Writing, Blogging, Despair, and Becoming a Writer

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New writer Adam Claxton posted a couple of intelligent questions to this blog on Monday.  The  second of which is:

Also, do you find it disheartening when, for instance, you post to your blog and you receive no comments?
 I do.

The answer to which is:  not at all.  I am a writer and therefore all my insecurities are tied up in my novels and short stories and occasionally, to a far lesser degree, my non-fiction.  The blog?  It's a pleasant way to keep in touch with friends, both those I've met and those I haven't, a way of making myself commit a fraction of my life to words in a sort-of diary, and little more.  

If you want your blog to have lots of responses, there are tricks for achieving this:  Ask questions ("Which genre writer pens the worst sex scenes?") or make lists ("The Ten Worst Lists Any Genre Writer Has Made This Year"), for example.  Use lots of flashy illustrations (see above).  Make controversial statements ("Robert Heinlein was the worst thing ever to happen to science fiction").  And on and on and on.  I'm sure there are hundreds of articles out there on this very subject.

But why?  Phil Foglio, in a statement I gather he now rather regrets having made, once famously wrote that "Winning a Hugo for fan art is the doorway to winning more Hugos for fan art."  The chief thing having a popular blog does is bring more people to your blog.  If you are, like John Scalzi, also a prolific creator of fiction then, yes, this does ultimately result in more sales.  But if you're at the beginning of your career, struggling to find time to write, struggling to improve your writing, struggling to sell what you write... why add another level of pain to your workload?  It's not going to bring you any closer to where you need to be.

So, were I you, I wouldn't bother with social media at all, except to the degree that it gives you pleasure or that the contact eases the sense of isolation all writers face at the beginnings of their career.  All your serious attention should be focused on writing and writing and writing.

The first question was (and here I paraphrase) how do I cope with the despair endemic upon being an unpublished or little-published writer?  And here nobody has a good answer.  You simply have to tough it out.  Jack Woodford (the onetime king of soft-core porn and author of writing advice books that are half brilliant and half abhorrent) once observed that learning to write was extraordinarily hard -- but that you should be grateful for this because it weeds out the competition.  Everyone wants to write.  But only real writers are willing to put up with the pain.  Or, rather, those who can't put up with it never do become real writers.

That's bleak, I know.  But until you succeed, there's no way of knowing for sure that you will.  All you can do is write, hope, and write some more.


Above:  The Flame Nebula in visible and infrared light.  From NASA, of course.

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When To Take Writing Advice

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This is for all the gonnabe writers out there.  It's possible I've said this before but if I have, it bears saying again.

There's a lot of writing advice out there.  In fact, there's a lot of good writing advice out there.  But not all of it is going to work for you.  This is because writing is not a single discrete thing but rather a diverse family of abilities which result in a superficially similar end-product.

There are writers who cannot begin a story until they know every twist and turn of its plot.  Then there are others who write in order to discover the ending.  Once they know how it all winds up, they stop writing -- even if it's before they've put the first word down on paper.  And I could go on and on.  Obviously, the same advice is not going to work for Franz Kafka and P. G. Wodehouse both.

So how can you tell what advice works for you?  You try it out.  If it works, you pat yourself on the back for having learned something today and place it carefully in your conceptual toolbox.  If it doesn't, you leave it where you found it without guilt or rancor.  It's just that simple.

Except, of course, when it's not.


Above:  This is what a writer's desk looks like.  Unless it doesn't.

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Free Story Idea -- Take It Away!

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Two things writers hear a lot are:  1) "Where do you get your ideas?" and 2) "I have a great idea for a story.  All you have to do is write it and we'll split the money fifty-fifty."

The answers to which are, 1) "I make them up." and 2) "Ideas are easy.  Writing them up is hard work."

We also frequently hear unpublished writers complain that they just don't have any ideas.  So, here for those of you who'd like an idea for a story is one I came up with this week and feel too lazy to write up:

"Community of Mind"

A psychiatrist checks in on a patient who had a neural stent implanted in her brain.  This allows him to monitor her mental health from afar, look in on her periodically, and offer useful advice.  This time, however, he discovers that she's connected her stent to the internet and shared input with a listserv of people interested in helping her run her mind.  So her head is full of contradictory voices working in a loosely hierarchic cooperative manner.

(You'll have to read a few books on how the mind operates first.  To all the obvious candidates I'd threw in When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase, the autobiography of a woman with multiple personality disorder.)

Some of the listserv personalities come and go.  Others stay almost full-time because they are bedridden or for other reasons have nothing better to do.  Most are hostile to the doctor, whom they see as trying to "cure" a woman great-spirited enough to share her own mind with them.

The doctor is genuinely trying to help her patient, but is hampered by the fact that professional ethics prevent her from discussing the case with the listservers.   She is also distressed by the fact that her patient appears to be hiding from her.

Eventually, the doctor comes to realize that the woman's personalities (or voices; I'm oversimplifying here)  are no longer in her head.  She has replaced them with outsourced voices.  In frustration, the doctor reveals that her patient (whom she now considers dead) was being treated for depression.  She has found a way of committing suicide without being detected.

The community, still in her mind, decide that the best way to honor their great-souled host is to continue as they are, leading her life for her, knowing that is how she would have wanted it.

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Structurally, this will be a tricky story.  You'll want to establish two separate listservers as chief voices for the community.  You'll need to make their voices distinctive, as well as the doctor's.  And you'll need to come up with a scientifically plausible way for the original personality/ies to dissolve into nonexistence.  But it can be done.  I could do it myself if I didn't have many other things on my plate.

Above:  Another place science fiction writers get their ideas from.  Photo courtesy of NASA.

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Dancing With Joy

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Volodymyr Arenev just now sent me images of the covers of two of my books, forthcoming in Russia.  The first is Dancing With Bears (Eksmo Publishers) and the second is The Best of Michael Swanwick (Azbooka-Atticus Publishing Group).  

I am, it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway), delighted.  I've been to Russia only three times, but it's a country that tugs at the heart.  And of course they have had more than their share of great writers, so the association, however tenuous, with Russian literature is one that any writer cannot help but savor.

Dancing With Bears is set almost entirely in Moscow, a destination that Darger and Surplus, my post-Utopian confidence artists, have been heading toward ever since they accidentally set fire to London in "The Dog Said Bow-Wow."  So I'm really curious as to how Russians and Muscovites (not the same thing; the first joke I was ever told on Russian soil was, "Have you heard that Russia has just opened an embassy in Moscow?") will react to the novel.  I fervently hope they'll like Dancing.  Despite some of the things that happen to their great city in it.

But is that a great cover or what?   

As is the cover for my short fiction collection.  Azbooka-Atticus has also signed contracts for an omnibus volume containing The Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Dragons of Babel.

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Tolkien et Moi

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Regarnis la pipe.  Si je dois raconter cette histoire comme il faut j'aurai besoin de son aide.  C'est bien.  Non, inutile de rajouter une bûche dans le feu.  Laisse-le mourir.  Il y a pire que obscurité...

The only downside to having a story reprinted in Bifrost, the French magazine of fantasy and science fiction, is that when my contributor's copy arrives, I must bitterly regret having never managed to learn to read French.  What a lovely magazine!  Well made, generously illustrated, and crammed with reviews, essays, interviews -- and fiction, of course.  Were I not illiterate in all languages but one, I'd spend a very pleasant afternoon with with it.

The latest Bifrost is a special J. R. R. Tolkien: Voyages in Middle Earth theme issue, and it contains my own "The Changeling's Tale."  It's about . . . well, why don't I quote something I wrote earlier?  In an essay entitled "A Changeling Returns to Middle-earth," which was a summation of everything I knew and thought and felt about Tolkien's great work, I wrote:

Decades later, I wrote a story in homage to Tolkien, called “The Changeling’s Tale.”  In it, a young tavern boy is swept up by a troupe of passing elves and carried away from hearth and home and all he knows and cares about.  He pays a heavy price for the going, but he goes out of love for their beauty, their grace, and their strangeness, into a future of which all he can know is that it’s beyond his imagining.  It was an honest story, I hope.  But it also carried an autobiographical weight.  Will Taverner was as close as I will ever come to a self-portrait.  His story is not that different from mine.  Long ago, I ran away with the elves, and I never came back. 

So now Will has made it all the way to France, a country I have never seen -- though I'm sure I'll visit it someday, to retrace the footsteps of Hope Mirrlees in Paris, if for no other reason.  I wish the lad luck.  It takes courage and bad judgment to run away with the elves, and I for one have never once regretted doing so.
  

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Let Herman Melville Teach You How To Sleep

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Winter is coming.  The nights grow longer.  The days grow colder.  More and more, we find our thoughts turning to hibernation and the soft oblivion of sleep.  And the weekend is almost here!  It's possible -- indeed, almost a moral imperative -- to sleep late in the morning.

Here, from chapter 11 of Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's paean to sleep, and his recipe for enjoying it best.  It goes without saying that it involves cold weather:

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

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Mark Your Calendars! Start Saving Your Shekels!

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Apparently a date has been set for Chasing the Phoenix, my second Darger and Surplus novel, and it is... drum roll, please!... August 11, 2015.  That's the cover up above.  The big fella would have to be Vicious Brute.  And the little one?  Maybe Little Spider, possibly even Surplus.  Though that would make Vicious Brute very large indeed.

You can read an anticipatory review (based on the publicity material rather than the text, which is not available yet) over at Bibliosanctum by clicking here.


And at this very moment, I'm going over the copyediting . . .

Talk about a thankless job!  No writer enjoys having somebody second-guessing his or her long-labored-over prose.  And the fact that the copyeditor occasionally discovers actual typos doesn't make it any better.    One blushes, stammers, looks away.  (My least favorite?  I had a character "reigning" in a horse.  Twice.)

Still, it has to be done.  Because mistakes find their way into the most tightly-written prose.  They're like cockroaches in that respect -- they want in.  And once in, they have to be stomped flat.

So I will take the opportunity to say:  Thank you, Christopher.  I mean that sincerely.  Even if I do say it through gritted teeth.

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