Kelly McCullough – Page 82

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.

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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)

Friday Cat Blogging

Gobble-gobble-gobble…

Turkeys? On cat day? Okay, that’s it thumb monkey no more computer for you.

But master must have his laptop, precious.

Shadow cat has cat shadow.

Okay, if we’re scrapping the theme maybe Ima just take a nap here…zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Napping’s a good theme…Ima nap for thiiiiiis long!

Yeah, let’s go with napping.

Insomnia

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)

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

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)

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.

Ancient Interview

These are questions a student sent me and my answers to same. I thought it might be of some interest to the readers of this blog, so here goes:

1: How long did it take from having the idea for your first book to actually writing it and having a finished book?

About three months but I’m an extremely unusual case because I write significantly faster than most novelists. At this point it takes me 4-6 months to write a novel while the industry average is around a year.

2: After having it finished, how long did it take to find a publisher that would publish your first book?

I still haven’t found a publisher for that one. My first published book was the the fourth one I wrote, WebMage. It took about 14 months to write (the longest it’s ever taken me to write a novel). I started it about 2 years after the short story of the same name. I finished WebMage the novel in 2000 and it sold in 2005.

3: Do you think that being a previously published author of short stories helped to get your books published?

Absolutely. My first published book involved the same characters as my first published short story. It even incorporated the short story into the first couple of chapters. Most importantly, selling short stories made it much much easier to interest an agent in my work.

4: Was there a driving force that pushed you towards becoming a writer, a specific event or defining moment?

I quit theater. From the age of 11-22 I worked on and in theater, that’s where my BA is. Then I met my now wife, and decided I’d rather have a life than an acting career-they’re basically incompatible-and I needed something else to do that touched on the same artistic interests as theater. I’d always enjoyed writing, so I sat down and wrote a book and fell in love with the process.

5: Is there a specific author who’s work influenced you towards becoming a science fiction writer, and if so why?

One, not really. Half a dozen, yes. Tolkien, Asimov, Shakespeare, Zelazny, Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, H. Beam Piper, Tim Powers. They all gave me experiences as a reader that I loved.

6: Did you ever doubt that your work would never be finished and published, and if so what kept you going?

Any number of times. Absolute iron in the bone stubborness. Once I started down the writing road I refused to stop for any reason. I liken the publishing process to knocking a brick wall down with your forehead. As long as you remember that your forehead will heal and the wall won’t, you’ll be okay.

7: Your books, WebMage and Cybermancy, fall under the science fiction category, but no previous books fall under the same type as yours. Was that helpful or hurtful towards getting them published by creating a new sub-genre within science fiction?

Both. It made it harder to sell them initially, but has made it much easier to attract attention from reviewers and readers once they came out. That in turn makes it easier to sell more books in the series and to keep a career going. I’m actually having the same issue with selling a couple of other books that I’ve written that aren’t quite like anything anyone else is writing, and I hope that once my agent finds a publisher for them the end result will be similar.

8: Were you daunted to become published along authors such as Jules Verne and H.W. Wells who arguably created the entire genre of science fiction?

Not really. One of the coolest thing about being a professional author, particularly in science fiction and fantasy is that the writing community is quite small and friendly. I’ve gotten to meet and make friends with a number of authors who I look up to.

8: What would be your advice towards first time authors, trying to finish a work and starting the daunting task of trying to find a publisher who will take the risk and publish them?

The most important thing you can do is write. Everything else is secondary to getting words on the page. That’s number one. Number two is to understand that no two writers use the same process or follow quite the same road to being published. There are 1,001 and one way to write a novel and every one of them is right. Third, hang in there. It’s a long slow process and most writers don’t sell their first book, or even their second, but persistence pays off. Fourth, learn how the industry works. There are a lot of people in publishing who blog about the process and that’s a huge resource that wasn’t there when I was getting started. Use it. Learn. Then write and write well and everything else will follow.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog April 3 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

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.

Friday Cat Blogging

I think I’m finally going to get ahead in the game!

You know that’s not funny, right?

2.4 from the Russian judge.

I actually thought it was pretty funny…

Yeah, but you’re a dog.

Dog humor. Like jumbo shrimp.

Eeek, a dog!