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.
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?
“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.
I’m a member of a science fiction group on Facebook, in which a vast array of books in, and around the edges of, the genre are discussed every day. I have found it to be a useful source for book recommendations and news about authors well known and otherwise. As is true of any other gathering in the social media, it is also a veritable font of varied opinions and manners of expression. This has made it an interesting study in reader habits and attitudes.
Especially of the attitudes. For example…
In the years that I’ve “hung out” with this group, I’ve routinely seen books reviewed by readers in no uncertain terms. Those who thoroughly enjoy a book often shower it with hyperbolic praise. Those who dislike a book try to bury it with hyperbolic scorn. It’s not at all uncommon to see the same book receive both treatments from different participants in a given discussion. Start a discussion by telling people this is the best book ever by a particular author, and you can be assured that a response will soon be posted (you rarely need to wait long) saying that the same book is nothing but garbage. It isn’t always expressed that politely.
In either extreme, the opinion is expressed as an absolute. The lover of said book has essentially declared it a literary masterpiece, while the detractor considers it a literary disaster of the worst sort. Whichever side is expressed, rarely will you see phrases such as “In my opinion,” or “I found it to be,” or any other acknowledgment that this is an opinion, not an objective measure of quality. It is what the reader declared it to be, period.
For those who were enchanted by a particular work of fiction (or any other sort of book, really) the tendency to gush at least a little is understandable. Equally understandable is the desire to express an honest opinion regarding a work that did not please the reader. Unfortunately, it’s apparently not usually enough to say that the book fell short in some manner. The book is often described harshly and, again, these terms are expressed as absolute measures, and not just one reader’s personal opinion. The concept of “your mileage may vary” is not often applied. You’re told the book is worthless, in terms that make it clear you should just accept this as the fact of the matter.
It’s especially interesting to see such an assertive thumbs-down applied to a book that is enjoying considerable popularity, and receiving glowing praise from readers. The negative opinions are then expressed all the more harshly and in an almost defensive way, as if the good reviews are seen as some sort of rebuke. And I’ve seen some positive reviews that were exactly that, efforts to put negative reviewers in their place, with the review of the beloved book becoming a secondary concern. In an unmoderated discussion (fortunately, the group of which I speak is moderated, and angry exchanges aren’t allowed to go too far), such reviews become exchanges of insults, more about the reviewers and their perceived beliefs than the book in question. I’ve seen book discussions of this sort (elsewhere) go so far off the rails that a latecomer might not even guess that the subject of the dispute was ever a book in the first place.
We all react to what we read, and for many of us, finding some way to express that reaction is inevitable; it’s just how we roll. What isn’t inevitable, of course, is confusing your opinion, based on how you reacted to the book, with some sort of unalterable law of nature. You say you loved the book, and I say I found it unenjoyable, but neither of us is really telling the world (or each other) that the book is good or bad. And while there are some truly amateurish works out there among those independently published (using the word amateur in the popular pejorative sense), I’ve read books that I would characterize as amateurish, and yet are enjoyed by many other readers.
If a book is rife with typographical errors, formatting problems, continuity errors, and the like, that’s an altogether different matter. These are technical problems that could have been corrected, if not avoided. Such things can be evaluated objectively; you can count them. But quality of character development and world building? Plot and pacing? Such things very often seem poorly done to one reader, but are satisfying to another. While it’s possible to botch such things so badly that almost everyone can agree on it, such books don’t often come up for discussion. If they’re indie in origin, they simply aren’t visible enough (due to such failings) to draw much, if any, attention. And if they’re from the traditional side of publishing – well, they probably wouldn’t have been published that way in the first place. Such works really don’t enter into a discussion of this sort. Books that do merit strong opinions – indie and traditional – have usually been put out there with some degree of professional attention.
For such books, all you can really say is whether or not you enjoyed them, and why. And you should do so, whether in a review at Goodreads or LibraryThing, elsewhere in the social media, or wherever you purchased the book. Let the world know what you thought. But if you do, consider paying a little more attention to doing so politely, in full recognition of the fact that this is, after all, just your opinion.
At its heart, science fiction is said to be a literature of ideas and extrapolation, typified by the question “What if…?” For this reason the genre is sometimes referred to as speculative fiction. (Current use of the phrase being a bag of angry cats I’m not going to open today.) And although the genre has certainly grown and evolved over the decades, the ideas behind the stories, and the “What if…?” questions those stories explore, remain an integral element of the genre.
For me, as a reader, the most obvious change in the genre – at least, since I started reading science fiction in the mid-1960s – has been the rise of truly character driven fiction, in which center stage is shared – not always equally – between the people created to make the tale come alive, and the ideas and “What if?” scenarios that challenge them. You don’t need to read much sci-fi from the 1940s and 1950s to appreciate this difference in styles, or to see how character-driven fiction opens the way to examine what it means to be human in ways that strictly idea-driven “What if…” stories find difficult to embrace. It could be argued, and I would certainly not disagree, that the genre is richer and more interesting as a result.
This is not to say that the writers of that earlier age failed in any way. Theirs is the work that laid the foundations for what came later, the work that inspired following generations to take the genre further. To ask new and different questions, and to present them in unique ways. That this is true can be seen by how many old-school authors managed to remain relevant in later years, without fully embracing these changes. By way of example, consider The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, winner of the Hugo Award for best novel in 1980.
The Fountains of Paradise is as good an example of a story written for the sake of a Big Idea as any I can think of, and the construction of the first space elevator surely counts as such. Perhaps it’s not all that surprising, then, that the characters in the story seem to take second place to the swirl of “What if?” questions that surround such an idea. Clarke focuses on the project of the elevator and its construction, while the characters involved dutifully fill their roles without taking the focus away from the idea of building an elevator to near-Earth orbit. Each necessary role is filled by a character, but these characters themselves stand for the ideas of what sort of people would be involved in such a massive undertaking. They are often stereotypes, and little more. There’s a visionary engineering genius, a benign spiritual leader, a journalist, a world-weary ex-diplomat, and a religious zealot, to name a few of the more prominent examples. They are all clearly and carefully drawn, but only the engineer and the diplomat come across as having any real depth. The journalist, in particular, is about as two-dimensional as a character can get. Which, come to think of it, may have been a deliberate dig at that profession by the author.
So, it’s the idea and its “What if?” questions that are the core of this novel. This is not a bad thing, Clarke being one of the true masters of such fiction. Clarke’s prose is, as always, steady, clear, and unadorned, getting the job done without distractions. The story develops over years, dealing with the major challenges assumed to be involved with technology on such a scale, but at the same time sending the clear message that such a thing is believed – by the author, at least – to be within the realm of future human accomplishments. There’s a steady current of “yes, we will, someday” optimism in this story, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed it, even though it felt as if it might have been first published in an earlier age.
One aspect of the old-school approach that did stand out for me was the use of female characters. Or, rather, the lack of such. Aside from the journalist – who comes on the scene occasionally and has one major adventure during the development of the plot – and a faithful housekeeper, there are no female characters to speak of. This was typical of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, when female characters generally lacked any real depth, if they appeared at all. I’ve grown so accustomed, in these later days, to major roles in science fiction being assigned to women, that their near-absence in this book, published in 1979, stood out. This says nothing about Clarke and his work in general, since female characters are anything but absent in his other books – Imperial Earth and Rendezvous With Rama come to mind – but their scarcity in this novel struck an odd note for me. It was a puzzling after-thought, though, and not a spoiler. I might have noticed this oddity sooner, while reading the book, if the story had actually been character-driven. But the people weren’t really the point of this story, and I only came to this realization after reading the book, and sitting down to evaluate it for this essay.
Clarke’s work in science fiction is always about the Big Idea, with the characters involved placed there to serve their roles as people necessary for the fictional setting. Someone to deliver the dialog, in other words. Science fiction has largely moved away from this style, but there was still clearly room for such a tale by one of the old masters in 1980. And for all that this style does stand in contrast to so much of what’s out there today, The Fountains of Paradise remains a readable and entertaining work of science fiction. It’s the story of a Big Idea and a host of “What if” questions told by a writer who clearly knew how to imagine the future.
I will be participating in TusCon 49, this year’s rendition of “The Best Little Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Convention in Arizona.” The event will be held November 11th – 13th, 2022.
I will be there most of the three days, but the best day to catch up with me will be Saturday, November 12, when all of the convention programming I’m involved with will be held:
Reading: Where a Demon Hides
Saturday – Panel Room 2, 1:00 pm 2:00 pm
I will give a reading of the first chapter of my newest novel, Where a Demon Hides: War of the Second Iteration – Coda, and maybe a short story or two – time permitting.
Panel Discussion: Killing Off Characters
Saturday – Ballroom, 4:00 pm 5:00 pm
Some authors love to do it. Some authors hate to do it. But you have to do it. Characters must die. But why? And how do you do it well? Panelists include Carolyn Kay, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Jennifer Roberson, Marsheila Rockwell, Marty Ketola, and yours truly.
Autograph Session
Saturday – Autograph Area, 5:00 pm 6:00 pm
I’ll be with fellow authors Cameron D. Blackwell, Kristyn Merbeth, and Mona Ventress, available to sign books and meet readers in a casual setting.
What’s Up over TusCon
Saturday – In the central courtyard, near the pool, 8:00 pm 9:00 pm.
Once again there will be telescopes set up for your viewing pleasure. Jupiter promises to provide an especially good show, this year, and the Pleiades will be rising. (This event contingent on clear skies.)
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.
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.
“Inventing a universe is tough work. Jehovah took a sabbatical. Vishnu takes naps. Science fiction universes are only tiny bits of word-worlds, but even so they take some thinking, and rather than think out a new universe for every story, a writer may keep coming back and using the same universe, sometimes till it gets a bit worn at the seams, softens up, feels natural, like an old shirt.” Ursula K. LeGuin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories.
***
In addition to my rather low-keyed involvement with a couple of Facebook writing groups, I often peruse postings on a reader-oriented group, one relevant to my preferred genre, both as a reader and a writer. I speak of the Science Fiction Book Club – and if sci-fi in its many forms is your thing, I strongly suggest looking it up. (Fair warning to fellow indie authors: self-promotion is not permitted in the group, a policy I fully endorse. Also a warning to readers: prepare to see your To Be Read list explode.)
As you would expect from a group of any sort on the internet, on or off Facebook, opinions abound. These opinions – and here we’re talking about opinions regarding authors and their books – are often expressed without the caveat that these are, after all, just opinions and not facts. They are stated in ways that clearly lead to the impression that objective characterizations of quality are being offered to the masses. I’m talking about statements to the effect that a book’s pacing is too slow, or that the characters are two-dimensional, or the sequel wasn’t as strong as the original, etc. An often encountered judgment is that a series started out strong, then lost steam. The author didn’t know when to quit.
When a series is mentioned in any context (but especially when not knowing when to quit is invoked) rest assured that someone will join the discussion by declaring that they won’t read a series. For such readers a series is generally seen as both a failure of creativity and a money grab by an author or publisher, an example of milking a literary cash cow. They’re particularly harsh when discussing someone on the indie side of things, such as yours truly. (And no, such a complaint didn’t prompt this essay. I’m sure there are readers out there who won’t touch War of the Second Iteration just because it’s five books long, but I have not yet seen such a comment aimed at my work. Watch this space.) For any author, especially one working on an incomplete series, writing a series is also often viewed as a sign of laziness. Indie or traditional, they say the author obviously can’t be bothered to develop truly new material. And this idea is usually expressed with a sort of off-hand contempt that insinuates that the author is in some way a failure.
It apparently doesn’t register on these self-appointed critics that some of the biggest names in this (or any) genre have written or are working on a series of books. Anyone out there really think Ursula K. LeGuin is a failure? Or how about C.J. Cherryh? Readers are still buying each new installment in Cherryh’s Foreigner series. Whether you care for their work or not (just your opinion, after all), any writer who can write so many successful stories in one imaginary universe can’t by any honest definition of the concept be considered a failure. And the authors cited as examples are anything but exceptions to the rule.
Contrary to what critics of multi-volume stories believe, producing such work is hardly a sign of laziness, much less a failure of imagination. When a writer creates an imaginary universe it’s only natural to explore its depths. The endeavor doesn’t become more or less creative because you don’t start from scratch every single time. It’s possible that you’ll only pull a story or two out of what you’ve built. However, if you go to any trouble at all to create cultures, ecologies, technologies, and histories to support one tale, you have, by default, laid the foundation for more. If you are gifted with sufficient imagination, there may be many more stories in there, waiting to be told. While there’s no obligation to build on that foundation, if there’s room for more stories, or for one story to go on beyond a single book, why not? A universe, real or imagined, is by its nature boundless. For a teller of tales this means possibilities. More stories. Chances for existing characters to grow and change. Writing a series does not show a lack of creativity; quite the opposite. A writer who continues to explore new stories in a universe of their own making is displaying an awareness of potential, and a willingness to explore it.
As for the bit about milking a cash cow, what of it? If series didn’t sell, there would be far fewer of them. Last time I checked this was not the case – not by a long shot. Seems to me that those who turn their noses up at a series, and snub the authors of such, know very little about the publishing world. They’re also no more than a vocal minority in the world of book readers. When I read such commentary, I can’t help wondering if I’m being trolled. The way such views are aired, it often feels like little more than an attempt to stir the proverbial ant hill.
I honestly can’t recall what aspect of my childhood instilled in me such a fascination with telling stories. Before I could write effectively, I told all sorts of windy tales to anyone who would listen. That so many of the adults around me seemed entertained by my childish flights of fancy kept me at it, completely oblivious to how they were humoring me. At some point I went from talking to writing things down. I have vague memories of turning scratch pads and scrap paper into “books.” That I was so serious about these efforts surely amused them all.
That I was encouraged from the very beginning to embrace literacy, both reading and writing, as things wonderful to do for their own sake, surely set the foundation for these habits. That a career as a writer was not what the adults were trying to set in motion only became obvious many years later.
Just before I finished high school, I sold a short magazine article to an aquarium hobby publication, about how to keep crayfish alive in a fish tank. I sent it with the idea of sharing ideas, not of getting paid, so imagine my surprise when the publishers thanked me for my contribution by sending a twenty-five-dollar check. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that my father had to co-sign the publishing agreement. I was all of seventeen years old.
That check put a dangerous idea into my head. Dangerous, that is, from the parental point of view. The idea was that you could make money doing something teachers and parents alike told me I was pretty good at. (I honestly thought they would approve.) At about that same time I read Isaac Asimov’s combined memoir and short story collection that chronicled his earliest career efforts as a writer of science fiction: The Early Asimov, or Eleven Years of Trying. Writing and selling fiction suddenly seemed doable. The idea became considerably more hazardous when I decided to write fiction; it became a goal, and one that started out much further ahead of me than I could possibly have imagined.
For the next thirty years or so, I made sporadic efforts to pursue this goal. I say sporadic because a succession of life changes and other distractions kept me from being as focused, or as disciplined, as I now know I needed to be. Still, in the late 1970s and through the mid-1980s, I made some money flipping the nonfiction side of the authorial coin. This didn’t last, as toward the end of that time the sort of publications that bought what I wrote were either merging with other publishing concerns, or dying outright. My markets slowly dwindled, and each year that passed saw me more reliant on the proverbial day job. I didn’t stop writing, though, and focused my efforts more on fiction, of which I sold not a word.
More life changes took place, including getting married and then deciding to finish the degree I’d left hanging when I moved from Illinois to Arizona. I did very little writing at all while working on the degree, except, of course, what was required for the classes I took. After graduation, I wrote yet another novel that I couldn’t sell. As I’ve told the tale elsewhere (in The Process), the market-based reason the book didn’t sell, combined with other unrelated problems, shut me down for several years. I just couldn’t see putting all that work into something that was apparently going nowhere.
Ebooks, print-on-demand, and being able to publish directly to the public changed all of this. Talk about a life changer! I took that novel the editors said they couldn’t find a market for, and self-published it. That last sentence covers a lot of details, and many intermediate steps before publication occurred, but suffice to say it was quite the learning curve. I climbed it, and on June 7th, 2012,The Luck of Han’angabecame available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Ten years have passed since that day. The War of the Second Iteration turned out to be a five-book series, not a trilogy. A story about a multiverse that contains science so advanced it might as well be magic unfolded in my mind, and I wrote a story about gryphons that were anything but mythical (The Gryphon Stone). A character from the Second Iteration series decided he had another tale to tell, and I obliged by writing All That Bedevils Us. And then there’s the one about the dog who needs a ride home, Toby. Most recently, I gave writing a love story a try, one with a fantastical twist, and so Variation on a Theme came into existence. These and others add up to ten books in that ten-year span. I’m immensely pleased with that output, but even happier with the receptions they have received.
Yes, the books sell, and that’s a thing that can only be gratifying. Some of them sell quite well, in fact, and this indie thing is easily paying its own way. But – far more important to me – people like what I write. There are readers out there urging me to write more, to get another book out – which I’m more than happy to do. I’ve even heard from a few readers who said something I wrote helped them get through dark times, by allowing them to escape for a while and come back to reality refreshed and better able to cope. Toby has led to a few dogs (and cats) finding forever homes. If there’s a better way to describe success as a writer, I can’t imagine it.
And now, about the next ten years…
(At the time of this essay, in celebration of a decade of successful indie publishing, all of my full-length novels in ebook format are marked down to just 99¢. Prices will return to normal June 30th, 2022.)
Under Desert Stars 