Tag Archives: writing

Freaking Out in Powell’s City of Books

30 Monday Dec 2024

Posted by in Exit Black, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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As a Portlander, I have to contend with the reality of Powell’s City of Books. It’s the largest independent bookstore in the world, and as you might imagine it has a mighty footprint on the Portland literary scene. A friend who worked there told me about 20 years ago that 40% of Amazon’s book orders actually go through Powell’s. I doubt that that is still the case today, but it gives you some idea of the size of the place, as well as the indirect role Powell’s played in the rise of Amazon. One of Portland’s most popular tourist destinations, Powell’s City of Books is its own Portlandia sketch.

For many years, basically from the time I started writing fiction in my thirties, I had a lot of trouble going into Powell’s. Part of the dread I felt was simple cognitive overload. But I was also contending with two related kinds of self-loathing in the City of Books, one as a reader and one as a writer.

As a reader, I would feel depressed in City of Books to come into contact with all the great books that I hadn’t read and would likely never read. As a writer, I would despair that of the tens of thousands of titles that were on the shelves on any given day, nothing I had written had ever shown up there. In my foolishness, the place had become a visual metaphor for two ways I felt I had come up short as a human being.

Eventually the feeling passed, probably just because I got older. It doesn’t upset me so much anymore that I don’t have that many more books to read in my future. Even if I live a fantastically long life, it seems unlikely that I have more than 2000 books left to read, and the number could be far, far lower than that. The key, as my friend and bandmate John Governale has shown me, is not to try to read all the good books out there, but rather just to remember that there is always a great book out there for me–I don’t need to spend any time reading a bad one.

As for the fact that my stuff had never shown up on the shelves of Powell’s City of Books, I eventually got over myself there, too. I think that as I got better as a writer, I started to find more joy in just writing well (as distinct from winning awards or getting prestigious publications or big book contracts). I still love to get published, but even more than that I love the feeling of putting together a story that really works.

As I tell my students and my kids, there are lots of situations where you start getting good at something right around the time that you don’t have to do that thing anymore. And there was a similar feeling of irony for me when I went into Powell’s City of Books last week and found that my latest novel, Exit Black, is indeed on the shelves there. I still prefer the smaller independent bookstores in my life–Broadway Books, White Oak Books, Annie Bloom’s–but it is a nice feeling to know that a tourist in Portland who wanted to find my work for some reason could find Exit Black right in the Gold Room of Powell’s City of Books, section 722.

“As you know, Captain:” the Perils of Infodump

06 Monday May 2024

Posted by in Advertising, Exit Black, fantasy, Lit News, Literary criticism, My Fiction, Science, Science Fiction, Stories, YA fantasy

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I was invited recently to present a workshop at one of Oregon’s wonderful creative writing conferences–the Compose Creative Writing Conference at Clackamas Community College (perhaps the hosts tried to come up with a seventh word starting with c- for the title, but six must have been all they could fit in). After the honor of being invited wore off, I realized that I would have to actually, you know, present something at the CCWC at CCC.

I decided to present a session on reducing infodump in speculative fiction. Did I choose this topic because I’ve been widely praised for my taut, sleek stories? I wish. Actually, if anything the opposite is true: during the early years of my fiction career, I got so many rejections along the lines of “this story is well-written, but it takes forever to get to its point. There’s so much infodump here that I was barely able to get to page 8.”

The best thing I can say about infodump in my writing is that editors don’t complain about it in my stories nearly as often now. So I figure that I’ve either learned to deal with it or editors are just tired of giving me notes on it.

As you probably know already, infodump refers to bogging down the flow of a story with tedious explanation. And, while writers of any genre can fall into the habit, it’s an especially common problem in speculative fiction. If you’ve ever read a bad fantasy novel (or watched a bad sci fi movie), you have surely seen some infodump along these lines:

Scientist: I sequenced the DNA sample you brought me. Whoever provided it has some snips that I’ve never seen in a human genome before.

Captain: Snips?

Scientist: ‘Single nucleotide polymorphisms.’ As you know, captain, all sexually reproducing creatures on Earth–including humans–inherit two copies of each gene, one from the mother, and one from the father. These genes determine everything from eye color to explainexplainexplain continue explaining for four pages explainexplainexplain I hope you did well in middle school biology…

For me, infodump is even worse in fantasy than in science fiction. In SF, there’s at least the possibility that what’s being infodumped actually will teach you something real about how planetary motion works or what the principle of competitive exclusion is. In fantasy, the infodump often amounts to nothing more than 20 pages of the author’s fever-dream journal entries about a fictional queen who lived 800 years before the story takes place and what she did to curse the elven sword that is the McGuffin for this whole heptalogy of novels…

What causes infodump? Why should you be wary of the phrase “as you know” in your writing? And how do you reduce infodump in your novel? Well, if you want the whole story, come see me at the CCWC on Saturday the 18th! Or, if you’re not a Portland person, drop me a line: I’m always happy to talk F/SF with book clubs, writing groups, bookish nerds, random drunks, and people on a secret mission.

For now, I’ll just say that two factors that contribute to infodump are 1. writers’ mistrust of the reader’s ability to follow along, and 2. writers who get lost for hours (or months, or decades) in worldbuilding before they ever get around to actually writing their story.

I may say more on the subject soon, but as you know, I have been working on reducing my infodump.

My First 2024 Writing Retreat

21 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories

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Outside of the summertime, I rarely get decent stretches of time to write. During the school year, I feel lucky when I can squeeze in 20 minutes to write at the beginning of the day. For me, that kind of time is maybe enough to work on revisions, especially of short pieces, but I’ve had no luck writing novels in those tiny dribs and drabs.

A couple of years ago, after my bitching about that state of affairs for the 6,813th time, my wife wisely proposed that I take a few writing retreats throughout the year–little two-day stints where I can write for hours at a time.

Right after new year’s day, I had my first retreat of the year: over two days, I wrote in a swath across the central Willamette Valley–Corvallis, Monmouth, Salem. I knocked out about 4,000 words of a short story I have been working on and allowed myself to feel, briefly, like writing is the main thing I do.

I spent a good part of the retreat in the Hamersly Library of Western Oregon University. I hadn’t been to Monmouth since I was a little fellow, when my dad taught English at Western Oregon (back when the place was still called the Oregon College of Education). Classes hadn’t started at WOU yet, so I was able to walk around this campus which I would have been too young to remember, listening for my dad’s ghost lingering around the older buildings.

Portrait of the author with his father, ca. 1972

No librarians challenged me when I walked in to the Hamersly (why would they? Librarians are the most welcoming bureaucrats on Earth), and I was able to find the perfect nook to write in. It’s worth giving thanks for libraries: like the DNA of our culture, libraries are both the metaphor for the entire human enterprise as well as the literal encoder of that enterprise. The Hamersly wasn’t built until 2000, long after my dad stopped teaching in Monmouth, but I may as well have seen my dad’s shade there, walking among the stacks. I was reminded of one of my favorite poems from Philip Larkin, my favorite librarian poet:

New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.

Farewell, Lolo Pass

14 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, Utopia and Dystopia

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I write in coffee shops. It’s easier for me to stay focused, to keep to the writing plan, when I see other people tapping away on their laptops around me. The imagine the experience is not so different from that of medieval monks in a scriptorium, their pens all scratching away as they copy illuminated manuscripts. I’ll invite you to imagine the many, many other ways I would have made a terrible monk. In this one way, however–my need for the silent company of other writers–I would have thrived.

So it was a drag to learn a few days ago that my current writing haunt, Lolo Pass in Portland, is closing any day now, to be converted into a residential drug treatment center. I don’t want to be all NIMBY about it: Portland needs residential drug treatment centers right now way more than it needs another trendy bar/coffee shop/hostel. But Lolo Pass was my trendy bar/coffee shop/hostel–I wrote so many words in that place that it was the obvious choice for me to hold a launch party for Exit Black.

There will be other places to write, just as I’m sure I will figure out a place for the Exit Black launch party. But for now, I’m just sad to lose a place where I spent so many writerly hours. I hope a whole lot of Portlanders get clean in this space.

Goodbye, Lolo Pass. Note the author’s laptop behind the monstera leaves.

Hello, Knowledge Seekers

21 Thursday Dec 2023

Posted by in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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I once had dreams of writing witty, engaging content for this blog once per week. I guess I still nurse that fond hope. But obviously something about my strategy hasn’t been working so far: I believe this is only my fourteenth post this year.

The main reason for the slowdown is what it’s always been: my job. Teaching has been in many ways a wonderful career; in other ways, it has seemed like a wish I made on the monkey’s paw: I loved reading and writing, and so I thought that becoming an English major was a natural fit. And what better job for an English major than teaching community college English?

Little did I know when I was a 23 year-old teaching assistant that there would be weeks upon weeks of my job, year after year, where I would do nothing but read or write–and that none of that reading and writing would be for pleasure. I’ve probably read 20,000 student essays by this point in my career: many were thoughtfully written, and most were at least earnestly written, but not one of them was something I would have picked off of a newsstand shelf for fun. (Nor, to be fair, would my students have written any of them for fun). And every one of those essays, even the most slapped-together, carelessly constructed rush jobs, demanded that I write something real in response. By the time I get home most days, I barely have the mental energy to read the directions on a microwave burrito, much less read a novel, much less write one.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to quit teaching. I love community college students: I love their grit, their humor, their intellect, their disarming mix of cluelessness and commitment. I love seeing students ten or fifteen years later and hearing their excitement when they tell me that they still remember how to use commas around an appositive or that they never again started a conclusion with the words “in conclusion.” Often they remember things that I barely remember saying or things that aren’t really that important in the full analysis of what makes good writing. But some of what they remember is a kind of totem to them, and years later, they are better writers.

There are several weeks every term that I feel the fatal stroke or heart attack is just around the corner for me, that I’m just a day or two away from collapsing at the front of a classroom or dying with a stack of half-graded essays in my inbox. And then, every term (usually around finals week), the mental fog lifts again. I feel like I can go on for one more term, or maybe even for a whole year. I’m always reminded in those moments of the lines from the wonderful Jane Kenyon poem “Back,” which I believe she wrote about the lifting of a depression, but which I feel could apply to any teacher at the end of an academic term:

. . . I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas . . .

Every day, I walk into class with the greeting “Hello, classmates!” or “Hello, knowledge seekers!” I try to present myself as though I were a wise, relentlessly optimistic trail guide leading them on their mystical journey through that ancient land of rhetoric. Some students surely must know that even thirty years into my career, I’m still faking it. But often enough, students take me up on what I’m offering: they follow along whether they realize or not what a sham all my optimism and confidence are. And some of them–many of them, most of them–finish up in a different place than where they started.

Portrait of the teacher by a beloved ENGL101 student in fall 2023.