Writing

I am certainly no genius. <glances at notes, which read PAUSE FOR ARGUMENT>. No one’s going to argue the point? I see.

So: Not a genius, it’s agreed. But I do have a particular set of skills when it comes to words and stories, and having complete about a thousand novels give or take (with maybe a dozen of those salable) I can claim to know at least a thing or two about the craft. Maybe not the right things, but … things.

One thing I know is that there are many, many ways to write a novel, including the often-overlooked super secret way: To not write a novel at all.

Every Story Tells a Story Don’t It

A novel is just a series of scenes, after all. I tend to be a bit linear in my writing in the sense that I start at the beginning and work my way to the end, and even if the scenes in-between those two poles jump around in time or are otherwise complex in structure. But there’s no reason you have to adhere to any sort of linear process.

My recent Avery Cates fiction, for example, are novels that are written as a series of novellas. This isn’t revolutionary or unprecedented, of course, but it’s a technique that I hit on for two reasons: One, I wanted an experiment to challenge myself, and this was a new way of working; and two, it allows me to work on a novel as my schedule and energy allows without delaying the satisfaction of finishing. Part of the joy of creation, after all, is putting THE END on the page and showing it to the world. By breaking my novel into parts, I get the best of both worlds.

It also makes writing more manageable. Instead of trying to create 100,000 words that all fit together, I can concentrate on writing 20,000 words and making those work. This takes away some of the complexity, allowing me to focus in on specific aspects of the larger story. It’s freeing.

Of course, you don’t have to break your next novel into novella-sized chunks. There are myriad ways of breaking a novel into more manageable chunks — down to the scene level, writing different scenes as they catch your interest instead of in strict chronological order. Just the act of cutting your story up into chunks can help clarify any issues you might be having.

Of course, I’ve also had a few recent novels collapse into chaos, leaving me just a short story to salvage from the debris, which is a bonus of this technique, since even failed novels produce standalone bits and pieces you can pull out.

The other advantage, of course, is that if I die suddenly the chances that I’ve finished one more story is pretty good. As is the chance that my hard drive is filled with photos of my cats and terrible poetry. Please come to my house, steal my hard drive, and burn it if I die. Thank you.

A question you often see on writing forums and the like involves just how many characters you’re legally and morally allowed to have in a story. I responded to this weird obsession with an acceptable number of characters a few years ago with an article in Writer’s Digest concerned with the fact that very often a manuscript that isn’t working is suffering from too many characters. And while this is absolutely sometimes the problem and I stand by that article, writing isn’t a science, friend. It’s a big mess of superstition, imagination, and magic.

As a result, despite the fact that having too many characters is sometimes the problem, inventing new characters is sometimes the perfect solution to myriad story problems.

Make Room! Make Room!

Too many characters is a problem for Future You, with their completed novel and their insufferable smugness because they completed a novel. Worrying about having too many characters before you’ve actually completed your novel is like worrying whether you’re planning to use too many nails when building a house—you have to wait until the house is finished to make a judgment call.

Because a new character can solve problems. Granted, this is also what leads people into trouble, because every time they have a problem they invent a new character to solve it, and before you know it you’re a 70-year old fantasy writer trying to resolve the arcs of like 15,000 characters in two novels. But there’s a reason pro writers get into character trouble in the first place: Characters solve problems.

So in the Draft Zero stage, why not create characters with abandon? Characters can fill plot holes, provide exposition, and do plenty of other work for your story. And you can always eliminate them later, either by wholesale deletion, or by combining one or more characters doing work into one. Of course, you could also solve plot problems by giving an existing character a new role, but this leads to a parallel problem—over-busy characters. Which solution works best for your story is entirely up to you.

The point is, just as there’s no definitive rule about having too many characters, there’s isn’t a rule on minimum numbers of characters, either. Create them, delete them, combine them and split them at will. You can always go back and make some corrective adjustments later in the writing process.

I also like to create throwaway characters based on people I know IRL and then kill them off in creative ways when the IRL people annoy me. I’m not saying that’s a healthy approach, but it sure is fun.

We’ve all heard the old saw about how good writers borrow and great writers steal, and it’s definitely important stuff to think about—great new books are absolutely built using the bleached bones of great old books. That means reading other books, especially outside your usual preferred genres and time periods, is essential.

That doesn’t mean stealing is easy. Obviously, if you’re not careful you’ll blow the alchemical process of transforming the cool stuff you mine out of someone else’s story into your own brilliance, and wind up with a copy instead of something unique.

In his review of Stephen King’s The Outsider, Victor Lavalle talks about one of the first things he ever wrote as a kid, a story unabashedly ripped from King’s Night Shift. He later admits to near-relief when the story is thrown away, because he knows it couldn’t possibly be any good, being far too slavishly tied to its source. It’s easy to simply copy someone else’s style or ideas. It’s much harder to transform them.

The secret is the same as everything else: Practice.

I Keep Telling Y’all to Write More Stories

This is where short stories and flash fiction are your friends. When I’m reading a book and really enjoying it, I have a tendency to naturally rip off the tone, style, and literary devices used in it. Because I write a short story every month (sometimes more than one), I can easily channel this tendency towards theft into a standalone story that lets me play around with these things without ‘infecting’ a longer manuscript. Otherwise these new idea might suddenly appear in, say, chapter 23 of a novel-in-progress, then suddenly vanish again. By working them into a story, I can have fun and start the process of making them my own without any sort of commitment.

If the experiment goes well, I can always write more stories. I can keep playing with these tools until I am actually ready to introduce them into a longer work. And by the time I choose to do so, I’ve gotten comfortable with them. They’re just part of my toolbox.

So, think about what you’re reading right now. Think about what you can steal from it. Then sit down and write something short using this new tool, whatever it is, and have fun with it. It will undoubtedly make your writing stronger.

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.