Reading Outside the Genre

Garth Marenghi once famously observed that he was the only writer that has written more books than he has read. Obviously now that Russell Brand has written two books the claim is open to challenge but it still raises an interesting question.

To what extent is it desirable to read other works outside one's genre?

Imagine writing an SF novel if all one had ever read was other SF novels. What would the final product be like? My unproven assumption would be that work would be anodyne and unchallenging to the reader. SF is the literature of ideas and those ideas are, on occasion, best mined from outside the genre.

My settled view is that if one is going to learn the craft of writing by reading then learn from the best. If you want the unsurpassed study of psychological disintegration then read Crime and Punishment. If you want to see a perfectly structured novel then reach for The Good Soldier. If you want to experience the benchmark work of magical realism then it's Love in the Time of Cholera you need.

Writing the Numbers

In writing Sci Fi one thing becomes readily apparent; this shit is full of numbers. There are many references to dates, distances, speeds and other such assorted bollocks. So how does one correctly write numbers in English prose? On whether numbers should be represented by words or digits there is a doctrinal schism.

The much vaunted Chicago Manual of Style recommends using words for numbers one through ninety nine and digits for 100 and above.

By contrast the Associated Press Style Book advocates one through forty as words and digits for 41 and thereafter.

Personally, I favour the AP approach as, for reasons I can't fully articulate, it feels more contemporary.

As we are dealing with English, which is a parasite ridden mongrel cur of a language, there are some exceptions. These include, but are not restricted to:

• Numbers at the start of a sentence should be expressed in words regardless of their value.
• Numbers that are not integer values should be expressed in digits.

There also areas of ambiguity which are left to the personal taste of the author to arbitrate. For instance the question of negative numbers remains unresolved. I personally favour expressing them digits. If you know differently, and can cite and authoritative source, please let me know.

The Process

"Hey, man! What's your process?' Asked nobody, ever.

Well, seeing as you didn't ask I'll tell you anyway. I work on one project at a time and I write 500 words every day. The only recent exemption to this rule was the day I had my wisdom teeth out on my birthday. I felt that act itself was already sufficiently laden with symbolism that writing seemed redundant.

If I had the luxury of being a full time writer then my target would be 2,000 words a day, every day.

The routine of working every single day with no fallow periods is important for two reasons. First, it harnesses the power of habit. After approximately 100 days of this routine the prospect of missing a day and breaking the streak is enough to induce a state of existential terror. Second, if one works at a book every day one is always thinking about it. It's always at the forefront of the mind and everyday things seen or read may provide relevant inspiration.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most famous proponent of this school of producing a book via the long march. He draws upon a inexhaustible well of energy to write for six hours starting at 4am every day and describes the process as 'mesmerisation through repetition' and ominously likes writing  a novel to 'survival training'.

I start my daily writing by a review and edit of the previous day's output. All new material is written in a rather displeasing green colour to make it easy to identify for subsequent revision. I run a specially created Ubuntu linux virtual machine with LibreOffice and Dropbox to handle the content creation and data protection.

So write something every day. Even it's a suppurating canker on the face of English literature it can always be improved. The only piece of writing that can't be improved is the blank page or screen of the writer who chose to write nothing.

Write the Book You Want to Read

If I were in the business of dispensing advice to prospective authors this is probably the most valuable thing I could share with them. Why do I say this? After all, the authors tastes may or may not intersect with what is commercially successful and therefore intensely craved by publishers and agents. A quick perusal of the SF&F shelves at the airport would lead an author to believe that what they should be writing is a Young Adult series about a teenage vampire who is attending a high school where she learns how to be a good vampire and not abuse her powers for evil. This work could, perhaps, be distinguished from the plethora of similar crap by having the title in a sans serif font.

The reason I would never counsel anyone just to write what is currently selling is that writing a book is incredibly hard work. If the author doesn't love the characters, story and themes then the process is going to seem even more onerous that it already is. If the book you are writing isn't a book that you desperately want to experience then the inspiration and enthusiasm aren't going to be sustainable. If you don't write the book you want to read then, in my opinion, you won't end up writing any book at all.

Footnote: If any publisher would like to pay me mad cash to write the Elyssa Bloodmoon: Vampire Academy series the answer is, of course, yes.