I’m going to be in San Francisco next week—my husband will be presenting at the 2010 Embedded Linux Conference, and I’m taking my son to see the King Tut exhibit for the second time before it goes home to Egypt forever—therefore I won’t be trawling the Internet much for writing and publishing news to discuss.
So let’s get philosophical now.
What are you doing here? Not here on this planet, but here in the fiction-writing community, thinking about your stories and pressing your hand to your heart.
What does the creation of fiction mean to you?
A lot of people write in order to be heard. I get a certain number of manuscripts every year that are the stories of traumatized children, battered partners, abandoned lovers, just-barely-disguised autobiography cast as fiction. It’s not fiction—it’s real. These are real people. They have really been traumatized, in these very real ways. Their pain is not imaginary.
Most of these manuscripts are in early drafts. The need to be heard is far more immediate than the need to create art. These are the cries of the voiceless injured, channeled into the surface elements of what they’ve read in published fiction. The plodding, often frustrating, interminable, years-long work of crafting words into literature is beyond the pressing needs of these writers. They just want to know their story isn’t a secret anymore.
They write to be released, not immersed.
I also regularly receive more of a manuscript than the amount I’ve been hired to work on. The yearning to be read and acknowledged is intensely palpable. The desire to be recognized by someone in “authority,” a professional in the industry, is so huge that it occasionally wins out over the intellectual knowledge that I don’t have time to read everything, I’m approaching these manuscripts as work projects, not casual reads, and my opinion doesn’t help, anyway, if I can’t add significantly to the quality of the manuscript. Will I love it so much I just can’t stop reading, even when my time is up? It doesn’t matter. I’m not an agent. I can’t get anyone published. (Well, myself.)
And sometimes I get manuscripts of amazing talent, from writers who have already dedicated themselves to this craft for years, who have practiced and practiced and practiced with words, who have sketched and drawn and fleshed-out multiple imaginary worlds of varying themes, varying premises, varying purposes. Some of these writers are serious, no-nonsense, and practical. Some are emotional and easy to throw off balance. Some are a little of both.
My favorite manuscripts, though, come from writers who, no matter what their original agenda or skill level, are no more or less than respectful apprentices. They don’t come to this craft only because it offers them something they need, because it’s easy for them, or because they just want that desperately to come to the attention of a professional and an audience.
They might come to it for any and all those reasons, sure. But mostly they do it because they love fiction and, by god, they’re going to learn how to DO it. To do it RIGHT.
They’re my favorites because I know these people will make it, with or without me. I’m no fool—I know I’m an excellent editor, but I also know I’m not the only one in the world. And I know “making it” doesn’t always mean publishing. It doesn’t always mean earning one thin dime, even if you get published. It doesn’t even always mean gaining an audience.
It means creating the literature you long to create, getting down in just the right words the story that only you can tell.
And knowing you did it.
Myself, I’m a sort of platypus of all the above: a writer who absorbed very young just enough excellent literature to miss it when I overlaid it with a blanket of terrible crap in my teens—the type of writer who’s teetered precariously for decades between hiding my nose in the entire history of English literature and daydreams of what I’m going to spend all my loot on. I have not yet written the novels I long to write. But I’ve discovered that all my years of professional writing and editing and the intense analysis of literature have given me this wonderful ability to help others do exactly that.
What kind of writer are you? What do you want from fiction?
Why are you here?
Well, you certainly know how to ask the tough questions. Egads! I don’t have a coherent answer for this one, but I do now have plenty of thoughts whirling in my brain. Not a bad thing.
Hmm. What do I want from fiction?
Yikes. Why do I write? Because I want to, but that seems like such an inadequate answer.
I know in some ways it’s testing myself, putting hurdles in front and pointing at them and going ‘Clear that’, and when I do, putting another one in front of me.
But in many ways, it’s because I love writing. I feel happier when I stand up from the writing desk, knowing I’ve accomplished something. It may not be a lot, but it’s something that I’ve done, that I can put my hand to and say ‘That’s mine’, and damn that can be a good feeling.
Years ago, one of my programmer friends told me why he programmed – ‘I do this for myself. Others get to enjoy the benefits only as a side effect.’ It sounds a little self-centred, but I couldn’t write if I didn’t want to read the stories I write, to live in the worlds I create, to have those adventures.
I love writing, I love creating new worlds and new fantasies, and I’m very glad I have the time and the opportunity to wake up in the morning, sit down at my desk, and let a story flow forth. It may not be the best story ever written, but it’s *my* story, and to me that’s just fine.
What an excellent post, Victoria.
I still haven’t answered your last email you sent me forever ago as I was trying to decide if I could afford to hire you or not. It got me really thinking, then, about what kind of writer I am and what I want out of my writing. The past few months have been revealing to me in that they have shown me I’m not in this for the money or fame. I used to think I was, and that was why I kept choosing commercial ideas for my stories. A part of me wants that, but not much anymore. I’m in this to learn how to do it well, and this is a huge reason why I chose an English major and became the editor of the literary magazine and wrote and wrote and wrote my butt off in college to figure out how the pros did it so well. What was I doing wrong?
After my long hiatus from writing (5 years), I’m finally back in it, still trying to get better, and I know that will never end. It’s a beautiful journey.
I write because I like stories. Good stories, well told. I like to tell stories and listen to other people tell stories. I like fictional stories, and I like true stories. It’s always the story that matters to me, not the genre, or style, or format. I first read Lord of the Rings forty years ago. I couldn’t begin to guess how many times I’ve re-read it since. It is a great story, it’s literature, and I never tire of it. On the other hand I’ve read Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October multiple times because it’s a great story, well told. It ain’t literature, but it’s a great story. The song “Ode to Bille Joe” tells a great story. It paints wonderful pictures, primarily with dialog. I already know what happens at the end but I still listen all the way through every time. Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” tells a great story too, full of interesting characters, mystery, intrigue, passion, greed, and even murder. I never turn that one off either.
So I write because I want to tell a good story too. And I think I can. For me, when I write a particularly good passage, or a really cool scene, then re-read it, I’m more excited that it’s a really cool scene than I am about having written it myself. That’s why I love revising; because it makes the story better, and God knows I love a good story.
As a child, literature was an escape for me. For little pockets of time, I was riding the Black Stallion in a match race against Cyclone and Sun Raider. I was holding Flicka in a stream while the cool water cleansed her wounds, I was racing my horse down a ravine against a flash flood that was going to wipe out a family who was camping there.
It was a gift to be transported into these worlds, and I would be honored if I could one day give the gift of transport to some little kid who might also need it.
K
I’ve wanted to be a writer for so long, I really had stopped thinking about why. Victoria, you’re wonderful post has me asking myself this question I’ve avoided for so long. Funny enough, I see myself in your last example, someone who writes to tell the story he wants to read, and just knowing that I’ve done it is what truly matters. Would I turn down millions of dollars? Nope. But just to hold a manuscript. Just to have someone get wrapped up in words that I put together, yes, that is the strongest of draws. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to pause and reflect.
Wow, I had no idea you guys were such deep thinkers! You’re like Ghandi! Let’s talk about this more on today’s post.
During a recent screenwriter’s strike that question, “Why do you write?” was going around and a number of screenwriters wrote essays about it.
I, however, wrote a scripted scene.
You can read it here:
http://slantedconcept.com/why-write.html
But from another point of view, you might want to look at my blog entry for this week on a new iconography for action-romance which is part of a long series of blog posts (on the co-blog aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com where I post on Tuesdays) on Inside The Writer’s Mind, showing not telling the mechanism inside a writer’s mind that produces stories.
The one on iconography is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
This iconography shift in Romance is illustrative of how the whole world has changed.
Participating in that change, and “gossiping” about it all is what writers of fiction do. We don’t lead the change or cause it. We participate and discuss it.
Every novel is like a sentence (or sentence fragment) in a cocktail party conversation. Readers are walking through this huge cocktail party called a book store, snagging bits and pieces of conversations among writers.
Writers read each others work, and write novels to answer points raised.
I write to contribute to the conversation.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
I went through my undergraduate years thinking that I would have some unrelated day job but during that time I wrote an actual, high quality SF novel. Don’t get me wrong, the first draft was not nearly as good as the second draft and there was a lot of painstaking editing involved. Talk about making good use of a tendency to ‘day dream’ and tendencies towards ‘fantasy’. I read like gangbusters during my childhood which fueled the whole thing.
Most of my fiction is anything but thinly veiled autobiography. There is some connection to me, but the connection as at least as distorted as you get with a fun house set of mirrors. If you think that’s autobiography then, that’s your problem.