Thought on writing...

[seawasp]

... triggered by autopope's (Charlie Stross) comments on his current writing.

I am always rather bemused, even stunned, when I see a pro author say something like "I hate this book" or "I'm just glad that's over", or similar comments. And it's not an uncommon thing to see.

As I posted in a comment to Charlie, if I got to the point I even mildly disliked a story, it'd never get written.

I can't imagine writing a book I HATED.

Comments

[kayshapero]

I once wrote a song I thoroughly detested by the time I got through with it. There was this song cycle, you see about a furry analogue to what happened to the Japanese in California during WWII and I wanted to add a terrorist about to blow up the track to the duet between shipped out lass and left behind lover.... For some reason it proved to be a Kodiak crossed with grizzly bear to write. But after far more perseverance than I usually put into a song, I did actually finish it. I sang it ONCE; at the ConFurence filk contest which it didn't win, which is probably just as well since I flung it into a drawer when I got home and haven't looked at it since. I may dig it out someday, and see if I can turn it into something I like when I don't have a deadline bearing down on me.

Or perhaps not.

BTW - saw this Kevin and Kell strip, thought of you. :)

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

I assume as a pro, if you've contracted to do the book you're stuck. You may hate the story but you'll suck it up and do it.

[seawasp]

Yeah, but you have control over contracts you make. If you don't like the story you don't have to sign to do it.

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

But what if you liked it when you started? God knows I've entered into a few projects happy and left them burned out....

[lwe.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

I had this project I thought would just be great, and I plotted it out, and I submitted it to Tor and got a three-book contract to start what I thought at the time was going to be a series of at least five books. Then I started writing it.

I loved the first chapter or two -- and then the fun ran out, and I didn't like it anymore, and I was committed to three books and I'd already spent most of the advance on my kids' college tuition.

So I wrote it anyway, all three volumes. I compressed my outline so that three volumes would be the complete series, no need for a fourth or fifth, but I still had to write three.

Now, in fact, I'm reasonably happy with the results, I don't hate the finished books at all, but I hated writing them. And it took five years to write them, because it was so unenjoyable to sit down and work.

They're all published now, as the Annals of the Chosen, and I know not to do that again -- my next proposal was carefully designed to be fun to write, and in fact I wrote a couple of hundred pages before submitting it just to make sure, which is why there's a seventeen-month gap between The Summer Palace and A Young Man Without Magic instead of the usual year or so.

But I wrote three books I hated writing.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I resemble that remark.

seawasp is missing some context. (a) This is the day job -- I don't have the luxury of walking away from it. (b) Lots of readers will scream blue murder at me if I leave it unfinished. (c) The series to date is 630,000 words long; for comparison, "War and Peace" is 590,000 words. (d) I burned out on it around the gap between books 3 and 4, largely due to editorial tinkering (short version: for policy reasons, I was told to shove the series in a direction that didn't mesh with my own vision of how it unfolded).

[seawasp]

Ah. Being told to write the story as it ISN'T supposed to go, yes, that could do it. What do you mean by "policy" reasons? Whose policy, to do what?

I'm not sure that the readers screaming should be a major issue. There's LOTS of readers screaming at David Weber over the direction the HH series has gone. The question is whether the screaming readers are ALL your readers, or enough of them to hurt the bottom line (if, as with you, this IS your job).

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Whose policy, to do what?

I'll tell you over a beer at Worldcon (or whenever we next meet).

The screaming readers is ... well, it's just that I dropped one series (Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise) circa 2004; doing it twice in a decade might raise eyebrows, so I'm trying to bring this one to a satisfying close before I walk away from it.

[seawasp]

Well, unless I hit it big in the lottery (or in writing, which seems less likely) that'd have to be whenever you end up somewhere in this neck o' the woods again.

Yes, I suppose you don't want readers' first reactions to your name to be "Stross? Yeah, he's that #()*%# who can't be bothered to finish a series once he starts it!"

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose you don't want readers' first reactions to your name to be "Stross? Yeah, he's that #()*%# who can't be bothered to finish a series once he starts it!"

'Zackly.

So I'm at least trying to park this one on a satisfying note.

(I don't promise not to do more of them -- in fact, DGH offered me a follow-on three book deal for #7 to #9 last time I saw him -- but I need a couple of years off to re-charge, minimum. Besides, I've got another series I'm working on, and that one is (a) fun to write, (b) pays more on a per-book basis, and (c) has a cult following.)

[dsrtao]

Some other things to contemplate:

You have a day job. If you decide that _Polychrome_ is so much trash tomorrow, your roof is still pretty secure. You've lost a minor part of your income. Charlie has no such security and would lose the major part of his income, I think.

Writing is his day job. There are days when I've hated my job, or at least disliked it enough to bitch about it on LJ. Haven't you? But overall I like it, or I would find a different one. I presume it's the same with him.

In this particular case, he's made it to the end of a six-book cycle. The publishers screwed with his pacing by setting particular page limits. He has to keep track of minutiae from five books ago. Now he's almost done, coming around the last stretch -- I would feel every little problem as a big frustration, too.

If this book ends really well, some people will go out and buy all six volumes. And some people will pick up other books with his name on them, because they liked this one and this story is over. Contrariwise, if this becomes known as a lousy ending to a once-promising series, his credibility will take a hit. Not a huge dive -- there's a Hugo and some veritable geek classics out there to support him, but it will probably hurt for a while.

[seawasp]

I've hated my job, and there's parts of writing I don't like -- for instance, all the #()%(_$ research I've had to do on Boundary and Threshold. And doing outlines.

But that's not hating the BOOK, it's hating the work that keeps me from actually WRITING the book, so to speak.

THe idea of deciding anything I'm writing is "trash" is utterly alien. Or utterly irrelevant, I suppose -- it's all trash, but it's MY trash.

The accumulation of detail... yeah, that's a pain, but that's why I keep notes! (and beta-readers).

For me, I guess, I'd be more EXCITED coming to the end.

But if that characteristic is a necessary concomitant of actually becoming a REAL writer, I hope I get the chance to hate one of my books.

[randallsquared.livejournal.com]

Well, this series is definitely his weakest work, and started out weaker than anything else he'd written at the time. I'm going to buy them all and give them another go when they're all done, due to the turn he says it's taken, but I much prefer pretty much everything else he's written (and I'm really, really looking forward to the sequel to _Halting State_).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, my only (paid) writing experience is in a pair of mathematics textbook (and a second edition proposal that's being considered by the editor now), and ... yeah, there's parts gone through it when I just hated the book. The general idea I like, not least of which that it shores up my professional credentials pretty neatly, and much of the overall work including the messy, you know, writing.

And yet, over the course of the year, there are parts where it's just a slog. Expanding on something I thought was clear and that my co-author didn't like. Rewriting something that clearly made sense to me when I wrote it, four months ago, but is now gibberish. Tracking down where exactly I shifted symbols for something, and then shifted again, and rewriting a hundred equations to get them consistent again. Figuring out which if any of the references I started out with are still actually referred to in the book. Getting the inexplicable LaTeX typesetting glitches to stop glitching. There's a part of it that's just endurance and if there's a way to avoid that ... well, I don't know. But utter joy that I don't have to muck about with the book again also happens in nonfiction book writing.

[julesjones]

He was excited about the series when he started it. And then various stuff happened, both with the writing and with his health. And he had to keep writing it even when he got heartily sick of it, because that's his day job, not a side business. This is a bad place to be in when it's a single 100k job, but when your planned story arc is several doorstops and several years to complete your contractual obligations, yes, I can see hating it by the end. At least at the time of writing it.

I've got a series that was planned as four books, and I only ever wrote two because I got writer's block on the third -- but I also very deliberately wrote the first two as stand-alones you could read as independent books. People have noticed that there is the potential for more books and have occasionally asked if I ever planned to write more, but without that *irritated* tone readers have when they're asking when they'll get to see the end of the story. It does make a difference.