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.)
Tag: things done and left undone
Thought for the Day
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?
Too Hot to Think.
Readercon was a nice convention this year† (and air-conditioned!), but now we are back home and it was hot enough today that I count myself accomplished because I managed to get around to paying the electric bill.
That was about it for accomplishment, though.
We saw Pacific Rim while we were down in Massachusetts, and I’ve got some thoughts about it that relate to writing as well as to film . . . but I’ll blog about them tomorrow, maybe.
Tonight it is too hot.
†I’d like to thank all the people who came to my 10:30 AM Sunday reading, and to Jim Macdonald’s 2:30 PM last-of-the-con reading. A good audience is always heartening.
Pop-Up Targets, Unexploded Land Mines, and Snakes in Cans
These are things that can disrupt your day, ranked in order of ascending troublesomeness.
A Pop-Up Target is something unexpected that requires immediate action, but which you have the resources and ability to deal with promptly. A suddenly necessary payment at a time when the bank account is flush, for example, or an unanticipated piece of time-critical paperwork. The target jumps up, you deal with it, and you move on, slightly more adrenaline-charged than you were before.
Adventures in the Writing Life Version: The FedEx delivery man shows up on your doorstep Thursday afternoon with a package containing a stack of unpleasantly familiar paper and a cover letter: Dear Author–here’s the copyedited MS for your next novel. Please go over the copyedits and get them back to us by this coming Monday.
What you do: Cancel your social engagements for the next 48 hours. After a few seconds’ more thought, cancel the rest of your life for the next 48 hours. Check your local FedEx pickup to see what’s the absolute latest you can hand over the MS and still expect it to show up in New York on Monday. Check your bank account to see if you can afford that much money. (If both your budget and the publisher’s schedule really are that tight, phone your editor. Ask if you can FedEx the MS back to them on their dime, because otherwise it’s coming back to them by Priority Mail.) Buckle down and get to work on going over the copyedits, and be grateful that you aren’t having to deal with a Copyedit From Hell.
An Unexploded Land Mine is something that you thought that you’d already dealt with, or that you were supposed to deal with and forgot, or that somebody else completely neglected to inform you about back when it should have been dealt with. Some land mines are relatively mild; others can blow you sky-high. What they have in common is that “I should have known about this one, dammit!” quality that adds a touch of frustration and outrage to the whole deal.
Adventures in the Writing Life version: “What do you mean, I didn’t send you back the signed contracts!” Or, “No, you didn’t tell me you wanted a map for the front of the book and a glossary in the back!” Or, “I thought you were going to handle asking for blurbs, and now you’re telling me that I have to do it?”
What you do: Send back the signed contracts with a profuse apology for your absent-mindedness, and promise never to be so flaky again. Grit your teeth and draw the damned map and make up the damned glossary. Take a deep breath and make a list of writers you know who might be willing to come up with a back-cover blurb for you, then start writing letters.
And then there’s the Snake in a Can. Like the trick jar labeled “peanuts” with the spring-loaded snake inside, these show up completely unexpectedly and leap right out into your face. Also, sometimes the snake is real. A heavy-duty snake has the ability to disrupt your whole life for days, if not weeks, if you can’t manage to stuff it back into the can.
Adventures in the Writing Life Version: Your publisher goes bankrupt without warning. Your agent, with whom you have a warm personal relationship and who has been a prime force in building your career, gets hit by a truck while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan. The company for which you’ve happily written three potboiler tie-in novels and with whom you’re under contract for a fourth suddenly lets go all their in-house publishing staff (including the editor of your novel in progress, with whom you’ve had an excellent relationship) and replaces them with people you’ve never even heard of.
What you do: Don’t keep all your writing eggs in one basket. Maintain good relationships with everyone in your field, to the extent that it’s possible, so that if you’re suddenly swimming for your life in a rising flood you have people who might throw you a lifeline from the shore. Resign yourself to the fact that sometimes bad stuff is going to happen that isn’t your fault, and that you can’t do anything about, and that is going to mess up your life more than it messes up the lives of the people actually responsible — but don’t let yourself dwell on it for too long, because dwelling on it only uses up time and energy that you could be spending on writing something better for people who will respect you more.
I Meant to Do That!
There are some things, as a writer, that you should only ever do on purpose. A short and incomplete list:
- Humor. There’s nothing worse than making people snicker when you were hoping to tug on their heartstrings, unless it’s making them guffaw when you were aiming for elevated dignity. Accidental humor is often fatally easy — all it needs, sometimes, is a random typo of the “united/untied” or “public/pubic” variety — while deliberate humor can be fiendishly hard even if you’re one of the rare few with the gift for it. (And in the realm of bad things that can go wrong with deliberate humor — if the little voice in your head says, “Maybe this is a bit too edgy,” then for the love of all the Muses, listen. And remember, as always, John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)
- Ambiguity. Properly managed, a judicious amount of certain kinds of ambiguity can add depth and texture to your story. Done badly, all it does is cover your story with an unnecessary layer of shadows and mud. How can you tell if you’ve pulled it off? You probably can’t — you’ve got privileged access to the inside of your own head, and can see the stuff you didn’t put down on paper or in pixels. This is where trusted first readers come in. If they say that something isn’t clear, don’t waste time explaining how they’ve missed it. Fix the text so that they don’t miss it, instead.
- Offense. Sometimes it’s necessary for a writer to give offense because the target is, no kidding, offensive. Other times . . . well, writers often have big feet as well as big mouths. If you did decide to give offense on purpose, don’t bat your eyelashes afterward and claim that you didn’t. That’s tacky. And if it truly was an accident, then apologize without groveling and try not to do it again, okay?
- Conspicuous alliteration, internal rhyme, or recognizable meter. Unless you’re very very good indeed, all of these verbal juggling tricks and somersaults can distract from the point of your story, rather than ornamenting it. (The late Poul Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest, in which some of the characters speak in blank verse written out as prose, but Poul Anderson was good enough to get away with it.) Accidental occurrences of things like this should be eliminated ruthlessly from the text. As for doing it deliberately — if you’re a certain kind of word-mad writer, you’ll probably at some point end up trying out the technique. Just remember,
don’t attempt this feat without a netseek out a trusted first reader for help in determining whether or not you’ve carried it off.
There are plenty of other things that writers should only do on purpose, but the four above are biggies, and should do for a start.
Feast and Famine
I’ve said more than once that there are two basic states in the freelancing life: the state of too much work and the state of not enough money. Usually it’s either one or the other, though sometimes, painfully, it can be both at once.
In theory, there should also exist a balancing state of not enough work and too much money, but I don’t think freelancers get to go there.
(Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a backlog of editorial work that I need to get done, so for the next little while my entries here may be somewhat brief.)
Some Days are Like That
You get a lot of stuff done — really necessary stuff, too — but none of it is writing-related, so you finish the day feeling like you haven’t done anything at all.
At times like these, it’s important to remember that taking the trash to the town dump is also a vitally important chore, because if it doesn’t get done, eventually the trash bags will take over the entire house and you won’t have any room left in which to write.
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.
Q and A
Dear Dr. Doyle:
What am I allowed to write about?
Signed,
Worried
Dear Worried:
You’re allowed to write about whatever you damned well please.
You just have to be willing to accept the consequences.
In some times and places, those consequences may be political, and they may be severe. In which case, good luck and may the blessings of whatever deity, if any, you prefer be upon you, because you’ll need them. In other times and places . . . somebody you’ve never met may say unkind things about you on the internet. Which is no fun, to be sure, but on a scale of zero to “taken outside and shot” is maybe a three.
What should you do if strangers are saying unkind things about you on the internet? Most of the time — nothing.
If you’ve actually screwed up, apologize. Then get back to work and do better the next time.
If, upon sober reflection, you decide that you haven’t done anything you’re sorry for — don’t fake it. Get back to work and don’t waste your energy on an argument that nobody’s going to win.
Remember — if you’re arguing, you aren’t writing. Let your work make your arguments for you.
In the Deep Winter
This is the time of year and the kind of day when it’s hard for me to get anything done, where “anything” covers a lot of territory, from writing to cooking to taking the trash to the town dump.
It’s bitterly cold out — we’ve got another wind chill advisory up, which means that going out-of-doors without proper protective clothing is a life-threatening proposition† — and distinctly chilly inside, and all I really want to do is huddle up next to the electric space heater in the office and try to think warm thoughts.
High summer is another hard time to get things done, but winter, I think, is worse . . . the heat only saps my physical energy, but the cold leaches away everything.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I need to get to work and do some editing, at the very least, before I turn into a pumpkin for the night.
†No exaggeration . . . in cold like this, a person living on one of the less-traveled roads could slip and fall on the ice on their way down the driveway to get the mail out of their mailbox, and die of hypothermia before anybody passed by who might see them and call for help.
Where I Was; Where I Am
I was at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston, land — at the moment — of a myriad hand sanitizer dispensers. It remains to be seen whether or not I’ve escaped catching the flu, or some lesser variety of con crud. (Bring people from all over the country, and sometimes the world, into one hotel for a long weekend, and a lot of people are going to go back home with new and exotic colds and other viruses.)
Now I’m back in far northern New England, watching the thermometer drop and still chasing my Zeno’ s tortoise of a novel denouement.
Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll have some cranky and intemperate things to say about dialogue attribution tags and their deployment. But not tonight.
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