Help Cat Valente Design an Award

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Cat Valente got active in discussing Jay Maynard’s award proposal at Black Gate and suddenly had an inspiration of her own, which has been discussed on Twitter and in File 770 comments all day.

Oooh, what if the awards were ACTUALLY for story? Like…aspects of story?

  • Best Ending
  • Best Twist
  • Best Worldbuilding
  • Best Villain
  • Best Action Scene
  • Best Romantic Scene
  • Best Death Scene
  • Best Dramatic Speech
  • Best Protagonist
  • Best Climax
  • Best Battle Sequence

I could actually get CRAZY excited about awards like that. And they probably would sell books like crazy. Without spoilers, knowing a book won an award for Best Ending would make me pick it up in a heartbeat! Plus, you would know damn well people had read the books. There would be so much discussion!

There I go, getting excited about a doomed idea

 

Absolutely! (Note, I don’t have a Twitter account, so that @mglyer isn’t me, although he is holding a mighty good-looking sandwich.)

What would it take to get this award off the ground?

Valente already has a short list —

Well, you need a couple of administrators to gin up a website and run the thing, access to a large community online to hash out the rules and categories and how to make it fair, for example, for both long and short fiction, and to design a nominating/awarding process, money for award trophies because it’s no fun without a statue, a con willing to host an award ceremony, and publicity. And, you know, a name…

Fire away. Personally, I need a good night’s sleep before I join the brainstorm. I’ll be interested to see what the night shift comes up with….

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145 thoughts on “Help Cat Valente Design an Award”

  1. I love this idea passionately!

    It doesn’t seem to fit at all with awards as we know ’em, and it spotlights narrative elements and storytelling craft! I don’t know if it’s feasible, but I sure want it to be!

    –although I’m immediately lunging for some kind of “Best Unique Element That’s Totally Undefinable And Unique To This Specific Work” award.

    Where has this previous discussion been? ::WANTS::

  2. Going to have to decide how many types of work will be allowed. Is it any format, one format, awards by format? Does Star Wars: the Force Awakens compete against Ancillary Mercy? Do novels go against short stories? Would the film of the book be eligible if the book already won something, if it didn’t?

    Nominations by character or by work title only? The former could be spoilery though at the same time, a multiple protagonists aren’t uncommon.

    A name. The Valentines? A nice anatomical heart statue mayhaps?

  3. It is a really good idea…

    It’s going to be tough to come up with a worthy overall name for these awards though… maybe a name for each category? You could for example call the “Best Death Scene” The Red Wedding Award or the George R.R. Martin Award etc.

  4. Love the idea. However, spoilers are the first thing that jumps to mind.

    I think announcing nominations by title of the book would do a lot to lessen how much is spoiled. You could have the scene or character hidden behind some kinda spoiler tag so people who have read the work or do not mind spoilers could go discover the specifics. ‘Best Twist’ is still something I think could be an issue. As often knowing a book has a great twist before reading it, can ruin the experience. Well it can for me.

    As for works, I kinda like the idea of all kinds of media competing against each other. So I like the idea of having it open from everything from novels to short stories to even video games.

  5. Candidate ideas for the award statue/trophy… I’m thinking it should have something to do with writing tools.

    Quill pen and inkwell. (yeah, it’s been done before, but maybe with a fresh treatment of the subject?) Names of category, winner, work, are engraved onto a plaque on the inkwell.

    Honest-to-Remington typewriter keyboard (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) with a nonstandard layout that shows the relevant names. This should be relatively flat, suitable for hanging on a wall or leaning against the back of a shelf.

    iPad-ish thingie with stylus. Relevant names appear on the screen. Perhaps use a genuine tablet computer, so the award trophy is also functional? Eh, maybe not—cost is likely to be prohibitive—so just go with a nonfunctional sculptural object.

    Scale model of an early (1980s-90s, say) personal computer, with the CPU box, keyboard, and monitor. Put the relevant names on the screen. Maybe a blinking LED as a cursor on the screen?

  7. Hyperbolus: That spoiler philosophy question is very interesting. I’m glad you brought that up.

  9. Lets just call it “The Spoiler Award”. Statue shows a fan desperately trying to run away from a troll that is running after him while simultaneously reading loud from a book.

  11. I think I might like to see ‘Best Worldbuilding’ split, hugo-dramatic-presentation style, into ‘most in-depth worldbuilding’ and ‘most unusual/innovative worldbuilding’, although that does seem to potentially be over-dividing the field.

    I’d also wonder if it might be worth swapping ‘Best Battle Sequence’ (which, by the title, seems to imply a focus on groups fighting other groups) with the more open-ended ‘Best Combat Sequence’ or ‘Best Fight Sequence’ – there’s some potential overlap there with ‘Best Action Sequence’, but a lot of my favorite fights are scenes where our hero’s going it alone, and ‘Battle’ seems to strongly imply groups of people on both sides. Pulling from my current popcorn SF of choice, Tim Zahn’s (hugely enjoyable – I keep meaning to rec it as soon as I manage to catch up on a recommendation comment thread while it’s still ongoing; the first trilogy had a quite nice hardcover omnibus edition that I picked up from the SFBC a few years ago) Cobra series, you often end up with fights where the lone (cybernetically augmented) hero is facing impossible odds, and ends up using the environment to even the odds before disengaging, completing their strategic objective, and vanishing into the night. It’s a fight, and it’s an action sequence, but not in the same sense that a well-written EVA-sharing-a-tether-with-secret-space-aliens is, and I feel like it’s the kind of thing that should fit in the ‘Battle Sequence’ category, except that the whole point of the scene is that the character’s not having a battle.

    —–

    edit; Hampus, that looks lovely, I see that I missed some fantastic things by not having TV access back in the ’80s. As if all the books piling on my stack weren’t enough, I guess I’m adding old telly programs too.

  12. This kind of award could also spin off its own spoof awards that might perhaps go to things by quantity rather than quality – “Largest Number of Named Characters” (ok, so the first year, this would have to be the winner), “Longest Sequence of Unnecessary Twists“, or looking at quality from the other direction, “Biggest Plot Hole” (which could receive an award in the shape of the vehicle that can be driven or flown through the plot hole).

    On a more serious note, when it comes to the trophies, there are worse ways to go from design to an item held in hand than 3D printing, for instance through services such as i.Materialise or Shapeways – these can print in many materials including metals, including electroplating of precious ones onto polished brass.

    I know, there’s something great about things that are made by the human hand (or by the hand guiding machinery) – but 3D printing is, in my view, about going as quickly as possible from idea to some semblance of reality; much like science fiction can take an idea and see where it goes.

    (And who knows, maybe one of the 3d printing services would be interested in helping sponsor the awards if their involvement in producing the trophies could give them some good publicity.)

  13. Lets just call it “The Spoiler Award”. Statue shows a fan desperately trying to run away from a troll that is running after him while simultaneously reading loud from a book.

    Double spoiler alert: troll perched atop the spoiler of a car landspeeder.

  14. Trophy: books with personalised dustjackets showing a relevant logo – a rose for romance, crossed swords for battles, etc etc. A swift google reveals places that will print these for you.

    For irony purposes you could put the dustjacket over a relevant book, so Death Scene would be over a GRRM. (h/t another Mark)

  15. Back in the good old days of TelevisionWithoutPity, there used to be specific subthreads for stuff like this – ie, best fight sequence, best musical etc etc etc. Don’t think it ever went to getting set up for a Tubey, their annual award setup.

  16. If a novel has a great twist at the end, can it win both Best Twist and Best Ending for it? In general, can one work win more than one of these awards? If so then what’s to stop a bunch of dedicated fans from just voting for their favourite novel in all the categories, giving it a clean sweep? If not, then how do you decide in which category a novel can win?

  17. Don’t think it ever went to getting set up for a Tubey, their annual award setup.

    You don’t think so? Well if you aren’t completely sure, I guess the question is:

    Tubey or not Tubey?

  18. @Mike Scott

    If a novel has a great twist at the end, can it win both Best Twist and Best Ending for it? In general, can one work win more than one of these awards?

    I’d say yes, but I think all details are up for grabs right now.

    If so then what’s to stop a bunch of dedicated fans from just voting for their favourite novel in all the categories, giving it a clean sweep? If not, then how do you decide in which category a novel can win?

    Hopefully some sort of “don’t be a dick” rule. If we wanted to be geeky (and why wouldn’t we be) then throw in a voting system that mitigates against straight-line voting in some way. Perhaps ranking or points, if you want something individual voters can influence.
    Alternatively, count the votes in such a way that once a book has locked in an award, its votes in other categories get handicapped.
    Example, book A gets strong votes in Action, Death, and Climax due to an action-packed death-filled climax, and would be beating Book B in all 3. Establish the category it has the strongest victory in, perhaps by % of votes, and hand it Best Action, then reduce its votes in all other categories by say 25%. Book B then takes Best Death over Book A due to the handicapping, and has its votes in Climax reduced, so that either Book A comes back in again, or they both lose to Book C. (Caution: this example was pulled out of posterior in 2 minutes flat, may have obvious flaws!)
    This assumes that everyone is reasonably good-natured about the award set-up and accepts that it’s more interesting for 6-10 people to walk off with an award or two each than just 1-3 people taking everything. (Caution: this assumption may not be valid!)

  19. I like this idea a lot…. You could get round the “spoilers” thing a bit, I think, by having a policy of only identifying works by their titles, at least in official communications. (After all, if you’ve read something, you know why it’s been nominated in a particular category, right?)

  20. For Best Twist and Best Death Scene, the trophy will be presented in a plain paper bag, and the recipient will be banned from attending the ceremony. To ensure security by obscurity, the winners will only be named on Google+.

  21. Best Opening Sentence. (Don’t know if we’ve had anything as good as Neuromancer‘s lately – not going to go and look right now – but it would be an incentive.)

  23. Aaaaand the best opening sentence goes to:

    “Now I am become Fifth, the destroyer of worlds.”

    Sorry, had to. No clue on how to set up awards. Sounds like a good idea though.
    Some additional ideas for categories, if you want to broaden it a little:
    – Best Cover Image
    – Best Illustration (i.e., maps, drawings, etc., in the book itself)
    – Best Foreword / Afterword (by a third person, not the author)

  24. Lord Melvin:

    I think I might like to see ‘Best Worldbuilding’ split, hugo-dramatic-presentation style, into ‘most in-depth worldbuilding’ and ‘most unusual/innovative worldbuilding’

    I’d also consider splitting the worldbuilding category, but into short and long form – worldbuilding in short fiction is different from novels in a way that the other proposed categories aren’t. On the other hand, your distinction between “in-depth” and “innovative” might leave room for short stories in the latter category (novellas might conceivably make a run for the former, as with GRRM’s “In the House of the Worm”).

  25. Also, Best Character Development. And I’ll add my vote to “Skjald” as the name of the awards.

    (BTW, Cat, if you take this beyond brainstorming, I’m a lawyer and can help with the organizational paperwork, although my time isn’t unlimited.)

  26. Best Blurb. Though, actually, Worst Blurb is a lot more fun – “Theirs was a Doomed Romance in a World Gone Mad. With a 1,000 Elephants!!!”. Could be called the C.M.O.T. Dibbler Award. OK, OK, not what this is about, I know…

  27. For the ‘best opening sentence’ may I suggest the name ‘Galaxy Award’ in honour of “Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding”.

    The award itself could be a piece if artwork displayed at Novacon some years ago which consisted of two UK chocolate bars (Galaxy bars) wrapped around each other.

    Overall I think these awards are a great idea.

  30. Best Twist is sort of a big red flag to everyone that these awards are definitely “spoiler territory” for those people upset with such things.

    To play devil’s advocate, if I knew that, say, Cat Valente won “Best Twist” with a novel of hers I hadn’t read, if I didn’t know what the twist was, that would make me wonder just what was coming, and go and read it. So, unless the actual item was named on the award or within the listing of the award giving itself, the fact that there IS a twist isn’t a spoiler…is it?

  31. This actually sounds like a very interesting idea, and something I haven’t seen featured in awards before.

    One question, would non-text works be included? Audio books? TV shows? Movies? Comics? Videogames? If so, would they be competing side-by-side for the categories, so that Best Twist applies equally to all? Or would it be Best Twist Written, Best Twist Dramatic Performance and so on? The former might make it hard for people to compare, the latter might mean a *lot* of awards.

    And for a more nuts-and-bolts question, is there going to be a nomination stage and a voting stage, like the Hugos?

  32. @Cat

    Categories per media would get tricky very quickly. I’m amused by the idea of everything being eligible, but it would be chaotic. I’d be tempted to be boring and restrict it to books, although I’d quite like to see a low enough word count that Novellas get a look in.

  33. @ Cat:

    One question, would non-text works be included? Audio books? TV shows? Movies? Comics? Videogames? If so, would they be competing side-by-side for the categories, so that Best Twist applies equally to all?

    I’d say that they should – one of the beautiful things about Cat Valente’s categories is that most of them (not all, but most) can be compared readily across media, and the object of the awards would be to recognize the story rather than the medium through which it’s told. Maybe the most visual of the categories, action and battle/combat, could be separated into print and visual media, but I don’t think this is necessary for the others.

  34. More usual in F than SF, but Best Map. Fictional cartography often enough seems like an afterthought to me, think it could use a boost; GoT’s opening credits might be brilliant, but the in-book maps are pretty average IMO. (Not relevant to everyone; I have a friend who refuses to read any fiction that comes with a map.)

    Also, Best Appendix(ces) (or other in-book explanatory resources). OK, it could be argued that having to include an appendix is a storytelling failure, but if it avoids excessive infodumping, I’m all for it.

    Better stop before it gets to Best Dedication…

  35. The awards should be named after master storyteller Jack Vance.

    He wrote both SF and fantasy, and excelled at most of the categories proposed.

  36. Not sure about Best Map, although I wouldn’t mind seeing fantasy maps get an award in their own right. Maps are aids to understanding rather than being part of the story proper, so IMO a map category would stray a bit from what Cat Valente is trying to do. Appendices are more in a gray area – the Dune appendices, for instance, had a couple of entries that were virtually stories in themselves – but I’m still not sure.

  37. Best Spoiler, eh?

    A few years ago Matt Ruff won the Tiptree for “Set This House in Order”. The plot element that made it Tiptree-worthy was a massive spoiler that surprised the expletives out of me when I read the book …

    (But, what can you do? )

  38. Funny you should bring this up – when this whole mess was just starting, I mentioned to James Nicoll that I’d had issues with the Hugos even before this fiasco and that perhaps it was time for a new award to be created.

    I don’t like the inherent classism in a fan award that makes you have to pay to be able to cast a vote. That leaves a lot of fans unable to vote because they cannot afford to pay.

  39. Apologies, it’s not at all applicable to Cat’s idea, but there are *a lot* of SF/F awards out there, so has anyone yet suggested a Best Award Award? (And that could have categories too, like Best Award for Best Novel.)

    I would add that the Best Award Award itself would obviously be disqualified from receiving the Best Award Award, but that if there were more than one group handing out Best Award Awards, it might be worth considering a Best Award Award Award.

  40. Sorry, that last should read the Best Best Award Award Award. And the award itself would be some sort of Ouroboros sculpture, I expect.

  41. I kinda love this idea. It’s very nifty. I don’t have bandwidth to spare right now, Cat V., but I’d be happy to offer advice and feedback on the getting it organized part.

  42. I don’t think spoilers would be a problem really except for the category of Best Twist, even then knowing a twist is coming isn’t necessarily spoiling it just an indication that there is one. I knew there was a twist in Gone Girl before I started reading it and it didn’t hurt my enjoyment of it at all. I don’t think there would be more spoilers involved when discussing the award more than there are already for discussing why any other book or story is/isn’t worthy of any award.

    I love this idea! It’s cool because it means that novels and shorter work would be competing for each category equally. Aside from spoilers I think it would be harder to determine what counts for nomination so as not to get a huge flood for each.

    Since it suggest by Cat, I’d say make the award after a famous literary cat, namely the Cheshire Cat/Cheshire Awards. You could make the award a creepy floating grin.

  43. Hi everyone! Thank you for being willing to discuss this! I have no experience with award design!

    I think removing the Best Twist category would take away the spoiler concerns. It’s not a spoiler to know that a book has an Ending or a Protagonist. The categories I came up with were off the top of my head, there’s probably ones to add or replace. I actually had Best Opening Line and Best Prose/Dialogue in there but took them out because my point was about the All Mighty Story.

    Identifying works by title alone: yes. Only way to do it, I’d think.

    I’d had the notion of simply dividing every category into Short Form and Long Form. I’m not sure how it would work to qualify everything from movies to video games to others…how could that ever be fair when Star Wars reaches such a wide audience, more than any novel?

    I have significant concerns about the voting system for OBVIOUS DANG REASONS. Ideally, it would be just like the Locus Awards, but that’s intensely vulnerable to gaming. However, I also don’t want any weird trust level crap and I don’t fancy charging money as Worldcon does for the simple reason that I am not Worldcon and it’s probably not worth it to people to pay for my popcorn awards? What’s in between?

    Jonathan: serious question. Does an award have to be an organization of paperwork kind? Or only if they take in money?

    Someone on Twitter had the idea of challenging fans to make the statuettes out of junk from their house, which I actually perversely like, but might be less practicable.

  44. This sounds so fun and exciting. There is that kind of risk about a certain kind of formulaic quality.

    One option would be that instead of picking eight or whatever interesting categories, and straight up voting, we could design a kind of massive (fun?) online quiz where one answer could win a book points in multiple categories. E.g. one question might be a straightforward “Name the book that has your favourite character (and who they are)” and so obviously that gets that book lots of points in the “BEST CHARACTER” category but maybe it also gets that book one or two points in the “MOST EMOTIONALLY ENGAGING” category, on the basis that characters are homunculi of our very own heartflesh, & thereby vectors for feels. Basically a question of literary criticism meets game design. (I imagine starting by making up a survey a bit like the recent xkcd non-purposive survey (http://xkcd.com/1572/) except for BOOKS, and then playing with ways of mapping responses onto a huge list of brainstormed categories. Gather data in this way, create algorithms with interesting weightings, and you could generate HUNDREDS of categories, of which maybe only half a dozen are the prestigious ones that folk are mostly talking about here … but the long tail gives it a bit of the old hardly-anyone-goes-home-empty-handed vibe. The mechanics could be transparent, but most people probably wouldn’t want to min-max it, we’d just DO THE QUIZ and enjoy the results of the hivemindlove).

    http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/prizes

    Instead of fighting a losing battle against gaming, embrace it. This Hedgehog et al system would be of great historic importance > http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/happy-puppies.html

  45. I do think that if you allow the awards to cross length categories or media, you’re automatically shutting out the least popular buckets. e.g. if the award is for prose fiction of all lengths, it’s pretty much guaranteed to go just to novels. One look at the nomination and voting tallies in a non-slated Hugo year will make this obvious.

  46. I may be utterly alone in this, as I’m not personally averse to spoilers, but I don’t know that spoilers are a huge issue necessarily. Like, in the discussions around nominated works for book X vs book Y for, say villain, then specificity is going to come into play, right? “What Villain X did was SO MUCH MORE VILLAINOUS than what Villain Y did, how can you not see that??????”

    Spoilers seem to be the name of the game with this award system. Having read nominated works thoroughly would be the bar to entry.

  47. Do you think these would start to function as incentives? Like if there WERE a Best Map would people start trying to up their map game?

  48. Also to Matt Y’s point above, a really really good twist survives spoiling. Put another way, it’s good and adds to the book even if you knew it was coming. Add it has re-read value. So true Best Twist contenders could likely withstand spoilage.

  49. @ Cat Valente:

    Jonathan: serious question. Does an award have to be an organization of paperwork kind? Or only if they take in money?

    You don’t need paperwork or a formal organization to hand out awards, but as a practical matter, this thing probably will take in money. There are all kinds of administrative expenses that you probably know better than me: getting the awards made, renting server space and/or a post-office box for voting, software to record votes, etc. Also, the award, its rules, its voting system and its regalia are intellectual property, and you’ll want to create an entity to register them in order to prevent others from appropriating them. You can of course register trademarks in your own name, but if this award becomes an ongoing thing and you decide to let someone else manage them, it’s a lot easier to make the transition if there’s a nonprofit company that holds the funds and owns the IP.

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