Gerard Houarner

In celebration of March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, I’d like to present my theory of personalities for today (because, you know, that changes daily….please, you can trust me, I’m a professional) to try out as an exercise.  Because, like March, people change.  And yet, like the rhythm of seasons, they really don’t.

As usual, this is not a one-size-fits-all tool, merely an offering that might help some get a handle on imagining the mysteries people, and characters, contain.  So if this is a weakness for you as a writer, what follows may help.  Many of us just like to make it up as we go along, whatever that may mean and however that may happen…

Basically, this is just a different way of approaching a character sketch, for those of you who like or need to do one before starting out on a story.  Or, for those of us who like to take notes on characters as they develop in the stories we write, a different way of documenting our discoveries for future reference.

The visual aspect of the exercise may help some, drive others insane.  Fair warning, if I haven’t already driven you to madness by what I’ve said so far.

The idea here is to think of what is going on inside people as dynamic, not static.  There’s a little engine in the head and heart running all the time.  For many people, that engine runs relatively smoothly, as far as anyone watching can tell, and people stay pretty consistent.  Red Sox fans don’t root for the Yankees.  You’re either into girls (or boys), or you’re not.  You eat broccoli, or you don’t.

But under different conditions, other aspects of personality emerge.  I happen to think, today, that there is a pool of needs and drives in all of us that represents potential for behaviors that are not part of the routine person we present to the world.

People surprise us, all the time.  They shock us, with divorce, suicide, murder, or other manifestations of an inner crisis or a hidden aspect of personality that never had the opportunity to surface.

Something else was going on inside, a ticking time-bomb, or a suppressed need, or a potential for social or anti-social behavior that required the right set of circumstances to be expressed.

Disaster strikes – economic, environmental, personal.  The economy collapses, or a tornado levels the town, or a job is lost.

We meet someone who brings out previously hidden or suppressed aspects of our personality – they drive us insane with love, or hate.

Someone we love dies.  Or leaves. 

This is the stuff of story.  Under the stress of change, internal or external, heroes and villains emerge from the roles we assume as parent, lover, worker, citizen, or fool.

So. 

Draw a circle off-center on a piece of paper, then draw arrows pointing in all directions, some colliding, others flying apart, the rest pointing in random directions. 

Name those arrows.  Take your time.  Think of people you know, characters you’ve loved, or take a close look at yourself (I never said this wasn’t going to be scary).  I’d prefer a long, hard look at real people (assuming, of course, that you are, in fact, real) (sorry, had a Phil Dick moment, there). 

That circle represents the inner landscape of a person.  Your character.  Those arrows are the emotions, drives, needs that motivate behavior.

Perhaps your life has been blessed with a remarkable absence of troubling incidents and people.  You may not be a particularly self-reflective kind of person.  Of course, you need inspiration.

The next time you sit in a park, go to a family reunion/wedding/funeral, take a long trip or, God help you, visit a mall, make it a point to focus on observing people.  Watch and listen.  Look at expressions, body language, and see how they change depending on who they’re with and the situation they’re in.  Grab details you catch or overhear and put them down.  Observe.  And feel free fantasize. 

Think of the random arrows in terms of strong personal drives, interests, fears or needs – likes chocolate, morning person, prefers bright colorful clothing, hates bugs.

Stalks people.  Powerful religious faith.  Generous.  Hates morning people.

The  arrows that clash or fly apart are more interesting – these are the conflicts people struggle with: wants to be left alone but needs people; wants power but hates responsibility;

Here’s a thing about the arrows – when they collide, I think of them as active conflicts between two opposing needs – a lover may embrace you passionately for the night, and then abandon you for a rival the next night.  Ouch. 

Arrows that fly apart, for me, represent a more passive conflict, or the potential for a startling change of behavior under a different set of circumstances.  For instance, hates morning people might turn into a surprising tolerance for an individual morning person through the power of love.  Or, a fear of violence might turn into a passionate embrace under the right provocation, like in road rage. 

Basically, the same need, fear, what have you, changes under different conditions.  

Of course, all of these characteristics are interchangeable.  A lone flying arrow can be turned into a double – could be likes bright clothing in the summer, dark in the winter (wow, what a conflict…).  Or doesn’t like people in general but really needs to be with family. 

The point is, we’re complicated.  Full of contradictions. 

The head spins.  Don’t worry.  Draw and label as you see fit.  Make it your own.

Don’t think of reasons.  People are what they are through upbringing and chemistry, depending on environment and the immediate situation.  This isn’t a psycho-analytic tool, just a different way of doing a character sketch.

The point, if I may repeat myself, is to illustrate and emphasize the dynamic nature of what goes on inside of people. 

People change, yes.  But, really, not necessarily.  In my theory of personalities for today, people just slide into different potentials they had all along depending on the circumstance.  The find the killer inside, if they indeed had a killer in them.  Or the lover.

That can happen once in a lifetime.  Or it can happen on a routine basis, like a serial killer who appears normal but operates differently as he or she creates or exploits different circumstances.

If any of this makes sense, here’s a continuation of the exercise:

Draw another circle, partially intersecting the one you’ve already drawn.  Or, draw two circles, partially joined.

Two people.  The shared space represents that they have in common, the aspects of their personalities that creates a bond between them.

Could be positive needs, drives, etc, could be negative ones.  Most likely a mix.

And everything else outside the shared circle are characteristics each may find annoying or irrelevant in the other.  Or, just as likely, complete mysteries to the other.  Potential sources of problems between the two, or untapped connections.

The message is, in imagining characters and their interactions, remember needs and drives are powerful things.  Try looking at individuals as a collection of puzzle pieces going off in random directions, not  always or perhaps even rarely expressed in actual behavior.  And those puzzle pieces someteims draw strange bedfellows.

Thinking of people who are mysteries to others and to themselves is scary.  To my mind, realistic, but that’s just me.  As someone recently pointed out to me, being realistic is often considered anti-social.  But thinking of characters in this way I think opens up the imagination and the possibilities for surprising and engaging fiction.

Openings

Happy New Year. Welcome to the season of beginnings.

New projects. Weight loss programs. Resolutions.

Well, not quite beginnings. You’ve probably been around for a little bit, living your life all this time, and I’m sure you’ve got quite a way to go.

You could call them crossroads, or changes. I’ve probably used those before, though, and for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to take a slightly different tack. Because, you never know, one of these days I may get it right…

I want to look at storytelling through the lens of openings.

Not beginnings – the start of a story, the place where you choose to introduce your readers to characters and their problems. Though the beginning of a story is the first opening in a story, of course.

That’s the beginning of a reader’s experience of your story. But that’s not the whole story. The stuff that happens before, and after, is not immediately relevant to the experience you want to convey.

I also mean a few other things when I say openings – one, I think of those spaces that allow someone to enter an ongoing process. So, yes, the beginning of a story is an opening. In multiple viewpoint stories, there are several openings into the overall tale, different perspectives on the action. So every time you switch point of view, you are creating a new opening into the story.

I also mean plot, as in those classic film and novel how-to’s and classes, in which plot is designed as a series of events that unfold into ever more complicated problems. You know the deal — end of first act, the initial problem is resolved but it results in an even greater problem, the true issue at the heart of the story that will propel the reader to the end, where there may be a twist as another opening is created, another perspective on what has happened is granted.

I also mean characters, because even a minor walk-on is a window into what is going on for the reader (or should be), and can do or say something that creates a new direction than the one the reader anticipated. An opening, through which the reader falls, hopefully Alice-like into a Wonderland.

That being said (to quote Arrested Development, and for those who don’t watch that or TV in general, the reference is to an observation about the phrase’s disingenuous implied permission to hold opposing opinions at the same time), those first few pages of a story, the first chapter or two, are probably the most heavily revised and edited of anything I write. They are the fruit of everything that has gone on before in the story of the characters coming together for the story you’re starting to tell. They’re also the seeds of what’s coming.

The beginning, in short, is the front door through which a reader walks into a story. In that first opening, I try to see, plant, hint, or lay down the faint possibility of every other opening to come.

If there is magic in the first opening, than the reader can anticipate more in the twists and turns to come. If it’s murder, well, best wear the bullet-proof vest (though not helpful against all the other methods for murder available).

If there is kindness, then there is the possibility of virtue playing a part further down the line. Or maybe, cruelty.

Certainly, contradicting the possibilities inherent in that first opening – throwing in a different point of view to end a story, using magic in a technological world, characters behaving beyond their parameters without appropriate motivation – risks alienating readers (and your editor). Surprises are great, new perspectives are exciting, but the views provided by the openings need to look on to the same story.

Ideally, the seeds will transform into something unexpected. Surprising. Hopefully memorable. But, at least for me, I need everything important to have a reference point in the beginning.

This doesn’t mean I’m calculating at the beginning of a story. Some folks can, I’m just not that smart. I can’t anticipate or contain a whole dream of a story and then set out to put it down.

Quite the contrary, I try to go as fast and as long as I can, throwing in all kinds of weirdness, details, intrigue, whatever, right at the start. Make things move. Yes, I have specific ideas about what I want to happen, but I find the best parts, the most useful elements that come into play later, often come from the unplanned (unconscious) random additions taken from whatever is happening in the world or inside me.

Then comes the sticky part. That middle. Even if I have an ending in mind, there’s the road between beginning and ending that must be built.

Things happen. New ideas are introduced. Something happens in life, and become startlingly relevant to the story. You see new possibilities in a character, or invent a new one. Those openings into the story pile up, turn into holes through which the story leaks, flops, stinks up the joint.

You get stuck. Lost.

Everything goes back to the beginning, to the first time broke through into the real world through the first opening you made.

Like in time traveling, going back to the beginning should reveal opportunities. Images. Something that needs to be unified as a thread. It’s the source.

Mine that first opening.

And, when things are discovered along the way, work your way back and make sure you (even if no one else) can see where the new thing you’ve inserted was there, or potentially there, all along.

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

This is another piece experienced writers may want to ignore, since its observations are self-evident to anyone who’s actually experienced the business of writing. My rambling on the subject might drive you mad. Trust me, I know who you are. Some of you are my friends. It’s okay.

Or, you might be offended by certain characterizations I make about the profession. But it’s just one person’s opinion, so don’t sweat it. I’m offering this one to folks who may still be struggling with what it means to be a professional and an artist.

Let’s start with the happy part. I like writing. I love living in the world of my imagination, exploring dreamtime realities and translating them into stories for this world. I also like seeing my name in print. I know, it’s an ego thing, but there it is. It makes me feel like I belong, however tangentially, to a club, to a community of other writers and readers who dig this kind of stuff.

Then there’s reality.

I don’t love writing. I don’t want to spend any significant part of my life locked up in a room writing stuff I’m not personally invested in. Non-fiction doesn’t interest me. Neither do media tie-ins, or whatever genre is hot at the moment. I like doing Storytellersunplugged because it allows me to examine the process of writing, which I hope will help me write better stories, and because it lets me share things with other writers so I feel like I’m passing something along. But other than that, I don’t feel the drive to write about other things in life that I love. Which is bad for business, if I was running a full-time business over here.

I also lack an easy facility in the art of writing. The stuff doesn’t necessarily flow quickly and coherently. I need time to think, feel, observe. My instrument – my set of verbal skills, or perhaps the connections between the different parts of my brain – is in need of some oil and the gingko just ain’t doing the trick.

So lack of love for all aspects of the physical and intellectual act of writing, combined with a certain level of talent and production capacity results in limitations which must be overcome if I’d wanted to make a living at this game.

I still have hopes. There’s always hope. A character or story may take-off, connect with a larger audience, and suddenly an income stream is generated and I can make a living off of what flows naturally from my imagination.

But there is also reality.

When I was young and hanging out on college campuses, a friend related a story about a teacher in a writer’s workshop in a small, exclusive college who pointed out to the class that there weren’t any real writers in the room because real writers were already working and making a living with the craft.

Harsh. And not entirely true. There are plenty of great writers who have come out of the writing workshop industry that has emerged over the last few decades to replace, in part, the pulps and magazines that were the writers’ old learning grounds (and, like modeling schools and gyms and the host of other strip-mall consumer industries, to service and profit from both those who genuinely want to write and the general whims and delusions of a bored and restless public – part of the hustle of business) .

And there are great writers who enjoy and thrive in the workshop environment, who need and depend on peer feedback to make their stories better. Chances are, these people would still be the informal, unpaid storytellers for their families and communities if they were born before the nineteenth century developments in printing technology that opened up opportunities and markets for product – newspapers and books – and the job of writer.   If they were lucky enough to be born into the right kind of family, they might even have added their voices to the literary movements throughout history and also made some money.  Or, they could have been part of the Church’s service industry.

But for those born to write, in this day and age, I think the teacher was partly right. There are writers out there who have the talent, passion and business sense to jump in and make it happen. They don’t do workshops. They sell what they write and don’t look back.

On the other hand, if you jump into the writing game and it ain’t working right from the start, if you’re not connecting immediately with editors and audiences, with the work conditions and range of tasks you might be doing, then there are realities to be faced.

You need training. Yes, you may have talent. Passion. Discipline. Those factors knock out a lot of people right from the start. But there’s more work to be done. And maybe the work feels different from what you thought it might be like. Adjustment must be made.

So storytellersunplugged and other writer blogs and workshops and writing programs and books and magazines and the whole vast network of training and advice is out here waiting to help improve your skills and craft.

But the business aspect of the job of writing is less publicized. Talking about contracts and relationships with agents, editors and publishers can get touchy. There are all kinds of special deals floating around and no one wants to give up their good thing – some writers have a word rate below which they won’t work, or ask for the money up front, or have their own contract or other standards for doing business. Of course, these writers are good and reliable enough to demand these things. But there are writers just as good and reliable who don’t have the same criteria for doing business.

The kind of business mind set I’m thinking about here goes beyond the “send your story to the highest paying market for its type and work your way down” kind of advice, though that is certainly a good place to start.

Advice on finding agents, contracts, publicizing books through tours and media appearances are also part of the business, but not the heart of what I’m trying to reach here.

What I’m thinking about is a kind a kind of entrpreneurial spirit, perhaps competitive or even predatory, a hustling attitude that incorporates a powerful belief in one’s work, as well as its value and its right to survive and thrive in the marketplace.

It comes naturally to some born with the talent to write. But the attitude has also driven terrific talent away from publishing (in my own journey through workshops, I’ve met a few people who were brilliant but had no tolerance for the rituals and ceremonies that come with putting a book out – for some, there’s just not enough money in the process to make it worthwhile).

The attitude embraces a curiosity about how publishing works, and explores opportunities to inject the writer into the system to make it work for one’s career. The hustle jumps on new technology, seeks out opportunities like a shark in bloody water.

Of course, the attitude can be comically inappropriate for writers without the skills and chops to back it up, just as the lack of some degree of hustle can be financially and even artistically destructive for the talented who don’t want to be bothered with business.

Agents, you say. They handle the business side. Indeed. Yes. They’re supposed to do that. But they’re also making a living off of you. Developing a relationship with an agent that works for both sides is not always easy. There is Tom Monteleone’s oft-told tale of proposing a novel about dinosaurs returning to the modern world through dna cloning, which his agent rejected because nobody wanted dinosaur books. Then Jurassic Park came out and Monteleone fired his agent.

In other words, handling an agent is part of the business of writing.

You could be like Thomas Pynchon, Michael McCarthy, J.D. Salinger and remove yourself from many public aspects of the business side of writing and still maintain a thriving career. If you’re good enough.

For perspective, let me end this segment with where I stand on the business of writing.

For starters, I loathe business in general, and particularly when it involves writing. It’s a failing, I know, like not being physically gifted but loving sports. Ebay bores me. I love money and the security and freedom it brings, but not enough to sacrifice the time to pursue other things that I love.  I went into the mental health field as a profession  in part because it’s not (so much) business.

I hate unenforceable contracts and the stone-faced lies and bullshit that come with them, banging on naive but enthusiastic publishers who don’t research or think through the money involved in publishing and make lots of promises and plans and wind up screwing everybody, or trying to get money out of the sociopaths and borderline personalities and, yes, the hustlers, who only want to screw creative types to make a buck.

I never wanted to make my living at the game. As I did my research when I was young, interacting with pros and editorial types, reading interviews and watching profiles on TV, I was…..hmmmm, how should I put it…..disappointed? Let’s leave it at that, for now.

At no point was I ever captured by the “romance” of writing, tempted by its freedoms, inspired by its rewards. And yet I always knew I wanted to write, and to be published. I wanted to tell the kinds of stories that I liked, and do them as well as possible so that they could live in someone else’s head. I also wanted be a part of that club, if only as the “unknown” person, the waiter, in a picture of famous writers of the time.

I knew at a pretty early age that what was inside of me wasn’t going to be a money-maker, and this has been confirmed at every stage of my life. And then, there were those stories of publishing atrocity – Philip Jose Farmer just had a retrospective in Locus, but I grew up with the story of his being ripped off, along with other wild tales from the pulp and magazine days. Man, the business of writing scared the hell out of me.

It seemed to me there were easier ways to make a living, and that if I pursued a career as a writer I’d have to stop writing the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. I didn’t dream about becoming an investigative reporter, or a copy writer, or what evolved into a technical writer. Using words in those ways didn’t mean anything to me.

My goal with writing evolved from the notion I had in high school about becoming a cult writer. Yeah, that was gonna be cool. Still working on that one.

I’ve published a bit. Consider myself professional because I focus on getting paid for my work. Even here, at Storytellersunplugged, though I’m not being paid to write, I’m learning, growing , listening to the long line of people here who’ve done things and been places I’ll never get to.  There’s a slim busines plan about researching my thoughts and feelings about writing so perhaps one day, I can make a little money teaching writing, or develop some of these thoughts into a coherent article or two. It’s a goal. But I still hate the business.

Yet I have to deal with it to get what I want. That’s part of being a professional.

Needs, wants, choices. That’s how I process life. But what do I know? Who the hell am I? What do real writers think?

I’ll leave you with some recent commentary I recently found:

Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, two old SF pros representing slightly different points on the optimistic/depressive scale, have been in the writing game for quite a while at a fairly high level; they also contribute a column for the SFWA Bulletin built on dialogues about various aspects of writing.

In an issue I have on hand (Fall, 2007, #175), the topic was “Abuses.” That is, the abuses writers suffer in the business. “I am hard-pressed even after all these years to think of writing as a ‘profession,’” might be the line that sums up Malzberg’s point of view. And Resnick frequently capped his explanations of various publishing cons with a variation of, “Well, you wanted to be a writer, didn’t you?”

(An important note, Malzberg also points out that it takes two to participate in any corrupt business practice – the perpetrator, and the collaborator; of course, the only realistic option in the publishing business world appears, in this column, to be not to try get published. And there are many days when this seems to be a perfectly reasonable choice.)

Last month’s Clarkesworld Magazine featured an article by the award-winning, sharp and sophisticated Richard Bowes, “I Like Writing But I Hate Being A Writer.” While not focused on the business side of writing, the piece does give a bluesy feel for the range of engagement a writer can have with the “profession.” The editor who commissioned the piece mentioned in his blog that his feelings are quite the opposite. For me, however, the title certainly sums up my state of mind.

Maybe I’ll come back to this topic again next time. If you want it to stop, petition Joe and Dave to throw me off the blog. Or send money. Yeah, that’s the ticket – send your cash contributions to storytellersunplugged and we’ll all share the wealth here at SU and I’ll stop talking about the business of writing.

Man, I knew I had some hustle in me……

.

David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, talked about writing songs in a recent television interview, saying (paraphrasing here) that if you want to write about a dock, you don’t start by describing the dock. It may take a while to get there, but in the meantime you do something to spark the imagination.

Ellen Datlow, interviewed by Nick Kaufman at www.fearzone.com/blog/ellen-datlow, talked about her reading experience for the St. Martins Press Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies:

“There are so many pieces of short fiction (this is not only in horror of course) that provide a set up and scene but no real story. Or have no texture — all surface, no undercurrents. Or use flabby language or over the top language with dialog that you’d never hear in real life. I prefer fiction that works on more than one level (although a short, sharp shock can be fine for a change of pace).”

Last year, the venerable small press genre magazine Space and Time (over forty years and still going strong!) was sold to a new publisher. I continued on as its Fiction Editor, with my wife Linda Addison as Poetry Editor. Why would we do such time-consuming work for no other apparent reward than helping work we love get published? Well, I guess the answer’s in the question….

Anyway, we had to recruit a few new associate editors to help with the slush, and in talking to a few volunteers from the Garden State Horror Writers Association (Gary Frank, Jennifer M. Perrson, Edward Greaves, along with veteran New Yawkah editor/writer Monica O’Rourke and previous ST associate editors Natalia Lincoln and Alexa DeMonterice, and last minute sign-on Alan Kistler), I found myself talking about something called the slushiness of slush.

Or.

What to look for and how to deal with stories coming in from the cold.

It’s at this point that I remember another reason why I do the Fiction Editor gig at Space and Time – it reminds me what my stories, everybody’s stories, face when they’re sent out.

Reality. Readers. The world outside of your dreams and the language that rings inside your head and the kinds of characters you’re drawn to talk about.

So. In reading the few hundred stories that I’ve personally handled during the past three months, what principles have guided me through the selection process?

For the short answer, go back to the opening words of wisdom.

For the long and quite possibly tedious answer, read on.

First off, the experience of reading as an editor for a project, whether it’s your own or for someone else, is really reading for an audience. That is, you’re reading to attract the audience, or a market, a publisher hopes will buy the product you’re helping to put together. So, reading for an audience is a lot like writing for one.

You’re no longer trying to break through a single editor to get a story in a magazine or anthology. I think it’s more like writing a novel and thinking about the market you’re trying to reach in terms of a career.

Of course, ultimately, that audience begins with you. How well you blend a personal vision with a market’s need (and who really knows what the “market” needs? Mad Ave didn’t get where it is by meeting stated needs, but by creating them.) is certainly a predictor of the project’s success.

In this case, I’m working with a publisher and so I’m looking for particular kinds of stories that reflect a merging of visions. I’ve been around ST for a while, working with the previous publisher Gordon Linzner, so my preferences are pretty apparent. Fortunately, they’re not too far off from one the new publisher is looking for, or else I wouldn’t be there.

What I look for in stories, my own and in my reading, is a sense of wonder, a sense of character, and a varying blend of darkness and light. Okay, that’s probably pretty vague. Sorry. But then again, I’m not. Because ultimately I’m looking to be surprised in a good way, and I think most short story readers are looking for the same thing.

Note to self. Be surprising.

Another thing I look for is a hook. Something at the beginning that signals something interesting is going to happen. A seed of what will be at the end (and like a seed, something that looks completely different from what will come at the end). In short, not a description of the dock.

Now, I’m going to go into some things that will, I suspect, bore experienced writers and, I fear, be ignored by novices.

The publisher requested email subs. I’ve never read exclusively email subs before, so I didn’t realize there is a significant segment of writers out there who do not know, or perhaps do not believe, that manuscript format applies to electronic submissions as well as old-fashioned snail subs. The story shouldn’t just be a file with the title, name and text attached to an email.

No. Really. I’m not kidding. As I told several writers, if you send a publisher a story and they like it, what happens if they can’t reach you? If they can’t send the contract? The check? Emails get lost. We had to scramble looking for old emails to tell people yes or no. And then there’s the joy of going the extra mile to get the word count.   Yee hah, that’s the way to editorial love.

Oh, this crazy internet age….

Other observations:

If the story is from the first person point of view, and every sentence has an “I” as a subject, you have a problem.

Boy, some folks out there really have issues with extreme religious types – the sinner-hating madman is the new serial killer. But just because you don’t read many stories from pro markets with this theme doesn’t mean it’s new and original and needs to be done. No, that’s not the message, at all.

It’s more fun when characters interact. I know, I have a problem with this, too. Sometimes the idea, or the background, or a single character’s interior processes seems like so much fun to play with that the temptation to stay pat with that particular hand becomes too great. But – and I find I keep having to remind myself of this in my own writing – it’s even more fun if there’s an antagonist and protagonist. Really. Especially for the reader.

Don’t describe the dock.

Playing tricks with the premise instead of the characters, like the big “reveal” which never turns out to be that big, or laying out a funky idea but leaving it out there to plod to its inevitable conclusion. Yes, Twilight Zone and Vault of Horror style storytelling is popular. But I’m not sure that market is actually buying much reading material. It’s the kind of thing Nick Mamatas from over at Clarkesworld has pointed out: a bunch of guys find something in a field, bring it back, bad things happen, end of story. The pulp days are gone (well, except for television). These days, the story is about characters, not the premise. The story is in how the characters interact with each other under pressure from the premise, not just how they react to the monster or the alien or the cool techie idea until some one or thing dies at the end.

It’s okay to have a character arc, even in a procedural or a fantasy.

Readers want to feel a sense of excitement about the world they’re entering. A sense of commitment from the writer to the story, the world, the characters. They want to believe, they’re looking reasons to have faith. They want to be entertained. Language conveys that sense of something special going on. Rhythm, color, something, anything.

It’s okay to set a story someplace other than where you grew up, but research that place so it doesn’t sound like a place everyone grows up.

It’s okay to set a story where you grew up, just don’t make it sound like a place where everyone grows up.

About that dock thing (note to self – learn to let go): editors and teachers talk about starting the story in the middle. Things are happening, the reader wants to find out what they are, and feels compelled to catch up while events are unfolding. Don’t describe the dock, let the boats come and go, the passengers get off and on, the birds fly, the fish lurk by the pilings.

To the writer who responded to my brief “I’ll pass” note, which at least was not the standard rejection note, with a demand to know “why,” I’ll provide the explanation that I didn’t bother to at the time, for the same reason I didn’t say anything: If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

Look. We all put our hearts out there to get stomped. It hurts. It hurts even for the pros who always seem to get accepted. I’ve been there when Asimov talked about receiving a rejection from the magazine bearing his name. I mean, damn. Sometimes an editor provides explanations, other times they don’t. Sometimes the writing is just too terrible. Sometimes the story doesn’t fit. There’s not time. There’s nothing to say other than that’s not what the editor is looking for. Whatever. I understand, new writers, especially, want to know why. But giving feedback is a 50/50 proposition. Not everyone appreciates it. Some folks get insulted. And sometimes, there really is no explanation.

Writing is hard. So is being on the other side of the editorial desk.

Of course, being 99% writer, I’ll side with writing being harder.

But diving into the slushiness of slush is no easy thing, either. It is, however, worthwhile for writers to try out if the chance presents itself, if for nothing more than the experience of rejecting instead of being rejected.

Hearts do get broken on both sides of the line.

Rejections, Reviews and Other Dubious Reactions

A friend recently complained about a review, which got me to thinking how I react to them, and by extension the slings and arrows of rejections and critical feedback and interpretations in general. Certainly a lot of folks have talked about this kind of thing here, so there’s no particular need to go over it again. And yet, I feel compelled….more on that “ego” thing later. Scroll on if you’ve heard this one before and don’t want to hear it again….

I believe it was Robert Heinlein who pointed out that (I paraphrase roughly – he was talking about doing revisions) when it comes to a story, the only person whose opinion matters is the one who’s signing the check.

Now there’s certainly a poetic conciseness to that idea, a compression of angst and sweat and ego and creative vision that forges a pretty hard diamond on the tip of one’s pen, to be accompanied, hopefully, by the clink (or shuffle) of currency. I’m sure there’s a bunch of you rising to arms against the conceit being applied to all reactions to one’s writing (and yeah, he revised, too, and depending on what’s being critiqued, not always enough), but bear with me for a minute.

There’s also Doug Winter’s observation that (again, roughly paraphrased) if you’re going to believe the good reviews, you’re going to have to believe the bad ones, too.

Ouch. That’s one tough hombre.

And finally, Doug Clegg, during one of his Jersey City “salons” a few years ago, observed (really, really rough recollection) that writers, despite their apparent insecurities, actually have pretty large egos because it takes a lot of belief in one’s self, at some level, to keep sending work out there in the face of rejection, or if accepted, the silence that so often greets the publication of one’s vision, or if there are accolades, the accompanying criticism, as well as the discrepancy between hours worked and money received.

So.

What does it mean when editors tell you your story isn’t right for their magazine, your book doesn’t fit the line, your numbers are really down? Or when a reviewer picks your piece as the “sucky one” in an otherwise fine collection (or picks out other stories as excellent in a crop of otherwise poor offerings)? Or when your critique group pans your latest?

Or a reader complains online that your writing is too obvious, or too complicated, or too something-you-never-even-thought-of? Or when your story goes forth and not even the crickets take notice and are silenced by its passing? Or when you can’t make a living in the game, or if you do, it’s not as comfortable as you wished it might be?

Or, you become one of the chosen destined to lead us all out of the genre ghetto and into the promised land of riches and literary acceptance?

It depends, I think, on what you need it to mean.

If you’re hanging on to the writing thing for a good review, or an award, or a pat on the back or a fan letter, to make the game worthwhile, or if you want to be some kind of star (and at cons and writer receptions, you really hear/feel this a lot from young writers) you might be in for a rough time.

Even if you’re using a paycheck as the measuring stick for writing worth, times and fashions change, numbers corrupt, and people signing the checks suddenly stop, not because the opinion they have has anything to do with your writing. No, the opinion more often these days is about how much money they think they’ll make (or lose) from that writing.

As someone who makes very little money from writing, is generally ignored on message boards (even his own), will never win an award, and has good reviews on his brief quote sheet only because, after thirty years and throwing a lot of stuff up against the wall, occasionally something defies the physics of ennui and sticks, I have to be careful about what I allow to have an effect on my desire and ability to write.

There’s not much setting me apart from the rest of humanity. Writing is one thing. So, I guess I fall in line behind Doug Clegg’s comment – in a world in which Shakespeare’s works are alive and well, along with classics from every age commanding the attention of new readers (or the producers of new media), and in a time when the mega mall B&N is a literary Library of Alexandria (not that most people would seek out those bits and pieces of that library in the store), I insist on putting my two cents in.

Who the hell do I think I am? Certainly not the guy who’s going to set the world on fire. Just a guy who needs to write, get published, maybe be heard once in a while in far off places for an instant before being drowned out by more relevant voices.

It makes me feel good.

So yeah, there’s ego. But that ego’s a funny thing. Survival, at least for me, depends on walking a line between too much and too little ego, like a shaman walking the borderland between good and evil.

Fortunately, there’s not much good news to turn the head, so that side of the path is covered. But the dark side calls, and it asks: why bother? So, yeah, those occasional bon mots keep me from straying too deeply into the depressed side. Being addicted to creativity’s rush also helps.

But in order for the stories to improve, and so advance the writer on the path of financial and critical success, the information that comes back on the writing – good and bad, from reviews, editors, your ego – needs to be processed a bit, absorbed, applied, in some way so the writer can exploit successful techniques and learn from the bad decisions.

In the writers group I belong to, formed by members of a class taught by Shawna McCarthy and further trained by Nancy Kress and Terry Bisson, we use this thing called consensus. Sometimes, the majority of people just don’t get a story or an element inside it. Just like rejections for a particular piece may keep piling up over the course of months and years. This is the universe is delivering a message: is one really to believe in one’s unsung genius, or does the story actually suck?

Reviews (like a writing group’s critiques) are delivered by all kinds of people, some knowledgeable and a few with genuine critical chops. Sometimes you get a nice guy who can’t write a bad review, and other times, you get the person who loathes the particular thing you do (no matter how well or poorly). Reviewers have their favorites, and you’ll never please some. Reader reviews are even more dicey – gods help you if your work is picked up by somebody expecting serial killers and you’re delivering vampires, or the the reader was in the mood for high fantasy and picked up sword and sorcery, or the cover blurbs signaled a touch of high-octane deep physics speculation but what’s delivered is military sf. And you don’t even want to know what happens when a cozy mystery seeker accidentally stumbles into a noir thriller. I’ve seen it, and it ain’t pretty….

Editors and agents are a different deal, of course. Anybody with experience in the business is worth listening to, even if they don’t particularly like what you’re trying to do. But even here, you have to tread carefully. I’m sure every writer on this blog can, over a few beers and under the cover of a blood-oath to secrecy, tell you stories about editors, publishers and agents who have their heads up, well, I don’t have to go all Bronx on you, do I. And editors and such can return the favor, as well.

Creative people, and professionals in the “creative” business, are passionate. They know what the like, want, and what works for them. They are not always best at seeing the “big picture.” They are not always terrific at distancing themselves from their little successful corner of the universe and seeing how someone else might succeed doing, or being, something completely different. Their tastes can be….idiosyncratic.

So my metaphor in dealing with the situation of feedback, positive or negative, is this: it’s all noise. Being a city-dweller, I think of it as listening to traffic, but rural types may hear nature’s sometimes subtle (insects, birds, the wind in the willows) and occasionally boisterous (thunder in the valley) call. Or, if you have kids, well, you know what I’m saying.

You don’t need to process every single note of sound aimed in your direction. But you do need to listen to the general noise level and understand what it means. A lot of sirens and flashing lights far ahead, even the flare of brake lights, is a warning to get off at the nearest exit. Country folk, gods bless ‘em, can smell a storm coming (unless they’s jes funnin’ with me). And you can sure pick out the sound of something needing attention with the gang of kids under your supervision if the tone of the yelling and screaming changes, or if it really gets “quiet….almost…. too quiet.”

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is the accumulated reaction you get is what’s worth listening to, short of the occasional brilliant and incisive critique that lights the epiphany bulb. It’s pretty obvious what the one ton of rejection slips and no publishing success is saying, and the options – workshops, critique groups, giving up, or just keep collecting those rejections because you just like to write – are all there for the pursuit of the reality of your choice.

A good review means about as much as a bad one. A few positive, or negative notices on a piece of work means, maybe, you’ve hit on something. Or, maybe not. An award, as far as I can tell from out here in the balcony seats, doesn’t do much when the customer picks up the book (because it has a cool cover, which draws said reader close enough to notice the title and maybe the “award-winner” blurb), opens up to the first page, and doesn’t like the words on the page.

I’m not saying awards and great review quotes and blurbs are meaningless – of course, they legitimize the work and the writer in the eyes of casual readers and busy editors digging through stacks of manuscripts. They’re great tools for getting noticed and laying the groundwork for acceptance on a variety of different levels.

But in terms of the actual impact on the work and how seriously a writer needs to take that stuff, positive or negative….I’m just saying, watch out.

Noise from various circles tells you what part of the market place you’ve reached – it’s up to you to figure out if that segment is worth reaching, and listening to. Everybody wants a best seller, but not everybody wants to write what usually becomes a best-seller. What writers want is the stuff they like to write to become best-sellers and, well, good luck with that.

On a more practical note, the noise you hear from editors, fans, readers, bloggers, message boards, reviewers, critics, your Mom, all needs to be plugged into the algorithm in your head that figures out what you need from your writing.

This is slow and steady stuff, I think, not quick decisions and sudden changes of directions. Hanging around my betters, I’ve heard media writers talk about the need to do more original work, and folks concentrating on their own thing contemplate jumping into work-for-hire to make ends meet. Some take jobs (or focus on marrying well).

The general noise can inform choices in characters, tone, genre, plots, etc, if you let it. All I’m saying is that I think it’s important to hang on a healthy bit of ego, figure out what you want from writing, and then filter that noise through your needs so you get something meaningful from it.

A bad review from someone representing an audience you don’t want is, in fact, a good review. Revising when you understand exactly what you’re going after, rather than jumping at popular or editorial whim, is I believe a sane decision. Fighting for what you believe works in a story and giving up when something doesn’t is the sign of a strong ego, not an over-inflated or weak one.

So. For the newer writers, I’d say, don’t believe Heinlein. Writers lie. They go for dramatic effect. Sometimes they even want to impress the rubes. (Of course, I would never….) He revised, and when he didn’t, he probably still sold the story but it didn’t become one of his steady earners on the reprint circuit, so he cheated himself.

And yeah, Doug Winter is right, treat the reviews and critiques, whatever their source, as the background noise created by your work. Whatever they may say, don’t get bogged down in defending yourself or your “vision,” and certainly don’t get hyped up on accolades. What will probably help most, anyway (I believe), are some of those negative reactions, as painful as they may be.

Because, when taken in bulk, they’re telling you something, just like big numbers adorned by critical contempt or low sales numbers accompanied by critical love (okay, those numbers may be telling you your covers suck and your publisher’s art director has one of his or her hydra heads up, well, you know….).

What you take from that background noise will have an effect on the creative and career options you make for yourself – some choose to write in simpler sentences and stay closer to traditional plots, others are satisfied with obscurity that comes with expressing a very specific and personal vision.

I remember Ed Bryant speaking as the MC for some kind of gathering (World Horror/Fantasy/Stokers) and pointing out that writers out on the edge rarely get rewarded for their efforts. Something to consider, if only as motivation to check out the nearest Home Depot for some rebar and concrete to fortify one’s ego.

Just on the editorial feedback side of the creative process, I remember meeting a writer years ago at one of SFWA’s NY receptions, lamenting that his advances were shrinking as his sentences grew longer. I haven’t seen him since. And, a young writer I used to meet at a Long Island convention every year had a successful military fantasy trilogy published, but grew so exasperated with the business that he stopped writing. And, of course, there’s the guy in Shawna McCarthy’s class who was quite stunned that writers couldn’t make gobs of money fairly quickly and walked out, and the other guys who, after a few rounds of critiquing, understood writing for publication wasn’t the thing they wanted to do.

So, yeah, Doug Clegg is also right – it takes a strong ego to stay in the business and be successful, or to quit it if it isn’t right for you, anymore, or to hang in there doing only what you love for however large, or small, an audience that passion earns, or to apply what you love to whatever forms and styles that will make you the money you need.

The background noise of reviews, critiques, sales, feedback, rejections and all the other reactions your writing provokes, filtered by what you want, know, and let yourself believe, gives you the signals you’ll need to make your choices.

Bring the noise. Bring the funk. It’s a good thing if you know how to use it.

All easier said than done, of course. But things to consider, to watch for in the jungles of the world and the self.

Gerard Houarner

Secrets

A recent Poets and Writers magazine had an interesting article in which a teacher talked about giving feedback to a student about holding back information characters gave each other to add greater tension to their interaction, and to the story as a whole. Kelly Link, in her Locus interview, talked briefly about her short story writing, mentioning her fear of losing her skills at compression and withholding as she moved to writing longer fiction.

Another article in the NY Times Science Section about the function of denial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/health/research/20deni.html) in everyday social life resonated deeply for me – we keep secrets from ourselves and agree to keep them in shared social and political worlds. In a kind of psychological/sociological dance of ying and yang, personal, political, religious, sexual and cultural identities can all be viewed as much in terms of the values presented (truthful, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, etc) as for secrets that are hidden (greedy, hateful toward this group or the other, exploitative, predatory, etc).

In plain English, we are as much what we present as what we hold back (adjust your mix according to taste for cynicism or trust).

To be obvious, a preacher can offer comfort, help the poor, speak beautifully about the joys of forgiveness and maintaining a relationship with a higher being of eternal love while at the same time victimize children or spread hateful attitudes about other religious or ethnic groups.

A civilization can produce magnificent, awe-inspiring art and architecture, make profound leaps of insight into the nature of the surrounding world and universe, produce technology to adapt and exploit entire habitats, and still torture and carve the hearts from living human beings for apparently perfectly acceptable and rational reasons.

(Hmmm – I see where my mix tends to go….)

Life and survival certainly depends at some level on being secretive, from hunter/prey relationships to plants and bacteria. Perhaps consciousness, at our level, does indeed depend on the capacity to deny, to edit reality, to make the everyday story of our lives flow a little bit more smoothly and certainly comfortably. After all, we’re the prime audience for the story of our lives, so I guess we’re also pretty tough editors. We also want to stay sane.

Anyway, the mash-up of ideas came together in my little head in terms of “secrets,” and how important they are in terms of storytelling. (I bet you were getting a little scared there about how deep off the philosophical end I was going to go – have no fear, my tiny brain can’t hold too much, and often manages to muddy what gets into it.)

As usual, folks who’ve been around might be getting a bit restless with the obvious. Don’t mind me, I just need to belabor the obvious so eventually I might get it, myself.

I’m thinking of secrets as a hook or a way to look at an idea/premise or to solve a storytelling problem – as story-starters, as a means of building tension in a scene, a lens through which to observe and develop a story – a perspective, just like “consequences” from a few months ago.

In the little editorial reading I’ve done, none on a “professional” level, I’ve certainly had a chance to run into the notion, and how secrets are handled by writers at many different levels. Probably a number of my own personal rejections have been signals about how I may have failed to satisfy a market’s expectations for how they should be handled.

Just shooting off the top of my head, I’m seeing the idea of secrets in a few different ways. Certainly the concept serves as the initial plot driver in a lot of genres – romance, mystery and noir, thriller; certainly the “literary” genre, with its close attention to the details of common daily life and interactions cunningly positioned to arrive at the epiphany the reader expects to experience for that type of story, thrives on the secrets characters hide from themselves and each other.

Secrets are, of course, at the heart of who-dunnits – with the hero resolving the crime’s transgression through through solving the puzzle of people, their actions and consequences. Thrillers manipulate who knows what among the various characters and between the cast and the audience, driving readers to turn the pages with the anticipation of discovery. Romance seems driven by triangles and unrequited love, secrets all.

Horror treasures the secrets of past sins, hidden desires, ancient powers, traps, unspoken insanity, with the horror residing in the secret’s revelation.

Fantasy seems to use a lot of secret identity, revolving around the discovery of hidden “good” as opposed to “evil.”

SF is frequently driven by finding out the secret of the “other” in alien-contact stories, or the permutation of known or theoretical science at the heart of the puzzle of odd-phenomena disrupting the characters’ lives.

What drives characters, from this point of view, are the loves and hatreds, the fears and desires, they keep hidden. What drives the story is a secret or mystery (House of Secrets/Mystery, for you old school DC fans out there) the reader, if not the characters, wants to uncover or resolve.

So one way to start a story (or to identify what kind of story you really like to tell) might be to find a secret that fascinates you. It could be the same kind you like to keep, or the kind you find fascinating in others (hate to tell you, but they’re the same – but go ahead, denial is a beautiful thing). Characters and situations, and most importantly conflict, flows from that hidden knowledge.

The tropes are all around – cheating spouses, thieving workers, the seven deadly sins (only seven? you sure?). The spy, detective, investigator. The lone individual cast out of his/her comfortable life by a vast conspiracy, or a secret about themselves known only to a benevolent/diabolical few.

Hamlet? Adultery and murder. Ibsen? Family. Yes, of course, there are other things involved in the art, but the engine that propels the narratives containing fantastic speeches and insights and observations and language is, at least from this humble point of view, lowly little secrets.

If a scene is sitting there flat with folks lecturing each other (because you’ve got a lot of backfill to shove in, or a rant simmering in your psyche, or whatever), try (as the Poets and Writers article suggested) letting the characters hold back some of the information or feeling, and see what misunderstandings, conflicts and tension arises from that.

Let’s face it, watching people lie to each other is great fun. Even when the observer doesn’t know the actual truth. In fact, trying to figure out what’s being hidden is half the fun.

If you’ve got a premise or an idea that fascinates, but it isn’t going anywhere, what happens when one character hides that idea from someone else? The story shifts from being about the idea or premise to being about the characters and why one would do this to the other (and then you can release the secret from its box and let the consequences fly).

If the characters are just not going anywhere, no arc or emotional throughline seems to be taking shape, perhaps too much has been spilled on the pages and everyone “knows” each other too well (which I think is a common problem when trying to get at characters in the process of writing the story – in exploring the character’s head, too much can be revealed to the reader/other characters).

Secrets say a lot about the characters keeping them, as well – there are cultural preferences for certain kinds of denial, from the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” to someone denying they have a particular ethnic ancestry. Friendships are built on one person protecting another from the truth or protecting a shared but hidden attitude about status or a piece of knowledge or an act no one else knows about.

Most importantly, secrets add depth and complexity to characters. In some types of fiction, and particularly in longer fiction, where conflicts are expected to turn and twist and snap at the reader like a wrestling ‘gator, all kinds of buried emotions, past incidents, desires, need to pop out to keep the story engine going.

Oh yeah, and keeping secrets is not always a bad thing. Like the Times article points out, denial can be a good thing. No harm, no foul, no need to know.

Nor are all secrets necessarily “bad,” as the one true king in a thief’s disguise frequently reminds us. Upon further meditation, good secrets can have terrible consequences, if you want them to, just as bad secrets can unwind into good endings.

Ultimately, a story is also a secret you’re telling, in a round about kind of way. After all, you know the ending before the rest of us ever will.

One brief final spasm – secrets are, of course, only one aspect of character, and for some, I’m sure, minor or irrelevant. I was reminded of this after watching the movie adaptation of The Mist, which got me to thinking about myths and folktales. When the archetypes haul themselves out and become all that they can be – religious faith, scientific rationality, and practical realist in the King story adaptation – you pretty much know what you’re getting in terms of character and even plot. Once again, it’s the storyteller’s secret (in this case, the possibility that you need a little of faith, rationality and reality to survive) that provides the real pay-off.

by Gerard Houarner

First off, thanks to the Garden State Horror Writers for having me over last month to talk about writing. It was very cool picking up where I left off on some of these Storyteller postings and shooting the breeze with writers dedicating

This month I’d like to follow-up with some more thoughts on revision, mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. I finished a big chunk of writing a few months ago and put it on the back burner to cool off, and recently took it out again. This is something many writers recommend doing, but practically speaking, if you’re a working writer with contracts and publishers demanding more work from you, you don’t get the chance – just listen to some of the other folks on SU racing for their deadlines, pouring out the words and moving on to the next project because the rent’s due and the fridge is empty.

Editors pick up on the problem areas, of course. It’s their job. Unfortunately, problems still happen. Everyone has sob stories.

(Everyone has sob stories about meddling editors, as well – it’s a give and take situation where discussion should be encouraged. Sometimes you the writer have good reason to do something a particular way, or happen to know a fact that makes a particular scene or character unique. It’s up to you to defend your stance. But it is true that an editor often acts as the Voice of Reason – we’re just too much inside our own world and need to be brought back to that space we share with readers. I once heard Howard Waldrop talk about his editorial experiences, including Ellen Datlow asking him to revise a story to “give the reader a clue.”)

Well, I’m not in the writer-working-for-the-mortgage league, nor can I share Waldrop’s rarefied literary company. I do write stuff, and it does get sold and published, so I’ve had to deal with revision at my own level.

I think part of the problem with the art of writing is that it’s usually done in such a piecemeal fashion. A painter or sculptor has the “whole” work right in front of them. Most composers can “experience” their creation in a few minutes, unless it’s a symphony, movie score or musical.

Writers not only take as long and longer to finish a piece of work as other creators, but they don’t get the benefit of “living” with their creation. A reader can gobble up a novel in hours, or over the course of a few glorious days. The book lives in a reader’s mind for that time as a kind of alternative reality, a dreamtime.

The writer can’t look at the stack of pages, or a list of file names, and encompass what work’s been done visually. The writer can’t listen to the story’s tune.

In a Locus interview with Jay Lake last year, he mentioned a concept that really caught my attention: Span of Control. Basically, it’s the amount of story he can contain in his head “organically” without thinking about “mechanisms” (I think he means where the story’s going next, plot, twists, threads, arcs, whatever you want to call those structures.) Within that Span of Control he said he was able to maintain his voice; outside of it, the writing degrades.

The way I relate to this idea is in my capacity to “be” in a story, to see it all, complete, or at least have confidence it’s all resolvable and makes sense.

Span of Control for a writer is like an artist looking at the canvas, walking around the sculpture, listening to the song.

You can see how the pieces connect, relate to each other, flow. Yes, I know, it’s not what’s usually regarded as “editing,” but I think this perspective helps.

Working writers may have an advantage over part-timers like myself, on distracting day jobs, although there are plenty of other factors that can cause the same amount of interference – issues with family, house, medical, etc. The point is, the more time you spend in your story, the easier it is to remember it, dream and live it, maintain that Span of Control.

The more you write (the more you practice the skill), the more story you can hold in that SoC (Lake mentioned he’d been able to expand his ability to retain the story information). The more you can hold, the less you need to worry about making critical plot errors leading to problems later, as well as major revisions.

I think particularly for beginning writers, dealing with the frustration of “starting over” on a piece after a few days off and generally dealing with the interference in carrying the whole story in one’s head is a killer. That’s why the advice of writing every day, at a certain time in a consistent place, is so valuable.

I recently enjoyed a certain amount of comfortable SoC by taking a week off and writing and/or revising every day for most of the day. I was able to pick up where I left off much more easily. In a story involving a bit of complicated (for me) historical/cultural research, I was able to sustain the mood/atmosphere I was hoping to achieve. It had taken me two weeks to get half way through the story (part-time writing, half an hour to a couple of hours a few nights a week, a few hours on the weekend). I finished the story in two and a half days, revisions and all, at least for now.

On another, much longer piece, again with a lot of cultural research involved taking me months to finish, I was able to do a complete revision, with some serious re-writing, in a few days.

I could literally pick up on where I’d slogged through areas over a number of weeks, and where I’d managed to carve out time and get through a part of the story in a matter of days. The writing was smoother and there were less errors (pesky pet sex changes, the miraculous transformations of hair color or clothing, name flips).

Another observation: the beginnings of these pieces were usually smoother, more polished, than the endings. Warming up for writing sessions, I go back, pick up what I’ve been trying to do, make changes, revise. When building the story engine at the very beginning, I spend a lot of time going back, tweaking, adding, deleting, refining. The attention makes for writing.

(Not that this piece is any example of “fine writing,” but in putting it together in one sitting, I’ve gone up and down the thing a dozen of times before getting to the end, adding, cutting, clarifying, etc – yeah, it’s not scintillating, and it may not even be entirely logical or coherent, but alas it makes sense to me and you should have seen what it looked like before all those revisions. I couldn’t have even reached the end without the on-the-fly edits.) (Oh, and yeah, I went back the next day to read it cold and try to make the thing make some sense. Just so you know I tried.)

The further along the story I move, the less I go back. I think there’s a certain “tipping point” I reach where I’ve moved beyond the set-up and I’m more involved with the new scenes and what’s coming next. The problem comes in with those middle scenes I finished but don’t revisit to “warm up” because they don’t necessarily have relevant information for what I’m working on at the moment. Scene and act changes are a new beginning, so going back winds up being distracting.

Then comes the race for the end, where my need to finish can lead to tragic errors of judgement. What saves me, at least sometimes, is my habit of going all the way back to the opening and making sure the elements I introduced (imagery, conflicts, whatever) are resolved, reflected, etc.

That still leaves the middle hanging, though.

Details. Bothersome, tedious details. That kind that make the stories “real.” The things that bite a writer in the butt when they’re inconsistent, or just plain wrong, that throw the reader out of the story, or never lets them get into it because there’s not enough and/or they’re not used well. That’s the job, though.

So. Span of Control, as far as I understand the concept, is a nifty tool for writing and revising, both on the fly and at the end before the story goes off to an editor. I interpret it as being “in” the story like you’re in your apartment or house – you know where everything is, or at least know the general area to go look for something, and you’re aware of the color of your walls, what kind of furniture is in the bedroom, what’s in the pantry because, well, you live there. You know who’s in the house (unless you live with teenagers). You use the material at hand, you don’t forget things you might have started or overlook opportunities to make things better or something out of place.

But stuff happens to tear you out of your “story house” all the time. Sometimes it’s the day job. Or medical issues. A leaking roof. Let’s just call it reality.

Unless you can make a full-time living from your writing and have a partner who can run interference for you in dealing with reality, that SoC is going to get knocked around a bit.

And, you might not be able to work your way up to Lake’s ability to keep an entire novel in his SoC. (Hmmmm, SoC. Sock. Unfortunate. But it’s funny, and I’m kind of a funny guy, and there’s really no time to revise SOME MORE, and since there’s no editorial intervention on a blog, I guess you the reader will just have to suffer with that one – hope you’re having fun!)

I think time is needed. A day, a week, whatever works for you, to live in the story from beginning to end.

Yes, of course, you re-read the thing. Cold. From a distance. Outside the SoC dreamtime. Catch those mis-spellings, missing words. Animal sex-changes. Developing editorial talent and a sensitivity to your weaknesses (like word drops, and “reading” those words back in when they’re not actually there during the revision process, leading to colorful manuscript marks) is crucial to presenting a professional manuscript to an editor.

I know a few writers who love this part of the process. They look forward to the cutting, the re-arranging. Others don’t look forward to it but know it’s vital to their making a sale (as Nalo Hopkinson pointed out about herself in a recent interview). Still others seem to do it on the fly, in the dream time – my old teacher Joseph Heller used to talk about finishing a manuscript page, and once it went down on the pile (these were the days of typewriters, folks), that was it, the page was done. Of course, he spent a lot of time on that page. But he could keep what had gone on before, and where he was going, all in his head while he concentrated on that part of the picture. And then there’s always the saintly spouse or companion, the valued band of first-readers who understand what’s trying to be said and know just what to say to help the process along.

But I think you also need to experience the work as a reader will: hold it all in your mind like a passenger who’s going along for a relatively quick ride, not as the builder who’s spent weeks, months, perhaps even years cutting the road through mountains and jungles and those dry, broad stretches of desert or arctic wasteland.

Basically, my point is two-fold: maintaining the SoC helps the writing and editing-on-the go process, and the cold and distant read tests the strength of the illusion you’ve created as well as catches those bumps you might have missed in dreamtime which might push a reader out of the story.

From what I can see, successful working writers schedule revision time as part of the deadline (you guys feel free to tell me I’m wrong) and have the skill to distance themselves and approach the work with “fresh” eyes over a short period, to some extent (reading aloud is probably the best technique – what feels right on the screen or on paper can suddenly jump out wrong when you hear it). I think those guys are also adept at something resembling Lake’s SoC so they can keep the story going while minimizing disastrous stalls or false steps.

Of course, as you can plainly read in this blog, this doesn’t work for everyone all the time. Still, revision on the fly along with revision after creation are skills that separate the published from the unpublished. This kind of work I think helps writers get to the end, and want to get to the end, of a story. And finishing a story is half the battle.

For the rest of us, my advice is do what you can to sustain the Span of Control, through work habits, meditation, rituals, notes, and time away from the real world’s interference. And don’t be too eager to push the story out the door straight-away.

If you have the luxury of putting the story aside for a little while, take it. Put in for a vacation or personal day, use a long weekend, call in sick, and live with your creation. Of course, be ready for editorial guidance suggesting you’ve spent a little too much time inside your world and need to make concessions for the rest of us in the “real world” – you might be just a little too good at SoC. But on the other hand, don’t be surprised by what you might catch that can save you from rejection.

by Gerard Houarner

In keeping with the Storytellersunplugged tradition of telling a scary story for October, I’d like to present the following “original” – a “true” story about a fellow named….um, ah…..Ron. Yes, this story is told from the pov of “Ron” but it could be anybody’s story – why it could be your neighbor’s story, or the guy sitting next to you in a writing workshop, or even your story, or perhaps even…..mine.

….

So I received a proof from a publisher of a novel finished some time ago which took a long while to write. Starts and stops, structural collapses and rebuilding. You know the routine.
Then it made the rounds, and there were starts and stops, structural collapses and the need to rebuild a career. You know the routine.

So I get this book back, which belongs in the past and is no longer where I’m heading but I’m glad it’s coming out, and there is a context. There have been problems, I’m told by the publisher. In cobbling dozens of individual chapter files into one master manuscript/file, I mistakenly put in the same chapter twice. The publisher is puzzled. My bad. Upon further review, I also neglected to put in an Interlude – not a chapter with a number, but an Interlude.
Yes, there is cuteness to the conceit, but there is also a very real reason for its existence, to do with cycling through points of view and introducing a –

I’m sorry. I know. You don’t care. You want to get to the scary part. I’ll tell you.

So these gross errors are fixed, but I also get a note that I forgot to finish a sentence in the ms.

Now my memory is that I went over this thing quite a number of times, and that’s something I should have picked up. Unless I was doing a last minute revision, got distracted, and forgot.

Things happen. I vowed to fix the problem.

But the seeds of doubt had been planted. Bad thoughts lurk.

The manuscript is a mess.

A disaster.

A heaping mass of unprofessional crap.

Then the proof came in.

I set aside my doubts and went to the first page. Read the first dozen, made a couple of changes, but everything looked fine. Relief trickled through me, a spare little stream running over parched earth.

Then I remembered that I’d wanted to compare the original ms with the proof to catch those errors an editorial changes the publisher said he’d made. I didn’t want to go to that humongous master document because there’d already been problems with that. No, I wanted to go to the original individual chapter files.

Yes. Because I’m a professional.

So I search through my computer, which is two and three machines removed from the one I originally started and finished the story on, find what I’m looking for and open up a few files.
Then I begin the tedious task of comparing the two manuscripts line by line to make sure what I wrote and intended to be in the ms is actually there.

And there is a problem. A very large and serious problem.

My heart sinks. A little knot grow at the back of my neck.

No, this cannot be.

The world shrinks to a tiny, flickering flame of hope surrounded by darkness.

I check another file, a chapter further along. I check the last chapter. Random chapters.

The problem is spread over the entire manuscript, from beginning to end.

The galley doesn’t match my files. Somebody has re-written the entire novel, from start to finish.

Oh, the story is still there. But paragraphs, whole chunks of narrative have disappeared.

Chapters have been split. Words, phrases, heaping helpings of paragraphs have been altered.

There is damage.

And darkness.

My mind races. My stomach turns. What is happening? Why doesn’t the galley match the files?
And then I make the most sickening realization of all, the one every writer, anyone who’s ever done anything creative, fears the most –

– the stuff in the galley is better than the stuff I wrote.

It’s all right there, in black and white.

Stiff, clumsy wording; remote characters; lecture chunks; odd dialogue. That’s the stuff I wrote. I thought it was good enough to send out. What was I thinking?

Did I really think this was worth anything at all?

There really is a sinking feeling, a sensation of dropping out of the world and into a pit which isolates you from every other living organism in the universe because you are not worthy of sharing the same reality with the meanest water bug from that reality.

It feels something like the sickening feeling you get when you’ve locked yourself out of your car, or your house.

I know that feeling.

But this is worse.

It feels like every letter and phone call and email you’ve ever received saying sorry, this wasn’t to my taste, or it doesn’t fit, or try again (though after a thousand of those, you feel like a beekeeper who just doesn’t feel the stings anymore).

It feels like the silence that follows a follow-up query to ask if your story is still under consideration, or a request for your contributor’s copy or your money, which you still haven’t received even though it’s been so many weeks, months, years since publication.

It feels like the embarrassed eye-shift and side-shuffle into an open elevator an editor or publisher gives you as you approach them at a convention with the intent of casually asking if they’re open for proposals, or if they ever read that proposal you sent to them

I know that feeling.

But this is worse.

Somehow – and I know this is silly because the magnitude and shock shouldn’t be the same – it feels like someone you love telling you they don’ love you. Oh, and: Goodbye.

I know that feeling.

Okay. This doesn’t beat that, but it’s in the same ball park.

What has happened, I surmise, is that the publisher has caught on that the manuscript is an irredeemable pile of shit. Maybe he’s picked up the thread of a story he liked somewhere in that mess. Perhaps he felt a deep pity for me. He did warn me – there were problems.

Take your time, he said. Make sure it’s what you want.

Yes. Hints. Clues. I hadn’t been clever enough to pick up on them. It’s like when you show up at a party and the host and hostess try to turn you away from the door and then they tell you the party’s cancelled only you hear the laughter and the tinkle of glasses and storm past them because you’re hungry and you need to use the bathroom and, hell, they did invite you only to discover that –

– you’re not wearing pants.

I don’t know that feeling. But perhaps you do.

So I go over the pages, and my brain explodes because someone has reached into my crude and clumsy prose and ripped out the necrotic organs and injected life and snap and personality.

Why, of course plant a character description right up front so the reader knows they’re not dealing with the usual blonde you see in the opening scenes of horror movies.

I pull up other chapters, and the changes run straight through. I consider printing out both – compare, synthesize.

I start running all the names of writers who’ve been published by this company, and yes, I can see this one’s hand, and that one – the snap, the crispness, yes, yes, they saved this thing
Give the re-writer a byline. All the money.

I suck. I can’t write for shit. I have to stop, now. I’ve contracted a terrible disease that’s robbed me of my verbal gifts – no, no, what am I saying, I never had any verbal gifts, how did I ever manage to get a couple of hundred stories published.

I actually open an email to the editor and start writing out my thoughts about not even going on with the proofing, just go ahead and publish it and give the other writer a by-line and th
e money…..

Something makes me back to the computer. Open up the chapter files again.

It’s not even a spark of hope. More of an instinctive twitch.

Hmmm, I thought I had this chapter open already.

Odd. This set of chapter headings are 1,2,3…, the other one, two, three…. Why is that?

Oh.

That first set was an early draft.

The other is the final draft.

The other draft looks just like the proof.

It was all so long ago. Oh.

Right. I remember tearing it apart. Making changes. Deleting, re-writing, reorganizing.

I’m the other writer.

That is the power and the necessity of revision.

It is the only thing that will keep you from killing yourself.

…..

There. I think if you’re a writer you’ll find that tall tale pretty terrifying.

Or hysterically funny. Two sides of the same coin.

Thank Poe it never happened to me. Just to some poor dope named “Ron.”

Names were changed to protect the stupid.

Nothing going on here.

Nope.

….

Stop look at me…..

Gerard Houarner

A recent wave of media coverage about the “Beloit College Mindset List” hit on a couple of troublesome notes for me. Here’s the link in case you missed the buzz (slow news day, I guess):
http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/

The list is a rough estimation of what an 18 year-old heading off to college understands of the world. It presents a frame of reference. There are lists for the last ten years, and comparisons even between those lists are interesting, though basically they cover the children of the 80′s and 90′s (for some of us, these are our kids). College admission offices use them, as well as the government, to help bridge the generation gap (to use antique terminology).

Well, no matter what you may think of the list – it’s an instant cliche or stereotype, for example, or perhaps a depressing snapshot of the state of education in this culture, or even a nasty piece of condescension based on a very narrow profile of class, religion, race, ethnicity, and even immigration status – it does provide a baseline with which to approach defining a character’s base of experience.

Or not.

I can easily think of a number of teenagers whose frame of reference is completely alien to the assumptions presented on this list.

For example, kids raised with anime and online computer games and blogs can have a surprisingly sophisticated world view because they’ve interacted with kids from all over the world and have a lot of time to explore a great many topics on the internet – they’re not necessarily brainwashed television drones mindlessly accepting what cable channels and advertisers are pushing at them.

Unfortunately, I can also easily fall prey to the belief that the list is accurate for roughly half the incoming freshman, especially after watching any MTV “reality” show.

The lists are simplistic and over-generalized, in my opinion. But they weren’t generated as deep, sociological commentary, but merely as a way to “get a handle” on a cohort of young people marching, or stumbling, or perhaps even crawling (as we did in our time) toward adulthood. How much of handle they’ll allow their target audience to get is open to debate, and perhaps the springboard for a comedy series or movie (cable Disney or network Disney? Straight-to-video or online? Saturday morning cartoon or Adult Swim? Ah, the choices – more on that topic later….)

Still, the list is a tool that is apparently taken at least semi-seriously by a number of people who control our lives, so it’s worth looking at from a writer’s point of view.
They can be a window to the perspective of a character, quick and easy, like those birthday cards presenting a collage of images and information from the year in which you were born. What’s useful is that knowing what a “normal” person is “supposed” to know and not know from any generation at any given time forces us as writers to either limit the references, choices and awareness of possibilities a character can have, or come up with damn good and interesting reasons why or characters would know about things people of the time/generation would not commonly be aware of.

These kinds of “snapshots” are a baseline, a cardboard “human figure” cutout of character, the basic point-of-view – the sound track of lives, the media influences, the cultural touchstones, the historical contexts (that’s before we even get to the usual character flaws and family traumas).

My view of space was shaped by the residue of 50′s “sci-fi” and pulp exuberance, by Sputnik and Mercury, by Analog and Galaxy and The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Star Trek (OS) was a revelation. A miracle.

Later generations can look on this heritage in any number of ways, from a joke to quaint to perhaps even respectful and empathic awe.

But that era belongs to a set of people. It was very quickly replaced by other events, new and even more miraculous and disastrous events. The generation of the Challenger disaster looks at space a little differently.

The same can be said of the WWII, Korean War and Vietnam War generations – I grew up in a family which survived the Occupation, hearing stories about work camps, Resistance, bullets zipping into the ground as kids watched dogfights overhead oblivious to the danger all around them, identity checks, massacres. I also grew up with some WWI stories passed down around the family table, and stories of wayward country priests and elves waiting in the night by bridges and stars dancing in pools of water on dead-of-night country paths.

I had teachers who were WWII and Korean vets, and before I was 21 had worked with Korean and Vietnam vets.

But I never went to war, and that’s a bit of a cultural divide both in my generation and between generations.

I’m a city kid who hung out with other first generation immigrant kids from all over the world, so I saw the homes of people from China, Puerto Rico, Africa, and half of Europe.

Even for all of that experience, and lack of it, by the time I was ready to enter college, TV was black and white for most of my young life. Radio was huge. Records were vinyl. Newspapers were relevant.

I would have been surprised to see myself fit on anyone’s list of typical assumptions about a college class. I might even have been grateful at the time, seeing myself fit in somewhere, anywhere.

But my point here is there are a great many of us who share the same “knowledge base” from that mid-fifties generation. And I look at the card for my birth year and I’m amazed by the stuff I don’t know, about sports, or history, or popular songs, ads, etc. I was immersed in my own little world, a great deal of which was rooted in the “real” world of that time, but that viewpoint probably didn’t connect me to a great many other folks because the “real” world was very big, and young people didn’t necessarily see it from the same perspective.

And this is from the time when there were only a few channels on TV, and school curricula were perhaps more consistent within big regions of the country, and cultural expectations and restraints were more powerful. Yes, this was the hippie era, another time of revolutions and terrorists (another thing that amazes me is listening to the news reports about some terrible event as if nothing like it had ever happened before – each generation gets to own its own atrocity, and …..yeah, I guess that is my point).

And this is also my point – it’s one thing to look at a list of common reference points for a generation, and it’s quite another to actually apply it to that generation.

It’s a 20th century thing which has slid with heart-stopping speed into the 21st century. There is more information available, as well as more choices for people to consider. Granted, the global percentage of people with access to that information and with resources to make choices remains small. But that percentage is growing. Just look at India and China (alas, Africa is still recovering from the choices that were made for its people).

The number of special interest sub-groups boggles the mind. What binds countries, anymore? What makes a culture? In Europe, the older generation grouses about young people cross borders freely, using a single currency, all the old rivalries and animosities forgotten, as well as cultural heritages. Kids going to college may be video or role playing gamers who are jocks as much as nerds (or geeks).

Religion, while obviously still a foundation stone, is not quite as consistent or prevalent a tribal marker across all economic classes as it once was in this country. Neither is race. Baseball is no longer the national pass time. The old WWII movies used to show soldiers asking approaching figures in the night who won the last World Series – if that kind of thing actually happened and isn’t just Hollywood hokum,
then I’m sure soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t using the same assumptions to check on who’s an enemy and who’s a friend.

In this fragmented world, what is the expected cultural knowledge base? How many people tune into the same things going at the same time? Despite all the hype and hoopla, five or twenty million people watching whatever television show of the moment is hot is hardly a consensus in a country of over 300 million people. A million records, a few million downloads, isn’t enough to make you a pop legend to the vast majority of people. Books that sell tens of thousands of copies are still not spread widely enough even among the “intelligentsia” (does anyone even use that, anymore?) to generate a consistent and reliable dialogue.

Even a district by district breakdown of “red” and “blue” states reveals a startling degree of fragmentation – it just isn’t that simple.

Sorry about the grandiosity.

Let me just get back to the original slant on this topic and say that lists, birthday cards, articles on the “lost” generation or generation “Z,” “Y,” “Z” (uh oh, we’ve run out of letters, are we going back to “A?” Will this lead to a false sense of entitlement among our children and grand children and – there I go again….) can offer a valuable and even necessary starting point for developing a character and seeing what choices they might make given the situations you’re going to put them in.

It’s 2007 and your female character is a 35 year old mother (and you the writer are 20 or 50), maybe touching base with one of those lists might inform the character’s background in terms of cultural and economic influences. It’s not all about family traumas and positions in the sibling hierarchy and economic status (though character is a lot about those things, too).

And here’s something just as important: these lists are a window to readers, our “Harry Potter” generation or working mothers or returning vets or cult movie fans.

As storytellers, we naturally refer back to the “canon” with which we were raised, the music we heard and were exposed to when we were young, the historical and scientific “facts” we learned in school.

Yes, as storytellers, it’s important to reference the past, the valued traditions and treasures that need to be carried forward, and to put these references in an emotional context so it has meaning for readers who did not grow up with them.

Write what you know.

But it’s also important to reference what is immediate and relevant to current readers who grew up on these lists, or who raised children going off to college.

Keep learning. Know more.

When I was in college, writers and poets were sometimes rated in various snarky ways – for instance, a 3rd rate poet at least preserved the language (which a poet friend of mine always repeated, as if chewing over the final judgement of his present profs as well as all future critics and readers – “well, his work was boring, but at least he used words correctly”).

Maybe a storyteller’s role is in part to preserve the past in meaningful way for new generations, to pass on old culture to what amounts to a brand new culture growing in our homes and in our midst, separated from us by technology and experiences and choices we may not have or even understand. To pass on through headphones and virtual reality plug-ins the Bronte sisters and Dickens and Shakespeare and Sophocles; Revolution and Civil War here and elsewhere; Vivaldi and Leadbelly and the Beatles.

And more, the storytellers role is also to integrate that past and all the unpleasant truths it holds, like slavery and slaughter and exploitation, as well as all the glories it contains, like Michelangelo and Bach and Philip K. Dick (yes, I know, and I don’t care – I could have said H.P. Lovecraft, so be grateful), with hip hop and 9/11 and Stephen King and Harry Potter and Samurai Jack and WMD’s and internet gaming.

To make the past relevant in this moment, and for the future.

To be relevant as storytellers in this moment (yeah, for the sales, to get readers, yes, yes, but also for the sake of what we grew up with, what was and is important to us, what can be passed on, even if it’s only the correct usage of language).

Because I still think the kids on those lists have a lot more to offer, and the “people in charge” are making some assumptions that will wind up biting them in the butt (good for them), and I’d be happy to contribute what knowledge and perspectives I hold so folks growing into the future will have a bit of the past to help them in their merry biting.

Just some late night perspectives on storytelling……