Archive for the 'Writing' Category
September 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
So, you want to make your work–book, movie, sculpture, whatever–perfect, don’t you? You want it to shine. And you’re going to polish it, rewrite it, re-imagine it, and retcon it every chance you get? Or maybe you just can’t resist adding those few last-minute flourishes?
Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is universal. So universal, that some people make vast fortunes just so they’ll have the ability to tinker endlessly. People like, for example, George Lucas.
Continue reading ‘Tinker, Tailor, Topple, Die’
July 15th, 2011 by jdsawyer
You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.
Continue reading ‘Playing Jazz With Words’
June 21st, 2011 by jdsawyer
Writing fiction in the age of the Internet can be fraught for the author who values authenticity–particularly if you write historical or technical fiction. Since the glorious thing about writing fiction is that you essentially make shit up to entertain other people, there are a range of opinions about the technical rigor to which writers should aspire.
I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.
Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?
There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” Continue reading ‘Failing the Wikipedia Test’
June 11th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Disclaimer: What follows is a rant about something that can screw up the creative process. This post is more esoteric than is normal for this blog. It contains a lot of jargon, and talks a lot about academic politics and social history, and it won’t interest everybody. Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t signal a change of direction for the blog. I’ll be back on Monday with more stuff about contracts, stories, podcasting, and my general flavor of nutiness.
Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:
A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”
Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:
Continue reading ‘Literary Studies, Anyone?’
June 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
A funny thing happens during times of great industrial upheaval: Everyone wants a piece of the new deal, but nobody wants to take what they perceive to be a risk. Most established players retrench, hold on to what’s familiar, and try to shout down anyone with a contravening opinion. It’s human nature to get defensive when one perceives a threat to one’s view of the universe.
In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.
Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.
Continue reading ‘Who’s an Outlier, Again?’
May 22nd, 2011 by jdsawyer
And the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, saying “It is done.”
All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.
New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.
What does this mean for you?
Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.
It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).
Time to crack the champagne!
April 4th, 2011 by jdsawyer
When I started writing The Antithesis Progression, I had a nice, tidy three-book series in mind. Then I wrote it, and discovered that what I thought was book 1 was actually 2 books cleverly hiding inside my head under a single title.
Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.
Yeah.
If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.
Continue reading ‘The Great Cull (Free Will Update)’
January 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
December 27th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
December 6th, 2010 by jdsawyer
The following is intended for other writers working to find their stride. I hope something in the following meanderings is useful to you as you hash out your process.
Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my pears, it’s enough to make one want to accept exile to an obscure Italian island.
After my writing binge this summer, I’ve been caught perpetually in the feeling that I’m wading through treacle, and it’s been driving me bonkers. Too much time on the road, too much Real Life ™ getting in the way, not enough time podcasting, or writing, or doing any of the half dozen other things that are in the top five of life priorities.
Continue reading ‘That Plateau Feeling is an Illusion’
October 22nd, 2010 by jdsawyer
And, from the kitchen this weekend we have for you a lovely Link Salad, with leaves of history and science, garnished with a healthy dose of whimsy.
But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!
Now, on to the main courses:
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 22 2010′
October 10th, 2010 by jdsawyer
On Halloween Weekend, October 29th to be exact, a new series debuts at Amazon.com and in the other major ebook markets.
A man of infinite social grace he isn’t, but what former disgraced Oakland Police Detective Clarke Lantham lacks in high culture he makes up for with his ability to slip into any role he needs to to get the job done (which is probably why he got fired in the first place).
Fortunately, the world needs private detectives. Unfortunately for Lantham, on this particular Friday morning, “the world” consists of a fretful mother with a missing daughter, and the case she hires him for is about send reality staggering into the gutter like an eighty-year-old drunk.
From the posh shadow of Mount Diablo to the kink clubs of San Francisco to the genetic engineering labs of Stanford, Clarke Lantham chases down pieces of the weirdest puzzle he’s ever seen, all for the sake of a nineteen-year-old girl whose face he can’t stop seeing every time he closes his eyes.
And Then She Was Gone is the first of the Clarke Lantham Mysteries, hard-boiled detective fiction with a hard comic edge, the series consists of a planned three self-contained novels and a number of short stories, though I enjoy writing this character so much I would not be surprised if it grew. This is a market experiment–how well can a relative unknown do in the suddenly wide-open ebook marketplace? We shall see. If nothing else, this experiment has yielded one result already: a book which will give you your month’s RDA of adrenaline while making you chuckle maniacally.
I hope you join me on October 29, 2010 for the all-markets rush. More details coming soon!
September 29th, 2010 by jdsawyer
An editor friend of mine recently asked me what I would consider an ideal rejection letter, if I were a hopeless writer with delusions of adequacy and no command of grammar. (I’m pretty sure the “If I were” bit was a ruse to make her think she wasn’t talking about me, so I actually expect to receive the below letter in the mail in the next couple weeks).
Since I enjoy being entertained (even while having my manuscripts torn up), I suggested something which I would be proud to hang on my wall for the sheer conversation-starting value.
So, here is my ideal rejection letter for completely hopeless writers:
Dear [writer],
Thank you for your submission. While we do not think it advisable for you to commit suicide this early in your career, your writing displays the kind of promise and angst that have made unknowns like Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank, and John Kennedy Toole into posthumous best-sellers. These writers made the crucial mistake of dying with only one or two books to take the world by storm–don’t let yourself fall into that trap!
Unfortunately, our policy only permits us to publish fiction in your genre after your scandalous death, so we encourage you to build up your backlist and contact us again when you feel you have said your piece.
Sincerely,
[editor]
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go to the mailbox to check for today’s round of rejection slips.
What are some of the best rejections you’ve given, gotten, or heard of? Chime in in the comments!
September 5th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Zombie industries are all around us–these are businesses whose models have ceased to be relevant and they’re just waiting for something better to knock them over. This doesn’t mean they’re not still earning money–some of them are earning quite well, thank you. And it doesn’t mean that they’ve been artificially resurrected with government stimulus money, although those certainly seem to be zombie-like.
No, I’m talking about industries and businesses that don’t yet know they’re dead. The ones whose future demise is as certain as the next big earthquake: we don’t know quite when, and we don’t know quite where, but the prospect that somebody will huff and puff and blow the house down has a probability of 1.
Continue reading ‘How To Spot a Zombie’
August 27th, 2010 by jdsawyer
If you want the background for this post, check The Binge post for a description of my recent unintentional astronomical word count adventure. Short version: I wrote one hundred twenty three thousand words in fifty days. Yow.
So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?
Plenty.
What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?
Try these on for size:
First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.
Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.
Continue reading ‘Writing Odyssey: Lessons Learned’
