02.15.08
Tea Cozies of the Undead
You’ll have to let me rant a little more before I start helping you write better. I’m sorry - but I have unlimited electronic ink and lots of free time. So just bear with me and I promise I’ll get to brass tacks when I can.
I also feel the need to say to you that this isn’t a series about how to write novels. Or tech manuals. Or blogs. It’s about how to write so you don’t throw up a little in your mouth at your own keystrokes. It’s about how to write what you know.
Everybody Good? Good…let’s go on.
Anne Rice is an awful, AWFUL book-writer. Her first works were edited heavily by the publishers and as a result, the Vampire Trilogy of Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned are toned, statuesque beasts. They’re deserving of the cult following they’ve garnered since the late 70’s. Her later works suffered as a direct consequence of her success; her renegotiated publishing contracts allowed her to print completely unedited works. She’s prolific, but she’s gotten leggy, like the bougainvillea she vainly tries to capture in her Southern Gothic idylls. Invariably somebody gets violated in each book she’s written. At least Clive Barker and Stephen King murder their characters when they get onerous and dull. I can’t imagine what the hell you do when all your subjects are immortal, sexy and immortally sexy. Eventually she’ll start writing books like “Sexy Vampire Drinks Tea,” a 900-page tome about tea cozies of the undead.
Anne’s talent is not the issue. She’s obviously talented. Her stories are entertaining, that’s for sure. They’re just not very good. Kinda like the difference between Hamlet and The Golden Girls. I leave it to you to choose which is which.
The issue at hand is that Anne is a brilliantly messy writer who needs the outside eye of a publisher. Many writers do, and there’s no shame in this. Those who weave fabric usually don’t know how to make couture fashion, and vice versa. It is more important to get messy, make mistakes and clean up later than it is to struggle for ‘perfect’ the very first time. Unfortunately, some people see editors as some sort of evil. They assume that talent needs no editing.
That’s a crock of &^%$. It’s perpetuated by those who can’t write. It allows them to say “well, my book was edited and they cut out the best parts. Hogwash. If you had a best part then you’re blatantly acknowledging that your work was 90 percent “suck.” Don’t jerk yourself or your reader around.
Deciding very early on what sort of writer you’re going to be, and exploring every possible facet of that choice is something any successful writer has to do. If you find out that you’re a excellent short-story writer, don’t spend 25 years struggling to write a 500-page novel. If you blog well, don’t struggle to write techno-babble. Learn to use the natural inner voice you have inside you every day to speak up and out. If that inner voice is screaming “Let me write tech manuals!” then you’re gonna be rich and you owe me a percentage. More often than not, however, you’re gonna find that your inner voice rambles, travels over some odd terrain, comes back to the road and relaxes for a bit, then dodges into the roadside fields yet again. Trying to rein in your inner writer is like trying to paint a cat: nothing good can come of the effort.
Good writers are flexible writers that allow that inner voice to take them on a journey, but also allow the journey to color and flavor the writing until you’re not sure who wrote which chapter. Look at Stephen King as opposed to Anne Rice. Once again, King’s works are wildly different in scope and nature, keeping only King’s wry uber-narrator as an omniscient overpresence, and even that God-voice isn’t always heavily invoked. Look at King’s early works; Thinner, The Shining, The Stand - and then enjoy his wild turn to the theatrical with books like Dolores Claiborne or Gerald’s Game. Yes, they’re all Stephen King; his spade-shaped face is imprinted into our brains as we open each book. But the joy of a King novel lies in the incredible flexibility of his voice, like an operatic baritone reaching for tenor notes only to fall to bass in mock despair. Even his repeaters, like Eyes of the Dragon and its contemporary child Needful Things are driven in different ways. Both are about fighting the Nameless Evil; the only thing in common is the simple bravery of the characters who choose to fight.
Don’t understand me? Start reading.
Next time: tiny tools and simple rules.