Tactless Tuesday: Listen to Captain Sisko

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Benjamin Sisko: I'm no writer, but if I were it seems to me I'd wanna poke my head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life, Jake! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes!
-- "The Visitor," Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Aside from outting myself as not only a fan of Star Trek, but of a huge fan of DS9, I share this quote with you in hopes that it might punch some of you in the face like it punches me in the face every time I come across it.

Here's the context. I'll even remove all Star Trek and sci fi from the setup, so those of you with a negative reaction can move on and get to the meat of the matter:

A young man, in his late teens, has found his passion for writing. Everywhere he goes, he says potential plots. Everyone he interacts with, he regards as potential characters. He spends every waking moment thinking about his writing or with his nose buried in his writing. Sure, there are other responsibilities and he takes care of those, but as soon as they're done it's back to writing. He's not a slacker because of writing; he's just obsessed with his craft.

One day, his dad is taking him on a trip to see something that's once-in-a-lifetime. The young man spends his time on the trip holed up and working on his story.

That's when his dad utters the magic words: "I'm no writer, but if I were it seems to me I'd wanna poke my head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life, Jake! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes!"

This really hits home with me now, as it did when the episode first aired. When I was a younger man, I spent every spare moment with my writing. (Check yesterday's post if you don't believe me!) In college, when I wasn't doing homework, I was either working on photography or writing. For a while it was songs, not fiction, but it boils down to the same thing. When I gave up writing (more on that another day) I spent most of my time looking for something to fill the void. When I came back to writing, I was pretty much back to the old ways.

And I often still am.

There's work, there's my wife, there are things I have to do. But when not otherwise obligated, I'm writing, or blogging about writing, or talking to writers, or thinking about writing.

Here's the thing. Unless you want to write about writing, or about someone who spends his or her life trapped by obligations, you need to experience more than those two things in order to write. You need to do other things. You need to interact without it being about writing. You need to stick your head out of the rabbit hole and check out what's going on.

I've recently started volunteering for my local EMS as one way of doing this. It's not work, church, marriage, chores, or writing. It's something different. Just one avenue to just plain experience life. I may learn nothing from it to incorporate into my writing. But I will learn more about what it is to be a person in this world, and that will make me a better writer.

So, to all of you, I give the same directive as Ben Sisko gave to his son Jake, and that an elderly Jake then passed onto a young writer who idolized him:

Poke your head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday: Immutable Fiction

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One of the biggest road blocks I used to have in my writing, that has only been reduced to an obstacle over time and practice, is the notion that But, no, it happened that way.

It's fiction; it did not happen that way.

In fact, it didn't happen. You made it up. Remember doing that?

I had the great fortune of growing up with a mom who was an incredible editor. It was painful at times, but I learned more than I probably even realize from her corrections. I'll tell more of that story another day. I bring it up now as an illustration.

I remember the story that it really came to a head during. It was a short piece featuring a teenage MacGyver-type named Bridge Flag. I wrote the story out and was really pleased with it. In one passage, my mom thought something didn't work , and asked me to change an entire sequence of events. I was used to major revisions, but usually that were about writing quality.

Boy did we get into it.

"I can't change that. That's how it happened" -- "You can't change the facts. The facts are the facts!" -- "I'll rewrite it, but I might as well just get rid of the story if I have to change what happens, because it's not the same story."

Dang. Admittedly, I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, but even today I find myself having this battle with myself internally. I don't mind making major rewrites. I love revision, in fact, and major revision is just that much more fun. But I get a hitch in my step when it comes time to think about changing a "fact."

There was some truth in what I told my mom. Changing events that are directly in the plot line does, in fact, change the story. Here's the thing, though: the story is make-believe.

Sometimes, even as fiction writers, we too often approach our writing as if it were reporting. A plot isn't something that actually happened, though. You may feel like you just watched it unfold and let their characters do their thing, but you didn't; you made the story up. That means you can change it.

And, frankly, if it's not a good enough story, then you should.

Ultimately, when the rage subsided, my story was a lot better, and someday I will revisit Bridge Flag and may get his stories in publishable shape. If I had resisted, though, on the grounds that the plot was unchangeable, because that was how it happened, I would just have a broken story.

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday on Wednesday for a Hamburger Today

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So I again didn't realize it was Tuesday yesterday. I love the Christmas / New Year stretch, but I think my ordinarily impeccable sense of date and time goes haywire and becomes truly peccable.

Now for Tactless Tuesday, on time-delay. The FCC requires a delay in my blogging now because I'm just that hardcore. (cough) Ahem. Anyway.

Today's message: you're not trying to be a writer; you are a writer.

At the risk of sounding like some cornball, "power of positive thought" message, I do believe that the terms in which you regard yourself have a powerful impact on you. Many of us recognize that the boy who thinks he's dumb can get himself caught in a spiral of failure. Most of us even seen how the girl who thinks she's unattractive can pull her entire presence down through low expectations for herself. Some of us might even acknowledge that the sports team who knows from day one that they're shooting for middle-of-the-pack in the standings can often doom itself to playing below .500.

A lot of unpublished or little published writers, however, don't notice when they do it to themselves. "I'm trying to be a writer." "I'm working on becoming an author." "I mess around with stories."

Hold the phone!

Are you writing?

Then you're a writer. You're an author. And you're writing stories.

I'm all for pushing yourself to publication, but I think too many young-in-the-profession writers get themselves mired down by focusing on their potential rather than embracing their actual and helping it become even more. I know I did this for a long time, and I can't adequately describe for you the impact that it had on my confidence and my writing ability when I stopped being timid about it and just started calling myself a writer.

I'm not an aspiring writer. I'm a writer aspiring to publication.

I'm not struggling to become a writer. I'm struggling to become a full-time, self-sustained writer.

I'm not trying be an author. I am an author.

And if you're writing, so are you! Don't trap yourself!

Freedom!

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday #5: The Target Audience

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So far, an awful lot of the Tactless Tuesday content, and indeed one of the major themes of my blog, is the importance of approaching writing from a business persepctive rather than as a solitary art, so it might surprise you what I've designated as the firth lie we writers tell ourselves:

We must write for a target audience.

I know, I know, it sounds like basic marketting strategy, but there are three reasons I believe this is not true and can, in fact, end up tying us in knots as we try to comply:

1. Target audience is a marketting point that deals with how you package your writing, not necessarily how you craft it in the first place.
2. You can't accurately identify a full target audience until you have an end product.
3. There are a host of reasons to make writing decisions; you need to stick to the ones that deal with the craft of writing.

It's one thing to identify your genre and your basic niche, but when you get the place where you identify that you are writing for fourteen year-old girls, or middle-aged male readers who skew conservative, or readers who place a premium on environmental issues, then you are jumping ahead of the game and doing a disservice to your story. You risk limiting your audience, restricting your own writing, and turning your work into a polemic rather than a story.

If, as a I firmly believe, a professional fiction writer's job is to write a story, than the decisions you make need to be first and foremost based on the story, its characters, and the craft itself. Too often we writers are tempted to make decisions such as which what kind of secondary characters our target audience wil relate to, what degree of darkness or humor or target audience will accept and appreciate, how close we can brush up against certain socio-political topics without risking our target audience.

Instead, we need to decide those things based on what makes a good story and what constitutes good writing.

Then, when it's all done, we can figure out a target audience to whom the work can be marketted.

Alright, that's the last of the lies series for right now. I hope you've enjoyed them. In upcoming weeks, we will address:

• You're not trying to be a writer; you are a writer.
• No, it did not happen that way.
• Yes, you should outline, and here's why.
• and more!

As always, the point of Tactless Tuesday is to hard-sell, and while I do believe what I'm saying, I also think some of the value in saying it so bluntly is to generate discussion, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the target audience!

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday #4: People Don't Get Me

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Today's gloves-off blow to a writer's ego is aimed squarely between my own eyes. In case you don't still have the original list of initial lies we tell ourselves memories, here's how I phrased this one:

If people don't understand what we've written, it's just because our writing is too artistic and intellectual.

Oh my goodness, that one's soooooooo tempting. And sooooooo wrong. There are few things more satisfying than being able to tell yourself that your literary story was not accepted, because they just couldn't track your arch high symbolism, the artistic swerve you laid down, or the true power hidden within your deceptively simple words.

Sorry, folks. Sorry, Nevets. You're a writer. That means that your medium of expression is communication. Yes, there may be times when a particular reader or two just don't click with your stuff, but if general readership doesn't "get" your writing, it's your fault. You're doing a bad job. Why? Because you're the one writing it. It's your responsibility to make sure the reader can walk away from your story with what you want them to.

One the most influential moments in my development was a writer was in the early 90's. I had CompuServe at the time, which was an on-line service provider and did not yet provide regular access to the Internet. There was no web yet. But I took it on myself to search the CompuServe directory for people I might want to reach out to as a young writer.

I sent a note to award-winning science fiction author Vonda McIntyre. I don't remember at all what I wrote, but I do know I was surprised to get a reply back from her. Somehow, what I had said to her touched on this topic -- something about writing just what I want, and who cares if other people even see it, let alone like it, let along understand it. She described her approach to writing to me as being akin to a storyteller of old, and that if there was no one listening, she wasn't really doing her job, wasn't really doing what she wanted to do. Storytellers didn't just amuse themselves. They captivated their audiences.

What that means to me personally has changed over the years, but one thing it continues to bring home is that we are communicators. If people are confused by what I write, then I need to resist the temptation to hold myself aloof from them. I need to be a better communicator, and a better writer.

What do you guys think? You ever wrestle with this?

By the way, if you've missed previous installments of Tactless Tuesday, you can click here to see the list.

.Nevets.

Tactcless Tuesday #3: Our Own Way

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Time for a little more brutal honesty The third (or second or fourth, depending on how you want to count it, but third officially) lie that we writers tell ourselves is that we each need to just write however works best for us. There are lots of different ways to go about writing, and they're all equally good.

I know I tell myself this all the time, though about a narrower range of things than I used to. As a sentiment, it certainly appeals to our artistic side. It also appeals to that little, "be your own boss," guy or gal that sits on the shoulder of almost every writer who has a straight job to pay the bills. It also just "feels right," because it hearkens back to warm, kindergarten memories of the aunt we loved interceding with the children and saying, "now, now, there's no wrong way to play make believe."

If you're a writer that just likes to put down the words and does not seriously intend on becoming published, then that is probably essentially what you are doing. You're exercising your imagination in the form of words that stay. There's nothing wrong with that, and there is, indeed, no wrong way to do that. If you're trying to become published, hoping to someday become a professional, full-time writer, however, you're doing something else entirely. You are no longer playing believe on the playground. You're doing homework. And there are always right and wrong ways to do homework.

I'm not here to tell you what the right way to write is. I don't quite know, myself. If I did, I would probably be published by now. And that's the trick of it. If we're trying to get published for years and don't make it, if we're in our third year of working on a novel and keep getting stalled out -- then it is silly to shun advice on how to write better because it "doesn't work for us." The system you're using that's getting you unpublished and stalled out? No matter how much you might like it, that system isn't working for you either. So lose the attachment to it, and become more open to other ways to practice the craft of writing.

Some of the areas that I hear myself and other writers invoke the law of, "well, we all need to write in our own way," include:

1. Outlining.
2. Deadlines / Work schedules.
3. Effective work environment.
4. When to edit.
5. and more!

I'm not saying that there's only one way to do these things. I'm sure there are some different approaches based on different learning styles, different patterns of creativity, and so on. What I'm saying is that the appeal to "Well, it's okay, we each have our own way to write and that's just fine," is not the same as saying, "My personality responds negatively to deadlines; I've tried them, and for as long as I can remember they cripple me."

Okay, I know I'm rambling a little because I'm still not fully over a virus I picked over break, so let me try to distill all this into two walking-away points:

1) If you're trying to published and are unsuccessful, or if you're trying to complete a writing project and keep stalling out, then the chances are excellent that how you're writing is not working for you.

2) If you're going to reject advice on a better way to write, try to have a better reason than, "I don't like it," or "It doesn't work for me." Learn enough about yourself to figure out why you don't like it or what it doesn't work, and then decide if that's still valid.

In my case, I rebelled against outlines for years with a passion rarely seen. "They're boring and they constrain the creative process." I also balked at the notion of having deadlines. "Some days you write more, some days you write less." About a hundred unpublished stories and a dozen unfinished novels later, I decided I was full of crap and needed to start trying to write differently.

How's your method workin'?

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday Teaser

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I won't be starting Tactless Tuesday again officially until next week, but I thought I'd offer a little brutal honesty on a Tuesday anyway.

Here's the thing that I seem to struggle with most, and that I think a lot of others do, as well: as a writer am I an artist or a businessperson? It seems to me that a lot of us prefer to think of ourselves as artists. It's from this that arises the killer sentiment that I often find myself repeating:

"There just doesn't seem to be a place for stories like the ones I write in the publishing world."

There are a whole lot of problems with that statement, but I want to focus in one aspect of it.

When I say that, as an artist, the implication is that the problem is with the market. After all, I have my integrity to express myself; they should have the integrity to respect that. "Woah is my, no one ones to hear my voice crying from the wilderness, won't any one just give me a chance."

And there's some truth in that. If I just want to write whatever the heck I want to write, maybe show it to some friends, maybe post it on a blog, maybe even print it off at Kinkos and hand it out at the circus -- fine. That's cool. That's artsy and busting with integrity.

But as soon as I want to get published, I'm entering the business realm. I am trying to open up commercial negotiations. Asking someone to publish my story is a business proposition. "Hey, here's my time, give me your resources, you'll get money and I'll get read.

Suddenly, from a business perspective, "There's no place for stories like mine," no longer means the marketplace needs another publisher. It means I need to write different stories. Maybe one day I can earn the right, like Louis LaMour or Robert Ludlum or Piers Anthony, to publish anything I want just because I want to. But the business model has to be there.

Does this mean I need to stop writing the same kind of stories? Not necessarily. But if a certain kind of thing is pretty universally not getting picked up, it's not the wisest use of my energy and talents. And, frankly, I learned the hard way that I don't have enough energy and talents at this point in my life to be able to justify wasting them.

Until next time, keep the quills to the parchment and chisels to the clay.

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday #2 - The First and a Halfth Lie

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Apologies that this is so late, and apologies that I have been so absent this past week. My straight job has been consuming more of my time and energy (mostly the latter) than usual, and it has meant that I've had almost no time to keep up this week with my writing. But I could net let down the legions of loyal fans that have already come to look anxiously forward to Tactless Tuesdays. I hope the delay in my posting has not caused any medical of psychological conditions.

p.s. If it has, check out Solitude. It's the cure for anyone's blues. LOL

So, Lie #2 that we tell ourselves as writers is an extension of last week's Lie #1, but it works itself out differently. The lie is this: our characters have lives of their own. Here are the forms this lie can take:

* I am so mad at my character for doing this.
* I didn't expect my main character to do that and now I don't know what to do.
* My main character is not cooperating.
* Would my main character do this_or_that?
* How far would my character go?
* I don't know my character's background.
* I need to interview my character.

And so on and so forth. Here's the thing. Just like you're writing your story, and you're the boss of it, you're the creator of your character. If you don't want them to do something, it is entirely in your power to stop them. If you don't know what to do now that they've done something, change what they did. Would they do something? You tell me -- you're the author.

I understand that sometimes our psychology as a writer works in a way that these characters can feel like independent actors. That's fine. I understand being confused, surprised, or upset. You're really surprised at what you wrote, but it fees like it's the character who did you in. I also understand using interviews and backstory role plays and all that as ways to help you develop the character.

I get that.

But here's the problem when you feel like your character has its own life:

They take control of your story. I have too many writing friends who get stalled out because of their character. Their characters ruined their story. Their characters are too confusing. Authors control all that. Like it or not, every character you write about is up to you.

I was trapped in a story forever because of something like that once. I didn't like a character, I didn't understand that character. It took me ten years to finally realize, "Oh, crap, that's right, I can make that character whatever the heck I want to." Woohoo!

That's what's great about being a writer. You can change all the people who are annoying you!

So stop being a prisoner to the people in your imagination!

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday #1 - The First Lie

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Welcome to the first Tactless Tuesday. Today begins a several week series examining lies that writers tell themselves. I know about most of these because I have told them to myself a hundred million times. In fact, as much as possible I will try to draw all illustrations from my own experience.

Lie #1 - Stories exist outside out imagination.

Few writers would tell this tell to themselves quite so brazenly. Let me suggest some alternative forms that this lie can take, which might sound more familiar:


I have to tell the story that demands to be written.

I can't change that part, because that's the how it happened.

My favorite part of writing is discovering what happens as the story goes on.

I just can't wait to see what happens next.

I didn't expect that to happen.


Each of these, in some way, requires that the story have its own existence -- an ability to compel your writing or determine its own course of action.

So what's the big deal? If that's how the writer perceive it, it's just a quirk of the human brain. No harm done.

Here's the truth that this lie often serves to conceal: The writer is in charge of the story.

Too often I talk to fellow writers or read their blogs and get this sense of helplessness. As if the writers are engaged in some dialectic struggle with spiritual force of their story, hoping that in the end, the result will be better than either the writer's will or the story's. But the story doesn't have a will. The writer is the boss! The writer is the creator!

Writers have the ability to take charge and take control. You have to write the story that demands to be written? Perhaps there's some psychological reason that you personally have to write the story, but it's not the story's fault. Take responsibility.

You want to see what happens? Hey, you're the one who makes it happen. You didn't like what happened? Change it. Something needs to be changed? The story never happened; you created it in your imagination, so changing it doesn't hurt anything or anyone.

Here's the point. Writers need to not feel helpless before their stories. Writers are all-powerful when it comes to what they create. That's the power of being the creator. Your story does not exist in some spiritual plain that you are tapping into. You are that story's momma and poppa and deity all in one. Make it yours. Claim it!

.Nevets.

Heads Up - Soon you Too Will Hate Me!

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Well, hopefully you do not soon hate me. I'm not really big on being hated. And actually I don't even really intend to be controversial. Makes for a great blog title, though. I'm all about the hook. haha

But, though I may yet hope to remain your harmless little lovable Nevets full of sweetness and light, I will warn you that Tactless Tuesdays are coming, starting next week.

Again, it's all about the hook. (Which, on a total tangent is the name of a very catchy bit of goofy story-telling in verse by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks with a Rolling Stones-ish feel.) On Tactless Tuesday I will not be tactless. I'm way too much a of a goody-goody for that. But I will take of the infamous kid-gloves and cut to the chase of cliche.

Say what, Nevets? Speak English, Man.

To give you an idea of what I mean, the opening series of posts will cover Lies that Writers Tell Themselves, the first five weeks of which will cover...

1. Stories exist outside of our imagination.
2. Characters have lives of their own.
3. We each need to just write however works best for us.
4. If people don't understand what we've written, it's just because our writing is too artistic and intellectual.
5. We need to write for a target audience.

For each of these, I will explain why I think it's a lie, how I think the lie manifests itself, and why I think the lie is dangerous. I will definitely not be targeting people or being rude. Just honest without window dressing. And I'm not talking to anyone. I'm a writer, and I buy into these lies all the time. I just hope to call attention to these issues, help get thought flowing, and maybe get some conversation started.

So look for Tactless Tuesday, starting next week!

.Nevets.