Writing – Page 9 – Kelly McCullough

Noodling, Or the Fine Line Between Processing and Woolgathering

I’m in one of those (usually) short fallow periods that seem to be a part of my process. What that means is that I need to let my subconscious pick away at some identified problems in the structure of the book going forward.

The way it usually goes is my subconscious spots a big old problem in the plan before I actually get to it in the text and I have conscious “well damn,” moment. I then stall out for a while, usually on the order of a week or two while my backbrain picks away. Then, at some point I say, “the hell with it, I’m just going to write through it,” and I do so. I suspect that I hit the write through it moment because my subconscious has solved the problem and sends some subtle message to the motivational centers.

Unfortunately, there’s a potentially perfectly valid alternate theory: I’m lazy. I hit a difficult spot and don’t want to do the work to get through it, so I go off and woolgather until my Midwestern guilt at not working gets bad enough to drive me back to the keyboard where I solve the problem in real time by just writing through it and all the fallow period stuff is so much sophistery to disguise the fact that I don’t actually like to do hard work.

I strongly suspect and hope that the first theory is the correct one but I’m aware enough of my ability to self-justify that I will never really know, and that’s actually pretty aggravating.

Sigh.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog July 01 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writers Block/Writing Against Resistance

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)

Head Full of World

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)

Not All Writers Are Neurotic…At Least Not In The Same Ways

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)

Ideas = Cheap and Plentiful

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.

————————————–
*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)

Advice for the Young Writer

A fan asked me for some advice for the young writer in the house who had recently won an academic writing award and was wondering about internships and other academic opportunities. This was my response:

Sounds like you have every right to kvell. It’s actually quite a tough call, really. Once you get past the initial startup talent hurdle—and it sounds like he has—the rest is wildly variable.

I don’t know many writers who followed anything like a straight path or even the same path. The one core piece of advice that is entirely true is that if you want to write you must actually write. There is no substitute for time spent in the chair putting words on the page. That plus learning to assess and improve your own work are what makes up the heart of the craft of writing.

Journalism internships and practice all teach observation, putting words on paper on deadline, and force practice. John Scalzi followed that route as did my friend Neil Gaiman. Theater teaches you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, how to build characters, discipline, and story. That’s where I come from and it makes a strong part of the backgrounds of people like Mary Robinette Kowal and Ellen Kushner. English exposes you to a lot of different writers and helps you build the world of reading that all writers need as a foundation. My friends Lyda Morehouse and Pat Rothfuss are among the English majors in the field. Publishing and editing offers a path into the world of the business of writing that can show you a lot about how to think critically about story as well as to get practice without starving. See Laura Anne Gilman among many others.

There are downsides to all four of those paths too. Journalism often leads to burning out on the joy of writing, without which there’s not much point. Theater is a gorgeous all-consuming passion that may never let you go. It’s like eating the food in faerie. English as it is taught right now often emphasizes form and style at the expense of story and substance, and that’s a terrible choice for the writer who wants to be read by people who aren’t English majors. The jump from one side of the editorial desk to the other is a very long one and it’s awfully easy to get sucked into the idea that doing this thing which is like writing is the same as writing.

Diverse experience helps the fiction writer enormously. The more you do and see and learn, the more fodder you have for your work.

Most of all: WRITE, READ, LIVE, WRITE, WRITE, WRITE.

Today’s Lesson

Pay attention to the little things.

Laura finished the beta of MythOS last night and really liked it. But we got to discussing whether it ended on a note that was a touch too dark. So I went back and reread the last 1,000 or so words.

As I was going over the final four or five paragraphs I realized that with a change of just three sentences I could shift the emphasis from the down notes and cost side of the wrap-up events to the up notes and the most important victory. I changed part of one paragraph, less than 25 words and it completely reframed the ending in a way that just lit the whole thing up. The events were identical, but two words of dialog got changed and a bittersweet tear became a bittersweet smile. And that made all kinds of difference. I won’t say more because it would be a serious spoiler, but always remember the little things matter.

2013 Edit: Adding the original text and the revised version below the reblogging disclaimer for those who are interested. The core change is in the third paragraph down.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 7 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The final lines as they appeared in the book:

“Goodbye, father,” said Fenris. With a great leap he joined me.

Click.

“Goodbye,” cried Loki, “and…good luck!” Then he smiled like the first breath of spring after a thousand-year winter and whispered, “Somewhere. Somehow.”

I waved back, then looked around for Laginn–I owed him a farewell. Something grabbed my bare ankle.

Clash.

In a huge room carved from the living wood of the world tree Yggdrasil a million copper beads all moved in the same direction at once.

The world ended. And as so often happens in such moments, a new one began.

And the version from the Alpha Draft:

“Goodbye, father” said Fenris. With a great leap he joined me.

Click.

“Goodbye!” cried Loki and the pain in his voice ripped at my heart. “And…good luck.” He waved at us with tears in his eyes.

I waved back, then looked around for Laginn–I owed him a farewell. Something grabbed my bare ankle.

Clash.

In a huge room carved from the living wood of the world tree Yggdrasil a million copper beads all moved in the same direction at once.

The world ended. And, as so often happens in such moments, a new one began.

Writing With Pets = Imagination Insurance

I write full time at home with five cats who provide me with companionship and imagination insurance. I’ll discuss that in brief after a round of feline introductions. Meet my feline overlords:

‘Belle – don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, hate me because you’re not
Meglet – who is a very small animal
Ashbless – poetry in motion…Limerick
Leith – I’m old dammit, show some respect (RIP: Dec 11 2009)
Jordan – I used to be a cute kitten, now I’m a big thug
So, how is this a writing post?

Well, because pets and writers seem to go together like fire and smoke or some other equally trite pairing. Part of this is of course due to us human types being social apes. We’re wired for group interactions and pets provide people who work in solitude with the illusion of having coworkers, or a pack if you prefer.

That’s a part of it, but not the most important part, at least not for writers. For us they provide imagination insurance. What’s that you ask? Well, pretty much by definition fiction writers are endowed with overactive imaginations.

We are prone to wild flights of fancy, especially those of us who are speculative fiction types. In shadows we see ghouls and imps. Dragons hide in our garages, and trolls demand tolls when we take the laundry to the basement.

This is by and large a wonderful way to live. Except, of course, when it’s not. Like when the house settles with a horrible screech at three a.m. or when the bats start crawling about in the walls just after sundown. At those times, it’s all too easy to people the shadows with things of malign intent.

That’s where the cats come in. With five, there’s always at least one who’s out of sight somewhere. In a house with cats you don’t need to imagine what’s making that noise. You know. Any horrendous sound anywhere in the house, no matter how horrible or loud, was made by a cat. No trolls. No dragons. No axe-wielding maniacs. Just cute fuzzy creatures who can be safely ignored while you finish that paragraph.

(Originally published on SFNovelists, March 11 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

15th Publishing Anniversary

I sold my first short story 15 years ago today. The story was WebMage and went to Weird Tales, then edited by George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer and published by Warren Lapine—I still remember the magazine’s address: 123 Crooked Lane. That short later became the 1st couple chapters of the novel. I started writing fiction in 1991, so in terms of my career, I have now been a professionally published writer twice as long as I was an unpublished one, which is surreal beyond all words.

Research

So, quite a while back I promised I’d talk about research a bit. With 18 books either completed or attempted this is something I would seem to know a bit about. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case, since it’s an awfully idiosyncratic process, and not just in terms of writer to writer, but even book to book. Still, there are a few commonalities that are worth mentioning.

Part I Open Research:

1) Ongoing and general research. I would recommend that every writer do this in whatever way is most suited to them. Which means:

1a) Read. Read constantly. Read non-fiction. Read widely. In my case I do a good bit of web reading–following interesting links from news and science sites. I also always have at least one non-fiction book going, usually several. Right now I’m reading How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (anti-mumbo-jumbo, pro-science screed), Plants in Hawaiian Culture (just what it sounds like and just started-this one is directed research for WebMage VI should it ever happen), The World Without Us (a book on how fast and in what ways the Earth would change if people were removed tomorrow), A book on Indian (India) myths and legends, and two novels. I’m also reading–as a part of my regular ongoing reading–articles in Discover, Science News, and Popular Science–I get an amazing number of fantasy ideas from science magazines, not to mention a few science fiction ideas.

1b) Take notes. Every time I go somewhere or do something out of the ordinary I encounter new and interesting bits of information. Anytime that any of them tickle my writer-sense I write them down. Sometimes a bit leads nowhere, but just the act of writing it down fixes the whole experience in my memory and other things that happened near the thing I thought was potentially useful are the ones that turn out to be useful.

2) Directed/Undirected useful habits.

2a) Bookstore browsing. Everywhere I go I try to spend some time looking at the local book selection, especially the local used book selection. I’m especially careful to do this in places that are geographically remote from my home ground (Hawaii, Halifax) or intellectually focused (Cultural Museums, History Centers). No matter the topic there are a jillion books on it, but without being able to physically browse through them and see what the local authorities think of as important, it can be difficult to figure out just what you want to pick up. I look especially for small press and/or scholarly work on topics relevant to the place/mission. That’s how I ended up with the Plants in Hawaiian Culture book which promises to be fascinating.

2b) Big Books of ______, Cultural/Historical Atlases, Visual Histories, Timelines, See How A _______ works, Encyclopedias. Scour used bookstores for these. Pick a price point and buy anything that falls under that price point, because you never know which ones are going to be terribly terribly useful three books down the road, and these kinds of book are priceless.

You want something aimed somewhere between the smart 12 year old and the seriously curious tourist, because that’s really the level of detail most readers are looking for, the cool stuff. The really deep, deep expert stuff is usually too much. If you care too much about the really deep details, you will often end up including stuff that bores the daylights out of the reader.

Read them, especially the encyclopedias–juicy little fact bits make great grist for the writing mill and can provide fantastic telling details. The atlases are also especially useful, allowing you to orient yourself both physically and historically. There you’re looking for things like a historical atlas of London with neighborhoods and landmarks shown, or an Atlas of World War II battles that gives you strategic and positional information on the war.
Part II Specific Research:

Here I’m going to talk about specific, directed, research in the context of two books, Outside In (incomplete and temporarily trunked) and Numismancer. I’m picking these two because the primary research process for each is fairly accessible and is really just an extension of the general techniques described in my last post.

A brief digression here on the value of librarians and other human sources. One of the secrets of my research success is knowing a number of good librarians and keeping track of who in my social network knows what about what–i.e. if I ever need to know anything about felt or felting I’ll call Paula. Many research problems have been solved by emailing my librarian friend Jody or others in my network of experts, and some of that happened with each and every one of these books.

Outside In:

This book was intended to be a dark contemporary fantasy exploring the secret magical history of architecture. I’ve written several novels of this sort–though none has yet sold–and it’s a genre I really enjoy writing. This particular iteration was closer to horror than I usually get and that’s part of why it got trunked.

As with any book I write, a huge portion of the overall structure rests on things already in my head at the beginning of the book. In this case, a bunch of stuff on the Roman household gods (particularly the Lares and Penates–the gods of the cupboards and doors among other things) tied itself together with the grounding I’d gotten in architecture while taking Art History classes, and the construction techniques I’d learned as part of my technical theater training. There were other influences, but that was the core of it.

My research for the book broke down into three major components: setting, context, and history and I’ll address them in that order.*

Setting: In this case, St. Paul/Minneapolis ~2006, a made-up but plausible curriculum for a special Masters program in architecture at the U of M, a huge and semi-haunted mansion in St. Paul’s Summit Ave neighborhood. To cover all of that I needed: 1) a good St. Paul/Minneapolis atlas (already owned). 2) the online course catalogs of a half-dozen architectural Masters programs. 3) Websites detailing several historic Summit Ave. mansions including the James J. Hill house, as well as websites for a couple of other non-Summit mansions. Because the setting was so terribly important for a story built around the magic of buildings, one of the very first things I did was to draw up top elevations of the multiple floors of the mansion.

Context: Magical and architectural. In this case, the Roman gods structure provided a good deal of my underlying magic and was something I’d already refreshed in the course of writing and researching the WebMage books—which reading was in turn built upon intense childhood interest in mythology. The main part of my magical research was to look for more extensive sourcing on the Lares and Penates. Sadly, a perusal of Google and the ERIC academic article search system demonstrated that there isn’t much written on them. What there is, I’ve mostly read at this point. My other primary sources were a copy of Trachtenberg and Hyman’s Architecture, which I read cover to cover and extensively highlighted and bookmarked, and The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (used as a secondary source rather than read through). The former was the suggestion of a friend who’d spent some time in the U of M’s architecture program, the latter is an Oxford reference book—I pick those up whenever I find them cheap enough.

History: Mostly my research here came from the Trachtenberg and Hyman and Oxford Dictionary of Architecture mentioned earlier, with a leavening of historical summaries from the various mansions I’d studied.

Numismancer:

Another secret magical history book, in this case, the secret history of money. This one came out of a dream I’d had in which coins from a fountain drove away a bunch of dark fey that had been chasing me. Set in Edinburgh and Brussels around 2007 with strong references to the Scottish Parliament, the E.U. banking system, small craft sailing, and schizophrenia.

Setting: For this book I drew a great deal on the almost two months I’ve spent in the Edinburgh area over the past fifteen years. I also picked up a good European atlas (which covered Brussels) and an ordinance survey map of Edinburgh (the primary setting).

Context: My main book reference for the context and history of money and coinage was The Teach Yourself Guide to Numismatics which is a sort of history and lexicon of numismatics in alphabetical order, and is absolutely fantastic. It breaks the study up into easily digestible and fascinating info-nuggets. I will buy any of this series if I ever see them again. My sources for the E.U. banking system and the Scottish parliament were primarily the websites belonging to those institutions. They contained more information than I could use or digest laid out in a relatively straightforward format. Sailing? I’m no longer certain what reference books I used for that. I’m not seeing them on the current dig through the heap, though What’s What: a Visual Glossary of the Physical World probably played a part. For the schizophrenia sourcing I mostly called on a lot of memories of what it was like to spend a good deal of time with a close relative who is a paranoid schizophrenia. This last is a rich source of information but can be hard on both the schizophrenic and the observer.

History: Various general histories of Edinburgh originally read because I love both history and Scotland and because I read non-fiction voraciously as fuel for the fires. Also, many text and sites focusing on Edinburgh features that became important to the story as I went along, including the parliament site, websites and books about the history of the Forth bridge, the University of Edinburgh’s website and many others.

2013 update: That’s all for now, though I’d originally planned to go over several more books.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog as two posts on January 21 2008 and, January 23 2008. Original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)