General

I’m not much of a perfectionist. In my personal and professional life I’m kind of a hot mess in many ways, actually; I don’t plan ahead much and like to wing things—I’m the clichéd guy who tosses assembly instructions aside and just begins fitting things together. The end result is either exactly right or wrong in a terrifying or beautiful way.

In writing, I’m also not particularly worried about getting everything just-so. I’m a Pantser, of course, and that’s part of it—Pantser tend to charge ahead without worrying how they’re going to find their way back. But another part of it is just personality: I don’t like to get bogged down in details. I’m big-picture. I’d rather get the general story down on paper and then worry about fixing up the details later.

In other words, I like to fix things in post.

No CGI in Novels, Unfortunately

Some writers are meticulous planners who have every detail figured out before they start writing, but my first drafts tend to be hot messes of changing character names, disappearing characters, plot threads that go nowhere, and the occasional Truck Driver’s Tense Change. In movies, there’s a lot of post-production work that goes into fixing mistakes. Fixing things in “Post” is an accepted part of the process.

Why not apply that to novels? Obviously, all writers do just that—most of us revise our first drafts to some extent before showing them around to people. The trick is to internalize that fact and make it part of your tool chest—in other words, stop worrying about getting things correct as you write. Instead, barrel through and assume you’ll fix things in post—i.e., revision. The end result is a speedier path to a completed first draft, a big-picture story that works on the macro levels. All that will be left is to go back and fix up the micro stuff that you pushed past.

The advantage to this is simple: You’ll have more completed drafts. It’s easier to fix up small problems—even a lot of them—when you have a completed story than it is to stop everything and contemplate each small problem on its own as you encounter it. And the more completed drafts you have, the better chances you have of having something worth selling.

Of course, your mileage may vary. If your manuscript descends into literary madness because of this advice, I have a pocket full of smoke bombs and a bag full of new identities.

Any writer who has struggled to publish or seen their published book’s sales head straight into the crapper has wondered—usually out loud in a drunken slur while pushing their finger into someone’s chest—how it is that so many terrible books get published and sell well while good books, like theirs, languish.

The answers they come up with usually cycle through some common tropes: The reading public has bad taste, publishers allocate marketing and promotion resources unfairly, they’re too good-looking and smart to ever find true success in a suckass world (that last one might be specific to me).

While these things might be true for certain books, it’s worth getting something clear: A book can be well-crafted—and thus 100% publishable and capable of selling well—while being a pretty terrible book. Because craft and art are wholly distinct things.

The Well-Crafted Turd

Every writer has read a popular book and wondered how in the world it’s so successful. Dumb plot, stiff dialogue—we’ve seen it all in some of the biggest-selling books ever written. And yet most of those books are well-crafted, in the sense that the sentences flow, the story lines up, the characters have clear motivations. No matter what bestseller you hold up as an example of a terrible book that does well, you’ll find (if you look at it objectively) that it’s probably pretty well-crafted.

Craft, though, is just the tools and raw materials of the trade used competently. It’s like making a chair: You can learn the basics of woodworking and eventually get to a point where you can make a chair that will function just fine and have a bare minimum of aesthetic appeal. But no one’s going to cheer your work as a reinvention of the form, or ogle the subtleties you brought to the piece.

In the same way, you can learn the fundamentals of telling a story and use those tools properly. The end result will be a novel, and if your craft is up to snuff that novel will probably be publishable even if it isn’t art. No matter how terrible your example of a bad novel might be, it adheres to the basics of good craftsmanship, and that’s why it can sell in the millions to people who don’t care if it’s art, they just want someone to tell them a story, even if it’s a variation on a story they’ve heard before.

Now, all of you people who held up one of my books when I asked about an example of bad books, very funny.

I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy. Blame my parents, who always treated me like a smart guy. Blame my teachers, who also acted like I was smart. And I did pretty good in school, for a while—until one day I realized that my older brother was actually smarter, and always did better than I did. So I gave up and began exploring ways to get through school without, you know, studying or doing any work.

Still, as my wife The Duchess will attest, secretly I still think of myself as Very Smart and sometimes I can’t resist trying to show off how smart I am. The fact that these showoff moments usually end in humiliation and embarrassment somehow doesn’t deter me from thinking that I’m Very Smart.

That’s okay; my humiliation and embarrassment is entertaining and thus enriches the world. The only time trying to show off becomes a problem for a writer is when you do it in your fiction.

The Answer is Don’t Think About It

Showing off in your writing happens in three basic ways:

1. Research Gore: You spent a hecka lot of time researching something for your book, and goddammmit you’re going to get your dollar’s worth by dropping every. single. bit. of that research into your story, no matter how awkward it makes things.

2. See-What-I-Did There-ism: You’ve spun up one of those perfect plots, filled with surprises and twists and subtleties, but you can’t just let it speak for itself—you have to put a pin on every brilliant thing, having characters break into speeches explaining the trick, or returning to it over and over again to ogle this or that piece of smartness.

3. Encyclopedia Browning: You know a lot of things. You know a lot of interesting things, and like the Worst Guest at a Party Ever you must tell everyone all of your interesting things. So you have your characters speak like Wikipedia Articles, droning on and on about stuff that has nothing to do with the plot in order to drop all these awesome tidbits into the story.

These are all terrible for your story. Dropping interesting stuff into your fiction in natural, smooth ways can be great. Dropping things like anvils into the middle of your story or dialogue is annoying, because it’s like when you have a conversation about something and the other person keeps steering it back to themselves.

You might very well be as smart, well-read, and traveled as you think you are. Just keep reminding yourself that no one is reading your book because you’re interesting. They’re there for the story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go read the dictionary for a while so I can drop some 50-cent words into my next book. Abra-Adumbrate!

When I was a young man, I wrote exclusively on an old 1950s-era manual typewriter that I stole from my Mom (in the sense that it was her typewriter from her working days, and I borrowed it one day and simply never gave it back). I loved pounding out stories on that thing. It was like a tank, a solid hunk of metal and you could feel the goddamn earth shake every time I typed on it.

At the same time, I started writing short stories in college-ruled notebooks, something I still do today, and I got superstitious about the pens I used. I would only use a certain kind of cheap blue disposable pen, so I bought them by the dozen and if one ran out of ink I stopped working until I could find a replacement.

In other words, I totally fetishized my implements. Until practicality imposed itself.

Any Way, Any Where

Basically, the Internet happened and I could no longer get away with submitting type-written manuscripts, and finding my exact kind of pen became a bit of a burden. So I weaned myself off the typewriter (I tried to do first drafts on it, keyboarding them in for revision, but this was too much work when I could simply do the first draft on a computer) and I got a little looser with my pen rules (though they still must be blue for no reason I can articulate).

Oddly, despite these early fetishes, I’ve never been hung up on office space or writing space, and ultimately I think that’s the healthiest thing: Don’t get hung up on where or how you write.

For some writers I know, these hang ups are delaying tactics. They spend months futzing with their writing nook, or playing with fonts, or trying out keyboards, all in the service of avoiding having to actually start their book and possibly fail at it. For others, it’s just a love of the idea of being a writer but not so much the effort involved.

But the perfect writing space, or a super-cool process involving expensive pens or expensive gadgets, shouldn’t be your focus. There’s nothing wrong with having a great working space where you’re comfy and free from distraction. There’s nothing wrong with liking a certain pen, or a certain keyboard, or a certain word processing software. But I’ve come to believe that the main goal should be productivity: Learn to write under any conditions, any where, in any way. Learn to be able to composed a short story using a stubby SAT pencil and some butcher paper while trapped in an elevator with fifteen other people. If you can do that, you’ll always produce great stuff, no matter what’s going on in your life. The more fragile and rigid your environment, implements, and process is, the more likely it gets broken on a regular basis. And every day you don’t write because you ran out of the right pens is a day you’ve lost.

Of course, none of this applies to whiskey. When the house runs dry of spirits nothing gets done, but that’s just science.

Writing a story (or even a work of non-fiction) involves a lot of moving parts—imagination, rational thought, language skills, literary sense, style, et al. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, though—sometimes you get so caught up in trying to capture voice or describe action that you forget to pay attention to some of the most basic, dumbest things that can make your writing suck.

Writing a story, for example, is as much about the placement of words on the page as it is the ideas that those words convey. This is one reason writer’s have experimented with the form of their sentences as much as they’ve experimented with the content.

Writing a story is therefore more than just a mental act. It’s a physical one, with a physical record that can affect how your reader interprets or reacts to a story. For example: Stacked paragraphs.

Writing a Story

Look at the first three paragraphs of this little essay; they all being with the same three words. This is a bit of an extreme example of Stacked Paragraphs; for me it usually manifests in a more subtle way—like starting every paragraph with He. “He looked. He stood up. He sighed.” That sort of thing. Very often I’ll pause in the middle of writing a story and realize I’ve started the last six paragraphs with the word He, forming a stack that jumps out at you once you see it on the page or screen.

This can be bad because it becomes a drone in the reader’s mind, a repeated rhythm and beat that—unless it’s on purpose for a specific reason—makes your writing seem dull. When the reader subconsciously anticipates how every paragraph begins, they start getting lazy about reading your work—and then they get bored.

Stacked paragraphs is a minor thing you can fix easily enough in revision—but to do so you first have to be aware of it. Keep your eyes open.

And when fixing it, resist the urge to drop all kinds of bizarre new ways saying He did something. Getting rid of stacked paragraphs with awkward constructions or oddball word replacements might liven up your writing, but it leads you into a whole new minefield.

And whatever you do, don’t think about all the dumb mechanics mistakes you’re making that you haven’t noticed yet. Believe me, that way lies madness.

There’s a human tendency to stratify just about every pursuit between amateurs and professionals. In some cases, of course, this is useful; it’s good to know the person you just hired to re-wire your house is a licensed, professional electrician and not someone who is fascinated by the way electricity causes fires, for example. And if someone offers to buy you some drinks, it’s helpful to know they’re not going to punk out after ten or eleven rounds.

This drive towards professionalism is sometimes harmful, though, and is sometimes used merely to create an exclusive strata so those on the right side of the velvet rope can feel smug. Creating jargon and secret information that only the initiated can parse is one way of doing this; jargon can be an incredibly useful shorthand for professionals, of course, conveying reams of information in a condensed form almost like the episode Darmok from Star Trek: The Next Generation where an alien civilization uses short phrases that convey entire scenarios with incredible depth of meaning.

But professionalism isn’t always useful. Sometimes it’s just flattering yourself. That’s how it is in writing.

Jargon for the Loss

Some young writers strive for the secret knowledge that professionalism can provide because it makes them feel like they’ve slipped past the velvet rope even if they haven’t written anything worth reading or published anything. And that’s the real danger here; being able to discuss The Hero’s Journey in depth, or explaining to anyone who will listen that the ?climax’ isn’t the end of the story is great and all, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not actually writing.

In other words, don’t waste too much energy on being able to talk a good writing game. Instead, put that energy into the actual writing. No one’s gonna care if you call the denouement of your novel That Moment When It All You Know Kind of Gets Ironed Out and Everyone is Done Fighting—if your story is great. If your story is great, you can call the plot mechanics by any names you want, and literally no one will care.

Sure, knowing the jargon and concepts will help you discuss writing with your fellow novelists, but trust me when I say that this is overrated. Also overrated? Ending blog posts with a coherent restatement of your premise.

Reading through some online forums about writing, one thing that always strikes me is the pervasive sense that there are rules. Now, you can tell from the title of this blog (and the book it’s promoting, coming out next year) that I don’t really think there are many rules when it comes to writing, but a lot of writing-related questions center on what’s “permissible” or “allowed.” As if there’s some sort of international court of literary pursuits that will hand down judgments.

Questions like “how many characters should this story have” or “is it permissible to begin the story this way” miss the point of creativity. There are no permits to be issued. You’re on your own.

Writing is Thunderdome

A writer friend and I have been engaged in a circular argument for decades now concerning movie reboots. His position is that reboots are almost always wastes of time because they’re usually rebooting a perfectly good movie to begin with—and almost all reboots are inferior. My position is that any idea can work. There’s no fatal flaw in the basis of the idea—say, the fact that it’s a reboot or remake—that dooms it. You can take a story that’s been done before and improve on it. Or fail to do so. But that’s a flaw of execution, not ideas.

And that’s the thing about writing. It’s Thunderdome. You can try anything you want, and if you pull it off it’ll be great. And if you fail to pull it off, you’ll get crushed. It’s that simple.

People like rules because it’s comforting. They like patterns and formulas because it makes it seem like a step-by-step guide to success. And yes, to some extent following rules or a formula can lead to a successful story—but so can winging it, or actively breaking rules. If you have the urge to ask, is it permissible to do this? why not just do it and find out?

Have a dead narrator? Have one hundred characters? Lie to the reader? Why not. If you don’t pull it off people will tell you it was a bad idea—but it won’t have been. It’ll simply be an idea you failed to pull off. That’s the bottom line: A bad idea is just an idea you failed to pull off.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go work on my reboot of The Sound and the Fury in which the whole thing is narrated by Benjy. You’re welcome.