SF/F Commentary

I’ve become interested in the last few months with the idea of intellectual ownership of written materials.  In part this is because of the ways some fiction authors (and others) have responded to criticism and interpretation in the last few years elsewhere and on this blog.  Setting aside instances where someone intentionally spams a book’s page with negative reviews, it seems to me that for some authors there is a critical disconnect between the act of creation and the life as the creator.  That is that these individuals believe they have ownership over interpretation after the moment it leaves their hands and becomes a publicly accessible (purchasable) object.  As a writer, I can understand the impulse to want to avoid negative criticism and even to say “I am not X,” but responding to criticism or interpretations is not usually a skill writers have learned how to do (or that they can learn how to do without stepping on toes).  They become “problems.” I think it’s important for fiction authors–published or otherwise–to understand that they don’t own interpretation of their work.  What happens to your novels or short stories after the public has access to it is simply beyond an author’s control.  The public will read subgenres and “messages” or “themes” into a work, and they will do so without consideration of the author’s intent (often because intent is difficult to know, even if it is declared).  Some may even write that they hate someone’s work, and might do so in ways that authors normally wouldn’t (perhaps because we understand as writers what other writers hope for in negative reviews:  constructive criticism). There’s very little an author can do about these interpretations and receptions (unless an unethical activity has occurred, obviously).  In most cases, authors shouldn’t try to do anything about these things.  They should leave it alone.  Why?  Because we’ve learned that authors often turn into jackasses when they respond to criticism or interpretations.  They go on the attack, telling critics (amateurs or professionals) how wrong they are.  Sometimes they tell these critics that they are idiots, and in rare occurrences, they send their fans on a rampage against the offending person.  None of these things are good for an author’s career, unless they’ve built that career on controversy. But there’s also the underlying assumption in these moments that there is such a thing as a correct interpretation or reception.  The problem in such an assumption is that it limits (or tries to limit) how readers relate to a text.  To tell them that a text is not “science fiction” or “New Weird” (or that their criticism is misguided) is to tell them that their experience is wrong and, in part, not as valuable.  It neuters the reader’s experience (or can), and neutering readers is like blasting one’s bone-marrow with radiation:  an author might get what they want out of it (i.e., the correct “reading”), but they’ve still done so by smashing the readers (cells) that fed the author’s popularity (blood). The fact of the matter is:  you do not own interpretation or reception, particularly when such ownership flies in the face of reason(ability).  Your work is not “yours” once it hits the reader-stream.  Trying to control readers is both futile and bad news.  Putting that in your head when you begin writing is for the best, because it sets in motion the will to avoid response to criticism and to interpretation, and the subsequent jackass moments such responses often create.  This is not to suggest that there are no purely wrong interpretations/receptions.  To call a book “fantasy” when it is clearly a non-fiction book is a complete failure of a reader to understand genre.  But readers can take care of that, and often do (even on Amazon).  It’s okay to let things go and acknowledge that your control ends when a reader reads a work. ———————————————— It occurs to me that all of the above is complicated by writers who are also critics (both pathways are nearly inseparable).  But I’ll save that for another time, I suppose. What do you think about all of this?  Let me know in the comments.

Adam and I have made enormous progress on our collaborative story.  How much?  Day one ended at about 850 words, which is certainly nothing to scoff at; day two, however, ended at about 4,000 words, which seems to me to be an impressive amount of writing for anyone.  To be fair, I wrote close to 2,500 of that, since Adam skipped out for 45 minutes to take care of some business.  That means it’s his turn to add a substantial chunk to the story though. In any case, some very interesting problems arose as we started work on the project again.  Plotting, for example, proved difficult for both of us, since we couldn’t decide where to take the story.  We had some ideas, but we each kept finding holes in the ideas of the other, which made trying to pin down a central “plot” impossible.  I don’t think that will be a permanent problem.  We seem to have started in the middle of the middle of a story, which means we’re going to have to add something to the beginning anyway.  At that point, we’ll have an enormous climax and a lot to think about. But there are some really cool things about using Google Docs for story collaboration: You can comment live on something that has been written, either to get clarification or make a suggestion (I used this to ask Adam a question about a word I didn’t understand–a medical word). You can correct one another right then and there.  This is opposed to going back and fixing spelling errors and serious grammar problems yourself.  You don’t have to stop writing.  You can keep going. You can keep track of all of your research, etc.  And you can share it publicly with everyone as a kind of teaser.  Can you guess what we’re writing? We’re going to hit the story again tonight (and some of our other individual projects).  Hopefully we’ll get closer to a conclusion (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is going to involve quantum physics and other insane stuff). What have you been writing, by the way?  I’d like to know (because I’m a creepy writing stalker).

The Internet is an amazing thing.  I’m sure of it now.  Yes, it’s full of stupid people making stupid comments on YouTube that make dyslexic people wonder if everyone else is dyslexic too, but after what happened last night, I have to say that the Internet is the single greatest human invention (next to bread and John Williams). My friend Adam and I have been doing our best to do what are called Word Wars every single day.  This is in part because Adam is the crazy “write 5 billion words a day” type and because he knows that the last four to five months have been a veritable hell for my writing; I suspect he’s using my lighter load this semester and his persuasive abilities to get me back on track.  In any case, a Word War is a kind of “competition” between at least two people (though I’ve seen wars with up fifteen) who decide on a time limit, and then do nothing but write for that period; the person with the most words after the buzzer “wins,” but the object is not necessarily to win–the object is to write.  Adam and I have written over 20,000 words (combined) since the 1st through these wars.  We don’t get to them every day, since sometimes one of us is having an off day, but we try our hardest and have formed a pretty strong little writing relationship (and friendship) through all of our critiques and what not. Really, it is. Today, however, I upped the ante.  I’ve been playing with Google Docs a lot in the last three weeks for the classes I teach, though I’ve been using them for Young Writers Online for a year or two.  Lately I’ve been getting a laugh from seeing people from YWO using the documents I set up for moderators at the same time that I’m using them.  It’s the ultimate in web-surveillance, because you not only see that they’re online, but you see everything they are typing, including when they select features (like bold or italics) and use them.  Maybe I’m a simpleton, but I find real-time documents amusing.  I suspect this is because I grew up in a period where things like Google Docs were either not around or not of interest to me (video games were pretty much my life-blood when I was young).  I preferred Real Time Strategy Games (like Starcraft) and the first Half-Life, which is the single greatest First Person Shooter ever invented.  Period.  I will argue with you over that game until I suffocate! Moving on.  So early last night it dawned on me that Adam and I could write a story in Google Docs in real time, piece by piece.  We’ve talked about collaborating before, but haven’t done so yet because, well, we’re both busy and weren’t sure how it would all work.  I suggested doing real-time story writing with Google Docs as a semi-joke to him, and then didn’t really think too much of it for an hour while we did some writing.  And then I got inspired to write a paragraph of something entirely random and explosive (literally, it starts with an explosion), and then I forwarded the Google Doc link to Adam and gave him editing capabilities.  An hour later, we had an action-packed scene completely written out.  Written together.  Paragraph by paragraph. Look out!  The pea people are coming! First things first, let’s get the obvious out of the way.  The fact that technology has made such a collaborative project possible without long wait times between chapters and so on is simply amazing.  Here we are, two little nobodies with very little to our name (with the exception of Adam, who has a pro sale to his name, because he’s awesome like that) writing a story together in real time, watching each other as each word flows from our fingers.  I’m awed by it, to be honest.  Maybe I’m silly to get so excited by such a thing, but what’s going through my head right now is the potential for this technology to make collaboration across borders possible.  Imagine writing a story with someone from the Philippines or Japan or Europe or (and here my skin starts to tingle) someone from the Caribbean, or the lower Americas!  Maybe it’s already happening and I just haven’t heard of it yet, since Google Docs has been around for a while. But the second thing to take from our first day is two-fold: We came up with a fun, action-packed romp that we’re both quite happy with.  Will we have to edit it?  Of course, but the cool thing about real-time collab is that we can do it together. We both really want to keep it up, and are planning to spend a bit of time tomorrow doing so.  Maybe even a few hours.  I don’t know.  All I know is that we want to see where it goes.  Maybe this story will be a dud, or maybe we’ll see a real gem in it, edit it up, and submit it somewhere.  And you know what?  I don’t care what happens with the story so long as we both get something useful from it and decide to collab again.  Adam and I have talked about writing a novel together in the past (a young adult, science fiction space opera, actually), and if this is the gateway into making that possible, then you can count me in.  Adam has one hell of a brain and the ideas that come out of his head are fantastic, if not a little unsettling.  I’m not too shabby either, and I think combining both will produce some truly amazing things. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.  Whatever happens, I think we’re enormously pleased with last night’s proceedings. ————————————————————– So, have you ever collaborated with someone over the Internet?  I’d like to hear about it in the comments.  It doesn’t have to be a writing collaboration.  Music, movies, whatever!  Let