What Counts

Hard toremember sometimes, when we write: what counts.

Robert Heinlein was the first to clue me in: a good few of his characters were writers, adventurers who'd had adventurous lives and thought nothing could be easier than writing about their real-life experiences.

They soon found that the only way to successfully write adventure was to forget what they knew.

Some of us have this problem. Some writers have the opposite problem: I call it research-itus, where you research and research until you kno w every in and out and the subject lies dead under your fingertips.

I'll be honest. Along with a lot of writers, my process is half close-my-eyes-and-remember, half close-my-eyes and-imagine.

Remembering, I'm back with the the thump-thump-THUMP of my heart as a blade flashes in the sunlight, the vague brutality (like lightning looking for a place to ground) that drew me to nerve centers, floating ribs, weak places in joint-construction. This is very hard to turn into interseting reading.

Very. Hard.

To tell the truth, (and I want to tell y'all the truth), trying to chronicle these moments, however cathartic, leads to damned boring reading. The excitement is more taking that, and imagining...

More often, I read the other guys: writers who've done so *damned* much research and just. Can't. Wait. to show it. Whether it's the average rainfall of California or the three easiest takedowns against an armed assailant, these writers really, really, *really* want you to feel the depth of their research.

Guess what, all of us:

It don't matter.

Research doesn't count. Not really. Neither does experience.

What counts?

Words on a page.

We write words. Some of us draw pictures. A few of us do both. But, as always, the main thing is the story.

Tell a story the audience can't wait to hear, and they don't give a damn about your research. Or your experience.

They just want to hear what happens next.

Don't believe me? Check out the Iliad. Homer had all the access he wanted to seasoned veterans, men who could give him any detail he wanted about spear-maintenance, overlapping-shield tactics and the friner points of battlefield injuries.

What survived the last two or three thousand years? Achilles dragging Hector's body behind a chariot. Athene stepping in with her poisoned arrow. Helen, lovely and troubled, standing at the ramparts of Troy.

Gilgamesh? Nobody gives a rat's ass about the finer points of Bronze Age warmaking, only that the big bastard set out in a small boat to battle one hell of a big serpent.

More recently: most *real* pirates plundered tar and timber, rope and rum. Compare that shabby truth to the story told in Treasure Island, and be thankful RL Stevenson's research and experience wasn't of a higher caliber. In the end, every one of us who makes a mark on paper is just like Blind Pew...



In other news, Shauna gave me a lovely award. I'll pass it along when I'm sober. Meantime, thank you very much Shauna. Glad you find a little bit you like in this blog...

For Research Purposes Only

...yeah, right.

36,700 words (but with, I think, good reason)

A big part of life in NZ is the constant presence of the bush at our back door. It's baffling to me that Christchurch has such serious problems with heroin and meth, underage prostitution and suicide and some of the world's most beautiful mountains, ski fields, beaches, and wilderness.

The current book heads into the bush and the next one takes place almost entirely there. So, you see, research was absolutely necessary.

Who'm I kidding? It was bloody marvelous!

(These misty ones were a little before dawn and a little after, respectively.)

I didn't take the laptop, but I did take an actual notebook. Damn compulsive, me...

Old Man River

34,000 words

Mark Twain used to tell a story about how when he was a kid he loved the Mississippi. It was a place of mystery and wonder to him, and he couldn't imagine anything better than to pilot a steamboat down its wide wet length.

He grew up and got a job sitting in the bow of the boat taking soundings. I can't remember if her eventually made pilot or not, but he did get to the point where he knew the Mississipi like the back of his hand. From St Paul to New Orleans, every sandbar and shoal, every rip and sunken root was as intimate to him as his teeth to his tongue.

And, he said, the river's magic had been lost to him forever.

Like a lot of us, books were tiny worlds of mystery and wonder sandwiched between two covers. Every new story held the potential to carry me away, every bit as much as the Mighty Miss might carry a little boy far from Hannibal, MO. I've never been able to imagine anything better than storytelling.

When I got serious about writing, I realized I was going to have to learn my river just as closely as Twain learned his. I stopped picking up books for entertainment alone and began reading them with a different eye.

"How did the author do that?" I'd ask. "Ooh, I bet she's setting this up for later," I'd say. "What do I like about this dialogue, and what don't I like about that?" I no longer fell so easily into the worlds between covers. Or maybe I fell so deeply that I saw the machinery behind the curtain.

At a point of high suspense, part of me might still be reading with the shivers, but another part was examining the author's use of adjective, adverb, metaphor and sentence length to build that suspense. And comparing it to other examples.

Research also meant branching out. Like a lot of the book-buying public, I sought security in authors with multiple titles on the shelf. "If he's written this many, he must be good," I'd say. Research meant buying every first novel I could find, making a special point to read every award-winning or nominated first novel every year.

Some writers can write just like they always have and still sell books. They're on they're ninth, or nineteenth, or ninetieth, book and it reads more or less like the first one they sold back in nineteen ought-whatever. Newcomers can't do that. The bar is always set higher for us and always will be. We have to be in step with the current voice and style. And we have to beat it by enough to make people notice.

I didn't care if I thought I'd like it. I got reading those books that had done just that. And y'know what? Not a bad read among them. So many fantastic, beautiful, haunting stories I read, I had to take several long walks around my typewriter (it was a typewriter back then) before I got my nerve back.

Sure, I don't read like I used to. I read now the way a magician watches a magic show, or a boxer watches a bout. It's the way a tracker looks at a wooded glade, or a painter at a painting.

And I've decided Mr. Twain was being more entertaining than honest.

The river would've changed for him no matter what. If he hadn't piloted down it, he might have ended up a drummer (salesman) using it to get from A to B, blind and deaf to its beauty. Or he might have ended up as so many of his boyhood friends did, holding a plow and walking behind a mule, the river little more than a source of vague resentment over dusty dreams.

As it worked out, decades later and half a continent or half a world away, Twain could close his eyes and conjure that boyhood love, that spirit of magic and mystery, in ways that a man who knew the river half so well never could.

And he could raise that love in our hearts, too.

Quarter Turn and a Hurdle - Research

25,000 words (75 more to go!)

Yeah, it's a meaningless milestone, but it feel like I've done something anyway. I've been at this almost a month, and I've got major and minor characters strutting and fretting upon the stage, a sense of what they all want and how they all get in each other's way, and everything seems to be shaping up nicely.

Until I hit the hurdle.

One thing about me: I *love* to waste time. I love to read. Writing can be hard. Put those three things together and you have 'research'. I can surf the net for hours, or check a big old pile of books out of the library, or better still, spend half a day in a musty used bookstore looking for something I'm *sure* I need. Calling it research somehow makes it okay.

Except it's not. It's time-wasting procrastination, is what it is, and I don't get much done that way. So these first drafts come rolling out without a darn bit of research. Except for whatever I was reading that got the guys in the basement excited in the first place, of course. Oh, and my street atlas. But even that one's not strictly necessary.

Mostly, I just hit the first draft at a dead run. I use my general sense of people, how we work together and how we don't, the sorts of rules we set to get things done and the ways we shade them to goof off.

The rest of it, I just make up.

Where I *must* have a proper name, date, whatever, I *highlight* it (Like that) and go back and find it later. Later that day, later in the second draft, later. The made-up stuff I also go back and check up on. Weird thing is, I'm right more often than not.

Most of my research (the real stuff, not the time-wasting) comes on the net (thank you wikipedia!) or from the library. I interview real people whenever possible, and that info is gold. Not so much for the dry facts I could find elsewhere, as for the little stuff no one would think to mention (do detectives take their unmarkeds home at night? can a knight in armor really do a somersault? what gets sore first on a street hooker?) (the feet and the lower back, apparently). And more, much much more importantly, a sense of the way my informants look at the world. What do they want? What are they worried about? How do they think their world could be a better place? Do they think it's getting better, getting worse, or staying the same? How do they feel about their job?

I'm lucky. I meet a WIDE variety of people, and I genuinely like *most* everyone I meet. I try to see the world through lots'n lots of eyes. Makes it easier when it's time to make stuff up...

A lot of times, people give you little gems you'd never have thought to ask for. Pour dark rum over the roots of marijuana plants to up the sugar levels. A two-handed battleaxe requires a zone offense and defense; for a rapier, it's all about beats. Tuck folded newspaper or magazines up your sleeves to protect your inner forearms in a knife fight. The street girls can order whatever drugs keep them going through the night by cell phone and have them delivered right to their corner.

So this weekend I met a manager at Paparua Men's Prison. Funny thing, the phrase 'I'm a writer, and I was curious...' seems to relax just about everyone. Enough to open up to a guy looks like me anyway. I got lots of little stuff about the prisoners, the guards, the upper management and the sometimes strained relationship between Corrections and the cops.

And I hit the hurdle.

Turns out the news item about the mall cops handling prisoner transport was only true in Auckland. My book's solidly set in Christchurch. I've got some changes to make.

What am I doing about it? At this point, nothing. Sure, somewhere in the back of my head, the gears are spinning, but mostly I'm just trying to get through my first draft. Baker needs to break jail. That's all I need to know right now. I'll sort out how when it comes to me.