Writing

Something non-creative folks don’t understand is the private rush that accompanies creation. For me, as a writer, nothing feels better than writing THE END on a story I’ve been working on, whether it’s been days or years since I started.

And that rush is especially powerful if I’ve tried something new. I write a lot, and much of my work is fairly standard — I have my ways of doing things, the tics and subjects that grab my attention, the tics and techniques I like to use in my storytelling. I start with an idea, imagine characters, and go to work.

But sometimes there’s an innovation, what in chess is sometimes referred to as a ‘brilliancy.’ These don’t have to necessarily be brilliant, it’s more like they’re ideas or techniques that are new to me. An innovation can be exhilarating, it can remind you why you started this lonely, low-income life of words in the first place. And when you pull off a brilliancy like that, you want to show off. You want to rush that story out and flex on everyone, say ‘see what I did? DO YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE WROUGHT?!?!’

The flex ain’t worth it. Brilliancies are exciting stuff. But remember, an incredible technique doesn’t make a good story, necessarily.

Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!

It’s easy to be so struck by some new idea you have, some new trick, that you let it cloud your assessment of the overall work. You write an entire novel in a breathless stream-of-consciousness style that really sings! But you forgot to tell a compelling story doing it. Or you managed to pull of the sort of epic, mind-bending plot twist that comes around once in a lifetime, carefully dropping seeds throughout your plot in an assured way that often evades you! But you forgot to make your characters interesting, three-dimensional people.

Brilliancies are great. They’re often the oxygen that keeps us going creatively because they get us excited about writing all over again. But it’s important to remember your fundamentals. It’s crucial that your brilliancy serve the story and not the other way around.

Of course, sometimes you have to wallow in the great idea for a bit, just enjoy yourself, and then go back later and make it into an actual story. The sad fact is, you often have to use an exciting new idea until it stops being so exciting, and then you can use it like a tool instead of showing it off like a new toy.

Of course, as a writer, my most recent brilliancy involved rigging up one of those beercan baseball hats to feed me sips of whiskey while I work, so … I may be the smartest human alive.

As you may or may not be aware, I have a little podcast called The No Pants Cocktail Hour where I discuss a short story I wrote while drinking some delicious whiskey and then read the story with some half-assed production (sound effects, etc). It’s fun! And, I hope, interesting to both folks who write professionally and those who aspire to write professionally.

The most recent episode focuses on a story I published back in 2007, Mr. Benders New House. It’s an unusual story for me, and I’m quite proud of it. If you’re curious about it (or why I’m proud of it) you can listen to the podcast, natch. But something that stuck me while recording this episode might be useful to other writers. Because something I see a lot of is young writers who worry a lot about how their work will be received. Whether they’re good enough, whether they have the right to use a certain POV, whether a subject or plot device has been over done.

Mr. Bender’s New House reminded me that those are all concerns for after you’ve finished the story. Step One is write the damn thing. Step Two is worry about whether it’s good, or if you didn’t pull it off, or anything else.

In other words, when it comes to first drafts, write like no one is reading.

Future You’s Problem

It’s kind of vital to remember that on the privacy of your own screen or your own notebook page you can write anything. No one ever needs to know about it, or read it. That’s incredibly freeing, and you should run with that.

That means working on an idea you’re not comfortable with, or you’re not sure you can pull off. Maybe it’s a romance, and you think of yourself as a hardboiled crime writer. Maybe it’s deeply personal and reveals ugly truths about yourself. Whatever it is, the rule of thumb is that if it scares you it’s worth writing about — but it’s important to keep in mind that when you’re working on a draft it’s just for you. It’s private. There’s no law that says you have to publish it, or show it to Beta readers, or put it into a blog post.

In fact, it’s often helpful to assume you won’t show it to anyone. Tell yourself this is just an exercise, for your eyes only. Then go to town. Write about your darkest fears or desires. Reveal yourself. Try crazy literary experiments. Try whatever the hell, because when you’re done you can just tuck it away. Or destroy it, if that’s your jam. Or put it out there if you feel good about it.

In Mr. Bender’s New House, I tried a kind of subtle trick, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Or that anyone would notice. If I’d thought about it while writing I probably would have given up. I probably would have decided it wouldn’t work, or I’d make a fool of myself trying to be a kind of writer that I’m not really. But I finished that story, and I sold it, and it was published, so I did something right, although it’s possible I still failed at what I was trying to achieve. If I’d given in to the worry, I wouldn’t have that story today.

The key is to not let worry over its reception stop you from working on it. Just write as if no one will ever see it. If Future You decides differently, that will be their problem, not yours.

Of course, this can be applied to any creative activity. Or non-creative activity. The one thing I’d advise is never apply this to dancing. Don’t cance like no one’s watching. ONe thing I’ve learned is that someone is always watching.

Question of the day: If you want to write stories that involve far-away (or entirely fictional) places, do you have travel to be able to do so believably? That’s an actual question you hear from writers, and the idea that you must travel widely before you can write (this actually comes up in epic fantasy a lot, his argument that to write a fictional universe you must experience many cultures and geographies up close) is surprisingly common even among writers who should know better.

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer. No, and this sort of exclusionary bullshit is just silly. But I’m not here to pile on a writer who has just had their nose rubbed in their own privilege, I’m here to talk about the writing part.

Make Shit Up

It’s amazing that you have to remind writers that they are, in fact, writers, and that their main function in life is to make shit up. It’s also amazing to think that we have to remind people that Google exists.

If you’re wondering whether you must travel to Nepal in order to experience the climate, culture, and wildlife firsthand before you craft your epic fantasy that is set in a fictional version of Nepal, the answer is no, of course not. In fact, your fictional version of Nepal doesn’t even need to resemble Nepal very closely, does it, since it’s, you know, fictional?

And even if you do want it to be accurate, there’s this thing called research.

Now, if you can travel places to do firsthand research, by all means do it. Nothing wrong with firsthand experience. And nothing wrong with allowing the places you do get to visit to influence and inspire you. Heck, one reason I set a key sequence of The Electric Church in London was because I’d recently taken a trip there, and the memories were vibrant and it seemed like a fun idea.

But if you can’t travel — whether due to the slow apocalypse we’re experiencing or run-of-the-mill budgetary and lifestyle limitations — don’t fret. You don’t need to in order to write a book. Through a combination of fakery, research, and imagination, you can very likely craft a convincing mirage of the place you’re using as a setting. Even if you have actually been there, you’re probably going to fictionalize a little bit anyway. Just turn that knob to 11.

For some reason people seem determined to invent things you absolutely must have, do, or know in order to write a novel. None of it is true. You don’t need anything. And I certainly don’t know anything, and I’ve published nine novels.

I read a lot of books. This doesn’t make me particularly smart or special; it just makes me someone who reads a lot of books. I read books for fun, of course, but also as a paid reviewer. The reviewing gig is great, because I get to read books I wouldn’t normally choose. Sometimes that is delightful. Sometimes it is … not. But I always get something out of it.

One problem I’ve encountered in some of the books I’ve been reading of late is a tendency to go for AWESOMENESS in the prose style. You might call it Purple, or just overdone — every description is a superlative, every action is incredible, skilled, decisive. It’s like the author dialed their writing up to 11 and then tinkered with the wiring to milk a few more watts out of the power supply IN ORDER TO MAKE IT ALL AWESOMER.

Tip: Don’t do that.

Superlatives for the Loss

It might seem counter-intuitive, but the more you tell me that your character is awesome and the best at what they do, the more adjectives and adverbs you pile into your sentences, the less convinced I am.

This is a case where ‘show don’t tell’ can actually be a very useful piece of advice. The more you have to tell me how awesome your character, story, and settings are, the less I believe you. If you want to convince me I’m reading something epic, you have to demonstrate it.

Some young writers think that they need to ‘punch up’ their writing to convey the excitement they feel when they’re making up the story, but this is the exact opposite of what you need to do. The more ‘awesome’ you drop into the story, the worse the writing gets, as a rule.

The thing about description is that the more AWESOME it gets, the less universal it is, as a rule. Because superlatives and modifiers are crutches. Readers should be excited about your story because it’s interesting, clever, and emotionally resonate. They should care about your characters because they feel real. None of this has much to do with piling 13 AWESOME words into every sentence.

In fact, a good exercise is to write a story with a limited number of modifiers — a restricted vocabulary, maybe, with just a short list of basic adjectives and adverbs, or a certain number you can use per 100 words. Restricted writing like that rarely produces great work, but it’s almost always a learning experience for the author.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to this story I’m writing about Ripper Mojo, whose fists are like steam-powered locomotives humming with violent rage and whose eyes are as deep and unblinkingly penetrative as a midnight sun.

Whenever there’s a lull in the party conversation and you bring up the craft of writing¹, someone usually brings up stealing. As in stealing tricks and techniques from other writers in order to make your own work better.

This isn’t controversial, of course; all writers borrow from each other to some extent. There’s one aspect of this sort of literary theft that I’m particularly good at², and it’s something I think more writers should work at: Mimicry.

Stops Copies Me

Back in college, I was once accused of plagiarism by a professor when one of my papers read a little too sophisticated; my professor didn’t bother checking, he just assumed no normal 19-year old kid would write those sentences³. And he wasn’t wrong, as I was definitely not normal at all.

But it wasn’t plagiarism, it was my innate ability to absorb writing style and regurgitate it in my own work⁴. It’s something I do almost unconsciously, and I do it to this day. I’d been reading a lot of dry, erudite works of literary criticism, and I just started writing in the same style.

Today this happens mainly in the monthly short stories I write. If I’m reading a book with a distinct style or technique, it will always bleed into the short story I’m working on. Sometimes this is overt. Sometimes I’m purposefully using a style from something I’m reading or have recently read — sometimes, in other words, the whole point of the story that month is to try on another writer for size. Sometimes it just sort of happens, sometimes even in the middle of the story. It will start off as a run-of-the-mill caper story, and suddenly I’m riffing on an omniscient second-person dream sequence⁵.

This differs from the usual advice to steal little and steal big because it’s more diffuse, less concrete. It’s not about stealing an idea or a concrete approach, but rather trying on another writer’s whole deal, trying to reverse-engineer another writer’s whole process.

More writers should try mimicry as an exercise, I think. It’s like breaking into someone’s house and walking around for a few days. You wear their pajamas, eat their food, delete stuff from their DVR. Maybe it’s not how you’re going to live the rest of your life, but you see things from a new perspective, and you pick up little tricks of the trade.

Of course, with literary mimicry there’s less chance of expulsion and arrest than with other forms of theft, which means you get the thrill of the crime without the consequences, thus obeying the Beretta Theme Song Rule⁶.

I sometimes get a kick out of killing off characters. Heck, in the original draft of The Electric Church, written 20 years before the version that finally published, I actually ended it with Avery Cates committing suicide. Considering I’m still writing about Avery today, I’m kind of glad I reconsidered that particular ending.

But I am still overly fond of murdering fictional people. A few years ago while working on the draft of a book I killed off a supporting character and every single person who read the draft protested. Harsh words were used. I quickly reconsidered again, and the character lived.

But here’s the thing: Killing off characters, even main characters, should never be off the table. Even characters who really can’t be killed — characters with Plot Armor, like (usually) your main character. Even if you will never actually kill the character off, you should pretend you might.

Sleep Well. I’ll Most Likely Kill You in the Morning

The thing about Plot Armor is it’s boring. Certainly, if you’ve written an engaging character, people won’t want them to die — but it’s important that the possibility exist. If your readers get the sense that a character can’t possibly die, it gets a little boring.

The secret is to lie to yourself. Forget that your main character can’t die. Act like it’s a legitimate plot bomb you can throw in there.

And, hey, maybe it is! Maybe your main character isn’t really your main character. Maybe they can die. There are no rules, after all.

But even if you really can’t kill a character, pretending that you can will trick you into putting them into dangerous situations that will require some delicate plotting to get them out of. If you go into every scene thinking that anyone can die, you’ll craft a much better story than if you go in thinking you have no choice but to plot around the fact that the main character can never, you know, not be the main character.

The deeper into this writing career you get, my friends, the more you realize everything can be solved by lying to yourself just a little bit more.