Steaming punkin's

"Steampunk is for Goths who discovered brown."
"It's a great trend in costuming , but the book didn't sell that well."
"It was based on a movie that wasn't too successful. The costuming is popular, but it's so over."
"It's based on Victorian upper class. It was an ugly era. We shouldn't glorify it."

Those are just a handful of the ‘nays' I got on Steampunk -- from people who acquire novels - or lead the thought on the subject.

They could of course all be right: But I have never been too good at accepting ‘received wisdom' at face value. Contrarian by nature I take these sort of things as something of a challenge. This is probably incredibly stupid and I'd be a lot be a lot better off accepting things. If publishing believes it is over... they must be right. They know best, right? Heh. It would have been enough to make me want to write a Steampunk book - even if I didn't have a proposal floating around out there already.

Don't Goths read? And don't people read about Goths, even in brown?

I'm a little iffy about the book that didn't sell too well - which book? My own interest in an alternate history that focussed on an age of steam began with Harry Harrison's 1973 ‘A Trans-Atlantic Tunnel, Hurrah' (which had coal-fired rocket ships), and Keith Roberts's 1968 ‘Pavane' (which was a depressing heavy treatment of a fascinating idea - where the suppression of the reformation had lead to a Catholic dominance of Britain and the World - and steam was still the major power source). I enjoyed Tim Powers Anuibus Gates - even I wouldn't have called it Steampunk as much as time-travel. Or do they refer to the much later Gibson and Sterling's Difference engine? Or Jay Lake's Mainspring, or Meivelle's Perdido Street Station? I don't know. Some of these probably didn't sell too well, although they did get noticed. (Notice and sales don't actually go hand in hand. It depends who is noticing. Literati critics for example tend to ‘notice' the sort of books which just don't sell.)

However, it is fair to point out that Sir Terry Pratchett's ‘Nation' is de facto Victorian era alternate history and has many of the trappings of Steampunk - and outsold all of these books put together, and just about anything else.

I think the movie reference is probably ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' -- IMO the sub-genre has been totally undermovied for its cinematographic potential. What a surprise. Hollywood likes books that out of copyright, so they can make movies for which they don't pay the author, and then secure the copyright to their work for generations. I had hoped that the recession would send them back to their once counter-cyclical to economic trend roots and change the direction of the industry, but it hasn't happened. Hasn't happened in publishing either. Time was when the industries to be in bad times were cheap mass entertainment (movies and books) or beer (cheap booze) as escapism (especially if it leaves you feeling more cheerful for a while) is popular in tough times. The movie and publishing business have tanked along with upper-middle class goods sales the last 3 times, which should make us scared. Message: we aren't seen as good uplift-your-spirits worth what the product costs any more.

The Victorian upper class one I just had to try and swallow my tongue or I might have had howling roll on the floor laughing fits. It's a very PC answer from a very PC author and editor... Hmm. I guess medieval-styled high fantasy is based on a lovely era... for peasants. We in the editorial upper class should decide what is suitable for the proles to read, eh?

Anyway: all of the reactions got me thinking why Steampunk might - despite their comments - actually still be popular. Rising rather than falling. After all, genres and subgenres wax and wane, and then just one book can stir them to life or even fierce flame again. (I notice Baen are doing a bunch of Slowship books. That was dead as mackerel until some blokes wrote Slow Train to Arcturus.)

The first question was why might this subgenre be popular in first place - because if you can work out what made it tick, you can exploit those directions. And as I was once upon a time trained in logic an debate, let's start by establishing a few premises
1)Steampunk is set in a world (either alternate history or just plain elsewhere-fantasy) where steam power is the most common form of powering things.
2) It's 19th century, usually Victorian in the underlying cultural setting (which affects everything from architecture, fashion, to cultural mores).

So what makes it attractive?
These are my ideas:
1) The cool costuming possibilities (and this too IS important). It's escapist, it's fun.
2) The accessibility of the technology - yeah, there is brass and clockwork and steam and smoke-stacks... but it's big old-fashioned engineering. It's stuff we understand. It's quirky, but plausible. Familiar enough, but different.
3)The 19th century was an expansive, hopeful century (at least for the West - which, I dare remind people - is still the cultural background for a lot of the market for sf and fantasy. We're so busy appealing to markets we don't have and possibly won't get, that there is an inclination to neglect our core audience. They still are the people who buy English language sf and fantasy. People who live in America or Western Europe or Commonwealth countries, not Iran or China... yet). This ties in with the fact that Steampunk (with the exception of some of the more literary new grunge stuff - which garners awards and yet fails to get the sales volume) is less dystopian and dark than cyberpunk (which doesn't seem to be flourishing as well recently).
4)Because it is set in 19th century social and cultural milieu it is de facto less politically correct. A lot still rests in a nest of 19th century culturally acceptable ideas. ‘Manifest destiny' and colonialism -- now a prime evil -- underlies large parts of the genre. This is of course correct for the era, and provide appeal to readers right now (yes, it leaves the bad bits out -which I agree were awful and if you were one of the colonised or a child laborer much worse then), when various aspects of 20th/21st century are rather depressing, and yesteryear seems rather attractive. The same magic that worked for fantasy, which has its strength in comforting escapism even if it is wildly inaccurate and reflects an idealised and sanitised view of the very upper class of medieval society. It's why the pulp sf - with a view of a brave new exciting world full of promise sold well. It's why dystopia and tears sell well in good times, not bad. Yes, it was an ugly era. But it was an era of hope - and there was a courage and grandeur to it that seems absent now - which loops back to costuming.

There is an element of wish-fulfilment about this. No, I don't think the readers all want to return to Victorian sweatshops and gin-sluiceries any more than many of the readers of my journey into living and being self-sufficient on a remote island really all want to do all of that... but there are aspects they yearn for. That they like reading about.

I don't think any of these factors have gone away. I do think the literary/new weird tarnished the attractiveness in the current economic environment, and if I was an acquiring editor, that's not the kind of thing I would buy until the economy was doing extremely well. (but I'm not an acquiring editor, and my opinions on what I'd buy and push appear to be very different to theirs. I'd be asking the hard question - why is publishing - which is normally counter cyclical to economic trends now running in tandem with the trends, while other counter-cyclicals - like beer continue to reflect an inverse?)

However, ultimate long-term success really hinges on pleasing readers once you have passed the gatekeepers: I think if you want to be a success in this sub-genre you're going to have capitalise on what attracted people - and that includes the cultural aspects and quirky costumes and brass gadgetry.

So: what's your take on it? What makes it work, or fail?

How events shape our writing

I'm going to do my best to stay away from politics today, but bear with me if I wander a bit too close to the line. Yesterday was 9/11 and for so many Americans it brought up a myriad of emotions. I'm not going to write about who did what to whom -- we know what happened and we each have our own interpretations on cause and effect. What I do want to talk about is how traumatic events -- be they events that hit on a national level like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor or events that are purely personal -- affect our writing.

I don't know about you, but writing for me has always been as much therapeutic as it is creative. When I don't write for a long period of time, I feel it. It is that outlet for me in much the same way physical activity is. It is the one time I can be totally inside myself and let my thoughts and feelings come pouring out, whether it is in a journal entry or in writing a new book or short story.

But what really brought this home is a project I'm considering going back to. It's one of those toss it under the bed and let it mature or it will never see the light of day sort of projects. You know the ones I mean. It's that book or short story that insisted it be written but, once done, there is nothing you can do at that time to make it into something that can be sold.

Well, this novel is just that sort of thing. Not only is it waaaaaaay too long. We're talking goat-gagging length of almost 250k words. So massive editing needs to be done. Editing on the scale I couldn't have accomplished 2 years ago, much less 9 plus years ago. It is also a split-personality book. And that is where emotional reaction to a traumatic event comes in.

A little background. This book is a space opera. That's what it started out to be and that is what is remains -- even if it is a big, bloated space opera right now. Like a number of space operas, politics played a role in the plot. But it started out as being very much in the background, mentioned only to explain why a couple of things happened. Pre-9/11, it was a character-driven novel.

Then 9/11 happened and I suddenly understood the emotion I'd seen in my parents when they spoke of Pearl Harbor. The feeling of safety I'd known growing up, something the duck and cover drills in elementary school never took away from me. Sure, on an intellectual level I knew there was always the possibility of someone attacking us. You can't grow up during the Cold War and not have that drilled into you. But, you see, I never believed it would happen.

That belief was shattered on 9/11. While the images of the Twin Towers will always haunt me, the feeling I will always remember is that quick spark of fear, of breathless waiting as I stood in line outside the local blood bank that afternoon and talking with several American Airlines executives waiting along with so many others to donate blood. We'd been discussing how strange it was to see no planes in the air. None of us had realized until then how used we'd become, living as close to DFW airport as we did, to the constant sight of multiple planes overhead. Having an empty sky was unsettling.

Then a hush fell over the crowd -- and it was a crowd. At that time, there were approximately 100 of us standing in line waiting to give blood. All eyes had gone skyward and were fixed on a single aircraft flying much too low for comfort. No markings on the plane. All we knew was that it shouldn't be there and it was flying eastward, perhaps toward the airport or perhaps toward Dallas and its skyscrapers. Now, nothing happened and we learned later it was a federal agency plane doing a flyover. Still, that fear, that spark of anger at the thought the horror was about to visit close to home remained.

And it translated into the space opera. A third of the way through the book, it suddenly changed. Suddenly gone was the nice, almost light-hearted romp of approximately 100k words. In its place was a hard-hitting, political novel with too much of everything. But it was what I needed to help process and deal with what had happened that terrible day. And, because I didn't consider myself a "real" writer back then, I finished the novel and under the bed it went.

But it didn't disappear from my head. It stayed on that very back burner all these years, pushing forward from time to time, as if to see if I was ready to look at it again. Until recently, I wasn't. But this past week, those occasional pokes became persistent and I pulled it out. Somewhere in there, between the lame attempt at being light-hearted and the heavy-handed political response to 9/11, is a good book struggling to come out. I can feel it, if that makes sense. Now I have to put butt in chair and bring that book it can be out. That means reading the original and remembering all those emotions that were poured into it and then figuring out the best way to rewrite it. Most likely, it will be from scratch. That's okay. The original served its purpose -- or should I say purposes? -- in that it let me write the story and let me get out and process some of the emotions that ran so strongly through me 9 years ago.

So, do events, personal or national, influence your writing? How do you use your writing to help process or deal with these events? Or am I the only one this happens to?

Gina Covello, Fashionista of the Damned with “Tomorrow the World”

Okay, you know how vampires are always accused of mesmerism, hypnotism and all that jazz? Well…come closer… closer…look into my eyes…. It’s all true. You will tell no one. You will buy my books. You will buy copies for all of your friends and family, your enemies, your cat….

Oh, er, sorry, I got a little carried away there.

Let me start again. You know how you walk through a bookstore and vampires are everywhere? That’s because we’re insidious. We’ve infiltrated your hearts and souls. Zombies might eat your brains, but we can get inside them without ever cracking open your skull. And, really, isn’t that better for everyone? Certainly it leaves a better-looking corpse. Luckily, it’s not really in our best interest to leave corpses lying about. For one, it’s unsightly. For another, corpses don’t buy retail. And in a tight economy, we don’t want to start stalking our target demographic, not after all the trouble we’ve gone through to control creative types like writers, illustrators, directors, producers and anyone else we can tap for a portion of the proceeds.

Mercenary? Hey, it’s not like we can go out and get day jobs. Besides, agents take 15% for what they do—talk about bloodsuckers! We’re only taking our cut for all the inspiration we provide. We’re like the ultimate unsung ghost-writers. Think that’s not hard work? Have you ever tried to wrestle creative types into revising their visions? We should get hazard pay! Take my chronicler, for example. She’s one of those bloodsuckers I referred to above. That’s why I chose her—I figured she could totally relate. But have you ever tried to influence an agent…and a Taurus besides? Hard-headed doesn’t even begin to cover it. Oh, the power struggles we’ve had…let’s just say I need to suck down the blood of a caffeine addict just to cope. And do you know how many times I’ve had to grit my teeth when she refers to me as “fictional”? [Link: http://varkat.livejournal.com/171738.html]

One side effect of this whole fanged fiction flare-up is that we can now hide in plain sight. Thanks to Charlaine Harris and True Blood, advertisers can cater to us right out in the open. [Link: http://www.d-kitchen.com/projects/true-blood-season-2-campaign#] I’ve even got my own blog! [Link: http://ginasgems.livejournal.com/]

So, love us or leave us, vampires are here to stay. We’re fanged, we’re fabulous, we’re famished…and you look good enough to eat.

(Now, look into my eyes…you will think no more of this than of the plot to Avatar. You will forget this conversation ever happened. When I snap my fingers, I’ll be just a fashionable figment of your imagination. ;-)

*****

Lucienne Diver is the author of the Vamped young adult series, which began in May 2009 with a novel of the same name. The sequel, ReVamped, is a September trade paperback release from Flux, and two more books, tentatively entitled Fangtastic and Fangtabulous will follow.

Kirkus has said of Vamped, “Those who enjoy a good giggle will respond eagerly to this brassy, campy romp.” School Library Journal says, “This quick read is filled with teen slang and fashion consciousness; it’s a lighthearted, action-packed, vampire romance story following in the vein of Julie Kenner’s “Good Ghouls” (Berkley), Marlene Perez’s “Dead” (Harcourt), and Rachel Caine’s “The Morganville Vampires” (Signet) series.” Further information is available on her website: www.luciennediver.com.

MGC thanks Lucienne -- and Gina, of course -- for guest blogging today!

Telepathy and Characterisation

I don't know if you have ever read Stephen King's book On Writing, but one of the things that really stuck in my head was his description of writing as telepathy.

In essence what you are doing is very carefully crafting your own Thought and placing that down in a special format that can be interpreted by another person. All the thoughts, images and musings on themes (both conscious and unconscious), particular word choices, phrases . . . You are communicating this directly into the brain of another human being - across time and space. When you sit down to read a classic, you are opening a window into the mind of that long-dead author. Meshing your thoughts up against theirs and for a moment provoking a state within yourself that echoes that of the original creator.

Recently I have been thinking about this in terms of character. As writers we all try to craft our characters well. We want them fleshed out, with believable reactions and thoughts, consistent backstory and good dialogue. We want their purpose to be consistent with where they have come from, and their goal to echo their nature. But these characters cannot help but be an extension of what we are. The ones we like are those that have characteristics that we respect, or perhaps aspire to. Or perhaps they live the life we may dream of, strive for what we dare not. The antagonists are the opposite - encapsulating all the attributes we perceive as negative, and standing directly in the path to the hero (otherwise there would be no conflict on this level).

So these characters end up projected right into the mind of the reader. I would contend that at this point their is an immediate judgement - just as the human mind forms immediate conclusions about strangers you may be introduced to. Either you like them, or you don't. You have an immediate connection, or you are left underwhelmed. And just as the same person can either be the love of someone's life or a dull stranger (for different people), your characters can strike a chord with the book-buying public or potential editors or fail to create this response.

Now, of course there are some elements of human nature that are nearly always appealing. We love the girl who saves the kitten, or the man who cares about his friend. But when we extend to other elements of character, the reader can simply not connect with your crafted thought-projection.

In story, its the old scenario at the crit group. You circulate the story and find that two people loved the character, two hated them and four hardly care about them - and crit your word choices instead.

Have you come across situations where your characters have both connected to and underwhelmed different readers? Have you ever had one editor rave about your characters while another fails to care about them? Have you ever hunted down a book that everyone was raving about, only to find you either hated the characters or found them vacuous?

PS: I may be out of Internet range over the next day or so, will try to log in wireless, but apologies if I do not respond to posts.

Plotting For Pantsers

Those of you who know me know I am about as close to pure pantser as a writer who produces coherent stories can be. I often have no idea what's going to happen past the next chapter or so, and only a vague notion of how I'm going to get from there to the ending - if I know what the ending is supposed to be.

For those of us who plot by the seat of our pants (pantsers), it's a fairly common experience. It's also why plotters think pantsers can't carry a plot in a bucket. Of course, those of us who plot in detail (something I personally can't do) have nice detailed outlines and they know beforehand what's going to happen - so those fortunate souls probably look at pantsers like me with complete incomprehension anyway.

So how can a pantser plot? One option is to ask Pratchett how he does it (he's probably the most prominent pantser in the genre at the moment) - but he's probably not going to be able to tell you. See, the biggest difference between plotters and pantsers that I can see is that for plotters it's all up front in the conscious brain. Pantsers just about everything is subconscious until it needs to be made conscious (usually while you're writing it, sometimes later than that). I'll find myself dropping something in for no reason I can see - and then later it turns out to have been key foreshadowing.

Anyway, here are some of the things I do in lieu of having a carefully planned out plot. I try to have a very good idea what drives my characters, even when they're being recalcitrant. I look for at least one overriding need which they're going to try to meet. In Impaler, Draculea's strongest need is to protect his family - a need which is so strong he'll risk everything on the slim chance of success - not least because there is no other option.

Which is - for me at least - the key to plotting. Once I know what a character needs most, I arrange to remove the options they have of getting it to drive them into the method that will challenge them most. Impaler was easy - it was all historically there. For other books, I've used weather, other characters, anything environmental I can so that the only choice they've got is the one that leads to the end. Sometimes, if I have a character with a strong sense of duty I can use that instead - the character's own nature will push him or her into situations that force the plot.

Another technique is to borrow from the world of psychology. I hope you'll forgive the digression into what's only a short distance removed from pop psychology, because it does make a handy tool to figure out what that oh-so-irritating character will do next.

What I'm talking about is Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, which is at its core the simplest commonsense. The most basic human needs are for food, safety, and shelter - not necessarily in that order. If those aren't satisfied, higher order needs will be ignored in favor of meeting the lower order needs. So, starve your character, and his most urgent priority will be food. Put him at immediate risk of his life, and he'll do his damndest to survive. Strand him in the middle of winter, and he'll focus on finding somewhere out of the weather. And so forth. You can drive a plot a long way by this method, throwing obstacles that force your main character to fulfill a basic need in a way that will make their real goal harder to achieve.

Another useful technique is to re-use the minor characters, letting them help or hinder the main as the need arises. Pratchett uses CMOT Dibbler - and his many avatars - this way. Dibbler is mostly a background noise character, but he's always there and can be relied on to complicate things, drop a useful or frustrating hint, and sell food items of dubious origin. Pratchett could have worked with anonymous food vendors, but with Dibbler, he doesn't need to, and he has quite a bit of layered information in the things Dibbler does.

All of these things can help, but there's no real substitute for understanding plot structure. The thing with pantsers is, we need to understand it at a conscious level as well as an instinctive one. I use that order because that's the order I learned plotting. I read so much I have a built in grasp of what plot structure should look like. The result is that I'll naturally spawn intricately layered plots without really understanding what the heck is going on until - in extreme cases - I've finished writing the book. This isn't a good thing - the Epic With Everything is 160k words, and was written while I was still in uber-stripped-down style with next to no setting. Properly cleaned up and expanded there's at least three novels crammed into it, all of them hopelessly intertwined. Maybe one day I'll get good enough to tease out the structure of the thing and make it work as separate novels.

By learning plot structure at a conscious level, I have a better idea what's happening, so I can consciously shape what I'm writing to improve the pacing and foreshadowing in what I do.

What are some other ways pantsers can improve plotting?

Seeing Anew

Revision – should be easy, right? You take your vision and you do it again.

Well... that is actually one of the things you need to do. But to be serious for a while (and you know this kills me, right?) let’s take it from the top.

Years ago, at a workshop with Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, I was stunned to hear that while I was experienced enough to write stories, I lacked the necessary experience and knowledge to revise/rewrite/recast. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I mean, I used to teach English. And, of course, I learned English (and a few other languages) at one time. How many times had I revised a paper? Revising was easy, right? You go over your book and you change the wording and stuff...

Well, making a long and painful story short, KKR and DWS were absolutely right. I didn’t know how to revise. And I still don’t – or at least it’s not something that comes naturally. I work at it every single time I have to do it. It’s a painful process. All forms of revision.

What do I mean all forms? There are many things that get lumped in under “revision.” Some have different names but they all are, in a way, forms of revising. The ones that come to mind are: editing, revision (proper), rewriting, recasting.

To the extent they all involve taking work that could be considered finished and making it different in an attempt to improve it, they all involve re-vision – i.e., taking your vision and re-doing it. And each of them involves peculiar dangers that you make things worse, instead of better.

Take editing, which is probably the most minor of the processes – you change a word, a sentence there, move that explanation on the mating cycles of cockroaches to the beginning of the book... Simple, yes? I mean, the book remains essentially the same.

NOT simple. Why not? Because as you were writing it, you were “unrolling” the story in a certain order. If you’re like me, there’s the reminder-ticker-tape at the back of your head going “have you described him? Is this the first time we see him? Mention the thing with the hair!” While when you’re editing, again if you’re like me, you’re lost in the prose itself and it might be hard to remember what you’ve mentioned before and not or to find the exact reference back there. So in fact, when you move the thing on the mating cycles of cockroaches, it might be before you mention the villain is a cockroach and you might be confusing your reader terribly.

At the next level of invasiveness is revision proper. This goes a little deeper than mere word changes. With this one you have to ask yourself things like “Did I sufficiently describe the escape pods, so they understand the urgency of her flight?” Or “Should that second scene when he gets knocked on the head be there? He got knocked on the head once already. I need another injury. How about liver failure?” This one is proportionately more dangerous than mere editing. (And btw, I mean editing as a writer does with her own work, not as an editor does, which is more the revision proper level.) While editing can bring the reader to a dead stop at a sentence or paragraph, this one allows you to kill a novel dead, dead, dead. How?

By the time you start this phase, chances are you’ve been living with the novel for at least some months, and probably years. At this point, it’s very easy to come across a description of the character and decide that “oh, who needs to know his eyes sparkle with green fire?” and cut it out. Only your reader did not know that, and, denied the knowledge of this ophthalmic problem, will wonder what your MC sees in the guy (and why she’s stockpiling holy water.) By this process, you end up with talking heads and a nonsensical plot.

The opposite problem is trying to overcompensate for this and thinking “oh, I need to explain that.” In its extreme form, it has the author explaining how a zipper (or something else we have now) works. In its various intermediate forms, it can swell your novel to twice its size and give the reader WAY more information than anyone needs or wants. It can also bring your action scene to a dead stop, as you explain how the sonic guns work.

In a way the next level up – rewrite – is safer (As btw KKR as DWS told me they would be.) This is where you wrote the entire novel. Now you lock it in your drawer and you re-write from memory. While it will never be like writing it the first time – characters and situations are familiar, and presumably there are fewer surprises, though some minor scenes might change – you’re still telling the story anew, and that keeps it fresher as it unrolls. If you are a relative newby, this is the type of “revision” I’d recommend, for your seriously flawed stories. At least, if you suspect the problem is on the “narrative” side, rather than the story side. I.e., you have a basically solid story with solid characters, but you made a mess of how you told it. This is often the solution for stories you’ve edited to death.

And then you have recasting, which is the simplest one of all from a storytelling point of view... and the hardest too from a diagnosing point of view. This is when you take a story and you try to figure out why it was rejected. And then you play with removing/replacing story elements to make it better and/or more marketable. I’ve done this with half a dozen short stories. For instance, there is a story where a revelation of the character’s alien nature made it very icky that the Main Character had married him not knowing this. It tarnished both of them. Though the story was lovely on the word/emotion-path level, no one would touch it.

When I’d been away from it long enough to realize what was wrong, I went back and made the MC his adopted sister instead. This required recasting the story, because no scene could remain the same. But when I was done, it sold first place I sent it.

So now that I am an experienced author (G) I get to tell you – revision is hard, because it’s hard to see anew what you already saw once. This goes against the way the human mind works. It’s like playing poker with yourself. You pretend you never read this, and you write it again.

Do you understand the difficulties? Do I sound like I’m just being snobbish? What is your particular revision issue? Have you markedly improved a story by revising it? How?

It’s a difficult process. Share your pain.

The Creative Genius Connundrum

According to Mark Changizi over at Scientific Blogging:

'“Genius” is a fiction. It is a throw-back to antiquity, where scientists of the day had the bad habit of “explaining” some phenomenon by labeling it as having some special essence. The idea of “the genius” is imbued with a special, almost magical quality.'

So if there is no such thing as genius, what is there?

Changizi thinks what makes some people better at coming up with ideas is 'their manner of hunting ideas'.

His theory is that 'Being a successful idea-hunter requires understanding the field (whether science, art or technology), but acquiring the skill of idea-hunting itself requires taking active measures to “break out” from the ape brains evolution gave us, by being aloof.'

I'm not quite sure what me means by 'being aloof'. I agree you have to know something inside out to be able to play with it and bend it in new ways. As writers we play with language, we also play with narrative to create tension and we play with the people we invent, to make them so interesting that complete strangers feel compelled to read whole books about them. (Otherwise, why would they finish our books, once they start them?)

I've just read Changizi's article on the Value of being Aloof. From what I can gather, he thinks belonging to a community stifles your creativity because as soon as you join a community you adapt to fit in, which limits your options.

I don't know what sort of communities he has belonged to, but I've found the writing community very supportive. I belong to several different writing communities and sub groups within those, and each one stimulates me in different ways.

Now I've found another article by Changizi which supports what I just said.

'in order for an individual to act like a community of idea-seekers, one must just carry out multiple directions of idea-generation in parallel. '

I think what he's trying to say is that we must stimulate our creativity by going to many different sources, seek out new input and always be open to ideas.

This comes back to my theory that there are two types of people in the world.

There are those people who don't like change. They reject difference, whether it is race or culture, because it it frightens them.

And then there are those people who seek out the different because they find it stimulating. I suspect it is born into us and not something we can consciously control. So the creative person actively seeks out stimulation because that is the way their mind is wired and they are looking for inspiration.

I love the Jack London quote: 'You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.'
For more Jack London quotes see here.

What do you think? Does the writing community stimulate your creativity or hamper it? Do you actively seek out the new and possibly confronting? Do you chase inspiration with a club?