Novels

We all know what conflict is, right? It’s one of those essential ingredients to a story. You need a setting, you need characters, and you need those characters to have to fight for or against something—i.e., you need conflict.

You get much deeper into the weeds of what conflict means in terms of good storytelling, but essentially that’s all it is—something for your characters to struggle for or against. It’s kind of necessary so that your story isn’t just 100,000 words of people sipping tea and commenting on the weather. At the same time, conflict doesn’t necessarily mean evil wizards, despotic kings, assassins, or even office rivals. In her classic book Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin boils conflict down to an even more essential element: Change. “Story,” she wrote, “is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

The Change

Where a lot of writers go wrong is in assuming conflict must be huge and oversize. It must be fighting Nazis or slaying dragons, murdering husbands or surviving terrible torture. But of course there are plenty of stories that exhibit low-key, subtle conflicts, and our everyday lives are filled with conflict that doesn’t qualify as epic.

And that word—epic—is the problem, often enough. Writers can get so fixated on the idea of “epicness” (no matter the genre) that they start to imagine stories where every single scene is like something out of The Matrix movies, with rain pouring down and people shouting as they fly through the air, metaphorically or literally. You can’t craft a successful story where the emotional charge is always at 10, and your conflict doesn’t have to be “something something save the world” or “something something we’ll all die horribly otherwise” or any sort of similarly “big” problem.

It’s also a mistake to think that you have precisely one conflict in a story, or that your conflict has to be a thread through the whole story. Think about what Le Guin says, again: Conflict is change. Thus it can change. The conflict that motivates your character in the beginning of a story might be resolved and replaced—or augmented or transformed. Say your character has been hired to break into a safe in an old mansion. The first few chapters are about their research, prep, and hiring a team to help. Then they get into the safe—and discover a portal to another dimension inside and are promptly sucked in. The conflict changes.

Of course you could make it your goal to write the ideal conflict-less story, but there’s a good chance your characters will still be sipping tea by page 300.

I’ve often discussed the different approaches to creating the plot of your novels, from Pantsing (yay!) to Plotting (10 GOSUB 20), to Plantsing, which is, in my humble opinion, the only way to go. I’m a Pantser by nature, but a Plantser by professional necessity. Sometimes you just have to stop what you’re doing and Plot out a little, no matter how much fun Pantsing is.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find yourself in a scenario like this: You have at the center of your plot a pretty amazing feat. Maybe it’s a locked-room murder with an elegant, brilliant solution or a plot twist that will give people whiplash in the best possible way. The problem? You have no idea what the actual solution is. You have the greatest set up in history, you just have no idea how it works.

Some would assume you have to figure that part out before you start writing. Me, being Day Drunk and unconcerned with things like propriety or making sense in first drafts, I say you Leeroy Jenkins that son of a bitch.

Leeeeeeroy Jennnnnnkins!

If you were alive and online a few years ago you might have heard about Leeroy Jenkins, who was a member of a World of Warcraft guild. Faced with a huge number of enemies, the guild was resolved to take them on for Leeroy, who needed something from the area. While Leeroy was away from his computer making dinner, the guild constructs a complex, intricate plan in order to give them a chance against overwhelming odds. Then Leeroy comes back to his computer and, ignorant of the plan, just charges in, shouting his own name as a battle cry. The intricate plan falls apart and the entire guild is killed as a result.

Leeroy has become shorthand for a stupid charge into certain death—which is exactly what you should do if you have a premise that’s super cool but you can’t figure out.

Really, what’s your downside? You might write a lot of words that lead nowhere. Don’t even pretend you haven’t done that before, many times. This time, do it intentionally. If you have no idea how your protagonist committed the clever murder, or how you’re going to work the reveal that the hero is actually the evil mage everyone is fighting against, just dive in. Keep writing. Write what you have figured out, and hope to hell you get the rest by the time you run out of blacktop.

Will it work? Damned if I know. I myself am rocking probably 50% on that score. But it’s always illuminating, and if you don’t figure it out, the idea wasn’t all that great to begin with.

Exposition is difficult to deal with in fiction, especially when you’re world-building in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. The urge to explain everything is pretty powerful, and there is a practical point where you must explain things, or your story won’t make sense. But exposition is usually a drag, because it’s essentially like a scene in a movie where the actions stops dead and everyone stands around while someone lectures the audience.

This is where people will always, always trot out “show don’t tell,” which is fine as far as it goes. Show don’t tell is a pithy piece of airless advice you can carry around and spit out easily, but it’s not always the most helpful nugget. If you’ve got 16 pages of single-spaced information about your universe’s religions, you have to tell some of it, right?

No, you don’t, of course. In fact, in your first draft you should even try to avoid exposition altogether.

Dressing

There’s two things to remember about exposition. One, no one in real life engages in it in any sort of natural way, which is why it feels so weird and is so noticeable when it pops up in fiction. Your inner monologue is not, I hope, an endless recitation of historical facts, cultural observations, and detailed descriptions of everything you see. We only engage in exposition in real life in very formal moments: Classrooms, presentations, lectures, heated discussions at bars that skirt up to the edge of a stabbing, that sort of thing.

So, treat your characters like real people and avoid it. You know the backstory and history of your characters and your universe—it will come out in little details, asides spoken in dialog, that sort of thing. Write your first draft with the assumption that everyone has read the little bible you’ve created for your characters and universe, and no exposition is necessary.

Then, after you’ve let the draft sit for a bit and you return to revise it, you’ll find it’s very easy to pick the moments when exposition might be needed, and you can judiciously dole it out. Your Beta Readers will tell you when they were confused, and you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised at how much information was present just in the more natural dialog and actions of your characters and the details of your descriptions.

That’s showing without telling. And once you’ve done that, you can go in and fill in some gaps with exposition. The end result will seem much more electric and natural.

One of the biggest mistakes writers—both published and unpublished—make is trying to game the system by picking a project based on what they think will sell, instead of writing something they’re excited about. From my own personal experience, this is usually a one-way ticket to a terrible novel no one wants to read, much less pay you money for.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but the writing you do for passion will always be better than the writing you do via market research and trend-watching. Smarter writers than me might sell those novels, of course, while I wallow in my for-the-love paradise, but personally I think when you write a better book, you sell more copies. My experience has also been that the books you sell yo publishers are rarely the books you think you’ll sell to publishers. Again, your mileage may vary on that, but so far every time I write something that’s a surefire hit, no one wants it, and when I casually toss a trunk novel onto the table with little enthusiasm, it comes back to me with a contract. The world is mysterious.

The Patterson Effect

Some might point to writers like James Patterson, who seems to have the “write for sales” formula in lock—and he certainly does, along with a few other writers who can churn out 4-5 novels a year (often with co-writers, who are likely doing most of the actual writing) and hit the bestseller lists with most of them. This is a thing, of course, but consider that Patterson worked a long time in a more traditional way, building up not only writing experience and craftsmanship but publishing-specific business experience as well as relationships throughout the industry. He didn’t just decide one day to become James Patterson, Inc. It was a process.

Of course, for many unpublished writers the urge to try and crack the code so you can write a book genetically engineered to sell is a powerful one. Just keep in mind how many novels are bought and published each year, compared to the ones that actually sell enough to warrant second novels. The gap there is huge, and the lesson is easy: No one knows what’s going to sell. Publishers make educated guesses, and are often wrong. So the chances that you’ll guess right are even slimmer. Just write a book you’d want to read. It’s the strongest play.

A lot of writers are obsessed with originality, believing their ideas for stories must be, you know, 100% original and unique. Not me; I generally settle for 33% unique, with the other 66% being freely appropriated from everything else in the known universe. And while your exactly ratio of originality-to-borrowed might vary, the fact remains: There’s nothing new under the sun, and if you think you’ve got a story no one’s told before you simply haven’t read very widely.

If you’re struggling for ideas to write about, one possible problem is you’re being too precious about originality. Forget it. Try this: Take a very shopworn story idea, and just write a story. What gives your fiction value isn’t the elevator pitch, it’s what you add to it. So, for example, write a story about a wife and her lover who plot to murder her husband for his money. It’s so ancient! It’s so cliché! So, figure out how to make it sing.

Another thing to try is to cannibalize yourself.

They Taste Just Like Lady Fingers

We all have failed novels. I have several dozen. They all failed for different reasons, and they contain at least some good writing and interesting ideas, like a rotten plank that can be ripped down to healthy wood. If you’re currently not doing well in the inspiration department, why not go back through the graveyard of your failures and see if there’s a novel that had a great premise but didn’t work in execution, or a novel that took a wrong turn somewhere and died right under your hands. Start over.

Or, look for discrete sections in your failed novels that hum, that sing—and see if you can rip them out of their rotten narratives and combine them, or use them as the core for a whole new attempt, lathering on fresh words until you have a healthy novel.

Will it work? Sometimes, sure. Not always, certainly. But if you don’t have any ideas now, what do you have to lose?

Last year I wrote a novel. It’s a sci-fi-ish story that begins when a group of people at a remote bar are suddenly detained by a group of soldiers without any clear insignia. It was one of those high-concept premises that just grabbed me—as an inveterate pantser I was psyched to find out why, exactly, these people were being held, and how they would get out of it.

After finishing the novel, I let it sit for a bit, then re-read it. And I didn’t like the second half of the book. The setup still grabbed me, but the way I solved the problem and answered the question of why just seemed kind of expected and unsurprising—I went down some obvious roads.

So I deleted 40,000 words and jumped back in. I wrote a totally new backend to the story, which was pretty easy because the first half spun on that mystery, and most of the action revolved around the people in the bar forging alliances and working together to turn the tables on their captors, so it was easy enough to change the story without having to completely change the first half. I spun out a fresh batch of 40,000 words and took the solution in a completely new and more interesting level.

Then I let the book sit for a while, and realized I didn’t like this version, either.

Know When to Fold ?Em

I won’t re-work that book again. That doesn’t mean I’m trashing the premise; I might return to it someday, but if I do it will be a start-from-scratch effort. Sometimes you just have to know when an idea isn’t gelling, no matter how much effort you put into it, or how good the idea is on paper.

I’m glad I finished it, both times. I am a big believer in finishing things, like novels. You sell 0% of the novels you don’t finish, after all—and who knows? After a decade or two I might dig these two novels out and re-read them and discover I like them better than expected. Or maybe long after I’m dead the Jeff Somers Archivist will stumble on them and they’ll be published on the 100^th anniversary of my death via Zamboni flattening.

The always-entertaining IO9.com has a tidbit about Philip Roth declaring that the novel will be dead within 25 years. Which kind of sucks since, you know, I write novels. On the one hand, I toss this into the Decline of Western Civilization Since Year One category, because people have been bitching and moaning about how everything is going to hell since we invented culture, and every subsequent generation produces a few twits who like to prance about declaring that this time it really is going to the dogs. It’s either The Kids Don’t Read or Today’s Music Sounds Like Robots Fucking or We Had Something Called An Attention Span Back in My Day or similar; yet somehow society continues and some of the things decried as crap in the past becomes recognized as art with worth by future historians. And life goes on.

Generally I ignore this stuff. For one, these folks are universally wrong. Sure, it’s possible that someday the novel will be abandoned. Maybe it’s even likely. But people who think they have seen the future clearly are nuts: You cannot see the future, and history will confound you. Television was supposed to kill the movies, video games were supposed to make kids into violent sociopaths, and no one was supposed to get excited about a book ever again. Somehow, books still sell in the millions, and some folks think teh kids today are actually better readers because of all this newfangled technology. It’s always easier to declare the world doomed, and it gets you more press.

On the other hand, there is always a possibility that a watershed moment is coming, and I know for sure that I will be the last person in the universe aware of it. The point is not that I know Mr. Roth is wrong – I don’t. He may well be right, though I am suspicious that he conveniently chooses a time in history when he will most likely not be here any more to defend his statement. No, my point is that I don’t worry about such things because there is nothing I can do about them. If the novel is going to be replaced by, say, Twitter Plays or holographic machinima in my lifetime and I am left as The Sad Lonely Man with Books No One Wants to Read, well, I doubt any bloviating I do in the meantime will make any difference. And trying to be out ahead on these things is just silly, because you end up chasing trends that burn out. People are buying and reading novels right now, so I’ll keep writing them. Trying to figure out what they might be reading or experiencing instead 25 years from now so I can get on that train before the rush is a waste of time.

Of course, I’m always wrong about everything. Ask people about my sad Fantasy Baseball draft picks, or my geopolitical predictions. So if the novel disappears and I am left on the street corner wearing a WILL WRESTLE YOU FOR FOOD sign, please don’t laugh and point. Just wrestle me, like a Good Samaritan.

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.

I had one of those moments the other night. No, not one of those “oops I drank a bottle of High West Double Rye and wet myself” moments – or, well, yes, one of those moments too, but that’s not the subject of this little essay thank you very much. The moment I’m referring to was a spine-tingling idea I had to solve a plot problem in a novel I’ve been writing for approximately 75 years. Which is actually a merging of two novels into one. Which has been slowly driving me insane. But let all that drift, because I figured something out, and it was to take a tiny detail alluded to a few times throughout the current draft and bring it back as an awesome but somehow perfectly obvious twist.

To celebrate I drank a whole bottle of High West Double Rye but I think I already told that story, so let’s let it drift.

After I woke up, went to the desert to dry out, and had a few starvation-induced hallucinations, I realized something: The only reason the twist came to mind or even worked at all was because I’d previously put in a couple of throwaway details. The thrill I experienced when I thought of a way to leverage those details into brilliance was pretty much the same thing I would have felt if I’d been reading a book and an author suddenly promoted what had seemed like an unnecessary detail to a plot point. In other words, I was writing like a reader.

Frankly, I think that’s important.

Here’s how it works, at least for me. In chapter one, I give a character a gewgaw for some color. Then I forget about it. Then in chapter 10 I realize I need that character to do something amazing and for that he needs an implement. And I realize with a thrill that I can just resurrect the gewgaw. I stand up, tear off my shirt, and scream IT’S BRILLIANT while the universe recreates the crane shot from The Shawshank Redemption. I could have given the character the gewgaw right then and there and retconned it into the story later, but because I used something I’d already added to the story and then forgot, I have the same experience (hopefully) that the reader will have.

It’s artificial, of course. I can do anything I want in my story – I can just make shit up any time I want! Yet when I have that moment when I’m just thrilled by a twist because it seems natural, it usually means I’m onto something. For a second there, I wasn’t a jaded, slightly inebriated writer trying to fool people into spending $8 on his books. I was part of the audience, and I was excited.

Of course, I’ve enjoyed some terrible films and novels in my time, so none of this means the story I’m working on is any good. It’s just the religious experience of occasionally shocking yourself with your own writing that gets me every time.