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I could care less, but I don't care to.
--Emily Weems
If it works, rip it apart and find out why!
--Emily Weems
I'm all right about mornings provided they don't make unreasonable demands. Getting out of bed is occasionally an unreasonable demand.
--Emily Weems, 14 Nov 1999
Anything can be done with the right amount of smoke and mirrors.
--Emily Weems, 30 Nov 1999
For me, sleeping becomes just another tedious task designed to keep me from watching the fog.
--Emily Weems, 16 Sep 2000
Well, the office frowns on nudity and ritual sacrifices . . . but I'll see what I can squeeze in at lunchtime.
--Emily Weems, 29 Aug 2001
He's a tarantula ass who likes to suck goat nipples?
--Emily Weems, 04 Sep 2002
Public hysteria is no substitute for the facts.
--George Willard
Apply butt to chair and fingers to keys.
--attrib. George Willard
Life is unfair. Complain to the Manufacturer, not me.
--George Willard
This is the price I pay for the privilege of getting nasty with twits.
--George Willard
A current theory I'm slowly formulating says that there's so much totally pathetic poetry out there because so many delittantes decide to write verse, thinking it'll be easier than writing good prose. (They can cloak punctuation and syntax inadequacies in "poetic license.") (Is that a license to hunt down and kill poets?) IMNSHO, though, a good poet MUST be able to write good prose, too. Learning how to open a piece, carry it to a conclusion, and fill in the middle cannot help but make a poem better, too, even if it doesn't obviously possess those features.
Someone... recently posted some verse s/he didn't think worked right, and asked what was wrong with it. I try not to critique poems, because I'm rarely very complimentary, but the problem was obvious to me: The poem had pretty language, nice phrases, and flowery words ... but it was disjointed, thought-scattered, and didn't say much of anything -- and didn't say it in far too many lines. Hey, random images are nice on an LSD trip, but just try to communicate them to someone else....
All "true art" is a form of communication with the audience. The "gentle" arts are usually a form of emotional communication along with the intellectual. If a person doesn't learn communications skills in a straightforward fashion, will they be able to do as well in the obscurity of their verse?
Hmmmm... "the social responsibility of the writer." Heinlein wrote about interesting, strong, ideal women as -- according to those who knew him -- he saw his wife, Virginia.
Why did he have an obligation to mention all the empty, shallow, mundane people, male or female, and their little troubles? Would it have advanced his plots or improved the stories? You have generalized his body of work from (or so it seems) one book. In others he had women with emotional upsets, and men with emotional upsets. When he did, they were there for literary reasons.
[...] The "ideal mate" syndrome has existed since poetry was invented; the definition may change with the times, but the chrome-plated prototype is still hyped.
And what's so bad about "ideals" in literature? Much recreational reading is done for the purpose of escape. Read a Harlequin Romance novel sometime and see the ideals popping out all over. Go to a laundromat and look at the women sitting there reading these. Wanna bet their real-life husbands or boyfriends bear a close resemblance to the ideals in those books?
True, most women I've dealt with fall far short of Heinlein's characters -- but I *have* met a few who came close, and I admire them tremendously. They exist. And they aren't slaves. If they "serve" a man as Jubal Harshaw's amenuenses did, it's because they choose to do so for their own reasons. They form their own opinions, make their own choices, speak their minds when they wish to do so, and often seem to wind up on this [WRITING] echo.
--George Willard, Jun 1993
No, it's pure sloppiness and ignorance which sets my teeth on edge every time I see it -- but it is, as you mention, rampant.
Many schools have quit teaching the most elementary rules of grammar and punctuation, going to "outcome-based education" instead where "an honest effort" is considered as good as getting it right. PFAUGH! What a dishonest way to teach, what a shortchanging our students are getting. Some moronic idiots (I know of no kinder term which would fit; I wish I knew worse, more-accurate ones to use) specializing in "education" "think" that, since the lowest-common-denominator child in the classroom might feel ch allenged or have his delicate psyche damaged by "failure," it is unreasonable to ask him to extend himself to the limits of his abilities; conversely, letting any other children in class outperform him will be just as bad. Therefore, don't ask much of the children, don't reward superior performance, and don't say *anything* which might make some retarded (oh, sorry, I mean "mentationally challenged") student feel in any way slightly inferior, even if he is.
Then, add in the "relevant education" movement -- started, I am shamed to say, by teachers from my generation -- and you have the massive decline in academic performance of American schoolchildren recorded over the last few decades. After all, it's more important to learn alternative history, feminism, self-expression (as long as it doesn't involve anything difficult like reading and writing), sexuality, alternative religion, and multi-culturalism than things boring and useless -- like math, science, rea ding, writing, or simple job skills.
Yes, it sometimes dismays me to see so many participants here who are intelligent and articulate repeatedly apostrophizing their plurals. It bothers me nearly as much when so many seem to have forgotten how to use question marks. But my name is Hossie, not King Canute. "Against stupidity, the Gods Themselves contend in vain." Go into stores (or even read the portable signs out front) and you see incredible gaffes of punctuation, word usage, and math. Complain to the manager, asking them why the chain (w hich uses their own full-time sign-maker) can't even be bothered to hire one with the intelligence or education to not make them look like fools to such as you and I, and you'll likely get an evasion or a hostile response -- because the manager him/herself is too stupid to realize that the signs were in error and s/he resents having this recognized.
Sorry, you punched one of my buttons. I realize that I've used the word "stupid" and its adjuncts pretty freely in this message, but I have a hard time otherwise classifying people who can't seem to understand the importance of clear, precise communications, and refuse to make the minimal effort to improve themselves to what used to be considered no more than an average level of ability. I suppose they don't have time, what with the Stanley Cup and NBA playoffs, summer softball, television,
the latest mo vies, and that big backyard barbecue on their minds. Whoopee-fuckin'-doo!
--George Willard, Jun 1993
"Yes, it is eroctic literature."
"Eroctic? What's the origin of this word?"
"It's so hot it gives you an erection hard as a rock."
--George Willard, 24 Jun 1993
All the fancy instrumentation in the world can't communicate the combination of physical and emotional responses if you lack the experiential referents. While growing up as a horny virgin male, I eagerly asked my more-experienced cousins and friends what sex was like. They did their best to tell me, but nothing -- not stories, not Crisco, not early-adolescent homosexual play, nothing -- gave me more than an inkling of the actual concentrated sensation and head-bursting feeling of... well, you
know!
- -George Willard, 29 Jul 1993
Consider the public image of "writers." The movies and TV have taught them that writers suffer endless strain over "the idea." Once "the idea" is found, then a few feverish hours or days of typing results in an immediate best-seller and the author buys a Malibu beach house (preferably fireproof) and a Lear Jet.
--George Willard
When confronted by the truth, many people resent hell out of whoever challenges their dreams.
--George Willard, 03 Nov 1993
Government should only do for us what we cannot do as well or better for ourselves.
--George Willard, 18 Nov 1993
Writing is a Religious Experience in its most basic form.
--George Willard, 13 Feb 1994
"The middle sheep in the flock is rarely taken by wolves."
--Contributed by Hossie
In the face of your complete lack of redeeming social value, you are hereby declared obscene.
--George Willard, Mar 1995
Y'know, [Patricia], the pitiful part of all this DuffyDrivel is I think he honestly doesn't know how insulting and unpleasant he's been. There's a short-circuit somewhere in his brain that bypasses his ability to understand what he's writing. That's one serious handicap for a would-be writer. If he *can* read his own words for meaning, and he continues to deny what he has said, then he's a liar and shouldn't become a writer -- his career is in publishing.
--George Willard, 2 0 Mar 1995
(In reply to Patricia C Wrede, Mar 1995)
Unfortunately, being a pioneer doesn't always mean you reap the rewards -- sometimes it just means you're visible targets.
--George Willard, 26 Apr 1995
BTW, your verse is redolent of a used Stridex pad.
--George Willard, 26 Apr 1995
Certainly not you, you hemmorhoid on the anus of humanity!
--George Willard, 26 Apr 1995
(NOTE: the use of deadly force may be frowned upon by the authorities, or at least get you talked about.)
--George Willard
[Echoing, perhaps deliberately, one of Lazurus Long's philosophies in life. -MN]
(What kind of a language is cunnilingua anyway? -MN)
Well, I understand it's spoken very fast -- lickety-split.
--George Willard, 02 Oct 1993
I try to entertain *and* put across a message, one that many disagree with. But I don't do it by taking myself so seriously that my jockey shorts crack from an excess of starch.
--George Willard, 22 Apr 1994
Y'see that li'l mare there? Shoot, you got room; you oughta buy her 'fore I take her to the next sale. Be a shame for her to get her head blowed off and butchered.
--George Willard [Relating a hard sell.]
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Nothing you enjoy feels like business when you're doing it, whether you're getting paid for it or not. Anything can be a hobby -- one of my college friends used to sit around solving complex and esoteric equations for fun. Anything can be a business -- some people get paid to do gardening.
Writing for publication has both aspects: the creative-artistic and the commercial-business. What you mostly don't hear from anybody is that nobody who is writing for publication can do one to the total exclusion of the other. Even the most commercial hack writer has to put a certain minimal amount of creativity into his writing, or it's just an unsellable plot summary; even the most airy-fairy Artiste-with-a-capital-A has to deal with contracts and money at some point if he's going to be publish ed. You don't have to like the business side of writing; you don't have to do a good job of it; but you ought not to be surprised by it. [...]
How you choose to run -- or not run -- your writing career is none of my business. You are at perfect liberty to give away your stuff, put it all in public domain, sign a work-for-hire contract for a pittance for your magnum opus, or perpetrate whatever other business idiocity you wish, and I won't turn a hair... so long as you don't complain about the results to me afterward. And, of course, so long as you don't go recommending to innocent beginners that the best way to break in is
to write a S tar Trek novel... Getting past the publication hurdle does not confer immunity from rude idiots. It is merely a change of venue. If your friend is interested in teaching, a MFA will provide useful credentials. If your friend is interested in the curriculum for its own sake, that, too, is a good reason to pursue it. But if your friend is interested in writing, and particularly if your friend is interested in being published, most such programs tend not to be very useful.
The reason for this is that publishers are not hiring writers; they are buying a product, to wit, a manuscript. Thus, they do not care what credentials a writer has; they care whether the product is good or not, and they can see that by reading it. If the story is good and suits their needs, they buy it, and if not, not: having an MFA is irrelevant. You don't actually have to explain, you know. And who said anything about "happily"? I've only ever known one writer who claimed that he always enjoyed the process of putting words on paper, and he was lying. I mean, if it was that much fun all the time, we wouldn't be so good at finding excuses not to do it. ...you are never going to be able to please everyone with something you do. When my first book was published, it got, for a long time, no reviews at all. Then it got a review -- a thoroughgoing pan, lambasting it as derivative, sloppy, and riddled with stupid, careless errors. The reviewer concluded by saying, "Wrede may someday make a competent hack."
The most difficult part of it, for me, was that some of what the reviewer said was clearly correct. The viewpoint is sloppy, and the plot is far more derivative than I like to admit in public. This lent his other remarks a certain credence. In short, it was not a pleasant experience. And you can tell that the review made an impression -- after all, I can still quote the thing after thirteen years.
But one has to learn to take this kind of thing in stride, whether it comes from reviewers or from friends or from colleagues. Otherwise, one allows one's creativity to be nibbled to death by ducks. Literary immortality is not my concern, nor do I feel that it should be. My job is to write the best book I can manage to write today. It would certainly be very nice if some of them lasted, and it wouldn't be honest to pretend that I don't ever wonder if they will or hope they may, but if they don't, so what? I'm gonna be dead by then anyway. There are only 26 letters in the Western alphabet, but one can make them into millions of different words, none of which has quite the same meaning as any other. Your bones -- your skeleton -- may be slightly larger or smaller than mine, but if our skeletons were the only parts of us that showed, we'd all look practically identical. It's the cartilage and muscle and tendons and skin and hair that make people look different from each other (unless you're an expert). Plot is just the skeleton
of the story . You need one in order for the story to stand up straight, instead of collapsing into an unreadable pile of goo, but if you strip the flesh from Great Literature, you will find the same bones underneath that you find in schlock.
Shakespeare is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers in English Literature, yet most, if not all, of his plots are derived from clearly established sources (i.e., we know exactly where he got them from). It's what you do with it that counts.
So don't worry about it. Nobody really understands about writing like other writers. I tell my mother, "My characters won't do what I want them to," and she just looks at me blankly and says "You're the writer, aren't you? Just have them do it." But I was at a dinner with thirteen other writers once where one of them said, "I had to end the chapter early, because my character had a really hard day and when he got into the bathtub, he wouldn't get out." And all up and down the table, everyone nodded in
unison. Good ideas are all over the place. Write your stories. If it really comes out that bad, and the idea is really that good, put it away and come back to it in five or ten years, when you've practiced enough to get it right. You aren't absolutely stuck with what you've done until it's published, you know. That's it, exactly. Plaigiarism of published works is rare enough to be news when it happens; plaigiarism of unpublished works is next to non-existant. If you are going to steal, there are an awful lot of things that will net you a lot more money, a lot faster, with a lot less work, than swiping someone's unpublished ms. and trying to sell it.
In a way, it would serve the plagiarist right. I mean, look at all the rejection stories we have on this echo. Can you imagine someone thinking he's stumbled on a gold mine, swiping a ms....and then having to retype it (to get his name on every page, instead of the real author's), spend hours at the library looking up places to send it, spend postage money sending it out . . . and then getting 20 or 30 rejection letters? He'd have to be crazy. No, he'd have to be a writer . . .
It is difficult to learn from anything or anyone you hold in contempt. One rejection means less than nothing. A personalized rejection means they came that close to buying it, and somebody else almost certainly will. Editors are not a single monolithic being working from a checklist. Editors are individuals with different tastes, attitudes, and agendas. What one considers mainstream-with-fantasy-elements, another may consider unpublishable drivel, while a third might think it was just perfect for her new literary fantasy line.
I know very, very few authors who have sold their first book on its first submission somewhere. I know a great many who have sold it on their second, fifth, tenth, or fiftieth. [Isn't there ANY good news about getting published?]
Seeing your name on a book cover for the first time is a high that is only exceeded when you get a letter that says something like "Dear Ms. Wrede: I am 11 years old. I used to not like reading. Then I read your books. I have read them all six times, and now I am the best reader in my class..." Besides, being sweetly reasonable to twits is excellent practice for dealing professionally with certain publishers... One of the few things about writing that one can say with confidence is that the phrase "everyone writes like that" applies to hardly anything at all in the writing process... Actually, I think that worrying about literary immortality is the fastest way I know to pick up a really bad, possibly semi-permanent, case of Writer's Block. If one is worried about making every comma golden and perfect, one can very quickly get to the point where nothing looks good enough to present to all those years of posterity. And it's rather difficult for one's works to achieve literary immortality if all of them end up in the wastebasket because they're "not good enough."
L. Sprague de Camp told a story at a con once, about writing LEST DARKNESS FALL (a time-travel novel about trying to prevent the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent dark ages). It required massive research, obviously, on the Romans and the Goths (who were invading at that time). After the book was published, he got a letter from a university classics professor, who said basically, "I loved the book, and you got all the history right, but on page 273 [one of two lines in the Gothic
language in th e book] you should have used the ablative case instead of the genetive." His position was, if that's the biggest mistake anybody can find, he did pretty well. (And he fixed the case in subsequent editions.) And both Larry Niven (with the Ringworld) and Hal Clement (with the weird planet in MISSION OF GRAVITY) made math errors that somebody caught years and years later. Nobody's perfect, and somebody will find it; the thing is to make it *hard for them to find.* If you're doing
that sort o f fiction, that is. Writing doesn't require you to become an expert on every single aspect of your book; if it did, no fiction would ever get written. What you need is a) enough information that you will not be making really *basic* mistakes that will flag you as an ignoramus to anyone who really does know the subject, and b) the writing skill needed to make it appear that you know a lot more than you actually do, by dropping the right detail at the right time.
A lot of background in books is like that; the author doesn't actually know much about this or that bit, but she creates a soap-bubble illusion (a few facts stretched over a lot of hot air) that makes the reader accept a greater depth of knowledge than she in fact possesses. There is no "allowed" in fiction. There is only whatever the writer can or can't make work. If you make it work in your book, you can do it, no matter how many people haven't done it or try to claim you can't do it. If you can't make it work in your book, then you can't do it, no matter how many other people have used the exact same technique. [...] Relying on inspiration is like being on one side of a river when you want to get to the other side and [you're] just standing there waiting for somebody to come along with a boat, or for the river to dry up, or for somebody else to build a bridge so that you can cross. Maybe somebody will, but odds are that you'll get across much faster if you head up or downstream looking for boats or stepping stones or bridges, or even by just wading in.
And if you have a lot of rivers to cross, and you always rely on waiting for something to just happen to come along at the right moment...well, you're not likely to get very far unless you are one of the rare souls for whom Murphy's Law works in reverse.
There are such people...but I certainly wouldn't count on being one.
[...] I can think of one, maybe two, writers who rely heavily on inspiration. Everybody else I know works like a dog.
Inspiration is lovely when it happens, and if it is at all possible, most writers try to take full advantage of it when it does. But hardly anyone I know relies on it. We'd never get anything done, if we did. Individually, the letters are a treasure and you'd love them. Kids are great.
And they send pictures of themselves in their Halloween costumes dressed up as your characters, or draw dragons and cats all over the margins of the letters, and stuff like that. And it's absolutely great to get the occasional one that says "I never liked reading much until I found your books, but now I am the best reader in my class!" I like getting fan mail; it's the sheer unnecessary quantity of it that's a pain. If I just got my legitimate one or two letters a month, I'd be
happy as a clam. Garlic is a wonderful thing, but it's really not a terribly good idea to put it in raspberry ice cream. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for garlic-lovers to forget that the object of today's cooking session is to make raspberry ice cream, and to insist that as long as we have it right here, all peeled and chopped and ready to use, and it's *sooooo* good, we should leave it in the final mix. How many times in the past twelve years have I said something along the lines of "A mediocre novel is harder to sell than a good one, and it's hard to write a good one in a genre that isn't your true love?" And "Write the book you have a passion for, not the one you think will sell?"
Sometimes I get the feeling I'm shouting into a black hole. Juried awards are fairy dust -- completely unpredictable good luck that comes out of the blue for no apparent reason, and disappears just as fast. I know people who've been on the World Fantasy Award juries, and they always complain that the book that wins is never the one anybody thinks is the *best* -- it's the book that everyone can agree on. Broadly voted awards are popularity contests, and the broader the voting base, the more closely they track actual sales figures.
Awards are lovely things to have, but awards and award-winners are a really, really lousy thing to use as a serious goal or as a standard-of-comparison for one's actual work. Because they're fairy dust. (Return to Quotations Files Index)
Surf to: Writing Echo Quotation File Part VII: (various and assorted writers)
--Patricia C Wrede 07 Nov 1993
--Patricia C Wrede
--Patricia C Wrede
--Patricia C Wrede 28 Jan 1994
--Patricia C Wrede 28 Jan 1994
--Patricia C Wrede, 30 Dec 1994
--Patricia C Wrede, 23 Jan 1995
--Pat ricia C Wrede, 01 Feb 1995
--Patricia C Wrede, 01 Feb 1995
--Patricia C Wrede, 20 Mar 1995
--Patricia C Wrede, Mar 1995
(see George Willard, 20 Mar 1995)
--Patricia C Wrede
--Patricia C Wrede
(see Pamela C Dean's note on the good news/bad news aspect of writing)
--Patricia C Wrede
--Patricia C Wrede
--Patricia C Wrede, 11 Jan 2001
--Patricia C Wrede, Jan. 2001
--Patricia C Wrede, 30 March 2001
--Patricia C Wrede, 10 Apr 2001
--Patricia C. Wrede, 14 Apr 2001
--Patricia C. Wrede, 08 July 2001
--Patricia C. Wrede, 24 Mar 2002
--Patricia C. Wrede, 24 Mar 2002