Tag: full of theories

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Worst boss

One of the questions that novice writers ask established writers a lot–like, really a lot–is what to do if your editor asks for a change you don’t want to make. I think they may ask it so often because they’re not satisfied with the answer we give, which is basically, “Well, decide how important it is to you and do it or don’t do it, accordingly.” In some ways it feels like they’re asking for reassurance of a just universe–that writing the book the best way you know how will turn out to have been the right thing in a way that is recognizable to everybody, or that there is a magical incantation you can do to have control without responsibility. And neither of those things is true. Control and responsibility go hand in hand, and very smart people can completely disagree on how a story should go. These are things to roll with, and you can’t really tell what someone else will come up with and how much it will matter to you until you’re in the middle of it, so there’s no closed-form answer. Make the changes or don’t, remembering that it’s your name on the cover.

But honestly, there’s a reason this is a novice question, and it’s because it’s about controlling other people. Almost all the novice questions are about controlling other people. How do I make sure that people imagine what I’m imagining, exactly? You don’t. How do I make sure that my story/book/poem/whatever doesn’t get lost in the shuffle before it even gets read? You don’t. And so on.

The journeyman and pro questions are about controlling your own efforts. I think a bigger problem than, “What if an editor wants me to do something with a story that I don’t want to do?” is, “What if my past self wants me to do something with a story that I don’t want to do?” Because that past self–that selfsame self–sometimes gets published. And then you’re stuck. Never mind working to editorial specification! You have to work around the limitations that that idiot kid (=you two years ago) put on your characters and plot. And you will see brilliant, amazing authors thrashing around trying to figure out a way around this problem. Long series are the absolute worst for follow-on consequences that you brought on yourself, that you can’t blame anyone else for–and that you still need to try to weasel out of. And yet the entire process of writing narrative is one of choosing and accepting the consequences of your choice.* Ramification is the name of the game. Try to skip out on that, and you’ll skip out on the reader’s trust and attention along with it. And yet argh, that one thing, if only it wasn’t set down in print!

*This is why it can be so difficult to write narrative while depressed, or one of the reasons. Layered on top of all the stuff that’s first-order stuff, you are making a choice per word and then more choices about going back and changing stuff so that it fits the larger scale. Writers with clinical depression have all the respect in the world from me.

I know a bunch of professional writers who joke about our “mean bosses” or our “incompetent bosses” or variations on this theme. We’re never, ever talking about editors. Editors aren’t our bosses. We are our own bosses. We are the ones who decide that character A should really be an only child when we desperately need her to have grown up with a brother in book three; we are the ones who leave a major villain alive so that the reader expects that villain will get dealt with when we are SO BORED with that villain in book six. Nobody teaches writers all sorts of useful skills, but management as self-management is one of the huge ones.

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Puzzle pieces

I am in that lovely stage of writing a book when everything is a piece that might fit. It’s the stage where there is still room for some large elements (like the infestation of naiads and dryads that occurred a few weeks ago; it remains) and a ton of small elements, and so everything is examined for whether it’s the right element.

So when I read a book as background for a future project, I found stuff in that book for three other projects, including the one I’m working on. The one I’m working on is not really a surprise: it’s what my brain is obsessively turning over, as above. But I think I’ve figured out why I keep getting so many ideas for other projects in this stage. Usually I try to approach everything with the attitude of, “How can this be awesome?” And in this stage, it’s a very specific and heightened kind of awesome. It’s not just “that’s a cool thing to know,” but “that fits into narrative in the following known way.”

It’s not that books I read out of this stage won’t contribute to other projects in similar unpredictable ways. It’s that the penny can take much longer to drop. When a book is accreting material like a literary gas giant, it all happens so fast, so I notice it more. That’s all.

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The Laws of Thermodynamics

Last year one of the Fourth Street seminar participants approached me after the seminar. They had a lot on their mind and were feeling pretty strongly, though, I hasten to add, they didn’t seem angry with me or to blame me. The general gist seemed to be: I have had a lot of short stories published, so things are easy for me; this person is completely unpublished and has also struggled with issues in their job, their romantic life, and their health, and they were just not up for submitting themselves to more rejection; and therefore, they told me, they were going to self-publish, because that way they would dodge the possibility of rejection.

And that was where they lost me.

There are good reasons to self-publish, and there are good reasons to seek a traditional publisher. There are good reasons to make one’s career a hybrid of the two.

But if you are really, truly not able to deal with rejection, none of those three possible paths will work for that.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean this to be discouraging, which is why I didn’t blurt it out to the person from the seminar. Publishing can be awesome in whatever form, and the feeling of your work connecting with someone you don’t know, some stranger whose only connection is that you wrote a thing and they read it–that’s amazing.

But self-publishing moves the rejection from editor, agent, or publisher, to readers. Very directly to readers, since the self-published author really needs word of mouth and reviews. There will be thousands or millions of people who can reject your work instead of just dozens.

I don’t want to be dismissive or uncompassionate here–quite the opposite. Some people are going through such a stack of stuff at a given time that one more rejection is legitimately just too much, and that’s a thing to respect, a thing to know about oneself. I just…would really like for people who are in that situation not to go into a particular form of publishing thinking that it is the emotionally safe way to share their work with the world. There is no emotionally safe way to share meaningful art with the world. It all involves at least a small emotional risk.

Things that you create can sometimes wait. If you’re in a particular kind of really horrible place in your life, it’s okay to make awesome things and keep them to yourself for awhile. I’m not saying that’s the situation universally, or for you in particular. I’m just saying that self-care is all right and is sometimes part of making this whole thing work in the longer-term.

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On the uses of writerly proprioception

We’ve talked in the past about something I call writerly proprioception: the sense of relative shape and position within a story, the sense of where stuff is in relationship to other stuff and how much there is (but relating to one’s story, not to one’s body). For me this is a very literal analogy: it feels like knowing that my left knee is x many inches from my left foot because, well, because. Because you just know that. Because it’s your leg.

(My actual proprioception sometimes gets a little messed up–go neurological symptoms, sigh–so I guess that part of the analogy is possible too.)

But recently I heard the advice, “Don’t keep writing just to keep writing”–that is, don’t add on words to a section for the sake of adding on words–and I think that’s mostly good advice? but I have a caveat.

If you’re adding words to a scene of your story/book/whatever because you have a word count goal for the day and have not yet met that goal–or because you know that it’s very difficult to sell adult novels unless they reach a certain length–that’s not likely to result in quality fiction. If the scene is done and you haven’t met word count*, the correct answer is to finish the scene and start another scene.

But. If your writerly proprioception is telling you that something else goes there–if your writerly proprioception is basically saying that there’s a gap between your foot and your knee–sometimes writing more in that spot and seeing what emerges is really, really useful. If the actual words you write don’t contribute, you’ll have to take them out again. But if you know there needs to be something there, and you don’t know what yet, writing to get to it is a perfectly reasonable method, and at that point, by all means, keep writing just to keep writing.

Recently the current project (Itasca Peterson, Wendigo Hunter! filled with fierce eleven-year-olds and their grandpa!) did that to me. I could feel that Chapter Two was not done. And so I kept writing, and up popped a subplot that has implications in Chapters Four, Six, Nine, and Fifteen. I said, “We’re having an infestation of what?,” and then I just altered the outline and went on doing it. Because my sense of shape and structure knew there needed to be something there, and when I kept writing, there it was. Boom.

In the past I’ve told myself I could edit that kind of thing out later. I have learned better than this. I have had structural mice and load-bearing bears. The things I didn’t know I needed are the least removable of anything in a piece of fiction, basically. That is the brain doing what it’s trained to do. That is the part that’s smart about story asserting itself in the face of the part that thinks it knows what’s going on. Listen to that part. You’re working hard to let it out.

*And if word count is a good way for you to self-motivate. It isn’t for me, and I have known a lot of people to get hung up in various ways on word count. But I also know that it works for some.

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Cultural translation, part 375

This is in response to a locked post a friend made about how hard it can be to talk about things when you’re doing badly, without minimizing or feeling like you’re whining. I wrote most of the post and then realized that people might think I was being subtle about myself instead of reacting to a friend. But: locked post, cannot link. Sorry.

Some years ago, a friend of mine lost her partner (also a friend of mine). In addition to his death–as if that wouldn’t have been enough–my friend also lost her voice for quite some time, and there was an incident with a falling piano, and…yeah. It was not a good scene for my friend. Everyone who knew her knew of the string of bad things, but those of us in town had more opportunity to actually spend time with her.

Then I went to World Fantasy, and I ran into some people I know by name but do not know well. They were friends with my friend. And when I mentioned her name, they immediately said, “Oh yes, how is [friend]?” And I said, very firmly, “She’s doing just great.” They reared back and stared at me as though I had grown a second head. Doing great?, they asked incredulously. I, in turn, stared at them as though they had grown additional heads and said, “I don’t know how much better anyone could expect her to do under the circumstances!” Well, no, they agreed. Under the circumstances. Really one could not. But we sort of looked at each other funny for the rest of the conversation.

And it is hard to find the balance between informing people of bad stuff that’s going on and feeling like you’re whining. It really is. But this is also complicated by the fact that friends and other people of goodwill can’t rely on coming from the same cultural perspective on this. Even when one is speaking on behalf of someone else and not worrying about whining–and Lord knows if anyone had earned a whine that fall it would have been my friend–what message is conveyed by what level of response is highly, highly culturally determined. I would have felt disloyal if I’d said something that, in retrospect, was more like they seemed to expect, more along the lines of, “Poor dear, with all she’s been through it’s a wonder she can put one foot in front of the other to get from bed to bathroom.” It was a wonder. But she was doing it, and I didn’t want to give the impression that she was not. They already knew the practical details–I knew this was not a situation where I was going to be called upon to say, “Oh, had you not heard the terrible news?”

And I think one of the major cultural obstacles to overcome in achieving actual communication is how much people are expected to state the emotionally obvious. Sometimes it’s a relief to turn to someone and say, “I’m really sad right now,” or, “This has been very stressful for me.” But sometimes it’s also a great relief not to have to. Sometimes it’s a very great relief for the person or people you’re with to think, “Hmm, gee, Friend’s partner died, maybe Friend is REALLY SAD, I’ll do something nice,” without having to spell out every moment: “Still sad. Yep, still devastated. Life still in chaos due to very sad thing, yep yep.”

Sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes that’s just how it works out. But wow, is it another layer of difficult just when people don’t need more difficult. And it’s a thing to keep an eye out for a) when writing people from different cultures and b) in trying to be compassionate in, y’know, real life.

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The stupid mistakes of smart people (are not the same)

I have talked in this space before about how I watch a bunch of cop shows, largely because I watch them while working out. This has advantages (pacing! hurrah pacing!). It also has disadvantages, because dang, are some of the things paced the way I need them to be…kind of obvious, honestly. It’s like you can see the places where they said, “[Find motivation for character here],” and then never did a search on brackets. Except that I’m not convinced that they did. I’m not convinced that in every case there was someone saying, “Uh…that motivation makes no sense.”

Here’s the thing. It’s not that smart people don’t make stupid mistakes. For whatever axis of “smart” you have decided is important in this consideration, you can come up with obvious, boneheaded mistakes that people with lots of that kind of “smarts” will make.

BUT THEY’RE NOT RANDOM MISTAKES.

If you’ve established that a character is both street-smart and good at math, having them decide to go into debt to a loan shark with no known plan of repayment is so far out of character that you have to seriously jump through hoops to justify it. (Yes, actual example.)

That same character might underestimate an opponent’s competence in a number of areas. They might rely on contacts who didn’t come through this time. They might do any of a number of “dumb” things. But for heaven’s sake, make them dumb things that fit. You only get so many foolish choices without it looking like you’re making things too convenient for yourself, or without losing sympathy for the character, or without undermining their characterization as smart. There are all sorts of failure modes here, and you don’t have to give your character perfect decision-making skills to dodge them.

Something that is helpful here: if you have an idea of what a small characteristic error looks like for your character, you can seed that to ramify into the larger ones later, so that a reader doesn’t say, “They’d never make that mistake!” But it does have to ramify throughout, or it doesn’t work.

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Choosing a short story market

Recently a friend who is just starting to send out their short stories sent me a story to find out what market(s) I would suggest for it. I gave that person my theories, and then I thought, well, this might be generalizable. Perhaps other people could use this too. So here we are.

First, your method is going to be different if you write a lot of short stories than if you only write a few. Someone who writes a short story a year or so can make their own total ordering of markets if they want to, and just go down that list, skipping any that don’t happen to fit the sub-genre of the story at hand. But if you write a lot of short stories (hi! welcome to the club! we have cookies!), doing that will give you a lot of down time for any given story, when really good editors who might like your work and give you money and a platform for it aren’t looking at your work. (Also some of us are allergic to total orderings.)

For those of us with a few more short stories in our system, I really recommend a more ad hoc approach, but the focal questions are still, “Of available markets, where would I most like to see this story published?” and, “Where does this story fit better than anywhere else?” You can focus the first question on money, response time, size of audience, prestige among people whose opinions you value, whether they’ve published you before, how much you like the editor, how much you like the art department, how much of a PITA their submission process is, reliability of publication time, how many q’s are in the names of the members of the editorial staff. Honestly I think the most sensible approach is to combine these questions for your own answers. I have a friend whose list is entirely, strictly based on how much the publication would pay them, and if that fits my friend’s needs, that’s great; I feel like you can write more stories, so waiting so that the person with the best pay rate sees everything first creates an unnecessary bottleneck between you and readers. I also think that if I have two stories to send out and one of them is a hard SF story, that’ll go to Analog or Nature first, while the other goes to markets with a broader focus. But if you write mostly or all hard SF, that’s a different question for you.

Another question you have to answer for yourself is whether you have a floor on your markets. Your time is worth something–time spent scouring the web for the fortieth market that will pay you $5 is time you aren’t spending polishing another story. It’s also time you’re not spending playing with the dog, building something out of Legos, or perfecting your flip turns in the pool. So you may find that some markets are just not worth your time at a particular point in your career. On the other hand, you may find one quirky amazing editor whose work you love but who is only offering $5 for your story, so I’m not saying that you absolutely have to set a dollar minimum (or a response time minimum or whatever). I’m just saying that it’s worth counting the costs as well. And while I haven’t put individual unpublished short stories up on Amazon, I have put some up for free on my website. Both are options. If a magazine isn’t run by your best pals, doesn’t pay you even the pittance we’re used to in this field, and isn’t going to get your work in front of more eyes than you can get for yourself, it’s time to stop sending it around.

There’s a lot out there. There are lots and lots and lots of options for publishing short stories, and it can get totally daunting to sort through them. I understand that it would probably have been easier if I’d just said, “Clarkesworld. They’re really fast, so always send to Clarkesworld first. Second, if it’s open….” But this is really one of those things you have to use your own rules of thumb for.

I know that it can get frustrating when editors say, “Read the publication to find out what we want,” but sometimes it really does help, and also reading broadly in a field you’re working in is good for your work. The caveat I have here is that you can’t always tell whether they’re not publishing things like what you’re sending them because they don’t want them or because they’re not getting them. Shimmer is probably not panting for your David Weber-homage space opera story, but in general, if guidelines say “all different kinds of speculative fiction,” I say believe ’em. I’ve sold stories when I was absolutely sure I was just checking off a box so that I could say I tried, so don’t pre-reject yourself. Prejection sucks for everyone.

Last thing: if an editor goes to the trouble of telling you that they don’t want a particular kind of story from you, believe them. An editor who is a friend of mine told me that there was a particular category they just were not into and probably would never buy. This helps me not to waste my time and theirs! I sent this editor a story in a different category, and they bought it, and I have every hope that this will happen again someday. But hearing, “I want to see more of your work, but not such-and-such,” is doing you a favor. Accept that favor with thanks if it ever comes your way.

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Excitement! Suspense! Cliffhangers! Or…not.

Further in my watching of ten gajillion cop shows with my workouts, I have noticed an alarming tendency to try to add suspense in all the wrong places. Not every season has to end with a cliffhanger. If people like your show, they will keep watching your show.

I repeat: NOT EVER SEASON HAS TO END WITH A CLIFFHANGER.

But if you do choose to end your season (chapter, whatever piece of your narrative arc) with a cliffhanger, for the love of Pete can you make it one that actually…cliffhangs? Competently?

For example: “Will this be the end for the group of people this story focuses on?” No. No it will not. Everyone knows it will not. Exactly zero cop shows ever have completely disbanded their unit after that kind of cliffhanger, and the ones that have sort of disbanded it (The Wire S1 into S2) did not make it a cliffhanger. They just said: yup, now we are shifting these characters around to do something different. “Will [only female character] perish in a watery grave?” I’m just going to guess no there. “Will [main protagonist] spend his life in jail for a murder he didn’t commit?” Also going with no.

And okay, yes, if you’re doing it right, the suspense is not whether they will get out of something but how–but in the cases above, the “how” looks pretty obvious. How will [only female character] not perish in a watery grave? Well, by swimming or by having one of the others pick her up in a boat, I’m guessing. Haven’t seen that one yet, so we’ll see. And how will [main protag] get out of jail for a murder he didn’t commit? In a cop show–except for The Wire pretty much universally invested in the system working–I’m going to guess exonerating evidence. Wheee. So could you please stop pretending that we don’t know these things?

Putting a secondary character in peril is more effective than putting a protag in peril if you have established a reason for us to be interested in the secondary character–and if we actually believe you’d carry through with it. By the time you’ve watched a season of a show (read several chapters of the book, etc.), you have some idea whether it’s the sort of show that would let a bad guy murder a 4-year-old. That kind of show has to signal its turns pretty early on, or they will put off the people who are watching it to unwind of an evening with a little light mystery. We live in a narrative-savvy age. You have to roll with it.

Also more effective: putting a protag in non-mortal peril of a kind you’d carry through with. Fiction does horrible things to series protags as long as it lets them keep protagging. “Maybe their spouse will leave them or die!” Yep, unless the spouse is seriously major in the show (El in White Collar, for example), that can happen. “Maybe they will be demoted but still able to do the stuff we thought was interesting about them!” Yep. “Maybe they will have an injury they will have to work through in implausible PT episodes!” Wait, that’s a different gripe. (LEGEND OF KORRA PT FAIL ARGH.) You can make them sad. You can make them lonely. You can make them injured. We know these things happen to protags, so we can actually worry that they will happen this time.

Tim and I had a beautiful alternate universe Criminal Minds for the season in which there was an SUV explosion and it was strongly implied one of the team members was in the SUV at the time. In the time between seasons, we lovingly detailed the adventures of Aaron Hotchner after he had recovered from his massive burns and was dealing with trying to run the BAU from a wheelchair while doing actual rehab so the scar tissue wouldn’t cripple his fine motor control and still raise his son. But we knew they would never, ever do it. The question for the beginning of that season was “how will they cheat,” not “who will be killed or maimed.” And really, “how will they cheat” is pretty much always less satisfying suspense. It’s got the viewer/reader thinking about the creator, not the characters. Not what we want.

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And by “people,” I mean….

I was on the phone with my favorite great-aunt today, and I told her that I had been going through my stories in a particular setting, writing down a master file of who was who and who was where and who was related to which other person so that I wouldn’t contradict myself in future.

Auntie: “Oh, that’s good! Because some people get really engrossed in their reading and then get irate when there are contradictions and mistakes. And by ‘people,’ I mean your uncle.”
Me, laughing: “He’s not the only one.”
Auntie: “No, dear, but I live with your uncle.”

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Year in review 2014

I know, it’s not the end of 2014 yet, but I will be Christmasing merrily away for much of the rest of the year, and then collapsing in a heap. So it seemed like a reasonable time to talk about this year in writing.

My bibliography tells me that I have twelve things with 2014 publication dates, which seems like a goodly number. (Right now it actually has thirteen things with 2014 publication dates, but one of them is a tyop it is on my list to fix.) I appeared in new places! I reappeared in old places! I made my first invitational anthology sale! Hurrah stories! They are:

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Re-Capitation (co-written with Alec Austin), On Spec, Winter
Ask Citizen Etiquette, Asimov’s, February
The Suitcase Aria, Strange Horizons, February
The Stuff We Don’t Do, Nature, April
The Salt Path, Apex, June
Maxwell’s Demon Went Down to Georgia, Nature Physics, June
Calm (co-written with Alec Austin), Analog, September
Emma Goldman: A Biography for Space Aliens, Daily SF, October
The New Girl, Apex, November
Boundary Waters, Nature, November
A House of Gold and Steel, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, December
The Hanged Woman’s Portion, Not Our Kind, December

Also I wrote a lot more stuff. I didn’t finish any novels this year, but I worked on some that will pay off next year, I think. And so far–this is one that could easily change depending on my mood and everyone else’s mood at the lake house with the in-laws in the last week of December–I’ve finished twenty short stories. Which is quite a few short stories, actually, even for me. I looked, and that’s how many I wrote last year, too, but I don’t plan on doing it every year. Also I have more short stories waiting to come out (six) than I did last year at this time, so that’s good.

(One of the things about that is that I calibrated how many short stories I should have in circulation at any time back when I was not quite as good at short stories. So I was selling a smaller percentage of them. Still, I am adjusting what “a reasonable number of stories out in circulation” means for me. Some things are a process.)

Last year I talked about having the spigot, just being able to write and write and write. This year I did not have the spigot turned on. And I wrote anyway, and it was good, and other people liked the stuff I wrote, and I liked the stuff I wrote, and I even had fun with the stuff I wrote. So that is its own kind of victory: to be there, to be hanging in and doing it and making the art work, when it’s not in free flowing amazing mode.

Also I led the Fourth Street beginning writers’ seminar, which I will do again next year, and ideally next year I will do it when I am not recovering from such a bad virus. (As I said at the time: on Wednesday of that week, I was still so sick that we had to put a stool in the shower for me to sit on, because standing up long enough to shower was still too much for me–not because of the vertigo, because I was just that sick and weak. On Friday morning I went to lead the writers’ seminar. I think it went well! I just think it can go better next year when I am not quite that wretched.) And I have learned a great many things this year about process and about people in one’s writing life and about a great many other things, so I will have different things to say next year. So that will be good too.

So onwards.