constitutes “good writing” merely a subjective judgment?

At the risk of alienating almost everyone who writes and who reads, I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think so. I firmly believe that there are certain basics to good writing that, if we had the tools, which we do not, as of yet, could be measured objectively. But since those tools have yet to make an appearance, I’ll merely offer some subjective and scattered observations.

Some aspects of writing can already be measured objectively, such as basic grammar. When subjects and verbs do not agree, the writing is bad. When punctuation is lacking, the writing is certainly suspect. When six different readers come up with six totally disparate meanings for a passage, the writer’s skill is most probably lacking.

Beyond such basics, however, writers, English professors, reviews, and editors can argue vociferously. Some believe that style is paramount, and that beautiful sentences, impeccably crafted, with each word sparkling like a gem in its own precisely placed setting, are the mark of good writing. Certainly, well-crafted sentences are indeed the mark of a good writer, but when the sentences take over from the meaning, the emotional connotations and overtones, and the plot, those beautiful sentences become purple prose, no matter how well-crafted.

Still others advocate the stripped-down Hemingwayesque style of short direct and punchy sentences and actions. My personal feeling, which I’ve discovered is shared by very few, is that in the best writing neither the reader nor the reviewer notices the writer’s style and sentences, because story and style become one. Put another way, the style becomes transparent in allowing the reader to fully experience the story. When the way in which a story is told is noticed more than the story itself, the writing is not as good as it could or should be.

Others cite originality in plot and the need for every book by an author to have a different plot. This particular fixity seems far more prevalent in F&SF; certainly mystery and romance readers don’t seem to mind the same basic plot time after time, and more than a few “great” writers have used a limited number of basic plots. In fact, Heinlein noted that there were only three basic plots.

Even today, there are editors who believe that any novel that is written in any other tense or persona than third person past tense cannot possibly reach the highest level of literary and artistic perfection. Unlike them, I believe that the choice of tense and persona should be dictated by the story itself and represents an integral part of the novel or story, and that the default third-person, past tense is only a general guideline and certainly not part of a set of objective criteria for excellence in writing.

Endings clearly vary from genre to genre. Certainly, very few “great” mainstream novels have happy or up-beat endings, while very few fantasy novels have endings leaving the main characters as miserable — or as dead or dysfunctional, if not both — as do those mainstream novels. The implication from the “literary” critics seems to be that a novel cannot be good or considered as great unless it leaves the reader lower than a snake’s belly, while the fantasy critics tend to believe that a book cannot be good unless the supply of nifty magic “stuff” is not endlessly innovative and unless the hero or heroine suffers and triumphs over hardships and difficulties so massive and entrenched that the efforts of entire societies had theretofore proved insufficient to surmount. [And I confess that, once or twice, I have succumbed to this weakness, and I do hope that I will possess the fortitude to resist the temptation to go forth and do the same in the future.]

The human condition, in general, tends toward optimism in a world whose behavior tends to reinforce the reality of pessimism. For that reason alone, my personal feeling is that “good” writing should encourage and represent realistic hope.

Final examinations are nearing at Southern Utah University, and student stress is building to incredible levels, as it does near the end of every semester these days.

Every day, my wife, who is a full professor at S.U.U., is deluged by students who are “so stressed” that they’re having trouble coping. They have great trouble dealing with the term papers, the projects, the juries, the performances, and the examinations that all come due in the last week of the semester. Now… such requirements aren’t exactly new. They’ve been a part of collegiate curricula literally for generations, and my wife and other professors continually warn students not to procrastinate and attempt to get them to think ahead. But very few of them do, and this generation seems to have far more difficulty in dealing with the situation than any previous generation. Yet the world that awaits them beyond school is filled with deadlines and pressures, and eliminating or reducing such pressures from college, as some institutions are apparently attempting to do, hardly seems a good way to prepare students for “real” life.

Why? Is just that they’re more verbal about the pressures? No… I don’t think so. There are too many other indications that they actually do feel stressed out. But why? Why should these college students be so stressed? They have the highest standard of living of any group of students in history and the most opportunities. When I was their age, the country was in turmoil, and there were riots about the Vietnam War, and a goodly percentage of young men faced the draft or military service in the service of their “choice” before the draft claimed them for the Army. When my parents were students, it was the middle of the Great Depression, and Germany was turning to Nazism, and World War II loomed. When their parents were students, the era of the Robber Barons was in full swing, and the nation was heading into World War I.

The vast majority of problems faced by today’s students are internal, arising out of their own chosen life-style and habit patterns. Yes, there is a drug problem, but they don’t have to use or abuse; that’s a matter of choice. Even war, for them is a matter of choice, given that we have an all-volunteer armed services. HIV, AIDS… those too are essentially a matter of choice, except in very rare cases. Whether one gets into the “right” university or graduate school is not a matter of survival, unlike being conscripted for WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. And while the “right” school may confer greater opportunities, those opportunities don’t come down to actual survival, but to a higher level of income and prosperity.

Yet “stress” and college counselors abound, and most students seem to complain about being “stressed out.”

I’d submit that this wide-spread epidemic of stress is the result of our “instant society.” Back before the age of computers, doing something like a term paper required a certain amount of forethought. Papers, strangely enough, were far longer then, and required more research, with extensive footnotes and bibliographies. Typing them required more time, and anything more than punctuation revisions could not be made without retyping the entire page. Tables had to be carefully measured and hand-typed. Graphs were hand-drawn. What can be done in minutes today on a computer took hours and then some.

Today’s students are used to getting everything “instantly.” When I was a student, unless you were wealthy, telephone calls required either lots of quarters and a pay phone [now nearly obsolete] or a recipient who would accept the charges. That necessitated at least some forethought. Today, it’s just flip open the cellphone and call. There was exactly one fast food restaurant in the town where my alma mater is located, and it was a long walk from campus, and the college grill closed at 10:00 p.m. And late late or Sunday shopping for paper or supplies… forget it.

Now… I’m not praising the “good old days.” I’m just saying that they were different, and that difference required a basic understanding that you couldn’t do everything at the last moment, because very little in society was “instant.” Even so, some students procrastinated… and flunked out. Today, they can procrastinate, and technology sort of allows them to throw something together… but it’s often a mess… and they end up stressed out.

No matter what anyone says, it just doesn’t occur to most of them to plan ahead. Why should it? Between watered-down high school curricula where last minute preparation usually suffices, especially for the brighter students, and a society that caters to instant gratification on all levels, very few of them have ever had to plan ahead in terms of dealing with day-to-day work and studies.

They’re intelligent; they’re incredibly quick at some things, like video and computer games and tasks and internet searches. What they aren’t good at is foreseeing the convergence of the mundane into a barrier that can’t be surmounted at the last minute. Nor are they all that good at seeing beyond the immediate visual superficiality and assessing how what they see may play out in the long run.

So… we have stressed-out students, many of whom will turn into adults who will end up even more stressed out when it turns out that neither technology nor the instant society have an instant solution for their lack of forethought… when they truly have run out of time.

Last weekend, as with almost every weekend this fall, the college football pundits were proven wrong once more as Oklahoma upset Missouri and West Virginia lost. The commentators were wrong. All this got me to thinking about just that — commentators.

We have sports commentators, who are “experts” on everything from bowling, golf, and football to anything that appears on some form of television — and that’s anything that’s professional, in additional to the collegiate “money” sports. We have financial commentators. We have political commentators. We have news analysts and commentators. We have religious commentators. We even have F&SF reviewers and commentators.

Yet all too many of these commentators are really just dressed-up versions of Monday morning quarterbacks, with explanations of why things happened after they already did. Pardon me, but anyone with a certain amount of intelligence and knowledge about a field ought to be able to explain what did happen. But how many of them, particularly outside of sports, have that good an average in predicting what will happen?

Besides, what about the old idea of thinking for one’s self? Doesn’t anyone think out their own views — by themselves — any more?

While it’s always been obvious that a certain percentage of any population is unable to formulate coherent and logical opinions about much of anything, I have to wonder whether many are even trying these days. Oh, I’m certain that people retain that capability, but with instant polls on everything from whether anyone agrees with what Celebrity X is doing to who leads in what Presidential primary state or whether the results of the Hugo voting are superior to the results of the World Fantasy Awards or whether some other writers and books really deserved the “award,” we’re inundated with commentary and interpretation of news, polls, and events, so much so that it’s often hard to find a complete set of facts by which one might, just might, have the opportunity to make a judgment based on facts, rather than on commentary.

It almost seems that, in more and more fields, commentary is replacing facts and news about the events, as if readers and viewers could not be bothered with learning the facts and deciding by themselves. I know that I have to take and read more and more periodicals, often more obscure ones, just to find information. Even news stories in the local papers are filled with speculations and commentaries on why something happened, so much so that it’s difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to discover the facts.

I’m dating myself, but I really miss the attitude of Jack Webb on the old Dragnet, when he’d say, “Just the facts, sir, just the facts.”

That’s one reason why I’ve been so pleased with the unpredictability of the college football season. At least somewhere, real life is destroying the false image of the infallibility of “professional” commentators.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that various readers and reviewers have remarked on the fact that I seemed obsessed with the “theme” of power, and sometimes the “theme” of gender and sexual politics. Other writers get identified with these or other “themes,” and usually, but not always, the noted identification carries the implication that the writer under discussion should get on with it and stop pounding at that theme.

But… is there a distinction between observation of human nature and a theme that underlies human behavior? Or is it just a matter of reader and reviewer opinion? Is it a repetitive and unnecessary theme when the reader or reviewer doesn’t want to accept the observations, but merely life-like when they do?

For better or worse, before I became a full-time writer, I spent almost thirty years in the worlds of the military, business, and government and politics, and in these worlds I received a thorough education in how power is used and abused in all fashions by human beings. As many others before me have noted, and as doubtless many others after me will note, very few people really understand and know how to use power effectively, and even fewer use it for what might be called the “greater good.” This is not a “theme.” It’s an observed fact, and if I include fictionalized versions and variations on what I’ve observed, as an author, I’m being true to human nature.

This issue applies to other aspects of writing science fiction and fantasy as well.

In the Spellsong Cycle, Anna continues to use the same tactics, often in battle after battle. So do various others of my characters in other books, and some readers have complained that was “unrealistic,” that such tactics wouldn’t continue to work. In combat, effective tactics are based on the abilities of the combatants, the weapons at hand, the geography, and various other limited factors. The range of effective tactics is indeed limited, and tactics are used effectively over and over again. This is why military strategists study ancient and modern campaigns. In addition, weapons change their form, but their functions change slowly over time, and sometimes not at all over centuries. Today, the function of the vast majority of modern weapons is the same as two centuries ago — to apply various destructive and explosive devices to the most vulnerable aspects of the enemy. We’ve gone from musket balls to cluster-bombs and RPVs, but the function remains the same. Even in science fiction, this observation holds true.

Likewise, so does another human variable — the slowness of human beings, especially in groups — to learn from experience. Even after WWI, the armies of most industrialized nations, including the U.S., still retained cavalry units — with horses — despite the clear knowledge that mounted cavalry was ineffective and counter-productive against such weapons as the machine gun. Castles took a long time to vanish after the development of artillery. Yet I can’t count the number of times I’ve had readers complain about — and even some reviewers comment on — why one side or the other doesn’t learn how to cope with something after one or two battles. Borrowing from another media… Duhhh!

After a certain amount of experience, I learned that fights of all kinds consist of short and violent action, punctuated by far longer periods of comparatively little action. As a beginning Naval aviator, I was told that flying was “99% boredom and one percent sheer terror.” In a sense, it’s true. Most time in the air is spent getting to a place where intense action occurs or is undertaken before you return. Some missions are designed to have no action; you’re either gathering information or waiting on station in the event something might happen. Yet far too many books depict only the action and all action… and more action. To me, that’s incredibly unrealistic.

Yes, fiction has to offer entertainment, and no one wants to read, and I certainly don’t want to write, something as boring as a moment-by-moment adaptation of boring reality. By the same token, not taking into account the crux of human nature and human brilliance and stupidity — and at least some of the waiting in between — can only result in the written version of a high-speed video game.

I don’t write those, but they do get written, and that’s part of the marketplace. I don’t mind that, either, believe it or not, but what I do mind is when readers and reviewers with a “video-game” mindset criticize those authors who are trying to enlighten and educate, as well as entertain, because their books are more true to life. Some themes are true, both in life and fiction, and ignoring them is one reason why conflicts like Vietnam and Iraq, or the Middle East, or… [pick your favorite politico-military morass] have occurred and will continue to happen.

Overused theme or time-tested observation? In the end, it still depends on the reader’s viewpoint.

The other day, my wife made an interesting observation. She asked, “If so many people believe in Heaven and an afterlife, and Heaven is so wonderful, why is everyone trying to live forever?” At that, I got to thinking about the associations and corollaries. According to the polls and statistics, the United States is the most “religious” nation in the world. And from what I read and can determine, we’re also the nation that spends by far the most money on medical research and procedures to keep older people young and to extend life-spans. We’re also the nation where talk of practical immortality and agelessness holds great sway, where the singularity will lead to practical agelessness, if not immortality. The entire issue of immortality has been one of the staples of both science fiction and fantasy from the beginning, with the immortal land of faerie or such works as Zelazny’s This Immortal.

Yet, if the true believers are right, what’s the point? Heaven is obviously a far better place than here on earth. If it weren’t, how could it be Heaven? So why are we spending billions to keep the most elderly barely alive, if that, when they could be in a better place… that is, if you’re a believing and practicing Christian or Muslim? And why have so many books and stories centered on immortality?

Now, I’m not disabusing medicine or medical research. People shouldn’t have to suffer horrible diseases or die of infections or be paralyzed for life or otherwise incapacitated when medicine can cure them or improve their life or condition. Yet, the plain fact of medicine is that, in the United States, the vast majority of medical care and expense goes to those who are in their last year of life, and far, far, less money in research and treatment goes to children and infants.

If those dying of old age are going to a better life anyway, wouldn’t it make much more sense to spend more of that medical funding on finding cures for children’s ailments… or providing better nutrition and preventative care for the young?

But then, do all those true believers really believe in Heaven and the afterlife? It’s often been said that actions speak louder than words and that people put their money in what they believe… and they read that which interests them. If that’s so, all the medical scrambling to extend lives and find immortality might suggest a certain, shall we say, shallowness of belief. Even hypocrisy, perhaps? Or, too, perhaps they do indeed believe in an afterlife, and subconsciously don’t want to face the theological nether regions reserved for those whose actions are less than charitable and worthy.

Either way, I find it food for thought. Exactly why does a society with so many true believers support medical age-extension and the quest for physical and earthly immortality anyway? And why is there now such an increase in books about immortal vampires and werewolves and the like? Are the two trends connected… and if they are… how do they square with the fact that the fastest growing religions are those which are best described as fundamentalist evangelical… with the attendant belief in an afterlife?