Month: July 2003

This just in: This guy is amazing.

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In an addendum to my post below about the Gene Wolfe fracas, a LiveJournal user named Natalia Lincoln who was apparently there posts her version of what happened, along with a follow-up. What I found interesting was a collection of “rules” or “guidelines” for writing that are apparently from Mr. Wolfe, and I’m stealing them for use here:

1. Live. Have life experiences. Ride horses. Fly planes. Travel.

2. Learn to read. How does the other writer do it? Play with their idea: switch POVs or settings around. Evaluate it: did the writer fail/succeed?

3. Read the markets you’re submitting to.

4. Learn to write (Strunk, Transitive Vampire, etc.)

5. Don’t worry about what the reader will think of you personally, worry about making yourself perfectly clear.

6. Don’t write sentences like ad copy.

7. Read the type of material you mean to write, for a wide range of ages, levels of seriousness, audiences, classics.

8. Don’t read endless series.

9. Find a quiet place to write.

10. Writing time: aim at writing at least one hour a day. What will you give up to get this? Sleep? Social time? TV? For 28 years, Wolfe held down a day job, mechanical engineer, and still wrote.

11. Come to grips with the fact that you’re not going to be able to write at the same time & place all the time. Adjust and keep going. Writing on a train is great.

12. You will need a computer/typewriter, dictionary and a wastebasket, and printing and mailing supplies.

13. When you correct galleys, use a colored pen, not black.

14. Write your ideas down as they occur to you. Make notes more detailed than you think you need to be.

15. Initial situations are easy. You don’t have a story until you have an ending. Furthermore, you don’t have a story until you write it.

16. No amount of planning, world-building, etc. constitutes a story. Don’t spend more than an hour researching/planning a short story, or a day on a book, before you begin. Only by writing do you find out what you need.

17. Don’t mirror your outline or your research. You made it, or found it, you can change it.

18. Writers’ groups can be good or bad depending on who’s in the group. Creative writing classes are the same, only they cost more. Find out who the teacher is; that’s important.

19. Writer’s Digest is for people who haven’t published a word. Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop online is better. Kathleen Woodbury, editor.

20. Network. Odyssey is good. Get to know the local bookstores, and who works in them. Go to cons (esp. World Fantasy Con, in DC this year). WorldCon used to be good, but it’s so big now it’s hard to find the right people. You can find valuable friends at these cons.

21. Get to know the fans, but esp. get to know the editors, agents, writers. Sit up front and ask questions. To get into the green room, ask if you can help.

22. Collect all the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten.

23. Prepare to be able to teach. Study until you know it backwards, forwards, and upside-down.

24. It’s easy for you as the writer/teacher to tell people how to write. What’s hard is getting them to believe you.

25. Know the rules, and if you must break them, have a good reason to.

26. Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line. (OK, I added that one myself.)

I don’t know if Mr. Wolfe actually outlined these rules in precisely this form, or if this is just Miss Lincoln’s distillation of lecture notes. But they’re still pretty interesting.

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Hmmm….it occurs to me that part of my current anxiety may stem not just from my increasing frustration with matters economic, but from the more prosaic fact that I haven’t been listening to much music lately.

A lot of my recent writing efforts have taken place not at my regular desk (where I was doing my rough-drafts in longhand, and where I have a nine-year-old Sony Discman that’s still going strong), but at the computer, where I don’t have a Discman. But the computer does do MP3s…and I did buy, some months ago, an extension cord that would make it easier for me to plug headphones into the computer.

Anyway, right now I have John Barry’s score to The Lion In Winter playing on the big stereo while I edit an old essay, and I’m just happy as a rat in liverwurst (to pinch a metaphor from Stephen King).

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If you want a breakdown as to what’s going to appear in the Extended Edition of The Two Towers when it arrives on DVD later this fall, check out AICN‘s story.

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WARNING: Unsightly whining coming up.

Great googly-moogly*, I know that Saturdays are always my worst days for traffic around here — so much so that I take a lot of Saturdays off from posting entirely — but less than thirty hits yesterday?! That’s just cruel!

* Where does the phrase “Great googly-moogly” come from, anyway?

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Frustration is getting your novel outline done, printing it out with the first three chapters, printing out the cover letter, getting the whole package nice and ready…and then discovering that your large manila envelopes aren’t big enough for all that stuff. Gah!

So it’s off to OfficeMax today to grab a set of bigger envelopes, and then tomorrow, this thing’s out the door. It’s a moderately strange feeling, actually sending out something that I started noodling with nearly seven years ago (and whose central story idea came to me several years before that). But it’s not as strange a feeling as I might have expected, since I’ve already moved on to other things.

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Apparently there was a recent fracas of sorts at the Odyssey Fantasy Writers Workshop recently: fantasist and SF-writer extraordinaire Gene Wolfe apparently gave some fairly caustic criticism to a few stories, and the resulting brouhaha led to Wolfe’s bowing out of the workshop. Wolfe wrote his side of the story in LOCUS Magazine, and John Scalzi has a long missive on the subject on his blog.

I’ve never even considered going to Clarion or Odyssey or anything like it. Not because I’m arrogant and think I have nothing to learn; were that the truth, I’d have something other than a drawer full of rejections to show for my efforts. And not because I’m timid about my writing; I send it out, after all, and occasionally I post pieces of my fiction here, if I decide they’ve “expired” (i.e., I’ve decided that they’re simply not salable, and I don’t just want them sitting in a drawer with their rejections). I don’t do the writers’ group/workshop thing because they strike me as fairly neurotic. I decided a long time ago that the main way I would measure myself as a writer was by selling my work, and not by seeking camaraderie with other unpublished writers. I guess that, for some, this could mean that I’m a shill who’s only in it for the money. So be it, really. Time spent sitting around talking sagely about someone else’s stories is time I’m not spending writing my own stories (blog posts and GMR reviews aside), but that’s not even the main problem. For me, the weight of producing something on a deadline simply so it can be criticized by a bunch of peers would be the death-knell for my writing. I don’t need that. I’ve got death-knells aplenty, thank you very much.

It’s not that I’m afraid of being told that my work is crap, because it seems to me that any writer of any worth at all will be convinced, all on his own, that his work is crap. I don’t need someone else to confirm that for me.

As for Mr. Wolfe, I’ve only read a few of his stories and I am now working my way through the first novel of his I’ve ever read (Latro in the Mist, actually two novels bound as one). But I know that he is held in very high regard in literary circles and that he has years of teaching experience. A Usenet poster today said, “If Gene Wolfe told me a story of mine was crap, I’d say, ‘Thank you sir! May I have another’?” I’m inclined to agree, although if Mr. Wolfe told me he didn’t understand my story and I was feeling mischievous, I’d say, “Back at ya, pal.”

(And in case there’s any doubt that these students could have encountered someone meaner than Mr. Wolfe, there’s always Harlan Ellison. Yow!)

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I forgot to link them before it began, and I didn’t do any posting yesterday except to update an already-published post, so I’m probably remiss here. But two people on my blogroll, Mickey and Jesse, took part in this year’s Blogathon. Had I any extra money I would have sponsored each. Instead, I’ll just pipe up a day late to point my readers to these fellows’ sudden explosion of content. (Check out Mickey’s laser-shining-through-ice-cubes picture, and Jesse’s eerie channeling of Peggy Noonan. Aieee!)

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Oh, GAK!

As I’m writing this, the TV is on in the background (only because I didn’t turn it off yet), and “Inside Edition” or “Access Hollywood” or some such thing is on. They’re talking about some young author whose book has just been made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon (I think), and the person doing the story just said: “She was even able to stand out to the publishers by submitting her manuscript on pink paper!”

Huh-whuh??!!

Everything I’ve ever read says NOT to try things like this. Some even go so far as to say that manuscripts submitted on funky papers are not even read. What’s the deal, here? (I didn’t catch the name of the author, but I surmise it can’t be too hard to figure out. If I’m bored tomorrow, maybe I’ll dig further into this.)

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In a response to this post, Shiela recommends me to a Jack-the-Ripper movie with which I’m unfamiliar. Sounds cool, and I might as well plug a favorite Ripper movie of my own: Time After Time, a wonderful film in which Malcolm MacDowell plays H.G. Wells in 1890s London, who has built a prototype time machine. One of his friends, played by the always dependable David Warner, turns out to be the Ripper, and uses the machine to flee Scotland Yard to 1979 San Francisco. Wells goes after him, and so doing meets and falls in love with Mary Steenburgen. The whole “fish out of water” thing common to time travel stories is in evidence, of course, but it takes on a more pleasing subtext by way of Wells’s status as a Utopian who believed that the Twentieth Century would see the final blossoming of human society. Man….I gotta go rent that one sometime….

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