Turkey City Lexicon
(It’s not just for SF fans anymore!)
It has often seemed to me that science fiction writers are the people most at home on the web, the people least surprised by its possibilities, the folks most likely to see its uses. This only makes sense: they are, after all, the ones most at ease with potential technology, spending their days writing coherent stories about complex possible worlds.
So it’s not surprising that they’ve come up with new and different ways to approach issues specific to writing and publishing.
During the early brouhaha over Publish America’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) as a publishing venue, it was a group of science fiction authors who banded together to disprove PA’s claim that it vetted manuscripts by composing a truly awful novel (that did, in fact, get accepted for publication). And it’s science fiction authors who co-host Predators and Editors, which has hopefully helped steer many unwitting authors-to-be in the right direction.
Not new, but not widely known, either, is the Turkey City Lexicon, a site meant to help science fiction writers workshop (or critique) each others’ work by giving them nice packages that say, far better than could any one individual, what might be problematic about a given passage. Named for the Austin, Texas workshop that was the cradle of cyberpunk, the lexicon has gone through a number of different editions (carefully uncopyrighted), and is as hilarious (and as thoughtful) today as it was back in 1988.
Here, for example, we can find Brenda Starr Dialogue (”long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters”), the Squid in the Mouth (”the failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth”), and the Kudzu Plot (”Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”).
Much of what is offered in the Lexicon is, in fact, very good advice for anyone writing anything, and I highly recommend reading it, laughing over it, and taking it to heart. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in The Writing Life, About Writing, Fiction, Technology on June 25th, 2008