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PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , ,

My boss, Kate Eltham, is leaving the writer’s centre in a couple of months. She’s heading off to be the next chairperson of the Brisbane Writers Festival, and I’ve got to admit, that’s something that excites me. She spent six years turning QWC into one of the best resources for writers in the country, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to turn BWF into one of the finest damn literary festivals in the world. That’s the kind of person Kate is – smart, ambitious, transformative. As a Brisbane writer and reader, I’m really looking forward to seeing the kind of festival program she runs in 2013.

On the other hand, as a guy who works in the writers centre, my first thought upon hearing the news was fuck, time to be a writer again. And I gotta tell you, that thought hurt. I haven’t been a writer in a while now. A year, at least. Maybe longer.

I’ve written, certainly, but in my head there’s a difference between someone who writes and someone who’s a writer. It’s a really personal distinction, and I don’t require other people to subscribe to it, but for me a writer is someone who embraces writing as a job. Even if they’re not making a living from it yet, their entire process is built around getting paid, getting the next job, building a career. They’re people who embrace the fact that they’re a small business and they’re willing to concede that “how will this piece help pay the rent next week?” is just as important as “how will this piece change the world?”

A writer hustles. They aren’t thinking about what they’ve done, they’re thinking about what comes next. They’re lining up opportunities and back-up plans and…well, you get the picture. And, it should be noted, they’re generally pretty happy with all that. I was, back when I thought like a writer. It took working for QWC before I actually relaxed into a day-job and thought, yeah, this is rather nice. I could get used to earning money like this instead of fuck this job. I’m going to figure out how to earn more cash and quit.

Not that working for QWC has changed – it’s still a pleasure, I still enjoy going there, and I still enjoy talking to my co-workers. Nor is my job guaranteed to change or disappear, although both are certainly possibilities and the introduction of a new CEO will result in all sorts of uncertainties on top of the already-uncertain nature of working for a non-profit arts organisation.

I’m okay with uncertainties when I’m a writer. Less so when I’m working a dayjob.

And I really don’t want to get caught off-guard if I get to the end of my contract and find myself unemployed again. Better to start thinking like a writer now, rewiring the ol’ thought patterns, than start the process when the uncertainty becomes certain.

Best case scenario, I’ll produce a bunch of work and get to keep my dayjob. Worst case scenario, I’ll be ready to transition over should the dayjob ends.

If you need me this weekend, I’ll be finishing off some short stories. And writing some blog posts. And possibly putting together a rough plan for a novel or two.

The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

So about halfway through 2011 I got an email from Robin Laws which said, in essence, I’m doing this anthology of modern fables for Stone Skin Press; might you be interested in contributing? I was. In fact, my first response, which didn’t actually get put into my emailed reply, was oh, fucking, yeah I’m interested. You’re Robin-freakin’-Laws. That kind of enthusiasm is unseemly in an professional email, and I do try to contain my inner fanboy when talking to editors. The actual email probably said something like I’d love to be involved. Here’s the premise for my story. You know. Sedate. Professional.

Only twice have I written for editors or been published in markets that my gamer-friends have recognised. The first time that happened, it was when I was published in Weird Tales. This is the second. In this instance, my enthusiasm probably seems somewhat mysterious to any writer-types who aren’t involved in gaming, so the short introduction to Robin is this: he’s one of the smartest RPG designers I’ve ever come across.

Lets set aside the fact that he designed the Feng Shui RPG, arguable the best RPG game ever printed, and the fact that he unleashed Battlechimp Potemkin on the world as a result.

Lets set aside the fact that he was one of the first game designers I ever found who applied cultural theory to RPGs and saw the solid capitalist impulses underneath D&D’s basic premise that equated the acquisition of capital resulted with increased power and personal competence.

Lets set aside the fact that he actually thought about *what made games fun* and designed with that in mind.

Lets set aside…actually, lets not. The man is smart. Capital S Smart. One of the highlights of being involved with the first Gen Con Oz was inviting him out as guest of honour. It can be depressing and strange to meet your idols, particularly in the gaming industry. But Robin was smart and affable and charmingly Canadian, and he was the first person to point out to me that Australian’s will appologise to you before they tell you how much they enjoyed you work. I’m pretty sure I’d done exactly that a few minutes prior, when I asked him to sign a copy of my Feng Shui rule book.

In short, there was nothing disappointing about meeting Robin Laws. If anything, the man RULED EVEN HARDER when you met him in person, and I’ve got a whole bunch of friends who cite meeting Robin as one of the best things about the first Gen Con Oz show.

So yeah, I was excited to write something for an anthology he was editing, especially since the concept seemed kind of interesting.

Of course, 2011 was the year of manic deadlines, so there was a certain trepidation when I said yes. Especially since it turns out the final submission date would make it the very last deadline of the year. Extra especially because the wordcount was tight – 1,500 words max – and I’d spent an entire year unable to write something that clocked in lower than 5K.

It got worse when I realised I’d be moving in December. And that the deadline for Robin’s anthology was exactly twelve hours before I was scheduled to go pick up a truck and start moving furniture.

So I spent a week packing and writing and revising, and about two AM in the morning I finished a draft of my story, The Minotaurs and the Signal Ghosts, that seemed to work pretty well. I think half the reason it actually got done was the sheer joy of finding myself back writing a first person POV after a year of Flotsam’s third person narrator.

I’m not, by nature, a writer who enjoys third person omniscient or limited, so I kinda went crazy with the idea that I could have a distinctive voice telling the story again. The net result was three straight hours spent cutting words from the draft so it’d fit the word count.

Then I mailed it off, got a few hours sleep, woke up, moved house, and proceeded to crash for the next three months, refusing to even consider writing things that weren’t work-related or the equivalent of pro-wrestling fan-fic. Never again, I swore. Never again am I agreeing to write so much to deadline in one year.

And now Stone Skin Press have announced The Lion and the Aardvark. They’ve put the cover up on their blog and it’ll be out towards the end of the year, and when that happens I’ll have a story I’m pretty damn proud of sitting in an anthology edited by Robin-freakin’-Laws, and all-in-all that’s pretty damn cool.

In the film of Adaptation, the character who is not Robert Mckee basically says that it’s the endings that matter. You can make a mess of three quarters of the film, but if you nail the last act, you’ll wow them in the end and the audience will go home happy.

For a long time 2011 was one of those writing years I tried to forget. It was, personally and professionally, a fucking mess of a year.

But the ending kind of rocked, and I’m going home happy in the end.

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , , , ,

Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings.

Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing.

For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always perplexed when people look down on pro-wrestling.

In Al Snow’s wrestling world, “good” is less valuable than “profitable.” He looks at Wrestlemania III, arguably the biggest and most-watched wrestling show of all time, and challenges the conventional wisdom of wrestling critics that suggests that the technically brilliant match between Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage was better than the headline match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. The critics aren’t wrong. You can find both that matches on YouTube if you search, and there’s no doubt that watching the athletic display of the former is far more interesting than the plodding actions of the latter.

But people paid to see Hulk Hogan – a charismatic bodybuilder with a five-move arsenal – bodyslam Andre the Giant and that makes it the best match on the card in Al Snow’s world. Hulk-Andre made the company money, it kept people coming back for more, and it had casual fans invested even if the hardcore wrestling fans would rather watch the guys in the midcard.

Replace “Hulk-Andre” with “Twilight” and you’re probably seeing the analogy I’m making. I may not enjoy Twilight as a reader, I may find it enormously problematic, but that doesn’t mean I want it to ease existing. By some objective standards it may qualify as the best book in publishing – it’s not only a blockbuster that generated new readers, but it’s now spawned a second blockbuster (equally maligned) in the form of 50 Shades of Grey.

It’s all very well to get caught up in the art of writing, or in producing the best work you can, but at the end of the day writing and publishing is a business, and business has a pretty useful way of figuring out who wins and who loses.

If you’ve got the most money, you’re the winner on that day. If you’ve got the most money and people are *hanging out* to see what you do next, then you’re the big winner overall.

Given the choice of being Ricky Steamboat or Hulk Hogan, I’d still probably choose to be Steamboat. He was smaller, faster, more  athletic, and over the course of his career he drew plenty of money as a wrestler. People paid to see him wrestle, to see him gain and defend championship belts, to see him face down nemesis after nemesis. He coupled quality matches with the ability to make money, and while he never became the star Hulk Hogan did, you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t do okay for himself.

But it’s stupid to look down on Hulk Hogan when what he’s doing works. When what he’s doing is bringing other people to the show, and creating the platform that allows everyone else to earn money as well.

It’s okay to create art, but treat your fucking business like it’s a business. Figure out how it’ll earn you money, ’cause paying rent is one of those things that needs to be done and it’s no fucking fun dying alone and broke in the gutter.