Category Archives: writing

The magic rule that will make you a writer

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A few months back, Max Kirin posted 7 Cardinal Rules in Writing Life on their blog, and lots of people have reblogged, so it keeps popping up again and again on my screen. I do not disagree with Max’s cardinal rules, though if I were to make a list of my seven I suspect mine would be very different. And if you check out the blog post, you will note that Max says they aren’t really rules, but rather advice.

I can’t help but notice that a lot of the people re-blogging Max’s 7 Cardinal Rules… only blog the image of those seven, brightly-colors nuggets of wisdom, without the accompanying text explaining that it is just advice. Nor do they include the links pointing to more detailed blog posts on related topics. Which is fine, of course. We all quote our favorite bits of things to make points from time to time. Continue reading The magic rule that will make you a writer →

Prepping to go camping

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Camp-Participant-2015-Twitter-ProfileOnce again, I’m going to participate in Camp Nanowrimo. Camp is similar to the full-fledged National Novel Writing Month, except they’re much looser on the rules (not that the full rules are that restrictive). Camp Nanowrimo is for doing things such as editing/revising a novel (which you may have written during a previous NaNoWriMo, for instance), or working on a smaller project as perhaps a way to practice for trying to write a full 50,000+ word story in 30 days at a subsequent NaNoWriMo.

I’ve used it in the past to do editing, plotting, and revising. Currently, I’m planning to use it to try to finish splitting a big book that has two many subplots and characters into two less-huge books which I hope will be less confusing. I don’t want to merely cut the book in half and just stop in the middle. I’ve been frustrated at book series that did that. I think I’ve found a way to separate the plot lines so that the first book will come to a conclusion that feels like a conclusion to the plots I’m moving into this book.

I may change my mind. And tackle a different project altogether. It’s not as if I have a shortage of them, after all.

Why do this as part of Camp Nanowrimo, you may ask? It’s helpful to me to have a defined goal, with a clear end date and some mechanism for measuring progress. Or importantly, a mechanism for reporting progress so I have motivation not to goof off. In most of my previous Camps and Nanos, I’ve managed to remain focused and accomplish at least most of my goal more quickly than when I’m just trying to meet my own monthly tasks.

I enjoy bantering with my writing buddies, including cheering them on when they make progress, or racing with someone to see who can hit a higher word count on a particular day.

So, I’ve invited a bunch of my past writing buddies to be cabin mates (a cabin is a group of participants who share a private message forum and can easily keep track of each others’ progress on the cabin web page), and we’ve got a good crowd for this time around.

It’s going to be a fun April!

Apologist shovels more BS on the elite pile

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DontMakeExcusesIt seemed as if every writer with a blog was piling on about that former MFA teacher (Ryan Boudinot) and his article last week. (I wrote about it here, The Digital Reader has a nice round up here )

This week, one of Boudinot’s former students wrote a follow-up article for the same publication, I Was the MFA Student Who Made Ryan Boudinot Cry. The follow-up agrees that Boudinot’s original comments were wrong, at least in so far as they might represent what teachers privately gripe about among themselves about their most disappointing students but should never say in public. And they were phrased unkindly.

I provide a direct link to the follow-up because it feels as if the former student is sincere in their comments. But their attempt to defend or rationalize Boudinot’s original article is both misguided and wrong.

The former student alludes to Boudinot’s acrimonious departure from the teaching job just before writing the article as a possible explanation for how ungracious the article was. Boudinot’s teaching style is excused as being the kind of “tough love” portrayed most recently in the movie Whiplash. Finally, they point out that Boudinot is reportedly a very loving father to his two kids.

None of that changes the clear, irrefutable fact that most of Boudinot’s article was pure assholery. And now that we know that even students who admire him describe his teaching style as “contemptuous,” “ruthless” and “merciless” we can safely conclude that the article was hardly an aberration.

I’ve had enough experience with various kinds of jerks, jackasses, and other abusers to recognize the pattern. Every single abusive person who has ever breathed has also had any number of people who would swear that the person actually meant well, they’re just blunt. Or their communication style is simply argumentative; if you give as good as you get, they’ll respect you. Also they clearly love their own spouse/kid/dog so much that it is simply impossible that they are the kind of mean-spirited, angry, judgmental dickhead that their recent actions might be construed to imply.

Bull.

And I say that while confessing that there have been times in my life when I was exactly that kind of jerk or jackass.

Being angry makes you do stupid things, obviously. Being angry about how one lost a job (or how one felt forced to leave) is going to leave you prone to say unwise things about that job. But the problem with this excuse is that none of his vitriol was aimed at the school or the program. The people who have agreed with him act as if he was leveling an indictment at the system that determines which students get into the program.

While it is possible to infer that underlying message, he doesn’t ever say the graduate admissions system should be scrapped—he says he wished some of his students had suffered more. He places all of the onus for students being unprepared on the students not being “serious” or “not the real deal” or not being talented.

When you’re angry with a specific person with whom you have a shared history, you will sometimes say things that you do not really mean or that you don’t believe are true because you want to hurt that specific person. Sometimes. More often, what you say is stuff you’ve believed all the time, but have refrained from saying for one reason or another.

When you’re not yelling at a specific individual who has hurt you, you never say anything you haven’t always believed to be true. Being angry doesn’t make you spout random thoughts that never entered your head before that moment. All being angry does is remove your filters. You say things you have refrained from saying not because you were trying to be kind—you refrained from saying them because you didn’t want to deal with the consequences of speaking your true opinion.

And as far as him being a good father? Maybe he is, I don’t know. But it makes me think of those virulently anti-gay politicians who suddenly understand that gay people are human, too, but only after their own child comes out. If they were a genuinely nice person, they would have had the empathy to see that when the victim of the hatred wasn’t someone they have a vested interest in. Similarly, I’m not impressed by a person who is able to be nice to his own family while he is so mean and nasty to people he no longer believes can do anything for him.

I’ve quoted before the saying, “If you meet one asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you keep meeting assholes again and again all day long, you’re the asshole.” If you get a bad student who isn’t interested in learning or becoming better at the craft, you got a bad student. If you keep meeting bad students again and again in ever single class you teach? You’re a bad teacher.

Pulling the trigger (warning)

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Safety sign reads "Warning: Unpredictable Triggers"
says-it.com/safety
Years ago, when I was a member of the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, there was one particular controversy that surfaced from time to time, in slightly different forms: that a particular piece of music we were rehearsing perpetuated oppression and therefore should never be performed.

This debate was triggered one time by a particular piece of classical music which included religious text, and we wound up setting aside some time at the spring retreat to discuss the issue. There was a large group discussion, then we broke into small groups, then back to the large group again. A very curious fact came to light during this process: every single one of us who felt strongly that we wanted to perform this piece, in part because as an out queer group our performance would be “taking it back” had been raised in conservative Christian families, and had experienced various traumatic events at the hands of people claiming to be acting on god’s behalf… Continue reading Pulling the trigger (warning) →

Literary digressions

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ursula-k-le-guin-quotes_8626-3I accidentally wrote a book.

This was not a case (as has happened to me a few times) where I began writing a short story and it just grew into something much longer than I meant. This time it was because I couldn’t finish a scene in the denouement of a book which I had planned as a book.

I had been working on the second novel of my Trickster series for a while. I had finally finished the the big climactic battle, and was working on the wrap-up chapter last September. I’d been struggling with one specific scene in that final chapter for more than a week. It wasn’t meant to be a super long scene (though when it was finished it was about 1200 words). I knew what had to happen in it. I needed to tie up one of the main plot lines and its most closely associated subplots… Continue reading Literary digressions →

Struggling with meaning

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I wrote yesterday about why I believe storytelling shouldn’t be preaching. I’ve also written about how author’s values inform stories, usually not in the ways you think.

Sometimes stories come about because the author is trying to figure something out. We write the tale hoping to find that answer. I wrote a story set in my Trickster universe that was one of those. I’d had the bare bones of the conflict in my head for a long time, a kind of just-so story to answer a question about how one of the characters got into a particular vocation. But while I had an opening problem, I didn’t know how it ended, so it sat in my big list of story ideas on the hard disk for a couple of years.

Completely unrelated, I had been struggling for a long time to understand a particular zen koan. And it occurred to me, one day, that this character’s struggle might be something like the koan.

The next thing I knew, I was writing a story… And what came out was something called “The Luminous Pearl, or the Second Tail of Sora.”

Go give it a read, and tell me what you think.

Storytelling should not be preaching

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Brandon Ambrosino, writing for Vox, asks, “Why are Christian movies so painfully bad?” He’s writing specifically about the recently released movie, “Old Fashioned,” though he mentions a few other recent examples. The full article is worth a read, but I want to focus on a couple of points:

As Daniel Siedell, Art Historian in Residence at The King’s College in New York City, notes, “For [Evangelical Christians], culture is a tool, a more effective way of getting at political realities, or winning the battle of ideas in the public arena.”

Siedell uses the following analogy with his students to explain what he means.

Imagine a gorgeously wrapped gift sitting under a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The presentation of the package, while pretty, is nowhere near as valuable as what’s inside.

Now, he says, extend that idea to Christian art. The artistic qualities of a work become the unnecessary wrapping paper. As such, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad they are.

That’s why it doesn’t matter that Old Fashioned is often very boring. It doesn’t matter that the script bursts at the seams with overwrought dialogue, or that the actors (outside of lead actress Elizabeth Roberts) offer phoned-in performances.

Ambrosino eventually disagrees with this point, but I don’t think he does so as vehemently as he should. Quality is not just the packaging. Quality is an inherent property of the entire work of art. When you think you can make a work of art and treat the artistic qualities of the work as superfluous, you are not making art. Period. I understand the mind set of the evangelicals, believe me! I was raised in that sub-culture, and once people noticed I had what they considered Talent, everything I wrote and did was evaluated through that lens of whether they felt it was proclaiming the message of Christ.

I tried to make one of Ambrosino’s points at the time: if the quality of what we produce is a turn-off, it doesn’t matter how important the message is. People will never listen to your message if they are bored by your story/movie/what have you. But it always fell on deaf ears.

Part of the problem with both my argument then and Ambrosino’s now is that we’re conceding something that we know is wrong. In order to try to make the argument that they should try to be better at making art in order to get their message across, we are buying into the fallacy that art is merely a means to deliver a message. It’s their argument:

Brian Godawa, Christian screenwriter, thinks it’s important to note that Christian films aren’t the only ones that are explicitly preachy. All films, says Godawa, “have messages to some degree or another, and writers and directors know full well they’re embodying those messages in their storytelling.”

I’ve written before that it is impossible to create art that is true to yourself without your values informing the work. That’s not the same thing as a message. I know that I’m a big believer in hope, so my stories, even when I write things I considered very dark, always have some hint of a glimmer of hope. But that isn’t the same as a message. I don’t write a story because I wish it will make other people feel the same way about hope as I do. I write stories because the stories want to be told. My own perspective will always be to look for that glimmer of hope, so I see the stories that way.

But each reader will have his or her own perspective, as well. And even though I am the storyteller, it’s their story, too. Their interpretation of what the story means (to them) is just as valid as mine.

And while I often have very strong opinions about the stories, art, and music I love; I understand that they are my opinions. I may think that your opinion about that particular piece of art is utterly wrong, but I will defend your right to express it. I may debate you about it, but I expect you to argue back.

That’s the difference between trying to send a message and letting your belief inform your artistic endeavors. I don’t consider it a failure if a reader doesn’t agree with me at the end. I don’t even consider it a failure if some readers don’t like the story at all. I especially don’t consider it a failure if a reader feels compelled to tell me just how much they hated one of the characters, or that they are angry at me about how the story ended.

Because in order to hate a character, you have to believe in the character. In order to be angry about how the story ended, you have to become invested in how it ends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from readers who tell me they liked something, or that they found a particular character adorable. Someone told me that recently about a pair of characters in one of my stories, and I just about died from pure happiness. But you know what? A few years ago when one reader wrote to tell me, in regards to a particularly ruthless character I had written about, “I don’t trust him at all!” and others wrote to tell me how much they loved the same character, I just about died from glee.

The people who are delivering messages want one and only one reaction to their story. You must agree with them. If you don’t agree with them, you have failed to learn the lesson they are so desperate to teach you.

And that’s completely backwards from how it ought to me.

The serialist’s dilemma

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My lynx plushy seated at my laptop.
I wish I looked as cute sitting at my laptop as my lynx plushie does.

When we experience a story we enjoy—whether it’s a novel, movie, episode in a television series, comic book, whatever—it’s natural to want to feel that enjoyment again. This need can often be satisfied by re-reading or re-watching, but sometimes that isn’t enough. Maybe there was a supporting character that we become particularly enamored with and we just wish more of the story had focused on them. Or perhaps it was a subplot that really intrigued us and we’d like to see more of that particular dynamic. Or it could be a single line of dialog that alluded to a past event that sounds very interesting and we’d like to know more about what happened. Or it could just be that we want to know what happened next. None of those desires can be satisfied merely by repeating the original story.

In any case, we wind up clamoring, “More! More! Give me more!”

When you’re the storyteller, this is a very flattering thing to hear. The audience liked your story! They love your characters! They want more…. Continue reading The serialist’s dilemma →

The idea of ideas, part 3

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I’ve written about how having an “idea” is not as important to storytelling as many think, and why specific questions about “ideas” can be so misleading as well as off-putting. As at least one commenter pointed out that while those posts show that focusing on ideas is the wrong thing to do, I don’t explain what the right thing to do is.

Except I did.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
—Ray Bradbury

In the first post I said that focusing on ideas is like a carpenter obsessing over a single nail instead of getting on with the task of building a house. And that analogy has the answer, if you just stop and ask, how does a carpenter learn how to build an entire house from scratch? The answer is that there isn’t a short simple answer. You have to learn about how the tools work. You have to learn about which building materials go where. You have to learn about foundations and framing and supports and seals and scores of other things. You have to practice. You have to have someone look over your work from time-to-time during your practice and tell you whether it seems to be working. You have to build little projects and then put them to the test—see if they do the job you intended them to do and how they hold up against the elements.

It’s not a simple process. No one, not even someone as awesome as Neil Gaiman nor as wise as Ray Bradbury, can tell you in only one or two sentences exactly, step-by-step, how to be a successful storyteller. We can tell you things that work for us. We can point you in the correct direction. We can offer encouragement.

We can give you truths in a nutshell, such as, “The way to be a writer is simply this: write.” But you have to understand that those sorts of truths are like zen koans. The answers come from you struggling with the simple statement and the unspoken complications within.

We can write articles and blog posts about our process. We can point you to excellent books on writing (Building Fiction by Jesse Lee Kercheval, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft by Stephen King, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, to name but a few). We can try to answer specific questions. But there are two very important things to remember about that. First, we’re humans trying to get along in life just like you, and time we spend giving advice to you is time that we aren’t writing or otherwise earning our own keep. Second, what any of us know took us years of trying, failing, trying again, and slowly learning how to fail less often, and you’re asking us to give you this hard-earned knowledge for free.

I got in trouble several years ago on a writer’s forum for stating one very important truth underlying all of this process. I haven’t mentioned it in a long time. That probably means its about time to bring it up: if there has never been a time in your life when you read voraciously—when getting to the end of a particular book was more important than sleeping or eating, when you rushed to get to the end of one book so you can start another, or when you read multiple dozens of books and even more short stories in a single year—then you can’t be a writer. You don’t have to read like that all of the time, but in order to understand stories you have to have been consumed by them, been enthralled by them, been so caught up with them that they seemed more real than you yourself.

There’s even neuroscience to back that up. Certain areas of the brain simply don’t fully develop if you don’t spend a lot of time reading for pleasure.

You also have to spend some time looking at some of the stories you love and analyzing how the author did it. You need to spend time looking at some stories you hate and analyzing why they don’t work for you.

You have to write. Get one word down after the other until you reach the end of the tale. Then you either set it aside (and start writing something else) for a while until you can pick it up, look at it objectively, see both the flaws and the good parts, and figure out how to do better. Doing better might by re-writing that story. Doing better might mean tossing that tale and moving on to others. You have to let readers read your stuff every now and then and find out whether it works. You have to learn which reader advice to ignore, and which to take to heart. You have to keep writing and trying to get better.

And by the way, when I said look at your work objectively, seeing both flaws and virtues, I mean exactly that. Too many look at their own work and see only flaws, and despair. Others look at their work and see no flaws at all, and think they have nothing to improve. Every work has some flaws, but every work has something in it that isn’t bad. If you can’t find both, you aren’t being objective.

This is as succinctly as I can put it without sounding like a platitude. And there is so much more I could say about each point. But all of this is really just me trying to unpack, just a little, a profound truth that that late, great Ray Bradbury like to say:

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
—Ray Bradbury

The idea of ideas, part 2

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So, I wrote about ideas in writing as building blocks of a story on a par with nails. Which was a slight oversimplification, for purposes of setting perspective. Some ideas are more important to a particular story than others, so some of them might be boards, others major support beams, and others cornerstones. The main point is that it is the entire assemble of the structure that constitutes a story.

I admit that questions about ideas are one of my pet peeves. For example, in the late 1980s I started writing a series of hard science fiction short stories about a group of scientists and grad students following up on a tremendous interstellar tragedy caused by a small-ish black hole moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. I got asked several times, “Where did you get the idea of a black hole moving so fast? That is so cool.”

Each person that asked seemed to be quite let down when I replied, quite truthfully, “There’s a small globular cluster orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy that has jets of hydrogen shooting out of it at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The total mass of those jets is the equivalent of thousands of stars. If a small globular cluster apparently made of ordinary stars could have an event that did that, what might be happening in the hearts of large galaxies?”

Astronomers have since discovered much more dramatic things shooting out of the center of big galaxies than those hydrogen jets that originally gave me the idea. So now the idea seems even less unusual.

And they were even more disappointed if I explained that the first story was to answer a request from the editor of the shared universe fanzine where the story originally appeared. For reasons way more complicated to go into, she needed me to destroy an entire inhabited star system with certain preconditions.

To me, the story isn’t about the black hole, nor even is it about the death and destruction caused by it. The first story is about the scientific method, and the kind of people who can’t observe an unexplained thing (in this case, a gravity lensing effect where one isn’t expected) without trying to figure out what caused it.

The subsequent stories are about curiosity, and different ways people react to it. One of the recurring conflicts is between some people who are obsessed with finding answers at almost any cost, and others who don’t feel that way. If you want to engage me in a conversation about the stories, that’s what I want to discuss, not the black hole. Nor the method someone might use to attempt to protect records are artifacts from a nuclear (or worse) attack. Nor how someone would engineer a biological weapon to effect a species from an alien ecosystem which you have almost no knowledge of. All of those are just gimmicks—things I concocted to put the characters into a series of situations where I could explore questions about the pursuit of knowledge, the morality of such pursuits, and so forth.

Those concoctions are interesting, and yes, I spent a lot of time researching various odd corners of science to come up with those building blocks, but that was all in service of the story.

And in the end, it’s the story that matters. If I don’t tell the story the best I can, I have failed. Even if I come up with a lot of “cool” ideas along the way.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
-Ray Bradbury