thousand words typed to try things out. You are not a bum. You are now back in the game. You are working on a book.
You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you're tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something el se entirely throws our a historical fact that, right at this moment, you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in a embassy and the murderer fl ees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.
People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk a bout life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it's not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught ...
Undirected research goes on all the time, o f course. There's no research like the research you're doing when you think you're just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprisi ng INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humours (and so on, for 64 words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like "soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony." And finally there was the building up of some insight int o the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.
I've learned one or two things over the years. One is that the best time to work out a book is in bed, just after you've woken up. I think my brain is on time-share to a better author overnight. A notebook is vital at this point. So is actually being fully awake. If I had been fully awake I probably would have written a fuller note than "MegaPED:" on the back of a c a rd by my bed the other day. It's probably the key to a plot idea, but don't ask me, I only wrote it down.
And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. The blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
This appeared in 1988 in the first of what turned out to be thr ee books in the Drabble Project, produced by Birmingham fans to raise money for charity and add to the gaiety of nations.
A drabble is that once popular SF formal, the short, short, short — one hundred words, not a word more or less. Every word counts. Oddl y enough, I really enjoyed doing it, and even managed to fit in a footnote.
Incubust
The physics of magic is this: no magician, disguise it as he might, can achieve a result beyond his own physical powers.* ( *See the Necrotelecomnicon, p. 38. )
And, spurned, he performed the Rite of Tumescence and called up a fiend from the depths of the Pit to teach her a lesson she wouldn't forget, the witch.
The phone rang.
"Nice try," she said. "It's sitting on the bedhead now."
His breath quickened. "
You are also fiddling with your internal radio. Once you're tuned in on the next book, research comes and kicks your door down. Something is casually mentioned on TV. A book about something el se entirely throws our a historical fact that, right at this moment, you really need to know. You sit down to dinner next to an ambassador who is happy to chat about the legal questions that arise when a murder is committed in a embassy and the murderer fl ees outside, i.e., technically into another country, and the plot gulps down this tidbit.
People are magnificent research, almost the best there is. An old copper will tell you more about policing than a textbook ever will. An old lady is happy to talk a bout life as a midwife in the 1930s, a long way from any doctor, while your blood runs cold. A retired postman tells you it's not just the front end of dogs that can make early-morning deliveries so fraught ...
Undirected research goes on all the time, o f course. There's no research like the research you're doing when you think you're just enjoying yourself. In Hay-on-Wye, under very noses of other authors, I picked up that not-very-famous work The Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business ANECDOTES; comprisi ng INTERESTING REMINISCENCES AND FACTS, Remarkable Traits and Humours (and so on, for 64 words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like "soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony." And finally there was the building up of some insight int o the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.
I've learned one or two things over the years. One is that the best time to work out a book is in bed, just after you've woken up. I think my brain is on time-share to a better author overnight. A notebook is vital at this point. So is actually being fully awake. If I had been fully awake I probably would have written a fuller note than "MegaPED:" on the back of a c a rd by my bed the other day. It's probably the key to a plot idea, but don't ask me, I only wrote it down.
And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. The blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
This appeared in 1988 in the first of what turned out to be thr ee books in the Drabble Project, produced by Birmingham fans to raise money for charity and add to the gaiety of nations.
A drabble is that once popular SF formal, the short, short, short — one hundred words, not a word more or less. Every word counts. Oddl y enough, I really enjoyed doing it, and even managed to fit in a footnote.
Incubust
The physics of magic is this: no magician, disguise it as he might, can achieve a result beyond his own physical powers.* ( *See the Necrotelecomnicon, p. 38. )
And, spurned, he performed the Rite of Tumescence and called up a fiend from the depths of the Pit to teach her a lesson she wouldn't forget, the witch.
The phone rang.
"Nice try," she said. "It's sitting on the bedhead now."
His breath quickened. "
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