Jeremiah Tolbert

Today, we move back to dis­cussing writ­ing, specif­i­cally, the begin­ning of a writ­ing career.  Considering I’m barely out of that phase, it’s really the only phase I feel con­fi­dent in dis­cussing.  So:

Read Bilal wrote last week:

I have been read­ing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy for a long time. Given that I am a sci­ence grad stu­dent I also have some sci­en­tific back­ground. I come up with ideas to write a sci-​​fi story or novel. Then I think on them and develop a gen­eral direc­tion how­ever, time lim­i­ta­tions, English being my sec­ond lan­guage and gen­er­ally poor writ­ing skills (I don’t think peo­ple like sto­ries that sound like aca­d­e­mic papers) pre­vent me from doing any­thing with them. Are there any options out there to col­lab­o­rate or a way to start writ­ing? Thanks.

Whenever any­one brings up this sub­ject, I am reminded of an inci­dent from my child­hood when I was first show­ing inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion.  In about 8th Grade or so, the three junior highs held a joint writ­ing con­fer­ence for kids like myself.  They put us into sem­i­nars with authors based on the gen­res that we were inter­ested in.  I got to meet some great writ­ers and get some feed­back.  And I met James Gunn, and I’ll never for­get it.

James Gunn was not like the other writ­ers.  He came in swing­ing for the fences.  “Most of you here will never pub­lish a sin­gle thing,” was pretty much the first thing he said to us.  He pro­ceeded to explain, in detail, why it was dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to sell sto­ries at our age.    Why, if we could, we should give up writ­ing all together and find some­thing bet­ter to do.   He went on in this fash­ion for an hour, and I have a mem­ory, per­haps false, of some of the kids cry­ing.  Me, I was excited.  Because I could see exactly what he was doing.  He was test­ing us to see how seri­ous we were.

At the end of the class, he gave us his mail­ing address and said if we were still inter­ested, he would cri­tique a story for us.  I took Mr. Gunn up on that.  I expected at the time to receive a Mamatas-​​style sav­aging of the story.  Instead, I got back a very kind and thought­ful set of line com­ments for what was prob­a­bly a truly awful, awful bit of juvenelia.

So when peo­ple ask me about writ­ing, I think of James Gunn, and I think that per­haps I should do every­thing I can in my power to dis­suade you from tak­ing up writ­ing, espe­cially writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion short fic­tion.   Reasons why you shouldn’t:

1. The pay is crap.  The pro rate is 5 cents a word, but can some­times go higher.  What was the pro rate in the 1950s?  3–5 cents a word.  You will not get rich, or even pay the bills, writ­ing SF short fiction.
2. It’s hard, and it takes a long time to get good at.  I’m a rel­a­tively fast learner, and it still took me 5 years of writ­ing every week before I started to con­sis­tently write well enough to sell the work.  And it’s hard work, so it’s easy to fall out of habit.  It’s not like rid­ing a bicy­cle.  You can for­get, or at least get a lit­tle rusty.
3. It will iso­late you from every­one you know.  Because it won’t be your job, but a side gig, you’ll be doing it in your spare time.  Spare time means you sac­ri­fice things, like time with your fam­ily, or time with your friends.  You might give up TV like Jay Lake.
4. You’ll read a lot less than you used to.  That time can be spent writ­ing! Ironically, one good way to get bet­ter at writ­ing is to read a lot.
5. Rejection sucks.  You’ll get rejec­tions.  A lot of them.  I think I heard once that Michael Swanwick has never been rejected, but the rest of us have hun­dreds of them.   Sometimes, they’re kind, and some­times they’re nasty and make you want to never write again.  See, even the edi­tors will test you.
6. Nobody reads sci­ence fic­tion any­way.  Like, what, 4% of books sold are SF?  And short fic­tion, the biggest mar­ket has 25,000 sub­scribers last I checked, and prob­a­bly fewer now.  They’ve been shrink­ing con­sis­tently for years.  It’s a niche pur­suit at best.

Still with me?  The prospect of dying alone, pen­ni­less, in the gut­ters doesn’t frighten you?  Well, then you have the infec­tion, and the only thing I can do is try to give you some advice to help you progress through the stages of your illness.

First of all, don’t worry about the lan­guage issue.  If you can learn to tell a story, it doesn’t mat­ter what lan­guage you write it in, and edi­tors will look past some some­what clumsy writ­ing for a great story.  You could write in your native lan­guage, and find some­one who knows English bet­ter to translate.

Starting out, I do not rec­om­mend you try to col­lab­o­rate (except maybe with a trans­la­tor).  You need to mas­ter plot­ting, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, theme, world build­ing, and a dozen other skills, and you’re not going to do that if you’re shar­ing your writ­ing duties with some­one else, in my opin­ion.  These are things you will learn on your own.

Being a sci­ence grad­u­ate stu­dent is an advan­tage.  Editors are hun­gry for hard sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries.  If you can write them, you are prac­ti­cally guar­an­teed a career.    But remem­ber, they have to be good sto­ries first.  If you write a bad story with cool sci­ence, it doesn’t do you any good.  It’s going to be rejected.

As far as start­ing? Open a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram and type words together to form sen­tences, and sen­tences to form para­graphs.   You will prob­a­bly be ter­ri­ble at first.  99% of writ­ers are.  But the truth of it is, you get bet­ter through the act of writ­ing.  Jay Lake likes to say that writ­ing is a mus­cle and it needs to be exer­cised.  I agree with this notion.  The begin­ning of any writ­ing career is going to be about sta­mina train­ing and build­ing up some bulk.    You’re not going to be com­pet­ing in the Olympics for a very long time (to strain the metaphor).

Ideas.  You’ll hear this from every­body, so I might as well break the news to you.  Ideas for sto­ries are a dime a dozen.  Ideas can help put a story over the top, but they are not a good foun­da­tion for a story.  The foun­da­tion for a story is, well, story.  The com­pelling events of a prob­lem and the peo­ple that attempt to solve it.  That prob­lem could be built around a great idea, but with­out the peo­ple and their attempts and fail­ures to deal with it, it’s just an essay or a sci­ence fact article.

I thought when I was start­ing out that I was hot shit when it came to ideas.  I thought I had the best ideas of any new writ­ers I knew, and that it was all I needed.  I wish I could go back and start over again, real­iz­ing that the ideas should have taken a back seat to learn­ing storycraft.

Read and absorb every­thing.  Because once you become a writer, your brain becomes a black hole with a vora­cious appeti­tite for ideas and infor­ma­tion.  When I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t read SF mag­a­zines.  I pick up the mag­a­zine deal­ing with a topic I know the least about, say, Woodworking Monthly, because I never know if I’m going to want to write a story about a wood­worker.   A guy who builds cab­i­nets for a liv­ing doesn’t at first seem a likely can­di­date for a pro­tag­o­nist, but you’ll learn how to do it.  You’re going to use every bit of knowl­edge you ever obtain.  Your entire life becomes one giant research effort.

After all of that and  you’re still inter­ested in writ­ing?  Okay then.  Go, you have my bless­ing, what­ever that’s worth. Do it.  Put your butt in a chair and start typ­ing, or writ­ing with a pen, or what­ever method you pre­fer.  Do it, and do it con­sis­tently for sev­eral years.  Read every­thing you can–not just SF, but the classics.

I look for­ward to read­ing your first pub­lished story.  Drop me a line when it comes out!

So how about you all?  Do you have any inter­est­ing sto­ries to share about when you were just start­ing out with writ­ing, or what­ever career you pur­sue?    Any tips to add to mine here?