I don't need any more courses

I subscribe to Writing Magazine, and I usually  buy Writers' Forum too each month.  And every time I read these magazines my eyes stray to glossy adverts for writing courses.

Over the thirty plus years I've been writing I must have attended hundreds of them.  Go back fifteen years and you would have found me, and most of my local writing friends, eagerly preparing for the annual Writers' Conference at the University of Winchester.  Some years I even booked for the Friday all-day workshop as well as the weekend.  My Friday would start at ten in the morning, and not finish until ten-thirty that night.

When I knew nothing about the publishing industry, or the business of writing for publication, I learned a great deal from course tutors and fellow writers. I did courses on creating powerful characters, pitching to agents, the state of the publishing industry, and self-publishing.  And I've lost count of the times I've walked out of a one-to-one session with an agent feeling dispirited.

On one occasion I cut short my fifteen-minute interview with an agent after she suggested that there should be a romance in the book between the male and female leads.  Considering that the female is a cat-shaped half-human and the male is full human, I thought it was the stupidest and weirdest comment I'd ever heard from an agent.  I think that has to count as one of the lowest points in my search for publication.

I've sought regular feedback on my manuscripts, read them to countless critiquing groups, and had my self-published books rigorously copy and line edited.  I've learned to think in terms of a commercial product.  Then in 2008 I had a book taken off the slushpile by a major publisher.  They read the whole thing, and liked it, but didn't offer me a contract.  But to have got that far from an unsolicited approach was a real boost, and they gave me lots of positive feedback on the novel .  More recently, an agent kindly critiqued my  cover letter for the novel I'm currently submitting, telling me she couldn't improve on it.

So I've decided I don't need any more courses.  I've learned my craft.  Now my quest to get published has shifted to finding the people who believe in my vision of the future, and don't try to turn my female characters into sexy airheads.  Courses can't help with that search.  It's down to numbers, self-belief, and perseverance - and a whole lot of luck.

Committing to my characters

I'm currently re-writing a novel which I originally wrote as a young adult tale.  Leaving aside my naive view that YA fiction was simpler and needed less depth than adult fiction, there are other reasons why the story didn't work.

I've mentioned in previous blog posts my tendency to pull my punches in describing characters' emotional reactions to events that affect them, but in this particular book I've committed a far worse sin.  I've failed to get into my character's skin.  I could see what she was seeing, but I didn't describe the differences between her vision and a human's.  But what I hadn't done - surprise, surprise - was describe her emotional reactions to the things that were happening to her.

And that was fatal for this particular manuscript.  For starters, she's just returned from a field trip to find the research station she departed from a few hours ago a smoking ruin.  But even more traumatic was her discovery of the burned remains of her parents there.

I've had the experience of my own parents dying, and I know the feeling of being suddenly cut adrift.  Two people who have been around for every day of your life are suddenly gone.  And this plunges us into a black hole of grief.  Each of us grieves in our own way, but if we cared at all about the person who's died, then we will grieve their loss.

But my character Chita was being too stiff-upper-lipped.  True, she is in constant danger of attack and has an ongoing threat to her own life, but I needed to show her grief.  I needed more of her emotions, a sense of that black hole that her dark thoughts are constantly falling into.

What I needed to do was get inside her skin.  She's a genetically engineered cat/human, and I think I've always had my internal censor sitting on my shoulder when I write about her.  "This will never work" it says.  "Do you have any idea how Impossible it would be to combine I'shara and human DNA to create a viable hybrid?"

This is when I need to silence that voice and commit to my character.  She does exist, a fully-functioning big cat with a human brain, language, and intelligence.  And my task now is to get fully inside her fur, live her life, and bring this glorious creation alive.  I have to commit to my character.

In at the deep end - what's going on?

Recently I've been trying to read several SF books by highly regarded authors which I couldn't get into the first time.  I know we've got to pitch our readers right into the middle of the action, but the reader also needs to know where they're being thrown to.  And especially in science fiction and fantasy getting the balance of action and world description right is crucial.

One of the books I struggled with started with an introduction (a prologue by any other name) which was 22 pages long.  That section is written in the first person, and is the record of an unknown therapist.  The client he/she is talking to is also not identified by name.  She's a female, but the introduction takes the form of the therapist's notes, and all the way through she's only called the client.

In short, this prologue is one massive info-dump of backstory, told by one unknown character to another.  And it's a very confusing and and complex backstory at that.  It involves two husbands, a lost brother, and half a dozen events that made no sense to me at all. 

And yet... the novel is published by one of the major UK SF imprints.  We're not talking about a thrown-together self-published book here.  We're talking about a book that has been accepted and edited by a mainstream publisher.

Having looked it up, I see that this is the fourth book in a series, so I think this marathon prologue info- dump is an attempt to tell the reader what happened in the first three books.   But it really doesn't work.  And even the back cover blurb mentions that the world is confusing, and that there are an awful lot of interweaving story strands,

You might say that I ought to seek out and read the first book before criticising this.  But readers often don't come to a series in the order the books were written.  And I've picked up middle books of other series before and had no trouble working out what was going on.  And wanted to read the rest of the series.

But not with this author.  And after struggling through a 22 page info-dump attempt to get up to speed, I've no desire to persevere with the book.

Yes, I do get impatient with long descriptive set-ups, but this long interview didn't pitch me into the middle of the action at all.  It pitched me in at the deep end, and I had no idea what was going on.

I haven't failed, I've just found 100 editors and agents who don't believe in me

When i got four rejections on the same day recently I had a massive downer.  It was time for some swift self-esteem boosting measures.

And then I remembered the famous Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." And it occurred to me that this was just as relevant to trying to get published, albeit in a slightly altered form.  What an inspiration that quote is!  And it gave me a clue to a new way of dealing with faceless rejections.

Because, of course, every rejection that comes in is a failure.  It's a failure to convince another person of the brilliance of our prose, or the brilliance of our ideas.  And it hurts.

But, having got picked off the unsolicited slushpile once, I know I'm not deluding myself that I can write.  That was a major publisher, and the submission was made without an agent.   A tiny, tiny, proportion of scripts get followed up from this source.  I had the whole manuscript read, and received some fabulous feedback on my world-creation and characters.  A serious publisher thought my writing was good.

Since then I've had lots of this type of infuriating feedback on my short stories.  You know the sort of thing, "I love this character, she's really spunky... But we're not going to publish your story anyway."

And that brings me back to Edison's quote.  The most important thing in engaging with the brutal edifice of publishing is to make sure we keep our self-esteem intact.  And Edison's quote gives me the lead to doing that.  I haven't failed, I've just found a hundred editors and agents who don't believe in my writing.

Some will, some won't.  Next!  Their lack of belief in me is their problem.  It isn't going to destroy my self-belief.  Because the publishing process is all about belief.  It's about finding people who believe in me and in the world-visions set out in my novels.  And when I get downhearted I remind myself that even people like NASA fail.  Twenty of their first 28 attempts to send a rocket into space failed.

But now we have the International Space Station, and NASA is planning to go to Mars.  So persistence pays off, and i intend to follow that lead.  And one day, I will find the agent and editor who do believe in me and my work.  Watch out then, for I'll take off like one of NASA's rockets.

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Short story competitions - falling between the cracks

As a science fiction writer, short story competitions have always been problematical for me.  If I enter  an SF competition, then the judges are looking for something 'radical', something that 'pushes the boundaries of the genre'.  They're looking for weird tech, or aliens.  But if you look at the winning stories you'll often find that marriage still exists in those worlds, and men still control women.  Hmm.  A strange kind of 'radical'

Now the thing is, the kind of 'radical' I write is rather different, and a good deal quieter than the those stories.  For a start, it's usually near-future, a hundred or two hundred years ahead, and human societies are not radically removed from today's.  

My 'radical' stories challenge current culture.  They imagine a society where people have grown beyond the use of recreational sex to bolster their self-esteem.  But that isn't a kind of 'radical' that competition judges want to see.  Neither, it seems, are stories where women have been totally freed from the burden of childbearing.  SF might speculate about the future, but this, it seems, is a step too far.

So perhaps I should try a general writing competition.  I've considered submitting short stories to two recently.  And I started by researching the judges.  Both were female, but that's not necessarily a good thing for me.  I discovered that one of them was an ex-editor of a romance imprint.nn I can't imagine such a judge, steeped in the world of cozy, unrealistic, romance, looking kindly at a story which contains zero romance.  In fact, it might even outlaw romance in that world.

So that was one competition ruled out.  What about the other one?  That judge was an author of contemporary women's books.  Books about relationships and cozy families.  So I can't see an  SF story which challenges the basis of her world doing well in that competition either.

This kind of falling between the cracks is common for me, and so damned annoying.  What I'm looking for are competitions that appreciate a conventionally-written story with a beginning, middle and end, a story that challenges the conventions of current western socieities.  And so far, I haven't found the entrance to that magic world between the cracks where I belong.

Throwaway sexual comments = quickest way to lose my readership

I've recently started reading an SF book by a male author who is highly regarded.  This is part of my tug of war love/hate relationship with the genre.  It's the books by men that gain most of the plaudits, and the ones most likely to be included on lists of 'ten best SF authors' books you must read'.

I have a real problem with some of the books I've tried to read, mainly because they portray a future that is as hostile to women as the present patriarchal sexualised society is.  Let me give you an example.  One book I started reading had a section which I think was supposed to be a prologue, although it wasn't clear from the headings. And that section consisted of a male character reminiscing about the past.

Nothing wrong with that, you say. Except that at one point he's thinking about a woman.  And we get one line of her dialogue.  And that line is her saying that she really wants to come.  Oh, please!  I have no idea who this stray woman was in terms of the story.  I don't know if she's the other character's girlfriend, or some prostitute he had casual sex with.  

The cynical, weary side of me says that this piece of writing is there as a cheap device to lure in male readers with the promise of sex.  This woman appears on the first page, so you'll probably think that the narrative includes sex and buy the book.

This cheap titillation device lost me as a potential reader of that author's work.  If his level of respect for women is to put them as anonymous characters into his books with their only thoughts about sex then I don't want to read his work.  Because he isn't respecting women, and I expect respect.

I want to read stories that give me some hope for the future.  And the biggest hope you could show me was a world where both men and women have grown up.  Where neither sex uses sex as a way to raise their self esteem.  They don't need to, because their self-esteem is high without that.

That's why books like Ancilary Justice caused such a stir in the SF world.  Because they turned everything our culture tells us about sex and gender on its head, breaks it apart and shows us how constructed, how false it is.

And that's why I have a love/hate relationship with male SF writers' books.  Because all too often I see no trace of a change, no shred of hope that the future can be better.  And my time and my money are limited, so why should I spend either with people who don't respect me?

The eyes of the beholder - the case for multi-viewpoints

Two-thirds of the way through my re-write of Snowbird I realised that the story still wasn't working.  The   manuscript still wouldn't be fit to submit for publication once I'd finished.

As the story is over twenty years old you might be forgiven for thinking that I was just tinkering with the story, afraid to say that I'd finished with it.  But you'd be wrong.

The first major problem is that the whole novel is in the viewpoint of one person, Jian Kabana, my starship Coder.  Certainly she's the major character, and most of the events in the book revolve around her, but there are many problems with telling the story only through her eyes,

One is that it made it hard to describe Jian's appearance - at least, without resorting to the old routine  of the character seeing herself in the mirror.  And in the early drafts I'd done just that.  But I felt that it was important to say that she had dusky skin.  Her mother was white-skinned and her father dark-skinned, so naturally Jian's skin tone is somewhere between them.  But if I didn't mention this up front, most readers would make the assumption that she was white.

The second problem with one viewpoint was that I couldn't get into the head of her friend and Scwanberger security guy Brett Dorado.  I wanted him to confirm that, despite her wild looks, Jian is an ace Coder.  And I wanted him to reveal that he is a cyborg, as a result of being a victim of an illegal military programme.  Only he knew some of that information, so he had to reveal it.

And the third reason I need multi-viewpoints is that I'm planning on writing a series of books based around the Darius orbital shipyard location.  In fact, I already have a very rough first draft of the second book, Darius.  That is a multi-viewpoint book, and although it needs re-writing, it already has more pace than the first book.  So by re-writing Snowbird in multi-viewpoints, I'll be setting the pattern for what I hope will be a long series of books.

My last reason for re-vamping the book was pace.  With one character only, she has to do a lot of thinking about or straight telling of what's happening to other characters.  And that slows the pace down and makes the book plodding.

I've re-written five chapters so far, in three viewpoints, and the book works much better.