Editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden had this little dissertation about writers as otters. You can't train an otter, she says, because when you reward it, instead of saying "Let's do that again!" it says "Oh, let's do something else that's even cooler!" This is the writer's approach. They want to surprise you, and if too many people have the same idea it begins to seem not so surprising anymore. "It does not appeal to my Inner Otter!" Drives editors nuts, because they're trying to train their writers. They want something within the range of marketability.
LSC: You have to go through the editors, the publishers, and the marketers to reach the reader. But then, you've done so.
LMB: I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure. My own literary favorites include, among many others, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, and of course C. S. Forester. All of these writers created not works of art, but, on some level, works of life. Theirs are creations who climb up off the page into the readers' minds and live there long after the book is shut. Readers return to such books again and again, not to find out what happened—for a single reading would suffice for any book if plot and idea were all—but because those characters have become their friends, and there is no limit to the number of times you want to be with your friends again.
I have been, therefore, vastly pleased with the number of readers who have written to tell me that my stories have stood their friend in time of need: the mother of a handicapped child; a blind man who lived in rural Kentucky, and "read" the books on audio tape; a woman who reread them all over a weekend and went back to solve a problem at work that had seemed intractable; a soldier serving in a difficult post in the Middle East; a young woman who took them with her to reread during the week of aftershocks of the California earthquake, when she was camping in her backyard, unable to return to her damaged house; a woman fighting depression and an array of medical problems, who felt well enough after a reread to get up and continue coping with her life.
One reader wrote to let me know that my books had informed his thinking, when he grappled with the task of composing a statement for his national church council on what its position was to be viz cloning and other looming biotechnologies.
And then the writer gets one of those letters, as I suspect most writers do—paraphrased from memory—"Dear Ms. Bujold, I want to thank you for the very great joy your work gave my husband during the last six months of his life . . ."
Joy to the dying? Where does that fall on any intellectual grid of "literary merit"?
And then you realize that we're all dying, here. And so.
I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor, and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatterbrained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money.
"What robber?" my reader asked.
"The one who just held us up at gunpoint," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing.
My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
LSC: This story was told to me at a mystery convention—I was pleased to discover that it wasn't the equivalent of an urban legend, but quite true. Talk about escaping into a book!
LMB: Years ago I read an interview with a forensic pathologist who said he had never gone into a bad crime scene, where he had to clean the blood off the walls and whatnot, in any place where there were a lot of books. It occurs to me that because books give us escape even though we may be physically trapped wherever we are, they give us a "time out" space. People who don't have this have to stay in the pressure cooker as the pressure goes higher and higher, until they finally explode into violence expressed either externally or internally in stress illnesses. Books give readers a place to go. This is good for your health and potentially good for the health of the people around you as well. In that sense, I think reading can be a form of self-medication.
Both historical fantasy and futuristic science fiction have the appeal of being very far away from here, that escapist element. Of course the more you read about history, the less you want to go live there, but it still has that romanticism—not in the sense of sexual romance but in the sense of exotic places. "Escapist" is one of those terms that get used with a sneer, but I'm getting to be more and more of the opinion that it has a value in its own right that isn't being properly appreciated.
That said, if there is any meaning at all in any work of fiction that can be transposed back to real daily life, it lies in the characters' lives and moral dilemmas. "All great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection," as one of my characters remarks. The human condition is a mess and always has been, and visions of perfecting it are a snare and a delusion, but we can all grab for great moments—for one floating instant, to do better than we think we can. Heroes are just people who are lucky or determined enough to match the moment—and at least once, to get it right when it matters.
LSC: So now, after this long strange (and one hopes, ongoing) journey, that's what it's all about?
LMB: If writers have a duty, it is to think as clearly as we can; to reexamine all our assumptions repeatedly on both micro and macro scales. Happily, this also will yield us better fiction. A novel is a slice out of the writer's worldview. The slice in turn, if it is coherent, generates as an emergent property a comment on living as human beings, which is the book's theme. We experience theme, even if we cannot articulate it openly, as an exhilarating sense of meaning to the book. The book has succeeded in creating meaning inside the head of another person. And in my worldview, that's what art is for.
LSC: Thank you. For every word.
Publishing, Writing, and Authoring:
Three Different Things
Lois McMaster Bujold
You may imagine that a bunch of writers discuss High Art when they get together, but I'm sorry to say they more usually bitch about the publishing business. (The less obvious reason for this is that no writer can talk about his/her own work in front of another writer with the emotional intensity they really feel; it just doesn't work, socially.)
The business as it is presently constituted consists of three parts: publisher, distribution system, and bookstores, followed at a remove by readers. A publisher's actual main customers are therefore not the readers, but the book chains and the big distributors who in turn supply small bookstores and libraries. Present conditions have the publishers trying to push ten gallons of books into a five-gallon pipeline (the distribution system) into a three-gallon bucket (the bookstores). Something has to give, and it does.
One way to get More Stuff through is to speed it up, which is why books whip on and off the shelves with such velocity (category romance novels are given, count 'em, thirty days on the market before being replaced by the next batch). What this means is, the speed of book turnover has grown to be faster than the speed of word of mouth, a slowish process formerly vital to a new book or author. All but the very first readers to buy a book thus have no way to send economic feedback messages back through the system saying, "More, please." The late reader's vote is not counted; the reader who borrows instead of buying casts no vote at all.
The selling of any book traditionally falls into two periods. The first phase takes place months before the book is published, out of sight of any reader, when the publishers send their sales people out to take orders from their real customers, the aforementioned middlemen. I was bewildered when I first heard of a large ad budget being spent on a book when I never saw sign
of an ad in any newspaper or even bookstore. Turns out that money was being spent advertising to distributors of various ilks. Publishers have turned, in something like despair, to attempts to buy room for their books in that narrow pipeline; hence such things as paid placement at the front of a bookstore, front page treatment in book chain newsletters, various complex incentives for high volume, etc. (I won't even get into the horrors of the book returns system.) The sales force works like mad to pitch the packaging of their books to a harried crew of buyers who, given the volume of books to pass through their hands, cannot possibly read the actual texts.
Only after those orders are collected is the size of the print run chosen. So to a great degree, the level of success any book can obtain is set before anyone reads it. If orders are low, the book will never have a chance to find readers through store placement, or ever get near any best-seller list. It's like a glass ceiling; breaking through it seems almost impossible. If a book—or rather, its packaging and the sales numbers of previous books by that author—fails to pass muster at the stuffing-in end of the pipeline, no reader (or very few) will ever learn of its existence in order to ask for it. Reader input is limited to an expensive and wasteful negative—readers can (and do) reject books they do see, but they have no way of asking for books they don't see.
Such was the hair-tearing state of the business up to the middle of the Nineties. Then along came the Internet. And publishers' Websites such as Baen's Bar. And Amazon.com, with shelves that never get too full to hold More Stuff. And, most critically—word of mouth got hyperdrive through chat groups and e-mail. Word of mouth got faster, even, than the system's book-removal rhythm.
And suddenly, publishers had an economical way of getting the word out to the excluded people in this process, the actual book readers, of their books' existences—totally jumping over the unfortunate book-blocking nature of the distribution system. Instead of trying to push books through the pipeline, this intelligence network potentially allowed a thousand or ten thousand actual readers to line up on the other end and pull the books through—the books they wanted, not the ones some desperately overworked distribution exec imagined would sell. It was briefly very exciting and hopeful—until the Internet filled up. Still, those new lines of communication are solidly established now.
It is at this point still unclear to me what the Internet will do in the long run to publishing. It's certainly a boom time for readers: more books are simultaneously available in more formats, more readily accessible, than ever before in history. MP3 downloading of audiobooks over the Internet is a new market that looks very promising. So far, e-books seem to be falling into a supplemental niche just like audio books. Tree books are mortgage money; e-books are (still) pizza money, although as the generation comes up for whom reading off a screen is the default norm, and as reading devices improve, I expect to see more e-books sold, or at least downloaded. But I'm not sure how much this will help the economics of individual living writers, as given the infinite shelf space in such e-book stores as www.fictionwise.com (who are adding upward of a couple of hundred new titles a week), writers finds their books competing for reader attention not just with one season's releases, but with a century's worth of offerings. The glut has been shifted from the publishers' laps to those of the readers. Time in which to read is still only issued 24/7, a hard limit. You do the math.
That said, people still want to write, for reasons that have little to do with publishing economics. I have concluded by experiment that teaching writing is not my strength—teaching is a different, complex, and underrated skill—but I get asked how-to questions anyway. My writing methods have a lot of intuitive elements that I can't even analyze, let alone articulate and transfer, so all my tips tend to cluster around problems I've had to solve for myself, which may or may not be the same problems a learner is having. I suspect one could trace most writers' own problem spots just by the advice they give. With that warning, here's a bag of things I've learned or observed along the way.
If you want writing time in your day, you have to take it—no one will give it to you. Often, you can only take it from your own alternate activities; writers' lives tend to get rather stripped-down for that reason. Nowadays, I have more control over my own time, and the limiting factor isn't writing time per se, but the speed with which I generate and refine my ideas. When I was most pressed for time, in my younger days, having a separate place to go work, out of the house—in my case the library, because it was free and quiet—helped focus my energies. Two of my writer friends, back when they both had day jobs, used to have regular lunch dates where they would meet in a coffee shop and write like mad for the first forty-five minutes, eat in fifteen, and go back to work. One, I know, still works in short bursts, just as I still use my outlining system that was originally designed to make my actual people-free first-draft writing time intensively productive, because it was so limited.
Other than a limitless imagination, a fiction writer should possess self-discipline. Writing is great fun, but it's not all fun; if you can't steel yourself to plow through the un-fun parts, you'll never finish anything worth the writing. This quality includes both drive, and relentless self-correction—a continuous search for how to Do It Better, from whatever sources one can find.
We pause now for my "Writer's Block—Your Friend" spiel. There's something in my back-brain which puts on the brakes when I try to do the wrong thing in my book, put in something that the book isn't supposed to be, take a wrong turn. I just go blank. The words won't be forced. It takes a while to sort out if this is what's going on, or if it's just normal distractibility, but when I do get it correctly identified, the only thing to do is go back and revisualize the story itself. Noodling around on the sentence-revision level isn't the cure.
I've come to think theme is an emergent property of a book, and so it really isn't right to talk about a book's theme before the text is complete. But I think what's happening with this kind of block is that the wrong thing I was trying to do wouldn't have fit that complex emergent meaning that doesn't exist yet, but is trying to become. This sense of story, which I often can't even see or name at that point, is the invisible template against which I ultimately test each choice—of action, of viewpoint, whatever. When it finally fits, it all clicks in and I'm off and running again. This process is far more visceral than it is analytical.
Remember that scene from the movie Roger Rabbit, where Roger whips his hand out of the handcuff in which it has been stuck, and the human asks in outrage, "Could you always do that?" and Roger replies, "No! Only when it was funny!" It might seem, in something as apparently generic as an action-adventure novel, that almost any action would do. It doesn't. Only when it fits the theme. Then it's the right one. Then it's unstoppable.
And then there are the writer's blocks that come from simply not knowing what happens next. Some days the ideas flow, some days they have to be laboriously pieced together. Sometimes the attempt at piecing-together jostles the real answer loose. I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
In making up a new world, a writer has to be conscious of where language comes from, especially if trying to transport the reader into a different time and place than their everyday normal twenty-first century. (Pardon me while I walk around and admire that phrase. For most of my life, "the twenty-first century" was shorthand for "the future"; now I'm living in it. Time travel the hard way . . . shouldn't we spare a few more moments for marveling?) A writer needs to be a little bit conscious of the sources of words, too. I found in writing books in the Chalion and Sharing Knife series particularly, where the setting is, while not historical, at any rate preindustrial, I had to be constantly watching my vocabulary for anachronisms. I couldn't refer to objects that wouldn't have been invented in those worlds; all my metaphors had to
be checked to make sure that they would work in this new context. I puzzled a bit over borderline words like "sanguine" and "choleric," which have their roots in an obsolete theory of physiology that never existed in Chalion, but have since acquired general meanings; I decided to leave them in lest I be stripped of vocabulary altogether.
The inverse of screening wrong words out is putting right ones in. Neologisms in fantasy and science fiction present an ongoing challenge. A certain number of new words are needed for new concepts, a certain number to give atmosphere, but if there are too many the reader may get vocabulary overload. Was that last polysyllable a noun or a verb, a person, a place, or a thing? When as a reader I get saturated like that, the words just fuzz out into meaningless white noise, which is probably not the effect the writer intended.
A large vocabulary and a sense of where words come from, their roots and histories, help keep the writer from going astray. It can take time and a lot of reading to develop this kind of ear, but any newbie can use a dictionary. A quick dictionary check of any made-up word to be sure one hasn't accidentally duplicated a term already taken will help prevent, say, inadvertently naming one's major fantasy character after an airplane part. (True story. Not one of mine, happily.) Checking that one hasn't used some absurd word in a foreign language can be harder, although an Internet search may help here. Ursula Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," although it applies only to a partial range of story types, is recommended reading to sensitize one to the issues.
When you finish book one, don't just sit down and wait for it to sell; start on book two. Novel publishers want writers who have proven that they are capable of doing continuing work, and at a steady rate, not one-book-wonders. And your second book, or your third, or fourth, may actually be the one that breaks the barriers for you. If you're lucky, as I was, you'll be able to clean out your manuscript drawer then and there (remember, publishers want more than one book, at least until your books tank and then they don't want any). Also, writing the second or later books may teach you more about writing, and more about how to improve your early work, than getting caught in an endless loop of revising the same material and rehashing the same problems.
The Vorkosigan Companion Page 8
