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Ambition and despair

I don’t think any of us start down this path without vaunting ambition. There are those who think the path will be easy, and indeed a tiny tiny number have found it so, there are those who know the reality and expect to work hard for years. But all of those who start writing that book think that they will succeed. Some of us dream of being read by millions, and some by enough people to pay the bills. And some of us run closet hopes of being read by millions and resultantly having fresh peeled grapes fed to us by the beefcake dancing boy, while we recline in our hammock overlooking the beach in Tahiti. Not me, to be fair, I’ve always thought dancing boys very useful when one is short of shark bait. But ambition, yeah (and not just to go shark fishing.)

Ambition requires some degree of self belief. You don’t get very far in this trade with a mere desire for peeled grapes (or shark bait) if you lack the trust in your own ability and skill to ever show it to anyone. Yeah, we know. Amanda kept hers under the bed for years… Kate in the bottom drawer under her copies of Physical Geography, which was a lot more disappointing than she’d thought it would be. The point is they didn’t throw them out. They just took a little nudging. The problem is we’re our own worst judges. I have seen so many authors (some published too) with nothing more than conceit in the way of skills, which wears a bit thin quite fast, but with enough ambition and enough self-faith to make up for their deficiencies. There’s a sort of inverse law here. If you’re new, and you think your work is perfect, it probably isn’t. If you’re new and you think your work sucks so badly that you keep polishing it and trying to learn… it probably isn’t as bad as you think it is.

The point I’m trying to make, is without some sort of hope, without some sort of dream, without that ambition, burning long and hot and prepared to put in a lot of effort and of yourself, this is not going to work. So if you have barely the energy to brush your hair, and don’t really think you are as good as… (insert author here), barring a ton of luck it’s not going to happen. And if you’re really that lucky buy lottery tickets. You can buy a publishing house with the proceeds.

Because to counter that ambition, that bright oriflamme, the forces of despair will ambush you at every step, will send out more minions than Sauron. And you’re going to have to step past them or walk over their limbless corpses to get on. Yes, now you can turn the tables on the idiotic system of gatekeepers… but even self-publishing you’ll find the idiocies of Amazon (and yes, there are not a few of these) instead. There will be the will-sapping fights to get the document to look right on .epub… and the same but worse again for .mobi. Expect to have to get up off the ground dozens of times. Expect to have to work relentlessly for an audience, who will vanishing every time you don’t post, don’t make them laugh. Expect to have your best efforts torpedoed by things which are still beyond your control. And if you do make it through the conventional publishing hurdles – unless you’re one of the darlings – expect them to want you to work relentlessly… while they forget to pay you or forget to put the book on the shelves.

At the end of the day, whether you succeed or fail will probably be more a matter of luck than effort or judgement. But by heaven, if you don’t put in the effort, give it your astute thought processes, get up off the floor again and again… you’re not going to be lucky. Your ambition will lose to despair.
Now go out and kick some serious kneecaps! (too bad for those of you are cursed with tallness, and have to kick higher spots. Those are the breaks. We can’t all be dwarves.)

Yes. I am nearly finished the next Bolg PI story. The dwarf and attitude rub off.

Timing Workshop IV: Focusing the mind wonderfully

by Sarah A. Hoyt

It is said that the prospect of hanging in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully.  What is not often said is that a lot of the effect of timing and pacing IS focus.  And a lot of this can be achieved by a series of tricks that have absolutely NOTHING to do with what actually happens in the novel.

I don’t know if I ever told you guys – more than a hundred times – but plotting used to be my bete noir, and a great part of this was timing.  You see, people kept coming back and saying my novels were too slow, or that they just didn’t flow, or…  A thousand other things that amounted to “dang it, your world and characters are interesting, but they aren’t holding OUR interest, and we don’t know why.”

Being me and congenitally inclined to go exactly the wrong way about anything at all, (I have scores of ancestors who staked their lives on the WRONG side of wars to prove it) I decided the problem is that I was putting TOO MUCH in.  Too much world building, too much character building, too much description, too much complication to the plot, too much.

This was, understand well before I was published.  I decided that, of course, what people needed was a clear cut line from beginning to end, where every action advanced the plot.

To be fair to my younger (and markedly stupid) self, part of this was justified by reading (rolls eyes) ENDLESS nonsense about just that from writers who clearly never took the time to analyze their own writing, much less anyone’s else’s.  Alternately it’s written by writers who think ONE school of writing – minimalist – is correct.  These are the same people who believe EVERY adjective must be excised ruthlessly and every word must be compacted to contain the most possible meaning.

Look, minimalism is all very well if you’re writing artistic statements, or if your goal in life is to write a certain type of bloodless thriller.  However for everything else, it sucks.  Why does it suck?  Because it lacks flavor.  It’s a highly stripped-down form of story-telling, which in no way resembles either our genetic predisposition to tell stories nor The Way Real People Talk TM.

I’ll freely admit part of my loathing for it is a matter of personality.  I once made myself what seemed, on paper, as an ideal office: walls and floor reflective white.  Desk, bookcases and file cabinets steel and glass.  Everything clean and stripped down.

And I couldn’t write in it.  I fled it for my current office: Roll top desk, oak bookcases cluttered with books, and just enough interesting objects to hold the eye.

It’s probably a personality thing.  In the next house, G-d willing, we’ll take the glass furniture (which is upstairs) and put it in the “publishing room.”  It seems ideal for that sort of methodical work.  Just not for a place where I relax and work.

I think with writing I feel the same way.  I love the minimalist style for non-fiction books.  I’m actually a great fan of bullet points.  (History books are a little different, and I do like the flavor of the times.)  But for my fiction, let me have the impression that the characters live and breathe and that the place they are in is not like a bad television set – the good ones are actually artfully made imperfect and lived in – where everything is brand spanking new and coordinates.

But again I was – and still am – stupid, so I followed the advice.  At the end of this, I was writing what should have been six book series compressed into 100 thousand words, and people were less interested than ever.  (This is when guy who would turn out to be agent #2 sent me a rejection saying the sense of timing couldn’t be taught and therefore I’d never be published.)

What I’d missed is that the reason we read fiction is not to absorb information, even if the information is a bloodless narration of an exciting chase, but to experience the emotion of the character(s) and, sometimes, to live in the world – or both.

What this means is that stripping it down, in order to improve pacing is exactly the wrong thing to do.  I started suspecting this when I heard people enthuse about Harry Potter.  It wasn’t what HAPPENED that made them fans, so much, but the exciting details about the world.  When my kids decided, unanimously, that I’d gone to Slytherin and dad to Hufflepuff, for instance.  (Okay, Sarah, you say, you only have two kids.  Unanimity cannot be hard.  Right.  Someday remind me to introduce you to my kids.)

Then I went to a local con and heard a relatively successful local author read a passage from her book.  She gave the readers a chance to pick the passage and they universally shouted “the one with the sausage.”

Okay, the scene was – had to be.  Couldn’t be anything else – completely irrelevant to the plot.  It was the characters in a tavern getting in trouble/confusion over purchasing/stealing a sausage.  Silly in the best Shakespeare comedic style.  It was “a bit with the dog.”  BUT it was clear it was part of what attached the readers to this series.

Being me, I went home and thought about it.  Clearly what made books work was having enough of this sort of thing (of course I didn’t know why yet.  Despite having been a reader for years, when I started writing I became stupid about “why people read.”) to give flavor to the plot.  And the thing was that I was writing these bits.  I was just ruthlessly excising them in revision.

So with fear and trepidation, I started allowing some uneeded scenes to fall in – the first one being “three guys in a car” in Draw One In The Dark, which stupid me thought was completely uneeded.  Until readers started writing about how they could see the characters grow up and bond in the scene.

Eventually I came to realize that actually most of a book will be things that don’t DIRECTLY affect the plot.  They do affect it, in a roundabout way.  They’re character development, and worldbuilding, which by themselves, and where you put them might not do much, but which will, later on make the climax more climaxy and the clinch more clinchy.  (EVEN if you’re not writing porn.)
So, what is the difference between that and having the character go shopping or have breakfast?  Well… Here’s the thing, you really shouldn’t have the character do things that couldn’t possibly interest anyone but the character’s mommy.  Other than that, putting in a bit of quotidian life might work to give the world solidity.

BUT how do you do it, and keep the novel flowing.

Txred in the comments mentioned having a character in a gun show.  Yeah.  completely dumb if all the character is doing is going, “um, ah.  I like that one.”  But have the character shopping for the one gun that can save her life, while expecting the bad guys to burst in at any minute?  Tada, tension.

This gets particularly important with later books in a series, because you have all this background to apprise the reader of.  I know the author school that just infodumps ten pages at the beginning, but unless you have fans who would walk through hell for you, no one is going to read those ten pages.  And hell, if they’re like me they won’t even remember them, even if they read them.

So, faced with writing a short story (well, 11k words) in the world of DST for Baen’s Christmas collection (coming out this November!) I had to subsume everything that the name Jarl Ingemar will mean to anyone who has read Darkship Thieves, or even more so, by then, the earc of Darkship Renegades, into the first few pages, so the reader gets the impact of this personality that will eventually bestride two worlds and a starving, freezing, ill-treated young man of 19.

Now, here I have to tell you you can’t trust your instincts.  I still can’t do it by feel.  I do it by “knowing how” then test it with first readers.  But here’s the trick:

The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully…  So start with your character walking to the gallows (metaphorically.)  The reader is so riveted to seeing how he escapes, that he’ll tolerate any number of explanation on how he got there.  You can subsume entire pages of physical description, tactical details and past history, so long as every few paragraphs you remind the reader he is walking to his own hanging.

You can use the same – should use the same – in a longer work.  Amid your scenes of tavern revelry or bawdy house fun, always, always, always bring us back to three things: the objective, the timing device and the objective.

And make sure, always, that you remind us at the beginning or ending of the more frivolous chapters/scenes of at least one, and preferably all three of these things.  Of course, you should find ways to do it that aren’t repetitive, but you know that.

The other thing is to keep the goal in mind, and make the goal big enough to carry the novel.  Your character MUST have a goal, and the goal can be simple: to survive, for instance.  But it must be told in ways that can be visualized: for instance, your character has to be able to see himself back in his living room on earth, after his adventures in fairyland.
And he has to want it so badly he can taste it.  And you have to remind the reader how badly he wants it.

The goal can change.  In Darkship Thieves it changes from “I will survive and get back to my position of power” to “My husband will survive and we will go home” – but then it could be argued it’s still the same goal recast – but it has to be done in a logical manner and preferably over one or two memorable scenes.

Anyway – that’s the way to concentrate the mind: remember the hanging is coming in the morning.  Unless…

Now, go over a favorite book, again, and look at all the scenes that don’t directly affect the plot.  Then go through and mark down all the times you’re reminded of the objective, the timing or the danger – and the various means you are.

Open Floor

Chris is under the weather and asked me to post an open floor today. You guys know the rules.

Feel better, Chirs!

Canst Thou Minister To A Mind Diseased?

by Sarah Hoyt

Over the weekend I had to explain several times how books come to me.  (I’ve decided, btw, that this is the reason I – at least for now – prefer to work out of contract.  Because it allows this to happen.)

The book I mostly had to explain was A Few Good Men, and what happened was this: I’d just started Darkship Renegades, and the local con was in town – January.  It has a bad habit of hitting just as I come off the holidays and my brain is engaging again.  (No, I don’t take the holidays off, but I’ll admit I probably should.  Precious little gets done, and that usually of the administrivia type “clean the drawers” or “organize outlines” or…  Because when the world presses that close about me, none of that isolation needed to immerse myself in the dream happens.)  So, I worked on DSR until the LAST possible minute, and then Dan started muttering about dragging me to the con still attached to my computer, and how we had panels, and we were LATE.

I ducked into the bathroom to put my makeup on.  And there, mascara wand in hand, the opening of A Few Good Men hit – with its own flavor and distinctive voice.

The world celebrates great prison breaks.  The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.
    They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.    
    Monsters like me.

That voice, and the story was so prevalent in my mind I actually read that paragraph – as well as a bit of A Fatal Stain – at my reading.  I think I bewildered the readers.  But to me, it mattered.  I already had the entire book in my head, you see.

Did I do something to bring that about?  Not consciously.  In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion the best way to explain how novels “hit” my mind is the old excuse of someone being caught drunk, disorderly and Southern, “I was sitting on my front porch, reading my Bible, when suddenly–”

What I mean by all this is that many writers – I don’t know if it’s most – experience most of the their books – even I have gone at them the rational way before – as stunning intrusions into their ordered daily life.  You might not be sitting on your front porch, reading your Bible, but you’ll be putting on makeup, or washing dishes or – last week – ironing up a storm.  And all of a sudden, out of nowhere there will be a “voice” or a “personality” or a full story in your head, loud as an Hallelujah chorus and twice as startling.

And when that happens you HAVE to write it.  There is no other choice.

Well, at least there is no other choice if you’re an inexperienced author.  If you are, over the years you’ve developed several methods of delaying, indefinitely filing or putting a stake through the d*mn things before they have time to take over.

This is especially needed because they have a tendency to “attack” when you’re midway through something else.  Depending on your school of thought – more on this later – this happens because you are already tuned to whatever it is that “broadcasts” these ideas OR because you don’t really want to finish the current novel (because you’re afraid it won’t be very good, or because you don’t actually like hard work, or because you feel unequal to it, or–) and the new idea is your subconscious giving you an out.  You take your pick, I’m not religious about either option.

EXCEPT that with 23 novels under my belt (that’s the SOLD ones, mind.  Another eight, perhaps nine – who keeps count? – before.) I don’t often feel like I can finish a novel and I’m familiar with the compromise of bringing the ideal platonic vision into the hard world outside the cave.  And yet, the things still attack – always – just as I hit stride on another novel.  Also, if I’m ill or out of it and AM struggling with the novel, slogging every half page as if I were breaking granite off a mountain side, the other ideas DON’T hit.  That would seem to be advantage side one.

In fact, I’ve just been reading a book on mental illness, focusing particularly on schizophrenics (it has some application to The Brave And The Free, though most of what is happening to Reehat is self-induced.)  Many writers – those of us who experience ideas as intrusive eruptions of the outside upon our thoughts – would, I suspect be classified as low-level schizophrenics: the point at which you experience part of your thoughts as an outside reality, but don’t confuse them with reality.

The difference is that we don’t seem to progress to the later stages which most schizophrenics who require outside intervention do.  (Well, most of us don’t progress to the later stages.  As in most other places in society the introduction of certain type of recreational drugs into the artistic society in the sixties and seventies broke some writers badly: mostly those who experience stories as coming from the outside.)  Also most of us can integrate more or less well into the everyday life around us.

Yes, it is often less well, as many of us have problems juggling the inner and the outer life.  But most of us are as sane as anyone else required to take fictional stories and people seriously for a large portion of their working time.  Still you find most of us living perfectly mundane-yawn-inducing lives.  When not pounding the keyboard till our fingers bleed, we are parents, housewives, computer programmers, students, and often, until we make enough to live from, manual laborers of some sort.  (I’ve often thought if all else fails I’ll go into house cleaning.  I can do it, and it has the huge advantage of my being able to day dream through it.  The problem of course would be how many ideas would attack while cleaning in the trance.)

We are perfectly normal until we can get together with our kind and explain this odd issue we all suffer from and which would have “normal” people wishing to commit us all.
Are we truly insane?  Who knows?  While I’m not one of those who believes mental illness is a society construct due to the strains of capitalism (and of course Marxists were NOT being hypocritical, when they said that while supporting a system that DID punish political dissent as mental illness – after all, you’d have to be insane to oppose the Marxian paradise.  See?  All explained.  Tails I win, Heads you lose.  If you run into a situation like this, you might be in the presence of the corrupt Marxist philosophy.)  Nor do I think “we’re crazy because of industrialization” nor any of it.

I think the brain is a complex biological mechanism that not only can be thrown off by defects of manufacture (genetic defects I mean) and dents acquired in use (environmental pressures) but also can be influenced by whatever is going on in the rest of the body.

The later is very hard for me to accept because I like to think I’m in control of what I think and what I think with.  However, having been caught in an off-kilter hormonal cycle from hell off and on for ten years (no, not menopause.  Menopause is relatively easy to understand by comparison) I’ve come to realize that in at least one part of this cycle (which will keep worsening if not interrupted) I get so profoundly depressed that the only reason not to commit suicide is that I can’t muster enough energy.

By definition any “genteel” sort of affliction that doesn’t interfere much with how others around you experience you and might even bring pleasure to others – via stories – does not require treatment.

The truth is most of us would fight you tooth and nail if you tried to treat us.  See, the dream-state we enter when writing can be experienced as pleasurable or not, but one thing it is: intense.  We experience more intensity when working than most people do in their daily lives.  And one thing human beings have proven they can’t stand is boredom.  All the junkies who prefer bad trips to humdrum are living (or sometimes dead) proof of this.

So if you have a mechanism in your mind that can take you elsewhere and elsewhen and make you – for a time – someone else, but which is mostly under control and doesn’t affect your daily life, has no physical bad effects and is free – would you give it up?  I don’t know about you, brother, but I wouldn’t.  In fact I don’t.  In fact, sharing with other writers the belief that most decongestants  “turn of the writer thing” I will go through winter honking like a goose and sounding like Darth Vader rather than take them.

Since we’ve learned there are adaptations – celibacy – that benefit a colony of organisms even while not benefitting the organism, it’s in fact entirely possible that writers are a positive adaptation.  I have this theory that they gave Indo-European culture the boost to become the dominant culture in the world.  Writers are, for lack of a better explanation, the thing in the human community that tells people what they are.

Or we could all be nuttier than good quality fruitcake, of course.  This is possible.  But as long as we keep track of which voices in our heads are really hours, and which reality is really reality, there is no reason for anyone to intervene.
Now, in the past the way to keep the “writer thing” in its place was business.  If you were a working professional, you had to deep six, delay or modify many ideas, so you could finish/run with the ones that would support you.  (I can’t tell you how to kill, delay or modify the strong-presenting dreams, because what works for me might not work for you.  Thought avoidance works for the kill, but for the delay often you have to write down a few pages and reassure yourself it will be there when you come back to it – which is what I did with AFGM.  For “modify” you might have to write it out first, then edit ruthlessly.)

With indie that’s more difficult.  It’s easier to jump from dream to dream, never fully interacting with reality.

Can I help you with that?  Well, so far I’ve been keeping track of which world my body is actually in.  Finishing something before moving on is another thing.  I’m currently writing four novels at once, which is the best compromise I’ve found.

Generally, to keep your balance, remember reality is the thing that bites you if you ignore it.  You can spend time with hands over ears going lalalalalala at your character, but you’re not going to get evicted for failure to pay the mortgage THERE – you will for failing to pay it here.  Remember that kids and pets are important in the REAL reality.  If you don’t feed and pet your cats, they’ll sit around your desk and not let you write.  And kids need to be fed, cleaned, and moderately paid attention to.

And always remember which voice in your head is truly yours.

If you do that, you’ll keep balanced between reality and dream, you might even make a living off the dream AND there will be no reason to give you anti-psychotics.  Which, friends tell me, interfere with the writing-thing like nobody’s business.

That’s the best I can do for you.  It’s a battle we each must fight alone.  The success in fighting it determines whether you become a professional writer or a common, garden-variety nut.

Good luck.