I make a lot of my living as a freelance writer, which means people pay me to write all kinds of things. Some are fun and creative, some are … not. Some make me question my sanity, but as long as the check clears, I tend to get over it with the help of a nice dram of something brown and liquory.
I have one job that has pretty strict word counts, and involves taking a lot of material and research and boiling it down to that word count. Invariably, this means that my first draft of every piece is approximately five billion words over, and I have to start cutting.
And as a writer, you learn a lot about the mechanics of writing from cutting. You also learn how terrible you are at first drafts.
Everything is Terrible
I am old and wizened enough to remember when Twitter had a 140-character limit, and every tweet was an exercise in sculpting language. Trying to communicate nuance with 140 characters was tough, but as a result of that hellscape I now find 280 characters flabby. It’s too much space.
Cutting, of course, is a skill. You don’t have to read the infinite ‘restored’ version of The Stand to know that writing without limits has its downside. And that’s why my freelance gig with the hard word counts is actually good for me. Taking 1,200 flabby words and cutting them into a diamond-sharp 600 word gem isn’t always easy, but it usually requires that I consider every sentence–every word. I have to justify every word, every phrase, and think about whether I can say the same thing in fewer words.
Usually, fewer words is more powerful writing.
As an experiment, I’m thinking of trying to write a novel with a preset word count. Something borderline, like 55,000 words. A big, epic story whose first draft is going to be 150,000 words, and then try to go through every line and cut out more than half of the words, just to see if what’s left is a razor-sharp story or a skinny mess.
Because I’m starting to think the main test of a writer is cutting the words down to the bone, and then cutting some more, and somehow still ending up with exactly what you wanted.
For example, this post was originally 6,700 words long, including a lengthy middle section in which I confessed to my crimes. You’re welcome.
I’m old enough to be amazed at the fact that I can just re-watch a TV show or movie whenever I want; when I was a kid this was impossible, and I still forget about this casual superpower sometimes. It’s a great opportunity to learn something from successful media; after watching it once (or twice) for the entertainment, you can go back watch it again for the structure, the writing tricks, and the fundamentals.
Recently I started re-watching Community, the sitcom that ran on NBC and Yahoo! for six seasons. Originally developed by Dan Harmon, who ran the show for season 1-3 and 5-6, I remember watching it pretty enthusiastically on its original run (it might actually be the last broadcast network show I ever voluntarily watched, actually). It was funny, it pushed some boundaries and did unexpected things.
Watching it again, it made me think about how we write about characters, and in particular a common trick used when story has a large group of linked characters: Isolation.
No Complications
In real life when you meet people, they come with all kinds of existing connections. Friends, family, and romantic partners that pre-date your own association. Sometimes, though, these connections are obscured because of the circumstances surrounding your meeting. For example, when I met people in my dorm in freshman year of college, most of those pre-existing connections had been left behind, albeit temporarily. For a while it was possible to pretend these people were yours, that the only relationship that existed was the one between you and them.
Of course, it’s not true. For a while it might seem like you’re all living in an intimacy bubble, but eventually other relationships push in. But then exclusive feeling is pretty heady stuff. You get to imagine you know these people better than anyone else in the world.
And that’s a powerful trick to pull when writing about characters, and pretty common in TV writing. Consider Community, a show about a disparate group of people at a low-value community college who form a study group. The characters are a mix of adults re-calibrating their lives and younger folks who couldn’t hack a traditional 4-yera college for one reason or another, and during the run of the show there are vanishingly few relationships outside the group. When one member of the group has a problem, they turn to another member. All major milestones, holidays, and other major events are attended and facilitated by the group.
This is seductive because it’s easy. In real life, when you enjoy someone’s company you have to schedule around the rest of their life, and maintaining intimacy takes a lot of work. I a SitCom world, it just … happens. Once you know someone long enough, they’re your closest friend and every single thing that happens involves you, effortlessly. The kind of intimacy and embedding in someone’s life that normally takes years, if not a lifetime, just sort of happens effortlessly. That’s one of the appeals of these fictional relationships.
So, when you’re putting your own characters together, think about that. Delete any ‘pre-existing’ relationships that have nothing to do with your story, and imagine that these people form a freshman-year bubble. It heightens all the stakes and emphasizes the bonds between them in an unrealistic but effective way.
On the one hand, it purports to be a long read on how journalism is being killed by the gig economy. But I’m not the only one who saw instead someone complaining that they can’t make more than $20K a year writing book reviews and rambling essays like this (which he got paid $1K for, which is about 50 cents a word, which ain’t bad for something requiring zero research).
Here’s the thing: If you want to make a living as a writer, you should get comfy with the idea that sometimes you’re gonna have to write stuff you’d rather not write.
Sex Toys and One Direction
When my day job and I, er, got a divorce, and I convinced The Duchess that I could make money doing freelance writing (a feat I may never equal in terms of sheer improbability), I had no idea how to proceed. Being the author of some admired SFF books and a slew of short stories didn’t mean I had a phone full of editor contacts I could tap for lucrative assignments.
Like a lot of folks, I imagined I knew what freelance writing was: I’d send out some emails suggesting topics to a few editors, someone would buy one and offer me some immense amount of money, and then I’d write this long article. I’d do this a few times a year and be comfortable.
I’m sure some writers manage to do that, but … not me. I didn’t even know where to start, so I found content mills, where you can get some very terrible writing work without trying too hard. I had bills to pay, and a wife to impress. I didn’t have two years to figure it out, I needed an income immediately if not sooner. So I took anything I could get. I wrote blog posts for a penny a word. When I made it to two pennies a word, I was depressed as hell but kept going. I wrote catalog copy for sex toys. I ghostwrote a blog about One Direction.
I didn’t want to write any of this, and I certainly didn’t want to write it for two fucking cents a word. But I did, because it was work. And I slowly found my way to better jobs. I worked steadily and got more clients and better-paying clients until I was finally able to quit the really awful jobs and establish myself, and it was all a messy mix of luck and doing the work. I wrote stuff I didn’t want to, because it was my job, not some genteel dream I could indulge.
Even today, when I make quite a lot more than two cents a word, I still write a lot of stuff I’d rather not. Because it’s a job.
Of course, some writers do better. Some cold-pitch like wizards and land in glossy magazines their first try. Some people are better than me. Some are better at networking, or luckier, or more privileged. I accept that; I’m not the smartest man in the room and just because I toiled in the lower hells of freelance writing for a few years doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way. But I do know this: No matter how successful you are as a writer, the fundamentals still apply: Do the work.
Literature at all levels changes so gradually it’s hard sometimes to even see it happening. Like a glacier moving an inch a year, everything seems static and ordinary until you suddenly look up and realize you’re miles away form where you started.
Like eleventy billion other people, I watched “The Battle of Winterfell” episode of Game of Thrones last week, squinting into the pixelated darkness, and really enjoyed it. I’ll go on record as liking the plot twist involving Arya, and not minding at all the sometimes sketchy tactics the living used against the dead, allowing that fighting an army of zombies that’s endlessly replenished from your own casualties and is directed by an ancient being killable only by an extremely rare substance has its challenges.
What struck me more than the technical lighting issues and the surprise way the supernatural villain of the story was dispatched in an 80-minute battle was the way people were disappointed by the lack of main character deaths.
Are You Not Entertained?
If you’re not familiar with the term Plot Armor here’s the thumbnail: It’s when a character is so important to the story their death is impossible, with a resultant loss of drama and tension. You can put Harry Potter in all sorts of sticky situations, after all, but we know he ain’t dyin’ before the final confrontation, and probably not then. Plot Armor has been an unavoidable fact of most fiction for a long time.
But there was a bit of a sea change a few decades ago, as writers working in multiple genres sought ways to upend convention and escape hoary old tropes. George R.R. Martin was one of those writers, and since A Song of Ice and Fire is essentially one extended deconstruction of epic fantasy tropes established in Tolkien’s time and slavishly followed since, one of the things he sought to undermine was Plot Armor. Hence, Ned Stark losing his head just as he should have been gathering his energy to be the protagonist.
This was more shocking back in the 1990s when the series first published, of course; many have followed in Martin’s footsteps, and Plot Armor has decayed, leading us to a point where we’re all surprised and disappointed when major characters in an epic fantasy story survive. The whole trope has been turned on its head. Death isn’t shocking. Survival is.
The ultimate lesson here is this: Know your genre. Know the tropes you’re working with. And think about whether there are any you can play with successfully–but also know which ones work for your story. You don’t have to deconstruct, subvert, or complicate every single convention in your chosen niche, but it can be a glorious success when you hit on a rule you can break to great effect.
Now, if all of these characters survive the entire series, then we riot.
I read a lot, which shouldn’t be a surprise, since I’m not
only a writer, I’m a writer who writes an awful lot about books and
literature in general. My reading list isn’t all that erudite; in
fact, I’ve always been a sucker for a good mystery, especially the
old classics—Christie, Sayers, etc. In fact, I’d argue that
there’s a lot you can learn about writing in general from mystery
novels. You can learn how to sketch a character quickly, how to
manage the Law of Conservation of Details when describing things—and
how to plot.
Working Backwards
A lot of newbie writers ask the gormless question “How do I
plot?” Usually they start off by saying they’ve done all the fun
stuff—they’ve imagined a great character, daydreamed a universe,
and done whatever else catches their interest; some writers will
spend time on the tax laws of their fantasy universe, others will
write a 30,000 word backstory about the rise of the robots. What
neither does is the hard work of actually working out what happens
in your book.
Well, look to mysteries. When you
finish a mystery—even a very good mystery, maybe
especially a good
mystery, you know what the secret is, right? You know who did it and
how. And usually, almost always, once you know how the crime was
committed, it’s not so mysterious any more, is it? In fact, it can
seem kind of dumb. What was a tantalizing mystery at first becomes
just a bunch of stuff you didn’t know before.
Embrace that. Because Plot is
just a bunch of stuff you didn’t know before.
Start with the end and work
backwards. Sure, you still have to think of the end, but this is
usually easier, big-picture stuff. Like, the protagonist is the most
powerful wizard in the realm and has saved the world. Or, the alien
invasion was stopped because the hero figured out how to kill them.
Then work backwards.
It’s going to seem dumb.
Obvious. Of course
this has to happen, or of course this
has to happen—but the thing is, it’s only obvious and dumb to you
because you already know what
happens after each step. Once you figure out what happens before, the
after part will seemed obvious.
This
doesn’t remove all the effort, of course, and can still go wrong.
But when you can’t see Step 1 but you can see Step 100, working
backwards is a great way to figure out what, exactly, happens
in your story.
I have a lot of practice in this,
of course, because of all the times I wake up in strange places
wearing someone else’s clothes.
Friend, are you in the doldrums? Has your idea factory shut down?
Have you been working on the same scene in your WIP for six months
with the end result being 500 fewer
words than when you began?
We’ve all been there. Even me,
despite being more or less a genius and one of those prolific
assholes who routinely writes 3 books a year just to be smug about
it. Although, it hasn’t
happened to me recently;
the last time I had what could be described as a Doldrums Moment was
about two decades ago, a protracted period of emptiness where I
couldn’t even get a short story going. It was one of the most
frustrating and terrifying moments of my life.
Because, as I’m sure you all know, there’s the fear that whatever weird chemical imbalance in my brain or specific experiential weirdness that unlocked this creativity might go away. The mysterious spark that makes me able to tell stories and invent people and build worlds isn’t under my control, after all. I was born with it or it was baked into me by forces I was most certainly not directing at the time. As a result, it might disappear at any moment. We’ve all read a new book by an old favorite author and thought, well, that was disappointing and then watched in horror as every new work by that author also disappoints and you realize they’ve lost it, whatever ‘it’ gets defined as.
That could be me, and it could be
you, and so the Doldrums terrify us. If we’re not working on
something that feels good and strong, the possibility that we wrote
our last good piece yesterday starts to loom.
I got out of my doldrums twenty
years ago and have prevented them ever since with the application of
two things. One is constant work—writing a story every month,
always having a file open somewhere. That keeps things percolating.
The other crucial step is shaking things up.
Crisis and Opportunity
Shaking things up can mean
different things to different writers, but fundamentally it calls for
forcing yourself to work and think differently, either temporarily or
as part of a fundamental shift. When I feel a little stale, I try any
or all of the following strategies:
New implements—write a
novel in longhand? Why not. Write a short story by dictating into my
phone? Might work! The point is, force your brain to forge new
connections by working with novel mechanics.
New genre. If you’ve
been writing nothing but noir detective stories for 20 years, the
effort involved in writing a comedic fantasy might be just what you
need to shock your creative battery into new life.
New experiments. I
personally get very fixated on finishing things—which I regard as,
overall, a superpower for any writer, as you can’t sell/publish
what you don’t finish. But,
sometimes getting away from that and just writing scenes or dialogs
or fun little bits is a tonic.
New projects. If the
fiction writing starts to feel like heavy lifting, I’ll start a
new creative project, which doesn’t have to be writing. I compose
and record songs for my own amusement. I started a podcast this
year. Sometimes I create book covers just for fun, or cut trailers
for my stories using free stock video. Rechanneling your creativity
away from writing lets your brain do some subconscious work in the
background.
Change in schedule.
Grinding can get work done, but following the same routine day in
and day out can make writing feel like a chore. Take a day off, then
pick a new time to write, see how it goes. You can always go back,
but the disruption might be revelatory.
None of these are guaranteed to
work, but so far they usually do. And you can
always go back to your original schedule or process
once you’ve gotten past your doldrums.
Did I forget to mention alcohol?
Because yes, sometimes the best way to shake it up is to drink a
bottle of bourbon and wake up in a dumpster wearing a funeral suit.
It happens to the best of us: You’re writing, making progress in a story, and suddenly you realize that you’re missing a piece of real-world information. Like, say, you’re writing a story about an aspiring singer, and you’ve got an idea for a scene where they practice a song in the privacy of their room, and you realize you don’t really know what kind of song they would choose to practice. Or you’re writing a spy thriller and your character needs to buy a gun, and you realize you have no idea what kind of gun they would choose or even what the considerations are.
Hey, it happens. We can’t know everything. No matter how widely you read, travel, and interrogate alarmed strangers on public transportation, no writer can know every single thing that might seem like it belongs in your story. And a really bad habit a lot of young writers is to stop what they’re doing in order to ask for suggestions on what detail to include.
Dear Hive Mind
On the one hand, this is just research, right? It’s something a huge number of writers do in order to get the real-feel aspect of their writing on point. And that’s true, and there’s nothing wrong with doing a bit of research to get your facts straight. And with the Internet it’s soooo easy to stop writing and just ask a million strangers what they think.
What I advise against, however, is stopping cold to poll the room or the Internet for a suggestion. All this accomplishes is ruining your flow and rhythm, taking you out of your story and holding you up while you debate what’s probably an unimportant detail in your story. Because if it’s important, then you probably would have encountered while conceptualizing your idea. If you’re knee-deep in the narrative before you realize you’re lacking, like, crucial information, you’re doing it wrong.
Another reason to avoid this is that it can easily become an excuse to give up, or at least take an extended break. The Internet is enough of a distraction. Don’t go down a rabbit hole about what kind of shoes your main character would wear to a cocktail party unless those shoes are the murder weapon or something.
And if it’s not crucial, it’s not worth stopping for. Put in a placeholder and fix it in revision.
Pausing to have a drink and stare heroically off into the distance, pondering your work-in-progress? That’s fine. And kind of sexy.
Through my literary agency, I was invited to offer a few remarks at a high school induction ceremony for the National English Honor Society. Of course I agreed, because I love any opportunity to put on an adult suit of clothes and pantomime competence. And also any opportunity to make a speech, because listening to myself talk is hella fun.
Here I am speechifying; tell me it’s not hot:
Pants? I’ll never tell.
It’s interesting to note how the high school experience, at least in this narrow way, is exactly as I remember it. Aside from the security on the entrance, things don’t seem to have changed much since my day, despite the constant sense you get as a middle-aged person that the Youth have strayed onto darker paths than you could have imagined at their age, and are evolving into strange creatures you can’t possibly understand. The kids sitting, bored to tears, during this induction ceremony were exactly like me and my friends when we were that age. It was … oddly comforting.
It always amazes me that I’m asked to make remarks and then no one wants to vet those remarks before I make them, especially when I’m known for talking about drunkenness and pantslessness and those remarks will be directed at children. And yet this is what happened. For my speech, I decided to put a button on the whole competency issue by talking about my own lack of it, but the ultimate point I tried to make was that English and language skills are fundamental to just about every industry. You hear a lot about how to make a living and career choices, but what’s often lost is that being able to read and write with skill and efficiency is absolutely a superpower no matter what industry you wind up in. Anyone who’s had to parse the gibberish emails of colleagues will know what I mean.
Anyways, here’s the speech I made:
First of all I’d like to congratulate all of you for this achievement—you should be proud of yourselves and very smug about this. And I’m kind of an expert in being smug, something my wife will confirm for you if you want, so I know when it’s a good time for smugness, and this is one of them.
And I know that it must really mean something to you, hearing it from me, person you’ve never heard of before. But I know what I’m talking about here, because I’m one of you. I’m one of those people who started reading big adult books when they were kids, one of those people who started writing stories when they were nine years old. I even sold a novel when I was sixteen, though it never published due to an incompetence singularity so powerful it destroyed several careers.
But words and writing had been so good to me in my childhood, so when the time to go to college, I naturally chose to earn a degree in English, mainly because I’d already read all the books. I started to understand how powerful it is to have this sort of grasp and control over words when my a professor in a 200-level class accused me of plagiarism because I was too good at mimicking the style and tone of the reference books I was using. I offered to show him other examples of my writing to prove it was my work, and when he saw the stack of manuscripts I brought in he instantly gave in and changed my grade. The kicker? The writing that seemed too good to be mine got a B. But I knew then that being able to write was an advantage over most other people.
After graduation, unfortunately, my parents informed me very sadly that seeing as I was legally an adult with a college degree, they could no longer pay my bills, and so I had to get a job. Which is when I discovered that I am a man afflicted by what scientists call No Marketable Skills Syndrome. Which is something else my wife can confirm for you, if my performance up here isn’t confirmation enough.
I’m not athletically gifted, which I know surprises you based on my appearance here. But the fact is, when I played Little League as a kid I pioneered the little-known position of Left Out, and the kid playing Center Field used to routinely practice racing over to shag any fly balls hit towards me.
I’m not musically gifted; I’ve been playing guitar for ten years and still can’t do a proper barre chord.
I’m not good with numbers, I can’t program, and I have the hand-eye coordination of a rock, so there was no professional Fortnite playing in my future—especially since I don’t play any video games that don’t have a God Mode. I’ve got really poor attention to detail; I was once fired from a job in a convenience store because I could never stock the sodas correctly in the cooler, and believe me when I say that stocking the sodas in the cooler was not difficult. I’ve also got a strong tendency to space out and daydream during lectures, meetings, and disciplinary hearings called to address my tendency to space out and daydream. As my sainted wife will tell you, I’m virtually unemployable.
And yet, here I am, making this speech, which obviously means I am successful and important, because unsuccessful and unimportant people do not, as a rule, get to make speeches. The reason I’m up here making a successful and important speech despite having no marketable skills or, apparently, fashion sense, is simple: Like you, I pursued English, and the skills that mastery over language have given me have enabled me to publish ten books and dozens of short stories, to sell film and TV options on several of those books and stories, and to make my living as a writer for websites like Barnes and Noble’s book blog, for magazines like Writer’s Digest, and for corporate clients writing terrible things I am largely ashamed of.
Because, here’s the thing: English, the stuff you’ve learned here in school and that you’ll hopefully continue to learn, is a superpower. No kidding. You’ll have to take my word this despite the fact that I just used the phrase ?the stuff’ instead of some creative and well-crafted metaphor.
Here’s a few things that will happen because of what you’ve learned here in school and will continue to learn going forward:
1. People will assume you are smart, whether you are actually smart or not. Again, I know this from personal experience as a not-very smart person who has been given the nickname Shakespeare more times than he can count. Also the nickname Einstein. It’s always Shakespeare or Einstein. I’m not sure why Einstein; I guess he’s the only other really smart person people can think of off the top of their heasds. People see you reading a book or writing in a notepad, and they just assume you’re brilliant. It’s really useful.
2. You’ll be able to see through people and know what they’re really thinking. This is because most people don’t have the skills you’re getting through studying English—deep reading comprehension and the ability to write effectively and efficiently. Whether it’s emails, texts, or angry, anonymous notes left on your windshield, no one’s gonna be able to get anything past you in this life. At the same time, you’ll be able to fool everyone because of your language skills. Think about that for a moment: If you happen to be a sociopath—and science tells us that there’s a very good chance at least some of you are—that means you’re practically Lex Luther already.
3. People will pay you to write things and read things for them, because they can’t. Or don’t want to. You won’t want to believe this, because for folks like us who have this mastery over language reading and writing seems easy, so the idea that someone will pay you, for example, tens of thousands of dollars for the right to publish a book you wrote in your spare time in-between a heavy schedule of playing video games and napping will strike you as a ridiculous fantasy.
But the thing is, these things are extremely difficult for a great many people, and so it does, in fact, happen. Even to people who have No Marketable Skills. Because writing is fundamental to everything. Everything begins with words. Every movie, TV show, and video game begins with a stack of memos and outlines and instructions. Every product begins with research papers and more memos and emails and reports. Music—even music without lyrics—requires language to be arranged and performed and composed. Every business and academic endeavor is fueled by words, and the people who can write those words and the people who can easily digest and comprehend them are absolutely necessary to their success. With the skills you’ve acquired and will acquire, there isn’t an industry in the world that doesn’t need you—possibly in a hidden, non-glamorous sort of way that will be forever disappointing, but still.
Of course, I am duty-bound to also inform you of the downsides to this life, which mainly boils down to the social shunning you’ll experience because you won’t be able to ignore bad writing. You’ll become that person who complains about plot holes, idiot dialog, and undercooked themes in movies and TV shows. People will stop inviting you to things because you can’t stop talking about how the ending of Us makes no sense—just incomprehensible nonsense that gets increasingly incomprehensible the more Jordan Peele makes attempts in interviews to explain it. Trust me—these sorts of observations do not make you very popular.
Look; its lonely being the smartest person in the room, but thanks to what you’ve achieved here, that’s gonna be your cross to bear. Once again: congratulations!
About ten years ago, I started playing guitar. I’d always wanted
to learn, beginning back in high school when it was still the
ultimate in cool. But I am a very lazy person, and the costs in terms
of time and money turned into one of those things that I never got
around to. And even when I came into possession of a cheap,
hand-me-down acoustic guitar I didn’t do anything serious with it,
because the idea of actually engaging a tutor to learn seemed like an
impossible social leap, and the Internet did not quite exist back
then so there wasn’t a guitar channel on Youtube to do some
self-learning.
After hearing me whine about this, The Duchess finally bought me some lessons and forced me to go, and it was awesome. I actually learned to play! And then, because of who I am, I decided I wanted to start composing and writing songs. I downloaded some software and bought some equipment, and set up my own little desktop studio, complete with drum apps and midi keyboards, and I began making music.
Terrible, horrible music.
Beginner’s Crap
Look, any time you start a new activity or discipline, you’re
bound to suck. No one just picks up a guitar and understands
instinctively how to shred. It’s the same with writing, really—your
early efforts are going to suck
with a capital ‘S.’
But when I recorded my first
recognizable song, I wasn’t depressed because it sucked. I wasn’t
aware that it sucked,
at least not on one level. On another, very sober level, sure, I knew
it was awful. But there was a part of me that was just so jazzed that
I’d done it, that
I’d created a song, a composition, all on my own, that I was super
excited about it.
It’s the same with writing.
That first story maybe sucked, but I
wrote it anyway, and I was so excited to have finished a story I
didn’t dwell on whether it was any
good or not. I kind just assumed it was good and moved on to the next
story.
That last bit is the key—the
insane overconfidence that makes you think that the thing you just
wrote is actually awesome, even if it is objectively not.
Years later, you might come across that story and realize with
dawning horror that it is, in
fact, terrible. But that’s something for Future You to deal with.
In the present, the key to creating is to just assume what you’re
doing is great and worry about making that conform to reality later.
Everyone’s
first attempts suck. It’s okay. And yes, sometimes your later
attempts suck, too.
Writing a story is all about
balance. You have to provide the reader with character backstories,
world-building, a plot, and a clear protagonist who has a clear goal
that is obstructed by a clear antagonist. Okay, maybe it doesn’t
have to that
clear—some writers make a beautiful meal out of subtlety and
uncertainty—but in general you have to give your reader something
to hang onto, a relatively clear path to follow.
For a lot of writers, they take
that to mean they have to establish the protagonist/antagonist
dynamic very early on and then structure the plot immediately around
that conflict. Like, if your hero is introduced in Chapter 1, your
villain has to show up in Chapter 2 and there has to be a clear
conflict between them right away.
This isn’t true, though. In
fact, it’s perfectly okay to obfuscate your central conflict, and
it’s perfectly okay to take your time defining the
protagonist/antagonist relationship—or to even change it in the
middle.
The Hate You Give
There isn’t any rule that says
you have to set up your central conflict right away. I’ve started
re-watching Deadwood
in anticipation of the film they’re finally releasing, offering
fans some much-desired closure after all these years. And what’s
interesting is that exactly none
of the central conflicts that will come to define the series are set
up in the first episode in any but the smallest of ways. There are
lower-case ?c’ conflicts there, but none of the main-event
conflicts, and you’d be hard pressed to put your thumb on who,
exactly, the antagonist or protagonist is going to be.
There’s a lesson there. Letting
your characters and setting breathe a bit, trusting
your readers to find interesting what you find interesting about your
universe—these are good instincts. Rushing into declaring a thumb
war between two characters just because you feel under pressure to
get your conflict set up is bad writing, or at least it often is. Can
you make the argument that many novels are successful because
they don’t waste time setting up the conflict and the protagonist
and antagonist? Sure! Of course. As I’ve often said, there are no
rules. All that matters is that you can pull off what you seek to
achieve.
The
point is, don’t put artificial pressure on yourself to gin up a
conflict. It’s okay to take your time, and it’s okay to bury that
lede a little—just have a plan. Having a plan is pretty much the
answer to every writing problem out there, just like two fingers of
whiskey is the answer to just about every personal problem I’ve
ever had.
