The Heironymus machine; one of the many unlikely things contained within my novella, Of All Possible Worlds.
My novella, Of All Possible Worlds will be inhabiting some future edition of Asimov’s, all 20,000 words of it.
So I’m happy about this. I’m also kicking myself.
I wish I’d not opted out for two decades on the fiction writing, but that’s water over the bridge. Or under it. Or is it water over the dam? Or the Damn? Or something. It’s water, and it’s in some way no longer accessible.
Here’s hoping I get plenty more water to, ah, write with. Not piss away.
I lacked confidence in myself, confidence in the work; I didn’t think I could get much better, than I was writing in the 90s, and I wasn’t getting the kind of reception I wanted with the short stories; which was absurd. I had sales and editors I was working with who were wonderful people. Also, I’d only been at it for six or seven years, why the hell couldn’t I keep getting better at it? Why did I have to assume I’d hit a plateau?
The real problem was in me, not the world; with my expectations, with my bipolar nature.
I couldn’t believe in anything hard enough, long enough, to write at longer lengths. Finishing short stories required acts of will almost beyond me. Suspending disbelief in my own inadequacy. Mostly I wrote for my workshop, in the hope of inspiring them to write more; even the worst story I wrote I felt was somehow an inspiration.
See? I made myself write this. Sure, it’s not very good, but hey, it’s there. It’s good in places.
So, you’d think, now, finally with validation, that this would be behind me. That I’d know, that it’s OK, to pour myself into these things, because they do pay off, eventually.
You think that? Heh. Well. You’re a regular bundle of sunshine, aren’t you?
Success or failure is a greek chorus, as Nancy Kress once told me. You want to write? Write.
That’s all there is to it. It always pays off. Except when it doesn’t, and you have to throw it away, because, you know, you still make sucky things. I do still make sucky things. Alas.
But seriously, what the hell else am I going to do?
My novella, Of All Possible Worlds, has now gone back to Sheila Williams at Asimovs for a final decision. Will it or won’t it be the longest story I’ve ever I’ver sold–or told. I won’t know for some period of time, weeks or months, but it feels good to be done with it for now.
The story includes some history of science fiction elements, as well as, well, historical elements, taking place in the 90s in an alternate universe where JFK, Robert Kennedy, and MLK were never assassinated. The Dean Drive, a supposed reactionless space drive technology which was promoted in the pages of John W. Campbell’s Astounding / Analog magazine is one component; Wilhelm Riech’s Orgone Box makes an appearance, as does Galen Heironymous’s epynomous machine .
Getting the re-write finished as the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination played out was an interesting experience. My parents and I both had our children as one world was ending and another, darker world dawned. A month after I was conceived, the Cuban Missile crisis turned the cold war from an abstraction into the omnipresent specter of doom which would walk beside me from early childhood to late adolesence. Yet, we came as close to annihilation as the species ever has, as I gestated in my mother’s womb, no bigger than a frog.
The apocalypse? You’re soaking in it!
My mom’s obstetrician, concerned about her stress, recommended drinking an extra glass of wine a day, to ease her nerves, but alcohol made her nauseous. So she smoked her low tar cigarettes and attempted to relax and go with the flow. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
And so, a few years after the unpleasantness in Cuba, when those shots rang out, and Kennedy fell, my parents were hard at work, my mother confined in that female prison of sixties motherhood, marking time until she could go back to grad school and do something real with her life, my father making his career in Academia. I was grumpy but not a case of full blown colic, perhaps having inhaled too much apocalypse, cold war fumes or side stream cigarette smoke. My parents had another child, my brother John–and then, BOOM, they killed Bobby and Martin and there were race riots and war protests and that post WWII glow was really and truly gone for good.
Fast forward 30 years or so.
The cold war ended without WWIII, for no real reason anyone has ever been able to articulate. Bill Clinton presided over an era when the worst thing, the absolute worst thing, that was happening, the thing that his political opponents assured us was impeachment worthy, was lying about a eight minute blow job with an intern in a civil trial. Remember? Remember, when they asked us, WHAT WOULD WE TELL THE CHILDREN? As they, you know, told the children. Over and over and over again. A booming economy was a tide lifting all ships. Sure, it lifted the yachts with nine dollars out of ten, but even the leaky canoes were buoyed up by that trickling down final dollar.
For god’s sake, they were paying me 100 dollars an hour for playing with photoshop while intoning the words ‘brand experience’.
Then… I watched a partisan supreme court decision install the worst president in history, watched the towers fall, watched the US launch its first pre-emptive unilateral war based on cooked intelligence, with my kids toddling about my ankles. We turned off the TV news at that point, actually, I read about 911. I didn’t watch it more than once. And as a result, I never fully empathized with my PTSD addled countrymen. I read of two towers falling; the rest of the country watched hundreds upon hundreds of towers fall, over and over and over again, and they went mad, embracing anyone and anything they felt might keep them safe. In this case, preemptive war, torture, and tax cuts.
My parents and I both muddled through the madness.
Children are not had for rational reasons. They are always a kind of ridiculous hope, a hail mary pass, that somehow the world is going to be OK, and that life is worth living. That the good outweighs the bad, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Every child is a selfish act. Every child is a hopeful thing.
Alice Sheldon, also known as James Tiptree, one of the planet Earth’s greatest Science Fiction Writers; CIA agent and all around bad-ass.
Before I start, everyone needs to go and read Jame’s Tiptree’s story now free on Lightspeed Magazine, And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side. It’s a great title, the titles alone of Tiptree’s stories read like short poems, and the stories carry a punch undiminished by the decades that have passed since their writing. There were those who thought Tiptree just might be J.D Salinger writing under a new name. There were those who thought it might be Henry Kissinger.
So go and come back. I’m serious. Read the damn thing. It’s short and it’s about sex and it’s written by the person on the sidebar there–intrigued? That person writing as a man. Go!
Ok, James Tiptree, as we now know, is the pen name for Alice Sheldon. Robert Silverberg, an SF great, famously stepped in it with this quote about the mysterious Mr. Tiptree:
“It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.”
So Silverberg was really really wrong. And since reading that quote, I have resisted pretty much every ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ generalization about male vs female writing as being just as stupid as the comment above.
The undeniable truth of what Silverberg stays speaks not to any intrinsic intellectual quality of male or female, but rather, to the life experiences available to the writers he mentions; Hemmingway can speak of war and manliness and manfulness and Being a Man, and Austin on the importance of marrying the right husband because these are things with which they had a lot of practice.
Alice, born a century and a half or so later than Austin, could write convincingly about more things than Austin, having done them; living in a world in which progress had been made.
All fiction, including Science Fiction, Fantasy and Historical fiction, is about Now, how we understand ourselves, now. The point of prose and the novel being the continually unfolding now mixed with introspection as a cure for solipsism, with every author only ever rendering that single character of him or herself, refracted through imagination to become a secondary creation …
but I’m rambling.
Alice / James often wrote about the other, from the point of view of the other, writing male characters as a man, and nobody noticed her inauthenticity, nobody cared, because she was good at it, and because her name didn’t give her away. Both those things were part of the Tiptree story.
Which brings us to the question of the hour, who should people like me, personally, be writing about? White male heterosexual privileged men? To what standard should we be held?
The upside to being a white heterosexual male writing science fiction, or anything else for that matter, are too numerous to mention, but I’ll take a stab at it. You don’t have to worry that the name you’re used to using will be counted against you (unless your name is gender ambiguous). No one will question the authenticity of your male characters, and your male characters then enjoy a fictive universe where they also enjoy these same privileges–privilege squared! Sticking to People Like Us let’s us get to The Point without a lot of tedious messing around with retrograde stuff which so many of us are sick to death of. Sick to death of!
So many of us have hearts in the right place; we want to live in the mythical meritocracy, where a penis or lack thereof, skin pigment, or lack thereof, sexual preference, or lack thereof, doesn’t determine success.
But we’re not there yet. Pretending that we are is delusional. It may be a useful delusion of course, if it lets you work a little harder, a littler longer, without despair, as the shrunken opportunities for the non-white-male-het doubtless go to those who give it their all; to those that never give up.
And so those of us to-the-manor-born wrestle with who the hell we should be writing about, and how the hell we should be writing about them; we can ignore the whole business, concentrate on the characters we know best, the people just like us, and become another brick in the wall. Or we can try, to write about excluded characters, and be excoriated for getting it wrong.
Because let’s face it, we’re going to get it wrong.
For the simple reason that even if we get it mostly right, the simple act of looking for a flaw can generate them in the eye of the beholder. Inauthenticity drips off of your name alone. Because there are many different ways to be a man or a woman or non-gendered, black or white or interracial, straight or gay or bi, cis or trans or genderqueer, as a member of the in-group we will always be vulnerable to these attacks by the outgroup.
Can you see me playing for myself, the worlds tiniest violin? My thumb and forefinger moving barely perceptible against each other in a see saw motion? I’m not really feeling very sorry for myself. I’m going to do just fine–and I know it in my bones. Privilege!
I just rewrote that sentence three sentences back, by the way. It started out as binary pairings, (man and woman) and I added third states when I realized every couplet was really a triplet, really a continuum. I also included two couplets of thinking about gender, because gender is so damn complicated.
Then I wondered at my ordering in each couple; I put the dominant group first, the other pole second, and the often excluded middle third, representing the order in which each of these states is generally respected, understood or acknowledged. I did all of this without even thinking about what I was doing.
I left my original ordering in, the bad ordering, to reveal that I am in fact, still a person caught up in all of this, unconsciously but now consciously revealing the degree to which I am far from having gotten past all this.
Which sort of reveals the process, and the benefits, of actually trying to do this, actually trying to step outside of yourself and your experience to imagine the other, to role-play the other, to be the other. You’ll get serious insights that can feel meaningful with about five minutes of effort.
There are always those who feel outraged to be saddled with the sins of the father. The fact that most black people are descended from folks who were kidnapped and enslaved and who worked for the first century or two without asset accumulation has nothing to do with the fact that my family can afford to send me to college and theirs can’t. Or if it does doing anything about it will produce more unfairness which in the long run is worse than just considering all slates wiped clean by Lincoln or Johnson or Obama. People who focus, laser-like, on the tiny-subset of instances in which being non-white-het-male has come in handy, with regards to recent policies in government or business or academia.
In my guts, I have no idea why one would focus on these things. This feels like sociopathy. (Of course, I have never personally been burned in this way. So who is the sociopath?)
Seems to me the people being dragged to death behind pickup trucks, those crucified on fenceposts, those shot while asking for help with a broken down car, have more to lose, than the occasional ivy league slot or business promotion. But that’s me.
Which is a very convoluted way of saying I think we should try to step outside ourselves.
Try and fail–for some, and succeed for others. There are women who love Heinlein’s female characters, for example, though I think the majority of double x chromosome types tend to throw late Heinlein books against the wall while throwing up a little in their mouths. (Especially Farnham’s Freehold or Fear No Evil.) But hey, he was a person from a time and a place and he was trying. So RAH is OK in my book. Your mileage may vary.
When we are called out, for trying to write about the other, we should listen, and nod, and say, “I hear you. I’m sorry what I did didn’t work for you. I did my best, but I hope to do better in the future, and maybe get it a little more right. Thanks for reading my stuff. Thanks for telling me how I got it wrong.”
Sure, this is hard, but it beats being dragged to death behind a pickup truck. Right?
At least, in my book.
PS: this is an aspirational piece for me, as my characters tend to represent the tiniest sliver of humanity imaginable. I’m goading myself here to try to do more.
So I’ve written about this before, but I’ll mention it again; when you start writing and submitting and getting rejected, there’s a temptation to take some part of a rejected story, something that fires you up, tickles you, enrages you, delights you, and give it a twist and plunk it into the new story and keep working on it.
There’s nothing wrong with this, really, until you start publishing the things.
Then you realize, ‘OMG, people have seen this from me before.’
One of the things that swirls around in my half-century old brain is the degree to which I assumed I’d live and work off the planet, if I wanted to. Men were being fired off to the moon on a weekly basis, it seemed like, when I was growing up. The teachers wheeled the big tube TVs into the classroom and teared up while we watched the mirror-faced balloon like heroes bouncing through washes of analog noise, and it seemed normal. I mean, you’re a kid. Sure. People are going to the moon. Of course they are.
Apollo ends and the shuttle is this slow motion train wreck of escalating costs and shrinking launch schedules. The libertarians like to say that the oversold promise of the shuttle helped depress private development in space for decades; progressives bemoan the ever diminishing budgets at NASA, and the failure to continue the government push into the final frontier. Whoever you blame, the end result remains. Space travel peaked when I was in elementary school.
Now, we have really really good and fast computers, in our goddamn pockets, excellent CGI, fantastic SF movies like Gravity, which aren’t really even SF anymore, and I’m personally never ever getting into space. Ever ever ever.
So my characters wrestle with this, even in fictional worlds. This feeling of being stifled, this sensation of a frontier opening and abruptly closing. This sense that as a country, as a species, as a planet, we’re off track.
As Woody Allen said about God, the best you can say about us is that we’re basically a planet of underachievers.
In fiction, though, there are answers, even if they’re not the ones the protagonists are looking for, opportunities and tragedies, joys and sorrows amplified, crafted, transformed. In the secondary creation, all things are possible, and even if I deny myself perfect wish-fullfillment there, I find the landscape invigorating.
There’s a chance for us yet. As a species, and as individuals. By hook or by crook, we’re going to get there.
Pecking out my first few stories while a sophomore in college.
“I don’t really get the genre thing,” My friend Steven Solomon said to me, about my writing, once. Stephen is an artist, who has a day job usually, but he’s a real artist, not a commercial artist or graphic designer or an illustrator, things I have been and at one time wanted to be.[/caption]
Of course, he does those things, too—but he’s an artist; by which I mean, he takes what he does seriously. It’s an attitude thing.
He isn’t stuck up or too good for pop culture; his encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, of Jack Kirby and Superman, is breathtaking. But he doesn’t see himself as confined to, limited by, any kind of commercial limitation for his work; he’s not a category; he’s not a shelf in a bookstore; he’s bigger than a genre.
Steven Solomon was on my mind at Clarion, when talking to Michael Swanwick, about his book Vacuum Flowers, and Gibson’s book Neuromancer. I’d loved both books, and held them in more or less equal esteem, and said so to Swanwick, imagining this might be endearing.
Swanwick winced, as if I’d offered him a shot glass full of urine.
“I had written a book, ‘in the tradition.’ Bill wrote one outside of it.” he said, finally.
Have I mentioned that I feel like I have been a disappointment to my Clarion instructors?
Swanwick also mentioned that by appropriating the term Turing Police for my own, well, Turing Police, in my first published story, I’d looted Gibson in a thoroughly uncool way. I had a stupid defense, about genre people sort of building on each other’s work, which was just plain wrong; Swanwick was right. It was OK to have Turning police, people doing what they do; calling them that was unforgivable.
I was wrong. Sorry, Mr. Gibson. I suck.
Which leads us back to genre, ‘in the tradition,’ being derivative, and making art out of crap, which is what Michael Swanwick said genre artists, at their best, do.
I always wanted to be visual artist or a writer, what a business partner of mine who abandoned me during the tech bubble called an original content creator; but I couldn’t really imagine myself a fine artist. Or maybe I could, when I was very young, before middle school, and I grew out of it.
I recall vividly, telling my seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Moore, that I would like to be an artist when I grew up, and she said to me, without missing a beat, that she was sure I’d be a fine graphic artist, and I didn’t really know what she meant, what the difference was, between real art and graphic art, but I knew instinctively that I had been demoted, and I recall feeling insulted.
I also recall feeling brought down to Earth. I mean, how many people really got to be artists?
We didn’t have a lot of art books in the house, or live near any major museums growing up in upstate New York, so Art, Fine Art, was something of a mystery. I knew about the handful of artists that impinged on the mainstream culture of the day. Andy Warhol. Picasso. Salvadore Dali. Peter Max and Leroy Niman. But that was about it.
We had a book of MC Escher prints, though, which fascinated me. I looked at those, over and over again. And once, even read some of the text and found that Escher was a Graphic artist. Which made me feel like, OK, maybe it would be OK to be one of those after all.
Growing up in the 70s in suburbia, art was a rack of posters in a local bookstore; art was album covers and book covers and calendars. Roger Dean and Frank Frazetta and the Brother’s Hildebrandt and the others I started to collect. I bought books full of pulp covers. Fell in love with the scratchboard and pen and ink of Virgil Finley. Art was illustration.
And so I planned on becoming an illustrator.
No teacher ever really liked my writing, I was a B minus writer, but my drawing was better than about 95 percent of those around me. Becoming an illustrator, a graphic artist, seemed like a mature, grown up way to be Creative without starving to death.
So my writing was confined, from my teens through my late twenties, to thinking up premises for SF worlds and characters, and talking about these ideas with my friends.
The mechanics of typing manuscripts was quite simply exhausting to me, in the late seventies. I’m not a natural writer, a good speller, and typing my papers for high-school or college was nightmarish. I was once so absurdly grateful to a woman, a fellow student, for typing my paper I slept with her, even though I shouldn’t have, and honestly, didn’t really want to.
But I digress.
I attended Syracuse University enrolled in VPA, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and did the freshman art core, which had art history and aesthetics and one of the two great teachers of my life, Larry Bakke, and actually learned what the hell art was, what the hell illustration and commercial art was, what culture was.
Like the goldfish learning about water; your own culture is more or less invisible to you unless you are forced to confront it in some weird way; travel to another culture; instruction by a great teacher.
I got just barely enough education, over the next decade or so, to be able to see what genre was; what science fiction was, as we entered the internet era, the tech bubble, the age of Wired magazine and Boing Boing and the fantasy of the Long Boom.
It all came together for me, somehow, in the white hot end of the tech bubble, and I imagined myself becoming what we called back then, unironically, a Visionary or Thought Leader. My SF career floundered when I didn’t sell my Clarion stories to major markets, and the semipro markets that were buying me winked out of existence. But it didn’t matter, because I was going to get rich on stock options, and then, write novels or make movies or so something even cooler. Possibly involving virtual reality goggles.
I had transcended the genre, see? I was living science fiction. I didn’t need to write it. That ended in a plume of ash on 911, as the tech bubble burst and I gave up on that vision of myself, not all at once, but slowly, over a decade of failed entrepreneurial ventures.
Leaving me… here. A man always in and of his times; a wasted youth in the seventies; a slacker in the late 80s, and a dot.com snake oiler through the millennium. Through it all, the SF paperbacks trailed along, stacked around the edges of my life, mixed with literary stuff and commentary and piles of piles of the New York Times.
Leaving me here, doing the genre thing; again.
But not naively, anymore, I don’t think; I’m not confined by the genre because I grew up in it; it’s part of me, hardwired, natural. I’ve been outside it, too; I’ve had a life, which I bring back to it, some little bit of the world, the part that fits into my weirdly shaped head.
And now I think, maybe I’ll never write Literature.
This is one of those no-brainers, like not showing up late for a job interview reeking of peppermint schnapps and opium. The fact that it’s a no brainer, though, doesn’t mean that people with brains don’t regularly submit typo-riddled work. As a first reader for a national SF magazine in the 90s, I saw a lot of sad manuscripts.
The magazine is gone. My editor, Charlie Ryan, disliked people making fun of slush in public forums; he never wanted anyone to feel like a sincere effort was being met with scorn, or ridicule.
I figure talking about it now can’t hurt.
At the bottom of the barrel was the typewritten stuff. There wasn’t much of it in the 90s, but at that point, not having a word processor meant that you weren’t serious about writing. I’m sure there were, and still are, some serious established writers eschewing word processing, though none comes to mind. But at that time and in that place, the typewritten stuff, the translucent paper all braille like, embossed and crinkly, with patches of white out, was the most uniformly awful material we saw.
Word processing and spell checking doesn’t catch every mistake, obviously. It does, however, make too many of them on a page unforgivable. Why? Because it’s easy to key in an edit. It’s not like you have to retype the page (yes, people did that) and if you can’t be bothered, or won’t clean up your content, well, what does that say about you and it?
We saw all the things writers are told not to do, manuscript preparation wise. Otherworldly, cthulian fonts. Unreadable ink colors. Three hole punched manuscripts fashioned together with yarn, or brass bolts, or something other than a paperclip; badly xeroxed copies of typewritten manuscripts; odd smelling manuscripts; angry harassing cover letters.
You know what we didn’t see a lot of?
Properly formatted, carefully copyedited stories that totally sucked.
I passed on a lot of decent stories of course, or was part of that process, but it was hard not to notice, a correlation between the quality of craft and content.
Here’s where peer based workshopping becomes a time saver; it is easier to see someone else’s typos than your own. Even if your own sense of grammar is imperfect, your spelling rusty, your grasp of punctuation workmanlike, you will still find things to fix in someone else’s manuscript, even when that other person is a better writer than you are.
And studying someone else’s unpublished prose, looking for little ways to improve it, is an education in and of itself. Your detachment, from other people’s work, will frequently help you spot problems with your own.
I once sold a story to a magazine called Mindsparks, edited by Catherine Asaro. The magazine folded before the story got very far, but it was one of those early sales that gets you thinking more seriously about your work. She sent back the manuscript, dripping with red, edits to be keyed in.
A friend in my workshop saw the manuscript and said, “Wow. It’s amazing she bought it at all.”
I burned with shame.
Because every mistake you see in a manuscript pops you a little bit out of the story; it just does. Like watching William Shatner’s toupee slip in a fight scene in an old Star Trek Episode, or a styrofoam rock ricochet off of Deforest Kelly’s head; like the boom mike swinging into view in a low budget movie.
So why use tools like Gammarly? You have your workshop, right?
Marking up low level errors can make a reader miss higher level ones; you’re going to burn the attention, burn the insight that could have been yours, if you’d given your reader something cleaner.
DISCLOSURE: I’m trying out the service at Grammarly now in a seven day free trial; one of those where you give them the credit card info and you have to remember to shut it off to avoid a charge if you don’t end up using it; standard free trial kinda thing. So far, having used the service twice, I see that it catches stuff that I have been forcing humans in my workflow to help me with; it may end up being worth 12 bucks a month to me.
I know these blog posts have been sloppy, too. If they’re worth sharing I guess they’re worth copyediting, and again, I don’t want to give people a shitty impression; I’d like for readers of the blog to one day buy a novel or mine. So.
Here’s to new tools and processes that make us better.
What do you care about? I mean, really care about? Care enough about to have really strong opinions about? What interests you? I mean fascinates you.
Those are personal questions. If a stranger asks them of you, you’ll lie, say something normal, inoffensive, something job-interview like. Because, Jesus, who the hell wants to let a goddamn stranger know that kind of thing? Know what really twists you up and makes you tick, turns you around, chews you up and spits you out again.
You do, Bucko.
You’re that kind of fool, you’re that kind of idiot, if you want to be a writer. If you aren’t that way to start with you’re going to end up that way, in some form or another.
Some people disguise themselves elaborately with characters and plots which transmute whatever it is they’re twisted up about into something unrecognizable. What is the vampire, the zombie, the serial killer, the sociopath, in your book, really? What is she to you? Why are you writing about her?
Everything is a memoir. You reveal yourself in every word, in every image, in every character, in every plot.
If what I’m saying now makes no sense to you, and you’re writing, but not publishing, think about it. If you’re publishing more and better than I am, please tell me I’m full of shit, because I want to be.
Because writing is embarrassing. Write about love and friendship and commitment and betrayal and anger and forgiveness and despair and strength and weakness and you’re going to bump into yourself, over and over again, and not the sanitized, official version of yourself, but the truly misbegotten version of you under the mask that is purely and wonderfully and awfully you.
It’s possible that this is a silly way to write and I’m getting to the end of my rope; I have no desire to repeat myself, and I find the same characters and stories and plots and obsessions swirling around again and again, and I want to get out of myself and do something different, but I want to own what I do, to feel like I am qualified to write it, and that keeps me close to certain things.
I’m not sure sometimes if I need to write more or become a better human being, somehow, if I want to write better.
More empathic, intuitive, observant…more in touch with my own subconscious, more disciplined, less motivated by selfish desires and simple animal drives.
I’m 50. Has that ship sailed?
I come to fiction for the hope of transformation and character change, and I’m the character I want most desperately to change; I come to fiction because I know it happens damn infrequently in real life. But I want it to happen. I want to be able to work hard at something and not fucking have it explode on me, melt away like the dot.com era, blow up in my face and silence me for decades.
I look around and see the people my age with their stacks of novels and their elaborate personas and their degrees and families and interests and I think, Dear God, I am hopelessly outclassed. I’m fucking doomed. I can barely make food and do laundry for four people and write a goddamn short story now and then.
Oh well. Back to the 1000 words a day, and here’s hoping I live long enough to embarrass myself well and truly before I’m gone for good. Because it’s all I ever really wanted to do. Even if I’m not great. And why the hell not. Anything is possible. People change.
I know that, because I’ve read about it, in books.
I believe firmly in the idea that one way to learn how to write prose is to write and finish and share a bunch of short stories; you can even try to market them; the rejection of those first few stories is always a bracing experience, letting one know that one hasn’t gotten the hang of the thing. Yet.
Some folks stick with the short format, (in Science Fiction I think of James Tiptree and William Tenn; in the mainstream I think of Raymond Carver), but most branch out and write at longer lengths. Dean Wesley Smith’s thought experiment aside, there are virtually no professional short story writers anymore, and haven’t been for decades, so for those pursuing prose as a paying career, the short stuff is for training and marketing and experimentation.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King explains why writing short stories, for him, makes no financial sense.
And he’s Steven King.
When should one start writing at length? When should one write novels? As soon as possible. One handy thing about the novel is that, once started, many have a kind of inertia which can keep you writing, carrying you through your first few million words, your first five years, or 10,000 hours of writing. (Gladwell’s Outlier metric for success.)
Really, I think, it doesn’t matter what you write, just that you do write, and read, and get feedback, for 10,00o hours. I do think that short stories have the ability to let one write, and let go, of a lot of things quickly; a novel will hold you, in a tone, in a voice, in a milieu, in your own understanding of what writing is and isn’t. If you are anything like me, and you sucked horribly when you started , it’s best that you pass through a series of mental models for the activity, as quickly as possible.
There is a magic moment, in between writing THE END, and staring at the blank page once again, during which something inside you can shift, recalibrate, reset itself. Every ending; ever beginning, resetting; recalibrating.
You need to get through the “I have a neat idea and the story exists to illustrate it’ phase, the “I have a wonderful plot and a series of robot like characters trapped inside obeying the Plot,” phase, the didactic, “I have a message about how to live” phase, the “playing dungeons and dragons by yourself, the living breathing characters in search of a story” phase, to the integrated phase, where you do all of these things at the same time without really thinking about it.
Because you don’t really write by thinking about it. Writing isn’t really thinking. It’s something else. I’m not sure what.
Writing contains ‘thinking about it’ phases, of course, research and notes and editing, which are all think-intensive activities. But the writing is something else again.
So, Mr. Miyagi has us wax the floor and paint the fence, do All The Things, separately, and then, somehow it comes together in the end and we kick the bully in the face and we triumph and write a book that we sell and live Happily Ever After.
My problem is that I haven’t figured out how to write anything longer than a short story, yet. I’ve internalized a set of rules, for starting the story close to the end, for paring back the list of characters to a few, for revealing worlds in a few choice lines of exposition, and through the Edges of Ideas (I always have to cheat some, and use some exposition, but I try.)
Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t already read the Turkey City Lexicon, please, just go and do that and get back to this if you feel like it.
So, I write, I slip into the dream and I keep waking myself up, my short story alarm keeps going off, saying, “This is backstory. You can’t get to the end in 7000 words at this rate!” “You are spending too much time in someone who is not the protagonist or the antagonist. Stop!”
I’m afraid the only way through it is going to be write a shitload, and throw away half of it.
So. I guess I better get writing.
Wish me luck.
I’m working on my second novella now, God help us. Ms. Williams at Asimov’s told me to write at this length; they publish a lot of novelettes and novellas.
If you’re a depressive or bipolar the writing thing swirls through your disorder, your ‘non-neurotypicality,’ if we want to be less pejorative. Your mental state radiates into your characters and worldview; the world’s reaction to your writing feeds back into whatever scripts you’re feeding yourself about your life and work.
It can be hard to keep going.
Early on, in my late 20s, I started seeing posts, now and then, from well-published writers that said things like, “if you can quit, quit. There’s no earthly reason to encourage someone to do this. Money? Security? Respect? Critical success? There is so little, of any of this, to go around, that the very idea of encouraging someone else to persevere seems cruel. Morally wrong.
The only reason to write is that you have to, these posts all said.
I saw posts from people wondering if people really could learn how to write. If you were still getting only rejections, five years in, maybe it wasn’t in you.
All of this combined with the wall of rejection and my own mental state to create a kind of toxic subtext to my work. I wrote stories that became hard to parse, they were so bleak; universes almost completely devoid of opportunity. You know why Dystopias are so damn easy to conjure up in fiction?
Because writers already live in Dystopian Darwinian hell worlds similar to the Hunger Games.
Theres this one pile of food; everyone rushes to get it; someone else’s success is your failure; your brother’s in arms, your workshop mates, are your competitors. How many pro publication slots are there in award winning markets? How many slots are there in the spinner rack at the drug store? How many books are really seriously marketed by a publishing house? Finite numbers, all.
Once upon a time in the genre, there was supposedly this feeling of camaraderie; almost unique to science fiction, where writers did not see each other as competitors. I remember reading about this in the 70s and 80s. It sounded way cool.
I like camaraderie! It’s one of the things that gets me through the day.
I’ve also read that this camaraderie was a side effect of the publishing culture at that time, and that that time went away, and SF publishing became a lot more like publishing in general, where camaraderie is far from a given.
Now I’m enjoying this weird moment of validation, having sold the four stories to Asimov, where I feel like I can reach out, to other writers, who are publishing, and see if I can’t kinda…
Make friends?
I’m fifty, and making new friends at this age feels very weird. Typically, it’s mostly only necessary after death, empty nests or messy divorces; most people have all their friend slots filled at this age, and people who don’t, well, you have to wonder about them, the way a woman in her 30s regards the man her age who has never been married.
Befriending younger people is always fraught with a kind of tension. You have to suppress the desire to tell them how young and beautiful and inexperienced they are, and how their optimism is kind of painful. And my God, people in their 20s and 30s all seem goddamn radiant when you’re in your fifties with teenage children. They’re like campfires shooting out rays of warmth and light.
But I’m doing it, or trying to, fitfully, and I’m writing my 1000 words a day whether I want to or not. I’m making a goddamn literary life, goddamn 1000 words at a goddamn time. A charming note at a time, a note to a writer. Reading and writing like it was a job, more than a job, and less than a job, (when it comes to money…alas.)
Summer turns to fall and inside my head it is getting darker, and it’s all material, it’s all stuff I can use, if I push through it. If I keep working. Even if I don’t believe in what I’m working on. Maybe I only have to believe that I can keep working; maybe that is all I need.
Write for the workshop who is growing tired of your schtick, for the trash bin, for the rejection slip, for the indypub book that never sells a single copy. Write for the bad reviews. Write for very little money.
Write for the worst case scenario. But write. Don’t stop. Because as lousy as writing sometimes is, not writing is worse.
If the Bush administration taught us anything, it is that things can always get worse.
Caroyln See has advice for writers on Making a Literary Life. I’m taking it.
Most of us start writing knowing nothing about the writing life; knowing no writers, in places where there are no book-readings of note, and nowadays precious few bookstores to boot.
Of course there’s always Amazon and ebay and ebooks and even libraries, so people have access to books, even if they don’t bump into writers and editors on a daily basis. In school, bored teenagers are deprived of cellphones and computers and often end up reading as a result, to stave off madness induced by boredom. This is one reason YA is a great category to write in.
Of course, if you’re interested in the writing scene, there’s trade press, packed with photographic evidence of the fleshy reality of writers, and there are also conventions, where one can go and see a writer or editor, read their name tags and gape at them. (Nowadays, with twitter and facebook it is possible to literally drown yourself in a writer’s, ‘platform,’ but never mind, just bear with me.)
In the genre, conventions are often dominated by media related things or a few big name, rock-start type authors, but there are exceptions to the rule. Readercon is one, a convention so lousy with writers that they often outnumber the fans.
If you were anything like me, you didn’t look at trade press, you had only read interviews with a few big name writers, you didn’t do social media from writers, and your knowledge of publishing was based on introductions and forwards in books by writers from long ago
And so you write and send things out and you hope like hell somebody notices you. Somebody likes you. Somebody cares. And you have no idea what to expect, what you’ll get back, in return.
What strikes you immediately, as you wait for your rejection letters, is that the short fiction thing is a smallish world. A handful of professional magazines, another handful of respected smaller presses and online markets, and a plethora of start-up ventures that pay Dickensian rates and last an issue or three before folding, often with your unloved story sitting in their inbox…or in their accepted but not yet paid for pile.
Yes. It can be a sad business, the writing thing, for the first few years. Or in my case, decades.
At some point, if you persist, you find an editor who likes your stuff, and buys more than the one thing from you. They buy a few things. And suddenly, you have a relationship with someone else in this endeavor, a business relationship, and this relationship is different in tone from your relationship with fellow struggling writers.
Some writers like to go to conventions and find their heroes and pal around with them, buy them drinks and mine them for anecdotes and advice. You can do that, if you’re that sort of person. Carolyn See, in her book Making a Literary Life suggests that you ought to reach out to fellow writers and I suppose editors and industry people with charming notes, handwritten letters in which you thank writers for the work of theirs you have enjoyed; these thank you perhaps include a few insightful comments, and perhaps, are answered, and perhaps, lead to rewarding two way relationships, eventually.
You do not ask writers to your read your manuscripts; that’s what editors and agents do. If you’re persistent.
The purpose of these notes, conventions, of meeting your heroes and editors is that writing can be sort of a lonely business, and somehow, for many, coming together to talk about it can be very very satisfying. There can be some bit of useful advice.
Someone might hand you a copy of the scarecrow’s diploma, the lion’s medal, or the tin man’s heart.
Of course, you have to let yourself do this. You have to imagine yourself as someone worth knowing, someone worth talking to. This should be something you can do, of course, if you expect people to read and pay for your writing. Not everyone is like this; some people write well without hand-holding and drinks and anecdotes and farcical metaphorical objects and shun the socializing. They’re great, and they get read, and more power to them, and you, if you’re one of them.
But most of us want to be in this game with some friends, want some comrades in arms, want a champion, or two, on the editorial side.
I have found they will come to you, by and by, if you don’t get ahead of yourself. (See my series of posts on How Not to be a Writer and don’t get ahead of yourself. Seriously.)
In the company of writers you will find yourself discussing openly the most peculiar and intimate things. In the same way a doctor or painter is supposedly immune to the embarrassment of nudity, some but not all writers feel immune to embarassment with regards to… pretty much everything.
I’m one of those.
I’ll never forget, a one-off workshop I arranged, back when I first let myself imagine myself as someone worth talking to, a discussion of a story, which featured a slip-stream nerd hero ejaculating dust onto the belly of an earth mother type deflower-er. The dust was a metaphor for the guy’s desiccated soul, or something, but it was quite an image, and we all found ourselves wondering out loud if the guy would actually do this.
Was his knowledge of sex based on porn? What kind of porn existed in his world? Is that something people did who didn’t watch porn? Well it’s a form of birth control now isn’t it? Back and forth we debated, a group of men and women, strangers, of marriageable age, not a blush in the crowd.
But when you meet your heroes, your editors, your champions, it’s not really a peer thing, it’s something else; there’s a power imbalance; editors spend a fair amount of time crushing the most cherished dreams of very weird people, which if you think about it for more than a second is a rather brave thing to do.
So you will struggle, with your champion, your hero, to be a somewhat less neurotic, needy, aspergery version of yourself, perhaps.
So I met Ms. Williams, the award winning editor of the award winning magazine at the Brooklyn book fair, and Rob Reed, whose stories in Asimov’s I’ve enjoyed, and a wonderful illustrator named John Allemand, and Emily Hockaday, a magazine staffer who has helped me with my galleys, and I did my best to not act crazy or unappealing, not to talk too much, and to express my joy, my happiness, at becoming a part of the magazine’s history.
Maybe just a four story part; but hopefully more.
Everyone was very nice to me. Ms. Williams radiated a kind of intelligent calm at me. I need more people in my life to do that. My wife needs help.
And I did not ask Ms. Williams about my stories, one of which she has had for perhaps a stastically anomalous number of days.
