three conversations to share

from World Fantasy

#1 with Nancy Kress on a panel (not with me) about teaching Clarion (I think). She said that one of the most frustrating things about teaching was the way that students seemed to want her to tell them the answer to this question, "Will I be a successful writer?" They had sorted themselves, she said, into groups of good writers and bad writers before Clarion ever started, or so they thought. But really all they had done was sort themselves into people who did clean first drafts and people who did rough first drafts, and in fact that said nothing about the end product of their writing.

The truth is that the only way to figure out if you are going to be any good at writing is to keep at it for a long time. The proof is in the process of writing, how good you are at making revisions, working with an agent and editor, hearing criticism and being able to incorporate it, being able to re-envision the book over and over again without abandoning it. And this is only the writing part of the process, not the marketing, which can be even more important. To base a judgment on a single snapshot of the process would be like trying to figure out who will win a race by looking at a single snapshot of that chosen randomly in the middle.

#2 with Holly Black about surprises in novels. Surprise is an important element in a novel. But most novels have more than one surprise. Even more than one big surprise. Just because you guess one surprise does not mean that the novel is now useless to you. In fact, there are frequent cases in which a novel dangles one easy-to-guess surprise in front of the reader so as to distract him/her from guessing bigger, later surprises. You are so busy congratulating yourself on figuring out one thing that another will hit you square on, with maximum effect. We writers work hard at loading our surprises well and doling them out with pacing.

#3 with Ellen Kushner (and Holly Black) about warmth of voice. Using the new Bordertown ARC, she went through each story from the first paragraph only and showed us how the voice can be warm or not warm. This has nothing to do with the quality of the story, mind you. There are plenty of cases where you want (or need) a cold voice in order to pull off the right story. But it is quite clear when you look for it what makes a warm voice. It is inviting the reader into the story and acting as though the reader is "one of us," rather than someone who couldn't possibly understand or who must be led through each step carefully. I had never thought of this before, but it was obvious once Ellen pointed it out.

One of the reasons I like to talk to other writers: they are smart. They are always thinking about things, not just writerly things, but everything. I loved the sense that you are never "done" with figuring out the writing process. The best writers are the ones who are always tinkering, always playing with it.