Tag: Neil Gaiman

“If You’re Bored, Your Readers Will Be Too”

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Isabel as gatekeeper. You shall not pass.

I hear the titular advice a lot: “If you’re bored, your readers will be too.” It’s that kind of advice you see on inspirational posters. It’s simple enough to fit in a small space. It sounds good at the outset. And, like, many of those, it’s not very helpful.

In this case, I think it’s actually the kind of bad advice that can cause real problems because it’s absolutely not true.

See, writing is a painstaking process. Especially writing a longer work like a novel. Even for people lucky enough to write fast, or on those fantastic days when the words pour out, there’s days when the writing isn’t like that. And there’s revision, which can be torturous. If you write a lot, then you perforce spend a lot of time writing. It’s absolutely unreasonable to expect to be thrilled and fascinated every moment of the process.

Certainly not at the level you hope the readers will be.

This is the key, so I’m going to all cap it. Because, what else is the Caps Lock key for?

READING AND WRITING ARE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES.

Do I need to say it again for the people in the back? I’m guessing no, because we all recognize that this is true. There are few more contradictory feelings for an author than releasing a book we spent the last six months or a year writing and at various levels of editing, only to have readers message within hours that they LOVED it and when is the next one coming out? On the one hand, it’s fabulous and exhilarating that people are so excited for the story that they read it immediately. There’s really no greater compliment. (So, Readers – don’t stop! That’s not what I’m saying.) On the other hand, however, it’s daunting that readers can devour so quickly what takes so long to produce.

Which is why this whole “if you’re bored, the reader will be, too” thing is a false equivalence.

What it takes me a day of work to write might feel like a slog. Let’s say I write 3,000 words/day, which is my usual goal. At my typical average of 271 words/page (this is remarkably steady across all my work), that’s about 11 pages. (That’s in Word, Times New Roman 12pt, double spaced, 1″ margins all around.) How fast do you read 11 pages? At the average reading speed of 200 words/minute, that takes 15 minutes to read what I spent hours drafting. And that’s not counting any of the editing that comes after.

OF COURSE my experience is slower and less exciting!

Neil Gaiman says that writing a novel is a lot like paving a road with bricks. (I think this was on his Tumblr – I haven’t been able to find it again. If anyone knows, please link me to it! Edited to add, I asked him on Twitter and he suggested this post, which isn’t exactly how I recalled it, but is full of awesome.) He says it can be like laying down one brick after another, slowly making progress. Laying bricks is, by nature, tedious. Painstaking, even.

You don’t go into brick-laying for the thrills; you do it because you want a paved road.

Same with writing.

If you’re bored, that’s okay. Keep going. Seek the next brick, layer on the mortar, carefully set it in place. Keep going.

If you do your job right, the reader will cruise along on a smooth road, never guessing what it took to put it there.

Exactly as it should be. 

 

What Blender Setting Do You Go For?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

We’ve been on a long road trip this last week, seeing all kinds of family. And leaving the cats behind, like the monsters we are. Here is Jackson showing off his best Pitiful Abandoned Kitty face.

Thus, I’m late posting today. But so it goes!

I’ve shared this news elsewhere, but I’m happy to share again here! Many of you have asked what I’m up to with various writing projects, including a few delayed ones. (Yes, the next Sorcerous Moons books are coming – I promise!) Basically what happened is that I changed agents back in February/March. And then I worked up something entirely fresh for New Agent Sarah Younger. Basically I gave her a list of ideas, we debated them, and I wrote 100 pages of one of her top three choices – the one I loved best. We went back and forth on it with several revisions. That’s a great benefit of working with an agent as sharp as Sarah. She gave me great feedback on the book, tightening it up and making it the best it could be. Basically we spent three months working on this. 

Which meant I kept setting aside other writing projects to work on the next round of THRONE OF FLOWERS, THRONE OF ASH. Thus my entire schedule getting delayed and shuffled. The beautiful part is, when Sarah took this out on submission, we had tons of interest, multiple offers, and a sale two weeks later. And here it is!!

These books won’t start coming out until 2019, so now I can go back to a regular schedule. Which absolutely means finishing both the Sorcerous Moons and Missed Connections series. The other thing that happened is that Kensington, who published my Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books, started up a new SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) imprint. They wanted to publish THE SHIFT OF THE TIDE, but that would have delayed its release until March of 2018 and I knew you all would have fits. (See? I do love you and want you to be happy. I really do!)

So, we said no on that, but they really wanted me to be part of this new imprint, so we settled on me writing a trilogy for them set in the Twelve Kingdoms world. It will be high fantasy, which means less of a romance arc. BUT, I’m pretty sure it will be Jenna’s story. For those of you who know what that means! We finished talking about that right before the other submission, so that got announced at the same time. 

All that taken care of, our topic this week is Scrapbooking—taking stories from real life as the springboard for your stories and subplots. Come on over to get my take on blender settings. 

On Further Serendipitous Hijinks

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

3_23 moon cropWe had fierce dust storms in New Mexico yesterday, which at least makes for amazing sky colors. Here’s the nearly full moon setting at sunrise – still one of my favorite sights. 

So, yesterday I had an interesting moment. Kind of a continuation of this run of serendipity despite sad events. It’s really been a strange few weeks, with many highs and lows.

At this point we’re packing up to make the long road trip for R’s funeral. He was David’s brother, who died much too young from cancer. We’re hoping to drill through a few windows in the winter storms twixt here and there to gather with our extended family on David’s side. One of those people is our daughter, whose birthday was on Monday. A happy note is that we’ll be able to give her birthday presents in person, a rare event these days.

Yesterday, David and I went into town to shop for her gifts. We found the Perfect Thing after several stops. Once we had that, I made an impulsive excursion to buy a vital accessory. I went to my favorite place to buy that accessory – can’t tell you where in case a certain birthday girl reads this – which, like Saturday’s excursion, involved hijinks through different parking lots.

I was standing at the counter, buying my stuff, when out of the sitting area came… guess who? Yeah – Neil Gaiman. He smiled at the counter gal helping me, nodded at us both, saying thank you and good evening. 

I managed not to have a fangirl meltdown. But it was close.

And no, I didn’t introduce myself. I chickened out. And besides, that would be *really* stretching my Meet Your Heroes luck!

Still, can you all believe it? My timing is just… I don’t know what to make of it.

Never mind that the counter gal friend of mine tipped me that Neil comes in most days. I may have found my new favorite hangout.

Oh, and Harlan is again up for your voting pleasure in the Ultimate Hero smackdown. You can vote all day, as many times as you feel moved to do so, today – March 23, 2016 – until midnight US Eastern Daylight Time. tumblr_o43ln6XpAO1un3364o3_500

Cheers, everyone!

This Is Voice

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

10_6_15Santa Fe had a mass ascension of our own this morning, as the fog lifted out of the valley. Just gorgeous.

I had a very interesting experience recently regarding voice that I thought you all might be interested in.

Writers talk a lot about voice. There’s all kinds of debates and classes about it, thoughts and rules. Inevitably every convention – for readers or writers – will have a panel or workshop on the topic. Clearly it’s not an easy concept to define. Or rather, we all kind of know what it IS – just not how to explain it to someone else.

In general, voice is what readers will love about an author’s work, regardless of genre. We recognize it when we settle into a new release by a favorite writer, or into one of our comfort reads from her. We sink into that world and voice with a sense of delight and kinship. It’s kind of like love – we sense it, but can’t force or constrain it.

So, I’ve been watching old Taylor Swift documentaries and concerts. There are REASONS for this. She only came onto my radar with last year’s album 1989. Which I love, love, love. Before that I thought of her as a teeny-bopper Country & Western star and had never paid attention. Also, I’m not much for C&W music. I almost never hear it. David is even more definitive about it than I am. He hates the twang and, as soon as it comes on the radio, he switches stations.

Then Taylor crossed over into pop, produced this tremendous album – that I only listened to because so many of my writer/agent/editor friends loved it – and I fell in love, too. Imagine my surprise, then, when I recognized one of Taylor’s early C&W songs. It was one I’d improbably heard a few times and really enjoyed. It stuck with me, though I had no idea who sang – or wrote – the song. (That older song of hers was Our Song, for those interested.) But the lyrics, the cadence, the sensibility behind it, had all grabbed me – in the exact same way her songs in a different musical genre did years later.

This is voice.

Within the same couple of weeks, something else similar happened. I’ve mentioned more than once on this blog my mad love for Amanda Palmer. I think she’s a brilliant singer and songwriter also. And if you’re out there shaking your head about me liking both Taylor Swift and Amanda Palmer, then you’re not paying attention.

So, one day I wanted to send a friend a snippet of the lyrics to The Ship Song. As you do. She’d quoted Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing and that song was covered by Concrete Blonde on their Still in Hollywood album, back in 1994, along with The Ship Song. They have a similar feel, making them forever connected in my mind and that one of my favorite albums of all time. So I looked up the lyrics to The Ship Song, to be sure to get them right. Guess what? Amanda Palmer wrote that song. I never knew it and didn’t discover Amanda Palmer until she connected with favorite writer Neil Gaiman in 2009. I loved her work before I knew who she was, just like Taylor. And I love Neil Gaiman’s writing – and Neil and Amanda connected first as artists, then as lovers and spouses.

This is voice.

This is what makes us who we are, as human beings. The questions we ask, what we seek to answer, the stories we tell – these all come out of our deepest selves. More, I think we’re attracted on some profound level to those others who are in the same place, asking and answering about the same things. We connect with each other, as readers, as listeners, as writers and musicians.

This is voice.

 

 

On Living with the Results of Our Decisions

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Master Of The Opera Act 5 (eBook)The covers for the final two acts of Master of the Opera are in the wild! Head over to The Bookpushers to see both!

You all know I’m online a lot. Some might say TOO Much. I’m looking at you, Mom. And Anne Lamott. Between my laptop and my SmartPhone, I’m pretty much connected to the internet in some way during my waking hours. A major exception is when I’m at the gym. The other is when I sit down to read.

I need the internet to do both of my jobs. As a writer, I start my day by writing blog posts, answering business and reader emails, posting links to new covers, corresponding with my website designer over new info, etc. I interact with people on Goodreads, Facebook and Twitter. For my day job, I work for a company based out of Boston, interacting with colleagues and clients across all the timezones. That’s necessary connectedness, too.

But, in order to do the core work of both my jobs – writing or thinking through data – I have to step away from the distractions of the internet. When I write, I use Freedom to shut off access, to remove all temptation. When I switch over to the day job, though I might dip in and out of Facebook and Twitter, I mostly don’t look. The less I look, the more productive I am. I save things that take longer than a quick look – like Tumblr – for the evenings, when we’re watching a movie.

Yesterday, I was very productive, as I needed to be. I made excellent progress on developmental edits for The Mark of the Tala. I’m trying to finish those out this week, to stay on schedule with all the writing work. And I delivered the two items on my list for the day job that had to be done yesterday.

I finished my day job just in time to do an online chat with Night Owl Reviews for an hour, finishing up at 7pm.

It was a good day.

Settling into my armchair for the evening, I scrolled through Tumblr. As is my habit, I scrolled back to where I stopped looking the night before and worked forward.

And I saw it.

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. HERE. In Santa Fe on September 29.

I clicked the clicky as fast as my fingers could fly.

DENIED.

They’d already sold out. The notice had gone up at some point yesterday and I had already missed the window.

You guys know how I feel about Neil and Amanda. I even dreamed about them coming to my house for dinner. I don’t identify as a fan for much, but I’m a total fangirl for them.

Clearly, I’m not fangirl enough, I thought, or I would have known about this sooner.

But then… I only have so much energy to spend. I had to make choices and I did. I have to live with all the results of my decisions.

I’ve always found it interesting that the word “decide” means “to cut away.” (Think of other words, like “excise” – to cut out.) Deciding on one course of action means that you cannot do another. Working from home for so many years means I’ve developed a fair amount of self-discipline. I decide to get my work done first, which means I’ve decided not to be a 24-7 Neil Gaiman/Amanda Palmer fangirl.

Thus, while I’m happy to reap the satisfaction of having completed my work, missing out on those tickets is as much a result of that decision.

And I wouldn’t sacrifice the one for the other, in the final analysis. I guess that means my decision was a good one.

Or, at least, I’d make the same decision again.

Which is the most important point.

Is Your Brand Interfering with Your Writing?

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

001It’s funny living in Santa Fe, because it’s such a center for the visual arts. Ever since Georgia O’Keeffe arrived for a visit and fell in love with the light, visual artists of every stamp have flocked to the region. Galleries are everywhere and nearly every person you meet is a painter or a sculptor or  a photographer or a jewelry maker and so on. It’s prevalent enough that it became a kind of running gag after we moved here, when we met new people – what kind of artist they’d be and how long before they told us we should buy some of their art.

(I am deliberately specifying the visual arts because there’s a weird dearth of writers here. One of my writer friends calls it “the vast Siberia of literary arts” and she’s not far off.)

So, it’s not unusual to see people’s artistic efforts around the neighborhood – in a way you would never see in another community. It’s quite wonderful, really, even if some of the art is kind of bizarre. There’s one house down the block from us where the resident artist – I’m convinced it’s a woman, but I don’t know – is into painting the desert plants and artifacts. First she painted a cow skull in big blocks of lurid tempura colors – pink, green and yellow. Then a piece of driftwood. Then a wooden saguaro cactus. She seems to be into the quadrants of unnatural colors thing.

It’s not pretty.

Then I noticed the other day that she’d attacked a large, many branched cholla on their property and the poor thing is now painted in similar chunks of this bright color, which I’m pretty sure will kill its ability to photosynthesize. It’s like she’s Goldfinger, serially murdering the landscape.

At any rate, I can see what she’s going for – a very clear style – even if it doesn’t do much for me. I do wonder, however, if she’s sacrificing a heartfelt artistic effort for the sake of this style. This brand.

We writers hear about brand all the time these days. We’re in a peculiar position in that we, ourselves, are our brand. Just as we glommed onto authors, reading everything from an author on the library shelf, readers follow US, not necessarily our publishers or our genres. What we write arises out of us, but we are the physical embodiment of it because, even with print books, story remains intangible. It can be kind of a funky thing – especially when being sane about the business requires separating ourselves from our work.

I’m very careful to say “this work was rejected” or “this book got a good review,” not “I was rejected” or “I got a good review.”

But, for the purposes of branding, well meaning and helpful marketing types are forever reminding me that *I* am my brand. My brand is me. I’m pretty much just a walking, talking advertisement for All Things Jeffe. I’m picturing something like that old movie poster for the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

See how creepy this gets?

It struck me the other day, because I saw a youngish writer tweeting about writing tips. She said something along the lines of that, when she gets stuck writing, she thinks of her brand and what her readers would expect from her. I can see how this is smart marketing, but it bothered me. It took me a few days to pin down why.

This is the tail wagging the dog, right?

I mean, let’s look at someone like Neil Gaiman. He started out writing dark graphic novels and creepy stories. He liked wearing black t-shirts because they generally looked clean and matched everything. Over time, the way he looks and the stories he writes merged into a very recognizable “feel” that is quintessentially Neil Gaiman. This is partly because he’s a person who is comfortable with himself and his career. His sincerity and honesty, his self-deprecating humor and insightful intelligence – all of these combine to make him very recognizably himself.

But WHAT he writes is all over the place! He does exactly what the marketers advise us not to do. He writes children’s books, adult magical realism, horror, screenplays, graphic novels, science fiction and more. All under the same name, too.

Here’s how he answered a recent set of questions on his Tumblr:

1. How would you describe the genre of your work?

 Stories.

 2. Have you always known what genre you wanted to write, or was it a process?

I don’t know. I write stories, if that’s any help.

3. How important is the development of atmosphere and setting to the genre of your works?

Very, I think. Whatever genre they are, if they had no atmosphere or setting they would not be as good.

4. What do you prefer to write and why? (short stories, novels, screenwriting)

Yes. And the rest.

 5. Is there any advice you would give to young aspiring writers? Thank you!

 Write. Finish things. Worry less about genre and more about telling good stories.

Answers like this are why I admire him so much.

When he writes and hits a snag, do you think Neil asks himself what his brand is and what his readers would expect?

No no no.

Neil doesn’t think about what his brand is – or his genre, for that matter – because his allegiance is to the story. I feel very strongly that if we as writers don’t have first allegiance to the story, then we may become nothing more than factory workers, packaging little chunks of canned brand in the hopes of filling the supermarket shelves.

I don’t think we should EVER be thinking about brand while we’re writing. Writers often talk about the art of writing and the business of writing being two very different things. For me, I want to keep them that way. It’s a reality of the modern marketplace that writers must engage in the business end of writing far more than in the past. Nobody gets to be JD Salinger anymore, playing the hermit and refusing all interaction.

But we also don’t have to become what the marketers would make us into. There’s a soullessness to that and there are plenty of ways out there to make a living that are soulless and are much easier and more lucrative.

Like marketing. 😀

Seriously, if I wanted to be in sales and marketing, I would have gone to business school. I’m glad there are people who did and who then give us advice on how to get our books out there and into the hands of readers who will love them. But that’s a different way of seeing the world. I don’t tell them how supply and demand works and they don’t tell me how to craft a story.

That’s where I want my first loyalty to always be.

Story first. Sales later.

Defending Genre (Again)

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Who would not be seduced by this face, I ask you?

It seems the debate on “real literature” and “serious reading” will continue to roll on. It’s occurring on so many levels, with so many lines being arbitrarily drawn. There’s the Literary camp, of course, who accepts only a few authors into their lofty ranks. I really like this summation by Neil Gaiman in answer to a question on his Tumblr about why his teacher says Gaiman’s book isn’t “real literature”:

“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig,”  as Robert Heinlein once said.

I mean, you could ask your teacher to explain why Watchmen’s on the syllabus, if it’s not real literature. Or why TIME picked it as one of the 100 best novels of the Twentieth Century, but that will probably just make your teacher even more defensive. And mostly you’ll just be trying to explain to someone who is color blind why red is a really nice colour.

(About twenty years ago I was on a flight to the US, and sat next to an English professor at some middle-range US university, and we talked about books, because I love talking about books. And his specialty was early twentieth century literature, and I thought our conversation was going to be so much fun, until I realized that he really didn’t know any authors who he didn’t teach. He could talk Hemingway or Fizgerald, but as soon as I started mentioning authors equally as interesting out of the canon, and I was sticking to American authors because he was, you know, American, he started looking hunted; and I felt a little sorry for his students, but only a little, because even a bad teacher can’t stop you reading in your own time.)

I saved this link and this story because I think it speaks volumes. For a long time English and Literature classes famously only taught a few writers – often referred to as “dead, white males.” This has opened up, but judiciously, to minorities and females. But, as there’s an idea that lines must be drawn, most books smacking of genre are excluded from consideration.

Then, the other day, I stumbled across this really excellent essay by Ursula Le Guin. I think what we’re seeing now is these genre authors who’ve reached the age of authenticity, talking intelligently about their bodies of work, which just happen to be genre. She proposes a solution to the endless debate:

To get out of this boring bind, I propose an hypothesis:

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.

The value judgment concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.

Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.

Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.

Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.

Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

This makes the Puritan snobbery of “higher” and “lower” pleasures irrelevant, and very hard to defend.

All of this continues to be on my mind because, even within genre, there’s criticism of who is legitimate and who isn’t. Mainly, there seems to be a bastion in sci fi and fantasy that feels pressed to defend it against feminization. No “soft sci fi” is their battle cry.

So, I’d like to propose an amendment to the hypothesis, as such:

Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre or emotional style is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

What do you all think?