Professional Writer = No Day Job?
On a recent episode of the Functional Nerds podcast, Patrick Hester posited that based on the prefix “professional” in “professional writer,” those writers who do not make a living as writers technically don’t count as pros. I’m paraphrasing, of course, so I recommend actually listening to the podcast here (the comment appears around the 30-minute mark). The idea is not a new one. It falls within the same discussions about who gets to call themselves “writers” or “authors,” and who has to suck a bag of too-bads and accept that they don’t get to use a fancy label. And it’s likewise tied into the longstanding discussions about the term “professional” within our field, most notably in the fact that what the SFWA considers a “professional” publication has very little to do with whether one actually makes a living as a published writer. It’s from that last line that I’d like to suggest that while it’s perhaps accurate to apply “professional writer” only to those who make a living as writers, the material realities of the writing life make such a determination numerically meaningless. So few writers actually make a living as writers, and of those that do make a living as such, most of them do so via a variety of writing avenues. A midlist author of science fiction novels, for example, may fill in the enormous gaps from fiction publications with freelance work (essays, editing, etc.). The number of authors who actually get to live off a single form of writing (Stephen King, for example, or Neil Gaiman…) comprises such a small number of all published writers out there that using “professional writer” on them alone wouldn’t really tell us anything other than “these are the authors who sell enough books to pay a mortgage.” Since a great deal of non-writer folks likewise wouldn’t fall within the domain of a “professional” based on how well they do in a given field, I just don’t see why the term provides any use value if we apply so selectively. And that’s perhaps the big problem here. What the hell is a professional writer anyway? Would Harper Lee count as a professional writer? She only wrote one book: To Kill a Mockingbird. But it sells so many copies every year that I suspect she could live quite comfortably off the various royalties and rights purchases associated with it. Is she a professional writer? By the standard of financial value: yes. By any other standard of professionalism? Nope. Most uses of the term professional apply to those who actually participate in the production of a “thing.” A doctor who has a practice or works at a hospital is a professional. A practicing lawyer is a professional. An author who sells one book and nothing else? Well… I suppose all of this is essentially a reflection about the state of the field of authorship. In other fields, one can become a professional by “doing,” but in the world of writing, I’m not sure there’s an easy measurement for “professional” and “not.” Harper Lee is probably a professional writer, but the standards by which her professionalism would be measured wouldn’t apply to someone like, say, Tobias S. Buckell, who still splits his salary between fiction sales and freelance work (I’m not sure how true that is today, though; he used to do these in-depth analyses of his yearly salary, but he’s been quite busy lately). In Hester’s assessment, the former is instantly a professional writer; the latter is not. Why? What makes the distinction here? Money can’t be the only valuable distinction between the two. There have to be other factors, too; otherwise, what’s the point of calling anyone a professional writer if all you need to do to become one is publish one book and sell millions of copies? Any thoughts?
Postcolonialism 101: Misery Tourism (or, How the Genre Community Still Essentializes Africa)
“What is misery tourism?” you might ask. At its most basic, “misery tourism” refers to the ways peoples from wealthy, usually Western nations “tour” the “developing” or “undeveloped” world in order to “learn” something. The process is almost always attached to an assumption of superiority, whether directly acknowledged or buried in the subconscious. To partake in misery tourism is to justify the superior position of your culture by intentionally subjecting yourself to “lesser” cultures (as a means of justifying the bias embedded in the notion of “lesser” cultures). To put it another way, misery tourism is what (mostly white) Westerners do to make themselves feel better about their own circumstances. I bring this up because of the following, which is taken from Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s blog post entitled “Broadening the Toolbox Through Cross-Cultural Encounters: On Resnick, Africa, and Opportunity“: When I spent time volunteering in prisons, I came away telling people that everyone should go and experience that for themselves because “the inmates are a lot more like us than you’d imagine.” For me, it was a scary and yet sobering reminder that human beings no matter their backgrounds, etc. have more in common than different. The same held true of my experiences in other cultures. I tell everyone to visit a developing world country at least once. See for yourselves what you’ve only imagined from the pages of National Geographic or TV specials about starvation, etc. Go there and experience it and be forever changed. If you’re not changed, you’re doing something wrong. I don’t see how you couldn’t be. Don’t fear this kind of change. It’s the good kind–the kind that makes you smarter, wiser, more aware and more appreciative. It’s the kind that makes you a better person and inspires you to write better stories and live better lives. That kind of change can’t be a bad thing, can it? This appears after Schmidt reminds us how important it is not to fall into the trap of stereotyping other peoples and cultures (by way of getting into their heads to push our boundaries). Schmidt, unfortunately, falls prey to a number of common intellectual traps when it comes to the subject of the African continent. For example, rather than trying to explore a particular African culture, he reduces them all to “Africans,” as if talking about “Africans” actually means something. He might have identified specific nations (Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Mali, Chad, Sudan, etc.) or specific peoples (Igbo, Sua, Kikuyu, Tutsi, Oromo, Afrikaner, Egyptian, Bemba, Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Fulani, Yoruba, etc.), having spent so much time in Africa (says he). But instead, he makes them all one. They are Africans — not in the sense that they are all “from Africa,” but in the sense that they are all more or less the same, like Americans (except we’re not all the same either). Doing so allows him to make grand assumptions about what they are all like (they are communal and find joy in little things). There are other traps, too, but this is, I think, the most obvious and most damaging. What shocks me most about these statements is that Schmidt wants us to believe he has learned something both from his experiences as a traveler and from reading genre fiction written by people who are non-white, mostly non-Christian, and mostly non-American. Yet in essentializing the plethora of African cultures, as so many people do, he exposes his own narrow view of the continent. I suspect he does not believe this of himself, but most Westerners don’t want to believe that their privilege blinds them to the narratives of neo-imperialism which control the discourse surrounding the African continent. In fact, Schmidt obviously means well, and makes many valid points. But this doesn’t excuse the central problem, which Binyavanga Wainaina perhaps best explores in “How to Write About Africa.” His humorous-but-not-really “story” exposes many of the myths peddled about the African continent. Two quotes of relevance here include: In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular. And: Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. That pretty much sums it up. Becoming better writers is simply a justification for misery tourism. Its only purpose is to validate ethnocentric views of the world and the perpetuation of stereotypes and myths still held by so many Westerners today. I’m not sure there’s a way to combat this behavior, as we’re all guilty of it to a certain degree. One would think education about the history of the various now-countries of the African continent would do it, but that requires people to take the wax out of their ears and actually listen. In other words, so long as you see the African continent as little more than a monolithic culture of inferior peoples, you cannot possibly challenge the ethnocentric assumptions that pepper our cultural perceptions of the world. That’s not to say genre fiction is hopeless. Far from it. But it’s not enough to say “look, there are some brown people
Writing Wonders: Are Flashbacks Evil?
I think with all writing concepts, there are no simple answers. Flashbacks are no different. Just as you can ruin a book with poorly constructed multiple POVs, so too can you ruin a book with flashbacks. It all comes down to how and when you do it. Case in point: I am currently reading Tobias Buckell’s The Apocalypse Ocean, the fourth book in his Xenowealth series. One of the POVs in the book is of a woman born from genetically augmented stock by an alien race known as the Nesaru. But the only way we can really understand what her past means to her in the present of the novel (after the events in Ragamuffin, in which a human revolution against alien control had its first and most important victory) is by flashback. Buckell could tell us her history in an infodump, but the result would lack the emotional impact we need in order to sympathize with the character. Thus, Buckell uses the flashback. Only rather than shove it in the middle of an important sequence, he uses it as a way to further the plot point (specifically, her plot) — it occurs in a chapter devoted specifically to her reaction to a previous scene; we know something will happen in this chapter, but we don’t know what, and so Buckell uses this flashback as a way to show her motivations as an individual. It’s a smart move, I think, since it avoids all the problems that can come with flashbacks — pulling the audience out of the story, destroying pace, etc. It also helps that readers of Buckell’s work will recognize familiar themes in this flashback, which might not be something to be expected in other works with such devices. That’s really all it comes down to. If you’re going to use a flashback, you have to use it with the awareness of its impact on the rest of the narrative. If inserting a flashback will hurt the pacing or if it appears in a pointless moment in the story, then you’re probably going to run into problems. What I’m curious about are those books which experiment with the flashback form. One example that comes to mind is Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything, in which much of the story meanders through different points in the character’s lives. Think of it as a long series of interconnected flashbacks. Much of his writing follows this format, including Spaceman Blues. But what other kinds of experimentations are there? Do they work? Feel free to leave a comment! (Question suggested by Paul Weimer on Google+.) P.S.: One might also consider The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers as a kind of flashback-infused text, though that’s difficult to argue since most of the book takes place in the flashback, rather than in the “present.”
Bad Worlds, Bad Language, and Worldbuilding Gone Bad
Recently, I’ve been reading Star Carrier Book One: Earth Strike by Ian Douglas. I was intrigued by the epic military SF setting and decided to plow into it. What begins as a solid piece of action writing, however, quickly dissolves into a linguistic nightmare in the first chapter written from an alien POV. In this chapter, Douglas stops using standard words for time or distance and instead opts for a series of nearly incomprehensible terms: mr’uum, g’nyuu’m, g’nya, g’nyurm, and lurm’m. I’m not sure what these terms actually mean, nor do I care to find out. What annoys me about them isn’t just that they are incomprehensible, but that no other vaguely scientific (or intensely scientific, for that matter) elements are written in this way. Douglas is careful to avoid turning all scientific references into alien gibberish, and yet chooses to turn the simplest of these concepts into words that have no inherent meaning. For me, this is an utter failure to properly worldbuild. If you are going to maintain all the other scientific references so that your audience can understand what the aliens are talking about, then it is absolutely necessary not to disengage that audience from the spatial and temporal logics of the narrative’s world. It is worse still if there is no logical reason for these linguistic invasions. What purpose does providing alien terminology as replacements for human terminology serve? To alienate us? Isn’t that accomplished by providing the perspective of the alien itself? Of course it is. Since we’re already in a futuristic society, taking us into the alien means we can still relate to something. But “mr’uum” has no obvious relation. It is not derived from a language English speakers would be familiar with. After two or three pages of these terms, I decided to read something else. I may not go back. The linguistic intrusions served as barriers to entry for me as a reader. I became overly aware that I was reading a fiction, and especially that I was reading a fiction comprised of words on a page. In other words, escape became impossible. Each new intrusion meant severing me from the imaginative realm of the novel. Once you do that to me a few times in a row, you’ve likely lost me for good. These choices are best avoided. There are better ways to convey the alien; one need not use linguistic trickery to get the job done. Aliens have different physical features, different cultures, and different worldviews. Any of those elements could serve to heighten the reader’s sense of alienation without pulling them from the story. Ultimately, however, there must be a reference, a “thing” for us to cling to so that we don’t get lost in the alien. But more on that another day…
First Novels: Are They Forgivable?
While listening to SF Squeecast’s discussion of Kameron Hurley’s novel, God’s War, I was struck by the suggestion that the novel’s perceived faults were forgivable because it is a first novel. Not having read God’s War, I cannot speak to the accuracy of the suggested faults, and therefore cannot directly discuss Hurley’s novel. However, the question raised by the hosts compelled me to consider my own position on first novels. Are mistakes in first novels forgivable? If so, when do we start to fault an author for not being up to par? There are no quick and easy answers to this question for me, in part because I don’t think a first novel is a relevant starting point for the discussion. What matters, in my mind, is the reader’s first experience with an author, which may occur with that author’s first novel, or may occur at any other point in the author’s career. From my own experience, once I’ve read a bad book by an author, it casts the rest of their work in a different light. If I happened to have started with better work, then I can probably forgive that author for a crummier novel, regardless of when it arrives in their career. But if I started with a crappy novel, it becomes very difficult to convince me to try something else, perhaps because my experience has already been tainted by a negative. There is always the chance that I’ll try something else by that author, but perhaps only with a lot of prodding. After all, there are so many good books already out there — waiting to be read. For proper first novels, the process is largely the same for me. If your first novel is crap, then it’s not likely I’ll return to your work. But so far in this post, I’ve taken as a given that the negative experience is the result of a truly awful novel. Can I forgive minor mistakes if the overall product is good? I don’t know. Maybe? That might depend on the author. Myke Cole’s first novel, Shadow Ops: Control Point, is far from a perfect novel, but you’ll be hard pressed to convince me to ignore anything else he writes (unless he turns into some kind of foam-at-the-mouth crazy person who thinks we should cut off the left foot of every first born son or whatever).* How much do I care about the flaws in his work? Where is the line between “reasonable flaw” and “complete disaster”? I’m not sure I can define the line at this moment; I’m still stewing over the idea. In other words: it really depends on the situation. Are first novels forgivable? Maybe. But that probably depends on the answer to this question: What makes the novel needing of forgiveness? If the writing is atrocious, then forgiveness may not be forthcoming. Minor plot holes? Who knows… What do you all think about this? ——————————————————- *Control Point is a pretty good book. Lots of action. A nice take on superhero abilities, and so on. Plus, Myke is a wonderful human being, as I discovered when Jen and I interviewed him here and brought him on for a discussion episode here. Note: I’m using “forgive” rather liberally here for lack of a better word. There are very few instances when a bad book causes offense. So take my use of the word lightly.
Not All Editors Are Nice People (or, Some People Live in Imaginary Universes)
I’ve had the pleasure to work with or receive criticism from a number of wonderful people. Lyn Perry of Residential Aliens, for example, is one of the most gracious people who has ever published one of my stories. In fact, when I was rather harsh about the stories in one of his issues last year, he didn’t react as you’d expect (getting in a huff over it). Instead, he was happy for the criticism, and offered up the next issue for my perusal. He and I are likely to disagree on all kinds of things (personally and religiously), but our relationship has, however brief, remained friendly. I’ve had similar experiences with Bruce Bethke, who will be publishing one of my fantasy shorts this year (“In the Shadows of the Empire of Coal”), and Nick Mamatas, who ripped one of my stories a new one, but in a way that showed me what I had done wrong (in a way that was irrefutable). I’ve been fortunate to have these experiences, and the many others I don’t have the space to talk about here. The vast majority of editors are in that “nice people” bin. But this post is about a bad experience. No names. No specifics beyond the event itself. Some time ago, one of my friends pointed an editor with an anthology to fill in my direction. I read the details, thought it sounded pretty nifty, and set to writing a story. There were a few hiccups on the way — personal issues and so on — and I spent a bit of time facetiously hyping up the story (I tend to do this with people I’m friendly with — “This is the best thing ever” and so on, though it almost always comes with a 😛 face; my friend thinks the story is brilliant, and I trust his opinion on almost anything. Plus, it got an honorable mention in a major award recently, so there’s that). I appreciated having the extra time and said as much. Eventually I got the story done and submitted it. As with any submission, I expect a preliminary “acceptance” to come with the caveat of “w/ edits.” This is (usually) a normal process. Most of the time, the edits are minor. You need to trim this. You need to add a little emotion here. And so on. In this case, the edits were extensive. The story I’d written was a tad long, with a lot of attention paid to the world and the characters. So I went to work. I cut the beginning and sucked relevant details out and moved them down into the second half. I trimmed quite a bit from that story, to be honest, but there were some aspects of the edit requests that I didn’t understand. And if I don’t understand something, I have to ask about it. That’s what I did. I sent the new edit back and asked for clarification: “I don’t quite know what you mean by X. Could you give me an example?” What follows is one of the most unusual experiences I’ve had in the writing world. The editor decided to do the edits themselves, along with their co-editor. I assumed this was their “deal,” and let them do it. A week or so later, I receive a heavily-edited story. The vast majority of the edits made sense. Trim some worldbuilding here. Trim some of this here. Get to the meat quicker. I accepted most of those. But then there were the edits I didn’t agree with. These edits required cutting a lot of character development in order to reduce the story into the theme, moving details where they didn’t make sense, or cutting details entirely, which you couldn’t remove without tossing the whole world out of wack. The crucial point, however, rested on whether to keep a secondary character’s motivations apparent (the editor wanted to cut that out; I wanted to keep it in, even if trimmed excessively, because otherwise that secondary character would be little more than a shell). The editor and I argued about this until he finally said that unless I accepted all their edits (the implication being that the publisher would ask for more edits anyway, so why bother haggling?), they would not accept the story and would have to find another fill the anthology. Shortly after, they proceeded to tell me that I was one of the most difficult writers they had ever worked with: I had forced them to edit my story, refused to accept most of the edits, and had wasted their time, etc. It got worse. I was told that their other reader didn’t finish the story (why accept it, then?), that if another story came in, they would take it over mine (umm, ok), and, the icing on the cake, they denied that what actually happened (I asked for clarification in an email I still have in my inbox) didn’t happen because “that’s not how [they] recall it.” The reality? I accepted 90% of the edits (or more), and wanted to rework other suggested changes so as to avoid losing important details. I never asked for this person to edit the story for me, nor refused to accept the majority of the edits. There is no evidence of that ever happening (I have almost all of the emails and tweets). This same person has since written their imaginary version of the experience (granted, without names). It is just that: an imaginary version of what actually happened. The facts don’t lie. The result of this experience? I will never work with this person again. Ever. I’m sure they would rather not work with me either, but for reasons founded on a reality that never existed. And that’s fine. Because in the grand game of writing and publishing, there are a lot of people I’d rather work with anyway. People who I’ve already had the pleasure to work with. They’ll get my stories. Some of them