The Odds

I have written before about the long odds of writing and publishing. I am now convinced if you write well, which entails a lot, then you just have to find the right reader for the stuff you write. And this may be a huge struggle.

It is frustrating to see stuff published that you write circles around. Does that really happen? Does the industry really care who writes something as long as it is well written? One author rigorously tested that theory.

His funny, but tragic, story is here.

You can find this story in other places, but this blogger reports it well.

Sad Truth About Writing

When two economics professors meet, they talk about economics. When two writers meet, they do not talk about writing. That is part of my experience from meeting lots of professionals at Writers of the Future 27.

When I meet an economics professor, I want to know what area he/she does research in. I want to know what his/her approach to the area is. For instance, in this vein, I might tell another economist that I wrote my dissertation on terrorism. I looked at problems of terrorist bargaining and have published a lot about terrorism and the media. My favorite work I did on the subject showed that if terrorists vie for media attention, then there is an upper bound on the amount of terrorism as they shove each other off the front page and bore the public with more and more events. Then we would talk about what we're working on now.

Two writers talk about the kids and about the crazy thing that happened last week at Costco. They may talk about the business--how a publisher is trying a creative way of cheating them with a new contract offer. But they do not talk about what they just wrote or what they are writing. I have a theory as to why this is true.

Writing is like farming. When two corn farmers meet, they do not show each other pictures of their favorite ears of corn from the last harvest. "Oh, look at the silk on this one! It is enchanting."

There are thousands of farmers. There are thousands of writers. There are tons of corn. There are tons of manuscript pages. When a writer sends a manuscript to an editor it goes into a huge pile, called slush. There are thousands of other manuscripts there. Eventually someone--usually with a lowly station, "reads" them. Maybe they read a paragraph or two of them. When you have to pick one manuscript from a possible two thousand, you are not looking for small flaws that will exclude. You are looking for something that grabs you by the throat. And everyone's throat is different. Here is an article by Mike Resnick, who has published a few million words and has a stack of the top awards in his field.

Professional writers are accustomed to this view. Many writers produce lots of manuscripts and realize that they're going into a big pile--though well-known writers' manuscripts go into a smaller big pile than the slush. And well known writers will see plenty of rejection--which is not personal.

Writers do lots of writing. They see lots of writing. They do not want to talk about writing.

What about economics professors? I am in a class of professors that teaches and does research. And in my area of the profession, twenty-five publications in twenty-two years is considered great. I read about economics--for fun! I love to listen to economics podcasts.

Maybe when two of a different class of economists meet, they are more like farmers and writers. Some economists sit in front of a computer screen all day and churn out spreadsheets showing that this part of an company is efficient or that part is not. When two of these meet, I doubt they say, "My new spreadsheet technique works so well! Look how I pivot those tables. It makes everything so easy."

If writing is so boring, why am I now talking about writing? I'm new to writing--look at the luster of the kernels of this ear! It brings tears to my eyes.

Sad Reality

When reality television began to take hold, I told my students, "Civilization has been excellent. It is a shame to see it end."

Reality television's continual digging for the lowest common denominator is wholly depressing. But up to now, I have not been depressed because I ignore RTV, except for a few minutes here or there. I did write a story that shredded a RTV show.

Today I had a terribly sad thought. I was clicking around the dial and saw a clip of a guy at a gas station that caught his vehicle and himself on fire. He ran a few steps, then stopped, dropped, and rolled, which helped a little. Two other guys helped extinguish his flaming legs. He sustained minor injuries.

RTV displays extremes of human behavior. Video cameras are everywhere, planted for security reasons, planted to make RTV shows, and everyone seems to have a camera on their phone. Writers have the opportunity to see humanity's extremes in ways that were unthinkable fifty years ago. RTV is a gold mine for writers.

I feel like crawling in a hole and crying.

Shouldn't I Know More?

I recently listed some protagonists and antagonists from my writing. You may have noticed that the protagonists have the longer character descriptions. However, I think that writers' antagonists should be as richly developed as their protagonists.

How do I reconcile the last two sentences in the previous paragraph. I withheld more about the antoganists, so as not to kill the suspense. In fact, I withheld some information about the protagonists to preserve some suspense.

Though we usually think of the protagonist as "the good guy," sometimes the protagonist is not so good. The protagonist is the character who is the most changed by the events of the story.

Taken as a whole, who is the protagonist of the first Star Wars trilogy? The person who undergoes the most change over the three films is the guy who is usually credited as the chief bad guy--Darth Vader. Star Wars is Vader's quest, and Luke serves as his guide for the quest.

Bad Authors

I love reading books by good authors. I am glad those authors are out there. I love that these authors are successful and will continue to churn out great books.

Before I started writing, my only view of bad authors was, "What a lousy book. A waste of time and money."

Now that I write, though, I hate bad authors. When I see a book by a bad author on the shelves, red fireworks burst in my brain and my mouth curls into a sneer. The terrible writing I have read by the author comes back to me and I growl and grouse.

I recall a book about a group of people who travel back into the past to explore history first-hand. They run into problems and are stranded in the past. The "characters" are soulless cardboard cutouts. At best, they can be summarized in one sentence. They spend 72 hours or so in the past without sleeping and without eating. and they don't seem to be hungry or falling asleep on their feet--much less on the verge of kidney damage because they have not drunk anything. This was a chronologically continuous account, in which nobody had to use the bathroom. (Don't get me wrong--I'm not that interested in reading/writing bathroom scenes. But if an author is going to follow characters extremely closely for a long time . . .)

I especially hate bad authors who sell lots of books, like the author I mention above. My ill will compounds when people make movies about bad books, like the one above. The reason that I harbor these ill feelings about bad authors, who are not being malicious, but are just incompetent, can be summarized in one word--"jealousy."

The Limitations of Form

I wrote poetry for a year or so. I enjoyed it, then said everything I needed to say, so I stopped. Some of my favorite music uses poetic imagery. But the form of writing limits the author's ability to incorporate different elements.

Fiction authors that attempt to use poetic imagery throughout their work may fail to understand the limits of form. What this reader wants is a story that gets started and keeps moving. Once the motion of the story is established and the reader is inside the author's world, the author has more freedom to use strong poetic images. But, at first, the images are hit-and-miss. The author first has to orient the reader and build up the atmosphere.

In George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones the most cunning, merciless, schemer tells the most heroic, noble, honest character, "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground." In its place, that is a powerful line. The line cannot have the same power in this blog because the reader is not "in" the world of the story.

I recently read the lyrics to Tom Waits's song, A Soldier's Things. It is a powerful, moving song--all the moreso for its subtlety. But the lyrics do not convey the power of the song. The tenderness of the piano and the vulnerability of Waits's voice build the atmosphere. The slow speed of delivery hands the reader one image at a time, slowly, to ponder. Then the last two or three lines of each stanza delivers the punch. It is unbelievably powerful.

But the lyrics of A Soldier's Things on paper or computer screen rob the song of its power. The reader's eye moves too quickly to give the mind time to engage and build the emotional power. A Soldier's Things succeeds as a song, but, for me, fails as a poem. A short story that related the same experience would have many of Waits's excellent concrete images, but they would be couched in the words necessary to make a story and the images would lose their power, being so disbursed.

Many of the songs that I most like are similar to short stories. They have characters, a setting, action/plot, and atmosphere. But very little popular music has these elements. Mostly it has fragmented emotions attached to nothing.

Raising the Stakes

I have not read enough by fiction writers about writing to find out what others feel their strengths and weaknesses are. Some things come naturally for me.

The plot is the essential thing for me. Keep the plot moving toward a climax.

I have a feel for the issues of control of the plot. Before I begin writing, I know the direction and the final destination. But I do not know each step and learn the way as I go. And sometimes I find a new direction and twist, but I always keep moving ahead.

The characters live for me. They feel unique with unique voices.

I have difficulty with two issues. I have discussed my difficulty with decisions about moving the plot ahead, vs. creating an atmosphere.

I also sometimes have difficulty with raising the stakes. Not only does the conflict have to take place. For much of the plot, the protagonist has to face difficulty in moving ahead. Sir Edmund Hillary does not just start at the bottom of the mountain, then execute a plan for climbing and make it to the top. Sir Edmund must sacrifice, suffer, face death, etcetcetc.

So after I write a few scenes, I often must then look into what I have written and say, "Are the stakes high enough for enough of these scenes?" Often I find that I have work to do.

Atmosphere, Point of View, Keeping the Plot Moving: A Modern Example

The problem that I referred to yesterday regarding atmosphere and point of view may be illustrated by considering what you would omit from your diary entries. Consider how someone who is not familiar with our modern world would interpret a typical day. Let's have someone from the Roman Empire read a line from your journal.

I woke up at 7:00 so I could drive to school for my first class.

How many things would you have to explain to give a full picture of this line to your Roman reader? Instead of a full narrative, just make a list. Any list I make will have holes in it, but here are a few things. Some of these concepts would have rough analogies, but would need further explanation. You might be able to picture the Roman reader asking one question after another, leading to the various concepts.

Modern reckoning of time
Alarm clocks
Electricity (the physics/chemistry)
Electric wiring of houses
Electric power generation using fossil fuels
Drilling for oil
Oil pipelines
Oil refining
Nuclear power
Solar power and alternative fuels (and current marketplace irrelevance)
Electric power wiring infrastructure of cities
The modern corporation
Public utility price regulation
Speed of automobiles
Combustion engine
Driver's licenses
Photography
Modern police
Assembly line techniques
Traffic system
Modern university education is specialized
Modern university education is for nearly everyone, not just a small percentage of extremely wealthy individuals
Mixed public/private financing of education
Modern social structure
Modern views of gender
Human capital theory. That is, most university education is sought in order to increase the individual's expected future income (it was not always this way)

I will stop there. You would not think to explain all these concepts in your journal. In fact, I could not competently explain them all. If you did take time out to explain them to your Roman reader, it would be clear that you were not telling a story as you would naturally tell it.

How would you explain any of these concepts? Some of the concepts have analogous concepts for our Roman reader--some don't. An automobile is like a big chariot, which uses a device to give it power (opening up all those questions). Electric wiring of houses and cities is like the aqueducts and public water distribution systems that some major Roman cities had--only for electrons (eesh!).

In fact, you may not understand many of these concepts. I do not have enough familiarity with physics to feel comfortable explaining how spinning a magnet inside a coil of wires generates electric power. Any physicist reading my last sentence is probably banging her head on her computer screen.

I feel more confident about explaining human capital theory vs. screening theory in education. That is, (human capital) does the university actually teach you things that make you more productive on the job? Or (screening) does the university just provide a difficult challenge that requires intellect, problem solving ability, and perseverance, so that students who can and will navigate the university maze and get a degree has shown that they will be good employees (though they learned nothing useful in the maze).

You can see that your Roman reader would need a great deal of explanation to get a full picture of what was really happening in your sentence. And if you provide these details, you won't tell much of a story. But if you change the time to "shortly after dawn" and change "drive" to "went," your Roman reader might have a clear (and terribly unrealistic) picture of what transpired and you can get on with your story.

Authors must satisfy themselves that they know enough about their world to tell others about it. Then they must tell enough so that the reader can understand the world without getting bogged down in the details. And the author's narrator (depending on the point of view that the author uses) must relate the important aspects of the world in a natural fashion.

My pet peeve involves modern writers who feel they have to describe every mundane traffic route from one location to another. "I took the 101 to the Santa Bozo Freeway until I was nearly to Plotzville. Then I drove west on highway 42 for five miles and took a dirt road until I saw a man standing beside the road with a sign that said, "Shut up. We don't care how you drive to work."

Atmosphere vs. Point of View in Fiction

Nirvana Cat, set in the year 1857, is told from the viewpoint of Vincent, a naïve Augustinian monk. Vincent lives in a relatively large city and, thus has an excellent understanding of city life in his time. He is accustomed to the fact that the streets are worse than stables, with horse and human waste deposited there day after day. He is accustomed to coal smoke from industry and from consumer use.

As author, I seek to transport the reader to Europe in 1857 to enjoy Vincent’s experiences as he tries to thwart a steampunk Muslim bioterror attack on the west. But I am limited by Vincent. He will not tell you, the reader, about many things that he considers to be commonplace. And, of course, he cannot tell you about things that he does not know or understand.

This tension between establishing an atmosphere and creating a viewpoint exists when fiction involves a world with which the reader is not familiar. Some atmospheric details can be slipped in quietly, but others are more difficult. The author has to be reconciled to the fact that the reader will not be able to learn everything about the setting and characters that the author knows.

Some of the many odds and ends about the setting and characters that were not revealed in the story follow.

1. A pickelhaub is the Prussian military helmet with the spike on top.
2. Most of India’s Mughal Emperors were extremely religiously tolerant. They were Muslims, but tolerated Hindus. The last Mughal Emperor even took part in Hindu ceremonies when it was permitted and entertained Hindu philosophers at court.
3. There was tension between the Mughal Emperor and a class of Muslims in India, who felt that the emperor’s religious toleration was not in accordance with the Koran.
4. John Stuart Mill, the most prominent economist of the era, formulated our modern conception of libertarianism. That is, I should be allowed to take actions that do not materially harm anyone, even if 99% of voters think my actions are “bad.”
5. Some scholars suspect that Gregor Mendel, the monk revered as the father of modern genetics, fudged his experimental results so as to obtain the precise results that he thought were correct. This takes nothing away from Mendel’s conclusions.
6. Brunn, Austria was eventually to become Brno, Czechoslovakia.
7. Children were often born and raised by mothers housed in London’s Newgate prison.
8. By the time the Mughal Empire ended, when the British crushed the Sepoy rebellion, the emperor only ruled one large compound of buildings in India.
9. The Brunn monestary in 1857 was the only Augustinian abbey; the rest were priories.
10. The British East India Company was created in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. Good luck, Bill Gates.

Evil in Fiction

I was prepared to write the end of Furnace Angel. I had a general idea of how to I wanted to resolve the plot. But as I looked at the story and considered the resolution, I realized that the ending was not going to deliver a modern horror story. People with subscriptions to horror magazines demand a resolution that is unsettling--one that makes me queasy.

So I twisted the ending into one that made me queasy. The ending was EVIL.

It was so evil that I did not know if I could live with it. That presented me with the question, "Will John Arkwright write horror?" I thought about it quite a bit. I could try to change the ending. There might be even more horrific endings that I could live with. I contemplated other endings.

My problem was resolved in Sunday school. Some verses in Isaiah discuss "calling good, 'evil' and calling evil, 'good.'" I mentioned my story ending in class. Before I knew it, I put forth a point from an Orson Scott Card essay.

Evil enters fiction in three ways.

Fiction can depict evil. The scriptures depict plenty of evil. And a great deal of conflict in fiction portrays someone who is a bad guy. In order to see good triumph, we must see evil. In order to teach someone how to behave, one often has to also teach them how not to behave.

Fiction can advocate evil. Not only does evil happen in the story, but the evil outcome is the "right" outcome from the writer's point of view.

Fiction can enact evil. Child erotica is evil on its face.

That gave me a good standard for the horror story. Furnace Angel certainly does not enact evil. I have to make sure that Furnace Angel does not advocate evil. I may change the ending. I may not. I have more thinking to do. But now I have my standard. Thank you, Uncle Orson.