Jay Lake's Process of Writing | |||||||||||
Jay Lake | |||||||||||
Apocalypse Ink Productions, 300 pages | |||||||||||
|
A review by Trent Walters
This is Jay Lake's process. If it's useful for you, great. That's the trouble: We compare ourselves to other writers, expecting
our paths to be the same, expecting if we slouch, wear a T-shirt and hold a cigarette in our mouths in the same manner, we'll carry
some of that James Dean aroma of success. But it does not work that way. I used to stymie myself, worried how Lake could dash
out 10,000 words in one hour while I plodded along for less than half that in an entire day of writing. You let it go. We are what we are.
The book consists of blog posts organized around certain subjects: story ideas, outlines, drafts, world-building, revision,
writing habits, story length, genre, writing the other, critiques, reviews, rejections, publishing, and the business end. Clearly,
this is not your typical writing book. The articles eschew well-covered territory of traditional story parts in favor of less
familiar territory with surprisingly mature attitudes towards author jealousy, rejections and negative reviews. Things that
upset most writers -- bad reviews -- don't Lake because he chalks it up the reading to each individual reader. He's just happy
someone took up their own time to review his work.
The posts are reader-friendly and generally inspirational as if you're carrying on a conversation with its author. It's
warts-and-all honesty, dealing with highs and lows, ego inflation and deflation. Some readers might balk at this, but you should
appreciate his candor in dealing with essential if peripheral writing topics.
It is full of Jay Lake's writing wisdom. For me, his ideas on story ideas are mystical mumbo-jumbo, but they would be useful to
those with organic writing styles. However, plenty of the other stuff has juicy nuggets: names, productive lifestyles, the
business, and world-building details.
If you've ever wanted advice from Lake but moving to Oregon is out of the question, this book is a good substitute -- it makes it
feel like he's sat you down for a beer and a slice of pizza to chat up the writing life. I highly recommend it. I'll be reading it twice.
Trent Walters teaches science; lives in Honduras; edited poetry at Abyss & Apex; blogs science, SF, education, and literature, etc. at APB; co-instigated Mundane SF (with Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd) culminating in an issue for Interzone; studied SF writing with dozens of major writers and and editors in the field; and has published works in Daily Cabal, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy, Hadley Rille anthologies, LCRW, among others. |
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide