Elizabeth Bear

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

Welcome to Storytellers Unplugged. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

WARNING! IN THE FOLLOWING COLUMN I SHALL ENGAGE IN A SERIES OF GROSS GENERALIZATIONS. WARNING!

The question writers dread most is “Where do you get your ideas?” Of course, the universe and its ironies being what they are… that’s also probably the single question we get asked the most often. (1)

And because we mostly don’t know where we get our ideas–or if we do know, because the answer is hopelessly complicated–we develop a battery of mildly amusing quick answers, so we can get past that part of the interview and on with things we might actually have a chance of not sounding like idiots talking about.

Well, I’m here to break the cone of silence and talk about where those ideas come from.

Some of them are, indeed, inspiration. They leap up from some deep preconscious place and seem to emerge fully-formed. I have a story–“The Chains that You Refuse”–that exists because my friend Celia Marsh bet me I couldn’t write a story in future perfect second person, and have the POV and tense choice actually inform the story. We were in a chat at the time, and without hesitating, I typed, “It will have been raining in Harvard Square for only half an hour when you give up hope.”

And I was off. I finished the first draft in about an hour, and I’ve never done anything much by way of editing it except moving the semicolons around. It just came out that way–which is almost unheard of for me; I edit and revise very heavily. Looking at it, I can identify some of the DNA from which my subconscious spliced it: a few nights I spent walking around Boston in the rain, a black denim jacket I wore habitually through my twenties, the too-good-to-resist names of some shops and restaurants in Harvard Square, a juggler I once saw performing street theatre there, the Shriekback song “Signs,” and of course the Great East Coast Blackout of 2003 (2)

But when it got itself writ, it was a synthesis, a blaze of inspiration, a flash of glory. It happened all at once.

Or so you might think, but the fact was that I had been collecting its various component parts for years, squirreling them away like a New England farmer ploughing up rocks for an eventual dry fieldstone wall. Celia’s comment was a catalyst, a grain of sugar dropped into an already supersaturated solution.

More often, this process happens a lot more slowly. I start off with a single idea, something I know I’m going to use eventually, and I pack that away in a corner–possibly I start writing it, and possibly I don’t–and then I start looking for the other bits that go with it. To extend that drystone wall metaphor painfully, you put in the big boulders first, and then you look for the bits that fit perfectly around them.

If you just pile up big rocks, you have a pile of rocks. The pieces you use to support and shape the wall are essential to its structure.

So say you’re building a wall… er. Writing a novel. You might start with one big block and a couple of little ones, and have no real idea yet how they go together. So you fuss with them a bit, move them around, and figure out some of the ways they might fit. But then you need more pieces. Fragments, bigger stuff. Great big chunks you have to call a friend to help lift. You start putting them together and see how they fit, and when you’ve got them wedged and balanced just right–voila, you have a book. Or a wall. Whatever.

So where do you find all these bits?

I find ‘em in all kinds of spots. The answers are going to be different for you, but some of the places I look are in news stories (3), songs, nonfiction, television documentaries, fiction, poetry, personal experiences, conversations, and stuff I just stumble upon. After a while, you become like a treasure hunter–always keeping your senses peeled for the perfect little thing that will prop of the wobbly end of that big lump and make it fit seamlessly into the whole. (4)

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Image by helena.40proof, used under a Creative Commons license.

(1) Even more often than “Will you read my manuscript?”

(2) which I cleverly missed, because I was in Las Vegas at the time…

(3) especially some of the quirkier stuff that gets on NPR

(4) I think this is part of what people mean when they talk about artistic awareness

…does not entitle you to behave like an asshole.

It’s a simple point, but one so many miss. Artists do not get special privileges. They do not get a free pass on behaving badly simply because they have the werewithal to pick up a pen or a keyboard or a paintbrush–or swing around an electric guitar or get before (or behind!) a movie camera (saints preserve us). Nor are they magically exempt from social standards because they are witty, charming, and dashingly attractive (as of course all artists, especially writers, are–the occasional glamorous clubfoot aside).

Nothing you do entitles you to father and abandon illegitimate children, spend other people’s money profligately, drive at great speeds through residential neighborhoods, get drunk and hurl household objects at hotel staff, or make public statements of bigoted stupidity about other people’s race, religion, sex, sexuality, physical abilities, or taste in cocktails.* Nothing.

I don’t care how many club feet you have.**

The converse is true as well, of course. Just because somebody else is an artist, this does not behoove us to act like an asshole to them.

If you would not march up to somebody’s front door and tell them their children are ugly, do reconsider popping by the comments section on any given painter’s Deviant Art page to tell him how much you hate his work. Also, if you spot your favorite actor having dinner with her spouse in a quiet pub, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to approach her.

I guess what I’m saying is that entitlement, either way you take it, is an ugly thing.

As an artist, if you ever catch yourself about to utter the words, “Do you know who I am?” or find yourself justifying some jaw-droppingly self-centered behavior on the grounds of your art, it might be time to reassess. Likewise, as a fan (and I have yet to meet an artist who is not also a fan–of something!) if you’re about to plunk yourself down in your idol’s mate’s vacated chair to tell them how much their last movie stank, take a moment to reflect. And remember what your grandmother told you about etiquette.

And remember, in both cases, that the universe doth extend beyond thee.

–Elizabeth Bear

*okay, maybe that last.

**although if it’s more than two, that might be a road to fame right there.

Image copyright Sean Dreilinger, used under Creative Commons attribution

It’s a book. Or more precisely, it’s a pair of books. They’re titled Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, and I’ve been working on them–one way or another–since the very beginning of 2003.

This is what they look like:

Pretty, aren’t they? They’re about Christopher Marlowe and Will Shakespeare and faeries and queens and devils and spies and swordfights and blackest enchantments, and I bet if you read them you would really like them a lot–

–You know what? Reboot. Forget that. I suck at self promotion anyway.

And anyway, okay, I admit it.

I lied. I’m not, actually, here to sell you books. Not directly, anyway. What I’m here to do is something far more insidious. I’m here to promote myself as an interesting person, who has interesting thoughts, and therefor whose interesting books you might like to read. I’m here to improve my notoriety, in other words, so that the next time you are in a bookstore you might see my name on the spine of a book on the shelf and think, oh, huh, Elizabeth Bear, haven’t I heard something about her?

Sure, but that’s in the future. And so, right now, reading this column, you might ask, well, why do I care? Bear, why are you telling me this? How on Earth did this get to be a subject for a column? Do you think you’re Pen and Teller? (I would have to be the one that talks a lot. It’s true.)

The reason you care is because there’s only one reason for you to be on this website, reading this column right now. And that reason is that you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of writing books and surviving in the publishing industry, because that’s what we talk about here. Either you’re an aspiring writer, or you’re a writer who wants to improve her career, or you’re for some insane reason interested in what other people do at their jobs all day without actually being involved in the process yourself.

So here’s something writers do at their jobs all day, when they are not actually writing books. They figure out ways to get people who might like their books to pick them up and look inside.

See, that’s half the battle. And it’s the part we as writers have the least control over. It’s what cover art and cover blurbs and blog tours and book-signings and ComiCon giveaways are all geared towards: getting people who might like this book to pick it up and look inside.

A lot of writers have this idea that if only the entire world knew enough about their book, they would buy it and read it and then buy more copies for all their friends, and then the writer in question would be catapulted to superstardom and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. Sadly, this theory is borne out neither in experience nor experiment. I attest my own self–see, as a writer, I read a lot of best-sellers. Books that would not normally interest me, because I want to keep an idea on what the state of the industry is. And the thing I notice most about them is that only very rarely do these books appeal to me. I am not, in a phrase, the target audience for these books.

Thus, I must assume–sadly–that there are many readers out there for whom my books would be equally unsuccessful. So it would seem that getting my books into their hands is an endeavor roughly equivalent to placing classified ads looking for vocalists interested in joining a choir of pigs: wasted effort, a public nuisance, and all that.

Ahh, but somewhere out there there are readers for whom these are the perfect books. And them, I have to find. Them, I have to lure into picking the books up and opening them. And reading the first sentence, the first page. The first dozen pages. Maybe a chunk in the middle, so they can see if the style holds up.

Once I’ve done that, well. If they were the right reader. If these were the right books.

Then I’d have made a sale.

And that is the purpose of promotion.

***

Swedish pony image from egevad on flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

As those of you who have been reading my updates here for the past few months are aware, I’ve been wrestling with some problems with my process. That’s entailed, more or less, trying to move from a level where I have to think through everything I’m doing as a writer back to a more organic one, where things come more naturally.

It’s like learning to drive a car. Assuming you have learned how to drive, remember when you first started, and you had to think about everything you were doing very carefully? If it was a manual transmission, there was the process of clutching, shifting, and controlling the gas pedal. Once you actually made it out on the road,you probably found yourself microsteering, making tiny course corrections and constantly fiddling with where the car was going rather than aiming it along the road like a pro.

We don’t drive the car, in other words. Instead, we shift and clutch and steer and manipulate the blinkers and check our blind spot more or less as independent actions. Until eventually, one day, after we’ve beendoing it for a while, we get into the car while we’re distracted by something else–maybe we’re mad at our boss or worried about our elderly parent–and discover to our surprise that we have made it to our destination without thinking about each individual element of the process.
That’s an ongoing problem in learning any new skill. At first, it requires massive attention to detail and we have to wiggle each bit as an independent element, but eventually we find we’ve reached a point where to progress in the skill we have to internalize what we’ve learned, and make it automatic.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with how to stop thinking in detail about my writing, and just let it happen. I’ve been noticing that the actual process of writing is taking up more of my intellectual capacity: I used to use music as a distraction while writing, to occupy my conscious mind and get it out of the way of the storyteller down there in the subconscious.  Lately, I’ve been finding even that is too much of a drain, because I am trying to think about too much.

Just last week, I overheard a piece of advice that wasn’t even directed at me, but which hit home quite spectacularly. Think about what you’re doing, not about how you’re doing it.

Well, of course, I realized.  That’s the secret, right? Think about what you are doing. Not about how you are doing it.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Because my learning process for the last seven years has been heavily geared towards intellectualization and practice. I’ve been very conscious of what I have been learning and how I have been learning it, and of how I have manipulated my process to make myself a better writer.

And now, suddenly, that learning process, which has been my friend since 2001, is tripping me. And so I am endeavoring to take this advice which I have appropriated, and just put one word in front of the other and tell a story with interesting characters and well-developed themes.

Just drive the car.

Writing is like everything else.

And as this is apparently the week for food metaphors on Storytellers Unplugged, who am I to break a trend?

See, I just finished stage one of one of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever been a part of. It’s this thing called Shadow Unit, Season 1. It’s not over yet, but this first bit–an interactive hyperfiction serial modeled on a television season, as you have probably inferred–is finally in the can. It consists of 250,000 (one quarter of a million words) of fiction written by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette, Amanda Downum and myself; interactive character blogs; original artwork; message boards; and other goodies. It’s about a group of unrealistically sey smart people saving the world from the worst monsters imaginable (I said it was modeled on a TV show!), and it’s some of the most fun I have ever had with fiction.

Anyway, one of the characters likes to cook. Likes to bake, in particular, and in particular likes to bake bread. And as he blogs about baking bread at great length, this has naturally led me to consider how writing is like baking bread.

And how stories are like bread loaves.

They start off much the same way, with some leavening, yeast or a starter. You add flour and water to make a sponge, and then you walk away for a while and let the leavening work. So maybe the leavening is sort of like your initial idea, and the flour and water are research, or the other things you add to the original idea (or character, or setting or argument, or whatever) to give it some substance. Something to work on.

And then after the sponge starts to bubble and expand, you have to add the things that will give it texture and flavor: salt, oil, milk, herbs, whatever. This is sort of like the part of story writing where you are figuring out the cool stuff, the quirky little magical things that make the story more than generic.

Then you have to knead it, which you could liken to writing and rewriting the story. And at this point, both loaves of bread and stories gloop to your fingers and are sticky and get on everything and you work and work and wear yourself out and then suddenly, magically, they form up and pull themselves together into clean squeaky rounds.

And you might thing, ahh, it’s done. All my patience is rewarded. But it doesn’t work that way, because there’s still the rising, and the slashing, and the baking–
…and then the eating, of course.

Which is what it’s all about.

Well, that and the picking crusts of dough out from under your nails for days afterward.

So, yeah, I’ve been having a hell of a spring. I’ve been missing deadlines, having to back out of promised projects, and having constant sourceless panic attacks and bouts of serious doubt about the quality of my work and my ability to do it. It’s a precarious way to make a living, this writing gig, and there’s always the fear that you’re going to lose the mojo and that will be the end of that.

Anyway, I talked to my editor on the current book, and had to tell her that I just wasn’t going to get it done on deadline. I’ve never missed a novel deadline before; I still feel kind of awful about it. (It’s a bit of a point of pride for me to get work in early.)

But here I was having this experience where I could not think, or plot, or write, and it felt like every word was being dragged out of me as if with red-hot pliers. Usually, I write by inhabiting my characters, and suddenly, I couldn’t get into their heads. Usually, I feel story structures as a shape, a thing with dimension and weight and movement, and that had utterly deserted me. I had no sense of how anything worked, or if it balanced.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

So the past four months has been a learning experience. Especially since I could not figure out what was wrong with me.

Until I went away on a business trip and forgot to bring my daily multivitamin along. And whammo! Within two days, the panic attacks stopped, my confidence and usual sunny demeanor (hah!) re-established themselves, and I was thinking about stories. And the stories seemed interesting to me.

When I got home, I took my vitamin–and within two hours, I was back where I had been before I stopped.

Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I threw the damned things in the trash.

And today, one week later, I wrote 781 words that were not an agonizing grovel through misery and broken glass, and which I think actually contribute to the story I’m trying to write.

I think I’m cured. By Jove!

And I’m even more convinced than I ever was that brain chemistry, man, is a powerful and mysterious force. Oh, and also, I won’t be taking that brand of vitamin again.

And my editor has given me an extension on the manuscript, and if we bust our butts, we may not even have to reschedule.

…hey, check it out. A happy ending!

This post is inspired by Skipp’s post of April 5th, in which he confesses to a deadline crunch and offers an assignment. That post struck a chord with me, because I’m on a bit of a deadline crunch myself.

See, my new novel was due April 15th.

I say “was,” because I figured out several months ago that that wasn’t going to happen, and asked my agent to ask my editor if we could push the deadline back somewhat, because I was having no luck at all getting my head around the dratted thing. I knew even then that I was floundering, and that this was going to be a long, hard slog.

I had no idea how hard.

I have been struggling with this draft since February 29th. I’ve written about 62,000 words. I have been fighting this book like a pit of pythons. Hammering on it. Writing it in spite of itself.

And I’ve realized in the past week that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to use any of them.

This is the sort of thing that happens, sometimes. You take a wrong turn, or you’re not sure if you’ve taken a wrong turn, but what you are suddenly sure of is that you don’t know where you are going. Sometimes, you can blunder on for a while and eventually come to something you recognize–a mile marker, a mountain on the horizon, the turnoff for Schenectady. Pick up one of those things, and you can bushwhack your way home, and you might find some fascinating synchronicities along the way.

But sometimes you drive a while further, and you realize that you can’t get there from here. And possibly, you’re not even sure where there is anymore.

When that happens, there’s only one solution.

You have to pull over and fish out a map, and spend a little time staring at it until you figure out where you are.

The problem is that when this happens with a book… there isn’t any map.

I’m asking for another extension.

A long one.

Even though I find it frustrating and humiliating to do so. Because I’m going to have to explore, you see, and draw a map. And then once I have the map drawn, I’m going to have to figure out if there’s any way to that shining city I can just see across the desert there, hovering like a mirage.

Some of you will probably remember that in the not-too-distant past, I blogged here about a young character who had taken over my life–rearranging my cooking and exercise habits to suit himself, waking me up late at night to whisper secrets in my ear. Well, the secrit projekt he was a part of is a secret no longer–it’s live.

It’s called Shadow Unit, and it’s an experimental interactive hyperfiction modeled on a television show, and the fan community for a television show, and, well–go look. Poke around. There are many concealed goodies, and (so far) novellas by Emma Bull and myself, with more to come from (Storytellersunplugged’s own) Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, and Amanda Downum.

But that project, as much as I love it and as excited as I am about it, is not what I’m here to talk to you about today.

No, I’m here to talk about the horror of deadlines, and the kind of books one is not excited to be writing, because they feel like albatrossi around one’s neck.

You see, I have one now. And I’m sweating it. The deadline was originally set for April 15, but it was evident as early as last year that I wasn’t going to make that happen. I’ve gotten an extension to June 1, and I’m scared to death about it. I have characters, and a sort of plot, and a setting… and I don’t have a book. It’s not ripe yet. All the disparate pieces are floating around in my head, but they’re not yet soup, if you know what I mean: they’re just chunks of potatoes and onions and meat and uncooked, crunchy barley. I am, to make it absolutely plain, trying to write this book too soon.

And I don’t really have a choice about it.

Because I have a contract, and the cat has to eat.

When a novel is really firing, it fills up my head. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything else–getting bills paid, eating, remembering to bathe, talking to friends on the phone or the internet. I become irritable when interrupted by the fact that the coffeepot is empty. I become unbearable, I suspect: totally pwned by art. It’s a possessing force, and I get really, well, boring about it.

Currently, this book is more like the bright elusive butterfly of love. I catch glimpses of it, flitting around, and it throws me occasional cool things. (Like “Cyberleeches!” and “Baby Mammoth!”) and then flits away again, refusing to be, you know, a narrative. So it’s just a collection of Cyberleeches! and Baby Mammoths!

And I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

Except persist, I guess.

This is where the professionalism comes in, and I keep telling myself that. That craftsmanship and hard work carry you over the places where inspiration fails. But man, it’s hard to keep writing seven hundred or a thousand words a day when you feel like it’s all flat, and it’s not moving the story forwards because you don’t feel like you know what the story is, and none of the characters are very interesting at all.

Of course, the funny thing is, looking back, I felt exactly this same way about Undertow, which is nominated for the Dick Award (Yes, I’m twelve, and I love typing that) this year. Like I was just groping forwards, with no sense of what was going on here, and none of that certainty that knowing the story brings. (I know the story in Shadow Unit. It’s in my bones. I can feel where that one is going, with trainwreck inevitability, and it’s exciting and so what I want to be working on. But alas, that is not what I am promised to perform, and it’s also not what pays the bills.)

So I guess I will persist, and get through this, and I will have to rely on somebody else to tell me if I’ve written a publishable novel or not.

I wonder if I can get it done by deadline. Because I would really like to have this albatross off my neck.

It makes me tired.

And because the perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum, I think that in the course of this extended whinge, I may have figured out one of the things I was doing wrong. I’m trying to make the dratted thing make sense, and be rigorously logical, and it’s just not that kind of book. It’s a gonzo book, and it needs a gonzo attitude.

…huh. Maybe I can do something with this, after all.

I am suffering from post-novel ennui. From malaise. From the disease that afflicts writers after the completion of a book, medical doctors after boards, and graduate students after finishing a dissertation.

Basically, my brain has drained. Somebody pulled the plug. There’s nothing between my ears except dustbunnies and crickets.

This turns out to be a bit of a problem, because I have a novel due June 1, and also a novella and a novelette. And I honestly can’t write any of them yet because they are not yet in my head.

Let me explain it this way. Essentially, when I think of writing, I think of projects as having something akin to soup, and something akin to fruit. Books are like soup in that to write one, you have to throw a lot of things in a pot and let them simmer until they are tasty and the flavors have melded, and then you can serve them forth. They are like fruit because they need ripening time, and if you try to pick them too soon all you get is inedible fruit.

So here I am walking this thin line between not blowing off my deadlines, and trying to buy some time to let my brain regenerate. (My personal life has been hectic lately too, which doesn’t help much with the whole OMG I have to write this book! problem. Writing, for me, seems to require a certain amount of free headspace, and that, of late, I have not had.)

Which leads me to think about observation, which is the best means I know of by which to refill a recalcitrant brain. Noticing things, a simple and neglected art, and the core of creativity.

You see, all that stuff that shows up in art, that has to come from somewhere. And mostly, we get it by abstraction from the real world. Things we observe, notice, internalize, and alter to fit our fictional reality.  And the better we get at this, the more intensely we can focus on and notice unusual aspects of our everyday world, the more effective we become at using those details to convey realism, concreteness, upon our constructs.

Those tiny tidbits–the telling details–are what makes the difference between an abstract, a symbol, and the illusion of reality.

And in some regard, it’s what my head is out of right now. Noticed things, experienced things. Things that have weight and heft for the brain.

So right now, frustrating as I find it when I would really like to be writing something, that’s my job. Noticing stuff. Experiencing it. Taking it in, whether it’s the tiny ripples a grooming cat’s tongue leaves in the fur of its wrist, or the way chalk gets stuck under my fingernails when climbing and makes it look like I have a French manicure, except for how ragged my nails are.

And maybe when I’ve done enough of that, I will have a head full of story.  I’d better, anyway, because for some reason this cat here keeps insisting she needs to be fed.