Some time ago I read a book called THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE, by Robert Epstein. Glancing through my old newsletters looking for something else, I came across my review of the book and decided to share it with this blog. Here's essentially what I said about this very iconoclastic work:
Epstein, a psychologist, advances the premise that teenagers are *not* typically lazy, incompetent, immature, and impulsive as popular belief has it. He deconstructs the notorious "teen brain" hypothesis widely reported in the media. To my astonishment, the best-known experiment on which that conclusion rests involved only 24 subjects (!) and, as described by Epstein, doesn't even necessarily prove what the reports claimed it proved. (Furthermore, Epstein reminds us that observed changes in brain wiring can be the result rather than the cause of behavioral changes.) Well, inaccuracy and sensationalism in news stories about science don't surprise me, but this author goes far beyond debunking the "immature teenage brain" theory. He maintains that "adolescence" as we know it is a cultural, not a biological, phenomenon, pointing out that it didn't exist as a concept in most of the world's societies throughout history. He quite rightly reminds us that in preindustrial cultures teenagers were considered young men and women, not overgrown children. Rather than rebelling against adults, they were in the process of becoming adults and worked alongside their elders in productive occupations. Even today, many societies don't suffer from the teenage rebellion, angst, and turmoil we think of as normal and inevitable. However, when these cultures become saturated with Western products and ideas, their young people often begin to think and act like American adolescents.
I notice some weaknesses in the way he presents his background information. For instance, it would be easy to get the impression that he thinks the anti-child-labor laws of the late nineteenth century were altogether bad, which he surely isn't saying. On the whole, though, his premises appear sound to me. Epstein attributes our teenagers' problems to their "infantilization" resulting from the "artificial extension of childhood." American teenagers are subject to more restrictions on their freedom than the average incarcerated felon. (I've read somewhere else the idea that our treatment of children, in terms of freedoms and responsibilities, is exactly backwards. We expect too much maturity of little kids, such as making them sleep alone in a dark room from birth and placing them in a highly structured school environment in kindergarten with a curriculum that used to be postponed to first grade or later. Yet we bar our teenagers from meaningful work, criminalize much of their behavior with mindless "zero tolerance" rules, and stifle their free expression in speech, clothing, etc.) So far, my reaction to THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE is "right on, preach it, brother!"
His proposed solution, however, is more controversial. He would like to see young people of any age (though he hints that, in practice, the decision-making competence he considers the potential of most kids probably doesn't begin much before age thirteen) who can pass standard "competency tests" given adult status in whatever area they've passed the test for. Yes, even drinking, sex, and marriage (as was the case in most cultures throughout history—remember, Juliet wasn't quite fourteen). He proposes a drinking license or cigarette-buying license, similar to a driver's license and revocable if the holder breaks the rules associated with this privilege. The permissible school-leaving age would be lowered, with education spread out over a lifetime and tailored to the individual's needs. In lots of ways, his utopian vision of integrating teenagers into the adult world, with as much responsibility they can prove themselves ready for, appeals to me. But it won't happen, given the vehement opposition even the most modest of his proposals would incite if anyone tried to translate them into practical social policy. The biggest problem with his plan, to me, is that we'd still have the intractable economic realities that underlie the "artificial extension of childhood": Very few people can support themselves independently without those 22 or more years of schooling we've come to accept as the norm. And it's hard to work at a self-supporting job while attending school full-time. Our entire educational system would have to be re-structured. Which is one of Epstein's proposals, but it's even less likely to come to pass than a drinking license for high school students. At age eighteen, I would have wholeheartedly endorsed Epstein's program. (I got married at eighteen, and we're still married; in fact, we had our 44th anniversary earlier this week.) Now, having survived the teen years of our four sons, I have a more ambivalent reaction; I find some of his suggestions more than disturbing. Still, they comprise a serious attempt to tackle a grave social problem. Try to find a copy of this book at your public or college library. It will stir up some uncomfortable thinking.
And for a similar take on the subject of adolescence, read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular." Why DOES intelligence often cause teenagers to be ostracized by their peers? This mind-blowing essay gives a very convincing explanation, which relates to the "infantilizing" practices discussed by Epstein:
Nerds
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Do Your Lovers Live The HEA
I'm blatantly borrowing John Rosenman's excellent blog post title, "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA?"
You all know, if you've read my novels, that my answer is yes, but it's not so easy as all that.
Heather Massey at The Galaxy Express, on July 6 reviewed John Rosenman's novel Beyond Those Distant Stars http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/07/reflections-on-john-b-rosenmans-beyond.html
He gave the discussion another spin in his blog post
http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2010/07/13/do-your-lovers-live-hea/comment-page-1/#comment-323
And then Heather pointed me to his post and I commented, he answered, others commented, Heather is brewing another comment, and I commented back on John's comments -- you gotta read this thing.
Here's his thesis reduced to a sound-byte:
-------Quote John Rosenman--------
My point is that romances need to be less restrictive and more open to possibilities in order to explore more fully the often painful and difficult realities of life. Romances can be complex. They can be literature.
-------End Quote---------
We, at Alien Romance, of course agree that Romance genre not only "can be" but actually is "Literature" upon occasion. Many occasions, in fact. Many more occasions when combined into SFR or PNR.
In the comments on John Rosenman's post, Heather pointed out that I had explained how "the ending" is defined not by the content of the event (resolution of the conflict) but by where in the character's story-arc you stop writing.
Heather quoted me in her comment:
-------Quote---
Jacqueline Lichtenberg said it best, noting that “There’s HEA potential in every other genre, even or especially Horror.” ( http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html )
In this post ( http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html ), Ms. Lichtenberg notes that
“Why does Romance genre absolutely require it? And SF also has an ending-point formula — called “upbeat.”
These are actually identical requirements. It’s all about where you start telling the story, and where (in time) you end it. Life is a sine-wave. It has high points and low points and neutral points but never stops waving. Storytellers just CUT a section out of that sine-wave to structure a plot.
The publisher’s end-point requirement determines the starting point.”
-----End Quote---
There are a couple more points I want to bring to the surface here because we've been discussing the Editing process for the previous 7 posts which relate to this "ending" issue, and why we have defined endings. This series was posted on:
Aug 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Sept 7 & 14, 2010
The HEA is an editorial requirement when the editor is filling a publishing line with consistent, identical product under the Romance Genre label.
The HEA is not an editorial requirement for lines that do not advertise the "Romance" genre label, but they may have other requirements.
Why is the HEA ever a requirement?
John points out that the fun, enjoyment, and fascination inherent in reading a story that pivots on a Relationship is the uncertainty of how that relationship will be at "The End."
To generate that uncertainty, some novels must end differently than the HEA.
Otherwise, you have something like a TV Series episode where you know the main characters won't get killed. So the threat to their lives is not piercingly immanent to the viewer.
John points out that the HEA itself is not unbelievable, but in reality it doesn't always happen. It does happen sometimes, so it's plausible in fiction but should not be inevitable because if it's inevitable, there's no suspense, and thus no ultimate payoff. His underlying thesis seems to be that inevitability itself is unrealistic enough to destroy reader enjoyment, and an inevitable HEA is worse than other sorts of inevitabilities.
And I think that's the core of the issue. Inevitability. Realism.
We are attracted to fiction that discusses "life the universe and everything" in terms of a philosophy (theme) that we either have internalized or wish we had internalized.
Fiction reading either reinforces our assumptions about the world, or holds forth an ideal that we want to assume and shows us how it is possible the ideal could really be true.
Good fiction does both while at the same time calling both assumptions and ideals into question. That's called "depth" and you usually find it in "Literature."
You seldom find it in films because of the nature of the visual medium. But the classics, the films that last for generations and still speak intriguingly of our dearly held ideas, do reveal "depth" on re-viewing. That kind of screenwriting is very difficult. I think it happens very much by "accident."
See my blog post on what you can do in a novel that you can't do in a film:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
I have been contending that the essence of the Romance Genre - the essence that we extract and combine with the essence of the SF Genre or Fantasy Genre (or both) - actually is the essence of "Literature" in its highest form.
See:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/mutants-as-aliens.html
where I discussed how
Romance Genre embodies two core principles:
a) Love Conquers All
b) The Soul Is Real
The HEA is a "requirement" because HEA is what results once Love has Conquered All. If all is conquered by love, there's nothing left that can sunder the couple, not even death.
If the HEA is not the "ending" of the novel, the theme that distinguishes Romance from all other art forms is not present in the novel and it is therefore not a genre romance novel.
Love Conquers All might be a sub-theme, but it would be there to be disproved so that a larger theme "life is nothing but misery" -or- "happiness comes in bright sparks that fade quickly" -- can be fully presented.
Here's one of many of my discussions of the uses of theme in novel structure:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
Those readers looking for reinforcement of their belief that Love Conquers All and/or The Soul Is Real, and those looking to indulge in a few hours of hope that these things are true, will be bitterly disappointed by an ending that is not an HEA -- and they will want their money back.
You can work with either core premise of Romance in a non-romance. You can construct a non-Romance genre novel to culminate in an HEA and that will not make the novel a Romance.
As I said in the comments discussion to:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/toystory-3-analyzed-for-beats.html
Romance Genre is distinguished by specific choices for the elements that a novelist can fill in with a number of different choices when writing other genres.
Those choices for a Romance are:
A)In a Romance the Relationships IS the plot, and all else is commentary on that relationship.
B)The conflict is the Relationship, what creates the attraction and what blocks the attraction.
C)The story is all about how each person is changed by the need for the Relationship.
D)The beginning is where the couple first become conscious of each other.
E)The ending is where the Relationship roadblocks are removed and it's full speed ahead into a Happily Ever After life for the couple.
Any given reader may, at whim, prefer to sink into a novel where they know what the rhythm and theme will be - a Mystery, Western, Action, Intrigue, Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, any genre. At other times, they may want "general fiction" -- which also has a very strict, set formula.
See my post on the reasons why we have such a thing as genre fiction.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html
The Romance genre, and all its hyrbids -- SFR, PNR, Action Romance, whatever criss-crossed mixture -- if the "R" comes last in the nickname, it means the plot-structure follows the 5 elements I listed above.
Sometimes we read fiction for a realistic view of our real world. We want contemporary maybe urban settings like where we live with people who are up against the same problems we are (TV sets as babysitters, cell phones always on, carpooling nightmares), and sometimes we want to get away to impossible places with other problems.
If you go for the kind of Romance where not only does love conquer all, but also The Soul Is Real (where lovers find their Soul Mate and there's something spiritual, transcendent, bigger than "reality" that enters their lives because of that mating) then you are in the set of Themes where the HEA is not only inevitable but also realistic.
If you combine both Love Conquers All and The Soul Is Real, you walk into a world where there is no other possible ending than the HEA.
The story isn't over until the Soul Mates have ignited Love so bright that it illuminates and dissipates all darkness - and the world is revealed to be truthfully what it seems to be under the blurring veil of "falling in love."
The illusion of perfection is torn aside to reveal the truth that perfection already exists - and continuous, solid, strong, pervasive happiness is the stable foundation of life, not a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
It's not that the couple will face no further challenges, but that those challenges will only strengthen their love and their ability to make life better for all those around them.
This is the thematic statement about the true nature of reality that the Romance Genre focuses on.
The story can only end where the couple (and the reader) understand the inevitability and realistic condition of life, the HEA.
If the writer quits writing before that point, the reader feels as if she has read a story-fragment, three chapters without the outline! It's incomplete because happiness is the goal and it has not been achieved.
Achieving that goal of steady-state happiness though, isn't easy. It isn't realistic enough even for a Fantasy if the goal is achieved easily.
If the Soul Is Real - then all sorts of PNR genre stories are possible where soul mates try and fail and die and are reborn and try and fail and die and are reborn and grow painfully until they finally succeed. That can take lifetimes and a whole series of novels strewn across all of human history and possibly to the stars and beyond.
When the Immortal Soul is involved, the story possibilities for Romance Genre then truly do verge on the immense vistas that John sketched in his blog post.
From John's description of the kinds of stories he likes to write, I deduced that what he (and many others who feel as he does about the HEA) is writing is the "backstory" of a Romance, the "try and fail" lifetimes before the Soul Mates can achieve the HEA. He seems to be writing the growing pains of Souls.
For some readers "The Soul Is Real" is a fantasy premise. For others it's a pragmatic fact of everyday life. In either case, the novels produced by combining that premise with Love Conquers All have the potential of reaching the kinds of audiences that Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet has been proven to reach.
In my comments on the TOYSTORY 3 post linked above, I raised one question we should address at some point.
---quote of myself----
Westerns reached a level of respect during the years they dominated TV. Why shouldn't SFR (science-fiction-romance blended) reach the same level of popularity?
How would that change the world? Would that change be for the better? Is it the writer's responsibility or role to effectuate such change, or do we wait with folded hands for others to decide?
----end quote of myself----
Why is the inevitable HEA such an imperative element in defining "Romance Genre?"
Why do so many people feel the HEA is not realistic? Why do they feel that pain, parting, sorrow, frustration and loneliness are the hallmarks of a realistic fantasy that draw readers in to a built world?
And then turn the question around and look at it this way:
Why does John think the Romance Genre should relax it's stricture about the HEA being necessary?
Consider other possible ways to solve the (very real and important) problem his post points out.
He looks at Romance Genre and says it should change its formula and that would solve the problem of dull boring books with a predictable ending.
But maybe there's another (better????) solution.
Maybe people should change?
Maybe people should change their ideas about what reality really is?
Well, if that's the solution, then what ideas should be changed from what to what? And how?
Oh, this is one huge topic, the HEA!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
twitter.com/jlichtenberg
You all know, if you've read my novels, that my answer is yes, but it's not so easy as all that.
Heather Massey at The Galaxy Express, on July 6 reviewed John Rosenman's novel Beyond Those Distant Stars http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/07/reflections-on-john-b-rosenmans-beyond.html
He gave the discussion another spin in his blog post
http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2010/07/13/do-your-lovers-live-hea/comment-page-1/#comment-323
And then Heather pointed me to his post and I commented, he answered, others commented, Heather is brewing another comment, and I commented back on John's comments -- you gotta read this thing.
Here's his thesis reduced to a sound-byte:
-------Quote John Rosenman--------
My point is that romances need to be less restrictive and more open to possibilities in order to explore more fully the often painful and difficult realities of life. Romances can be complex. They can be literature.
-------End Quote---------
We, at Alien Romance, of course agree that Romance genre not only "can be" but actually is "Literature" upon occasion. Many occasions, in fact. Many more occasions when combined into SFR or PNR.
In the comments on John Rosenman's post, Heather pointed out that I had explained how "the ending" is defined not by the content of the event (resolution of the conflict) but by where in the character's story-arc you stop writing.
Heather quoted me in her comment:
-------Quote---
Jacqueline Lichtenberg said it best, noting that “There’s HEA potential in every other genre, even or especially Horror.” ( http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html )
In this post ( http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html ), Ms. Lichtenberg notes that
“Why does Romance genre absolutely require it? And SF also has an ending-point formula — called “upbeat.”
These are actually identical requirements. It’s all about where you start telling the story, and where (in time) you end it. Life is a sine-wave. It has high points and low points and neutral points but never stops waving. Storytellers just CUT a section out of that sine-wave to structure a plot.
The publisher’s end-point requirement determines the starting point.”
-----End Quote---
There are a couple more points I want to bring to the surface here because we've been discussing the Editing process for the previous 7 posts which relate to this "ending" issue, and why we have defined endings. This series was posted on:
Aug 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Sept 7 & 14, 2010
The HEA is an editorial requirement when the editor is filling a publishing line with consistent, identical product under the Romance Genre label.
The HEA is not an editorial requirement for lines that do not advertise the "Romance" genre label, but they may have other requirements.
Why is the HEA ever a requirement?
John points out that the fun, enjoyment, and fascination inherent in reading a story that pivots on a Relationship is the uncertainty of how that relationship will be at "The End."
To generate that uncertainty, some novels must end differently than the HEA.
Otherwise, you have something like a TV Series episode where you know the main characters won't get killed. So the threat to their lives is not piercingly immanent to the viewer.
John points out that the HEA itself is not unbelievable, but in reality it doesn't always happen. It does happen sometimes, so it's plausible in fiction but should not be inevitable because if it's inevitable, there's no suspense, and thus no ultimate payoff. His underlying thesis seems to be that inevitability itself is unrealistic enough to destroy reader enjoyment, and an inevitable HEA is worse than other sorts of inevitabilities.
And I think that's the core of the issue. Inevitability. Realism.
We are attracted to fiction that discusses "life the universe and everything" in terms of a philosophy (theme) that we either have internalized or wish we had internalized.
Fiction reading either reinforces our assumptions about the world, or holds forth an ideal that we want to assume and shows us how it is possible the ideal could really be true.
Good fiction does both while at the same time calling both assumptions and ideals into question. That's called "depth" and you usually find it in "Literature."
You seldom find it in films because of the nature of the visual medium. But the classics, the films that last for generations and still speak intriguingly of our dearly held ideas, do reveal "depth" on re-viewing. That kind of screenwriting is very difficult. I think it happens very much by "accident."
See my blog post on what you can do in a novel that you can't do in a film:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
I have been contending that the essence of the Romance Genre - the essence that we extract and combine with the essence of the SF Genre or Fantasy Genre (or both) - actually is the essence of "Literature" in its highest form.
See:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/mutants-as-aliens.html
where I discussed how
Romance Genre embodies two core principles:
a) Love Conquers All
b) The Soul Is Real
The HEA is a "requirement" because HEA is what results once Love has Conquered All. If all is conquered by love, there's nothing left that can sunder the couple, not even death.
If the HEA is not the "ending" of the novel, the theme that distinguishes Romance from all other art forms is not present in the novel and it is therefore not a genre romance novel.
Love Conquers All might be a sub-theme, but it would be there to be disproved so that a larger theme "life is nothing but misery" -or- "happiness comes in bright sparks that fade quickly" -- can be fully presented.
Here's one of many of my discussions of the uses of theme in novel structure:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
Those readers looking for reinforcement of their belief that Love Conquers All and/or The Soul Is Real, and those looking to indulge in a few hours of hope that these things are true, will be bitterly disappointed by an ending that is not an HEA -- and they will want their money back.
You can work with either core premise of Romance in a non-romance. You can construct a non-Romance genre novel to culminate in an HEA and that will not make the novel a Romance.
As I said in the comments discussion to:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/toystory-3-analyzed-for-beats.html
Romance Genre is distinguished by specific choices for the elements that a novelist can fill in with a number of different choices when writing other genres.
Those choices for a Romance are:
A)In a Romance the Relationships IS the plot, and all else is commentary on that relationship.
B)The conflict is the Relationship, what creates the attraction and what blocks the attraction.
C)The story is all about how each person is changed by the need for the Relationship.
D)The beginning is where the couple first become conscious of each other.
E)The ending is where the Relationship roadblocks are removed and it's full speed ahead into a Happily Ever After life for the couple.
Any given reader may, at whim, prefer to sink into a novel where they know what the rhythm and theme will be - a Mystery, Western, Action, Intrigue, Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, any genre. At other times, they may want "general fiction" -- which also has a very strict, set formula.
See my post on the reasons why we have such a thing as genre fiction.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html
The Romance genre, and all its hyrbids -- SFR, PNR, Action Romance, whatever criss-crossed mixture -- if the "R" comes last in the nickname, it means the plot-structure follows the 5 elements I listed above.
Sometimes we read fiction for a realistic view of our real world. We want contemporary maybe urban settings like where we live with people who are up against the same problems we are (TV sets as babysitters, cell phones always on, carpooling nightmares), and sometimes we want to get away to impossible places with other problems.
If you go for the kind of Romance where not only does love conquer all, but also The Soul Is Real (where lovers find their Soul Mate and there's something spiritual, transcendent, bigger than "reality" that enters their lives because of that mating) then you are in the set of Themes where the HEA is not only inevitable but also realistic.
If you combine both Love Conquers All and The Soul Is Real, you walk into a world where there is no other possible ending than the HEA.
The story isn't over until the Soul Mates have ignited Love so bright that it illuminates and dissipates all darkness - and the world is revealed to be truthfully what it seems to be under the blurring veil of "falling in love."
The illusion of perfection is torn aside to reveal the truth that perfection already exists - and continuous, solid, strong, pervasive happiness is the stable foundation of life, not a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
It's not that the couple will face no further challenges, but that those challenges will only strengthen their love and their ability to make life better for all those around them.
This is the thematic statement about the true nature of reality that the Romance Genre focuses on.
The story can only end where the couple (and the reader) understand the inevitability and realistic condition of life, the HEA.
If the writer quits writing before that point, the reader feels as if she has read a story-fragment, three chapters without the outline! It's incomplete because happiness is the goal and it has not been achieved.
Achieving that goal of steady-state happiness though, isn't easy. It isn't realistic enough even for a Fantasy if the goal is achieved easily.
If the Soul Is Real - then all sorts of PNR genre stories are possible where soul mates try and fail and die and are reborn and try and fail and die and are reborn and grow painfully until they finally succeed. That can take lifetimes and a whole series of novels strewn across all of human history and possibly to the stars and beyond.
When the Immortal Soul is involved, the story possibilities for Romance Genre then truly do verge on the immense vistas that John sketched in his blog post.
From John's description of the kinds of stories he likes to write, I deduced that what he (and many others who feel as he does about the HEA) is writing is the "backstory" of a Romance, the "try and fail" lifetimes before the Soul Mates can achieve the HEA. He seems to be writing the growing pains of Souls.
For some readers "The Soul Is Real" is a fantasy premise. For others it's a pragmatic fact of everyday life. In either case, the novels produced by combining that premise with Love Conquers All have the potential of reaching the kinds of audiences that Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet has been proven to reach.
In my comments on the TOYSTORY 3 post linked above, I raised one question we should address at some point.
---quote of myself----
Westerns reached a level of respect during the years they dominated TV. Why shouldn't SFR (science-fiction-romance blended) reach the same level of popularity?
How would that change the world? Would that change be for the better? Is it the writer's responsibility or role to effectuate such change, or do we wait with folded hands for others to decide?
----end quote of myself----
Why is the inevitable HEA such an imperative element in defining "Romance Genre?"
Why do so many people feel the HEA is not realistic? Why do they feel that pain, parting, sorrow, frustration and loneliness are the hallmarks of a realistic fantasy that draw readers in to a built world?
And then turn the question around and look at it this way:
Why does John think the Romance Genre should relax it's stricture about the HEA being necessary?
Consider other possible ways to solve the (very real and important) problem his post points out.
He looks at Romance Genre and says it should change its formula and that would solve the problem of dull boring books with a predictable ending.
But maybe there's another (better????) solution.
Maybe people should change?
Maybe people should change their ideas about what reality really is?
Well, if that's the solution, then what ideas should be changed from what to what? And how?
Oh, this is one huge topic, the HEA!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Intelligent Houses
The fully computerized house of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is getting closer to reality:
Smart Gadgets
A house that could notice when you haven't moved in a long time and checks to make sure you aren't dead could be useful, especially for older people living alone. Do I really want my refrigerator nagging me to lose weight, though? (And how would it know who's eating the food? Maybe I've had a lot of guests lately.) And I definitely know I don't want the car's navigation system trying to cheer me up by telling jokes.
However, I wouldn't mind an intelligent vehicle like the one in KNIGHT RIDER that could do the driving for me. On a crowded freeway, a smart car would probably be a more confident and safer driver than I am on my own.
If a computerized dwelling got much smarter than the one described in the article, Sarah, the sentient house on the TV series EUREKA, might eventually evolve. A household computer with a friendly voice might be pleasant and welcoming—but would I want to go further and live in a house that has emotions and a personality? Knowing "she" could see and hear everything that happens would feel too much like having a human observer watching me every minute of the day and night. Nevertheless, Sarah-the-house is one of my favorite characters on the show. Lately she's established a romantic relationship with Andy, the robot law enforcement deputy. Now, there's an intriguing subject for fanfic.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Smart Gadgets
A house that could notice when you haven't moved in a long time and checks to make sure you aren't dead could be useful, especially for older people living alone. Do I really want my refrigerator nagging me to lose weight, though? (And how would it know who's eating the food? Maybe I've had a lot of guests lately.) And I definitely know I don't want the car's navigation system trying to cheer me up by telling jokes.
However, I wouldn't mind an intelligent vehicle like the one in KNIGHT RIDER that could do the driving for me. On a crowded freeway, a smart car would probably be a more confident and safer driver than I am on my own.
If a computerized dwelling got much smarter than the one described in the article, Sarah, the sentient house on the TV series EUREKA, might eventually evolve. A household computer with a friendly voice might be pleasant and welcoming—but would I want to go further and live in a house that has emotions and a personality? Knowing "she" could see and hear everything that happens would feel too much like having a human observer watching me every minute of the day and night. Nevertheless, Sarah-the-house is one of my favorite characters on the show. Lately she's established a romantic relationship with Andy, the robot law enforcement deputy. Now, there's an intriguing subject for fanfic.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing Part VII - How Do You Know If You Are A Writer Or Editor?
The previous 6 parts of this series explored the world from the point of view of an Editor.
The Editor archetype has made great POV characters for Romance, blockbuster films, Intrigue, Mystery/Suspense, and even Adventure, so as a writer, editor or reader of fiction you may find these posts illuminating.
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
Part VI on September 7, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vi.html
Having described the pressure-cooker corporate politics, bottom-rung-of-the-ladder position of most of the editors with whom the beginning writer might deal, I've also sketched in how the writer can fit into the Editor's world by understanding what the editor is actually faced with. This understanding allows the writer to revise to editorial requirements with speed and efficiency.
And we've looked at what the writer can do to cope with the sudden, often cryptic, mostly unexpected editorial rewrite orders.
Oh, yes, the professional writer expects rewrite orders -- but the particular ones that arrive are always either unexpected or monstrously disappointing.
The Writer-Editor relationship is multifaceted and complex. Few writers, especially beginning writers, feel comfortable with that relationship.
It always seems (regardless of whether it's true or not) that the editor wants to insert their own voice into the Art.
The writer faced with rewrite orders feels trampled upon.
It's usually the parts that the writer treasures, feels best about, felt triumphant writing, or were the actual core of the whole concept, that need changing or even deleting.
That's crushing. It's mind-numbing. And it's always done in haste beyond belief.
Later, fans will complain about this or that glitch -- the writer knows the source was either the haste or perhaps the editor's demand. How do you defend the work without whining and pointing the blaming finger at someone the reader has never met and barely knows exists (especially after the glowing thank-you placed in the Acknowledgments?)
Worse, how do you defend the flaw the reader has found when you know it was actually an improvement? When you know what the editor was trying to achieve, and how you had failed, and you did the best fix you could in the time allotted?
You don't. That's how.
After a novel is published, suddenly the writer's world has changed. The EDITOR is no longer the customer.
Remember, The customer is always right was one of the maxims we focused on in Part II and kept returning to in subsequent parts of this series.
The editor was the writer's customer - but now the reader is the customer.
And the customer is always right.
Listen carefully. Find what's bugging the customer. Don't make that mistake again. Figure out a way to get what the reader wants past the editor. That's the professional commercial fiction writer's job.
So, as a writer you've had your ultimate customer, the reader/viewer, complain about errors, mistakes, that were actually introduced in the editing/producing process.
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about "being edited?" Did it destroy the work in such a way that the very reason you write at all was erased?
Did getting your novel published dissipate your drive to write more novels?
Was it too horrible? To painful for words?
Maybe you're not a commercial fiction writer. There are other fields of professional writing and other ways to make a living from a writer's skill sets.
How long did it take you to produce that first sale? I mean how long did it take to write that particular novel, not to do your practice for the circular file? The one you sell might be the 5th or 10th you've written - and that's OK. Eventually, you might even sell those prior novels when you have a reputation to exploit.
My point here is, how FAST did you write the words that you put out to license with this publisher?
I hope you kept a record of how many hours you worked on those words before you got the contract and entered the editing process.
Add to that the time spent on the editing process, which should be a minor percentage of the total and keep calculating.
You now know the advance payment. Wait 2 years. See if there are any royalty checks - watch for when the royalties dwindle to a trickle from e-book sales, or the novel is remaindered and taken off the publisher's books.
OK, now you know how many hours it took you to produce those words, and how much money the book made. You also know what you, yourself, spent out of pocket on publicity, convention tours, fan mail, etc.
Calculate the $/hour.
Did you make minimum wage? Did you make what you expected to make? Did you make enough to make the whole effort worth your while (which isn't a number of dollars; very often writers don't work for money). Many times, if you do the figures honestly not the way the IRS demands, you will find you've poured more money into the publication than you got out.
Professional commercial fiction writing can be an expensive hobby.
Here's a valuable blog post to consider on the full time writer's life:
http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/
On facebook, I posted the following link:
http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2010/07/13/do-your-lovers-live-hea/
Which is a professional SF writer who includes a love-story in most novels talking about the HEA - Happily Ever After - ending as "restrictive." I commented on that post and it's given me an idea for what has to come next on this Alien Romances blog.
I posted a link to that HEA ending discussion on facebook, and Jonathan Vos Post (a nuts-n-bolts SF writer with a very real, real-science background) commented thusly:
Jonathan Vos Post
My father, as editor, published some Romance novels when I was a child, which did not much interest me. But I have friends in RWA (Romance Writers of America) which is 10 times the size of SFWA or MWA. Supply exceeds demand, driving down average book advances, but sales are huge, amounting to roughly 1/6 of ALL books sold in the USA. In that ... See Moreflood, there are both the competent but forgettable works, and also enduring works of imagination and sparking language about human beings. So -- happily ever after to WHOM?
And that "TO WHOM" has been a core issue with the discussion on Twitter's #scifichat of "Utopia" -- everyone's idea of Utopia is different.
The HEA is a variety of specifically tailored Utopia-for-two (at least).
Now take those 3 posts together.
a) There's never been a high percentage of writers making a full time living from writing, and those that do live fairly low on the economic scale (or in a cheap place) The percentage is shrinking these days.
b) Genre fields have more would-be writers pushing more product at publishers than there are publishing slots. Publishing slots will not become more numerous until there are more readers demanding that genre. The Romance field has more would-be writers who are competent, even excellent, than SF genre does because SF demands an education very few people have, want, or can absorb and entertains like-minded folks. Romance is for everyone, BUT can be written well only by those who have a real feel for human nature and spirit. More people believe they have Romance writing talent (even when they don't) than believe they have SF writing talent. Romance genre writing looks easier than SF writing. It's not.
The $/hour you make as a professional commercial fiction writer is peanuts compared to, say, a grocery store manager (not clerk; manager). Many professional writers are grocery clerks in their spare time.
But the education required of a Romance Writer (or SF writer; Mystery, Western, International Intrigue - any genre, including general Literature) is far higher than the education required to manage a retail outlet.
Librarians and Teachers make a lot more than writers, on average, and the education is maybe equivalent -- but over time, a writer needs far more ongoing education than a Librarian or Teacher.
Librarians and Teachers can pay for ongoing education and deduct it from taxes.
Writers can't do that. It's not "educational expense" to go to three movies a week, or more.
Take the resource you have within you, figure its market value, then figure the return on investment you are making as a writer.
Do the figures work out for you?
Robert A. Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley agreed that if you can do anything else but write for a living - do that instead.
Most full time writers do it because they are physically unable to do the job their education qualifies them for, or because they really can't do anything but write.
Now think about the economics of "being a professional writer."
There is one way to increase your income despite the over-supply of your product in the marketplace and your extremely high overhead expenses (continuing education, market research, self-promotion).
Decrease the time it takes to produce saleable word strings.
Yep, there's that corporate buzzword every employee hates -- productivity.
You have to increase productivity to make a living.
Isaac Asimov made a great living (lived in New York; very high overhead). He did it by selling FIRST DRAFT.
The man was a certified genius with an eidetic memory. Research was a breeze for him, and writing was simply typing as fast as he could. He had his own editor at Doubleday (hardcover publishing house) and kept that editor constantly busy, too busy to deal with any other writer (I was a Doubleday writer: I was in Asimov's editor's office). Asimov produced a constant stream of fiction and non-fiction best sellers that paid an editor's salary, and enough profit to live on nicely. (constant being the operative word)
And in the process, he shaped the SF field from its earliest days.
The man was a WRITER - a professional writer. That was his identity. (Yes, I knew him, sometimes introduced him at Star Trek conventions, too).
Is that the nature of you?
Take Marion Zimmer Bradley as another example. She lived on writing proceeds, but not so well until she hit the big time, which took decades since SF was at that time an all-male field, and Fantasy didn't exist in the modern form.
She wrote mixed-genre. Can you classify the Darkover universe? ESP was an element forbidden in SF (James Blish introduced it after a fashion in Jack of Eagles, but not using the fantasy elements MZB did). Yet Darkover is a lost colony of Earth, with natives and human-Terran hybrids, so it's SF. Well, no, it's neither. It's cross-genre where one of the genres didn't exist yet.
MZB's novels sold steadily - but not in high volume until much later in her career when she finally sold some mainstream novels and one of them was made-for-TV miniseries Mists of Avalon. She edited an Astrology magazine, wrote true confession stories, and anything else her agent could glean for her, even horror and romance under various bylines. She wrote anything and everything she could get paid for, and the training she got from that improved her SF to best-seller and Hugo Nominee status.
She turned out voluminous words-per-day on a steady basis. 20-30 manuscript pages a day that needed only a light rewrite and touch-up was her usual pace (I know because she took me on as a student and demanded the same pace from me - we exchanged chapters on our current WIPs - wrote a chapter a day, mailed it, picked up the arriving chapter of the other's WIP, and sent back a letter of comment on that work, then read the incoming comment on our own WIP and made whatever rewrites suggested - and that was 1 day's work, 6 days a week for me).
That's a professional working writer's day unless you're Isaac Asimov in which case you write it and send it in. (he did articles and short stories too along with novel chapters, and non-fiction chapters; there was nobody else like him!)
A professional writer produces words-per-day. That's the job.
Words aren't worth much. So to make a living you must produce a lot of them, very quickly and to market -- i.e. not needing much rewrite.
Just as a publisher's overhead expenses are increased by accepting manuscripts that need rewrite orders -- (then need arguments with writers who don't want to conform their product to the market's requirements), so too are the professional writer's overhead expenses increased by having to do rewrites, before or after contract. Fewer rewrites equals increased income.
Maxim mentioned in previous posts in this series; TIME IS MONEY
Here's another glimpse of a professional writer's life.
TV Screenwriters.
When you're working on a weekly series as one of a stable of contracted writers, you write the stories given to you at the story-conference.
The season is planned out by story-arc, and various episode concepts are created and assigned along with deadlines. The 1 hour slot has to be filled by a 40-45 page script - usually shorter than that, or cut-able.
The first draft deadline is inflexible. Miss it, you're fired. Rewrite deadlines are even more inflexible.
The script always comes back with rewrites that conform it to stuff done by other writers working on different scripts of the season and stuff rewritten on the fly by the actors and director on the set. The rewrite usually has to be done over the weekend or turnaround in 24-48 hours. During production you can be working 16 hour days 7 days a week - and more.
Speed and accuracy are of the essence. Do it or you're fired.
You have only days to write that script, hours to do the rewrite - and several of these scripts to juggle through the pipeline every production season.
I had the privelege of having two of the writers for a Canadian TV series ask to meet me at a convention one time. I therefore made it a point to hear their presentation at the convention before meeting them. They collaborated on a production routine like that and had many (many) annecdotes of near-disaster, quick rewrites, mid-night phone consultations, and hair-raising reasons to have good art changed to mediocre or bad art, some reasons expense related, sometimes because an actor was ill, sometimes an effect was in-budget but just not attainable. Commercial writing in TV or any field is not about art. It's about deadlines, production schedules, and union workers standing around idle burning clock time.
And that wasn't the first time I'd had an inside look at TV production writing, so I know their lives weren't unusual. Their ability to explain the kind of pressure the job puts on the writer though was unusual. I wish the presentaton were posted online as a video.
If you can't turn out the sheer volume of publishable (produce-able) words on deadline - TV isn't the field for you.
I grew up in the News Game - I know journalism from so many sides you wouldn't believe they all exist.
I currently know one working print journalist working full time to support just herself - not even a whole family. I know how many hours of research she does, and how fast she has to bat out the stories to very specific lengths no matter the complexity of the subject. It's good training for novel writing, and it is just like TV production writing. No matter what, you make the deadline, you produce the words to order without much need for editing. Take up too much editing time, you're fired. Journalists make better money than novelists - steadier money - but still it isn't a living anyone could envy, especially today with print media disappearing and the Web based journalism not lucrative enough to compete with print.
So in determining whether you are a writer or an editor, there is a short list of attributes about yourself that you should inventory:
a) monetary income requirements - how poor do you want to live?
b) personal attributes of intelligence, memory (are you Isaac Asimov?)
c) alternative places to apply your inventory of skills and knowledge and what they pay. Are you physically able to do something else?
d) supply and demand - if you're going to be a supplier of words, how much competition do you have?
e) how reliable and uniform is your word-production? Can you improve it in time to prevent starvation?
f) do you have a backup plan? What if the publisher's check bounces? (they do) Are you willing and able to write just about anything that pays?
What's the difference between a writer and an editor (other than the steady paycheck, however paltry?)
Basically, any editor is actually a writer.
Any writer has to learn to be an editor to turn professional.
Both writers and editors have consider the 6 attributes listed above.
Both are in the same economically sensitive business - some more advertising supported parts of the industry have bigger swings, but demand is closely tied to the economy, jobs, leisure time available per person.
There is only one point upon which I've seen writers and editors differ markedly as personality types.
It's e) above -- word production pace and volume.
Writers produce torrents and tides and tsunamies of words, every day all day, and aren't happy doing anything else. A lot of those words are typo'd because of haste to get it all down. A lot are parts of wordy-constructions and need rephrasing, and many just plain don't say anything and need deleting. But the torrent of words just never lets up, good, bad, indifferent, and brilliant they just keep pouring out to be shaped to professional standards on the first rewrite.
Editors produce a few words - maybe half a sentence - and spend a month or a year pondering those few, searching for just the right single word. Nothing is ever good enough for an editor.
Editors produce a story idea, and spend five years writing character sketches.
Editors produce a lot of poetry, but slowly and with multiple grinding polishings until all the words just sparkle.
Editors don't produce words at commercial rates.
Editors polish and polish and ponder and choose and re-choose, and grind away wanting everything just so perfect.
I know only one hugely best selling, widely read, greatly admired, critically acclaimed writer who worked like an editor - polishing and polishing for 10 or 15 years to produce a book that was maybe 40,000 words long.
Theodore Sturgeon (a very good friend, keenly missed now that he's gone) worked like that. He was invited by Gene Roddenberry to contribute to Star Trek in the season where they drew upon seasoned professional SF writers (so was Marion Zimmer Bradley but she declined because she didn't like TV as a story-medium and had never seen Star Trek).
Theodore Sturgeon wrote the original script for Amok Time that introduced Pon Farr, the Vulcan mating drive, to Star Trek and by that changed the world.
The final broadcast version was different from the version Sturgeon wrote (I have copies of both scripts), but the concept of the mating drive survived and shaped our notion of Vulcan culture and Spock's place in it.
But unlike Harlan Ellison, a natural screenwriter, prolific SF novelist and editor, wildly best selling shaper of the middle-history of the SF field, Sturgeon didn't go on to work in television. He kept on working, perfecting a novel titled Godbody which was finally published in 1986. A jewel.
I've known many editors and agents (interchangeable roles; they both try to fit an artistic product into a commercial market), and all of them do write, or want to write, but don't produce enough words/day to make a living at writing.
Some editors and agents just give up, acknowledging their tropism toward stories but knowing they can't make it as professional writers for lack of the word-volume production.
As far as I know, that's the only difference. Librarians and Teachers likewise may have a book in them - one. They may write on the side. But they stop to polish and grind and end up condensing everything to near poetry. It's just not enough words to make a living when you get paid by the word.
So, turn your eye inward and judge yourself.
Do you have what it takes to attain and sustain a words/day volume rate that can bring an income large enough to satisfy your lifestyle requirements?
If so, you then have to consider the competition. What if you don't make it? What's your backup plan? What are the odds that you will succeed where thousands of others have not?
Are you willing to take that chance?
And it's the same problem for editors. For every person who has the talent and training, the ability and determination to make it in editing -- there are 10,000 more just as good. But only 1 job that pays steady.
Today the number of paying jobs in publishing is shrinking, and the corporations are again playing the game of firing the senior staff because their salaries are too high, combining the positions so 1 person does the work 3 did before, then hiring kids just out of college to fill the 1 vacancy and paying them entry-level salaries. They then tell the shareholders and Wall Street they've increased "productivity."
You can't live in Manhattan on a Manhattan editor's salary. That's economics. Check it out.
Why are you even thinking of getting into this game?
If you're not an editor or a writer, then maybe you're actually born to be an AGENT?
Here's a blog entry by an agent on the role of the agent.
http://chipmacgregor.typepad.com/main/2010/08/what-is-the-role-of-an-agent.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Next Tuesday we'll look at a blog post by a writer who asks, "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA" (the Happily Ever After ending)
The Editor archetype has made great POV characters for Romance, blockbuster films, Intrigue, Mystery/Suspense, and even Adventure, so as a writer, editor or reader of fiction you may find these posts illuminating.
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
Part VI on September 7, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vi.html
Having described the pressure-cooker corporate politics, bottom-rung-of-the-ladder position of most of the editors with whom the beginning writer might deal, I've also sketched in how the writer can fit into the Editor's world by understanding what the editor is actually faced with. This understanding allows the writer to revise to editorial requirements with speed and efficiency.
And we've looked at what the writer can do to cope with the sudden, often cryptic, mostly unexpected editorial rewrite orders.
Oh, yes, the professional writer expects rewrite orders -- but the particular ones that arrive are always either unexpected or monstrously disappointing.
The Writer-Editor relationship is multifaceted and complex. Few writers, especially beginning writers, feel comfortable with that relationship.
It always seems (regardless of whether it's true or not) that the editor wants to insert their own voice into the Art.
The writer faced with rewrite orders feels trampled upon.
It's usually the parts that the writer treasures, feels best about, felt triumphant writing, or were the actual core of the whole concept, that need changing or even deleting.
That's crushing. It's mind-numbing. And it's always done in haste beyond belief.
Later, fans will complain about this or that glitch -- the writer knows the source was either the haste or perhaps the editor's demand. How do you defend the work without whining and pointing the blaming finger at someone the reader has never met and barely knows exists (especially after the glowing thank-you placed in the Acknowledgments?)
Worse, how do you defend the flaw the reader has found when you know it was actually an improvement? When you know what the editor was trying to achieve, and how you had failed, and you did the best fix you could in the time allotted?
You don't. That's how.
After a novel is published, suddenly the writer's world has changed. The EDITOR is no longer the customer.
Remember, The customer is always right was one of the maxims we focused on in Part II and kept returning to in subsequent parts of this series.
The editor was the writer's customer - but now the reader is the customer.
And the customer is always right.
Listen carefully. Find what's bugging the customer. Don't make that mistake again. Figure out a way to get what the reader wants past the editor. That's the professional commercial fiction writer's job.
So, as a writer you've had your ultimate customer, the reader/viewer, complain about errors, mistakes, that were actually introduced in the editing/producing process.
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about "being edited?" Did it destroy the work in such a way that the very reason you write at all was erased?
Did getting your novel published dissipate your drive to write more novels?
Was it too horrible? To painful for words?
Maybe you're not a commercial fiction writer. There are other fields of professional writing and other ways to make a living from a writer's skill sets.
How long did it take you to produce that first sale? I mean how long did it take to write that particular novel, not to do your practice for the circular file? The one you sell might be the 5th or 10th you've written - and that's OK. Eventually, you might even sell those prior novels when you have a reputation to exploit.
My point here is, how FAST did you write the words that you put out to license with this publisher?
I hope you kept a record of how many hours you worked on those words before you got the contract and entered the editing process.
Add to that the time spent on the editing process, which should be a minor percentage of the total and keep calculating.
You now know the advance payment. Wait 2 years. See if there are any royalty checks - watch for when the royalties dwindle to a trickle from e-book sales, or the novel is remaindered and taken off the publisher's books.
OK, now you know how many hours it took you to produce those words, and how much money the book made. You also know what you, yourself, spent out of pocket on publicity, convention tours, fan mail, etc.
Calculate the $/hour.
Did you make minimum wage? Did you make what you expected to make? Did you make enough to make the whole effort worth your while (which isn't a number of dollars; very often writers don't work for money). Many times, if you do the figures honestly not the way the IRS demands, you will find you've poured more money into the publication than you got out.
Professional commercial fiction writing can be an expensive hobby.
Here's a valuable blog post to consider on the full time writer's life:
http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/
On facebook, I posted the following link:
http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2010/07/13/do-your-lovers-live-hea/
Which is a professional SF writer who includes a love-story in most novels talking about the HEA - Happily Ever After - ending as "restrictive." I commented on that post and it's given me an idea for what has to come next on this Alien Romances blog.
I posted a link to that HEA ending discussion on facebook, and Jonathan Vos Post (a nuts-n-bolts SF writer with a very real, real-science background) commented thusly:
Jonathan Vos Post
My father, as editor, published some Romance novels when I was a child, which did not much interest me. But I have friends in RWA (Romance Writers of America) which is 10 times the size of SFWA or MWA. Supply exceeds demand, driving down average book advances, but sales are huge, amounting to roughly 1/6 of ALL books sold in the USA. In that ... See Moreflood, there are both the competent but forgettable works, and also enduring works of imagination and sparking language about human beings. So -- happily ever after to WHOM?
And that "TO WHOM" has been a core issue with the discussion on Twitter's #scifichat of "Utopia" -- everyone's idea of Utopia is different.
The HEA is a variety of specifically tailored Utopia-for-two (at least).
Now take those 3 posts together.
a) There's never been a high percentage of writers making a full time living from writing, and those that do live fairly low on the economic scale (or in a cheap place) The percentage is shrinking these days.
b) Genre fields have more would-be writers pushing more product at publishers than there are publishing slots. Publishing slots will not become more numerous until there are more readers demanding that genre. The Romance field has more would-be writers who are competent, even excellent, than SF genre does because SF demands an education very few people have, want, or can absorb and entertains like-minded folks. Romance is for everyone, BUT can be written well only by those who have a real feel for human nature and spirit. More people believe they have Romance writing talent (even when they don't) than believe they have SF writing talent. Romance genre writing looks easier than SF writing. It's not.
The $/hour you make as a professional commercial fiction writer is peanuts compared to, say, a grocery store manager (not clerk; manager). Many professional writers are grocery clerks in their spare time.
But the education required of a Romance Writer (or SF writer; Mystery, Western, International Intrigue - any genre, including general Literature) is far higher than the education required to manage a retail outlet.
Librarians and Teachers make a lot more than writers, on average, and the education is maybe equivalent -- but over time, a writer needs far more ongoing education than a Librarian or Teacher.
Librarians and Teachers can pay for ongoing education and deduct it from taxes.
Writers can't do that. It's not "educational expense" to go to three movies a week, or more.
Take the resource you have within you, figure its market value, then figure the return on investment you are making as a writer.
Do the figures work out for you?
Robert A. Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley agreed that if you can do anything else but write for a living - do that instead.
Most full time writers do it because they are physically unable to do the job their education qualifies them for, or because they really can't do anything but write.
Now think about the economics of "being a professional writer."
There is one way to increase your income despite the over-supply of your product in the marketplace and your extremely high overhead expenses (continuing education, market research, self-promotion).
Decrease the time it takes to produce saleable word strings.
Yep, there's that corporate buzzword every employee hates -- productivity.
You have to increase productivity to make a living.
Isaac Asimov made a great living (lived in New York; very high overhead). He did it by selling FIRST DRAFT.
The man was a certified genius with an eidetic memory. Research was a breeze for him, and writing was simply typing as fast as he could. He had his own editor at Doubleday (hardcover publishing house) and kept that editor constantly busy, too busy to deal with any other writer (I was a Doubleday writer: I was in Asimov's editor's office). Asimov produced a constant stream of fiction and non-fiction best sellers that paid an editor's salary, and enough profit to live on nicely. (constant being the operative word)
And in the process, he shaped the SF field from its earliest days.
The man was a WRITER - a professional writer. That was his identity. (Yes, I knew him, sometimes introduced him at Star Trek conventions, too).
Is that the nature of you?
Take Marion Zimmer Bradley as another example. She lived on writing proceeds, but not so well until she hit the big time, which took decades since SF was at that time an all-male field, and Fantasy didn't exist in the modern form.
She wrote mixed-genre. Can you classify the Darkover universe? ESP was an element forbidden in SF (James Blish introduced it after a fashion in Jack of Eagles, but not using the fantasy elements MZB did). Yet Darkover is a lost colony of Earth, with natives and human-Terran hybrids, so it's SF. Well, no, it's neither. It's cross-genre where one of the genres didn't exist yet.
MZB's novels sold steadily - but not in high volume until much later in her career when she finally sold some mainstream novels and one of them was made-for-TV miniseries Mists of Avalon. She edited an Astrology magazine, wrote true confession stories, and anything else her agent could glean for her, even horror and romance under various bylines. She wrote anything and everything she could get paid for, and the training she got from that improved her SF to best-seller and Hugo Nominee status.
She turned out voluminous words-per-day on a steady basis. 20-30 manuscript pages a day that needed only a light rewrite and touch-up was her usual pace (I know because she took me on as a student and demanded the same pace from me - we exchanged chapters on our current WIPs - wrote a chapter a day, mailed it, picked up the arriving chapter of the other's WIP, and sent back a letter of comment on that work, then read the incoming comment on our own WIP and made whatever rewrites suggested - and that was 1 day's work, 6 days a week for me).
That's a professional working writer's day unless you're Isaac Asimov in which case you write it and send it in. (he did articles and short stories too along with novel chapters, and non-fiction chapters; there was nobody else like him!)
A professional writer produces words-per-day. That's the job.
Words aren't worth much. So to make a living you must produce a lot of them, very quickly and to market -- i.e. not needing much rewrite.
Just as a publisher's overhead expenses are increased by accepting manuscripts that need rewrite orders -- (then need arguments with writers who don't want to conform their product to the market's requirements), so too are the professional writer's overhead expenses increased by having to do rewrites, before or after contract. Fewer rewrites equals increased income.
Maxim mentioned in previous posts in this series; TIME IS MONEY
Here's another glimpse of a professional writer's life.
TV Screenwriters.
When you're working on a weekly series as one of a stable of contracted writers, you write the stories given to you at the story-conference.
The season is planned out by story-arc, and various episode concepts are created and assigned along with deadlines. The 1 hour slot has to be filled by a 40-45 page script - usually shorter than that, or cut-able.
The first draft deadline is inflexible. Miss it, you're fired. Rewrite deadlines are even more inflexible.
The script always comes back with rewrites that conform it to stuff done by other writers working on different scripts of the season and stuff rewritten on the fly by the actors and director on the set. The rewrite usually has to be done over the weekend or turnaround in 24-48 hours. During production you can be working 16 hour days 7 days a week - and more.
Speed and accuracy are of the essence. Do it or you're fired.
You have only days to write that script, hours to do the rewrite - and several of these scripts to juggle through the pipeline every production season.
I had the privelege of having two of the writers for a Canadian TV series ask to meet me at a convention one time. I therefore made it a point to hear their presentation at the convention before meeting them. They collaborated on a production routine like that and had many (many) annecdotes of near-disaster, quick rewrites, mid-night phone consultations, and hair-raising reasons to have good art changed to mediocre or bad art, some reasons expense related, sometimes because an actor was ill, sometimes an effect was in-budget but just not attainable. Commercial writing in TV or any field is not about art. It's about deadlines, production schedules, and union workers standing around idle burning clock time.
And that wasn't the first time I'd had an inside look at TV production writing, so I know their lives weren't unusual. Their ability to explain the kind of pressure the job puts on the writer though was unusual. I wish the presentaton were posted online as a video.
If you can't turn out the sheer volume of publishable (produce-able) words on deadline - TV isn't the field for you.
I grew up in the News Game - I know journalism from so many sides you wouldn't believe they all exist.
I currently know one working print journalist working full time to support just herself - not even a whole family. I know how many hours of research she does, and how fast she has to bat out the stories to very specific lengths no matter the complexity of the subject. It's good training for novel writing, and it is just like TV production writing. No matter what, you make the deadline, you produce the words to order without much need for editing. Take up too much editing time, you're fired. Journalists make better money than novelists - steadier money - but still it isn't a living anyone could envy, especially today with print media disappearing and the Web based journalism not lucrative enough to compete with print.
So in determining whether you are a writer or an editor, there is a short list of attributes about yourself that you should inventory:
a) monetary income requirements - how poor do you want to live?
b) personal attributes of intelligence, memory (are you Isaac Asimov?)
c) alternative places to apply your inventory of skills and knowledge and what they pay. Are you physically able to do something else?
d) supply and demand - if you're going to be a supplier of words, how much competition do you have?
e) how reliable and uniform is your word-production? Can you improve it in time to prevent starvation?
f) do you have a backup plan? What if the publisher's check bounces? (they do) Are you willing and able to write just about anything that pays?
What's the difference between a writer and an editor (other than the steady paycheck, however paltry?)
Basically, any editor is actually a writer.
Any writer has to learn to be an editor to turn professional.
Both writers and editors have consider the 6 attributes listed above.
Both are in the same economically sensitive business - some more advertising supported parts of the industry have bigger swings, but demand is closely tied to the economy, jobs, leisure time available per person.
There is only one point upon which I've seen writers and editors differ markedly as personality types.
It's e) above -- word production pace and volume.
Writers produce torrents and tides and tsunamies of words, every day all day, and aren't happy doing anything else. A lot of those words are typo'd because of haste to get it all down. A lot are parts of wordy-constructions and need rephrasing, and many just plain don't say anything and need deleting. But the torrent of words just never lets up, good, bad, indifferent, and brilliant they just keep pouring out to be shaped to professional standards on the first rewrite.
Editors produce a few words - maybe half a sentence - and spend a month or a year pondering those few, searching for just the right single word. Nothing is ever good enough for an editor.
Editors produce a story idea, and spend five years writing character sketches.
Editors produce a lot of poetry, but slowly and with multiple grinding polishings until all the words just sparkle.
Editors don't produce words at commercial rates.
Editors polish and polish and ponder and choose and re-choose, and grind away wanting everything just so perfect.
I know only one hugely best selling, widely read, greatly admired, critically acclaimed writer who worked like an editor - polishing and polishing for 10 or 15 years to produce a book that was maybe 40,000 words long.
Theodore Sturgeon (a very good friend, keenly missed now that he's gone) worked like that. He was invited by Gene Roddenberry to contribute to Star Trek in the season where they drew upon seasoned professional SF writers (so was Marion Zimmer Bradley but she declined because she didn't like TV as a story-medium and had never seen Star Trek).
Theodore Sturgeon wrote the original script for Amok Time that introduced Pon Farr, the Vulcan mating drive, to Star Trek and by that changed the world.
The final broadcast version was different from the version Sturgeon wrote (I have copies of both scripts), but the concept of the mating drive survived and shaped our notion of Vulcan culture and Spock's place in it.
But unlike Harlan Ellison, a natural screenwriter, prolific SF novelist and editor, wildly best selling shaper of the middle-history of the SF field, Sturgeon didn't go on to work in television. He kept on working, perfecting a novel titled Godbody which was finally published in 1986. A jewel.
I've known many editors and agents (interchangeable roles; they both try to fit an artistic product into a commercial market), and all of them do write, or want to write, but don't produce enough words/day to make a living at writing.
Some editors and agents just give up, acknowledging their tropism toward stories but knowing they can't make it as professional writers for lack of the word-volume production.
As far as I know, that's the only difference. Librarians and Teachers likewise may have a book in them - one. They may write on the side. But they stop to polish and grind and end up condensing everything to near poetry. It's just not enough words to make a living when you get paid by the word.
So, turn your eye inward and judge yourself.
Do you have what it takes to attain and sustain a words/day volume rate that can bring an income large enough to satisfy your lifestyle requirements?
If so, you then have to consider the competition. What if you don't make it? What's your backup plan? What are the odds that you will succeed where thousands of others have not?
Are you willing to take that chance?
And it's the same problem for editors. For every person who has the talent and training, the ability and determination to make it in editing -- there are 10,000 more just as good. But only 1 job that pays steady.
Today the number of paying jobs in publishing is shrinking, and the corporations are again playing the game of firing the senior staff because their salaries are too high, combining the positions so 1 person does the work 3 did before, then hiring kids just out of college to fill the 1 vacancy and paying them entry-level salaries. They then tell the shareholders and Wall Street they've increased "productivity."
You can't live in Manhattan on a Manhattan editor's salary. That's economics. Check it out.
Why are you even thinking of getting into this game?
If you're not an editor or a writer, then maybe you're actually born to be an AGENT?
Here's a blog entry by an agent on the role of the agent.
http://chipmacgregor.typepad.com/main/2010/08/what-is-the-role-of-an-agent.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Next Tuesday we'll look at a blog post by a writer who asks, "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA" (the Happily Ever After ending)
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
9-11
In case you aren't familiar with it, here are the lyrics to the best 9-11 song I've ever heard, Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning":
Where Were You
This song acknowledges all the conflicting emotions of that day but in the end focuses on hope and reconciliation. Remember how, just for a while, we all came together and recognized the matters we usually fight over as trivial by comparison? (As Miss Manners sardonically wrote some months later, we knew the terrorists hadn't won when we stopped being nice to each other.) Too bad our fallen human nature is such that it often takes a major disaster to remind us to love our neighbors.
Margaret
Where Were You
This song acknowledges all the conflicting emotions of that day but in the end focuses on hope and reconciliation. Remember how, just for a while, we all came together and recognized the matters we usually fight over as trivial by comparison? (As Miss Manners sardonically wrote some months later, we knew the terrorists hadn't won when we stopped being nice to each other.) Too bad our fallen human nature is such that it often takes a major disaster to remind us to love our neighbors.
Margaret
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Language and Thought
Here's a recent article on whether language shapes thought. The hard-line theory that grammar and vocabulary rigidly constrain a culture's perception of reality has been overturned. Yet the structure of our language does obviously influence our world-view, and it does so in more nuanced ways than simply preventing certain types of thought:
New York Times
Fortunately, Newspeak as designed in the dictatorship of George Orwell's 1984 probably wouldn't work the way its inventors hoped, to ensure that "heretical thought. . . should be literally unthinkable." In Orwell's afterword to the novel, he wisely adds, "so far as thought is dependent on words." The lack of precise terms may make a thought harder to shape, but the human mind is creative enough to get around that problem. We speak in parables and metaphors or invent new words.
What interested me most about that article cited above was the point that our languages force us to *notice* certain things. For example, a French speaker can't refer to a generic cousin, as we can in English. The gendered ending of the word forces the speaker to specify a male or female cousin. Some languages have different words for grandparents, aunts, or uncles depending on whether they belong to the maternal or paternal side of the family. And some languages have a very useful feature that requires every statement to indicate the source of the speaker's knowledge—eyewitness, hearsay, opinion, etc.
Although many people mock what's sometimes called "political correctness" in speech and writing, being careful about the terms used to refer to other people has a valid point. When "man" could mean either "human being" or specifically "adult male," it wasn't hard for phrases such as "the rights of man" to blur with ambiguity at the edges. Latin could avoid the ambiguity with "homo" for the former and "vir" for the latter; English doesn't have that distinction. Changing language doesn't magically change attitudes, but who could deny that language does help to shape attitudes?
And then there's the ever-shifting quality of euphemisms. "Retarded" (implying that the child is just developing a bit slower than others) began as a polite substitute for harsher terms such as "feeble-minded." Nowadays "retarded" has become perceived as an insult, to be replaced by phrases such as "developmentally disabled." The trouble with euphemisms, as the history of "retarded" illustrates, is that new ones eventually pick up the taint, so to speak, of the old ones, so yet another replacement has to be invented. The change in Maryland law from "disabled persons" to the subtly different "persons with disabilities" is an example of this trend.
Metaphors shape thought more powerfully than vocabulary and sentence structure. Consider the implications tucked inside metaphors such as "war on drugs," "war on poverty," and "war on terror." In war, violence is justified, and absolute victory is the only acceptable goal. In fighting against poverty or drugs, who are the enemy combatants?
Here's Orwell's essay about Newspeak:
Principles of Newspeak
He mentions that Newspeak aims to diminish rather than extend the range of thought and, as far as possible, make speech independent of conscious thought. Notice Orwell's sly references to the ways twentieth-century political discourse was already tending in that direction. Just the opposite of what we, as writers, aspire to do with language!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
New York Times
Fortunately, Newspeak as designed in the dictatorship of George Orwell's 1984 probably wouldn't work the way its inventors hoped, to ensure that "heretical thought. . . should be literally unthinkable." In Orwell's afterword to the novel, he wisely adds, "so far as thought is dependent on words." The lack of precise terms may make a thought harder to shape, but the human mind is creative enough to get around that problem. We speak in parables and metaphors or invent new words.
What interested me most about that article cited above was the point that our languages force us to *notice* certain things. For example, a French speaker can't refer to a generic cousin, as we can in English. The gendered ending of the word forces the speaker to specify a male or female cousin. Some languages have different words for grandparents, aunts, or uncles depending on whether they belong to the maternal or paternal side of the family. And some languages have a very useful feature that requires every statement to indicate the source of the speaker's knowledge—eyewitness, hearsay, opinion, etc.
Although many people mock what's sometimes called "political correctness" in speech and writing, being careful about the terms used to refer to other people has a valid point. When "man" could mean either "human being" or specifically "adult male," it wasn't hard for phrases such as "the rights of man" to blur with ambiguity at the edges. Latin could avoid the ambiguity with "homo" for the former and "vir" for the latter; English doesn't have that distinction. Changing language doesn't magically change attitudes, but who could deny that language does help to shape attitudes?
And then there's the ever-shifting quality of euphemisms. "Retarded" (implying that the child is just developing a bit slower than others) began as a polite substitute for harsher terms such as "feeble-minded." Nowadays "retarded" has become perceived as an insult, to be replaced by phrases such as "developmentally disabled." The trouble with euphemisms, as the history of "retarded" illustrates, is that new ones eventually pick up the taint, so to speak, of the old ones, so yet another replacement has to be invented. The change in Maryland law from "disabled persons" to the subtly different "persons with disabilities" is an example of this trend.
Metaphors shape thought more powerfully than vocabulary and sentence structure. Consider the implications tucked inside metaphors such as "war on drugs," "war on poverty," and "war on terror." In war, violence is justified, and absolute victory is the only acceptable goal. In fighting against poverty or drugs, who are the enemy combatants?
Here's Orwell's essay about Newspeak:
Principles of Newspeak
He mentions that Newspeak aims to diminish rather than extend the range of thought and, as far as possible, make speech independent of conscious thought. Notice Orwell's sly references to the ways twentieth-century political discourse was already tending in that direction. Just the opposite of what we, as writers, aspire to do with language!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part VI
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
OK, so now down to the very nitty part of the nitty-gritty of rewriting to editorial requirements and getting it done within the deadline (which was probably yesterday).
What do you do first?
Some editors scribble in margins, some write long detailed notes page and paragraph references followed by an explanation of the problem they are having at that point.
It doesn't matter how they present the problem set to you. If you've done the original work solidly, you'll have no problem.
But how do you do that original work "solidly?"
Here is where I discussed "what to do first" when you start out to write a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
That blog essentially says write the jacket copy FIRST, then explains why that's necessary in terms of the eventual reviews, buzz, and publicity, and adds some clout by "who" agrees with me.
It gives a formula created by an Agent to tell you exactly how to create the jacket copy which you then use to create the novel beat by beat.
I keep raving about Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on how to create a screenplay from scratch. He didn't invent the concept "beat sheet" but he reverse-engineered hundreds of blockbuster screenplays to discover what they had in common and formulated the universal beat sheet for the 110 page screenplay.
One of his students reduced that beat sheet to a formula for creating the "pitch" (i.e. what a book would use as flap copy or back-copy to sell the book to a reader).
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2008/10/try-this/#comments (and scroll up to the post)
And now here is another excellent summary of how to concoct that all important STARTING POINT for telling a story - the POINT which will, if you use it meticulously, allow you to rewrite to editorial specification successfully no matter how tight the deadline:
http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/10-tips-for-writing-loglines
Now there it is - the entire SECRET of this whole editorial thing.
These 3 posts enumerate the moving parts of your "vehicle" as referred to in the previous 5 parts of this series. And it's the vehicle that is being edited -- not your story, and not your art, but the packaging around it.
So, parts 1-5 of this series are explaining to you what an editor is, what an editor does, and why.
Most of you probably already knew everything in parts 1-5 of this series, but you lose sight of that when confronted with rewrite orders. Everything you "know" goes out the window and all you can think about is what's important to you. All you feel is your own feelings.
The editing process is about putting your personal investment, your feelings, aside and focusing on your customer, your audience, not yourself. The "professional" part of writing is the PERFORMING part, and that's what the editing process is about.
Creating the submission draft is like the dress-rehearsal. The editorial process is like the actual performance with the whole crew standing behind the camera and the director seeing $$$$ flowing across the set by the second. You are on stage before a live audience that paid for the show, and THE SHOW MUST GO ON. One take. That's all you have (publishing is very low-budget stuff).
The objective of the first 5 posts in "What Exactly Is Editing" is to get you to use your writerly instincts to walk a mile in your editor's shoes, to see her job from her eyes, to feel her feelings and share her objectives. She's your customer, and at this point, your audience waiting for that opening night performance.
Your final edit to editorial specification may require a whole lot of changes, but you should not take that fact to mean that you wrote it wrong to begin with (unless of course you wrote it after selling this editor at this publishing house a novel on the basis of a 1 parag description and not even a sample chapter).
If you sold on the basis of a paragraph (yes, I've done that a few times) and then got a torrent of editorial tweaks (thankfully that never happened to me), it does mean you weren't paying enough attention to that Line's specific requirements, or the requirements changed between contract and delivery.
But if you wrote it on spec, for a general market, you should expect any editor or producer to need some tailoring nips and tucks to make your story fit into her vehicle, her packaging.
If your story won't fit into her standard shaped packaging, then it will snag in the publishing channel, the tube that runs between you and your ultimate reader. The thing will just STICK in place, (clogging up the channel and preventing other more smoothly tailored books behind it from getting to their readers). In other words, it won't sell well.
To minimize the need to re-shape your story to any particular editor or producer's market channels, take that market's characteristics into account.
Study the market, internalize the beat-sheet that market prefers, make it part of your subconscious. Here are two posts that may help.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (this is a different post than the one above - just mis-numbered)
Writing is a performing art. Remember learning to dance? Or drive? At first your attention is on your feet, or you get dizzy juggling all the information approaching a stop sign for a left turn. After a while, some other part of your brain takes over, and you can dance or drive while talking, singing, flirting with your dancer partner, or thinking about your grocery list and yelling at the kids in the back seat. (but not while on a cell phone or texting).
Writing stories is the same way. Once the subconscious is trained, it will organize all the bits of the story into a beat sheet based on a concept and pitch that fits a very specific market. Then it will toss that up into your conscious mind and compel you to write it.
Amateur or beginning writers will "get" an idea before it's been collimated into a beat sheet that fits a specific market. That's why they struggle so much. You can't do all this stuff consciously. You have to drill the moves in deeply, memorize your lines like an actor, memorize your sheet-music like a pianist, then PERFORM that piece.
A particular structure for a particular market is like a specific Shakespearian play, or a Brahms symphony -- it is exactly what it is, but it is made anew, fresh and different by each artist who performs it, by each time that artist performs it.
If you know your business, your submission draft will need only a few tweaks and a clean-up of typos and inconsistencies.
If you do get a torrent of editorial comments that need action, then you start methodically.
#1) Put yourself in your editor's shoes, at her desk, answering her phone, attending her committee meetings.
#2) Pick out two or three novels your editor edited for that line and stack them on the desk before you. (presumably you've reread them a number of times to drive the beat-sheet into your hind-brain). For a screenplay, it's the same drill - study the product of that producer.
#3) Go to the END of your MS. Make sure the climax is RIGHT AT the very end, nothing left over but a nice, sweet denoument if that.
#4) Go to the BEGINNING of your MS. Make sure the beginning contains everything that's at the ending and nothing much else. Delete what does not pertain to the ending.
#5) Go to the MIDDLE of your MS. Make sure that the tension level is correct - low-point for an HEA and high-point for a tragedy.
#6) Go to the 1/4 and 3/4 points for a novel (the act breaks for a screenplay) - check that the plot-development necessary to lead to the ending is exactly at those points and not one page off.
#7) Review the editor's problem points and use those notes to smooth and smooth, to simplify, emphasize, showcase, and show-don't-tell the LINE (that artistic line we talked about in this series on editing) that leads from Beginning to Ending through the Middle.
#8) After entering all the changes the editor wants, check again to make sure the EMOTIONAL LINE and the artistic line, and the plot-line and the story-line and thematic statement all move with the beats.
Make sure no scene goes too long (most writers linger at a scene a few parags or events too long). Make sure all that you originally intended is there for the reader. Make sure your changes don't "show" - don't cause discontinuity or emotional jerking around. Make sure the interna-climax pattern is correct for the length of the novel.
Here are checklists for how to analyze your structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
#9) One more read-through if you have time, one more spell-check and make sure your POV shifts "work." Check for the elements cited in the following posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
And you're done.
With experience, it shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 workdays to polish up a 400 page novel MS. That's a target. It could take years and buckets of sweat to get that experienced.
In Part VII on September 14, 2010, find out if you're a writer or an editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
OK, so now down to the very nitty part of the nitty-gritty of rewriting to editorial requirements and getting it done within the deadline (which was probably yesterday).
What do you do first?
Some editors scribble in margins, some write long detailed notes page and paragraph references followed by an explanation of the problem they are having at that point.
It doesn't matter how they present the problem set to you. If you've done the original work solidly, you'll have no problem.
But how do you do that original work "solidly?"
Here is where I discussed "what to do first" when you start out to write a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
That blog essentially says write the jacket copy FIRST, then explains why that's necessary in terms of the eventual reviews, buzz, and publicity, and adds some clout by "who" agrees with me.
It gives a formula created by an Agent to tell you exactly how to create the jacket copy which you then use to create the novel beat by beat.
I keep raving about Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on how to create a screenplay from scratch. He didn't invent the concept "beat sheet" but he reverse-engineered hundreds of blockbuster screenplays to discover what they had in common and formulated the universal beat sheet for the 110 page screenplay.
One of his students reduced that beat sheet to a formula for creating the "pitch" (i.e. what a book would use as flap copy or back-copy to sell the book to a reader).
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2008/10/try-this/#comments (and scroll up to the post)
And now here is another excellent summary of how to concoct that all important STARTING POINT for telling a story - the POINT which will, if you use it meticulously, allow you to rewrite to editorial specification successfully no matter how tight the deadline:
http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/10-tips-for-writing-loglines
Now there it is - the entire SECRET of this whole editorial thing.
These 3 posts enumerate the moving parts of your "vehicle" as referred to in the previous 5 parts of this series. And it's the vehicle that is being edited -- not your story, and not your art, but the packaging around it.
So, parts 1-5 of this series are explaining to you what an editor is, what an editor does, and why.
Most of you probably already knew everything in parts 1-5 of this series, but you lose sight of that when confronted with rewrite orders. Everything you "know" goes out the window and all you can think about is what's important to you. All you feel is your own feelings.
The editing process is about putting your personal investment, your feelings, aside and focusing on your customer, your audience, not yourself. The "professional" part of writing is the PERFORMING part, and that's what the editing process is about.
Creating the submission draft is like the dress-rehearsal. The editorial process is like the actual performance with the whole crew standing behind the camera and the director seeing $$$$ flowing across the set by the second. You are on stage before a live audience that paid for the show, and THE SHOW MUST GO ON. One take. That's all you have (publishing is very low-budget stuff).
The objective of the first 5 posts in "What Exactly Is Editing" is to get you to use your writerly instincts to walk a mile in your editor's shoes, to see her job from her eyes, to feel her feelings and share her objectives. She's your customer, and at this point, your audience waiting for that opening night performance.
Your final edit to editorial specification may require a whole lot of changes, but you should not take that fact to mean that you wrote it wrong to begin with (unless of course you wrote it after selling this editor at this publishing house a novel on the basis of a 1 parag description and not even a sample chapter).
If you sold on the basis of a paragraph (yes, I've done that a few times) and then got a torrent of editorial tweaks (thankfully that never happened to me), it does mean you weren't paying enough attention to that Line's specific requirements, or the requirements changed between contract and delivery.
But if you wrote it on spec, for a general market, you should expect any editor or producer to need some tailoring nips and tucks to make your story fit into her vehicle, her packaging.
If your story won't fit into her standard shaped packaging, then it will snag in the publishing channel, the tube that runs between you and your ultimate reader. The thing will just STICK in place, (clogging up the channel and preventing other more smoothly tailored books behind it from getting to their readers). In other words, it won't sell well.
To minimize the need to re-shape your story to any particular editor or producer's market channels, take that market's characteristics into account.
Study the market, internalize the beat-sheet that market prefers, make it part of your subconscious. Here are two posts that may help.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (this is a different post than the one above - just mis-numbered)
Writing is a performing art. Remember learning to dance? Or drive? At first your attention is on your feet, or you get dizzy juggling all the information approaching a stop sign for a left turn. After a while, some other part of your brain takes over, and you can dance or drive while talking, singing, flirting with your dancer partner, or thinking about your grocery list and yelling at the kids in the back seat. (but not while on a cell phone or texting).
Writing stories is the same way. Once the subconscious is trained, it will organize all the bits of the story into a beat sheet based on a concept and pitch that fits a very specific market. Then it will toss that up into your conscious mind and compel you to write it.
Amateur or beginning writers will "get" an idea before it's been collimated into a beat sheet that fits a specific market. That's why they struggle so much. You can't do all this stuff consciously. You have to drill the moves in deeply, memorize your lines like an actor, memorize your sheet-music like a pianist, then PERFORM that piece.
A particular structure for a particular market is like a specific Shakespearian play, or a Brahms symphony -- it is exactly what it is, but it is made anew, fresh and different by each artist who performs it, by each time that artist performs it.
If you know your business, your submission draft will need only a few tweaks and a clean-up of typos and inconsistencies.
If you do get a torrent of editorial comments that need action, then you start methodically.
#1) Put yourself in your editor's shoes, at her desk, answering her phone, attending her committee meetings.
#2) Pick out two or three novels your editor edited for that line and stack them on the desk before you. (presumably you've reread them a number of times to drive the beat-sheet into your hind-brain). For a screenplay, it's the same drill - study the product of that producer.
#3) Go to the END of your MS. Make sure the climax is RIGHT AT the very end, nothing left over but a nice, sweet denoument if that.
#4) Go to the BEGINNING of your MS. Make sure the beginning contains everything that's at the ending and nothing much else. Delete what does not pertain to the ending.
#5) Go to the MIDDLE of your MS. Make sure that the tension level is correct - low-point for an HEA and high-point for a tragedy.
#6) Go to the 1/4 and 3/4 points for a novel (the act breaks for a screenplay) - check that the plot-development necessary to lead to the ending is exactly at those points and not one page off.
#7) Review the editor's problem points and use those notes to smooth and smooth, to simplify, emphasize, showcase, and show-don't-tell the LINE (that artistic line we talked about in this series on editing) that leads from Beginning to Ending through the Middle.
#8) After entering all the changes the editor wants, check again to make sure the EMOTIONAL LINE and the artistic line, and the plot-line and the story-line and thematic statement all move with the beats.
Make sure no scene goes too long (most writers linger at a scene a few parags or events too long). Make sure all that you originally intended is there for the reader. Make sure your changes don't "show" - don't cause discontinuity or emotional jerking around. Make sure the interna-climax pattern is correct for the length of the novel.
Here are checklists for how to analyze your structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
#9) One more read-through if you have time, one more spell-check and make sure your POV shifts "work." Check for the elements cited in the following posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
And you're done.
With experience, it shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 workdays to polish up a 400 page novel MS. That's a target. It could take years and buckets of sweat to get that experienced.
In Part VII on September 14, 2010, find out if you're a writer or an editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Monday, September 06, 2010
Peter's Evil Overlord List
Peter's Evil Overlord List
With apologies to Linnea, whose "day" it is, but I couldn't resist sharing this link.
With apologies to Linnea, whose "day" it is, but I couldn't resist sharing this link.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Immigration and Alien Romances
From time to time, I blog about how much there is in our everyday news to inspire speculative thinking, idea-based fiction, and world-building for all types of science fiction/fantasy romance, and especially for one of the "punk" genres. (Steampunk. Cyberpunk. Etc)
In recent posts, I've looked at pollution and man-made disasters, volcanic eruptions, and the potential for disastrous mistakes if we become unreasonably dependent on the products or services of pharmaceutical companies (or any other enterprise, whether for our physical comfort -- the power companies-- or for our spiritual comfort.)
Immigration seems to be a hot topic from the Antipodes, almost to the Arctic. In fact, one eHow Contributor opines that Iceland's Immigration laws are among the most rigorous of all the Western Democracies. I expect that some of my colleagues will pay greater attention to immigration and the treatment of "illegal aliens" in their future alien romances.
I've always been fascinated by the local treatment of foreign royal spouses throughout European history. "Alien" wives haven't always been well received, and I had a little of that sort of thing as a sub-subplot in my alien romance "Knight's Fork" (no longer available unless through private vendors or second-hand).
However the wives of the rich, powerful and influential are probably not put through the frustrations, humiliations and stresses to which GI brides, mail-order brides, and ISP wives are subjected.... to say nothing of the hurdles facing regular good folks who wish to adopt a orphan child from overseas.
King Henry VIII's blind date with Ann of Cleves worked out pretty well for Ann, considering the fate of his other wives, and what the Princess's life might be like if she'd been sent home, rejected.
But... back to the futuristic fiction. I seem to recall that there was some sort of quarantine policy on Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 was more of a way station than a permanent destination for most of the characters who passed through its ports.
Much of the alien romance fiction that I've read hinges upon either conquest, colonization, or the forced importation of desirable captives who possess an ability, talent, skill or gift that is in demand in the aliens' world. If there is a shortage of breeding stock, for instance, local immigration policy is likely to be accommodating.
Lawbreakers and smugglers find themselves in trouble. There's a practical difficulty in terms of cost and logistics in deporting or repatriating inter-stellar stowaways and illegal immigrants. The local authorities' solution in Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow to the problem of an unwelcome missionary was to use and abuse him for entertainment.
Jack Vance had an interesting and plausible mix of border controls and air traffic control in The Demon Princes.
What immigration policies have you seen in action in your science fiction and fantasy travels?
Best,
Rowena Cherry
Footnotes and Links
German Immigration Law
http://www.workpermit.com/news/germany4.htm
Japanese Immigration Law
http://www.ehow.com/about_5117692_japanese-immigration-laws.html
Russia's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/list_6165747_russia_s-immigration-laws_.html
Iceland's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5150933_icelandic-immigration-laws.html
Pakistan's Immigration Laws
http://www.expatforum.com/articles/visas-permits-and-immigration/pakistan-visas-permits-and-immigration.html
Current Controversy in Australia about Australian Immigration
http://www.embraceaustralia.com/the-australian-immigration-debate-7566.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9dgq2RPbg&feature=related
An anonymous correspondent's summary of Mexican immigration laws:
American Immigration Laws
http://space-snark.blogspot.com/
In recent posts, I've looked at pollution and man-made disasters, volcanic eruptions, and the potential for disastrous mistakes if we become unreasonably dependent on the products or services of pharmaceutical companies (or any other enterprise, whether for our physical comfort -- the power companies-- or for our spiritual comfort.)
Immigration seems to be a hot topic from the Antipodes, almost to the Arctic. In fact, one eHow Contributor opines that Iceland's Immigration laws are among the most rigorous of all the Western Democracies. I expect that some of my colleagues will pay greater attention to immigration and the treatment of "illegal aliens" in their future alien romances.
I've always been fascinated by the local treatment of foreign royal spouses throughout European history. "Alien" wives haven't always been well received, and I had a little of that sort of thing as a sub-subplot in my alien romance "Knight's Fork" (no longer available unless through private vendors or second-hand).
However the wives of the rich, powerful and influential are probably not put through the frustrations, humiliations and stresses to which GI brides, mail-order brides, and ISP wives are subjected.... to say nothing of the hurdles facing regular good folks who wish to adopt a orphan child from overseas.
King Henry VIII's blind date with Ann of Cleves worked out pretty well for Ann, considering the fate of his other wives, and what the Princess's life might be like if she'd been sent home, rejected.
But... back to the futuristic fiction. I seem to recall that there was some sort of quarantine policy on Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 was more of a way station than a permanent destination for most of the characters who passed through its ports.
Much of the alien romance fiction that I've read hinges upon either conquest, colonization, or the forced importation of desirable captives who possess an ability, talent, skill or gift that is in demand in the aliens' world. If there is a shortage of breeding stock, for instance, local immigration policy is likely to be accommodating.
Lawbreakers and smugglers find themselves in trouble. There's a practical difficulty in terms of cost and logistics in deporting or repatriating inter-stellar stowaways and illegal immigrants. The local authorities' solution in Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow to the problem of an unwelcome missionary was to use and abuse him for entertainment.
Jack Vance had an interesting and plausible mix of border controls and air traffic control in The Demon Princes.
What immigration policies have you seen in action in your science fiction and fantasy travels?
Best,
Rowena Cherry
Footnotes and Links
German Immigration Law
http://www.workpermit.com/news/germany4.htm
Japanese Immigration Law
http://www.ehow.com/about_5117692_japanese-immigration-laws.html
Russia's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/list_6165747_russia_s-immigration-laws_.html
Iceland's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5150933_icelandic-immigration-laws.html
Pakistan's Immigration Laws
http://www.expatforum.com/articles/visas-permits-and-immigration/pakistan-visas-permits-and-immigration.html
Current Controversy in Australia about Australian Immigration
http://www.embraceaustralia.com/the-australian-immigration-debate-7566.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9dgq2RPbg&feature=related
An anonymous correspondent's summary of Mexican immigration laws:
1 There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.2. All ballots will be in this nation's language.3. All government business will be conducted in our language.4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office.6 Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers. No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or other government assistance programs. Any burden will be deported.7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.8. If foreigners come here and buy land.... options will be restricted. Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally born into this country.9. Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations, no waving of a foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. These will lead to deportation.
10. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted &, when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The above laws are the current immigration laws of Mexico
"In order to become a citizen, a person must be able to speak English, pass a United States Citizen test, and have a favorable opinion of America, among other qualifications."
~Caitlin Kelly, eHow Contributor.
American immigration information:
http://www.hg.org/immigration-law.html#1
http://space-snark.blogspot.com/
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Is Consciousness Necessary?
The TIME article I wrote about last week mentions the theory held by many philosophers, notably Descartes, that animals have no consciousness. These people believed nonhuman animals were fleshly automata with no self-awareness, emotions, or capacity to feel pain and pleasure.
Recently I also read an anthology of essays called ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, AND PHILOSOPHY: NEW LIFE FOR THE UNDEAD. One author, Dale Jacquette, proposes a thought experiment in which zombie-like human beings exist, "people" who operate entirely on instinct and have no consciousness, no inner mental and emotional lives. The difference between the zombies in this essay and those in voodoo tradition or horror movies is that the thought-experiment creatures look and behave exactly like the rest of us. They perfectly simulate not only the behavior and speech of ordinary people but even the outward signs of emotion. Yet we know for a fact that they are automata. Would it be morally acceptable to use them in gory gladiatorial combats to the death? Jacquette concludes it wouldn't, because of the desensitizing effect on the spectators.
What about intelligent beings who have no consciousness? Could intelligence exist without awareness? Peter Watts creates aliens like this in his novel BLINDSIGHT. When they accidentally pick up communications from Earth, they find the evidence of our self-awareness so alien that they consider Earth a threat that must be obliterated. You can read the entire novel on the web (warning, it's heavy going in places, at least I thought so), and Watts also includes his notes on the story's background and the research sources he used. Scroll down to the section on sentience and intelligence:
Blindsight
Here's an excerpt from that section:
"But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. BLINDSIGHT plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconscious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DILBERT.)
Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective."
And here's another quote that I find quite unsettling:
"It turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”"
How do we know people other than ourselves aren't mindless androids like the zombies in Jacquette's article? How do we know they have conscious minds? We assume they do because they have the same body and brain structures we do and display the same outward signs of thinking and feeling. So we accept that they probably have inner lives similar to ours. In the absence of telepathy, though, we have no proof of this hypothesis. We have to accept the consciousness of other people on faith.
The protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's fiction use this situation to justify what most of us would consider inhuman behavior. If there's no way to be sure other human beings have the same emotions and sensations we do, why go out of our way to try to make them feel good? With no direct access to their minds, we have no certainty our efforts are successful, so why bother? If cruelty to others makes US feel good, go for it. Scary.
As for Peter Watts, I have to give him credit for creating truly ALIEN aliens in BLINDSIGHT. I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept, though. Acting and reacting without consciousness can be imagined, but how can the communication of abstract ideas necessary to produce a space-traveling civilization occur without self-awareness and a theory of mind (the hypothesis that other individuals have thought processes like our own)?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Recently I also read an anthology of essays called ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, AND PHILOSOPHY: NEW LIFE FOR THE UNDEAD. One author, Dale Jacquette, proposes a thought experiment in which zombie-like human beings exist, "people" who operate entirely on instinct and have no consciousness, no inner mental and emotional lives. The difference between the zombies in this essay and those in voodoo tradition or horror movies is that the thought-experiment creatures look and behave exactly like the rest of us. They perfectly simulate not only the behavior and speech of ordinary people but even the outward signs of emotion. Yet we know for a fact that they are automata. Would it be morally acceptable to use them in gory gladiatorial combats to the death? Jacquette concludes it wouldn't, because of the desensitizing effect on the spectators.
What about intelligent beings who have no consciousness? Could intelligence exist without awareness? Peter Watts creates aliens like this in his novel BLINDSIGHT. When they accidentally pick up communications from Earth, they find the evidence of our self-awareness so alien that they consider Earth a threat that must be obliterated. You can read the entire novel on the web (warning, it's heavy going in places, at least I thought so), and Watts also includes his notes on the story's background and the research sources he used. Scroll down to the section on sentience and intelligence:
Blindsight
Here's an excerpt from that section:
"But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. BLINDSIGHT plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconscious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DILBERT.)
Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective."
And here's another quote that I find quite unsettling:
"It turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”"
How do we know people other than ourselves aren't mindless androids like the zombies in Jacquette's article? How do we know they have conscious minds? We assume they do because they have the same body and brain structures we do and display the same outward signs of thinking and feeling. So we accept that they probably have inner lives similar to ours. In the absence of telepathy, though, we have no proof of this hypothesis. We have to accept the consciousness of other people on faith.
The protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's fiction use this situation to justify what most of us would consider inhuman behavior. If there's no way to be sure other human beings have the same emotions and sensations we do, why go out of our way to try to make them feel good? With no direct access to their minds, we have no certainty our efforts are successful, so why bother? If cruelty to others makes US feel good, go for it. Scary.
As for Peter Watts, I have to give him credit for creating truly ALIEN aliens in BLINDSIGHT. I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept, though. Acting and reacting without consciousness can be imagined, but how can the communication of abstract ideas necessary to produce a space-traveling civilization occur without self-awareness and a theory of mind (the hypothesis that other individuals have thought processes like our own)?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part V
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
I started this series on Editing actually in response to a question I got on Twitter, but I have forgotten who originally asked.
There was an exchange with a professional writer who had a rewrite order and a deadline and was just going nuts over it, and some others who chimed in. Finally someone asked what were the most rewrites other writers had to do.
I mentioned that my first award winner was published as 5th draft, a record for me that I never equaled again. And I said something (in 140 characters or less) about how quickly other rewrites had gone for me -- even extensive rewrites. And then came the question about how I did that.
I intended to write answer that question - then lost the questioner.
Recently, I decided I had to write up the answer I had so far (this is Part V, and there could be more), and asked on twitter for Questions I could answer in How To Rewrite To Editorial Specification On Deadline.
In response, I got the following from @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
3)What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
----------
Now if you've read Parts I-IV of this little blog series, you may see where these questions lead you astray.
Look again at the questions. Think about the focus, the implicit subtext.
Remember that in solving any problem, phrasing the question correctly is at least 90% of the solution.
Remember all the word-problems you did in grammar school math? You have cherries, and apples and boats on a stream, and you have to make an algebra equation out of it all.
If you get the initial algebra expression wrong, you'll never get the correct answer.
Phrasing the question is most of the solution.
Are these questions phrased in such a way as to get the answer you need in order to look at an editor's rewrite orders (or what screenwriters call "Notes") and know immediately what to do to make your manuscript publishable or producible?
Do you see that I've already answered all those questions in the first 4 parts to this series?
No?
Do any of those questions take into account what an Editor's job is?
Do any of those questions focus on what the editor is trying to accomplish?
Do any of those questions address the real key issue to figuring out what to do with your story to make it "acceptable" to that editor?
No, they don't.
They look at the rewrite order, and at the story -- totally ignoring the Editor's PROBLEM.
Here's a glance at the problem the Editor knows this novel will face in the marketplace.
Again from twitter, a random selection of comments from a chat on publicity.
@BookMarketChat Another thing I think is true - get help. You may not see yourself, your work as clearly as a coach, publicist or honest friend. #bookmarket
--
@BookMarketChat Yea!RT @publishingcoach: Things change so quickly these days, and peoples memories are short. You'll lose some fans, gain others. #bookmarket
--
Two key take-aways: CHANGE and a perspective on yourSELF, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Keeping your eye on a changing market, and changing your behavior as that change happens is a major key to understanding the rewrite orders an editor is sending you -- even though you wrote exactly what the contract required!
Between the time you sign a contract or even seal the deal with a handshake via email -- things have changed in the editor's office!
When an editor (or producer) takes time to give you "Notes" or a rewrite order, direction, or marginal notations on a manuscript, the editor is asking you to finish doing your job, and to solve a problem the editor has, not a problem you have, and not the problem the editor had when you signed the contract.
The editor is not asking you to solve YOUR PROBLEM.
The editor (or producer) is asking you to solve THE EDITOR'S PROBLEM.
Worse, you have to solve the new problem IN TIME to get the product into the pipeline before things change again for the publicity department.
Consider that the way those questions that were sent to me are phrased focuses the attention on the writer's problem ignoring the entire issue of whether the editor has a problem and what that problem might actually be and how it's changed lately.
In those questions, the Editor and the Writer are talking past each other, not even at each other. Certainly there's no communicating going on.
These questions are by are professional writers who have done this work with professional editors. And look what they're asking.
Let's frame it all another way.
A) What exactly is this Editor asking me to do?
B) How do I figure out what the Editor really means by this note?
C) What should the finished product this Editor needs look like?
D) How do I figure out what part of my manuscript to change to get the effect this editor needs?
----------
A) You can tell what the editor is asking you to do by looking at other books in the line the editor is editing for. The editor is asking you to make yours "the same but different" - to conform to the better selling novels in the line.
What does it mean "conform?" It means to use the same structure, the same trope, that has sold well before, but be fresh, original and different in theme, twists, character quirks, details, background.
In editor-speak "conform" means be different.
B) To figure out what an editor "really means" you have to know this editor a little bit at least. But it's usually safe to start with the assumption that the editor is an editor not a writer.
The editor will spot and flag a section, character, element, or detail that isn't "on beat" -- a pacing flaw, a bit that's foreshadowed (set-up) but never happens (pay-off).
The editor checks the emotional-tension of scenes to see that they are placed in the correct order - that climaxes (you should excuse the expression) come in the right places.
Some publishing lines have actual page-number formulas for internal climaxes, a set number of pages for sex scenes, action scenes, etc. But most don't have that strict a formula. Still, every genre (even Literature) does have a structure that determines the BEATS.
Blake Snyder showed you, in the SAVE THE CAT! series, exactly how to reverse engineer products aimed at different audiences to determine the best selling beat structures. Good editors know the beat of their line. The others don't stay in the job long.
What the editor "really means" is that "this "beat" right here where I've made this marginal note or on page-this of the MS is "wrong"."
It isn't the editor's job to tell the writer HOW TO FIX IT. The editor isn't a writer. They often suggest what to change into what, but usually are just trying to express what's bothering them without actually, consciously analyzing what's bothering them.
It's like a computer user calling tech support and yelling "It Doesn't Work" and tech support asking for the error code number, and the user just yelling IT DOESN'T WORK!!! How should I know why???? And tech support says "Well what did you do before it did that?" And the user says "I don't know, that's your job."
The editor is the USER, and you are her TECH SUPPORT. It's up to you to figure out why it doesn't work and fix it. It's only up to her to tell you THAT it doesn't work, not why or how to fix it. Don't call her and ask.
So if you're going to tech-support your own manuscript, you have to know its "computer language" (the symbolism in which it speaks; it's theme) and you have to know how it works, and where the drop-down menus are where other choices can be made.
You have to know the BEATS, the genre, the conflict, and all the moving parts of the composition.
Then when the editor points and says "this doesn't work" -- you don't call the editor up and defend your ART, you figure out why it doesn't work for that editor's line, and that publisher's purpose.
The reason it doesn't work on page 152 probably lies on page 1 -- maybe page 5 -- of a 400 page manuscript.
The editor can't tell you where the problem IS, only where it became noticeable. If you put the manuscript together, you should be able to take it apart, fix page 5 and see how that changes page 152, and it'll satisfy the editor. The editor doesn't care how you fix it, or how you figure out the problem is actually on page 5. The editor only cares that it be fixed and that it work, on deadline.
C) What should the finished product this editor needs look like? Do your homework. Read other books, novels, stories, in that line. If you're in film, read Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series. In fact, if you're in text, read that book anyway. It's all there. It's in the beat. If you can see it in a film, you can see it in a novel!
D) How do you figure out where to make changes to get the effect an editor needs? Again. The editor may not know WHY there's a problem on page 152, or what to do to fix it. But it is the editor's job to know what overall effect the novels in a line (or a film from a production company) should be.
If the effect isn't almost right already, the editor wouldn't take the trouble to ask for rewrite. So the necessary change probably isn't nearly as drastic as the editor thinks! If there's a problem with the "effect" (happy ending, crushing low-point for hero in the middle, a "lighter" or "darker" mood) it's either a pacing problem with the BEAT SHEET structure, or it's just choice of vocabulary. Line editing to adjust where beats fall and/or vocabulary changes can fix a lot with "light" or "dark" mood. Sometimes it can be fixed by deleting a scene or character and putting the information conveyed by that scene or character into another component of the story.
Writing is "magic" to editors. It isn't their job to know how you produce emotional effects, but only to know whether you've done it or not.
So to fulfill a rewrite order on deadline and on schedule, you START by structuring the story with precision beats before you write.
In fact, since most of a writer's work is done subconsciously way before "having an idea" for a story -- the smooth, quick, professional rewrite order response actually starts before you have the idea.
If you know what you did, what you chose, how you chose it, and why, and you know the editor didn't "get" the effect you worked for, you have to make a choice.
Either the effect you worked for has to be deleted entirely, in all its parts. Or something else has to be deleted to make room, and the effect worked up into the foreground.
Now, given this approach -- listen carefully to the editor, understand that this rewrite order is an attempt to conform your product to her Imprint's line, understand that it isn't criticism and has nothing at all to do with your Art, and everything to do with marketing, getting good reviews, and starting buzz.
Doing a fast, smooth job on rewrite is all about listening to the editor, and that's just like listening to any other person. Stop listening to yourself and start listening to the other person.
Now let's go through those questions submitted and answer them:
First @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
First- listen. Look at the overall pattern of rewrite notes and find the connecting mechanism built into the story while writing it.
Understanding that the actual problem with the manuscript is very likely NOT at the point where the editor noticed it, find the actual problem and fix that. Often 15-20 scattered complaints sprinkled through a 400 page manuscript can be fixed with one or two tweaks.
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
To "enrich" a scene that's locked into a nice paced sequence of scenes you don't want to mess up, go for SUBTEXT.
Plant a foreshadowing or "set-up" long before the scene you want enriched. Tiny tweaks to the scene you want to enrich will then make it a super-huge pay-off to the previous setup. And be sure to end the scene with a set-up for a pay-off that'll come several scenes later, maybe at the end. When there's a difference between what the viewer knows and what the character knows, you get rich.
Make sure the reader learns something they have wanted to know for an excruciatingly long time in that scene but still knows they don't know everything - and it will be enriched.
3) What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How quickly and efficiently you can rewrite depends on how carefully you prepared TO REWRITE before you wrote.
It depends on how you kept your own notes and what is connected to what and what foreshadows what, and where the tension builds and where it's released.
Rewrite orders that aren't simple story-logic tweaks (he put his hat on twice without taking it off) are almost always related to adjusting pacing to fit the genre.
Understand how you paced it to begin with, and you'll know what you can delete now to tighten the pacing, and what to add to slow it down.
Editors don't always just tell you the problem is pacing. They may say it's uninteresting or complicated or abstract, or I don't like this character or I don't believe that character would do this -- and it's up to you to understand, as their tech-support, that the real problem they are having is with pacing.
A character who would NEVER do this will do it if in a big HURRY.
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
Then retrain your instincts if you want to work for this editor. Otherwise find another editor.
Actually, that's not all the choices available. The true professional who has an editor whose rewrite orders violate their "instincts" doesn't throw away their own instincts - but rather just acquires a new set of instincts to broaden versatility and increase chances to hit in other markets.
Your instincts may be perfect for one genre, and mean failure in another. Do you have to spend your own life writing one genre under one byline? Or can you take this opportunity to learn what this editor knows - so later you can choose to use it, or not?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
Yes. It's simple. NEVER ARGUE. If the editor is WRONG (and they can be, especially if the MS is badly messed up) then fix what's really bothering the editor, not what they're complaining about.
It's for sure, SOMETHING is bothering the editor. Fix it so nothing bothers the editor. It's their job at stake - and yours too for that matter.
This is a point where sometimes you have to impose again on your beta-readers, or consult a fellow professional writer. But don't take up the editor's time.
When you figure out what the problem really was and fix it -- then never make that mistake again.
It isn't your job to do what the editor wants. It's your job to do what the editor needs. It isn't their job to know what they need, except that this MS has to work, and it has to work by deadline.
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
Yes, again simple. "Here attached is the completed MS. Thank you for catching all my mistakes."
How do I arrive at this insane conclusion?
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
The editor is your customer. The editor is always right even when they haven't a clue what they're talking about. Never argue with a customer. Figure out what they really need and give it to them without hassling them. Make them happy and they'll come back for more.
--------
So what exactly is editing?
It's the process of packaging a piece of art to fit into a delivery system with standard sized tubes that whisk the art to the consumer in a frictionless medium.
Think of a Christmas Giftwrap station in a department store. They have an array of standard sized boxes to put your odd-shaped gift object into.
That's what editors and publishers do for a living: put odd shaped art objects into standard sized boxes, wrap them up pretty and mail them off.
The most onerous part of an editor's job is dealing with writers who somehow think their art has anything to do with publishing.
Publishing is the business of mailing off those standardized boxes. What's inside the box is irrelevant to the business model as long as it fits inside the box. Think about the USPS advertisement "If it fits; it ships for one, low flat rate." That's the publishing business model to a T.
Learn to look at it that way, and you'll never have any problem deciding what to do in response to rewrite orders.
The rewrite orders are the editor's attempt to get you to make your product fit inside the box that their schedule says they must fill at a specific date. It mustn't stick out, and it mustn't rattle too much.
If there are a lot of rewrite orders on a single MS, it's because you did something very wrong. Fix it. Learn from the mistakes and never do them again.
It is a process and does take a few times through the system, often with a couple different editors and agents to get the hang of it.
But you'll learn faster if you can grasp this single fact.
What you're doing isn't what they're doing, and they don't care what you're doing as long as it doesn't get in their way.
It's not your job to convince the editor they don't know how to do their job (even if they don't).
It's your job to give the editor what they need to keep their job, and their job is to drop identical boxes into the tubes.
In Part VI on September 7, we'll look at this from another angle.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
I started this series on Editing actually in response to a question I got on Twitter, but I have forgotten who originally asked.
There was an exchange with a professional writer who had a rewrite order and a deadline and was just going nuts over it, and some others who chimed in. Finally someone asked what were the most rewrites other writers had to do.
I mentioned that my first award winner was published as 5th draft, a record for me that I never equaled again. And I said something (in 140 characters or less) about how quickly other rewrites had gone for me -- even extensive rewrites. And then came the question about how I did that.
I intended to write answer that question - then lost the questioner.
Recently, I decided I had to write up the answer I had so far (this is Part V, and there could be more), and asked on twitter for Questions I could answer in How To Rewrite To Editorial Specification On Deadline.
In response, I got the following from @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
3)What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
----------
Now if you've read Parts I-IV of this little blog series, you may see where these questions lead you astray.
Look again at the questions. Think about the focus, the implicit subtext.
Remember that in solving any problem, phrasing the question correctly is at least 90% of the solution.
Remember all the word-problems you did in grammar school math? You have cherries, and apples and boats on a stream, and you have to make an algebra equation out of it all.
If you get the initial algebra expression wrong, you'll never get the correct answer.
Phrasing the question is most of the solution.
Are these questions phrased in such a way as to get the answer you need in order to look at an editor's rewrite orders (or what screenwriters call "Notes") and know immediately what to do to make your manuscript publishable or producible?
Do you see that I've already answered all those questions in the first 4 parts to this series?
No?
Do any of those questions take into account what an Editor's job is?
Do any of those questions focus on what the editor is trying to accomplish?
Do any of those questions address the real key issue to figuring out what to do with your story to make it "acceptable" to that editor?
No, they don't.
They look at the rewrite order, and at the story -- totally ignoring the Editor's PROBLEM.
Here's a glance at the problem the Editor knows this novel will face in the marketplace.
Again from twitter, a random selection of comments from a chat on publicity.
@BookMarketChat Another thing I think is true - get help. You may not see yourself, your work as clearly as a coach, publicist or honest friend. #bookmarket
--
@BookMarketChat Yea!RT @publishingcoach: Things change so quickly these days, and peoples memories are short. You'll lose some fans, gain others. #bookmarket
--
Two key take-aways: CHANGE and a perspective on yourSELF, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Keeping your eye on a changing market, and changing your behavior as that change happens is a major key to understanding the rewrite orders an editor is sending you -- even though you wrote exactly what the contract required!
Between the time you sign a contract or even seal the deal with a handshake via email -- things have changed in the editor's office!
When an editor (or producer) takes time to give you "Notes" or a rewrite order, direction, or marginal notations on a manuscript, the editor is asking you to finish doing your job, and to solve a problem the editor has, not a problem you have, and not the problem the editor had when you signed the contract.
The editor is not asking you to solve YOUR PROBLEM.
The editor (or producer) is asking you to solve THE EDITOR'S PROBLEM.
Worse, you have to solve the new problem IN TIME to get the product into the pipeline before things change again for the publicity department.
Consider that the way those questions that were sent to me are phrased focuses the attention on the writer's problem ignoring the entire issue of whether the editor has a problem and what that problem might actually be and how it's changed lately.
In those questions, the Editor and the Writer are talking past each other, not even at each other. Certainly there's no communicating going on.
These questions are by are professional writers who have done this work with professional editors. And look what they're asking.
Let's frame it all another way.
A) What exactly is this Editor asking me to do?
B) How do I figure out what the Editor really means by this note?
C) What should the finished product this Editor needs look like?
D) How do I figure out what part of my manuscript to change to get the effect this editor needs?
----------
A) You can tell what the editor is asking you to do by looking at other books in the line the editor is editing for. The editor is asking you to make yours "the same but different" - to conform to the better selling novels in the line.
What does it mean "conform?" It means to use the same structure, the same trope, that has sold well before, but be fresh, original and different in theme, twists, character quirks, details, background.
In editor-speak "conform" means be different.
B) To figure out what an editor "really means" you have to know this editor a little bit at least. But it's usually safe to start with the assumption that the editor is an editor not a writer.
The editor will spot and flag a section, character, element, or detail that isn't "on beat" -- a pacing flaw, a bit that's foreshadowed (set-up) but never happens (pay-off).
The editor checks the emotional-tension of scenes to see that they are placed in the correct order - that climaxes (you should excuse the expression) come in the right places.
Some publishing lines have actual page-number formulas for internal climaxes, a set number of pages for sex scenes, action scenes, etc. But most don't have that strict a formula. Still, every genre (even Literature) does have a structure that determines the BEATS.
Blake Snyder showed you, in the SAVE THE CAT! series, exactly how to reverse engineer products aimed at different audiences to determine the best selling beat structures. Good editors know the beat of their line. The others don't stay in the job long.
What the editor "really means" is that "this "beat" right here where I've made this marginal note or on page-this of the MS is "wrong"."
It isn't the editor's job to tell the writer HOW TO FIX IT. The editor isn't a writer. They often suggest what to change into what, but usually are just trying to express what's bothering them without actually, consciously analyzing what's bothering them.
It's like a computer user calling tech support and yelling "It Doesn't Work" and tech support asking for the error code number, and the user just yelling IT DOESN'T WORK!!! How should I know why???? And tech support says "Well what did you do before it did that?" And the user says "I don't know, that's your job."
The editor is the USER, and you are her TECH SUPPORT. It's up to you to figure out why it doesn't work and fix it. It's only up to her to tell you THAT it doesn't work, not why or how to fix it. Don't call her and ask.
So if you're going to tech-support your own manuscript, you have to know its "computer language" (the symbolism in which it speaks; it's theme) and you have to know how it works, and where the drop-down menus are where other choices can be made.
You have to know the BEATS, the genre, the conflict, and all the moving parts of the composition.
Then when the editor points and says "this doesn't work" -- you don't call the editor up and defend your ART, you figure out why it doesn't work for that editor's line, and that publisher's purpose.
The reason it doesn't work on page 152 probably lies on page 1 -- maybe page 5 -- of a 400 page manuscript.
The editor can't tell you where the problem IS, only where it became noticeable. If you put the manuscript together, you should be able to take it apart, fix page 5 and see how that changes page 152, and it'll satisfy the editor. The editor doesn't care how you fix it, or how you figure out the problem is actually on page 5. The editor only cares that it be fixed and that it work, on deadline.
C) What should the finished product this editor needs look like? Do your homework. Read other books, novels, stories, in that line. If you're in film, read Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series. In fact, if you're in text, read that book anyway. It's all there. It's in the beat. If you can see it in a film, you can see it in a novel!
D) How do you figure out where to make changes to get the effect an editor needs? Again. The editor may not know WHY there's a problem on page 152, or what to do to fix it. But it is the editor's job to know what overall effect the novels in a line (or a film from a production company) should be.
If the effect isn't almost right already, the editor wouldn't take the trouble to ask for rewrite. So the necessary change probably isn't nearly as drastic as the editor thinks! If there's a problem with the "effect" (happy ending, crushing low-point for hero in the middle, a "lighter" or "darker" mood) it's either a pacing problem with the BEAT SHEET structure, or it's just choice of vocabulary. Line editing to adjust where beats fall and/or vocabulary changes can fix a lot with "light" or "dark" mood. Sometimes it can be fixed by deleting a scene or character and putting the information conveyed by that scene or character into another component of the story.
Writing is "magic" to editors. It isn't their job to know how you produce emotional effects, but only to know whether you've done it or not.
So to fulfill a rewrite order on deadline and on schedule, you START by structuring the story with precision beats before you write.
In fact, since most of a writer's work is done subconsciously way before "having an idea" for a story -- the smooth, quick, professional rewrite order response actually starts before you have the idea.
If you know what you did, what you chose, how you chose it, and why, and you know the editor didn't "get" the effect you worked for, you have to make a choice.
Either the effect you worked for has to be deleted entirely, in all its parts. Or something else has to be deleted to make room, and the effect worked up into the foreground.
Now, given this approach -- listen carefully to the editor, understand that this rewrite order is an attempt to conform your product to her Imprint's line, understand that it isn't criticism and has nothing at all to do with your Art, and everything to do with marketing, getting good reviews, and starting buzz.
Doing a fast, smooth job on rewrite is all about listening to the editor, and that's just like listening to any other person. Stop listening to yourself and start listening to the other person.
Now let's go through those questions submitted and answer them:
First @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
First- listen. Look at the overall pattern of rewrite notes and find the connecting mechanism built into the story while writing it.
Understanding that the actual problem with the manuscript is very likely NOT at the point where the editor noticed it, find the actual problem and fix that. Often 15-20 scattered complaints sprinkled through a 400 page manuscript can be fixed with one or two tweaks.
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
To "enrich" a scene that's locked into a nice paced sequence of scenes you don't want to mess up, go for SUBTEXT.
Plant a foreshadowing or "set-up" long before the scene you want enriched. Tiny tweaks to the scene you want to enrich will then make it a super-huge pay-off to the previous setup. And be sure to end the scene with a set-up for a pay-off that'll come several scenes later, maybe at the end. When there's a difference between what the viewer knows and what the character knows, you get rich.
Make sure the reader learns something they have wanted to know for an excruciatingly long time in that scene but still knows they don't know everything - and it will be enriched.
3) What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How quickly and efficiently you can rewrite depends on how carefully you prepared TO REWRITE before you wrote.
It depends on how you kept your own notes and what is connected to what and what foreshadows what, and where the tension builds and where it's released.
Rewrite orders that aren't simple story-logic tweaks (he put his hat on twice without taking it off) are almost always related to adjusting pacing to fit the genre.
Understand how you paced it to begin with, and you'll know what you can delete now to tighten the pacing, and what to add to slow it down.
Editors don't always just tell you the problem is pacing. They may say it's uninteresting or complicated or abstract, or I don't like this character or I don't believe that character would do this -- and it's up to you to understand, as their tech-support, that the real problem they are having is with pacing.
A character who would NEVER do this will do it if in a big HURRY.
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
Then retrain your instincts if you want to work for this editor. Otherwise find another editor.
Actually, that's not all the choices available. The true professional who has an editor whose rewrite orders violate their "instincts" doesn't throw away their own instincts - but rather just acquires a new set of instincts to broaden versatility and increase chances to hit in other markets.
Your instincts may be perfect for one genre, and mean failure in another. Do you have to spend your own life writing one genre under one byline? Or can you take this opportunity to learn what this editor knows - so later you can choose to use it, or not?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
Yes. It's simple. NEVER ARGUE. If the editor is WRONG (and they can be, especially if the MS is badly messed up) then fix what's really bothering the editor, not what they're complaining about.
It's for sure, SOMETHING is bothering the editor. Fix it so nothing bothers the editor. It's their job at stake - and yours too for that matter.
This is a point where sometimes you have to impose again on your beta-readers, or consult a fellow professional writer. But don't take up the editor's time.
When you figure out what the problem really was and fix it -- then never make that mistake again.
It isn't your job to do what the editor wants. It's your job to do what the editor needs. It isn't their job to know what they need, except that this MS has to work, and it has to work by deadline.
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
Yes, again simple. "Here attached is the completed MS. Thank you for catching all my mistakes."
How do I arrive at this insane conclusion?
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
The editor is your customer. The editor is always right even when they haven't a clue what they're talking about. Never argue with a customer. Figure out what they really need and give it to them without hassling them. Make them happy and they'll come back for more.
--------
So what exactly is editing?
It's the process of packaging a piece of art to fit into a delivery system with standard sized tubes that whisk the art to the consumer in a frictionless medium.
Think of a Christmas Giftwrap station in a department store. They have an array of standard sized boxes to put your odd-shaped gift object into.
That's what editors and publishers do for a living: put odd shaped art objects into standard sized boxes, wrap them up pretty and mail them off.
The most onerous part of an editor's job is dealing with writers who somehow think their art has anything to do with publishing.
Publishing is the business of mailing off those standardized boxes. What's inside the box is irrelevant to the business model as long as it fits inside the box. Think about the USPS advertisement "If it fits; it ships for one, low flat rate." That's the publishing business model to a T.
Learn to look at it that way, and you'll never have any problem deciding what to do in response to rewrite orders.
The rewrite orders are the editor's attempt to get you to make your product fit inside the box that their schedule says they must fill at a specific date. It mustn't stick out, and it mustn't rattle too much.
If there are a lot of rewrite orders on a single MS, it's because you did something very wrong. Fix it. Learn from the mistakes and never do them again.
It is a process and does take a few times through the system, often with a couple different editors and agents to get the hang of it.
But you'll learn faster if you can grasp this single fact.
What you're doing isn't what they're doing, and they don't care what you're doing as long as it doesn't get in their way.
It's not your job to convince the editor they don't know how to do their job (even if they don't).
It's your job to give the editor what they need to keep their job, and their job is to drop identical boxes into the tubes.
In Part VI on September 7, we'll look at this from another angle.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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