Author Archive: jsomers

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.

The Frog in the Well Problem

Author: June 8, 2020 0 Comments

Writing is either the greatest and most satisfying adventure in existence or an ongoing existential hell akin to having your paper cuts soaked in rubbing alcohol for ever, I can’t ever decide which. Some of that ties into where, exactly, I am in terms of the writing process. Just finished a story I’m very excited about? Writing is a joy. Mired in month 15 of struggling to force some coherency into an otherwise doomed narrative? Writing is torture.

One scenario that is particularly painful is when I’m making progress on a story but it’s slow, and I keep having to add material to apply new ideas or understanding. The result is what I call the Frog in the Well: Two steps forward, one step back.

To Infinity and Beyond

What happens in this scenario is that the end of the book never seems to be any closer. Even though I’m doing good work, even though I’m eating up plot and moving characters along, there always seems to be a static amount of work to do. And when I do make measurable progress, it usually sparks a new creative line that requires some backtracking and back-filling of the story to shore up.

None of this is bad, really. Progress is being made and I’m generally happy with what I’m producing. But it’s frustrating as hell because I can never seem to see the end. So if you’re dealing with something similar — the apparently endless project — what can you do?

One thing that works for me is to go back and re-read what I’ve already written. I’m often surprised at how much I’ve already forgotten, and sometimes it’s comforting to see how much progress I’ve actually made.

Sometimes I actually jump ahead and work on the ending. Why not? I’m a god here, I can do what I want. This can get messy, because inspirations that occur while writing the ending can require more back-filling, thus extending the length even further. But if I can flesh out the ending at ll it helps me feel like there’s a plan, at least.

Of course, then I finish the story and after three seconds of quiet satisfaction I will panic at not working on anything, and it all begins again. Which, come to think of it, is very similar to my hangover cycle. Food for thought.

Writing

The Problem with Being Cool

Author: May 28, 2020 0 Comments

So, maybe six months ago I started a story. It doesn’t matter what the story’s about; it’s not finished yet anyway, because as I’ve aged things just take longer, probably because of my slow slide into senility and death. The reason I mention this is because when I wrote the opening lines all that time in the past, I had the characters use the term ‘karen’ in its current memey definition of a privileged jerk thinking demanding special treatment. At the time, the term was still kind of bubbling under and felt very inside baseball, at least to me.

Yeah, it’s going to come out.

The thing about cool, topical slang and stuff is that it really appeals to writers. We’re Word People. We love to discover a new expression or a bit of jargon that not everyone knows. You slip it into a story and instantly it feels like you’re part of a Mystery Cult that worships your story.

But there’s a problem: What seems like Inside Baseball for the Cool Kids can suddenly become an overused piece of pop culture that people roll their eyes about.

Streets Ahead

You’ve got to think hard about any cultural reference you make in a story. Something that seems fresh and subversive in January might seem old and dated in March. I mean, there was a time when inserting a reference to Where’s the beef? or Wazzzuuuuuuuup! would instantly get a hearty laugh out of your audience.

Not familiar with those? Exactly!

Of course, this goes beyond language — you generally have to worry about how any pop culture reference will age, and I’ve written about that before. But I’m pretty settled with movie and TV references. I rarely include them, even in my contemporary fiction, because I’ve drilled it into myself that this is a fast ticket to Dated Town, Population: Streets Behind. Language is trickier. Some jargon and slang remains underground more or less forever, and sometimes including it seeds your story with the precious resource known as verisimilitude. As with all Literary Science, your mileage may vary and you may be capable of pulling off some shit I shouldn’t even attempt.

Still, next time you decide to include some current meme flavor in your writing, take a moment and imagine how it’s gonna play next year.

Writing

Black House: An Interactive Fiction

Author: May 21, 2020 0 Comments

Black House is live.

So, er, what is it? Well, Black House is an interactive fiction, a text adventure. You read descriptions, then you type in simple instructions and see what happens, like this:

You wake up in a room rapidly filling with water. There is a jug of whiskey and a small sponge next to you.

> Eat sponge

You chew on the sponge for a while, then die of stupidity.

<YOU HAVE DIED>

Well, something like that. Here’s the story of the story.

ZORK

Back in the sands of time, I played a lot of these sorts of games — Zork and its many descendants. I was always instantly hooked by the idea that these little text universes might be infinite, that if I poked around long enough I would stumble onto an endless series of hidden rooms and tricks. They weren’t infinite, but there were enough hidden things to manage the illusion. I liked solving the puzzles, but I enjoyed just roaming around trying stuff just as much.

MAZE

Then, sometime later I discovered a book called Maze by Christopher Manson (which I’ve written about before because it is incredible) which had the same spirit, if a somewhat darker tone. Maze is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s very similar in some ways to a text adventure.

As is my Method, Maze inspired me to rip it off wholesale, so I created my own maze, creatively titled The Maze and so blatantly stealing from Manson’s superior creation I still feel the shame today. I originally created my maze in HTML, then later recreated it in Visual Basic and spat out a Windows EXE file. What can I say: I’m just that cool international man of mystery sort who coded shit in VB in the 1990s and early 2000s. You’re jealous. Let it drift.

Marks

The third piece of this puzzle is Philip K. Marks, a character I started writing about in the 1990s. Marks is a kind of shitheel private investigator who specializes in weird, paranormal, sci-fi mysteries. I’ve published five stories featuring Marks, and a few years ago I thought it was time to write a novel-length story with the character. When I thought about what story to put Marks in, I thought of my old maze, and got excited about turning the maze into a novel. The end result was Black House, which I loved but had its flaws.

Black House wasn’t really saleable, so I sat on it for a while, then a few years ago I tried an experiment: I published it online, one chapter a day for about a month, then one day after the last chapter went up I pulled it down. The site is still there, if you’re curious.

Which brings us to today: I stumbled on this Medium article by Julie Stevenson a few months ago. I’d worked in Inform back in 2010 when creating the site for The Eternal Prison, which featured a flawed and half-finished text adventure, so I was reminded that this was something I could actually do.

So I did.

I was intrigued by the idea of turning a novel-like thing into a text adventure, and Black House, having come from a text adventure of sorts to begin with, was the perfect source. That’s what Black House, the game, is: A novel in text-adventure form.

Go on: Play.

Fiction, More Shit I Gotta Do, Novels

Idea Origins

Author: May 20, 2020 0 Comments

Like any writer, I’ve been asked numerous times ‘where do you get your ideas’? I used to react to these questions with a snarl and a sarcastic remark, followed by a sassy strut accompanied by the theme music I hear constantly in my head1. The reason for the reaction was due to the nature of the question: It’s both incredibly complex and brutally simple. I steal most of my ideas from stuff I read, watch, or listen to, and I have no idea how the process actually happens in my brain. How do I go from watching a rerun of Community on a Saturday night at 3AM after drinking an entire bottle of Scotch to writing a novel about superintelligent cats who subjugate mankind and make us all run around randomly so they can chase us? I have no idea.

Now that I’m older and more mature, however, I realize that this impossibility is exactly why people ask the question. How do you know if your ideas are any good? Sadly, there’s really only one way: You spend several years of your life writing them, and then show as many strangers as possible. Which is a lot of investment for someone who doesn’t have the careless, unearned confidence that I have. So I’ve taken to being more thoughtful about my responses to the ‘ideas’ question, and one thing I’ve realized is how often I have to have an idea several times before it actually turns into something resembling a good story.

Trickster Mark One

Take my novel Trickster, which morphed into the novel We Are Not Good People. I had the original idea that formed the kernel of that story back in 1995 or so; a flabby, not particularly good short story in which a stunned drifted encounters a man floating several inches off the ground as pigeons sat on his shoulders and head. The old man tells the drifter that its easy to do magic, you just have to be willing to be alone.

It wasn’t a great story, but it was a great tone, and the central image stuck with me. I carried that idea with me for twenty years or so. I never re-worked the story, though hints of it made their way into other stories, references to the old man, to the drifter, the fucking pigeons.

When I finished the Avery Cates series in 2010, I started thinking about what I wanted to write next. I found myself thinking of the old man again. That central idea — magic was possible if you’re willing to be alone, really, truly alone, came bubbling back and slowly morphed into the idea of blood magic, magic that literally stole lives to function. That, I thought, was loneliness, and I was off to the races.

In a way, I stole from myself. I developed an idea into a bad story in 1995. That kept the idea preserved in amber over the years, so when in 2011 or so I chipped the amber away that idea was still there, fresh and ready.

That’s one reason why I write a short story every month in a notebook. Most of these stories are terrible–but they each enclose an idea that I might be able to use later. I also write these stories because an old witch once told me the month I don’t write a story is the month I die, but that’s a whole other post, man.

Trickster, We Are Not Good People, Writing

Lazy Writing: The Inevitable Plot Point

Author: May 11, 2020 0 Comments

Plotting a story can be complicated stuff, as any writer will tell you. Sometimes plots come to you in linear form, with an idea for a beginning that then leads you to characters who then lead you to the ending. Sometimes it’s the other way around — sometimes you think of an ending, or a plot twist in the middle, and you find yourself working backwards from there.

Which is fine, as long as you put in the work to make your plot point or ending seem organic by the time you get there. Because if you don’t, you wind up with a twist or an event that won’t feel even slightly real to your readers.

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises, the third and concluding film in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster superhero trilogy, is generally regarded as the weakest of the three films (for good reason). While it’s seen an uptick in critical assessment in the ten years or so since it was originally released, there’s one plot point that prevents it from ever being considered a, you know, actually good movie: The police in the sewers.

Police Commissioner Gordon, ostensibly a smart, experienced law enforcement professional, decides to send the entire police force including himself into the sewers to thwart villain Bane’s plans. This is … insane? Incompetent? Yes! But mainly, it is required by the plot. Nolan needed to get the police out of the way or the rest of the movie made even less sense, and so that plot point became inevitable: The police wind up trapped in the sewers because the police had to be trapped in the sewers. It makes just that much sense.

Westworld Season 3

More recently, we have Westworld, season 3 on HBO. Every season of Westworld follows the same pattern:

  1. Intriguing beginning, with smart world-building.
  2. A slow slide into stupidity.
  3. An unearned finale.

This most recent season was no different. The first few episodes were pretty solid world-building of a near-future world outside the Delos Park. It felt like a world that might inspire a park populated by human-like androids you can rape and kill with impunity. It had interesting ideas. And then it slowly narrowed down to a point where civilization collapsed … because an AI predicting your eventual fate based on collected data about your life has predetermined your fate.

Now, that’s not a bad idea, on paper. There’s a story where this moment, the moment when the world is clued in to how they’ve been manipulated and decides to go insane in response, is earned. It is not this story, though, because they’ve done exactly zero work to earn it. You can tell without any doubt that the writers decided where the story needed to go first, and then tried to build a story backwards. And that’s why the story feels awkward, and forced.

When you have a predetermined ending to your story, you have to work very hard to make it feel natural. If you’re not careful, it can feel very stiff, because it’s dead space. It’s already been written, it’s already there, as opposed to being a blank, writhing space that the writer is striving towards.

When you’ve got a predetermined point you’re writing towards, there’s a tendency to rush, to leave out all the organic little bits that make your story feel alive and rooted in the gravity of the real. You just keep rushing towards that end point, certain that once you get there everything will be forgiven. But that’s rarely the case.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

The Hair Situation

Author: April 29, 2020 0 Comments

FRIENDOS, after years of casual use in both my writing and my conversation I was recently forced to look up the meaning of the word hirsute. This is because the hair situation is getting dire. I’m not speaking solely of the haircut situation during our current emergency; as regular readers of this blog know, haircuts are one of my great obsessions owing to the social awkwardness of having someone touch your head and make small talk with you while wielding a sharp object. I regard the haircut as a huge waste of my time, but insecurity stops me from simply shaving my head or letting everything grow out to monstrous proportions, leaving me to simply complain weakly. Which I do on a regular basis.

No, while the haircut situation is, of course, dire, I am also an old man at this point, which means my body is in full revolt, which for some evolutionary reason beyond my understanding involves hair exploding out of unexpected places, in unexpected and unwanted volumes. Ears? Check. Nose? I pulled a nose hair out of myself a few days ago that was easily seven feet long. Back? Sweet lord. My DNA is apparently loaded with Gorilla bits. And I never really put much thought into my eyebrows until a year or so ago when my regular barber suddenly frowned mid-cut, retrieved some clippers, and carefully shaved what felt like a sweater’s worth of eyebrow hair away.

This is disturbing on the one hand due to mundane, common anxiety: It’s all evidence of advancing age, after all. It’s enraging for other reasons: I was promised (it might have been implicit) by the universe that adolescence was the last time I would have to sit by and watch helplessly as my own body humiliated me on a daily basis.

Full Body Sculpting

A big part of this horror is Reverse Vanity; I’ve always told myself that I am that particular brand of Cool Dude who doesn’t care about things like his hair or general presentation. This results in shaggy hair, sloppy clothes, and a generally dubious attitude towards Hair Product or Tools; when I let my so-called beard grow, I never trim it or groom it. I just let it grow wild until I look like an insane person and then shave it off, setting off a fresh cycle of shame.

But this is just a different kind of vanity, tied into the image of Laissez-Faire Jeff who is too cool to worry about meaningless stuff like whether he looks like Grizzly Adams after a rough weekend. So caring about the tufts of hair my body is now producing is off-brand, in a way, and doing anything about it would be seriously off-brand. So I just sit here, slowly being consumed by my own hair, which makes it sound like my body hair is some sort of parasite feeding off me, growing longer and more lustrous as I shrink and shrivel. Which is kind of what’s going on, actually, and now I am totally freaked out and regret writing this essay.

Of course, I have a complex relationship with my hair. First of all, the Blonde Betrayal. When I was tyke, I looked like this:

So I can be forgiven for assuming I would remain a fair-haired, adorable little moppet for life. Instead, by my teen years all my adorable moppetness had evaporated, leaving me the wreck you know and love. When I allowed my hair to grow in college, I didn’t do any sort of grooming (branding!) so it quickly became a pile of crap on my head, which made me feel less cool than I assumed long hair was supposed to. When I went to my old barber on Winter Break for a ‘trim,’ he sadistically ruined my hair to teach me a lesson.

I still bear all these hair-related scars. So all this weird new hair is just a cosmic insult.

Here at Somers Rules Ltd, however, we believe in science! to solve all problems, so I have embarked on an experiment to discover whether excessive alcohol consumption can cure the Hair Problem. I’ll keep y’all posted, though I suspect one look is all it will take to determine if it’s working.

Bullshit

Modeling Characters

Author: April 22, 2020 0 Comments

For writers, making up stories is the fun part — but there’s a lot of daylight between the fun, free-association process of being inspired with an idea for a story and then actually writing that story. There’s a lot of work involved in plotting it out, making sure the logic works, building a universe for it all to happen in — and crafting characters to populate that universe and perform the actions that move the plot along.

For some, characters are the hardest part, because people are unpredictable chaos machines. You can imagine a building, or a magic system, and they will follow some basic rules you can rely on. People don’t so that, and if you create characters that follow a blueprint they won’t feel particularly real; part of what makes people people is their inherent randomness, the way they do things that surprise and frustrate and amaze you. Capturing that vibe on the page is hard work.

But it can be easier than you think. Just try modeling.

Dammit, Jim

I spoke at a college writing class a few months ago, and one of the students asked me about figuring out their characters’ voice. I suggested they try this one weird trick:

  1. Think of a celebrity with a distinctive communication style. William Shatner as Captain Kirk, or Jay-Z with that weirdly compelling coughing noise he uses to punctuate his lyrics.
  2. Imagine your character is speaking in the same way as you write their dialogue.

To be clear, do not try to convey Captain Kirk’s oddball rhythms. This is something you do in your head, while you’re writing. What happens, though, is that your character’s lines subtly take on those rhythms. You shape the phrases to them. It all comes alive, and if you resist the urge to make it too explicit your dialogue will have a bit of dance to it that isn’t obvious.

If you match the voice you’re using as a model to the character as closely as possible, this will also help you ensure that your characters don’t all talk with the same rhythm and phrasing, which is one of those subtle problems that are easy to overlook right up until someone points it out to you.

Of course, you have to be careful not to slip over into parody — and you don’t have to use celebrities. Have a friend or family member with a distinctive speaking cadence? A character in the neighborhood with a recognizable style? That’ll work just as well — perhaps better, since there will be no chance of your model’s subject being recognized.

Me, I just model every character on myself, since I have a such a beautiful speaking voice. Which I know because of all the hours I’ve spent talking to myself.

Writing

The Time I Method Acted a Clock

Author: April 15, 2020 0 Comments

I had a ridiculous childhood in many ways. On the one hand, I was a free-range kid whose parents more or less stopped worrying about my whereabouts or safety between the hours of 8AM and 8PM — seriously, my childhood was filled with me just rambling around Jersey City dodging serial killers and clowns offering free candy2. On the other, I was involved in a lot of organized activities like Little League and the Boy Scouts3, and also found time to collect approximately 5,000 Star Wars figures and create complex dioramas with them that told intricate fan fiction stories.

Like I said: Ridiculous.

I wasn’t a shy kid, not really, but like a lot of people who grow up to become writers I also was not exactly a Type-A, Put Me In Coach person who craved the spotlight4. I feared the spotlight; then as now I much preferred to stay in the shadows like Gollum and gurgle my sarcastic asides to myself in the safety of anonymity. Like a lot of authors, in other words, I am and have always been more comfortable writing than performing.

Which is problematic when you’re trying to sell your work, because you’re pushed to get out there and do a bit of performing in order to do so. Whether it’s readings or panels or social media, this sort of thing can be painful for a writer. For me, any time I’m forced to be in front of a crowd I get extremely sweaty5. Sadly, if you want to try and market your work you’ll find yourself in front of a crowd at some point, and if you’re like me you’ll be sweating like a nervous wreck and possibly6 chugging from an unmarked bottle of liquor.

Here’s what not to do: Don’t be like me and the clock.

Look Upon My Many Participation Trophies!

Childhood is, of course, filled with bullshit. I wasn’t in Little League and Boy Scouts only because I wanted to be; I was there in part because my parents, like all parents, needed me out of the goddamn house on a regular basis. As I’ve grown older and found myself occasionally dealing with children, I have come to understand the need to keep them busy at all times7.

This means sometimes as a kid you get thrust into strange places. When I was in Cub Scouts we put on a play and everyone was more or less obligated to participate, so we all got some sort of role. I was cast as: The Clock8. This entailed standing on stage holding a cardboard clock face.

That was it. I had no lines9.

I was petrified, and extremely unhappy about the whole thing, so when the time came to stand on stage for what seemed like infinity, I took that clock face and held it directly in front of my real face so I couldn’t see the audience. And stood there like that for the entirety of the play, with all the adults whispering from the wings and urging me to show my face10.

Fuck that, I thought.

That’s how I view promoting myself, but of course you have to get out from behind the, er, clock face, which isn’t easy if it doesn’t come naturally. The key is to come up with a virtual, transparent clock face of sorts — a persona to hide behind, a shtick. The more distance you can put between yourself and that sweaty idiot standing in front of a crowd, the more comfortable you’ll be11.

Or, why not — go for the literal clock face. Your shtick could be Clock Face Man! Which is better than what we all are in public these days: Pandemic Face Mask Person.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, promotion, Writing

Westworld-Building

Author: April 8, 2020 1 Comment

I’ve been watching Westworld on HBO these past few years, and generally enjoying it. While the first two seasons were fascinating explorations of the nature of sentience, the loops and chains that bind us in our lives, and the innate brutality of mankind, they were also a bit small-scale and interior. The fact that almost all of the action took place in the titular park didn’t help this suffocating sense of insularity, although it did make the glimpses we got of the futuristic world outside that much more tantalizing.

Season 3 has finally moved outside of the park, said park being in bloody tatters after the (SPOILER ALERT) android uprising and jailbreak. And I have to say, they’re doing a bang-up job of world-building, exemplified by a wonderful show-don’t-tell moment in Episode 3, ‘Absence of Field.’

An App for That

As far as I can tell, the future of Westworld is a sort of Late Stage Capitalism nightmare where an advanced AI is keeping things stable by predicting all possible outcomes and then tightly controlling society at every level. This results in things like Caleb, played by Aaron Paul with typical weary charm, being denied any possible employment that might improve his life because the AI has predicted an early death by suicide for him — and thus concludes he’s not worth any additional resources, or the criminal underground of society using an App called RICO where they sign up for crimes and advance in a gamified fashion as they make ill-gotten gains. This is, I imagine, some sort of control or release valve the AI is using to let the oppressed and unhappy vent a little, feel like they’re sticking it to The Man when in fact The Man has hired them a’la 1984‘s revolution.

The set and costume design is pretty great. The cars are all driverless and look like slightly wonkier versions of the Tesla Cybertruck (if that’s possible), the flying machines are sleek and futuristic, and the personal technology is the sort of Apple-fied techno porn that reads as totally possible. At the same time, the fashions aren’t too far out there. Someone could time travel from Outer Westworld into our own dimension and they might seem a little bit weird, but they’d pass. Which I think is smart; the big mistake a lot of sci-fi makes is either having people dress in crazy, bizarre ways that feel artificial or exactly as we do today, which feels lazy. Westworld‘s elevated and slightly amplified fashions feel resfreshingly possible.

But let’s get to what I really liked about this episode: The ambulance. The main protagonist, slightly crazy and vengeful android host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is badly injured, and Caleb calls an ambulance as a Good Samaritan. The EMTs in the ambulance hook her up to the diagnostics, and are then baffled because, of course, Dolores isn’t human.

But here’s the thing: As Dolores appears to sink towards death, former soldier Caleb calls upon his training and begins telling the EMTs what they ought to be doing, and their response is that they can’t do anything until the App in the ambulance gives them a diagnosis and treatment plan.

In other words, the implication is that the EMTs know nothing. They know how to interact with an App, and that’s it.

A Better-Looking Idiocracy

The show hasn’t come out and stated that most jobs are performed by robots or Apps with minimal expertise required of the humans around them, but it’s easy to see the clues. The world seems to have further divided between the super-rich who flit about from board meetings to cocktail parties and the super-not-rich who scrape by in minimally-viable jobs that anyone can do because the Apps are doing all the work. Even the crimes are being committed by people who can’t actually plan crimes.

This fits in perfectly with the series’ other themes concerning AI and sentience and consciousness. Who is really alive in a world where meat sacks can’t do anything unless the AIs embedded in their systems tell them how? But what I really like is the unshowy way they’re exploring this future. No one is As You Knowing the Apps or the lack of education/experience/skills. They’re just showing you examples of it throughout and letting you piece it together.

This being Westworld, of course, there’s going to be at least one enormous orgy sequence featuring robot sex, and frankly I can’t wait to see the Apps for that.

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Writing What You Know: Start There

Author: April 1, 2020 5 Comments

Yeah, yeah: It’s write what you know time again. If you’re a writer who likes to talk shop, you can’t escape it — most of us probably startle out of bed at night screaming WRITE WHAT YOU KNOWWWWWWWWW at least five times a week. And the only thing more numerous than conversations about WWYK are opinions about WWYK. Which means that I, as a self-respecting literary superstar, have to generate new opinions about it on a regular basis or risk fading into obscurity.

My basic take on WWYK has always been that it’s a good guideline to remind yourself not to rely on bullshit, but it shouldn’t be taken too literally, or your work devolves into memoir. But recently I’ve been thinking about another way of looking at WWYK: Using what you know as a starting point.

Start Here

Worrying over writing what you know assumes that you’re supposed to be some sort of expert in everything you put into your story, which simply isn’t — or doesn’t have to be — true. But you do need some level of verisimilitude, of course. Write What You Know doesn’t mean you have to be an expert in what you’re writing, it means you should draw on something you are an expert in.

So, for example, let’s say you’re writing a story about a contract killer. You are not yourself a contract killer, nor have you ever been (I assume). So how can you write what you know? Well, you’ve had a job. You know what it’s like to work for someone else, doing something you’re variably good at. Start there.

Or maybe you’re writing a story about a couple getting a divorce, but you’ve never been married, or even had a bad breakup. You’ve probably had some sort of painful experience involving someone else, an argument, a fight, a decades-long prank war involving increasingly cruel and elaborate pranks that shatter lives and destabilize civilization, something. Start there.

These things don’t have to map 1:1 to the details of your fiction. You’re just looking for a starting point, a way to take your lived-in experience and extrapolate it into something you’ve never lived. That’s how you use WWYK — you take what you know and write it into your story. It’s a starting point.

So am I sitting here wondering how I can map a lifestyle that is 75% sitting in a comfortable chair and 25% drinking pleasant adult beverages and 19% Internet rabbit holes onto cyberpunk sci-fi stories about murderous cyborgs and the desperate professional killers that fight them? You know I am, hun.

Writing