


   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.



