I have always intended to be a science fiction writer. This may strike those who have known me since childhood (or know me now) as strange, but here's the reason for it. When I was writing fairy tales, I still considered myself more of a storyteller than a writer. Odd given that I wrote more short stories than some famous writers (though none are publishable quality but hey, I was 7-10ish), but this is a fact I only realize in the past tense. Had I considered myself a writer then, I would have known that a strict diet of science fiction was not for me...or a strict diet of anything.

But when I discovered authors as a fascinating species of people who told wonderful stories, the authors I discovered were science fiction (ignoring the fact that several have been reclassified as fantasy based on new standards of what counts :p). Had my sister any idea of how much of an absolutist I could be, she would have varied my introduction into books as fun a bit more because this led to years of frustration on her part as I scorned fantasy writers.

Needless to say, if you've been following this LJ at least, I no longer box myself so completely into a single genre. I wrote a bunch of literary stories while taking creative writing in college because that was expected of me, but they in no way impinged on my image of my writer self. I was a science fiction writer and that was that.

Then I discovered that the one author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, who had done the most to capture my imagination with her sociological science fiction actually published writers too. It was not much of a leap to my plan to succeed, a plan still ongoing despite her death because others have picked up at least part of her tradition. The only trouble was that she chose to publish fantasy not science fiction. What should have been an insurmountable barrier to the absolutist me, became instead a challenge. I went cursing and screaming my way into writing fantasy.

I was lucky enough to get all but one rejection with a kind note, something I didn't realize was lucky until years later, but ultimately I could not manage, still can not manage, to write what she's looking for. On the other hand, had she not pushed me to writing fantasy, there are a number of novels under my belt that would never have been written, so overall, I think I came out on top.

What's the relevance of that story? Well, it all becomes clear when you see the statistics that came out of my Story A Day challenge.

I wrote ten stories. The average length was 3,036 words with the longest coming in at 4,765 and the shortest at 1,124.

Of those ten stories, six were science fiction and four fantasy.

The science fiction stories were, on average, shorter (2,776 words) but that was because two of them were less than 1,300 words. The longest was the longest overall.

The fantasy stories averaged 3,427 words, with the shortest being 2,555 and the longest being 4,387.

Therefore, though I had more science fiction stories than fantasy, I had more fantasy word count overall than I did science fiction.

I can't say, at this point, which are my favorite stories because the most recent ones resonate the most just because of proximity, but I will not be surprised to discover some of each genre making it to my top list.

Not quite an analysis, but here's a blow by blow description of writing my last three stories. I got home from BayCon (which involves a five hour drive through the mountains) on Monday night with three stories still to go and the end of the month looming.

Back from BayCon. I'm tired, but had a wonderful time. Survived my first moderation stint thanks to wonderful panelists and participants. (10:22 PM May 25th)

Today is my birthday! I'm bleary eyed and non-productive, but I have a smile on my face :D. (12:10 PM May 27th) Note: I actually started the story on the 26th, but didn't get very far after unpacking and all.

Short story up to 1800 words. That's about it for the day. (12:10 AM May 28th)

More progress on the story, though it's still not done. I think I broke it, to be honest, but maybe editing will patch it back again :). (12:28 PM May 28th)

Time for me to shut everything down and get to bed. Okay, past time, but got into a good programming kick. Sadly, the story remains in progress. (11:52 PM May 28th)

I did it! 4,765 words and has issues, but the story is done :D. (10:17 AM May 29th)

Odd statistic: I have written 95 short stories for Forward Motion's Story a Day since it began in 2003. (12:26 PM May 29th)

And started story 9. It's building as it goes. Not sure exactly where that is, but up to 800 words. (8:49 PM May 29th)

Umm, forgot to update, but as of 1am, story 9 was complete at 2555 words. And this one I didn't break :D. (10:16 AM May 30th)

Since I seem to be updating as I go: Story 10 is conceived, outlined, and about 500 words. I really like this one. SF culture conflict. (1:16 PM May 30th)

Like most writers on a deadline :p, we chose today to rearrange two bedrooms and my study. Furniture, vacuuming, even buying a mattress. (4:16 PM May 30th)

Hmm, good thing there's one more day to go. 10th story stands at 920 words (about 1/3rd), move about 1/3rd done, and I've lost my voice. (11:16 PM May 30th) Note: unrelated loss of voice as I was not using Dragon for these stories.

And DONE! 10 stories in one month. I swear it gets harder each year, but I love the challenge. (11:16 AM May 31th)

Story 7 - Life on the Line (Speculative Fiction)

I have been doing Story a Day since 2003. Some years have been easy, some hard, and some, like this one, just filled with too much other stuff to be able to concentrate. However, analyzing the process is proving quite interesting. For example, SAD 7 has been waiting for me to do something about it forever. It's the 20th and I got the prompt on, I believe, the 8th or 9th. Now there was a lot going on in my life to account for, but ultimately I didn't have even an idea to jot down, though I had some rumbles rolling around in my head.

Today, I sat down with an "or else" hanging over my keyboard and produced an interesting little story, and I mean little at 1124 words, based on that group of random thoughts. It's not a bad story, but neither is it one I feel will cause me, or others, to sit up and take notice. So what's the difference between that and some of the prompts that have haunted me for years because I ran out of time to write them (and do plan to someday)?

Simple. This is tripping over something I already knew (and even mentioned in the Story 6 analysis) but hadn't really nailed down. Prompt writing works best for me when I get a visual of a character. Curve of Her Claw, my story in the Cloaked in Shadow anthology, came to me in a rush as the words "dark elves" gelled around a very distinct figure (which, btw, the artist did an excellent job of capturing). From there, it was just a matter of nailing down the story.

In contrast, From the Ashes, my story in Triangulation 2004, with "hard port," or Unique Worlds which won the Confluence 2007 writing contest, with "fewmets at the end of time," came very slowly, almost teased into existence. In both cases I almost didn't have a story in time for the deadline.

Characters bring their story with them for me. Ideas do not. I do write idea stories, but they may take years to come together and are written in snatches here or there rather than as a concentrated whole pouring out as quickly as I can get my fingers to move (well, on the good days ;)).

What purpose does this serve? I now have a better idea of which generators are the safer to use during SAD, but this extends beyond that. I know if I want to do a themed anthology that offers ideas not characters, there's a good chance it will take me longer to put something together. There's always the idea stories that rush out and kidnap a character into them, but I can't count on those as easily as I can character stories that will shanghai ideas to wrap around. I also know that when on a strict deadline, I should focus on finding the character however the story came to be.

What prompted this analysis is:

A Quick Story Generator:
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/quickstory.php
The theme of this story: dark comedy. The main characters: clumsy novelist and stressed astronomer. The major event of the story: surgery.

Story 6 - Prospects (Science Fiction)

What did I learn from this story?
 
Well, if you'd asked me two hours ago, I would have said that I could NOT write a short story based on something as thin as this even though I generated two characters to make it better:

The tired, rude gigolo who fears people think he/she is a fraud.
The graceful time travel technician.


However, I came up with an idea. I hate writing idea stories. They're much harder, slower, and require more work in the edit.

However, about a third to a half of the way through, Pierre came to life, took hold of the story, brought it over the edge into risque so I had to excerpt a little bit to post on Forward Motion, and I happen to think it ends with a kick in the gut...

The answer then? If I let myself be open to it, even stories I craft rather than create can take on a life of their own and bring me joy.

Of course it's at a WAY nasty length. Too long for flash and too short for anything else :p.


The prompt generator was:
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/quickchar.php

Valerie Comer is running a series on her blog about muses as a side event to her Me, My Muse, and I workshop on Forward Motion and invited me to offer some of my own experience.  Pop over and read all about it here:

http://valeriecomer.com/?p=326

Story 4 - A Ship of the Line (Science Fiction)

This one was the perfect story. I got the prompt the night before, came up with the idea, was too tired to jot it down, and when I woke up in the morning it was still there. So I wrote up a 558 word synopsis to keep it from escaping. Then my day kind of went crazy and it took all day to get to the end, but still, this is why I love SAD. The feeling of getting a solid idea in a flash is a thrill, and then making it happy that same day? Just wonderful.

This story came from here: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/generalpersongen.php

Story 5 - Balance (Fantasy)

This story was an interesting one. I set it down first as a synopsis with two POVs. Then as I was writing it, I thought it would end up too long, so eliminated one of the POVs and futzed with the outline to fix it. Didn't write much of anything most of the day, and panicked at the end. I finished all but about 400 words out of 3,338 using voice recognition (saving frequently but it didn't crash...possibly because I wasn't using it in Trillian and had cleared up some system resources). Where I had noticed before that I tended toward dialogue with VR, this story is oddly not quite narrative but certainly not dialogue heavy. It's a mood piece I guess. I'll see what I think when it comes time to edit.

However, with this one I definitely broke through any worries about Dragon crashing and worries that VR was going to be dialogue heavy.

And whoops, I used the same generator twice: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/generalpersongen.php I guess it really works for me :).  For those who might have read it, this generator brought both Purity, which got an Honorable Mention in the Oceanview Short Story contest, and Ties That Bind, which got an Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future.

Story 3 - Community Service (Science Fiction)

Now for this one I cheated. I'm not proud of it but this is the truth.

I try on the first pass to get one prompt from each generator...just to test things out. I know I'm supposed to use the first prompt I get, but the adventure game generator has never worked for me. On my good days, it offers a novel-length work in synopsis. On my bad, like today, it stymies me entirely. (http://www.bin.sh/gaming/tools/adventure.cgi)

I got the prompt last night before bed (so at 12:20 am), and couldn't even manage to read through the whole thing. Then, this morning, I read through everything only to remember that it provides not just prompts but full plot concepts. And not just one of them but several. In the last few years, I bullied my way through to something, but this year I didn't have the will. So...when nothing much would coalesce into anything useful, I chucked the prompt and skipped to the next generator. Before breakfast was over, I had the beginning to a very odd little story that hits most of the concepts of the prompt and ignores some of the big ones, but it was a fun write.

The prompt I did use was: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/sentai.html, another that has given me novels, but some short stories as well, like Community Service.

Story 1 - Independence (Fantasy)

So...what did I learn in this story?

I learned that I have to hit SAVE even when using Voice Recognition :p. I also learned that I tend to go dialogue heavy through VR and maybe I should try and focus on my storytelling more.

I also learned that trying to recreate the sweet parts from memory after a loss is a sure way to make me avoid writing. And even more importantly, that if I just let the story unfold again, it may be stronger in parts than the lost original.

I used the new Zettercise generator for this one: http://www.fmwriters.com/community/dc/Random_Zettercise.php

Story 2 - Sweetentime (Urban Fantasy)

Unlike the previous one where I didn't know where it was going, this story came together rather quickly in the shower. I actually raced out with my hair in a towel and in my robe to jot down the beginning and a synopsis, to make sure I didn't forget anything. The difficulty with this one was to come up with a way to tell the whole of the story without a lot of mechanical description of how the elves were doing what they'd done or even this world. I think I managed to show the interactions between the worlds okay. I skimmed the other and may have to change that in the revision.

What I learned? Well, I'm still a little iffy on the urban fantasy side. I write contemporary romance and fantasy, but I think the balance of the mundane with the fantastical is very difficult in UF.

This one came from Kat Feete's generator: http://www.katfeete.net/writing/specfic.php

As some of you may know, I descend into the heart of muse insanity each year for my birthday month. In 2003, Holly Lisle started the Story A Day challenge on Forward Motion, www.fmwriters.com, as a one-off dare to produce 31 stories based on online story generators in a single month. I pushed as hard as I could and only managed 25, many of which weren't worth editing. But the rush of ideas and creation and just pure lunacy was addictive.

At this point I don't remember whether I influenced the decision to keep it as an annual event or not, but I certainly appreciated the fact. However, the reoccurring version came in a softer form. You can still drive for the 31 stories, and some do, but there are also levels from 10, 15, and 20 stories in a month.

For the past three years, I have managed only 10 stories, but still, that's more than I write the rest of the months combined. And some of my more solid stories, stories that have reached the final consideration pile in several pro markets, came from this extravagance.

However, between the fact that my son's big school musical always falls in May, and BayCon, a Northern California Science Fiction convention, also does, this challenge leaves little time for my other writing projects.

You won't be hearing much from Molly, for example. And though I hope to finish consolidating the crits for Selkie at least, that may not happen until June.

So, to keep you all busy, I'm copying over my notes for the Advanced Writers Board challenge on Forward Motion. On top of writing the stories, the challenge on the second board is to consider what each story taught you and tell everyone else about it. Sometimes the lessons are trivial, and sometimes they're a real kick in the pants.

I'm starting out behind, so I may combine a few of the shorter ones, but you'll probably see more posts from me because of this than ever before. I just hope you enjoy them, and maybe even learn something about your own process in watching me question mine.

Through Arcane Rules and Procedures, We Persevere Because We Must

This comes as a spinoff from last week's post. In the comments thread, we had a little chat about how most writing rules aren't actual rules for all that the term is uses. New writers often promote them as absolutes when picking up almost any published book would show that's not true, while the phrase, "you have to know the rules before you can break them" is frequently tossed about. However, if they really were rules, there would be consequences (and fame and fortune from breaking them successfully is not what I mean ;)).

In driving, if you run a red light, the only question is whether you're caught. You are guilty. You have broken a rule. There's no way around that fact.

In cooking, if you substitute salt for sugar just because you feel like it, someone's going to notice, and not in a positive way.

But in writing, that's not true. Some of the experimental fiction works prove even the basics, like punctuation and capitalization, are up for interpretation if you manage to do it well. There are no hard and fast rules in writing. Everything is subjective, with the only requirement for success being that you somehow catch the imagination when you do break the rules.

This is a very difficult concept for writers. Most things work on the basis of rules, not just driving and cooking in the examples above. As you gain knowledge of the rules, you automatically improve whether it's blacksmithing, piano, or the aforementioned driving.

But writing doesn't work that way. The rules are different for each writer, the dangers are different, and techniques that help one person can crush another. Even worse, there's no guarantee that with practice we'll improve. Some writers hit a plateau they can't get beyond and others peak early.

It conflicts with our understanding of life and the way things work.

The whole fear of "writing to a prompt" is based on real life where if I follow the same sewing pattern I'll end up with the same thing you do. But that's not true of writing. If we follow the same pattern, some of us will end up with masterpieces of the genre, others will end up with brilliant outliers, and still others' efforts will result in cardboard cutouts that make a reader cringe.

People scoff at romance and detective novels because they are formulaic. Those people are usually the ones who have not read any, or picked up one and dismissed the whole. Put Nora Roberts next to Holly Lisle next to Lucy Monroe next to Lynn Viehl in romance and you'd be hard pressed to figure out that they're writing the same genre. Take it even closer and choose seven Harlequin Presents novels by different authors. Some will be works of art, some will not. Some authors take the formula as a jumping off point, others stick to it rigidly. Some have a spark; others are decent stories but no more than that.

Writing is not rocket science.

In rocket science, if you put the same ingredients into the same mix, you'll get the same explosion. If you find a rocket design that works, you can replicate that design again and again and it'll still work.

In writing, even with the same author, you put the same ingredients in and get something different each time. I have certain themes that show up frequently in my works. However, the result of those themes varies radically and cross genre lines. It takes literary analysis to recognize the patterns; I know only because I have analyzed my works out of curiosity.

Authors who figure out a winning plot structure can use it again just like the rocket scientist, with one simple difference: no guarantee it'll still work, or even that it'll look the same. Successful writers take the same design and create something new every time. If a writer rubberstamps books though, they soon lose readers who despair of shelling out hard earned cash to read the same book with only the character names changed.

Writing taps into one of those places we do not understand, the hidden underpinnings of humanity that make no sense when brought to the light. When it doesn't reach into the swampy darkness, the writing comes out flat, cardboard, or even worse, bland. When it does, tears drip onto the pages, people stare as the reader bursts into uncontrollable laughter, or readers explain in detail why they hate someone to death, only to reveal that someone exists between the covers of a book.

Creativity is a mystical force. The muse is a mystical creature that none can explain or command. Creativity doesn't require practice as much as it requires nurturing. Muses are fickle and tricky, but can be wooed and bribed. Ultimately, most writers could do almost anything else, including minimum wage jobs, and earn more per hour than by writing. Forget any dreams of low stress, hanging out at pubs, sipping your tea with a finger curled as you scribble down the next masterpiece.

I've been a non-fiction editor/abstractor fulltime, I've run systems departments, and now I write and freelance. Of all of them, the editor/abstractor was the most relaxing. Systems and writing run neck and neck, and I never had to put myself in the place of an abusive, manipulating crime boss in systems ;).

This is one of the biggest struggles. We can't see the end of the trail because there is no trail. There is no promotion path laid out, no promise of an income, much less a raise, and no hopes that anything will ever get easier.

Every writer has to cut their own way, though they can borrow another's machete to make the process a little faster. There's no guarantee of success either in improvement or in accolades. And in the measures of modern industrialized society, all but the very cream of writers like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are failures with regards to economic status and stability.

So...if we can't measure success by the hours we've put in, by the income we earn, by moving up the writing ladder, just what is it that keeps writers going? What makes us batter our heads against rules that aren't rules, against skills that might actually undermine our progress, and an environment where we have to crawl past the carrion bodies of other writers who couldn't keep going across the desert in hopes of an oasis at the other side?

Because we have to. Because to do anything else would mean denying our true selves. Because that way lies madness as the voices in our heads start breaking out into reality because we don't keep them confined in fiction.

Whether we love it or hate it, writing is a calling as true as any other, and not one that can be ignored.