I’ve been struggling with my writing for most of the year–not, thank goodness, with my nonfiction writing, so the blog hasn’t suffered unduly, but with my fiction. I have spent A LOT of time thinking about why I’m struggling and trying various strategies to make the writing work better for me. Most of those strategies failed. But in the last few weeks, I’ve finally found one that feels right.

I was reading snippets from Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing when I had my Aha! moment. He gives this three-fold advice to writers: Work, relax, and don’t think. Work I felt I understood, so I began turning around the other two steps in my head. What would it look like if I relaxed while I was writing? What would it be like to stop thinking so frantically? What if I stopped trying to avoid all the objectionable components of writing, stopped being obsessed with not making any of the obvious and embarrassing mistakes? What would happen if I gave myself permission to write what I wanted to write? In short, what would happen if I trusted myself as a writer and gave myself free rein?

I am cerebral sort of person, so it’s difficult for me to even imagine not thinking, but I’m also stubborn and I was determined to give it a try. I sat down and spent the next week and a half writing a short story without censoring myself. I looked forward to working on it, and the words came more easily. I even voluntarily worked on it on the weekend. Here was the joy I had somehow misplaced for so much of the year. When I finished it, I felt a sense of completion. Whether or not I had written something good, I had written something I felt connected to and could take satisfaction from.

I gave the story to my husband, my faithful first reader, without telling him I had been trying anything different. When he finished reading, he told me it was the best thing I’ve ever written.

In creative work, I think it’s important to strive. I believe in working to learn and improve, in tackling difficult themes and uncooperative characters, in experimenting to learn your craft (whatever it might be) to the best of your abilities. But what I didn’t realize until now is that there is a point when I have to let go. I have to trust that my writing knowledge will be there for me. I have to stop second-guessing every decision I make. I have to believe in my vision and voice as an artist.

And it turns out, I do have my own voice. It’s been there all this time, waiting for me to be willing to listen.

Relax. Don’t think. Trust yourself.

What lessons pertaining to your work, artistic or otherwise, did you learn this year?

2. Bodies are complicated, and often doctors don’t know what’s wrong. So sometimes you have to get creative and proactive in seeking out information, alternatives, and talented people who can help you.

3. A large number of acquaintances is not necessarily going to be as satisfying as a small number of people to whom you can reveal your true self.

4. If your significant other is not meeting one of your core needs and shows no inclination of doing so in the future, it is okay (even necessary) to break up with them.

5. So much of life boils down to communication. Unfortunately, many people are incredibly bad at it.

6. Thinking you might not be good enough is not a good enough reason to decide not to do something.

Photo by fairydancer464 on photobucket.com

7. The people who are judgmental about your life choices are generally not the people you want to spend time with, anyway. And it’s impossible to make every person in the entire world like you.

8. Be on the lookout for those who are taking away your agency. The easiest way to have your choices taken away from you is if you never even realize you had a choice in the first place.

9. Fake it until you make it is a cheesy-sounding piece of advice that is actually true. Corollary: Your major is not as important as you think. (Except when it is.)

10. Be fanatical about taking care of your teeth, flossing, and visiting the dentist regularly. And use a mouth guard if there’s even a chance you’re grinding your teeth at night…the unsexiness of such a device be damned!

What do you know now that you wish you’d learned earlier?

As the year draws to a close, my attention turns to the list of books I have read this year. I’ve been keeping track for the last three years, and I’m surprised at how much pleasure this small habit gives me. I only write down the books I have finished, which eliminates many books every year, nonfiction taking an especially big hit since I often read selections from nonfiction books instead of reading them from beginning to end. Re-reads count, as do beta reads for novelist friends. Short stories and novelettes do not count unless they are in a collection, but novellas sometimes do…if I remember to include them.

Looking over my list for 2011 as of today, I’ve selected my ten favorite new-to-me reads thus far this year. It’s been a fantasy-heavy year for me, in stark contrast to my list of favorites of 2009, which was very science fiction-heavy. Maybe next year I can find more of a balance.

I did read several YA dystopias this year, but upon reflection I am unable to include any of them on my “Best of” list this year. While some of them were entertaining, none of them hold up particularly well in my memory, and almost all of them suffer from some flaw or another that makes me hesitate to recommend them. I haven’t read all the recent YA dystopias that have received good buzz yet (I’ve heard good things about Blood Red Road and Legend, for example), so it’s my hope that I missed a few gems that I’ll catch up on next year.

Favorite YA Novels:

1. Where She Went, by Gayle Forman. Contemporary YA
This is the sequel to If I Stay. It is told from the point of view of a young rock star who is trying to come to terms with his life and his decisions. The two main characters are both passionate about music, which possibly explains why I particularly like it.

9. Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Historical Fantasy
10. The Lions of Al-Rassad, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Historical Fantasy
What is most noteworthy about my reading year is that I discovered the beautiful prose of Guy Gavriel Kay. I have to be in a certain mood to read him, but when I am, there is absolutely nothing better.

What books did you read this year that you particularly enjoyed? Please let me know so I can add them to my reading list!

While watching it, I realized that this movie, more than any other, is responsible for many of my early ideas of what adulthood was going to be like. It came out in 1989, so I’m imagining it reached the free cable preview weekends (my only real source for movies at the time) a few years after that, and I remember watching it more than once in high school. And while I spent lots of time consuming every Robin Hood movie I could get my hands on, watching Star Wars Episode IV whenever I got sick, and sighing with my best friend over Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally struck me as being more like what real life was actually going to be.

Here is what it taught me:

1. Everyone you know will have a professional sounding job: attorney, journalist, political consultant (I had to ask my husband last night what that actually meant). These jobs will cause them no angst whatsoever and were obviously easy for them to both choose and succeed at.

2.However, everyone will actually spend most of their time and energy dealing with their crazy love lives, having lunch with their girlfriends, and hogging the batting cages from small boys. Also going to baseball games, reading self-help books, and attending many parties.

3. On New Year’s Eve, everyone goes to posh parties at big venues with lots of people they don’t know. Otherwise it doesn’t count.

4. People will often host small and slightly awkward parties at their apartments, where everyone divides up into two teams and plays Pictionary. And they always have an easel set up with a really big pad of paper to make it more awesome. (WHY has this not happened to me in adulthood? WHY?)

5. Never let a friend set you up because blind dates always end badly.

6. Adults are not afraid to do zany and embarrassing things, like sing Oklahoma! at the Sharper Image or have public fake orgasms. (This is particularly true of theater people, but alas, the movie neglected to educate me on that fact.)

7. It is okay to toss barely-used Kleenex around the room when you are very upset.

8. Men might be idiots about love sometimes, but in the end they will come to their senses and sweep you off your feet with an appropriate grand gesture and speech combo. (This is what most romantic comedies teach us, but I’ve found real life to be a vast disappointment in comparison, since most people I know do not seem to have the inclination to actually plan and execute grand gestures.)

9. A man who is married will never leave his wife for you. (Thanks to Carrie Fisher for the running gag teaching this valuable life lesson.)

10. When you move in with somebody, be on your guard for their equivalent to the Roy Rogers wheel wagon coffee table, and make sure you’ve stipulated that it’s not going to be part of the move ahead of time, thus avoiding an embarrassing fight in front of all your friends who are helping you.

What movie most shaped your ideas about what being an adult was going to be like?

Meanwhile, YA continues to be hot, hot, hot, even while agents and editors are cautioning writers that there is a glut of YA, and maybe writing some quality MG wouldn’t be a bad idea right around now. They say this at conferences, in any case, but I’m still hearing stories of agents recommending that their actual clients write YA, even if they’ve gotten their start in writing for adults. (Which incidentally tends to make me cringe. I understand intellectually that there is more money for fiction writers in YA, and the sales might be easier to make due to the aforementioned hotness, so it makes sense from a business perspective. But I’d like to think there’s more to writing YA than just good business sense; that it’s the end result of receiving a calling, of having some kind of affinity to teenagers, of what kind of stories a writer deeply desires to tell. I’m not saying a writer can’t write both YA and adult fiction–I do that myself. I just want it to be a case of good business uniting with a true interest in writing for teens. But I digress.)

I could write another whole post on the differences between the speculative and YA communities from where I sit (and maybe I will), but the fact remains that I don’t have a treasure trove of resources to share. Instead I will give three pieces of advice (which you can take or leave), advice that unfortunately does not offer any shortcuts but has helped me learn more about YA in the last three years than anything else.

READ YA. Read a lot of it. Read MODERN YA written and published in the last ten or so years (at least some of which has been published in the last three years) so you know what’s going on now instead of what was going on when you were a kid (trust me, unless you’re close to being a teenager yourself, it is different now). Read some MG (Middle grade) so that you understand the difference through examples instead of relying only on my handy-dandy list. Read different genres of YA; you might only be interested in writing science fiction YA, but read at least a few paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary novels as well. Read a few of the really “girly” book series so you know what’s going on there. Read the blockbusters of the field. I don’t care if you don’t like Twilight; if you want to write YA, you should read it anyway (at least the first one) so you can understand what about it tapped into the zeitgeist of the time and understand the ripples it generated (and still generates). Likewise, you should read The Hunger Games, and even though much of it is MG (in my opinion), you should read at least some of the Harry Potter books. Then go read some obscure titles no one has heard of.

STEEP YOURSELF IN TEEN-NESS. If you haven’t spent any in-person time with teens since you were a teenager yourself, it’s time to change that. I don’t care how–you can hang out with a family member, volunteer, teach a class, offer to mentor a teen writer. If all else fails, you can scout out where the local teens hang out after school, go there, and shamelessly eavesdrop. You can watch TV shows and movies targeted at teens (just NOT during your writing time, please): Buffy the Vampire Slayer is old school but still helpful, and lately I’ve been spending time watching Veronica Mars, Glee, The Vampire Diaries, and Gossip Girl (and I’m sure there are others). I don’t watch these shows thinking they are necessarily a realistic representation of teenage life, but to watch for more widespread trends: how do relationships/hook-ups work now? how do teens use technology? what are the latest fashion trends and the current slang? how do the characters speak to each other? what issues tap into today’s teen experience that might be a little different from your own teenage years? Sure, if you’re writing a far future dystopic novel, today’s slang might not be so relevant, but it’s still important to try to understand how your readers see themselves now.

REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE. Not just the clichés, and not from a superior, “now I’m a wise and mature adult” perspective. How can you understand as deeply if you’re looking down at someone? No, exercise that empathy muscle and try to remember how you actually felt: the frustration of not having complete power over your life, even if you were spending a lot of time watching adults royally screw up; the surging hormones and confusion when trying to deal with lust and affairs of the heart; the uncertainty of not knowing exactly who you were and how you fit into the larger world (or perhaps bending self perception of who you were to fit into a fantasy); the endemic unfairness; the world-crushing importance of everything going on in your life; the huge milestones bearing down on you, one after another (and whether you looked on them with excitement, horror, or a co-mingling of the two). And then remember that all of the above plays out differently for different people, both in terms of which ones are relevant to each person and what’s going on inside versus the show they’re putting on for the outside.

That’s all I’ve got. If you know of any YA resources I didn’t mention, please give them a shout-out below. Also, if you think all a modern YA writer needs to read is the juvenile Heinlein oeuvre, tell me that too because then we can have a truly epic argument.

When we think about social media, it is important to remember how much the internet, and the ways we interact with it, are evolving. The rate of change is fairly rapid, and because of this, it is easy for conventional wisdom regarding best practices to fall behind.

Think about it: the internet is still fairly new. Some of us might have trouble imagining life without it, and yet the first commercial service providers didn’t start up until the late 1980s, just a bit more than twenty years ago. Google got started in 1996-1997 (about 15 years ago); Livejournal began in 1999 (12 years ago); MySpace was founded in 2003 (about 8 years ago); and Facebook launched in 2004 (7 years ago). All of these services took time to develop and find their audiences. So even experts in social media haven’t been doing it for very long, because not long ago, nothing existed to do.

What this means is that there’s still a lot of space for experimenting, being creative, and developing your own unique way of using social media. Take, for example, the author Tobias Buckell. A year ago, contrary to all advice, he decided to shut down the comments on his blog. Experts told him that this was crazy talk, that he needed to enable comments on his blog to encourage conversation and engagement with his audience. Some people went as far as to say that without comments, it wasn’t even a real blog any longer. But Tobias was feeling drained from all the time and energy he had to spend moderating the comments, and he was censoring what he allowed himself to talk about as a result.

He recently published the results of his experiment: he went from 20,000 unique visitors/month when he shut off comments to 100,000 unique visitors/month a year later, which is the highest traffic he’s had in the seven years he’s run the blog. And he sounds happier because of it too, saying: “It’s really been a lot more fun since I starting letting myself be myself.”

So obviously the conventional wisdom that a blog has to have a commenting option, and that you can judge a blog’s impact and degree of engagement by looking at how many comments are being made on it, is flat-out wrong in this case. Yes, the experts were wrong. Would the no-comments approach work for everyone? No, probably not. But apparently it’s not the deal breaker everyone thought it was.

When considering my own use of social media, I find this distinctly comforting. It’s human to hit a wall sometimes. I’m sure many of us have a social media tactic that we’re “supposed to do” but makes us cringe. I’ll tell you mine, although maybe you can already guess. I’m supposed to write blog posts that are less complete and leave more room for all of you to respond. (And I love it when you respond, really I do.) But right now, it’s hard for me to even consider being less than complete–the thought makes my inner perfectionist rear up and ululate in horror. I imagine a blogging horror story in which I deliberately delete something I really wanted to say in order to leave it for someone else to say, and then…NO ONE SAYS IT.

Illustration of ululation (photo by Retron on flickr)

1. A variety of fresh fruit and vegetables: Because in the past, you could usually only eat what was locally grown. Granted, I live in California, where many fruits and vegetables can be locally grown, but I’m still grateful for this.

Just looking at this makes me hungry.

2. Living in the United States: Okay, it’s true that the right of habeas corpus referenced in the Constitution seems to be on a permanent holiday, and apparently we’re not allowed to protest peacefully anymore either. But even though there are a lot of things I think need to be fixed, that doesn’t change the fact that I enjoy many benefits from living in the United States. My standard of living is higher than it would be in many, many other countries; I have access to useful infrastructure; and I don’t generally have to worry about my country being obliterated in the near future. These are benefits that I very much appreciate.

3. Corrective Vision Technology: Without any technological assistance, I am very, very nearsighted and couldn’t function normally in the world. Not only do I have access to glasses with light-weight lenses that don’t make me look at the world through Coke bottle glass, but if they break I can get them fixed locally and promptly. Plus, if I get sick of them, I can opt for contact lenses that aren’t painful like the old ones used to be or get corrective eye surgery. Yay for being able to see!

4. The Internet: My life would not be nearly as rich without the increased access the internet has given me, both to a wide variety of people and to a huge collection of data. When I was a kid, if I wanted to know something I’d look it up in our set of World Book encyclopedias and hope there was a relevant entry; if there wasn’t, I’d have to make a trip to the library or just settle for not knowing. Can you imagine settling for not knowing anymore? I can’t. And if you wanted to stay in touch with someone who didn’t live in your town, you wrote letters…which meant you couldn’t stay in touch with a very large number of people. Nowadays that’s gotten a lot easier.

5. My blog: For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a lot to say. However, if you meet me in person, you might not realize this is true, because I have this ingrained habit of asking questions and listening…which means I don’t always get around to the saying what’s on my mind part. Getting to share what’s going on up there in my head with you all is a great privilege…and a significant pleasure.

6. My car: This one is a little embarrassing. I had to replace my car early this year, and I’ve been surprised at how much I appreciate the new one. Sometimes it’s the little things: I push the ignition button and it ACTUALLY STARTS. Every single time, even. Wow, do I feel grateful to not have to worry about getting from point A to point B anymore. (P.S. The seat warmers don’t hurt either.)

7. Libraries: Until the last few years, buying a book (and probably a Mass Market paperback, at that) was an extremely big deal for me. The rest of the time, I supported my reading habit by frequenting my local library. I can’t imagine what I would have done my whole life without libraries, and I’m incredibly grateful that I was given the means to live the kind of literary life that would have otherwise been outside of my grasp.

8. My family: I know I sound like a broken record, but my husband and my dog probably make the biggest difference in my life on a day-to-day level. They make the good days better and the bad days not quite as grim. Any list of happy things doesn’t feel quite complete without mentioning them.

Please tell me a few of your own happy appreciative things, or write your own post and make sure to tell me about it!

I hope you all have a very happy Thanksgiving! I’m taking next week off from blogging for the holiday, so I’ll see you again the week after next.

I don’t seek to disagree with the argument in favor of positive stories but instead to offer a more nuanced view. I think there is plenty of room within science fiction for optimism and stories of a basically positive nature. I also emphatically agree that the demand for such stories is high; we have but to look at Analog, which has the highest circulation numbers of the Big 3 science fiction magazines and the most prominent focus on more upbeat endings for stories, to see the popularity of positivity. And if we take a peek at novel-length science fiction, we see many of the genre’s favorite writers who take a generally positive tone (or at the very least, not excessively bleak): Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, and John Scalzi come to mind, as do Charles Stross and Robert Sawyer, all authors who have been nominated for Hugos in the novel category in recent years. Indeed, my husband and I have often wondered if the recent upsurge of the steampunk subgenre is related to a general desire for nostalgia and shiny adventure stories decked out with amazing flashing gadgets and mad science.

On the other hand, I would be disappointed to see the hunger for positive stories lead to less ambiguity in modern science fiction and fantasy. Bryan Thomas Schmidt says he misses old-fashioned stories “where good people fought for good causes and came out ahead, making for a better world.” He argues that the wildly popular Song of Ice and Fire books by George RR Martin are gritty but feature “admirable heroes who fight against evil for good.” Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read these books, but I don’t remember any admirable heroes–what I remember are flawed human beings who make a lot of mistakes and get caught up in the throes of power in various interesting ways. While some characters are worse than others and there are exceptions (Jon Snow comes to mind as being more noble than most of the characters, and also one of my least favorite, although as I’ve said, it’s been a while), the reason I enjoy those books is because of the ambiguity, not the noble heroes…an ambiguity that equates more with how I view our own world. In fact, I have a problem reading many fantasy novels that have the obviously good guys (constructed of cardboard) fighting the obviously evil forces of darkness (made of a lesser grade of cardboard). I don’t object to novels where good people win in the end, but paint the villain too evil or the hero too saintly and good and the story loses a lot of its tension for me.

Meanwhile, my colleague Brad Torgersen states, “Yet a good deal of written sci-fi adores the “downer” ending, the anti-hero, the morally ambiguous and ultimately meaningless stories…” While you all know I love a good comfort read, I don’t find all science fiction that isn’t optimistic and upbeat to be meaningless, and I think describing dystopias and darker science fiction in such terms is doing the genre a disservice. Sometimes people fail. Sometimes moral questions have more than one answer depending on a person’s point of view. Sometimes downer endings and ambiguous stories show us more about ourselves and what we hold to be important.

Speaking as a reader, I didn’t discover science fiction through the optimistic Golden Age of science fiction. I didn’t read Asimov’s short story gems or Heinlein’s romping juveniles as an adolescent. My gateway drug, at age 11 or 12, was Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, a novel I would not classify as particularly lighthearted. Sure, we get the fun zero-G and gaming bits, but we also get a faceful of child brutality, emotional isolation, and the morality of war and genocide (or xenocide, in this case). We follow our protagonist into dark places, and ultimately it is his nearness to perfection that damns him. I fell in love with science fiction not because of its ability to uplift (although nothing to sneer at) but because of its penchant for dealing with difficult questions of humanity.

Granted, Ender’s Game does end on a hopeful note. I find that overall, I prefer reading novels that do have some sort of hopeful or positive note at the end (although there are exceptions, 1984 being the first to come to mind). I don’t need a crystal-clear happy ending, mind you; I enjoy goals achieved but at a high price, or goals achieved that the protagonist then realizes weren’t what she wanted. I enjoy the bittersweet. But I do like some kind of positive salve to end with. Short stories, though, are a different beast altogether for me. They can end in an extremely dark place, they can devastate me and make me cry, and often I’ll like them better for it. I don’t tend to feel despair from a sad ending as much as I feel empathy and an increased understanding of the more painful aspects of being human. The more positive, romping short stories often (although again, not always) lose my interest as they don’t always seem to be about anything in particular, and they more often fail to make me think about things in a different way.

So my complaint of some positive stories is that they are not sufficiently challenging to satisfy me, while my colleagues’ complaint of some dark stories is that they’re depressing and overly pessimistic. All of this makes me suspect that the problem may not be nihilism so much as differing tastes of the reader. Some readers like happy stories; some readers like dark stories. Some readers like a nice variety. Readers will be depressed by different things, readers are looking for different experiences, and readers find meaning filtered through their own perspectives. Perhaps we have an imbalance of dark short sf fiction (in novel-length, I’m not seeing it as much), and if more writers begin to explore optimistic ideas in short form, I won’t be sad. But I’m also very glad there’s a place for experimenting with darkness, exploring the ugly parts of humanity, and shining a light onto those things we most fear.

Your turn to weigh in! Would you like to see more positive science fiction stories? What are your reading preferences (or writing preferences, for that matter)? Anything you’d like to add?

Nothing and no one living is always perfect. (Photo by jfh686 on flickr)

Not convinced? Let me draw your attention to some perfectionism highlights:

1. Freeze/block: Yes, perfectionism can cause things like writer’s block. I know because to this day it gives me trouble while I’m writing. Once a perfectionist realizes there is no way to get a given job done perfectly, it becomes oh so very difficult to do that job at all. At least, if we actually care about the job at all. The less we care, the easier it is to avoid the freeze.

2. Inefficiency: Unless the perfectionist’s target IS efficiency, of course. Because it’s so hard for us to leave something alone and actually call it done. If we just made another little tweak…or a hundred. If we only had time to start over. You’d better hope your perfectionist is feeling perfectionistic about deadlines, or it’s all over. (Happily, I am in fact a perfectionist about deadlines, so at least I get to finish, whether I like it or not.)

3. Stress: If you aren’t a perfectionist yourself, just imagine a world in which everything you are even tangentially involved with has to be perfect and go exactly as planned. And if it’s not perfect, you have failed and it is All. Your Fault. And if it doesn’t go as planned, then life is ruined. And if only you could be a little better, maybe all the problems in the universe would disappear. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Yeah, I’ll get right on that.

4. Obliviousness, otherwise known as self denigration: Because perfectionists hold ourselves to such impossible standards, we often fail to notice, or give ourselves appropriate credit for, the awesome things we may accomplish. We may not notice positive character traits, and if we do, we think they’re no big deal. If we achieve something big, we focus on what we didn’t achieve yet, something we failed at, or explain why it isn’t important: Well, but I’ve only made one pro sale. Well, but I’ve only sold one novel. Well, but I was only able to succeed at x because I failed so spectacularly at y. Well, but I’m not that intelligent because I don’t have a PhD/don’t have a deep understanding of quantum mechanics/don’t speak six different languages fluently.

So yes, all is not fun bright times in perfectionism world. While perfectionism does often create driven personalities who go on to achieve great things, I think there are ways of being driven and ambitious without being quite so hard on ourselves. One of my favorite parts of The West Wing was when President Bartlett had dealt with a problem, often less than perfectly, often when there were no good solutions or easy answers. He’d always turn right around and say, “What next?” What next allows us to focus on what we can do instead of dwelling on our inability to be perfect.

Any other perfectionists out there? Any strategies you use to help you work through it? Any aspects you find especially difficult? I’d love to hear from you.