26 May 2004

Because She Has To: A Conversation with Elizabeth Moon
by Ken Rand
www.sfwa.org/members/Rand/

Ken Rand resides with his family in Utah where he writes semi-fulltime. He's sold fifty-plus stories to Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, On Spec, Talebones, Writers of the Future (volume 13), Star Trek: Strange new Worlds (volume 2), Fictionwise.com and four dozen other magazines and anthologies. Books published: The 10% Solution: Self-editing for the Modern Writer (Fairwood Press), Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon (Yard Dog Press), and Phoenix (Zumaya Publications). Upcoming: Bad News From Orbit (Silver Lake Publishing). His Writing and living philosophy: "Lighten up."

Science fiction and fantasy writer Elizabeth Moon writes because she has to. "I have to tell stories," she says. "I don't know why I have to—I just know I do."

Moon is the author of 15 novels (so far) and numerous short stories in two collections. The Speed of Dark (Ballentine Books, 2003) was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and won the Nebula. Remnant Population (Baen Books, 1996) was a Hugo nominee.

Moon started writing "before I could really remember," she says, "according to my mother. I wrote all through school. I never thought I would become professional, never thought it was practical, but I continued to write."

Somebody told Moon that "it couldn't be done," but instead of discouraging her, that inspired her. "I did not believe it when I was told I was sure to fail," she recalls. "I did not let people tell me that my ideas were no good, which they did—they told me that. I kept on doing what I had to do. I didn't quit. Not quitting is a major part of success in creative field, and probably many non-creative fields.

"I'm talking about continuing to persevere in something that you want to do. It doesn't mean that you finish every single thing. It means that you keep trying, and keep trying, past the failures, past the things that don't work out. You don't quit."

Moon did try to quit, she says, several times, "because I was filling up boxes with paper that were taking up space in the house. I was wasting money and time, I thought, writing, when I should be doing something more useful.

"Every writer has many chances to quit. Every person who says when they're in high school, 'Oh, I want to write. I want to be like so and so,' has many chances to quit. There are many other things that people will suggest that you'll be better at or that'll make you more money—and they're right about that—but the ones who get published are the ones who don't quit."

Like most aspiring writers, Moon has read a lot. "Of course, I copycatted for years," she admits. "We all do. If you're going to steal, steal from good ones. I've tried to pick up their tools and make them my tools, and then I would have those tools to use my own memories on."

Moon notes two distinct corners she turned on the road to becoming a professional writer. "One was after we moved to Texas," she says.

The Moons—Elizabeth and husband Richard and son Michael—now live in a small town near Austin, Texas.

"I met a young woman who was working in a bookstore who recommended a particular professor at a nearby university, who allowed adults to audit some of her classes. I took her creative writing class, the first time I'd ever had a writing class.

"It was the first time I'd ever let myself write and say, 'Okay, the goal for this period of time is to write. It's not something you have to fit around everything else and do in the middle of the night.'

"Well, that let the cat out of the cage and it turned into a tiger and I could never stuff it back into the cage. I decided I would spend the next year trying to get something published.

"Somewhere in there, we ran into a family monetary problem. My husband's business was not doing well, and I discovered that I could ghost write articles for him and those sold. And I started writing a column of local news for the county weekly and that paid for the typewriter ribbons and the paper to do these other things.

"That made me realize it's feasible for me, in a small town, at least to write salable nonfiction. I can write a 1000-2500 word article and, man, it will sell. So that was a good feeling.

"The turnaround in fiction came about a year or two years later [in the early 80s]. I had been trying to write short stories because I had been told all along that you have to write short stories before you can write a novel. Short stories are the training ground for novelists. Well no, not for natural novelists.

"I started a short story for a friend's kid. They had moved to Utah from Texas and he was miserable, so I started a story for Steven. And it grew, and it grew, and it grew. Like all my short stories, it tried to grow too big. But this time, since it was for a kid, I thought, I can make it as long as I want. That turned into The Deed of Paksenarrion [trilogy from Baen, 1988-89], which originally was probably 20 to 30 percent longer than it is now.

"Somewhere in that period is when I read this awful novel, and I remember literally throwing it across the room. 'I can do better than this. Why are my books not on the shelves, and this book is on the shelves?' I began to think that maybe I can write fiction professionally too.

"I started writing some short stories. I happened to read Writers Digest one month and there was a little tiny ad for Sword and Sorceress number three, with [Marion Zimmer] Bradley as editor. I sent off some of these little stories that I'd written, and she promptly sent them back. But after the last one she sent back, at the bottom of the page, she said, 'I would have bought this one if it had come in early, but now I only have room for 1500 words.'

"And I thought, well, gee—I had a bad experience with a horse earlier that spring. [Moon loves horses as much as she loves writing.] I bet I could make a story out of it. And I did. It started out at 2300 words, and I thought it was perfect. The practical side of my head, which by now had dealt with several nonfiction editors who had very exacting word lengths, said, 'No, she said 1500. She meant 1500.' I cut it down to 2100. Oh, I couldn't cut another word. I cut it to 1900. 1700. I finally got down to 1497 words and she bought it—my first fiction sale."

That was 1985, the year she made her first sale to Analog.

Some writers can't write both SF and fantasy, some can. Moon can, but she has no idea how she does it. "I've read both for a long time," she says, "so obviously my mind can absorb both types of things—the different moods, the different feels of them. But there's always a gear shift between the two. Science fiction is very much in the head. Fantasy is very much in the gut. And if there's not some heart connected to both, you're in trouble."

Why SF and fantasy? Why not, for example, Westerns, given her love of horses?

"I've never enjoyed reading Westerns that much," Moon responds, "and I'm not convinced that you can write something you don't enjoy reading. I enjoy mysteries, but I cannot write mysteries, or at least I've never written good mysteries yet. I would love to be able to write mysteries as well. I would love to write all sorts of things that I'm simply not good at. I've written some one-act plays for community theater. That was a lot of fun.

"Mainstream, I could probably pull off. Romance I could not pull off. It's not a genre that I read in happily, and therefore I can't write it well. When I try to write romantic scenes, I get the giggles."

Moon is keeping an eye on the e-book industry, but has drawn no firm conclusions. At a panel at this year's Nebula, she asked some "very pointed questions" about e-books. "What can you tell me about the actual income that a writer can expect," she asked. "If I have an income of 'x' now, and if I would go into e-books, what does it take to get that same income? As a pro, this is what I'm interested in. They all kind of hummed and hawed and said 'We can't quite tell you, but that's a reasonable question to ask.'

Moon cites the general economy in part for the speculative fiction market being down. "If people are hungry," she says, "they aren't buying books. Or they're getting them second-hand, which does the rest of us no good. The conglomeration of lines into fewer and fewer publishers is not good for anybody. There's not as much variation."

It's not a good time for new writers, she says, "but I think it's always been difficult. If you look at the cohort of people that came in the same time that I did, not that many of us are left. I think some people get their book published and realize it's a lot more work than they thought. They get the one book published and then they can at least say I've written a book to all their friends, but to keep doing it? Make a career out of it? Time after time after time? It's hard.

"I think that talent is related to it only in part. There is the luck of the draw. There is the timing, there is hitting that moment when people are ready for what you're writing. And the luck includes not only what's in the field, but the things going on in the world outside the field."

Still, if you want to make writing a career, Moon advises you to ask yourself—why? "Why do you have to write? If you have to write, if you find yourself writing in your spare moments, if you find yourself filling boxes and notebooks with stuff, then probably you have sufficient drive, sufficient perseverance.

"The next thing to do it to test the talent. Finish something, send it off. Keep doing that. See what kind of results you get back. There aren't that many places for new writers to put stuff, but they were saying that when I came into this in the Eighties.

"Read good stuff. Measure yourself against the best. Look at the top writers in the field. Look at the top stylists in the field. And then look at your work, and ask, 'how many percent below am I'? Because if you just aim for the midline, or if you just say, 'well I can write better than that creep,' sure, maybe you can. But maybe that creep was the last one that they picked because they had to fill the list and somebody else got sick and didn't turn their book in. You don't want to be there. If you think you're as good as the best, you may be halfway up. And that's better than if you aim for halfway up and are actually at the bottom."

Here's a little thought experiment that tells a lot about Elizabeth Moon's priorities: Ask her what she'd do if she suddenly had a billion dollars in her bank account. "I'd have more land and more horses and I would still write," she answers without hesitation. "There's also music. I'd certainly hire a housekeeper and a secretary so I could spend all my time doing the stuff I love to do, which includes writing."

Reading her stories is a top priority for Moon fans: they do it for the same reason she writes them--because they have to. Fans are now reading Trading in Danger, just out from Del Rey Books, the first in a new far-future space-adventure series. Details are at sff.net/people/Elizabeth.Moon/.