I checked my email yesterday and found a message from Tor.com, a science fiction publication. To my surprise, it was a letter of response to "Patient Zero", a short story I had submitted nine months ago. They rejected it. I shrugged it off, probably because I had long since abandoned the story. Anyways, it was old news to me, but I still printed the letter and stashed it away with other responses.
I also noticed how casually I took the news. Any feelings of doubt lasted as long as it took me to get through reading the letter. Nine months ago, it would have taken me maybe a day or two to get over a rejection and move on. But in the nine months since I sent out "Patient Zero", I've abandoned a big novel, stopped myself from wasting time on another dead-end novel, and turned over half a dozen story ideas in my head, most of which I decided simply weren't worth my time; they just didn't work for me.
As you write, you have to be your own content manager. By that, I mean you have to try to partition your mind into two aspects: the Writer and the Boss. The Writer does the grunt work, the research and the production of a story. The Boss assigns stories to the Writer; "Hey, Writer, what are you working on? Well, fuck that shit. I got an assignment for you."
It might sound weird, like something you'd expect from a guy with dissociative identity disorder, but it is something I encourage. When you act as the Boss, you endeavor to take a few steps back from a project and look at it objectively. You ask yourself, "Is this story really working out?" If it's not and you're looking at the project as a writer, you might have too much emotion invested in the work. You've spent time researching the material, and long hours have gone into writing it all up. You don't want to say that the time spent has been for nothing.
How do you bring out the Boss? You need time and distance. For example, if you finish a a draft for a novel, take a week or two off from it (but no more than a month). Give yourself time to forget some of the finer details and specifics of what you wrote. When you go back to proofread, first tell yourself to be objective; imagine that you're going over someone else's work rather than your own.
Details can be a bitch.
I've been working on background notes for the last week or so for this space exploration story of mine. I'm nearly done with them. Right now, I'm working on fleshing out the spacecraft that takes my explorers to their destination. I won't lie: it's a goddamn pain, but a necessary one; the spacecraft is just too important of a setting to overlook. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to return to some points of warning.
Back in November, I wrote a post called "Itty Bitty Details". It was me trying to sort out which details ought to get a writer's attention and which could afford a bit of neglect. Now, there really is no set in stone rule on how to go about this other than you need to prioritize details based on the work you're doing. If you're writing detective fiction, it would help you to look into information on how police work is done. If you're writing a comedy set in a music store, the operations of that store may not be too important. Look at the film Office Space as an example; the main character works as a computer programmer, but there aren't too many details about what his job entails; all we need to know is that it sucks.
Back to my original issue: how much detail is too much? I think that a writer should have enough detail to give himself a foggy view of what he's writing. For example, tonight, I drew up a diagram of the cockpit for my spacecraft. I did not do painstaking schematics of consoles and gauges. I did not draw a circuit diagram for the computers. None of that. All I needed to know was the size of the space and where everyone was going to be seated. There is a private section for the ship's commander (Star Trek fans would call this the captain's ready room, I think), but no details on what the furniture is like in there.
See? A rough and broad image. Later on in the week I'll have to figure out where the life support system goes, but I won't ask myself all the intricate details of it. All I need to know is where the water and air are stored.
There are a few reasons for all of this.
First, as I said, it's a matter of priority. When you get down to it, the spacecraft is a ferryboat. Once my characters have landed on this new planet, they'll be reliant on whatever shelter and gear they bring with them, so that I have detailed because it's more relevant to their survival, and since survival is one of the main things I want to talk about, that shelter becomes an even more important setting.
The second reason is spontaneity. As I'm writing, I might come up with an idea for a cool little gizmo to put on the ship, maybe some big, cool MRI machine for the doctors to use, or a robotic surgeon. If I had detailed the ship's hospital right at the beginning, I would have to redesign it to accommodate this change. It's enough for me to say, "This is how big the hospital is. This is how much space and area you have to work with. Find some place to put this gadget."
Third, if you really delve into your work to the nth degree and say to people where the nuts and bolts literally are, you're going to waste your time. John Howe, one of the concept artists for the Lord of the Rings films comments how a coworker who had a zoology background bugged him on his design for the winged creatures worn by the Ringwraiths. Howe's reply was, "This isn't National Geographic. This is Lord of the Rings. Leave me alone." Similarly, I'm not designing a ship for NASA. If any astronautic engineers want to bug me about my spaceship, I'll just turn the tables on them and say that they're the ones with the advanced technical degrees; I'm just a writer.
There are a couple of other reasons I have in mind, but they're more project-specific - stuff relating to theme - and I don't want to give anything away just yet.
Story, as it turns out, has become a necessary thing to think about when you're writing. I'd hate to be a party pooper, but it seems that I strayed from that fact a little bit this week as I was trying to get things ready for my colonization story. I was so focused on all these little details that I forgot to ask myself the fundamental question: what is the story that I'm trying to tell?
Don't get me wrong. Research is important, but don't let it blind you to what's really important. As George R.R. Martin said: "A writer cannot do too much research, though sometimes it is a mistake to try and cram too much of what you learned into your novel. Research gives you a foundation to build on, but in the end it's only the story that matters."
For me, I was going off of a conceit (settlers arriving on a new world), but I didn't have a story. Does a landing shuttle crash? Are the colonists trying to keep away a swarm of alien animals who see them as fresh meat? Do the colonists divide into rival factions? This week, my answer to all of these was a shrug and, "I don't know."
Let me put this another way...
Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, a beautiful film counted among the greatest science fiction films ever made. It was put together in a gorgeous fashion that made you feel like you were looking at a possible alternate reality (at least from our post-2001 point of view; I don't remember the Soviet Union being around in that year, and I certainly don't remember there being any giant space stations or lunar bases). but what was the story about? Bowman turned into the Star Child at the end and then...what?
Now look at 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Cold War tensions rise. Soviet and American astronauts distrust each other. Curnow and Brajlovsky strike a friendship. Chandra embarks on a paternal quest to save his creation, the HAL-9000. Kirbuk is trying to decide whether Floyd is friend or foe, and Floyd is trying to redeem himself for the failed voyage of Discovery. Now that's a good set of stories, and all of them under the umbrella of the main conceit, which is aliens trying to communicate with humanity.
Now, if it were up to me, I would have tried to combine the beauty of 2001 with the narrative of 2010. Roger Ebert compared 2001 to poetry, and it certainly is. I guess the problem that I have is that I prefer narrative poetry.
A little over a week ago, I stopped work on my alien invasion novel. My friends were surprised. Hell, I was surprised. I'd spent two and a half years taking a stab at it and then the last couple of months trying to breath new life into it and trying to make it all work out. Only it didn't. It was a shock and a disappointment, and I was pretty pissed off about it for a while. However, it's ultimately all for the better and I've moved on to a new story, this one about colonists arriving on a new world.
But the question persists: why did the alien invasion novel fail?
I got into writing fifteen years ago. As a kid, I started writing stuff that ripped off whomever I was reading, most of it military science fiction, and thus explaining why I kept working on an alien invasion story. As time goes on, you don't just sharpen your style and voice, but your themes as well. I started to notice that I was interested less in a flat-out war story and more in things related to survival and culture clashes. I still like myself a good war story, but the latter themes seemed to have more depth to them, more substance.
Did my invasion novel touch on survival? Not really. The urgency didn't seem to be there too strongly - the need to live the next day, the next hour, the next minute. Did my invasion novel touch on culture clashes? Not really. The plan was to have at least some of my characters meeting with the aliens and try to talk out their differences, but that was more towards the end of the story. The aliens didn't appear until about a hundred pages into the book, and even then it was one creature who died quickly.
There's no shame in focusing on a handful of themes. On the contrary, doing so helps a writer to prioritize his time. If you think (but have no desire) you should write about sparkly and overly-emotional vampires because they're popular at the moment, then for God's sake, please don't. Don't waste your time on a subject that doesn't hold your interest. If you're bored when you write, you'll be bored on the page, and your readers will pick up on that. Write what you're interested in, weave your own energy and enthusiasm into the text, and your readers will respond well to it.
Maybe one day, if I connect the right dots, I might try tackling the invasion novel again.
I talked to a writer friend of mine tonight, asking how's she's been and how her work's going. When I told her what I've been up to, she said, "I hate your productivity." Now, in fairness, I have been having an enviable amount of output lately. I must have put out at least 10,000 words on my novel in the last week, and I've experienced a strange burst of motivation, but I digress. My friend has said this four-word phrase to me for some time now, or at least a variation of it.
Bitterness? I'd like to think she's not the bitter type, but perhaps in need of some motivation. And, in fairness, she's got a 9-to-5 job, while I'm working part-time at the moment; I've got more time in my day to get the words out.
Writing is a very lonely profession. You sit alone at a keyboard (or typewriter, or quill and ink, or hammer and chisel) and you produce words that form a narrative. That simply won't change. Get used to it. But writers do need each other to keep their spirits up. To my friend - to any writer who feels they're not putting out like a good literary whore ought to - productive hatred may be just the thing for you.
It's not kill-or-be-killed kind of fury, but a game of Can You Top This? I think George Lucas mentioned this once in an interview when he talked about the relationship he had with people like Steven Spielberg; "If you're so smart, why don't you do this project or that project?" Your friends can't do the work for you, but, whether they're newcomers to the craft or veterans, by seeing them produce actual work, it might drive you back to your own, and come Hell or high water, you're going to get determined to punch out those four of five pages a day.
There's also another kind of productive hatred I'd like to mention: revenge. When I was in grad school, you wouldn't believe how pissed off I was to hear that Lauren Conrad got a three-book deal from HarperCollins. I mean, seriously? You HC butt-fuckers gave her three books?! And on top of that, last year, they agreed to let her produce another unholy trinity.
I still remember fuming in 2009 when I heard about her first trio of books, and I asked a professor of mine, "Is it okay to write out of revenge? If you see someone you know can't write a grocery list get such a sweet deal, is it okay to write with the intention of giving her her comeuppance?" My professor said, "Um, yes, Mario. It's totally okay."
So when folks ask me how I stay motivated, I always tell them it's because I see other people getting shit done and don't want to look lazy with my work...and because I want Lauren Conrad to cry, to cry her Laguna Beach heart out.
Writing isn't like masturbation. There's no instant gratification. The problem is that you can have a difficult time finding the off switch to your creativity, an inability to tell your brain to stop coming up with new ideas until you've finished the book you've already started. And the sick irony is that you need your brain to think creatively in order to write in the first place.
What you need is an idea notebook, a convenient repository to jot down your ideas as they come to you. Sounds like a no-brainer, but it does wonders. I keep a journal as a hobby, and I often write down my notes and thoughts on the writing process in it, but that's not enough. Matters of everyday life get written down as well; there's at least a complaint a day about how little sleep I'm getting.
With that in mind, I recently bought a small, plain blue notebook. Dedicate each page to one story idea. Write the rough idea, key sources of inspiration if you have them, and maybe a couple of possible titles to toss around. Now, if you're working on a story and it doesn't work out the way you'd hoped, you don't have to freak out about where your next idea is going to come from. Just tick a mark on that abandoned project, turn the page, and move on to the next one.
Writing is a balancing act between the need to produce material and the crunch of a 24-hour day. There's nothing anyone can do about the length of the day. I just want to get that out right now.
The second thing I want to get out, in case I haven't been clear enough already, is how my alien invasion novel works: it's a series of vignettes focusing on eight main characters.
And now to reconcile Point A and Point B. I'd prefer to get a vignette written each day on the novel. It's a nice and convenient way to keep track of my progress. There are a hundred and one vignettes, so at this pace, it should take me a little over three months to finish the first draft. The sad reality is that every now and then some vignettes come around that are longer than others, or there are days when things pile up on the side and I can't get to the end of a scene.
When I start a vignette, I like to have a to-do list with me, a sequence of events that tell me what these five or six pages are about. I usually have five or six events per vignette, but today I started one that had ten, nearly double the amount I usually go for, and I only got through about a third of them. However, I still reached my day's quota of a thousand words.
Was this a good day or a bad day? It was both - good because I reached the quota, and bad because the vignette wasn't finished - but to me I think I came out on top because a thousand words is a lot to get down on paper. Part of me is a little bummed that I didn't get as much as I wanted to today, but I can at least sleep easy that I got a minimal standard. If I had kept going until I got to the end of the vignette, I'd probably be awake until six in the morning, and then I wouldn't wake up early enough to get the next day's work done.
So yes, there is a time crunch on a writer, but there's a mental one as well. Overworking the brain can cause it to shutdown when we really need it. That's why it's never good to constantly pull all-nighters when you're in college. In my opinion, setting a daily goal like a word quota is a great way to make sure you're getting things done without overextending yourself.
And on that note, I'm going to sleep.
