Jay Lake: Writer

[writing|process] Talent, ability and voice

tchernabyelo on talent and ability. He asks if there is a limit on talent and ability, and discusses the need to analyze his successful work better.

As I said recently in a slight different context, “careful craft will beat brilliant inspiration nine times out of ten. The true point is, of course, to yoke careful craft and brilliant inspiration together in a single process.”

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that I believe talent to be rather overrated. This is not sour grapes; I say this as someone who considers himself to be fairly talented at the narrative arts. But ability, taken here for discussion purposes in the sense of “craft”, is what makes for successful writing.

Be assured I am not discounting the value of talent. It is possible to dazzle with sheer brilliance, and I’m rather pleased when someone can do that to me. But even sheer brilliance must still rest on structure, plot, character, setting, and all the other impedimenta of story-telling. Those are craft.

I can’t teach you talent. You have whatever you have. Hence ‘s “box it came in” theory, which I prefer to think of as the “hand of cards”. There are ten or twelve or fourteen things that a writer needs to attain mastery of in order to tell a strong, compelling story. We all first come to the table with two or three or five of those things in our hands. Natural talent, in other words.

In my case, as a very new writer, long before I’d sold a word, or even written a comprehensible story, that was plot (though not endings), setting, and prose styling. Characters, on the other hand, were sort of people-shaped black holes for me, dialog was so clunky it hurt, my control of POV was laughable. Those things I had to learn. Craft, in other words, carefully attended to and practiced over the past two decades.

One of my personal challenges in growing as a writer has in fact been to recognize the limits of my talent, and from that where and how to apply my learned skills at craft development to those areas where I already considered myself pretty hot shit. (Ego isn’t pretty, is it?)

I may not be able to teach you talent, but I can teach you craft. Or at least someone can, if it doesn’t happen to be me. In fact, with one notable exception, I’m of the opinion that any aspect of craft can be taught, and if practiced well, mastered.

Another way of saying that is to aver that you don’t need talent to succeed at writing. You need the ability to learn good craft, you need to attain facility at that craft (if not mastery, eventually), and you need psychotic persistence. Talent sure can help, and may be a handy shortcut for some of the cards of craft, but it can also be a dead end and a trap; much as I have experienced.

The notable exception? I don’t believe I can teach you voice. Voice is one of those things that adheres to the Potter Stewart test – “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” To my current thinking, voice is the distinct quality that makes you the writer you are, delightfully unlike everyone else. It arises out of the intersection of talent, craft, and life experience, and like the sea, voice is ever changing.

You have talent in whatever measure you happen to be granted it. Craft can be taught, and will bridge the gap between talent and achievement. Voice is the intangible fusion that moves you from practiced to good; and with luck and skill, from good to great.

So to speak to tchernabyelo directly, is there a limit on talent and ability? Yes, on talent, because it’s an inherent quality independent of effort and focus. Potentially not on ability, because it’s an acquired characteristic dependent on commitment and practice. You can’t control talent, but you can control craft.

As I often say, “write more”. That is the essence of commitment and practice.

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 5:33 am Mon July 19 2010 | Comments(6) |

[process] Advice for mid-career writers, and the lack thereof

From yesterday’s Link Salad:

How to soar when you’re already in flight… — A.M. Dellamonica asks a really interesting question about how writers talk to one another. My facile answer to her is that aspiring writers outnumber established writers by a ratio of thousands:one, so the audience is distinctly different. But that’s a lousy answer. I need to think on this.

This one’s still on mind. First of all, to address my lousy answer of yesterday, I’m going to throw out a couple of numbers. It’s early, and I can’t be arsed to do real research right now, so take these with a small grain of salt.

In the field of sf/f publishing, I estimate there are less than 2,000 active, working professionals. (If I’m wrong, it’s certainly not an order-of-magnitude error.) The bulk of those are writers — novelists, short fictioneers and us multimodal types — but I also include agents, editors, publishers, critics and whatnot.

Now, consider that the last time I looked, a trade publishing house might get 20,000 novel submissions a year from aspiring or early-career writers. (Again, if I’m wrong, I don’t believe it’s an order-of-magnitude error.) So figure that not every one of the same trade houses gets all the same novels at the same time, let’s say there are in any given time period 50,000 would-be novelists with enough gumption to complete a novel and send it out. Let’s take a flyer and say there’s another 50,000 would-be short story writers pursuing their craft and submitting to those markets.

So what I said yesterday is wrong. The ratio isn’t thousands to one, it’s fifty to one. That is, 100,000 aspirants to 2,000 working professionals.

Still, that’s a very different audience than mid-career writers. There are probably hundreds of aspiring and early-career writers who read my blog. If more than a few dozen mid-career writers read my blog, I’d be surprised. Just by the numbers, I can reach more people and hopefully do more good offering advice and examples to the larger audience.

All of the above and a $1.25 will buy me a Coke.

More to the point, Alyx observes in her original posting on this topic that people who’ve arrived at the mid-career point generally have developed enough awareness of their own process and craft to self-direct their developmental issues. With rare exceptions, this is notably not true of new writers, or, frankly, people new at any complex undertaking. That’s why we have critique groups and con workshops and (sometimes) editorial feedback. To guide people whose vision of themselves is not yet suited to the task.

There is a complex interchange between ego, motivation and experience, and I’ve generally found that more established writers are less certain of themselves than people just setting out. That phenomenon is probably a good thing, given the psychotic persistence that it takes to succeed in this field. If you approach writing without a lot of ego strength, or some fungible substitute such as alcohol or money, you are in for a rough ride. Again, there are always exceptions, but they are rare.

For my own part, I find that Alyx is right about developmental issues. I’m painfully aware of certain deficits in my craft, just as I’m aware of my strengths. A few examples of my deficits: I still don’t write female characters as convincing as my male characters, I skim over the depth of relationships and emotions that could really make my work pop out, I haven’t mastered the subtleties of POV as well as I’d like, I rely on rhetorical tricks and clever language to wallpaper over cracks in my work. A few examples of my strengths: good world-building, clean line-level prose, a strong sense of style, a protean literary voice, decent mastery of the telling detail/crunchy bits.

As Alyx asks, how can someone dispensing generic advice on the Internet address my issues as a mid-career writer? The further along I get in my career and my work, the more idiosyncratic those become. All new writers need to learn about manuscript format, submission processes, what editors really do, storytelling basics and intermediates, the whole process of ‘breaking in’, and so forth. Mid-career writers are like Dostoevsky’s unhappy families; each is developing in their own way.

I’m not sure what I’d say if I were dispensing advice to mid-career writers. I think I’d talk about meta-issues of ontology, self-critique and the learning process of writers. Or cite cases in order to extract principles. It would get pretty airy pretty fast, methinks. Still, I wish I knew the answer.

What do you think? What advice would you offer me or Alyx? As she asks, Is there something about character or plotting that’s general enough to make a good post but so advanced it’ll spark growth in someone really seasoned… a Cory Doctorow, say? A Connie Willis?

Tags: Process, Publishing, Writing

Posted: 5:19 am Thu July 15 2010 | Comments(16) |

[process] The virtue of slowness, -or- peed skills

Hi. My name is Jay. I am a writer. Yesterday I wrote 6,000 words. In the past week, I wrote 14,400 words. I can stop anytime I want to.

I’m going to say something here that I’ve said before, specifically about myself: It is possible to write too fast. Speed in writing is not inherently a virtue. As writers, a great many of us track word counts, and can readily get hung up on them. This is sensible enough, in that word counts are one of the few nominally objective metrics of progress which are within our control as writers. That and submittals.

But not all word counts are created equal. For a writer who is a multiple pass reviser, the first draft word count may be almost irrelevant. For a writer who’s a write-and-send type, the first draft word count may be just about all there is. In my case, my first drafts tend to read like other people’s second or third drafts. One of my truly great gifts as a writer is a very active subconscious (“Fred”) who does an enormous amount of pre-writing for me somewhere deep in my head, working out things offstage that some writers have to work out on the page.

Which is not to say my first drafts are perfected instances of the story-teller’s art. In many cases, especially novels, they are very far from it. (Just ask casacorona, who has to edit me, or calendula_witch, who reads it all fresh off the griddle.) It does mean I write clean copy that’s usually not terribly difficult to fix. And I tend to do it swiftly, which is another great writerly gift.

The true struggle of my writerly career, my personal maturation challenge, has been to slow the heck down as I write. Because I am quite capable of slamming through 2,500+ words per hour. For hours on end. (I once calculated my theoretical maximum drafting rate, based on my typing speed, as being 4,000 words per hour. I believe I’ve hit 3,400-3,500 words per hour once or twice.) And it’s pretty clean copy (see above) and can be pretty good prose.

Fast writing is not bad writing. But it’s not the best writing. Because while I can keep a pretty clean, crisp skin on prose churned out that quickly, the story bones don’t necessarily have time to set correctly. Some pieces of story require deliberation, even when Fred is all over it behind the scenes. A project of the few years before cancer swallowed me up in 2008 was reducing my draft throughput speed. I worked to get it down to around 1,800 words per hour, which is apparently about as slowly as I can move without falling over. (Imagine trying to ride a bicycle very slowly.) Much slower than that and it all just stops working. Combine a slower drafting speed with an increasing focus on revision as I move through my career, and the quality of output increases, at least in theory.

There are always exceptions. Some of my most successful stories have been pieces I sat down and wrote in one swift, ripping go. But I can’t always call down fire from the gods, and careful craft will beat brilliant inspiration nine times out of ten. The true point is, of course, to yoke careful craft and brilliant inspiration together in a single process.

Another exception is right now. Thanks to chemotherapy, I’m coming off a silent period a little over two months long, which is the longest period of time I’ve gone Not Writing in at least the past decade. It’s made me crazy. Story, both in specific and as a Platonic ideal, has been boiling in my head for the last several weeks. A lot of pent-up energy is trying to get out through my fingertips. Furthermore, I have two major deadlines (Sekrit Projekt and Endurance revisions) in the next five to six weeks, both which are already postponed due to cancer and its discontents. I must move swiftly to meet my commitments.

So now is when I trust to the same speed I’ve been working for years to moderate, and trust to my experience as a writer not to make the speed-mistakes I used to so blithely gloss over. Also, trust calendula_witch and casacorona. Because for the next five or six weeks, I am required to move very, very quickly. Luckily, speed has always been one of my gifts. Perhaps by now slowness has taught me sufficient wisdom to make speed my servant instead of my master.

It’s never a contest, you know. That’s the sweet, sweet lie we writers always tell ourselves when someone else hits a milestone we hunger for. But still, it’s never a contest.

Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Endurance, health, Personal, Process, stories, Writing

Posted: 5:41 am Mon July 12 2010 | Comments(11) |

[process] Writing Cliches of the Personal Kind

Author Shanna Germaine talks about her personal cliches in writing. It’s kind of a funny list. She covers both things she returns to a lot, and things which are absent in her writing. After eight novels and close to three hundred short stories, I’m not sure much of anything is absent from my writing, but I certainly do return to a lot of things. In no particular order, and off the top of my head, here are some of my tropes:

• Lost boys
• Absent fathers
• Absent mothers
• Frightening grandfathers/distant male authority figures
• Zeppelins
• Angels
• An absent God
• People angry at the world
• Talking animals
• Gentle humanism
• Reversal of gender roles
• The “key man” theory of history
• The price of magic/power/belief
• Place, place, place
• Self-discovery
• Personal responsibility
• The question of “who counts”
• And of course these days, cancer, cancer, cancer

What do you find in your work, over and over?

Snurched from Shanna Germain at Year of the Word.

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal, Process, Writing

Posted: 8:29 am Sun June 20 2010 | Comments(6) |

[process] A primer on text messaging, for those what wants it

I was asked for my opinions on some text messaging dialog in a story, because the writer didn’t personally use SMS and wasn’t sure about the details. As it happens, I do a lot of work with commercial text messaging at the Day Jobbe, so I rather over-answered the question. I’ve turned that answer into a blog post, intended for the reference of writers who may not be particularly familiar with texting or want some of the nuts and bolts.

(Surely there are one or two of you out there who don’t text?)

Technical details

A text message is a communication between two cellular telephones (or something spoofing as a cellular phone), or between a commercial sender and a cellular phone. This means you don’t see a sender identified per se on a text message, or some equivalent of Caller ID. What you will see on a text message is the originating phone number (ie, 8885551212) in the case of another phone, or in the case of a commercial message, a five- or six-digit code that functions as a phone number equivalent, though they are undialable.

Most phones check the originating number against the internal address book and supply whatever name is in the address book. So, if I send you a message, and you don’t have me in your phone directory, all you’ll see is the originating number. Which you may or may not recognize, depending on how frequently we communicate.

If you have me in your phone directory under a nickname, say “clownfeet”, that’s what will show as the sender. It would only have my name if your directory had my name. Likewise, I could send the same message to you, then to someone else, and you might each see a different sender based on how you do (or don’t) have me listed in your phone’s directory.

The narrow technical way of looking at this is the text messages move via a protocol called “SMPP”, which is in a sense roughly analogous to email’s SMTP protocol, where the sender ID is always the originating cell phone number (or commercial short code). In email, a name field is usually associated with the actual address, so you’ll see things like this:

“Jay Lake”

But there is no name field in SMPP, just the originating number — it’s a very stripped down protocol.

In other words, the header on the message will not state who it is from, it will only state the originating phone number. However, the user’s phone will do a best-effort to provide a sender name if one is available in the internal address book.

Possibly sources of confusion from this analysis include:

1) Someone else picks up the sending phone and uses it. occasionally texts from either my phone or her mother’s, but the recipient has no way to know that it is her sending the message instead of the phone’s owner, unless she identifies herself within the message body. Or from context, of course. In story terms as in real life, this leaves many opportunities for social engineering if someone is careless with their cell phone, or has misplaced their trust in an associate.

2) All the major carriers operate email gateways, so you can send me a text at 8885551212@mobile.att.net, for example. [Not my real number, obviously.] This has a tendency to munge the sender ID in the header, as the message is not originating from another cell phone and the gateways are not especially sophisticated. This is true even if the message was emailed from another cell phone’s email client or Web browser, the point being it arrived on the carrier network via SMTP rather than SMPP, and was translated by the gateway. So it’s possible to have legitimate messages from a known sender with munged headers, resulting in no intelligible sender information. In story terms, one might use this method to spoof the source of the message, for example, by relying on the obscuring effect of the gateway.

3) It is also possible under some circumstances for a bad actor to spoof either the header or the entire message. This takes a lot of know-how, some special equipment and a willingness to commit felonies under Federal law. For virtually all ordinary purposes, this can be disregarded, but be aware it can be done. Mostly only fraud management and security types care about this, given that there can be a presumption of identification associate with cell phone use, that occasionally plays into dual-factor security regimes. The story applications of this should be obvious.

Grammar, spelling and punctuation in text messages

There’s a tendency to assume that punctuation and whatnot is optional in text. Experience certainly might suggest that. But the protocol is content-agnostic, meaning you can send any punctuation you want. There’s a habit, especially among teens and young adults, of leaving punctuation out, but that’s a cultural/social marker, not inherent in the mechanics of texting. Note, however, on an older phone or dumbphone with no keyboard capability, the tediousness of multi-tap entry can drive even language pedants to such shortcuts.

Most of what we do see as text messaging usage derives from leetspeek. Wiki explains it much better than I can, but it’s very much worth paying attention to this if you’re using text messaging as in-story dialog. This becomes an issue of character speech register and dialect, just like any other form of dialog. For example, ‘s texts tend to use a lot of shortcuts, mine tend to be fully spelled out with no abbreviations, though I’ve been known to skimp on the punctuation.

Note also that there’s a 140-character limit to text messages which tends to inflect some people’s use of abbreviations, even those who by generational cohort or social self-selection might normally not do so.

The key point here is that the diction is in fact independent of the technology, and is largely derived from online chat, chatrooms, etc. As such, it is very dependent on the demographics and psychographics of the user.

If that was of interest to you and raises further questions, or you want a deeper dive into the technical and business side for some reason, as always please feel free to ask away in comments.

Tags: Child, Process, Tech, Writing

Posted: 4:18 pm Mon June 14 2010 | Comments(4) |

[process] The fine art of rejections

and I were discussed rejectomancy this afternoon, which prompted me to dig into my own blog archives for material on the fine art of rejections. Apropos of that, see the following:

Rejection, Acceptance and Publication — A discussion of what we as writers do and do not have control of.

Musing on Rejection — My theory about the levels of editorial response. The quality of rejection is not strained.

A few comments on acceptances and rejections — A more recent post on my personal rejection history.

Presented for your reading pleasure. I personally prefer to view rejections as the cost of doing business, rather than taking them as personal slights, or assuming some form of conspiratorial exclusion. But that’s just me, and I do treasure my sanity.

Feel free to share your thoughts in comments.

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 5:03 pm Tue June 01 2010 | Comments(3) |

[process] Some notes on dialog

Had a constructive conversation the other day with the delightful about the uses of flash fiction as a personal development tool. I’ve commented on this before at length, how flash serves as a laboratory for focusing on specific aspects of craft. Character in a setting with a problem: “The cop stumbled over the body in the apartment door.” What cop? Whose body? Whose apartment? But also, focusing on characterization, blocking, action, background detail, dialog, etc. Any one of those things, in the framework of a very short story. Might be salable, might not, but good practice nonetheless with the cardinal virtue of being closed-ended and therefore a rewarding activity that can be concluded over a single writing session.

and I got on to flash as dialog. I pointed out we all have a tendency to write who we are. I write lots of middle aged, over-educated heteronormative white guy dialog when I’m defaulting. And one thing that drives me bats in fiction is overuse of dialog tags.

Which are necessary if you have two middle aged, over-educated heteronormative white guys talking to one another. On the other hand, if you have a stuffy old closeted professor of Classics talking to a newly-immigrated Somali cab driver, you could get away with almost no tags whatsoever, other than a little blocking assistance. These two characters will have very different speech registers, and very different assumptions about the world.

One of my more extensive experiments in flash was working on integrating dialog with characterization, blocking, setting and other story elements so I could get away from “Jane said”/”Aaron said” tennis matches. Finding ways to signal the speaker through their actions or context or placement in the scene allowed words to do double, treble or quadruple duty, all while cleaning up the text. This makes the story world both economical and interesting.

What’s a favorite example from your own work, or others, of how to embed dialog like this?

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 5:54 am Mon May 24 2010 | Comments(10) |

[process] Some notes on worldbuilding

Reading the Science in my Fiction blog lately has gotten me thinking about worldbuilding again. That’s a topic never far from my mind, and is perhaps the first aspect of fiction craft I became formally aware of, as a reader during my teen years. (I blame a combination of Robert Heinlein ret-conned future history and the release of First Edition AD&D for this.)

I might try to make this a regular series of posts on the blog, because I have a lot to say, but I don’t yet have an overarching thematic structure in which to embed my thoughts. Ie, random musing.

For today, point the first: Monocultures.

Science in my Fiction recently had a post on single-biome planets. I don’t completely agree with them, I can imagine several situations where a single human-viable biome is present on an otherwise inhospitable planet (think Larry Niven’s A Gift From Earth for one example), but the general point is very well taken. But I think the point applies just as much to monocultures as monobiomes.

It’s a trope in SF (and to a much lesser degree in fantasy) that an oppressed or defeated or otherwise marginalized culture flees to a place of new opportunity. Consider the US grade-school version of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts as an example of this. In SF we see entire planetary civilizations dedicated to a single purpose. A good version of this in fiction is Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe cycle, with the worlds of the Exotics, the Friendlies (sic) and the Dorsai. Yet, much like the Pilgrims, historical and sociological evidence strongly suggests that monocultures do not long survive their charismatic (or traumatic) foundings. Schisms occur. Persecutions lead to diaspora, which leads to competing centers of civilization far from the original core.

In order for a monoculture to make sense in an SF novel, it would have to be fairly young, fairly small, and very tightly controlled. Which could certainly be true in the early years of a new colony. Or in a very resource-constricted environment where one entity has control of both information and critical resources. Think North Korea, for example. Or in a dying colony. But in general, with any substantial population and a decent surplus of resources, people will find things to argue about. That’s what we do.

So I find monocultures, especially allegedly long-term monocultures, dubious at best. I tend to lose story trust very quickly when presented with such, unless a valid (and interesting) rationale is presented as well. Besides which, they don’t usually work well in fiction except as allegory (Dickson’s intent, surely, in the Childe Cycle), and allegory is difficult to pull off well.

Point the second: Societal impacts of magic.

I was in a workshop years ago where a very good writer (who is now a Bigger Name than me) presented a charming short story which was, essentially, Jane Austen with magic, during which, as a complete toss-off line, someone mentioned that the South Tower of the manor had previously been turned to butter by a passing magical storm.

Everybody else in the workshop thought it was a terrific story. I got totally hung up on the butter question. Where did twenty or thirty tons of butter go afterward? What happened to the local dairy economy when the lord of the manor went to dispose of enough butter to feed half of England for months? What was the value of the labor spent to build and then rebuild the South Tower in a world where all that effort could be randomly erased at any moment? If transmutation were so random and simple, what was the value of any material good? If the gold in the vaults could suddenly become gravy, who would keep gold in vaults? Etc.

The workshop patted me on the head, told me to take a pill and lie down, and carried on. But that conversation bothers me to this day. It’s a trope in some kinds of fantasy that we see the world-as-it-is (or was) with this one magical element introduced. As a reader, I understand the appeal of that. As a writer, it makes me nuts.

Naomi Novik’s excellent and entertaining Temeraire series is a startlingly clear example of this. The books take place in the Napoleonic world, with dragons. Dragons have been around since prehistory, according to internal evidence in the text. Which leads me to think that if the Phonecians had dragons, they’d have had deepwater navigation thanks to over-the-horizon reconnaissance, and the Romans would never have risen as they did. Or if the Romans had dragons, would they have been more successful in repelling the barbarian invasions during their decline? Etc. I find it almost inconceivable that the world of Napoleonic Europe could have evolved with such an overpowering historical inflection. Had the dragons appeared just a few dozen years before the narrative present of the story, it would have all made sense. Which isn’t the point of the Temeraire, of course, but it bothered my world-building self intensely.

I can make the same criticisms of my own Mainspring series. That there should be a Victorian England as we knew it in an Earth where the equator is impassable and therefore the British East India Company is much a reduced or nonexistent beast, for example, is ludicrous. I make some efforts to explain this away in the world-building, which I hope are successful, and (like Novik) I did this for a reason, but it still doesn’t make sense. Given that the Mainspring universe is about a light-year wide, and contains one solar system driven by clockwork, it doesn’t have to make a lot of sense. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

My larger point is that when you introduce magic, any kind of magic, it’s impossible to imagine that society will simply stay the same. Randall Garrett did a good job of this in his Lord Darcy books, showing a society familiar enough to have that frisson of interest to the reader, but also quite distorted from our own in both the narrative present and the internal history by the presence of the magic. There’s a huge temptation when working at the high concept level to say, “It’s just like Little House on the Prairie, with werewolves!”, and that obviously works commercially — Jane Austen with Zombies, anyone? — but if you’re attempting or even pretending to SFnal rigor or internally consistent fantasy, work out the plausibilities first.

Tags: Books, Mainspring, Process, Writing

Posted: 5:55 am Thu May 20 2010 | Comments(9) |

[cancer|process] Writer’s block, or energy block?

I am experiencing something much akin to writer’s block these days. Which is really ticking me off.

Longtime readers will be familiar with the fact that I almost never experience writer’s block. I can be held up for a day or so on a difficult point in a story. I can be distracted by an overwhelming emotional or life experience. But I’ve never had that feeling of sitting down, staring at the screen, and sweating for the words to come. If a piece is stalled, I just work on something else. Words have always flowed like water for me. It’s been one of my gifts as a writer, perhaps one of my core gifts.

What I am going through now isn’t writer’s block in the stare-at-the-screen sense, not precisely. The words are in there. I have a novel to revise, a novel to write, a Sekrit Projekt to complete, a novella to revise, random short story ideas on almost a daily basis. They bubble, to the point now of frustrating me, a lot.

What I don’t have is energy.

Up until about the beginning of April, I was writing at a pretty good clip, even for chemotherapy. But since I completed the first draft of “The Stars Do Not Lie”, I’ve been having a hell of a time finding focus and energy to work on more. I’ve slipped in a little bit of revision on older pieces that had been languishing, and done some Writing Related Program Activities around getting stories out to market, answering interviews and whatnot. All of that is a kind of short-burst productivity I can do without extended periods of deep focus.

At this point in my chemotherapy cycle, by the time I’m done with the Day Jobbe, I’m pretty much done with the day. I’ve lost the 3-5 pm time slot I was using to write in. My sleep needs have piled up more with the accumulating fatigue, so I’ve lost the 3-5 am time slot I was also sometimes using. Basically, the world is closing in, and taking my time with it. That I lost three of my ‘free’ weekends in a row through March and April to various medical issues in my family was no help either.

My current plan is to service my deadline projects in the upcoming weekend time, and try to hammer out at least a little daytime writing. I can do a lot by sheer force of will. But I cannot do everything. Meanwhile, this damned block has got me for the first time since I’ve become a pro.

This might be the thing that pisses me off the most about chemo. That cancer and the drugs have stolen my creative time and space away from me.

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

Posted: 5:09 am Wed May 12 2010 | Comments(4) |

[process] Answering a few questions about writing, self-improvement and reprints

and I have been having an exchange in comments on yesterday’s post about the profits and process of writing. The conversation has grown sufficiently interesting to deserve its own post.

In answer to a question of theirs, I said:

Yep, about 450 first draft short stories in the past ten years. Perhaps another 200 in 1990s, though those aren’t in my record set. And I think 10 first draft novels in the past ten years. Call it 3.5 million words of first draft. I could go dig out more precise numbers at some point if you really want them.

Didn’t mention reprints, which is a whole different issue.

My experience of myself is that increasing output correlated to higher quality, at least insofar as I have been very willing to learn and not get invested in the perfected majesty of my own prose,

Their reply was:

I want to ask you a very profound question about how you learn about writing, but I’m not sure quite how to phrase that. I would be interested in your discussion of that. It seems to me that your learning process (especially since you strike me as quite analytical about your process) over a span of time would be interesting. Did you ever find yourself trying to follow certain trends that were doing well? How did you make sure you were developing the unique voice of Jay Lake?

Have you talked about resales/reprints before? I…can’t remember. Any profound observations or interesting metrics there?

To break that down….

It seems to me that your learning process (especially since you strike me as quite analytical about your process) over a span of time would be interesting.

Well, I’ve actually blogged about this over the years. For example, my discussions about span of control and the “hand of cards” / “box it came in” theory. The best way to track that is troll through my blog archives with the “process” tag [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. Most of the longer posts and essays under that tag are me reflecting on my experiences, or answering questions from readers.

Did you ever find yourself trying to follow certain trends that were doing well?

I’m not quite certain how to read this question. If you mean market trends, no. I write what I want to write, how I want to write it, within certain occasional contractual constraints. If you mean creative or learning trends, absolutely. That was the whole point of my “story a week” practice, for example. Or the period back around 2002 when I wrote a metric ton of flash fiction, because I decided to use flash as a laboratory to hone specific aspects of my craft.

To digress from meta-analysis to content briefly, the point of that was when I learned from Bruce Holland Rogers that flash generally does one thing — character, setting, problem, mood, whatever — and I realized I could therefore use flash to focus on one thing at a time. Plus the work effort was contained, the feedback loop short and sharp, and with luck, I’d have sellable inventory when I was done. So I did a lot of self-directed exploration of aspects of craft which I had identified as weaknesses in myself.

How did you make sure you were developing the unique voice of Jay Lake?

Hah! I never did that. I just wrote what I wanted to write. The voice is just there. But in my case, that’s one of the cards I was dealt. If I ever dig out some really ancient work, say from the early 1990s, you’d see it even in those stories.

More to the point, I’ve averred numerous times over the years that voice is the only aspect of writing that can’t be taught. At least by me. A decent instructor, or some strong self-awareness and good books/web sites, can guide an aspiring writer to control over grammar, speech register, plot, structure, character, setting, point of view and all the myriad nuanced aspects of well-crafted fiction. But voice, in my opinion, emerges organically from the sum of all those parts, and if its strong, will exceed that sum.

Of course, in our genre, especially the more classic views of SF, transparent prose has a high value. I submit that transparent prose is not voiceless, but it’s a formal kind of voice that is deliberately set behind everything else so that the plot, especially, stands forward. Other writers, critics and teachers surely have very different views of this, but I think the tradition of transparency can cause a lot of confusion when considering voice.

Have you talked about resales/reprints before? I…can’t remember. Any profound observations or interesting metrics there?

Not really. I’ve had about 80 short fiction reprint sales in English, including over a dozen Year’s Best sales, and if you want to count foreign rights as a form of reprint, another couple of dozen there. Plus one story that only ever appeared in Greek, and not in English. Not sure how to count that one, but maybe I ought to market it here, huh? (It was about the first Olympics on Mars.)

Reprints are good because, in a pure marketing sense, they’re free money, and they give the story extended life. Not a lot of money, generally, though there are rare exceptions. As I write this, I realize I could probably benefit from a more aggressive reprint strategy. I also find myself wondering if there’s a market niche for a high-profile Web site that feature entirely reprints. I suspect a lot of authors wouldn’t mind getting their favorites from their short fiction backlist some more exposure.

One thing has occurred to me in discussing this topic is the issue of writer self-awareness. I went through a phase, long before I wrote sellable prose, where I considered myself an unsung genius, and thought very, very highly of my prose. I refused to revise, because it was so good. (Note that I did not sell any of this prose.) Basically, I was a real ass about my writing. I have found that being willing to pay attention to input from first readers, critiquers and critics has really improved my ability to improve my writing. Which is not to say I always, or even often, agree with the input at a detailed level. It’s more along the lines of trying to figure out why people reacted the way they did, and processing that.

One of the gifts of having done this seriously for twenty years and professionally for ten years is that I’ve developed a fairly high degree of self-awareness and some facility at self-criticism regarding my writing. I strongly recommend this as a strategy for other writers, but I think you have to take the long road to get to this point. At least I did, but then I can be notoriously stubborn.

Want me to discuss more aspects of publishing, writing or the auctorial life? Post ‘em in comments, I’ll take them up here on the blog as time, energy and chemohead permit.

Tags: Process, stories, Writing

Posted: 5:55 am Thu May 06 2010 | Comments(3) |