Control What You Can... Let Go of What You Can't

Publishing is a difficult business. Millions of new books are published each year, yet the average book sells only 1,000 copies in its lifetime and fewer than 500 become NYT bestsellers. Traditional publishers account for maybe one million of those books, and still, that's only 1–2% of the projects submitted to them.

The odds of making it rich or even just making a living by writing novels are... not great.

I don't say this to be a downer. I say it because I love data and find it very useful for making plans and managing expectations. I say it because I'm also a writer who wants to be one of those statistics (the good ones, at least), and data helps me understand what I'm getting into.

Here's some slightly more encouraging data:

• More than 95% of books that publishers reject are "poorly written, have a bad or unoriginal premise, or are irrelevant."

They call it the slush pile, but it's entirely avoidable. As you improve your writing, you'll easily rise up above the slush. This is a thing you can control.

• Nearly 67% of sales are in authors' backlists.

The odds of good sales might be bad for one book, but they increase with each book you publish. As you write more, you sell more. This is also a thing you can control.*

* With self-publishing, at least.

In every area of life, there are aspects you can control and aspects you can't. You can't control whether somebody makes you angry, but you can control what you do with that anger. You can't control whether somebody likes you, but you can control whether you like yourself.

In publishing, you cannot control the publishers, the readers, the market, or virality. You cannot control whether people will buy or enjoy your book. You cannot control how much money you make or what people say about you. But there are things you can control.

You control your writing.

You decide what words go on the page and whether there are words at all. You can improve your skill through practice. You alone decide what and how many stories you tell.

You control your schedule.

You decide how many days you write, for how long, how many words. You decide whether you're going to write a ton in one sitting or a little at a time—and both are fine! You alone decide how to balance writing with the rest of your life in a way that brings you joy.

You control whether you keep going.

You decide if you will keep writing, take a break, or stop altogether—again, all are fine decisions so long as they are your decisions designed to fit your life!

If you want to keep writing no matter what, nobody can stop you. The more you do so, the better you'll get. If writing is something you want, then the only way to fail is to give up on it.

It's important to let go of what we can't control so that we can focus our energy on what we can. I'm not saying it's easy—I know from experience it's not!—but it's possible, and it's the only way to find joy in what we do.

Control what you can. Let go of what you can't.

How to Start a Novel

There are lots of great tips out there for how to start a novel. You've probably heard some of these:

• Start in the middle of the plot (in medias res)
• Start with exciting action
• Start with a compelling mystery
• Start with an intriguing first line

These are all great ideas. They're not even mutually exclusive! But I bet you can think of stories that started with these things and were still... kinda dull? Or maybe you can't, because you stopped reading them. I know I have. And some of my favorite stories don't do any of these things!

Here's the thing about writing: There are no rules. You can start the novel however you damn well want—even with fifteen pages of world-building about Hobbits. If the reader is still enjoying themselves, nothing else matters.

The tips above come from stories that did these things and worked, or else stories that didn't do these things and that people felt were boring, but...

They're good ideas, but they can fail you if you don't understand why they work. For example...

Starting in medias res is cool because it skips boring exposition, but it can fail if the reader doesn't understand the current action or why it's happening. They'll feel lost and confused.

Starting with action is fun and exciting! But that excitement can feel bland if the reader doesn't understand the reasons for any of it. They'll get bored quickly.

Starting with a mystery is cool and intriguing. ("Where am I? Who am I?") But it can fall flat if the mystery feels forced ("Oh right, I slept over at my friend's house last night.") or if the mystery is only maintained because details are deliberately held from the reader (like a novel that refuses to name the protagonist for several pages just to be clever). The reader may feel tricked or patronized.

Intriguing first lines are basically always cool but only if you pay out on them. It could feel pretty disappointing to read "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... and then the murders began." only to find out that the "murders" are just gathering crows or something.

But if you'll look carefully, each of the above tips can fail in the same way: An opening doesn't work if the reader doesn't understand what's going on.

It's not enough to start a novel with the protagonist running for her life through a dark forest. We need to know why they're running? From whom? What happens if they get caught?

Within a page or two, the reader can ideally answer these questions:

• Who is there?
• What do they want?
• Why do they want it?
• What happens if they don't get it?

If an opening has those things, it won't matter whether the novel starts with a literal explosion or inside a quiet coffee house. Either way, you'll have an invested reader.

Characters We Care About: Goals and Motivation

Probably the most important thing a story can do is make the reader care about its characters. There are a number of factors in what makes us care about someone, but today we're going to talk about one of the most important ones: your protagonist's goals and motivations.

1. What does the character want?
2. Why does the character want it?

Readers want to root for your characters, but to do so, they have to know what they're rooting for and why. If you give them that, they'll love your characters forever.

What Does the Character Want?

If the reader doesn't know what a character wants, then very little that character does matters. They're just walking around doing stuff. Think of the beginning of A New Hope. There's a bunch of action, a bunch of people getting shot and dying, a big scary dude in a cape and mask walking onto the ship. The opening crawl covers some basic info, but it's difficult to care* until C-3P0 says, "We'll be destroyed for sure" and "There'll be no escape for the princess this time."

He cares about someone. She's in danger.

So we start to care.

The reader doesn't need this information right away, but the sooner the better. You've only got a few pages to grab most readers, and the first step in doing that is giving the reader something to root for.

*Because infodumps rarely work.

Why Does the Character Want It?

Watch any reality competition or any sports on TV. One of the main things they ask the competitors is, "Why is this win important to you?"

The competitors we care most about are those with the most compelling reasons: "I'm doing it for the folks back home." "This is my chance at a better life." "Everyone said I couldn't do it. I have to prove to myself that I can."

Compelling motivation makes for good television and great storytelling. For example:

• Harry Potter wants to succeed at Hogwarts. If he doesn't, he goes back to his awful life with the Dursley's.
• Luke Skywalker wants to find out what R2-D2's hidden message means. If he does, he'll be able to answer questions he's long held about his father and Ben Kenobi and ultimately himself.
• Katniss Everdeen doesn't just want to win the Hunger Games so she can survive. She wants to get back to her family so they can survive as well.
• Zuko wants to find the avatar, not just to restore his honor but to be allowed to return home and to prove he's worthy to be his father's son.*

*Think about it. When did you start caring about Zuko? For me, it was the episode "The Storm" when his uncle told his men why Zuko was so driven that he hurt the people around him.

It was when we learned his motivation. 

Motivations are sometimes framed as stakes, but the idea is the same. Your protagonist wants to achieve something, and they need a compelling reason to achieve it—one that the reader can stand up and cheer for.

It's one of those things that's not hard and it is at the same time. For those of us who tend to focus on world-building and plot, we can get lost in "what needs to happen" and forget about why it needs to happen. But that "why" is paramount.

Because if you can get the reader to root for your characters, then you will have found something every writer hopes to find: a fan.

On the Importance of Democracy

One of my kids told me they didn't really think they were gonna vote when they turned 18, and I felt like I failed as a father. I know that's a common feeling (am I right, fathers?), but it drove me to action. I don't want to fail them, and I don't want to fail you, so you get to be my temporary children for the next few minutes.

You gotta vote.

I don't mean that in a burdensome obligation kind of way, but in a "Hey, it's actually pretty cool we live in a time and place where our opinion has meaning!" kind of way.

It's a safe bet that you have lived your whole life in a democracy. I know I have. Because of that, it's easy to take it for granted that (1) we can always vote (that's what all countries do, right?) and (2) our vote doesn't feel like it does anything.

But here's the thing. If you live in a country without a democracy (or with a fake/failed democracy, like say Russia), your opinion is worthless—sometimes even dangerous. The people in charge of your country/state/city/school are chosen by other people for reasons you don't even get to know about. The law is whatever those leaders say it is. And there's nothing you can do to change it short of some sort of rebellion, which are notoriously difficult to organize and bad for the health of everyone involved (historically speaking).

Voting's easy though. Among other things, the organizing has been done for you, and most laws ensure a minimum of bloodshed. Most importantly, your voice matters.

Yeah, your voice doesn't make change alone—it's the collective voice of thousands or millions of people—but your voice is part of those millions. Change happens when we speak together.

Despite popular opinion, there are electable representatives who care about people and who will fight for change that serves all people. These candidates aren't always available at the highest levels of government, but guess what! The highest levels of government are not the ones that matter the most!

Sure, it'd be nice if the federal government finally ended Daylight Savings Time, raised the minimum wage, or did literally anything about 70% of the world's mass shootings. But state and local governments can and do make those kinds of changes all the time, and your vote carries orders of magnitude more weight in those elections. And when enough cities and states make a successful change, the federal government eventually just goes along with it.

And while you're there, vote for the highest levels of government too. It's just one extra dot.

Voting isn't the end-all fix to the world—nothing is. But so long as we live in a place where it's an option, voting is one of the easiest, most important ways to help.

I know there's a lot going on in the world right now. Hope is a hard thing to maintain, but hope is absolutely vital to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Voting itself is a kind of hope, and you know what they say....

AI and Why We Write in the First Place

Recently, the organization behind National Novel Writing Month (which challenges writers to write 50,000 words in the month of November) officially condoned the use of generative AI and said anyone who didn't like it was classist and ableist.

People got mad about that.

So, let's talk about AI for a bit, what it can do, what it can't do, and whether it should have any place in the writing process.

What do we mean by "AI"?

As always, let's define terms first. This post is not talking about AI that defines enemy behavior in Pac-Man nor the fictional, self-aware AIs of Terminator and I, Robot. We are specifically talking about generative AI or large language models (LLMs).

In a technical sense, generative AI is closer to Pac-Man than Skynet. In science fiction—including science fiction that I wrote!—AIs are self-aware and sentient, capable of complex and original thought. But that's not how any of our current technology works, not now nor in the foreseeable future.

What we call artificial intelligence today is not, in fact, intelligent. LLMs are very powerful, very structured predictive text generators. They are very good at putting together strings of words that sound good and are grammatically correct (i.e., modeling language), but they have no idea what any of it means. They don't even have a way to know.

This is an important point, and we can't get anywhere in discussing the topic unless we agree on it.

So.

What can AI do?

In an ideal world (not an ethical one—we'll get to that in a sec), generative AI can do a bunch of things for writers in theory, like...

• ...brainstorm a list of ideas.
• ...edit text to be grammatically correct.
• ...write a whole damn story.

And that sounds amazing, which is why the CEOs of the world have been throwing everything they have at this tech.

But there are some inherent and (because of the way LLMs fundamentally work) insurmountable problems.

What AI can't do

Remember that part about AI not understanding what anything means? Turns out, that causes some problems.

AI can't brainstorm a list of original ideas. They might sound original to you, but there is nothing AI can come up with that hasn't been thought of or remixed already. In fact, because LLMs are trained to produce something that sounds good rather than something that is unique, the list you get will be the most mediocre ideas you can pull from a quick Google search. Helpful perhaps, but never ground-breaking.

"But, Adam, didn't you say there are no ideas so original that they are unlike anything that has come before?"

I did! I also said that novelty doesn't come from original ideas but from combining them with your unique life, experience, voice, and story.

An AI doesn't have any of those things.

An AI editor can't ensure the author's voice or intended meaning is maintained. Again, this is because AI has no idea what words mean. It only knows which words statistically appear in a given sequence to be considered "correct" by humans (plus whatever extra guidelines and guardrails its programmers placed on top of it). Your text will sound correct, intelligent even, but it will also sound generic. You will no longer be in it.

(Note that if you are looking for a way to make your text great while maintaining your intended meaning and unique voice, that's exactly what I do.)

AI can write a whole damn story but not a story that's worth a damn. Sure, it'll sound smart. Statistical models (and a soupçon of plagiarism) ensure that. But it won't mean anything. Nothing connects. Nothing has a point, and nothing is being said, because the AI has nothing to say and isn't aware that "saying something" with your story is even a thing.

Should writers use AI at all then?

In a brighter timeline, I believe there are versions of us discussing how AI can be used to help with all the tedious stuff humans have to do so we can have more time to do something that matters—like make art. Or at the very least, we could discuss how AI can enhance our creativity rather than make it worse.

For example, brainstorming mediocre ideas isn't all that bad! I do that all the time with a Google search, helping me trigger new, unique ideas. And helping a poverty-stricken, non-native English speaker edit their story into passable English seems like a good thing. Even writing a whole damn story could be...

Well okay, I don't think that one's any good.

I mean, if I'm just using AI to churn out a story—even if I do the work of revising that story to sound good—at that point, what am I even doing then? I'm not making money. (Statistically speaking, publishing books is a terrible way to make money!) And I'm not even writing. At that point, I'm just editing someone else's mediocre prose at a loss.

In any case, those discussions are for a brighter timeline, one in which AI is 100% free and ethical. In our timeline, AIs have some ethical wrinkles:

• Big LLMs are trained on authors' writing without their permission.
• And they do an excellent job plagiarizing that writing without telling you it's plagiarized... because they have no idea.
• Corporations want LLMs to replace human writers and editors in order to increase profits for the already-rich.
• And as these corporations discover LLMs suck at writing, they try to rehire those human writers and editors to fix the LLMs' work at a fraction of their worth.
• By all accounts, training and using LLMs consumes a lot of power—like way more than it should considering what little we get out of it.

If we could get around those problems—if AI had consent for all the data it was trained on, if corporations used it to make creative lives better, if training and using one didn't consume as much electricity as a single Icelandic citizen uses in a year—then sure, maybe, AI might be useful for things like brainstorming or grammar checking.

But those are real problems, and personally, I can't get past them. (And AI's are only mediocre at brainstorming and grammar checking anyway.)

I've heard folks say the tech will get better, these problems are fixable, etc., etc. But coming from the computer science field myself and having studied LLMs back in the 20th century (GOOD GOD!), I'm unconvinced. The technology hasn't changed very much in that time, only the amount of data and server power available (and the billions of investment dollars to make it look like things are better).

So, I won't be using AI for the foreseeable future. Writing is hard, but not because humans are bad it. We're actually the only beings on Earth that are any good it! Making a computer write for me (and not very well) just makes me wonder: What am I buying with that time, when instead, I could be making something new?

That's me. I'm curious your thoughts (but do be kind in the comments if you want them to stay there).

Grounding the Reader in the Scene

In a first draft, we often write things as they occur to us. Maybe some dialogue first, an occasional gesture or action by one of the characters, throw in an emotion or two. The result might be something like this (for the purpose of illustration, I have hacked this passage from Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld):

"How long can we last without parts, Klopp?" Alek asked.

"Until someone lands a shell on us, young master."

"Until something breaks, you mean," Volger said.

Klopp shrugged. "A Cyklop Stormwalker is meant to be part of an army. We have no supply train, no tankers, no repair team."

Alek shifted the cans of kerosene in his grip. He felt like some vagabond carrying everything he owned.

A functional scene, but confusing for anyone other than the author. The reader only knows what you tell them, and the lines above don't say much by themselves.

Grounding a scene means imagining that you are painting a picture in the reader's head (because you basically are). Without any additional context, the reader has nothing in their mind, a white space with only the characters and objects you place in it as you name them.

By the end of the first line above, the reader knows there are two characters: Klopp and Alek. They might know something about these characters from previous scenes, but they don't know where the characters are or what they're doing now. All they have to imagine are two characters they know standing in empty space.

The third line adds another character: Volger. The reader now has to reimagine the scene, possibly even replaying the first two lines in their head to imagine Volger also being present. This slows the reader down as they have to rethink what they thought they knew.

The fourth line mentions a Cyklop Stormwalker, some kind of vehicle. Are they in this vehicle? Are they repairing it? Who knows? Not the reader, but they have to revise their mental image again. Finally, in the last paragraph, we get some visual. We know that Alek is carrying cans of kerosene, so maybe they're carrying these back to the Stormwalker, but where are they now? The author might know, but the reader doesn't

The most straightforward way to fix this is to ground the reader in the scene. Start the scene with a description that answers the questions: Who is here? Where is here? What are they doing?

For example in the passage above, we could add the following paragraph before the dialogue:

Alek, Klopp, and Volger trudged along the streambed, the kerosene sloshing with every step, its fumes burning Alek's lungs. With each of them carrying two heavy cans, the trip back to the Stormwalker already seemed much farther than the walk to town this morning.

With just a couple of sentences, we now know who is in the scene (Alek, Klopp, and Volger), where the scene is (along a streambed), and what they are doing (carrying kerosene back to the Stormwalker). This simple addition makes it far easier for the reader to visualize the scene, and they don't have to revise that mental image with each new line of dialogue.

But what if the reader stopped reading at the last chapter and hasn't picked the book back up in months? Or what if they were distracted when reading the last chapter? Or what if they just don't remember the details—or at least the important details—of what happened in the previous scene? It is often useful to drop a hint of where this scene occurs in the plot as well as in time and space, something like this:

And yet, thanks to Alek, they'd left behind most of what they needed.

This serves as a quick, clean reminder without needing to do a full recap. The reader knows something bad happened, and the line above will be enough to remind most readers what that thing was.

It also has the added benefit of implying what Alek feels in this scene, which is in some ways even more important.

Let's put it all together and add a little bit more of Alek's emotions to the scene (i.e., let me show you the full passage that I hacked apart for illustration):

Alek, Klopp, and Volger trudged along the streambed, the kerosene sloshing with every step, its fumes burning Alek's lungs. With each of them carrying two heavy cans, the trip back to the Stormwalker already seemed much farther than the walk to town this morning.

And yet, thanks to Alek, they'd left behind most of what they needed.

"How long can we last without parts, Klopp?" he asked.

"Until someone lands a shell on us, young master."

"Until something breaks, you mean," Volger said.

Klopp shrugged. "A Cyklop Stormwalker is meant to be part of an army. We have no supply train, no tankers, no repair team."

"Horses would have been better," Volger muttered.

Alek shifted the burden in his grip, the smell of kerosene mixing with the smoked sausages that hung around his neck. His pockets were stuffed with newspapers and fresh fruit. He felt like some vagabond carrying everything he owned.

"Master Klopp?" he said. "While the walker's still in fighting prime, why don't we take what we need?"

Now we have a scene that can be easily visualized, that doesn't require mental revision as the reader reads each new line, that reminds us what the characters are trying to accomplish, and that shows the character's emotions. In other words, we have a well-grounded scene.

Should this be what was written in the first draft? I mean, only if you already have a clear, clear idea of the scene from the start. For most of us, the first draft is essentially our pencil sketch of the story. Revision is where we make it read well, like I've done above.

I can't say that this is how Scott Westerfeld actually put this scene together, but it's how most of my scenes get put together and probably most of yours. Write what comes to mind first, then go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.

And if you still need help, well, that's what editors are for.

Writing for the Market

A common question writers wrestle with is whether they should write what they love or write what will sell. This is an important question! But before I try to answer it, I need to drop an important truth:

Nobody knows what will sell.

I mean, we all make our guesses (and agents and editors are in a better position to gauge these winds than most of us), but it's not like Rowling sat down and decided that a story about a wizarding school was a gap in the market that would definitely be a hit. Heck, even publishers didn't know—the first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times!

Trying to write a bestseller is like hitting a moving target with a paper airplane on a breezy day. It can probably be done? But it's easier if you can just throw a thousand airplanes.

I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of time.

Here's what you can do though:

(1) Know your market. Read books that target the same audience you want to target. Learn what's out there. Try to understand why it works.

(2) Enjoy your market. The number of authors who can find success writing for a genre they don't like are very, very few. Most of us write what we write because we were readers first—because we like our genre!

You don't have to enjoy everything in your target market of course, but the books you don't like are selling for a reason. You may not agree with it, but it will help you immensely to try and understand what your audience sees in them.

(3) Write what you want to read. There are multiple reasons for this. One is because if you don't enjoy it, neither will your readers, but another is because you're gonna be reading this book a lot.

(4) Put yourself in your work. There are no ideas so original that they are unlike anything that has ever come before, but there is no one else in the world with your life, your experience, your voice, or your story. The one thing every breakout hit has in common is novelty, and nobody can write you but you. Use that.

(5) Don't give up. Not everyone is going to be a success, but failure doesn't exist. If something doesn't work, examine why and try again.

Nobody knows what will go viral (and if you do, please explain this to me), but there are elements within your control. You just have to try stuff and see what works. Know your market, take risks, and be yourself. It's the best any of us can do.

Question for you: Is there a novel that you think shouldn't be popular but is? What do you think draws readers to it?