On writing
MORE ON MY FAVORITE TOPIC: ME!
Deadprogrammer (http://www.livejournal.com/users/deadprogrammer/) asks Q: Does GUEST LAW tie in somehow with the Phoenix trilogy and the rest of the stories?
A: Not to my knowledge. However, if the crew of the Procrustes (in Guest Law) were descended from colonists or rebels from the Second Oecumene (in THE GOLDEN AGE), they would have ghost-stories about the evil machines that had swallowed the Earth and reduced mankind there to pets. Keep in mind that an author can sometimes be as surprised to discover a tie-in when he invents it, as the reader when he reads it.
Q: It would be really great if Tor published an anthology of your stories. They are truly excellent.
A: Please feel free to pass your opinion on this matter to Mr. David Hartwell at Tor books.
Q: I am also curious about your creative process. How do you work?
A: You should never ask a writer this question. We are a boastful lot, and prone to exaggerate our powers, so as to create the mystique and glamour needed to sell our wares. Have you never written a paper for school? The process of writing a novel, in essence, is the same. Except novels are longer, and require dogged and irrational persistence to see through to the end.
Q: I am also curious about your creative process. How do you work?
Well, since you insist on an answer, good sir, I will oblige.
I write entirely by intuition, without forethought, off the cuff. I start at the beginning, write one draft, and end at the ending. The turmoil, trouble, care and pain that bedevil other writers, I am blissfully unaware of, and I know not why. On the other hand, they may be better than I am, so neither of us has cause for complaint.
A modern man of talent thinks he is a genius, and is proud of his work. An old-fashioned man of talent thinks he is possessed of a genius, and is thankful for his good fortune. I am old-fashioned.
It is like fishing. The fisherman is not responsible for the fish he catches, its beauty or its sleekness or its taste: but he can feel a workmanlike pride in the fact that he took the time and trouble to sit with his rod at the fishing hole every day, and be patient. The fisherman who casts even when the fish are not biting, is like the writer who writes even when the muse is mute: any man who lacks the courage to stare at blank paper, he can never be a writer.
Sometimes I get stuck, and have to revise: not often. Since I am a newspaperman, I can write quickly, and I have trained myself not to get writers block (which is an affectation of the pride, in my humble opinion: self-consciousness).
But, since I foolishly write without an outline, when I get stuck and must change things, hundreds of page, hours and days of work, go to waste. Alas! Do not follow my methods, young writers!
The reason why I can write impromptu is that (would you have guessed?) I have moderated role-playing games for many a-year.
Yes, good old fashioned Dungeons and Dragons, but with, perhaps, a little more intrigue, soap-opera and detective story-lines than Mr. Gygax intended. (Also, not his dice mechanics. I prefer RUNEQUEST by Chaosium, as more flexible and logical).
Hence, I learned how to fashion a plot out of the elements current to hand, with characters not under my control, while creating the illusion that everything is made up in detail beforehand. And, as any moderator of a game might tell you, you must improvise immediately as your players deviated from the planned script, since your players will instantly lose their suspension of disbelief if the moderator seems to hesitate, or puts the game on hold while he makes up what must happen next.
So, to write a story, I do this: I sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper, and take dictation from the muse Urania, sometimes Thalia, sometimes Cleo.
Without exception, I begin when I am presented by an arresting visual image: a ringed sun rising over a range of walking plant-beings, fire in their upper branches; an ancient starship crewed by tattooed and half-naked mutants, lurking silently in the void; a golden armored starship, utterly streamlined, and larger than any other work of man; a blonde teenaged girl in a school uniform, running, realizing for the first time that the boy she could always outrun as a child, is forever after going to be faster and stronger than she; a mansion overlooking the sea, with men in silver armor below the waves, drowned but still alive, their hair flowing in the current, while a distant bell unheeded sends echoes out across the moonlit waves. (These last two are the openings of ORPHANS OF CHOAS and LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS).
I discover some logic to explain where and how the image could fit into the universe, what type of society or peoples could have produced the things seen there. I am a cynical man, so I think of the natural conflicts that would have to be present in that society. One discovery leads to another. The natural conflicts present in the scene suggest themselves: I write the first line.
Once I have written the first line, logic dictates that the first paragraph and the first chapter must build upon or challenge the assumptions in the first line. The first characteristic of a character determines logically what type of character he must be. The first plot-action determines the second plot-action. The mood of the first bit of description establishes the tone and “voice” of the tale.
From the first action on, the story is like a chessgame. At every move by the protagonist, I calculate what the several possible responses of the antagonist might be, given his limited information. I assume the protagonist, given his limited information, will respond to that response. In each case, I attempt to make each option both narrow (only two possibilities), costly (Quick! Do you want your wife, or the starship?) and limited in time (The bomb will go off in seven seconds). I select the point of view from which the scene will be told in order to control the hints and clues being fed to the reader, so as neither to sate him with too much info (a flaw of my writing, obviously), nor to cheat him of essential clues that would have allowed him too easily to figure out what is to happen next.
Gene Wolfe, much as I admire a man who is obviously inspired by a God more profound, august, and wise, than the lighthearted pagan muses who assist me, is a writer who, in my humble opinion, serves too thin a diet of clues: he is too subtle for me.
The reason why I can write so intuitively, is due, I suspect, to my irrational faith that rationality always discovers underlying patterns, causes, and implications in even arbitrary assumptions.
If you will indulge me, I will use several examples: the fiery trees must be an alien planet. There is no economic reason to travel to an alien planet; without faster-than-light drive, the distances are too far. Only an extraordinary incentive could compel men to spend decades reaching a destination: a religious motive, or the secret of eternal life. Therefore there is a Jesuit expedition on this planet, which holds the secret of eternal life. John W. Campbell Jr. once challenged his writers to write a tale where intelligent aliens had to be slain to grant men longevity. I did not recall that any of his stable of writers took up the gauntlet: I did here.
Second example: if the starship is streamlined, we must assume that it travels at a velocity much greater than normal, so fast that the one-particle-per cubic kilometer of open space is dense to her. We also have to assume that there is much more dust and dark matter between the stars than current theory suggests, making star travel more difficult than it might appear to us. Only a very long-lived peoples could travel between the stars, therefore assume humans have learned how to become immortal. Physical bodies would wear out: assume an electronic form of immortality, where memories are freely and rapidly downloaded from one form to another, at will. If the ship is to be the center of a conflict, obviously, some want her to sail, others not. If she is the only one of her kind, it has to be the folly of a rich man, and so the society must be libertarian enough to allow for the capital formation needed to fund such foolish ventures, but conservative enough to have mechanisms in place to oppose and obstruct such things. It cannot be like our modern mixed-economy socialism. The Victorian period was the last time in history when private fortunes could be accumulated without massive looting by the state, and the Victorians were ruled by an informal system of mores, stronger than their laws. Therefore assume the hero will be snubbed and shunned, rather than arrested, if he persists in his dream of sailing his starship. Given the fluidity of memory and identity postulated above, the obvious way to resolve the matter, would be to have him forget about it. But, since reality is not amenable to the type of falsification and pretense involved, there would have to be clues still present that our hero might stumble across.
By the way: do not be misled by these examples. This is not the intellectual process I actually went through. This is my attempt to reconstruct the intellectual process of the muse that inspires me. I am only taking dictation, as it were.
I suppose modern people might scoff at the muse, and claim that it is my subconscious mind that it doing this intellectual process. Unfortunately, Occam’s razor does not allow me to postulate the existence of any entities not required by the hypothesis. The idea of a “subconscious” consciousness is, of course, a contradiction in terms. My ideas come from the unknown. To call the unknown “sub-consciousness” is merely to affix a meaningless label. Far more likely that the unknown is a Greek goddess dancing atop Mount Ida, or Mount Pelion, or by the side of the springs of the Hypocrene, while the Shining God, his deadly bow put down, takes up his harp divine and rules their revels with his measure: I ask you, is it more likely that I am doing this myself, in a fashion I myself am unaware of?
Q: Do you create a detailed outline first and then fill in the flesh of the stories?
A: God in heaven, how I wish I did! No, I write out who scenes in first draft, sometimes hundreds of pages, which I need to throw away if I change my mind. An alert reader will detect the lack of craftsmanship in my pages. I suspect that Heinlein and Robert Jordan write the same way I do, because their scenes, like mine, betray a certain self-indulgence and meandering motion. Young writers should not copy me! Copy Jack L. Chalker, who claims (and I have no reason to doubt his claim) that he outlines extensively, and plots out his endings before he writes his beginnings. Copy Ayn Rand, who does not have a character, a scene, or even a word in place without having a good and clear reason for it.
For example, there is a scene in the end of GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE, where the identity of the Old Man who first accosted Phaethon is revealed, the one who told him he was a hated outcast, not the popular celebrity he thought himself. While Daphne was trying to guess who he might be, I was as eager as she was to find out. I did not know myself until I typed the words.
Q: Do you put together huge maps with historical timelines, technology and other details of you worlds?
No, and no. God in heaven, how I wish I did! I carry it all in my head.
Since most of my ideas are filched without shame from other and better authors than myself, it is easy to keep track of. Phaethon, the immortal with bad memory being hunted by a sinister conspiracy, is, of course, my version of Gilbert Gosseyn from A.E. van Vogt’s WORLD OF NULL-A. The name is from Greek myth. The way he talks is from Jack Vance. The far future history is an invention of Olaf Stabledon; the Golden Age is Greek. The word “Sophotect” was invented by Poul Andersen in HARVEST OF STARS, which is the best science fiction book written in the last 20 years, and him the only writer who could have written it.
While I am writing, I occasionally jot down notes on historical persons mentioned in the text, dates, distances, and other matters where it is easy for an author to contradict himself. Since most of the action of GOLDEN AGE and ORPHANS OF CHAOS takes place on Earth, I studied earthly maps to put my locations.
GOLDEN TRANSCENDENCE, for example, has a appendix at the end, where the historical Mental Structures are mentioned in brief, as well as a short essay on the naming conventions and laws of the Golden Oecumene.
Q: Do you keep notebooks with ideas?
Yes. I carry one in my pocket at all times, and I have a file for story ideas on my computer. Whenever I get a story idea, I jot it down.
Q: What kind of a word processor do you use?
A: I am not sure. It is a computer with flashy lights and buzzers. When it breaks, I cry to my friend Bill Erskine, and he does something magic, and it works again. I think there are little men inside it, who mess up my files. They are small and buzz like bees. Bad men! Bad men! Leave my files alone!
Q: Oh, and I have another question. How do rights to short stories work? Let’s say you publish a short story in a magazine. Does it mean that the magazine becomes the holder of intellectual rights to that story? Can you publish it somewhere else?
A: Typically, short story sales cover First North American reprint rights only. Many publishers also ask for first anthology reprint rights. Some magazines ask for first anthology rights as well. The magazine does not become the holder of any rights aside from the specific ones granted by the writer. All this is controlled by the contract you sign with the publisher. You own the story. The magazine is renting it for a limited use.
Legally, you are allowed to publish it elsewhere if you wish, or even contribute it to the public domain. In practice, however, magazines seek for original fiction only: sending an editor a story that has been reprinted elsewhere is wasting his time and abusing his courtesy.
Magazines who accept second-run stories, will say so in their guidelines. FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES. They are eager to send them to you. They exist for a reason. We are in a business, and we conduct ourselves professionally, and show each other professional courtesy. If you are uncertain, send a query letter.
Anthologies will often print second-run works. By definition, “Best Of” anthologies contain second-run works. Certain authors whose names are famous enough, can convince editors to publish anthologies of their previous work. Other anthologies, which are based on theme, often prefer original material.
Read WRITER’S MARKET. All typical questions asked by novice writers are answered there in plain language. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582971897/qid=1065049188/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-0191641-9564873
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
