On one of my OryCon panels-- "What I Wish I Had Known Then"-- one of
the other panelists made the distinction between a writer "getting paid"
and "getting paid money". Which confused me, because what would you be
getting paid in, if not money? His answer was "exposure". And it's
true, there are several publications of lesser repute who will offer
this "payment" of "exposure".
But that's not payment, any more than handing someone an issue of Saveur is making them dinner.
Now,
if you're at a stage in your writing where, to you, there's value in
your work getting seen without monetary compensation, hey, that's your
business. But don't call it "payment".
But beyond getting actually paid-- which is a lovely thing-- there is the next level of "money" which is the Big Prize.
King/Rowley/Grisham Money.
I'm
not going to fool myself into thinking that's going to come, at least
not quickly or easily, if at all. I'm not doing this with stars in my
eyes. Well, maybe a little bit.
The truth is, there are several ways to make the "big money" that are far
more lucrative-- at least in terms of yielding said big money-- than
writing fantasy and sci-fi books. If I were only concerned about making
money, I'd do one of those things. But doing this-- writing these books-- that's what drives me.
So if the big money comes-- a film or TV deal based on Thorn and what follows, for example-- I'd like to think I'd mostly keep doing what I'm doing: writing the next book.
And travel more, of course. Those aren't mutually exclusive, after all. But in the meantime, I'll be digging away in the word mines. See you down there.
Showing posts with label perils of the writer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perils of the writer. Show all posts
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Monday, November 17, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Composing the Symphony vs. Plot Jazz
And I’m a big planner, both in terms of individual novels and long-term series plans. I’m a get-out-the-map-and-figure-out-where-I’m-going guy. I’ve got outlines for novels I’m still going to write: specifically Books Three for both The Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages, as well as Books Two and Three for Holver Alley Crew and Way of the Shield, books themselves that are still waiting in the wings for their time to shine. And past that, well… let’s just say that as far as I’m concerned, none of those series are intended to end with Book Three.
But outlining is going to have its limits. For me, a typical outline of a 100k-ish novel is somewhere between 1000 and 1500 words. That hits the key plot points, but clearly lacks details of character interaction and transitions. I find that there’s plenty of “Here is Point A” and “There is Point B”, but I still have plenty of chess pieces to move around to have things in place for Point B.
And that’s where the Plot Jazz comes in.
“Plot Jazz” is a term coined by some fans of Deep Space Nine and Farscape to talk about how those shows– shows which never really had a “plan” more than a few episodes ahead– had a great tendency to build off of things set up by throwaway lines or the possibilities a random idea offered up. An excellent example is in Farscape, where John having hallucinations of Scorpius in “Crackers Don’t Matter”– an episode where everyone is going crazy for spacy-sci-fi-reasons– triggered the idea that “Hey, maybe Scorpius put a chip in John’s head!”. That concept ended up being a key factor that shaped the rest of the season, and the series as a whole beyond it.
Plot Jazz, where you play it where it takes you, and hope it sounds good.
Now, what Plot Jazz means to a dyed-in-the-wool outliner like me is that secondary and tertiary characters often become more than they were in the outline. Not taking over the story, but having more consequence that the outline would have indicated. And that’s usually because in writing the outline, I don’t necessarily know what I’ll need those characters to do in the specific. The “what” is in the outline, but not the “why” and “how”, and there is a fair amount of discovery in working that stuff out.
There’s a fair amount of that in Thorn of Dentonhill, where while I was writing I’d realize something like, “Colin needs a friend he can talk to in this scene” or “I need a Constabulary officer to show up here”, and then the character that comes out of that expands into a life of its own. That’s where, for example, Colin’s crew of Jutie, Hetzer and Tooser or Lt. Benvin came from in Thorn, and those roles ended up being more than could have been predicted in the outline. Jutie and Lt. Benvin both get mention in the outline for Thorn II, but the details of the how and why with what they do ended up giving them both a crucial role in that book, including realizing I needed to give Lt. Benvin a whole group of constabulary officers under him.
So while I love my outlines and will never, ever let them go… that doesn’t mean I can’t embrace the Plot Jazz when I need it.
—
*- I do know of one writer who does write very detailed outlines for his novels, that the outline is around 40K for a 100K novel. He said the main difference between his outline and the novel is dialogue.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Deadlines and Schedules
I'm a big believer in a regular writing schedule. Find a time of day that works best for you, carve that time out, and affix yourself to a chair and get it done. It's not always easy or fun, but that's how one gets it done.
Now, fortunately, so far, I've not had much of a problem with deadlines. The Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages were essentially complete manuscripts when they sold. Editing work was required, but the time I was given to get that done was ample. On top of that, as soon as I signed the Thorn contract I started to put my nose to the grindstone on Thorn II.
That doesn't mean I'm immune to things blowing up in my face. A disruption to my life can throw everything out of sync. A few weeks ago my wife was in a car accident. Fortunately her injuries were relatively minor, but the car was totaled. So the process of dealing with things like insurance, car rental, and so forth is time and energy out of my day, and that has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" more often than not turns out to be writing. Or sleep. Or the dishes pile up. Those last two tend to come to a head far sooner than the writing, though.
Since my deadlines are relatively self-imposed at this point (i.e., when I want to get something done is sooner than other people are asking for it), getting back on track is mostly a matter of readjusting my expectations and going back to the grind. I've learned from experience that trying to do things like double my output or "catch up" usually results in things going even further off the rails.
Not to be all tortoise-and-the-hare, but slow and steady, getting back on task and doing the work each day is really the only thing you can do. But it does help that my personal deadlines give me enough breathing room to account for things going wrong.
Now, fortunately, so far, I've not had much of a problem with deadlines. The Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages were essentially complete manuscripts when they sold. Editing work was required, but the time I was given to get that done was ample. On top of that, as soon as I signed the Thorn contract I started to put my nose to the grindstone on Thorn II.
That doesn't mean I'm immune to things blowing up in my face. A disruption to my life can throw everything out of sync. A few weeks ago my wife was in a car accident. Fortunately her injuries were relatively minor, but the car was totaled. So the process of dealing with things like insurance, car rental, and so forth is time and energy out of my day, and that has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" more often than not turns out to be writing. Or sleep. Or the dishes pile up. Those last two tend to come to a head far sooner than the writing, though.
Since my deadlines are relatively self-imposed at this point (i.e., when I want to get something done is sooner than other people are asking for it), getting back on track is mostly a matter of readjusting my expectations and going back to the grind. I've learned from experience that trying to do things like double my output or "catch up" usually results in things going even further off the rails.
Not to be all tortoise-and-the-hare, but slow and steady, getting back on task and doing the work each day is really the only thing you can do. But it does help that my personal deadlines give me enough breathing room to account for things going wrong.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Riddles, Puzzles and Games
There is something alluring to putting a riddle in your story, especially in fantasy. Heck, that goes back to The Hobbit and the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum. But making a good riddle, that's another matter.
I recently read a book-- no need to go into specifics-- but the underlying premise involved solving riddles to get to the end goal. And in it, people were downright stumped by said riddles. For months on end. Thus the author was telling us that they were super hard.
Except I solved each riddle within moments of reading them. So, at least for me, the foundation the book was built on was extraordinarily flimsy.
But on the other hand, you don't want your riddles to be so hard they're based on a logic that only a madman could get from A to B to C, and then realize that "C" means "see", and you need glasses to see, and glasses are kept in the cabinet, and therefore The Riddler is going to assassinate the President's Cabinet!*
So, having your puzzle actually make logical sense is crucial. But the great thing about logical puzzles is they can seem like complete crazysauce, because Pure Logic rules don't really apply to the real world. Take, for example, the "100 Green-Eyed Dragon" puzzle. The nature of the puzzle is extremely convoluted, involving several rules and caveats to enable it to work the way it does. I won't give you the answer, but I will say that the answer only works because it's a matter of Pure Logic, including the caveat that every dragon involved operates on pure logic, and they also know that every other dragon involved also operates on pure logic. Take that presumption away, and the whole house of cards falls apart.**
Of course, much of the fun of putting riddles or puzzles in a story is having your characters go through the process of solving it. If you can work it that A. your (average) reader hasn't already figured it out and B. after going through the process with the character they will think, "Yes, that makes sense now.", then you've succeeded.
What are some of the riddles you have in your stories?
---
*- This is not an actual example of The Riddler's riddles on the old Superfriends show, but it more or less fits the train of logic to get to the actual intended answer the show had.
**- Another example is the Prisoners and Hats puzzle. Quick version: three prisoners are sentenced to be executed, but the jailer will let them go if they solve a puzzle. He has four hats: two blue and two red. He lines them up and puts the hats on their heads, so no prisoner can see his own hat, and the second prisoner can see the first, and the third can see the second and first. Now, the the solution comes from the fact that if the third prisoner sees two hats of the same color on #1 and #2, he immediately knows he's got the other color, and says so. But if he sees #1 and #2 have different colors, then he knows nothing about his own hat. However, #3's silence would indicate to #2 that his hat is different from #1, so he can figure it out. That's the solution, but it's entirely based on the idea that #3 isn't an idiot, and that #2 also isn't an idiot, AND he knows that #3 isn't an idiot. Poor prisoner #1, of course, has no information and has to rely on the both of these two, praying that they aren't idiots.
I recently read a book-- no need to go into specifics-- but the underlying premise involved solving riddles to get to the end goal. And in it, people were downright stumped by said riddles. For months on end. Thus the author was telling us that they were super hard.
Except I solved each riddle within moments of reading them. So, at least for me, the foundation the book was built on was extraordinarily flimsy.
But on the other hand, you don't want your riddles to be so hard they're based on a logic that only a madman could get from A to B to C, and then realize that "C" means "see", and you need glasses to see, and glasses are kept in the cabinet, and therefore The Riddler is going to assassinate the President's Cabinet!*
So, having your puzzle actually make logical sense is crucial. But the great thing about logical puzzles is they can seem like complete crazysauce, because Pure Logic rules don't really apply to the real world. Take, for example, the "100 Green-Eyed Dragon" puzzle. The nature of the puzzle is extremely convoluted, involving several rules and caveats to enable it to work the way it does. I won't give you the answer, but I will say that the answer only works because it's a matter of Pure Logic, including the caveat that every dragon involved operates on pure logic, and they also know that every other dragon involved also operates on pure logic. Take that presumption away, and the whole house of cards falls apart.**
Of course, much of the fun of putting riddles or puzzles in a story is having your characters go through the process of solving it. If you can work it that A. your (average) reader hasn't already figured it out and B. after going through the process with the character they will think, "Yes, that makes sense now.", then you've succeeded.
What are some of the riddles you have in your stories?
---
*- This is not an actual example of The Riddler's riddles on the old Superfriends show, but it more or less fits the train of logic to get to the actual intended answer the show had.
**- Another example is the Prisoners and Hats puzzle. Quick version: three prisoners are sentenced to be executed, but the jailer will let them go if they solve a puzzle. He has four hats: two blue and two red. He lines them up and puts the hats on their heads, so no prisoner can see his own hat, and the second prisoner can see the first, and the third can see the second and first. Now, the the solution comes from the fact that if the third prisoner sees two hats of the same color on #1 and #2, he immediately knows he's got the other color, and says so. But if he sees #1 and #2 have different colors, then he knows nothing about his own hat. However, #3's silence would indicate to #2 that his hat is different from #1, so he can figure it out. That's the solution, but it's entirely based on the idea that #3 isn't an idiot, and that #2 also isn't an idiot, AND he knows that #3 isn't an idiot. Poor prisoner #1, of course, has no information and has to rely on the both of these two, praying that they aren't idiots.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Haters Gonna Hate; Raters Gonna Rate.
So I have to confess to another bad habit, at least a bad habit for writers. I like to go to the Amazon page of books I enjoyed (or Goodreads or what have you) and read the one-star and two-star reviews. And, sometimes, they have valid points, and I can see where they were coming from. Other times, said reviews are crazy-sauce. If the internet has proven one thing, it's that some people will fundamentally mis-read something, and have loud opinions about it.
Knowing that, am I going to be able to keep myself from reading my one-star and two-star reviews?
No, I'm not. I'm really not. I just don't have that kind of self-control.
However, what I think I'll be able to do is roll with those bad reviews. I won't respond to or challenge the reviewers. I will likely rant and scream a bit within the confines of my own household, but nothing public. I mean, I was an actor and theatre producer, so I've had bad reviews before. I can take it.
But.... I might also see some valid points. Points that I could learn from in the next project. Or give me insight into which aspects of the books are or aren't working for people. Because, it would be the height of hubris to think that I've got everything figured out and there's nothing left for me to learn. Even the most misguided, vitriolic bile-spitting hate-screed of a review could have a seed of value I can harvest. And if there isn't, then... ignore it.
And since there's always more to harvest, it's off to the word... fields. Hmm. That metaphor isn't quite as romantic, is it?
Knowing that, am I going to be able to keep myself from reading my one-star and two-star reviews?
No, I'm not. I'm really not. I just don't have that kind of self-control.
However, what I think I'll be able to do is roll with those bad reviews. I won't respond to or challenge the reviewers. I will likely rant and scream a bit within the confines of my own household, but nothing public. I mean, I was an actor and theatre producer, so I've had bad reviews before. I can take it.
But.... I might also see some valid points. Points that I could learn from in the next project. Or give me insight into which aspects of the books are or aren't working for people. Because, it would be the height of hubris to think that I've got everything figured out and there's nothing left for me to learn. Even the most misguided, vitriolic bile-spitting hate-screed of a review could have a seed of value I can harvest. And if there isn't, then... ignore it.
And since there's always more to harvest, it's off to the word... fields. Hmm. That metaphor isn't quite as romantic, is it?
Monday, September 15, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Establishing the Stakes
This past weekend I watched the five pilots that Amazon put up to gauge customer interest. It's an interestingly democratic way to do the pilot process: bring the pilots to the people, and let them decide which should get a series order.
Pilots are, of course, like opening chapters of a novel: they have to hook, they have to engage, and most importantly, they have to establish stakes. You have to gauge your pacing and your revelations, and make sure characters are responding in proportion to the events unfolding. You can't just have people screaming about how serious things are and expect the audience to buy in to that.
In other words, stakes have to be real, and they have to be shown.
On of the five pilots in particular, Hysteria, fails greatly in this regard. We start with a doctor visiting her brother on death row, where he wants her to tell him about what she's investigating in Austin. This is just a framing device for the real story, in which (and I'm quoting from the copy) "A young doctor is summoned back to her hometown to investigate an epidemic that may be linked to social media."
Now, we'll ignore that her hometown is Austin, and despite the fact that it was filmed here in Austin, the show frames the city like it's a place with one school, one hospital, abandoned factories and alleys that cops get beat up in if they walk down alone. We'll ignore that stuff.
Instead we'll talk about the stakes.
See, it starts with a bunch of girls sneaking out at night to go dance with some wrong-side-of-the-highway boys in the abandoned snowglobe factory. One of the girls is livecasting it on her phone while she gets sexually aggressive with on of the boys. The other boy starts to get aggressive with her sister, but then her sister starts having seizures.
At the hospital, the doctor is already treating it like it's Super Serious Business-- beyond the scope of just her having seizures and being in a coma. Before even the light of day hits, he's already talking about calling in our main character from Houston, as she's a neurologist and psychiatrist.* Because in Austin, there's none of those on hand, or something.
Now, by the time the doctor arrives, the video has been seen by a handful of people, one of whom (another girl who was there) starts having seizures. We literally only see her hand shaking, and then we never hear directly about her again. The other girls who were there, we are explicitly shown that they are fine.**
So, to reiterate: two cases. Despite that, we're shown the doctors talking to the parents of ALL THE GIRLS as if they all have a stake. Like, "hey, parents of girls who are not patients, let's have a conference involving you as well."
Meanwhile, we see a mysterious person putting together a video of the girl having a seizure mixed with other footage of her dancing. For mysterious, possibly nefarious reasons. After that video comes out and goes viral, then there's another person with seizures.
And the city of Austin freaks completely out.
So, let's go back: two girls with seizures-- so it may be a disease or or exposure to something, or it may be one girl with a neurological problem and a friend with some sort of sympathetic psychosomatic reaction. Then a third-- and to everyone's knowledge, completely unrelated or connected person-- also has seizures (and that could just be epilepsy or something else entirely) in a city with a greater metro population of a million. And people reaction like the Serious Epidemic Business is here.
Like, screaming in the hospital parking lot freak out. Like, press conference in the high school gymnasium with the chief of police and screaming angry parents.
Had the show even remotely earned these stakes? No, not at all. Not with only three cases, one of which shows no real connection to the the other two. In fact, the third case is shown to be different because he gets violent with the people trying to help him. There's literally no reason for them to even think the third case is connected to the other two, beyond seizures.
Of course, our heroine figures out a connection, in that the third victim is the mysterious guy who made the video, and thus she thinks that the SEIZURES ARE BEING TRANSMITTED THROUGH YOUTUBE. Or something. This is despite the fact that we're shown plenty of people seeing the video (and it's hardly a clickbaity-you-have-to-see-this-video), and no one else is showing symptoms. But before this absurd epiphany (which seems to be the underlying premise of the show), they have no reason to believe any connection. They say that his symptoms aren't the same, except for seizures, and that they don't believe he's had any contact with the girls... so why do they think it's a connected case? They just do.
So what did they do wrong? They didn't establish believable stakes. If anything, they explicitly undercut their stakes, but then had characters react as if the stakes were extremely serious.
If you want your audience to believe what you're telling them, believe that situations are serious, then stakes have to be established fairly and legitimately. This isn't just a matter of show vs. tell-- we're shown who's sick, we're shown the town's reaction. But what we're shown of events doesn't match what we're shown of reaction.
Without well-established stakes with logical points connecting them, there's no way your audience is going to accept what you're giving them.
---
*- The mother latches onto "psychiatrist" part and freaks out.
**- One is set up with tension, like her father is going to find her seizing in the shower, but no, she's fine and showering, and yells at her dad for coming in there.
Pilots are, of course, like opening chapters of a novel: they have to hook, they have to engage, and most importantly, they have to establish stakes. You have to gauge your pacing and your revelations, and make sure characters are responding in proportion to the events unfolding. You can't just have people screaming about how serious things are and expect the audience to buy in to that.
In other words, stakes have to be real, and they have to be shown.
On of the five pilots in particular, Hysteria, fails greatly in this regard. We start with a doctor visiting her brother on death row, where he wants her to tell him about what she's investigating in Austin. This is just a framing device for the real story, in which (and I'm quoting from the copy) "A young doctor is summoned back to her hometown to investigate an epidemic that may be linked to social media."
Now, we'll ignore that her hometown is Austin, and despite the fact that it was filmed here in Austin, the show frames the city like it's a place with one school, one hospital, abandoned factories and alleys that cops get beat up in if they walk down alone. We'll ignore that stuff.
Instead we'll talk about the stakes.
See, it starts with a bunch of girls sneaking out at night to go dance with some wrong-side-of-the-highway boys in the abandoned snowglobe factory. One of the girls is livecasting it on her phone while she gets sexually aggressive with on of the boys. The other boy starts to get aggressive with her sister, but then her sister starts having seizures.
At the hospital, the doctor is already treating it like it's Super Serious Business-- beyond the scope of just her having seizures and being in a coma. Before even the light of day hits, he's already talking about calling in our main character from Houston, as she's a neurologist and psychiatrist.* Because in Austin, there's none of those on hand, or something.
Now, by the time the doctor arrives, the video has been seen by a handful of people, one of whom (another girl who was there) starts having seizures. We literally only see her hand shaking, and then we never hear directly about her again. The other girls who were there, we are explicitly shown that they are fine.**
So, to reiterate: two cases. Despite that, we're shown the doctors talking to the parents of ALL THE GIRLS as if they all have a stake. Like, "hey, parents of girls who are not patients, let's have a conference involving you as well."
Meanwhile, we see a mysterious person putting together a video of the girl having a seizure mixed with other footage of her dancing. For mysterious, possibly nefarious reasons. After that video comes out and goes viral, then there's another person with seizures.
And the city of Austin freaks completely out.
So, let's go back: two girls with seizures-- so it may be a disease or or exposure to something, or it may be one girl with a neurological problem and a friend with some sort of sympathetic psychosomatic reaction. Then a third-- and to everyone's knowledge, completely unrelated or connected person-- also has seizures (and that could just be epilepsy or something else entirely) in a city with a greater metro population of a million. And people reaction like the Serious Epidemic Business is here.
Like, screaming in the hospital parking lot freak out. Like, press conference in the high school gymnasium with the chief of police and screaming angry parents.
Had the show even remotely earned these stakes? No, not at all. Not with only three cases, one of which shows no real connection to the the other two. In fact, the third case is shown to be different because he gets violent with the people trying to help him. There's literally no reason for them to even think the third case is connected to the other two, beyond seizures.
Of course, our heroine figures out a connection, in that the third victim is the mysterious guy who made the video, and thus she thinks that the SEIZURES ARE BEING TRANSMITTED THROUGH YOUTUBE. Or something. This is despite the fact that we're shown plenty of people seeing the video (and it's hardly a clickbaity-you-have-to-see-this-video), and no one else is showing symptoms. But before this absurd epiphany (which seems to be the underlying premise of the show), they have no reason to believe any connection. They say that his symptoms aren't the same, except for seizures, and that they don't believe he's had any contact with the girls... so why do they think it's a connected case? They just do.
So what did they do wrong? They didn't establish believable stakes. If anything, they explicitly undercut their stakes, but then had characters react as if the stakes were extremely serious.
If you want your audience to believe what you're telling them, believe that situations are serious, then stakes have to be established fairly and legitimately. This isn't just a matter of show vs. tell-- we're shown who's sick, we're shown the town's reaction. But what we're shown of events doesn't match what we're shown of reaction.
Without well-established stakes with logical points connecting them, there's no way your audience is going to accept what you're giving them.
---
*- The mother latches onto "psychiatrist" part and freaks out.
**- One is set up with tension, like her father is going to find her seizing in the shower, but no, she's fine and showering, and yells at her dad for coming in there.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Picking Your Battles
So the big news in writerly circles this weekend involved the current salvos in the Amazon/Hachette fracas, with writers remaining caught in the middle*. I honestly haven't been talking about it mostly because I really don't have a dog in this fight, not directly, but also because people like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig are saying the sort of thing I'm thinking, and saying it far better than I probably would. And in the case of Chuck, with more profanity and bushier beard.
What I find fascinating about all this is how some people who don't have a dog in this fight are turning the whole thing on its edge to give themselves a dog. To twist distribution contract negotiations into something about THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: BIG 5 PUBLISHERS VS. INDIES. And, you know, I tried to see it, and I looked at it sideways and squinted... and I still didn't see it. Closest I could see to it was Indie writers-- who use Amazon to distribute their work, and may or may not have a beef with Big 5 publishing-- see this whole thing as a chance to take one of the Big 5 down a peg. Or something. If you want to see it that way, if you want to frame it as a David And Goliath Fight... that's your business. Frankly, it's far more of an Ali/Frazier, as I see it.** But how I see it doesn't really matter, because... I'm not really in it.
Sooner or later, though, there will be one of these writerly rows in which you will firmly be on one side or another. That might be because things are happening that affect you, or it's a situation you feel passionate about. Or it might be because you hold one kind of politics and said something in favor of those politics, and people who hold another kind of politics have decided you are now a punching bag. Sometimes you come to the fight; sometimes the fight comes to you. Sometimes the fight is an angry mob; sometimes it's just a few mosquitoes. Both don't require a flamethrower response.
You've got to decide how you're going to handle it. You've got to decide if you're going to handle it.
Because not every fight is worth it. Sometimes you should just focus on your own writing. Which is, frankly, what I'm going to go do.
---
*- Someday we'll all be grizzled old veterans. "I was there for the Amazon/Hachette Wars! Fought in the great Blog Battle of August 9th!"
**- I won't comment which is which, though.
What I find fascinating about all this is how some people who don't have a dog in this fight are turning the whole thing on its edge to give themselves a dog. To twist distribution contract negotiations into something about THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: BIG 5 PUBLISHERS VS. INDIES. And, you know, I tried to see it, and I looked at it sideways and squinted... and I still didn't see it. Closest I could see to it was Indie writers-- who use Amazon to distribute their work, and may or may not have a beef with Big 5 publishing-- see this whole thing as a chance to take one of the Big 5 down a peg. Or something. If you want to see it that way, if you want to frame it as a David And Goliath Fight... that's your business. Frankly, it's far more of an Ali/Frazier, as I see it.** But how I see it doesn't really matter, because... I'm not really in it.
Sooner or later, though, there will be one of these writerly rows in which you will firmly be on one side or another. That might be because things are happening that affect you, or it's a situation you feel passionate about. Or it might be because you hold one kind of politics and said something in favor of those politics, and people who hold another kind of politics have decided you are now a punching bag. Sometimes you come to the fight; sometimes the fight comes to you. Sometimes the fight is an angry mob; sometimes it's just a few mosquitoes. Both don't require a flamethrower response.
You've got to decide how you're going to handle it. You've got to decide if you're going to handle it.
Because not every fight is worth it. Sometimes you should just focus on your own writing. Which is, frankly, what I'm going to go do.
---
*- Someday we'll all be grizzled old veterans. "I was there for the Amazon/Hachette Wars! Fought in the great Blog Battle of August 9th!"
**- I won't comment which is which, though.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Perils of the Writer: The Long Upward Struggle
Tomorrow morning is the Workshop, and my whole weekend is ArmadilloCon (my schedule) so I don't have too much time to write here today.
But I wanted to talk a bit about how getting to where I am has been a hard struggle. It's always been hard work, and plenty of times I really questioned myself whether it was worth it. Not to mention the world is full of discouragement. The odds of getting an agent's attention are astronomical. Publishers aren't interested in new writers.
It's very hard to even get to here. But like Jimmy Dugan says, the hard is what makes it great.
But that means you've got to fight through the hard. You've got to get up each time you're knocked down. You've got to take every scrap of encouragement and forage it together-- even some spare words of, "You've got a lot of real talent" and make that the only meal you're going to get all year.
It. Is. Hard.
But it's very possible.
Keep fighting. See you in the word mines.
But I wanted to talk a bit about how getting to where I am has been a hard struggle. It's always been hard work, and plenty of times I really questioned myself whether it was worth it. Not to mention the world is full of discouragement. The odds of getting an agent's attention are astronomical. Publishers aren't interested in new writers.
It's very hard to even get to here. But like Jimmy Dugan says, the hard is what makes it great.
But that means you've got to fight through the hard. You've got to get up each time you're knocked down. You've got to take every scrap of encouragement and forage it together-- even some spare words of, "You've got a lot of real talent" and make that the only meal you're going to get all year.
It. Is. Hard.
But it's very possible.
Keep fighting. See you in the word mines.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Blessed are the Slushdivers
I don't want to bag on people who self-publish. There are good reasons to do it, and there are people who do it very well and have found great success doing it. That's excellent for them.
That said, I've got a big problem with the zealots who don't merely preach the gospel of self-publishing, but scream from the mountaintop how traditional publishing-- or "legacy" publishing, to use their attempt at a backhanded term-- is doomed to die. That's it's already dead, and its proponents just don't realize it.
This is, of course, crap.
The big argument they like to make is that readers don't need publishers to make decisions about what's worth reading for them, they can find what they like for themselves. That the people can be their own gatekeepers.
This is an argument made by someone who has never read through a slushpile. Which is a shame, because it is something that every aspiring professional writer should do at least once. To get a little perspective, if nothing else.
So, for perspective, this is what agents and editors do:
Imagine a river of shit. Roiling, torrential rapids of hot shit. And careening through the eddies and currents of this river, there are diamonds. And rocks. Mostly rocks, but some diamonds.
And a few brave souls DIVE IN THERE and swim through that festering flow of feculence, searching for a couple diamonds. They come out with what they find, sort out the rocks from the diamonds, and clean those off and sell them. And by the nature of how things are, yes: some diamonds will not be found. It's a shame, but that's a reality.
This is a metaphor, but I'm really not exaggerating.
Really, really not. I've read through slush submissions, and it can really be that bad.
Now, if you're game for diving in and finding your own diamonds: power to you. Seriously. It isn't easy. I'm pretty amazed that agents and editors are still constantly doing this to find new work.
And I'm glad they do. Because, on the whole, I'd MUCH rather go to the stand by the roadside with cleaned-and-polished diamonds then listen to the guy on the riverbank screaming that there's diamonds in the shit river and anyone can get. He might be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that I appreciate the work that the divers do. And if I resent anything-- as a reader-- its the assumption that I should want to dive in and find the diamonds myself.
I leave that to the professionals.
That said, I've got a big problem with the zealots who don't merely preach the gospel of self-publishing, but scream from the mountaintop how traditional publishing-- or "legacy" publishing, to use their attempt at a backhanded term-- is doomed to die. That's it's already dead, and its proponents just don't realize it.
This is, of course, crap.
The big argument they like to make is that readers don't need publishers to make decisions about what's worth reading for them, they can find what they like for themselves. That the people can be their own gatekeepers.
This is an argument made by someone who has never read through a slushpile. Which is a shame, because it is something that every aspiring professional writer should do at least once. To get a little perspective, if nothing else.
So, for perspective, this is what agents and editors do:
Imagine a river of shit. Roiling, torrential rapids of hot shit. And careening through the eddies and currents of this river, there are diamonds. And rocks. Mostly rocks, but some diamonds.
And a few brave souls DIVE IN THERE and swim through that festering flow of feculence, searching for a couple diamonds. They come out with what they find, sort out the rocks from the diamonds, and clean those off and sell them. And by the nature of how things are, yes: some diamonds will not be found. It's a shame, but that's a reality.
This is a metaphor, but I'm really not exaggerating.
Really, really not. I've read through slush submissions, and it can really be that bad.
Now, if you're game for diving in and finding your own diamonds: power to you. Seriously. It isn't easy. I'm pretty amazed that agents and editors are still constantly doing this to find new work.
And I'm glad they do. Because, on the whole, I'd MUCH rather go to the stand by the roadside with cleaned-and-polished diamonds then listen to the guy on the riverbank screaming that there's diamonds in the shit river and anyone can get. He might be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that I appreciate the work that the divers do. And if I resent anything-- as a reader-- its the assumption that I should want to dive in and find the diamonds myself.
I leave that to the professionals.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Losing Your "Strong" Female Character to Trinity Syndrome
This article by Tasha Robinson should be required reading to all writers (especially male writers, like myself) who like to think they are writing strong female characters. Perhaps you are, but Ms. Robinson gives a good checklist to contemplate.
A big thing she talks about is the "Trinity Syndrome"-- where a female character is given the impression of being strong and important-- like Trinity in The Matrix-- but after her strong and important introduction, she actually contributes very little to the actual plot, other than propping up the hero. Or, as Ms. Robinson so eloquently puts it, "A sexy lamp with information for the hero written on it."
This is not something I get right all the time, myself. Thorn of Dentonhill, I'll admit, has only one significant female character in it, but she is pretty crucial to the plot, and it involves being Veranix's friend and confidante, but not a romantic partner. I may not have done a perfect job, but I strove to make sure that Kaiana was not a sexy lamp. Is she a Trinity? I don't think so. I can tell you, if she veers in that direction in Thorn, I'm fairly sure I turned out of the skid in Thorn II.
A Murder of Mages has many significant female characters, including and especially Satrine, who is very much the co-protagonist. No one there is a sexy lamp, and Satrine is definitely not a Trinity.
That said, this gave me good things to think about, and places where I can see room for improvement in my own work. Which is always the goal, right?
A big thing she talks about is the "Trinity Syndrome"-- where a female character is given the impression of being strong and important-- like Trinity in The Matrix-- but after her strong and important introduction, she actually contributes very little to the actual plot, other than propping up the hero. Or, as Ms. Robinson so eloquently puts it, "A sexy lamp with information for the hero written on it."
This is not something I get right all the time, myself. Thorn of Dentonhill, I'll admit, has only one significant female character in it, but she is pretty crucial to the plot, and it involves being Veranix's friend and confidante, but not a romantic partner. I may not have done a perfect job, but I strove to make sure that Kaiana was not a sexy lamp. Is she a Trinity? I don't think so. I can tell you, if she veers in that direction in Thorn, I'm fairly sure I turned out of the skid in Thorn II.
A Murder of Mages has many significant female characters, including and especially Satrine, who is very much the co-protagonist. No one there is a sexy lamp, and Satrine is definitely not a Trinity.
That said, this gave me good things to think about, and places where I can see room for improvement in my own work. Which is always the goal, right?
Monday, May 19, 2014
Perils of the Writer: All the "Rules" with a Grain of Salt
Every fledgling writer hears all sorts of "dos and don'ts", rules that you NEED to follow if you want to have ANY CHANCE of getting published. Most of these things are nonsense, essentially trying to quantify something that is more gut-feeling than hard and fast rule. Case in point:
But more to the point, there are only three punctuation marks that can end a sentence. Why avoid one-third of them completely? How is that lazy writing? I don't know. It's a fundamental part of punctuation. It would be as if someone said, "I never like seeing quotation marks. There must be some other way to show a character is speaking."
The advice, as a reading rule itself, I find almost obscene. It's a step away from saying, "If I see a sentence with two words that start with a 'k', I stop reading." I shudder to think of fledgling writers running to their manuscripts and slashing out exclamation points. Because THEY! MUST! GO!
I'm so glad neither my agent nor my editor follow such a silly rule.*
--
*- The first sentence of Thorn of Dentonhill is "Thief!"
I was just at a conference, where in the opening pages agent-author seminar, the agents stopped reading a participant's opener as soon as they hit an exclamation point, and stressed that shows lazy writing. There must be some other way to show the emphasis, or else don't emphasize the point where it is used.I have to admit, this one, in particular, strikes me as especially arbitrary. Exclamation points show lazy writing? Incorrect usage of exclamation points can certainly be problematic, but to exclude their usage altogether? Absurd. I'll say again with emphasis: Absurd! (Especially considering one of the events at that conference was titled, "The Power of Positive Writing!” Yes, with the exclamation point.)
But more to the point, there are only three punctuation marks that can end a sentence. Why avoid one-third of them completely? How is that lazy writing? I don't know. It's a fundamental part of punctuation. It would be as if someone said, "I never like seeing quotation marks. There must be some other way to show a character is speaking."
The advice, as a reading rule itself, I find almost obscene. It's a step away from saying, "If I see a sentence with two words that start with a 'k', I stop reading." I shudder to think of fledgling writers running to their manuscripts and slashing out exclamation points. Because THEY! MUST! GO!
I'm so glad neither my agent nor my editor follow such a silly rule.*
--
*- The first sentence of Thorn of Dentonhill is "Thief!"
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Perils of the Writer/Worldbuilding: Avoiding the Chakotay Problem
I've talked before about worldbuilding and the challenges of just doing a copy-and-paste of Earth cultures, which, of course, you don't want to do. Draw inspiration from real-world cultures? Sure. But if you just drop them in, unconsidered, and say, "That, plus magic makes a fantasy culture", you're going to cause trouble for yourself.
The biggest problem in doing something like that is when you do that, if you don't do the research work, then you could easily fall into the trap of making your fantasy culture merely the stereotype of the Earth culture you're inspired by. And then you'll fall face first into the Chakotay Problem.
Chakotay, if you aren't aware, was the first officer on Star Trek Voyager, played by Robert Beltran, and his primary character trait was being Native American. What kind of Native American was relatively vague, though at least one episode narrowed it down to a tribe in the Amazon river basin of South America.
Not that it mattered, because the show's presentation of him was "vaguely Native American", slapping any sort of poorly thought out trope or stereotype onto him. They did this with no regard to where in the Americas it came from, or even if it had legitimate origins at all. Part of this came from poor research. Apparently, the document prepared for the showrunners by an "expert" to draw from was written by a sham artist-- someone who claimed to be an expert on Native American culture, but had zero ties to it, no scholarship on the subject, and made things up whole cloth.
So the end result was a mish-mash of stereotypes and Chakotay mentioning "his people" having sayings, stories or traditions, all of which were utterly made up. Tripe that was at best ignorant, and more often than not, highly offensive.
Clearly, this is a thing you want to avoid in your worldbuilding.
The best thing you can do is give your cultures dimensionality. Do the proper research. Make sure that the real-world cultures you are drawing inspiration from aren't immediately obvious. Build depth into them, and don't rely on trite stereotypes. Otherwise, all you'll do is highlight your writing as something not to take seriously.
The biggest problem in doing something like that is when you do that, if you don't do the research work, then you could easily fall into the trap of making your fantasy culture merely the stereotype of the Earth culture you're inspired by. And then you'll fall face first into the Chakotay Problem.
Chakotay, if you aren't aware, was the first officer on Star Trek Voyager, played by Robert Beltran, and his primary character trait was being Native American. What kind of Native American was relatively vague, though at least one episode narrowed it down to a tribe in the Amazon river basin of South America.
Not that it mattered, because the show's presentation of him was "vaguely Native American", slapping any sort of poorly thought out trope or stereotype onto him. They did this with no regard to where in the Americas it came from, or even if it had legitimate origins at all. Part of this came from poor research. Apparently, the document prepared for the showrunners by an "expert" to draw from was written by a sham artist-- someone who claimed to be an expert on Native American culture, but had zero ties to it, no scholarship on the subject, and made things up whole cloth.
So the end result was a mish-mash of stereotypes and Chakotay mentioning "his people" having sayings, stories or traditions, all of which were utterly made up. Tripe that was at best ignorant, and more often than not, highly offensive.
Clearly, this is a thing you want to avoid in your worldbuilding.
The best thing you can do is give your cultures dimensionality. Do the proper research. Make sure that the real-world cultures you are drawing inspiration from aren't immediately obvious. Build depth into them, and don't rely on trite stereotypes. Otherwise, all you'll do is highlight your writing as something not to take seriously.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Sequel Grinding
Some more experienced writers have told me that writing the second book is much harder than the first.
So far, with Thorn of Dentonhill II (new working title: Elements of Aventil), that hasn't been the case.
Not to say I haven't had my challenges. It's gone steady, but around the 2/3 point, my writing output has slowed down. Not stopped, but gone from 5-6K a week to 3-4K. But that's not uncommon. Every book I've written has had some sort of mid-point quagmire, and frankly, this has been the least troubling one to date. I mean, Way of the Shield spent months in around 30,000 words where I just couldn't figure it out. So spending a week longer to hit 70K on Elements is hardly cause for alarm.
But why do writers have trouble with second books? Mostly this comes from the fact that first books usually have years of midwifing, where writers work at their own pace. Polishing and perfecting. So once that finally sells, the pair of questions "Great, what's next? And can you have it done in six months?" can certainly seem daunting.
Now, perhaps why it's less daunting for me is because I kept working on rough drafts of new material while shopping Thorn-- a tactic which paid off, since I sold Thorn and Murder of Mages at the same time-- so the process of "Now how do I write another novel?" was demystified. I worked out a process of outlining. I've been coming at Elements with this solid outline-- which has, for the most part, survived intact, though there are plenty of aspects finding their way in that had nothing to do with the outline.
Of course, part of this has been to address the question, mostly imposed on myself: now that I'm "a professional", can I grind out the work at the pace I need to? Part of the reason why Way of the Shield could sit and do nothing for so long is that no one was really asking for it. In theory Elements of Aventil is going to have people asking for it, and having it done, proving I can do it as fast as I need to-- especially now, when we aren't at "quit your day job" money yet-- is an important next step.
So, in brief: yeah, writing the sequel is hard. But, fortunately, it hasn't been as hard as I feared it could be.
So far, with Thorn of Dentonhill II (new working title: Elements of Aventil), that hasn't been the case.
Not to say I haven't had my challenges. It's gone steady, but around the 2/3 point, my writing output has slowed down. Not stopped, but gone from 5-6K a week to 3-4K. But that's not uncommon. Every book I've written has had some sort of mid-point quagmire, and frankly, this has been the least troubling one to date. I mean, Way of the Shield spent months in around 30,000 words where I just couldn't figure it out. So spending a week longer to hit 70K on Elements is hardly cause for alarm.
But why do writers have trouble with second books? Mostly this comes from the fact that first books usually have years of midwifing, where writers work at their own pace. Polishing and perfecting. So once that finally sells, the pair of questions "Great, what's next? And can you have it done in six months?" can certainly seem daunting.
Now, perhaps why it's less daunting for me is because I kept working on rough drafts of new material while shopping Thorn-- a tactic which paid off, since I sold Thorn and Murder of Mages at the same time-- so the process of "Now how do I write another novel?" was demystified. I worked out a process of outlining. I've been coming at Elements with this solid outline-- which has, for the most part, survived intact, though there are plenty of aspects finding their way in that had nothing to do with the outline.
Of course, part of this has been to address the question, mostly imposed on myself: now that I'm "a professional", can I grind out the work at the pace I need to? Part of the reason why Way of the Shield could sit and do nothing for so long is that no one was really asking for it. In theory Elements of Aventil is going to have people asking for it, and having it done, proving I can do it as fast as I need to-- especially now, when we aren't at "quit your day job" money yet-- is an important next step.
So, in brief: yeah, writing the sequel is hard. But, fortunately, it hasn't been as hard as I feared it could be.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Real World Politics and SF/F
I don't usually bring up real-world politics here. But it's been drumming around the circle for a while now, so I might as well address it. I might be something of a rare bird in this industry, in that I'm on friendly terms with people with vastly varying political leaning. People who I disagree with, even vehemently. And don't get me wrong, I do love occasionally getting into it, politically speaking, as long as it's a good argument, and not just yelling, "You're wrong!" back and forth.
But let's not confuse politics for behavior.
Because there are plenty of people-- people on the far left and far right, frankly-- who gleefully act like assholes, and then when called on that behavior, use their political affiliation as a shield. "Oh, you're coming after me because of my beliefs!" Terms like "witch hunt" are used, because it's easier to hide behind that, make yourself a victim, instead of acknowledging: hey, I'm acting like an asshole.
It's so much easier to act like you're being persecuted.
But if you act like an asshole-- and believe me, I've been there: back in my twenties I'm sure I had some Grade A moments-- people will and should call you on it, and it's disingenuous to say it's because of your politics. You know why? Because I know people with the same political lean who aren't assholes, so it's clearly not some sort of obligatory behavior based on political opinion.
I am all for people wearing their politics on their sleeves. And put it in your fiction. Have your fiction be a full-on polemic; rip your political opinion off your sleeve and shove it down my throat. Politics I agree with, politics I don't agree with. Go full out.
All I ask is that it actually be a good read, too, you know?
Which brings me around to the Hugo Nomination thing. I want to believe that people who nominate things do so in good faith, even if they are politically motivated. I haven't read Larry Correia's Warbound-- or anything else by him-- but I've seen enough people praise the books. He was nominated for the Campbell a couple of years ago. I can honestly believe that there are plenty of fans who really liked his book and feel it deserving of a "Best Novel" award, even if their reasoning was motivated by politics.
However, I actually read “Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day. Now, I won't go into Mr. Day's personal history or anything-- it's out there and well documented, and you don't need me to give you an opinion on him. You have your opinion, one way or another. But here's the thing about “Opera Vita Aeterna": it's just poor writing. Overly florid, trying-too-hard writing that, if I were in critique-teacher mode I would have made a lot of red-pen marks on.
I get, as a matter of principle, wanting more stories with an explicitly conservative or religious message to them. I get wanting those stories to be lauded and nominated for awards. If that's your political or theological lean, then of course you want to see that. But given that, why would you hitch your wagon to a work that is so mediocre and hold it up as a shining example of the sort of thing you want to see? What do you gain by that?
But let's not confuse politics for behavior.
Because there are plenty of people-- people on the far left and far right, frankly-- who gleefully act like assholes, and then when called on that behavior, use their political affiliation as a shield. "Oh, you're coming after me because of my beliefs!" Terms like "witch hunt" are used, because it's easier to hide behind that, make yourself a victim, instead of acknowledging: hey, I'm acting like an asshole.
It's so much easier to act like you're being persecuted.
But if you act like an asshole-- and believe me, I've been there: back in my twenties I'm sure I had some Grade A moments-- people will and should call you on it, and it's disingenuous to say it's because of your politics. You know why? Because I know people with the same political lean who aren't assholes, so it's clearly not some sort of obligatory behavior based on political opinion.
I am all for people wearing their politics on their sleeves. And put it in your fiction. Have your fiction be a full-on polemic; rip your political opinion off your sleeve and shove it down my throat. Politics I agree with, politics I don't agree with. Go full out.
All I ask is that it actually be a good read, too, you know?
Which brings me around to the Hugo Nomination thing. I want to believe that people who nominate things do so in good faith, even if they are politically motivated. I haven't read Larry Correia's Warbound-- or anything else by him-- but I've seen enough people praise the books. He was nominated for the Campbell a couple of years ago. I can honestly believe that there are plenty of fans who really liked his book and feel it deserving of a "Best Novel" award, even if their reasoning was motivated by politics.
However, I actually read “Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day. Now, I won't go into Mr. Day's personal history or anything-- it's out there and well documented, and you don't need me to give you an opinion on him. You have your opinion, one way or another. But here's the thing about “Opera Vita Aeterna": it's just poor writing. Overly florid, trying-too-hard writing that, if I were in critique-teacher mode I would have made a lot of red-pen marks on.
I get, as a matter of principle, wanting more stories with an explicitly conservative or religious message to them. I get wanting those stories to be lauded and nominated for awards. If that's your political or theological lean, then of course you want to see that. But given that, why would you hitch your wagon to a work that is so mediocre and hold it up as a shining example of the sort of thing you want to see? What do you gain by that?
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Knowing When to Deviate from the Outline
So, earlier this week, the long running series How I Met Your Mother had its final episode. And, despite some excellent moments in there, its ending left me cold, and I was far from the only one to think so. It was, quite frankly, not the appropriate ending for the nine years they had built up.
SPOILERS: Specifically, in the time frame where older Ted is telling his kids the story, the mother is already dead, and he's more or less telling them the whole story to put the idea in their head that maybe he should start dating again. More specifically, that he should date his on-again, off-again flame from before meeting their mother, who the kids know as Aunt Robin. The kids approve, and the last shot is Old Ted showing up at Old Robin's apartment, carrying a blue French horn in a direct callback to the very first episode.
But here's the thing: this was the ending the writers had intended from early on. They had shot the scenes where the kids actively suggest and approve of Ted getting together with Robin way back in the beginning of the show, since they didn't know how long they would go, and the actors playing the kids were growing up. So, they had had this footage for eight years, and had always intended this as the ending.
And you know what? If they had used it as an ending then, at the end one of the first couple seasons? It probably would have worked.
But at this point, it wasn't right. The show had spent much time demonstrating how toxic Ted's affections for Robin were, how definitively their relationship didn't work, how much he needed to make a point of letting her go. They had developed, rather well, the romance and marriage of Robin and Barney. And biggest of all, they had Cristin Milioti join the cast in the last season as the titular mother. Milioti managed to pull of the high-wire balance act of making Tracy-- the mother's name, revealed in the penultimate moments of the show-- into a real and vivacious person that the audience cared about. All these things which made that ending, that old footage, completely inappropriate for the story they had built up.
I've gotten rather long-winded here.
As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will attest, I'm an outliner. I'm big into making the Big Plan as part of the writing process.
But even with that: you need to embrace when the story has, through the organic process of writing it, shifted in a different direction. Sometimes the worst choice you can make is to stick doggedly to an endgame plan that no longer fits your story.
The big question is, how do you know if this is how you're doing? For me, the biggest sign is when I'm working and feel myself at odds with where I'm going and where I "need" things to be. This was part of my problem when writing Way of the Shield-- finding ways to fit what I had planned for the end sequence when that just was not working.
"Kill your darlings", I was told in film school, and that still applies-- including throwing away the ending you've been sitting on for eight years when your story demands it be something else.
SPOILERS: Specifically, in the time frame where older Ted is telling his kids the story, the mother is already dead, and he's more or less telling them the whole story to put the idea in their head that maybe he should start dating again. More specifically, that he should date his on-again, off-again flame from before meeting their mother, who the kids know as Aunt Robin. The kids approve, and the last shot is Old Ted showing up at Old Robin's apartment, carrying a blue French horn in a direct callback to the very first episode.
But here's the thing: this was the ending the writers had intended from early on. They had shot the scenes where the kids actively suggest and approve of Ted getting together with Robin way back in the beginning of the show, since they didn't know how long they would go, and the actors playing the kids were growing up. So, they had had this footage for eight years, and had always intended this as the ending.
And you know what? If they had used it as an ending then, at the end one of the first couple seasons? It probably would have worked.
But at this point, it wasn't right. The show had spent much time demonstrating how toxic Ted's affections for Robin were, how definitively their relationship didn't work, how much he needed to make a point of letting her go. They had developed, rather well, the romance and marriage of Robin and Barney. And biggest of all, they had Cristin Milioti join the cast in the last season as the titular mother. Milioti managed to pull of the high-wire balance act of making Tracy-- the mother's name, revealed in the penultimate moments of the show-- into a real and vivacious person that the audience cared about. All these things which made that ending, that old footage, completely inappropriate for the story they had built up.
I've gotten rather long-winded here.
As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will attest, I'm an outliner. I'm big into making the Big Plan as part of the writing process.
But even with that: you need to embrace when the story has, through the organic process of writing it, shifted in a different direction. Sometimes the worst choice you can make is to stick doggedly to an endgame plan that no longer fits your story.
The big question is, how do you know if this is how you're doing? For me, the biggest sign is when I'm working and feel myself at odds with where I'm going and where I "need" things to be. This was part of my problem when writing Way of the Shield-- finding ways to fit what I had planned for the end sequence when that just was not working.
"Kill your darlings", I was told in film school, and that still applies-- including throwing away the ending you've been sitting on for eight years when your story demands it be something else.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Perils of the Writer: Ego in Check
Many years ago, I worked for the English department at the University of Texas at the main office front desk. This meant I also answered the main phone line for the department, which as you might imagine, got several odd calls. One call stands out, even a decade after the fact.
The call came from a poet who was at another University, calling about a journal that, if memory serves, we did not publish, and wanting to speak to the Chair of the Department to inform him that she was contributing to this non-existent publication. Now, one thing that you should know is that a standing rule I had was that I never just sent phone calls to the Chair without a certain degree of screening, either on my own or through the department's executive assistant. So I asked for some clarification about who she was and what she was talking about. And that's where it got weird.
It got weird for several reasons. First, this poet in question was acting like she was a huge deal. And, without going into details of who she was, researching it after the fact, she was, in fact, a rather notable modern living poet. However, one would have to be somewhat familiar with a specific subgenre of poetry to be aware of that, and I was not. So that's a little bit on me. However, this was compounded by the fact that she had a professional name that was more than a little pretentious (which began with "The Poet") AND she referred to herself by that name in the third person. Add in some understandable homonym confusion with her professional name, and the net effect meant that to a person who was unfamiliar with her and her work, she sounded like a crazy person.
However, she knew who she was and that she was a big deal, and as such, seemed to be completely unaware that how she was presenting herself would come off as lunacy to someone who didn't know that. So she kept repeating the same thing, since to her frame of mind, she was talking to a fool who didn't understand he was talking to someone quite important in the poetry world.
And, I swear to you all, I honestly thought it was some crackpot who had written a bunch of poems and was insisting that the English Department publish them for her.
The only thing it would have taken is a small amount of clarity, coupled with her not presuming that I ought to know who she was. I'm not talking a ludicrous amount here. I mean saying, "My name is The Poet ____, and I'm the Poetry Emeritus at ______, and I would like to talk to the chair of the department about XYZ."
Now, with that verbose wind-up, my point: it can be easy, as a writer's career grows, to lose oneself a bit in one's ego. Of course, a bit of ego is a good, healthy thing. You need that to be able to do that bit of shameless promotion to get your work out there. Hell, you need it just to be able to query. But when you cross from, "This is who I am" to "Don't you know who I am?", you're in dangerous territory.
So that's something to keep in mind: even if Thorn and Murder of Mages are huge successes, it's important to remember being here now, remember being where I was one, three, or seven years ago. Maintain humility, especially when dealing with the people who are coming up behind me.
Of course, that's easy to say now. Hopefully I won't lose sight of that down the road. But I would think the last thing I'd do is berate some poor kid on the phone for not giving me my due.
The call came from a poet who was at another University, calling about a journal that, if memory serves, we did not publish, and wanting to speak to the Chair of the Department to inform him that she was contributing to this non-existent publication. Now, one thing that you should know is that a standing rule I had was that I never just sent phone calls to the Chair without a certain degree of screening, either on my own or through the department's executive assistant. So I asked for some clarification about who she was and what she was talking about. And that's where it got weird.
It got weird for several reasons. First, this poet in question was acting like she was a huge deal. And, without going into details of who she was, researching it after the fact, she was, in fact, a rather notable modern living poet. However, one would have to be somewhat familiar with a specific subgenre of poetry to be aware of that, and I was not. So that's a little bit on me. However, this was compounded by the fact that she had a professional name that was more than a little pretentious (which began with "The Poet") AND she referred to herself by that name in the third person. Add in some understandable homonym confusion with her professional name, and the net effect meant that to a person who was unfamiliar with her and her work, she sounded like a crazy person.
However, she knew who she was and that she was a big deal, and as such, seemed to be completely unaware that how she was presenting herself would come off as lunacy to someone who didn't know that. So she kept repeating the same thing, since to her frame of mind, she was talking to a fool who didn't understand he was talking to someone quite important in the poetry world.
And, I swear to you all, I honestly thought it was some crackpot who had written a bunch of poems and was insisting that the English Department publish them for her.
The only thing it would have taken is a small amount of clarity, coupled with her not presuming that I ought to know who she was. I'm not talking a ludicrous amount here. I mean saying, "My name is The Poet ____, and I'm the Poetry Emeritus at ______, and I would like to talk to the chair of the department about XYZ."
Now, with that verbose wind-up, my point: it can be easy, as a writer's career grows, to lose oneself a bit in one's ego. Of course, a bit of ego is a good, healthy thing. You need that to be able to do that bit of shameless promotion to get your work out there. Hell, you need it just to be able to query. But when you cross from, "This is who I am" to "Don't you know who I am?", you're in dangerous territory.
So that's something to keep in mind: even if Thorn and Murder of Mages are huge successes, it's important to remember being here now, remember being where I was one, three, or seven years ago. Maintain humility, especially when dealing with the people who are coming up behind me.
Of course, that's easy to say now. Hopefully I won't lose sight of that down the road. But I would think the last thing I'd do is berate some poor kid on the phone for not giving me my due.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Path to Publication, Part II: Early Days Of Writing Garbage
So, way back in 2000, I was talking a certain amount of talk about the idea of writing novels, and had a number of little snippets of stories. Fits and starts. I also had the starts of worldbuilding-- more broad brushstrokes stuff than real details. A world with a handful of nations that could mostly be described with a couple of sentences. But I certainly didn't have anything concrete that I could consider real writing work, or even anything that was properly on its way to being real something acceptably novel-like.
And then came the strange offer.
Through a friend-of-a-friend, I was brought into a project involving a fledgling gaming company. They were gearing up to release a new RPG system, and a series of rulebooks to go along with it. The game was supposed to be a sort of universal-system, usable in any fantasy setting, but they wanted there to be a "house setting" that they could present, and the worldbuilding I had done was the setting they wanted. And they wanted some tie-in novels to support the setting.
I really was not ready for this.
For one, I needed to get the worldbuilding to a level that was sufficiently organized and comprehensible to someone who wasn't me. For another, I needed to have something that could at least be a start to these tie-in novels that they wanted.
Except, of course, part of the problem was they weren't really sure what they wanted. I'm not in any way going to say that I was writing great stuff that they ought to have run with... but they were never able to articulate what it was they were looking for. I never even quite got a straight answer of whether they really wanted novels or something else.
What I did know is that they had 100 ISBNs. I'm not sure if anything ever came about. The project didn't so much fall apart as peter out. I don't even know what happened to the people behind it. Communication just stopped after a certain point, and nothing more came of it.
As part of the process of this, I ended up with the beginning of something, a beginning that was for all intents a travelogue-in-discussion. Really. While things happened, what happened was more or less a thing excuse for the main characters to be able to discuss each nation in the world in broad brushstrokes. While it was very rough, a lot of what was in this bit were the beginning seeds of what would eventually become the (deservedly trunked) Crown of Druthal. But that was a long way off.
The only other thing I had done of substance was about six chapters of a thing I was calling A Convergence of Angels on the I-35, which was more or less a sort-of-urban-fantasy-by-way-of-Tom-Robbins.
IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: The big question behind that would have been what, exactly? Now, it wasn't so much an option in the way it is now... but if it had been, I might have convinced myself that the travelogueish start was the first entry in something to be serialized. But really it was an amateurish mess with snippets of amusing dialogue. It would have, deservedly, gone nowhere.
BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: I might argue that I was starting to get an idea of dialogue, and differentiating characters with that. I was starting to get an idea of what the scope of writing a novel might entail, much like a guy who ran a little track in high school would start to understand there was more to running a marathon than "keep running until it's 26 miles".
And then came the strange offer.
Through a friend-of-a-friend, I was brought into a project involving a fledgling gaming company. They were gearing up to release a new RPG system, and a series of rulebooks to go along with it. The game was supposed to be a sort of universal-system, usable in any fantasy setting, but they wanted there to be a "house setting" that they could present, and the worldbuilding I had done was the setting they wanted. And they wanted some tie-in novels to support the setting.
I really was not ready for this.
For one, I needed to get the worldbuilding to a level that was sufficiently organized and comprehensible to someone who wasn't me. For another, I needed to have something that could at least be a start to these tie-in novels that they wanted.
Except, of course, part of the problem was they weren't really sure what they wanted. I'm not in any way going to say that I was writing great stuff that they ought to have run with... but they were never able to articulate what it was they were looking for. I never even quite got a straight answer of whether they really wanted novels or something else.
What I did know is that they had 100 ISBNs. I'm not sure if anything ever came about. The project didn't so much fall apart as peter out. I don't even know what happened to the people behind it. Communication just stopped after a certain point, and nothing more came of it.
As part of the process of this, I ended up with the beginning of something, a beginning that was for all intents a travelogue-in-discussion. Really. While things happened, what happened was more or less a thing excuse for the main characters to be able to discuss each nation in the world in broad brushstrokes. While it was very rough, a lot of what was in this bit were the beginning seeds of what would eventually become the (deservedly trunked) Crown of Druthal. But that was a long way off.
The only other thing I had done of substance was about six chapters of a thing I was calling A Convergence of Angels on the I-35, which was more or less a sort-of-urban-fantasy-by-way-of-Tom-Robbins.
IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: The big question behind that would have been what, exactly? Now, it wasn't so much an option in the way it is now... but if it had been, I might have convinced myself that the travelogueish start was the first entry in something to be serialized. But really it was an amateurish mess with snippets of amusing dialogue. It would have, deservedly, gone nowhere.
BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: I might argue that I was starting to get an idea of dialogue, and differentiating characters with that. I was starting to get an idea of what the scope of writing a novel might entail, much like a guy who ran a little track in high school would start to understand there was more to running a marathon than "keep running until it's 26 miles".
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Path To Publication
I've been asked, especially recently, why I chose the path of traditional publishing over trying one of the avenues of self-publication. Frequently in the past, I was more or less told I was making the wrong choice.
Once I was even told, "You just want to see your book in bookstores."
I found this a fascinating rebuke. Of course I want to see my books in bookstores. That's where people buy books. I mean, yes, the digital models have made the methods of distribution more diverse, but they haven't eradicated the old ones. The old ones are still pretty vibrant. The old ones are still how quite a few readers acquire their books. Why would I want to deliberately exclude those readers?
Now, I won't say that self-publishing is wrong in a vacuum, in that every person's situation is unique. There can be really good reasons to do it. However, I think there are also very wrong reasons to do it. This is the sorts of argument I see:
I find this either/or look at it interesting. "Self-publish or nothing!" Why is "Try to write better" not a consideration? I wonder how many of these people declared defeat before really trying. They bought into the myth that it can't be done, so they didn't bother.
It isn't easy. John Scalzi just recently compared it to playing in major league baseball, and I think that's pretty apt. It's long, hard work, and it takes patience and perseverance.
So over the next few entries, I'm going to talk about my path to this point. As part of that, I'm going to include "If I had self-published at this point" along each step of the journey. Because, as I said, I don't think self-publishing is definitively the wrong path to take... but it would have been the wrong path for me.
Once I was even told, "You just want to see your book in bookstores."
I found this a fascinating rebuke. Of course I want to see my books in bookstores. That's where people buy books. I mean, yes, the digital models have made the methods of distribution more diverse, but they haven't eradicated the old ones. The old ones are still pretty vibrant. The old ones are still how quite a few readers acquire their books. Why would I want to deliberately exclude those readers?
Now, I won't say that self-publishing is wrong in a vacuum, in that every person's situation is unique. There can be really good reasons to do it. However, I think there are also very wrong reasons to do it. This is the sorts of argument I see:
"Unfortunately there are thousands of us out there who can't even get a publisher to look at our work so it's self-publish or nothing!"
I find this either/or look at it interesting. "Self-publish or nothing!" Why is "Try to write better" not a consideration? I wonder how many of these people declared defeat before really trying. They bought into the myth that it can't be done, so they didn't bother.
It isn't easy. John Scalzi just recently compared it to playing in major league baseball, and I think that's pretty apt. It's long, hard work, and it takes patience and perseverance.
So over the next few entries, I'm going to talk about my path to this point. As part of that, I'm going to include "If I had self-published at this point" along each step of the journey. Because, as I said, I don't think self-publishing is definitively the wrong path to take... but it would have been the wrong path for me.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Perils of the Writer: Fanfic of Yourself
I was thinking about one of my trunked projects, Crown of Druthal, as well as the process of novel midwifery that has brought Banshee to the point where it is now (i.e., a rough draft in progress that I feel relatively good about).
And I came to realize that the problems with Crown and the earlier versions of Banshee (which bear almost no resemblance to the current project) was that neither one was really a story. Sure, they had characters, they had setting, they had events happening... but neither one added up to a cohesive whole.
I was essentially writing a fun time hanging out with characters I liked in a setting I liked, and not doing much but enjoying doing that.
And that, dear readers, is essentially what fanfic is.
Mind you, I'm not saying fanfic is bad-- if you enjoy doing it, have at it. But you are quite limited in what you can do with it once you've written it. You can, essentially, share it with the fan community, and the degree that it can be enjoyed is based on the size of that fandom. No one who isn't already a fan is going to care in the slightest.
So if you're writing fanfic of a thing that only exists in your head, how many fans are out there?
Just you.
So, if you find yourself caught in that rut, how do you break out of it?
For me, it was a process of figuring out an actual story, tied to a central character (or characters). The central character came first, of course, but then figuring out what their story was brought in secondary characters as needed.
And that was a key place where I had gone wrong with Crown and early versions of Banshee. In both cases, I had come up with a wide, sprawling cast. Both involved ships (one at sea, one in space), so I had worked out who ALL the key people on the ship were, what their jobs were, how they all related to each other... but that had nothing to with any specific story. They were just there, giving me a deep bench of characters to pull from in any given situation, without any organic reason to have them all.
And in the long run, that won't give you a compelling story that will hook anyone who isn't you.
-----
A small plug for fellow agency-brother. Glynn Stewart's Starship Mage series has launched on e-books. The first one just came out, and the next one is due in March of 2014. Go check it out!
And I came to realize that the problems with Crown and the earlier versions of Banshee (which bear almost no resemblance to the current project) was that neither one was really a story. Sure, they had characters, they had setting, they had events happening... but neither one added up to a cohesive whole.
I was essentially writing a fun time hanging out with characters I liked in a setting I liked, and not doing much but enjoying doing that.
And that, dear readers, is essentially what fanfic is.
Mind you, I'm not saying fanfic is bad-- if you enjoy doing it, have at it. But you are quite limited in what you can do with it once you've written it. You can, essentially, share it with the fan community, and the degree that it can be enjoyed is based on the size of that fandom. No one who isn't already a fan is going to care in the slightest.
So if you're writing fanfic of a thing that only exists in your head, how many fans are out there?
Just you.
So, if you find yourself caught in that rut, how do you break out of it?
For me, it was a process of figuring out an actual story, tied to a central character (or characters). The central character came first, of course, but then figuring out what their story was brought in secondary characters as needed.
And that was a key place where I had gone wrong with Crown and early versions of Banshee. In both cases, I had come up with a wide, sprawling cast. Both involved ships (one at sea, one in space), so I had worked out who ALL the key people on the ship were, what their jobs were, how they all related to each other... but that had nothing to with any specific story. They were just there, giving me a deep bench of characters to pull from in any given situation, without any organic reason to have them all.
And in the long run, that won't give you a compelling story that will hook anyone who isn't you.
-----
A small plug for fellow agency-brother. Glynn Stewart's Starship Mage series has launched on e-books. The first one just came out, and the next one is due in March of 2014. Go check it out!
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Perils of the Writer: Clavicle and other crucial word choices
This week's work on Banshee brought me to an interesting point, somewhat unintentionally. In brief, my main character, Lt. Samantha Kengle, was injured on a mission (a nasty creature managed to bite her on the neck). She loses consciousness, and when she comes to, she's being treated.
Initially I wrote that she would wake up with her uniform coat off and one of the aliens pressing her hand to Kengle's bare chest. (Said alien can essentially function as a living diagnostic scanner).
But then it hit me about the unintended implications behind that. Sure, it's medical, but the point is my one female human character gets stripped down while unconscious, and wakes up being groped. Sure, groped in a medical fashion by a female fish-alien, but still. I had put in a layer of sexual vulnerability that I had never intended, and it rested largely on the word "chest".
I re-thought the scene. I needed the alien to be able to get at bare flesh and the injury, but keep it professional. Leave no doubt, no subtext, that what was happening was anything other than medical treatment.
So I changed "chest" to "clavicle". Made no difference in terms of the text of what was happening, but pulled away the subtext I wanted to avoid.
I'm not going to get all, "words are important, words have power", because I'm sure you all know that. But word choice is crucial, and sometimes we make strange choices-- subbing in a not-entirely accurate synonym to avoid repetition, going for an uncommon word to avoid a common one. And sometimes the words we choose have unintended consequences.
Fortunately, this time, I think I sidestepped it. But there may be other ones that I'll fall into.
Back to the word mines for now...
Initially I wrote that she would wake up with her uniform coat off and one of the aliens pressing her hand to Kengle's bare chest. (Said alien can essentially function as a living diagnostic scanner).
But then it hit me about the unintended implications behind that. Sure, it's medical, but the point is my one female human character gets stripped down while unconscious, and wakes up being groped. Sure, groped in a medical fashion by a female fish-alien, but still. I had put in a layer of sexual vulnerability that I had never intended, and it rested largely on the word "chest".
I re-thought the scene. I needed the alien to be able to get at bare flesh and the injury, but keep it professional. Leave no doubt, no subtext, that what was happening was anything other than medical treatment.
So I changed "chest" to "clavicle". Made no difference in terms of the text of what was happening, but pulled away the subtext I wanted to avoid.
I'm not going to get all, "words are important, words have power", because I'm sure you all know that. But word choice is crucial, and sometimes we make strange choices-- subbing in a not-entirely accurate synonym to avoid repetition, going for an uncommon word to avoid a common one. And sometimes the words we choose have unintended consequences.
Fortunately, this time, I think I sidestepped it. But there may be other ones that I'll fall into.
Back to the word mines for now...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)