Category: Writing

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.

Time To Publication

John Scalzi is talking about why debut novelists are so often so much older than debut musicians or actors. I commented over there with my own timeline and it seemed worth noting it here too. Please feel free to post your own both here and there.

My novel publishing timeline:

1967 – 1991: Time spent learning to write well enough to write a novel (ages 0—26).

1991: Wrote first complete novel (age 26)

1992–1993: Wrote two more novels, one of which is possibly publishable with rewrite (28)

1993-1998: Wrote a bunch of short stories while trying to sell all three initial novels (31)

1999: Started selling shorts and returned to novels, writing the book that would ultimately sell first (32)

2000: Got agent who started marketing novel (33)

2000-2005: Wrote three more novels, all still looking for publishers (38)

2005: Contract signed for that debut novel (38)

2006: Debut novel published (39)

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 24 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Building a Writing Career—The Real Secret Handshake

There is one thing you can do to build your career in this field that will help more than anything else, a secret handshake of the writing biz. You know what it is, though it may not occur to you immediately. Who wants to take a swing at it?

*a hand shoots up*

Write the best story you possibly can, every time?

*sighs*

Okay, two things. But really, writing the best story you can is the ante you need to pay just to get into the game. Without that you don’t even get to play. Anyone else want to guess?

*waits*

I see some hands up and I’m pretty sure some of you know the answer, but since this is a pre-canned essay, I’m going to have to type it myself anyway.

Be professional.

I’m letting that sit out there all alone because it’s really really important. Science fiction and fantasy publishing is a business, and it’s actually a very small one at the professional level. If you were to take every single SFWA eligible writer in the entire world and put them together in one place you’d have a group roughly the size of my wife’s high school student body. Admittedly, it was a large high school, 2,000 plus students, and the group gets bigger when you add in all of the agents and editors, but due to agent-writer and editor-writer ratios that still doesn’t take you outside the large high school range.

Think about that for a moment. A large high school. If you went to a big school think about how fast information moved through the student body. Think about the way that if you did something notable as a freshman it stayed with you for the next four years because everybody knew everybody at least a little. Even if you went to a smaller school (my graduating class was 17) you probably still have a feeling for the scale just from being immersed in pop culture.

So, in terms of community size and reputation building, professional science fiction and fantasy, is basically a large high school. The plus side of this is that everyone knows everyone else, and at its best the community functions like a tight-knit village with lots of mutual support. The minus side of this is that…everyone knows everyone. If you have a public hissy fit (and the internet counts as public) when you get a particularly brutal rejection letter it may hang there in the background of your reputation for the rest of your career.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for reputation management. Be professional. Remember that if you want to make writing your career, it’s just that—a career. Remember whenever you post something online about writing that you’re pretty much posting it on the wall labeled “my professional reputation.” Don’t punt deadlines unless you absolutely have to, and then manage the fallout in a professional manner. Tell your editor what’s coming as soon as you can see it. Apologize. If you’ve got a fan base that you interact with online, make sure to keep them as up to date as possible.

Above all, treat people with respect and kindness as much as possible. Personally, I’ve found that this is a good idea in general for managing my life. Your millage may vary there, but it’s really important for your professional interactions because those will have a huge effect on your career over time for a very simple reason. Editors are people, and they buy stories for a lot of reasons.

Primarily, editors buy stories because they believe they will sell, but after you get over that basic hurdle (see writing the best story you possibly can every time above) other factors start to come into play and right up at the top of the list is how they feel about the writer as a professional. Does the author produce a reliable product? Do they do so on time? Is the author easy to work with? Can they be trusted not to do anything that will alienate fans? Etc.

Now, I will admit that if you sell 100,000 hardcovers every time your name appears on a dust jacket you can get away with all kinds of crappy behavior—though many will think the worse of you. But if you’re underselling and so is captain-difficult-to-work-with, I can tell you who is going to be the first cut from the list and it’s not the writer who acts professionally.

So, yes, Virginia, there really is a secret handshake. It’s called professional behavior, or more simply, being polite and meeting your obligations.

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

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)

About That Good Art Article at NPR…

So, there’s an NPR article making the rounds right now. It purports to be about whether the quality of art is primarily responsible for the popularity of art. Leaving aside that I don’t think the methodology of the study addresses the question the article seems to be claiming it does, this is a subject that makes my bones itch.

That’s because I’m not at all sure we can have anything like an objective standard of “good” for something as subjective as art. I strongly suspect that we can draw a line between bad and competent, but once you’ve crossed over into competent, I think that things go very very fuzzy.

First off, what constitutes good? For example, in writing, is great prose ultimately the true measure of good? Or is it something else entirely. Good or great pacing is also a skill. So is good or great character, or world, or story, or simply the ability to evoke emotional response. I have read things with very meh prose that are still amazingly excellent works do to other aspects of art and craft and vice-versa.

Also, who gets to decide what constitutes good? That’s a huge question, both in terms of expertise and of culture. There are things that I as a professional writer might judge to be bad prose because of my own personal context when I read it, while an inexpert or early reader might find the very same prose amazing because the writer is doing important things with simple structure and words.

On another axis, there are things that I may find deeply moving or fun because I’m a middle-aged, cis-gendered, white, straight, liberal, atheist guy from the midwest. Those same thing could be frankly appalling to someone who doesn’t share my cultural biases.

Audience matters, and good for me is almost certainly not good for everyone. While I absolutely want experts deciding whether a bridge design is sound, experts deciding on esthetics is a dicier proposition. Posit for a moment that “good” is actually a democratic proposition, in which case it may be that good for the many who are not experts is better than good for the few who are.

Mind you, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but every time I see someone trying to make objective decisions about something as subjective as whether art is good I get a little bit itchy. I’m not at all sure these questions have answers that aren’t entirely situational, and I’m skeptical of arguments that say that they do.

On Plotting/Outlining and the Benefits of Experience*

I find that after ~16 highly outlined novels, I mostly don’t need that scaffolding these days. The outlines have become internal to my head.

To elaborate: I find now that if I know where I’m going (almost always before I start the book) I no longer need to do much advance outlining. The things that I need to make a coherent story of the target length with all the bits that are needed for something to be a story are in my head in a very firm way.

If X is my goal then U, V, and W have to happen structurally to provide the story beats. It’s much less mechanistic than that, but that’s more or less how it works now. I know that the plot tools will be there when I need them, so I can focus on the themes and character and bigger picture.

I started to get the first flashes of it around novel number 10 and I’ve been using it ever since, but it really kicked in solidly with Crossed Blades, which was number 17.

This is almost entirely a function of experience. I’m up around 4-5 million words of fiction written counting all the stuff that fell by the wayside. I’ve got around a million words in print, another million that’s forthcoming or that I expect to publish, and 2-3 million that ended up on the cutting room floor.

That last 2 million plus was at least as valuable as the stuff I kept, since it represents reflection and change. I used to cut ~4 words for every survivor when I started. These days the ratio is reversed, but it took 20 years to get here.

The process has allowed me to create heuristics for writing a Kelly McCullough novel, heuristics which I constantly work to improve as I strive to become a better writer.

It’s that experience and that practice at solving the problems of writing a novel that allowed me to write Blade Reforged in 100 or so days and have something I could turn in without massive rework. Likewise, writing Drawn Blades in 88 days.

It used to take me a year to write a novel because I had to do a lot of backing and filling that I can avoid now. Mind you, I prefer to have 150-175 days, but it’s nice to know I can do it in less when I have to. Unfortunately, the only way that I know of to get there is to hammer out the work day after day and year after year.

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*Importing and expanding my contributions from a Twitter conversation about plotting/outlining with Paul Weimer, Tobias Buckell & Damian G Walter

Writing About Pain

This started as a comment in Justine Larbalestier’s post about writing physical pain. I thought it might interest some of you here, so I’ve ported it over:

In my first published novel (WebMage) I wrote a good bit about a knee injury my central character incurs in the first couple of chapters and about how it affects everything he does from there on out. In that case I was writing from the personal experience of the aftermath of a torn cartilage injury that I lived with for more than a decade before I had the insurance necessary to get surgery.

Rather than focus on the pain itself (which sucks but isn’t all that interesting) I focused on the things that it simply made impossible. With my injury the pain was intermittent depending on whether a bit of the torn cartilage had flopped into the cup for the end of my knee bones or not. If not, I could do many things just fine, but always with the awareness that might suddenly change. If so, there were all sorts of things that were simply too painful to do–long walks, walking any distance more than about 50 feet without my cane, running, stairs, etc.

I think the random length cyclic nature of being able and unable to do things was the most interesting thing about the injury, so that’s what I focused on. Since that’s a component in many injury type pains it’s not a bad departure point.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog June 17 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)

Book Proposals…I’ve Gotten to Kind of Like Them

So, I’ve been working on the proposal for a successor series to the WebMage books. The funny thing is that somewhere along the line, writing book proposals went from being an awful task to kind of fun.

Because of where I am in my career, I no longer have to have a completed book to synopsize, and it’s much easier to plump a cool idea out into a book outline then it is to condense a novel done into one. That helps…a lot. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve been working on the screen porch on a lounger surrounded by cats and a beautiful Wisconsin spring. But the most important change is that I’ve done this enough (way more than 20 times) and read enough successful proposals (30-50) that I no longer worry about the mechanics. It’s just another form of the story/play that is what I love most about my job as a novelist. I feel like I am finally becoming truly comfortable in my skin about all of the aspects of being an author.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I will continue to have a career under this name, because that’s entirely dependent on book sales, and I have very little control on that front beyond writing the best book I can every time, which I would do anyway, just for me. But that’s just how the business works. I guess the point of the post is simply this:

It gets better.

Every one of those writing tasks that seem daunting now, eventually gets easier and less painful. Keep practicing, keep growing, keep sending stuff out, and some day, when you’re not expecting it, the tasks that seemed impossible once might even have become fun.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog  May 5 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)