BEWARE OF FRIENDS BEARING FEEDBACK

Feedback.

This is the thing authors crave the most—at least in the formative years of our writing careers. We desperately cry out for someone—anyone—to read our work and tell us if it’s good or not. Do the characters speak to you? Does the plot hold together? Do you identify with the protagonist? What about the pacing—is there pacing? What’s good about it? What’s bad about it? What didn’t you get?

Am I good?

Would you buy this?

Oh, man… I get it. I’ve been on both sides of that equation my entire adult life. I’ve been desperately hungry for feedback on my own writing, and have been, as an editor, the provider of feedback for literally hundreds of authors. And I can tell you for sure I’d rather remain in the latter position than have to go out, hat in hand, for feedback on my own writing.

But we need that feedback, don’t we? Especially in the early stages of our careers. How can we learn to do anything without a teacher? A mentor? Just… any goddamn hint that we aren’t screaming into a void?

That leads us to sometimes seek out feedback from… I won’t say “the wrong people,” as much as I’d like to, because I have no way of identifying who the wrong people might be. An experienced professional editor is the right person, of course, but we come at a price.

So what about beta readers?

If you have a trusted beta reader, someone who you know knows books, knows story, knows the genre you’re writing in, and you know that person to be smart and creative, capable of giving you solid advice, then wow—congratulations. Hold that person close. Give them gifts of frankincense and myrrh.

But unfortunately, most of the people we know can not reasonably be described in such glowing terms. I wish I could remember who it was, decades ago that, in a documentary about screenwriting, described the focus group as:

The uninformed reporting on the unknowable to the unimaginative.

…but that pretty much nails it. And what are beta readers or our writers group friends but a focus group? In Story Trumps Structure, Steven James wrote on the subject of beta readers:

I can’t think of any other field in which people who aren’t experts critique other people who aren’t experts in the hope of everyone becoming an expert.

Yes, people chosen at random or from a pool of friends and family may have opinions, but do they have informed  opinions? And if they say something akin to “I didn’t get it,” “I liked it, I guess,” “It was really creative!” and so on (you know you’ve seen stuff like this) sans detail or actionable advice, well… does that help?

Now, before you freak out, this is not me saying the only advice worth listening to comes from a professional editor. Though I will maintain that the best advice comes from a professional editor, hearing from a friend that they liked your book absolutely can settle your nerves and keep you writing. There is nothing wrong with settling your nerves, and you always want to keep writing. But you still need to know, on a sentence by sentence level, if your book works, and that’s not something you’re likely to get from a beta reader. It’s just too complicated, this whole writing thing, as Karl Ove Knausgaard told us in “What Writers and Editors Do”:

The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination—and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.

In other words, who’s to say what good even is, let alone whether or not your book is good? John Cheever said: “I have never completed anything in my life to my absolute and lasting satisfaction.” So even if you do get some positive feedback from a friend, will that satisfy you?

And then the really hard part:

In the end, you’re alone with your work.

Claire Dederer in “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” challenged us to own that.

There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

Feedback? Yes, sure. Why not?

Some version of the focus group? Be careful with what if any of that feedback is specific enough to be the slightest bit actionable—and take action only if you honestly agree with that feedback.

A professional editor? Essential, one way or another, because good editors always keep in mind that we aren’t working on own own books, but supporting authors with the realization of their books.

But whatever anyone tells you, positive or negative, this is, has been, and always will be your book, not theirs, not some version of “ours,” but yours.

Whether the focus group likes it or not.

—Philip Athans

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THE TRADITIONAL BOOK BUSINESS IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE

Period.

I know this will trigger a lot of my friends in the indie publishing sphere, and other people who have seen various “exposés” that use bits and pieces, often in questionable context, to make the case that traditional publishing is dying, that some new forces (especially Kindle Unlimited) are in the process of annihilating the “Big Five,” and so on.

Let me start with two bits of cold reality:

1. The Big Five are fine.

2. The supposedly fatal diseases they suffer from are, in fact, nothing at all new and has been the way the business has worked, for good or ill, since at least the 1930s.

I don’t want to beat up on Elle Griffin, an author I don’t know and who, in her article on The Elysian, “No one buys books,” is mostly correct in her reporting, if incorrect in her conclusions, but it’s hard for me to read this article and not respond, so let’s go…

First of all, like the many other articles like it, “No one buys books” is fueled by testimony given in the Random House/Simon & Schuster court case that ended with a judge blocking the merger of these two publishing houses. For a lot of people otherwise unfamiliar with how the publishing business works, this was some scandalous stuff, a description of an unsustainable, lumbering old industry that had lost all its audience, all its profit margin, and all its ability to function.

Elle Griffin begins with this basic takeaway:

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like  Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like  The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

To which my answer is: Yes, I know that, and it’s absolutely nothing new. You can go back, say, a decade at a time and replace all the names and titles in this paragraph and find that nothing has changed at all for as long as anyone can remember. This has always been true, everyone. Always.

And yet these five publishers still account for the overwhelming majority of all books sold in America.

In the section “bestsellers are rare,” there’s some dubious quoting of trial testimony, corrected by Michael Cader at PublishersLunch, in an article you might find behind their paywall called “That Stat Isn’t a Stat.” In it you can read the rest of the exchange about the percentage of books that turn a profit, instead of the attorney’s question being mistaken for testimony.

Cade also provides the real profit figures—at least as real as we’ll ever get, I think.

0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

In the traditional publishing world it’s highly unlikely you’re going to see any profit at all from a book that sells fewer than 5000 copies. So using that as the cutoff, we see that 87.7% of books published in any given year fail to make a profit.

Is this something new? Some sign of a dying industry? Some death knell for traditional publishing?

No.

I’m no scientician or mathematist but I’m content to round 87.7% up to 90%, which is the profit cutoff I’ve been hearing for the past twenty or thirty years or so.

Publishing is now what it has always been: a painfully low-profit margin enterprise—at least for publishers. This is not a sign of impending collapse. It’s a sign of business as usual.

Are bestsellers rare? Yup.

Have they always been rare? Yup.

Will they continue to be rare? I’m sure they will.

Again, this is how it’s always been.

Always.

Elle Griffin then goes on to expose the shocking fact that “Big advances go to celebrities,” as though that’s an invention of the Britney Spears book and hasn’t always been the case. But it has always been the case. No one is surprised when celebrities or former presidents get the big advances. They need them to pay their ghostwriters, who will cost them somewhere in the low to mid six figures.

A lot of people bought that Britney Spears book, too, by the way.

I’ve already broken down the financial realties between traditional and indie authors (as best I can with Amazon keeping indie sales data a state secret) and what we can expect in terms of advances from the Big Five, so please go back and look at that post. The upshot is that if you’ve been selling hundreds of thousands of books your advances will be higher than if you’re a new, previously unpublished author with no track record. Why is this weird?

And while we’re at it, what other businesses rely on a small number of big hits to pay for the larger number of—not quite “flops,” per se, but less popular releases? Here are a few industries that also operate under that model: movies, videogames, TV, music, fashion, processed foods, software, airlines, tourism, and the stock market.

Please, honestly—pause and think about it.

Why is this either a surprise or some kind of sign of the apocalypse?

And then this one gave me a bit of a chuckle:

Penguin Random House US has guidelines for who gets what advance:

• Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
  • Advance: $500,000 and up
• Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units
  • Advance: $150,000-$500,000
• Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000- $150,000
• Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000 or less

Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? 

Well, Michael Cader corrected her on this one:

This comes from an exhibit in conjunction with The Trial. But the full document is a  2012  Crown Publishing Group document that delineates marketing plans for titles at various levels—lead titles; opportunity titles; etc. The document was sent to Madeline McIntosh by Maya Mavjee, who wrote: “I know this is out of date. But it was useful as a guideline. Once everyone, including editors, understood the parameters for each category it made the author care conversation more manageable.”

So, there’s another alarm silenced.

At this point… why keep going? Are we, any of us, surprised by statements like: “Franchise authors are the other big category,” “Publishing houses want a built-in audience,” and “A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing”?

Name a business that doesn’t operate in precisely the same way.

This one actually made me laugh out loud: “Publishing houses pay for Amazon placement.”

Really? You mean they haven’t been doing that at chain brick and mortar stores for decades and decades and decades? You know that the food companies do that at super markets, too, right? This, my author friends, is why I advise everyone at least try to get your book published by one of the Big Five before you go the indie route. This is visibility you will never be able to pay for on your own. You won’t even get the meeting.

And, “shockingly,” we learn that, “even celebrity books don’t sell…” Any book by or about anyone or anything likely won’t “sell.” We’ve seen that data. That’s the reality of any and every business.

And in the end we’re left with Elle Griffin’s assertions that “Books don’t make money,” except we’ve seen that sometimes they do, and those books pay for all the other books. And because audiences are fickle—and always have been—publishers have to publish as many books as they can and hope that some reasonable percentage of them will sell lots and lots of copies, so at the end of the year the company might turn a profit, which will likely be in the single digits.

So, anyway, summing up: Nothing is substantially different about the book publishing business today than it has been in the almost forty years I’ve been a part of it.

But what about the existential threats, like: “Amazon is the biggest threat to the industry,” which people have been saying since Amazon first went online and it’s no more true today than it was then. Amazon has not just changed the retail book industry, it’s changed the entire retail landscape. They make money by selling other people’s stuff, and their own publishing efforts are not terribly significant. I know people who went to work for them as an “editor” only to find that Amazon’s definition of that job is some version of data mining. Amazon’s imprints are there to respond to user searches that fail to come up with a currently in-print book. If enough of those searches come up, Amazon works to get that book back in print themselves They’re not a publishing company, they are, like the rest of the tech sector, a data company, and this is a tiny sliver of their business. Amazon in no way benefits from the destruction of traditional publishing, or any of the other industries they seek to be the sole retailer of.

And as for a “A ‘Netflix of Books’ would put publishing houses out of business,” which boils down to the Big Five won’t sign on to Kindle Unlimited so they’re going to miss the boat on that and so definitely collapse under their own traditionalism.

Really?

Just like Netflix has destroyed Paramount, Dreamworks, or any other movie studio?

No?

No.

And in the end what Elle Griffin is trying to tell us is that the future of books is entirely in the indie sphere, that there’s no reason to fall into the traditional publishing trap, which is in the process of failing, and the future is 100% independent.

Which is one way of saying that instead of having five big publishers predominately sold by Amazon, we’re hoping for a time when everyone works directly for Amazon.

Are you sure that’s the book business you want?

Are you sure that’s better than the book business that’s been in operation in its current form for at least ninety years and is healthy enough that one company wanted to pay $2.2 billion to buy another one?

I know it sucks to beat your head against the querying process. And for some people it may not be worth it. I work with indie authors all the time. I buy and read indie books—I really do. It’s become a vibrant and exciting landscape for book lovers, and a safe place for authors to do some great work—especially in genres and categories and styles the admittedly “hit-driven” Big Five might be reluctant to give a try. As authors we do have that choice now. It’s not just desperately hope to find an agent then desperately hope your agent will sell your book or then nothing—total failure. But go into traditional or indie publishing (or both) armed with the full story. Know the advantages, not just the disadvantages, of traditional publishing, and make decisions for yourself in a reality-based way, not in a false panic over all the out of context and alarmist takes on this one court case.

Calm down, y’all, and celebrate that we have options, and that includes a healthy and vibrant, if a bit business-as-usual traditional publishing industry.

—Philip Athans

Oh, and from May of 2011: The Publishing Business is Not Dying

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A LITTLE MORE ON GOODREADS, REVIEWS, AND SO ON

First, watch this video…

Okay, so then that’s my opinion of reviews, critics, the critical mob on social media, etc. But is that just me, shouting alone into the roaring masses of naysayers and worst-listers? I’d like to take this Tuesday to open the floor to a few other authors, living and dead, for their take on the value of reviews for authors, the nature of the review, and the personification of the book critic.

Buckle up…

First of all, behold Bertolt Brecht seeming to describe social media in “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties” way back in 1934…

It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint, in a part of the world where complaining is still permitted, about the wickedness of the world and the triumph of barbarism, or to cry boldly that the victory of the human spirit is assured. There are many who pretend that cannon are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses. They shout their generalized demands to a world of friends and harmless persons. They insist upon a generalized justice for which they have never done anything; they ask for a generalized freedom and demand a share of the booty which they have long since enjoyed. They think that truth is only what sounds nice. If truth should prove to be something statistical, dry, or factual, something difficult to find and requiring study, they do not recognize it as truth; it does not intoxicate them. They possess only the external demeanor of truth-tellers. The trouble with them is: they do not know the truth.

Truman Capote, interviewed by Patti Hill in The Paris Review in 1957 simply shut the door on critics…

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by the prissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to—but few of the good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion. I’ve had, and continue to receive, my full share of abuse, some of it extremely personal, but it doesn’t faze me any more. I can read the most outrageous libel about myself and never skip a pulse-beat. And in this connection there is one piece of advice I strongly urge: never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

Haruki Murakami was rather more tolerant of the critic, as evidenced by this bit from his essay “Who Do I Write For?” in Novelist as a Vocation:

One well-known literary critic (who is no longer alive) gave a scathing review of my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, saying, “You’re in big trouble if you think this kind of thing passes for literature.” When I read this, I simply thought, “Okay, I guess some people feel that way.” It didn’t make me upset or want to lash back. That critic and I had a very different way of viewing literature. What kind of ideological content my works had, what social role they played, whether they were avant-garde or reactionary, artistic fiction or not—I’d never given any of this a single thought. I’d started out with the stance that if I enjoy writing it, that’s sufficient; so from the start our ideas didn’t mesh.

And there definitely is something to be said for simply shrugging critics off. After all… “We can’t control our readers and some of them will hate us, and not because they misunderstand but because they understand perfectly,” Grace E. Lavery wrote in “You Already Write How You Write, Just Give In.” “I dislike some perfectly good writers.”

And as Mr. Capote hinted at it could very well be an age thing. You do sort of fall off the “I want everyone to love me” train as you get into, say, decade five. In “Inside Fran Lebowitz’s Digitally Unbothered Life,” the author and raconteur said:

When I was very young, I did [read reviews]. My first book came out when I was 27—I read everything. I probably kept that up until I was in my early 30s, and then I just stopped… At a certain point you lose interest in yourself, or at least you should. There’s a limit to how long you can think about one person, even if that person is you. I’ve lost interest in the subject.

And then, of course, there’s the undeniable mental health aspect of all this. And who besides Colleen Hoover has experienced the ups and downs of social media stardom? In “48 Chaotic Hours With Colleen Hoover” the multiple best-selling author said, “I could sit there and read reviews all day and have to go to therapy and take Xanax, but I don’t want that life…”

Hey, who does? It can get a little angry out there, on both sides. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield wrote: “The professional blows critics off. He doesn’t even hear them.” While, “The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had the guts.”

Vladimir Nabokov knew full well that book reviews aren’t about the book, or the author of that book, but the critics themselves…

The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.

All that said, it turns out maybe not everyone hates the idea of the critical crowd. Surprisingly, George Orwell actually called for something rather like the social media landscape in his 1936 essay “In Defense of the Novel”:

Incidentally, it would be a good thing if more novel reviewing were done by amateurs. A man who is not a practised writer but has just read a book which has deeply impressed him is more likely to tell you what it is  about  than a competent but bored professional. That is why American reviews, for all their stupidity, are better than English ones; they are more amateurish, that is to say, more serious.

Of course, Orwell didn’t live to see that actually come to pass. I’ll admit I can’t do much but project my own feelings onto his ghost, but I can’t help thinking he’d have changed his mind after a few minutes on Amazon or GoodReads.

And then there’s Stephen King, who seems a bit more sanguine on the subject…

I’m always interested in what my readers think, and I’m aware that many of them want to participate in the story. I don’t have a problem with that, just so long as they understand that what they think isn’t necessarily going to change what I do. That is, I’m never going to say, I’ve got this story, here it is. Now here’s a poll. How do you think I should end it?

That, to me, is really what it all boils down to. Whatever’s going on on GoodReads should not be changing what and how you write. We all do, absolutely, have the right to our own opinions. We also have the right to remain silent.

Silence is Wisdom, where Speaking is Folly; and always safe.

—William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude

 

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. 

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

 

Be careful out there!

—Philip Athans

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is now on YouTube!

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

In Writing Monsters, best-selling author Philip Athans uses classic examples from books, films, and the world around us to explore what makes monsters memorable—and terrifying.

You’ll learn what monsters can (and should) represent in your story and how to create monsters from the ground up.

THIS IS NOT MY WRITING MANIFESTO

Honestly, I don’t write manifestos. I’m not sure I’ve actually ever even read a manifesto. In fact, I can’t help feeling that when someone sits down and writes a manifesto, that’s when we need to call in the men in white coats. Authors of manifestos are calling out for help, and we should be making sure they get the help they need before the cult is gathered at the End of Times.

What makes this not a manifesto is that this is for and about me, and me alone. These are not instructions for how you must live your life or conduct your writing career, but how I plan to conduct my own writing career from here on, based on my personal experiences over a few decades of ups and downs, successes and failures, and so on and suchlike. No invitation to move to an intentional community will follow. You’re going to have to write a non-manifesto of your own.

So this is not my writing manifesto, even if it might seem like one:

From now on—however long that is for me—I will only write what I want to write and I will write it only in the way I want to write it. I will not be making commercial decisions when it comes to my own writing. If it gets published, hooray. If not, shrug. I will protect my copyrights and trademarks. I will expect to get paid by people and organizations who should be paying me. But when I sit down to write it will be by me, for me. Readers are invited and appreciated, but otherwise optional.

Lest you think, uh oh…

…I take full ownership of my long history with and continued love of pulp fiction in all its glorious incarnations. This is not me saying that from now on I fold myself into the literati and will henceforth only be Mr. Artsy Fartsy. I’m the guy who wrote a novelization of a video game I never even played. Actually, two of those. I collect and read Perry Rhodan and Doc Savage books and that’s not going to stop. I also used to be quasi-punk rock zine guy. Editor and publisher of Alternative fiction & poetry. Outsider poet. Then I was RPG freelancer, then D&D insider, then writing coach and freelance editor… None of that is being erased, and the last two are continuing apace.

But after leaving Wizards of the Coast I started doing a lot of thinking—I kinda had no choice. And then I started doing a lot of scrabbling around trying to figure out how to make a living in the “jobless recovery” following the Depression of 2007+. I wrote a novel I thought would be “commercial.” It was rejected by everyone except a small press who picked it up then dropped it. Then I dropped it. Then I thought about going back and revising it, but never worked up the energy to do that because it was fun and it’s fine, and there’s some good ideas in there and I’m not embarrassed by it, but in the end, if you have any piece of writing you can’t really be bothered to pick up again, well, listen to yourself and move on. Yeah?

Then I started putting together notes and multiple outlines for a dark fantasy thing that, maybe… could it be fifteen years later?… I have a rough first chapter of.

Well, that’s me telling myself I really don’t actually want to write that, yeah? I mean, I know how. I’ve finished novels. On deadline and otherwise.

Then in 2015 I sort of sat down with myself and thought back on those heady times of outsider poet, underground publisher Phil, and though looking back on that work is… Well, it was a look back at a much younger me—but it was me. And that got me wondering what present day me might look like. Not punk rock anything or outsider or tortured artist me, but me, me. Older, more experienced, strangely less jaded…

And that’s when I started writing again. I made the decision, eyes wide open, to start writing what I want to write, when I want to write it, and if it gets published, hooray. If not… whatever. I started writing short stories again. I started writing poetry again. And started getting it published, too. And each one of those publications—in tiny magazines you’ve never heard of—was a pure delight to me.

Now, please don’t think that this is in any form a repudiation of any of the other things I’ve written. I’m immensely proud of work like Annihilation and the Watercourse Trilogy, and all the work I did with an amazing group of people at TSR and Wizards of the Coast. Likewise, this isn’t me swearing off genre fiction. I might actually write that dark fantasy. There’s this dungeon crawl idea I can’t shake. I don’t want to die never having written a sword and planet novel. And lots and lots of horror.

I have no interest in erasing any part of my past—even if I could. This is about moving forward from here, based on the last nine years of writing without the pressure of commercial acceptance. Unless you’re a songwriter you don’t get rich writing poetry, but I’m tumbling toward age sixty and “getting rich” hasn’t felt at all important for a while now. I love what I do for a living and the people I’m privileged to work with. That’s not going to stop, and it has been and will continue to be how I pay the bills.

The writing, though—my writing—that will stay my own. It will be what I want it to be. There might not be lots and lots of it. After serious thought and the last nine years of actually doing it, I guess I’ve decided to be more like Harlan Ellison and less like (early) Robert Silverberg.

This is not my plan for the future. This is what I’m doing right now, and have been doing for nine years.

This is not my writing manifesto.

—Philip Athans

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is now on YouTube!

Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

I can be found in…

AREN’T WE WONDERBRINGERS?

I happened upon this Big Think video this morning and it got me thinking. It’s only six minutes long, so watch it now, please.

Isn’t that the primary role of the fantasy and science fiction author? To create and convey a sense of wonder? One of the earliest science fiction magazines was called…

The guy they named the Hugo Award after was onto that idea at least as early as 1930.

So then the question bears asking…

How much wonder are you conjuring in your work in progress?

 

—Philip Athans

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Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most challenging—and rewarding!—genres in the bookstore. But with best selling author and editor Philip Athans at your side, you’ll create worlds that draw your readers in—and keep them reading—with

The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction!

DO YOUR CHARACTERS EXHIBIT GREATNESS AND GRANDEUR?

A couple days ago I started reading The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald, chosen at random from my huge shelf of old paperbacks.

Very early in the book, two characters, both of whom are readers, have a late night conversation that centers on their mutual dissatisfaction with the ordinariness of their own late 1950s suburban American middle class existence…

I mean that if you take a lot of mealy little people who have already sort of sold their souls down the river before the book even starts, then you can’t really give a very large damn about what happens to them. The author can put them into perfectly frightful situations, and the poor little things can run back and forth, bleating like anything, but you sort of say so what.

(…)

Before something can fall in a dramatic and glorious way, it has to be way the hell up in the air. There has to be a greatness and grandeur about it. And then it falls, and it’s a long time falling, and it makes a glorious and tragic noise when it hits bottom. Hamlet. Richard the Third.

This is the prolific and successful author of thrillers (and a little science fiction) establishing early on in this book that his principle characters aren’t great personages of history like Richard the Third. But, I think, without spoilers, it’s easy to assume that he’s in fact in the process of endowing these characters with at least a version of “greatness and grandeur” that will lift them “way the hell up in the air” out of their petit bourgeois malaise so they can make “a glorious and tragic noise” when they hit bottom.

To me, that sounds like all the character arc anyone ever needs.

But can a couple of otherwise typical contemporary mealy little Americans be lifted up in this way? In “Where My Characters Come From,” Haruki Murakami cautions:

The novelist has to put characters in his novel who feel real and are compelling and speak and act in ways that are a bit unpredictable. A novel with characters who only say and do predictable things isn’t going to attract many readers. Naturally there will be people who feel that novels in which ordinary characters do ordinary things are the really outstanding ones, but (and this is, after all, just my personal preference) I can’t get interested in those kinds of books.

That means, I think, yes, we can start with “mealy little people,” but we better get busy lifting them up in some way or another. These aren’t real people, after all, are they? They’re characters in a novel. It’s the fact of their existence in a fictional context that allows us to move them up the scale from ordinary to grand. “I don’t want to have the terrible limitations of those who live merely from what can make sense,” Clarice Lispector wrote in Água Viva, “Not I: I want an invented truth.”

Me too!

We all need to start with characters who are in one way or another “grounded” but as soon as possible start to lift them out of the ordinary and into… well, wherever the heck you want them to be. However far up in the heavens or down into the hells. But put them there and drop them back down—or shoot them up even higher—because of the decisions they make, and more than that: who they are.

In Growing Great Characters from the Ground Up, our GoodReads Group Read from last month, Martha Engber wrote:

Like buried treasure, extraordinary qualities lay hidden in places that can only be found when characters take action, the more dangerous and difficult the better. And it’s that action—that search—that makes readers so ravenous for more.

And isn’t that because “that action—that search” is what starts to give them a sense of greatness and grandeur?

As always, try to widen your definition of “greatness and grandeur” so that we’re not all stuck writing Richard the Third. There can be a sense of greatness and grandeur in a suburban family drama, a contemporary romance, and so on. Maybe instead of greatness and grandeur should we think in terms of charisma and activity? These are people we’re drawn to, for either their good qualities or their bad. “Characters in fiction aren’t like characters in a sitcom,” wrote Naomi Kanakia in “The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions.” They’re powerful and vital, and they’re beyond likability.” So great doesn’t necessarily mean heroic.

This is about the formation of connection between our readers and our characters, so they achieve a sense of greatness and grandeur, however tempered by realism or modernism. After all, as Robert Charles Wilson told us, “…fiction as an art form is a finely-tuned device for generating a sense of intimacy and pathos in readers—a novel that doesn’t do that, at least to some degree, is fundamentally broken.” And a novel that does do that, creates great, grand characters.

“There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up a mirror of reality and turning it slightly,” Harlan Ellison wrote in “A Love Song to Jerry Falwell,” “so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal,’ the obvious.”

—Philip Athans

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BOOKS FOR FANTASY AUTHORS XL: GROWING GREAT CHARACTERS FROM THE GROUND UP

From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.

By now you’ve joined the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads Group, right? Because… well, of course you have. There you will have seen that we do a bimonthly group read, and this month (March 2024) we read Growing Great Characters from the Ground Up: A Thorough Primer for Writers of Fiction and Nonfiction by Martha Engber.

It’s been a little while since I’ve read a book that focuses in on one specific aspect of the writing craft, so I was excited to dive in. Though I personally didn’t quite vibe with the author’s gardening metaphor that quibble fell away quickly under the weight of the good advice and interesting exercises the book provides. Rather than get into any sort of synopsis, I’m just going to share some bits from the text that I was moved to copy out to my “Random Writing Quotes and Examples” file…

Martha Engber starts at the very beginning, which I thought was great. This is a book that will be of use to authors at any stage in their writing journey, including at the very, very beginning. She has a way of reducing concepts to clear statements like:

Fictional characters are people born from imagination. While this might seem an oxymoron—because how can characters be real if they’re made up—it’s not. If we’re real, then what we create is real, too.

We’re then taken through a version of a step-by-step process of developing a character, including what I agree is of significant importance…

By understanding your character’s belief systems, you’ll know how they’ll act in any given situation.

Like buried treasure, extraordinary qualities lay hidden in places that can only be found when characters take action, the more dangerous and difficult the better. And it’s that action—that search—that makes readers so ravenous for more.

The protagonist’s physical and mental journey should be the focal point of the story.

I was also taken by her idea of characters as atmosphere:

By simply describing real people—where they are, what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, how they’re reacting to one another—you can immediately convey everything about a scene, from its location to the current emotional atmosphere, whether tense, curious or excited.

And then, of course, no one can talk about characters without a focus on motivation…

Motivation is integral to our survival because without it, there would be no reason to act. We would be hungry, but not enough to search for food. We would feel pain, but not enough to stop the source of the pain.

What motivation gives us, then, is an incentive to act and so change our situation.

When we finally understand our character’s greatest fear, our goal is clear: to make him face that fear.

We’re also in complete agreement on the basic definition of plot, which is what characters actually do…

When characters are allowed to act according to their natures, they instigate a chain of believable actions that lead to believable conflict, a process known as plot.

…and there’s more than one way to “do something”…

When people say they like plot-driven stories, they’re not saying they’re willing to swallow cliché characters for the sake of showy action. What they really want are great characters who choose big physical actions that are highly dramatic and have a grave impact on a lot of people, like risking their lives to rescue others. They’re usually featured in genre fiction such as thrillers, science fiction, westerns and mysteries, and action nonfiction stories of true crime or high adventure.

The term character-driven implies the story’s characters are more important than the plot. But remember that we said admirable characters are doers who take action. The trick is there are two types of action. External actions are visible to others and usually physical, whereas internal actions are often invisible and emotional, such as when a man realizes he’s in love. When people say they like character-driven stories, they’re saying the characters’ actions don’t have to be predominantly external, but rather can be largely internal.

A character should be true to himself in both interior belief and exterior action no matter how unsettling or distasteful his behavior becomes.

I’ve said in the past that all authors must have intellectual curiosity, and roundly agree that that goes for characters as well…

Imbuing our characters with life experience and compassion will make both our characters and us more interesting. Yet what will upgrade us all from interesting to fascinating is not only how much we feel, but also how much we know.

And you know how I feel about the character description info dump… 

If you like research and are particularly proud of your thorough effort, you’ll be tempted to use all the information you find. Doing so, however, could slow the pace of your story, overwhelm your readers, give them the impression you’re showing off or that you have no idea how to edit. So before using any fact, ask yourself, Does the detail make the scene or character authentic? If not, leave it out. You can always use excess material in articles, lectures and other promotional efforts.

Revealing your character over the course of your story helps avoid an info dump, creates tension, reveals the character’s suffering, and moves the story toward its climax.

Finally, I’ll leave you with her take on one of my least favorite things, the medical examination character description…

Cliché is the trickiest disease to diagnose because it’s so insidious. It slips into our subconscious through conversations and popular media and slips out again when we write. It’s often so omnipresent that we don’t even recognize it, so that when we write, “She had long, raven hair and cherry lips,” we think we’re geniuses when really such descriptive phrases have been used beyond excess.

Find this book! Even if you don’t feel you’re particularly struggling with your characters, anyone can benefit from this sort of fresh way of thinking.

—Philip Athans

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STOP ALREADY WITH “TROPES”

A bit of rant here, to take or leave.

There are a lot of ways to take a shortcut past thinking and into talking and for what at least seems to be a majority of people talking about books (and movies, etc.) the quickest and easiest thinking bypass is the process of reducing a work of art to a series of “tropes.”

There aren’t a lot of words I truly hate but this is one of them, at least in the context in which it’s become popularized. And you know what I mean.

There are two things that are terrible about this process of reduction into tropes and that is that it diminishes books and the authors who write them, and it diminishes readers. It diminishes us by forming boxes into which we place art and artists and people who experience art.

Let’s really not do that. In fact, whole generations of artists have worked diligently and creatively to break that conservative and reductive view of art even though it does make the creation and appreciation of art a little more difficult. That I understand. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art,” William Deresiewicz wrote:

Art is for equipping us for modern life. Art became modern when artists ceased to work within traditions and embraced the imperative to invent their own. Art became difficult. Reading a poem, standing before a canvas, we no longer know what to think, because we have lost the conventions that would once have done our thinking for us. New demands are placed on us for comprehension and judgment. But such is modern life in all its aspects: a ceaseless cognitive and moral challenge, an attempt to keep our feet, and heads, on ever-shifting ground. Art tunes us for the task.

Art—and yes, once again, fantasy and science fiction novels are a form of art—does make demands on us, and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean we need to wrestle it to the ground. It means we have to exalt it, let it lift us, and fly around the infinite universe of creativity on its wings.

But how to express that on TikTok? That’s hard—it’s a work of art in itself. I can understand the urge to corral that experience into something that can be dissected and explained in some kind pseudoscientific way, even as I rail against. This is the origin of the “trope.” It’s become a way of pretending to sound smart. And I understand the desire to do that, the pressure the social media landscape puts on all of us. We can’t just like or dislike something, we have to review it, deconstruct it, defend our opinions like some kind of jailhouse lawyer building cases for why we’re right and the other person is wrong.

Can I be the one to remind you that this is not even a little bit necessary? I don’t know, but I’m just going to take on that role this week whether y’all like it or not.

To wit, I hereby grant all and sundry permission to like or dislike any work of art for any reason entirely personal and idiosyncratic and absolve you all from the need to defend that in the court of social media opinion.

You do not have to prove you’ve “close read” a book by identifying the enemies-to-lovers trope. And if you like that trope, I further absolve you from having to feel as though you can now only read books that somehow or another employ that trope—or that other people have said employ that trope—and grant you permission to read whatever the hell you like for whatever reasons including no reason at all. You are allowed to read said books without having to list the various tropes employed within nor share that list with other people who are either defending or attacking that or any other tropes.

Tropes are nonsense and will, under my new ruling, be disallowed from public discourse across all platforms and for all time.

This like all other edicts coming form me carry not the slightest shred of legal or religious standing and can be ignored, revised, or adhered to at the pleasure of anyone who hears it with no fear of reprisal, just as I stated it with no fear of reprisal because I hereby absolve myself of the responsibility of defending my anti-trope stance to anyone who should choose to defend the pro-trope cause.

So says I.

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

 

DON’T KILL YOUR DARLINGS

There’s good writing advice, interesting writing advice, iffy writing advice, and then there’s terrible, awful, spirit- and creativity-destroying writing advice, and the worst example of the latter category is “Kill your darlings.” What makes this nonsense so bad is how often and irresponsibly it’s repeated.

Often attributed to Dylan Thomas, sometimes William Faulkner (who, if he followed this advice himself would have killed The Sound and the Fury in its entirety), and then repeated by other teachers and authors including Stephen King. In reality the concept seems to have first been belched forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a series of Cambridge Lectures about 110 years ago. Never heard of him? Neither have I. Maybe that’s because of his darling-free writing.

Whoever started it, it goes something like this:

If you find you’ve written something you just love, that makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, delete that immediately and without further consideration because if you love it that much it can only be self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like.

What a spectacular load of bullshit.

If you feel that anything you wrote—a sentence, a paragraph, a scene, a chapter, or a whole series of novels—is something you just love, makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, that’s the part you keep.

If you do wonder if maybe this bit here could be a little, okay… I don’t know… maybe self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like, or maybe even understand, then okay, listen to that still, small voice and delete it. But if you do feel that way about something you’ve written how could it be considered a “darling”?

If you’ve been damaged enough by this maybe well meaning but tragically terrible piece of advice, please go back and put your darlings back in. Every last goddamn darling. And keep writing those darling with the goal of a whole book that’s nothing but non-stop fucking darlings.

Kill your darlings?

No!

Nurture your darlings. Protect your darlings. Publish your darlings.

If you don’t like what you’ve written, if it doesn’t resonate with you, why would you think it would resonate with anyone else? Why would you keep that and throw away what you love? It’s insane to even consider that.

Will everyone who reads it feel the same way? Well, you have no idea and no control over that—welcome to being a writer. But an equal number of people will dislike your writing sans darlings, and I’ll go you one farther: even more people will dislike darling-free writing.

This is creative writing, y’all. We’re not writing business memos or legal briefs. If you kill your darlings, what do you have left? Acquaintances? Passersby?

Nothing?

Never, ever, ever, kill your darlings.

Ever.

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most challenging—and rewarding!—genres in the bookstore. But with best selling author and editor Philip Athans at your side, you’ll create worlds that draw your readers in—and keep them reading—with

The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

SEARCHING FOR THE SOUL OF AI

I have been vocally anti-AI/LLM/Chat bots “writing” fiction—“writing” anything—or making any sort of “art” since the first rumblings made themselves known, and I continue to rail against it as it continues to accelerate into an uncertain future.

But something made me start to really think about this. Am I turning into that fusty old man ensconced entirely and forever in the Good Old Days? Am I reacting to AI like Woody Allen reacting to the computer?

If you’ve watched any Woody Allen movies in the last couple decades you’ll know what I mean. Here’s a bit of a scene from Blue Jasmine in which Cate Blanchett plays a woman in the present day, a character her own age, forty-four when this movie was released in 2013, but speaking dialog written by a then seventy-eight year old Woody Allen, who remains under the impression that in order for Jasmine to take an online course in interior design, she must first take an in-person adult education course to “learn how to use a computer.”

In his book Apropos of Nothing, Allen restates his insistence on still writing on a typewriter, but double downs on his ludditism by admitting that his wife has to change the ribbons for him. That’s a level of technological expertise still unavailable to him. This was the least of the cringeworthy moments in that book, which didn’t help me like the artist as much as I like his art. I know he’s old, but he is still alive in the world—the world of 2013, and the world of 2024. He is choosing not to participate.

In the period between closing up Alternative fiction & poetry and starting at TSR, I worked various “day jobs” while writing, and the one I liked the most was managing record stores. Once—and this was late 1994 or early 1995—an older woman came into the store and told me she wanted music for the car she just bought, and apologetically said she likes “the older stuff, like Tony Bennet.” While walking her over to the Easy Listening section I asked her if she needed a cassette or a CD. She looked at me as if I’d begun reading aloud from a paper on quantum mechanics then shakily replied, “Um… it’s a Cadillac.” After walking with her back to her car and determining it was equipped with a cassette player I sold her some Easy Listening tapes and she left happy. In that moment, though, I resolved to myself, at the age of thirty, never to be like that. That whatever new technologies might arise to replace the cassette tape, I would never be so utterly oblivious to the world around me.

Okay then, fast forward thirty years and in terms of AI, am I being that old lady who didn’t know the difference between a cassette and a CD? Will some youngster have to walk me out to my car to determine if generative AI is a tool or an obscenity? Am I, as I approach the age of sixty, as much a science fiction-raised technophile as I’ve always been, growing incapable of rolling with real world technological progress?

In her Big Think article “Why we reject new ideas,” Kristen French interviewed University of Utah business scholar Wayne Johnson, who said:

There’s a paper by Erik Dane from 2017 on something called cognitive entrenchment, which argues that the more expertise you have, the more kind of ossified your knowledge structures become, the less you expose yourself to other sources of information. And so it becomes really difficult to accept or value a new thing. We rely on experts to judge things, but novelty specifically by itself means that the expertise is less helpful. When something is new, nobody can be an expert on it. That’s why sometimes experts make such mistakes.

Am I cognitively entrenched when it comes to AI? I don’t believe I am, but would I be able to recognize my own cognitive entrenchment from within a state of cognitive entrenchment? And am I reacting to the reality of AI or the controversy around AI? As Johnson continues…

Disagreement makes people think the idea is risky. But I think the disagreement really tells us something about the evaluators: They’re using different criteria, they may lack the expertise for it. So the biggest thing that I would say is don’t give up when you see a lot of disagreement about an idea. Don’t just say, “Ooh, controversial, bad, we’re done.” So if you’re trying to see if ideas are good or not, come up with a really good evaluation checklist or criteria and have everyone use that.

Is there some version of an “evaluation checklist” for AI? It certainly seems to be being built and developed entirely in the blind, with no consideration to the authors and artists it’s stealing from, with no consideration of the past, present, or future of human creative endeavor. It’s currently at a lower level state where it’s easy to see it struggling with the sense of coherence a human artist is innately capable of, but that bug having been identified, the tech companies—long running on “can we build it?” without a thought to “should we build it?”—are hard at work fixing it. When it inevitably, and by many accounts soon, crosses that invisible boundary, will I be rendered obsolete? Will any and every human author or artist be as important to the world as, say, a swordsmith is now? There are people who do make swords, as a hobby or to sell to a small community of collectors, but as a part of the economy or as a valued trade, they may as well not exist at all. That technology is a thing entirely of the past. Am I—are we all—the lost tradesmen of the near future? A wordsmith with an audience of dozens?

In his 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” William James wrote:

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.

Am I protecting my own domain while and by vilifying the domain of the field of generative AI? Writing, creative writing—fiction or non-fiction—is important to me, it’s sacred to me. And as William James said, “Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant.” This is my life. But is this new world of AI-generated art happening whether anyone, including me, likes it or not, whether it will be objectively good or bad? And in railing against it am I only closing myself off to “the new,” insisting on a typewriter instead of the current-gen Mac Mini I’m writing this on? As James said:

Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

I consider myself a “pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer,” and that’s exactly what’s closing me off to the “ejective world” of AI. After all, the atomic bomb created a new center, a new perspective: the Cold War and the threat of global annihilation. That sucked. The burning of fossil fuels brought about the new center, the new perspective of the Anthropocene. Technology is not always good, nor, even, is it always neutral. I can’t see generative AI or “AI art” as anything but a disaster in the making. But we survived—at least for now—the disasters of fossil fuels and nuclear fission, and in some ways are better for it. Can we outlast AI?

William James ends his essay with this, which might be a recipe for a sort of truce between human artists and the machines created to mimic them:

And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.

I can’t stop the tech industry from doing whatever they want to do, however clearly awful it might be to me, but will there be any way, ever, to get the same from them? Is there a way to stop AI “art” from devouring the rest of the vast field of human creativity? Can we tame, or at least peacefully coexist, with what Pandora has released?

For now, at least, I have nothing to leave you with but questions, and this simple statement: Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model..

—Philip Athans

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is now on YouTube!

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