Adam Roberts: On Success and Orientation

millymollymo

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2016: the Story So Far | www.AdamRoberts.com


I know a lot of the discussions on this site are about breaking free from the "unpublished" to the published. I know a lot of the published ones here still debate their progress and look further up the ladder. This crossed my path on Twitter this morning via Simon Spanton and is well worth a read regardless of where you are if you're writing. If you're a reader, it's worth considering what you respond to. An easy read? Something to help you grow either mentally or as an individual? Because everyone else is talking about 'that book'?


(Also, I agree behoove is a great word and should be in use a whole lot more.)
 
Hm... this reminded me of an article I wrote and had published in Focus (BSFA's magazine for writers) some time ago. I reproduce here in full, with the caveat that this is my opinion of the writers' obstacle course. Others may have a different view.


Glass Ceilings of Science Fiction

A glass ceiling is an unseen and seemingly unbreakable barrier for people to progress in achieving their aims, whether it is in their careers or in their artistic attainments. We’ve all come across them in our lives, where despite trying every which way we can, we end feeling so frustrated and angry. Our goals seem as impossible as ever.

Such glass ceilings exist for science fiction writers. They should be viewed more as significant milestones on the way to becoming a successfully published science fiction author. Each achieved milestone denotes the writing has taken a major change in quality or direction. So what are these glass ceilings?

Let’s break it down by the results to publishing:

1) For a small circle of family and friends who are more interested in what you are doing rather than the quality of the writing

2) In small circulation magazine as a new writer, which gives you your first unknown audience

3) In a small circulation science fiction magazine as a genre writer, which still gives you a small unknown audience

4) In a medium circulation science fiction magazine, which actually gives you a reasonable (rather than token) fee for the story

5) In a high circulation science fiction magazine, which gives you a professional fee (as per SFWA criteria for joining them say)

6) A novel by a minor publishing house

7) A novel by a big publisher

In theory you can skip some of these steps, but these days, unless you are very lucky or very talented, it is unlikely. The reason? You are learning to improve what and how you write at each step.

So what does it take to jump between the steps?

Everyone who is competent at writing can do step 1. But what makes a story good enough to reach step 2?

First off, you have sufficient skill to write a story with a beginning, middle and end to the magazine’s requirements of theme and word count. And you have the ability to spot the opportunity to submit your stories. But remember you may have been given some leeway in skills because from the publication’s view you are new, and therefore of possible interest to readers.

So how do you go to step 3, being published in a minor in-genre magazine? Well if you have completed step 2, you’ve lost the opportunity of newness. But you are sufficiently skilled to bring an interesting new writing style or innovative minor issue or a slightly different story line to it. Notice the emphasis here is something NEW! It doesn’t have to be anything mind-blowing major, just an adjustment here or there. Re-hashes of old themes they are not!

Going from a minor to a medium circulation genre magazine, is doing step 3, but noticeably better in ALL the skill areas. It’s not good enough to just improve the writing style. The ideas have to be more mind-bending and the story line more unusual. Often the unusual story line follows naturally from the bigger idea, but not always. This is where you find the stories start to write themselves. In part this is due to your deviating away so much from published science fiction that you’re on a green field site. You have more freedom to pick and choose what your story does and it still having that ‘fresh’ feel. Yes, you can go for a new literary style to bring a new voice to science fiction, but finding one that’s not been used before will be very difficult.

Moving on to step 5, the big circulation magazines, is more about acceptance and reputation. You are entering the commercial world here, big time. You will have to act in a professional manner in your dealing with the publisher. Your science fiction stories will of course be even better than they were at step 4. And by this stage you will have a following of some sort, which can either be by popular demand of the readers or, more likely, support from people within the publishing industry.

Moving onto step 6, you are writing novels. These long pieces of work take time and plenty of revision to pull together to make an acceptable product. The plot will be more complex or the drawing of the characters more nuanced or novel theme more difficult to explain or the presentation is difficult to control e.g. several threads of a story from different parts of the future being progressed in alternating chapters. It takes skill to juggle a novel into shape with all its different threads and by-lines. And it has to be sellable. Which means you have to pick a subject that the readers want to know more about. Because of the long haul time-wise between starting a novel and getting it to market, you have to be able to anticipate what you think will sell. Not easy I know. Usually, people opt for variations on current popular themes for their first novel, which usually doesn’t make it. So the only advice I can give here is get a reliable crystal ball.

Step 7 is when you become a big name author – well I don’t have any experience of that at all, so can only comment on what I observe. A lot of people say that it’s luck. I don’t. It’s having a big enough imagination and the ability to control the complexity of big projects. These are skills that can only be developed with practice. Did I hear you say that you can’t build up your imaginative skills? Of course you can. Keep trying. Believe me, it gets easier every time. Here’s the real but – the public only has so much money to spend. So there can only be a limited number of big list authors. It’s a case of the best athlete wins here. You’ve got to go somewhere in your writing where nobody else can hope to follow to have that competitive edge.

Almost everyone goes through these steps as part of the learning to write science fiction curve. All too often writers try, reach a peak of skills, hit the frustration barrier of a glass ceiling, give up and settle to bumbling along at the level they have achieved. What they probably don’t realise is that with practice, their writing continues to improve. They should keep on trying to reach the next level, break whatever glass ceiling is in their way. With time, people can get to step 6. Getting to step 7 depends on how well your interests align with readers.
 
Hmm. Some very personal reflections by Roberts there. I like his reviews (his brutal assault on The Wheel of Time is very funny, although he pulls no punches), but I don’t think his books would be my sort of thing. That said, I sympathise with him a lot. Personally, I don’t feel that I have failed, but that I am not succeeding as quickly and as much as I would like.

Awards have never appealed to me: partly because I don’t really get the idea of awarding something as subjective as art, and partly because, like it or not, SFF awards (obviously the Hugos in particular) have become immensely politicised and largely split into two camps. Neither camp really represents me, although I am closer to one than the other. I also have never really liked (that is to say “enjoyed” rather than “approved of”, and not just in SFF) the kind of books that win awards, at least in the last few decades. Nor really does serious SF fandom much appeal to me for various reasons that I’m sure are unfair, so I won’t go into them. Suffice it to say that the conventions I’ve done were fun, but I was left with the feeling that I just wasn’t quite into it enough.

I suppose for me the aim is to produce something that is of high quality but is a popular success – the “balance” that Roberts talks about. Obviously I’d like to sell a million copies so I didn’t have to worry about money any more (like 99% and rising in our society, worrying about money is something of a fact of life, although I’m hardly destitute by quite a way). I continue to believe that you can produce a saleable product that isn’t dumb, or preachy, or a rehashing of someone else’s better work or a variation on a tired theme. And actually, to me, mass-market SFF for adults where the cutting edge is, because that’s where the majority of serious readers are – casual readers, too, who aren’t enthusiasts and are coming to the story fresh*.

I think Adam Roberts is too hard on himself. If he decides that his book has “failed”, it probably has, as he’s the author and can decide what failure means. But to conclude from that that the book is not good enough would be wrong. There are plenty of arbitrary reasons for that failure, and the approval of awards panels seems like one of the most arbitrary of all. But I do understand how Roberts sees “trundling along” as failure. I know the feeling and I don’t want to trundle on until I'm writing Space Captain Smith #78, which would inevitably be bad because I’d have run out of jokes by then. You have to do new things and try to move on as a writer, and it is incredibly frustrating when those new things don’t take off.

Anyhow, I hope Roberts’ next book does well. It sounds like it has all the ingredients – which is no guarantee of success, of course, but raises the chances considerably.

(As an aside, I would say about Serendipity’s post that the stages listed aren’t necessarily stepping stones to publication and publishers may not see them that way. Short stories are a very different thing to novels, and not all short story writers want to produce novels. I’m not sure if that was what Serendipity was saying, so I may have misinterpreted his or her post.)


*I don’t mean to suggest that YA is worthless as literature or entertainment. But YA seems to be necessarily about the troubles and experiences of teenagers, which don’t interest me and, I think, can get in the way of (for an adult) discussion of more interesting issues.
 
*I don’t mean to suggest that YA is worthless as literature or entertainment. But YA seems to be necessarily about the troubles and experiences of teenagers, which don’t interest me and, I think, can get in the way of (for an adult) discussion of more interesting issues.

Often, but maybe not always. I'm thinking of Philip Pullman especially, although it could be argued that His Dark Materials for instance is an adult novel with teenaged characters.
 
This hearkens back to our thread about what motivates us as writers. This guy is motivated by awards. That's a tough one. As Toby notes, awards are highly politicized. In subject matter, writer-cliques, and the whims of fashion. For my part, while I'd be gratified to be short-listed for a prize, it's tough to imagine myself expecting a nomination.

He did open my eyes to a frustration I hadn't considered before: successful enough to keep getting book deals, but presumably not commercially successful enough to quit the day job. I had always assumed that if you don't achieve some kind of mainstream commercial success at some point, or achieve the prestige of critical darling, the book deals dry up.
 
I had always assumed that if you don't achieve some kind of mainstream commercial success at some point, or achieve the prestige of critical darling, the book deals dry up.

He's with Gollancz, though. I always got the impression they were a bit more old-skool than most.
 
He's with Gollancz, though. I always got the impression they were a bit more old-skool than most.
Although Simon Spanton (no longer with Gollancz IIRC) said to me on 15/5/15: "The market is insanely tough at the moment and we are looking to reduce the number of books we publish." So a major publisher believes in him, which is pretty damn successful. (For all I know that could be why Simon left...!)
 
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He did open my eyes to a frustration I hadn't considered before: successful enough to keep getting book deals, but presumably not commercially successful enough to quit the day job. I had always assumed that if you don't achieve some kind of mainstream commercial success at some point, or achieve the prestige of critical darling, the book deals dry up.

But this the nature of success - at what point do you say you're done? There is always another peak and another and we forget the goals we did achieve.

In terms of the critical vs book deal - I know a lot of authors who are niche but critically acclaimed, and there is a place for them. Often they get their funding stream a different way (so, for instance, an award can bring a house a lot of attention and sell books beyond the writer's own.)

I think it depends how much your publisher/agent believes in you, and how much they've already invested. Kameron Hurley is a good eg of a writer who tipped after limited sales. Arguably, Adrian Tchaikovsky (who won the Clarke award yesterday), is another slow-build.

I also think - rewards are very skewed in this industry. There are some people I know whose sales I would love. I suspect there are some people who would love the sort of reviews I've had. I've had invites to cons as a guest - others would like that. But I've never been given my own column and might like that. This is all tongue thoroughly in cheek but once we establish a system of value being proven by x, then we doom ourselves to feeling miserable.

You cannot control what you get in writing. You might be a critical darling, or a best seller. You might be both. You might find that the blog you started for fun gets more attention than your books. You might find that you have a profile to die for and no sales - or sales but no profile to build them further with.

But if you can put your value (I had a huge blog on just this theme once JoZebwrites: On pride) on pride and whether you like what you wrote then you move to the point where motivation is integral and ring fence the happy feeling. Certainly, any study of motivation would tell you that the attainment of a goal you have no ability to influence your attainment of is not going to motivate - but will demotivate. Money - so bestselling - is only a motivator to a point (that point being around £55-60,000 GBP per annum). The only true motivator comes from self empowerment, and what Adam is doing here is disempowering himself.
 
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Immunisation against big success will indeed bring you less pain/anguish in the long run, but you run the risk of falling into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, and it could be that this mentality will negatively affect future works. Then again, this is an amateur scribbler with hopeful dreams speaking, and Roberts has lived disheartening things I have yet to experience.

I did find it funny that Roberts downplayed his next work so much. Who's gonna want to read something even the author himself holds little hopes for?
 
I did find it funny that Roberts downplayed his next work so much. Who's gonna want to read something even the author himself holds little hopes for?

He downplayed its artistic merit, while expressing hope that it has more commercial appeal than his previous work. Those are two different things, though it is unusual for a writer to publicly say that they are two different things.
 
Who's gonna want to read something even the author himself holds little hopes for?

Me. I've always admired him as a writer, but find him too much about abstract ideas and not characters or plot. His next one sounds like it might be something I'd like to read.

By the way, it might not have been on any awards listings, but I checked out Amazon reviews of The Thing Itself and they're very high.
 
He is indeed an intellectual writer (check out the brilliant confusions of Snow) and sometimes that can lead authors down some pretty dark dead-end paths. I think he could have focussed a bit more on the random ups and downs of the biz in his blog post.

As for comments above on the value of good reviews, when people decide the way forward is to deliberately court and encourage 5* reviews regardless of the quality of the work, that does reduce how meaningful their reviews are. If you want to be an author you have to dare to let your readers tell you what they think.

Motivation is a peculiar beast though. I think Adam Roberts is motivated to write SF ideas - which is fine. He's one of the best at that. He's probably going through a bad patch, and all authors have those…
 
An interesting side from Ian Sales here:
Awards, rewards and self-publishing
Though mostly focusing on awards, he weaves in thoughts relating to the above blog, and the subject.

I thought this was provocative:

In today’s genre conversation, books receive either five stars or one star. It’s a piss-poor excuse for a conversation, and it’s poisoning the genre. Not only is sf blanding out, we seem to be actively encouraging it to do so…
I do wonder what the fanboy enthusiasms of cites like goodreads and Tor are doing to genre fiction. It does seem like there are only two popular responses to a work of fiction: OMG that was so awesome! Love it!!! and Meh, it just didn't do it for me.

We've addressed the question before on this site. Is there a place for critical analysis of the traditional sort in a publishing world driven by egalitarian social media, where the great bulk of participants simply want to share enthusiasm and cheer on the popular, and where critical analysis will usually be denounced as elitist? And if we discard critical analysis, where does that leave awards?
 
I think that's right, but I don't know to what extent it's right. Definitely the ability of anyone to write a review means that the quality of reviews has dropped, it's harder to find good reviews, and almost nobody is paid to write them. I've said it before, but I think the attitude of people towards appreciating fiction has changed, too. I don't know if this is to do with the internet, or just has happened at the same time, but there seems to be an increasing need for stories to deliver an emotional kick rather than to explore new ground. Audiences want "the feels" far more than before, it seems, which to me seems to be something of an invitation for writers to produce formulaic work.

As to the validity of including self-published writing in awards, I'm not sure I quite follow Ian Sales' argument. In any case, I don't have a strong view on this, but I do wonder if it's a good idea to include more experimental works that might not otherwise see publication, especially if they won't be much appreciated in the majority of the internet.
 
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