The "15 Things About Me and Writing" meme
Dec. 14th, 2005 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithFalling in line like a good little writerbot...
1. My teachers always told me that I could write. In grade school, Sister Assumpta used to help make my life miserable by reading my essays in front of the class. When she realized it bothered me, she sent me out of the room on errands, but I always returned before she was able to finish whatever I had written at the time.
2. I never really thought about being a writer until I was in my 20s, but didn't do much about it until I hit my 30s.
3. I read little SF/F. I tend to compare and contrast with work I've written or would like to write, and end up cowed or irritated. Major exception--Terry Pratchett, probably because I know I will never be able to write anything like that. Ever.
4. I believe that if you keep up with recent scientific advances and read history, you can write SF/F. True or not, it's my delusion and I'm sticking with it.
5. My favorite writer-of-the-moment is Ian Rankin, the Scots mystery writer. He writes office politics better than anyone I've ever read, with John le Carre running a close second in that regard. I love office politics. A well-described meeting is a great way to define a society and its expectations and limitations.
6. I can't see myself ever writing a male protag. I'll write male POV, but not as the primary character. I will either write middle-aged female or a younger female who has been knocked around by life enough that she is essentially middle-aged. I couldn't write an ingenue to save my life. The sarcasm would creep in eventually.
7. I've committed to writing a short work, which scares me a bit because I've never sold a short work. I wrote a couple of things in the early 90s that were rejected. Since then, it's been all novels. I think long and convoluted.
8. Stories usually come to me via an image in my mind's eye, often triggered by something I'm doing at the time. A few years ago, I was walking King along the bike trail when something caught my eye. It was a tarp or some plastic object, bright blue in color, lying (laying?? See #12) on the slope of a ravine. I imagined it a cape, then imagined someone walking over to it, attracted by the color. Since then, I've worked up synopses for a fantasy trilogy, and guess what? That scene doesn't figure in the story anymore.
9. I'm a slow writer. I wish it wasn't true, but I am. The most I was ever able to kick out in a day was 23 manuscript pages, and I couldn't write the next day. My brain felt like a wrung-out washrag.
10. I can't escape by writing. Things have to be going well for me to be able to concentrate. If life is proving a challenge, I tend to listen to music and ruminate, or read.
11. I'm an introvert personality, and I write in an introvert way--start slow, ruminate ruminate, erase, start over, ponder ponder ponder, erase. Worry over a scene until the words are exactly right. I'll never wow the assembled with glittering monologues, and I'll never be an off-the-cuff essayist. It takes me too long to get the right words, and that wrecks the spontaneity.
12. I have never diagrammed a sentence. Some terms for parts of speech are a mystery to me. At times, my grammar stinks. I write by feel--if it sounds right to my ear, I assume it's correct. The editors out there can weep now.
13. I would love to write a good horror thriller. I think scaring readers out of their wits is one of the best things a writer can do.
14. I don't think I would have become a writer if I had to write longhand or use a typewriter. I edit so much as I go along that anytime I do write longhand, I have a unreadable mess on my hands after only a paragraph or two. I fear I am a product of the desktop age.
15. I dropped the only creative writing class I ever took.
1. My teachers always told me that I could write. In grade school, Sister Assumpta used to help make my life miserable by reading my essays in front of the class. When she realized it bothered me, she sent me out of the room on errands, but I always returned before she was able to finish whatever I had written at the time.
2. I never really thought about being a writer until I was in my 20s, but didn't do much about it until I hit my 30s.
3. I read little SF/F. I tend to compare and contrast with work I've written or would like to write, and end up cowed or irritated. Major exception--Terry Pratchett, probably because I know I will never be able to write anything like that. Ever.
4. I believe that if you keep up with recent scientific advances and read history, you can write SF/F. True or not, it's my delusion and I'm sticking with it.
5. My favorite writer-of-the-moment is Ian Rankin, the Scots mystery writer. He writes office politics better than anyone I've ever read, with John le Carre running a close second in that regard. I love office politics. A well-described meeting is a great way to define a society and its expectations and limitations.
6. I can't see myself ever writing a male protag. I'll write male POV, but not as the primary character. I will either write middle-aged female or a younger female who has been knocked around by life enough that she is essentially middle-aged. I couldn't write an ingenue to save my life. The sarcasm would creep in eventually.
7. I've committed to writing a short work, which scares me a bit because I've never sold a short work. I wrote a couple of things in the early 90s that were rejected. Since then, it's been all novels. I think long and convoluted.
8. Stories usually come to me via an image in my mind's eye, often triggered by something I'm doing at the time. A few years ago, I was walking King along the bike trail when something caught my eye. It was a tarp or some plastic object, bright blue in color, lying (laying?? See #12) on the slope of a ravine. I imagined it a cape, then imagined someone walking over to it, attracted by the color. Since then, I've worked up synopses for a fantasy trilogy, and guess what? That scene doesn't figure in the story anymore.
9. I'm a slow writer. I wish it wasn't true, but I am. The most I was ever able to kick out in a day was 23 manuscript pages, and I couldn't write the next day. My brain felt like a wrung-out washrag.
10. I can't escape by writing. Things have to be going well for me to be able to concentrate. If life is proving a challenge, I tend to listen to music and ruminate, or read.
11. I'm an introvert personality, and I write in an introvert way--start slow, ruminate ruminate, erase, start over, ponder ponder ponder, erase. Worry over a scene until the words are exactly right. I'll never wow the assembled with glittering monologues, and I'll never be an off-the-cuff essayist. It takes me too long to get the right words, and that wrecks the spontaneity.
12. I have never diagrammed a sentence. Some terms for parts of speech are a mystery to me. At times, my grammar stinks. I write by feel--if it sounds right to my ear, I assume it's correct. The editors out there can weep now.
13. I would love to write a good horror thriller. I think scaring readers out of their wits is one of the best things a writer can do.
14. I don't think I would have become a writer if I had to write longhand or use a typewriter. I edit so much as I go along that anytime I do write longhand, I have a unreadable mess on my hands after only a paragraph or two. I fear I am a product of the desktop age.
15. I dropped the only creative writing class I ever took.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 03:30 am (UTC)I'm with you on #4--never thought about it that way before, but it makes perfect sense.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 04:32 am (UTC)It's my response to the sense I used to get from some skiffy writers that I had to have whacked my way through vast stretches of the canon in order to write the stuff. Is skiffy the only genre where you're expected by some to have read everything that went before? Do they expect this in mystery? Romance?
I read Ellison, Asimov, and many, many short works in the late 60s/early 70s. Then I didn't read any more SF until the mid-90s. Read all the Moon and Bujold I could get my hands on, and secure in the knowledge that skiffy was now replete with middle-aged female protagonists (insert straight face here), I dug into New Scientist and a bunch of medical textbooks, then dove/dived headfirst into Jani's world.
I recommend New Scientist to one and all, whether you want to write or just want to keep up with scientific advances. Lovelovelove that magazine.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 02:39 pm (UTC)I mentioned the Jani Killian books in a recent article for Rabble for just this reason.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 05:12 pm (UTC)It's funny--reading Moon and Bujold was what convinced me that my 42 year-old scarred survivor would find company in a flourishing market. Then sometime in the early 2000s, I was sitting on a Wiscon panel with Gerri Balter and a few other women discussing middle-aged and older female protags. I mentioned how reading B&M convinced me that there was a place for Jani. Gerri then chimed in that prior to the start of the panel, she and another panelist were trying to think of writers who were writing M-AFPs, and came up with Moon, and Bujold, and...me.
I lucked into some very selective reading, and from there assumed a subgenre.
There are more M-AFPs out there now, thankfully.
I belong to another list consisting mostly of romance writers, and something that one of them recently posted bothered me. She wrote that she preferred to read books featuring younger female protags, because they worked for her more as escape lit. As someone who was middle-aged and who was dealing with the resultant issues, she didn't want to read about someone dealing with the same issues. I realize she was qualifying things here, and everyone os certaintly entitled to read what they want. But when you have middle-aged women saying that they don't want to read stories featuring middle-aged women, it makes me wonder whether true market inroads can ever be made.
Do men feel the same way? Do middle-aged men prefer to read about younger male protags? Is a middle-aged man with middle-aged issues something they don't want to read about since they already deal with it every day?
I speak as someone who considers Angst the One True Path, so I'm probably not the right person to be pondering this issue.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 04:33 pm (UTC)-->Thank you for saying this out loud!
Sometimes I wonder about all that, because the canon only gets bigger. Yes, everyone should read enough in their genre to know generally what's been done before, and to get an idea of...I wouldn't say the expectations of the market, but perhaps the things that make it a genre.
But that can be accomplished by reading what they like to read for fun. Presumably, few writers are writing in genres they don't like and read themselves.
Off on a tangent, then back in time for tea
Date: 2005-12-16 06:36 pm (UTC)It was more difficult to say than I thought it would be because SF seems to *me* to be one of the most backward-looking genres there is. It seems odd given the fact that it's supposed to be populated by futurists. Maybe it's due to the fact that the genre is so relatively new and by its nature not as structured as mystery or romance. There are no real ground rules--lots of opinion, like the stuff that's been flying back and forth for the last few weeks--but beyond requiring that some point of the main plot turns on some scientific principle, there's no real plot pattern that I can see that defines it. No developing relationship. No uncovering of the crime and the perpetrator.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why its popularity isn't what it was. There's no element of Story-with-a-capital-S that's inherent in the genre. If you have relationships, you're borrowing from romance. A crime or a discovery, you're borrowing from mystery. What SF had going for it in the beginning was the shock of the new *everything*, the thrill of discovery of *anything*, and as the thrill died away and promises faded unfulfilled (see
But folks are still trying to go back and uncover the Golden Whatever that made SF so glorious for a time. Problem is that they can't find it, because there is no There there, and so they respond by striking out at any other genre that has the nerve to be popular because it fulfills the Story needs that large numbers of readers possess.
And where the hell is this going and what is the point?
Much of what I learned about what worked and didn't in skiffy, I learned from--wait for it--reading Usenet rec.arts.sf.written gripes about what posters considered bad SF. Monolithic alien cultures--bad. Ok, study some anthro and soc, open eyes and look around, read the papers, and build a real multicultural culture. Unpronouncable names with impossible glottal stops--bad. Don't use apostrophes (even though I think I could have justified some). Check out a few language building sites, and minimize the use of my new language to minimize the chances of my looking like an idiot.
Unworkable political and economic systems. Unworkable militaries. I mean, the handwaving necessary to get readers to believe the faster-than-light ships is the easy part. But if that slice of science hangs together, and the rest of the story doesn't--are you going to draw in readers for whom the more sociological/anthropological/economic/other stuff matters?
My crisis of faith involves the fact that SF that doesn't work for me doesn't work in ways that define it as SF. It's all the nonSFnal political/economic/relationship/mystery/character stuff that, when it fails to grab me, causes me to set the book aside. Maybe that defines me as a member of some band of illiterati, but the simple thrill of discovery isn't enough for me. And yes, I wonder often why I decided to write something defined as SF.