I’d added data to text fields, selected options in drop-downs, etc, but none of it showed up.

“Show me the page” only dumps the source the server returned as the last response. It doesn’t show any form data you’ve supplied. You could run it as the first or last thing during a form submission action and you’ll get the same output.

I haven’t tested it, but I imagine the other webrat tasks only operate against the original source, so if you selected an option and then used webrat to check if it was done, webrat wouldn’t see the change.

I am not a devotee of reality shows. Despise them, in fact. All that faked-up conflict and people spouting sound bites at each other for the benefit of the camera makes me ill. We mute a lot of commercials so we don’t have to listen to a “worst-of” parade of insults and trash talk during the shows we do like.

So why did we start watching Dancing?

Lesson #1: It’s about people I happened to see a list of the celebrities this season and the thought of seeing them dance was intriguing. Marlee Matlin, deaf actress who won the Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God, dancing? How does that work? Penn Gillette, the taller and more obnoxious half of the magic/comedy duo Penn and Teller? He’s about seven feet tall and built like Bigfoot. Kristi Yamaguchi, Olympic gold medal-winning figure-skater? Oh, she’s going to kick so much butt…

Lesson #2: It’s not about technique Every second show is a “results” show with musical guests and featured professional dancers. When Jose something-or-other, world rhumba champion and Kathy whats-her-name, two-time American Foxtrot champion come out to show you what pros can do when they have a “real” partner, I’m instantly bored. It’s just a bunch of dancing. Which is fine, I guess, but I wouldn’t watch two episodes a night for two weeks, no matter how technically spectacular.

Some writers tackle spectacular subjects, delving into the ramifications and twists of an alternate reality or world-changing event and try to wow you with their insight and daring. Their characters are robots who do what their choreographer tells them, but they’re nobody. I can’t get into stuff like that.

Others do the same with setting, trying to wow you with what it’s like to sit on this veranda, staring at those mountains with the sun coming through the trees just so… Snore.

Lesson #3: It’s about struggle These are not professional dancers. They’re not in dance shape, even though two of them are athletes. They learn one or sometimes two new dance routines a week for almost 3 months, starting from zero in most cases. The learning curve is a cliff.

After six seasons of shooting this show, they know how to package the stars so you engage with them as people. They struggle like mad week after week, half of them in way over their heads, but every Monday they step into the arena. It’s a hero’s journey for every couple, in the Joseph Campbell sense, with a smokin’ hot twenty-something in the Obi-Wan Kenobi role.

Lesson #4: It’s about bad things happening to good people Half of the stars invited on this show came into it with no real hope of winning. They wanted to have some fun, learn to dance a little, perform in front of an audience, charge (or recharge) their careers. Several came in with something to prove about their particular minority.

But every week they didn’t get sent home, hope grew. Every week they weren’t the worst on the stage, desire sharpened. You could see them coming alive; the hangdog expressions faded, the backs straightened, they found joy where they least expected it.

Then one day, the axe fell on them, and it tore their heart out.

They put on a good face, talked about how fantastic it was, but it’s the Oscar nominee speech: I’m happy just to be here in such distinguished company.

Then the day came (for me it was this past Monday) when there wasn’t anybody left you could stand to see leave. But they sent one home anyway, and that’s the weirdest lesson of all…

When it comes to stories (and that’s really what this is to us), we like to get our hearts broken.

What a strange, illogical and glorious species we are.

Only one problem. Criticism is enough to make you bi-polar.

I’ve received two kinds of reviews so far: “fanboy” and “where to begin?”

Fanboy reviews taste great: they’re full of unabashed prose about what a wonderful job you’re doing and how they’d probably buy it as-is if they ran across it in the bookstore. They can give you confidence that you’ve struck gold, but are useless when it comes to boosting the quality of the work, which is why I signed up.

Receiving a fanboy review is a Sally Fields Moment: “You like me! You really, really like me!” Once you’ve had a chance to cool off, doubt creeps in. Maybe they’re kissing up to get a good rating and don’t care about helping you improve. Maybe they like everything they read, which means their accolades don’t mean much. Do I sound neurotic? Guilty as charged.

“Where to begin” posts usually butter you up a bit at the beginning, like a doctor saying “this will only hurt a little.” Then they crack their knuckles and start pummeling you. Are you unaware passive voice is evil? Did you mean to imply that character X has inappropriate urges toward farm equipment? Is character Y dead (because they’re lifeless as an old stump)? Can’t your character just say things instead of having to “growl” and “chirp” and “bark” everything? Are we at the zoo?

These posts suck. No matter how politely they’re phrased, how carefully they avoid making it personal, every line stings because it’s something you could have noticed yourself if you weren’t the lamest writer ever to violate a word-processing program with your dreck. You suck, your words suck, your computer and internet connection probably suck, too.

Just because these reviews hurt doesn’t mean they aren’t exactly what I need. Criticism isn’t comfort food, it’s medicine. Comfort food tastes good, finishes bad. I can’t count how many slices of pizza I’ve eaten while saying, “I’m going to regret this later.”

Criticism is medicine. Medicine tastes terrible going down, but it gives your body what it needs to get stronger and beat back what ails you. There’s nothing noble about walking around hacking up phlegm and saying “I’m going to whip this thing on my own.” You’re just wasting your time and making the ones around you miserable.

The reason criticism works so well is that a different perspective is worth 50 IQ points. Just coming at something from a different angle with a different set of preconceptions and knowledge makes subtle things obvious. If two people of equal ability and experience exchange critiques, they each come off looking like geniuses because they see things in your blind spot with perfect clarity and vice-versa.

Healthy criticism makes healthy stories. But this is going to hurt a little.

Sheryl tossed her rich, luxurious mane of raven-black hair over her shoulder, the late-afternoon sunlight filling it with highlights. “Kiss me,” she said. Rico took a long, leisurely sip of his Sumatran double-expresso, the half-and-half and two packets of raw cane sugar helping it slide down his throat like liquid gold. He set it back on the saucer and moved it slightly to make room for his elbow on the tiny, black powder-coated cafe table. “What if I don’t want to?” he asked, flicking a crumb of his long-finished scone from the crease of his copper-colored silk trousers. She laughed, long and low, her voice surprisingly deep for a slender, toned woman with a dancer’s physique. A hank of her hair fell across one side of her face, casting it into shadow and making her look even more mysterious than she did already. “Oh, you want to,” she said. His gaze burned into her, his longing to kiss her visible on his face like a neon sign. People driving by the front windows of the cafe could tell how much he wanted to kiss her. Astronauts orbiting overhead could tell. He was terrible at hiding it. “There’s no faulting your confidence,” he chuckled, even though he really, really, really wanted to kiss her. She was so beautiful he couldn’t think of anything else.

Need a hint? Here it is again.

“Kiss me,” Sheryl said. Rico flicked a crumb from the crease of his trousers. “What if I don’t want to?” “Oh, you want to.” She let her hair fall across her face. He chuckled. “There’s no faulting your confidence.”

What’s the main difference between those two versions? Length, obviously. The first is most of a page: 223 words. The second is only 36. But why the difference in length? How to decide what to chop and what to leave?

The second version is 100% story. The only things left either advance the scene, express emotions in the characters or evoke them in the reader, preferably more than one.

The first version is drowning in detail. A laundry list of irrelevancies that don’t do any of the above. What does it tell us that he drinks Sumatran coffee? Would he be a different person in any significant way if it were Brazilian? Do we care that the crumb is from a scone? Are muffin crumbs symbolically inferior? What about the color of the table?

Much of it is repetitive, as well. Her body is slender and toned and a dancer’s physique. Commuters, astronauts and Rico know he wants to kiss her. Really, really, really wants to, in case you weren’t paying attention.

It’s noise. Static on the radio. Glare on the television screen. It feels like story when you’re writing it, but it’s actually interfering with our ability to read the parts that really matter.

So how to differentiate noise from story? The question to ask is always the same:

What is the purpose of this scene?

This is a flirting scene. Flirting is about the tension between desire and denial. Anything that contributes to the flirting should be kept. Anything that doesn’t advance it is detracting from it.

What we leave are significant details. There are exactly seven:

• She tells him to kiss her. Not many women do that. What does that tell us about her?
• Instead of doing what he’s told – as most men would – he plays it cool, flicking a crumb from his trousers. Again, that makes him unusual. Why isn’t he responding? Is he not interested? Playing hard to get? Scared? Gay?
• He deflects her with a flippant question, taking control of the situation while teasing her, increasing the tension.
• Her reply further demonstrates her confidence. She isn’t the sort of woman to be put off easily. More tension.
• The hair in her face ups the seduction. She’s trying to break his resolve, and likely enjoying herself in the bargain.
• He acknowledges her ploys and charms with a chuckle, complimenting her without words.
• He finishes with a backhanded compliment, encouraging her while reiterating that things will progress on his schedule, not hers.

Easier to read, more powerful, and we’ve freed up 187 words that we can use to ratchet up the tension instead of wasting them on copper-colored pants and raw cane sugar.

So take a hard look at a scene that’s been frustrating you. Ask yourself “what is the purpose of this scene?” Then take out your machete and start hacking, because I’d be willing to bet that in the center is a powerful, emotionally-charged story that only needs a bit of noise-reduction to really shine.

• Thank You, John Scalzi Intro post explaining how I came to go and what I liked best.
• The Dynamic Trio “Why people who live in cold climates need their heads examined and Somerset Mall doesn’t stand a chance in the pending zombie apocalypse.” John Scalzi interviews his good friends, wife-and-husband YASF¹ authors Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld.
• That Second Cup of Coffee “The Opening Ceremonies gets short shrift and why the second cup of coffee is almost always a mistake.” My caffeine-fueled chat with my favorite YA author, Scott Westerfeld.
• Originality is Overrated “Stealing Shakespeare blind and ‘the best 50’s SF of the 21st century.’” A string of publishing luminaries point out that no one creates in a vacuum and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
• Auteurs Starve, Performers Thrive “John Scalzi: The Good Parts Version” In which we discover that he’s not kidding about the Coke Zero, as well as many other “good parts”.
• The Sun Kisses Karl Schroeder’s Cheek “Somebody finally mentions Joss Whedon on a panel and the story behind this blog’s subtitle” A discussion of setting and how it fits in SF/F.
• Money Flows Toward The Mouse “Why Shakespeare is in the public domain but Steamboat Willie isn’t, and the eighth deadly sin: pissing off your fans.” The Piracy of Fiction on the Internet and why Walt Disney’s money machine needs “protecting” but Romeo and Juliet doesn’t.
• The Reports are Highly Exaggerated “SF is not dead, but does it smell funny? Plus, the long shadow of Will Smith.” Why SF as a genre _is_ dead if you define it narrowly enough, but thriving if you’re willing to squint a bit.
• Your Reading List for 2008 “Your reading list for 2008 and the power brokers of the 21st century: librarians.” Justine Larbalestier threw down the gauntlet for the “Golden Age of YASF” with this statement “The most exciting books being written in SF/F today are in the YA genre. Full stop.” And then commenced a _huge_ list of “must-read” examples.
• Winston Smith, You’re Late for Homeroom “Beer with your heroes and high school as totalitarian dystopia.” A chat with Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld where we decide that sometimes, just letting an outcast know that they’re not the only one to ever feel this way is the greatest gift you can give them.
• …And the Horse You Rode In On “Give me Shredded Mini-Wheats or give me death! 30% more fiber than your regular panel.” A hilarious, and apparently cathartic, discussion of the question: why is it, with all the histories available to build a fantasy, all we ever get is medieval Europe with dragons?
• Dinosaurs, Mammals and Cockroaches “Only the cockroaches – and John Scalzi – will survive.” Is is possible to evolve as a writer without ruining your career? Plus, John Scalzi refers to himself as a cockroach.

A number of these panels (as well as a few I missed) are now immortalized as mp3’s over at Time Traveler Show so you can go check out how well my notes stand up to the truth. Thank you, Time Traveler!

1. Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

This is particularly true of continuing dramas, though it’s a relatively recent discovery. Many modern TV dramas¹ understand that the old-fashioned “anthology” technique (where each show can be shown in reruns in any order because the main characters never evolve) isn’t nearly as satisfying as the “soap opera” technique where what happens in this episode is crucially dependent on the events of last episode. Modern characters must arc over the course of a season and a series to become real.² What do they arc over? Their flaws.

Super-villains won’t save you

The problem with the “super-villain” approach to fiction is that bad actions don’t all come from bad people. On the contrary: they have the most meaning when a good person is caught in a moment of weakness or high emotion and does something rash. We are frail, we are victims of our own emotions. When I’m angry, I say and do things that are beneath me, and I know this as soon as I’ve calmed down. These actions cause me regret and guilt, but there is no way to make them right. For a writer, there’s gold in them thar hills…

Consider this sequence: a good person, in a moment of weakness or heightened emotion, does something uncharacteristically bad which cannot be undone (the course of life has been irreversibly altered), and spends the rest (or at least a good portion) of the story trying to undo or make up for the action. Spiderman failing to stop the robber who kills his uncle Ben is still shaping his character hundreds of comics and three movies later.

Fear and guilt are very powerful emotions, especially for people considered “good” by society. Other people stick up for you when you are accused, which makes you feel more guilty, knowing their trust is misplaced.

In praise of thorny questions

Is one failing enough to damn a person forever? This is a thorny question. If a man cheats on his wife, but she forgives him and he never does it again, is he still damned? Even if they stay together fifty years? If a person kills in a fit of rage, can anything they do in their subsequent life redeem that? If a man murdered a colleague with premeditation and got away with it, but later discovered a cure for cancer, do the scales even out?³ Sometimes this sort of character is called an “anti-hero” because they’ve got bad laced through the good inside them, but I think we all have some anti-hero in us, and all three-dimensional characters should, too.

This was one of the main sub-texts of Buffy and Angel: can Angel and Spike, who have done horrible things in the past when they were “not themselves” redeem themselves with enough conscious good deeds? Faith addresses this when she says, “Have you thought about how many people we’ve saved? Gotta be thousands, right? I think one innocent bystander still leaves us in the positive column.”

Easy questions with easy answers don’t help us a damn. It’s the thorny ones, with difficult, complicated, even impossible answers that we can spin into timeless tales that stay with the reader.

Thickening the plot

Most of the evil in a character-driven story about comes from people being weak. We’re not all weak, and we can be very strong in the main, but when bad things do happen, it is because of the emotional failings of the characters. Someone failing in the face of temptation is an excellent engine for a story.

Even if you’re a “plot-driven” writer who leans more toward James Bond and less toward Jane Austen, your car chases and crime scenes will be heightened and your series character more compelling with a healthy dose of self-destruction.

Not everybody has to be “broken”; that’s probably overkill. But everyone has flaws, and as the saying goes: character comes from action and action comes from character. That note in your character sketch that says “Bix has a terrible temper” doesn’t mean anything until she blows her stack in a scene.

But as long as a plotline stems from someone being weak, even for just a moment, you’ve got something to work with.

1. Buffy, Angel, Grey’s Anatomy and Galactica are personal favorites
2. Not that I consider soap operas to be the best example of good characterization.
3. Remember, the things we want in life generally doesn’t match the things we want in fiction.

Malcolm Gladwell’s head resembles nothing as much as a tiny black-powder explosion…

The afro gives him a “crazy professor” look that is completely in keeping with his style of delivery. If you’ve never heard him speak, try this speech on genius or this speech on office chairs to get a feel. He’s a crazy-smart guy whose main job is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his first book THE TIPPING POINT, is the first coherent analysis of why ideas catch fire and take off in a big way. This is something we writers want desperately for our books, so I’ll give a “highlight reel” as a starting point for a conversation on how and how much marketing should be done by writers.

There’s an overview on the book’s Wikipedia page which I’ll link to instead of cutting and pasting it here. Instead, I’ll focus on is how we can transfer these ideas into the writing/publishing arena.

The key thought in the book is that fads and trends function like epidemics, and in epidemics seemingly tiny events can have radical effects. If the number of people getting sick is balanced by the number of people who recover² from a disease, the number of sick people will stay roughly constant. However, slightly alter the infection rate, or alter the time they stay sick and the disease will either catch fire and become an epidemic, or die out completely.

So what are the tiny effects that we can use to make our books become epidemics instead of going extinct? Three things:

• The Law of the Few
• Stickiness
• The Power of Context

The Law of the Few

The Law of the Few is fun to read, mainly to try and spot yourself in the mix. There are three main categories: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Connectors are obsessed with people: they believe a stranger is a friend they haven’t met yet. Mavens are obsessed with knowledge: they develop powerful interests in topics/events/things and are driven to evangelize about them to everyone they meet. Salesmen are persuaders: their lives are devoted to convincing other people to agree with them.

In short, you need all these people on your side to get a “buzz” going about your book. You are probably one of these 3 things, which means you need to build up your “team” with the other two. Who do you know that knows everybody? It would be better if they were in the industry, but don’t sell anybody short: with six degrees of separation in play, nobody is a “nobody”. Who do you know that could sell refrigerators to Eskimos or vacuum cleaners door-to-door?³ You’ve got your Salesman.

I’m a Maven. I’m fascinated by any field that has minutia: endless details I can collect and try to put into some sort of coherent framework that I can share with people who don’t have the time or obsession to do the same. This blog should be a good indicator of that. I’m not trying to make friends with this blog, or directly sell things to you, I just want to share my thoughts on things I consider important, in the hope it will be useful and interesting to you, too. Not as social as a Connector, but not as profit-oriented as a Salesman. That’s me.

Stickiness

It doesn’t matter how many people you talk to about your idea if it doesn’t grip them enough to mention it to other people. This is a measure of the idea’s “stickiness”. Remember THE DA VINCI CODE? Yeah, me too, unfortunately. The book was a fast-paced thriller in a sea of other fast-paced thrillers released that year. Why did it grip the nation and the world to the tune of millions of copies? Water cooler conversations that orbited around the question “Do you think it could really be true?” Why does anyone know Paris Hilton’s name? Not for her talents, clearly. It’s that whiff of scandal that people latch onto.

The “elevator pitch” for my current book JUNE BETRAYALS goes like this:

4 teenagers born the same night develop strange powers and discover another girl like them is being held prisoner. Will they learn to control their powers and rescue her before they’re discovered by the organization that made them what they are?

Does that intrigue you? Would you look it up in the bookstore or the library if someone mentioned it to you? Most importantly, would you mention it to someone else? If so, the idea is sticky and I’ve got a shot. If not, I’ll get remaindered, or never published at all. Any suggestions on how to make it stickier are of course solicited.

The Power of Context

Gladwell spends a good chunk of this section talking about DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD and its massive success. It’s basically a synergy of 3 effects: the book, the author and the readers.

The book was a character-driven story about women and how they develop and maintain ties in their lives. It was, in short, a book people wanted to read. This is a given. The most buzzed book of all time (howdy, Dan Brown!) won’t develop a readership if nobody can stand to read it. Make your book engaging, gripping and fun. This doesn’t have to mean car crashes, espionage and gunplay, as YA-YA makes perfectly clear.

Author Rebecca Wells went on a year-long book tour and did readings everywhere that would have her. Her background in theatre meant these weren’t just “person behind podium droning on” events, but a one-woman show. She talks about how the numbers swelled as she got the word out, trying to make that experience memorable. Recall now that these were free performances. Old-school salespeople believe if they dance, somebody better pay. New-school marketers like Seth Godin know that “paying forward” pays off in goodwill in the long run.

Last (we’re finally coming to the context) is described as “a reading group book” because it’s the sort of deep, multi-layered story that begs to be reread and discussed with others. Think how much better movies are in mixed company, when you can talk about them afterward, enriching the experience with other opinions and enthusiasm. But there was a second level to the context: readers began creating their own “Ya-Ya” groups with friends and family, seeking Wells out to sign group photos and the like. People fit the book into the very fabric of their lives. Think of how many teenagers wear t-shirts with their favorite music artists or sports figures on them? They’ve found a way of maintaining contact with what they love even when they can’t watch or play sports or listen to music. In YASF,⁴ fan art and clothing is very popular for the same reasons. I doubt I’ll see my wife wearing a Charlaine Harris t-shirt anytime soon, but a writer can hope.

Finding your own Tipping Point

How do we take advantage of all these ideas to make ourselves into the Next Big Thing? My first suggestion would be: stick with what feels natural. If you’re a Maven, start a blog. If you’re a Salesman, get out there and sell your book. If your book “can’t be summed up in a sound bite” then find some aspect of it that can and use that, even if it doesn’t express the full breadth and depth of your work. What about your book got you intrigued enough to write it in the first place? That may be what you need to talk about to get others intrigued enough to buy it.

But trying to work this book like a checklist is a one-way trip to phony-land. People can sense when you’re doing things for mercenary or calculating reasons and they won’t trust a thing you say. If you can’t do it honestly, don’t do it. Don’t pretend to love people if you’re Greta Garbo at heart. Don’t try and song-and-dance your readings unless it reflects who you are as a person and an artist.

Finally, the biggest thing I took away from this book is the generosity that pervades it. Connectors love people and love making people feel good by introducing them to new people they might not have met on their own. Mavens love teaching and will talk your ear off about high-def TVs or European sedans if they find out you’re in the market because it makes them feel good to help.⁵ Giving people something to talk about around the water cooler or a new way to look at their own lives is a generous act. Giving them a world to immerse themselves in for hours or days is, as well.

First you give… then you get.

1. This is a really long post, so I’m experimenting with a “jump”. Bear with me if it all goes wrong.
2. or die
3. …as I spent a miserable winter doing in my twenties.
4. Young Adult Science Fiction
5. That’s why this blog exists.

An important thing to note is that once you’re into it, once you’ve warmed up and let the world fall away from you, it’s almost impossible to hate what you’re doing.

During the down times, when you’re procrastinating instead of doing your work, this should be your mantra: when I get to the middle, I’ll find the joy. When I get to the middle, I’ll find the joy. Then when it comes, allow yourself to feel it, be replenished by it. Don’t stop working; just acknowledge that this is what happiness is and that you have found it.

It’s worth sitting through the agony of the first fifteen minutes, when you’re stone-cold and dumb as a stump, to get to that first accidental chord that makes you do a double-take, or a character turning left instead of right, to get to that question mark that demands you answer it. Then you fall through the hole in the paper or start riding the melody line and all is right with the world.

When I get to the middle, I’ll find the joy.

My greatest writing hero is Joss Whedon. He’s the creator and driving force behind 3 of my favorite dramatic series of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The opening sequence of “Serenity”, the movie extension of the tragically short-lived Firefly TV series, is a masterpiece of film-making on at least 3 levels: cinematography, economy of language and character development. Joss introduces his entire crew of eight characters,¹ tells us what they do on the ship, how they interact and what matters to them in probably the longest single camera shot since Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope”.

Oh, yeah… and the whole time the ship is this close to burning up during re-entry.

How does he do it? A classic SF info-dump? Some ninety-second blast of exposition beginning with “As you know, Captain…”? A slow crawl of yellow type yammering on about trade agreements with the planet Naboo? Hell, no.

Arguments. Five of them in a row. Some of them no more than two sentences long. Each as distinct and beautiful as jade chess pieces. What Captain Malcolm Reynolds says to his pilot, his lieutenant, his muscle, his mechanic and the ship’s doctor in that single sequence describes the entire dynamic of this crucible called Serenity. It also sets him up as a larger-than-life figure: anyone who can have a coherent argument with his entire crew is a man to be reckoned with. I’ve talked with people who’d never watched the series, had no idea what they were walking into, but by the end of that scene felt completely at home in the world.²

That scene wasn’t an accident. The history of all three series³ bears out this credo: it ain’t got a thing if the ensemble ain’t got that swing.

Author Jenny Crusie has two brilliant essays on her website about the work of Joss Whedon and reading them really brought home for me why Buffy and Angel are so addicting.⁴

No man is an island. True. But even if one was⁵ there wouldn’t be anything to say about them! People are only people by their relationships with other people. This is in part about conflict, sure, but people agreeing with one another can be a defining moment, especially when you can feel their hearts breaking as they do it.

Let’s take Cordelia Chase, for instance. A minor character in the early days of Buffy, Cordy became a central figure for most of Angel’s run. By the end,⁶she was my favorite of the cast and her swan song episode possibly my favorite of the run.

Taken alone, Cordy is a shallow, self-absorbed beauty queen that deserved all the loathing the Buffy cast lumped on her. But through her interactions with the other characters, her “layers” begin to show and she matures into a real hero and a real woman. Her perpetually-bemused relationship with Xander Harris on Buffy, then later with Grue on Angel forced her to face the fact that perhaps her goals in life “marry rich, divorce richer” weren’t actually where her joy was after all. By the time her relationship with Angel begins to develop, she is — and we are — ready for it to be as powerful as it deserves.

The complicated relationship between Buffy and her Watcher/father figure/punching bag Giles is another example. By the legendary musical episode “Once More With Feeling” in the sixth season,⁷ he realizes his role as her surrogate father at almost the same moment that he must step aside in order for her to become a woman. His duet with Tara (who expresses similar torment over her doomed relationship with Willow) “Wish I Could Stay” peaks with the line “Believe me, I don’t want to go… And it’ll grieve me ’cause I love you so…” If that doesn’t break your heart, you don’t have one.

I could beat this into the ground — it’s possible I already have — by talking about Buffy and Spike, Spike and Dru, Angel and Xander⁸ or Willow and magic. The examples are strewn across the Buffyverse like semi-precious stones. Joss didn’t put them there as lessons, he put them there to tear your heart out and make you beg for more, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him anyway.

The cult of conflict states: they must fight to keep our interest. Interest is not enough: it sells our creative birthright short by a mile. I say: it’s how they fight that makes us fall in love.

1. The ship Serenity herself is the eighth
2. Let me take a few seconds to let my heart stop pounding. Honestly, the guy’s a rock star.
3. Abbreviated as Firefly’s was
4. My wife and I inhaled them on DVD, two and three episodes every night for months.
5. Tom Hanks in Castaway, for instance
6. I won’t steal Ms. Crusie’s thunder by discussing the last half-season. Read the essay.
7. Don’t get me started; we’ll be here all night.
8. No, that’s not what you think; they’re just both in love with Buffy

First off, let me say that all four authors — Scalzi, Sarah Zettel, Paul Melko and Jim Hines — all agreed that it’s imperative to challenge yourself and make each book better than the last. On that one aspect the answer was an undisputed “yes” in favor of evolution.

From there, it got murky.

In a certain sense, evolving means not writing variations on the same story over and over, trying new subject matter, new settings, new character types. At the same time, Scalzi and Hines are both known primarily for a single series each: Scalzi for OLD MAN’S WAR and its sequels, Hines for his goblin books. Series almost always outsell individual novels, partly because of the “contract with the reader” Scott discussed at the previous panel. When a reader picks up a book set in a continuing universe, it’s because they want to spend more time with old friends, indulging in a particular kind of derring-do. It would be foolish to pretend they don’t.

But does evolving require shooting the cash cow? Is Terry Pratchett — over two dozen Discworld books and counting — milking the cash cow and prostituting his talent for the almighty dollar? Scalzi says emphatically “no” because of how much the stories have changed over the years. Pratchett is one of my favorite writers precisely because he manages to keep the spirit of the characters intact while pushing them onward through their lives; the progression of Sam Vines being a prime example. He also uses the tropes he himself has created to deal with increasingly larger themes in recent years: communications and money and their respective roles in the evolution of society. Scalzi hit a pure note when he said “I can’t criticize anybody for paying their mortgage.”¹

In another sense, evolution is the process not of going different places, but going deeper into the known. Deeper and better characterization, truer and more powerful dialogue, a finer control over the reader’s emotions. All of these are noble aspirations that don’t require throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

So how do we do it, at a nuts-and-bolts level? The answers were as varied an idiosyncratic as the writers themselves. In fact, Sarah Zettel’s advice centered around finding your own idiosyncrasies: your best method of working, your preferred topics and narrative style. Ignore the how-to books, she says, the only real way to learn to write is by doing it your way and doing it a lot. She also emphasized finding the love of the daily craft; there’s a lot of mythology about legendary writers who profess to hate the act of writing, but perhaps if those writers spent a few months working in a factory they’d realize that joy is relative. It may not be rainbows and lingerie every single moment, but it sure beats driving a cab. At the same time, if you really do hate the daily process, you’re going to go crazy in short order.

Paul Melko concurs. You can’t live for the milestones: completed drafts, publication dates, royalty checks. They are too few and far between to sustain a life.

It’s possible to lose yourself in your and other people’s expectations, too. Jim Hines talked about completely missing the point when his first book was published. He thought that style — happy, sarcastic sword-and-sorcery fantasy — was a fluke and went back to what he thought he “should” be writing: serious, deep, moody high fantasy. When he couldn’t sell it, he began to wonder if happy fantasy was actually his calling after all.

Scalzi had moderating advice on that subject. After establishing over the course of a couple books that he was “good at dialogue, smartassery and action scenes” he decided to experiment with THE SAGAN DIARIES, which had none of that but was set in the same universe as his other books. He believes it’s the best thing he’s every written.

Scalzi introduced a metaphor to think about evolution on a grand scale: dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches. Dinosaurs rule the world. They are the dominant predators of the age and all the old success stories are about them. But they’re going extinct because the world they were created to dominate is disappearing. Mammals are newcomers, poised to take advantage of the new climate and tools. All the new success stories are about mammals, because they’re taking over the dinosaur spot at the top of the food change.

But consider the lowly cockroach. They’ve been here forever, and as we know they’ll be the only survivors if “the big one” hits. They’re disdained by both dinosaurs and mammals alike, because they’re not the prettiest things around. They may do media tie-ins, work-for-hire. They may publish non-fiction because frankly, non-fiction pays. They may continue to crank out mortgage-paying works that will never make it into the hall of fame. And cockroaches do evolve, contrary to popular opinion. They shift from one food source to another with lightning speed. They’re a species that will never need to read WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? On survivability alone, the cockroach is worth thinking about.

But being a cockroach — or keeping your day job, as Sarah pointed out — means never having to worry about keeping food on the table, which allows you to do things that ignore the market, the prevailing wisdom and the trade winds. The things that put a smile on your face when you lay your head down at night and again when you sit down at your computer.

Now it’s your turn. Go write.

1. Though I doubt this applies to Pratchett much these days