Storytellersunplugged

As a writer, I read a lot. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. I was checking Stephen King books out from the local library before I was even capable of reading them. I can still remember laying under my bed with a flashlight tearing through “The Stand” for the first time when I was eleven or twelve. It was a paperback. This was before King put out the “Complete and Uncut” version. I don’t know what happened to my copy of that paperback, but I can still see that cover clearly in my mind. You probably can too. The cover is almost completely black, except for a slice of blue cutting through the bottom half. In that blackness is a sinister face, obviously belonging to Randall Flagg. To this day, there isn’t a single book from my childhood that I recall as vividly as I do “The Stand.” It painted pictures in my mind that I’ll never forget. As with many of you, King was a big part of my childhood. I read “The Talisman” around the same time. Haven’t read it again since. Don’t need to. I remember every scene from that book like I just finished it yesterday. It had that big of an impact on me. King had that big of an impact on me. I won’t even get into “The Dark Tower” books because I’ll just end up going on and on and I’ll never get to the point of this essay.

I don’t know about all you other writers out there, but I find it very easy and very comfortable to lose myself in the fictional worlds that other authors have created instead of tending to my own. There’s so many wonderful writers out there and there’s just not enough time in the day to enjoy everyone else’s work and still get your own done. I’ve had to get really disciplined and only read at night before bed. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve pretty much succeeded. I work on my own shit during the day and enjoy the work of others while in bed.

Writers can procrastinate better than anyone else in the world. We are the kings of procrastination. Everyone’s got their distractions. But writers have it worse than anyone else because we work from home. The internet is a huge distraction. E-mail, message boards, checking your favorite sites for daily updates, porn… Did I say porn? I didn’t say that. But you know what? I bet writers masturbate more than anyone else out there. We’re at home all day and writing or not, we get bored. Video games, TV, phone calls, snail mail, DVDs, music, and books. You can find a lot of ways to distract yourself in your own home. It’s easier to give into these distractions than to get your work done.

You have to be careful not to lose yourself. As much as I may want to crawl back under that bed in Virginia and crack open that copy of “The Stand” for the first time, I can’t do it. I’m an adult now. I live an apartment in California and Stephen King isn’t going to pay my bills. Only I can do that. And the only way to do that is to keep writing. That often means turning off the phone, refusing to sign online until your work is done for the day, and staying celibate just a few more hours than you may like so you can wrap up those pages.

My original intention when I started writing this piece was to talk specifically about how I’m addicted to horror fiction and have found my desire to read the latest books sometimes eclipsing my desire to work on my own stuff. As wonderful as those worlds are, you have to have balance. So horror fiction, as with all my other distractions, has had to take a back seat to my own work. And you know what? It’s actually worked out well. I really enjoy getting into bed now and curling up with a book at night. It’s a nice way to congratulate myself after a hard day’s work.

-JOSH BOONE

At RavenCon, in Richmond, VA, this past weekend, I took part in a panel discussing whether short stories should be considered the building blocks of a writing career or a dead end for someone striving to become a professional writer. Some worthwhile discussion came out of it, so I thought I’d return to the question here on Storytellers.

Anyone with at least a passing familiarity with my work will probably know that I’ve had a handful of novels published, but eighty-plus short stories (not to mention I’ve edited several anthologies and DEATHREALM magazine, which directly relate to the short form). So, in my career of almost a couple of decades, a large part of my experience has been with short fiction. I’m still alive and writing more than ever, so I guess that answers the dead end part of the question.

Uh, well, um…

First of all, it comes in handy to determine what we mean by “career.” Me, I work a full-time day job, so writing is not my primary source of income. It is, however, a lucrative (sometimes very, sometimes not) second vocation; I write with intent to make money. I report income from writing on my taxes and claim every deduction to which I am legally entitled. I have a fairly extensive list of professional writing credits.

So, to my mind, having a writing career, primary or otherwise, means that writing is not merely a hobby. I would be loath to say that anyone who’s been writing for twenty years and has never earned a penny from it (or, God forbid, actually paid someone to publish his or her work) has anything resembling a “career.”

So what do I think about short stories in relation to the topic at hand? Well, the short of it is that if I had devoted as much time, energy, and resources to writing and selling novels over the years as I have to short fiction, I might well be at a different stage in my career — at least from the standpoint of dollars, cents, and sheer numbers of readers. (Or maybe if I wrote better short stories…) Face it, very few writers, at least within the genres most of us frequent, gain huge readerships and lots of dollars by publishing short stories. The majority of writers who support themselves, whether primarily or secondarily, do so with novels — or most likely a combination of forms. Yes, of course there are exceptions; that’s true of virtually every point I might make down the line, so accept it as a given, that I might avoid needless repetition.

The novel and the short story, while having many common elements, are very different animals; one writer who excels at novel length may fare poorly with the short form, while another may do just the opposite. To some, at least early in their careers, the short story may be compared to a set of training wheels — a tool for exploring the various aspects of storytelling that the writer may expand upon when he or she moves into the novel arena. During the learning experience, it’s much easier to get feedback, editorial comment, and various, assorted pointers with the short story than with a big honking book. Others, such as myself, enjoy the short tale as a uniquely effective means to tell a story that doesn’t need or deserve eighty or a hundred thousand words, particularly when the focus is horror. Many is the time that horror is best served by a smaller vehicle, one that doesn’t carry on at length but hits fast and hard, leaving the reader with an indelible impression that might end up muddled if it were expanded. The work of T.E.D. Klein comes immediately to mind here. While his novel, THE CEREMONIES, is a fine enough book, the original, shorter tale on which it is based — “The Events at Poroth Farm” — is to my mind the more substantive, more memorable work.

On the positive, practical side for short fiction, some writers may find regular publication in markets that pay enough for short stories to remain an attractive, lucrative endeavor. If one has enough short fiction out there in publications that pay royalties over time, it’s possible to earn some fairly serious income. I have a few tales out there that, due to reprints and foreign-language editions, have brought in almost as much as I’ve made from a novel or two.

Back to the more problematic: for the writer who focuses primarily on the short story, name recognition may be somewhat more elusive. A book in a bookstore, with the author’s name on it, blurbs on the cover, and reviews in the media help establish a writer’s identity in a more focused way than do appearances in a variety of publications, few of which will receive the attention equal to that of a novel release. It tends to take a body of work that has received critical notice (or at least a particular story that has been singled out) for the writer of short fiction to gain audience-building recognition.

Adding to the handicap is the fact that anthologies and single-author collections, which might help further the career of the short story writer, are very hard sells to the big publishing houses. These days, most such books are the purview of the small press. On the positive side, there are a number of reputable small presses, such as Delirium Books, Borderlands Press, and CD Books, just to name a few, who not only publish excellent products but actively promote them and pay reasonable rates, thus offering the struggling short story writer some well-deserved outlets.

In the end, whether writing short fiction is a means to an end or a dead end depends largely on one’s expectations. While one may always hope, the more realistic expectation for someone who writes primarily short fiction is that he or she is not likely to become a household name. For that matter, few novelists are going to earn that particular distinction, but the novel, at least, puts a name on a book, usually offers some attendant perks, and tends to stand out more than the same name in a number of different anthologies or magazines.

Of course, the novel is not without its own pitfalls. If your book is a bomb, and editors at the bigger publishing houses no longer even want to hear your name mentioned, you might want to start submitting some short stuff to a few mags that offer you some exposure…

For me personally? I’ve found the short story one of the most gratifying components of my writing career. It’s hardly been a dead end. Still, these days, I’m putting a bit more emphasis on my novel-writing, and I figure that as long as I’ve got words to share, I’ll get them out there in whatever form is most appropriate for any given idea.

–Mark Rainey

by David Niall Wilson

(Since we don’t seem to be quite on line with Lucius yet, I’m posting this — maybe of interest. It was originally published a few years ago in the HWA Newsletter)There are a lot of fundamental questions associated with poetry. Some of these questions are so basic they challenge the foundation of modern verse as a relevant art form, or seem to – others are completely subjective and require a different approach. I want to look at a very simple division in the poetic form that has deepened over the years into a chasm. The question is, is poetry a romantic art form, or a classic art form - and can it be both

The classical philosophy would view the poem as an object. It has a form, rules that govern that form, a purpose, and these qualities can be measured, or at least judged, through the application of reason. Meter and rhyme can be tested and found to meet the rules set forth in the form, or discarded as falling short of the model. This way of looking at poetry is currently in disfavor among most poets. The rules and structures are seen as impediments. The aesthetic qualities of the images presented are considered to be restrained in ways that block some purer form, spawned from a freestyle spontaneity.

The Romantic philosophy would describe the poem as subjective to the object of inspiration. In other words, the images and emotions behind the poetry are quantified by the re-creation in words. Romantic poetry, in this sense, is a very sudden art form, whose structure is dictated by the moment and the inspiration, rather than fitting that same inspiration into a previously defined and refined structure. This second philosophy is the current ruling school of thought, and has been so since somewhere around the early 1960’s. Since then, it has grown in strength, as the classical forms have diminished.

In high schools and universities, analysis of creative form is the preferred method of teaching poetry, or any other form of Rhetoric. The body of work that has stood the test of time is broken down surgically, analyzed, quantified, and found to meet the tenets of rule and form. Then, from the rules extrapolated by this analysis, students are directed to create their own works, following these rules and within these forms. Unfortunately for the classic forms of poetry, literature rarely breaks down in this manner to be raised again like Lazarus. The fact is that, while classical poets followed certain structures, the rules themselves were recorded and applied long after the fact. With the specter of insufficient metaphor, unsyncopated meter and the limits of imaginative rhyme glaring over your shoulder, it’s damned hard to be eloquent.

This has led to a tangential surge into other forms. Newer forms. We now have classic forms, the sonnet, and the haiku – and we have non-linear forms. Free verse. Spoken word dialogue, and even less-structured, more abstract forms. Notice the use of the word forms.

A scream is a very short, very intense experience, both for the person screaming, and anyone within close proximity. To translate that scream to poetry in the modern form would be a swift chiseling of the words that shift most quickly to the center of the mind. The words may seem staccato, short and incomplete, but they convey the scream. They fulfill their purpose. Upon immediate examination, the poet may well sit back, smile and say “Wow,” or something similar. The scream will be as they remember it, vivid and sudden.

A classic poet might take that experience of the scream in a different direction. Time would pass. The experience would be sifted through other experiences. Images would arise from the meeting of one image with the next until a rhythm emerged. Classic style poetry is an art of patterns. The pattern is natural to the poet, though it may seem coarse and difficult to those around him. The pattern will draw the words into place, and if the poet is careful, and strict with his own imagery, those words will fit into place like the bits and pieces of an intricate puzzle. The images he can paint with these words will be similar to those evoked by the work of the Romantic style poet, but more subtle.

Of course, not all free verse is sudden, or spontaneous. A Romantic style poet, using my own definition of this style, can spend hours lingering over one word, or one line, just as his counterpart on the Classic side pores over a rhymed couplet. If the poetry is true to the poet’s intent, it can be a nerve-wracking experience. Prose offers the buffer of sentence structure and descriptive paragraphs. Poetry offers only enough room for words that matter. Classical poetry is unforgiving in its structure. Romantic poetry is unforgiving in it’s necessity of standing without the support of accepted structure.

And still we have the question - is there a place for the classic styles of poetry in modern literature? Has the time for following known structures passed us by, and given way to an un-structured, more intense progeny?

My own mind tells me no. What we have in most free verse poetry is not a lack of classic form, but a variety of new forms, as yet un-catalogued. Shakespeare didn’t follow the standard format of the sonnet, but created his own slight variance on that form. The result was not condemnation, but the birth of the Shakespearian sonnet. For a poem to work, it requires structure. That this structure is not a known, accepted structure matters much less than that the poem is true to whatever structure it follows. Years from now, there may be professors in universities teaching the “rules of 20th Century Free Verse” to future literati, all of whom will be wracking their brains for words to fit those structures and convey meaning. Perhaps not.

Classic poetry teaches patterns of creativity. The act of taking your thoughts, and your words, and swirling, shifting, and re-arranging them until they fit both form and concept is both cleansing, and inspiring. New words, new phrases, seem to leap from the connection of those that come before, and the sense of challenge is immense. Much as the cards of the Tarot were originally conceived as a tool for meditation and personal insight, later to develop into fortune telling and divination placebos for the masses, classic poetry may now have more meaning to the poet; but does that make it less valid? Is there room for such poetry in this day and age? By all means.

There is really no clear delineation between the old, and the new, the classic and the romantic, except that subjective analysis applied by those who critique, but do not write. A poem may rhyme, or not, may flow like the back-beat of an old blues tune, or bark like a pen of hunting dogs catching a scent, but either way, it is an experience.

In writing - prose, poetry, or non-fiction, there are patterns. Some are more easily spotted and captured than others. Few can give the true satisfaction of a sonnet that works. These are rare. My hat is off, in the modern genre poetry world, to Mr. Keith Allen Daniels, who I believe is hard to rival in the art of the sonnet in the confines of genre work, though he has sadly passed on. I think, too often, that we write poetry for genre publications without the deep thought we might give other poetry. Too many poems I read in horror related publications are repeats of grave imagery, or pleadings for the poor, guilty souls of vampires.

Darkness encompasses half of existence, and in that darkness there are patterns. Whether you choose the Classic, or the Romantic style of expressing these patterns, learn to observe them. Expand your concept of what is dark poetry and erase some of those lines drawn between genre and mainstream. There is horror in the mainstream…count on it. And I would further suggest that poetry is a good exercise for anyone who writes. The patterns and images of strong poetry are succinct, vivid, and powerful. These patterns can be manipulated, as in the classic forms, to fit the formats of the short story, or novel, and the economy of words and deeper thought given to each “beat” of those words, when read or spoken, can change the face of a paragraph, or a page, of fiction dramatically.

Whether you choose structure as the base, or the inspiration of a moment – or manage a melding of both schools, the one rule that remains is that the poem be true. You will know when you have hit the right pattern, and if the poem feels forced, or discordant, it probably is. The poet is the harshest critic of his own work, as is true with any great art form. The form will be there when you carve away the words that don’t matter. When you see it, pluck it out, whether it rhymes like Dr. Seuss or flows like Robert Frost on acid. When you have it, you will know.

Don’t let it slip away.

The images slip
Sliding away so quickly
Then die, pen skewered

DNW

I do a lot of playing in other people’s worlds. My professional writing career started this way, coming up with extensions for White Wolf’s ominously named World of Darkness setting. It continued with my first published short fiction, non-people-I-was-currently-working-for division, with a story called “Let the River of Death Wash Over Me” in an anthology of fiction for the Deadlands roleplaying game. (Cowboys. Zombies. Zombie cowboys. What could be better?)

And then, of course, I ended up at Red Storm, where my first job was to create an adjunct to a setting created by Anne McCaffrey, and my second was to pretend to be Tom Clancy on a regular basis. Not the smoking cigars, appearing on talk shows, taking deeply manly jacket photos part of being Tom Clancy, mind you. I got the “coming up with storylines for Tom Clancy videogames” part, which meant diving into a world that had – again – already been created, and which had an awful lot of fans who wouldn’t take kindly to a screwup. I’ve been doing that for over six years now, with side forays into other franchises and other characters that someone else might have originated – hello, Might and Magic – and it doesn’t show too many signs of letting up soon.

And yet, the odd thing is that I find a tremendous amount of creative challenge in doing this. I do enjoy writing my own stuff, and when I’m writing on my own time that’s obviously my first priority. But I find that when I took freelance RPG gigs in the old familiar setting, or when I sit down to work on a game that someone else originated, there are rewards to doing the work that have nothing to do with the
paycheck.

Part of it is that the spaces and characters I’m messing around with are, at least theoretically, interesting and cool. If they’re not, they generally don’t last long enough to generate expansions (for tabletop) or sequels (for videogames). So the literary playspace I get to crawl into is one that has, on a certain level, been proven. This creates expectations, certainly. Everyone knows what Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell) or Ding Chavez (Rainbow Six) talks like, acts like, and more or less thinks like. Wander too far away from the stuff that made these characters memorable, and the risk of a fan revolt becomes real. (So, too, does the risk of fan apathy, which is potentially more dangerous, both to the franchise and to continued employment.) Stick too close, on the other hand, and the fans risk getting bored. There had better be some variations on “Tango down!” or else your writing turns into a punchline, which really isn’t the sort of effect you want a tense counter-terrorism themed tactical shooter to create.

So those are the risks. But the rewards are there as well. It’s a chance to develop an already-interesting character or setting, to do variations on a theme and riff on what’s been done before. If there’s an established backlog of experience for a character, better known as the earlier games in the series, it’s something to draw on and reference as that character is allowed to grow. Knowledgeable fans appreciate the nod to their prior experience; new ones simply get the benefit of expanded character depth, and I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every iteration of the franchise. I can shade the character dialogue based on previous encounters with situations or NPCs and take it away from the strictly factual.

The other big creative tool that working on established material gives is boundaries. Franchises have hallmarks and definitions, after all. That’s what makes them specific franchises, not free-floating amorphous blobs of IP. Knowing those hallmarks, the rules of the world and of the people in it, allows me to focus my writing on what works and what can be polished, not on throwing wasted possibilities against a Teflon-coated wall of continuity. To put it another way, I didn’t write a lot of shiny happy fairy tales when I was working on novels related to White Wolf’s Exalted setting, because the setting didn’t support them. I did, however, hold as tightly as I could to the rules of the game, because they’re what defined character action and possibility in the setting. Breaking those rules would have broken the viability of the fiction in the world, and that would have defeated the purpose of the books. And by having those rules as to what the characters could and could not do – rapid-fire blazing arrows of divine wrath, yes; pseudo-Celtic harp strummery to conjure gods to stone circles with the elves, no – I defined the possibilities of the
action and the narrative.

By the same token, knowing the continuity and character limitations (physical and psychological) that others have established is a help and a challenge in defining what I do. Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear had a mission set at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so it made sense for me to keep the storyline of Rainbow Six: Raven Shield out of museums. Ding Chavez and John Clark have an established relationship in the Clancyverse continuity, so I could play on that when the characters interacted. Russian ultranationalists were the bad guys in the original Ghost Recon, so for the first mission pack I could simultaneously distance myself from that storyline - the villain was an expansionist warlord in Ethiopia who’d mounted a coup – while riffing off of it (the warlord’s aggressive expansionism had been kick-started by a massive weapons purchase he’d made from those same Russian ultranationalists, who’d needed cash to get their particular ball rolling). The world gets deeper and more coherent, the story gets more interesting, and what has gone before defines and enriches
the new work.

That’s not to say that there are no creative down sides to the gig. The property generally must be preserved, after all, which means bumping a character off (or even making alterations) is a big deal. The keepers of the flame and the keepers of the license both have things to say about what can and can’t be done, and so do the keepers of the budget. And in the end, it’s not work that I own, just work that I do. All of these things could add up to making my efforts nothing more than drudgework with pretty pictures.

I prefer to find the challenges and opportunities, though. I like the idea of existing fans finding something new and exciting with what I do in a franchise or a setting. I like taking an established character and saying, “What if?” and then following that through to wherever it leads. And I like, occasionally, the focus that comes from knowing what the boundaries are before I start. Not all the time, certainly, and not forever. But for right now, it ain’t half bad.

–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)
http://www.snowbirdgothic.com

by Janet Berliner

Used to be, once-upon-a-time, that interviews were exciting to give, take, and read.

“Hey, look, Ma. I’m important. They’re interviewing me for the Bazooka Times.” “Hey, look, Pa, they’re doing a piece about when you taught me to fish and you got mad at me and tried to drown me.” “Hey, look, Dumbo. If you’d hooked up with me instead of that gorgeous Übermodel, you could sit on the (rented) leather sofa with me and share the spotlight.”

I remember the first interview I did for the raw fear it evoked in me. I was eighteen, an intern for a weekly newspaper–the pride and joy of my mentor who was the Editor-in-Chief and did everything short of beating me with a Mighty Sjambok to keep me in line. This was in South Africa, where there were no personal tape recorders yet, no television at all because of its potential to corrupt the masses into believing that all people were created equal. There were no computers or word processors, even in America. Hell, there weren’t even ball-point pens. We used what were quaintly known as fountain pens with blue-black ink, the stains on our fingers badges of survival. My pen was a Waterman, given to me by my grandfather. I still have it, use it, treasure it.

I was an intern who rarely did more than make coffee and set type (by hand, with calipers), so being sent out to do an interview was a major coup which required multiple hours of instruction. When I was deemed ready, I made an appointment, got permission to take photographs, guaranteed that the person I was interviewiewing–a radio personality by the name of Morkel Van Tonder–would be given veto rights before publication. The interview was to be done as a Q & A and to include what is currently called FAQs, i.e., frequently asked questions.

There wasn’t a thing previously in print about Morkel that I didn’t read as prep for the interview, not just once, but over and over again. Among other things, he ran an audience participation quiz show where someone was chosen to pick a ticket from a large bowl for a small prize. I took my mother to see that and was invited to pull out the ticket.

I selected hers. Yes, it was honest, and not the only time I’ve done that. No, I have no explanation.

That was 1960. Fast forward thirty plus years to 1993. I was living in America and had been at both ends of a lot of interviews. We had television, tape recorders, computers–personal and otherwise. There were radio interviews, but not yet online interviews like the fabulous ones our own DNW has been doing in his journal. For television and print, make up artists airbrushed pretty people to look prettier; on television, prompters and cue cards destroyed spontaneity. Hey, even I was being interviewed on live television and conducting interviews with the rich and famous.

For the most part, I no longer did Q & A. Profiles were more my style. They were fun to write and to read and they enabled me to take advantage of opportunistic happenings like meeting and talking to Evel Kneivel in the middle of a Las Vegas casino, meeting Steve Lawrence (a delight) and Eydie Gormé (less of one) in the Green Room after a performance honoring lounge lizard extraordinaire, Buddy Grecco. Meeting them turned into stories, stories turned into profiles.

Yet, and here’s is the real reason I’m writing about this, there were two rules I’d never broken and have not broken in the years since then:

1) I still always offer the subject the opportunity to check my facts and insist that I be afforded the same courtesy when I’m interviewed.

2) With a prearranged interview, I always do my homework. A case in point: For a weeklong interview with Michael Crichton, I read six million of his words, including twelve versions of Jurassic Park and his Master’s Thesis in anthropology. I even watched the movie in several languages. Did he tell me to do these things? No. Was I glad I did them? Yes, particularly since he grilled me about everything.

So do your homework, check your facts, try to find a new angle (like my piece on Judith Krantz about “typewriter turn-on,” or my long interview with Ray Bradbury over what he claimed to be his first ever Chinese dinner), and be grateful as hell to any interviewer who obeys those rules when you’re in the hot seat. I’ve had more than one reviewer use jacket copy as the basis of a review of my work. That’s bad enough. But when they take hours of my time, then write a profile based on never having read a word I’ve written, it’s downright insulting.

Workshopaholic
by Terese Pampellonne

First of all, I apologize for not posting last month. Due to unforseen events, I was unable to post on time.

Anyway, I just plunked down a good piece of change to be a part of a Novel Writing Intensive. You’d think that after two years of an M.F.A. program I would have had enough of workshops. Or that having published a novel, (here’s the plug) The Unwelcome Child along with a string of short stories I would no longer need to pay for help. But I’m at a crossroads with my current project, and I think I could use some outside insight.

Some writers believe workshops do more harm than good, especially if you’re in the first draft phase. Opinions and critiques too early on can squelch creativity, and I agree. But there is something to be said about not only having to produce a certain amount of material by a deadline, but to know that material is going to be read and critiqued by other writers. There’s a level of competitiveness that takes place in these workshops. When someone comes in with an extraordinary segment of work, my first response is usually ‘Fuck! Why can’t I write like that?’ The second is ‘Everyone has their strong points, you have yours.’ But the third is always, ‘Get back to that computer and work harder!’

The trick to being in a workshop is to find the right one. First off, I’ve never found it helpful to be in a workshop where the mediums are mixed. When it comes to writing, I believe in segregation. Prose writers should stick with other prose writers, poets with other poets, etc. etc. This is because I believe the level of enthusiasm does not always cross over to different forms. For example, I’m indifferent to poetry so I might not be a good person to critique your poem. I could critique your screenplay, but since I’m a playwright I’m going to want more dialogue whereas a screenplay needs to be told in images. I once belonged to a workshop comprising of one screenplay writer, a writer working on an art table book and another novelist. Guess whose comments I found to be most on target? That also goes for genres. I think romance novels are silly (sorry romance writers) and I’m no fan of fantasy — I left halfway through the second Lord of the Rings, no, make that sprinted out of the theater all the while frantically dialing my husband on my cell phone to come rescue me. If I had to see one more dewy-eyed elf or the backside of a horse as it rode off into the distance I was going to lose me mind. The point is, although I would try my best to be objective while reading a novel of fantasy, my level of expertise and enthusiasm is not going to be the same as a fellow writer of fantasy.

Second, you want your workshop to be challenging. It may be ego-booting to be the most polished writer in the group, but it’s not going to help your writing. And chances are the people critiquing your work are either not reading it carefully, or you’ve brought in a piece that has already been worked over. So be honest with yourself. Does your piece need to be workshopped or are you there just to be stroked? Have the courage to bring in the rough stuff as in what you need help with most.

Third, keep in mind who is doing the critiquing. Do you respect their work? Are their responses helpful or just hurtful? You can usually tell how much time they’ve taken with your manuscript via the notes. If someone has read your work with care, it is quite possible there will be insights that never would have occurred to you, questions you’ve never thought to ask yourself and encouragement about something you were sure wasn’t working. What you don’t want is a line edit. Grammar and punctuation corrections are fine, but if that’s all there is then you know the person has no real interest in plumbing your prose (kind of sounds obscene, doesn’t it?) Not that I’m the Cat’s Meow, but I try and read something through at least twice before I write up a critique. I find it’s only through the second read-through do I usually have a handle on the work in question.

Fourth, how do you know when to take a note to heart and when to not? I know it’s hard to give up something you love, but if nine out of ten people are telling you they don’t understand something, chances are something’s screwy. This is not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes people don’t know squat. But try and be honest with yourself whether or not your resistance to changing something is because of a bruised ego. On the other hand, your book shouldn’t follow democratic principles. Opinion polls are for campaigns, not novels. In the end, you have to trust your gut instincts.

I realize that many of you reading this have been published many times over and are confident enough in your process and writing that you don’t have any need for writing workshops. Quite possibly you have great editors or really astute friends when it comes to reading your work. Unfortunately many of my friends are on different paths now . . . they’ve either grown brains or are busy growing families. When you’re trying to keep one two-year-old twin from biting the other, you don’t have the patience to listen to the complex plot line of a novel. Given this, I think the most valuable thing a workshop can give you is the opportunity to connect with other writers.
Perhaps that’s why every time I’ve decided no more workshops, inevitably I find myself signing up for another all over again.

by Jeffrey Thomas

On the grounds of Saigon’s sprawling zoo is the Museum of Vietnamese History, an impressive and fascinating place. A museum of any kind is pretty much the best place to put me, besides a book store. Here, I encountered a mummified body that sent my spooked wife out of the room (I reassured her by saying that the mummy would be standing at the foot of our bed watching her sleep that night), wooden stakes that had been planted in the bed of the Bach Dang river to sink invading Mongol warships (and I bet the Mongols said, ‘Dang!” about that), a number of giant stone dildos, er, “linga” fertility symbols from the Mekong Delta (my wife’s eyes grew in amazement when I told her these were meant to look like a “baby”, as she calls such appendages), and a Buddha with a gazillion arms. Hong is taking a course in nail care (which may come as a surprise to you – a Vietnamese woman working as a nail technician), and so I asked her how much money she’d charge Buddha for a manicure. She replied, “Ong Xa (husband), do not joke about Buddha.”

But the one item that really seized my imagination was a wooden statue of Buddha. The statue was wearing a kind of hat, and had one of his mere two hands upraised. Yet the wood had decayed considerably, so the hand was barely more than a misshapen mitten. And the face – well, there was only a hole there in the middle of a kind of swirly vortex, like a giant knothole. Another, smaller vortex was in the center of the chest. The placement of these holes was just too weird for me: the site of the face, the site of the heart. Could they have been there from its creation? Had the sculptor worked around them, worked them into his piece? But it seemed just too weird that an artist would purposely create such a grotesquely disfigured representation of a holy person. So had the statue been defaced (literally) during the war, the bullet holes having grown since then? Or were termites the sacrilegious vandals? Whatever the cause, the statue’s visage put me in mind of a very disturbing photo I once saw of a man who had lost all his face to cancer. And those two images became superimposed in my mind.

I wanted to take a picture, but the brochure and posted signs warned against them (even though I did sneak a photo of the giant “babies”), so I sketched the statue in my notebook later on. I knew I had to work this image into the novel I was currently plotting. This novel is called DEADSTOCK and is set in my future world of Punktown. In the story, the protagonist is a private detective who a decade earlier served during a controversial conflict called the Blue War. There are a few flashback sequences, and in one of these I have the protagonist – Jeremy Stake – encounter the clerical class of his blue-skinned enemy, the Ha Jiin. These clerics purposely deform themselves with a cancerous agent, so that over time their faces become obliterated in a symbolic giving up of personal identity. Thus blinded, during their prayers they wander their monastery feeling the contoured mosaic images set into the walls, in place of reading a holy book.

You would read this novel without knowing how I arrived at that idea, that image. I read other writers’ books without knowing the origins of a lot of their ideas. All that matters, of course, is how well these things work in the context of the story…but it’s intriguing when I learn a little about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Those “making of”DVD extras kind of facts, pertaining to an author’s creative process.

I pride myself on my imagination, but I don’t always just grab ideas out of the ether, and this is true of other writers – though their personal modus operandi and the images that resonate with them of course vary widely. Every person I meet, every conversation I hear, every place I go might become transferred to the written page through the distorting lens of my imagination. It’s not a laziness, it’s not that I’m reaching only to the nearest objects at hand. It’s that I am so thoroughly a writer that everything I digest must pass through a creative tract of intestine before it gets assimilated elsewhere. Everything that catches my attention, everything that I love or that I hate. Images, emotions, impressions. From a statue on public display, to the look on my wife’s face when we are intimate. I can’t help it. It’s all fodder. It’s all inspiration.

It’s a fascinating process. It takes me by surprise sometimes. I don’t go looking for these things. I didn’t go into that museum looking for ideas. But that Buddha raised his deformed hand as if to beckon me over, as if to whisper to my muse through the black hole of his face.

There’s an abandoned abrasives factory just down the street from me, its numerous buildings spreading out like a little ghost town. For years now I’ve taken my dog on walks through its parking lots and outer grounds, and my son and I have taken long walks into the woods down a desolate access road to view the most distant and secretive of these derelict structures. Yes, a wealth of impressions, filling me to the brim. How could it not be so? I first touched upon this setting in my novel BONELAND, but I really embraced it for my novella DOOR 7 in my collection THIRTEEN SPECIMENS. In that story, I endeavored to make the factory’s giant smokestack an imposing and sinister image of power, a kind of corporate “linga”, a gigantic evil “baby”. The little brick warehouse sitting in the middle of a sea of asphalt became a place where the protagonist hides on a night when there is a threatening windstorm of strange debris. A crushed turtle my son and I found on the access road…a mummified frog embedded in the tarmac…odd vines in the trees by the side of the road…a huge metal tank. It all became part of that story.

Oh, but they’re tearing it all down now, even as we speak, my wonderfully creepy factory. To replace it with…stores. Restaurants. Condos, and a park. Yeah, it will be nice for my son and I to walk to these conveniently located places. But there are stores and restaurants all over this town. There is only one ghost town factory. Sigh. Will these new places inspire images and settings in my stories? Maybe not – but my muse will let me know.

I’m best known for my Punktown stories, and while the general idea for that world was probably gestating in my subconscious for some time, it was one weird image that seems to have punched through into the bubbling black oil below the surface.

It was 1980 and my father was still alive, and driving me somewhere or another. I looked at another car, and its female driver had long hair. The sun made her eye sockets look as black and deep as a skull’s. The way her hair fell about her face, it looked like strands of it were pouring right out of her empty eye sockets themselves.

Unbeknownst to her, that anonymous woman became a Tikkihotto, one of the alien races that recur in my Punktown stories. They basically look like us, but in place of eyes they have these ocular filaments that writhe in the air. They see things in odd ways. Well, kind of like I do.

Why that should have given me this “eureka!”moment, an epiphany, I don’t know. But it did. That’s the way I digest the world. No wonder I have a constant upset stomach!

Let’s go back to Viet Nam. On an earlier visit there, outside the War Remnants Museum (which has enough ghastliness inside to humble a thousand horror writers), I met a man who was selling souvenir books, and who like all Vietnamese street vendors was very persistent, but he’s the only one who ever broke me down – because he was missing a number of limbs and one eye, and said an American land mine was responsible for his maiming. He insisted I shake hands with him (that is, he got me to shake his stump), which definitely cinched the transaction. We sat and talked for a while, as his English was quite good. Well, he made an impression. Cut to an excellent novel I recently read: LOST SOLDIERS, by former Navy Secretary James Webb (whose lovely wife is also named Hong). In it, Webb describes a beggar named Hai who I instantly recognized as the guy I bought a badly photocopied Vietnamese phrase book from outside the War Remnants Museum. I contacted Webb and brought this up, and he confirmed that the person I met was the same person who had inspired him to include him in his novel. In all of that huge teeming city of Saigon, we had both had an impression made on us by the same individual. (Well, with his tragic appearance he makes a strong impression.) I have no doubt I would have put this guy in a story myself sooner or later had Webb not beat me to it. But this was one of those instances where I could specifically isolate the source of another author’s inspiration for a particular detail; something he had observed in real life and incorporated into his fiction. Of course, all of Saigon has impressed Webb and found its way through his digestive process, and as I’ve said in an earlier essay, I’ve got a Viet Nam novel in me that waiting to find its way out (and a publisher who’s already interested in it, to put more pressure on me). But the way Webb sees Saigon and the way I see it, through our creative lenses, will be quite different. That’s the wonderful part. Many eyes can look upon the same city, the same object – like that wooden statue of Buddha – and come away with different impressions. To my wife, that Buddha was a ruined but still historical representation of the being to whom she prays. To me, well, he was a funky weird alien with no face – cool!

(Shh. One mustn’t joke about Buddha.)

So if you meet me at a convention or book signing, be on your guard. You might just become a Ha Jiin or a Tikkihotto in my next Punktown novel.

Huh. You should be so lucky!

(Admin Note - thanks to our lovely local cable provider, I’ve been without Internet access all day, hence the lateness of this post. My apologies to both Richard and our loyal readers!)

by Richard Steinberg

“If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing,” Kingsley Amis

And if the following annoys you, then consider me simultaneously repentant and satisfied.

Maybe it’s because I’ve just completed two of the most sweeping rewrites of novels I’ve ever done. Maybe it’s the result of some conversations (both private and public) I’ve been having lately. Could even be due to the winds which have been whipping through the Las Vegas Valley stirring up dust, pollen, and dysphoria . . . what Cicero called: “that perverse and fretful disposition.”

But I have become consumed with the “Why” of writing.

Why would anyone, myself included, ever want to be a writer?

Why do we write what we do?

Why do we, or should we, care so much?

I won’t pretend to be able to answer this for anyone but myself; am not sure I know all the answers as the questions apply to me. But I know at least one of them; and as I think about it, it seems to apply to each of the questions above.

Why?

Because I have to.

In all but one of the columns that have appeared here on STORYTELLERS, I have referred to a difference that exists between a “professional writer,” and a “creative typist.” This isn’t a judgment in any way, merely a differentiation. And I count myself as a professional writer.

Both groups contain published and unpublished authors who deserve and don’t deserve that publication. Both groups contain people who have been paid for their work and who have volunteered it. Both groups contain talents and no-talents, individuals of incredible technique and those who couldn’t spell organization, let alone use it to improve their work. Within both clubhouses there are people who are inspired, liberated, made whole by their work; and some who just like the sound of their own words regardless of whether that sound will ever be remembered or even considered at the time of their reading.

There are specific and compelling differences though.

The professional writer doesn’t distinguish the work that pays them in seven figures from the work that pays them nothing.

It’s not that they don’t prioritize projects, they do. Deadlines, research needs, known average writing production rates, family lives, personal health, social obligations and desires, and much more all figure into that prioritization. And I’d be lying if I said that a project that paid me three quarters of a million dollars didn’t get more consideration than that which paid nothing.

More consideration . . . but that’s it.

Not more importance.

Everything the professional writer writes, by definition, must be the best work they are capable of doing. Whether it’s a novel, a play, a film, a computer game, an e-mail, or a shopping list. Your professionalism DEMANDS this of you. Do I prefer some projects to others? Of course. Would I rather spend more of my severely limited time on money making endeavors rather than on what fellow contributor Janet Berliner calls: the work we do for the improvement of our craft as a whole. Bet your ass!

But, as a professional, if I commit myself to write, there can be no lesser levels for some projects than for others. It’s tantamount to saying that if you pay me, I’ll like you. If you don’t . . . I’ll acknowledge you (if convenient) with little effort and less commitment.

There’s also a secret little reason for the professional to hold themselves to this high standard on everything from novels to notes to the teacher: the more you force yourself to write to the highest standards possible (creatively, efficiently, consistently) the easier it will be to always write to that level. It’s the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.

We always write our best, meet our deadlines, and commit wholly to each work so that we always will.

There’s another distinction that separates the professional writer from the creative typist: the professional writer emotionally commits to everything that has their name on it.

A column for STORYTELLERS, the Japanese translation process of my novel: The Four Phase Man, one of the novels I just rewrote, a possible series pilot teleplay, a letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Review Journal, a note to my sister The Sister, a whiny e-mail to my agent . . . each and every one has my full attention, my full commitment while I am working on it.

The amount of time I spend on each is dictated by other things, the level of commitment is NOT!

They used to say of actress Norma Shearer that the worst thing you could say about her, was that if you asked her how she was . . . she would TELL YOU. This is also, to an extent, the professional writer’s creed. As many others have pointed out, we all have different time limits on our lives, but there must be no limits on the real emotional content of our writing. Our names (or pen names) are on the work; on ALL the work. How can any who would call themselves “professional” even think of allowing a half-assed effort?

Pick your favorite writer, consider their work as a whole . . . can you think of any of it that was substandard? You might like some pieces more than others, might even hate some of their stuff . . . but how much of their work can you say was not committed to?

So that makes it really easy to pick out the professional writers among them from the creative typists.

Now before I move to my last point, I want to restate something that is very important here: there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a creative typist! Many are fabulously successful, some are best-selling authors, and I count several among my closest friends.

But, to me, they’re like that brilliant magician who does SOMEONE ELSE’S TRICKS better than anyone you ever saw, or the sports team for whom making the playoffs is the goal with no thought (or particular desire) of winning the championship. In the end, they won’t affect anything . . . change anything . . . be remembered.

And therein lays my last point: the professional writer recognizes their responsibility to not only carry on, but carry forward. To effect change, to impact the world, to entertain – absolutely – but also to influence.

In the early 1940s, creative typists were writing competent, sometimes compelling war novels. They had the usual characters, solid plotting, effective action sequences, occasionally a love story, and always the flag held high and unassailable. They entertained (again, a writer’s first responsibility) but didn’t move their readers.

But there were a few, a golden few, professional writers on the job as well. One of whom wrote a book with few action sequences, no usual characters, no real love story; and a complicated plot revolving on the duel between the human spirit and the force of arms.

Every major publisher rejected this book, despite the author’s considerable fame. It was only published – with great reluctance – when the OSS (precursor of the CIA) published a few hundred copies for secret distribution in occupied Europe; forcing this professional writer’s publisher to go to press out of embarrassment.

The results?

When King Haakon VII of Norway, at a ceremony presenting the author of The Moon Is Down – John Steinbeck – with Norway’s highest civilian honor shortly after the end of the war, the following was true:

Throughout World War II in much of Western Europe, the novel was secretly translated, printed clandestinely, and cautiously distributed to a terrorized, enslaved public. It gave them hope, and courage; taught them how to translate faith into action, belief into triumph. The Nazis came to so completely fear the effect this novel (by this professional writer) was having on occupied Europe that over fifty people (that we know of, there are reports of perhaps as many as 150 more) were put to death for possessing, printing, or distributing copies of the novel. It stood – and still stands in Cuba, Colombia, Tibet, Paraguay, North Korea and other dark places in the world – as the most banned, yet most printed novel in the world.

A feat – created by commitment, dedication, and personal responsibility – that I just don’t think a “creative typist” could accomplish. A thing accomplished – to no small extent – by John Steinbeck’s talent and technique, certainly; but even more so by his never allowing himself to write in any other way than an effective, complete, and professional manner.

“One hasn’t become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating,” Niyi Osundare

Q: What is the answer to the Why of writing?

A: Because, in the words of Harry Chapin, professional writer extraordinaire: there only was one choice.

Believe!

By Jeff Mariotte

I’d been thinking for some time that I might write about outlines for this month’s installment. Joe Nassise touched briefly on the subject a few days ago. Then I saw this post by my friend Lee Goldberg, writing about another friend, John Connolly. In it, Lee writes, “In talking with other writers, I’ve noticed that the ones who hit the wall the most are the ones who make up their plot as they go along, preferring to be ‘surprised’ by their characters and the turns in the story.”

These incidents combined to make me think that the question of “Do I outline, or what?” has not gone away, and probably never will as long as writers write.

I’ve known authors who do it both ways. James Ellroy once told me his outlines ran far more than a hundred pages long. His books are incredibly densely plotted, with solid motivations for everything that happens, populated by characters with richly developed lives. It would be hard to imagine that he could work out such intricate plots without a very detailed outline.

On the other hand, my feeling when he told me that was that writing such a long, complex outline would use up much of the creative energy that I’d want to plow into the book itself. After creating a massive outline, would I still be interested in the project? Or would the joy of discovery, which is one of the main reasons I like writing, fade after the outline stage?

Another, purely pragmatic problem arises when I contemplate an Ellroy-ish outline. I’m not at the level where I can afford to write a book a year and still feed the family. I’m writing five or six books a year, plus comics and other projects. Taking time out of the year to write an outline that might run to 180 pages or so would essentially mean replacing one book with an outline, and you don’t get paid for an outline.

But if you analyze Ellroy’s plots, it’s hard to argue with his results.

Other writers, like the ones Lee mentioned above, don’t outline at all. These, often, are the ones who like to let their characters “run away” with the story. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like they mean that metaphorically, but like they become possessed by characters who make them type certain words on the keyboard in a certain order. I prefer to think of it less concrete terms—those characters are the ones who engage the subconsciously creative part of the writers’ brains, so they’re the ones whose stories the writers think about when they’re driving or showering or mowing the lawn. Having become consumed by those characters, when they get back to the keyboard, describing the events they’ve seen in their mind’s eyes becomes the first priority for those writers.

The lack of an outline, for these writers, means that they don’t have any outside mechanism with which to put the brakes on those runaway characters. And sometimes, of course, the characters lead the writers on a journey that turns out to be effectively plotted and builds to a satisfying conclusion. I have to believe, however, that in those cases it’s the writer’s innate mastery of structure that gets them to that ending, not the will of a character intent on dragging her author down an unmarked trail.

For my part, I use outlines, except when I don’t.

To be more precise, much of my work is in the realm of licensed fiction. In this type of work, outlines are required. The license-holder wants to know what the writer will deliver before the final manuscript is done. The license-holder’s primary concerns are that the book be an accurate reflection of the original property—that the characters in the book don’t do things the original characters wouldn’t (without a very sound explanation), that they and their world are treated with respect, and that, if the book needs to fit into a certain continuity, it does so.

Before a writer types in word one, that writer—unless he or she is overly eager and/or confident and/or facing a ridiculously punishing deadline—makes sure to get approval on an outline.

Even after that stage, the license-holder can, and sometimes does, change its mind (speaking of it as a corporate entity, although it isn’t always). In that case, a new outline has to be drafted and approved. No, the deadline doesn’t move back—such are the demands of licensed fiction.

Once that outline is approved, the book must conform to it in all particulars. If the writer decides some character needs to die for the plot to work, or someone else has to move to Ohio, the writer can plead to the editor, who will (perhaps) plead to the license-holder. Sometimes the change will be approved mid-stream, other times not. Either way, time’s a wastin’. Shoulda thought of that the first time around.

I also use a detailed outline when I want to try to sell something before I write it. In the case of my original teen horror series Witch Season, for example, I outlined all four books, in thirty pages, and included another couple of pages of brief character sketches. It worked, and I sold the series before writing more than the first chapter. When you do this for a living that’s a good way to go.

In that case, no one had to approve my outline but me, and I was free to change it at will. I had thought it out pretty thoroughly, though, and while thirty pages certainly didn’t cover every detail (leaving me plenty to discover on my journey) it did hit the important plot points that needed to happen.

My editor asked me to deviate from the outline once, because she had become enamored of a character who died late in the series. She hoped there was a way to save that character, so she didn’t have to say goodbye. I tried to help her out, but no matter how I looked at it, the character had to go. In that instance I stuck with the outline over my editor’s objections, and we both agreed that the book was the better for it.

When I’m writing purely on spec, though, I tend not to outline, at least not in much detail. I’m not sure why outlining is so difficult at those times. I wrote my horror novel The Slab with no outline, except that now and again I would jot notes about things I had realized should happen in upcoming chapters. Recently I completed another spec original, and ditto—I tried to outline it several times, got nowhere, and finally just launched into it.

I tend to write quickly, and once I have a first draft down that functions much like an outline. If I need to change things or flesh out some aspects and eliminate others, at least I have the skeleton down so I don’t forget what goes where. If I took a year or more to write a book, I’m sure an outline would be an absolute must, otherwise I’d forget what I meant to put in. Writing more than one project at a time, an outline is also handy, as a road map to where you left off and where you’re going.

So there you have it—the final word on the question, “Do I outline, or what?” The definitive answer is, “yes, outline, or what.” If you’re working on your first novel, I would say you should absolutely outline, because it might save you from spending six months writing yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. If you’re working on your fortieth, you might be a little more comfortable with issues of plot and structure.

But then, if you’re working on your fortieth, you’re probably also challenging yourself to keep improving your work. I think it’s rare to get to that kind of number without the drive to continually learn and re-learn your craft.

So maybe you should still think about outlining.

Or what.