On Writing

A couple of points that are key to this post:

1. I do not believe in false modesty, so all mentions of personal insufficiency herein are heartfelt.
2. I do believe in publicly shaming myself into action.

From my earliest days of self-awareness, I had a burning drive to be a writer. This stemmed from my being a voracious reader of books; science fiction, specifically. Thankfully, I grew up in a pre-internet era, or these beloved electrons would have kept me from so many delightful hours and days completely immersed in dead paper.

I read hundreds of -- perhaps a thousand or more -- science fiction books as a youngster. I can't pinpoint exactly when I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I recall imagining the dozens of manuscripts I would write, and when I was -- eight? nine? -- asking my father for a filing cabinet so I could store my works-to-be. He suggested buying a little cardboard two-drawer thing for me (I've had one for years now, as it happens, and they are surprisingly useful), and I was discouraged because I knew it wouldn't be large enough for my coming output, and so I didn't get into writing quite yet.

This thing of having plans and never actually executing them was to be the curse of my life, as it turned out. And while I may have slain a few of the mental dragons involved, conquering it completely remains my holy grail.

As I became an early teenager the writing flame began to burn all the brighter, and I made my first couple of attempts to scratch some handwritten thing out. In High School, my friends new me as the wannabe writer, and I even completed a small thing or two on a sturdy manual typewriter, including something intended for the first Writers of the Future contest.

The most successful story I ever wrote back then had an odd little history. I had a rather depressive friend who at some point was close enough to killing himself that he called a suicide hotline, who promptly alerted the cops while assuring him all along that his privacy was guaranteed, even as he watched the officers get out of the car and approach his door. He spent a bit of time in a facility for troubled youth, and when he returned he was naturally enough behind on his school work. His English teacher told him he could make up credit by writing stories, so my friend and I spent an all-nighter taking turns churning out stories on his Apple II that he could turn in.

One of my stories was from the first-person point of view, started out something like this:

You must listen to me. I have a message. The world hangs in the balance, but first I must get someone to hear me.

Throughout the story the protagonist pleads that someone must listen to his message to save the world, but no one hears him and in the end he dies knowing that humanity will also die for not having listened.

My friend turned in this story, and for some reason the teacher took this oddity about the death of us all from a recently-suicidal student rather seriously. Next thing my friend knew he was in the Principal's office expected to explain the meaning behind a story that he couldn't quite remember, given both the fog of the all-nighter and the problem of not having actually written it. Thankfully we were a decade or more away from Columbine, or he might still be in that Principal's office.

As I approached graduation, my intent was to be a full-time or almost full-time writer and to set the world on fire. At the first or second mind-blowing science fiction convention I attended (NorWesCon), where I was immersed in the shocking experience of fitting in somewhere, I encountered a woman, Bridget, who would change my life.

I was looking for some kind of writer's group, and Bridget happened to be involved in one, the only problem being that it was in another state. Somehow we decided we could get past that, so I ended up joining them remotely. They would tape their meetings and send the tapes to me, and I would tape myself and send the tape and my latest story back to them -- this was a very high-latency precursor to Skype.

Through this I met my partner of 20+ years, which is the biggest way my life was changed, but that is another story.

As for writing, I burned with mental energy and could churn out the bad stories. I would get gripped with an image or line of prose and have it take over my brain until I could get it out...one way to make sure I would finish a scene or story was to not let myself actually write down the magic line in my head until I had written out all the preceding material, at which point I got to experience a mental fireworks show as I put down the words that had been haunting me til that moment.

Nothing else meant nearly as much as writing to me. This was clearly my purpose in life, and the one thing I had to be.

But it wasn't to be.

For one thing, there was the need to make a living. Which required, to my dismay, doing the one thing I was sure I would escape: Working 9-5 in a corporate office.

For another, there was the artistic maturity problem. I actually had a facility for throwing around words (much more so then than now, I fear), and found I could write some interesting letters and sometimes weave an interesting auto-biographical tale, but when it came to making up stuff about how other people talk and think and creating plots that I wouldn't immediately eviscerate as being ridiculous and unacceptable, I became a blithering idiot.

Also, I had some strange mental hang-ups. Like, for no particular reason, I believed you could only write something you already knew. The idea that researching something was an acceptable way to proceed was repellent to me, and if I did try to research something and then write that into a story, it felt incredibly and obviously artificial, like I was yelling, "Look what I read about!" It's surprisingly crippling to a writer to be stuck with what you already know, especially if you are eighteen.

The plot problem was a big one. Not only would I not allow the seed of a plot to live long enough to find its own way, but I would constantly plot myself into a corner and then give up on the story because it turned out not to work. I simply could not see or accept that, as the writer, I was in charge of the universe and could make anything happen that I wanted. Somehow the plot had to spring up organically and then all the parts must work perfectly together without artificial interference from my conscious mind. Since this more or less doesn't happen in the real world, I was truly stuck.

And there were other issues, such as lacking the ability to perceive passage of time and familiarity with character that the reader would have, such that on page three I would feel like the reader had been living with this character forever and knew him as well as a family member, when in fact the reader hadn't quite cottoned on to their name yet.

I soldiered on, spending years obsessed with one story that I could never get right, based on my relationship with the depressive friend mentioned above, and then with another story about a spaceman stuck on a planet that never came together, then trying to combine those two stories...eventually I toyed with playwriting, and found the excellent The Playwright's Handbook, which I recommend to anyone writing any sort of fiction. The interest in playwriting prompted me to join a local playwriting workshop that was quite educational.

The workshop was weekly, and consisted of doing a writing exercise, then everyone turning in the progress they'd made on their play that week and hearing it read by two professional actors, after which we all critiqued that week's work. This format was amazing, because it's simply unheard of for complete amateurs to get to hear professionals perform their work days or hours after pen hits paper.

For a year I attempted to turn that same muddled story that had been obsessing me into a play. After a year I had a couple of reasonably good scenes, and got the honor of having one of the scenes produced as part of a workshop contest. Unfortunately, life events and a misunderstanding with the instructor ended my participation in that workshop; if I got something out of it that really stuck with me, it was the hours and hours of listening to and commenting on the work of other budding playwrights.

My writing drive began to fade. The vast chasm between my taste/sense of quality and what I could actually produce had eroded my lifelong desire. Here and there I tried something again, only to back away when I saw the result.

I knew that the only answer to these issues was to continue trying, to actually finish some stories, and to slowly learn the craft. But I just didn't have the patience. Eventually playing computer games, and then making computer games, became my hobbyist passion, particularly once I found the BYOND game creation system, which was right up my alley, so much so that I spent years creating games and eventually contributing to the business aspects of the system and the revamping of their website.

Oddly, I discovered that when it came to designing computer games, many of my writing hang-ups were not to be found. I had no problem dispassionately looking at the components of a game that wasn't quite working and re-arranging them until something good resulted. When it came to game design, I lacked the lifelong soul-defining desire that would crush any creative thought before it could be fully born. I was able to treat it, as Penn Jillette describes Penn & Teller's handling of their magic show, like "running a laundromat".

And this eventually resulted in a popular game that gets a bit of play to this day. My collaborators (hi Guy T!) and I put in a lot of work and the work paid off in satisfaction, but when the work was done I didn't find myself embiggened, as Jebediah Springfield would say.

So my fancies turned back toward writing, and the hope that I could get some of that game design mojo to rub off on my craft of choice. Mr T (Guy T, that is) and I worked on some things together that we never quite finished (ahem, there!). In the meantime, Guy was editing a BYOND-based web magazine, BYONDscape, and interested in accepting fiction. So I decided to try an make progress this way: I would just write stuff as well as I could on the first try but without letting my self-criticism kick in, and I would send them to Guy before I could talk myself out of it, and it would be up to him whether to publish them.

In this manner I actually completed several stories and Guy agreed to publish them. Score something for me, even if in retrospect I find all but two of them cringeworthy; they were reasonable for that audience and that format, and the rule was to just get them out there. Later I submitted the stories to the science fiction podcast magazine, Escape Pod, which rejected all of them but did seem to at least take a couple into real consideration (I judge this by the fact that when something really didn't work for them, I got it back in about 20 seconds...)

Being serially rejected by Escape Pod, while to be completely expected, demotivated me again. I had a story in progress that quickly felt amateurish, so I let it hang. It's been a while, but now that I find myself reading the slap-to-the-face that is the ultimate James Tiptree, Jr. collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, I find myself both marveling at her (yes, her -- I'm likely to get into that in another post) bracing prose and ability to instantly capture an adult personality in a few words and thinking that for that last story I was working on, if I just twisted this and did a bit of that, maybe it wouldn't be so bad...

But how to publish? BYONDscape is no more in that form. Years and experience have thoroughly disabused me of the universal notion of the new writer that having a work selected for publication anoints one, changes one, or does a damn thing for one (other than get a bit of a paycheck, if you are lucky). And in this webbified instant world, waiting months or years for response isn't too interesting either.

I'm fully aware that this attitude marks me as a permanent amateur, and that I'm avoiding the true path to publication...but, really, I don't care. At this point in life, writing fiction, like blog writing, is for the improvement and enjoyment of myself and those few outside of my head who might be interested.

So I am resolved: I will publish the occasional thing on this blog, at whatever frequency they occur. There will be a "Stories" block on the side, to taunt me with its near emptiness, and for each item I decide to publish here I'll provide a corresponding post with some background on how the story came to be. Stories will be open for comments, and I'll refine them at my whim or if a suggestion inspires me.

I will seed the box with the two stories I mentioned that don't quite have me trying to kill myself in despair. You are welcome to join in the taunting if I'm not holding up my end.

Now you know where I am and how I got here. Be kind, but be not gentle.

Comments

[Guy T.]

There's a lot there to comment on, but since I have to get up early, I'll limit myself to this bit:

> I'm fully aware that this attitude marks me as a permanent amateur, and that I'm avoiding the true path to publication...but, really, I don't care. At this point in life, writing fiction, like blog writing, is for the improvement and enjoyment of myself and those few outside of my head who might be interested.

I think that's the best possible attitude to have... of course, it happens to be the one I've adopted myself. I've been working on a "magnum opus" for some time, and my plan is that when I finish it I'll go to the Creative Commons license generator, whip up the proper text and insert it, convert the document to a PDF, and then release it for free on the Internet. Finishing it -- and being satisfied with its finished form -- will (or should) be sufficient justification for the labor. Everything else is gravy.

Of course, my attitude could change quickly if the next Depression comes upon us and I think I can make a few bucks cranking out words. (I actually tried to put together a "potboiler" novel this summer, and came up with some pretty cool notes for it over the space of about two or three weeks, before deciding I should be faithful to the project I've been working on.) But when you have a good day job and you're good at it, it's probably much better to be grateful for it than to resent it as a necessary but time-draining evil.

Now and again in my copious Internet browsing I run across bloggers who discuss what they've learned about the "true path to publication," as you put it: the submission/rejection process, the book/movie industry terms for various tropes, and so forth. It's commendable that they've done their homework, but at times it can be a little creepy, reading about the way "insiders" work as related by someone who is emphatically not an "insider."

I have to think that if you're writing to someone else's idea of the "right way" to write, you're not doing yourself any favors in the long run. It is definitely good to know what's come before, and what readers/viewers tend to like, and what tends to be a deal-killer; but IMHO, the people who tend to impress me the most are the people who A) take the time to learn the rules and then B) violate the rules, if and when needed, after careful consideration of where the rules have merit and where they fail.

[Ronald Hayden]

Guy said:
I've been working on a "magnum opus" for some time, and my plan is that when I finish it I'll go to the Creative Commons license generator, whip up the proper text and insert it, convert the document to a PDF, and then release it for free on the Internet.

By the way, I remain available to provide editorial services or whatever on that if you wish (I think we talked about that some time back) -- I'd certainly like to see it come to pass, as I know you've worked on it for a long time.

Something I forgot to mention, that might be useful for this kind of scenario, is the podcast/audiobook route. And in getting into detail on that I realized, as I often do, that the topic is worthy of its own post...so I'll work that up and it'll show up in a few days...

[Guy T.]

> By the way, I remain available to provide editorial services or whatever on that if you wish (I think we talked about that some time back) -- I'd certainly like to see it come to pass, as I know you've worked on it for a long time.

Thanks! I've actually already thought you would be one of a very few people I might ask for opinions before the final release. You mentioned the problem of the character who the author expects is fully introduced in three pages, while the reader doesn't yet know his name -- knowing my writing habits, that could be an issue. I recently read some stuff I wrote a while back and even I had to stop and backtrack to figure out all the stuff that a reader was supposed to automatically deduce from the preceding text.

> Something I forgot to mention, that might be useful for this kind of scenario, is the podcast/audiobook route. And in getting into detail on that I realized, as I often do, that the topic is worthy of its own post...so I'll work that up and it'll show up in a few days...

Yep, that's definitely an option once I get to that point. BTW, I downloaded that (Something) Elephant audiobook (the Civil War one) and expect I'll listen to it soon.