Writing – Page 5 – DONFOOLERY

Functional Freakiness

I made a small effort toward getting back in the writing saddle after my weekend adventures. I confess, I haven’t had much luck. This is how I’ve been feeling for nigh on two weeks…

Reading between the lines of those blog entries, you can probably detect a tinge of guilt. It was fed, in part, by this quote I’d read (and posted to my tumblr) from filmmaker John Waters in his “10 Best Pieces of Advice for Functional Freaks.”

I’m a fascist about my work habits and I expect you to be, too. Never have a spontaneous moment in your life again. If you’re going to have a hangover, it should be scheduled on your calendar months in advance. Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time-management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it’s a lifestyle that breeds power.

I may have reasons for my lack of discipline and productivity since the end of the academic year, but no real excuses. At least none that my Inner Drill Sergeant would accept, especially with the amount of rejections I’ve received lately.

I think it’s time for Gunny to come back out and square me away.

Now, between that John Waters quote and Gunny up there, a lot of you are probably fearing for my sanity. But if you’re not familiar with the flims of John Waters, here’s a sample of his mindset. This is a little something he did for some indie movie theaters that I remember seeing in high school.

There may not be much difference between Waters’ and Gunny’s attitude toward work, but if someone who works as hard as Gunny can produce the stuff what Waters does, then you know what? I want to be a functional freak.

Sunday Brain Dump

1
Last night, I went to the season opener double-header for the Ithaca League of Women Rollers, i.e. our two local derby teams, the SufferJets and the Bluestockings. Great bout!! A comment was made by one of the announcers, giving me an idea for a short story.

2
Came up with another idea for a short story a couple of days ago. I think it’s a killer idea. I don’t have a character in mind for it. Which means, I don’t have any scenes in mind. It’s frustrating, because until I come up with one or the other, the idea’s useless to me.

3
I used to keep a monthly scorecard of my short-story submissions, but explaining why I didn’t submit any stories for a given month got old. I got back on a submissions kick this month, putting out 5 previously rejected stories and 3 new ones. I’ve already gotten 3 rejections back. *sigh*

Gotta keep pushing!

4
It’s taken me two years for me to follow my own advice and start reading Ben Tanzer‘s book Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine. You know how it is. You intend to order something that’s not available at your local bookstore, and you just put off doing it. And then, it does appear at your local bookstore.

Yo, Ben — I started it and I’m liking what I’m reading so far. Sorry it took me so long!

5
This is part of a push on my part to read more novels in 2010. How else am I ever going to learn to write one…?

6
It has its flaws (which I understand are soon to be remedied), but I’m still in love with mint.com. It’s given me something I’ve needed for a long time, namely a way of GTD-ing my money management.

7
I cannot tell you how much I’m enjoying the 2010 series of Doctor Who. I wasn’t up in arms about David Tennant leaving the role, because I’d learned my lesson. I remember ranting in 2005, “What do you mean Christopher Eccleston’s leaving?” I had no idea how good Tennant was going to be. Well, I looked forward to Matt Smith’s performance, and so far, so good. And I admit that he rocks the tweed jacket better than I do.

Not only that, but so far the new head-writer/producer Steven Moffat has delivered, too, AFAIC. The BBC made the right choice, giving the show to the writer whose episodes have won Hugo awards. No, the episodes haven’t been perfect but I’m very, very impressed with what he’s done with the show’s tone. Everything people say about the fairy-tale/fantasy tone is all true. The first two episodes, especially, seemed like a sci-fi version of Pan’s Labyrinth. The only to make them better would be to have had them directed by Guillermo Del Toro.

8
I really need to do something about my home office. I’m fighting the clutter lately, and losing. The trouble is, the only solution is hard for me to face. I need a new desk with more tabletop real estate, which means taking the time and trouble to empty out and junk my old desk. Dammit.

I think that’s it for now.

My Branding Motto

I see lots of Twitter discussions and blog entries on the importance of social networking and branding for writers. I have my share of sites (just look at my sidebar), and have given some thought to what my “brand” might be (or should be), so I certainly don’t knock the idea.

Yes, publishing’s moving. Yes, a writer (any artist, really) should be online somehow. But, how much time and energy do I spend doing this? Where do I spend it? More importantly, what about the writing? Makes me wonder if I have to be Don Draper to figure this all out.

Alan DeNiro (author of one of my favorite short story collections, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead) has also tried to ponder these mysteries, partially spurred on by a presentation at SXSWi, at which the assertion was made that…

An author is no longer an individual working in a room alone, but the leader of an online “tribe” of followers –- the people who comprise the author’s audience. Several example kept coming up, wine guy Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Crush It!, business guru Seth Godin; and Kroszer’s favorite example, The Pioneer Woman, who “could organize a tour on her own without the help of a publisher.” The consensus, from another panel –- “Scoring a Tech Book Deal” was that a potential author needed a minimum of 5,000 Twitter followers.

Now, I have no intention of being John the Baptist in sackcloth and ashes, crying out in the wilderness. I’m not going to rail about art vs. commerce. I’m just saying that as I look at my “writers” list on Twitter and the Google Friendconnect bloggers I’m following on the sidebar–which accounts for only a third of the writer blogs I follow on my RSS feed reader–I see exactly the tribalism that’s being talked about. Book and story reviewing, writers of every level interviewing other writers of every level, guest blogging, group blogging — and I honestly have no idea where I fit in yet.

Until I figure it out, though, I feel I’m doing two things absolutely right…

I’m writing what I want to write, and I’m putting it out there.
I’m connecting with “the right people.”

Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Joel Hodgson said his crew was never worried if not everyone would get their arcane references, because “the right people will get it.” Who are “the right people?”

First, I’ll talk about how I collect them. I collect them the way I collect comic books after the 90s when people realized they just didn’t need 8 variant covers of the same damn first issue of every book with an X in the title. I invest in the books I want to read. The ones that interest me. Same with the folks I follow on any given social network I belong to. I follow them ‘cos I want to. Because they pique my curiousity, or enthrall me with their points of view, or they’re doing exactly what I want to be doing, the way I hope to do it. And, I strive to be equally interesting to them. And I accomplish this by putting myself out there, and responding the best I can to what these people put out there.

I read an interview with–well, I forget if it was Ricky Gervais or Eddie Izzard. To paraphrase my favorite bit of that interview, I’d rather be 1000 people’s favorite writer than 10,000 people’s 10th favorite writer. The way I see it, my chances of accomplishing that are better when I develop–okay, a tribe–of people who “get” me.

i.e. “The right people.”

I guess you could say my branding strategy so far can be best summed up in the poem “Motto” by Langston Hughes…

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is:
Dig and be dug
In return.

Now, I did say “so far.” So, tell me — am I missing anything? What else should I be considering? I want to hear especially from my peeps that have blogged about this in the past (don’t make me go back through all the Read items in Google Reader, pleeeease?). Am I thinking too hard about all this? Or not hard enough?

Educate me.

Getting Things Done, For Longer Than I’ve Been Alive

Jim Lehrer, host of the PBS NewsHour (formerly known as, among other things, The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour) for over 35 years, is one of my biggest writing influences. During his long and storied career in journalism, he’s written and published nineteen novels. This makes him one of my writing heroes, despite the fact that I haven’t read word one of his books.

So what makes him my influence? He wrote those books while he was anchoring, reporting in, and producing award-winning news shows. And he’s not some Johnny-Come-Lately who decided to “follow his real dream” once he got the NewsHour gig and after getting a bit of fame behind him. His first novel Viva, Max! was published in 1966, seven years before he teamed up with Robert MacNeil, at the beginning of a career that would garner him numerous awards for excellence in journalism.

Do a thought experiment with me. Lehrer’s books get fair-to-middlin’ reviews but let’s assume–purely for the sake of argument–that each and every one of his novels is utter crap (Again, I don’t know this, because I haven’t read any of them). Imagine how much work it would take to produce and publish nineteen bad novels, and you’ll see why I’m impressed.

In short, he’s a guy who gets his writing done, and in the interviews I’ve seen over the years in which he talks about his fiction, he gets it done anywhere and everywhere he can, every day.

I’ve met writers who hold down day jobs and/or are parents (some, of kids with special needs), and/or who are adult caregivers, and/or who are dealing with their own or someone else’s medical/mental/emotional problems. And I look at these folks, and at Jim Lehrer, and ask myself, “What the fuck excuse do I have?”

Does it make you ask the same?

How Don Is About to Get His Groove Back

As I slogged through my horrendous backlog of Google Reader items last week, I read one of the best writing-related posts I’d ever seen from io9.com entitled “12 Secrets to Being a Super-Prolific Short-Story Writer.” I actually know some of these…

Know how your story ends before you begin it.
Don’t just write the same story over and over again, or you’ll bore yourself.
Start crude, then work on refining.
Have a bunch of stories on the back burner, and keep rotating.
Don’t be afraid to stare at the blank screen for a few hours.
Write a bunch of stories in a shared world.
Some stories are just the turning point in the story, not the whole story from beginning to end.
Try creating a character study, or a collection of potent images, instead of just a series of plot twists.
If you’re getting bogged down in a particular story, you probably haven’t found what it’s about yet.
Try an exercise, like rewriting a well-known story from a different viewpoint.
Don’t be afraid to take crazy risks.
Write for different markets.

It’s no secret to anyone that I’m weeks overdue on delivering my Four Horsemen Contest story, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. But every inch of the teeth-pulling progress I’ve made on the damn thing thus far was made by re-learning these two pieces of advice.

5) Don’t be afraid to stare at the blank screen for a few hours. Sometimes you gotta spend some time chewing over the turning point in your story. Sometimes the ending you thought was so crystal clear when you started out has turned mushy. Sometimes you have to throw out a thousand words of perfectly good story because it rang false and didn’t feel like the direction the story should be going in. There’s no substitute, on occasion, for sitting and sweating it out. Think about the characters, and what they’re actually thinking and feeling in the situation you’ve set up. Think about the themes you’ve established and what sort of resolution they’re leading to. Take the time to visualize the right ending for this story, or put it aside…

I’ve seriously forgotten how to just sit and sweat it out. I’d sit and get frustrated that nothing was coming. I’d make myself scribble some words down. Then I’d hit the backspace key and delete. Then I’d hit Ctrl-Z and put it all back. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a life issue, really. I’ve never had any trouble bleeding, sweating, or crying to keep my momentum going. I’ve had stuff knock me down, and I’ve had to get back up. But when something just stalls? When I’m working and working, and I’m just spinning my wheels? That’s often when I want to give up.

But I’m getting better.

9) If you’re getting bogged down in a particular story, you probably haven’t found what it’s about yet. This is sort of an extension of tip #5, I guess. Maybe you’re trying to make your characters care about what you want them to care about, instead of what it makes sense for them to care about. Maybe you’re focusing on a supporting character, while your main character is wandering around just outside the frame. Maybe the real theme or idea of your story is something you’ve only touched on in passing. The power of storytelling is so great, that when you find what your story is actually about, you may feel it propelling you forward with its unstoppable logic. The characters will be motivated to move forward, the mysteries will feel more and more urgent until someone solves them, and the underlying themes will get clearer and clearer until they form into some kind of potent image. That’s the idea, anyway.

And, I’m almost there.

Part of the problem (and no, I don’t really count the hell my work life has been the past few weeks) is that my writing process has moved soooo far away from starting with an idea. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “First contact with mutual attraction between the species.” But I had a hell of a time starting with that because that idea, in itself, said nothing to me at first. Given the right germ of a scene, maybe a character interaction or a piece of dialogue, that idea might’ve occurred to me.

But, I’m not bitching! It took a bit of struggle, but I’ve actually found something resembling a theme, related to the “First contact with mutual attraction between the species” idea, that I can sink my teeth into, based on the characters and situations that have already presented themselves in the puke draft. And that’s what I’ve been working on, trying to hammer it into shape in the Forge of Vulcan (i.e. my netbook).

Yep, I can feel my groove coming back, slowly but surely.

Motion in Poetry

Last Sunday night, I attended a poetry workshop by the current Broome County (NY) Poet Laureate, Andrei Guruianu at Buffalo St. Books. He did a reading from a few of his collections, including his latest, and nothing was sacred anymore, and then guided willing attendees through an exercise.

Guruianu did a brief lecture on poetic elements, which was very useful. Up until now, I had no criteria for judging any piece of poetry other than, “I know what I like.” And Guruianu’s words about the elements of what he considers to be good poetry gave me at least one way to evaluate the poetry I read from now on. To him, the best poetry uses words to depict an environment or invoke images that are concrete, significant, meaningful, and which resist the mind’s tendency to go off on tangents and lean toward abstractions.

Afterward, I went back through the five or six books that I laughingly call my “poetry library” and I’ll be damned if I didn’t go back to the ones listed as my favorites and found just that. Not one poem about “war” or “time” or “space” or “that girl who broke my heart.” Poems on those sorts of topics, yes. But not about the abstract concepts.

And of course, I went back through what I laughingly call the “poems” I’ve written thus far. Now, I knew most of them sucked, but now I know at least one reason why! And the few (well, one… okay two or three) that “worked,” did so because they generally had more concrete elements.

So, to answer the questions that are undoubtedly on your mind…

Yes–I’d like to write more poetry. Maybe see if I can salvage the stuff I’ve written so far. Maybe write something like the work I heard at the poetry panel I attended at Astronomicon 11.
No–I’m not posting any of it here. Maybe at Fictionaut, but even then probably not for public consumption. Because I care for you all, far too much. Maybe once I’ve learned a few more things.

Quandary

I have–rather, I had–I dilemma. This post isn’t about the dilemma itself, but rather my joy over how I found my solution.

If you’ve been following my Twitter lately, you’ll know that I’m making an effort to resubmit my rather shameful backlog of returned stories in order to keep them in circulation. It’s quite the shell game, making sure you’re resending stories to Plan B, Plan C, Plan Q markets while making sure it fits their varied guidelines and submissions periods.

Now, I believe in the conventional wisdom–sub to top markets first, then work your way down. I don’t always follow it, but I believe in it. Me, I consider all of the following when I decide where to submit a story:

Pay Rates–just like the conventional wisdom says.
“Street Cred”–I wasn’t paid for my one piece on McSweeney’s, yet it’s been worth its weight in gold, as I found when I mentioned it to other pro writers at a recent conference
Story Fit–only 2-3 stories I’ve ever written might have almost, possibly, if you squint your eyes, be appropriate for Analog)
Timing of their submissions period.

I don’t like having to make Story Fit and Timing my primary criteria. I get there sometimes when I feel I have to choose between (getting rejected by) a top-paying pro-zine or high “street cred” market that isn’t taking subs until next month, or a market that might not pay quite as high in either area but that’s taking subs now. That’s where I am with one particular piece. I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say that I’d been asking myself the question of “How small of a market is too small?”

Then, checking my backlog (another backlog–gee, there isn’t a pattern, is there?) of unread Google Reader items, I found that John Scalzi, Cat Valente, and Sarah Monette all have different takes on my quandary, all posted over the last few days.

I rush to point out–none of these positions are wrong! They gave me a lot to consider, and now I’ve decided that the story in question isn’t going to do me any good whatever sitting in my trunk.

Odds & Ends

I didn’t take notes at some of the Astronomicon panels I attended because the material was pretty straightforward with nothing particularly earthshattering or, the opposite, I was too engrossed in the discussion and/or managed to take part! So, here are two of those, with more to come.

“Is It Fantasy, Sci-Fi, or Something Else?”
with Josepha Sherman (moderator), with Sal Monaco, Daniel Rabuzzi, and Steve Carper

I remember it started off with an invitation to the audience to shout out the name of a series (lit, TV, whatever) and the panel would try to categorize it as best they could. The Twilight Zone came up and I remembered being a little disappointed with how easily the panel resolved their hemming and hawing and decided, “Sci-fi. Well, no fantasy… well, it had some fantasy elements, but mostly sci-fi.” I let it go, ‘cos I didn’t want to come off like Prometheus from on-high (read: The 2009 Rod Serling Conference), pontificating to the unwashed.

The most interesting part of the discussion happened when the subject of the hard-to-categorize came up. That’s when I got to show off a bit, rattling off all the various lit mag issues devoted to that recently, Tin House 33, Conjunctions 39 and 52, Interfictions–well, I didn’t bring up Interfictions. One of the panelists, Rabuzzi (a member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation) did!

“The Internet and Personal Privacy”
with Alan Katerinsky (moderator) with the hosts of the radio show Sound Bytes–Nick Francesco, David Enright, & Steve Rea

The tech specifics were over my head, but we’ve heard all the principles before. Put anything on the internet, you’re putting it in public, and it’ll always be there, period. Their examples were pretty graphic. Transcripts of VOIP conversations that one member managed to sniff. One panelist was at his laptop rattling off the names of every laptop in the room currently on the hotel’s WiFi–thank god mine was off! “If I can see it, I can probably get into it,” he said.

Next time: Sci-fi poetry!

Writing the LOL

I think I got the deepest perspectives on writing from the Astronomicon 11 panel “You Think That’s Funny? (Writing Humor),” moderated by Guest of Honor Mike Resnick, with writers John Stormm and John-Allen Price.

1
Why/How do these writers use humor in their stories?

Stormm uses humor as a way of breaking tension. People sort of are looking for an escape nowadays, especially with everything going on in the world lately, and the fact is, funny things happen to people!
Price, who writes sf military, notes that humor “unfreezes you in those moments of terror.” He makes note of stories of (military) institutional humor–requisitions bordering on the strange & possibly illegal, officers who’ll just decide, “Aw what the hell, do it,” (Apparently the addage “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission” is true even in the military.), as well as people just plain messing with each other
Resnick said several times, “Nobody in this field ever turned down a story for being too funny.” Just about every type of humor works in sf/fantasy, because humor is basically just “The expected, happening in unexpected ways at unexpected times.” He wasn’t talking about padding, but he said “You can add x-hundred amount of extra words to your story just by making a joke.”

2
Pitfalls and warnings? Resnick reiterated a few times: try to be original and don’t go overboard. Stormm says that if you do borrow anything, attribute it.

3
Stormm had the best piece of advice, I think: Take your readers up to the brink with a joke and let their imagination fill in the rest. That way, it becomes their joke.

4
Required reading: Robert Sheckley, William Tenn (his short-stories), & Fred Pohl (his more satirical stuff).

The Neverending Story, Part π

I’m not a novel-writer–yet. I joke that I’m too ADD to stick with any project that long, which does have the ring of truth. But I couldn’t see a goldmine of an Astronomicon panel like “Writing Series and Sequels” and not take notes for future reference, especially when it’s moderated by Nancy Kress with Robert J. Sawyer (FlashForward) and GOH Mike Resnick sitting in, not to mention John Stormm, Rick Taubold, and Sal Monaco.

So, when I do finally write a novel and perhaps, as Kress put it, “commit trilogy,” I’ll keep these points in mind…

0
It was fun watching Nancy Kress and Mike Resnick fight over who was going to moderate, and by that I mean the way they went round-and-round with, “No, you do it!”

1
Not everyone on the panel necessarily knew they were going to write any kind of series. In the novel Far-Seer, Robert J. Sawyer killed off the main character in the last chapter. But as demand in the UK rose, he wrote the sequel. Nancy Kress was done with The Beggars Trilogy after the second book, and “fell into” the third one because of her publisher, who would only publish a collection of her stories if the third book was written.

2
A series has certain special needs, including (but not limited to): Consistency of characters, the need to keep yourself interested as the writer, and the need to deal with the problem of backstory, i.e. avoiding the infodump.

Sawyer had a different view. “I love the infodump!” he declared. The edict against infodump is “Turkey City Lexicon bullshit!” Just don’t be lazy, he said.

3
The different types of series written by the authors on the panel seemed to fall into three types:

Types with a story arc
Types when characters cycle in and out of the stories
Types when the characters are always the same and don’t really change

4
General take-aways/advice…

Planning and consistency are key!
Each book needs a climax and stories that evolve.
It’s important to have some kind of end in mind to work toward. cf. George Martin. Things have a natural life–sometimes it’s best to know when to let it die a natural death.
It can be scary when a franchise actually becomes popular. You could need a different pseudonym to escape a successful series the same way you would a bad one.
Publishing is in transition nowadays. As Mike Resnick said, “Everywhere you look there are new ways to make money.”
There is a certain professional pride in wanting each book you write to stand alone. Nothing wrong with that.
Have an idea that’s big enough and make sure you have enough story for it.