author agonistes
Mar. 9th, 2010 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI dreamed I was a fantasy writer who was developing a few enthusiastic fans for my only published books, a fat, vaguely GRRMesque (except that I'd finished it), four-book series. For convenience sake, I'd planted its wide-ranging locale on a previously blank continent of an imaginary world I'd been otherwise crafting in detail for years, and what I was trying to hide from my readers was that, unlike my other (mostly unpublished) work, I'd written the series by rote and didn't care about it. The fact that I had, and would show to the curious, unpublished maps of other countries on this world that were far more detailed than the maps in the books should have been a clue.* The fact that I had little to say about the film adaptation of the first book, other than that I had been happy to be paid for it - even though my dream self was as caustic about Peter Jackson as my real self - should have been another clue. The truth was that I hadn't cared much what the film did to the story because the book had never been that meaningful to me, but I couldn't say that.
And so there I am, lending copies of some ancillary stuff, like those other maps, to a couple visiting readers and trying to pretend that I care about this series, not as much as they do, but at all. What a depressing dream.
Reality isn't like that. Even if I could imagine myself writing fiction, I'm a slow, fussy author and can never not care about what I write, though the experience of writing 800-word concert reviews regardless of whether I have 800 words to say about the concert or not may be slowly warping my mind towards journalism, at least.
And I think of the more tragic experience of a guy I once knew. Though he'd never published any fiction, he devoted years of his life to carefully crafting a gigantic SF epic which he would talk about obsessively until your eyes glazed over. I've known many aspiring fiction authors, some of whom have achieved success in print** and some of whom never got published at all, but none who shared their devotion publicly as much as this fellow.
And then, to everyone's surprise, his epic was accepted by a major publisher and released as a series of paperback originals.
And it sank like a stone. After all his work it made no impression. He has a brief dismissive entry in the Encyclopedia of SF, and I just looked the books up on Amazon and found only two reviews, both crushingly negative and confirming my own experience at an abortive attempt to read book one. I sometimes see copies of one volume or another in used book stores, and I wonder whatever became of him and whether he ever subsequently thought that all that effort was worthwhile.
*A couple of those other maps in my dream were ones I actually drew in childhood. I never wrote any stories based on them, though I did once offer one to a friend who wanted to write stories but not to have to invent a setting for them.
**There are at least four major authors in the SF/F field who were my personal friends before they'd ever published a word: major at least to the extent that for each, I've at least once received an astonished "You know so-and-so?" Why yes, I do. And none of them talked much about the fiction, at least to me, before they started publishing it.
And so there I am, lending copies of some ancillary stuff, like those other maps, to a couple visiting readers and trying to pretend that I care about this series, not as much as they do, but at all. What a depressing dream.
Reality isn't like that. Even if I could imagine myself writing fiction, I'm a slow, fussy author and can never not care about what I write, though the experience of writing 800-word concert reviews regardless of whether I have 800 words to say about the concert or not may be slowly warping my mind towards journalism, at least.
And I think of the more tragic experience of a guy I once knew. Though he'd never published any fiction, he devoted years of his life to carefully crafting a gigantic SF epic which he would talk about obsessively until your eyes glazed over. I've known many aspiring fiction authors, some of whom have achieved success in print** and some of whom never got published at all, but none who shared their devotion publicly as much as this fellow.
And then, to everyone's surprise, his epic was accepted by a major publisher and released as a series of paperback originals.
And it sank like a stone. After all his work it made no impression. He has a brief dismissive entry in the Encyclopedia of SF, and I just looked the books up on Amazon and found only two reviews, both crushingly negative and confirming my own experience at an abortive attempt to read book one. I sometimes see copies of one volume or another in used book stores, and I wonder whatever became of him and whether he ever subsequently thought that all that effort was worthwhile.
*A couple of those other maps in my dream were ones I actually drew in childhood. I never wrote any stories based on them, though I did once offer one to a friend who wanted to write stories but not to have to invent a setting for them.
**There are at least four major authors in the SF/F field who were my personal friends before they'd ever published a word: major at least to the extent that for each, I've at least once received an astonished "You know so-and-so?" Why yes, I do. And none of them talked much about the fiction, at least to me, before they started publishing it.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 05:33 pm (UTC)But there's truth in that perspective too. "Many readers are devoted to the books in a way I'm not," said Tolkien, or words to that effect, though he had a lot more dedication than he liked to let on.
I would have been a lot more interested in what this guy had to say about his SF epic if it had only been, as it turned out, a better book; but the possibility of a negative correlation between talking your work out and its quality can't be ignored.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 06:15 pm (UTC)If the author in question is who I think it is (and better that, than that there are two such sad stories out there), the fellow was a bore in pretty much whatever medium he chose to employ.
With one exception. According to rumor and legend, he was a wizard with a cover letter. The story goes that his books were initially rejected by the editor who ultimately accepted them, but the author resubmitted to the very same editor with a new cover letter making the case for publication. And the editor accepted his manuscripts and published them. Pity whatever skill went into that one letter never made it into the books.
But among writers who are not otherwise cataleptically tedious, there seems to be a range of opinions on whether talking out the work is a good idea or not.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-11 08:13 pm (UTC)One of the primary ones is that trying to talk about plot points (I usually want to talk about it, when I'm trying to work out details of some point) is laborious, because it requires explaining a great deal about the context -- and it's a fantasy with a not-simple context. I keep thinking it would boring for them to have to stand and listen to the 5 minute explanation just to get to the thing that *I* wanted to talk about.
And by all that, I don't want to imply that I find the details of my world boring to me. They're not. But I've worked hard to try and avoid the encyclopedic info-dump in the story, and so I don't want to do it in real life either.
But beyond all that... I don't talk too much about the work-in-progress, because I want the story-telling to speak for itself. I don't want to spoil the surprises and the emotional punches. I want to get the fresh reactions of the readers.
Maybe I should get cracking and finish the thing -- faster. :D