Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 9: Writing Fun

Many authors, when they "get serious" about writing, discover that their attitude will suck all of the fun out of their work, and it shows in their prose.

A novelist who isn't having fun will tend to write beautifully and powerfully, but may go an entire novel without cracking a joke, without displaying a sense of humor. In short, they seem stressed, and I've literally seen this stressed attitude destroy writers, because each time that they write a story, they try harder and harder to be better. Their works become ponderous and "fraught with meaning," and eventually the over-stressed writer learns to hate his or her job. They don't just lose their sense of humor, but there isn't any warmth or joy or charm or life in their works.

Such writers never quite seem to understand the value of Shakespeare's words, "The play is the thing." If I were to paraphrase what I think he was saying, I'd simply put it, "Play as you work. Enjoy what you're doing, and your reader will, too."

The importance of that came to me after I finished my first little Star Wars novel. I had to come up with a new project. I had a couple of goals. First, I had been labelled as a "science fiction writer," but I wanted to write fantasy, too. So I was looking for ways to edge closer to fantasy. At the same time, I had a Star Wars novel coming out, and I wanted to capture that audience, too. So I wanted to write something that had some playfulness to it.

I came up with an idea that was originally called The Forward Woman and the Backward Man, a tale about a woman from a futuristic world who falls in love with a bodyguard from a very backward planet. I sent the proposal in to my editor at Bantam, and she loved it. But Bantam's parent company really wasn't committed to science fiction at all, and the offer showed that.

So my agent called and asked if I would be willing to pitch the novel to Tor. She asked if I could get a proposal to her in two hours. That wasn't hard, since I'd already worked one up. But then she called a few minutes later and said that Tor liked it so much, they wanted two more book proposals of different books by early afternoon. So I outlined two more novels out of thin air, and she said that they wanted those, and asked for four more different proposals by the next morning. I outlined those, and Tor wanted them, too, but I decided that I really didn't want to have a seven-book deal, and so we dialed the contract back to just three books.

Tor's advances weren't much higher than those at Bantam, but the offer included a hardcover release, and a hardcover novel sale will bring you four or five times as much as a paperback sale, so I figured that the royalties would be much higher.

As I began the novel that would become , I decided not to write about any big serious topics. I'd been writing about the biological influences that led to concepts of "good and evil," about the traumatic effects of child abuse, about the relationship between commitment and love—and I felt mentally exhausted.

So with my next book, I decided to "write about nothing." Instead, I just wanted a book that would transport the reader to strange new worlds and let them have fun along the way.

But I soon learned that I had a problem. I'm not that shallow. Deeper themes kept creeping into the novels. Oh well, I decided. The important thing to me was to learn to relax as I wrote, and I made it through The Golden Queen and had fun. But I was worried about how it would be received.

I mean, I decided to write a book set on a planet where people had been biologically engineered to speak with an Irish accent. One of my main characters was a talking bear who wanted to be a Catholic priest. It featured an interstellar war with bug-eyed monsters. It didn't sound at all like high literature, and I figure that the critics would probably knife me.

You see, it sometimes seems to me that critics get all wrapped up in "high seriousness," too. They're out looking for novels that are important and fraught with meaning. But my literary theories suggest that you may be missing the mark when you look at a book that way.