The most obvious and least practical method is to write the entire epic before allowing any of it to be published. This has the advantage of treating the multi-volume series the exact same way as one would treat a story complete in one volume: you write the whole thing, you edit and revise the whole thing, you review the whole thing for consistency and pacing, and then you finally publish it. Unfortunately, very few writers are in a position to do this with even a short series or trilogy (not to mention that most of us lack the patience necessary to do without readers for so long), which means that some of the books will probably be in print and un-revisable before the end of the series is even in first draft.

That leaves the would-be epic novelist with one option: prevention. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than ignoring the whole issue.

The first thing to do is to understand the pitfalls. Really understand them, not just as a check-off list, but as things you can recognize almost as soon as you see them. If you don’t recognize something as problematic, it’s almost impossible to fix even after the fact; preventing it from happening in the first place will likely be a matter of luck, no more. Also, there is no writing technique that is always a bad idea. If you understand the potential problems, then you’re also more likely to understand when they aren’t problems, and when adding another viewpoint or subplot or volume is a plus for your story, rather than a minus.

The next thing to remember is that prevention involves a certain amount of planning ahead. This can be tricky for the sort of writer for whom outlining or telling the story kills it dead, but it’s usually not completely impossible if they avoid the particular areas (usually plot) that do the story-killing, and focus instead on more abstract aspects of the story.

For the rest of us, planning ahead usually begins with some kind of shape or structure. The Harry Potter series is shaped by the British school system; each book covers one school year until Harry reaches what should be his graduation year. That shape or structure is more or less inherent to the story Rowling was telling, but many stories don’t have such a tidy shape embedded in them from the beginning. For those, the author has to find or choose or invent the framework that will support the story: the seven deadly sins or cardinal virtues, one per book for seven books, for instance, or an invented set of tasks to be covered, events to happen, places to go, or people to meet.

While this kind of shape or structure, or even an arbitrary limit on the number of volumes, can do a lot to help an author keep a story under control, it isn’t absolutely necessary. The important thing is the control, not the specific mechanism by which it is achieved. The longer the journey, the more necessary it is to have a road map and compass, and to check them frequently to make sure one is still on track. (Sadly, they have not yet invented a GPS for writers that will break in while you’re typing to say “This scene is off track; your characters will never get across the mountains this way. To get back on track, delete the snow-elves, mystic polar bears, and cloud-fairies and have your characters go down Caradhras and head south to the Mines of Moria instead.”)

Then comes the outline, which is only for people who actually do outlines. People who can’t outline or who go by instinct still need something, but it’s usually not specific incidents or a plot line; it’s more of a feel for “what this story is.” Whatever you do, you will probably need it to be clearer and more detailed than you think, because the basics of prevention involve regular checking of what you write against your outline or feeling. It’s not a matter of rigidly following the plan; you’re allowed to decide that I-70 from Denver is closed, so you’ll have to swing south through Utah to get to L.A. What you’re trying to do is make sure that you don’t end up in Mexico City while you’re still promising everyone that you’re going to get to Los Angeles one of these days, yes, indeed you are.

To do this, you establish a routine of checking back with your road map/outline every ten chapters, or every 25,000 words, or every third-of-a-book, to make sure that what you’re doing is still heading in the right direction. If it isn’t, you then need to decide whether you can keep your shiny new characters/subplot/background and get back on track without too much of a detour. If it isn’t possible, you grit your teeth and take it out. The idea is to set your check-in so that it’s frequent enough that you won’t end up trashing half a book or more, but not so frequent that you start feeling like it’s a straightjacket that takes all the fun out of it.

Checking in at the end of the first draft of each book is not optional. This is where the prevention part really kicks into gear, because whether you’re following an outline or writing an epic by the seat of your pants, you are going to be stuck with whatever you’ve written for the rest of the series, so you need to make sure you can live with it. If you are particularly methodical, you can, at the end of each book, make a list of all the viewpoint characters and how many scenes they each have, or do a chart of all your subplots and where they are and where you expect them to go. The idea being, of course, to see if they’ve started proliferating madly on you, so you can catch them while you can still do something about it.

At this point – the end of the first draft for Volume-Whatever in the series – you have a choice: you can either revise backward, or revise forward. That is, you have your middle-of-series draft, which has started developing in unexpected directions. You can either trim it back ruthlessly so as to keep to your original vision (backward revision, i.e., revising the book you have just written), or you can change your vision of the story (forward revision, i.e., revising your outline or concept or whatever you’ve been using to keep things on track).

Be aware that revising your outline/concept is a lot of work. If you’re still early in your epic series, say book 1-2, you can rip up and rearrange major plot threads without it being too noticeable, but this will mean essentially redeveloping the entire rest of the series plot outline. The farther you’ve gotten in your epic, the harder it is to change course. This is possibly one of the reasons for Epic Bloat – if the writer has a Cool New Idea halfway through Book 3 of a six-volume epic, it looks like being easier to add another three or four volumes to the series (thus making the change barely 1/3 of the way through, rather than halfway through). Don’t. Really. It will not end well.

To sum up: preventing Epic Bloat is mostly a matter of paying attention and being ruthlessly honest about what is and isn’t necessary to the story. To do this, you have to know what your overall story is and how your subplots fit into it, and you have to keep checking as you write and finish various volumes to see if you are still writing the story you set out to write.

It is always a bit awkward when you finally get around to reading this much-ballyhooed book and discover that as far as you are concerned, it is at best OK. It’s much worse when you read it and decide it’s awful.

I’ve had that happen a number of times over the years, and my first reaction is always “Ohmigosh, what am I going to say to all those friends who love it so much?” After a small delay, my second reaction is usually “What the heck do they see in this, anyway?” and my third is “I’m really tired of hearing about how great this is when I disagree.”

That’s the point at which I generally pull up my big girl pants and admit to everybody that no, I didn’t think the couple were absolutely adorable, I thought they were idiots and spent most of the book wanting to smack them upside the head, or that the style was so wooden that the characters never came alive for me, or that no, I didn’t think that plot was particularly clever and original, I thought it had long gray whiskers back when Homer was looking for subplots for the Odyssey.

Fortunately, most of my friends react to this with long, productive discussions about what each of us likes in a book and why, rather than with tar and feathers. One of the first things that becomes obvious when you do this is that every reader seems to have a particular itch or two. If a story doesn’t scratch that itch, it doesn’t matter what else it does right; the reader won’t like it.

For instance, a while back one of my friends highly recommended a story that she’s read many times; I thought it was fairly decent, but I’ll never go back to it. The difference is that for her, plot is paramount, and this story had it in spades; it was a convoluted spy thriller that never dropped a thread or faltered in pace or atmosphere. I could appreciate that, but I didn’t actually like any of the characters, which dropped it from good to decent for me. More characterization might have helped, but the author seemed to be relying on characterization tropes that anyone who regularly reads that sort of spy thriller would be able to fill in, and since I read them by fits and starts, I couldn’t.

The first and most obvious conclusion to reach from all this is that the writer can’t please everybody. Some things are incompatible: you can’t do a book that’s both sweet, light, and fluffy and bitter, dark, and edgy. You also can’t write a story that has both a simple, spare, transparent style and a convoluted, lush, dense style at the same time, nor can you write simultaneously in first person and third person.

You could, theoretically, write a book that is neither one thing nor the other; that has light bits and dark bits, that’s fluffy in some spots and edgy in others, that has passages that are simple and spare and passages that are convoluted and lush, that alternates between scenes in first person and scenes in third. What usually happens when somebody tries that, though, is that they don’t get a story that appeals to everybody; they get a mish-mosh that doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Trying to give equal time to every possible thing that some reader might like ends up not giving enough time to anything to scratch any reader’s particular itch. It also tends to pull the writer’s attention away from the story and on to matters of technique, which is fine if the writer is trying for a technical tour de force or if he/she is trying to learn as much as possible as fast as possible by juggling as many things as possible. Focusing on technique to the exclusion of story is, however, not usually the best way to end up with a story that other people actually want to read. This is why writing exercises are called “exercises” and not “recipes for stories you can send out and sell.”

On the other hand, a story that is particularly strong in one area – one that does a really, really good job at scratching one particular, and particularly common, itch – will often find a large audience even if it does a lousy job with a lot of other things. It’s not always obvious just what itch the story is scratching, especially if one happens to be one of the folks who doesn’t care about it. This is the kind of book where people start off “Well, the characters are kind of cardboard, and the basic premise is pretty stupid, but…” and then they tell you why they love it anyway.

Ideally, of course, one wants to write something that is strong in as many compatible areas as possible. One may not be able to write a story that’s simultaneously slow-paced and fast-paced, or that has both a straightforward, linear plot and a convoluted one, or that uses a simple style and a dense, lush one at the same time, but one can certainly write a fast-paced, convoluted plot using a simple style, or a straightforward plot using a dense, lush style.

This is obvious once somebody says it, but too often it gets taken for granted, especially when writers of a particular genre – say, action-adventure – have realized that a particular combination of elements – say, fast-pacing, simple style, linear plot – works particularly well for whatever they’re writing. If enough writers adopt it (and they will, if it’s effective), that combination of elements becomes a standard for the particular genre, so much so that writers and readers don’t even notice what’s going on any more, until somebody does something different. It’s good to at least think about, though, because mixing things up can be a lot of fun – and can attract new readers.

For a writer who’s under contract, there’s no help for it but to slog on and hope the juice comes back before the deadline arrives. A writer who isn’t under contract can dump the story and move on to something else, which may or may not be the right decision, but which is always a hard decision.

Abandoning a story halfway through – truly abandoning it, without mumbling about coming back to it someday – is not an easy thing, even when the writer knows for certain that the story has gone totally cold and isn’t likely to warm up any time in the next couple of centuries. And a lot of the time “losing interest” isn’t really about the story going cold.

So what is it about, then? Well, what kinds of things make one reluctant to sit down and work on a story?

1) The plot and/or characters have gotten predictable, pedestrian, and boring…at least as far as the writer is concerned. Sometimes, this is because the writer has more experience as a reader; the idea that seemed fresh and exciting when she started writing turns out to have been fresh only because the writer hadn’t run across the multitude of similar stories doesn’t look so cool when she’s reading the forty-leventh story of the same type. Sometimes, the predictability is simply because the writer has been reviewing the plot too often and too much, and she’s gotten to know it too well. Some writers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others; the extreme case is the writer who gets bored with the story if she knows anything about what comes next.

2) The story is technically more than a little too stretchy, and the writer is tired of not being able to get it down properly and sees no prospect of ever getting it the way he wants it. A writer who feels as if he is making progress is usually willing to hang in there, but banging your head against a stone wall is not something anyone wants to keep doing if they have a choice.

3) The writer has taken so long to write the story that they have outgrown their interest in the premise, the plot, or the characters. The novel I started writing in 7^th grade never really even reached the mid-point of the story; by the time I’d gotten thirty or so pages into it, I wanted to write better-conceived, more consistent, more grown-up stories. So I left it and never looked back. The same thing can happen to adult writers; the plots and worlds and characters and problems I was deeply interested in when I was in college don’t draw me any more.

4) The writer finds she has said everything she had to say about those characters or subject. This one usually affects writers who’ve been writing a series, often a popular, long-running one. After a while, you get to the point where you’re just done with those people or that place.

5) The writer has taken so long to write the story that the real world has overtaken his premise. This one is a problem for people who do modern, real-world, or near-future stories; the classic example is the way the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s affected all the writers who were in the middle of writing spy thrillers involving the U.S.S.R. when the collapse happened. Any real or near-future story that involves technology in a central way is extremely vulnerable to this kind of thing – what looks like a cutting-edge computer when you’re writing it may very well look like it dates from the last century when the story actually comes out.

6) The story may be moving inexorably in a direction the writer simply doesn’t want to go for some reason. The intricate murder-mystery is turning into a drawing-room comedy, and the writer hates drawing room comedy and is just not going to write it, that’s all. Or perhaps the fast-paced action-adventure is insisting on becoming a psychological drama within a couple of chapters, and that particular psychological drama cuts a little too close to home for the writer to want to write about it now (or, maybe, ever).

Some of these problems are fixable; others aren’t. If the world overtakes your near-future plot, there’s not much you can do; they’re not going to roll back the Arab Spring just so your novel will still work. If, however, you’re just bored and finding the plot predictable, you can often change things up to rekindle your interest (this is the origin of the well-known advice about having ninjas jump in through the window if you’re stuck). Outgrowing your story or your series is a good thing, at least in a personal sense (though if one has been making one’s living from a series one can no longer stand to write, it seldom seems so at the time).

The main thing, though, is to be quite, quite certain that one really has lost interest, and is not simply avoiding writing a tricky or unpleasant bit that’s coming next. Because one cannot avoid the tricky and unpleasant bits completely or forever, and while it probably doesn’t hurt to abandon one novel or story in the middle every so often, abandoning a whole string of them sets up a pattern of bad habits that can be really hard to break.

What isn’t quite so obvious is that having too much talent can be a drawback. I’ve seen far too many new and would-be writers who’ve written amazing first novels or parts of novels…and then died on the vine when writing suddenly got hard. They were used to being able to produce words easily, words that were better – a lot better – than the words being produced by their fellow first-novelists. What they didn’t know was what to do when the words stopped coming, or when they stopped improving.

Basically, these writers were coasting before they even got started. Their first book (or a significant part of it) came easily to them, without a lot of the flaws that are usual in a first novel, and they expected that to keep on happening. They never had to work at getting better, so they don’t try (some of them appear not to know how). When writing starts to get hard, they either wait for the solution to come to them, or they give up. Either way, their competition starts out-producing them pretty quickly…and since those other writers are used to working at getting better (because they’ve had to do so all along), they get better faster, and go on getting better while Mr. Talented Writer stagnates.

The prose and the techniques that look so great in that first novel (because Mr. Talent was doing things no other first-novelist was doing) don’t look nearly so impressive in the fifth novel. Editors and readers expect writers to improve, regardless of where the writer started, and if the writer doesn’t, folks start to lose interest.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that nobody, not even Mr. Talent, is good at everything that goes into a story…which means that even those early, surprising books that were so much better than the other first novels still had some flaws. Maybe even serious flaws. People will overlook that in a first novel, but they start getting impatient if a writer is still having the same problems with plotting or characters or whatever in their fifth book.

All too often, though, the writers who’ve been admired early on for their talent do not recognize any flaws in their work, and thus see no reason to try to get better…at least until they’ve been whopped upside the head by reality a couple of times. I recall one young gentleman whom I met on a visit to a high school; his English teachers raved to me about how great his writing was, how imaginative, how creative. They’d obviously been raving to him along the same lines, because he clearly expected me to refer his short story to the nearest professional editor I knew, and he was quite put out by the amount of red ink on the manuscript when I handed him back his great, imaginative, creative…and ungrammatical, plotless, poorly thought-out…story.

In my experience, people like that make one of three choices. 1) Most of them quit writing fairly quickly when their stuff starts coming back from the professional markets, because what got them to try for publication was the fact that so many other people thought they’d be good at it. Faced with the evidence that they’re not going to be able to just toss a manuscript on an editor’s desk and listen to the praise roll in, they give up (often with some grumbles about the Big Bad Publishing Industry and how it isn’t open to great, imaginative, creative work like theirs.

2) The next-largest group submits their story a couple of times, then decides that since the Evil Publishing Industry obviously doesn’t appreciate their work, they’ll self-publish. This used to be a fairly small group, because pre-Internet, most of this category went to vanity presses that required up-front payments of several thousand dollars, so you had to have quite a bit of money to go this route. These days, Amazon and the Internet and print-on-demand have made it easy, so this group is growing rapidly.

And 3) one way or another, the author realizes that he or she still has a lot to learn, talent or not, decides they really do want to learn it, and buckles down to the learning part. The realization can come in a variety of ways: sometimes, it’s getting a couple of stories ripped apart in a good workshop or class; sometimes, it’s a series of rejection letters; sometimes, it’s an uncomplimentary review of their self-published masterpiece that hits home. Whatever it is, it provides them with the motivation to really start working on the discipline and persistence parts. They’re the ones who eventually make themselves careers in writing.

Mind you, every writer needs to have a certain amount of confidence and belief in his/her work, or we’d never send anything out. There’s a difference, however, between thinking that a particular story is as good as one can presently make it, and thinking that anything and everything one writes is brilliant and not to be improved upon.

The reason I like that definition better is because it puts the emphasis on getting someone to act. You can be inspired, enthusiastic, and really want to do something…and still manage not to do it, as many, many writers can attest. Motivation is what gets people off their duff and actually doing something, rather than just talking about it.

Mind you, it’s pretty hard to get motivated to do something you don’t actually want to do (as the state of my kitchen sink will attest). Nevertheless, the sink gets cleaned periodically – perhaps not as often as my mother would have thought proper, but well before it starts growing blue fuzz. (OK, there was that one time…but it was an accident, really, I had to go out of town on short notice and…)

So when people ask me how to “get motivated” to write, I start with a couple of basic questions.

First, have you ever had a day job?

For most adults (and quite a few high school and college students), the answer is “yes.”

And did you always feel like getting up and going to work in the morning?

I don’t think anyone has ever said “yes” to this one, though a few folks have said “Almost always.” I think they’re balanced by the folks who don’t really wake up until they’re in the office and downing their second cup of coffee – sleepwalking your way to work does not count as “motivation,” in my book.

So what motivated you to go to work at your day job every single day?

This usually gets me some narrow-eyed looks, because people can see where I’m going. But if I can get people to answer honestly, it’s usually one of the following:

1. They have to eat, pay the mortgage/rent, etc.
2. Other people are depending on them for support/income.
3. They were afraid they’d get fired if they didn’t show up and work.
4. They have a responsibility (to the boss or the people they work with) to show up.
5. They find the work challenging/satisfying/meaningful overall.

Motivation, in other words, is not always a positive, happy, upbeat thing that makes you like the work. Motivation isn’t about liking. It’s about doing.

There is no motivation in the world that is going to make writing quick and easy and painless, each and every day. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re pretty much doomed to disappointment. Motivation is what makes you sit down and work on the book even when it isn’t fun, when the prose is horrible and draggy and every comma looks wrong, when the characters won’t behave and the plot looks trite, and when you have the dismal feeling that something went off-track four chapters ago that means you’ll have to throw away 25,000 words or thereabouts.

Motivation comes in two basic varieties: external and internal. Having a boss or other authority figure who says you have to work is external; so is wanting to win a Pulitzer, or just wanting to get published. Wanting a challenge is internal; so is the desire to create, or just have fun. Most people find one sort more effective for them than the other (though really, for most writers it’s nearly always a mix. Everyone has bills to pay, and writing isn’t a field many folks get into if they don’t find it satisfying in some way).

Thus the first challenge for anyone who is trying to “get motivated” is to figure out what makes that particular writer willing to sit down and work. External or internal? Once that’s settled, figure out how to make that happen for you.

Every writer has his/her own tricks. Among the ones I’ve seen used successfully: Having one’s partner dole out one’s favorite cookies in return for word count (anywhere from one cookie per chapter to one cookie per paragraph, depending on how stuck the writer was). Taking a writing class in order to have a deadline. Participating in NaNoWriMo, ditto ditto. Having a partner/friend nag on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis. Going to a coffee shop or library to write.

Making a “writing date” with a fellow writer, where you get together with your laptops and work for an hour or two before you have tea and scones (or Coke and a hamburger, or whatever rings your chimes). Joining a writing group (for crit, for support, for socializing – again, whichever supplies what you need).

Finding a “writing buddy” to check in with daily or weekly to compare progress. Taping pictures around one’s monitor that inspire or remind. Keeping a progress log (page count, word count, time…whatever works for that particular writer). Selecting a music “sound track” that suits the story. Getting “instant feedback” from dedicated first-readers who camp on their email.

Talking about the story to anyone who will listen. Not talking about the story to anyone at all until it’s completely finished. Getting up early/staying up late to write. Making a daily page/half-hour a habit first thing in the morning, like showering or brushing your teeth.

Reading bad fiction (“I can do better than this!”). Reading good fiction (“Oh, wow, I have to try that!”). Reminding oneself that “if I don’t write this story, it will never be told.” Telling oneself “it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be finished” or “I can always put a pseudonym on it” or “This is just practice.” Telling oneself “This is the best thing I’ve ever done; it’d be a crime not to finish” or “I can’t waste all this effort by not finishing!” or “This will change someone’s life, but only if I get it done!” Telling oneself these things regularly (like, every morning and evening, and before, during, and after writing sessions, and as often as one thinks of it at other times).

Basically, you have to figure out what works to get you to sit down and put words on the page, and then arrange to get it. And you have to be honest with yourself. You may like reading great books, but if you end up spending all your writing time head down in Jane Austen, it isn’t really getting you to write, now, is it?

So…have you written your page today?

The answer is “It depends on the writer.” I know writers who freeze up at the mere thought of a deadline, and writers who can’t seem to write anything without one.

It also depends on what else is going on in the writer’s life at the time. A writer who is under a lot of pressure in other areas of her life (unexpected illness, serious financial problems, a death in the family, etc.) may suddenly find that having a deadline is one thing too many to handle, even though it’s never been a problem in the past. I’ve also known writers for whom the existence of a deadline was the only thing that kept them going during times of illness, financial crisis, etc. Mileage varies.

So first comes the old “know thyself” part. Which sort of writer are you?

If you can’t write (or can’t write much or steadily) without a deadline, and you don’t yet have one, you’ll have to figure out some way to persuade your backbrain that you have to get Chapter Three finished by next Saturday. Some folks take writing classes because it gives them a time and place at which they have to have some amount written. Others join writing groups for the same reason (though for this to work, the writer has to really take it seriously, and I’ve seen too many crit groups where 80 to 90% of the participants just didn’t have anything at all for any given session, which makes it hard to take it seriously as a deadline). Still others make a solemn promise to someone that they’ll see pages every Sunday, with the recipient given the right to impose penalties. (I know one writer who missed this sort of deadline and was forced to buy the recipient a hot fudge sundae…and watch her eat it.)

The more common problem, though, seems to be people who freeze in the face of a deadline.

If you’re this kind of person, the first thing I recommend is that you stop for a few minutes and think about why this happens to you. And be brutally honest. At least half the people I meet who have this “problem” only have it with their writing…they don’t freeze up when faced with a deadline at the office, and when they had papers due in college, they just buckled down and did them (OK, sometimes at 4 a.m. the day they were due, but still).

For folks like this, the problem is not so much the deadline as it is the fact that it’s a fiction writing deadline, which says to me that a good part of the difficulty is in the way they think about writing fiction – as something scary and special and not subject to the normal rules of work. Fixing this is a matter of attitude adjustment, which is never easy and which may involve lots of poking around in your childhood and your backbrain in order to figure out what you really think, why you have these reactions, and how to change them to something more productive.

But that still leaves the other half of people who have problems meeting deadlines. There’s still a lot of variation in this group: some people are convinced that no one can be creative writing to deadline (this is not true; many people can. The question is whether this particular writer is one of them or not); some chronically underestimate how long it’s going to take them to write ten pages (or how many pages it will take to cover X amount of material); some simply have bad time management skills; some procrastinate out of habit; and some go into such a panic at the thought of missing a deadline that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – their brains start running around in circles and screaming about the deadline instead of making up the stuff that will allow them to actually meet the deadline.

Again, diagnosis is key. If you’re having trouble meeting the deadline because it is One Thing Too Many on top of your child’s cancer, dealing with your soon-to-be-ex-husband’s lawyer, taking care of your elderly parent, and worrying about layoffs at your job, what you do will be very different from what you’d choose if the problem is habitual procrastination or underestimating how long it’ll take to get ten pages done.

Once you know why you’re having problems meeting deadlines, most of the solutions are common sense. There are a gazillion books on time management and beating procrastination out there; if one of those is your problem, it’s fairly easy to figure out what to do. (Actually doing it is another story, but no one can really help you with that part.) If it’s lack of discipline (or butt-in-chair time), the solution is likewise both obvious and not something anyone else can help with.

If you’re one of the folks who panics and/or freezes…well, if your brain and/or your backbrain is busy worrying or panicking about when something is due, it doesn’t have a lot of room left for actual work. Basically, you have to find some way to take the pressure off. In extreme cases, this may mean writing everything on spec (you aren’t required to sell on portion-and-outline after you’ve started publishing professionally, and of course if you haven’t sold anything yet, you pretty much have to work this way, as I don’t know any publishers who buy uncompleted first novels).

In less extreme cases, negotiating a deadline that’s much longer than you need can help; so can an understanding editor, agent, and/or spouse/partner. The main thing that seems to work, though, is forgetting about the deadline and refocusing on getting the writing done. For some, this means putting the deadline out of their minds and logging lots of concentrated time writing on a regular basis. Having a writing buddy to check in with (or to go for a “writing date” with – one of my friends and I have taken to hauling our laptops to a café once a week to spend an hour or two working) can help. If you’re of a more methodical/analytical mind, figuring out how many words-per-day you have to write to meet deadline and then making sure you meet that minimum every single day can work, as long as you only think about today’s word count and not that looming, panic-inducing deadline.

And of course, asking other writers for their methods of beating deadline-anxiety can be useful, as long as you don’t take any of them for the One True Method. Every writer develops his/her own tricks as they need them. These are some of mine; do, please, contribute your own in the comments, if you like.

As near as I can tell, no one on either side of any issue in this election wants to admit that the other side even has a point of view, let alone actually consider it for a few seconds. And while this may be effective in politics, it tends to make for pedestrian writing, at the very best. At worst, ignoring “the other side” (whatever side that may be) results in fiction that’s didactic, preachy, and only enjoyable by people who already agree with the writer’s position.

Even if the number of people who agree with a particular stance is large (and thus the presumed audience and sales will be equally large), not considering the other side of the argument – and treating it, and the people who hold it, seriously – is nearly always a prescription for a second-rate book.

The reason is that obstacles that are too easy for the protagonist to overcome are almost always boring to read about (unless they’re a deliberate parody, e.g., the hero’s dreadful battle wound turning out to be a paper cut). Too-easy victories imply that the problem wasn’t really that bad to begin with. A protagonist who spends an entire book slaughtering paper tigers isn’t going to qualify as a hero for the reader, no matter how many medals the folks in the book pin on him.

And all that applies just as much to political, intellectual, and moral arguments in fiction as it does to physical obstacles. If Sleeping Beauty’s prince was faced with a neatly trimmed, foot-high “hedge” that he could step over instead of with an impenetrable forest of briars, it wouldn’t be nearly as memorable a story. If the protagonist of the story never doubts her purpose or her moral position, and always has an irrefutable answer for the weak and flimsy objections and challenges raised by her misguided and/or evil-and-corrupt opponents, it starts to look as if she’s in the proverbial battle of wits with an unarmed opponent – obviously, nobody even halfway rational, smart, or sane would ever take that other position.

Yet “everyone is the hero of their own story” – and that applies as much to the corrupt, evil, stupid antagonist as it does to your favorite main character. I know a number of writers who pay lip service to this idea, but who can’t seem to deliver when it comes to really understanding the antagonist’s view and portraying it without a secret sneer (which never seems to be quite as secret as the writer ought to have wished). I’m not really surprised by this. Putting oneself on the other side of an argument is hard, especially if one is passionately involved with one’s actual beliefs on the subject.

I don’t know any easy way to learn to do this. One has to make a deliberate, conscious choice to look at things from an unfamiliar (and usually extremely uncomfortable) angle…and one has to keep making that choice, noticing whenever one starts slipping back into thinking that no reasonable person would ever think that way or do that thing. Sometimes, it is easier to start with something that one isn’t quite so passionate about, something that doesn’t hit one’s personal hot buttons quite so hard. Other times, one simply has to change one’s plot (and/or the character of the antagonist) so that he doesn’t do that thing, think that way, believe that nonsense. Still other times, what works is to take the “opposite” viewpoint and give it to the hero (and not just to convert him to the “right” side at the end!), or do an ensemble cast story in which every one of the “good guys” has a different, not-altogether-palatable slant on whatever the question is.

In the long run, seeing the other side clearly, and being able to see (and, ideally, understand, and maybe even to some extent sympathise with) the reasons why the antagonists might think that or behave that way, is vitally important for anyone who wants to write realistic antagonists. And if it has a little real-world application as well, so much the better, I say.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” –The Naked City by Malvin Wald

The thing about those eight million stories is, they’re all different from each other. And trying to make them be the same is a mistake.

This is something that a lot of people – readers, writers, and editors alike – tend to forget a lot. In online blogs and forums, in writing workshops, in how-to-write books, in reviews and reader discussions and recommendation lists, you find comments that boil down to the same thing: do it this way, not that way; do this kind of thing, not that kind.

These recommendations are particularly insidious – and confusing – when they focus on one specific aspect of storytelling to the exclusion of everything else. Because while characterization, plot, and worldbuilding are important to all stories, the balance among them does not need to be the same for all stories.

What set me off on this was a rant I read recently from a reader who disliked science fiction because it was “too technical” and didn’t pay enough attention to characterization to suit that particular reader. There were some good points made, but by the end of the rant I was left wondering why on earth this person wanted to read SF at all; it seemed to me that his/her taste would be better suited by mainstream or literary fiction.

The gadget story and the idea story have been staples of science fiction from the very beginning, and yes, in many (though not all) cases, doing justice to the worldbuilding, the idea, and the extrapolation may not leave enough room for the author to do detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization (especially in a short story). Obviously, if you demand detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization in your stories, you won’t find these stories as satisfying as less idea-heavy stories that use the extra space for characterization.

But there are plenty of readers for whom the in-depth characterization that the ranting reader loved is something that gets in the way of the stuff they love – the ideas and extrapolation and worldbuilding. Or the slam-bang action plot.

What I don’t get is why the plot-lovers and the action-lovers and the idea- and gadget-lovers can’t happily read the action-plot books and the idea-centered books, while the character-loving readers read the character-centered books. Instead, you see people ranting at each other because “science fiction needs to return to its roots in hard-science-based stories because science is what real science fiction is about” or “science fiction needs to pay more attention to character arcs because characters are what makes a story satisfying.”

From where I sit, these statements are equally nonsensical. What makes a story satisfying to that second reader is the character arc, but quite obviously, what makes the story satisfying to the first reader are the ideas and the scientific extrapolation, the “gosh-wow” factor. Or, to restate a writing truism, you can’t please everyone.

This debate has been going on for decades, but I think it’s entering a new phase. The advent of the Internet and the growth of ebooks makes it possible (not easy; possible) for work to find an audience even if it is not “commercially viable” (i.e., that won’t make enough money to be worth the time of a major publishing house). That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Internet also makes it possible for a small number of readers with decided opinions about what constitutes “good” books or “real” science fiction to browbeat authors and especially would-be authors into believing that whatever standard they’ve set is the One True Way, and that they can’t write without doing X (whether X is hard-sf developed ideas, character arcs, action-centered plots, or whatever).

Ideally, of course, one would have it all: ideas and worldbuilding and plot and character growth and a hero’s journey and chocolate cake with ice cream and sprinkles. But sometimes, that’s not the story you’re telling, and something has to be left at the bare minimum standard. Or to put it another way, every story has to have as much plot, as much background, as much characterization, as much symbolism, as much dialog, as much action, as much description, and as much of every other possible story element as that story needs. And sometime, a story doesn’t need much of one element at all.

Putting in things – even really basic story elements – that a story doesn’t need is a good way of ending up with a jumbled mess that nobody will enjoy reading. Figuring out exactly what things a particular story needs and doesn’t need is, of course, not easy. A lot of it is a matter of practice and taste, and chipping away every part of the stone block that isn’t an elephant (or a duck, or whatever it is one is carving).

There are hundreds of SF novels published every year; why insist that all of them do the same things in the same way? I don’t see any value in trying to turn the eight million stories into eight million versions of the same story. It kind of defeats the purpose of having eight million stories in the first place.

Part of the reason I didn’t think about it much was because at that point I didn’t have a backlist; I had one novel just barely in print, another in production, and a third under submission. I didn’t think any of that advice could possibly apply to me.

Fast forward thirty years, and I am now the hoary Old Pro with a much greater appreciation for what “managing the backlist” means, why it’s important, and why I should have been thinking about it a lot more carefully all those years ago. It’s my turn to pass the advice along for the latest generation of writers to ignore for a while. Hopefully a few folks will remember at one or more critical points in their careers.

First, a definition: for the purposes of this post, the backlist is all of a writer’s published work that’s over two years old, whether it’s still in print or not. Two years is kind of an arbitrary cut-off point; I picked it because if you have a hardcover/softcover deal, the book usually gets some sort of sales push on its initial publication in hardcover, then another push when the paperback comes out a year later. By two years in, it’s definitely no longer “frontlist.” If the book is a paperback original, it probably ends up being part of the backlist by one year after publication.

For a career writer, the backlist is important because it’s a potential source of free money, or almost-free money. You, or your agent, have to do some work to track it and to re-sell it, but compared to the amount of work it takes to write and sell a book in the first place, this is minimal. And these days, the backlist is even more important than it used to be, because of all the interesting new avenues for selling that the Internet has opened up, podcasts and e-books being only two of the most obvious.

One of the things this means is that an awareness of the importance of one’s eventual backlist is highly desirable from very early in one’s career. Everything that gets published will eventually be part of the backlist. If all you think about up front is the current part of the deal, figuring you’ll worry about managing the backlist when the title becomes backlist, you’re moderately likely to miss things that affect what you can do with a backlist title until it’s too late to fix them.

Example 1: Years back, a friend of mine wrote a trilogy that was canceled after Book 2. Annoyed, the author took the third book to a small press publisher, so that the current fans of the trilogy could finish it. The small press did a bang-up job, and everyone was happy…then. Ten years later, the author had to turn down a lucrative offer from a major publisher for the whole trilogy, because the small press publisher still had the rights to Book 3 and was perfectly happy selling 10 copies per year, and so wouldn’t revert the rights. If the author had been thinking about long-term possibilities, he could have made sure that the small press contract contained a reversion clause that would have made things simple – after ten years, or upon notification by the author if sales are less than 50 copies per year, or whatever.

Sorcery and Cecelia was originally published in 1988 as an “orphaned” book – the editor who bought the manuscript had left the company and there was no one at the publisher who wanted to push the book. It didn’t do well, and went out of print fairly quickly. Caroline and I got the rights reverted right away, as a matter of principle, even though there seemed to be no likelihood whatever that we could ever re-sell the title (lousy sales of the first edition tend to make other publishers less than eager to acquire a title).

Ten years later, things had changed and we not only sold Sorcery and Cecelia to a new publisher, we also sold two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. Ten years after that (i.e., now), we were able to get them all issued as e-books by Open Road media.

The point about all this is that one never really knows what is going to happen in the future. The market is constantly changing; so are the readers. People whose books were once wildly popular are now completely unknown (quick! Who was #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list for the week of June 21, 1953? Annamarie Selinko’s Desiree, #1 for 21 weeks, that’s who. Google is a wonderful thing), and books that died when they first came out become sneak hits months or years or decades later.

A writer who keeps this in mind will aim for long-run flexibility, so as to keep as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. There’s no guarantee that one won’t make mistakes; it is practically certain that one will. If one thinks about the long range possibilities, though, one can at least make conscious decisions: “I would rather have a small but steady stream of e-book sales now than hold off e-publication on the chance that I’ll get a better deal in five years” works, for me, much better than “I want an e-book NOW!” and then, five years later, “Wah! If I’d only known there was a chance of this, I’d never have put out that e-book!” or “I’m holding out for a big deal” and then, five years later “Wah! Nobody’s interested in buying this; I could have had five years’ worth of e-book sales if I’d only done an e-book back then.”

Judith straightened up, fixed the panelist with a gimlet glare, and said, “Why not? What better place is there?”

There was a moment of stunned silence as both the audience and the panelists tried to absorb the fact that a major SF writer known for promoting higher literary standards in the field had just contradicted something that the rest of us had assumed was a fundamental writing principle that everybody agreed on. Everyone except Judith. She gave us a minute or so to recover, then proceeded to list a number of well-known novels that had obvious agendas of various sorts and that were either better for having them or that wouldn’t have existed without them. I wish I’d written the list down, but I was too busy grappling with her confident writing heresy to grab a pen.

That moment of silence when everyone tried – and failed – to come up with a solid, logical answer for the obvious question that no one else had asked made a big impression on me.  What it did not do was instantly convince me of the rightness of Ms. Merril’s position. (Nor the wrongness of it, either.)

I’ve thought about that experience, off and on, for years since. The result of all that thinking has brought me around to the same position I’m in on a lot of writing (and other sorts of) issues:  It Depends.

The interesting thing about the whole to-preach-or-not-to-preach question (aside from the fact that pretty much all the writing advice I see still takes the position that having an overt agenda is inherently a Bad Thing, full stop) is that it depends more on the writer and the writer’s attitude than on the story. Taking an overt moral, religious, or political stand in one’s fiction is something authors choose to do, or not do. It’s rarely something dictated by the necessities of storytelling.

Once you start actually looking at novels, you can find rather a lot of them that clearly have some moral, ethical, or political ax to grind…and that work, or don’t, on a variety of different levels. Some seem to work in spite of the author’s agenda; others seem to work because of it. Some make the agenda subservient to the story; others make the story obviously serve the agenda…and manage to work anyway.

There are, I think, two basic dangers in starting with an agenda. The first is a writing problem: does the author have the skill to pull this off? It’s trickier than it sounds, because the writer has to strike a readable and appealing balance between the needs of the point he/she wants to make and the requirements of storytelling. Passionate conviction is seldom an adequate substitute for writing skill. Yet the balancing act is possible; we still read Aesop’s fables, in spite of the blatantly obvious fact that every one of them is constructed to make a very specific point.

The second danger is that if the writer’s agenda is too obvious, most of the readers who disagree with it will dislike the book (or, more probably, never pick it up in the first place). There really isn’t much the writer can do about this except realize that it’s going to happen and brace for it. One can try to bury one’s moral, ethical, or political point so deeply that it won’t offend anyone, but that gets right back to the don’t-preach-in-fiction argument…and quite frequently allows readers to miss the whole point. And if you feel strongly enough about a moral, ethical, or political stance to want to write about it, you aren’t going to be happy with what you do if you try to pretend that you’re not really doing it.