The problem with the auto having been diagnosed as an easily-fixable (and not especially expensive as these things go) rust hole in the oil filter, I’m free to turn my attention to other matters . . . things like the Iron Laws of Storytelling, for example.

What am I talking about when I speak of the Iron Laws?

They’re the set of reader expectations that have been hanging around in western art and literature for so long that they’re practically hardwired into our brains.  If you’re a writer, you violate those laws at your peril; which is to say, you should only do it on purpose and with your eyes wide open.  (“A gentleman,” my father used to say, “is never accidentally rude to someone.”)

A few of the Iron Laws, slanted toward science fiction and fantasy, but applicable everywhere:

Truth spells (or truth serums, or whatever) never make anyone happier. You’d think people would have figured that one out by now, especially with the way that nobody under a truth spell ever tells one of the good truths, like “The pie here is so delicious I always stop by for a piece after a bad day, because it makes everything better” or “Your hair is beautiful; if you ever cut it I think I’ll cry” or “You’re the only reason I made it out of seventh grade alive.” But fictional characters keep on trying, just the same.

The equivalent, or at least related, law for contemporary mimetic realism is, of course, “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves.”  They will, however, almost inevitably hear only the most misleading portions of any important information actually exchanged.  Likewise, in a romance novel — or almost any novel with a romantic sub-plot — any platonic hug or similar physical gesture of affection between two uninvolved characters will inevitably be witnessed, sans context, by the significant other of one of the two parties.

And if you’re a character in a story with a title like “Appointment in Samarra”, there’s no point in buying a bus ticket to Omaha instead.  You’re still going to end up in Samarra by the end, and it won’t be pretty.

There are other Iron Laws besides the ones I’ve mentioned here — feel free to enumerate them in the comments.

 

I started wanting to be a writer not long after I started being a reader, at about the same time as I realized that books were things made by people, and not just the naturally occurring fruit of the fiction tree.

I wrote a lot of really awful stories and poetry in junior high and high school — the kind of thing that the term “juvenilia” was invented to cover, and thank God this was before the internet and the permanent archiving of everything, because if I’m lucky all of it got thrown out years ago — and finished my first book-shaped object during the summer between high school and college. It pretty much stank on ice, but I remember it fondly nonetheless, because I finished it and learned a lot about writing in the process. (Among other things, I learned that it’s a very bad idea to set an important action sequence in a cave, or in any other place without natural or artificial light. Your characters will spend far too much time fumbling with lanterns and lamps and candles, and you’ll have to keep track of who’s holding which and what gets dropped when and what happens when all the lights go out. I eventually gave up and — I told you the story stank on ice — resorted to lighting the whole scene with magically glowing rocks. I would have been better off revising the plot to get rid of the cave entirely, but I didn’t know that then.)

The short stories I wrote as a college undergrad weren’t much better; I was starting to get a handle on the concept of a prose style, but not so much of a handle on the concept of plot.  I made my first attempt at selling to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during that time, and — not actually much to my surprise — failed to succeed.  I took another stab at writing a novel during my senior year, but the plot bogged down in Too Much Epic at about the same time as I got accepted into the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the book never got finished.  Bits and pieces of some of the themes and characters got recycled years later, though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I only wrote one short story during the time I spent at UPenn — a Norse saga pastiche that damn-near wasn’t even in English — because Academia was taking up nearly all the available space in my brain.  The degree was totally worth it, though, not least because I learned that I could work for seven years on a project and carry it through to completion.  I also learned that the answer to “How long did it take you to write that book?” can be either “several years” or “a couple of months”, depending upon how you look at the process.

Two things started me writing seriously again:  the advent of affordable home computers (see “Down 48K Memory Lane“) and the sheer blinding boredom involved in being a Navy wife in an overseas billet in a country where reading material in English was not easily come by.  Those were the days before the commercial internet, when modems ran at 300 bits per second, 8-bit ASCII text files ruled the world, and new books arrived in town via slow boat from Hoboken.  If we wanted fresh fiction, we were going to have to roll our own, and so we did.  We eventually sold some of it, too, and that was the start of our freelance career.

(It was another two decades after that, however, before we finally sold a story to F&SF.  Persistence pays.)

When writing fantasy, it’s often more effective to be parsimonious with your use of magic, rather than the reverse.

The Fellowship of the Ring, after all, came away from Lothlorien with the equivalent of some cammie cloaks, a hank of nylon parachute cord, and a flashlight.

The current revolution in electronic publishing is like the California Gold Rush^† in a lot of ways.

• It’s real.

  Underneath all the hype and ballyhoo and frenzied hysteria of 1849 lay a bedrock of sober fact: There really was gold in the California hills.

    Today, a similar feverish atmosphere surrounds electronic publishing, and in particular electronic self-publishing. Publishers are scrambling to secure electronic rights; authors are scrambling to retain them; and web pundits and tech mavens are urging publishers and authors alike to get with the program now, right now, before it’s too late. A person of cynical bent might be forgiven for suspecting that the e-publishing revolution is in fact nothing more than a balloon full of hot air, rising high only to go *pop!*, but that person would be wrong. Electronic publishing really is a big new thing. Maybe even the big new thing.

• Some people will make a great deal of money at it.

  In every gold rush, a few prospectors strike it rich. The creek that runs through their claim turns out to have more gold dust in it than sand, and the caves to either side of it are littered with gold nuggets the size of tennis balls. They go up into the hills bearded and starving and wearing jeans and flannel, and come down again wealthy enough to buy a mansion and a yacht and a couple of United States senators. In the e-publishing gold rush, a few electronically self-published writers will sell a lot of books and make a great deal of money and — if they want it — get picked up by established publishing houses.

• Other people will make moderate amounts of money.

  Most of the prospectors who headed out to California in 1849, or up to the Klondike in 1896, didn’t strike it rich. Some of them, though, did succeed in panning enough gold to go back home and marry their sweethearts, or set themselves up in business, or do whatever else they thought was a good thing to spend their money on. In like fashion, a fair number of electronically self-published writers will make enough money over time to take a vacation, or repair the roof, or keep the pantry stocked for another month.

• But a whole lot of people aren’t going to make any money at all.

  A few of them won’t care, because they only went West, or into e-publishing, for the adventure of it in the first place. The exciting times and narrow escapes they had, and the colorful stories they have to tell, are all the reward they ever really wanted. But bunches and bunches of people are going to head back to civilization even more broke than they were when they started out, and without ever getting close to realizing the dream they left home with. Assuming, of course, that they ever make it home at all.

• Because some of those people will have very bad things happen to them.

  They might drown in the spring floods, or get dry-gulched by bandits, or succumb to malnutrition because they spent all their money on mining equipment and none of it on food. They will fall prey to swindlers who salt the claims, and to bad advice that leaves them stuck in Donner Pass with winter closing in.

  If they are in e-publishing, they will start publishing houses with no capital and no business plan. Or they will entrust their manuscripts to scam agents, or submit them to publishers who are all façade and no action. They will hear all manner of bad advice, and take it all.^‡

• But some people will make money without ever staking a claim.

  They’re the ones who make it their business to sell mining equipment and blue jeans and flannel shirts and canned food and camp supplies to the miners. And the people who end up making steady reliable money off the e-publishing revolution are going to be the same sort of people: freelance cover designers and web-page maintainers and editors and copyeditors and e-text preparers.

  The astute reader will note that a number of these goods and services are ones that established publishing houses handle — and pay for — as their share of the work required to turn a manuscript into a book.^§

†Or the Klondike Gold Rush, or the Australian gold rushes of the mid to late 19th Century — insert local historic gold rush of your choice; there’s been a bunch of them.

‡They should read Writer Beware, and Preditors and Editors, and AbsoluteWrite. Then they will at least have a good set of maps and directions to work from.

§The astute reader will also note — per my sidebar link — that I’m doing my bit in the sale of picks and shovels. If you’ve got a NaNoWriMo book or other project that you’re interested in whipping into better shape, we can do business.

(In the spirit of full disclosure:  This post originally appeared in my personal LiveJournal; I’m reprinting it here in the interest of reaching a wider, or at least more public, audience.)