Jay Lake: Writer

[writing|process] A Sunspin darling I killed

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that working through Sunspin in this revision process has been an exercise in killing my darlings. Just for fun, here’s a snippet that got excised yesterday, for being heavy on tangential world-building and getting in the way of the plot. I don’t know if it will ever re-appear, either in this book or in a related piece. And I really do like it.

And the snippet… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Books, Fiction, Process, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:26 am Mon January 23 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing|process] In which I listen to my backbrain

the_child‘s basketball game was cancelled yesterday due to inclement weather. (Yes, they play the game indoors, but the location was 45 minutes away on country roads.) My fallback plan for the day was to embark on the Sunspin revisions.

Except I didn’t. My backbrain really wanted to wait until today, when I’ll be at the Fireside Writers’ Group after work, and in the mode, as it were.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t get where I am today as a writer by ignoring my backbrain. I have no idea why it wanted this extra day off, but it did. Okay. An extra day’s not going to crimp my production schedule much. And really, I was practically vibrating with Writing Avoidance Fu.

This may or may not be related to the odd phenomenon where I feel nervous just before embarking on a substantial project. The first couple of days when I start a new novel, or a major revision (as now) are often picky, fussy moments for me. Which is peculiar, because there’s not that much in life that can make me nervous (outside of cancer stress). I mean, I can stroll onto a stage in front of almost 3,000 people, grab a mic and go without a second thought. Most of the usual social stressors roll right off me — flying on planes, going on first dates, and so forth.

As for writing, I’ve spent the past two decades making it my life. Almost nothing about writing incites nerves in me. Except starting big projects. (Well, and contract negotiations.)

So pre-flight nerves? Or some bit of buggery in the plumbing of my writing mind? Maybe there’s no difference. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because today, Sunspin

Tags: Books, Cancer, health, Process, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:38 am Tue January 17 2012 | Comments(0) |

[writing|process] The outline for Mainspring

Since people seemed to like my recent post with the outline to Alternating Current, I thought I’d post the outline to Mainspring, my first trade novel, which was released by Tor in 2007. Note this book didn’t sell from outline, it sold from finished manuscript, but the outline is still an important sales document even in that context. This was originally written at a workshop as part of an exercise at a writing workshop, but I returned to it later. What you see below is the revised outline.

It also occurred to me while drafting this post that I’ve never revised an outline after the fact to match the finished manuscript. More to the point, I’ve never bothered to. I find myself wondering if revising the outline (or possibly even rewriting it from scratch) after the first draft and before the revision passes would be productive. Have you ever tried that?

Note this outline comes more recently in my career than Alternating Current, and it helped sell a novel in New York. Also as discussed above, this was not revised post-drafting to match the final product, so if you’re familiar with the finished book, you’ll seem some variances. Another interesting exercise would be to go through several writers’ outlines and look at their variances — it would tell you something about their individual processes, I think.

And the outline… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Books, Mainspring, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:42 am Thu January 12 2012 | Comments(3) |

[writing|process] Alternating Current – a proposal for a novel I’ll probably never write

Just for fun, and to make jackwilliambell happy, I’m posting here a rather old outline for a novel I’ll probably never write now. It’s called Alternating Current. It’s about Nikolai Tesla and Harry Houdini coming back from the dead to wreak vengeance on an immortal Guglielmo Marconi for stealing Tesla’s secrets.

Note that this is a rather old outline, from a time before I’d sold any novels, and I’ve never tried to market or write this book, other than a couple of short stories drawn from the backstory. Enjoy this for what it is, an early-career Jay Lake idea that never made it into production, and a mediocre example of the art of outlining.

And the outline… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alternating, Books, Process, Writing

Posted: 6:43 am Wed January 04 2012 | Comments(1) |

[process] More on finishing

Yesterday, I wrote about finishing what you started. [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. kellymccullough in particular pointed out in comments that I’d somewhat overstated my proposition.

What I’d meant to talk about was a fairly narrow (if possibly widespread) issue of allowing a new idea to distract you from an existing one while in the middle of a writing project, specifically a novel-length project. This is a common enough symptom of muddle-in-the-middle, wherein about a third to halfway through the writing process, the manuscript feels tedious, pedestrian and boring. Your subconscious is looking for excuses to bolt at that point. Many if not most writers go through that experience. The point I was after was not to let the new shiny pull you off the current project. That’s bad discipline, and as you can neither revise nor sell an incomplete manuscript, it’s bad for your career.

kellymccullough pointed out quite rightly that one can write oneself into a corner with respect to craft issues, lacking perhaps the right tools to do proper justice to an idea. Forcing yourself to keep working on a manuscript you’re not ready to finish can be self-defeating as well. Knowing the difference between distraction and an intractable writing problem is of course a challenge.

I myself have dealt with this. As I said to Kelly in comments:

And to be clear, I have one major unfinished novel that’s been on my desk for the better part of the last decade, for exactly the reason you describe. (It’s Original Destiny, Manifest Sin.) At that time, I didn’t have the professional tools to finish what I started back around 2004. But I didn’t abandon that novel because I had a better idea — which, you’ll note, is specifically the issue I address in the post — I set it aside until my professional development as a writer let me come back to it. And ODMS is the next novel on my writing schedule after I wrap the Sunspin cycle.

Original Destiny, Manifest Sin was simply beyond me at the time that I began writing the book. That’s perhaps the strongest novel idea I’ve ever had, but needed me to be a stronger writer to address it. As I’ve observed elsewhere, I realize a while back that in some important senses, the entire Sunspin project is a warm-up for returning to ODMS. This has to do with my control of structure and character in a highly multithreaded storytelling environment.

Likewise, back to my original point about stopping work, there are life crises that represent a legitimate and even necessary halt to writing. This was discussed by valarltd and cathshaffer. My own cancer treatments have done this to me. I cannot write for several weeks after general anesthetic, nor can I write after the first two or three months of chemotherapy. My right brain goes into vapor lock in a big way. In ordinary life, I’ve never been blocked for longer than a weekend in the past decade. If I get stalled on a project, I shift gears and write a short story or some such to clear my head. Then I keep going. But not with cancer. I don’t have those choices. Likewise the serious illness or death of a family member can throw you off. Not finishing a manuscript under those circumstances isn’t a failure of discipline, it’s a recognition of the pressure of life crisis.

My point being to clarify yesterday’s post — sometimes there are reasons to abandon a project. Simply falling in love with another idea is very rarely one of them. Discipline is still important, critical even, but as I’ve often said, there is no canonical writing advice except “write more”. “Finish what you start” is pretty high up on the list, but it’s still context dependent.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal, Process, Writing

Posted: 6:15 am Tue January 03 2012 | Comments(3) |

[process] Some home truths on finishing what you start

A thing I hear reasonably often from aspiring writers, and occasionally from established writers, goes somewhat like this: “I was working on this novel, when I had a better idea that caught my attention, so I quit after 40,000 words.” Often this is followed by: “I have seven unfinished novels.” Or however many. And optionally by: “I don’t understand why I can never get anything to market.”

I have to say people, finish what you start. There’s always a shinier idea somewhere ready to come along and grab you by the shoulder. That’s the nature of our imaginations, and it’s a normal part of writing avoidance.

Look at me, now, with a 600,000 word project on my desk of which I’ve written 200,000 words only to be interrupted by chemotherapy. How could I possibly manage such a project if every neat idea I had in the mean time interrupted me?

Furthermore, if you don’t finish what you start, you’ve got nothing to sell. Six or eight or ten unfinished novels are worth less than one finished novel. Heck, an infinite number of unfinished novels are worth less than one finished novel. If you don’t have the discipline to follow through an idea when the middle gets muddled and draggy and boring (and they all do that when you’re in the middle of writing a novel), you don’t have the discipline to be an author.

I’ve written through parenting crisis, emotional disasters, mental stress and distress including anxiety and depression, busy times at work, illness, you name it. In the eleven years since I became a pro, chemotherapy and surgery are the only things that have been able to stop me cold, and believe me, if I could find a way around that, I would. There are no excuses except the ones you make up for yourself. Even with chemotherapy and surgery these past two years, I’ve managed about 250,000 words of first draft each year.

If you want to be an author, finish the project. Then write the next project. Being a pro is that simple, and it’s that hard.

What is it that stops you from writing?

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal, Process, Writing

Posted: 8:54 am Mon January 02 2012 | Comments(7) |

[process] Writing the second (or third) book

Greg van Eekhout (who has one of the coolest names, ever) is launching into writing the sequel to his novel The Osteomancer’s Son. He made an observation that:

I’ve never written a sequel or a continuation of a series, so this is new territory for me.

My response to this was:

I have been quite surprised by the change in my technique and internal thought processes brought about by writing second and third books in series (or at least in continuity). You will be too, I am confident.

This has got me thinking about those second and third books. Last year while I was drafting Kalimpura, the third book in the Green cycle, I made a passing observation on this topic [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]:

This is the second time I’ve written a third book in series. (Pinion being the other, of course.) As I believe I observed while writing Pinion, it’s a rather different experience that writing a standalone or initial book. So much of the worldbuilding, characterization and discovery is in place. I have to touch on bits of it so a reader who’s starting with this book won’t be lost, but I have it internalized. That means that writing this book is a different experience for me. I am far more focused on plot and inter-character dynamics because that other stuff is already in place and not crying for attention. And much as I had this experience with Pinion, I think it’s likely to make a somewhat different kind of book.

Now if I could only figure out how to deliberately leverage this phenomenon in future projects.

Well, since then I’ve outlined all three volumes of Sunspin in one go, deliberately designing them to work as a three-book project. Which is, or should be, me attempting to deliberately leverage this phenomenon in a future project.

In a nutshell, I think it does come down to what I said before. After a first book has been written, much of the worldbuilding, characterization and discovery are in place. Unless the plot of the second book is “our heroes sail over the horizon to discover new, alien worlds”, it’s probably operating from much the same geography, culture and politics as the first book did. That means one’s focus as a writer actually narrows rather than broadens. We don’t have to do everything in the punch list for book 2 (or 3, or 23). There’s still a bit of obligatory effort to bring new readers up to speed, but mostly we can assume that anyone reading book 2 knows what the Castle of Inordinate Doom is, and what happened to the Lord of Bright Shadows in book 1. That means we don’t have to set all that stuff up again.

Fine. So far, so obvious. But what does this do the writing process, to address Greg’s not-quite-a-question?

I think first of all we have to make different kinds of promises to the reader. Book 1, any book 1, is in part saying, “Hey, look at me!” They usually begin with something sharp and memorable, a clash of cymbals to grab the readers’ attention and say, “Hey, I’m worth the next few hours or days of your free time.” Book 2 is saying, “Welcome back, old friend.” Reader trust already exists, at least in principle, and while it needs to be sustained, it doesn’t need to be re-established from scratch. That allows a lot more room to maneuver in building the opening scenes, which can serve different purposes in a book 2 than in a book 1.

Likewise how the characters are introduced and what is done with them. Subtlety and depth come to the forefront, in favor of the broad strokes often used to establish a brand-new protagonist. A book 2 character has a shared history with the reader, an account balance of well-established words and deeds and emotions that can be drawn on. They enter the stage differently.

Finally, as alluded to above, the need not to explain so much is powerful. The tapestry is already woven from book 1. We can assume so much more, and only introduced those things which are changing, as well as those things to either elucidate or camouflage the changes. It shifts the art and craft of world building significantly, allow tighter focus on selected elements, given what can be assumed the reader has brought forward from book 1.

Emphasis and focus can make book 2 as different from book 1 as book 1 was from some discovery short story that originally introduced the character and setting. It’s a softer, subtler art. The character and plot loom larger in the writer’s mind, written as they are across the established setting and tone.

Greg, does this make it any easier?

Tags: Books, Green, Kalimpura, Pinion, Process, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 9:09 am Fri December 16 2011 | Comments(1) |

[process] Tools in the toolbox

Richard Parks, a couple of days ago, blogged regarding the career and craft contrast between short stories and novels. Go read it, the post is worth your attention.

Back? Good. Did you notice my comment on Richard’s post? Here it is again, in case you missed it:

One comment I make about the connection (or lack thereof) between short fiction and novels is that they’re like cabinet making and framing carpentry. Related in some obvious ways — wood, saws, hammers, whatnot — but very different arts requiring very different skills. Some transference of skill is possible, but there are people who are cabinet makers, there are people who are framing carpenters, and there are certain people (myself included) who can do both. One does not, however, inherently or readily lead to the other.

The question is usually framed as something on the order of, “Do I have to publish short stories in order to break in as a novelist?” It’s usually asked by an aspiring writer of some crusty old novelist (well, crusty if we haven’t showered recently), usually at a convention, perhaps during a panel session, perhaps in the bar. I think Richard’s post does a terrific job of answering the question, but I want to pick at my cabinet making versus framing carpentry metaphor again.

In a sense, that metaphor is obvious to the point of crude. Writing short stories and writing novels are both crafts that require mastery of character, setting, plot, style, usage and so forth. Those tools, while not identically deployed, are sufficiently similar as to be almost interchangeable, at least up to a point. A hammer is, in a sense, a hammer, after all. But the creative wood we work in each pursuit is a different grade, cut to different tolerances, and used to very different ends. And its the uses of those wood that influence the uses of those tools.

Take character arc. A novel is a journey, almost always. If nothing else, there’s hundreds of pages for the reader to pass through. Hundreds of pages for a character to emerge, be established, develop or elucidate their stakes, try and fail in hopefully spectacular ways, and eventually seek a resolution and a validation. There’s room to breathe, room for expansion and digression, room for the character to grow and change in unexpected ways, influenced by other characters, by the plot, by their own inner demons.

If a novel is a journey, a short story is a quick stopover. Grand events are almost always off the page in a short story, present in the backstory or by implication, or perhaps briefly glimpsed in the course of the story. The characters arrive all but fully formed, fleshed out from the moment they hit the page. They don’t have time or room to develop a full arc. Short stories typically focus on a single or very limited set of plot elements, and the characters’ responses to them. The character arrives extant, encounters the situation, resolves it perhaps with a moment of enlightenment or epiphany, and moves on past the ending to some other, hidden part of their life.

The writerly tools and skills required to propel and motivate a character through that novelistic arc are very different from the tools and skills required to march a character through a short story arc. The sheer scope of things places different demands on the characters and the author alike.

The same distinction applies to plot, setting and all the other bones and bits from which we assemble story in all its manifold forms. All of which is to say, Parks is right. If you have what it takes to be a good short story writer, write good short stories. Use those tools well. If you have what it takes to be a good novelist, write good novels. Use those tools well.

I suppose where the question still applies as an open issue is a newer writer feeling their way into the craft who wonders which way to go. Assuming you have roughly equivalent talents in both directions and your quandary is over which way to jump, it becomes a question of personal preference and career direction. That’s a huge discussion of its own, in its own right, a topic I’ll address at another time.

Your thoughts? Questions? Comments? Better metaphors?

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 6:05 am Thu December 15 2011 | Comments(3) |

[process] Competing with the visual

Yesterday on Facebook and Twitter, I said:

A challenge of written SF nowadays is describing setting to a reading audience conditioned to visual marvels in television and movies.

There was a fairly interesting thread of comments on Facebook in response to this, including a fascinating digression on Herman Melville.

I’ve been thinking since about what this means for fiction writers. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Changes in media or technology change reader expectations, because they change reader experiences. Movies, radio, television: all three must have really altered reader experiences. Sometimes they change writers as well — for example, the introduction of the typewriter apparently had significant effects on sentence structure in novels. Not to mention what the changes in revision process from longhand to typescript must have been.

As for special effects, I’m sure this is at least partially observer bias on my part, given my age, but it seems to me that the modern era of special effects began with Star Wars in 1977, and it’s only been amped up ever since. The visual influence of movies from Bladerunner to Gattaca has been pervasive. A writer cannot help but be subject to the audience expectation that’s been set in the visual media.

Personally, I often run to set-piece descriptions of new settings, and can be guilty of ornate overdetailing in close scenes. I’m not sure those are the correct responses. As a writer, I cannot compete with ILM, and there’s small point in even trying to do so. As a writer, it’s my job to build a word picture than can translate into the reader’s own sense of wonder, whatever their influences are. That my readers and I largely share a cultural grammar of film and television should just be a tool in my toolbox.

But it’s still a challenge to wow someone who’s seen Fifth Element with baroque marquetry, or to impress a fan of Alien with a dank, gothic starship on the page. The greatest sin would be to create a cheap imitation.

Tags: Movies, Process, Writing

Posted: 6:24 am Mon December 12 2011 | Comments(3) |

[process] Perseverance

I was emailing with someone yesterday and mentioned that it was eleven years from the time I workshopped my first story (summer, 1990) to the time I made my first sale (spring, 2001). (See my Facebook thread on this for a ton of comments from various folks.) In that time, I wrote one or two or sometimes three stories a month, sent out hundreds of submissions, and workshopped twice a month for most of the decade. That’s the value of perseverance, right there.

It still amuses me that now, ten years after that first sale and twenty-one years after I got serious about trying to be an author, some people still seem to think I was some sort of overnight success. That’s a long damned night. I am who I am today in my writing life and in the field because of years of toiling alone in complete obscurity, then slowly engaging and emerging into the company of writers as I earned my place with my efforts.

Do I have talent? In all honesty, I rather think I do. But talent wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere without all those years of perseverance.

Do I have an easy, extroverted personality that helps me fit in and get along with damned near everybody who bothers to try to get along with me? Well, yes, but that’s an artefact of my middle age and has nothing to do with the millions of words of first draft I’ve written. I was for many years young, socially awkward and unpublished.

Do I have good connections in the field? Yes, now after twenty-one years of effort, countless hours at conventions and workshops, and many publications in most of our major and independent markets. I didn’t get published because I know people. I know people because I got published. A lot of times over the years.

Everything I’ve earned, my publications, my public persona in the field, my network of friends and associates: it all comes down to perseverance. Writing. Constantly. Last year, with six months of chemotherapy and a round of liver surgery slowing me down, not to mention a full-time job I never took off from during my illness and a teen-aged daughter in the house, I still wrote a quarter million words of first draft, and roughly that much again in blogging. Which wouldn’t be a bad total for a full-time writer working with no major distractions. This year’s numbers will be fairly similar, under fairly similar circumstances. That’s what keeps earning me my place at the table. Not talent, or being fun at parties and a dab hand with a microphone, or knowing a bunch of writers and editors. Writing.

Writing.

If you want to see your work published, be on panels, emcee the Hugos, get to know your writing heroes, all the fun stuff that goes with being a working writer, then, well, write. And write more. I’ve been doing it for two decades, and am still just as serious and hard-working as I was back at the beginning. More serious and hard-working, frankly. 1990 me would have been appalled at the prospect of writing an entire 250,000 words in year. 2011 me is appalled at writing only 250,000 words in a year.

Write more. Keep writing. Everything else flows from that.

Tags: Cancer, Child, health, Personal, Process, Writing

Posted: 6:26 am Tue November 29 2011 | Comments(6) |