I really don’t want to do this.
I don’t want to criticize Neil Gaiman. I don’t want to criticize someone who I hold up as something of an idol. A writer whose career is something I aspire to, whose achievements I look to for inspiration. But I will.
Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) co-wrote the screenplay for the new Roger Zemeckis version of Beowulf. And the word “version” could not be more apt. Because this film isn’t exactly Beowulf. It’s not what you read in high school. In fact, a better title for this film would be “Neil Gaiman’s Beowulf” or “A Roger Zemeckis interpretation of Beowulf” or even “Half Beowulf/Half Something Sort-Of Inspired by Things We Think We Found Reading Between the Lines of Beowulf”
I might have let this go. I was almost willing to, actually. Because this is not a bad film. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good film. The motion-capture technique Zemeckis uses to create a quasi-animated picture is still far-from perfect (although much improved from The Polar Express a few years ago). It’s not yet photo-realistic, and it may never be, but it holds promise for the future of fantasy and sci-fi moviemaking. But this blog is about writing, and so this review is going to focus on the writing.
The story of Beowulf, as most of us know from sleep-inducing classes in our teens, is the oldest epic poem written in English. Not quite our English though. If you read it in the original, or listen to it read in the original (as I was forced to do by a high school teacher who was very impressed with his own ability to pronounce dead languages) you’ll find it sounds something like German. It dates from a time before English became the chaotic mish-mash of Anglo-Saxon, Church Latin and Norman French that regularly boggles the minds of non-native speakers these days.
It’s old.
And that’s where I have a problem with this new version. The earliest Beowulf manuscript we have dates from around the 10th century, but the poem itself was probably composed much earlier, sometime in the 7th century or so, detailing events alleged to have taken place in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. In other words, the story hasn’t changed in about a thousand years, and it has existed in some form for maybe five hundred more. Not quite The Iliad or The Aeneid, but well-qualified to claim that it has “stood the test of time.”
Enter: Gaiman, Avary and Zemeckis, stage left.
Their version begins by following the basic storyline of the poem. The hideous monster Grendel is terrorizing the Danish lands of King Hrothgar, who sends out a call for aid. He is answered by a contingent of Geatish thanes, led by the boastful, but fearsome warrior of the title. Beowulf does battle with the beast, only to learn that Grendel’s Mother poses an even greater threat than her bestial son.
In between, a lot of mead is consumed and lot of absurd, self-aggrandizing stories are told, all of which are essentially true to the poem and to the culture of that pre-Christian age. Fine so far.
But then, just as the film should be building to a crescendo, as it does in the original poem, it deviates so far as to have almost no regard for the source material.
I won’t say any more about the plot, because that would spoil it, which is kind of preposterous when you think about it. How could anyone be concerned with posting a spoiler about a story that is older than the language this is written in?
And that’s the problem. When did it become OK to take time-honored tales and “improve” them for modern audiences? Who got the idea in their head that they were a better storyteller than Homer? That they could do a better job of relating the events of the Trojan War with Brad Pitt as a “more human” Achilles?
But “Troy” is only one of a series of recent Hollywood disgraces. How about “300?” There you have a true story so compelling that people have been telling it for millennia, a story of men giving their lives for their nation, fighting against impossible odds and doing so knowing they face certain doom, a story that has betrayal, drama and genuine sacrifice. Instead the movie version has the Persians depicted as Tolkien-esque monsters, and the Spartans as only barely more human—a group of almost robotic super-soldiers.
And we’re not even going to discuss “Alexander.”
With this Beowulf adaptation, it seems Gaiman and Avary were trying to clear up some of what they perceived to be “motivation” problems in the original. They seem to have felt that there were some holes in the story that they could fill in with a few minor leaps of imagination. In short, Neil Gaiman thought he could improve Beowulf. Maybe he did, maybe his version makes more sense, and makes Beowulf more human. Maybe he explains Grendel a little better, gives him a good reason to terrorize the Danes, so the audience can understand his character better.
All of those things are exactly what you’d ordinarily praise in a story, and they’re things that Gaiman excels at in his own stories. But this is the wrong place to do it. Beowulf has stood on its own for so long, not because it does (or does not) comport with modern rules of drama. Beowulf is a tale for the ages. It’s a time capsule of how our distant ancestors saw the world. It tells us what they valued, how they approached life, and death. Beowulf isn’t for us. It was for them. It’s their story, and the reason we keep telling it is to understand who they were, because that’s who we once were.
It doesn’t really need to be improved, just told.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
What are you working on?
This is something people have been asking me quite a bit lately. And I don't really have a great answer. Try to sum up a five hundred page book in a few lines, off the top of your head. Then try it with one that you're still in the middle of writing.
But since it is almost done, and I'm reasonably certain of the basics of the story, I've scribbled up a preliminary "cover blurb" to answer the questions. Something like this would end up on the back flap of the book when it's published, subject to revision by several other people, of course.
Here it is, for the first time anywhere:
The Prometheus Gate
November 1966
Al Grimsby walks into the Third District Police Station in Cleveland, Ohio—carrying the body of a boy he has just killed. He turns himself in, and confesses to twenty-five more child murders.
February 2007
After serving more than 40 years of a life sentence, Al Grimsby escapes from a maximum security prison. And the killing begins again.
Christina Falcone, the FBI’s top behavioral analyst, is assigned to profile and apprehend him. Skeptical from the start, her investigation leads her into a maze of conflicting clues—secret government experiments, legends of lost gods and an archaeologist named Carter McAlester, who works for a shadowy organization with their own agenda—a desperate search for a legendary Sumerian tablet, an artifact that may predate civilization itself, and which may hold the key to an unspeakable power.
A power that Al Grimsby may already possess, and which may have driven him mad.
While Carter pursues the artifact from the streets of Berlin to the dusty ruins of Babylon, watched by his own mysterious masters, Falcone finds that she is the one being hunted. Plagued by nightmares and dark visions, she races to discover the truth before she too descends into madness, and before Grimsby can finish the bloody work he began four decades before.
Before the Prometheus Gate can be opened.
But since it is almost done, and I'm reasonably certain of the basics of the story, I've scribbled up a preliminary "cover blurb" to answer the questions. Something like this would end up on the back flap of the book when it's published, subject to revision by several other people, of course.
Here it is, for the first time anywhere:
The Prometheus Gate
November 1966
Al Grimsby walks into the Third District Police Station in Cleveland, Ohio—carrying the body of a boy he has just killed. He turns himself in, and confesses to twenty-five more child murders.
February 2007
After serving more than 40 years of a life sentence, Al Grimsby escapes from a maximum security prison. And the killing begins again.
Christina Falcone, the FBI’s top behavioral analyst, is assigned to profile and apprehend him. Skeptical from the start, her investigation leads her into a maze of conflicting clues—secret government experiments, legends of lost gods and an archaeologist named Carter McAlester, who works for a shadowy organization with their own agenda—a desperate search for a legendary Sumerian tablet, an artifact that may predate civilization itself, and which may hold the key to an unspeakable power.
A power that Al Grimsby may already possess, and which may have driven him mad.
While Carter pursues the artifact from the streets of Berlin to the dusty ruins of Babylon, watched by his own mysterious masters, Falcone finds that she is the one being hunted. Plagued by nightmares and dark visions, she races to discover the truth before she too descends into madness, and before Grimsby can finish the bloody work he began four decades before.
Before the Prometheus Gate can be opened.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Ghost Hunters
Maybe I'm aiming at a soft target, but this has been bothering me for a while. If you don't know about it, Ghost Hunters is a series on the Sci-Fi Channel, with new episodes currently airing on Wednesday nights. It centers on a group of likeable New England blue-collar fellas, plumbers by day, who spend their off-hours poking around in supposedly haunted places, looking for evidence of ghosts. What began as a hobby has now blossomed into a fairly well-organized group they call TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society). It's at least as much a reality show as a supernatural show, since the episodes are often more entertaining for the interactions between the team members as they are for any actual paranormal activity.
A caveat before I proceed.
I'm an atheist. Not because I dislike religion (although I do) but for the simple reason that I won't assert a belief in anything for which sufficient evidence cannot be produced. Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out what he call the "teapot atheist" idea. Essentially it says that no one believes, as an article of faith at least, that there is a ceramic English teapot in orbit around the planet. There might be one. Science doesn't rule it out. But no reasonable person would proclaim their belief in such a thing absent some evidence that it's actually there.
As a person with no religious beliefs, therefore, I have no notion of an afterlife. There might be one. It might actually turn out to be very nice, but without some evidence that something of us survives after death, I'm not going to say I believe in that particular teapot.
Now, back to Ghost Hunters.
The TAPS crew appears to be a dedicated, sincere bunch. They travel just about anywhere that people claim to have seen a ghost and they use all sorts of equipment to study the places they visit--including devices that measure electromagnetic radiation, infrared scanners, and both digital video and audio recording devices. And they're not flaky. They're basically the kind of guys I grew up with in Jersey, beer & a shot guys who get their hands dirty at work. They don't employ creepy-looking "psychics" who claim that the dead "speak" to them, and who do little more than spout meaningful-sounding vagaries seasoned with a few period-authentic details (like some other ghost-chasing shows that aren't even worth a mention).
In fact, the TAPS guys actually spend more time debunking the potential hauntings they investigate than uncovering evidence of ghosts. Which is good, because the vast majority of the time their investigations produce nothing of note. I'm not being critical though. That's a good thing, in my opinion.
But I am critical of TAPS in other areas. And I'm astounded that no one else seems to be.
My first gripe: every time TAPS investigates a haunted house, the very first thing they do (after setting up their equipment) is to go "lights out." Yes, they turn out all the lights in the building and walk around for several hours in the dark, looking for ghosts.
What's wrong with that?
For one, can we all agree that if there are actual disembodied spirits who have managed to transcend physical death and are now somehow clinging to the Earthly plane, their primary concern simply cannot be a fear of indoor lighting. How seriously can you really claim to possess a mind geared toward skeptical, science-based inquiry if you insist (for no good reason, as far as I can tell) that ghosts only come out in the dark?
The premise itself is the worst kind of foolishness. And no one, either connected to the show or beyond, ever seems to point this out.
But the "lights out" thing is troubling for another reason, and this is a much more serious charge. Doing something like that undermines both TAPS' scientific bona fides, and it severely limits what they can actually uncover.
All the information any human can ever obtain about the world has to come to us through one of our five senses. Everything. That's all there is. You're reading this, which means you're seeing it. We can construct devices to expand our perceptions, to "hear" ultrasonic frequencies and "see" infrared light, but none of these things are actually accessible to us unless we translate the information into something we can actually see or hear. And here's the rub with Ghost Hunters.
Plunging the house you're investigating into almost total darkness deprives you of the most important of all the senses, and the one that (for most of us) provides the lion's share of the information that you can obtain. Sure, you can scan the place with heat sensors and EMF detectors, that's great. But the bottom line is this: if ghosts can be seen, then they either radiate their own light (and therefore produce energy of some sort--which is a physics problem that I've never seen a decent solution to) or, like us and everything else we see, they reflect light. If they actually do generate their own light then it probably doesn't matter (to them or us) whether the living room light is on, but if they simply reflect light, then turning everything off makes them just as invisible as all the other things TAPS members regularly bump into in dark houses.
The kind of investigation TAPS conducts is essentially an attempt to observe as much about a given location as possible. How can you claim to be serious about investigating anything when you insist on hobbling your powers of observation?
A final note on the "lights out" thing before we move on. A lot of what TAPS "discovers" as part of their investigations involves team members hearing "strange noises" and catching sight of "something moving in the shadows." This is nonsense, and is a direct result of walking around in the dark. Turn on the cameras, leave the lights on and see if anything happens. Then, if you hear footsteps where you think no one is walking, try to at least get a look at what might be making the noise.
Second issue: duration.
Despite the self-imposed problems I just outlined, TAPS has come across some really tantalizing pieces of evidence. I've seen some things on this show that have either been rigged by the producers (and I'm going to dismiss that notion for now, and assume that everything is on the up & up) or might very well suggest something unexplained. In other words, they do occasionally find something.
And then they leave.
This is also bad science. Scientific inquiry means making observations, formulating a hypothesis and then testing it. It means that even when you achieve a result that appears to prove your theory, you repeat the process, you repeat the observations, over and over and over until you've either ruled out your idea or you're convinced that it's probably a correct explanation of what you're seeing. Then you tell other people, and they try to replicate the same result, and the process goes on. Something isn't considered proven until the result it describes can be reproduced consistently, wherever it's attempted under the same conditions. Then you have something.
But TAPS never does that. They hang around for a few hours, gather some data and then leave. Even when they find something, they just throw up their hands and say "Gee, maybe the place really is haunted."
No.
Go back. Stop wasting your time with every Tom, Dick and Harry in Red Sox Nation whose kids don't want to sleep in their bedroom because they think a ghost lives in their dresser. If you find something like the apparition in the prison, or the black shadow slinking around in the pool hall basement, or the child's toys that appear to answer your questions on their own, or the closet door opening and closing by itself in the hotel room--with a glass breaking by itself, for Christ's sake! -- then take your fancy equipment, set it up and leave it there. For weeks. Or months. And then see what you have.
I would rather see one single, solid piece of evidence supported by hours upon hours of repeated observation and testing of every conceivable sort than a thousand pieces of possible somethings with little or no follow-up. TAPS has gone back for follow-up to several locations, I know, but not the way I'm suggesting.
Finding something that established conclusively that human life does not always end when the heart stops beating, that some kind of intelligence survives death, would rank as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of human history. Instead it's the premise of a reality television show that sometimes does as much to frustrate legitimate inquiry as it does to further it.
It doesn't have to be that way. It can be good TV and serious science at the same time. Maybe TAPS can start by taking a page out of the Motel Six handbook -- next time, leave the light on for them.
A caveat before I proceed.
I'm an atheist. Not because I dislike religion (although I do) but for the simple reason that I won't assert a belief in anything for which sufficient evidence cannot be produced. Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out what he call the "teapot atheist" idea. Essentially it says that no one believes, as an article of faith at least, that there is a ceramic English teapot in orbit around the planet. There might be one. Science doesn't rule it out. But no reasonable person would proclaim their belief in such a thing absent some evidence that it's actually there.
As a person with no religious beliefs, therefore, I have no notion of an afterlife. There might be one. It might actually turn out to be very nice, but without some evidence that something of us survives after death, I'm not going to say I believe in that particular teapot.
Now, back to Ghost Hunters.
The TAPS crew appears to be a dedicated, sincere bunch. They travel just about anywhere that people claim to have seen a ghost and they use all sorts of equipment to study the places they visit--including devices that measure electromagnetic radiation, infrared scanners, and both digital video and audio recording devices. And they're not flaky. They're basically the kind of guys I grew up with in Jersey, beer & a shot guys who get their hands dirty at work. They don't employ creepy-looking "psychics" who claim that the dead "speak" to them, and who do little more than spout meaningful-sounding vagaries seasoned with a few period-authentic details (like some other ghost-chasing shows that aren't even worth a mention).
In fact, the TAPS guys actually spend more time debunking the potential hauntings they investigate than uncovering evidence of ghosts. Which is good, because the vast majority of the time their investigations produce nothing of note. I'm not being critical though. That's a good thing, in my opinion.
But I am critical of TAPS in other areas. And I'm astounded that no one else seems to be.
My first gripe: every time TAPS investigates a haunted house, the very first thing they do (after setting up their equipment) is to go "lights out." Yes, they turn out all the lights in the building and walk around for several hours in the dark, looking for ghosts.
What's wrong with that?
For one, can we all agree that if there are actual disembodied spirits who have managed to transcend physical death and are now somehow clinging to the Earthly plane, their primary concern simply cannot be a fear of indoor lighting. How seriously can you really claim to possess a mind geared toward skeptical, science-based inquiry if you insist (for no good reason, as far as I can tell) that ghosts only come out in the dark?
The premise itself is the worst kind of foolishness. And no one, either connected to the show or beyond, ever seems to point this out.
But the "lights out" thing is troubling for another reason, and this is a much more serious charge. Doing something like that undermines both TAPS' scientific bona fides, and it severely limits what they can actually uncover.
All the information any human can ever obtain about the world has to come to us through one of our five senses. Everything. That's all there is. You're reading this, which means you're seeing it. We can construct devices to expand our perceptions, to "hear" ultrasonic frequencies and "see" infrared light, but none of these things are actually accessible to us unless we translate the information into something we can actually see or hear. And here's the rub with Ghost Hunters.
Plunging the house you're investigating into almost total darkness deprives you of the most important of all the senses, and the one that (for most of us) provides the lion's share of the information that you can obtain. Sure, you can scan the place with heat sensors and EMF detectors, that's great. But the bottom line is this: if ghosts can be seen, then they either radiate their own light (and therefore produce energy of some sort--which is a physics problem that I've never seen a decent solution to) or, like us and everything else we see, they reflect light. If they actually do generate their own light then it probably doesn't matter (to them or us) whether the living room light is on, but if they simply reflect light, then turning everything off makes them just as invisible as all the other things TAPS members regularly bump into in dark houses.
The kind of investigation TAPS conducts is essentially an attempt to observe as much about a given location as possible. How can you claim to be serious about investigating anything when you insist on hobbling your powers of observation?
A final note on the "lights out" thing before we move on. A lot of what TAPS "discovers" as part of their investigations involves team members hearing "strange noises" and catching sight of "something moving in the shadows." This is nonsense, and is a direct result of walking around in the dark. Turn on the cameras, leave the lights on and see if anything happens. Then, if you hear footsteps where you think no one is walking, try to at least get a look at what might be making the noise.
Second issue: duration.
Despite the self-imposed problems I just outlined, TAPS has come across some really tantalizing pieces of evidence. I've seen some things on this show that have either been rigged by the producers (and I'm going to dismiss that notion for now, and assume that everything is on the up & up) or might very well suggest something unexplained. In other words, they do occasionally find something.
And then they leave.
This is also bad science. Scientific inquiry means making observations, formulating a hypothesis and then testing it. It means that even when you achieve a result that appears to prove your theory, you repeat the process, you repeat the observations, over and over and over until you've either ruled out your idea or you're convinced that it's probably a correct explanation of what you're seeing. Then you tell other people, and they try to replicate the same result, and the process goes on. Something isn't considered proven until the result it describes can be reproduced consistently, wherever it's attempted under the same conditions. Then you have something.
But TAPS never does that. They hang around for a few hours, gather some data and then leave. Even when they find something, they just throw up their hands and say "Gee, maybe the place really is haunted."
No.
Go back. Stop wasting your time with every Tom, Dick and Harry in Red Sox Nation whose kids don't want to sleep in their bedroom because they think a ghost lives in their dresser. If you find something like the apparition in the prison, or the black shadow slinking around in the pool hall basement, or the child's toys that appear to answer your questions on their own, or the closet door opening and closing by itself in the hotel room--with a glass breaking by itself, for Christ's sake! -- then take your fancy equipment, set it up and leave it there. For weeks. Or months. And then see what you have.
I would rather see one single, solid piece of evidence supported by hours upon hours of repeated observation and testing of every conceivable sort than a thousand pieces of possible somethings with little or no follow-up. TAPS has gone back for follow-up to several locations, I know, but not the way I'm suggesting.
Finding something that established conclusively that human life does not always end when the heart stops beating, that some kind of intelligence survives death, would rank as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of human history. Instead it's the premise of a reality television show that sometimes does as much to frustrate legitimate inquiry as it does to further it.
It doesn't have to be that way. It can be good TV and serious science at the same time. Maybe TAPS can start by taking a page out of the Motel Six handbook -- next time, leave the light on for them.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
1408
I rented 1408 last night. If you haven't seen it (or heard of it) it's based on a short story by Stephen King. A jaded author (John Cusack) who makes his living staying at supposedly haunted places and then writing about them, spends the night in a REALLY spooky place -- Rm. 1408 at the fictional Dolphin Hotel in NYC.
Just as an aside, that description pretty accurately sums up my ideal job. Travel all over, stay in very spooky places and get paid to write about what you see (or don't see). Kind of like Ghost Hunters, but with just a laptop.
Of course, all sorts of terrible things happen in Rm. 1408. It's not a bad film. I rented the director's cut, and having read up on the differences between it and the theatrical version, I think I might have made the wrong call. The ending of the director's cut was not to my liking, and while the theatrical version sounds a little forced, I think I'd prefer it.
Anyway, worth a rental.
Best part of the film for me: Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager, offering John Cusack a drink before he spends the night in the infamous room.
Jackson: "You do drink, don't you?"
Cusack: "Of course, I just said I was a writer."
Just as an aside, that description pretty accurately sums up my ideal job. Travel all over, stay in very spooky places and get paid to write about what you see (or don't see). Kind of like Ghost Hunters, but with just a laptop.
Of course, all sorts of terrible things happen in Rm. 1408. It's not a bad film. I rented the director's cut, and having read up on the differences between it and the theatrical version, I think I might have made the wrong call. The ending of the director's cut was not to my liking, and while the theatrical version sounds a little forced, I think I'd prefer it.
Anyway, worth a rental.
Best part of the film for me: Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager, offering John Cusack a drink before he spends the night in the infamous room.
Jackson: "You do drink, don't you?"
Cusack: "Of course, I just said I was a writer."
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Oh, you're a writer too?
Someday I'm going to compile a list of things that no one ever tells you before you have a novel published.
And when I do, this is going to be the first thing: the moment people find out you wrote a novel they're going to tell you one of three things, a.) they wrote one too and just haven't been able to get it published (yet) or b.) they've always wanted to write one, or c.) they have a ton of great ideas and they definitely plan on sitting down one day to write them all out.
I get this all the time. I'm still not sure whether to be bothered by it, or just amused. Usually I alternate between the two, and I'll explain why.
The first example (I wrote one but haven't gotten it published) hardly bothers me at all. Those people are a lot like me, no more than two years ago. The main difference usually though, is that people who tell you that have generally written one manuscript, and sometimes not even to full novel-length. When I got lucky enough to receive my first contract offer for a book, it wasn't for my first book. Depending on how you count them, it was something like my fifth book that finally snagged me a publisher.
My actual first book (or first attempt) was part 1 of an intended fantasy trilogy I started when I was in the ninth grade. I worked on it all through high school and into my first year of college, when I began to realize that it was never going to be any good. After that I wrote several short screenplays, half a dozen short stories, three full length screenplays and three more novels, all of which were rejected by every professional outlet to which I sent them.
The end result though, was that by the time I finished my fifth one, I was a much better writer than I had been when I finished my first. And this isn't an unusual scenario. You get better by practicing something, and there's no other way to practice writing than to just do it.
So for those folks who tell me that they wrote "a novel" and just want to get it published, I smile and wish them, with all sincerity, the best of luck. Maybe they really are just that good. Maybe they have a story so compelling that people will want to read it, and maybe they managed to get all the little things right the first time out of the gate: believable characters, developed over an entire book, an interesting plot, a good balance between narrative and dialogue, a sound ear for how people actually speak, and the subtle differences between one character's cadence and another's, and a thousand other tiny things.
It wasn't so easy for me. I needed to work at it. Still, those folks are generally well-meaning and actually took the time to do it at least once, and for that they have my respect.
The other bunch of people, the "I've always wanted to write" and "I have lots of ideas" crowd -- I have a little less patience for them.
For one, having never even attempted to write anything, much less a four or five hundred page manuscript, they have no idea what it involves, and to me, they kind of demean the process (even if only unintentionally). It's almost as if they're saying, "well, it's great what you do, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't do it too."
But most of them can't. And never will. They'll just go on thinking they can without ever really trying, the way the guy on the corner stool at your local bar watches Alex Rodriguez strike out and yells at the TV -- he knows he could hit a fastball when he was 12, and somewhere in the back of his head, he still thinks he could have played for the Yanks if things had gone a little differently.
Years ago a professor of mine taught me a phrase -- "the habit of art." It applies to anything artistic, playing music, painting, sculpting and writing. You simply do it or you don't. It's part of how you live. You don't make an effort to do it, you don't make time to sit down and do it, you don't think about someday planning to possibly sit down to do it.
You either write or you don't. If you do, there's no stopping you, it's a part of who you are. And if you don't, then I suppose you could acquire the habit, but there's no substitute for actually doing it.
So please, don't tell me what you're planning to write, or what great stories you want to tell. Get to writing them. And plan on doing it for a long, long time before you ever see anything even resembling success, if at all. Of course, if that doesn't sound like something that appeals to you, then you were never going to be much of writer anyway.
And when I do, this is going to be the first thing: the moment people find out you wrote a novel they're going to tell you one of three things, a.) they wrote one too and just haven't been able to get it published (yet) or b.) they've always wanted to write one, or c.) they have a ton of great ideas and they definitely plan on sitting down one day to write them all out.
I get this all the time. I'm still not sure whether to be bothered by it, or just amused. Usually I alternate between the two, and I'll explain why.
The first example (I wrote one but haven't gotten it published) hardly bothers me at all. Those people are a lot like me, no more than two years ago. The main difference usually though, is that people who tell you that have generally written one manuscript, and sometimes not even to full novel-length. When I got lucky enough to receive my first contract offer for a book, it wasn't for my first book. Depending on how you count them, it was something like my fifth book that finally snagged me a publisher.
My actual first book (or first attempt) was part 1 of an intended fantasy trilogy I started when I was in the ninth grade. I worked on it all through high school and into my first year of college, when I began to realize that it was never going to be any good. After that I wrote several short screenplays, half a dozen short stories, three full length screenplays and three more novels, all of which were rejected by every professional outlet to which I sent them.
The end result though, was that by the time I finished my fifth one, I was a much better writer than I had been when I finished my first. And this isn't an unusual scenario. You get better by practicing something, and there's no other way to practice writing than to just do it.
So for those folks who tell me that they wrote "a novel" and just want to get it published, I smile and wish them, with all sincerity, the best of luck. Maybe they really are just that good. Maybe they have a story so compelling that people will want to read it, and maybe they managed to get all the little things right the first time out of the gate: believable characters, developed over an entire book, an interesting plot, a good balance between narrative and dialogue, a sound ear for how people actually speak, and the subtle differences between one character's cadence and another's, and a thousand other tiny things.
It wasn't so easy for me. I needed to work at it. Still, those folks are generally well-meaning and actually took the time to do it at least once, and for that they have my respect.
The other bunch of people, the "I've always wanted to write" and "I have lots of ideas" crowd -- I have a little less patience for them.
For one, having never even attempted to write anything, much less a four or five hundred page manuscript, they have no idea what it involves, and to me, they kind of demean the process (even if only unintentionally). It's almost as if they're saying, "well, it's great what you do, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't do it too."
But most of them can't. And never will. They'll just go on thinking they can without ever really trying, the way the guy on the corner stool at your local bar watches Alex Rodriguez strike out and yells at the TV -- he knows he could hit a fastball when he was 12, and somewhere in the back of his head, he still thinks he could have played for the Yanks if things had gone a little differently.
Years ago a professor of mine taught me a phrase -- "the habit of art." It applies to anything artistic, playing music, painting, sculpting and writing. You simply do it or you don't. It's part of how you live. You don't make an effort to do it, you don't make time to sit down and do it, you don't think about someday planning to possibly sit down to do it.
You either write or you don't. If you do, there's no stopping you, it's a part of who you are. And if you don't, then I suppose you could acquire the habit, but there's no substitute for actually doing it.
So please, don't tell me what you're planning to write, or what great stories you want to tell. Get to writing them. And plan on doing it for a long, long time before you ever see anything even resembling success, if at all. Of course, if that doesn't sound like something that appeals to you, then you were never going to be much of writer anyway.
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