Admittedly, novels can contain other types of writing: essays, for example, where the author or a character expounds on his or her opinions. But that kind of stuff should be used sparingly—some might say not at all—so dialogue and description are by far the main components of prose fiction.

Stories, Not Lists

Teaching our class at Clarion West, Lucius Shepard said several times that he approached description as “a little story.” (Lucius writes gorgeous description; I encourage you to read as much as his work as you can, and learn from a master.) After reflecting on what Lucius said, as well as on the thoughts of numerous other writers, I’ve come to the following formulation:

A descriptive passage is the story of a character’s encounter with a person, place, or thing.

Feel free to memorize that or have it tattooed on your forearm. Print it in 48-point type and hang it above your desk. The formulation may seem simple, or even obvious, but it’s still a valuable statement to keep in mind…and every part of the statement is important.

First of all, a descriptive passage is a story (or at least it should be). Too often, writers describe things just by making lists of details. For example, when you want to describe a person, you may be tempted to list facial features, body type, clothing, and so on.

But that’s not how we actually experience other people. We don’t encounter people as static lists of characteristics, we encounter them in a temporal sequence of perceptions and resulting reactions: i.e. as a story.

Pay attention the next time you encounter someone, whether it’s seeing someone at a distance or close up. For example, if you spot somebody from a distance, you can’t see small details; however, you might notice brightly colored clothing or the way the person walks, and general things like tall/short, fat/thin, male/female, etc.

Or circumstances may prevent you from gathering such information. For example, I’m writing this on a cold winter’s day when people on the street are all bundled up. From a distance, some people are obviously male and others obviously female, but many are not obvious at all. That’s important to notice…and it’s important to figure out which details make the difference. Those are the telling details that you can use in your writing. If you can identify someone as female from half a mile away, what factors make it so? If another person’s gender is hard to tell even close up, what contributes to that effect? These are details to tuck away in your memory so that they’re available when you want to describe a character of a particular type.

Temporal Sequence

Lucius Shepard gave our class an assignment: whenever you enter a room, pay attention to what you notice and in what order. This is easier said than done; usually when you walk into a room, you notice several things in close succession, so quickly that they seem simultaneous.

But they aren’t simultaneous. Your consciousness has a very low bandwidth, and simultaneity is generally too difficult to manage. (It takes serious mental practice, for example, to take in both sight and sound at the same time. It’s possible, but we almost never operate in that mode.) Instead we time-slice our attention: first we may notice a sound, then a sight, then a smell, then another sight, then a touch, and so on. That’s how we actually perceive the world…and if you want to depict a realistic encounter, that’s how you must write the descriptive passage. (You may make the artistic decision not to pursue realism, and that’s a perfectly valid choice. Just be aware that you’re making it.)

The temporal sequence underlying an encounter also includes reactions: emotional, mental, and physical. When you step into a bakeshop, and the smell of fresh baking envelopes you, you react. You smile and you breathe in deeply. Perhaps you remember some bakeshop from your youth, or the smell of your grandmother baking pies. Maybe then you actively look around the shop in search of cherry pies like Grandma used to make. Instead, you see a teenage girl who’s looking at the clock as if she can’t wait to get off work…and you wonder what she’s got planned that’s so much better than inhaling the shop’s aroma. And so on.

Perception: smell. Reactions: breathe in deeply; remember Grandma; look around. Perception: girl looking at clock. Reactions: wonder what she’s got planned; philosophize about ignoring aroma. Perception: girl asks, “Can I help you?” Reactions: step forward; try to remember what you came in to buy; look around again to see if anything reminds you what you’re there for.

This illustrates how people actually experience their lives. You don’t experience the bakeshop as a list of details; you perceive a single detail, then you react (with emotions, thoughts, memories, and physical actions), which leads to more perceptions, which lead to more reactions, and so on—a temporal sequence of perceptions and resulting reactions.

Point of View

But there’s another layer to this. “A descriptive passage is the story of a character’s encounter…” Typically, the character is your viewpoint character and that character’s personal traits exert a strong influence on both perceptions and reactions. As I said in a previous posting, architects notice architecture, botanists notice plants, and police notice “suspicious behavior.” The background and agenda of a character will change the nature of your descriptive passages.

For example, how do you write the bakeshop description if the person walking in is a boy with a crush on the teenage girl? He’s entering the shop in the hope of seeing her. In all likelihood, he won’t even notice the smell; all he’ll notice is her.

Will he notice that she’s staring at the clock? It depends on what sort of boy he is. One sort will only look at her body; another will look at her face without thinking about her expression; another will wonder what she’s thinking, but will go off on a fantasy that she’s dreaming of him, not just wishing for her shift to be over. The boy may never notice the baked goods at all…in which case, your descriptive passage shouldn’t mention them either. If you’re describing this scene from the boy’s point of view, it will ring a distractingly false note if you deviate from his viewpoint.

(You might say, “But it’s important for my plot that readers know there’s a giant wedding cake on the counter.” If so, then you have to find a way to bring the cake to the boy’s attention, or else you have to tweak the boy’s personality so that he’s someone who would notice the cake. This isn’t rocket science—you could just start the scene with the girl in a backroom, so that when the boy enters, he has time to look around before she shows up.)

While I’m thinking of it, there’s another important point to note: personal factors influence what a character notices, but they don’t override all other considerations. Even the most love-besotted boy will notice if there’s a zebra standing at the checkout counter. The same goes for other blatant oddities. In real life, humans can be monumentally oblivious, but in fiction, we ought to assume that big unusual things will be noticed by anyone.

Time’s Up

That’s it for this post, but there’s more to be said about writing description. Next month, we’ll look at pacing and what I call “wordspace”. In the meantime, I’ll open the floor to your thoughts on description. Expound away!

First of all, I want to assure you that I have been very good this year.  Really.  I’ve done A LOT of writing; I’ve put my butt in my chair just about every day.  (My butt’s actually a little flat and wide at this point for all the writing I’ve done.  But that’s probably more than you wanted to know.)  I’ve met my deadlines.  I’ve dutifully posted at my various blogs.  I’ve read a bunch, done a ton of research, and tried my best to keep my website up to date.  Oh, and I’ve been nice to my wife and kids and friends.  Just ask them.  Well, maybe don’t ask my teenager, but go ahead and talk to the others.

So, since I’ve been so good, I thought you might like to see my gift list.  It’s not too long.  Well, okay, it’s a little long.  But what do you expect?  I’m a novelist.  You want pithy, go to a short story writer.

Just kidding.  A bit of humor there for you.  You like humor, don’t you?  If not, I apologize.

Maybe I should get to my list….

First of all, I’d like a bestseller.  Which is not to say that I want you to give me a book that is a bestseller.  Not that I have anything against bestsellers.  They’re great.  I’m sure the authors who write them are very happy.  It’s just that, well, what I really want is for my next book to BE a bestseller.  Can you do that?  I mean, I’m sure you can do it.  You’re Santa, after all.  But it would be nice if you did that for me.

I’d also like a movie contract for one of my books.  Or several.  All would be great.  But that’s probably asking a lot.  Why don’t we start with one?

Nice reviews would be, well, nice.  I understand that we’re in a tricky area here.  I’m kind of asking you to bend people’s opinions, which might not be kosher.  (It doesn’t offend you when I use the word “kosher,” does it?  I hope not.)  Let’s do it this way:  if you could be really nice to the people who give me good reviews, and give broken glass and rusty nails to the people who crap on my books, that would be great.  (It doesn’t offend you when I use the word “crap,” does it….?)

Also, do you know Oprah?

There are also a few things I want that can actually be put under a tree.

Like a Hugo, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award.  I don’t need all three in one year (though that would be really cool!) but I would like to get started on a collection of shiny new hardware.

I should ask for other stuff, too, shouldn’t I?  I mean it’s not all about ego and money, is it?  It’s also about material goods.

I would love a new laptop.  A mac.  One of those really, really thin ones that’s lightning fast and wicked cool looking and mega-expensive.  I need it for work.  Seriously.

I’m also wondering about a new muse.  Not that I don’t like my old muse.  But she is getting a little long in the tooth, as they say, and I’m interested in writing some different stories and books this year, so I thought that a new muse might be in order.  I don’t know if that’s something your elves can make, or if one needs to be captured.  We might be getting into another of those tricky areas.  I’ll leave the muse thing to you; you know best.

And that’s all!  See, I told you it wasn’t too long.  It’s not like I’m being greedy or anything.  Thanks, Santa!

Best,

David

PS.  What do I REALLY want for the holidays this year?  Love and laughter, health and happiness; great successes in the coming year for my colleagues here at SFNovelists (and, yes, for me, too); story and book sales for the aspiring writers among our devoted readers; and peace, joy, and freedom for all the people of the world.  May all of you have a merry holiday!

David B. Coe
http://DavidBCoe.livejournal.com
http://www.DavidBCoe.com

I’m doing some graduate student mentoring at a university, helping a student with her thesis project and also instructing a couple of independent courses with her.  This is something I’ve done before at this school, and I enjoy it a great deal.  For the courses, I’ve assigned lots of reading — classics of speculative fiction for one course with another student, and most recently examples of terrific worldbuilding for this fall’s course.  And so I’ve gotten to re-read some of my favorite books in fantasy and sf.  This got me to thinking that it might be fun to share our favorite reads — books that we go back and read again and again because we love them that much.

It’s always dangerous for a writer to make a list like this, for the simple reason that with every book we leave off the list, we risk offending a colleague.  So let me say up front that none of my books are on my list, and I’m not taking it personally.  I don’t expect that my books will be on many (or any) of your lists either.  And I’m fine with that, too.  Just because it’s not on this list, that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the book.  It’s just that some books lend themselves (for me) to periodic re-reading.  Okay?  We good?  Phew!

Moving on…

My list of favorite books to re-read every now and then, in no particular order:

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card — Ender is one of my favorite heroes, and I find the storyline utterly compelling.  The second book in the original sequence, Speaker for the Dead, is also very good.  The other two books I found somewhat less compelling.  But this first one is brilliant.

Slow River, by Nicola Griffith — Her shifts in POV and voice are so masterful, and her character work is so good.  Reading this book is like taking a writing course.

Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien — I expect this one will show up on many people’s lists…

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay — Masterful worldbuilding, lovely prose, achingly beautiful story.  That rarest of things in epic, alternate world fantasy:  a stand alone novel.

The Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road), by Guy Gavriel Kay — See above.  I love Kay’s work, in large part because he proves false with every book the snobbish assumption that genre fiction can’t be literary.

Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert — The worldbuilding and political intrigues of these books totally do it for me.  Yes, they’re complex, at times to the point of bewilderment, and yes, after the third book the story becomes a bit too much for me.  But I love these three.

The Earthsea Trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore) by Ursula LeGuin — I just read these three again for the worldbuilding course.  They are gems.  Understated, quiet, but magnificently written and stirringly beautiful.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman — This is a somewhat controversial book.  I know lots of people who loved it and lots who hated it; very few in between.  I loved it and think the concept and execution are both brilliant.

I’ll stop there with my list — eight projects; fourteen books in all (if you count LOTR as a single book, as I do).  Not a round number, but those are the titles that come to my mind.

How about you?  What does your list of favorite re-readable books look like?

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Ha!

Seventeen years and more than a dozen contracted books later, I am that wiser, more experienced person I should have listened to more carefully when I was still a newbie.  There is no such thing as security in this business, career paths are not linear, advancement is not the absolute norm.  Writing, like any artistic career path, is subject to the whims of the market.  It is a series of fits and starts, successes and setbacks, triumphs and disappointments.  The good times are sweet and worth all the work necessary to achieve them.  The bad times pretty much suck.  I’m familiar with both.

But I didn’t intend this post as cautionary.  I’m not trying to sober you with bad news.  This is not a tale of woe.  It’s a tale of survival and, as such, it’s got a happy ending.

This has not been an easy year.  Last year I had several releases and enjoyed one of my more profitable years.  (Yes, I know:  writers don’t always talk about “profit.”  But the fact is, my art is also my business, and as much as I enjoy being creative, I also enjoy eating, and I prefer that my family live in a house as opposed to, say, a cave.)  This year I’ve had no original releases at all, though the final volume in my Blood of the Southlands trilogy, The Dark-Eyes’ War, will be re-released in paperback in December.  Instead, I’ve been preparing for the release next year of the first book in a new series that I’m writing under a new pseudonym.  (The series is the Thieftaker Chronicles, the book is Thieftaker, the ‘nym is D.B. Jackson.)  And I’ve been writing other stuff.  A ton of other stuff.

I’ve written short stories, I’ve written a middle-grade novel, I’ve written a contemporary adult fantasy, I’ve been revising a second contemporary fantasy, and I’m planning to outline a couple more Thieftaker books.  In short, I’m jumping from project to project, and I’m having a blast.

I worried at the beginning of the year that I might lose my focus, that not having a new release would leave me discouraged.  The opposite has been true.  It has allowed me to forget about the promotional side of things for a while and just focus on writing, which is what I most love to do.

I often tell aspiring writers, in the course of cautioning them about the difficulties of this business, that they should only write if they love it.  For most of us, writing is not incredibly lucrative.  Advances and royalties are not the steadiest, most reliable forms of income.  Previous success does not ensure future work.  So, if you want to write, make sure you’re doing it for the right reason.  Do it for the love of creating, do it because the characters in your head have to be given their day in the sun, do it to realize the promise of those wonderful stories burning a hole in your chest.

But while that’s what I tell people, the truth is that I’m not always so great at following my own advice.  After all these years, I have allowed myself to forget why I started in the first place.  This year, I’ve remembered:  I write because I love it.  And I have been living that passion again this year.

My career has not followed that steady ascent I had so naively envisioned years ago.  But the ups have been more frequent that the downs, and after seventeen years, I remain as enamored as ever with the career choice I made.  There is no way to put a dollar value on that.  And the cool little secret of this year is this:  Not only am I having fun, but I’m also setting myself up for future success.  I’m writing from my heart, I’m writing stories and books that I want to write.  Best of all, I like the material I’m churning out.  I think publishers will like it, too.

It turns out, all that advice I was giving and ignoring was pretty good after all.  Write because you love it.  Write because you have to in order to remain happy and sane.  Learn the business; be smart about your professional choices.  But never ignore the passion that got you here in the first place.  I needed an unusually quiet year to remember that last.  But remember it I have, and in unexpected ways this has turned out to be my most successful year ever.

In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what your motivation is. Motivation is motivation; it’s just a matter of how strong it is. People who want to be writers are generally charmed by the idea of being famous, or working from home, or imagining Jolie and Pitt being cast in the big screen versions of their books. I encountered a lot of them in my college fiction courses. A few are writers now. Most of them, however, went on to become doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs, once they discovered how hard writing was. And that was before they learned how lousy it pays.

People who want to write, however, have it a lot harder. Doing something else is a much more difficult option. I know, because I did something else for a long time, and spent most of that time wishing I had more time for writing, despite the fact that (as of this writing) I have yet to earn as much in seven years of publication (note that I am not including time spent before publication) as I earned in my first year as a banker. And first year bankers didn’t earn any more than teachers back in 1983.

If you want to be a writer, but aren’t yet afflicted with the disease of wanting to write, my advice is to run, now, as fast as you can, for the hills. Find something else to do before it’s too late. Bricklaying. Pest extermination. Sewer work. Anything, just as long as it pays. If you can’t help yourself and still want to write, my advice is the same. Just make sure you have the extra energy to get up every morning to write at the crack of dawn, or spend every free minute after dinner at your computer instead of watching Jersey Shore with your spouse.

And that your spouse doesn’t mind.

He was hugely important to me, but then how could he not be?  I was ten, exactly the right age for his juveniles, which are basically adventure stories for boys, six years after the last was published (Have Space Suit—Will Travel) in 1958.  You couldn’t go into a library in America in the ‘60s without finding every one of them in the children’s section.  I devoured them, and from them I jumped straight to Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, E. E. Smith, and the Golden Age.  A few years later I was reading Brunner, Ballard, and Delany. 

Without Heinlein, I might never have gotten to any of them.  Heinlein introduced me, and thousands of other readers (mostly boys, unfortunately, but that’s another post), to the language and ideas of true SF.  Andre Norton just wasn’t the same, though I loved her books as well.  Her SF was more lyrical and fantastic.  Heinlein’s was down to earth and full of common sense.  And he made the fantastic seem commonplace in a way that few writers have before or since, allowing the reader to go right to the heart of his characters and stories, but without losing any of the “WOW” so necessary for good SF.

A couple of years ago I had dinner with several other F&SF writers, half of whom were my age, and half of whom were younger.  For some reason the conversation turned to Heinlein, and we were all carping on the crap he turned out in his dotage, when one of the older writers said, “At least we have his juveniles.”

“Heinlein wrote YA?” asked one of the younger writers in stunned surprise.

Heinlein’s juveniles aren’t really YA, though you might make the case for Podkayne of Mars.  But the fact that this young writer writes YA and had never heard of, or read, any of Heinlein’s non-adult novels amazed her.  She’d read the later novels and hated them, and couldn’t believe Heinlein could write for a younger audience.  In fact, none of the other younger writers at the table had read any of Heinlein’s juveniles, or any of his Golden Age writing for that matter, basically because they detested his later books, the one’s that had come out when they were coming of age, so thoroughly.

They hadn’t needed to.  There is so much more SF available now, so many more writers applying the ideas and techniques developed by Heinlein and the other early greats, that I’m not sure it’s actually necessary to read them anymore.  Not to have a basic understanding of the genre, at least.  If you want to be well-read, then you certainly have to sample them.  And LeGuin, and Delany, and Tiptree, and Gibson, and Willis.  You don’t have to like any of them, but you do have to read them.

But if you want to be a writer or a fan rather than a scholar these days, then I don’t think you have to read Heinlein at all.  You only have to read what you like.

What do you think?  Does Heinlein still matter?

Finishing a book for me is utterly consuming.  As I’ve described it before, a book sometimes feels like a puzzle.  I start with the outline, or, to work within the metaphor, with the border pieces.  I set aside the internal pieces until later, and just get that broad exterior in place.  Once that’s done, once I have some sense of what the puzzle is going to look like, I start to fill in the middle.  It’s slow going at first — so many pieces, and so little sense of how they will ultimately come together.  There are fits and starts.  Sometimes I put a piece in one place only to discover later that it doesn’t fit there as well as I thought.  But the more it comes together, the better my understanding of what the final product will look like.  And as I come to the final chapters, the number of unused pieces diminishes, as does the number of gaps that need to be filled.  By the end of the book — the puzzle — which is where I am right now, fitting in those last pieces is easy, and I am in a rush to finish, to see the finished image.

This is an imperfect metaphor, of course.  My book outlines tend to be more informative about the content of the vast middle than the border of a puzzle could ever be.  And my progress in writing a book tends to be at least somewhat steady — certainly steadier and quicker than the early moments of putting a puzzle together would be (especially for me, since, ironically, I really suck at puzzles….).  Still, as a way of describing where my head is at right now, this works as well as anything else.  I’m trying to fit all those last pieces in place, I’m trying to meet a somewhat arbitrary and self-imposed deadline of July 1, and I’m desperately trying to make certain that when I’m done, there are no spare pieces left over — always a bad thing.

So, I hope you will forgive me for the belated posting and for the brevity of the post.  I will do better next month.

She Brushed Her Fiery Red Hair Out of Her Piercing Green Eyes

Here’s the thing: I almost never think about what color my hair and eyes are. Even when I look into a mirror, that stuff never enters my consciousness; I’ll notice if I need to comb my hair, but I won’t consciously note that my hair is the same color it’s been FOR MY WHOLE FRICKIN’ LIFE [1]. Same thing for my eyes—I’ll notice if they’re significantly bloodshot, but not that they’re the same-old same-old brown.

Yet I can’t count how many times I’ve seen stories by beginners, where the viewpoint characters pointedly mention the color of their hair and eyes, not to mention their “heart-shaped faces”, their “generous mouths”, and their “slightly too big noses”. [2]

I’ll grant that some people probably do take conscious note of exactly how they look, no matter how familiar the details are; some people care a great deal about the face they present to the public. It’s also easy to imagine circumstances where the details leap out at you—if you’ve just started wearing colored contact lenses, you’ll be very conscious of your new eye color whenever you look in a mirror.

But when I see “eyes and hair” passages in writing, they seldom have any in-context excuse. They read as if the writer felt obliged to give a physical picture of the character, so details were shoehorned into the prose without considering what the viewpoint character would actually notice.

The effect is to take readers out of the story. Instead of connecting with the believable thoughts of a particular person, the reader is suddenly presented with thoughts from…where? It’s nothing but an authorial intrusion, and it breaks the spell of the narrative. We can feel the writer forcing stuff into the story, not naturally but from a sense of, “I have to do this—readers will expect it.” What actually happens is that readers get disconnected, even if they don’t consciously realize why. It’s like when a bad stage actor gestures artificially to “indicate” some emotion.

How the Pros Do It

So what’s a good way to describe your viewpoint character? Usually, you don’t have to. In many books, the viewpoint character isn’t directly described at all.

I just pulled three books off my shelf at random and checked the first three pages of each to see if the viewpoint character was described. In two, there wasn’t a single word of description (although there were descriptions of people the viewpoint character met). In the third, there’s one vital detail: “He dug his claws into the snow.” This tells us that the viewpoint character isn’t human…but apart from that, there’s nothing to indicate what kind of creature he is.

On the other hand, all three books reveal plenty of psychological details. They show us how their viewpoint characters think, not how they look. One depicts a scheming politician debating how to manipulate another person. (This mental debate also gives us useful background info about the political situation…but we’ll deal with exposition in some future post.) Another book describes an unfortunate first-mate on a ship, fearful about a storm and several other threats; the character’s fear establishes foreboding and suspense, always good elements at the start of a story. The final book I happened to pick is about the aftermath of a battle, in which a non-human soldier is ritually burying the dead. This establishes the setting (we’re in the middle of a war) and tells us something about the culture of one of the sides.

In all three examples, the authors create approachable viewpoint characters with whom we can connect. We understand what kind of people these are, even if we have no idea what they look like. We see what they care about and what they do to achieve their ends. In other words, we quickly get to know these characters, even if we don’t have a picture of them.

The most important skill related to viewpoint is establishing a connection between the character and the reader. Don’t let unhelpful details get in the way.

In some cases, however, physical qualities are central to a character’s psychological identity—see my own book Expendable. Expendable was written in first-person, so I handled the character’s description in the simplest possible way: the narrator addressed the reader directly and said, “Here’s what I look like.” The same approach is used in almost every first-person story I can think of; if and when it becomes relevant to the action, the narrator says something like, “Now you have to understand I’m a big tough-looking guy…”

In third-person limited stories, the usual solution is equally simple: have your major characters described by lesser characters. “The doorman had heard that Miss Elizabeth was a beauty, but seeing her in the flesh took his breath away. From a distance, the first thing he noticed was her walk…”

In third-person omniscient stories…well, we’ll save that till next time.

For Every Action, There is an Equal and Opposite…

In all cases, don’t neglect the usefulness of in-story reactions from other characters. You can show how your viewpoint character looks by the way other characters react. Almost always, this works better than listing physical details.

Let’s go back to Miss Elizabeth, mentioned above. If it’s important for readers to understand that this woman is gorgeous, don’t waste your time listing “attractive” physical traits. If you say, for example, she’s blonde and curvaceous, not only is that a cringe-inducing cliché, but many readers will have vastly different opinions on what constitutes beauty. The buxom blonde cliché will also bring in cartloads of the readers’ mental baggage: they may decide she’s an airhead, cheap and easy, a gold-digger, etc.

It’s far better to show people simply reacting to her beauty…trying to impress her, gazing at her longingly, making envious remarks, and so on. If you show the reactions without actually giving specific details, readers will develop a mental construct that’s more beautiful (to the readers’ personal tastes) than anything you can actually describe. Even better, you can move the action forward at the same time that you expand our understanding of the character; you don’t have to stop what’s going on while you list the character’s qualities.

The same applies to any character whose physical appearance is significant, whether the person is intimidating, a laughingstock, repugnant, or whatever. If their looks are notable enough to affect what’s going on, then people looking at the characters will have discernible reactions. If a character’s appearance isn’t striking enough to provoke reactions, how important is it to your story?

Characterization is about a character’s entire identity, not just their outward appearance. For many of us, the precise details of how we look don’t play that big a part in who we are. If you had to list the ten most important facts about yourself, would you mention the color of your hair and eyes?[3]

Still Not Done

Am I finished with viewpoint? I’m going to post (at least) one more entry on this topic, discussing something I talked about in Viewpoint and Story Experience: stories where readers may not directly identify with the viewpoint character, but where the character is just so entertaining that you’re willing to listen to whatever he or she says. In the meantime, it’s time for your comments!

[1] Except for that time the director made me dye it when I played John in The Importance of Being Earnest. ↩

[2] Note to anyone looking for a post-grad thesis topic: investigate why beginning writers so often choose a slightly flawed nose to be their protagonist’s obligatory lapse from physical perfection. Why is this a whimsically charming way for a character to avoid being too good to be true? Discuss. ↩

[3] You realize I’m not just talking about hair and eyes, right? I’m talking about any time when a writer lets I ought to mention that overrule what the viewpoint character would consciously observe. ↩

Don’t get me wrong. I love books. I love the feel and smell of the paper. I love the pretty pictures on the covers. I love the sight of all my books lining the walls of my house, reminding me of great worlds, great characters, great stories. But … these days I just don’t buy that many of them.

I still buy words, of course. But I buy them on my cell phone. And “real” books — the kind they chop down trees and roll printing presses to make — have become my word delivery vehicle of last resort.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Or, actually, I am sure. I feel … conflicted.

On the one hand, the convenience of e-books is awe-inspiring. I can fit hundreds of books onto my phone, which now also contains my calendar, internet, fax, and pretty much everything else I need to make a living writing fiction (short of full-featured word processing and an ergonomic keyboard, which I’m sure are coming soon). As a writer of research-driven science fiction and historical fantasy, I also love the convenience of having all my notes and highlights instantly available in searchable form. No need to sift through index cards so I can track down citations for the copy editor. It’s all right there in my computer: notes, quotes, page numbers, everything.

The convenience factor has even changed my relation to my once-beloved paper books. The other day I was ransacking my shelves for a book when I felt a surge of new and unfamiliar annoyance. Why was this book hiding from me in such a childish manner? Why couldn’t it just tell my cell phone where it was and end the pain for everyone? In short … why wasn’t it acting more like the real books that were already on my phone?

That was a very strange moment, and I still don’t quite know what to make of it.

I’m not sure anyone else out there knows what to make of it either. Here are two major players in the e-book revolution — each taking opposite positions about the change from paper books to e-books.  On one end of the spectrum, Joe Konrath waxes poetic about the e-book as multi-media platform and social network. At the other end, Cory Doctorow argues that people still buy his books on paper even though he gives the e-files away for free because reading the old-fashioned way remains a precious refuge from the constant stimulus and interruption of life in the wired age.

And the thing is … they’re both right.

On the one hand, e-books offer both stupendous convenience and miraculous new creative possibilities. Not least, they free writers of the tyranny of printing, binding and distribution costs. They replace the tyranny of paper with the tyranny of time: a publishing paradigm in which delivering words is so cheap that the true “cost” of a book will be measured not in dollars but in attention spans.

On the other hand, as Cory points out, reading a good book on paper is richer, deeper, more visceral than reading it on a screen. And if I had to pick one word to describe what sets paper books apart, it would be — once again — time.

Time flows fast and shallow when you’re on-line. There’s the constant pull to check the email, check the news, make sure you’re not missing the latest frog-on-monkey video. Sometimes I watch myself pinging back and forth between research, email, news, and writing … and I can’t help thinking of the line in The Grapes of Wrath about how a man’s life moves in starts and jerks but a woman’s life flows deep and steady like a river. I don’t know if that’s true of men and women (and I doubt Steinbeck did either). But I do think it captures something essential about the emotional and intellectual commitment we make when we shut the computer, step out of the everyday world, and give ourselves up completely to a book.

When you read on-line it’s easy to get stuck halfway between the book world and the real world. But when you settle in with a paper book, your inner time flows as slow and deep as the story needs it to flow. A great story is its own universe, full of pleasures and insights that only reveal themselves when you let the book set the pace. Some of those rewards are sturdy enough to survive the constant interruptions of reading on-line. But others are more fragile. And that facet of the reading experience — that timeless feeling of being submerged in a dream that unfolds at its own rhythm — is what pulls me back time and again to my favorite paper books.

But on the third hand … here’s an article by Adam Penenberg about the future of reading in the digital age. As he points out, the first cars were called “horseless carriages” — and that’s pretty much what they looked like too. So the books of the future may look as different from today’s e-books as a Maserati is from a Model T. Hypertext and book-based social networks are just the beginning of an evolution that we can’t predict any more than Johannes Gutenberg could have predicted us. In fact, I’ve been talking recently to a high tech startup that’s already developing new interactive e-book features much like the ones Penenberg describes. Their work is intriguing. To me, it’s more than intriguing. It’s downright inspiring. And here’s why….

• Imagine reading a science fiction novel where made-up science terms are hyperlinked to a database that explains how the writer invented them and points you to the underlying research from which the invention was extrapolated.
• Imagine reading a book whose full annotated text is live on Goodreads so you can share your reading experience with others in a permanent moveable feast of an online reading group.
• Imagine reading the “Director’s Cut” of your favorite book: a version that includes all the earlier drafts so you can follow the editing process from first draft to publication; a version that includes extra scenes or chapters that the editor and writer both liked but that were cut simply to keep down printing and binding costs; a version that includes alternate viewpoints or additional backstory about your favorite characters, or even alternate endings.
• For that matter, imagine a book with no ending at all … a book that continues to evolve, digging deeper, uncovering new thematic resonance and hidden emotional depths, for as long as the writer is still alive to work on it.

Some of those new insights would come from the writer alone. But some of them might come from … you the reader? After all, why not? Isn’t every serious reading of a book a conversation across time between writer and reader? Why shouldn’t that conversation go both ways? And why shouldn’t it be part of the book? No reason at all, as long as writer and reader want it to be….

These things aren’t science fiction. They’re all possible — right now, with the technology we already have. The only thing standing between them and you is the fact that publishers are still treating e-books like the red-headed stepchild of paper books instead of what they really are: a completely new story delivery system with its own universe of possibilities and opportunities.

So here are some questions I’d like to ask you about e-books — and I might as well confess now that these questions are the real purpose of this post, since this is only my first, provisional attempt to grapple with what e-books mean for me as both a writer and a reader.

• Have you made the jump to e-books, or are you still on paper?
• Are there any books you’ll always want to read on paper? Which ones? And why?
• How have e-books changed the way you read?
• How have e-books changed the ways you imagine you could read?

I’ll take a stab at that last question myself, just to get the conversation started. And since I’ve bloviated more than enough for one post, I’ll make my answer concrete and personal…

Right now, as I sit in my office typing, I’m looking at a stack of paper in the bookshelf across the room from me. That stack of paper is a book. Actually, it’s three books: a big fat doorstop of a science fantasy trilogy that I finished just before I wrote my first published novel. People ask me about that trilogy all the time, because it’s the book that explains the big picture of the universe my published SF novels are all set in. But even though I know there are readers out there who would love to read it, I’ve never seriously tried to sell it. Why not? Because it’s basically my personal Lord of the Rings. It took over a decade to write. It has an invented language with its own alphabet, marginal notes and illustrations, and lengthy appendices discussing the history, literature, religions, and culture of the major characters. And, um, did I mention the illustrations?

I love all that stuff, of course. And so do lots of readers just like me — the same readers who actually learned Elvish when they were kids and can still tell you who El-ahrairah is and what silflay means. But publishers, of course, hate it with a passion which surpasseth all mortal understanding … for the simple reason that it makes books insanely expensive to produce and screws up their profit margin.

Anyway, El-ahrairah is not the point (though perhaps he should be). The point is that only a decade ago, that trilogy was unpublishable because turning it into words on paper was just not going to happen for any writer whose name couldn’t guarantee publishers an automatic spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. But now? Now anyone with a decent laptop could publish it.

And that is exciting. It’s not all that exciting to me as a writer; even if I decided to get back to that book the second I was done with the books I currently have under contract, I wouldn’t be able to start work on it another five years. And, as the Soviet Union learned to its detriment, there’s a limit to how excited anyone can really get about a five year plan. But it is exciting to me as a reader. Because here’s the thing: If I’m sitting here daydreaming about ‘cheating’ on the books that pay my mortgage in order to self-publish a book that’s too big and complicated and expensive for traditional publishing, then you can bet there are a thousand unpublished writers out there right now who are actually doing it.

And you know what? Some of their books will be great. And they’ll be great in ways that would never have survived the sales, editing, and marketing process imposed on traditionally published fiction. And when those great, new, unconventional books hit the internet … I’ll be right there ready to buy them. And so will a host of other readers just like me.

That’s what it’s all about: readers and writers dreaming together. It is the shared dream that makes a book, not the ink or electrons or paper. If you dream better on paper … well, the paper will still be there for you. After all, people still ride horses for fun, don’t they? But if we use e-books creatively, then they can let readers and writers share new dreams … dreams that might have languished on writers’ shelves in the age of paper. Will the process of transition be disruptive and painful? Yes. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But it will also be fertile … as fertile as we allow our imaginations to make it.

And when it’s all over? There will still be writers. And there will still be readers. And we will still be dreaming the strange and consuming dream of fiction together. And that strikes me as a pretty damn good thing.

I linked to Curtis’s post on my Facebook page, under a heading that read something like “Google Declares War on Publishers and Writers.” Many of the comments to my post expressed outrage at Schmidt’s declaration. But a sizable number of them did not. On the contrary, they said that Google was justified in refusing to do this and a few went on to argue that in fact e-piracy really didn’t hurt authors at all.

I was floored.

And so I thought I would bring the issue up here. I know that I’m going to tick people off with some of what I’m going to say. I don’t really care.

Piracy hurts artists. I say this as someone who is old enough to have made cassette tapes of my friends’ albums (Grateful Dead — Europe ‘72, Allman Brothers — Beginnings, The Who — Who’s Next, and a bunch of others that don’t make me sound nearly as cool . . .) in violation of copyright laws. I was wrong to have done it. I apologize. Because piracy really does hurt artists.

How? Well, let’s start with the obvious. If you illegally download a book or a song or a movie, or if you buy downloads from sites that you assume are legal (because some well-known search engine took you there, and well, doesn’t it follow that it must therefore be a legal site?) you are denying the artist a royalty on that sale. You are, in effect, taking money out of the artist’s pocket.

“But wait!” some will say. “You can’t assume that every illegal sale correlates with a lost legal sale. Some people, if they can’t buy something on the cheap from an illegal site, won’t buy it at all.” That may be true. There may not be a one-to-one correlation between illegal sales and sales lost. Doesn’t matter. Even if the correlation is three-to-one or seven-to-one or even ten-to-one, it is still money taken out of the artist’s pocket.

But more than that, illegal downloads and the like also have a negative impact on an artist’s numbers. (And here I will focus on the publishing industry, because that’s what I know best.) Again, it doesn’t matter what the ratio of sales lost might be. Lower sales numbers make it more difficult for writers to keep their books in print and to secure contracts for future work. We live in an age where the bottom line is everything to publishers. A writer’s future is only as secure as his or her most recent sales figures. When our numbers go down, our career prospects grow ever more tenuous. Decisions about whether or not to tender contracts for future books, be it in the same series or not, are based on the number of sales reported on recent books. So are decisions about the size of advances, how much money will be put into packaging and publicizing the books, how widely they will be distributed, the size of print runs, where and how books are shelved in a bookstore. In short, every single decision that will impact the success or failure of future volumes is tied to previous sales numbers. Only the most naïve observer could possibly think that piracy doesn’t hurt an author’s prospects for success.

Piracy-deniers will say, “But even if you don’t get the sale, you’ll have more people aware of your work. Name recognition helps authors; word of mouth is the best form of advertising.” Name recognition does help; word of mouth is crucial to our careers. But only so far as those things lead to legitimate, measurable sales. If my books don’t sell in a way that profits my publisher, I won’t get another contract. I can say, “Well, but lots of people know who I am! They might not be buying the books legally, but they are buying them. My name recognition is off the charts!” But that’s really not going to help me at all.

“The publishing industry is stuck in the dark ages. It has to adjust to the new realities of a digital marketplace. That’s what the music industry did a few years ago. Now it’s publishing’s turn. Until the industry changes, piracy is going to continue to take its toll.”

Yeah, I can’t argue with that one. And frankly it wasn’t my intention to. Because here is the bottom line. The industry might need to change, but it hasn’t yet, and in the meantime, piracy is illegal. Selling copies of my books that have been stolen or acquired through illegitimate means, is illegal. Buying pirated copies of my books is illegal. By making it possible for people to buy and sell those pirated copies, Google is abetting an illegal industry. And no matter how it is justified or marginalized or forgiven, nothing can change that. Piracy is against the law. And everything else is crap.