Archive for the ‘changes’ Tag
In conversations with other writers, I often find myself in disagreement regarding a particular aspect of the writing process. Many, perhaps most, dislike the work involved with revisions and editing, seeing it as a relentless, grinding chore designed to fuel self-doubt. You see countless memes in the social media expressing, in cartoonish grotesquerie, the fear and loathing often invoked by the process of editing. For me, the very opposite is true. The hardest part of the fiction-writing process is creating the basis of the plot and the characters to start with. I don’t outline, because fiction doesn’t come to me that way. I grope my way forward, figuring things out as I go. “Pantsing,” say some, as in writing by the seat of your pants. I prefer the phrase discovery writing. Whatever you choose to call it, this phase is always hard work, and rarely easy, but it’s work that must be done to get me where I want to be.
What I most look forward to is what comes after, that process of self-editing and revision that unfolds after that rough draft has developed a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s some discovery writing still to come, but it grows from what’s already there. Part of the joy of writing comes in those bright epiphanies that occur as I begin to realize the true potential of the tale I’ve told.
Some books take longer than others to reach this point of revision. My current work in progress took a long damn time to get there. For a while, I feared it never would.
I expected the third book of the Children of Rost’aht tetralogy (Heir to Rost’aht) to be a challenge. The story takes place at the same time as Book Two (The Best Laid Plans), and I needed to make sure certain details lined up just so. News from elsewhere (events in Book Two) needed to reach the characters in Book Three with a degree of timing that made sense. I’ve never tried such a thing before, and although the concept sounds simple enough, it didn’t prove to be as straightforward as I’d hoped. And that’s an understatement. My usual discovery writing approach to a first draft proved poorly suited to the task. It felt at times as if I were riding a bicycle over rough pavement, while always looking behind instead of ahead. Time after time I was drawn up short by the realization that something had been revealed that the current characters could not know, not at that point. Just as often, I sailed past something that they really should have been aware of, if their actions were to make any sense.
And then there were the external distractions of this past year, coming into focus while I worked on Book Three. As mentioned in the previous entry, I was puzzled by a dramatic fall-off in book sales, infuriated by the theft of several titles by trainers of chatbots, and dismayed by a stark reminder that eBook piracy is alive and well. I was riding downhill quickly, looking backward, and hitting pot holes. It’s impossible to maintain balance riding a bicycle that way. It doesn’t work any better while writing a story. Needless to say, the discovery writing phase of this book did not proceed smoothly, or without a few spectacular crashes.
It took months longer than usual, and what I finally ended up with was a mess. At some point, the usual pattern of discovery simply unraveled, and some of the “chapters” I wrote were wildly out of sequence. I did not always think of necessary plot elements until well after I passed the point where they were needed. So I just wrote what occurred, when it occurred, with the vague notion of moving bits around to correct placement, after the fact. But my first attempt to do so dissolved into chaos.
At a writer’s group meeting, a few months after the time I would normally have sent the manuscript off to the editor, I shared my tale of woe. In the conversation that followed, someone made the point that an outline at the start might have kept any of this from happening. A moot point. Any time I’ve tried to do an outline for a work of fiction, it’s automatically become discovery writing, with a fully written first draft as the result. And I did, in fact, have a draft, albeit a really bad one. But what at first seemed an entirely pointless observation turned into a true lightbulb moment. Why not turn the mess into a collection of very short chapter summaries and reorganize them into a sort of outline, after the fact? Surely it would be easier that way to see the big picture, rather than taking on the entire thing at once? This idea emerged from the group conversation, and the consensus was that it might be worth a try.
I agreed and went forward with it. Each of the so-called chapters I’d devised was given a number and a short summary. I then spent a lot of time making copy and paste maneuvers, guided by those summaries, and eventually had everything lined up properly. Heir to Rost’aht existed – sort of – its plot ordered, and missing parts glaringly obvious. And then I did the same thing for Book Two, realizing only then that an after-the-fact outline of that book would provide a useful guide to the necessary order of events. No surprise – I found mistakes in the development of Book Three’s plot through this second outline.
It all worked out in the end. I was able to take the existing material and relocate or delete anything that rendered the dual timelines contradictory. I was also able to plug some gaping plot holes. In a sense, I rewrote the rough draft into a first draft, one finally suitable for revisions. Now I can dig in to the part that makes it all worthwhile, the revisions that put life and color into the plot and characters I’ve created. For me, this truly is not the greatest chore involved with writing fiction. What I did to reach this point was the hard part, and especially so in this unusual case.
There’s a moral to this story, best expressed by nature writer Ann Haymond Zwinger, in her book The Nearsighted Naturalist: “If anybody says writing is an easy task, don’t ever buy a used car from him.”
Much of my activity in the social media has to do with writing and reading. Networking with other writers counts as one of the better reasons I have for spending time online. It’s good for the morale to be in touch with people who understand this strange habit I have, without requiring any explanations. The same goes for reading, especially when discussing a specific genre, such as science fiction. These interactions, which include numerous reviews and recommendations, account for nearly all my fiction book-buying decisions these days. The discussions that lead to book selections on my part are often wide-ranging and diverse, and – of course – loaded with opinions. Also, sometimes, complaints.
A specific complaint I see expressed regularly has to do with trilogies or longer series. This complaint reads the same way whether the author is as popular as Frank Herbert or N.K. Jemisin, or a relative unknown such as yours truly. A reader will mention reading a Book One, and, inevitably, someone responds by allowing that they, too, like the first book, and sometimes also the second. But after that it was all downhill. The author, they believe, ran out of ideas or – worse – simply got lazy (speculations vary). Such commentary leaps out at me because, as often as not, I’ve read the series or trilogy in question, and experienced no such thing. Different people will react to books in different ways and the definition of “quality” is, of course, flexible and highly subjective. And a series really can run out of steam if the writer extends the story too far, striving for quantity at the expense of consistent quality. (It is, by the way, very difficult to know when to quit.) All of that being true, I rarely see such a comment made about books by an author whose body of work consists of stand-alone novels or short stories. Readers might find that body of writing inconsistent, one book to the next, but it isn’t normally seen in the same way as a steady decline over a series of connected novels. (“Their first book was great, the next only so-so, but that latest release deserves an award!”) Something else happens when it’s a series of books, meant to be read in order.
Curious about this difference in perception, I’ve made it a habit to ask people about reading habits when they make the observation that a series started out with great promise, but lost momentum somewhere along the way. The key questions turned out to be “How long did it take you to read that series?” and “Did you read it straight through?” I haven’t exactly made a systematic study of the matter, but the responses I’ve received have led me to the following observation: there seems to be a correlation between the perception of a series faltering and the habit of binge reading.
Binge reading simply means that you start with book one and don’t stop until you’ve read through the entire series. (People also do this with movies and TV shows.) You’re all in, fully committed. The series is treated, essentially, as one really big book.
Binge reading is a habit I never acquired. In younger days, books came to me one or two at a time. They were all stand-alones until I discovered Tolkien, and even then there was a considerable lag in reading The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. The same thing happened when I read Frank Herbert’s Dune. The other books in that series were out there (it was still a trilogy at that time), but acquiring copies took some time – and I read or reread other books in the meantime. I believe this is how I developed a good memory for books I’ve read, so reading the next book months or a year later has never been a problem. And these days I’m in the habit of having a mix of reads ongoing at any one time, fiction and nonfiction. It could be said that I’m the opposite of a binge reader.
Other readers take a different approach: they buy the whole series at once, or if necessary wait until the entire thing is complete, and then plunge in. (The latter makes a certain amount of sense, since now and then a writer gets partway into a series and just drops it.) Those for whom binge reading is the norm make a serious commitment to reading a series. For most, this complete immersion is a big part of the fun. And in truth, most of the binge readers I’ve met end up quite satisfied by their experiences. But not all of them.
In the conversations I’ve had with fellow readers, more often than now it’s the bingers who claim that the writer jumped the shark, and should have quit while they were ahead. But was it the writing or the reader who ran out of momentum? While it’s certainly possible for a writer fade in the stretch (that sort of thing can happen to anybody, in the course of any endeavor), I find myself wondering if the problem is more likely due to reader fatigue, than any failing on the part of the writer.
For many readers, bingeing through a series is part of the fun. Not everyone who binge-reads runs afoul of this phenomenon, or experiences it with every series they read. But some do, and I’ve even heard from readers who absolutely will not read a series, ever, because they all “lose it” before the end. They are often quite vocal in their dislike, and are critical of writers who write a multi-book series – as if this were some sort of personal failing.
So – some binge and some do not. To my mind, bingeing carries the risk of reader fatigue, and having examined my own habits in this light, binge reading will never, for me, become a habit. All a matter of perception on my part, a matter of calling it the way I see it. How does it work for you?
A friend and fellow writer recently worked with a writing coach, seeking to restart a writing career that had stalled out. The result was a renewed enthusiasm for the craft, and it seems my friend is on the path to regaining the motivation to write. I didn’t catch all the details of these coaching sessions, when the tale was told, but one aspect in particular caught my attention. It seems this writer has an intuitive approach to writing that runs counter to a few commonly expressed ideas regarding the writing process. Advice about how it “should” be done had been internalized regardless of the conflict it created with my friend’s approach, and the self-doubt that developed as a result created a serious case of writer’s block.
The answer for this person, brought to light by the coaching, turned out to be giving themselves permission to write in a way that came naturally, regardless of outside advice. To accept that what some writers consider a bad habit might actually be the best thing for another writer to do. And that trying to shoehorn your process into the expectations raised by others could be the worst.
It’s all too easy to fall into the expert advice trap, especially if you’re new to writing. Most of us learn, as our very first lesson, that writing isn’t as easy as just putting down words in the right order. Writing creatively takes practice, and for most of us we’re talking a lot of practice over a significant amount of time. It’s natural enough, then, to seek advice when you’re new to the craft of writing, and it makes perfect sense to try out the advice that’s been received. But one piece of advice I always give to new writers is this: these are not rules being set out for you to follow. The only things other writers can provide, however well-known or successful they may be, are guidelines based on personal experience. It pays to listen to how others approach the craft, and you may well learn something that helps you move forward. But…
Guidelines, not rules. Always remember this concept. If you’ve worked out a process that’s getting the words down, but something you do doesn’t fit the standard advice floating around out there, don’t assume you’re doing something wrong. Be willing to try new ideas out, but give yourself permission to dismiss them if they don’t help get you into the groove.
Three examples from my own experience should serve to illustrate what I mean. The first has to do with word counts. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve been told that worrying about word counts as a measure of productivity or progress is a bad habit. That you shouldn’t become “hung up” on word counts, for fear of being discouraged by seemingly inadequate numbers. I can see where that fear might interfere with the creative process, should consistently low counts undermine motivation and morale. For some writers that surely is a potential problem, and a reason not to keep a count. For me, though, it works the other way around, and I’ve been using word counts for as long as I’ve been writing. Word count records, especially when putting down a first draft, keep me honest about my work ethic; keep me from lapsing into lazy habits. And on “bad” days I can look at even a modest word count and be assured that I at least made some progress. It’s a tool I know and use well. It might work this way for you. It might not.
Another thing that I’ve been told repeatedly is that it’s a bad habit is to have multiple works in progress. The advice here is that you absolutely should focus on one project, finish that one, and only then move on. For beginning writer this does make some sense. But we don’t stay beginners forever, and not all beginners work the same way. For me, with more years of experience behind me than I want to count, having more than one project moving forward greatly increases my productivity. If I just can’t get the current novel rolling today, I have a couple of things to work on that keep me writing. This gives the writing process itself momentum, regardless of which project sees its word count rise. In thirteen years I’ve released eighteen titles of various lengths. More than a few of them were written concurrently. If you have enough confidence and self-discipline, having a different project to switch to when something gets stuck can be beneficial. Unless your natural mode is one of laser focus on one thing at a time, all of the time, in which case that’s your process, and never mind what I do.
Writing nonstop without revising as you go is often highly touted (and by some big name authors) as the best way to write a book. Going back to change things before the draft is completed is seen as a risky habit that could slow down the development of the book. Or worse, keep you from ever finishing that book in the first place. Should you then plunge forward with a draft and never look back, just because they say so? Revise only when that first draft is done? For the most part, that’s what I do. But ideas sometimes come after the fact, and unless I go back and make changes – or at least insert notes regarding what the changes should be – I’ll be distracted by that stray idea for the rest of the first draft. No one I know writes well when distracted. So if going back and forth as needed gets the job done for you, feel free, no matter what someone else tells you. Subverting that natural tendency, on “expert” advice, could make you a less productive – and less happy – writer in the long run. Grant yourself a dispensation and revise whenever you feel the need.
Always be willing to try other ways to write. Some of what you learn might prove useful – you just never know. Or that well-intended advice could be the worst thing in the world for you, as a writer. On the chance that the latter scenario arises, always reserve for yourself the permission to say no, and do what really works for you.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve recently climbed a long, steep mountain trail. At the top of that mountain you gazed out over the world below, filled with a deep sense of satisfaction that made your physical weariness worth all the trouble you experienced on the way up. You set yourself the goal to make this difficult climb, and it proved even more of a challenge than you ever imagined it could be. But you kept climbing until you were at the top. You’ve accomplished a thing not everyone can do. You climbed that mountain.
The next day, at a party, you meet a person proudly showing off pictures of that same lofty view. This person impresses the crowd by reciting numbers regarding the steepness of the slopes, the altitude of the summit, and what the view from the top revealed of the world. But this person didn’t hike the trail, much less scramble up and over the steeper, rockier portions. They bought a ticket from a helicopter tour company that flew them to the summit, and then back down. You’re prepared to shrug it off – to each their own, right? But then that person claims to be a mountaineer, just like you. When you point out the obvious difference between a mountain climber and a tourist buying a helicopter ticket, the reaction is filled with lame rationalizations as this person tries to make their accomplishment somehow equal to yours. What difference does it make, they eventually insist, how you reach the summit? You got there; that’s all that matters, right? The work and effort you put into your experience of the actual climb means nothing to this pretender.
As if this isn’t bad enough, there are people at the party who actually agree with this point of view. To them, you aren’t a successful mountain climber. You’re a braggart.
Sounds outrageous, doesn’t it? Welcome to the world of the honest storyteller in the age of so-called “AI.”
The last time I wrote on this subject, I was asked what exactly I had against the idea of artificial intelligence. The truth is, I have nothing against artificial intelligence at all. I think meeting and interacting with such a being would be a fascinating experience. But so far as I know, the event called the “singularity” by researchers in that field has not yet occurred. Or if it has, the entity that evolved from it is quite wisely maintaining a low profile. Consider the popular assumptions regarding the likely results of such an emergence. Would you be in a hurry to announce your existence to a world that assumes you mean to destroy it? What we have, instead, are sophisticated machine-learning systems capable of manipulating and connecting data in extraordinary ways, and presenting the results (in certain applications) in a manner that effectively mimics human communication. These systems have enormous potential to aid such endeavors as science and medicine, and I surely have no qualms about their application in such fields.
But some of the systems popularly termed “AI,” and being marketed for public consumption, are quite another matter. My anger (let’s call it what it is) is directed at the misapplication of these tools. Generative AI systems are being used by writer-wannabes to avoid the considerable work and time involved with learning to write readable fiction.
I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve met, in the twelve years since I first self-published, who decided to give writing a try – and then expressed utter dismay at how hard it is. Reading a book gives the false impression that it’s all just a matter of laying out the words, and spelling them correctly. That the book was the result of a year or more (often much more) of dedicated effort, during which it existed as a rough draft that would be no fun at all to read, is invisible to the average reader. It isn’t until you decide to start following such a path yourself that you realize, and perhaps appreciate, how steep the mountain before you really is. You soon doubt both your ability to stay on that trail, and your sanity for even trying in the first place.
Many people, in this age of direct-to-readers self-publishing, seem to find the need to climb that mountain offensive. Publishing a book is so automated it takes very little effort to do so. It just seems wrong that the writing part should be such a painful and frustrating slog. This is especially true of those who have been misled into thinking of writing as a sort of side-hustle that can yield easy money. Surely we’re entitled to an easier way to get this thing done?
There is no easier way. All truly creative endeavors are the result of melding human knowledge, experience, and imagination into a form that can be shared with others through a combination of hard-won talent and willingness to work toward the desired result. Writing is no exception to this truth. But this is not what you get when you tell a so-called AI that you want a plot or story start that involves certain elements of your preferred genre of fiction. The machine will consider all the fiction it has scanned (sometimes illegally) that meets the user’s parameters, and cobble together something that fits the general formula for that genre. It really doesn’t matter how you use what it gives you. There was no creative effort from you to get this started, no exercise of the imagination that draws on a lifetime of experience, or a skilled effort applied after years of practice. What you’ve been given, with little or no effort on your part, are words and patterns absorbed by an algorithm, from stories someone else actually wrote once upon a time.
By the way, I am well aware of the ironic roll self-publishing plays here. Would we be having this discussion if publishing your own book could only be done the old-school way, requiring a publishing company and a contract? I don’t believe so. Irony, indeed, that the very thing that opened the door for my own work – and is still considered by many publishers to be cheating – has made so-called AI a viable product for those who want to have been a writer.
I write these words with a certain sense of resignation. I’m not so naïve as to believe my expressions of ire will stop people from cheating with AI, whether in the arts or in other fields. I doubt there’s ever been, in all of history, an innovation that wasn’t misapplied in some way. This one just happens to hit close to home. But I am what I am, a storyteller and a writer, things I can’t live without. Like our imaginary mountain climber, planning his next conquest in spite of what he experienced at that party, all I can do is to go on writing the tales I have to tell. I will always do so to the best of my ability, without input from machine-learning algorithms. That’s a promise. Every project I’ve taken on has challenged me, and never in the same way twice, but having climbed that mountain a dozen times now, I know I don’t need to cheat.
No, this writing thing isn’t easy, not at all. But it’s always worth it.
There is a meme commonly posted in the social media, on Facebook in particular, meant to offer support or comfort to those facing life’s slings and arrows. The messages range from heartfelt to sickly saccharine, but the intentions are always good. The nature of the message varies with the problem being addressed, but they always start with the phrase, “I don’t know who needs to hear this…”
It’s easy to flip past such posts and scroll on. To be honest, I usually do – they are so frequently repeated that they become part of the landscape, in a manner of speaking. And I can see how some people might be tempted to give these harmless messages of general support a cynical roll of the eyes. But if you’re dealing with one of the topics discussed in this sort of post, you might have a different reaction. Those posts dealing with depression usually get a nod from me. It does sometimes help to know you aren’t the only one in the world with one foot on that slippery slope.
Which is why I’m writing this entry for my weblog. A form of depression has been a fact of my life for as long as I can remember, although I was in my early thirties before I knew for certain the nature of the beast. That’s when I became acquainted with a condition known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. (An apt acronym if ever there was one.)
Every year, as the Autumnal Equinox approaches, I unpack a bright light – technically called a “light box” – and rearrange my morning schedule to accommodate Bright Light Therapy (BLT, and yes, that one’s been done to death, believe me.) I do this to counteract, to some degree at least, the effect of ever shorter days on my mood and motivation levels. The BLT sessions last three quarters of an hour, and I pass the time reading and sipping the day’s first cup of coffee. As treatments for mental health problems go, it’s not bad. It certainly beats the Valium they stuffed into my late father when he hit rock bottom, many years ago. And it’s quite effective. Most years, I am largely untroubled by serious symptoms, which in my case manifest as anxiety and depression.
Most years. But not this year. Autumn of 2023 bushwhacked me.
SAD varies in severity from year to year, and I can’t always correlate severity with an external trigger. Oh, when I was working the day job (whichever one you want to point to over the last forty years or so), stress could certainly reduce the effectiveness of BLT. But I live the writing life these days, something long desired. While life has its ups and downs, this form of semi-retirement hasn’t actually challenged me in a big way. And yet a few weeks after the days began to shorten noticeably this year, and I’d settled into the seasonal serving of BLT (couldn’t resist after all), an all-too-familiar sense of anxiety struck me. It came on strong, taking me by surprise, and derailing mood and motivation. There was nothing really to be anxious about, but there it was, that deeply unsettling sense of something being wrong, and threatening to get worse. It was especially noticeable as the afternoons wore on and the shadows stretched across the world. (Cloudy weather can seriously aggravate my condition, especially when light levels fluctuate.) That anxiety becomes a sense of impending doom that has no rational justification, and yet cannot be denied. At its worst, it’s nothing less than debilitating. Motivation dies as I find myself just hunkering down and hanging on, waiting for the awkward episode to pass. The length of time it persists varies from day to day. In the morning, with BLT, hot coffee, and a world gradually brightening outside, I can catch my breath. I can do things. But then the afternoon comes, as it always does. Sunset can be an awkward time of day, and has been for a few weeks.
The current episode of deep anxiety seems to be settling down (not lowering my guard just yet), but cloudy days and sunsets are still not my favorite things right now. I’ll probably never really know what upset the balance this year.
In a conversation with an online acquaintance, I was reminded that I’m not alone in coping with this disorder. As I said before, for some reason knowing this does help. Which is why I don’t roll my eyes at certain memes when they pop up in the newsfeed. Many of us dealing with SAD have sympathetic family and friends. I’m blessed with a wife who understands what’s happening, and why, and knows better than to take at face value some of the things I say when I’m down. She was there when I figured out what was wrong with me – it was a joint discovery. But not everyone is so fortunate; not everyone has the support they need. And so I’m writing for whoever needs to hear this.
If winter gets you down it might not be, as some would say, mere holiday stress or – worse – giving in to a personal failing. You may be dealing with a very real condition, one amenable to treatment. While I’ve managed without seeking much professional help, I know people who have needed a therapist’s assistance to cope. Either way, you can control this condition and keep your head above the high water mark until spring. Ignore anyone who tells you this is pop psychology. It’s a legitimate diagnosis, as you’ll learn officially if you do need to seek professional help.
How can you tell if you need help? Only you can decide, but if there’s even a tiny bit of doubt, talk to a doctor. There are very few physicians out there, these days, who think this is some sort of popular self-diagnosis. A timely referral to a mental health care professional might make all the difference.
In the meantime, if you suspect you have this seasonal problem – and many people do to one degree or another – consider the following up-to-date resource before making any decisions.
Defeating SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder): A Guide to Health and Happiness Through All Seasons by Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
You should be able to obtain a copy from just about any local bookstore. You can also get it by following the links below, if you prefer.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
This book covers symptoms and treatments, discusses the latest research on the condition and its variable nature, and provides guidance on coping with SAD, including the selection of lamps for the application of BLT.
The anxiety and depression caused by short days in autumn and winter are not figments of your imagination. The condition is real, and can cause all manner of problems as it interferes with day-to-day living. But you aren’t alone in this, and SAD can be treated, and treated effectively. Just thought I’d throw this out there, for anyone who needs to hear.
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
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.
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.
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’anga became 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 