Author: drdoyleeditorial

Tales of the Before Time: From Paper to Pixels

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Back when I first started writing, as a wee young sprat, it was all paper and pen or pencil — I wasn’t yet up to the level of actually submitting things, so the idea of a typed manuscript was unknown to me.  The family typewriter was an Underwood that weighed approximately as much as a boat anchor, with keys so stiff that my grade-school fingers would have buckled under the strain of pressing them.  I wrote my first short stories (which sucked) and my first you-could-probably-call-it-a-novel (which also sucked) in ink on narrow-ruled notebook paper.  I used a cartridge pen for preference, rather than a ball-point, and my handwriting was dreadful.

Time went by, and eventually I achieved a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a high-school graduation present from a maiden aunt who knew me, perhaps, better than some of my other aunts (who tended to give me things like hairbrushes and pillow-slips.)  That typewriter lasted me nearly a decade, and saw the production of numerous college and graduate school papers, plus a handful of not really very good short stories and the first five or six pages of a novel that never went anywhere.

The Smith-Corona electric in time acquired a companion, an Olivetti modern Icelandic manual that I used to prepare the first draft of my dissertation.  (Previously, with the Smith-Corona, I’d had to add in the special Old English characters by hand.)

Neither of these typewriters, however, was very good for writing fiction.  My handwriting was still dreadful, but my typing wasn’t much better — I estimated at the time that it took me about thirty minutes to produce a clean page of submittable copy.

Then came the glorious day when Atari brought out a personal computer that could be had for a price that ordinary human beings could afford.  Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was a rotten typist; the computer was a very good typist, and just as soon as I could find a letter-quality printer to hook up to it, I’d be in clover.  In the meantime, at least I had a dot-matrix printer (does anybody out there remember dot-matrix?) for the early drafts.  And when we finally did get a household letter-quality printer, shortly afterward it was manuscript-submission time.

The next decade or so witnessed our household’s march forward through advancements in printer technology — dot-matrix to letter-quality daisy-wheel to laser to inkjet, faster and better and faster again.  And we bought paper.  Lots and lots of paper.  We bought fanfold paper in foot-high stacks; we bought 20-pound bond in ten-ream boxes.

And time kept moving on.  One day we looked around the office, and realized that it had been a year or more since the last time we’d submitted anything as a printout on paper that we sent through the US Mail.  At some point while we were busy writing, it had all switched over to electronic manuscripts submitted by e-mail, and we’d scarcely noticed.

I could spend some time at this point indulging myself in nostalgia, but the truth of the matter is that I am immensely grateful for the computer and word processor combination that types better than I ever could, and the electronic mail that doesn’t insist on proper postage and a stamped and self-addressed envelope.

Well, Well, Well.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

It appears that Random House has blinked.

The contracts for Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt will now come in the writer’s choice  of versions, one of them the previous “profit-sharing” arrangement, and the other a traditional advance-plus-royalties deal.

Which means that there’s even less excuse, now, for a writer to sign the unconscionable version.

Fillers and Placeholders

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When you’re hard at work on the first draft and running for daylight, you can’t afford to lose your forward momentum.  The first draft isn’t the time and place to spend fifteen minutes looking for the perfect name for that minor character who steps onto the page long enough to deliver a crucial bit of plot development before vanishing.

For the first draft, it’s often enough to have [CharacterName] appear from [NameOfPlace] with the necessary plot element in hand.  Just remember to search on the square brackets during the second-draft revisions, when you’re putting in that perfect name you finally came up with when you were drifting off to sleep the night before.

Identity Crisis

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You may be a novelist (and not a short story writer) if:

Your short stories regularly top out at 8000 words or more, even after you cut them for length.

Your short stories tend to have a half dozen or more named characters fully-equipped with backstories and personal agendas.

You find yourself amplifying your short stories with subplots and digressions.

You find yourself spending as much time on working out the details of your story’s background and milieu (what science fiction and fantasy writers call “doing the world-building”) as you do on working out the plot and the characters.

The milieu of your novel is bigger — more expansive, more full of implied consequences and further actions –than the story you’re telling in it.

Your trusted and reliable first reader gives you a look of deep sympathy and says, “I hate to tell you this, but what you’ve got here isn’t a short story.  It’s the opening chapter of a novel.”

If this happens to you, take heart.  For the natural-born novelist, novels are actually easier to write than short stories.

They just take a lot longer.

Bad Contracts and Worse Contracts

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Some contracts are bad.  They get their hooks into the author’s copyright; they have restrictive option clauses and punitive indemnity clauses; they want to grab not just world publishing rights but the right to publish in all forms everywhere forever, including Mesopotamian baked-clay tablets and electronic transmissions to the Oort Cloud.

Other contracts are worse than bad, they’re unconscionable.  They do all of the above, and they don’t do the one thing that could possibly induce a professional writer to sign them, which is to offer good money up front.

Just about every professional writer has signed at least one bad contract, and they’ve usually done it for only one reason:  they needed that up-front money, and they needed it right then.

Once in a while, in this business, you may need to sign a bad contract.  The roof may leak, your kid may need emergency orthodontia, the IRS may be demanding more blood than your normal turnip harvest can provide.  If that’s what you have to do, then do it with your eyes open and deposit the check before it can bounce.

But nobody, ever, has any reason to sign an unconscionable contract.

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself

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So I’m not even going to bother.

John Scalzi has a couple of masterful takedowns of Random House’s new Hydra and Alibi imprints, and why no writer in his or her right mind should sign one of their contracts, here and here.

And if those warnings aren’t enough, here’s Writer Beware on the subject.

Furthermore, SFWA† has ruled that Hydra is not a qualifying market for membership purposes.

If all of that isn’t warning enough for the wary, then I don’t know what is.

†The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For acronymic purposes, the second F is superimposed upon the first.

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.

They Don’t Have a Word for It

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Some writing problems are problems across the board, no matter whether you’re writing mainstream or genre fiction: Point of view is tricky, and requires careful thought; the middle of a book is dreadful and disheartening; getting in the necessary exposition is hard work.

Other problems are genre-specific.  Take, for example, the problem of vocabulary and word choice in those genres where the stories being told are not set — or are not entirely set — in contemporary consensus reality: science fiction, fantasy, historical or alternate-historical fiction.  If you’re a writer working in one of these genres, there are going to be some words that simply aren’t available to you — at least, not if you’re a careful and word-conscious writer who doesn’t want to lose, or at least severely distract, some of your readers.

For example:  In a pre-clockwork society, timekeeping is unlikely to subdivide the day into pieces smaller than an hour or so; even an early industrial society isn’t going to break things down that finely.  Your characters aren’t going to have the vocabulary and headspace to think about doing things “in a minute” or “after a few seconds” . . . they might think about “in the blink of an eye” or “after a few heartbeats,” but they aren’t going to be pulling out their watches to check.

Likewise, your pre-industrial characters aren’t likely to think about things like nerves and adrenaline, because (absent some highly developed magical healing arts or the equivalent) they aren’t going to know about them.  Depending upon the state of medicine in that time and place, they’ll be lucky to know about the circulation of the blood.

Also, the English language as it exists in contemporary consensus reality has got all sorts of buried history and technology embedded in it.  If a character in your story wears his or her hair in a mohawk, or if a particular must-visit destination is a mecca for some group or class of people, then the history of your imagined world contains, by implication, both Islam and the Iroquois Confederacy.  If a character is a loose cannon and prone to going off half-cocked, then either you’ve got a post-gunpowder world or you need to rethink your description.

How long, you may ask, does it take before all the associated concepts and implications wash out of a word and leave behind an all-purpose bit of vocabulary?

As is so often the case with writing, the answer is “it depends.”  Generally speaking, the further back in time, or the more obscure the concept or technology, the closer the modern term is to becoming generic.  Also, a lot of your readers are never even going to notice or care about the issue.  On the other hand, some of your readers are going to be the sort of word and history nuts who pick up on this stuff and get thrown out of the story by it.

In the end, all you can do is know your audience and know yourself.  Then go with what feels right.

Thought for the Day

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If you need to slow a character down, or put him out of action for a bit, there’s no need to break his leg, give him a concussion, and make him come down with infectious equine encephalitis, all at once.

Spraining his ankle is usually enough to do the job.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve falls into the Annoying Plot Developments category.

Say you’ve got a character who has been told by the bad guys, “Don’t go to the police or else very bad things will happen.”  Or a character who is being pressured or blackmailed by the bad guys into doing something that will jeopardize their relationship with their one true (and presumably competent) love.

Do they, at that point, go straight to the authorities or the one true love and say:

Sirs/My Darling [as appropriate]–

The villainous kidnappers/my wicked uncle [as appropriate]

Want/wants me to steal government secrets/hide him in the hayloft [as appropriate]

Which will naturally cause you to believe that I am a spy/am meeting a secret lover [as appropriate]

No, they do not.  And a goodly chunk of the middle of the novel is taken up with the resulting unnecessary running-around — which may have been the reason for the annoying plot development in the first place.  But it is a sloppy and clichéd way to handle the problem, and your readers deserve better.