Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Another Thing I Don’t Miss at All

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True fact: writers used to trade tips for freshening up a typed manuscript that had been out and back a few times without finding a home. An electric iron set on “warm” was sometimes involved.

The first time I added the words “please consider this a disposable manuscript” to a cover letter, I felt a beautiful warm God-I-love-technology glow.

I expect that the first writer to send out a typed story for submission felt the same way, because if typing up a story was a drag, making a fair copy by hand using pen and paper must have been a thousand times worse.

The One-Third Principle

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On the days when I’m wearing my editor hat, I write revision letters.  On the days when I’m wearing my writer hat, sometimes I have to read them — and having read them, have to do something about them.

On those days, I spend a lot of time dealing with what I think of as the one-third principle of editorial commentary.  The way it works is this:

In any given set of editorial comments, roughly one third of them are going to inspire sentiments along the lines of “Oh, thank God you caught that before I ended up looking like an idiot in public!” or “Yes, that is absolutely true and insightful and every writer should be so fortunate as to have someone like you for an editor!”

Another third of the commentary is going to cause a reaction more along the lines of “Well, maybe . . . I’m not saying that I buy it, but it isn’t worth arguing over, either.  I might as well save my energy and make the changes.”

And the final third of the commentary is going to be the cause of neck-cracking double-takes and exclamations of “Say what?!” and “Over my dead body am I changing that!”  Which is, of course, where the saved energy  gained by not arguing over the middle third ends up getting spent.

When I put my editorial hat back on, I try to remember these things.

Tristram Shandy Saves the World

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Playing with alternate histories is — if you’ve already got the sort of mind that likes extrapolations and what-ifs — a great deal of fun, and it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular (because they do have that sort of mind) have turned alternate-history into a viable subgenre all on its own.  The fun of the game is muted somewhat when it’s played for money, however, because for the story to work the historical turning point has got to be one that a sufficiently large number of readers will recognize — which is why we’ve got “what if the South won the Civil War? novels by the cartload, but not a lot of “what if Mexico had never sold the Gadsden Purchase to the US?” stories, even though the resulting history of the American Southwest, and of Mexico, might have been a great deal different in a number of interesting ways.

I suspect that most writers who dabble in alternate history have got one or two “what-ifs” that they know will never make it commercially.  My personal favorite:

What if Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, instead of being a weird outlier in the early history of the English novel, turned out to occupy the position of genre-prototype that in our history was filled by the works of Richardson and Fielding?

When I’m feeling particularly energetic, I can make a good-enough-for-fiction argument that Sterne’s interest in free-associative internal monologue, if allowed to influence the fiction of the next several generations, would have led to the development of psychology and psychiatry at least a century earlier than actually happened, and in a climate of Victorian optimism rather than turn-of-the-century anxiety.  And when I’m really on a roll, I can argue that the earlier development of psychoanalysis would have done a great deal to alleviate Kaiser Wilhelm’s mental problems, especially his need to overcompensate for his physical inadequacies by building battleships.  And thus, ultimately, Laurence Sterne would have prevented the Great War, and by extension World War II as well.

Of course, there’s no easy way to make a scenario like that into a novel, because for one thing, a depressingly large number of potential readers are going to say, “Tristram who?”, and for another, it’s hard to come up with the conflict necessary for a good story when you’ve got an alternate history that consists of a lot of unpleasant events not happening after all.

Tales from the Before Time

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This is a story from the days before electronic submissions, when all the internet was on dial-up and the web hadn’t yet been invented, and printing was done by dot-matrix printers on fanfold paper, and writers — by which I mean in this case my husband/co-author and I — turned in their novels in the form of four-and-five-inch-deep stacks of hard copy.

So there we were, on a sunny summer day, motoring down to New York from far northern New Hampshire, with the intention of handing over a stack of hard copy to our publisher and (if we were lucky) getting a lunch downtown on the strength of it.  Under ordinary circumstances, we would have used the post office like normal people, but as it happens we were piggybacking the novel delivery onto a family visit in Westchester County.  We were also hauling our complete computer setup — CPU, monitor, printer, and all — with us in the back of our mini-van, because my co-author’s other paying job at the time was as managing sysop for one of the pre-web online communities, and he couldn’t leave the place unwatched.

About fifteen minutes into what was going to be a six hour drive, my co-author said, “The middle of the book doesn’t work.”

I made a noise like Donald Duck being goosed with a cattle prod.  “What do you mean, ‘the middle of the book doesn’t work’?”

“Don’t worry.  I know how to fix it.”

And, in fact, he did.  Because the novel in question was a space opera, “fixing it” ended up requiring the insertion of an entire space battle of epic proportions, plus all of its foreshadowing and repercussions, written in a single thirty-six hour push by the two of us hot-seating it at our computer in the living room of his family’s house.

But that turned out to be the easy part, because then we had to print out the hard copy — something we’d originally planned to do in a leisurely manner the day before we were to take the train from Mount Kisco into Manhattan, and which we now had to accomplish in the narrow window of time between writing “The End” to the revised novel at sometime past midnight and leaving for the train station in the mid-morning of the following day.  And then, at around two in the morning, we discovered that the brand of dot-matrix printer we owned had a Feature:  in order to protect the print head from burning out through overheating, whenever the print head got too hot the printer would simply stop printing until the print head cooled down.

We were in a house without air conditioning, on a sultry night in August, and we had a deadline.

“We do not care about the integrity of the print head,” we said.  “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.”

So we took the cover off the printer, set a fan blowing directly onto the print head, and let ‘er rip.

We finished printing out the manuscript with a couple of minutes to spare, and spent the train ride into Manhattan separating the fanfold pages and tearing off the perforated tractor-feed strips so as to turn the printout into a stack of hard copy fit to hand over to an editor.

Which we did, and then we had lunch.  Martinis may have been involved, because we felt that under the circumstances, we deserved them.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, other than that if you need to fix the middle of the story, you do what you have to do in order to get it fixed; or possibly, that writers under pressure can come up with workable solutions to all sorts of things.

Also — laptop computers, broadband internet, and electronic manuscript submissions are all awesome developments; and I don’t miss fanfold computer paper at all.

Halfway Home

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In the beginning, writing is easy, because you don’t know yet how much you don’t know, and you don’t know yet how much work it’s going to take to get better.

And eventually, you know that you’re not yet as good at it as you can be, but you’ve been at it long enough to know that you’re at least adequate and — more importantly — you know how to work at getting better.

In between those two states, though, is a trackless waste where a lot of dreams go to die.  It’s the stage where you’ve realized how much you still don’t know, but you haven’t got any idea how to go about getting better.  This is the point where despair can take over.

What can an aspiring writing do to avoid getting mired in despair?  Different remedies work for different people, but here are some that have proven effective:

  • Write something with the pressure-for-excellence taken off.  Blog posts; a journal; letters to imaginary friends, or to real ones; fan fiction, even, if that’s where your heart lies.  You don’t have to write the Great Post-Postmodern Novel every time, or even the Next Big Novel in your genre of choice, any more than a concert pianist has to play the Warsaw Concerto every time he or she sits down at the keyboard.
  • Go for some education.  Sign up for a writers’ workshop, or take a course online, or read some books on writing.  These are all good ways to pick up tips on craft and technique, because craft and technique are things that can be taught.
  • Seek out the company of other writers.  You may not pick up any tips on craft or technique from them (then again, you might), but writing is a lonely business and too much time spent alone with it can make it seem like you’ve been hiking through the same stretch of desolate landscape since forever.
  • Read for pleasure — books in your genre, books out of it, whatever takes your fancy — and read for instruction as well.  Watch how your favorite writers handle the tricky bits you’ve been struggling with; notice when even your favorite writers sometimes don’t quite hit the mark.  (Even great writers don’t hit it every time.  Point of view in Moby-Dick wanders all over the place; Mark Twain had trouble writing endings; Dickens was fond of plot advancement through incredible coincidence.  And so on.)
  • And keep on writing.  Nobody ever got through the wasteland by stopping in the middle of it and waiting for something to happen.

Bowknots

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If the endgame of a novel is hard to write, the bit that comes after the endgame is even harder.  This is the part I think of as the “tying up all the loose ends into a bowknot” stage of a project –  and when I reach it, I have to struggle every time against the urge to simply ring down the curtain on the action climax and be done

But I know that I can’t let myself do that, because skimping on the bowknot stage is a quick way to leave the readers unhappy and unsatisfied with the entire rest of the book.  The bowknot is the part where all the plot coupons get gathered up, and What Was Really Going On gets summarized and explained, and everyone gets played out with sweet music and the implication that the world of the story extends beyond the FINIS and the fade to black.  Tying the bowknot is not the fun part of writing the novel, it’s the part that has to be done with sheer bloody craftsmanship, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.

The other thing to know about bowknots (and this took me longer that it should have to figure out, which is why the last scene of my first novel got rewritten multiple times) is that the length of an effective bowknot is proportional to the size of the work itself.  A short story can be tied up in a single paragraph, or even a single sentence.  A novel can take a whole chapter, or sometimes more.

How do you know you’ve tied up your bowknot in an adequate fashion?  Your best bet is to find a reliable outside reader and bind him or her with strong oaths to tell you truly whether or not the ending works.  Don’t be surprised if it takes several iterations of the process and more than one outside reader to arrive at an acceptable finished product.

And don’t worry too much.  Getting the ending right is a matter of craft, which means it’s something that can be learned, and that can be improved with practice.

No POV Beyond This Point

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That’s what the sign said, anyway, in the parking lot of the Base Exchange.  What they meant, of course, was Personally Owned Vehicle — which is military-speak for the family car.  All the same, it gave aspiring-writer me a memorable moment of mental bogglement, because the same acronym, in writer-speak, is shorthand for Point Of View, and Point Of View is everywhere.

In the universe of fiction, nothing happens without an observer; without observation, the story would not exist.  Even the so-called “third person objective” has an observer — third person objective is nothing but observation.  It’s the “fly on the wall” viewpoint, the “camera’s eye” viewpoint, which gives the reader action and dialogue and description but nothing interior to the characters or to the narrator.  (This is all elaborate sleight of hand, or sleight of mind — the writer is only pretending not to judge or comment on what’s going on.  In fact, every detail is selected out of the near-infinite number of possible details with an eye to how it’s going to contribute to the impression the writer wants to make on the mind of the reader.  Not surprisingly, third person objective is fiendishly hard to do well, or to carry off at length; most of the famous examples, such as Hemingway’s “The Killers”, are short stories.)

At the other end of the spectrum from third person objective is the omniscient point of view favored by Victorian novelists.  For a long time in the mid to late twentieth century, omniscient POV fell out of favor, the victim of changes in literary fashion.  Not surprisingly, given the lack of contemporary models, most of the writers who attempted to write in omni POV struggled with the process; failed attempts at omni were denigrated as “head-hopping.”  It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to manage access to the interior lives of all a story’s characters, and to move freely between them without jarring or disorienting the reader.

Occupying the middle of the spectrum is tight-third POV, and its variant form, multiple tight-third.  In tight-third, the writer allows him- or herself privileged access to the interior life of only a single character — or, in multiple tight-third, to only a single character in a particular scene.  Tight-third, whether single or multiple, is probably the most common point of view in contemporary fiction, and to the extent that anything in this business is easy, it’s probably the easiest to get right.

Outside of the objective/tight-third/omni spectrum we have the varyingly-weird outliers:  first-person, the “reader, I married him” point of view; second-person, the “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” point of view; and oddities such as the epistolary story, told through letters and other documents.  They’re all hard to write in their different ways, and a certain proportion of your audience is going to find them off-putting (there are readers out there who will never read a first-person story, for example, or a first-person story where the gender of the narrator doesn’t match the gender of the author, even though the text is plainly labelled “fiction.”)

What point of view should you use for your story?  As so often in the writing business, the answer is, “It depends.”  If your main character is talking to you in a distinctive voice and won’t shut up, first-person may be the answer.  If you’re concerned with how the society of the story both affects and deals with the events of the narrative, and if you feel up to the challenge, then omniscient POV may be what you’re looking for.  When in doubt, though, it’s always a good idea to go first for tight-third.  No reader is going to question that choice, and it’s one with a lot of good models available for emulation.

But if tight-third isn’t working for you, or if your narrative persists in veering toward one of the other models, then try the various alternatives until you find the one that clicks.

Review Halloo

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In addition to editing and blogging and occasionally teaching, I also write fiction.  Or, as we sometimes put it around here, “I tell lies to strangers for money.”

Which means that from time to time the books I write get reviewed — sometimes by people who like them, and sometimes by people who don’t. A good review is always nice. A good review that makes it clear that the reviewer didn’t just like the book, but actually got what the writer was doing with it –above and beyond buying groceries and paying the rent — is something beyond nice.

(There’s no predicting which reviewer you’re going to get such a review from, either. Sometimes it’s from a friend who’s liked your stuff since forever; sometimes it’s from somebody whom you’d swear wouldn’t give you the time of day. Just another one of those things that make most writers just a little bit crazy.)

But a good review is not required.

It’s okay if you-the-reader or you-the-reviewer don’t like my book. Maybe the book sucks. It happens sometimes. Bad stuff can happen to the writer, or to the publisher, or to the world in general that causes the book to be radically screwed up in one way or another.

Sometimes what sounded like a good idea in the writer’s head, and a good idea in the proposal stage, and a good idea at the outline stage, turns out to have been a bad idea after all when the time comes to make an actual story out of it. Sometimes it’s a really good idea, but not, as it turns out, a really good idea that the writer in question is able to carry off.

Or maybe the book is a good book for its target audience, and that audience is not you. Maybe it’s a good book that you disagree with so intensely that it makes your eyeballs bleed. And it’s your right to say so, at whatever length you feel necessary.

But please don’t feel like you’re obliged to let me know about it. I don’t go chasing down reviews, whether good or bad – that way madness lies, at least for me – and I’m not especially interested in defending my work after I’m done with it. Once it’s all grown up and out in the world, it needs to stand or fall on its own.

The Lone and Orange Sands

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A correspondent asks, “Why don’t ‘jar of Tang’ stories work for readers?”

Before I take a stab at answering that one, some definition of terms is probably in order.  The concept of the “jar of Tang story” comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of workshop terms originally compiled by and for the Texas-based Turkey City Writers’ Workshop:

A story contrived so that the author can spring a silly surprise about its setting. . . . For instance, the story takes place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.

This particular kind of failed story is especially common in science fiction and fantasy, since determining the nature of reality and figuring out the rules of the universe are recurring themes in both genres, and the reader is presumed to be an active participant in the process.

It’s also necessary to acknowledge that once in a while you’ll find a reader who actually likes this kind of story, because there’s no accounting for taste and nothing is so weird that there isn’t somebody out there who will like it.  Also, a sufficiently accomplished writer can make anything work — but for some stories, “sufficiently accomplished” means “maybe Will Shakespeare could have pulled it off on a good day.”  (But mostly Will Shakespeare didn’t even try, because part of being an accomplished writer is knowing how to pick your battles.)

Setting aside idiosyncratic tastes, here’s the big reason why “jar of Tang” stories don’t work:

Readers like being fooled; they don’t like being made to feel foolish.

Being fooled is the good kind of surprise, the one where the rabbit comes out of the hat and the ace of spades is on the top of the deck instead of in your hand and the nice young man who works at the coffee shop is really the Crown Prince of Ruritania in disguise.

Being made to feel foolish is something different.  It’s the writer saying to the reader, “Ha-ha, gotcha!  You totally thought that those characters you were identifying with had slogged across a vast and waterless desert only to come up hard against an impenetrable but transparent — and clearly the product either of magic or of superscience — wall!  But you were wrong!”

Whereupon the reader feels stupid for not having considered alternate interpretations, and feels like a chump for trusting the author to play straight with him or her, and is generally full of resentment and wounded ego — because the reader is supposed to be a fellow-traveller on the voyage of discovery that is the story, and not anybody’s dupe.

Where I Was Yesterday, Other than Here

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Yesterday was a non-posting day, because it was also move-the-son-back-into-college day.  Four hours there, four hours back, and a lot of running around doing paperwork and toting luggage in between — and that’s when everything goes smoothly, which it often doesn’t.

This time the car started leaking oil just as we finished the move-in process, and we only made it back home by dint of adding more oil every sixty to a hundred miles to replace the stuff that was running out.  The car is now reposing in the local auto shop and awaiting repairs, and I am left reflecting upon the feast-and-famine nature of the freelance life.

Which is why I wasn’t thinking much about Writer Stuff yesterday, and also why I’ve argued my natural reticence into submission and added a tip jar to the sidebar of this blog.