Jim Butcher: Livin' On Television by Bret Wright

In the real world, however, the road to success began as a game trail that only Butcher could see, and evolved into the superhighway that it is today, only through hard work, tenacity, and the support of his immediate family. His television series grew out of many years of trying – and failing – to get published. In a recent presentation to a group of writers, Butcher told them about his road to being published. “I wrote my first book when I was nineteen” he said. “It was horrible. Really bad. I wrote another one . . . which was also bad. The third . . . OK, that one sucked, too. Then I used all of that novel-writing experience and rewrote the first novel, which was . . . still bad. So, I branched out into this paranormal thing on the next one, and it . . . well, it was a real stinker.”

Finally, after years of writing and banging his head against a wall, Butcher decided to take a writing workshop in Oklahoma. To his great surprise, it opened up his writing in a way that no amount of independent study had previously. The real difference in his writing came when he found out about writing sequels. This isn’t the type of sequel one gets when writing a novel and then writing another based on the first. This kind of sequel has to do with the way an author tells the story. Think of it as the reaction to a setup. “In a book, there are scenes, and then there are sequels. The difference is reaction. When you write a scene, you’re providing the characters with a situation. The sequel to the scene is the reaction you get from the characters to the situation you set up for them.” This kind of story telling provides for more solid, viable characters, and it carries the story (and the reader) into the realm all writers want readers to enter: suspension of disbelief; that state where everything that occurs in a story is perfectly reasonable and explainable.

The road to realizing his writing mistakes was a humbling one for Butcher. Because he was an old hand at novel writing, he decided to show the instructor in Oklahoma that what she was telling him was fine in theory, but didn’t hold water in practice. “Besides,” he thought, “I have an English Lit degree. I’ll show her!” He proceeded to write an urban fantasy novel because the teacher had suggested it due to Butcher’s admiration for Laurell Hamilton’s work. “I did absolutely everything she said to do, down to the smallest detail, just to prove she was wrong.” The result? Storm Front, the first book in the Dresden Files series. He also wrote the second and third books in the series while he was at it. To date, the series up to its ninth installment, with another in the works.

The series centers on one Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. He’s a detective of sorts, living in Chicago. He’s also a wizard. Oh, and he fights the minions of black magic, and basically ticks off the high council of wizards who oversee things. Harry has a bad relationship with anything that involves technology, to boot.

When Butcher writes, he turns on the television. “I like having the television on in the background. Either a good movie that I’ve seen, or a not so good one that I haven’t.” With the televsion on, he thought about what he wanted from this new book. He knew he wanted a character who tracked down the supernatural, like in the old Nightstalker series, but he wanted the detective to have supernatural powers. Sort of a blend between Tolkein’s Gandalf, and Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. “Gandalf isn’t shy about letting people know what idiots they are,’ he says, “and Sherlock was the same way; both exist in the murky world of shadow.” While he was building his main character, Cast a Deadly Spell(which follows the adventures of H. Phillip Lovecraft: PI) was playing in the background. Then Babylon 5 came on. Between the two shows, Butcher came up with the name of his main character. “I had these two lines bouncing around in my head, ‘Harry wants to see you. Harry wants to see you,’ and ‘Dresden. Dresden. Dresden.’ Suddenly, there was the name I’d been looking for.”

One might think that Butcher’s success followed soon on the heels of his writing workshop. Not true. He began attending writing conferences because a friend had suggested that he concentrate on the people he wanted to sell his manuscript to. Doing it in person seemed like a natural way to approach them with his ideas. On top of that, he continued to send out his manuscripts, and the rejections piled high. The low point for him came early one morning as he was trying to catch a plane to another writing conference where an agent he’d been trying to meet would be speaking. “I’d been trying to get published for almost ten years at that point, and I was going to this conference that cost a lot of money. It was oh-my-god-early in the morning, in March, twenty degrees out, and my tire blew out in the middle of nowhere. I had oil and gunk all over my convention clothes, and the lug nuts would not move. I was going to miss my plane.” He sat on the side of the road and kept thinking about missing his plane, not being able to reach his wife so she could come get him, and having cars splashing by, getting more and more mud on his good clothes.

“I thought, ‘if you were a character in a book, you’d erase this entire scene,’ because I was doing exactly what my teacher told me a character should never do.” He says you can have your characters do a lot of things – heck, they can get away with murder -- but if you want certain death for your character (and your novel) just have him or her wallow in a little self-pity. With that in mind, Butcher got up off of the pavement, screamed at his tires, got the bolts off, made the conference, and landed an agent. A perfect story arc.

Since that time, Butcher has kept up a steady stream of writing. He’s produced The Dresden Files series, in addition to a fantasy series called Codex Alera, of which the latest installment, Captain’s Fury, is due for release in December of this year. “That’s the main thing. Write, write, write. Don’t loiter over the same project, just keep going. Don’t wait for the world to stop and acknowledge you.”

That advice is pretty basic, and Butcher swears by it. “You have to remember the basics, and you have to understand that writing is a business,” he says. “Keep the emotion out of it.” He says that this last is hard for him. “It’s a cold-blooded point of view, but agents are professionals, and they understand that it’s a business. I think I could have avoided a falling out with my first agent had we communicated better. Read and understand your contracts, keep in touch with your agent.”

Another bit of advice is this: Get used to chopping away at your manuscript when it’s necessary. “I’m a minimalist,” says Butcher, “Actually, I’m more of a Japanese brush painter who sits and stares at a blank page and then makes a single stroke – there! It’s a horse.”

He says he likes sparse writing, and has been known to go back and chop two weeks worth of work to get at what he really wants to say. “Savagely edit yourself. You have to. It’s easier to go back and flesh things out than it is to cut. I’ve actually had an editor tell me to expand this, expand that, cut fifty pages and – oh, hurry, we’re on a deadline here.”

For Butcher, it’s all led to some pretty big “wow” moments. “One of those moments came when I got the news that the T.V. show was going to come out. They told me I couldn’t tell anybody yet! So, my family and I jumped up and down in the kitchen, and then we went to Burger King to celebrate.” Another was getting to meet Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics and creator of Spiderman, among other comic book heroes. Butcher had written a Spiderman novel for Marvel, and was to appear with Lee on stage. They met in the green room, and Lee shook his hand. “I’m a big name dropper,” Lee informed Butcher, “I’ll be able to use yours now.”

The formula for overnight success varies from person to person. There are few who actually do it in the literal sense. Somebody once asked Henry Matisse how long it took him to draw a simple line profile on a piece of paper, and the artist famously replied, “My whole life.” In Jim Butcher’s case, it took almost ten years, a whole lot of tenacity, a smidgen of luck, the television, and lots of failed attempts in order to be able to say that he’s just getting started. “There are some writers who just appear on the scene, they’re true overnight sensations, but that’s rare. Mostly it’s a lot of hard work, and knowing what your goals are.”