Writing Fiction

Taking a Holiday

I'm away on Wednesday, June 21 for a week in the Canadian Rockies. I won't have much access to a computer, so if you send me email I won't be able to answer (or post here) until the very end of June or the beginning of July.

Hope your week will be as happy and surprising as mine will be. My wife and I find Jasper National Park an amazing place, even after visiting it every summer for almost thirty years.

Keep writing.

Back to Henderson

It's been months since I've done anything with Henderson's Tenants, but I haven't forgotten about it. When I walk the dogs every day, I think about the story, and especially about the opening chapters when the story's themes emerge.

This afternoon I went back into the manuscript, and remembered what it was like in the spring of 1985, when I'd bought my first computer and written a nonfiction book in seven weeks. Totally buzzed by the experience, I figured I could crank out two or three novels a year.

Instead I learned that word processing makes it much too easy to expand a novel without actually moving it forward. You can create three astoundingly rich chapters, and keep going back over them to add just a drop of gravy here and a sprinkle of chile there. Meanwhile the story itself goes nowhere. My computer-written novels have taken at least as long as those banged out on typewriters.

In earlier returns to this story, I found I'd written so tightly that I had no obvious spots for added detail and expansion...but I needed them. The story needs a lot of new texture and layering.

So I walked in the woods and thought about what changes I needed. I also kept reading books about climate change, economic trends, and technology, and considered how to blend some new ideas into the novel.

This afternoon, with avian flu relatively quiet, I opened up Henderson again and found some spots. Tinkered with an idea or two, and found the results OK. The changes will pay off later in the story, and Henderson's world will be a little more detailed and believable.

Not bad for half an hour's work...after dozens of hours of dog-walking.

What Writers Read

A reader recently wrote to ask:
I have always wondered if reading makes you a better writer. I find that reading books can sometimes influence my writing and diminish my creativity regarding my own work. However, I am curious whether reading more could actually enhance my writing in any way.

You bring back memories of my teenage years, when I'd just read an old translation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea...and I started thinking in an old-fashioned English style. No sooner had I recovered than I began reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and began writing in a clipped, unemotional style...until I got into Catcher in the Rye, and started sounding like a mid-1940s whiney teenage jerk, for Chrissake!

Well, that's just an occupational hazard. Sometimes a writer comes along with a style that's literally infectious (I hate to think of the thousands of young Salinger imitators in the 1950s and 60s). Hemingway swiped the deadpan style of the medieval Icelandic sagas. Some of his readers used it to create the hardboiled detective novel.

Every writer should be a voracious reader, and not only in one's own preferred genre. As a writer of SF and fantasy, I'm in a long line going back to Menippus, Lucian, St. Thomas More, and Jonathan Swift. They started a kind of conversation that's been going on for two thousand years, and I added my humble bit to it. Writers of gothic romance are answering the Bronte sisters, and crime writers are responding to Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard.

But if all you read is your own genre, you're going to be in trouble very soon. Writers choose a particular genre because it can express something the writers want to say. H. G. Wells wrote SF, but he also wrote social satire, romance, and a host of other genres. To do so required a huge range of reading.

Even if you want to stick to a single genre (Celtic heroic fantasy, say), you can't recycle Irish myths forever. Your addition to the conversation should give us something new, something we hadn't thought about in this connection.

Just off the top of my head, imagine an Irish fantasy story drawing on a historic fact: the Phoenicians and others sailed out of the Mediterranean to trade for tin and other valuables. So imagine a story in which Celtic gods and heroes must confront the child-devouring gods of the Phoenicians.

Simply to get this idea, you need to read some Irish history and archaeology, and then get into what we know about the Bronze Age Mediterranean of three or four thousand years ago. That in turn could get you reading fiction set in that era, generating still more ideas.

This is really just "applied" reading, feeding yourself with material you can use directly in your present story. But if you also read widely in genres and on topics you know nothing about, you're likely to stumble across still more ideas. Those can inspire new and unusual stories.

Far from diminishing your creativity, such reading will increase it. Sometimes you'll find a writer so good that you'll feel crushed. But don't be! Ask yourself: "How is this damn genius getting away with it? Why is he making me laugh or cry while I turn the pages?"

The answers to questions like that will give you new confidence for your own work, and that in turn will make your work more fun to write and to read.

And if you've really learned from your reading, some future reader will ask: "Damn! How is she doing that? How can I top what she's doing?"