Writer's Whirled

Writing For (or against) The Masses

2007-08-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

You wanna know how scary writing for the masses is?

Well, in the words of George Carlin, "Think about how stupid the average person is; now realize half of them are dumber than that."

Television, books, and movies alike have all been in recent years pandering more and more to the lowest common denominator of our culture. The horror/thriller movie genre has changed from action, suspense, and mystery to torture, rape, and murder. Reality shows have as little to do with reality as 'sunshine units' have to do with sunshine.

Go back; read a Heinlein or a Bradbury. Pick up an Asimov or a Burroughs. All are cornerstones of the Science Fiction and Fantasy markets. But look at them through the filters of a modern editor. Historical anachronisms aside, would any of them even be publishable nowadays? If Heinlein were still alive and he sent in a short story to a magazine under a pseudonym, what are the chances he'd get past the door? No, he'd get, like countless other great talents the world will never ever see, a rejection letter saying that "It's good, it's just not what the market's looking for nowadays".

Now, novice writers and friends alike, don't get me wrong. I know that my work will be nullified, mutated, and dumbed down. I know that if words and story were DNA, from the point of my ending Draft 1 to the point where (hopefully) a book gets published, the two versions will share as much in common as a hummingbird and a hippo. And I'm even ok with it, in a sort of detached Stockholm Syndrome sort of way.

So... I'll tow the line like a good little word soldier, but you won't find complacancy from me. I can't do it and still be a writer - I don't think it's possible without becoming a hack. Loose too much of your desire to express yourself, and you know what you get?

Serial Romance Novels.

________ held ________ against his _______, glistening with sweat as he worked the _______ of the _________. "I'll take you away from all this, _______. You'll never have to worry about ______ or ______ ever again once we get to _______."

"Oh, ______!" She cried passionately, holding her prone ______ close to his _______, feeling his ________ through his rippling ______. "I can't believe I nearly ________ to _______ because of ________. I'm so happy you found me in time!"

It's like MadLibs, except even more horrifying. And the sad thing is, you can insert that scene and dialog into almost any romance novel you find and it'll work.

This is why, to me at least, 'edit' is a four letter word. To be absolutely clear, I hate editing. It's what stopped me from every attempting to write a book before, and if I am defeated in my attempts this time it will doubtlessly be by editing. And not the "I before E except after C unless it's Tuesday in the month of May" kind of editing - I no I'm not prefect. Mispellings happen, liek it or knot.

No, I'm talking about "Gee, this is great and all, but do you think that perhaps you could..." editing. Anyone who wants to truly understand a creator's pain should watch The TV Set, a movie about what all this poor guy's script has to go through in order to get it produced. It's a very Shakesperian comedy (so sad it's funny). Anyone who's ever been creative should feel this pain.

And I know, there are those who will argue that it's the cost you go through in order to be successful (looking at you, Impy). I liken it to being a parent of a daugher - you know she's going to grow up and do some unspeakable things, you try and force yourself to hope for her sake she enjoys them, but you really REALLY don't want to think about it, especially while she's three.

Once More With Feeling

2007-08-19T00:16:00.000-07:00

Things have not gone 'as planned' with my novel.

Actually, I suppose in order for things to have gone 'as planned' that would have involved me having 'a plan' for them to deviate from. Don't get me wrong; I knew there would be complications involved in the writing process. It was fear of those complications (and a mire such as the one I've been stuck in for the last several months) that stopped me from writing a novel for the first ten or so years I was determined to write one.

I knew that, after the completion of my book (manuscript, insists my semi-agent) that there would be an extensive period of editing and re-editing. That entire sections would be removed, chopped up, torn apart, glued back together, and then presented to me as being 'better' than my original vision. I knew that, even with the help of my semi-non-official-agent-agent, there would be a lengthy period of shopping it around to different full agents, and that even once (if) we'd aquired a full agent we'd still have to begin again (again) and re-re-re-edit the whole thing before we'd be able to submit it to a publisher... who would doubtlessly have notes on how they'd like us to re-re-re-re-edit it.

In a way, I was almost ok with that. As one author (self-published, but hey) told me at PhilCon 2006, "I keep a printed copy of the 'original' version on my shelf and say to myself 'That there... that's the real story'. That's how I got through editing." I knew the story was going to change. Hell, the story has changed so much inside my head over the years, there's nothing anyone else could do to it any worse than running through the mulcher of my brain for ten years hadn't already done.

No... what I've run into is a new and entirely different sort of problem. One that, I suspect, most authors would give their right shift key to encounter. One that, nevertheless, has still flumoxed me for the last six or so months.

See, I started out trying to create a fairly detailed history of my world. The story is set in and about the year 6000 in what more or less is our future. In addition to the future-forward version our own native human culture, I invented several sub-cultures deviated from humanity throughout the years, as well as a handfull of alien races each with their own backstories and unique origins/secrets/stereotypes/social constructs/classes/castes/religions. Timelines were drafted, maps were drawn, small encyclopedic entries written. And that, in a nutshell, is my problem.

What I wrote is a perfectly good, fully functional, well-compiled... third book in a series.

Normally, that would be great. However when the third book precedes the first and second, and even the author isn't entirely sure what ought to go into books 1 and 2, it can tend to occasionally cause - and how can I say this delicately - bloody awful confusion. I know what I wrote is good. I'm not going to pull my usual modest BS line here and go "Awww, shucks, really?" No. I believe in my own abilities to tell stories. I just apparently don't have a firm grasp on where to START telling stories.

What I've written stands alone; you don't need books 1 and 2 to understand it or even to fully appreciate it. We COULD send it out now, shop it around, try and get some interrest going in it. Heck, it might even sell well and make me some money (I tell a lie - you never make money off the first book unless you or the publishers are insane). But, if I did that, I'd never be able to revisit the bit that I so conveniently skipped over to get to "the good part", as I call it. It'd be gone, obscure history, nevermore.

So... the last six months or so have been me, languishing. Not because the production turnaround time of my book isn't what I had hoped for; but instead because I screwed it up. Do I begin again, start where I can at least now clearly define the particular story arc beginning and write forward, trying to dovetail the already written and established story and this new exciting prequel together into one unified masterwork? Or do I just say "bugger it all" and do something else?

As of now, I've decided to write the first book and see how it goes. I've got a good story, even if I didn't deem it originally fit-for-print (and therefore shoved it into 'history' instead of 'story'). And I'm currently working through some various embellishments that, while not corrupring or bastardizing the original intent, make the events leading up to the current point of my work far more 'exiciting' and less 'people riding around in broken spaceships fussing with computers'.

The working title for Book 1, lifted with love from the less-popular-but-still-awesome Laziest Men On Mars song, is "The Terrible Secret of Space".

The 99% Paradox

2007-04-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

Inspiration is a fickle thing; light as a butterfly or heavy as a boulder, but rarely does it land on either extreme when you need it most. In the weeks preceding the completion of the first draft of my first novel, "The As-Yet-To-Be-Officially-Named Adventures-Of-Captain-Briggs-And-Some-Unpleasant-Insect-Monsters-From-Beyond-The-Stars", I was so filled with good ideas that I thought I might burst. Whole hosts of abandoned and forgotten side projects suddenly sprung to life, each bubbling forth with more ideas than my sleep-deprived mind was capable of handling. It was like stepping up to a partially completed jigsaw that you'd struggled with for hours before and, without thinking, rotating and matching that one completed piece so that it fits perfectly and the barn/bridge/country house with the children/dogs/ducks in front of it suddenly has a place in it's multi-faceted puzzle world.

Each new idea suddenly made sense... provided that it was directly associated to some project other than the novel-at-hand. Those ideas, like rare variant action figures, seemed to be packed one per case of 25 and were usually gone before I got to the store. Eventually, I had to start carrying a notebook and a audio recorder with me wherever I went in hopes that, if I couldn't remember, I might be able to at least record my better ideas.

Now, compare and contrast that with immediately after finishing Draft-of-book-1. Suddenly, I am filled with a great emptiness, as if I have launched my only firework and now have nothing to do but watch the others explode into the night sky. I know my work is not done - I'm starting to get some sneaking suspicions that I may have done myself a terrible wrong in writing this first book that it'll take me years to untangle (more on this later). But there's no heart in me; least not now.

It reminds me of a problem once faced by a laptop owned by my soon to be wife. In order to conserve power and make the laptop function longer, they rigged it so that the fans would only kick on at full power once the processor reached 100% of it's load capacity. Not a bad idea in and of itself. The problem was that some other branch of their R&D department had engineered the processor so that it was only capable of running at full capacity if it sensed that the fans were running at their highest speed. Also, as a stand-alone, not a bad idea.

The result? The processor only got up to 99% utilization and stopped, waiting for fans that would never kick on... because the fans were waiting for the processor to cross that line first. Both sides danced back and forth along the 99% threshhold, neither able to cross without the other, both slowly pushing themselves towards destruction.

I was the same in highschool. The closer the deadline -> The better the ideas -> The less time to enact them in. Why, I remember getting a perfect 100% grade on a report I wrote (poorly) in the class before it was due. It's not that I couldn't have done well if I'd taken the whole 3 weeks to 2 months assigned... it's just that deadlines make the brain work faster.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but capacity is the baby's mama of creativity.

Writer's Whirled

2007-02-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

In Spring of 1998, I began writing 'The Great American SciFi Novel'.

In early January 2007, almost 9 years later, I finished.

Not that I was writing for 9 years constantly, mind you. Heavens no. I mean, the first novel does go on a bit (clocking in currently at 350 + pages) but if I'd been writing for 9 years solid... well, my fingers would probably have fallen off. You'd be talking about some serious long-term damage to your joints and tendons.

No, apparently I just have this tendency to get distracted. If life were a video game and I was an enemy and you were looking at my 'Weaknesses' column in a strategy guide, it might read something like this: Bright shiny objects, loud noises, video games, new fads, side projects, world politics, quantum physics, prime-time television, cats, existential angst, and bright shiny objects.

So, following the completion of the first draft of the first book and the realization that I may just do this again and again, my literary agent has suggested that I attempt to document the process in some permanent and fan-base-generating manner. To this end, I am crafting this wonderful blog to describe, often in painful detail, the adventures I experience in-and-out of my fantasy worlds, and the journey my novels are taking from point a (a bad idea which appeals to me and lives inside my head) to point b (a bad idea which suddenly appeals to everyone else and lives in a word processing document).

Contained within, henceforth and forthwith, I promise to badger my reading audience ample doses of trivia and personal opinions on software, hardware, writing styles, spell checkers, why I'm right and the spell-checker is wrong, and how I can't learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. Sprinkled across this landscape will be wry social commentary, the occasional cheap shot at pop culture, the occasional expensive shot at pop culture, wit, wisdom, and puns.

Oh, yes, there will be puns.

Welcome to Writer's Whirled.

Insomnia

2006-12-30T02:17:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I wrote a majority of what will be the climax of my first novel. I've been at it for almost 8 hours and have had well over half a bottle of Vault Zero, which perhaps explains why it's 8 AM and I seem to have neither the desire nor the capacity for sleep. Alas, I will try.

The recent burst of writing comes part in parcel with a challenge I received from Hilary, who tasked me with the completion of this particular writing endavour before the end of the year. In the last three days, I've written nearly 10,000 words, bringing my total count up to 98,000. Now, I'd like to have gone that extra 2,000 tonight, but I'm afraid that if I do I may die from exhaustion tomorrow (and if not that from Jacque when she reads this and sees what I've been up to).

I've retired to the basement, because it is A) away from the laptop, and B) Dark.

Damn caffeine. So as it giveth, it taketh awayth.