JeremiahTolbert.com

On Giving Up on Fiction Writing

I’ve been talking about this in private for a while now, but I’ve decided to talk about it publically. There’s a lot of information out there about how to start writing, but there’s not a lot written about how to stop. Sorry if you’ve heard some of this before.

I’ve been struggling with writing since my father’s death a few years ago. His death was followed by his brother, then his mother, then both of my mother’s parents within a year. Around the same time, my little sister’s health problems became significant enough that she needed a kidney transplant. Our family was put through the wringer, and I did not come out of it okay.

Early last year, my occasional panic attack problem turned into a daily panic attack problem. Eating anything made me feel sick, and feeling sick felt like dying, and then I really lost it. I tried to get help via my medical doctor, but they were afraid to prescribe a high enough dose of anything to help me. I finally gave up and went to a psychiatrist who quadrupled the medication and finally started getting my attacks under control. The panic attacks had gone on for so long that I had lost over 50 pounds. After getting medication working to control the attacks, I continued to lose weight. Recently, to my dismay I’ve started to regain some, but that’s a topic for another post.

So it wasn’t until last year that mentally I was starting to come back together. Prior to my father’s illness, I was pretty solid. I was enthusiastic and I was very productive as a writer. I hated Laramie, but living there motivated me somehow to write 1-3 short stories a week. It was a wonderful outlet, and I learned a lot in my time there and started making my first few big sales.

So come the bad times of the last few years, my production ground to a halt. I had been working on a novel loosely based on my father’s childhood in Kansas in the 70s called Prince Starling when he called to tell me he had cancer. I think the coincidence here damaged me in some fundamental way inside regarding writing. It broke some connection I had to my creative spirit. The monkey deep inside somehow decided, ridiculously, that by having used my father’s stories that way, it was some how responsible for his illness.

I wrote some while he struggled with it. I really didn’t believe he was dying until he was in hospice, because he did such a good job of pretending he was going to beat it. I will always react with suspicion to claims of recovery from cancer now. But I believed because I wanted to believe and I had to believe.

Now, in the last six months, I was laid off from a horrible job and after a couple of months of terrifying freelance scurrying, I got my best job yet with a new company. I work from home, I have tremendous creative freedom, and I get to work with cutting edge web technologies. The only downside is that it’s pretty time consuming and it leaves me more mentally drained at the end of the day than I have ever been.

Rather than fight it, I’ve decided to just go with it. The job is great, but it takes enough from me that I find writing to be far too difficult to manage at this time. Roundbottom takes up a considerable chunk of my free time and I find it mostly very creatively fulfilling. I certainly won’t run that site and project for the rest of my life, but I could get several years out of it for sure.

I love the idea of writing. I love writing ideas. But lately, the struggles to keep my life afloat have left me with little energy to deal with the fight of publishing.

Truth is, I am still pretty emotionally sensitive. I was much thicker-skinned before all this, but negative reviews literally send me into stupid tears. Rejections sometimes as well. My one and only Clarkesworld rejection confirmed my worst fears about my inabilities and I nearly made the decision there to give up on writing permanently. I do not have what it takes to shrug off rejection very well. Perhaps its because I have deep personal issues iwth the subject of rejection or something. Either case, I can’t seem to make it not bothering me, so when I’m doing it, it’s a major source of pain for me.

So to recap, personal issues, struggle with time and energy, plus inability to handle rejection (all adding up to what is probably a lack of motivation)–these are the reasons I have decided to set aside my pursuit of a side-career as a fiction writer, at least until I have a better grip on the basics of a life, a family, and a job.

I hope those of you who are my writer and editor friends won’t drift away because I’m not writing. I will be more than happy to read stuff for people. I will not be giving up reading, and talking about SF. Just putting any real story words out myself, except for the weekly Roundbottom schedule stuff which is not insignificant.

I don’t consider this a permanent retirement. It’s still a passion of mine, and I hope to return to it when I feel like it’s in me, maybe in a couple of years.

The Mainstreaming of Science Fiction on TV?

Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, TV

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The ABC series Lost is, quite possibly, the most broadly successful science fiction television show yet. While ratings have been on a decline in this, the fourth season, the season’s premiere pulled in 16.07 million viewers. Now, these are Nielsen numbers, which I consider suspect at best, but it shows that the show is very popular, and almost certainly not just with traditional SF fans (those numbers cannot be accounted for purely by fans). Current episodes have dealt openly with science fiction tropes (which I will not name exactly to avoid spoilers). You could argue about the true classification of the show, but it most certainly falls into science fiction, as well as maybe a couple of other genres.

When the show first started, fans knew something was unusual, but that was a bit subtle. Dozens of people had survived a horrific plane crash, landing on a strange island. Compasses don’t work. There’s a weird radio transmission. And there’s a monster in the jungle that nobody can see.

Still, I suppose, many audience members disinclined to like SF could make the case for the show being in the thriller/mystery genre. And it did have a heavy human, more dramatic element in the form of each episode’s character-centric back story arcs. It wasn’t until late season 2 that things really began to take a turn for the speculative. And even then, it was subtle, just a few elements. But as the show has progressed, it’s become clear that the entire foundation of what the show is about is science fiction (or at least science fantasy).

But as each season has gone on, it has been increasingly impossible for even the most determined to deny that Lost is, at its roots, a science fiction show. You could call the techniques they used to grab their audience bait-and-switch, because the show creators introduced the heavy speculative elements slowly. I’d also call it the frog in a pot of boiling water acclimation method.

My coworker, the Lost fan

An anecdote: I have a coworker who hates science fiction. In his words, he likes “real things.” He despises superhero movies, and pretty much everything a SF fan loves. Early on, the show creators of Lost said in an interview that everything presented on the show had a grounding in real science (something that at this point is highly debatable). Still- my coworker clung to this statement like it was a life preserver. It allowed him to keep watching the show no matter how fantastic things got, because it was still somehow “real.” At this point in the fourth season, he’s pissed off, because he realizes that statement was total bullshit. But he’s still watching, and still hooked.

The reason? A good mystery is compelling no matter what other genre tropes you add to the stew of your story. The characters, after 3 complete seasons, are sympathetic and well-known. All the foundations of a good story are there, to the point that, despite my coworker hating everything there is to hate about science fiction, he is still a huge fan of the show.

This is a good example of how genre is becoming the mainstream. For those fans who would like to see the genre remain distinct and separate, I think this turn of events is going to be a massive disappointment. Reviewing the past events of the show, it almost looks as if the show creators deliberately plotted out their introduction of SF tropes to create the frog in a pot of boiling water effect.

What’s especially fantastic in my mind is that Lost hasn’t given us SF-lite. It slowly introduced the elements, yes, but they are not watered down to be more palatable. We have full-fledged weirdness here. This is a show that Charles Fort would watch and clap his hands with glee.

The potential for new fans

By the time Lost completes its arc, there is going to be a whole new audience primed to accept our stranger ideas. New TV shows will come along to take advantage of this, but maybe, just maybe, SF publishers can lure some of them in too. Frankly, you could do worse than adding even 1% of Lost’s fanbase to your readership. You could do a hell of a lot worse.

I’m sure there are downsides to the mainstreaming of SF tropes. It makes us feel less special and unique, maybe. But as a working creative, I will just have to swallow my pride on that one. With this kind of potential for fans out there, it gives me hope that we could actually make a good living telling genre stories, and not just the ones marketed to an aging, increasingly conservative SF fanbase.

But then, maybe I’m all wrong

But then, the decline in ratings that Lost is suffering right now might be an indicator that the broader audience of Lost has been alienated by the speculative aspects of the show. For the week of May 4, the show didn’t even break the top 20. There may be many reasons why this show is falling in the ratings. And even if it is popular by genre show standards, it pales in comparison to reality shows involving dancing and singing.

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Posts Tagged ‘Fiction’

On Giving Up on Fiction Writing