Author
More Cat Blogging from 2008
I haven’t had time to upload any cat shots so, here are the feline overlords version 1.0. Moonshadow and Spot, both of whom have left this world and both of whom I miss terribly.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 28 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
Jordan on my brand new mailbox:
Isabelle preventing us from getting rid of what is apparently her chair now:
Nutmeg plotting her escape from Alcatraz using only a garden utensil:
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 20 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
Friday June 13 2008—The first Friday Cat Blog
The Feline Collective Soaks Up The Sun:
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 13 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
2013 update: This post was part of an ongoing discussion about things that contribute to writing resistance/writers block.
My basic feeling about what causes writing resistance/writers resistance is that it varies quite a bit from writer to writer in part because it’s really 3 separate phenomena that can act individually or in concert.
1. I’m notism. As in, I’m not inspired. Or, I’m not having fun. Or, I don’t feel the way about this piece that I feel when I’m really writing.
This is the one that I am most subject to, because most of the time when I’m writing I’m having a blast and feeling inspired. Except, sometimes I’m not, because sometimes writing is really hard unpleasant work. So, sometimes when I’m not feeling terribly inspired I wait for things to happen instead of making them happen. But then I usually remember that doesn’t really work for me and I go make things happen.
I’m notism is the biggest reason why I’m writing 2 books a year instead of 3 or 4. My actual writing time for a novel is between 2-1/2 and 4 months, while completion time is around 5-7 months because there’s a lot of dead time in the process, sometimes weeks in a row.
2. Perfectionist control-freakism. In this case the writer isn’t willing to finish the work because some portion of it isn’t up to their current standards, and (A) they’re damned if they’re going to let anything go out the door that isn’t exactly as it should be, and (B) they are damn well certain they can control the quality of their work at all times.
The problem with this one is that it is a falsehood rooted in the truth of the writer’s experience. Most writers get better with age and practice. Experience plus improved craft tends to equal better writing. So, as you get older you see how much better a job you could have done on earlier work. This leads to hanging onto things longer and longer in hopes that you will figure out how to do it better, because you know you will.
But, if you don’t let go of anything then it never gets to readers who can teach you things, and you never sell anything. That means you don’t get to focus on your writing as much as you could if you were a high-selling professional, and you don’t improve as much as you might if you would just learn to let go. And, even more than that, the way that you grow is by always trying to write in way that you’re reach exceeds your grasp. If you don’t fail in little ways in a piece, it means you’re probably not attempting something that’s at the level you should be shooting for.
3. I suckism. This is the conviction that whatever piece your working on is awful and you hate it and no one will ever want to buy it and if you’re foolish enough to send it out your agent, editor, readers, friends, family etc. will all decide the you are a fraud and should never have started writing in the first place.
In response you hide in a dark room and don’t write because if you don’t write it, it can’t suck. Or, if you don’t finish it, no one will ever see how much it sucks.
I personally don’t generally get this, though I often have the corollary I don’t know if this makes senseism moments. Fortunately, those tend to be brief and can be solved by calling someone else, telling them what you’re trying to do and seeing if it makes sense to them. With I suckism the only answer seems to be write it anyway, then find an audience who can read it and talk you down off the ledge.
2013 nota bene: In the original thread someone asked if there was much difference between two and three. I think so. There is a significant difference between “it has to be perfect and it’s not” on the one hand and “it sucks so much the universe gets smaller every time someone reads this on the other.” I occasionally get into a perfectionist mood, but I’ve never really had a case of the I sucks.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 19 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
As a writer, part of my job is to answer questions about my current, past, and future works and what I was thinking when I wrote this or that. We do this for interviewers, classrooms, talk audiences, and fans. If you happen to notice that I or another writer pauses for a long beat before answering some questions, there is a reason for that: we don’t know the answer. Or, at the very least, we have to dig deep to get there.
Like most other writers the first book I sold was not the first one I had written. It was in fact the 4th. It sold with a sequel, which I wrote shortly after getting the contract. That book was my 9th. It was followed into print by my 11th, and my 12th was next published.
At the time of this writing I had written 12 novels and portions of 5 more. Of those, 5 complete books are out being shopped around along with 9 proposals. I currently have three books that I am actively working on, none of them sold. In all I have roughly 4 years worth of potential future work spread across seven different series that is out under consideration and that could land in my lap at any time. 2013 update: now working on my 20th novel, with nine in print and three forthcoming (not counting book club and foreign editions), of which 1-1/2 are written. I have six completed novels out looking for homes, possible extensions of current series to think about, various editions out of sequence, etc. That gives me a bit over a year’s work contracted and 2-5 hanging in space that may or may not ever land.
This is occasionally nerve wracking, to say nothing of confusing. Both because I don’t know what among my various projects should be priority one, and because of things like the interviews I am doing as part of the promotional effort for book 11, CodeSpell.
When I am asked questions about my latest book and my next book I always have to remind myself that they are talking exclusively about the books currently in print or announced. When I am asked about process stuff from WebMage, I have to reach back past 15 complete novels, umpteen proposals, something like 25 worlds, and several dozen plot outlines to try to recapture what I was thinking at that time. That ignores the complications of short stories, major life events, and stuff I’ve read in other people’s novels that may also be blocking the spigot of authorial knowledge.
This is not a complaint. I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk over my work with people who are genuinely interested. It’s just that, as an author, it can be a little bit intimidating to know that person asking me a question is often more familiar with the book they’re asking about than I am.
(Originally published on the SFNovelists blog June 11 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
Some time ago I was chatting with my friends Jody Wurl and Neil Gaiman. Jody made a comment about finding it hard to imagine what it was like to walk around with the whole world of a book in your head. Neil’s response was very smart, as they generally are, and immediate and had to do with the ebb and flow of a book over the course of writing. Since the conversation had moved on by the time a good response occurred to me, I didn’t bring it up at the time, so I’m going to do it here.
I find it difficult to imagine what it’s like not walking around with the whole world of a book in my head. From my earliest days I’ve built elaborate worlds in my imagination. Generally, I’ve had at least several floating around in there of my own design plus a bunch that belong to other people. They may not all be at the forefront at any given time, but it only takes a moment for me to put myself in Middle Earth or Pern or Lankhmar.
Now, there is some qualitative difference in my understanding of the inner world of Aragorn vs. the inner world of Ravirn, since I’ve got a lot more experience placing Ravirn in unfamiliar situations. But in many ways the experience of being a novelist and being a fan have a lot in common experientially, or at least they do for me. Stepping out of this world and into one of fiction, mine or someone else’s is pretty much second nature for me.
The conversation didn’t move that way, but I think it’s an interesting topic so I’m going to leave you with a few of the questions that occurred to me to do with what you will. If you’re a writer, do you find there’s a big difference between having someone else’s world in your head and having one of your own? Does one seem to fill your brain more? Is there a cognitive difference in terms of creative brain space vs. consuming brain space? If you’re not a writer, how do you experience a fictional world? Is it a place you wholly contain in mind, or is it very much a place that you access through the gateway of a book? I don’t have comments turned on here, both due to excessive amounts of spam and because I found that I wasn’t posting when that was the case, but I’m more than happy to entertain them on twitter or facebook.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 2 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
I was at a library author appearance recently (Catherine Friend–funny funny writer, go buy her book Hit by a Farm). She said that when she was younger she’d never really been interested in being a writer. Further she said that this was at least in part due to having read about writers and determining that (at least according to their bios) they were pretty much all insecure neurotic drunks. She then gave the punchline–she was here to tell us it simply wasn’t true and she was living proof…she didn’t drink. Then she went on to detail her insecurities and neuroses. It was funny and it did a great job of selling her most recent work–a humorous memoir.
On that level the joke and the related anecdotes worked great. On another level they grated on my nerves a bit. I won’t argue with the neurotic bit, I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who wasn’t a bit neurotic in some way, but then I don’t know that I’ve ever met any human who wasn’t a bit neurotic in some way.
It was the insecurity thing. There is a school of thought, much reinforced by writer blogs, that suggests that all writers moan about how their work is crap much of the time…except for those writers who are egotistical monsters. Now, it is certainly true that some writers are insecure wrecks and some writers are certainly raving egotists, but there’s a lot of ground in between. And really, I suspect that most writers spend most of their time in that middle ground. If we didn’t believe we were doing pretty good work most of the time we’d never send it out. I certainly believe that I mostly do pretty good work most of the time.
I’m sure there are people who will argue with me on this, and that’s fine. There are 1,001 ways to write a novel and every one of them is right. If being an insecure wreck is your method and it works for you, I’m not going to try to say it shouldn’t or try to make you stop. I just want to provide a counter-example. It is perfectly fine to be happy writing most of the time and be happy with what you have written…as long as it doesn’t prevent you from seeing flaws and correcting them.
So, consider this official permission to enjoy yourself and give yourself the occasional pat on the back from a real live professional author (yes, that is tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s also sincere). If every time you write you enjoy it, and every time you reread your work you go “Hey that mostly works,” and sometimes you even say things like “I rock!” Or, “I’m a genius!” It’s all fine. Just don’t let it stop you from improving. It’s perfectly acceptable to be a happy and secure writer. You can even do that and sell books.
This message brought to you by the Kelly McCullough People Like Me, They Really Like Me, school of writing.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 17 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
2013 update: This post was originally inspired by a post on the same subject by Justine Larbalestier and Eleanor Arnason’s response when I linked it.
When I say that ideas are easy, what I mean is that producing the basic idea isn’t all that much work by comparison to the other parts of writing a book. It can take no more than a few minutes and sometimes happens as a subconscious process.
Doing the research, blocking out what to do with the idea, and writing and polishing the book can take anywhere from months to years of hard work. That’s certainly been the case for me. The core of even the best of my story ideas have happened in a flash or the length of a dream. Crafting that idea into an actual story is what takes real time and major effort.
I’m a relatively fast writer–I’ve written a 5,000 word story in single day and sold it, and I routinely write novels for my publisher in under six months. In that same six months I will come up with dozens of new story ideas. Most of them will be discarded, but a few go into the ideas file, a few get plotted out for possible later use, and might even became the next novel. I’ve had hundreds of novel ideas that I think are really cool and thousands that I’ve thought would make a decent book. I’ve only written twenty because the writing is where the work and the effort go.
Is the production of the initial idea easy in absolute terms? I suppose that depends on the writer. In my case, I can’t not produce story ideas in job lots.
Is it easy by comparison to taking the core of the idea and doing the research and reshaping needed to make it into something you could hang a book on? That’s certainly been my experience. Is it really easy compared to the actual months long day-in-day-out effort of writing and polishing the actual novel? Again, that been my experience.
More than that, idea generation is pure unadulterated joy, especially if you can get someone else to do the fiddly bits. One of the most entertaining things Wyrdsmiths does as a writers group* is to sit around and brainstorm solutions to story problems. I always find that to be an electric experience. Dozens of ideas get thrown out in a matter of minutes, batted around, added to, twisted, knocked down, thrown out–it’s like eight-way tennis with ten balls, some of which have really strange properties. And, if it’s not my story we’re talking about, I don’t even have to make the implementation work.
So yes, I think idea generation is easy for a certain value of easy.
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*at least for me.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 13 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
I am having one of my periodic wrestling matches with insomnia, which, in my case seem to be related to the same part of my brain that does the heavy lifting for storytelling. For me insomnia is invariably a can’t get my brain to stop whirring problem and one that feels like it feels when I’m processing story.
There are variations:
The worry whirr, in which I can’t get my mind off some care that I can’t do anything about.
The engineering whirr, in which I am working on a project of some sort and end up spending hours on design issues that I could solve in minutes with a piece of paper a pencil and some measurements.
The genuine story whirr, in which my brain picks away at some aspect of the current w.i.p. and won’t let go even once I solve the problem.
And tonight’s special joy, the what if whirr, in which my brain gets its teeth into constructing scenarios in which things are other than as they are–in this case the cascade was triggered by the ongoing work left by my grandmother’s rather abrupt departure from the scene.
None of it is terribly fun and I have found that the best response is to get out of bed and do something that is not sleeping for a while–hence this blog post. Now that I’ve done that for a bit I’m going to wander back to bed and see if I have successfully distracted the story-telling part of my brain enough that it will shut up and let the rest of me get to sleep.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 28 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
Here’s a thought on the science fiction vs. fantasy discussion, primarily from my perspective as a writer rather than a reader. One of the reasons that I write much more fantasy than science fiction is that as a reader I find that fantasy wears significantly better than science fiction. If I pick up a stack of 30 year old sf and fantasy I find that the fantasy is usually much more current and quite a bit less likely to have been rendered moot or obsolete by the passage of time. For me this is true even with sf and fantasy titles that I loved when I first read them in the 80s when I was reading about even amounts of both genres. As a writer it’s certainly my hope that people will still find at least some of what I write worth reading a hundred years from now and I feel that writing more fantasy than science fiction increases my odds dramatically.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 14 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)