Choosing

Onion Starts

So much of life is about choosing. I’ve blogged about it before, talking about “saying yes” and “saying no.”

Down here in Central Texas, spring is nearly upon us. Now that I know I won’t have a fellowship, it’s time to plan both my garden and my writing for the rest of the year.

While I put my Michener application together and took the GRE, my novella revisions got pushed onto the back burner. Instead, I focused on shorter works and exercises. In November, I did my own personal National NovelWriting Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge, writing a new story “start” nearly every day. The whole exercise was wonderfully fun, and I ended up with 27 story starts. Of those, there are about a dozen that I think I can turn into viable stories.

In January and February, I participated in a flash fiction contest with one of my writers’ groups. A couple stories from that are already in submission and I’ll be sending a couple more out next week.

Looking over what I’ve produced over the winter and thinking about what I want to accomplish this year, I can see that I have far too many open projects.

It's time to hunker down and face the hard part. Choosing. While Heinlein famously said “finish what you start,” adhering too strictly to that rule doesn’t allow for the kind of writing exercises and noodling in my journal that are an important part of learning how to craft a story or build a character.

Still, choosing is hard! Even the most cursory writing exercises produces images that stick with me, or lines of dialogue that keep whispering in my ear. Reading them over, I can’t help but think,  with a little water and sunlight something could really grow from this start.

But time constrains us all, and I’ve come to understand that not every start has to be finished. As long as I’m being productive in terms of completed and submitted stories, then there are some things that I can set aside. In other words, as long as I continue to finish things, I don't have to finish ALL the things.

But, once I commit to a story, I have to finish it, because choosing is hard but finishing is harder.

I finished the first draft of a story yesterday, and it wasn’t pretty. I mean I just limped across the finish line. It felt like I was writing garbage. I’m reading it over and revising it today, and while the last third is a bit of a morass, it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it was when I was miserably wading through it. 

Things almost always get harder in the middle. Quitting one project to start something shiny and new is the trap to avoid. Each project comes with unanticipated demands, requiring me to stretch and learn in new ways. Choosing, and the commitment to finish, is where we grow.

Rule #4

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." ~ Wayne Gretzky
"Why are you making me hold this envelope?" ~ my daughter

Remember Heinlein's rule number four?

"You must put the work on the market."

I've been trying to keep it simple: Keep working, keep trying to get better, and keep sending stories out there. And now, all of a sudden, I have a spate of forthcoming stories! This is no overnight success story. I got serious about writing again in 2011 and have been writing and revising and sending stories out ever since. What has kept me going for nearly three years has been the process of constantly creating new work. Of course, acceptances and publications are the goal. I can't wait to see these stories out in the world and to hear what people think of them - hot, cold, and lukewarm. But, I also feel that getting published is the frosting on the cake. The cake is the work. The work is the constant and truly it's own reward.

The Horses will be appearing in Every Day Fiction in June. I like this webzine at least as much as Daily Science Fiction. Every Day Fiction is less genre bound, so there is always a good variety of stories, and they're always under a thousand words.

Futile the Winds will be appearing in Interzone - tentatively slated for their July issue (247)! This, for all intents and purposes, is my first professional sale. It will be the first time my work will be in a non-on-demand print publication, available on newsstands and in bookstores! And what a gorgeous publication it is, as you can see by the cover of the current issue. I cannot wait to see the artwork for my story.

Cattle Futures is slated to appear in Stupefying Stories special Wild Weird West Anthology, tentatively scheduled for release in July.

Beata Beatrix will be appearing in Bourbon Penn (another gorgeous zine), hopefully in their next issue.

I'll post with links as the individual stories become available. Until then, back to work restocking the inventory! I'll leave you with the thought that's been going through my head this week:

Heinlein’s Rule No. 5: You Will Submit Again!

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."  --Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784) 

Sounds like Johnson and Heinlein are cut from the same cloth.

While this doesn’t exactly close the circle, this final step will keep you focused on the fact that this whole writing business is a process, not a one-off proposition. Still, it’s difficult to master the yin and yang of creativity and business. The work of creation, crafting and art is its own reward. When I manage to pull some ideas together, to bring a character to life, to stitch together several disparate elements into a coherent tale, to entertain or move some reader out there, well, the value of that is incalculable.

Yet, our creativity can be both priceless and worth something here in this world. I believe that we all express ourselves creatively every day in a myriad of ways, sometimes its not so apparent when those expressions don't fall into a traditional category of arts and/or crafts. Maybe its how you train your dog, or your way with dinner conversation but when you choose writing (or painting or acting) as your life’s work then you should expect compensation. And by “expect” I don’t mean stand around waiting for pennies to rain down from above, I mean “expect” as in you should work toward that goal.

That said, I think the line of reasoning really speaks to me is from Steven Pressfield’s excellent book The War of Art

"Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunch-pail mentality, the hard-core, hard-head, hard-hat state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day."

This rule is the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. Your work is your work, whether you build it with your hands on an assembly line or it comes from your head and heart as a story. If you’re going to be a productive artist you must show up to work, do the work, and when it’s finished put it on market. More concisely:

"Inspiration is for amateurs" --chuck close

So, those are the Rules. Thinking about them, talking about them, blogging about them, it’s all good, but the most important thing to do is follow them. While one story is in the hopper at a publication, draft the next one. It wont take long before you are sending stories out to editors regularly. In no time it will be routine. You’re a writer, this is what you do: you write, you finish what you write, you don’t spin your wheels in revision, you send your work out, and send it out again until it sells.

Heinlein's Rule No. 4 - You Will Submit

From the original edition of
Have Spacesuit Will Travel

By now you can see where Heinlein’s going with these rules. This rule gets down to the question of what are you writing for, and this is a question worth considering. Not everyone is writing for publication, and it’s important to know what kind of writer you are. I think too often people feel that there is only one right answer to that question. As if writing for yourself somehow doesn’t count.  

I have always written and for many years my writing was only for myself, I consider it a form of meditation. This may possibly be because I am a terrible meditator, perhaps it was my Judeo -Christian Western-Culture upbrining, you know, “Idle hands do the devil’s work.” The best way for me to slip into an altered state, and possibly gain some enlightenment, is when move my pen across the page. This page is a place where I can be alone, to work out whatever I need to work out that day. This writing is rewarding and fullfilling and completely legitimate. Publication doesn’t make you a writer, writing makes you a writer.  

I still sit down and freewrite for 10 to 15 mintues every day. Nowdays, many of these sessions are devoted to character and story problems but if there is something that is bothering me or a tough decision on the horizon I’ll devote as many freewriting sessions to working that problem as necessary. (For those who want to know the details: it all goes into one journal, which I index, so that I can find particular story notes and becuase old librarian habits die hard.)

But I digress. You have decided that you want to write and to be published -- which is what Heinlein is talking about after all -- then you must submit.

Writing with this goal is different from writing to simply complete a story or writing exercises to improve your craft. I’ve written to all these goals and more, but making up my mind that I am going to send this story out to paying markets as soon as it’s finished changes everything, right from word one. I’m not sure if I can even articulate how deeply it effects my writing but I can feel it in my bones when I work. When I’m working on a story for publication, I’m writing for someone else and that makes my story a kind of gift. Of course, that’s only if it’s good. It has to be a story that is worth that stranger’s precious time because time wasted is kind of the opposite of a gift.

This is what keeps me honest, what challenges me to bring all my skills to bear in the service of the tale I’m telling, and what inspires me to try new techniques for delivering exposition or creating a character. Developing, writing, and sending a story out is all one long exercise in letting it go, and knowing that my story is going to be out there in the world without me around to explain or further clarify an event or a character’s intention makes me understand the whole story-writing process better.

Thanks to the electronic age there are many, many venues to submit to. So, write, finish your stories, polish them up, and send them out there.

Photo by Steve Johnson, Creative Commons

The Rules Work!

A mere six months after committing to follow Heinlein’s Rules I have my first publication! You can read “Fairview 619” at it’s current home at Aurora Wolf. A second story has been accepted by Flagship, the science fiction/fantasy arm of Flying Island Press. I’ll post a link to that one when it’s available. I have two more stories in revision and two more in my head ready for drafting. The happy news meshes perfectly with my next blog post (look for it on Thursday), which will be titled “You Must Submit,” aka Heinlein’s rule number 4. Until then, I hope you enjoy my story. I would love to hear your comments either here or on Aurora Wolf’s site.

Heinlein’s Rule No. 3 You Must Refrain from Revising Except to Editorial Order

I’d like to think that when Heinlein says “refrain from revising,” he’s not saying “refrain from ALL revising.” Either way, I think this is where I part ways, just a little, from his writing advice.

Again, I see where he’s coming from. Heinlein says, “You must write,” not “you must write the same thing over and over.” How I see this rule is his way of stressing that you must keep moving forward through story after story until thinking of new stories, framing them, and telling them, becomes second nature.

There is another aspect to his statement that rings true for me and it was something I learned when I was an art student. My mom, an artist and calligrapher and my first and best instructor, told me: “The most important thing to know, when you’re working on a piece, is when to lay the brush down and walk away from it.”

It’s so easy to get sucked into the world of whatever it is that you are working on, to get fussy and overwork it. When you’re working in pencil, charcoal or paint crossing that line can happen in an instant and it’s usually immediately obvious. The piece is ruined, and you get to throw it away and start over.

This can be a little more difficult to recognize when writing, especially on a computer where there is no paper to literally wear a hole in. Anyone who’s spent any time writing knows what I’m talking about here. I’ve personally worried more than one piece of writing down to a shiny and useless nubbin.

A short story, a chapter or even a scene; it’s easy to get stuck in a kind of holding pattern endlessly circling over it, making and unmaking little changes. It is such an inviting trap to fall into especially when the way forward is unclear. You can tell yourself that you are working on your story, when really you’re not.

That said, I believe revision is absolutely necessary. To me, it’s is such an essential part of the evolution of any story that I’m writing that it is difficult for me to identify specific rounds of revisions. The key, for me, is to stay focused on moving forward. I revise every day but set some limits. For example, I only allow myself to revise the previous day’s work before breaking new ground. No starting every day by polishing that the first scene one more time.

Some have said that writing is like driving at night. Your headlights can only show you a little piece of the road ahead but if you trust the road and your map, you’ll eventually arrive at your destination. Once there, you can look back over the ground you’ve covered and everything is much clearer. The places you need to rewrite, the set-ups you need to put in place or tweak, the character adjustments.

So, rewrite, just keep driving.

Photo by MSVG, Creative Commons

Heinlein's Rule No. 2 - Finishing What You Start

While this piece of advice turns up in most how to write books, I don’t think it gets nearly enough emphasis. I have certainly managed to ignore this idea for years. Not this year. And I’m here to tell you following this one piece of advice has made the biggest difference in my writing to date. Simply committing to each story that I start has changed my whole approach.

I think about my ideas differently now, I gather them in my daily journal the same as I always have, but choosing which ones to develop, and which ones to actually launch into a story is now more of a process.

I don’t think it matters how you decide to see your idea through to the end, if you write from an outline (I do), or by the seat of your pants it’s the commitment to finish that will teach you more about writing than any class.

After the heady bon voyage and the thrilling embarkation I usually sail straight into the doldrums of the middle of the story. Navagational equiment will tell me my destination, but with no wind, I'll have to row. And it’s sweaty, hateful work.

Sometimes when I’m adrift in the open ocean I look back across what I’ve written so far and lose heart. I see that the story is not working, that something is broken. In the past this was often the point where I would abandon ship for another enticing idea and begin another story.

But not this year. I’ve come to realize that it’s my duty to save this story or go down with it. What I’ve found is that no book, class, or seminar had taught me how to manage all the elements that go into creating a ripping good yarn. The only way to really learn is to, you know, get in there an manage the elements.

There is also a reward for committing to the characters. Because I’ve made a promise to them, they are free to become more real and to contribute their own individuality to the story. It becomes a partnership, and suddenly the work is fulfilling enough to be the engine that I need to reach my destination.

Heinlein's Rule No. 1 - You Must Write

You must write. Contrary to the evidence of this blog I have been writing. Or perhaps the lack of entries is proof that I’m writing. So far this year I have several stories in various stages of drafting and revision. I have written more - and more regularly - than I have for years. I just haven’t quite figured out how to plug writing this blog into my process.

You must write. We all know it. This advice is so elemental and we hear it all the time. There are entire writing books devoted to expanding on that one brief imperative sentence. But I like how Heinlein puts it. Rule number one. Three words. Period, end of conversation.

You must write. And I’m here to tell you that it’s really not that hard to write - to write just a little - everyday. Or is it? Apparently it is. Why else would we keep repeating that mantra? Personally, there have been many, many days gone by where I have not written a word. Day’s I’ve spent thinking about writing without ever, actually sitting my ass down to write. All I can do is put those days behind me. Like Tolstoy’s families, the happy families are all alike. Every day that I manage to write is a good day because no matter what else happens that day at least I got my pages done. But every day I manage to avoid writing is unhappy in its own way.

You must write. As I get older I’ve come to know myself better, and by this I specifically mean I’ve come to know just how subversive and sneaky that little do-it-later troll is. He doesn’t live under a bridge, but in my brain. I have veered off the path too many times to count. I used to care about the reasons behind my habits of procrastination and avoidance but I have to tell you I don’t any more. I’ve discovered that I don’t need to know how quicksand works to recognize it, and when I come upon it all I need to do is sidestep it. And by “sidestep” I mean sit my ass down and pick up my pen.

You must write. Because writing isn’t the result, it’s the cure.

Heinlein's Rules 2011

I admit it I love making New Year's resolutions. I like the feel of taking on a challenge and renewing my resolve to move toward a goal. I know, I know, it's already the 13th but, personally, I feel the whole month of January is fair game.


Last fall I came across Robert A. Heinlein's rules for writing, which appeared in his 1947 essay "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction." They go like this:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Pretty basic stuff, nothing groundbreaking here, it's really more of a kick in the pants. But it made me pause and reevaluate my habits. While I've conquered one, and have made serious inroads into two, my record is pretty spotty on three through five so I have resolved to follow all five this year.

Okay, I have issues with three, which I will address in a separate post. In the mean time you can check out Robert J. Sawyer's opinion on number three in his excellent post on Heinlein's Rules at http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm.

I am excited to put Heinlein's advice to the test and see just where I land at the end of 2011.

There is another great site this year called Write 1 Sub 1 that uses Ray Bradbury for inspiration (be sure to check out the adorable interview with Bradbury on their site). http://write1sub1.blogspot.com/

So, I'll be writing every day, I'll be finishing what I write, I will be revising. I'll be submitting new stories and resubmitting any rejected stories as those rejections come in. (I will not rewrite to resubmit except to editorial order after acceptance - that's the way that I can honor that rule).

So, here goes.