I am in denial about the year being half over, yet here we are. It’s summer here in the Pacific Northwest, which means the rose garden is in full bloom, the ferns are taking over the world, and the slugs in the forest are getting very, very large indeed. I would rather have forest slugs than cicadas, for sure, so I’m okay with this. I am bracing myself for inevitable wildfires. I hate wildfires.
A few quick newsletter updates for June:
I’ve turned in my next novel, which will be my sixth. (Sixth!) It’s a middle grade fantasy adventure called HUNTERS OF THE LOST CITY, and it will be published by Quirk Books in 2022. I will share more details as soon as there are links online! For now all you need to know is that it’s about monsters and magic and mountains and girls who want their world to be better.
I had a lovely long conversation with sci fi author J. Dianne Dotson where we talked about anything and everything: the video is over on her YouTube channel, along with chats she’s had with several other authors. My very fluffy cat makes an appearance.
MAYDAY Magazine has published the winner of their 2021 fiction contest, for which I was the guest judge. The winner is here: Shapeless by Haley Kennedy. And this is what I said about why I chose it:
"What I love most about “Shapeless” is how delicately it balances the mundane and the weird to create a character and a sequence of events that feel both achingly familiar and breathtakingly strange. It’s not an easy juxtaposition to pull off, but it works every step of the way, from that first gasp of surprise--and delight--upon realizing what’s happening to Margo, all through her exploration of identity and evolution of power that encompasses fear and experimentation and loneliness and disgust and pride all at once, up to the inevitable realization that no event in a person’s life is only just an event and no trauma is only just trauma, because past and present and future are all always, in all people, intertwined as part of the whole. It’s a powerful, unsettling story, but also a deeply intimate one, where the personal and the peculiar cannot be separated.”
I’ve recently started a new novel. Two, actually. And I wrote up synopses to pitch two more. Finish one, dive into the next, that’s how it goes. The beginning of a new book is always an exciting and beguiling time. It could become anything, it could be magnificent, and most importantly it hasn’t yet crashed into the limitations of trying to communicate exceedingly complex emotions and ideas via the powerful but imperfect tool of written language.
One of them is likely going to be a bigger book than any I’ve written before, with more points of view, more story, and a timeline that might actually stretch longer than what can be numbered in days or hours. I like my hyper-compressed action timelines, but I’ve been there, done that, gave the copyeditors plenty of headaches. I want to stretch my legs a little, so I am trying something new.
Big, new, and challenging. It’s going to be hard. I know that going in. I’m glad for it. A large part of the reason I keep jumping around in genres and age groups is that I like the challenge of figuring out new ways to tell stories.
I’ve been thinking about this because of something I saw on Facebook the other day. A fellow writer mentioned that he dislikes the term “world building” because the use of the word “building” implies something tedious and laborious, when in fact it is easy and innate and intuitive. Leaving aside the silliness of believing that everybody has the same negative emotional association with the word “building” as this author (do people really hate building things?), the claim that any part of writing ought to be easy for all people is baffling to me, as is the assumption that if it’s not easy and intuitive, it must be tedious and painful, as though those two options are the only possibilities.
This isn’t really about what that person thinks about writing. Some parts of writing are easy for some people; other parts are not; everybody and every story is different. That’s not terribly interesting to think about.
What is more interesting to me is unpacking this idea that difficult equals tedious, or that doing something difficult is such a negative experience that even terminology suggesting it must be avoided. I find it interesting because it all comes from an obviously false equivalence—and one that does not withstand even the gentlest scrutiny—that is nevertheless very common, and very a harmful. Anybody who got stuck with the gifted kid label back in school knows how toxic it can be when we are taught that ease means talent and leads to success, whereas difficulty means inadequacy and leads to failure. But it lingers. Oh, does it linger.
Now, to be clear, what I’m talking about isn’t the difficulty of being an author, with the surreal gothic horror of the publishing industry, the economic uncertainty, the ever-changing community, and the often-ugly reality of working in a highly competitive creative field that overvalues the work of certain (straight, white, cis male) writers while undervaluing or actively harming nearly everybody else. All of those difficulties are real, and worth discussing, but what I’m thinking about now concerns the actual writing part of writing. The part that happens without publishers or editors or reviewers or even readers.
But I’m also not trying to do that obnoxious tortured artist thing in saying that pure creation is so hard because our souls weep for the impossibility of truth or some nonsense. Look, I sit at home with my cat in my lap and I make up shit about spaceships and magic. Let’s not have any illusions about the tragic romanticism of this life. Nobody’s dying of consumption in a Parisian garret because they can’t finish the perfect couplet of ineffable ennui, not in this writing career anyway. (Who would feed the cats?) (Yes, I know, they would eat my face. Let them! It’s poetic.)
I’m really just talking about the very mundane reality of how sitting down at the desk every day to tell stories can be hard, because making up and writing down stories can be hard, and that’s okay. Because, for me, two things are true:
1. I often find writing very difficult.
2. That’s why I like it.
I don’t think this is that strange. Let me explain.
First: Last weekend I spent twelve hours making bone broth for ramen from scratch. I didn’t need to do that; I could have bought a packet. But it’s extremely satisfying to do the whole process from beginning to end, to learn and enact every step that goes into it, so I did it.
Second: Lately I’ve been pushing myself to take longer and longer walks, because I want to get back into hiking in the mountains. I don’t have to do that. Nobody has to throw themselves onto a trail and trudge along for miles only to end up exactly where they started, except now tired and sweaty and bug-bitten. But it’s enjoyable and thrilling to experience the world that way, and I want to do more of it.
Third: A good friend of mine will be moving to Japan in a few months (whenever Japan opens their borders). I wanted to learn a little bit of Japanese for when I visit her. But as soon as I started learning, I realized that I actually love it, so I’ve dived head first into a whole-hearted self-directed study. It’s ridiculously hard. There are too many kanji to memorize. I am not used to particles. The entire ordeal requires a completely unfamiliar way of thinking about the structure of grammar and language. And I really, really don’t have to do any of it. It’s not necessary for travel. I would get by just fine as an awkwardly gesturing 外人. But it’s fascinating and engaging and uses a part of my brain that has felt stagnant for a long time, so I’m doing it anyway.
People climb El Capitan for fun. Ride their bikes across the Alps for fun. Translate the words of Shakespeare into Klingon for fun. Play musical instruments. Build musical instruments. Build treehouses. Knit sweaters for dogs. Make xenomorph cosplay. Plant and tend gardens. Invent their own board games. Bake macarons. Go cave diving. Design robots. Whatever.
Then they go back and climb something higher, play something more complex, build something bigger, bake something fancier. Sometimes it’s a hobby. Sometimes it’s a job. Sometimes it’s the work of a lifetime. Sometimes it’s a weekend fling.
There’s nothing unusual about this. People do unnecessary, difficult things for the enjoyment and satisfaction all the time. It is simply not true—it has never been true—that something being difficult keeps people away, because it has never been true that difficult things are necessarily laborious and tedious. Difficult things are often delightful and thrilling and fun, even when they are also hard as hell.
Writing is hard because storytelling is hard, and storytelling is hard because communicating the breadth and complexity of human experiences is hard. And yes, that includes world building, because worlds are not simple places in which all experiences can be understood and communicated with ease. (In fact, I would argue that people in general, but mostly older white men, believing that they intuitively, innately, easily grasp the entirety of the world and other people’s experiences in it is the source of nearly all the world’s worst problems. But that’s another essay entirely.) Transforming what exists only as ideas and feelings inside our own brains into words that will create a specific emotional and intellectual experience in somebody else’s brain is not a minor achievement. It’s a big, strange, wildly complex thing to do.
We are messy, messy creatures. What we feel and do and think and say and fear and love and dread and hope and hate and crave and lust and forget and remember, all that stuff that stories and histories and revolutions and lifetimes are made of, it’s all messy too. That’s why writing is sometimes really very hard.
Which makes it a bit weird how obsessed writers are with the difficulty or ease of writing (she says, wryly, having just written a several hundred words on the subject). There’s advice everywhere about how to make it easier, but rather less about how to view difficulty as a sign that you’re doing something worthwhile, that you’re digging into the full complexity of human emotions and experience, that you are thinking seriously about the power of language and the empathy it can stir in readers. It’s a sign that you have something to say that matters so much to you, and will hopefully matter so much to those with whom you share, that you care very deeply about getting it right, even when getting it right is neither easy nor intuitive for you.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think that’s the kind of difficulty we should shy away from—or warn others away from—because I don’t think avoiding what’s difficult is a way to tell better stories. Writing doesn’t have to be hard for all people at all times; to claim that is just as ridiculous as saying it must always be easy.
But when writing is very difficult, I rather like the idea of embracing it rather than viewing it as a failure or a sign that you’re not good enough or you need that one-cool-trick you think other writers have discovered. So it’s hard. So what? Lots of things worth doing are very hard. Maybe it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. Maybe it means you’re doing something right.
Funny how I was thinking just yesterday that you hadn't posted in a while (no pressure LOL) and I missed reading new posts from you! Beautiful and poignant as always 🧡.
Looking forward to your future releases!