Richard Dansky

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.

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.

There is no such thing as “writer’s block”.

More specifically, there is no such thing as “writer’s block”, if you are defining “writer’s block” – notice the clever use of quotes there – as some sort of externally imposed mental lump of concrete that – for no reason – stands between you, the author, and the precious, precious words that you need to continue writing.

Now, there is such a thing as “I don’t actually want to write this and can’t admit it to myself.” There is also such a thing as “This is going the wrong way and I don’t know how to fix it”, not to mention “I’ve written myself into a corner and don’t know how to get out of it but don’t want to throw away the stuff I’ve already written”, “I’m bored with this project but can’t let myself think that,” and “I’d rather be writing this other thing.” There are even instances of “I have to write this thing or else all these other bad things (contract cancellation, not getting paid, having your pet hamster get repossessed, etc.) will happen.

Any and all of these can bring your writing to a crashing, skidding, stuck-axle-deep-in-gooey-mud halt, simulating the symptoms of the mythical ailment called “writer’s block”. Certain other things also simulate the core symptom of “writer’s block”, including not being at your computer, spending hours playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, watching realtime score updates from the World Cup while following the vuvuzela’s twitter feed, and so forth. But really, “writer’s block” is an inaccurate catchall, a symptom labeled as a disease and about as accurate as declaring someone cursed with imbalanced humors, dropsy, or the vapors.

That’s not to say that at certain points, you won’t find it impossible to go forward on a particular project no matter how hard you try. There are various workarounds for this: jump tracks to another project, do some editing, try to bull your way through one painful adverb at a time. But the best and most efficient use of your time in that case is to figure out what’s really going on that your subconscious has decided that your muse has had a few too many and is getting cut off for the rest of the night. Figure out what’s really going on, from “I just need a nap” to “My hindbrain is telling me that I’d actually rather watch a Real Housewives of Harrisburg. Pennsylvania marathon than spend one more minute trying to pound it out”.

Be honest. Be unstinting in your scrutiny. Be willing to admit to yourself something you may not want to hear – like, say, the fifty three thousand words you’ve already laid down on that vampire novel are painfully derivative and deep down you know it – and act on it. And acting on it may be hard. It may mean starting over. It may mean mass edits. It may mean stepping away from a project for a while until you actually like it again, assuming you can afford to do so. But until you pinpoint the real problem and deal with it, you’re going to be dealing with its monstrous, unproductive offspring instead.

Which means no writing. And nobody wants that.

A while back, I got a pretty positive response to an essay about questions that you should never, ever, under any circumstances ask a writer. (I’m serious. Like, not even if they’ve got zombie plague and you’ve got the antidote, and it can only be administered through a ritualistic makeshift quiz show. Trust me.)

But with that in mind, I thought it was worth exploring the questions that you should ask a writer, the ones that will generally provoke an interesting and interested response. The ones that won’t cause a writer to transform into a snarling ball of maniacal fang-toothed fury. The ones they’re liable to answer in complete sentences, stone cold sober and with at least a faint hint of enthusiasm.

1-Tell Me About Your Book

This never fails, largely because almost all writers have enthusiastically and emphatically inscribed something into their latest book that nobody besides them – not the readers, the reviewers, the critics (and no, they’re not the same beast; cross-breeding them mules you out the dreaded Two-Starred Amazon Kvetcher), not anyone has teased out of the text. This is the one thing that (almost) every writer is dying to tell you about, the clever thing they did that they’re balloon-burstingly proud of.

Mind you, it often is clever, or subtle, or well-hidden. It is often worth hearing about, and knowing about it can often make the reading experience richer and more rewarding. Alternately, it can be where the author snuck the name of his favorite watering hole into the text (to be fair, I only ever did this in roleplaying books, not fiction), but even that can be fun, if taken in the right spirit.

2-Who Are You Reading?

Not “Who inspired you?” or “who are your favorite authors?” It’s “Who are you reading now”, with an implied “and can you tell me about the cool stuff.” Most writers actually like to read, and often do so voraciously. Being asked about what they’re reading lets them share the stuff they like – which everyone, writer or not, likes doing – and also presents an opening for the writer to talk about what he likes in someone else’s work. Rarely will you get something like “I’m reading [insert book title here], and it’s pretty good.” No, writers are an educated audience, and just like baseball stat geeks wanting to discuss the latest pitch data analysis they’ve seen, or Lost fans wanting to discourse on how precisely the series finale let them down, writers like to talk about cool writing they’ve seen and explain why it’s cool. It’s analysis and a show of appreciation and, every so often, an insight into the writer in question’s work as well.

3-What Are You Working On Now?

This one can be double-edged. Some authors prefer not talk about a current project, for fear of disrupting their mojo or getting it out in words instead of on the page, or having someone sprint down the hall and compose a similar-themed piece on their sparkly new iPad.  And that’s fine.

On the other hand, lots of authors do like to talk about a current project. Seriously. Check their blogs. The word count meters – 2045 words today on “The Vampire’s Ukelele!” Score! – alone are staggering in their omnipresence. So ask. Maybe the writer wants to talk about it because they’re looking for feedback.  Maybe they’re stuck on something and want to talk it out. And maybe they’re just doing something really cool, and can’t wait to share it because they’re xcited.

4-Which Book Do You Wish You’d Written?

If only to see how many variations on “The one that sold a zillion copies” you’ll get as a result.

5-What Were You Going For With This Thing In Your Book? (where “This Thing In Your Book” = something coherent, thoughtful, and actually evidentiary of the fact that you read the furshlugginer book with something approximating attention.)

Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book tends to go over well. Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book, liked it, and thought about it goes over better. And asking a question that indicates that you read it, liked it, thought about it and came up with something new and interesting to ask will make you a friend for life.

There is danger here, though. Asking a question that’s been heard a million times before? Asking a question that indicates you didn’t get further than the first paragraph of the back cover text (which was written over lunch by an overworked intern who had only the cover art to go by, and who has a psychological condition whereby they must use the word “mordant” at least twice per sentence or else become convinced they’re George S. Kaufman risen from the dead)? Asking a question you already know the answer to? And worst of all, asking a question that’s not really a question, but rather a chance to show off how brilliant you are when it comes to the author’s work. These don’t go over so well. Trust me on this one.

6-Can I Buy You A Drink?

Yes. Yes, you can. Next question.

7-What’s Your Process For Writing?

Not “How do I become a writer?” Not “Please tell me I’m doing the right thing with my own quirky, convoluted approach, any criticism of which will provoke an angry blog post and possibly an assault with a sock filled with quarters.” A genuine inquiry into how a writer works – really works, as in “puts butt in seat and starts typing” – can deliver valuable insight into how the act of writing happens for a particular author. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an honest answer along with some explications of the whys and wherefores of that process. If you’re not, you’ll at least get a story of how Famous Writer X was rude to you for no reason whatsoever, and you’ll be able to cadge drinks at conventions on that one for years.

Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re suggestion based on years of observation, discussion, and having to bail out writer friends from local holding cells after they beat one too many over-eager interrogators senseless with rolled-up convention programs. But if you do want to talk to a writer – really talk to one – you could do a lot worse than to start here.

Most writers I know have rituals. These run the gamut from adjusting their desks a certain way to writing by candlelight to setting a glass of perfectly innocent booze on fire before each writing project as a sacrifice to the Writing Ancestors. They may sound silly, or wasteful (perfectly good booze, after all) or unintuitive, but in their own way, they all make sense. And by make sense, I don’t mean that the individual rituals themselves are constructed on a foundation of adamantine logic and garbed in shining steel armor of unassailable rationale. I mean that the idea and practice of rituals themselves makes pefect sense, particularly for us writer types.

Why? Because rituals are, in large part, about comfort. They are about adjusting one’s surroundings in a particular way in hopes of achieving a desired result, and once that change has been accomplished the ritualist is in a more comfortable place. More comfort means less brainpower devoted to worrying, to nagging thoughts and “what ifs” and everything but the task at hand (in this case, writing). More energy devoted to the task at hand generally means more and better work. The idea of doing more and better work becomes associated with the performance of the ritual, which makes it even more comforting, and, well, you see where this goes.

Now, I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that the performance of a ritualized behavior induces a shamanic trance, an ecstatic state of creative being. Others can debate that to their hearts’ content; that sort of thing really isn’t my style. What I can say definitively, however, is that I do have certain rituals built into my writing process, and that when I perform them faithfully, I tend to write better. I find myself less easily distracted, I write better, and I write longer and more quickly.

And again, I don’t think there’s a mystic or psychic or religious component to this. Rather, it’s just my way of lowering myself into the writing mood, which is all that it needs to be.

Like anything else, rituals evolve. Once upon a time, I’d put a finger of scotch (not the good stuff) out on my desk every time I sat down to write. Later, once I acquired a better appreciation for scotch (and found myself doing a lot of my writing in a building where a any hooch left unattended for more than eight seconds wasn’t safe), things changed. I did most of my writing late, late, late at night in those days, which meant mainlining caffeine, which meant mainlining Coca-Cola. Eventually it got to the point where I conflated writing with the presence of the sweet nectar of downtown Atlanta (Seriously. Downtown Atlanta is positively coated in the stuff. It’s terrifying) and found myself unable to get into a writing mood unless I’d Coked myself up. The fact that I rarely found myself able to sleep before 7 AM on the nights when I did this, well, we’re all young and stupid at some point.

And when the caffeine and the tooth-melting sweetness got to be too much for my aging dentition and sleep habits, I found rituals evolving again. As ridiculous as it sounds, there was a dry patch in there (no pun intended) after I kicked the Coke habit but before I found a comfortable routine to replace it. I lapsed a couple of times, went on binges when I felt desperate and blocked and in dire need of word count. After all, a frosty red can just said “writing” to me in a way that more sensible beverages didn’t. Without it, I felt uncomfortable and distracted, not out of any particular love of Coke products, but rather because drinking Coke was part of getting my brain in a receptive state for writing. It took, literally, years to retrain myself, including a sad and desperate fling with Caffeine Free Diet Coke (truly, the drink of the self-delusional).

These days, the daily ritual is, if nothing else, better for my teeth. Clear the desk, shut the door, start the music and, if I’m hoping to be particularly productive. It’s the pre-project ritual that’s gotten more complicated, a lengthy and reverent process of putting together a writing playlist that reinforces the mood and tone of what I want to write. Firefly Rain was Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and southern rock out the yin-yang; the work I did on Splinter Cell: Conviction was 98% action movie sountracks (instrumental only, thanks) mixed with a light sprinking of Foo Fighters. Why Foo Fighters? I have no idea. It just felt right, and once it felt right, I didn’t feel right not writing to it.

Like I said, ritual.

Perhaps the notion of sorting out a writing playlist has deeper or more logical underpinnings. After all, sorting out what music is or isn’t appropriate for writing a particular project is in large part defining what the project itself is or isn’t. You can’t know if something fits unless you have a good idea – conscious or otherwise – of what you’re going to be writing to that particular piece of music. After all, that piece of music can either reinforce or break the mood you’re trying to achieve – I at least tend not to get a lot of writing done when my lizard brain forces me to sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, for example – and so it’s a litmus test, a way of gut-checking whether I know what I’m writing well enough to actually get down to it.

Like I said, comfort. Purpose. Ritual.

And less flaming booze, which is always a good idea.