I was thrilled this summer to get an invite to be in an anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, using a theme that is dear to my heart: Kickstarter. Author Keffy Kehrli wrote a story for Lightspeed magazine that was entirely in Kickstarter terms, and JJA liked the idea so much he wanted to do a whole book based on it. And of course he had to fund it via Kickstarter.
It’s already funded, but consider it a pre-order, or helping reach stretch goals.
Breaking Bad spoilers below.
I’m a tangential watcher of Breaking Bad. We don’t have cable so I’ve watched via Netflix, and usually while doing something else. Jim fills me in. I did get a chance to see last week’s episode and watched with fascinated horror at The Phone Call. Many people have apparently been talking about The Phone Call, trying so hard to whitewash Walt into remaining a hero, doing things for his family, how he said things to try to throw the blame off Skyler, and how Skyler is a bitch and deserved it anyway, etc. This article says why that’s stupid, why that’s making the show as stupider than it is. (also because sexism, but that’s not the point of this post.) Like real people, Walt is neither Good nor Evil. He loves his family and hates his wife and does horrible things for what he thinks is a good reason and has killed and rescued and poisoned and caused the death of his brother-in-law and mourned that death. He is capable of many things, good and evil. He’s complex.
So why, asks the article writer, do some people so desperately want Walt to be the “good guy” – why do they justify his actions? Part of it, yes, is the fact that we liked Walt in the beginning, and we are good people (in our own eyes), so we can’t be evil, so Walt isn’t evil.
This is the same justification people use when they say racist things. “Racists are bad. I’m not bad. So what I said wasn’t racist.”
But the real reason we can root for bad guys is point of view.
Several years ago I was watching a nature program and suddenly saw through the careful emotional manipulation – in a freaking NATURE program – that they plunge the viewer into. They’ll talk about the migrating bird that flies thousands of miles and gets maybe a mouthful of food along the way but OH NO HERE IS A HUNGRY EAGLE, RUN MIGRATING BIRD!!!
In another scene we’ll get a view of the mama cheetah who has been kicked in the face by a zebra and will soon die, as will her cubs. Fuckin zebras, man. Poor cheetah family.
Even though the nature shows show the prey’s POV a majority of the time, and therefore we find ourselves rooting for the antelope to get away, sometimes we see it from the predators’ point of view, and suddenly we feel for the wolf who hasn’t eaten in days during the lean winter months, and the hungry babies, poor puppies!
While in the scene above we easily felt for the poor migrating bird who was nearly starving and wouldn’t eat until it reached its destination a billion miles away, like a dad who won’t stop to pee on a long trip to grandma’s in Kalamazoo, the scene could have been told from the POV of the hungry eagle, who perhaps had an injured wing and had chicks to feed, and maybe one had fallen out of the nest or been eaten by a snake, and the narrator would have been all GO, EAGLE, GO! EAT THAT BIRD!
We have seen most of Breaking Bad from Walt’s POV. We have seen his professional despair, his cancer diagnosis, his denial of coverage, his controlling wife. Then we see him take control of his life and his money and then do that thing that always makes us like a character- he does something well. He does something better than anyone else, and that’s cook. We see him start to try to help his family by doing horrible things. We know he loves his family. We know he even loves Hank. We know he goes into every horrible thing he does with, if not reluctance, with a grim sense of “this is the only choice I have.” All of these things can make people believe “it’s not his fault.”
MINOR spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire series:
George RR Martin has masterfully used POV in A Song of Ice and Fire. He sets up Jamie Lannister to be reprehensible early on. We don’t start getting Jamie’s point of view until a few books in when he begins to look sympathetic, and we see his change from inside him. We can even start liking him a little, or at least rooting for him, even when we’re reminded that he’s a complex character who is not embracing the “good” way of life by any stretch of the imagination. (Remember the threat he made against an infant in the Tully family? Yeah, he’s still a Lannister.)
Back to Breaking Bad, imagine the story from Skyler’s POV. A woman whose husband is getting screwed in his job and then diagnosed with cancer and then denied treatment, and bam, unexpectedly she turns up pregnant. That’s a lot of shit to deal with. Then her husband begins to cook, and she has no idea, but knows that Something is Up. When she finds out, she is forced to decide whether to keep her family together or high tail it out of there. She becomes his accomplice, still not knowing the depth of the shit he’s gotten into, until enough people die that she starts to notice. She’s seeming pretty sympathetic to me right now.
While we never want the Lannisters to win in ASoIaF, we do want Tyrion Lannister to succeed, because we see his sympathetic POV – this made the Blackwater battle a complex one because we hated something to happen to Tyrion but wanted Joffrey’s city to fall. A lot of people complain that Sansa is a bitch for not liking Tyrion even though he did the very nice thing of not raping her, but they forget that Sansa thinks the Imp is evil, still believes he tried to kill her brother, he fights for the Lannisters, hell, he IS a Lannister, etc. We want her to see the good in him that WE see, because we’ve seen his POV, but we forget that a) he hasn’t told her the truth of anything because b) he (rightly) thinks she will never believe him. Sansa can’t have Tyrion’s POV, so she hates him. When we see him through her eyes, he’s a horrible, ugly man who is an attempted murderer, part of a family who has nothing but horrible people in it, a drunk, a frequent visitor of brothels, incapable of decency or love.
Anyway, the way to get people to like or sympathize with a character is to show the character doing something well (Remember Italians said that Mussolini made the trains run on time?), or doing a kindness to someone, or see them mistreated. But also give them a POV so we can see their different layers, the shades of gray that make up everybody’s soul, and remember, like Walt, like Jamie, we all do what we do because we believe it’s the right thing, or the only thing to do.
I can’t take credit for this. This is taken directly from a conversation I had with Ursula Vernon, who was trying to give me a “buck up little camper!” talk.
See, what happened was I was procrastinating and playing my DS and doing laundry and watching The Office when there was something work-related I had to do. When I finally got my head straight and did what I was supposed to, I killed it, efficiently, well, and even got a compliment from the client. But as I was walking to lunch, I still felt lousy and unaccomplished because I’d wasted that time. I thought, man, if I could be productive like that all the time, I’d be unstoppable.
Ursula gave me a great metaphor for this (well, no, first she said, “if you did that all the time, you would die.” Then she gave the metaphor): traditionally, a pound cake needs a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar. The thing that makes it really good is the butter, right? * So if butter is the best part, why not make a butter cake? THREE POUNDS OF BUTTER. CHURCH LUNCHEON, HERE I COME!
Three pounds of butter? You’d die.
The butter in this metaphor, says Ursula, is the time that you work and you’re on top of it, you’re nailing everything, you’re creative and clever and productive and awesome. But if you ate just butter, if you were so on fire creatively all the time, you’d die. The flour is the boring stuff in your life, the laundry and the gardening and the cooking and the driving. It’s boring and tasteless, but the butter needs it for support to make a cake. **
Your mind needs downtime to process awesome creative stuff. You need time to wind up the clockwork toy that is your brain, and the winding up is the part of your life where you’re not sitting at the computer (or notebook or easel or drawing pad or musical instrument, etc). How many ideas do you have when you’re away from your computer? Driving? Showering? Shopping?
This is why I worry when someone says they can’t wait to quit their job so they can “write all the time.” I have no day job, thanks to the economy, and promise you, people who write as their day job don’t do it all the time. Just like we don’t eat butter all the time. We need procrastination, manual things to do, times where our brain clicks off to let the subconscious play for a bit. ***
One thing the day job and parenting gives you, besides all the negative stuff I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of right now, is structure in your life. You have a time you need to be at work, you have a time to get home, you have a kid who needs its own schedule. While this can give you a sense of being overwhelmed, you can look at your schedule and see where your holes are. If you fill the holes up with TV and video games (I don’t judge; I do the same thing) then think about removing those things and writing.
Because right now, I look at the day, and the time I have to write is a huge lump that procrasti-brain decides can be pushed back further and further, and suddenly it’s 9:30pm and I should be relaxing but I haven’t written yet and HOW CAN THIS BE WHAT EVIL CREATURE HAS EATEN MY DAY?
I think I’m talking about two different, but linked, things here. The point is, time doing things other than creating is necessary. Wishing for a full day with nothing to do but write, well, be careful what you wish for. If, right now, you are finding other things to do than write when you have 30 min of free time, you will do the same thing if given 8 hours. I promise.
So. Pound cake. Turns out the flour is necessary. I’m going to go do a load of laundry now.
Work in Progress: MIND THE DRAPES (working title)
* Note- I could argue that the most important thing was the sugar, but that’s a moot point in regards to her argument.
** Note- if I am completely honest with myself I will admit that DS playing is not really flour in my life. It’s not much of anything except for dopamine hits to my easily-addicted brain. Maybe it’s Cheetos.
*** Note- While procrastination and the like are necessary, remember what happens if you have too much flour and too little butter. Yuck. Don’t go overboard.
TL; DR – shut up about bad books getting published.
With the release of Dan Brown’s new book, I expect to be getting more email from people complaining of HOW could he have gotten a book deal if he writes so poorly? How in the world did EL James make a shitton of money off of fanfic BDSM? Then undoubtedly they will point out why the books are so awful. Or mock them.
And I get it. I feel the jealousy, I get all Christmasy green and red with jealousy and rage. “So all I have to do is shit on a page and send it in and they will buy it? Is that it?” I say through a gin-soaked olive. (Then my editor calls me and tells me under no circumstances am I to send her feces.)
Tobias Buckell recently had an amazing blog post where he was talking mainly of book bloggers and pro reviewers, but it applied to authors as well.
1) When you get to a point where you’ve read an amazing number of books, you change. You’ve read so much that what may seem new or interesting to most (and even to the writer of the book you’re reading) is just a variation to you. Your expectations regarding the work change.
Due to subjectivity being what it is, many writers can mistake what’s happening and view it as the books getting worse, not their own aesthetic changing. Two things can happen. One, despair at what they perceive is the dying of quality. You see this a lot with people who hit a certain number of books read: they begin to rail against the dreadfulness of everything. It can lead to bitterness, cynicism, and outright hatred of something they previously loved.
This hit home so hard. I know the “rules” of storytelling, I can spot lazy sexist writing (Hello, Jim Butcher, hanging a lantern on Dresden’s lecherous eye doesn’t make it any better), the lack of a strong conflict, cardboard characters, weak motivation, and the classic “let’s save the big gun till the end instead of using it at the beginning and saving us all this trouble” (hello Iron Man 3, Babylon 5, and every episode of Power Rangers ever.) This distracts and annoys me. And I want to stand up and shout, “Does everyone else not SEE that Bella is suffering from emotional abuse? Why can’t you understand that Harry Potter telling us something “dully” in every goddamn chapter is weak writing?”
They won’t listen. My friends and colleagues will listen, toasting me with their drinks or their tubes of cookie dough or their drug of choice, and will sit and wonder why the “good” books go unnoticed. But the world at large? They won’t listen. Because they’re enjoying themselves.
And now we come up against the common battle between entertainment and art. But we have to admit that book selling is a business, and the publishers wish to make money. And, frankly, so do artists. Entertainment is what fits the majority of people. There will always be a place for the “important” literature, don’t get me wrong. But the entertaining stuff sells whether it sticks to the rules or not.
Because people want to be entertained. And the average person is not going to critique a book or a movie, they’re just going to watch, experience, and probably tell a friend if they loved it or hated it. If it didn’t move them at all, then you’ve got a problem. But Brown, James, Meyer, and whatever other author would sit accused in the court of your authorly opinion, only they’re busy counting their money so they didn’t answer their subpoena, they move people. And that makes people buy books.
So crap is getting published. Yeah. Happens all the time, and will continue to happen. What can you do about it?
Here’s the horrible secret: if your book follows every rule, gets rid of adverbs and passive voice, has grammatically perfect sentences and a solid three act arc, no one will care* if the book doesn’t grab them in some way.
John Scalzi said it better than I did. Also his new book is out and I highly recommend it.
* Your mom will. Also, your English teacher will be pleased you know how to use a semi-colon.
I’m going to go all stream of consciousness on you right now. Hold on tight.
[Something happened, which I will explain after I discuss the emotions involved.]
So here I go.
I was solicited to do a novella. I spent the last week researching and brainstorming, and last night I wrote my outline. As I was writing it, I felt good, it went a lot smoother than any other outline I’d experienced. So i have a character in a setting. What happens to her? What next? What next? What mistakes does she make? What next? How does it end? BOOM- 1000 word outline. Done. LIKE A BOSS. (link NSFW)
I checked it over a couple of times, all the while feeling a slow sinking feeling. This was drivel. It was predictable and weak and trite and lacked any depth at all. They were going to hate it and regret asking me to write for them. They would take my gin away. And my puppy.
Then I had an epiphany. I realized the following things:
So once I remove the watermark of MUR WROTE THIS THEREFORE IT IS SHIT that I place over every story I write, and look at the story as a standalone, it might, you know, be good.
Half an hour later one of the editors contacted me. He really liked it. Mur the gladiator got a THUMBS UP and lives to fight write another day!
And the crowd goes wild.
And then Mur stressed about whether she should blog about this newfound confidence.
I know in your world, my “next book” is The Shambling Guide to New York City. (io9 calls it one of the “astounding summer books not to miss” – and you can preorder it now! – not that I’m squeeing like crazy or anything.) But in my world, I’ve been soaking in the Palmolive of New Orleans and Zoe’s next adventure. I just finished The Ghost Train to New Orleans, the second book in The Shambling Guides.
Sequels are hard. There are so many things that can go wrong:
All of that said, I’m pretty happy with the book, except when a rush of overwhelming fear comes over me and I think it’s absolute crap. But I’m pretty sure I am experiencing a very common feeling*** to being done with a book, so I just tell myself it’s natural and have another cookie.
** I admit that yesterday I wrote a scene that made me laugh out loud, which I figure was a good sign, but still, for someone like me, I suppose any early review of book 1 can paralyze your work on book 2. If someone says something bad, then OH SHIT I AM A SHIT WRITER WORTH SHIT I MAY AS WELL QUIT AND SAY SHIT AGAIN. SHIT. If someone says something good, then OH SHIT I HAVE TO DO IT EVEN BETTER THE SECOND TIME. PRESSURE! PRESSURE! You can’t win. And by you I mean me. Perhaps this has something to do with my own psyche. Huh.
*** I just spent 20 min searching Neil Gaiman’s blog for something he wrote about feeling like his books are shit every time he gets about halfway through them, but the guy has such a huge blog and I can’t remember the appropriate keywords, so I’m at a loss. If your Google-fu is better than mine, knock yourself out.
He’s just better at saying these things than I am. Watch this whole thing, dammit.
I’ve been doing that hiding thing again. I need to take some time off from blogging and podcasting because Ghost Train to New Orleans is due this month. [Insert HERE all clever remarks about how I have to hold off on I Should Be Writing, because I should be writing. Go ahead. I’ll wait.] And then lots of stuff happens in SF and I feel I should write/podcast about it. But the SHOULD takes a lot of mental weight and I just get tired and say nothing. Damn.
Anyway. In short: I’m writing a book. I got nominated for the Campbell award. The Hugo Award nominees were also announced, and people got real mad. Nightshade Books is in trouble and people are freaking out about it. Roger Ebert died. Iain Banks is dying. Leviathan Chronicles Season 2 was released with a lot of my content. The Torment Kickstarter ended, setting a record. The Shambling Guide to NYC started getting mainstream reviews. Last week it sleeted in NC, and now highs are in the 80’s. But what’s the stupidest thing in the world is the fact that what got me blogging again after a hiatus was toilet paper.
Baby, you should know I am really quite a sweet guy
When I buy you bathroom tissue, I always get the 2-ply
~Weird Al Yankovic
In a frugal attempt to save money, and I also think I was in a hurry, I grabbed some cheap toilet paper at the store. I didn’t think much about it, or how thin it was when I put it on the roll. Then when it came time to use the tool for which I purchased it, I was astonished that I could see through it, and then realized I’d need more than I had originally thought. (Hence the money saved is wasted on having to use more to do the job.) Then there was the texture. THE TEXTURE ON MY TENDER BITS. Seriously, you don’t think about this shit until it HAPPENS TO YOU. 2-ply is important. It’s vital. Without it, civilization can crumble, man. CRUMBLE.
I bought some 2-ply right away, crying to the toilet paper gods that I will never go back. Now the evil 1-ply sits as an emergency, “we’re out of TP” backup. It watches me. It KNOWS.
I was at someone else’s house when I discovered that they, too, had 1-ply. I was immediately torn. You don’t complain about your friend’s TP. But I wondered about the etiquette of carrying around your own roll for times like this. I remembered sharing a beach house with a bunch of friends, and when we discussed who was bringing what to stock the house, this friend always wanted to be in charge of the paper products (napkins, paper towels, and TP) because they insisted on “their” brand of TP. I thought it was a bit strange, but the honor of supplying the tribe with recently slaughtered paper products is not something I particularly covet, so they took that duty.
Heh. “Duty.”
Sorry.
But now I understand, and for a brief moment considered traveling with my own TP. The reality here is I can’t remember to pack my daughter a fucking coat, so I would likely fail at remembering the travel TP. And if I remembered the TP and still forgot her coat, then I might as well turn in my Mom badge and my gun. (Yeah, that joke isn’t funny anymore. It’s a metaphorical gun. That shoots guilt. And bees.) Also it seems downright rude or awkward to head to the bathroom carting my own roll.
Oh, it’s not you, it’s me. Polyps. You know.
And hell, it’s really not that important. Just so you know I’m not freaky about this. But it did get me thinking about characterization. This is a tiny bit of my life, the middle class white whine about 1-ply toilet paper. But in fiction, this is the kind of thing that can define characters. Insisting on, eg, 2-ply, or brand name products, or the newest gadget when the old one works fine, can say things about a character without you having to say “Kevin was an upper middle class American.” Instead, maybe, “The first time Kevin felt 2-ply TP, he knew there was no going back. He’d go so far as clean adult book stores for the financial right to wipe his ass in comfort.” Not to mention a character always carrying her own special TP to the bathroom with her can say a lot about her view of the world, and her desperate need to control.
When you’re thinking about “how would your character have reacted to Kennedy being shot?” or “The waiter spills water down your character’s back, how does she react?” you can think, “what kind of TP do they buy? Are they a coffee snob? Generic or brand name? Boy shorts or bikinis? Target, Wal-Mart, or Belk?”
I just wrote 800+ words on middle class whining and toilet paper. I think I should probably stop and get to writing or something…
Also, I do realize what I am saying about MYSELF that I thought this much about toilet paper, and I blame book stress.
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Today will be the 100th day writing in a row, thanks to the Magic Spreadsheet. I have thoughts on it, cause that’s how I roll.
It is one of my true beliefs that the majority of the problems in the world are caused by people thinking, “My experience is the same experience everyone has had. And if they don’t have my experience then they’re doing it wrong.”
A more poetic way to say this is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before you make assumptions.
I try to step out of my own experience to see others’. I also, as you know, Bob, like to encourage the new writer who is discouraged. I quit writing for 10 years because I was discouraged, and if I can stop someone else from losing ten years of their writing life then I will damn well try as hard as I can.
[Criminy, i just got depressed. A decade of my writing life is gone because i was discouraged and I quit! Anyway. Buck up little camper! Onward.]
Thusly, I was quite annoyed when I read this article about Philip Roth pooping on a young writer’s (Julian Tepper) dream by suggesting he quit after the sale of his first book. And it wasn’t because the guy was crap, or that he had no potential. Tepper’s first novel is about to come out! No, Roth just said, “It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful.”
I often compare this job to ditch digging because dangit, you have to get your work done (plug for Magic Spreadsheet goes here) no matter whether the inspiration strikes you or not. But here’s the deal- writing is unlike ditch digging (besides the very obvious way) in that manual labor is hard, and thankless, and rarely what kids dream they will be. Kids dream of being writers. And they write, and yes, throw away, a lot of words in their efforts to be writers. It’s mentally and emotionally hard work. It’s agonizing sometimes. But sheesh, what career isn’t? I can’t think of any job that’s super easy, fun, rewarding, and not tough on you ever.
A writing career is a dream come true for a lot of people. And you’re going to have more people thanking you for how your book affected their lives than you will have people thanking you for making sure the roads don’t flood when it storms. Even if you write wacky superhero satire, you can make a difference in someone’s life.
Roth clearly is not a happy writer (obviously, since he just recently retired from it.) Or he wasn’t the day that Tepper gave him a copy of his book. But Roth never considered that perhaps Tepper’s career isn’t going to mirror his experience exactly. And I’m not even talking about the external fame and money, I’m talking about his internal view of his life and career. Tepper might view writing as something other than “torture.” (I hope Roth is never tortured. Cause my worst day writing isn’t quite torture… Amnesty International has never investigated my office.) Some people love writing. Some see it as work that needs to be done. Some people are self-loathing and trudge to the computer to open a vein and drink scotch and complain about writing later. But there must be some reason they do it…
Anyway, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a response to Roth here, which is how I heard about this, and wanted to give my two cents.
Chase that dream to be a writer. It’s awesome.