Back online after - how long?

[hawkwing_lb]

I'm back after a dry period. Stuck in the rut. Can't write. Can't write right. That rut. And since I just managed my first significant wordcount in two weeks, you'll pardon me for being incoherent.

Good night.

Comments

Block

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

Skip ahead.
Well, that works for me.
Find something else that you really don't want to do but should. Then the writing becomes a pleasant escape. The lesser of two weevils, as it were.

Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Ach, writing's always a pleasant escape. :-) The most frustrating, annoying escape in the business - since I'm nineteen now, and have to keep reminding myself that most writers these days only start getting published after age thirty, so I've plenty of time.

Hear that, brain? Plenty of time.

Nah, the problem's that when I have a book to read, it sort of gets in the way of the writing thing. Plus, there's all these unpleasant things I have to do to figure out how to make the story work (not sure I've succeeded in that yet, but still) and feeling useless as all hell in the meanwhile, if you follow that.

But stuff is looking up. I've managed 1500 words+ the last two days, and am on course to having 16K written by the time I hit Freshers' Week.

Weevils. Heh. Have you seen the film Master and Commander, by any chance?

Re: Block

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

Um. I don't share your opinion at all (the industry, alas, does). The industry NEEDS younger writers and also (desperately) younger readers. See your comments about the middle age puddin's at Worldcon. Both Mc Crumb (bimbos of the Death Sun - a 'must read' before cons) and Stross have pointed out that conferences represent the demographics of the readers

That's demographics of dying genre

Which why I am unashamedly targetting a broader range of readers

I seldom get to watch movies :-)

Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

The industry needs new blood, yup. But writing's the kind of lark - like composing, or painting, or anything else that's a mixture of art and craft - that takes fifteen years of learning how to do it well enough to become an 'overnight' success. Though if I may, I'd like to draw your attention to scott_lynch (Scott Lynch) and matociquala(Campbell award-winner Elizabeth Bear) mid twenties and and early thirties respectively.

New blood, though, isn't necessarily young blood - and 'young' isn't what it used to be, either. My generation'll still (most of 'em) be in full time education till they're twenty-three or so - consider Kit Marlowe, or whassname, John(?) Keats, dead before thirty. These days, there's a better than even chance you'll still be producing in your seventies, or even eighties.

I don't think the genre is dying. More like, it's becoming more mainstream, and at the same time, the real gems, the 'big-idea' SF - like Charles Stross's (autopope) stuff, and Alaister Reynold's Century Rain and I don't know how many others that I've never heard of because Ireland's out of the loop on 'niche' stuff.

Generic second-world fantasy and endlessly-rehashed space opera are what's killing the genre, if anything is. 'Cause they sell in numbers, and they're also easier to market - I mean, it's kind of hard to write a blurb for a book that's about. Um. Alternate 1950s Paris. Post-apocalyptic Earth. Post-human society. Alien technology. Archaeology, and, um, stuff, though someone managed it for Century Rain.

Problem with well-done fantasy and SF is that it poses hard questions, and if the questions are hard, and not, you know, sort of glossed over with action and sex and the happy ending (not that I've anything against the happy ending, but sometimes it's the easy way out), well, those kind of books stretch your mind and make you hurt, sort of.

Hell of a lot of people don't want their mind stretched. Or to consider hard, painful questions.

And of course there're those who turn their nose up at SFF because it's 'not realistic'. Irony is, they watch reality TV, too, and think that's somehow less fantastical.

Um. I think I'm ranting. But, Master and Commander? It has a pretty funny weevil joke.

Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Um. Add a 'mostly' to that 15 years to success thing. I think.

That's my e/x/c/u/s/e goal anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Re: Block

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

(Smile) A couple of things here. Firstly: "But writing's the kind of lark - like composing, or painting, or anything else that's a mixture of art and craft - that takes fifteen years of learning how to do it well enough to become an 'overnight' success."
Two things. Innate talent varies enormously (I know. I don't have much, and had to learn my craft.) Some people start where I hope to get to one day. Some start high and never progress because they think they're too darn wonderful to have to learn. The amount of work put in over the time, and the amount of learning over that time vary so incredibly as to make this sort of generalisation so vague as to be meaningless. One of the early sf greats (Bradbury? Blish? I think the former) said that you had to be prepared to write a million words (or 10 novels) without selling one, to learn the craft. Selling has become tougher, but that's still a more accurate take IMO.

Secondly: the mix between 'art & craft', the skill to become a writer... is but one aspect of being a successful writer. The other is having the background to draw on to allow you to make realistic 'suspend disbelief' characters and situations. This is actually the aspect that usually takes 15 years. Not learning the craft (and the art you have). But, as you accurately pointed out, Marlow and Keats did so, well, despite dying young. There are two possible "answers" here. One is that writers need to have started young with hectic lives. Shrug. I was doing a man's work on a commercial fishing boat during my holidays when I was 13. At 17 I was already a conscript and had, as Kipling put it, shot my man and begot my man. By the time I was 19 I had enough experience (much of which I really didn't enjoy aquiring) to write from. There are still plenty of young folk being generated every year with experience that the average 50 year old (Eric Flint's theory about the age threshold to write great novels. Humph.) can't match or ever hope to match.

hum. says comment too long. continued next frame...

Re: Block

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

continued....

The other answer is to... um... actually take the advice always given to (and ignored by)writers. Write about people and situations you know, from a perspective you can relate to for an audience that you can relate to. A late teens Irishwoman writing from the POV of a Bangladeshi octenagerian patriach shark fishermen, to sell in Bangladesh, is a disaster. (This is an extreme example but it not atypical. 17 year old spotty, plump, middle-class, stay-at-home middle American writing about glitz glamour and exotic places, from the POV of a twenty-five year old shapely New York socialite sex-goddess, is great wish-fulfilment and lousy reading. A lot of folk take 15 years to figure this one out) However, a late teens Irishwoman using folk-history from her own background, and characters she's observed and make can make 'real', could be stunning. Her target audience would be 15-30 year olds with an interest in Irish folk history and a culture to which they can relate and an age which they can least remember being.

The 'health' of the Genre: 25 years or so ago when McCrumb wrote "Bimbos" the average con goer was 19-25 and for sf males outnumbered females 5:1. Fantasy the age was much the same but there were more female readers. This is 'representative' of the reader demographic. Now... the average age probably 35-50, and certainly for fantasy, males are disappearing. And the scary thing is most of thos 35-50 year olds started reading sf /fantasy when they were about 15. If you don't catch them then, you have probably lost them forever. At the moment the industry is putting 95% of its effort into trying to track an aging audience.

Mainstreaming... shudder. There has always been a part of sf/fantasy that wanted to be recognised as mainstream 'literature' (a sub-genre in itself and a very unimportant one, relating to fashion rather than quality. Popular with editors. Hated by most readers.) If that's the best life can offer me as a sf writer, I'd rather give up.

Quote: "Problem with well-done fantasy and SF is that it poses hard questions, and if the questions are hard, and not, you know, sort of glossed over with action and sex and the happy ending (not that I've anything against the happy ending, but sometimes it's the easy way out), well, those kind of books stretch your mind and make you hurt, sort of.

Hell of a lot of people don't want their mind stretched. Or to consider hard, painful questions."

Reality check (rueful grin). With the exception of a TINY minority, all fiction reading is escapism. Perhaps 1% of readers would pick up a book to have their mind stretched. Another 5% would want Meiville or Gaiman on their shelf (or hand or coffee table) because it is fashionablely avante garde or left-wing (they're not really left wing by conviction. It's just fashionable. 70 years ago they would have been fascists). The rest of readers don't mind having their their mind stretched -- as long as you do it by stealth -- In a read that they really love. Satirists like Tom Sharpe and Terry Pratchett do this best, probably. It's all about saying more than one Authors have been doing since Euripides. Shrug. Don't expect recognition for doing this. Do expect to effectively reach millions more people, and actually to have a profound effect on society. Recognition will go to those who ask hard painful questions in an open fashion... which very few people will read, (which is why the sales of sermons are so bad, and people have to force copies of the Watchtower into your hands) and whose impact is likely to be zero. So what you write depends on what you're looking for. Ineffectually, I am trying stealth, myself.

I'm not too sure what 'second-world' fantasy means?

Got to agree about the reality TV :-)

Monkey

Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

well, you know I'm going to take your word for this. Since you're the professional and all. :-) Really, my thoughts on the subject of writing and genre and market and all that are just wee maggots squirming about and hoping someday to mature into butterflies. (Yep, I know butterflies come from caterpillars. I did say hoping.)

And second-world, as in not urban, historical or alt-hist fantasy, ie, not this world or a recognisable mirror-image (I don't know where I picked up the term, but I doubt I invented it). Too much of the second-world stuff is poor imitations of Jordan and Goodkind - or Mercedes Lackey, for that matter. Sometimes Tolkien with the edges filed off. All fiction is derivative, but some is more obviously derivative than others. Naming no names.

Hi and Re: Block

[otakuloki.livejournal.com]

First, I should warn you, I'm the first of the people who may be showing up now that Dave has mentioned your blog in his. I hope you won't think this too rude (I don't mind being seen as pushy, just hate being rude.) when I jump in.

I really want to comment here about this comment of yours:

"Problem with well-done fantasy and SF is that it poses hard questions, and if the questions are hard, and not, you know, sort of glossed over with action and sex and the happy ending (not that I've anything against the happy ending, but sometimes it's the easy way out), well, those kind of books stretch your mind and make you hurt, sort of.

Hell of a lot of people don't want their mind stretched. Or to consider hard, painful questions."

I'm not sure that I agree, entirely with the importance of hard questions. SF and F are fictions of ideas, and to a lesser degree, action, since ideas in and of themselves are active things. Even thinking up something and not doing anything about it is an action. The least possible action, I agree, but still an action.

What makes better SF and F to my view is what it does with those ideas - and the willingness to consider an idea from all sides. This often does have the effect of asking some very hard questions. But that's a side effect of the most important thing in good SF and F. The first thing to remember is that both SF and F are fiction, and fiction is the telling of a story.

Without that even the best of ideas, or the most difficult of questions, just become sermons, or thesis papers. Neither of which are very popular.

Perhaps the most evocative hard question in literature is: at what point does one sacrifice an individual for the benefit of the group? This is the core of the story of Jonah on the boat and untold other stories since. In SF, it's the core of Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations. But it's not the question that makes that story, even though it is the describes the plot of the story.

What makes the story work, what makes it great SF, is how the reader identifies with the characters in the story. It's a sparse story, with only the bones of characterization for each character. And, frankly, it works because of a demographic that's hopefully changed: that most people reading SF were male professionals, who would be socially programmed to protect young women from lethal effects of their own ignorance. But even today, even for a female reader, or a teen reader, the core of the characters come through - the nobility of the girl, and the self-loathing of the pilot. That's the true core of the story, and why it haunts the reader after it's been put down.

Aspire to ask hard questions. Aspire to educate your readers. To slip past their forebrains knowledge or insight.

But, do it while telling a story.

Re: Hi and Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Oh, go ahead. Dave's already warned me that he might send some traffic this way, so it's not like I didn't know some strangers might turn up :-).

As for the rest - well, you're more eloquent than I am. I'm still trying to figure out how to say what I mean, when I start talking about genre, and market, and ideas and the functions of writing and literature. I know howI feel, of course, but not what I mean. :-)

Still pretty much a hit and miss process...

Re: Hi and Re: Block

[otakuloki.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it ever becomes other than a hit and miss process. Though your fraction 'on target' will improve with practice. 8-)

And I have a tendency to lecture. It comes from talking to dogs, or turbines. Both listen well, and don't tell me to shut up.

Thanks for the welcome.

Re: Hi and Re: Block

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Lecture away :-)