How Precious Was That While, page 9
So that was part of what I learned in my first trial year of writing: how to keep going, to avoid Writer’s Block. Block was something I simply couldn’t afford. So I eliminated it, and have not suffered from it since. Any other writer could use my system to eliminate it also. But just as an alcoholic may arrange to “forget” to take the medication that keeps him straight, and relapses, some writers aren’t much interested in learning how to sustain writing. Thus I feel that for many, the root of their Writer’s Block is a lack of interest in actually writing. For them there is not much hope. It’s an irony, for some do have talent.
This statement of mine, that Writer’s Block may be mainly an excuse not to do what they don’t want to do, has aroused wrath in some. There are women who get similarly angry at me for suggesting that the various reasons they have for avoiding sex derive from a profound lack of interest, or even distaste, for sex. It’s a fair parallel. Of course there are many writers who really do want to write, but are prevented by circumstance, and there are many women who would like idealized sex, etc. But there are also many who don’t, and don’t want to admit it. So let me go into my system for abating Block, and those who find it boring are probably not serious about writing. Those who are not hopeful writers should find this chapter increasingly uninteresting, so should skip on to the next, which is about suicidal teens.
My system consists of a series of plays, devices, and tactics, any of which may work in a particular case, and some will work in any case. One is variety: if you are bogging down in a heavy project, try switching to a light one, or at least a different one. I discovered this when I was writing Omnivore and proceeding an inch an hour. Then my wife had to work late, and would be coming home around midnight, and I just didn’t like the notion of her walking alone a couple of blocks to her car in the parking lot at that hour. So I went with her, and took along a notion for a separate project, Sos the Rope. This was to be an adaptation of a chapter from my first, unsold novel The Unstilled World, and I hadn’t actually done any writing on it, so could take just pencil and paper along and play with it. I don’t like to take substantial projects out of the house, lest they be lost. So I sat in an empty office for several hours, and gave it a try—and to my surprise it moved phenomenally. It moved so well that next day, at home, I just kept working on it. Why mess with a winning game? And in about ten days I had written about forty thousand words, which was just about all of the first draft of the novel. Later I typed it and retyped it, and it expanded to sixty-two thousand words, so I think it took about a month in all. I entered it in a contest, and it won, and suddenly I had $5,000 and a published novel. Then I returned to Omnivore, and still it crawled. So it wasn’t me, it was the material; action-adventure Sos the Rope moved much more readily than intellectual Omnivore. So I remembered, and thereafter tried to keep more than one project in the hopper, so as to be able to switch between them, and work on whatever was moving at the time. This abated much of my problem. Summary: if A doesn’t move, try B, or C, or D.
Another is what I call my bracket system, which started when I was writing or typing first draft text, BC (Before Computers). When I came to a hangup, I’d simply use brackets (this worked with pencil, too) to give me privacy and wrestle with the problem therein: [Now I need a good example here; what offers? I’ve used the-falling-in-a-hole how-to-get-out problem before, and I’ve used the man-embracing-girl-and-not-knowing-what-to-say-next problem too. I need something new. What haven’t I used, that’s interesting? Little green men from space? So what’s the problem, and how is it solved? Maybe they are here to solve the problem of Block? They have a ton of AntiBlock they need to jettison? Okay.] So then I emerged from the brackets and got on with my text, having a better notion where it was going. When I typed my second draft, I deleted the brackets and their contents; they had done their job. When I computerized I made a macro to delete the brackets when editing, and when I got a multiple-file program I dispensed with the brackets and had a whole separate parallel Notes file instead for the purpose. I still use it. Typically, my writing day begins with notes, and shifts increasingly to text as the day progresses. Then I print out both notes and text and save them, and assemble my text into the ongoing novel. Sometimes I’ll forget a notion I was playing with, and check back through the notes for prior days to find it: maybe there is a place for little green men from space. Regardless, I keep writing, if not on the text itself, then on why the text isn’t moving, until I solve the problem. So I’m always working, one way or another. Most notes are brief, but sometimes they last for days and thousands of words, as I break down the problem [Just what is the nature of ultimate reality?] and get a handle on it. [Self does not exist.] This works for me, and I have heard from others who have tried it, and it works for them too. It doesn’t guarantee quality writing, or publication, but it does abolish Writer’s Block. For those who aren’t just using Block as an excuse not to write.
Another device was to keep a record of each day’s accomplishments. I started that Work Record the day I began my Second Attempt to be a full-time writer, in JeJune 1966, and maintained it for twenty-one years without a break. Then a computer hard disk crash wiped out three months of it, and I quit, shifting to a more personal diary of daily thoughts. But four years later I resumed it, and now I have both diary and record. With multiple computer files it’s convenient, and both serve their purpose. The record of thoughts helps clear my creatively seething brain of distractions so I can settle down to paying writing, so represents another AntiBlock device. The Work Record goads me to continuing performance, because if I goof off, it makes that clear.
So with that system, I kept writing. In fact I became a writaholic. On a typical day I write about 5,000 words: 1,000 in the Personal file, 1,000 in the Novel Notes file, and 3,000 in the Novel Text. But it varies widely with the difficulty of the novel and the number of other distractions I have, such as phone calls or family crises. This text, for example, was delayed by the need to sign twenty copies of contracts that arrived today, then interrupted by the phone at this point: a reader had driven from California to Inverness just to meet me. So my writing day ended right here, at 1,750 words text.
The following day was spent exchanging haircuts with my wife—we stopped going to barbers when their prices passed one dollar—exercising, and answering letters, which included two faxes from alarmed collaborators about the proposed scheduling of their novels. One arrived near midnight, waking me, and I lost a couple hours sleep because of it. So the next day, typing this text, I was logy and inefficient. The weather complicated it by putting our area into a major storm warning from the system that had flooded California a week before; there could be ferocious thunderstorms and even tornadoes. Indeed, it rained several inches, and there’s always the threat of power failures, which aren’t fun when you’re trying to use a computer. It didn’t help that I received a letter from a friend of forty-five years, Ronald Bodkin (mentioned in Chapter 2), that his elder daughter Christie Lynn, who once visited us for a week in Florida, had committed suicide. Meanwhile my word processor had decided to right-justify my text, so I had to delve in and reset it to normal. This too is part of the business of writing. The outside world seems to be constantly striving to prevent a writer from writing in peace, interspersing major or minor distractions. A writer has to learn to write regularly despite whatever the world does to interfere. My first year of writing wasn’t phenomenally efficient, but by its end I had pretty well learned to write on a sustained basis. I had developed my intellectual writing muscles, learned to handle interruptions, and made progress in becoming independent of mood. A writer who waits for inspiration may wait forever. A real writer writes when he has time, his inspiration on tap when he needs it.
I have an analogy for that, too. Ping-Pong was my one good sport, because I was small and automatically frozen out of things like basketball, and I played in some tournaments while in college and the Army. I wasn’t of champion caliber, just one of those good but not great players a rung or three down from the championship level. As I worked my way up in high school, I had great games and awful games. Gradually I improved by raising my lows, so that I could play consistently near my best. I made it a point to warm up by playing lightly for fifteen minutes or more early in the day. That warm-up zeroed me in so that I could make my shots instead of missing them, and it normally lasted for the day. I won many games from equivalent players, because they didn’t realize that they weren’t playing well at the start. Okay—my writing progressed similarly. I had on days and off days. But as a professional I couldn’t afford off days, so I learned to write as well as I could whenever I could. I eliminated the lows. Inspiration? It pretty much ceased to be a factor.
Now this concept can freak out some hopeful writers. They think a piece of fiction should spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, as it were, and isn’t valid otherwise. That a writer should write only from overwhelming inspiration. Nonsense. A real writer should generate his inspiration as a tool, ready whenever he needs it. I have another analogy. I’m great for analogies; they are part of what make me a writer.
Think of a highway. As you drive blithely along it at ten miles an hour over the speed limit, cursing the idiots who are trying to slow you down by five miles an hour, and wishing the authorities had had the sense to make the road more direct and with fewer potholes, do you ever ponder just how much work has gone into the preparation of that long strip of asphalt? Suppose you were the contractor in charge of building such a highway? Would you wait for inspiration? Would you hold your breath and strain until suddenly the fully formed road burst out of your left ear and spread itself in a ribbon across the landscape, instantly perfect? Only in your dreams!
No, in real life you would start at the beginning, reviewing maps of increasingly fine detail to ascertain the best route, considering the mountains, chasms, deserts, rivers, cities, and other natural hazards obstructing the way. You would study charts of likely traffic flow, so as to determine where the highway should be six-laned and where two lanes would do. You would figure out the most practical course, all things considered. Then you would set about gaining the right of way. It would turn out that your best route between cities crosses a nature park protected from development by federal law; you must go around. Your best site for a major intersection is owned by a reclusive billionaire who will sue you and tie you up in court for two and a half centuries if you even think of paving over his duck pond; you’ll never make your deadline there. Your best place, geographically, to bridge across the river is surrounded by Hell’s Bells Bog, so deep it would take fifteen umptillion tons of special fill to stabilize it, putting you over your budget. The second-best place for the bridge is an earthquake zone: do you gamble that you can complete your project and get well away before the ground shakes? So you route it down past the quiet marina subdivision, where there’s already a bridge you can upgrade for heavier traffic, and the neighbors set up a deafening clamor: Not In My Backyard! So by the time you have settled on your (distinctly awkward) route, and gained the necessary (ruinously costly) permissions, the project has lost much of its luster—and you haven’t yet moved the first spadeful of dirt.
Thereafter you must get the physical job done. Every foot of it has its own character and challenge, and most of the surprises are unpleasant. Some of the vital materials arrive late, and others are flawed, and some of your crews go out on a wildcat sympathy strike because of an incident not connected to you. But by dint of superhuman effort you manage to get it done, one hour before the deadline and one dollar within the budget. It opens for traffic—and the local newspapers condemn it for not being more conveniently and scenically routed. All this money and time wasted on this poor effort? Obviously, they say, an imbecile was in charge.
Now, about writing a novel with a set wordage and a set deadline for a schlock publisher, and receiving the usual courtesies of critics …
The fact is, the average full-time freelance fiction writer is not far from the poverty line. My first piece of advice for any seriously hopeful writer is “Have a working spouse.” Because then maybe you’ll have a secure income. Don’t write for riches, because your chances for achieving them this way are remote. Oh, sure, I made it—but I liken it to winning a lottery. It’s great for the winner, but you’re far more likely to be a loser. I don’t think there are any accurate statistics, but my understanding is that only one of every hundred seriously hopeful writers will ever get anything published by a paying market, and only one in a hundred of published fiction writers will make a significant livelihood by it. Of course there are other kinds of writers, such as journalists or technical writers, and these have better chances. It’s freelance fiction that’s the Lorelei.
And so it was for me. My spouse did go to work, and we did just barely struggle along. But there were real signs of progress. Two weeks after commencing my Second Attempt at full-time writing, I sold a novel. I had written Chthon over the course of seven years, bit by bit as time permitted, a big section written during leave time in the Army, and much done at the end of the first trial year of writing. I had been marketing it for a year, and three hardcover publishers had rejected it. In fact, hardcover publishers never did give me the time of day; the way I finally broke into hardcover print was when Del Rey developed its own hardcover line and took its paperback writers along. So I had finally submitted Chthon to a paperback house, Ballantine. After five months passed without any word, I queried—and received news from Betty Ballantine that they had wrestled with it for some time and finally decided to publish it. So I had my first novel sale, for $1,500, with 4 percent royalties. It was a great breakthrough. Because I couldn’t make a living by selling one story in four, for one or two cents a word, as my first trial year had shown. But if I could sell a couple of novels a year, survival was possible.
You’re still game? You say if you had the same kind of setup I did, knowing what I learned by trial and error, you’d be just as successful as I ever was? All you need is the chance to prove it, and you’d dive in tomorrow, so as to have time today to buy a handful of red peppers to soak in hot sauce and shove up your boss’s left nostril (or somewhere) as you inform him politely that you are leaving this rathole at Mach 3 and won’t return no matter how pitifully he begs you.
Very well. Let’s say you do what I did, and take a trial year writing while your obliging spouse works, so you have time to write without starving. Let’s say you have no family or friends to distract you, so you can work all day without interruption. Let’s further say that you have read this book and know how to avoid Writer’s Block. And that you have had the impossibly good fortune to have a contract: you wrote to a publisher saying “I have this great notion for a novel about how this ordinary Joe gets shanghaied into space by aliens and forced into stud service for a harem of 365 luscious creatures, each of whom would make the sexiest human starlet look dull, because they are sick of parthenogenic reproduction and need to get some male offspring to make things interesting.” And the publisher was so impressed it sent a contract by return mail, specifying payment of $10,000 on delivery of the 80,000-word manuscript, with a deadline of six months. (WARNING: don’t try this at home. I could get a contract this way, but you couldn’t, because you are unknown. In fact you probably wouldn’t even get a reply to your letter. This is merely a thought experiment.)
Six months? Hell, you’ll do it in three! Why wait any longer than you have to, for your money and fame? So you start in, and write like mad, and it goes great, and in only three days you have the whole thing done. And it’s 8,000 words long, half of which consists of bedroom scenes that, well, when you show it to your spouse, she looks at you a bit oddly and says “I thought you threw out that bachelor porn as you promised to when we got married.” You realize that it’s a female editor you have to deal with, and the fine print of your contract says “nothing libelous or obscene.” It doesn’t help when your spouse inquires when you are going to get into the story. “But that is the story!” you protest. “No it isn’t,” she retorts. “It’s a masturbation fantasy.” Then, as an afterthought, “You know, Ditchdiggers Amalgamated is hiring unskilled workers now. Maybe if you hurry—”
So you realize that more is required. If Spouse doesn’t go for it, Editor probably won’t either. All those women are on the same dull wavelength. Your great idea doesn’t seem quite as great anymore. “What kind of a story were you expecting?” you inquire cunningly. “One where Joe realizes that it’s impossible and not very interesting to have a different woman in bed every night, and falls in love with the only creature who has split ends and a slight weight problem, and tries to escape with her,” she replies, inhaling a bit self-consciously.
So you start over, this time beginning with your map, or rather, outline. You lay out ten chapters, each of which should be the length of your whole original story; that will guarantee you an 80,000-word novel. You use the Bracket System to figure out plot complications: Joe doesn’t know why the aliens are after him, so Chapter 1 is all about his desperate attempt to escape capture, concluding with an 80-mph car chase that ends with his vehicle mired in the Hell’s Bells Bog and slowly sinking as the alien saucer descends with grapplers extended. Chapter 2 has his seeming rescue as eight lovely young women appear and haul him out just as the car sucks out of sight under the mud. But instead of letting him go, they carry him to the saucer, and he realizes that these are the aliens. His feelings are mixed, because though they are phenomenally pretty, he’s afraid that they may be taking him to something utterly awful. One of them, with a really rather slight weight problem, and who’s looking at her hair anyway? is assigned to watch him while the others see to the operation of the alien craft. He tries to leap out the porthole, but she tackles him and they struggle, and her alien smock/dress comes undone and she’s even more luscious than he had thought, and—and it’s going too fast, and you have to back off and restructure. Again. This highway, uh, novel, just can’t go exactly the way you thought it would, in your naïveté before you actually tried writing it. It’s ironic: here you are, the god of this fictive realm, and yet you can’t write it quite the way you want. Because 80,000 words turns out to be a whole lot more fiction than you figured. Funny; it never seemed that long when you were driving other folks’ highways—er, reading their novels. You realize that the infrastructure of a novel is actually quite intricate and carefully planned.
