The Blessing Of The Vile Metal

Hello, my name is Sarah A. Hoyt and I’m a writer. I suspect I was born a writer and I hope some time in the future they find gene therapy to prevent such disastrous birth defects.

I’m always either writing or thinking about writing. Characters drop into my head, at times, to make my life miserable by simultaneously demanding I write them and not telling me things I need to know.

I am also a vile capitalist – card carrying – and I write for money. Despite all the various schemes that various enlightened people have come with to ensure a society where no one would need to ever work, I think I’m a better writer because I write for money.

I can see a bunch of you quirking your eyebrows. I wish you wouldn’t do it. What would your mother say if your forehead froze like that?

Toni Weisskopf told me once to never tell anyone I would write for free. I hope she forgives me, because I must tell you that I would. In that utopian world (just remember utopia means nowhere) where every tear shall be wiped away and everyone gets everything they need for free from the machines or the humunculus or whatever, I’d probably keep a schedule pretty similar to now. Only if I could get the machines or the magic or whatever to cook, clean, iron and do litter boxes, I could write MORE. Everyone else would be lazing about, and I’d be in front of the computer, having the time of my life. (Yes, even when this is expressed by hitting my head on the desk and groaning. It’s part of the er... process.) I realized how bad I wanted it when I was daydreaming about winning the lottery and I thought "wow. I'd have so much more time to write, then."

However, what I wrote would likely come out very... odd. Look, I’m as apt as the next fellow to get lost in my own head, captive of my own fantasy. And the next fellow in this case is probably John Norman. (Note I wouldn’t get captive of his fantasy because EW.)

These musings are the direct result of my reading Robert A. Heinlein’s biography – the first volume, Learning Curve. I noted that he wrote For Us The Living out of love and conviction. But then market realities intervened, and he started writing to sell and that shaped his stories and them... well, first readable and eventually and in the beginning with Campbell's help (THIS IS JUST MY OPINION AND I’M NOT GOING TO ARGUE IT. NOT THAT I’M TOUCHY OR ANYTHING) brilliant.

Why is this important? Because we’re living in a world where you can become published and even “sell enough to fit your ambition” without ever getting an editor who reminds you of market realities. This combined with the fact that say, short stories no longer pay enough to support anyone and that breaking into novels requires both , might create the conditions in which any future Heinlein would get stuck in the For Us The Living phase. This prospect keeps me awake at night.

Left to my own devices, I would still be writing books so profoundly unpublishable that even I don’t want to re-read them.

Instead, I wrote eight books. The first... six... were in a fantasy world people exclusively by an hermaphrodite humanoid species and run on high magic but really science fiction principles. It took me six books and a sharp rejection from – if I never say this again, everyone remember this – Ginjer Buchanan, for which I will forever be grateful to her, for me to snap into focus and realize that I’d gone so far out on a limb with this world building (Well – she says sulkily – it was supposed to say something about the equality of the sexes) that not only was it unlikely and vaguely repulsive but also – to anyone not as immersed as I was – insane. Not in a good way. The last book in this world had forty eight chapters each one by a completely different person. It had a cast of thousands. It... was unreadable. To make things worse – well better, really imagine otherwise – my treatment of sex in this “series” was at my most Victorian. To me the sex didn’t matter, it was the CONCEPT. But of course, the only thing that MIGHT have sold it was if I’d put sex in.

So I pulled back and wrote Big Bright Shiny Machines. It’s a space opera, set roughly in Athena’s world – it will eventually get rewritten. Then I wrote Mirrorplay, a fantasy set in a pre-Cretan world. This was a trilogy crammed into 100k words. This too will eventually get rewritten. The story is good, the crafter, however, was an idiot.

And then I wrote Ill Met By Moonlight. (Well, technically I wrote Darkship Thieves before it, but it wasn’t published till this year. Also, I heavily edited it, before it WAS published.)

The point is, if I had direct access to “publishing” and had gathered even a couple hundred fans – and there are fans for everything, which is kind of a corolary for rule 34, that if you name a form of exoteric porn, fifteen sites spring into being. In the same way if you wrote stories about elves who roam the Earth looking for one-eyed goats, or murder mysteries in which everyone is killed with a paper clip, a fandom for these would immediately spring into being – I would still be writing the early stuff and probably convinced only the worst of bad luck hadn’t allowed me to make it to the big time.

Instead, I spent ten years in the desert, writing novel after novel and emerged, I think, if not with the commandments, at least better for it.

Writing for money forced a certain discipline on me – beyond “I have to stop fooling with this now, deadline was three months ago.” It forces me to try to figure out when I’ve gone too far out on a limb.

Do you ever feel that sort of market pressure? If not, why not? And how do you think it affects your writing? For better or for worse? And what mechanism do you think – and please tell me one because I want to believe there IS one – will keep young writers striving for more, when they can get a couple hundred fans for any drivel they produce?

When The Teacher Is Ready

The Pupil appears.

Which is an inversion of the usual, isn’t it? However, just as true as the other way around. At various times in my life I’ve been a teacher. Not a writing teacher, interestingly enough. I’ve taught German and English composition and French and once long ago math.

One thing I noticed is that every time I teach a subject I emerge from it with a much deeper understanding than before. In that sense my sons have been invaluable to me, because they’re the sort of kids that ask questions. Difficult questions. Sometimes true puzzlers. I’ve read twenty books to answer a question my younger son has put to me about... oh, the Middle Ages. And every time, my knowledge grows.

I think that’s part of the reason we tend to fall into how-to mode in this blog: there is something about the process or how to create this or that, which is not clear to us. It might be something we have particular issues with. I don’t conceal from anyone that plotting was my bette noir when I started writing. I had characters, or at least character voice, but I quickly found out even the greatest hero in the world can bore you to tears if all he’s doing is sitting around angsting about how his eggs were runny for breakfast. (At first I got over that by taking books I admired and outlining the plot, so I could see the bones beneath the flesh.) So I think we write about what plagues us, so that we can learn it ourselves.

The other part of it is that every writer is fascinated by how-to-write. I think because like any artistic pursuit a good part of the work takes place inside, deep, deep inside, at a subconscious level. And we don’t like that, being rational beings. Or at least I don’t like that.

No, that’s not quite true. Part of me loves that. Usually it comes at the end of a novel, when I’m sailing in under full impulse, after I’ve laid all my traps and changes, and set in al my surprises, and suddenly it all starts falling into place, including things I didn’t THINK through. (Like the fact that Thena in Darkship Thieves is named Athena Hera – and yes, Sinistra too, think bar Sinister. I had no clue why till a character made a joke about it, I just knew that was her name.) I love that feeling, but at the same time these “gifts” feel like they come from some untrustworthy goddling and at the root of my culture is the knowledge those whom the gods love they first drive mad.

So that’s the other part of it. Sometimes even things you know really well, you want to take apart and teach someone, so that you know them consciously. And tons of times the fact that I’ve analyzed what works in what I do and what doesn’t, has saved my bacon when I’m on deadline and sick as a dog. Also, once I interiorize some knowledge, I can grow again, around it. My progress started with studying plot, and then my plot was good and my characters looked puerile in comparison. So then I worked on characters, now I’m back to plot. It’s not a straight forward road, more the way a nautilus shell grows in an endless spiral I think.

Laura Resnick resposted on Facebook recently about some article saying that how to books do more harm than good. Is that true? I don’t know. I own maybe a hundred of them. Of those, maybe ten have helped me. Have the others hurt me? Only a little and in the beginning because I believed everything I read. After I gained a little knowledge, I started taking things with a grain of salt. And some of the things I learned in those books I’d never have realized any other way. Like, after reading ... oh, hundreds of thousands of books, I’d never consciously realized what Dave talks about in the post on Monday: that you can cut scenes and skip over the “boring” stuff. I thought you had to stay with the character, so that I’d literally drag my readers up a staircase step by step by – yawn – step. Until I was reading Dwight Swain’s Techniques of The Selling Writer and he talked about how to end scenes and how to begin them, and... well... a lightbulb SHOULD have gone on over my head. It was so obvious, but I needed to see it written down in plain language.

All this to say – we’re considering publishing a book with the most helpful posts in this blog. Eformat to begin with. We’ll put it at some really low price. The problem is, you see, that we have no clue which – if any – posts you guys would consider helpful to have all collected to together to consult in need. Are there any of those? Would you point us at them? And are there any subjects you want us to tackle in the future, with this great, collaborative collection in mind? Or are the mad (mad, I tell you, mad) geniuses more entertaining than instructive? (Oh, yeah, and thanks for listening to us, and for all your answers, which sometimes cause the nautilus to grow another shell as I ponder them.)

BEING Alien

When I first started writing, I KNEW that all the editors at every house were laughing at my submissions. Perhaps this is normal. Or perhaps it has to do with my being foreign-raised, knowing I was foreign-raised. No, not in the normal way. I wasn’t raised with English speaking parents, or even one of them.

I first learned English in the classroom at the age of fourteen. It wasn’t even my second language, which was French, but my third. And if I hadn’t fallen in love with it within six months – due in part to an excellent teacher – and started reading in English in my spare time, with a dictionary by my side, when I first came to the states, as an exchange student, I’d have spoken at best broken English, like my colleagues did. And four years later, I’d still have been fairly lost. Not only was my English skewed – I knew how to say "ontological doubt" but had no idea how to say "faucet" for instance – from being learned exclusively in the classroom, but my mental picture was skewed too.

Mostly you make up an image of your homeland by growing up in it. Oh, yes, into the pot DO go the books you read, but also a million other things that mark you as a native of your generation. Things you’re not even aware of. Things of which I’m only marginally aware, because at some time they felt odd – though not anymore

When you come in mid-movie, as it were, you have to make up what went before. Years ago, in a writers newsgroup I belong to, half a dozen of us who were born scattered throughout the world, talked about this. It took me YEARS not to feel like at any moment, someone would tap my shoulder in the grocery store; while out driving; in the park and say "You don’t belong here, get out." No, this wasn’t a fear of a police state. It was just a sense that I "didn’t belong", that I stuck out, that in the "normal narrative" of history, I had no right being here. That I was, in fact, the character who rebelled and refused to follow the plot outline. Most of these women still felt that way. Most of them, too, like I did at one time, shuddered at the thought of writing an American childhood. What if you got it wrong? The majority of your readers would KNOW.

Do I still feel that way? No. I’ve watched the kids go through school here. I’ve read a ton of biographies. In the beginning (I’m not a visual person, so this was odd) I watched A LOT of TV. Not soaps because I have my limits, just... news and sitcoms, and documentaries. I heard people make references to their growing up. People about my age. And the substratum of knowledge accumulated.

I’ve learned to swim in it. And I’ve lived in the US longer than I lived in Portugal (by about two years.) I haven’t memorized the music, but I can sight-read, and hum the difficult parts.
The tell though is that I can write a childhood in the twenties almost or as convincingly as a childhood now.

Other than that, except for the dastardly accent, I can pass. You could talk to me for hours and not know. And if you know I’m hearing impaired even the accent won’t tip you off. And a lot of my readers are shocked to find I have an accent.

So what am I saying here? I’m saying that wherever you come from, if you work at it, you can do it. I’m also saying that – remember I’m the woman trying to improve on your fears – that no matter how silly this idea of being a writer sounds, you can do it.

Of course, the industry seems to be crumbling – It’s a gift. If I’d stuck to teaching, my original profession, kids would probably be learning via implant. If I’d taken that scholarhsip in computer science, we’d be using slide rules, like in Heinlein novels (and then too, every profession seems to be crumbling as it is hit by the blunt edge of fast change. I found this out talking to my dentist.) But that doesn’t matter. If editors truly don’t gather around my manuscripts to laugh at them, it should be much easier for any of you. If I can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

So, lay down on that comfy couch. Speak up. Your mother already told me everything... No, seriously. Tell me your fears. What do you think happens when your article/story/novel hits the editors’ offices? What paralyzes you? – for years I dreaded cons for fear of offending anyone. I’m sort of over that now, but do you fear it? What about this process do you dread? I tell you right now, it’s probably unfounded. Let’s talk about it.