October 2007

World in the Satin Bag

Heinlein’s Rules of Writing

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If you don’t know who Heinlein is, you obviously don’t read SF. I regret to say I have yet to read any Heinlein, which could be considered blasphemy by many. In any case, he was an influential writer and he had a few little rules that even to this day seem to be rather relevant. This also is going to address a comment by Jameel regarding ‘constant fiddling’, where you are always making changes rather than progressing the story. So pay attention: Rule One: You Must WriteSounds obvious doesn’t it? The problem is that too many people, including myself at one time, say they want to be writers, but never actually get anything done. You can’t be a writer if you don’t write! Rule Two: Finish What You StartThis one I have problems with and I think a lot of writers do too. Sometimes you’ll write something and suddenly be extremely bored with it. Are there others of you out there that have that problem? To put it simply, though, you can’t publish anything if you never finish anything. Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except To Editorial OrderApparently creative writing teachers hated Heinlein for this rule, but when you think about it it makes sense. You shouldn’t write something, and then continuously rewrite it every time someone mentions something in it or doesn’t like a piece. Otherwise you’ll just do that forever and never get anything done. Remember, not all revisions are good. Sometimes you can revise something and make it worse! Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story On the MarketDuh! You can’t get published if you don’t do this. One thing to consider doing once you start submitting is to try to keep a relatively steady stream. Write it, submit it, write something else, submit that, and if something comes back rejected, resubmit it elsewhere. Rule Five: You Must Keep It On the Market Until It’s SoldWell I’m sure there is some leeway to this. If you’ve submitted something to everything imaginable and have 500 rejections on one story, I think it would be safe to say that you’re not selling that story. That doesn’t mean to give up. New markets spring up all the time and one of those might take your story. You also can’t let rejections discourage you too much. Some of the most popular authors were rejected hundreds of times before getting anywhere. Also, when you get a rejection, take that story and submit it elsewhere right away! Rule Six: Start Working On Something ElseOnce you submit, don’t stop writing. Get right back into it and write something else. Period. If you don’t write then you’ll spend a long amount of time sitting around waiting for your acceptance or rejection. So write! So, in theory, following these rules will do you some good. I know a few that I need to follow! What do you all think of these rules?

World in the Satin Bag

So You Want To Be A Writer…

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Being a writer, even a published one, is not an easy thing. We all wish we could have the success of people like Stephen King or John Grisham, selling million dollar book contracts and selling millions upon millions of copies worldwide in a whole assortment of different languages. The sad part of that dream is that it most likely will never come true.In short, being a writer is hard. Here are some things to think about to make sure you’re serious about this venture: Trying to keep up with the market is impossible. Therefore writing to the market is pointless, unless it’s short stories. Even if you sell your novel, it could take a year or more before it ever goes to print. By then, whatever market you had written and marketed that book to may have changed and now your really interesting and original novel is old news. Rejections are common. Some writers go through hundreds of submission attempts before anyone ever gives them a shot. You’ll likely have the same problem. The market is brutal like that. So, be prepared to get rejected a lot. Maybe you’ll get lucky on your first try, but most likely you’ll get a lot of rejections before an editor really considers your work. Writers are poor. Don’t quit your day job. If you have high hopes that you’ll be able to write for a living and be comfortable doing it, think again. Orson Scott Card discussed this very thing in his book on writing SF & F. In reality, even if your first novel does well, you probably won’t be buying Ferrari’s with the paycheck that comes with it. That also assumes you sell out on your advance. See, the way it works in the market is that a publisher forwards you an advance of money–usually a few thousand dollars. This is sort of your ‘tide-me-over’ payment. When your book actually comes out, you have to earn back that money for the publisher before you get paid anything else. You get a percentage of every book sold, so from the start, that percentage is paying off the money they gave you. Maybe you’ll earn out your advance, maybe you won’t. Until you do, you get nothing else.In the event you get published and earn out your advance, likely you won’t be making a whole lot of money at all. In fact, if anything, the money you’ll be making won’t be enough to even pay the rent. So, don’t quit your day job. If you do, and you’re married, make sure your significant other is willing to support you. Publishers have no qualms about dropping you. Sounds lovely doesn’t it? Well, if you’re not making the publisher any money, they have no reason to keep you around. So if you don’t earn out your advance on your first novel, you might get a second chance, you might not. That depends on how bad your novel does. Most publishers accept that a first novel often won’t make a lot of money anyway. So if your second novel, and your third, aren’t doing very well, then expect to be dropped. If that happens it might become very difficult for you to get back into the market. The market functions on money. Writing is a hell of a lot of work. You can’t be a writer if you don’t write. That means you have to accept that writers block is not a real syndrome, but actually the result of laziness. If you finish your novel and want to publish it, realize it could be a long road before anything happens, if anything happens. Publishers have long wait times. If you submit your novel to one publisher, you might be waiting for months, or longer, before a response comes back. Some publishers won’t take simultaneous submissions, so this means you could be jumping from publisher to publisher shopping your book for many many years. This can get very discouraging when it seems like all the publishers are rejecting your work. The Writing World is not fluffy bunnies and joy. It’s damn hard work. Being a professional writer is like any other full time job, except in this case you get to do something you actually like to do. So, of course you’ll enjoy writing, but you’ll also have to recognize that it will be difficult and a lot of hard work, and in the end you’ll have no guarantee that you’ll be a bestseller or one of those names that everyone knows. You do have to have some talent. Maybe not a lot, judging from some of the abysmal novels that seem to be coming out these days, but you can’t just spring up one day and say “I want to be a writer” and expect your first words to be pure gold. Most people write garbage for a while. Many of us know that saying that you have to get through the first 1,000,000 words before you write anything good. It’s an overstatement, but if you think about it, in some respects, there is truth to it. Most likely the first thing you write will be crap. Stephen King and J. K. Rowling are flukes. They are not common place in the world of writers. In fact, both are incredibly rare. Almost all writers don’t have the monetary success of those two. So if your dream is to be like them, expect to be disappointed a lot. John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell are both fantastic writers who have great careers ahead of them, and neither of them are being handed huge contracts for millions of dollars (correct me if I’m wrong though). I only bring this bit up more before because too many people have hopes to be like those really popular and rich authors. Come back down to Earth. A better focus would be just to be published and successful enough to be able to continue doing it. I’d love to be rich like

World in the Satin Bag

Young Writers Online

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I have a lovely announcement to make to all you out there.I have started a new website with my friend Andrew for young writers. It’s called Young Writers online and you can visit he link here.What is YWO? Well, a site for young writers, built by young writers. This means, young teens, teens, and even college age adults. The hope for the site is to help all sorts of writers develop their craft through critiques and discussion. There’s a full community there everyone. So come on in, join up! I hope to see some new faces there. Also, I’d love it if people would spread the word. YWO is really new, which means we have a long way to go before we are a thriving community. So please feel free to talk about it in your blogs, review it, or whatever suits you.And if you’d like to add a link or image to your site for us, that would be awesome. You can find all our various image options here. Hope to see you there! (Don’t click the read more, there is no more after this)

World in the Satin Bag

A Dialogue of War (in fantasy)

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This very subject was brought up by SQT in her recent post. I don’t want to steal the spotlight from her very well drawn analysis, but I did feel like addressing the issue a bit myself.SQT is very right that it seems that fantasy is overridden with novels that focus on war. I can’t think of a novel I have read that didn’t have war as a central theme somewhere. War might not be the primary plot line in a story, but almost all fantasy seems to have it there in some capacity.Some of the issues I see with this is that fantasy writers want to place a lot of focus on the people in war that aren’t ordinary, ignoring those that suffer the most. I addressed this in the comments to some extent, but I think some context here would be great.Look at the historical basis for fantasy. Generally, most fantasy is written in a semi-medieval style time period. We all can generally accept this as true. Whether or not magic, dragons, or other strange and supernatural things ‘actually’ exist in this fantasy setting is irrelevant to this discussion. Medieval societies were violent by nature. Machiavelli handled this idea very well in saying that a ruler could control his people by subjecting them to war. What Machiavelli proposed is that a king or prince, or even queen, would rule the masses by using the fear of war–death, destruction, and loss of livelihood–to keep them in order. This serves several purposes: It reduces the number of impoverished people, the lower class, in situations that would cause them to revolt by placing them, instead, in armies and ultimately into combat. While they may be subject to obviously unlikable conditions, the idea that they are protecting their homeland and doing something that might be considered honorable might hold their complaints at bay. It keeps those living in the impoverished situations from revolting or dissenting by making them believe that they are constantly on the verge of being destroyed by the enemy, whoever they might be. Fear generally results in undeserved loyalty, but as we can see in our current and ancient history, this is an all too common thing. It raises new generations into this cycle of oppression by war. Children raised in this situation are also even less likely than their parents to question authority. Of course, it does happen, but that has much less to do with the people themselves than the failure of the ruling class to make the idea of war more serious than the horrid policies of those in power. Machiavelli wasn’t lying through his teeth when he proposed some of the ideas on The Prince. Medieval times were violent by nature. From 1,095 to 1400 C.E. (current era) there were nine crusades not including any of the Northern Crusades or the various other smaller crusades, which together with the traditional nine crusades numbers somewhere around twenty. This is only a select number of the many wars that took place in the Middle Ages. Also take into account that what is considered the Middle Ages (400 to 1400 C.E.) encompasses all of Europe. In 1100 years of history we can only imagine the number of small and major wars that took place.We have to then take into account the commonality of war in what would traditionally be fantasy fiction, which is most often set in a time much like the Middle Ages anyway. As I said, the problem isn’t that fantasy writers focus so much on war, since war in some form or another would be common anyway, but that fantasy writers instead base their stories primarily around characters which are abnormal. These are the heroes, characters who possess heroic qualities–excellent swordsmanship, magic, etc.–rather than being insignificant in the sense that from the start of the book they aren’t anything special. In most cases these are also the characters who have very little to actually lose. Why would this be such an issue? Because the primary reason that war is such an effective device in fiction is that it represents ultimate loss. People die in war, lands are destroyed, families are broken, etc. Without loss, what is the point of having war? It becomes a device in the story that has no reason to exist. Sure, the abnormal heroes of the story do experience loss, but do they really experience it? Does a king really feel the lost of the hundreds or thousands of men in his army? Not likely. In fact, a king might feel little at all unless someone of great importance is lost. A king may feel anger at the loss of a keep, but the king doesn’t mourn this loss.But the people who live in the towns and villages do. They experience it worse than the ruling class because it is they who are being murdered and slaughtered, and it is they who are driven from their homes and experience the ultimate of losses.Then this begs the question, what would fantasy be without traditional styles of heroes? Very difficult, but better fiction. Ordinary characters can become heroes. It would be more interesting to begin with a character that is in the lower class, has no discernible amazing abilities, but becomes great through his or her own force, rather than through luck. A character doesn’t have to be a captain of the guard, a general, or a king, or anything in royalty at all. A simple scribe could end up a hero. But it becomes far more effective to take war from the eyes of someone who truly experiences it. Kings didn’t frequently engage in battle. They were often preoccupied with the other nuances of war. It was the lower class that saw battle more often.So, what do you think? Do you see some of the same problems in fantasy? Do you disagree? What say you?

World in the Satin Bag

Editors and Their Faults?

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How much responsibility does an editor have when it comes to the condition of the work they are choosing to publish?Serious question. What do you all out there think? For some context: I am currently reading a novel that has a lot of mistakes that not only should never have been written, but should have been picked up by the editor, the writer, and the copywriter. There were POV violations all over the place, flat characters, character development issues and contradictions, and even a sentence in the book where a huge line of zeros randomly appears in the middle of a word. The last I might be willing to pass to printing error, but that’s pushing it. So, how much of that should have been addressed by the editor before the book went to the press? Do you personally expect more from an editor? (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this)

World in the Satin Bag

Russians Rule the World Today (Sort of)

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Okay, so I’m on a roll with the misleading titles, but really you can’t blame me given what today is. Happy Birthday to Sputnik!That’s right, today is the birthday of the flight of Sputnik in orbit around our little blue planet. In a way, it was both the most amazing and most frightening thing in a time when one world war had ended and people were deathly afraid that another would occur (with the Russians obviously). But, seeing how, in theory, the Cold War has ended and, in theory, we’re semi-decent buddies with Russia, for however long that will last, we should pay some respects to that little spacecraft that captured the world for a rather brief moment in time. For a little more info, Sputnik flew for about 3 months and then dropped out of orbit. The interesting thing is that you could actually pick up the beep of its transmitter (or whatever it was that was sending the beep in the first place) on little radio receivers–you know, those ones that people used to use to talk to people in other cities sort of as a hobby. In a world afraid of nuclear war that’s a rather frightening thing. So, Happy Birthday Sputnik!For more information check this article out by ABC.

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