Entitlement, continued
I need to lead off by saying (again) that the VAST majority of my reader mail is POSITIVE, and it’s a rare week that goes by that I don’t receive at least one really moving one.* But the ones that make you start reading adult-ed catalogues for career change opportunities tend to stick, like a splinter under a fingernail, and cause intemperate howling entirely out of proportion to the actual damage they’re doing.
KFoster writes
I must admit I really don’t get that letter — Sunshine seemed to me to be complete in and of itself.
It did to me too. And while I knew that the ending is very open . . . all the best books have open endings to one degree or another, because as I have said ad nauseum, that’s what makes a story live: the wriggliness of it, the sense that the minute you let go, the minute you close it and lay it down, it’ll be off over the horizon like a hellhound. Even stories that end (or anyway climax) with the death of the main character–Madame Bovary, say, or Anna Karenina–give you a strong sense of how life goes on without them, however sad and terrible the loss. The death wouldn’t be anywhere near as sad and terrible if you didn’t see it reflected in the lives of those still breathing.
I’ve been completely unprepared for the amount of mail I get wanting to know where the sequel to SUNSHINE is. Huh?
If you want to write more in that world, great; if not, I can live with that too. But I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to get that type of correspondence as frequently as you seem to get it.
Yep. Frustrating is the polite word for it. On the one hand you think, well, people are different, they think differently, they see things differently, they want different things, that’s fine . . . and on the other hand you think FOR (*&^%$£”!!!! PEOPLE, LIGHTEN UP. . . And go away.
However (don’t hate me!), I do think there is a difference between a standalone novel that is written as such and a novel that is published as part of a series. If you buy Book 1 in the Trilogy of Mischka the Magical Mummy, I think there is a reasonable expectation that there will be a Book 2 and a Book 3 – although perhaps not a reasonable expectation of how quickly Books 2 and 3 will be available.
Good grief, I entirely agree. There is an apples-and-purple-mangosteens difference between standalones and unstandalones. LOTR is one book, whacked into three. If Tolkien had had the poor taste to pop his clogs after he’d written that last sentence of THE TWO TOWERS and before he’d finished KING–and that fantasy was something that happened in those days, so his publisher had already published it and FELLOWSHIP–all of us at-the-time readers would have snatched ourselves bald in terminal frustration–and all of you following would have been warned that this was The Great Fantasy Trilogy That Wasn’t. There is absolutely a reasonable expectation that an unfinished story be finished. Some of the problem comes with what different people (vide supra) see as unfinished. And some of the problem is that nasty business of writers being mortal–which means both that they need to earn a living, and therefore are likely to want to get paid per volume to buy themselves enough time to write the next volume . . . and that life (or possibly death) may get in the way and they find themselves unable to write the next volume.
PEGASUS, I presently hope and/or believe, will come out as two separate volumes. It’s still one story. There’s no question of being nagged for ‘sequels’: PEGASUS II isn’t a sequel, it’s the rest of the one story. But I’m planning to live a long time yet, so it should be okay.
ChrisW writes
I’m not sure that this sense of entitlement is only directed towards writers.
JEEZUM CROW, OF COURSE NOT. This was what my philosophical footnote was supposed to be about: I believe that most if not all the world’s problems are to some greater or lesser degree caused by one group of people Othering another group of people . . . and the lamentable behaviour that inevitably results.
I think that many people . . .believe that getting what they want, when they want it is their right. It’s as though no one but them exists in the world. Everyone else is the “other”.
Unfortunately there’s a bit of this hardwired into the human animal, I think: it’s the survival instinct gone wrong. But it does get very discouraging when you run up against a lot of it.
JMeadows writes
As far as entitlement to further books that have been announced, sometimes yes, it’s the author struggling or missing deadlines for their various personal reasons, but sometimes it’s the publisher. Not under the author’s control at all. It’s money, or orphaned books, or whatEVER. There are so many reasons why some books never get out, even if they’ve been “promised.”
Yes, absolutely . . . sometimes even when they’ve been written. The first volume or two of a trilogy hasn’t done well enough . . . so the publisher decides not to publish the final book. Can you say ‘destroy an author’s career in one fell swoop’? There ought to be a clause in a trilogy contract saying that the publisher WILL publish all three volumes. . . . supposing they’re successfully written in, you know, their language, English or Mandarin or whatever. Although I suppose there you’re getting into varying definitions of the word ‘successfully’. But I can think of at least two perfectly good and interesting fantasy trilogies that were orphaned after the second book, and whose publishers, in my opinion, should be shot.
Blondviolinist
You know, when I’m thinking about “postmodern anti-linear” novelists, Robin’s name doesn’t really come to mind.
Well yes that was my reaction. . . . It seems especially unkind to brand me with icky lit crit labels when by definition as a genre hack I am beneath the notice of literary critics. (I’ve always thought this was a good reason to be a genre hack. Lit crit was not one of my more relished and esteemed classes in college as an English major.)
kolokolchiki
. . . . is that they were all made to read Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” in high school and embraced it as the model by which writing must needs be done! Personally, I much prefer your model, Robin. Now, to insinuate the Story Board model into the high school English curriculum….<muttering and mumbling>…..muahhahahaha……
. . . From Poe http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/composition.html
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
WHAT??!?? Well, anyone who has ever read Poe knows he was out of his gourd. This is manifest evidence. I frequently don’t know how something is going to end. I don’t know how PEGASUS is going to end. I was wrong about how HERO ended. Half my novels started as short stories. None of my novels has ever failed to surprise me.
This might almost be worth a separate entry. Hmmm.
Antiquarian
I find it insulting that people think they have any say in what a writer produces.
At the risk of demonstrating myself as an arrogant jerk . . . I agree. And the bottom line is, they don’t. You have to listen to the story–indeed you can only listen to the story. The rest is just static. There are writers who find . . . um . . . static useful, and do incorporate it into their thoughts about their story-telling–just like there are writers who send out very early drafts of things for feedback, or who discuss story ideas from the beginning. I am not in this category. Until I married Peter nobody saw anything till the final draft. To me other mortals’ comments are static: the story is the only signal I’m interested in. That said, other mortals can be very useful in pointing out your mortal mistakes, the places where you’ve failed to hear what the story was telling you, or flubbed the translation process. But for me that needs to be at the end. Any earlier and it just gets in my way.
I for one LOVE that I can wonder about that’s going to happen next with Sunshine and the gang. . . . I hate stories that tie up all the frayed bits.
Me too. As above. It stomps the life out of them. It’s the old pin sticking the butterfly to the specimen box.
… Now Chalice–oh how I wished it has been longer.
Well, so do I. There’s always the hope that I’ll be given another story somewhere at least in that world. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that I haven’t at least wondered if there might be another related story waiting around a bend in the road or in a dark corner. The last few years I’ve been feeling that maybe some of the knots holding my psyche together** are loosening in a way that might let some of those related stories in without simply blowing me up (there have been eras when my stories felt dangerously stronger than I did). Stay tuned . . .
And, speaking of staying tuned, I thought I could get through all of ENTITLEMENT’s comments in one post. Wrong. So, same time, same place, in a day or three. . . .
* * *
* These are sometimes positively scary. Something I wrote made that much difference to someone? Wow. Golly. Gee. I don’t know how other writers feel about this kind of thing but I’d have a lot more trouble with it if I didn’t believe that the stories that come to me are already out there in some fashion and my purpose–and it’s both a good purpose and a genuine skill–is to get them down on paper. I’m glad I’m doing a decent job of getting them down on paper, but the ultimate responsibility, fortunately, doesn’t feel like mine.^ It’s a bit like those acknowledgements in the fronts of nonfiction books: ‘thanks to Blah, Bleaugh and Bloo, whose expertise and advice were invaluable. All the remaining errors are mine.’ The original story–the Plato’s cave Story–is perfect. I only do what I can do, and, being mortal, this means errors. The errors are mine.
I’ve gotten better about living with this basic truth as I’ve got older, but some of the really stupid mistakes still bite me. Bats having dropped out of the hardback of DRAGONHAVEN is possibly the most glaring of the typo-type errors. Slightly more complex are things like the end of BEAUTY, which can be read that Beauty, looking in the mirror with her ex-Beast, sees that she has become beautiful. No! No! It’s not that at all! She looks in the mirror, sees what she’s always seen . . . except for the fact that she’s grown up, and realises that who she is and what she looks like is all right. It would have been dead easy to change this if I’d realised it was so effortlessly read that she’s become common-or-garden-variety beautiful, like her sisters.
Another of these errors of explication is about Sunshine, who refers to the fact that she’s not very chatty . . . and then goes on and on and on in SUNSHINE. I even thought about this^^. . . and thought, nah. It’s inherently obvious that there’s a difference between talking out loud to another human being^^^ who might talk back and talking to your notebook or your computer. (I’m like this, by the way. I tend either to hysterical logorrhea or stumbling monosyllables in person . . . which is one of the reasons I have trouble with Author Appearances. I have to self-press the hysteria button to keep rolling, and the There’s a Lion^^^^ in the Room adrenaline level is not actually a lot of fun. Not to mention the likelihood that the ME will smack me around for some time afterward. But all you regular blog readers will have noticed that stumbling monosyllables is not a problem here in Computer Land.) But evidently it isn’t obvious, because people mention it occasionally, like they mention the end of BEAUTY. This would also have been entirely easy^^^^^ to change. If I’d realised. Sigh.
. . . I think there was a point to all of this originally. Something about the author/reader relationship being fairly fraught, whatever angle it’s galloping in from, and whether it’s chucking spears or roses at you.
^ This is not a veiled reference to god. At least not any of the standard gods. And it’s way too late at night to start on personal theology. Besides, I have a novel to finish in the next four months.
^^ as I did not think about alternate readings of the end of BEAUTY: but then BEAUTY was to be my first published novel and I was leaping at a different assortment of small noises in those days
^^^ Well. Not necessarily a human being
^^^^ or possibly a vampire
^^^^^ easy as blood, death, vampires, etc
** Mental picture here of the Monty Python crew standing around with handkerchiefs with little knots in the corners on their heads
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