Teaching Writers to be Talented

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As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I’m pretty iffy on the subject of “talent.” People say “That writer is SOOO TALENTED!” based on the work they produce, and there’s really no way to know where the work–not to mention the expertise that created it–came from. Multiple revisions? Strong editorial hand? A childhood spent ear-deep in books? Years of study?

This blog is mirrored on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, where people can leave comments. On DW, David Hines started a conversation about how we learned to recognize the things that need to be revised.

As I said before, if it feels wrong, I revise it[1]. The question is: how did I learn to recognize good from bad? I mean, it’s easy to talk about teaching the rules of grammar or plot cliches, but those are intellectual lessons. For me, I know it’s wrong before I really understand why. It’s the feeling that makes me give it a second look.

So how do we train writers to have this instinctive response to things that suck in their own work?

Here’s how I understand it works:

1. Make sure they’re exposed to good work.
1a. Make sure they understand what makes it good.
2. Make sure they’re exposed to terrible work.
2a. Make sure they understand what makes it terrible.
3. Tease out the good from the bad in problematic works.
(None of this is exactly revelatory, is it?)
4. Expect writers to explain for themselves why they respond the way they do.

It’s number 4 that matters most, I think. It’s important for mentors, peers, and teachers to point out not just good from bad but good from great, but it’s even more important for writers to acknowledge and analyze their own responses to work. What they feel, not what they ought to feel.

Eleven-plus years ago, when my wife and I were expecting, we did a lot of research on proper parenting techniques. Let me just say, there’s a lot of bullshit out in the world about raising your kids. Most of it is about discipline and far too much is faddish, but we were happy with John Gottman’s teaching. (Yes, this is a digression. I’ll bring it back to the topic at hand soon, I promise.) Actually, we borrowed a DVD from the library featuring a lecture he gave on “emotion coaching.”

Essentially what he explains is that it isn’t enough to love your kids or to be warm to them. It’s also important to teach them about their emotions. You set boundaries for proper behavior. You pay attention to those times your kids are feeling angry, frustrated, sad, etc. You don’t try to change their moods to something else with jokes or play or tickling. Instead, you teach the child an age-appropriate name for what they’re feeling and make sure they understand that it’s okay to be sad or angry or whatever.

And so on. The important thing is, when the child understands and trusts their own feelings, they get a host of benefits not the least of which is to trust the little feeling of alarm you get when you meet someone sketchy and manipulative.

To bring this back to writing, there are a lot of responses that people have to narrative and language that, left unexamined, lead them to make really shitty story choices. They may know what will evoke a particular response in a general sense, but can they predict the response accurately? Do they understand their own responses, and have they developed the empathy to incorporate the responses they’ve learned to expect from other people?

Because that sort of accuracy is what people call “talent.”

You can tell I think that previous sentence is important because it’s got its own paragraph. Here it is again in bold: Talent = Accuracy. If you can evoke a response from the reader[2] that you intended to get, that’s what people call talent. If you can do it while avoiding cliches like beautiful-but-klutzy-heroines or villains-shoot-the-hero’s-dog, people will think you’re even more talented. If you can make the reader feel something compelling but unusual, coming out of a narrative they can not find anywhere else, they’ll think you’re extraordinarily talented.

It doesn’t have to be something you’re born with. It doesn’t have to be something that makes itself known before you turn 18. It can come from hard work and close study and long sessions spent gabbing with other writers. No one can really tell, because the only thing they can see is the finished work.

That’s why I think that creating a talented writer is a pretty straightforward process, if the writer is willing to do the work: Examine their own responses. Understand how and why others respond as they do. Practice getting the responses you want. Become lauded as “a talented writer.”

The best(worst) thing about it is that people will see the end result of all that hard work and declare that it must have come from something innate within you, and they could never manage it themselves.

[1] Having already spent too much of my day on this post, I’m going to throw it onto the blog as a vomit draft. No revision! I fully expect to regret this at some later point.

[2] “The Reader” = Not every reader everywhere but a fair proportion of them.

Twenty Palaces sales: the first year

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A few weeks ago, the November 2012 sales numbers for self-published books became available to the people who published them. Since I first published the Twenty Palaces prequel (cleverly title Twenty Palaces) in November of 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to post the sales figures. Why not?

Looking at this, you might be tempted to look at the price I’m charging and try to work out how much I’ve made. That won’t work. For one thing, not all of these sales came at Amazon’s 30% sales commission (I refuse to call them royalties; Amazon isn’t my publisher). Despite setting the price above $2.99, they charged me 65% on a surprisingly high number of them.

Which sucks, but that’s the price of doing business with a company like Amazon. So, if you think you can figure out what I earned, it’s actually quite a bit less than that.

Also, the first month’s sales were small because I posted it just in time for the last week. December was the first full month.

Anyway, the Smashwords sales cover Kobo, iBooks on Apple, Sony Reader, and Smashwords themselves, and since I didn’t start them until months later than Amazon and B&N, I didn’t break them out by month. I would have had to break out each seller and that was too much work. They’ve been small players for me anyway.

Here’s the table:

Month Amazon US Amazon non-US B&N Smashwords Group Total All
11-Nov 83 6 0
11-Dec 902 27 54
12-Jan 430 25 55
12-Feb 281 19 40
12-Mar 211 13 42
12-Apr 182 2 20
12-May 131 16 31
12-Jun 126 14 32
12-Jul 98 8 27
12-Aug 96 11 27
12-Sep 71 8 17
12-Oct 62 5 14
12-Nov 44 0 11
 Total 2717 154 370 170 3411

Christmas! The Christmas season is worth a few sales, and that’s a fact. Checking the numbers for Giftmas ’12, there was another small bump not reflected above.

Anyway, the numbers aren’t terrible but they aren’t fabulous either. I’m certainly not going to be touring Europe by rail on this novel, and it doesn’t inspire me to Kickstart The Twisted Path, which would have been book number next. Still, for a book I’d already written, I’m happy enough with the results and grateful to everyone who bought a copy.

If you haven’t bought a copy, I put some handy links into the table above. Knock yourself out.

Finally, I know some authors post their numbers every year, but this was sort of a pain to do. I’m not seeing it becoming a tradition.

Revision

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Twitter user @UOJim asked me to write a post about revision, and I realized I have never done a systemic evaluation of the way I revise. Writing this will be a way to organize my thoughts on the subject, all of which I will probably forget once it’s time to go back over EPIC SEQUEL WITH NO DULL PARTS next spring when the first draft is finished.

(See how hopeful I am? Finished draft in the spring. It’s like a magic spell: I write it to make it happen.)

The way I figure it, there are two basic kinds of revisions: story-level and text-level. Continue reading

Negative Amazon reviews fail to keep a book out of the #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list

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Film at 11.

Authors, don’t fret those bad reviews. They mean less than you think.

Plot Without Conflict, a non-Western view

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Via Kelly Sue DeConnick, a discussion of non-Western plot structures that do not involve conflict.

I don’t have a lot to say about it, because I’d need to read much more in-depth to feel knowledgeable for that, but it is interesting.

Chainmail Bikinis *ARE* My Business!

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Oh, hell, would you look at the fabulous 200th issue of SFWA’s Bulletin:

IMG_1587

Let’s see, we have a wintry mountain scene complete with icicles, a dead giant with monster-teeth, and…

And a woman in a chainmail bikini.

You know what this cover says to me? It says: “I have nothing of value to say to you.” It says: “The only thing I have to offer is more of the drek you’ve been trying to distance yourself from.” It says: “We provide garbage because we don’t think garbage is what everyone likes.”

Apparently, there’s more WTFery inside, but I’ll have to take people’s word on it because I’m not interested. I used to read The Bulletin cover to cover but lately it just makes me feel embarrassed to see it drop into my mailbox.

SFWA, you’re an organization of professionals. If you want to pander to me, treat me like a savvy customer, not a mouth-breathing lowest-common-denominator soft-pron fantasy fan. I do not need paintings of swimsuit models on the covers of the professional magazines you send me; that’s what the internet is for.

Have some damn pride.

How to purchase your own Hugo Award

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Blastr has posted a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) list demonstrating how much it would cost to buy yourself a Hugo nomination and/or a Hugo Award.

Now, I’m not going to replicate their numbers here, you’ll have to click through to see them. They’re based on last year’s numbers. Since folks can nominate and vote just by paying for a membership in the convention, how many memberships would you have to buy (for friends, ‘natch) to put yourself into consideration. It seems like the cheapest options would be $850 to be nominated and $8800 to win for short fiction.

That’s 17 pals to make the bottom of the list, assuming this year’s numbers are like last year’s. You might want to round up to an even grand just to make sure. My question would be this: Would it be worth it?

Never mind the bragging rights to having the statue, or to putting “Hugo-nominated author” into your email sig file. Would it get you better contracts, more sales, more reviews, or anything at all? Would it ever pay off?

From everything I’ve heard, it never would.

A chance to do some good in the world

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Wing-it Productions makes a habit of helping at-risk, homeless, and incarcerated youth, and now they’re asking for help. To stay afloat and continue their weekly teaching sessions for kids inside the King County Juvenile Detention Facility and also homeless kids–not to mention their performances at kids burn centers and cancer society camps, plus their regular theater shows–they’re holding a fund drive.

They need $5,500 in donations by Jan 31st to collect their money, at which point their board will put up matching funds. They’re at 76% as I write this.

Their company, which includes Jet City Improv, is over twenty years old, but things have been tough for theater groups over the last couple, and it would be a shame if they were unable to continue their work. And yeah, the founders are friends of mine.

So please, even if you’re not a Seattle local, consider making a small donation.

Randomness for 1/15

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1) “The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months.” Read the nominated reviews here.

2) I’d say that the question of whether President Obama would rather fight a single horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses has been answered pretty authoritatively.

3) Movie plots done as pictograms. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t get all of these.

4) Minor characters get their own movies. I didn’t get all of these, either

5) Emotions for which the English language has no words. “Viitsima” is my new pen name.

6) A comprehensive list of things that made David Banner “Hulk out” in the TV show THE HULK.

7) Segway inventor patents portable bulimia machine, demonstrates that he’s one fucked up human being.

Can you guess how many of last year’s bestselling SF titles were published last year?

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One.

Actually, that’s not fair. I’m not counting the media tie-ins, of which there are four, three of which were published last year and made the list.

Of the rest, Ready Player One was published in 2011. Also, didn’t that one get a mainstream push? The other four slots were taken up with Ender’s Game, Dune, and two different editions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The only book that was a) original fiction and b) released that same year was the latest “Honorverse” novel from David Weber.

(A quick note: I don’t have anything against media tie-in novels. I wrote one myself last year for the Spirit of the Century rpg. They’re still not the same as pop art created outside a corporate structure, even ruthlessly commercial pop art like these lists.)

You may think it’s unfair to compare the books this way, because Ender’s Game, Hitchhikers and Dune are often assigned in school, but let’s look at the numbers. That OSC novel sold just over 100,000 copies. The tenth best selling novel on the mystery list is one of the “Dragon Tattoo” movie editions, with 127,000+ sales. Another edition of the same novel holds the fifth spot.

And the rest of the listed books are all original fiction, as long as you’re willing to throw stuff published under James Patterson’s name into that category, and I’m not sure I am. None of those books need to be assigned in school to reach six-figure sales.

If you look at the number one mystery novel, it would make #7 on the Romance list. I was tempted to leave any discussion of the Romance bestsellers out of this discussion because the 50 Shades of Grey + sequels have been the Big Cultural Thing this past year, which sort of skews the results.

Still, very few people are buying sf novels, and most of them are buying old favorites. I knew science fiction was a small part of the market, but I had no idea just how small it was.

I wish they’d included the bestselling fantasy novels, too.

This all leads me to three conclusions:

1) Science fiction is a genre in decline (obvs).

2) I am even more determined to reject the idea that fantasy should aspire to science fiction’s protocols.

3) I will never write science fiction. I don’t love it enough to move into that ghost town.

(Added later: John Scalzi confirms that Redshirts sold well enough to make the list, but most of those sales were ebooks. These lists only track pbooks. I wonder how including ebooks would change the comparisons of the books below.)