Here’s a great clip of Iain Banks giving an interview and talking a bit about process while showcasing his home office.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PdfXwAbP7U

Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I’ve posted about how flash fiction lets a writer really experiment with execution, especially when it comes to authorial voice. In The Many Voices of Flash I talk about how flash’s quick and somewhat disposable nature makes it a perfect vehicle for experimentation, but beyond that it is the constraint of flash with its hard word limit that means such experimental means are often the best way to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness out of so short a story.

In the case of voice, I think it is such a powerful way to create character and mood that to not use it when appropriate — to adopt instead a plain, unadorned, or straightforward style designed purely for clarity or ease of reading — is to throw away one of the best tricks we have available to us. And on the question of voice, I like to draw a distinction between the author’s natural style and that adopted for the story in question:

Instead of voice I like to think of many different voices, those tricks of style that are as different from story to story as the characters, themes, and settings of each piece. Different because they are integral, indivisible parts of the story itself, whether they are the actual words of a first person tale or the differences in cadence and inflection in a third person narrative, there is no excuse not to bring a conscious mind to the creation of these voices. Especially, as I’ve said, in flash fiction where to fail to do so is to write without one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal.

I love playing with voice, writing in dialect, changing style to fit a story, and I think, so far, I’ve done so with a lot of success. If that isn’t something you yourself have attempted, consider doing so in a few pieces of flash fiction, its the perfect medium to play around in.

I’ve always loved single author short story collection, but I realize I’m in a minority — the sort of people who devour forewords, afterwords, and author’s notes, always hunt for biographical notes in books and magazines, and read non-fiction books about their favorite authors. Knowing that short story collections of any kind, both multi-author anthologies and single-author collections, don’t sell very well in comparison to novels and, having written and published some shorts with the ambition to keep doing more of the same, I’ve often wondered just how the single-author collection fits in with the modern genre fiction writer’s career path.

Over at The Fix prolific short fictioneer James Van Pelt sheds some light on the questions that many writers have about collecting their fiction in his ‘The Day Job’ column on Publishing a Short Story Collection. Van Pelt addresses the following concerns of burgeoning writers:

• When should a writer do a collection? Do they have to be at “critical mass” or have won an award?
• Small press or major press?
• How well do short story collections do?
• Do you need an agent?
• How do you choose the stories and how much input does the writer have?

If these are things you’ve thought about (I have), Van Pelt lays it all out nicely in his article. Small Press is certainly the arena for collections from writers who have yet to achieve significant book sales to tempt a major publisher, but Van Pelt also addresses self-publishing in his article. He closes with a list of some recommended science fiction and fantasy short story collections.

Following up from Monday’s post linking to Cory Doctorow’s advice for Writing in the Age of Distraction, I thought I’d mention two free writing applications designed to confront just that: Write or Die and Dark Room. Both operate on the principle that the less opportunities the writer has to break-off from writing, the better.

Write or Die is a free online application based around the philosophy that immediate punishment is a far more effective motivator than distant, intangible rewards. To that end it is customizable to present several types of punishments to the writer who stops typing, ranging from a warning message all the way to the actual deletion of the text you’ve been working on!

I’ve played a bit with Write or Die, going for the maximum penalty and least forgiving grace period (the time you may go without actually typing). And, while I got a kick out of it, I can’t really imagine it being all that practical for something longer than a blog entry — I certainly couldn’t approach writing fiction with any sort of artificially imposed limits such as this (which I can envision becoming distractions themselves). Still, if you have the attention span of a gnat, or a masochistic streak, have a look. And, even if it doesn’t sound useful to you,  the site alone is worth investigating for its humor and attitude.

Dark Room is of a more practical nature. Apparently based on a Mac application called Write Room (Ryan Harvey’s blog entry about it on Black Gate lead me to Dark Room, he also blogged about Write or Die here), Dark Room is basically a full-screen, green text on black, text editor with very simple interface. The page width, font, and colors are all customizable, but I like the default just fine. While it doesn’t seem like much, having a full-screen blacked out with no other menus, tabs, or task bars peeking out at you does help to reinforce concentration. Dark Room saves files as text documents.

Dark Room is a bit like an Alphasmart Neo, it’s a ‘first drafter.’ Meaning, when I’m done working with it, I still have to jump through hoops to open my file in a word processing program for formatting and spell checking. Maybe that trade-off in efficiency is worth it sometimes but, frankly, often it seems like a hassle. As much as I like the working environment of Dark Room, I still don’t see it as being that one application that can suit all my needs.

But when I do find that application that final lets me part ways with Microsoft Word, I’ll let you know.

Over at Locus online an interesting article by Cory Doctorow (they’re always interesting, actually) deals with writing in the internet age. You know how it is — never before has it been easier to write copy with our ultra-portable laptops, spellcheckers, online encyclopedias, and laser printers stuffed with cheap paper, yet matching pace with these advances is our ability to distract ourselves from the work at hand. I know I’ve wrestled with this myself, and even bought myself a piece of kit, the Alphasmart Neo, as a help around some of my distractions. Doctorow offers some good advice, some of which I very familiar with and can endorse from experience, and some of which is new to me.

Probably the two biggest ways to ensure steady production is to create an unflagging, but manageable, work schedule and stick to it even when you can write more, and to leave the day’s work unfinished. Combined, these two rules ensure your mind is propelled forward toward the next day’s writing and, that when you sit down the following day to pick up in the middle of a sentence or scene, you have a much easier time getting started.

Then Doctorow suggests we don’t research as we write, a sin I’m guilty of. While sometimes I have no problems googling a quick reference for a story I’m writing and then jumping back into the flow of things, other times I’ve fallen into what Doctorow warns against: “an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web.” The times I have successfully and by necessity pulled this off were for very small projects in which my enthusiasm far exceeded my knowledge, and I more-or-less researched and wrote simultaneously. But I can’t imagine that approach working on anything other than a very short story. Doctorow shares a tip used by journalists, inserting ‘TK’ into the the text where you are unsure of the content, as it’s easy to pick up with a search later ( the letters TK only rarely appearing next to each other in English words). I use brackets for the same reason, as they stick out and don’t get used much for anything else.

He talks too of the worst distractors on our computers, the IM, chat, and RSS feeds that give us up to-the-minute distractions. But the one tip he gave that really intrigued me, as I’ve been thinking the same thing, is to lose the fancy word processing software in favor of simpler programs. He recommends text editors, but I’m not sure I want to go that far — especially as I’d have to go through the process of copying the text out of them and into whatever spell-checking and .rtf file generating software I’d use to prepare the manuscript. I’d love to find some middle ground, something with the stark simplicity of a textpad (or, preferably, dark room) and some of the functionality of a word processor. This demands further experimentation on my part, but I’m open to any recommendations.

. . . put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

• Title: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• Author: Stephen King
• Genre: Nonfiction — Writing
• Year:2000

At some point in the middle of writing this book — On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft — Stephen King nearly died. The events of the accident that almost killed him are recounted at the very end of the book in a section entitled “On Living: A Postscript,” but they form a powerful coda through which everything else in the book, which is at least as much a celebration of the writer’s life as a primer on the craft of writing, is magnified and given a kind of gravity that elevates it beyond its humble intentions. Earlier in the book King, in what could be construed as his thesis, remarks that a person may come to writing for whatever reason, but the one thing they must not do is come to it lightly — and in this memoir the serious business of writing and the serious business of life are inseparable.

We all have some idea of who Stephen King is, right or wrong, but On Writing provides a look at the man through the lens of his craft. While not King’s autobiography, perhaps it should be, as it addresses his early years with an eye toward his future career. The first part of On Writing, then, is the part King calls his “C.V.,” an autobiographical look at some of the events and early writing experiences that formed him into the writer he is today. Recounting events from the traumatic to the absurd — the ear-drum piercing needles he received from doctors as a child, the enormous babysitter that used to sit on him to pass gas — King’s journey through his early years reads in some places, perhaps not surprisingly, like a Stephen King novel. It’s an effecting and interesting look at his life, a rags-to-riches story that gives an idea of how, in King’s words, one writer was formed.

King also deals frankly with his addictions in this section, recounting disturbing details of his drinking and drug use. Disturbing not because they are of the ‘falling to pieces, waking up in a strange city’ variety of druggie adventures, but because they are the insidious, everyday struggles of a family man who continued to work hard at maintaining his enormous success but could not get away from his own demons. King tackles the mythic stature of the addicted writer squarely, in a warning to anyone that thinks art must be fueled by self-destruction.

In the next two sections, “Toolbox” and “On Writing,” King talks of his practical approaches to the craft. Strictly speaking, there is nothing new here, no great insights that haven’t been covered in other books on the topic. But, as King states, On Writing is short because most books about writing are stuffed full of bullshit. King doesn’t bullshit the reader, and if he does repeat things that have been said in many places and in many ways, that’s because those things are fundamentally true. So when he rails against passive voice, says the adverb is not your friend, and speaks of good description as being as much about what is left out as what is said, he is reframing basic truths that have to be absorbed by every writer. If reading about them again gets the message across, then it doesn’t hurt to repeat the information.

And that is at the essence of the book — while other writing books may contain much of the same injunctions, they are not written by Stephen King. Like his work or not, one cannot deny his depth of experience and success at crafting effective stories. He writes with an easy confidence and casual familiarity that render his memoir into a conversation between friends — or between mentor and student. What On Writing succeeds at so well, what so many other books lack, is the infusing of the author’s personality into the work to the point that the reader becomes emotionally invested in the message — and is inspired by it. While it contains a fair amount of practical advice, like cutting ten percent between the first or second draft, or letting a manuscript go cold before doing a final edit, On Writing is really about inspiring by example. And when King finally does recount his accident, and the slow, painful journey back to health after his near-death experience — a recovery made in large part because of his love of writing — we are presented with an undeniable example of the power of art to transform lives.

As should be obvious, this book is a must for fledgling writers who are fans of King. But its appeal goes far beyond that, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in the craft of writing. It is part absorbing first-hand account of the writer’s life, and part no-nonsense primer, but the whole ads up to an inspiring look at art and life.

• On Writing at Amazon
• Stephen King’s website