The Knitting, er, Writing Life

I'm always impressed by how often writers are creative in other ways. We're musicians, dancers, singers, sculptors, painters, and martial artists as well as story-tellers. (Or maybe these are all other ways of telling stories and it's all the same thing.) Many of us are also knitters or crocheters. That's one of Vonda N. McIntyre's beautiful beaded sea creatures on the right.


I like to knit for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I learned from my mother (and I still have a pair of her double-pointed needles from her own youth). I love the soothing, repetitive movements. I love that I can do it and something else at the same time. I love that when I'm done I have something beautiful and useful to give away. (I do a fair amount of charity knitting, which you can read about here.. I love that friends will scavenge yard sales for supplies for me, thereby creating a living "knitwork" of love throughout the community.

But most of all, I love the enduring lesson of Writing According to Knitting: It doesn't matter how many mistakes you made, you can always unravel the dratted thing and start over. Maybe other people don't need this lesson repeatedly drilled into their brains, but I do. For me, it's the essential underlying principle of revision. If a first draft, like a knitting project, is so well within my skill and comfort zone that I don't make any mistakes, all it takes is a light polish (read: blocking) and I'm done. But I'll never get any better that way. I have to try things I've never done before, often things that call for concentration, consistency, and staying in touch with the tension of my hands or the tension in the story.

It's fine to stretch beyond my abilities. In fact, it's necessary. And delirious and terrifying. But you know what? If I make an awful tangle of it, I can always go back and do it over. And over, until I either set the project aside until I'm more adept or my skills come up to snuff.

So take a flying leap off the edge of reality. Push the envelope harder than you thought possible. Try something you've always believed impossible. Take risks and then grow to meet them.

"Going Silent"

When I notice that someone I've been following on a social media site (including a blog) has "gone silent," I want to know why. Some of this is idle curiosity of the gossip type. Occasionally, the reason can be much more serious than such happy occasions as the person taking a vacation or being buried in an engulfingly-wonderful work project. My own excuse for not posting more regularly this year is that I'm happily wending my way through editorial revisions (that is, revisions in response to feedback from my editor) for my June DAW release, The Heir of Khored.

On at least one occasion, quite a few years ago, the other person's silence was due to a life-threatening situation that prevented the person from obtaining help. Only the concern of friends who noticed brought the necessary assistance. (In this case, the person had been incapacitated and without food or water for 48 hours in a closed apartment in the summer.) I was one of the people that took action for our friend, asking someone local to to a welfare check on the person, and I came away from the experience with a profound respect for the power of social media to create positive communities that not only nurture and enrich our lives, but can literally save them.

A minor bit of brag

My post, Contrary Writing Advice: Don't Finish This Story!, which appeared earlier in this blog, has been reposted to the blog of Science Fiction Writers of America..You read it here first!

Happy writer smile, and wishes for many playful, delicious story beginnings to you all.

Write What You Love

Larry Brooks interviewed best-selling author Philip Margolin on his latest book and a bunch of related writerly topic. This comment from Margolin struck home for me.

Don’t try to figure out what you must write to get published or make the bestseller list; write something that excites you. If you look at most first novels, even ones that aren’t particularly good, they all have a certain energy that comes from a writer getting an idea that excites them.

I think this is right on target. If you look at what's hot now, you're looking into the past. A traditionally published book often takes about a year from its acceptance to its appearance in bookstores. Many times the lead time is longer. The manuscript must be edited and revised, copy-edited, and proof-read. Cover art must be commissioned, sketches reviewed and approved, and cover designed. Sales teams need catalogs about six months in advance. That's not counting advance reading copies (ARCs) to review venues like Publisher's Weekly. Finally, the book must be printed and distributed so that it is available at your corner bookstore on or slightly before the release date.

Even with epublishing, which does not require the long lead times for preparation and distribution of the physical book, there is a gap between the finished product (which hopefully has been through a similarly-rigorous process of editing and proofreading, not to mention cover art and design!) and the initial conception of the author -- the decision to write this particular book. Writers vary in how long it takes to write a novel. This involves not only the speed of creating that first draft but on how much revision the draft needs. And how committed we are to making each book the very best we can, which means both learning our craft and not turning out hastily-written slip-shod work. For most of us, care requires time.

So the ebook or print book you see in the stories may have taken anywhere from 6 months to 6 years in creation. Who wants to be that far behind the times? More to the point, who wants to spend that much of your writing career imitating what someone else was excited about 6 years ago?

Fads will come and go, tastes will change with the seasons. Publishers merge or fold and even more arise. Wonderful books receive lousy promotional support and fizzle. Mediocre ones catch the public's fancy and make pots of money. We as writers have zilch control over any of this. I truly believe that chasing the market is not only futile, but deadly to our creative lives.

The only way to have a satisfying career is to write what you love. It is not enough to guarantee commercial success, but without it, you might as well take a job as an accountant. The paycheck's a whole lot more reliable.

If you've enjoyed this essay on nourishing yourself as a writer, please check out my collection, Ink Dance: Essays on the Writing Life. It's filled with stories, advice, commiseration, and inspiration.

Contrary Writing Advice: Don’t Finish This Story!

I love to take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head, following the tradition of rules are made

to be broken but first you have to learn them. Beginning writers make mistakes. At least, I did, and I don’t know anyone who’s gone on to a successful writing career who didn’t. At some point, either a teacher or a more skillful writer points out, “Don’t do this” and why it’s a bad idea. Sometimes we figure it out for ourselves. I wonder if in the process of expunging our mistakes we also ignore that kernel of wisdom or inner creative impulse that led us to make the mistake in the first place.

For example, we get told, “Avoid passive verbs, especially the verb to be.” But sometimes that is exactly the right verb and if we contort our prose to avoid it at all costs, we end up with…well, contorted prose.

The writing rule to Always Finish What You Start is equally worthy of a challenge, yet it rarely is. The rule is practically engraved in granite, creating a sense of obligation to slog through stories, no matter how much we’ve grown beyond them. We end up with trunk stories (stories that are so flawed as to be unsellable and are therefore relegated to the proverbial storage chest) when we could have been writing the very best new stories we’re now capable of. The second rule, to move on to something new, is a good one most of the time, as is the commiseration, Not every story succeeds. I’m all for taking risks in our writing with the understanding that we’ll occasionally go splat into the Quagmire of Drekness from time to time.

Is there any value to starting things we don’t finish? (Or allowing ourselves to not finish what we start?) That is, aside from dropping projects that just aren’t working and using our time and creative energy more productively? I think there is.