Warning: This will be a long post veering back and forth over multiple subjects that I see as related, but you may not.

There is a tradition among science fiction writers of “paying it forward.” The idea is that you can’t pay back the people who helped you, so you pay it forward instead, by helping others. I’ve heard it said that the phrase was popularized by Jerry Pournelle after he asked Robert Heinlein how he and Larry Niven could pay Heinlein back for the extremely helpful letter he wrote them critiquing The Mote in God’s Eye (at least, I think it was Mote). Supposedly Heinlein told him, “You can’t pay me back; pay it forward instead.”

This is trotted out, then, as why established SF/F writers should help beginners — to “”pay forward” the help they received when they were beginners. It’s supposed to be something special about the SF/fantasy field.

I have a few problems with this concept.

First off, SF fandom claiming this idea as uniquely its own is, shall we say, not firmly grounded in reality. Older writers helping younger writers along is a tradition much older than science fiction, and it crops up in every genre. It’s absolutely normal practice for writers in every field to teach writing, since actually making a living writing is rare, and it’s commonplace for those teachers to recognize and mentor the most promising students.

I talk to writers in other genres — I used to be a member of Novelists Inc., which is mostly romance writers, and I was briefly a member of Mystery Writers of America — and there’s plenty of mentoring going on in all of them. Romance Writers of America seems to exist almost entirely to mentor beginners. So this attitude that SF has something special in “paying it forward” is, to me, self-congratulatory puffery.

Another issue I have with the concept is that many beginning writers seem to feel it’s necessary, that it just isn’t possible to become a writer without mentoring. You need contacts in the industry, they say. If you don’t have writers to vouch for you, or personal contacts with editors or agents, you can’t break in. If you aren’t involved in fandom, if you don’t have editors providing detailed feedback, you’re screwed. You need to have supportive elders paying it forward. They feel that they are owed support by the established writers in the field, because after all, they were helped by the previous generation, right?

And that brings me to the long, ranting part of the post. The very short version is that I don’t feel I have anything to repay.

I sold my first novel, The Overman and the Basilisk, to Lester del Rey at Del Rey Books in May of 1979. He retitled it The Lure of the Basilisk, and retitled me Lawrence Watt-Evans. I didn’t actually meet Lester until 1982.

I didn’t meet my first self-proclaimed, non-gafiated SF fan until March, 1980, when the recently-formed Blue Grass Science Fiction Association (BGSFA, pronounced Bugs-Fah; later renamed LexFA, the
Lexington Fantasy Association) saw a “local boy makes good” piece about me in the Lexington Herald-Leader and invited me to a meeting.

The first published fiction writer I ever met was Harry Stubbs, a.k.a. Hal Clement. I think I was eight. He came to the house to talk to my father about NEACT business. NEACT was the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers; Harry and my dad were both active members.

So was Isaac Asimov, and that connection allowed my parents to contact him to talk at our church when I was a teenager. At the time I was actively avoiding all church activities — at the age of eight I had rebelled against the staggeringly boring sermons of Rev. Holmes and refused to attend any services. (I wasn’t the only one; the parish committee fired Holmes not long after, replacing him with David Weissbard.) Even Asimov wasn’t enough to lure me back to church, but I did wander over to the Common afterwards and got a look at him as he was preparing to leave. I’ll count that as the second.

The third published fiction writer I ever met was me. If you don’t want to count that, then it was Stephen Leigh, at Rivercon V, my first convention, in July 1980, five months after my first novel was published. Phyllis Ann Karr was next, then Roger Zelazny, and after that I lose track; that convention had a pretty good guest list.

So much for writers nurturing the next generation in my case.

As for help from editors, the first editor I ever met was probably Carol Amick, who worked for the town weekly, the Bedford Minuteman, and went on to become its editor. We never spoke; when I say “met,” I mean she was pointed out to me when we were in the same room.

The second was a man whose name I’ve forgotten, the editor of the Bedford Patriot, the short-lived right-wing rival to the Minuteman. When I was seventeen I decided that their writing was so bad they
might even consider hiring a high-school kid; I was right, and they bought three or four feature articles from me.

My first contact with a fiction editor was a rejection slip from Ed Ferman at F&SF in 1972. It was the standard form letter, no note. I went on to collect an assortment of rejections — seventy-one before I sold anything — from a variety of editors. All of those rejections were form letters except for a handful from Moshe Feder, who was then an editorial assistant to Ted White at Fantastic and Amazing, and a couple from Hank Davis, who was Ed Ferman’s assistant at F&SF. Those came along in 1974 and 1975; Hank was sending them because Moshe had urged him to. They were short typed notes, never more than two paragraphs, explaining why my stories were being rejected and offering encouragement to try again. In one case it was because the story was deemed too much like Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; at that time I had never heard of Fafhrd and the Mouser, so that one turned out to be very useful, because I went out and found the relevant books and read them. I love those stories, but I don’t really see the resemblance other than it being sword & sorcery about a pair of adventurers.

I sold a short-short to The American Atheist in August, 1975. The entirety of my contact with them after submission was a note in May of 1975 telling me they were buying it, and a packet in August containing my contributor’s copy and my check.

The third editor to ever send me something other than a form rejection or a form acceptance and a check was Lester del Rey, when he bought my first novel with a three-page, single-spaced revision letter.

So much for detailed editorial feedback being necessary to a writer’s development, or editors only buying from people they know.

Another standard way to break in is supposed to be through writing workshops. I first heard of writing workshops in 1980, after my first novel was published. I signed up for one anyway, thinking it might be educational, and was severely disappointed — I had more professional publishing credentials than anyone else there, including the instructor. The only ones I’ve attended since then, it was as an instructor.

As far as other formal training goes, I have never taken any sort of course in creative writing, or fiction writing, or whatever. The only English courses I ever took were required ones.

Family support? My parents actively tried to discourage me from writing from 1962 until 1971. Late in 1971 my father seems to have decided that if I hadn’t given up yet, maybe I could pick up a little extra money writing articles; it was his idea to try the local papers. That was the full extent of his support. When The Lure of the Basilisk was published, a couple of months before he died, he read it and informed me that it wasn’t really very good. My mother liked it better.

I never heard what two of my sisters thought of it. Jody considered it too bloody, and stopped reading my work midway through my second novel, The Seven Altars of Dûsarra (originally The City of Seven Temples; Lester changed it), when my hero lopped off an enemy’s head. She never read anything else I wrote after that, up until she died in 1986.

My sister Ruth said that for the first couple of chapters she kept thinking, “I could have written this. This sounds just like any Evans.” Then somewhere around Chapter Three it took off, and since then she’s been a fan.

I don’t believe my brother’s ever read any of my work. If he has, he’s never mentioned it.

My wife Julie was supportive of my writing up to a point; she thought it was a cool thing to do, she did read and enjoy it, and she had no idea how difficult it was to succeed as a writer. However, she also made it clear that she didn’t intend to support me forever if it didn’t work out, and in fact by March of 1979 she was clearly fed up. I quit writing and started a mail-order collectibles business. When Lester bought the novel, though, I went back to writing with Julie’s blessing.

Right up until that first novel was published, my in-laws kept asking when I was going to get a real job.

So much for writing education or an enthusiastically supportive family being necessary.

Oh, yes — agents, another supposed necessity. I knew nothing about agents when I sold my first novel. When Judy-Lynn del Rey rejected The Chromosomal Code three years and four novels later, saying it was publishable but not right for Del Rey, that was the first time I gave any thought to getting an agent. I asked Lester for advice, since he was a writer himself and had dealt with scads of agents.

He didn’t offer any advice; instead I got a letter from a guy named Russell Galen who told me that he was Lester’s agent, Lester had suggested he contact me, and that he’d like to see a sample of my work because he might be interested in representing me.

He was interested, and sold The Chromosomal Code to Avon.

Russ has been my agent ever since, pretty much. (There was a brief interruption when he left Scott Meredith and I didn’t immediately follow.)

This is why I don’t have much useful advice for people looking for agents; my experience really doesn’t serve as a model for anyone else.

To sum up: My experience doesn’t fit any of the standard advice. I had no contacts, no training, no support; I just wrote, and sent what I wrote to editors. That worked well enough to sell my first articles when I was seventeen, my first story when I was twenty-one, and my first novel when I was twenty-four.

I didn’t talk about writing. I didn’t read about writing. I didn’t workshop my writing. I didn’t know any writers, editors, or agents.

I just wrote.

That worked for me.

And I didn’t receive any help that I felt I should repay.

If I sometimes seem impatient with needy beginners, well, that’s why.

On the other hand, I do try to help out promising beginners. I have advice pages on the web; I’ve read stories for friends (and if you have to ask, you aren’t a good enough friend); I’ve taught workshops without pay. (I’ve also taught and critiqued for money, though that’s not relevant here.)

But I’m not paying anything forward. And you don’t need help.

Huh. It’s mid-April, and this is my first post of the year. Other things have been keeping me much too busy. In fact, the only reason I’m posting this now is that I’m sufficiently stressed out over other affairs that I wanted to do something unimportant, so it won’t matter if I screw it up.

Warning: This is a long post.

Back in February I was invited to write a guest blog entry for a blog devoted to writing advice, which I did, with this result.

However, it took me several tries to get there, and I thought it might be amusing to look at just how it developed. I knew I wanted to write about how would-be writers tend to forget that writing professionally is first and foremost a business, rather than a purely artistic endeavor, so I started out with this:

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I had never met another writer before I sold my first novel. I had never attended a workshop or taken a creative writing class. I didn’t subscribe to any writers’ magazines or read any books about writing, and back then there weren’t any websites or blogs or newsgroups. I’d never been to a convention of any sort. Everything I knew about the writing business came from reading submission guidelines and Writer’s Market – I believe it was the 1974 edition – or from implications in various story introductions and essays. Oh, or from personal rejections from editors.

(For those of you too young to know about Writer’s Market, it was just what it sounds like, a fat annual hardcover volume listing markets that would consider submissions from freelancers. By the time each volume saw print, many of the listings were out of date. By the time the next edition came out, it seemed as if most of the listings were out of date.)

Perhaps as a result of this isolation, I never had any doubt about what I was doing, or what I wanted out of my writing – I wanted to sell stories that people would enjoy reading.

In May it will be thirty years since my first novel sale, and in that thirty years I’ve met hundreds of writers, attended dozens of workshops, taught writing classes in many forms, and while I still know why I write, I honestly don’t know about a lot of you other folks.

Then I stopped. This wasn’t so much advice as autobiography, which was not what I had been asked for. So I started over, trying to compress the stuff about my own background. I got further this time…

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.

So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

I sometimes do novel critiques for money, and there’s an assumption built into those that the author whose work I’m assessing is looking to publish it professionally through a regular commercial publisher. When I write up my reports, what I’m doing is giving my best estimate of what needs to be done in order to meet that goal. (Often, this boils down to, “Write a different novel and do a better job of it.”)

I’ve also taught writing classes, and again, there’s an assumption that I’m teaching my students how to produce stories they can sell to commercial publishers. After all, that’s what I do. It’s my known area of expertise, and the reason people are willing to pay me for this stuff.

Every so often, though, I get a critique client or a writing student who has some other goal entirely. I always find this disconcerting. It usually isn’t apparent until I say something like, “No one’s ever going to buy this the way you’ve done it,” only to be answered with, “I’m not trying to sell it.”

Honestly, I don’t understand this. If you aren’t trying to sell it, what do you expect me to teach you?

In one case, many years ago, I was teaching a workshop and had a student bring in a story that was, in my professional opinion, ready to be published. Not only that, but it fit the theme of an open anthology that a friend of mine was editing. I said as much. I said I couldn’t critique it because there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I gave the author the name and address of the anthology editor and told her to send it in, and get ready for her first sale. I did everything but address the envelope for her.

She never sent it. I checked with the anthology editor later, and no such story had ever arrived, nor had the author’s name shown up on any submissions. I even checked with some magazine editors, just in case she’d decided to go that route, rather than the anthology. Nothing.

Eventually I ran into one of her former classmates from the workshop and asked if he knew anything about it. He said that he’d seen her at various workshops over a period of years, and about half her stories were deemed ready to submit to pro markets, but as far as anyone knew she had never actually submitted one, and had no intention of ever submitting one. She liked writing them and hearing people praise them, but wasn’t interested in actually getting anything published.

Now, I have nothing against writing for fun, and sharing your stories with friends. There’s plenty of that on the web, and before we had the web there were fanzines. It’s what most fanfic is all about, too. No, the part I don’t understand is paying hundreds of dollars to attend writing workshops when you aren’t interested in what the workshops are designed to teach, i.e., how to get professionally published. What did she get out of it that was worth the cost?

And I stopped again. I’d gone off on a tangent that might be interesting, but once again, it wasn’t really the advice I wanted to give. I backed up to where I thought I went off the rails and tried again:

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.

So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.

Writers (and many readers) often gripe about seeing “crap” get published and make money – I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the works of Dan Brown or Clive Cussler or Terry Goodkind. They’ll also bemoan how neglected more talented authors are. The fact is, though, that Brown and Cussler and Goodkind sell hundreds of thousands of books and bring in big piles of money, and publishers are in business to make money.

There are those who claim that they sell zillions of books because the publishers put huge amounts of promotion behind them, but that’s reversing cause and effect. Publishers put most of that money into these books and authors only after they’d demonstrated that they’ll sell. Once you know you have a product customers want, it’s worth advertising it; if you have something where you don’t know whether there’s a market, putting money into it is a gamble. It’s much easier to get a snowball effect when the snowball’s already rolling. If publishers really knew how to turn any piece of crap into a bestseller, they’d do it all the time.

Okay, that was better, but still not going quite where I wanted. I tried again.

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.
So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.
This often leads to a basic disconnect between writer and publisher. The writer assumes that his job is to write the absolute best story he can, but what the publisher wants is a story that he can sell.

These aren’t necessarily the same thing. Pretty much every writer can point to bestsellers that he thinks are crap, but which sell just fine, and then there are those wonderful, brilliant writers whose work doesn’t sell. In fact, the term “a writer’s writer” is often code for “a good writer whose work doesn’t sell worth a damn.”

The fact is, the reading public doesn’t make their buying decisions based on what writers consider quality. Readers buy stuff they expect to find entertaining, and superb writing is fairly low on the list of elements that entertain your typical book-buyer. If the truth be told, there are several features that writers, especially beginning writers, worry about that most readers don’t care about, especially in genre fiction.

Originality, for example. Would-be writers are often obsessed with finding a story idea that no one’s used before. This is especially acute in the science fiction field, but it turns up in mysteries and fantasy and probably other genres I don’t know as well. I’ve been asked hundreds of times, “Has anyone ever used this idea?”

The answer is pretty much always “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” Brilliant new ideas just aren’t that important. A favorite old story retold well is likely to be received with more enthusiasm than something completely new. How many versions of the Arthurian cycle have been successful? How many reworkings of the Iliad, or the story of Belisarius, or the Orpheus story, have there been? Oh, it’s nice if you come up with some stunning new approach, but it’s not necessary.

Accuracy is another one – but it’s a tricky one. There are things that you absolutely must get right, but what they are depends on your particular audience. If you’re writing a hardboiled detective story and your hero pulls out a gun, you better know what kind of a gun it is, how many rounds it holds, and just what a bullet from it will do. If you say it’s a .38 Police Positive, you better know that that’s a revolver, not an automatic, that it has no safety, that it holds six bullets, and so on.

But you don’t need to know the law, or real police procedures, or what the requirements for a P.I. license are, because readers generally don’t know that stuff.

If you’re writing romance, you don’t need to get the guns right.

If you’re writing science fiction, you don’t need to know much science. What’s important to the story is what your gadgets do, not how they work. Over-explaining will just slow down the story. Unless it’s important to the plot, you don’t need to explain how your starships can travel faster than light; they just do, by authorial fiat.

The only things you need to get right are the ones that will throw the reader out of the story if you get them wrong.

And style – I’ve seen beginning writers rework sentences over and over, trying to make every one into a perfect little gem. Readers don’t care; they just want the story.

That’s the essential thing – the story. Readers want characters they care about, going through experiences that matter. You can have the most brilliantly original idea ever, and if it isn’t part of a good story no one will care. You can have every detail of your setting 100% accurate, and if nothing interesting happens there no one will care. You can have elegant, perfectly-phrased sentences, but if they don’t tell the reader something he wants to know, no one will care.

Those bestselling authors who write “crap” are telling stories that readers care about.

Originality? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon retells a story that’s been around for centuries.

Accuracy? Dan Brown’s history and theology are nonsense, but The Da Vinci Code sold a zillion copies.

Style? Pick your own example; there are plenty.

But these people are telling stories that catch readers’ interest, that touch something below the conscious level. On a technical level their work may be lousy, but it doesn’t matter.

And then on the other side, I’ve seen unpublished work that was beautifully executed but that’s never going to sell for one reason or another. I’ve argued with writers who won’t compromise their artistic vision.

That was almost right, but it wasn’t really “Art vs. Commerce” anymore. Also, I wasn’t happy with the tone — it seemed too negative. And I wasn’t coming up to a tidy ending. So I retitled and revised it, and here’s what I actually sent in:

Worrying About the Wrong Things

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have misguided notions of what matters in the business of writing. They think that if they can just master all the techniques, and turn out a good enough story, they can sell it.

It doesn’t work like that. It’s not technique that matters.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine, go ahead and focus on technique – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.

This often leads to a basic disconnect between writer and publisher. The writer assumes that his job is to write the absolute best story he can, but what the publisher wants is a story that he can sell.

These aren’t necessarily the same thing. Pretty much every writer can point to bestsellers that he thinks are crap, but which sell just fine, and then there are those wonderful, brilliant writers whose work doesn’t sell. The term “a writer’s writer” is often code for “a good writer whose work doesn’t sell worth a damn.”

The fact is, the reading public doesn’t make their buying decisions based on what writers consider quality. Readers buy stuff they expect to find entertaining, and superb writing is fairly low on the list of elements that entertain your typical book-buyer. If the truth be told, there are several features that writers, especially beginning writers, worry about that most readers don’t care about, especially in genre fiction.

Sometimes would-be writers worry about stuff because it’s what they learned in English class.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s what workshops focus on.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s cited in “how to” books.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s what they care about.

It’s fine to care about all these things, and to do your best to get it right, but technical quality is not what will make your story sell. There are several things that writing workshops and rabid fans focus on that just aren’t that important in the real world.

Originality, for example. Would-be writers are often obsessed with finding a story idea that no one’s used before. This is especially acute in the science fiction field, but it turns up in mysteries and fantasy and probably other genres I don’t know as well. I’ve been asked hundreds of times, “Has anyone ever used this idea?”

The answer is pretty much always “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” Brilliant new ideas just aren’t that important. A favorite old story retold well is likely to be received with more enthusiasm than something completely new. How many versions of the Arthurian cycle have been successful? How many reworkings of the Iliad, or the story of Belisarius, or the Orpheus story, have there been? Oh, it’s nice if you come up with some stunning new approach, but it’s not necessary. Your story may be as old as humanity itself; what matters is how well you tell it.

Related to this is the notion that one must avoid any sort of cliché. Writing workshops will often convince beginners to avoid phrases like “white as snow” because they’re clichés.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re clichés What matters is whether they communicate with the reader. “White as snow” works because most people have seen snow, and they know just how purely white it is. It still conjures up a definite image.

“Black as pitch,” on the other hand – how many modern Americans have ever seen pitch? How many even know what pitch is?

It’s not whether it’s a cliché that matters; it’s whether it still conveys what the writer wants to convey.

Accuracy is another issue that writers get hung up on – but it’s a tricky one. There are things that you absolutely must get right, but what they are depends on your particular audience. If you’re writing a hardboiled detective story and your hero pulls out a gun, you better know what kind of a gun it is, how many rounds it holds, and just what a bullet from it will do. If you say it’s a .38 Police Positive, you better know that that’s a revolver, not an automatic, that it has no safety, that it holds six bullets, and so on. Get that wrong, and you’ll knock a lot of readers right out of the story.

But you don’t need to know the law, or real police procedures, or what the requirements for a P.I. license are, because readers generally don’t know that stuff.

If you’re writing romance, rather than mystery, you don’t need to get the guns right. Romance readers generally don’t care.

If you’re writing science fiction, you don’t need to know much science. What’s important to the story is what your gadgets do, not how they work. Over-explaining will just slow down the story. Unless it’s important to the plot, you don’t need to explain how your starships can travel faster than light; they just do, by authorial fiat.

The only things you need to get right are the ones that will throw the reader out of the story if you get them wrong.

And then there’s style – I’ve seen beginning writers rework sentences over and over, trying to make every one into a perfect little gem. Readers don’t care; they just want the story.

That’s the essential thing – the story. Readers want characters they care about, going through experiences that matter. You can have the most brilliantly original idea ever, and if it isn’t part of a good story no one will care. You can have every detail of your setting 100% accurate, and if nothing interesting happens there no one will care. You can have elegant, perfectly-phrased sentences, but if they don’t tell the reader something he wants to know, no one will care.

Those bestselling authors who write “crap” are telling stories that readers care about.

Originality? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon retells a story that’s been around for centuries.

Accuracy? Dan Brown’s history and theology are nonsense, but The Da Vinci Code sold a zillion copies.

Style? Pick your own example; there are plenty.

But these people are telling stories that catch readers’ interest, that touch something below the conscious level. On a technical level their work may be lousy, but it doesn’t matter. They connect with the reader.

That’s what matters, and that’s what will sell a story, where originality, accuracy, and brilliant prose won’t. You can be hackneyed and inaccurate and sloppy, and it won’t matter, so long as you don’t commit the one unpardonable error, the one thing that really counts.

The one thing you must never be is boring.

If you care to do a side-by-side comparison, you’ll see that Victoria then edited it a little – with permission, and with me approving all the changes – to produce the final version.

Which still isn’t exactly what I’d wanted to say in the first place, but it was close enough, and I wasn’t willing to put in any more work on something I wasn’t getting paid for. So there it is.