There’s no question about it: bringing up children is hard work. It takes love, devotion and lots and lots of time. As a writer, it can put a serious dent in the number of daily hours you have in which to write, and reduce your lifetime output from a hundred books to ten – especially if you also need a full-time day job in order to support your family.

But listen to this:

Before I became a father, I didn’t really understand what people meant when they talked of unconditional love. Now I know. Being a father’s changed everything. It’s made me vulnerable again. It’s given me moments of true happiness, fear, helplessness, and pride. It’s put me in touch with my emotions and given me new perspectives and empathy, and insights into my own childhood. And while it means I have to sacrifice sleep in order to find the time to write, it’s unquestionably been worth it.

Yes, parenting takes a lot of time and energy – but my life’s so much richer for it. And so is my writing.

Most writers need a day job to keep them financially afloat. But the advent of social media sites has changed the way we look for work. Below are a few things I have learned during my search for a new job:

1. Before a job interview, you can look your interviewer(s) up on LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook to get an idea of their professional background, their likes and dislikes, etc.
2. They’ll be checking you out too, so make sure you set your privacy settings on Facebook, so that only your friends can see your embarrassing pictures.
3. Unless you protect your feed, *anyone* can read what you write on Twitter. So use some common sense and don’t post anything that could offend or discourage a potential employer.
4. LinkedIn is very useful as an online CV but beware how much personal information you put there. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to identity thieves.
5. Beware when signing up to multiple email job alerts that the same vacancy may be advertised by several compteting agencies, and you may therefore end up unwittingly applying for the same role two or three times.

Are you an author with a day job? How do you balance work and writing? Do you take an undemanding job in order to save your energy for writing, or do you look for stimulating work to give you ideas and experiences to write about?

If you go to the Links tab above, you’ll see I’ve added a section called Advice for Writers. This collects together links to articles and tips I’ve posted over the last few years, making them easier to find.

For the last week, my article “How To Communicate More Effectively” has been serialised on the Futurismic website. In case you missed it, there are links below to each instalment:

• 1 – Introduction
  
• 2 – Attract Attention
  
• 3 - Create Interest
  
• 4 – Inspire Desire
  
• 5 – Build Conviction
  
• 6 – Generate Action
  
• 7 – Bringing It All Together

“How To Communicate More Effectively” is aimed at writers, magazine publishers and book publishers in the SF&F field. I’m not claiming to have invented any of these techniques – these are tried and tested methods that have been successfully employed by commercial copywriters for the last sixty years – I’m simply trying to help struggling SF magazines by giving them some “extra ammo” in their appeals for the new readers and subscriptions they need in order to survive.

I’m fascinated by science but when I write, I write about people. I write about characters reacting to the situations in which they find themselves. In an interesting article on his website, Jeremiah Tolbert pretty much sums up my own attitude to writing the science in science fiction:

(The thing) I take exception to is the notion that you need to be deeply conversant in anything.  I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief and I think that’s a long ways from being a polymath. You don’t need to be an expert on anything but people.

Read the full article here: http://tinyurl.com/5k6448

See also my earlier article, Near Future SF *is* Possible

Sometimes when writing fiction, it’s hard to keep a mental image of all the characters involved, and mistakes start to creep in. You get muddled and describe your hero as having blue eyes in chapter two and green ones in chapter six. To get around this problem, I suggest casting your story in the same way you’d cast a movie.

Continue reading “Do you have trouble remembering what your characters look like?”

“the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

- John Steinbeck

Writing on Bookslut, Paul Kincaid seeks to reassure the voices constantly heralding the “death” of science fiction:

The truth is, we tire of novelty more quickly than we tire of anything else. And because science fiction as a genre lives and dies by novelty, it suffers from this ennui more than any other form of fiction. So if, for whatever reason, science fiction is not challenging the way we understand the world, disrupting our sense of reality, or doing any of the other things we associate with novelty, then our automatic reaction is that the genre is dying. It is all or nothing… Science fiction has always been dying. That’s how it reinvents itself. 

Charles Stross recently wrote something on his blog that I really disagree with:

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

The thrust of his argument is that the international situation is changing so rapidly that any book of near-future SF written today will be obsolete before it can be published, much as many Cold War thrillers were rendered obsolete by the sudden end of the Cold War.

That’s a fair point. But I don’t agree that you can then extrapolate from here to say that it’s now impossible to write near-future SF. Sure, times are challenging and it’s tough to make predictions about the near-future geo-political and economic landscape - but the role of SF is so much wider than that.

For me, the two purposes of any kind of fiction are:

1. To entertain
2. To say something about the human condition, about what it means to be alive, here and now.

If you’re writing about characters, about people and what makes them tick, then whether you set your story ten, twenty or fifty years into the future, you’ll still find people falling in love, trying to earn a living, screwing each other over, and hanging out with their friends… things they’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Those basic primate sex, power and death motivations will still be there.

I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.

After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.

For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.

Greg Bear’s novel Eon was first published in 1985, a year after Neuromancer, and assumes the tension between the USA and USSR continues until the year 2000, and then erupts into a full-scale nuclear war. Does that mean we can’t read it now, in 2008? Obviously not, or Orion Books wouldn’t be re-releasing it with an arty new cover. The fact is, Bear’s book is an epic adventure with the pace of a thriller and characters that draw the reader’s sympathy – so it doesn’t matter that he got a few details wrong, any more than it matters that Orwell’s vision of 1984 didn’t come to pass in that particular year.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s always been difficult to make accurate predictions of the near future, but that’s no reason to stop doing it. As long as your story’s based on more than simple prediciton, and if it’s an entertaining tale with involving characters and a serious point to make, it’s worth writing. You may get some aspects of the future wrong – but so what? As long as you give it your best shot, no-one can ask more of you than that.

I watched The Philadelphia Story on DVD this evening, for the first time in several years, and it’s still one of my favourite films. It has a crackling script and a great cast, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant — but it’s Jimmy Stewart’s Oscar-winning performance as the frustrated, principled writer, Macaulay (Mike) Connor that gets me every time I watch it. I guess it’s easy for me to identify with him. You see, Connor really wants to write short stories but has to work as a journalist in order to make a living, and you can see that – despite his tough talk – it’s really eating him up inside. He’s facing the one dilemma every serious writer faces sooner or later: how to balance the need to write with the need to eat.

Tracy:  These stories are beautiful. Why, Connor, they’re almost poetry.

Mike:  Don’t kid yourself. They are.

Tracy:  Tell me something, will you? When you can do a thing like that book, how can you possibly do anything else?

Mike:  You may not believe this, but there are people that must earn their living.

Tracy:  Of course, but people buy books, don’t they?

Mike:  Not as long as there’s a library around.