I’d definitely pair Writing the Other with Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story, because the books share a subset of similar concerns. In Bly’s case she talks in depth about the dereliction of duty on a writer’s part when, for example, writing about a character who works for a major corporation doing something illegal (say, dumping toxic waste illegally) without having any sense of how that affects their moral compass or how they see the world. This is an unsubtle, half-remembered example, but the point is: clear seeing from other perspectives is incredibly important to writing nuanced and powerful fiction.

Both Writing the Other and The Passionate, Accurate Story are recommended books in my own Booklife.

This is the fourth of a series of posts on my novel Finch. Finch is set in my fantastical city of Ambergris, but also borrows heavily from such genres as the spy novel, the noir mystery novel, and certain types of political thrillers. In the novel, an inhuman subterranean species called gray caps has risen up to take control of the city and subjugate the human population. As in Paris during Nazi control, the gray caps attempt to give a semblance of normality by providing institutions of order like a police force, even though these institutions are often merely a façade or horrible/absurd in nature. Against this backdrop, reluctant detective John Finch must solve a strange double murder.

You can find the other entries here:

Finch and Black Hawk Down: Repurposing Technique

Finch’s Opening–intro post

Finch’s Opening–discarded approaches

You can read the first 68 pages of Finch here.

To recap, I felt I had four possible entry points to the novel:

(1) John Finch, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).
(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.
(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.
(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all four of these approaches, but finally settled on #2. Why? See below.

***

(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.

Ultimately, because the focus of the novel is on John Finch, I decided on an opening with him at the door to the apartment, about to go inside. This is the moment of maximum tension for Finch. On the other side of the door, he’s about to encounter not just his inhuman boss, the gray cap Heretic, but also a Partial, a human traitor who has had one eye replaced with a gray cap spore camera. These things scare and stress him more than encountering bodies. Ambergris is a war-torn landscape in which dead bodies are a hazard of living there. A couple more, even dead under mysterious circumstances, aren’t going to phase John Finch—especially since he has a past serving in the Hoegbotton militia as a soldier. It’s also the first of the doors Finch will go through, and that initial moment of tension repeats throughout. Most times, Finch has a choice—not a great choice, but a choice nonetheless. He can go through the door, or he can turn back. Each time he braves a door, in a dangerous context, the reader learns something about his character. (And, in a context where he’s often a pawn, opening a door can be an act of defiance as well as an act of bravery.)

Now, just as John Finch goes through doors—many doors—in the novel, on another level I was thinking of the doors the reader would have to open to enjoy the novel, in a sense the progressions. Sometimes a satisfactory entry point can be accomplished in part by the context provided by the description on the back cover of a book. Other times, the burden falls entirely on the opening chapters. Mary Doria Russell thought about this extensively when writing her science fiction novel The Sparrow. Her decision, to me, seems a little extreme, in that she decided to flense most descriptions in the first hundred pages that might have served to confuse readers not familiar with SF—which is to say, elements of the future. This gained her readers, but destabilized the novel to some extent.

But I also didn’t want the reader to get the bends entering what I knew would already be a strange setting and situation. While the situation itself—a double murder—would in fact result in a stabilization of reader expectations because it’s so familiar from movies, TV, and detective novels, I still felt further “normalization” between the reader’s perspective going in and the world of the novel would be necessary.

So starting off with Finch at the door gained me the space to introduce strange elements one by one while still beginning at the moment of maximum tension for the main character. The progressions are very simple but important:

—Finch enters apartment
—Finch encounters the Partial
—Finch encounters Heretic
—Finch encounters the dead bodies
—Heretic leaves and Finch is dealing with dead bodies and the Partial
—The Partial leaves and Finch encounters the city

The physical space supports these progressions: hallway leading to doorway leading to living room/kitchen leading to balcony. (The physical space is also representative of transformation—from human to non-human, from Finch to Partial to Heretic. To pass through that space, something of the inhuman psychically rubs off on Finch. It’s also useful to put space between the Partial and Heretic as emblematic of things that occur later in the novel.)

The point of these progressions, however, is not just to acclimate the reader to a surreal place, nor just to let the oddness of the Partial sink in before we get to the oddness of Heretic, and then the peculiarities of the case Finch must solve.

No, it’s also to show Finch in different states of action and reaction. His reaction to the Partial is largely contemptuous, but we wouldn’t have gotten to see that so clearly if he’d encountered both the Partial and Heretic together, nor seen so sharply the contrast created by then having Heretic once more out of the room. Further, the Partial is fairly scary, so Finch’s reaction establishes some sense of his backbone—before then meeting Heretic, who obviously scares the crap out of Finch. Because Finch is scared of him, but not of the Partial, this potentially ups the tension because to most readers the Partial is fairly daunting. Thus, Heretic must be off the charts.

We then also see Finch with the bodies—and we get a sense of who he is from the fact that although he is a reluctant detective, if he’s going to do a job, he’s going to try to do it thoroughly. He’s going to try to do it well—and this with the Partial snapping at him, after Heretic has left. This further establishes that John Finch is trying to do the right thing, even under extremely difficult conditions.

(A version of the opening that shoved Finch, the Partial, Heretic, and the bodies all together in the same space, immediately. In a non-fantasy novel this approach might’ve been just fine. In Finch, it would’ve destabilized the novel by undermining effects that achieve full fruition in the latter stages of the story arc.)

It’s important for the reader to see Finch interact with the Partial both before and after Heretic has left the building for a couple of reasons. First, Finch acting in the exact same way despite being rattled by Heretic demonstrates a certain amount of groundedness and level-headedness. He gets rattled, but he doesn’t stay rattled. Second, it’s useful for the rest of the novel to show the range and limits of the Partial’s general disdain for Finch. Third, the Partial is a recurring character but doesn’t have many scenes–this is another opportunity to insert him into the narrative in a way that makes sense from a characterization point of view.

These decisions may have stretched out the scene, but they’re prefaced by an interrogation transcript that’s a kind of prologue–Finch under great duress at an unspecified point in time. I felt that that element combined with the inherent questions raised by the two dead bodies offset the potential risk of the slowing the pacing slightly—while the rewards of the approach down the line were too great to ignore.

Is a lot of this “business”, like stage directions? Yes, and it’s important to get that “business” right if you want to achieve more complex effects in a novel. I’m reading Skylark by Peter Straub right now and one thing I marvel at is the grace and art of his blocking. To some extent where characters position themselves and where they are in relation to other characters helps to define them as people. It also provides the anchor for a scene that, by allowing us to see clearly as readers, makes Straub so effective in things he’s trying to accomplish on a chapter and story arc level. Similarly, in Finch I am trying to leverage simple building blocks into the foundation for something that will ultimately encompass elements of the thriller, the noir mystery, surreal fantasy/SF, the spy story, and several other forms of fiction…

(Beginning of the section in which Finch is looking out over the city.)

Then, at the end of chapter 2, Finch stares out over the city. By this time, he’s run the gauntlet of Partial, Heretic, the bodies. He’s in a different emotional space than when the scene started—he’s more stressed now, even as he’s slightly more relaxed because Heretic is gone. When he looks out over the city, it’s with a sense of sadness and loss that’s compounded by what he’s just gone through—having to contend with the Partial, having to interact with Heretic—and thus he imbues the landscape he sees with that essential quality of emotion. Now, too, with the reader having experienced a small slice of what Finch’s life is like, that landscape means something more than if it had been presented first.

Landscape not invested with emotion or point of view is inert, lifeless.

Now, why did I use present-tense for the scene where Finch stares out over the city? I’ll tackle that question, and the question of use of present-tense throughout the novel, in one of my next posts on the novel.

(For bonus points: anyone translate the Latin phrase Finch finds on the man’s body? Anyone know where I took the gray caps’ favorite symbol from?)

And, just so it’s not lost in the shuffle–Bruce Holland Rogers first put forth the six points in my post at Booklifenow. I, with his permission, paraphrased them (as noted); Everything on gender after the first couple of sentences are my observations or quotes from others. Also, Rachel Swirsky has posted a blog entry related to the discussion here.

Excerpt:

As one female writer who wished to remain anonymous put it in an email to me: “[The significance of sacrifice is] wrapped up for me in the stress/struggle I have as a female writer, on the losing end of gender expectations. There a number of things I always felt like I should do: cook healthy meals, exercise, keep the house clean for me and my significant other, remember my friends’ and family’s birthdays, be there for my five younger siblings whenever they need me, etc. Yet I’m constantly aware of the fact that all the time I spend on those good things is time that I’m not writing. I constantly feel guilty — either guilty because I’m not writing, or guilty because I’m not keeping up with the tasks mentioned above. I think women are probably more prone to that feeling of guilt and personal failing than men, though perhaps that’s just a stereotype.”

As per my post from Tuesday, this is the first of two follow-up entries on the opening of my novel Finch. Finch is set in my fantastical city of Ambergris, but also borrows heavily from such genres as the spy novel, the noir mystery novel, and certain types of political thrillers. In the novel, an inhuman subterranean species called gray caps has risen up to take control of the city and subjugate the human population. As in Paris during Nazi control, the gray caps attempt to give a semblance of normality by providing institutions of order like a police force, even though these institutions are often merely a façade or horrible/absurd in nature. Against this backdrop, reluctant detective John Finch must solve a strange double murder.

The discussion that follows is by no mean complete with regard to what the opening of the novel is trying to do. Nor is authorial intent always paramount, in that when readers encounter a text, the text changes. Neither am I claiming the opening of Finch is perfect. I am simply relating the process that led to the final versions of those first two chapters.

You can read the first two chapters here.

To recap, I felt I had four possible entry points to the novel:

(1) John Finch, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).
(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.
(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.
(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all four of these approaches, but finally settled on #2.

(An even worse iteration, from very early–Finch wakes up in the morning!)

For this post, let’s consider the options I ultimately didn’t use…

(1) John Finch, reluctant detective, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).

In a standard noir novel, approach #1 would be a writer’s choice about eighty percent of the time. It’s immediate, it introduces the case swiftly, it creates tension automatically. Usually, you can also get in a lot of initial characterization of the detective’s cohorts. By placing the bodies in the foreground, you also emphasize the arc of the story concerning the investigation and solution of the case. However, if you are interested in creating a hybrid or mutation, or a cross-pollination of forms, the immediacy of this approach has some drawbacks; there’s such a thing as getting to a point too quickly. I abandoned this approach when it was clear I would have to pack too much information into too small a space. I also felt I would be creating the wrong emphasis, for reasons I explore below and in the third post in this series.

(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.

In a police procedural with an ensemble cast, there might be a good reason for starting at the station, especially if the call about the murders happened later in the day, allowing another kind of tension to take the place of the reader’s interest in a particular case. However, starting in the station is far too early in the story for most possible story arcs. It’s the kind of approach that a beginning writer is most likely to end up with in a final draft, starting at a point that, because of the interaction between characters, seems to contain dramatic tension but is, in fact, the bridge between actions that usually gets cut–in both fiction and movies. Further, starting at the station would have created an additional demand: getting John Finch to the murder scene.

(Another alternate version, this time eschewing the car but still boring.)

In a very early draft, I started with Finch in the station and also wrote a scene of him getting into a car and driving to the murder scene. As I was writing it, I realized there was no tension in any of this, and that the car scene not only established the wrong level of technology–made things too easy–but also served as a kind of travelogue introduction to the city that actually worked against readers buying into the scenario. Still, the writing didn’t go to waste because I was able to recycle elements of the police station scene into the scenes following Finch leaving the apartment. In this context, the reader having already been introduced to the horrors of a gray cap in the flesh, the scene in the station takes on added tension in a way that it wouldn’t have if the reader hadn’t first encountered a gray cap. This is just one example of how the elements in a novel are introduced contributes heavily to reader perception of later elements.

(From later in the novel, another alternative version–Finch gets his car, finally. Still boring. Wrong level of technology.)

Note also that if I had, say, included the gray cap in an opening scene set in the station–if, for example, the gray cap hadn’t called but just appeared there–then the reader would not only be in a strange setting but meeting the main character, his colleagues, and the gray cap all at once. This would have had the effect of canceling out reader attention on important details or a necessity to downplay certain characters or elements. It’s also, I feel, a mistake in some detective novels—too many characters around a crime scene, which makes for confusing initial situations, in which the reader has to keep track of too many people. (Why an empty apartment to open? Space.)

(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

It is my feeling that landscape not invested with emotion or point of view is inert, lifeless. Like a historical novelist, when writing fantasy set in a place not here, I have an obligation to describe that place and make it realistic, but I have an equally important charge not to lard the narrative and the characters with excessive description or description that is not truly related to the viewpoint character. Which is to say that certain things are known to Finch and thus must be given over to the reader and other things that he knows but would not comment on or really register must be conveyed in a kind of shorthand, or conveyed in a context in which he would register them. That includes aspects of the setting, in addition to his interactions with other characters.

It’s also important to remember that characters are setting—good characterization, in which the character is clearly shaped by environment and situation, reveals a lot of information about your setting.

At the same time, I had other challenges with regard to setting (which, in Ambergris is also history). First of all, I had to strike the right balance so that readers of prior books in the series wouldn’t feel like they were being told things they already knew, and new readers would have all of the context they needed to enjoy the novel without knowing anything about Ambergris. Second, Finch is set one hundred years after the prior book in the series, Shriek: An Afterword. Therefore, it has changed in fundamental ways and I felt there needed to be a moment where the frisson of that registered with readers of my other books–and so they would have the full context of those changes.

(At least I didn’t have the problem of also having to summarize the actions of characters from the prior novel, because of the stand-alone nature of the Ambergris books—there is historical/political information the reader needs, but it’s not a narrative taking up where the last book left off. The most elegant solution in such cases is the one used by David Anthony Durham in The Other Lands—to simply include a preamble summarizing the action in the previous book, rather than try to interject unnecessary recent plot/history into the beginning of the next in the series, which bloats or slows down the new book– in a way the opposite of the potential problem with Russell’s approach to The Sparrow.)

(Yet another approach, dropped, in which while Finch is leisurely walking to the crime scene, I get in some of the description that in the final version comes at the end of chapter 2.)

In early drafts, I tried two approaches. The first was to place a timeline for Ambergris history and a two-paragraph description of the current situation as a kind of prologue. Second, I did try putting description of the city upfront. Neither approach worked at all–indeed, both approaches made me much less enthusiastic about working on the novel. Why didn’t these approaches work? The novel is about John Finch. Any attempt by me to distance the reader from Finch betrayed not only the character but the novel. It is around the time that I abandoned the city-first approach that I also abandoned the title “The Appoggiatura of John Finch” and went simply with “Finch”. So, in this way too, my early drafting didn’t go to waste. In inhabiting and discarding approaches, I came ever closer to my final approach.

(Continued in my next post, tomorrow evening.)

>>This is the second post in a continuing series on craft centered around discussion of my novel, Finch.

Sometimes the most complex effects rely on simple decisions. If you don’t put thought and effort into such decisions, the foundation of your novel is flawed and nothing you build on that foundation will be truly sound. (See Vladimir Nabokov’s Cornell lectures, which discuss things like the floorplan of a house in Jane Austen’s work, for example.)

In Finch, I had several decisions on how to begin the novel, each of which would’ve made a big difference to its tone and its later effects.

Choices on where to begin included:

(1) John Finch, reluctant detective, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).

(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.

(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.

(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all of these openings. Only one stuck.

>>>If you’ve read the novel, you know what I settled on. Do you know why I chose it? I’d love to hear reader speculation.

>>>If you haven’t read the novel (or even if you have), what do you think are the pros and cons of each approach above?

(If you participated in one of these discussions during my book tour, it’d be great if you’d chime in after a day or two, allowing others to comment first.)

I’ve prescheduled a longer post for Thursday explaining my own point of view on the various approaches so that you can read my thoughts prior to me factoring in your comments, and then we can discuss further if anyone’s interested. (I’ll include further analysis of the opening two chapters, as well.)

If you’d like to read the beginning of Finch, the publisher has the first chapters online.

Despite having been very active in the 1990s, it’s in the 2000s that Ann and I came into our own as a creative partnership, and I reached what one might call mid-career (I’m now 41). We had many, many opportunities, were tendered many kindnesses by people too many to mention for fear of leaving someone out, and, throughout the decade, put our all into every project, even when it sometimes threw our lives out of whack. (A book is often an obsession; an obsession is often a type of love.)

As the decade comes to an end, I would just like to thank Ann—my partner, my best friend, my wife—for her creativity, generosity of spirit, smarts, and comradery on so many projects over the past years. Not only has she accomplished so much, but she’s done it while devoting thousands of hours to her synagogue as a teacher and dealing with a full-time, often very demanding day job.

As the decade comes to an end, I’d also like to showcase the books and other physical artifacts we’ve created. We love books. We love the people associated with books. They are still the most potent symbol of a reading, writing, and editing life. They provide the physicality that gives one the satisfaction of a job well done. There are other measures of the decade–family, friends, teaching, etc.–but our books also often encompass those elements, in terms of the back story behind them.

So thanks to all of the readers and everyone else who has been supportive. The book business is not an easy one–it is filled with treacherous pitfalls, reversals, unexpected bad luck, and unexpected good fortune (which can be just as perilous). Sometimes a kind word or gesture by a reader or colleague has been instrumental in giving us the energy to complete a project. But, as I say, we’ve been blessed this decade, and we’ve made a good run of it. I don’t think either of us has any regrets (except I wish I would sometimes would learn not to comment on blog posts on the internet).

Here, then, is our decade in review, through books/magazines we wrote, edited, or published, leaving out over forty foreign language editions and most reprint editions…

UPDATE: Or you can always go the short route and just click here.

Early Aughts

The original edition, with the World Fantasy Award winning novella.

The final issue of Ann’s The Silver Web, with awesome work by Carol Orlock, Daniel Abraham, Vera Searles, Michael Bishop, and more. Cover by Scott Eagle.

The expanded edition, 2002, a World Fantasy Award finalist (not pictured, the current Bantam trade paperback edition). As with all of the books I’ve written, Ann was a huge component of its success, helping in all aspects.

Got married and edited the World Fantasy Award winning Leviathan 3 that year as well, which included Zoran Zivkovic’s Library stories, which won in the best novella category. Also a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, only the second book at that time to have done so, with The Troika by Stepan Chapman from my Ministry of Whimsy Press being the first.

Chapbook The Exchange, with Eric Schaller

A Ministry title from the early 2000s, as an imprint of Night Shade.

Ann was out of town on business for a few days in 2003 and I got bored and put together an anthology in a month. With pretty damn cool work by K.J. Bishop, Ursula Pflug, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, and others. Even got reviewed in the Washington Post, which cracked me up considering how indie press it was…

The original, hardcover edition of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Disease, with art/design by John Coulthart. A Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award finalist, among many other honors, reprinted in a couple other languages, and eventually published by Bantam in trade paper with a different cover. Ann was instrumental in the book’s success, including reading submissions, helping make decisions about various aspects of the book. Probably the most intense effort of the early 2000s for both of us.

The original Prime edition of Veniss, finalist for the World Fantasy Award and several others.

Limited edition chapbook of my story Secret Life with art by Eric Schaller.

Mid Aughts

Ann edited this omnibus of two Cisco novels, the first of which had appeared as a stand-alone from her Buzzcity Press and won the International Horror Guild Award.

Secret Life, my second short story collection but probably the first major one.

In 2004, my Ministry of Whimsy also published Zoran Zivkovic’s novel The Fourth Circle, his first book publication in North America. The cover art, btw, is by K.J. Bishop.

My first nonfiction collection, which raised a certain amount of controversy.

Another 2004 Ministry title, with cover by John Coulthart.

The Bantam edition, 2005. Never that thrilled with this cover, to be honest. Pan MacMillan edition was better. Around this time, and into 2006, Ann and I spent a lot of time concentrating on correspondence with and editions from our foreign language publishers, including a five-week European book tour in 2006.

Shriek, on the right, came out in 2006 along with the reprint of City of Saints. Shriek made a lot of year’s best lists, including Amazon, San Fran Chronicle, but failed to make any awards lists. But to this day, Shriek is the book I get the most personal and satisfying emails from fans about. Perhaps relatedly, it is probably the most personal and, from a writing perspective, most satisfying book I’ll ever write. Ann spent a good deal of her time in 2006 helping me set up 20 Shriek book release parties at venues around the U.S., based around the Shriek movie.

The Secret Life Select Fire Remix actually attempted to remix my story collection the way you’d remix a CD. Jeffrey Ford’s intro was fragmented and recombined, the title story woven through the body of the book, short-shorts added, story notes moved to the end and expanded, and some stories deleted. I’d say this is probably the one book I can point to as being a huge bomb. It was inscrutable to all but core fans–an example of me having blinders on with regard to a reader’s entry point into a book through the cover, blurbs, etc. Since all that material was faked. Lesson learned. Heh.

Setting up the Best American Fantasy series, with help from Sean Wallace, took up a lot of our time in 2006 and 2007. The concept of the series was initially received by several genre reviewers with puzzlement. Since then, they seem to have gotten used to it, but it was sobering to realize the same attitudes that had resulted in having to put in a lot of extra effort in the 1990s on Leviathan 1 and Leviathan 2, and for Ann on The Silver Web, were still there. Things don’t get easier–you have to enter the fray again and again, have to keep proving yourself, each time older but with more experience. It was in this spirit–my slogan for 2007/08 was “knives out”–that we approached the last years of the aughts.

In 2007, as well, Ann took over as fiction editor for Weird Tales. She immediately focused on updating the type of short stories being bought and began her usual (IMHO) excellent job of finding great new writers and highlighting them alongside more established writers. At the same time as she took on this solo gig, and in the context of the BAF experience, we decided that, with my Ministry of Whimsy and her Buzzcity Press moribund, combining our efforts and co-editing all future anthologies together made artistic and financial sense. We could redouble our efforts, and Ann’s often profound contribution to previous books would be recognized formally re future projects.

While teaching at Clarion San Diego in 2007, we surprised the students with a printed-up book of their writing exercise stories created during our week. The finalized anthology, with nonfiction from Clarion instructors, will appear in 2010, with all proceeds going to Clarion. (As an aside, one of the great experiences of our lives together was teaching at Clarion, because it was the first time we’d really taught together, and we found that we balanced each other well. Before, we’d always been in support of each other.)

Late Aughts

The New Weird, collecting, analyzing, and questioning the controversial movement (or non-movement, depending on your point of view), came through the potentially cantankerous reviewer gauntlet relatively unscathed, getting plenty of positive reviews. It’s now taught in universities, including by Junot Diaz at MIT. It remains our favorite of our works in terms of the art of compiling, organizing, and contextualizing fiction and nonfiction about fiction. It has also clearly influenced other anthologists, who have since taken more structured approaches to their own projects.

In 2008, also, Weird Tales continued its rejuvenation with Stephen Segal as creative director and Ann as fiction editor.

PS Publishing released my novelette “The Situation” as a book with cover by Scott Eagle. Wired.com’s GeekDad offered it as a free download, garnering a lot of attention for it–I still get emails from office workers who recognize the particulars. The story is, in disguised form, exactly what happened to me in my day job in 2007, at which point I became a full-time writer.

Aided by our unimaginative title and a NYT article on Steampunk that came out the same week as our anthology, Steampunk was a huge success, and a World Fantasy Award finalist.

A stunning 20th anniversary issue, with an original novella by Mike Moorcock and my interview with China Mieville. This was probably my favorite of the many interviews I’ve done over the years.

In the middle of this perfect storm of attention for New Weird, Steampunk, and Weird Tales, my whimsical collection of stories based on the real lives of my readers came out in a thousand-copy limited edition…and sank without a trace…before resurfacing with several favorable reviews at year’s end and into 2009.

I wrote a Predator tie-in novel that I’m probably too proud of. It taught me a lot of about editing scenes and character point of view, much of which helped with writing my next novel, Finch.

Fast Ships, Black Sails was meant to be a fun and entertaining anthology of diverse pirate stories, and several stories wound up making various year’s best anthologies, including work by Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, and Howard Waldrop. The antho was also a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Many reviewers cited it as the best original fantasy anthology of the year.

Another two issues of Weird Tales came out that year, and cemented what would become a Hugo Award win in 2009 for Segal and Ann.

Falling victim to the publishing purges and reorgs of late 2008, the second volume of Best American Fantasy actually came out in early 2009. We’d chosen a tighter focus for the second volume, eschewing fantasy as metaphor, for example, out of a sense of self-preservation more than anything else. The result is tighter, and received more critical acclaim, but was not as adventurous. That said, I really love all of the stories in the book.

With the help of John Coulthart, we created a chapbook of student writing for the Shared Worlds teen writing camp participants this past summer.

Weird Tales soldiered on, continuing to innovate in both its hardcopy and website forms.

Our charity antho Last Drink Bird Head came out from the newly resurrected Ministry of Whimsy, now an imprint of Wyrm Publishing (Neil Clarke). Featuring over 80 contributors, including Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Gene Wolfe, and Tanith Lee, it fit nicely with such other quirky projects as the fake disease guide.

Yes, it is one of the greatest zombie stories ever.

I closed out 2009, and the decade, with possibly the strongest one-two punch of my career: the writing strategy guide Booklife and the surreal noir fantasy novel Finch. Both books went into second printings within weeks of publication in October-November. Both books received rave reviews. Finch made the best-of-lists of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Barnes & Noble Review, and many others. It received full, enthusiastic reviews in the LA Times and Washington Post. Grove Atlantic picked it up for UK publication, while A&C Black picked up Booklife for the UK as well (July and August 2010). In a way, I ended where I began, finishing my Ambergris Cycle. Booklife, meanwhile, reflected everything I had learned from a decade of books.

2010—2019?

What book projects are we embarking upon for the future? Watch this space…

Your writerly “leverage,” as I define it, is a kind of political capital. You can amass it based on your visibility through your online presence and your books, published short stories, etc. It consists of intangibles beyond audience, too. The respect and affection others have for you affects your leverage–how people perceive you as both writer and human being.

You use leverage to make your projects, your books, successful–leverage breeds leverage–but it serves, or should serve, another purpose. You should use your leverage (or position or privilege) to be of use to other people in the writing community (or even outside of it). No matter what level you’re at, there’s something you can do to help someone else.

I’ve met writers who hoard leverage or privilege, who feel that concealing their contacts, masking their methodology, building closed cliques, ignoring talented people who ask for help, is the best way of helping their careers.

Maybe this is true in the short term, but the fact is the best way to build leverage long-term is to be open and useful to others–as much as you can be without disrupting your own time for writing and other creative endeavor.

Paying it forward, contributing to community, can at times be controversial or uncomfortable or actually cause you to lose prestige or respect temporarily. The whole point, at times, of using your position is to expend it like rocket fuel–in a short burst that is of immeasurable value to someone else.

I think about this, too, because sometimes people get into positions of power by being miserly with their leverage…and never realize that they’ve reached a position where they can afford to take a stand, be publicly controversial for the greater good. And so they don’t.

Whatever level you’re at now, don’t be that person. If you die without calling in all your markers, for others, for yourself…you lose.

What I’m saying is this: whether you’re a writer with one published story or a writer with twenty novels out, you have some leverage. What you can do might be tiny in scope, but might mean a lot to someone.

As we enter 2010, in a perilous publishing atmosphere, with a lot of uncertainty ahead, we should all be thinking of about not just ourselves but others. Trust me when I say the more connectivity you build, the more good works you foster, on whatever level, the more you, too, will benefit in the long run.

This is a rare cross-post to Booklifenow.com

In a general way, TV and movies have often had a terrible influence on fiction, in that some writers substitute received experience and received ideas from mass media for their own personal vision–some even think the structure of most TV shows is perfectly suitable, untranslated, for novels and stories. A lot of this material, reading like scripts or in other ways underwhelming, appears on editor slushpiles every day.

But there are also specific ways in which other media enhance and influence fiction. One example common to most fiction now is the cut-away from scene to scene, wherein you don’t get, for example, our hero or heroine driving from point A to point B. One reason that Lord of the Rings feels dated sometimes is because Tolkien doesn’t cut away for the most part, leaving in pastoral bits of quest that slow the pacing and don’t always resonate with a modern reader.

Then there are techniques from movies that you try to break down and truly translate into fiction. These techniques didn’t impact my prior novel, Shriek: An Afterword, because one secondary goal in writing that novel, due to its subject matter and dueling narrators, was to create a book that couldn’t be made into a film. But my latest novel, Finch, is meant to be cinematic–the beats, the structure, the visuals, at times mimic similar elements in film. There are experimental elements, but these elements are sublimated by the mystery plot.

In this context, I found one effect in Black Hawk Down fascinating, because I wasn’t at first sure how to convert it to a fictional context. Regardless of what you think of Ridley Scott’s film, the editing is precise and often brilliant. In one scene, attack helicopters are headed into Mogadishu–and in one sequence Scott (or his editors) cut the sound. The effect is to more or less leave the viewer lurching through the air. When I saw the film, my stomach seemed to drop when the sound cut off, and it was clear the filmmakers meant for the sudden absence of the noise from the helicopters to put you more directly into the scene–to in a sense turn film from a two-dimensional medium into something you were more immersed in.

I liked the effect very much, and kept turning over in my mind how it could be used in fiction. The answer came while working on Finch. The novel is broken into sections corresponding to the days of the week. Basically, the novel covers seven extremely important days in the life of John Finch while he’s investigating two impossible murders in the occupied failed state of Ambergris.

Each day, as you can see above, starts out with a transcript of Finch being interrogated by an unknown person. Where, when, and how the interrogation is taking place doesn’t become clear until later in the novel. But the reader comes to expect the interrogation fragment when moving from section to section…except there’s one section title page, where the page is blank except for the day title…and the effect is meant to be the equivalent of cutting the sound in Scott’s movie. To bring the reader out of their expectation, to create a kind of lurch or surprise. At the same time, the totally blank white page where before there has been the expectation of dread is a strangely liberating experience. What does it mean for Finch? What does it mean for the chronology of the novel?

Now, this effect will not manifest for all readers. Some may even have treated the interrogation sequences as little more than epigraphs to that point. But, that was the intent: to suddenly pull the rug out from under, but unlike the unease caused by the sudden lack of sound in Black Hawk Down, it’s meant to convey more a sense of release, a sense of possible grace, of possible relief for Finch…although there’s always the possibility it just means he’s dead, the interrogation over.

I think there are probably more overt ways to translate the technique, but that’s how I used it in Finch.

Over the next month, I’ll be posting more pieces on technique pertaining to Finch. Posts that involve spoilers will be clearly marked. Next up will probably be a post on the use of past and present tense in the novel.