The Vorkosigan Companion (11 page)

That said, people still want to write, for reasons that have little to do with publishing economics. I have concluded by experiment that teaching writing is not my strength—teaching is a different, complex, and underrated skill—but I get asked how-to questions anyway. My writing methods have a lot of intuitive elements that I can't even analyze, let alone articulate and transfer, so all my tips tend to cluster around problems I've had to solve for myself, which may or may not be the same problems a learner is having. I suspect one could trace most writers' own problem spots just by the advice they give. With that warning, here's a bag of things I've learned or observed along the way.

If you want writing time in your day, you have to take it—no one will give it to you. Often, you can only take it from your own alternate activities; writers' lives tend to get rather stripped-down for that reason. Nowadays, I have more control over my own time, and the limiting factor isn't writing time per se, but the speed with which I generate and refine my ideas. When I was most pressed for time, in my younger days, having a separate place to go work, out of the house—in my case the library, because it was free and quiet—helped focus my energies. Two of my writer friends, back when they both had day jobs, used to have regular lunch dates where they would meet in a coffee shop and write like mad for the first forty-five minutes, eat in fifteen, and go back to work. One, I know, still works in short bursts, just as I still use my outlining system that was originally designed to make my actual people-free first-draft writing time intensively productive, because it was so limited.

Other than a limitless imagination, a fiction writer should possess self-discipline. Writing is great fun, but it's not all fun; if you can't steel yourself to plow through the un-fun parts, you'll never finish anything worth the writing. This quality includes both drive, and relentless self-correction—a continuous search for how to Do It Better, from whatever sources one can find.

We pause now for my "Writer's Block—Your Friend" spiel. There's something in my back-brain which puts on the brakes when I try to do the wrong thing in my book, put in something that the book isn't supposed to be, take a wrong turn. I just go blank. The words won't be forced. It takes a while to sort out if this is what's going on, or if it's just normal distractibility, but when I do get it correctly identified, the only thing to do is go back and revisualize the story itself. Noodling around on the sentence-revision level isn't the cure.

I've come to think theme is an emergent property of a book, and so it really isn't right to talk about a book's theme before the text is complete. But I think what's happening with this kind of block is that the wrong thing I was trying to do wouldn't have fit that complex emergent meaning that doesn't exist yet, but is trying to become. This sense of story, which I often can't even see or name at that point, is the invisible template against which I ultimately test each choice—of action, of viewpoint, whatever. When it finally fits, it all clicks in and I'm off and running again. This process is far more visceral than it is analytical.

Remember that scene from the movie
Roger Rabbit
, where Roger whips his hand out of the handcuff in which it has been stuck, and the human asks in outrage, "Could you always do that?" and Roger replies, "No! Only when it was funny!" It might seem, in something as apparently generic as an action-adventure novel, that almost any action would do. It doesn't. Only when it fits the theme. Then it's the right one. Then it's unstoppable.

And then there are the writer's blocks that come from simply not knowing what happens next. Some days the ideas flow, some days they have to be laboriously pieced together. Sometimes the attempt at piecing-together jostles the real answer loose. I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."

In making up a new world, a writer has to be conscious of where language comes from, especially if trying to transport the reader into a different time and place than their everyday normal twenty-first century. (Pardon me while I walk around and admire that phrase. For most of my life, "the twenty-first century" was shorthand for "the future"; now I'm living in it. Time travel the hard way . . . shouldn't we spare a few more moments for marveling?) A writer needs to be a little bit conscious of the sources of words, too. I found in writing books in the
Chalion
and
Sharing Knife
series particularly, where the setting is, while not historical, at any rate preindustrial, I had to be constantly watching my vocabulary for anachronisms. I couldn't refer to objects that wouldn't have been invented in those worlds; all my metaphors had to be checked to make sure that they would work in this new context. I puzzled a bit over borderline words like "sanguine" and "choleric," which have their roots in an obsolete theory of physiology that never existed in Chalion, but have since acquired general meanings; I decided to leave them in lest I be stripped of vocabulary altogether.

The inverse of screening wrong words out is putting right ones in. Neologisms in fantasy and science fiction present an ongoing challenge. A certain number of new words are needed for new concepts, a certain number to give atmosphere, but if there are too many the reader may get vocabulary overload. Was that last polysyllable a noun or a verb, a person, a place, or a thing? When as a reader I get saturated like that, the words just fuzz out into meaningless white noise, which is probably not the effect the writer intended.

A large vocabulary and a sense of where words come from, their roots and histories, help keep the writer from going astray. It can take time and a lot of reading to develop this kind of ear, but any newbie can use a dictionary. A quick dictionary check of any made-up word to be sure one hasn't accidentally duplicated a term already taken will help prevent, say, inadvertently naming one's major fantasy character after an airplane part. (True story. Not one of mine, happily.) Checking that one hasn't used some absurd word in a foreign language can be harder, although an Internet search may help here. Ursula Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," although it applies only to a partial range of story types, is recommended reading to sensitize one to the issues.

When you finish book one, don't just sit down and wait for it to sell; start on book two. Novel publishers want writers who have proven that they are capable of doing continuing work, and at a steady rate, not one-book-wonders. And your second book, or your third, or fourth, may actually be the one that breaks the barriers for you. If you're lucky, as I was, you'll be able to clean out your manuscript drawer then and there (remember, publishers want more than one book, at least until your books tank and then they don't want any). Also, writing the second or later books may teach you more about writing, and more about how to improve your early work, than getting caught in an endless loop of revising the same material and rehashing the same problems.

Right revising is a most excellent thing. Perpetual revising that eats new work is not.

My best advice to aspiring writers is to write what you are passionate about, rather than trying to write "to the market." After all, if you try to write what you think others will like, and its flops, it will have been an absolute waste of your time; worse, if it succeeds, people will want you to write more of the same, not what your heart is set upon. If you love your work, there is more of a chance that others will too, and you are more likely to produce your best—which will create its own market, the mad gods of luck and publishing willing.

So, this ambles roundaboutly over to the next set of hard tasks, not terribly closely related: marketing one's tale.

I landed my first novel sale to Baen without an agent, but I wouldn't recommend this course of action to a new writer. I did it the hard way—wrote seven published books and won my first Nebula.
Then
I found my agent. On the bright side, she is a very good one.

Besides checking books on writing and Net-based sources, which have grown far more abundant these days (if varied in utility), if a new writer is looking for an agent it certainly can't hurt to attend the larger science fiction conventions, such as Worldcon or especially World Fantasy Convention, where a high concentration of agents and editors appear, and better still, appear on panels, where you can actually ask them your questions. Beyond that, it's just the usual slog of query letters and partials-and-outlines, as described in the many how-to books. If you have a published friend, you can sometimes get an introduction to their agent, but beware that you're putting your friend's professional reputation on the line when you do this. Your offering had better justify it.

Keep in mind, agents are not, normally, writing instructors. (Some agents do critique their clients' work, some don't. Mine mostly doesn't. It's not her job. Wrestling with French tax forms, or Bulgarian pirates, or publishers' accounting departments, or corporate-speak contracts, that's her job.)

Since the mid-Eighties when I broke in, the slush piles have grown bigger and the number of publishers who will even look at unagented submissions has grown smaller. Baen is one of the few publishers who still read slush (unsolicited novel manuscripts), but even they can only "start" perhaps one or two new writers a year. It's worth it to try every channel, but if you can land an agent who likes your work, so much the better. While no agent can sell a book that wouldn't sell on its own, once you have an offer, you'll want an agent anyway to do things like retain subrights, be sure your contract is reasonable, and market foreign sales.

Most agents do not handle short work even for their established clients, so of course new writers who can work at both lengths should send off their short tales to the magazines themselves. There isn't much to negotiate or change in most magazine contracts (though you should be sure you have a proper reversion clause), and a short story sale looks good in one's cover letter when offering a novel. No, it is not necessary to write or sell short stories before tackling novels; different writers have different natural lengths, and it's not a bad idea to play to one's strengths in the beginning.

Much depends on whether one writes better at short or long lengths. Many (not all) writers have a length that comes most readily to them. Both my friend Pat Wrede and I tend to be natural novelists. Our good ideas come in novel-sizes. Her first five sales were novels, before she ever figured out how to construct a salable short story. A lot of famous writers seem to be natural short-form writers. One is most likely to sell whatever one writes best. (Duh.) The odds are about the same, i.e., ghastly. (The mantras "They have to buy something," "Odds are for other people," and "There's always room at the top" are useful when contemplating this. Also "If s/he can do it, so can I." At least when "it" is properly understood as "the bloody hard work.") The short story market is shrinking at present, and many more people complete, and therefore submit, short work than long, so it's very competitive. On the other hand, the turn-around time for new novel submissions has become unconscionably long, literally years sometimes, and one can't simultaneously submit works of fiction. Any professional sale is a good thing, and will look good in the cover letter—selling either a novel or short work to an editor's respected colleague establishes your professional status, and the editor is likely to give your next submission, of whatever length, a closer glance.

There is a lot of on-line help out there these days that did not exist when I was breaking in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has a valuable Website—the page at www.sfwa.org/writing is a gold mine. I suggest starting with Patricia Wrede's "Worldbuilding Questions" and Tappan King's "The Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript," and going on till you come to the end. Newsgroups such as rec.arts.sf.composition are on-line hangouts for both new writers and some helpful old pros, and hundreds of on-line critique groups of varying value have sprung up. E-mail has freed writing groups from geography. The SF publishing news magazine
Locus
is probably the best resource for publishing, bookselling, and convention news, as well as having extensive review columns and excellent interviews with writers. Not to mention photos of both famous and important behind-the-scenes faces—I was able to recognize my new publisher in an elevator crush at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon because I'd seen his photo in
Locus
.

Which brings us to reviews. Good reviews are always heartening, bad ones depressing. Curiously, a few bad ones manage to be far more excoriating than the ten or twenty good ones are uplifting. There's a psychological study in there somewhere, I'm sure. Ignore the bad, enjoy the good, and don't take either sort too seriously.

The most popular novels have both a good story and a good set of characters, accessible to a broad range of readers, not just to a tiny elite. (Though I will cheerfully maintain that elites deserve their reads, too, "elite" and "bestseller" don't usually occur in the same sentence for an obvious logical reason.) Books with legs usually need to be books that sell themselves, that people will recommend to each other; clever or expensive publicity can boost a book up onto bestseller lists for a moment, but only the story itself can keep it there for any length of time. There is also the question of cracking that critical mass, of getting enough people recommending it to each other (or arguing about it) that other readers become curious just because they've heard about this thing six times in two weeks in several completely different conversations, and start to actually remember it well enough to go look for it.

Some of a writer's necessary work lies midway between art and commerce, as in learning how to deal with editors and agents and contracts and business etiquette (many writers have no business background, and unfortunately it shows). Paranoia is certainly one of the pitfalls that up-and-coming writers need to avoid. No editor is trying to steal your work, really. It is perhaps also wise to avoid buying too blindly into the "whine and cheese" fests some writers indulge in. Dissing one's publisher, agent, or other professional colleague in public is as unappetizing to listen to as someone dissing their ex-spouse, and can lead the uninitiated newbie into mistaking as adversarial, parts of the publication process that are, in fact, best accomplished in a cooperative spirit. It's a good idea for any writer, though, to become aware of what level of sales constitutes success for one's chosen genre, so as to avoid either inflated expectations or selling oneself short. "How far is up?" can be a confusing question to answer.