Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

It all makes sense now.

The cold truth is, writing is the easiest part of writing for a living. The actual writing? Easy. Give me a topic, five minutes on the Internet, and a keyboard and I can gin up 500 words on just about any subject. Give me three months and a monetary incentive and I’ll write a novel. The act of writing words has never been much of a problem for me. I understand I’m not everyone; some writers do in fact struggle with the actual writing, and many of them produce great work. As Diff’rent Strokes taught us, it’s take different strokes to move the world. What might be right for you might not be right for some.

<wanders off, singing the Diff’rent Strokes theme song>

Where was I? Right: Writing is the easy part. If you want to make your living writing, however, a lot of more difficult skill sets come into play. If you want to actually make money from writing and you haven’t been able to get the six-figure advance or sell the film rights before you’ve even written the damn book like Garth Risk Hallberg, you’re going to have to learn to do a few things that—if you’re like me—you don’t really want to do. Things like

Make the Phone Calls. I do a fair bit of freelance writing to pay my enormous liquor bills, and some of it requires me to make phone calls and speak to people, usually people who don’t find me entertaining or charming. It’s my least-favorite aspect of the work, but it must be done.

Write the Synopses. If you’ve ever tried to sell a novel, you know the peculiar hell of trying to boil 90,000 words down to three paragraphs of pithy plot. But if you want to sell that novel, you have to do it.

Make the Pitches. When you freelance, pitching ideas is a constant. It is something you do every day, and it’s kind of exhausting sometimes, but you either do it or you earn about $500 a year.

Take Edits. Look, you and I both know that sometimes we nail it. Sometimes we write something great, and sometimes the feedback we get from clients or editors is less than coherent. Sometimes you get that edit letter and you just have to step outside and let out a primal scream … but you go back in and revise.

Massage Text. Sometimes your first draft is perfectly fine, but you have to go back and massage it anyway. Maybe to fall in line with style or SEO guidelines, maybe to hit a specific word count or other formatting metric, or maybe just because a client or editor didn’t like it.

These are things no one wants to do. I’d much rather write whatever I feel like and collect fat checks for each piece as I finish them. But if you’re looking to write for a living, forget twaddle like write every day–that advice is basically telling you to do something you already want to do. Instead, do the stuff you don’t want to do. That’s the best use of your time.

Your Novel about Intergalactic Reverse Vampires Whose Language is Comprised of Re-Enacting Old Star Trek Episodes Bores Me.

Elmore Leonard once famously included in his Ten Rules of Writing “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” The hard part for a writer, of course, is to figure out what those parts are. The first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust spends a lot of time noodling about remembering how a specific cake tastes and ruminating on things like sleeping habits—and if you haven’t read it, trust me when I say you spend the first few dozen pages or so wondering how in the world you got suckered into reading it. And then, IMHO, it clicks into place and you begin to really enjoy it, but there’s a bit of a hump to get over, and that hump could very easily look like he included a part that people skip.

And, certainly, many thousands of people have indeed skipped reading Proust, much to their delight and relief. And loss.

One common question I get when talking to writers at conferences and events and occasionally when I come home to find them hiding in my closet with a roll of duct tape and a bottle of chloroform is “does every scene and line need to be dramatic?” In other words, how do you tell a story that feels real if you don’t offer up the sort of mundane details that Leonard seems to be advising you to skip? You can’t tell a story that is 100% people fighting, saying witty things, and blowing things up. Or, sure, you can, but it would just be … well … kind of awesome, actually. But! Not really a story. So how do you write about characters who feel real without including some of the boring bits that we all deal with?

The answer’s surprisingly simple in concept, although complex in execution: You’re not supposed to skip the boring parts, you’re supposed to find a way to make the boring parts not boring.

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Yes, That’s Volume 29 of Handwritten Short Stories.

FRIENDS, when you have achieved the summit of midlist author success (or, like me, if you’re stranded at base camp coughing up blood but insisting you’re going to make the ascent any day now), you get asked a lot of questions. One of the most popular questions that writers get in interviews or when buttonholed outside the restroom at conferences concerns process. Everyone is curious about the disciplined, specific routine and schedule you follow in order to produce sellable wordage (did I just coin that phrase? can I sell T shirts with SELLABLE WORDAGE on them?). How many words do you write per day? How many hours? What’s your routine?

My answer is, I don’t really have one.

Which is strange, because I am a man of habits. Of routines. Of deep, deep ruts. If you followed me around for one day you would know precisely what I’m doing the next day, and the day after that, because I deeply love a routine. And yet, when it comes to writing, one of the most important things in my life, I have no routine.

Oh, to be fair, I do keep regular working hours for my freelance writing. That stuff is usually on a very short deadline, and I don’t get paid until I turn it in, so I’m inspired to work regularly on that stuff. So yes, every day between certain hours you can usually find me working on a freelance project. But when it comes to fiction, there’s no schedule or routine whatsoever, and it’s because I didn’t start writing seriously until college.

“my parents became alarmed at my mediocre grades and apparent belief in a benevolent god who would always take care of me”

(more…)

THE BAD WRITING, IT BURNS US!

A writer’s life is pretty much nonstop glamor. For example, today I cleaned out litter boxes, drank three beers before lunch, and fell asleep with cats on my chest and half a sandwich on my head. The glamorous life indeed.

The fact is, writing is kind of an interior existence. When Hollywood needs to dramatize writing, they usually make us look like computer hackers, pounding away at keyboards with intense expressions on our faces. Sometimes we drain a tumbler of whiskey really intently, or smoke cigarettes, or sweat profusely. But let’s face it: Writing a book is just typing, for a long time. Easy? No. But also not, like, working in a salt mine.

I’ve written forty novels so far. If that number impresses you, you haven’t been writing long, as a lot of writers have rooms full of trunk novels hanging around their necks like the shrunken heads of their enemies. Out of those forty novels, about thirteen have been deemed (by me, at least) publishable, and nine have actually sold for American money (the one I sold for a small bag of interesting bottlecaps doesn’t count). That means that I’ve written twenty-seven novels—twenty-seven novels—that kind of suck.

And so it goes. Not only is this high number of terrible novel-length monstrosities not really a concern, I’ve recently come to think they’re necessary. Because when I look back in anger at my writing over the last 15-20 years, there’s a pattern: For every decent novel I’ve written, there are like at least five or six terrible ones. You have to write the shitty ones to get to the good ones.

The Pattern

I wrote six novel-like things before my first published novel, Lifers. One of these is really just a novella, and one was the proto version of The Electric Church, but this early draft is definitely juvenelia. After Lifers (written in 1997), I wrote the following novels:

“The Only Time” 1999

“Book of Days” 2001

Chum 2001

“The Night Will Echo Back at You” 2002

“The Weak Theory of Mike Edelson” 2002

“The Ancestral Home of the Malarchy’s” 2002

“Almost as Delightful” 2003

“Fallen Among Thieves” 2003

“The Hobo Obituaries” 2004

With the exception of Chum, which was eventually published in 2013, none of these novels are very good. In fact, a few of them are lost to my memory, and I can’t even guess what they’re about. Two of them have been re-worked into a new novel that took the best of each and discarded the crap. The others can’t be saved, I don’t think. Then in 2004 I wrote the revision of The Electric Church that sold.

That string of six stinkers in a row between 2002 and 2004 is quite a dry streak; I often have trouble giving up on projects and must continue to pound the keyboard until I somehow come up with an ending of sorts, just so I can call it finished. Lord knows my long-suffering agent has seen plenty of these:

AGENT: What in the great googly-moogly is this?

ME: A new novel I thought you could sell. We’re so hungry …

AGENT: This is not a novel. It’s a collection of gibberish and erotic doodles.

ME: They’re not meant to be erotic.

AGENT: … that is even worse.

The Purpose

But you sort of have to get these bad books out of your system. You can’t write the good ones unless you write the bad ones, for a couple of reasons:

1. If you don’t get those bad ideas into a mockable format, you’ll never know they’re mockable.
2. Sometimes you have to get obsessions out of your head so you can move on.
3. Sometimes the only reason to believe a gimmick is a bad idea is to actually write that novel in the second person from the perspective of a cat (I just made that up I totally did not ever consider doing this nope not me)
4. You can often generate some great stuff inside the boundaries of a bad book, material that can be later excised and re-used.

In short, your head will start to fill up with terrible ideas. Let’s face it, you’re kind of a bad idea machine. You’ve got to drain them out of there like pus out of an infected wound.

So, sometimes when I realize the novel I’m writing isn’t so great (something I just realized about what I’m working on tonight) I don’t give up. I push on. Not only will I get to mark a novel complete, I’ll have gotten a whole raft of terrible ideas safely into a file on my hard drive, where they will glow with evil power but never actually hurt anyone. Unless I choose to send them to my agent, which would just be mean-spirited.

Jorts Are Pants Too.

WRITING ADVICE INVOLVING PANTS, FOR A CHANGE.

Friends, the worst part about advancing age is easily the self-awareness. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be back in my dullard youth, completely and blissfully unaware of what a massive asshole I could be. I had some good times back then, believe me, secure in the myopic knowledge that I was awesome.

Today, I can’t fool myself so easily. I’ve seen too many repeated patterns, and too many poor results. After a while, you either have to admit you’re doing it wrong or accept the fact that your existence is going to be an increasingly awful existential hell of your own making. So, I am finally ready to admit it: I am not easy.

LIKE SUNDAY MORNING

In my youth, which is to say up until a few years ago when someone accidentally spilled paint thinner on my Dorian Grey painting and I melted like the Nazis in Indiana Jones, I thought I was the easiest guy in the world, because I didn’t give a shit about a lot of stuff other people seemed really worried about. Like, what a group of us did for fun at night. Or what did I want for dinner. Or what I wore. I prided myself on being easy, like Sunday morning: Just tell me what we’re doing, and I’ll wear whatever I have lying around, and anything is cool for me for dinner.

When something becomes part of your self-image, it’s hard to shake. For a long, long time I was convinced that I was Easy. Everyone else complicated things, stressed over unimportant stuff, and wasted time. Case in point, the first time The Duchess ran her yellow eye over me and decided I needed new pants.

ME: What’s wrong with these?

HER: We will dub them the So-Called Pants and their fame will be eternal. Now drive me to Old Navy.

ME: Yes’m.

I can now admit it: I am not Easy. I am, in fact, a royal pain in the ass, because my ideal is always whatever I’ve been doing. When it comes to pants, I like the pants I have. Any attempt to replace those pants will be met with petulant resistance and passive-aggressive plotting to undermine you as a person. It’s not that I don’t care what pants I wear, it’s that I want the pants I already have.

This extends to every other aspect of my life. I used to think I was easy, but now I realize that not having a strong opinion about anything actually makes me an enormous pain everyone’s ass. And this sort of personal epiphany is going to serve me well as a writer, because it’s exactly what the characters in your stories ought to be dealing with.

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Nobody likes characters that are too woke, too self-aware, perfectly in tune with themselves. They come off as flat and obvious, and they resist character arcs, because they have nothing to evolve from. In real life, of course, no one is 100% self-aware. And just like when you write dialog and have to find some artificial patois and rhythm that seems realistic without being at all how people really talk, when creating a character you want the semblance of real people.

An essential part of that is a lack of awareness about their limitations or annoying traits. Think of it this way: We all go around thinking we’re pretty cool, that we’re the heroes of our own narrative. We usually aren’t, but we think we are. Your characters have to have things about themselves that they are unaware of, at least at the start of your story. They can have epiphanies as the tale goes on, but saddling them with things they don’t know about themselves is powerful, and feels natural.

Getting a POV character to convey things to the reader that they themselves are not aware of? That‘s where the old chestnut about “show don’t tell” comes into play. For example, years ago when some girlfriend took me shopping for pants, I thought I was being Easy. My inner monologue was filled with self-congratulations on how chill and easy I was being. BUt anyone watching would have been aware of how difficult I was within moments. That’s your job as a writer.

So, don’t say my pants have never done anything for you.