This is the second of three posts of online notes for the Westercon panel
Fake it ’til you make it: a survivor’s guide for the introverted author

Okay, you’re introverted. Welcome to the  club. Why else would we sit at home in front of a computer and talk to people who aren’t there.

There are actually three separate questions facing the Introverted Author — or the other kind, if there are any. How can you learn to write? How can you get published? And how can you get that published work into the hands of the right readers? Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Here is an entire lecture, given by Sinclair Lewis, supposedly when he was drunk.

“You stupid-looking sons of bitches wanna write? Well, gwan home and write!”

That wasn’t very useful, was it?

Some people have a natural talent for writing. They just write, with some degree of ease; everyone knows it, although it isn’t politically correct to say so. I have to confess to being one of those people.

I also have to say that, while it makes life pleasant to have that natural capacity, it doesn’t make writing well any easier. And it doesn’t make selling any easier. A would-be writer who has to learn to write by diligent effort, but has something to say that the public wants to hear, or who has a voice like the voice of his audience, will probably sell more and sooner.

Is there any help out there for young writers? Actually, there’s a ton. Possibly too much. There are classes and workshops galore. You can even get a college degree in writing. I suppose you could get a degree in writing, then turn around and teach writing, without ever having had a commercial publication. That seems to be the way it is done these days. It isn’t for me, but it might be for you. I seem to detect a sameness int the products of this system, but that may be prejudice.

It is certain that the writers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, didn’t learn to write in classes or at conferences, but they did learn.

There is a certain amount of sameness in genre fiction anyway — virtually by definition. You can learn the requirements of the genre in class, or by careful reading of what has been recently published in your field. It doesn’t matter whether it is science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, or so-called literary fiction — which is just a genre with a necktie and a superior attitude.

Whatever comes first, classes and conferences or just extensive reading in your chosen field, what comes next is putting your butt in the chair and writing.

Writing is the easy part. Getting published is harder. I wish I had some good advice to give you about that. In fact, I wish I had some good advice to give myself.

Stick with it. Persevere. Don’t give up. Never say die.

Platitudes, just platitudes.

You can say it in reverse. If you don’t keep trying, you can’t succeed. That’s true, but it doesn’t guarantee anything.

I read this advice in a fishing book — “You won’t catch a fish if you don’t keep your lure in the water.” Now that sounds like a metaphor if I’ve ever heard one. But, really, what does it mean. If you keep the wrong lure, in the wrong pond, at the wrong time of day, you’re going to go home hungry.

Now there’s a metaphor.

Here’s my own story, in brief. I started writing full time in 1975. My first book, Jandrax, came out from Del Rey in 1978. My second book came out from Pocket Books in 1981. That book sold again in German translation in 1983.

My next publication came out this year.

That makes me the poster child for perseverance, but is anyone else willing to undergo a thirty-four year dry spell? I didn’t think so.

There are a thousand books which will tell you how to write your novel, and how to get it published. Read them if you want. I’ve certainly read my share, and most of them have at least some useful things to say. Then ask yourself, “How many successful novels has the author written?” And draw your own conclusions.

I know that’s all depressing, but I’m not here to lie to you.

When I was a young writer, there were only two paths to publication. You would find an agent if you could, or you would have to go it alone. Now the number of publishers willing to look at unagented submissions has shrunk, and at the same time it seems harder than ever to get an agent.

Today, self-publication forms a third path. I cay much about it, as I haven’t yet tried it myself. I plan to listen this weekend to those who have, and form some conclusions.

So let’s assume that you are recently published. If you have a commercial publisher, he may do something to help sell your book, but not much if you are new. That is both a disaster and an opportunity — which sounds like something out of a self-help book. Okay, let’s admit that, and take a look.

Back in the seventies and eighties, success for a book, once it was published, was in the lap of the Gods. Not the lap of the publisher because they were already working on the next book in the pipeline. Not the lap of the author, because there was absolutely nothing he could do to help himself. continued tomorrow

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These are the online notes for the Westercon panel
Fake it ’til you make it: a survivor’s guide for the introverted author

Here is a true tale for you, set once upon a time when the world was young. You can take some comfort in it when you are feeling shy.

I had just sold my second novel to David Hartwell, and had him lined up to buy my third. He invited me to a get-together with other young authors at Charles Brown’s house in the Oakland Hills. Charles Brown was then the editor of Locus.

I date this by the fact that A Fond Farewell to Dying was the only book Hartwell bought from me. The other deal fell through. No fault, no foul, no complaints; he gave it a fair hearing but it wasn’t ready. That’s a different story for a different time.

I also date that night by the fact that Heinlein had just delivered his first new manuscript in years. Everybody was speculating about it at the party. Hartwell’s assistant, who had read it, wouldn’t comment. It was Number of the Beast.

The year must have been 1979.

That night, I think, or perhaps at one of the Westercons I attended shortly after, I met Marta Randal and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. I went home immediately afterward and read Islands and Hotel Transylvania. I suspect that I will spend the weeks after this Westercon similarly playing catch-up.

I might have met several other authors who were unknown then and are famous now — memory does not record all the faces I saw that night.

I remember Charles Brown’s house, old, wooden, perched on the edge of a winding hill road. He had good bookcases and old bookcases and rickety bookcases and stacks of books and spills of books; more books than I had seen outside of a library. The main room was full too —  of writers, most of them new to the business.

Now, here’s the survival guide for the introverted author part.

The room had four corners. Every corner had a young author in it. All the rest of us were milling around trying to find a corner, but there weren’t any more. Every one of us was trying to look like we thought we belonged.

No one was succeeding.

Mind you, we did belong. We had been invited. We were all authors who had made it to at least the bottom rung of the ladder, but nobody seemed to feel it yet.

There were a few more experienced writers, known names who had won awards. They were working the room like a stand-up at Vegas. I don’t think they were showing off. I think they were trying to put us at ease.

I appreciated the effort, but it didn’t work. Introverted is introverted, and a lot of writers seem to suffer from the malady.

A year or two later, I gave a talk at Westercon on “How to Build a Culture.” It went smoothly and I enjoyed it immensely. The difference was confidence, and it wasn’t the year or two that gave it to me. It was the setting. I was on stage, with a microphone, behind a table and they were out there. They means you.

I could speak in front of a thousand of people with no hesitation, but I get tongue-tied in an elevator. I have a lot of non-writer friends, and most of them are of the opposite persuasion. They excel at small talk, at chatting, at putting a new acquaintance at ease. I envy them that skill, but if you put them in front of a large audience, they would freeze up.

Of course, one could try the old chestnut about imagining the audience naked. I’ve never thought that was a good idea. If the audience is full of beautiful people of the gender that interests you, you might get distracted. If they are significantly the opposite, they might scare you.

It seems better to me to imagine that the audience likes you, and wants to hear what you have to say. Whether it’s true or not, that mind-set might make for a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I’m sure that there are people who can talk to one person, then turn around and talk to a thousand, and never miss a beat. We can ignore them. They won’t be found in a room where the panel discussion is “Fake it till you make it”.

This discussion continues next Monday and Tuesday.

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    Here we have an oddity. I am adding this paragraph after the original post date, but before Westercon. The title of this panel was changed from Fantasy World Building to Of Wizards, Dragons and Klingons: Fantasy and Sci-Fi World Buiiding. That is a bit ambitious; it pretty much includes everything writers do. I will leave these posts as they were, covering only fantasy worlds, but if you look at the rest of the panels on my Westercon page, you will find enough to justify the omnibus title.

I love fantasy, as long as you understand that I don’t include horror. Although all my publications so far have been science fiction, I have actually spent more time writing fantasy. You’ll see it, eventually.
     The first thing I wrote seriously, three years before I sat down to become a writer, was the first chapter of what became a three book fantasy series, Valley of the Menhir, Scourge of Heaven, and Who Once Were Kin.
     Since I began this blog, snippets of fantasy fiction and posts about the writing of fantasy have appeared here and there. Long term followers may recognize the following from posts 240 -243.

When you are ready to build your own fantasy world, you might consider these four things: tone and magic (today’s post), as well as language and the concept of the archaic (tomorrow).

Tone

The tone of the prolog to my novel Valley of the Menhir is intense and serious, but it can afford to be. It only lasts eight ms pages; if it were prolonged, such seriousness would quickly become pretentious. Books, like the characters in them, need to breathe. This is true whatever the genre.

J. R. R Tolkien set the tone for fantasy, and not necessarily in a positive way. The feel of Lord of the Rings is a combination of pretension and childishness, a tone that came from the uneasy mixing of hobbits with humans and elves. I liked LOTR well enough to read it twice, decades apart, but I don’t think I could make it through again. To be fair, the hobbits were the best thing in the books. When I tried to read the Silmarillion, the hobbits weren’t there to lighten the mood, so I finally bogged down and quit.

Tone at its best is found in A Wizard of Earthsea, which is, for my taste, and without equivocation, the best fantasy novel of them all. The overriding factor in the tone of Earthsea is humility. Ged is the son of peasants (or Earthsea’s equivalent) and he never loses touch with his humble beginnings. True, his arrogance leads to tragedy, but the bulk of the book is the story of Ged regaining the humility which is his natural state.

The language of the book is simple, matching the tone of the story. The image of a man in a tiny boat, pursuing his nemesis alone across Earthsea, has an almost Ghandiesque simplicity about it — if we remember that Ghandi had the simplicity and arrogance to bring down the British empire.

Tone can take many shades in fantasy, and still work. Fritz Leiber’s Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser stories on one hand and Keith Robert’s Pavane on the other are worlds apart in every way, but each strikes the tone necessary for its story. And yes, I know Pavane is an alternate worlds novel, but it reads like fantasy.

Roger Zelazny’s tone has one foot in science fiction and the other in fantasy. It doesn’t matter what he writes, his tone remains the same, and it works everywhere. Lord of Light is certainly science fiction and Creatures of Light and Darkness is certainly fantasy. Amber, in all its volumes, transcends categorization, but all these works belong in the genre called everything-Zelazny-wrote. I’ve read all his work repeatedly, and will continue to do so, because I get lost in the sound of his voice. And that is what tone is, after all.

Magic

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
                Clarke’s third law.

The universe is full of forces; some of those forces are personalities.
                reference lost

I believe that the second quotation above is from a piece by James Blish, which I read many years ago and no longer have available to me. If anyone recognizes the source, let me know. In that same piece, as I recall, he spoke of Black Easter as an experiment in which he treated the Book of Revelation as simple fact. Roger Zelazny made a career out of treating non-Western religions as if they were simple fact.

Like stardrives, magic can be highly structured or haphazardly thrown in when the story needs it. Both styles work, depending on the skill of the author. The most organized magic I recall is Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories. For disorganization, see any new author.

A primary, underlying question in any presentation of a fantasy world is, “Where does the magic come from?” Is it a dispersed, readily available natural resource like The Force in Star Wars? Does it reside within its wielder, as a natural consequence of his being? Or is it owned by other powerful beings, who must be supplicated or bargained with to obtain a portion of their power? This choice has a huge effect on how dark the story is likely to become. we continue magic tomorrow

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