Author: drdoyleeditorial

John Scalzi Gets His Rant On

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…in “A Creator’s Note to ‘Gatekeepers'”, a post with which I agree, as they say, times eleventy-one.

(A lot of self-nominated gatekeepers, in my own experience, are stuffy purists of one variety or another–the sort of people who, if they’re cooks, only write recipes for people who live where they can purchase absolutely authentic ingredients, rather than making do with locally available near-equivalents; the sort of people who don’t want anyone to listen to a Bach concerto unless it’s played on authentic Baroque instrument; and so on.  The sort of people, in fact, for whom an experience is spoiled once the wrong sort of people show up and start enjoying it.  It’s a variety of snobbery, and it annoys me greatly.)

Links of Interest

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Well, of interest to me, anyhow.

This one doesn’t have anything to do with writing, except in the way that everything, eventually, has to do with writing; it’s about the spread of prehistoric dairying culture as traced through ancient cheesemaking tools, and how that tracks with the development of lactose tolerance in northern and western Europe.

I can’t see hanging an entire story on those bits of knowledge, but it’s the sort of idea that tumbles around in the back of a writer’s head for an extended period of time, accreting other ideas to itself all the while, until it becomes something much bigger and shinier and definitely other.

This post by Greg van Eekhout, on the other hand (while a couple of years old at this point) is very much about writing — specifically, about the vexed question of skin color in cover art, and the work involved in getting it right.  As long as you’re over at Greg’s site, you might as well read this more recent post, as well, in which he takes on the question, “What is a writer of Dutch-Indonesian descent doing playing around with Norse myth?”  (Other than, “A damned fine job, that’s what,” which was my instant reaction, years ago, to reading his short story “Wolves Till the World Goes Down” at the Viable Paradise workshop.)

Tales from the Before Time: Paper

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They’ve been promising us the paperless office for more than two decades now, and I’m starting to think that as futuristic promises go, that one is up there with the personal jetpacks and the flying cars.

That being said, while we haven’t yet got a paperless office, we do have (at least in the writing business) a less-paper office.  Most of the science fiction and fantasy short fiction markets these days prefer online submissions — The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is the only major magazine I know of that still requires paper.  (F&SF is still our first try on those occasions when we have a short story to send out, because they’re a good fast rejection.)  As for novels, it’s been over a decade, I think, since we submitted a finished project in paper form.

I have fond memories, though, of papers past.  I remember the narrow-ruled composition paper I used to write my first, dreadful novel in the summer after I graduated from high school.  I’m fairly sure it would have dressed out as a complete, if short novel, given the number of lines per double-sided page and my cramped, illegible handwriting.  It occupied most of my brain space for over three months, and taught me a lot of things, including “always think about where your light is coming from,” and probably kept me sane while I waited to go off and become a college freshman.

I remember the heavy-duty erasable bond paper that I used for my essays and research papers all the way through college and graduate school, and that did duty as well for my occasional failed attempts at selling short fiction.  (I got my first rejection from F&SF back in those days, and for good reason.  The story sucked.)

I remember the flimsy, pale yellow second sheets that I bought by the ream and used for first drafts once I switched from composing in longhand to composing on the keyboard.  The very flimsiness of that paper had a liberating quality:  “You can throw this out if you have to,” it said; “there’s plenty more where it came from.”

I remember the fan-fold paper that ran through our first dot-matrix printer, an Epson MX-80 that was built like a tank and lasted for years.  I remember the bond paper we bought for our letter-quality printer in 10-ream boxes, and how fast we could go through a box-full back when we were printing out 500-page manuscripts in multiple drafts.

These days, we go through a ream every three or four months, maybe.

But paperless?  Not yet.

How Long is a Piece of String?

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I finished a short story this evening, just barely making the deadline.

Looked at one way, I started writing it three days ago.

Looked at another way, I’ve been working on it for six months.

It took me most of that time to look at and discard all the possible stories I wasn’t going to write, and to find the right idea and the right angle of approach for the one that I was.  And it took me the better part of a month to find the voice that I wanted to tell it in.

Once I had all of that sorted out, putting the words together was the quick and easy part.

So — how long is a piece of string?

And the answer is:  As long as it needs to be.

Radio Silence from the Northland

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I’ve got a promised short story for an anthology due the day after tomorrow.

So I’m kinda not here for a bit.

(Goes back to staring out into space and muttering.)

Writer at . . . Work?

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It’s easy to tell when a plumber or an electrician is hard at work.  They’ve got parts and equipment all around them, they’re doing things to other things with tools and things, and you can tell when they’ve finished because there’s a working thing where there wasn’t one before.

It’s still fairly easy to tell when a teacher or a scholar or an accountant is hard at work.  They’ve got piles of books and papers, or they’ve got lots of computer files, and they’re writing on them or typing in them or reading them, and you can tell that they’re finished because when they’re done, they stop.

Writers, though . . . writers may have piles of paper and lots of computer files and lots of books scattered all around, but at any given moment they may be staring out into space, or playing Solitaire on their computer, or putting together the world’s longest paper-clip chain, and maybe they’re just goofing off, but on the other hand maybe they’re off somewhere inside their own heads working out the final twists on the plot, or trying to come up with the perfect opening sentence.

And there’s no way to tell from the outside which is which.

It’s a wonder our friends and family and household pets put up with us sometimes, it really is.

Thought for the Day

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Try not to attach your writing to a particular habit or tool — no matter whether it’s alcohol (the classic writer’s trap) or caffeine or chocolate; or one specific fountain pen and color of ink; or absolute silence; or the perfect comfy chair.

Because this world is fickle, and chairs break and pens and ink go out of stock, and silence is easy to get when you live alone but a lot less so once you decide to go through life in tandem or (God help you) reproduce.  And as for self-indulgent habits . . . they have a nasty way of either turning on you or becoming forbidden fruit, just when you think you need them most.

When the day comes that one of your favorite things either goes away or has to be given up, your life is going to be ten times harder if you also have to figure out how to get your writing done without its aid and support.

Avoid attachment . . . that’s the ticket.  Easier said than done, but then, what about this writing thing isn’t?

Getting Acquainted

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So you have the idea for a novel — you’ve got a compelling theme you want to work out, or you’ve got a nifty science-fictional or fantastic conceit that you want to play with, or you’ve got the outline for a marvelously well-fitted and dovetailed plot — and now you need characters to fill it.  Unfortunately, all you’ve got so far is a list, if you’re lucky, of names that you think might work.

It’s time to get acquainted.

There are a lot of ways to get to know your characters.  None of them work for everybody, because writers (and characters) are persnickety like that.  But there’s a chance that one of them may work for you.

Some writers fill out detailed character questionnaires for all their characters.  (There are lots of these available on the internet.  Just google on “character questionnaire” and there you go.)

Some writers have their important characters write letters to them, or to each other, or keep a diary.

Some writers make musical playlists for their characters.  Others scour the internet and other resources for visual references for their characters’ physical appearance, clothing, and home decor.

Some writers draw up astrological charts for their characters, or do tarot readings for them.  (This approach, oddly enough, can work just fine even for writers who think that astrology and the tarot are pure hokum.  It gives the writer a way to think about the characters in symbolic terms.)

As always, there isn’t a right way to do this.  Whatever works, works.

Today’s Link-of-Interest

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An interview with Stephen King, in which he talks about effective opening sentences:

In The Atlantic, here.

(Stephen King on writing is always worth listening to, in my opinion, because — also, of course, in my opinion — he’s pretty much the Charles Dickens of our modern era.)

Tales from the Before Time, Part the Next

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Or, One of the Ways I Knew I was a Novelist and not a Mathematician.

(Other than, you know, the fact that I sucked at basic arithmetic.)

It was the logic puzzles — the kind that feature islands occupied only by liars and truth-tellers, or by sane and insane vampires and non-vampires; or streets of varicolored houses occupied by persons of various nationalities who own zebras, smoke cigarettes, and drink tea; or all the variations on the one about the man with the drawer full of black and white socks who wants to know how many times he has to pull out a sock from the drawer if he wants to find a pair of matching socks in the dark.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t work them; I usually could, if I put my mind to it and followed out all the lines.  (Though I mostly found the process not entertaining enough to be worth the trouble.)  It was that I kept getting distracted.

Who on earth, I would wonder, keeps a zebra for a pet, anyway — and what do the other people on the street think about it?  And how does day-to-day social and economic life function on all those strangely-populated islands?  (If a liar and a truth-teller get married, how do they raise the kids?  And if they have four kids, do they get one liar, one truth-teller, and two kids who sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth?)  And for heaven’s sake, why doesn’t the guy with the drawer full of mismatched socks go ahead and turn on the light?†

Those aren’t the sort of questions that logicians and mathematicians ask; but they are very much the sort of questions that are going to occur to novelists and other storytellers.

†I know why he only has black socks and white socks in his sock drawer — he’s in the Navy, and those are his uniform socks. And maybe he’s dressing in the dark because he doesn’t want to wake up his significant other. But I’m still at a loss as to why he hasn’t done the normal Navy thing and rolled his pairs of socks up into tidy little balls, so that all he has to do is make at most two dips into the drawer.