Writing

Plot Holes: Gaslight ?Em

Author: April 11, 2018 0 Comments

To the outside world, writing probably seems easy. We sit around daydreaming, then spend a few hours typing, and a few weeks later we email a manuscript and receive a million dollars, probably. We writers, of course, know better—most of us are going to end up broke, insane, and working at a local big box store mopping the bathrooms and muttering to ourselves about how hacks stole all of our ideas.

Even worse, the act of writing is rough going sometimes. Ideas that flare into being as bright, perfect creations wither into rotten, saggy lumps when we get our potato hands on them. Characters fail to become real people, Netflix suddenly drops a full season of a new show with the exact same premise as your WIP, and plot holes infest your story until it’s more hole than plot.

A Feature, Not a Bug

I recently had a manuscript reviewed specifically for plot holes; I braced myself, because my mind wanders at the best of times and I am no stranger to the hell of realizing the character who saves the day in Chapter 31 was killed off in Chapter 9. I’m a person who lives very much in the present; I forget things so quickly and utterly I am not kidding when I say that by the time I finish a manuscript there are elements of the early chapters that I have zero memory of. It makes taming a plot into coherency kind of difficult.

This time there were no big plot holes to worry over, thank goodness, but it did prompt me to consider my usual tactics for dealing with plot holes.

Sometimes, of course, the only way to deal with plot holes is to eliminate them even if it means yet another extensive revision to the story. This is only necessary when the plot holes in question make your story a mess. But going back to fix up a plot hole isn’t always necessary—and sometimes causes ripples in the rest of your story, a domino effect of fixes opening up new rifts.

So, sometimes—sometimes—the best thing to do is to take your plot holes and celebrate them. Elevate them from subtle to screaming. To gaslight your reader with them.

This isn’t a technique you can use a lot. The story has to have a certain elasticity to it, a certain loose relationship to realism—if your plot is rooted firmly in the real world, playing around with plot holes like this won’t work. But if you’ve got some leeway with the point-of-view, if your narrator is unreliable or the reality of your fictional universe is a bit skewed, you might be able to take a plot hole and turn it into a feature instead of a bug.

Easier said than done, of course. But then, so is writing a novel in the first place.

plot, Writing

The Great Compression

Author: April 4, 2018 0 Comments

As a writer, I like to finish things—more than finish them, I like to whip things into marketable shape. On the one hand the psychology of this is obvious; as I’m fond of saying, you sell exactly zero of the books and stories you don’t finish. My legacy on this world is going to be my writing, so the more of it I can publish and get seen, the better.

On the other hand my obsession with finishing things and extracting some sort of publishable value from my writing goes beyond simply practicality, and I’m not sure where it’s rooted in my life. All I know is, once a work gets to a certain bulk, I’m determined to make the effort of writing it worthwhile by finishing it and then polishing it into something that might, conceivably, get published.

One side effect of this obsession is an eagerness to try new techniques or crazy ideas. I get super excited with experiments that might lead to stronger material—experiments that go beyond polish and revision. One example is when I Frankensteined two failed novels together to make one great novel (something I discuss in detail in Writing Without Rules). Another is something I just mentioned on Twitter last week: Boiling a novel down to a short story.

The Great Compression

I’ve been planning to submit a story to an anthology, but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write a fresh story to match the theme or see if I had something already in the can that would work. I realized that a novel I completed last year was actually a perfect fit, theme-wise. The only problem? The antho had a word count limit of 6,000 words and the novel was 63K+.

This novel has a long history. It started off as a short story I wrote in the early 1990s; I really liked it but could never sell it anywhere, and so a few years ago I started trying to work it into different formats, eventually ending up with an unsatisfactory novel last year. I still thought it had great potential, so the story was still alive in my head, but it wasn’t right.

The idea of trying to cut 90% of the story? Exciting. Like, thrilling. I love stuff like that, extreme challenges. Could I excise most of the novel and still have the core of it?

It was dismaying easy, actually. Dismaying, because it implies that 90% of that novel was just bullshit I poured in there to bulk it up, something I expressly advise people not to do. My only defense is that I didn’t bulk it up on purpose. And I like a lot of the writing I deleted. In practical terms, one reason the story was easy to compress is the structure I used in the novel—it has three timelines, so step one was simply to choose the timeline in which the main, core story occurred, and then delete the others. Just like that, 50% of the words were gone.

Next, I compressed characters. In a novel you can be subtle and granular with your characters. In a short story every character has to be essential. So I eliminated characters whose roles could be passed on to other people. That took care of another chunk of words.

All of this work took me: One day. And I had a story that was still coherent at about 9,000 words. The rest was shaving and shaping, and I really like the story I ended up with at 6K.

Is there a lesson here? The only lesson, I think, is that it’s worth it to push yourself, to try crazy things, to go beyond NaNoWriMo and see what you’re capable of. I can’t swear I’ll sell this story to this anthology or anywhere else. But it was fun to do this, and ultimately successful.

For my next trick, I’m going to try compressing an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into one night. I may not survive. You may not survive. But someone’s got to try, dammit.

General, Writing

Writing in Real Time: Episode 3

Author: April 1, 2018 0 Comments

Video: How to Determine Your Novel’s Word Count | Jeff Somers and the Rough Beast, Episode 3

Jeff Somers takes a moment to contemplate the utility (or lack thereof) of using word count as a progress bar in a book. He discusses the fact that his first published novel was far from oft-cited word counts for viable novels, and the fact that forcing yourself to write words you’re just going to delete later is a waste of time.

Writing, Writing Without Rules

Snatching Failure from the Jaws of Victory

Author: March 30, 2018 0 Comments

Last year I submitted a short story to an anthology, and a few weeks ago I got an email informing me that my story had been selected. This is always great news, and it was made even better by the fact that the antho was kind of prestigious and I could expect a bit of attention, so this was more than just a tidy sum of money and an extra credit on my resume.

The email noted that the although the editors had chosen my story, the publisher had the final say, but I figured, what could go wrong?

You see where this is going.

Thanks but No Thanks

Yup, the publisher pulled my story. They had their reasons, and the editor who contacted me to break the news was very awkwardly embarrassed about it, but hey, shit happens. I sold a story and then it got un-sold, and that sucks, but you move on.

Luckily, stuff like this is rare, and usually it’s me doing the un-selling. I once sold a short story to a magazine, but their contract turned out to be very shitty, so I pulled the story. I’ve been ambushed by vanity publishers and had to pull stories. Usually, once you get the acceptance, though, the rest is just details.

Not much you can do about it. Losing opportunities like this is just part of the game, because there are two sides to every sale: The editorial, and the business. And whenever you get a story past the editorial part, there is always the possibility that the contract will be bad, or the terms not what you expected—or that someone on the bean-counting side will object for bean-countery reasons.

The lesson is simple: Don’t brag on your sales until it’s a done deal. When I was sixteen, I sold a novel to a tiny publisher. I immediately began bragging to everyone about, and was very likely insufferable for a very, very long time. Two years later, as I started college, the tiny publisher had gone out of business and had mailed back my manuscript, half-edited. And I had to start admitting to everyone that I wasn’t getting published after all.

It’s part of the game. The fact that the game’s rules were apparently written by a drunk and vengeful god is beside the point.

career, Writing

What Does Writing Look Like

Author: March 15, 2018 0 Comments

Whenever you go looking for writing advice, you’ll hear the phrase butt in chair a lot. Basically it’s an admonition/reminder that you can’t write a novel or a story if you don’t, you know, write. So you have to actually sit down with your butt in a chair and type or scribble, or nothing gets done.

This is true, and it’s decent advice as far as things go. But there’s another aspect or dimension to any writing advice. You have to ask yourself, what does “writing” look like?

It Looks Like a Lot of Work, is What It Looks Like

Because writing isn’t just tapping at a keyboard.

Now, I’ve literally written every single day of my life since I was about twelve years old. That’s a lot of days, and a lot of writing (though I should note that many, many writers started writing as kids and have written every day since, so this doesn’t make me special), and most of that involved typing or writing longhand to some degree. But there are other things that may not look like writing but which definitely are writing. For example:

  • Thinking. Thinking is writing, so sitting in a comfortable chair staring into space counts. As long as you’re actually thinking and not just daydreaming about shaving your cats and dressing them in tiny suits.
  • Reading. Everyone tells you to read widely in order to become a better writer, so reading counts. So does watching and listening, as long as you take some time at some point to process the things you consume and consider what they can teach you.
  • Talking. Talking about your work—or someone else’s work—is also writing. The concepts you are exposed to in conversation about the craft or business of writing are just as vital as anything else.
  • Revision. This might seem obvious, but some writers consider revision to be treading water—you’re not creating anything new, so it’s just busywork. But revision is often just as creative as a first draft.
  • Drinking. Just kidding. Or am I? Deranging your thoughts and experiencing a chemically-altered perspective can be part of the creative process. Or so I tell myself at 3AM when one more shot of whiskey seems like a terrible, awesome idea.

Writing int his context is sort of like expenses that you claim on your taxes: Just about anything can count. If it somehow, in some way, worms its way into your creative process at some point it counts as writing.

So “butt in chair” and similar advice doesn’t have to be taken literally. As long as you’re working on your writing in some sense, you’re doing the work, even if you didn’t type anything.

Now I have to go pitch a book about why Day Drinking is a great way to write a novel.

General, Writing

Build a Privacy Screen

Author: March 13, 2018 0 Comments

I’ve often discussed the fact that I’m pretty much the worst judge of my own material, as well as the most clueless person in the room when it comes to my own career. The books I thought would sell usually haven’t, and many of the ideas I thought were nuts when I first heard them have turned out to be the most lucrative decisions I ever made.

In other words, I’m a moron. The only reason for you to take my writing and career advice seriously that I can come up with is the fact that I’ve made every mistake, so you can definitely learn from my general drunken incompetence.

This also means that there’s always a disconnect between the work I’m doing and my feelings towards it and the work that has sold or hasn’t sold. For example, sometimes when working on a new novel I start thinking about whether it can sell—whether a publisher will like it and pay me money for it, and whether it actually appeals to readers assuming that happens. It’s tempting to start comparing it to older books that succeeded or failed, and before long you’re in your own head and the work suffers.

You have to build a Privacy Screen.

Or a Wall

What I mean by that is that you have to disconnect your creative work from your business. While there may be writers in the world who can combine their sense of the market with their creative endeavors (outlining and writing novels based on their sense of what will sell), it’s usually a losing proposition, at least for me. If it works for you, that’s great. It never works for me, and thinking about sales and publishers and contracts while I’m writing usually leads to a lot of dubious decisions in terms of plot, character, and literally everything else that goes into a book.

Instead, when I’m writing a new story, I don’t think about anything except the story part. Years later, after that story has sat for a while and browned up, been revised and had the dark edges trimmed off, that’s when I will tentatively wonder if it has any legs in an economic sense. The best part is, I grow disconnected from my own work over time. A few years after finishing something, it’s like someone else, a stranger, wrote it, so I can usually judge pretty fairly whether something has a chance or not.

Personally, I think this separation is necessary. If I start thinking about a story’s saleability while I’m still writing it, it’s just so easy to talk myself out of what I’m doing out of insecurity and panic.

The cure is obvious, though: Every time I start to think about selling a story while I’m still writing it, I drink until I black out. Usually when I wake up, the story is miraculously finished!

career, Writing

Publish or Perish

Author: March 9, 2018 0 Comments

Different writers take different approaches to their careers. There’s no wrong way to pursue your literary goals—some folks want bestsellers and big advances, some folks want more control over their own writing, some folks want to self-publish and some folks want to publish small, smart books. Some folks want to stick with short stories, some people want to spend decades working on a single, epic novel.

You do you. Personally, the only thing I don’t understand about other writers are people who don’t try to basically publish everything they’ve written that’s any good at all.

Paper the World

Me, I basically plan to publish everything I’ve ever completed, even the stuff that is pretty terrible, even the obvious juvenelia. I’ll put out a self-pub book that’s 5,000 pages long called SOMERS SUCK and it will just be all the awful stories I wrote plus several awful novels, plus all that poetry I wrote when I was in my tortured 20s. The world may never recover.

I’m only slightly kidding. I firmly believe that writing—or any creative endeavor—should ultimately lead to getting your work read or viewed or listened to by as large an audience as possible. I believe that if you wait for your work to be polished and perfect enough you will wait forever, for the simple reason that everything I wrote five years ago seems awful to me today, but that is a moving target. The stuff I’m writing today will seem awful five years from now. So judging your own work is a loser’s game—just get it out there and let the world judge you.

So, I submit most of the short stories I write. I have inflicted some mediocre novels on my agent. All in the hopes that maybe I’m wrong about how mediocre they are—after all, we’re the worst judges of our own work, as you may have noticed.

Oh, sure, there are some things that even I know are too terrible to submit. Slowly, short stories I once liked drop off the submission list as I rack up rejections and slowly realize they weren’t very good to begin with. And novels get retired too—although sometimes resurrected if I happen to see an opportunity. But I more or less intend to publish everything, and I put a lot of constant effort into that goal. I’ll likely never achieve it, but I think it’s useful as a career motivator.

Also, I’d love it if people in the future started wearing T-shirts that read SOMERS SUCK. Actually, that would be cool right now.

career, Writing

Writing in Real Time: Episode 2

Author: March 5, 2018 1 Comment

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.”

Fiction, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing, Writing Without Rules

Avoid “By the Way” Writing

Author: March 5, 2018 0 Comments

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.”

Ban the BTW

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.

General, Writing