You Can’t Do That!

Critique groups, critique partners and other such checks on your sanity and the sanity work are important, not to say vital.

But there’s another type of “check” that can be sanity or insanity, very good or very bad.

I have a stable of experts, from law enforcement to various parts of science, whom I call on when in a pinch.  You guys know who you are, I often acknowledge you in my books and rest assured you’re the good guys.

A good expert is the one who can tell you the relevant facts you need to finish your story.  A great expert is the one who looks at your story, pulls his hair out, says “you got it all wrong.”  And then spends three days researching till he comes up with facts that WILL fit your story if you make minimal adjustments and don’t change the plot much.

I’ve been blessed with great experts.

On the other side of this, there’s what I call the “self appointed experts.”  These people are often other writers who have a “Method” and whose main modus operandi is standing athwart the storyline/setting/character you want to use and screaming “You can’t do that!”

Sometimes they are well intentioned.  For instance, the gentleman who came to one of my occasional writers’ groups and who told me “you can’t sell a first novel that’s longer than 100,000 words, no one will buy it, no matter how great it is.”

This, by the way, was said at the time when the books being bought were climbing up to 250000 words – what my friend Dave Freer calls Goat Gaggers.  But this gentleman had been to a world con and heard an editor say he didn’t want anything longer than 100000 books and was trying to be helpful to those of us who had no money to go to worldcon.

Mind you, this gentleman is the same who – reading one of my space operas – told me that calling a gun burner just wasn’t done and also that guns don’t zing, they snick or crack or…  Without bothering to notice I was talking about a laser weapon, not a normal present day gun.  So one has to question the good intentions, just a little.

And that’s part of it.  The self-appointed expert is most often a contradiction and if you wonder if they’re wholly well intentioned you might be right.  In general I don’t think they themselves could tell you for sure what their intentions are, if they’re honest with themselves.

Often they are “elder” writers as you’re just coming in, and their intention, if they were honest, is to keep their superiority over you, when they’re afraid you’re moving past them.  Their “superiority” may be largely imaginary, which makes it worse.

My one experience, for instance, didn’t involve any of my multi-published or bestselling friends, whom I tend to listen to with rapt attention because, duh, they know better than I – but when I was just starting to sell short stories, I was friends with an author who had sold one novel, years ago.  She was a fountain of “you cannot do that” and all of them bordered from the crazy to the wrong.  More the fool I, I allowed her to kill two books.  In one of them, as I was working on the preliminary outline for a thousands years old nomadic culture, I talked about it to her, and mentioned they often stayed in caves along their route.  She told me I had it all wrong.  I needed to start from the geology up.  For there to be caves, they needed to be in sandy, limestone country.  This, by the way, is nonsense.  Of course there are caves in other rocks (I grew up with caverns in granite) and over thousand of years, the culture would have MADE them where they weren’t.  But I thought (I was very young) maybe that was the American perception and I’d never sell it.  Besides, I didn’t want to start with the geology…

The other one, which might still see the light of day as Hell Bound, was an urban fantasy where this woman was being stalked by what appeared to be an angel.  I showed her the first three chapters and she informed me it didn’t have an “engine” that there was nothing “driving the book.”  Again, I was very green and very young and I thought that she must be right, though I didn’t see it.

It wasn’t until I sold my first trilogy and sent her the manuscripts – and she didn’t realize it was sold and told me that I’d never sell it because the books “engine” was romance, not fantasy.  To this day I have NO idea what she meant.  And that’s when I realized – in retrospect – that I should never have listened to her.

Then there is the “subject matter” expert.  The problem with these is that sometimes they are truly experts in their subjects, but they’re not writers and can’t imagine their own field 500 years in the future.  They’ll be too bound by “the way things are.”  These are the people who, fifty years ago, would have told you that there would never be small personal computers in every home, and would have laughed at you if you told them there would be a computer of sorts in every coffee maker.

When picking your science experts, pick science fiction fans, they tend to be more flexible.

Then one of my fans told me about a sub-set of the “experts” who, apparently, are experts in made up lore.  They will tell you your elves have to be pretty and sweet (Or blood thirsty and evil) because that’s the way they are in some RPG.  Of course, those of us who are so old that RPGs are “those things my crazy friends play”, just snort and giggle at “the RPG doesn’t do it that way” and shrug.  But I understand for the young kids, who think that game antecedent is as valid as legend, this can be a stopping point.

So, my advice on experts?  If you didn’t ask for the advice, do not take it too seriously.  If something sounds right, or as though it might be worrisomely right, check them with an internet search or ask someone you know.

The best advice on experts?  Find imaginative, cooperative, brilliant experts in whatever field, that will make your plot work within the facts.  And no, I’m not sharing mine.  (My preshious!)  Heaven knows I keep them busy enough!  Thank you guys!