Collected Quotes

Writing quotes - those marginally useful tidbits you look up when you're trying to figure out why you aren't writing and you know you should be. Or is that just me? Here's my offering of the reminders that send me back to the page in a guilty scurry.

 

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. Toni Morrison

This one is first because this one is how writing happened for me. Itty bitty library and no loan system, so after I’d read through the science fiction/fantasy section, there was nothing left to read. But Mom had an old Selectric typewriter. I found paper. And despite the fact that I couldn’t type to save my life (I was 12) I started writing the grandest, least likely yarn ever conceived by a preteen brain. Pirates. Princesses. Horses. Sword fights. A black panther! Yeah. Like I said. I was 12. The story making any kind of logical sense was just not a thing. But spending my summer in front of that typewriter pecking out word after word stoked a fire that never quite went out. Believe me. I’ve tried to put it out. Writing doesn’t die when I try to put out the fire, little bits of me do instead. So I quit fighting it and I write. Mostly.

A word after a word after a word is power. Margaret Atwood 

I love Margaret Atwood. This pithy sentence gets at the whole writing conundrum: It can only be done word by word by word – and some days that is torturous – but that way great and powerful magic is unleashed. Word by word, you build worlds. People who didn’t exist before. Entire universes and lives. If you’re lucky, those words go out into this world and affect real lives here and now. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is. You know the cliché. With great power comes great responsibility. This is the same. You have a responsibility to your story, to your readers and to yourself. And when I say ‘you’, I mean ‘I’. I need the reminder.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. Ray Bradbury

Another vital reminder for me because I excel at overthinking shit. It’s my damned super power. (Seeking a super power trade – anyone?) It’s part of why I do NaNoWriMo just about every year – not that I ever win. Won’t this year, either. But the artificial ‘deadline’ of 50k words in a month makes me go faster than I’m usually comfortable with. Sometimes it works. The first pubbed book was a NaNo book. Sometimes it doesn’t work. This year’s NaNo project is wandering in the weeds with no point and notably no conflict. So I stopped. But I didn’t stop. In taking the pressure of WRITE ALL THE WORDS off, I paused to look at what I had and at where I might want to go. Some stuff got pulled into clarity and now, it’s back to 2k a day. No more thinking. Doing. Because that’s the only way stories ever get told. By doing. One word after another.

Infected SFF: Where Romance Cooties Reach the Stars

Ray Bradbury famously relates a story about how much he loved Buck Rogers as a kid. LOVED Buck Rogers. Collected all the comics. Kept them in meticulous order while his friends jeered and laughed. They told him those stories were junk. Worthless. Finally, buckling under the weight of peer pressure, he tore up his comics and threw them all out. And for three long weeks, he was miserable. Life wasn't worth living. Then one day it occurred to him. Those people making fun of what he loved weren't his friends. Buck Rogers was. He went back to collecting comics, reading what made him happy, and found a new group of friends who didn't belittle his passions.

This is the long way of saying that if you don't like romance in your stories, then the stories I write with romance in them aren't written for you. They're written for the people who love that thing. Frankly, the question of whether romance belongs in any story, ever, is spurious. It comes across as trying to silence the voices of people who have visions of the future/alternate realities that aren't straight white dude centric. There ARE more things in heaven and earth, ya know. To quote a dead white dude.

If SFF is, at its core, an exploration of what it means to be human in the larger context of time and space, there is no way to carve emotional motivations out of characters. Humans are singularly messy creatures from a touchy/feely standpoint. If we weren't so messy, murder rates probably wouldn't be what they are, nor would birthrates. Doesn't mean that every story has to feature some frilly, blossoming lurv. Not everyone is motivated by sex or romance. For that reason, I'll argue there are no hard and fast rules about what belongs and what doesn't. SFF, to me, is about what you can get away with based on the notion that no one gets to invalidate someone else's experience, OTP,  or feelings. If a story moves you, it wins, no matter what form it takes.

The only thing any of us gets to do, then, is vote with our pocketbooks. I don't read Oprah books, for example. Does that mean I think those books aren't worth having been written? Not at all - I merely understand my own limitations. I can depress myself, thanks. I don't need a book to do it for me. That said, in no way does my personal preference invalidate the fact that tons of people adore those books. More power to 'em - readers and writers alike. I just won't be spending my limited book $$$ on stories that'll make me want to slit my wrists. Sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Managing a depressive personality and state means building some walls. Mine say "no reading this type of book" and "no graphic animal cruelty pics on the FB feed." If you have a rule that says "no kissy", I respect that and advise you to skip my stories.

So careful with the value judgments out there in the great wide world. Read what you love. Don't let anyone else convince you to shred your collection. But by the same token, don't be that kid trying to bully someone else into trashing the thing she loves. There are 7 billion + people on earth. Surely there are enough tastes to allow for all kinds of stories about all kinds of people, monsters, aliens and robots.