Thought for Food

July 25, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Writing, considered as a profession, can be enormously satisfying. However, it is seldom enormously profitable; and even those writers who have achieved mega-bestsellerdom have usually traveled on a long, arduous, and often stony-broke journey to reach that point.

Which is why most writers’ personal recipe collections are big on dishes that are cheap, nourishing, and tasty . . . primarily cheap.

Lentil soup, for example. The only things you really need in order to make starving-writer lentil soup are a bag of lentils, about six or eight cups of cooking liquid, an onion, a bit of meat, and a bay leaf, and the meat and the bay leaf are optional. The meat can be the last leftover bits of a ham, if you’re currently well-off enough to have had a ham; it can be pieces of kielbasa or smoked sausage; it can even be cut up store-brand hot dogs, if hot dogs are all you can afford. Once, because what I lacked at the time wasn’t money, but rather transportation to the grocery store, I used a pound of bacon, cut up into small pieces, because the bacon was what I had. If you’re a vegetarian, you can leave the meat out completely, maybe throw in some diced carrots or potatoes along with the chopped onion. Season it however you like. Some people go with curry-style seasoning; I usually go with the abovementioned bay leaf and a bit of prepared horseradish, with a generous shot of soy sauce thrown in for savory saltiness.

Cook like it says on the lentil package, for however long it takes to get the soup to the consistency that you prefer. A crockpot is good for this; so is a dutch oven on top of the stove.

This will feed one writer for several days, or one writer and family for an evening meal, with maybe a serving left over to warm up the day after.

Work and Travel and Cats

July 23, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, why I didn’t post anything over the weekend.

One of our cats died, apparently of old age — we never knew how old she actually was, since she came to us fully grown. She turned up one winter in our basement (which, because we live in an old house, is more permeable to the outside world than I’d sometimes like), and by the end of that spring had moved in and claimed the status of #1 House Cat.

Then we went on a road trip down to Brooklyn, which involved something like ten hours in a minivan with nonfunctional air conditioning. Each way.

And I’ve got an editing job I need to finish, and a novel, likewise.

The flow of insightful commentary is a bit sluggish right now, for some reason. I can’t imagine why.

Things to Avoid, Antagonist Division

July 20, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

One of the things you don’t want to do, when you’re creating your antagonist and putting him through his protagonist-thwarting paces, is to end up with yet another instance of the amazing mind-reading teleporting menace.

You know how that one works: your protagonist is running across country to escape from the monster, or running from room to room in the big old mansion to escape from the serial killer, or dodging about the streets of the big city to evade the hired-gun assassin-spy. No matter which way he turns or where he goes, however, the bad guy is always right behind him — or, often, is already there waiting for him.

And a lot of the time, if you stand still long enough to think about it, you realize that there’s no way the antagonist could have gotten to that point from where he was standing before, or that he could have known which way the protagonist was going to turn for help, without being able to read minds and teleport. Which most serial killers and assassin-spies are not, in fact, able to do. (The jury is still out on monsters.)

There are two main ways to avoid this problem. One way is to keep your story moving so fast, and so entertainingly, that the reader never has the time or the inclination to stop dead in his or her tracks and ask, “How the hell was he able to do that?” The other way is by means of careful plotting and meticulous attention to continuity, which may in fact actually involve tricks like drawing charts and making timelines in order to keep track of what your antagonist is doing during those parts of the story when he isn’t on stage.

When you’re done, if you’ve done it right, your reward will be to have the reader never notice all the hard work that you put in.

One Thing After Another

July 18, 2012July 19, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

When you live three hours by road from the nearest city of any size (and by “of any size” I mean “is able to support at least two separate movie theatres and a shopping mall”), you end up listening to a lot of audiobooks. You also end up realizing that not all books make good road listening. You don’t want the sort of book you have to devote a lot of mental processing power to decoding in some fashion — at any rate, you don’t if you’re me, and spend a lot of your driving-and-listening time in the sort of environment where it’s necessary to devote at least a portion of your brain to keeping an eye out for moose in the road.

(Important safety tip, here: Brake for moose. As far as the moose is concerned, it doesn’t stop for other things, other things stop for it. Unless you’re an entire pack of wolves, it doesn’t consider you a threat worth bothering with.)

What you want, for driving a long way at night on a moosey road, is a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis. Of late, our household has found that the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (available for free download from Librivox) are just the ticket. Granted, Burroughs is not the most elegant of prose stylists, nor the most original of thinkers, and he can be counted on to exhibit just about every -ism to which a white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant writer from the first decades of the twentieth century might be susceptible . . . but when it comes down to sheer one-damned-thing-after-another plot construction, the man is hard to beat.

Attitude Adjustment

July 17, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The British novelist L. P. Hartley famously observed, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

This is a true thing, and the source of great and recurring headaches for writers of historical fiction, alternate history, historical fantasy, and historical romance (as well as any other fiction, genre or not, that deals with time past rather than time present or time future.) Readers today are, or at least like to think that they are, enlightened and forward-thinking ; and when they read for pleasure, they want the characters they identify with to share their values.

At which point they run headfirst into the unfortunate fact that even historical figures who were howlingly progressive by the standards of their day are likely to exhibit turns of thought and vocabulary which can leave their modern ideological descendants gobsmacked.

I don’t mind it when a historical romance elides or passes over stuff like that; conversely, it irritates me no end when a writer feels obliged to make his/her characters progressive before their time, as it were. Granted, in almost every age you can find people whose attitudes and beliefs were more in line with those of our era than with their own . . . but their contemporaries usually regarded them as whackaloons. And again, granted, sometimes that attitudinal disjunction is the whole point of the story, but if it isn’t, it can be an almighty distraction from whatever the point of the story actually is.

This is, alas, one of those writing problems with no easy solution. Which way you go is your own choice, based — ideally — on the nature of the story you want to tell and the expectations of the audience you want to tell it to and your own ideas about the relationship between truth and fiction. But it’s a sad fact that no matter which path you choose to travel, at least some of your potential readers are going to think that you picked the wrong one, and are not going to be shy about saying so.

Hey — nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.

Weather for Working

July 16, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The writing life has its ups and downs, but on days like today it at least has the advantage of taking place largely indoors. Because if I had to do my work outside on a day like today, I do not think I would get any work done at all.

Spring is a good time to write. So is autumn. Winter is great, so long as you can afford to keep the heat on. But summer is not a good time for any sort of strenuous endeavor, even of the intellectual kind.

Summer heat waves don’t summon up the good times in fiction, either. They bring us Southern gothic novels featuring humidity and honeysuckle and family secrets (a dead mule may also be involved at some point); and if the supply of Southern gothic fails, the dog days also have a stock of noir-tinged detective novels full of adultery, blackmail, and conspiracy to commit murder.

Only in children’s and young adult fiction, really, is summertime a pleasant source of adventure and romance.

A Weekend on the Road

July 15, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, why I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days.

I’ve been at Readercon, a science-fiction convention in Burlington, Massachusetts, restoring my soul and enjoying the air conditioning.

Regular posting should resume on Monday.

Music to Write By

July 13, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Some writers need absolute silence in which to write. This post is not about them.

Other writers like to have some background sound. Usually, these days, that means music.

Writers who love their background music have a variety of different tastes and requirements. Some writers prefer orchestral music, finding the intrusion of human voices distracting, while other writers can’t do without their vocalists. Different time periods appeal to different writers as well. One writer will have a preference for Baroque concertos, another for heavy metal, a third for show tunes.

I like writing to vocal music with a steady beat — not surprisingly, there’s a lot of classic rock in my playlists.

What about you?

A Lonely Business

July 9, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Writing, that is.

It’s a job that you mostly do sitting at your desk, listening to the voices inside your own head. It’s not surprising that some writers end their careers as eccentric hermits; what’s surprising, actually, is that more of them don’t.

It isn’t required to be an introvert in this job, but sometimes it helps. At the same time, if you’re going to make a living (or at least a part of your living) as a writer, you’re going to have to get out in the world. If you don’t, you’re going to lose touch with all the stuff you’re writing about.

So make the effort. Schedule time for things like community involvement — things like scouting, or the volunteer fire department, or the folks who clean up sea birds after oil slicks. Whatever works for you, so long as there are other people involved in it. From an artistic-development standpoint, it helps if it’s the sort of group that attracts a cross-section of different types, so that the repertory company of actors living in your brain can have as wide a range as possible.

Don’t isolate yourself from other writers, either. Some days, it can be vitally important to your sanity that you’re able to have a conversation with somebody else who understands why it is you do what you do with all those words on the computer screen, and who understands why it matters.

Which is why I’m moving mountains, right this minute, in order to be at Readercon this weekend, down in Burlington, Massachusetts.