Sunday, February 27, 2005
Stross on writing
Charlie Stross on Writing
A terrifically insightful view into the realities of genre publishing by one of SF's brightest burning stars, Charlie Stross. I very much wish I'd read something like this when I was 20, but like Stross I was forced to work it out from first principles. I suppose the vast majority of genre writers are well into their thirties before they work out how publishing really works. At World Fantasy Convention in Tempe this last October I was talking with Graham Joyce about how grateful I am about my fifteen years of abject failure--if I'd succeeded in selling my first novel right out of college, I would not now be the writer that I have become--when Graham told me that writers weren't supposed to be published before they were in their mid-thirties. Not a sentiment I'd heard expressed before, but having heard it, I thought it made perfect sense.
In an alternate dimension, somewhere out in the exfoliating worlds of the multiverse, there is an analogue Chris Roberson who sold his first novel to a big NY publishing house in 1992, and went on to a middling career as a pseudo-intellectual literary writer in the years that followed. I'm just glad I'm not him.
A terrifically insightful view into the realities of genre publishing by one of SF's brightest burning stars, Charlie Stross. I very much wish I'd read something like this when I was 20, but like Stross I was forced to work it out from first principles. I suppose the vast majority of genre writers are well into their thirties before they work out how publishing really works. At World Fantasy Convention in Tempe this last October I was talking with Graham Joyce about how grateful I am about my fifteen years of abject failure--if I'd succeeded in selling my first novel right out of college, I would not now be the writer that I have become--when Graham told me that writers weren't supposed to be published before they were in their mid-thirties. Not a sentiment I'd heard expressed before, but having heard it, I thought it made perfect sense.
In an alternate dimension, somewhere out in the exfoliating worlds of the multiverse, there is an analogue Chris Roberson who sold his first novel to a big NY publishing house in 1992, and went on to a middling career as a pseudo-intellectual literary writer in the years that followed. I'm just glad I'm not him.
