Writing Fiction

Downloads from Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

The second edition of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy has a CD with some supplemental materials—links to books and authors mentioned in the text, posts from this blog, plus a number of reviews. (I've even thrown in a scholarly article published way back in 1972.) The CD is readable only on a PC, however, so Mac users (including me) are out of luck.

However, I've uploaded those materials as a long Word file, and you're welcome to download it—even if you haven't bought the book. I hope you find these items useful.
Download wsff_cd_items.doc

More about words and pages in a novel

"How Many Pages Make a Novel" now has a comment thread several years long, and it's actually awkward for me to track through the thread to try to answer the latest questions. So let me try to re-state some basic points, and to answer some recent questions in the process.

A short-short story is anywhere from 250 to maybe 1500 words. A short story is 1500 to 10,000 words. A novelette could be 10,000 to 30,000 words. A novella is 30,000 to 55,000-60,000 words, and anything longer is a novel. However—

These are all terms from the early part of the 20th century, when popular magazines ran a lot of fiction. A few writers made very comfortable livings selling short stories and novelettes to women's magazines, men's magazines, general-interest magazines like Saturday Evening Post, and even newspapers. 

One men's magazine built itself around not running fiction: it was called True, and every item in it was nonfiction. (I loved it, but I also loved Bluebook, a men's magazine that ran many early Robert Heinlein novels in serial form. This was so long ago that "men's magazines" didn't have pictures of naked girls.)

For a long time, the short-story and novelette market has been a ghost of its former self. The only "popular" markets are a handful of fantasy, SF, and mystery magazines. University-funded "little" magazines will sometimes run a short story or two, but they pay little or nothing. High-end magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's will run short fiction, but usually only by established authors.

The chief markets for a new writer, therefore, are genre novels for the mass market (SF, fantasy, thrillers, romances, etc.) or for the young-adult market. YA novels are usually shorter (20,000 to 40,000 words—but then there's Harry Potter!). Most genre novels for adults start at 60,000 words and work their way up to fantasy series in which each novel is maybe 125,000-250,000 words long...and the series goes on for as many titles as readers will buy.

Most publishers' websites, if they have a page of advice for contributors, indicate the general length of the books they publish. But you can also get a sense of that by simply counting the words on two or three random pages of a book, averaging the numbers, and multiplying by the number of pages.

But bear in mind that layout and design can influence the size of a book. Sometimes a short novel can be "bulked up" with wide spaces between lines of large text. This gives purchasers the illusion that they've bought a lot of reading for the price of the book.

I don't want to discourage anyone from writing at whatever length they like. Short stories can be great reading, and also great training for writers aiming at novels. Two or three novellas, published together, can be quite marketable (preferably, however, if the author's already well known).

In general, I'd advise writing long. It's easier to cut than to add material. So if you want to sell a romance and you know the length is going to be 55,000 words, shoot for 65,000...and then go back through the manuscript and cut the 10,000 weakest words.

Some good news

The last few months have been decidedly nonfiction for me: I got swamped by the arrival of swine flu, which hugely increased traffic on my site H5N1, and hugely reduced my free time. I was also finishing a new book, Write Your Nonfiction Online (the bad link is now fixed) and just this afternoon sent in the revised manuscript. And I've been writing and editing for The Tyee, which is enormous fun.

But I've also thrown some old irons back in the fire. My agent in Toronto is exploring TV/film possibilities for three of my books—the new edition of Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, plus my novels Icequake and Lifter.

This isn't exactly a hot new development. Various people have inquired about film rights to the pioneers book over the years, and Lifter has been looked at a couple of times by the Disney people. When Icequake came out in 1979, a lot of people thought it would make a great but unproducible movie: The special effects would be too expensive. 

That, of course, was long before computer graphics came along. Now, Icequake could be pretty effective even in a made-for-TV movie.

Having grown up among movie people, I'm not holding my breath—and I'm not spending my percentage before I get it, either.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of new ideas for Henderson's Tenants, and while we were on holiday I got a single major idea for resurrecting a novel I did back in the late 90s—a project that never found a publisher. 

So now that the latest project is off my desk, I'm looking forward to doing some more fiction this summer.

Nineteen Eighty-Four after 60 years

Orwell's great novel was published on June 8, 1949. On the eve of its 60th birthday, a number of British authors talk about its influence, and the influence of other books: Orwell's 1984 sixty years on.

It's certainly been an important book in my own personal and professional life. On my third or fourth reading, I finally understood that Winston Smith is not a hopeless fighter for freedom. He's just hopeless. 

The entire bogus plot against Big Brother has been created by O'Brien, sending hypnotic messages to Winston through the telescreen: "We will meet in the place where there is no darkness." Winston's willingness to do anything to overthrow Big Brother shows that he has no more morals than O'Brien himself. Just as he had no loyalty to his own family, he has none to Julia.

Although one early reviewer (in a Labour newspaper) saw this aspect of the novel, most critics seem to have missed it. They needed a tragic hero, a convenient martyr to postwar Stalinism. 

Orwell certainly was attacking Stalin (the Stalinists, after all, killed his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War). But his real warning was to his own side, the decent left-wingers in Labour. The philosophy of Oceania, after all, is Ingsoc—English socialism, monstrously corrupted by its own willingness to win power at any price. (With Gordon Brown's Labour government now imploding, Orwell seems as timely as ever.)

Apart from the political message, the lesson I gained from this reading of Orwell was not to trust surface meanings in fiction, and not to expect stock responses (like rooting for the "hero") to be of much use. That was a valuable lesson for any writer.

One writer's path to the first novel

What a surprise—last night I got a note from an old roommate at Columbia, Richard Beeson, whom I hadn't heard from in many years. He told me about the long, roundabout path he had to take to his first novel, Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, and I thought it might be of interest to other writers:

I was so immersed in the music business that I had little time for anything else. I did keep trying to do my own writing (the reason I went to Columbia in the first place), but an opera job at Lincoln Center is all-consuming. 

I became orchestra manager at NYC Opera, thinking that would give me more free time. Big miscalculation. I started this book in 1988, the year after I became orchestra manager, and managed to finish the first part (which I thought then was the whole book) in 1991, but it didn't fly. 

I kept puttering with it, but simply didn't have the time to do it justice, until finally in late 1999 I bailed out of the job and "retired" as of Feb. 2000. Then I spent a year or so going through all my notes, including all the dreams I had logged. I even made a database of them.

Slowly I managed to formulate the plot and characters for the rest of the tale. I began to think of it as a many-book series, probably seven. When I had finished 3, I found an agent, but after a few months she said she didn't know what to do with them. She suggested I write a mystery instead (based on some of the material in the big books).

I did that, and had just finished it, when I was diagnosed with the big C, head and neck, stage 4. (This was in early 2004.) I managed to come back from that, but the experience changed my whole approach to my writing. 

I left that agent and spent the next 4 years rewriting the big book into one book comprising three parts. Also rewrote the "mystery," making it a thriller. I found a team of agents who were willing to represent the thriller, but they didn't even want to look at the book that really mattered. After a year, they gave up on the thriller.

At that point, I said to hell with it, I might as well self-publish. I had always been loath to follow that route, but the way the publishing industry was going, and given my age, I didn't think I had much choice. It could take me another five years to find an agent for a weird book like Seduction, and how many more years for the agent to find the publisher, etc. etc. This way it took less than a year to get the book "on the shelf," as it were. Also got to design my own cover, which I couldn't have done otherwise.

So now it's out, and in a few months I'll bring out the thriller.

Of course I'm delighted that Richard's brought out his book, especially after so many years, and I wish him every success with it. 

Like Richard, I long considered self-publication a racket—and it was, in the days of the vanity presses. But it is now possible to come to a businesslike deal with an electronic print-on-demand publisher that gets your work out there, on however modest a scale. If you've got any kind of knack for business and marketing, you should at least be able to get your investment back. 

If the book does sell pretty well under your own imprint, you may even be able to interest a commercial publisher in becoming its distributor. That could give you access to markets you could never reach while pitching it to booksellers with your car trunk full of copies.

As with Richard, determination is the key factor.

Dialogue in fiction

A commenter asked, a couple of days ago, about how to format dialogue in a manuscript. Much of the answer is in this section of Write a Novel, my online self-guided course.

But as long as I'm thinking about it, here are some general suggestions:

In North America, we set off dialogue with "double quotes." In Britain and many other Commonwealth countries, we set it off with 'single quotes.' Note that periods (and commas) go inside the close quote.

We can introduce dialogue, and identify the speaker, in several ways:

David said: "That's a terrible idea."

David said, "That's a terrible idea."

"That's a terrible idea," David said.

"That," said David, "is a terrible idea."

In general, David said: is a bit rare. Most writers seem to prefer David said, as an introduction. When the reference to the speaker comes after the quotation, the final sentence of the quote ends with a comma and close quote before explaining who's talking. If you choose to interrupt the dialogue with the explanation, the dialogue that follows said David doesn't take a capital letter.

A long-winded speaker may go on for two or more paragraphs. In that case, we use the quotation marks to indicate the start of each paragraph, but the end of only the final paragraph:

"That's a terrible idea.

"For one thing, it would be really expensive.

"For a second thing, I would probably get killed."

The missing close-quotes tell your readers that the same person is still talking. 

Every time you do include a David said or a Sarah replied, you're probably wasting your readers' time. The characters' manners of speech should be so distinctive that we instantly understand who's talking. Maybe you'll need an explanation at the beginning of the exchange between David and Sarah, but once they get going, we notice that David and Sarah don't sound anything like one another.

Some writers, lacking confidence in their readers' intelligence, will make their characters address each other by name at every opportunity:

"David, why did you come home so late tonight?"

"Sarah, you're always nagging me!"

"David, it's not nagging! I'm worried about you!"

"Give me a break, Sarah!"

If you and your sweetie talk that way, don't come to me—go find a counsellor. But do keep the he said-she said expressions to an absolute minimum.

Look again at that last exchange of dialogue. The question marks and exclamation marks (just one of each) go inside the close-quotes. They convey the tone of each speaker's statement. But if your characters are always yelling at each other, that should be clear from the content of the dialogue, not from the exclamation marks.

And how do we indent dialogue? Just like any other paragraph. A half-inch indent should be fine. Each time a different person speaks, we indent again. So every time David speaks, he starts with a new indented paragraph. When Sarah answers, new indented paragraph.

No one taught me this. When I was reading pulp science fiction magazines almost 60 years ago, I noticed how they displayed and punctuated dialogue. When I started writing my own SF on my mother's portable typewriter, I imitated the usage of the magazines. And when I started sending in my manuscripts, the editors were very happy with them because they didn't need line-by-line corrections. 

Editors are wonderful people, and if you give them almost no work to do, they'll think you're wonderful too.

Dialogue as generational dialect

Ran across a good article in this morning's Globe and Mail: The linguistic divide. Excerpt:

A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word "like" when narrating a story, than those over 40. As in "I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' " instead of "I said, 'What are you talking about?' " 

This linguistic difference is a key demographic marker, says Sali Tagliamonte, who has published a paper exploring the use of "be like" in the scholarly journal Language Variation and Change. 

"The use of 'like' is a watershed. It captures a change in how people narrate their stories," she says. "We think it came from California in the 1980s and it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker's inner experience."

I couldn't find the original article (and you have to subscribe to the journal to see anything more than the abstracts), but this brings up a good point for fiction writers. 

We tend to think of our own speech as "normal," and in dialogue most of our characters will speak as we do. If you're a teenager writing about teenagers, that's probably fine. But if you're a teenager writing a historical novel, or a fantasy, your characters may still sound like 21st-century teens. (And if you're a 50-something writing young-adult fiction, you're likely to get into big trouble!)

As a writer and as an English teacher, I've paid close attention to speech patterns and usage for over 50 years. I well recall when "like" emerged in Beat Generation novels, cheerfully plagiarized from black jazz musicians by white kids like Jack Kerouac. The LSD converts in the 1960s used "like" a lot as a way (I guess) of conveying what their hallucinations were, uh, like. Eventually it mutated (young people would say "morphed") into a synonym for "said."

And as a soon-to-retire teacher, I could predictably paralyze a class with hilarity just by speaking the way the students did.

To strengthen your dialogue, then, listen hard. Notice the vocabulary and cadence of English spoken by your grandparents or your grandchildren. When you read novels written in the 1950s (or 1850s), pay attention to the dialogue. 

Did Victorian Londoners really speak in that ornate style? Actually, they probably did; it was a society that enjoyed reading and being read to, and cherished big vocabularies. (Even then, notice the class and generational differences in the dialogue of Dickens's characters.)

Also notice the words and expressions that don't show up in, say, Jack Kerouac or Norman Mailer's early work. Chances are that much of your own vocabulary stems from developments in the language since then. You could create an awkward anachronism by having your World War II platoon talking like one on patrol in Baghdad.

Quite apart from ensuring historical accuracy, listening for usage and dialect makes you notice what's new—expressions coming into the language from all kinds of sources. Picking up on them can sensitize you to the language and make your future dialogue that much richer.

Manuscript format and word processors

A reader sent an interesting question the other day:

What are the rules to numbering pages of a novel?
Does every page need a number? If so, top or bottom of each page?

I also read somewhere, that last names should be on each page before submitting to a publisher.
I take a deep breath here, because I have over two hundred pages completed without numbers/name and my wonderful reliable computer does not have a format that includes the inserts.

Microsoft Word costs more than I can dish out right now. Is there any other way?

Good questions.

Yes, normally a manuscript does need a number on each page, usually in the upper right corner but sometimes at the bottom center or right. Putting the author's name at the top of each page is a fairly common practice, but not essential. (It's just insurance, in case part of the manuscript is misplaced in an office full of manuscripts!)

Here's one way around the cost of Microsoft Word: Get one of the free downloadable word processors like Open Office.

You might also try a web-based word processor like ThinkFree, Google Docs or Zoho. I haven't used them much, but they seem to handle most routine word-processing chores. And they're free.

It shouldn't be hard to learn the basics of whatever free word processor you pick, including how to insert page numbers. Then copy your existing manuscript and paste it into a file in the new word processor. You may have to make some formatting changes, but basically that should work fairly well.

Also, visit the websites of the publishers you plan to submit to. See what they require. In many cases, they may just want an electronic version of the manuscript. Whatever they want, supply it. Remember that it may be a personal achievement for you, but it's just work for your editor. Make it as easy for her as possible.

Blogging the writing of a new book

I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and correct the text.

It's also now possible, of course, to write and publish online, so fiction writers may find some of the content of the new blog useful for that purpose also.

Hazards of being a blogging novelist

Guy Gavriel Kay has an entertaining item in today's Globe and Mail, about the bad things that can happen to successful novelists who interact online with their readers: Release the fans! Excerpt:

George R.R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor of an ongoing, seven-volume fantasy series called A Song of Ice and Fire. Four books are done. The first three came quickly, then there was a five-year wait for the fourth. 

The first indicated publication date for the fifth instalment, fiercely awaited, was 2006. That has rather obviously been missed: Martin is still writing it. The natives are restless. 

How restless? Well, on his blog, cutely called Not a Blog, Martin fired back two weeks ago at what he called “a rising tide of venom” about how late he is. 

Seems some of his loyal and devoted readers are savagely attacking him for taking holidays, for watching football in the fall, for attending conventions, doing workshops, editing a volume of short stories, even for being “60 years old and fat” (I'm quoting here, trust me) – the implication being he might drop dead before fulfilling his obligation to do nothing else but finish the damned series.

Publishing digitally

Via today's Globe and Mail, an article worth reading and pondering—even if you haven't published yet: Who gets the biggest piece of the digital pie? Excerpt:

There has not been a wholesale overthrow of the traditional book in favour of portable handheld devices such as the Apple iPhone and Sony Reader, or even the home computer. 

It's estimated that no more than 3 per cent of total annual retail book sales in North America can be attributed to digital consumption, and most of that is occurring in the United States. 

But in the last year or so there have been harbingers of what veteran publishing guru Jason Epstein calls “a historic paradigm shift.” And the “ongoing and accelerating interest,” as Illingworth describes it, has anxious authors and jittery publishers bobbing and weaving around the issue of what's a fair split of the revenues in this Brave New World.

When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit

One of the great pleasures of the new century is that Dick Cavett writes a blog on the New York Times. In his latest post, he writes about When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit. Excerpt:

What if we could get John Cheever and John Updike?” someone said.

“Together. On the same show!” The fantasy came true.

But the greatest pleasure of the post is Cavett's own lovely, funny prose. If you're tragically too young to remember when he owned late-night TV, his posts will both make you realize the depth of your loss, and almost make up for it. Dick Cavett should be designated a National Treasure.

Publish and perish

A gloomy but relevant article in today's Globe and Mail: Publish, and your book will probably perish. While the examples are mostly Canadian, the situation is the same everywhere. Excerpt:

A book's promotion was also, remembers Toronto-based fiction writer Andrew Pyper, about "sharing rides in Hondas to readings in church basements in small towns" - a phenomenon, after having published four books in the last 12 years, he still deems "the core of the thing." 

Indeed, [Margaret] Atwood - who once, early in her career, did a book signing in the men's socks and underwear section of an Edmonton department store ("I think it was because it was near the escalator") - continues to call publishing "an art and craft with a business component." 

"But now," adds Pyper, "there's this additional virtual [promotion] apparatus of sites and blogs and whatever. ... Do these things actually work? Nobody seems to know."

I sympathize with Atwood: For my first nonfiction book, I was stationed in a Vancouver department store, where someone asked me where the men's shirts were. (The department store, a major national chain, is now defunct.)

Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs

I'm happy to see that this site is included (#81) in a list of the Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs. By all means explore the other sites—you're likely to find some good advice.

Thinking about self-publishing?

Via the New York Times: Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab. Excerpt:

Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies. Small bookstores are closing. Big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy. 

A recently released study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books. 

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground. 

Credit for the self-publishing boomlet goes to authors like Jim Bendat, whose book “Democracy’s Big Day,” a collection of historical vignettes about presidential inaugurations, enjoyed a modest burst in sales in the hoopla surrounding President Obama’s swearing-in. 

After failing to secure a traditional publishing deal in 2000, Mr. Bendat, a public defender in Los Angeles, paid $99 to publish the first edition of his book with iUniverse, a print-on-demand company. 

He updated the book in 2004 and 2008, and has sold more than 2,500 copies. IUniverse takes a large cut of each sale of the book, currently on Amazon.com for $11.66. 

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

We're a long way from the days of the old vanity presses, and self-publishing looks like a more reasonable way to go, especially when even the top editor of Publishers Weekly has just been laid off.

John Updike, 1932-2009

Via the New York Times, sad news: John Updike, Author, Dies at 76. Excerpt:

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76. 

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

I didn't read all of Updike's novels, and I didn't always like those I did read, but I deeply respected him as a man of letters: superbly literate, disciplined as a writer, a brilliant essayist. Few writers have observed their times more perceptively.

Writing fiction in bad times

Every industry is in trouble this winter, and publishing is an industry. 

I've put a couple of new links in the Writers' Resources list: Publishers Weekly and Quill and Quire. The first covers the American publishing business, and Q&Q is Canadian. If you explore them, you'll see that the book biz is in the same trouble as magazines and newspapers.

What does this mean for those of us who write fiction?

Maybe not much. In the midst of the Depression in the 1930s, publishers brought out astounding novels, and magazines paid well for short fiction. (My dad, a very good-looking guy, made some money as a model for the illustrations in high-end magazines specializing in women's fiction.) The giants of mid-century popular fiction got their start in the Depression: Robert Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. 

Or maybe today's recession means a lot. Publishing had fewer competitors then—just radio and movies. People read more, and it didn't cost much. A brand-new hardcover novel might cost $1.95, and the 20-cent royalty could keep the author living pretty well.

Seventy years later, fiction is a minor branch of a megapublishing industry. That industry is battling a host of competitors, many of them online. I recall when a paperback novel cost 35 cents; now it's more likely 30 times that. (In my local supermarket today, I considered buying a Dan Simmons novel about the doomed Franklin expedition in the Canadian Arctic: good author, subject that fascinates me, but the price was just too high.)

In times like these, no publisher is quite insane enough to take a chance on an unknown writer with no agent. The publisher has long since sacked the underpaid sub-editor who would normally read submissions from such writers. The agents who normally filter promising manuscripts for the publishers are seeking only safe, predictable stuff from writers with great sales records. Unknown writers would get a prompter answer from the Norse god Thor than from such agents.

In the 1980s and 90s, I earned less and less with each novel. I started with $20,000 for Icequake and another $20,000 for its sequel, Tsunami. That paid for the upstairs we put on the house, including the office where I'm writing this, but neither book sold enough copies to pay for those advances. 

Later novels got smaller advances, or outright rejections. I had to peddle them downmarket, and even when I got back to Del Rey Books, I couldn't sell enough copies to warrant the great editorial support I got. After Redmagic in 1995, Del Rey also stopped answering my queries.

The mass-market industry was changing, and not for the better. After eleven published novels, I was actually less marketable than some kid with no track record. The kid might make some money; I clearly couldn't.

No, I'm not feeling sorry for myself. No one promised me a literary career of wealth and fame. Some people buy lottery tickets, and some write novels. Most never see any return at all. At a particular time in North American publishing, I wrote stuff that editors liked, even if not enough readers did. No complaints.

My writing did teach me a lot about the numbers. Consider this: My last couple of novels in the 1990s made about $8,000 each. Each took me a couple of years to complete, while I also taught college English full-time and also wrote a lot of articles (word for word, the articles paid way better).

Assume you need, say, $65,000 to live reasonably well and securely in 2009. To make a living from writing novels at 8 grand a book, you'd need to crank out eight novels, each around 125,000 words, between now and next Christmas. 

That's a million words, or roughly 20,000 words (100 manuscript pages) a week. And that assumes your publisher is delighted with every script as you deliver it, and brings it out promptly, and each book "earns out" its $8,000 advance. If it doesn't, your publisher will soon lose interest. (You'll also have to publish most of your stuff under pen names, because readers are happy with about one or two titles a year from a given author.)

Now, not many people can crank out 20,000 words a week, year in and year out, and be sure of entertaining enough people to keep it going. And who would want to be one of those industrious hacks? When would you have enough time to take a week off in Cancun, or an afternoon to go to the dentist?

And what happens when your publisher gets sold to some conglomerate, and the new guy in charge thinks you're the problem and not the solution?

The prospects for new writers today are far, far worse than they were when I broke into mass-market fiction in 1978 with The Empire of Time (advance: $3,500). I didn't even have an agent. Now the mass-market publishers won't even look at unagented submissions.

If I've depressed you sufficiently, let's consider what you could do if you still think that God put you on earth to write fiction and not deliver pizza.

First, do what writers did 300 years ago: Make a few copies of your stuff and circulate it to friends. Enjoy their comments, positive or not, and get on with your life.

Second, self-publish. Vanity presses, when I was a kid, were a joke: Awful writers paid fortunes to get into print with a lifetime supply of Christmas presents to friends and family. Now, online print-on-demand publishers are charging reasonable amounts to bring out a few copies of well-designed books. 

Look into it. If you're industrious, you could order enough copies to fill the trunk of your car, and then distribute those copies to local bookstores on consignment. If you publish your own book, you're a publisher. Maybe you're more of a businessperson than you thought, and you'll actually enjoy the experience.

What's more, if your book sells fairly well on consignment, some commercial publisher may be willing to become your distributor, placing the book in far more outlets than you could hope to reach.

Third, give your stuff away. Do it on the cheap by turning your manuscript into a PDF and posting it on your blog. Or hire someone to typeset it using InDesign, and then upload it to your blog. You'll reach a few more readers, and they may pass your book along to others. You won't have money, but you'll have readers.

Fourth, remember Hunter S. Thompson's observation: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional." If you've got the brains and bloody-mindedness, invent a whole new genre for an audience no one even knows exists. Edgar Allen Poe, as weird an American as the 19th century ever produced, created the detective story and moved science fiction way beyond Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

But whatever you do, don't give up writing fiction. You've already wired your brain by writing, and it will only atrophy if you don't keep at it. Every story you write is first of all a dialogue with yourself, and only after is it a dialogue with your readers. So keep talking with yourself, listen to what your inner writer wants to tell you, and you may well end up talking also with readers in the 23rd century.

Sexual symbolism in fiction

The other day, a commenter quoted part of my post on Michael Crichton and added his own observations:

"More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)"

Did Crichton ever admit to this? It's weird analysis like yours that always turned me off to english teachers. Some times a story is just a story. And, no, I'm not a Crichton fan. I'm someone who is tired of being told by english teachers/professors what constitutes literature, when 80% of the vaunted literature I have read for these people is pure crap.

To the best of my scanty knowledge, Crichton never admitted to it. But most writers have only a vague sense of the symbolism they employ. This is why we are usually the least useful critics of our own work.

George Orwell, however, knew exactly what he was doing in Nineteen Eighty-Four when he put "the worst thing in the world" in the Ministry of Love's Room 101. Orwell once explicitly stated that "101" was a kind of rebus for the female genitalia: Winston Smith goes back to the womb, and is thereby deprived of both his adulthood (such as it is) and his individuality.

My commenter may be right that "80% of the vaunted literature I have read for these people is pure crap." I don't know what his teachers' syllabi contained. But it may also be that my commenter didn't realize that stories are told as much in images as in words. 

These images are deeply ingrained in us and our culture, and probably go back at least ten thousand years ago. The basic plot of every story is something like this: We were living in a good place. Someone did the wrong thing, and we got kicked out. Now we've got to figure out how to get back there.

Whether that good place is Eden or the womb, it symbolizes a harmony between the individual and the world. In Orwell, the harmony is viciously ironic; Room 101, after all, is in the Ministry of Love where no love at all is available.

Orwell was working in a genre known as "anatomy" or "Menippean satire," which is based on an intellectual attack on intellectuals (the kind of folks who make you read 80% crap). SF novels are also Menippean satires, whether by geniuses like Orwell or hacks like me and Crichton. And like any genre, Menippean satire has its conventions.

One key convention is the "rationalization" of sex. Orwell isn't even subtle about it: In Oceania, people belong to the Anti-Sex League, and Winston and Julia finally get it on in an Edenic patch of countryside which is bugged by lots of microphones. Big Brother has sex organized, just like the Two-Minute Hate.

The father of SF is probably Thomas More, who in Utopia is equally concerned about rational sex: In Utopia, young couples wanting to marry must see each other naked before the ceremony, just so they know what they're getting.

And wicked old St. Thomas More played other games with sexual symbolism. We learn that Utopos, the founder of Utopia, created it at the end of a long, penile peninsula. He effectively cut it off, having a channel cut across it. The resulting island is a kind of vagina and uterus, where the cities are all built on the shores of an inland sea. You can reach this sea only by traversing a narrow and dangerous inlet. Once you're in, though, it's smooth sailing.

Is this a weird analysis? Only if you think geography could never be a storytelling tool, and intellectuals could never tell a dirty joke.

Sometimes we don't even know when we're doing it. When I was writing Greenmagic, I had a passage in which my magician-hero is communing with the magical powers residing in the stolen staff of another magician.  My hero is planning to use the staff to overthrow the oppressors of his people, and sometimes he rubs the staff and promises the powers within that soon he will release them.

A female teaching colleague, reading this passage, pointed out the obvious (to her) Freudian symbolism of this passage. Boy, was I embarrassed!

I guess the moral is that you're always going to write about sex, whether you intend to or not. Sex is a symbol for the basic human society, what Vonnegut called the "Republic of Two." And the symbols you use—Room 101, a wizard's walking-stick, a rose, a 9mm Glock—will tell your readers a lot about your story...and maybe about you as well.

New Year's thoughts on writing

This afternoon, I visited the list of Amazon.ca Bestsellers. Out of the top 25, seven were books by Stephenie Meyer in the Twilight series.

While I'm delighted for her success, I'm a bit discouraged for the rest of us. It's impressive that a young writer can revive the century-old genre of the vampire novel. But success on this scale does not advance the cause of fiction.

Instead, it's like clearing vast swathes of the Amazon rainforest to raise cattle destined to become hamburgers: For the sake of a totally predictable product, we sacrifice a treasure house of diversity.

Success on this scale teaches publishers the wrong lesson: When readers show they like something, give them lots and lots more of it. As long as they keep buying it, don't publish anything else—it'll probably lose money, and it might make readers less interested in teenage vampires.

Imagine a restaurant that can create wonderful dishes in any of a dozen distinctive Chinese cuisines. But because sweet-and-sour pork is more popular than anything else, that's all you can get. It's not worth it to the restaurant to stock the materials for ginger chicken or inside-out fish or mapu dofu.

Or imagine the café in Monty Python where Spam is part of every item on the menu. Replace "Spam" with "vampires" and that café is 21st-century popular literature.

So we're replacing the rainforest diversity of early 20th-century fiction with a dreary monoculture, and then we're grateful (as with Harry Potter) that "at least the kids are reading something."

That's like saying, "At least the anorexics will eat Spam."

One of the great glories of fiction is that it enables an individual to express his or her uniquely personal vision, and make it part of the vision of others—maybe even centuries later. And one of the universal messages of good fiction is: "This is my vision. Tell me yours."

For monoculture fiction, the message is "This is part of my vision. Wait for the sequel."

For apprentices and for old hacks like me, these are hard times. The apprentices can barely find anything really worth reading and emulating. They're like would-be chefs who've never had a chance to taste anything but Quarter-Pounders, so they dream of being really great hamburger flippers.

And the old hacks, with their own visions, find it hard even to get a publisher's attention: "Interesting proposal for a Beef Stroganoff, but unfortunately all our customers want Quarter-Pounders."

So what should we do? In two words: Keep writing. In three more: Your own stuff.

Don't worry about getting published. Worry about getting to be a good writer. 

The top book on the Amazon.com list is by Malcolm Gladwell, another monoculture writer with one interesting idea: It takes luck plus hard work to succeed in anything. The hard work boils down, in his view, to 10,000 hours of practice before you're good at anything—playing the piano, playing hockey, whatever.

It's not a new idea. When I was a kid, the saying was that you needed to write a million words before you could gain real skill as a writer. At 250 words per hour, you could write 2.5 million words in 10,000 hours.

My point is not to work just for the sake of getting published and becoming as rich as Stephenie Meyer or Malcolm Gladwell. Write for the sake of writing, for the sake of shaping your own brain into a writer's brain so you can see the world as a writer sees it. Even if you never publish a word, you'll be a wiser and more perceptive person. 

And since we will always have a market (however small) for wisdom and perception, by the time you're into your second million words you will likely have an audience. Who wouldn't want to be read by seekers after wisdom and perception?

I wish you every success as a writer in the new year. But you will achieve success not by wishes, but by putting three words together, cutting one of them, and putting down another three words. Over and over again.

Keep at it.

The simple joys of dishwashing

This evening, after a good dinner, I did the dishes and came upstairs to find this story on Slate: Barack Obama's life will be somewhat normal for exactly 64 more days. So why not wash the dishes? Excerpt:

In Barack Obama's first interview since winning the election, he made an odd but revealing confession: He found it soothing, he said, to do the dishes.

I know exactly what he was talking about. For a writer, that kind of mundane chore is absolutely essential.

By dumb luck, I've managed to live a life in which nothing much has happened. I had the same job, college teaching, for 40 years. I've lived in the same nice house for 36 years, where our two girls grew up.

My wife's a wonderful cook, and I'm happy to clean up. When the kids were young, we'd all have dinner together; then everyone left the kitchen and I stayed to do the dishes.

In that time I could daydream, think about tomorrow's classes, and wonder about the current or future novel. And I discovered that nothing frees the mind like putting the body to some kind of automatic work.

It works on all levels. Sometimes I'd get an idea for a whole novel or nonfiction book. Sometimes, with a book in progress, I could focus on what ought to happen in the next chapter. It got to be a running gag: If I was having plot problems, we needed to invite people over for dinner so I'd have more dishes to wash.

It doesn't have to be dishes. Mowing the grass is good, and so are shaving and vacuuming. Walking our black Lab one night many years ago, I wondered what my neighbourhood would look like ten million years from now. That led to Eyas, the book I still consider my best.

That beloved dog is long gone, but I still walk his successors, two beautiful Australian shepherds, and I think about books in progress and books that I might someday write. Then I come home and accomplish work that I'd never have even imagined if the dogs hadn't dragged me out in the pouring rain.

Some years ago my wife insisted on buying a dishwasher. I could see the artistic crisis that meant, but you can't put a cast-iron skillet in a dishwasher. Some chores, thank heaven, will always be boring, robotic manual tasks. I hope I can perform them for many more years.

And I hope President Obama gets some dishwashing time as well. It could give him the ideas that will save us all.

War Fiction

It's Remembrance Day here in Canada, and Veterans' Day in the US. Today The Tyee published my essay War and How We Told It, discussing the early Canadian novels about what they called the Great War.

Farewell, Michael Crichton

Via The New York Times: An Appraisal - Michael Crichton - Builder of Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok. Excerpt:

Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology.

As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum...Of the dead, speak nothing but good. At the age of 67, I feel a shiver when I hear of another writer dead at 66.

But Crichton's novels survive him, though they don't deserve it.

Crichton was clearly a very, very smart and well-educated man. He was also a fast writer of formula fiction, and he stayed within the limits of his "engineered" formulas. That was the key to his success and the cause of his failure.

Crichton understood how to take a half-teaspoon of science and add it to four cups of routine story. The result was a nanotech threat, or a dinosaur threat, or an alien-virus threat. The half-teaspoon of science made his stories just exotic enough to interest readers, without actually making them think. They could sit back and let the routine story carry them up and down the usual roller coaster. At the end, we usually got something like a return to the safe, reassuring status quo.

I read quite a few of his novels, sometimes enjoying them as a pleasant way to waste a weekend. But I stopped taking him seriously after The Andromeda Strain.

Here we have an alien disease, which is to be identified and destroyed in an underground laboratory. To ensure that the disease can never escape, a nuclear bomb is planted under the bottom floor of the lab.

More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)

Now, a satirist could have had a great time with such an image while poking fun at thrillers, Big Science, and any number of other targets. But Crichton didn't have a satirical bone in his body.

He certainly advocated for certain values, and opposed others. One value he opposed was Dumb Kids who Get In Trouble. Another value was Bitchy Women who Hassle the Hero. But he used dumb kids and bitchy women simply to move his plots along, and to make us sympathize with his heroes. God knows the heroes themselves didn't offer much we could sympathize with.

Most of his novels, especially after he began to succeed in Hollywood, read more like treatments for the inevitable screenplays that would follow them. They offered just enough technobabble to give the stories some credibility, and they kept readers turning the pages. But they never drew readers to think seriously about the issues the stories dramatized.

Writing fiction is a craft. If we're good enough at that craft, our readers (not we ourselves) can call us artists. Like any craft, writing relies on formulas and conventions. If we want to challenge those formulas, we first need to understand them very well.

Then we can tweak them in ways that make our readers snap out of their trance and ask: "What the hell is this story really about? And why the hell do I find such a story interesting?"

A story that makes us ask such questions, and find answers to them, begins to escape formula and become literature.

I'm glad for Crichton and his family that he was able to make enough money to keep them all very comfortable. But I'm sorry for Crichton, because his intelligence and talent suggested that he could have been a far better writer if only he had taken his craft seriously.

Fan mail for Elmore Leonard

The Tyee has published my article In Praise of Elmore Leonard .

If you haven't discovered the old master yet, you have many, many great stories to look forward to...and to learn from.

George Orwell blogs the 1930s

This is the best news of the week: the Orwell Diaries are a day-by-day journal of George Orwell's life, published 70 years to the day after he wrote them. The chance to get inside Orwell's head and see the world as he did is an opportunity no writer should miss.

I'm putting a link to the blog in the Writers' Blogs and Sites list.

The Length of a Chapter

Monique posted a comment asking: How Long is a Chapter? It's a frequently asked question. The link will take you to my post on this subject from May 2007.

You may also want to check my online course Write a Novel, which could be useful.

Most people find this site by Googling questions like how many pages in a novel. Once you're here, use the Google Search function in the right-hand column. You may find what you're looking for very quickly.

Farewell to Rust Hills

Via The New York Times: L. Rust Hills, Fiction Editor at Esquire, Dies at 83. Excerpt:

L. Rust Hills, a staunch advocate of contemporary American literature who, as Esquire’s curmudgeonly fiction editor in three separate stints from the 1950s through the 1990s, published original works by scores of the country’s finest writers, died on Tuesday in Belfast, Me. He was 83 and lived in Key West, Fla.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said a friend, the writer Christopher Buckley.

A shrewd reader with a keen ear for an original voice and a sure sense of the distinction between new writing and merely fashionable writing, Mr. Hills upheld standards he unashamedly thought of as literary.

The list of distinguished writers he championed early in and throughout their careers is long and comprises several generations. To name just a handful: Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx.

I have a faint recollection of hearing Rust Hills speak at Columbia, but I certainly knew who he was, and how important he was. Especially in the late 50s and early 60s, Esquire was one of the really big literary magazines. Every issue was an event—a provocative essay by Mailer, a short story by Styron or Gaddis. For aspiring young writers, Hills and Esquire showed that you could not just get published; you could make an impact.

We are now long past the age when editors actually edited. Now they make deals. Almost every book I read reminds of that, because today's books—fiction and nonfiction alike—are embarrassingly under-edited.

Spelling and grammatical errors are too numerous to count. Worse yet are passages that are so dull or poorly written that even your word processor's style guide would flag them for revision (or excision). Yet somehow they get past today's editors.

The problem seems to lie with publishers' bottom-line priorities. It costs money to do serious editing. In the Golden Age of American literature, roughly 1920-1970, publishers actually thought money wasn't quite as important as identifying good new writers and fostering their careers. If that meant hiring editors like Maxwell Perkins and Rust Hills, so be it. Today's corporate mentality is just looking for the next blockbuster, regardless of quality.

You can still find good editors here and there. Thirty years after my first novel appeared, I'm still grateful to Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Owen Lock for the attention they gave it. My editors at Self-Counsel Press are patient and meticulous; they've saved me from embarrassing myself on more than one page.

But it's more a matter of luck than certainty. So we owe Rust Hills our gratitude for setting an example that some still follow.