Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 3

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Authorial responsibility

MY PROBLEM WITH ALL THIS

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: I completely hate this. “This” being specifically this blog, what I’m typing, this direct, immediate communication from me to you, the reader.

(Of course, chances are you’re not a reader of mine. But I’ll gloss over that for now.)

Why do I hate this? Well, I feel like I’ve said this before – in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve said it a lot – but one of my deepest beliefs as a writer is that writers should stay the fuck out of their audience’s business.

This is because the reading experience is an extremely private, personal, subjective experience. The core relationship is between the reader and the text: the writer has no place interjecting themselves into this relationship. It is not the writer’s place to tell the audience how to think about the work, or whether the audience’s opinion or interpretation is wrong or not.

Nor is it the writer’s place to directly enter into discourse with the reader, because to do so would, in a sense, overrule them, contradict them, taking this very delicate and personal relationship with a work and forcing a completely different set of associations and connotations and interpretations on it.

I will say this a thousand times: 90% of the work done in the reading experience is done by the reader. The writer is essentially providing a recipe, a blueprint: it’s the reader who comes in and does the creating. I am not putting anything into your head: it’s you that’s rendering and summoning up this beautiful or terrible experience, guided by my vague instructions.

My opinion is moot. If I don’t mention a character’s race, and you make them black in their head, it’s not my place to say, “Actually, no, that’s wrong, she’s white. Oh yeah, and she’s from Connecticut, actually, and she played field hockey, and she also failed out of law school and worked in house renovations for six years before the story, I just didn’t mention any of that stuff. But here it is now, here’s who she really is. I don’t know what’s in your head, but that’s who she is.”

No. That’s not how this works. You have the authority. I am giving you soft clay figures, and you are shaping them and giving them details.

 

HOW MUCH OF THIS IS YOU? HOW MUCH OF THIS IS ME?

This leaves only the issue of responsibility.

Am I, the writer, responsible to you? Are you responsible to me? If you completely misinterpret my work and say, for example, that The Troupe actually has a hidden Jewish agenda, that it’s putting a nice face on the Jewish culture and I’m actively extending the secret Jewish control over the media, is it my responsibility to come out and publicly say, hey, no, pump the brakes here, what you’re saying is crazy?

I prefer to think it isn’t. A story is a conversation. And when the writer’s done writing it, they’ve had their say. Now it’s up to the story to speak for itself, and for the readers to talk amongst themselves and make their own decisions about what this book is.

The writer should more or less leave the premises. The writer should be, in some sense, an absentee parent. Or at least a very hands-off one.

Now, this relationship – the one between me, the writer, and you, the reader – is muddy despite my beliefs that a writer should flee the spotlight (or throne) whenever possible. If I’m writing about something extremely sensitive – say, apartheid, or something like that – it is my responsibility to be judicious and thoughtful when writing it. That should be the default mode at all times: ideally, any piece of writing should be informed by a humane and empathic sensibility, one that considers experiences external to one own, even if it isn’t about something delicate.

So here’s the ideal mode of the writer/reader relationship:

Even when writing about hard or sensitive things, the assumption should be that the writer is writing about this with care. The reader should trust that the writer is doing this, or attempting to, and if the writer is being lurid or provocative, the assumption should be that they are doing so for a reason.
Likewise, the writer should write assuming that the reader will be reading the story with the same trust and care. The writer should assume that the reader will not be taking the text at face value: the writer must trust that the reader understands that a book involving violence, for example, is not necessarily encouraging violence.

This is the ideal state.

But people fuck it up a lot.

Some writers will write stupid, offensive shit. Some readers will read stupid, offense shit into a work that might be neither. The latter can go both ways: some readers might read the work and say, “Boo, racism!” or some might alternately say, “Hooray, racism, because I am a racist!” (They won’t say that, because they don’t think they are. But they are.)

So the question is, what’s the writer’s responsibility in all this? Is it up to them to set the record straight?

My feeling is that the writer should shut up and basically either be a punching bag or stay out of it, regardless of whether or not the work is what people are claiming it is. (Probably both, really – the punching-bag aspect is inevitable.)

Seriously, how many times has a writer weighed in on a bad review and wound up looking stupid? And has that ever actually helped? When has the writer’s involvement ever actually fixed anything? It seems to me like it just makes it worse.

Here’s the deal, writers: if you write something, people get to say whatever they like about it. And, in my opinion, you don’t get to say anything back. You’ve had your say.

This isn’t about you. The deal is, everyone gets to read it, everyone’s reading of it is legitimate, and it’s up to the audience to figure it out. Even if they are saying some wildly fucked up shit about your work, your job – and it’s a cruddy job – is to placidly sit it out, or, better yet, get started writing the next thing.

This is their thing, their relationship. It’s like your kid fighting with their significant other, and though you might get mentioned a lot (“It’s because your crazy, stupid dad messed you all up!”), it’s not your fight. Let them figure it out. Even if it hurts you, it’s their decision.

 

WHY THE HELL ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS

The reason I’m writing this is because of – take a breath here now, because we’re gonna get deep – the recent discussion around trigger warnings.

Trigger warnings, for those who don’t know, are kind of like the warnings you get before television shows (“This show is rated TV MA-LSV”) except way more specific, in that what it’s warning you about is something along the lines of rape, domestic abuse, child abuse, etc.

It’s my general understanding that trigger warnings came about because the internet – in its infinite hunger for outrage and all manner of upsetting things – encourages sharing of incendiary material, and some of this material causes deep, terrible reactions in those who might have gone through the experience described in the material.

I completely understand this. It actually happens to me: sometimes I wish people would include trigger warnings for “infant died of brain cancer” because, hey, I have a kid, and that makes me feel all fucked up at work. I would prefer not to read that. It triggered a really nasty reaction in me. So it must be a million times worse if it’s actually happened to you.

Trigger warnings have since become somewhat popular with fiction. Some writers include trigger warnings for their stuff. Strong Female Protagonist, one of my favorite webcomics, included one before they tackled an arc in which gang rape was very, very obliquely (and, I think, tastefully) mentioned. And I support them for doing it. That’s a sensitive position to take, and SFP is very involved with their fans.

I know I’m never going to do it, though.

Some people complain about trigger warnings because they’re basically spoilers. “Watch out!” the trigger warning might say. “This story contains spousal abuse!” And then you spend the rest of the story waiting for the spousal abuse to come along.

That’s a somewhat legitimate issue with trigger warnings. But it’s not why I’m not going to do it.

My problem is that I genuinely, sincerely, honestly believe it is not my place to interject any bit of myself between you and what I wrote. Even if it’s to tell you to watch out, to help you.

That passage above about the white girl field hockey player from Connecticut, that’s authorial “helping” too. Authorial help is not, in my opinion, very helpful.

That’s why I tell myself every day that if I ever Make It (whatever that means) I am chunking this blog in the garbage and starting some oblique avant-garde website where you can’t figure out if I’m real or not. (I guess that’s what I do with twitter, anyway.)

I don’t want to be involved in your relationship with my books, even to smallest degree. I don’t want to hold your hand through the story. I don’t want you to like the story more because you think you like me. I want this to be about you and what I wrote.

 

DO YOU ACTUALLY THINK THIS CAN WORK

I can hear the questions out there, and they’re fair ones:

So you’re okay with this? You’re okay causing these sorts of horrible reactions in people, you’re willing to let that happen?

To which I have to say, hell no, I’m not okay with it.

I’ve had people tell me they read my books and spent all night crying. I’ve had people tell me my books violently reminded them of their fucked up relationships with their parents. I’ve had one person tell me – once, agonizingly – that I had accurately captured the feeling of losing a child, because they had gone through that.

And I could tell, each time, that it had fucked them all up. This thing I made had done this to them. My book had fucked them all up.

Except it didn’t. I didn’t do this, I didn’t sneak into their heads and make this happen. I didn’t set them out to remind them of their deceased child. What breaks one reader’s heart will completely bounce off another’s.

We all bring our own baggage to our books. It’s a muddy relationship, but I still think the reader does most of the work. It’s the reader who animates the horrors in all the corners of a book. And the reader is who what makes all the good parts beautiful.

Is it fair? No. Does it make me feel good? No. It makes me feel like dogshit. I still don’t know how to react to, “Your book made me cry.” Do I thank them? Do I apologize? And then the next reader will walk up and say, “That part was hilarious,” and I’ll wonder what the hell is wrong with them.

Despite our image of authorial authority – one imagines a writer like a provocative director of a play, imagining upsetting scenarios – I don’t have any control over you. I don’t control what you see. I can’t make you like my books. And I also can’t make my books not hurt you.

But – But! – I do think that it’s my place to take the criticism if you’re giving it out. If you think my book should have had trigger warnings, it’s completely okay for you to get all over Amazon and all over Goodreads and give me 1-star reviews for not doing so. By all means, write essays about it, tell all your friends about it.

That’s your prerogative as reader, as audience member. If you think I’m an insensitive piece of shit, you can grab a megaphone and sing it from the mountains.

And I won’t stop you. I’ll stay completely silent. I won’t raise a single hand to defend myself. Because that’s the deal. Your reading of my work, no matter what it is, is legitimate. It’s your reading. And it’s not my place to overrule you, even the tiniest bit.

Is this a good relationship? Is this a good way to leave this world, as writer and reader? Is this healthy? I don’t particularly know. I doubt it. But I think it might be the right way to do it. To warn you about something would be to distance myself from it, to abandon it – to a certain extent, it’s to avoid responsibility for it.

But it’s a moot point. If what I wrote is bad, really, genuinely hurtful, it’s me, the writer, who should be the fall guy for it. And I should fall all the way, if that’s the case.

Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is one of the strangest, most dream-like novels I’ve ever read. I struggle to find anything to compare it to – some other reviews have noted the Atwood similarities, particularly with the alternations between following the present and reflections upon a melancholy, difficult past – but for the first three quarters of the book, the only thing I could think of was video games.

Not just any video games – not Super Smash Brothers or Halo or the like. Rather, it made me think of the lonely, survivor/mystery games that have never seemed to really break into the blockbuster mainstream, games like Myst or Silent Hill or the online games where a nameless protagonist is trapped in a room riddled with obscure messages. These games are often cult classics that are difficult to duplicate and difficult to explain why they’re enjoyable – because in so many of these games, there’s long stretches of silence in which either very little happens or very little is understood.

These games use something that novels can use only very rarely, and often with little success: the unknown.

And I mean the complete unknown. Not the whole, “what’s in that room, I can’t see it” unknown, but the “who is this protagonist, why are they here, what’s going on” sort of unknown, an unknown in which much is happening and everything suggests hidden meanings, but at the end of it, it’s impossible to conclude exactly what is going on. Novels can’t often do this – without the immediate action of video games, the unknowability leaves little to grab onto in a book – but to my disbelief, Annihilation succeeds. This quality, of course, must tread a very thin line between tantalization and frustration, but Annihilation does so, perhaps aided by the length of the book (I suspect it’d be quite hard to maintain this over 500 pages) and the stick-to-the-facts nature of the protagonist.

What to say of the protagonist? It’s hard for me to decide. She is a biologist (this is the only name we have for her), part of a team of women sent to explore a strange place. With her are a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor. But the biologist, we find, is untrustworthy and unreliable, both because of who she is and because of her circumstances.

She has arrived in a verdant, natural, but somewhat alien location described only as Area X, and in order to make this journey she and the rest of her team of explorers had to be hypnotized. This hypnosis, as we quickly gather, was far more pervasive than she and the reader thought, and soon the reader has an abundance of reasons to distrust her. Does she know why she’s here? Why was it so important for her not to know? What is this place? What happened here, and why does she not know? What has she been programmed to do? Why is it that everyone in this team has so thoroughly shrugged off their names? They came to this place through a door – but where is this door?

The first indication at how strange and bewildering this protagonist would be was, for me, a scene in which they discover a vast underground staircase, tunneling straight down into the earth. This is the first scene of the novel, but what makes it strange is that the biologist begins by calling it a “tower.” It’s only when her compatriots begin describing it as a tunnel that it makes it clear to the reader that what she is observing and recording may not be as linked to the real world as a reader would assume. She insists on calling it a tower, and her frustration builds and builds until, out of the blue in a strategic conversation:

“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” I confessed. “I can’t see it as a tunnel.” It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. I saw a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.

All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a moment the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable, then I don’t see the harm.”

This scene actually provoked nervous laughter in me. What a peculiar thing to do! What a peculiar thing to think, as if insisting a car was a sailboat or a road a river! What is the meaning of her strange association, we wonder? And yet it quickly becomes apparent that the rest of the team is just as damaged, paranoid, and untrustworthy as she.

The book is a meditation on observation and mimicry, I think, a book about observers sent to observe something that cannot be observed. Something vast and alive and intelligent is living in or below or around Area X, performing strange acts for unknowable reasons – in some ways, the book’s closest cousin is Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem. These people were sent here to witness something that cannot be witnessed.

In another aspect, though, perhaps the book functions as an exploration of relationships: the biologist agreed to go to Area X only because her husband was on the previous expedition, and mysteriously returned in a strange state and quickly died of cancer. Her reflections upon their difficult, dissolving marriage are among the book’s most moving. There is a reason she carries a microscope with her wherever she goes: she chooses to be a watcher, an observer, but never engaged, never open or intermingling, and it is this nature that doomed their relationship. As the story proceeds, the unknowability of other humans parallels with the unknowability of Area X – though it suggests, however peripherally, that perhaps love can function much like spores: a series of small, insignificant, invisible gestures and moments that land upon the mind and form fruiting bodies, slowly colonizing you in a manner that is both inextricable and terrifying and lovely.

Toward the end of the book I became increasingly aware that this was the first in a trilogy. Some was explained at the end (maybe too much, I sometimes wondered – the tantalizing opaqueness dissolves as the biologist begins to lift the veil on the nature of Area X, and sometimes I wished the book ended with my knowing as little as I started), but much of it is not concluded. I look forward to reading the rest of the series the moment they become available.

No dog food for Victor tonight

It’s my pleasure to tell you that AMERICAN ELSEWHERE has been nominated for a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award.

This is a real thrill for me. I’ve never been to Readercon (I’ll definitely be going this year) but I seem to bump into Readercon peeps all the time, and I get along very well with them. Moreso, the 2010 Shirley Jackson I won for MR. SHIVERS was the first major writing event of my life, and it came at a time when I needed it. Four years later, my respect and appreciation for the award has grown: I know more of what it means, and I’m increasingly grateful for the leg up it gave me.

So it’s an honor to be nominated, and I’ll definitely be there this year. If I win this time, I won’t get the news while sitting in a bath at home, hungover, like last time. But I think I’ll really just be looking forward to the company, no matter what happens.

But I have some more fun AMERICAN ELSEWHERE news: the book has been optioned by the BBC America production company as a TV show.

If you follow other writers, you may be aware that optioning is a real shot in the arm, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything. At best, it’s one small step on a long, long path. As my friend David Liss wisely put it, it’s getting paid to hold a lottery ticket. But I’m tremendously pleased to be here and to have someone value what I’ve done to this degree. It’s a huge honor.

And I’m truly, deeply thankful to the fans and readers out there who like my stuff and continue to read it, with or without awards and TV shows.

LibraryThing giveaway

Heyo! We got another CITY OF STAIRS giveaway here! Get em while they’re the book equivalent of hot!

Some other stuff that is over and dead, besides novels

Because the Guardian went ahead and declared novels as dead, I thought it’d be useful for me to join in and list some other stuff that uninformed people think is common and good, but is actually dead and not done anymore.

Here you go:

1. Windows – Windows are completely passé at this point. There used to be a market for people inside of a thing, like a building or a car or maybe a boat, that also wanted to see outside of that thing, but it’s proven to be a fad and we’re moving beyond it. Where I am people generally avoid windows or they just forget they’re there. Sometimes they glance at a window and say, “gosh, what a weird part of this wall,” and when they realize they’ve been looking out of a window they’re really embarrassed.

2. Shoes – Shoes are just weirdo gloves for your feet with thick palms (the palm-part being the part of the foot-glove that goes down on the ground, in this description). Once we got iPhones and started snapchatting, it quickly became apparent that it was pretty ridiculous that we’d had these things for the past hundred or so years. I’m still not sure why we were putting things on that particular part of the body. It was a big lol, that moment. I lolled.

3. Anything smaller than a bird – These are unnecessary. A bird is the appropriate minimum size of a thing. Other, smaller things – like coins, spiders, little rocks, a baby’s eye – are not needed. We’ve woken up and realized we’ve been burdened by these ridiculous fripperies for too long.

4. Containers that are wider than they are tall – This one is self-explanatory. I don’t use plates with edges anymore, personally, and I don’t know anyone who does, nor would I wish to.

5. Face-touching with the mouth-part of the face – When people were very drunk they used to do this, to touch their mouths to other people’s mouths, but as times have changed it’s become clear that this particular act is wholly unneeded, and a waste of time.

Why we need diverse books

This is just a quick thought I wanted to throw together that was too long to go on Twitter, where #WeNeedDiverseBooks is trending.

A book is fundamentally a perspective: it is an observation of an issue or subject told from what is often a singular vantage point. Even though the book might feature multiple characters and their points of view, the observations are frequently all coming from one localized point.

Now, think of this in terms of science: let’s say you want to figure out a phenomenon. You want to understand what’s happening. So what do you do? Do you record data from only one perspective, exploring only one facet, depending on one singular feed of information?

No, of course you don’t. Instead, you triangulate. You look at the phenomenon from different vantage points, using different methods. You take data samples from multiple perspectives, as many as you can, trying to record all the various impacts and effects this phenomenon could have.

To not do this would be dishonest, dangerous, and lazy. You would gloss the truth of the phenomenon, never coming close to understanding what is actually happening, and, as is very likely, you’d instead simply record the phenomenon in your own preferred terms. Because let’s be honest, the primary reason you’d want to depend on one singular dataset is probably because it’s telling you something you want to hear.

Now, let’s assume that in books, the phenomenon we wish to learn more about is the human condition.

What chance will we ever have of ever coming close to understanding who we are and what we want if we limit ourselves to one perspective?

The only choice we have, I think, is diversifying our perspectives as much as we feasibly can.

City of Stairs – UK Cover

CITY OF STAIRS will be released simultaneously in the UK by Quercus Books. They’ve done up their own lovely cover for it, which I have the privilege of now releasing for you here:

 

So if you’re across the pond, that’s what you’ll want to keep an eye out for on the shelves.

Related: Kristin from My Bookish Ways has kindly organized a giveaway for the book over on Goodreads (where I am obligate to say that the book currently maintains a near-perfect score). You can submit to win here. 

Fun stuff!

On whale oil and lifestyle choices

Today is Earth Day, a day that, weirdly enough, I feel somewhat ambivalent about. This isn’t because I have problems with the planet Earth – that’s where I keep all my stuff – but I have some problems with the cultural sustainability movement itself.

I can distill my problems down to one moment: walking through Dillard’s and coming upon a line of bamboo products. They had bamboo cutting boards, bamboo cups, even bamboo bedsheets, actual sheets made of intensely processed bamboo. This was being sold as a highly green, sustainable product, because it’s made out of bamboo, which grows super-fast, and it also benefits from what I suspect to be an Asian Exoticism – to folks in the US, anything slightly Asian is mysteriously better. Because of these collective influences, bamboo is a hot product in the green market.

But here’s the thing – just earlier in the year I’d attended an architectural materials seminar discussing the specifications of building materials in depth, and I was aware that bamboo was actually not a very sustainable product at all.

First of all, most of it’s grown and shipped out of China. So almost all of the agriculture and collection was coal- or oil-powered, and then they had to put it on a bigass ship and send it across the ocean over here, which uses God knows how much oil. Secondly, bamboo is not like pine or other conventional woods: it’s tough to work with and it frequently takes a not-insignificant amount of chemical treatment to make it pliable. And thirdly, holy shit, you want to make bedsheets out of wood? (I know bamboo is technically a grass, but still.) Do you know how much energy that takes to do?

But bamboo remains a hot commodity for people interested in sustainability. And that’s my problem with the sustainability movement: to a certain extent, it’s a culture. For its purchasing demographic, sustainability is not a series of technological developments, but it’s a lifestyle choice, almost verging on being a religion.

And that means that it’s not for everyone, it’s for my people, and the real problem is that there are people who aren’t your people whose only choice is to become your people. “If you were smart,” you’d say to those Others, “you’d convert.”

And that’s really easy to turn down.

*             *             *

The upshot is, there are a lot of exciting things happening right now. All of them are good for the majority of people. Some of them, if not most of them, also align with the sustainability movement.

The big winner, as innumerable financial and economic forecasters have noted, is solar power, which has had an unprecedented drop-off in price, coupled with a marked increase in efficiency. If experts are to be believed, by 2020, and without tax credits, solar power will be as cheap as coal, if not cheaper. Here in Austin it’s already cheaper, albeit with tax credits.

(To those who decry governments propping up ridiculous energy sources, please consider this.)

And not only is the cost of solar plummeting, but the efficiency is still improving every month – with some pending advances that could make solar panels generate well over twice as much energy.

The remaining issue is storage – what do you do when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? – but the tech industry is anticipating this. Between Elon Musk’s Tesla battery factory, the new, cheap, flow battery, and significant advances in graphene (which Samsung and researchers in Ireland are figuring out to produce in industrial quantities), the storage market is looking to mimic the solar photovoltaic (PV) market in increased scale, decreased cost, competitiveness, and consistent technological advances. And with the plummeting cost of solar PV, there’s plenty of reason to try to stake out territory.

*             *             *

So things are changing. These changes are technological, and they’re chiefly self-interested. I mean, these people aren’t making these investments out of the goodness of their hearts: they’re making these investments because if someone can figure out how to harness, capture, and utilize all the energy falling out of the sky, then they could make a metric shitload of money.

In other words, these advances in sustainability are, in some part, occurring independent of the bamboo-enthusiast wing of the green movement, the hyper-critical Greenzos of the world. And I think it’d cause active harm to lump these huge advances in with the cultural sustainability movement.

Making sustainability and technological advances of this kind a lifestyle choice, an explicitly cultural domain, would be akin to saying that only white people use bank accounts, that that’s a white people thing to do. Essentially, it’s restricting what potentially could be an enormously helpful mechanism into rigid cultural boundaries. And that sucks.

But though energy has become a partisan and cultural issue over the past 50-75 years, it can’t stay that way. Mainly because the market won’t tolerate it, even if you try and use the government to stamp it out. (A curious tactic from players who are frequently anti-taxes and anti-government meddling in the market.) If something’s reliable, useful, and dirt cheap, then people will want it.

Try and imagine a counter-smartphone movement in the early aughts of this century, a political organization focusing all of its strength on ending the proliferation of smartphones. Try and imagine a counter-computer movement in the 80’s and 90’s, lobbying groups focusing to prevent increased electronic data storage. Unimaginable, right?

It’s tech, just tech. It’s not a lifestyle choice, it’s a device, a tool. And tech will always keep getting better and cheaper, and people will want to buy it more and more.

*             *             *

If you didn’t know already, I think about science fiction a lot. And a big part of science fiction is changing a rule in the world and trying to predict how the world would react to that change. What if people could, say, teleport? Or clone themselves? Or upload memories into one another’s brains? What would the short-term exploitations of this new rule change be? How would it change everyday life? What would the unintended consequences be?

So the idea of solar intensely intrigues me, because, well, it’s something we’ve never dealt with before. Energy has always been a hugely centralized industry: it takes money to find fossil fuels, money to buy the land, money to dig them out of the earth, money to transport them, money to refine them, and finally money to distribute them. It’s an enormous chain of supply that can only be shouldered by someone with a lot of money. So to a certain extent, energy has always been about depending on a few very wealthy players.

(And in case you’re wondering, I’m not one of the self-flagellating types who condemns all of humanity for using a resource to the greatest extent it possibly could. I don’t believe that humanity or nature ever existed in a perfect Garden of Eden state: I think nature’s always been in flux and that we, as a species, are kind of an anomaly, a breed of creature that became exponentially adept at finding exceptions to every natural rule. Other species existed before us that were in the right time and the right place to reproduce to the extent that they had consequences on their environment. We’ve just hugely, hugely, hugely scaled that up.)

But the recent technological advances suggest a state of human civilization that’s never been around before: a distributed energy system, where someone could theoretically be able to afford cheap solar PV and storage, and live on their own without having to depend on someone to provide fuel and energy for them and manage the energy market. It might not happen for decades, but it could, theoretically, eventually come about.

In some ways, it’s a Libertarian dream come true. In others, it’s potentially a way to lessen inequality all around the globe. If just anybody can get their own electricity – if there are no gatekeepers, no one with their hand on the tap – who knows what we could do?

This has happened before to other industries, of course. Publishing, for example. The telephone system for another, as I mentioned above. This isn’t the first potential industry disruption.

And it’s not the first disruption the energy market’s ever had, either.

A couple of hundred years ago we depended on a very specific animal for energy. The world created a tremendous industry solely for hunting this animal, extracting the energy resource from the carcass, refining it, and shipping the energy all over the world. The capital of this industry was New Bedford, Massachusetts, and when the captains of this industry heard that a group of entrepreneurs believed it’d be possible to extract a new source of energy out of the ground, rather than extracting it from the corpse of this very specific animal, they laughed it off.

But no one uses whale oil to light their lamps these days.

We look back on that era and we find it odd and barbaric. The idea of human beings chasing whales across the sea, slaughtering them, and cracking open their skulls to access their oil – all so that humans could light their lamps ­– is unthinkable to us now. “How could they have done that,” we ask, “when we were sitting on vast oceans of oil, just a few hundred feet below the surface of the Earth?”

Sometimes I think we might one day find our current energy industry as strange and ridiculous as we do whale oil. “Why did they ever have to drill down into the earth and suck up goop made out of long-dead plants,” or children might ask, “when all around them energy was falling on their shoulders, every day? Why would anyone ever go to all that work?”

How to get an agent

My last post about writing advice came with a few questions – namely, if you can’t tell us how to write, then what the hell are you good for, anyway – so I thought I’d write a post about the one piece of advice I probably can give with good conscience: how to submit to an agent.

The underlying theme of this post, as you will see, is Be Professional. You know how the Cub Scouts have “Be Prepared”? It’s kind of like that, except elementary school kids have actually shown some success at being prepared, whereas most writers out there are seemingly allergic to being professional. This may have something to do with being stuck indoors all day making shit up, but it still speaks to the big point of this piece: there’s already lots of factors contributing to an agent sending you a rejection, you don’t want for your own damn self to be one of them.

Anyway. On with the listcicle, or whatever they call them these days.

1. Finish it.

Agents are, on the whole, busy people. Either they already have a full roster of clients, or they’re helping out their agency, or they’re trying to build their roster as much as they can. In short, their time is limited, and they aren’t going to want to spend their time on an idea. They’re going to want to spend their time on a book.

Yes, a real, finished book. Not an outline written on a church flyer. Not a handful of pages. If they’re gonna look at it, they’re gonna want to see the whole thing.

So, finish your book, first and foremost. Don’t put the cart before the horse. Not finishing it would be akin to trying to get investors to sink money into an innovation that you haven’t even gotten to work once yet.

2. Cut it. A lot.

Chances are, if you’re a burgeoning writer, you’re probably not too sure of yourself right now. No writer really is – writers are some of the most insecure people I’ve ever met, probably because of the alone-in-a-room-all-day thing I mentioned above – but when you’re first starting out, you haven’t had a myriad of people tell you with surgical, professional detail which parts of the thing you made are completely terrible.

As such, you’re probably not too sure of yourself, so you’re going to overdo it to compensate.

I want you to think of something: think of a mason building their first wall. They’re laying bricks, but they’re not quiiiiite sure if the bricks are sitting right. So what do they do? They slap on mortar. Lots of it. And then, you know, the mortar looks a little uneven, so what does the mason do? They slap on more mortar. More and more and more, because they’re really nervous this wall isn’t going to stand up.

So what do they have at the end? A lumpy-ass wall with hardly any brick visible.

There’s about a 60% chance this is what you wrote in your first draft. Probably greater, but I’m being nice here because you’re cute and I’m getting soft in my old age.

Here’s the thing: with writing, less is more. The reader is doing almost all the work for you. They’re the ones putting flesh on all the faces in their heads, they’re the ones coloring in all the CGI explosions. All the extra shit you’re throwing in there just to make sure they Get It? You don’t need it.

Cut it. Cut it all. Cut it to the bones, then cut some more. Keep cutting. As Le Carre put it, the point of writing is to distill the essence of a whole cow in a cube of bouillon.

3. Stick it away somewhere.

Okay, so you wrote a book. Yes. It’s a big deal, something most people never do, so pat yourself on the back. Seriously, give yourself a spiritual thumbs up. Have a second glass of white wine before reading the New Testament tonight, because you deserve to have a little fun.

Now stick the thing away somewhere in the dark and don’t read it for a month.

Now, I can hear you getting impatient – you want to be successful right now, I get it – but you don’t want to give your prospective agent a possible shitshow, do you? You want this to be totally and completely the best thing you’ve ever done, right?

Then you need some distance, especially at this stage in your writing career. You’re all bound up in this thing. You can’t be trusted to look at it with a critical eye – chances are, if you look at it right now, you’ll just slap on more mortar. You need distance. You need some breathing room.

It’s like a one-night stand or a whirlwind affair – take some time by yourself outside of this relationship before you return to it and decide if this is really something, or if it’s just meeting a base, immediate need.

And it’s okay if it is. Writing is like painting: the first few are likely stinkers. You’re not Creating A Novel, what you’re doing is building up your literary muscle and connective tissue. Because listen, you’re not going to just jump in a pool and perform a perfect butterfly stroke the first time out. This takes work.

Something to keep in mind during this Time Apart period:

1. DON’T get any bright fucking ideas for mixing up your novel. DON’T read something cool and say, “Yeah, I’ll throw this in, too!” It either stands on its own or it doesn’t.

2. DON’T start doubting yourself. You wrote a book. You must have thought it was good. It’s not like radioactive material, decaying and turning shitty in some cupboard in the dark.

3. DON’T start anything new. Usually what you’ll be doing is something similar enough to what you already wrote that the two will lean on each other like drunks at a bar, like chimera twins.

4. Cut. Again.

So, you’ve let it sit. You’ve got some distance on it.

Now come back to it and read it like a reader.

This is hard. This is maybe the hardest part. You’ve got to read the thing that’s a product of you as if you’re somebody else. It’s like watching a sex tape with you in it – you can’t get too embarrassed, and you can’t get too defensive here, either. You need to stay impartial and detached, and find the flaws in what’s on the page. (This metaphor kind of fell apart but I don’t care.)

Your instinct will be to add more. Don’t. Cut instead. Your instincts will find weaknesses, but don’t put on more words. You need to be a sculptor, shaving away excess to reveal the design beneath.

5. Let someone else read this puppy.

Now’s when you get it beta read.

If you’re having ANY doubts right now – any “I can’t let someone see this” kind of total panic attacks – you’re not ready to be a writer. Because if you actually break in to the industry, a whole, whole, whole lot of people are going to read your stuff, and they’re gonna read it hard. I don’t know if you need to take a spiritual journey to find your self-confidence, maybe go on a road trip or find your spirit animal or whatever, but if you can’t send someone who’s a good, hard beta reader your stuff, then you’re not ready for primetime.

Now, make sure to pick your beta reader with care. Absolutewrite.com is a great place to find someone who’s not a complete asshole, but also isn’t a total softy. In fact, maybe go get an account on the forums there now and just hang out for a year or two. That’s where I started.

Some bloggers beta read, too. In fact, they get requests nonstop. So, if you want them to beta read you, and take you seriously, read their reviews thoughtfully and engage them. Talk to them, leave comments. That’s crystal meth for most bloggers.

Now, your beta reader is going to come back with comments. And Neil Gaiman once said a very true thing:

When someone says there’s a problem with a book, they’re almost always right. That thing is a problem.

But when they say how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

So take their concerns seriously, but take their advice with a grain of salt. Be polite, but don’t let them write your book for you. But the odds are, the solution is somewhere in what they’re saying. And sometimes you realize you’ve been thinking of the solution all along, you just didn’t know.

INTERLUDE: Being a worrywart

Okay, so you did some tough edits, you let someone beta read, you took their comments seriously.

Now, if you’re still uncertain, go through steps 2-5 ad nauseum. Do it until you’re confident of your work. You need to actually believe that the thing you wrote is The Thing, because that confidence will show through: it’ll make you research your agents more, it’ll make you make your queries more professional, it’ll give you the stamina you need to see this through to the end.

But don’t be too insecure. Some writers get stuck in this stage forever. Again, if you’re content to dither and fret, you’re not ready to be a professional writer. At some point in time, you got to cut the umbilical cord.

7. Research your agents.

Agents are sort of the border mavens of publishing, in a way: some edit, some don’t, but all of them essentially exist because their heads are (hopefully) giant rolodexes and encyclopedias of what editor is where, what imprint is looking for what, what did well, what didn’t, what overseas publishers are hungry for this, that, or the other…

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Editors are much tougher to pitch to. This is because editors are busy advocating for their books, and when they’re not doing that, they’re listening to agents. Agents are the personal advocates of The Writer, in any state – unpublished or not. Editors are advocates of The Book, but chances are they’re only advocates of The Book That’s Been Bought. The Book That’s Been Bought has gone through a lot of stages first. And a lot of those stages start with an agent. That’s why you need one.

Now, agents do a lot of stuff. Not all agents are right for you. This is when that confidence comes in: this is something you slaved over, right? You’re looking for the person who could carry not only your book but your whole career into the constellations themselves, and set your figure among the stars next to Orion, right?

So make sure you’re not picking a chump. You’re worth it.

Also, don’t try and bring someone something they don’t want to buy. Don’t bring SFF to a YA mainstream agent. Don’t bring a book of poetry to someone doing Weird Fiction. Agents multitask and sell a lot of things, yeah, but try and get their tastes down first. This is what they spend their days and nights on: they are almost CERTAINLY unlikely to make an exception for you. I know you’re a delicate, special snowflake and all, but the odds are very, very, very low that they’re going to undertake a book they don’t do just out of the goodness of their heart.

8. Follow the rules, and be professional.

Okay, you picked out your top 10 agents, right? Now’s when you start querying.

Agents will have explicit instructions on their website about how to query them. If they don’t, they’re not what you’re looking for. (Or they aren’t taking on any new clients.)

Follow those rules. Follow them oh, oh so carefully. If they say they want the first ten pages, give them that. If they don’t ask for those, don’t give them that. This SHOULD be simple, but most newbie writers are desperate, so they’ll do the equivalent of asking their classmate to prom by playing them a lute solo in the middle of lunch at the cafeteria.

You want to be totally radioactive and untouchable? Don’t follow the rules. Assume you’re special, and your book is special and you both deserve special accommodations by these seasoned professionals. That’s a great way to never get published.

This is when work experience comes in handy. Have you ever had to send an email to 15+ important, busy people about a big project? That’s how professional you want to be.

The problem is, most writers aren’t professional. Writers – even ones making money – seem to exist in a state of arrested development. They want to think everyone’s a fan of the stuff they like – and, sure, agents and editors wouldn’t be in this if they weren’t fans, but this is how they make their living. They have people gushing at them all over the place. What they want is something straightforward and by the numbers. They want to see that you know the rules and you’re willing to follow them. They want to see that you’re stable and dependable. No one wants their lawyer or accountant be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so the same goes for you, Mrs. or Mr. Professional Writer.

Here are some pointers:

1. Don’t be cute. For the love of fucking God, don’t be cute. Don’t start your query with something like, “Darkness is falling in the realm of Cantilverde…” or any of that bullshit. Talk to them like a possible investor. This is a business proposal, not a performance or a god damned magic show.

2. MAKE SURE you get their name right. E-blasts will get you blocked, and rightfully so.

3. Practice your pitch. Pretend like you’re talking to someone at a party, and the subject of your book organically comes up. You like it, right? You think others should read it, right? So practice communicating what’s fun about it. OR: imagine you’re discussing someone else’s work, and you’re advocating on their behalf. That’s what you want to write in your query.

4. Don’t withhold the plot. Spoil away. Like I said, they want to see everything they could be buying.

5. Don’t talk about yourself or your family unless it’s really important. “My mom likes this” is such a turnoff. Unless you’re an Iraqi war vet or your dad was Ghandi or something, odds are no one cares.

6. Personalize your query. You’ve done your research, right? Mention the other books they’ve agented – which you’ve read now, right? – or some of the blog posts they’ve done. This is a professional way of saying, “You’ve attracted my interest because of your personal qualities and features, and because of this I have something that might be of interest to you.” Most will not do this. Most writers will come at them like, “I VAGUELY UNDERSTAND YOU ARE A GATEKEEPER TO PUBLISHING, PLEASE IMMEDIATELY MAKE ALL MY DREAMS COME TRUE.” This is a god damned working person on the other end of this email. Value and treat them like one.

9. Do whatever they hell they say. In the most professional manner possible, of course.

If they ask for the first three chapters, give them those.

If they ask for the whole thing, do that.

If they say no, don’t beg and plead and whine. It’s over: let it go, and move on.

And from this point on, act like a real professional, someone whose time is valuable and who recognizes everyone else’s time is valuable too. Be professional in how you treat them, how you respond to them shopping your book around – don’t call them crying on the phone – and in how you act online about this whole experience.

Writing means art, but professional means business. People want their professionals – in all industries – to be courteous, considerate, prompt, and dependable. They expect the best of you because it’s your job to give the best. It’s their job to give the same.

But don’t forget: being professional not only means that you understand other people are valuable, but that you are, too. You have something you do well, something you worked on, something you’re serious about. Don’t undersell it.

Good luck.