Writing

In a recent New York Times article, the author Jo Nesbo informs us that he arranges the books in his library at home alphabetically. This is sensible; I wish I’d started doing that a long time ago. Writers always like to boast about how many books we’ve read and own, moaning on and on about how difficult it is to move house when you own literally every book ever written, including some of those really large intimidating ones that scare people. You know the drill. But it’s true! I own a lot of books. And they are in complete chaos.

Years ago, my books were arranged carefully by author and series, and I would spend a lot of time after every move carefully unboxing the collection and arranging them again. When I moved into the house that has been the Somers Compound for the past decade or so, I was simply too tired to do that, so I just tossed books onto shelves in any order. And there they have stayed.

The Flood

Things have only gotten worse over the ensuing years, too. Shelf space is tight, for one thing, so I am forever making shelving decisions based solely on space and geometry. Plus, now that I write so much on books online, I get a lot of freebies from publicists and such. Which have to go on the shelves, because, as I may have forgotten to mention, I never get rid of a book I’ve read. Never. I don’t throw them away, sell them, or loan them out. If I read it, it’s mine forever.

So I obviously regard my books as part of me, as representative of me in some way. So the fact that I’ve allowed total disorder to descend on the collection is worrying, in a way. If it somehow represents my inner world, my inner world is like the universe in Stephen King’s Dark Tower books: Slowly dying.

I have now depressed myself.

I often think that if I’d been born 20 years later I could have amassed this library and habit using eBooks and saved myself all the trouble; except that my experience with MP3s tells me I’d have lost like 500 books in various platform and storage missteps, which would be an even worse metaphor for my inner world. So it’s back to learning higher math in order to squeeze one more bookshelf in the house.

If you intend to traditionally publish any of your writing, you’re going to have to become intimately familiar with rejection. In self-publishing rejection is a bit softer; unless you literally sell zero copies of your book, someone out there accepted you. But if you’re doing the traditional publisher or short fiction market thing, you’ll end up with quite a number of rejection notes.

I know, because I’m an expert in rejection. I have thousands of rejection notes. I even have a lot of them on paper, in a file, because I am an Old and back in The Day we sent our fictions through the mail like animals. But whether email or print, rejection is rejection, and you’re gonna have to get used to it.

Types of Rejection

There are, in my experience, generally three kinds of rejections:

1. Form rejections, which are comprised of a stock sentence or two and convey nothing about the mood in the office when your story was written or anyone’s reaction to it;
2. Feedback rejections, when an editor takes the time to jot down some thoughts about your work;
3. Assholes.

The vast majority of rejections I’ve received have been #1, and that’s fine. We’re all busy and when I submitted my short story to your magazine I did not purchase any sort of editorial service, so we’re good. I’ve gotten a lot of #2s, and they’re always nice, but I rarely do any revision based on them, because I’m arrogant and lazy. The few times I have revised based on a rejection note’s feedback, it has never changed any minds. Let it drift.

I’ve also had a few #3s. Some people just think that their position as Dispenser of Pennies to the Poor Unwashed Writers gives them the right to be nasty. The only thing to do is scratch that market off your list. Don’t worry, they’ll be out of business soon enough.

What do you do with rejection? Make a note of it, take a moment, and immediately submit the story or novel somewhere else. Rejections are just one person’s opinion (maybe two or three, depending). If you still love your story, just keep moving with it. And someday your pile of rejections will be a hilarious detail in a blog.

Once you make the dubious life decision to pursue writing as a vocation or avocation, there are a couple of things that are absolutely, 100% certain to happen:

1. Someone will start calling you “Shakespeare”;
2. Someone will ask you if you’d be interested in writing their genius idea for a novel in exchange for, say, 20% of the profits;
3. You’ll have to deal with criticism of your work.

From the author’s point of view there are two kinds of criticism: The kind you agree with and see value in, and everything else. The first kind is easy because it usually indicates that you yourself thought there was a similar problem with the book, and you’re just getting objective confirmation. It doesn’t feel too awful because there’s a good chance on some level you’ve already dealt with it.

The latter though can be difficult, because when people make criticisms of your work that you think are ludicrous, it’s easy to just shrug it off and assume they’re just not very good readers. But not only should you always be appreciative of anyone who is willing to give you feedback on your work, you should probably also not ignore criticisms that seem off the wall. In fact, if you’re first reaction is to frown in puzzlement at a piece of feedback, chances are this is exactly the feedback you should be paying extra attention to.

The Zone of Discomfort

It’s easy to accept negative feedback when it lines up with what you’re already thinking. The hard part—and thus the necessary part—is to listen to feedback that seems completely off-target and objectively evaluate it.

Why? Because you will never control how people react to your work, and if you’re not regularly confused and outraged by the feedback you get, you may be in a bubble where only people who see things the same way you do get to read and comment on your work. You’ve got to seek feedback that scares you a little bit, that confuses you. You might ultimately reject it just as your initial instinct told you to, but you have to at least consider it. It’s the only way you’ll ever see your writing from a point of view outside your own experience.

Also: Don’t challenge critics to duels. It never ends well.

Most stories have what literary scientists call characters; fictional people who the reader chooses to believe are real. Or the reader chooses to believe this if you manage to make those characters at least halfway believable as people and at least 56% interesting.

A lot of writers think the first part (believability) is hard and the second part (interesting) is easy. After all, making characters pop off the page can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from a distinctive accent or catch-phrase-laden dialog to costuming, physical appearance, and perhaps really crazy hair. You can almost tell you’re reading a pretty awful story simply by stepping back to observe the characters, because there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of the story and what the characters are wearing.

It boils down to: The crazier you make a character’s defining characteristics, the less believable they are. Because if a man walks into a room wearing a cape, with a parrot on his shoulder, no one thinks look at this fascinating man! They think, who in the world wears a cape? and they pop out of your story as if shot out of a cannon.

Unless, of course, you’re writing a story set in a place where capes are common, in which case: Carry on, but you get my point.

People Be Crazy

In real life, people who dress outrageously aren’t the cool characters of your story, they’re the people you don’t want to sit next to on the subway. Defining your characters by a verbal tic, accent, or strange appearance is easy—guy in a cape, got it—but the cape doesn’t make them a distinct character on the page, it just means your reader can’t think of anything else when they’re doing something.

You’ve got to make your characters distinct the same way people around you make themselves distinct. We all (or most of us) play along with certain conventions of society. We dress within a fairly narrow range of acceptable fashions. We speak certain ways to strangers, slightly differently to friends. Within a spectrum, everyone basically behaves the same way because as George Costanza once said, we’re living in a society here and that’s part of it.

So how do you tell your friends apart if we’re all within this range of normalcy? Their opinions. Their backgrounds. Their way of speaking (which may actually include an accent or catch-phrase, to be fair, though that’s rarely the only thing that distinguishes them). Not using the easy physical markers to define your characters will force you to dig a little deeper and make them into people with motivations, back stories, and subtle traits that make them stand out.

Unless your character is a magician-pirate, in which case go with the cape and the parrot.