It's Okay to be Formulaic

Merry New Year!

I want you to read this article by Kameron Hurley. I want you to read it especially if you are at a point in your journey where your ideas, focus, and creative skills have gained more precision but it feels like you're starting each new piece with a hammer and chisel and you don't know why. If you are more confident about what you can do as a writer, but you are not as consistent and productive as you would like to be from one piece to the next, I want you to read this article.

Spoilers: you're not necessarily doing it wrong. You just need more practice doing it right.

I know you know that. I knew I knew that, until I read the article:

I’ve started a lot more books and stories than I’ve finished, and this is a problem. Why? Surely, when a concept or story isn’t working, you should stop while you’re ahead, right?

"Right!" I say. Not exactly, she says:

The thing folks don’t realize is that learning how to write a piece of work requires you to actively practice how to write the whole thing. Writing five hundred great beginnings will not make you a great novelist.

I knew I knew that. "Tell me something I don't know." She did. A bunch of things. Mainly, I did not know it was okay to be a little formulaic.

It is okay to be a little formulaic.

There is a lot of pressure in literature to be original and fresh, and in the speculative fiction genre that can get to be as arduous as reinventing that wheel. Especially for a short fiction writer in today's market. Even just looking through your own body of work you can feel like you need to do something drastically different each and every time to stay relevant. If you're constantly thinking about what you could be doing differently, you're not really thinking about, much less nailing down, what you did right the last time.

Hurley calls it understanding the form. I understand it as having a formula. Go ahead and read the article. You'll see what I mean, when she talks about her work in corporate writing, how many novels she had to write before her first sold, and how many she wrote after the first that were very similar to the first, until she had that formula down pat and and was ready to move on to a new one.

It is okay to be a little formulaic.

When you have a formula that works,  it is not always necessary to change it up drastically or abandon it straight away, even when you aren't doing anything wrong, and especially before you've had a chance to understand what you did well, how, and why. Got a new idea for a story? Go back and see if you're trying to accomplish something you've done before, see if the circumstances and events map, and if they do, use all your previous hard work to your advantage. You can plug in new values for every factor and variable--characters, world, goal, conflict--and execute it again, over and over, until your results are as reliable and consistent as your creativty demands.

I'm not just talking in broad strokes of beginning-middle-end, goal-conflict-disaster, a fantasy story, a novella, a Heinleinian story. I'm talking fine grain stuff you won't see by emulating someone else's formula. I'm talking about your own recipe for success. I'm talking about knowing why you made the creative decisions you did, what you cut or kept and how that worked or didn't, story elements you'd like to replicate and others you'd like to avoid. What happens when you pull it all together with just the right details in just the right way. It's not magic. It's a formula, and it is okay use it more than once. That is how you practice doing it right.

If you only do it twice, I can attest the process becomes familiar, becomes easier, becomes more efficient and effective. The very last piece I wrote in 2014 was to test Hurley's article. Having a formula to work from was the difference between knowing what I was doing and doing what I knew. I wrote faster and smarter and with more confidence that I would not only finish in a timely manner but I would end up with the story I wanted.

That is how you practice doing it right, over and over, until it seems like you can produce a certain kind of story effortlessly. It really is okay to be formulaic. From what I've seen, the majority of the stories on the market are just that, and to great success, including many by our favorite authors. I knew I knew that. Hurley's article crystallized it.

SIROTI: The Week in Review

A lot of my reading on stuff about writing stems from conversations on CritiqueCircle.com. Did I mention CritiqueCircle.com is a great place to chat with a variety of writers, as well as give and receive feedback on WIPs? CritiqueCircle.com.

• The Business Rusch: Perfection

So, this week on writing, it started with Perfection, at Kristine Rusch’s website. While I thought the article was overly-long and meandering at times, there is, apparently, something for everyone to take away.  My take away? “Give yourself some credit, cut yourself some slack, and write on to the next adventure.”

Her main focus gets a little lost in the text, IMO, but it is about critics and reviewers and how one shouldn’t keep revising to appease every concern raised in pursuit of a ‘perfect’ novel. There’s no such thing. This, I find, can be applied to the inner editor, as well. Hence, my takeaway.

• Your E-Book Is Reading You (Wall Street Journal)

Speaking of the pursuit of the perfect novel, e-books can and do collect more data on how e-reader owners read books. This is useful to publishers. I can only imagine it is useful because it might help them make more money, in as much as it helps their authors know what readers’ sweet-spots are and what buttons to push.

Is it useful to writers at-large? For the ones not backed by big houses, I doubt it. Trying to write towards a trend is like trying to hit a moving target. It’s almost impossible considering how long it takes to write a novel and how fast trends come and go nowadays.

As for me, well, I think there’s a good story in there somewhere.

• http://ssnroyal.blog.com/2012/07/01/gina-fairchild-fellow-author/

Oh, and I’ve been interviewed! :)


Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0

SIROTI: The Week in Review

I read a lot of stuff on the internet. It cuts into my writing time. That's my excuse for not updating this blog more often, and I'm sticking to it.

So, what Stuff have I Read On The Internet this past week?

Journey to Planet JoCo series. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, but there I discovered two things I had never heard of before: Jonathan Coulton and sci-fi songwriter. Each interview in the series is short and mostly humorous. You can read or listen to them. I read the interviews looking for any tidbits on how Coulton approaches storytelling in his medium, and I came away thinking simplicity and honesty is key. There’s not a lot of room in a song to be verbose and expositional, so the simplest tales told as candidly as possible make his songs relatable and enjoyable, and quite emotional, at times. Listening to his music (among which are the hit songs to the Portal games) are an added bonus.

Is SF Still The Genre of Big Ideas? Seven notable speculative fiction aficionados, including Daniel Abraham and Alistair Reynolds, answered the question, offering great insights into how they viewed the genre itself, where it’s been, and where it’s going. I left my thoughts in the comments section there, the gist of which is: the question is a tad presumptuous.

Shame by Pam Noles. If you ever wondered why race matters in a work of fiction, this moving essay might just give you some profound answers and a new perspective.

The Most Comma Mistakes. Because you can never read too many explanations of the rules for commas. The one that got me was the Identification Crisis comma.

The Art of Fiction, Dorothy Parker. Witty and frank.


What have you been reading lately?


Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0

Stuff I Read On the Internet: Instagram

Yesterday, I saw a news item about this thing called Instagram. Had no idea what it did, but JOY TO THE WORLD! IT’S GOING TO BE ON ANDROID, SOON!!

What is it, again? Off to Wired.com I go, to read Clive Thompson on the Instagram Effect.

Apparently it’s an app that applies filters to your photos and allows you to instantly share them on the go. Okay, so…what’s new about applying filters and sharing photos?

The article implied this little app is opening people’s eyes to the beauty around them, helping them look at things artistically through their multitude of photo filters. More still life masterpieces, less grainy camera mugging. Hence, the Instagram effect.

I found this to be the passage to ponder [emphasis mine]:

In old analog cameras, many such filter “effects” were a chemical byproduct of the film, so photographers became expert at understanding the unique powers of each. Fujifilm’s Velvia film, with its high saturation and strong contrast, attracts photographers looking to capture the vibrancy of nature, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom notes.

But casual photographers rarely developed this type of eye, because they just wanted to point and shoot. What Instagram is doing—along with the myriad other photo apps that have recently emerged—is giving newbies a way to develop deeper visual literacy.

Is it, really? The author may be able to articulate what made the Velvia film special but do Instagramers know how their boring photo suddenly became artistic? I can see on Wikipedia the aptly named ‘1977’ filter for Instagram applies an old 70’s effect but why does it look that way? Was it the contrast? Brightness? Hue? Saturation? Are casual users of Instagram familiar with those terms and what they mean?

I wonder. Of course, anything meant for mass consumption must use terminology and a medium understood by the masses, not just a select group of professionals. That’s why software like Photoshop is a success with people who may not be visually artistic or technologically savvy.

But the further we travel on this road from real-world to digital photo manipulation, I think, the literacy Thompson speaks of gets lost in translation. Bits of knowledge fall by the wayside. “High saturation and strong contrast” = the colors pop.

Curiously, one of the comments on the article crystallized, in my mind, why Instagram exists. The commenter recommended an alternative photo app which allows the user to edit the filters—curves, channels, brightness, contrast, etc. It occurred to me: Does anyone care about curves? I tinker in Photoshop and generally don’t mess with anything more compilcated than sliders, checkboxes, and number inputs (and, yep, filters.) Who cares about channels? I just want to snap a photo, un-crapify it, and show it off to all my friends, family, and followers.

Instagram, like some of the more popular apps, is not for tinkerers. It is for consumers to consume. A lot. Rapidly. You can’t do that puttering around forever in settings or code. Am I lamenting the death of ‘real’ photography? Why, no. I’ve never had much interest in photography and only started taking lots of random shots when I first got a camera phone. (So, Thompson is right on that score, for people like me.)

What I am doing, as I often do when an article like this gets me pondering, is making note. I’m making note of trends like this, which make good fodder for science-fiction stories. *squirrels it away in Ideas folder to germinate*

Do read the whole article. It's well-written, not very long, and the author provides a distinct and interesting point of view on this trend.

What's your POV? Where do you think this trend in digital photography is going? Or is it going nowhere fast?

Photo credit: "Ricoh Hi-Color 35 (Original)" by Steve Keys, available under CC BY 2.0

Finding Your Angle

Over at the Publication Coach website, Daphne Gray-Grant has some interesting advice for writers of all stripes. Like most Writing Advice, some of hers resonated and others didn’t. One such article that stuck: How to Find an Angle.

When I translated to fiction writing what she had to say about the difference between an angle and a topic, and why simply writing about a topic at face value will produce dull work, it all sounded so familiar. The vast majority of the stories that remain in my Never-To-See-The-Light-Of-Day trunk are all Idea Stories, stories about a topic with no angle, an idea with nothing to say. Pretty much all of my science-fiction stories had started with a Big Idea—or a What If—but the successful ones like Don’t Read the Books found an angle.

I can go through story after story of mine, and the same will be true for why each one rose above dross or remained just a good idea that went nowhere. Oftentimes, that defining angle will come from a character, and how the topic shapes their life and the world they live in. DRB went from being an idea about the extinction of physical books, to the story of a woman who lived through the change, what she lost, and what she gains.

While Gray-Grant’s process for finding an angle didn’t click as much as the idea of having one, the article helped to elucidate the importance of each story having something to say. I recommend How to Find an Angle. It’s short and sweet, and she gives good examples and clear explanations that just might be for you.