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Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.

David Foster Wallace

Let's begin.

Life--that wonderful solar-powered accident of proteins and amino acids--is naturally bounded by its beginning and its end. Before its beginning and after its end, the intricate chemical processes that give rise to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, love, and sonnets are mostly atoms going about their nanoscale business. Bonds are created and broken, first during the anti-entropic dance that eventually bursts into the actuality of consciousness, and later during the complex decay of substances into other substances, all of which will eventually be reused, like that molecule of oxygen you shared with Buddha just now.

Now, there's a groove that happens when the processes that govern our various physical substances are all crackling along, smooth and fine, molecular machinery with atom-toothed gears all whirring with the precision and regularity of the thermonuclear fusion that propels the shine of starlight into our living eyes and perceptive minds. The intangible processes by which we contemplate the world around us tend not to notice the tangible processes that power the pumping of our blood and the rumblings of our guts.

However, the central fact of our existence is that this smooth and swinging groove must inevitably falter and cease. Physical injury can disrupt its beats, disease will interrupt its melodies, and eventually our ability to perceive and process the sensual input of the world around us will end. The intangible processes of our consciousness will vanish, and only the tangible stuff that hosted those processes will remain.

It's a simple thing, in one sense, so ubiquitous that it borders on the banal. So very common. We know how the music ends: all beats stilled, all of the ephemeral processes that comprise individual personhood dispersed into silence. I think it would not be too presumptuous to suggest that it is not death itself that most people fear, but a bad death: a painful death, a lingering death, a death alone or surrounded by strangers, a death bereft of dignity.

Everyone has to confront that fear. However, it's one thing to do so within yourself, and quite another to bear witness to that confrontation as it takes place within someone else.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a short story, titled You Can't Go Back, Mr. Mountain. It was about a man who had chartered a small single-engine plane to fly him over the San Francisco Bay, so that he could empty his mother's ashes into the air above the Golden Gate Bridge. The title was a reference to the idea that the death of a parent is a milepost that, once passed, creates a permanent demarcation.

It was an okay story, as far as it went, but I never submitted it for publication. It lacked a certain verisimilitude, a subtle depth of tone and imagery that could only be gained, I thought, by actually experiencing the kind of deep loss that the main character had experienced. I didn't know very much about loss then, deep or otherwise. Perhaps I wasn't giving myself enough credit--maybe, if I had submitted it, what I saw as a lack of depth wouldn't have been apparent to someone else. I put the story aside, telling myself that I would come back to it. My mother was still healthy, and the notion of passing the milepost of her death seemed far in the future.

It's not so far in the future, now. Her health has been declining precipitously for the past three years, the result of a progressive and chronic illness, a twenty-seven year-old surgical error, and a bad roll of the genetic dice. I can see that milepost now, and some days it seems very close indeed.

During times of unusual or intense life-drama, I used to joke--in the way that one jokes about that which isn't a joke at all--that it was "all material." That is: the strange and traumatic vagaries of life form a deep well from which to draw inspiration for fiction. I still believe that, more strongly than ever, and these days, I don't pretend to joke about it.

I don't intend to turn the events of my life into the crass bones of my stories. I'm not going to be writing a melodramatic tale that centers on a young man whose mother is dying of a progressive chronic illness. I'm not taking mental notes so that I can write manipulative, tear-jerking scenes. But I am aware, as my mother and I progress through this experience together, of an expansion and deepening of my emotional vocabulary. I am gaining insight into the subtleties of incipient loss, and this experience is transferable to my fiction, because it's human.

I've written about my overt intentions for my current project. But without genuine human experience beneath the exotic and flashy narrative, there is nothing to bridge the gap between me as the teller of the tale and you as its reader. It becomes cold and sterile, a product to be consumed rather than a story to be experienced.

I believe we have enough consumable products in this culture. I'd like to believe that I can create something a bit less disposable. To do that, I'm willing to use the entirety of my human experience.

Good and bad, ugly and beautiful, meaningful and pointless. It's all material. It's what draws a reader in, and it's what makes a tale worth telling.

Ah, well. I'm supposed to do this for a living, but sometimes the right word doesn't present itself. To continue: to justify the personal experience here, I feel the need to tie it in to writing, because a) it makes me feel less like an overwrought exhibitionist, and b) it's useful to me to do so, which in turn leads to c) maybe it'll be useful to someone else. (See how that works? Two "me"s and a "you." But at least I care a little.)

So. I pay attention to my internal life, my interactions with other people and the world at large, as well as other people and their interactions with me and the world at large, because that is a prerequisite to the creation of characters in fiction. Observation must precede the commitment of the details of a character to the page, and when it's time to write, details are all you've got to work with. You can write out a ten-page character sketch as an exercise, but you can't include that in the story itself, because it doesn't belong there. What belongs in the story are the expressions of that biography which can be found in the way a character thinks, speaks, and acts. You don't tell the reader that a female character is shy. You show her speaking to a person she's just met with her arms folded across her chest. In a later scene, when she's grown more comfortable with that person, her arms drop, and she becomes more expressive with her hands as she speaks. If the person she's with is an observant sort, he'll notice that. If he's self-involved or doesn't care all that much about her, he won't. So from the simple portrayal of body posture, you can convey two sets of character traits: those of the woman, and those of the man.

Taking it further, there's a certain insight you can gain into a character's mindset if you find yourself in a similar mindset. My forthcoming novel involves a protagonist who's falling in love--actual, true love--for what is essentially the first time in his life. I don't have to be falling in love myself while I'm writing about that, but it certainly helps if I've done so once or twice, can play around with the thought of it, and imagine what emotional and mental states I'd have to be in for that to occur if I were the protagonist. There's a difference between falling in love at, say, 18, and falling in love two decades later. I've got the former experience in my memory banks. I have to use my imagination for the latter, and to do that I write odd little outbursts and fictional vignettes, some of which end up here for you lovely people.¹

If all of this sounds a bit familiar, that's because it owes quite a lot to the work of Lee Strasberg, and is also an inversion of the gonzo notion that fiction is the best fact. To yank from that link:

Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques by which actors try to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to develop lifelike performances. It can be contrasted with more classical forms of acting, in which actors simulate the thoughts and emotions of their characters through external means, such as vocal intonation or facial expression. Though not all Method actors use the same approach, the "method" in Method acting usually refers to the practice, advocated by Lee Strasberg, by which actors draw upon their own emotions and memories in their portrayals, aided by a set of exercises and practices including sense memory and affective memory.

This isn't a new or original idea (which I had already assumed when I started this post, and confirmed with that Google search just now.) Some of its more extreme examples have been proclaimed as "ridiculous" in a short burst of reductio ad absurdum. But I haven't taken any classes on it, or read any books describing the approach. And as for the extent of my own particular method, well, I'll just leave that one be. Which, given some of the stuff I've written, might be something of a disturbing idea. There are of course limits. I don't want to end up like Heath Ledger because I spent three months alone in a hotel room really getting into the mind of the Joker. But there is some role playing that goes on, yes. I'll spend time in a weird space, and explore it to see what it's like. If I've done the work properly, that shows in the finished product.

One of the ways this expresses itself during the creation of a story is when a narrative "goes off the rails." That's where you're writing along, at a pretty good clip, and suddenly find yourself in a sort of cul-de-sac where the story just stops working. If you're lucky, you'll notice this sooner rather than later. This used to happen to me fairly frequently--and still does--but what I managed to figure out about my own process was that this sudden dead end was nearly always the result of a character who wasn't behaving like herself. If I had a particular plot point I wanted to reach, and made a character do or say something that she simply wouldn't do or say in order to reach that point, I could keep forging ahead, yes. But somehow, the whole thing would start to unravel, to feel less and less genuine, and I would finally get to the point where the characters were sort of standing around, waiting for me to figure out where the screwup had occurred so that I could go back and allow the character to make a choice consistent with her own personality. Because, as it turns out, once one character is forced to jump through a hoop, it's reflected in how all the other characters react. It's as though they know she's being a phony, and then everything gets awkward.

Now, none of this is intended to be instructional, per se. It's just a set of observations about my own process, and while I believe that reading about this sort of thing can be useful, in the end the most genuine writing--the writing that only you can produce, the writing that's in your voice--is always the product of your own, personal process. Perhaps that's synthesized from a multitude of external sources, but at some point there has to be a kind of alchemical reaction that produces something entirely new. So, if anything, maybe this will form some minor ingredient, a bit of crypt shroom to add to your own peculiar brew.

Which would be nice, I think. See? I'm helping!

¹Just to keep things confusing: that doesn't mean there isn't genuine emotion in there, that's kind of the point. Let me put it this way: I'm not lying. If in doubt? Ask. I mean, if you want.

Sara Soulati kindly invited me to write a guest post for her blog as part of a project she's working on for her MFA in Creative Writing. In it, I use the word "really" too many times, and talk about stuff as though I know what I'm doing. You can read it here.

So admonished Ipu-wer some 4,200 years ago. Nobody knows much of anything about him, except that at some point he spouted off a bunch of such things, prophecies in the Biblical sense, which means they're not so much about the future as about one fellow standing before Pharaoh and saying nasty things about the past and present governance of Egypt. All cloaked in metaphors about sinking crocodiles, Rivers of blood, grieving nobles, and fumigation via incense. The last two columns of the papyrus--described by the translator as being in a state of "lamentable destruction"--tantalize us with the words, "Once upon a time there was a man who was old and in the presence of his salvation, while his son was still a child, without understanding..."

Actually, that's not very tantalizing at all, but that's all we get. Nothing else is heard from Ipu-wer. I wonder if, in his own time, he was held in the same regard as the tentative prophet in Life of Brian, who prophesied that "At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock."

"Ipu-wer?" they'd say. "Was that the guy who went on about men sitting in bushes and robbing people, and about how the go-spells and enfold-spells don't work anymore because nowadays any old tosser can say them aloud? Pfah!" Who knows? Maybe all the good material was in missing bits of the papyrus. Maybe all that stuff about not having enough cedar for the mummies was just Ipu-wer warming up, a prophetic throat-clearing before he laid into Pharaoh with raging holy fervor and let everyone know that the gods were really displeased with his corpse-buggery or whatever it was that Middle Kingdom Egyptians found scandalous.

But now all we've got left of him are a few columns of unremarkable cryptic metaphor and stories that defy consecutive translation, barely enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry, and really only noticed at all because some of his scribblings might possibly refer to a small group of wandering Semites whose own collected prophecies and tales later became part of the best-selling book of all time.

I suppose the lesson here, if any, is that if you can't write your own deathless prose, write about somebody else who's bound to be fabulous and important so that you might at least survive as a minor point of interest appended to their fantastically dramatic and splendid life.

Here's to the Ipu-wers of present-day Earth! May you lot of hangers-on choose your subjects with care and diligence, and may the inevitable loss of most of your work be described in a footnote as "lamentable." 

Occasionally I have an urge to post nothing but scat.

No, not that, you filthy person. You know--Ella Fitzgerald bee-doodly-op-bopping for 32 bars on "It Don't Mean a Thing." That kind of scat, hep cat. Skiddly-diddly-oh-no!

That sort of thing doesn't translate well into pixels, though. It's more of an expression of a generally positive and somewhat overflowing creative urge, a sort of writerly, procreative yawp. Meeeee I'm making word-worlds! Thickening plots! Sharpening characters! Bee-deep-bop-oh-whoahh-zaaa!

I was going to write another post about arrogance and confidence and so on, but @DanielleLaPorte pointed me towards "How To Be As Confident As This Pig" on Josh Hargarne's blog, and I really don't have anything to add to that, so if you're hankerin' to read about ego and confidence and so on in particular, go there and do that. Meanwhile, I'll be writing here about a different yet tangentially-related thing. But if you go off to check out Josh's thing, this one will still be here. Amazing, what they can do nowadays with pixels and tubes and whatnot.

One of the reasons I took my January hiatus was because I needed to take a break from reading about writing, publishing, agents, contracts, Amazon shitting itself, and all of the other things which are necessary bits of knowledge to have while building a career but peripheral to the creative act of writing itself. I was swamped by everyone else's ideas and in danger of losing sight of my own, so I dropped out of sight. It was a good thing to do, and it feels good to discover I was actually missed (here and elsewhere).

I've never been a focused person--at least, I don't think so, other people in my life have disagreed--mainly because my interests and curiosity are broad. This is generally a good quality to have, but can make it difficult to sit still long enough to, say, write a novel. The rest of my life is full of real-life type things that take up time, so I spent January assessing what my own priorities are and figuring out what I needed to do to finish this book I've started. The first thing I decided to do was to stop listening to how other people write. The second thing I decided to do was cut short my nascent efforts to get involved with online writing communities.

Both of those decisions resulted from the same realization: at this point in my life my time is very limited, and I'd reached the point where I needed to discover my methodology and focus entirely on my work. There's a lot of good advice about writing out there, but I've been reading about writing for almost three decades, and the returns have diminished to the point where--right now--it's not worth it. If I'm going to invest time in reading, I'm going to read fiction, not books about fiction.

Some of the advice that's out there has to do with the benefits of community, and I'm sure that for a great many people such involvement is invaluable. But the thing about communities, particularly those built around writing, is that they take up time. You can't really join up without committing yourself to reading the works in progress of others, and thinking critically about them, and offering your thoughtful and constructive opinions. Not, that is, if you expect others to do the same for your work. Unless you're an asshole, there's got to be giving to accompany the taking. I made the decision to prioritize my creative work over that of other people.

But I still needed feedback and criticism. Useful feedback and criticism. I also needed some expert help in getting over my 25,000 word hump. I've got a drawer full of unfinished projects here, and all of them died around the 25,000 word mark. I don't know why, but clearly there is some barrier that I have heretofore lacked sufficient creative steam to either power over or smash through (I call it a hump, see, but it could be a wall...or maybe a pit of some kind, or an expanse of sticky tar with, like...spikes in it...or something...).

In my current situation, there was really only one way to get regular, focused, and useful criticism without any expectation of reciprocation: hire someone to give it to me.

That was a big leap for me, and I don't regret it. I happened to know someone with over two decades in the business, who lived on my side of the continent, who I clicked with--which is vital; you don't want to work with someone whose criticisms are based on their failure to understand rather than your failure to properly express. She's cheaper per hour than my therapist was, she doesn't blow smoke up my ass, and I'm confident that when the time comes to kick said ass, she'll do so. Best money I've ever spent.

I'm not telling you all this by way of advice, because it'd be ridiculous for me to tell you that what you need to do is hire a development editor.¹ However, I'm confident enough to suggest that the key transferable bit of my little process here is the identification of my priorities, the peculiarities of my unique situation, and--most importantly--the honest assessment of my weaknesses. I know what my strengths are, but those aren't what fucks a man up, now are they? Maybe what works for you, your situation, and your weaknesses is gathering a little local group of aspiring writers together and meeting in a dive bar once a week to get drunk and hack each other to literary bits.

What's important is knowing when you've listened enough, and knowing when it's time to start feeding your own creative beast whatever meat it wants, regardless of what any Expert says.

---

¹Just as it's silly for Warren Ellis to say, "If you don’t have some kind of kit for capturing ideas, even if it’s a 50p reporter’s notebook and a pencil from the local shop for local people, you’re doing it wrong." Lots of folks do that, lots of folks recommend doing that (which keeps Moleskine in business), and it works for them. I've always been of the opinion that if I can't remember an idea that came from my own skull it isn't worth remembering, and as I have a prodigious memory, that's worked pretty well for me. So: not doing it wrong, thanks.

...when an executive editor at Tor Books tells you in no uncertain terms that first-time novelists shouldn't attempt first person narratives, after you've just spent part of the afternoon writing the second chapter of your first novel... which happens to be a first person narrative?

I had asked a question in response to Howard Hendrix's comments about the "polyvocal" nature of novels. I wanted to know how you pull that off with a first person narrative. His response was that there are always other voices in any novel--as opposed to lyric poetry, for example--and that these voices will form its polyvocal nature. I had a follow-up question about how one deals with the fact that even though there are obviously multiple voices, they're all necessarily filtered through one voice in a first person narrative. I wanted to know what to focus on so I could avoid a sort of vocal monotone, which is when Beth Meacham offered tidings of first novel doom, saying that "You've really got to have your chops" to pull such a thing off.

So, I waited until the panel ended, and approached Howard with my follow-up. His more detailed response was that in order to overcome the first person filter effect, your other characters really have to pop. They must be vibrant, distinct, and interesting.

Now, when Shelly said I should press on and turn Walk of the Night People into a longer work, he specifically said it was because "We want to spend more time with these characters." This story is a first person narrative, with (at the moment) four other prominent characters. So I think I may have the character pop I need.

After another panel, I sought out Tad Williams and asked him his opinion. "First novel, first person narrative: do it or don't?"

His response was enlightening. "If you're writing a story that you absolutely love, that you're passionate about, and that's the best way you can get that across, then for Christ's sake write it in the first person." He told me about a first novel for which he had recently written one of his rarely-dispensed blurbs that had a third-person frame at the beginning but was, essentially, a first person narrative. There are all these rules, he said, and people come to conferences looking for tips. But beyond the basic three (try not to write crap, be passionate about your story and your craft, treat people professionally and with respect) any of those rules can be bent or broken as necessary for the telling of the tale. "Now, you may get a publisher who says, 'This is great, but it needs to be in third person.' So argue with them. Make your case. Rewrite a chapter in third person and ask them if they really think it's improved."

So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post, what you do first is seek further information from People Who Know These Things. Then, you weigh their responses against an honest assessment of your own skills. Beth was right: I do need to have my chops to pull this off.

But I need chops to pull anything off. So, essentially, I'm right where I started: seeing whether I've really got what it takes to do this thing.

This is a perfect demonstration of why it is so vital that those of us who are writers spend time with other writers, editors, agents...anyone who has anything to do with the business and the craft. I had one question that required input from four people before I was satisfied with my answer.

What the hell would I have done if was holed up by myself with this vast and terrifying unwritten thing before me?

Given up, I think.

Mmmm....humans. More of them, please.

---

¹Originally posted elsewhere in July of 2007, during Westercon. It's Old Home Week at Writebastard! Also called "Your Humble Narrator is taking a bit of a break, but because he likes you so very much, he will still provide you with content via the magical incantation, CTRL-C....CTRL-V." Some perspectivisin': that "vast and terrifying unwritten thing" is still before me. But I haven't given up, it's not so huge anymore, and I'm not afraid of it. I have not, however, managed to gather a tribe unto me or join one. Hence, Zoetrope. When meatspace fails, go virtual.

Justine Musk has a much more constructive take on the "I don't know what the hell I'm doing" panic I confessed to a couple of days ago:

Becoming a successful writer - and by this I define ‘successful’ as someone who writes publishable fiction, and by this I mean fiction that is skilled and artful enough to create a powerful emotional experience for a reader who is not the writer’s spouse, friend or family member, who doesn’t know or care about the writer at all but would be willing to do something so drastic as to pay money for the privilege of reading her work - is all about writing your way through a succession of big and little failures. There is the failure to sell your work, and the failure to get an agent, but these are capstones: the major reason why a writer fails at either is, ironically, because they haven’t yet failed enough. They haven’t pursued the craft long enough, haven’t written or revised enough, haven’t taken enough chances or gotten enough constructive feedback. They haven’t learned enough.

In short, they haven’t completed enough practice novels. And what is a practice novel but a novel that fails to be good enough to be looked on as anything else?

I've written before about the difference between the goal of writing and the goal of getting published. The latter, it seems to me, is a recipe for compromise and crushing depression. But there's a certain attitude required to make the former work, that I haven't quite managed to adopt yet: I have to be willing to invest a lot of time and effort in a project for its own sake, independent of its eventual fate as a published work or a drawer dweller. The purpose of such a project, then, is what Justine says it is: practice.

While I've managed to avoid publication as the principle motivation for writing a novel-length work, that's a negative definition. I know what's not motivating me, but I haven't really established what is motivating me. Given my glacial progress, it's become clear that the answer, in truth, is "not much." Right now I'm able to look at a shorter work as a learning experience, probably because the irregularity of my output and my nebulous focus makes completing a 1,200 to 13,000 word piece somewhat more realistic and much less threatening.

In the end, this might turn out to be a "you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you run" kind of thing. If I get another half-dozen short pieces published over the course of the next eighteen months and I'm still quaking in my boots at the thought of a 100,000 word marathon, then maybe I'll have a problem.

Until then: breathe. Write. Practice.

Thankfully, I no longer produce much in the way of non-fiction, blog-based or otherwise. Andrew Sullivan reminds me why:

It's not the amount of time that's taken in writing a book that matters, it seems to me. Some masterpieces have been written very quickly. It's the motivation. If your primary motivation is to hit the hot button, to rush a book to market around a newsy meme, then you are unlikely to produce anything that lasts. I miss the days when books were written because an author simply had something to say and took her time to say it well.

My newsy output always rubbed my caveat bone the wrong way.¹ It's easy enough to oversimplify complex issues in a way that will attract a large audience that agrees with you, but I was always revisiting posts after I'd thought of some crushing oversight in my reasoning, and I was never willing to make the rhetorical sacrifices required for continued audience growth. I was, in short, far too neurotic for that sort of thing. My readership peaked a few months after U.S. soldiers hauled Saddam out of his spider hole, and there was a noticeable uptick in my mental quality of life when I finally quit writing about Things That Matter.

Sullivan is responding to Damon Linker's comments about a "new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule."

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

To bring that sentiment over into my world: an onslaught of sparkling vampire- and young wizard-style books² would be, I think, the fiction equivalent of fast-tracking a newsy meme.

---

¹Holy crap that's awful. It's so awful I'm leaving it right where it is. Behold!
²"-style" indicates literary Dairy Drink.

Yes. Purchased with humility and more than a touch of desperation.

Remember when I said that arrogance is sneaky? You don't? You...you aren't hanging on my every word? You didn't read through the entirety of the archives when you first found this site after a Google search for "love to eat them mousies"?

Eh. Can't say I blame you.

There is nothing quite so humbling as the moment when you realize--not suspect, but know--that you've overestimated your own knowledge and perhaps even your abilities. It's much worse when you can peruse your own archives and pick out all the shining nuggets of ignorance.

Ignorance is not stupidity, it's simple lack of knowledge, and it's remediable. But because it's a lack it can be hard to see, and that means that it's easy to go traipsing off into the forest like Bear Grylls when you're actually a Tenderfoot who's liable to throw a can of beans on the fire without putting a hole in it first. Then comes the inevitable surprise, alarm, and legume-scalded face. And the weeping. The gut-wrenching weeping.

I've already had one serious attitude adjustment about this blog, which had to do with my maniacal notion that it was going to chronicle my writing of The Novel in a year. I got over that relatively quickly. I had a few things published online (and got paid for one of them, score one for me). But The Novel was still the thing, and although I was doing quite a bit of head work on it, and some revisions to bring the existing chapters in line with the ever-evolving concept, it just...wasn't...happening.

Then, one day last week, I hit on the reason why. Or rather, it hit me, in the face, with the the explosive, scalding force of a can of fire-burst Bush's: I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Yeah, go ahead, laugh. One day that'll happen to you. I hope you're not landing the space shuttle or fighting the Taliban when it does.

It seems stunningly obvious, I know, but it took me a bit of thinking to figure out why I hadn't realized it before then. I made a simple but profound mistake: I confused the ability to write with the ability to write a novel. Not the same thing at all.

I had already started to patch the gaping holes in my literary knowledge by gathering and reading the books of the giants. I have Dan Simmons to thank for pushing me to take that on as a conscious project. In an essay about literary style, he presented the opening paragraph of A Farewell To Arms, accompanied by a sort of quiz. After the questions, he wrote:

The good news is that you don’t have to take this quiz (although good for you if you did), but the bad news is that if you couldn’t answer questions #1 and 2, you haven’t read widely enough or well enough to consider becoming a writer [...] Sorry to be the bearer of such bad tidings. Tis true, ‘tis pity; ‘tis pity ‘tis true.

Those questions were "Who wrote this passage?" and "What was the novel it appeared in?" respectively.

I didn't have the answers.

I had a split moment's worth of sophomoric rage--what the hell does he know--followed by the crystalline realization that he was right. The issue wasn't whether it's true that no one can write if they don't know Hemingway. The issue was that my thin literary diet could not support the task I had set before me.

Fortunately, my brain tends to absorb and retain things, so I've been soaking it in Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, et al., and wondering why it took me so damn long to feed myself properly. I've learned more about writing in the past two months than I have in past ten years. It's a wonderful thing, and I feel my writer's sinews strengthening. So, there's been some progress.

Back to that cork board. Expanding on the theory that what I'd been doing so far wasn't going to take me any further, I set out to acquire some new tools, with the explicit intention of using them to help build a more solid structure for the Novel: note cards for characters and plot points, strung together, easy to shuffle around as things changed. I'd noticed last year that all of my unfinished books tended to peter out around the 20,000 word mark, where my initial rush of free-associative creation ended and the more precise work of constructing proper arcs and so on should have begun. If I knew more about where I was going, I reasoned, I'd have a better idea of how to get there.

And that's when my can of beany ignorance exploded.

I've got a story, yes. Is it a good one? No idea. I don't know about pacing a longer work. I don't know about scenes and sequels. I don't know about structure. In short, while I have an intuitive grasp of many of the things I'll need to do to build a story that can hang together for 100,000 words and bring the readers along with it, there's a lot more that I don't know, and I've been behaving--and writing here--as though I do.

Whoops.

As I said, ignorance is remediable. But for years I've been holding on to the pretentious, cavalier assumption that, someday, I'd just...do it. Sit down, write The Novel, get published. Now, here it is. Someday. And instead of working, I've been assuming. Wanting to have written instead of wanting to write.

There's a brief post followed by 207 comments over on Nathan Bransford's site, all in response to his question: how important is creativity over craft? I don't know if I'd put a percentage on the two, the way some commenters have. But I do know that I've been behaving as though creativity was all that I would ever need. I was wrong.

Now I've got a hell of a lot of work to do, and many things to learn. I'm pretty sure I can do it and learn them...but it's hard to avoid feeling like I've wasted too much time.

Holy shit what a rheumy-eyed, beaten down, completely unfabulous medical waste disposal bin of a day. Week, even. Month. Year!

To that end, I am off to Staples to procure a large cork board, 3x5 cards in several colors, pushpins, and string. This has to do with novel-writing, obviously.

I do believe I've reached the point where sanity can only be found in making up an imaginary world and living in it, and if I don't set about doing so immediately, I might as well nip off and donate my body to science because my brain will shrivel into a small wrinkled ovoid of leathery Spam within a fortnight.

I'm not one of those, but I'd like to be, so John Scalzi's rant is a valuable bit of etiquette instruction for me. This portion in particular, though awkwardly written, resonated:

What it comes down to is that the belief that selling work really comes down to who you know is magical thinking, or at the very least it's wildly overrated in terms of what actually sells work. Yes, there are authors for whom their assurance of a blurb on your cover might convince a publisher to buy your novel, sight (and quality) unseen. Currently, they are called "Stephenie Meyer" and "Dan Brown."

That's part of a syndrome I've written about before: a focus on getting published, as opposed to writing. It's akin to a neophyte pitching a novel he hasn't finished yet, before he's ever published a lengthy work of fiction. Stephen King gets to sell an idea for a book he hasn't written (and so, most likely, does Dan Brown). Me? Not so much.

My problem--and it's a good one to have, I guess--is that I live in gut-crunching fear of coming across as an egomaniac in e-mail exchanges with an editor who's agreed to publish my work. Part of the reason for that is that editors are busy people and their e-mails to someone who is basically a stranger can be short and impersonal. But the greater portion is my own neurotic fear...for example, I got paid for the Spanish translation of "...Sumerian Pot..." when it was published in Letras Libres, at which point the writing became something of a product, and a business transaction. I worry that my correspondence with editor Ramón González was overly focused on securing payment, and the whole thing was a bit nerve-wracking because I was dealing with arranging said payment across an international border using a language I don't speak very well. So, on the one hand, I fear I came across as an ungracious, grasping materialist, and on the other hand I fear that any attempt to correct that possible impression would just come across as neurotic and unprofessional.

It's early days yet, and by nature I'm inclined to worry about social interaction in general. I suppose I should take some solace in the fact that I'm actually concerned about etiquette and the impression I make, even if it means I occasionally feel like a boorish Philistine and become paralyzed with the fear of not knowing how I actually come across. Judging by what Scalzi has to say, there are some people who aren't concerned about that sort of thing at all.

I took a summer workshop from him in 1997, before he was Jonathan Ames, when I lived in Jersey City surrounded by crack vials, murder, and fire. Well, he was still Jonathan Ames, just not as much (at the time I didn't know about the thing with the hairbrush). I didn't know what I was doing back then, so I didn't get much out of it. Not that I know what I'm doing now, but I have a better grasp of what questions to ask.

These days he's doing quite well, and is only five years older than me, which makes me feel small and doomed. Here's a recent profile of him in New York magazine.

Ames, ever the showman, calls the crowd to attention. Then he apologizes. The knife-thrower is running late.

"I wanted Miss Saturn, she's this hula-hoop person. But she wasn't available," he tells me later. "So then I wanted Ula the Pain-Proof Rubber Girl--I once broke a cinderblock on her belly while she lay on a bed of nails. But she wasn't available either. So she suggested Throwdini." More than anything, he loves to put on a show. Despite the harrying demands of a TV series, he describes the process as fun, like "putting on a big wedding." On set, he looked around and said, "All these people! All these trucks! There's a truck with a spigot on the side where coffee comes out! All because I wrote something. This is beautiful."

While attending a conference a couple of years ago, I read what was then the first or second draft of a short story I have yet to place. After 750 words or so, the person leading the encounter group (can't really call it a workshop) stopped me and asked, "What is this story about?"

That flustered me. Not because I didn't know what it was about, but because I knew exactly where she was coming from: there was no punch-bang in the face within the first paragraph, that rip-roaring whatever-it-is that's supposed to be the key to getting out of the slush pile and onto the editor's or agent's desk. She'd already talked about it in the prior session, and I kept hearing the same thing elsewhere during the conference--from would-be writers, from published authors of varying quality, from agents.

Trouble was, I though that was a bunch of crap. Still do. Dan Simmons says it better than I can, and with much more authority:

Instructors at these workshops - and even some editors and agents who should know better - talk about things such as "elevator pitches" and "the power of the pitch," while barely published writers just at the beginning of their writing careers, (and who knows if they'll even have a career,) sagely counsel beginners just one step below them that to be published one must have a killer narrative hook and dynamite non-stop-action for the first few pages. The idea is to hook the reader or agent in immediately by slam-bang action, they explain, or your book will go unread.

Well, I understand how some weary - or putridly lazy - agents or slushpile readers might counsel such nonsense to beginners. What they're really saying is "put everything you have on the first page, preferably in the first two paragraphs, to show you're commercially viable because I'm too jaded and lazy to read your whole book." That's hardly a description of narrative power.

Think of all the great and rewarding books from A Portrait of a Lady to In Search of Lost Time to The Grapes of Wrath to Light in August to Joyce's Ulysses that would go unread and unpurchased if this idiot definition of "everything up front and fast" were the real definition of narrative power.

Nor is the Da Vinci Code narrative style of breathless rushing to and fro without allowing time for one's characters to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom what I mean by narrative power. If there's a phrase for that, it might be "bestselleroid attention deficit disordered hyperactivity."

If you've only got time for either what I've written here or the rest of what he wrote, but not both, go read what he wrote.

Now, there's a certain compression that's a consequence of the short story form that demands a bit more, sooner. I've since rearranged that story to bring some more intriguing language and a better setup into the first 250 words or so (it's still not right, and it's still not published). But at the conference I was hearing the same thing about short stories and novels, and the focus was always the same: sell. Get an agent. Get published!

It took me awhile to figure out that getting published! was not my primary goal, and I knew it going in to the conference. It took me longer to figure out that "improving [writers'] craft, primarily through workshops that focus on the reading and critiquing of each writer's work" often means how to get published! Or how to get an agent! And longer still to decide that I don't really have time to attend conferences where the only barrier to entry is the ability to pay the conference fee. Figuring out how to sell it before I've figured out how to write it is pointless

The other thing I've realized is that I've got my sights set too low. I've read the work of a lot of successful authors. But do I want to go a few rounds with Stephen King, or do I want to go a few rounds with Dostoevsky, as Hemingway did?

Not that I'll ever approach any of the three. But: it's either about the craft, or it's about getting into print. It's demonstrably possible to accomplish the latter without much engagement with the former. And I don't want to accomplish that.

This idea led, in turn, to the happy realization that I have a lot of ignorance to remedy: not enough time spent with the masters, too much time spent relying on whatever natural talent I've got with the arrogant assumption that it will all somehow fall into place if I just read what's out there now, what sits in the front bays at Barnes and Noble or gets shuffled around in the shell game that is the New York Times Bestseller List. Not so. Not so at all.

Amazon's a wonderful thing: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Flaubert, and Faulkner are on their way to me. I can't write without reading these and others and accomplish what I want to accomplish, which is to aim towards greatness. That's not to say that I'll achieve it. It's about the striving, and I know damn well that falling short of greatness is much better than falling short of the lesser-thans. It's time I stopped behaving as though I'm owed something that I haven't worked for.

I often ask my graduate students on the first day of a creative writing course to write down their cultural influences. I do this because I find that the biggest problem in student writing I see, other than poor mechanics, is self-absorption. Too many of them write about their personal wounds: drug and alcohol abuse, car wrecks, anorexia, dysfunctional and failed families, failed love affairs, depression, anxiety, and rage against feelings of powerlessness. I don't mean to suggest that these are not suitable catalysts for making literature, but my students tend not to see these stories within a social matrix or cultural lineage. They feel locked within themselves and think of artistic expression as a key that will let them into the kingdom of emotional freedom, rather than seeing art as a mindful reframing of experience and emotion through a forming intelligence. They write with too much "I" and no sense of "we." They can tell me what has happened to them - but they cannot tell me the significance, the moral and psychological consequences. They cannot step outside of their anguish to see the cultural context that shapes them. They just know that they, who among the most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth, feel they don't belong anywhere.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Culture, Biology, and Emergence"
The Georgia Review, Spring 2009