Looking at Old Work or In Which There Is Much Facepalming

For some reason, this week seemed like a good time for me to take a look at a novella-length science fiction story that I wrote in 2007. I think I was reminded of it after catching sight of a market on Duotrope that accepted novellas only and finding that interesting. So I had a look.

My writing was so much worse in 2007 that I kind of can't believe it.

One of the biggest favors a rejecting editor ever did me was tell me that I relied too much on weak and helping verbs. I have no recollection when or in what context this occurred, but I wish I could get on my knees and kiss this editor's feet. "Was verbing" used to be my go-to way to write. Like, in 75% of my sentences, a character was standing in a doorway, she was eating an apple, she was stitching up a wound. I thought it indicated immediacy - so-and-so was opening the door while saying the dialogue you just read. I was so thoroughly wrong. I am appalled at how clunky and hideous this (amazingly consistent) method reads to me now. Here's a sample.

I could hear Dad talking steadily in the next room, and as Roger and I walked through the front room, what he was saying started to come clear. ... There was the sound of weeping ... We came into the dining room. Dad was sitting on the floor. He looked years older than he had when we came to see him the previous month. He wasn’t even eighty yet, but he looked so much older. His voice was raspy, and he was still talking, to his Clara and to somebody else.

This wee passage betrays three giant problems with my writing as it was then: helping verbs, overdescribing poorly, and perspective.

Helping verbs: "Was" appears 413 times in the original 22,500-word manuscript, five of them right here, plus "wasn't". Ugh. "Was sitting" should be "sat", "was saying" should be "said". The last sentence should start something like "He talked on in a raspy voice," to cut a couple of words and two wases.

Verbs like "sound" and "look" and "feel" and similar should be used with care, too, as they're weak verbs. (In syntax, I now know, they're called light verbs, and do interesting things to the structure of a sentence.) "Seems" in particular is a verb I can't seem (ahem) to stay away from, but I try to remind myself when drafting that it's a fiction equivalent to a weasel word. Not one thing or another. That's no way to write powerfully.

Another issue is that for years, my characters obsessively looked and looked and looked. They looked at everything around them, and at each other constantly. ("Look": 130 appearances in this MS.) I suspect this bad habit is due to being trained in film rather than writing. Eyelines are absolutely essential in filmmaking, and where everyone's looking is a critical set of choices when creating a scene with dialogue. But it dawned on me when I was revising Highbinder that there's not a lot of evident eye contact in most published fiction.

Overdescribing poorly: I remember my motivation for writing the way I did. Although I couldn't have said it this way then, the watchword was "hark." Hark, the sound of weeping floats from the next room. Hark, our father looks so old. Hark, his voice is raspy. This is the way you notice a scene in real life, one thing at a time with small, ordinary words, but by Christ it's horrible to read in fiction. (As an example of the right way to do it, Toni Morrison is an incredibly evocative writer, and she describes hardly at all, with a poet's touch.) And even though I overdid it, the descriptions are so bad! I wanted to say it straight for the reader, so she could walk right into the room with my characters, but I ended up making it mindlessly dull.

Perspective: This seems to be a common thing for writers who haven't learned their craft yet. They'll describe the scene as the narrator or main character experiences it. "I could hear Dad talking steadily", "He looked so much older". You gotta let the narrator stand back from the scene a little bit, and let the reader come in to observe things on her own: Dad talked steadily. His lined face betrayed his age. Obviously you can't leave the MC's experiences out completely, particularly in first person, but just a teensy sprinkle of "I could hear" and "I could see" and "I could feel" is likely the way to go. YA and genre fiction do this over-the-character's-shoulder technique a lot more than lit fic, and that's fine, but if you do it too much the writing just seems inept.

In general, there's nothing good here. There's no creative spark in this passage. Nothing in it at all that makes it seem competent, much less compelling.

I was such a fucking amateur. I'm ashamed.

(And I realize, too, that I am probably still an amateur now. That I'll look back at my current work in another five years and go ah, Jesus, I can't believe I sent my work to anybody, much less Analog and Prairie Schooner.)

However! This novella, the 2007 one, does not seem like it's unsalvageable. I spent a whole morning last week editing about half of it, vacuuming out as many wases and weres as I could manage, cringing so hard I probably took an inch off my height. After sleeping on it, I'm not sure this effort was the right way to go. The MS is less like a car dragged out of a lake and more like a corrupted piece of software: every sentence and paragraph too feeble, every chapter needing a bones-out rewrite. I think I should just start all over. Sketch out the novella, the characters, etc. and begin with word one.

Although it bears an annoying resemblance to Children of Men, the ideas in it feel like they're worth saving, and the climax is one of the best I've ever come up with. So maybe I'll rewrite it. (Someday.) It struck me as the kind of project that might be good for a self-released ebook, if none of the handful of novella markets out there is interested. I'll keep you posted.

The Killer Stays in the Picture

On Saturday I got my fourth rejection for the crazy robot story. It was returned even before two weeks had passed. In the case of this magazine, which ought to have a frustratingly slow reading process as befits its venerable reputation, and which is on the opposite coast, this speedy postal no is pretty embarrassing. A slush reader at a prominent genre magazine and a reader I like and trust a great deal both told me I should have no trouble placing this story, but I am having trouble. And I have this theory about why.

I wish I could remember the source of this insight, but at some point in the couple of years after college, I heard that most fledgling filmmakers make their first movie about a killer. Hollywood, scouting for new directors, does not want to see film-school shorts about serial killers, because they see too many of them. (I think it's kind of like "it was all a dream" to end a story - oh, honey, no.) I was startled, because indeed, the final short film I made in my senior-year production class was about a killer. Had I so little imagination?

Making mediocre movies about killers is easy, I guess. Not only can you truck in cliches and superlatives, but the stakes are automatically high. How many will die? Will s/he get caught, or escape? Creating tension in such a situation is hardly difficult.

The crazy robot story - spoilers - ends up with the crazy robot becoming a killer of humans, because he, uh, goes crazy. His madness is about exclusion from being human, and since the character thinks in terms of inferiority and superiority, he decides that (certain) humans are inferior and don't deserve to live. I'm proud of the killin' climax of the story, I truly am, but the thing I'm beginning to wonder is if I need to take the murder out of it. Because isn't it just another killer story? A situation where I've inflated the stakes to make things easy on me, rather than taking the hard way in and evoking the robot's struggle without such all-or-nothing tension?

Killing and other grievous harm happens pretty often in my stories, but until now I haven't considered in detail whether this is a matter of laziness rather than affinity. Perhaps I should be assembling plots with purposely lower stakes, stories that create interesting conflicts without the glitz of murder. But murder interests me. Serial killers interest me. Not because they're easy to write about (the good ones aren't), but because I find them alien and fascinating. A lot more fascinating than writer-main characters who can't seem to bed the girl or frustrated Flaubert-reading housewives dreamed up by male MFA grads.

Like anything else in writing, you can probably do whatever you want as long as you do it really goddamn well. But I imagine a lot of slush readers would pick up my crazy robot story and say, no matter its quality, oh jeez, another dang killer story, haven't we had enough of these? And that makes me wonder if I should just steer away from what actually interests me, challenge myself by writing about small quiet conflicts instead. Hopefully I wouldn't be doing this to write to the market, but instead to push myself in new directions. Those subjects just sound so stale, so inert, compared to what I most enjoy.

What do you think? Can "it was all a dream" stories work if they're that good? Are serial killers too commonplace, too easy, for a medium-good writer like me to try and pass them off?

Fond But Not in Love

Spent a little under four hours on the opera story on Sunday. Reread it again this morning, and while I think I might have dumped an awful lot of stuff in the first two pages (not info dump so much as Our Story So Far dump), I think it'll come to be a working piece. It added up to just over 6,000 words, which is a comfortable length, and although these feel like famous last words, I don't think that'll change dramatically. The thing that's funny about this story is I think it's generally a good story, but it's not one I'm passionate and thrilled about. It's a new experience not to have just written my favorite story; so far they've all been my favorite as I'm writing them. I'm proud of it, but I'm not in luuuuurve with it.

It's also very much a sci-fi story. Now that I've done the two back to back, I can confirm that it's a distinctly different experience writing SF than it is writing lit fic. If pressed I would say that with SF I feel more relaxed on a word-by-word basis, just putting down the words that make the scene occur rather than worrying inordinately about whether they're the most beautiful words evar. And when writing I feel more concerned that the audience is exasperated and impatient and wants me to get on with it, so I try to make shit happen more compellingly.

I've also noticed that the wide majority of the lit stories I've written concern female characters, and most of the SF tips toward male characters, which is not deliberate but just the way it comes out. Weird.

So, now to give it two weeks to rest and soak up its juices before revision. And since that's settled and no more new stories are clamoring very hard to get out, I need to plan what to do next. The more I think about it, the more I think that the KUFC book needs to get written. I have this block of time before the spring when it seems wise to work on a nonliterary project, and all signs are pointing to KUFC as a book that I can and should write before then, so I can revise it and send it out before summer.

But I'm balking. The old perfectionist instinct doesn't want me to start working because I am deathly afraid I'll just have to rewrite it when I'm finished, as I have to rewrite the Greenland book and the time book. Not a very mature reason to balk at doing anything - because finishing it will be toooo haaaard - but there we are. I don't want to give up the creative roll I'm on, though, so I think I'll just have to stop whining and do it.

Over the weekend I read another 150 pages of 2666, and BOY, it is something. Every Latin American novel I read is like nothing I've ever read before: García Márquez, Shadow of the Wind, this one. It's weird. Very foreboding and moody while not really explaining what the threat is so far. Totally absorbing even while it's totally baffling.

I also read another 50 pages of Olive Kitteridge. Meh. It's become one of those decisions that's too trivial for me to even concentrate on, whether I should finish this book or not, because it's not very long and it seems like it'll have been worth reading but I don't really care about the people or events in it so I could just as easily stop. Anybody read it and want to tell me if the best stories are after page 100?

That's all for today. Hope you're enjoying these last couple of weeks before the Mayan apocalypse Christmas.

Sing, O Muse

During the wonderful 24 hours that I spent in San Francisco, Kathleen and I talked a lot about writing and a bit about writing our passions.* Knowing that I really love opera, she asked me why I didn't write a story about that, or at least a story that integrated it. I said I didn't even really like talking about opera to my acquaintances, because I have met almost no one in my generation who's interested in opera (aside from actual opera singers, I know a couple of those for reasons too long to go into), and it's an interest that people generally roll their eyes about as weird and snooty and difficult to enjoy. Or at least this is how I see it. Kathleen told me that this did not matter, and encouraged me to write about what I loved, because that's how writers do great work.

*I know I didn't reproduce this set of interactions correctly, so I apologize to Kathleen for my shitty memory. Instead of being confusing and losing my point, I just filled in the blanks with fiction that makes the anecdote cohere.

I was reminded of some unexpected feedback I got on my old SF novella The Apocalypse Experiment. I included a scene wherein Maria, one of the main characters, talks about why she learned to knit. The novella takes place about 150 years from now and knitting has fallen even further out of common knowledge than now, and it's a world where there's no place for handmade crafts. It's partially for this reason, Maria explains, and partially for the exact same reasons that I learned to knit (which she also explains), that she took the time to learn.

I thought this scene was lame and awkward and I was ashamed of it as a seemingly obvious explanation of my own feelings about knitting. I left it in anyway because I felt it communicated something important about Maria and also about the world she lived in. Somebody told me, upon reading it, that he thought this was one of the best scenes in the novella. It was warm and affectionate, he said, and made Maria and her emotions come to life.

Shut the front door, was my reaction, but I thanked him politely and continued to despair about finding any kind of a market for a 23,000-word science fiction novella with dubious science and a very unhappy ending. This was also one of the first bits of evidence in an ever-growing pile that says I really don't know what parts of my writing are good and effective and which parts aren't.

ANYWAY, I had this idea a while back for a SF short story that mostly concerned the human voice and a significant change in its configuration. It occurred to me after the San Fran trip that I could integrate opera into my concept for this story, and that it would be richer with my [paltry] knowledge of and [significant] passion for the form. I drew up a concept and a general arc and sat down last night with my new Moleskine to draft it.

I don't know how many words I wrote, because I wasn't working on a computer, and I'm not finished so I haven't transcribed it yet. But I've set down several pages (on that narrow Moleskine rule - I counted: 45 lines per page) so far. It is mostly rude clay, with a lot of very inadequate work, but as I'm writing through it I'm learning more about the story and the MC and what I want to say, so I think in the end I'll be able to shape it and clear away the rubbish and have an actual elephant story. The opera addition was a good idea, adding a center to the story, and I will be glad to be able to write about this thing I love. Thanks, Kathleen.

Objectively, it's odd to me that longhand feels freer than typing into Word does. Because I type pretty quickly, it takes me a much much MUCH shorter time to draft things on the computer than it does to write them with pen and paper. Also, I am able to edit while drafting, often meaning that cringeworthy sentences are not recorded for all time, a big plus. Since I'm all obsessed with not wanting to write things over and over again, and with wanting to get it right with as few drafts as possible, you'd think that keyboarding would be the way I'd find greater creative freedom.

But no. It just isn't. Writing longhand is messier, in a good way, like a messy living room that indicates real human occupancy. It's easier for me to make notes that make sense to only me, and it feels realer, like I'm working instead of cheating on work. And I have the time to think before I set the next word down, think about how the sentence goes. (Er, sometimes.) And there's something about it that feels romantic. I don't know how else to express that, and it's foolish and has nothing to do with real writer-work, but I won't deny it.

Granted, there's been a real loosening in my work over the last six months in terms of how I feel about rewriting and tossing out the bilgewater. I don't howl and clutch the precious first draft anymore. That probably contributes to how longhand has become an advantage. Plus there's new fearlessness. And seriousness. And glee. All of these things together, not one of them less important than the others, have come to pass for me, and I know it means that I'm doing better work.

BECAUSE I AM THE FICTATOR. KNOW MY FICTIVE DOMINANCE.

In other news, I got a second specific story idea for this big scary project and took a couple of pages of notes on it. For various reasons I'm not really sure whether I should start it or not. The SF story has to finish up first, and after that I'll see whether I'd rather maybe go back to KUFC. It's nice to have a lot of irons in the fire, but my nature is to enjoy finishing things, so I also think of them as nagging loose ends. Oh, well.

As If I Know What Positronic Means

Some years ago, I wrote a novella called The Apocalypse Experiment. The premise was that in the not-too-distant future, aliens nicknamed Portents have ended the fertility of the human race, killing all already-pregnant women and then all women who become pregnant. Humans are scared into a zero birth rate. A pair of scientists and a group of the Last Babies (the last generation to be born, now middle-aged) decide to try and restart the human race by controlling the hormones created and exuded by pregnant women, keeping them secret. Ultimately, they fail, in a tragic way that I didn't foresee until it was on the page.

Even before I'd finished writing, Children of Men came out. Oh, well.

I was horribly insecure during the whole time I was writing this novella. The lion's share of my genre reading has been edge-of-genre fantasy and science fiction - Bradbury, Susanna Clarke, Gaiman, Gregory Maguire, Douglas Adams, etc. There's not a lot of straight Arthur C. Clarke science fiction and even less R.A. Salvatore fantasy in my head. I don't know what you call this in the fantasy realm (low fantasy?), but what I like to read is known as soft sci-fi. Bradbury's later short stories are the best example of this I know, because they're mostly about people, and sometimes those people happen to be, y'know, on Mars.

Before The Apocalypse Experiment, I had only tried to write science fiction in short stories. My memory is telling me that in fact I only attempted YA sci-fi short stories before I wrote this novella, but that doesn't seem right to me. In any case, none of them were any good. The science was exceptionally shaky, because I am so thoroughly right-brained that I can barely calculate tips properly, much less comprehend physics; and I felt like I failed to get at the thing I love best about soft sci-fi. Which is: the way in which fantastic stories unknot what's essential about us, the way the best writers use the framework of science fiction and otherworldliness to show something humbling and brilliant and miraculous about the human animal. Ourselves mirrored in the future. This is also why I like soft sci-fi as opposed to hard; hard sci-fi is far more interested in the Petri dish than in the organism.

You have to write the fantastic stories properly, though, before you can capture the psychology of humans within their cage. You have to build the world before populating it with ideas, and that was what I failed to do in my stories. With the novella I wrote, I think I did a better job at this; my characters were pretty darn well-realized, and I was really proud of my plot. I was really proud of the whole thing, in truth. I still think the science is perhaps a bit embarrassing, but a reader like me wouldn't know the difference.

That's the thing that keeps driving me back to wanting to write science fiction at all. A reader like me. Someone who finds Arthur C. Clarke appallingly boring but who's devoured every damn minute of Star Trek: TNG. (Multiple times.) Someone who couldn't tell if a method of space travel was implausible, couldn't care less if the medicine is unrealistic or inconsistent.

I have a lot of smart friends, though. A lot of people who are thoroughly left-brained. One of them, for example, is a Ph.D. from MIT who's researching artificial intelligence and string theory. Their faces loom in my mind whenever I get a sci-fi idea that would cause me to invent and fumble through all sorts of crap I know nothing about, and I hear them scoffing and laughing at my ridiculous ideas about future transportation and future housing and future diets. So I get insecure. And I put those ideas aside, think about writing them later, maybe after I've been to a few cons and suffered through a little more Clarke.

The idea I'm working on now? It refuses to be put aside. It won't leave me be. I'm crazy about my conflicted, semi-Magneto-esque, completely wackadoo android, and I've just got to get his story down. I was depressed this morning to learn that Asimov (who straddles the line between hard and soft, I find) has already written part of my central idea. Children of Men all over again.

But I'm going to write it regardless. This story is developing to be a lot more like Poe than like Asimov, anyway, and I think I'm going to write in that direction, throwing to the wind all my frets about my poor sci-fi skills. It's coming out slowly and painfully, but I keep trying to remember that I wrote 25,000 words through insecurity about my ability as a sci-fi writer, and surely I can write a few thousand more now.

Not Crimson Glow, But It'll Do

The big news is that I dyed the last couple of inches of my hair purple yesterday.

I've been wanting to do this since high school. I've really been itching to do it since I quit my paralegal job in November of last year. But when Matt got laid off, there seemed a chance that I'd have to go back to conservative office work, so I resolved to wait until he got a job. He started work yesterday, the dear thing, so I bought a Splat kit and went to town.

It was surprisingly easy. The bleach barely fried my hair at all, no breakage. And I'm very happy with it. And I know I couldn't have for all sorts of reasons, but I kind of wish I'd done this years ago and could have had fun experimenting ever since.

Aside from this, which is kind of a headline in my life in that it's a big and much-desired first for me, there really isn't much news. Today, after work is done, I'm going to run through the [non-]horror novel and do the aw-crap-did-I-really-overlook-that-mistake edit, so I can order another 10 copies of it from Lulu (I ran through the first 10 already, which yay (?)), most or all of which will go with me to the conference later in the month. I'm still not feeling in a writing mood yet, for stories/essays/whatever. I've been mulling over a story that was inspired by Star Wars - someone I trust told me that it's a good idea, and I was thinking of mutating it from SW into a more generic sci-fi background and seeing if it works out. But with money-work and life stuff the way they are this month, I'm not sure if I'll get to it before May.

Oh, but when/if I do, Margaret Atwood has started a sci-fi mag! This is terrific. And the pay scale is pretty significant. Canada has better litmags than the U.S., if you ask me, and I'm sure this will be no exception.

Unrelated to all else, GO BIG BLUE.