Writing

Writing is 50% reading, and that reading should be broad and all-inclusive. Reading within a single genre or a narrow slice of stuff you’re naturally interested in might make you a bit of an expert in what’s selling in that genre, but it won’t make you a better writer—for that you need to challenge yourself and read stuff you don’t immediately connect with.

For example, I started reading Milkman by Anna Burns, which recently won the Booker Prize. It certainly wasn’t a book I’d naturally pick up and start reading in the bookstore, but sometimes it’s good to just read a book just because it won a prize. If you’ve heard Milkman, it might be because of it’s one gonzo literary stunt: There are no proper names in the whole book. It’s told from a first-person point-of-view without using anyone’s actual names. The first line is “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died” and that’s how the rest of the book goes—characters are referred to by relation (Ma, Third Brother-in-Law, the Real Milkman, etc) but nobody and no place receives a real name.

And, frankly, it’s exhausting.

McSomebodying

Look, I’ve tried this myself. I’ll bet a lot of writers have—the unnamed protagonist, at least, smothered in mystery and soooo psychologically ripe. It’s probably something every writer at least flirts with, that Clint Eastwood archetype of the unnamed character. Burns takes it to an extreme, and it’s an effective trick, to be honest, though I found it to have diminishing returns. At first it was interesting and intriguing, but over time it got to be a little much trying to remember how many Brothers-in-Law there were, and trying to care about characters that appeared for a few pages, were never named, and then shuffled off into literary oblivion.

But, and this is the whole point, at least Burns had a purpose here. Her choice to eschew names was purposeful, and that’s the key. When my own unnamed protagonists failed it was usually because I made that choice for no particular reason, just because it felt cool in the moment, or because I’d neglected to name the character at first and didn’t feel like fixing it. Purpose is the key—if you choose to do something kind of gonzo like an unnamed character, have a reason before you start.

On the flip side, writing a story without naming any of the characters can be a great way to measure your ability to actually craft characters; if you don’t name them, you’re going to have to rely entirely on your ability to make your characters deep and detailed. When there are no names to differentiate who’s doing or saying what, it quickly becomes apparent if all of your characters are essentially the same flat empty space. This can be a great exercise to force you to think harder about how you create interesting people to populate your stories.

Of course, I haven’t won any Booker Prizes, so feel free to ignore me <pours himself a drink, stares sullenly out window).

Someday writers everywhere will gather in Central Park like in the beginning of The Warriors and a cult-like leader will strut about an ersatz stage demanding to know if we can dig it, and then everyone will form up into two armies: Pantsers and Plotters. The War of Literary Identity will be epic for about twelve hours and then everyone will realize they’re actually Plantsers and a new Pax Litterara will bloom.

Even though your personal approach to plotting is, you know, personal, there remains this sense among a lot of writers that there are rules to all this stuff, and that therefore there is a right way to Pants your way through a story. One school of thought is that if you’re a Pantser that means you don’t do any sort of planning whatsoever, that every novel is like an eighth-grade jazz ensemble—everyone just sort of playing something and then miraculously in hour two of the set everything comes together for ten wild minutes and a song is achieved. In other words, there has to be a lot of wasted time as you noodle about without any plan, until inspiration combined with luck results in a plot.

In my experience, this isn’t true.

No Stairway

The way Pantsing works for me is similar to working out a guitar part for a song. I’m no musical genius, and my knowledge of music theory isn’t broad. I play for my own pleasure, and I build my little songs using a pretty simple process: I start with a chord progression that sounds kind of interesting, then I start noodling with scales over that progression until something resembling a song emerges.

That’s pretty similar to how I write a novel: I start with something foundational, either a scene or a character or a premise, and then I noodle over that until something resembling a story emerges.

The key here is just that—the key. In my musical noodlings, I’m operating within the framework of a musical key, which dictates the notes that will sound good over the chords. It’s chaos and noodling, yes, but noodling within a framework. It’s the same for writing—yes, I’m throwing words around to see what sticks, but it’s within a framework. Pantsing is not, I don’t think, just starting with a blank page and then relying on automatic writing or something to come up with a plot. Unless it is, for you, in which case, you do you.

The framework is vital, for me. It can be so broad and flexible as to be nigh invisible and infinite, but it has to be there. Otherwise you’re that eighth-grade jazz ensemble. You might get lucky, but you can’t repeat a trick you didn’t understand in the first place.

Well, it’s 2019, and we’re all still here writing. Or at least I hope we are. No matter how many things I publish, how many manuscripts I complete and feel good about, there’s always an up-and-down quality to enthusiasm. Every writer experiences dark moments when they lose confidence in what they’re doing, or feel like their careers are stalled or perhaps ended forever. It’s inevitable.

When this happens in terms of what I’m working on, it’s pretty awful; whether you’re 3,000 or 30,000 words in, that sudden sense that your WIP is boring and not worth the effort can lead to day drinking and poor Netflix choices which can then slur into a spiral of lost time that undermines everything else you’re trying to do.

When this happens to a WIP I try a little psychological trick: I imagine my reader’s reaction to what I’m working on.

The Audience is Key

I’m a huge believer in getting your work out there. The act of creation is just half of it—the other half is getting your words in front of eyeballs to be appreciated, critiqued, and hopefully enjoyed.

When I was a little kid, I shared a bedroom with my older brother. When we were small, we’d lay in bed at night and entertain each other with stories. We just made shit up, and it was a blast, and I can remember the feeling of excitement when I had a good idea for a new story at night. I anticipated my brother’s reactions, and couldn’t wait to lay my genius on him. The fact that most of my stories at the time were satires of Star Wars which thought the height of humor was renaming Luke Skywalker Luke Mudd is beside the point, dammit. I was eight.

That anticipation sometimes solves my enthusiasm deficits. I imagine someone reading the story I’m working on, and getting to that big twist or that moment where I really sharpen and define the premise, and I imagine their reaction. I imagine that excitement—we’re writers, so we’re readers. We know that excitement that wells up inside when you realize the writer is about to do something really, really cool.

I imagine that. And then I want that moment. And often that clicks me back into being excited as a writer, and I get a second wind on the WIP.

Of course, if that fails, there’s always the aforementioned day drinking, which has gotten me through just about every other crisis in my life. To paraphrase The Simpsons, Booze: Teacher, mother … secret lover.

I’ve written before about Plantsing, when you combine plotting and pantsing into a hybrid approach that uses the strengths of each style of plotting a novel. I think Plantsing actually underscores a deeper concept that often gets overlooked: There is no One Way.

There’s no One Way to do anything in writing, in fact. You can type on a keyboard or a typewriter, you can tap on a tablet or a phone, you can scratch with a pen or a pencil, you can dictate to a transcription App. You can plot, you can pants, you can plants. You can work up detailed character sketches or you can just wing their dialog and backstory. Base characters on real people or movie characters or no one at all.

In other words, sometimes this business of discussing writing and passing advice back and forth devolves into a search for the ?right’ way to do something, and there clearly isn’t such a thing. Which leads me to my next thought: Variety being the spice of life.

Try Something New

Some of my most energized, fun writing has been done after shifting gears and trying a new way of approaching my work, whether writing in a style or voice I’ve never tried before or working with new tools. It’s easy to get locked into ruts in this business, easy to just do what comes naturally. But that leads to stagnation, or simply a loss of energy. Something as simple as writing at a different time of day, or using a different implement, can recharge you and make it all seem new.

That’s what I chase, sometimes—that newness. When I was a kid, writing was this amazing thing where every day I’d read something new to steal in a book and rush to incorporate it into my stories. Every day I’d have new ideas that I’d never seen before (note, that doesn’t mean they were unique—just that I hadn’t seen them; the list of things I still haven’t seen is very, very long), and when I pulled off a successful story I was goddamn excited.

You lose that, little by little, as you polish and refine and age. My writing is much better today than it was 30 years ago, but that excitement has worn a little thin. Changing things up and chasing that spice is usually the cure.

Of course, another way to get that excitement back is to drink a fifth of Michter’s. It works, but the writing is largely incoherent.

When discussing writing as craft, something that doesn’t often come up—in part because it’s kind of a diffuse topic that’s hard to pin down—is how to get into a story. Most writers have experienced that disturbing moment when they have an idea for a story—an entire plot outline, even—and yet can’t seem to get the damn thing off the ground. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, to have a great premise, some solid characters, and other elements of a great story and not be able to tell that story. Personally, I start to feel a bit crazy; after all, the ingredients I’ve come up with are solid. I know they’re solid. I should be able to take these ideas and synthesize them into a novel. After all, that’s what I do. I’m a professional writer.

Getting into the story is a maddening challenge; it’s like hooking onto some kind of invisible wire. If you miss by even a few degrees you’ll flounder and lose your grip. If that’s happening to you, one thing to consider is whether or not you need an Outsider.

Elementary, My Dear Watson

I’ve been working on a novel idea for a while now. I have a premise I love, a cast of characters, and at least some idea where I want the story to go (I’m a Pantser, after all, so I don’t want to plot too much). But I’ve tried several times to get the story off the ground, and it keeps crashing back to earth. I finally realized the problem is that my main character is too intimately involved with the central mystery. They know everything. And so having them be the reader’s link to the story was problematic, because my protagonist either has to behave like an imbecile and somehow be unaware of things that should be obvious to them, or has to be actively lying to the reader the whole time in order to keep some plot elements secret.

Now, the latter isn’t a bad idea. The Unreliable Narrator is a tried and true tradition, and can be used very powerfully. This isn’t the right story for that, however; the protagonist shouldn’t be unreliable—there’s plenty of unreliable stuff in the story, so I need the characters to be reliable enough. So, I have slowly come to realize that what I need is a different kind of protagonist. I need an Outsider.

An Outsider is a character who knows nothing about the plot elements, the setting, or the other characters (maybe all three). They need things explained to them, which is a slick way of explaining things to the reader, and they are plausibly ignorant about many of the story’s key elements. The classic example is Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Watson isn’t stupid, but he’s usually in the dark about Holmes’ feats of mental strength, and when Holmes explains things to the good doctor he’s also explaining them to the reader.

The companions on Doctor Who are another great example, as they’re role is often to be just as confused as the viewer until The Doctor explains what in the hell the Shadow Proclamation is.

Sometimes that’s what you need as a main character, an Outsider who doesn’t know the secrets, so they can be your way into the story. You can grab onto them as they explore the ruins of your plot, and see the secrets you’ve planted here and there through fresh eyes, all while freeing yourself from having to worry about dropping hints and somehow twisting your POV character’s narration so it plays fair while never revealing that they are in fact the killer.

See? Writing looks like a lot of Day Drinking and sitting around, but it is, in fact, hard work. As a matter of fact, I’m exhausted having written this and must now go take a nap.

If you’ve ever listened to me blather on about writing, or read one of these blog posts on the subject, you know one thing: I am not a big believer in the value of word count as a metric of writing progress. It’s useful after you’ve finished a manuscript, to see what, exactly, you’ve created in marketing terms. But as a daily goal, I think it encourages busywork writing, and as an overall goal I think it encourages padding.

Your mileage may vary, of course; for some writers having a definitive word count goal for the day is the only way they can work, or it might simply be baked into their process. And that’s fine; I’m certainly not the God of How to Write Yer Stories, I’m just a gob with opinions. The main thing for me is, don’t let word count become the point.

No One Buys a Book for the Word Count

That’s the thing with daily word counts and even project word counts—achieving them can feel like progress even if your story stinks. This happens to me, too; I’m not immune to the siren call of word count stats. Often I imbue a story with a certain importance solely because I’ve reached a more or less random plateau and have decided, for no real reason, the the story is now Too Big to Fail. Sometimes this is 3,000 words, sometimes 30,000, but there’s always a point where it crosses over into TBtF territory and I begin investing a truly incredible amount of mental and emotional energy into trying to make it at least resemble a real book or short story.

But I should remind myself—as should you—that people don’t care much about word counts when they read a story. Instead of worrying over sunk costs when I have a certain number of words piled up, I should be worried about whether or not the story itself is good, and whether anyone is going to want to read it. A short story that is compelling and surprising is miles better than a doorstopper novel that is dull and lifeless.

Easier said than done, of course, which is why, in part, word counts is a more seductive metric: You can always achieve a word count goal. Artistic goals can be much more slippery, and thus more frustrating.

For my part, I’m going to start a campaign to get novel length redefined to, say, 5,000 words, for resume-padding reasons. Who’s with me?

A millennia ago, aka 2015, I had an idea for a story. It was a sordid sort of mystery story, narrated by a charming sociopath, that jumped around in time and was populated by many awful, unlikable characters. It was dark and twisty, so I was excited.

I worked on that story for a long, long time. It went through several iterations over the course of a year, never quite gelling. I finally wound up with a novella-length story that was okay, but not particularly great.

After a few weeks, I returned to it, obsessed, and began working on it again. I started writing a fresh narrative, and then I’d borrow pieces from the novella that worked well and stuffed them in. And I worked the idea up into a 65K word novel that was also okay, but not particularly great. I’d add heft, but no real zing. So I set the story aside and worked on other things.

Then I had an opportunity to submit a story to an anthology. The novel I’d just finished, dark and not particularly great, was ideal for the anthology in terms of subject and tone. There was just the small problem of the anthology’s length limit: 6,000 words.

I figured I had three options: 1) track down the editors and buy them drinks until they feel under my Svengali-like sway and simply accepted my novel as a story in their anthology, possibly publishing it as a companion volume; 2) I could write a whole new story for the anthology, which frankly just seemed like work; or 3) I could cut my dark, not particularly great novel down to the bone and see if removing 90% of the words made it sing.

I chose option 3, because, frankly, I like a challenge.

The 10% Solution

It worked.

I tore that story down to the studs. I sometimes complain about how Kill Your Darlings is bad writing advice—and it often is—but this was a real Kill Your Darling Moment. Darlings were everywhere. I got rid of everything but the basic story, aligned it all into one timeline instead of a timey-wimey ball, shed characters and bits, and removed 90% of the words. And here’s the thing: I liked the short story that emerged. It was tight. It was shaded. It was the essential idea that had sparked my imagination 3 years before. It was like I’d grown some hideous block of mineral in a lab, then took a hammer and chisel and carved a small, gorgeous medallion from it.

The anthology bought the story. And that’s it, that’s the punch line. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme and all, but I’m personally kind of chuffed that I took a failed novel and transformed it into a successful story, and all I had to do was get rid of most of my work.

Will I try this with some of the roughly six thousand failed novels I have on my hard drive? Maybe. Why not? Would I recommend this to other folks with failed novels they just can’t quit? Maybe. Why not? All you’ve to lose is your sanity. But then, you’re a writer, so …

Like most famous and successful people, over the years I’ve crafted a very careful brand and public persona. My brand has been carefully cultivated, and is centered on a sort of shambolic pantslessness that I vaguely hope makes me seem amusing and cool rather than sad and deserving of pity. This is, of course, in part a defense mechanism, as I learned long ago that the key to being a terminally lazy person is to always shelter in incompetence; once you establish that you’re essentially useless, no one asks you to do anything any more, and a life of leisure can be yours.

The only place where pride has prevented me from claiming complete incompetence is writing. It’s the one aspect of my existence that I’ve been able to monetize, after all, so claiming incompetence would be counter-productive to my desire to purchase liquor and Fritos on a regular basis. It’s also the one aspect of my life I feel truly confident in. As a result, despite my freewheelingly inebriated branding I do self-importantly appoint myself as an expert of sorts on writing and even the business of selling your work, at least in a localized, heres-what-worked-for-me kind of way. And so I get the dreaded question on a regular basis: How can I get published? How did you get published? This last question is usually accompanied by an exasperated gesture and tone of voice as they indicate my poor fashion sense and grooming, implying that if I can get published, surely any moderately educated laboratory chimpanzee can.

I don’t dispute that; in fact, that was more or less the initial subtitle of Writing Without Rules.

My answer is always the same, and it’s always pretty simple: I did the work. If you want to be published, do the work too.

The Work

So what does that mean? Well, there’s writing, of course—you can’t publish ideas, friendo, so step one will always be writing it all down, then putting in the dull plod of revision and polish. That’s stipulated—but let’s assume you have a story or a novel or a play or a poem or a 6,000-page manifesto about Doritos.

The Work then requires that you submit or self-publish your writing. This isn’t easy. It requires research, organization, and constant diligence and will most frequently yield rejection and criticism. But here’s the thing: Every book or story I’ve sold, every speaking opportunity and freelance writing gig I’ve landed has stemmed from the grind. With a few exceptions where I was invited to submit a story by an editor who was already familiar with my work, every story I’ve ever published is the result of mailing a submission to markets, sometimes dozens of them before getting a sale. Every book I’ve published is the result of submitting to publishers or stems from the meta-effort of submitting to agents, which resulted in signing with my wonderful agent Janet Reid, who then sold books for me. Every freelance job I have is the product of some kind of work, whether a cold pitch, answering an advertisement, or creating and delivering a presentation.

When I was a young, callow writer I sometimes imagined that I was writing such brilliant, incendiary stuff opportunities would bloom around me like magic. As I got older I realized the truth: If you want to publish, you’ll have to grind. It takes effort. I have hundreds, thousands of rejections. I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded. But slowly, if you do the work, you start to make a name for yourself and build a platform. As far as I can tell, there are no shortcuts.

Of course, I may simply be not very smart. This has been suggested to me many times, though I usually reject the idea as ridiculous. After all, I played all three Zork games as a kid and even solved the Oddly-Angled Room puzzle.