The Vorkosigan Companion (7 page)

More seriously, I don't see that being a writer is all that more demanding of sacrifice from one's family than any other career or job, and in some ways less. I started writing when my kids were ages one and four. I had more time, and much more flexible time, with my kids by working at home what amounts to part-time, than I would have had putting in eight to ten hours a day at some office, factory, or hospital. I never had to negotiate with the boss for time off when a kid was sick; I was always there when they got home from school, no need for latchkeys or complicated child-care arrangements; vacation and holiday schedules were variable at will. Yes, I had to call on help from relatives or sitters now and then, particularly when running out to do publicity things like conventions, but the total of time taken was still much less. And for whatever the experience has been worth to them, as they grew older I was able to take the kids along on a lot of travel opportunities. They met a wide variety of creative and interesting people.

On the minus side, writers have no backup, in the form of a boss or organization, to lend them credibility or clout in defending their working time. With an outside job, the boss, safely absent, gets to be the bad guy who is blamed for taking you away. If you work at home, you have to be your own bad guy. No one will give you working time; you have to learn to take it. (This leaves aside the little point that no one but you can possibly know when you are mentally ready to sit down and write.) And most other breadwinners are given sympathy and credit for having to go off to work; work is not regarded as a privilege for which they must beg and negotiate time. But a writer's family may suspect (rightly, as it happens) that she's really secretly having fun, and tend to treat the demand for respect as well as some sort of attempt at double-dipping.

LSC: Writer Ardath Mayhar talks about writing an entire novel while one of her sons banged on the typewriter with a spoon.

LMB: I know another who typed her second novel one-handed while nursing her baby. (It was probably her best chance to sit down uninterrupted.) It actually may be less confusing for the kids to have a parent who makes a clean break and leaves the house to work, than to have one who's there, but not paying attention. One of the problems of being a writer is in identifying "time off." If the book is always running in your head, niggling at your brain, you're never quite altogether present to the people you're with. I suspect this can become frustrating after a time, but the people you really need to ask about the effect of this absentmindedness are writers' family members themselves.

But all that said, on the whole the experience of being a parent, watching real kids grow, has given me back human content for my work a hundred times the value of the time it's taken away.

LSC: If your family has given you content for your stories, so has your reading—and not just fiction but lots of nonfiction as well.

LMB: A nearly universal trait among writers—if we didn't love to read, why else would we want to make more books? I pick up a lot of ideas from historical reading—to paraphrase, history is not only stranger than we imagine, it is frequently stranger than we can imagine. Real life provides jumping-off points for my fictional ideas, but they are frequently turned inside out or upside down before they land on the page, re-visioned, revised. Reading, observation, music and songs, experiences people tell me about, my own life and emotions—it all goes into the stew. But inspiration isn't just knocking into an idea—everyone does that all day long. It's hitting the idea, or more often cross-connection of ideas, that sets off some strong resonance inside one's own spirit, that hot pressure in the solar plexus that says,
Yeah, this is it; this matters!

Sometimes inspiration falls freely from the heavens; sometimes you have to hunt it down and kill it yourself. Then there is reverse-inspiration, that restless discomfort that says an idea is just wrong for a story. Over time I've come to regard that sort of warning writer's block as almost equally valuable.

Not everything I read triggers an idea-rush. Or does so right away. My reading falls roughly into two categories. The first is general cultural filter-feeding, where I just sop up whatever randomly catches my eye, which then goes into the mental compost, sometimes never to be seen again. It's a sort of Drunkard's Walk through whatever aspects of my world impinge on me. Later, when a set of ideas is beginning to form up into a potential book, I'll do much more directed reading.

LSC: I've said that history is like gossip, or like real-life soap operas.

LMB: The fundamental question of history is "What were these people
thinking
?" The chains of disasters that real people have visited upon each other can scarcely be equaled by anything one could imagine—in fiction things have to make sense. I must be eternally grateful to you for turning me on to history as reading matter, back in junior high.

It's all in the footnotes, all in the details: the diaries and the stuff that gets down to the way people actually lived, not general economic theories of faceless forces at work. In building a world, you want those telling details that hold more than they appear to hold. Every object you put into a story tells you something about the background, potentially. If you have a character wearing a nylon jacket, it's implied that you have a petrochemical industry around there somewhere. You can't use any metaphors from a technology that doesn't exist in that world, and so on. But that kind of thoughtful attention to what all your details imply can allow you to get more bang for your buck, more information than appears on the page.

Effects must have causes. That's deeply inculcated into the modern mind and so we want to see these causes, these costs. That's what storytelling is all about. For all the physical action, eventually it always comes down to someone making a choice somewhere, to do one thing and not another, and those choices are the turning points, if you like, of history. Historians tend to fall into two camps. You have the people in the Impersonal Historical Forces camp, who want to say that all history is these great movements—vast things happen but no people ever do anything. And on the opposite pole are the Great Man theorists, who want all of history to be the effects of certain individual acts by a rather limited cast. I think the actual truth lies somewhere in between. It's far more chaotic. Small causes can have enormous effects and it's very fractal, really.

LSC: For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, and so forth.

LMB: What if—and there's the beginning of many a story—what if at certain key critical junctures, certain things had happened differently; might some of the horrors of history have been averted or healed? In real life, we can't know. In books, healing becomes possible.

LSC: Healing is one of your themes. Do you do much research into the science, medical and otherwise, in your science fiction?

LMB: Sometimes; sometimes I draw on what I already have in my bag. And I've several times had real doctor-readers review both my fantasy and SF manuscripts for medical accuracy. But foregrounding the characters, necessarily, entails backgrounding the technological speculation, however much those new technologies are in fact affecting characters, settings, and plots all three. Because the tech is mostly in the background, some readers don't seem to notice how much is actually there, mostly in biology and medicine.

But I'm interested in the impact of technology on the characters' lives, the new moral choices and dilemmas it presents them with. Sometimes the details are important. When I was writing from an engineer's viewpoint, and he was facing an engineering problem in
Falling Free
, I had to provide enough to give some sense of how the problem-solving was going on inside of his head. But the reader doesn't usually retain all that anyway, so why clutter the page? The stuff should work, and the implications should be displayed, ideally. I don't do this across the board—some of my technologies are complete hand waving, such as the faster-than-light travel. Other technologies, like the design of the uterine replicator as described in
Ethan of Athos
, are very carefully thought out, and would actually work, more or less, as described.

So it depends on the focus of the story. If the plot turns on the tech, or the viewpoint character thinks in detail about it, then one needs to give it more attention.

LSC: Paying attention to the plot. And the characters, and all the rest of the package.

LMB: All at once, all the time, yep.

LSC: But the words have to go down in a row. What's your particular method of developing the story and getting it down?

LMB: I will start to work up ideas for a story from all sorts of sources—other reading, history, film, television, my own life experiences, my prior books, debates with friends about ideas or other books. When my eyes or brain burn out on reading, I'm quite fond of all the nonfiction DVDs I can get from the local library or, now, Netflix, science and travel and history. At some point, all this will spark or clot into notions for a character or characters, their world, and the opening situation, and sometimes but not always a dim idea of the ending. I will start jotting notes in pencil in a loose-leaf binder. By the time I have about forty or fifty pages of these, I will start to see how the story should begin.

I use a sort of rolling-outline technique, largely as a memory aid, and work forward a small section at a time, because that's all my brain will hold, up to what I call "the event horizon," which is how far I can see to write till I have to stop and make up some more. This is usually a chapter or three. I'll get a mental picture of what scenes should go in the next chapter, and push them around till they slot into sequence. I then pull out the next scene and outline it closely, almost a messy sort of first draft. I choreograph dialogue especially carefully.

Then I take these notes to my computer and type up the actual scene, refining as I go. Lather, rinse, repeat till I get to the end of the chapter and, my brain now purged and with room to hold more, I pop back up to the next level to outline again. Every scene I write has the potential of changing what comes next, either by a character doing something unexpected or by my clearer look at the material as it's finally pinned to the page, so I re-outline constantly.

Making up the story and writing down the story are, for me, two separate activities calling for two different states of mind.

LSC: Whereas for me, they're virtually the same thing—the writing generates the creation. But everyone's muse has his or her own idiosyncrasies.

LMB: Yep. For me, creation needs relaxation; composition is intensely focused. I do the making up part away from the computer, either while taking my walks or otherwise busying myself, or, when I get to the note-making or outlining stage, in another room. I do not compose at the computer, although I do edit on the fly, and the odd better ideas for a bit of dialogue or description do often pop out while I'm typing. Sometimes, they're sufficiently strong that they derail what I'd planned and I have to stop typing and go away and re-outline; sometimes they're just a bonus, an unexpected Good Bit, and slot right in.

I do most of my writing either in the late morning, or the late evening. Late afternoon tends to be a physiological downtime for me.

LSC: I know from hard experience that some books come out a lot faster than others.

LMB: For me, it's varied from nine to sixteen months. The amount of time I've taken between books has varied from six weeks to six months. In the absence of distractions I write at a fairly steady rate—about two chapters a month, on average—but then there are the major life-interruptions, which pick their own times. Conven  tion travel, much as I enjoy it, also takes a big bite of time each year. I lose one to two weeks of writing time/attention/energy for each three-day convention I attend.

My writing schedule, too, has varied over the years. In the beginning I wrote during my kids' naps and after they were in bed, but then they stopped taking naps and started staying up later. The younger one hit school as I was starting my fifth novel,
Brothers in Arms
, and then I began writing in the mornings and early afternoons, school hours, though I am not by nature a morning person. Since I have at last moved to a house with my own office, I sometimes get in an evening or late-night session. But my prime time is still school-hours.

If I have the ideas marshaled, I can write in much less than ideal circumstances. If my inner vision is a blank, it doesn't matter how much peace and quiet I have, nothing comes out. During the sticky bits of a novel, I've sometimes found it useful to fool myself with the "five hundred words a day" trick. Five hundred words is not very much, just a couple of paragraphs. A few days of lowering the bar, and I'll get past the bad bit, and it flows again. Other times the blank stays blank, and a good thing too.

LSC: And then there are the several stages of editing, combined with the hair-pulling and head-desk-banging.

LMB: Structural editing almost all takes place at the outline stage, for me, as I shove the scene sequences around and at last into place. Very seldom do I add or delete whole scenes after the first draft. When I complete a day's work I usually print it out and take the pages away to read in the new format (in a different room and chair, which my body desperately needs by that point), and mark it up with line-edit and copy-edit stuff—fixing syntax, improving word choice, adding some forgotten bit or cutting something excess that impedes the flow. At the end of the chapter, it goes out (by e-mail, now) to my inner circle of test readers; those who are syntax-and-grammar sensitive and/or rhythm-and-word-choice sensitive are pearls beyond price. They help me identify a lot of problem spots on the sentence level.

When I agree with their critiques, I enter changes and print out the chapter that goes into the accumulating three-ring binder. I look back over this material fairly frequently as I continue to write, and mark up any problems that catch my eye. At the end of the book comes the vast appalling task of going back over the whole thing, and making all necessary changes on all levels. I enter all these, print it out again, read it again, make any other changes that seem required (by this time I'm cross-eyed and thoroughly sick of it all), and produce the first submission draft, which goes to the editor. She returns her comments, I make what responses I'm going to, and back it goes to the publisher. After that there will be the copy edit to read and approve or fix, and, finally, the galleys.