The "On-Line Writers' Groups" thread sparked something, so I decided it was better put here.
When I was in high school I wanted to be "a writer". From when I was about eleven on I read voraciously. My folks had moved from southern Wisconsin (about an hour or so from Chicago, a place that was even then turning into a Chicago suburb) to nowheresville Lower Alabama. I had alot of transplant anxiety, so I went to the library ... started with Sci_fi ... read EVERYTHING they had (everything ... seriously ... all of it) and was forced over into fantasy. (I also read all of that and moved over into old pulps and hardboiled crime fiction, later). My favorite author became David Eddings, and for YEARS I would read all of his fantasy series over the summer, start to finish, chronological order ... sort of a bizarre ritual.
At some point in there I decided: "This rocks, I'm going to be a writer like David Eddings." I was probably thirteen. So I wrote. Short fiction, long fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, poetry. My teachers (because that's what teachers DO) encouraged my writing ... my folks encouraged my writing ... my mother still has boxes filled with my notebooks from that period. My teachers suggested I enter various local contests for short fiction and poetry, which I did well in, so all the way into early college that was my thing. I won local and regional fiction contests by the boatload (my mother still has all of the plaques and trophies ... that's what mothers do). I figured I was "hot stuff".
About 8 years ago (I was 18, early acceptance and a year into college) I decided it was "time" to write that fantasy novel ... which would sell and net me a deal for the other four parts in a five part epic and propel me, not into the realm of Stephen King, but into a comfortable life writing similar five-part epics with a strong fan base and the easy freedom of "doing what I loved".
I started doing alot of research into "the industry", and publishing, and reading about authors and reading the writing authors did about writing ... I've always been a research nut ... more and more the reading in the industry suggested things were getting tight. New authors were always submitting manuscripts, there were too many young authors to publish them all, but because nobody knows where the next break-out hit would come from it was reasonably easy to get a first book deal ... impossible to get a second. Mid-list authors were feeling the pinch ... why buy a fourth book by Joe Midlist for 4th-book advances when you can get two or three fresh new writers for that price and maybe get the next LKH in the deal? Like trading cards.
"But," I figured, "If I'm the next Stephen King, then it won't matter, right? I can write a break-out run-away hit. Right? That wasn't the plan, but I'm adaptable, I'll just write a best seller."
At the time, where I was, reading what I was reading, the "new" and "big" thing seemed to be online critique groups. Like traditional writer's groups, but without all the hassle of having to, y'know, live near any freakin' writers. Remember, I'm in nowheresville. The only other local guy calling himself a writer is a year younger than me (and today he sells used cars. I know, I saw him a week ago.) So I joined an online critique group. It was the best I could find, had very strict rules about critique and required X critiques before story submission, etc etc. So I joined up.
I wrote, I think, the first two chapters to a planned fantasy novel as part of the group. It sucked. Alot. It's something I think I could do again, as far as concept goes (sort of a Dutch Mercantilist setting with a fat Bilbo-esque merchant protagonist). I'd done a lot of historical research prior to starting, including Dutch naming conventions. I put some forethought and work into character names.
A few people pretty harshly ripped on ... my character names. I think, today, it was a pretty odd thing to be critical of ... and, remembering my style back then, they could have done some critiques of obscure vocabulary and purple prose ... but for whatever reason it totally deflated my bubble. I walked in having done my reading ... I was going to be thick of skin and quick of wit, taking lumps and learning "craft" ... but one person said the lead's name sounded like an expensive shampoo and I was GONE.
I think, mostly, it was that I'd done specific research on a subject in order not to sound silly doing it ... and then got called "silly". Also all of the industry reading basically said: "You're doomed! Unless you write a runaway Best Seller as your first book, and get a great agent, and don't sign a bad contract, you'll sell one book and be blacklisted for life if it isn't an instant hit!" That may not have been what was actually being said, but that was my impression. I figured if I can't even get past "Name The Character", I wasn't going to write a best sller and would be doomed instantly to career crash-landing.
So I decided that week that I was going to shelve my writing "career". I figured I should do some living and learning, get educated, practice in other ways, get a degree in English (two of them!). I decided I wasn't going to go for the Creative Writing major, but I took some courses ... that was GREAT for my craft. Both the classes and not making it my career choice. Where I was, all of the writing classes concentrated on contemporary literary fiction ... and I wanted to write fantasy. The teachers were all mid-list or low-list contemporary literature authors whose "day job" was teaching mid-list literary fiction to college kids. They had TONS to teach me about craft ... but most of them also looked down their nose at people who didn't write contemporary literature.
So I wrote contemporary literature. Just excercises, mostly. Vignettes. Shorts and short stories. We focused on prose and the dramatic/tragic contemporary literary plotline. I saw why some teachers outright refused to work on fantasy/sci-fi when I got into a class that didn't, outright, refuse to work on fantasy or sci-fi. Then I stopped writing fiction entirely until recently.
Various things led to my picking it back up. The desire had been growing for a long while. My wife came across some of my old writings and encouraged me to write again. Butcher's series was something that I'd been wanting to read, but nobody had written. That it sold said that maybe what I liked wasn't entirely outside of what the market desired. I read up on the industry some more, this time things suggested it wasn't as gloomy as I'd thought.
My WIP is a little hardboiled crime, a little mystery, a little supernatural. Set in Birmingham, Alabama and surrounding area, with some focus on Muscogee, Cherokee and Navajo mythologies.
Just a minute ago, for practice, I put together the plot in a story skeleton (which is a little more action-oriented than the question we used in our classes):
"When a young woman disrupts his life and then disappears, a man with no memory tries to track her down. Will he succeed where a black cult, organized crime, old gods, and his own past want him to fail?"
It may end up being garbage. I believe now, where I didn't before, that I CAN write fiction that will sell ... it may not be a break-out run-away best seller, but if the prose is solid and the story is exciting ... it'll get picked up. Maybe not this book, but perhaps the next, or the one after that will be where I reach the point.
Then, after that, it's just a matter of continuing to write solid, exciting fiction that people enjoy reading.
--fje
