Richard Dansky

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – the net is awash in advice by, of and for writers. This is a good thing, insofar as getting information into the hands of folks who are interested in using it to become better at their craft is generally a good idea. There’s advice on writing, there’s advice on marketing, there’s advice on self-publishing, there’s advice on e-publishing, there’s advice on how one should comport one’s self when engaged in a metaphorical act of cross-species carnal knowledge between Rana pipiens and Pan troglodytes. There’s advice on writers and agents and editors and bookstore folk and podcasters and cover artists and blurb-givers.

But lost in this flood-stage river of writing advice tends to forget one important person in the equation: the reader. Sure, there’s lots of stuff out there about how you can get readers to buy your book (which is kind of important), and get them talking about your book, and get them reviewing your book on Amazon. But it feels like something’s missing from all that, the sense of the reader as reader, not customer, the notion that their role in this is to enjoy what the experience of reading. And that bothers me a bit.

I confess, I’m a big reader. I read fast, and I read often, and I spend a lot of time in airports, so I have lots of reading time. I also review books, more or less, for four publications, so there’s a pretty steady flow of reading material through Chez Dansky and its hotel room-shaped far flung outposts. In a given year, I’ll probably read about 120 books cover to cover, plus take bites out of another thirty. I love reading, love the experience of curling up with a good book (metaphorically curling, that is – the seats at LaGuardia really don’t allow for much in the way of alternative posture choices) and losing myself in it. I don’t read because I have to – the reviewing gigs follow the reading, not the other way around – I read because I genuinely enjoy it, and I genuinely hope that everyone who reads something of mine gets that same enjoyment.

One of the things I’ve done the past couple of years is track which books I’ve read in a given year via Goodreads. It’s not keeping score, it’s more a way for me to check myself to see what my reading habits are, and how they change, and if I need to stop reading so damn many graphic novels. (Answer: Yes. Yes, I do.) As the year wound down, I did a run through this year’s catalog, and thought about where I’d read them, and when, and how. And I realized there were stories to the reading, to go with the stories that I was reading, ways in which the things I’d read had resonated beyond the experience of just reading. I thought I’d share a few of them.

Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned The Seal (Joe R. Lansdale) – I bought this in an airport bookstore in St. Louis, waiting for a delayed flight to take me home to start the year. I read it in the airport, and was finished before my plane left the ground. On the flight, I read an uneven biography of Forrest J. Ackerman, and fretted over the fact that I’d dinged the cover.

A Man Called Intrepid (William Stevenson) – Read mostly in a hotel room in Paris, off the Bastille. Three weeks at the head office to start the year off, punctuated by news that two relatives I loved dearly had passed away. One of them, according to family folklore, had served in Europe, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a good and generous and strong man, much loved by all who knew him. I learned of his passing while stalking back and forth in the courtyard of the Louvre one cold night, trying to uncross figurative wires and meet up with the marvelous Gio Clairval, writer and translator, and fellow friend of Bull Spec editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn. Eventually we found one another, and had a lovely dinner over which many stories were told, and I didn’t mention that Uncle Joe had passed  because, really, that would have been kind of selfish. Eventually dinner wound down, and we said good evening, and I walked myself home to my hotel. And in the evenings the rest of that trip, I’d read myself to sleep with stories of derring-do from World War II.

Journal of a UFO Investigator (David Halperin) – Read for the sake of a review and interview of the offer, for Bull Spec Magazine. The interview was at Foster’s Market in Durham, and I was lost and late getting there. I parked in the wrong lot, sprinted in, and recorded the whole thing on my new iPad, which would have been fine if I’d had any chance to test recording things on my new iPad before breaking it in at the interview. The author, David Halperin, was wonderful and generous with his time, just as the book was wonderful and generous. Later, he wrote me to say that he thought the review nailed exactly what he was trying to do with the book, and asked if I’d be kind enough to repost it to amazon. So I did.

Ice Cream: A History (Ivan P. Day) – Read on the back deck of my house with a glass of homemade lemonade as accompaniment. That didn’t happen a lot this year; 20 or so weeks on the road. The hammock went almost entirely unused.

A Mammoth Murder (Bill Crider) – Bought off a dealer’s table at World Horror Con, pretty much because the back cover copy promised a Bigfoot angle to the mystery. I read it at home in the first couple of days following the con. The Bigfoot angle was pretty much a dud, but those who seek Bigfoot are used to failure. God forbid anyone ever actually found a sasquatch; the zoologists would move in instantly, and where would all the happy cryptozoologists be then?

The John Varley Reader (John Varley) – Read in a variety of places around Visby, Sweden. Four stories were read on the beach. Two were read as I perched precariously on the old town wall. Three more in a coffee shop, waiting for something that wasn’t coffee. You get the idea. And in the end, the book stayed there, left behind at the hotel for their tiny lending library, so someone else might get a chance to read it the way I had.

A Taste for Absinthe: 65 Recipes for Classic and Contemporary Cocktails (R. Winston Guthrie) – My wife is a statistician. She is also an absinthe fiend, having become thoroughly hooked on the not-so-blithe spirit during a trip to Prague for a writing workshop with John Kessel and Wilton Barnhardt. When this book came in for review, she decided we’d be having an absinthe party so we could review the recipes scientifically, with a matrix and, err, statistical stuff. So we invited friends over, and we bought a bunch of absinthe, and we made a lot of drinks, and, well, I’m pretty sure I remembered enough of the evening to actually write the review. Were any of the drinks any good, though? You’ll have to ask her.

Mendoza in Hollywood (Kage Baker) – Kage Baker passed away in early 2010. She and I both wrote for Green Man Review, and I was asked to write an appreciation of her for the magazine in the wake of her passing. I’d read and enjoyed her work prior to that, of course. 2011 was the year I really fell in love with it, and I dove in and devoured that which I had not already read. Sometimes, we find things too late; we don’t want to read the next thing from an author who’s gone because that brings us one step closer to reading the last one. Then again, there’s still joy to be taken in the reading of what is there, and there’s a brand new copy of Empress of Mars waiting for me in my to-read pile.

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed (Philip Plait) – Read in Toronto, in a hotel room that was hugely spacious but lacking in a desk. In the convenience store next door, I was nearly trampled by a Lady Of The Evening stampeding her way to the drink cooler; apparently she was jonesing for a strawberry-kiwi Snapple. Later, I saw her on the street, yelling into her cell phone, tottering on heels high enough to require elevators, and clutching the half-empty Snapple bottle like it was the stuff of life itself.

The Disappearing Spoon (Sam Kean)- Bought in T.F. Green International Airport after a lengthy, lengthy conversation with one of the booksellers there. It was the trip home from NECON, and any books we’d bought there were packed and tucked away. Our flight was delayed – pretty much every flight I had this year, with the exception of the prop job puddle jumper that got me to and from Visby at ungodly hours in the morning was delayed, canceled or otherwise banjaxed – so Melinda ran back to the bookstore to pick up some things we’d talked ourselves out of buying. In truth, the bookseller had helped with that. He’d been so engaging and knowledgeable – and so interested in the fact that there was a writers’ convention down the road he’d never heard of – that we focused more on him, than on the books. But he got us on the rebound, and I read the book in dribs and drabs, one gaggle of elements at a time, over the next week.

Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett) – Also read in Toronto, as much of the back half of my year was spent there. I bought it from a tiny, cluttered used bookshop on Yonge Street, where the shelves had long since given up the fight and the books were stacked ten high and three rows deep on the floor. I read it over meals and in cab rides, reading it with one eye to make sure that I got where I was going and didn’t end up lost in the hinterlands of Missasauga or some such. Maybe I read it slower that way. Maybe it was just a very dense book. In any case, I didn’t finish it until just before I left for home. Many books I read on the road, stay there. If it’s not something I’ll read again and I can find a good home for it on the road, there’s no reason to shlep it back. Far better to let it stay behind so someone else could discover it. This one, though, came home with me.

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds (Manly Wade Wellman) – I was mocked by the lead singer of a Swedish prog-metal band for reading this visibly during his band’s set. Prog Day is a local festival, out way the heck and gone in Chapel Hill. My friend Steve Burnett introduced me to it a couple of years ago, and my modus operandi is pretty simple: pack some books, pack a chair, pack a cooler full of beverage, and go hang out. It’s what everyone else is doing, after all. It was just my luck that the lead singer of Freak Kitchen noticed me – us, really; Steve was reading, too – during his set. The book, of course, is by Chapel Hill resident Manly Wade Wellman; things come full circle when you least expect it.

To Rule The Waves (Arthur Herman) – A deliberately contrarian history of the British Navy, selected largely for its bulk and ability to be the only book I’d need on a trip over to Vienna. The reason for the trip was the inaugural STAGConf, dedicated to Storytelling and Games (see how that worked?) and held in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Between lectures, everyone would eat pastry, then scurry off to ogle the Venus of Willendorf. Pictures do not do her justice. She is stunning. And she put what we do – what we were all there for – in perspective. Nobody’s going to be going to museums to check out lines of dialog from Cold Fear, twenty four thousand years from now.

Girl Genius, Volume 1 (Phil and Kaja Foglio) – Part of a 6-box-of-books delivery from one of the magazines I review for. I tore them open and blasted through a good ten or so in the next two weeks. One of those weeks was spent on the road, which is when I read half of those books. The other half were all read that night. I stayed up, sitting in one of the living room chairs with my cat curled up next to me, going through one after another. After I wrapped up each book, I told myself I’d be off to bed. Then I’d pick up another book, and another, until the sun came up.

After the Apocalypse (Maureen McHugh) – This one was read traveling back and forth on the Toronto subway. The stories are mainly about everyday people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances – we’re talking serious end-of-the-world stuff here – and acting in less-than-admirable but entirely believable ways. When you’re on a subway car surrounded by complete strangers, that sort of thing makes you think. My next subway book, for the record, was about sasquatches.

The Hollow Earth (Rudy Rucker) – Melinda brought this home from a World Fantasy Convention, years ago. I read a few pages, and put it down someplace vaguely accessible, and started reading something else. Every so often, I’d pick it up again, and read a few more pages, and then put it down again. This year, I decided to finish it. I picked it up. I sat down in a room with no other books in it. I read the rest of it without stopping for lunch, for tasty beverages, or for random acts of affection toward one of our cats (this is less optional than it sounds – none of them have been declawed, all of them have abandonment issues, and one actually managed to chase off a burglar at one point. Ignore at your peril). And when a few hours were up, I’d finished it. It was done. I’d never pick it up for a few pages and then put it back down, again. And it was OK. Not great, not a mindblowing read or an unstoppable narrative cannonball knocking me off my feet. OK. But I’m glad I finished it.

Monster Spotter’s Guide to North America (Scott Francis) – Am enjoyably disjointed mess of a book that never quite figured out what it wanted to be, but it’s full of hodags and wampus cats and sasquatches, and I’ll never say no to that. This one was a Hanukkah present from my family, much of which is down here. I’ve got an eight year old nephew, and he’s got a friend who’s suddenly decided that he’s into Bigfoot; he cornered Steve at a Christmas Eve party to ask him details of our abortive Bigfoot-hunting expedition in eastern North Carolina (Note: We didn’t find Bigfoot; we did find hippies), which thrilled him to death. Maybe one of these days I’ll sit down with him and my nephew, and we’ll go through this book, and figure out where we can find Bigfoot in suburban Raleigh. And if he asks, I’ll lend him the book, and he can read it, too. Happy new year, everyone. And happy reading.

It’s a little late for Thanksgiving, but then again, I’ve never been a big fan of shoving all the thankfulness onto one day. That always seemed to me to be a recipe for being an unappreciative jerk the other 364, because, hey, Thanksgiving’s got it covered. A suitably reverent tweet in the morning, maybe a few “Likes” on Facebook status updates on other folks saying they’re thankful, and we’re done, right? Meh.

Me, I’d rather cheat the calendar, or, at the very least, pull a Canute number on encroaching Christmas for at least one more day, and think about things in this very, very strange life that is professional writing that I’m thankful for. And with that in mind, here’s a very incomplete, deeply scattershot list of a few of the things that I’m thankful for – as reader, as writer, as book reviewer, as whatever.

Because, really, it’s rough out there. There are a ton of folks always eager to take anyone and anything that isn’t theirs down, simply because it isn’t theirs or isn’t them. That’s another reason to give thanks – to let the folks out there who are doing good and generous and noteworthy things something positive, a note of appreciation tucked in with the din of RWAH RWAH RWAH YOU STIIIIINK that can rise to the heavens like burning oilfield smoke. And from the other side, there’s plenty of self-interested chest-pounding, deliberate stalking of controversy in search of the elusive page hit, and general jackassery that can obscure the good stuff that’s out there. That’s a shame, too.

So, without further ado, a baker’s dozen writing-related things and people I’m thankful for.

1 – Girl Genius – Brilliantly inventive, effortlessly inventive, frequently hilarious, this gaslamp fantasy adroitly avoids the Dickensian miserablism that lurks at the heart of so much steampunk. Unafraid in all the right ways – talking cats? Hat-obsessed killing machines called Jagermonsters? Talking castles with a mean streak?? – it takes chances, embraces possibilities, and trusts that the audience is smart enough to keep up. Then there’s the protagonist, Agatha Heterodyne, who is smart, resourceful, courageous, and unlikely ever to be portrayed onscreen by Megan Fox. I’m thankful that three times a week, I get to read a tiny piece of something so brilliantly crafted.

2, 3 & 4 – Matt Forbeck, Chuck Wendig, and Mur Lafferty – They love writing. They enjoy writing. They share their love and enjoyment of writing in every way imaginable, and they do so generously, without arrogating unto themselves the status of self-proclaimed “guru”. The world is full of people who will gladly tell you how to write in exchange for your workshop fees or your allegiance or your guaranteed thumbs-ups on Facebook. How refreshing, then, to have three folks who are so eminently the real deal willing to share what they know, not to make themselves look good, but because they genuinely want to share.

5 – Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog” – It’s a ghost story. It was written two decades ago. I just discovered it this year, and it’s pure magic, a reminder of how good writing can be, even in the most unexpected places. Originally published in 1993, it’s a story about a young man who drives classic cars very fast across the wide-open spaces of the American West, the mysterious figure of the “Road Dog” who haunts those same highways, and the man he works for, who digs a grave for his beloved car. It’s also about ghosts, and about growing up, and about love and memory and finding one’s place and a whole lot of other things I can’t go into without spoiling things, and so I leave it to you to discover, if you haven’t discovered it already. To me, it stands for the idea that there are always undiscovered gems out there, waiting for the joy of the first encounter. (and yes, I know, “Road Dog” won a Stoker and has been reprinted in F&SF and all that jazz. It was new to me. So might it be new to someone else. Don’t judge; just envy the blue lightning of initial discovery)

6 – The community of the Game Narrative Summit at GDC Online, and the fine folks who put on STAGConf, and everyone else out there interested in good storytelling in games – Because the craft isn’t static. Because as new media evolve, as new hardware makes new techniques viable, there’s always room to learn and grow. And so, Stephane Bura and Tom Abernathy and Rhianna Pratchett and Alexis Kennedy and Jeremy Bernstein and Mary De Marle and too many other folks to count, I’m thankful you’re out there doing good work, pushing boundaries, and genuinely giving a damn about how to do this insane job right. Because God knows it would be easy enough to say “It’s just a game” – that’s what some of the critics think, right – and just fill in the blanks of a thousand “Arrggh, he shot me” variants. I’m happy and I’m humbled to work in a field that’s constantly generating concepts like StoryBricks and Andy Walsh’s Ondemand Storytelling and Well-Fed Snakes and a whole bunch of other approaches, all championed by folks who have a keen passion for telling good stories in the medium that speaks to so many of us. Thank you for being out there, guys. Thanks for never stopping. Thanks for making it a thrill to keep up.

7 & 8- ChiZine Publications and Tachyon Publications – I think every the CZP book I’ve seen is gorgeous and memorable, and even the ones that I haven’t necessarily enjoyed have been manifestly themselves, interesting and different and most emphatically not trend-sniffing. Their monthly readings, which I’ve dropped in on a few times, are simply fun, a celebration of the fact that, hey, books are gettin’ made here, folks. Tachyon’s books are elegant, visually understated and always thoughtfully put together. These two aren’t the only smaller presses whose work I’ve enjoyed this year, far from it, but they’ve been the ones whose output has most consistently ended up in the hallowed “read this next” spot on my night table. And for their willingness – and for Apex’s, and Angry Robot’s, and a whole bunch of other people’s – to put books out there that don’t just play it safe in cover art and subject matter and author choice, as a reader and reviewer I’m emphatically thankful.

9 – Anne McCaffrey – I didn’t read a whole lot of her books after the Dinosaur Planet series wrapped up. My first exposure to “The Ship Who Sang” was in a comic book adaptation called Starstream. I never had a secret recipe for klah, and I never had a stuffed firelizard doll I sat on my shoulder at conventions. But the very first videogame I worked on was an adaptation of one of her novel series. Throughout what was a grueling and messy development process, she was always extremely pleasant to work with and generous with her creation. I think I can truthfully say that without Anne McCaffrey, I wouldn’t be where I am, doing what I’m doing today, and for that, I will always be thankful.

10 – Local booksellers – The Regulator, one of the anchors of Ninth Street. Books Do Furnish A Room, tucked away in an unassuming blue building at the back of a gravel lot, where only those in the know and the lucky will stumble across it. Chapel Hill Comics. McIntyre’s. The Brier Creek B&N, where the staff has always been unfailingly polite, friendly, and well-informed. Many, many more. The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is blessed with an abundance of places bookish people can find treasures. Yesterday, in two stops, I picked up an oral history of Negro League baseball, an award-winning science fiction novel, a “non-fiction” account of hauntings along the Maine coast, and a volume on the unit charged with stealing art treasures back from the Nazis. Thank you for feeding my habit.

11 & 12 – My niece and nephew – Because you like to read. Because you want to read. Because put together, you’re not yet bar/bat mitzvah age, and you both love books. You could not make your uncle prouder.

13 – Bull Spec Magazine – Not just because of the magazine, though the magazine’s great. Strong fiction from a mix of local and international authors, gorgeous covers, the occasional readable book review *cough cough* – it’s good stuff. Or to put it another way, I bought a subscription for my dad, and I write for it. But another part of what makes me thankful for all the work Sam Montgomery-Blinn and team have done putting Bull Spec together is this: I’ve been in Carolina for a dozen years, and until Bull Spec came along, I never found a writing community. You’d think in a region that had John Kessel and Lewis Shiner and David Drake and Mark Van Name and all sorts of other writerly types wandering around loose, there’d be more of that, but no. Bull Spec became something a lot of folks coalesced around. Sometimes it was as simple as Sam sending out an email saying “Hey, you guys know about this thing coming up?” Sometimes it was a formal event, and God help the poor waitresses who had to attend to a post-reading horde of writers. And sometimes it was the thrill of seeing someone you knew in print. All good things, and for that, I am thankful.

The list doesn’t end here, of course. It would be a sad and small world if it did. But to everyone and everything above, and to everyone and everything else out there that makes life a little better for the reading/writing type, thank you.

 

There is nothing intrinsically sacred about the act of writing. Yes, it’s a strong creative outlet. It’s a wonderful career for those of us lucky enough to be able to do it for a living. And it fuels one of my favorite hobbies, which happens to be kicking back in my hammock with a good book and a glass of lemonade.

But, it’s not holy, and it’s not mandatory. “Oh, you should write a book!” is a wonderful sentiment, but what’s implied in it is “You need to spend a lot of time doing something that you may not enjoy doing and may not do particularly well.” The folks who think that everyone should write are ignoring the fact that many people are neither suited to nor interested in writing – or perhaps in any creative endeavor – and yet will be perfectly fine and happy with that choice, and lead long and fulfilling lives as a result. Indeed, the more shrill voices in the “Everyone MUST write!” camp can, with a little squinting, be seen to be a bit…nervous about their participation in the second-least-sanitary thing you can do by yourself at a keyboard, and their motivational speaker-like manic encouragement of others to join them takes on an air of “convince me that I did the right thing”.

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My first actual publication, out where live human beings I wasn’t related to might read it, was in an academic journal called Lovecraft Studies. The thing I published was part of my undergraduate thesis, a ruthless kidnapping of old H.P.L. in which I dragged him through the thickets and swamps of critical analysis by way of Mikhail Bakhtin. It was, to put it mildly, dry reading for those not inculcated in the rituals of the Advanced English Degree. But when I got the notice that the piece had been accepted – no payment, just a couple of contributor copies, as is academia’s wont – I walked on air. Nearly literally – I was living at my cousin’s place in Boston at the time, and the stairs were steep, and when I read the letter with the acceptance mid-way up to the door I jumped and nearly went back down the hard way. But it was an indescribable moment, one of validation, and excitement, and the first faint embers of thinking that if I could publish once, I really could do it some more.

And along the way to publication, helping hands were there for me every step of the way. Professor Enda Duffy at Wesleyan, my thesis advisor, who taught me theory and turned me into someone who actually could write a serious paper with serious thought behind it. Professor Paul Lewis at Boston College, who worked with me to take it from student paper to professional-level material. And Lovecraft Studies editor S.T. Joshi, twice, who first read over the thesis-as-thesis and commented, and then accepted the paper for his journal.

For all that composition is a solitary ritual, you don’t walk alone in this business.

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The act of writing, if we can decouple it from the veritable supernova of how-to and motivational essays spattered across the blogosphere, is not necessarily fun. It involves long hours, hard work, research (if you’re honest), and the non-zero chance of doing terrible things to your posture, your eyesight, and your marriage. The truth of this leads to a dilemna: For the serious writer, the individual who actually does want to write, who has stories to tell and will, by God, get them out there, then the implicit obstacles in the composition process must be overcome. Don’t do it, and you don’t write. You become that ghastly bore who slinks around parties telling everyone about your novel-in-progress that you gave up on at page 32 because you couldn’t get that first fight scene just right, but, yeah, you’re going to finish some day, really and for sure.

On the other hand, if you’re a casual writer, if you’re scribbling because you enjoy the act, then the obstacles and hard work take on a new meaning. (and let me say that I think there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with being a casual writer, a dabbler, an occasional scribbler. You’re having fun with it? More power to you) It may be surprising to some, but there is absolutely no moral virtue to punishing yourself and those around you by slogging through the writing process if you’re not actually that interested in writing. You don’t get a merit badge, you don’t get an XBox Live Achievement, and you probably don’t become a better human being out of it. What you do stand a strong chance of becoming is a miserable bastard, chained to a project you’re not enjoying but which you are going to finish, God damnit, because God damnit you’re going to finish it. In the meantime, you’re being an unpleasant git to everyone around you because you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t enjoy for an end goal that’s at best unclear, you’re not doing other things you might enjoy – or need to do – more, and you’re lining up your friends and loved ones for the summarily cruel experience of reading your manuscript and commenting on it in a way that will not cause irreparable rifts in your relationships.

Nobody’s judging you. Write if you want to, not because you think you should.

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The worst lesson I learned about writing, I got in high school. I entered an essay contest  sponsored by the National Objectivist Foundation or something to that effect, largely because I’d read Anthem in class and not absolutely hated it. My essay, on Odysseus and how he was a strong, self-reliant figure (not actually true, if you close-read Homer: the guy’s always getting help from hot princesses, hotter goddesses, gods with bags full of wind, and a crew that indulges his idiotic whim when rowing past the island of the sirens – but I digress), went absolutely nowhere near actual Randian philosophy, because I really hadn’t noticed or internalized much of it while reading the cockamamie book.

The essay came in roughly 249th in the country. I was a national semi-finalist, or some such; I still have the letter around somewhere. And I’d written the damn thing on an electric typewriter in the basement the night before the deadline, one draft, no revisions, because I’d told someone I was going to enter and then forgotten about it until the last minute.

The good lessons there, about working under pressure and generating something coherent under tight deadline – have stayed with me. The bad lesson – the idea that with some natural talent and a little bit of razzle-dazzle, it’s possible to skate without putting the real hard work in – took a long time to put into context. There are times when you really do need to just pound something out and let the fancy fingerwork cover for the fact that you haven’t pored over it the way maybe you would have under ideal circumstances. But it’s too easy to fall into that mode for all writing, to push everything up against the deadline as a way of getting out of a lot of the hard work of writing – iteration, editing, revision, putting in the research to get it just right – and tell yourself it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances.

When it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances, it often behooves you to take a look at how exactly those circumstances got arrived at, and who put you there. A lot of times, it’s you.

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There are only so many tropes that writing advice can hit. Your villains should be interesting. Your hero shouldn’t be an [N] Sue, where n = some value of you, except with bigger secondary sexual characteristics and a smaller waistline. Write every day. You get the idea. These things are everywhere, constantly rewritten by some very smart, very talented, very generous-of-spirit people who do write, and write well, and want you to do the same. They’re also rewritten by mean-spirited jerks, hustlers who don’t write themselves but who will gladly take your nickel in exchange for advice they’ve never put to the test, and never-was-es making their best guesses at a target they can only see through binoculars.

None of which, ultimately, matters. At a certain point, you put down the advice and pick up the pen, or reasonable facsimile thereof. If you’re going to write, you write. If you’re not going to write, that’s fine, too. If you enjoy reading writing advice, and get a kick out of looking for the pithiest way to say, “If you’re going to write a sex scene, it helps if at some point in your life you have actually been naked”, then good on you, and happy reading.

But the fact remains, there is no ultimate end here. There is no moral weight, no checklist, no Mandate of Heaven that you, yes YOU, must write or the pillars of the skies will topple. If you choose to do so, do it well, and to the level that you find rewarding – occasional limerick writer or full-time novelist, it’s your life and you make the call. If you choose not to, that’s your decision, too, and get comfortable with it. Don’t feel you’ve failed God, the universe and your sainted mother because you never finished turning your Shadowrun campaign from college into a grim, gritty urban fantasy novel indistinguishable from the last twenty you just read. You haven’t. You haven’t even failed yourself, unless actually writing that novel was something you did indeed want to do.

And if that’s the case, get off your ass and get to work – but because you want to, not because I told you to.

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to your writing is writing.

Sounds counter-intuitive, I know. I mean, writing’s writing, right? (Right.) It doesn’t matter so much what you’re writing, as long as you’re putting words on page, because, hey, it’s all writing, and the act of writing is sacred and glorious and wonderful, and if you don’t believe that why are you reading a writing advice blog.

To a certain extent, that’s true. You get better at writing, you become a better writer by actively writing. Depending on how seriously you take Malcolm Gladwell (and I, for one, have started taking him far less seriously since he started hanging out with Bill Simmons), this is part of the ten thousand hours of practice it takes to get to a hypothetical state of mastery, and in that sense it doesn’t matter so much that you’re writing novels or short stories or blog posts or captions for cute cat pictures.

OK, maybe the LOLCat stuff doesn’t actually help. But that’s beside the point. Bear with me.

No, the real kicker is whom you’re writing for, and therein lies the trap.

Writers, to make a broad and sweeping generalization that will no doubt produce at least one angry comment, are often insecure creatures. We want our writing to be wanted. We want it to be read. We want to find places for it out in the big bad world. And so it’s always seductively easy to say yes, when offered an audience. A guest blog post? Absolutely. An interview request (with an interview that turns out to be twenty pages of questions)? Hey, it’s exposure! A short story for a charity anthology with ridiculously strict guidelines? It’s for a good cause! A lengthy blog post on the relative merits of Supernatural vs. The Vampire Diaries? Hey, gotta keep the online presence going, even at six thousand words a pop. You get the idea.

It’s not that any or all of these are bad ideas. The trick, however, is figuring out who really benefits from each one, and prioritizing them accordingly. Assuming you’ve got a day job and and still insist on writing, odds are A)you’ve got limited time to write in any given week and B)you’ve got limited energy, unless your employer has spiked the free coffee with a mix of Red Bull, Five Hour Energy, and Colombian marching powder. As such, you need to look at every project on your docket and dope out which ones are most worthy of your time, attention, and energy. Prioritize the ones that benefit you the least – the freebies, the dives into areas of small readership, the nobly clothed time-wasters that feel oh so very urgent but which really are there just to keep you from working on the big stuff – and you find yourself devoting less and less time to the stuff that you need to get done for you.

And that’s not saying that “blogging is bad!” or whatever. That’s a silly, reductionist take, and not at all true. Blogging’s damn useful for building and maintaining a presence. Book reviews, in addition to providing a steady stream of books, tend to have a short turnaround and get your name out there when other pieces of the publishing machine are going slowly. Interviews, well, assuming you’re not being interviewed as the Author Of The Month over at White Supremacist Lifestyle Magazine, hey, it’s good pub, right? It’s just a question of learning to assess how much you get out of it as compared to what you put in. A ten page interview for a website that gets a couple of dozen hits a month is  probably not as deserving of your time as working on your own stuff. A lengthy blog post that takes you from sit down to bedtime may be enjoyable, but you have to ask yourself whether there was greater benefit in that than in doing a shorter post and perhaps laying down a few hundred words on a short story. Answering questions from a student who’s trying to break into professional writing? Absolutely admirable, but answering questions from five students starts to represent a serious time commitment, and one that may prevent you from doing the very thing they’re asking you about. Writing a story to post for free in order to bring in new readers? Very cool and very 21st century, but if the hits aren’t there, it might be worth investing that time – or that story – someplace else.

Ultimately, it’s not enough just to write. You have to write smart, and you have to be ruthless in assessing why you want to write project A instead of project B at any given moment. It’s ridiculously easy to self-sabotage by loading up your plate with tons of distractionary (yes, I know that’s not a word) deliverables, any of which seems like a good idea at the time but all of which, together, gang up on you to prevent you from doing the big stuff, or the hard stuff, or the important stuff. But hey, in the meantime you’re a busy, busy writer who’s constantly writing, and that’s what’s important.

Then again, maybe it isn’t.

So the next time you sit down to write, think about what you’re writing. Then think about why you’re writing it, and who you’re writing it for. Learn to say no to projects that are quite literally not worth your time, because time is a precious, precious commodity. And be honest with yourself as to why you’re picking the projects you’re picking. If you’re not there’s no way you’re going to optimize your time, your productivity, and your words. That’s not the path to mastery, or a successful writing career, or happiness with your work.

But in the meantime, at least you’ll be keeping busy.

1-Fail To Know Or Care Who’s Going To Be There

Complete and utter unfamiliarity with the folks you might be talking with and their work is always going to go over well. If someone’s a guest – or especially a Guest of Honor – it’s probably for a reason, and “they’re local and they know someone on the con committee” only goes so far. Knowing why they’re guest-worthy and possessing a basic familiarity with the work that got them that exalted status isn’t hard, shouldn’t take long, and will keep you from looking like a complete piece of Samsonite should you actually find yourself conversing with someone whose work you should probably know.

Research can, of course, be taken too far – if you read everything by the GoH and half the attendee list have written on the off chance that someone might mention a flash fiction piece they did in an issue of “Cthulhu’s Unicorn: A Magazine Of Optimistic Cosmic Horror For Children” back in 1993. For one thing, that’s creepy. For another, all you’re really doing is gorging, and the second half of that equation is the verbal equivalent of a Roman Moment. The last thing you want to do if you actually talk with some of the professional folks at a conference is barf up the minutiae of their professional careers the moment they say hi. Doing this tends to freak people out and make them wonder if you’re going to boil their pet bunnies any time soon and this, as you might guess, is not something you want.

2-Say You Hate Rush

All genre fiction writers love Rush. It’s a law. Saying you hate Rush at a writers’ con is just asking for anyone in earshot to inflict their a cappella version of “YYZ” on you. So unless you’re ready for an endless stream of DUH nu NUH NUH nu NUH NUH nu NUH, play it close to the vest.

This, incidentally, also explains why most genre fiction writers don’t get laid much.

3-Loudly Accuse A Famous And Successful Author Who Is No Doubt A Personal Friend Of Any Number Of People At The Conference Of Being A Cheap Hack/Sellout/Lousy Writer

Contrary to popular belief, the appropriate response to this one is not “Who the @#$# are you?” It is to write you off as a loudmouthed jerkwad. The people who like or respect the author you’re slagging are going to assume you don’t know what you’re talking about, and not like you. The folks who might agree that Successful Author X actually does kind of suck are still going to think your “Sales = Lame” rant is jejune. (They’re also going to be familiar with the proper use of the word “jejune”) And fans of the writer in question – who will no doubt outnumber both your fans and you – may in fact make their displeasure known.

Having a well-reasoned and interesting take on why you don’t like a successful author, or genre, or anything, really, can be a conversation starter. It can be a way to establish that you actually think about the material you read, and thus, most likely, about the material you write. It can be a great way to figure out what the folks you’re talking to are into. But jumping straight to lame-ass jeremiads probably won’t do you too many favors.

4-Drink To Excess, Then Puke All Over An Author You Admire

Really, this one should be self-explanatory. The drinking to excess part is fine, of course. The trick is to find an author the one you admire doesn’t like, and then be violently ill all over them. Doing so will earn you all kinds of points, and possibly an anthology invite. Failing that, hotel fountains work, as do shrubs, potted plants, and any kind of tiled surface.

Alternately, one could choose not to buy quite so heavily into the stereotype of the drunken writer and manage to enjoy one’s self within vague moderation, but really, that’s just being silly.

5-Derail Panels By Asking Long, Rambling Questions That Really Aren’t Questions But Are Excuses For You To Show Off How Much You Think You Know About A Particular Topic But Probably Don’t And Which Will Only End Up With You Embarrassed By The Subject Matter Experts On The Panel Or With Time Thankfully Running Out Because You Talked For Eight Solid Minutes About Your Superawesome Point That Nobody Besides You Actually Thinks Is The Slightest Bit Clever.

People tend to leave panels during the Q&A. Don’t get yourself remembered as the reason.

6-Let Your Ambition Go Outside Without Pants

There are lots of reasons to go to a writing convention, and many of them have to do with business. This is an accepted fact. Business, after all, gets done at these things. So does networking. Manuscripts get passed off. Invitations to anthologies get issued. Collaborations get set up, sometimes even by people who haven’t gargled a fifth of Ketel One because their last nine drinks convinced them that unless they sterilize their tonsils right now, the Throat-Invading Spore Men of Galargnicax Six will assault them imminently.

That being said, if your too-naked ambition makes a mess on the carpet, odds are none of those deal-type things will be happening for or with you. Persistence is good. So is professionalism, and dedication, and taking advantage of your opportunities, whatever they might be. Stalkerish fervor that makes it clear that you only see the other attendees at the conference as walking slabs of meat whose sole purpose for existing is to help your career, not so much. A little grace and respect can’t hurt, and it just might help.

 

1-Why do so many writers spend so much time writing about writing?

Because deep down, many of us are still in thrall to the delightfully archaic notion of “Write What You Know” – which, in some form or other has been zombified since the first writer picked up a travel guide and said, “Gee, I guess I don’t have to go to Sasketchewan to write this thing after all[i]”. And since we all write, we all theoretically know about writing – as opposed to, say, the history of the Adams-Onis treaty, string theory, or the mechanisms of ontogenic development in axolotls[ii], and thus we are qualified to inflict our particular thoughts on the subject on you, the innocent and helpless reading public.

The fact that deep down, many of us harbor the nagging suspicion that we’re somehow doing it wrong and thus compulsively seek affirmation by dangling our techniques in front of the world in hopes of told we’re getting it right, is pure scurrilous rumor.

2-You told me not to do [thing X] in my writing, but I just bought [book y[iii]] and the author does that all the time, and she’s sold more books than you. So who do I believe?

That kind of depends. Odds are, the specific example you’re pointing out is not the reason the book in question sold so well, so doing that particular thing and expecting it to rain shirtless Robert Pattinsons is probably not an effective career plan.  There’s also the little thing that the nature of transitive properties is important – just because one book contravenes something an author says is good did well doesn’t mean that A)everything in that book is good B)all books do it or C)everything that writer has ever said about everything now needs to be thrown out post-haste.

And of course, there’s the notion that the magical notion of “good” writing isn’t always “appropriate” writing or “what the audience of a particular type of fiction wants” writing or even “accessible” writing. So deal with it. Judge for yourself what works better as a model – the original advice or the book that succeeded by violating it. Just don’t expect a single right answer.

3-Why do so many sources of information on writing disagree so much?

Because writers are contrary, ornery people who  over the years have found a wide variety of routes to success, some of which are tuned to the needs and skills of the individual writer. Also, many people who are writing about writing, even successful or famous ones, have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and as such their advice may be contradicted by others. What this means is that you need to figure out what works for you, not take something on faith just because you read it in glowing electrons, and be willing to toss a source of advice – be it Robert McKee or the guy at the local comics shop who’s self-publishing stuff with a circulation of twelve[iv] – if it doesn’t pass your personal sniff test.

4-What caused the explosion in writers writing about writing?

The fact that the internet removed the barrier to entry to the market. In days of yore, there were only a couple of ways a book on writing got published, largely because they tended to be long, dry, and about as likely to succeed fiscally as a remake of Highlander starring Gary Busey[v]. Now, however, everyone who wants to write about writing can. Generally, this is a good thing – it services lots more niches, it allows different voices to be heard, and so on and so forth. It just also means that there’s a lot out there, and not all of it is well thought out or deathless or universal or whatever. In short, it’s a good thing that there’s more writing about writing out there. It’s a bad thing if you don’t approach it with a critical eye.

5-Is all this writing about writing merely an excuse not to write?

You are a bad and cynical person for asking this question, when all writers want to do is share their hard-earned wisdom with those who come after them, in hopes of sparing them the faltering missteps that the writers made on their way along the trail.

Seriously. We’re all givers like that.

6-There’s so much good information on writing out there! How do I narrow it down?

Here’s a useful guideline: If you spend more time reading writing about writing than you do writing, you need to cut back. If you produce more tweets of links to articles about writing in a day than you do words, you need to cut back. If you have spent more time laying out plans for a blog you intend to write on writing but will never actually do anything on than actually writing, cut back and punch yourself in the back of the head a few times for good measure.

A good rule of thumb is to read until something sparks an idea and makes you want to write something of your own. If, over an extended period of time, nothing does that, you may want to ask yourself why you’re reading about writing, and instead turn to blogs and podcasts about golf, cooking, Bigfoot hunting, or making your own cheese from common household chemicals.

7-Why do so many of these articles take the form of lists?

Because it’s a lot easier to develop seven ideas for one paragraph than one idea for seven. Because the format lends itself admirably to snark, which, as we all know, is the leading indicator of quality online essay writing these days. And because single points developed over multiple paragraphs can sometimes be mistaken for giant walls of text, and thus get dismissed as “TL:DR”.

In related news, I’m doing next month’s piece entirely in rebuses.

 

 

If there are more proper nouns in your back cover text blurb than non-proper ones, you’re probably doing something wrong.

When I worked in a bookstore (yes, one of those quaint things that sold bits of dead tree bound up with black squiggles in them), there was a pretty regular process to the courtship between reader and book. The reader, drawn in by the cover art or the name on the cover, would make several passes by the shelf where the book in question stood, demurely shelved. The reader would then pick it up, and, if the front cover art met muster, flip it over. This was a key moment, as it was the first time the prospective reader would actually, you know, read something to do with the book – the dreaded back cover text. If it’s good – if it’s appealing and it’s interesting and it’s accessible – then odds are, the potential reader is going to do something silly like buy the book. If not – if your back cover text is an indecipherable swamp of capitalized terms that are worth more on a Scrabble board than they are to an uninitiated reader, odds are that text is going to serve as what we in the videogame industry call a Barrier To Entry.

In other words, it should entice the reader, not terrify them. You’re looking to get someone to get to know your kingdoms and monsters and wizards, not give them a Wonderlic test on their suitability to read without resorting to a dramatis personae cheat sheet. So if your book comes back with back cover text that reads like the fantasy equivalent of the President’s morning briefing, complete with strategic analyses, family trees and threat levels, suggest a change for something simpler. Your unminted readers will thank you.

Unspeakable evil probably doesn’t live in your mom’s basement.

Look, I get it. Horror is largely a symbolic genre. The ghosts and vampires and unnameable critters from the vasty plains of Fgg’gtt’btt’tt (or, as I like to call it, Brooklyn) all stand in for something. Unfinished business, sex, giving yourself up to something else, the undefined future – whatever. We get it, and we get it instinctively, which is why we like reading that stuff.

And so, it’s no-brainer that the boojum lurking at the childhood home would be a major player in all of this. Childhood’s scary. It’s when all the deep down frights get hard-wired into you by a big, bad world that you don’t understand. It makes sense that a childhood home would get wrapped up in the scares that hit closest to home, the ones you have to face down before you can move on as a fully integrated adult-type human being.

That being said, it seems odd that every old family home that falls into the hands of every struggling writer on the planet has a gate to interdimensional evil in the basement.  I ask you, does it really have to be the end of the world every time a guy who’s blocked on his second novel goes home? Can it just be town-devouring evil? County-devouring? Hell, is there room for it in the basement with all the bloggers who are allegedly crammed in there?

Because really, what you’re saying when you claim world-destroying evil is seeping out through the walls of the place you grew up is that your childhood fears are the worst and most important ones that ever were. And considering how many novels there are about blocked novelists fighting world-destroying evil in the basements of their ancestral homes, the math simply doesn’t add up. They can’t all be the most uberscariestest things ever, can they?

Try some perspective. Put it in scale. Scale back the ambition, and by doing so, you just might give it a bit more personality, a bit more individuality. I mean, seriously, destroying the world is about as generic a monster motivation as you can get (Besides eating brains. Eating brains is the new beige.) Trying something even a little bit different might make your unspeakable horror a little more interesting to talk about.

If your star-spanning galactic empire doesn’t have working cell phone technology, you may want to rethink things a bit.

Yes, hard science fiction is hard, largely because hard science is, well hard. Look at it. The word “hard” is right there in the name. Also, the hard science stuff tends to get in the way of giant space dogfights, zippity-zoom travel between star systems, and remarkably human-looking green alien ladies who are happy to go reverse cowgirl on any number of Captain Kirk wannabes. It does this mainly by virtue of pointing out that such things are impossible, which is roughly the equivalent of pointing out that Edward and Bella makes Woody and Soon-Yi look like nothing at ground zero of a Sparkly Vampire Online Dating Site Meetup.

So really, it’s OK. Handwave the faster-than-light travel. Make all the aliens want to boink like space is one big rave at Ibiza and Orbital is doing their version of the Dr. Who theme song. Throw in zap guns and nanotech and God knows what else to your heart’s content, if it makes for a better story.

But the moment your intergalactic space cops need to rely on a communications device that can’t do half the crap my iPad does, you lose me. The instant your plot hangs on a mystery that could be solved in fifteen seconds with Google (and I say fifteen only because space cops are lousy typists), you bore me. When your novel of the future has a technological paradigm that was cutting edge at the same time Zaxxon was, I’m putting your book down.

So take ten minutes with one of those newfangled electronic typewriter thingies attached to the intertubes, and check to make sure your science fiction is, in fact, fiction, and not the sort of stuff you see at yard sales. The results might surprise you. And they might interest your readers. Which, as they say, is a good thing.

Question: What is the appropriate price-point for an ebook?

Answer: Whatever the point of intersection is between the readership’s level of interest and willingness to shell out cold hard cash. Until we reach that point, everything is just the accrual of data points. I for one have no particular dog in this fight; I’m merely horrified at the apparent willingness of various participants in the online discussion to garrotte each others’ children over the absolute moral principle of $0.99 versus $4.99.

Yes, it’s an important discussion. Yes, the answer will go a long way towards shaping the future of the ebook market. No, it’s not a statement of personal moral turpitude for someone to take up a position opposite yours.

Question: Why should I boycott Dorchester? For that matter, what’s Dorchester?

Answer: You should boycott Dorchester and its associated imprints because they’re jerks. And because they’re selling books they don’t contractually have the right to sell. And because roughly 87% of the horror novels they published under the Leisure imprint had spooky old houses on the cover, and I’d really hoped that we as a genre had moved beyond that.

Question: Should I self-publish? There are all these stories about people making tons of money doing it.

Answer: Yes. Just bear in mind that people are a lot more motivated to share their stories of huge success with the world than they are their tales of abject failure. There’s not a lot of incentive to post, say, “I went to self-publishing and nobody bought my damn books.” That being said, there are an awful lot of those stories out there, too.

At this point, anyone who denies that there is viability to self-publishing is sticking their head in their sand. People, as J.A, Konrath will be happy to point out at great length, can make a lot of money at this. However, it’s not going to happen magically, or without a lot of hard work, or all by itself. Expecting self-publishing to be a panacea, wrapped up in a golden ticket to Willie Wonka’s factory wrapped around a chewy candy center, are exactly as wrong as those who think that getting a book accepted for publication by a mainstream house means they’re now off to Neil Gaiman’s tax bracket without ever having to lift another finger. The hard truth remains that, no matter what approach you choose, success in writing requires a hell of a lot of hard work.

Unless, of course, you’re Snooki.

Question: Why are the shelves full of paranormal romance novels/teen angst with vampires/zombie novels when I can’t get my brilliant stuff a sniff anywhere?

Answer: Because publishers think that paranormal romance, teen sparkly vampire wizard ninja angst, or zombies will provide them a better chance of selling books than whatever you’ve written, even if it’s really, really good. There is no moral judgment. There is no commentary on you as a person. There is honestly not even a judgment on your work in most cases, other than “we don’t think we can sell more copies of this than we can of this other proposal about teenaged vampires trapped by the zombie apocalypse on board a zeppelin.” And I say this as someone who’s currently peddling a horror novel about a sentient video game, and another one about a private detective who’s a sasquatch.

It can be frustrating, It can be maddening. It should not be personal.

Alternately, you can take it personally, develop a massive persecution complex, splash it all over the net, and in doing so provide yourself with plenty of hands-on research for your next project, which will be about angsty teenaged wizard ninja sparkly elf vampires. And which will sell millions.

It’s not entirely true that comments sections are where brain cells go to die in agony. It’s only mostly true. Yes, there are some online forums (or fora, or foraminifera if you’re feeling shellfish) where there is reasoned, respectful debate, and the original content is as meritorious for sparking inspired followup debate as it is for its own existence.

I know. I’ve been on a few of them. No, I’m not telling you where. Such secrets are best kept by a few, lest exposure lead to disaster, and the whole thing get dismantled like a mystically effervescent trampoline in an episode of Community.

The other types of forums, though, well, I suspect you’ve found them for yourself. Frequently. They come in all shapes and sizes, with comment threads of all lengths and degrees of abuse of the English language. Indeed, I’m firmly behind instituting some sort of rating scale based on the density of “Your Mom” jokes on a per-post basis, simply to provide unwary readers[i] some idea what they’re getting into.

There are, however, certain threads that unite most forms of bad forum discussion. No matter where you go, these are the things that will get posted ad nauseum, ad infinitum, and often in all capital letters lest the author of the comment suffer the indignity of not being heard.

The most common can be boiled down to this: “I didn’t like the story/article/essay, so it’s universally invalid and wrong.” In other words, the commenter has decided that her or his taste should  be the ultimate arbiter for any and all content posted, if not to the web in its entirety, then at least to the site in question.

Big deal, you say. Ignore it and move on. Generally, I do, but there’s something troubling underpinning that particular flavor of comment: the notion that the writer owes it to each reader to tailor their work to that reader’s taste. In other words, it’s a formal abdication by the reader of their responsibility to take charge of their reading choices. To stop reading stuff they don’t like and move on, rather than demand that material that others may enjoy be suppressed or not supported just because it didn’t match their personal taste. To commit the supreme folly of using one bit they dislike to make grandiose, melodramatic pronouncements about how they can never read a site or an author or suchlike again, because they had five minutes where the stuff they were reading didn’t give their eyeballs instant orgasms.

Hand in hand with that is the sort of comment generally made by the Lone Counterexample Ranger, which generally starts with “Game/Movie/Novel/TV Show X isn’t like that,” and which continues with an unspoken “and so everything you’ve ever said is wrong, wrong, wrong.” What’s also unspoken is the implicit “that I really like”. By ignoring the one movie or whatnot the poster likes, you’re apparently somehow insulting them, even if the thing they mention is either a lone example against a general argument, or not actually relevant. What matters, at least in the comments section, is that your hard work and lengthy effort to create a fully realized piece can be dismissed summarily with an “Oh yeah?”[ii]

Deep down, they’re really the same thing: an abdication of all responsibility onto the author. And while that may seem like an odd thing to kvetch about – after all, it’s the author who writes the bloody thing – there’s something pernicious underneath. The author’s job, except in cases of direct patronage or James Frey’s literary sweatshops, has never been to bend all of one’s efforts to pleasing a single reader. It is to create the best work possible, and to let the audience that finds that particular work interesting find it and enjoy it. The noisily entitled reader, on the other hand, insists that everything they read be tailored specifically for them. When there’s more than one of them on a particular forum, the math suddenly gets tricky. And if there’s more than one forum or blog or whatever, well, what’s the poor, beleaguered writer to do?

The answer, of course, is to keep writing. Trying to find and respond to each and every poster suffering from this sort of delusion that they are the sole intended audience is fruitlessly counterproductive. For one thing, time spent chasing this sort of stuff down is time you’re not writing. For another, by responding and, say, defending or clarifying your work, you’re giving the kvetcher exactly what they want: personal attention, an affirmation that their half-assed commentary is as valid as the subject of the comment[iii].

And, I’m not at all sad to say, it’s not. Thoughtful commentary? Yes, of course. Supported counterexamples? All good stuff, and worthy, and worth wading into. Just not the “make it all for me” tantrums that seem to have swamped the unwary waders in online discourse[iv].  But those are the readers’ responsibility, if they choose to pick it up, along with a mature understanding that not everything is for each and every one of them. “The food here is terrible, and such small portions,” said Woody Allen: the solution is to stop eating. And the solution for not seeing anything you like on the menu at a sushi restaurant when you hate fish is to go next door to the pizza joint, and not castigate the sushi chef for his “failure” to give you a Chicago deep dish. While you’re at it, remember that some folks might like sushi, too, and that’s OK.

Honest.

---

[i]Or vanity-surfing authors looking to drop in on any place online where their stuff is mentioned. You know who you are.

[ii] I offer as evidence the rebuttal to a recent article I wrote on the wimpification of modern vampires, whereby Nosferatu’s Count Orlok was cited as a counterexample. The rest, I leave as an exercise for the student.

[iii] To be fair, you have to admire their efficiency. It’s a lot more streamlined to get attention by shouting “You’re a poopyhead” than by actually creating something, after all.

[iv] The first person to comment on this with a “my blog comments section isn’t like that” gets absolutely nothing. You hear me?  Nothing.

In order to become a successful writer, you need to blog and tweet relentlessly. Or maybe you need to not be distracted by social media, and focus exclusively on your writing. You need to give your stuff away online in podcast and PDF format to spread word so people will pick up the hardcopy or ebook. You also need to not give your work away for free or do things “for the exposure”, because that’s not professional. The way to write is to write endlessly on your own to hone your craft. The way to write is to go the workshop route. The way to write is to get into the University of Iowa. The way to write is to get Oprah to embarrass you on national television, then lowball NYU undergraduates into doing exactly the sort of crap that people used to claim Stephen King did with his army of chained writers.

You get the idea.

At last check, the internet was 34% Nigerian phishing scams, 26% porn, 18% political screaming, 14% cute cat videos, 6% sports, and 2% writing advice. In other words, a significant chunk of the verbiage slung online on twitter, on webpages, in magazines, and on blogs (like, say, this one) is dedicated to telling you how to write better. My Twitter feed features at least a half dozen “Here’s my new article on writing!” tweets per day, which still puts it behind the horoscope retweets but ain’t chopped liver, either. And that’s every day.

All of which means that there is an obscene amount of writing advice out there for you to take to heart in order to achieve massive literary success. Of course, the fact that much of this advice is mutually contradictory gets conveniently ignored in conversations like this, and if you tried to follow all the advice out there you’d rapidly explode from the sheer impossibility of it all. It doesn’t help that much of the writing advice out there is absolutely well-intentioned and drawn from personal experience. When Mur Lafferty or Chuck Wendig or Joe Konrath tells you something about how they’ve made a particular approach work for them, it’s because that approach worked for them. They’re not trying to fool, or scam, or confuse you. (Other folks might be, but they’re not.) They’re hard-working, successful pros who are honestly trying to share their knowledge.

But bearing in mind that this is all done with the best of intentions, that can still leave the reader of writing-related material – that is to say, you – wondering what the hell to do next. Because there IS a lot of advice out there, and a surfeit is as bad as none at all. Too many options can paralyze you as surely as no options.

So here’s my advice, because all that’s really needed is a little more, right?

It comes in two parts.

One, the only surefire key to success in writing you’re going to find online is “Keep writing.” (There’s a second one, “Be Neil Gaiman”, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Two, the best thing you can do with this tsunami of writing advice is to look at it, to understand what it’s actually suggesting you do, and then look at yourself. Figure out what you’ve got the time and the inclination and the bandwidth to do. Don’t adopt a strategy that calls for a massive, constant online presence if you’re not interested in blogging every day, if you’re not interested in engaging others on Twitter and in comments sections on blogs, and so forth. Doing so – and then failing miserably at it because you couldn’t or didn’t want to do the things that particular bit of advice called for is a lot like bitching that you didn’t lose weight just because you bought a gym membership. Similarly, if you know you do like puttering around online, picking the Salinger Hermit Method For Success As A Writer is going to fail you miserably.

And I can hear someone out there getting to this point in the essay and freaking out: “Oh my God! He’s giving writing advice that says you can’t take writing advice!”

Which, apart from the horrifying spectacle of the moaning and geshrying and everything else, is wrong. It’s also not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that before you can figure out whose techniques work for you and which approaches you should follow, you first need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Figure out what kind of writer you are. Figure out how much effort you’re actually willing to put into writing, and into the things around writing, and which things you’re more likely to do than others. In other words, do your research on the most important resource for your writing: yourself.

Then and only then, once you’ve looked yourself in the eye and said, “OK, I’m not willing to get up at 5 every morning to write but I can do a blog post a day and hit five conventions a year,” then you can start looking for folks who seem to match your level and style of commitment, and see what they’ve done to achieve success.

Crazy, I know. But it’s so crazy it just might work.