Pieces

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This blog was going to be entitled “yes, writers ARE your b*tches” mostly because – though I don’t believe that I also believe stating “So and so is not your b*tch” is incomplete. Relationships between writers and fans are not that simple. But because relationships between writers and fans are not that simple and because I have in the past ran across a couple of unhinged ones, I thought I’d better not get too playful.

To go right to the heart of the matter, no, writers are not, technically, their fans’ slaves. You can’t tell us “write this one. Now write that one. Now do it faster and with pudding on your head.” On the other hand readers are also not the writers’ slaves. No matter how dedicated a fan is or how much he loves a series, he’s going to get tired of waiting for the next book (a verity I’m quite aware of as I juggle four series); he’s going to get upset when your character gets a personality transplant in book ten; he’s going to get mad at you when you announce you’re not going to write his favorite series anymore and instead are going to start a new one (in this last case, though, please check with the author, before badmouthing him/her far and wide. Chances are he/she was a victim of real or imaginary computer numbers [imaginary, you say? Look, it’s computers. If there isn’t a kink in the program somewhere, I’ll eat their circuits. It’s hard to believe a series with enough distribution to elicit death threats when stopped doesn’t have enough fans to keep going. And yet, I’ve seen it.])

What’s more, fans have a right to be upset – even if they don’t have the right to send death threats. As both a reader and a writer, what a writer contracts for is selling more than a few hundred pages of words. A write sells worlds. A writer sells lives. A writer sells imagination that is not contained in the reader’s head, but which the reader does end up owning, and making his own by the process of reading and re-imagining.

It is that process of owning that creates fans – as opposed to just readers – and makes them go out and hand sell the book everywhere. And it gives them fractional ownership in the writer’s imagination. And the writer, who makes a living from having enough fans to do this, cannot complain. He or she might not like it, but it’s what he/she signed up for.

So am I saying that from now on when one of you wails that you want another book in… oh, let me pick a good and dead series, the Shakespeare series, I’ll rush to provide? Well no. Because see, while you’re not my b*tches and I can’t take you for granted, I’m not your b*tch either, and you can’t take me for granted. We have, in a way, a relationship, but it’s more like courting, where we each have to be sensitive of the feelings of others.

For one, for people who want say another Shifter’s book now, I can only way “right now I’m working on Darkship Renegades. Barring cloning, I can only write a book at a time.”

Lately I’ve found myself in the odd position of not being able to post on FB when I am cleaning (which is actually relevant, as I’m away from computer and can’t answer messages or pokes) or if I’m engaged in some non-writing project, because people will yell at me and tell me my job is writing. Yes, I know what happened to George R R Martin and his post about doing something fun, which occasioned Neil Gaiman’s “George RR Martin is not your b*tch” post to which this one is a “no, but…” response.

No, but, as a reader, I imagine the resentment they must feel. The new electronic communications has linked readers and writers in a way that gives both very odd ideas about the other. I can imagine people who subscribe to my facebook page to hear about the next book being frustrated when I talk about kids and cats. “Why is she doing this? Why is she not writing?” I can understand it. They shouldn’t take me for granted, but neither should I take them.

So, instead I’m going to explain – lately I’ve come to think of my books as pieces of myself. It’s not far off. In fact, reading other authors’ books I can sometimes get the almost physical sense of a piece of their mind/their emotions/their personality torn from them and put on the pages.

For the purpose of the analogy, these pieces regrow. Also for the purpose of this analogy when one has been on a killing schedule for a while – and the pace of killing schedules varies per author. For some one or two books a year is a killing schedule – there is no time for the pieces to regrow, and you start filling the books with parts that are vital. This is often the author’s best work. It is also unsustainable. Keep it up long enough and you’ll be empty, and a great silence will come that can’t be broken.

Fortunately this is not very common. More common are writers who go silent for a month or a year and then start writing again. And each of us has a different way of refilling the bucket (my friend Chris McMahon has a great running analogy for this over at Mad Genius Club yesterday.) My favorite way, when money and time permit is to go to Denver with Dan and the kids and spend three days bumming around mini-golf courses, museums and diners or occasionally hiking, and reading – voraciously. I usually buy 50 or so books at the beginning of those vacations, and have finished by the end. (Have I mentioned I love my kindle?)

 That hasn’t happened in a while which, yes, is an issue right now. Other things I’ve done include taking art classes, because sometimes my brain spins over the same spot of the plot and I can neither resolve it nor get past it, and art chases the words away.

And sometimes I just put the book down for a week and paint walls or crochet a curtain.

The important thing is to allow those pieces to grow back, so I can fulfill my unspoken contract with you guys. Because otherwise the contract breaks both ways, and no one gets what they want and need.

Trust me, I want to write those books as much as you want to read them.  If I weren’t enamoured of the worlds and characters I wouldn’t have created them to begin with.  But writing is not totally an act of will, and sometimes you have to let the subconscious catch up.

10 thoughts on “Pieces”

  1. I’ve heard about Author Burnout. They have written in one story-universe so long that they get tired of that universe and its people. IMO there’s almost nothing worse that an author continuing a series when they are tired of it. IRRC David Weber has said that he likes to write other stories/series to refresh himself before coming back to a series. So I see no problem with an author focusing on other things than my “favorite series/characters”.

    Of course, you don’t need my permission. [Very Big Grin]

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    1. Drak,

      That’s EXACTLY why I write in multiple series. For three years I did nothing but Shakespeare, and by the end of it I was suicidally depressed. Heck, I don’t think I could do just ONE genre. And heck, I do appreciate the people who’d rather I wrote than cleaned. You know what? As soon as I make enough money to pay a housekeeper, I promise to dispense with cleaning time. (Though I might take walks or cook instead.)

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  2. An interesting inter-relationship, isn’t it? And with, first, publishers pushing authors to do more of the promo work, and then authors having to do it because they’re starting to ditch the publishers, authors have become commonly available to the fan. Cons, signings, and all over the internet.

    It’s easy for fans to say “But the writers need our praise and interest” and go too far. And as the World’s Worse Housekeeper I’m probably guilty of sounding like I’m berating you for painting the bathroom, when I’m actually trying to enable you to neglect the housework. Which doesn’t work for you.

    And as for multiple series . . . after kicking a bit (mostly in private, IIRC) when LMB wrote something other than Miles Vorkosigan, I’ve come to really enjoy her two fantasy series.

    So, write what grabs you. Write what you want to write. I have a suspicion I’ll really like it.

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    1. Pam — we do need praise and interest, seriously. Sometimes, particularly as we struggle through interesting times in the industry, it’s all that keeps us going. OTOH the internet creates a false feeling of intimacy between writers — or even bloggers — and their audience. You participate — vicariously — in things that were, previously reserved for close friends and family. Like, I might talk about what I had for breakfast, or what have you. (Though there are things I don’t usually mention, like when we’ll be out of the house or things that might pose a security risk, of course.) This creates a feeling that fans know me personally when in fact of course they don’t. The things I object to, beyond “you’re a horrible person, you’re not writing my favorite series fast enough” emails are attempts to more or less move in with me and/or become one with me at cons. NOT that I object to hanging out with flies. I do a lot of it, anyway, but cons — to me — are work time, and it’s necessary to have time away and also necessary to meet with editors/agents, something some (thank heavens, rare) fans don’t GET. In that vein, I’ve now been “scarily stalked” twice, which frankly freaks me out. I think you shouldn’t have stalkers until you’re a bestseller. I think that’s in the rules somewhere. The other side of this — there’s always another side — is that now — just the last year — some people are starting to treat me with a sort of hands-off timidity where they’re afraid to tell me if I’m doing something wrong/upsetting them/forgot to do something I promised them I’d do. While I appreciate the compliment, if it is that, and while I don’t like being yelled at anymore than the next person, I don’t think I’m nearly big enough — again, I think you have to be AT LEAST a bestseller — for that kind of reverence. In the end, I’m just me, and I don’t expect people to treat me like the second coming of Robert A. Heinlein, (or perhaps Harlan Ellison) and treated as though I might explode before their eyes. It would perhaps be too much to say it upsets me, but it DOES puzzle me.

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  3. It’s interesting, you’re the only writer I can recall coming down even moderately on the side of the fan in the whole GRRM fracas. My point during it was not that I believed that GRRM was my b*tch, but his actions have definitely affected the way I perceive the series. In 2000, as of a Storm of Swords, I was a promoter of the series. I highly recommended it to all my friends. Fast forward to 2005, when we get half a book, and an afterward explaining why it’s only half a book, but promising the other half Real Soon Now(tm), and then seeing six years of blog updates about doing anything but fulfilling that promise, and I no longer recommend it – he’s never going to finish it, and unfinished it will in the end be unsatisfying. So instead I tell people, “don’t invest the time until he finishes the series, which will never happen, and you’ll save yourself a world of pain”.

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    1. well… I’m a reader too. And I’ve been struggling with my relationship with my fans for a while. I don’t think you can own me and what I do — of course! — but at the same time oh, heck, I’m a free marketeer. So I have to believe in giving value and in respecting my public. The experience you describe relates to my buying Anne McCaffrey’s Norilka’s Story and finding out it was a) really large print and b) a rewrite of a story already contained in a previous novel. I do think a writer should TRY not to disappoint fans that way. Of course we’re human, and we work for publishing houses (which being — with exceptions — part of large entertainment conglomerates are not human.) So I can’t promise I’ll NEVER do anything like this, but I’ll try my best not to, because I’m aware I owe something to my fans. (Who owe me nothing, except common privacy/decency.)

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  5. I’ll expect you not to take breaks from work when I stop taking breaks from work. Of course, considering that reading fiction is not part of my job, if I were to stop taking breaks from my work I wouldn’t really care whether you write or not ;-) .

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