Kid Rock once said, "If it looks good, you'll see it."
Blogger. Twitter. Each in their own way is a great platform from which a writer can interact with his audience, but they apparently can't interact with each other. At least, not perfectly.
I redesigned the blog because I thought it needed a fresh look. I started a new Twitter page because I wanted to try and broaden my range. Yeah, I thought that sounded simple too, but the new blog has a flaw in that it won't allow me to link Twitter to it. No complaints. I think the flip-card look is great. There's just that one small hurdle.
So if any of you are wondering where the Twitter link is, it's in the "About Me" section. Sorry. It's not a click-and-go link but one that you'll have to copy and paste.
Every writer from the shitty to the outstanding needs to address a problem in whatever piece is being worked on. Theme is very important, but it is no replacement for subject matter. Instead, subject matter arises from theme. There is a difference.
Paint can be used as an analogy for the distinction. There's red, but then there are different shades of red (burgundy, rust, scarlet, etc.).
Theme is a general branch of material. Survival, for example, is one of the themes that interests me, and it's a theme found in Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and David Brin's The Postman. Now when you look at a theme, try to look at it in a different light. Do NOT fool yourself into thinking you're going to find something that no one else has done before. Stephen King did an interview for Under the Dome, and when comparisons to The Simpsons Movie were brought up, he said, "It's really not a question of whether or not something's been done before - the basic situation's been done before - but what you can do with it."
A useful tool in finding subject material is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow used this to help illustrate what motivates us. Apparently, Freud was just partly right with the fucking. That's just one of a number of basic needs like air and food.
The middle part of the hierarchy - the need for relationships, for acceptance and love - that's where I found the subject material for my book, boiled it down to a trio of questions: Who am I? What defines me? Where do I belong?
I can't tell you exactly how to find your questions. There is a bit of serendipity and soul searching involved. Hopefully this will help you guys out a bit.
Like most writers, I have a day job. I'm a tutor. I'm a tutor who's been told that summer vacation is starting to roll its ugly head around the corner.
When I was in college, summer vacation was a time of jubilation. It was a few months spent drinking, going wild, and having sex with a couple of Swedish blondes who knew few English words and had fewer clothes. Of course, that was all on my summer to-do list. Nevertheless, it was a time that I could relax from being under the thumb of my professors.
Now that I'm older, summer vacation is an enemy to me. It's the Vader to my Skywalker, the Khan to my Kirk, the Mandarin to my Tony Stark. Time off? Sure. Time paid? No. Screw relaxation. I want the sweet green, and you do too.
So how does a writer deal with the months of famine? Tighten thy belt and prepare to lose at least ten pounds. Personally, I think going crazy with boredom is the bigger concern. This is my first summer out of school. I was in grad school during the summer months, and even during a few years in college, so for me having time on my hands is a feeling I'm getting used to.
On the other hand, writers could seize this free time with both claws. Think about it. During the school year, I'll sometimes come home from tutoring sessions feeling so wiped that I can barely put together a grocery list, let alone a complete sentence. With summer rolling around, I've got days, weeks, of free time in which I can devote just about all of my energy to writing, to submitting stories, to hopefully getting something published, and maybe even getting paid for it.
If you're a teacher and this is your first summer as a writer, I'm not saying it's going to be easy. You're not going to be living the life of Frank Castle. Hell, you're not doing that even when the paycheck's rolling in.
I don't know. I guess I'm just trying to help keep the educator summertime suicide rate low.
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.
