Creativity in recombination: authors and earthworms

I recently had the pleasure of reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and, unrelatedly, some keen analysis of the "canon" of Star Wars from the perspective of 1979, and, still more unrelatedly, some engaging discussion of the soil of the New World in Charles C. Mann's 1493. It has all reminded me that there is, truly, nothing new under the sun, but you can do amazing things with a blender nonetheless.

Let's talk about The Graveyard Book. It's meant as a children's story, about a boy named Nobody who grows up in a graveyard, is raised by ghosts, and has bildungsromantic adventures with ghouls and other spooky creatures. It felt like a fresh story to me, even though you might not think it has a right to. It is, after all, an unapologetic rehash of Kipling's The Jungle Book. While Kipling's not exactly fresh in my mind, I recognized one chapter that drew thoroughly on Mowgli's encounter with the monkeys (for structure) and on H.P. Lovecraft (for everything else).

But that's Neil Gaiman's shtick. He has spent his life filling his head so full of mythologies and legendaria that he can hardly sneeze without producing a novel combination of archetypes. (Part of) what makes Gaiman so much fun is that he makes no attempt to hide his sources. In a sense, he lets you see how his creativity happened because if you recognize at least some of the elements he's drawing on, you can trace for yourself how he combines them. And that is creativity, or at least a large part of it.

While I'm at it Star Wars, as much as it's praised, deserves more credit than it normally gets for putting new skins on old archetypes. There was no reason for George Lucas et al. to hide the similarities between Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress, The Dam Busters (apparently the origin of the "Death Star Trench Run"), or Buck Rogers. The combination itself was novel enough to be something new.

Essentially, much of what we celebrate as great creativity is the work of earthworms: churning culture's litter of old ideas into a fertile topsoil. Which isn't to belittle it at all--that churning turns used-up stories into fresh ones.

How much does your writing weigh?

Microsoft Word and some other programs have a useful feature that will take your writing and tell you its Flesch-Kincaid reading level. At least, this information is useful if you have some idea what it is. Briefly, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula is supposed to take a bunch of writing tell you about how many years of education you would need to make sense of it. It goes like this:

0.39 (number of words/number of sentences) + 11.8 (number of syllables/number of words) - 15.59

Before I get to my point, let me talk about cars. Since I know hardly anything about cars, I can promise this won't take long.

Some cars are much heavier than others. Now, engineers generally try to make their cars as light as possible so they can go faster, so one reason a car might weigh more than another car is that it's not as good as the lighter car--the engineer made bad choices, the factory used lousy materials, and such. But a lot of very well-made, very fast cars also weigh a lot. Why? Because they have powerful engines, and more powerful engines are heavier. But even in a car with a powerful engine, the engineers will want to keep the weight of the rest of the vehicle down.

Back to writing. What I've discovered is that the idea you're trying to get across is like your writing's engine. Reading level makes a good, rough indicator of your writing's weight. Sometimes big ideas take big words to get across, and complex ideas take complex sentences. There's not necessarily any shame in a higher reading level. But make sure it's because of what your writing has under the hood, and not because you filled the backseat with scrap metal.

Here's a passage, for example, that weighs in at a 12.7 grade level. That means, in theory, that if you haven't graduated high school you probably won't be able to follow it:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. (Blaise Pascal)

In this case Pascal had a few things to say. Every clause adds something to the sentence in (more or less) as few words as necessary. A modern writer might throw the reader a bone and break the sentences up more, but a 12.7 grade level is forgivable.

Now, on the other hand, take something I wrote to see if I could:

I assert that it was my own personal experience and is now my very highly confident and very considered opinion that the phenomenon was, overall, very highly negative and undesirable in all or at least the substantial majority of its effects, consequences, aesthetic qualities, moral components, and/or the subjective emotional feelings which it directly or indirectly brought about and/or produced in myself and/or in others who shared the same or similar or related experience of events which had related and/or directly or indirectly comparable characteristics.

According to Word, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of that sentence is 41.3.* And let us be clear: it does not actually take 17.3 years of post-doctoral education to decipher this monstrosity. It certainly didn't take that for me to write it. I would argue that to have one's eyes glaze over is to truly comprehend the passage. It is a mockery of a sentence, not (simply) because of its length, but because it is a paraphrase of the sentence: "I thought it was bad."

Writing clearly is harder than writing obtusely. Writing clearly is also better than writing obtusely--there isn't much I'm more sure of than that when it comes to writing. Yet at some point (high school? college?) we seem to learn to "up-write" and use weighty writing to create the illusion of weighty ideas. If we're lucky, we learn to un-learn that lesson before we waste too much effort before it becomes an intractable habit.

* I started out aiming as high as I could go, thinking I might hit the high teens. On seeing that I had in fact hit the mid thirties, I thought I would try to get as high as 40. I overshot, and wondered if I could perhaps squeeze out 50 without adding anything of value. I'm sure I could, too, if I wanted to spend another half hour at it, but really it's better to call it off here.

The Last Ringbearer: or, playing in someone else's sandbox, sort of a review

I recently had the interesting experience of reading The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Yeskov. If you've read The Lord of the Rings, the name sounds oddly familiar, and it should: The Last Ringbearer is a novel written parallel (or maybe crosswise) to the plot of LOTR, with the central conceit that Tolkien's novel is a "victor's history" written by Gondor's partisans after their successful war against Mordor.*

I can't recommend the book on its own merits**, but I'm not here to rag on it either. If you're a quick reader and the above sounds interesting at all, then do read it***, or at least the first part, which tracks most closely with the events of Tolkien's book.

LRB diverges from LOTR from the first page, and it diverges hard. Beyond the broad category of "fantasy" the books don't even share the same genre: LRB starts out reading something like a Conan yarn, and it evolves into something more like a Cold-War spy thriller. What gives?

I'll tell you what. Because I could complain about the genre shift as "missing the point" of the source material--and other people have--but I think that, itself, is missing the point. In an important way, Yeskov's Middle Earth is strikingly true to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

You see, Tolkien's Middle Earth was a canvas, or perhaps a terrarium, which he filled with linguistics, Norse epics, his experiences in the Great War, and an undercurrent of Catholicism--in short, anything and everything that interested him. Later writers have mistaken Middle Earth for an archetype, and hesitated to deviate from it.

I think Yeskov did what Tolkien did, and filled his version of Middle Earth with whatever the hell he found interesting: rationalism, politics, spycraft, werewolves, parallel universes, and so on. I honestly couldn't tell you whether J.R.R. Tolkien would approve of the result, but I'm pretty sure more fantasy writers could stand to learn a lesson from it.

* Perhaps in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Jane Eyre from a perspective more sympathetic to Bertha Mason.

** It was written in Russian originally, and the English translation is the sort that you have to make allowances for. The plot itself is a little disjointed and, pretty conventional if you sift out the fantasy elements. Yeskov's Middle-Earth amalgam is certainly the most interesting thing about the book. But then, I don't think the book was meant to be sold commercially, and it's free (see next footnote), which softens but doesn't obviate criticism.

*** Because the book is from Russia, and the Tolkien estate is not a fan, the book can't be sold. The e-book, on the other hand, is freely available from the translator.

The king is a noob

Last summer several friends encouraged me to pick up Crusader Kings II, a video game which, when I had to explain it to my mother, I called a "medieval politics simulator." I have ended up sinking a good amount of time into what Wife and I have simply been calling "Europe," as in, "Have you been in Europe all afternoon?"

Part of the game's appeal is its detailed dramatis personae: you can play as a ruler of almost anywhere, from emperors down to counts, and (at least from 1066 on, I think), all the people you can play as are verified historical personages, with Wikipedia pages and everything. Of course, once you take control history goes off the rails. By the time you've played your first character's heir, and then their heir, and so on for a century or so, things can get pretty fanciful (such as, for example, a continental Cathar Irish Empire, or a Nubian king simultaneously holding the thrones of the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires). It's a game where politics are intensely personal, and some time (not today) I want to get into the ways it demonstrates 1) a game without a set story can still have a strong message; 2) game systems are worldviews; and relatedly, 3) simulation is political. (I've been paying attention to some interesting video game commentary lately that's been feeding into this.)

But right now, I just want to appreciate CK2 as a story generator, and share a few of the imagined lives that have emerged from it. Some characters, especially in the first few generations of any given simulation, I have grown kind of attached to.

Gaudiosa the Cruel, Queen of León

Gaudiosa was my first fictional ruler, the daughter of real-life King of León Alfonso VI. In real history, Alfonso ruled from 1065 to 1109, being briefly deposed by his brother Sancho (King of neighboring Castille) in 1072. He lived to be close to 70, had five wives, a few mistresses, and six children. His eldest daughter and successor married into the house of Burgundy and that was the end of the dynasty.

Things went differently in my game. Taking over Alfonso in 1066 my first move was to get him married to a Byzantine Princess. (I was a little dodgy at this point on how to marry my characters advantageously, so this union didn't do a great deal for him politically but at least it was novel.) Alfonso made war on his brother Sancho at the first opportunity and took over the Kingdom of Castille. He then died suddenly during a celebratory tournament, leaving the crowns of León and Castille to his 3-year-old daughter, Gaudiosa. (On the ruler's death, I stopped playing "as" him and "became" Gaudiosa.)

Gaudiosa was lucky in her guardian, a loyal, upright, and kindly man who taught Gaudiosa her virtues and succeeded in curbing her vices (most troublingly, a penchant for torturing small animals). Unfortunately, he died while Gaudiosa was still young and her next guardian couldn't keep her from developing a sadistic streak. But I tried (and so, by extension, she tried) to remember the mentor of her early youth and grow into an upright ruler.

Much of the politicking of Gaudiosa's regency revolved around trying to arrange a betrothal between her and the heir to the neighboring kingdom of Galicia, which would unite most of the lands that the historical Alfonso VI had managed to rule. The King of Galicia would hear none of it, so Gaudiosa began to court both the king and his heir directly with gifts. There was never a betrothal, but when the young man came of age and came into his inheritance (the one quickly following the other) he agreed to the marriage his father had rejected. There seemed to be something of a love story in it. More pragmatically, their heir nearly inherited a united northern Spain (though in fact, through some genealogical snafu, she inherited a patchwork).

Gaudiosa reigned for fully 70 years. She made frequent (and variously effective) wars on the Muslim Caliphs to her south, and dealt with several peasant revolts. There was an element of tragedy to her epithet, though, because in spite of her best efforts to the contrary she became known as "Gaudiosa the Cruel." Indeed, when you spend your nights lying awake, in a concerted mental effort to not go torture the prisoners in your dungeon, you probably won't be remembered for your gentle spirit.

Dirk V "the Old," and the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors

Oh Dirk, you sneaky bastard. Dirk V of Holland was also a real person, but his life in my game unfolded quite differently than history. When I took control of him he was a boy of 14, and he spent the rest of his upbringing learning the various combinations of cloak and dagger. Upon coming of age, Dirk was apparently far-and-away the sneakiest man in all the land.

Dirk's liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV, soon invited him to be the royal spymaster, a title which Dirk would hold through the reigns of at least four emperors.

Heinrich IV quickly died a natural death. (His successor kept Dirk in his position as spymaster.) It was only later that Dirk started working on a plan to make Holland independent of the Holy Roman Empire. Doing that, however, would require a weak ruler he could impose his demands on.

Dirk had the realization that, when all of the spooks and scoundrels in the king's service answer to you, it's astonishingly easy to knock off the king himself. Indeed, a beam soon gave way in the rail of a battlement as the emperor took a walk, and his imperial majesty fell to his death. Awkwardly, the carpenter who had weakened the battlement had an attack of conscience and fingered Dirk as the mastermind of the assassination.

Somehow, this didn't have a noticeable impact on Dirk's reputation. The new emperor, in fact, invited Dirk to reprise his role as arch-schemer. Dirk was, after all, the most qualified, and the new emperor may not have shed many tears over the passing of the old one.

Tragically, shockingly, an unknown assailant (it was Dirk) soon pushed the new emperor from a high rampart, and the second consecutive Holy Roman Emperor accelerated into the afterlife at a rate of about 9.8 meters per second squared.

And no one suspected Dirk. One wonders if the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors might have continued indefinitely, but the next emperor was a child, and so he won the grand prize: ot falling to his death but instead being presented with an ultimatum from various territories seeking independence, led by Duke Dirk of Holland.

Dirk V lived to be known as "The Old." I imagine the epithetiers were alluding to his ability to kill the most powerful man in Christendom twice and somehow still die of natural causes himself.

Aodh the Gentle, King of Ulster

Aodh was a king of the early Irish, a nominally Catholic people who lived as disorganized tribes and were, frankly (and, to be honest, because I enjoyed it this way) barbaric to their neighbors. Aodh, however, was zealous both in his Catholicism and his desire to see his people become more civilized.

As a youth, Aodh suffered from fits that his family interpreted as demonic possession. It provided an interesting bookend to his rule.

Without going into detail about administrative reform, King Aodh succeeded in moving his kingdom into a more organized way of life. He expanded his kingdom, and generally did a pretty good job kinging for most of his life.

Then one day, on a campaign for a war that didn't turn out well (at least, for his allies--Aodh himself was just being neighborly and it wasn't any skin off his nose), Aodh saw a comet and took it as an omen. That's when things started going downhill.

Aodh started hearing a voice, which he became convinced was the voice of Jesus Christ. This in itself was not a disaster for the kingdom: in fact, it might have done Ulster some good. After all, if Jesus were telling you to do things, they would probably be for the benefit of your neighbors, the poor, and so on. Following the advice of the voice in his head, Aodh began living a concertedly virtuous life. He received back into his court an aged concubine who he he had once loved and discarded, now unlovely and consumptive. His love for his lawful wife became the subject of much comment.

The voice became more insistent, as head-voices probably tend to. Aodh drained the royal coffers giving alms, and eventually ended up giving alms on credit. And eventually--finally-- the voice warned him of the scheming of bishops and cardinals around him, and Aodh broke with the Catholic Church to follow what seemed to him a simpler faith.

In his time as king, Aodh had made enemies, but he had never antagonized anyone on the scale of professing heresy. All his neighbors pounced, raising arms against him as a heathen. Aodh's allies, and he had a few, would not move to help him--kill real Christians to protect a heretical madman? Never. Suddenly Ulster stood alone, it seemed, against the whole Christian world.

That would soon have been the end of Aodh, Ulster, and the nascent Irish state, if not for something that could itself have been divine providence: King Aodh died peacefully in bed, at what everyone agreed was a reasonable age. The crown passed to his son, an uncontroversial Catholic. The armies arrayed against Ulster collectively blinked, muttered a few awkward and insincere apologies, and returned home.