TED Lectures
I am a huge fan of the TED lectures. If you haven't heard of them, they're basically short talks--not more than 20 minutes--given by various people on subjects ranging from business to technology to art and beyond. There are even live performances. I've watched dozens of these short pieces both for entertainment and to try and expand my ideas about how to run Blind Eye Books.
Today (among others) I watched Brene Brown speaking about The Power of Vulnerability, and about the paradox of how the most connected people are the ones who are able to tolerate vulnerability.
While I can usually find an oblique way to relate anything to either selling books or writing, I found this particular lecture to be particularly applicable to writing.
Back when I was at Clarion in 2004 I had a one-on-one meeting with Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Wait... That sounds kinda weird. I should explain.
The way the Clarion workshop works is that around 20 of you go hang out on a university campus for six weeks and in between cocktails and impromptu soccer drills, you try to write the masterpieces that will jump start your writing career. Every day you rise at the fiendish hour of nine a.m. to sit in a critique circle talking about the various manuscripts that had been turned in the previous day. In the afternoon, you read other new manuscripts for the following day and then attempt to write your own during the down time after dinner. Every week or so the instructors get switched out. And every week each student gets a one-on-one with each different instructor where they can talk privately about their work. This is why I was in a meeting with Gordon.
He wasn't into my stories. I wasn't that surprised. But the great thing about a really good editor is that even if they aren't into your stories, they can usually tell you why and that's always helpful if your goal is publication. In my case, Gordon told me that he felt like I was hiding from him inside my prose. He also paraphrased Chip Delaney remarking that, "if you're going to screw the pooch, you might as well put it all the way in."
It took me a long time to figure out what that meant. Not the pooch part--I got that right away. I even understood what he was saying about hiding inside my prose, but understanding how to connect with readers more authentically took a long time. Not only did I have to figure out how exactly to stop hiding, but I had to figure out why I was hiding in the first place.
Two years of pulling my hair and howling into the dark and unforgiving night and driving my wife crazy with questions that she could not answer ensued.
Then, as with most quandries of this sort, once the answer was found it seemed simple. I could not be authentic because I did not want to be vulnerable.
Writing unique fiction is a vulnerable-making activity. If you put your writing out in the world, everybody's got an opinion about it and not all of them can be good--that's just a mathematical truth. So being the ambitious--yet still defensive--writer that I was, I unconsciously hit upon the strategy of not writing about my actual thoughts or beliefs. I wrote about what I thought might be true to some abstract and amorphous "reader," not what I knew to be true from my own life.
I'll tell you right now that this is the road to nowhere, authenticity-wise.
Writing about your own truth is not the same as writing any old self-indulgent text you want. There is still the craft of writing to consider--things like pacing, conflict, resolution, character development. Those quantifiable elements should be included in any piece. Writing about your own truth pertains to the takeaway of the story. The message. It pertains to who you cast as your villain and who is your hero. Who wins and who loses and most importantly, why the villain deserves to lose and the hero deserves to win.
That's where authenticity shines through. If your writing contains personal truths, you probably won't connect to everybody--but you will connect to the readers who "get" you. And isn't that who you're writing for in the first place?
Today (among others) I watched Brene Brown speaking about The Power of Vulnerability, and about the paradox of how the most connected people are the ones who are able to tolerate vulnerability.
While I can usually find an oblique way to relate anything to either selling books or writing, I found this particular lecture to be particularly applicable to writing.
Back when I was at Clarion in 2004 I had a one-on-one meeting with Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Wait... That sounds kinda weird. I should explain.
The way the Clarion workshop works is that around 20 of you go hang out on a university campus for six weeks and in between cocktails and impromptu soccer drills, you try to write the masterpieces that will jump start your writing career. Every day you rise at the fiendish hour of nine a.m. to sit in a critique circle talking about the various manuscripts that had been turned in the previous day. In the afternoon, you read other new manuscripts for the following day and then attempt to write your own during the down time after dinner. Every week or so the instructors get switched out. And every week each student gets a one-on-one with each different instructor where they can talk privately about their work. This is why I was in a meeting with Gordon.
He wasn't into my stories. I wasn't that surprised. But the great thing about a really good editor is that even if they aren't into your stories, they can usually tell you why and that's always helpful if your goal is publication. In my case, Gordon told me that he felt like I was hiding from him inside my prose. He also paraphrased Chip Delaney remarking that, "if you're going to screw the pooch, you might as well put it all the way in."
It took me a long time to figure out what that meant. Not the pooch part--I got that right away. I even understood what he was saying about hiding inside my prose, but understanding how to connect with readers more authentically took a long time. Not only did I have to figure out how exactly to stop hiding, but I had to figure out why I was hiding in the first place.
Two years of pulling my hair and howling into the dark and unforgiving night and driving my wife crazy with questions that she could not answer ensued.
Then, as with most quandries of this sort, once the answer was found it seemed simple. I could not be authentic because I did not want to be vulnerable.
Writing unique fiction is a vulnerable-making activity. If you put your writing out in the world, everybody's got an opinion about it and not all of them can be good--that's just a mathematical truth. So being the ambitious--yet still defensive--writer that I was, I unconsciously hit upon the strategy of not writing about my actual thoughts or beliefs. I wrote about what I thought might be true to some abstract and amorphous "reader," not what I knew to be true from my own life.
I'll tell you right now that this is the road to nowhere, authenticity-wise.
Writing about your own truth is not the same as writing any old self-indulgent text you want. There is still the craft of writing to consider--things like pacing, conflict, resolution, character development. Those quantifiable elements should be included in any piece. Writing about your own truth pertains to the takeaway of the story. The message. It pertains to who you cast as your villain and who is your hero. Who wins and who loses and most importantly, why the villain deserves to lose and the hero deserves to win.
That's where authenticity shines through. If your writing contains personal truths, you probably won't connect to everybody--but you will connect to the readers who "get" you. And isn't that who you're writing for in the first place?
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There is a terrible momentum to emotional honesty. Yeah, I agree. It's cause it's so easy once you start, yeah? Because its all there already intuitively and you just have to write it down.
What a wonderful post -- pooches notwithstanding.
I think, even leaving aside any potential audience of readers who get or don't get our work (which is hard as hell), it is very difficult to be vulnerable in our writing. It's like getting naked in public.
And the fear is legitimate because when we do let go and begin to write about the things that really scare us or move us, we can't seem to stop. Even when we recognize that people are beginning to see US through the veil of words, we still can't stop.
It's like jumping off a building. Once you jump there is no turning back and flight -- often undirected -- takes over. There is a terrible momentum to emotional honesty.