The professional amateur
Set the beat so they will buy it
If there’s a hook they can’t deny it
Sing about love so they can feel it
Sing about love so they can sing it
Sing it-”Catch Without Arms” by Dredg
It seems to me that every budding writer in the blogosphere is determined to undermine my credibility by appearing incredibly calm, collected and professional. Their blogs are full of remarkably rational updates on their progress and objective thoughts on their projects in general. Then there are those which inform their readers of the author’s love for kittens, or this really funny conversation they had with their friend about how greasy hamburgers are. Those blogs don’t make me feel all that inadequate, but they do make me cry a little.
It seems to me that either I am incredibly poorly equipped to deal with the emotional vampirism of writing a novel, or everyone else is full of shit. I’m going to go with the latter, because I’m loathe to admit my own faults and abusing others is more fun anyway.
Some six or seven months ago, I came up with a mission statement which I pretentiously called a ‘self-employment contract‘. Basically I laid out a plan with which I was to complete my novel by a relatively arbitrary deadline. Write X hours a day, Y days a week and so forth. Sounds reasonable, right? WRONG.
The thing is, writing isn’t professional. A professional writer, by definition, is a writer who gets paid to write. That’s it. There’s no bloody uniform or code of conduct. You can pretend to be in an office and you can pretend that the .doc file in front of you is just another progress report, but that will never be the case. Well, unless you’re writing urban fantasy, in which case you should pretend the .doc file in front of you is a steaming pile of binary shit.
Some days it just doesn’t fly. Some weeks it just doesn’t fly. I’ve been sitting down in the exact same spot as I did when writing came easily in an effort to catch that elusive gnat of inspiration for the better part of a week. Aside from an e-mail or two, I’ve managed to write nothing.
Yeah, I know about writing prompts. I know about ‘writuals’. I know about all the gimmicks. They don’t really count for anything when you’re suffering from literary constipation. At times like these, you long for someone else in a similar situation. You want to hear that you’re not the only one. Instead, all you get is a list of bubbly assholes posting word counts and how their NaNoWriMo novels are taking shape.
Whatever happened to the writers who drank themselves stupid and started fights with innocent bartenders to vent their frustrations? The writers who packed their veins with near-lethal narcotic doses in desperation? The poor bastards who went on whoring rampages and ended up writing about the bitch who gave them twelve different STDs?
I’m not saying those are particularly appealing options for me. I like the quiet life, and I leave such outlets for my more adventurous peers. I would like to read about them, though. It’d be nice to know that there are still people out there for whom writing is a passion, not a Sunday hobby quantified by the word count of their vampire detective’s adventures.
It’s not professional. It will never be professional. There’s no manual or guidebook for this. It’s an unholy clusterfuck of imagination and reality. Embrace your inner lunatic and let him guide you down that twisted path.
That’s what happens when you play catch without arms
It’s what sets, sets, sets us apart
That’s what happens when you compromise your art
It’s what sets, sets, sets apart-”Catch Without Arms” by Dredg
Postcards from Mars
It’s been a slow couple of days – I know what I want to write, but I’m still working on how to get it to read like it sounds in my head. I have made progress in less concrete areas, however – for one, I’ve come to terms with just how insignificant a measure of progress a novel’s word count really is. Thus far I’ve managed to crank out up to 15,000 words in a single sitting, most of which is now looking like it might be chucked out completely before I’m finished with this novel.
It’s not that the text is bad or I don’t want to include it, it’s just that I fear I may have set too ambitious a level of detail for the novel. If it’s going to extend from my main protagonist’s birth in 1165 to Salah ad-Din’s siege of Krak des Chevaliers in 1188, then I quite simply cannot delve as deeply into my various characters’ backgrounds as I have done. The novel would be at least a thousand pages long.
I may not be too impressed by the rules and regulations of first-time writers and the sorts of things they should be sending off, but I do know that no one will touch a novel that humongous from a newbie. God knows I wouldn’t. Besides which, I’m having a hard enough time keeping a few hundred pages coherent. So I’m going to have to rethink my structure at some point. I’m not too bothered by it though, because as I’ve mentioned I think I’ve come to grips with the notion of a first draft being a very rough block of clay which will eventually be formed into something less elementary.
Were I less cynical or more inclined to spew out Oprah-style catchphrases, I’d say I’ve learned to forgive myself for the mistakes I make while writing. I’m not though, so I’ll just say that I’ve decided to postpone the time at which I start caring.
In the meantime, I wrote a short poem to annoy everyone with. Here it is; A Martian Wish.
I want a girl with bedroom eyes,
with ample cleavage and soft-skinned thighs.
I want a girl like that:
without an ounce of fat
and I want her for her mind.
That’s all I got today, I hope everyone had a good international worker’s day or whatnot, I did my part by buying some new glasses(huzzah for Syrian prices) and subsequently perfecting new dramatic facial expressions to accompany them. Right, well, at least I didn’t hurt the proletariat’s efforts.
The literate voices in my head
Having expelled some pent-up frustration in previous posts, I’ve found myself feeling a bit more balanced lately. It seems that venting really is healthy; who’d have guessed? Work on the novel has resumed at a much better pace, though I find myself struggling with a new dilemma: literary schizophrenia.
The novel’s taking a lot of hits in terms of stylistic integrity. I am veering from point of view to point of view, changing tone as I please and whilst I’m sure that it’s there somewhere, I’m not at all sure that I’d recognize my theme if I sat on it.
I don’t really see this as a problem, though – writing for me has always been an evolving process. I may have an outline, a synopsis and even the will to see that plan through, but I am always noticing things about my writing after I’ve written them. Not before. A delayed understanding of your own writing, if you will.
It’s a bit like picking up some bizarro short story you wrote in high school and reading it through. Once you’re done cringing at the poor grammar and horribly cliched characters, you’ll come away with a sense of retrospective awe – “Oh, that’s what I was trying to say”.
Anyway, as I was saying; the novel’s going through a bit of a schizophrenic phase which I’ve heard is relatively normal and only healthy. After all, I can always go back and edit the rest to conform to whatever style or tone I eventually decide on.
Or I could just submit it as is and change the title to “I need mood-stabilizing medication”. Either way, I figure as long as the novel is still in my hard drive(and half a dozen USB back-ups) and not in a publishing agent’s in-box, there’s little point in forcing myself to abide by any self-imposed standards. There will be plenty of time to review it, muck about with it and doll the thing up. Until it’s finished, my primary concern should be finding what it is I really want to say and how I really want to say it – not what I may have thought when I first drew up the idea.
In the meantime, I will continue to write incongruous and disjointed text. I apologize to those of you who actually receive this work in progress and ask that you bear with me as I search for my personal Holy Grail.
Poe’s woes
On occasion Finnish newspapers trickle through the diplomatic courier mail, eventually making their way to my desk. They’re not very interesting, but they do provide a slightly delayed view of what has happened in my home country. Fortunately for anyone reading this, I won’t share the details of Finnish current events because to be perfectly frank, it’s a terribly boring place full of depressing people.
Instead I want to write about an article I read in a paper last night. The article was a sort of retrospective review of Edgar Allan Poe’s only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The reviewer naturally praised Poe’s mastery of the short story format, but went on to remark how Poe’s novel was so stylistically inconsistent and generally incoherent that it would never have been published had it been submitted today.
Granted, Poe himself called the novel a mistake and a joke, but despite that, it reminded me of another article I read, where an author slightly altered Jane Austen’s works including her landmark novel, Pride and Prejudice and submitted them to a number of publishers. Not only were none of the submissions considered for publication, but apparently only one of the publishers caught the flagrant plagiarism. I should note for those not interested in clicking the link, that the novels were submitted only to prove a point.
These are, of course, only two examples, but significant because they reference two of the most celebrated writers of all time.
As a writer hoping to one day be published, articles like these naturally discourage me. If Poe or Austen couldn’t get published today, what chance do I have? Such is the nature of the beast; when you spend so much time isolated from the rest of the world, you end up thinking only of yourself. But let’s expand this a little. Let’s look at what these articles are saying one more time.
Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen wouldn’t get published today.
Edgar Allan Poe. Jane Austen. I’m pretty sure if Dostoevsky submitted Crime and Punishment to an editor, it’d come back with a letter requesting a more specific genre and more involving dialog in the first two pages. I am relatively certain that Fowles’ attempts at peddling The Magus would end in tears and demands for less linguistic posturing and more action. I am positive that Bulgakov would end up drowning in form letters informing him that Random Publisher X is not looking for the sort of insane shit to be found in Master and Margarita.
How much great literature is being lost because of the publishing industry? How many novels that would have inspired generations have been tossed in the bin, abandoned in antiquated hard drives or burned symbolically because of the dollar-driven motivations of the industry that supervises what is or isn’t worth publishing?
Of course, this is only tapping the issue of what doesn’t get published that potentially should. What about all that which does please the blinkered representatives of the omnipotent publishing industry? Their works are torn this way and that, rearranged and reorganized until whatever resemblance they once bore to the original work is superficial at best. How many lives are you willing to destroy to please your demographic, you ravenous beast of an industry?! Insert a shaking fist here, if it helps you understand my melodramatic intent better.
I suppose it’s a bit one-sided to say that the publishing industry is solely to blame, however. Of course they have to make money, otherwise they can’t stay afloat and keep publishing books. Of course this isn’t a new phenomenon, books have been rejected by publishers since the printing press was invented. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is a business, after all – businesses have to make money.
Perhaps we are to blame. Perhaps it’s all of us, harboring delusions of literary grandeur who have pushed the industry to their current standards. Perhaps it’s every Tom, Dick and Harry writing a novel and shoving it into every available agent’s inbox that has made the selection process so time-consuming that they’ve no choice but to abide by those standards. Hey, I can understand that. I think there’s a whole lot of shit out there that shouldn’t have been published. I wonder if one day someone will come up with a calculation for how much meaningful writing has been lost to the droves of urban fantasy writers taking valuable publishing quotas? Yes, I really hate urban fantasy. It’s a stupid fucking genre and people who write it should have their breathing licenses revoked. It’s never too late for a mid-life abortion.
But hey! That’s a whole other rant, and for all my vitriolic posturing I recognize that there are people out there who enjoy it. I don’t, but then I’m a giant prick who doesn’t enjoy a whole hell of a lot that doesn’t have oodles of nicotine, caffeine or sex in it. I’m sure there are people out there who feel equally wronged by historical fiction(blasphemers!).
Perhaps it is people like me, though. I’ll eventually finish my book and send it off. I’ll probably end up sending it to a lot of different people before getting an answer I like, or alternately getting enough recommendations to eat my crappy manuscript that I’ll oblige such a request. Perhaps it’s people like me. Perhaps it’s people like you. Like us.
Perhaps more of us should get off our self-aggrandizing asses and get a real job. Perhaps more of us should just stop. Stop writing. Stop dreaming.
Or perhaps, somewhere along the way, the world lost the plot. Who the fuck is writing it, anyway?
I bet it’s some urban fantasy writer.
A cure for compulsion
Have you ever taken a look at the amount of self-help literature available to writers? Whether on the internet, in bookstores or in your local daily paper, it seems you can’t bend over without having someone shove a compendium of writing do’s and don’ts in your face. As an avid surfer(of the world wide web) I barely manage to sneak into my e-mail inbox before being bombarded by some asinine twat and his patented 12 step guide to literary immortality.
I’ll confess: I’ve read a few of them.
Of course I have. Who doesn’t have doubts when they’re starting out? I don’t claim to know any more about this whole writing gig than the next schmuck. I haven’t taken a creative writing class since high school, for God’s sake. I haven’t had “face time” with any successful authors. I’ve never sat in a circle with other writers discussing our respective work. I’m flying blind out here. It’s a pretty scary prospect. After all, it is a very competetive field.
More than that, it’s a business. As with all businesses, there are rules. There are do’s and don’ts. There are accepted methods, tried-and-true models and professionals. There has to be; writing is a money-making endeavor. There’s a lot of money on the move. Just look at J.K. Rowling and her fifty thousand billion hundred million dollars. Make no mistake, writing is a business.
But should it be? Of course it is, but should it be? Has it really come to this? To lectures on how to submit your manuscript, to ‘ways to optimize your chances’, to self-indulgent self-help guides? To do’s and don’ts? To checklists and submission rules, to diplomas in creative writing, to support groups for those that don’t make it?
I know I’m new at this. I know I’m naive about the realities of writing. I don’t know how to write a novel in 12 steps. I don’t know what constitutes an ‘engaging and interesting’ beginning, which is apparently all agents and publishers read these days. I don’t know how to balance my narrative. I have a minor stroke every night as I reflect on all that I don’t know. And you know what? I’m glad.
Don’t get me wrong; of course I want to succeed. Who doesn’t? I want to write a great novel and have it sell a trillion copies. I want to out-sell the Bible. I want to write the new Bible. But I’m glad I don’t know what to do and what not do, because God knows that enough of life is restricted by rules and guidelines without having to worry about what someone arbitrarily assigned as the acceptable norms of ‘creative’ writing. If you want more action in the first chapter, then you fucking write it.
As long as I’m pissing and moaning, I’ll add something else I hate. I hate restrictions on blogging. I hate that I shouldn’t write about something I don’t like, because it creates a ‘negative image’. “People respond poorly to negativity”, they say. So fucking what? Should I only write about how the garden is blooming during this lovely Damascene summer(it is quite nice, actually)? Whatever happened to writers being regularly institutionalized assholes nobody but their masochistic spouses can stand?
Just so that we’re clear, I think a lot of the literature floating around out there is complete and utter shit. I think you could pretty safely burn 90% of the books published each year and not lose any significant contributions to the world. Should a novel of my own writing ever be released into the wild, I’m sure you could add that to the pile. I think every single urban fantasy novel in the world should be shoved down their authors’ throats while on fire. I think anything sold in an airport bookstore should be dropped from 30,000 feet with the rest of the ejected waste product. I hope the lot falls on an urban fantasy writer’s home and breaks their pink Macbook.
I hate people who think that saying that you hate something means that there’s something wrong. “Hate is such a strong word,” they say. Okay. And? Why shouldn’t I be allowed to feel strongly about something? Why should I have to tip-toe around the things I ‘really don’t quite agree with completely’ when I could just be honest with you and tell you I hate them? It’s not like I hate babies or puppies. I actually quite like puppies.
I hate people like me, who make such a big stink about being ‘writers’ when they’re just another Joe behind a keyboard with delusions of grandeur. In fact, I think I’ll stop now.
And yes, I do feel better now.
History is written by just about anyone
Hot on the heels of the previous post, I give you a query regarding historical fiction.
Those familiar with my current project know that it is a historical fiction novel, centered around a specific period of the Crusades and dealing with a decidedly Frankish(European) view of things. When I first set out to write the novel, I had visions of telling the history of certain institutions and places through characters who weren’t very central to the story itself, acting more as observers than participants. It was above all the history that fascinated and continues to fascinate me.
As I slowly hammered the novel’s outline into some form of acceptable shape, I quickly found my original concept flying out the window. My characters had become central – the novel was no longer about history, it was about them. By that time I was okay with it, as I’d grown rather fond of the fictitious buggers anyway, but a part of me resented the way they now overshadowed the historical backdrop of their misadventures.
Along comes a fantastic account of Damascus(there’s a link in the post below) and its history comes alive before me. I begin to see a way of writing my own version of its history without involving characters who are too…meddlesome. A mute protagonist, for example, would be a suitable mouthpiece for providing a view of the historical events of this fascinating city without becoming too involved in the daily drama that tends to fill our lives. I mean if the asshole can’t talk, he can’t screw up my story, right?
Then again, there are a million books out there which tell the story of Damascus and every other city in the world from every imaginable angle. I don’t want to write another one, I’m not interested in just the cold, hard facts – I’m interested in the motives of the people we know only from secondhand accounts, I’m interested in the details that historians omit in favor of a more holistic view of things, I’m interested in the life between the pages of history.
How do you balance the historical and the fiction in historical fiction? Which should be given priority, and by what margin?
It seems a difficult question to answer, even from examples that already exist. One of my greatest influences is undoubtedly Mika Waltari, a Finnish writer who wrote some of the most engaging historical fiction I have ever had the pleasure to read. Initially reading him purely for his masterful prose(it doesn’t translate very well, unfortunately – Finnish is an incredibly rich language), I really became interested in the possibilities of historical fiction when I did some research on the subjects he’d written about. Every detail I found in his books checked out: something I fear I have been unable to replicate.
Regardless, he was undoubtedly a master writer and I am a mere chick in the nest. An unhatched egg, actually. I’m not setting out to copy him, but I would like to know how he managed to weave the history and the narrative so seamlessly and brilliantly. I take a great deal more creative license than he ever did, and it’s something which pisses me off to no end; I want to educate while entertaining, amuse while informing and most of all tell a damn good story.
It’s funny, when I first decided to write historical fiction I thought it’d be the easiest possible genre. ‘Your world is already there’, I told myself. ‘How hard can filling it with characters be’? Not very. It’s getting the details and the balance right that’s bloody difficult. Oh, and the research. Who ever knew writing would require so much reading?
Destruction by distraction?
How much is too much?
As I plod through the tiresome mud that is the act of actually writing down the stories in my head, I find myself wishing for a new project. It’s not that I dislike the one I’m currently working on – far from it – it’s just that I find myself excited over so many different topics and I feel that if I don’t immediately start work on them, they’ll disappear forever.
Not a very realistic fear in light of my chosen genre being historical fiction, but still. What if I forget?!
This post is brought to you by the Dover republication of H.A.R. Gibb’s excellent translation of Ibn al-Qalanisi’s The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, which is a firsthand account of the Crusades as seen from the central vantage point of Damascus. The chronicle includes a great deal of the intra-Arab machinatinos of the time, and the sheer magnitude of duplicity and intrigue that was carried out then has set a million stories alight in my wee brain.
Would starting work on such a project now, before I finish the previous, jeopardize my focus and bog me down? Would I end up with two unfinished projects instead of one? Or should I seek another project to provide myself with an occasional distraction from Saint John?
I know many struggling writers manage a full-time job, write short stories or articles and probably cure cancer while writing their novels, which makes me think I’m just a whiny bastard. On the other hand, if I’m concerned about losing focus then that’s probably some sort of a hint that to undertake a second project at this point would be detrimental.
I already write short stories from time to time, though lately I haven’t found myself inspired by anything enough to pen one; would this be an acceptable substitute? Why the hell isn’t there a manual for this shit? If someone recommends a Novel Writing for Dummies book or something, I will trek to whichever corner of the Earth they inhabit to personally strangle them.
Voice the voiceless
I just got off the phone with my brother, whom I’d reluctantly sent the first chapter of my novel to some time ago(he insisted and I was running out of excuses). He said he’d read it, so I naturally asked him what he thought with the kind of feigned disinterest any enterprising writer does. He gave me an odd answer, probably the strangest response I’ve heard thus far. There are too many words, he said.
I thought: huh? It’s the beginning of a book, there are supposed to be a lot of words. Then he explained that it sounded fanciful – as opposed to the more natural tone of (for instance) this blog. I immediately defended my baby by proclaiming it a first draft(which it isn’t) and claiming I’ve every intention of revising it(which I do), whilst mentally preparing myself to mentally blot the conversation with images of robot ninjas or something else really cool.
Alas, my abilities to deceive myself have waned over time, and I found myself wondering if he was right. Gripped by insecurity, I raced to my laptop and opened the first chapter: too many words. Too fanciful. Then again, I thought, this is historical fiction. A story about 12th century Jerusalem shouldn’t read like a 21st century blog, should it?
No, of course not. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that the writing I see in that chapter looks unfamiliar. It lacks whatever it is that readable text has – probably readability itself. Of course it’ll be revised and I’m sure that in the months to come will end up looking nothing like it does now, but all that aside the brief conversation raised a question to my mind; when the hell am I going to find ‘my voice’? What the hell is a ‘voice’? I went through puberty once, I don’t want to go through it again.
So while I await for my literary balls to drop, what to do? Well, there’s nothing to do but press on. I guess the best way to spur my hibernating hormones is to keep doing what I’m doing and hope that the issue resolves itself sooner rather than later. That doesn’t mean that I can’t look back at those first chapters every now and then and agonize over my inability(I swear I’m not going to revise anything until it’s done, D) to tamper with it.
I can draw some consolation from the fact that the first six chapters of the book are already slated for complete rewrites. I’ve also changed the perspective and tone of the novel from chapter eight onwards, and it feels much more fluid now that I can write it in a style that is more…me. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I think I’m starting to get there.
Somewhere in the distance, an ageing Eddie Vedder prompts the masses; “voice the voiceless!”
PS: Thanks for the honesty, bro – don’t worry, I don’t get discouraged by criticism. I need it a lot more than I need someone to tell me that it’s great if it’s not.
PPS: Your kids are ugly!
A prayer for pestilence
Here’s a theory:
A writer’s ability to write anything even remotely interesting is inversely related to the soundness of their body and/or mind.
The thought occurred to me today as I scrapped the nth version of chapter 9 and roughly fifteen thousand attempts at writing a new short story. Every word I put down felt forced. Every sentence sounded contrived. Every paragraph stared back at me with the sort of disingenuous pretension that would have made David Lynch proud. On second thought, I should pitch all those shitty bits and pieces to his agent. He’d probably turn them into a seven-hour feature film. “Lynch has done it again,” the critics would say, “I’d rather get punched in the face than write another letter’s psychotic imagery and incomprehensible metaphors made me claw my eyes out in wonderment.”
But I digress. As I wondered as to why I wasn’t coming up with anything, I perused through one of my many archives of crappy fiction to bother publishers with and a thought occurred to me. Every one of those stories is based on a premise I came up when in some altered state of mind; sick, drunk, hung over, angry, sad or even just plain tired.
Ergo, I am incapable of writing anything genuine or inspired because there’s nothing wrong. Life’s pretty peachy, and as we should all know from our angst-ridden teenage years, art is pain, man. Happy people don’t create, they’re just…happy. How boring is that?
In an attempt to immediately rectify the situation and get my creative juices flowing again, I will now indulge in a two-week heroin binge followed by a visit to a leper colony and copious amounts of casual sex with clingy and emotionally vulnerable women. If that doesn’t get me writing something decent, I don’t know what will.
What to write?
It’s funny how difficult an innocent question like ‘what to write’ can be when you sit down and try to think of some profound way to answer it. I suppose the truth is that there is no profound answer; you should write about what you feel comfortable writing about. Writers are as kaleidoscopic in nature as people are. Not every writer has to strive to write the Great American Novel(what the hell is that, anyway?). Not every writer should strive to write the Great American Novel(seriously, I don’t understand it. Maybe you have to be Great. Or American). I know I’m not trying to write anything ground-breaking or revolutionary. I just want to tell a story.
That said, I do think that there is literature that isn’t worth writing. I do think that there needs to be a ‘point’. I’m all for the random placement of letters and sentences, but if it isn’t saying something – if it isn’t woth anything to the person who reads it(note: this can be the writer, too) then was it worth it to write it?
I think the best advice I can offer on what to write could be summarized thusly: write about the world and write about God, write about everything you wish both would understand. I admit it’s a bit pretentious, but then again so am I!
