Writing Blogs
Displaying blogs about Writing. View all blogs
Max: the long version
I did an interview with
Australian
Speculative Fiction recently;
they’re putting together a book on Australian sci-fi writers and
apparently I qualified. They e-mailed me a list of questions and,
as per my usual policy, I decided, “Must respond to that soon,”
then let it sit in my inbox for about a month. (I blame my mail program.
Thunderbird
lets you press “1” to mark a mail message
in red as “Important” to make sure you don’t lose those
e-mails you really need to follow up. But this gives me a totally false
sense of accomplishment and closure, as if I have dealt with them
and can move on. I now have a solid red inbox.)
Fortunately they kept hassling me about it, so I eventually got around to pounding out my answers. I mailed them off, they thanked me, then a week later sent me a copy of their article for the book. Of my response, they’d used four sentences.
Four sentences!
I can’t let all those other sentences go neglected. So here’s the full text, for anyone who’s interested.
1. Why do you write (insert genre)?
That’s like asking why you pick your nose: you just do. I mean, not YOU, necessarily. I’m sure you’re very hygienic. But writing is a compulsive thing: I do it because I do it. First I get an idea and it bounces around my head for a while. If it sticks around… well, I can’t just leave it there. That would be cruel. If I’m intrigued enough to want to know what happens next in this story myself, I sit down at a keyboard and find out.
I’ve never chosen a particular genre and thought, “Okay, let’s come up with a story in that.” In fact, I don’t think about genre at all. That’s the kind of thing I don’t worry about until I’m trying to sell it. When I was searching for a literary agent for Jennifer Government, one wrote back, “Sorry, we don’t represent science-fiction.” And I thought, “Science-fiction? Is that what this is?”
Get feedback
Now a community service announcement. If you’re a Struggling
Writer (TM) looking for ways to improve, head straight for
the recently-revamped
Internet
Writing Workshop.
Or, possibly, read the rest of this blog, then head on over.
That might make more sense.
The toughest thing about writing a novel is the loss of perspective. For me, the process usually goes like this:
- Hey, what a great idea for a book! This will rock!
- This story is going gangbusters. Look at all these plot threads unfolding!
- I should really start to tie some of these plot threads together.
- Okay, now which threads are important and which aren’t? What is this book really about?
- What makes a good story? Why do human beings read books?
- What is the meaning of life?
- Boo boo boo boo boo boo.
The best antidote to this is feedback. Or maybe therapy, but I’ve never tried that. Feedback allows you to view your story through the eyes of someone reading it for the first time, something you the author can never do. When I get good feedback, I weep with joy, and the realization that I need to do three months of rewrites.
But there are two big problems with feedback:
- Some people are insane. They tell you to change all the good parts of your book, and set it in space. Since you have no perspective, it’s difficult to tell these people are insane; you can think they’re really insightful.
- It’s embarrassing, at least for people who haven’t done it very much. Writers are often touchy about receiving feedback, and readers know this so they’re careful about giving it. The result is feedback like: “I liked everything.” Which is nice to hear, but completely useless. Or even harmful, if it prevents you from seeing problems that need fixing.
The Internet Writing Workshop solves both of these problems. First, you get lots of feedback, possibly a dozen or so quick critiques, and this makes insane opinions stand out. When ten people tell you they love your main character and one person says you should rewrite him as a woman, you know you can safely ignore that person, and everything he ever says.
Second, everything is via e-mail, so you don’t have to look any weepy-eyed writers in the face as you critically dissect their masterpieces. And they don’t have to look at you, so the feedback you get is honest and free of any reflex need to soothe your feelings. This doesn’t mean you’ll always agree with it, but it will give you that invaluable glimpse of your own book through someone else’s eyes.
The IWW is completely free, being run by hard-working and soft-hearted volunteers. I used it all the time when I was starting out, and it made me a better writer.
| MaxBarry.com ›
Writing ›
Get feedback
The Great [Ii]nternet Debate
Suddenly people are writing to me about the word “internet.”
A few months ago I happened to
mention
that I don’t think internet should be spelled with a capital I.
At the time, this passed without much comment, but now
I’m getting besieged by IT professionals telling me how
I am wrong, wrong, wrong.
Their arguments fall into three categories:
- Check a dictionary, idiot.
- An internet is any network of networks, so without capitalization it’s not clear which internet you’re talking about.
- There’s only one Internet, so it’s a proper noun and should be capitalized.
Arguments #2 and #3 are actually contradictory, so what I should really do is forward the e-mails from one side to the other and just let them go at it. Argument #1, though, is what annoyed me about capital-I Internet in the first place: this idea that there is a golden tome somewhere entitled THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE and if you follow it precisely you’re right and otherwise you’re wrong. Or, to use an example that may be more relevant here, that English is a language just like XML is a language, and if your usage isn’t in the spec, it’s a non-standard proprietary extension, doesn’t validate, and was probably invented by Microsoft.
To me, there’s no such thing as “correct” English. The purpose of communication is not to score the maximum number of grammar points; it’s to convey a thought from your brain into someone else’s. You do this by following common usage. That’s my beef with dictionaries: they still list “usward” (av. (Archaic) Moving toward us), but have to be dragged kicking and screaming to “blog.” Common usage beats dictionary definitions every time, and in common usage “internet” has lost its “I”.
/rant
:-P
Points on a Continuum
I’ve spent most of the last three and a half days at
Continuum,
my first ever science-fiction/fantasy/horror convention. I didn’t
know what to expect, so my first stop was the
“So This is Your First Convention” panel. This proved to be a little alarming,
as Danny, the Chairman, talked about the “6-2-1” rule: “Each day,
have at least 6 hours
of sleep, 2 meals, and 1 shower. Please, the shower is
particularly important. I can’t stress that enough.”
But I soon discovered that sweaty nerds dressed as Darth Vader were actually thin on the ground. Instead, there were endless ranks of spunky young women with arresting eye shadow. What’s more, they were friendly, thus rectifying the single flaw I’ve always found with spunky young women with arresting eye shadow in the past. Danny was right: the convention felt like an intimate party for a couple hundred people. Everyone was excited to be there and ready to party down.
The convention’s centerpiece was the Maskobalo, a big costume party. There I learned another important lesson: nobody respects the guys who wear tails. “Furries,” said Sarah, a blindingly blonde punk rocker wearing a SHOW US YOUR RIFFS T-shirt. “See, some of them love animals a little too much.” Actually, that’s not what she said. What she said terrified me to the depths of my soul, and I had to bang my head against the floor until I could no longer remember specifics.
My favorite part of the Maskobalo was the most realistic Dalek I’ve ever seen—when it talked, even the lights on its head flashed—doing stand-up comedy:
Yesterday I went for a job interview. The woman said, “Do you have any EX-PER-I-ENCE?” I told her, “Daleks have ruled the galaxy for THOU-SANDS—OF—YEARS!” She wrote: Some management experience.
Just before the Maskobalo, I got talking to Ian, who had read some of my blogs. He said, “That one you did about drool, did you make that up?”
I was shocked. “You’re not suggesting I make up blog posts for comedic effect.”
This had sounded a lot less sarcastic in my head. Ian laughed. “Riiight.”
“No, no, I mean they’re all true. I don’t make anything up.”
I could tell Ian didn’t believe me. But I didn’t have time to argue; the Maskobalo was starting and we had to go into the main hall, along with a Dominatrix, a Knight, and a Cyberman, to watch a Dalek perform stand-up comedy.
Hand me my Chewbacca costume
In a few weeks I’m going to my first ever science-fiction convention:
Continuum (Melbourne, Australia,
11-14 June). They asked me to write a piece for the program book, so
here it is:
I admit it: I am a conference virgin. I’ve never done this before, just about everything I know I got from movies, and I’m hoping it’ll be fun but worried it will be painful. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do but will be desperately covering this up and pretending I’ve done it loads of times.
At first I wasn’t sure I was qualified to speak about science fiction. Only one of my novels is sci-fi, and even that masquerades as mainstream fiction. But then I thought about it:
- I use Linux, read Slashdot, and program web games, and yes, yes, there’s no proven link between tech geekery and science-fiction, but we all know the correlation is there
- I think Neal Stephenson is a god
- Jennifer Government is being developed as a sci-fi movie by Steve Soderbergh and George Clooney, and I think this is the coolest thing ever
- I once met Chris Carter and got to hang out with the X-Files people
- My agent went to college with Joss Whedon, and this deeply impresses me
- I believe that the Star Wars prequels are not just bad but desecrations
- I have trouble finding purpose in a world without Buffy
So dammit, I am qualified. I also thought about some of the short stories I’ve written over the years:
- Plucky crew dock with what appears to be a deserted spacecraft but isn’t
- Girl’s best friend hits puberty before she does; also becomes werewolf
- Six-year-old girl sees alien invasion as opportunity to get back at her brother
- Teenagers hang out on the beach and tell scary stories until they all get eaten by weird bugs
- Small group of post-Earth survivors defend their homeworld against what is ostensibly alien attack but turns out to be other human survivors
- High school girl has sex with exchange student, goes nuts, gets hit by a train
Admittedly, most of these were written in high school, and featured my classmates as characters. The last one, for example, was called Jenny, and was very popular with everyone in my year except for Jenny. (I ended up marrying her, though, so she must have forgiven me.) Still, I’ve written my share of SF and H.
Not that you’d know, though, because none of these has ever been published. It is, I’ve discovered, very tough to sell fiction in Australia. The only way I managed it was to get an American publisher, which was not only easier than landing a local one, but made me abruptly more attractive to Aussie publishers. There is something bizarre about having to go to America to impress an Australian publisher, but the fact is new writers require heroic measures to get noticed. I have some experience with this, which I’ll be sharing in my Shameless Self-Promotion panel on Monday.
So if you’re interested, come along. Just remember, it’s my first time. Be gentle.
Lost in the Amazon
The average rating of any book on Amazon.com is four stars. No
matter how brilliant or terrible: four stars. The only exceptions are:
- If the book is brand new, its rating is five stars because the only reviews have been secretly written by the author.
- If the book is widely unknown, it has four and a half stars because the only people who have bothered to post reviews are devoted fans.
- If the book gets lots of publicity and everyone says it’s great, it gets three and a half stars because people complain it’s overhyped.
Before the UK launch of Jennifer Government, I had a chat over lunch with my British editor about the despicable things publishers do. It was a long and wide-ranging discussion, as you can imagine. But the part that’s relevant here is that he said, “It seems that if you post a truly awful review on Amazon, a completely over-the-top bashing, it’ll generate four or five very positive reviews in response.” Then he added, “Not that we would do that,” which was just as well, because I was getting nervous about their marketing plan. But he’s right: Amazon is not so much a collection of reader reviews as a forum for people to argue about books.
I find it tough to read Amazon’s user reviews of my own novels, partly because they can be incredibly scathing and partly because many are written by obvious lunatics and their fevered scratchings bear little resemblance to English. Bada-boom! Oh yeah, that felt good. Anyway, bad user reviews range from the vicious (“Much better than William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition! But that’s not saying much”) to the really vicious (“If you must read this book, do some good and support your local library. Sales will only encourage mediocrity”). It’s difficult to restrain the urge to track these people down, follow them to their work, and stand behind them all day yelling, “Hey, everyone! Carl’s doing a crappy job! His work is lazy and uninspired, and if you ask me, he should be unemployed! Frankly, even I could flip burgers better!” But that would be churlish.
Even the good user reviews can be a little frustrating. Take this review of Jennifer Government from hutsutraw in New Jersey:
This book has a lot of characters, blazing story - you really have to focus on what is going on where and with who. It is a fast paced, entertaining story. The only fault I have with this book is the lack of character description. Other than that, it’s definatly worth reading.
Great! Me, I dislike physical description (but that’s a subject for another blog), but I understand that not everybody feels that way. Thanks, hutsutraw. Only… wait a minute… what’s the rating? Three frickin’ stars! Three! Because I didn’t tell you what color shirt everyone was wearing? I get three out of five for writing a novel that is allegedly flawless in every way except that!?
I tell you, it’s not good for the blood pressure. I’m not one of those writers who refuses to read reviews of his stuff, but I can definitely see where they’re coming from. Matthew Reilly, an Aussie author, once told me, “If you believe good reviews, you have to believe bad ones, too.” My view is a little different. It seems to me that people who write good reviews about my books are intelligent, discerning, witty, and extremely good-looking. Bad reviews, on the other hand, are written by escaped asylum patients. I know, what are the odds? But experience really does seem to bear this out.
P.S. Humble apologies to everyone on the mailing list who got two copies of my latest few posts. I think the problem has been fixed now.