Writing

Wanting To Be

I have a story in this anthology; my first published work outside of a magazine

Read this; I’ll wait.

She desired to be a writer, but had not considered making a living as part of the plan. When she did, she gave up the notion of a writing life for a while and ‘did other things.’

I have a few thoughts about this.

One is that doing ‘other things’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re able to write all day long and not have to do other things, how good will you be? Even Jane Austen had to work at living in her constricted society, which provided much fodder for her post French revolutionary novels. One can definitely say that she wrote about what she knew. Most of us end up doing other things and write when we can.

Still, why shouldn’t a person who wants to write think about how a full-time writing life might be funded? My mother wanted me to be an attorney, my father wanted me to be either a nurse or a teacher until such time as I married and founded my own family. Idiot that I was, I thought a teaching career meant shoehorning knowledge into the brains of ten year olds and I never thought about becoming a professor of English; despite Career Day, I never had a firm grasp on the options available (which were fairly limited at the time).

I get annoyed with my callow, past self sometimes for being too easily dissuaded. But in the late 1960s, the library lacked the materials that could tell me what a writer’s life was really like and the books that famous writers wrote about writing were nearly unintelligible to a 16 year old with little life experience. There was no internet to browse, and every adult I talked with told me to pick something more serious and suitable for a girl.

What’s more serious than writing, and why can’t girls be writers? I might have asked. But I wasn’t raised to ask such questions. Since I could be stubborn about my writing, I might have chosen writing as a career anyway, but I didn’t know enough about it as a life that I felt I could choose it. I wasn’t confident in making the choice. As it turned out, I did make a living as a writer, putting out user manuals, marketing materials, speeches, and policies and procedures guides.

But there’s something about telling people you are – or want to be – a fiction author. It makes you hesitate. It makes you feel awkward or weird. Even now, when I’m mostly retired, I hesitate. Because I still get those looks, those speculative looks, sizing me up to see if I’m author-worthy. And why do I only feel comfortable saying it now because I’m mostly retired? Isn’t that sort of like saying, “Hey – I’ve done all the important stuff I’m going to do in my lifetime, so now I’ll just amuse myself with writing as a hobby.”? Like I’m asking for their indulgence.

Even people in their twenties probably get that pitying look when they state writing books as a career. Yeah, sure. You’ll find out soon enough, you sweet, deluded kid. Older people can only justify it by being done with traditional things. You can be a technical writer, a blogger/journalist, or a joke writer. But if you want to be a novelist, you’ll have to squeeze it in between family responsibilities and bread-winning. And you don’t mention it.  It’s not something you add on at introductions: “Hi, I’m Bob. I’m an expediter, but someday I’m going to write a novel.” And why can’t you? Because your worth as a creative person is determined by what you sell, not what you produce. Tech writers are paid by someone to write the manuals and online help. Bloggers can be paid by ad sales, nonfiction books about how to be a successful blogger. Journalists are paid by news outlets. Joke writers are paid by the joke and the good ones sell directly to comedians or work for SNL. It’s not art in the public mind, it’s production.

Can you really be considered a novelist if you’ve never been published?  Can you be considered a serious novelist if you pay for your own publishing? It’s weird. People can pay you to be a salesman and no one will question that. Tell them you’re a business owner and you get instant respect. You business might be in Chapter 11 and your employees think you’re the worst boss in the world, but hey – you own a business. Tell them you’re a writer, then tell them you write urban fantasy or science fiction and you can go to the restroom and come back before they can think of something to say.  Who pays the novelist to write?

Okay, this is becoming a Rodney Dangerfield routine…

What I’d like to see happen is that somebody show up on Career Day and tell those kids what it’s like to be a professional writer – that there’s all kinds of ways to do it, just like there are different kinds of engineers and scientists. Plan it like you’d plan for any other career.  If you want to write novels, that’s fine, but it may require some compromises. Unless you’re really, really lucky or really, really good, getting published in the traditional way won’t be easy and you may never hang out on a bestseller list with Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but it can still be satisfying.

And one more thing – it’s okay to tell other people; just say it with as much confidence as you can and try not to feel weird about it.

 

It’s Not Your English Teacher’s Outline

Recently, I guest moderated #sffwrtchat (science fiction/fantasy writer chat) on Twitter. The subject was outlining, and the newly-created “League of Extraordinary Pantsers” was there to welcome me.

Just in case you didn’t know, writers can be loosely divided into two camps – those who outline, and those who write by the seat of their pants. You might guess that I fall into the outlining group, and you’d be right. I was a technical editor and software project manager for a long time and there’s no way I could avoid outlining.

The chat was an eye-opener for me. For one thing, never having had a conversation about how I outline a story or novel, I’d never actually looked at my process in detail. Secondly, during the course of the conversation, I discovered that a number of the Pantsers didn’t actually hate outlining, they hated what they thought it was.

This Type of Outline Can Be Useful

The type of outline shown at the top, with its Roman Numerals and sub-paragraphs, is the one that most of us learned in English class. And detested. I can just imagine what people who didn’t like writing thought of it if those of us who did like writing disliked it.

It fairly screams dry, boring, and creativity-squashing and the samples (like in the picture) were generally poor. But the tool itself isn’t bad. It’s just our perception. Once you know how to use the traditional outline, it’s fairly useful. It’s a tool, like any other, to be folded into a process; shaped to fit. What I found with the Pantsers I was talking with was they were still stuck in English class, thinking the way they learned it is the way it had to be.

What Do You Use Outlining For?

A good question I was asked at the chat. I’m an INTP, which means that I can be good working with details, I just don’t remember them well because my brain tends to take a forest view, rather than individual trees. So I use outlining to keep track of details and find I refer back to it frequently when I’m writing.

I also use the outline to gauge how the flow of my manuscript is going and see whether a character or action is pulling me off course and whether or not I want to allow it to continue. Also to see if maybe I’m giving too much time to a scene, which is blocking the flow. For me, it’s all about flow. I write from beginning to end, without skipping around. I think this might be due to the technical writing, which was always linear. Once you understand the process for setting up and using an acid bath for etching silicon wafers, you then write about the process: you don’t jump into the  middle of an acid bath. But it could be that my mind just works that way. Whichever, I’m fine with it.

For me, writing a piece is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle. The outline is the edges and corners you lay down first to frame the picture.

I start at the start, end at the end. I may know in my head what the ending will be, more or less, but I don’t write it until I get there, because things could change and I hate wasted energy. As I put the puzzle together, I make sure that each piece fits before moving on to the next, which means I do a lot of rewriting and editing as I go. Because I can end up spending a lot of time reworking a chapter, the outline gets me back in the groove when it’s time to move forward. And when I have to change something, where I will need to edit the preceding work is easier to see because of the outline.

I create several documents for a novel. The character bible, where I list each character and everything I know about him or her. The main outline, which is a high level description of the book, its flow and arcs. I create an outline for each chapter, and – when the chapter is finished – a summary. Yeah, I know that can be a lot of docs, and a lot of work. But keeping these docs does two things for me: helps me maintain my course and helps me feel I’m in control of the novel, rather than the novel controlling me.

I also do outlines for short stories, though I don’t bother with a character bible or the detailed outlines I keep for novels. My short story outlines could even be plotted as line graphs, the elements are terse enough for it.

Do I Recommend This Style of Outlining?

No. It’s just what works for me. Outlining for someone else might be using the graph version, even for a novel. It could be Post-It Notes® or index cards on a corkboard, as some of the outliners in the chat use. A travel writer might print out the pictures taken and arrange them in writing order – a very visual sort of outline.

At the end of the chat, one of the pantsers paid me the compliment of saying I had almost convinced her to give outlining a try. Almost.

I hope she does give it a try. Once she comes over to the dark side, she may never want to leave. Bwahahaha.

In any case, what’s important is that no writer gets hung up on the idea of outlining. It is no more immutable than any of the other tools used by each of us in the process of writing. What’s useful is only what works to help you get the words out and the work finished.

What’s your take on outlining and how does it fit into your process?