One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part one

I will soon publish a massively rewritten versions of Shree Krishna and the Singularity on Create Space, Amazon, and Nook. I think I spend more time revising this book than I did writing the first version.

It took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel. I don't think I could have done this when I was younger, although I certainly tried back then. One thing that I know for sure is that technology has made it much easier to write and publish a novel than it was thirty years ago, when I first tried to write.

The word processor is a godsend to writers. If you look at writing advice from the science fiction authors I read growing up much of it seems to be about how to avoid rewriting. For example, Ray Bradbury advised writing only short stories to begin with. He famously said you should write one short story every week. At the end of a year you'd have 52 short stories, and he defied anyone to write 52 bad short stories. According to him, it couldn't be done.

He advised against writing a novel right away, because you could spend a whole year writing a novel and have it not turn out that well, whereas if you spent the same amount of time doing short stories you'd have something good to show for it.

Robert Heinlein had a similar piece of advice: Do not rewrite except to editorial specification. When he started writing the pay rate per word was low enough that if you had to do multiple drafts of anything you might starve.

He had another piece of advice, which was to keep everything you write on the market until sold. Eventually someone would be desperate enough for content to buy it.

There is a well known story about L. Ron Hubbard where he typed his stories on a continuous roll of butcher paper fed into his typewriter, so he didn't have to spend time putting individual sheets of paper into the typewriter. I don't suppose he did a lot of rewriting either.

Reading about these authors, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to be an author I'd have to learn to knock out something good on the first try.

I tried to write a book before I had a word processor. It was a memoir of my years in the Hare Krishna movement. I wrote a first draft, made copies of it for ten cents a page at a local community college, put a cover on it, and gave it to friends to read. Then I put it in a box for thirty years. Just the thought of all the work I'd have to do to get it in shape to submit to a publisher was enough to keep it in that box.

If I had that manuscript one week after the Jonestown massacre it would have been easy to find a publisher for that book, but every year that went by made that draft less worth revising. It needed a lot of revising. I didn't even have a good title for it.

I got my first PC a few years later, plus a dot matrix printer. It didn't occur to me to use it to write anything right away, and the printer was a big part of the reason. A dot matrix printer uses a continuous sheet of paper like L. Ron Hubbard's butcher paper. The paper had holes in the sides to help the printer guide it through the rollers. When you were finished printing you had to tear off the part of the paper with the holes in it and separate the individual pages. Print quality was described as "near letter quality," which was aspirational. It looked like crap. There was no way you could take pages printed on a dot matrix printer and send them to a publisher.

Why couldn't I just send the word processor file to the publisher? There was no internet and no email back then. I programmed computers for a living and nobody had these things yet. The heros of science fiction novels didn't have them.

I went through a lot of computers and eventually got one that could connect to the internet using a modem. That didn't get me to start writing again either, but I had learned to program a PC by then and I got an account on Sourceforge so I could share the code I had written with the world. They even gave me a website I could use to tell the world about what I had created.

I went through a few more years and a few more computers and one day I read about a project called One Laptop Per Child which was going to make laptops that cost one hundred dollars that governments would buy in bulk and give to children for their education. It would have a user interface called Sugar and possibly a hand crank you could use to keep it charged.

I became involved in this project and wrote a manual for it called Make Your Own Sugar Activities! for a website named FLOSS Manuals. The software I used to write the book not only made a website, it also could generate an e-book or even a printed book from what you wrote. The website would submit files to Lulu.com and would get whatever profits came from selling the book.

My family was very impressed with the printed book, except for one thing: my name was not on the cover. FLOSS manuals are usually written by a team of people who are credited inside the book but not on the cover.

The book was licensed so that anyone could distribute or publish it as he liked, so I looked into publishing it on Create Space and found that the process was really simple and really cheap. I came up with a new cover with my name and picture on it and published it using Create Space.

I didn't sell a lot of these, but I realized that at last all the things that kept me from being a writer had gone away.

I didn't need to get it right on the first draft.

I didn't need to print it out, ever.

I didn't need to keep sending it to publishers with a self addressed stamped envelope until it was sold.

I didn't need to convince a publisher that it was something that he could make money selling. Create Space books and e-books don't need inventory and distribution. They are created when somebody buys one. They stay in print forever. They never wind up on remainder tables. There is no way to lose a fortune publishing a book that doesn't sell. If nobody likes your book it hasn't cost you much to learn that.

Finally, I didn't need to follow Bradbury's or Heinlein's advice to become a writer, except for two points mentioned by Heinlein:

1). You must write.
2). You must finish what you write.

In the next installment I will talk about how I actually learned to write a science fiction novel.