Writing Advice: Be True

With a lot of background before the advice.

No question today, just something that’s on my mind, a confluence of a couple things that have been happening. And I know “be true” is weird advice to give to a craft about which Lawrence Block once wrote a book called “Telling Lies For Fun and Profit,” but I promise it’ll make sense if you stick with me. This is advice I’ve given in one form or another many times, but I think it’s good to hold with you as you go into the new year.

So there’s a good and a bad that I want to talk about first, and let’s get the bad out of the way.

With an incoming government that promises to be more authoritarian, with all that entails (emphasis on loyalty, on saying all the right things), there are some people trying to curry favor in advance by doing and saying things they haven’t been asked to yet—capitulating in advance, as my lefty blogs put it. What this comes down to is, in many of the cases, people being dishonest in a way they hope will gain them some access or favors or at least keep them out of the crosshairs. I use “dishonest” here in a sense that some of them might argue with; for example, ABC settling a lawsuit they were likely to win is maybe more cowardly than dishonest. I view it as dishonest from the perspective of newspeople in general, who tend to value freedom of the press and the ability to say stuff in print and on TV, but from the perspective of Disney, who own ABC, it was likely a (cowardly) business transaction: a relatively tiny amount and abandoning the principles of journalism and free speech to save them potentially more in future legal troubles or lost business or something that hasn’t materialized yet, who knows. You can find other examples easily.

A couple weeks ago, I was at Midwest FurFest, having a conversation with a friend about traditional publishing. It struck me that the furry writing community and the furry writing market are distinct from traditional publishing spaces in a way probably made easier by the small sums of money involved. But anyway—traditional publishing spaces are full of gatekeepers: first you have to convince an agent that your book is sellable, then you and your agent have to convince an editor that your book is sellable, then you have to work with your editor to make the book more sellable. A lot of these agents and editors are people who love books, and to be clear they are trying to find the best match between “your vision” and “what people will buy.” But there has to be a threshold, because any book represents an investment. I’ve talked to writers who lamented the way their books eventually came out, changed by the process into something different than they’d intended.

Self-publishing is a way around this, a democratization of writing, and there are small self-pub communities out there (the homeschooling one, for example), but self-publishing as a whole is difficult to navigate for the reader who doesn’t know any of the authors, in a way that traditional publishing (which has budgets for marketing designed to inform people about the authors they don’t know yet) isn’t.

Furry has evolved into something else. There are publishers, and they do gatekeep to some extent, but the vision of the author is generally centered. Most furry publishers don’t employ “editors” in the sense that we talk about them in tradpub; they do proofread and choose covers, but a lot of the editing work happens in writing groups with beta readers and colleagues, and when the book gets to the publisher (which in some cases is the writer also), it is assumed to reflect the writer’s vision, and the furry publishers generally don’t want to change that much about it.

That’s a reflection on furry culture in general. We mostly pick our avatars in the community based on our identity, and they can shift as that identity shifts (this is a generalization; I know there are people out there who pick a fursona because of a friend or partner, but I think they also make it their own). Our creative output is sometimes aimed at a particular market, but (artists who complain about drawing porn aside), mostly people find a sub-community where their work has an audience and then they do the stuff they love to do for the people who love it.

So what I don’t really need to remind y’all of, but what I’d like to anyway as a thought to carry into 2025, is this: Be true to yourself. Write the stories that inspire you, that you want to share, that you want to make real in the world. Don’t give up writing your story because you think it might be dangerous, or because you think people are looking for something different. Only you can tell your story, so don’t leave it untold while you try to tell someone else’s.

What is “your” story? I hear that question a lot, especially from writers starting out and young writers. We grow up immersed in other people’s stories, and some of them connect strongly to us, so the first stories we try to write are our own versions of those stories. Fanfiction is a natural progression of this, putting our own spins on established characters or putting ourselves into our favorite settings. But when it comes to writing your own original work…I think “your story” is collected from the parts of yourself that you don’t see in other stories, or only see piecemeal. Or that you see in other stories but not quite right. Think about a time in your life when you faced a problem and came out the other side happier or wiser or maybe both. When did you realize something about yourself that you didn’t know before? These are the stories that will resonate with other people going through those same experiences, or who want to know what it’s like to go through those experiences.

I can’t promise you that this approach will get you readers and sales, but I can’t promise you that any approach will get you that. What I can promise you is that this approach will result in stories you’re proud of, a catalog that you’re happy to have your name on, and the best work you can create.

Now go out and make some fantastic stories for the new year. And thank you for sticking around to listen to me here. I am so grateful that you all want to hear my stories.