David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Just back from the novel workshop at Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s house on the Oregon Coast. I haven’t posted anything here for the last two weeks because I was exceptionally busy at work (I think I had a total of two working hours last week that weren’t consumed by meetings) and I had to critique two full novels and four partials before the workshop. So not only didn’t I have any progress to report on my own writing, I didn’t have any time to report it. But I’m back now, and things should be a bit less hectic for the near future. Travel to and from the workshop was interesting, in the Chinese sense. On the way out of Portland on Thursday night, I took a wrong turn and didn’t realize my mistake until I’d gone 15 miles in the wrong direction and was thoroughly lost; it took me over two hours to get all the way out of town. Then on Saturday Portland was slammed by an ice storm that made the streets impassible, but I hung out at the workshop house until mid-day Sunday and it had all thawed out by the time I got home. But we had lovely weather at the coast all weekend. The workshop itself was a lot of fun, with the seven of us and Dean (plus Kris and local writer Steven York in the evenings) talking about writing stuff in the mornings and evenings and between crits. We ate exceptionally good Thai food and far too many M&Ms and potato chips (Karen Abrahamson kept pushing junk food, which proves that Canadians are not nearly as nice as they are made out to be), and got way too little sleep. We walked on the beach and visited the bookstore down the hill and made friends with Galahad the cat. Some of us even got some writing done (I didn’t). I got very useful feedback on my novel. Reactions from the other workshop participants were mixed but Dean and New York editor John Douglas (who sent comments by fax) said that it would most likely sell if I made some changes: add a prologue showing the Cedar Point disaster; increase the emotion and sensory detail throughout, especially in the opening chapter; clear out the table of contents and the time map and date at the top of each chapter, and replace them with solid scene setting to ground the reader in time (if readers get lost between the two timelines, don’t try to paper over the problem with graphics and typographical tricks, fix the underlying problem!); watch for places where a chapter ending that’s supposed to be a cliffhanger goes past its emotional peak and cut it right at that peak; use more varied paragraphing; replace the detailed outline with a shorter, more focused proposal (in proper manuscript format!). These changes are actually not that large, especially by comparison with the major surgery Dean suggested to some of the other participants. I should be able to get this puppy in the mail in a few weeks. Dean gave several long talks on the business and craft of writing, some planned and some impromptu and all exceptionally valuable (if sometimes a bit discouraging). I took about 14 pages of notes, which I will attempt to summarize here as a public service. (Disclaimer: What you see here is my summary of Dean’s advice and opinions. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it; on the other hand, I may have gotten some of it wrong.) The workshop was largely focused on presentation, because it doesn’t matter how good your novel is if you can’t present it in a marketable way. We did talk a lot about the novels themselves, especially their structure and double especially their openings (because the first chapter or two determines whether the remaining chapters will be read at all), but the most interesting and useful information in the workshop was about the proposal. A novel proposal (also called an outline or synopsis — the words are completely interchangeable) is a sales tool for your novel. I’ll repeat that, because Dean did: the proposal is a sales tool. It is used throughout the publishing process to represent your novel, so if it fails to intrigue and excite the reader it almost doesn’t matter how good the novel itself is. Fundamentally, the proposal has to capture the essential elements of the novel in miniature. Dean brought out a bottle of shampoo and a tiny sample-sized bottle of the same shampoo. The big bottle is your novel, the small bottle is your proposal. The shampoo in the small bottle is the same color, smells the same, and tastes the same, and the bottle has approximately the same shape — but the cap is proportionally bigger because otherwise you couldn’t get the shampoo out, and there are fewer words on the label because if you just made the same text smaller you couldn’t read it. The purpose of the small bottle is to get you to buy the big bottle, not to be a perfect copy of the big bottle. Similarly, the proposal has to say what the novel is about, not just recount the plot. It has to capture the novel’s emotions, not just list its characters. It should have the same voice, style, and stance as the novel. It can be long or short — as little as a few pages, or over a hundred pages for a complex best-seller — but it has to be as exciting and intriguing as the novel itself, if not more so. It is usually written in third person present tense, no matter what person and tense is used for the novel itself, and it must use standard manuscript format (12-point Courier, double spaced, 1″ margins, with your name and address on the first page and your name in the header of every subsequent page). Non-standard formats make it harder for the editor to read and give them an excuse to reject the novel — and they receive so many proposals they are looking for any excuse at all to toss the current one and move on to the next. It used to be that the science fiction field was based on reputation and personal relationships, and novels were sold over dinner at the Worldcon. That’s no longer the case. Computerized sales tracking and corporate attention to the bottom line mean that the only thing that counts today is how you sell, which is determined by quality more than publicity or anything else. One downside of this tracking is that if your sales are disappointing you may not be able to sell your next book at all. The upside is that a new author, or a new name for an existing author, gets a fair shake based solely on the quality of the novel — as represented by the proposal and sample chapters. It’s a great time to break in. If your sales record is dragging you down, don’t hesitate to adopt a new pen name. Even an author who is doing reasonably well can benefit from changing their name — if you are selling at the $5K advance level and you write a true breakout novel, you can sell it under your own name for $5K (with corresponding publicity), but a really great book from a fresh name with no track record will be judged on its own merits and can sell for $100K (with corresponding publicity). Here’s how the publishing field works today: first off, there is no slush pile any more. Hardly any publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts. Instead, publishers receive query letters. The assistant editor sits at her desk in the hall outside the editor’s door and goes through the pile of queries received each day, passing only the most intriguing ones on to the editor. The editor then picks the most interesting queries out of that reduced set and requests a package (sample chapters and proposal) from them. The received packages then receive a further winnowing, with editors or assistant editors reading them and rejecting as many as possible, retaining only those that demand recognition — for these they request the whole manuscript. If the manuscript bears out the package’s promise, the editor presents the proposal to other editors, management, and the sales force. If these people all agree, based on the proposal and the editor’s passion for the novel, that this is something that will make money for the publisher, they extend an offer to the author. So your job is to create a query letter and a proposal package that are so compelling that no one anywhere in that process will be able to say no. This process takes months and months. These days you have to treat novels exactly the same as short stories: write one, submit it, and move on to the next one. If one comes back, resubmit it right away. Don’t track rejection times, don’t bite your fingernails waiting for a response; you have no idea whether it’s taking a long time because it’s being seriously considered or because it’s sitting at the bottom of a huge pile. Just work on the next novel and make sure it’s as good as it can be. If you keep the pipeline full of quality work, eventually one will land in front of the right editor at the right time and will “click.” And once you’ve sold one novel, the game changes and you have an entirely different set of problems (one of the main ones is the temptation to overcommit yourself). Can an agent get you around this process? No — not the kind of agent you can get as an unknown. Good agents don’t have to take on writers with no sales, there are plenty of writers who have just made their first sale and need an agent. And even with a good agent, the process still takes enormous amounts of time. The main thing an agent can do that you can’t do for yourself is to submit to multiple publishers at once. Do not be discouraged by the length and complexity of the process. The system is more in the writer’s control than ever before. If you can write a good query and package you can sell even if you don’t have an agent, never go to conventions, and don’t know anyone in the business. (You still need an agent to negotiate the contract, though.) The reader’s initial reaction is the most important, because editors and assistant editors don’t spend a lot of time deciding if a novel is marketable. The opening has to grab the reader’s attention and the remainder of the sample chapters have to hold it. Use pacing, cliffhangers, etc. to pull the reader along. Setting and sensory details are critical; a novel (especially in its early chapters) has to be even thicker and richer in detail than any short story — after all, in a novel you have much more room for this sort of detail and you should make effective use of that. The manuscript must be clean and free of “scabs” — typos, grammatical errors, punctuation problems, etc. — which can make the editor think that the copy edit might be more trouble than it’s worth. It’s especially important to kill typos and other glitches in the early pages. Your goal is zero defects. The title is an important element, because it represents the novel when people are talking about it (within the publisher, and then in the market). If you can’t come up with a memorable title that summarizes the book in some way, work with a friend who’s good at it. Good novel titles tend to be shorter than good short story titles; most best-sellers have two-word titles. The secrets of a successful proposal are clarity and focus on character. It must be welcoming to read (standard manuscript format!) and the novel’s structure must be clear from the proposal. But it needs to convey what the book is about — from the character’s perspective — rather than summarizing the plot. It should explain how the book opens, how it ends up, and how the character gets from point A to point Z, but avoid the details. “What the book is about” is bigger than the plot. The query letter is the postal version of the elevator pitch. It must be brief. Typically it has one paragraph of what the book is about, one paragraph listing your qualifications (previous publishing credits and relevant life experience), one paragraph citing similar successful novels, and one paragraph to ask for the sale (e.g. “The novel is finished and I would be glad to send it to you, thank you for your time”). The query letter should use standard business letter format — this is a job interview, and you wouldn’t show up for a job interview wearing a sweat suit. Don’t explicitly state your novel’s theme in a query or cover letter; that tends to make it appear preachy. When you send in your package it should be assembled in this order: 1) cover letter, 2) sample chapters, 3) proposal (labeled as such). Be sure to include your full contact information at the top of each, since the three pieces often are separated from each other during the process. Include exactly the amount of sample material requested by this particular agent or editor. If they ask for 50 pages, give them exactly 50 pages — cut off in the middle of a word if need be. For the novel’s opening, many successful writers pick one detail of setting or character and focus on it for several pages. The description needs to be thick and rich in sensory detail, and focus on what the detail means to the viewpoint character. What about it catches her attention and why? Similarly, if you have multiple viewpoints they can be made distinct by giving each one a “walking motif.” For example, one character could notice smells, while another notices noises, or the temperature. What is each character’s reason for being? That should be the most powerful element of the character’s first appearance and should color their every perception. Most wannabe writers stop at about page 100 or 150 (1/3 of the way through the novel), the point at which the excitement of the opening is past and only the long slog of the middle is visible ahead. You must keep going past this point. Resist the urge to go back and revise, or even read, the first part — you have to trust the process and “eat the elephant one bite at a time.” Deadlines are useful to keep you going. It’s important to get feedback on your work, because the writer’s job is to create an impression in the reader’s mind — to transfer thoughts and feelings and images from your mind to the reader’s. Because you already have these images in your own mind, you cannot judge whether or not your writing is effective. But you should complete the entire novel before sending it for critique. Very few writers can accept critique on individual novel chapters without allowing it to warp the novel into “art by committee.” Science fiction, per se, is a dying genre; even Western outsells it. But there are enormous quantities of science fiction and fantasy being published outside the “science fiction” publishing field — they are just labeled as romances (romance is 55% of the market, vs. 5% for SF) or mysteries or thrillers or just “fiction.” SF writers who have escaped the SF ghetto include Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, Robin Cook, Neal Stephenson, Jonathan Lethem, Neil Gaiman, and Karen Joy Fowler. Take a look at some recent SF and fantasy best-sellers and see if you see the words “science fiction” or “fantasy” anywhere on them. The science fiction ghetto is superficially welcoming to new talent, but in the long run is harmful to them because it locks them into a tiny market. Don’t think of Asimov’s as the best possible place to sell your short SF story, take it to the New Yorker or Playboy first. Part of your job as a professional writer is to stay abreast of the markets, even those you don’t plan to write for. If a major romance publisher has a line of supernatural romances, and you have a fantasy book with a strong romantic element, you may be able to sell that same exact book to the romance publisher for a hell of a lot more money than you’d get from a fantasy publisher. You may have to change the query letter and proposal to stress the romantic element. Publisher’s Marketplace (www.publishersmarketplace.com) costs $15 a month and is well worth it. It includes a database of recent deals (editor, agent, type of book, and size of advance) that is invaluable in researching agents and markets, and an email newsletter called Publisher’s Lunch that helps you keep abreast of the news in the field. An agent who isn’t sending news of their deals to Publisher’s Marketplace is missing out on how business is done today. Most agents you see at the Worldcon these days are not the agent you want. The good ones are too busy to leave New York for more than a day. An exception is agents who have a client up for a Hugo, who may fly in just for the day to hold the client’s hand (and help them with deals if they win the Best Novel Hugo). Mainstream writer’s conferences such as Surrey are better, but watch out for scammers. An extensive website for an individual agent is a warning sign: good agents don’t have the time, or any reason, to maintain one. When you hear an opinion about an agent, consider the source: is this a multi-published author, or a wannabe? A good agent can’t save your career, but a bad agent can hurt it. The agent is your employee and you need to be aware of what they are and aren’t doing for you. You also need to keep up with the market so you know what the alternatives are. Your agent could retire or flake out without warning, and you may need to change agents suddenly or if a better alternative emerges. Be willing to fire your agent if they aren’t working to your satisfaction, or if you find that you are turning into a type of writer who is no longer well represented by your current agent. You are responsible for your own career. You need an agent you can work with, but the agent you like the best personally might not be the one who’ll do the best job. “Big Books” are an entirely different genre, with their own structure: an incredible setting, vividly realized; everyday characters doing extraordinary things; multiple viewpoints (generally), often two characters with their own problems who collide mid-book to produce an even bigger problem. Most authors should never even attempt a Big Book. The author of a Big Book must have incredible control of the reader’s thoughts and feelings. It takes a lot of practice and reading, study of best-sellers, millions of words written. Styles of best-seller change with the decades; read Making the List by Korda for insights. Big Books can fail in big ways if you get the small stuff wrong. Your hero can get hurt, he can get damaged, he can be in pain, he can be frightened, desperate, frustrated, but he can never whine. He has to keep moving forward even when he can’t.

My resolution for the new year is simple and far-reaching, and peripherally writing-related. It’s based on the idea that any piece of writing can be improved by reducing the wordcount by 5-10%. So I resolve to Edit The House: to go room by room and reduce the amount of stuff by 5-10%. We’ve already edited the kitchen, as a side effect of the remodel, and I’m particularly looking forward to editing my clothes closet. I’m less enthusiastic about editing the bookshelves upstairs, but something has to go… they’re so full there isn’t even any more room to cram books in on their sides. There will be a garage sale this summer. I have another goal for the year (but I’m not going to make it a formal resolution, because I prefer to have just one new year’s resolution): to put the novel in the mail by my birthday (February 21). That’ll give me five weeks to edit it after the workshop in mid-January. My resolution for 2004 was to Finish The Novel, which I defined as finishing the first draft, revising it once, preparing the submission package, and submitting it somewhere. I think I can mark that as a near-miss (or even done, if you count sending it to the workshop as “submitting it somewhere”). Not much writing news to report. I’ve been slogging away on my critiques for the novel workshop. I need to pick up the pace, but I’ve been partying hard for the last few days (one party Friday night, two today, another tomorrow). And I need to make an addendum to the David’s Index post of December 30: one more rejection came in under the wire, a 141-day(!) boingeroo from Gordon Van Gelder rejecting the story he asked for a rewrite on. (“Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to pin down what isn’t working for me … I’m just not feeling this one.”) Oh well. That one goes to scifi.com next. Happy Gnu’s Ear, everyone!

Word count: 119459 | Since last entry: 0 | This month: -2718 In honor of the Solstice — a phenomenon which has been going on since before there was life on this planet and will continue long after humanity has departed (assuming we don’t blow the damn thing right out of its orbit) — Kate and I celebrated in our usual fashion, with pepper-salted squid at Thien Hong and a movie (in this case Flight of the Phoenix — a little implausible, perhaps, but I liked it). We held a kitchenwarming party this weekend. Large numbers of people attended, from all our various interest groups (neighbors, co-workers, science fiction fans, writers, square dancers, and various others even more obscurely connected), and they all seemed to find something to talk about with each other. Many were the oohs and aahs over the new kitchen. We made and bought massive quantities of food and drink, which of course guaranteed that everyone would also bring plenty of same. I figure we’re set for something to bring to the next five parties we attend. No work on the novel since the last post. I have a pile of manuscripts to critique, but since putting the novel in the mail I’ve been focusing on various other holiday traditions, notably decorating the tree and buying presents for friends and relatives (just about done with that, unless I change my mind). One bit of writing news, though: my story “Tk’Tk’Tk” will be in the next issue of Asimov’s. Happy Solstice to all!

Word count: 119459 | Since last entry: -5467 | This month: -2718 In the last week, I… …added a graphical “time map” to the top of each chapter to help the
reader make sense of my unconventional timeline. …went through the critique comments and made a list of things I wanted
to do to the novel. Actually, I only looked at my notes from the oral critiques, and I only put the most important comments on the list. It was still eight pages long. …went back and highlighted only the most significant issues. That was
about half of them. …did a quick red-pen edit of the manuscript.
This was something half-way between Holly Lisle’s one-pass revision method and Neil Gaiman’s rather facetious six-step revision method and took most of three days. …checked off about one-quarter of the items on the things-to-do list.
Most of those were the simple ones, the ones that could be addressed by adding a sentence or a paragraph. The big ones, like almost all the ones under the heading “make the aliens more alien,” remain undone for now. …sat down and keyed in the red-pen edits, which took only half as long
as the editing itself (still a couple long evenings’ work, though — I haven’t had more than about 5 hours’ sleep in a night this week). …cut two complete scenes, several partial scenes, and a whole bunch of
paragraphs, sentences, and words, for a net gain (by which I mean loss) of over 5000 words (4%). I am proud of this. …reformatted the manuscript in Courier 12, printed it out, and sent
it off to the novel workshop just under the deadline. 509 pages plus cover letter and synopsis. Go me! So how do I feel about this significant accomplishment? See the title above: It Sucks. I have been looking at nothing but the flaws, missing details, missed opportunities, and most especially the petty, whiny, reactive, boring characters in this novel for the last week, and of the dozens and dozens of changes I wanted to make to address those flaws I was only able to make the simplest 25%. But. There were also many positive comments (about as large, and welcome, a percentage of the total as the raisins in raisin bran, but critique is focused on the areas for improvement) and at least I am done with the damn thing for a while. And I did feel a sense of accomplishment as I put the tightly-wrapped manuscript in the mail. Next: catch up with everything else in my life, which has been on hold for the last week. Then start in on critiques for the other novels in the workshop.

Word count: 124926 | Since last entry: 58 | This month: 2749 I had a number of things to do this evening. The main one was to write a list of things to do, and watch out for, during my quick revision pass. (It has to be in the mail by next Wednesday, aiee.) I started with my file of miscellaneous notes (which I haven’t added to in months) and the notes I have written at the top of some chapter files. While I was looking at those chapter notes I decided to go ahead and put all the chapters in one file. It took me, fundamentally, all evening to do that — put all the chapters in one file, in the right order, with consistent formatting and spacing. The file is 893 KB. It’s 317 pages long — with 1″ margins in 10-point Times New Roman. It’d be 532 pages in industry-standard 12-point Courier, which is what I’m going to have to do for submission, but since this printout is just for me I’d rather save paper with the smaller font. Oof. No wonder it took two years. Next steps: Look at the notes from all my chapter critiques and finish the to-do list. Print the giant document out. Start revising. I think my little WinCE device may not be up to the task.

Word count: 124868 | Since last entry: 126 | This month: 2691 I made a few edits to the last chapter and epilogue before printing them out and giving them to my crit group. Also got my crits on the previous chapter, chapter I (that’s letter “eye,” not Roman numeral one); generally positive. That was Friday and Saturday. Now it’s Tuesday. I seem to have spent the intervening time commuting back and forth between my to-do list at work and my to-do list at home (a mix of novel-related, kitchen-related, and general life stuff like groceries and laundry). Tonight I folded large quantities of laundry and did the thing of going through the last couple of sets of critiques and recycling all the pages with no marks on them. Not exciting, but necessary. During these tasks I also watched a couple of truly Godawful reality shows. Another reminder, if one were needed, why I so rarely watch television. Next step is to go through all the critiques and my various notes to myself from the last year and make a to-do list of changes to make during the editing pass. I’ll have to prioritize it, because there’s not enough time to do everything I want to do. Yes, one of the items on my to-do list is to make a to-do list. Truly I am lame. Oh, as long as I’m here I thought I would share with you something that came to me in the shower this morning:

Blade runner, that replicant’s after you
Blade runner, if he catches you you’re through

That Roy Baty is really a crazy clown
When will he learn that he never can mow him down?
Poor little blade runner never bothers anyone
Just huntin’ down a skin-job’s his idea of havin’ fun

Word count: 124742 | Since last entry: 1482 | This month: 2565 Okay, now it really is all over, including the shouting. I thought I’d finished the penultimate scene in the last chapter yesterday, but when I woke up this morning (at 5am, after going to sleep at midnight, oy) I realized the villain had been defeated too easily. So tonight I extended that scene with about five hundred words of serious physical action. Then I wrote the anticlimax, as planned, and dove right in and wrote the epilogue too: 775 words. I thought it would be brief, but I wonder if it’s too brief. And the very last sentence seems kind of weak. But… it’s done. The first draft is all done. One hundred twenty-four thousand seven hundred and forty-two words (plus about 87,000 words of notes, outlines, and journal entries) in just under two years. I still have some summary and synopsis stuff remaining to do, but… I wrote a novel. I WROTE A NOVEL! Falling over now. Thud.

Word count: 123260 | Since last entry: 1083 | This month: 1083 It’s all over now but the shouting. Dozens of bodies on the floor, including several main characters. Blood everywhere. Just a short anticlimax left to write, explaining how the few survivors make it home, and the last chapter’s done. The last chapter. Done. And I just killed off… someone I’ve spent the last two years with. Jeez. It was a good death, I think. Deserved, but not unredeemed. I’ve been planning this moment for so long… I’ve had this scene in mind for months, maybe in some form all the way back to the beginning. (Yep — I just checked, and this character’s death was in the “Sketch a Novel in an Hour” outline I did at OryCon in 2002, though I didn’t know then exactly how it would happen.) So it’s not unexpected, and I’m not particularly upset about it. I think? At the moment it’s nearly midnight and I do have to sleep. Maybe I’ll cry later. Maybe not. Good night, sweet prince.

Word count: 122177 | Since last entry: 1210 | This month: 9995 Back from a long weekend in Seattle and Vancouver, where we visited with relatives, had at least three Thanksgiving dinners that couldn’t be beat, and did much square dancing. Weather was great and I only gained two pounds for the weekend. Thanks to Will and Grant for their hospitality, and to Jeremy for taking me out for a late lunch on Sunday. I generally managed to write a couple hundred words a day, which is really unusual for me when traveling and brings my total for the month to a very respectable figure of almost ten thousand words. I got Jason and Sienna safely into orbit, where Green Hills soldiers menace them with maser pistols as they prepare to take them to Raptor. Only one scene to go, I think, in this final chapter — probably about a thousand words — and then I just have a brief epilog to write, plus the usual summary of the previous chapter, before Saturday’s critique group meeting. I might not get the epilog written in time, but I’m going to try. Preparations have begun for the novel workshop in January. I need to send out the complete novel to two people, plus chapters and outline to five, by December 15. I won’t have time to do much more than a very cursory editing pass, unfortunately. Then I’ll have two complete novels and five chapters-and-outlines to critique by January 15. Plus all that holiday stuff. Whee. But the workshop itself should be a lot of fun. One other bit of good news: I sold another story to Realms of Fantasy. It’s “The Ecology of Faerie,” AKA “the one with the frogs,” which I originally wrote for The Faerie Reel and then nearly sold to the Usborne YA Fantasy anthology. This is my first YA story sale, a sweet and gentle tale of magic and batrachians which nonetheless is a bit of a horror story as well. It’s also the first time I’ve sold a second story to the same market.