Writing

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.

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.

It’s an absolute truth that first drafts in general suck, whether we’re talking about the first draft of a single line or the first draft of an entire novel. First stabs are rarely polished and sensible, and are frequently so awful as to be the basis of scientific proof that you cannot and should not write.

The Electric Church was my second published novel, and both my third and 17^th completed novel (the first draft was my third novel, but the version eventually published 14 years later had a lot of water under the bridge and so was really a wholly separate novel). And believe me, all that work was necessary—and I’m saying that as a guy who generally likes his first drafts. The fact is, first attempts are often terrible, because you’re feeling your way through the darkness—you don’t yet know what’s going to work. There’s a lot of daylight between theory and practice—in your head, some literary technique or trick might work, but when you try to put it to paper it all falls apart.

This can be a low point for a writer. You have a great idea, you start to work on it, and then you realize it’s not working. It might, in fact, be terrible. The real trick here is to be okay with that. The trick is to embrace the suck.

The Only Way Out is Forward

The hardest thing to do is realize that your work isn’t great but keep going. Embracing the suck isn’t just about understanding that early efforts are often ragged and imperfect. The real secret is to resist the urge to toss everything you’ve done and start over, because that’s the recipe for never finishing a project. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to toss everything into a garbage can and set it on fire when you realize your work sucks, but the legit secret to making progress is to resist that urge.

The trick is, revise, don’t restart. If you’re someone who gets frustrated the moment your prose isn’t 100% pure gold, if you get stuck re-writing the first sentence a thousand times, if you abandon projects at the halfway point because they’re not what you imagined initially you’re going to struggle to finish anything, because the way you get that prose as close to perfect as possible is to finish a draft, then go back to the beginning and polish. And then repeat.

Full disclosure: As noted above, I’m not much of a reviser. I tend to like my drafts—but I do revise. My revision efforts tend to be pretty focused; while I like 75% of my draft, the 25% I don’t love is usually threaded throughout the whole thing, and I address it. If I have a section in the middle of a chapter that is obviously not working, I don’t just toss the whole chapter or novel out—I struggle through it and leave it behind. Then I go back and work on it.

Of course, some writers do restart every time they drift from the mark, and they also produce plenty of publishable material. That last part is the key—are you finishing stuff? Do you have polished, publication-ready material at the end of the day? If yes, you can ignore this. You do you. If no—ask yourself if you need to lower the bar for a first pass.

I apply this to liquor as well, of course. Sometimes you order a dank beer that is absolutely awful, and some people give up and order something else. I push through. In other words, I am the hero in this situation.

So, I watched season one of The Umbrella Academy. I’d never read the comics, and so went in pretty cold, aside from knowing that the lead singer of My Chemical Romance wrote the original comic stories. And it’s a pretty fun series if you’re into superhero stories!

It’s also a great place to discuss a specific writing challenge that comes with superheroes, which goes like this: Just as we’re all dying from the moment we’re born, every super-powered character has to be neutered at some point the moment you create them.

With Great Power Comes an Equal and Opposite Power

The problem is obvious, right? When you have a character who has an incredible power, they can slice through plot problems. In The Umbrella Academy, the kids all have powers, but one character is a cut above: Allison, who can make people do anything she wants by saying I heard a rumor. That’s a pretty potent power; after all, she can stop the villain at any time simply by whispering in their ear.

And so, the moment she’s created, she has to be smothered, or else nothing makes sense. When you create a hyper-powerful character you have two basic choices: One, you can neuter them somehow. Two, you can create a villain that is equally powerful. That’s it, and they both have problems.

In The Umbrella Academy, they chose option one. SPOILERS: They were clever about it in the bulk of the series; Allison is guilty about using her power throughout her life to get what she wants, and super guilty because she used it on her own daughter to get her to go to sleep. That’s a believable motivation for not using your godlike powers every five minutes. Later, when the true adversary is revealed and Allison must as a character start unleashing her power, however, they have to stop it or the story ends with one episode to go as Allison just says I heard a rumor you’re gonna take a five-year nap and that’s it. So they injure her vocal chords, essentially rendering her immaterial to the story, which kind of sucks.

Option two is also kind of boring, because when your villain has the same abilities and powers it turns into a slugfest. A boring trading of blows that amounts to two drunk guys having a fist fight in the parking lot of a 7-11.

So what’s the solution? Frankly, the solution is to not play the game. Don’t create a character whose powers are so incredible they can solve any plot problem you throw at them. Give their power a flaw, or a limitation, or a steep price to be paid. This way you can avoid having a mind-controller character who literally controls zero minds during the big final battle in your story.

Like a lot of folks, I’m a broadly creative kind of person—I just like making shit up, in a wide variety of media. The fun of making stuff doesn’t necessarily require talent; I make videos and music and sad, misshapen things around the house using editing, composition, and carpentry skills that run the gamut from mediocre to nonexistent, but I don’t worry about the end result much. I just enjoy making stuff.

So, one reason I’m a writer instead of a musician or a furniture-maker is the fact that I’m good at writing, whereas I am … not good at those other things. I might enjoy making music, but I’m not good at it, and that’s okay.

But you know what, there’s another reason I write instead of some other creative expression: The lack of collaboration.

Me Myself and I

To put it bluntly, I hate working with other people. I hate having to offer up my ideas before I’ve polished them, and I hate having to fight and push to get things the way I want them. I fully recognize that this process of having to defend your ideas is healthy, and often results in better work. When you’re forced to defend every idea, you have to up your game.

But I don’t enjoy it, so I don’t do it.

The great part about writing is, you don’t need other people. Or special equipment. Or software skills. All you need is a writing implement and some ideas. That’s awesome. Even if I had some special talent aside from writing—which, it’s worth repeating, I do not—writing would attract me because it’s so old school you can literally do it with a piece of charcoal and a rock. Nothing gets in the way—not screens, power failures, or the annoying tendency of people to have feedback and alternative takes.

Of course, the real epiphany always comes late in the essay: The fact is, the collaboration comes in the writing game, it’s just kicked down the line. Because once you convince someone to represent or buy your work, the notes come. The edit letters. The comments in the margin. The tracked changes. Whether I like it or not, selling your work usually means opening yourself up to collaboration.

But, there’s a crucial difference. When I am forced to collaborate later in the process, I’ve sold the damn thing. I have a fair amount of confidence that it’s pretty good. Which not only makes the act of having to interact with other people (shudder) much easier, it makes it much easier to push back on feedback and take a stand on the intention behind your writing choices.

Of course, my other secret weapon is my social awkwardness and charming personality, which combine to ensure that no one wants to collaborate with me twice.