Category: Musings

Musings on Art and Practice and Joy

I want to make a point about art and success and failure and practice and motivation. Over the course of my 47 years on the planet I have mucked around with visual art, music, dance, acting, martial arts, 3D design, and writing. I have been decent at some of those, good or even very good at others, and I now make my living writing. There is a reason that I left many of those things behind while mastering the writing,* and that’s what I want to talk about here. It’s going to be a bit rambly because there’s no way to get at this without providing a good bit of background.

I recently had reason to want to sketch something. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary skills. Not anymore, anyway. My degree is in theater, and, as part of that I took a fair number of design classes. If you can’t draw a set or costume concept you can’t really build it. Now, I never got very good at free-handing an original composition, but I did get to be pretty solid on architectural style projections and good if never great at copying line drawings and altering them to suit what I needed. So for example, drawing a rose from scratch was more or less beyond me, but taking a small sketch of a rose that someone else had done and copying and altering that copy at a larger scale to create a drawing of multiple roses was something I could do well and with relative ease.

Which brings me back to the thing I wanted to sketch this morning. It was a pretty simple composition and something I could easily have done when I was in practice. But I quit doing that practice when I left theater for writing. At that time, my writing skills weren’t all that much better than my drawing skills. Some, certainly, but not bunches.

I’m going to leave that there for a moment and jump over to music which is the absolute bottom end of my range. I have never been particularly good with musical things. I have a decent ear, and a wide vocal range—one of my theater voice teachers characterized it as one of the widest she’d had in a student. I can even carry a tune…briefly. On the other hand, my rhythm is terrible and while I can hit the notes, I tend to jump keys from verse to verse. I noodled around enough with guitar and piano to discover that learning the fingering was relatively easy. What I lacked was drive and timing.

I was a decent dramatic actor, and a good comedic one, possibly even very good when it came to improv. But even very good isn’t enough to make a living at it. I had the physical chops for the dance side of the business, but there again my lack of rhythm was an insurmountable barrier. Those skills worked better in martial arts, but injuries sidelined me out of that arena. I’m still quite good at 3D design—good enough to design and build complex structures in steel that involve cutting, grinding, and welding.

The reason I’m still decent with 3D design is that, for me, it’s fun and useful. From my first encounters with it, I had enough talent to complete things that were functional, if not pretty, and to see where I was failing and how to get better. The same is true of writing, only more so.

From my earliest compositions for classes I have always been able to express myself better than most. Teachers gave me praise, and even when it felt like a huge and painful chore I had a sense of accomplishment when I finished something. Sure, many of those things are awful by my current standards, but by comparison to my then-peers I was always doing pretty well.

When I first bailed out of theater, I sat down and wrote a novel in about four months. It’s not a very good novel, though it’s not utterly awful. More than that though, I had a ball writing it. Even when I completely punted sentences or whole scenes, I could see that it was actually a book and I could see it day to day. It was a practice novel—though I didn’t know it at the time—and the practice was fun because I was accomplishing something in the exact same way that I was accomplishing things with 3D design.

I was making something visibly useful and entertaining even if it wasn’t up to professional standards. I never had that feeling of accomplishment with dance or music, or really even drawing and drafting. I wasn’t good enough to find the practice an end in itself, and so, I wasn’t motivated to do it and get better. I had many of the necessary tools to become good at those things, but I never did, and it was all about joy. I take joy in writing and building things and so I have gotten very good at them. I took joy in acting and martial arts, but other things caused me to leave them behind.

There have been several roads I could have followed in life, even several forms of art that I might have mastered. What has drawn me into my present career as a science fiction and fantasy author was joy in the practice as well as the end result. Without that, I don’t think that I would have succeeded. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the secret of my success so far is simple:

Finding joy in practice.

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*I’m not prone to false modesty, or really, modesty at all. I’m not as good a writer as I intend to be someday, but I’m very, very good at it.

Sometimes you Feel Like a Duck

Saw one of those writer posts that makes me feel an odd duck. My authorial dream has never been the JK Rowling rich and famous package. My goal has always been to simply write the stuff I want to write and make enough money so I don’t have do work that isn’t writing.

Mind you, I wouldn’t say no to the whole NYT bestseller and movies thing it if it came along. It’s just never been a first order goal. More than that, I have friends who are at that level of success and it’s not without it’s downsides.

I’ve never been all that award or critic focused either. My main goal from day one has been to produce fast, fun books that casual readers and fans can love, with a strong secondary goal of not making my peers and more critical readers want to fling the book across the room. Basically, what I am trying to do is produce well written commercial fiction that a broad spectrum of people can have fun reading. I do try to put in layers for those who want to look for them, and I am enormously happy when people who are better prose artists than I am like my work, but really I just want to write stories that people want to read. Everything else is gravy.

Public Metrics

Anyone who has followed me on social media for any length of time knows that I generally post my wordcounts and workout metrics. Anyone who has followed me through the end of a book knows that I also post my edit metrics to the extent that is possible.

There’s a reason for that. Well, several, actually. Since I am occasionally asked about it, I thought I would put together a post, so I can point people at the long form answer when it comes up. So, in rough order of importance…

1) Accountability. I am my own boss. With the exception of a few hard deadlines in the course of a book’s production, I don’t answer to anyone for anything. I don’t have to have a daily wordcount. I don’t have to have a weekly one. I don’t have to workout. All those things are my personal marks to hit. Since I’m lazy as well as a workaholic (both true, don’t ask) I know how easy it would be for me to ignore the work until the last minute. But you can’t do that with a book.

A book is an endurance event, and you have to keep chipping away at it. Likewise getting and staying in shape. It’s a daily process, no last minute cramming. By posting my metrics for all the world to see, I’m forcing myself to have a visible personal mark, and when I faceplant, I do it in the open. It keeps me honest and makes a huge difference in getting things done.

2) Visible model of a working artist. When I started writing there was no real internet, no good way to see what the day-to-day of a working writer looks like. Turns out, it’s fairly boring. You get up, you do your not-writing work, mostly sitting on your ass in front of a computer, you write, likewise mostly sitting on your ass in front of a computer. Posting my metrics provides a model for people who are interested in becoming writers. Hey, that’s how McCullough does it, maybe I can do it too… And, the workouts? If you’re a writer and you don’t have a fitness regime of some sort, all that ass sitting will turn you into a giant bowl of pudding.

Part of providing a model is posting when I fall behind or below my goals as well. Hey, look, I’m behind. Hey, look, I didn’t make my goals for the week. Hey, look, my brain took the day off and the rest of me went with it. Hey, look, I decided not to lift heavy things. Having to post that stuff is motivational for me—I REALLY don’t like failing. It also shows that you can do this and faceplant from time to time and still come out fine. I have never missed a deadline yet, though I know it will happen eventually.

3) It entertains me. Much of what I do I do because it entertains me. I did a university classroom visit recently—they were reading WebMage. The professor asked me:

So, I see that you have a ton of little references and in-jokes in this book that your target audience will probably miss—the “Say goodnight, Gracie” joke for example. I’m a generation older than you are, and that one isn’t something even everyone of my age would get. Since your audience is mostly a generation younger than you are, why do you put that in? Or some of the more obscure Shakespeariana?

My answer: Because it entertains me. There are other reasons as well, but the main reason I do many things is because they amuse or entertain me. Posting my metrics both bad and good entertains me.

4) Writing is a solitary business. I work at home alone, with only cats to keep me company. I am also an extrovert. I adore throwing parties and hanging out with cool people. Basically, I sustain myself with the blood of the living. Writing doesn’t give me much chance to do that. And, no, working in coffee shops or other crowded venues doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried. I’m about ten times as productive working in the quiet with no one around, and I need to be that productive to stay on top of my workload. Posting metrics is my equivalent of having coworkers or hanging out with the other gym rats—and no I don’t actually enjoy working out with other people either. I do much better when I’m competing only against myself.

5)  Social media presence. One of the things that the modern working writer really needs is a way to reach out to fans. In my case, I use social media, and social media is hungry, it needs content. Sometimes that content is funny bits that fall out of my head. Sometimes it’s microfiction like Dragon Diaries. In any case, you need to keep feeding it. Metrics make a good snack.

So, I post my metrics good and bad to stay accountable. I do it to show beginning writers what my day looks like. I do it because it entertains me. I do it because social activity keeps me sane. I do it because it works as promotion and engagement. For me at least, posting my metrics is a huge win.

Fear

I have been thinking a great deal about fear over the past few days. Fear and how it affects your life and your writing. I think this is true for any art, but I am a writer, so that’s how I’m going to frame this.

If you are going to succeed at writing you are going to write a certain amount of crap. You will write sentences that clunk and scenes that will later embarrass you. Some of your mistakes are likely to get published, preserved forever in amber where others will be able to see your failures and point and laugh. If you are especially lucky, people will still be mocking your mistakes long after they bury you.

You cannot let the fear of that stop you. Fear will kill your hopes deader than any horrible sentence or purple paragraph or complete failure. Fear keeps you from trying, and not trying means never succeeding. You cannot win if you don’t get in the game.

It’s hard, I know. I’ve been there. I was recently described as fearless by an old friend, which is part of what got me thinking about this.* That may be how it looks from the outside, but it’s not quite true. I have been afraid many times, both in this business and in my daily life. I am not fearless.

What I am is brutally brutally stubborn. I refuse to let fear stop me from doing what I want to do. I attempt things knowing that I will fail some of the time and that it will hurt.

Physically, I fear the bruises and cuts and burns that come with attempting hard things in the real world, but I won’t let that stop me from working my body or climbing a mountain or building and welding. In writing, I fear looking like a hack or a fool or a wannabe.

I fear these things, but I will not let that stop me. I have the scars and the awful reviews to prove it. But, what I also have is things that I have built, a body that is fit, books and stories that I am proud of. I have good reviews to go along with the bad and the respect of some of my peers.

I would have none of that if I let the fear stop me from trying. If I let the fear stop me from failing. If I let the fear stop me from succeeding.

Fear is the enemy. Don’t let it be the victor too.

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*Thanks Tim! I wouldn’t have written this without that post.

Writing Environment: Minimum Conditions

What I need to be able to write:*

1) 10-12 square feet to myself.
2) A comfortable seat and someplace to put my feet up. Not sure why the feet being up matters so much, but it does. I find it almost impossible to work at a desk or table. Comfortable didn’t used to matter as much, but my back isn’t as forgiving as it was when I was thirty.
3) Relative quiet. White noise or instrumental music is fine, but lyrics or interesting conversation kill me dead.
4) 1-1/2 or more hours when I know I can just write.

Those are the necessities. It also helps if I have:

A) Power, though the longer battery life on each new laptop has made that less of an issue.
B) Caffeine readily available, tea or diet soda by preference, something that I can sip when I pause to think.
C) A nice view, preferably of green space or nature, though a college campus is fine to. A little bit of visual distraction that I can watch but don’t have to.

That’s really about it.

*This came up in comments in response to Samaire Provost on a facebook post and I thought some of the folks who wander by the blog might find it interesting.

Not Writing = Vivid Dreaming = Need to Write

Sometimes people ask me where I get my ideas, or why I write. This is one part of the answer.

For a number of reasons I haven’t been writing the past month and a half. First there was the post-book lull compounded by Laura needing a ton of help to get her department moved. Then there was the spring gardening madness which has to get done while the weather and the season are right. Now that that’s all almost done, I’m starting to think about writing again, and boy do I need it.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t shut off the creative part of my brain. Whether I’m writing or not, there’s a never-ending spring of strange in the depths there. It works a bit like a reservoir behind a dam. If I’m writing, the sluice gates are open and the weird wells up and pours into the book. If I’m not writing, the levels just keep getting higher until they start to pour over the top.

The main places they go when they do that are my early morning pre-filters conversation and my dreams. Normally, when I’m writing, I either don’t remember my dreams, or (occasionally) I have dreams about the book. When I start to remember my dreams I know I need to direct the flow back into fiction. Generally I do this at the one remembered vivid dream a night stage. I’m up to three most nights.

For example, last night I had two which stayed with me well into today:

The first was a castle break-in dream in which Laura and I and two large brown bears were sneaking into a castle. For some reason we had decided to pretend that we were there for a bear-polka party—which was why we needed the bears. The rest of the details got written over by the second dream.

The second involved Laura and I sitting on stage chatting with Minnie Mouse as part of a Disney On Ice show. This Minnie did synchronized swimming kind of stuff at the midpoint and she and I got to talking about how the On Ice stars all practiced fencing. About midway through this, John McCain showed up and we got into a verbal tussle which led to arranging a duel—cavalry sabers to first blood. After Arlen Specter arranged the exchange of information for the duel Minnie invited me to train with the On Ice crew for the duel because John McCain was always making their life miserable.

Since I don’t want to spend my night polkaing with bears or fencing with Minnie and McCain, I really need to get back to writing.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 9 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writing and Self Promotion, A Dialogue With Myself

I’m not at all convinced of the value of self promotion, but I’ve got a book coming out in just a hair over two weeks and I end up going back and forth on the subject. It goes a little like this:

MythOS comes out in 2 weeks!

That means that you’re at the point in the launch cycle where you should be frantically trying to do ninety and nine kind of promotion, right?

*cricket noises*

Right?

No…Maybe…I really don’t know…but probably, no.

Wait, isn’t that heresy. I mean, your publisher isn’t going to do a whole lot since you’re midlister and this a late book in the series. If you don’t do it, no one will, shouldn’t you be panicking?

There’s something to that. My promo budget is almost certainly minimal by publisher standards. At the same time, I’m not going to spend my way to a successful book launch. Not without a lot more money than I’d ever earn back, thus negating the point of the whole exercise. Even that assumes facts not evidence, i.e. that anyone knows how to apply money to the problem of book promotion in such a way as to generate significant sales for midlist books. If it could be reliably done, the publishers ,who have a lot more experience at the whole thing and a lot more books to sell, and hence greater incentive, would already be doing it.

But what about things that don’t cost much money? Shouldn’t you be frantically running around trying to drum up free publicity?

To an extent, sure. I’ll do any interviews that anyone wants to offer me. But checking in with my radio and print and bookstore contacts takes about an hour. What next? I could spend a ton of time to generate more effect, but I’ve got the same problem there that I have with money. Time is more expensive than money since there’s no way to get it back and there’s a diminishing returns effect that kicks in very quickly. In general, I think most self-promotion is a bad use of a writer’s time

Really? Why is that?

Anyone who is good enough writer to get something published, is almost certainly a damn good writer. This is for the simple reasons that the odds of success are lousy. I’ve got a highly specialized skill set for writing and none of the specialized skill set involved in promotion. That being the case I’m almost certainly better off investing the time and effort I’d spend on promotion in making my next book irresistible. I’ll have more fun that way and I’m more likely to be successful.

Okay I can see that, but I still think you should be out stumping for your book. Got anything else?

How about the numbers argument? Lets say that by doing a ton of promotion I can move a few hundred copies of my book that wouldn’t have sold otherwise. 20 at this signing over here. 50 by appearing on local radio. 50 by going to a con that I wouldn’t otherwise have gone to, and so on.

That’s great!

No, it’s not. A few hundred copies doesn’t really matter that much when a moderate print run is 10,000-20,000 books. Take my first book, WebMage. In the first six months I sold an average of 75 copies (mmpb) a day, every day. That earned out my advance plus ten percent. That was fabulous and I was delighted. But I need to double it.

Double it?

In order to make a marginal living I need to sell at least 150 mass market paperbacks a day every day for the rest of my life +inflation. Ooh, better double it again. To make a decent living I’d need to bump that up to something more like 300 a day. To crack six figures it’d have to be ~800 a day. Now do you see why I’m not that excited about spending many hours to sell a few hundred extra books?

I guess so. But you make it sound like there’s no way to win at this game.

I don’t think there is, not through self-promotion. I would love to believe that I could come up with a self-promotional effort that would have an ongoing several hundred books per day kind of impact on my sales and that wouldn’t eat up so much time it would be counterproductive in terms of writing the next book (or preferably the next several books). I’d also love to believe that my cats will support me in my old age….

That’s depressing. All right, Mr. Pessimist, so what do you suggest a writer does about it?

Write.

What?

It’s very simple. Write. If I take the same energy it would take to do a ton of self promotion and I focus it on what I’m good at–writing books—I can produce a complete extra book (or maybe even two) a year. Given that the best promotion that I know of is to have another book come out, one that’s as good or better than the last one, that seems like a simple bet. Especially when I consider that in addition to a new book’s impact on backlist, a new book generates its own sales to add to that books sold per day number. Not only will it promote my books in the best way possible, but it brings in new revenue and it’s a ton of fun. I love writing. That’s why I’m in this business.

Oh, I guess that makes sense. So, you’re not going to do any promotion?

I have a simple rule for promotion: It should involve no money, no time, and no effort.

That sounds like no promotion, all right.

Not quite. I’ll do a little. Here and there. Take this blog post, for example. I’m willing to bend my rules a little for pure promotion’s sake, but not much. I’ll spend some time, a little effort, a couple of bucks. I will also bend them for things that I enjoy doing, like cons, readings, and interviews. I’m a social person and an escapee from the theater asylum. I like meeting new people and being out on stage. I would do these things even if I wasn’t writing, though the book sure helps get interviews. I’m just not going to get wound up about the whole thing.

Any last thoughts for the folks who’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this post?

Yep. If you’re a writer who doesn’t like doing promotional things, or if you’re not good at them, don’t feel guilty about keeping your self-promotion to a minimum. Even if you do enjoy promoting yourself, realize that it’s a trade off. Time spent on promotion is time spent not writing, and writing is the point of the whole thing. Isn’t it?

(Originally published on the SFNovelists blog May 11 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

1983

Do you remember 1983? If so, what were you doing in July?

Because that’s the month that marks my last serious connection with one of the main drivers of American mass culture: Television. I could push the date further back, to spring of ’82 perhaps, when I first started dating. Or later, to fall of ’94, when Laura and I formally disconnected the antenna on the television we hadn’t watched more than once a month in the four years we’d been living together. But August 12th 1983 is probably the best date. That would be the day I got my driver’s license and was formally free of being stuck at home in any meaningful way. That’s the day I stopped knowing what was on on any given evening.

This comes up because over the years I’ve had any number of conversations that follow a certain pattern.

1. Someone will ask me something about television, a program, an event, something.

2. I say I don’t watch television.

3. They say, “oh really?” or “I don’t watch it either,” or something else that acknowledges that they’ve heard and processed what I said.

4. A bit of time goes by and then they make some reference to something on television and are quite surprised that I don’t know what they are talking about.

5. Repeat steps 2-4 up to half a dozen times before it sinks in.

Sometimes this will happen more than once with the same person. It’s understandable really. Television plays a central role in American culture and most people watch at least some television, often without even registering that they’re doing so. I have no moral or cultural objections to television, it just doesn’t interest me all that much.*

The only non-DVD** television shows I’ve watched since 1994 are scattered episodes of Myth Busters,(~15-20) The Daily Show,(~5-8) Muppets Tonight (~5-10) and Whose Line is it Anyway, (10-20) all seen either while staying in hotels or because friends taped stuff and insisted we would enjoy it.***

From ’83 to ’94 I watched occasional episodes of Night Court, (~5-10) Next Generation, (~5-8) Deep Space Nine,(~5-8) The Young Ones (~15-20) and Cheers (~6-12), mostly because it was on when I was visiting someone.

I’ve never seen a single episode of Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, or The Drew Carey Show. Nor have I seen Voyager, Buffy, Angel, Babylon 5, Xena, Hercules, BSG, or any other f&sf favorites of the last 25 years. I have never seen an entire episode of reality tv of any kind.****

I am not plugged into television culture and haven’t been for 30 years. But it is so pervasive that even people who’ve known me that whole time and know that I haven’t been watching television are often surprised when they talk about some show, or a star or director of same, and I don’t have a clue who they’re talking about.

I find the phenomena fascinating and occasionally frustrating.

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*Let me repeat in the firmest possible terms I have ZERO moral or cultural objections to TV. It just doesn’t interest me. I got a lot of pushback on this post when I originally put it up from people who felt that I was judging them for watching TV. I wasn’t, and I don’t. I do however find it fascinating how many people assume that my not watching TV means that I condemn the idea. Not true. I really really really don’t care if other people watch TV.

The reason I blogged about it is right there in the post–Americans talk about TV shows on a regular basis and when I explain to them that its not a subject I can really participate in because I have no frame of reference, many of them either don’t believe me or don’t process the information and keep asking me questions that could just as easily be in Sanscrit for all the sense they make to me. I find it to be a fascinating phenomena.

**On DVD we’ve watched four new shows: Dr Who Seasons 1-6, The Big Bang Theory, Sherlock, and Downton Abbey. We’ve also watched two shows from my childhood: Soap and The Muppet Show, but those don’t add anything to my post ’83 cultural literacy.

***and they’ve been entirely correct.

****not quite true, I did watch one episode of the Nineteen Hundred House because friends thought Laura and I might be interested.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog September 16 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writing Priorities Vs. Reading Priorities

I want to talk a little bit about priorities in writing and reading here because I don’t think they’re necessarily the same thing. This was triggered by a writing question I received recently.

Here a ranking of story element importance suggested by the questioner:

1. Story/Plot followed closely by
2. Character
3. World
4. Dialogue — although I’m not sure this can be separated from character.
5. Author’s general wit–Good examples: Pratchet, Zelazney
6. General writing prose
7. Description

This was cool for me for two reasons.

1) I always like to see how other people look at story.

2) It gives me a chance to unpack the idea that writer priorities and reader priorities are not necessarily the same thing. In fact writer priorities and writer priorities are not always the same thing, not even in the head of just one writer. Taking these seven elements as my base set, (I could and probably would add others on my own) I actually have three* different ranking priorities** depending on how I look at them: personal reader preference, personal writer enthusiasms, professional writer necessities.

As a reader it goes like this for me:

1. Story/Plot
2. Character
3. World
4. Prose
5. Wit
6. Dialogue
7. Description

As a writer jazzed about writing a story:

1. World
2. Story/Plot
3. Character
4. Wit (in this case, smart, not funny)
5. Prose
6. Dialogue
7. Description

As a professional writer aware of audience needs:

1. Prose
2a. Story/Plot
2b. Character
3. World
4. Description
5. Dialogue
6. Wit (in this case, smart, not funny)

I think the reader set is fairly self-explanatory, that’s what I notice and what I enjoy as someone reading for pleasure.

The second set is also pretty obvious. These are things that excite me in terms of composing and writing a work.

The last one looks a little bit different.

It starts with prose. That’s because if you don’t put the thing together in a readable manner the rest of that stuff just doesn’t matter because no one’s ever going to see it. Now, what exactly constitutes a readable manner is open to a lot of debate. For me it means first and foremost clarity. The reader has to be able to understand everything I want them to understand. Second, the mode of the prose has to suit the mood of the story. Perky text message speech is probably not going to go well with a Gothic horror piece unless it’s used very very carefully and deliberately. I personally also prefer invisible prose, where the reader is hardly aware that they are reading rather than experiencing the story, but I’ve seen beautiful, obtrusive, poetic prose work as well.

Second I’ve put plot/story, though I could make a persuasive case that character should go first, which is why I changed the numbering scheme. You really need them both. Stories with one but not the other are going to lose a big portion of readers. You can pull off something that’s great for a subset of readers with one being outstanding and the other craptacular, but if you don’t have both, you’re in serious trouble.

I put world third though it’s both my favorite element to write and a really critical component, especially in SFF. Yes there are readers who put setting first in terms of what draws them into a story. And yes, setting can be the difference between a good book and a great one, but it’s really not as important to the average reader as the other two. That’s because it’s more fungible. There are a lot of stories that can be told equally well in New York, Feudal Japan, or Middle Earth. SFF is rife with stories that could only work in the magnificent settings created specifically for them, and it’s only behind the other two by a hair, but I do think it has to come in third.

I’m not going to get into 4, 5, and 6 here because I’ve already run long.

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*It’s actually four since I have a professional reader’s set too, but that’s a whole post in itself and begins with coherence, which isn’t even on this list, so I’m going to leave it out here

**They’re also shifting priorities over time and depending what I’m working on

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog August 20 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Star Wars Exhibit

Laura and I went to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota with her sister Kat and Kat’s husband (my fellow Wyrdsmith) Sean Murphy. It was entertaining—cool ship models and some of the props and costumes–but Laura and I felt that it just didn’t have the same impact as the Magic of Myth Star Wars exhibit, which Laura and I saw at the Smithsonian sometime last century.

We spent some time trying to figure out why that was and concluded that it’s got nothing to with the exhibit and everything to do with episodes I-III. After seeing what Lucas did with I-III we simply aren’t the same Star Wars fans we were when we saw the Magic of Myth. While there was some really cool stuff in the prequels, the incredibly inferior storytelling has tarnished the brand for us in a deep and abiding way, which is actually quite sad.

The one big exception to the simply not as cool as all this stuff used to be factor was the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon in the Jump to Lightspeed attraction, where the four of us got to go into a mockup of the Falcon’s cockpit and watch a short surround-projected film that included several jumps to lightspeed. We were all acting like excited nine-year-olds for that bit, hitting buttons, flipping switches, and just generally playing in a way that grownups mostly* don’t get to. It was thrilling because we all deep down loved IV-VI, and the Falcon by itself didn’t evoke the disappointment of I-III.

I’m sure there’s an important lesson in there for writers about not tarnishing your brand and learning when to stop, but I’m equally sure it’s actually quite hard to apply. I have no doubt that Lucas thought I-III were going to be great and that’s why he did them. He certainly didn’t need the money. There’s also a lesson in understanding that once a story has an audience and fans, it can never be entirely the writer’s toy ever again, no matter how much we might want it to be. Perhaps that’s all generalizable to something like the writer has to understand that the audience is part of the story and that’s true from the moment you start writing something you intend to share.

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*I actually do get to play on a daily basis because my job is writing fantasy, but it’s generally make-believe in my head, and rarely involves toys.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog July 21 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)