Actions and Outcomes

We — and by “we” I mean “I” — are slightly stymied in our dossier progress by the picture component. I never really had firm, unyielding portraits in my head of most of the characters, but I did for Brandon and Poe, and so as I’m putting together pictures of possibilities, I keep thinking to myself that they are not *quite* right, and then I get frustrated and ignore the dossiers for a little while. Which is cool because it’s not like I don’t have a real book to write and a real proposal to finish and to, you know, do my job and stuff.

Last night I was at yoga class, and we had a substitute teacher who was talking to us about the Bhagavad Gita 2.47, which (as she put) basically says that you have the right to your actions, but not the outcome of your actions. (I came home and googled it, and it’s a lot more than that, but this is beyond the scope of the story, which is what I was thinking about in yoga class today.) You know how sometimes, when you least expect it, some stranger comes along and tells you precisely what you need to hear? I was just hanging out on my mat, zoning as she discussed the weekend yoga retreat and how there was a sale going on in the center’s shop on yoga props and then she drops this bombshell on me and I focused.

My writer friends and I talk a lot about “protecting the work” — about how it’s so easy to get caught up in marketing or submissions or reviews or what some other writer is doing to promote their books that you forget that the only thing — the most important thing, is the work.

And this is sort of the same thing backwards, at least to my mind. I am entitled to my actions, to the words I put down on the page. I am not entitled to anyone liking — or, and here’s the kicker — disliking those words. It doesn’t belong to me. Which is a good way sometimes of turning off that internal editor, which is a rather misleading term for the chorus of “this won’t sell” “your fans won’t like this” “your editor won’t like this” “the reviewers are going to get all over this” that goes on in my head. It’s not actually an internal editor at all. It’s the internal manifestation of all those things that are very external indeed, that are the outcomes of my actions. Somebody liking or not liking the choices I’ve made with my work is not my responsibility. Making the right choices is.

I was also recently reading Lilith Saintcrow’s excellent essay on the same topic. About telling truth in fiction. And that whether or not people like that, you have to write what is the truth:

Even when I am writing to spec, writing with specific guidelines or saleability in mind, I am writing about these issues and themes because they concern me as a human being. So much of writing is, for me, a way to think about these issues, to hold a conversation with myself.

But there is a deeper truth in here.

The ending of Working For The Devil was so hard to write. I knew what the ending had to be, of course–I was pretty sure I was working on a series and had the framework in my head. The only way the framework would hold up is if a Certain Character died.

I did not want that Certain Character to die. My editor did not want that Certain Character to die. My agent, my readers, nobody wanted that Certain Character to kick the bucket.

But he had to. Because it was the essential truth of the story, and I had made a bargain with the Muse and the story. The bargain was I would not truckle. The bargain was that I would tell the truth as best as I knew how, and the truth was that character had to die. There was no way around it. That was the way the story went.