Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Here’s Episode Two of my ongoing experiment in which I’m writing a sci-fi novel in real time and vlogging about it:
Jeff Somers and the Rough Beast, Episode 2: Plantsing!
This video series follows author Jeff Somers (Writing Without Rules, coming from WD Books in May 2018) as he discusses how to write a novel while at work on one of his own.
As they say, “Life goes on. Maybe there won’t be marriage… maybe there won’t be sex… but, by God, there’ll be dancing.”
I’m currently reading a novel that’s pretty well done in many ways, but the author has one terrible habit that really annoys the crap out of me: By the Way Writing.
BTW Writing is when you shoehorn facts into the prose when information suddenly becomes necessary for the reader to know. It’s a form of exposition that gives exposition a bad name. Here’s a made-up example:
Jim turned the corner and stopped dead, uncertain if he should keep going or turn back. Up ahead was his old friend Tanner, who would almost certainly demand money, probably framed as a mysterious debt suddenly remembered and now long over due (Jim hated to loan money because of his deadbeat father, who had steadily drained the family bank accounts with constant small loans begged from his mother).
The BTW part is that last sentence; BTW Writing almost always occurs at the end of a paragraph or longer section within one, and often though not always within parentheses. It’s a clunker of an expo drop, and I call it “By the Way” due to the awkward way it’s just shoved in there, because the writer suddenly remembered that they hadn’t communicated that information before. Realizing it was important for context or character development, they just toss it in. It’s literally like saying “By the way, this is why he’s like that.”
This is shitty writing for many reasons, but it’s fairly common to see it creep into your first drafts because often when you’re working on a story you do suddenly realize you either forgot to include a detail earlier, or you suddenly realize there’s a detail to include in the first place. I do a lot of first-draft BTW writing myself. It’s often easier to just drop a loaded parens into your paragraph than it is to stop dead and search back to find the right place to bring it up earlier.
The key though is to go back and fix that. Find your BTW bombs and defuse them, sprinkling that information earlier in the draft in a more elegant way.
Like a lot of bad writing habits, this one can be subtle and tough to spot. Sometimes reading your work out loud can help, because BTW lines tend to stop the flow like a truck crashing into a building, and you can feel that when you read it out loud, because you literally have to stop and shift mental gears when you hit one.
By the way, there should be a joke here at the end, but I can’t think of one.
The first time I wrote a story, I was probably eight or nine years old. It was a school assignment that, bizarrely, involved bookbinding; our assignment was to write a story, lay out signatures, create hardback covers, and bind it all into a book by hand. I have no idea why someone thought this was a useful skill for kids in Jersey City, New Jersey to have—but it was fun. I wrote a story about how the planet Earth was created by aliens who had this huge pill, like a Tylenol rapid-release capsule, they launched into space.
What I remember from my early days of writing was the sense of limitless possibility. Every book I read offered something I could steal and try out for myself. Every idea I had seemed incredibly new and original (spoiler: they weren’t, but they felt that way). Every time I sat down to work on an idea, I had this rush of exploratory joy—I was venturing into fresh snow every single time, and it was mine to mark up and shape.
These days? Much of that thrill is gone. And that’s something all creators have to deal with.
I wasn’t really aware of this curse of experience until I began learning how to play guitar a few years back. I’d always wanted to play, and finally learning how was a lot of fun—and in those early days when every new chord or bit of music theory knowledge was a revelation, I felt like every song I put together was a major creative breakthrough. Looking back, those songs are terrible—but at the time I had that sense of excitement that I once had with writing. It made me realize how I’d lost some of that in recent years with my writing work.
Don’t get me wrong—I still feel vital and creative. I still get excited about writing something new and I still push myself to experiment and try new techniques. But the excitement is tempered by the knowledge that what I produce probably isn’t going to be a world-shattering new idea. I’ve been at this too long. I know my own limitations too well, and I am much more familiar with the body of work produced over the centuries, so I can no longer fool myself that I’m doing anything seismically new.
That’s the curse of experience: The knowledge that you’re not as smart as you once thought you were.
Still, we beat on. Knowing your limitations doesn’t mean you don’t still have a fire in the belly for creating something awesome. It just means you don’t fool yourself quite so much. There’s a sadness in that, but also power. It’s like my knowledge of the capabilities of my liver: Limiting, sure, but also kind of comforting to know where your line is.
There’s a persistent myth that your first effort on a manuscript will be terrible. That a good book or story requires dozens of revision cycles, endless routing through beta readers, and wordsmithing until it’s almost unrecognizable when compared to the first draft.
This is what scientists call horseshit.
Some stories require that kind of massive effort, it’s true. And some writers like to work like that, which is fine. But neither of those facts means that your story isn’t actually kind of great in its initial draft form. There’s a sort of understandable instinct to distrust things that seem too easy, and when you bang out 80,000 words in 3 months and actually love everything you did, it’s natural enough to feel like you must be missing something.
But, hey, it happens, so why not to you? In other words, don’t start tearing your first draft apart and jump into a heavy revision just because. Consider the possibility that your first draft is actually great, and maybe all you need is a polish?
Of course, I say this as a writer who tends to be very satisfied with my first drafts, or, you know, completely unsatisfied. In other words, I either like my first draft enough to polish it and do something with it, or I despise it and want to bury it in the back yard and never admit it existed. For me, personally, there’s nothing in-between.
But assuming your first draft is trash just … well, just because all first drafts must be trash? That’s crazy. In fact, I’d encourage the opposite: Assume your first draft is fire, and then try to find reasons why it isn’t. Because I firmly believe most first drafts are actually pretty good, and most revision is kind of unnecessary in the sense that it doesn’t actually improve things, just re-arranges them.
Of course, what do I know. I’m sitting here wearing a cardboard box as pants as I write this.
As you all know, I’m not a complicated man. Give me a cat in my lap, a glass of scotch, and a keyboard and I’m more or less complete. Also, I have a tendency to reduce all of life’s questions to an extremely brief list of bullet points; I am comforted by limited choices, and so I boil everything down to insane levels of generality.
For example, my writing career philosophy (not to be confused with an artistic philosophy), which is essentially three nested rules:
That’s it. Those are the guiding principles of my writing career.
Better to finish stories. I make this point a lot, but it bears repeating: You sell exactly zero of the stories and novels you don’t finish. Even if I’m not feeling 100% confident in a story’s success, I try to finish it. I can always revise a mediocre story later. I can’t do anything with a story that isn’t even a story yet.
Better to be published than not. I firmly believe that the only reason for writing, for creating, is to share your ideas and works and let people read them. Possibly to force people to read them, too, but that’s a whole other blog post involving the small private army I’m organizing. The point is, I intend to publish everything I write, someday. And so should you.
Better to be paid. You can’t always control market forces, and you can’t always get paid. But you should aspire to always be paid, because being paid for your work recognizes the value of it, being paid means your publishing partner values your work, and being paid means you might be able to write more.
Those are simple rules, but they make all the difference. Notice there’s a lot of wiggle room with each, though; I don’t see much value in being rigid. Sometimes you might not finish something for a good reason, sometimes you might be okay with not being paid. Guidelines instead of rules, maybe—but useful nonetheless.
On the other hand, my rules for alcohol are even simpler:
I sometimes find action scenes a bit of a challenge, in part because I’ve written so many of them now it’s sometimes tough to find a new way of approaching them. No matter what genre you work in or style of writing you employ, there will always be aspects of storytelling that begin to feel a bit rote over time, and for me writing about people attacking each other, shooting at each other, and chasing each other has become so prevalent in my work I can sleepwalk through those sequences.
I hopefully don’t need to state that sleepwalking through your own writing process is never a good idea.
Keeping things fresh means trying new things, both in terms of choreography and technical approach. When writing an action scene I always work out the rough choreography first—nothing too detailed, and nothing formal or written down. I just like to start with two basics: Where is everyone in the beginning of the scene, and where do I want them to be at the end of it (the answer is usually 50% “dead,” btw)?
Then, once I have those basics in my brain, I keep it simple.
There’s always a temptation to make your action scenes kind of crazy, with a bit of the old ultraviolence and all that. The same temptation occurs in action films, and you can probably think of a few movies where the action is so frenetic and insane that your suspension of disbelief goes right out the window. That can happen in your writing, too; sure, your character might be a badass, but is she really capable of being shot three times and thrown out the window only to come racing back into the fray? Can anyone actually fight off fifteen people at once?
Sure, if you Keep It Simple, Stupid.
I like to steal a trick from action films to keep things streamlined: Space out your enemies. In the real world, if fifteen thugs come at you, they’re going to swarm you and the fight’s over in no time. In movies, you might notice that when the hero faces fifteen opponents they come at him one at a time while the others stand around tentatively, looking menacing but not, you know, actually attacking. Keeping things simple by dicing your action scene into smaller, easily manageable bits like that is one way to keep things clear in your own head, which will also keep things clear on the page.
Next, steal a trick from writers who know what they’re doing. Read some Elmore Leonard or Lee Child and see how they render action scenes: Briefly, with an economy of words to convey both the action and the way the hero triumphs. They don’t pour thousands of words describing the roundhouse kicks and the precise holds and martial arts moves employed. They use simple action verbs, keep things moving briskly, and trust your minds eye to fill in the rest. In other words, they keep it simple.
Of course, I’ve lost every fistfight I’ve ever been in. It’s one reason I’m a writer instead of a mercenary.
Check it: I started a new novel a few months back, so I started a Vlog series detailing my progress, the barriers I ran into, and the many, many times my cats tried to sabotage me. Here’s Episode 1.
Jeff Somers and the Rough Beast, Episode 1: How to Write a Novel
This video series follows author Jeff Somers (Writing Without Rules, coming from WD Books in May 2018) as he discusses how to write a novel while at work on one of his own.
Elsewhere in this blog I’ve advised writers to avoid exposition entirely in first drafts—to write as if everyone was as familiar with your characters and setting as you are, then going back and filling exposition sparingly later. The idea being that you’ll more clearly see when exposition is necessary once you’ve told the story.
That advice still stands, but it doesn’t address how, exactly, to cram exposition into your story when you decide it’s necessary. You could write an entire book on the subject, but here’s one piece of pithy advice you can take or leave: Avoid as you know dialog.
As you know is a phrase that works to imply that what’s about to be said is common knowledge:
NPC: What time is it?
Main Character: As you know, I recently lost my watch. That’s a stabbing!
<stabs NPC>
It’s an idiot tag, though; if it’s common knowledge, why is the character saying it? Instead of camouflaging exposition, it actually lampshades the fact that your character is about to vomit up a few paragraphs of exposition. Nothing that follows as you know (or similar phrases) will sound natural in any way.
Worse, you don’t even need to actually use a phrase like as you know. Simply having your characters recite information purely for the benefit of the reader will sound artificial and stiff, no matter what else you do.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily tell you how to get necessary exposition into your story in a natural, subtle way. But sometimes the road to better writing is knowing what to stop doing. After you eliminate all the bad choices, after all, what’s left should be if not an ideal choice at least a better choice.
As you know, this is the end of the blog post.
One of the double-edged aspects of streaming services like Netflix is the fact that, in a sense, you’ve pre-paid for all the content it offers. That often means that when you stumble on some piece of obvious trash—like, say, The Cloverfield Paradox—at 1AM, the bar for pressing select is pretty low. After all, you’ve already paid for it, and you’re obviously looking to waste some of your life. And hey, every bad movie or TV show you watch actually amortizes the amount of money you spent on each bit of media. You have a duty to watch moar.
Now, I’ll pretty much watch anything with time travel in it, which is my thin excuse for having fired up When We First Met on Netflix the other night. I was aware of the film from a few scabrous reviews that took the film to task for its rapey-rapey premise (guy meets girl of his dreams, screws up and becomes her best friend [obviously, gross] while she meets and marries a perfect guy, then stumbles into a mystical time travel photo booth and gets the chance to relive the fateful night so they end up bangin’, which of course he pursues with stalkerish glee despite the fact that his crush is, you know, happy with her dude) which is basically Groundhog Day if it was all about nailing someone who thinks you care about them as a person.
Still, I watched it, which means I am partially responsible for the rapey romcoms to come. Sorry about that.
Let’s put aside the odious premise and the fact that When We First Met is just simply not that good (to be fair, the story does try to bury a less-rapey twist as the main character learns and grows; it’s just unfortunate that guys in bad SFF movies have to use the awesome power of space/time manipulation to try and score a lot before they can grow as people). I want to focus in on one particularly terrible aspect of the story that could be a lesson for guy writers everywhere: The Lady Puzzle.
Interestingly, Groundhog Day is itself guilty of Lady Puzzle Plotting, but it’s saved by it’s brilliance and a few other things we’ll get to. First, what is Lady Puzzling? In essence, it’s that story where a guy thinks that women are essentially Encrypted Sex Robots. If you want to sex a lady, you need the encryption code, which is generally imagined to be secret intimate knowledge of their likes, dislikes, and opinions. None of which is ever treated as, you know, the sacred inner life of a living being, but rather as bullshit you have to memorize like you’re passing a sophomore year bio exam.
In When We First Met, when our Hero figures out he’s traveled back in time to the day he first met the object of his totally-normal obsession, he weaponizes the years of intimate knowledge he’s gained about her by being her friend [again: gross] to anticipate her every desire. So you get idiot ball stuff like him asking her what her favorite cocktail is only to interrupt her before she can answer so he can parrot her favorite drink at her as if it’s his own.
The idea is, time travel or no, the secret to getting into a lady’s panties is figuring out the Secret Code that will uncross her legs. Like, claim to like the same music or politics that she does! Learn her odd and obscure hobbies and pretend to like them!
You could call this the Taylor Swift Gambit: “Find out what you want / Be that girl for a month.”
Worse, in the film this works. Sort of. In the first iteration, his creepy knowledge of everything about her does indeed get him back to her apartment, but he’s ruined by an earlier interaction which convinces the girl that he’s a creepy stalker instead of a magical male version of herself. Ha ha, subversion of tropes! Except, it was working. Now, ask yourself: If a stranger came up to you and started claiming all of your personal tastes as their own, would you be charmed, or alarmed? In a Lady Puzzle plot, they’re charmed, because ladies must follow programming if you’re giving them the correct input.
I am fond of saying that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution of ideas. So, why then does the Lady Puzzle aspect of Groundhog Day not get a razzie award? For one, the aforementioned brilliance of the movie; it’s sharp and insightful, unlike When We First Met. Second, the character of Phil Connors is presented as pretty much an asshole at the beginning of the story, so the fact that he would use his time loop powers in order to gather information on a lady and use it to crack her encrypted code isn’t surprising—and his evolution away from such behavior is thus affecting and emotionally powerful. In When We First Met we’re supposed to take the main character’s “niceness” at face value—he’s really in love, yo, and so his antics as he tries to speak the magic words that will get him into her pants is just a manifestation of his desperation to build a life with her. That this is kind of the fundamentals of “Nice Guyism” is completely lost on the folks making this movie.
Finally, in Groundhog Day, the Time Loop Pickup Artist technique is shown to be only intermittently successful. Yes, Phil does manage to seduce one woman using the trick, but it fails spectacularly with the woman he really wants—over and over again. She reacts with increasing alarm and suspicion as he tries to construct the perfect evening that will lead to sexy time, culminating in an epic supercut of face slaps. It’s not until Phil leaves off and becomes his true self that he escapes his time loop and winds up with the girl.
To be fair, as alluded to earlier When We First Met does ultimately concede that the Lady Puzzle approach is a bad idea (spoilers, in the unlikely event you watch this movie, follow). After several failures, our hero realizes that his crush will never truly love him no matter how he manipulates reality, and slowly begins to realize that his crush’s roommate is actually the woman who has always been there for him, and with whom he’s had a true connection. It’s meant to subvert the whole Friend-zoney, Red-pilly vibe of the premise, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. You’ll have to judge for yourself … though I wouldn’t recommend it.
When writing stories, something else I don’t recommend? A Lady Puzzle plot. Somers out.
Characters are puppets. Ultimately, they exist solely to make your story happen, to pull plot levers and fall into deadly pits, to weep and laugh and leap and dance as per the program you feed into their CPU.
Of course, part of the challenge is taking these puppets and making them seem like real people, to weave that illusion that this collection of words is actually a person whose life and internal monologue we can magically tap into. It ain’t easy, and if you recently wrote a manuscript in which your characters basically stand around until the time comes for them to pull a plot lever and unleash some hounds, if all their dialog serves to explain plot mechanisms and the like, well, you aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last.
There are a lot of ways you can make your characters feel more like human beings with motivations and depth as opposed to automatons following your script. One of the most enjoyable and effective ways is to be generous with the words and page space and give your characters some downtime.
If you’ve ever watched a TV show and noted a scene where characters just sort of hang out, a scene where no plot work is done, a scene that seems to exist solely so the writers can tell a few jokes, that’s downtime. Essentially it’s a scene which accomplishes zero plot advancement and isn’t even concerned much with character development. It’s just a relaxed moment where the characters hang out, interact, and exist. It’s also a fantastic way to make them seem like real people, for the simple reason that we all engage in a lot of downtime.
It can feel like an expansive waste of space, because you’re not moving the story along. You’re just having some fun and letting your characters talk. But it does so much to make them seem like real, rounded people it’s totally worth it. Plus, since it doesn’t have much to do with the plot, it’s something you can actually insert into your story after the first draft is done. You’ve got the plot, you’ve got your characters in their positions so they can pull those plot levers. Now you just go back and insert a few downtime scenes to flesh them out.
It’s also fun, assuming you actually like your characters.
Of course if you overcorrect and write an entire novel composed of downtime, congratulations, you’ve just invented the mumblecore literary genre, you bastard.