Writing

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.

BAM!

A short while after Writing Without Rules came out, I was contacted by an English professor at a nearby university, informing me that she’d chosen to use WWR as the textbook for her writing class, and inviting me to come speak to her students. This was amazing on many levels. On one level, I was flattered and excited to think that someone thought my little book about the craft and business of writing was strong enough to use in a classroom. On another level, I was amazed that someone actually thought I was capable of putting on adult clothing and speaking in public. And on another level I sort of assumed it was a massive prank, and when I arrived at the classroom the walls would fall down and everyone I knew would be there laughing to inform me that my life was some sort of Truman Show prank.

Oddly enough, none of those things happened. What did happen is that I spent two hours teaching a Master Class in fiction, and answering a lot of questions from young writers. The class was a standard mix of energies, from people eager to ask questions and staring at me intently while I spoke to people doodling in their notebooks and whispering over Instagram posts in the back. Y’know, college.

The students had a lot of questions about writing. Which, seeing as no better options existed (like, me juggling for two hours straight, mainly because I cannot juggle)[1], I endeavored to answer as best I could, afraid the entire time that my pants would spontaneously fall down, which happens. What also happens—and happened—is that I made several references to books, films, and entire schools of thought that apparently no one under the age of 30 has heard of. Stuff like this would happen:

Student: What’s one of your favorite characters you didn’t write?

Me: Tom Ripley.

Class: …

Me: From The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Class: …

Me: By Patricia Highsmith? They made a movie with Matt Damon a few years back?

Class: … cool.

Anyways, I thought I’d list some of the questions the class came up with, and my responses (or the gist of them) for future reference (NOTE: My written responses here might be a tad more eloquent than my rambling, stammering responses in real time as I feverishly had to remember where I was and what I was doing every time someone asked a new question).

What makes a good mystery? a good sci-fi novel?

The answer to questions like these is always rooted in the fundamental rule that good stories depend on characters your reader cares about facing a conflict your readers also care about. These things are not unrelated. At a higher level, mysteries should play fair with the reader, and sci-fi should offer a perspective on the universe that the reader hasn’t seen before.

Why do you write mystery/sci-fi?

The dumb answer is that it’s what I read as a kid, and therefore what I started working in when I began writing. The dumber answer is that sci-fi is where I found my first success in publishing novels. The fact is, I still enjoy reading and writing in both genres, and that’s all that really matters.

Why do you think there is no such thing as writer’s block?

As I explain in more detail in Writing Without Rules, it’s more accurate to say I think people mischaracterize writer’s block. It’s not a single, monolithic affliction, it’s a collection of things that can impede your creativity or confidence. It’s more effective to figure out which specific aspect is mucking you up, rather than just throwing your hands in the air because you have the dreaded ‘block.

How much should you care about what readers think?

When writing: Not at all. Write what you want to read. When selling a book you’ve published, care a lot.

Do you write with an audience in mind? Do you have an “ideal” reader?

See above; I write for myself, so I’m my own ideal reader. I believe in separating creativity and marketing; I write a book I’m excited about, then I try to figure out how to publish it and sell it. The most efficient way of doing things? Nope. No one has ever described me as efficient. Salty? Sometimes. Adorable? You know it.

Have you had stories or pieces of stories that you’ve completely scrapped and why?

Rarely, but it happens. I have a disease that compels me to finish things, even projects that are clearly not ever going to be successful, so usually once I hit a certain mass I’m going to finish the damn story/novel/what have you if it kills me, which often (read: usually) leads to spectacular mediocrity. But! I have in fact decided to ice a story or novel even after it’s reached a significant milestone. The reason I might trash a novel that’s 90% finished? It’s always the same: I simply don’t want to write it any more. Excitement and passion are necessary, and even in broken, mediocre stories I usually remain excited about the story it could have been, if nothing else. If that goes, the story usually never gets finished.

What is your process of writing a story from planning to finish? How do you know when you’re done?

To put it as plainly and as simply as possible, you’re done when your protagonist resolves their conflict. It sounds stupid simple because it is stupid simple. You gin up a character. You give them a goal. You put things in their way. And when they get around those things and achieve the goal, the story is over. Ta-da!

My process is gormless and shambolic; I am a natural Pantser, so I start with some sort of inspiration and just start making stuff up, stuff that delights and amuses me. Then I run into problems and have to apply some form of Plantsing to get back on track. I don’t have a schedule; I write when I can, when the mood strikes, when I have the time. I enjoy writing. It’s one of my favorite things to do, so I don’t really need much discipline to work at it. Which, thank goodness because discipline is not my bag.

How do you revise your writing?

It depends, honestly. If I’m happy with the draft, which I often am, my revision is just tweaking and polishing. I have done full-on tear-down revisions that rework the story from the ground up, but that’s not too typical for me. Of course, if I have an edit letter from my publisher, that’s a different story.

Where do your ideas come from?

I steal them. Literally. I get ideas from books, movies, TV shows, random snippets of conversation I hear, and stolen pages from your diary. The main two ways I get ideas is to take someone else’s story and think, I could have done that better; and take an idea someone drops in their story but doesn’t develop and then go develop the hell out of it.

Have you ever had a piece you thought was good, but wasn’t well received? How did you deal with that?

Alcohol helps. If I submit or otherwise distribute something, I think it’s good, so bad reviews or a weak response from an editor is always disconcerting. When you put your stuff out there you’re going to get rejection and bad reviews. So much rejection and so many bad reviews. I think the fact that I started submitting stories and novels at an early age, and really aggressively (like, dozens and dozens of submissions a year) inured me to rejection and criticism. It just doesn’t bother me very much any more. That’s kind of the secret: Get used to being told you suck. Because all it takes is one person to say otherwise.

Do you read your own reviews?

I used to, but after a while I realized that it’s something I have no control over. All I can do is write the stories I want to write and do my best to get them out there. After that, it’s out of my hands, so why bother?

How do you deal with rejection?

See above; the key is to market your work all the time, until rejection becomes a blurry haze. Then pour yourself a drink.

Do you peer review/ show work to friends or other writers?

Not often. I sometimes have a writer friend read something I’m working on, and my wife, The Duchess, often reads stuff I’m particularly excited about. But as a rule, no. If I like something, I’m usually pretty confident about it.

Who are your influences?

Old masters: Tolkien, Zelazny, Chalker, Chandler, Hammett, Thompson, Highsmith. New masters: King, Tartt, Saunders.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished Grant by Ron Chernow, and am now reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which is excellent.

How do you break into publishing? How did you?

Every piece of success I’ve ever had stems from The Grind: I submit, and submit, and submit. I follow up. I take the opportunities I come across. I do the work. It really is that basic for me. I sold my first novel Lifers by submitting to publishers probably 50 times. I landed my agent by submitting to agents a similar amount. My short story Ringing the Changes wound up in Best American Mystery Stories, ultimately, because I submitted it to markets. My freelance work is mostly the result of answering ads and cold-pitching editors.

There are other routes into publishing a novel: MFA programs, publishing short stories in major markets for a long time, having a successful blog or other platform, intense networking (I suppose). For me, though, it’s always just been a simple 4 step process: 1. write a story; 2. submit the story; 3. repeat; 4. profit? sometimes.

How do you balance the story, the characters, the setting without there being too much detail or too little detail?

First of all, detail is a revision problem. When writing a first draft, don’t worry about it, just tell the bits that you’re excited to tell. When you’re done, put it aside, come back to it later. Re-read it with fresh eyes, and the detail question will jump out at you, trust me. It will be obvious if you have too much, or not enough.

Then, use your own experience as an example. When you walk into a room, what do you consciously notice? A big mistake writers make is having characters who hyper-narrate their own existence, noting details that no human in the universe has ever noted. Put yourself in the scenario and imagine what you’d notice, then pare from there.

Have you ever had a real life person in your life think your character was actually them?

Not really! I’ve based characters on real people I know all the time, but people usually have a very strange self-image that doesn’t match reality (for example, in my head I am very suave and witty and competent), so they rarely recognize themselves unless you literally name the character after them and include some very, very obvious details.

Do you base your characters on real life people?

Sometimes. Usually my characters are bits and pieces of myself, my idealized self, and other people all mashed together. Rarely is there a 1-1 mapping of real person to character, but it has happened when I’ve got a very specific reason.

How do you know your work is good?

Since I write for myself, that’s easy: When I’m happy with what I’ve written. When I can’t wait to show people.

How can you be more confident in your writing?

I think there are a few basics to confidence:

1. Finish. Finishing stories and novels and blog posts goes a long way to feeling like you’re in command of your instrument and know what you’re doing. A pile of half-finished manuscripts on your hard drive makes you feel like an amateur.

2. Work. Submit stuff. Publish blog posts and essays. Enter contests, go to workshops. The more you get stuff out there and deal with rejection and feedback, the more confident you’ll get, because you’ll have the experience of realizing someone’s negative feedback isn’t very useful, or that rejections are subjective.

In other words, don’t wait for permission to be a writer. Don’t imagine you need special bona-fides. Just write and try to get your work read. The rest is noise.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, all this adulting has exhausted me. I must have a celebratory bottle of rye and a nap.

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[1]I considered doing the Daffy Duck trick you can only do once bit, but since no one was getting my geezer references as it was that seemed likely to fail.

Today my brother and I, who both hate everything as a matter of reasonable caution, were discussing the surprising fact that we both generally enjoy the work of Diablo Cody, the screenwriter of Juno, Young Adult, Jennifer’s Body and Tully, among other things. Cody is a divisive figure because she hit the mainstream scene in such a splash of aggressively hipsterish hype with Juno, but in my opinion the film is a perfectly fine story told with verve, and generally speaking if you make a splash like that with your writing you can’t be all wrong. Most people write and no one notices. If you’re being noticed, you’re doing something right.

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from Juno. For example, you can learn the very important lesson that you should never try too hard.

Homeskillet?

If you don’t remember Juno or have never seen it, it’s the story of a teenage girl who discovers she’s pregnant and goes about an unorthodox process of figuring out what to do about it. When it came out it was often touted as either a work of quirky genius that ‘got’ kids today, or a film that existed in a strange alternate universe where kids listened to odd indie music and spoke almost exclusively in weird slang.

The lesson you can learn from the script for Juno is to not try too hard. The early going for Juno is where Cody ladles on the weird verbal affectations to the point of comedy—I mean, I get that she’s establishing tone and character and style, but are you seeing this shit, which is the first exchange of dialog in the film:

ROLLO: Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the Crime Dog! Back for another test?

JUNO: I think the last one was defective. The plus sign looked more like a division sign. I remain unconvinced.

ROLLO: This is your third test today, Mama Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt about it!

TOUGH GIRL: Three times? Oh girl, you are way pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is your nipples real brown?

ROLLO: Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe your little boyfriend’s got mutant sperms and he knocked you up twice!

JUNO: Silencio! I just drank my weight in Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.

ROLLO: Well, you know where the lavatory is. You pay for that pee stick when you’re done! Don’t think it’s yours just because you’ve marked it with your urine!

JUNO: Jesus, I didn’t say it was.

ROLLO: Well, it’s not. You’re not a lion in a pride! These kids, acting like lions with their unplanned pregnancies and their Sunny Delights.

JUNO: Oh, and this too.

ROLLO: So what’s the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?

JUNO: I don’t know. It’s not… seasoned yet. Wait. Huh. Yeah, there’s that pink plus sign again. God, it’s unholy.

ROLLO: That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet.

I think we can all agree that no one in the history of the universe, much less a 16-year old girl and a 30-something gas station attendant, has ever spoken in this manner, or used the word homeskillet in that manner.

Cody’s laying it on thick in order to get her characters’ quirkiness and verbal acuity across. She wants us to know that Juno exists in a hyper-verbal world, is smart, and fierce. All very well, but she’s working too hard here, making Juno so quirky and so odd that’s it’s almost impossible to watch.

The film calms down quickly after this. There’s still plenty of quirk, of course, and plenty of invented slang—and that’s fine. It never reaches these levels of overheated quirk, however, and finds balance. The problem is that I can probably never watch the film again without girding my loins, because those opening minutes are excruciating.

So, herewith the lesson: Don’t try too hard. Trust yourself to make your characters interesting and your dialog cool without laying it on so thick and so obvious that it’s weirdness can be seen from space. Otherwise someday a cranky writer like me is going to write about you.

When I was a wee lad in Jersey City, I found school to be pretty easy. I was that kid, beloved by teachers and scorned by his classmates. I totally looked the part, too; I looked like a character out of Bloom County, with glasses the size of the universe and a penchant for button-down dress shirts. I usually made the Honor Roll and was always picked first in Spelling Bees.

Some time in 7^th Grade, however, I experienced a kind of early life crisis and simply stopped giving a shit about my grades. I didn’t fail anything, but I stopped putting any effort in, and the bottom fell out. In 8^th Grade, one of the supposed ‘perks’ of being a good student was the ability to become a Safety Monitor or something like that—essentially you got a reflective sash to wear and you helped the crossing guards. It was supposedly an honor, and I became one, and then quickly regretted it, for the following reasons:

1. You had to wear the ridiculous sash, which invited mockery and
2. You had to stand outside with the weird middle-aged crossing guard ladies all the damn time

So, wallowing in this newfound lack of fucks, I decided to quit the Safety Monitors. The idea of quitting something seemed exciting.

My 8^th Grade teacher was a terrifying woman, universally feared in the school, and she dragged me into her class when I quit and dressed me down. She told me I’d regret it for the rest of my life (!), that this was a huge mistake, and I should reconsider. I did not reconsider, and as I write this today is the first time I’ve thought about this incident in approximately 35 years, so I think she might have overstated the case.

Quitting felt good.

Failed Novels A-Go-Go

Which brings me, at long last, to writing. I hate to quit on writing projects, especially when they get to a fairly mature point (a few thousand words, give or take). If I’ve got a substantial amount of material, the idea of just giving up on it horrifies me. After all, it could be a mediocre novel or story! All I have to do is stick with it!

And I usually do, and I usually do finish it, and it turns out better than expected often enough for me to justify my obsessive-compulsive desire to finish everything.

But sometimes, quitting feels good.

Knowing when quitting on a manuscript is the right thing to do isn’t easy. For some, of course, it is; they get the first whiff of Fail and they drop the story like a hot potato. I get that, but it can also lead to never actually finishing anything, because frankly I’ve never written a novel or story that didn’t seem on the verge of failure at least once in the process.

So how do you know when it’s right to just give up, and when you should put any and all effort into salvaging what you’ve written? The only metric I’ve come up with is Mental Real Estate (MRE).

MRE is, simply, the amount of time I spend thinking about a writing project. Not working on it, but thinking about it while I’m involved in other things. A story that’s alive and writhing, demanding to be written will occupy my thought constantly—while doing the dishes, taking a walk, or brushing my teeth, I’m thinking about that story. Even when it’s not working, I’m thinking about it.

If I realize I only think about a problematic story when I’m sitting in front of the keyboard actively trying to work on it, that’s when I know it’s a done deal and I should walk away. If the story vanishes from my mind the moment I turn away, it’s already doomed.

Of course, as I get older, the list of things that vanish from my thoughts when I’m not looking right at them grows longer and longer. I apply a similar metric to deciding when it’s time to enter a care facility: The day I forget about whiskey when I’m not actively drinking it is the day to check into the Long Sunset Home for The Aged and give up. Until then—sláinte.

I’ve always been a good mimic in terms of writing—not in terms of anything else, it should be noted; I have never been able to convincingly act like anyone else, or sound like anyone else, or dress like anyone else, even if we define ‘anyone else’ as ‘normal people.’ But when it comes to writing I’ve always been able to absorb someone else’s style and them replicate it, if I want.

When I was younger I did this constantly, in part because I was still forming my own style and in part because when you’re young everything you read blows your mind and you can’t wait to use every trick you just learned, like immediately. I still do it today; a few years ago I was reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald for a while and I wrote a short story that is basically a riff on Fitzgerald that goes on for 3,000 words or so. But it’s more controlled now, more purposeful.

Recently I was hosting a page on Facebook about writing and mentioned the concept of imitating writers as a learning tool, and got some pushback from writers who were very, very strongly against the practice. Their argument boiled down to ?you shouldn’t imitate others, but rather find your own voice.’ Which is true enough, but I think they missed the point: Imitating other writers is all about finding your own voice.

A Continuum

Writing isn’t something you invented yesterday, after all. You’re part of a continuum, a tradition that goes back a very long time, and all of us are building on what came before. It’s like when I play guitar: Every now and then I come up with a riff or three that are actually kind of tasty, and I think, hmmmn, I’m not terrible. And then I think, if this was 1963 I could be the greatest guitar player in the universe, because I have a basic grasp of the intervening 50 years of guitar music.

In other words, when a writer crafts a story that revolutionizes and excites and transforms (or merely entertains) it’s not something they did in isolation. They read novels and stories for years, digested them, processed them, and then used those absorbed tools and tricks to create something unique.

In order to get to that point where you’ve got a toolbox full of ideas and techniques you can use to make something wholly your own, you have to first acquire those tools. That starts with the basics and then moves on to increasingly esoteric and specific things that only you can use and appreciate. Imitating other writers gives you practice with their tools, which you then modify and make your own.

So, don’t hesitate to copy your favorites writers. Write entire novels in someone else’s style, why not. In the end it will help you find your own. You can also do it with fashion, which is why I’m going to be wearing nothing but white suits from now on.

Here’s a tragedy in one act: I wrote a novel a few years ago, a thriller with a bit of sci-fi seasoning in it. I told my agent the opening premise, and she immediately said something like ‘that might be good as long as the next words out of your mouth aren’t xxx’ where xxx was a plot twist that was 100% exactly what I’d just written.

There was what scientists call an awkward silence.

That’s always a sobering moment for a writer who often thinks they’re being clever. I was a bit dismayed, but I thought on it and realized that the plot twist was, in fact, a bit overused and obvious, and so I delicately chopped 54% of the novel out of the manuscript and set about re-writing the second half of the book with a different plot twist. Which wound up ruining everything and the book was and remains a disaster.

The lesson isn’t about the shopworn plot twist; you can sell a shopworn twist if you try. No, the lesson here is that writing to hit someone else’s target is usually a mistake.

You My People

That doesn’t mean my agent was wrong. My agent is less than enthusiastic about a lot of my work, which is perfectly natural, and she’s usually very smart about it. My agent is looking at my work as the person who will have to try and sell it, so naturally she has a different perspective on it. But what I’ve slowly come to realize is that there is very likely someone out there who would read that manuscript and be amazed by it. And that’s what it’s all about: Finding your People.

By and large, my agent is my People. When she dislikes something I’ve written, I usually end up realizing she was right about it. And often when she pushes back on a novel I want to go out on, it’s purely from a market point-of-view—she might admire it, but she doesn’t think she can sell it.

As a writer, you need objective opinions and feedback, of course, but you also have to know who you are as a writer and what you’re trying to accomplish, and stick to that. Instead of constantly revising and re-working your manuscript to match the last round of feedback, you need to find the people out there who will read your work and be instantly drawn to it. Those are your People. In other words, there’s an agent out there who will read your work and love it. There’s an editor out there who will read your book and decide that whatever the P&L says, they’re going to publish it. There are people out there who will love your work and want to put effort into getting it out there. All you have to do is find them.

How to find them is a whole other story involving tears, despair, and stolen diamonds. But I’ve said too much.