Consider the cases of two average (and fictional) Americans; we’ll call them Patty and Paul.  Patty has been laid off from her job as a dental hygienist.  And although she’s been applying and interviewing all over the place, she hasn’t received one offer of a job that pays more than her unemployment benefits.  As a result, she’s just had to move into her mom’s basement.

Meanwhile, Paul was laid off from his construction job, but quickly found new work through a stimulus-funded road project.  Things were a little tight while he was out of a job, but now he is catching up with his bills and starting to breathe a little easier.  He even managed to buy his wife a pearl necklace for their tenth anniversary.

Ask Patty and Paul whether the stimulus worked, and you’ll get fairly predictable answers.  For Patty, it didn’t; for Paul, it did.

Notice I didn’t say Patty thinks it didn’t, or Paul thinks it did.  That’s because I believe our reality is formed by the stories we live, take part in, or hear.  Patty’s got a “moved in with Mom” story, and so she’s existing in a world in which the stimulus was a big, fat flop.  Think of one of the things you most believe in, something you Know to be True.  You have a story to prove this, don’t you?  I suspect you do.  Moreover, I suspect you’ve told it to more than a few people in your time.

Do you live in a world in which a green apocalypse is imminent?  In which processed foods are a deadly scourge?  In which race is a real and relevant part of every social interaction?

I don’t live in any of those worlds, but I know, and respect the heck out of, people who do.  We are all going about, living in our own parallel worlds—and though they may intersect, they’re never fully the same.

Every time we tell someone a story, we allow them a peek into our world.  We allow them an opportunity to change their own world, or to harden its precepts, or to, ever so slightly, allow its boundaries to blur.

If this is true, we writers have a special responsibility.  Yes, our stories are fictional, so people are less likely to build their worlds around them.  But at the same time, we can reach so many, and we can hold their attention for so long, that it behooves us to treat the world we’re projecting with respect.  To make sure it matches up with our values, not just whatever’s convenient for the plot.  To make sure it is our True World, set out there for everyone to see.

Many parts of it were.  It was a fabulously original film with great graphics, cool action sequences, and a really wonderful hook.  The plot built, engaged, twisted, and then at the end it just kind of rolled over and died.

I was with 9 right up until that ending, because it was clearly a movie that was loved by its creators.  All the little ragdolls, with their unique looks and characters, spoke of love in a big way.  So did the unique use of music. And all of the wonderful detail.

When a project is loved, that usually means it’s going to be awesome.  Up was clearly loved.  So were Alien and Apollo 13. In the game world, we’ve got offerings like Lego Star Wars, Plants vs. Zombies, Guitar Hero.   And so many other movies, books, games, and TV shows that I can’t possibly list them all.

Loving your project means being willing to abide with it long enough to find all the little details that bring out its heart.  This is not an easy thing.  It is fundamentally sort of terrifying to spend time in a world of your creation.  Because if something is askew, amiss, feeble, or overwrought, it is all your fault.

Loving your project, then, requires faith not just in your work, but in yourself.

9 was loved.  I’m sure of it.  But 9 also fell flat at the end.  Why, I don’t know.  But here’s a guess: perhaps 9 illustrates one of the pitfalls of loving your project: loving it too much.  Loving it so much that you are no longer able to view it critically, so much that you become wed to your initial ideas and fail to seek improvements.

“Really?” said Outlander.  “I didn’t know genre writers cared about prose.”

“Of course we do,” I said.

So, yes, hr hmm, awkward.  But we breezed right past it, because really I understand. There’s a huge rift between literary writers and genre writers, and although I’m now on the genre side, I wasn’t always.

When I was in college, I bought into the idea that in order to write anything worthwhile, I had to write something literary. It was the idea espoused by all around me, all my professors — the very first grown-up, professional authors I had met. And I was too young and naive to understand that the view they were putting forth was not the view of the Community of Grown Up and Professional Authors. It was the view of the Academic Community.

When I entered college, I wanted to write science fiction.  It took them about one year to convince me I had to write literary, and I spent about nine years (!) doing it.  I read Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards every year.  I subscribed to the New Yorker.  I met a lot of truly awesome friends in the literary scene, including the writing group I’m still part of today.  During this time I also wrote some decent stories, but there’s only about one I’d now proudly display to my friends.  Partly this is because, well, I was just a young writer.  But I think it is also partly because I was trying to write stuff that didn’t really get me jazzed.

What finally jolted me out of this literary mindset was NaNoWriMo, the online challenge where people sign up to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in a month.  Something about the excess and sheer wonderful craziness of the idea let me decide to try something genre.  After all, it was an insane challenge.  I wasn’t going to really produce something worthwhile.  And therefore I could try something fun.

That book became my first, unpublished novel, Murder 101: Introduction to Death.  Even after I finished it, I thought of my foray into genre work as a diversion, a way to jumpstart my career.  But not (no, never!) the real meat of my career.  No, that had to be literary.  It was probably another two years before I gave up on the idea of being a literary writer altogether.

And doing that made me happy.  Not wildly, ecstatically happy–just content.  At peace.

But I have been on the literary side of the fence for too long to expect all my friends to understand completely.  Outlander wasn’t being a jerk when he asked me whether genre writers cared about prose; he was just expressing the belief of his community.  Literary writers tend to believe that genre writers don’t care about good prose, that they don’t care about meaning or nuance or writing something “real.”  You can hear their attitude in the term they sometimes use to describe literary fiction:  “serious fiction.”  As though genre writing were inherently silly.

Similarly, genre writers tend to believe that literary writers don’t care about plot, or tension, or actually telling a cohesive story.  They believe that literary writers like to wade around in a marsh of emotion without giving the reader something they can hang onto and clearly understand.  In their own way, they believe that literary writers are not “serious –” serious about story, about structure, about scene.

I’ll tell you a little secret:  there’s some truth to both these sides.  Genre writers do care more about plot than prose, and literary writers do care more about prose than plot. But both groups do care about both things; both groups are earnestly trying to put out the best books, the very best books that they can.

And that is the way of things.  And though I am glad both kinds of fiction exist, I am happy to find myself on the genre side of the fence.  It’s the side that’s never going to get me access to the Nobel or the New Yorker.  It’s the side that’s not likely to pave my way into book clubs or high society galas.  But it’s the side, I guess, where I’m comfortable.  Frankly, it’s the side where I think I’ve always been meant to be.

And yes, I do care more about plot than prose.

But in fact, the three book analogy is a little more apt than that. It really is, I’m not kidding, like writing three books. The first book is the first infodump, those 75,000 or so words that sort of contain a plot. Out of that you pull the second book, the book that makes sense, the book where the gun your character acquired on page 50 doesn’t mysteriously disappear on page 200 just because you need her to be in danger. And finally you preen and polish your way to the third book, the book that has a theme, the book where relationships build the way they’re supposed to, and everything feels resonant and real.

For me, it was when I crossed that boundary from second book to third book that I began being able to actually hold the whole thing in my head. Suddenly gone from my mental canvas were all the little half-formed subplots and alternate courses I’d rejected along the way. I could remember where this bit was, where that bit ended up. And when I made a change to one scene, I had an instant mental map to the four other places I’d need to touch to make it work.

After a lot of that touching, and fiddling, and fussing, I’m ready to say that the third book is done.

I sent out query letters last night, but not before spending a long time worrying about it. I had two voices in my head. One said, “The book is strong. You know the book is strong. The query letter is strong. You have had your group look at it two times (which was perhaps excessive). The synopsis is strong. The first five pages are strong. For God’s sake, send it out and get it working for you.”

And then the other voice would say, “It’s mid-December. Everybody’s busy this time of year. Agents have parties to go to, presents to shop for, relatives to avoid discussing uncomfortable topics with. In short, they have lives. For all you know, they’re already checked out for the month. Do you really want your query to be one of the twelve hundred they come back to on January 2nd? Besides, if you wait and send it mid-January, you can spend another month worrying about whether the third sentence in paragraph 17 might have too many syllables.”

In the end, that last argument was the one that did it. The fact that I simply didn’t know what else I’d do to the book, besides fret over it, convinced me to send it out.

These days most people prefer e-queries, so that’s what I sent. And I already got one response, albeit a “I got your query letter and will review it” response. Which began with the words “This is not a form rejection.” Nearly stopped my heart. “Oh, my God, it’s a non-form rejection!” I thought. “I hate those too!”

I was looking for a paragraph. Just a random graf, from a random page in a random novel that I read when I was in high school. It was from a fantasy, and concerned the protagonist’s freshly cast spell — how she could sense the spell’s fullness and rightness and completeness. The idea of the graf had always stuck with me, but after seventeen-or-so years, the actual words had faded from memory. I only had one scrap left: if she had tapped it with her nail, it would have rung like a bell.

I typed that phrase into Google, but I didn’t get any relevant hits. It’s just full of too many generic words (though Google helpfully suggested that maybe I meant “if she had taped it with her nail.”) Moreover, I wasn’t sure I had the exact words; like I said, it had been awhile.

The next step was to look for the book itself. I remembered that it was a fantasy, I remembered the plot, and I remembered that there was a red-headed girl on the front in a purple dress.
After scouring my brain, I remembered that the protagonist was a magic user referred to as “mageborn” and that one of the minor characters was called “Alix.” I was worried that both of these search terms would be too common (I’m sure more than a few books use the word “mageborn”), but a simple search for “mageborn Alix” returns several results for Barbara Hambly’s Stranger at the Wedding.

At this point I considered just buying the book. It is out of print, but there are used copies available on Amazon, and I remembered greatly enjoying it as a teen.

But I wanted to see if I could get further, actually uncover that paragraph. And so I turned to Google Books. This service allows you to search for text within books — lots and lots of books — which Google has scanned. Search for “Call me Ishmael” and you’ll get Moby Dick. Search for “Tarleton twins” and you’ll get Gone With the Wind. Search for “Richard Parker” and you’ll get Life of Pi, which I highly recommend.

Google doesn’t let you see the whole book unless it’s out of copyright or the publisher has granted permission. But it’s a fun place to bum around, and if you don’t believe me, try paging through a few old Life magazines from the thirties. The ads alone are delightful.

So I searched for “Stranger at the Wedding,” then searched within it for my one key phrase: “if she had tapped it with her nail, it would have rung like a bell.” After a few variations, I hit on it. But I still didn’t have the whole paragraph! Google would return a few lines at a time, but they didn’t have permission to reveal a large excerpt, so I was left with fragments. After several minutes of playing around I had the beginning of the paragraph, and the end, but was missing a few words from the middle.

The final step: I took those opening words and typed them into a regular Google web search. And found myself directed to Scribd.com.

Scribd is a self-publishing webstite; I’m guessing that after Hambly’s publisher let her book go out of print, she turned to Scribd so she could continue to sell it. Interestingly, in the Scribd version, Hambly has edited out the final phrase, the one phrase I remembered for all these years, the phrase that enabled me to start this search in the first place. But when I put the Scribd text together with the Google Books text, I finally had the graf I was looking for:

To her inner perception of magic, the spell felt hard and smooth, like blown glass cooled perfectly to its final shape; if she had tapped it with her nail, it would have rung like a bell.

And now that I see the thing in its entirety, I remember why it stuck in my head for so many years. This is exactly (exactly!) what I am always trying to achieve with my writing. Not for my writing to feel like Hambly’s, but for it to feel the way her protagonist’s spell felt: solid and cohesive and unblemished and resonant.

I can imagine my nails running over that blown glass she’s talking about, feeling the smoothness, how there’s nothing on that surface that catches or snags. In my head, the glass’s final shape is a sphere, and when I imagine tapping it I can almost hear the chime.

What’s that? Surprising… and inevitable? Surely those are contradictory.

Well, sort of, yes. But you still have to do your best to hit them both. You’re going for an “Oh… of course!” moment. The ending shocks the reader, but then very quickly they begin putting it together with little facts and suggestions you’ve seeded along the way. The nagging feelings they’ve had about the characters are suddenly justified. Scenes that previously didn’t make a lot of sense now make plenty. Everything comes together.

It’s a hard thing to accomplish, and something I greatly admire. So I made a quick scan of my bookshelves and here is a list of books that really hit that note for me. It’s not long. If anyone else has some good ones, please post.

• The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown
• Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
• Lion in the Valley, Elizabeth Peters

I don’t really understand why people go around saying something so patently stupid, unless it’s to create a belief in a literary elite to which only the elect can aspire. I mean, think about it. No one would say “painting can’t be taught.”

Sure, they might contend that you can’t make a master painter out of some guy off the street. But they would understand that you can take that guy and put a color wheel in front of him. You can teach him how to gauge perspective, how to identify a good paintbrush, and what the human anatomy looks like from different angles.

And if that guy was in fact not some random joe off the street, but a guy who came to you and said, “I like to paint. Please teach me how to paint better,” well, then, he’d have a real shot, wouldn’t he? Similarly, the people who enroll in a creative writing program are the ones who can benefit most from learning writing techniques.

Because of course there are techniques. There are techniques for dreaming up ideas, and there are techniques for transmitting those ideas effectively to paper, and there are techniques for engaging the reader’s emotions while you do it. And anyone who claims that such techniques don’t exist, frankly, isn’t a pro.

I can’t claim that writing programs are perfect; they’re not. If I look back on the really valuable things I’ve learned, I find that most of them came from my own self-directed study, or from conversation with my fellow writers, or from analysis of movies and books. I’ve got big problems with the way writing is taught in major institutions, to tell you the truth.

But I absolutely can’t abide the idea that “writing can’t be taught.” It speaks to an elitism and a mysticism that has nothing to do with the craft as I know it. And when people perpetuate this myth, it’s a way of saying to new people in the field, “Give up. Don’t bother. You’re not that guy.”

The way I see it, you can be any guy you want to be. It takes effort and practice (you better believe it!) but you can do it. Even if you have to teach yourself.

When I’m planning something to write, I refer to these two stories as the Acute Issue and the Chronic Issue. Acute Issues are, well, acute: “Don’t get eaten;” “Kill the monster;” “Stop the bomb before it hits zero.” And Chronic Issues are more internal and long-lasting: “Stop feeling guilty;” “Find someone to love;” “Admit your mistakes.”

I believe both issues are essential to a really good story. I think this is why everyone universally agrees that Terminator 2 is a better movie than its predecessor. Both had the same great Acute Issue: “Don’t get blown to bits.” But it’s in the Chronic Issue where they really diverge.

Terminator has a love story as the Chronic Issue: it’s fine and all, but we’ve seen it before. But T2 had a boy looking for a father figure he could trust. A great Chronic Issue, which was really well-developed in the script. And even though T2 is a thriller, even though its Acute Issue is what drew you into the theater, you just can’t help but respond to the power of that Chronic Issue. And that makes T2 the winner hands down.

When you read thrillers that fail to include a good Chronic Issue, or literary novels that fail to include a good Acute Issue, you notice the lack. You may not know exactly what is missing, the way I wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s missing in mediocre music–but you know it’s something.