Category: Musings

Admitting to Writing

A few weeks ago Miss Snark had this to say Don’t ever talk about your novel socially until it’s published. Ever. here. She followed it up with this post in which she expanded upon her thesis.

In general I’m in complete agreement with Miss Snark, but I just don’t buy this one for a number of reasons, some of which may be genre specific. 2013 update: Exactly six years on I find this even more ridiculous than I did at the time.

1. I’m an F&SF author, and making the rounds of cons and talking about your work in progress is a big part of career development.

2. I wrote full time for a while before selling a novel. If I hadn’t talked about the novels I was writing I’d have had an awfully hard time explaining what I did during those years, since most people you meet will at some point ask you what you do.

3. Much of my social circle is now made up of professional and aspiring novelists and English professors. Talking about unpublished novels is a huge part of the normal conversation. It was not always this way, but developed in part because of a willingness on my part to both talk about my work and to welcome other writers into my life.

My life wouldn’t be nearly as rich if I hadn’t always been willing to talk about my writing. Further, those aspiring novelist connections really helped me get through some rough times on the way to publication.

On the other hand, I don’t think I talked about my first novel socially before it was finished, and that I would highly recommend.

It’s an interesting topic, and one made more so by the massive amounts of support her pronouncement generated in the comments thread. I’m wondering whether that’s about her audience, genre, or what.

2013 update: I’m going to pull out and edit some of my comments from the thread that followed as well, since they expand and clarify my thinking.

Comment 1) If you read the whole comment thread and the surrounding context it becomes pretty clear that Miss Snark’s not just talking about pitches to agents in inappropriate places (which is not just rude, but stupid and actively counterproductive to boot). She’s pretty clearly talking about discussing your writing to anyone anywhere outside of a business setting. Later she says this:

“It’s rude. It’s rude to talk about something no one else knows about or can read. Like showing your vacation slides…the only person really interested in how good a time you had is …that’s right: you.”

and this:

“I don’t care if you think it’s ok to do this. It’s not. Not ever. If you think you’re the exception, you’re not.”

I will concede that my first point falls into one of her exceptions. However, 2 and 3 are very clearly outside her acceptable window.

The comparison to asking for legal advice or medical advice only holds for the instance of the inappropriate pitch, which I won’t defend. A more appropriate comparison would be to say that a doctor may never talk about medicine at that bar or barbeque or whatever. Likewise the lawyer may never talk about the law.

I find this simply silly as I have discussed medicine, med-school and medical issues with doctor friends at any number of social settings. Likewise, I regularly talk about writing and works in progress at social events. The idea that one would exclude the possibility of talking about one’s work at any social setting is frankly ridiculous.

Oh, and though I’ll concede the point on cons as business events, they’re also social events and its the social side that is much more likely to see me talking about my writing–as opposed to panels where I’m mostly talking about the specifics of the panel topic.

Comment 2) If for example she said: “You should never pitch an editor or agent that you happen upon in a purely social setting. Never.” I’d mostly be right there with her. As I said above, it’s not just rude, it’s also stupid and may well close a door forever.

But she very specifically says don’t tell anyone, not just don’t pitch agents at dinner parties. Four of six points are pretty clearly addressed to the idea of telling no one, not just not telling publishing professionals. This is made clear by the fact that she explicitly names publishing professionals in points 5 and 6.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 1 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

 

Patience is a Virtue…Arghh!

A comment by CJD in one of my Wyrdsmiths posts back in 2007 included this: “the struggle is with embracing that kind of strange patience (embracing uncertainty and ‘no applause,’ as the Buddhists say).” It got me thinking about writing and patience and the fact that it’s one place I am quite Zen.

One of the first things I learned back when I started down the writing road was how to be genuinely patient about things I had no control over and the corollary skill of figuring out which things I do and don’t have control over. It’s an important skill for a writer to try to develop.

I don’t have control over how fast editors will respond to my stories. I do have control over how many stories I have in the mail, and who gets what when. I don’t have control over whether or not a given market will buy a book of mine. I do have control over how good the book is.

At one point this led my father-in-law to comment on my being a type z* personality. The specific incident that made him say that had to do with a waitress having forgotten to get my order in with the cook so that my food failed to come at the same time as everyone else’s. My response was just to smile and tell her to get it to me when she could. I don’t have control over when my food comes. I do have control over whether or not to let it raise my blood pressure.

I get a lot of questions from friends and family about when will I see covers, copyedits, royalties, etc. I can usually answer these questions with educated guesses based on contract language, past experience, etc. and if asked I will dredge up the information, but I don’t think about it much otherwise. I’m not sure, but I think this drives some of them crazy—that I have to work to give them such important information and that it doesn’t seem to interest me.

But those are all whens that I can’t control, so there’s very little point in worrying about them or even thinking about them. Things I can control are how I react to the cover when it comes, when I turn in my copyedits relative to my deadline, and what I’ll do with any royalties.

This is not to say that I don’t get impatient, just that I try very hard not to. In my case that means learning not to think about the things I can’t control, and to focus intensely on the ones that I can. It’s something midway between denial and low grade meditation. I’m sure there are other ways of handling the issue of writer’s patience, but that’s what works for me.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 25 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

*subsequent events have caused my father-in-law to rethink that one, as it’s not that I’m type z it’s just that the hyperfocused version of me mostly comes out when I’m sitting at my laptop with no witnesses.

R E S P E C T and R E L I E F

2013 update:  One of the fundamental social problems for the beginning writer in America is the resistance of friends, family, and even total strangers to the idea that writing is a legitimate pursuit.  At least, until you’re making money at it. My experiences abroad have been very different, but here in the USA there is a major cultural bias against work that doesn’t bring in a paycheck. Without that monetary stamp of approval, strangers will say things like “no, I meant what do you do for a living.” Family will ignore your boundaries and ask you to do all sorts of things during your writing time because you’re not really working. Even friends will often fret about your chances and worry that you’re wasting time you’ll never get back. It is because of this that eight years on my primary feeling about getting my first novel published is still relief despite the unusual levels of support that I personally experienced on my road to publication. Now, on to the reblogging. 

As part of a longer post over at her personal blog my friend and fellow author Lyda Morehouse wrote: Writers, in particular those who haven’t got book or short story credits to their name yet, have a hard time convincing their friends and family that what they do is real and important. Getting a paycheck is something you can wave in people’s faces to say, “Yes, actually, I got paid to write, thank you very much.”

This brought me back to trying to explain to people how I felt when I sold WebMage (the novel-when I sold the short story I was unambiguously delighted). Now, let me first note how fortunate I am in my friends, family, and writing community. Pretty much from the get go, I’ve had incredible support from people who really believed in me and what I wanted to do. In particular, my wife, Laura, has never wavered in the slightest in her belief in my writing, not even at those times I myself was wavering.

When I sold the novel I had quite a few friends who were not upset exactly, but certainly concerned about my apparent lack of wild excitement. Part of this was because I was going through a particularly difficult family trauma and there was fear on the part of my friends that the strain of that was devouring my joy. There may even be some truth to that hypothesis. But it wasn’t the whole or even the majority truth, because I was intensely engaged in the experience of having sold a book. It’s just that what I was feeling was mainly relief.

Relief from my own occasional conviction that I was never going to make it.

Relief that I would never again have to say “yes, I’m a writer of novels but…”

Relief that I had not let down all the people who had supported me on my way here.

Relief that the long trial of apprenticeship was over.

I have had a hard time explaining this to most people, though there are two major categorical exceptions: 1) Other writers-who have been there. 2) Ph.D.s-who have also been there. With the latter, all I had to say was “Do you remember how you felt when you passed your defense? Like that.” And the response was a knowing nod or a wry smile.

Selling the book or passing the defense means you have passed through the fire. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a career or be a success. It just means that you have survived the ordeal of getting to the place where those things are now genuinely possible. That may sound pessimistic, but it’s not. It’s the voice of relief, and it’s everything.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 19 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Sci Fi

So, I stumbled on this iteration of the sci-fi/skiify/SF/Science Fiction discussion, via Frank Wu who links to Lucy Snyder.

This one fascinates me. I personally use sci-fi, SF, science fiction, and speculative fiction pretty interchangeably, and I’ve never understood the conniptions some folks have about the term sci-fi. This is despite the facts that I’m a third generation fan, that I’ve been going to conventions for 25 years, and that I write and publish in the field.

I really don’t get it. Yes, some people use the term to denigrate the field. However, for those who think science fiction is a waste of time, it’s not about terminology it’s about content. They’re going to dump on science fiction no matter what you call it. In my experience they also use the term science fiction to denigrate the field. If you talk to them about SF, they assume you mean San Francisco until you explain it to them, then they dump on SF. Likewise speculative fiction.

This whole debate seems to me to be a sterling way to let the people who hate the field define the way you should talk about it, and to turn the term sci-fi into something that people who are on the pro science fiction side of the fence use to bash each other over the head with. In short: getting worked up over sci-fi seems terribly counterproductive.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 13 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

2013 Update: Adding in my comments from the original post in response to Lyda noting that Sci-Fi registers as a media fandom thing for her or a non-reader thing.

I don’t get the non-readers thing. I’ve used the term sci-fi all my life and I am not a media person and never have been. I don’t watch television at all and haven’t in more than a decade and I rarely watch movies. I come from a family culture of reading first and media as a distant and barely visible second. I picked up “sci-fi” exclusively from literary sources.

Actually, thinking about it, it rings as an academic/literary term for me, c-sci, poli-sci, sci-fi.

Story and Sleep

I’m an insomniac. Let’s start with that. Sleeping is a skill I’ve never fully mastered and I am subject to both going to sleep too late and waking up too early, as well as occasional bouts of being awake in the middle. In general this is no fun, and actually in specific as well, now that I think about it.

But what does this have to do with writing you might ask. And it’s a reasonable question. I’m not entirely sure it has anything to do with writing, but it definitely has to do with being a writer, or more specifically a storyteller. Not only do I tell stories literarily (my writing) and socially (at parties) but I tell stories to myself in a more or less continual stream.

Someone smiles at me as they drive past me on the freeway? I automatically make up all sorts of things to explain the smile. I can’t help myself, given any starting point and something unknown, my brain starts filling in the gaps. This is one of the two chief sources of insomnia for me–the other being problem solving–I can’t get my brain to shut up and quit telling stories. I seem to need the damn things.

As with most storytellers, I am an avid consumer of storytelling (that might even be the root of being a storyteller–an impulse that says “well, if nobody else is going to tell me a story…). Often this leads to reading–yes, the horror, a writer who reads–quite often at night, when I might otherwise be sleeping. Because of this and the complete exhaustion of some life stress I made a discovery about three years ago.

I sleep better if I don’t finish reading the book. In fact, I can almost always go straight to sleep if I put it down at a cliffhanger moment. If, however, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open but I still push on to the finish to see how it all ends, I will then spend the next several hours wide awake.

This is because (I think) when there’s still story left at the time I put the book down, my brain stays in happy reader mode–the story is still in the hands of the author and therefore it is not my problem. OTOH, if I finish the book, the storytelling part of my brain knows that the author is done and realizes that if it doesn’t do something right now the story will end! There will be no more story! Aiee!

And so my brain kicks into high gear telling a new story. It may be the story of what happens in the book after it ends, or it may be the story of what’s going to happen to the stupid cat who is sitting on my head. That part’s not really important. The important part is that story is once more my responsibility. I bring this up because last night, like an idiot, I finished the book.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 26 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

(Spidey) Sense of Structure

Writing can get easier. I won’t say that it does, because every writer has a different journey, but it can.

The good news, I’ve recently developed a strong sense of novel structure. The bad news, it’s still almost entirely intuitive rather than conscious. The worse news, it took 10 books. The better news, it seems to be shifting into a conscious process as I’m writing number 11.

I’ve had a pretty good handle on how to plot since my fourth book—the first three are decently-plotted, but it was a messy organic process. But I didn’t fully develop this structural sense until writing number 10, The Black School, + 30 or more outlines. I got inklings of it with number 8, Chalice, but it mostly blinked out for 9, Cybermancy. And now I’m occasionally managing to consciously invoke it for 11, MythOS.

This is a pretty typical development process for me in terms of learning how to do something in writing:

1. Consciously set out to learn how to do X
2. Beat my head against the wall on X
3. Lose track of the fact that I’m trying to learn X
4. Get compliments about how well I’m handling X
5. Notice that X makes sense to me intuitively—it tastes right*
6. Think about how I’m doing X
7. Bafflement
8. Forget that I’m thinking about how I’m doing X
9. Answer someone’s question about X and realize I now get it
2013 Updated to add:
10. Forget that I ever didn’t know how to do X
11. Forget how to explain X
12. Grrrrr

*Tastes right. I’ll talk about this in some depth with my next post.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 15 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project. In and effort to elicit comment at the old site, I wrote the bit that follows at the end. No response. This is one of the many reasons I have not enabled comments here at kellymccullough.com)

Thoughts? Arguments? Digressions? Large purple groundhogs?

Locus of Control and Gender in Writing

There’s something I’ve been speculating on after talking about the phenomena with my wife–she’s a physics professor who does educational research on women’s achievement in physics classes. One piece of the literature on research on gender interactions with the classroom has to do with what’s called locus of control, or where the student believes control over things like grades is located.

For example, a female student who does badly on a test will typically internalize the blame I’m a bad student, I didn’t study enough, whereas a male student will typically blame the instructor or the material they wrote a bad test, this is a bad class.

Over the last few years the advent of writers’ blogs has given us an unprecedented window into writerly processes and writers emotional interaction with their art. I’ve seen an awful lot of I’m a bad writer, I’m not good enough, my work is crap, from professional and semi-professional writers talking about how they felt before they sold their first story or novel, but not as much the system sucks, this editor just didn’t get it, etc. and I’ve been wondering about it.

Is it a function of gender and locus of control? My sample set is heavily weighted toward women.

Is it just not wanting to offend the folks who might be buying your next novel?

Is it that these writers are an unusual sample set and have a more female communication style?

Is it that these writers are an unusual sample set in that writer self-esteem is lower than normal?

Something entirely different?

I’ve written a bad post?

I don’t know, and I don’t have a good idea for coming up with a measurable answer, but I thought it was an interesting question.

Oh, and for the record, I tended to blame the system, a position reinforced when stories that had heaps of rejections suddenly started selling after my publishing record improved. I tend to code very male on things like that.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 27 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

“Lie” vs. “Myth”

Elizabeth Bear started me thinking about this with a post that is both fabulous and true for a given value of truth and a given value of broken. It’s about reading and writing and cultural expectations and the idea of epiphantic healing and I wanted to like it much more than I did, since it clearly touched a lot of people. But something about it didn’t work for me at a very deep level, and my subconscious has been picking at what that something is until this came out:

In the dungeon nothing is wild and free

Sometimes a myth is all that keeps you alive, a myth in the shape of a story or book. You can’t leave the dungeon. If you could, it wouldn’t be a dungeon. But stories are day passes that let you out for a time, myths that let you believe for a little while that there’s another kind of place, one where happily ever after really happens and that a moment of magic or insight can make the pain stop. When you’re in the dungeon you don’t need someone to tell you that those moments aren’t true, that pain doesn’t just go away, or that the magic moment is never going to happen. You know that.

What you need is very different from what you know. What you need is that day pass, that myth that allows you to believe that somewhere the reality of the dungeon is the myth, and the idea that it can all be made better is the truth. It’s the myth that keeps you sane, the myth that allows you to keep breathing every day, to hang on a little bit longer.

How you got into the dungeon isn’t as important as the dungeon itself, but I’m a storyteller, so I’ll tell you a little bit about one kind of dungeon.

It’s the dungeon of being a child who doesn’t have the power physically or legally to walk away from the situation that causes the pain. The pain doesn’t even have to be something that everyone would agree is awful, though often it is. All it has to be is unbearable and inescapable by normal means. When you’re in the dungeon, instant healing is not a “lie” it’s a “myth” and a reason to keep on keeping on. And with this particular dungeon sometimes you do get out, sometimes you grow up and you get the keys to the dungeon and you walk out into the light. And while the healing won’t actually be instantaneous or magical, that moment that you realize you’re out is, that epiphantic moment.

Sometimes a lie is a myth. Sometimes a lie keeps you alive long enough for myth to become truth. Again, for a given value of truth and a given value of broken. So, if people want to keep writing myths where breakage can get better in a moment, there’s an audience out there who really needs them.

Clearly Bear’s answer is right for her and for a lot of her readers. I just had to write this because some people need a different truth.

——————————————–

There was a lot of interesting and valuable writerly discussion that followed in the comments when I originally posted this in 2007. I’m going to include some portions of my comments here as they clarify and expand on my points, specifically in regards to a question raised by one of our commenters about character development and the idea that epiphantic healing leaves someone “untouched.”

I’m not actually talking about coming out untouched. I think that’s actually one of the chief spots where I disagree with Bear’s post, the idea that epiphantic healing means being returned to the initial state.

Now, it may be that I’ve missed all the books she’s talking about and she has missed the ones that I have read, but I have never seen characters made whole in a way that returns them to their initial state.

That would miss the entire point of character development and maturation that goes on in the vast majority of stories, and I don’t know of a single  author outside of certain types of media tie-ins (where they’re not allowed to significantly change the characters) who does healing as reset.

What I usually see in epiphantic healing is a step forward into a new state of wholeness, not a step back into the old.

Another thought. Maybe it has to do with the way I see the intial state pre-breakage.

Elizabeth talks about the teapot lid that’s been glued back together being her best, scars and all. To me that implies a rigidity and completeness to the inital state that I don’t see in people. It also implies that the proper state of the thing in question is it’s original state, hence the gluing back together. She was speaking metaphorically of course and the state she’s talking about is clearly not meant to map directly onto a human being.

So what she intended and what I got may be wildly different things.

But I think of people in a much more plastic work-in-progress kind of way. Take a perfect new block of clay. Say it’s pristine and geometrically perfect. Then break it apart. Shatter it. That’s more how I see a person who has been broken. If you have the right sort of mold, you can near instantaneoulsy smash the disparate piece into a new, complete shape.

That’s how I see epiphantic healing in a novel, remembering of course that the new shape is going to have tags and loose bits and is open to being reshattered and reformed again. Of course, the piece can be put back together slowly and shaped lovingly into something perfect over time and that’s much more likely the way things will go. It may also get mixed with something else, fired, utterly broken, etc.

Anyway, I’m really not trying to say that Bear is wrong. She’s perfectly right for a given value of truth and a given value of broken. I’m just saying that there are many values for those variables and one person’s horrid lie is another’s life-saving myth, or even soul-saving truth.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 18 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

The Cultural Poison of April Fool’s Day

This may seem strange coming from someone who makes a good bit of his living off writing funny stories and humor-heavy novels, but I think April Fool’s Day is pure cultural poison.

First off, many of the “jokes” that pass for humor on April Fool’s aren’t funny. As John Scalzi has noted, the failure mode of clever is asshole. An awful lot of the posts and stories that appear on April Fool’s are supposed to be clever but aren’t. What that makes them is an exercise I’ll leave up to the reader.

But it’s not just that so many April Fool’s pranks fail, and fall into asshole mode because of it. It’s that so many of them start in asshole mode even when they’re successful. The bulk of April Fool’s jokes are premised on the idea that some number of readers/viewers will fall for them. The punchline is “Ha ha, you bought this crap we’re selling, you’re an idiot.” The goal is humiliation, and that’s not funny. It’s cruel.

Much of it is also asymmetric in the worst way, pranks played by the powerful on the powerless. News organizations printing false stories that some small number of their readers will buy into. When a “joke” consists of some powerful media entity making John Doe look like an idiot, that’s the powerful afflicting the powerless. Even when the asymmetry is smaller, say a moderately well known media figure privately jerking their fans around, it’s punching down. Good humor punches up or in.

Finally, April Fool’s humor tends to pollute the public information stream. Some people believe the joke, and never ever get over that, and they propagate it forward over and over again. Others deliberately misuse the dross created for April Fool’s. Photoshopped pictures or links back to articles that never get updated with an April Fool’s tag will be injected into the public conversation to intentionally enrage or discredit. The internet is forever, and a gag put up by the AP or the NYT can continue to bite people in the ass for years after the day. Scientists and others will have to spend valuable time debunking these things again and again. Time that could otherwise be spent on advancing knowledge will be routed into cleaning it up.

I guess it’s really not all that strange that April Fool’s pisses off this writer of humor. Most of the jokes of the day are bad for one reason or another. As someone who strives to craft the good kind of jokes, the poorly crafted or cruel variety that is marketed as humor on April Fool’s devalues the very idea. And that pisses me right the hell off.

 

Locus of Control—Stress and Writing

So, something we’ve talked about in Wyrdsmiths from time to time is how life stress affects our writing. There seem to be two basic models.

1. Stress = no writing.

2. Stress = more writing.

Under number one, the writer needs a place of calm to work from, and stress prevents that. It’s more complex than that of course, but I’m much more qualified to talk about the second model because that’s where I land.

Under number two, the writer finds writing to be one place in their world where they can exert some real control and so does more and more writing work.

As I said above, I tend to the second of those models, though there does come a point where stress can push me over the edge into reduced productivity—it never seems to truly stop me. I think in my case that’s an interaction between control issues and being a happy writer. Writing makes me happy, and when I’m happy I tend to write more. It’s a positive feedback loop. There’s the converse negative feedback loop, not writing makes me unhappy, being unhappy means I write less, etc. But I’m simply not as prone to that because being unhappy also makes me want to do something to exert control over the situation, and for me work is one of the best ways to re-exert control, which breaks the negative cycle and kicks in the positive one.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 8th 2006. Reposted as part of the reblogging project)

The original post also included these questions, but, as I’ve elected not to enable comments at kellymccullough.com, I’m separating them out below and people’s answers can be found at the Wyrdsmiths version:
So, how about y’all? Do you fall into mode 1 or mode 2? Or something completely different? How does mood interact with writing for you?