Lessons from Master Hugh

[elfs]

We all have gurus. Right now, I'm reading Bujold and discovering, not only that she make it look easy but that it is easy. Bujold writes more than you do: that's the whole of her secret. That's it. Lois writes more than you do, and that's why she's famous and you're not. She is not afraid to write a ton of bullshit and then pare down to the essentials. She's not afraid to read it out loud to see if it scans. She's not afraid to break the rules. But more than anything else, she writes more than most "writers." This lesson is so important it should be tattooed to either your scrotum or the fold under your left tit where you fail the pencil test (or both, if you've got both) (or somewhere else appropriate, if you've got neither).

Today, I also reminded myself about Hugh MacLeod, the brilliant artist behind "Cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards." MacLeod's pointers on creativity bear some reading, and there are a few that strike me as immeasurably wonderful (note that his rule #3 is the same as the paragraph above):

#10: The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.

I started writing on cheap highschool paper with a pencil. I eventually graduated to a desktop computer and eventually a laptop. But it's an older laptop without all the bells and whistles of the modern age. When I want to write I pop out the wireless card so I can't fiddle with the internet. I use an ordinary text processor so I can't fiddle with the font. The two most amazing things my text processor does is it has a better file browser so I can find stuff, and it spell checks, and that's about it. I write emphasis in a style I've been using for years, with *asteriks* around the stuff that needs to be made louder, and that's about it.

Needing more than a keyboard and a screen to be a writer is known as wanking.

#15: Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

I'm trying.

#22: Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway.

This one I haven't quite learned yet. I sometimes kinda wonder if blogging out the process is all that worthwhile.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Your blogging question sort of points to a problem with lists, They can over-simplify.

"Keep writing" is no good if you can't tell good from bad.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I always ask myself two questions about my own writing: "Is this something I would want to read?" and "How do I make it more like something I can't put down?"

It's important to know that I can't put down Weber or Bujold, just as most who read them can't; I also can't put down China Mieville or Justina Robson. My problem is that the latter two are great stylists, but have other peccadillos I don't want to absorb. (My spell checker insists that's "peccadilloes," but my spell checker is wrong in this case.)

It's not "How do I write like Lois?" although that's a good question. It's "how do I approach the populism of Lois and still achieve the aching beauty of China's descriptive style and the ineffable density of Justina's characterization" (without giving in to Mieville-style political pointmaking or Robson's disjointed plotlessness)?

[ibsulon.livejournal.com]

re: #15 and #22. Here's a bit of unsolicited "advice" worth no more than the grains of salt encrusted upon it:

1. Do you want to be published? Barnes and Noble published? Your prose is certainly good enough for that. (Hell, we've seen Dan Brown.) You are good enough at plotting at this point.

So are you trying to be published? Are you sending out manuscripts obeying current publishing fashion to agents? Short stories to appropriate outlets?

If not, why not?

[omahas.livejournal.com]

It's rules like these that always make me laugh...after I wash all the bullshit they've thrown on me off. You can smell the psychological issues that the writer of these "rules" has embedded in their psyche.

#15: Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

Yeah, because there is no line we can draw...the moment you get that first penny, your art has become less than great. So go throw away that laptop (that you bought with money you got from your "art"), go throw away that house (that you bought with money you got selling your "art"), don't pick up that pencil...you can't afford it. Remember? You can't take a penny for your art.

Instead, borrow food coloring from someone and write with your colored pee. Or better, cut yourself with your own nails and write in your blood. Then your "art" will be the greatest it could ever be.

#22: Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway.

Ooh, doesn't this exude "nobody cared about my stuff when I was creating it, so no one will care about your's either!" Like people in this world are so self-centered, so selfish, that they truly could care less about you. If they don't care about your writing, they don't care about anything else regarding you either...it would take too much time out of their "busy lives" to bother doing things like reply to your blog entries, come to your parties (there are other, more interesting parties, I guarantee it), talk to you to at lunch (there are other, more interesting people who can help them succeed better than you), etc.

Which means everyone who does these things for/with you, you've just degraded.

The guy who wrote these rules has issues, man...issues.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Or better, cut yourself with your own nails and write in your blood.

I think it's reasonable to say that most writers write as a hobby well before they start writing professionally. And that basically assumes that they either have some means of supporting themselves, or they still live with their parents. :)

However, I can fully disagree with his hypothesis just the same. Many writers (and other artists) haven't come into their own until they actually tried to get paid for their efforts. Dilbert creator Scott Adams is one such example that comes to mind - he says that the stuff he created before he was published (namely the stuff that was rejected) was just crap that wasn't funny. He looks back at that period and sees how much better he is now, how much he's improved now that he listens to people when they say something needs improvement.

The difference for Hugh however, is that he undoubtedly believes that the writing he did before he was published was generally more to his liking. That doesn't mean that it was *better*, just that he liked it more when he did whatever *he* wanted to do. No doubt, noone was then or is now interested in actually reading it though. It's a pretty common thing for artists of all stripes to feel this way.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

What you said.

My writing has improved significantly with the addition of editors (and the attendant money).

And 22 seems to include my parents and husband in the "people to not want in your life." (Mudd helps me brainstorm, and Mom makes suggestions on what to write next)

[gromm.livejournal.com]

#10: The more talented somebody is, the less they need props.

Perhaps there's another expansion to this rule, but I think he might be referring to props in the story and writing itself. This might be one of the reasons that Sci-Fi isn't considered "real" writing, because of all the cool gadgetry and technospeak. It seems to be a common theme in Star Trek and its spinoffs to use a lot of technobabble to fill space. The same is painfully true of a lot of spy novels too.

Personally, I gave up on writing in no small part because I'm totally anal about my spelling and grammar, and I just can't leave it alone to edit later. The words themselves become a distraction to me, and I can't hammer out a lot of text in a short period of time. Even my LJ posts and comments suffer from this. :)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

My rough drafts would kill you. For example, in the current work, in Chapter two a "Constable Dillard" is introduced. In Chapter 3, for no apparent reason, he's "Agent Ceslau," with a completely different backstory. At the end of Chapter 3, Caprice has two pieces of evidence, but chapter four opens with her having only one. In Chapter 2, the Mars Farming Syndicate has four sub-arcologies off the Wingrad City "hub" arcology; in Chapter five it suddenly has a fifth. The senator changes accents and authorities. Her uncle's not in on the conspiracy, and suddenly he is.

I throw everything into the story. It morphs and changes as I write. Once I've got at least one climax and ending, I then go back and re-write everything, keeping a writer's bible of the decisions I've made. Only then do I start to worry about grammar.

Style is harder to handle this way because style and voice often require closer attention earlier in the game, and has to be settled before mechanical issues like spelling and grammar become part of the process.