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Aborting the novel

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 3, 2012

In the last four days, I’ve written about 37,100 words. Writing them was surprisingly easy. At no time did I feel “blocked”. But ever since the first thousand or so, I’ve been plagued by doubts as to the quality of the work.

About an hour and a half ago, I wrote a sentence, and I thought to myself, “I can’t do this anymore.” The sentence was bad. Most of the sentences that had preceded it were bad. Structurally, the novel was fairly sound (hey, I plotted it out with a synopsis and everything). But I had a strong sense that on a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing was cliche and awkward.

I usually don’t have the sense that my work is bad. Usually, I am extremely enthusiastic about it while I am writing it. I’ve previously written two novels that were significantly flawed, but while I was writing both of them, I had no doubts as to their merits.

For a long time, I thought I might be fooling myself. I thought that the novel might actually be good in a way that I was too close to it to see. But I don’t think so. I trust my own aesthetic judgment. It’s been good to me. And I no longer wish to try to work against it.

I kept going for the last few days because I thought, “Hey, what’s the big deal. A week or two more work and then I’ll have a novel. If it sucks, then so what? I’ll toss it in the trash.” But I just can’t keep forcing myself to work on something that I don’t believe in.

When I was at Clarion, Samuel Delany said to our class, “Writing bad stories doesn’t teach you to write good stories; it just teaches you to write more bad stories”. Although this advice nags at me and sometimes feels to me to be fundamentally false, I also think it has alot of explanatory power. There are not alot of people who are even attempt to explain why one writer turns out cliche, awkwardly-written stories and another writer turns out good ones. Most attribute the difference to the ten thousand hours: the good writer must’ve practiced more than the bad one. But this is clearly not the entire answer. Many bad writers have written reams and reams of books. Surely at some point they must’ve gotten enough practice to write a good one?

I’m afraid that if I keep writing this one, then I’ll only be relearning how to write badly. And I’m also afraid that I will stunt my judgment. So, yeah, I’m putting a pin in this one. It’s not a total loss. I think the first part of what I’ve written might work as a novella, and I’ll explore the possibility of revising it into one.

I am also going to shelve the whole Mythmakers idea for now. For five years, it’s stood as a barrier between me and my next novel. But I think it’s time to cut my losses. I think it’s just too chilly and science-fictional and epic for me. I’m not sure that I am that kind of writer anymore. When I was 21, I loved vast mind-bending ideas. Now I write smaller, subtler stories. It was exactly this sort of subtlety that I think was missing from this manuscript.

In addition (and this is the saddest announcement of all), I think I am going to abandon two-week novel-writing. Last spring, it was an amazing experience. This spring, it led to perhaps the worst four days of my life. I’m not sure that I want novel-writing to be such an emotionally intense endeavor. I’d prefer to just plug away at things for a few months or a year. Slow and steady is going to be my mantra from now on.

Furthermore, I think that I might have hit the limits of the kind of quality I can wring from writing very fast. When I compare this novel to my last novel, I feel like I am seeing the difference between a very ambitious, poorly-executed work and an unambitious, well-executed work. The latter can often be enjoyable, exciting, and, sometimes, memorable. The former is almost always quite boring. I don’t want to write unambitious stories, but I fear that if I kept trying to write novels in two weeks, then I would soon begin limiting myself to unambitious ideas.

Anyways, guys, I hope you understand. I did make a big deal of announcing my novel-writing endeavors because I hoped that the chance of public embarassment would keep me writing. But…I’m actually not particularly motivated by shame. Woops.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Hey everyone, don’t expect anything out of me for the next fifteen days. I am writing a novel.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 30, 2012

I think the title of this post says it all. By the time you read this, I will hopefully have started. This is going to be my third novel. It’s been gestating since May of 2007, and I think it’s time to finally write it down. This time, I’ve already written a synopsis and everything. I’ll probably be posting a few blog updates, but I plan on not having any social engagements (or, really, going further than six blocks from my apartment) for the next fifteen days. The book’s working title is The Mythmakers, but that’s definitely not going to be the final title.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Why I’m going to stop giving out writing advice

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 26, 2012

I’ve had a huge run of good luck, lately. In the past year, I’ve sold quite a few stories. Because of that, part of me decided that I now have a license to pontificate a little bit. And to some extent, I do. I’m definitely the kind of writer that I would have listened to a few years ago: someone who was a little bit ahead of me in the game and might have a little bit of advice on how to hop to the next level. In fact, I spent ages browsing the blogs of writers just like me, trying to get some sense of how they went about getting to where I wanted to be.

But there are a number of reasons that I just don’t feel honest when I give advice.

I’m not that good – Writers really shouldn’t aspire to be me: a guy who’s sold a few soon-forgotten stories to a few tiny magazines. They should aspire to be Kafka or Kerouac or Borges or Ted Chiang or Gene Wolfe or China Mieville or whoever their favorite author is. I think people do themselves a tremendous disservice when they aim too low. I’m pretty good, but I’m not nearly as good as I want to be. And I’m not as good as you should want to be either.

I don’t remember what I did – Writing is a series of ladders. You go up one ladder and then you forget what it looked like. All you can remember is the ladder you are on. I remember times in my life when I was really cerebral about my writing. I remember times when trying to write every single day was exactly the wrong thing for me. In fact, overambitious productivity goals were for many years a significant impediment to my growth as a writer. The advice that I currently give to people is to listen to themselves and try to develop their own way of doing things. But maybe that’s not the right advice for most people. Maybe most beginners need to learn discipline. Or maybe they need to learn to relax and just write whenever. Maybe they need to set goals, but those goals should be small and achievable. I don’t know.

I don’t remember what I am doing – Honestly, most of my writing proceeds as kind of a blur. If you were to point to a specific story, I’d only have a vague idea of how I thought it up or what steps I went through in revising it. I promote the myth that most of my stories spontaneously cohere from free-writing exercises, but, in reality, I think that well over half of my stories occur to me as ideas (often while I’m driving) that I then sit down and pursue in a fairly ordinary way. I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t a genius of spontaneous story generation until I actually sat down and thought about the roots of most of the stories I’ve sold.

I don’t know what I’m going to do – It’s entirely possible that I’m doing all kinds of things wrong! The way I write is fast, thoughtless, and involves a quasi-mystical communion with my subconscious. A lot of writers seem to get a lot of mileage out of writing slowly and carefully. It’s likely that I will someday (maybe soon) hit a plateau and have to change the way that I write. In fact, my writing process has changed a lot over the last year. If you’d asked for my advice just a year ago, it might have been very different. Thus, it seems a little disingenuous to hand out advice that might not even be working for me.

It feels unfair to you – I get rejected all the time. Like…every third day, I get a rejection. I just started sending out a story that I think is literally the best story I’ve ever written: a story that I was sure was going to get reprinted in Year’s Bests and nominated for awards. It got rejected. Twice. And that’s okay. But sometimes I feel like I compensate for that sort of rejection by going out and pontificating to people who’ve had slightly less visible success. And that’s dumb. I’m a better writer than most aspirants, but I’m not necessarily a better writer than you. There’s no reason why you should be have to listen to what is mostly a ritual of preening that serves what I find to be kind of an ugly psychological need in myself. Sometimes good things can result from bad motives, but I think that bad motives often have a tendency to poison the results. It’s possible that I’m giving out helpful advice, but given that my motive is to make myself feel important and not to necessarily help other people, I think it’s also possible that my advice might be making people feel bad rather than actually helping them.

So yes, I apologize to anyone and everyone that I’ve given writing advice to, particularly if that advice was in any way unsolicited and/or unhelpful. I’m still going to keep writing about my writing process and the ways that it’s evolving and the things I am doing to try to become a better writer, but I am going to try to steer clear from any implication that this is stuff that you should consider doing.

Posted in Advice | 2 Comments »

My eight hundredth short story rejection

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 17, 2012

Last Friday, I got a form rejection from Nature. That rejection was my 800th short story rejection. That number is so impossibly high. It is 123 stories that have been rejected from 175 markets. Since I sent out my first submissions on December 20th, 2003, I’ve gotten, on average, a rejection every four days. For a long time, the only things that I got were rejections, so I looked to my rejection count as a primary writing indicator. More submissions meant more chances at success, but it also meant more rejections. Since rejections were directly correlated with submissions, rejections were good. It meant that I was making progress.

And now I have soooooo many! I am absurdly proud of my rejection count. Awhile back, Jay Lake had a thread on how many rejections people had gotten before making their first pro sale (you can even see me comment on it; back then I had only a puny 312 rejections), and my number was so much higher than most people’s. Until then, I’d simply assumed that almost everyone had to garner a few hundred rejections before making any decent sales. But that is actually not the case.

In any case, here is a list of my other rejection milestone posts. As you can see, I am actually getting rejected much more often now than I was at the beginning of my career. This is a little surprising, since my stories tend to get held longer than they used to and they’re more likely to sell (both of which tend to reduce rejection-count). I think that my increased productivity and diligence in submitting have, for now, more than made up for any increase in writing skill.

In the comments to one of these posts, someone wrote in praise of my tenacity, and I wrote back saying that tenacity was all well and good, but sooner or later one has to take the hint. I wrote that if I wasn’t seeing much success by the time of my eight hundredth rejection, I might consider quitting. Luckily, my success has come fast enough (for now), to forestall weariness. In terms of sales, this last century has been the best one yet. I’ve sold  six stories, all at pro rates, to Daily SF, Clarkesworld, Apex, IGMS, Redstone, and a theme anthology whose editor will hopefully get back to me soon on whether it’s okay to announce the sale to y’all. That is some pretty good selling right there, and it includes two markets–Apex and IGMS–which had rejected me 21 and 22 times (respectively) before finally accepting something of mine.

Posted in Writing | 4 Comments »

Sold “An Early Adoption” to Redstone Science Fiction

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 30, 2012

Yep, good news is just blowing in from all over the place. I think this is one of my favorite short stories, so I’m glad that it’s found a home. This would’ve been the first time I’d sold two stories in a row, if it had not been preceded–two hours earlier–by a rejection from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. C’est la vie. This is the second story I’ve sold to Redstone. The first–”Death’s Flag Is Always At Half-Mast” was published in August 2010.

Oh, it’s going to be published on April 2nd, so you’ll get to read it rull soon.

In other news, I’m going to be at FOGCon (right here in the Bay Area) on Friday and Saturday. I don’t know if any blog-readers will be around, but if you see me, feel free to say ‘hi’.

And in my final news, I watched Battle Royale (a Japanese movie from the 1990s in which a bunch of kids are taken to an island and forced to fight each other) today. The only way in which it differs from the Hunger Games is that it lacks the reality-show element (but it does have innocent kids killing each other [something that HG notably lacks]. I particularly liked one scene where a roomful of girls murder each other over a misunderstanding.)

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Sold “The Snake King Sells Out” to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 28, 2012

Years of looking at the bibliographies of up-and-coming authors have taught me that in the science fiction world, there are three main groupings of markets. The first grouping contains the online mags: Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Strange Horizons. In the second group are the digest mags whose stories hew more closely to core 90s-style humanist SF: Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And the third group holds the remnants of the Golden Age, stories that are more idea- or adventure-driven: Writers of the Future, Analog, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the now-closed Jim Baen’s Universe. The fantasy groupings are a little different, but to a large extent, these groupings even hold for those stories.

Authors can sell novels, hit best-seller lists, and win awards without ever breaking out of their grouping. A good example is Catherynne Valente. She’s a fairly prolific short story writer whose stories are a massive influence on the world of contemporary fantasy and sci-fi, but I don’t think she’s ever published a story in any of the group two or three magazines.

Which really doesn’t mean anything, of course. The three groups differ primarily because they have different audiences. In order to be a successful author, you don’t need to appeal to multiple audiences…you just need to find your audience; and Cat Valente has clearly managed to do that. Or we can look at Ted Chiang, who’s never really published a story in groups one or three. Or Eric James Stone, who hasn’t really published a story in groups one or two (except for a reprint in Apex in 2009).

All I’m really saying is that with this story sale, I’m now a cross-group author. Woot.

This story was at IGMS for 143 days before I queried (about three weeks ago). My query shook loose a revision request (editor Edmund Schubert wanted to see a different ending). Ten days after I submitted the revision, he accepted the story.

This is probably my most-revised story. I polished it up to what I thought was perfection and sent it out (to Apex) about a year ago, and then submitted it to a workshop class (with Nick Mamatas, in Berkeley), where he told me it was too long (and that the ending was bad). I went through it really exhaustively, cutting about a thousand words and polishing it up to perfection again, only to have to do a third round of revision before I could actually sell it.

I’m really happy about this. I’ve done two revision requests before (for Shimmer and Strange Horizons), and after failing to sell the stories, I’d become somewhat cynical about the whole request-for-revision game. But now I suppose my faith in sunshine and love and puppydogs has been restored. It’s also always good to sell to a new market. And this is my tenth pro sale, so I can cross that off my goals list as well. The story should appear in May.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , | 12 Comments »

Coming to grips with the worst-case scenario for my writing career

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 22, 2012

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about worst-case scenarios. Any reader of my blog has to have noticed that I’ve had a fair amount of writing success lately (and there’ve been other great things that I haven’t mentioned, like a revision request from an editor; an invitation to submit to a closed anthology; and another super awesome thing that I will hopefully post about in a few days [not, unfortunately, a novel sale]). And all this success has been great!

But it’s also seriously stressed me out. Before, I was pretty sure that every submission I sent out was going to end in a rejection. Now there’s this constant uncertainty! It could sell! It really could! Recently, I had a submission at The Magazine of Fantasy And Science Fiction for 90+ days (I even queried by email at sixty days and was told that Gordon Van Gelder was really considering it for real and everything). Now, that’s awesome. A year ago, I’d never gotten anything but form rejections from F&SF. Now, they’re thinking about buying a story from me? It was really awesome. But also very nervewracking. Since I know that Gordon is pretty much the only editor who accepts stories by snail mail, the hope that I’d sell to F&SF was alive and well until pretty much the moment that I opened the envelope.

Well, I didn’t sell that story to them. It wasn’t so bad, but the whole thing did take a very real emotional toll on me. And this is the same emotional toll that I suffer from every near miss. When I had no success, I felt like I had nothing to lose. Now, I feel like I am putting my reputation on the line with each submission. It’s definitely better than being uniformly rejected, but I had learned to deal with uniform rejection, and I haven’t yet learned to deal with this.

Which is why I recently read Dale Carnegie’s self-help guide How To Stop Worrying And Start Living. This book has a lot of good advice (although I think it might work better for people with a less morbid disposition than myself), but one thing that I took away from it is that when a person is worrying about something, he ought to clearly outline the worst-case scenario. Without a clear worst-case scenario, the dread is very generalized and all-encompassing. But once we have a worst-case scenario, we realize that it’s not that bad.

With my writing hobby / vocation / career, the worst-case scenario is surprisingly bearable. Under the worst case scenario, I suffer a few years of declining success (i.e. I recede from my current high point) and realize that this isn’t really going to happen for me. I slowly downsize my writing commitment and start producing just a few stories a year. I go to graduate school and major in something practical (like Economics). I get a solid public policy or private sector job. I start looking for ways to achieve success in my job (rather than my current strategy of downscaling job commitments to focus on writing). And, as a side benefit, I get way more time to catch up on my video games.

It’s definitely not what I want, but it’s also not something that I need to be terrified of. And that’s good. I think that in some cases terror can be a goad to greater effort and productivity. But I also think that terror really has the potential to kill off my creativity. Right now, I’m still trying to find the right mindset with which to approach my neo-pro status, but I have confidence that I’ll figure it out eventually.

Posted in Writing | Tagged: | 3 Comments »

Coping with my own desire to always be in the midst of writing a totally awesome story

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 21, 2012

So, I haven’t completed a story since the 3rd of March (two whole weeks ago!) and that one was just a flash fiction. I haven’t completed a story that I really felt good about since February 14th (five weeks ago! An eternity!) What’s more, right now I don’t really feel like writing more stories. I don’t have any ideas for stories. Whenever I try to start a story I immediately feel so totally over it.

Luckily, I don’t really need to write new stories right now. I’m sitting on thirteen unrevised stories (the oldest of which date back to this time last year), which all need a few days of loving before they can be lobbed onto slush piles all across the country. I’ve been steadily working through this pile for a few months now, and I’m looking forward to cutting it down to zero (my to-be-revised pile hasn’t been at zero since the fall of 2009).

In fact, I often find that an unwillingness to work on new stories is a result of having too many stories in my to-be-revised pile. It’s hard to get excited about a new story when I know that there’s a good chance it’s not going to get submitted for six to twelve months.

The problem is that  my back-brain doesn’t know this. My back-brain is loading me down with killer anxiety about not having produced a new story in awhile. Whenever I go even five weeks without writing a story that I feel good about, I start to wonder whether I’ve lost my mojo. I begin thinking that I might never write a good story ever again!

Usually, I combat this by dropping everything and doing my best to squeeze out a new story (which is how I ended up with thirteen unrevised stories in the first place). But not this time! This time the anxiety can just take a back seat! Until I feel like writing new stories again, I’m going to be content to just do a month or two of revision.

I’m trying to learn to trust my subconscious a little bit more. I think that my subconscious gives me stories at its own pace, and while there is some benefit to pushing myself, I think it also makes sense to listen to the messages I am trying to give myself. Ugh…but it’s not easy. I’ve been doing this for eight years, and I still have pretty much no idea how I’ve managed to write a single word.

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Revising that old stuff

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 28, 2012

Ever since late September, I’ve been writing iteratively: revising a story a half-dozen times before it’s even finished. And then I’ll often hold off on declaring it done until I’ve rewritten the ending a few times as well. The result is that by the time the first draft is complete, my stories have about as much revision as I am capable of giving them. Oh, they’re not flawless. If I subjected them to critique, I’d probably find alot more that I could do with them. But, generally, I’m satisfied with them. I often wait a few weeks, give them a few more passes for style and spelling, and then send them out.

This is not, however, the way that I always worked. I used to race through and complete a first draft as quickly as possible and then hold off on revising it for six to nine months (out of sheer inertia and lazineness). This system was tremendously annoying and also kind of silly, and I’m glad that I abandoned it.

However, I still have about 11 stories that I wrote under the old system, which have just been languishing for ages. I’ve seriously considering just not revising them and not submitting them. This prospect is a little tempting since nowadays I’m suffering from a relative lack of markets to submit to. I’m ineligible for Writers of the Future; I can’t submit to Strange Horizons because I’m reading slush there; and I can’t submit to Clarkesworld or Apex for a few more months because I’ve recently sold stories there. I know, I have a hard life, filled with terrible problems. But, anyway, it wouldn’t be entirely awful if I didn’t have as many stories coming to market as I usually do.

But I couldn’t just abandon the work like that. Some of these stories are actually not at all bad (my recent sale to Clarkesworld is a story that came from this period). So I think I’m going to spend the next month doing some intensive revision. Editors, beware….eleven steaming Kanakias are about to be dropped on your desks.

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As of today, I’m reading slush for Strange Horizons

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 15, 2012

I actually applied to be a slush reader (and was accepted) way back in December, but SH has been closed for a little longer than was expected. Still, we opened about eight hours, and I’m looking forward to reading my first stories.

I decided to start reading slush after my class with Nick Mamatas last summer. He said that a slush-reading stint could do wonders for a person’s writing. Now, this is something I’d heard before, but I’d always dismissed it as being too time-consuming for me. However, I’ve come to realize that if I am going to get better, then I really need to start doing all of the things that I am afraid to do. It is a little scary to have this fairy major commitment hanging over me. And it doesn’t help that this also means that I can’t submit to one of my top short story markets (Strange Horizons has rejected me more than any other market: 32 times). Still, I am confident that it’s the right thing to do.

And I am especially pleased to be doing it for SH. I’ve been reading it for years and it’s one of my favorite magazines. I’m not supposed to talk much about my slush reading (although I am allowed to say that I have the job), so I expect that this is the last that I’ll blog about it for awhile. Still, I thought it was something that was worth mentioning

Posted in Writing | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

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