One of the hardest things to hear as a beginning writer entering a critical process (with work shoppers, teachers, or editors) is that anyone hates your characters.
It’s even worse when they hate your main character. (MC or POV.) It’s even worser still when likability isn’t their arc; they aren’t supposed to become likable; you though they were already.
I’ve written about this before. But it is a fruitful question.
One of the things writing can reveal is the subjective quality of your own introspection, that is to say, when compared to others.
Specifically, I’m talking about your particular flavor of negativity bias.
One of the problems is that many brains interpret negativity bias as TRUTH. When someone hates your character for articulating in their internal monolog or spoken dialog strong negativity, a common response, for the writer, is to think, “shit, that’s just true. What the fuck is wrong with (this reader) (me)(my writing)( the entire fucking universe, oh God, I’m going to binge watch old episodes of Columbo.)
Relentless negativity bias is exhausting to those that aren’t used to it.
Genre is a sort of flag that tells us how much negativity we are expected to wade through while still empathizing with a character. Of course, great writers can get away with defying these conventions, but I’m not talking about Great Writers. I’m talking about you.
And me.
See what I did there? Did you flinch? Did you agree with me at some level, that we are both not great, and then did you get pissed off and depressed? Because writing about writing is supposed to build you up, not tear you down? Because that is the genre convention?
Most genre characters are slightly idealized and simplified. Especially the ones we are meant to like or inhabit.
It doesn’t have to be much. But a single truly offbeat detail can prevent something from being publishable. A single thought. A single action–on the page.
And we fucking hate your POV. And probably? If you hadn’t written the thing?
So would you. But you don’t see that. Not without help.
I had a friend, a dog person, a very sweet person, who hated Cats. When we saw one outdoors, she would make a little hand-gun, and shoot at it, making the little hand gun POW noise. This person was super supportive of me. But I have cats. I’m allergic to dogs.
At one point I had to tell her, “fucking knock that shit off.” She was driving me nuts.
I can’t say that to a character in a book. At some point I stop wanting to hang out with them. So I stop reading.
Hand gunning cats wasn’t her most salient personality trait. It’s just a detail. But it derailed me.
I think horror characters can be more perfectly realistic… and of course Literature is the place where characters are permitted to be totally realistic. This is one reason so many people hate Literature. (Capital L.) This is probably why Amazon kindle data reveal that most people don’t actually finish literary best sellers.
Of course, they read every word of series genre novels written by not-great writers like you and me. Assuming we get the fucking hang of it. Nobody buys book 5 if they didn’t get through book 4.
Moving on…
Modern audiences, young people, are also often more and more intolerant of stupid opinions and unkind or irrational feelings in anyone. Even a villain. They don’t want to experience that kind of self-talk. They find it damaging and infuriating.
But… Villains can be more realistic too, which is one of the reasons why some people empathize with them. Think of the people who never break with Walter White of Breaking Bad. They bond to him early, when his morality is ambiguous, and stick with him to the bitter end. Some readers are like that.
But many of us want heroes so badly we don’t care about realism. Or, rather, we enjoy a judicious editing that screens us from some realistic negative self talk. Self loathing. Cynicism. Pessimism. Nihilism.
We will put up with slightly boring heroes too. Second bananas and villains will steal the stage.
Don’t worry. You’re doing it right. (I mean, given that you’re not great. Hah. Ouch. SHUT UP!)
Inserting ‘positive’ stuff about your POV may feel fake, un-truthful, but remember the research–you are editing that stuff out. It’s actually in there. People are mixtures of good and bad. The parts you put down on the page are decisions you make.
Those decisions guide readers about the kind of story you are telling.
They can make or break a story.
They lie at the heart of enjoyability. Of what is and what isn’t entertaining.
Whether you are writing literature with a capital L or not.
A friend of a friend, an avid reader, now has the time and space to give writing fiction a shot. He’s super smart, and an avid reader. I was asked, how would I recommend he go about it?
Decades spent writing, worrying about writing, workshopping, taking courses, reading craft books, staring into space, submitting, not submitting, writing a ton a day, not writing for 18 years, crying silently in darkened bathrooms, has given me a super valuable perspective on this.
My advice is worth more than you might imagine given my modest professional catalog. Why you ask? Because like you, I am weak-willed and not that special. And yet, look above.
Since 2012 I publish most of what I write in nationally distributed professional magazines. Multiple stories and or novellas a year.
So. Listen to me.
The Truth that Will Set You Free
I’m gonna say stuff that is so simple it’s stupid, and yet, I have to say it, because so many people I know who say they want to write, and publish, don’t do this.
Read short stories.
Sure, you can read short story collections by authors you love. That’s okay. You can read themed anthos, that’s good, too. You can read Year’s best’s–that’s also good. Read the award winners! Why not! Read old award winners? Cool. Read anthologies in adjacent genres to your target genre? Also cool. Read classics, from a century ago? You have my blessing…
Do that and while you do that, or afterwards, get some actual fiction magazines being published RIGHT NOW and read them.
Read these magazines cover to cover. Finish the stories whether they grab you or not. Read the whole damn thing.
Maybe this is obvious, that you would do this, but in my experience, it isn’t. I didn’t, for years. I read year’s bests and single author collections. And so I wrote these stories that didn’t fit into the moment, into the magazines, my dialog with the genre as I had known it growing up. Stories influenced by classic… older, authors. Mostly old white guys. Writing in the old white guy voice to the young white guy in me that loved reading the old white guys.
I wrote. I didn’t sell things. I got sad. I stopped writing.
I never stopped reading. Novels mostly. But no more short stories for a long time.
Then… I started up again, and this time, I walked to the newstand at Copley mall and picked up an issue of Asimovs, one of Analog, and one of F&SF and I went home and I read all three. Then I read Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, online, for free.
Now, I’d read years bests for a decade. Or most of what was in them. And these magazines were the places most of the years best stories had been selected from.
But reading the actual source magazines was a completely different experience. The uncollected, uncurated, unawarded stories were vital for me to figure out how to do this.
Why Does Actually Reading Magazines help you Sell Your Work?
If you do this for six months, read three or four magazines consistently, cover to cover, your brain will map out the story-space for each publication, AND the superset story-space of them all.
What The Hell is Story-Space?
Story-space is a higher dimensional construct–my own invention— an n-dimensional manifold, a candy colored rainbow lens flare that you can crush down and stuff into a glowing gem on the infinity gauntlet.
Storyspace has a zillion dimensions.
Characters. What kinds of people? Aliens? AIs? Demons? Angels? Robots? Farcical fairy tale creatures?
What historical time periods? Alternate history? What milieus? What kinds of worlds? What kinds of dystopias?
What kind of plots? Puzzles? Character Arcs? Literary epiphanies?
Nitty gritty. How is AI, information technology, space travel, FTL climate change, handled? How do people handle traditional elements… vampires? Clones? Cyborgs?
Brandnames. Song lyrics. How is it done? How are people doing it now?
If you are writing literary fiction… what are the limits of how unlikable the characters can be? (Hint: They can be utterly detestable!)
Collect literary epiphanies in a used Atloids tin. Detail in dry erase marker on your fridge what makes each story epiph. Or write it down in a pocket sized spiral notebook with one of those orange half pencils they give out on miniature golf courses. If you use a ballpoint pen this won’t work.
For any kind of story, in any genre… how much sex is there, and how is it rendered? What words are used for the naughty bits?
How much violence is staged, and how graphic is it? How much action? How much dialog? How much introspection? How much narrative info dump?
Ever notice how short stories and novels don’t include car chases?
As you read each story the question isn’t so much did you like it but rather, what in the story do you think was liked? What is expected? What feels fresh? What feels classic and familiar… or timeworn but well crafted and easy to read?
What’s hard to read, challenging… but dense with meaning?
Can you Sum Up Why I should Read Magazines in One Paragraph?
What will happen to you, as it happened to me, is the subconscious machine in your head that makes all your shit up will enter into a dialog with the literature you read, the stuff you’re reading now. That is being written now!
That editors are buying now.
Depending on what kind of person you are, you may end up writing to market, or, you may end up shaking your story fist angrily and farting in its general direction. Fixated on what you want to add to the moment, what you think your genre is missing. Maybe you are an underrepresented voice and you bring that to the field. Maybe you’re not. That’s okay. Both things are okay.
Maybe you’re genre mixing, smashing; maybe you write in your unique voice purely idiosyncratically, because you’re a genius. Well, good for you!
I STILL THINK SHORT STORY UNIVERSITY WILL HELP YOU. AND YES I HAVE GONE INTO ALL CAPS AND I’M SORRY. I’LL STOP NOW.
Whatever happens, you’ll know what you’re up against. And you’ll be informed by the moment.
So. You’re reading. Now what?
The Most Obvious Advice Ever Given that Nobody Listens To
Write.
Write a lot. Write every day. Stop watching TV if you have to. I know that sounds harsh, but everything is on demand now and you can watch it later. Read and write. Eat, do self care, bathe now and then, make a living, don’t neglect your kids or partner, and yeah, maybe you don’t have as much time as you’d like, most people don’t. What time you have, read and write, every day.
Share what you write with people who also write and talk to them.
Fancy word for that is workshop.
Google how to find them and how to run them. Read my descriptions of workshops on this blog, in the sidebar, it’s a category. And if you live in a place without workshops, or your schedule doesn’t permit it, join my mailing list if an online video conferencing experience appeals to you.)
But before you start rewriting stuff, send some of it out raw to the places you want to sell to. Send out enough to know if you’re a genius who doesn’t need workshops, classes, craft books. If everyplace you like rejects what you send?
Then you need workshops.
Worry about ruining your good name? Use a pen name on these test submissions. Ruining your name isn’t really a thing, but it’s okay if you’re afraid of that.
Google how to write covers letters. Google how to find markets. I could cut and paste links here, but you know, google this stuff yourself, you might find something I don’t know about. Submission grinder is a great resource.
Read writers guidelines. (Google Magazine Name plus Writers Guidelines or Submissions. This is usually faster than using the site-nav.)
Obey the guidelines with regards to file formats, word counts, multiple submissions, simultaneous submissions. Don’t do anything cute to try to get attention. Don’t send stories in the postal mail in pizza boxes. Or use stripper themed delivery services. Don’t collar editors at conventions and shove smudged manuscripts at them. These things rarely work.
Submit the stories the way you are supposed to. What’s in your cover letter? Google that. Or skip it. No cover letter for you. See if that works or not. Why am I being so cavalier? Because you are going to write a lot of these things.
They’re not precious anymore.
Use a tracking website to track your submissions, Submission grinder is free, or you can pay for Duotrope, or you can do it yourself in a spreadsheet. If you use Submission Grinder, the data is shared and you can see how fast people are selling stories and getting rejected, you can see a sample of that data, and this can be useful.
Or it can be a sick twisted obsession. Good luck with that.
How Much Must I Write to be in Short Story University?
Finish a short story a week.
Submit a short story a week. It doesn’t have to be a story a week, you can have a pipeline and be working on a few, editing some, starting others, but on average, a story a week flys out of your computer and into the world.
Very quickly you will have stories at all the places you care about, waiting and some you don’t even read. But you read the guidelines! So you haven’t sent anything absolutely terribly inappropriate; only stuff they won’t buy, which you can find out, for free, by them not buying it.
Should you read every market you submit to? Yes. Can you submit to them without reading while reading other markets in that genre? Yes.
How Do I Write So Many Stories?
By letting yourself write bad ones.
Don’t have any ideas? Google ‘writing prompts.’ Use them.
Or use your bad ideas. I dare you.
Don’t worry about publishing your stories yourself because they aren’t selling for the first year. Publishing is gonna take a lot of time and effort and short fiction doesn’t sell well anyway, so no. No. Just no. Indypub is not part of Short Story University. You can do Indy in your spare time if you want, but don’t let it decrease your output. Don’t let your publisher hobby make you drop out of Short Story University
How much money will you make the first year? Not enough to matter.
This is your apprenticeship, your college, your training course. If you do this for two years and have a 100 stories you have shopped around at 10 places each? That’s a 1000 submissions dude. (Math!)
When you have ten stories out? Every day… you’re one day away from, maybe, selling your first story–or your first two, three, or four stories.
You’re in the game! IN THE GAME I TELL YOU!
If you do this for two years, taking 4 weeks off for good behavior, and have the 100 stories and the 1000 submission entries and you haven’t sold anything?
I will buy you a drink, or a meal, or a huge cartoon mallet which I will let you hit me over the head with. It will be padded. I won’t let you kill me. But you’ll want someone to hit. It can be me.
I won’t get hit, though. You will sell stories. I know you will. There is simply no way you can’t. Because nobody does this for long without some success. Absolutely nobody.
Success may be getting twenty bucks and getting published on in some webzine, at first. It may be like that for some time. I’m not promising you miracles. I don’t know you. What I do know, from doing this for decades, is that people who read a lot and write a lot sell stuff sooner or later.
Thats’ it. This has been called “Dare to be Bad,” (Google it) by two writers who have been editors, who rejected all my work in the 90s. They’re great at what they do, both the writing and the editing. (sniff). The writers are KKR and DWS. Again, use the google. If you aren’t committed enough to use the google you can’t be a writer. Seriously
There is nothing in this article that you didn’t know. I have told you nothing. And yet, you read this. Because you want to do this, and you haven’t, you haven’t committed, you haven’t finished watching Game of Thrones, you have a hard job and a time-sucking family and you’re busy and have medical and mental health issues and…
I get it. But you’re reading this inane article still.
Oh. And after you throw out your TV? Turn off your social media the first year. Turn it back on when you start selling and then, if you keep up the output, roll that conversation into the conversation with the texts themselves you are having.
If you stop reading or writing, stop social media-ing.
Why the Short Story Obsession? I Write Novels. Or Have Started One…
Oh. Why am I not talking about novels, when most people read novels and most of the money is there and there are actually more professional first novel slots than short story slots?
Because you can’t write novels fast enough to learn how to write, most of the time.
You’ll be trapped in your novel’s voice, its logic. Its craft level. Until you finish it and workshop it and submit it. If you write a lot, if you write 2-6 novels a year, and do what I said, with the short stories? You’ll be fine. Maybe. But you probably won’t, because you don’t have the time.
How do I know? Twenty years of workshops, conventions, and being an underachiever, that’s how.
You’ll bog down, unpublished novel person. You’ll pick at it. You’ll wonder if you should start anything new. You won’t. You’ll finish it… sort of. The one person you give to read it won’t get to it for a year and you’ll stop being their friend. I’m not joking. You’ll be super angry. You’ll find some new people to read it and they will tell you things that break your heart.
Hey, you didn’t do this in a week. This took a year. So you’ll have to find other people to look at it. Maybe pay them. Maybe in a class you’ll take next year. So until then, watch a lot of TV and post to facebook every day. And fuck those people who read the thing. Or couldn’t read the thing. Don’t they know how long you worked on it?
You’ll realize, you’re doomed. You can’t do this. You’ll publish the book yourself.
Nobody will buy it.
You’ll find yourself crying quietly in darkened restrooms.
Don’t do that. Okay, I do know people who skipped shorts and just wrote novels and they were fine. But… look I’m not that special a person. I am not a paragon of willpower. Remember that guy that cut his arm off to escape when he got trapped mountain climbing? I’m not that guy. (I had a character do something like that once… it was awesome. That novella didn’t sell…)
The folks I know who skipped Short Story University? One threw his TV out the window and sold a novel before he came to Clarion. None of his clarion shorts sold. He went on to become a bestselling author.
Some people just aren’t short story writers. But you know, he wrote six in six weeks.
The other one I know of wrote five novels in a few years, knew they were bad, sold the sixth, and is a pro now.
So that is possible, and if you do that? Again, I owe you a drink, a meal, or you can hit me in the head with the cartoon mallet.
I recommend Short Story University. It can be attended for free, if you want to use libraries and other free services, craft books instead of classes, free internet interactions rather than conventions. You can part time it, an hour or two a day, or go full time it if you are bloated with privilege.
It will be worth it. Two years. It’s an associates degree. 100 stories. 1000 submissions. You want this. You can do this.
Now go and do it.
POST UPDATE!
Since writing this I’ve had a lot of traffic that makes me think there’s a need here, specifically for the Workshop part of my advice above. My course would help transfer workshopping meta-skills to folks who aren’t in major markets, who don’t have local writer communities to draw on. If this interests you, PLEASE JOIN MY MAILING LIST so you get the course announcements in time to take them.
When as a youngish person I first thought I’d write a short story…
So a person FB messaged me to say he’d read my F&SF stories and wondered if there were any more. I said no, but happily thrust a indy-pubbed antho of four of my Asimov’s stories at him, which, you know, is something writers might do, if you talk to them.
Be warned.
It turns out he’s a writer, or trying to be, though he has yet to submit anything, and he’s tried doing some workshops, but nobody around him is taking it seriously. Classes have been briefly useful, but haven’t given him any lasting writing community.
I’m 51. I am speaking now to 20-30 year old me, who might or might not be like this guy, or like my friend Rob, or Leslie, or Ben, from one of my workshops. I don’t think they read this blog. (Between you and me and Google Analytics, very few people read this blog. Shhhh. It’s ok. It’s fun to write anyway.)
1. Write some prose everyday.
2. Write when your life is a mess. I have personally lived through long periods of unemployment, underemployment. The temptation, when the market keeps telling you you are worthless, is to internalize that message and figure you have nothing in you worth saying. So you waste that time. Then, when you have work again, you’re tired, and you kick yourself, because now, you wish you had time to write.
If you have time to write, write. Please. Fifty one year old me it telling you. There is time in your life you are wasting, youngish, newish, person.
Waste an hour a day less of it. Write.
3. Finish what you write. Badly, if you have to. Do a sucky job. Write a terrible ending you are ashamed of. But finish it. You only grow when you finish. Its like the end of the Dungeons and Dragons game, where the points get totaled. Level up! (I know how dated this reference is. Sorry.)
4. Share what you write with someone who will read it and talk to you about what they thought you were saying. These people at first are not professional, but, they are readers who read books like the ones you are trying to write. Do not share your writing with people who do not read the genre you are writing; when you do, in workshop settings, listen politely to what they say, but don’t take it to heart. You will be told that old ideas are really novel and wonderful, or, that your text is completely unintelligible, both statements true, for that person, and both statements that don’t mean anything.
Professional people, in general, will have no time to talk to you yet, because most of you will quit, and the value in most prose is roughly equal to the gold content of sea water. Gold is in there, but there’s no profitable way to distill it. So accept the fact that for the first few years or so, you’re on your own.
If this writing and sharing process is enjoyable for you, and you actually do it, I grant you permission to call yourself a writer. Should we meet in the real world, which is unlikely, I will sign something to this effect, if you want. You are a writer.
Now, that that you have the scarecrow’s diploma, do you still want to write? If so, repeat steps 1-4.
6. Send finished things to appropriate people, as a kind of second opinion, to see if what they say lines up with what your non-professional readers say. So your girlfriend or best friend or workshop friend says your stuff is as good as Stephen King? Way cool! See if you can sell it. Google on-line market listing sites. (Submission Grinder and Duotrope are two current ones.)
Things that might happen:
Your friends say you are great, but you get only form rejections. Keep writing.*
Your workshop mates say you aren’t publishable, and you get form rejections. Keep writing.*
Your workshop mates say you aren’t publishable; you sell the stories they said wouldn’t sell. Keep writing.*
You aren’t published but you get short notes after very long waiting times from editors that sound sort of nice. Believe every nice thing said. Keep writing. *
So this is the broad outline. Right now, my youngish newish reader is stuck on the ‘finding people to work with’ stage. He’s in a smallish city. I did my writing life in a big one. I’m going to do some research on on-line workshops for that, and get back to that for him.
* What is the asterix? It’s the caveat, if you want to. If it feels right. Note, I didn’t say good, because sometimes, the stuff we have to do doesn’t feel good exactly.
I am not the author of the story being rejected above, but I feel his pain. I have actually written a story with the same premise, a long long time ago. Though my title was more restrained.
Why am I calling this series How Not to be a Writer?
It’s embarrassing and awful and stupid and I shudder even saying it, but what the hell. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. (But may require extensive physical therapy.) I rewrote a beloved story, a nineteen year old piece, Clarion vintage, finding within it a slightly more interesting ending. I then sent it to a market that had rejected it long ago. It sold. I was pleasantly surprised, but I had mixed feelings. I quit for almost twenty years because of that story’s rejection. I had written, “The Last Straw,” on the slip, (which I stumbled over the other day, with no memory of having written it. Why was I looking at a folder of 20 year old rejections you wonder? Never mind.)
My problem, back then, was that I had gotten ahead of myself.
I remember spilling my guts about my frustration, as to where I was, as a Writer, to Nancy Kress at Readercon sometime during my 19 year hiatus. She’d been my first week Clarion instructor. She said something to the effect that she didn’t really worry about writing as a career, until it was one. Her expectations for her writing weren’t way out ahead of the reality. She never suffered from my cognitive dissonance. She hadn’t gotten ahead of herself. God I felt like an asshole talking to Kress. Not blaming her, I mean, just listening to myself made me feel like an idiot. Well, that, and the look on her face.
It reminded me of how stupid I felt in therapy.
Back in the 90s, the editors did this thing, with your Clarion stories, where you got hand signed, typed rejections. A professional courtesy; you shucked out the two grand and spent six weeks, and the editors kinda tipped their hat at you, for sticking it out and coughing up six stories. A nice thing, really. But what happens, when Clarion is over, the stories all sent round and you start getting the unsigned half page slips again? After Clarion, I took every rejection to heart. You knew you were being read, you were being seriously considered. I’d been giving it a bit of a go, as a writer, for six or so years, I thought, finishing a few stories a month, sending them out, but I didn’t feel like I was moving fast enough. I submitted my Clarion stories to the four mass-market magazines, one by one, and then, stopped writing.
That’s the ‘how not to be a writer part of my story, and it’s very simple and stupid and howlingly banal, like the end of a 1000 page Steven King novel you sort of loved till it was over, but the way you stop being a writer is by stopping writing.
Which I did.
For nineteen years.
I blogged for a few causes, did some GLBTQ advocacy, wrote a Slate piece on parenting, but basically, I gave up on writing.
I gave up. Was I blackballed? No. Did the editors stop reading my stories? No. Did they come around to my apartment, and destroy my mac with a sledgehammer and call me names? No. Was I imprisoned like Nelson Mandela and denied writing materials? No. I gave up. I had editors who were publishing me, back then, Warren Lapine and Ed McFadden, whose various nationally distributed magazines did everything imaginable to give me hope. Short of hopping on planes and slapping sense into me, they did what they could. It didn’t matter. I had gotten ahead of myself.
Mea culpa.
And so, all stories end in tautology. Here goes.
Wanna write, then write.
Wanna Be a Writer? What does that have to do with anything?
Wanna be rich and famous and loved? Everybody does, and what does that have to do with writing?
How is the experience of writing different, for you or Neil Gaiman or Steven King? Is the blank page they stare at somehow more seductive? That void they fill, different from the void you chuck your prose into? Aren’t we all the exact same, in that blissful no mind moment of creation? Here but not here, awake and aware and asleep all at once, rocked to sleep in the wake of the ongoing flow of the fictive dream?
Or unpleasantly awake, grinding it out, painfully, on the days when it all seems like shit?
Is their blank page really better than yours?
Write if you want to, and write if you have to, and write what you want to write, what you have to write, something that means something to you, so that, just in case there’s no fame and fortune, then, well, you’ve already paid yourself with meaning.
You want to write to a market? Write in a genre? Then you do that; maybe you’re not writing stuff that you yourself would read for pleasure. That’s OK, you can do that too. If you want to. Set your goals, create your metrics, give it a shot, see how it feels, see how you do. I know people doing this with indy pub, who are making serious money at it. That’s cool, too.
But finish what you start, submit what you finish, to editors or publish it yourself, and see what happens.
Need a community, to write for, to write with? Then… build that community. Write to it, and for it. The community you wanted to belong to doesn’t embrace you, after five years? Ten? Get over it as quickly as possible and keep writing; change your game, change the rules, look for meaning, keep moving, don’t stop if you can find a way to keep going with some kind of joy in your heart some sense of purpose.
Veronica Roth, the author of Divergent and its sequels, a best selling YA series, puts it pretty well; that this is the first paragraph of her first in series novel description gives you a sense of how important she thinks this is.
One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.
I’m a James Thurber fan, but I don’t really like his ‘serious’ short fiction very much, the angry drunken couples at party stories. I like his personal writing, his autobiographical sketches, his satire of period stuff I have little knowledge of; his drawings, his doodles, his, well, fluff. A Thurber collection invariably scrapes all the stuff together in a single volume. I wonder sometimes, if his stories were hard to write, and the fluff easy.
I’m just glad he wrote both. Maybe, someday, someone will feel the same about me. Or you.
Whit’s workshop honestly wore him out. He would become visibly agitated, as he critiqued our stories, his face flushed, his voice raised. And he put so much effort into marking up our manuscripts that somehow, he never wrote much himself, even though a lucky break had let him pursue writing full time for a number of years. (A situation I’ve been in myself; the luck and the not writing.)
Inside us all lives a creator, an editor, and a critic. Engage that critic too fiercely, rev up its engines, and it will crush every nascent naive, sentimental, derivative impulse from the get-go. Watch that internal critic shut the creator down while the editor, and the rest of the world, shrugs.
Could Whit practice what he preached? Not easily. Themed anthologies with deadlines became his salvation. When he did finish and submit stories, they were good. Pretty damned good, when you factored in the fact that he wrote so few. He progressed faster, further, with a handful of stories, than anyone I’ve ever worked with before or since. He seemed to do it through sheer force of will.
He’d raised the stakes for himself with all that critique.
But you could tell, it was painful, caring so much, about how little we could make him care. And so Whit quit the workshop, to write on his own, publishing ten stories over a ten year span.
I inherited the Weasels. We were of course, at that point, the Witless Weasels, which was our nameless group’s not really name.
My wife and I had moved to Boston from Jamaica Plain, and then, to Cambridge. Ok, we lived on the Cambridge Somerville line across the street from a creepy bomb-shelter of a bar called The Abbey Lounge, but it was Cambridge, dammit. Our living room was huge, under a big skylight on the third floor of a small apartment building. We had two sofas facing each other and a few chairs that sat a dozen people easily. A big dining room table off to one side was perfect for stacking manuscripts.
At the workshop’s most productive stage the table would support five or six piles of short stories, each stack of ten stories somehow impressive. What my friend Anthony Butler once referred to as ‘evidence of industry.’ Every two weeks people would walk in with a stack of laser-printed courier 12 point double-spaced manuscript under one arm, walk out three hours later with a different stack–composed of everyone else’s stories.
The workshop, already important to me, became the focus of my life.
I had more writing time than most. I had split my full time McJob running an imagesetter at a graphic arts service bureau and ended up with four days a week in which to write. (and three 12 hour days to work.) I quit that job and became a half-assed freelancer, which was even more flexible.
I did write, every day, but I had a hard time finishing things. I’d drink a pot of coffee every morning, write five or six thousand words of email or USENET posts (the paleolithic version of Facebook) and finally crank out some fiction.
I’d start every story with high hopes, write a few thousand words, plot it out in my head, and eventually encounter myself on the page, my limitations, my ego, my hang-ups, my misery, my impatience, my insatiable desire for love and acceptance, my inappropriate lust, my weakness, my despair, my anger.
So I’d stop working on that story and start another.
By now the workshop was stable at around 10 people, who were getting to know each other pretty well. I scouted MIT’s science fiction writing class taught by Joe Haldeman for members. I joined a group of local Extropians and Cyrionicists (you know, people who are going to freeze themselves after death.). I started going to local SF conventions and making friends. Somewhere along the way, I made an executive decision, and named the group Critical Mass. Most people liked the name. A few hated it. I decided I could be autocratic, this one time, so we’d have a goddamn name. I suppose this marks the beginning of the workshop’s decline.
The best known writers to come out of that room were Michael Burstein and Mary Soon Lee. Michael was the 1997 John W. Campbell award winner, an Analog author, whose anthology “I Remember the Future is well loved. Fifteen of the 17 stories were nominated for a hugo or nebula award. Mary Soon Lee published seventy two stories over a period of a decade, breaking into Analog, Interzone, and F&SF, and getting a story into David Hartwell’s Best of the Year Anthology. There were other accomplishments, other points of light as well; one of my MIT finds sold a story called The Portable Girlfriend under the name Doug Teirny, which made it into the Years Best Erotica in 1997. Drax got a piece in Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly. Being discovered by the guy who discovered Raymond Carver? Pretty cool.
Those who stuck with the workshop got somewhere. Always. Maybe only a few sales. But something, everyone got something. Steven Patten, Rick Silva, Dawn Albright, Sandra Hutchinson, Michael McComas, Jenise Aminoff, Sandra Hutchinson, Gil Pilli, Mark Sherwood, Simon Drax. Many of us became close if not exactly friends, united in this effort; colleagues… comrades.
Here is the thing; love and friendship among writers is sometimes conditional on the writing; leave the church of writing, and you’ll leave some friends behind, too. It’s not that you’re shunned, either. The drifting apart is mutual.
But the person who took the workshop to the next level for me, personally, was Mary Soon Lee, and her process.
1. Finish almost everything you start.
2. Workshop everything you finish.
3. Listen to critique, fix any typos or glaring errors that emerge, but don’t rewrite anything unless you feel like it; and you probably won’t. Just send it out to your top magazine choices. If you think it hasn’t a hope in hell of selling to your top markets, send first to smaller presses that like you.
4. Keep it out until it sells or you run out of markets.
This worked for her pretty well.
I started finishing things. Every two weeks, a new story, on the table. They started getting better. I’d sold that first story to Aboriginal SF; after that I sold another ten stories or so; if two more reached publication without the magazines that bought them folding, I would become a SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Professional science fiction writer.
Um. Professional here doesn’t mean you make a living; it means you sold three or more short stories (or one novel) to someone who distributed them as books or magazines by the tens of thousands.
The thing is, my internal critics barely let me write at all. Copying Mary Soon Lee forced me to finish all those stories of mine I hated, which I eventually would grow to love as I finished them, and hate again as they were rejected. Then, like Whit, I upped the ante, raised the stakes, and decided to apply to Clarion.
You know. So I could strengthen that internal critical voice.
You see where this is going.
Stay tuned for part 4: Post Clarion Wipeout: Nineteen Years in the Dark
Let’s return to a time before I had children, before I went to Clarion, before the internet bubble, before my so-called professional identity, before we had a mortgage and a car. I was a guy who’d scraped by for over a decade, in high-school, and college, and after a series of, oh, let’s call them medical problems, finally graduated from Syracuse University with a B average and a BFA.
Only took me the seven years.
Anyway, my first writing group dissolved, a few meetings, a few pieces, important, but transitory. My friendship with Ron and Marty Hale Evans continues to this day, but Steven Burke, his novel about the doomed Red Sox and the Crows, and the Vogon Poet, are long gone.
I do not remember how I found Whit Pond’s nameless group. Was it a flyer in a bookstore? Maybe the Science Fiction bookstore Pandemonium in Harvard Square? I took the Orange line to downtown crossing, caugth the red line and traveled through Cambridge into Somerville, Porter Square. I emerged from the insanely deep subway stop, up the three sets of escaltors, following directions from the flyer carefully, ending up at new-england ranch house. The houses in Somerville reminded me vaguely of the those in suburban central New York, but the lots they inhabited seemed shrunken, the yards tiny patches of weeds or concrete blocks, the houses packed in side by side in a frightful density. Insufficient tree cover made the neighborhood look a little washed out, dingy.
Still, it was nicer than were I lived, in a brownstone apartment building in Jamaica plain.
The man who opened the door for me was middle aged, thick in the middle, with longish receding graying hair. He had a mild southern accent and radiated a calm and determined intelligence. He shook my hand, smiled somewhat sadly, and welcomed me to the group.
Whit’s critique group style was anarchy. We didn’t take turns. We interrupted each other. We shared a few stories every two weeks, and we talked about what was wrong with them. We didn’t talk about what was right with them, for a few reasons. One, there wasn’t much good about them. Two, Whit was a brutally honest critic, and he set the tone for the group.
Whit told us, over again, he didn’t care. We weren’t making him care.
“I don’t like your characters. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about what’s happening. By page ten, I hate everyone. I’m hoping they all die horribly,” was what he told us, mostly, and mostly, it was true.
Whit’s critiques were breathtaking. The word flensing comes to mind. They made my heart hammer and my palms sweat. They hurt. And you knew, though, that Whit was only being honest. He liked science fiction, he liked stories. He just didn’t like yours. And, after Whit had pointed out their failings, neither did you.
And so I started to think, seriously, and continuously, about why we care about the stories we read. The made up people in the them. The bullshit situations. The make believe worlds. And suddenly, science fiction, a literature of ideas, became to me something else entirely; writing was really about character and emotion. Why do we care? Why do we care?
Every word I write now passes through that filter. Why should anyone care?
Workshoppers came and went; not many people could stand more than a few Whit crits, a few whittings. But one day, a pretty young woman showed up, in the pouring rain, seven months pregnant, looking like she was going to pass out. We brought her in, and listened to her. Let’s call her Rain. She’d sold a story to a goddamn magazine, to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy magazine, a story called Black Ribbon.
She brought a copy to a meeting, and I read it. A lovely short story about a cursed, imprisoned girl, bewitched into something toxic. Finally she is sent out by the people imprisoning her, to go to a dance, a ball. Where she dances with a host of royals, all of whom will be killed by her embrace. She’s just happy to be out of the house, dancing. Creepy. Weirdly moving.
I cared. It was good. And this woman had written it.
She taught us about the rules of workshopping, which she’d done before with actual writers who actually published things. She was like some ancient goddess bringing fire to a bunch of grunting cave men. We would take turns. We would not interrupt each other. We would use a timer. The author would speak at the end. We would go around the circle. And then, with her in place, the group began to solidify; people started coming back, week after week.
Rain’s life, as it turned out, was a shambles. She’d been impregnated and abandoned by her worthless hippy husband, who had taken all her friends with him when he left her. She’d clawed her way from the bottom of a pit of murderous depression to come to the workshop that night, struggling with pregnancy releated blood pressure issues, staggering through the damn rain to bring the grunting cavemen fire. She came and she kept coming. She brought her baby with her a few times, because she didn’t have a lot of resources, being far from her family in Ohio. She dated one of the guys in the group for awhile, a strange angry bearded man named Jeff.
I talked her up to my friend Peter. They were married the day after I came back from Clarion.
First and foremost, though, Rain was a writer, who had sold a story to a magazine, and she knew how a workshop should be run. Whit, it must be said, took her advice, and while it didn’t soften his critique, somehow,he became more bearable, because his became just one of a set of opinions given roughly equal weight. He still set the tone, but the group was now bigger than just him. The people who stuck were the people who could keep bringing stuff in. Some would become my friends for life. (but so many would fall away. Rain and Peter included. Life is like that sometimes.)
The group had no name, but we joked, sometimes, about being weasles, ripping each other’s flesh. Like the Frank Zappa Album cover above.
And the day came after a year or two when I would write a story that Whit didn’t hate.
He looked confused, at that meeting, flipping back and forth in the manuscript, trying to say, what it was he usually said, but he couldn’t. Because I’d made him care. He would call me, later in the week, at home, with a new series of complaints about the story, why it was deeply flawed, but it was too late. I’d sent it out.
The story was called Dollhouse, and it was my first professional sale, sold to Charlie Ryan at Aboriginal Science Fiction. In 1994.
Like Rain, I’d sold a story. I had my sign! I knew what was I doing.
Or so I thought at the time. For a while.
Until Clarion.
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Vogon Poetry is one of the many pitfalls plaguing new smallish writing workshops.
My first writing group met maybe a half dozen times, and reviewed less than twenty pieces in all. We were a hopelessly mismatched group. I was a traditional science fiction fan, more or less, with some strange experiences under my belt, a veteran of the psychedelic seventies. Ron, the big-bearded man, had a similar backstory, but he was subtly different.
For one thing, Ron was on the internet, which I’d only read about in magazines. He’d upgraded his Mac 128 to a Mac Plus and wired it to a 300 baud Volksmodem. I marveled at the four tiny multicolored wires teased out of the phone cable, screwed into little posts on the modem, next to the mottled beige Mac all-in-one information appliance. Ron had met his wife on IRC, the web’s first chat protocol. He’d proposed to her the first time they’d met in person. Ron was living in the future. He was, and is, one of the few true intellectuals I’ve known in my life.
Marty, Ron’s wife, was sort of in and out of the group, and probably wrote the best prose; she wrote from experience.
Steve Burke was an object lesson to me on not judging people based on regional accents. He was from South Boston and had that accent; that Boston accent. Parking the car in the Harvard Yard. He’d lived through the busing crisis; he’d suffered for decades at Fenway Park with the Red Sox. He wrote contemporary fiction, fragments of a novel, in which the curse of the Red Sox manifested itself as crows which dogged his protagonist through a series of calamities. He was smart, and funny, and soulful, and I regret having lost track of him over the years.
And then… there was, oh, let’s call her Rose. Rose the Poet. Who wrote, well, poetry. Here’s the thing about Rose, though, and maybe it’s all you really need to know about her, (but I’ll say more) Rose wrote poetry but never read any. Reading Rose was akin to listening to a man who’d never heard music bang on his guitar with a rock.
And this, to me, is the essence of almost any workshop, you bring together a group of people ostensibly trying to do the same thing, and you discover gradually that you are all so weirdly impossibly different that it’s amazing you can even speak to one another. You try to create some kind of shared language, shared understanding, of what writing is, what prose is, what story is, and mostly, you fail.
But it’s fun, somehow, trying. More than fun–it’s illuminating.
We met a few times, over a few months, never finding a venue we found comfortable. Quickly, Ron and I dubbed Rose the Vogon Poet, and it became harder and harder to go to the group. Ron wrote two science fiction short stories, both of which I remember vividly to this day, and decided that his calling was elsewhere. He didn’t really read or write SF; he mined it for idea, he sucked out its marrow and used it to help him construct reality. Ron’s reality is complicated. Maybe everyone’s is.
We dissolved the group officially, in order to get rid of Rose, and though we met a few times afterwards, in a new, reformed, Poet-less group, we’d cut the heart out of the thing when we did that somehow shameful thing.
I can’t remember what I wrote with these people–my terrible novella? I remember their work, though. I remember a line from one of Rose’s poems. “Today, I am a bandage.” I remember Steve’s crows. I remember Ron’s VLAI (Very Large Artificial Intelligence, my first brush with the Singularity.) I remember Marty’s bee-drowsed meadow.
I remember losing a kind of shame I had, shame and fear, at pretending to be a writer, at playing at it. I remember a subtle shift in personality, in identity, as I struggled with figuring out what the hell I was going to say about someone else’s story.
I would never be the same, afterwards.
If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.
Once Upon a Time, I was going to Be a Writer. Sorry about the capitalization, but there was no avoiding it.
Of course, at first you don’t really want to be a writer as much as you want to be someone who has written. Better yet, someone who has published, really cool stuff, that you and a few million others really really like; love even.
You want to be so good you change people’s lives.
You want to give back to the Universe that feeling, those feelings, all that life you absorbed, acquired, imbibed, by reading. It’s only fitting, it’s only fair, that someone for whom books have been so important should write them.
So you write, for a few years, and you suck, and you can tell you suck. (See Above.)
Not to mention the fact that if you are as weak, as close to clinical depression, as undisciplined, as lazy, as I am, you talk about writing for years before doing it. (To be fair, I was waiting for word processing to be invented.)
When I finally started, I thought, if I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, my first story, long enough, it would be Publishable. Whatever that means. And so I wrote on it for a year, and finally sent it off to Analog, because, well I’d heard of Analog, and read a few issues. Or had I read Asimov’s? Anyway, I knew that Analog had once been Astounding, and Astounding had been great, and well, maybe I was great, too.
I printed the drafts out dot matrix on perforated fanfold paper every few days and marked up the copy with a red magic marker, an extrusion of wretched prose which grew longer and longer, but very slowly. Like a tumor.
Oh, that story. A novel’s worth of ideas, many of them stupid, in a novella length story-like thing. My first story combined elements of Eric Frank Russel’s Sinister Barrier with a Zelazny-like Men as God’s milieu, but set in the modern era; reality was a game played by a cabal of reincarnating immortals. The ending came to me in a dream–in a goddamn dream, a vision, and as I wrote it, I knew, I had tapped into something big, something incredible.
I’d be like Heinlein selling Lifeline to John W. Campbell. Oh, maybe I’d need to revise it. John Campbell sent back letters to aspiring writers longer than the stories themselves, i’d read, for Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. OK, Campbell was dead, but whoever was editing Analog would probably write me a nice long note.
I remember that envelope, the weight of the manilla, the dot matrix address label, as I slid it into the pivoting maw of the blue Postal Box, and a sense of unease, or disquiet, as it fell away into blackness and suddenly, I couldn’t edit the damn thing anymore. The story was done.
I awaited my ascension.
I’ve lost that story, but I’m pretty sure it sucked donkey dick. An any rate, it was rejected with a half page form in six weeks, and I didn’t write another word for another year. Completely derailed by a completely ordinary foreseeable thing. I had no community. No support group. No friends who were writing. No class I was taking. I didn’t even read any books on how to write. I’d read 1000 novels, I should be able to write one. Jeeze.
Kids! Don’t be like me! They should bring me into writing workshops to give ‘scared straight’ rants to aspiring writers, like the convicts they use to frighten delinquents. It isn’t 1930 anymore, and I wasn’t Robert Heinlein, or JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, and neither are you, and if you want to do this there are going to some goddamn bumps along the way. (See above.)
But during that year of mourning my Heinleinlessness, I met a friend, in a long-vanished basement used bookstore in Harvard Square, a great friend, a burly, hairy young man with thick glasses and a shy smile and a penetrating gaze. We talked for awhile, and it was like they say, you don’t make friends, you recognize them, and it turned out he wrote, too, and he had a group, and did I want to go? He gave me his phone number, because at that time, we didn’t have email addresses.
I was living with my girlfriend, friendless in a strange city, in shock at finally leaving my miserable home town, temping and trying to figure out who I was and what the hell I was going to do with my life. Yeah. I wanted to go.
This was twenty five years ago, I still want to go, and I’m going, again. I haven’t yet grown out of the Workshop Thing. I gave them up, for a time, and as it turns out, when I give up on workshops. I stop writing fiction. But I digress.
I took the red line to Charlestown, to a basement cafe, and found my bearded friend Ron, an ordinary looking guy named Steve, and a petite young woman named Carol–who was, as it turned out, a poet. Sort of.
My writing life began that day, everything beforehand was a prelude. I had now created a feedback loop that didn’t require John W. Campbell to write me letters on how to fix my stories, because, John W. Campbell was, and remains, very dead. I wasn’t dead. I was in my late twenties, the author of a single terrible novella, but I’d found the goddamned workshop, a few writers, somehow, this was going to work.
Once Upon a Time, I was going to Be a Writer. Sorry about the capitalization, but there was no avoiding it.