I’m A Novelist, I’ll Never Be Done

A few days ago, in my conference, I asked for topic suggestions and one of the ones I got was to write about writers in the media, as compared to the real thing. (BTW, still open to topic suggestions, if any of you want to ping me with one.)

This is more difficult for me to write about than it sounds, because truly, the only time I watch movies is when I’m sick and/or doing something else so mindlessly boring that I need to distract myself. This including ironing or exercising when it’s too snowy for me to go out. So I watch maybe all of five movies a year, a lot of it re-watching old favorites. Yes, yes, I AM odd. As for TV, I watch it even more rarely. I’m NOW catching up with Stargate which is all new to me.

Most of what I know about TV is filtered to me through my husband who watches tv series while exercising, because it’s timed more perfectly to his schedule than movies.

My impression might or might not therefore be valid. However that has never really stopped me from shooting my mouth about stuff I don’t know anything about (I’m a fiction writer. I make crap up. Live with it.)

To begin with, when I was very young, my impression of a writers’ life came mostly through pulp novels, a lot of them pulp sf novels. In them, agents would send their writers off for weekends at borrowed country estates (I’m trying to remember the title. Simak. Tunnel from the future – mind is blank. I can remember the Portuguese title, but that’s the same as the American title for Clark’s Our Children’s Children, which in Portuguese was called “The Book of the Grand Seigneurs” Yeah, that – translation and titles, is probably another post, if anyone has the slightest interest) told them they were working too hard (or not at all), suggested cures (Martians Go Home, Fred Pohl) or came over to make sure their writer was working. Writers worked a lot, very hard. Publishers were shadowy figures, in the background and mostly published whatever they were given.

Of course, you know this is not PRECISELY true. And wasn’t even when I started out. It might have been true in the forties, for pulp authors. I honestly don’t know. When I came in agents were the first slush readers for houses – effectively, if not in name – so not only were they harder to get than (sometimes) a publisher (if you met one at a con, say) but they were often more impersonal than publishers. Very often during my career I had an easier time hearing from a publisher/editor than from an agent. And yeah, no matter how much your agent approved of what you did, publishers STILL culled further. Which, for once in this process, makes perfect sense. (Of course that’s all upended now with ebooks.)

Then I came to the US and started writing in earnest and had what I think is the normal impression – all writers are well off. Well, at least they make enough to be upper middle class, right? It seems logical, given the amount of work that goes into a book, and how few people can do it competently. The ones who aren’t very good don’t last, the ones who last are raking it in.

I was, of COURSE, going to be very good and therefore I would be supporting my husband by the time we hit thirty, and then he could work on his music. (Splort. Giggle. Yeah, that worked out for us.)

Ironically, if I had made a sale back when I was twenty something (I was saleable, mind, I just had clue zero how to go about SELLING. I wasn’t “good” but that’s something else. Tons of people aren’t, who sell. And tons of people are who don’t sell.) at the levels paid to mid list writers then, two books a year would have doubled our income and given us a significant help at the beginning. But I didn’t know how to even start selling, so… Nothing doing.

Little by little I learned better. Which is why now I roll my eyes when I read books (a lot) about some writer with no contacts and no special attributes who just shoots to the top of the charts because she/he’s so “brilliant.”

I see this in the mass media too – and of course, I wish it were true, even if I myself might not be as brilliant as I’d like to be, because as a reader, I’d get wonderful stuff – that if you’re really good you’ll make it big. Often the plot of books/movies, etc with a writer are that of the writer finally breaking through and writing better and enjoying enormous success. This makes for great plotting. It’s also, alas, not true. For the time I’ve been in the business, at least, the publishers have been under the impression that they were Hollywood and that the important thing was to ‘manufacture celebrity’ as a way of selling books. Many times the books themselves weren’t read (that’s how important the quality was) if the proposal met basic standards and the author was “nothing special” in the way of “something we can promote” and not having a “platform” – this meant the author was not particularly beautiful, cool, didn’t have an interesting personal story or (lately) a well-viewed blog, and didn’t know anyone in the business. These were in general relegated to the mid list no matter how brilliant the book might be. (This was responsible for making Sir Terry Pratchett largely unknown in the US while already a bestseller in the UK. Gave me great comfort to know he was selling about what I sell per book. You see, British guy, not particularly sightly, no “platform” – books were pure gold, but you had to FIND them to read them, and distribution in the US was a laydown of about 5k copies per book. [I got very lucky and found him early on because someone in town bought all the British editions, then sold them to my favorite used bookstore.] Their excuse for why he didn’t sell here was “British humor” – it took changing his agent and editor both for him to break out of that slot. I’m sure the numbers from GB helped with that break out. If he’d been an American and published only here, even the greatest writing genius of our time might still be selling 3 to 5k copies per title. If they hadn’t got rid of him yet.)

But sometimes the movies get it at least sort of right. The title of this post is from Sliding Doors (which you absolutely must see if you haven’t.) It is spoken by the main character’s no-good boyfriend and it captures an attitude I’ve often seen among “wanna bes” They want to be writers in the worst way. And they are. As in, they never finish anything, because it has to be a towering work of genius. Someone in their childhood convinced them they’re brilliant, and… well, poor things. From that movie too comes the splortch worthy line of “I know one day you’ll finish your book and we’ll be rich.” My friend Rebecca Lickiss and I laughed till we cried, because see, it is what every new writer – and their relations – thinks and… well, not true. Notably, the rest of the theater thought we were insane. At least no one else laughed, and some people stared. Which tells you how widespread that myth is.

As for Castle, I haven’t watched it. To some extent, the entire idea of his getting ATTACHED to a police unit is silly. Writers write. Yeah, we might go out on a police ride-along (I haven’t, but I don’t write procedurals) but the chance of being that involved just for research is close to nil. We’re more likely to cultivate a police officer buddy and then call them at the most outrageous hours with questions. Another thing my husband told me that made me grin was the idea of the poker game with all these big names. It’s cute. REALLY cute. And it’s not as if you all don’t know each other – bestsellers usually do. And heck, I know tons of bestsellers. It’s just that the chances of you all being in the same place at the same time, much less doing so weekly are zilch.

All the writers I do work like heck, even the bestsellers. And these days publicity/con, etc commitments are as big as contracts, which means chances of you being in the same town at the same time, even you all live there, are almost none. A bestseller friend of mine tries to get a bunch of us local writers together fairly often, and he succeeds about twice a year, if that. Divergent travel/delivery schedules keep us in conflicting “orbits.” The last get-together was one of the better attended. There were about ten of us, but some people were “missing”. There’s always people missing, because of scheduling conflicts. You know how you guys go to cons to see your favorite authors? You know how periodically all authors disappear from the con for hours? Yeah, that’s because what entices US to the con is the chance to socialize with our friends. Weirdly, I sometimes see my friends from here in town ONLY at worldcon, across the country.

However, one thing my husband told me Castle did is sort of true – at least has been true at times in my life and might be true again – I don’t remember the exact quote, but Castle was trying to spin a bunch of stuff about his process and his police partner snaps “You mean, wait till the last minute, then write the book in three days in a caffeine fueled haze?”

What it didn’t say and it’s sadly true (perhaps because like alcohol and drugs, which I advise against, btw, it’s a way of breaking through the conscious constraints which is good for self-doubting authors, like most of them) is that such work is often the best the author does. If it said that, it wouldn’t be a good story, so it doesn’t. But it is the truth, nonetheless.