The Corean Chronicles
More Writing About Writing
To begin with, I have to confess I'm as guilty as anyone. About what? About writing about writing, of course. Now... for some background.
When I began to consider being a writer, I thought I was going to be a poet, and I did get some poems published in various small poetry and literary magazines. And then, there was this escalating altercation in Southeast Asia, and I ended up piloting helicopters for the U.S. Navy and didn't write very much. When I got out of the Navy, I started writing market research reports dealing with the demand for industrial pneumatic accessories by large factories. Then I wrote a very bad mystery novel, awful enough that I later burned it so that it could never be resurrected. Only after all that did I attempt to write science fiction, and after close to ten years of hit or miss short-story submissions, with only about half a dozen sales while I was working full-time at my various "day jobs," I finally got a rejection letter from Ben Bova which told me to lay off the stories and write a novel. And I did, and I sold it, and I've sold, so far, every one I've written since. Now... all this history is not bragging, or not too much, but to point out that virtually all the writing I did for almost forty years was either occupational-subject-related or poetry or fiction that I hoped to see published -- and even more hopefully, sold for real money and not copies of magazines and publications.
All that changed a year ago, when I started blogging... or more specifically, writing about writing or about subjects that bear on writing, if sometimes tangentially. Instead of writing fiction for publication, I'm writing close to the equivalent of a book a year... about writing. I'm certainly not the only one out there doing this. In fact, I'm probably one of the later arrivals in this area.
But I can't help wondering, no matter how my publicist has said that it's a good idea, if there's something just a bit wrong about writing about writing, instead of just writing. What's happened to our culture and our society when readers seem to be as interested, or more interested, in writing about writing than in the writing itself. And why are so many younger writers going to such lengths in their blogs to attract attention?
At least one well-known publisher has noted that no publicity is all bad, but is this sort of thing all that good? Or is it not all that good, but necessary in a society that seems to reward shameless self-promotion as vital for success?
Who could say... except here I am, along with hundreds of others, writing about writing.
Is an actor who guest lectures at a University wasting his time? Shouldn't he be on set, whether live or film, making a new show?
Is a waiter who writes about waiting tables wasting his time? Shouldn't he be waiting tables instead?
Long story short, I don't think it's a waste of time or a bad thing at all if writers write about writing. There are those out there, including myself, who derive just as much satisfaction from reading about how you get your ideas as I do from reading your stories. People like me like to know how your characters got their viewpoints, what real life situations caused you to write about this particular subject, who and what these characters and places are based on in your mind, or whether you plucked them out of thin air. These kinds of things are interesting to us.
There are some authors who wax eloquently about football or baseball or renovating their houses, and well, good for them. That doesn't particularly interest me. I don't read their stories to learn about football or home renovation, I read because I want to know what makes them tick as writers.
So, I guess there's a balance to be maintained. How much writing about writing do you do versus actual writing? How much writing about other stuff that your readers don't care about do you do versus actual novel-writing?
The football-loving author who writes about his home renovations may not care what his readers think, since he knows we'll buy his books anyway. But for authors like you who post about things that have a direct impact on your writing, even if tangentially,... well, that's a Special Bonus Feature on that extra disc in your DVD, to extend the metaphor.
I say, keep it up.
Plus its really cool to get a glimpse into the people behind incredible works of art.
I just now found your blog, despite reading you over a decade now (and meeting you once on your Chaos in Texas tour). I just never thought that you'd have a blog - but yes, maybe unsurprisingly, a bunch of authors have blogs. I'm currently reading several authors' blogs (Scalzi, Stross, Moran, Perry), and the amount of actual "writing on writing" is relatively low. There is some (especially on Stross' blog), but there's a lot of things that aren't directly novel-related.
Consider it your ability to scratch an itch that you couldn't otherwise. And heck, Scalzi just put out a book on the posts from his blog - so there is a way to directly profit from it. Either way, I now get more words out of my authors, which is (almost) never a bad thing (there are a couple authors I read, where I wish they'd stop blogging and put out the next damn novel. ;)
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