Luc Reid

It was about 10:30 or 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, 2007, and I was at a party at the house of some friends, when the conversation shifted to New Year's resolutions. I mentioned that I never do them ... and then realized that this year I wanted to do one. With everything that had been going on in my life (and I'm a single parent with a full-time job who runs both a singing group and a large online writing group, so that is a lot), I hadn't been getting much writing done lately, despite my best intentions. So after thinking it through for a few minutes, I actually did make a resolution: I was going to write every day for 2008.

The rules were pretty lenient: there was no minimum length, and the writing could either be generating new material or making at least sentence-sized changes to existing material. However, all of the writing had to be for publication: no journal entries, blogs, etc. would count.

So I started. It was awkward at first. It would get to be time to go to bed, after a day full of things to do, and I'd realize that I hadn't written yet--so I'd sit down, chip away at making meaningful edits on some piece I wanted to get out the door for just 10 or 20 minutes, then turn the computer off and head to bed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had cleared out all of the projects that I felt were overdue and needed immediate attention and was able to get back on track with a novel I was working on.

This was more difficult. I wasn't entirely clear on where I was going with the novel, and because I was getting in my writing time late in the day, I really didn't feel like spending some time planning the story, then spending more time writing the story. So I tried just writing, an approach that has worked well for me some of the time before. Within a few weeks, it was clear I was driving myself through a trackless wilderness. Just Writing might work for me for some projects, but this one required a lot of thought and planning to come off well, and it wasn't working out. I began working on another project instead, one that I knew was more straightforward and would come out more easily.

But thinking back on that experience, I soon realized that I needed to change my resolution: my writing time could be for writing an actual piece, but it could also be for planning a piece, in writing (daydreaming and straight research wouldn't count).

Feeling I had gotten off track with the novel I had been "just writing," I set it aside and got to work on a new project, one that required a lot of brainstorming, imagination, ideas, and planning--and I've been working on it every day since. What I've found is that my brain has gotten fired up with the story, and since I don't take more than a day away from the old story forge at a time, the coals are still hot when I next get back to them, and just need me to blow across them a little for the flame to leap back up. This is <i>much</i> better than writing from a cold start: this is jumping into the saddle and having the horse break into a gallop.

Writing every day has become easier since I started, and I've found more opportunities to do it. So far, one quarter of the way through 2008, I've missed one day (when I was both sick and on vacation). As nice as perfection is, missing one day is fine for me. If I miss one day per quarter for the whole year, I'll consider that a massive victory.

And there have been more benefits, surprising ones. I find that before I go to sleep or when I'm driving, I'm working on the book in my mind: I've obtained a limited amount of that enviable obsession that produces idea after idea, insight after insight, into a project. I'm re-reading a favorite writing book at night now (Donald Maass' <i>Writing the Breakout Novel</i>, which I recommend highly), and as I go through it, I find myself easily able to see how Mr. Maass' insights can apply to my book, and what I need to do. The characters are getting richer and more human, the plot more surprising and satisfying, the milieu more real and engrossing.

So here's my advice to you: if you're serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don't have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead--just for a month or two--writing every day. Don't set high word count requirements, but follow your regime faithfully. What's interesting is that your work may change not just in the quantity of words you've generated, but in the way it feels to you to write it. After the first couple of months, writing for me began to feel effortless again, something I had only seen occasionally in the past and that I now suspect had more to do with having gotten into a habit of writing very regularly for a while than with some particular inspiration.

I'm not the first person to try this by any means. Some writers--even other when-I'm-not-at-my-day-job-or-with-my-family writers, like me--have made it a permanent part of their lives, as I may come to do as well. A whole group of us on Codex, my writing group, are doing this. Lots of other people are first. Lawrence Schoen (Codexian, fluent Klingon speaker, and author of a variety of clever short stories published in English and translated into a passel of other languages) started doing it back in 2006 or 2007.

And what about your writing? Would it help you?

Titles can benefit a story in as many as five meaningful ways, only one of which is based on having read the story already. Therefore it tends to be a bad idea to use a title that becomes interesting only after reading the story (e.g. "Charlie"). In no particular order, titles can (and arguably should):

1. Intrigue someone into being curious about the story ("Something Wicked This Way Comes," The Da Vinci Code).

2. Give the reader an immediate and accurate sense of what kind of story is coming in terms of genre, mood etc. (I, Robot, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

3. Serve as an easily-remembered and easily-communicated label for the book when telling others about it (Dune, The Hobbit). An easily-communicated title is easy to remember, spell, and say, and is strongly connected to the story itself. It stands out: you remember it specifically rather than something like it.

4. Lend a sense of authority or poetry ("To the East, a Bright Star," The Once and Future King).

5. Be unlikely to be confused with other titles. This particularly makes one-word titles problematic unless the word is extremely unusual (Xenocide).

Caveats:

Ÿ         These rules don't apply in the same way to movies, in part because there are only a very limited number of movies out at a given time and most interested consumers are exposed to a poster and/or trailer for each, making the title less important except for item #3.

Ÿ         Also, many very successful books have "broken" these rules, because of course the book itself is more important than the title.

Ÿ         And of course it's debatable how many people will actually be influenced in any way by a title if they don't have another recommendation for the book. That said, some readers are intrigued by titles, and a title can be the difference between your book being looked at on a shelf or within online search results or disregarded with the all the other books the reader has never heard of.

Many writers, from beginners to established pros, seem to want to come up with titles that cleverly cap off or sum up the story. They'll write a story about a magical cape and call it "The Cape," or a story in which the secret is that the protagonist is really dead and call it "Unsettled." These types of titles often lose the opportunity to ensnare the reader's interest and advertise what they're about.

Titles are much more important for books than for short stories, since a person who is browsing for a book online or in a bookstore, or who glimpses the title in a list, has the opportunity to find out about the book and perhaps buy it. Short stories, by contrast, are usually available only in groups within magazines, anthologies, and collections, and so individual titles are unlikely to have much opportunity to attract readers to buy the work.

In terms of learning to write good titles, I highly recommend exercising this part of your brain wherever possible by using good titles for e-mail subjects, forum discussion titles, boring reports you put together for work, etc. It's a rare situation where anyone will be bothered by you slapping a magnificent title on an otherwise dull report or a quick e-mail, and the more you work to come up with titles the stronger that facility will be.

There's an old and revered legend that circulates among science fiction and fantasy writers, and it goes like this: "A lot of people won't read science fiction just because it's labelled 'science fiction,' so publishers call some science fiction 'mainstream' and then people will read it, but it's really science fiction." Optionally, the legend may include "Authors who won't call their work science fiction are selling out."

The same thing is said about fantasy; I'll deal with science fiction here for convenience, but the same arguments apply.

As you can probably tell from the title of this entry, I don't exactly agree with this idea, and I think the exact reason the ghetto is a myth leads to an important thing for writers (at least science fiction and fantasy writers) to understand, of which more in a moment.

What books are we talking about here? Margaret Atwood (for instance, The Handmaid's Tale) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, for example) get a lot of mentions in this context. More recent examples include Maria Doria Russell (The Sparrow) and Gregory Macguire (Wicked).

Here's how people seem to look at this: if a story is set in the future (like The Handmaid's Tale) or contains science fictional elements (like the interstellar flight in The Sparrow), it's science fiction. If science fiction is defined solely by subject matter, that makes sense. But is that the most useful definition of science fiction? I'm big on "useful."

Think about it this way: as a reader, which of the following is more important for you to know about a book?

A) Exactly what subject matter it contains, or

B) Whether or not you're likely to enjoy it.

Or as a writer, which of the following do you care about more?

A) A taxonomic classification of your book based on an analysis of story and setting elements, or

B) Who will buy your book.

In both cases, we have a choice between A, which gives us rigid categories that take into account only certain aspects of a book and B, which gives us information about what books are good for what people.

A and B are not equivalent. Putting a spaceship into a story doesn't necessarily make it appealing to all science fiction readers, and for many readers, how a story is told counts for a lot more than what props show up in it or when it's set.

I'll use the term "mainstream science fiction" here to describe stories that contain elements we usually associate with science fiction but that are written for a general audience instead of primarily for science fiction readers.

So, recently a writer friend and I were discussing Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which I'd call "mainstream science fiction," and Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, a novel that's clearly labelled and read as science fiction. My friend asked what I thought made The Sparrow mainstream science fiction and Hyperion genre science fiction. My answer was this:

1) The Sparrow focuses on the story and characters rather than the speculative elements. The speculative elements are background rather than foreground.

2) The Sparrow presents speculative elements gently, in ways that mainstream readers find easier to adjust to. No terms are thrown out without indications of what they mean. No speculative elements are introduced simply for coolness factor: they are streamlined to the essentials required to tell the story.

I readily admit that these aren't hard-and-fast distinctions, but they're meaningful distinctions to readers.

Here's the opening of The Sparrow:

On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit Residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.

And the opening of Hyperion:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

In Hyperion, we're supposed to take a variety of speculative elements (the existence of some sort of Hegemony; big, green monsters; and a spaceship with a balcony) in stride.

In The Sparrow, the only immediate speculative element is the date, and that is immediately comprehensible to everyone. Russell failed to take the initiative to come up with a more plausible future vehicle than a bread van or to create a brand new religious order. Throughout the rest of the first chapter, there is only a reference to a mission to a place (the reader will probably conclude that it's a planet) called Rakhat, and a mention in passing of the fairly non-speculative effects of travelling at near light speed.

Hyperion has several times as many speculative elements on the first page as The Sparrow has in the entire first chapter. Actually, Hyperion has more speculative elements in the first sentence than The Sparrow has in its entire first chapter!

The essence of mainstream science fiction as compared to genre science fiction is how it expects its readers to deal with speculative elements, their tolerance and ability to grok them. So mainstream vs. genre is a meaningful distinction that is useful to readers, because it helps them select books that are or are not suited to their tastes. Some genre readers aren't interested in mainstream fiction because it doesn't have enough wild stuff. Some mainstream readers aren't interested in genre fiction because it asks them to do things with their brains that they don't like to do and that their brains aren't currently good at.

Why is this important to writers? Because while every book you write has to be a book you love, you also have to know who else out there in the world will read it. If you want to reach a larger audience, you have to tell your story in a way that they will be willing to read. If you want to reach science fiction readers, you need to tell the story in the way that they want to hear it told. And these are basic writing choices rather than simply labels slapped on by publishers.

From here we get into trickier questions, like the Harry Potter stories. In a sense, Harry Potter stories are clearly fantasy: they throw out a lot of magical things and don't explain everything. But they still don't demand the reader to juggle ideas in the way the usual adult fantasy novel these days does, in part because there's no attempt to justify the magical system. Thus the Harry Potter books manage to be mainstream books in the same way a science fiction movie like Independence Day, which doesn't require audiences to imagine anything radically new, is a mainstream movie.

But there's a subtler point here, which is that if you can make the payoff high enough, you can ask more of your readers (or viewers). Many kids and adults who wouldn't have been interested in reading a fantasy story under normal circumstances simply got so much enjoyment out of Harry Potter that they were willing to accept his impossible world, just as many of Michael Crichton's readers will sit still for discussions of reconstructing DNA because later in the story, they get to see characters they care about running from a ravenous T-Rex.

The lessons I take from all this are as follows, then. Rule one: write a story in a way that readers are willing to read it. Rule two: if you can write a story that fascinates people, you can break rule one and any number of other rules. Rules aren't made to be broken, but you could argue that in writing, they are made to be transcended.