wetranscripts | Entries tagged with audience

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/29/15-48-deliberate-discomfort-part-two/

Key Points: Have you been uncomfortable writing something? Writing about my own bad mental health issues. Writing about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. Trying to write live in front of an audience. Having someone reading over my shoulder while I'm writing. An explicit lead in to a fade-to-black scene. How do you do it? Remind yourself that your audience doesn't have the same experience. Read and analyze how some other author does it. Some lines I'm not likely to cross, but others... The most uncomfortable scene for me to write was a spanking, a disempowerment of an antagonist. How do you decide to include something that makes you uncomfortable? Basically, if I think the book needs it, try it. Then look and see if it works. Think of an actor, inhabit the character and write from their perspective. I have two lines, one for things I don't do, but it's not wrong for my characters to do, and another for things that I probably won't depict in detail.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 48.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deliberate Discomfort Two, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] Fifteen minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] Awesome. We are recording this live. When this airs, you will be able to go and look up a YouTube video and watch us do this. But right now, we're very excited to be talking about deliberate discomfort. We didn't episode on this topic earlier in the year that focused on writing things that are uncomfortable for your readers. Topics like sexism or racism or things like that that you know could be triggering issues for your readers and how to handle that appropriately. This episode, we're going to focus on writing things that are uncomfortable for you as an author. Maybe that is a sex scene, or maybe you got a character who swears a lot, something that you're worried your mom is going to read or that a character does or thinks something that you would never say, but your character does. All of those kind of questions. So what I would love to start with is actually just asking our podcasters if they have some experience they want to share where they had to write something that kind of made them uncomfortable to write it.

[Howard] The best example I can offer for me is the piece that I wrote for the… I've forgotten the title of it, the Robison Wells benefit anthology.

[Dan] Altered Perceptions?

[Howard] Altered Perceptions, called No, I'm Fine, in which I was writing about a bad mental health episode that I had. As I began writing, it began to hurt. I mean, it was actually physically painful. The sensation that I sometimes get when I'm depressed is that I'm so sad that I'm feeling pain. There's a physical pain associated with it. As I was writing, I was excited to sit down and write, because the story was in my head and I was good to go. But putting the words on the page was painful. Sandra and the kids, we were taking a little spring break at a cabin, and they had gone to see… They'd gone out to see the sights or something. They came back and Sandra took one look at me and was like, "What happened to you?" I said, "Well, I wrote for two hours and this piece is done and it's beautiful and please don't ask me to ever write this again because it hurts so much to do." After having done it, pretty much all of the other things I'm afraid to write about because they make me uncomfortable, I sort of shrug off and I'm like, "Eh. When the time comes I need to do 'em, I'll do 'em because I've already eaten the live spider today. Everything else is easy."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, to be clear for people who aren't familiar with that other anthology, this is kind of a first-person perspective on your own mental health issues and not wanting to have to rely on medication for them.

[Howard] Yup.

[Dan] Which was very painful to write.

[Howard] I can link to it in the writer notes. It's free for people to read now.

[Dan] Awesome. Brandon or Mahtab, have you got an experience of writing something that was uncomfortable or painful to write?

[Mahtab] Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. A few years ago, a friend, a writer friend, had asked me to contribute to an anthology. This is the only nonfiction piece that I've ever written. But it was about stories about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. I was like, "Yes, sure, no problem. I'll write it." But as I actually started writing it, I just found myself being so uncomfortable because there were so many painful things about fitting into Canada, not knowing the people, of course luckily language is not an issue. But just… Some of the stupid things that I did. I just remember that I really had to dig deep to be able to write my experience of how I spent the first year out here, not knowing people, working a job for a very long time and then… It was actually cathartic when I finally finished writing it, but I found myself cringing, very, very uncomfortable. But I think the main thing is I pushed through it, and it was one of the best things that I wrote.

[Dan] Oh, that's awesome.

[Brandon] For me, it's a little bit different of an experience I want to share. What I… Probably the most uncomfortable I've ever been when writing was when I tried to do it live in front of an audience. This was at Jordan Con. They… We were going to run a charity drive for Worldbuilders. Pat Rothfuss was the guest of honor at Jordan Con that year and I thought we'll just do a kind of live writing session where I brainstorm with a crowd and start writing a story and we did it on Twitch. Then, Pat would stop by and answer some questions, and I thought this would actually be easy for me for two reasons. One, in my class, we often do live brainstorming sessions where we come up with a story. So I thought I've done this before. Number two, I'm not very precious about my early draft. I released Warbreaker, one of my novels, chapter by chapter as I wrote it. It doesn't really bother me for people to read unpolished work of mine. So I thought these two things would combine together. I found it enormously uncomfortable to be writing… For whatever reason, it was the idea that there were now several thousand eyes looking over my shoulder at everything I did. Even when I present an unfinished draft to people, it's at least something that I'm aware of what it is, right? I'm comfortable with it and I say release this. As I'm writing, I'm not sure what's going to come out. I'm not sure how things are going to flow, how the words are going to look. It was really, really uncomfortable. To the point that I've never done another one again. Despite raising $1000 for Worldbuilders, I think, during that session, which was pretty good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It shocked me by how uncomfortable I was.

[Dan] That makes a lot of sense to me. That is, for me, one of the most violating feelings in the world is knowing that somebody's reading over my shoulder as I am writing. If my wife comes into the office, or one of my kids comes in, I have to stop, because I can't write while someone's looking at it. It feels so wrong. I don't know how to explain it. Some of my own experiences… The one that I wanted to point out was my most recent novel, Ghost Station, which is a Cold War spy novel on Audible. There is a… Not a sex scene, but definitely a fade-to-black, these people are about to have sex, kind of scene. Which I've never written before. Even as lightweight and as preliminary as it was, it took a lot for me to put that in there. The explicit this is what's about to happen, we all know it, that's put this in this book. Maybe it's because I come from a primarily YA background, maybe it's because I am a very religious person, I don't know what it was, but it was hard for me to write that. It's interesting to me that it was harder for me to write that then to write all of the grisly murder stuff that's in my horror novels. But there are certain lines that are harder to cross then others. I think that's very individual.

[Dan] So, as you were working on these, as you had to write these uncomfortable things we've been talking about, what did you do? How did you psych yourself up? Or what did you tell yourself that says, "It's okay, I can do this?"

[Brandon] One thing, for me, while I was working on this thing, like, as it became uncomfortable, I had to keep telling myself, no one else thinks that this is awkward. Right? Like, no one is pointing and saying, "Oh, you typed that word wrong, how can you possibly…" All of these things that were going through my head, they weren't true. Despite them being valid emotions, I could counter them with a little bit of logic and saying, "Look, people are enjoying this. This is what they expected when they showed up. Yes, it's uncomfortable for me, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad experience."

[Mahtab] Yeah. For me, I don't think I've still managed to write… I mean, though I write mostly middle grade, I did attempt a YA a few years ago in which I did want to write some sex scenes, but it was so badly written and it… I mean, I'm lucky… I'm so glad that the book is not sold yet. But it was hard. So I started reading other books to see how well they did it. I love the way Diana Gabaldon writes her Outlander series. It comes so naturally, her… I mean, her sex scenes are fantastic. I was like… That's… I'm not cringing reading that because it's so well-written, and it's… It just sounds so natural. All I can say is I have still not discovered exactly how to do that because a great part of my culture is such that we did not have open discussions about this. We don't have talks about sex or body or feelings and stuff like that. So it's really hard as a writer to make myself do that. So, I'm still struggling with it, and maybe at some point in time, I might pull out my YA book again and see if I've become braver. But, at the moment, I'm so glad that I'm in the MG world and I don't have to cross that line.

[Dan] I want to ask Brandon, speaking of sex scenes, I remember when you were kind of given the reins of the Wheel of Time, there was a lot of discussion about this online. Because the Robert Jordan books did have… I mean, not like erotica, but there were sexual situations which up to that point readers did not think that you could write that kind of stuff. Outside of maybe one scene in the Mistborn series, you hadn't really written that kind of stuff. So, how did… What did you do to kind of get into that, to ease yourself over that obstacle?

[Brandon] Honestly, it wasn't hard for me. I have a certain threshold that I just personally am not likely to cross. Perhaps that will change. Wheel of Time had never crossed that, reading it, for me. Right? Wheel of Time does mostly fade to black. With some… A little bit of explicit things before. Actually, way more uncomfortable for me… I'd say the most uncomfortable scene for me to write in the Wheel of Time was a different one, which is… There is a scene where a character takes another character over his knee and spanks her.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Maybe it's a woman that takes a character over… Anyway. They… It's an intentional disempowerment of a female antagonist. He had written for me to do this scene. I think I probably would not have put it in if I were writing it today. It just made me uncomfortable, because I thought this feels like the wrong way to disempower a character. But this is a book series kind of from another generation. This sort of thing had been more common in the Wheel of Time. It's not something that I commonly put in my books. The sex scenes, two characters consenting who are in love, that didn't bother me. Right? Now I have different standards in my life, but I think that this is kind of what life is about. We choose our lines and we think about them and we may change them as we go through life. That's what life is for. Someone having different lines for me just means that they're looking at this differently. Certainly, I didn't have a problem writing those scenes. But something like that… Does that make sense? Like, in that case, I think it's a different thing. I think, looking back, because I was a newer author then, I think I would have gone to Harriet and said, "I just don't think this is the right way to disempower a character. I would rather not put this in the book." And see what she said. So there's an example of something uncomfortable that I'm writing that I think perhaps should have nudged me the other direction and not had it be in the book.

[Dan] That is great. I definitely want to have a discussion about that. But first, we need to do our book of the week. That's actually me. I'm doing not a book but a role-playing game. This is one that some of you may have heard of, because it has an Amazon series. It's called Tales from the Loop, which is a really neat kind of 80s nostalgia weird science fiction game. The reason that I thought it applied to this topic is because it doesn't have traditional hit points or damage or anything like that. But as bad things happen to your characters, you instead take conditions. Those conditions are things like upset, scared, exhausted, injured. Then the way that you get rid of those, the way you heal yourself, is that you have to go and have a conversation, a meaningful conversation with an important person in your life. Which just feels like a really fascinating way, in fiction, to deal with those kinds of trauma issues and, for players and authors to work through those through the kind of role-playing improvisation. So, Tales from the Loop. It's by Free League. It's a really great game. That's our book of the week.

[Howard] All my characters are going to be dead by act two.

[Laughter]

[Dan] All right. So, let's get back to what Brandon was talking about, because I think that's really interesting, this discussion of everyone has lines they won't cross, and what I really think were talking about in this episode is what happens when my characters have lines that are different from my own. I need, I have decided as an author that this person is going to use words that I don't or this person is going to do something that I would never do. That makes me uncomfortable, because those lines are different. So I want to ask, first, how do you make that decision when you're writing a story that you really want to include something that makes you uncomfortable? How and why do you decide that?

[Howard] Honestly, if the thought crosses my mind that this story needs this and such a scene, that's not the sort of scene that I'm comfortable writing because reasons. But if I had the thought that this is possibly the right sort of scene, then the odds are pretty good, at least in this stage of my career, the odds are pretty good that I need to trust my instinct and acknowledge that this book needs me to write something I'm not comfortable with. If, after I've written it, or after I've struggled to write it, I go back and look at it and I feel like, no, this is wrong, this has changed the tone of the story, or I didn't do it well, or I did it so badly I'm not allowed to say I didn't do it well… Which, I gave that two votes because that's what's most likely going to happen. Then, I'll revisit it and… Oh, I can't count the number of times in Schlock Mercenary I had an idea for a panel and realized I do not have the skill within the format I've created for myself to illustrate that the way my brain is illustrating it. So I'm going to move the camera. I've made that compromise a lot of times because I'm not as good at things as I want to be. But I'll never get good unless I try to write the scene, unless I try to draw the picture, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me, so I can step back from it and say, "Well, that was miserable. Did I do it well?"

[Mahtab] I got some very good advice from one of the editors that I worked with on a previous novel called The Tiffin. There were some scenes of violence against a child. I was having a bit of difficulty writing it. One of the… My mentor at that time said, "Think of yourself as an actor." An actor sometimes has to do a lot of different roles. They just have to inhabit the character. So inhabit your character's skin and write from the character's perspective so that… You basically have to forget yourself, you have to forget that you're the author writing the story. Inhabit what your characters are going through or the violence that is happening against your character, and just write as honestly as possible. Somehow, removing yourself from the equation and just writing from inhabiting the character's world helped me get through my barrier and write that particular scene. So, sometimes just have to do that. I don't know if that makes sense.

[Dan] No, it does. I think that's great advice. Brandon, do you have any last thoughts on this topic before we end?

[Brandon] It is something that I've thought about quite a bit as a writer. It's something I had to be comfortable with early in my career. I've told this story before, about my younger sister, Lauren, my youngest sister, when I was writing Mistborn. I mean, the cursing in Mistborn is very light, but I don't just generally curse at all, and my characters were. Why did I do that? It's because… I often come up with fantasy curses in my books. In this particular book, it was a gang of thieves and the fantasy curses were sounding silly coming out of these characters' mouths. It's something I'm very conscious of. In certain worldbuilding you can make, and with certain fantasy worlds, you can make them not sound silly. But sometimes they just do. Depending on how you're making them. That was ruining the tone of the story. I said, I'm just going to have to come to our world swears for these characters. Again, they're very light. Right? Most people wouldn't even consider them curses. But my little sister was one of my beta readers at like age 14. She crossed them all out. With a black marker.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] She was super offended. It was my first experience of this, people are going to be like, "Wow, Brandon is cursing." Right? Like, it is the weakest. But everyone again has their different lines. So I had to kind of ask myself. I said, "Well, it didn't bother me." I decided I was going to go forward with it. But there are certain curses I've just never used in my books. There are certain derogatory terms for people that I just don't use. I don't anticipate myself ever using them because of the way… I don't like what those words add to our society. So I don't. That's just kind of a personal choice on my part. So it's like I have two lines. I have a line of things that I don't generally do, but that I don't think actually are… That's not wrong for my characters to do. Then I have lines that I probably won't depict, at least in explicit detail, my characters ever doing. Because it's just not something that I want to write. It's odd, because I don't necessarily think these things are bad for other writers to write. But it's just not where I want to take my stories.

[Dan] Awesome. So, let's give you some homework to finish up. If you have decided that you want to put some kind of these elements into your fiction, but it's hard kind of getting over that first little hump, breaking the ice, here is an exercise. For this one, I'm using swearwords. I just want you to open a file and write down every swearword you know. Every cuss, every bad word you can think of. Put them into sentences, write them as dialogue. It will be uncomfortable, but it is going to kind of… Like I said, it's going to break that ice a little bit. Then, after that, delete the file, burn the paper you wrote it on, destroy it forever. It doesn't matter. Because it just kind of… Once you've written them down once, then later it will be much easier. Anyway, that was our episode. Thank you so much for watching. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.32: Short Story Markets

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/09/15-32-short-story-markets/

Key Points: Do you need to be prolific to make it in the short story markets? No. How do you find short story markets? Look for the lists, such as The Submission Grinder, or collections of award-winning short fiction, and see where they were published. Pay attention to what you like. Look at the audience size, the pay rates, and is it shiny for you? Do you need to be famous as a short story writer to break in as an author? No. Be your own kind of writer. How do you stand out from the crowd? Write the story that grabs you. Learn to write a competent story. Then learn to trust yourself.

[Transcriptionist note: I may have confused Erin and Lari at some points in the transcript. My apologies for any mislabeling.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 32.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Short Story Markets, with Erin Roberts.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Lari] I'm Lari.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] Thank you. We are very excited to have Aaron Roberts with us for this episode. Erin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Erin] Sure. I am a writer, primarily of short stories. I've had short fiction published in Asimov's, and in Clarkesworld, The Dark, and PodCastle. I also was, which is great for this particular episode, a slush reader for EscapePod for about two years.

[Dan] That is fantastic. Thank you for joining us.

[Dan] This is, as most of our episodes are this year, a topic that was requested by listeners. So we've got several questions, and most of these rather than about fiction writing are about fiction selling and fiction markets. So I'm just going to start. The first one here, the question is, with so many short fiction markets, does a good short story author need prolific-isy to gain notice and readership?

[Erin] No.

[Dan] Maybe the first question is what are… He says with so many short fiction markets. The short fiction market is so different today than it was when I was breaking in like 15 years ago. What are the short story markets? What are… I mean, without an exhaustive list, obviously. Where are the places people can look today to sell short fiction?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about this is that… I'd like to try to give this advice in a way that's as evergreen as possible. So… Because markets are constantly appearing and disappearing. That's been true through the entirety of publishing. So, what you're looking for are markets that you kind of want to be in. The best places to find those are places that collect lists. So you can go to some place like The Submission Grinder or Duotrope or Ralan's, or you can go to an anthology of books… Of fiction that is award-winning and look to see where those pieces were published. These are all places that you can find markets, but the process of figuring out which market you want to be in… Like, giving you a list of "Ah, this market is…" Like, we can do that, but it's not…

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The chances of it being outdated a month after we record this is pretty strong.

[Erin] I also think that a lot of it's about you. The kind of stories that you like. The markets are different, they all have different styles, they all have different sort of editorial focuses. So, I would always say, read a lot of current short fiction, and see, are you gravitating to a certain market? Are you like, "Ah, the stories in X are the stories that I would love to be alongside." Because one of the best things about being published in a short fiction magazine is saying, like, "Well, my story's great," but also, "Oh, my gosh, these other stories, I'm so excited to be a part of this."

[Dan] So, back to the question, then. In order to really get out there, to gain a readership, to gain notice as a short fiction writer, do you need to be prolific? Do you need to be constantly publishing in tons of different markets?

[Mary Robinette] I don't think that you do. I mean, when you look at someone like Ted Chang, he does not constantly publish. Like, it is a thing you can do. But the question I would ask is why do you want to be noticed? Like, what are you trying to gain from that? So, here is my advice when you're thinking about like, what market to go into, and this is taking on to what Erin says about like what is important to you. That there are, I think, three things that help you decide what market to look at. One is the size of the audience the next is the pay rate. The third is the shininess. So, audience is literally how many people are going to see this thing. Pay rate is exactly what it sounds like, are you being paid adequately for your effort? Then, the shininess is how much do you want to be in this particular market? Like, there's… I grew up reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So, getting into that magazine was… That was shiny for me. Even though they didn't have the best pay rate when I got in. Shimmer Magazine is beautiful, and I wanted to be in Shimmer, even though the market size is very small. So, that varies. But at other points in my career, where… Like, there was a point when we were in New York and I was supporting my husband and myself on our… On my theater and writing income, which is exactly as large as you'd imagine that to be. So, at that point, pay rate was the most important thing. So, like the number of markets that you go into, the only thing that that affects is… The two pieces of that that you are affecting there are the number of eyes that are seeing your words, and how much money you're getting paid. So, for a career, it's like which piece of that are you trying to manipulate?

[Erin] I'll also say that both as an editor and an agent, I was very scared of the word prolific. I didn't know prolific-isy was a word, but I'd be… I'm even more scared of that one. It's possible to be prolific and be really good, but I think when there's… The stress is on the quantity, it always makes me fear for the quality. So if someone's trying to just write and write and write, it immediately makes me suspicious that there isn't that much attention to editing and just letting the material rest so you can take a new look at it. So, I would say, for me, it's always best to just pay attention to what you're putting out there, first and foremost.

[Dan] So, I suspect part of the thought process behind this question is someone who wants to break into the market, someone who wants to gain notoriety, either because they want to move on to getting a big publishing contract or something like that. So, Lari, you as an editor may be the one to answer this. To what extent does that matter? Does somebody need to become famous quote unquote as a short story writer in order to break in as an author?

[Lari] Absolutely not. I also think editors use a little bit too much the idea of falling in love. I think we kind of lean on it a little bit too much. But it is true that a lot of the publishing process involves a couple people just falling in love with your writing. So an agent falling in love with your writing, and an editor falling in love with your writing. Often, that doesn't really have anything to do with your previous platform.

[Erin] I just want to build on that to say that I think this question may also be coming from the idea that there is a way to sort of game the system of publishing. Like, if you do this thing correctly and follow this path, it will lead you to glory. So to speak. But I just don't think that's a good way necessarily to go. Because you have to love the writer you are, instead of dream about the writer you wish you were. And figure out, if you're a prolific writer, and that's your style, then go be prolific. But if you're not, don't stress about the fact that I will never succeed, because I am not this other person. Live in your own career and your own writing style and process.

[Dan] Excellent advice. I want to break right now for our book of the week, which is, actually, appropriately, the Nebulous Showcase. Mary Robinette, can you tell us about that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, one of the things that we've been talking about is how to find good markets. Looking at a collection of award-winning fiction is a way to figure out which markets people are publishing in that are… That other people are also reading. So the most… We've got the Nebula Award Showcase 2019, which was edited by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. That has a collection of the winners and nominees for the 2019 Nebula awards. So it's got people in there like Rebecca Roanhorse and K. M. Szpara and Sarah Pinsker. It's got just a ton of really good fiction. So, if you're wanting to get a better idea of the sort of landscape, grabbing the most current Nebula Award Showcase at whatever point you're listening to this. It may be that you're listening to this and are grabbing the 2020. But grab that, and enjoy some really… The fiction of people who are at the top of their game right now.

[Dan] Excellent. All right. There's another question here that I think is similar to the first one we had, but takes a different approach. What the question says is by submitting to one of the most famous sci-fi/fantasy magazines, I learned that they receive about 40 stories a day, but publish about 12 stories every two months, including those from established authors. I imagine many submissions are good, but how do you stand out from the crowd? So, rather than using short fiction to stand out in some other way, how do you stand out just enough to get published? How do you get noticed? How do you grab the attention of a short story publisher or editor?

[Erin] When I was… I'll say when I was a slusher, we just read stories. A slush reader for a magazine reads all the stories that come through the door, and decides which ones to pass up to the editors. At EscapePod, actually, the process is blind. So we don't know who's sending it, and if it's like my favorite author ever or someone I've never heard of. What I learned from that is just write a story that grabs a reader. A slush reader is just a reader that has been given a particular title in a particular role. They're not any different then you as a reader, except maybe that they do it more. So when you're reading stories, what grabs you? That's the same thing that's going to grab someone at a magazine. So if you write a great story, then it should grab someone's perspective and make them want to read more and publish it.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to add on that. That is absolutely true. And also, there is a thing that happens… That I've seen… It happened to me… Happens to a lot of writers. Which is that your publishing… Or submitting, and then you start getting the personalized rejections. Then you make a sale, and you don't know why that story sold and none of the others have sold. Like, what did I do, and you try to replicate it. You can't. Then you go through a dry spell for you don't sell anything. Then suddenly you sell something, and you have no idea why. Here is what I think is happening this is based on having done the slush reading that Erin did, but in a slightly different form. I slushred for Asimov's, but I was… They divided their slush into three piles. The first was complete unknowns. The second, the B pile, was people who had some credits. Then the A list was people who had already sold to Asimov's. All that that was really doing was triaging the sort of process. Some people in the B pile were people who'd been in A… Or been in the C pile and gotten moved in for a slightly closer read. But what it meant was that I was reading stories and all of them were competent. Like, every single story in that pile was competent. The thing that was frustrating was that for a long time, I was like, "Ah yes. I understand why editors so frequently say write a story that rises above. And that they can't describe what this rises above means." But, comparing what is happening with that pile with the authors that I know, and myself who can't… Who are like, "Why did this one work?" Here's what I think is happening. I think what happens is that you learn to write a competent story. Then you learn to trust yourself. That there is a period of time in which you are writing competent stories, and there's nothing structurally wrong with that sucker. But you are so focused on the technique of it, but you aren't actually thinking about all of the things… You aren't interrogating any of the things that you are actually interested in. You're trying to mimic things that other people are doing. So they're a little bit stiff. They're a little bit predictable. But there's nothing wrong with it. Like, no one can point at it and go, "This is wrong here." Then there's a point at which you write a story that is coming very much from your own self. Those are the stories that are unique and stand out. Because they are stories that no one else could write. The stories that don't stand out are the stories that anyone could have written. They're just… There's… Again, there's nothing wrong with them, they're just not doing that extra step of letting your own voice out. In this case, what I mean by voice is your own personal taste out. So I think that one of the things that you can do is… As a writer, is to remember that you have honed your reading experience over your entire reading career, which is much longer than your writing career, and to trust your reader instincts over your writer instinct.

[Dan] That sounds like awesome advice. We, unfortunately, are out of time. We've got some homework coming from Lari.

[Lari] Yeah. So, I want you to pick a couple of contemporary published short story writers, and just trace their publication history. So you can see where they've been published, at which points in their career, and hopefully that will help you start sketching a roadmap for your own.

[Dan] Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/01/15-09-choose-your-own-adventurous-publishing-path/

Key Points: Self-pub? Traditional pub? Hybrid? How do you decide what's the best outlet for your work? Right now, trad and indie are two parallel but separate markets. Which one is best for your book? Who else is doing similar work, are there successful titles like it in the market? Don't try to go indie just because your work isn't very good! Look where your audience is. But there is no easy mode of publishing. Don't get taken in by "Here's the simple path to success." Fundamental strategies or principles are the same, but you have to keep up with the changes, too. You can make self pub and trad work together. Your goal should not be "making a stunning debut." Your goal should be cranking out good books. Be a 10-year overnight success! Similarly, awards are a consequence, not a goal. Turn your words into money.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Nine.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path.

[Pause]

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And Dongwon didn't know he was supposed to turn to page 3.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I was too busy marveling at the beauty of that very smooth episode title.

[Howard] Isn't it great?

[Piper] I was panicked because I'm in… Like, a different spot.

[Dan] These are the kind of titles that we get when there's no adults in the room.

[Dongwon] Choices have been made.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Who are the people who…

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. Okay. Despite the very unprofessional nature of this episode intro, this is a very great and important topic to discuss. One of… Like… As we've been covering throughout the entire year, there's a lot of career questions that we know you listeners have. This is one of the big ones that we hear at conventions and all the time, is, should I go self-pub? Should I go traditional pub? Should I do some kind of hybrid of that in the middle? So we wanted to make sure that we had both Dongwon as an agent and Piper as a very successful hybrid author on this cast to talk about this. So, I'm going to ask be really dangerous question first that's going to get us all in trouble. When you're looking at a particular work, how can you decide what the best outlet for that is, self pub, indie, trad? How do you know?

[Piper] I have a thought, but I think Dongwon has a thought, too.

[Dongwon] Let's see if our thoughts are in alignment. So, I think, is my thinking about this has evolved and as I've sort of taken a close look at both markets and sort of the state of where traditional publishing is, I have become more and more convinced that they're two parallel but separate markets happening in book publishing right now. I think the indie readership and the indie authorship and publishing is often a discrete set of people from the people buying traditional books in bookstores. So I think the question is whenever you have a specific book is, is this particular type of book working in the indie bookstore or… Well, indie bookstores or independent publishing, right? So I think you need to be looking carefully at who else is doing this and are there other successful titles like your book in this market, right? So if you're writing a 200,000 word literary beautifully written epic fantasy story, I think that's going to be a really tough sell in the indie market, right? On the other hand, if you're writing a 60,000 word compulsive urban fantasy that's part of a 10 book series, you're going to have a really hard time finding a traditional publisher, right? So I think a lot of this is being driven by certain market trends, certain audience expectations and demands.

[Howard] I'd like to take just a moment to address the third possibility, which is that the thing that you are writing, depending on who you are and what it is that you are writing, might not fit in either place because it's not very good.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I hate to phrase it in that way, but if you've been turned down for representation by agent after agent, if you've gotten rejection from editor after editor, and what they been saying is, "This isn't ready yet, thank you for playing." That's very different from what my agent told me in 2006, which was, "I have tried to sell this…" We were talking about Schlock Mercenary. "I have tried to sell this, and everybody I've talked to has either said I'm already reading Schlock Mercenary, I love it. We don't have any place for it at our publishing house. Or, I don't know what that is, but I can tell you right now, we don't have room for it at our publishing house." In every case, the answer was, "Howard, you need to be self-publishing." Now, I'm self published differently than the Kindle Unlimited or whatever market, but the decision point is the same. I was told by the gatekeepers, if you will, that my thing fit in a different space. If I'd been told, "Oh, we would love to pick that up, something like that up, we've been looking for just such a thing, but this one is really crappy…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Going to the indie space with it might not be a great career move. So… That's… I bring that up because I don't want people to go to Indy because… I don't want them to go to Indy without good critiques, without understanding…

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad that you brought that up, because even 10 years ago, that was the whole stigma of the entire indie market, which is, these are the people who couldn't hack it in the real publishing, and so they went indie. Which is not… It wasn't true then, and it's very, very not true now. It is absolutely a respected and viable publishing path, but it wasn't before. Now, Piper, you keep trying to talk, and we keep stepping on you. What do you want to jump in here with?

[Piper] You're not stepping on me. I'm dodging, I'm waiting, I'm dodging. But, the moment is here. So, I do agree that there needs to be a certain quality, that you have to have faith in, in your book, and be sensitive to… Open to critique so that you know this is the right quality. There are, I agree, certain market trends that will help you to realize that perhaps your book could find your readership better via self pub or indie. So, for example, science-fiction romance right now, at this time in 2019, is very niche. It has a very specific readership, and that readership often looks for things online in certain ways. So it's so niche, it's not necessarily picked up by trad pub. But there are readers out there hungry for it. So it can still be very, very successful if you take the leap of faith to go indie with this series. You can have a really small, tight, but super loyal readership out of that. That can be very, very profitable. I would say paranormal romance is something that people have been waiting for it to come back for years and years and years, but I've got news. There's readers. They're out there. They love paranormal romance, they would eat it up. The audience is out there for indie work and self pub work.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree with that. I… My first self published book is now eight or nine years old. I've been hybrid for a while. It was for that exact reason. Here's a book that is clearly good and there clearly is an audience for it, but that audience is small enough that a big publisher is not necessarily interested. So we put it out in that space, and it found its audience and that's great.

[Piper] Yeah, and you can make money that way. It's not that trad pub is the way to go to make bank. Right? Indie pubs can definitely make, if your goals are focused on the financial return. Any pub can be very profitable done strategically. There are advantages to trad. But indie can also have strategies that allow it to be profitable.

[Dongwon] You keep such a higher percentage of every sale you make, if you go indie, that it takes so many fewer copies sold to really be very profitable. If you know what you're doing, and if you're successful, you can make significantly more money by going indie than you will traditional.

[Howard] Six weeks ago, we had several authors on the show. It was one of the ones that we recorded live at the Writing Excuses Retreat. That episode is probably resonating with you right now, dear listener, as you are recalling some of the numbers that they spouted.

[Dongwon] The thing I really want to caution you, though, is for every one person who is making those kind of numbers, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are selling under 10 copies a week, right? Those who have under 20 copies sold total of their book, right? All I'm pointing out… That's true on the traditional side, too. There's plenty of books that are published traditionally that vanish without a trace, that you've never heard of, right? I'm only pointing out that there's no easy mode of publishing, right? Sometimes where I get very nervous about the conversation around self-publishing and indie is there's a certain industry of people who are invested in making it look easy and invested in saying that here's a simple path to success, right? Here's the 10 tricks you can do. From my experience, that just doesn't exist.

[Howard] They're invested in it, because they have built a business around selling shovels to the prospectors.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They are the ones who are selling editor services, selling cover services, selling whatever. Part of their pitch is telling you…

[Dan] Well, it's not entirely these people, though. I do think that there is kind of a…

[Howard] Oh, there's absolutely…

[Dan] A group of old-school people that've kind of been burned by the market and their primary investment is biting the hand that used to feed them and doesn't anymore.

[Piper] Well, I would like to say that I have some recs because sometimes it's really frustrating to listen to these episodes and just have somebody tell you to go out and find somebody who knows what they're doing. So, dear listeners, I have some people who know what they're doing.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So, Zoe York is getting a shout out. I don't know her personally. I have not ever spoken to her, but I do stalk her… I mean, follow her on social media. Zoe York has a book coming out. She also has two really great podcast episodes on the Sistercast about building your marketing brand. Now, it's applicable if you're a trad author, but particularly if you're going to go indie, if you're going to go with self pub, those two episodes really, really break down what it's like to think strategically about your approach to the market, and how you're not only going to market your first book, but your series if you're going to have a series, and then how do you keep that going over time so that you can build that trickle income up to something that really feels good. Skye Warren also did a marketing class for expert marketing advice through the RWA forum to celebrate the opening of their RWA marketing forum in January 2019. So those are two people who really know what they're doing and have made that information and knowledge available to you publicly.

[Dan] Perfect. As it happens, Zoe York is our book of the week.

[Piper] It is.

[Dan] Romance Your Brand. What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] So, Romance Your Brand came out in December 2019. It's, actually, the full title is Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series. So, friends, don't think that this is limited to romance. It is applicable across, I would say, all spec-fic genres. It is really, really focused on helping you build a marketable brand with an eye towards all the things that you need to be able to keep in mind, the moving parts of promotion and marketing and ads and also planning out your series.

[Howard] Because some of these things just work so much better in print than they do in audio, what we're going to do is were going to get a list of Piper's recommendations for people you can trust. I want to throw Writer Beware in there. And we're going to get them into the liner notes, so that you've got links. I bring up Writer Beware because I figured out how to articulate my concern. My concern is that the un-agented author, the author who has… Who hasn't found their footing, hasn't found their connections within the industry, and is looking for somebody to help out, is a prime target for predatory publishing schemes. We don't want any of you to end up there. We want all of you to never end up there. The way to avoid that is to listen to the reputable voices and do some homework. We will have pre-done some of that homework for you.

[Dongwon] For me, I'm very focused on educating writers about how the business works, and I think it's really important. It's one of the reasons I do this podcast, not just to hang out with your beautiful faces. But what I want to do is make sure that people understand what they're getting into. So I hope I'm not coming off as negative about the indie market, I'm not at all. I think it's a really wonderful opportunity. It just breaks my heart when I see people going out there being sold a false bill of goods and not understanding how things work. In my experience, kind of going into what Piper was talking about a little bit, is publishing is kind of publishing no matter how you're doing it. The fundamental strategies, whether you're doing literary fiction, contemporary realistic, women's fiction, or indie romance, or whatever it is, the fundamental principles are all still the same. Selling books is just selling books. There are different tactics that can apply in very limited ways, right? I think indie has a certain set of tactics that are working. Those change seemingly every six months or so. So a lot of it is keeping up on, like, what's working right now, what strategies are we using, how's the algorithm working, and those kinds of things. But we're doing the same thing on the traditional side. On a slightly slower cycle, but what's going on with the booksellers, what's going on with the libraries, what's going on with the school markets? So, a lot of it is similar factors, but the underlying principles are all the same, no matter where you are.

[Piper] As a hybrid author, I just want to say that you can harness those marketing strategies so that your indie and your trad can work together and actually build each other up.

[Dan] That… Let's talk about that. Because we talk about being a hybrid author all the time, and yet there still are people who are wondering, "Can I self pub and still have an agent? Is it possible to self pub one book and then get picked up by a trad publisher for your second one?" What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] Well, I can tell you that it is totally possible. There are some concerns sometimes with it. You want to look at the genres of what works you're going to self pub and what works you're going to try to put out there for submission for trad. In some ways, it may be easier for you mentally to think about I'm going to self pub in this genre first while I submit for trad in another genre. That doesn't necessarily have to be the way you go, but sometimes it's easier. Because the risk is if you put a book out indie and it doesn't perform well, and then you try to take that same book or a book in that series to trad, there's a track record that the publishing houses going to look at to determine whether they think there's a market for that book. That can impact you. Right, sometimes if your book went gangbusters and awesome, then, yes, the trad pub is going to want to eat that up and take it and publish out further with their extended distribution capabilities for you. But in other cases, when the book does not do as well or does not find its audience, the trad pub may unfortunately decide that that's not a good investment, and therefore it can hurt your chances. You want to think critically about that.

[Dongwon] You almost never can take a book that you've self published and resell that to some publisher. The cases where that happens is people are coming to you because you are selling so many copies, right? So if you are Andy Weir and you're just selling a billion copies every 30 seconds, then, yeah, publishers are going to come knocking, yelling, "Hey. We want in on this." Right?

[Dan] We want some of your money.

[Dongwon] If that's happening, then that is when that works. If you self publish something, you're not getting the numbers, you're not getting a lot of excitement, then my advice is to move on to something else that's in a different category, a new series, and that's what you want to be pitching to some publishers. The hybrid authors I work with, we really view the self-publishing side and the traditional side as two parallel careers. There's crossover in terms of the marketing and brand. In my experience, there's almost no crossover in terms of audience. The people who buy one are not buying the other one. Right? So you can't expect that if you sold 100,000 copies indie, that suddenly you're going to sell 100,000 hardcovers, right? So I think learning to think of them as two separate channels that you're developing in parallel. It's really more about market and career diversification, then it is about transferring audience from one to the other.

[Piper] I'm going to slightly disagree with you on the fact that I do, as a Venn diagram, think there's a small amount of overlap, because I don't want to disregard the readers that are buying both. But that's because there are readers that have become loyal to the author and decide that the author, regardless of how it was published, is a one-click buy. But they are a smaller selection.

[Howard] We also need to take into account that 10 years ago, this conversation would have been completely different, and that these markets change. For me, the decision points about choosing your own adventurous publishing path hinge on some of the same things, which are, on these two different paths, which market is my book going to sell better into? That's going to change over the years. The big one for me is do I want to make the sale once and let somebody else sell it a million times, or do I want to beat down 10,000 doors myself? I chose the beat 10,000 doors down myself path because I'm an idiot.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Or you really like knocking on doors, Howard.

[Piper] Yeah, maybe.

[Howard] I really… I would much rather have somebody else doing that work for me. But what we found is that my primary product, as of this episode airing, is something that plays to a market where I can't let one person sell it for me.

[Dan] It's worth pointing out, you said that these markets change over time. They're still changing. We're in the middle of a massive technological flux in this industry. I genuinely don't know what either the trad or indie market is going to look like a year from now. We don't know. So it is worth your time not just to figure out what to do with your own books, but to keep your thumb on the pulse and keep track of what is going on. Who is big, and where they're big, and why they're big. Because it's going to keep shifting throughout your career. I have one more question before we end. We're going to go a little bit long, because somebody asked a question that I think needs more of a disabusement than an answer. He says, "Does self-publishing count as a debut, and hence ruin your chance of emerging with a big bang?" In a lot of ways, I think that if you're publishing plan is I want to emerge with a big bang, I want "a stunning debut" written on the cover of my book, your publishing plan at that point is to win the lottery. What you need to be focused on more so than these questions "of am I going to hit big? Am I going to have a massive debut?" You just need to be cranking out good books.

[Howard] For every big debut we can think of, we can quickly put our fingers on, there are 100 ten-year overnight successes. Where people have been grinding away at this, and they've had books hit the market, and they've perhaps rebooted their career a couple of times… That would be a great topic for later this year.

[Dan] Hey!

[Piper] Hey-o!

[Howard] And yet, we don't really notice them until this thing happens. Well, that's not a debut author. That is a ten-year overnight success.

[Dan] One of the examples I love to use is Hilary Mantel. She started small, she got big, and then with Wolf Hall, she got huge. She got massive. She had a BBC miniseries. All of these things. That was the first time most of her readers had ever heard of her. So, in a sense, that was emerging with the Big Bang. She just had to write 20 other books 1st.

[Piper] Right. Patricia Briggs is my favorite, favorite author in the urban fantasy space. But I read her before she hit big with the Mercy Thompson series. She had the Sianim series, she had Hurog series, she had a really, really fun adorable book, The Hob's Bargain that I was in love with and have read 50 bajillion times and had to buy three new copies of that book. So she was out there already for quite a few years before she ever wrote urban fantasy. People are like, "Oh. She hit big." But she was already out there, friends. She was already out there, she had written quite a few books already before the Mercy Thompson series came out, and that hit.

[Dongwon] To sort of go back, though, and answer the actual question, if you all don't mind?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, fine.

[Dongwon] What we do do is we say it is a traditional debut, or a traditionally published debut. You put parentheses around traditionally published and you make the font really little, so it looks like it's just a debut. That's the actual answer.

[Dan] I'm glad that you hit that. Okay, so there is one aspect of this that I do want to touch on a little bit, which is awards. Again, I don't think that your goal should be to win awards. Your goal should be to write good books in a long-term career. But, for example, the Astounding Award for Best New Author, which is connected to the Hugo, that one, I… You can only win that in the first two years of publishing. But they look… They do, for that one, look at specific markets. So they don't count self pub for that. To my knowledge. That could change any day. Because as we said these things are still in flux. So. There is that. But I don't want anyone listening to this episode to say, "Oh, I've got a fantastic book. I'm going to wait three years to publish it because I want to make sure I have a shot at the Astounding Award." That's not your goal.

[Howard] "I don't want to spoil my Astounding eligibility." No, what you don't want to spoil is you're not getting paid for writing these words.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Howard] Let's go turn these words into money.

[Piper] Awards, actually, don't often boost your sales. Like, there's a spike. Don't get me wrong, there is a spike. But they don't skyrocket your career in the big picture and the long tail.

[Dongwon] The thing I always say is that awards are a sign that other things are going well. Awards are a consequence, not a goal.

[Piper] Agreed.

[Dan] Excellent way of putting it. We are going to end our episode right here, and we are all kind of on egg shells because Howard told us he has a secret homework planned and he wouldn't tell us what it was.

[Howard] Okay. The secret homework plan is I want you to write the Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path thing. What you're going to do, you're going to build yourself a flowchart with little decision points about your manuscript. Is this going to sell into a wider market? Is this a niche market? Do I want to hand sell a bunch of copies? Do I want to sell it to one person? Do I have test readers in mind? How do I feel about this manuscript? You're going to write this thing, and in writing this thing, start fleshing out the flowchart. Start fleshing out the flowchart, and write a fun fiction about your Adventurous Publishing Path. Fill every one of those pages. I promise you, when you are done with this, you will be the first person ever to have written this.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because it's ridiculous. But also, I promise you, you'll be way more excited about choosing these things, because you will have begun imagining yourself making the difficult decisions.

[Dongwon] Please work hard to keep it from becoming GrimDark.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, I want to read the GrimDark one.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's going to be great.

[Piper] Make it light! And fun.

[Howard] He didn't win the Astounding Award. Something got hit by a meteor. All right. Dan, take us home. Please.

[Laughter]

[Dan] From where?

[Howard] The ruins of civilization.

[Dan] Okay. Unlike Howard, you have no excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/02/15-05-setting-goals-for-your-career/

Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…

[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?

[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.

[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…

[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.

[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…

[Dan] Hufflepuff.

[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.

[Dan] So, give us some examples.

[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.

[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.

[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.

[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Don't we all?

[Dan] We've been friends for decades.

[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.

[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…

[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.

[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.

[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.

[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?

[Laughter]

[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]

[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.

[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…

[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.

[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.

[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.

[Victoria] Mortality.

[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.

[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.

[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Ghost Station.

[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.

[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…

[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.

[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.

[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…

[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.

[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?

[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.

[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.

[Brandon] We are a little overtime…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.

[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/05/15-01-evolution-of-a-career/

Key Points: This season is going to be organized around topics taken from questions from the audience. So this is what you wanted to know! Starting off with the evolution of a career, goal setting for a career as a writer. How do you choose a book for early in your career versus saving it for later? Work on what you're most excited about. Start with something simple, tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight. Sometimes you want to push yourself, set a challenge for yourself. When you look back on first projects, you are sure to think you could do it better now. But that opportunity cost comes with everything you write. Pick an area to improve, but focus on the things that give you joy. If you have an idea, you're excited about it, it's ambitious… Go for it! Even if it doesn't work, you will learn. Don't worry about using your best idea too early, you will have more and better ideas later. The path you expect, the path you plan, is probably not the path you will follow. Grieve for the untaken path, but rejoice in where you are walking now. You always learn from experience. How do you plan for the next stage? Have a plan, but be ready to toss it. Look for options. Avoid closing doors. Don't brand yourself by your first project. Do a couple of books to prove you can do it, then do something else. Leave breadcrumbs for your readers to follow. Pay attention to what your readers like. Think about who is this book for. Brands evolve. As you plan your career, make sure you have a plan, and make sure it's something you love.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode One.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Evolution of a Career.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. We are very excited to have Dongwon with us for this, the very first episode of 2020. We are doing something a little different than we've done in the past with this new season of our show. Mary Robinette, this was your idea. Can you tell us what we're doing?

[Mary Robinette] Well, we realized that the podcast is 15 minutes long, this is 15 years long at this point, and we're not that smart, but you all are. So we decided that rather than trying to come up with a topic, what we would do is go to you and see what things you wanted to know about. So we've collected a bunch of questions, and we're using them to guide the season this year. So you will not, in most cases, hear a specific question from an audience, but the topics and the questions that we're trying to answer for you have all been generated by you.

[Dan] One of the things that we saw a lot of, and this shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did… Maybe a third of the questions we got in were all based around career. What does a career look like as a writer, and how does it change over time, and how do you decide what you're going to do? So, since we've got Dongwon with us, we wanted to talk about the evolution of a career. How do you set goals for your career? So let's… Let me actually start with this question that I think is really interesting, and I'll throw it to Dongwon first. When you're starting to look at your writing as a career rather than just a thing that you do, how do you choose a book that is very good for early career versus one that you might want to save for later on when you're better or more established?

[Dongwon] It's kind of a tricky question. Because… The thing that I always, always, always tell people is when it comes to you picking the project that you want to work on, work on the one you're most excited about. That said, I do talk to a lot of writers who at some point will say, "I tried to do this thing and it was too big for me at this stage. I didn't know how to do this, I didn't know how to do that." So sometimes, when it comes to that first novel, and a lot of debuts… Often times, you can read a book and know that this was a first novel, that this was a debut, that this was the first thing you did. Because it has sort of a clear, sort of straightforward through line. It tends to be A to B to C. It tends to be much more straightforward, in terms of how we naturally as people tell a story. Right? So sometimes what you want to think about for that first book is keep it a little simpler, right? Don't try to do the 15 POV's with complicated tense things, complicated structure. Focus on telling the story that you already know how to tell. Tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes talk about this with my students as setting things on the easy setting. There's nothing wrong with an easy setting. Like, you can do beautiful, beautiful work if you are dealing with things that you are confident in. So sometimes I think about that, like, waiting until you have the writing chops, or picking one aspect of the novel that you're going to put on the difficult setting and everything else is well within your comfort zone. I also want to say that having a practice novel as your first novel is… There's nothing like wrong with saying I'm going to write this without the intention of publishing it. If you finish it, and you're like, "This is publishable." Potentially. Sure. But we don't say, "I have picked up the violin. I'm going to go to Carnegie Hall…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "With the first thing that I've learned to play."

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I do want to emphasize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting yourself a challenge that is kind of beyond your level. That's how we push ourselves. That's how we learn. But I do agree that when you're sitting down and saying, "Okay, I've got a few books under my belt. I think it's time to do one that I'm going to really try to get published." Maybe back off on that difficulty level, like Mary Robinette was saying, and do something that you know you can really hit out of the park.

[Howard] Sorry. At risk of overthinking things, there is nothing in the first five years of Schlock Mercenary that I couldn't go back now and do an infinitely better job at. There are no first projects that later you is going to look at and say, "Boy, that… I really only could have written that as an early career thing. I'm not ready to write that anymore." No. You're always going to be leveling up, you're always going to be improving. There's a story in the second year of Schlock Mercenary where I start telling the story from the point of view of the bad guys, and Schlock is the monster. I decided to use marker art for it. It was all hand-lettered. I… This is me… This is in 2001, 2002, I think, that I'm telling this story. I remember thinking at the time, "Yeah. There's no way I could have told this story or illustrated this story when I was first starting out." I looked back at that now and I think I was not ready to tell that story then.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I could do such a good job with it now. But now it's done. Now I've told it. Now I can't tell that story again. There is an opportunity cost associated with that for me. But that opportunity cost is associated with everything you write. You don't get a do over. You know what? Life is grief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Just own that. Own the fact that your first project is always forever… It's going to be your first thing. We all had to do that.

[Mary Robinette] My… So, the first novel I published, Shades of Milk and Honey, is the fourth novel that I wrote. When the UK edition came out and they asked me if I wanted to do anything different, I'm like, "Well, yes, in fact." So that novel, the UK edition is two chapters longer than the US edition because I had a better idea of how to do endings. But every novel I do is an iteration of like, learning where my weakness was. So I think that's the thing… Like, when I say do the easy setting, I don't mean for the entire novel and don't… But what I mean is pick something… Pick one area. Just one area to improve, when you're thinking. Like one area to stretch in, and focus on the things that make you… That give you joy. Chase that. Rather than doing the thing that I see a lot of writers do in their early career, they put so much effort… Focus on "I gotta have an original idea. It's gotta be original, it's gotta be new and exciting." So, as a result, the emotion that they're trying to evoke in the reader is that writer is clever. Which is… That's like wanting someone to say, "That person is funny." Instead of trying to…

[Dan] Instead of trying to make them laugh.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[Dongwon] One last point I want to make on this, and to contradict myself a little bit. I do really want to encourage people, though, that when it comes to writing that first book, if you have an idea and you're excited about it, and it's an ambitious project, swing for those fences, right? Like, go for the big thing. Don't go half measures. Kind of talking about Howard's point a little bit, resolve to not have a regret about it. Just do the thing! If it doesn't work out, you still learn so much in that process. Then it's on to the next book. Right?

[Dan] Yeah. Given that we've raised the specter of the opportunity cost, I do want to point out, the more you practice this, the more you do it, you're going to have better and better ideas every time. So don't worry that you're burning your best idea too early. Because 10, 20 years from now, you're going to have such better ideas than that one, and so many other cool things to do.

[Dan] Anyway, we are going to stop now for our book of the week. Which is actually a musical theater production of the week. We were… Mary Robinette and I were absolutely just geeking out about what turns out to be one of our shared favorite musicals of all time. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] Follies, by Stephen Sondheim. I love this musical so much. The idea is it's an old vaudeville house… Like a Ziegfeld follies kind of thing. It's shutting down, and all of the old performers are coming back for a reunion. So the whole thing is told in present day and flashbacks. You get to… They have cast present day elderly actors and their younger selves. It's a fascinat… It's like beautiful and heartbreaking. Some of the singers can't hit the high notes that they used to be able to hit anymore. But the depth of their performance is so much more. So it's… When we're talking about the evolution of a career, this thing that we had just been geeking about is a beautiful portrait of that.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite songs in the show is called The Story of Lucy and Jessie. Where it is a woman singing about how now she is older and more experienced and much more interesting, but she doesn't have her youth and energy, whereas the youth and energy person was such a bland, boring person that nobody wanted to talk to, and how she can never be happy because she can never combine those two parts of herself. The way that it looks at age and youth and early career and late career is stunningly cool.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Follies by Stephen Sondheim. You can find it on many different forms of media. I am a big fan of the original cast. Dan is a fan of the new cast.

[Dan] I do prefer the original cast, although the new cast does have Bernadette Peters on it. She really hits it out of the park. So. Awesome.

[Howard] I arranged music for an a cappella group, when I was [hhhhh] 25 years younger than I am now. They did a song called Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home. Nine guys. At the end of the song… One of the guys was a contra tenor, who just killed it. Squeaking up there in the stratosphere. Another guy who was a… one of the sons of the university's music faculty. Amazing voice. End of that song, they are scatting and noodling around. The two of them duel very briefly with notes that most of us can only admire from a great distance. It was an amazing and beautiful thing. I caught up with the other singer a few years ago, and found out that… Boy, not five years after singing that, he developed vocal nodes and could no longer perform at all. But now works as music faculty. I have the recording that I was present for, where he was… I almost have guilt, because I wonder if the things that he was doing to his voice to hit those notes that the other guy was just born to hit might have been part of the problem. But that thing that he was able to do in that portion of his career will always be with me, will always be with him. It always exists. But he had to take a different path. When we talk about the evolution of careers, we have to recognize that the path that we think that we are on, the path that we have laid out for ourselves, is not the path that we will be on 20 years from now. It is going to change. We can't hit it regret free. There will always be… I said, life is grief.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You get to grieve for the path untaken. You get to grieve the expenditure of what you thought was the best idea when you couldn't write it as well as you could now. But you also get to rejoice in where your feet are right now. You've got to be agile and keep them moving.

[Dongwon] The thing I want to say about that, though, is also there's no wasted time. You always learn from that experience. You can take so many lessons from a moment that… I'm a big believer that the only way, literally the only way we learn new things is through failure, right? You hit that wall and you learn lessons from how you hit that wall. You pick yourself back up, and then you keep moving forward. Right? So. Even if it doesn't work out, take the lessons from it, right? Examine it to see what other things you could have done, how you could have pivoted from there, and do that next time.

[Dan] We… I don't want to spend too much time on this specific topic, because we're going to dedicate an entire episode to it later in the year, called Rebooting Your Career. But for now, we've talked about the early stage of your career, let's talk a little then about career planning. So another question I'm going to pitch right at Dongwon. Once you've got that first book, maybe you've made your first sale you've done some self-publishing and found some success. How do you plan for the next stage?

[Dongwon] This really is one of my very favorite topics. It's one of the things I love most about my job is working with writers to help them strategize about how do we want their career to look. What are we planning for this first book, for the book after that, for the contract after that, for the contract after that? Right? So, roughly, generally with most of my clients, not necessarily everybody, with most of them, we have a sense of here's what we're doing now, here's what we're doing in five years, here's what we're doing in 10 years. Right? Now, the thing is, publishing is a system that is designed to be extremely random. Right? What makes a book work is highly unpredictable. What makes a book tank, also highly unpredictable, right? So when you're thinking about this… There's two things you need to keep in mind, is, always have a plan. Always know where you're trying to get to. But also be ready to throw that plan out the window at the drop of a hat. Often, what we're doing is, when we're planning for those decision points, right? You're looking at… We have contract one, contract two, contract three. Then, what you're doing is, at each of those junctures of when we're deciding what are we going to write next, the thing we're solving for is having options. Right? We're not solving for we will do A to B to C. What we're doing is solving for, okay, once we do this, what are the three moves we can make at that point? How do we make sure that the first move we make doesn't close doors for the next move we want to make? Right? If we get that movie deal, then we can do this. If the book sells five copies, then we can also do that. Right? So you're keeping all those things in your mind, and trying to build out a little bit of a decision tree. But you will go completely mad if you try to map the whole thing. So you pick your path, but then you're ready to know, we can pivot wherever we need to. Right?

[Mary Robinette] This is a really important point that you… Having those options open. One of the things that I see writers do at the beginning of their career is that they pin their identity and their… They brand themselves around their first project. That is, let me just say, a mistake. Because the first project is unlikely to be the first one that takes off. If George RR Martin had done that, we would all be looking… His entire brand would be vampires on a steamboat.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because that was… Fever dream.

[Dongwon] It's a very good book.

[Mary Robinette] It's a very good book. It's not what he became known for. I did a lot of Regency stuff, but one of the things that I did, very consciously, when I was… This is, speaking of closing doors. We sat down and talked about book 2. It was a sequel. But the classic sequel in a romance is that the sister of… Or the best friend of the main character now becomes the POV character in the next book and does… It's another romance structure. We made the conscious decision not to do that, because had I done that, I would have… That would have put me on the romance path very, very firmly. I like romance, but I didn't want that to be the only thing I did. So we made the conscious decision to not do that. That's the kind of thing that you're looking for.

[Dongwon] My general rule of thumb, strategy, is you have book 1. You do book 2 in a way that's similar to book 1, either same category, similar voice, similar topic, to prove you can do it, you can do it again, and then in book 3, prove you can do something else. Right? That's generally how I think about it. It's not always that pattern, but it's why… If we're going to do a series, I like duologies, I like linked standalones, I don't like a seven book series. Right? Because if you have a seven book series, then you're trapped in that for seven years of your career at a minimum. Right? So if you're doing track… So, what you want to keep is maneuverability. You want to keep the ability to jump to something else if things go wrong. Or even if they go right, sometimes the right move is to jump to something else.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to… Excuse me. I want to jump in on this because I very specifically went maybe much farther over the line then I should have with my second project. My first thing was first person, modern day, contemporary horror. Then the second project was third person, post-apocalyptic science fiction. Multiple viewpoints instead of one, female protagonist instead of male. Like, I made it as different as I conceivably could because I wanted to not be pigeonholed. I wanted to present myself as the person who can do anything. Which has had both pros and cons. It is very difficult for a giant audience to follow me book to book. Because not everyone's interested in the same things that I am. On the other hand, I've got a historical fiction that came out last year. Everyone was like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Of course he's going to jump out of the other four genres he does into a brand-new one, because that's the brand he's established for himself."

[Mary Robinette] I looked… So, when I was… When we were first talking, it was like, "Do I want to do a Tad Williams career, where every single book is different, or do I want to do a series, genre, where you are doing a series?" I write all over the map in my short fiction. So the thing that I have been doing is I've been doing the same, but different, path. So like book 1, straight up Re… Austen pastiche, book 2 is a courtroom thriller… Or is a wartime novel, spy novel, disguised as a Regency romance. Like, the same is the set dressing and the characters. That is my same. My plot structure shifts. When I got to Ghost Talkers, I kept a plot structure that was similar to one that I had already done, and I stayed in historical, but I jumped forward by 100 years. I also knew by that point that what people liked in my books was that I had happily committed couples. So I stuck with that. With the Lady Astronaut books, it's science fiction, but it's still historical. That, again, it's like that is a very conscious choice. The book that I have coming out this year is another Lady Astronaut book, but the one that I am working on for next year is… It's straight up science fiction, but I am deliberately giving it a 1920s noir feel, in terms of the aesthetic, to retain that sense of familiarity, to make it easier. So, I think of it as leaving breadcrumbs for my readers to follow me. Which has…

[Dongwon] I mean, really what this is is having a brand.

[Dan] One of the things we talk about a lot, and that new writers hear all the time, is don't chase market trends. Don't try to write what you think people want. This advice sounds like it's the opposite of that. Because you're saying, I know what my readers like. But it's because they're your readers. You're not trying to chase an entire market. You have found your people and you are giving them what they want. Which is a very different thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I am looking at expanding out of that, because I'm like, I don't want to stay just with the historical Regency. Which, obviously, I love my Regencies. But I… Like, how do I bring science fiction in? How do I bring mainstream people in? Like, I'm trying to add each time without losing my core.

[Dongwon] I talk a lot about how all of publishing is reducible to one question. That question is, who is this book for? Right? So what you're doing isn't writing to the market. It is being very intentional about who this book is for. You know this is my current audience. I want to grow my audience. I want to push my audience to also follow me to these other places. So, sometimes when you make the big jumps, as Dan was talking about earlier, it can be hard to hang onto that audience even though you know who the audience of the new stuff is, right? So in terms of transitioning and growing, I think there are two very different strategies that can work really, really well.

[Mary Robinette] I did lose people when I didn't do the traditional romance structure for the second book.

[Dongwon] I mean, you always will, right? Because you take risks when you write a new book, otherwise, why are you writing a new book? So, there are chances you will lose people, but you will also gain people, hopefully.

[Howard] When this episode airs, I'm six months away from ending the 20 year Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. In terms of career decisions, that is a conscious decision built around… Big surprise, making money. The two words…

[Dan] That's a good career goal.

[Howard] Schlock and mercenary…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Either of those words should suggest that I'm all about the art. When you reach the… When you get to the bookshelves and you are holding something and you see that it is the first book of three, or the third book of 10, and book 4 isn't out yet… There is a group of people who won't spend money yet. Well, I'm right now, in print is book 15 out of 20. I need to be able to say, "The end." And have everything in print, because there is a group of people whose money I don't have yet.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That is…

[Dongwon] There's 10 of them. You're going to get them.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm coming after all of them at once.

[Mary Robinette] I've never bought one of your books.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you keep giving them to me, so…

[Howard] But this… So, this decision, I need to be able to say the end. There are people who are asking me, "So, what comes next?" No matter what the answer is, there's a group of people who won't be satisfied with that. The most important person for me to satisfy right now, and Sandra and I have had this conversation several times, is me. What do I want to do next? Part of what I want to do, and this is the sort of thing that's dangerous to put on the Internet in a recorded permanent sort of format. One of the things that I would love to do is no longer be putting out a daily comic strip. Because there are things that I can't do while I have that deadline pushing down on me. But the thing that has set me apart from almost every other comic strip out there is that it has been daily and has updated without fail. So, am I sacrificing my brand in order to do the thing that I want? Or am I making the right career decision? As of this recording, I don't have a good answer to that.

[Dongwon] I mean, but this brings up a really important point, that the thing about strategy is that brands evolve. Right? They have to evolve. If you remain static over time, you don't have a strategy, you have a pattern. Right?

[Mary Robinette] My brand when I began was the puppeteer who was also Regency. Right now, it is the writer who can talk about tea in space.

[Dan] Yeah. Which, there's a huge market for that. Who knew? We… Excuse me. We have let this episode run a little long because it is the very first one and we wanted to introduce the whole year. I do want to end on the point that Howard hit on. Which is, first of all, as you're planning your career, a) make sure you have a plan, but b) make sure it's something that you love. Because otherwise, why are you doing this? Goodness knows, there's not enough money in it to make it worthwhile. But if it's something that you genuinely love to do, that is what is going to see you through everything else that happens to you.

[Dan] So, we want to leave you with some homework. Let's get that from Dongwon.

[Dongwon] I think the homework is, a lot of times when I talked to a writer I'm considering working with, I'll ask them this question of whose career do you wish you could have if you look out in the market today. When I asked that question, I'm not asking who do you want your books to read like. It's not about the style of the books, it's not about the voice of the books, or even the subject matter. It's look at their career. Look at how fast they publish, what kinds of book they publish, kind of who they're publishing for, are they doing YA and adult, are they doing like all different genres, categories, and things like that? So, take a look around at the market and really pick one or two authors. Really examine how have they published. What years… What was the pace of that, when did they start taking off, and those kinds of things. Consider, is that the life that I want, or do I want something else? Then that will help start helping you inform a decision about the career choices you're looking over the next year, five years, 10 years.

[Dan] I would add to that, look at the other ways they spend their time. Are they the kind of person that does a lot of news stuff, a lot of convention appearances, do they make most of their money speaking rather than on their sales? Kind of look at all of that peripheral stuff as well.

[Dongwon] Are they doing a lot of school visits? Yeah, exactly. What's their lifestyle like, too? Do you want to live that life? Right? Do they have a day job? Or, all they are, are chained to a desk, putting out books every six months?

[Dan] Awesome. Well, great. This is been a cool episode and we're excited for the rest of the year. Please join us next week when we're going to have Brandon Sanderson and our 2020 special guest, Victoria Schwab. We're going to talk about theme and subtext. It's going to be awesome. So, for now, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/

Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.

[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.

[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.

[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.

[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.

[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/17/14-7-how-weird-is-too-weird/

Key Points: How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling? Typically, you get one bye, you can ask the audience to believe on big thing. Everything else has to follow from that. Beware of "Oh, it's magic" so anything goes. This depends on the expectations of the audience, and the genre you are writing. But even serial urban fantasy has one major shift, not anything and everything. Make sure the audience knows where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes the worldbuilding is too weird the first time, but re-reading is okay, because now you know something about what is going on. Sometimes you can do more weird things by connecting them to the first bye. Think of a budget -- weirdness, boring, anything that challenges the reader, they all draw on your budget. Too much, and you lose the reader. Learning curve... add weirdness slowly, building off other weirdness.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How Weird Is Too Weird?

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] My friends used to call me How Weird.

[Ooh! Garbled… Starting this podcast]

[Howard] Yeah. How Weird is too weird. Just…

[Brandon] Oh, no. Sorry. No.

[Howard] That was like fourth grade.

[Margaret] [garbled]

[Howard] And junior high.

[Brandon] Well, let's… We're going to theme this again. This is our year of worldbuilding. So we're talking about how weird is too weird, specifically in our worldbuilding. Let me just ask, how do you, and I kind of want to bounce this off Margaret first, because she's the one we've heard the least from regarding these topics. How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling?

[Margaret] Well, it depends to a certain extent on the media that I'm working on for that particular project. But in television, one of the rules of thumb that I sort of inherited from my training in my experience is the idea that you get one bye. Like early on, you're setting up, the beginning of your film or the pilot episode of your show, and you get to ask the audience to believe one big thing. Everything else has to sort of follow on from that. A show that… I mean, an exciting example of a show that no one has seen because it never actually turned into a TV show, but I was working on a show called Day One for NBC. The bye for that was these giant alien monoliths suddenly erupt out of population centers all over the Earth. This is the vanguard of an alien invasion. It would have been a really cool show. But that's the one thing we get. We don't get that and armies of flying elephants and dolphins can now talk. Like, you get the one thing. Past that, everything either has to come from those monoliths and the alien invasion, or it's got to be rooted in the familiar world that the audience is already going to be familiar with.

[Brandon] That's very interesting.

[Howard] There's a flipside to that coin that gets cited a lot by apologists and whiners of all flavors. That's, "Oh, you can believe in a universe that has dragons, but you can't believe in a sword that cuts through a horseshoe?" Well, you didn't say it was a magic sword. A sword can't cut through a horseshoe. I will totally believe in dragons, because they gave me… That was their one bye. If they want to tell me that dragons cut through horseshoes, that's fine, I can probably absorb that, and say that their one bye is magic exists and that includes creatures. But you have to pay attention to this. You don't just get… You don't just get to throw these things down because, oh, hey, it's magic.

[Brandon] So let me ask you, Margaret, do you take that same perspective on fiction? The one bye? Or would you kind of say that's a short form, television thing?

[Margaret] I think it depends a lot on the expectations of your audience, and the genre that you're writing in. When I'm working on Bookburners, this is very much designed to be in the vein of something like X-Files or Warehouse 13. It's that urban fantasy sort of set up. So the assumption is that the world works basically the way that we assume that it does, but also there is this encroaching magical force that is coming into the world that causes this. We don't get that and the major power… And the Vatican doesn't exist. You can only shift around so many things before it starts to feel arbitrary. What you want to do is make sure that you're setting your audience up in a way that they know where they're standing and what they're doing.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. As you were talking, I was thinking about China Mieville. Like, with the new weird movement, the basic bye is stuff is going to be weird. We're going to have women whose heads are bugs. Not the head of a bug, but their head is a bug. But gravity works the way gravity works. Electricity works the way electricity works. So if China were attempting to do stuff is going to be weird, I'm not going to explain the physiognomy of any of these creatures. But and also gravity doesn't work the way you think it does. That would be two byes. So I think that you can do kind of a blanket bye in terms of this is sort of a genre expectation thing.

[Brandon] Right. Say, I'm thinking of like Hitchhiker's, right? Where the… There is not one bye. The bye is nothing will make sense, but it will be funny. But I do think genre expectations are a big deal here, right? When you write… You pick up an epic fantasy that's a 1000 pages long, it's secondary world, you are going on board for I'm going to get a lot of worldbuilding. When you sit down to watch a new show that's been pitched to you as a science-fiction thriller with a singular hook premise, you want that premise to be the focus of the show, not and then this other thing.

[Howard] You brought up Hitchhiker's… I assume you're talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes. So much weird. The reason they get away with it is that the narrative voice would take some of the weirdest… Hey, boy, this came at you from left field. I'm going to now use this… Use the opportunity to explain it, as an opportunity to be funny and to satirize something you didn't see coming. So as that extreme weirdness happens, the voice sells it in service of something else. I think that's where I draw the line.

[Brandon] The voice is the familiar.

[Howard] You want to make it weird…

[Brandon] In the Hitchhiker's Guide.

[Howard] The voice is the familiar.

[Margaret] You, as the reader, have a literal guidebook to all of the strange stuff that is going on in those books.

[Mary Robinette] Plus, the point of Hitchhiker's is that you are Arthur Dent. So the expectation that has been thrown down is everything is just going to seem strange.

[Brandon] Everybody else gets this but you. That's kind of the joke.

[Brandon] Let me ask this, then. Have you guys experienced media or read books or stuff where the worldbuilding was too outlandish for you? That it was hard for you to get into?

[Howard] Yes. I'm going to apologize for it, because I loved it anyway. Iain Banks, Look to Windward. The opening sequence is a war, battle thing, in which we are just immersed in the POV of an alien who is essentially a six-legged giant ferret. He never says, "These are six-legged giant ferrets." I never get all at once a description to tell me where I am. I read the first chapter and was lost as to who I was until I got to the end and thought… Oh, I was actually kind of disappointed. Oh, these aren't people. This had felt very human. Then I read it again. Reading it again, I was fine. I felt like I was the target audience for this. I was absolutely the target audience for any Iain Banks' novel. But that first chapter was too weird on first reading. Iain Banks… His one bye for me is if you have to read it again, read it again, this is going to be fine. You're going to love this. It's going to be okay.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which, Mary, you're going to give to us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, this is The Nine by Tracy Townsend. Which is, for me, right on the edge of too weird, but in ways that are… I, like, finished the book and have been recommending it quite a bit. It's… It feels like London, and it feels like a steam punk London, but there are these other creatures that are going through. It's a… It's taking advantage of the many worlds theory, so it's a version of our London, but definitely on a different world, and there are these creatures that have their eyes in their feet.

[Brandon] That's different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And, so there's all of this very solid worldbuilding that goes from that single premise. But my brain is like, "Why would that evolve?" Like, and then trying to picture it, and trying to understand how it all works. So they tend to be arboreal, they do a lot of moving through trees. They have ferocious teeth, but they have no eyes in their head. Their eyes are in their feet. It is… It's… For me, like, I think one of the lines for me on the weird factor is how much time I spend trying to picture it in my head and if that's going to throw me out of the story. Now I pitch this is a book of the week because I think it's a gre… Terrific heist novel. It's got great character building. The steam punk makes sense. Frequently, when I read steam punk, it's like, this does not… Why… None of this makes sense. There's so much to love about this book. But if you are looking for something that is like, "All right, things are going to get weird," the nonhuman races in this world are weird. There's also tree people who are… Will shave their bodies, plane their bodies to take on specific shapes in order to cater to humans. It's like… There's so much stuff in this book. It's just filled with "Whaaat?" There's a ton of that. But mostly the reason you read it is because great characterization. And just a thrilling heist novel.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was The Nine.

[Mary Robinette] By Tracy Townsend.

[Brandon] So tell me this. Mary, when you're working on short fiction, how do you budget your weirdness?

[Mary Robinette] So. The… It's actually surprisingly like television in that you do pretty much get the one bye, you get the one thing that is this is weird. Mostly because everything that you put on the page, you have to spend words on to explain to the reader. So when I'm trying to get the reader to understand something, I know that it's going to throw them out of the story. Proportionally, that's going to take more of the narrative than it would in a novel. Even the same number of words. So I tend to also do one bye for short fiction. Usually, the short story is something that is exploring that one idea.

[Brandon] Something Margaret said earlier really kind of hit with me. We will have a podcast later in the year about how to make a story have worldbuilding depth rather than just breadth, which is the idea of taking a concept and digging deep into it. You said earlier this monolith story that you were working on. The idea being that you get your one bye as the monolith, but that doesn't mean that has to be the only weird thing. You are just going to connect any other interesting science fiction/fantasy elements through the monoliths.

[Margaret] Right, right. The idea in this series, and I think I can safely talk about what we might have done had this been a thing. My apologies, Jesse Alexander, if I'm spilling anything here. But in the pilot episode, there are these giant monoliths. Everybody is dealing with the fact that these things have erupted out of the ground. After that, other strange things start to happen. But it kind of comes at you one at a time. I think that speaks to what Mary was talking about on the short story. The idea of that subjective line of how weird is too weird… When you lose your audience, it's too weird. Anything up to that point, not too weird. When I started in film school, one of the things they told us was that the only firm rule of screenwriting is that you can't be too boring for too long.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Try to cut the boring stuff.

[Howard] That's a really good rule for everything.

[Margaret] Yeah.

[Brandon] I thought about this a lot when I've been teaching my class. I've said to my students, worldbuilding is the place where you generally are given more leeway. If you can keep your characters relatable, it doesn't matter how weird it gets as long as that character remains familiar. Now, sometimes, that character you want to be part of the weird, and then you're going to do other things to ground us. I really like what we've come up with with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, where the guy is the normal, and everything else can be a little weird, or a lot weird.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… I'm thinking about this in terms of budget. Let me give you an analog… Or analogy. The concept of social capital. People will often ask me, "Oh, will you plug my Kickstarter?" Well, I have a limited amount of social capital. If I plug your Kickstarter, then I'm digging myself into a hole when the time comes to plug mine. As you are writing, as you are introducing weird things, as you are spending time on exposition, but it really needs to be exposed. As you are spending time on navelgazing, but you really want to dig into this emotion. All of these things are coming out of a budget. I don't know how exactly readers quantify the budget as they are reading, or television viewers quantify that budget, but if you think about it as a budget, you are doing a thing that is challenging the reader, and if you go too far, you lose them. Boring is challenging. Because a slog is challenging. How weird is too weird? When you've gone over budget, it's too weird.

[Brandon] Yeah. I would rely a lot on your beta readers, on early looks at things. Also, I think learning curve… We haven't even touched on in this, but I do think if you add your weirdness on slowly, building off of other weirdness, then you have things that feel perfectly normal by the end, that if you would have thrown it at the reader in the first chapter, you would have been in trouble.

[Brandon] We're going to do our homework. Margaret, you've got our homework this time.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework today is to… Well, your homework today, if you choose to accept it. Take a project that you are working on. Figure out what your one bye is. Can you narrow it down to one science fictional or fantastical element that is the core to the story you are telling, and have everything flow from that?

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.38: How to Find and Use Alpha Readers

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/23/13-38-how-to-find-and-use-alpha-readers/

Key points: Alpha and beta readers? Alpha readers, you trust to read a rough draft, to be honest and give you helpful feedback. Beta readers read a more polished version and you get their feedback. Or, alpha readers are industry professionals, while beta readers are test audience. Alpha readers are agents and writing groups. "You'll have your own definitions." Alpha readers understand the form. Where do you get them? Writing conferences. Book clubs. Face-to-face or online critiques? For alpha readers, back-and-forth, face-to-face is better. Beta readers, online feedback is okay. Don't forget targeted experts! Be aware that bad critiquing can ruin books! To get the right feedback? Make sure you and the other person can argue and articulate different opinions and understand what the other person is saying. Send it to the right people. Ask your readers to just give you their reaction, you will diagnose the problem. Look for people whose strengths complement your weaknesses. Use tiered questions, get their reaction, then drill down for specifics. Put pins in the good parts! Use targeted beta readers, who are as close to the character's experience as possible.

( Who wants to read this? )

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm… Um… I haven't actually finished today's chapter yet.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Valynne, you were going to define for us alpha, beta readers, that sort of thing.

[Valynne] I think sometimes people call them… Use that… Use alpha beta interchangeably. To me, on alpha reader is generally maybe one person whom you trust to read what you're writing. It's not polished, it's just rough draft. You throw it at them, they tell you what they like. You trust them to be honest and trust that they will give you feedback that is helpful. Beta readers, I would say, I like… I consider a beta reader someone… It's at the… Your manuscript is at the stage where you've gone through, you've done some edits, you've polished it a little bit more, and then you're sending it to beta readers to get their feedback. These people can be other writers in a critique group, it can be family members, it can be friends. I think it's good to have someone who is going to give you honest feedback and good feedback such as other writers in a critique group.

[Brandon] We'll talk about how to get that out of them.

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] Then, also, have a cheerleader. Someone who just loves everything you write. I think writing can be hard, so it's nice just to have someone who tells you what things they absolutely love about your writing.

[Brandon] So, today we'll talk about kind of alpha and beta readers. Because you'll have your own definitions, listeners. I have a starker line between them than Valynne. Alpha readers are industry professionals. Beta readers are test audience. For me. So, for me, if you are my agent, you're an alpha reader. You are reading a book before it's done to give me feedback. A beta reader is, you probably aren't an industry professional, you're a fan, you read the book to just give a reader response when it's in a close to finished form.

[Dan] That's kind of how I split them up as well. Because the two groups give very different kinds of feedback. There are people that I use as beta readers that I know if I send them my first draft, all the advice and all the feedback they give me is going to be weird, and often going to be wrong. Because they don't know how to read a first draft. They will identify big problems that I know are big problems and they will start suggesting solutions. That's not what I want. Instead, I send it to my writing group and to my agent.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. Where do you get your alpha and beta readers?

[Valynne] I think that one of the best ways to find critique groups, for example, is to go to writing conferences. Any… You're already among people who write and a lot of times are people looking for critique groups. You can do critique groups online. You don't necessarily have to live close to each other. So, I think that's one of the nice places to find someone to…

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Do you usually use… Do you do in face critiques and Internet critiques, or do you do only Internet critiques? How's it for you?

[Valynne] When I first started writing, I used to do a critique group once a month. We would bring pages, we would sit… Everyone would come to the critique group with those pages read, and we would talk about… Give… Go person by person, give the feedback. These days, it's really hard to find the time to do those kinds of critiques, so we are still critiquing each other's work, but sometimes it's more a full draft of something that's about to go to print or something like that. So a lot of it is more online now.

[Brandon] Dan, where do you find them, and is it in person, online for you?

[Dan] My group right now is… My alpha readers are my agent, who I found by querying an agent. Then 2 other authors that I have just met at writing conventions over the years. Wendy Tolliver and Matt Kirby, who are both fantastic YA authors. We got together and formed a writing group. So that was just kind of networking interactions at conventions. A lot of… Like what Valynne's talking about. That's all in-person stuff. My beta readers, I've got a group of about 6 to 8 people that I will send every draft to once I think it's ready for public consumption. That's all online, and they will give me feedback online. I will also, for every book, have a group of kind of targeted experts that I feel like I need specific advice from. That changes book to book, but I think I can talk about that later.

[Brandon] We'll talk about that after the break.

[Howard] For me, alpha is in person, and beta can be in person but functions fine online, asynchronously. Alpha… And that, for me, that's the distinction. It's got to be completely synchronous communication with alpha because there's so much back and forth. When I'm critiquing Bob Defendi's work, often what I am telling him is I think this is what you are trying to accomplish with this chapter. I get the sense that that is what this chapter is for. I feel like it didn't do that job because of this section right here, it's kind of confused me. Bob can then respond and say, "Oh. Well, wow, it's really weird that you got that idea."

[Laughter]

[Howard] And off he goes. That kind of feedback we have to go back and forth, because when Bob brings it, he knows there are things in here that are broken and I need my alpha readers to identify them, and the alpha reader… Brandon, as you said, industry professional alpha reader needs to be somebody who understands the form well enough to be able to say, "I know what this chapter should be trying to do because of the form that I know that we're working within."

[Dan] Now, this, I think is dangerous. All of us use industry professionals for alpha readers because we are industry professionals at this point, and it is invaluable. Over the years, I have come to appreciate how important it is to have that back and forth conversation, when I can say, "Okay, this character doesn't work at all and I think it's for these reasons. What do you think?" And then the person, the author, will say, "Well, actually, this is what I intended." Those are very important. But I remember when we, Brandon and I, had our writing group in college. We were trying to do that and we didn't know what we were talking about, and we ended up ruining some books.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Which I think is maybe just inevitable and part of the learning process, but it is something to watch out for.

[Brandon] It's way more dangerous for discovery writers, I've found, than for outliners. My books didn't get ruined, but I ruined books. Because I said, "Try this." Then they did, and it was the wrong thing entirely. Let me say where I've got mine, and then I want to dig into this question. My alpha readers are still my writing group, the same group that I started with Dan in college, but then he moved away.

[Dan] Ha Ha! I became too big for you. [Chuckles]

[Brandon] We approached Eric James Stone, and they still meet in my house every week in person. In person's really important for me. I have about 70 beta readers. We'll use a group of between 20 and 50 for each book. We do an online Google spreadsheet that goes… That is chapter by chapter with questions for them to fill in. The beta read for Oathbringer ended up being 600,000 words of comments.

[Howard] Comments? Ha ha. Yep.

[Brandon] Fortunately I didn't have to sort through them. I have people that sorted through and pulled out the important ones.

[Dan] I don't have people, so my process is a lot simpler.

[Brandon] Let me ask, this one's really important. That gets us into, and you guys are going to appreciate this. How do you get the right feedback from a critique group or from alpha beta readers? How do you get them to give you what you need and not ruin your book?

[Howard] One of the things that I've learned through experience just in talking with people is that I can tell if somebody's going to be a worthwhile critique if that person and I can argue about a book that we have both read and articulate different opinions on the book and understand where each other is coming from, even though we had different responses to it. It's one thing, "Oh, yeah, I loved this book," and then it's just how much we loved this book. But if we are each picking at a different aspect of the book… You know, if you sit down with your friends and have a book club with them where you are reading books together and allowing yourselves to critique the books, you will find alpha and beta readers in that crowd, I think, pretty quickly.

[Dan] When I… One of the things that I try to do is make sure that I am sending it to the right people. So, for example, when I write a horror novel, I will make sure one of my beta readers is Steve Diamond, because he knows that genre inside and out. So I know that the comments I'm getting from him are going to be the kind of comments I'm looking for. Where is when I write like my cyberpunk stuff, I don't usually send it to him, I'll send it to somebody else. So that's kind of an early level just filtering system. Beyond that, I always tell my beta readers, not my alpha readers, just to give me their reaction. Don't try to fix this problem, just point it out to me. Tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, and why. Then let me… You tell me the symptoms and I will diagnose.

[Valynne] The other thing that I like to do is that I am very aware of my weaknesses as a writer. So I like to give it to people whose strengths are opposite of what mine are. I think that is really helpful for me because I know there are things I just miss. If it were up to me, I would write a book that was straight dialogue all the way through. I love writing dialogue, and half the time, my editor is saying, "Where are these people standing? What are they doing?"

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] "What are they wearing?"

[Laughter]

[Valynne] I'm just not good with details like that. So I think it's good to… You know, other people have other strengths. Ultimately, we want to be strong in all the areas, but we still have our own strengths, and so I have someone who is really good at pacing, I have someone who is really good with character development, and that's… If I'm struggling with a particular thing in a book, that's how I send it out to a beta reader.

[Dan] Now, with… Very quickly, when we have those face-to-face conversations with alpha readers, I use Wendy and Matt, and I will sit down and I will ask them tiered questions. "I'm not very happy with this scene. Do you like it?" I won't tell them why I'm not happy. Get their reaction first. Then they'll say, "Oh, yeah. There's something wrong with that." I'll say, "Well, I think it's this. What do you think?" Just kind of get deeper with every question. So that I'm not leading them on, but I can drill in specifically.

[Brandon] We've found… It's very useful to get general reactions from a group, and then ask specific questions. That's a big difference between alpha and beta readers, to me, is alpha readers I can go and say, "All right. This is obviously broken. Why do you think it's broken?" Beta readers, I would never do that.

[Brandon] We have to stop for our book of the week. Howard, you're going to tell us about Death by Cliché.

[Howard] Yes. Actually, Death by Cliché 2, Wrath of Con. That's spelled c-o-n. Our hero is trapped in a role-playing game. Like in the game universe, not stuck at the table on Thanksgiving. Trapped in the game universe, and the players, he discovers, are at a convention. But that's… What convention they're at is actually irrelevant, what's relevant is the adventure that's happening in the story, and the horrors of what happens when someone has an artifact that lets them control the weather.

[Brandon] Can I pick up book 2 and read it?

[Howard] Yeah, you can pick up book 2 and read it now. It's… I'm currently offer reading, I think, book 5 for Bob.

[Dan] Do you need to have read book 1?

[Howard] You don't need… Oh, sorry, that's the question. You don't need to read book 1. You don't need to read book 1. It reads very nicely as a comedic fantasy novel.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Somewhere, Bob is shouting, "Yes, you have to read book 1!"

[Howard] But you should buy book 1.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because supporting living authors.

[Howard] One of the things that I wanted to bring up about that whole series from Bob is that our writing group has changed over time as he's written these. What we found is that Sandra is the one he's going to for character motivation and often sensitivity reader issues, and I'm the one he's going to for wordsmithing, joke-smithing, the setups of the funny bits. The most critical piece that we've discovered as we've critiqued is that when there are things that we love, we put smiley faces in the manuscript because… Not just because Bob needs to be told, "Yay. You're a good writer. See, this part didn't suck."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But because when you are editing, it's easy to lose track of the things that made a chapter wonderful. We want to put pins in those so that they don't get broken during the edit process. That was long, sorry.

[Brandon] That's all right. Bob's a good friend of a lot of us here. We like him. He's funny and his books are funny. So you should all go read them.

[Brandon] You mentioned the term sensitivity reader, which Dan mentioned to me has been… kind of people have been shifting away from that.

[Dan] So, sensitivity reader is a phrase that became popular because as we started focusing more and more on diversity, and I know that Valynne wants to talk about this, so let me just say very quickly. We started… The idea is, if you're going to write about say a black person and you are not black, you are going to want to have someone who is read it so they can make sure that you are presenting their culture and their background correctly. However, we're not… Kind of the nomenclature is moving away from sensitivity to targeted beta reader, because really, it's just the same thing as I suck at writing cops, so whenever I write about police, I have two friends who are police officers or family of police officers that I give it to them and say, "Make sure that I got this right." It's the same thing in dealing with another culture or another ethnicity or another religion or whatever. So, just using one blanket term for all of them is a little more common now.

[Valynne] I think that the word targeted is very important because I think especially when were talking about writing diverse characters, we often tend to approach it like it's a paint-by-numbers, which it's not. It's not I know a Japanese person, I'm writing a Japanese character, so this Japanese person I know can represent the entire Japanese culture and everyone in it. For example, I was talking to Brendan's sister-in-law this morning and explaining that I am fourth-generation Japanese. What that means is that I do not speak Japanese. I am pure Japanese, but I do not speak Japanese. My experience is vastly different than someone who is first-generation Japanese whose second language is English. So, targeted means that when you're writing a character, try to find beta readers that are as close to that character's experience as you can get. Because you need to understand like the generation of the character, the geographical location of the character, and how that affects the character. There are so many things that make a huge difference. So the more accurately you can target that to beta readers, the better chance you have of not offending anyone and just presenting it accurately and with respect.

[Howard] At this point, fair listener, you probably recall several episodes we've done this year under the general heading of What Writers Get Wrong About, with that whole idea that as a writer, unless you have a subject matter expert, whether that's an astronaut or a police officer or a third-generation Taiwanese person, you are likely to get things wrong unless you have offer readers in that demographic who can help you get things right.

[Dan] Now I want… What Valynne said about being very specific is very important. I recently had a really interesting experience. I went down to Guadalajara for the book fair there, because I've got, among other things, one of my book series is about a Mexican-American hacker. The Bluescreen series. I used to live in Mexico. I have a lot of friends in Mexico, and importantly to this story, I used my Mexican friends as might targeted beta readers. They are not Mexican-American, they are Mexican. So the character ended up feeling very authentically Mexican, and the books have been huge in Mexico. The Mexican-Americans, like the Latino population here in the US, haven't really picked them up because it doesn't ring true to them. It rings true to Mexico, because that's who I used to make sure I got it right. So specificity is important.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and do our homework which Valynne is going to give us. You wanted someone to do this. Right?

[Valynne] Homework is to take something that you have already written. Identify something within your manuscript that you can send to a targeted beta reader for.

[Brandon] And then do it.

[Howard] And then send it to them.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/27/12-35-short-fiction-markets-with-spencer-ellsworth-and-guest-host-beth-meacham/

Key Points: The short fiction market has grown enormously. Where should you submit? Consider size of the audience, how much you get paid, and how shiny it is to you (attractiveness!). What's most important to you? Express yourself first, don't try to impress the editor or write like someone else. Short fiction teaches you to get the important stuff on the page, and shave off the unimportant stuff. Plus, it's fun! You need to read short fiction to know what's already been done, and then tell a new story. Finally, slap your muse. (aka don't write the easy story, look for a unique new story!)

( The Big 3/4/5/ became 10 or 20? )

[Howard] Who's got our writing prompt?
[Beth] Spencer does.
[Spencer] Okay. So. Since I assume a lot of you came here because you're Brandon Sanderson fans, anyway, and you like long stories, I want you all to think about a long story you really… The type of long story you really enjoy, the type of storytelling you like to see a big book, an epic, an epic of Gilgamesh type thing. Then I want you to sit down and write it in under 4000 words. See if you can communicate the same thing… The kind of thing that you think needs 500 pages, in 4000 words.
[Howard] Outstanding. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write short.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/06/11-45-elemental-issue-with-desiree-burch/

Key points: Issue as an elemental genre is a bit different. The driver is not so much emotion, but curiosity, let me think about that. How do you avoid being preachy? Remember that the first goal of a storytelling is to be entertaining. Issues raise questions, polemics answer them. Have empathy for your audience! The more specific a work gets, the more broadly it relates to people. To let a character deal with a major issue, consider making the main plot about something else (thriller, romance...). Use multiple points of view to show us the issue in the round.

( Behind the curtains... )

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to call this, because we're going to talk about it in two weeks…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Anyway as a subgenre, so… I'm going to let us go there. Mary, I'm going to have you give us some homework.
[Mary] Right. So what I want you to do is, I want you to get a magazine about a topic that you do not normally read. I want you to read the entire thing, cover to cover. Including the ads.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] Was that okay?
[Brandon] You just… That's all you want them to do, just read it?
[Mary] This time, you're just going to read it.
[Brandon] Take notes on the issues that arise, even if they are issues that come from the ads. We'll have you do something with that in a later week. All right. We want to thank our special guest star, Desiree Burch.
[Desiree] Thank you for having me here.
[Brandon] We want to thank our Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Whoo! Applause!]
[Brandon] And we want to thank you guys for listening. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: flammable

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/14/11-33-crossover-fiction-with-victoria-schwab/

Key points: Crossover fiction is fiction that has a primary audience and a much larger appeal. E.g. young adult fiction being read by adults, or vice versa. Crossover authors often write multiple genres. Write for a specific person, perhaps in a border zone. Include things that will work for multiple audiences. Some breaks are larger than others, e.g. between middle grade and YA. Part of it is what the reader is interested in. What's different? How much context or explanation is needed. What do the readers resonate with, usually emotional? Levels of reading intelligence and levels of subject material are independent. You can use different pen names for different genres. Diversify for safety. Try lots of different things. Watch for pivot points where you can move into a different arena.

( Where's the bridge? )

[Howard] Is this a time travel writing prompt?
[Mary] I think it is now.
[Brandon] All right. I guess that's our writing prompt. You gotta write a story about a book that can't be read until you are dead.
[Wow… That's bleak… Garbled]
[Brandon] Someone just did… Wrote a book to not be read until they die. I'm trying to remember. There… It was something in the news item.
[Mary] Well, Mark Twain's memoirs. He… They couldn't be read until 100 years after.
[Brandon] So either it's a story that you're going to write that someone can't read until a certain date or you can write about somebody who's dealing with that, if that's too morbid for you.
[Mary] I thought you meant that they couldn't read it… That the reader could not read it until the reader was dead.
[Howard] See, that's what I was thinking. The reader cannot read this book until they have died.
[Dan] That's how I interpreted it.
[Brandon] Okay. All right. All right.
[Mary] So what do you want to do, audience?
[Brandon] Whatever you want. We've got like seven in there for you. Thank you, Phoenix ComicCon audience.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: sweating

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.5: Query Letters

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/07/03/writing-excuses-6-5-query-letters/

Key points: a good query letter has a really strong description. Target a specific editor. Describe the genre and give your title. The plot synopsis shouldn't tell us every detail, just the most interesting things. It should reveal the hook, the genre, and the audience. The hook is what will keep us turning pages. Avoid telling us that we will keep turning pages, show us something that makes us want to turn pages. No marketing speech. Remember, no one trusts the salesman. The core is a good description that makes you want to read the book. Keep it simple and short. Make sensible comparisons. "A great query letter, then, is one that is going to pique your interest, and tell you just enough to make you want to read."
( Mr. Postman? )
[Dan] All right. Well, I think we have a fairly obvious writing prompt for today to close off with. Write a query letter based on whatever your current project is. Describe it very succinctly, give a good synopsis, try to hook an agent's attention, and see what you can come up with.
[Sara] And practice it a lot.
[Howard] In a mirror.
[Dan] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: fiddling

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

July 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.32: Short Story Markets
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.38: How to Find and Use Alpha Readers
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.5: Query Letters

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with audience

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

Writing Excuses 15.32: Short Story Markets

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

Writing Excuses 13.38: How to Find and Use Alpha Readers

Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

Writing Excuses 11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch

Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

Writing Excuses 6.5: Query Letters

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July 2025

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