Lilith Saintcrow

From Roy Blount of the Author’s Guild. Please feel free to post and spread this around!

I’ve been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren’t known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don’t lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn’t in the cards.

We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let’s mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that’s just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children’s books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they’ll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: “Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see…we’re the Authors Guild.”

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Just a quick writing post this Friday, because I am juggling eight fiery chainsaws and a partridge. (The poor bird looks scared to death.) ANYWAY.

I often say that the characters do all the heavy lifting and I’m just the scribe. This is true as far as it goes, and like all true statements it is more complex than it appears. To put it simply, there is a division of labor in this storytelling gig. I do my work, and the characters take care of themselves.

I am responsible for showing up at the keyboard every damn day. I am responsible for shutting out distractions and making writing a priority. I am also responsible for filling my creative “well” with images and Stuff. I am responsible for knowing the technical stuff–grammar and structure, etc.

The Muse is responsible for ideas, for characters, for the telling detail, and for vomiting up raw material for me to shape. (Pardon me a moment, I just had the image of a bulimic Muse and about laughed myself into a heart attack. Nobody else knows what’s so funny. Story of my life.)

I do not ever worry about running out of ideas or characters or stories. That is not my job. They are lined up around the block and it’s physically impossible for me to get to them all before I die, even if I write 24/7. Which I can’t do because, you know, I have a life. At least, I have kids. Close enough.

I’m responsible for my end, and the Muse never falls through on hers. I firmly believe that if you make writing a priority, if you make the time to sit consistently at the keyboard and keep your grammar and your metaphysical pencil sharpened, you will never have to worry about the Muse’s end of the deal. Yes, she is fickle–but like all good nymphs she is amazingly faithful in her fickleness.

The stories will come. You can’t stop them. They will inundate like the sea trying to gulp down Venice or Holland. Your job is to build the dikes and keep them maintained so you can keep the canals at a reasonable level. (Yeah, I know this analogy breaks down. You still get the picture, good enough.) Those dikes are consistent hard work and keeping your knowledge of craft constantly sharpened. You can reclaim acres and acres from the sea that way, in little chunks of work spread out over every day.

Do not wait for the Muse. She waits on you, not the other way around. Yeah, you can throw the bitch a bonbon every now and again to keep her happy. But the first step–of showing up consistently at the keyboard with your grammar clean and your head full of random stuff gleaned from life–is all yours. She will show up when you do. The more you show up, the more she learns to trust you. This trust is fragile; you can break it by choosing not to be consistent. Then, like any jilted Havisham, she will immure herself in a house you can’t get into. And that sucks like a big sucking thing.

But you can always tempt her out by showing up at the keyboard again. Consistently.

My Muse is a bitch. She really is. She’s fickle, unendurable, demanding, flighty, and constantly throwing cute little shinies across my path to distract me. She’s also a right dominatrix when a book really takes hold and all my spare RAM is taken up with keeping up with her.

But she always shows up. Every time I sit down and do my part of the job, she steps up. 100% of the time, she gives her all. And since she does…well, I’m not going to do any less.

So don’t worry about losing ideas or running out of ideas. That’s not your job. Your job is simple: show up consistently with your grammar and put your hands on the keyboard.

That’s it. No golden handshake or soopah-sekrit magic wand. You do your job, and the Muse will slather you with enough magic for twelve. She’ll spread it around like coconut oil on a roasting bodybuilder. She’ll cake it like Baby Jane’s aging face; she’ll spread it around like bribes in corrupt oligarchy. She’ll throw so much magic at you you’ll have trouble keeping up.

She is very good at her job. You only have to be consistent at yours. And all that wonder is yours for the taking.

Over and out.

So…we’ve got two short stories struggling to be born.

* The Heart Is Always Right, a weird little piece involving gargoyles and a bit of Beauty and the Beast (with vampires!), is at 3k. The limit on this one is 8-10K, for the Supernaturals on Vacation anthology. I have the ending, I just need to get there. Plenty of room to do so, and I’m telling it in first-person, so it’s…good. I like this story because I like the hero, who I am going to try to make nameless. Maybe I can even pull it off. Deadline: Feb 1.

* Say Yes is for a book of YA vampire fiction. We’ve got two girls, a popular one and a not-so-popular one, a vampire, and a coming of age. ~400 words right now, and they’ve been hard ones because I’ve been doing the thing I always do with shorts: fretting and fretting and making decisions in the first hundred words that will affect the rest of the story. Deadline: Jan 5.

Short stories are very, very difficult for me. Novel structure I can do all day long, I enjoy it. Short stories are outright hard, and I have to have them all put together inside my head before I lunge through and force them out onto paper. I have to do a lot of thinking to make a short come out right. Each time I finish one I feel relieved and swear never to do that again because it stretches all sorts of mental muscles, usually in “demm oncomfortabul weez”, as Pashpush used to say.

So, wish me luck. I know I’m ahead of deadline and it’s ridiculous for me to worry about it, but each short story feels like a do-or-die situation. My brain has a hard time convincing my adrenals that everything is, indeed, okay.

Argh. Now how do I do private school in California in less than five hundred words?

*headdesk*

PS: Mazoku, don’t fear. The Demon’s Librarian should be out early next year for you. I think you’ll like that one, too.

So I hit 50K on my NaNoWriMo project last night–after the kitchen was cleaned up. (This is for book 2 of the Strange Angels series, you can preorder the first one here.) Just after that I finished reading Kage Baker’s The Graveyard Game. I went to bed feeling like a champion. It’s a precious feeling.

So often I feel like I’m just juggling fiery things; like it’s all I can do to grab the next chainsaw as it starts to come down and send it back up. Part of this dynamic is simple–it’s how I like it, when I’m running near full capacity I don’t feel lazy. Part of the dynamic is complex–a stew of work ethic plus fierce perfectionism and the thought that maybe if I work hard and fast and good enough “they” will love me. That component is a pure search for the approval I never had as a child, and it’s so useful I have kept it even though it drives me crazy.[1]

I don’t know what I would be without driving myself so hard. I get a funny squirrelly feeling when I think of maybe not demanding as much from myself. The dark side of it is this feeling that I could be doing better no matter how hard I work, which can tip one into a cycle of self-destructive chewing at the leather straps of life.

While I don’t quite advocate this for other writers (Jesus, who in their right mind would, even if it works for me?) I still think it is crucial for a writer to have an internal drive. I will even go so far as to say this drive has to be higher than average. Nobody is standing over you with a truncheon making you write. An editor will not be calling you every day to see if you’ve gotten your wordcount in. You’re expected to produce and turn in a reasonably finished product, because it’s what you’re contracted for. The daily slog of writing work requires that you be your own boss; if you expect to make a living from writing you have to have not only the drive to make your craft better and deal with rejection but the self-imposed will to work every damn day to get the job done without someone poking at you.

It’s a lonely road.

I’ve worked in offices and I’ve worked retail; I’ve even worked in manufacturing. In each instance I could cope with having micromanagers, but I worked much better when I was given an objective and then left alone to do it. This translated out very well to writing, but it was more of a handicap while working, say, retail. It was a big problem in office work. I wanted to give my best–but unfortunately, the manager wanted to “control” or wanted their emotional needs filled in a way that didn’t mesh with me producing my best.

So often (not all the time, mind you, but often) people get into management because they’re good bureaucratic sociopaths. But that’s another blog post.

Writing for a living requires a completely different set of skills than office work. Working retail is good for gathering material–Christ, is it ever–but the skills you develop there don’t serve you in very good stead when it’s just you and the keyboard and the blood-tinted sweat prickling on your forehead.

This is why when I say “writer” I’m referring to someone who wants to make a living from this thing, or at least have a reasonable chance of consistently getting published.[2] A lot of hobbyists call themselves writers; that’s not a bad thing. But I do think there’s a dearth of professional advice. A lot of people engage in speshul snowflakery or just plain obfuscation over writing.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a mystery at the heart of every creative endeavor. That’s why it’s Creation. It’s one of the biggest mysteries known to us. But there’s also a paradox–hard work and discipline prepare the ground for that mystery (the harder I work, the luckier I get syndrome) and prepare the ground for making a living from that mystery. Sculpting and painting require a certain amount of technical proficiency (don’t throw “modern” art at me here, please); I don’t know why people like to think writing is any different. That technical proficiency goes hand in hand with hard work and discipline. Making a living from writing requires that hard work, discipline, technical proficiency, and creativity.

It’s no wonder it feels like juggling fiery chainsaws.

Anyway, this is why I think NaNo is good for a lot of writers or hobbyists who think they might want to become writers. The process of having a this kind of goal–brute output–and a deadline does wonderful things for those people suited to it. It can also teach a professional writer a refinement or two on the nature of their own creative and self-imposed drive. The skills and drive to become a professional writer, to make a living at this jazz, are not some collection of arcana only shown to those with the Golden Handshake. Like any skills, they can be practiced, learned, fiddled with, and tweaked for a particular personality or set of circumstances. Thinking about how you’re going to solve the problem of being self-driven, how you’re going to arrange things to get yourself through fifty thousand words or so, is immensely valuable.

Great ideas are good. Practiced craft and discipline to convey those ideas is better, and is totally learnable. Practiced discipline and self-drive to get those ideas out into the world, to deal with submissions guidelines and editors and deadlines and copyedits and all that Other Stuff is the best of all, because the work isn’t just languishing in isolation. It is out there doing what it’s meant to do. Each step in the process has its own rewards and pitfalls.

And part of the joy of being self-driven is accomplishing a particular goal, like NaNo, and looking back over the peaks and valleys–and knowing that you walked every inch of that alone. Knowing that you pitted yourself against obstacles and pitfalls, and that you came out ahead. Knowing that you did it, goddammit, and every inch of that victory you sweated for is your own, your very own, your precioussssssss.

It is a wonderful feeling. It should be. Because tomorrow I’m going to have to get up and do it all over again, and if I don’t feel good about it why on earth will I do it? Take your victories where you find them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to celebrate by taking a walk. Or going out for Thai and getting a mojito. Or maybe just by laying on the floor and feeling like I’ve climbed a mountain and ironed all the wrinkles out of my cerebellum at once.

It’s a small triumph, perhaps. But it’s all mine, and I’ll take it. Tomorrow it’s back to juggling chainsaws.

Today, however, it’s feeling good about the fiery machines I’ve juggled so far.

Over and out.

[1] The conscious choice to keep a particular response is different from suffering that response unconsciously and allowing it to f!ck up your life. At least, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
[2] Do not moan at me about how I don’t have a copyright on the word “writer”. I offer this definition so you know what I’m talking about, in the interests of being as precise and clear as possible. ‘Nuff said.

Watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons while thinking about the Friday writing post is probably not good for me. I’m just sayin’.

I am now in that part of the novel–a quarter to a third through, basically–where I realize I have been wrong for 20-odd thousand words and now I know the real way everything should go. This feeling is deep and panic-laden, and it is the bane of many a good writer.

The seduction, of course, is to go back over what you’ve written and rewrite it according to the New Shiny Idea. This is all very well, but it doesn’t get one any further toward the finish line.

My solution is to just start at that point, assume that I can fix the front end of the book later, and write the rest of the story according to the New Shiny Idea. A zero draft does not have to be perfect, and it’s a lot easier to go back and tweak the initial 20K than it is to rewrite the first 20K five times and then get discouraged and toss the whole work, which usually ends up happening.

Constantly reworking the front of your novel according to the New Shiny Idea is 98% of the time an avoidance tactic dressed up as something you could conceivably think is good writing habit. It feels like you’re making progress, you end up writing 70-100K or so, but you do not have a finished work to show for it. You have an overchewed piece of steak. It is a trick to keep you from finishing, because finishing is scary.

Finishing is scary because it is only the first step in submitting, getting rejected or published, etc. It represents a whole new set of problems, chief among them is the ever-famous Internal Censor screaming you finished this and it’s still a piece of crap! Who told you that you could do this!

I can’t say it often enough. Do yourself a favor and get the whole corpse up on the table before you start operating on it, trimming and tweaking and making it pretty enough to bury. (Hey, all metaphors break down sooner or later. So sue me.) Do not worry if you get a great idea of blinding flash of light a third or a quarter or half of the way there. Incorporate that idea at the point you get it, and keep forging ahead.

Believe me, you will revise a finished work often enough to get sick of it, and enough times to fully meld that shiny idea seamlessly with the beginning.

Just don’t obsessively rework the front end of the story. Of all the avoidance behaviors new (and even experienced) writers display, this is one of the worst and most seductive because it feels like you’re doing actual work when you’re really…not.

It’s hard just to keep on keepin’ on. Believe me. I am right now trying my damndest not to go back and fiddle with a few important things that ABSOLUTELY MUST go in the front of the story–but if they ABSOLUTELY MUST, I will catch them in revision. So will my beta, and my editor, and my agent. There will be no shortage of opportunities to shoehorn. Right now, though, my job is to get this whole thing out of my head and onto the page.

Time to get back to work.