Storytellersunplugged

(Since we had no extra essay left this month for the 31st, I split the extra day with Mr. Steinberg - We’ll resume our normal schedule on the 1st.)

By David Niall Wilson

Life is full of situations that make us consider and reconsider the decisions we’ve made. What if I’d gone to college straight out of high school? What if I’d gone to the Naval Academy instead of boot camp? What if I’d settled into writing in the eighties instead of talking about it on through until the nineties and had not missed that big horror boom? These are decisions and behaviors I can look back on and say I could have done things differently. We all have points like that in our lives…you can’t avoid them. Most of us who write incorporate them into the lives of our characters and the plots of our towns and worlds so we can work back through them, examine them, dissect and improve on them.

But that’s not what this essay is about. The fact is that not every turn on the road from here to there has a choice associated with it. Not a real choice. Lately I’ve given this some serious thought. In June I lost a job that was supporting my family pretty well. I was not happy with the job, but it paid the bills…there was no future in it, but it was something I’d come to depend on. Then I lost it. I lost it for a number of abstract and concrete reasons, but at the root of it all I lost it because it just wasn’t a viable choice. Not for me.

You can’t make yourself do something you are miserable doing forever. You can try, but in some way it will all break down – either YOU will crumble and become a shell of what you were, or the situation will break down and spit you out. There really isn’t a good, happy medium in a situation like that. People have integral needs, desires, goals and emotional anchors. These things can’t be ignored forever. They can be glossed over, pushed aside, nailed into coffins (they almost always rot or crumble, these coffins, but if not that’s where you’ll end your days) but they will not go away.

What I’m getting at is the intangibles that make life worth living. I have some beliefs that I know don’t work for everyone in the universe. What I don’t know is how any OTHER outlook could allow someone to survive. For instance, I was in a bad marriage a few years back. I had withdrawn into a junk-cluttered room by myself, had withdrawn into the Internet to live, drank myself silly and very nearly lost my career as a writer in the jumble. My friends wouldn’t visit because they hated the situation…my kids walked on eggshells not to send their mother off on a tirade…in other words…it wasn’t good. My philosophy on situations like that is that you leave. Others have told me in varying degrees, you work it out, you get counseling, you compromise, and I am here to tell you that these are stopgaps on the drain-flush highway – you are headed to the door and you are better off stepping through it on your own power. You get yourself into a situation you CAN live with and you get through. You clean up your act and you move on. Hopefully in the process you become someone that is of use to those around you once again. That’s what I did (I was fortunate enough to gain the support of the woman I love along the way, but with or without that I had to get out, or die – internally first, and probably physically much sooner than I believe is now likely).

I believe you do what you have to do to keep yourself sane. Writing is like that for me. I could turn off my computer, go to work and focus on contracts and computers and bringing home the paycheck every week – spend the rest of my hours working on the house and barbecuing steaks on the grill. I could have hobbies, take on a second job, learn to paint – start the band I never quite started – all of that seems logical. Logic, of course, has nothing to do with it. I could do any and all of those things, but while I did them I’d be thinking about writing. I’d be plotting and sub-plotting, wondering what might happen if I started putting words in front of one another again and worried about what will happen if I stop. The situation would break down and spit me out – or I would crumble and become something else – someone else – someone less than I am without the potential I feel whirling inside me every day of my life…

I don’t know if writing is a gift. If it is a gift, I don’t know that my own slice of that pie is large enough to be considered particularly special. All indications are that I’m going to make a very small ripple in the world of literature, but the voices in my head tell me otherwise, and I’ve come to trust them implicitly with my sanity. They may be full of crap, but they keep me going. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. Writing is an essential part of me…something I can’t deny, and would not survive well without. When a couple lives together for most of their lives, and one of them passes on…it’s a statistical fact that the other usually follows very close behind. When military men who have spent a lifetime at war are turned back into the civilian world, their life expectancy is short.

I’m fortunate that writing is not like a military career. Even if no one ever pays me for it I can keep writing. Even if I become one of those crotchety old guys who tell all the young folks what it was like in the day and go on and on about my sad, past successes without selling anything new, I can write. I can keep putting the words in order because I see how they should fit. I can do it whether it matters to anyone else or not…

But writing is like a love affair, and if the writing was to die? If I had to just live like someone who has no ability, or desire, to create? Well, I’d follow pretty close on the tail of the words…as they petered out and died, that would mirror in my life until there was no life left to mirror it in…and I would fade like old ink on low grade, acidic paper.

The answer to the riddle then — what does the title have to do with this essay? Simply this.

Why do I write the words, the stories, the novels, and the dreams?

Because they’re there, of course…because they’re there…

DNW

By
Richard Steinberg

“Spend all your time waiting For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay.
There’s always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it’s hard at the end of the day.
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins.
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight,” —Sarah McLachlan

Some peace tonight.

I’d like that.

Some . . .

On any night . . .

But unless I pay Mephistopheles or Archangel Michael (I’m never exactly sure which) their required tithes, I’ll have none. I’ll lay there in bed, my mind moving from vision to topic to recollection to fantasy with a blindingly random celerity that never slows; simply accelerates on and on and on until synapses warp, distort, and collapse from the weight and the friction and the heat and the hurt.

And I may lose consciousness . . . but never win sleep.

I’ve tried drugs (prescribed or otherwise obtained) tried exhausting my body with exercise, hammering it with alcohol, blinding my mind with meaningless sex or privileged lovemaking. I’ve counted sheep, royalties, tried warm milk, read extensively, consulted doctors, received counseling from professionals, amateurs, and most everyone who’s had a sleepless night or two.
But as the “cure” of the week fails, again, and the sun rises while the body breaks down just a little more and I face another day without replenishment I can hear Mephisto and Mike laughing at me while they share my last bottle of beer.

“Pay us,” they chortle, “and we’ll let you sleep.”

And the payment they demand – their vig on my sleep – is that I sit in front of the computer and confront those parts of myself I most fear, most despise, most deny, most loathe. They require me to rip open my soul as you would gut a fish; but instead of dumping the entrails into a handy garbage can, mine must be artfully arranged on a page.

Not just write, but write about truth.

There are nights when I put out fifteen or twenty high quality, entertaining, and necessary pages for the project at hand. But they are also emotionally void – technically superior but without meaning or emotion – and when I go to bed my mind ignites in a spherical explosion and sleep is denied.

Now I’m not arguing that there needs to be an emotional insight, discovery, revelation, or even minor angst on every page you write. There doesn’t have to be blood on every page for the Sanguinary Gods (or are they demons) of Writing to be sated.

But there does have to be blood at least beneath the skin of the project, whether it shows often or little, for them to be well pleased.

Now before you beginning muttering among yourselves – “Steinberg is reinventing hyperbole to make his point” – fellow contributors Janet Berliner and Stan Ridgley have known me for years and can back up my insomniac’s litany from their personal experiences. They’ve known me to be miserable, contentious, obnoxious, and depressive (combining rage with depression is a unique byproduct of my sleep deprivation) while I’ve been putting out vast quantities of good, solid, emotionally neutered product. They’ve also known me to be content, comfortable, and relaxed when I’ve only written a page or two of truth and substance.

So am I arguing that unless you wholly emotionally commit to the work with the fierceness of a zealot – or a Steinberg – you will be cursed by the Gods (instead of being granted peace and sleep) and will have your brain burn with the same intensity that the great bird picked (perhaps still picks) at Prometheus’s liver?

If you don’t put at least as much blood into the circulatory system of your story and characters as you do on your victim’s faces or pooling on the ground around them are you doomed to failure and moribund essay writing?

I wish that were true, but it’s not. A great deal of flat, uninspired, not living fiction is published or produced each year, and a great many of those achieve success . . . sometimes unbelievable success.

That’s one of the unfortunate truths in the dark and gooey heart of writing.

But this I promise you: nothing you write will affect or effect anything ever. Your work may be enjoyed, well reviewed, commercially successful – things to be desired and experienced absolutely – but in the end, the world your words passed over will show no signs they were ever there. It will be as if you and your work had never been.

Is it then your responsibility to be remembered, to change the world (or attempt to change it) to state for the record and for eternity what you believe and why?

Again, no. Success as a writer (by some horrible definitions) can be had without risk of actually having to say something.

But if that’s what you want, why did God (or evolution or whatever it is that you believe began somewhere and left man at a given demarcation along the way) give you a voice?
A voice by which you can challenge the heavens to strike you down, challenge your fellow humans to pull their heads out of their collective orifices; a voice that can praise or condemn or instruct or cajole.

A voice, if left unused, that can only condemn . . . whatever it is that you call “soul.”
One definition of sin (from within my own belief system) is: the failure to properly use a gift from God.

Now maybe you don’t believe in sin, or God, or even in gifts. That’s a discussion for a different time and forum. But I’ve never heard of a writer who didn’t believe in failure. Or who hadn’t experienced failure. Or who hadn’t been changed by failure.

Who hasn’t learned that failure is a thing to be avoided.

But how will you avoid it? Will you take no chances, play it safe and down the middle? Will you (in a nonplageristic sense) pass someone else’s story through a generic filter and your own fingers retyping without reimagining? Will your finished work represent nothing but airy haze which could disappear in a nano-second and never be missed?

Or will your readers sense a storm or a sunrise breaking just beyond that haze?
I am damaged; been broken apart and glued back together so many times that the barely seen, tightly glued joinings of the shards of my being wait impatiently for the right breeze from the right angle to completely fly me apart.

This next time, perhaps, irreparably.

I think that all writers – to one extent or another – are damaged individuals. Maybe, in the end, that’s what separates the writer from the creative typist. Simply the ability to feel the damage, throw wide open the overcoat, point to it, laugh or rage, and then examine it.

In front of God and everybody.

And when we succeed, oh . . .

Bram Stoker was a man unable, no matter how hard he tried, to control his “baser nature.” He drank himself into near oblivion nightly just to “keep the beast caged.” And had success as a novelist: Under the Sunset was his first successful novel, and The Snake’s Pass his second. Both almost completely forgotten, even in their time.

Then Stoker (at the urging of his friend and employer, the English actor Henry Irving) not only confronted his nature, but in so doing decided he had a right to that nature and owed no one an apology for it.

And he expressed that truth in Dracula . . . which will never be forgotten . . . and is a novel with blood not only flowing through the veins and arteries of the work, but through its spirit as well.
Curt Siodmak was a decent writer whose works such as People on Sunday and Platform 1 Does Not Answer were always well received, always made money. Siodmak told the story abut going into a publisher’s office the year after his second bestseller (Platform 1) had been published and having the man say to him: “Have you ever published anything?”

For years, Siodmak had concentrated on being the most commercial writer he could be, and it never felt right. And then, he decided he could no longer be silent about the coming cataclysm he saw brewing in the heart of Central Europe; and that regardless of its commerciality he must (“to sleep at night,” maybe that’s why I feel such a kinship to him) write about it.

And he expressed that truth in The Wolf Man . . . which will never be forgotten . . . a novel of personal pain and torment, flowing with the blood of a man who barely escaped the unreasoning persecution that took twenty-one of his family members.

Dracula and The Wolf Man, two classic novels of horror and dark visions filled with the fears, pains, mortal dreads, and deepest obsessions of their writers. Two novels that will be remembered forever. Two visions of two very different men who shined a light on that dark and gooey spot deep within themselves, snapped a picture . . . then had the guts to share it with us.
Mephistopheles, Archangel Michael demand it of me or they will not let me sleep.

This is an easier and more palatable explanation then my taking responsibility for punishing myself when I look away from truth in favor of the always comely “easy.”

Examining our own truths is not easy, seldom pleasant, occasionally pretty, mostly frightening. Translating that truth from deep within us to the page is a process that combines technique, a certain talent, and very real psychic bravery.

And each of us must find that thing which cues truth expression, hopefully in a less deleterious manner than mine own, and then must work to put that self-revelation in our writing. As overt as a storyline, or as covert as a character’s momentary but intense shiver on seeing an ice cream cone on the ground.

I am a damaged person, a writer seeking to heal himself and hopefully – at the same time – some small dark and gooey corner of the world.

I want to sleep; not in physical collapse or narcofied relief, but because I pulled it off! Because I put some blood beneath the page, regardless of whether or not there is any on top of it. Because I reached inside and pulled out some truth (however subjective that truth might be) and shared it with a dark and frightening world longing for truth . . . any real truth.

I want to sleep; because after sharing that truth, I am less damaged and the arms of the Angel wrap themselves around me and rock me to a blessed slumber.

“In the arms of an angel, Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there,” —-Sarah McLachlan

I hope to see you there.

Believe!

(Note: Our regularly scheduled essay for today would have been from the balding and somewhat curmudgeonly Stephen Mark Rainey…unfortunately, Mark had a lot on his plate this month (including a trip to my house where he watched bad TV and slept on the couch) — so we have a standby essay from Mr. Scott Nicholson (thanks Scott)) Tomorrow we will return to your regularly scheculed…well…schedule…)
–DNW

By Scott Nicholson

“Think globally, act locally” is not just a catchy environmental or political-action slogan. It’s also a handy guide to your promotional efforts.

Your publisher will take care of those national print ads in USA Today, billboards on Sunset Boulevard, and banners on Yahoo! Yeah, sure. If you believe that, I have a three-book proposal etched on a cocktail napkin to sell you. If you are one of the writers getting such treatment, you don’t need to read this article and I need your agent’s phone number.

Since your publisher is doing the big stuff (yeah, sure), you should focus on your own backyard. Even in the Internet age, every town in America still has a local newspaper and a local radio station. Your first novel release or writing award is legitimate news, and merits a fax if not a stamped letter. Despite the thousands of books released each year, you have done something that’s worth your community’s attention, whether or not they care about literature. When you think about it, an article in the newspaper is helping you target your audience: by nature of the medium, you are reaching people who read.

Get your hands dirty and write your own press release. Put the interesting information up front and lead with a hook. Editors at larger newspapers might deep-six the release, or pass it along to a reporter to pursue a feature story or interview. Often, smaller papers will run your press release as is, so make sure it’s the best writing in the entire paper. Send in a photograph with your release, and a copy of the book cover if you have one.

If you’re lucky enough to get a reporter assigned to cover you, be cooperative. They will sometimes have a preconceived angle for their story; maybe you’re the “eccentric mystery writer,” the “repressed serial killer,” or “the weird kid who liked spiders.” Go with it, because the story will be better if the writer is enthusiastic. And never complain if some tiny detail is wrong or looks bad in print. The only bad publicity is the kind that links you to child pornography or Pauly Shore. Besides, the industry has a saying: “Never piss off anyone who buys ink by the barrel.”

The radio audience is a little different, but most stations have morning shows or talk segments that require a steady stream of interesting guests. No matter if you cling to your self-image as a frumpy nerd at a dusty keyboard, remember that you are pursuing a fairly common dream. Everybody wants to be a writer, everyone has a book in them, and everyone knows it’s so easy they’re going to get around to it someday. You already have, so they want you to tell them how to do it.

Don’t let shyness or humility keep you from your moment in the spotlight. If you have to adopt a bit of a persona to get over your nervousness when the mic flips on, then go for the “author persona.” It always works, it’s always real, and you’ll find it much easier to relax. If your work relates to the local community, whether in setting or influence, then talk about that. Remember, audiences all over the world, in all media, are hungry to learn more about themselves.

If you happen to snag some time on the local cable TV access channel, then be prepared for a stiff, overheated chat with glaring lights that reduce your pupils to BBs. The hostess will know nothing about you or your work, and will care mostly about her own hair. You will look slightly deranged, and the camera will probably remain as fixed as a Chicago election. There’s a reason literature makes for bad TV. It doesn’t move much and most of the time it’s not that sexy. Still, do it for the home team.

Once you’ve become comfortable with the local outlets, simply expand those efforts outward. Go to your old hometown, your college media, regional newspapers, and any publications or broadcast shows that focus on your particular genre or subject matter. If you’re an expert in something, use it. If you’re photogenic, cash in before your looks fade. A former FBI agent or police officer writing a mystery novel is an easy front page in the Leisure section, as is a gravedigger who writes horror novels, or a sex therapist penning romances. At the community newspaper where I work, the editor has a sign on his wall: “What does it mean? Does it matter? Who cares?”

Answer those questions for yourself. “Buy my book” is not a story. Your personal experience matters if you make it matter. And if you don’t care, why should anyone else? Don’t think of it as glory hounding or grandstanding. Think of your work as a unique flower whose beauty must be shared, a secret message the world is dying to hear, or a different frequency of noise in an overloaded spectrum. Despite what many people think, it ain’t easy.

It means a lot, it matters, and everyone will care if you dare to let them.

By Chet Williamson

Once upon a time, when all the world was fresh and new and people made telephone calls across wires instead of the ether, people would write “books.” These books might be mystery, science fiction, horror, western, romance, adventure, or what have you. Once written, the authors sent them to publishers in New York, who, if the books were entertaining and readable, would publish them. In exchange for their work, the writers would receive financial remuneration called “advances” and, if one was lucky, “royalties.” The books would be placed in “bookstores,” quaint shops where the books could actually be picked up and inspected before being purchased. In these olden times, there were no sections for individual genres. All fiction was lumped together, often in alphabetical order. Readers, in order to find the kind of book they were looking for, had to search through many books rather than go directly to one section. As a result, these early readers would frequently find new books and new authors amidst their old favorites, give those books a try, and discover that they had found a new writer to their liking. Sometimes these writers became so popular that they sold many more copies than other books and became “blockbusters.”

But there weren’t many of them.

Still, writers could make a living by selling their works even if they were not blockbusters, and many were comfortable as part of what was called the “midlist.”

Then publishers deduced that they could market books more readily by placing them in different “genres,” i.e., the forenamed mystery, science fiction, horror, western, romance, adventure, and what have you. Now people who liked mysteries went to that section of the bookstore, and never darkened the doorstep of the science fiction, horror, western, etc. sections. It got to the point where books became labeled with the genres that the publishers identified them as, making it more difficult for readers who didn’t usually read in those genres to find them. Despite this categorization, some midlist books and authors “transcended genre” to find an audience outside their usual category, and these writers’ books became “blockbusters” as well.

But there were fewer of them.

And those “blockbuster” writers developed a “backlist” (not to be confused with the “midlist”) that took up more and more space on those genre shelves, so that many bookstores carried fewer new books by new authors and more backlist books by the blockbuster writers. By now, there were fewer spaces on the bookstore shelves for new writers and for midlist writers as well.

And still fewer books became blockbusters.

Midlist and genre writers started to see that the deck was stacked against them, and they sought comfort by more deeply entrenching themselves in the genres first built by the New York publishers. If these publishers no longer loved them, at least the genre readers did, and the genres became “cults” and the cults became “niches.” Small presses and booksellers specializing in niche fiction took these writers to their bosoms, published them and read them, and tribes were formed to celebrate these niches.

The good part was that their books became available to anyone anywhere with an Internet connection; the bad part overall was that while the total number of books sold in a year increased, the overall number of titles available also increased, so that fewer copies of each title were sold.

As a result a funny thing happened. Even the blockbusters no longer became blockbusters. Oh, there were exceptions (e. g., The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter), but most blockbusters sold fewer copies, in part because there were so many other choices.

All of which brings us to the concept of “The Long Tail,” as defined in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The image Anderson uses is that the books (or films or CDs) published in a certain year are like a snake: the blockbusters make up the head of the snake, but all the other non-blockbusters make up the long, long tail of the critter. And that tail is getting longer and longer. I confess I haven’t yet read the book, but I did read John Cassidy’s review of it in The New Yorker (July 10-17, 2006), and found it intriguing and alarming enough to want to seek out this study of niche marketing as regards the entertainment business, of which we are all, like it or not, a part.

It’s eyebrow raising when Cassidy reports that in 2004, 950,000 out of 1,200,000 books sold were selling fewer than 99 copies a year, yet those low sellers were totaling an incredible number of sales. Furthermore, Cassidy adds that a quarter of Amazon’s total book sales “come from outside the site’s top-one-hundred-thousand best-sellers.” That’s an enormous market, and most of us are part of it. We’re not part of that small head that’s comprised of the blockbusters, but we are part of that long, long tail that makes up the largest part of what people in this country are reading.

So, once most of us see ourselves as part of that long tail, the question arises as to how the writer is best served by and can best survive in the market that has created such a beastie. You’ll get no immediate answers or conclusions from me, but it’s something I’m going to be thinking about. I believe that when writers look at this “long tail” concept in light of the previous history of bookselling and the genrefication (or ghettoization, if one prefers) of fiction in the past (which I’ve described above with tongue firmly in cheek), it should give all of us pause.

How do our careers in general fit into this scenario, and, more importantly, how does our recognition of this “Niche World” change the next story we tell, or the very next words that we type? I suspect that I’ll go on as I have in the past, telling whatever story I want to tell, and hoping that it will find an empathetic editor, receptive readers…and now, of course, the right niche. At least that’s what I think, but as the publishing world continues to change, the snake’s head growing smaller, the tail growing ever longer, and the financial rewards becoming ever slimmer (after all, 99 books sold a year doesn’t keep one in water, let alone wine), we may see more and more writers abandoning the fields of fiction for film or TV, where the same ”Long Tail” concept applies, or for the corporate world.

However we respond to it, it’s scary out there and getting scarier. Snakes on a plane have got nothing on being made part of a long tail that never stops growing.

One of the things that concerns folks in the video game industry to a surprising degree is whether or not we make what can generally be referred to as “art.” Roger Ebert thinks that we can’t, which is his prerogative, except that he insists on looking at games as if they were films, which they’re not. Developers on projects from Indigo Prophecy to Façade to Shadow of the Colossus seem to think that we can, and offer up variations on gameplay models that serve as their arguments. Every year at the Game Developers’ Conference, there’s a debate on whether we can generate “higher” emotions, and honestly, whether we should even try.

(For a while, the debate was whether games could generate any emotion at all, which I always thought was a non-starter of a discussion. Games absolutely generate emotions – the joy of the particularly sweet snipe shot of your buddy in multiplayer, the frustration of failing a jumping puzzle for the umpteenth time, the rage at a spawn camper who takes you out lickety-split, the relief after winning a particularly tough boss fight – these are all emotions generated by games. What they’re not, however, are “higher” emotions like love or bravery or anything else that someone at a small liberal arts college could conceivably write a thesis on, and as such they’re not viewed as worth mentioning. To this, I say pfui. The stuff that comes from the viscera is just as important, and if you can invoke a good primal response, you’re probably doing something right.)

I can understand the fixation on art, believe it or not. Huge sales are nice, the adoration of 12 year olds is groovy, and knowing how to conjugate the word “R0XX0R” is something that my high school Latin teacher would probably appreciate. But with all that being said, our work is in many cases, still ephemeral. Because the medium of delivery is so important and the technology advances so fast, very few games linger in the general consciousness. There’s no discernable difference between a book printed in the 1960s and one printed today, but there’s a world of difference between an Xbox 360 game and one that was made for a PSOne. As the new consoles arrive, the old games vanish from mindshare and memory and most importantly store shelves, rendering it ever harder for them to become classics or reference points. A book that’s not read for a while can still be returned to and referenced. A game that’s not played is out of mind, and sooner or later there’s nothing around to play it on.

Even when the platforms don’t change out from under you, the evolution of what developers can do leaves games that are even a year or two old in the dust. New features, new graphics tricks, new tools, and a fan base that demands the bleeding edge all conspire to push older games into the background. It’s a nigh-immutable law of the industry. But when you’ve spent eighteen months or two years or even longer pouring yourself into a project, you want it to last a while in people’s minds. You want it to be remembered, to have everything you put into it taken out and recognized, and maybe even admired.

Ultimately, I find myself torn on the subject. Do I want the games I write to have a real impact beyond the blam and the kablooey? Absolutely. I want my characters to breathe and live. I want people to have to think hard about pulling the trigger on them or genuinely wanting to avenge them when they go down in a bloody hail of zap gun fire. I want my jokes to be laughed at, my references and in-jokes to be excavated and analyzed, and my storylines analyzed and assessed by the standards of game stories instead of whether they fit into the too-small shoes of cinematic narrative. So in that respect, I do want to make art, or something close to it.

Except that I don’t, and I particularly don’t want to spend my energy and effort on the deliberate attempt to create something that will acquire lofty titles. My job is to work as part of a team that, ultimately, ensures that people have fun. If I do that well, if I mesh with the team to create characters and situations and dialogue that bear weight and that the player can attach to, then I’ve done my job, and maybe, just maybe, this vanishingly rare “art” will fall out of it.

Or it won’t, but people will still have a good time, and will still remember the game as a pleasant experience. They might even want to see more of those characters, or want another chance to be those characters. That may not be art, but it is good writing, and it means I’ve done my job. The memories the game creates won’t linger in academic journals, but there’s something just as meaningful about a nation’s worth of “no shit, there I was” war stories about a game I worked on. And maybe, ultimately, those are in fact the first steps on the road to art. If they are, I won’t complain. If they aren’t, I won’t say anything either. Either way, there’s another game to make, another opportunity to push the envelope of my craft.

That is, after all, what it still is: a craft. Video game development is young, and serious game writing is even younger (or perhaps it just spent twenty years in suspended animation, between the heydays of adventure games like Planetfall and Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the current blossoming of writing-heavy titles like Knights of the Old Republic and God of War). As game writers, we are still figuring out our roles, our shared vocabulary, and the limitations of what we can and cannot do. We’re inching our way toward the video game equivalent of talkies, but we’re not there yet, and we’re still figuring out how to use our tools – words – to best effect in a non-verbal medium. Even the best of us have, I think, an imperfect understanding of what we can do, brought on by still-developing technologies and processes and team structures.

Does that mean art is impossible in a game? Absolutely not. The cave painters at Lascaux didn’t have the advantage of a Pearl Art Supplies store down the street, yet they still managed to turn out a few things that are worthy of the term. F.W. Murnau made art without the benefit of render farms, CGI, or (presumably) on-set catering. If poked, I’d be able to point at a few titles that I think will be considered “art”, once we figure out what video game art is supposed to be – Grim Fandango and Planetfall and a few others, with a double fistful of games like Planescape: Torment that come damn close.

But ultimately, do I think I, as a game writer, should strive to make art? Absolutely not. I should instead try to do the best job I can with the tools I have, and if art emerges, it will be wiser heads than mine that declare it so. As I told a table full of junior game designers and writers in Shanghai, we are not artists, not yet and maybe not ever. What we are is honorable craftsmen, perfecting what we do in hopes that others will find pleasure and perhaps something more in our labors. To actively seek something more perhaps risks shortchanging what we must do.

Besides, I like being an honorable craftsman.

by Janet Berliner

Being multilingual has enriched my life. I had many languages left to learn when my hearing took flight, which saddens me greatly. While I could still learn a new one, I couldn’t do it my way. The easy way.

Language, to me, is music. You hear a new piece of music, with strange and wondrous chords and lyrics, and that’s what it is. A strange, new piece of music. If you listen to it many times and, without angst, let it wash over you, magic happens. You begin to anticipate the chords, to sing the lyrics, to move to the melody.

Language is no different. If you remove your angst and let it approach you, you will suddenly find yourself beginning to understand the meaning of what’s being said. Will you know every word? Doubtless not. But you’ll understand.

Which leads inexorably to the next step. You walk into a café, sit down, and find yourself greeting the waitperson in their language, ordering in their language.

It’s a trip, for them and for you, a neat way to segue into my brother, who is a tour guide in Israel. Well, right now he’s a medic on the front lines, but when he’s not that, he’s a tour guide. His training for that took five years at the University. He speaks nine languages. My mother spoke seven, fluently. I’m the dummy; I only speak five, and not all of them fluently. I wouldn’t try to write in any one of them except English. That’s tough enough for me. When I speak Dutch, for example, I speak like a kindergartner. But I can communicate. In Portugal, I had to point and wave. Did it work? Yes. Pretty much. But it’s not the same.

All of which leads to–well to a lot of things–but the first one is the issue of bilingualism here, in America.

Now here’s the thing. If everyone spoke English the way she should be spake, I’d be all for it. Heck, let’s have bi and tri and quadrilingualism (making those up as I go). Unfortunately, we all know ’tis not so. Not judging by the manuscripts I read on a daily basis for several agents. I
remember one particular author, nice lady, who sent me a manuscript in the early eighties, when I was agenting. The Romance genre had
recently started to blossom, and that’s what hers was. Straight line Romance, no diversions, no sub plots. Her use of language, however, made me cringe. The example I’ve never forgotten is: “She (her heroine) had to go back to square root one.”

I was pleasant to her, but sent her to someone I knew who handled only
Romances.

That “Someone” used the square-root one manuscript, as is, to obtain an eight-book contract. The nice lady has been selling her books within the genre since that time, and not simply one per year.

So what do I know?

Probably not much, but that doesn’t stop me having a strong opinion.

Maybe I’m being too rough, too blunt, too “mean,” but I don’t think so. If you’re trying to write and want to be published in English, the fact that you made a sale despite inferior use of language, doesn’t make it okay, and the fact that English is your second or third or fourth language is irrelevant.

But here’s the real problem. The BIG problem. Many of the readers at publishing houses, the ones who tell their bosses not to bother with our work, don’t have a frigging clue. Yes, some of them are Vassar grads, but others are coffee boys, unschooled and recently promoted. Not only that, don’t count too heavily on the likes of Vassar.

I recently took on a one-on-one editing/teaching job. The book we’re working on is a Civil War novel, the writer someone I taught more than twenty years ago. He’s an extremely bright and well-educated man. As someone educated in the “Colonies,” my focus upon the Americas was minimal (as was any American’s when it came to Africa). I knew next-to-nothing about the Civil War; Americans know as little about the Boer War.

My point?

I choose to learn as much as I can about as much as I can. Most other people (no, not you) don’t necessarily make that choice. I’m Jewish but chose to learn about many religions; I try to read translated books along with the originals (Mein Kampf was a case in point when writing MADAGASCAR MANIFESTO.)

Most people just plain don’t do that, nor do they care about speaking or writing correctly. They’re not taught to do it and they’ve never learned
to care.

Once upon a time, in the long ago and very far away, I was learning English at an all girls’ school called Micklefield. We wore pastel pink dresses. Any style would do, as long as it was pink. Navy blazers and panama hats topped things off. As part of our syllabus, we did a damn fine production of Macbeth. I was all of 8. I understudied Lady Macbeth but was cast as one of the witches. Fine type casting, if you ask me.

Thirty or so years later, my daughter was reading Romeo and Juliet in an advanced lit class at Jr. High in Cupertino, California–the very heart of Silicon Valley. She was required to write a paper and did so, without any help from me. It was definitely a solid A paper, but was given a C-. She
Was mighty upset. Not me. I was livid. I suggested she ask her teacher to explain why he had given her a C. She wouldn’t ask him, so for the first and only time in her schooldays, I marched myself into the classroom.

You’ll love his answer: “She answered the question from the play not from the movie. I showed them all the movie. She should have answered it from that.”

Resisting the urge to strike him dead, I asked: “Mr. Pimplehead. Have you actually read the play?”

“I don’t need to,” he said. “I’ve seen the movie.”

Yes, Friends, he was fired, but most of his clones are not. They’re right there, in the classrooms, teaching generation after generation how not to speak or write or understand the English language.

I have four grandchildren. One of them is reading, another is beginning to sound out words. I write little stories for them, but those won’t be their primary influence, nor will the fact that my daughters speak and write English well (one is a technical editor) and read a great deal. That’s all wonderful, but their greatest influences are bound to be their peers, their teachers, books and televisions.

Unless something changes dramatically in this society, I can only say, G-d help them all.

By Stan Ridgley

“You have trouble with relationships.”

That was Ruth, my first agent speaking to me.

That was back in the mid-90s, when hope ruled me and I thought everything was possible, and that the world was waiting for me and my stories, global fingers rapping bored and impatient, anxious for me to entertain it as it had never been stimulated before.

I had completed my first novel. I had finished this anvil of a masterpiece.

And I had an agent.

A New York agent, by golly. That was a decade ago and three agents back. And this agent told me that she could not stop reading my novel. It was a thriller. It was exciting, rich, robust. Muscular prose and a gripping storyline.

What was that first “men’s thriller” story?

Unpublished, is what it was.

But it was also this and it was also that. A confidante read it and dryly commented that its high concept was “Everything Stan thinks about.” At 185,000 words, it well could have been.

It was not bad, it truly was not. But it had lots of problems. Preaching was a big problem, but not its worst. Its worst flaw was what my dear agent told me directly and unbuttered and unsugared.

“You have trouble with relationships.”

Catastrophic trouble, apparently.

Wonderful characters who lost all color as soon as it was time to think, ponder, interact, emote. Interesting characters who turned to unfinished pulp not even good enough to be called cardboard.

Characters that stiffened when the action began to thin.

Characters that grew brittle when they required anything resembling sincerity, or depth of feeling, or vulnerability, or raw emotion.

Well, not all emotion. I could handle anger fine. Did it well. Hate, rage, envy. Most of us probably can.

Hate is easy.

And it isn’t difficult to find anger, is it? Or rage. We can do that to ourselves quite handily. And it requires no giving whatever. It is easy. Childlike.

Such a simple and self-indulgent emotion. In some people, I think that it serves as the emotion of first resort. At times, it probably substitutes for accepting truth. About ourselves.

Yes, anger is easy, I think.

But love?

No, not love. Not romantic love.

And certainly not romantic love played out in a scene between two people.

That is not easy at all. But I speak only for myself.

When you write that way—about romantic love, I mean—all the fears of being called schmaltzy, maudlin, cloying, or syrupy elbow their way front and center. The sense of vulnerability of putting yourself on the page becomes acute.

Aside from that, how can you write about something that you do not understand in the first place? Something that you simply know about two-dimensionally, from reading someone else’s work? Work that might well come across as schmaltzy, maudlin, cloying, or syrupy.

See? See how the cynical urge to kneejerk criticize is right there on the tongue?

Anger is easy. Pain, heartache, yearning, sorrow, love are not. Not for me, anyway, because I “have trouble with relationships.”

Love? Love is tough.

And that’s why love is avoided or ridiculed or dispensed with in some quarters, my own included. That’s my opinion, of course, which is the only opinion I have, flawed and torqued though it might be. Dispensing with love and romance in my storytelling became routine.

I recall that I would contrive anything to keep my characters from slipping into anything resembling a romantic situation, to the extent of creating an assassin—complete with backstory—to burst in and interrupt a possible tryst, introducing a thoroughly new subplot that added yet another 10,000 words of furious, yet loveless, action.

How can you write about love you do not believe in? And your disbelief has nothing to do with volition and everything to do with ignorance. You do not believe in it because you have not experienced it. And you scoff when a few persons may utter, “You will know it when you feel it.”

How obliquely bleak is that? Sounds like holy-grail doubletalk to me. Does it you?

It is so easy to not believe in love. Perhaps it is a self-reinforcing tendency that creates a hard external shell, a buffer against anything that might cause pain. Perhaps endless chin-scratching head-shaking repetition leads to a calloused heart.

As the years ease by and laugh-lines deepen to fissures and anxieties replace dreams, perhaps it is something as mundane as growing cynical.

Growing sour.

Bitter.

Hurt.

And perhaps you begrudge others the open display of what you, yourself, do not understand. Or have simply forgotten. Like a child, you ridicule it as “mushy.” Or as we grow more sophisticated, we refer to a more mature kind of “love” that is more controlled, less intense, more mellow, less fevered. Staid.

But that is not really love, is it?

That’s just coping. Settling. Letting time pass in the least hurtful and least vulnerable way possible.

When, exactly, does one stop believing in love?

That, of course, is a self-centered question, an extremely self-indulgent question, since there likely are multitudes of folks who never stop believing in love. In fact, I am certain of it now.

So I presume that I address my rhetorical query to that self-defining group of unemotional, “mature” folks who totally control their feelings, believe that being “in-love” is transient rather than transcendent, and that it may simply be an ephemeral state of mind that passes so quickly that its very unimportance is such that it need not be discussed. It remains little more than a distraction, really, from the real business of life.

And what might that business be?

Dentistry?

Lawyering?

Soldiering?

Bridge night?

Mergers and Acquisitions?

So I wonder. When did I begin again to believe in love? When did the door creak open for me?

I do not know, exactly. But I do know one thing with utter certainty.

Love hits suddenly.

Love hits like a firestorm, a raging conflagration that consumes everything before it, setting everything ablaze in a fury of white heat. Quicksilver lava with an attitude, scorching a path with sneaky speed. Devouring lifeforce at an incredible rate, like an F-111 on afterburners.

I do know that when you are in love, it compels you to share it with everyone you meet. And depending how you do it, it can be endearing or it can be insufferable.

I have noticed that someone falling in love somehow believes it is the first time that anyone has fallen in love, and that it is a feeling unlike anything anyone has ever experienced before in the history of humankind. They know intellectually that this is, of course, ridiculously untrue.

But it does not matter. So many things do not matter. It feels that way. Well, perhaps I generalize to a fault, but if I am wrong. . . . then I am simply wrong and have no apology for it.

When love strikes, it is as if the change is in the world around you and not in yourself. Yes, the world itself has changed, altered dramatically. And that is such a self-absorbed way of looking at things, but inevitable to the affliction, I think.

Or, at least that is the way it is with me, and I do not believe that I could be unique in that respect. And so it seems that the world behaves differently. The rhythms you never before noticed suddenly resonate with meaning.

The love songs once scoffed-at, if ever before noticed, suddenly seem composed especially for you and your situation. They speak to you. You understand their language.

Now.

Even those songs composed decades earlier.

Surely these beautiful ballads must have been composed with you in mind, inspired by a premonition that you would blossom at some point in the distant future and that you would need that song to provide you a release of feeling that you could not express otherwise, lest you burst.

And poetry! Love poems!

Poetry and plays and plots centuries old are no longer cliche, no longer ignored. No longer words on a page or actors on a stage. Love breathes life into words, and the words become reality. Lord, you begin to believe the words were written about you!

And if you did not appreciate the universality of at least some of our human experiences, then you begin to understand and celebrate that understanding. And you begin to wonder if there are not other senses, experiences, words, ideas, concepts that speak to us over the years.

Perhaps there is wisdom in tradition. Accumulated wisdom. Some wisdom, at least. That is a topic for another day. Maybe.

But does not all of this self-indulgence have the quality of an adolescent discovering the concept of “self” for the first time? Looking at one’s arms and legs with wonder, and turning inward to examine one’s thoughts, feelings, and unarticulated yearnings, and fruitlessly trying to separate the analytical mind from the very mind that is being analyzed?

That type of analysis is foredoomed by the uncertainty principle, as poor Margaret Mead discovered in her study in American Samoa. The uncertainty principle posits that the presence of the observer affects the behavior being observed—and self-analysis by a lovesick soul could be the archtype example of it. And so, too much introspection might lead us astray. Just as too much analysis of love’s siren call might destroy its magic.

Regardless, the bloom of love seems always new and fresh to the uninitiated, and yet it travels along a well-worn path that humanity has trod for centuries.

But it is just in these moments of introspection—probably too many moments—I wonder if given a choice, who I would rather be. Would I rather be a man afflicted and in love’s grip, or would I want to be a part of the multitude of head-shakers who lament such seeming addlepatedness?

Or perhaps there is still another group, quite large and in the middle, folks who suffer gladly the odd behavior of the man or woman in love, for it is something to believe in. Oh, they may not believe in it themselves, or they may have loved and lost, or they may be “beyond” that sort of thing.

But they recognize it as something beautiful and sweet. A brief, shining recrudescence of something magical and innocent.

And in a world so ugly and coarse at times, there is just not enough beauty and sweetness and innocence to go around.

Beauty and sweetness and innocence that embody an incredibly powerful force.

Love.

And how powerful and irresistible a force love must be if it frees one from healthy constraint and prudence and unleashes one to use words like “recrudescence” without apology, without qualification. And without the excuse that one is simply searching for a word to rhyme with “effervescence” or “quiescence” for use in a limerick.

No, I have learned that love is not to be trifled with. You embrace it, protect it, treasure it, enjoy it, and nurture it. If most others learned that long ago, then I plead your patience with the pleasure I get from savoring that datum.

“You have trouble with relationships.”

Perhaps I do, but at least now I know why. Or I know why I did. And maybe I still do in my writing. But even now I am subjecting myself to an appropriate remedy.

It is a remedy indeed appropriate to one who avoids romance in his stories. I am 40,000 words into my latest project. . .

. . . a romance novel.

It likely will turn one of three ways.

A stilted, wooden, caricature of every romance novel ever published and a clone of every one ever rejected — syrupy, maudlin, cloying, yet simultaneously bereft of any genuine emotion.

Or, a weird experimental project in which two sharply drawn and interesting characters, filled with leonine ferocity and lusty passion, never seem to find themselves in a . . . romantic setting. Interesting in an abstract way, but ultimately unfulfilling and jejune.

Or, a decent story.

A decent story, with a rich, multifaceted, yet conflictual romantic relationship that deepens and grows more complex by the chapter, ending with satisfying closure, two people finding each other, understanding each other, and believing in the magic and majesty of love, whose power can transform this world from a barren monochromatic landscape of cynicism, violence, and sorrow into a kaleidoscope of color and enchantment, passion and promise, desire and delight.

Wish me luck.

I need it.

By

Richard Steinberg

“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them,” Catherine Drinker Bowen

If you don’t like this column, blame my fellow Storytellers contributor, Dave Wilson; he’s the one that set my mind wandering in this direction. If, on the other hand, you like this entry, feel free to give me all the credit.

See, that’s what writers do. We mine strangers we observe, people we encounter, people we have been or would’ve liked to have been, and particularly our friends, for the shining ore that powers our work. The characterizations that shine head and shoulders (although the actual height of any particular shine is immaterial, I suppose) above the rest.

Strangers, personal fantasies, brief encounters all serve a purpose, all are extremely helpful; and in a previous column (Possession: Demons I Have Known) I wrote about the art of “soul reaping,” bottling elements of people you encounter to pull out of the jar when you need them. But the role of friends in your writing, well . . . Catherine Drinker Bowen’s quote gives just a hint of the possibilities your friends might provide you.

Just a glance through my e-mail address book (I’m almost afraid to go to the paper Rolodex) reveals:

An Argentine Revolutionary Journalist . . .

A star of International Cabaret whose Dad hung out with Errol Flynn . . .

A cloistered Nun who was raised to be a Jewish American Princess . . .

A TV News Anchor at the height of their career choosing to return to college . . .

A Movie Star who chucked it all to raise her toddlers and become a novelist . . .

A brilliant and beautiful Program/Project Manager who lives to be with the Masai . . .

A former Executioner for a Warsaw Pact nation . . .

Three Alcoholics . . .

Four former Addicts . . .

Six current heavy drug users . . .

Eleven, count them: eleven divorced parents.

There are more of course. There’s the Sexual Rapscallion, the Ego Maniacal Children’s Counselor, the Politician afraid of crowds, the Good Man sure he’s bound for Hell because he once cheated on his wife, the Good Woman who would never cheat on her husband but writes sexually explicit e-mails to strangers.

And, of course, Dave Wilson.

Writers, it seems, are drawn to these people. Their appeal to us is almost universal . . . what an enormous reserve of characters to draw from; whether we consciously articulate that or not. Our appeal to them? I think it’s as simple as the fact that we listen in a world that is largely hard of hearing. And being heard – to anyone – is one of the greatest gifts possible.

There’s the classic story of Scott Fitzgerald visiting a Long Island Country Club in the thirties. He arrives late, and apologizes profusely to his host.

“Nonsense, dear friend,” his host tells him. “We filled the time by recalling the tragedy of when dear old Gordie fell asleep in the middle of the whist tournament.” Everyone nods seriously, and Fitzgerald suddenly realizes that the line is not a punch line. It is/was a momentous occasion among these people.

“What did keep you though,” the host asks.

Still trying to picture the tragedy of Gordie falling asleep, Fitzgerald replies off-handedly: “A friend tried to hang the family dog last night, and after his little girl bit him in the knee I had to go down to the Police Station to bail out his wife.”

“The wife,” his host asks, stuttering with incredulity. “Why the wife?”

Fitzgerald accepts an offered drink from a passing waiter and sits down. “Yes. She tried to kill my friend for ruining their daughter’s dental work.”

F. Scott recalled Sheila Graham telling that story one night at a party, in order to illustrate the shallowness of Long Island Society. But he wrote in a letter to Ernest Hemingway:

“I looked around the room at a dipsomaniacal pervert, at an eternal adolescent in his seventieth year, a millionaire several times over who steals soap and towels from the studio washrooms, and one of the leading attorneys of our time who checks the laces on his shoes every two minutes or so, and wondered how I could possibly fit in here? Then Sheila said: ‘Scott, tell them about your new book;’ and of course I knew.”

Now, admittedly, I go to great lengths to disguise my friends (and family) when I borrow them for something I’m writing. I’ll play with gender (actually, I LIKE playing with gender) race, age, occupation, societal position to make sure they’re not recognizable to the world at large beyond being a “type.” But where I take physicalizations and moments from people in the world, I take much deeper insights (from my own parochial perspective) on my friends. And almost inevitably, shortly after the book, story, whatever comes out, those friends bury their noses in my words like bloodhounds searching themselves out.

And – almost universally – they find themselves . . . in the WRONG CHARACTER!!!

“You really nailed me,” the milquetoast cop says of a bold character based on someone else.

“I’m really angry with you, I would never say such a thing,” the sexy Weather Girl says of the mousy librarian character based on a different friend.

“How come I’m not in the book,” a dear friend once asked me when the character I based on him not only acted, talked, and lived like him . . . but also LOOKED LIKE HIM; and was unrecognizable . . . to him.

Now surrounding yourself (or being surrounded by, I’m never sure which) with people whose lives are always a beat off of normal rhythms has a price to the writer. If you’re a good friend – and I work hard to be – you feel your friends’ pains, torments, giddiness, celebratory orgasmic successes, and depth defying depressions right along with them. You want to help, to reach out to them and work to solve their problems, share their joys, and signal a direction to the lost or wandering aimless.

And it hurts when you can’t; although often it increases the quality of your writing.

And sometimes that hurt can be so intense it can stop, rather than enhance the writing.

We’ll call her: Zan.

Zan and I were lovers on four separate nights and one afternoon, spread over three or four months. We were friends for three years beyond that. She was a recording artist of some (not much, but some) repute. A woman who could do anything. Brilliant, talented, intelligent, beautiful, filled with reservoirs of love almost beyond description.

Except for herself.

I once met her (after one of her shows) at her favorite dessert bar in Schubert Alley, after witnessing her not only raise her performance to a hitherto unknown level, but seeing the audience respond with a thunderous ovation that seemed to last forever.

But when she came in, she sighed heavily and said: “They didn’t like me tonight. And they were right.”

Just so you get a fair picture of the woman, she was also one of the best, most charismatic, sexy, profound, funny and alive people I’ve ever known . . . when she wasn’t deep in a pit of her own digging.

I moved away and we fell out of touch. But her spirit and agony stayed with me so much that I endued the lead character of my novel – The Believer – with as much of her as he could hold. The character was male, younger, in a different performance field with different problems in life. But the character was still – in so many ways – Zan. I dedicated the book to her.

I finished the first draft – good but in no way ready for the publisher – put it aside for a while, then got sidetracked into other projects. Several years later, I returned to it; and after a rereading decided to do the rewrites that it deserved. I remember taking a break from working on the second chapter to check the news on-line and seeing the headline:

NY SINGER TAKES OWN LIFE

Being a fan of New York singers, and counting many as friends, I clicked on the link to see who it was.

It was Zan.

“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them,” Catherine Drinker Bowen

I couldn’t work, couldn’t look at the manuscript let alone rewrite it. Zan oozed from every page, and each reminder was an accusation! I had failed my friend. I had stolen parts of her soul for my novel but hadn’t been there for her when she needed someone, anyone to be there.

I was ashamed . . . but I was also on deadline, albeit self-imposed.

After two days I began again; setting my computer to play music randomly; except hers. Nothing came, absolutely nothing of any worth or value. Every technique, every trick, every writer’s ploy to get moving from a standstill failed.

Then my computer started playing a song called: Ship In A Bottle. And I began to write. Other songs came up and I was unable to work. Then: Breathing came up and I worked again. They were from an album sent to me by a friend (an Aussie Zed Special Forces Commando whose hobby was women’s scarf design) and the singer’s name was/is Amanda McBroom.

I not only played that album constantly, but bought her others and finished the rewrite (successfully) to her music. I sent her a note thanking her for her help, telling her how she had saved my (and more importantly, my book’s) ass; and telling her the story I just related above. To my surprise, she responded; and we quickly became friends.

Amanda is the antithesis of Zan; her voice soars with a latent belief in the future in the midst of the most depressing ballad. She is constantly positive, saucy, encouraging, uplifting, devilishly playful, and gently patient. Once, early in my Wilderness, when I bitched to her about how my career was stalled and starting to sink and everything about the arts sucked big time . . . she sent me pictures of baby ducks, puppies, and kittens. I’ve also seen her face bad times – personal failure – with about seventy-two hours of mourning and then getting back up, dusting herself off; telling her critics to “fuck off” as she started again.

The Believer is now dedicated to both of them. Two women who represent polar opposites in the rainbow of a writer’s friends.

The writer’s necessary world of interesting friends.

I just glanced at my paper Rolodex. We can add in:

A Norwegian inventor; a man of great precision who has lost every signed book I’ve ever given him.

A retired NYPD cop, who has this tendency to drive on the sidewalk.

There’s a Cocktail Waitress in Las Vegas who knows she is going to be the next Marjorie Kinnan Rawlins . . . except she’s afraid of nature.

And Dave Wilson.

“What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind–the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship,” George Eliot

Welcome to my world, all my dear friends.

Believe!

By Jeff Mariotte

I once worked for a comic book artist who, when he decided he wanted to be a professional comic book artist, set himself a schedule and put in eight hours a day drawing comic book pages. By doing so, he accomplished two significant things: he learned that he could, indeed, handle the grind of a daily stint at the drawing board, and he created a portfolio of samples that got him work in his chosen field. Today, he’s one of the most popular and successful artists in the history of that medium, and his popularity shows no sign of waning.

I’ve also known people who wanted to be writers, but whose primary efforts in that direction consisted of hanging around bookstores and coffee shops talking about what they would be writing, if in fact they were writing instead of talking. Now they still hang around coffee shops. Fortunately for them, the explosion of big box chain bookstores has resulted in many stores having coffee shops right inside, saving gas money—a plus when these folks are spending more on coffee than they’ll ever make writing.

The difference is professionalism.

Also drive, determination, and probably talent. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s take talent for granted. That’s less controllable than the other factors that go into making a professional—it can be honed, strengthened, but I don’t believe it can be acquired through sheer force of will.

The aspects of the job I want to talk about today, however, can be. Through my three-part connection to the world of publishing—as bookseller, editor, and author—I’ve seen a lot of behavior, professional and not, and I’m here to tell you that acting like a pro can have a positive impact on your career, while acting like an amateur can often keep you at that status forever.

As a writer, your goal is to sell to editors (and, via that route, ultimately to readers). But the editor is your first customer.

Talent, as I said, being a given, you might well be able to sell to editor A the first time simply by writing a good book. Beyond that point, though, it would serve you well to remember a few facts about editors, and behave accordingly.

Editors—like the rest of us—are very busy people. At the lower-to-middle echelons of publishing, they are vastly overworked, have few assistants to help them deal with the day-today paper pushing their jobs entail, read manuscripts at home, on the train, on the john, and they are not paid well enough for all the hours they put in. Nonetheless, when they really love a book they shepherd it through the various processes and dearly want it to succeed in the marketplace.

If you, as the writer, act like a professional—by which I mean meeting your deadlines, keeping a line of communication open that respects their schedule and the other demands on their time, respond promptly to editorial queries, page proofs, etc., and have reasonable expectations of the editor’s role in sales, promotions, and advertising—then editor A might be interested in your next book.

If you’re a pain in the ass regarding any or all of those things, then (unless your sales are stratospheric, in which case you can disregard this whole essay), then editor A has a big stack of other submissions that might seem a lot more interesting than your next project.

Editors are interesting people. They spend their time working on good books, they know great stories about writing and publishing, and they’re fun to hang out with. I wouldn’t, however, recommend getting roaring drunk with them, for instance, because you don’t want to do or say something in an inebriated moment that’s going to color your professional association with them. Remember: the editor works for the publishing company, not for you. His or her first interest is keeping his or her job, and sometimes that will require making decisions you might not like or agree with. The editor wants to keep the company in the black, not throw millions in your direction just because you’re pals. Business and friendship don’t always mix, and editors can be put into very difficult positions by trying to force those two relationships into one box. The two editors I know best socially, I have never sold to. On the other hand, most (but definitely not all) of the editors I have sold to I do know socially, to at least some degree.

You, as the writer, have a job to do. It involves writing a publishable book, then helping see it through to final publication by making yourself available to the editor when he or she needs you. After publication, your job might also involve working to promote the book to the ultimate consumers, the readers. Professionalism counts there, too.

If you are offered the opportunity to do an interview, take it. Don’t be late for the interview, whether it’s on person or on the phone. If it’s via e-mail as so many are these days, don’t file the questions and forget about them—tackle them as soon as you can and get them back in a timely fashion. The interviewer likely has plenty of other demands on his or her time, and is probably a freelancer, like you, who won’t get paid until the work is done. Consider the interviewer’s time at least as important as your own, because, after all, that interview’s ultimate purpose is to promote your work, not the interviewer’s interrogation skills.

If you’re offered the chance to sign at a bookstore—and it doesn’t cost you a ridiculous sum to get there, or take you away from the writing of the next book for too long—go. For 98% of writers, there is no guarantee anyone will show up. But they might, and the bookstore staff will be there regardless. For both audiences, staff and public, you should be on time, if not a few minutes early to discuss exactly what is expected of you. You should be reasonably dressed—suit and tie not required for men, evening gown not required for women—but a black Marilyn Manson T-shirt and torn jeans is not exactly appropriate attire, either, for most occasions (although it can be for certain books and audiences). You’re there to interest the public in your work, and you want to create the impression that you’re someone they wouldn’t mind spending a few (figurative) hours with as they read your work. Again, the relationship with the reader is a balancing act—you don’t need to be their friend, but you do want to come across as a trustworthy professional who can deliver the goods.

Not to harp on the drinking angle, but keep in mind that a bookstore appearance, even if it’s called an autograph party, is not really a party, and a book tour is not an extended party. I know of a case in which an author started drinking on the plane to an event, and never made it to the event or the several scheduled to follow. That’s a good way to make booksellers lose interest in promoting, or even carrying, your books. I also witnessed a case in which three co-authors appeared at a store to sign, and one of them was close to falling-down drunk. The lesser-known of the three authors, seeing his collaborator’s state and realizing the man would not calm down, ended up going outside the store to talk to fans and sign in relative peace. He made new fans, that night, by the score, because of his professional approach to the situation. The other co-author stayed inside and tried to ignore the drunk’s obnoxious behavior—both of them lost fans. No doubt in today’s web-connected world, word of the impaired author’s behavior would have spread much farther and wider than it did at the time, possibly having a greater impact on his sales (and certainly on the willingness of other booksellers to invite him to their stores).

Writing is many things: art, craft, calling, avocation, but when you do it for money, it’s also a business. Put in the hours, do the job to the best of your abilities, treat the people with whom you have to work with respect, and do what you promise to do.

Last year my July essay for Storytellers Unplugged was due the day I got home from the truly exhausting Comic-Con International: San Diego. I completely forgot about it and missed my SU deadline, for the first and only time. This year, my date is during the con. Knowing I’ll be surrounded by 140,000 or so people, keeping late hours, running around madly trying to do business and have fun, I’m interrupting the final chapters of a novel manuscript to write it a week in advance.

I don’t get paid for writing SU; in the greater scheme of my career, it’s a lesser deadline.

But it’s still a deadline, and a commitment. I’m a professional writer. Professionals honor their commitments.

If writing is the job you want to do, approach your writing like you know it’s your job.