Archive for the ‘Books and Writing’ Category
Who am I?
It’s one of the oldest of all philosophical questions, one that has prompted countless hours of self-examination by every generation of human beings. A question that can only be answered from within, and sometimes only with considerable difficulty.
It can’t be answered by someone else, looking in from the outside. Such an attempt often results in baseless assumptions being made, or if they seem to be otherwise, are based on false impressions. Misunderstandings arise as a result. Some are addressed and clarified in a rational, adult fashion. Some are not.
I’ve read many accounts of authors running afoul of unintended false impressions raised by the fiction they publish. People read the work, it affects them emotionally, and they decide they’ve learned something about that author through the feelings the story evoked. While for some authors this may be an accurate perception, I believe that far more often than not the opposite is true. After almost twelve years published, I find that I can now offer myself as a case in point.
Some of you may have read my short novel Toby, the story of a man for whom life has taken a serious turn for the worse, leaving him questioning the value of just about everything and everyone. Taking to the road to clear his head and reorient himself, he encounters a lost dog in a campground, and resolves to return this poor beast to its family. The catch: he finds the pooch in New Mexico, after the heartbroken family was forced to return to their home in Illinois without their lost dog. But he accepts the challenge, hits the road, and adventures ensue.
The eponymous dog is a major character; he is, after all, a turning point in this man’s life. I did my best to make Toby the dog and Paul the man equally believable characters, and from the responses I’ve seen, I did a pretty good job. Not being a dog owner, or in any sense a dog person, I did plenty of research on dogs and their behavior, then ran this story by a friend who has dogs that he and his wife train for agility competitions. This research added up to the dog not only becoming a believable character, but an eminently lovable fictional canine. So lovable and relatable, that some people think the book is about the dog, not the man.
I can easily see where a dog person would come to that conclusion, and don’t really mind at all that this happens. Toby is supposed to capture the heart of the reader as he helps Paul rediscover that the best approach to life is to say “yes” to it – whatever it may bring. The story is actually a sort of hero’s journey, in the Campbellian sense. That was my intention, along with wanting to write something with an unashamedly happy ending.
I have been amazed and delighted by the way the book has touched the lives of those who’ve read it. Very few have reacted in a negative way, all but one of them reacting to an unfortunate and unfair prejudice against Toby’s breed. That exception is the case in point noted earlier. One reader made an assumption about me, based on reading a copy of Toby. While not an unreasonable assumption, it was unfortunately incorrect. This reader contacted me about a behavioral problem that developed in their dog, a fairly serious matter as I understood it. While I sympathized, I had to respond, in all honesty, that I was entirely unqualified to provide such advice. What I know about dogs is second-hand, based largely on research, with some feedback from friends who are dog-owners.
Toby is an idealized representation of the canine species, created for a specific fictional purpose. He is not based on a real dog, nor is he derived from a lifetime of dog-raising experience on my part. I like dogs well enough, and have enjoyed the company of well-behaved dogs owned by friends on any number of occasions. But I’ve never raised one of my own – and really have no desire to do so. I explained this to the reader, pointing out that merely writing a book that includes a canine character didn’t qualify me to offer the advice being sought. I suggested seeking the help of a veterinarian or a specialist in dog behavior.
This was not the expected answer, and the reader was most displeased. For this reader the book created the unfortunate and false impression that I had significant expertise in dog care and behavior. How could I have created such a realistic canine character otherwise? The disconnect created by my reply prompted a harsh (putting it mildly) reaction. I’d misled this reader, and the concept that I might have done so without intending any such thing never entered the argument.
Okay, it does happen that someone reads a book I’ve published and decides that my work just doesn’t satisfy. But this is the first time anyone ever read a book of mine, expressed great affection for it, but ended up deciding I’m some sort of lying bastard unfit to walk on the same planet. How dare I write a book “about a dog” without being an expert in the care and feeding of the canine tribe?
Probably the same way I dare to write about people traveling between the stars, flying on gryphons, or meeting a harpy moonlighting as a Muse – just a few of things I’ve written about but never experienced. All in a day’s work, as a teller of tales.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by this reader’s assumptions, and the false impression of me engendered by the story in Toby. After all, I went to great lengths to make Toby a thoroughly believable dog. But that’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s part of my job. If I fail at it, I fail as a storyteller, so I always go all out when creating a character of any species. And yet here I sit, surprised by the realization that, this time, I may have succeeded just a little too well.
In an effort to increase the availability of my books in eBook format, I have now made most of them available through Google Play. Because their website does not effectively segregate my work from another author of the same name – an English preacher who has been dead for 337 years – searching for my books by author name is an effort in futility. You can search by each title, but it would be more convenient to have all the links available in one place. So, if you’re in the habit of reading on your phone and buy books through Google Play, allow me relieve you of the need to search for mine at all. A list of links follows.
The Astronomy Memoirs
Mr. Olcott’s Skies: An Old Book and a Youthful Obsession
Tales of a Three-legged Newt: Essays and Anecdotes for Amateur Astronomers
War of the Second Iteration
The Luck of Han’anga
Founders’ Effect
The Plight of the Eli’ahtna
The Courage to Accept
Setha’im Prosh
Tales from the Second Iteration
Where A Demon Hides: War of the Second Iteration – Coda
All That Bedevils Us
The Chimera Multiverse
The Gryphon Stone
The Lesson of Almiraya Bay
Fantasy
Variation on a Theme
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1981
History is a pageant of changes, recorded both in the events that create and drive those changes, and in the lives of the people caught up in them. Some of the changes are cyclic, and some are one and done; some of those can break the cycles. I’m a sometime student of history, and one of my favorite nonfiction genres is narrative history. A good narrative history details the events recorded and the changes that come in their wake, but goes further by depicting in detail the lives of those associated with the events. These are stories of people who are in equal measure caught up in and driving the events that we call history. I find such narratives compelling.
This interest in the cycles of history may explain why The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge held my attention as strongly as it did. A novel, and definitely not a future narrative history, it still detailed a story of changes, both cyclic and a one-off event destined to alter that cycle. Strongly character-driven, the tale is centered on the people coping with changes, some of them devastating, in a world as clearly realized as any depiction of our own world you might find in a narrative history. In much the same way as a well-told narrative history, I found this novel to be a compelling read. Of the Hugo Award winners I’ve read so far, this one really stands out.
Set on a world called Tiamat, a world with more ocean than land (the name is that of a sea goddess from Babylonian mythology), the story is of a cyclic change that occurs every century and a half. Other worlds have access to Tiamat through a stargate created by a black hole. When Tiamat’s star system is positioned just right, the gate works, and this access exists for 150 years. Following this period is one of equal length during which the world is lost to the rest of interstellar civilization. Two human cultures exist on Tiamat: the technology-dependent Winters, who control things when the planet is open to the off-world visitors who provide the technology, and the low-tech Summers, who according to tradition take over when access is cut off. To maintain control of Tiamat and its resources when that world is next open to them, the off-worlders have rigged the tech tools they provide to essentially self-destruct during the time the Summers rule. The change from Winter to Summer rule involves an ancient ritual, involving the sacrifice of the Winter queen to the sea when her Summer counterpart ascends.
The current queen intends to change this cycle, seeking a way to keep the technological tools running and herself on the throne – and among the living. That plan becomes ensnared in schemes involving interstellar smugglers, a belief system among Summers regarding their goddess, people called sybils who are flesh-and-blood data delivery systems, and a native species that is harvested for its blood. A drug is refined from the bodily fluids of these creatures that can extend a human’s life almost indefinitely. The drug is at the heart of all the character motivations, one way or another. Few things are as they seem, and if they are, they don’t stay that way for long. And just when you think things couldn’t get worse for the protagonists, they do. I was guessing at where this was all going down to the last handful of chapters, and when I had it figured out, I wasn’t quite right.
The Snow Queen is a wonderful example of what, in science fiction and fantasy writing, we call world building. As measured in terms of depth and detail, it’s right there with Frank Herbert’s Dune. There is a large cast of characters from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, with both characters and cultures clearly developed and believable. The ocean-dominated world of Tiamat, much like the world-encompassing deserts of Arrakis, is very much a character in its own right.
Like the world they inhabit, the characters in the story have depth and complexity that make them believable, however extraordinary their circumstances. There are no clear stereotypes. The heroes are ordinary mortals, flawed without always being actually dysfunctional. And the chief villain isn’t exactly a truly evil person, incapable of love or compassion, but someone caught between the contradictory motives of preserving her culture and saving her own life. The combination of pacing, world building, and character-driven plot makes this a story that deserves to be a classic of the genre. The ending satisfies, even if it puts a chill up your spine at times. And while there are enough questions unresolved at the end to justify the sequel Vinge wrote, I didn’t feel as if the ending dangled there, awaiting a true resolution.
It all adds up to a story that I will pick up and reread someday, after I’ve read its sequels. I’ve read Hugo winners that had me wondering “What were they thinking, voting for this one?” But not this time. Had I been given a vote to cast in 1981, I would quite likely have cast it for this book. I can say that in all honesty, having read the other nominees for that year. All were very good. The Snow Queen was extraordinary.
Let’s get something clear right from the start. This thing they call Artificial Intelligence, currently being discussed and promoted in a big way? It’s a misapplication of the term. These systems are not conscious entities, certainly not in the HAL 9000 or SkyNet science fictional sense. To the best of my understanding these are machine learning algorithms, designed to respond to requests in ways that mimic human interactions. They search the vast online resources out there, do so in an astonishingly short amount of time, and come up with a response that meets the criteria set by the user. That response is given in a way that reads (or sounds) like something almost human. AI systems get better at this the more often they’re used, and in that sense, at least, they do learn.
They respond according to their programming which, to be honest, is almost mind-boggling in its sophistication and ability. But Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term that has been appropriated by those who see “gold in them thar hills.” It serves them well as a marketing buzzword. These systems are not intelligent in the sense of being capable of independent thought, which would make it possible for them to be creative. (Not yet, anyway.) They don’t think. They don’t create. They harvest, organize, and present information in what seems a personable manner. They are computer tools to be used – or misused.
And misused they will be. Nothing special about AI as far as this goes. It’s a short list that contains only technologies that have never lent themselves to abuse. It always comes around to whether or not the risks inherent in deliberate misuse of technology outweigh the benefits. With AI this remains to be seen, although there certainly are signs of trouble ahead. One example, relevant to what I do, is the application of so-called AI to the world of writing.
While I believe that a time will come when true AI “wakes up” and develops its own sort of awareness and creativity, I don’t see it happening in the immediate future. The idea that a machine of any sort will be able to do what I do, and do it well enough to compete effectively with flesh-and-blood writers, while not entirely far-fetched, doesn’t worry me. These systems, when asked to start a story or write an essay, sift the virtual world and cobble together things found out there to fit the request. They create nothing new in the process. I don’t see the novelist or short story writer being replaced any time soon by such systems.
What I do see happening, with ever increasing frequency, is the use of so-called AI to “aid” the writing process. I’ve heard of writers who, for various reasons, have turned to these augmented search engines for story ideas, opening paragraphs (and even chapters), and for evaluation of stylistic elements in their writing. All of this is done to make the process easier or more efficient, or to save money by eliminating editorial expenses. Such use is frequently described as being on par with the employment of grammar programs. Some of those experimenting with AI seem to be looking for a way to jump-start a writing career that has faltered, for whom motivation has been undermined by a lack of success as defined by book sales. Such a measure of success is an expectation too many aspiring writers carry into their effort right from the beginning. Lack of fulfillment of this expectation is understandably frustrating, and that frustration can suppress the motivation to write.
For some, this use of AI might turn out to be just what they need to regain their motivation and start writing again. Having your personal well of inspiration cease to generate story ideas must be a horrible feeling. If AI helps someone to bounce back from such a dry spell, it could be considered an example of proper use of the technology, and it would be hard to hold that use against them. But to my mind, the current application of AI to get the actual work of writing done amounts to a steep and slippery slope. For no matter what “tools” you employ to make writing seem easier, the problem of finding and cultivating readers will not change. And it is this problem, more than anything else, that interferes with commercial success. Finding an “easier” way to write fiction will surely create a temptation in some to let the machine do ever more of the writer’s work, possibly increasing their productivity, but with a decline in quality. This is already happening; as a result, a few short fiction and poetry periodicals are now closed to unsolicited work because they are being inundated by lackluster, machine-generated material. If this trend continues, the independent book-publishing world risks being swamped as well, as increasing numbers of frustrated writers release books they have “written” using AI. Books that are, to an ever-increasing degree, the work of machine learning systems that become more adept at imitating human expression with each iteration – books with stories lacking the spark of true creativity that gives good fiction its emotional power.
Even if human readers of fiction recognize the soullessness of such material, there’s nothing to stop it from being published and promoted. The market is already seriously over-saturated as it is, and piling more – possibly substandard – books into the mix will help no one, writers or readers. This, more than the possibility that a machine might replace me, gives me nightmares.
For my own part, I won’t be using these so-called AI tools in my writing. This isn’t a purely ethical decision on my part. I won’t be tempted to try the AI writing tricks I see ever more people embracing because I don’t find them useful. Coming up with ideas or story starts? Seriously, I’ll die of old age before I run out of story ideas. As for reducing the “grunt work” involved with writing (whatever it is people really mean by the phrase), I enjoy the actual process of writing too much for that to have any appeal. And I don’t believe for a moment that AI can edit a book for me as effectively as a human being. So, when you read a story or a book by me (or even a weblog essay), you can be assured it was produced by 100% organic methods.
Sorry about that, HAL.
You’ve decided to try your hand at writing fiction, and have committed words to paper – or to a computer file. But after weeks or months of work, you’re getting absolutely nowhere. The material you’ve produced doesn’t inspire confidence, and as a result, it’s hard to stay motivated. What’s going on here? Why isn’t it working? It certainly didn’t look this hard, to judge from the books you’ve read.
You seek advice from other writers, such as the ideas I presented here. None of it works, and your frustration grows while the story sits there, untouched. Writing a story sounded like a thing worth doing, and you do know how to write, but it just isn’t working according to expectations. Why?
Maybe it’s time to examine what motivated you to write that novel or short story. What made this seem a good idea in the first place?
When I ask this question of people I meet, in and out of the virtual realm, the answers fall into two general categories: a love of reading fiction inspired the idea of telling a tale; or it sounded like an easy side hustle – definitely better than driving for Uber or Lyft. Whichever I hear, there’s a common mistaken assumption, that writing fiction is a relatively easy thing to do. That it might be anything but easy comes as a shock to many would-be writers.
Although telling stories is a thing that comes naturally to most people, no one is born a writer. We all tell stories of one kind or another. You spend a day at work, or at school, and then come home to tell your family about the events of your day. You share memories of past events with friends. That’s basic storytelling. For some of us, however, the itch to be creative wakes up the imagination, and stories come into being that are not of day-to-day events in real life. Fiction, in other words. That creative impulse can amplify this very human thing called storytelling (I’m tempted to say hijack it), and with enough such amplification, the urge to tell that story takes hold. And there you sit, a literate human being who has done plenty of reading, deciding to write this one down and see how it flies.
That bit about writing it down is the hard part. Writing readable fiction takes time and practice. For most of us, it takes a lot of time and practice. There are exceptions to this rule, but it’s those exceptions that define the rule, after all. That exceptions exist is no guarantee you will be one of them. And so it’s more than likely that the first attempt feels awkward, or just outright botched. When you find yourself floundering, you have two choices. You can keep at it, and practice the art until you are good enough to publish your work with some confidence. If you can accept the reality that the only way to become adept at writing fiction is to first write some lousy fiction, there’s hope for you. Go on and give it another try.
The second choice is, of course, to quit. You can give it up and be content with reading fiction. I’ll come back to that choice a little later.
But what about those seeking a side hustle?
To be blunt, if you started stringing words together because you thought it might be an easy way to make money, you’ve embarked upon a fool’s errand. The chances of making even a modest living by writing are very slim. The fact that a few people do so, and in fewer cases make a lot of money, comes back to exceptions defining the rule. And the rule is that making a living as a writer is incredibly difficult. I’ve never managed it, and I’m doing better than many indie authors. In my case, the sales of my existing books easily cover the expenses involved with the publication of new books: editing, cover art, promotion, etc. I consider this a success – but it’s a success more than a decade in the making. I’m comfortable with this. I’m a storyteller, not an entrepreneur wannabe. But if I had to pay the bills from that income, well…
So, if you’re into this for the money, make sure you have a day job that provides a good financial fallback. Unless you turn out to be one of those rare exceptions (best of luck with that) you’re probably going to need it.
However, it does seem to me that most people who try their hand at writing fiction these days are those who have always wondered if they could make it work. They’ve been inspired by the fiction they love to read. “I wonder if I can?” is a good reason to give anything an honest attempt. But perhaps your inability to finish that story is the answer to the question. It just may be that you can’t. That you are not, by your nature, creative in the literary sense. You are a reader and not a writer, not a teller of fanciful tales after all. It may not be a desirable answer, but it may be the truth.
How can you be sure, one way or the other? One way to make that call involves answering the question with another question. Can you stop? Now that you’ve had at least a little experience in trying to write fiction, and have let your imagination come out to play, can you give that up? If you realize you haven’t at least tried to get any writing done for a month or more, and you shrug this off without a qualm, it may be time to reconsider the idea of writing. If letting it go turns out to be easier said than done, if you find yourself being distracted by thoughts of that unfinished tale – or by new ideas for stories – you need to keep trying. There’s a good chance you really are a writer. So do a little each day, even if all you manage is an idea scribbled down or a new paragraph that helps a story inch forward. Keep at it. It will all add up, in the end, even if the increments are small.
The learning curve can be steep, but the view from the top is worth the climb. Work it bit-by-bit, if necessary, until you’ve finally told a tale to the end. Don’t worry along the way about whether or not it’s good enough to publish. It probably won’t be – yet. That’s what the revision process is all about. That rough draft might take some time, and your first efforts may be flat-out embarrassing. (Mine certainly were.) Be patient with yourself; you can only learn to write fiction by writing fiction. You may be stuck fast today, but if you persist, where might you be tomorrow?
I was once told, by a reader, that she was not going to read any further into the War of the Second Iteration series because the second book – Founders’ Effect – had ended in a cliffhanger. She loathed cliffhangers, considering them a cheap way to insure that readers went on to the next book. Instead of seeming defensive of my writing style, I observed that she must not be a fan of Tolkien. This comment produced a puzzled frown. The Lord of the Rings, as it happened, was one of her favorite works. And so I reminded her of the last line of The Two Towers: “Frodo was alive, but taken by the enemy.” A valiant effort was then made by the reader to tweak the definition of “cliffhanger” to exclude its use by Tolkien. The effort was abandoned when the ending of the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back came into the conversation. (A third party in the discussion pointed to similarities between the ending of my book and that film.)
To be sure, there are cliffhangers and there are cliffhangers. Like any technique applied to writing fiction (and here I am speaking of the creation of a multibook series) cliffhangers can be use well or badly. A good cliffhanger actually ends a story, providing closure for that portion of the story arc of the series. The characters are in a bad spot, but you close the book (or watch the credits roll) with at least some clue as to where things are going. You know Samwise is going to go after Frodo, and that Han Solo’s friends will not abandon him. This is exactly what I was trying to do at the end of Founders’ Effect. Apparently most readers have found my use of a cliffhanger in that book acceptable. According to the sales of the remainder of the series, better than 90% of the people who read Founders’ Effect go on to read the next three books.
I find that cliffhangers, like adverbs and adjectives, are best used sparingly, but not necessarily avoided entirely. As a reader, I’m not usually troubled by them. If the writer displayed enough skill to keep my attention all the way to the last page of the book, a cliffhanger at the end will more than likely have been handled properly. (The story has ended – but wait! There’s more! And I want more.) If the writer isn’t sufficiently skilled at this art to hold me all the way through a book – well, in that case, how the story ends would be a moot point. Very rarely, I find myself at the end of a book in a series that feels as if an arbitrary page limit had been reached. Something bad happens, the heroes are imperiled, and it just dangles there. I find that annoying as a reader, and I’m aware that it happens often enough to give the concept of a cliffhanger a bad reputation.
As a writer, aware of how badly readers might react to a clunky cliffhanger ending, few techniques I use cause me as much second-guessing. Does this segment of the overall series story arc really end here, in this deep pit of adversity currently occupied by the characters? Or would the larger story be better served by a resolution here, in this volume, that sets up the next book? In other words, does ending the book at this point, with the protagonist tied to the proverbial railroad tracks, actually make sense? In approaching such a decision, I’m usually going more on gut feelings than some sort of nuts-and-bolts analysis. A story has a way of evolving what I like to call an internal logic, a pattern that could also be called an emergent property. That logic or property can soon direct the story in ways that make sense – and should be followed – even when the writer started out with some other idea in mind. In my case, when it came time to end Founders’ Effect, the way that book had evolved, and what it suggested about the next book in the series, made a cliffhanger the most logical way to end it and set up The Plight of the Eli’ahtna.
If the cliffhanger feels right, thought must of course then be given to picking up the next installment in a way that repays the reader for their trust. That’s not always a simple thing to pull off, and this might explain why some cliffhangers misfire – and why I don’t often employ such endings in my books. I clearly did so in Founders’ Effect, and to a lesser degree in The Courage to Accept – and so far, those two books are my only examples. After all, it’s quite possible to leave a reader with the knowledge that there’s more to come, without leaving a character dangling from the edge of a cliff by their fingernails.
That being so, why use one at all? To my way of thinking, used properly – and sparingly – cliffhangers can be an effective way to increase the tension within a multi-book series, keeping the reader engaged in a way that avoids the dreaded middle-book syndrome. Cliffhangers raise the stakes, so to speak, and done well keep the flow of the story strong enough that the reader remains motivated. It really can work that way. The thought of Frodo in the hands of the orcs took me straight to The Return of the King. And guess where I was the day after they released Return of the Jedi? Yes, like so many of you, in line at a theater, eager to see that cliffhanger resolved.
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I was often criticized, as a youngster, for my reading habits. This was especially true when I was in my early to mid-teens. The truth is, outside of assigned reading for classes, about all I read was escapist fiction, science fiction in particular. I read some nonfiction on my own, of course, on matters to do with natural history and astronomy, but when you think about it, those interests – which were anything but mainstream in my small home town – were a sort of escape in their way. But when it came to reading fiction, science fiction (available fantasy having been limited to Tolkien’s work at that time) was literally all I read. And reread – books of my own being hard to come by, lacking any real income of my own. The town library was hardly well endowed with such fiction, and one of the librarians was among those who expressed “concerns” over my steady diet of escapism.
Pick a dearly held habit by any teenager, and a rationalization for it will be supplied – by that teenager. Or by the person that teenager grew up to be. It won’t always be simply self-serving, much less flat-out wrong. I had mine, being in general a misfit. Those less-than-mainstream interests cited above were shared by very few of my classmates (in the case of astronomy, by none at all), and in a small, conservative town, my corresponding lack of interest in sports and automobiles was viewed with suspicion. The things that interested me set me apart. Lacking much of a social life, as a result, I read books. The stories offered an escape from the often painful awkwardness of not fitting in, and at first, that was all that I needed. But they also fired my imagination, and awareness of the power of storytelling slowly grew. Looking back, it now seem inevitable that I would try to tell stories of my own.
And in the fullness of time, I did. It took a lot of time and practice (and life experience) to take me to the point of telling tales with any degree of ability, but I got there. And with the advent of modern self-publishing, I now have something of a readership. I still read a fair amount of fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but without the feeling that I need to dive undercover and pull the lid over the top. (The recent exception to this being the so-called “Pandemic Year” of 2020, when I indulged heavily in “comfort reads.”) But where I most often find an escape from the real world these days is in the writing I do.
It’s every bit as possible to escape into an imaginary world of your own creation as a storyteller, as it is to become so involved with the tales of others that the real world fades away. To nonwriters, this sort of escape may seem to verge on the pathological, but if you’re a writer of fiction, you know to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back home. (And hope there are no mice following behind, of course.) I often get so wrapped up in my work that I lose track of time, and frequently walk around the house thinking out loud on some aspect of a current work in progress. When the work is done and published, it then has the potential to become an escape for anyone who comes along and reads what I’ve created. That’s an interesting feeling, and a pleasant one, to think that I might be giving some stressed-out soul, somewhere out there, a few hours of respite from whatever troubles them. It’s a motive to keep writing, all by itself. And why not? We’re all in this together. Every now and then we should get away from it all, and do so in good company.
Where A Demon Hides: War of the Second Iteration – Coda
The war is over and Humanity has prevailed, but victory came at a terrible price. The weapon used to bring down the enemy killed or injured as many people as it saved. One of the unintended casualties, Alicia MacGregor, has existed in a medically induced coma for two years while her neurological injuries were repaired.
At last, to the relief of family and friends, the time has come for her to awaken and rejoin the world. She is healed physically, but the trauma she endured in that final battle left deep scars in her heart and mind. As she copes with the burden of horror and grief left by the war, Alicia discovers that she is haunted by something far worse than bad memories. Something that first threatens her sanity, and then her life.
Currently available in ebook format from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.
After my last essay, I received an interesting question. What if, no matter what you do, you just can’t get the story all the way through to the end of a workable rough draft? All well and good to say you absolutely must finish it in order to refine it. What if you literally can’t find your way to the end?
This is a situation very different from one in which you finish the draft and are tumbled into a state of deep self-doubt and depression over a perceived lack of quality in the result. As I pointed out in the previous essay, this is actually to be expected. With the completion of a rough draft, the work has just begun.
But what if you can only get so far, and then stall out with the story obviously unfinished? It’s an unpleasant situation. Been there and done that, although to date I’ve been able – eventually – to get things rolling again. I have seen other writers run smack into such a wall, and not regain their footing as easily. That’s an apt metaphor, hitting a wall, to judge by how people react when it happens. It’s a shock to the creative system. You’ve got this story idea in your head; it starts out with great promise and develops a certain amount of momentum, and then it just stops. Thus far and no further shalt thou go, it seems, no matter how hard you try.
The most common advice I see given to those in such a quandary is to set the story aside. Stop trying to force it to move forward. In baseball there’s a thing called “pressing.” You’re not getting hits, so you try ever harder, usually by swinging at more pitches. The strikeouts add up and increase the frustration you already feel. “Pressing” – trying too hard – is an easy trap to fall into. Instead, stand down for a while. Set that story aside, and let it simmer on the back burner of your imagination. When I get hung up trying to develop a plot, I might turn my attention to a household project, or do something hobby-related, anything that has nothing to do with writing. Taking a break works, if you’re really a storyteller, because the internal process that drives the evolution of a story will still be working. It’s not a 100% percent conscious effort.
However, for some writers, taking a break is a perilous thing. It’s so easy to become distracted by other activities and then realize it’s been days or even weeks since you last did any real work. If you’re afraid this will happen, there’s an alternative to consider. Write something else, such as a weblog entry or a different story.
Very few storytellers have only a single tale to tell. While I normally try to stay focused on one story at a time, if that story drags I often sketch out an unrelated storyline, or a work of nonfiction, just to give my mind something else to do. I have a number of files on my hard drive that preserve the seeds for new stories that occur to me on a regular basis. Fleshing out one of these can provide the sort of diversion I need, while keeping me writing and possibly giving me a head start on the next project. If the diversion turns into a current work in progress, I just go with that flow. I can always pick up the one that went off the rails another time.
Many writers hold themselves to arbitrary measures of progress, such as a daily word count, and such a commitment can aggravate your situation. The story is stuck, and you aren’t making meaningful progress toward that number, rendering you ever more aware of, and irritated by, the problem. So, redefine “meaningful.” Sit down, look at where you left off – maybe read a few pages – and then add the first things brought to mind by what you read. It doesn’t need to be story material moving the plot forward, just any thought about the story that occurs. Let it go at that and don’t be too hard on yourself for doing so. Even if what you add amounts to no more than a sentence, you’ve made some progress. It may be a tiny increment, but if you do that every day at least once, things start to add up. You may end up deleting that stuff when you get going again, but in the meantime you’ve kept your head in that story. It’s better to add a few words a day than nothing at all. And it’s very possible that while doing this something will click, and away you go again, meeting that word count as if nothing ever went wrong.
None of these idea are mutually exclusive, and over the years I’ve employed them in varying combinations. It’s very common, for example, for me to add short bits to a story as they occur, even though I’m taking a break by working in the garden. More than once, I’ve found myself with an active work in progress while also writing a weblog essay. You do what works, in whatever combination suits you.
It’s also possible that none of the above – or any of the other terabytes of advice you can find on the internet – will help you at all. Maybe you start a new story, and the same thing happens. You just don’t find a way to follow through. What then?
Ask yourself this: why am I trying to write a story?
The question of motive can be a sticky business, and is one for another time.
Over the years, I’ve been involved in several writing critique and support groups, some face-to-face and others via the social media. The best of these have been groups representing a mix of experience levels, from people who have published – traditionally or independently – to those who have yet to put down their first complete sentence. All of us in the former category were once upon a time in the latter, and received advice and encouragement from more experienced writers. We benefitted from the experience of those who went before us, and now some of us hope to pass our experiences, based on that mentoring, on down the line.
A frequently encountered problem, expressed during group meetings by writers new to the craft of storytelling – and such a person can be anyone from a teenager to an elderly retiree – is the feeling, as they write, that they are doing it wrong. They can’t get a sense for the plot’s direction, don’t have a clear idea about character motivations, or reading what they’ve already set down just leaves them with the feeling that they’re hopelessly inadequate wordsmiths. “It’s just not working!” is the summary, stated with varying degrees of desperation. And sometimes, “It stinks!”
Well, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. A beginning writer, being new to this art, is rarely in a good position to make such a judgment call on their own work. What you are usually hearing is a lack of confidence being expressed, and not an actual measure of quality. When I’ve read a few pages or chapters written by someone feeling desperate over the paltry quality level they perceive in their own work, I usually find myself in disagreement with that assessment. After all, I’m quick to point out, it isn’t a finished product. This is just your first draft. The rough draft, as it’s often called, and for very good reason.
The mistake being made here, and it’s a common one, is the confusion of the final product – books they’ve read by other authors – with the process of creating that work. When all you see is the end result, it’s all too easy to embrace the idea that it just works out this way. You tell the story, maybe get someone to read it for errors that a spell-check program won’t pick up, and there you have it. A story, written and ready to read. Which is not at all how it goes, and some, when they realize their current best effort is not producing such material, quite naturally want to know what they did wrong.
The answer is: nothing. Not a damned thing. You’re hacking out a rough, first draft, and such are rarely ever publishable right off, much less perfect. Whether you outline a story or not (outlining is advice frequently given to writers in such straits, though not by me) you have to tell that tale a first time. In a sense, you’re telling yourself the story. Whether it’s your first story, your fifth, or your fiftieth, you have to do that first telling to fully understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and how to make it work. And because of this it is absolutely imperative to finish that rough draft – even if you think it’s horrible, perhaps even beyond redemption. Starting over may seem called for, and I’ve done so a time or two myself, but if you find yourself backing up repeatedly, you may be stepping into a trap. One that will keep you from ever advancing toward your goal of being published. Only a finished work can be published, after all, and the only route to that result is straight ahead. You keep writing.
This often means forging ahead even when you’re not entirely sure you’re on the right path, or at least don’t have both feet on it. Doubts are understandable, but you had a good idea at the start, good enough at least to be a starting point. If you reach a point at which you realize X should have happened earlier than Y, don’t go back and start over. Go back to an appropriate point and add a note to that effect, and then go on as if you’d already done X instead of Y. If you get stuck wondering what comes next, but you have a scene in mind for a little further on, skip ahead with a note in the gap to the effect that Something Needs To Happen Here. It’s very likely that, as you continue, the material needed to bridge that gap will be made obvious by what you’re doing after that part of the story. It’s okay to go back and fill that gap, at this point. This isn’t the same as starting over.
Pursue the story to what at least seems a logical conclusion. Only then can you sit back and consider what you should have done. Again, such insights often don’t come right when you need them, but develop as the story does. By forging ahead regardless of doubts, you’ve now given yourself what you need to shape the story into what you hoped it would be. You have a rough draft suitable for revision.
Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not, especially if you’re new to writing fiction. This business of telling tales takes practice. But that’s the way of all things worth doing. There’s a learning curve, and like getting through to the end of that rough draft, there’s only one way to deal with a learning curve: you start climbing. And be prepared to stumble, now and then. It’s okay to make mistakes, since most of them will never be seen by anyone but you. You can fix those, and doing so is how you learn to tell a story well and truly. Sometimes you need to do it wrong to make it right in the end.
Under Desert Stars 