According To Hoyt

Keeping the pace up in fiction is not as easy as it sounds. I know I’m not always wonderful at it, though I (hopefully) am getting better at it. If you read my Shakespeare trilogy (soon to be available from Baen books webscriptions) this was perhaps my greatest failing. (Well, it’s either that or the fact that I went after near-authentic Shakespearean language. No, don’t ask. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was fun.)

In fact, before the Shakespeare trilogy, the last unpublished big book I wrote got rejected by an agent saying that my issue was timing (aka pacing) and that this simply can’t be taught. He was right, my issue was timing. This came from the fact that I couldn’t find a plot with two hands, a cane and a seeing eye dog, not even if said plot were, at the time, biting me on the posterior. (What, your plots don’t bite? Lucky you.)

He was wrong that it couldn’t be learned. Almost everything in writing can be learned. The idea of genius – the myth of someone who is born with all the abilities he or she will need to make it in this field, is wrong. (In fact, the older I get and the more I write, the less I’m sure there is any native component to writing, save the compulsion to tell stories.)

Start as you would with anything else. Read books that have great pacing. Laurell Hamilton’s first three books are three of those. But if you wish for something more sedate, but which still keeps the pages turning, read mysteries. At least, read highly structured, traditional mysteries. I recommend, of all things, the ones in which I stumbled onto one of the essential mechanisms: Elis Peter’s Brother Cadfael.

Of course, to begin with you need a coherent plot that’s long enough for the book. What do I mean by that? Well… that’s a subject for another post, but let’s just say you need to make sure there is enough to the plot that we won’t get to the middle of the book and wonder why we’re still reading. Okay, let’s put this way: theft of diamonds – probably enough for a novel. Theft of lollipops – probably enough for a short story. (Unless the lollipops are laced with arsenic and people start dropping like flies, one a day, and you’re trying to trace it before the next person dies.) Colonizing a planet – novel. Colonizing a bedroom – unless you’re a microbial life form, probably enough for a short story.

Second, make sure your character’s actions are LOGICAL. If your character takes a break, while trying to find the bomb, to go window shopping, I just lost my interest in your character.

The first, most important “sense of timing” mechanism is the obvious:

Have a ticking clock.

Sometimes these are real clocks. “There is a bomb somewhere in the city. You must find it before the clock reaches midnight.” This is often a timing device of thrillers.

However, there are other timing devices that don’t tick – though they can tick, if you really want to – the most important of which is: We have to do X before something terrible happens. This too is often the timing device of thrillers. “We have to find the lollipop before my child eats it.” And of romances, “I have to interrupt the ceremony before she marries that jerk.”

There is also the timing device who is literally a person: “We have to solve the murder, before John turns himself in.” Or “we have to figure out this designer plague before Bob becomes a werewolf.”

Now, with timing devices, you have to show them. You can’t just set up the clock at the beginning, then let it run in the background and never remind the reader. You have to show it, intermittently throughout the novel. The child inches closer to the poisoned lollipop; the bomb ticks; the woman gets into her wedding gown.

“But I don’t want to have an obvious timing device” you say. “My plot is loser than that. I don’t want a definite timing device. I want something more unstructured.”

Well… you can always have – the great chase. Someone wants to kill your character. They’ve started adding these to romances, I think to keep them more interesting. It’s also a great way to add spice to cozies, though the person might only be THREATENING the character – but the character doesn’t know that.

In plots structured this way, I ALWAYS try to have two people chasing/attacking the character. That way, when things get slow in one plot, I throw in a guy with a machine gun. (Well, not literally, but you know what I mean.)

Three caveats for that type of plot:
1- Have it make sense, when you turn it around to the villain’s pov. Even if the villain is mistaken or silly, the actions must make sense for the villain. You can’t have the man with the machine gun come LITERALLY out of nowhere. The villain has to have sent him over for a reason. Something provoked it right at that moment.

2- It has to escalate. The violence, chase, whatever has to get more severe each time. You can’t just keep repeating the same action, every time. Also be very, very, very careful of repetitive scenes.

3 – It has to matter. Unless the threatened character is likeable and you’ve done enough to make us like him, it will not fly.

Another way to hide tension and therefore make the pacing faster is to make us care desperately about the character and want the character want something he/she just can’t get easily. That’s what I used with Darkship Thieves, interspersed with “chase scenes.”

The Don’ts are as Important as the Dos, so try to remember – Don’t have your character stop to do her nails. Don’t let her sit around thinking about that beautiful summer day when she was a kid. (Unless you keep it short, and it ends with an explosion she almost fails to duck from because she’s reminiscing.) A down-time is fine – think three guys in the car in Draw one In the Dark, or the time they have while “hiding” in the hotel room – but don’t have them forget they’re running. Give them bad dreams, or something. They can get comfortable at the end of the novel. Until then, keep the pointy boot at their behind.

In which the gentle reader gets to watch the writer in a fight with her unruly subconscious. Or How the Devil Is In The Beginnings
Of all the mistakes a writer can make, the one I find most annoying and recursive – for me, at least – is figuring out how to start a story. No, seriously. Yes, sometimes the voice comes, like trumpets from heaven. I wake up with the character in my head and the opening lines.

Other times… other times, it’s like pulling teeth. I have everything about the story in mind, but I don’t have an “in.”

Lately I’ve found myself making a truly beginner mistake, one that I thought I was exempt from because I never went through it as a beginner: starting the story well before the story starts.

One of my fledgelings is prone to this. And that’s fine. As long as he knows that he’ll have to discard two to three pages off the beginning of his story that works. Because, you know, there could be worse curses, like never beginning at all.

But I used to have this down to an art. I knew, if not the voice, at least the moment when the story started. Now… now, I find myself floundering around in molasses for pages and pages and pages, until finally something kicks up and I go “Oh. So, that’s how it finally starts.” This is particularly annoying since I SHOULD know better. I’ve done better in the past.

Unfortunately writing is only partly conscious for me. Most of it comes from somewhere at the back of the Jurassic brain, where dinosaurs fear to tread. And for some reason the beginning has turned into the La Brea tar pits.

So, as much to help myself as to, hopefully, help the rest of you, because I CONSCIOUSLY know the rules of how to start a story, I’m going to list a series of questions that should give my back brain a hint of how to find the beginning of a story. It goes something like this.

1 – Identify the main problem of your story, then

a) start with a problem that leads directly to the heart of it.
b) start with something that mirrors the problem in the story, or foreshadows it

2 – Identify the characters main strength
a) start with a scene that demonstrates it in such a way that it makes us immediately determined to follow that character through hell and high water.
b) start with a scene that shows his strength failing, in a way that we know this is a surpirse.

3 – Start with a scene that doesn’t contain your main character but which
a) sets up the world and the world’s problem
b) sets up the main villain
c) sets up the limits of the danger your character will face (the answer is “very high” and this is usually done for thrillers.)

4- For extra points combine all three of the above in some form

5- follow the rule of the tangled skein of string, if you can’t find the beginning, cut through and start somewhere.
a) deal with the past via short flashbacks.
b) remember to keep it moving
c) make sure your entry point sounds startling and interesting.

Okay, so now you – and I! – should have some idea where to start. HOW do you start? This sounds obvious, but it’s not.

Look, nine times out of ten, when I read entries for contests or slush for publishers, the main reason I stop reading without finishing the story is that I’ve gone some distance – a page or two, usually – and I still have no clue whose head I’m in; where they are; what the goal is.

So, here goes: You’re there at the beginning, and your character is something and doing something. Try not to make that beginning sound like the sentence above.

Right up front, try to remember to tell us:

1 – Who your character is. Not just the name. Many times the name won’t even tell us the gender of the character, but in whatever order: name, gender, occupation, main characteristic as pertains to story.
Compare these two openings:

Edgar was there. He was doing what he’d come there to do. He’d tried so long to get there and now he was there. And he was going to do it.

Edgar was back in the sacred groove, and he was going to kill the high priestess, if it was the last thing he did. He’d had to fight dragons and mow down entire groves of sacred forests. Now he was going to kill her.

Which story gives you a clearer idea of what’s happening? Which one would you read further on? And no, I’m not even exaggerating with the first example. I wish I were.

2- Your character has a body. Nothing gives more “solidity” to a character than a touch of humanity. His underwear chafes. She has a blister on her thumb. She’s sneezing because she’s allergic to polen. He’s wearing a new shirt that feels uncomfortable.

Make it work in the service of your story, or at least sink it in unobtrusively, and if possible make it work to define the character and/or the time period. However, giving the character something to wear, or something to do with his hands is always good. And it can do double duty. If your main characters is wearing a kirtle or carrying a banjo, you’ve at least given us some hint of a clue of a vague direction to where and when we are. Ditto if he’s wearing jeans and turns on the tv.

Imagine you are in your character’s head. Now look down. What is the character wearing? What gender is he/she? And where is he/she?

Don’t write it in that form, but try to include it soonish, so the reader is grounded.

3- Use props to avoid infodumps. If your character is holding either a violin or a teddy bear, it tells us something about him/her and might postpone informing the reader that this thirty year old has anxiety issues and sleeps with his teddy bear… Who plays the violin.

And hopefully this will help you, out there, and also stop my subconscious from spinning in circles around itself. Honestly – its’ like all of a sudden I grow six extra legs, and I can’t remember how to walk.

So… here we go. Move one leg forward, then the other… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight…

I usually do a nine eleven post. It has now become fashionable to apologize at the beginning of these. I have no intention of doing so. No, I have not gotten over it. No, I don’t think I ever will.

Nine eleven was not a sudden, cataclysmic devastation of the sort that comes out of nowhere, tears your life apart and leaves you to rebuilt and get over it. Nine eleven was a sudden cataclysmic devastation that came out of somewhere and left us to deal with rebuilding and with questions, moral and emotional on how to prevent its like again within the limits of the future.

The difference between the two should be obvious but it doesn’t appear to be. Take Hurricane Hugo for instance. It marched from the coast, up the beach roads to Charlotte NC where I lived at the time. It changed our landscape within a night. We were fortunate in that our little cul-de-sac neighborhood lost power only for the 11 hours. But people lost houses, people lost lives, and people lost livelihoods. One of our favorite antique markets was made into kindling, destroying the livelihood of the family who owned it. It was, at the time, a sudden, devastating tragedy. Afterwards, we got T-shirts that said “I survived Hurricane Hugo.” I don’t know what eventually happened to those, because, you see, we got over it within a year or so. What else was there to do? It was the weather. You can’t say “this will never happen again.” Or rather, you can, but who will listen? The weather will do what the weather will do.

Nine eleven is a different kind of tragedy. It was brought about by men – by the will of men, the brain of men, the malice of men. Nine eleven was preventable – if we’d known it was probable (our security can’t prevent “possible” – we’d have to have the whole country in uniform for that.) More importantly, further nine elevens should be preventable by men and women of good will and with a bright enough brain.

Have they been prevented? Oh, please. Of course, yes, we’ve prevented a few of them mostly through intelligence work, and a few more by our determination to be a mob, not a flock. This is good. But mostly, mostly, we’ve hamstrung ourselves with stupid kabuki travel theater, have turned on each other over what brought nine eleven on and have accused each other of unspeakable (and unimaginable) nonsense.

The one thing that Hugo and 9/11 had in common, the one thing that made me fall in love with America and continue to be madly in love with it (I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could) was the… empowerment of the individual. Barely had the wind stopped blowing, after Hugo, and our neighbors were gathering, helping each other cut down trees that threatened to fall, helping each other patch roofs and, later on, when our electricity came back and other people’s hadn’t and didn’t for days, my husband and I spent the next several days making ice and taking it in coolers to our friends, and cooking massive hot dinners, where friends could come and have a meal. Our showers too were used around the clock. Everyone else had similar experiences. If you’re shrugging and going “of course” pat yourself on the back. You’re an American. In most countries, you’d stand around waiting for the “qualified aid personnel” and then complain if the aid was late, instead of taking your hand to what was there and doing what you could.

Nine eleven – well, I know people who crossed the country to help search the ruins, and I think ALL of us wanted to. Instead, we did what we could, even if it was just becoming a check in point for friends in NYC or donating blood.

But the different nature of the disasters revealed itself almost immediately. No one in Charlotte stood around scratching their heads and saying “Why did Hugo attack us?” But almost immediately there were people beating their chests over 9/11 and going “it’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”

Again, this is a very American thing to think – almost endearing in its Americanism. It is the other side of “what can I do” it’s “what can I stop doing so it won’t happen again.” Americans – and I’m talking here of you who grew up here – also tend to overestimate how much influence their actions had in the world and what they could do or not do about it. In American Culture, in Portugal, I was required to read a book, written by an American, about how everything that went wrong with modernity was America’s fault. This book, also used in our universities in the US, is hilarious in its naivite and inverse-hubris. Children, until 1913 or so, the US was a rural backwater, of little importance to the fulcrum of the world, which at the time was located, firmly in the middle of Europe.

It’s just that we’ve grown so powerful and so rich, and those around us have failed to catch up, and we feel – like Hollywood starlets elevated to riches we’re not sure we deserve – that we’re both the center of the universe and that we must have done something wrong. Relax. We haven’t. Not any more than any other country (more on this later) and in fact, considerably less than most countries of any importance. And stop flapping lips in an idiotic manner. The rest of the world would like nothing better than believing we’re to blame for everything, and thereby exonerating themselves. This, you see, makes it easier for them to do nothing about their problems. It makes it easier for them to take our subsidies and not feel an ounce of gratitude. And it makes it easier to hate us.

And that’s the one thing you’re going to have to face. Yes, they hate us. Yes, they will always hate us, until they bring us down. Should they manage that, they’ll spend the next two thousand years trying to deify us, portray themselves as coming from us, trying to imitate portions of our culture, and claiming no part in our downfall.

We are, in fact, in a very similar position to that of Rome in the ancient world.

Why do they hate us:

1 – Envy. Our own theology identifies this as the first sin leading to the first murder. Yes, yes, I know, half of America is afflicted with the heartbreak of psoriasis, (in my case eczema, but never mind. Our heartbreak is often overlooked,) the other half is broke and unemployed. Our children aren’t learning and our dogs scratch themselves too much. Forget it, okay? Our lifestyle is not only far and above more… comfortable than that of your average European (and we EXPECT that) but even our homeless live better than the poor in other countries. When is the last time you’ve worried about your next meal. Really worried? Worry about losing the house, sure. The job, even more sure. Not being able to buy cat food, of course. Problems sending the kids to college, of course. But worry about not eating for days? Please. Even our poorest of the poor have soup kitchens.

In a dark time in my life, in what is considered a first world country – even if the poor relative of the family – I went for three years without new clothes, because we simply couldn’t afford them. Since this was between the ages of 11 and 14 and I grew about a foot, even given my mom’s abilities with remaking clothes, I’ll leave you to imagine what I looked like. Here, even while very broke, we never let our kids go without suitable and appropriately sized clothes. And it wasn’t that hard. The thrift store near us often holds dollar-days where each piece of clothing is a dollar. And though it meant pancakes for a week, at times, we were NEVER so poor we couldn’t spend ten dollars and get the kid sweaters and a coat.

We’re better off than 95% of humanity. They envy us madly. Why shouldn’t they?

2 – Fear. No, not of us. (One of the things Pratchett is wrong about is the whole “if you want war, prepare for war.” It’s not true, it’s never been. Not blaming him too hard, though, I learned this in school, too, and it’s part of what Europeans believe. They fasten onto the mad militarism gripping Prussia on the run up to World War I and the answering militarist thinking in the other countries, and think that’s what CAUSED World War I. Was it? No. Go back and read about the geopolitics and the pressures of growing civilizations. But this is the explanation you’ll find in most books. Because it’s facile. And because it’s easy to avoid. “I just won’t think of war–” Europe should do itself a favor and start really looking at itself and its fracticidal tendencies, and stop trying to diagnose a country they know as little about as we – often – know of them.) Yes, they project it onto us, but what they truly fear is modernity. And, for those who’ve never lived abroad, everyone knows modernity comes from America.

In the summer of 2000 I found myself in a panel at a conference, where they were talking about how wonderful the future would be. How the whole world was now connected. How everyone lived in one big village. And how wonderful this was. And I suddenly felt disconnected and lost, because I could see the other side. Look, I’m not going to claim Portugal is particularly backward, or particularly hateful. It’s not. As countries go, Portugal is the nice guy in your office who keeps his head down and does what he thinks he’s supposed to. The idea of a Portuguese terrorist (or assassin!) could only take root in the mind of a novelist who disdains research. But Portugal is, by culture, a lot more traditional than the US – everywhere is, pretty much. Yes, there are reasons for that, but no room to discuss them – and it clings to “how things are done” a lot more. At that, it’s not the worst such country.
However, I recall people who reacted with irrational gibbering fear turned anger to each wave of technological innovation no matter how small, from new ways of lighting, to piped water. Reactions to behavorial changes are even worse. When I say I grew up between Elizabethan and Victorian England, I mean I was taught not to do things such as stand at the window, because that was shameless and looked like I was trying to attract boys. Yeah. Try to figure out how old that rule is.

So I thought of people more attached to their ways than Portugal, perhaps with the same view of their own supremacy, meeting the wave of the future. Of course they would turn to sabotage and terrorism. The result, Traveling, Traveling, was published in Analog in 2002 and is the free story (free story tab on my blog) for this week. It was the only time I was semi-prophetic, and I promise not to do it again.

Like it or not, the US is modernity for most people. When they want to stop the future, they’ll hate us and attack us.

3 – We’re safe to hate. We don’t defend ourselves. Not in words, not in movies, not in our fiction. Partly because we never cured ourselves of that colonial affectation of our upper classes aping Europe. And partly because we feel vaguely guilty about being better off than other people and a newer nation too. We revere age and tradition. And so, we ape their hatred of us, too. Or at least our artists do. So what they get from Hollywood and even from our literary lions, makes them go “See, it’s their fault. Even they say so.” (The fact this soothes their pride, helps too.)

I remember being in a car with a rabid anti-american when I was about 12. He was going on about how the only reason Portugal wasn’t the leading computer manufacturer was that the US wouldn’t let them. Even at 12, I thought “Oh, so, the long vacations, the lack of capital and, yeah, the fact that our tech education prepares people for the early twenty first century has NOTHING to do with it” and also “HOW does America stop us? And why would they care?” But the rest of the world believes this stuff.

It also, for the record, and because of our movies in part, believes a lot of other crazy stuff: like, that our barely competent secret services are some kind of supermen. That they have operatives everywhere, know everything and secretly control everything. It even seems plausible, from over there, given America’s wealth and the movies we see, in which of course the CIA is often the culprit and often superhuman. For Europeans there is a CIA agent behind every door and under every bed.

And yet, no one ever gets killed for spewing anti-American bilge. We’re the world’s most pussy-cat “empire.” In fact, we’re not an empire at all. All our soldiers want to do is go home. Do we punish people when they attack us? Well… sometimes. Late and usually reluctantly. Yes, 9/11 sent us to war. And then we stayed to rebuild the countries. Let me tell you, children, no other country does that. No. Truly. No other country does that.

In the seventies, I sat with friends around a café table in Porto and tried to scheme how to get the US to invade us. Because Portugal could use the rebuilding.

We’re safe to hate.

Given these three factors and the preponderance of traditionalist, triumphalist countries in the world, the amazing thing is not that 9/11 happened. What’s amazing is that it doesn’t happen once a year.

So, what do we do about it, you say? Let’s take it in order:

1 – You can’t get rid of everything you have. No, you wouldn’t be able to. Despite the beliefs of most college professors, world wealth is not finite, and it’s not a matter of a country playing rob-the-ball from the other. (In fact, at the root of all this, is also the fact that the very, very, very erroneous theories of Marxism have taken over both here and the rest of world, possibly because they’re facile and they make college professors feel virtuous.) Wealth is produced. Wealth grows. And the US, given who we are, and our tendency to roll up our sleeves and get to work, can’t help becoming wealthier. In fact, al the hardships our politicians put us through, which might or might not, be designed to make us look more humble to the world, only make us discover new ways to create wealth. Mind me, we’ll emerge from the great recession a completely different country, but yet wealthier, by an order of magnitude than the rest of the world. I’ll take bets on that.

2 – You can’t make people stop fearing. There is no way, there is no possible way to do that. Even here, right now, as change accelerates, a lot of us are afraid of what’s coming. We have perhaps a little more reason, because we don’t know what the future will look like. They should have an easier time. Except they don’t. A modernity of few children and shattered families is scary to a great deal of the world, but so are things that no one should find scary: mobility, representative government, women who don’t cover their ankles, equality of sexes. It goes on.

The second one alone, though paid lip service in Portugal excites much fear and does not prevail in most homes. And again, Portugal is a modern first world nation. Technically. Imagine the other countries.

This doesn’t mean we should cover our women, stone our gays (sorry, guys, you’ll have to buy your own pot) or make women stay in the home against their will.

Unfortunately, what we do do after we conquer countries – the forcible dragging into the twentieth if not the twenty first century is going to make it harder. Much, much harder. It’s akin to invading a wild species habitat. They’re not ready for it, they don’t know what to do, they just want you to stop.

3 – We can stop looking like the patsies of the world. We can stop being so easy to hate. That starts one on one, and person on person. You do not let foreign friends, in fact or online, talk about the US as being responsible for their plight. You just don’t. You man up; you woman up; you adult-it up. You educate yourself and you come back with facts. You tell them the truth and shame the devil.

First, for those of you who have only read histories of the sort that beats their chests and blames everything on America – find some of the popular but deeper histories on, say, Rome. Or Greece. Or before that. Find out how nations operate. Nations that aren’t the US (the vast majority of nations aren’t, you know?)

Read about other nations that existed in a unipolar world. Rome, for instance. Yes, Romans were Hell’s Own Bastards, the most evil civilization at their time and place – snort! – oh, you swallowed Spartacus whole? Children, children, children, the rest of Europe at the time were as much gentle pastoralists as the tribes of South America when the conquistadors arrived were noble savages, talking to the birds.

Yes, the Romans were scary-mean and addicted to violence and… Yeah. So were the other tribes. War was the normal state of humanity. Despicable practices, both civil and religious were the norm.

Rome distinguished itself only by being, for a brief time, capable of generating more wealth, more innovation and a better life for its citizens than the rest of the world at the time. And it was hated for it. The methods it used to stay on top were horrible and crude. And they worked. Because what came after Rome was 2000 years of darkness that made its earstwhile enemies claim to be its friends.

But after Rome read about the age of empires. Do try to use a book not infused with Marx. Those are always at best unrealiable and at worst laughable.

Read about how nations act. You need to know this, because Americans don’t act that way. And they tend to think other nations are like America. So we let them hang our few “sins” around our necks: the supporting of dictators to stop our enemies; the disproportionate force attacks on those who attack us and the – snort – despoiling of the “native” tribes. Read the age of Empires. I don’t have time to teach you history here. America is a babe unborn compared to ALL European countries, event he most backwards.

And then sit back and wonder, given you can’t do anything about the top two, what can you do about the last factor. Well, you can’t gag Hollywood, either, not without violating who we are. And I doubt you can make most of them study history. And they’ve rather proven they can’t be shamed.

So what can you do? You can be feared.

I say this with much, much trepidation. In 2004 I had an argument with Jerry Pournelle in which he took this position and I told him no, we had to be loved.

It’s been six years. I’ve grown up. He was right. IF another attack happens, we should make sure the response is of the sort that makes children cry in their beds in future centuries, for fear the Americans are going to come get them. We can bind their wounds afterwards, if we so wish, but first we have to respond harshly enough that they are afraid to fight back as we drag them to modernity.

Yes, I’m recoiling, even as I type that. I don’t want to see innocents suffer, and war, even a “small, surgical” war is suffering. Yes, even if we do the type of high level attack that really upsets their leaders (government centers, religious centers, monuments) we’re going to kill some innocents.

But look at it this way, our proctracted “drag them to the future and force them to love us” strategy is causing them to suffer too. And we didn’t go out there and hit them. They hit us, again, and again, and again, until one hit was large enough to make us attack back.

It’s time we make it known it’s not SAFE to attack us. We’re the crazy bastards who would as soon nuke you as look at you. We don’t want war, but we must prepare for it.

And then, after one or two of these, they’ll realize that they can throw fits over their own version of modernity; they can sit back and design it; but they can’t stop us by attacking us. That only makes them hurt more. And then they’ll stop attacking us, and forcing us to hurt them. They’ll stop hurting our women and children. We’ll stop hurting theirs. The future can be peaceful. We WILL help them rebuild.

So, if there is a next time – and yes, I pray to G-d there isn’t, but pardon me, I read history – hit back twice as hard.

Do it for the children.

Apparently, years ago, without meaning to, I repeated an argument for limited government first made by James Madison (I’d originally put Thomas Jefferson, since I read both of them back to back. Thanks to Paul Howard for the correction.) It went something like this: “If we could get angels to govern us, then it would make sense to let them rule our every action. But since the people who govern us are still human and prey to the same desires, flaws and foibles as the rest of us, it is best to keep their power as small as possible.”

I’m reassured that my mind, in my early thirties, was running on the same track as James Madison. I’m also afraid that I’ve changed my mind on that. Oh, not on keeping government small and as powerless as possible. I don’t like authority – I think I’ve mentioned that – and I have no interest in making my friends and neighbors “do the right thing.” (Exceptions are made for when people wake me up at three in the morning because they’re having some awful crisis and/or for people who are my kids. Then I will make them do the right thing, so that they leave me the heck alone, which is the ultimate goal of my existence: to be left in peace, so I can write.)

However, having written Darkship Renegade, I’ve changed my mind about it being better for angels – or saints, or supermen – governing us.

Yeah, it is one of my peculiarities that I only reason by writing fiction. What I write in non-fiction has usually been worked out in fiction first. No, I have no idea why. It’s like when I’m writing a novel, I’m putting all my chess pieces in place, then playing the game to figure out which is strongest.

Anyway, having written Darkship Renegade, I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than having someone who thinks it is his duty and who was created to do the best for the mass of humanity no matter what. Because what such a creature imagines is better for everyone, might be. But he’ll know precious little about what is better for each person. (No one can.) And that’s because humans are not, nor should they be perfect. And trying to make humans perfect – or perfect anything, like perfectly happy or perfectly good – has resulted in some of the most evil regimes in history.

And before I veer off into theology, which is always a danger this early in the morning and without my coffee, let me cut that short and say this is not a post about politics. It is not even a post about humans. Though it is about both of those, tangentially, because it is about fiction and the purposes and functions of fiction. Which of course, ideally involves both humans and politics, and a lot of other things.

As most of you know – because I keep talking about it – I’ve undertaken for the last year or so, a rigorous regime of walking about an hour a day. The problem I have with exercising (or house cleaning, or most things – except weirdly furniture refinishing – that don’t involve putting words on paper – or screen) is that it’s boring. My body is doing stuff, but the mind is free. Sometimes, depending on the mood, I can write in my head while I’m walking. Unfortunately that usually results in my wanting to come home early so I can write it down, and I find my walks get progressively smaller, as I train myself to think of writing while walking. (This can be solved by having a walking buddy with fascinating repartee, but mine is not available all the time.)

So, to keep myself walking (well, down from a size 24 to a size 16, thank you so much. Four more sizes to go. Sigh.) I started listening to audio books. This led me to make several fascinating discoveries, such as that while I love reading Repairman Jack (by F. Paul Wilson) I can’t LISTEN to the books, or I’ll have nightmares all night. Also that some books that are too ‘clangy’ language wise for me to read, are perfect as audio books.

But, most of all, I’ve found myself making observations on literary theory and “why this book works” while walking and listening to the book – particularly when it’s one I’ve heard before. In this particular case, it was while binging on Pratchett, after a binge on Heinlein.

It suddenly hit me, with sudden, scouring certainty that the reason both of them appeal to me – and are immensely successful in appealing to most people. Or “were” in Heinlein’s case – is that they both write characters that are profoundly flawed.

Now, there’s a danger in this. Characters are not, nor should they be, real people. Real people are too mixed to come across clearly on the page. No, I’m not even talking about moral definition here. I’m talking about getting an entire complex personality on the page.

Coming from a literary (I’m so sorry) background, I used to think this was the goal of writing. Writing “real people.” Until, that is I – fortunately – got exposed to Marlowe (I know, and he four hundred years dead. Zombie Marlowe. Yep, yep, THAT was the flasher haunting my university gardens for about a year) and realized that he came as close to writing real people as he could. And that was what made his plays infinitely worse than Shakespeare’s who dealt in “flawed archetypes.” To put it in blunt and simplistic terms, Marlowe left us with no one to root for and no one we want to see dead.

So which one is it? The archetype or the real human? Both, of course. Most people have the defects of their virtues. The brave man is often foolhardy and the strong woman prone to flashes of anger (not that I would have dealt with this in Darkship Thieves.) The man who is controlled and careful in his life, might think everyone should be so and nip in the bud the exuberance of a younger person under his control. Etc.

But there is more than that to being human. More than virtues and faults, balanced and presented so that we see the good character struggling with his evil tendencies, or an occasional flash of mercy in the villain, for which he feels he must atone.

To be human is to be in pain. To be ground between two states. Again, Pratchett’s metaphor serves here: falling angel meets rising ape. But it’s more than that. We’re creatures who live in the world, but who can imagine a perfect life of spirit only. Who can imagine a life without want or fear or pain, but at the same time must deal everyday with that corporeal reality that on this side even the most pampered little princess can get her finger stabbed on a rose torn.

Worse than that, it’s the … patterns that come with that corporeality and how the body influences us. I can imagine a perfect day of writing, with a break for lunch, then taking of at six pm to spend time with my family. But half the time the words won’t come till five pm and I end up writing through the evening and not spending time with the guys. And being cranky and feeling I failed them and myself, to boot.

It is that aching for perfection while enduring the slings and arrows of what, for most of us, in our time, is the piddling calls of every day corporeality, that makes us human. Being human means dealing with that, every day. It’s amazing as a species we’re not crazier than a squirrel on speed. Or maybe we are. There is such a gulf between the perfection we imagine and what we can attain, both in terms of fighting the body and fighting our own inclinations that probably come from the fact we have a body (pesky bodies) that the two can barely meet in the middle somewhere.

That is the unacknowledged ache at the heart of every human who ever lived. Unacknowledged because, well, we know it’s normal and we feel like whiners complaining about it. And that’s if we’re even aware of it, since it’s been there always and we know it always will be.

The writer who touches that, no matter how he or she does it, will be popular, because it will give us the sense we’re not alone, and it will make us, for the moment, more at peace with the odd mass of contradictions we are.

And that is (at least one of) the functions of fiction.

Sometimes writing books surprise you. I confess the only reason I bought The Art Of War for Writers was that gimmicky title. Then it arrived about three minutes before I left for a con, a couple of years ago. And then … I forgot it. It languished on a shelf for all these years, until I started culling books to donate/sell.

Most of these aren’t in my office. I’m keeping 90% of the books in my office, unless I have duplicates. (You’d be amazed. Sometimes it’s my “wonderful memory” striking. More often it’s my finding a book at a thrift store or a garage sale and going “so and so needs that.”) But the books in the office tend to drift around on a sort of unpredictable tide, and they were all piled in such a way I couldn’t find anything. So, I cleaned and sorted, and found The Art Of War.

It’s now become the bathroom book, read a chapter at a time whenever. (Bathroom books are interesting in a household of writers btw. My older son said “That book you have in the bathroom. He’s up a creek on plotting.” I said “What? The Art of War? I thought he was pretty solid so far.” “No, no, the other one, with the pink cover.” Turned out we had three how-to-write books in the bathroom and he read the first one that came up. It’s like your very own insane workshop all the time.) I’m on page ninety one and so far he seems well… a writer after my own heart.

Writers had different styles and approaches and it doesn’t matter how successful a writer is or how much you admire him, it doesn’t mean you can follow his advice. Sometimes reading an how to book by an author you really like can stop you completely.

For instance, from Heinlein’s biography, I’m very glad he never wrote a writing book. I’d have tried to follow it, and it would have ended in tears because how he approached writing – how he plunged into it – was completely different than my own process. His books were far more planned than mine, and he left a lot less to sudden inspiration from the subconscious. Perhaps that meant he was a more mature writer than I, but I don’t think so (I mean, yes, he was a better writer than I, but that’s not what I mean. I mean mature in the process of writing, meaning, if I write another ten years I’ll get that way.) I’ve done the plot every single step and the only thing that happens is that my subconscious veers off and adds on. The interesting thing is that afterwards, unless I look at the outline, I can’t tell which parts were added on on the spur of the moment. They often fit character and world far better than the ones I planned carefully and positioned with laser-like precision… Some of which end up having to be removed.

Mind you, the part where he lay on the sofa and moped because things weren’t write with the writing is exactly he same as mine, only I tend to stalk around the house obsessively cleaning and/or paint walls and, occasionally, growling at boys or cats.

Anyway, I found that the Art of War fits the way I think. (Possibly not surprisingly.)

Today’s lesson from page 91 gave me something that I’d been missing in the current plot. Oh, I know it. I just hadn’t brought it to bear on the current plot. And that was “Who does the Lead need to be at the end of the novel, in order to be whole.”

It occurred to me this provides yet another way into the plot for those of us like me who start from the character showing up. We know the character needs to grow in a certain way for the reader to be happy. We know that the character is broken. (Well, mine usually are. They show up with these gaping emotional wounds, usually.) In what way does it need to get fixed (or worsened) so that at the end of the novel the character isn’t fighting anymore and the reader is satisfied.

Figure that out, then figure out what needs to happen. Then trace it backwards.

BTW the page before says to keep track of action on two levels – I used to have trouble with this while doing my first novels – and I usually do, but he suggests the following framework to plot to:

Outer: action; Inner: reaction; Outer: Motion; Inner: emotion; outer: goal; Inner: growth; outer: attain; inner: become.

I confess I have never done this to that frame work and I wonder how it would work. Might be a little too precise for me. I suspect though that at this point I do it instinctively. (The hardest thing is keeping track of what you do without thinking at this point in your writing apprenticeship – and it’s always an apprenticeship.)

Anyway, until I finish the book I can’t say if I recommend it. But for now if you find yourself in a store with a few coins burning a hole in your pocket, go ahead and get it. Then tell me how it helped you, if it did.

I can’t say I’ve learned anything new, but I’ve reinforced stuff I’ve been doing for years that I didn’t have a name or a precise process for. (Like the plotting from the lead.)

And now I’m going to officeish and work.

Yesterday, while I was gone* Pam Uphoff posted a very interesting question over at Mad Genius Club.

It is a topic that has been treated before** but one that I feel is so, pardon the term, “mind blowing” that I, myself, keep having little shocks when I turn to do something that has been part of my life forever.

Pam’s question was something like “Should I just write my idea as it comes to me [no, you never should. IMHO you should use your conscious mind to shape your subconscious impulses. BUT that might just be me] or should I tailor it to what is selling well now?”

This is as old a question as “should I be a plotter or a pantser”? Almost every conference I’ve spoken at, I’ve got the question “Should I write what want to, or what will sell?”

And at almost every conference, I’ve given the same answer, “Write what you want, but be aware that if what you want to write is what is selling madly right now, the publishers will probably be full up on it by the time your novel even hits their desk.”

However, as with plotter and pantser, I have to say this is a question without a real answer. My answer could be and often was contradicted by others: authors, publishers, agents – people who’d made big sales or bought “big books” by going with what was trendy; by shaping their work to what they thought would sell.

So, yesterday I looked at Pam’s question and prepared to answer, then had one of those moments, like the ones that we often write about but rarely see, you know “it was as though the sky and the Earth had been swept away, leaving behind a landscape that xyz didn’t recognize, a new world in which he was completely ignorant of what to do.”

I’ve been in this business for over ten years, and I’ve been successful for a certain measure of successful. No, I haven’t become incredibly rich. But I’ve sold over twenty books, which means I must be doing something right. So, I know how to do it, right?

Well, yes. I know PERFECTLY WELL how to sell to publishers as they existed ten years ago.

And there is the rub. I looked over my writing how-to shelf, and most of them are designed to teach you to write the book that will stand out to publishers – the book publishers will like and take out of the slush pile and/or the midlist hell, and promote the heck out of. They say things like “make sure you have a social point” – only usually they say it more subtly – and “use important people as characters or tie to big events” and… stuff like that. They might also give you advise on how best to fit a subgenre that’s selling. No, I confess I don’t own something called “How to write the perfect urban fantasy” which should surprise no one who has read my Shifters’ series.

These books were good – and good advice – on how to write to get the publishers to notice you and promote you.

But here’s the problem, children – even if you’re not intending to go totally indie (I’m not, for one, because I don’t know when the music is stopping in this game of musical chairs, so I like to have a foot in each chair. So to put it. For the purpose of this metaphor I am, of course, an octopus.) you (and I) can have no idea if that publisher you are targeting will even BE there in the next year or two. Hell, even if he is there, you don’t know how he’ll be acting and/or what he’ll be buying. Worse, you don’t know if that heart’s blood book you just turned in (uh. Good title) will ever see the light of day or disappear into legal hell in a publisher’s bankruptcy.

So it would seem the safer thing would be to write what you think will sell to the PUBLIC, only no one knows what that is. No, not even the traditional publishers. Or particularly NOT the traditional publishers.

Yes, they did market research. But their market research was as distorted as ours. They were, of necessity, researching what bookstores would stock and what book reps would get enthusiastic about. (Part of the reason all promotion went to bestsellers, which is counterintuitive.)

And all of this, the publishers and the distributors and even to an extent the bookstores were getting their opinions distorted by something that Timur Kuran calls Preference Falsification in his Private Truths Public Lies.

Yes, the book deals mostly with tyrannical politics and how it creates that, but any regime enforced from the top and running without check, even if it’s a regime that engenders only “prestige” or “social approbation” creates that to some extent.

And when you’re talking about the publishing system, it is a system that tied money to prestige and social approbation. I’ve covered before how the feedback loop on sales numbers got vitiated by a virtual monopoly on what got on the shelves, and the readers of course not buying what they didn’t even know exists. The sales numbers, ultimately, didn’t act as a check on anyone’s career in publishing. (Well, the author’s, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.) So the route to be appreciated and promoted was to publish books your colleagues – most of them fairly insular by upbringing, education and residence (literally insular) – approved of and considered “hot.”

That this had buggerall to do with what Joe and Jane six pack was obvious, both from the fact that stocking in distribution centers often covered three very different states in the same exact books, and from the fact that we got told “they just don’t read” – and by and large, more and more, this was true as they couldn’t find anything they wanted to read.

Meanwhile, the people these publishers socialized with, or those who wrote reviews, were usually driven by the same values system and wanted to stand out as “smart” or “sharp” or “concerned” or “aware” or whatever it was that was hot at that time. So, the echo chamber told the publishers and editors exactly what they wanted to hear. (Excepting Baen where people, in the bar, felt comfortable enough to gripe and bitch.)

So I look over my shelves, on stuff like “make your romance stand out by treating the injustices of the Regency seriously” and I think “why?” No, seriously, why? The injustices of the regency, including child labor and a strict class system have nothing to do with our current life. Worse, they’re not even vaguely controversial. Of course I’m not saying you should be non-historical in something like that. Or that you should enthusiastically approve of the conditions. I’m saying your main character doesn’t need to be a crusader against poverty. And while it’s normal to make noises in the regency romances about the iniquitous treatment of women, I treat it as duck speak and pass over it. No women in the regency would TALK like that. No matter how they felt. Or if they did, they were so few and far between that it gets REALLY tiring to find them in every book. Ditto social reformers. Remember the kind-hearted people who ran orphanages raised the kids to go into service at twelve or thirteen. And meanwhile, they often worked. To have orphanages where they learn Greek and Latin or worse “just get time to play” is so a-historical as to make me spit out my coffee. Letting alone that it would be an unkindness in those days, preparing the kids for a world that wouldn’t exist for another hundred and fifty years.

Does your reader know and care about this? I don’t know. (Younger ones won’t, and will think the world was always a place where “crusading” for “these obvious goods” was rewarded. I will just quote Leonard Cohen here: “You shouldn’t lie. Not to the young.”) I know that Georgette Heyer doesn’t do any of this and is a perennial bestseller. As are others from before the publishing/bookstore shelves hegemony took hold. Most of them are despised by the current system as either preposterous or “fluffy” and yet they STILL sell. Agatha Christie and Heinlein come to mind.

The thing is, though, that times HAVE changed since those people were popular. And the reading public has changed too. My kids find Heyer’s too authentic regency speech difficult. For that matter, I now find Dragon Riders of Pern – much more recent – reads as a “dated style” in the era of internet posts (which are usually MUCH shorter than mine {G}) and tech-speak.

So – where do we go from here? No clue my friends. The road is as unknown to me as to you. Worse, it’s dark and we can’t see whether it winds through a forest or runs off a cliff. And it’s quite likely – in fact, I can practically promise you – there are rodents of unusual size ahead and that things don’t mean what we think they mean.

Fortunately, I have a couple of flashlights I found. I don’t know how much good they’ll be, but they might help us find our feet. That one I just handed you is called “what worked before.” Yes, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Heinlein, Simak, Anderson, Heyer, even Austen. Followed judiciously, in trend if not in style, it will show you where there’s firm ground to step on. This other one is called “what I want to write” which is often what one wishes someone would write.

We proceed cautiously, as the ground reveals itself. There’s gold in them there hills. We just need to create a road to them. It’s a little scarier, but far more exciting than what we had before.

Let’s forge forward into the new Earth and the new Sky.

*(I’m sorry I missed yesterday, particularly since it was my day at Mad Genius Club and I take my commitments very seriously. In passing, it was the worst possible day for this to happen, since it was my husband’s birthday and since I’d planned to go to officeish. I did go, but it caused a major disruption before I got there, and got me all out of sync, which meant I was making birthday lemon meringue birthday pie [can’t buy it. They don’t sell low carb that works for us] at five pm. Also, in passing, thank you to Amanda Green. Greater love has no woman than she who is awakened at seven am by an hysterical writer – who was at the same time trying to dress for officeish – screaming she can’t get into her blog, and can Amanda do SOMETHING. And then takes instruction and does it. AND forebears to post something like “Got called by crazy b*tch who sounded like her head was on fire.” Thank you, my friend. I owe you one.)

**http://kriswrites.com/2011/07/13/the-business-rusch-popcorn-kittens/

Hi, folks, this is Amanda. Sarah called this morning to report that she has a very sick computer and to ask me to let everyone know that today’s post will be delayed. The house tech guru, AKA Dan, is busy trying to fix whatever the problem is but she doesn’t know how long it will take. So, keep checking back. She’ll post just as soon as she can.

When my older son was four, as tall as a ten year old and as wide as he was tall, he was cast as an elephant in the kindergarten play. My husband and I – not in front of him – said “It’s type casting.”

You see, we weren’t particularly worried about his weight or his self esteem. Most of the males in my family start out what can be kindly called “hefty” and slim out in adulthood, when they also become be broad shouldered, narrow-hipped and too damn handsome for their own good. We figured a little knowledge of how the other half lives would inoculate Robert against thinking the world existed for his amusement.

He made a good elephant in the circus, with cloth ears and trunk, and he still loves elephants. If he’s depressed a visit to the zoo to look at elephants usually fixes the problem.

So, the other day we were talking about elephants and he said something about the kindergarten play. I said “It was type casting.” He laughed and said, “You know, in retrospect, the teacher looked a little nervous about that role assignment, which the other kids decided. She kept asking me if I was all right with it.” “Were you?” “Oh, yeah. I was much bigger than the other kids, couldn’t get in on the tumbling or other stuff that could hurt them, but I could pretend to be a tame elephant and the girls pretended to be tamers, and everyone applauded.” Then he paused and said something that got my brain going. “You know mom, there are so many things you can’t say and can’t do and can’t think these days that it’s like everyone is watching himself ALL the time. And my classmates? It’s like they came into kindergarten with a long list of things that they could be offended about, or they could misinterpret in order to be offended by. Or that they could be offended by due to some portion of their history no one knew about. I’m glad you and dad never did that to me. I think it must be emotionally exhausting to always feel like you’re a victim.”

And then I thought particularly about two things. My post on Writer Stockholm Syndrome and one of the reactions, from Passive Voice commenters.

The first one is obvious. Did that post come across as though I felt like a victim? Of course it did, I did feel like a victim for… 12? Years. Being paranoid is a perfectly normal reaction to living in hell. Was it emotionally exhausting? Oh, hell yes. I think, honestly, it was part of the reason I kept getting ill – I was living my life on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And I saw no way out of it. But the post was “I’m out of it now, one way or another. They can’t drag me back” which sort of mitigates the whine, I think.

(My commenter yesterday who said that the market would eventually solve the ills of early capitalism was right, of course. What he was wrong about was the several lifetimes it can take for that correction. As someone who was stuck at the tail end of a system where I couldn’t get out and couldn’t win and it had got so dysfunctional there was no good in it – still is, but now doesn’t care so much – I admire the early labor leaders who actually put something on the line to try to get out of untenable situations. In some industries, they’re still doing that. One can’t always count on technology riding to the rescue. The fact that they let their movement be co-opted by one of the most evil regimes ever to mar the face of the world is a separate and later development.)

So, who am I to complain about people who claim victimhood? I’ll point out while there was not a way out, I shut up and took it (in public, at least. My poor friends. What they heard.) and worked on creating escape hatches. Some of them are half-completed and would have worked without the technology change. The other ones were made much easier by the tech rescue. But I didn’t imagine I was special and/or sainted because I was getting screwed to the wall. I knew – writers talk to each other – that as screwing went, mine was fairly gentle, and at least they’d supplied the grease. There are people in much worse straits than I and far more inexplicably. (Let’s talk about my friend whose second book outsold its printrun FOUR TIMES and who was never accepted by the house again. Why? We don’t know. Worse, she wasn’t accepted by the house while in dire financial trouble which the house KNEW about.) And besides, I could see the incentives in the system that created this – it wasn’t personal.

That meant, as bad as it got – and it got very, very bad – after my first disappointment and my first heartbreak, I didn’t even bitch about it every day. What I did do was spend time thinking out ways to break out of it. It was still exhausting, it was still upsetting. But it wasn’t destructive.

Then comes the other side of it. The commenter at the Passive Voice (I’m not picking on the Passive Guy. He wasn’t the commenter and I have a little colleague-crush on PG. He’s good and he’s providing information we desperately need.)

This is something I’ve run into again and again and again. I’d call them the defenders of victimhood. They not only get to be offended on behalf of other people’s victimhood, they get to pick who the true victims are and tell you what you can say and think about them.

Knowing nothing about me other than maybe the – not very representative, I photograph horribly – picture on my site, he immediately decided I didn’t have a right to claim any victimhood, and oh, yeah, I was insulting designated victims. So he posted something like “Is she saying it’s easier for people of color to break into the business? Right!”

Of course, this required a willful misinterpretation of my post. (Or perhaps I’m horribly opaque.) If anyone needs a clarification, I said that if you were white bread and had nothing special about you, you’d get consigned to the midlist. HOWEVER if you had something special about you – and I did. Most people perceive me as “latina” which (rolls eyes) the Feds say I am, though they only say it recently. One of my employees long ago was convinced Portuguese was the same as Mexican. Yeah, he was a dumb *ss. But I had a materially difficult childhood. Yes, I learned English at 14. Yes, my husband and I got engaged when we hadn’t seen each other for 4 years and had never dated. All of these are “special” and “interesting” as far as the publishing establishment is concerned – they will only push you IF you want to write about that. As I said, after my first series crashed, the publisher thought the only way for me to have a career was to write about growing up in Portugal and my marriage as all, as an autobiography.

That is, my path to staying employed was HARDER than the “stereotypical American suburbanite” because they wanted me to “use” parts of my life that were so private as to defy imagination.

Worse, having gone to a very good liberal arts college, I KNEW what type of “autobiography” they wanted. They wanted a “poor me” autobiography, in which I was an heroic victim. For bonus points I should blame the US for anything bad that happened in my country when I was growing up.

They weren’t going to get it.

I know what real victims are. I’ve read stories of people growing up through the cultural revolution. I’ve read stories of Saudi princesses’ (PRINCESSES!) childhood. And I NEVER experienced anything that bad. Besides, I did okay and I managed fine, and memory is a slippery slope. How much of it was the outside imposing on me, and how much of it is the fact that my personality is crosswise to the world?

As for the US being to blame for the insanity in my country? Brother! I’m told by someone who worked for a secret service as a translator at the time that they DID know about some of the things the average American doesn’t know. But the worst the US did was NOT intervene while the USSR (and China, briefly!) made their (often bizarre) power plays.

Now that I’m an American, may I say I completely understand not running off and getting involved in every flare up in the cold war, even if it looks to people here like we did? May I say that as bad as things were they could have got much worse? May I say that Portugal is a grown up country and can pull up its big-boy britches and figure out its own messes? (They seem to be doing so, at any rate. It just takes time. But perhaps Lloyd Biggle Jr. was right and perhaps Democracy Impose From Outside Is The Greatest Tyranny. I think it’s more that if you keep cleaning people’s room for them, they never learn to do it themselves.)

At any rate, and again, my victimhood wasn’t very victimy. I never FELT like a victim. I always gave back as hard as I got, and found ways out of my binds. Yeah, okay, the Portuguese teacher told me she’d not give me an A unless I joined the communist party. It’s been thirty five years, and I’m a successful writer, and she, presumably, is still communist. I don’t think I’m the victim here.

And besides, if I wrote the truth my publishers wouldn’t like it. It wasn’t THEIR version of the truth.

So I bowed and said “no thank you” and instead sent them a proposal for an historical mystery series. And they bought it. And then I started working with Baen and they couldn’t care less about my victimhood creds, so long as I could write a story with a plot. As for the other publishers, I just got relegated to what I think is a special hell called “She has victimhood and refuses to use it.” Which is just below the hell reserved for white bread suburbanites.

(Now, if the commenter had said I was saying it was easier to get published for skinny white girls willing to trade on their looks, DUH. Yes, yes it is. They still need to know how to write, but it’s easier. No matter. It equalizes. Looks don’t last forever. Ditto, people with “contacts” – if they’re not good they don’t last anyway.)

So, why are people so fascinated with victimhood? Why do some people abrogate to themselves the right of defending supposed victims? Why – and I’ve seen this more than once in books – is being a victim considered to make you morally virtuous and worthy?

To an extent this is a very old idea. I think it started with the martyrdom stories back in the middle ages. People went through unimaginable suffering for their faith, and earned paradise forever.

Somewhere along the line, in going from a religious culture to a secular one (not complaining. Americans [born and bred] can’t even understand the stultifyingly religious nature of the middle ages. It was as suffocating as the victim thing is now. Perhaps more so. Even your naughty art had to be couched in religious terms) we forgot that what made the victims virtuous was NOT the suffering, but the fact they refused to give in to their evil torturers. NOT the fact they sat there and took it.

Victims who fight back makes for great literature. Particularly if they’re fighting back not against their being victimized but against SOMEONE ELSE being victimized or both. Victims being pulped and hating everyone who does it to them and complaining for 400 pages just make me nauseated (they also get assigned to my kids to read in school, thereby confusing another generation.) The claimers of victimhood for others aren’t good for my digestion either. If your whole purpose in life is to tell someone that they can’t talk about a victim that way, get over it. If you really think these people are victims DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Something that doesn’t involve talk, and something that costs you something. Talk is cheap and no one is going to believe you’re virtuous just because you’re always riding to the defense of someone suffering under the heartbreak of psoriasis. Oh, wait. YOU’ll believe you’re virtuous. But you’re wrong. You’re just whiny and jealous that you can’t be a “victim” which you think has some sort of spiritual power.

This is not social problems get solved. And they’re never solved if you can’t talk about the other factors involved. Yes, some victims bring it on themselves. I know that’s heresy, but it’s still true. The reason I was stuck in midlist hell was because I was too stubborn to give the editor what she wanted. Yes, what she wanted was unreasonable as far as I was concerned. But I knew what it was, and if I’d given it to her, she’d have made me a bestseller. So, I was in hell because I wasn’t willing to pay the price to get out. And while my position was horrible, someone saying “Listen here, you dumb *ss, I don’t even have that option” would have been PERFECTLY justified.

Other victims are helpless – abused women and children. Women in countries where they’re chattel. People in countries where their skin color or their religion bars them from certain jobs, or can even get them killed.

HOWEVER even while they’re victims, it doesn’t mean it’s because the other side is mean and evil. Only four year olds think that way. Usually there’s something in the system creating it. And you need to talk about it FRANKLY to fix it. You can’t stand in front of the subject yelling “you can’t talk about that. You’re not a victim.”

If you treat victims like some sort of religious symbols and can’t talk about them except in hushed, religious-like tones, you’re not going to look at the situation dispassionately. You’re also going to create incentives for being a victim. You’re going to in fact, keep the victim where he/she is for your own satisfaction. AND you’re going to feel good doing it. Take a good look in the mirror. There you are. That’s what you are. You’re using others suffering for your moral preening. Don’t look away. As long as you keep doing this, you’ll keep others suffering, so you can be virtuous. And you won’t discuss WHAT in the system is keeping people as victims.

For the record what did this in publishing was the winner take all system where to give you publicity and get the reps to distribute your book to the point where it wouldn’t sink out of sight, they needed to have SOMETHING beyond “it’s a good book” – reps by and large didn’t read the books – to make it “hot”.

It could be a tie in to a recent movie, but having something like “the author is…” worked better. And “the author is foreign born and…” worked best. But you have to be able to look at it and go “they give those who are willing to play victims a leg up.” You had to be able to say it. You had to be able to THINK it. You had to be able to realize that those who were victimizing the author were not the ones the author would have to complain about to get the benes.

And then you’d have to think of what was causing it, and that the publisher/editor were not evil – thank you commenter yesterday! – moustache-twirling villains, but just part of a system that worked that way.

And then you could figure out how to get around the system ITSELF.

But to do that, first you needed to have a free mind. You can’t be hemmed in with “I can’t say this. I can’t say that. I have no right to think that.” As Heinlein said (even if he doesn’t mention “peer pressure” read it as being there): When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, – not anything – you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

I could post about Labor Day, except that all that comes to mind when I think Labor Day is the Red Army passing in front of the Politburo on Red Square.

Yes, I do realize that was the First of May – when Labor Day is celebrated in the rest of the world – not in the US.

In fact, the uncoupling of Labor Day from the rest of the world has always been, in my opinion, part of the genius of the US. That way Americans don’t need to associate Labor with the Politburo. They don’t even need to associate Labor Day with Organized Labor. And by and large, as time goes by, while making nods towards the achievements of organized labor, most Americans don’t.

More importantly, the US got to miss on the “joy” of labor day for the rest of us, which came in two parts. One was watching the organized parades to figure out who was in and who was out at the Kremlin. Okay, I suspect this was not a part of it for, say, the British. For the French? Probably, at least to some extent, because they had a large communist contingent who openly took orders from Moscow, and a massive socialist contingent, some of whom more or less openly took orders from Moscow. Who was in power in Moscow meant how likely you were to have the trains, the mail or the garbage collection strike on you. (No, you say? Portuguese went on strike against Reagan’s development of the neutron bomb, a Moscow objective, not a labor one.)

The second was waiting to see whether there were any shenanigans planned for the day. Things like attacks on the police/military headquarters were not out of consideration. Nor were riots and general “demonstrations” of Labor’s power. What power, you ask? The power to scare other people. That was about it. It was enough.

I’ll say right up front that I’m leery of unions because in the late twentieth century, in western countries, they were Moscow’s stooges in the cold war dynamic. However, I must qualify that by pointing out that I’m leery of all organized groups and that in Eastern countries the unions proved they were double edged weapons. Where would Poland be – or the whole Eastern block, or even us – without Lech Walesa?

But even their behavior in the west, in the cold war, does not stop me from honoring their achievements in dealing with the labor situation as it existed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

I could tell you – it is true, as far as I can tell from research (which is always iffy) – that the life even in most grimy industrial towns, with around the clock labor was better than life in rural hamlets. Why can I tell you that? Two reasons: people immigrated to the cities to do that labor. (Still do in countries stuck at that level.) And famines became rarer and rarer and eventually stopped altogether.

This does not mean that organized labor was unnecessary. In an era when laborers were unskilled, easily replaceable and after a while wholly dependent on their employer (farming is a skill. People born and raised in the city could not just go back and become tenant farmers, even if they wanted to. Not without learning first, and most of them had no resources to.) employers had all the choices.  They could have pressured governments and kept their dominance over a labor force that became little more than feudal serfs.  Individual workers could do nothing against employers. So it took organization and a group. The equation went something like this: each one of us is powerless against you. But all of us, together, are powerful.

Unfortunately people tend to take these lessons, and then try to apply them to everything. Kind of like the tale of the man with the hammer.

Lately, some science fiction fans, on being told all the things writers don’t have any control over, came up with the idea that it was time for a general strike or something.

Which brings me to my people and their situation.

First of all, let’s dispense with arguments over what we do and whether it is labor or not. I don’t know about you Tovarish (Yes, I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress again, why?) but writing my books is closely akin to giving birth and I have it on good medical authority THAT was labor.

However, if we are labor, we are, at best, unorganized labor. And no, organizing us won’t work. To evoke TMIAHM again, this is no time for shoulder to shoulder.

While we don’t have to deal with air locks, etc, we do have to deal with other realities.

1- We’re as different from coal miners or steel workers as is possible to be. No? How not? If each of us labors for ten hours a day, our output will not be more or less the same quantity of usable product for more or less the same purpose.

This comes from the fact that we’re all educated – differently educated, mind you – and each of us writes differently. Our personality influences not just the quantity but the type of output.

You can’t negotiate a collective contract for product with such different audiences as Science Fiction and Romance. We won’t even go into non-fiction. How much should sex manual writers be paid in comparison to erotica? Is a two thousand word sex-tale the equivalent of a ten thousand word novella? Yeah…

2 – Not only would we continue writing for fun – while I’ve never heard of a coal miner or steel worker going to work for fun on their days off, or doing it obsessively after their paying job – but other people, now unpublished, would and do write for fun. So, if every published writer went on strike… Yes, you see it as well as I do. Publishers could buy from a bunch of newbies.

3 – Even supposing you could get every one to strike – and to have power, this would mean the bestsellers would need to strike, as well as the beginners – how are you going to enforce it? We’re not all in the same geographic area. Which of us is going to go tell Stephen King he’s being a fink, if he breaks strike? Who is going to travel to England and tell J. K. Rowling to down keyboard?  More importantly, how do you know if someone broke it? Manuscripts in various stages are always in the pipe line. HOW can you tell who broke it and how?

4- aha! You say. We’ll do what the screen writers do. You can’t sell to the publishing industry without being a member of the union. Yeah? You and whose army? WHY would the publishers agree to this? See above. How are you going to make them? Strike? Right. Hollywood has the advantage over us of being geographically concentrated, not just as to management (which publishing still is) but as to labor. Also, producing movies is VISIBLE. Editing manuscripts is done in privacy.

5 – How are you going to eat while you strike? Writers organizations? Dears, they can’t even organize enough to get us health insurance. Most of them – even the largest – refuse to defend writers against such abuses as publishers bringing out in ebooks books first published in the seventies, when those rights weren’t even in the contract.

6-if publishers kicked us over, they could replace us wholesale. And I don’t even mean from the anglosphere. I’m living proof they could hire from all over the world. Need I remind you that in many countries 4k a year IS more than living wage?  And people will be happy to get that for sit-down work?

Fortunately for us, there are other methods. We can be what we are – the ultimate loners – and work as unorganized labor to fight for our rights.

There is technology that allows us to tell the publishers, “Scr*w you guys, I’m going Indie.” Yeah, it’s in its infancy, it won’t support most of us, yet, but it’s already having an impact. And that means that for the first time we have some power on our side as well.

Every writer who can should at least have one or two Indie books, just to strengthen that transition, and to dip his/her toe in the pool and see what it’s like. Every writer should inform himself of this transition. (Most of us are. We’ve added three hours of intensive blog reading to our daily work, from what I heard at Worldcon.)

If you’re a writer and you’re not reading Kris Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, The Passive Voice and a bunch of others, you should be.

Think of it this way: Organized labor worked, back in the day. But today, most industries are moving to become more like us – not cohesive; dispersed; employing highly skilled workers; many of them labors of love.

These are good things, but they also allow for a lot of abuses from those who hire said workers. Abuses that not only can’t be corrected, but in some cases will be made worse by old-style Organized Labor.

So, it’s up to us to show other industries how to work through this.

Unorganized Creators of Content – on the count of three, stand up and do your thing!

The Future Is Ours.

When I was a kid in Portugal, under the newly instituted socialist (I have no clue what they called themselves, but the majority were socialist) regime, individual work was considered a little suspect. It was not exactly frowned at, but everything possible was done to dilute it. For a while we were graded by the class, for instance.

This happened in 5^th and 6^th grade. I never fell far below a B mostly because, well, they knew what would happen to them behind the bike sheds after class. And we didn’t even have bike sheds. Ashamed of myself? Not even a little. I usually had straight A tests, and I’d seen too many of my classmates with similar grades get pulled down to Cs and others with Ds end up with B because “they’re oppressed and they don’t have pretty clothes” or something like that. I won’t go into this at any more length. I’m not bitter about it. It worked for me. Of course, it would have worked for me if I had Ds normally too. It was called reign of terror. But it added up to “I had a problem and I solved it.”

For more serious effects of this type of “crowd decision”, read anything about the terror in France or the Cultural revolution. And no, I’m not comparing what happened to me to that, only saying mine is in the kindergarten level of that continuum, while those are at the post-graduate level, but they’re manifestations of the same “curriculum.” This is simply a way of explaining how my opinions on certain situations were formed.

In the same way, everything that could be done as group work was done as group work, including writing and art projects. The epitome of this was when we’d arrive at the school, ready for a normal day and got told all classes had been cancelled, here are paint pots, go out front and paint the school’s facade.

What we did to the front of that school stayed that way for about a year, and then another crowd of students did it, and then again. I don’t know what the school thought they were achieving. Savings on professional painters? Or just giving the students a sense of ownership in their school? Whatever it was, and regardless of what my teacher called it, it wasn’t art. Perhaps a clash of conflicting graffiti would be a way to describe it. Some of my classmates, mind you, were astonishingly gifted in art. But they’d be next to a guy who was just drawing private body parts, over and over again. Anatomically incorrect body parts. Or the girl who was just doing little hearts and flowers of the kind you doodle on the side of your notebook when you’re bored in class.

To call the result an eyesore would be an insult with eyesores everywhere. It became sort of an eye-crossing horror that you instinctively looked away from. And when the revolutionary fervor abated, the facade got painted an innocuous grey, which it still is today.

So when Travis Lee Clark in the comments, on He Beats Me But He’s My Publisher suggested that writing would move to a more “crowd sourcing” type of situation, where a novel would be put out as, say vs1.0 and then updated according to comments, my immediate and instinctive reaction was “oh my G-d, no!”

I hate to say it, but my reasoned, thought out reaction is STILL “Oh, good G-d, no!”

At least this is still my reaction for MOST type of projects, most situations and most writers. There are exceptions where this can work exceptionally well.

I found the comparison of this to reading on a computer as a generational thing funny. No, of course I never thought that people would refuse to read on a computer screen. I know it’s a matter of habit. I don’t have issues adapting to new trends. Look, I started out writing by hand, in exercise books, moved to a typewriter at fourteen, wrote my first novel in the first electrical typewriter I found, and I now work almost exclusively on computer (save for editing – the kindle is better for that – and plotting, where I do it by hand to save time.) I’ve tried every possible gadget to make my life easier, including a scanner pen for research (sucks) and Dragon Naturally Speaking (works, but it seems whenever I get it trained the computer dies, and then I don’t get around to training it again for years. Also, dictating what I write into a recorder while walking where there are ANY people can get the police called on me. [You think I’m joking.])

I started reading fiction in books where you had to cut the pages free (they were folded over and the edges and the book was bound that way.) Now I read mostly on the kindle. It’s not even generational. It’s habit. And habits can be formed.

But what stands in the way of crowd sourcing – again, in most cases, and for most authors – is more something in the immutable nature of the human mind.

The first characteristic of the human mind is that most of us – having evolved as social creatures – prefer to be part of a group to actually, you know, succeeding on our own. And if you’re nodding appreciatively and saying “But that’s why crowd sourcing for art is so great” think again.

Rick Boatright suggested, in the post on editing, that newbies post to the 1632 group, where people stand ready to shepherd you to publication. This is true and they are one of the exceptions, for reasons of being a shared world and one that’s becoming mind numbingly complex as you go. So if you want to write for 163x series, this might be a good thing. They and in fact the whole 163- phenomenon will be treated under exceptions. (Yes, I’m afraid this is one of those LONG posts.)

But I stay away from most anonymous online critique groups like poison, and I advise all my fledglings to do the same. Why?

There are several proverbs, in several countries, and they all agree. “The poppy that stands out shall be cut down”, or perhaps “The nail that sticks out will be hammered in.” Or “the forest grows, top on top.” They all mean the same. It means that in any group, if you stand out you’ll be pulled down. What’s more, if you are a normal human being you’ll try to fit in, and you won’t NEED to be hammered.

This is a post in itself. Or at least, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, by now, I’d need a full post to explain it. Something like “swallowing the poisoned apple.” But let me recommend you read Terry Pratchett’s unseen Academics and pay close attention to the metaphor of the crab bucket.

Let me also point out that I have over my ten years as a published author judged umpteen contests. I can tell, without being told, whether the entries were culled by “peer group” before going to the professionals. When they haven’t, there will be some that make your eyes cross, and some that are astonishingly professional and all you can do is say “send this out. It will sell.” When they have you get a kind of low-level Schrecklichkeit, a horribleness that screams “look how pretty it is and I made it all with my own thumbs.” And all entries will be at about the same level. (The last contest I judged is an exception to this, and I’m not sure why.) And when I was reading slush, I could tell the entries that came from the same group easily enough. Other editors could too. In fact, our writers’ group bucked that trend so spectacularly that we caught Stan Schmidt’s eyes for that reason alone. (More on that later.) They might all be good. They might all be bad. But mostly they were all boiled oatmeal and about as tasty.

That is one effect of crowd sourcing ANYTHING. Did the kids painting the mural next to the girl who painted like DaVinci feel like they needed to make their parts especially ugly to bring it down? Probably not consciously. But despite most of the great religions preaching against it (except for the dark times, when they encourage it) envy is not just a sin – it is arguably, evolutionarily what kept our ancestor-bands together and thriving. Group cohesion was important to survival, and therefore outliers at both ends of the spectrum had to be pulled down or up to meet that level. So it is part of all of us. We’re not angels. We are at best the place “where falling angel met rising ape” as Pratchett said. Some of the things useful to each of those are a pain to us, in this our in-between state. Deal.

I have been – in case it’s not obvious from my er… educational circumstances – in more group projects than I care to mention. (Being enamored of group work subsisted all the way to college and beyond. It was supposed to iron out inconvenient individualism and make us ready for the socialist future. (Look, they’re talking of revising their constitution now, so it doesn’t say they’re a democracy on the way to socialism. but while I was there, this was gospel.)) The only ones where I didn’t blush for the results happened in the following circumstances: A group of well-matched people, all at about the same level of intelligence, but with WILDLY different interests and talents; a project we could distribute so each one did the portion that suited him/her best.

If you look at the successful crowd sourcing projects – say the 163x or even Austen Fanfic as Practiced at Derbyshire Writers Guild or a dozen other “shared world” endeavors – you’ll find that they share these same characteristics. They are/attract people who are at about the same level FOR THAT ENDEAVOR but with wildly different specializations, which means they’re not competing for the same thing – in most stuff.

Yes, both of those, which are the only ones I know closely, do take beginners and help them. But that’s because you can absorb a beginner or two when you’re a massive group. It’s another version of the Tall Poppy, but more like pulling it up to the same height. And both start – self select – for interest in a type of lore that takes catching up on. (163x or Austen’s work.)

I also want to point out that this “pulling down” is not the result of CONSCIOUS envy. Oh, there are exceptions, yes. There are the people I call “the gods of workshops” – i.e. people who forgot WHY they started going to workshops (presumably to get good enough to be published?) and started deriving their power and prestige from the workshop itself, and their place in it. You usually know them as the people who pronounce, in an imperious air “Oh, my dear, you’ll never get published like this” – when they, themselves, have zero credits. But those are, thank heavens, few and far between. MOST people do this instinctively. They will find the flaw in your otherwise far-above-them story and attack it mindlessly, because some part of them is hurting that they’re not even aware of. G-d help us all, they’re HUMAN. In any human group, it won’t be just art – it will be personalities, friendships, pet hatreds and most of all cohesion that rules the day.

The other thing to take in account, even when a group is all at the same level of talent (almost impossible, but feasible, by sheer luck. Our writers’ group was pretty close) is the different rates at which people work and how fast people progress. In other words, experience changes how you write.

Let me put it this way. This weekend, as a challenge to myself, I’m trying to finish a started novel. I doubt I can – though I expect to get halfway through and maybe finish next weekend. It’s a novel I started three years ago. Yes, three years ago when I had… seventeen? Novels sold. And yet, reading it, I’m going “Oh Heavens. Did I know how to plot at all? There are lose ends all over the place.” This is part of the reason I haven’t been in a writers’ group in years, even though I tried recently. It’s not that I’m smarter or better than other people (unless you assume I’ve gained IQ points in the last three years, which I doubt) it’s that at this point it’s hard to find someone at my level of experience, or a little above who can see my glaring mistakes (even if most people who know me and my output don’t try to pull me down. They still don’t help.)

This brings us to where the commenter (I’m really not picking on Travis. They are good points, even if I disagree with most of them and I’m grateful to Travis for bringing them up) went on to say that really, she was sure things would change with e-editions mostly in control of the writers.

On that she is absolutely right. There are several things I can see – one of them is writers revising their work every few years, not so much in reaction to what the crowd said, but because they got so much better.

Another one – and she quotes something similar – is people showing their work to the intended audience, in the beginning, then adjusting their pitch so it hits better. I did this with the last re-write of Darkship Thieves and also, in case no one has noticed <G>, I tend to read stuff not yet published – often not submitted – at cons, to get people’s reaction. The net and writers’ online conferences makes this MUCH easier.

Another one is shared worlds. These always existed, and for these different rules apply, since they’re really a monumental work – a triptych in heroic proportions, done by a thousand hands – and some direction needs to apply (otherwise you end up with my class’s painting project.) These are now MUCH much easier, and I expect to see a lot more of them. In fact, I expect to see “pay for play” type of shared worlds that have music, stories, etc.

Also, lest it be believed that I’m smacking writers’ groups around, I’m not. I only started really progressing when I joined one, as a beginner. I’m just saying that these work best if all the authors are at same level of learning to begin with. (Yes, blank slate, like we were is the same level.) And also if they consciously TRY to diminish the Tall Poppy syndrome. We did this several ways, one of them being by making “Copyedits written only. You don’t read them aloud. Critique only two minutes, by the clock. Don’t repeat what someone already said. No discussion of manuscripts outside the group. No written, anonymous critiques.” This made it harder to beat down the tall poppy. The fact that we were all, to begin with, wildly different in personality and outlook also helped immensely. And even then, it won’t last forever. Know when you’ve outgrown them or they’ve outgrown you. Bow out gracefully. Come back for the parties.

But for novels as novels – or short stories as short stories – I continue to believe that Pratchett’s advice for witches holds: Try to be yourself, as hard as you can. I don’t think Heinlein, Pratchett, F. Paul Wilson, Austen or even Agatha Christie could have been improved with “crowd sourcing.” And I can just see what crowd sourcing would have done to someone as idiosyncratic as Jorge Luis Borges “What’s this thing you have with libraries and labyrinths, Jorge. Honestly. Make it more commercial. Throw in a werewolf and a hot girl.”

As for me, while I don’t belong in the group of luminaries, I’m simply too curmudgeonly to want anyone looking over my shoulder as I write. I have trouble enough working with the young twit I was a few years ago. Honestly, she couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

And speaking of trees, there is a Reiner Kunze poem, which I only imperfectly remember. Unfortunately, I can’t find the book, which I think is in a box in the attic. According to what I can find on line, the English translation starts “The Timber Forest educates its trees” which is not how I’d have “translated” it, but that’s life. It’s about the fact that trees in a forest grow top on top, and all get about the same light.

He ends with “To the wind they all whisper the same.” And that … homogenizing effect of crowd sourcing in most cases is what prevents great art from emerging from it.

Your mileage may vary. Which is of course the whole point.