Me, Me. Me

All of us act as the principals in our own little life stories, ever seeking resolution and seldom finding it.  Life, I mean and, for the purposes of this blog - WRITING!

Sitting alone in our darkened rooms or isolated at some coffee shop we dream of fantasy realms or advanced civilizations, the far future, or an imagined alternate now steaming from a very different past.  We fly through clouds of imagination and soar above the mundane even as we wrestle with the dull mechanics of grammar and punctuation, of refining prose to razor sharpness, and turning the ordinary into the fantastic.  The pieces we create through our writing are unique to us; something the Universe  has never before beheld.  Each completed piece  is a shining achievement that we can treasure, at least for a moment before exposing it to the cold world.

That editors and publishers fail to appreciate the bits of genius we present, that they sully our dreams of perfection with petifulmonous quibbles and objections, is a mark of their ignorance.  Don't they realize the I-ness of each piece?  Don't they see that no one else matters, especially those whose skills at the word-smithing game are woefully deficient?  No, no, no.  They do not.

So how are we to deal with the mundane publishing world's ogres, of their refusals to acknowledge the wonderfulness of what we create?  Do we curse the darkness of their souls, inveigh against the debased values they place on the written word, or do we demand that they take note of our existence? The latter usually produces few to little results.

And so we scribble ever onward toward oblivion, unrecognized for the genius within us, our revealed souls torn from our fingers.  It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing and when we are gone so too are all that we dreamt, all that we did, all that we said.  But the words live on.

At least the published ones do.


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Scouting Report from Plotland

Sorry I've been away so long but with the nebula 50th anniversary in closing out SFWA’s books for the year I've been too busy to update you on my continuing saga of exploring Plotland. On the plus side I've managed to get draft 3.5 of the novel completed so I only have to edit the piece two or three more times to find out were all the plot holes appear, correct misspellings, brush up the dialogue (a LOT!), research a few facts, and clean up the flow before I can ship it to some beta readers (any volunteers?)

Doing a much longer piece then my usual short stories has been an experience. I found it hard to concentrate on a single piece for months at a time so it has been tiring, mostly as a result of trying really, really hard NOT to work on the other stories languishing on my to-do pile. As a result 2015 will mark a new low for my usual output of twenty or more stories. On the plus side I managed to sell a bunch of pieces that I wrote in 2014 and see the publication of my make-up novel Distant Seas.

The biggest difficulty in writing this long piece has been trying to keep all of the subplots and characters in their proper places, figuring out who knows what and when they knew it. Giving the characters depth and personalities was more involved then I would normally do for a short story.  Without the help of Scrivener I would have been lost my way time and again. Scrivener made keeping track of scenes, vignettes, and research so much easier.   Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to take some time away and work on... WHACK!  WHACK!  WHACK!

I'll never learn.

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Nebula, Nebulas!

The Nebulas!

I said this a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating. The fiftieth anniversary of the Nebula awards, awards granted to writers BY writers for literary and genre excellence, starts just two days from now. Two days!  Holy crap, that means thee and me need to schlep to Chicago so we can watch the current and future famous congregate and try to figure out this new, NEW world of publication.  Should be interesting for fans, beginners, and established professionals alike to see people being handed large chunks of plastic, bronze, and paper in recognition of their efforts.

But I said that before at this piece on the Nebulas!


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Clicks

It's funny how the mind works.  After struggling with this short story that became a novelette, then a novella, and seems now doomed to wind up as a short novel for nearly a year, I can finally see the end.  Not the ending but the end of the struggle to escape the entangling plot threads that I'd wound into what appeared to be a Gordian knot.

Oh, I tried to engineer my way out of the problem(s) by plotting scene upon scene, layering details, and expanding explanatory material, throwing in flashbacks that later became explicit scenes, but appeared earlier in the story, and then just writing to be writing while hoping that I could weasel-word my way to a decent conclusion.

None of it worked and the more I attempted to extricate myself from the tangle, the tighter the  knot became. What to do, what to do, what the fuck to DO?

So I introduced a new character. Yeah, the dumbest thing I could do.  That introduction threw in several skeins of interactions, dialogue, and settings, that screwed up the plot even more.  Just what I needed was gathering more rope to tie around my hopelessly tangled plot. "Throw it away,"  I screamed and tried to convince myself to just give up and write something --anything-- else. This is my normal reaction to frustration and has resulted in a basketful of "something else's." Instead, I took a few days off to clear my mind, step back, and then look at the mess from a reader's perspective.

That's when something clicked.  Suddenly I saw how to untangle the knot that was holding me back, the critical knotted cord that tied everything else together.  If I tugged here, unwrapped that there, and combined those vagrant pieces of frayed rope, and then wrote another thousand word string on the nature of belief I could create something I could work with.  At this first draft stage a story doesn't have to be good, or even readable.

It just has to be done.



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Pantsing vs Plotting Redux

To be perfectly clear, the discussion on pantsing vs plotting has been ongoing since our first fateful discussion at Capclave.  Since then we’ve given several talks on our differences at various science fiction conventions. If you are at one of these you might drop into our panels to perhaps get a more detailed explanation of how we use our writing tools for pantsing and plotting  .

Jamie Todd took exception in his blog  at my characterization of his approach to writing and, like the typical pantser that he is, failed to appreciate the nuances of my objective assessment.  Case in point, he said:

When I try to plot out my stories, the result is stories that are too neatly plotted ….[these] stories I write organically, without planning every step of the way, have sold faster, and in general been more successful than those that I have carefully plotted out…… Would a music teacher say that it is a wasteful to practice your scales? Would a medical school professor tell students it is a waste of time and talent to intern?

The reason his attempts at plotting fail is that he takes things to extremes.  One does not lay out every mile of a road trip before leaving the driveway.  Instead one identifies the major landmarks, estimates the distances, and ensures that everything is properly packed in advance. The essence of plotting is to identify key scenes that lead the reader to a satisfactory conclusion.  He further accuses me of being one “who plot everything out ahead of time.”  Which is a gross mischaracterization: I merely plot the key points, identify the emotional highs and lows, where humor might play a part, and when bathos or pathos is useful.

He goes on to declare the inefficiency of pantsing, including articles to bolster his numbers instead of confining the argument to writing short stories.

I haven’t missed a day in 656 days now [and have] written 575,000 words ….prior to writing every day, I sold 1 story on average every 3 years. Since my writing streak started, I’ve sold one story or article every 45 days.

To counter that I would point out that Jamie started submitting stories in 1992, coincidentally the same year I began writing again after a fourteen- year hiatus.  Since then I’ve sold about four or five shorts, novelettes, or novellas each year plus produced several novels (some of which were actually published.)  Since I only sell about 20% of what I write I would argue that the two of us are equally productive*.

To be honest our differences are those of scale. While I like setting  up scenes in advance I never know what my muse wants to say until I reach the scene knowing only the character, setting, and the main thrust of what must take place.  Jamie says:

Plotting out things ahead of time has the same effect on me as talking about my stories: it spoils the excitement of the story.

In that sense I am a plotter only at the design stage of development and fall into pantser mode at the development level.  I usually return to plotting (as described in my Ten Stages of Story Development blog post and in a recent SFWA Bulletin article) after the first draft.  This most often involves rearranging scenes or parts of scenes and cutting, cutting, cutting precious words that do not inform the plot. Words are my children and I regret losing a one even though I often see the necessity of doing so.

In the end I must say that although we differ in doing our initial drafts we both use a mixture of plotting and pantsing where and when needed.  In that sense, we continually struggle with how to best harness our muse to do the difficult work of crafting a good story from the raw stuff of imagination and creativity.

We’re writers, damnit!

*I know that sort of spoils my efficiency argument.

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Pantsing vs Plotting

I'm sharing this blog with Jamie Todd Rubin who will probably rebutt my descriptions from his blog.

We will start as storytellers are wont to do by reciting a bit of history about ourselves and this discussion.  It started in a bar at Capclave when we were talking about how to write short stories and realized that we approached drafting our stories somewhat differently.  To put it simply, Jamie writes by the seat of his pants --which is akin to running with scissors IMHO-- while I choose the wiser and more prudent course of carefully plotting my works.

Jamie throws words down at a prodigious rate, striving to produce a MINIMUM of one thousand words a day.  This would give him three hard SF books a year or one and a half fantasy novel were those 365,000 words useful.  Instead, due to his hasty and impetuous headlong dash to finish something he has to throw out most of his words, edit with a chainsaw, and rewriting practically everything.  From this I draw the conclusion that writing by the seat of your pants is wasteful of time and talent.

I, on the other hand, take a more deliberate route to a conclusion that I know before the first letter of the first word on the first page appears on my screen.  I know in advance the scenes necessary to reach a foregone conclusion and am able to sketch in characters, settings, and times for each.  The work of then forging the story around the various elements becomes an exercise in creativity and planning.  My first draft is usually poorly organized but I can easily rearrange or edit the scenes to convey the sense of story I intend.  Sadly, the ending I know with such certainty at the outset rarely survives the first draft and sometimes is even changed on the galleys.

But that's writing.


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#250

This is the 250th article in this blog stream, a number I never imagined achieving when I started a few years ago.  My original idea was to put down my thoughts on the process of writing in hopes that by doing so I could determine the science behind whatever I did when I write a story.  Little did I know that it would soon turn into a litany on the  misery of being a short fiction writer struggling to have a voice in the SF genre.  On that last point, I hope that by expressing my frustrations I gave voice to those of you facing similar struggles.

To this day I have not achieved my original purpose. Instead I've wandered all over the territory, talking about whatever came to mind as I struggled with one demon or another as I fought to put words to thought and thought to paper.  To this day I still do not have a clue.

In fact, I've come to realize that I've done more erasing than creating.  I am continually modifying a word, a phrase, a paragraph or a scene to express some element of an emerging plot.  Too often that plot morphs as the words tumble forth.  I've often said that I always set out knowing the end, but the ending is never what I intended at the outset.

Puzzling.

Some articles have had huge responses and others that I thought significant passed without apparent impact.  Some have been banal, a few funny, and others dead serious but overall they have been an honest reflection of my thoughts.  For those of you who follow this blog I promise to continue in the same vein and for those occasional visitors I hope you enjoy paging through some of the most popular ones.


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