Orson Scott Card's Bootcamp -- The Rest Of The Week and Beyond.

I've had a couple people ask about the rest of Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp, as well as for my overall impressions of the experience.

We ended up doing my story the next morning, as I said in that last post. I now have blurbs for the cover of my next book. Stuff like this:

"I don't know if you know how to develop a character."
-- Orson Scott Card

Or maybe

"I'm not really sure if you know how to write a scene."
-- Orson Scott Card

Bestseller list, here I come!

No, seriously, it wasn't as bad as that makes it sound.

Let me kind of lay the scene out for you:

The way the workshop worked was this: We all sat around one big table. Once we knew whose story was next, the person sitting next to them would start, and we would go around the table, one person at a time. We weren't supposed to repeat anything anybody before us said, and Card didn't say anything until everybody was done.

Well, on mine, the young lady sitting next to me started, and this time, Card did interrupt her. (To the best of my recollection, he hadn't done that with anybody before. At least, not to the length that he did it with my story.)

And basically what he said was this: "Just to be clear, and so we don't have to dance around this, let me just say what all of you probably have written, in one form or another, in your own comments, but didn't quite nail down. What Erik wrote isn't a short story, it's the outline of a novel. And not just a regular novel--it's a big, sprawling, epic fantasy novel. That's the first book in a series."

So I ended up getting 16 wonderful critiques of how to turn my little hurried short story into a wonderful epic fantasy novel.

And one that I think would be a whole lot of fun to write.

So the above comments from Card were in that context--my story was rushed and hyper-condensed. But, as he correctly pointed out, at the time when I wrote the thing, I thought I was writing a short story, and the story as it stood showed little understanding of scene structure or character development. It felt more like a "told" story.

I did actually get a few compliments on the whole thing, my favorite being OSC's comment that I wrote smart people's dialogue pretty well. I believe his comment was that I was pretty good at "faking smart."

At the end, everybody gave me their marked-up copies of my story. So I now have a ton of working notes and an outline for a novel that could be really, really good.

Now let me tell you--that story was a huge source of stress for me for weeks before that camp began.

After I wrote my post about whether or not to go to boot camp, I started trying to write a story, just so that I could say I finished one before boot camp. Not having finished a story in a year and a half was like a huge anchor around my neck, and finishing a story before I went would have taken the added stress of that anchor away.

But I couldn't do it. The story sat unfinished, nothing but one scene and one flashback written before I left.

So I started writing that story on Wednesday with the anchor still firmly around my neck.

Add to that some personal issues that meant that I spent the whole of Wednesday morning on the phone with my wife and my work's corporate office trying to get some things taken care of--it was crazy.

But I did it. I finished the story and I got it in. I dug my way out from under the anchor.

Aside from getting the anchor off my back, boot camp did two other things for me.

The first was to stop putting so much faith in the text. As Card said in one way or another over and over throughout the week, the text is not the story. The text is completely expendable. If a draft isn't working, figure out why and then toss it. Write the first 10 pages ten times until you've found the way in that's working for you. Stop thinking that there's anything sacrosanct about the words you've written so far--if you toss them out and start over, your new words will be better. Both because you're a better writer now, as well as because writing that last draft helped you understand the story better.

So after I got home, I tried it. I thought of an old story of mine, and I wrote a half dozen openings for it, just for fun. And sure enough, I loved about half of them.

Seriously, I've learned for myself that it's true: The text doesn't matter. Don't be afraid to write, because if it doesn't work, you can just start over.

As for the second thing: By reading a bazillion short stories written by people who had been both as passionate and as rushed in writing their stories as I was, I learned a ton about how to read a short story looking for how to make it better. And I feel secure I can do the same thing with my own stories far more easily than I used to be able to.

The mistake I used to make was that I thought I could fix my story, make it more saleable, by grabbing my copy of Self Editing For Fiction Writers, and judiciously hacking away at adverbs and passive sentences.

But the truth is, the real facts about what makes us love stories aren't about any of that. They're about getting to know characters we care about, and about fine stories plainly told. The depth of a tale, the seriousness with which the reader takes your story, is not be created in fiddling around with the minutia of a draft. It's in fully mining the depth of a character, the depth of an idea, in the creation phase of the story. Of finding the interesting and exciting and fun and fascinating possibilities of who the person is and what is happening to them. And in science fiction and fantasy, where it's happening.

And it's so obvious, in retrospect. Seriously, I never ran to my friends and said, "You've got to read this latest James Patrick Kelly story. He is so good at not using adverbs." Loving a story came from somewhere else.

It's in the people, it's in the places, it's in the story.

I'm really glad I went to this. I'm glad for the perspective I got. I'm glad for the friends I made. I'm glad for the stories I got to read. I'm glad for the insights I got.

And seriously, I'm really glad for the group I was with. They were a really fine bunch of people, and I wouldn't have given up a one of them. I fully expect to see a bunch these people making it to the next level, and I look forward to struggling to keep up with them.

So the next step--the surprising next step--is that from here it's not so much about writing as it's about story creation. Really spending enough time coming up with the people, places, and conflicts, that when I get to the story, I'm ready, able, and excited to write it. And then, in the writing of it, finding even more exciting things along the way.

Gonna be a fun ride.

Boot Camp -- Day 3

Well, yesterday was the first day that I actually thought I was going to die.

But that was because it was the day that I spent all alone in a hotel room trying to write an entire story.

It's finished now. It feels like a good story weakly told.

But part of the point is that it's worthless to go in and edit for language when somebody may say something about an event on page 4 that would make everything after that worthless. So you don't "polish" the story when you're still getting straight the "story" part of it, the who did what and why.

And in this story, with the exception of a couple of weak spots, I kind of like my who did what and why.

But I'm really excited about how much better than this it will get when people smarter than me get the story in their hands.

I'll tell you--getting it down was sure hard. Wow.

Since that's the first story I've finished since "Fifteen Minutes," I actually feel like a huge monkey has been shaken off my back. I woke up this morning feeling more relaxed than I have in months.

So, onwards and upwards. Time for the critiques to start. I have to be ready to discuss the first two stories by 10am.

Boot Camp Day 2

Well, day 2 of Boot Camp with Orson Scott Card was also great.

Today we DID do the story openings, and he DID get to mine and I DID make the same mistakes as everybody else.

The main mistake comes down to this:

As fast as you can in your story opening, have something happening, and have it be clear what is happening.

Don't do anything coy, like not name a character (calling him "he" or "she") or doing some weird thing with no explanation of why people are doing the wierd thing.

The example he used was a car chase--imagine a car chase at the start of a movie. Two cars chasing each other around for 5 minutes. It would be boring.

It's only in the middle of the movie, when you know who is in the cars, that the car chase is interesting. The suspense does not come from asking, "Who is in those cars?" The suspense comes from wondering, "Will the car chase come out the way I want it to?" Do I want the guy in front to get away? Do I want the guy in back to catch the guy?

If you don't understand, you don't care.

So no vauge openings where you see a strange scene the reader doesn't understand, be it a place or an event or an act--the less clear it is what is happpening, the less engaged the reader will be.

Nearly every manuscript opening had some variation of this problem.

Then we reviewed the cards we all wrote for homework last night with complete story ideas. It was amazing. The process he was trying to teach us--the idea that we need to be open to the fact that there are a billion ways to write each story, and how to spot the holes in a story--was so easy with other people's ideas that it seems bizzare how hard it is with your own ideas. But doing it with other people's stuff is great practice and great fun. I honestly now want to write some version of every story my group talked about today (not saying I will . . .).

We also did another 1000 ideas an hour session on the price of magic. And the implications of the price of your magic. And how to find a character with that. And how to make that into a story.

Now is dinner, and then the Q & A on the business of writing. Then--

Well, then I have to write a story. By 10:00 am on Thursday morning. Done, ready to be photocopied by 10:00am Thursday morning.

Wow.

Wish me luck.

You may not hear from me for a while.

Day One Of Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp

Well, Day one is down.

We didn't get to the story intros, or to the other part I've been really looking forward to--the "1000 ideas an hour" session on the rules for magic. That would have helped with tonight's story assignment: Write 5 complete outlines for stories in about 300 words. (Each has to fit on the front and back of an index card.)

He gave us specific assignments for how to get the ideas--some had to be from observation, just from walking around, some had to be from research, and one had to be from an interview with a stranger.

We were paired up for safety's sake, and my partner and I interviewed a man with some fascinating stories, and a man with a fascinating personality, so that went well. I'll probably end up using ideas from both interviews somewhere in the five stories.

Oh! Almost forgot. After lunch we came back and read the stuff we wrote during break, and he called me up first. I ended up getting complimented on handling point of view flawlessly, which made me feel pretty good, but then every single person he called on handled point of view flawlessly, and it was like every person's sample just got better and better. I'm in a really smart class of people, looks like, which is fun.

From there, we talked about story structure until 5, when he turned us loose to go do our homework and have dinner.

I still have to do the research portion of the homework assignment, grab some dinner, and then figure out five whole stories so I think that's it for tonight. Hopefully I'll sneak over and blog some more tomorrow.

PS Hey Marci, thanks for the comment. You're a sweetheart. For those who don't know, Marci and the girls went to a ton of trouble to make this week special for me, including wrapping a present, complete with a separate card, for me to open each day of the six days I'm here.

I have the greatest wife and kids in the world.

Marci, I love you. Seriously.

Mia and Emma--I love both of you, too.

T Minus 90 Minutes to Boot Camp

Well, 90 minutes from now, I'll be starting Orson Scott Card's Writers Class and Literary Boot Camp.

I have no idea whether I'll be able to drop in little notes like this every day--we'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, you can be sure that I'm having a good time.

Go To Bootcamp?

Once upon a time, I was a science fiction writer.

Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. I wrote science fiction. I was even published. Here's a link to the Locus Magazine Index of Science Fiction entry for me. I even won an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest.

And then, my sweet, dear, kind wife gave up a bunch of money so I could go to a writing class with New York Times bestselling author Dave Wolverton. You might know him as David Farland, author of The Runelords series. It was a great workshop, very educational, and very magnanimous of my wife to get me there. There are times when, in my self-deception and near-sighted frustration at the fact my writing never really took me anywhere that I want to blame my wife for being unsupportive. Such is near-sighted and unappreciative. She's been patient and amazing.

So I went to this great workshop with Wolverton, who worked together with me on an outline for a story, helping me flesh out a fully realized world, and a fully realized story. It was everything a guy could ask for. It was an amazing thing I'd been handed.

And I blew it. I choked. I never finished the story. In fact, I never, ever finished another story after that. I haven't even tried to write fiction since.

The first time I remember genuinely getting a reaction from an audience to one of my stories was in fifth grade. I wrote a series of stories featuring kids in my class, and when I read them aloud, the other kids loved them. I loved that they loved it.

I kept writing in sixth grade. To say it was derivative would be an understatement--I literally wrote only using existing characters. Sledge Hammer, Thundercats--I was basically writing fan fiction and turning it in for credit.

The big transition came in Junior High, where I actually wrote a story using an original character. It was a hybrid of a bunch of stuff I read in comic books--my love of Snake-Eyes and the Joker were apparent in my main character of a psychotic ninja who roamed around the country breaking in and out of asylums as the mood struck him. I don't know if it was characterization or my copy-cat roots that made me decide to have him quote movie lines as much as possible--that was the way I talked, so I certainly thought it made for interesting dialogue, and couldn't possibly be a creative crutch.

By the time I was in high school, I was already collecting rejection letters from Sci-fi magazines. First Analog, then Asimov's--but the stories were slowly becoming more and more mine.

One of my favorites was about two guys who were receiving government funding to study alien abductions. In order to maintain their funding, they fake abductions using rubber masks with voice boxes and a helicopter souped up with lights and spaceship sounds. One of them decides they can get more attention if they give somebody symptoms of a disease that's becoming wide-spread, and then make it look like the aliens cure them.

Except the biologist they let in on their little charade double-crosses them. It turns out she thinks she may have found a cure for the disease, but she needs somebody to test it on, since she's no longer licensed to do human trials. She decides these two guys who are lying about their alien cover-up are the perfect patsies. She gives them the real virus and her "cure."

One of the guys--the one who's not as keen on the plan--decides to test it out on himself before he gives it to some innocent person. He takes way too much of the virus, and realizes by morning that the symptoms aren't fake--he knows he's got the disease, and he pretty quickly realizes the "antidote" doesn't help.

In a scene I still love, he puts on one of the fake alien masks and drives in his convertible to the campus they work at to confront him about the whole scam, about what hypocrites they are. They got into this field to prove aliens really existed, and in their zealosy to further their work, they had turned into the very types of frauds they had despised for discrediting the field back when they'd been young and idealistic, full of innocence and nobility of purpose.

That scene resonated with me as I wrote it, and it still resonates with me now.

Don't get me wrong--the story was terrible. In my youthful ignorance, I actually had the guy "preparing" what would turn out to be a virus in a pot on his gas stove at home, as directed by the biologist. I guess I figured that was the closest thing he would have to the bunson burners I "knew" real scientists used.

But the story itself came from everything about who I was at the time--my love for James Randi and debunking fakes and conspiracies, my love for science fiction, and my own youthful belief in idealism and doing what you knew was right, even if it meant self-sacrifice.

And that alien mask on that guy while he argued about what hypocrites they'd become--that was powerful to me.

By the time I'm in college, my writing is coming along, and I get that story published I link to above. I first share it in a science fiction writing class, and the reaction of my classmates is much the same as the reaction I received all those years ago in that fifth grade class room. The story is published, and I feel like things have come full circle. My career is about to begin.

Well, years go by. I get married. I start a family. Things happen, and eventually I have responsibilities that drain me, leave me too tired to write most of the time.

I still write, here and there. And I get encouraging letters, here and there. I send out stories, but get back encouraging rejections. I join writers groups, and get back strong praise in them as well, but I can't seem to close the gap.

It's encouraging and discouraging all at once. Rather than writing new stories, I start spending way too much time going back and revising and rewriting old ones. My output slows as I try to punch up the old stories--add new plots, trim away excess words.

This is when my wife makes the way for me to go to Dave Wolverton's writing workshop.

He does a fantastic job, and lays it all out. In a way I've never understood before, I see writing as the wonderful mix of art and technique and originality and interaction and wonder and mystery and openness and plainness that it is.

I choke. In the middle of all of it, I choke. And somewhere along the line, I decide I'm going to give up writing. "For a while," I tell myself. "Until I get everything else sorted out."

I don't write anything for years. I barely even think about writing.

And then Scott Card decides to have his annual literary Boot Camp in San Diego this year. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away.

And then the President decides to send me a check that makes paying for boot camp not seem like such a leap.

Back when I was writing, I wanted to go to the Boot Camp every year. But for the last few years, it hasn't even been an issue. I haven't given it much beyond a second thought.

But this year it was different. This year, I couldn't help but feel like I should go.

Why? Was it just the close proximity? Was it the money? I hadn't written in ages. What made it different?

At one point, I had decided that nothing was different. I had decided not to go.

But three things changed my mind.

The first was a talk that J.J. Abrams gave at TED. My father introduced me to TED, and sends me links to good talks every once in a while. After checking out a They Might Be Giants show he emailed me about, I saw a link to a J.J. Abrams bit, and decided to check it out. Here it is: (Strong Language Advisory)



In the video, he talks about a mystery box that he got at a magic store when he was a kid, and that he has never opened. The mystery box, to him, represents infinite possibility. So long as it remains unopened, it could be anything in there. He talks about his love for the mystery box.

I completely understand. This guy's speaking my language. His explanation of how cool the unopened mystery box is completely resonates with me.

But I have this other epiphany that probably only me and my wife can really appreciate--that I'm treating my life like he's treating that mystery box.

I'm a big fan of choices. My wife knows that I like to leave as many options open as possible for as long as possible, because I don't like the idea that when the time comes that one particular option becomes clearly preferable, or when a new and altogether better option presents itself, I haven't blown it by selecting a lesser option and sealing off passage to all others.

I've done this with my life. I've left my potential sitting unopened because I'm so enamored of what might be inside and don't want to spoil the picture of what it could be.

But the problem is, life doesn't sit patiently waiting the way the box does. Every morning, a new day gets opened up, and what's inside is not a factor of wishing or dreaming or hoping. It's a matter of doing, and if you spend every day just "getting by," comforting yourself with the hope that tomorrow's mystery box holds something exciting, chances are your days will begin to become remarkably similar to one another.

So his speech simultaneously intrigues me, with its discussion of infinite creative possibilities, as well as chastises me, as I realize that while leaving boxes of magic tricks unopened is a fun and intriguing game, leaving your own life unrealized is a tragedy.

The second thing that changes my mind is a talk by Michal Ballam called "The Creativity Factor. You can listen to it in Real Audio or Windows Media online, although the quality isn't great.

But the talk is about the importance of creativity in the lives of the young, and creativity in the lives of all of us. He talks about how one group of students from one class was encouraged in their creativity by a teacher who wanted to develop the potential in each of them, to let them be true to who they were, instead of focusing on what they couldn't do. And the miraculous way that, as the students developed the talents they were good at, the combination of confidence and trust they built in themselves made other things seem to come easier.

The final thing was not something I read or saw recently, but rather something that's occurred to me as I've pondered why I got so frustrated with writing and why I stopped.

I've blogged before about the book Bonds That Make Us Free.

In that book, C Terry Warner talks about being true to who we really are.

He talks about when he was studying the arts.

One evening when I was nineteen, I was walking along upper Broadway in Manhattan with Suzanne Miller, talking and looking in store windows. I had met Suzanne in one of Stella Adler's acting classes at Stella's studio, which at that time was located on Central Park West. Suzanne had a fierce integrity and a vigilance against humbug in herself that impressed me from the first moments I knew her. These qualities had already exercised a strong influence upon me. Nevertheless, she caught me completely by surprise that night by asking me: "Do you love yourself in the theater or the theater in yourself?"

The question stopped me in midstep. I knew I couldn't answer it the way I wanted to be able to answer it. I didn't have to search my memory to discover that I couldn't; I knew it immediately--or possibly I should say, I knew it already, even before she asked. Indeed, I knew that this had been the question for me all my life, though I had refused to acknowledge it before. It wasn't a question about the theater only, but about my motivations for everything I had ever done. Did I love what I was doing, or did I love myself in doing it?

In that moment a choice lay clearly before me. I could spend my life assembling, feeding, and protecting the egotistical, ravenous, and addictive fiction I called my self--or I could refuse it every sort of nurture and let it die an unregretted death. I knew that unless I somehow could leave off my project of promoting and protecting myself and instead open myself to life, I would be doomed to a lifetime of self-involvement.

The question she asked is based on a quote by Russian playwright Constantin Stanislavski: "Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art."

So caught up was I in the situation he describes, that it took me several readings of the book to realize even so much as what he was saying. It took me even longer to realize that it applied to me.

At some point, I had lost sight of the fact that writing was once something I simply loved to do. Writing had become my salvation, my doorway out of my dead-end job, my path to money and recognition and salvation. When it denied me all of those things, I hated it for it. I gave up on it.

I even remember the exact rejection letter that tipped the scales.

In my age I had become the man I'd written about in high school, stripped of idealism and writing stories he hoped people would buy instead of writing stories he desperately needed to tell. I had the mask on, the voice box, changing who I was, because I was trying harder to be marketable than I was to be honest.

That's not to say a story I needed to tell didn't slip out here or there--one of the last stories I ever wrote, "His Full Fifteen Minutes," is also one of the most honest and heartfelt.

But the question I had to ask myself, and the one that made me decide that I do want to go to boot camp, that I do want to start writing again, is this one: Do I love writing enough that I would do it even if nobody ever paid me a dime for it?

That's the question that tells me whether I should start writing again. That's the question that tells me whether I should pay for boot camp. That's the question that tells me whether I should take time that could be going to homework or my wife or my kids or cleaning or exercise and spend them alone. Typing.

And that's what art should be. That's what art has to be.

When it's all said and done, I still might not get into boot camp. There is an audition process. If that's the case, I'll still go to the writing class, and I'll save myself a bunch of money.

But either way, I'm still going to start writing again.

It's what I do.