Orison Release and Lessons From First Novels

Square-OrisonHi! In case you haven’t heard, Orison’s release date is today! It’s available on Amazon and BN, as well as directly from the Nine Muse Press store, in ebook format. (Paperback coming soon!)

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much at Surly Muse lately. I was working hard on making Orison the best book I could make it, and that took all the time and energy I had to do so. Flash fiction, blogging, and even supporting other authors as much as I wished to all went by the wayside. But it’s over now, and in the breath between this book and the next, I’d like to tell you a few of the things I learned along the way.

Between June and now, I’ve felt much less prescriptive about writing advice, so take them as my experience, nothing more. Here are the lessons I learned from my first book:

You must sacrifice. For over a month, I did almost nothing but edit. I managed to keep up with my day job, but only barely. Friendships, social gatherings, games and TV all had to go. I needed every ounce of focus and drive to get this book out the door. The book ate my life. I looked back on the lackadaisical months and years I spent procrastinating and stalling on previous books and realized just how wrong I’d been doing it. This is a lot of work. That first draft you’re so proud of? Only the beginning. It’s like Frodo and company getting to that little house at Buckland and having a beer. You’ve still got Mordor to go, and the road is long and hard. So get moving.

Revisions can take all your energy. On the up side, I have never enjoyed such black and dreamless sleep as when I was in the throes of edits. I would shuffle to bed at the end of each day and collapse, my brain utterly exhausted. It made me grouchy and terse. Few noticed, because I’m always grouchy and terse, but that’s beside the point. People ask “hey, how are the edits coming along?” and I would grown and slam the phone handset back into the cradle, or would have if I still had a landline, or if people called me on the phone.

Planning and detail are key. Finishing Orison made me less of a pantser than ever before. Why? Because every detail needs to be consistent, every plot needs to come together, every foible and behavior of every character must add up. If they don’t, readers will notice, and the more planning you do ahead of time, the more intimately you know your characters and your plot, the less work you’ll have to do on the back end. No disrespect to anyone who can just improvise their way through a novel. But I’ll never write that way again.

You need people. Beta readers, reviewers, artists, and friends — you’ll need them. Remember that Lord of the Rings analogy I was making earlier? Yeah. Frodo wouldn’t have gotten far without Sam. You’ll need support, and advice, and caution, and praise, and someone to hold your hair while you throw up. Okay, maybe not so much that last one.

When you think you’re done, you’re not done. I sent the “final” draft of Orison to my publisher with the thought that it was really close to done! Nope. It was still so very far from done, and I didn’t even realize just how not-done it was until the third round of revisions. After a full rewrite. Revisions will bring to light new and exciting flaws you’d never noticed before! Thrill as you realize your plot has a huge hole! Marvel at the way your characters change without said change being evident to the readers! Dread fixing it! Know you can’t avoid it! Throw away passages you loved because they no longer work! No time for tears, it’s revisions!

“The best you can make it” and “the best it can be” are two different things. This was a tough one. More than once, I hit a dark patch in my revisions where I considered rewriting the entire book from scratch. (I also considered setting my computer on fire, but I’m fairly certain I wasn’t serious about that). There were still a few problems. The themes weren’t quite as resonant as I wanted. The supporting characters could use more development. The scope could be a bit bigger. More, and better, and this change and that change, and soon I was looking another rewrite in the eye, and I couldn’t face it. I realized it’s terrifyingly easy to just tweak and edit a book forever because you want it to be perfect, and it never will be.

When you hate your book, it’s finished. Before it was over, I all but loathed poor little Orison. I wanted it, and all the characters in it, to die. Mostly because I was tired. Tired of trying to perfect every moment and nuance, tired of trying to bring every emotion and note to the page. When I finally finished my revisions, I had a really solid book… but boy, was I ever sick of looking at it. That’s how I knew it was done. I still loved it, of course, but in the way you love a child who has been playing a game called How Loud Can I Scream for two months solid.

Marketing can bruise. Promoting your book can be rough. Getting attention is difficult. You worry about irritating people. And guess what, you’ll almost certainly irritate somebody. And if your release has taken a long time (like this one has) even the well-meaning jokes can start feeling a bit face-slappy. You just have to get through it. Thick skin, and all that. But remember to retreat and take some time out when you need to.

There is only the next work. People kept asking what I had planned for the big release day. The truth? I just want to work on the next book. Turns out sitting back and reflecting on my accomplishment (singular) isn’t really my style. I couldn’t make Orison perfect, but I think I did make it damn good, and now I’m excited to make the next book even better. I hope you’ll come with me on that journey. After all, Frodo wouldn’t have gotten far without Sam.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t have gotten here without the help of Anna Loy, Gina Swensen, Angela Goff, Ruth Long, Eric Martell, Tracy McCusker, Khairul Hisham, Lisa Tomecek-Bias, Aaron Engler, Matt Kessen, Christina Ramey, Paul Ramey, and many more. Thank you all.

(P.S. my book bears little resemblance to Lord of the Rings. Just wanted to be clear about that.)

Learning is Not Doing

Photo credit: andy_carter on Flickr.

When people ask me for writing advice (and God knows why they ask me in the first place) the first thing I tell them is: go find some books on craft and read them. There are plenty of great ones:

  • On Writing, by Stephen King
  • The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, by Jack Bickham
  • Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell
  • The Art of War for Writers, also by James Scott Bell

And so on. I firmly believe that passion and intuition will only take you so far. There is a craft and a design to good fiction, and it’s not always subjective and elusive. Not every piece of fiction should slavishly follow a wildly complicated, Robert McKee-esque diagram — but there is, all the same, a formula, and even if you don’t want to follow it, you’d be well-advised to at least know what it is.

But there’s a limit.

OH GOD WHAT? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

Like a lot of writers, my shelf groans with how-to books on writing. I have more of them than I’ll probably ever read in their entirety. I have more still in my Amazon wish list, and have gone so far as to ask people not to buy them for me because I already have too many, thus defeating the purpose of a wish list. Now it’s a list of dread and moral horror.

The first four books I put on my Kindle? How-to writing books. All free, because man, if there’s one thing we writers know how to do, it’s how to give our advice away for nothing.

I’ve spent many hours reading up on craft, and it’s served me very well. But there comes a point where you have to set the driver’s manual down, get behind the wheel, and start causing some accidents.

Learning Can Be Resistance

I’ve talked before about Steven Pressfield’s notion of “resistance,” the sneaky deceiver that creeps into our subconscious like Gollum and cranks out excuses for us not to write on its tiny jack-in-the-box of failure. As Pressfield points out, resistance isn’t always obvious. It can take the form of things we think are productive, like:

Creating elaborate filing systems

  • Drawing up a four-page backstory for that cabbie in our novel who shows up in one scene and is immediately shot
  • Drawing plot diagrams
  • Reading about drawing plot diagrams

In other words, self-education on writing craft can itself become an obstacle.

Learning Can Paralyze You

A lot of writing advice is flat-out contradictory, especially when you read around the blogs of your writing peers. Everyone has a process that works for them, and while some elements of fiction are universal and axiomatic, others are highly subjective. If you take everything at face value, you’ll soon find you can’t pen a single paragraph without violating someone’s deeply revered First Rule of Writing.

Does all that information you’re absorbing convey any benefit if it paralyzes you into not writing? Not really, no.

Learning Takes Time

As I said above, you can read the driver’s manual all you want, but you’re not going to really start learning until you get behind the wheel and start the engine. Theory is just theory. It doesn’t mean anything until you put it into practice. I think it’s vital that writers learn the tools of craft, but every hour spent reading writing advice is an hour spent not using those tools. The rubber’s got to meet the road sometime.

How Do You Know?

So are you learning, or stalling, or possibly both? Fortunately, there’s a handy measure that can, beyond any doubt, determine whether all that sassy, irreverent writing advice is doing you any good. Ready? Here it is. In your mind’s eye, check one of the following boxes:

And it’s not multiple choice.

 

If the answer is “no,” then yeah, you’re stalling. Shut down the browser, put down the book, and get to work. It’s as simple as that. Optimally, take some of the stuff you’ve just learned and kick it into play. Find out if it works for you — because hey, maybe it doesn’t.

Just keep writing. That’s the game we’re all out to win, and, to butcher a WarGames quote, the only winning move is to play.

Writing at the Speed of WTF

Ripley's 0059
Ripley’s Believe It or God Will Spear You in the Face With a Metal Pole, I Swear I Am Not Kidding

For me, being a writer is sometimes akin to being a submarine commander — long stretches of inactivity punctuated by moments of sheer panic.

I’m not a Type A writer by nature. There are days when I’ll do just about anything to get out of writing. I’ll clean my desk. I’ll clean the toilet. I’ll clean the house. Hell, I’ll clean the neighbor’s house, while they’re not there, and then enjoy the panic and outrage that ensues from such well-meaning vandalism. Officer, someone came in here and tidied up and I can’t find anything! Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto!

The madness doesn’t end there. I’ll alphabetize my DVDs. Or my books. Do you have any idea how many books I have? Well, you’re reading a writing blog, I guess you probably do. Chances are you’re nodding your head right now, thinking of your own bookshelves and saying “yeah, you poor dope, better you than me — oh wait.”

I’ve considered buying a bicycle just so I could blow the tire on it, and then say to myself, hey, I’d love to write but I got this bicycle tire and chances are it ain’t gonna change itself. And then I’ll have a cup of coffee or two and watch the tire, just in case it does change itself and I have to call Ripley’s Believe It or Not. And I spend some time looking up the number for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, since I’m nothing if not well-prepared. I also look into some means of arming myself, should the now-sentient bicycle tire be out for vengeance. And so I construct a rudimentary lathe–

Well, the point is, some days I try to avoid writing.

Most writers know how that goes, even the disciplined ones. The myriads of whys and hows barely matter; unless you get some words on the page in the allotted time, you’ve flunked your daily test as a writer. And I will not chide you. Not today. If you can relate at all, I’m sure you’ve devised much more scathing criticisms than I could possibly level at you. You lazy bum. How much Ace of Cakes can one person watch? Do you call that research? Do you? Yeah, whatever, I’ve got my eye on you.

But then there are those other days, the ones few talk about. The days when you cannot possibly write enough.

I don’t mean the jacked-up rush of inspiration mode, where you chug three Red Bulls and stay up for forty-eight hours, writing until you can physically see the arc of your plot like a luminous vibrating parabola. I don’t recommend that anyway. It hurts. I mean the days where feel the keen sting of procrastination and what it’s cost you.

For me, those days usually come after I get some sort of great reader feedback, or attention from someone whose opinion I  value, or even a  great blog comment. Also, when one of my fellow indie authors releases a new book. There’s a sudden rush of activity in my email and on Goodreads and Twitter and suddenly I’m thinking: what am I doing? Must write faster! And then I throw the sandwich I’m eating out the window, because I’m a hardcore writer of writerliness and who has time to eat? Only to discover I didn’t actually open the window, and there’s now an apocalyptic Rorschach blot of turkey and mustard sprayed across the glass, and I’m back to cleaning the house.

Don’t throw food, is the moral there. It does not make for good writing, except for this one anecdote just now, which is too good to be true anyway. I’d never throw away a good sandwich like that.

Writer's Block 1
Photo credit: OkayCityNate

But dubious and fictitious food-hurling farragoes aside, there is very real danger to the “all or nothing” approach to writing. It can make you impatient. It can make you skip things like editing, proofreading, or devising an ending, or finding out what happened to that missing character you added in Chapter Fourteen. I think we all know at least one indie writer who has clearly released a book before it was ready. No one wants their Amazon reviews to be all about how they misspelled “reprobate”. No one is fooled by re-releasing your own novel with “2.0” or “Director’s Cut” slapped on the cover. Pump the brakes and finish it right the first time. A sloppy, half-finished book is a great way to ensure your readers turn tail and never come back. A good reputation can take months or years to build, and a handful of typos to ruin. Don’t blow it.

The need to see some sort of progress, right now, to write All the Books — well, it can lead to burnout and bad decisions. So I guess it’s more like being a drunk than a submarine commander. Or, possibly, a drunken submarine commander. Which, incidentally, is the subject of my next book. I’m trying to come up with a killer title, perhaps Land Whoa!

And that’s why you slow down and think before acting on your impulses.

Finally, thank you to everyone who left such awesome comments on the previous entry. You guys are truly wonderful.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Are You Starting New Writing Projects to Avoid Finishing Old Ones?

Image of a modern fountain pen writing in curs...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you haven’t been reading Ava Jae’s blog, this is a great time to start. Ava posted a great piece on what it takes to finish writing your novel, a struggle every novelist knows all too well.

One passage in particular from Ava’s piece stuck out to me:

You need to understand that if you really want to be a writer, you’ll need to go through this process many many times. And sometimes you’ll get tired. And sometimes you’ll get bored. And sometimes you’ll wonder if you’re wasting your time with your current WIP and if you should start on something else or if you’ll really be able to survive a couple rounds of revision.

In the past, I’ve been rather infamous for starting new writing projects mid-stream. I’d start a story, get to the middle act, then find something new. I’d finish a draft, then let it sit while I started something else. As recently as this year, I’ve found myself vacillating between projects, trying to decide which one was “right,” starting new things, while finishing nothing. Eventually, all forward momentum ground to a halt while I waffled so hard you could have poured syrup on me and served me at iHop. For cannibals. Serving meat waffles. I used to play bass for the Meat Waffles. Look, nevermind.

A Problem of Perspective

Sometimes there are perfectly valid reasons for abandoning a writing project. Often there are perfectly valid reasons for swapping that project out for a new one. But if you find yourself creatively stalled while you try to juggle two or more projects in the air, maybe it’s time to stop and think about why you’re juggling and not, you know, writing.

Finishing is Fear-Inducing

Finishing a novel can be scary as hell. Yes, there’s the rush of satisfaction and accomplishment you get from writing THE END, too often followed by crushing doubt and insecurity. Finishing closes a door. It makes a commitment. It says “okay, that’s the best I can do” — whereas shoving an unfinished piece of writing in a drawer says “well, maybe I can do better later.” And that’s perfectly valid, assuming later ever comes.

But an unfinished work can take on its own sort of romance, if we let it. A mediocre book is just a mediocre book, but an unfinished, unwritten work of unalloyed genius, well, that’s a joy forever, isn’t it? But if you’re serious about being a writer, I suspect you don’t want your body of work to consist entirely of imaginary books.

Starting is Sneaky

On the other hand, starting a new writing project is often its own kind of rush. It can become an addiction. A new project doesn’t have the plot snarls, impenetrable character motivations, structural issues, and glaring flaws of that work-in-progress. Sometimes, when we find ourselves facing a mountain of difficult work, it can be so much more appealing to just go build another mountain, convinced that Mount Totally-Awesome won’t face those same problems.

Maybe that’s the right decision. Maybe you get midway through a book and find out it’s truly unworkable — but maybe you’re just being lazy. In case no one’s told you (today), writing is hard work. Writing a novel can be a true-blue bitch-kitty. Abandon a story if you truly feel you must, but don’t do it to dodge the work.

Perfection is Persnickety

As writers, we thirst to have our writing soar, to transcend, to change lives. No one sets out to make a dull and mediocre book — we set out to make the best damn book we can write (or at least, I sure hope so). Facing down a book’s flaws can be nerve-wracking.

Sometimes it’s easier to put a book away, hoping that it will somehow sort itself out while it’s sitting in the drawer. You know, you’re sleeping soundly, and all of a sudden the little pages start coming to life, marching across your desk while Night on Bald Mountain plays and sentient fountain pens scrawl heartbreaking passages in flawless calligraphy. How’s that coming along for you? I can’t seem to get it working no matter how much peyote I take.

Nothing’s perfect. Your novel’s going to have flaws. And ultimately, that’s for the best. Because if it didn’t, that’d mean you’re either as good a writer as you’re ever going to get, or it’s all downhill from here. And who wants that? Embrace imperfection. Face it. Accept it. Do the best work you can.

Leave that unfinished book in the drawer for awhile if you need to, but do so with the knowledge that its problems will still be right there when you return.

Resist the Resistance

Not all works-in-progress are reedeemable. Some deserve to be abandoned. Maybe they’re flawed in ways too big to fix (or ignore). Maybe a better idea really has come along. Maybe you’ve decided you don’t want to tell that particular story after all. These are all fine and good. If you’re going to abandon an existing project for a new one, just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.

Don’t let fear stand between you and finishing.

 

Elsewhere on the Web

Enhanced by Zemanta

Writing Your Rough Draft: The Show Must Go On

Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman performin...
Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman performing the title song of The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many years ago, I attended a showing of The Phantom of the Opera. What does that have to do with writing motivation and your rough draft? Stick with me.

If you’ve ever seen the play, you’re familiar with that bit where the Phantom bellows out the final verse of “The Music of the Night” and reveals the female lead’s creepy-ass animated mannequin. During the performance I watched, the double was hidden beneath a sheet, which the actor had to yank away at the climactic moment. But just then, some yahoo’s cell phone rang out, the actor’s hand slipped, and the sheet didn’t come off.

The actor did the only thing he could do. He tried again, and this time the sheet came off. The moment wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough — it had to be.

Even though this anecdote is about performance art and not writing, it’s gone in my list of motivational stories for a specific reason: Screw-ups happen, but the show must go on. A writer’s rough draft is likely to be full of little problems: continuity errors, poor characterization, a plot that flatlines. An actor working live on a stage doesn’t have the luxury of just stopping when things get tough — writers, unfortunately, often do, unless they’re under a deadline.

If you’re going to maintain forward momentum and beat procrastination on your work, you’ve got to learn to work through the temptation to stop and get everything perfect.

This is something every beginning writer seems to struggle with. You want your first draft to be perfect, so you stop writing and go back to fix your mistakes. Forward momentum stalls while you try to perfect the writing you’ve done, instead of generating new words. Soon, your motivation starts to flag. You put the story away. You attend a writing workshop. You abandon the idea. You write a blog post about your writing problems instead of confronting them. You take up hang-gliding. Your rough draft languishes while you look up motivational quotes on the internet. You know, that sort of thing.

Been there. Done it. Fiction writing can be like a minefield of distractions.

So how do you keep your motivation strong and keep writing even when that rough draft seems like it’s actively mocking you?

  • Accept imperfection. You’re not a machine. No one’s first draft is perfect. Everyone quotes Hemingway for a reason. Realize you’re going to make mistakes and just keep writing. Remember: forward momentum.
  • Resist the temptation to edit. The first draft is for writing. The second and subsequent drafts are for editing and revising. Stick to your guns and just keep writing.
  • Don’t let your ego drag you down. Writers tend to be a fussy, neurotic bunch. We see imperfections in our work and we take it so damn personally. The quality of our writing suddenly becomes the quality of ourselves, and that first draft suddenly becomes some terrifying referendum on our personality. Don’t let it.
  • Remember that a first draft is just the beginning. It’s a common rookie mistake to hang everything on that rough draft as if it’s the ultimate goal. It’s not. You have a lot more work ahead of you. Sorry about that.

Mistakes happen. The show must go on. Keep your head down and keep writing.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Notes From the Writing Abattoir

Love of writing is a very peculiar kind of love. We spend hours alone, putting imaginary people through the paces, forsaking sleep and mental health in favor of coffee and scrawled character charts. We construct entire imaginary lives and then end them, in a way designed to upset those real people who have spent their time and money for the privilege of being upset.

But we love our characters, and that’s why, when we unleash some hellish fate on them, we’re polite enough to sigh and say “oh, you poor bastard” before picking up the knife again. And sometimes those characters and subplots and brilliant passages have to leave the story entirely.

Angela Goff (via @sirra_girl)calls this “stabby love,” and I think it’s a proper term. We hold knives to the throats of our characters, daring them to get out of the situations we’ve put them in. Challenging them. Be more interesting. More exciting. Be vital to the story — or you die.

If this seems a bit morbid, well, I guess it is. I don’t think dropping entire characters and storylines is a pleasant task — but it’s a necessary one. When it comes to editing, you can’t be a loving mother or father. You’re a narrative hitman, and your mission is to root out everything that isn’t the story.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one, as Kirk said in Star Trek II. In that movie, Spock died so the rest of the crew could live. In your writing, sometimes characters and subplots must die unmourned so that the rest of your story can live.

They don’t get any heroic speeches — they’re simply gone, perhaps to live again in some other story. Perhaps not. Writers are constantly making compost heaps of their own work, and some of those old ideas will thrive in new soil. But not everything returns, and that’s as it should be.

This is rarely easy. A beloved character can seem vital even when they’re not. It’s very easy to rationalize their existence, to alter the story to keep them around, when you need to just cut them. A great subplot or even an eloquent passage can be a liability if it drags the rest of the story down. It is a hard heart that kills.

But remember that you only kill out of love. Yeah, okay, that’s fairly ghoulish, but that’s the writing abattoir for you. You’re serving the rest of the story — trimming away dead material so that the rest can thrive.

So raise a toast to your brave, unnecessary characters, and do what must be done.

Fear and Criticism: Walking the Fine Line

Photo by University of Salford.

Inspired by Anna Meade’s recent blog post.

Putting your fiction out there for criticism can be a nerve-wracking prospect. Most writers I know have, at one time or another, believed that their work was no good. Some have frequently considered quitting. A few have never started at all (they’re the “aspiring” writers). A few writers, even some published ones, never leave the safe little cradle of universal praise they’ve built for themselves. Letting fear get the best of you is one of the classic writer pitfalls.

A good friend of mine gave me a great piece of advice back in college. At the time, I was consumed with anxiety over an upcoming astronomy test, and I was terrified I would fail. He rolled his eyes and said “okay, so you fail — and then what? The Earth spins into the sun?” His response, thought not traditionally comforting, shocked me back into a proportional response.

So. You release a fledgling piece of fiction out into the world. A piece that means something to you, something you’ve slaved and worked over. Someone hates it. Someone mocks it. Or, the most likely and painful scenario, no one notices. Your little piece of fiction toddles onto the information superhighway and is immediately run over by a twenty-ton Twitter semi.

What then? The Earth spins into the sun?

Look, setbacks are going to happen. Not everyone is going to like your work. Someone out there might think you’re the worst thing to happen to fiction since reality TV. Are you going to let any of that stop you?

Don’t. Facing the fear of rejection (or indifference) is one of the most important things you’ll ever do as a writer.

The biggest trick will be learning which criticism to take to heart. Not all criticism is useful. Neither is all praise, for that matter. Some of it is just noise, better left forgotten, even when your inner critic is dying to absorb it into your very soul. To grow as a writer, you have to have confidence in your work, but be open-minded to its potential flaws. You have to be mercilessly critical, but not to the point where you compromise the reasons you started writing in the first place. It’s a tricky business, and there’s no clear formula.

The first time I submitted a piece of fiction for publication, I was roundly rejected. That was kinda tough. The second time got easier. I kept practicing, I kept submitting. Eventually, people started noticing me, then paying me. It’s the same thing with flash fiction and Web competitions. The first time, you think no one will care, or you’ll get singled out for mockery. You just have to keep going. Your only alternative is giving up, and let’s face it, giving up is really boring. Persevering in the face of adversity is way more fun.

A great place to begin is to find people you can trust to be tough — readers who know what you’re going for and are willing to tell you when you’re not getting there. But sooner or later, to keep growing, you’re going to have to release your work into a cold and uncaring world.

But don’t worry. The earth won’t spin into the sun. Not today.

I Always Wanted to Be… a Lumberjack!

A blog post by Rebekah Loper, entitled “If You Couldn’t Write…” got me thinking about what would happen if I really, actually couldn’t write.

The heart of Rebekah’s question is really about secondary passions — about how we would fill the time if some mysterious outside force denied us our writing gift. The question itself has some pretty easy workarounds. Gone blind? Record some audio for transcription. Lose both hands? Get prosthetics, or fall back on audio again. So you’ve been stabbed with an icepick behind the earlobe and have a level of brain activity roughly equivalent to a bottle of Flintstone vitamins? Yeah, your writing days are probably over. But you’ve probably got bigger problems anyway, such as bedsores and routinely soiling yourself. Something plenty of writers are well-acquainted with anyway, am I right? High five!

In my experience, the biggest cause of writers not writing is not unhappy accident or cosmic malice, but writers themselves. We’ll come up with any reason not to write, including concocting fanciful scenarios about no longer being able to, especially in the wee hours when that unedited manuscript japes and mocks us like some unholy psychopomp.

But really, this scenario barely exists in life. Helen Keller wrote twelve books, and she was blind, deaf, and born without speech. Of course, the question doesn’t play as well if you frame it as “well, what if your name was Lazy Q. Lazerton from Lazytown, Louisiana and you didn’t write anything because you were a huge bum and spent all day watching Charmed?” Also, if you really couldn’t write, you’d have serious problems just living day-to-day, much less prospering in some other field, because modern life involves signing a lot of legal documents.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t intend this as a criticism of Rebekah by any means. But this question does seem to occur to writers with alarming frequency. That may just be my perception, but it does seem like writers are particularly prone to this hypothetical scenario.

For example, I don’t see people interview Olympic figure skaters and ask “so, say both your legs were shattered like a pair of sausages filled with peanut brittle that someone whaled against the back wall of a Stuckey’s for ten minutes. What would you do?” Probably Kurt Loder never asked Rick Allen, the drummer from Def Leppard, “so, what are you going to do if that other arm comes off? Like, some guy shoots meth into both eyeballs with turkey basters and comes at you with an industrial sander and wears that arm down to a shiny nub? What then, smart guy?”

The cynical part of me wonders if the question doesn’t sometimes spring from a sublimated insecurity: the thought that maybe our time might be better-spent — that we’re often tempted to just hang it up and get a straight job. I have no proof of this. I just know writers can be a fragile lot at times. I say this as some who has actually set his own writings on fire, so believe me when I tell you I’m not projecting.

The “what if you couldn’t write” question is, for me, an oblique way of saying “well, what if your life were totally horrifying?” I’m a storyteller by nature. I have to tell stories. I’ve been known to edit the truth[1] from time to time, not to obfuscate facts or deceive others, but to enhance dramatic symmetry. When I’m not writing, I’m reading. When I’m not reading, I’m playing role-playing games and telling stories that way. When I’m not doing that, I’m watching movies or television and picking them apart. Stories are my life. If I could truly eat, live and breathe stories, then I’d pretty much be Mr. Creosote.

So if someone came along and took that away from me, it’s hard to imagine what I’d be doing with myself. Probably making Youtube videos dubbing voices over my cats and pretending they’re wacky roommates in a 1980s sitcom. But see, that doesn’t sound as good as “I’d become a child psychologist” or “I’d manufacture wheelchairs for injured Olympic figure skaters.”

I guess what I’m saying is: I’m glad I can write, because I’m pretty sure I’d miss it.

1. Yes, I mean lying.

[Guest Post] Your Workshop Story Is Probably Shit

Today’s incendiary guest post comes from Tracy McCusker, former editor, published poet, and avowed pottymouth.

There’s a certain kind of story that can be found hanging around self-published short story collections and small-press slush piles. This kind of story has a certain whiff about it. It’s verbose. It’s stylized. It’s littered with impossibly academic sentences. It steps you through a scene without understanding how to frame it–noodly verbs and weak adjectives strewn across the page like chewed-up toys.

Oh yes. I know them well. I’ve read hundreds of these per year for four years.

It’s a workshop story.

When I was working as an editorial intern at Faultline, I read hundreds of short story first-pages. We churned 3,000 submissions. We published 30. It was easy to pick out the stories that wouldn’t make it into the second round of consideration.

There were the usual assortment that never made it in. The prison stories with no self-addressed stamped envelop to return a note to San Quentin. A paranoid city-dwelling protag ranting against the machine. Manuscripts typed out on yellowed paper (the same submission we received the year before). Novel-length stories jammed into fifty pages of tiny print.

But there was a second class of story that caught my eye as I perused the accompanying query letters: the workshop story. These were from the undergrad who’d been told by their adviser that their writing was super-ready for publication, despite numerous red flags that cried “amateur author!” Workshop stories were never rejected out of hand. They were sent dutifully on for consideration. None ever made it to round two. With thousands of submissions for an (unpaid) reading staff of five, workshop stories from aspiring writers didn’t get more than a form rejection slip.

This is not a case of gatekeeping, that’s such a drag. Many of the stories that did get published weren’t the most scintillating pieces of fiction. A certain roughness in quality is par for course for small press stories. A normalizing aesthetic can make a lot of these stories predictable and dull. And we’re talking about the published work. But many of these published stories had their charms: a good head for prose; an interesting character; an interesting voice. The small press was usually the first step on the ladder of the MFA/BFA to build up an reputation. To get in with the lowest rung on the publishing world.

I never grudged the submitters their aspirations.

But the workshop stories, man. They were usually shit.

True Tales of Horror: I was a undergrad workshopper

When I say these workshop stories were shit, I wasn’t sneering at these writers from an ivory tower of publication. I was in my second year of workshop, plugging away at my keyboard by night. Usually I was writing critiques. Once in a while, I pounded out a story. A couple nights before deadline. Or the night of. Day of? You bet.

It was college. Everything was due yesterday, and the pressure was on.

I wrote shit stories. This odoriferous patina clung to everything I did. I thought I wrote pretty sentences, and would preen over my clever turns of phrase. Poet-by-training, prose monkeys couldn’t compete with my 150+ word  sentences that drilled down into the very essence of societal manners merely from a protagonist entering a room.

But those sentences, too, were shit. No one could follow along. The beasts were eating their own tails. Communication was confused with obfuscation. I was making the strokes of art. But they were wild marks. I wasn’t in control of my craft. Not enough to make a unified work that conveyed what was in my brain.

And that was a good thing. Workshop gave me the room to experiment; my peers would pick apart these experiments and give me feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I look back fondly on my workshop stories. They were important stepping-stones in my creative development. But just as life-drawing studies aren’t meant to be published (unless you are that damn famous already), workshop stories are meant to be crammed in a tiny little desk drawer.

Here’s why.

1. Workshop stories are written in the haze of actual workshop.

You bang out a story. Maybe you have one stored up for just such an occasion. You’re writing down to the deadline. Or you smile as you pass around an object that you’ve been coaxing for weeks. If you’re a novice at craft when you make this object under duress or at your leisure, the object will always retain a hue of those novice brush-strokes.

Just like you don’t put your first still life up for sale, your first stories will always retain that youthful hue of partly-successful, partly-unsuccessful experimentation. The worst that can happen is a reader discovers you, reads your work, and forms a prematurely negative opinion about your work. Eventually, you may have an audience for these kinds of stories. The best you can do with this story is release it into the wild for free (or as a bundled freebie). But just as I keep my first drawings from art workshop under lock & key, you might not want readers to see just how bad you were when you started to get serious about craft until you’ve established a name for yourself as a writer.

2. Workshop stories are written for a specific audience.

Workshop stories are written and the around the embryotic fluid of their context: a group that meets weekly to read published authors and stories written for the workshop. This specific audience is at first foreign to you. You all speak different prose languages. If you’re new enough to writing, the stories have the tendency to read the same. Pop culture influence and pop literary influence is palpable.

Over the course of the workshop, this audience is primed by reading the same material, sharing a discussion on craft, reaching a consensus (or at least greater understanding) of the basic rules of writing. By the end of a good workshop, you know who your peers are. You’ve heard them critique you, you’ve heard them praise you. You know in a sense what this audience wants.

Good! You can now write for that audience. The problem is that audience is both super-literate (from having read a bunch of classic authors back-to-back) and familiar with each other (and understanding of particular readers’ wants/dislikes). This audience in no way reflects the reading public. That clever pun on The Death of Ivan Ilyich you made on page 5 that turned the key to the entire plot? Not such a big hit to someone who hasn’t read Tolstoy. Drag.

This can be a good thing. Workshops can be super-critical, influenced by stylistic concerns that your reading public won’t be. Did you eschew writing a first-person narrative about a young woman’s difficulty in a turbid relationship because that’s just so Sylvia Plath? Was your workshop genre-hostile, or even selectively genre hostile (science-fiction is the literary equivalent of gold, noir is hackneyed and artless)? Were the workshoppers just out of sync with your style/concerns/interests? All of these concerns can warp a starting writer’s sense of what they should be writing.  Writing workshops can be insular; the bubble of a 12 to 15 person setting doesn’t always carry through to the outside world.

The reading public isn’t privy to workshop concerns, much in the same way that arguments about counters and stem-height will make a non-typographer’s eyes glaze over. Your actual, non-workshop audience will get ticked off when it senses that you aren’t writing for them.

3. Even worse, some workshop stories are written for no audience.

One of the essential skills that workshop attempts to instill in its writers is how to write stories for an audience. It does this two ways: by showing a writer how their expectations match up to audience reactions; and introducing writers to the audience-community of other writers.

A writer can be led to an audience, but you can’t etc etc. Sometimes a writer will present a first story culled from their life, diary-style, replete with self-referential quirks that make no sense outside of the author’s head. Impenetrable stories are unpleasant reads. (Heaven help us if the author decides to help us out by footnoting it.) Workshop stories–especially early ones–tend to be wrapped up in what the author thinks is meaningful. Workshop authors are novices to prose that bridge the gap between what’s in their head and what’s in the audience’s head. This kind of meaning-making can take years of craft to hone, steady readers, and steady feedback.

Sometimes a writer will self-justify any criticism of their work as being “it’s not for you, it’s for me.” I am never sure how much of this statement covers a bruised ego, and how much of it is an actual writer’s belief that their writing is for themselves. Writing is meant to say something to someone who isn’t yourself.  If a writer is adamant on this point–wonderful! Start a journal.

This phenomenon is not limited to writing workshops. Look for this excuse to crop up approximately everywhere. The impetus to make art that is for oneself is fantastic; but then why insist on exhibiting work meant solely for yourself?

4. Workshop stories lack awareness of style’s function.

The function of style is not to do something stylistic. Style ain’t like clothes, worn and discarded at whim. Style communicates to your readers something essential. If you choose to write in a style that’s outside the norms, you need to make sure it is introduced early, often, and the reader is taught how to “read” the style you’ve chosen. Then you do something awesome with that style to justify its choice.

An example: switching “person” is one of the hardest things to pull off in fiction. If you write a story in third person, we expect it to stay there. James Clavell, however, gave that advice the finger. In Shogun, he would drill down from his omniscient third-person narrator into a close third, where the character’s thoughts, fears, and perceptions would bleed into our consciousness… until in a moment of supreme vulnerability, a character would begin to speak with an I-voice. Then he’d reign in the voice and pull us away from that intimacy. The breech would feel tragic. The tale of the rise of the Tokagawa Shogunate was full of such tragic breeches. Theme and style came together to create an atmosphere of vulnerability and loss that one or the other wouldn’t have  achieved.

And that is awesome.

Workshop stories generally operate on the level of experimentation. There’s the workshop story that plays around with second person (a perennial feature), but doesn’t quite know how to pull along the reader like Maile Meloy does in “Ranch Girl”. Or the workshop story that’s trying out an unreliable narrator, but by withholding too much information, the reader is simply frustrated by the multiplicity of readings rather than reveling in the possibilities Emily Carroll presents us in her supernatural fiction.

Within workshop, dabbling is important; outside of it, you need a more developed sense of just what the hell it is you are doing, and if it’s actually doing it.

5. Workshop stories generally know jack about the camera lens effect.

The camera lens guides what we seen on screen when we’re watching a film or TV show. We’re so inundated with visual culture now that there’s nary a word that can describe the effect that I notice in novice fiction. This is a failure of knowing how to pan, zoom, cut, and focus on information that’s important to the story.

Take a gander at this as an opening paragraph:

Daniel swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was groggy from the night of bad coffee, worse sleep. He got up and moved around his bedroom. He picked up his socks that he’d cast off onto the lamp in a fit of supreme nonchalance. Banging his head into the open drawer that he’d forgotten to close last night, he grumbled. He put the socks in the drawer. He closed it, walked across the room, and trudged out into the living room to make himself some coffee.

Aside from the fact that nothing remotely interesting happened in this paragraph (we learned nothing about the narrator, nothing about his state now aside from some cliched groggy-morning blues), the paragraph shows an extreme failure of the camera lens of the narrative. What about this scene is important? The coffee? The socks? Banging his head? Something that hasn’t even happened in the narrative yet? No matter your genre, every word counts and every second you need to be selling your story to your reader.

I’ll save an extended discussion about the camera lens effect for another post. Suffice to say, the camera lens effect is not a failure of editing (editing would likely clean the sentences up, or remove some of them without addressing the underlying problem). It’s a failure of the writer to choose important details with their camera lens. Instead they’ve focused on what they see the character doing in their head with their internal camera lens. They see it spool past their mind’s eye, so they write it.

Fiction is not about the details, it’s about the story. When a story is overwhelmed with finicky details (and our narrator is not a borderline autistic who needs to put those socks away or his world will be shattered), the scene becomes a waste of time.

It’s a pity (and a pain) that some workshop pieces are montages of scenes just like this one, strung together into a “story” that tells us nothing about its characters.

6. Workshop stories are pretentious, bland, cliched, or some toxic combination of the three.

It’s true. I’ve even written a story that was all three. It was about a young girl being smuggled up to Canada by her father and step-mother with the help of an ex-Vietnam vet. The short story read like a turn-of-the-century novel of manners.

The only cure for this ill is to read more, to read extensively, and to get some damn life experience that can break you out of regurgitating pop culture.

7. Workshop stories are not revised, or barely revised.

Writers everywhere say a story needs to be “edited.” What they actually mean is “revised.” Workshop stories are often not revised before they hit the workshop. The drafts that cause published writers to vomit in their mouth a little when they think back on their first novels? We read those.

Sometimes exclusively.

If you revise it once, or even twice after workshop, most likely you are still revising without a strong idea about how to fix all of the problems with your work because workshop critique was based on a first draft, maybe even an “ideas draft”. Not a finished product. What you need to do is workshop the story again (maybe even again) to receive feedback on a story that’s finally ready to be published. Most of us don’t get the chance to have a workshop story read more than once.

8. The best thing you can do with a workshop story is to forget about it until you can cannibalize it for later work.

I had seven advisers give me feedback on my workshop story! It’s totally my thesis!  I’m a special snowflake!

Here’s the Low-down Diddly Flump about writing programs. Feedback from your advisers is always aimed at the level of writer that you currently are. Feedback will attempt to push you to the next level. But if you’re at the bottom of the rope, you can only claw your way up so fast.

I have received amazing instruction from my writing teachers. Had dozens of them (been one of them), and most of them have been amazing. Yet I have a dim view of writing advice at the university level. I know how many students an adviser/instructor has to wrangle with. There is only so much you can do or say for each student before they’re pushed along to the next juncture. Even feedback on multiple drafts can only do/say so much.

I like to receive feedback from several different sources. A writing group outside the pay bubble. A writing partner who I exchange work with. Dan. A particular reader who I know likes the genre. Another reader who knows diddly-squat about the genre, but is game to give their feedback.

9. How do you know when a work is ready to be published?

If you don’t have reliable feedback of how good a work is (by producing work, sending it out, getting responses/sales), then you can only rely on a host of beta readers. Would they buy your work? Or at least read it without begrudging you the time they spent with it?

If you cannot judge how good your work is, then you need to put it away in a drawer until you have the clarity to evaluate it.

The best technique you can have in your toolkit is this: set aside three short stories, poems, whatever. One a classic from a respected author.  Another a piece by a favorite author written in the past ten years. One a piece you can’t believe was published (preferably also recent). After you have set aside your short story / novella / novel / epic poem for a few months (or years), take it out from that drawer. Read your piece side-by-side with these writers. Maybe your piece isn’t going to be world literature, but are you at least as good as your favorite author? Are you maybe half as good? One-tenth as good?

How about the piece you can’t believe was published? If you’re better than that–go ahead and throw your story into the great blue.

But if you’re not… stuff it back into the drawer.

Because polishing shit just gives you shiny shit.

 

Writers, what do you do with your workshop stories?

 

What You Leave Behind

Cartoon by Pictures for Sad Children.

This is a response to “All the Things,” a blog post by Random9q, which is in turn a response to Bullish Ink‘s guest post from earlier this week. Lately with this blog, I’ve aspired to be either pedagogical or humorous — optimally, both at the same time. This entry is a bit more personal — which is not an apology so much as a warning of possible self-absorption ahead.

In her blog post, Random talks about all the things she wants to do, and the overwhelming, sometimes crushing realization that there isn’t enough time in one’s life to do All the Things. In my experience, it’s easy to turn one’s creative drive into a terrifying binary situation where you either indulge all your creative pursuits, or none of them. Or, you may end up being what Ruth calls a “dabbler,” indulging in a little bit of everything, but not doing all that well at any of them.

I suspect this is a common occurrence among creative types — I know a lot of artists both struggling and established, and most of them have polymath aspirations to one degree or another. Writers who are musicians, musicians who are actors, actors who are writers, and so on.

I’ve also been through it myself — and I’m convinced that the key to the Creative Life™ — if we are to capitalize it so breathlessly — is this: The Creative Life is less about what you take with you than what you leave behind.

It comes down to this: craft takes time and hard work. Mastery of craft can take years, probably decades. And building a paying career out of that craft — that’s its own struggle, with its own pitfalls, separate from the act of creation itself.

I think the youthful idealist in many of us dreams of forging a masterpiece from nothing more than the very fire of our souls, and watching as the world catches its breath in astonishment. Hollywood and the infrequent shooting stars of publishing have romanticized the idea of being “discovered” like Audrey Hepburn and whisked into humbling (yet well-deserved) fame, without all that grueling, boring, unsexy legwork.

And if one such vision is compelling, than what about half a dozen? Write the novel, direct the film adaptation of your novel, write the soundtrack, and star in the lead! Why not, right? Shit, program the video game tie-in too while you’re at it, you’ve got nothing going on that week.

I’m not saying everyone thinks this, but if you’re a writer, I’ll bet it’s crept into your daydreams a time or two. And a fine dream it is. But that’s all it is.

To play off an Internet meme: finite creature is finite. Our time and our energy are woefully limited commodities, already divided a hundred different ways among the hungry goblins of our lives. Jobs, families, friends, social commitments, the inconvenient need for food and sleep: all these things, fulfilling as they are, nibble away at our time. And so we have to fit our creative lives into what space is left.

To be successful — to really excel — you’ve got to make room. A whole lot of room. And, unfortunately, it’s probably going to hurt.

Years ago, I used to make electronic music. I learned a lot, and made a lot of progress. I’d almost say I was halfway to good. But then I gave it up.

I used to draw comics, thinking at one point that maybe I’d try that out as a career. I gave that up too.

I used to have a room full of video games. Video games were my life. Hours a day, every day. Gave ’em up.

I don’t regret doing those things, because they were a blast — but neither do I regret leaving them behind, because I gave up those things for a reason: to focus on my writing. Because when I sat down and thought about it, writing was the only thing I would genuinely regret not being serious about. At the end of my life, I didn’t imagine myself thinking, “man, I sure wish I had played more Halo than I did.”

Because it’s entirely possible for you to die with your life’s work to go undone, if you are careless. And, if you don’t let that thought terrify you into paralysis, the knowledge can be a hell of a motivator.

A couple of caveats.

I’m not advising that you laser-focus on one thing, to the exclusion of all else. Not only is that likely to hurt your creativity in the long run, but you run the risk of ending up a crashing bore. Indulge your diversity. But distinguish between passion and hobby, because they are not the same thing.

Nor am I saying that a diverse range of skills isn’t possible; obviously, it is. Many actors, for example, go on to produce and direct, and quite successfully — but they usually do that after making dozens of movies, immersing themselves in their craft for years, learning it from the inside out.

A few prodigals have no doubt mastered all at once, but you may have to make peace with the fact that you might not be one such gifted soul. And I’ll be the first one to say that blows. But there it is.

Of course, Random was talking about game design, which I’m sure takes a broader range of talents than just writing — but you may end up having to outsource and delegate. I’m not really good at that kind of thing, which is why the solitary act of writing has always suited me better.

My point is this: You don’t have to feel bad about dabbling. You don’t have to harbor guilt over doodling around with your guitar when you should be writing, or composing epic porn sonnets while your film goes unedited, or whatever it is you’re doing when you think you should be doing something else.

Dabbling is fine — but you have to realize that you’re dabbling. You have to decide what you’re really serious about. You have to choose that thing. And you have to give up other things. Things you like a lot.

And that’ll suck. But it will suck less than letting the One Thing That Matters lie fallow because you’re afraid to truly commit to it.

You cannot have all the things. Sorry.

And when I say “you,” I guess I really mean “me,” because this is the conversation I had with myself a long time ago, and it started changing my entire world. If you’re letting your desire to do everything keep you from doing anything, then maybe it’s time you had a talk with yourself.