Category: writing

Cranky introvert that I am, I can get tired of staring at the same walls sometimes at home.

I decided to treat myself to a workday at a coffee shop. My office is a netbook, so I can do that with the greatest of ease. The change of venue was enough to get me happy and excited about bidding, which was great. I got my day’s quota of work done in a lot less time than it usually takes. Forcing yourself to get your work done before your battery runs out is a great motivation even if you have ample battery power.

As I was wrapping up and treating myself to a couple of sessions of working on some material for which I have no direct client, I ran across a LiveJournal entry from another writer who has a hard time considering writing fiction “real work”.

I get that.  I have a hell of a time forcing myself to work on StoneFlower and Screwskinny if I am not meeting my income quota for the month.  Never mind that if I get the damn things done I’m looking at a month’s income or so from advances. Fiction doesn’t pay what work for hire until you’re at least a midlist writer — a classification of writer that’s swiftly disappearing anyway.  Screwskinny likely has more marketing tie-ins than merely the book, so we’re looking at a lot more money — if it sells.

Notice the language I was using in talking about working on my self-assigned projects.  I was “treating myself”.  Indulging.   That’s nonsense, of course.  I’m writer.  I mean, it’s my job, not my hobby.  Yes, the money comes quicker from the directly-paying gigs, and I do need to take them on to pay rent.   Money-wise, they’re important.

Career-wise?  It’s the writer who has the guts and self-discipline on spec that manages to get her stuff in the bookstores.  So the fiction and the other self-directed projects are very important to my career.

I’ve been asked to develop a specific course that I’ll be teaching in January.  Will I have a hard time working on that?  Nope!  That’ll be directly to a specific project for which I’ll be paid, both as a writer and a computer instructor.  I’ll feel virtuous every time I open that file, take notes, do interviews, or wander around the house delivering the pretend lecture¹.  I have a client already there for it.

I think this is part of why breaking into writing books can be so hard, especially fiction.  Disciplining oneself to write and take that writing seriously when you have no idea in the world whether or not you’ll be paid for it can be hard when you have a million things demanding your attention, or when you’re looking at your bank account.  Once you’ve sold your first book, you might very well get an advance on the strength of an outline. Once you know you’re going to be paid, buddy, you have no problem at all calling it work.

¹By the time I am in front of a class with a new course, I’ve taught it about four times. Then it gets blown all to hell because the students ask questions and have difficulties I’d never anticipated. Nature of the beast.

I don’t like sitcoms in general. It’s not that I’ve no sense of humor at all.  I do. It’s very small, harsh and (as one friend put it) sanguine.

But another reason I generally don’t like sitcoms is that they’re weak, very weak, on what I go to almost any art for.

Tell me a story.

No matter what else, I need a story to engage my mind and emotions.  My tastes in this are pretty child-like.  When I want a story, I want interesting characters, a good guy, a bad guy, a concrete problem for the good guy to solve, a bad guy who has a real motivation for thwarting the good guy, and if the story is long, I want a certain development and learning in at least the main character over a period of time.  Ideally, the lessons the main character learns should be those lessons that contribute to him solving the problem.

I loved the first movie Highlander.  I hated the rest of the franchise with a bitter passion.  The story had been told and it was just capitalizing on a franchise.  (Obviously my tastes in this sort of thing aren’t common, or it wouldn’t have made the money it did).

I don’t watch television because in general TV shows are not set up to have a concrete story arch.  You have to leave it open for them to continue potentially indefinitely.  Of course, there are exceptions.  Many Doctor Who episodes work around this pretty well, with several episodes telling a discrete story.   Avatar: The Last Airbender did a brilliant job with the storytelling, but it did have a definite end. (Notice that a lot of the stuff I like is written for children).   If that were the norm for television, I’d have TV, I really would.

I liked The Incredible Hulk TV series pretty well.  It also was very strong on storytelling.  Thing is, a series of short stories under a single premise does have its limits.

It’s not that I don’t ever like series, or a series of stories set around a single character or premise.  I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan, and I really enjoyed the Callahans stories.  I have to admit that I lost a bit of interest after Callahan’s Secret, even though I really did love the characters.  I’ve read every single Discworld novel and short story so far published.  I’ve read all the books Heinlein ever published.   But out of the thousands of books I have read in my life, getting into a series is the exception rather than the rule.  Mists of Avalon was amazing.  All the tie-ins?  Blegh.

I hate movie sequels as a rule, unless it was a story told over several movies.

I know from a marketing perspective, the success of the Discworld Series, the Star Trek franchise and many, many other series that have generated a fandom cause producers and publishers to look for The Next Big Franchise.  It’s where the money is.  I understand that.

But my inner three year old is plumped down on a pillow with a frown and a pout saying, “Tell me a story!“

For all that I’m a compulsive reader, you could hardly call me a lover of “great literature”.   Oh sure, I like Shakespeare, but understanding that mode of English was hardly a leap.   My church gave out Bibles to its first graders when I was a kid and we got the King James Version¹.  So we were educated in Late Tudor/Early Stewart English from nearly babyhood.

But when I look at the books that really hit me between the eyes, that move me and that make me think/feel on a deeper level, they’re generally not considered “great literature”.  Stranger in a Strange Land, the later Discworld novels, American Gods, Shogun, The Lord of the Rings...  We’re talkin’ pop literature here.

And yet I’m so culturally (or perhaps emotionally) backwards and dense that this stuff does move me deeply.  I find the climax of Wintersmith — a kid’s book, can move me to tears².

I often struggle with the fact that my fiction isn’t very good.  Sometimes I wonder if it is my taste in books.  I wanna move people like I am moved by some works.  I know of one person who admitted he cried at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land and have never known anyone who has spoken of Terry Prachett as doing anything other than be funny.  Sure, Prachett is funny, but his best work³ isn’t a comic piece even if it does have humorous bits.  It’s why I like him.  He’s funny, but his stuff generally has a point.

Russian novels (sorry Prof. Barnstead) leave me clammy.   The Brontë sisters?  No.  Oh, I like Dickens well enough.  Mark Twain is amazing.  But “serious literature”?  Not so much.  They don’t move me.  They don’t inspire me.  They don’t make me want to reach beyond myself.

But I like that stuff to be candy-coated, too.  Inspirational literature as a genre makes me shudder.   Mostly, I think, it’s because I can’t relate to the characters.  I get John Blackthorne just fine.  Granny Weatherwax or Sam Vimes and their personal struggles with themselves?  Oh my goodness do I grok them!

I just don’t connect with what’s generally accepted as “great literature”.   I wanna be told a story, be affected with pity and terror.  I want something that moves me, even if it’s not all that highbrow.

¹In spite of its translation faults, I still favor the KJV when reading the Bible. Early training, I expect, but it just sounds better.

²The last scene does, too, but that was meant for the Pratchett fans who are parents and would catch the power of that metaphor, I think.

³Nation, his latest. It’s really fantastic.