General

One of the toughest things to attain in any story, but especially in a speculative story, is verisimilitude, that sense your reader gets that the universe they’re reading about actually exists. When your story is set in the real world and in contemporary times this is a little easier, of course, but no matter when your story is set if it’s supposed to be in this universe you’re going to run into the Pop Culture Problems.

Pop Culture Problem One: The Times They Are A’Changin’

Smart phones didn’t really become a thing until 2008, 2009. Before the first iPhone, people had cell phones and they were boring, and mainly used as, well, phones. Any story set before the arrival of the iPhone might as well have been written in a different century when it comes to how people live and how they communicate, and if you wrote such a story I’m sorry to tell you you’re boned. The only solution to this is to make all of your stories speculative in the sense that they’re set in an alternative universe that follows a technological history devised by you alone, and good luck managing to convey that to your readers.

Pop Culture Problem Two: Your Main Character, The Weirdo

When I was a youngster my parents allowed my brother and I to get a goldfish, because she hoped it would distract us from our burning desire for a dog or cat. We named our goldfish Topper. Any idea why?

If you answered yes, congrats, you have a knowledge of and possibly affection for 1930s screwball comedy films or 1950s TV series. Topper was a 1926 novel adapted into a 1937 film starring Cary Grant, and spawned sequels and a TV show. My brother and I watched the reruns as kids and there was a brief period of Toppermania in our house. What can I say: In the novel of life, I am the weirdo.

Would you ever use Topper as a cultural signpost? Probably not. Yet in many speculative novels we’re expected to believe that the main characters are super into the pop culture of the 20^th or 21^st centuries so the author can use those cultural signposts despite telling a story set in, oh, the year 3147. Having your SFF characters super into things like Seinfeld in the year 3147 is like having someone be super into Topper in 2017. It will never feel real.

Related: Pop Culture Problem Three: Look on My Works

Of course, all pop culture references should be avoided for the simple reason that they age like old paint: Badly. Having your characters Dab might feel cheeky in 2017 (or, more accurately, might have felt cheeky in 2016). In 2027 it will feel … silly. Or mysterious, if your potential readers are young’uns.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out a way to get a reference to fidget spinners into this scene I’m working on, so I’ll seem cool.

Some of you might know I used to publish a zine, The Inner Swine. For nearly 20 years I self-published four issues a year, 25,000 words an issue.

What was in it? Short stories. Occasional poems. And a lot of essays about whatever happened to be on my mind that month, that day, that year. Some of it has stood the test of time, some of it I’m embarrassed about. It was a lot of fun, though, and I learned a lot about writing simply by, you know, writing. More or less constantly for 20 years, because you don’t crank out a hefty novel’s worth of material every year if you slack off.

I never expected to make any money from the zine, or gain any sort of recognition. It was just self-indulgent and fun. I had a few hundred subscribers, was in a few stores. One of the main things I learned from the zine was this: Sometimes you have to write just for yourself.

The Brand

When your ambition is to make a living from writing, from telling stories, you can lose sight of that, sometimes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with trying to write something that has commercial potential—we all gotta eat. But it’s easy to get caught up in polishing pitches, collaborating and revising to get a book sold, or trying to constantly imagine what people will like and respond to. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing is to unplug from all of that and write something simply because you’re excited about it, find it interesting or entertaining, or want a challenge. Put aside any considerations about its marketability—or even if anyone else will “get” it—and just write for the sheer joy of it.

It isn’t easy, sometimes, with schedules. Sometimes you’re lucky if you get to work on anything, much less something just for the freedom of it. But if you can, you should.

Now, I have to get back to my epic poem composed in Esperanto. Which means I have to learn Esperanto, and soon.

Writing isn’t easy. Well, no, it is easy in the sense that you’re not climbing a mountain without oxygen, or living with some terrible affliction, or working in a salt mine. Or maybe you are doing one of those things and writing is even harder because of it, I don’t know, I can’t see you. But writing a story is just thinking of an idea and then typing or scratching at a piece of paper until you’re done. It’s not exactly negotiating Middle East peace or performing brain surgery.

On the other hand, writing isn’t easy. Every writer has failed novels, abandoned projects, or juvenelia they would very much prefer to bury somewhere deep. For those of us who have two jobs, or debilitating circumstances, or other difficulties, writing gets even harder. Often the only time you have to write is after hours, or in snatches here and there throughout the day. Not everyone can just take off for a writing retreat, or easily find an hour every day to sit in a quiet, well-lit place and think.

So, take this advice with a grain of salt: Don’t work when you’re tired.

Screw the Word Count

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of word count as a metric of writing success. I understand a lot of folks find it useful and that’s great, but one reason I disparage its use is the way it makes people believe that pushing yourself to drop words onto the page long after you should give up, have a beer, and take a nap. Daily writing goals are great when they inspire you to produce quality work. The trick is to be critical of your daily production, and ask yourself whether the words you’re forcing yourself to write are any good.

Often, when I’m struggling with a scene or some other aspect of a story, the easy fix literally is easy: I quit. I go to bed. I go watch something. I read a book. When I’m tired and frustrated, the worst thing I can do is force myself to keep working.

And sometimes that’s tough, because maybe I’ve had a string of days where I haven’t gotten much done, and I’m getting that weird feeling I might never write anything good ever again, and all I want before I turn in for the night is to feel like I wrote a good sentence or paragraph, so I’ll have someplace good to pick up from the next day.

The trick is, I usually write that good sentence the next day.

You do you, by all means. But next time you’re bleary-eyed and yawning and wondering why you can’t hit that word count you set for yourself, maybe take a nap instead. Then again, I think pants are unnecessary in the modern age, so listening to me is dubious at best.

IN the realm of writing advice offered by possibly Day Drunk authors currently hosting at least two cats on their laps, forcing them to type in a pose I call “T-Rex Yoga” (arms up and bent downward so you can hunt-and-peck), there are two basic flavors: General writing or career advice that covers whole universes of writing challenges, and extremely narrow and specific advice. This is going to fall into the latter category, as it applies specifically to scenes in a story that just aren’t working.

If you’ve tried to write a story, you will likely recognize this scenario: You know where you want the story to go, you have what seems like a good outline for getting it there, but every time you start writing it feels dead. Nothing is working. The starter is grinding but the spark plugs won’t fire.

When this happens to me, usually the problem turns out to be pretty simple: I’m being too clever by half.

Just Say It

When I’m working out the plot of a story and I’m looking forward, say, twenty chapters to a Big Moment, a twist or a reveal that’s pretty exciting, I usually have an idea of how I’ll handle that Moment, and it’s usually too smart by half. I always imagine the subtle hints leading up to it, and I always—always!—have a strong urge to resist anything that feels expected, or traditional. In short, I always want to be the smartest man in the room.

But invariably if, when I get to that Moment, I just can’t seem to get the gears to bite and the words just sit there, dead and lifeless, it’s because I’m trying too hard. I’ve got all this subtext, and subtlety. Like, my villain is revealing their plan—and naturally I don’t want this to turn into an Exposition Fest, so I’ve got this idea of how their evil plan will be revealed almost casually, in the course of telling another story altogether. In my head, it’s brilliant. On the page … a fucking disaster.

The answer is usually to dispense with subtlety and make subtext into text. In short, the solution is to just have the villain make a speech. Let them build a little Exposition Village and explain everything. Then move on and finish the story. I can always go back in revision and rub at that Exposition until its gone, and in the mean time I’m making progress.

It’s key to remember that while I’m no fan of excessive revisions, your early drafts don’t have to be perfect. If being clunky keeps things moving, then be clunky, and fix it later. That is also my romantic advice: Be clunky, and fix it later.

I’m reading a pretty terrible novel in fits and starts; I like to finish novels when I start them. In fact, there has been just one novel I’ve picked up in my life that I didn’t finish. That was a weird moment in my life, actually; I bought the book when I was probably 15 or 16 and felt this weird antipathy towards it. Like, I dreaded the book. I also hated the story, but I dreaded the physical object. So I decided to bring it back to the store for a refund, but when I got to the store I had a weird anxiety attack and so I wound up just leaving the book on the shelf again, no refund.

In another life, that’s the beginning of a horror story, somehow.

Anyways, other than that one time if I start reading a book I finish that son of a bitch, trust me. So I’m struggling through this one, and one of the main reasons it’s terrible is the way the characters routinely stop whatever they’re supposed to be doing to explain themselves. Everyone in this book is a Basil Exposition, constantly pausing to make a speech about their motivations.

Here’s a simple trick for better writing and better characters: Don’t do that. In fact, it’s better if your characters never actually explain themselves at all.

Sweet Mystery of Life

Exposition and how to do it is always a challenge, but having your characters stand up and make a speech is almost never the right way to do it. The Somers Rule for How to Do Characters Or Not Hey What Do I Know Rule states that your characters should behave like real people, within the bounds of the universe you’ve created. And real people don’t usually stand up and make speeches explaining themselves.

In fact, in my experience people are frustratingly prone to the opposite. People usually assume their motives are obvious, their innocence printed on their faces, their feelings towards you plain. Imagine if everyone around you randomly launched into lengthy speeches about their plans for the evening, the reason they’re not attending that meeting, that party, their lengthy designs on world domination and mass murder. It would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it?

So it is with characters. If the best way you can explain your plot or your timey-wimey bubble of special universe physics is to have everyone stop cold and make speeches, you are not writing a good book.

However—if you’re working on a zero draft and you’re using the speech technique just to map out the fundamentals, and you fully intend to revise these ugly speeches out when you get to later drafts that humans will be expected to read, that’s totally fine. Zero drafts are ugly, pus-filled horrors. All is forgiven if you rub enough revision salve on ?em.

Sometimes people wonder at me about supposed rules in writing and publishing—mainly in the context of “what will get my manuscript immediately circular-filed?” but also in more artistic terms. What’s allowed? What’s a deal-breaker? Do I really need to have a firm grasp of grammar? Do I really need to read widely and know what’s been done before?

Yes and no. Yes, you absolutely must know these things. But the rules are made to be broken; the trick is knowing how and when to break them. What many folks fail to realize is that the writers who broke all the rules when they wrote classic novels had demonstrated a firm grasp of how to write according to the rules first.

Practice Makes Imperfect

That’s the trick—before you can write the insane post-modern novel that’s told from the POV of sixteen damaged androids who each only have one sensory input working and a portion of fabricated memories on which to base their emotional reactions, all told in the present tense without identifying any of the androids by name, you more or less have to spend some time writing a conventional narrative in order to demonstrate mastery of the basics.

Or, okay, you don’t—or, better said, some absolute geniuses don’t. Some people are just born with an ability to use words and language at a level beyond mere mortals. If you’re one of those people, by all means write your insane novel without spending any time in the trenches, but not before you tell me why in god’s name you’re reading this blog.

For the rest of us, writing a conventional novel (or two, or 15) following all the “rules” of construction, pacing, and dialog tags is an absolute necessity. When you can turn out a tightly-plotted story with well-rounded characters speaking like real human beings without breaking into a sweat, then you’re ready to start screwing around, breaking rules. You can just hop on a dirtbike and start doing sick tricks. You got to learn to ride that sucker first.

Unless you’re one of those aforementioned geniuses. In which case WHY DO YOU MOCK ME BY LURKING AT MY BLOG?

One simple fact is that the moment you become a “professional” writer you will have to deal with edits and revision notes on anything you produce. It doesn’t matter if it’s a freelance piece you got paid $10 to write or a novel that got you a six-digit advance, those edits are coming, and some of those edits are going to infuriate you.

You work with them anyway, of course. The rule of thumb with revisions and edits is pretty simple: You consider them all. You respond and revise with some, you respond and don’t revise to others, but you deal with them all. Because you’re not as smart as you think you are.

Me Write Novel Good

Writing professionally is almost always a collaborative process, unless you’re super famous and successful and can force editors to bow to your will. I am neither of those things, and so I must work with editors in both the fiction and freelance milieu. The irony for me is that one reason writing appeals to me as an artistic expression is the lack of collaboration; I can write an entire novel—nay, a series of novels—without ever discussing them in any way with another human being.

When I want someone to pay me for my writing, that’s when things get sticky, because of course the folks opening the purse strings expect some input and control over what they’re buying. Which I understand, but it still galls you, because the process goes like this

1. Work on novel/freelance project/epic poem about cats for approximately 7,000 years, until it is honed to perfection
2. Show around to Beta Readers or others, deal with contradictory feedback, like when half your betas love the unreliable narrator and half think it’s “been done.”
3. Revise for another 5,000 years.
4. Sell it! And promptly receive a 700-page edit letter detailing that your new editor loved your work so much they want you to re-write 50% of it.

It can be depressing. But the secret is, you don’t have to do all the requested changes. You just have to take them seriously. Responding with a thoughtful reason why you’re not going to delete the character based on the Great Gazoo is all that’s necessary. What you shouldn’t do is sulk and refuse to respond. Because the other thing I know is that no matter how painful the editing process has been on either fiction or freelance, in the end my work has been better for it.

The Too Long, Didn’t Read version: Suck it up, Silky Boy, and do your revs.

Villains are fun. Every story needs an antagonist, but not every antagonist qualifies as a villain, of course; villainy requires a certain amount of malice aforethought and purposeful evil. Simply resisting the desires of the protagonist doesn’t make you evil, after all.

Villains are fun, especially in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, because you can go all 1966 Batman on them and give them wonderful costumes, gadgets, powers, and evil genius. The same goes for monsters, which aren’t always villains and aren’t always your antagonist—but they’re just as fun. It’s great to make them scary, to imply apocalyptic doom walks behind them.

The problem then is that urge we all have to explain our villains and monsters. To give them backstory and psychological underpinning, to explore potential sympathy your readers might have for them. And while this can yield rich literary fruit, it also opens you up to Villain Decay.

The Slipper Slope

Villain Decay is when you overexpose your Big Bad and thus reduce their effectiveness. Put simply, the more we know about your villain or monster, the less effective they are. In horror movies the best monsters are the ones we only catch glimpses of. Hannibal Lecter was a much better villain before endless sequels gave him all kinds of history and justification for his cannibalistic psychosis.

The more you know, the less interesting they are.

In the recent films Guardians of the Galaxy, the character of Nebula played by Karen Gillan isn’t a major character or villain, but you can see Villain Decay in full effect. In the first film, she was a psychotic, merciless enemy. In the second, she suddenly pines for her sister, and shows far too many flashes of humanity to be a real villain. Part of it is the urge to put conflicting characters together in order to see the sparks fly; the problem is that once you have your villain team up with your heroes for mutual goals, you can never go back. You’ve reduced your villain and they will never be as scary again.

This isn’t a rule or anything, just something to think about. Villain Decay isn’t inevitable, but if you’re thinking of humanizing or deepening the back story of your villain, you should be prepared for the fall out—and be prepared to find a new villain.

Language can be pretty simple stuff, as when you ask someone what they do and they respond “lawyer” or “carpenter” or “rodeo clown.” But language can also be complicated stuff, like when someone asks me what I do and I say “writer” and they cock their head like a bewildered puppy and very clearly wonder what that means, exactly.

The occupation of “writer” is as much a lifestyle affiliation as a profession, sometimes; people just like to call themselves writers because of the implied intellectual and artistic acumen. What’s the qualification, though? When do you get to call yourself a writer? Obviously, when you write something. Whether it’s a haiku or short story or a 1,000,000-word novel about tiny superintelligent kittens in top hats who spend their time being exceedingly polite to each other in exponentially increasingly complicated ways, the moment you have begun and finished a written thing you, sir or madam, are a writer.

Unless you don’t let anyone read your stuff. Then you’re some sort of Schrödinger’s Writer.

Show Us the Words

We all know that so-called writer, the one who shows up for the writing meetups, talks endlessly about their novel, and describes themselves as a writer—but never allows anyone to read anything, much less tries to publish it. That’s their prerogative, of course; there are any number of reasons why you might not want to share your work. But if you don’t share your work, what’s the point? If you write a novel and nobody reads it, does it actually exist?

In a sense, no, it doesn’t. I’ve never understood not showing work around, or trying to sell it, or, hell, giving it away if you can’t find a buyer. If you don’t let anyone read it, then it dies with you, and in a sense never existed in the first place.

I don’t care if you make money from it. I don’t care if you sell a million books or you manage to give away three copies. For me, the only way to be a writer is to allow people the chance to read your work. Otherwise you’re something else entirely.

This topic was suggested by Jon Gawne.

There’s a prevalent theory among some folks that typos—those tiny mistakes you make while typing your genius fictions or your skillful cover letters and queries—are dealbreakers, in the sense that any self-respecting agent or publisher will immediately direct your work to the trash if they note a single instance. The general idea being that a level of superhuman competence is required if you want to be a writer.

This is not true. I know it’s not true because I am one of the least competent people in the world, and my work tends to be riddled with mistakes and typos.

The Riddler (See What I Did There)

The first novel I technically sold (though there was no money and it never actually published, but contracts were signed) was sent out lacking a half dozen pages, and yet still managed to gain someone’s interest. Even today, when I am a Titan of the literary world, my agent mocks me on a regular basis for the typos in my manuscripts, letters, emails, and social media. And yet it hasn’t slowed me down a bit, because there are these wonderful people called Copy Editors. And yes, you need one.

What it boils down to is simple: You as the writer don’t need to be perfect. You need to have a manuscript and communications that don’t look like a drunk illiterate wrote them—but they don’t have to be perfect. Using “its” when you mean “it’s” once in a 500-page manuscript isn’t going to disqualify you. Heck, having dozens of typos won’t disqualify you, as long as they’re clearly oversights and not representative of a writer whose language skills are theoretical at best.

The Humorless

Will you possibly run into an editor, agent, or other literary personage who will reject you for a typo? Sure, and fuck ?em. While everyone has a right to run their shop along any standards they wish—and while I will stipulate that there’s a difference between the occasional typo and a manuscript that’s obviously not worth reading because of the lack of care or understanding involved in its writing—if you’re going to reject my work because of a misplaced comma, or a misspelled word, or that time I passed out while revising and didn’t notice I’d pasted in 6,000 words of a non-fiction article I was working on, then I probably don’t want to work with you anyway. Because I will have typos, and make mistakes, and accidentally send you a version of the story that’s 3 years old.

I want partners. Publishing a novel or a short story isn’t like accepting a minimum-wage job or something, it’s a collaboration. Part of that is copy-editing and proofreading to clean up my rough edges, and I want to work with people who have a sense of humor—and perspective.