GENREALITY

We have another theme week for you:  writing spaces.  Where we write, and what it means.

Here’s my space:

My office is a second bedroom in the house.  I do most of my writing at a desk, working on a desktop computer with a rather small flat screen.  The desk is full of chaos, because my brain is a bit “out of sight, out of mind,” and if I don’t want to forget about something — story outline, bills that need paying — I have to keep it right there where I can see it.  I know how to find everything, honest!  Stuff I want to keep out of the way, but still visible, I pin to the bulletin board.  My goal lists and project lists go there.

I put a lot of fun things in my office — I like having it be a warm and happy place, so that I like spending time there.  Lily the dog usually naps under the desk, which is lovely.  And my life-size cardboard Thor is quite the inspiration to me, I must say.

For a stretch of time a few years ago, I wrote a bunch on my laptop, spread out on the sofa.  I finished a couple of novels this way, because sitting at my desk was a drag and I had to change location to get things done.  Then I invested in a much better office chair — and I haven’t left my desk since.  That was a great lesson for me:  good, comfortable equipment, can make a huge difference.  Uncomfortable equipment makes me fidgety, and I won’t get work done.  So, invest in the good stuff, keeping in mind that what works for someone else may not work for me.

Lately, I’ve been trying to shake things up a little, to make working on the road easier and more productive.  I’ve done a bunch of traveling over the last three years, and I’ve learned that it really cuts into my output.  I’d like to change this, if I can.  I’m not fond of carrying a laptop with me, and I usually don’t — it’s the issue of comfort, again.  The laptop, while it has its uses, drives me bonkers, so I usually leave it at home.  This year, I’m going to try something else:  I got an iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard to go with it.  The keyboard is the size of a standard laptop keyboard, and works great.  (I never had a problem with the laptop keyboard, it was lugging the damn thing around that I didn’t like.)  I found a word-processing app that’s compatible with Word, which is what I usually use.  So far, I’ve found that this setup is much more portable than a laptop.  I don’t have to take it out of my bag to go through airport security.  I can set it up on my lap without feeling the need to move to a desk or table.  I even brought it to a coffee shop once.

Writing space and location is another one of those variables that really does make a difference, and it behooves us to experiment to find the arrangement that makes us the most comfortable and productive.

Every now and then I get an email that says something along the lines of “I just picked up your book, [insert title of eighth or ninth book in series], and loved it so much I went back and got all the other ones in the series.”

I love these emails, because they tell me I’m accomplishing one of my goals:  to make sure each book stands on its own well enough to provide a satisfying read and potentially draw people into the rest of the series.  These emails are a great reassurance to me.  My instincts were right, and paying attention to this sort of thing while writing an open-ended, ongoing series really is important.

Making sure each book stands alone well enough to tell a complete and satisfying story is important to me, not just for the sake of aesthetics, but because every book might be some readers’ first encounters with my writing.  Some readers put out the effort to make sure they read a series in order.  Some don’t.  I don’t — generally, I’ll read whatever’s available, whether it’s part of a series, first or last book in a series, or whatever.  (The first Bujold book I read was Mirror Dance, because it had just won the Hugo Award.  Not only is this book set in the middle of the series, it’s in the middle of a three-book story arc.  And I still loved it.)

This doesn’t mean I can’t have an ongoing storyline, and that the characters have to remain static.  On the contrary, I think one of the attractions of a series is watching characters grow and develop.  What I don’t do is try to explain everything that’s happened in the entire series in each new book.  In a sense, I want to treat each book like the first book:  what does the reader have to know about these people to understand the story I’m telling right now.  Any backstory I provide is brief and topical.  I don’t really think of it as backstory, but as character description, along with clothing and demeanor.  This character wears a leather jacket and has a resident Victorian ghost (because of what happened in book #6, but the reader doesn’t need to know that much detail to understand the story right now).

A couple of anecdotes doesn’t make for a hard and fast rule about how to write a series, but my own experience is that some people will read the later books in a series first.  Maybe they got book #8 as a gift, maybe it was the only book available.  But each book I write in the series, I have to ask:  How will this read to someone encountering the series for the first time?  That thought has served me well, I think.

A few weeks ago I talked about “show don’t tell,” and how “showing” dramatized a scene I was writing and, in my opinion, made the story richer.  In the comments, Diana asked an excellent question: could “show don’t tell” ever make a scene shorter, or does it basically always mean expand?  I’ve had a chance to ponder this, and in some of my reading and writing came upon a particular situation in which the answer is yes, showing can make a scene tighter and shorter, at least in terms of word count.

It happens in sections of dialog.  Have you ever read a scene where the text surrounding the dialog basically explains the dialog over again?  For example (I just made this up off the top of my head):

I was so nervous, my words stammered out, “I-I’m not sure. . .the mashed potatoes. . .I-I left them right there. . .”

The first half of that sentence, “I was so nervous my words stammered out,” is “telling.”  It’s unnecessary, because the dialog demonstrates (“showing”) very well that the character is stammering, most likely out of nervousness.  So, a better — more dramatic — way to write the sentence is to let the dialog “speak” for itself:

“I-I’m not sure. . .the mashed potatoes. . .I-I left them right there. . .”

If the dialog is written well enough, it expresses the emotion the character is feeling without the narrator having to explain it.

This off-the-cuff example is overly-simplistic, but I’m sure we’ve all run across that sort of thing in our reading.  It’s a bit pernicious, because we usually slide right on by sentences like that — both in what we read and what we write — without thinking of it.  It’s not wrong exactly, but it’s wordy, and often not as immediate.

This week on Genreality, we’re all going to be posting on the same topic:  annual goal setting in our writing careers.

I’m a big fan of setting goals, writing them down, and making plans to accomplish them.  Having the goal isn’t enough — making a daily plan to take care of the steps that will get me to that goal is the important part.  I’ve been writing my goals down since I was a teenager, and the start of a new year is a natural time to review the previous year, reassess my plans, and think about what I’d like to accomplish in the future.

In the past, I’ve used a system where I think about what I want to accomplish in the long term (5-10 years), the middle term (1-2 years), and in the near term (6 months – 1 year).  Ideally, the near-term goals are stepping stones to accomplishing the long term goals.  For example, if the long term goal is “have a successful career writing science fiction novels,” then a good near-term goal would be “finish this novel manuscript by the end of the year.”  The writing life is particularly suited to this kind of goal-setting because many of the steps we have to accomplish are concrete and attainable:  writing every day, submitting stories, attending conferences, reading a certain number of books, finishing a certain number of manuscripts, and so on.  It’s so wonderful being able to check off a step once you’ve accomplished it!

I also think it’s important to differentiate between goals and hopes.  Goals are the steps you have direct control over — writing, revising, getting your work out, educating yourself.  Hopes, or milestones, or wishes, are the parts of a writing career that we’d love to accomplish, but may not have any direct control over.  You might have your heart set on placing your book with a certain publisher — but if that publisher doesn’t buy your work, what do you do?  Landing on bestseller lists, winning awards, getting starred reviews, are all great milestones to aspire to, but be careful about setting your heart on something that you don’t actually have direct control over.  It’s better to focus on what you can actually do.

The last couple of years have been strange for me and my goal-setting process.  Namely, I’ve accomplished the big long-term goal that’s been on my list since I was a teenager:  I’m making a living as a writer.  The day-to-day goals have become habit, and haven’t really changed in years, which sometimes makes me feel like I’m in a bit of a rut.  Rather than look at those daily goals as “goals” anymore, I need to look at them as the good habits that help me accomplish my goals.  And what are the new goals?  In some respects, I’m having to take stock of my whole career:  How do I keep up the momentum I’ve generated?  How do I build on what I’ve accomplished?  Those steps aren’t so easy to pin down.  It’s not like when I was starting out, and the goals on the road to selling my first story were so clearly defined.

I’m still working on my goals for the coming year, but they fall into a couple of different areas.  Business-wise, I want to work on my time management skills so I can maintain the prolific pace I’ve established.  I have many books I want to write, and I want to continue to write short stories as well.  I want to try some new promotional strategies to expand my readership. I want to do new and interesting kinds of promotions, not the same kind of stuff that everyone does.  I need to think about what that would entail.  On the creative side, I have some pie-in-the-sky projects I’d love to tackle:  I’d love to write a comic book and a screenplay someday — entirely new forms of writing I’d have to practice.  I’m still learning and growing as a writer, and if I’m going to keep developing my career I need to keep working on being a better writer.  I have some ideas on how to accomplish this.  Another big goal I have is to pay attention to the rest of my life:  make sure I stay happy and healthy so I can better enjoy my beloved writing life.

You’ll find plenty of lists online of things writers should and shouldn’t do, and they can be good guidelines for how to get started.  But I think it’s important to take a little time for introspection, to really think about your life and what you want to accomplish with your writing career.  Goals shouldn’t be chores you have to slog through — they should be the things that are going to help your dreams come true.

Happy 2012!  I hope your year is getting off to a good start.  Me, I have been perusing the words of wisdom of others:

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

–Emily Dickinson

“Technique alone is never enough.  You have to have passion.  Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder.”

–Raymond Chandler

“How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!  Whether good or bad, it’s done.”

–Virginia Woolf

“Who would write, who had anything better to do?”

–Lord Byron

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

–Winston Churchill

May your coming year be filled with passion and success.