R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace

SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.

Tag: writing

Ringo Starr, 1964.

Three Tools of Writing: Introduction

2 February, 2024 /
Ringo Starr, personal hero, 1964. Seen here with Paul's grandfather. He's a very clean old man, inn'e?

REPORTER: “Are you a mod or a rocker?”

RINGO: “Er, no, I’m a mocker.”

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

A shower or a teller?

First-person or third-?

Are you a Shaker, a Quaker, a candlestick-maker?

The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?

Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!

Except…

I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.

QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?

ROSCOE: I’m all three.

Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.

I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:

  1. Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
  2. Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
  3. Card’s MICE Quotient

I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.

Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.

Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.

(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)

Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.

Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.

Because each could be the right tool for the given job.

Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.

Heinlein’s Rules #6: Write a Better Story Tomorrow

30 April, 2015 /

Think of this as “Mathieu’s errata to Heinlein’s rules.”

With a couple of exceptions, I hate looking over my old work. The patch-job of an exposition, the research errors, the way society has changed since the story was written…they all make me cringe.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

Because it means I got better in the meantime.

I’m the sort of man who’s only happy in motion. As long as I did better today than yesterday, and will do better tomorrow than today, I’m satisfied. If I’m stuck or idle, it doesn’t matter how much I’m making or how secure I am, I hate life.

Heinlein’s five Rules only apply to the life-cycle of one story, but any cartoonist will tell you that what happens between the panels is as important than what happens inside them. It is absolutely vital that you learn and grow as a writer and a human being from story to story.

This is where Jack London, as much as I admire the man, fell down. From White Fang forward he wrote the same few stories about the Arctic, manly men, seafaring life, boxing, Glen Ellen, Socialism, and the inherent superiority of the white man*. Robert Heinlein, on the other hand, is exemplary in this – yes, Heinlein always writes himself into his books, but it’s never the same man twice.

What do I mean by ‘learning and growing as a writer’? For one, new techniques. I used to be absolutely terrible at writing action sequences and sex scenes. But I learned how to block out the movements of my characters during action sequences, so I knew where and how fast everyone was going. And I learned to focus on the single emotional theme for each sex scene, so they don’t descend into passionless IKEA erotica. I still have issues with exposition…but I’m getting better. Because I’m studying how other writers have handled it (both well and badly) and trying new approaches. Fan-fiction and short stories are wonderful for this kind of thing.

I also mean stretching your limits – I wrote No Time partly because I’d never written a mystery before. Now, when I want to work in some of the things I learned writing a mystery (such as how to conceal or withhold information from the reader) into a romance or a fantasy piece, I have those tools. This is part of why I do write in so many genres – that, and because it’s fun.

I also mean writing characters and situations you find troublesome. I applaud Eliazar Yudkowsky for “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” insofar as he tried to write Voldemort as reasonable…from Voldemort’s point of view. Voldemort’s criticism of liberal philosophy and democracy as a whole is extremely troubling, partly because it sounds like he’s making legitimate points. That required Yudkowsky to climb inside the head of an avowed authoritarian – no easy task for someone who grew up in a liberal democratic republic!

My addendum to Heinlein’s rules is very simple. Rule #6 is “write a better story today than you did yesterday.”

Keep that up, and not only will your fiction get better with time…you’ll get happier.

Now go and lay down a couple thousand words. I want to see your story on my desk by Monday. 😀

—

*with some exceptions like The Iron Heel, People of the Abyss, Star Rover, The Sea-Wolf, John Barleycorn and Martin Eden. The point still stands.

Heinlein’s Rules #5: Keep It in the Mail Until it Sells

23 April, 2015 /

Remember last week when I talked about the 98% rejection rate?

Yeah, get used to that.

Frank Herbert famously tried to get his weird desert-planet novel published at every publishing house that then existed. He started with the usual science fiction publishers, like Ace, and moved up to other publishers, like Random House, after each genre publisher turned him down. Even conventional publishers didn’t want anything to do with it and its freaky mysticism and drugs and sex and ecology crap. Finally, he sent the manuscript to Chilton, whom you may know better for printing automotive manuals.

Chilton decided to go with it, which is how we got Dune.

PICTURED: Not an automotive manual.

PICTURED: Not an automotive manual.

“The Remedy,” as I mentioned, was rejected by Asimov’s (and two other markets) before I submitted it to the Ray Bradbury Contest and won  third. “Gods of War” garnered six rejections before it won awards and got on MindFlights. I have others with even higher rejection counts. Some are still counting.

Blood on the Floor is an anthology entirely about how writers deal with rejection. Because we deal with it a lot. How you respond to it tells you what kind of writer you are.

I’ve gotten to a place in my career where I enjoy each rejection. They delight me. Because it means I’m one step closer to finding the right market for that story, whether it’s the Amazon list or someone’s anthology project or some professional editor’s hands. It means I can move forward with that story, and moving forward is the important thing.

This rule is both a psychology and an action. You have to get comfortable with the story coming back to you in the mail, and dusting it off and sending it right back out again. Paper your bathroom with the rejection slips. Burn them. Some of the editors will burn you (I have one response for my Asian gothic “White Man’s Burden” that turns the screen brown when I read it).

Whatever you gotta do to deal with it, and to keep on going, do that thing. Because each rejection gets you closer to that story’s first sale.

When it does…celebrate. Have a cup of jasmine tea. Somebody just paid you money for something you wrote. Nothing, nothing, comes close to that feeling – the firm and certain knowledge that someone else values your work.

Then, work on secondary sales. Once the check from the first sale clears, send it off to Escape Pod/Pseudo-Pod/PodCastle (as appropriate) and let them pay you again for the audio rights. Send the story to foreign markets (I like SF World out of Chengdu, China, but Iran has a surprisingly vibrant SF community too). Keep an eye open for reprint-friendly anthologies and contests, and send the story there. Put it up for sale yourself, if you haven’t already. I’ve made more money from “The Remedy” and “Gods of War” and “The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin” from self-published sales than I did on the initial sales (if any).

Before you do any of that, read the agreement with your first market carefully. Most of them want exclusive first-print English language rights in their appropriate markets followed by non-exclusive rights after one year. What that means is they want the right to publish the only copy of your story, in English, for one year after the publication date. Online markets tend to say “online” or “worldwide,” traditional magazines tend to limit it to one country (“American first-print rights”) or continent (“European first-print rights”). Each market will have its own way of handling the rights, double-check you’re not double-crossing them.

Make that story work. And if it has to go out again and again, that’s what it has to do.

And then write your next story…you still have to lay down your day’s workdcount, remember. But, most importantly…

Heinlein’s Rules #4 – Put It In the Mail

16 April, 2015 /

In Bob Heinlein’s day, this was very literal. You would make a copy of the story and put it in a manila envelope with a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope for the response and you would mail it with a cover letter to some editor or other at that magazine you read.

This system sucked like a black hole with a grudge. Entire fucking galaxies could form from cosmic background matter in the time it took them to respond, assuming you got a response at all.

The rule still holds, though – put it on the market.

I formed a publishing house and publish a lot of my own work, but not all of it. I design a cover, format the thing, and put it up on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo and the Nook. This makes it available to buy, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s “in the mail.”

I don’t self-publish everything, though. Why not?

Partly it’s a latent need for validation – any writer who wants to see their work in print will know what I mean. Self-publishing brings in a little money, and sometimes fame, but being published by someone else makes you feel like a Real Writer. It’s a sign that your peers, the experts, the writers and editors, consider your work worthy. I’m not going to deny that’s part of it.

Partly it’s a matter of how you get paid – with a self-published story, it’s a few dollars here and there…for the next forty years. Send the same story to an SFWA-accredited market, and you’ll get a fat check to the order of five cents for every word. For a 5000-word short story, that’s a $250 check you can then use to pay your electricity bill. As Stephen King said, “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

For me, mostly, it’s about exposure. Dean Wesley Smith summarized it basically like this: “You can pay Asimov’s $250 for half a page to advertise your book, or you can send them a story that’s ten pages of advertising that they pay you for. It’s your call.”

Which is why it can sometimes take a year or so for stories I write (like “Hull Down” and “No More Final Frontiers”) to show up on my self-published lists, and why you’ll see my name pop up in the likes of anthologies like Blood on the Floor and I, Automaton. Because I still have to submit them to this market, then that market, then the other…

It still takes time. Except now I can cover six markets (including the occasional contest or anthology) in about nine months, instead of twenty-nine. And if it hits every editor on a bad day (and remember that most professional-paying markets have rejection rates somewhere around 98%) I can put it up for sale and let you people decide whether it’s good or not.

Sending a short story to markets is selling to experts. Putting it for sale on Amazon is selling it to everyone. Both are ways of selling, both can make you money, both can break your heart. They’re two roads to the same place.

As long as you keep it up.

Heinlein’s Rules #2: Finish What You Start.

3 April, 2015 /

Last night, I put down the last few words on No Time for the Killing Floor, the sequel to last year’s No Time. I should, by all rights, have finished it back on November 30. It’s fifteen thousand words short and has issues with irregular subplots, underwritten characters, and big steaming piles of infodump.

Doesn’t matter!

Finished the draft!

I’ve got two more unfinished projects (an Ian Brown story I owe Lachlan Atcliffe and a sea-tale of the future entitled “Fire Marengo”), and they’re next on the block. The drafts will be finished.

Because you really can’t figure out what you’re doing, writing-wise, until you finish. Once you have that first draft done, you can see how it all fits (or doesn’t fit) together. Entire scenes, characters, or subplots may need to be eliminated or changed. The bit you tossed in way back in Act I may suddenly make perfect sense in Act III (I call this a Blue Sun*). You really can’t know until you type in the two magic words -THE END-.

Those two words are the most important words. You cannot start editing until you write them.

I’ve seen more books killed from trying to edit and lay down new wordcount at the same time than from any other cause. You cannot edit a story or a book that isn’t there yet. As you write on, you may have to change some of the things you already wrote (when you realize, for instance, that the plot in Act II works so much better if the protagonist drives a truck instead of a Prius like you said in Act I). Good. Fine. Mark them. I use brackets [] and [tk] and what I call “the scaffolding”:

[Alison should be more important in this scene – she comes up later. Merge Charmian into her.]

That’s fine. But unless you are compelled by something you are currently adding to the story to change something already there, do not edit. You will finish your first draft and you will be so goddamn pleased.

The other thing is that, especially on long projects, you will feel dejection and even hatred. I was wallowed down in literally the last two or three scenes of No Time for the Killing Floor for three months and there were weeks where it was a long, hard slog to get a dozen words down.

For some problems, such as what Jim Butcher calls the Great Swampy Middle, there are methods of working around or through it. This is where reading the likes of King’s On Writing and Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones help – these writers explain how they get around these problems. This is also where reading great works will help you. Every time I have trouble with a crowd scene, I go back and reread the dinner scene from Dune, because Herbert absolutely masters how to have a dozen people talking and still tell a single story. I turn to Jack London for muscular prose, Bradbury for lyricism, Hugo for passion (and how to do interesting digressions), LeGuin for a very Taoist implication-without-saying-so, and Heinlein for exposition.

Sometimes, though, you just have to shoulder through it. Get to the end of the scene, the chapter, the book. I’ll sometimes skip to the next scene (which I’m usually eagerly anticipating) and then go back and take out the scaffolding and write connective tissue. Don’t make these leaps too far, though, or you’ll never be able to make the connection – just a scene or two down the line. Other times I’ll take it in a different direction than planned, or write several versions of the scene and label the alternatives as fanfic and “DVD bonus material.” Just get to the end…it’s the only way you can learn.

This also ties into my additional rule to Admiral Heinlein’s five…but that’s another day…

For now, remember this:

  1. Write.
  2. Finish what you start.

—

*In the commentary to Firefly, Joss Whedon noted that he dropped in the Blue Sun corporation in the first episode (specifically, written on the side of a packing crate) “just in case I wanted to do something with it later.” I realized here this was basically how Whedon makes it seem like he’s had it all planned out – he has these elements that he tosses in early, trusting  he’ll find a use for them later. Sometimes I get an impulse to throw in a telling detail, like the urchin children who dive the lost city of New Orleans for treasures, and later on I come back to it. “Oh, that’s what that was for!”

Heinlein’s Rules of Writing: Introduction

19 March, 2015 /

This is a story of how to succeed as a writer.

I started writing when I could form coherent words on a typewriter. Ensconced in some damp box in a decrepit trailer on my mother’s property is a one-page detective story I ripped off from Gonzo on Muppet Babies* – the earliest story I can remember writing, on Mother’s Selectric.

My writing career, in terms of getting things out, starts in 1998 – when I first sent “The Remedy” out to Asimov’s Science Fiction. They rejected it, but a year later the Ray Bradbury Contest gave it third place and published it in the annual anthology. Waukegan Library sent me a copy of Yestermorrow signed by Bradbury himself, something I still deeply treasure. That same year, I published my first ‘zine, Rocket Takeoff, starting my love-hate relationship with the publishing world.

In those days, you mailed yourself a copy of the story through the mail for a poor man’s copyright, and mailed another copy to the magazine so you could wait six months or a year for your rejection. Asimov’s was so notoriously behind the times that in 1998 the guidelines included the words “please remove the sides of the paper before submission,” a phrase I struggled with until I remembered the old dot-matrix printers that I hadn’t seen since ’93. You published anything by either coding an HTML website from scratch or by running copies off at Staples and then staying up all night stapling them together.

The market for SF short fiction was tiny then, because the explosion of online and otherwise Internet-enabled new markets, like Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, or anthologies like Blood on the Floor, had yet to happen. By 2001, I had a list of six markets that paid money, which I’d pulled together from checking the Barnes & Noble racks and copying out of the library’s Writer’s Digest.

Six. Total.

Submitting a story to those six markets and collecting rejections would have taken three and a half years, according to the nascent response-time information available at websites like Writer’s Black Hole. I don’t have records from that time any more, so I can’t tell you if I actually shipped one story to all six or not. I did write “Gods of War” and got Honorable Mention in the Cuesta Literary Contest. I flew off to China for a year, and came back.

There were more markets and more opportunities and more information. Duotrope’s Digest had started up, aggregating response-time, payment, and guideline information, and keeping track of which markets were still able to pay. I sold “Gods of War” to MindFlights.com**, sold a few other pieces, and kept on writing. But it was always starting, never finishing (a bit like everything else in my life during the three years wandering in the wilderness). After “Gods of War,” nothing seemed to sell, and “Gods” was just sitting there useless on my hard drive, spent.

I went back to China to finish my degree, and made the acquaintance of Paul Skelding. He was big on new publishing – Amanda Palmer and “the death of traditional publishers” were always on his lips. He introduced me to Smashwords and the concept of selling e-books. He and I concocted an online magazine together that spectacularly failed to sell, before he got married and was transferred north to Beijing.

I despaired, at that point. I’d dropped an old story from 2007 or thereabouts into One Weird Idea, one that had failed to sell, because I had literally not finished anything since. I was exiled from China and spent six weeks meandering around Hong Kong, living out of a matchbox in the Chungking Mansions and alternating between drifting up and down the Kowloon shore and sipping cheap spice coffee in the internet café/hat shop on the first floor. I admitted that One Weird Idea was a failure, and looked at my career to that point. I felt that if SF/F wasn’t spent, I at least was. I plinked at a few stories, both in America and once I’d fast-talked my way back into China, but the spirit was gone.

In December of 2012, when the world failed to end, I discovered Dean Wesley Smith. Specifically, I discovered The New World of Publishing and Think Like a Publisher. Dean doesn’t peddle get-famous-quick or false-hope stories. He praises Amanda Hocking’s grit and her good luck, but doesn’t consider her a pattern to replicate. He laid out the numbers and showed a way to make a living as a writer. Not get rich quick – make a living.

I was inspired. The various starts I had going all the way back to 2008 started getting finished, things like “Home for the Holidays” and “The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin” and “Simplified”. I checked the anthology lists, and cranked out pieces like “Bartleby the Clerk” and “Wives are Waiting by the Bank or…” and “The Diction-fairy” for them. I revived the moribund company structure I’d started on my last visit home, dusted it off and made it my publishing house. I put up stories on Smashwords and Amazon, I worked on the blog, I put together a business plan and marketing. I finished my first proper novel, No Time, for 2013’s National Novel Writing Month.

Lachlan Atcliffe commented, at the time, “whatever or whoever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

Most importantly, I sat down to write and I kept writing. Dean Wesley Smith incorporated workflow analysis and production goals. Jack London called it his stint and took to it with the same grim determination he used to haul line or shovel coal. But Robert Heinlein formulated probably the most perfect, crystalline version of the process. These are Heinlein’s rules:

  1. Write.
  2. Finish what you start.
  3. Do not rewrite except on an editor’s orders.
  4. Put the story in the mail.
  5. Keep it in the mail until it sells.

It was true for Jack London and Bob Heinlein, it was true for Dean Wesley Smith, it’s true for me and it’s true for you. In traditional blogging style, I’ll be treating all five of these individually over the next few weeks…and presumptuously adding one of my own. But, really, if you sit quietly with Heinlein’s rules and live by them, you, too, will succeed as a writer. It’s not easy. Nobody said it was easy. But it is that simple.

—

* To be fair, I also ripped off Tiny Toons: How I Spent my Summer Vacation for some bits.

** Yeah, I sold an overtly Buddhist short story to a Christian lit magazine. I was as confused as you are.

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