Honestly...
The first story I wrote (or to be more specific, the first story I remember writing that was not required for school-related work) was called Joshua Hamilton, a science fiction piece about 3700 words long that consumed me for about a week during the summer I was 15.
My father was taken with it, and ran copies of it off one of the photocopiers at work and passed it around to several people, which was kind of embarrassing, because, really, it honestly sucked.
The story idea didn't suck -- it was about a man who, upon suffering some calamity (I don't remember what; might have been disease, or perhaps a terrible accident) was the recipient of a new body. His brain was transplanted into an electromechanical substitute, kind of like a Frankenstein or Six Million Dollar Man situation, but from the inside perspective.
The thrust of the story had to do with the philosophical issues of personal identity and the mind-body problem.
Unfortunately, as a 15 year old, I wasn't up to the "what if" of the scenario. I could really not speak to any aspect of the the story, and had none of the tools required to address a philosophical problem in this way.
After being rejected by Analog and F&SF, I shelved the story, and went on to the next one.
And then the next one.
And the next....
It was also, if I recall, around the same time that I began banging out my first novel (thankfully still unpublished), called Children of the Sun, a science fiction tale about a wealthy industrialist (Benjamin Cramer) who was pursuing the promises of anti-gravity drives for space exploration. Kind of like Star Trek meets Atlas Shrugged. The iconoclasting Benjamin Cramer had something up his sleeve, though, beyond any Randian capitalism: the discovery of new spiritual truths connected to the adulthood of humanity as it advanced into a phase of colonizing discovery.
After being rejected by Doubleday, Signet, and two or three other publishers, I shelved the book, and went onto the next one (Shiralam, about interspecies relations on a distant tropical world where very little clothing was worn by anyone).
And then the next one (The Ascension, a kind of other-world mystery where somewhat ape-like beings were being used as pack animals - a book I might just revisit, 40 or so years after that first draft was put down).
And the next....
Looking back, the problem with all of these things was only partly mechanical. The writing craft was something I got reasonably good at. What I really was bad at was actually telling a story. I loved reading stories, and plowed through hundreds of SF novels between the time I was 15 and 25. Those were ten very full years, in that regard, and I can honestly say I absorbed almost nothing from that reading, not because the books didn't contain plenty to absorb, but because I was too full of myself to realize what it was I lacked: Education, experience, and the ability to actually understand what the point was.
Even when I quit my job, at 26, to work on a new novel, I was still pretty convinced I had what it took. For two years, I worked on it full-time (an espionage tale; I figured by then that SF and I just weren't going to get along in the writing world...), took several writing courses at Ryerson (which at the time was still called Ryerson Polytechincal Institute), impressed instructors with my natural editing ability (all those years writing bad stuff weren't entirely wasted), even guest lectured, and did freelance editing.
I think it was somewhere around 120,000 words into the book that I realized that even though I'd heavily researched and plotted the book, it wasn't working. I was lacking something. A lot of things. What I really was talking about was shallow, facile stuff that might have gone somewhere in a different century, but which, in the age in which I lived, simply demonstrated what a self-centered, empty-headed dolt I was. So I headed off to university to get the degree I'd never known I needed, and then life took a variety of turns.
I went through four versions of that book, about 10 drafts. I ran into trouble with it in 1988, and so shelved it for just about exactly 20 years.
To write fiction, you see, you have to be honest in a way that you don't when you're writing exposition or exegesis. This is what makes writing so incredibly difficult, because each character you invent has to be honest, as well -- both to themselves and to the story.
Recently, I read Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, and found myself nodding when, in the Afterword, he writes: "...when it comes to fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth in his own heart...[B]ad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do...."
One of the first pieces of advice novice writers receive is to write what you know. (In fact, that was the title of the first article about writing that was published in Cross-Canada Writers' Quarterly, in 1981 or 1982.) The problem is, what you need to know, first and foremost, is yourself. The rest can be researched. The most difficult question to ask and answer is: Who am I, really?
Which is really, if you think about it, precisely the question I was trying to address in Joshua Hamilton, when I was 15. And that's something I'm still not sure I can answer. But the point of writing at all is to go to those places, psychologically, that any other person would tend to shy away from. That's how you find the emotional core of the characters you create, the story you tell, and that's where you learn a bit about yourself along the way.
Honestly.
My father was taken with it, and ran copies of it off one of the photocopiers at work and passed it around to several people, which was kind of embarrassing, because, really, it honestly sucked.
The story idea didn't suck -- it was about a man who, upon suffering some calamity (I don't remember what; might have been disease, or perhaps a terrible accident) was the recipient of a new body. His brain was transplanted into an electromechanical substitute, kind of like a Frankenstein or Six Million Dollar Man situation, but from the inside perspective.
The thrust of the story had to do with the philosophical issues of personal identity and the mind-body problem.
Unfortunately, as a 15 year old, I wasn't up to the "what if" of the scenario. I could really not speak to any aspect of the the story, and had none of the tools required to address a philosophical problem in this way.
After being rejected by Analog and F&SF, I shelved the story, and went on to the next one.
And then the next one.
And the next....
It was also, if I recall, around the same time that I began banging out my first novel (thankfully still unpublished), called Children of the Sun, a science fiction tale about a wealthy industrialist (Benjamin Cramer) who was pursuing the promises of anti-gravity drives for space exploration. Kind of like Star Trek meets Atlas Shrugged. The iconoclasting Benjamin Cramer had something up his sleeve, though, beyond any Randian capitalism: the discovery of new spiritual truths connected to the adulthood of humanity as it advanced into a phase of colonizing discovery.
After being rejected by Doubleday, Signet, and two or three other publishers, I shelved the book, and went onto the next one (Shiralam, about interspecies relations on a distant tropical world where very little clothing was worn by anyone).
And then the next one (The Ascension, a kind of other-world mystery where somewhat ape-like beings were being used as pack animals - a book I might just revisit, 40 or so years after that first draft was put down).
And the next....
Looking back, the problem with all of these things was only partly mechanical. The writing craft was something I got reasonably good at. What I really was bad at was actually telling a story. I loved reading stories, and plowed through hundreds of SF novels between the time I was 15 and 25. Those were ten very full years, in that regard, and I can honestly say I absorbed almost nothing from that reading, not because the books didn't contain plenty to absorb, but because I was too full of myself to realize what it was I lacked: Education, experience, and the ability to actually understand what the point was.
Even when I quit my job, at 26, to work on a new novel, I was still pretty convinced I had what it took. For two years, I worked on it full-time (an espionage tale; I figured by then that SF and I just weren't going to get along in the writing world...), took several writing courses at Ryerson (which at the time was still called Ryerson Polytechincal Institute), impressed instructors with my natural editing ability (all those years writing bad stuff weren't entirely wasted), even guest lectured, and did freelance editing.
I think it was somewhere around 120,000 words into the book that I realized that even though I'd heavily researched and plotted the book, it wasn't working. I was lacking something. A lot of things. What I really was talking about was shallow, facile stuff that might have gone somewhere in a different century, but which, in the age in which I lived, simply demonstrated what a self-centered, empty-headed dolt I was. So I headed off to university to get the degree I'd never known I needed, and then life took a variety of turns.
I went through four versions of that book, about 10 drafts. I ran into trouble with it in 1988, and so shelved it for just about exactly 20 years.
To write fiction, you see, you have to be honest in a way that you don't when you're writing exposition or exegesis. This is what makes writing so incredibly difficult, because each character you invent has to be honest, as well -- both to themselves and to the story.
Recently, I read Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, and found myself nodding when, in the Afterword, he writes: "...when it comes to fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth in his own heart...[B]ad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do...."
One of the first pieces of advice novice writers receive is to write what you know. (In fact, that was the title of the first article about writing that was published in Cross-Canada Writers' Quarterly, in 1981 or 1982.) The problem is, what you need to know, first and foremost, is yourself. The rest can be researched. The most difficult question to ask and answer is: Who am I, really?
Which is really, if you think about it, precisely the question I was trying to address in Joshua Hamilton, when I was 15. And that's something I'm still not sure I can answer. But the point of writing at all is to go to those places, psychologically, that any other person would tend to shy away from. That's how you find the emotional core of the characters you create, the story you tell, and that's where you learn a bit about yourself along the way.
Honestly.
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