Sympathy is the very devil

As I close in on 100 rejections I can see a trend emerging in the letters and e-mails that accompany those stories that don't quite make it.

I can sense I'm making progress in that more rejections express the hope that I'll keep bothering those editors with my stories. Perhaps its rejectomancy to read too much in to that but given the thin nourishmnet from the big table I've had so far those crumbs taste pretty good. Cuspy? Look it up in the dictionary and it'll have my picture next to it.

Three of the rejections I got recently all mentioned failings of character. Those letters mean more than most because they do chime with what I think about where I am at. I now know I can handle setting, structure, dialogue and I'm getting a handle on action.

But character? Hmm - I know that the characters I write are pretty thin.

So I turned to the web and my collection of "how to write" reference books for help. To paint good characters SDL says I need to show them performing actions that are "habitual, purposeful and gratuitous". Reading that I realised the importance of action - in the sense of putting a character in places they must react rather than a sword or gunfight. People reveal themselves by their action otherwise they are just being shuffled from place to place and looking blankly on.

Also important, say folks like Orson Scott Card, are telling details - habits or incidents from a character's past to round them out. Then there are the elements revealed in dialog beats - reactions or additions to the words and the attitude a character brings to events.

I also found this great note by Jim Kelly about how to go about it. There's great stuff here - about how telling in a short story is okay but showing is important too. Probably the best advice he gives is to try it and keep on trying until it works. Writers learn by doing rather than be being told - they are not alone in that.

But I also came across the frightening information that Iris Murdoch felt she had never mastered the art of creating good, for which read sympathetic, characters. And that chimes with what I've felt reading Murdoch, her characters feel like exquisitely made mechanical people rather than living, breathing individuals. Where that leaves me I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd better go and find out. So, if you'll excuse me...

London calling

I've alluded to this before but I am very superstitious about giving away too much information about the stories I'm working on before they are published. I'm not sure where this phobia stems from but my fear is that the entropic load of a story is pretty light. By that I mean they wear out fast if told too soon.

That fear has made me reluctant to use this blog to promote stories I'm working on. But I've realised a few things. Firstly, I'm not interesting enough to sustain people's attention forever all by myself. And (1A) I don't want the blog to become the place I use to bemoan my lot. Which it has a danger of doing.

The second realisation is that if people do start visiting then they'll do so because they are curious about what I might be coming up with next. So, I'm starting an allied blog (much of which will be reflected here) about a novel idea I've been kicking around for a while. It's a steampunk romp and in that blog I'll work on the setting for it. My tentative title for it is The Brass Boy. Part of the reason I'm doing this is because a public announcment can be a good spur to action. I can ignore my conscience with increasing ease but lots of other people saying: "Hey, whatever happened to The Brass Boy?" is harder to dodge.

Steampunk seems a natural era for me to choose because I've become a Dickens nut over the last few years, have been a fool for Victorian history for years (Flashman!) and Jerry White's magisterial A Human Awful Wonder of God made me realise the parallels between 19th Century London and modern life. The pace of change from 1800-1900 was breathtaking and many people struggled to cope. Just like now. Plus this story I've been dreaming up has been battering me for a long time with scenes, characters and events. It'll feel good to give some of them a home.

Son of Sam

Like any other dough boy in the trenches I need something to keep me fighting when I'm up to my knees in mud, dodging bullets and subsisting on the meagre rations the writing game doles out. I don't wrestle a glossy of my sweetheart back home out of the pocket in my battledress but instead turn to Sam Delany's About Writing.

It's one of the few books that utterly changed the way I think about writing and what writing can be. I turn to it when I'm labouring on a story or when one is going well and it has never let me down. It is packed with good sense, useful insights and all round encouragement. There's so much in it that I can open it pretty much at random and find something useful. I'm heartened to discover that successful writers like it too.

But like Nicholson Baker when he wrote about John Updike my liking for this book of Delany's is not based on any familiarity with the rest of his work. I thought I had read some SDR but it turns out I haven't. So I've no idea if SDR's good sense on writing is carried through to his own work. I don't regard that as a problem given that sometimes the best managers were mediocre exponents at their particular trade.

I think that what I like about it most though is that it hums with the sense of what writing can be. Delany claims that writing is about creating false memories - painting a scene so vividly that it feels like a distant memory of an event someone lived through. In example after example in the book he shows how that can be done and how most prose fails to reach such heights. I have to admit I much prefer over-fed prose that borders on the purple though very spare text, such as found in Cormac McCarthy, can be just as good at evoking a sense of place. What matters is that a writer tries for that effect.

Despite buying About Writing a year or so ago I've not rushed out and bought any of SDR's books partly because I don't want to lose the sense of wonder and sheer possibilities that it has brewed within me. By reading quite a few books about being a writer I feel that I've got an idea of the craft it takes - in a way they've taught me how to build a brick wall. But Delany is the only one that has got me thinking about building cathedrals.

Books on tour

I've been on holiday hence the hiatus in posting and while I was away I read The Business of Dying by Simon Kernick. It's a good holiday book in that it is easy enough to read but, to be honest, it's not a great book, not even a good book. Why? Well, the central character was adequately drawn but the prose was pretty lumpen. There were no flights of language that painted a scene effectively, the action scenes were stodgy and the plot was telegraphed so clumsily that even I, who is only an occasional reader of crime fiction, could spot whodunnit.

But what also struck me was that, despite it being shelved under crime, it was a fantasy and it deserved that epithet almost as much as Tolkien does. By that I mean it depicted a world wholly unrecognisable from our own which turned out to be quite comforting in the way it worked. The reactionary revelation at the close of the book suggested that the crimes its central character is investigating, rape and murder of several young women, are caused by conspiracies among the great and the good who rule over us.

That's comforting because it absolves us of any duty of care and the alternative, that these young women are vulnerable because people do not act, is almost too terrifying to contemplate. We have let them down and continue to do so. It is much easier to think that nothing can be done about the neglect society as a whole visits on vulnerable people and it confirms many people in their powerlessness. That's another reason it is a bad book.

I'm not saying that men, or indeed women, in high places do no wrong. I'm sure many have, do and continue to do so. But it is as John Crowley said via Pierce Moffett in Aegypt (and one of my favourite books) - secret societies have not influenced civilisation but the idea that secret societies have influenced society has influenced society. There is no conspiracy, just us. And the sooner we contemplate that and do something about it the better.

Jewel crafting

There are times when a story has to be beaten bloody before you can drag it out into the light. When the words are so reluctant to come forth that you wonder if they perhaps have a better paying day job and that explains why they are so unwilling to show themselves and get down to some graft for you.

And then there are the times when you seem blessed, when the world helps so much with the writing that the cynic who lodges within suspects a set-up and advises you to tread carefully unless the Earth decides that the price of such benevolence is your body and opens up wide to swallow you whole.

I'm having such a time with the story I'm writing right now. Irrational fears about the momentum of the story stop me saying too much about the tale but it is set in New York around Wall Street. I needed some guidance on street names so duly turned to Google maps to find out where a particular subway entrance debouched commuters. And there it was on the map, around the corner from the stairs, a street named The Canyon of Heroes - a perfect fit for the story. So perfect in fact that if it is ever published lots of people will suspect I've made it up. And then there were lots of other parts, names, people and objects that fell into place too. Whether the finished story is better for it remains to be seen.

I've done enough of this to know when the writing is easier because of all the planning that has been done and this story I have planned endlessly - my pack of notes for it is verging on the Brandoesque. But that only explains part of how, or why, it is working. At times it feels like there are other forces at work that you are not so much writing a story as uncovering a hidden history that has always existed, unseen, until someone trips over it and looks back to see what caught their toe and sent them sprawling. And then, in the dust, they discover a gem. Only time will tell whether that turns out to be a diamond or glass.

This posting by John Scalzi really got me thinking. Just why do I write? Why do I put myself through this, neglect my family (a little) to satisfy my ego? It’s not, as Jeff Vandermeer found many people claim, because I am driven to do it. It’s a choice I have made and I find myself regularly questioning that choice every time a rejection comes back and every time I’m not enjoying the success I thought I would.

I guess if I’m honest I’m not as committed as I might be. Part of that is because I have a fairly busy job and a family so, unlike the lone gunslingers out there, this cannot be all that I do. And that causes me pain, because I’d like to. There is a lot at stake in trying to make this work, in trying to be a writer. Part of who I think am, who I consider myself to be, is a writer. If I cannot be that person, cannot live up to it for one reason or another, then that is going to do me some psychological damage. Because it means I have to re-think who I actually am. No longer am I the lizard-eyed ace of the keyboard who can turn a memorable phrase as easily as they can a corner. Instead I’m someone who couldn’t do it. Couldn’t live up to the idea of being a writer and became something else. Notice that all those comparisons are negative, I’m genuinely worried by what I would be if I cannot do the writing thing.

I’m a fool for books, I’ve said that before, and the life of someone who does that for a living seems an envious one. I remember reading Charles Stross saying that, after years of messing about, he suddenly got serious about writing and its gone as right for him as it can for anyone since he made that decision.

But I’ve read too that the difference between writers and everyone else is that writers write. Others do not. So, even if success is elusive then the fact that you are writing is some compensation. Just not enough to retire on.

Petrol fumes

Inspiration is a curious beast - capricious and generous in equal measure. Sometimes days can go by without hearing a peep, when thoughts about a story rattle around your head like a coin clattering on a cathedral floor.

And then there are days when you can hardly keep up with the ideas and you risk a high-speed writing injury as you struggle to get them all down without losing a precious word. Sometimes I'm convinced that I haven't got all the fragments and rack my brains for what I have missed.

Though when I can't I console myself with the thought that I may be like the man described by William James about the man who under the influence of laughing gas knew, just knew, the secret of the Universe. Sadly, as he came to the knowledge evaporated. With a huge effort he managed to write down the shattering insight which turned out to be: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout".

I used to regard the words gifted by inspiration as a manna from heaven and such strong stuff that they had to be laid with care in any story. Such gilded words, of course, would elevate any story about the quotidian and render it startling to the reader. Now, of course, I realise it's not like that. At all. From time to time inspiration has produced a corking phrase or idea, and I can remember exactly where I was when the best ones struck, but most of the time it is just another idea that needs to be assessed like its less blessed brethren. Some I discard or they change in the process of working on a story, others go in the ideas file (mine now runs to 66 pages) for later use.

Far better are the ideas that emerge as a story is being written - though at times the part of me that produces them can be reluctant to co-operate. This can delay a story getting going but I've learned to trust that Secret Partner (As Kate Wilhelm calls it) and wait for the right moment. It does mean I'm much clumsier than usual when this is going on because a good part of my attention is focussed internally.

But the reason I trust that SP is because, to be honest, it seems to be much smarter than me. I'm sometimes impressed when I go back and read some of the stuff I've written because there are parts of I could never come up with alone. People who know me well have often asked me after reading some of my stories - "Did you think of that yourself?" Something they have never said to me.