General

FANS, I don’t claim to know much of anything at all.

I know a few things: I know that Warren Spahn is the winningnest lefthanded pitcher in Major League Baseball history. I know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to arbitrary precision. I know that irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. I know how to tie a Square Knot. I can write a Hello World program in BASIC. I know what a Fnord is. See, I know a few things, but nothing, really, of any importance, and nothing, really, that would convince you that I am qualified in any way to write intelligently about Serious Writing Topics. The fact that I’ve published a few literary gems doesn’t mean much, if you consider some of the crap that gets published these days-not just published, but the crap that wins awards. I don’t have any advanced degrees and I’ve rarely won an argument, usually descending to physical threats after about five minutes of stuttering impotence; I haven’t published any scholarly papers on the subject of writing and I’m not making millions through my art. So, there’s really no reason to pay any attention to me, is there? On this subject, I mean. If you need an essay on why a six-pack is good breakfast fare, I’m your man.

Of course, you’ve already started reading this blog. That doesn’t say much for your intellectual abilities, bubba. So I can assume you’re not too picky about what you read, and plunge straight ahead into the subject at hand, which, in case the introductory paragraph wasn’t very clear on the matter, is the usage of Pop Culture references in fiction, and why I think they’re bad, and avoid them.

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Lord knows my public persona is a carefully constructed straw man made of assumptions, half-truths, ominously oblique remarks, and lurid facial expressions, which is to say there ain’t much meat to it. When confronted, in public, with a careful questioner who begins tugging gently at the loose threads that sprout from my opinions, declarations, and explanations, I can only run in fear and cower behind alcohol, meaning I pretend to pass out and refuse to be brought back to consciousness until the offending person is gone. It doesn’t help, certainly, that I am fact-challenged in most of my positions. I prefer to answer probing questions with brisk falsehoods, and hit the ground running hoping that no one bothers to follow up and discover how much bullshit is inside this wicker man.

This really only becomes a problem when I meet new people who previously have known me only through this zine. My established friends are used to my bullshit, and don’t even bother asking me questions any more—the common sense ones (“Would you like another beer?”) have obvious answers (“Yes, and be quick about it, damn your eyes!”) and the ridiculous ones never occur to them. One of the ridiculous questions which always occurs to strangers, however, is “How do you write?” or one of its tributary questions, like “How do you decide what to write about?” or “How much of your real life is in your writing?”

These questions are ridiculous because, to be honest, I can’t imagine their value to another human being. Write your way, baby, and don’t worry about mine.

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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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Writing advice is one of those things that a lot of people want from you but are then almost always disappointed by. I’ve seen it plenty of times: Someone says, oh hey, you’ve completed/sold novels, what kind of advice do you have for the aspiring writer? And they are clearly expecting me to say something like drink heavily all the time and the magic booze faeries will dictate stories to you or jot down this ancient Sumerian magic spell and you can summon magic booze faeries to dictate stories to you or possibly sit down and let me buy you expensive cocktails on my dime.

When I offer instead some chestnut about craft or reading widely or avoiding Tom Swifty constructions in your dialogue, their disappointment is obvious, and their eyes always say something akin to you sir are a fraud and I despise you.

So I’ve been trying to think of a piece of writing advice I can offer that is actually practical and useful but also concise and simple, the sort of immediate benefit I think many folks want. They don’t want to hear something that if you apply diligently for the next thirty years might offer some insight. They want something they can go home and do immediately. And in my role as professional bloviator, this is a tool I must have. And after much thought, I have it: Leave yourself hanging.

This is something I’ve done my whole life without actually thinking of it consciously, and it really does work. The concept is simple: When writing a story, always stop for the day at a point where you know what the next thing will be. In other words, never write until you’re unsure of the next step in your story. Whenever I’ve written until I had no idea what came next, when I sat down the next day I was stumped. If I leave even the slightest bit unwritten, I can swing into it easily the next day.

Simple? Yes, but surprisingly not obvious to many. So there you go: A bit of easily marketed writing advice I can apply my unique brand to. Said brand summed up with the phrase Cranky Inebriated Incompetence.