Entitlement, III
At the end of ‘Entitlement continued’ I promised an Entitlement III to try and round up some more of the good comments the subject inspired. That was a while ago. I’m disorganised, absent-minded, and I have three days left before the end of the month to get through alchemicalling the last ten pages of the first draft of PEGASUS into the last x pages of the second draft of PEGASUS. Which would sound fine except that these are the same ten pages of the first draft I’ve been failing to get through for at least a fortnight. I seem to be averaging ABOUT A PAGE A WEEK of the first draft = pages and PAGES AND PAGES of the second. Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh frelling gods.
Diane in MN wrote:
I don’t think you could have written a better ending for Sunshine,
Thank you! Again, this is (of course) the sort of thing an author always likes to hear . . . but the ending of SUNSHINE works. There’s always stuff in a story that you-the-author think works better or worse–in my case the stuff that works the best always feels given, and the stuff I’m the least certain about is anything I had to take a conscious, figuring-it-out sort of hand in making: perhaps a little like the difference between having instructions in a language you can understand for your beautiful shiny new board game with the fabulous-looking paraphernalia . . . and having to create a game out of this board and these pieces and these funny piles of tokens and punch-out and fold-out bits. . . . You’re pretty sure that if the instructions ever show up or get translated they won’t look a whole lot like what you’ve done.
I knew about the final confrontation and the jackknife in SUNSHINE very early on–I did not know about the goddess of pain till comparatively late in proceedings, and therefore didn’t understand why the confrontation that would include the jackknife felt quite so formidable*–and I knew that after that Sunshine would take Con back to her house for a debriefing of sorts that would see her skating very near the edge of breakdown. And I knew that the end would be very ‘open’ and undecided. And I knew, because I’ve been getting complaints from readers since BEAUTY, for pity’s sake, which I would have said had as tidied-up an ending as anyone could want, that the undecidedness would not make everyone happy. But–I probably shouldn’t be admitting this on a public blog–while the skating-near-a-breakdown part of that last scene was difficult to get in balance, when I got to the very end, the last few paragraphs of the book, I had one of those chills-up-the-spine yesssss moments. That ending works. And I–I really should have been old enough to know better–assumed that it would be obvious to readers that it works. That while a lot of people might want to throw old potato peelings at me and scream BUT WHAT HAPPENED?, they’d be half-laughing, because they’d see that I’d got them–the story had got them–and got them fairly.
but even if you’d chosen to write a more definitive one, you probably wouldn’t have satisfied [all] readers . . . who seem to want their own preconceptions realized, period.
Siiiiiigh. Which is something that after over thirty years in the business of telling stories for cash, I still can’t resign myself to. It’s a particularly fret-making subheading under ‘you can’t please everyone’. I don’t like it when people tell me this or that of my books doesn’t work for them** but not every book is going to work for every reader, even every going-into-it-with-the-right-attitude, likes-your-work reader. That’s life. Buy a beer to weep into, and then get on with it. What I can’t deal with at all is the people who say You Have to Do This. Um. No. I don’t. You are not my mother, my headmistress, or my boss. Nor do you have a monopoly on anyone’s decision-making process but your own. Unless you are someone’s mother, headmistress, or boss, in which case I feel deeply for your children, your students, and your employees.
Mrs Redboots wrote:
What I want to know is how people think anybody can write anything if they don’t have a life? You need something to write against – if you just sat in front of the computer 24/7 waiting for the Story Council to dictate, they wouldn’t. I know my own writing . . . comes out of the rest of my life and the skating and knitting and reading and travelling. . . .
Well yes! –although I would prefer to say something to write from. Having a life–although I and most of my friends tend to commiserate with each other about not having lives because we’re too busy doing things–is necessary compost for the roses and the deadly nightshade to spring from. Life reminds me a lot of, uh, research. I do quite a lot of reading up on various more or less relevant things either before or during the writing of a given story . . . if .0001% of it actually shows up in the story, that’s unusual. I know I’ve mentioned learning the basics of hand-spinning while I was writing SPINDLE’S END; and at least there are bees in CHALICE after the shelves of bee-books I read, but they’re magical bees and don’t appear in the how-to, history-of books. And have I told you about reading up on the Sioux/Lakota group of Native American languages while I was writing DRAGONHAVEN? There’s something like one word of Arkhola in the final DRAGONHAVEN. (No, Arkhola and the Arkholas do not exist, except in the world with the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in it.) You don’t notice the compost, but I believe you recognise the strength of what’s growing out of it.
Katherine
And may I just add that, until I started reading your blog and heard the tales, it never even crossed my mind that Sunshine might have a sequel? It ends! It ends beautifully! Of course I’d love to know what happens in the world after that. That’s what MY imagination is for. . . .Every time I read it my mind wanders down a different track of possibility.. . .But, more often than not, I don’t imagine anything else. I just revel in the . . . book I just read and the story I was able to lose myself in so thoroughly for those two hours. THAT’S what I want from an author. A well-told tale in which I get to take part.
YAAAAAY. Yes! Exactly! (Also thank you!) YESSSSSSS. –I agree as a reader too, which again is part of why I’m so bemused by readers who seem to think both authors and stories should show up at the coal-face Monday morning at 7 am sharp with their hair brushed and their boots polished, ready for orders.
(Er . . . you can read SUNSHINE in two hours?!?)
EMoon
Omigod, YES! Yes, and yes again, and yes, (bad word omitted) twice more with feeling. Lots and lots of feeling.
A ton of work was interrupted yesterday by someone who thought I would appreciate his finding an error on a map I drew 20-something years ago
Well, at least you drew maps. I’m still getting furious letters from people about the extreme unbroken maplessness of the McKinley multiverse.
(in a book where someone else put the labels on because they didn’t like my printing style), and then suggested that I should not only draw a new map (which I’m doing at editor’s request) but draw detailed little maps of everything that ever confused him in all the books in that story-universe.
Possibly my favourite of this kind of anal compulsiveness is the teacher who sent a list of every grammatical error in SWORD, shortly after it was a Newbery Honor book. She had no time for either the fact that it is colloquially written or that all the outright ‘errors’–as opposed to, hmm, casualnesses–were in dialogue, which is to say how people speak.
Since we didn’t get one about HERO she must have retired shortly after. And I hope she and her collection of 19th-century Bavarian gerunds are very happy together.
I’ve had con-chairs furious that I didn’t get back to them within the hour (um…I wasn’t home to get the message, and no, I don’t carry communications equipment with me to go to the grocery store down the road.)
. . . This was no doubt before the era of the BlackBerry. (That’s a joke.) I am in the interesting position that in fact I do carry my RaspBerry around with me pretty much all the time, but the phone/wireless is turned off. I don’t know how to pick up my email on it and I don’t want to know, I haven’t a clue about texting, and I tell people who want my mobile number that I haven’t got a mobile. And . . . I think people who are checking their palm-screens while they’re standing in the queue at the grocery down the road are the ones with the priority problem, not us.
I’m particularly glad Neil (and you) nailed the “I bought your book so I own your life and you owe me all the attention I want” attitude.
And the ‘you should be grateful to your readers’ rant? You know that one? Well, yes, of course I’m grateful to my readers. If readers didn’t buy my books I’d have to get a normal job, and I’m pretty sure I’m unemployable. *** But the you should be grateful rant is usually in response to something like my Author as Bitch from Hell or There Is No Sequel to SUNSHINE wherein I am having the effrontery to object to certain reader behaviour–including demands for free books. I always enjoy those.
There are fresh green beans in the garden. I “wasted” a half hour this morning picking them and munching a few raw.
You selfish cow. I’m appalled.
I don’t care; I was going bonkers after not being outside enough all week . . . I let the problems with last night’s choir practice rise up enough so I now know which measure I need to work on (it’s an Ireland anthem, hideously late-Victorian, but with some interesting if ugly half-ton skidding dissonances. I’ve got them all but one.)
Oooh. I might like it.
And some of the readers will be nipping my heels and trying to “make” me “make” the publisher put the book out sooner. And the story won’t be the way they imagined it should be, and so forth.
Yep. Although isn’t the most discouraging thing the way these people stick in the mind–and the flesh: I swear my erratic eczema is worse when, for example, I’m having a bad run of SUNSHINE-sequel demands–and all the nice, the thoughtful, the encouraging, the why-I-can-get-out-of-bed-in-the-morning-and-face-the-computer-again† readers, fade into a soft pleasant background cloud?
(Sorry–but reading what someone said to you about a sequel and then Neil’s post completely blew the control valve…)
We could start a club. . . .
That would be half-TONE skidding dissonances, not half-ton ones. For half-ton dissonances you want Britten’s “Festival Te Deum” or that awful thing of Walton’s we have to sing once a year.
Says the Mozart addict. With (reluctant) apologies to those who love singing Britten or Walton…to each her own throat-lozenges.
. . . All right, all right, very off topic, but too good to miss. (There were several comments on the half-ton dissonances in the forum.) I don’t sing, so maybe that’s my excuse that I can afford to love Britten. His Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is one of the most thrilling pieces of choral music I have ever not heard a good performance of. Sigh. (And I’m a Mozart addict too.)
KathyS
The really frustrating thing is that, the way publishing works nowadays, there is no guarantee that Book 1 of a trilogy will still be in print when Book 3 is finally out.
Yes. This is one of publishing’s most unforgivable sins.
Worse, there are libraries that randomly discard the beginning of a series while I am still waiting for its completion.
Aaaugh. I suppose that’s inevitable . . . but it instantly becomes one of the library’s most unforgivable sins.
One result is that there are some lonely books glaring at me from the shelves, awaiting companions that may or may not appear. Another is that some epics that might have been just my cup of tea are missed entirely, because I’m NOT going to buy on speculation unless I already have faith in the author. (I promise I’ll buy Pegasus though! Even if it has to glare at me for years and years.)
No, really, it’s not like that–PEGASUS is one book that I’ve (necessarily) lopped in two. Book two isn’t a sequel–it’s more like Part Two. It’s just in separate covers! (Oh, gods, and it’ll need a title!) And I promise I’ll keep going on Part Two as soon as I get Part One turned in! Eeeeep! We still have to hope that my editor likes it–and that a roc doesn’t swoop down and steal both memory sticks and both computers with Part Two on them! (Yes, I do back up! But a roc could easily swallow several computers!)
katroseb13
When I first finished Sunshine, I remember hoping there would be a sequel. At the time, I felt as if the ending of the book almost screamed, “my story is not done yet!”
But since then . . . I’ve come to realize that, perhaps, some of my reasoning was due to the sad attitude that, if the book was good, the author must make a sequel. Even if the sequel or the third book or the fourth book or the 100th book stink because the author really shouldn’t have kept writing it. But so many authors satisfy readers with another book, readers have come to expect everyone to keep writing about the same story.
Yes. And remember that while some of those authors are just churning ‘em out for money and couldn’t care less . . . most of those authors are churning them out for money because they need the money. Writing is a rotten way to earn a living. Most of us grasp at fashionable straws to stay in print: and sequels and series are fashionable. (Some fortunate authors just naturally write well in series.) I’m one of the lucky few who manage to write one-offs and still earn a living. Mostly. But I’m not doing any more major house remodelling in the next sixteen decades.
Now, as I have been following this blog, I have learned more about one of my favorite author’s storytelling gifts and perspectives about sequels. Why would I want to demand something that is not in the author’s power currently to give?
Very sensible (and comforting-to-the-author) of you. Although you can want anything you like. I want to be able to eat as much chocolate as I like without gaining any weight or breaking out in spots. It’s not going to happen. It’s when people turn their wanting into permission to demand–into entitlement–that the problems begin. Which is where we came in.
And if nothing else I wanted to write another Entitlement blog so I could be sure to give you this link, for anyone who doesn’t read the forum:
EMoon
Not only did your earlier post send me into bouncing-on-the-chair agreement, but it motivated me to post on the topic in my LiveJournal. For those who want to see yet another writer weigh in on this: http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/175073.html
* * *
* Anybody wishing to make comments, please remember: no spoilers. We can’t guarantee that everybody who reads this blog has read SUNSHINE.
** And frankly they could keep it to themselves. There are maybe six people on the planet who understand me and/or my work and/or what I’m trying to do well enough to make helpful suggestions about what I could do to make something read better. Maybe there are twelve, and I haven’t met six of them yet. But there aren’t more than that. Other people sticking their oar in only arouse in me a strong desire to snap it off and make them eat it.
*** Now that hellhound digestion is steadying down I’m starting to have fantasies about finishing homeopathy college after all. I still have a handful of clients because they won’t go away, and occasionally they send me someone new, and I could do more of that for, like, money. Although I am once again displaying my great gift for lighting on an incredibly difficult and obsessively absorbing free lance profession that pays garbage.
† Even when I have three days to finish the final ten pages of the second draft of a novel when I’ve been averaging one page a week for the last fortnight.
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