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Reflections on Writing |
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Newer additions to this page are added on top.
First up, here's C, which is short for his actual name, which he apparently no longer wishes to be known by.
On the whole "overusing a fantasy world" thing, I can see why some people like it, but it tends to bother me. The thing is, I may be giving authors (and fans) too much credit. I think that if the author came up with one great world and wrote half a dozen good novels in it, they should be able to do another one. Or at least not do more novels in their existing world that are just bad sequels; stories that aren't compelling and that sell only because they were part of a world that fans already liked. Matrix 2 and 3, perhaps? It's hard to do, but what's wrong with just ending a series once you run out of gas? Be happy with your achievement and leave it perfect and complete. Don't start up five years later with the son of some beloved main character, off in some distant land, when every reader knows exactly what he'll grow up to be; a faint shadow of daddy, doing watered down variations of the stuff dad did, in much more interesting fashion, 4 or 5 books ago. Which is the sort of thing I think about when I think of the other stories I could tell in my created and still-evolving fantasy world. Once the interesting, book 1-3 characters are dead/gone/retired. *cough* Also, don't the fans of the old series who keep buying newer books bear some of the blame? The author probably gets tons of mail from people who want more (Hell, I got tons of mail from people who wanted more of those silly holiday d2 stories, so imagine what best selling authors deal with?) of the same stuff, and the author has many more ideas about their series in their heads, and they think, "Hell, these people want it." and off they go. Or they write one great series that everyone likes, try to do other stuff that sells 1/10th as well... what do you expect them to do?
Here's another mail on fantasy and writing, from Richard.
I'd say yeah, it's easy to fear new ideas and do more of what you wanted to do. I'm not sure Episode 1 and 2 are good examples though, since mostly what fans dislike are the changes, and stupid things. Jar Jar, for instance. R2D2 suddenly sprouting flying rockets once and only once, when they were convenient, and never using them again. All of the Jedi being so boring and dopey and bad-haired. True, Darth Maul was a hit, despite looking like a pro-wrestling member of the Insane Clown Posse and being sort of a douche bag, but most everything else new is disliked. Of course the most obvious reason for that is that all the new stuff sucks. Princess Amidala and her kabuki make up, whining pouting daredevil teen Vader, a wholly-unnecessary million clone army subplot, etc. He tried new things, rather than just making Amidala like version 0.1 Leia, Anikin like younger Luke, sticking in some Han Solo-like rough neck pilot with a large, comic relief sidekick, etc. Yet at the same time, he's basically failed with Episode 1 and 2 for the same reason the 4th and 5th books in a good trilogy so often suck. Same world, similar settings and events, but all the magic is gone and everyone just wonders why it's so lame the second time around. And Lucas, like so many fantasy authors, just doesn't know. They're trying, trying awful hard, but they can't come up with a plot half as strong as the original one, or characters half as interesting.
Rather than work on the articles, I spent most of my free time over the weekend writing on the novel. Since that's what I'm always saying I should be doing, I suppose it's a good thing that I did, eh? I didn't write anything new, just upgraded old stuff, but it had to be done and I feel pretty good about doing it. Well, that's not an entirely accurate statement, since it's all new, just not new in terms of plowing into the fun stuff in chapters 4 or 5. What I did was finish rewriting chapter one, and when I say that I don't mean that I was nibbling a bit here or there; snipping a few words or changing around a sentence. I mean that I rewrote it completely, using the earlier one for a rough outline, but typing 98% of the words completely new, with all changed sentence structure, flow, tempo, analogy, etc. You'll still recognize if the start of the novel, if you read the original version I posted on the D2 site last Halloween, since the basic events of the female thief in the Royal Cemetery, the encounter with the reanimating Necromancer, the battle to escape, etc are still there. It's all of the details that have been changed, including how the fight goes, what sort of knights they face in the Cemetery, how they escape from the city, and so on. I also removed everything that was derived directly from Diablo II, so all of the spells and special abilities are now different, and lots of the stuff is much cooler than what I had translated from the game, at least in my opinion. And that's just in Chapter One, which is the only portion of the novel that's at all like the game. The rest of the story, which no one has yet read any of, is entirely different, aside from some of the same character archetypes existing (sorceresses, necromancers, knights in armor, etc) and none of those are presented at all like they are in Diablo II. It's funny, since I'm spending so much effort changing things so they aren't like D2, and adding so much more stuff in that's got nothing to do with D2, but I'm sure that I've inadvertently put some things in that are basically identical to things other authors have had in their fantasy novels, or other sword/sorcery games have had, and once the novel(s) are published I'll hear from people saying that I copied some character or event from the Elfstones of Shannara, or Baldur's Gate, or some old fantasy film, and you just know the person pointing that out won't believe me when I tell her/him that I never played that game or saw that movie or read that book. It's not exactly the same thing, but something most every young, creative person faces is the "reinventing the wheel" dilemma. You (the creative person) have all these fresh ideas and think you're doing things no one else has ever imagined, and you want to do it all very different than all of your influences (Unless you work for some cheesy TV show or game company or movie studio and are employed in some soul sucking project that forces you to just rip off pre-existing successes.) did it. Yet while you're spending so much effort making up something new and presenting it in a new style, you're always going to be trampling all over older stuff that was just like yours; stuff you've never seen, and will never know about until you do your stuff, and people point out how it's just like _______. I still remember my clever "evil witch with mind-switching abilities" story line in my first completed novel, and how awesome I thought the concept of some magical person being able to project their mind into another's body, live there for several years, until eventually leaving, at which point the body's owner would return mentally, with no idea that several years had passed. And then I read Lovecraft's work, and saw that he'd put that exact concept into at least 3 of his longer short stories, 70 years before I ever thought of it. And yes, I'm sure he wrote those and then found out that some other author had done it decades or centuries before he'd done it, and so on, and so on, and so on. There was an incompetent literary agent who I talked to and briefly sort of worked with back in the early 90s when I was first getting serious about writing for publication. I don't remember much that he said, and I rejected all of his concepts of commercial success (mostly since he thought my work was good enough to try to publish back then, and I knew it wasn't), but one thing he said to me has always stuck with me. He told me that I needed to slow down and relax and stop trying to reinvent the wheel with my writing. I didn't really know what he meant back then, but thinking back now I realize how hard I was working in every line and every paragraph. How much life and vitality and energy I was trying to put into every word, and how it was making my work overkill. I didn't need to put a vivid description into every other sentence, and I didn't need to make every scene of sex and violence almost painfully detailed. Just because I'd never seen another writer do it that way didn't mean I should do it that way. Mostly because there was a reason other writers didn't do it that way. Nothing sucks more than being told, when you're young, that you'll understand when you're older. I always rejected that instantly, thinking that if someone couldn't explain it to me in a way I could grasp it then the fault was either with their explanation, or that they had no point to begin with. And what sucks the most about that is how true you realize it is as you mature, and come to vividly understand things that you simply couldn't have a year, or two, or ten years earlier. Especially when you thought that process would stop once you were 15 and knew it all, and then 20 and knew it all, and then 25 and were past all of that juvenile cluelessness stuff. Guess what? You're never past it, and the smarter you think you are, the more you'll later realize you were wrong about, simply because you'll learn so much more over time. Well, that turned unexpectedly philosophical.
Here's a mail from Paulis that came in a couple of days before Xmas, but with my vacation and other topics I've never gotten around to replying to him yet, or posting about it here. Since I like the topic of his mail, I'll quote it and go from there:
It's hard to say how to go about writing, since I think most writers have their own individual style. For me it's effortless to write non-fiction (AKA blog), at least 99% of the time, since I've always got ideas for it. Admittedly they aren't great ideas, and most of the time I'm just talking about some news item, but for me that's quick and easy and satisfying, and with no end in sight to the stupid sort of news that I tend to focus on, it looks like I've got infinite content available. When I'm trying to write a more coherent piece of non-fiction, such as an actual article or report, I spend more time thinking it out and spend more time editing and improving it once it's written, but again it's quite easy overall; I just put more effort into making it cohesive and flowing, or at least go back and fix errors and add in things I forgot the first time but caught during proofing. However that's non fiction, and not really what Paulis was asking about. And as you probably know if you've ever tried to write it, fiction is an entirely different beast. Most every story for me is different, but quite often I'm motivated by a deadline. Take my series of Diablo-based short stories, most of them written the night before the various holidays that the stories related to. I'd have the ideas in mind for a while, in most of the cases, but it wasn't until I needed to have them done in 12 or 24 hours that I really got the urge to start writing. Short stories that are done just for myself (or to be posted here at some point) are different. Since I don't have a deadline to push me, I need to be more motivated to write them, and need to have better ideas for them going in, or I'm probably not going to bother trying. It's not that I want to write but stop myself because I realize I don't have a good enough idea; it's more like I just keep kicking a given idea around in my head until it either vanishes or becomes so well-polished that I can't resist writing it. And when I start writing I know it so well that it's very easy and quick to commit to the page (screen). At least that's how it should go, in a perfect world. Quite often it's more like I get a sudden urge to write and have some vague, tiny idea for a story, and as I start writing it I get more and more ideas for it and the story takes shape in my head as I'm typing it out. This often leads to the first few pages being very rough, and requiring substantial change or even rewriting to match up with the rest of the tale. This sounds like something similar to Paulis' problem; he gets an idea and starts writing and by the time he's done a few pages on the first idea he's got three others, two of which would force him to change around the first thing he wrote. And it goes on from there, with damn near every new idea seeming better than the earlier ones, and the best of them requiring major changes in much of what's gone before. The way to avoid this is pretty simple, and it's to be organized. Make up a detailed outline and don't deviate from it in any major fashion, unless you simply have to change something for the better. And if that happens, force yourself to go back to the initial outline and make changes in it, making sure everything you're tinkering with at this point will make sense and tie in later. The problem with this technique is that making outlines sucks, and if you're anything like me you get your best ideas for a story while you're writing it. I could stick to the outlines, but the story would be a lot weaker. Constantly thinking of new stuff and adding it in is great for the creativity of the story in the long run, but it makes writing it a pain in the ass, since you're constantly adding and changing things, and if you keep doing that into the middle of the story/novel, it's going to be a bigger and bigger pain to go back and update 50 things through the course of the several hundred pages. My first novel, Miss Pretty Lies, underwent massive late term changes, including the abandonment of the entire first chapter. This shortened the novel from 12 to 11 chapters, and required me to delete 30 or 40 pages, but also work in at least a dozen important concept and introductions from the deleted chapter 1 to chapter 3. (The early odds were one train of action, the evens were another, before the two threads merged by around chapter 9. Anyway, as Paulis says, the way you get better at writing is by writing. Reading helps as well, especially if you can be analytical and see how the writer does it, but basically you have to write to write, and to improve at it. Compare the early efforts on this blog to the current stuff and you can see that I've certainly improved. (Today's disorganized and chaotic blog, one in which parts of it were actually written while asleep is, of course, an exception.)
I'll put together some sort of "how to write" page at some point, in the writing section, and hopefully by then I'll have something closer to actual advice.
His last paragraph was one I wasn't going to include, for the auto-fellatio reason listed above. However I liked his comment. I do want constructive criticism more than compliments, and that's why I derived more benefit from the two or three negative comments about my D2 Halloween story than I did from the 50 or 60 positive comments/emails on it. I'll add some reader mails to the story, perhaps tonight, but the vast majority look like this, and what good does it do anyone else to read them?
And sure, it's nice to hear that people liked my work, but at the same time I'd like some point by point criticism or argument mixed in with the ego-boosting compliments. As for what James said about not being a writer... that's not a requirement to give feedback. I don't need expert commentary on what worked and what didn't and what could have been better. I mean I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm not writing to please writers, I'm writing to please readers, real people who will someday (with any luck) pay actual money for my work. People who like King or Barker or Rice or Jordan or Martin or even Koontz, and would like another writer along the dark fantasy/horror lines to read and enjoy. I'm not going to take everything I get in email to heart, but I'm always interested in what people have to say, even if they're just nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking. *cough* If a reader likes something overall, I'd like to know what parts they liked best, or what parts they thought were a bit slow, or which characters they didn't care for so much, and so on. I'm not going to look at comments and say, "This douche-bag doesn't know enough about writing to critique my work!" I'll probably say that when I'm published and some sniffy artsy critic is dismissing me for being a mere horror/fantasy writer, but I'm certainly not going to do it with honest feedback from real readers. And I'm not aiming this so much at James personally, but just saying it since I mean it, and since I think perhaps a lot of readers feel the way James does. I'm no movie maker or professional critic, but I'm certainly not shy about saying what I liked and what I didn't in a film. Not that my advice ever gets back to the film makers and not that they'd care if it did, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here.
An aspiring writer (as if I'm not one myself?) mailed me a couple of days ago asking about quality authors I'd recommend, and I really couldn't give him too many. I read a lot of series by a lot of authors, but very very seldom do I read anything that I think is high quality. A book can be quite enjoyable to read while still essentially being crap, in terms of quality. And that goes for music and movies and TV and everything else as well. Look at what sells the most copies; is it ever really any good? Is anyone going to argue that Shania Twain or Britney or other mega-platinum artists are the best quality music? Critics certainly don't think so, but then the general public are not critics, and seldom care for their advice. Critics are sniffy and holier than thou and have superior attitudes and think they know more about evaluating the quality of a work than the clueless general public. I am a critic. An unusual one, certainly, since I think I'm a creative creator myself, but I also enjoy analyzing and critiquing the work of others, and I think I have a decent eye and objectivity for it. Of course so does everyone else, and we're all above average drivers as well. But my criticism is unusual in that I know what I like is usually crap, but that doesn't stop me from liking it. Sometimes I think an action movie or genre novel or little-known CD is under-appreciated and deserving of more critical praise than it has received, but generally I think it's crap, I know exactly why it's crap, but I still enjoy it. The interesting thing is that as an aspiring writer and a critic, I feel I can learn just as much from bad writing as good writing. And I think that's true for everyone else as well, if they (you) can just take the proper attitude or outlook on a subject. Truly awful writing probably won't teach you much, unless it's popular, and then it teaches you just how horrible the taste of your average consumer is. Plus you can observe what needs (in the public) that awful novel is fulfilling, and try to figure out why they are buying it. And then apply this knowledge to your own writing by trying to fulfill that need while writing your non-crap story. This ties in to my lack of great writer recommendations to the aspiring writer emailer in that I read a lot of books, and most of them are crap, but that doesn't mean it's worthless to read and learn from them. In fact you can often learn more, and gain inspiration from the crap. When you read something truly brilliant, you are sort of humbled and in awe. You aspire to such heights in your own work, but at the same time you try to see just what exactly the author did to make it so good, and quite often you can't tell. Or it's just a general level of excellence throughout. Great characters, plot, dialogue, writing quality, original ideas, etc. You get a sort of, "Christ, I can't match that!" despair. This is, needless to say, the wrong way to look at it. Take it as inspiration, try to see what the author did to make it such a brilliant work, and strive to improve your own work. At the same time when you read something that's crap, but popular crap, you can probably see what the author did that made it popular (this is most discouraging when the work is one of a long string of mediocrities that are selling purely on the author's name based on past work that was better) and see how you could approximate or exceed their technique in your own work. So I guess that my writing and reading advice is to read what you like, lots of books that are similar to what you want to write, and try to emulate the penthouse, and surpass the outhouse. The last 4 or 5 Stephen King novels I've read have all been quite mediocre, but they are still pretty good novels. How can they be good, and sell a ton, and keep his fans interested, when they aren't really any good? Well I kind of addressed that a couple of weeks ago in my From a Buick 8 review, but in a nutshell they are interesting stories, just much less (story, character, action, ideas, etc) than his earlier work, which was what made him such a popular writer. I think that an unknown could probably get published today submitting From a Buick 8, or Rose Madder, or Bag of Bones, or Dreamcatcher, but they certainly wouldn't sell a fraction of the copies they do by King, and wouldn't build the new author any major fanbase in the process, since they just aren't very good novels. Nothing really sets them apart from any of hundreds of other semi-horror stories. And yes, I think I can do better. My point with this, if I have one, is that aspiring to write brilliantly is great, but it's not necessarily commercial. Aspiring to write brilliantly with a story people like and interesting characters and everything else is commercial and will garner you fame and fortune. And that's common sense, but it gets hard to see at times when you are just sitting home alone writing away on your PC and dreaming of a better world. *sigh* Oh wait what, you thought I was talking about myself there? No no, it's all advice for others. Don't be ridiculous.
I've been working on my old novel all evening and morning, reading the chapters for the first time in something like six years, and time got away from me. Also I wanted to go it. I'm up to chapter 10 and it's gotten a lot better than it was yesterday when I was just through chapter 4 or 5. The start is really the worst part, though there are pacing issues in the middle/late chapters as well. This is all discussed in yesterday's essay portion, so read that if you didn't visit on the weekend, and this will make more sense. Anyway, it's not as bad as I feared, though it does need work to be publishable. I might even be willing to give it that work. Plus Malaya is reading it and likes it. Well, likes it enough to keep reading it, anyway, and if she made it through chapters 1-3 and was still with it, she'll really like the rest. My challenge in rewriting it, if I indeed decide to bother with that, will be to pep up the initial chapters, which will be a lot of work, and then decide what to do to accelerate the pace of things in later chapters. I also have to decide what's going on with the sex. There is a ton of sex, which isn't a problem, but I think there is too much, and it's too well-described. I don't get the feeling any of it really works as porno, since it's not erotic or sensual. It's much more mechanical and manipulative. Intentionally that way, and that's how it should be for the story, but I think there is so much of it that it loses effect/importance after a while. Anyway, if I get to the point where I think it's close to publishable, I'll ask if anyone reading this wants to give it a look, with the condition that if you do you have to give me some honest feedback that I can use to improve it. More opinions on it can't hurt. It is a real novel at this point though, probably 400+ pages, with characters and a plot and all that sorta stuff. Better than some of the horror crap I've read, and it would be classfied as horror, though it's not really. I mean there's nothing especially scary in it, none of the " ghost and/or boogeyman leaps out of the closet when you're not expecting it" type stuff. More like some of the early Steven King action-heavy stories with some mental powers, but no magic or demons or ghosts. Firestarter or The Dead Zone or Carrie, perhaps. Not that it's in any way similar to any of those in plot or tone, but just to give you a very rough idea.
Largely spurred by my precious little honeydrop Malaya, I have been rooting through my older fictional writing the last couple of days, and for some reason have at last begun resurrecting my one completed novel, Miss Pretty Lies. It's not as bad as I feared, but it would be a lot of work to make it viable today. It's 12 or 13 chapters (the ending got sort of fuzzy and I haven't read it since I last edited it, in about 1995) and would be probably 400 pages or so in paperback form. Whether it will actually ever be in paperback form is unknown. It would require a lot of work to get the first chapter up to snuff though, as in a near total rewrite. Malaya likes it through 4 chapters though, and says it's reasonable quality, though she likes my current writing more. But she does agree that chapter one is a mess, after about the first two pages. Lately I've been thinking what I'm doing with my "career" such as it is. My initial idea with this site was to get a bunch of my old short stories online, and also do various humorous writing and a short daily update (the short part went away pretty early on). The site would get read by people, someone would read the short stories, think they were oh-so great, see that I'd done some longer stuff, they would be an agent or editor or would know someone who was, and magically I would get an offer to write a novel for $$. That may yet happen, but it's not happened yet, and since I know from the site logs that the fiction section is one of the least-read parts of the site, it seems like a pretty hopeless hope. Not to mention the fact that this site has been up over a year and to date I have dusted off and HTML'ed and archived exactly one (1) of my 40 or 50 old short stories. That might be a sign that I'm not exactly killing myself on the fiction front. However fiction is what I enjoy writing the most (I think) and it's where I see the best potential for some actual $$ for my toil. I don't see the non-fiction stuff on this site ever earning me any money (well, that's not entirely true) or leading directly to any income, or at least never enough to live on. Much less enough to make me rich rich rich, as I vaguely dream of being. So lately I've been re-evaluating my priorities, and thinking that rather than clinging to vague hopes of the non-fiction stuff here somehow leading me to fictional riches, I should flip that around. And work on the fiction, and try to get it published in the real world (something that I have a lot better idea how to go about doing than I do making money from writing oh... a syndicated humor column) and if that's a huge success all is well. If it's a mild success then that would probably help me get a foot in the door towards doing something more with the non-fiction, in terms of income-generation from it. In either unlikely scenario, my theory is that my main income would be from fiction, so I might as well get to work on it. Even if some agent/editor appeared Monday and wrote to say how much he/she loved my work and was interested in evaluating some novel-length fiction for publication I would say... let me get back to you as soon as I come up with some great idea and then write it. Bit like a beautiful woman asking you to make love to her, and then you remember that you don't actually have a penis, but have always meant to grow one just in case it was ever required. And you'll get right to that, if she'll just wait a moment. Anyway, this is a long and roundabout depiction of my recent thought processes, which have belated arrived at what should have been obvious to me about 5 years ago. The problem is that I don't have any clever idea for a new novel, other than some vague ideas for the types of characters I'd put into it, and a desire to write it. So I'm going to be doing more of my old fiction stories, hoping to put up a few every week, and possibly Miss Pretty Lies, though I should really work it into a semi-passable form and work on publication of it while I write something new and brilliant. I'm not sure if this spells doom for the D2 novel. I hope not, since I really want to write that and it is all worked out in my head and would be great. I say that with no hesitation or modesty, the characters are very cool, well-formed in my mind, and almost the entire plot is as well. Writing it would be easy, at least relatively speaking. Time consuming and arduous, but it's sort of like a big dinosaur skeleton. I know it's in the ground, I just have to dig it out. The problem, as I've belabored in the past, is that it's entirely noncommercial and unpublishable, and while writing various fan fiction short stories is fun and useful on the D2 site and rewarding, working for months on a novel is a bit more of a project. And it's not as if I have endless free time and nothing else to work on. Or some great abundance of income that would allow me to (continue to endlessly) fritter my time away on huge projects of no potential monetary benefit. Since I don't have any novel novel ideas, I'm going to spend some hours every day for the immediate future rooting through my old short stories and HTML'ing them and posting them here. Both to add to the site, and also to get me thinking more about fiction, and hopefully stir up some interesting novel ideas in my brain. I might post some parts of Miss Pretty Lies as well, but as I said, the fiction stuff here is about the least viewed part of the site, so a dozen of you would be interested, and everyone else would ignore it and wish I'd update some more damn Band Names pages, FFS. And post some more crap about gay animals and porn stars while I'm at it. And anyway, I'm not sure that posting online, for free, a novel I want to get published in actual book form is a real bright business model. Not that anything else I do can be described in that fashion either. The main problem with Miss Pretty Lies is that it's just not that good. It's okay, probably publishable with some modifications, but I can't imagine that any other novel I write won't be better. If I write 20 novels, MPL will almost certainly be #20 in quality and popularity. And I don't really want to start off with my worst work, even if it's not really so bad, relatively speaking. And yes, I'm looking ridiculously-far down the road, when there are more pressing matters. And yes, I say this about every 6 months, to no obvious change/effect. It was part of my NYR this year also. *sigh*
I do think I need to cut back on the blogging a bit. Not the frequency, 'cause I know you need your daily fix, but the long essay about this or that every day is taking too much time, and I really need to get to spending several hours a day on fiction, if I have any hope of cranking out a publishable novel. I've been thinking lately about what non fiction thing I could write about. It's so much easier (for me) to write non fiction, and if all of my readers (including the tens of thousands on the d2 site) were polled (and you know how that hurts) I imagine a solid majority would say they prefer my non-fiction. Having never really given a thought to writing non-fiction professionally, I spent the last 8 or 9 years planning to be a novelist, even as I was writing less and less fiction. For a while I thought I'd work in website creation, since I enjoyed doing the D2 site stuff quite a bit, and did a few new sites freelance, mostly for small businesses in the San Diego area. But I found that work really tedious, which it was. It's fun to do a website (like this one, or the D2 site) when it's something I want to do, and can cover whatever information or topics I'm interested in. It's not any fun to work on a design for people who have no creative ideas and don't want a creative website, and who just give you long and boring wordpad documents about their business that they want you to convert into HTML. When the only creative aspect of a fifty page website is figuring out a way to construct the invisible table system so that their plain text and funky point sizes will look online just like they do in the wordpad document... it's pretty bleh. I also realized that to make any real money doing websites I would have to get some more training in technology. I can do plain html stuff fine, and I'm good at organizing and having things navigable, though I'm lazy about graphics. However I don't know any programming and couldn't do a complicated site with ordering options and sales and database it all, which is what business want and need. And since I hate programming and don't wanna learn it, and find doing other people's sites boring, that seems to pretty well limit my website employment aspirations. Though I would like to know enough scripting to set up parts of this site in a clever database, as I often say. As for writing, which I started talking about before I so rudely and typically interrupted myself, I had always assumed I would be a novelist. Which is not to say that I wouldn't do short stories also, since some ideas are good for a full length story, and others are good for 20 or 30 or 50 pages. But there's no money in short stories, unless you are famous already as a novelist, and can get them in a collection and have your built in audience buy them. It depends on the genre also; horror works very well in short stories, and many famous writers mostly used that form. Lovecraft and Poe, for instance. In fact there are probably more great horror short stories than novels, and most of the horror novels aren't really "horror". They're more like adventures with some supernatural elements. ALA Steven King or Dean Koontz. Fantasy and Sci-Fi work well in short stories also, though they are better known for novels. It's a lot easier to set a long tale in a different (fantasy or sci-fi) world than it is to write a long tail that's consistently scary/creepy, set in our or any world. However some genres don't work as short stories at all. You don't see a lot of mystery shorts, or 25 page legal thrillers. Perhaps needless to say, it's harder to think up a good idea for a 500 page book than one for a 30 page story. Novels tend to be constructed from one huge central theme, and then the other portions are created along the way, and added on to it. You need a main theme and plot and a few major characters and some ongoing conflict, and then as you move them along the track of the plot, side plots and minor characters and other such things occur as you write. The hard part is formulating the main characters, their personalities, and the main events in advance, and sticking to it. You really don't want to get to page 250 and realize the main character should have been much angrier, or much more cautious, and have to go back and tweak their behavior every fifth page, and rewrite several major scenes. And yes, I speak from experience. Anyway, that's off the topic also. Which was me potentially writing a non-fiction book. I almost look at present day stories w/o magic or supernatural as "non-fiction". Obviously the events in your typical John Grisham courtroom thriller didn't actually occur, but they could have. I mean there's no magic or demons or spirits of the dead, etc. That sort of novel has never appealed to me to read, which is why I don't really watch any TV shows. I can see normal people talk and walk around just by leaving my apartment (something I do as seldom as possible), why would I want to read about them for 400 pages, even if they are doing relatively interesting things? I've always enjoyed horror and fantasy and such more, since it's set in a different world with different rules, one generally a lot more vital and interesting than our real world. Should I be thinking about writing a novel or story of a type that I don't even read? Probably not, and yet it doesn't seem like it would be all that hard. As for a real non fiction novel, I know even less about that. It seems to me that since you can get non-fiction about virtually any subject you can imagine, for free, on the Internet, that non fiction must be hard to pull off. Plus they have to be about something, which means research, interviews, or something of that nature. If you can write with a compelling voice (which I people seem to think I can) and organize your thoughts and keep it moving and lively and interesting and perhaps even amusing, then readers will be pulled along and enjoy themselves. But no matter how cleverly you construct your book, it still has to have some sort of backbone of factual information. And I much prefer to just talk out of my ass and opinionate, as you've probably noticed by now. I'm excellent at reading a short article, and in the process of talking about it and quoting a bit from it, writing something twice as long a piece as the initial article was. I don't see how I could turn that into a 400 page book though, unless I can find a 200 page article to comment on?
So I posted my fifth column on the D2 site Wednesday, and then my humorous Christmas short story yesterday. Yes, the day after Xmas. What do you want, it's free. As I did over Thanksgiving, when I posted a story and my first column, I've just been sitting around the last couple of days reading emails about how great I am. This is literally true, sadly enough. I'm not just exaggerating, there really are numerous emails to that end. Well, no one has specifically said that I'm great, but they say that my work is. And that I'm a great writer and so funny and clever and the only reason they are still visiting the D2 site, etc. Lest I get too carried away, I can recall Garwulf posting reader feedback about his columns that said much the same thing, and I found almost all of his work to be well written but boring and generally pedantic. As I've been saying in my column feedback, there is really no accounting for taste. That being said, how should I feel about emails saying how clever I am? I find them hypnotic; I keep pulling email every time I think of it, and certainly enjoy reading emails about me and my writing than I do questions about the D2X FAQ or complaints about Bnet crashing or the myriad of other familiar and by now very boring D2 site emails. I've gotten a bunch of really nice emails about this site and the features on it of late also. I'd quote some of the positive feedback ones, but you can probably imagine well enough already without me spending even more time metaphorically fellating myself. Anyway, as I'm doing other things around the apartment and semi-basking in the praise, I find myself wondering what I'm doing with it/about it/because of it. I can go on writing articles and short stories for gaming fansites forever, and get a ton of fans to write and say how much they enjoy my work... but so what? I mean it's nice, but that and $5.95 gets me a fish taco platter at Rubio's. It's not as if I'm doing this in my spare time as a way to unwind from my highly-paying legal/medical/porn career. This is my career. Except that careers will supposedly earn you money. I read an article this evening on yahoo about the highly-paid hired gun screenwriters in Hollywood, and for about the 700th time since I was 17 I thought to myself, "I have got to get into writing screenplays." It's not that I really want to though, I think my real love is the novel. It's just that a novel is 400 or 500 pages of solid text and dozens of characters and great prose arrangement and clever writing and if it's successful you might make $50k for a year or two of work on it. While a screenplay is 80-140 pages of double spaced dialogue and rough scene descriptions and a handful of clichι characters, and if it turns into a movie that makes some money you might get $500k for it and a $2m advance for your next one. Writing either one is like eating an elephant, as the old saying goes. You take one bite at a time. I'm bad that that, in general. I tend to put off things as long as possible, making them a far bigger chore to do when I eventually can't put them off any longer. Or I put them off so that I have to work on them for 8 hours straight to try and beat a deadline, when I could have just spent 30 or 60 minutes a day on them every day for a week and been done in advance. I'm always falling behind on the daily post archives page here, and especially on the articles and reviews and such I mean to expand from the daily comments. And I could so easily spend 20 or 30 minutes twice a week and keep those completely up to date. For years I've been totally disorganized and behind on things in real life, but I would force myself and pride myself for being inversely-proportional in my organization and punctuality online. Lately the two are becoming more equivalent, and not in a good way. Talking to a friend a couple of days ago she was asking why I don't get a newspaper column, or write some quick novels and get some money then. As I pointed out to her at the time:
And for my cheery and amusing closing comment, ALA Dave Barry... Oh that's right, I'm not much like Dave Barry. |
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his
pretentiously-titled page collects blog entries in which I talked about writing
in general terms. My writing, usually, but not the D2 novel specifically, since
there's a special article page just for that topic. I didn't want to include the
word "reflections" anywhere on this site, at least anywhere not
involving a photograph of a body of water. It's a stupidly cheesy
word. However I couldn't think of anything better.
"Thoughts," "commentaries," and "essays" all
sounded even cheesier and more pretentious. So here we are.