Storytellersunplugged

Hi.

You may ask, who the hell is this guy and what is he doing here? Most days I ask myself the same question.

I’m not a big internet guy. I’m not a “chatter.” I have opinions, but no great need to foist them on others. Maybe I know a thing or two, maybe I don’t.
I’m not an award winning writer, nor have I enjoyed commercial success. Some editors seem to like me, for which I’m very grateful. I get positive reviews and negative ones.

I write stuff that entertains me, that I find interesting. I tell stories I want to hear and have meaning for me. Some folks come along for the ride. I’m very grateful for them, too.

I don’t really know why anyone would come to me to find out about writing. And yet, here I am because I was invited and I’m too stupid to say no. So I’m going to use this forum to throw stuff out there in a “thinking out loud” kind of way, no doubt contradicting and repeating myself. I’m not going to try to teach anyone anything. I’ll just ponder a bit, recollect, and maybe when it’s over I’ll have a better idea why and how I do what I do.

Maybe the point of this is to serve as a warning for others, so that terrible mistakes won’t be repeated.

Points to be taken under consideration when reading this stuff (the real world is one of context; I prefer to leave the surrealism of being out-of-context for fiction):

I’ve been writing for most of my life – I used to punch out one and two page “novelizations” of old sf and horror movies when I was ten. Gorgo was my favorite, followed closely by It! The Terror From Beyond Space. By twelve, I was writing and illustrating forty page space operas. Wooo-hooo.

Story-telling held a peculiar power over me growing up – I was not athletic, sucked at music and art, but really enjoyed “making things” and dreaming and imagining. “Making” a plastic checker board or other shop project (yeah, they still had shop back then, if you can imagine….) just didn’t have the emotional hook of rampaging kaiju and saucers landing on forbidden planets. I liked what happened in my imagination more than what happened in real life, and holding a pile of paper filled with words describing what happened in that imagination gave me a very real sense of having “made” something I actually wanted.

I used a manual typewriter growing up. It was a big deal to pick up a discarded IBM Selectric from Citibank in college and have it refurbished.

In high school, I imitated Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Tolkien. I actually sold something to Space and Time, Gordon Linzner’s venerable magazine, when I was 18, in 1973. Yes, I’m that old. I had a teacher in high school who ghost wrote romance novels, and talking to him was my first taste of the “business.” Becoming a cult writer was about the best writing career goal I could come up with.

In college, I was a writing major and took workshops Joseph Heller and Joel Oppenheimer. I think I set a record for taking Lit courses classes, focusing on “genre” (the Religious Novel, the Political Novel, etc.). I earned my grade point average knocking out papers on Kafka, who fit into every academic genre. Joseph Heller didn’t throw the pieces I wrote against the wall in frustration, but he did scratch his head and wonder what exactly I was going to do with “this kind of stuff.” He didn’t see the market for it. Joel Oppenheimer encouraged me to go bugfuck. I’m not sure that was helpful, but it was entertaining. A more academic professor who’d actually had a story in the O Henry collections took a more serious approach, and actually called one of my stories a “tour de force,” but he also had reservations.

Reading the Paris Interviews series, plus writer bios and other interviews as well as writing how-to books – far less prolific back then in the pre-internet and book chain stone age – helped me get a handle on writing, as did the workshops. I picked up a trick here, a technique there. I still do. Whatever works - there is no right way to write, as the saying goes. There’s each individual author’s way.

On The Right Way to Write

Creators have to find their rhythm, the interplay of subjects and techniques that connect with what they’re compelled to say about the world they live in. No matter what the medium, there are many paths to creation depending on time, situation, ability. And the path twists and turns throughout life.

Finding that path means learning the language you’re going to use and the techniques of story telling. You have to know how to use the tools, otherwise what you build isn’t going to stand up. And you need discipline, which means you have to more greater pleasure from writing, or having written, a story than in screwing around.

But walking the walk of writing means taking on the job of forging a creative self. The job description entails discovering what works and what doesn’t, and making changes and adapting to realities. This sometimes means you have to adjust your goals. You may fill yourself with the voices of authors you love and want to become, and you start out copying Hemingway or Lovecraft when you’re learning to write. That will teach you a bit about a few tools, but at some point you have to move on or face some embarrassing questions (even if you’re a smart, young, packaged thing going to Harvard). The jobs of being Hemingway or Lovecraft are already taken. Forever. The job of being you is open until your dead.

You may want to be a best selling author, or a magical realist. But writers are both born and made. You’ll find out your head doesn’t always work the way you believed it could. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So what can you do? What do you have to say? What kind of writer can you become at this moment, and what you can work for in the future? If you really are a writer, you’ll keep digging, keep excavating yourself and the body of literature for the right combination of forms, techniques and subject to do what you feel you must. You’re going to make choices to become what you want to be, consciously, or unconsciously.

Or you’ll give up, relax, and do something else with your time. Nothing wrong with that.

No one can tell you what it will take for you to become a writer. If you’re not born knowing, or raised in household of writers who trained you from birth, then you have to figure it out, make up your own lesson plan, pull the material you need from places like this. Pay attention to what you feel passionate about and follow that feeling. Be prepared to sacrifice. Ultimately, you’re going to have to answer the question of how much you’re willing to surrender to achieve what you want.

That question is much more important than where do writers get their ideas, or how many hours or pages a day are enough, or should you outline or free-associate. These are technical choices based on individual needs and talents. Writing, or any other committed artistic endeavor, isn’t an option. It is a compulsion. For some, a religion. A holy chore (to quote Harlan Ellison).

If you’re really a writer, you’re going to do what you have to do to be what you must be.

I’ve made choices to achieve whatever it is I’ve accomplished. I know many writers who have sacrificed a great deal more than I have, and have the success and popularity to show for it. I also know people who’ve sacrificed more, and have nothing.

There are writers who’ve given up nothing, who breeze through this kind of work and laugh at people like me rambling on about choices and right ways to write and sacrifice, and are highly successful. There are those who sacrifice nothing and never sell a story.

You have to construct the right way to write for yourself. Talent helps, but lots of talented people don’t want to follow what may come too easily to them. They treat their gift casually. They don’t care. Writing has no emotional resonance for them. They’re not writers, even if they were born to be the best. In the end, you’re going to do exactly what you want to do, whether you know it or not.

Anyway…..

All I can say is that listening to writers talk about their craft and art taught me attitudes and approaches to becoming a writer. Workshops kicked my ass and taught me the realities of my limitations and abilities.

I graduated from college way back when. Worked, and entertained the notion of a career in publishing. Went to graduate school for psychology (probably to find out why I would ever want a career in publishing). Wrote a episodic fantasy novel, while working and going to graduate school full time, to hold on to my identity as a writer. Got my degree, and Del Rey published my first novel in 1986.
I still don’t feel like a real writer.

Going from typewriter to computer in 1986 opened up the way I wrote – I respond well to the “plasticity” of the electronic manuscript. It was a real pain in the ass to cut up, paste and insert revisions and new material by hand when Lester Del Rey told me he’d take my first novel if I made the changes he suggested. But it was worth it. Alas, I don’t derive sensual pleasure from pen and ink, the way so many literary writers do, nor have I ever bonded with the mechanical clatter of the typewriter.

In the years since, I’ve taken courses at the New School in NYC with Shawna McCarthy and Terry Bisson, and seminars with Nancy Kress. For many years I participated actively in Circles in the Hair, a writing workshop founded from members of that Shawna McCarthy class in 1993. The group still meets regularly. The teachers and workshop, as well as many generous editors who’ve rejected and accepted my stories along the way, kicked my ass and taught me a lot. I’m still learning. And getting my ass kicked. A lot. I’m still learning the right way to write.

As of this writing, I’ve had 3 novels and 236 stories published (some stories gathered into 4 collections, 44 earning Honorable Mentions in various editions of the St. Martins Year’s Best), edited three anthologies and served as Fiction Editor for Space and Time for 8 years. For whatever that’s worth.

On good days, I consider myself a respectable journeyman writer. On bad days, of which there are many, I wouldn’t be caught dead talking about writing to people who want to write.

But here I am. Like I said, I think I can do this as a kind of “thinking out loud exercise.” I’ll talk to myself (how very non-internet and antisocial) and think things out and hope whatever comes out makes some kind of sense. By articulating ill-considered and half-baked thoughts I’ve harbored about writing over the years, I’m sure I’ll learn something. Maybe I’ll say really stupid and foolish things that will entertain others. At the very least I’ll get my ass kicked. I’m used to that.

We’ll see how it works out. If it doesn’t, at least I gave it a shot.

Write. Comment. Ask questions. I won’t bite.

Not even if you want me to.