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.
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.
Since I started writing new Avery Cates stories a few years ago, things have gotten out of hand in terms of keeping track of the order of the stories. With novellas that combine into novels like Voltron, it gets even messier. So here’s the master list of Cates stories, in series order.
Whenever there’s a lull in the party conversation and you bring up the craft of writing1, someone usually brings up stealing. As in stealing tricks and techniques from other writers in order to make your own work better.
This isn’t controversial, of course; all writers borrow from each other to some extent. There’s one aspect of this sort of literary theft that I’m particularly good at2, and it’s something I think more writers should work at: Mimicry.
Stops Copies Me
Back in college, I was once accused of plagiarism by a professor when one of my papers read a little too sophisticated; my professor didn’t bother checking, he just assumed no normal 19-year old kid would write those sentences3. And he wasn’t wrong, as I was definitely not normal at all.
But it wasn’t plagiarism, it was my innate ability to absorb writing style and regurgitate it in my own work4. It’s something I do almost unconsciously, and I do it to this day. I’d been reading a lot of dry, erudite works of literary criticism, and I just started writing in the same style.
Today this happens mainly in the monthly short stories I write. If I’m reading a book with a distinct style or technique, it will always bleed into the short story I’m working on. Sometimes this is overt. Sometimes I’m purposefully using a style from something I’m reading or have recently read — sometimes, in other words, the whole point of the story that month is to try on another writer for size. Sometimes it just sort of happens, sometimes even in the middle of the story. It will start off as a run-of-the-mill caper story, and suddenly I’m riffing on an omniscient second-person dream sequence5.
This differs from the usual advice to steal little and steal big because it’s more diffuse, less concrete. It’s not about stealing an idea or a concrete approach, but rather trying on another writer’s whole deal, trying to reverse-engineer another writer’s whole process.
More writers should try mimicry as an exercise, I think. It’s like breaking into someone’s house and walking around for a few days. You wear their pajamas, eat their food, delete stuff from their DVR. Maybe it’s not how you’re going to live the rest of your life, but you see things from a new perspective, and you pick up little tricks of the trade.
Of course, with literary mimicry there’s less chance of expulsion and arrest than with other forms of theft, which means you get the thrill of the crime without the consequences, thus obeying the Beretta Theme Song Rule6.
I sometimes get a kick out of killing off characters. Heck, in the original draft of The Electric Church, written 20 years before the version that finally published, I actually ended it with Avery Cates committing suicide. Considering I’m still writing about Avery today, I’m kind of glad I reconsidered that particular ending.
But I am still overly fond of murdering fictional people. A few years ago while working on the draft of a book I killed off a supporting character and every single person who read the draft protested. Harsh words were used. I quickly reconsidered again, and the character lived.
But here’s the thing: Killing off characters, even main characters, should never be off the table. Even characters who really can’t be killed — characters with Plot Armor, like (usually) your main character. Even if you will never actually kill the character off, you should pretend you might.
Sleep Well. I’ll Most Likely Kill You in the Morning
The thing about Plot Armor is it’s boring. Certainly, if you’ve written an engaging character, people won’t want them to die — but it’s important that the possibility exist. If your readers get the sense that a character can’t possibly die, it gets a little boring.
The secret is to lie to yourself. Forget that your main character can’t die. Act like it’s a legitimate plot bomb you can throw in there.
And, hey, maybe it is! Maybe your main character isn’t really your main character. Maybe they can die. There are no rules, after all.
But even if you really can’t kill a character, pretending that you can will trick you into putting them into dangerous situations that will require some delicate plotting to get them out of. If you go into every scene thinking that anyone can die, you’ll craft a much better story than if you go in thinking you have no choice but to plot around the fact that the main character can never, you know, not be the main character.
The deeper into this writing career you get, my friends, the more you realize everything can be solved by lying to yourself just a little bit more.
