Writing to Sell, Part I

Apologies to anyone who has been waiting on this post. I know it’s taken a long time for me to write it, but that’s because it’s a topic close to my heart, and I wanted to take time and put my thoughts in proper order to do it justice. I also knew it would be a long one. This, of course, led to me procrastinating and putting it off, but that’s just how I roll sometimes. I’ve since decided to break the post into parts to help make it less daunting.

So. When I was taking writing classes in high school, I always did well because I enjoyed it and did it fairly competently. I took it more seriously than most of my classmates, and so produced a higher quality final product that got me a lot of A’s and convinced me I was a better writer than I actually was.

In college, things were quite different. Everyone in the class was a wannabe writer like me, and it was a very competitive environment. The teachers didn’t really teach, they just gave you assignments and then you would read in class and everyone would throw off the cuff critiques at you, some of which were publicly embarrassing and which often held no real advice for how to improve. Like many adult writing support groups, the goal became more to impress the class and teacher rather than to truly understand and advance your craft.

I stumbled a lot there. I would get bits of advice like “Write what you know,” and write stories about my roommate snoring, or being bored flipping through TV channels, or about amateur stick-fighting. None of that flew. So then I tried to cater to the audience. Figuring everyone loved to read about sex, I wrote a lot of porny nonsense, but that always felt cheap and often backfired anyway. Finally, I wrote a story about how I was sick of trying to do what everyone else wanted, and somehow that one resonated with me and the class. Sadly, that was the last story I wrote before graduation.

I stopped writing for a few years after that, trying to sort out my post-college life. Eventually my friend Myke and I started a mini-writing group, sending stories back and forth to each other.  Myke is a very talented writer, but he had a philosophy about writing that I didn’t quite jive with, even though my own was still forming. He believed that there was a very clear path to becoming a professional novelist which involved reading all the SF short story magazines, writing dozens of short stories in the same vein as what you saw, and submitting them everywhere under the sun in order to try and get published as many times as possible to build up a writing resume. This resume would then get you into SFWA and gain you access to parties and the like where you could network and sell yourself to editors and agents, using your long resume of shorts to convince them you were the real deal and get them to look at your (often unfinished) novel-length work.

The problems there were twofold. One was that I have never been a short story reader or writer. I learned in college tht it wasn’t my strong suit, and I don’t think you can apply all the things you learn doing shorts to novel-length work. I am also a wallflower, so even getting into the room with the right people is no help, because I suck at meeting people and suck even harder at self-promotion. It always feels phony to me and makes me stutter like an ass. Even now, you can see it in my live interviews, all filled with “uhs” and “ums” as I flounder for words and fight my discomfort at the spotlight.

Another thing Myke was very in favor of was the standard formula story arc, which goes something like this: Hero thinks he is a nobody, but then discovers he has an amazing power he can’t control, doesn’t understand, and is afraid to experiment with. He faces a villian with similar power who is practiced and expert, and bent on destroying the hero before he gets his act together. It gets worse and worse until all seems lost, and then at the last minute the hero somehow has a flash of intuition and gains mastery of his power which, because good is stronger than evil, handily defeats the villian just in time.

After reading it literally hundreds of times in different novels I have come to hate that story arc, even though there is no denying that it has been used over and over by most of the bestselling authors in SF, and obviously works. MANY successful writers swear by it.

With that in mind, I once asked Robert Jordan about it at a panel at the San Diego ComicCon. It seemed that his early Wheel of Time books followed that story arc, but then as the seried progressed, he abandoned it for a looser style that was sometimes satisfying (as in The Shadow Rising, or Lord of Chaos), and sometimes not (as in Crossroads of Twilight or Knife of Dreams).

I wanted to ask Mr. Jordan if this was intentional on his part, meaning, did he follow the traditional arcs purposely in order to get sales and then diverge once his career was assured, or was it just a natural transition. I started the question by saying, “When I am trying to write, one of the things I have difficulty with is the line between what I WANT to write, and what I think will sell…”

Mr. Jordan let me go no further, scolding me publicly and telling me I should never take the market into account, and always write what I want.

It was heartfelt advice and I know he meant it well, but at the same time, I knew in my heart it was wrong. Not taking your audience and patrons into account and just writing whatever you felt like was self-indulgent and in many ways just as bad as trying to cater to them exclusively. DaVinci catered to his patrons. So did Dickens and Michelangelo. I knew there had to be a middle ground, but I never really understood where it was.

Around that time, I sent some manuscripts to Joshua Bilmes, SF agent extraordinaire (don’t be fooled by his crappy website) and a guy I had met at a SFWA party Myke dragged me to (thanks Myke!). Joshua critiqued my work in a much more professional way than anyone else I had ever known, backing up his negative comments with reasoned arguments about story structure, rather than the emotional arguments I had gotten in writing classes and informal critique groups. He gave me a copy of a book called Writing to Sell by the legendary literary agent Scott Meredith, which helped me navigate my conflicting views between the catering to the market and writing what I really wanted.

But writing, like any art, is a very personal thing, and no self-help book can an artist make. There were quite a few things I disagreed with in that book, and others which changed my life. I will discuss some of those in my next post on this topic.

Posted on October 23, 2008 at 10:50 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
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