And Then What?

So, let's say you've gotten your work out there in your preferred venue. Let's say it's even moderately successful by whatever yardstick is used to measure success in that venue. (I would advise you to be flexible in your concept of success, as it will need redefining many times over the course of your career and it's best to be prepared.) What happens then?

Well, then you get responses. Or you don't. You get paid. Or you don't. You get asked to do things. Or you - no, wait, that's one of those sure things. You will be asked to do things, by total strangers, and all of these things will come at some cost to yourself. After all, you're published now! You must be ready and willing to give workshops, critique work in the same medium (or, sometimes, in a totally different medium), to advise other people who want to publish in the same venue, to mediate for other people who want to publish in the same venue because you have connections now - right? You must, in fact, be obliged to be available to anybody, anytime, and be glad to do it because it's "exposure"?

Do not, ever, fall into the trap of working for free, or of paying someone else to allow you to do work.

By "free," I do not mean "not paid in cold hard cash." As I've discussed before, cash is only the form of recompense that we can buy groceries with; it is not the only form of payment. You can get paid in satisfaction; in genuine effective publicity (by which I do not mean a chance to sell your books directly to schoolchildren); in prestige; in an equivalent exchange of work; in the pleasure it affords you to perform the service; in many, many potential forms. Only you can decide what currency will best recompense you for the service required.

The pleasure of being useful is a real and valuable one. None of us makes it through this world without help, and we all have people to whom we are grateful; but no one enjoys feeling like the recipient of charity. Having received considerable generous help from playtesters in making Widespot, I started hanging around the creator feedback forum, a part of the board I'd never entered till I needed it, hoping to return the favor - not to the same individuals, necessarily, but to people like them, and like me. "Paying forward" through volunteer work is an effective tactic for improving yourself and your community, if done in a sincere and generous spirit.

Nothing spoils paying forward like having it treated as a debt. If someone starts a thread asking for advice in making a neighborhood, I may download that neighborhood, playtest, and share my advice as someone who has done similar work. If someone contacts me and asks me, as someone who has done similar work that he has admired, to download a neighborhood and poke around in it and give him the benefit of my experience, I am fairly likely to do so if my life isn't crazy busy, because this sort of thing is done only by a small portion of the community and odds are good he's having trouble getting useful feedback. If I don't think I can afford the time to do so (bearing in mind that this is play that edges toward being work) I will at least try to give him references that should help him accomplish his purpose. If someone sends me an e-mail with an attachment demanding that I look at his neighborhood unless I'm a stuck-up bitch - well. I've got a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

I'm less generous with my writing critiques and advice; but that's a matter of supply and demand. The demand for advice on both writing as a craft and writing for publication is high, but it is not higher than the supply. Educating would-be writers is a full-fledged industry, and if you don't have the research skills necessary to tap into it, your first step is to get them. Generally speaking, if I don't know you personally, I don't want to read your manuscript; but I don't overvalue my time or my expertise. I agreed to mentor a high school student with writing ambitions last year, I've been in short-term critique groups in which we were all trading advice for advice, I've been involved in workshops for which I've been paid in free convention memberships, and I've been paid my school-visit rates for workshopping.

Among children's writers, the rule of thumb is that the less a school district pays you, the worse your school visit will be. If they want you, they will pay for you; and the more they pay for you, the more likely they are to prepare the classes so that your talk will do them some good, give you bathroom and lunch breaks, and not spring surprises on you like agreeing to four sessions with small groups in the library while actually arranging five sessions with large groups in the auditorium. (Yes, it happens.) If they pay you, they will treat you as someone whose time has value. If you don't, they will treat you like dirt.

That doesn't mean you should never, ever agree to do a free school visit. If you want to present for free in the poor district the day after you present for pay in the rich one; or at your own child's school where you know the librarian; or to polish your presentation and gain confidence, by all means work something out. But if someone approaches you to do one, and says the budget is limited, name a figure and offer to negotiate. If he wants you, he'll negotiate. If he goes away and never comes back, he didn't want you. And if he starts poormouthing about how you'd get a chance to sell your books and you should do it For the Community, you don't want him.

The people who try to pay you in guilt for doing them favors should always be given short shrift. Politely, of course. But if you allow them to get their teeth into you, they will suck you dry and then kick you. Sure, if you turn them down now they might temporarily reduce your standing in some community they share with you by badmouthing you; but the truth is, they'll badmouth you after they've sucked you dry and you can't give them anymore, anyway.

And the odds are good that the people they're badmouthing you to are either people who know what they're like, or people just like them, so you won't lose anything. Whereas, if you did him his favor, you'd be out your time, your effort, and a good chunk of self-esteem at being played for a sucker.

And by Left They Mean Right...

I've been wandering around doing miscellaneous things this morning, and finally decided to just go put in the zipper wrong until the penny dropped. It finally did, and I have now written on the pattern "And by 'left' they mean 'right.'"

I always had a problem with that. I remember a time when my chief problem in dressing myself was that I was continually putting things on backwards because it wouldn't click with me that the front had to face away from me when I donned the garment in order to get the correct result. When I have to make left-or-right decisions I still glance down looking for a long-faded freckle on my right hand to make sure I don't pull left. Though the freckle is gone, I know that the right hand is the hand on which I reflexively check the freckle.

No, I don't expect you to follow that. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but me.

The trouble is that 'left' and 'right' are subjective terms, and in order to get the correct one it is necessary to be oriented the way the person giving you instructions expects you to be. I hardly ever am. And clockwise and widdershins are not "left" and "right," because any circle that goes left at the top goes right at the bottom and vice versa. Although one of Charles Fort's most famous aphorisms is "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere," apparently I am the only person in the world who ever orients a circle starting with the bottom point.

However, I can learn my way around urban spaces like nobody's business; and for years I always knew, when I walked into a restaurant, where to find the restrooms. This no longer functions infallibly, but that may be my own fault for preferring nonstandard restaurants.

I console myself for my lack of spatial acuity by telling myself that it gives me lots of sensitivity to alien viewpoints. You know how when somebody says "you have something on your face right there?" and points to the corresponding point on his own face, you always reach for the wrong spot? That doesn't happen with me, because I comprehend that I am functioning as your mirror, and point at the mirror-image spot. If I explain something and can't make myself understood, I do not assume that I am speaking to a stupid person, but to one with a different set of intuitive assumptions and will try out a different set till between us we hit on the ones that will work, or abandon the attempt. Conversely, I am frustrated to the point of murderousness in conversation with someone who denies the validity of my, or anyone else's, world view. When I'm writing a character, I can freely give them opinions I don't share and tastes opposed to mine and not worry about sounding convincing.

I may or may not have gotten the "see another's point of view" skill if I could tell my left from yours without conscious effort; but believing that I wouldn't is at least comforting, so please don't disabuse me of the notion.

Teaching: Sewing, writing, whatever

(BTW, Happy Moonwalk Day.)

I have undertaken to teach a friend of mine garment sewing. She's handy and crafty and makes other sorts of fabric and leather items, but she thought she didn't know how to sew clothes because her technique has been to eyeball things on the rack, say "That looks simple," and proceed freehand. This worked for her on things like drawstring bags but not on things like harem pants. (She is of the fen and has places to go where harem pants are appropriate attire.) I told her she could too, and all we needed to do was get a simple pattern or two under her belt and then she'd know she could do it and could proceed from there.

So I took her to JoAnn's and she picked out a simple blouse and a simpler skirt from the $2.99 rack (always look in the $2.99 rack first; that's my philosophy). We already have (probably) enough fabric from a past failed attempt for the blouse, so we got fabric and notions suitable to make a skirt compatible with that. Two weeks ago we put together a rough draft of the skirt using some god-awful flimsy aqua stuff she doesn't remember acquiring (I'm thinking, garage sale, $1 an acre - who hasn't picked up crap like that?). T is too big to wear misses' sizes and too young to wear women's styles, so I showed her how to scale the pattern up, how to read the pattern, and how to lay out the fabric. I could see the light bulb go off over her head a couple of times as she realized why her freehand attempts hadn't worked. She hadn't known about things like grainline, or how the selvage isn't always perfectly straight, and without experience of the way a two-dimensional pattern translates into a three-dimensional garment she'd been cutting everything too big.

And she nailed it. She even got the zipper right first time. Today's the first day she's been able to come back to put together the real skirt, and then we can move on to the blouse, and after that I expect she'll be pattern drafting while I'm still plugging away at the same handful of patterns that I know how to make. But -

I picked up the notions while she stood in line to have the fabric cut, and I couldn't find the right kind of tape. The package said "twill tape" and I could only find bias tape and hem tape. I couldn't tell from the outside of the package what it was used for, and I figured twill is woven on the diagonal and bias is cut on the diagonal, so I got bias tape. When we did the rough draft, I learned that the tape was for the waist stay. I got worried about it, because the point of the waist stay is to, you know, make the waist stay. Bias stretches. And it's a bias-cut skirt, very flippy, and it's really cute on her, but it won't be if the waist stretches out. So I got onto the Stitcher's Guild sewing newsgroup and I asked. The lady who responded said yes, we needed to ditch the bias tape, but if I couldn't find the right kind cutting the piece so that the waist was on the selvage might work instead. Somebody else said a ribbon could be a waist stay, too.

I've now found some twill tape, in not quite the right color, and today I'll explain it to her and she'll decide whether to try the selvage idea or use the off-color tape, and that will be another bit of knowledge she has. Maybe my status as the sewing guru will be damaged, but that's okay. One of the things I'm teaching her is that you don't have to be an expert to do this. All you have to be is not afraid of failure.

That's one of the things I want people to understand about writing, too, but apart from one-day workshops I've never taught writing and I'm never likely to. I'm game to try if someone wants to pay me, but the fact is, writing is so easy for me that I'm afraid to teach it. I understand instinctively, or at least absorbed so long ago I can't remember learning, many things about writing and reading that other people need to be taught. I barely had to be taught to read, and from the start I was reading books in a different way than the people around me did. I always knew I was going to write these things, and from the moment I read my first word ("Exit," in the hall of my kindergarten on the first day. I had no idea what it meant and I'm not sure how I'd absorbed enough about phonics to sound it out.) , I've been doing so as a producer rather than as a consumer.

When I'm confronted by someone who is so intimidated by the blank page they can't start, someone who doesn't know how to choose which scene to write or how to get out of one scene and on to the next or how to make dialog sound natural or how to choose a point of view, I don't know what to tell them. When I start breaking down a work in structural or thematic terms during revision, a person who is at the stage with writing that T is with sewing gets a scared, glassy look, not because the material's too hard for them, but because it comes so naturally to me I don't know how to guide them past the notion that "I don't know how to do this so it must be hard."

This does not mean that these people are less talented than me, or that they won't in time write books that make mine look crude; it means I happen to have a knack for something they have to learn, and you can't teach knack. I jump right in and they need somebody to guide them in step by step. If I try to do that, I guide them down the wrong steps, or I skip steps, or I sound like I'm talking down to them. Because I completely lack the knack for teaching, and nobody taught me to write. Or rather, "Carolyn Keene" and Louisa May Alcott and Diana Wynne Jones and Shakespeare taught me by example, and I was equipped by nature to absorb those lessons.

I have no knack whatever for sewing. My mother taught me to do it and I continue to teach myself, with much recourse to advice from better sewers, much seam-ripping, and reiteration of patterns till I understand how they work. My favorite pattern, the one that made me into a person who sews rather than a person driven to sewing by necessity, has this funky stuff going on with attaching the neck band that I have to relearn every single time - I can't retain it.

Nobody's going to be intimidated by my way of showing them how it's done. They'll probably wind up feeling superior to me. And I can live with that. One reason I'm teaching T is so I'll have someone nearby who can help me when I'm stumped! All my sewing "experts" (who would all deny being experts if you called them that) live in different towns.

I don't need writing patterns because I understand how stories work, but I could no more break that down into teaching terms than Thai could explain to me how to fall asleep in the middle of the day. (I can barely fall asleep at night and daytime is impossible even when I'm desperate; I'm as unskilled a sleeper as you'll ever meet.) Lots of other people, especially beginners, need patterns, and it's not because they're lesser writers. They just have different knacks and have to come at the process in ways unfamiliar to me. Someday we'll all be sitting in critique as equals discussing structure and theme and character and whether the POV needs to change.

'Cause everything's doable once you know how.