


On writing...




From: Daniel Keys Moran 
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 1995 03:34:00 UTC
Subject: Writing 


DISCLAIMER: There are no rules. There is nothing that anyone can say
about the art of writing fiction to which there Are No Exceptions --


Here are some Basics, for me:


Plot and character are virtually the same thing. A good plot takes an
individual and displays his/her character. Most people (I think) read
books to meet other characters and find out what lives other than their
own are like. An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon
bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone
else. I want to be shown -- and that's plot. A sequence of events.


-- Synergy is terribly important. The word is suspect to me simply
because businesses keep using it to explain why they do bone-headed
things (A Paper- Manufacturing company: "Uh ... we bought this company
that makes fax software because, you see, they have to print the faxes
out. Synergy."), but if you can get by that phenomenon, in fiction it's
very real. Having One Real Strength (Gregory McDonald writes the best
dialog in the universe) is useless if other elements of storytelling
aren't addressed so well. (There's no sense of place in Gregory
McDonald's stories. His people are all amazingly shallow, and not
because he intends them to be.)


So if I steal my dialog writing from Gregory McDonald, I need to steal
my characterization from John D. MacDonald. ("Travis McGee.")


-- Your readers are Not Stupid. (This is merely a working principle --
some of your readers are Stupid. Big Plotting helps with those
readers. But it's best to write as though Your Readers are Not Stupid,
because the great majority of them are not, and some percentage of them
will be smarter than you are.)


When I was writing TAB my editor said that I should say everything Three
Times ... because Readers Were Stupid. It was the first and probably
worst of the fights we had while she was editing me; I said. No. Hell
No. It's true that some readers will miss something if you only say it
once ... but for the rest who are capable of paying attention, it makes
it that much nicer when surprises are sprung, down the line, and they
say, "So that's what he was setting up."


-- Characterization is defined by How People Handle Problems. "Life,"
says Gallagher, "is a bitch. But it's how you deal with the bitch
that gives you your Style."


The example David Gerrold used for me once was that for Pee Wee Herman,
getting back his bicycle was a Big Problem; it fit the character and
helped define the character. For Big John Wayne, getting back his niece
from the Apaches is a Big Problem, and it defines the problem. Give
either of them the other's problem, and you have no story.


"Hey there ... pilgrim. How about you ... uh-huh ... gimme back the
bike."


<G> Doesn't work, does it?



From: Daniel Keys Moran
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 03:37:00 UTC
Subject: Work habits.


Pran Mukher Jee asked how long I write every day. When I got done
answering him, I thought it addressed enough questions from other people
that I decided to mirror it to the list.


~~~~~


Pran,


Varies -- about 4 hours a day seems to be the limit at which I can do
productive fiction work. There are writers who can write very quickly,
but the one time I did that ("The Ring" was written in four months) the
result was so horrific that today I can't stand to look at it; it taught
me a real lesson.


After 4 hours straight writing the quality of the work I do goes down
dramatically.


I consult (computers, of course) to make a living; I've never quite made
a living from my sf writing, which is frustrating, but that's life. When
my bank account gets fat and I'm able to concentrate on my writing, I
can usefully work most of 8 or 10 hours, but only by doing
"non-creative" work the balance of that time. My favorite "non-creative"
work is the Encyclopedia of the Continuing Time, which documents times,
dates, events, people, stars, planets, species, things, etc., in the
Tales. Right now the Encyclopedia is a Microsoft Access database
application. It supports dates in B.C., A.D., and "Asimov" format, and
interchanges between the Asimov and A.D. dates as required. (For
example, all dates after December 21, 2294, are in Asimov Calendar
format; the next date in the sequence is Winter 1, 2295 Asimov.)
Sometimes it's useful to know the Gregorian month and day for a given
Asimov date; the program does this automatically. (I used to use an
astronomy program written in QuickBasic to get my days of the weeks for
future dates. Unfortunately, it messed up on the 2000 leap year with
some consistency -- but not always, which was the frustrating thing. If
it had gotten it consistently wrong I'd probably have caught it earlier.
2000 is a leap year; all Century years divisible by 400 are. Century
years not divisible by 400 -- 1900, e.g. -- don't have a leap year. So my
days of the week are questionable in the earlier novels.


The Encyclopedia started out as a notebook, 17-18 years ago -- days of
birth and death for the House of November, between the years of 2094 and
roughly 3300. Since that time it's been added to ... amazingly is a good
word, and there is probably no comparable piece of non-fiction, fiction
documentation, in existence. It's been a notebook, a dBase application, an
R:base application, a Microsoft Word 3.0 document, 4.0 document, 5.0
document, Word for Windows document 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 document; most
recently it's been a Paradox for Windows relational database, and finally
a Microsoft Access relational database. I may release a version of it to
the net sometime, with only those items relating to the books so-far
published; that alone would be fascinating to a lot of people, I suspect.


Anyway, that's the sort of thing I do when I'm not actually writing
fiction, but am "writing." Recently I've been working on "The Collapse
of the Levels" backstory -- in fact, I've identified a story
throughline, from "Starcloud" to "Wild," that I'm extraordinarily
pleased with. About 3 weeks ago I wrote ten pages that summarized (for
me) the entire thrust of the story connecting all those disparate
elements -- the "Tales of the Great Wheel" theme, to put that more
simply.


This is probably more than you ever wanted to know. :-) But it was a
good question.



