Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 68

Out of Context (Overheard at 4th Street 2011)

Rather than do a normal sort of round-up of how wonderful last weekend's Fourth Street Fantasy con was, I opted to collect an assortment of interesting comments heard and overheard during the course of the weekend. A few were made by panelists on actual panels; some were made at panels by members of the audience; quite a few were simply overheard in the con suite or in the halls. Unlike the semi-official con recorder, I didn't get attributions for many of them. I have mixed feelings about this: on the one hand, it would have been nice to be able to acknowledge particular people for their wit or the depth of their insights; on the other, pretty much everyone at Fourth Street was being witty, intelligent, and insightful, on and off panels, and I think perhaps the unattributed quotes give more of the flavor of the con.

So here, unattributed and in no particular order, are a few things that caught my attention during the course of the weekend. Should this inspire anyone with interest in next year's convention, the link is here.

 On to the quotations:

I've been artificial for over a year now.

So if the monsters are human, and the humans are monsters, it's really a definition problem?

In case you haven't had breakfast yet, there are cheese blintzes in the consuite.

Some of us write by the seat of our pants.

Point of view solves all your problems.

If the author is being obviously sneaky, this is not a plus.

Genre books are built around secrets.

The author borrows the reader's brain; if he leaves potato chips ground into the carpet, we have a right to be upset.

History will do what it wants, and so will I.

Cows on spaceships? OMG, the methane!

Yeast-risen bread is hard to make when you're migrating.

Nobody is going to domesticate a wolverine.

Writers like audiences. They pay the bills.

I'm a writer; I don't know how to retire.

Is this row knitting friendly?

I am not in this position, but I'd sure like to be.

I was trying to see how many genres I could fit into one series.

Writing about one main character is not limiting if that character provides what the author needs artistically.

Readers come at you from such different directions that it is catastrophic to pay attention to them.

If you worry about making your audience angry, you will bore them, and then it's time to get a job at Walmart.

You can either leave readers wanting more, or leave them wanting less…and if you leave them wanting less, there is retroactive damage to the series.

People in most fantasy novels are strangely healthy with very good teeth.

I am impervious to your eyeballs.

The world is weirder than we thought.

Oh, are those fingers tasty?

A well executed death makes the world seem less messy.

I don't write fiction. I'm not that brave.

Sometimes you just have to line your characters up against a wall and ask, OK, which one of you guys is screwing things up?

Not all experiments get you a parade in the streets.

Being miserable in a tent is intrinsic to the teen experience.

If you're not a control freak, you're not really a writer.

When society is monstrous, monsters become human.

If you want money, become a banker.

You're not going to run a whole culture on nothing but mushrooms.

Having two publishers is like being a bigamist who doesn't want to give up either wife.

Humans use magic; monsters are magic.

There is nothing less interesting than a universe in which no one ever grows, no one ever changes, and no one ever dies.

What Everybody Knows

On the very first day at Fourth Street Fantasy convention (which as of this posting, is still in session for another half-day or so), Elizabeth Bear mentioned running into a writing myth I'd never heard myself before: Women can't ride stallions, because stallions get aggressive around women. Geldings or mares only for female riders, please.

Say, what?   

This particular bit of misinformation is officially categorized as an urban legend. I call it a writing myth as well, because, while it is not a myth about writing, it is typical of a particular class of background misinformation that gets some writers (and occasionally editors) in trouble.

Specifically, the class of things that one is so sure of that one is positive one doesn't need to check them out. Things "everybody knows," or things that one learned from some supposed expert or authority figure. So the writer doesn't check, and the misinformation gets propagated further. If the writer is lucky, the copyeditor will fact-check the assertion and point out the problem. If the writer is unlucky, then either a) the copyeditor will not check, and the writer won't find out about the mistake until the story is in print, at which point the writer will learn about it from the most obnoxious fan at the convention, at the worst possible time, or b) the writer will have based a key scene or plot point on the misinformation, necessitating rewriting large chunks of the story when the copyeditor catches the mistake.

And then there are the things you find out that are verifiably true, but you can't use because "everybody knows" something different. When I was writing Mairelon the Magician, I discovered that the use of "pig" as a vulgar slang term for the cops dates back to the 17th century. I thought that was really interesting, but there was no possible way I could use it in a novel set in an alternate 1814 England. After all, "everybody knows" that calling cops "pigs" dates from the 1960s. Similarly, there's no way I would use the term "gay" to describe something bright and cheerful in a book set in the 1890s, even though that was what the word meant then. The word has been very thoroughly repurposed since then, and it's too difficult for most modern readers to make the mental shift.

Once in a while, it's worth the effort to fight to correct a particularly egregious and common "everybody knows," but most of the time, trying to make it clear within the story that this is neither an accidental mistake nor an ill-informed invention on the writer's part just throws the whole story out of balance and puts far too much emphasis on a minor bit of information. What this means is that sooner or later, someone is going to come up to you after the story is published and explain that you have gotten things wrong - that the word "telegraph" was not in use until after Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in the mid-1840s; that women can't ride stallions; and so on. Almost invariably, these people inspire a deep desire in the writer to commit violence; equally invariably, there is no point in arguing with them. Experience shows that even if one says "The Oxford English Dictionary has four citations of the use of telegraph in the 1790s," (sorry; mine's a paper copy, so I can't post a link) the person will simply blink and reiterate, "Yes, but there were no telegraphs until the mid-1800s."

In other words, getting the facts right will not protect you from the terminally misinformed. Every writer I know who's been around for more than a book or two has run into someone like this, and none of us enjoy the experience. (Even worse are the people who have confused their personal convictions and opinions about the past with historical fact, and who are perfectly ready to go on for hours or pages about their pet topic, whether that is a JFK-assassination-conspiracy theory, what the primary cause of the American Civil War was, or whether Ares and Aphrodite were considered lovers by the Ancient Greeks.

This nearly always prompts someone to say, "Well, if people are going to think it's wrong anyway, why bother with all that research?" And some writers do adopt this attitude. Me, I'd rather be criticized by people who are provably wrong in their claims (go look at the OED; there really are four cites for "telegraph", from 1794 to 1798, and a bunch more in the early 1800s) than by the people who actually know what they are talking about. Especially if a plot-point depends on it.

Surprise and Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock gave a famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense. It boils down to this: If a bunch of guys are playing poker and suddenly a bomb goes off under the table, that's a surprise. It's not what the viewer expects. If, however, the viewer knows the bomb is there from the start, and watches the timer ticking down toward zero while the men play on, oblivious, that's suspense.

The definition assumes a couple of things, not least that the viewer (or reader) actually cares about what happens when the bomb goes off. Note that it doesn't actually matter much whether the reader cares because the hero is playing poker and the reader doesn't want him blown up, or because the villain is supposed to be in the game but hasn't arrived yet and the reader/viewer is hoping that the bomb won't go off until he gets there.

It's a great definition, and it illustrates one of the basic techniques for creating tension or suspense: let the reader know more than any one character knows, so that the reader can see trouble coming a long way off. But it's not quite as simple as that, and trying to apply this technique without some level of understanding often results in false suspense.

For instance, take a slightly different situation: the heroine has discovered a plan to kidnap her son; she calls his cell phone, but there's no answer. The kid frequently forgets to charge the phone, though, so he might still be fine. She jumps in the car and tears across town to his last known location -

- and halfway there, she gets stopped for ten minutes by one of those hundred-car freight trains going by.

That's false suspense. The train doesn't just stop the heroine; it stops the story, because the story doesn't progress until the heroine gets where she's going and a) finds her son, b) doesn't find her son, but finds a clue as to where he's gone, or c) arrives just in time to foil (or not foil) the kidnap attempt. Yes, waiting for the train makes it more likely that she won't get there in time, but dragging out the trip for no story-related reason annoys most readers. So you don't want to do that.

The basic elements of suspense are the same as for any story: a protagonist we care about and something important at stake. What creates the suspense is the reader's awareness of some reason why the protagonist is very likely to fail. It can be something the protagonist doesn't know about, like the bomb under the table, or it can be something the protagonist does know about, like his own fear of heights or alcoholism. One can get a tremendous amount of tension and suspense out of a scene in which a former alcoholic, pushed almost to the edge, hesitates in front of the door to a bar, or studies the cocktail tray at a big party.

Usually, a suspenseful scene has some sort of time constraint - the bomb under the poker table wouldn't be very suspenseful if it was just sitting there, unprimed, with no timer. It doesn't have to be a short, specific time constraint, either; "…before the plane runs out of fuel" or "…before the virus mutates into its deadly form" work just as well as "…before the bomb goes off at 12:23 p.m.

But time constraints aren't always necessary; the recovering alcoholic who is resisting that moment of temptation doesn't have any particular deadline. The lack of deadline is, in fact, part of the point - resisting temptation is something that he's going to be facing for the rest of his life.

One can also create tension by limiting the amount of information the reader and/or protagonist has, doling out important details with agonizing slowness. The trouble with this technique is that it is very easy to limit the information too much, and end up with mere surprise, rather than suspense. In other words, if you're going to create suspense by limiting what you tell the reader and only revealing it slowly, the reader needs to know that there are important things you're not telling him/her. You also have to get the timing right; if the revelations come along at too slow a pace, eventually the reader is likely to give up.

One thing you absolutely do not want to do (except possibly in a totally over-the-top parody piece, and even then I'd advise caution) is a deliberate false-tension fake-out - the sort where the protagonist screams, blood spurts, and after two pages of backstory (his life flashing before his eyes?) the writer reveals that the protagonist has just cut himself shaving. This kind of thing destroys the reader's trust in the author (apart from obvious parody), and generally leads to instant wall-flinging.

Rewriting the past

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there" - L.P. Hartley

 One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous number of things that most people know or believe in the present day - the earth moves around the sun, tomatoes are not an aphrodisiac, flossing is important, recycling is desireable, smoking cigarettes causes cancer - that people did not know or believe at various points in the past.

Any writer who goes poking around even a little way into the past will quickly run into attitudes and beliefs that are very, very different from the ones we hold today. And when the beliefs and attitudes of the past clash with modern values, the writer is immediately faced with a dilemma: Does she portray the past accurately, and take the chance that her central characters will be less likeable and sympathetic (or perhaps that they'll be actively offensive) because they have attitudes that are consistent with their own time rather than ours? Does she "fix" things by giving at least her main characters more modern, more enlightened attitudes and beliefs that no one in that time period would hold? Or does she just ignore any differences and present what is essentially a modern novel with the characters in funny clothes?

Different writers answer these questions in different ways, depending on what things they think are most important. An example: Some years back, I read a novel set in England around 1810. One of the central characters was clearly a full-blown alcoholic, resulting in a good many difficulties for him and his family (as one might expect). Then, in mid-book, the character hit bottom and essentially invented the entire Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program (though he didn't call it that) and then worked his way through it, with support from his family and friends.

To me, this story was problematic to the point of being a wall-flinger, because the twelve step program (and the modern attitude toward drinking, drunkenness, and alcoholism) is an anachronism in 1810, especially in England, and the author clearly did not mean the story as an alternate history of any kind. The author of this particular book, however, obviously felt that portraying alcoholism and recovery accurately (according to the modern understanding of this condition) was much more important than being historically accurate.

Had I been writing this book, I would not have made the same choices. But that's me, and it wasn't my story. I'm not saying the author was wrong to make the choice she did; I'm saying that the result was a book that I, personally, didn't like much, won't reread, and wouldn't recommend.

BUT - there are other readers who love the book, some of them for the same reasons that I dislike it. They place a greater importance on having their fiction reflect modern values, understanding, and culture than on having those things be historically accurate. And I am okay with that, so long as those readers (and especially writers) know exactly what they are doing (and don't try to pretend that those stories are historically accurate when they aren't).

What I am not okay with are the writers who don't bother even trying to understand the periods they use as settings. The author I mentioned above obviously knew that there was no Alcoholics Anonymous program in England in 1810; equally obviously, she made a deliberate, conscious choice to have her character come up with the twelve steps so that he could work his way through them and begin to recover, and she put some effort into making her characters' actions plausible. I didn't buy it, myself, but at least she didn't have one of the other characters say "Look, why don't you come to an AA meeting with me tonight?" in London in 1810.

Unfortunately, there are too many writers who do just that sort of thing. Sometimes it's a relatively minor and innocent gaffe, like the Victorian-era "historical" that had characters taking showers; sometimes it's a more fundamental lack of research; sometimes it's complete and utter cluelessness of the sort that simply cannot imagine a world without cell phones or the Internet. The result, though is that the writer portrays the past as if it was exactly like the present, only with different fashions and horses instead of cars.

That carelessness is where I draw the line between I-don't-like-it-but-it's-your-choice and don't-do-this-just-don't. Because I agree with George Santayana that "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," and pretending that the past was exactly like the present is the first step in forgetting the parts that we need to remember. Even (or especially) if they're parts we don't like.

Where one writes

Writing is one of the few occupations that aren't tied to a particular place and time. It's something that you can do anywhere, any time, if you want to. So I used to find it odd to hear so many writers talk about their desks and offices (and I thought it was especially odd that some writers actually went out and rented office space. Why spend money when you didn't need to?).

A lot of this bemusement was because I started writing my first (unfinished) novel when I was in 7th grade. Literally in 7th grade - during the class. Sister Mary Louise never quite caught me; it was occasionally obvious that I wasn't quite paying attention, but she never seemed to figure out why I wasn't paying attention.

Starting off that way was excellent practice for the writing I did in college - at the library, outside in the arboretum, in the cafeteria, in the dorm elevator, in class, even sometimes in my dorm room with my three roommates talking on the other side of the big room we shared. Which, in turn, was excellent practice for the writing I did when I got out of school and got my first job, which once again was mostly in the company cafeteria, in coffee shops, on the bus (though not often; it was too hard to decipher the results), in restaurants, and, occasionally, on the dining room table in my one-bedroom apartment.

In other words, I started out writing anywhere and everywhere that I could carry a notebook and pen, mostly regardless of other conditions. Okay, I didn't try to write outside in the rain, or in places where it got cold enough to make my fingers stiff, or in the dark, but basically, I didn't worry too much about where I was working or what else was going on around me. I'd learned to block it out, so that I could grab writing minutes whenever and wherever they happened to occur.

And then I got a house, and a computer, and set up an office to write in. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, I came to realize some things:

1. Having an office is great, because if you go there every day and write, your backbrain gets used to thinking "Hey, we're at the computer in the office; must be time to write!" and you start getting more productive after a while.

2. Having an office is terrible, because it trains your backbrain to only write when you're in your office, so you stop grabbing those minutes at the bus stop or the coffee shop or the dentist's waiting room, even if you have a cool new iPad that you can take everywhere (with a nifty app that lets you scribble notes right on it) just the way you used to take your paper and pen. Also, your frontbrain starts using "I'm not in the office" as an excuse to not-write. Like you need another excuse.

3. Having an office is really terrible, because the minute you start doing things in it that aren't writing (like paying bills and answering e-mail and searching the web and playing FreeCell and Civilization), your backbrain decides that maybe it's not such a great place to write after all, and now you don't have anywhere that your backbrain likes writing.

4. Fixing points 2 and 3 is really hard. Especially #3. It takes time and energy and application.

Once I realized all that, I figured that despite the fact that time, energy, and application are all in chronically short supply in my life, I had better get busy on fixing things so that I could maybe get back to #1 again. I started off by getting back in the habit of hauling writing implements around with me wherever I go, and using them, even if only for a few seconds. "Writing implements" used to mean paper and pen; now it means iPad or laptop, but it's the same old principle. The laptop turns out to be a little clunky for grabbing quick minutes - mine's several years old, and takes long enough to warm up and shut down that if I only have a sentence or so to grab and a minute to grab it with, it's not the right tool. So my iPad has become my notebook-of-choice for wandering around.

The next thing I did was to start taking advantage of time-chunks that were already built into my day. Three days a week, I go walking with my friend Beth, and afterwards we stop for coffee (tea, in my case). So now I haul the laptop along, and when she goes off to work, I stay in the coffee shop, plug in the laptop, and get an hour or so of work done before I leave. For larger chunks of non-office writing time, the laptop is perfect…plus, I've gotten myself in the habit of dumping my writing session onto the flash drive I carry on my keychain before I pack up to leave, which a) makes it easy to transfer to the desktop when I get home and b) means I have my most recent data backed up and with me at all times.

And then I started making new chunks - nipping out to the library in the afternoon, stopping somewhere that has a bench and an electrical outlet on my way home from shopping, etc. All of which got me to stop using the "I can't write now; I'm not in the office" excuse.

Getting the office back to being a primary writing environment is going to be a lot harder, because the e-mail isn't going to stop coming, the research and blogging have to be done, and there's no point in taking Civilization off the computer when I know perfectly well that if I do, I will just put it right back on the minute I get the urge. (My sister borrowed one of my games once…and I went out and bought a second copy because I was in the mood to play and I couldn't wait for her to return it. I am hopeless.)

So I have to come up with balancing writing in the office with all the other things I have to do there. I'm starting small - when I return from a laptop session at the coffee shop, I'm now in the habit of immediately transferring the files from the flash drive to the main hard drive, and then opening the file to check over what I did. Usually, that means I write a few lines more, which always makes me feel smug and virtuous (because I generally get my day's word count done at the coffee shop, so those extra lines are gravy).

Mailbag #5

What first inspired you to write?

I hate questions like this because they make so many assumptions about "inspiration." But since you ask… Probably a combination of my mother, my father, and the family I grew up in.

This tends not to be the answer people are looking for when they ask this question, so let me explain. Both of my parents told me and my siblings stories and read to us, practically from the time we were born. My earliest memories include my father making up bedtime stories that included references to whatever had happened during the day. One of my earliest memories of my mother is of her reading "Little Women" to the three oldest of us when I was about five, to amuse us during a long train trip from Chicago down to New Orleans. And the family - well, basically, the only rooms in the house that did not have fully loaded bookshelves somewhere in them were the porch and the dining room, and in both cases the only reason they had no bookshelves was that there was no wall space on which to put them; both porch and dining room were surrounded by windows and/or double-doors.

In other words, I grew up with stories, with people who told stories, and with people who read stories. I didn't need "inspiration" to start telling stories, any more than I needed inspiration to eat dinner every night or breathe. I've been doing it as long as I can remember. Dad says, even earlier than that.

What inspires you the most in the process of writing?

Having bills to pay. No, really.

Writing fiction for a living is a job. If I worked at McDonald's, nobody would ask how I got inspired to go in to work every day. It's expected; it's what you do when you have a job. Same thing if I worked in corporate advertising or copywriting, both of which demand that the job-holder "get ideas" for new ads or copy. And Visa is not going to accept "I'm sorry I can't pay you this month; I didn't have any income because I haven't been inspired for a while" as an excuse.

And while it is true that some days are more productive than other days, the unproductive ones are generally due mainly to lack of energy (I stayed up too late reading/watching TV/knitting/partying; I didn't eat right the day before; I haven't been exercising; I'm stressed out about something), not to lack of inspiration. There are, of course, some writers who have slow days on account of lack of inspiration, but in my experience they tend to a) have a creative process that is very different from mine, and from many, if not most, of the other professional writers I know, and b) be the sort of writer for whom ideas really are the problem. Which is kind of a rare thing among professional, write-for-a-living type writers.

Career writers have been saying this and saying this and saying this, since long before I was born, even. I'm not sure why people are still asking.

Do you write morning pages?

The first three times somebody asked me this, I had no idea what they were talking about. Finally someone explained: "morning pages" are an exercise recommended by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. Basically, you're supposed to get up a bit earlier and write three full pages of…well, anything: thoughts, descriptions, reactions, "I hate morning pages" 280 times, whatever, as long as you keep your hand moving to "dump" all the stuff that's on your mind. And you're supposed to do this every single day.

I am not very big on "supposed to"s.

I did finally read the book. I'd describe it as a twelve-step program for would-be writers, and for me it was absolutely worthless. I've met a few writers who've told me that they loved the book, that it changed their lives, and that they do morning pages every day, and it vastly improves their creativity. Me…well, I tried the morning pages thing. I lasted a week, and got no writing other than the morning pages done any day during that time. And I was bored.

So the short answer to this question is "No, I don't do morning pages." The slightly longer answer is "No, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do them if you want." The medium-long answer is "No; but if you think they'll help you, go ahead and try them. They might work brilliantly for you, and if they do, you have a useful tool to help your process along. Just don't be afraid to stop if you've given them an honest try and they don't seem to be working for you…and if they don't work, remember that you can still be a writer even if you don't do morning pages. Every tool works for some writers, but not for other writers; if this one works for you, use it; if it doesn't work for you, nod pleasantly, let it go, and move on to something else."

Barn Door

Once again, I am late on a book. This time, it's a combination of things: first off, I didn't count on how much time handling my Dad's taxes would take this year; second off, I didn't count on yet another family crisis involving meeting with lawyers and bankers and what-not cropping up at more or less the same time; and third, I didn't expect this book to be 30,000 words longer than the last one I turned in.

I am - finally! - within three chapters of the end. (I think it's only two more chapters, but things often take longer than I expect them to, so I'm allowing myself three just in case.) And I am therefore confidently expecting (absent any additional crises) to have the whole thing done by the end of the week.

Yes, that means I expect to write two to three chapters in four days. No, this is not my usual work speed. So why am I so confident?

Barn door syndrome. Like the horse coming home at the end of a long day, I can see that I'm almost there, and no matter how tired and sick of this book I am, the thought of being done provides all the oomph I need. Also, with only 2-3 chapters left, I have a very clear idea of What Happens Next, and very little time for unexpected twists to mess things up. The next scene will be the Last Big Crisis, followed by whatever immediate clean-up is needed; that should complete the next chapter, or a bit more if handling the Big Crisis takes more space than I think it's going to. Then I have some character issues to get finally resolved, (half a chapter, or possibly a whole one…characters will keep talking on, even when I really want them to get on with it). Then I can send them all home at last.

I've been anticipating this rush-to-the-end for the last ten chapters. I was really hoping it would hit about five chapters ago, but that was before I realized how much I still had to cover in detail and how much space it would take.

Which goes to show that one ought not to depend too much on one's previous process or productivity levels, as they can and do change without notice. I am already having to tell myself firmly, on an hourly basis, that just because I am currently producing nearly a chapter a day, this does not mean I can blithely assume that I will continue at this rate, and can therefore figure on writing my next book in a month or less (much as I would like to).

On the contrary, experience shows that my daily word-count production is likely to drop way, way back as I fiddle with plot outlines and plans. It'll spike for a couple of chapters around chapter two or three, then I'll hit a wall somewhere between chapter 7 and chapter 10. There will be a long, slow slog (punctuated by quicksand and distracting emergencies) until somewhere around chapter 20, where things will start picking up until I once again get within three to five chapters of The End, whereupon the rest of the book will come out in a rush.

The pattern is fairly reliable. The trouble is figuring out how many chapters the book will have (and/or how long the chapters will be, as a shift there can throw off the pattern quite easily). I was expecting this book to be around 25 chapters. I finished chapter 31 this morning, and have, as I said, two or three to go.

You'd think I'd know better than to count on the predictabilty of my process by this time.

On Characters

There are four really, really important things to remember about characters:

Characters are people. (Yes, even if they're aliens or elves or talking rabbits.)
People, and therefore characters, are all the same.
People, and therefore characters, are all different.
Most important of all: Every person, and therefore every character, is an individual.

Taking these assertions in order: Characters are people because readers are people, and because writers have to work with human languages. I've seen the occasional attempt to write a "truly alien alien," and every one ends up being incomprehensible. Even if one trusts that the writer has actually managed to get his or her brain wrapped around a "true alien," getting it across to a reader in a story just doesn't work (except, of course, where the whole point is the utter incomprehensibility of the alien).

Stories start from where we are, and where we are starts with being human. "Truly alien aliens" are interesting and make interesting stories when humans meet them and have to cope with them, but the focus ends up being on the humans. The alien becomes less a character than an intriguing, unsolvable mystery. When the story gets told from a nonhuman point of view, the alien or rabbit or whatever has to have enough overlap with recognizable human wants and needs to be understandable, or there's no story.

Which segues neatly into point #2: people are the same. This is why we're still reading the Illiad and Romeo and Juliet and the Ramayana and the Tale of Genji, even though the writers who produced these stories lived in totally different times and cultures from our own: the stories speak to universal human themes and wants and emotions. Everybody hungers, loves, wants, fears, wonders. Every human culture has clear notions of what is right and what is wrong, what is done and what is not done. Exactly what it is that is done or not done, feared, loved, wanted, etc. varies from culture to culture and person to person, but the basic urge is common to us all.

And that variation brings me to point #3: People are different. Different cultures place their highest value on different things: individuality vs. the good of the community, or independence vs. obedience to authority, for instance. What is considered polite varies; what makes for high status varies; which people are held up for admiration or vilification varies. Within a culture, different subgroups are treated differently and thus have different life experiences that make those people think and react differently from people in other subgroups.

Even when nearly everything lines up - background, age, gender, culture - no two people are exactly the same. My sisters and I are very far from having the same wants and fears and so on, even though we grew up in the same family, time, and culture. Even my identical twin cousins, raised in the Alaska bush, are not perfectly interchangeable in their tastes and ways of thinking.

There are writers who get stuck at point #2 - all their characters are the same. Oh, they look a little different, but when it comes to personality and the way they react to things, the way they speak and think, the fact that A is an elf, B is an autistic teenager, and C is a polygamous 200-year-old alien makes about as much difference as the fact that they each have different colored hair.

Oddly, points #2 and #3 are often problems for the same writer, sometimes at almost the same time. A writer considers some group - modern teenagers, women, men, trauma victims, racial or ethnic minorities, rednecks, Christians, pagans, gays - as "too different" to understand, while also being exactly alike within that group. This usually results in the writer avoiding having characters that are, say, rednecks (because they "can't write rednecks" - i.e., they're too different), or defaulting to stereotypes (because "all rednecks are like that") when a particular story forces them to have a redneck (teen, woman, man, minority, etc.) in the story after all.

I think most of these problems happen because these writers lose sight of point #4. They forget that they are not writing about a group of men, a group of rednecks, a group of gays or Christians, a particular minority. They are writing about George and Chuck and Shaku and Mary Lou; Aki and Robin; Marge (never Margie!) and Shawn and Caitlyn. They are writing about individuals who share a common human heritage (or at least, enough human characteristics to interest the reader, even if they're rabbits) and a variety of unique life experiences that shape their personalities and fears and desires.

"What would a disabled-person/teen/Christian/man/rabbit do in this situation?" is not a relevant question for any writer; the question should be "What would Chuck (or Caitlyn or Aki or Robin) do?" The answer will not be shaped by only one of the groups that person belongs to (Chuck is, perhaps, a Christian as well as a teenager, a soldier, a father … the list could go on, and all of those things will factor into what he does next).

Writers who wish to write realistic characters have to avoid the trap of defining their characters (even the secondary characters) by only one aspect of what they are. They have to remember that characters are people. all the same, all different, all unique individuals with bits that overlap with other characters and bits that don't.

Keeping the pipeline full

Writing is a profession with a very long lead time. For the majority of writers, writing a novel takes somewhere between six months and two years (there are, of course, folks who can do it faster or who require even more time, but they're outliers). Then you have a wait for editorial revisions, and then it's usually one to two years before the book is published. And, as I mentioned last post, the advance money is spread out in irregular chunks over all that time.

Essentially, it's like a long, long pipeline, with the writer standing at one end pouring manuscripts in. No matter how fast you pour, it takes quite a while for the money to start coming out the other end. This can be intensely frustrating, especially at the start of one's career. One works for years for a payoff that never seems to arrive, or that looks inadequate when it does finally start trickling out.

A lot of people get discouraged during that initial start-up period. It's hard not to. It takes a long time to fill up the pipe. Eventually, though, money does start arriving.

And that's where things get even trickier. Because that pipeline is long enough that a lot of the time, there isn't a lot of correlation between how productive a writer is being and how much money is coming in. As your career builds up, there are occasional bursts of subrights money - which covers everything from foreign editions to audiobooks to movie options and merchandising - as well as money for reselling books that have gone out of print and had their rights reverted (though as ebooks become a larger part of the market, I expect "out of print" will become a quaint notion and rights reversion will get a lot more complex). About half my income in any given year derives from books I wrote more than ten years ago.

So money does not end up being good positive reinforcement for continuing to work hard at producing stories. Which is the next place where a lot of writers get into trouble. Since that pipeline is really long, it is quite easy to let up and coast for a while, because once you have filled up that long pipeline with work, the money will keep coming out for a good long while, even if you stop putting things in at the other end.

The trouble, of course, is that if you stop putting things in, eventually the flow at the other end dries up, too…and then it's another long, long haul to try to fill the pipeline up again. If I finish the current WIP within the next month, I could sit back and not write another word for two solid years, and I'd still have a new book coming out each year. Three years, if you count the paperback versions. Of course, at the end of that time, I would have at least a three-year drought before any more books came out, because that's how long it would take to refill the publishing pipeline…and if it takes me a year or two to write and sell a book, that gets added on top, so call it four or five years.

This is why I keep saying that discipline and persistence are the two most important characteristics a writer can have - because it takes discipline and persistence to keep writing when it gets hard, when it doesn't seem as if you need to (because the far end of the pipeline is spitting out enough money to meet your bills now, and three years from now is a long way off). Also because discipline and persistence are much rarer qualities than the talent that so many want to depend on instead.

Talent doesn't pay the bills.

Cash flow

Back when I was just out of college, I remember laughing at one of my friends who was complaining about the effects of her promotion on her budget. "Sure, I get more money now," she said. "But I only get it every two weeks, not every Friday! It's really hard to remember not to spend it all right away, because it has to last longer!"

I laughed then because as an office worker, I was "staff," and therefore got my meager paycheck once a month. Nowadays, I would laugh even harder. Because a writer's income isn't just a long time coming; it's unpredictable in ways a lot of people have a really hard time coping with.

You see, there are two kinds of payments you get as a writer: advances and royalties. Advances are a dollar figure that's set in the contract you sign; royalties are based on your sales numbers (usually 5-6% of cover price for mass market paperbacks and 10% of cover price for hardcovers, sometimes with escalators that raise the percentage if you sell an astronomical number of copies. Royalties on e-books vary all over the place, but they're usually MUCH higher).

Royalties are paid twice a year, spring and fall (e-books, again, can be different), and you don't actually collect any until the advance has been "earned out." In other words, your first royalties go to paying back the advance, and you don't see any more money until that's taken care of. Once the advance has earned out, you start getting checks…but you have no idea how large the checks are going to be until you actually get them, because they depend on how many copies your book sold in the six month period the royalty statement covers.

The amount of your advance payment, on the other hand, is fixed in the contract. The payment dates, on the other hand, depend on events and processes that are only partly under the writer's control. Generally, an advance is paid out in two to four equal parts, the current possibilities I know of being: on signing, on delivery, on publication/release (hardcover), on publication/release (mass market paperback). And it can take up to three months (though that is VERY unusual) for a publisher to actually cut the check when one of those milestones is reached.

To clarify things a bit, here's an example:  Jane Q. Newwriter has finished her first novel, The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, and joyfully signs a contract with a publisher for a hefty first-time advance of $10,000 and typical royalty rates. Delighted by her good fortune, she immediately quits her day job, figuring she can live on that $10,000 for quite a while, if she's careful. A month later, her rent is due, and there's still no check from the publisher, so she takes an advance on her credit card and complains to her editor. The editor explains that they're still processing the paperwork.

Another month goes by; Jane is living on her credit cards and starting to rack up the debt. Finally, her copy of the signed contract arrives from her agent, along with a check for $2,125 - barely enough to pay off the debt she's already got, and nowhere near enough to keep living on. What happened?

Well, Jane's contract divided the advance up into four payments of $2,500 each, and her agent gets 15% of every check. That $2,125 is Jane's "on signing" payment, minus her agent's 15%, and it got paid fairly promptly (Jane's signed contract has to also be signed by someone at the publishing house, reviewed by legal, and then the check has to be cut. This generally takes six weeks minimum, and as I said, up to three or four months if anybody is on vacation). Jane won't get her "on delivery" part of the advance until she delivers an acceptable manuscript (and it'll take another three to six weeks for that check to get cut, too); then she'll get 1/4 when the book is actually published (one to two years after she delivered it) and the final 1/4 will come when the paperback comes out (generally at least one year after the hardback is published.

So that $10,000 that Jane was counting on to live on for her first year as a full-time writer is actually getting spread out over a minimum of three years, probably longer. Since the book is already finished, she may be able to get the editorial revisions done fast and get her second $2,125 this year, but the "on hardcover publication" chunk isn't going to come until the book is published, and that will take one to two years after she turns in the finished manuscript. One year after that, when the paperback comes out, she'll get the final "on mass market paperback" part of the advance. Assuming, of course, that the publisher doesn't delay publication of either hardcover or paperback for any of half a dozen reasons.

Basically, what I'm saying is that when you're a writer, you either know exactly how much money you will get (the advance), but not exactly when it will arrive, or you know when it will arrive (the royalties), but not how much they will be. This makes long-term budgeting and cash flow management a critical skill for writers.