Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
LIKE a lot of writers, I read a lot of books. If you’re a writer who doesn’t read a lot — and read widely — reconsider your life choices, because I can tell writers who don’t read, or who only read narrowly. The former write like they’re describing a movie, and the latter write in a specific, usually quite stilted style (I have one writer acquaintance who thinks everything written after 1950 or so is trash, and their work reads like a gentleman of leisure in 1870 decided to try his hand at popular fiction).
Reading widely can be a burden, of course. In my professional life I review books, which means I sometimes encounter truly terrible novels written by people with more ambition and discipline than talent. I admire anyone who writes a novel — truly — but the desire to write isn’t always enough to produce something great.
But reading these bad novels gives me plenty of insight into what people get wrong. An example that’s come up a few times in recent books I’ve read is the Vanishing Character. It goes like this: The story begins with Character A, an spends a goodly amount of time with them — sometimes dozens of pages, multiple chapters worth of story. Then Character A vanishes for a long, long time. Like, completely, totally, entirely vanishes.
John Travolta in Pulp Fiction Looking Around in Confusion
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing a character, even for a very long time. But you have to consider how your reader will react, and you have to have a very clear purpose. If your character is vanishing because you ran out of story to tell about them, you need to rethink your story and its structure. If you have a plan for that character that involves making the reader forget about them so you can surprise them later, you need to think objectively about whether you’re pulling that off — about whether your readers will be fooled, or if they’ll spend the middle section of your story wondering why the character disappeared.
Because the real risk is that your story will feel like two separate books, pasted together — especially if your vanished character never turns up again, their purpose served. If the character’s purpose is purely back story or set up, think about how much time you’re spending on them. Readers can more readily accept a vanished character in what’s clearly a prologue or short back story chapter as opposed to half the novel.
Finally, consider tone and genre. I recently read a book with a vanished character where the beginning of the story is soaked in magic and occult happenings. Then the character vanishes, and the middle section of the book reads like a completely different story, with exactly zero of those things. You can get away with one of those things, but rarely both.
Some people ask me if reading bad novels can rub off on you and make your own writing worse just as great novels can make your writing better. The answer is, gobs, I hope not <uncorks bottle and drinks directly from it for several seconds>.
Just about every writer has That Book. You know the one: You started it when you were a much younger person, filled with hope. It keeps dying on the vine. Sometimes you make it 50,000 words through before it melts away like an ice cream in the rain, sometimes you write 65 versions of the first paragraph before setting yourself on fire.
But you always go back.
You go back because there’s something there. Maybe it’s a premise you love, but can’t make work. Maybe it’s a character that continues to live in your brain rent free. Maybe it’s just some especially good writing you haven’t been able to marry to a coherent story yet. Whatever the reason, the project goes in and out of drawers and recent files lists, never quite abandoned, never quite finished.
The Balance
I have a writer friend who has been working on the same novel his entire life. Literally, one novel. He’s written a very small number of other things, but this one novel has been his obsession for decades. Technically, he’s finished dozens of versions of it — complete, coherent novels. But he’s never quite satisfied, and he keeps going back to it and starting over. He tries different approaches, tweaks the characters, updates the setting, changes the rules. Sometimes he stops work on it for years at a time and just lives his life, not writing anything.
That last part is alien to me, but I wonder sometimes if I should take a note or two from the rest of his approach. I’m generally a fast writer. I like my first drafts (probably too much) and usually tear through a story pretty quickly. But I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t, if maybe I might benefit from letting more stories sit and marinate for long periods. But who has time? I’m going to die someday, kids. I can’t take the risk that I’ll be leaving a notebook filled with idea I never got around to working on.
I do have a novel I can’t quit. It’s been two years now, which I know for some writers isn’t very long, but for me that’s unusual. I love all the parts of the novel, but I don’t like the whole they Voltron into. And so I keep putting it aside, then tearing it open and trying to find a new path for the characters and setting and bits of business in there that I do love.
I’m not sure this book will ever be a success, but unlike almost all my other weird failures, this one is still alive in my head. Usually when I hit a certain level of frustration with a book I start to drift away from it, and slowly forget it. Sometimes, if I’m 95% to an actual novel, I’ll put in the effort to cruft up a serviceable ending because I’m a completist, but that’s with the full knowledge that the book is going into a drawer probably forever after that. But this one keeps whispering to me that there’s a plot that will pull it all together, I just have to find it.
Strategery
So, if you’ve got a book that won’t gel but also keeps flopping around, refusing to suffocate, what can you do. Here’s how I’m going to try and get this thing finally off the ground:
1. Plantsing. As some of you no doubt know, I’m a Pantser by nature. I take an idea and run with it, and sometimes after several months of running I have a novel, sometimes an enormous mess. But when I’ve got a novel that’s a hot mess like this one, it can sometimes be very helpful to chart the plot I have, then plot out the rest of the book. The shift in approach often clarifies things.
2. Brain Salad Surgery. Sometimes when your plot sputters out halfway through like this, the problem isn’t figuring out where to go next, but to figure out where you went wrong 100 pages ago — or even further back. So if the Plantsing doesn’t yield fruit, I’ll probably try starting fresh with a brand new beginning, then slowly fold in stuff I like from later in the story. Sometimes that jolts things back to life.
3. Go Episodic. And sometimes the solution is to just keep writing. Just keep writing little vignettes and short stories and subplots and backstory and whatever else I can think of. The material produced probably ends up being cut in the theoretical future of this novel, but in the mean time my Underbrain might tease a solution out of the material. And if nothing else, some of those episodes might turn into standalone short stories.
I’ll keep y’all posted. In the mean time, if you’re working on a novel that just won’t give in and become great (or at least coherent), maybe try one of these tricks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start drinking. Don’t look at me that way. It’s my process.
In which I watched Terminator: Dark Fate so you don’t have to.
1984’s The Terminator is a delightfully deranged, violent sci-fi story that somehow combines Linda Hamilton’s 1980s feathered hair and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexplicable Austrian accent and improbable body into a near-perfect story. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s very good trash, at least for some of us.
A sequel should have been a disaster. It shouldn’t have worked. But somehow James Cameron avoided simply remaking his first film with a bigger budget and managed to surprise viewers with a story that cleverly flipped the hero/villain dynamic. Making Arnold’s Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator the good guy, then having it stumblingly learn why human life is important, was a (slightly stupid) very cool plot twist, especially when coupled with Robert Patrick’s slender-but-relentless Series 1000.
Alas, like Daffy Duck’s gasoline and dynamite schtick, it’s a trick that only works once. Watching the horrifyingly terrible Terminator: Dark Fate the other day, I was struck by the fact that the diminishing returns on the T-800 Terminator learning how to be human have slipped down into negative numbers. This is an idea that has to stop.
Villain Decay
Since the glorious days of 1992, there have been four major films in the Terminator franchise: Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys, and 2019’s Dark Fate. Rise was a second sequel, and was relatively successful despite being a pretty boring retread of the previous films’ tropes. But at least it still had a relatively young Arnold Schwarzenegger (he was 55 during filming) who could at least look like a deathless killing machine.
After that, the franchise fell into a pattern: For three films, they’ve been trying to reboot the series, failing miserably, and then trying again.
2005’s Salvation tried something different. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, it tried to leave Schwarzenegger behind; Arnold only appears as a brief, CGI version of his 1984 self, the original T-800 model in a tiny cameo. If only Salvation had been a brilliant film and a huge hit, because the last two movies have been stuck with Grandpa Terminator, and it is terrible.
Everyone likes Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there’s no sin in growing old. But after the failure of Salvation, the film studios took a look around and obviously concluded the film failed because of a distinct lack of Arnold-style Terminators. And the only solution they can think of is to keep bringing Arnold back as an increasingly ludicrous killer robot.
WHY DO YOU CRY
The explanation for why a soulless killing machine would age and grow old is just barely acceptable, and then only if you’ve already suspended your disbelief to the sky-high levels these movies require: The T-800 is covered in real human flesh, complete with blood vessels, in order to fool the future scanners of the resistance. That flesh ages, even as the robotic chassis beneath it remains immortal or as close to it as technology can make it.
Sure, that makes no sense, and doesn’t explain why Old Man Terminator walks like a stiff, 73-year old man in pretty good shape, but fuck it: It’s Terminator Town. I’ll allow it.
The real problem is in Dark Fate‘s extension of the learning-to-be-human trope established in Judgment Day, where John Connor gives the T-800 simple lessons in how to be human, culminating in a line of dialogue that still makes me want to kill someone every time I hear it:
The whole “robot learns value of human emotions” isn’t exactly a new trope, and the decision to double down on it with Grandpa Terminator in Dark Fate is a terrible storytelling decision in a film filled with them. The T-800 in Dark Fate isn’t the same one from either of the two original films. There were several Terminators sent back in time, and after the end of Judgment Day one of those other ones found John Connor and, er, terminated him. Then it walked away, its mission accomplished, and instead of self-destructing or something else a real, programmed machine would have done, it goes off, starts a drapery business, and hooks up with a single mother.
This is real. This happened.
So we have Grandpa Terminator pretending to be the asexual stepfather of dreams, because apparently all Terminators have secret subroutines or unlockable achievements concerned with being a father figure. Which is a remarkable thing for an evil AI to introduce into the design, if you ask me. This leads to Grandpa Terminator doing all sorts of goofy old man schtick, like a lengthy monologue about talking a customer out of some really bad drapery decisions, and the sight of Grandpa Terminator sitting in a lawn chair that miraculously supports his 400 pound weight, passing out beers to everyone.
There’s a broad strokes argument for this sort of nutty twist, but it falls apart in practice. This is just terrible character work, necessitated solely by the desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film as the T-800 without just going ahead and animating him.
So: Mistakes were made. Someone made this movie, for example. And I watched it, as another example. Take some lessons from my shame: Playing around with making your villains into anti-heroes is fun, but it comes at a price, and that price is usually the ruination of the character. It’s a trick that works once, and you should be aware of it before you go Grandpa Terminator in your own story.
Something non-creative folks don’t understand is the private rush that accompanies creation. For me, as a writer, nothing feels better than writing THE END on a story I’ve been working on, whether it’s been days or years since I started.
And that rush is especially powerful if I’ve tried something new. I write a lot, and much of my work is fairly standard — I have my ways of doing things, the tics and subjects that grab my attention, the tics and techniques I like to use in my storytelling. I start with an idea, imagine characters, and go to work.
But sometimes there’s an innovation, what in chess is sometimes referred to as a ‘brilliancy.’ These don’t have to necessarily be brilliant, it’s more like they’re ideas or techniques that are new to me. An innovation can be exhilarating, it can remind you why you started this lonely, low-income life of words in the first place. And when you pull off a brilliancy like that, you want to show off. You want to rush that story out and flex on everyone, say ‘see what I did? DO YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE WROUGHT?!?!’
The flex ain’t worth it. Brilliancies are exciting stuff. But remember, an incredible technique doesn’t make a good story, necessarily.
Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!
It’s easy to be so struck by some new idea you have, some new trick, that you let it cloud your assessment of the overall work. You write an entire novel in a breathless stream-of-consciousness style that really sings! But you forgot to tell a compelling story doing it. Or you managed to pull of the sort of epic, mind-bending plot twist that comes around once in a lifetime, carefully dropping seeds throughout your plot in an assured way that often evades you! But you forgot to make your characters interesting, three-dimensional people.
Brilliancies are great. They’re often the oxygen that keeps us going creatively because they get us excited about writing all over again. But it’s important to remember your fundamentals. It’s crucial that your brilliancy serve the story and not the other way around.
Of course, sometimes you have to wallow in the great idea for a bit, just enjoy yourself, and then go back later and make it into an actual story. The sad fact is, you often have to use an exciting new idea until it stops being so exciting, and then you can use it like a tool instead of showing it off like a new toy.
Of course, as a writer, my most recent brilliancy involved rigging up one of those beercan baseball hats to feed me sips of whiskey while I work, so … I may be the smartest human alive.
Growing as a writer — or any kind of artist — is often a slow process that you notice all at once.
As many of you are aware (unfortunately, for you), I am an amateur musician. If you’re curious, you can check out my music alter-ego here. Because I am a Basic White Guy of a Certain Age (BWGCA), I’d always wanted to learn how to play guitar, but because I am a Lazy White Guy Who Coasts on Privilege (LWGWCP) it always seemed like a lot of work. Then, in 2008, my wife The Duchess purchased a guitar for my birthday, along with some lessons, and kind of forced me to finally do something about this.
I have zero interest in playing other people’s songs, except as a way to steal their musical ideas. I don’t give a fuck about being able to play songs around a campfire for people, I want to write my own music, even if no one gives a shit about it (and y’all are pretty aggressive about not giving a shit about my music). And I am certainly no musical genius, I just do this for my own satisfaction.
But it’s interesting to look at where I was musically in 2008 and where I am today. I started writing when I was ten years old or so, and long ago lost the thread of my artistic development. I hope I’m still learning and growing as a writer, but it’s hard to see that progress clearly, because I hit a baseline of competence a very long time ago.
But with music, that baseline of competence happened relatively recently. So, for example, here is the first ‘song’ I ever recorded, way back in October of 2008. Herewith the awesomeness that is ‘Ditty in G.’
Wow … that’s something, right? At the time, though, I was incredibly proud. It’s recognizably a song, after all, and I was very stoked to have created it. I mean, it’s … not good, but it’s also something I literally couldn’t have done a few months earlier.
Here’s the most recent song I’ve composed, the creatively titled ‘Song 1200.’
(Yeah, that means it’s the 1,200th song I’ve composed. Be amazed.)
Here is where I pause to assert that I know I am no musical genius, and I’m not presenting Song 1200 as something amazing. The point is, whether or not you think it’s any good it’s certainly more complex and sophisticated. And that’s the point here: Years of practice and experimentation have definitely made me a better musician. Years of practice and experimentation will definitely make you a better writer, even if you can’t always easily see it.
If you’re interested, I occasionally inflict my musical stylings under the name The Levon Sobieski Domination. If you’re not interested, that is, apparently, perfectly normal.
As you may or may not be aware, I have a little podcast called The No Pants Cocktail Hour where I discuss a short story I wrote while drinking some delicious whiskey and then read the story with some half-assed production (sound effects, etc). It’s fun! And, I hope, interesting to both folks who write professionally and those who aspire to write professionally.
The most recent episode focuses on a story I published back in 2007, Mr. Benders New House. It’s an unusual story for me, and I’m quite proud of it. If you’re curious about it (or why I’m proud of it) you can listen to the podcast, natch. But something that stuck me while recording this episode might be useful to other writers. Because something I see a lot of is young writers who worry a lot about how their work will be received. Whether they’re good enough, whether they have the right to use a certain POV, whether a subject or plot device has been over done.
Mr. Bender’s New House reminded me that those are all concerns for after you’ve finished the story. Step One is write the damn thing. Step Two is worry about whether it’s good, or if you didn’t pull it off, or anything else.
In other words, when it comes to first drafts, write like no one is reading.
Future You’s Problem
It’s kind of vital to remember that on the privacy of your own screen or your own notebook page you can write anything. No one ever needs to know about it, or read it. That’s incredibly freeing, and you should run with that.
That means working on an idea you’re not comfortable with, or you’re not sure you can pull off. Maybe it’s a romance, and you think of yourself as a hardboiled crime writer. Maybe it’s deeply personal and reveals ugly truths about yourself. Whatever it is, the rule of thumb is that if it scares you it’s worth writing about — but it’s important to keep in mind that when you’re working on a draft it’s just for you. It’s private. There’s no law that says you have to publish it, or show it to Beta readers, or put it into a blog post.
In fact, it’s often helpful to assume you won’t show it to anyone. Tell yourself this is just an exercise, for your eyes only. Then go to town. Write about your darkest fears or desires. Reveal yourself. Try crazy literary experiments. Try whatever the hell, because when you’re done you can just tuck it away. Or destroy it, if that’s your jam. Or put it out there if you feel good about it.
In Mr. Bender’s New House, I tried a kind of subtle trick, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Or that anyone would notice. If I’d thought about it while writing I probably would have given up. I probably would have decided it wouldn’t work, or I’d make a fool of myself trying to be a kind of writer that I’m not really. But I finished that story, and I sold it, and it was published, so I did something right, although it’s possible I still failed at what I was trying to achieve. If I’d given in to the worry, I wouldn’t have that story today.
The key is to not let worry over its reception stop you from working on it. Just write as if no one will ever see it. If Future You decides differently, that will be their problem, not yours.
Of course, this can be applied to any creative activity. Or non-creative activity. The one thing I’d advise is never apply this to dancing. Don’t cance like no one’s watching. ONe thing I’ve learned is that someone is always watching.
I GREW up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s funny; people who have never been to Jersey City in their lives will often assume that it must be a crime-ridden shithole — and especially so during the 1970s — simply because they hear the word ‘Jersey’ in there (twice, even!). Or because they’re racist asshats and Jersey City is very diverse, that is also a possibility, yes.
I am here to tell you that Jersey City was a great place to grow up. I was a pretty free-range kid, and roamed the streets at all hours and never once got abducted or knifed or forced to kill innocent tourists as part of an elaborate gang initiation rite.
Of course, I was a very soft, eyeglass-wearing child. It’s possible the gangs simply didn’t want me.
Anyways, none of this is to say that Jersey City was a paradise. It had (has) it’s bad areas, and I did have several brushes with crime during my formative years. I once got a brand new Huffy dirtbike for my birthday, and about three days later while I struggled to ride it ON TRAINING WHEELS two teenagers came over, casually pushed me off, and stole it. Once, when my friends and I were hanging out in a park about one block from my house, we were accosted by a group of older kids who made off with my one friend’s leather jacket. Shit happened. It’s a city, after all.
But I’m not here to talk about those minor brushes with crime. I’m here to talk about the most polite mugging ever.
Road to Nowhere
When I was maybe 12 or 13, my friend and I went to the 440 Mall, probably to see a movie and/or play video games at the huge arcade that once resided there. It’s weird to Present Day Jeff (aka Very Very Aged Jeff) how important malls were to Young Jeff; much energy and time was spent scheming on how to get to a mall and how to fund those excursions.
Coming home, my friend and I got on the wrong bus. By the time we realized we were going away from home, we were in an unfamiliar and kind of scary-looking section of town. We got off in a panic, got ourselves oriented, and began walking back to the bus depot through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. This is when I experienced the most polite mugging of my life.
A group of older kids surrounded us and began walking with us and chatting us up. They offered us cigarettes, inquired after our health, and then calmly threw us up against a wall and began searching our pockets. To say I was petrified would be an understatement. I’d watched television. I knew how these muggings ended. I prepared for death.
I remember I had a Velcro wallet with a camouflage design, because I was 13 and Velcro wallets were cool.
The kids, upon discovering that we had nothing but pocket lint and dreams between us, helped us up, dusted us off, returned our Velcro wallets and told us, cheerfully, that we were lucky because we had nothing worth stealing. Then they happily offered us directions and waved as they walked off.
I’m not making any of that up. They almost made me feel cheerful about being robbed. What’s interesting to me is that my brushes with criminals have always been kind of weirdly polite, while my interactions with police have always been negative and stressful. Weird, that.
Question of the day: If you want to write stories that involve far-away (or entirely fictional) places, do you have travel to be able to do so believably? That’s an actual question you hear from writers, and the idea that you must travel widely before you can write (this actually comes up in epic fantasy a lot, his argument that to write a fictional universe you must experience many cultures and geographies up close) is surprisingly common even among writers who should know better.
Short answer: No.
Slightly longer answer. No, and this sort of exclusionary bullshit is just silly. But I’m not here to pile on a writer who has just had their nose rubbed in their own privilege, I’m here to talk about the writing part.
Make Shit Up
It’s amazing that you have to remind writers that they are, in fact, writers, and that their main function in life is to make shit up. It’s also amazing to think that we have to remind people that Google exists.
If you’re wondering whether you must travel to Nepal in order to experience the climate, culture, and wildlife firsthand before you craft your epic fantasy that is set in a fictional version of Nepal, the answer is no, of course not. In fact, your fictional version of Nepal doesn’t even need to resemble Nepal very closely, does it, since it’s, you know, fictional?
And even if you do want it to be accurate, there’s this thing called research.
Now, if you can travel places to do firsthand research, by all means do it. Nothing wrong with firsthand experience. And nothing wrong with allowing the places you do get to visit to influence and inspire you. Heck, one reason I set a key sequence of The Electric Church in London was because I’d recently taken a trip there, and the memories were vibrant and it seemed like a fun idea.
But if you can’t travel — whether due to the slow apocalypse we’re experiencing or run-of-the-mill budgetary and lifestyle limitations — don’t fret. You don’t need to in order to write a book. Through a combination of fakery, research, and imagination, you can very likely craft a convincing mirage of the place you’re using as a setting. Even if you have actually been there, you’re probably going to fictionalize a little bit anyway. Just turn that knob to 11.
For some reason people seem determined to invent things you absolutely must have, do, or know in order to write a novel. None of it is true. You don’t need anything. And I certainly don’t know anything, and I’ve published nine novels.
I read a lot of books. This doesn’t make me particularly smart or special; it just makes me someone who reads a lot of books. I read books for fun, of course, but also as a paid reviewer. The reviewing gig is great, because I get to read books I wouldn’t normally choose. Sometimes that is delightful. Sometimes it is … not. But I always get something out of it.
One problem I’ve encountered in some of the books I’ve been reading of late is a tendency to go for AWESOMENESS in the prose style. You might call it Purple, or just overdone — every description is a superlative, every action is incredible, skilled, decisive. It’s like the author dialed their writing up to 11 and then tinkered with the wiring to milk a few more watts out of the power supply IN ORDER TO MAKE IT ALL AWESOMER.
Tip: Don’t do that.
Superlatives for the Loss
It might seem counter-intuitive, but the more you tell me that your character is awesome and the best at what they do, the more adjectives and adverbs you pile into your sentences, the less convinced I am.
This is a case where ‘show don’t tell’ can actually be a very useful piece of advice. The more you have to tell me how awesome your character, story, and settings are, the less I believe you. If you want to convince me I’m reading something epic, you have to demonstrate it.
Some young writers think that they need to ‘punch up’ their writing to convey the excitement they feel when they’re making up the story, but this is the exact opposite of what you need to do. The more ‘awesome’ you drop into the story, the worse the writing gets, as a rule.
The thing about description is that the more AWESOME it gets, the less universal it is, as a rule. Because superlatives and modifiers are crutches. Readers should be excited about your story because it’s interesting, clever, and emotionally resonate. They should care about your characters because they feel real. None of this has much to do with piling 13 AWESOME words into every sentence.
In fact, a good exercise is to write a story with a limited number of modifiers — a restricted vocabulary, maybe, with just a short list of basic adjectives and adverbs, or a certain number you can use per 100 words. Restricted writing like that rarely produces great work, but it’s almost always a learning experience for the author.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to this story I’m writing about Ripper Mojo, whose fists are like steam-powered locomotives humming with violent rage and whose eyes are as deep and unblinkingly penetrative as a midnight sun.
LIKE everyone else in this trash fire of a year, I’ve been bingeing a lot of streaming content to distract myself from our descent into what is almost certainly a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. One of the shows I’ve re-watched is Love, produced by Judd Apatow and starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust.
If you’ve never watched it, it’s essentially the story of two incredibly fucked-up people as they meet and eventually fall in love. Neither one is a very nice person, really, and a lot of the show falls under the category of ‘cringe comedy’ as you watch two lo-fi awful people grow and evolve into a more or less mature relationship. It’s kind of a dramedy, not exactly a laugh riot. I recognize myself in the two lead characters, in the sense that they are both monsters slowly realizing how monstrous they are and making fumbling attempts to own their bullshit, and that likely brought the series home for me.
I’m no connoisseur of Apatow’s work; I’ve seen a few things and enjoyed a few things, but I haven’t exactly made a study of his comedic empire. But I’ve noticed that in this series there’s some nice visual storytelling. Writing isn’t just about words; the visuals you use or show are just as important. One mistake a lot of writers fall into is making their visual storytelling very obvious. Love manages to keep it all very, very low key, and it works pretty beautifully.
Clothes
First of all, this show manages to create a very specific fictional universe. All TV shows and films do this, of course—they select settings and costuming that establishes something about the characters and the world they inhabit—but Love did an exemplary job of it.
Mickey’s wardrobe is a prime example. Aside from being on-brand for her character, what’s interesting about it is how limited it is. Many television shows have the characters in different clothes all the time, unless an article of clothing is iconic to their character like Fonzi’s leather jacket—this is especially true of female characters, who are often portrayed as clotheshorses for no other reason than the fact that male writers assume this is true about all women.
But Mickey actually wears outfits more than once, and individual separates appear in different configurations. You know, like a real person’s wardrobe. Mickey doesn’t have a spacious walk-in closet and endless budget for clothes. She buys thrift and is thoughtful, but like a real human being she wears things over and over again. That’s a great piece of visual storytelling.
Another is Mickey’s T-shirts. She wears a wide variety of hipster-ish T-shirts, including one she borrows from Gus when she (platonically) sleeps over at his place after telling him she doesn’t want to be in a relationship and they have an adventure. That shirt pops up again in the series finale when they (spoilers!) get married, which is both a nice callback and an indication that Mickey’s T-shirts tell a story. It’s easy to imagine that each of those shirts, from seemingly random places, are all stolen (borrowed) from people in her life. Ex-boyfriends, ex-roommates, one-night stands, friends—all these T-shirts forming this record of Mickey’s life.
Stuff
Love also treats the objects and possessions the characters possess as part of its storytelling. Gus drives an aging Prius, complete with dent in the door, which perfectly matches the character both in terms of self-image and financial straits. Mickey drives a busted old Mercedes, because she’s a broke hipsterish L.A. woman, but it’s also in immaculate shape. Mickey herself is a mess, but she cares for her things.
When Mickey, an addict, makes a first stab at sobriety early in the show, she re-arranges everything in her apartment and organizes her books by color. This is a fantastic visual—it’s a superficial improvement, just like this first attempt at sobriety, and because it’s impulsive and not well-planned, it actually causes her more trouble than it solves. A great little callback joke happens much later where Mickey, having agreed to cook an elaborate dinner, can’t find her cookbook and asks her roommate what color she thinks “The Joy of Cooking” would be.
Gus’s apartment is also a powerful symbol if you’re the sort to think too much about writing and storytelling. After breaking up with his girlfriend in the first episode, he moves into a furnished apartment, the sort of temporary place newly-divorced Dads move into, or people just starting out. On an obvious level, he does this because at the time he thinks he might get back with his old girlfriend (he explicitly says this at one point in the show). On the other, it’s a perfect indication that Gus is very performative. He hesitates to express his personal style (more on this below) and uses a generic approach to hide himself. Whereas Mickey’s apartment is crammed with knick-knacks and decorations and thoughtful style decisions, Gus is literally living in someone else’s (awful) taste. Later in the series, when he and Mickey have progressed in their relationship, she begins to influence his style and he starts to brighten up a bit.
The Rug
Finally, the detail that set off this essay, which might be something I’m reading far too much into. In the first episode of the series, just before Gus breaks up with his girlfriend, he orders a rug for their house. He wants it in gold, she insists it should be in blue. The day he breaks it off and leaves, the rug is delivered, so he takes the blue rug he didn’t want and puts it in his new apartment, a perfect symbol of Gus accepting a generic substitute for what he really wants.
When he meets Mickey, she has the same rug in her place—except it’s the gold version he originally wanted. That’s an obvious but graceful symbol that their relationship is meant to be, a nice visual connection between the characters the show obviously intends for us to notice.
In the seventh episode of season three, “Sarah from College,” Gus and Mickey go to a wedding of one of Gus’ old college friends, and meet Sarah, who Gus was once engaged to. Gus never told Mickey about this part of his life, and tension ensues. That tension gets worse when Sarah gets super drunk and Gus agrees to drive her back to her hotel over Mickey’s enraged objections. At the hotel, Sarah tells Gus how miserable she is, and he sadly tries to comfort someone who was once a big part of his life as he realizes how good he has it in the present.
On the bed is a pillow with a similar—similar, not exact—pattern as the rugs. It certainly could be a random piece of set dressing that I’m thinking way too hard about, but I prefer to see it as a subtle visual lining Gus and a woman he once wanted to marry in the same with the rugs link him to the woman he (spoilers!) will eventually marry.
A final note on Gus and his performative nature: The most telling detail in the show is that when he proposed to Sarah, it was a tragically huge production involving flying both sets of parents out to Los Angeles and having a violinist appear out of nowhere. Gus is performing, overdoing it. But when Mickey and Gus get married, it’s an elopement on the spur of the moment—which is then called off when they have a moment to think, only for them to sneak away from their friends and get hitched anyway all by themselves, with zero production at all. It’s a nice, subtle sign of character development.
That’s it for this episode of Jeff Takes Shit Far Too Seriously. When you write stories for a living it’s hard to turn off that machine in your head, which is, of course, why I drink.
