The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Elizabeth Bear:

This kind of behavior is caused by 'entitlement gnomes,' little fae creatures that whisper in writer's ears at night and tell us that we deserve to be published.

Which always makes me want to quote Bill Munny from Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it, Kid."

TNH:My first novel took a long time to write, but now that I92ve been through the process and gotten my feet under me, the rest should go much faster.

I found that once I figured out how to finish them, they all proceed at approximately the same pace (for me, it's ~1500 wpd. I know people who write much, much faster than that, of course). The trick is actually getting the butt in the chair and doing the ~1500 wpd. They pile up a lot faster than you'd think.

But it does seem that each writer has a more or less consistent rate at which he or she puts words on paper, and attempting to vary that rate either up or down for other-than-negligible periods of time has Consequences.

Of course, fire, floods, divorce, acts of god(z), crying babies, neurotic cats, armed insurrections, and rewrite requests can all have an impact on that.

Jazz:You know, I wasn't under the delusion that I'm the only person that gets that kind of tough love from white pieces of paper, but I have to admit that it's nice to know it goes all the way up to the top.

And somebody also mentioned the acceptance of what a friend of mine calls the "I Suck week" as a hazard of the profession. I think it's more than a hazard of the profession (the writer's equivalent of tennis elbow?): for me, at least, it's an essential step in getting better. One must acknowledge the suck to improve away from it.

I believe, in a Zen sort of thing, that one must have "I suck" and "I rock" both at once--as someone noted above, the I suck keeps one working to get better instead of stagnating, and the I rock keeps one's head out of the oven.

Xopher--

Garp is worth reading.

Teresa--

I would say fight scenes and sex scenes are similar because they're both all about tension and conflict, action and reaction, subtext and advancing the storyline without looking like that's what you're doing.

They also get reread more than the rest of the narrative. Which is another reason why they need so much rewriting. *g*

That's okay, Teresa--I'll just have to learn to write *really good* fight scenes. Or possibly bribe you with the comestible of your choosing.

Actually, it's my firm belief--or running joke--that sex scenes and fight scenes work the same way--and don't work the same way when they don't work. i.e., the ones that work are actually plot disguised as action, and the ones that don't work are filler disguised as titillation.

Or in any case, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Ahh, and somebody finally pointed out my particular auctorial insanity: at some point approximately halfway through the MS, every book is unfinishable. And at about 5/6th of the way through, it's suddenly the worst tripe ever written.

Yep. That sounds familiar, all right.

I write sex scenes to give editors something to cut. I probably shouldn't have let on, should I? The gig'll be up now. They'll start cutting my fight scenes instead.

Jason: "Writers is nuts." It's positively axiomatic. *g*

A list of truisms if I've ever seen one, although I do think the productivity ones depend on if you're a three-book-a-year-writer or a one-book-every-three-years writer.

Charlie Stross:

I will now be having nightmares about that image for the next seven years.

Please look forward to a misidentified Gaiman clone by postage-due mail as, er, a sort of thank you. He would rather not be Neil. He does, however, have a migra(i)ne.

(**Wanders off, contemplating the possibility that perhaps Charlie--or Neil--is somebody else's Mary Sue character.**)

It seems to me that the very essence of literature is fanfiction, of a sort.

Wait, bear with me. (Groan) By which I mean, I'm not sure it's possible to discuss genre (or Lit'ra'CHUR, for that matter) without also discussing the folk process and what I've heard referred to as the 'genre conversation.'

Fanfiction is just a more obviously tightly linked (and unpaid) sort of dialogue--but it's not all that different in type from Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" vs. Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" vs. Donne's "The Bait."

Or, you know, some of the great, ongoing SFF conversations--the canonical one being the Earthling Space War Vs. The Incomprehensible Aliens (usually Buggy Things, But Not Always).

Random comments on a fascinating, funny thread:

Isabeau--

Because getting to be a pro writer is very hard, and very unrewarding, and a good fanfic writer may well have a good job and enjoy writing for fun, as a hobby, because s/he loves it, because s/he can get instant gratification from other fans, because s/he loves those characters or those stories--and not want to get into the kind of hardcore work that going pro--including writing scripts or media tie ins--would take?

That's my guess, anyway.

Dan--

I would say that, for example, many Heinlein protags are total Mary Sues.

Vlad Taltos isn't really, I think, because he's flawed, he makes mistakes, he takes emotional damage, and he consistently gets himself deeper into trouble rather than conveniently resolving his own and everybody else's problems.

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