|
Please note that this page is not meant as an instructional course in the art of writing — it really is merely a forum in which I can answer questions put to me on a regular basis.
I started writing creatively when I was in
elementary school. I woke up one morning with the previous night's dream
vivid in my mind and felt I had to commit it to paper.
I began writing short stories in junior
high. A couple of these appeared in school annual literary publications.
I wrote my first novel, a heroic fantasy, at age 16, and if I'm a very
lucky person no other human eyes will ever see it.
At some point in junior high I decided
that writing was what I wanted to do for a living. Subsequently, in high
school, I made a very good decision and studied journalism and typing,
two disciplines that have helped me throughout my writing career.
In general, it has been very positive.
Early on, I went through years of financial uncertainty, which is one of
the likely negative consequences of this career choice. But I get a lot
of mail from people whom I have entertained and, very occasionally, from
people whose lives my work seems to have improved. I have had mail from
people who didn't enjoy reading before they encountered my work, and now
enjoy it, which I consider a major victory.
Ultimately, I wouldn't trade my career for
any other.
No.
A lot of people write to ask whether I
might take a look at the scripts, novels (partial or complete), short
stories, role-playing game characters, or other creative efforts they have
completed before they begin sending them out to editors.
My answer is always no. It has to be.
I don't have the time, and, if truth be
told, I generally don't have the interest. Most of my work time is
taken up with writing and rewriting. When I'm done with that work for
the day, I desperately need to do other things if I'm to retain my
sanity and not burn out.
Also to the point, I'm a writer, not an
editor, agent, or career consultant. If I'm working at evaluating
your work, I'm not doing my work.
So, ultimately, I'm going remain
professionally selfish and decline to evaluate your work.
And here's a word of advice for those of
you who read these words and decide to ask the same thing of another
writer: That writer may or may not be annoyed by the request, but you
can be certain that he or she will be annoyed if you attach
your manuscript to the e-mail that includes your initial request.
Don't send a writer a manuscript unsolicited. It's rude and may
prejudice the writer against you.
Write every day, and don't stop writing
to await feedback. Don't send out your story or query or pitch
package and then wait for an answer. Do another one. And another one.
And another one. On and on, forever. Many editors take note when they've
rejected the same almost-ready-for-prime-time writer for the umpteenth
time and will give such a writer consideration over a writer of similar
skill who has just submitted for the first time. Such editors know that
a writer like this is determined and productive, two qualities they want
to see.
Read a lot. Read mostly writers who
are very good at what they do — ease back on the works of writers you
consider "guilty pleasures." (Be prepared, over the years, to begin
disliking authors you once thought were very good and whom you once
enjoyed very much. As your writing skills improve, your recognition of
inferior writing will cause you to fling novels by some of your
once-favorite authors across the room, and you'll forever lose these
sources of entertianment.)
Find impartial advance readers.
Subject your writing to the scrutiny of people with strong language
skills who are willing to hurt your feelings in their analyses of your
efforts. (But watch out for those whose chief goal is to hurt
your feelings, rather than help you improve your skill.)
Start submitting. Begin submitting
your work to professional markets well before you're convinced you're
ready to do so — the editors representing those markets will let you
know when you're ready, and in the meantime you might find some helpful
advice in their rejection notices.
Don't look for a magic key. A lot
of people write me in the hope that I'll be able to give them some sort
of secret password or handshake — or any type of inside knowledge —
that will land them a sale. Well, there isn't any such thing. Just
write, get better at your profession, and keep away from get-rich-quick
and get-published-without-skill schemes.
Don't invest your hopes in the luck of
others. Many aspiring writers see stories about first-time writers
who sold their first novel for a million bucks or more. They spend their
time analyzing how these writers accomplished this feat — and do so
instead of spending their time learning their craft. Sure, learn how the
market works, learn the cold and heartless economic truths that are the
part of the foundation of the publishing trade, and exploit them if you
choose — but don't do any of this at the expense of learning how to
write well.
Don't blame anyone else. It's easy
for a beginning writer to come to the conclusion that the odds are
stacked against him or her. (They are.) Or that there's a conspiracy at
work to keep him or her from ever being published. (There isn't.) The
simple fact is this: If at some point you conclude that your inability
to get published is the fault of some outside force, you've pretty much
doomed yourself. Regardless of whatever forces are working against you,
from your own inexperience to the alignment of the planets, if you sit
around assigning blame rather than overcoming them, you probably won't
get published.
That's a question whose answer varies from
writer to writer. If you don't know the best answer for yourself, you
should try writing both ways to see which one works best for you.
I outline. In fact, originally, I outlined
them very heavily. One of my outlines would typically be about 10% the
length of the finished novel and full of detail.
Subsequently, I've reduced the amount of
outlining I do, for two reasons: My original outlines were much longer
than the standard outlines included in novel proposals (making people
reluctant to read them), and when actually writing the novels I tended
to deviate from my outlines often enough that all the extra detail
tended to be wasted.
My current outlines are about a third the
length of the ones I used to do.
I suppose it involves never being
satisfied with your own work, recognizing that each piece you've done
could have been better, deciding that each new piece you do will be
better than the previous one. Whenever I start to feel comfortable with
the sort of work I'm doing, I make the next project more difficult for
myself, such as by working with a larger cast of characters, playing
with points of view I haven't used before, and so on.
It's also important to realize that a
written work is a sort of interface between the writer's brain and the
readers' brains. I write to entertain myself, certainly, but I have to
take into account the fact that I don't speak exactly the same brand of
English as anyone who reads my work, nor do I think exactly the same way
any of my readers do. Communicating effectively with the readers means,
first, learning how they interpret what they read and, second, striking
a good balance between the way I want to express things and the ways
they want to interpret them.
When you boil it down, fiction is a sort of vicarious experience — you're handing the reader a package of events he can experience without ever having lived through them. I think, therefore, that the only responsibility that is universal among writers is to provide experiences worth experiencing. These don't have to be life-changing events or new perspectives on the meaning of life; sometimes it's enough just to entertain. But if a work of fiction doesn't make the reader's life better in some way — perhaps only very briefly — then it fails this "responsibility" test.
You have to realize that publishers want
to deal with writers across a span of years or decades, meaning they're
not generally interested in someone who just wants to get one novel in
print to fulfill a life's ambition.
You have to keep working, and working
hard, in a profession that is often not financially rewarding for the
first several years years. (The general belief in the industry is that
it takes about ten years of professional accomplishment to become a
"success" in the field of novel writing.)
You have to set out to learn about your
industry, understanding the complex relationships between writers,
agents, publishers, and readers, learning such things as the
relationship between the advance you receive and the enthusiasm
expressed for your work by the publisher's marketing department,
understanding as much as you can about distribution networks, etc. —
far more than this short FAQ page can explain.
You have to abandon the concept of
"author" (an author is someone who has written a book and goes on
glamorous signing tours, but never seems to do any work) and focus on
being a "writer" (someone who spends most of his professional life
thinking or pounding away at a keyboard in a necessarily unglamorous
lifestyle).
You have to develop a thick skin;
rejection is a part of every writer's life, and you have to learn to
deal with it.
You have to work every day, whether it
seems to be rewarding or not.
Finding an agent is similar in execution
to finding a publisher. You write something, you prepare it to standard
manuscript-formatting practice, you research your market (in this case,
the field of literary agents; lists of agents appear in various
magazines and other resources, but I don't know which), you pick your
first target, and you send him/her/them your manuscript. (Second
chorus:) You get rejected, you evaluate comments accompanying the
rejection (if any) and incorporate any you find particularly persuasive,
you revise your manuscript, you pick your next target, you send in your
manuscript again. (Third chorus:) See second chorus. (Fourth chorus:)
See second chorus.
And on, and on, until you get an agent or
give up.
Note that it is possible for new writers
to break into the SF&F writing field without an agent. Lots of writers
do it. I did it. (But I'm glad I have an agent now.)
Guidelines and tactics for putting
together unsolicited submissions (aka "over the transom" submissions and
"slushpile") appear in a variety of magazine and book sources. The
lowest-common-denominator source for this sort of information is the
annual Writer's Market produced by Writer's Digest Books.
It, and a variety of other sources you can find with a search at your
local library, will give you a good grounding in the arts of manuscript
preparation and query letter writing.
If you can interest an agent at this stage
in your career, congratulations. If you can't, then you'll have to go it
without one. Getting in print without an agent will certainly give you a
grounding in tenacity, productivity, and toughness.
If not for the fact that factors such as
electronic rights, foreign markets, and knowledge of market trends are
often best represented by a knowledgeable agent, I'd happily recommend
that everyone start out on his own and not worry about getting an agent
until later in his or her career. However, in today's publishing
climate, it is generally better to get into the profession under the
aegis of an agent.
Sorry, no. I can only recommend or warn
people away from the agents with whom I've had direct personal
experience, and that's a small enough sampling as to be useless. In
addition, an agent can be ideally suited to one writer and just as
unsuited to another (and vice versa), meaning that an agent I describe
as bad might be brilliant for another writer, and one I describe as
invaluable may not be able to help another writer.
Ultimately, it's neither responsible nor
helpful for me to make any recommendation.
That's an easy question to answer. I get
them from the same place every sapient being on earth does — from the
interaction of observation, memory, analytical abilities, intuition, and
so on.
The difference between a writer and a
non-writer isn't that one gets lots of ideas and the other doesn't. It's
that one remembers and develops his ideas while the other doesn't.
An example: You're walking on the
sidewalk. Up ahead, you see a bicyclist coming toward you. The bicyclist
suddenly pitches over sideways and slides to a jarring stop against the
curb. He doesn't immediately move.
Now, the average guy on the street will do
one or more of the following:
The writer, on the other hand, will take one or more of the choices above, and will additionally begin asking questions.
And on, and on, and on.
It's the development of the idea
that turns into a story.
My feeling is that a lot of people have a
disproportionately high regard for ideas and their relationship to the
finished story.
I tend to think of ideas as the grains of
sand that serve as the foundation for pearls. Yes, pearls are lovely
things. And yes, without sand or similar irritants they could not come
into being. But ultimately sand is just sand.
Many writers have had someone come up to
them and say, "I have a great idea for a novel. Why don't I tell you the
idea and you write it up and we split the money?"
To which I've always been tempted to
reply, "Tell you what. Here's a handful of sand. Why don't I give it to
you and you turn each grain into a pearl and we split the money?"
In most cases, what happens is that the property owner and a book publisher get together -- sometimes the meeting is initiated by the property owner, sometimes by the publisher. Sometimes they both work through an intermediary called a packager whose job it is to bring licenses, publishers, and sometimes writers together.
The property owner agrees to extend a license (to publish fiction based on its property) to the publisher for a period of time and a certain number of books. The publisher then arranges to produce the books specified. In almost every case, the publisher calls upon writers whom it knows, has worked with, and trusts. The property owner almost never chooses writers, though that does happen sometimes.
The property owner may choose to have very little oversight of the book line, or may choose to keep a close eye on it.
What this all means is that the single best way to become a writer for a franchise you like is to write original novels, stories based out of your own imagination and not relying on details from established universes, first. You get them into print by the traditional means of submitting them to publishers, and here I'm talking about traditional publishers of physical books. (While there are some fine writers in the e-publishing industry, e-books don't count as much among publishers as traditional books — since they require fewer financial resources to produce, they mean that less is being risked on the writer and that the writer will be succeeding or failing in a less demanding arena.)
Very few publishers of licensed fiction take a chance on a writer who has not already proven himself in the field. Sometimes you do still see it with game-based fiction, but usually with games from smaller or newer companies.
|
URL: www.AaronAllston.com/infopages/faqwritn.html. Optimized for FireFox 3.0. Copyright © 2009 by Aaron Allston. All rights reserved. |