The Value of Perversity

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, one of my many editor friends, once claimed that writers are like otters. Apparently, if you are trying to train animals, the normal method is to provide praise and rewards when they do something you would like them to do; the theory is that the animal thinks “He liked that! Cool! I’ll do it again.” If, however, the animal is an otter, what it thinks is “She liked that! Wow! Next time, I’ll do something even cooler!”

Almost all the authors I’ve ever known have a certain perversity of thought, especially once they’ve gotten over all the how-do-I-do-this-is-it-right jitters that so many have at the beginning of their careers.  Established writers are downright contrary; give ’em a set of guidelines (let alone rules), and they’ll happily set about straining them to the absolute breaking point, if they don’t shatter them into a million pieces just to prove they can.

I’ve written stuff purely because somebody said I couldn’t or shouldn’t. The most memorable was me saying I couldn’t and shouldn’t – I’d gotten an invitation to a themed short story anthology, for which I had no suitable story in the file cabinet, no time to write a new one, no ideas for one anyway, and besides, it was far too short a deadline…so I checked off the “No, I cannot contribute to your anthology” box on the enclosed postcard and threw it in my “outgoing mail” pile. I then sat down to work on the then-current WIP. Four hours later, I got up, fished the postcard out of the pile, and tore it up, because I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft of a short story I knew I’d finish in the morning that would be perfect for the anthology.

(And it was, and they bought it. The story was “The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn,” if you were wondering, and the anthology was Bruce Coville’s The Unicorn Treasury.)

Writerly perversity applies to just about any aspect of writing you can think of, from things like the style and content of a story to structure to decisions about where to submit a piece. And, of course, to the whole writing process itself.

Which is why I occasionally get accused of giving contradictory advice.

“But you said writers are supposed to do X!” someone complains.

“No,” I reply, “I said that that particular writer would be best advised to try X. You aren’t that particular writer. In fact, you are nothing like that writer, not at all, so why on earth are you trying to work the way he/she does?”

The normal response is either grumpy silence or a long argument over the nonexistence of writing rules and regulations in general. But really, it all boils down to this:

Writers do not like repeating the same trick over and over. They get bored easily, on the one hand, and on the other, they want to show off whatever shiny new trick has caught their attention. They are really, really insistant on doing something even cooler (though admittedly, it is not always evident to their faithful readers why this shiny new trick is cooler than the last one, but that’s because tastes vary).

Writers are very, very stubborn about all of this. And that is a good thing, because it’s how we get so many lovely new stories to read.