Babel Clash

I pondered this question all weekend. What lessons could Midwinter teach aspiring writers? The self-flagellating artist in me immediately responds, “Nothing. It’s a mediocre book at best; derivative, not descriptive enough, goes off on a far-too-wide tangent about 2/3 through. If aspiring writers were to learn anything from it, it would only be from the massive pile of mistakes I made in it.”

Midwinter can definitely teach you that a beautiful Chris McGrath cover is something that's nice to have.

Of course, this is hyperbole. Sure there are things I could have done better, but all in all, I think Midwinter works just fine. Great literature? Probably not. A solid fantasy read? Sure. Certainly a journeyman first novel. Even downright clever in places.

Maybe this is what it can teach you. Unless you are one of those supremely confident individuals who never second-guesses him/herself, and also happens to be brilliant, you are very likely to have misgivings about any story you embark upon. The bigger the story, the more moving parts, the more trepidation you are likely to experience. You will probably spend some time in the midst of writing it (somewhere just past the halfway point seems to be my personal favorite spot) thinking that it is the worst novel ever written, and any smart person would abandon it now. Other days (maybe the next day), you might find yourself thinking that you are a genius who can do no wrong.

The insidious thing about this is that when you go back to revise the text, you will have no idea which parts you wrote with which attitude. It will all come out sounding more or less the same. Stephen King makes a similar observation in On Writing, where he talks about how some days the writing comes slow as molasses and every word is painful. And other days, the words just fly out of your brain faster than you can scribble or type them, each one exactly what it needs to be. And when he goes back and rereads it, he can’t tell the difference, either.

There’s something distinctly unfair about that, though I’m hard-pressed to say what it is. You’d think I’d be grateful that I don’t write noticeably poorer when I’m feeling bad about what I’m writing.

The Office of Shadow, the sequel to Midwinter, due out Summer 2010. Another lovely Chris McGrath cover.

The moral here, of course, is that you have to push through that despair. You have to believe that somehow it will all work out. And usually it does. Sometimes it doesn’t, though. Sometimes what you end up with just didn’t quite live up to expectations. This is what we call a Learning Experience. You don’t need to share your Learning Experiences with the world (in fact, we’d prefer you didn’t). Put them in a drawer, or in a folder on your computer called Learning Experiences, and move on. The great thing about them is that they become rich veins of ore that you can strip mine later for other stories. “Oh,” you’ll say, “remember in that crappy thing I did about the werewolves, I had that conversation between the two FBI agents about the nature of evil? That was good! I can change a few words put that right here!”

None of the above really answers Morgan’s question, but it’s probably useful information for aspiring writers anyway. It’s impossible for me to be objective about my own work. When I read over it, I always remember what I was thinking when I wrote it, what the intent was, and I’m blinded by my own belief in what it ought to have been. Was it successful? Maybe? I don’t really know. Some parts I can read and think, “Yeah, that’s just it,” and some parts I can read and think, “Well, I missed the mark a bit here.” But I can never get past my subjectivity.

Even if Midwinter isn’t a perfect book, there are still lessons in writing to be had from it. In fact, there are probably more lessons in it than there are in a perfect book. Our favorite novels, the ones that blow us away, can seem maddeningly unassailable. We think, “I could never do that,” or we are unable to parse exactly how the author was able to accomplish some particularly clever trick. In a merely good novel (and often in very bad ones as well), you can sometimes see the rough edges, the loose strings. You can pick away at these and examine them and think, “I see what he was doing here. If he’d just done this, it might have worked better. And that this that you’ve discovered is now yours by right of salvage. You can take it and use it yourself free of charge.

If nothing else, Midwinter accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to tell a fun story that can be readily enjoyed over a rainy weekend, and perhaps even make you think a little about things like loyalty and duty and faith. It’s got a little romance in it, if you like that kind of thing; it’s got people hitting each other with swords; and it’s got people doing magic in it. Good guys and bad guys. A big monster with glowing eyes. You could do a lot worse.

Today is our last day here at Babel Clash. Some other author(s) will take the reins after James and me, and I’m interested to see what they have to offer. It’s been a pleasure and dare I say, a privilege, to post here over the past two weeks, especially with someone as thoughtful and well-spoken as James Enge (and Bill Willingham, too, who really should have posted more often). I’ve certainly gotten a lot of food for thought, and I hope you did, too.

If you’d like to follow my adventures further, you can visit the Clockwork Storybook blog where I, along with a slew of very talented writers, wax philosophical about writing and writers and reading.

Thank you.

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