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Some Ideas For Achieving Your Goals

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Every year people at this time of year make resolutions they plan to keep. And, as any given number of articles will point out over the next few weeks, most won’t keep them. It’s often due to a mix of things. Unexpected circumstances can intrude. Commitment wavers. Life intervenes. Your job could suck your creativity away.

I maintain that many people make a mistake with their ‘goals.’ For one, most things people set as a goal are things are often, or sometimes, out of their control. Second, goals are often vaguely defined. And thirdly, most of us have no real incentive to achieve a resolution written down, other than a vague distant sense of achievement we might reach well down the road.
Let me break that down. If one wanted to write a novel in a year, that’s a goal that might not happen. What you need to do is break what you would like to achieve into small actions you can achieve.

How many words are there in an average novel? 100,000? 90,000? Less? There are 52 weeks in a year, let’s write a short novel, that in rewrites will be added to. A 52,000 worder. That means you could write something that was novelish or novel-length-ish in a year with 1,000 words a month a week. Break that down again into units that you can fit into your world. Work every weeknight? 250 words a session. Have only weekends? Write 500 words each weekend day. Or set aside one day a week to write 1,000 words. These are small concrete goals you can tick off every week.

Whether you write a novel or not, at the end of the year you’ll have something close. You may even have written a novel. The final form of the novel might not be something you can control, but you can control your week-to-week goal of working towards a novel. This defines and breaks down your goal.

The last point, incentives, is important. I know of writers that talk about rewarding themselves for making the wordcount and the week-to-week goals. That’s nice. But I recently watched a show that crystallized something in my head. Humans are more scared of failing in public than just about anything else. The show took people having trouble losing weight and applied the idea of a ‘Credible Threat.‘ They told these people that they’d show these people on national TV at the end of the program.

Surprisingly, it didn’t matter as much what program they used, just the idea that there was a very real and very public end result spurred them onto to do things they didn’t realize they could (if you’ve ever seen ‘The Biggest Loser’ I’m always amazed and humbled by what those contestants achieve, it’s theorized that knowing they’ll be on TV spurs them on as much as the prize money).

I believe can see a more offbeat version of this in Steve Pavlina’s ‘Manisfestation/Intention‘ ideas at his popular site (and his Million Dollar Experiment), and though I don’t believe in changing the nature of the universe around me by declaring my intentions in public like Steve does, I find the use of Credible Threats to be extraordinarily useful.

Take for example the very early credible threat of starting this blog in 1998 by stating I was going to become a published writer, and this blog would follow the whole crazy adventure. I used to detail all the rejections and submissions I was making in posts, again, for the same reason. Even though I have dropped the ball, it’s amazing how putting it all out there spurs you on. It’s a deeper animal instinct of some sort, and it’s a useful tool.
Now, this blog is not just 100% for me to use as a Credible Threat. It’s a way to keep up with the SF community, think out loud, chronicle stuff I think is too cool, and because I found the idea of a static writer web page way too boring. Blogging made sense the moment I stumbled across it.

But it’s a nice side benefit.

How might you use a Credible Threat to help spur you on to write a novel?

1) Surround yourself by a group of peers who agree to race to finish a novel (I know of at least two professional writers using a large buddy system to get novels written and keep them on track)

2) Consider stating to a large group that you’ll give a substantial donation to a charity you hate unless you achieve your goal

3) Do it all in public, keep a blog detailing all you are doing

4) Announce that you are raising money for your favorite charity by asking friends to donate a buck for every thousand words you write

5) Fill in your own here.

How Many Novels Did You Write Before Selling One? 150 Writers Answer

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

The results of my survey concerning how many books a published writer wrote before they sold their first are in.

This survey came about because not too long ago I overhead a newer writer talking about the fact that he had been submitting his first novel to publishers and was growing quite discouraged by the sheer number of rejections he’d received. The writer he was talking to asked him what he was doing while waiting for the first one to make the rounds.

“Trying to write a better query letter,” was the response.

“So you’re not working on another novel?” the other writer asked. “Because you realize you’re probably not going to sell your first.”

On the surface that sounds like a pretty harsh response, but talking to any given novelist and you’ll probably find that for a great number of them they did not break into the field with their first novel. In conversation with other novelists I found all sorts of experiences and paths to publishing, with first book written being first book sold more the exception than the rule.
However I was recently challenged when I stated that, so I decided that there was one way to get some raw data (and also reminded again by John Brown in an online discussion when he asked if anyone had ever done a survey of this): a quick and dirty survey. It’s not a perfect survey. There was slightly confusing language, a repeated question, and I’m aware of all the reasons a survey can go wrong, but I still found it interesting, nonetheless.

I received 150 responses from a variety of authors, most of them SF/F, but thanks to Diana Peterfreund and others, a large number of Romance writers.

Of these published novelists, 65% did not break in with their first novel. 35% did.

I asked, in the first question, how many novels a writer wrote before selling their first. Here is the breakdown of that with percentages rounded.
32% wrote one novel
13% wrote two
11% wrote 3
8% wrote 4
9% wrote 5
3% wrote 6
13% wrote 7 or more novels
6% wrote some short fiction first
5% wrote a ton of short fiction first

What does that tell us? Out of a group of 10 writers who will go on to be published (we can’t guess at how many are turned away unpublished, right, this is a self selecting group), 3 will sell the first novel they write. 1 will write some, or a lot, of short fiction before selling their first novel. 1-2 will sell their second. The other half will write 3 or more novels before breaking in.
This is not intended to discourage. It is intended to encourage writers to keep busy after the first one is done. Also, many of those writers who wrote multiple books were able to sell their later books. They’d grown and gotten better, and could rewrite them.

With this in mind, having heard some novelists who noted that selling a first novel could be a bit stressful, I also asked the following question. Would you recommend starting your career off by selling your first novel?
5% picked ‘hell yes!’
15% picked ‘yes’
9% picked ‘no’
9% picked ‘hell no’
62% picked ‘don’t know’ or ‘sold a later novel.’ Presumably the ‘I don’t know’ selections were later novel sellers.

So those who sold their first seemed almost evenly divided between the experience. There were a lot of comments, so I’m going to provide sample of many of them here after the jump.

Here they are, a handful of randomly selected comments:

Continue reading “How Many Novels Did You Write Before Selling One? 150 Writers Answer”

When Did I Decide I Would Become a Writer?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I invited blog readers to post questions that I would do my best to answer in this post. Kenneth asks:

I’m sure you’ve covered this at some time, but when did you “decide” you wanted to be a writer? I know you read a lot growing up”¦was it something you just came naturally to, or was there a conscious epiphany that you were going to be a writer? What’s your degree in?

I’d been writing occasionally for fun. Teachers and friends would occasionally ask why I would do so well writing fiction, and if I was interested in being a writer. I was about 15 when the idea that I would like to become published, or be a writer, started to firm up into something much stronger. I remember standing on a dock explaining this to a family friend, that of all my future options it seemed the most exciting to me. I took creative writing in high school, and the high school newspaper took one of my stories. I wasn’t sure what I was doing for the next couple years, but I began to buy a lot of books about writing and writers from 15-17, and that was when the submitting started in drips and drabs.

When I entered college at 17 I knew I was going to be an English major, but by my sophomore year I realized that being in those classes were not going to teach me how one went about actually becoming a writer. I started spending a lot of time on internet forums trying to figure it all out.

While 15 was the year I kind of crystalized the idea, 18 was when I lay down the roadmap and kick started the whole process. I saved up and purchased a laptop. I taught myself to touch-type. I decided I would garner 100+ rejections a year and write every weekday. My grades dropped from Bs and occasional As to Cs & Ds as I skipped classes staying up late working every night. My Junior year I cut friendships and social circles out of my life that took up time and maintenance and focused only on a few core friends and writing.

I attended Clarion that summer, at 19, and since then things have been rolling.

Authors Still Have To Do Better About Diversity, Even When It’s Hard

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Douglas Blaine has a response to Pam Noles’ essay Shame.

He writes:

For a brief time in the third grade of the Catholic school I went to in Kansas (from what I hear not the same as Catholic school back east) there was a girl named Rochelle Ramsey that I was good friends with the left as mysteriously as she arrived. Maybe her family couldn’t afford the tuition”“mine couldn’t 3 years later”“maybe “˜the powers that be’ encourage the only family of color that school had ever seen to find a better place to integrate. All I knew was that my friend was gone.

He then, after summarizing, goes on to say:

So one thing come out of all that: where in all my experience am I supposed to reliably concoct a speculative fiction story that involves people of other (real) races?
Oh sure, you hear folks bather about doing research for a book, but I seriously doubt that they intend for one to “˜go live among the black people and learn their ways’. If I chose to write a story containing a more multicultural cast I would be at best able to call someone black at the onset, maybe a remark about brown eyes or crinkly hair and then I would be done. Every word out of his (sexist post later) mouth would be either as white as I don’t know how not to be or ridiculously contrived. I don’t (can’t) do this for the same reason I don’t write legal thrillers or romance or business books: I know nothing about the true subject.

Sorry Doug, you don’t get off so easy. I hate being confrontational, but this is a cop out. I appreciate your thoughts on this, but I really think you’re wrong and would encourage you to read on here, realizing that I’m not yelling or criticizing, but trying to explain.

Let’s extrapolate your argument a little. What if I were to say the following:

Oh sure, you hear folks blather about doing research for a book, but how am I supposed to reliably concoct a story that involves a scientist, I have, after all, never even been in a lab or met a scientist. How can I even begin to imagine what someone who does math for a living thinks like.

Or…

Oh sure, you hear folks blather about doing research for a book, but how am I supposed to reliably concoct a story about being an astronaut, I’ve never even been a test pilot, I can’t even begin to imagine the stress of flying a craft into the upper atmosphere or what it is like being weightless.

Or…

Oh sure, you hear folks blather about doing research for a book, but how am I ever supposed to write a story with a woman character. I’ve never had a period or breasts, what the fuck do I know about being a woman?

Or…

Oh sure, you hear folks blather about doing research for a book, but how am I supposed to know what a white man thinks like? I’m multiracial and grew up outside the US, I can never get into an American’s head

The argument, when other elements are swapped in instead of minorities, becomes ridiculous.

This is how you do it.

You give it your best, honest, empathetic, attempt. And you’ll probably screw it up. The first time, the second time, the third time, just like anything new element you try to add to your fiction. You’ll research, and talk, and ask questions, and just like any other character that you are not (which is most), if you are committed to it, you just might nail it and you will certainly be a stronger writer for it.

Honestly.

If we can’t bring diversity and get into the eyes of someone other than us in a story, what’s the point of writing about dwarves and aliens. Doug says

submit this is one of the underlying motives of authors for creating new races. We can invent elves and dwarves and the like and say they like fried chicken and watermelon without coming off as totally inept asses.

But that’s just the point, if we can’t get behind the minds of other humans what’s the point of even badly portraying aliens or fantastic creatures if its just going to be a way for us to lazily discuss ‘otherness?’ The using creatures as a short hand for otherness becomes 1) laziness, and 2) insulting. Why are weird looking creatures always going to be the stand in for otherness, and good looking white people the heros? That adds up to a bizarre mass, don’t you think?

Don’t get me wrong, using aliens as a shorthand is great, just ask anyone who was so struck by the black/white white/black episode of Star Trek, but having Uhura on the bridge and treated as part of the crew is just as damn important. Having a green monster as a stand in for the other is just, simply, not enough.

You’re going to have to try harder.

I don’t (can’t) do this for the same reason I don’t write legal thrillers or romance or business books…

Maybe, but are you saying you can never have love in your SF story, or a world with a functioning economy? Come on…

For those who feel similarly, and want more pointers or to dig into this further, you need to read Nisi Shawl’s trans-racial writing for the sincere. Here is a relevant snip from here opening about all the same arguments used above:

I wonder sometimes what kind of career I’d have if I followed suit with tales of stalwart Space Negroes and an unexplained absence of whites.
But of course I don’t. I boldly write about people from other backgrounds, just as many of the field’s best authors do. Suzy McKee Charnas, Bruce Sterling, and Sarah Zettel have all produced wonderful transracial characters, as I show in examples below. Before getting into their work, though, let’s discuss how to prepare for your own.
If you want to go beyond the level of just assigning different skin tones and heritages to random characters, you’re going to have to do some research. Because yes, all people are the same, but they’re also quite different. For now, we’ll set aside the argument that race is an artificial construct, and concentrate on how someone outside a minority group can gain enough knowledge of the group’s common traits to realistically represent one of its members.
Reading’s a very non-confrontational way to do this. Be sure, though, if you choose this route, to use as many primary sources as possible. If researching a story about first contact between a stranded explorer from Aldeberan and a runaway slave, for example, you’d do much better to read The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The latter is an important and moving book. But not only is it a work of fiction, it was also written by a non-slave; therefore it’s a step further removed from the authentic experience you need.
Websites on minority culture abound. Any half-decent search engine will bring up a freighter’s worth of URLs on African-Americans, for instance, and at least a line or two on lesser-known groups.

She even does workshops on this.

We’re writers. It’s our job to get into other people’s heads. There is no excuse not to.

What’s the Average Advance on a Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

In 2005 and 2007 108 science fiction and fantasy authors replied to a survey I did asking what they got for an advance for a book.

Basically I put up a survey on my website that people could fill out who were SF or Fantasy authors (sorry other genres, I don’t log your data, even if you do submit it).

Everyone kept worrying about occasional large advances that weren’t normal, like 1/2 million, but those outliers don’t affect the median.

If you found this data useful, please link to it or email this link to a friend. If you would like to reprint this article please do so if you’re a not-for-profit group, but contact me if you are a for-profit. Please make sure to provide a link to my website and my name (Tobias S. Buckell) as a byline in either case.

Continue reading “What’s the Average Advance on a Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel?”

Can Young Writers Get Published?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Sartorias and Justine Larbalestier dish about whether young writers can get published. Justine:

Recently I’ve had a number of letters from teenagers wanting advice on how to get their novel published and wondering whether their age will make it harder for them to get it into print. Specifically, would they be discriminated against because they were only thirteen or fourteen or fifteen or sixteen or whatever?
The simple answer is no. When you submit a query letter to a publisher or agent you don’t have to tell them how old you are. You’ll be rejected or accepted on the quality of your submission.

She also goes on to say:

Up until I was 15, I had a number of other poems and stories published. Without motherly intervention even. Every one of them with my age beside my name. After that, nothing of mine was published until I was in my thirties.
What happened?
Another simple answer: I started competing with adults. I stopped listing my age and started sending to more grown up venues. My work was not as good as that of the grown ups. I didn’t find my way into print again until I was way past my child prodigy days.

Like Justine or Sartorias, I also started out a young writer (I guess I still am according to some). My first serious attempts were when I was ~15 and started entering the Writers of The Future competition. Justine gives some good advice in general. Unlike Justine I don’t think anyone considered me a prodigy or anything decent (what my parents might say after-the-fact notwithstanding, they were very puzzled by the writing thing for a long, long time) or even above average. And I wasn’t. I was kinda stubborn though, and I kept at it.
I did shamelessly mention my age when I started submitting. My cover letter had a line in it that went something like ‘I’m an 18 year old SF/F writer recently moved to the states who is just starting out, as a result, any critique you might have in response to this piece would be extraordinarily welcome. Thanks, Tobias.’ It got me a fair number of editorial comments back that helped me out.

So I do think that focusing on the craft and Justine’s advice is great (at any level).
The place I got hung up on and stopped nodding and agreeing, and found I had to bookmark and respond (several weeks later now) was in Sartorias’ comments, where she says:

Age is necessary, I think…young authors who publish have a certain amount of skill at telling others’ stories, but except for Carolyn Glyn, there isn’t much original there. It takes us time and life experience to both get the skill–and have something to say that just isn’t regurgitation from our most passionate reading.

If you’ve read my blog over the years you might guess this always annoys me, because right now there are 14 year olds in New Orleans who are racking up the kind of life experience that a 30 year old in a factory in Ohio won’t ever achieve. The ‘life experience’ canard is one that annoys me. You don’t need to have aged like a fine wine to tell a good story, and there are many people who master their career at a young age because they spent a lot of time working at it.

I do think there is an apprentice period when working up to becoming a writer. It may be X number of garbage words, or X number of hours spent writing, or X years before things click, and it varies from writer to writer. But often enough I talk to someone jokes (half jokes) that I’m ‘too young to be published’ and I often find out in terms of words written, stories written, and years practicing, I have them beat. For 11 years now I’ve sat down and tried to write as often as I could during the week, and I’ve written over 100 short stories since I started at 15 (averaging about 1/month, if you think about it over the big picture), 1/2 of a novel at 17 that got lost in a hard drive crash, a full novel, and I’m close to finishing my second. I’m not Asimov (who started publishing in his teens, btw), but I’ve put in a fair amount of work. And

I’m always beating myself up about getting better to compensate for all the things I’m horrible at.

I really think the work and focus on learning and self-improvement put in has more to do with it than the age.

So, um, yeah, I respectfully have to disagree 🙂 Younger writers can get published, and you don’t need to collect a certain amount of life experience points to have something worth saying.

But, you will have to put in the work. Just like everyone else.

Six Reasons For a Writer to Have an Agent

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Paperback Writer (or also known as SF Writer S.L Viehl) corrects herself here about the advice that you sell a book to a publisher first and then get an agent. An agent popped in to negate that, and I added that I’d also acquired my agent who then sold the book to a publisher, but I was a little out of it, because I didn’t phrase it too well.

But here are some reasons I think it might be good to hunt for the agent first, and then if you haven’t snagged yourself one, start harrying the publishers:

1) The agent will probably know the field better than you. The agent should know which editors are looking for/interested in/buying your type of novel, if not have some good leads on it, or an editor who’s very receptive to the agent because of good books the agent sent him/her in the past.

2) Your agent can simultaneously submit your novel to a number of editors. You can’t. That cuts down on the time spent marketing the book!

3) Your agent is more likely to understand the contract ins and outs

4) You are going to need one eventually, why not start now?

5) Many agents work very closely with their writers to bring the fiction up to the next level before submitting to the publisher (this could be good or bad, in my case and a couple of friends it was good)

6) Your agent should be more experienced at pitching books than you.

So there are 6 reasons I think having an agent first can sometimes be helpful.

What Book Turned You Into an SF Fan?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

SF Signal asks what book turned you into an SF Fan, with reference to Bob Wallace’s enjoying the swords and blasters stylings of Burroughs.

I had never seen anything like it. The cover had two huge moons floating in the night sky above a city of spires and towers. There were what appeared to be three huge airships floating high in the sky. In the foreground were two men, one flying through the air with a dagger in his hand, the other, with his Roman centurion-type helmet flying off of his head, turning toward his attacker with his hands coming up to defend himself. He looked really surprised, with the implication being his attempt at defense wasn’t going to do him any good. Why this fight, with a knife aimed at this man’s heart? If there was ever a cover that would make me open a book, that was it.

That’s certainly not Earth, I thought about that cover. But it’s not Mars, either. At least it wasn’t the uninhabited and barren Mars I knew from school. So, then, what was this place? Lying there on the couch, next to the fire in the fireplace, I opened that copy of A Fighting Man.

It was Mars, alright, but it was a Mars that existed only in Burroughs’ imagination. It wasn’t called Mars, though. It was called Barsoom (Earth was “Jasoom”). At least that’s what the natives called Mars, natives who happened to be green-skinned men. Well, sort of “men.” The women laid eggs, which hatched little Martians. Until then, I assumed only chickens came out of eggs. But Martians? Ones that carried swords!?

My book was Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, appropriately enough.

I’d read other novels before then. My mother weaned me into novels with Clive Cussler. We lived on a boat, and I liked ocean-based stuff. I think I was like 5, if I remember right, maybe 6. I liked the Cussler books better than the reading primers because interesting stuff happened. The world was at stake, heros were at large, and villains were devising complicated schemes to gain power. It kept me moving along. It was easier to read a Cussler novel than to read a textbook.

When I had trouble with words my mother would hand me the dictionary. ‘Look it up.’ From this early behavior comes all my success in this world. I know all information if somewhere in print for me to tease out, even in fiction there are these things that teach me about the world as a child. I loved mystery, and devoured mum’s Sherlock Holmes collection over and over, trying to commit them to memory and struggling with the morality of Holme’s cocaine usage (I looked up cocaine in the dictionary, and was aware of the general idea of drug use from the age of 6, how’s that for ‘look it up?’). I moved onto westerns, reading Calamity Jane and other westerns people would buy for me from the used book store.

I lived on a boat without TV and must have been a minor blessing to my mother that a book would basically take me out of action for an afternoon. I admit, I was also fascinated by space ships a bit thanks to a Star Wars picture book someone gave me. Astronomy fascinated me a bit, I’d always ask my mom about the moon and what it took to get people there. I’d asked someone who was going to the states for something on the stars, and I got back a Michael Jackson T-Shirt.

Now this was back when he was popular, and I was still really bummed.

Then one day, on my dad’s boat, I was looking for reading material. I’d paged through a book about the founding of the United States and read the constitution, bill of rights, and declaration of independence, when I found two books back in a small shelf. They were Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke and Foundation, by Isaac Asimov.

Foundation, though I read it, was a struggle. Nothing really happened to me. But I’ll never forget the idea of a planet-wide city. That image stuck in my head and never left.

Childhood’s End blew my brain. I was never the same after it. My imagination had been stretched, and I was lead to question more of the world around me. It was entirely feasible to me that religion could have sprung up as a chance encounter with advanced aliens thousands of years ago, though I didn’t think that. I started becoming interested in early history.

And of course, look for me stuff like this. It was hard to find, where I was as a child. I still read voraciously, often getting into trouble so I could get ‘exiled’ to the library for an hour or so by my teachers.

But as I moved to the Virgin Islands from Grenada I started finding more SF. A few books a month or so. I encountered the Lord of The Rings in 4th grade and read the whole thing. Loved the Hobbit, still do, LOTR didn’t do as much for me, but the teacher that year let me read the whole school library as it was a small private school and I was the only 4th grader.

By 6th grade I started getting into large enough schools and finding swap libraries that my reading could veer substantially towards SF/F. Luckily, since I wasn’t the one picking them, but by chance, I got exposed to all sorts of random stuff, and by the time I was in the US Virgin Islands in 7th grade I was reading a book a day, most of it fantastic fiction.

My parents, well my stepdad in particular, did not think to start filtering the books until 10th grade or so, and by then there was nothing I hadn’t encountered in fiction that really surprised me. They worried about my obsession with SF/F, and asked why I didn’t read ‘other’ books. But I did. I probably read 1 non-SF book a week, more than most adults read, let alone any kids I knew of, but the fact that I read 2 or 3 SF/F books on top of the 1 non-SF made it look like I was obsessed.

It was a fun ride.

Is Science Fiction Too Politically Correct?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Over at Tangent Online SF fan/critic Dave Truesdale jumps the shark as he decrys the evil Liberal conspiracy to force short fiction magazine editors to buy metrosexualized short stories and so forth and so on. Nick Mamatas has his usually sharp retorts on his livejournal.

Anyway, Dave wonders

if SF is going soft these days. One doesn’t often see hard-edged political stories in short SF anymore—at least not many of them in the past twenty, twenty-five years or so.

There must be a certain point where anyone gets old and all they can think about was how great and golden the past was. Like all those people who think the 50s were the shit because thats when they grew up. There are some great stories from the 50s, 60s, and 70s that I’ve read in ‘Best Of’ anthologies, but even in the ‘Best Of The Golden Age’ anthologies and collections I’ve checked out, I’m still wading through white male US-centric only fiction. There’s a lot of stuff that must have seemed absolutely amazing only because the reader was 12 years old and hadn’t thought about something when they encountered it.

And that’s cool. I don’t begrudge that. The Tobias theory of literature is that the more you read the better. I started out reading light adventure novels in great bulk before I attempted a deeply serious lit novel. I still read mostly ‘fun’ stuff, I have to be in the right mood for a tougher book.

Occasionally, we’ll see something by way of satire (humorous, as in Esther Friesner’s “Johnny Beansprout” from the July, 2004 F&SF; or darker, as in some of Terry Bisson’s or James Morrow’s short work), but they are too far and few between, when taken as a percentage of the tonnage of short sf/f foisted on readers today. Most of which deals with character interaction, or the feelings of characters, or how they feel about whatever milquetoast situation lazy authors choose to put them in (yet another essay).

Ooh, today’s SF authors are ‘lazy’ and write ‘milquetoast.’

Who cares if the story itself is a tired one, the theme is trite or lacks true imagination without anything new to say. But boy, how cleverly the author left the resolution to the story so opaque as to render the reader scratching his head in bewilderment. But then the reader, not wanting to feel as if he doesn’t get it, turns to reviews in a few major publications where liberal “critics” spin the story as one of wonderment and progressive story-telling, and how mahvelous and insightful and avant garde the newest little darling (or metrosexual male author) is. And the confused reader buys it, not wanting to feel left out, wanting to be with the “in crowd.” Yup, the age of metrosexual SF is upon us, and reinforced by an elite group of cookie-cutter reviewers and critics who buy into everything they’re led to believe is cool, or progressive.

…

The overall point of bringing up Silverberg’s column, Ballard’s forgotten story, and my own comments, is perhaps to strike a spark in today’s short sf/f writers. Not just in a political sense of awareness, and what isn’t being written about very much anymore, but more importantly not to forget the story. If you’re not writing about much of anything, it doesn’t matter how well “nothing” is written. SF, Speculative Fiction, or whatever you want to call it, is still a literature of the imagination. So use your imagination to its fullest, work it, and many times the style of the story will take care of itself.

Okay, here’s a spark: I’m insulted by Dave’s arrogance and paternalistic attitude in insinuating that we’re all lazy and write milquetoast. That strikes a nerve. I deal with that smug shit from outside the SF community all the time, nothing new. Unca Dave knows best, we just have to listen to him. Yet he’s hopping up and down about people forcing their opinions on others? So far Dave is the loudest opinion forcer I’ve seen who is unable to conceive of people being able to enjoy a piece of fiction he doesn’t like so therefore it’s obviously the result of a VAST and GIANT LIBERAL CONSPIRACY. Sure. Or maybe, using Occam’s razor, a lot of different people like different things that differ from him. Look up long tail theory or infinite diversity in infinite combination, man.

And speaking of lazy and milquetoast, this is one of the more badly written pieces of criticism I’ve seen. It hardly addresses what makes the Ballard story better than stories published today (which would be interesting, and I’m sure you could make a good argument for the Ballard story), it doesn’t single out what stories and themes in magazines today are specifically milquetoast or who is lazy, or what editors are perpetrating the vast liberal conspiracy. This is a blog entry, but not an editorial, or a review of the Ballard story. And repetitive, I have yet to see a David Truesdale opinion piece that doesn’t repeat the same old, tired arguments like a broken record. All over the net right now SF authors are debating some fascinating things like on David Moles’ weblog (check out this amazing comment threat here) and Matt Cheney’s weblog (even his well written provocativeSH ‘SF is dead’ article is a great start. I disagree with it, but it’s thought-provoking and well written) giving us some fascinating new insights into what new SF writers are thinking about, worrying about, and criticizing. That’s some critical conversation, not a generic ‘I don’t like X/it isn’t like the stuff from the old days/people today aren’t writing write’ screed.

Go into the comments of the Tangent article, and you suddenly find out what Dave’s beef still is:

The most recent example, David, is the Karen Joy Fowler short story that won the Nebula last year. I believe it was titled, “What I Didn’t See.” We had a long (many months) discussion of it back then, and absolutely no one–with any certainty–could say, because of the opaque, open-ended ending, what the story was about.

Dave’s beating a several year old dead horse that he’s mentally incapable of getting over. A story he didn’t like by Karen Joy Fowler won a major award.

He’s still sore about it.

I wonder why its so freaking hard for some people to allow other people to be different than them.

What’s ironic is not Dave’s proposition that the field is too PC, but Dave’s insistence that everyone agree with Dave, and he won’t stop arguing until it happens.

Don’t hold your breath.

Keeping Rejections Taped to a Wall Doesn’t Make Me a Serial Killer!

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Did anyone watch Law and Order on NBC last night (it’s one of the few channels besides PBS and the ‘God’ channel we get in the house. Emily and I wonder if it will become the ‘all Law and Order all the time’ channel)? The basic premise was that a frustrated wannabe author writes a book about serial killers, gets rejected because ‘it’s not timely’ and then the author sets out to make it timely.

There’s this one scene where they find the guy’s apartment and break in, and find his study covered in rejection slips. “Interesting choice of wallpaper,” a detective says, and they all look at the slips and then back at each other with a sort of horrified look that implies: ‘what kind of twisted freak wallpapers his study with rejections?’

At which point Emily turns to me and says “Now do you understand why people who visited you in your dorm rooms were really freaked out by that?”

Hey, it wasn’t like I was nailing manuscripts to my wall made out of human parchment or something, I was just taping rejections to the wall. I can’t have been the only writer in history to do so.

Maybe it is that I live in a society in general that is scared to look at failure. Rejection really freaks people out. When I explain how many rejections I have people either assume I’m a really bad writer or I’m slightly weird.

But in order to succeed you will risk failure, or even encounter failure, and I really, really, wanted the success of writing. Bad enough to paper my walls with rejections.

It’s not scary, just determined.

And why the walls? Why not in a book or something?

For me each rejection was a concrete step forward, proof that I was working hard at being published. It wasn’t a wall of rejection, it was a wall of progress.