Writing Fiction at the End of the World

or, my advice to new writers

Often enough, I get asked for my advice for new writers.

First and foremost, it’s the same advice I give everyone: store three days worth of food and water at home. The world is changing rapidly.

I’ve got more advice that’s specific to writing and art though.

Inputs and Outputs, or Get a Life

Get involved in the fight to end capitalism and climate change, in whatever way suits your temperament, ethics, and skill set.

That’s my advice. Unlike the “store some food” advice, this advice is directly tied into writing.

Writing is not all you are and not all you should do. If all you do is write, your writing will suffer. Writing is your output; your lived experience–and the lived experiences of those you directly speak to–is your input. If you don’t have enough lived experience, your input will default to media you’ve consumed. This isn’t as good. Your writing won’t be as good.

If you’re bored of reading books about bored academics who cheat on their spouses, it’s because those books were written by bored academics who dream of cheating on their spouses. If you’re bored of reading the same book about war between this or that fantasy kingdom replete with elves and dwarves and dragons, it’s because those tropes were tired before almost any of us were born and those books are written by bored fantasy writers whose input hopper is full of books instead of life experience.

Even if you’re dead set on writing a book about elves and dwarves and dragons (maybe who are bored at their academic jobs and who cheat on their spouses), it will stand out if you’ve been to war or talked to those who have. The friendship–possibly romance–between Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings was drawn from Tolkien’s experiences of comradery in the trenches of World War I. That same war inspired the German Expressionist Horror film genre that gives us most of the tropes of modern horror today. That war was not good. It was not a good thing–Tolkien’s writing became about the evils of power, and the German Expressionists were distinctly anti-war.

In fact, almost all the originators of new ideas in the arts are distinctly political–that is, they are engaging with their work and lives in how society is structured. It’s the second generation of any given genre that often strips away this meaning and reduces the work to tropes.

Do relief work for those impacted by climate change, or talk to those who have, and you’ll learn about how communities survive disaster–only the elites panic and turn on one another, the rest of us band together to get shit done and stay safe. Most writing is about crisis, so it’s worth knowing how you–and others–behave during crisis.

Travel, and return home. Fall in love, fall out of love. Meet and talk to people from as many backgrounds as you can. Learn the difference between what’s legal and what’s ethical–break the law.

Probably don’t cheat on your spouse though just to write a better book. I swear, if the defining feature of the genre of Science Fiction is future technology, if the defining feature of the genre of Romance is love and lust, if the defining feature of the genre of Fantasy is magic, then the defining feature of the genre of Literature is infidelity. (This recurring theme in Literature is an tangential pet peeve of mine. Let’s normalize the option of polyamory rather than the abuse and harm that is lying to those we claim to love.)

Books are input too, and they aren’t inherently bad. Read as widely as you can, including books by those you dislike and by those whose politics you hate. Good books speak to the human condition, and the best villains are relatable even when their actions are abhorrent.

Personally, the best thing I ever did for my writing was drop out of college to hop freight trains and hitchhike and sleep under bridges and fall in love too often. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing for my mental health or my cultivation of good habits and stability, but it was the best thing for my writing.

Iterate, or Perfect is the Enemy of Good

The other best thing I did for my writing was get taught art by my mentor, a man named Steven Archer.

When I was sixteen, I started taking art lessons from Steven Archer, a multi-disciplinary artist in Baltimore. Sure, he taught me the craft of painting, but that’s not what stuck (or rather, painting is not the discipline I’m naturally drawn to). He taught me about how to be an artist.

Art is the byproduct of action. The process is more important than the goal. The goal of painting is to paint, and painters should paint, often. It’s only by painting that one becomes good at painting. But each individual painting is not precious. 

I took lessons in his apartment, in the living room. Above the futon there was this giant painting of a goth angel (I have my tastes, okay? I know what I like).

“You like that painting?” he asked. I did. His particular style and subject matter was why I’d started paying him to teach me. “I sold that painting for thousands of dollars a few years ago. I liked it, so I painted it again.”

Another time I came in and he held up a small pink and purple painting of a seashell, not his usual subject matter. “You know what this is?” he asked.

“A seashell?” I asked.

“Dinner. This is dinner. I can sell this painting and buy dinner.”

Because art isn’t precious. It’s beautiful, it’s meaningful, it’s one of the best reasons to get up in the morning, but it’s also just the byproduct of the act of creation.

Steven taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: you do not get better at a discipline by fixing existing work, you get better at a discipline by fixing the problems with the previous piece of work in the next piece of work.

That is, you iterate more than you edit.

There’s this possibly-apocryphal story in one of Steven and my’’s favorite books on the matter (well, Steven told me to buy it and read it, twenty years after I was his student), called Art & Fear. The story is that there was a pottery teacher who told half their class they’d be graded only on the best pot they made all semester, while the other half would be graded only on the number of pots they made. The people who focused on making lots of pots improved faster and wound up making better pots than the people who tried to perfect individual pots.

This applies to writing. There are people who don’t like Stephen King or his books, but no one can seriously make the claim that he does not know how to tell a story in an engaging way. It seems probable to me that the secret to his success is his prolificness. He is good at writing books because he writes an awful lot of books.

Now, we all know people who are prolific as hell and never get any better, who just churn out crap. If it makes them happy, then fuck it, whatever. But if I’m offering you, the new writer, advice, I would say we shouldn’t aspire to churn out crap. We should aspire to get good.

The “iterate, not edit” method is not “make the same thing over and over again.” After you finish a work, think about what didn’t work. Identify mistakes and improve upon them in the next iteration. While the process is more important than the goal, the goal informs the process. The goal is to create astounding works of art, whether to change the way that people think about the world or simply to create the kinds of aesthetic experiences that imbue the reader with a sense of meaning. That goal is the horizon that we always are rowing towards, but we have to stay rowing in that direction instead of just rowing around in circles with no goal at all.

It’s also not a hard and fast rule. I would argue that part of painting, or writing, or probably making pots (I’ve never made a pot as an adult, so I’m out on a limb here) is seeing problems as they arise and fixing them. I absolutely edit my writing. I sometimes start over fresh, I sometimes work through a few drafts, and every essay or story gets at least a second pass (I added that last part during the second draft of this essay). I think that editors are an underrated and essential part of the creative process, the unsung heroes of the book world. I will give my work several passes myself, then let an editor take a pass or even two on it as necessary. This to me is simply part of the process of writing. The thing I won’t do is spend my life polishing the same work over and over again. Get it as good as you’re going to get it and then move on. Perfect is the enemy of good.

New writers suffer the hardest from the desire to polish stories, because when you finish your first story–or book–you want it to become good enough to publish. This is the sunk-cost fallacy. You’ve spent so much time on it; you want to get a return on that investment. The thing is, you have gotten a return on that investment, but it was likely in lessons learned rather than something that specifically will appeal to the masses and become wildly successful and give you the money to buy a castle to live in with your cats like I’ve heard Enya managed. (I presume this is the financial goal of all artists. If it is not your goal, I can’t relate. My castle will have dogs too.) But mistakes are the soil in which ideas flourish. Finish your story, send it out for consideration, and start the next one. Whether or not someone wants to publish your last one is no longer your business or primary concern, your primary concern is the next idea, the next story, and writing it as well as you can.

Start Things and Finish Things

You have to start things and you have to finish things. This seems obvious when it’s written plainly, but we all struggle to some degree with this maxim.

There’s a political slogan, or maybe cliche: “the secret is to really begin.” So often we let ideas and plans float around in our heads and never put them down onto paper. You have to to actually put your ideas down onto paper. It’s hard, and it’s scary, because for years, you will struggle to translate the ideas that exist in your head onto paper. You will write things that are terrible, and you will write things that are good, and you will write things that are great, all before you actually successfully begin to consistently translate what was in your head into the written word.

I remember, about eight years into taking my writing seriously, wandering around at night in the mountains of North Carolina with my partner, discussing the book I was working on–what later became A Country of Ghosts. And it struck me as an epiphany that I could write anything I wanted. That seems obvious–of course you can write whatever you’d like. But I realized I could actually convey what I wanted, I could actually get the ideas out of my head and onto paper.

I’d written good stories before then; I’d even put out a couple books that I’m proud of. (I’d also written a ton of garbage.) But it was as though, all the sudden, after years of hang-gliding, I could just… fly.

I still work in disciplines I have not hit that level of competence with. I’m getting there with music, especially with piano and with black metal. But to translate my ideas into a pop song, it’s beyond me. I succeed at writing good music sometimes, and I’m proud of my music, but it’s not what it started out as in my head. I only assume the same process exists for drawing and painting… many people can draw many things, but some people can translate what’s in their head to paper. That’s mastery.

I still have so much to learn about writing fiction, and I’m proud of the steps that I take with each new project, but I promise you, it’s possible to get to where you can fly. You just have to crash a lot first. Like, an awful lot. Fortunately, gravity only hurts if you let it. Well, in this context. Don’t jump off your roof while yelling “I can fly and Margaret Killjoy told me I could.”

So you have to begin. You have to risk failure. If you never really start, then you can always hold onto the fantasy that you could be a writer. Some people go their entire lives daydreaming about writing books but never actually write books, and I used to look down on that but now I just see it’s a useful coping mechanism. It’s just not a way to become a writer.

You also have to finish things. This is another thing that people struggle with, and it’s related. See, if you finish your work, you have to submit it, or publish it yourself, which means subjecting it to judgment. But the only way to improve as a writer is to finish things, so that you’re in a place where you can acknowledge the mistakes you made and improve upon them with the next story or book you write.

Incidentally, this is why I push so hard for fiction writers to start with short stories, even if your end goal is to write epic novels. Your goal as a beginning writer is to fail faster and better, and the longer the work, the longer it takes for you to hurry up and fail.

I love Heinlein’s rules of writing:

• Rule One: You Must Write.

• Rule Two: Finish What You Start. 

• Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order. 

• Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market. 

• Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold.

Do It Yourself, or Do It With Peers

I come from zine culture, which comes from punk culture. Punk culture is obsessively DIY, Do It Yourself, or as my friend puts it, Do It Together. Whether you like the music or not, one of the beautiful things about punk is that at most punk shows, the band comes out of the crowd, shines, then disappears back into the crowd. We don’t put artists on pedestals, but we celebrate the creation that our friends are capable of.

Punk is music that’s okay to be shitty at. It’s designed that way. Raw emotion can cover for lack of skill. Some people also have skill, and those people are more likely to wind up touring and selling records and shit, but it’s also okay to just suck at it and get up on stage and be angry, we’ll all be angry with you in the crowd, all of us together screaming our hearts out against this rotten system. It’s beautiful.

Zine culture functions similarly. Anyone can just make pamphlets and distribute them, and that rules. I will celebrate that my friends are writing and sharing stories. Those stories can be terribly written, that’s fine. As long as the ideas are interesting, or the author’s heart is in the right place. It’s only the zines that really set fire to the reader that will get photocopied (or, you know, printed from PDF) and carried by other zine distributors. This doesn’t make the other zines unsuccessful.

With punk, and with DIY, we’re redefining what “successful” means.

This was the perfect culture to hone my skills within. I wrote zine after zine, short story after short story. I even wrote a few old novellas I hope to do some edits on and reprint one day. Some of these zines were good, some of them were less so. I got to see what people liked, and what I liked. I got to iterate quickly. I wrote under a ton of different names… Margaret Killjoy, now the name I use day in and day out, started as a pen name for zines. I think the first thing I wrote as Margaret Killjoy were a couple of steampunk erotica zines, and I made enough money off of those to pay my punk house rent for a few months.

That said, I’m glad I now work with a hybrid model of publishing. I publish some things myself (like through this substack, actually) or with the collectively-run publisher that I’m part of, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. I also work with independent publishers like AK Press and Feminist Press. I also work with mainstream publishers. I have a literary agent who represents me and handles my contracts. My career isn’t solely DIY. I don’t mind at all.

DIY helped pave my way into traditional publishing, because it gave me an audience and a platform even before I went about asking traditional publishers for their attention. Which helped me recognize what is true even for beginning authors–the relationship between publisher and author is a peer relationship. It’s not that a traditional publisher was so kind as to offer me a handout of a book deal. No, they are lucky to have me. And I am lucky to have them. We help each other.

Never, ever, let anyone convince you otherwise. Never be deceived that a publishing company or a record label or an art gallery is throwing you a bone. You are their peers. All of us in this wide world are peers, and fuck anyone who treats you like you’re less than them, and fuck you for acting like you’re better than other people.

From this point of view, I refuse to engage with “writing contests” or submit to any publication that requires a reader’s fee, and I recommend beginning writers do the same. Getting published is not a “prize,” not even for a first time author. Publishing is a business arrangement between peers. I recognize that this is “the way it is done” in many literary presses and magazines, but “the way it is done” is one of the worst excuses anyone has ever offered for their bad behavior. Go cheat on your spouse already. (One day I’ll get rid of the bias I bear against Literature, but that day won’t come until people stop acting like Literature is more elevated of an art form than science fiction and fantasy.)

This goes both ways (not the cheating on your spouse, but the relationship between author and publisher). Your editor is lucky to have you. You are lucky to have your editor. Listen to them. During the editorial process, it’s easy to get precious. You don’t have to accept every change an editor suggests, but when in doubt, accept their suggestions. Let them do their work, which is specialized and valuable and will help your piece shine. Don’t just blindly accept their changes, either. Think about each one, and internalize the lessons you are learning so that next time, you make fewer mistakes.

Often, an editor or first reader will mark a part of your writing as unclear or otherwise imperfect, then make suggestions about how to fix it. Again, sometimes you should accept their suggestions, but what is even more important than the suggested solution is the marking of the problem. Always consider every place they flag as needing work, but sometimes you’ll find your own solution to the problem. This is especially true with first readers rather than editors, who are usually better equipped to know what isn’t working than how to fix what isn’t working.

Leave the World Better Than You Found It

The world is on fire, and is going to be for the rest of our lives. No matter what we do about climate change, the world is changing. This has two impacts upon any writers. First, it means we’re all going to fucking die one of these days (this was always true) and we need to live our best and most meaningful lives. Write if, and when, you enjoy writing. Don’t beat yourself up about “I need to write 2,000 words every day or I’m not a real writer.” Telling your friends you love them is probably a more important use of your time on earth. Just… write the stories you are compelled to write. Our goal right now is to accomplish what we desire to accomplish in the one life we have.

Second, the immediate crisis of climate change leaves us with some sort of responsibility with our writing. Not every story needs to be about climate change or imagining solutions to it. Not at all. The odds that you’re a climate change expert in addition to a writer is reasonably low. But there are certain values we need right now more than ever, and it’s up to those of us who imagine better worlds to, well, imagine better ways of being. For me, I try to write in ways that encourage kindness, understanding, diversity, direct action, mutual aid, determination, and political and religious and cultural pluralism. I write in ways that I hope encourage other people to discover their own agency.

Fiction has more impact than you might realize. Stories about people give us a sense of what people are capable of doing, what kinds of decisions we might make. Consciously or not, we compare our actions to those of the people–real or fictional–that we admire. Fiction is the realm of imagination, and we need to imagine new things before we can work towards making those things real.

I’ll leave you with the words of the author who has had more impact on my career than any other, Ursula K Le Guin:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.