Here’s another one of my favorite discussions about writing, from “Building the Mote in God’s Eye,” an essay by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that appeared in Niven’s book N-Space, a collection of stories and essays. There’s a ton of fascinating material in this piece, but I want to focus on one particular thing. Niven and Pournelle’s collaborative novel The Mote in God’s Eye is set in a futuristic interstellar society whose government has reverted to monarchy. The authors defend the plausibility of this:

It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression: things get better, never worse … [the] proposition is that we of nineteen seventy-five are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays “proving” exactly that proposition — and written thousands of years ago. There’s a flurry of them every few centuries.

They also point out that monarchy has some practical advantages:

The leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?

But the part that relates directly to writing is this:

We had a choice in MOTE: to keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could have abolished “Emperor” in favor of “President,” or “Chairperson,” or “Leader” … We might have employed titles other than Duke … and Count … and Marquis. But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters.

There’s a definite trade-off here. It feels more plausible for future (not to mention current) dictators to call themselves, say, “presidents,” but it’s clearer for a reader thrust into an unfamiliar milieu if the titles communicate the character’s actual status. Writing is full of these sorts of choices. Plausibility versus Clarity. Explanation versus Pacing. Many new writers paralyze themselves because they see writing as like solving a Rubix Cube where you have to get all the colors to match up, and they can’t seem to do it. In fact writing is usually more like trying to solve a Rubix Cube that has no solution. You get to a point, after lots and lots of work, where the colors mostly line up, but it’s not perfect, and anything you do to try to fix one problem will mess up something else, and at some point you just have to make a judgment call about whether it’s better to leave one red square among the blues or one yellow square among the whites. And you just have to trust that some readers will have the same tastes and prioritize things the same way you do, and will go along with the choices you made.

Several of Asimov’s robot books included a foreward called “The Story Behind the Robot Novels.” This is an essay I’ve read and reread countless times. For me the key section is this:

It became very common, in the 1920s and 1930s, to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators. The moral was pointed out over and over again that “there are some things Man was not meant to know.” Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely. After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech — and both are still dangerous to this day — but human beings would not be human without them.

This pro-science, pro-technology sentiment is at the heart of Asimov’s philosophical outlook, which is why it’s such a horrific travesty that Hollywood turned his brilliant short story collection I, Robot into exactly the sort of moronic robots-run-amok hysteria-fest that Asimov was responding to by writing a more intelligent and nuanced treatment of the subject in the first place. (It’s also pretty pathetic that Hollywood is still churning out material — such as the Battlestar Galactica series finale — built around the sort of notions that would strike a bright teenager living a century ago as worn-out and intellectually contemptible.)

Anyway, the other Asimov foreword I used to reread regularly was “The Story Behind Foundation,” from his book Foundation. The part that struck me as romantic and memorable was this:

I had an appointment to meet [magazine editor] Mr. Campbell to tell him the plot of a new story I was planning to write, and the catch was that I had no plot in mind, not the trace of one. I therefore tried a device I sometimes use. I opened a book at random and set up a free association, beginning with whatever I first saw. The book I had with me was a collection of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I happened to open it to the picture of the Fairy Queen of Iolanthe throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis. I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire — of a Galactic Empire — aha! Why shouldn’t I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and of the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire?

It occurs me now that, as much time as I spent reading and re-reading this anecdote, and as much time as I’ve spent remembering it since, I can’t say that I’ve ever actually used the technique described. I can’t say why. It certainly sounds like it should work, and obviously it worked for Asimov. Maybe I’ll try it sometime.

Here’s another of my favorite bits of commentary on writing. This is Larry Niven discussing the problem of writing a science fiction mystery, from the afterword to The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton:

How can the reader anticipate the author if all the rules are strange? If science fiction recognizes no limits, then … perhaps the victim was death-wished from outside a locked room, or the walls may be permeable to X-ray laser. Perhaps the alien’s motivation really is beyond human comprehension. Can the reader really rule out time travel? Invisible killers? Some new device tinkered together by a homicidal genius?
   More to the point, how can I give you a fair puzzle? With great difficulty, that’s how. There’s nothing impossible about it. In a locked room mystery you can trust John Dickson Carr not to ring in a secret passageway. You can trust me too. If there’s an X-ray laser involved, I’ll tell you so. If I haven’t mentioned an invisible man, there isn’t one. If the ethics of Belt society are important, I will have gone into detail on the subject.

Here’s another one of my favorite paragraphs on writing. This is Orson Scott Card on writing child characters, from his introduction to Ender’s Game:

Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along — the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives on these children from that perspective — the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as important as any adult’s.

Here’s another paragraph on writing that really influenced me. This is from Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writers. Some of these rules I agree with more than others, but this is the one that’s really stuck with me:

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip … Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

Next up in my continuing series of paragraphs about writing that really had a big impact on me, here’s Stephen King from On Writing. Many of you I’m sure are familiar with this quote, but it definitely bears repeating:

   You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
   Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in … Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.

Here’s another little paragraph about writing that struck a chord with me, and that I’ve reread many times. This one’s not technically advice, but it kind of looks like advice if you squint. This is Gardner Dozois explaining the popularity of George R. R. Martin, from the introduction to the massive short story collection GRRM: A RRetrospective (later repackaged as Dreamsongs):

George has always been a richly romantic writer. Dry minimalism or the cooly ironic games of postmodernism so beloved by many modern writers and critics are not what you’re going to get when you open something by George R. R. Martin. What you’re going to get instead is a strongly-plotted story driven by emotional conflict and crafted by someone who’s a natural-born storyteller, a story that grabs you on the first page and refuses to let go. You’re going to get adventure, action, conflict, romance, and lust, vivid human emotion: obsessive, doomed love, stark, undying hatred, unexpected veins of rich humor … and something that’s rare even in science fiction and fantasy these days (let alone the mainstream) — a love of adventure for adventure’s sake, a delighting in the strange and colorful, bizarre plants and animals, exotic scenery, strange lands, strange customs, stranger people, backed by the inexhaustible desire to see what’s over the next hill, or waiting on the next world.

In the same vein as the Roger Zelazny quote I posted yesterday, here’s another of my favorite little bits of really common-sense, practical writing advice. It’s an excerpt from a letter that George R. R. Martin sent to his collaborator Lisa Tuttle, which she reprinted in her book Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction. On the issue of alien names he says:

“The best way to handle it, I think, is to avoid naming things gizzuks and smerps, and to run together real words and use them in context in such a way that they’re self-explanatory. Besides, human colonists would never name anything a gizzuk. Thusly I have stories that features windwolves and tree-spooks and rock-cats and plains devils and such.”

Some of the best writing advice I ever got I came across in Roger Zelazny’s essay “Constructing a Science Fiction Novel,” which appeared in his short story collection Frost & Fire. On the subject of describing characters he writes:

“How much can the mind take in at one gulp? See the character entirely but mention only three things, I decided. Then quit and get on with the story. If a fourth characteristic sneaks in easily, okay. But leave it at that intially. No more. Trust that other features will occur as needed, so long as you know. ‘He was a tall, red-faced kid with one shoulder lower than the other.’ Were he a tall, red-faced kid with bright blue eyes (or large-knuckled hands or storms of freckles upon his cheeks) with one shoulder lower than the other, he would actually go out of focus a bit rather than grow clearer in the mind’s eye. Too much detail creates sensory overload, impairing the reader’s ability to visualize.”

I was reminded of this advice while reading over this description of Abraham Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula:

“A man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes me at once as indicative of thought and power. The head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy brows come down and the mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart, such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man’s moods.”

If you can read through that without zoning out, you must be on Adderall — and that’s leaving aside the issue of specific details that are just silly (sensitive nostrils?). If that description coheres for you into anything approximating a human being, your brain just does not work like mine does. All I see when I read that description is Mr. Potato Head.

I just noticed that Tim Pratt’s superlative story “Cup and Table” recently appeared on PodCastle. The story is sort of Arthurian legend meets X-Men. Go listen to it now. I like stories in which things actually happen, and I submit “Cup and Table” as an example of how this approach can really work. As I understand it, Tim sketched out the storyline as a potential series, then stuffed the whole thing into one short story for the Twenty Epics anthology (epic-sized stories told in short story form). The result is just an incredible frenetic denseness of creativity, and reading the story is like mainlining pure awesome.

Of course, your mileage may vary. I seem to have people constantly telling me that there’s something wrong with my desire for brisk pacing and major plot twists in short fiction. When I turned in my story “Transformations” to one of my grad school creative writing workshops, the instructor’s first comment was, “This doesn’t work as fiction.” Huh? I thought. That’s strange, because I just read this story at the reading series last night, and everyone loved it. In fact, at one point I had had to pause for a full minute because I couldn’t be heard over the enthusiastic gales of laughter. “No,” the instructor went on. “There’s too much happening. We get this boy’s whole life from childhood to adulthood, and there’s this whole interstellar war. It’s too much.” Now, maybe this is a legitimate criticism of the story — the story is online here, so you judge for yourself if you want. But then she said something that really floored me: “A short story isn’t about things happening, it’s about capturing a single moment in time.”

Now, I have no objection to short stories that are about capturing a single moment in time — though it had better be a pretty interesting moment — but how can anyone say that this is the only way that all short stories everywhere should be written? I’m constantly aghast at the way that so many “literary” writers are so narrowly read that they’ve internalized so many formulas they’re not even aware of. (Such as, a short story = “a work of fiction shorter that is a) shorter than a novel and b) in which nothing happens.”) This isn’t true of all literary writers, by the way. T. C. Boyle, of one of my favorite short story writers, writes story after story in which all sorts of crazy stuff happens, and it’s wonderful. But far too many literary writers do seem to succumb to this sort of groupthink. Which is particularly sad, I think, when the edict in question (“nothing happens”) seems likely to lead in most cases to self-indulgence and stultification.

My short story “Red Road” will be appearing in the next issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, which should be out around the end of the month. I’ve been asked to put together a little “behind the scenes” essay about how I wrote the story. Here’s the illustration for the story followed by my essay:

As we were departing Lunacon, my friend John Joseph Adams recommended a book to me, but cautioned me that the book contained talking animals, as if that might put me off. I replied automatically, “No, that’s cool. I like talking animals.” Later I thought back on that and realized that, hey, yeah, I do like talking animals, and yet I’d never published a story that contained any talking animals. I started thinking it might be fun to write a story about some talking animals, but only if I could come up with some new angle — something sufficiently skewed and offbeat.

A few days later I remembered a conversation I’d had years ago with some of the other students at James Gunn’s writing workshop at the University of Kansas. In that conversation I’d made a joke along the lines of, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if someone wrote an animal quest fantasy in which … ?” Remembering that, I suddenly thought, “Hey, that’s not bad.” I had just come off a white-hot streak of writing successes, and I was in the mood for a challenge, such as taking a joke situation and trying to develop it into a narrative that contained as much emotional depth and thematic significance as I could manage.

One other inspirational moment I remember: I had read a news article about a left-wing intellectual type who had recently been knighted in the UK. All this guy’s left-wing intellectual friends had chided him for accepting the honor and had pointed out that monarchy and titles and all that were basically against everything that this guy stood for, and the guy was kind of like, “Yeah, I know, I know. But come on, I’m a knight now. How cool is that? How could I say no?” I kept thinking about that, and kept wondering what I might do in that situation, since I could easily sympathize with both sides.

I had a blast writing this story. It was enormous fun to be able to go back and write my own old-school fantasy complete with heroes and monsters and talking animals and a quest, just like the kind I read so many of when I was a kid, and I felt inspired to sneak in an unusually high number of sly allusions and little in-jokes. My interest in politics and culture tends to show through no matter what I write, so I think the story also contains a lot of hidden depth. I also think I managed to bump my sentence-level writing up a notch with this piece.

I wrote the story during a summer in which I was living in a small apartment in South Central L.A. It was too hot for me to go out much during the day and too dangerous for me to venture out much at night, so I spent day after day alone in that apartment and got completely absorbed (probably too much so) in the fictional reality of the story. The moment at which I became really excited about the piece and knew for sure that I was going to go ahead and write it all down was when I dreamt up the sequence in which Francis battles the owl. But when it came time to write that scene, I just didn’t know how Francis could possibly stand a chance. I paced around and around, swinging an imaginary sword. In the corner of the room, looming over me, I pictured a gigantic and sinister owl (the sweltering heat probably contributed to the near-hallucinatory intensity of this vision), and I would stare up at that monstrous owl and think, “Crap, how the hell am I going to kill this bleeping thing?”

I was really happy with how that part turned out. In fact, after I wrote that scene I couldn’t restrain myself from sending out a bulletin to all my Facebook friends announcing, “I just wrote the best sword-wielding mouse versus owl fight scene you’ll read all year!” Writing isn’t all fun and games though, of course. For whatever reason I had a hell of a time describing the throne room. I worked for an entire day — eight hours or so — on that one stupid little paragraph, though that time included many hours spent online perusing photos of various real-world throne rooms. I also found it challenging to work out exactly how the climactic scene was going to go down (even though that scene was something I’d planned from the beginning and was in fact the genesis of the whole piece). I spent several days wrestling with the logistics of the thing until I finally hit upon the image of a spooky, mist-shrouded landscape, which instantly felt right and which immediately solved a lot of my problems.

I had a great deal of fun writing this story, and I really felt as though I were living through the events as I was writing them. I hope that some of that same experience comes through for people when they read it.

Hey, more fan mail. I could get used to this. Steve writes:

I just read “Save Me Plz.” Fantastic. I’m writing a book right now. Pertains to video games. If you don’t mind my asking, what is your process for writing? Do you start with an outline and go from there? Anyway, just wanted to give you kudos. You’re amazing and inspirational.

Thanks, Steve! Good luck with the book.

I’m pretty picky when it comes to story ideas, and I don’t often get ideas that I think are terrific, so when I do get one that I really like I spend a lot of time trying to turn it into the best story that I possibly can. I typically spend weeks or months (or even years) thinking over an idea before I sit down to write it. I don’t start drafting something until I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen. I usually jot down a few pages of notes with things like lists of key scenes and some of the most telling bits of dialogue. Sometimes I’ll write a one paragraph/one page synopsis, and sometimes I do sketches of the characters to help me visualize them. Once I actually start drafting a story, I try to work on it every day until it’s finished. I usually write new material in the morning, when I’m freshest, and go for an hour of two, though I have been known to work around the clock on something that’s going really well. I have to be physically active in order to think, so I set up my work environment so that I can pace around. I often listen to music to get into the right emotional frame of mind. I also always have to be doing something with my hands, so I usually carry around a baseball bat or lacrosse stick or toy sword or toy gun or something. 99% of the work of writing for me is done in my head while I’m on my feet. Once I’ve figured out how the next scene or partial scene should go, I sit down and type it out fairly quickly the way I’ve already composed it in my head, then I get back to pacing. I have my computer read out loud what I’ve written so far, which keeps me focused on the story and also allows me to be constantly revising and polishing and catching typos as I go. By the time I finish a story, I’ll have been over the first scene hundreds of times. I usually go out for a walk in the evening during which I think about what new material I’ll be adding the next morning. I also sometimes use this time to listen to what I’ve written so far (by exporting onto my iPod an audio file of my draft as read by the computer). Since just as many people these days listen to my stories as read them in print, I try to make sure that the story works as well in audio as it does on the page.

Holy crap. Worst editorial advice EVER.

I’d never heard this story before (or if I had I’d forgotten), but here’s Daniel Keyes talking about his short story “Flowers for Algernon.” This anecdote was mentioned on StarShipSofa, and I tracked down the quote at Locus Online:

“…So I wrote the story. I called Horace Gold, and he said, ‘Bring it over. I’ll read it while you’re here. Have a cup of coffee, read a magazine.’ Horace was an agoraphobic who ran poker games Friday night to Saturday dawn in his First Avenue apartment, and his office for Galaxy was there too. I was kind of nervous, because Horace was an important editor, and that was only my fifth short story I was submitting for publication. Horace came in from the other room and said, ‘Dan, this is a good story, but I’m gonna tell you how to make it a great story: Charlie does not lose his intelligence; he remains a super-genius, and he and Alice fall in love, they get married, and live happily ever after.’…”