Assorted Nonsense

I read an interview with Stephen R. Donaldson the other day (author of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles, the Axebrewder mysteries, the Gap saga, and others).  In it he stated what an excruciatingly slow writer he is.

And instantly I felt a lot better about myself.

I felt even better when he expressed one of the reasons why he’s a slow writer.  He said its because he never comes right out and expresses the emotions of his characters.  This is one of the reason’s why I’m a slow writer, too (sadly, the comparisons probably end there).

Not expressing emotions directly means you have to find other means of indicating the emotions of your characters.  So easy just to say, Ridley came home all happy.  Much more difficult to express that sentiment in some other subtle fashion, in a way that makes the reader complicit in the story.   “Ridley fairly capered up the front steps of the house,”  maybe.

Why do this?  To immerse the reader that much more fully in the story.  If you tell the reader too much, if you don’t leave a little bit for them to figure out, they don’t get as involved in the story.  You want to make them think.  You want to raise questions that compell them to read further to get those questions answered.

Why is Ridley capering up those steps?   Does that mean he’s happy?  You don’t caper if you’re angry.  Do you?  I’d better read a bit further to see why he’s capering, to see if I’m right.

Once you get the reader thinking like that, they’re hooked.  I hope.  At least that’s what I’m counting on.

Also, honestly, it’s probably a bit of a game with me.  I can’t come right out and state things like that explicitly, even if I want to.  I will, sometimes, in early drafts.  But I always change it.  It’s my rule.  Never come right out and state what the characters are feeling.  Show what they’re feeling instead.

The downside, of course, is that it takes me a long time to finish writing a novel.

Here’s hoping it’s worth it.

Just for fun, and because I keep mentioning it, here’s a snippet of “A Time and a Place”.  I read this bit to a bunch of friends recently and the resultant scorn and derision was well within acceptable limits.  I don’t think posting this tiny little section is giving too much away.

The section starts at page one hundred and sixty-three of the novel, at the beginning of Chapter Eleven, a chapter entitled Vegetation Abounded:

It was awful – the light too bright and the sounds too loud.  I cried out and curled up into a ball to protect myself.

“Wildebear!  Can you hear me?  What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s not used to it.”

“Will he be all right?”

“He should.”

“Should?”

“He might not.”

“Will he or won’t he?”

“That’s what you’re here for, doctor.  To see that he’s okay.”

“Hmph.  What happened to him?”

“Not much.  Plenty.”

“That’s an infuriating thing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – just don’t say anything like that ever again.”

“I can’t promise that I’ll –”

“Okay okay, just — where was he, anyway?”

“Where he needed to be.”

“Oh for crying out – Wildebear!  Wildebear, it’s me, Humphrey.”

I peeked out from between my arms to see who was talking.  Humphrey – the name sounded familiar.  He had a lot of meat on him, this Humphrey.  He’d make a sumptuous meal.  And I just happened to be starving.  Although a part of me knew that there was something very wrong with the idea, I unfurled myself in anticipation of a feast.  Catching a glimpse of one of my front paws, I was shocked to discover that it was almost completely hairless.  My God!  Was I ill?  I emitted a most un-T’Klee like whimper and curled back up.

“Physiologically he’s all over the map,” a voice said.  “His pulse is racing and his serotonin levels are dangerously low.”

It had come from my front foreleg.  Something shiny and silver was attached to me.  I tried to lick it off.

The creature Humphrey leaned down to touch me.  Instantly I whirled on it, but something was the matter with my reflexes.  Before I could deliver the coup de grace the Humphrey creature grabbed hold of me and held fast.  I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been captured by my own prey.  It was like having been bested by a bandaloot.  I hoped that none of my brothers were around to see.

Except that… I had no brothers.  It was Cat’s brothers I was thinking of.

And I was not Cat.

Was I?

“Damn it Wildebear, what were you trying to do?  Slit my throat?”

Humphrey.  Humphrey!  It was my old friend Doctor Peter Humphrey – and I had been about to eat him!  What had I been thinking?  Awfully confused, flitting back and forth between two identities, one human, the other a cat, I could not have said with any degree of certainty who or what I was just then.

“You should think about cutting your nails once in a while,” Humphrey muttered.

A thin red line had emerged on the side of Humphrey’s neck.  My attempt to dispatch him had come altogether too close for comfort. I started to apologize, but couldn’t seem to get the words out — talking involved using whiskers I no longer possessed.

Humphrey let go and stepped back.  I desperately tried to pull myself together.  I had no fur, no whiskers; I was, therefore, not a cat.  I was a human.  And humans spoke with their –

“Humphrey!  I – I’m so sorry.  It’s – it’s good to see you alive!”

He touched a finger to his neck.  The tip came away red.  “Little thanks to you.”

I rose to my feet and took in my surroundings.  We were in a small room blanketed in luxurious sheets and pillows.  Frills, tassels, reds and purples abounded.  The furnishings would not have been out of place in a Sultan’s tent… or that of a T’Klee.  Humphrey and I were not the only ones in the room, I saw.  Iugurtha was there as well.

I began backing away slowly.

“You’re scaring him,” Humphrey told her.

“It’s not me he should be afraid of,” she said.

And with that everything fell into place.  Suddenly I knew precisely who I was, where I was, and what I had just been through.  It seemed incredible, but I had just spent several days, possibly weeks, living inside the mind of an alien cat.  I had witnessed the subjugation of a people I had come to love by a race of horrible monsters.  After an experience like that it was a wonder I was anything resembling sane.

“Wildebear.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“You’re licking the backs of your hands.”

“Ah.”  I stopped and considered.  “So I am.”  Then, because there really was no better way to relieve stress, I resumed licking in earnest.  “Please don’t ever throw me through the gate again,” I told Iugurtha in between licks.

“Once should suffice,” she said.  “What is your opinion, Doctor?  Is he in good health?”

“Nothing a little bed rest and years of psychotherapy won’t fix,” Humphrey replied.

Mention of rest made me realize how exhausted I was.  I excused myself, curled atop several of the fluffiest pillows I could find, and purred myself to sleep in a matter of seconds.

The Fiction Editor is a little gem about editing novels by a fellow named Thomas McCormack. It’s probably the best book on editing fiction I’ve ever read, and I’ve read plenty.

Most books on writing you’re lucky if you pick up one good tip. I’m serious about that. In one book I learned to be careful with the verb “To be” (it’s better to say “the birds flew” than “the birds were flying”). In another book I learned that the maxim “show don’t tell” is not a one size fits all piece of advice (sometimes it’s better to sum up crucial facts quickly than add a chapter to your manuscript). In yet another I learned to use a single name for your characters (don’t keep changing the name from Fred to the red haired youth to the budding gymnast back to Fred again) and in another I learned that tension does not exist in the manuscript but rather in the reader, and is generated by constantly posing questions that must be answered.

In McCormack’s text, although not quite one-stop shopping, I garnered many such tips.

McCormack is a former editor for St. Martin’s Press. In fact, he ran the joint for many years, and in so doing turned its fortunes around (it was on its deathbed when he inherited it). But he was always a budding writer (dramatist mainly) and clearly empathised with the writers with whom he worked, relating strongly to their needs. And what many of them need most is a good editor.

McCormack’s main premise in The Fiction Editor is that good editors are few and far between, and this is primarily because editing has always been mostly an intuitive endeavour. Editors have a few tricks up their sleeves but mostly they seem to go by their guts. They might recognize that something doesn’t quite work, but they don’t necessarily know why it doesn’t work, or how to fix it. McCormack argues strongly for a more disciplined, almost scientifically rigourous approach to editing.

I’ve always felt myself that there are a million hidden rules in writing, that I’ve gradually been unearthing one by one, almost like panning for gold. I have yearned for a teacher who could lay those rules out one by one, clearly, sytematically, a process after which I would know how to write not only clearly and quickly, but well.

McCormack goes on to divulge a few tricks of the trade, a mere handful compared to what must be out there, but far more than in most books. I suggest you purchase the book (now in an expanded second edition, available at Amazon.com) to find out what they are.

One caveat: The Fiction Editor is slightly self-indulgent. McCormack was the most powerful man in his company (I suspect) when he wrote it; it could have benefited from at least one more pass (hence the second edition… I own the first). I wonder if his underlings were afraid to point out a few things. For instance, he loves to make up words (neologisms, for which he apologizes). Actually, I quite like many of his neologisms, such as “gad factor” (the extent to which characters conflict). Others (such as “somacluster”) don’t work quite so well (I’ve read the book twice and still can’t quite remember what somacluster is supposed to mean).

The worst is “master prelibation,” which is really just an unfortunate and distracting choice of words, and which, were it not for McCormack’s otherwise earnest tone, I might almost suspect is a joke on his part (although I suppose it’s possible my own twisted sensibility might be at play there).

But I wouldn’t let that exceedingly minor caveat put you off. This really is a terrific little book on the art of fiction editing.

Here’s something that I don’t really get, and that I find kind of sad.

I just finished reading a memoir by Larry McMurtry called “Books.”  Although McMurtry is an Academy Award winning screenwriter (Brokeback Mountain, with Diana Ossana), the author of 28 novels, including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove, he is also the owner and operator of a used bookstore, and has been for about thirty years.  “Books” is about this alternative career.

That’s not what I find sad.

What I find sad is McMurtry’s admission that he never wrote a “great” novel.  Here’s what he has to say about his novels:

Most were good, three or four were indifferent to bad, and two or three were really good.  None, to my regret, were great, although my long Western Lonesome Dove was very popular… popularity, of course, is not the same as greatness.

Lonesome Dove is one of my favourite novels.  Maybe McMurtry is right… it’s not great.  It’s awesome!  If my novel were even one thousandth as good as Lonesome Dove I would be ecstatic.

I don’t think that McMurtry is being modest.  He’s been surrounded by books for so long that he has too many to compare his to.  He’s comparing his books to the likes of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.  It’s apples and oranges.  Newton’s is great for one reason, and Lonesome Dove is great for another.

It may be that the quality of your work is inversely proportional to how good you think it is.

I think my novel is coming along quite well.

Oh.

Damn.

Here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve encountered lately. People expressing concern because I am nearing completion of my novel “A Time and a Place”. They’re concerned because I’ve obviously invested so much time and energy into this project — the genesis of the novel was more than twenty years ago (though I’ve only been working on it in earnest for about four years).

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…

One panel I attended at Worldcon was called something like “The Analog Story”, or “What Makes an Analog Story”, or “How To Get Your Hopes Up Only To Have Them Dashed Much The Same Way That Girl in The Tenth Grade Ripped Your Heart Out Of Your Chest With Her Bare Hands, Then Spit On It, Then Threw It Into A Woodchipper.”

What the heck am I talking about.

I’m talking about a panel moderated by the well known, well regarded Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog. Mr. Schmidt, along with three or four other panelists (among them London, Ontario based writer Paddy Forde), discussed what they consider to be the kind of stories Analog magazine is looking for.

I must admit it’s been a while since I thumbed through the pages of an Analog, and I kind of had the impression that they were looking for nuts and bolts kind of stories these days, heavy on the hard science fiction. According to Mr. Schmidt, this isn’t quite the case. He prefers character based stories, with plenty of emotion (the kind of story Paddy Forde delivers in spades… he’s had two stories published in Analog, both reader favourites.)

I asked Mr. Schmidt what he thinks of humourous stories. He said he would like to see a lot more of them. This got me thinking. I try to insert a fair bit of humour into my stories. Actually, I don’t try, it just comes naturally (of course, whether anybody actually thinks it’s funny is another story). It just so happens that in the middle of my novel-in-progress (so close to being finished! so close!) there is a standalone story. Kind of a rumination on time travel, laced with (attempts at) gentle humour. I decided to package it up and throw it Mr. Schmidt’s way. It seemed to me that it might be his kind of story.

So there, you see, I got my hopes up. The story (called She That Dwells) is now in the mail, wending its way to Mr. Schmidt. A few weeks from now I’ll get a self-addressed envelope in the mail containing a form letter informing me that BZZZZZZT!!!! I should think about trying again. (Yes I know I should think more positively… it’s just that I’m bracing myself, you see.)

Because if this story is rejected, it means… maybe… the novel will be rejected.

Which actually means nothing, of course. Because one of the other things I learned at Worldcon (or was reminded of, because I already knew it) is how many times some truly fantastic novels have been rejected in the past. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman was rejected eight, nine times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up. This is astonishing to me… such a readable, important, fantastic novel, rejected so many times. Publishers should have been BATTLING one another over it.

So if my story (and subsequently my novel) is rejected, it won’t matter much. Like Haldeman, I’ll just keep plugging away until somebody somewhere buys it.

Shook Haldeman’s hand at the con, by the way. Told him how much I loved his book. What else is there to say? Thanks, he said, and signed it To Joe from Joe (what else was there for him to say? He’d said everything he needed to say in the book).

So wish me luck, because even though it won’t matter if Mr. Schmidt rejects She That Dwells…

… it sure would be nice if he published it.

David Hartwell is the Senior Editor at Tor/Forge Books, and one of the people I very much wanted to meet at WorldCon. He is the editor of many well known, well regarded Tor/Forge authors such as Robert J. Sawyer and Karl Schroeder and a great deal many more. He’s the man responsible for putting Guy Gavriel Kay on the map (to name just one) and I have the perception that he knows a great deal about publishing, writing and editing. I wanted the opportunity to extract as much information out of this man as possible.

Plus he seems like a nice guy.

I didn’t get to meet him one on one, but I did attend a panel which, although called a panel, consisted only of him facing an audience of perhaps twenty-five interested souls. I would call them aspiring writers, but the questions they asked did not indicate that writing or editing was of any particular interest to them. Because those subjects are my chief interest, I don’t really remember any of the questions or answers not related to writing or editing.

That’s what the panel consisted of: people lobbing questions at Hartwell, all of which he answered gamely and at some length. I got two questions in. The first was something along the lines of: “I’m interested in your work as an editor. Specifically, you edit the manuscripts of highly accomplished writers. What do you typically find wrong with such manuscripts, and how do you fix them?”

He said (and I am of course paraphrasing): “That question is just specific enough that I can answer it in something less than half an hour.” (Which got a chuckle.) “Most of the manuscripts that we receive have too many things wrong with them, so they don’t get published. Of the ones that we do publish, the single most common problem of professional writers is setting. The writers don’t spend enough time on setting.”

I found this really interesting. Naturally you might think that professional writers get most things right, maybe they might screw up continuity or make the odd grammatical error, but setting? I’ve spent a lot of time on setting in my (darned near completed) novel, so this response gave me hope, though that doesn’t mean that I’ve necessarily gotten it right.

Hartwell provided this example of a writer getting it right. There’s a sentence in a Heinlein novel (Fergus Heywood later told me which novel, but I forget) that goes like this: The door dilated. That sentence (according to Hartwell, and I agree) packs quite a punch as far as setting goes. Instantly you know you’re in the future (doors don’t typically dilate in this day and age).

Later I got to ask Hartwell another question. That morning, I told him, listening to Neil Gaiman speak, Neil had spoken of his quest to learn how to write a compelling story, one that keeps you engaged. One day events conspired to teach him this. It was after watching a Peter Greenaway movie, I believe, which lacked a compelling plot, yet that nevertheless kept his eyes riveted to the screen. I apologize to Gaiman if I have this wrong. But the point is the plot itself didn’t keep Gaiman engaged, it was other factors in the movie. Gaiman decided all that was necessary to write an effective story was to write a sentence that compelled the reader to move on to the next sentence, which compelled the reader onto the next sentence, and so on.

I related a portion of the above to Hartwell and asked for his opinion on writing a compelling story. He said, more or less, that it was up to each individual writer to find the secret of telling a compelling story for themselves. And it was different for each writer. Some writers use the interesting sentence after interesting sentence method, others painstakingly plot things out, others make it up as they go along, others use a sketchy outline, and so on.

I prefaced this last question with the remark that I had a thousand questions for Hartwell, but I would limit it to one this time.

He replied, “One for now.”

Here’s hoping I get to ask him many more in the not-too-distant future.

Wow!

Actual time to blog.

Naturally it doesn’t correspond with an ability to come up with anything resembling an entertaining post.

Hey, I just hit page 250 of the final draft of my novel. Exactly 103 pages to go of revision… assuming I keep all 103 pages left. Actually, if experience is any guide, it’ll probably morph into even more than 130 pages, as I always seem to be adding material. Which is fine as I want it to come out at 100,000 words. That’s the goal, and between the material I delete and the material I add I do believe it’s going to work out to around that.

Man, I can’t imagine actually finishing the thing.

Gawd I hope I finish the thing.

There are those who don’t believe I will finish it. There are even those who believe that subconsciously I don’t want to finish it, for some bizarre Freudian reason involving fish or something.

Let me just state here and now that I really want to finish it! I want to finish it so badly that I almost can’t stand it when the Go Train pulls into the station each morning and evening. Sometimes the Go Train is delayed en route and I couldn’t be happier! More time to write. Then they clear up whatever problem kept us back and sadly we are on our way again.

(I imagine retiring from my day job someday and attempting to write only to discover that I can only write on the Go Train. So I buy a monthly pass and spend my days traveling back and forth on the Lakeshore line, writing contentedly away.)

And with that my four and a half minutes of available blogging time is all used up. You might think that an entire four and a half minutes should have produced a post infinitely more interesting than a hackneyed update of where I am with the novel…

…but you would be wrong.

BEST NOVEL: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)

BEST NOVELLA: “All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Dec. 2007, Subterranean Press) [See SF Signal review]

BEST NOVELETTE: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang (F&SF Sept. 2007) [See SF Signal review]

BEST SHORT STORY: “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s June 2007) [See SF Signal review]

BEST RELATED BOOK: Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press) [See SF Signal review]

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Stardust Written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Paramount Pictures)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM: Doctor Who “Blink” Written by Stephen Moffat Directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR, SHORT FORM: Gordon Van Gelder

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR, LONG FORM: David G. Hartwell

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: Stephan Martiniere

BEST SEMIPROZINE: Locus

BEST FANZINE: File 770 edited by Mike Glyer

BEST FAN WRITER: John Scalzi

BEST FAN ARTIST: Brad Foster

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER: Mary Robinette Kowal

Just when I was nearing completion, I’m forced to stop…!