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.

Throw Out Your Thesaurus

Author: January 26, 2018 0 Comments

I have an acquaintance who was trained as a kid to never use the same word twice within a paragraph. It’s one of those rules beaten into her by nuns that she can’t forget, and thus composing even simple emails is a chore of Olympian proportions when we spend hours searching for yet another word that means agreed.

This always makes me think of the posts that go around Facebook and other social media listing 50 alternate verbs or adverbs or what have you, with the implication being that if you keep using the word said for every dialog tag like an unimaginative loser your writing will be bland and dull.

Here’s the thing: Using oddball words to break up monotony won’t stop your work from being bland and dull. It might make it unreadable, though.

Priority: Being Understood

Look, a limited vocabulary can indeed be a problem, but you have to choose your battles. Having every dialog tag be some biazarro word like gawped or emitted (both actually suggested in some of these posts) will make your writing sound amateurish and, frankly, insane. On the other hand, having every character described as attractive will simply focus the reader on the fact that all of your characters are more or less physically the same.

So, yes, some word variety is necessary. But word variety should be the natural result of your own reading and word acquisition. Words you use naturally in your own conversation will flow into your prose and feel natural. Words you search-and-replace into your prose with a list of alternatives will always—always—feel forced and weird. And if a little word variety is necessary, a little also goes a long way. You don’t need 50 ways to say he said. You should definitely never say he keened (also one of the examples from an actual post about this).

Your priority when telling a story, especially in the first draft, is to be understood. To have your plot make sense, to make your characters into believable people. Vocabulary variety should be a natural consequence of your language skills—not a science project where you drop strange new words into rando sentences to see what happens. He importuned.

dialogue, Writing

Dealing with the Unspoken

Author: January 24, 2018 2 Comments

There’s a bit of bad writing I like to call The Moron Double Tap. It’s prevalent in TV shows, but can be found just about anywhere: The moment that bits of plot-important information are repeated because the writer doesn’t trust their audience to get it. It’s like this:

JEFF: I can’t go to jury duty. I’ve been drinking since noon … yesterday.

POLICE #1: <opening liquor cabinet> All these bottles are full!

POLICE #2: <gasps> But he said he’d been drinking since noon!

In other words, did you need that bit of info repeated? Of course not. But there are morons out there, morons incapable of retaining any sort of info. These are the folks who lean over to their date at a movie and literally need every single character identified and plot swerve explained, and if you want your story to have the biggest audience possible you’ll sink down to Moron Double Tap levels in order to ensure you don’t enrage the idiots when they become confused at your overly-complex story.

It can also happen to writers when they’re dealing with the Unspoken.

Don’t Speak

There are always many unspoken things between people. You don’t after all, greet your oldest friend by shouting “WHY HERE IS MY OLDEST FRIEND!” and you don’t refer to people as your spouse or boss in normal conversation with them. Normal interaction is riddled with unspoken subtext and context.

The trouble, as anyone who’s ever tried writing a story knows with soul-killing certainty, is that when you’re writing a story you have to find ways to get that unspoken stuff out there, and there aren’t many good choices. You can go with Exposition Dumps, which are awful and stop everything in their tracks (and read very artificial). Or you might wind up with a form of the Moron Double Tap by having everyone awkwardly identify their relationships or unspoken understandings verbally:

JEFF: Why look, it’s Tom, my literary nemesis!

TOM: Hello there; As agreed I will pretend not to notice the way you refer to me as if I’m a character in a story.

This is, obviously, shit writing, but it’s an easy trap to fall into, because you hear a lot about how exposition is bad, but not much about the Moron Double Tap, because it’s so widespread.

How do you handle the Unspoken, then? The trick is, don’t “handle” it. Go Method, and just keep your unspoken stuff in mind as you write, the same way we all do in real life. Let the unspoken stuff inform your characters’ decisions, statements, and reactions. Trust me, it’ll become clear.

Unless your readers are morons, of course, in which case a little MDT might be necessary.

characters, General, Writing

Read Widely Also Means Read Old

Author: January 22, 2018 0 Comments

One of the first and most useful pieces of advice writers receive is “read widely.” This is great advice for many obvious reasons, of course, and likely the most important advice you’ll put into practice. You simply can’t overestimate how much you’ll learn about writing simply by absorbing other people’s work—not to mention the inspirations you’ll get and, put simply, the ideas you’ll be able to steal.

For a lot of folks, though, reading widely translates too narrowly, and they wind up simply reading every single new book that comes out in their lane. In other words, SFF writers read all the new SFF, romance writers read all the new romance. Reading widely should include books outside your genre and comfort zone—but it should also include older books beyond the staples.

Evergreen Lessons

The power of The New is immense. Anything older than a few decades—outside of cultural touchstones like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings—is often considered a little corny and dull by current standards. And in some ways this is true: Watch an old movie from the 1940s and it feels all wrong. The pacing is weird, the dialog sounds stilted, the sets and costumes aren’t simply old-fashioned, they’re almost bizarre to the modern sensibility. It’s easy to decide that old stuff is so alien to the modern generation it’s useless; after you don’t want to learn how to write to an audience long dead.

It’s a little different in novels, though. Sure, the language and conventions are often old-fashioned, and techniques that were amazingly new in the 19th century are now simply fundamentals. But you can learn a lot from reading old novels. If nothing else, you can learn what’s been constant. And that’s powerful—what hasn’t changed? What is so fundamental to the form that it’s essentially unchanged since the first novels were published? What about Don Quixote still feels fresh and modern to you, and why do you think that is?

If nothing else, you’ll get a wider view of why modern novels employ the techniques and approaches that they do. You might just pick up a few master-level tricks, since you’ll be reading books that have withstood the test of time, unlike, you know, 90% of all the books out on the shelves right now.

Bottom line: You can learn from any book. But the narrower your lane is, the less effective your reading will be in terms of improving and strengthening your own work. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to discover how similar olden times often were to our own. Sure, they didn’t have Netflix, but you might be interested to know that alcohol has always been a thing. I sure was. It made me feel like I was part of something larger than myself.

General, Writing

Write it Now

Author: January 19, 2018 0 Comments

A friend of mine has a peculiar death fantasy. Whenever we discuss our mortality (more often than is healthy, probably), he insists that when the doctors tell him that he’s got X months to live he’ll sell the house, liquidate his savings, and head to Las Vegas so he can spend what time he has left living the high life, and hopefully keel over with a Scotch in one hand and a steak dinner in front of him.

I always politely point out the obvious flaw in this thinking: What if you, you know, don’t get the warning? What if a piano falls on you, or your doctor says you have X days left instead of months? And he has no answer. I try to urge him to live a little bit right now. Maybe don’t sell the house, but maybe take a vacation to Vegas and have that steak sooner rather than later.

The same goes for writing. We all have other things going on. We have Day Jobs and families and chores and leaking roofs and broken transmissions and sick kids and such. It’s easy to imagine that someday you will finally sit down and start writing that book that’s been nudging you in the brain for the last few weeks, months, years, decades.

The fact is, there’s no perfect time, no ideal moment. Start writing today, because, yep, a piano might fall on you tomorrow.

That Means You

This isn’t advice that only applies to aspiring writers or newcomers to the peculiar hell called Being a Writer. This goes for all of us. We all have projects we’ve put off—because it’s too complex or time-consuming, because we have to write for a living today, because we’re not sure we can pull it off artistically. And we all have to remind ourselves of the piano hovering over us, suspended by a thin wire, that could drop at any time.

Certain activities always seem pointlessly risky to me. I always say that I don’t want my last words to ever be Why did I do this? I don’t want my last words to be, why did I agree to skydive? Or, why did I agree to ride this insane rollercoaster? You can’t avoid death forever, but I never want my final thoughts to be all-consuming regret because I chose to do something that was obviously potentially deadly.

In the same vein, I don’t want to think gosh, I should have written that novel about cats where the cats are secretly angels trying to stop the apocalypse but their owners won’t let them out of the house. I may not finish every idea I have, but I’m going to fucking die trying. And so should you.

General, time management, Writing

Avoid Busywork

Author: January 17, 2018 0 Comments

Writing a novel (or, sometimes, even a short story) often requires a lot of work that isn’t writing. This could be research, or world-building no one will ever see, or getting your workspace set up in a way that’s conducive to your style. It might mean taking some time off and renting a yurt or something so you can dedicate yourself to the work. Or it might mean reading a ton of books in the same genre or category so you can get a feel for what’s current, what’s common, and what’s overdone.

All of that sort of work is sometimes necessary, but it can also become Busywork, and thus a way to feel like you’re accomplishing something without actually writing anything.

Writing Feng Shui

There’s an old cliché of someone procrastinating by obsessing over their workspace. They’ll get started on this novel as soon as they get the desk set up exactly the way they want, or as soon as they have perfect quiet, or as soon as they figure out the perfect word processing software that is ideal for their work style. They spend weeks ordering gadgets and arranging the furniture in their home office but never actually write anything.

That’s an obvious delaying tactic, but there are other ways of putting off the inevitable moment when you have to type CHAPTER ONE and begin the process of turning your ideas into a coherent narrative. This can come in the form of endless research, one source of info always leading to another, ad infinitum forever and ever world without end. Or it could mean working on minute details of your world-building backstory. Maybe you spend six months creating a language for your tribe of half-elk, half-men. Or maybe you spend a year sketching the coat of arms for every prominent family in your fictional city.

This stuff is fun, and it might serve a very good purpose for your creative process. But it can—not necessarily will, but can—also become a way of feeling like you’re doing good writing without actually, you know, writing anything.

Finding that balance can be challenging, but a good rule of thumb is simple: Did you actually write anything today? Then you’re not writing, no matter how much work you put into everything else.

One note: Drinking is never busywork and is always necessary to the creative process. And I will fight anyone who says otherwise <tears off shirt, screams>.

General, time management, Writing

Give Yourself Permission to Fail

Author: January 15, 2018 0 Comments

Writing is a messy business. You might imagine that as you progress along your artistic and professional path things get cleaner and simpler—that you’re able to bang out clean, powerful prose at any moment without all the mess of false starts and revision, but you’d be what Literary Scientists call ?wrong.’

Yes, you get better at certain things. Organizing your thoughts, jump-starting beginnings, crafting thesis statements and arguments. Research, process—there are plenty of things you get better at, including recognizing when the words you’ve just put down on the page or screen are absolute hot trash (note to self: Absolute Hot Trash is a great band name). But you’ll probably never hit a point where you can bang out a draft of a novel or story quickly and nail it every time. Maybe sometimes. Maybe when motivation or inspiration really smacks you. But in general you have to give yourself permission to fail.

Nothin’ but a Number

This can be difficult to accept when you’ve attained a certain amount of experience and success. After all, if you’ve written and sold novels, been anthologized, won awards you must know what you’re doing! And yet you’ll still write stuff that is the aforementioned Absolute Hot Trash. You’ll still get a novel 66% of the way and then watch it fall apart. You’ll still review yesterday’s work and be dismayed that your sentences have all the flow of a high school kid rapping for the first time after drinking an entire bottle of Jägermeister by themselves.

The best thing—the only thing—you can is to give yourself permission to fail. Permission to write Absolute Hot Trash. Permission to delete 10,000 words and start over.

The important thing to remember here is that failing in a creative endeavor is not only not unusual even for veterans, it’s healthy. It’s necessary. It’s like a controlled burn that clears out the dead underbrush and old growth so new saplings can emerge. It should be embraced.

Most importantly, recognizing that you’ve screwed the pooch on a piece of writing means you’re still able to tell the fucking difference between good work and bad. If you ever feel like you’re in some amazing Zone where everything breaks your way and you haven’t done shitty work in a long time, get suspicious.

Of course, don’t make my mistake: Remember to also give yourself permission to succeed. Whew, the wasted years!

General, Writing

The Clicks

Author: January 13, 2018 0 Comments

My wife, The Duchess, often gets irritated with me due to my reaction to celebrity sightings. We live near New York City, and are frequently there, so there’s a non-zero chance we’ll run across a famous person. When we do, invariably The Duchess doesn’t notice but I do, and my reaction is to wait about three blocks and then whisper to her that someone famous was hailing a cab or being raptured or something back there. The Duchess curses my name, turns, and races back to see if she can still see them.

I do this for three reasons: One, my wife’s rage and antics are amusing to me. Two, I think people are The Worst and thus cannot think of anything worse than strangers intruding on my life. And three, I don’t give a shit about celebrities, and there’s an unreasonable, ornery part of my personality that doesn’t want to feed their famewhore machines with my attention unless they’re performing for me like some sort of court jester or pet monkey.

The Clicks

I carry this attitude to the Internet, where the famewhoriest of famewhores all live. This translates to a truculent refusal to click on things that are very clearly designed to make me click on them—and this goes triple for things that are Outrage Machines, the sort of video or blogger presences that are there to be controversial and upsetting solely so middle aged idiots like me will rush to click on them and see what’s so terrible. So that we can then rush back to our own Internet backwater and write up breathless condemnations, defenses, hot takes, or other reactions. In an attempt to scoop up e second- and third-hand clicks in the wake of the flagship controversy.

The problem with my obstinate refusal to give these folks clicks is that it means I can’t actually see what’s casuing all the fuss.

In the past, if you watched some controversial thing or gave in and listened to something, you could often do so without rewarding the jackass that created it. These days, however, if I click on something just to find out why everyone’s so pissed off, I am in fact rewarding that jackass with a Click. But if I refuse to bestow that Click, then I can’t really judge for myself. It’s a very strange place to be, especially since I myself am out there with my virtual tin cup, begging for Clicks just like everyone else.

Does this mean we’re all living in an episode of Black Mirror? Probably. But as long as I don’t have to fuck any pigs, I’m okay with that.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Reading for You

Author: January 12, 2018 0 Comments

One of the best pieces of advice any writer can receive is the admonition to read constantly and widely. There’s no better writing class than the brilliant writers who have come before you—that’s not a revelation, it’s the sort of advice we all kind of know instinctively, I think.

The writing world can be a little insular. Once you start following agents and writers in Twitter and keeping up with all the spilled tea behind the publishing scenes, it gets a little echo-chambery, and part of that effect is the reading list. Every week there’s a new batch of book you’re “supposed” to read because it’s the new hot thing in literary circles, or because of its back-story, or simply because everyone on your feeds is talking about it.

You can’t go wrong reading anything, really, but sometimes you need to step back from the “must read” hot lists and read some book just because you want to.

Break Out

One of the most depressing things about life is that someday you will be gone, but people will continue to produce books, films, and other art. Yes, someday they will release a Star Wars movie and you will be dead, and thus unable to see it. And someday a novel that you would absolutely love will be released, and you will not be able to read it. Again, because in this scenario—in case it isn’t clear—you are dead.

Trying to keep up with the current hot takes in the literary world can be a bit exhausting, and it also means you’ll wind up reading a lot of books that just don’t do it for you. Nothing wrong with that; you can learn about your craft from any novel, good, bad, in your wheelhouse or so far out of it it’s not even in orbit around your wheelhouse.

But sometimes you need to feed your soul. Maybe that means taking a break to read some classics. Or some history. Or some trashy thrillers. Whatever your secret sauce, sometimes you have to put aside the new hotness out there and stop worrying about being able to jump into every single hashtag and just read for, you know, pleasure.

Me, I’m currently reading a history about restaurants in America. Will that ever be useful to me as research for my fiction, or teach me a better way to write a fight scene? Probably not. But damn, I’m enjoying it.

General, Writing