Writing

The Art of Ripping Off

Author: September 20, 2017 0 Comments

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all authors steal from each other. That’s art, really; you build on what’s gone before, chronicling the changes in society and human understanding by taking a work and playing with it from your own unique perspective. It’s only stealing if you don’t transform it somehow, if you don’t add to it.

That’s writing 101: Good writer’s steal. The thing is, the first stage of transforming something into your own unique work is very similar to simply ripping someone off.

The Green-Eyed Monster

The creative process is 99% driven by jealousy. The other 1% is a combination of things, including greed, the pure joy of creativity, and fear of monsters, but mostly it’s jealousy. Writers are the most jealous creatures in the world. Publish a book to acclaim? We hate you, because our books are smarter. Publish a book to great sales? We hate you, because people clearly lack the taste and wisdom to choose our books over yours. Writers may smile when they shake your hand, but we are black holes of hatred and jealousy.

When we read a book that’s really, really good—or really, really popular, or, god help us, both—we instantly start mining it for bits we can steal. And if the book really grabs us as something great, our first attempts at replicating it will be very, very close to simply ripping the book off.

And that’s okay.

Writing a pastiche of something else is a great way to figure out its secrets. Writing a story that is essentially someone else’s story with a few flourishes is like taking an engine apart and then putting it back together to learn how it works. At the end, you’ll have a small pile of parts left over—mysterious and ominous. But the engine, maybe, still runs despite that. It’s mysterious, but when that happens, you’ve taken your first step to owning the ideas and making them your own.

You keep taking it apart and putting it back together again. Parts get left over. If the story still runs, you put in new parts of your own to replace them. Repeat. Eventually, you’ve got a story that hums and purrs and there’s so many of your parts in there it’s no longer something you ripped off, it’s something you transformed.

That’s how it’s done. Although, please don’t take the word “parts” too literally.

ideas, Writing

The Slow Down

Author: September 18, 2017 0 Comments

Creativity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who has composed a story knows the thrill of having made something, of having pulled together a fictional universe from thin air, using nothing more than words. It’s a form of magic.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work involved. And it’s usually low-paying, soul-killing work.

If you’re a writer, you know the feeling. You start off with an explosion of an idea in your head. You’re excited about it, and the universe that has taken form in your brain expands quickly, all hot gases and explosions of inspiration. Before you know it you’ve written a few thousand words, drawn some maps, and conducted a thorough casting call of the best actors in the world to play your characters.

That’s the easy part. The Hot Gas Expansion part of writing a novel. At some point, your Big Bang will cool off, expansion will slow, and you’ll run into a bit of trouble getting through the middle part. In fact, if you don’t put in enough work to keep all your galaxies and planets spinning, your fictional universe might experience Heat Death and start to collapse into a Big Crunch.

I wonder how many space metaphors we can cram in here?

The Slow Down

Almost every writer hits a wall after that initial burst of inspiration—or, if not a wall, a Slow Down. This is inevitable when you stop dealing with a rush of ideas and start trying to organize them into a plot, characters, and a stable universe in which to place them. It can be a frustrating moment for a writer, because you go rather suddenly from rushing along, having fun to crawling along, in the dark, with sweat stinging your eyes.

Pushing through the Slow Down is the only way you’ll get that book written, usually, but there are plenty of different ways to get through it. You can just push and push, of course, pouring words onto the page laboriously until the damn thing is done. Or you can step away and take a break, and come back when you’ve got the itch back. You can skip ahead and write a scene in the future of your plot because it’s more fun. Or you can decide that if you’re working this hard to write the scenes, your readers will have to work that hard to read them and you’ll scrap everything you’ve done since you hit the Slow Down and start again.

The key is to try to push through, because Slow Downs happen and they don’t necessarily mean your story is no good. A Slow Down might mean that, but to find out you have to put the work in first. And the key to working through Slow Downs is to know they’re coming, no matter how intense your excitement is at first.

If you’re very unlucky, like me, you might actually wind up with several WIPs in Slow Down Mode simultaneously. Which is when you just go on a bender.

General, Novels, Writing

When to Give Up

Author: September 15, 2017 0 Comments

We’re all gonna die someday. I know, I was pretty shocked when the reality of this hit me around age 28 or so; before then on some level I’d assumed I’d live forever through some fortunate combination of science!, the preservative qualities of alcohol, and my own specialness. Realizing that literally none of those things was going to apply was sobering, in the sense that it was the exact opposite of sobering in that I immediately launched a three-year bender.

But I digress: You’re going to die. And before you die, there’s a chance of a lengthy period of dotage. Which means you only have so many useful creative years in you, and there’s no way to know how many—which in turn means you only have so many books and stories in you. That means the biggest decision you have to make every day is what to work on, because your creative energies are a limited resource. And that leads to the big question: When should you give up on a book?

The answer is, you’re asking the wrong question.

Change the Conversation

We’ve all been there: You’re six months and tens of thousands of words into a new project, and it isn’t working. Or you’ve finished a draft, and no one likes it. The question looms: Should you spend another year trying to make it work? Or cut your losses and move on to something new?

There’s no need to be so final. A rough draft will remain just as rough if you let it sit in a drawer for five years, and it will have the same potential to be great and marketable a few years later. A draft that gives you the fits because it’s 60% awesome and 40% confusion and failure will still have that 60% awesome part if you come back to it. And a book that everyone likes but no one wants to buy might surprise you with a sale before you know it.

So the question should never be “Is it time to give up on this book.” Instead, ask if your time would be better spent on something else right now. Leave yourself open to going back to a book. It might seem silly, but the psychological impact can be huge. Tell yourself a book is dead and on some level your brain stops working over the problems. Tell yourself you’re just switching focus for a while allows the invisible hand that controls you (otherwise known as your muse) to keep sweating over that problematic story while you do other, less-frustrating things.

In other words, go full Winston Churchill and never surrender. Also, drink heavily and smoke cigars, and cultivate a speaking voice that is 50% lava and 50% sneering disdain, also like Churchill.

career, General, Novels, Writing

Don’t Compare

Author: September 13, 2017 0 Comments

It’s pretty natural to let “grass is greener” syndrome creep into most aspects of our lives; people put a lot of effort into hiding their disappointments and frustrations and trumpeting their success. The age of social media has made this even easier, because you don’t even have to invite people physically into your home to show off your material success—you just Instagram it, with the bonus of being able to carefully curate, light, and edit what you show.

This is just as true for the writing community. Authors will blast out their covers, their buy links, their humlebraggy links to Publisher’s Lunch, and edit out the lengthy edit letters, the discussions with their editors about low sales, and their dissatisfactions with their current WIP. So it’s easy to start thinking that other writers are doing it the right way, and to start comparing your process, style, and creative sensibility to everyone else.

You have to resist the urge to compare yourself, though, because that leads only to Literary Madness (similar to Space Madness, but more book-oriented).

Keeping Your Head Down

The simple fact is, there are no shortcuts. Even a writer who is objectively more successful than you in terms of sales or deals is likely building on years and years of sustained effort while omitting some of their failures or setbacks. It’s impossible to map your own writing journey onto someone else’s because you’ll never know the true level of effort they’ve put in, the true number of failures both real and imagined, or how much luck was involved. And luck is always involved, to some extent.

So, instead, keep your head down. It’s one thing to learn from other writers, it something else to compare yourself and constantly change your approach to the art and business of writing to match up with someone you see as being more successful. Do the work. Write the drafts, revise the drafts, send out the pitches. Submit the short stories, enter the contests, go to the pitch slams. Do the work, and most importantly: Do the work your way.

Of course, Literary Madness comes in many forms. For example, right now I’m wearing pants made out of papier-mâché paperback book pages.

career, Writing

Episodic Writing

Author: September 11, 2017 0 Comments

Every writer knows the feeling: You have the idea, you can feel its potential. You have a vague structure for the story, you have characters, you have an endgame. Whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter, you start work on the book and suddenly find yourself in a dark wood, uncertain of how to proceed. You have everything except a clear way forward to the bulk of your plot.

This can happen no matter what your process is, or how well-developed your idea/universe is. Sometimes writers think if they spend a year building the backstory, character bios, and universe they’ll be in a better position to write the story—and sure, that sometimes works. But no matter how well you know the universe of your book, you can still find yourself stuck at any point in the actual writing. Your characters stand around impatiently, waiting for you to figure out what’s next.

The problem sometimes lies in the need to always advance the plot. The advice that all the action in your story should in some way move your plot forward isn’t bad, but it can be misleading. Because sometimes the best way to advance your plot is to not advance the plot and engage in some episodic storytelling.

A Very Special Episode

Episodic storytelling is when you put aside the overarching plot and just have your characters interact with the universe you’ve built. It could be a series of self-contained stories, or even a longer mini-arc, or possibly a series of vignettes that don’t necessarily resolve into a coherent narrative. The point is to step away from your main plot and just explore.

In role-playing games and sandbox video games, there’s the concept of the Side Quest. You play the game and non-player characters (NPCs) will approach you with a mission. These side quests aren’t necessary to win the game, and don’t necessarily push you through the storyline of the game, but they allow you to experience aspects of the world, gain experience and capabilities, and extend the playing time.

That’s what episodic writing can do. Spend some time just wandering with your characters like the A-Team, getting into scrapes and learning about your universe. It’ll surprise you how it leads you back to your plot when you’re ready, and when you’ve finished a draft you can easily excise the episodes because they’re unrelated to the plot—or keep them in, possibly linking them up to the main plot. Worst case scenario is you have a lot of sections in your book that need to be removed—but chances are these episodes will contribute something to the overall story while enabling you to get there in the first place.

plot, worldbuilding, Writing

The Inverse Rule of Writing Fun

Author: September 8, 2017 0 Comments

I wrote my first novel when I was about twelve years old, and as a kid what I most remember about writing was the rush of constant ideas I was excited about. I wrote constantly, churning out novels and stories at a pretty prolific pace.

Part of this was a function of my ignorance and immaturity—everything seemed like a brilliant new idea to me because I wasn’t aware how much had already been done. And when I encountered things in other people’s writing, it was always a shocking new concept for me, which fueled my ability to just run off and bang out 50,000 words in a few weeks as I played with my new writing toy.

Another aspect of being immature and thus being able to write at a really fast clip was the fact that I wrote for myself. I didn’t bother revising; I finished an idea and moved on to the next. It was fun and exhilarating, but didn’t really result in material I could submit or sell. The more you work to polish, the more you work to produce writing that can actually interest people, the less fun it gets.

That Spark

Even today, my novels and stories always begin with that spark of excitement. It always seems like an idea no one else has ever had, or a technique no one else has ever tried. Usually, I’m wrong about that, because I’m kind of an idiot, but all that matters is that writing still begins in a molten moment of intense excitement for me.

That writing is fun. I can still tear through thousands of words in a few days, driven by excitement. But the closer your story gets to being really good, the slower things get, and the less fun it all becomes. That’s the strangest thing about writing: The inverse rule. The better your story gets the more like work writing becomes. If you’re lucky, you manage to balance this out—writing never quite becomes a chore, because you retain just enough excitement to keep pushing yourself along. But sometimes, usually when I get, say, the fourth round of revision notes back from an editor, you lose that balance and it just becomes work. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

Keeping yourself motivated when you’re way past that initial phase of intense joy is the piece of the puzzle most people struggle with. Writing is art, it’s creativity, and so it seems like it should always be exciting, and if you’re not excited you must be doing something wrong. But that’s not always the case, and navigating the Inverse Rule is the difference, often, between selling a novel and, you know, not selling a novel.

When it comes to dealing with the Inverse Rule, here’s a pro tip: Alcohol helps.

career, General, Writing

Leave Room for the Swerve

Author: September 6, 2017 0 Comments

A few weeks ago there was a leaked letter from George R.R. Martin to his publisher detailing his original outline for A Song of Ice and Fire. As Martin still has two enormous novels to go in his series and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones has become quite alarming in the insane plot department, there’s a lot of speculation regarding Martin’s most famous fictional universe, and aspiring novelists who want to craft their own fantasy worlds are paying close attention—or should be, because this is basically real-life writing craft spooling out right before your eyes.

The main lesson from the leaked letter is that whether you consider yourself a Plotter, Pantser, or Plantser, you should be ready for the swerve, because the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

The Swerve

Put simply, it doesn’t matter how meticulously you plot your books, or how in control you feel or how in tune with your instincts. George R.R. Martin is a pro, and his outline for ASoIaF demonstrates his sharp, professional approach to planning a series of fantasy novels. At the time he imagined the series as a trilogy. This was in 1993 or so, you know, twenty-four years ago. How innocent it all seems now.

The point is, Martin got into his story, and it swerved on him. The Swerve happens, and it happens when you least expect it. Simple stories get complex, stories you initially think will require sixteen dense volumes peter out after 30,000 words. The Swerve is something any novelist has to be ready for, because you’re never as in control of your story as you think you are. There’s a Shadow Writer inside all of us, living in our subconscious, and the Shadow Writer is always busy churning things in unexpected ways.

Putting in a ton of work and then watching your novel swerve out of your grasp is just the cost of doing business. Sometimes the Swerve works for you, sometimes it works against you. All you can do as a writer is accept the fact that it’s coming, and try to be ready.

Me, I’ve always been good with the Swerve because a similar thing happens every time I walk into a bar thinking I’ve to have three beers and no more.

General, Novels, plot, Writing

Hurry Up and Wait

Author: September 4, 2017 0 Comments

Writing anything is a lengthy process that requires a lot of patience and diligence. One of the biggest challenges that new writers face is dealing with the adjustment between excitement and difficulty that invariably sets in after the initial rush of creative energy fades.

We all know that feeling: You start off with a flash of inspiration, you sail into the first few hundred words or the first stages of plotting in a frenzy of excitement. And then you stall. Your narrative starts to get complex, a paragraph seems weak and uninspired to you and all of a sudden every word seems suspect, your plotting hits a wall around chapter 20 and you can’t see any way to bridge the gap.

It takes time to right the ship. It takes time to figure out what went wrong or if anything actually did go wrong and you’re not just doubting yourself for no reason. And then it takes time to link everything back up.

It takes time to write the first draft. Time to get feedback on it, to let it marinate in your Drawer of Dubious Ideas until you’re somewhat certain it’s not half-bad. Then it takes time to revise, to polish. Then it takes time to convince someone it’s worth going out on, or to convince readers that your new book is worth their money.

The Long and Winding Road (Is a Terrible Song)

It all takes enormous amounts of time. I first had the idea for Writing Without Rules sitting in my agent’s office sipping bourbon with her in February of 2016. We didn’t finalize the proposal until October, and I didn’t start writing the book until January 2017. I didn’t have a final draft to send to the publisher until May, more than a year after the initial idea. I still haven’t seen copy-edits, so the book’s not done yet, and the pub date is officially May 2018—more than two years after the initial idea.

And this has actually been one of the fastest roads from idea to published book I’ve ever experienced.

This is one reason why chasing trends is fruitless. Even if you’re in the habit of slapping unrevised, raw zero-draft books onto your DIY digital platforms of choice, the delay between your inspiration and delivery of a salable book is just too long. I don’t know about you, but the fastest I’ve ever written a complete novel from idea to THE END was three months, and I was a much younger man and the novel itself was garbage. Have brilliant novels been written much faster? Of course they have—and yet there’s always the delays of review, revision, and the other hard work.

In other words, settle in, it’s going to be a long ride.

career, General, Writing

Tip: Other People are Not Alien Creatures

Author: September 1, 2017 0 Comments

One of the most important things a writer can develop is a healthy skepticism about their own assumptions and worldview. We’re all living in bubbles, in a sense, and people naturally assume their successes are the result of their own virtues—that luck, privilege, and circumstance have nothing or very little to do with it. Realizing where your own assumptions come from doesn’t mean you change your mind about everything, but it does mean you can analyze yourself—which means you’ll be better able to analyze your characters.

Oddly, this sort of awareness and analysis can be paralyzing when it comes to writing characters in your fiction, because the more you realize how much of your worldview is the product of upbringing, environment, and experiences, the more you realize how little you understand your fellow human beings. In other words, the more you understand yourself, the less you understand other people.

The Other

Now, this is healthy, because assuming everyone else thinks and experiences life exactly the way you do is what gives us the gift of our Drunk Uncles telling us that Donald Trump is our political savior. You should have a healthy sense of doubt and terror when writing about characters that are drawn from walks of life other than your own. But it’s a mistake to go too far and assume that just because someone is a different gender, race, or culture they’re so completely unknowable that you can’t write them. It’s a mistake for two reasons: One, you’re wrong about that, and two, it leads you to write characters who are just you in different clothes, which is kind of boring.

This isn’t to say that you can sit down and write about someone utterly different from yourself without doing some work to get it right. But people all over the world have similar concerns, so it’s a mistake to assume that, for example, women are alien creatures with incomprehensible motivations. All humans share some basics, and humans within a specific culture share even more basics. Writing the Other isn’t always easy, and there are plenty of ways to go wrong, but the easiest way to go wrong is to assume that people who don’t look like you or live where you live might as well come from Jupiter and eat like Brundlefly.

Back in my college days, of course, a surfeit of lite beer meant I did sometimes eat like Brundlefly. Let’s not discuss it, ever.

characters, Writing

Managing Tone

Author: August 30, 2017 0 Comments

Writing is a superpower in the way you can reshape your own past, present and future. I think most writers have used their own past humiliations, failures, and arrests as fodder for wish-fulfillment stories; I know I have. Plenty of my fiction, especially my short fiction, is drawn directly from what we’ll call Pants Drop Moments when I managed to make a complete ass out of myself through incompetence (emotional or practical), arrogance, or a tasty combination of the two. I take that greasy kernel of shame inside me and transform it into a story by writing about what I could or should have done, and mapping out how to get there.

Or, yes, sometimes the story is just retelling the humiliation without the wish-fulfillment, which can be depressing as hell, but sometimes makes for a good story.

A moire subtle way of wish-fulfillment in writing is making your characters impossibly glib and easy with their words—the Chandler Binging of characterization. It’s tempting to make your characters effortlessly smart and funny, always coming up with perfect responses and quips. And there’s nothing wrong with that—smart characters who always nail their lines are fun, for you and the reader. But you have to be careful, because chasing the Rule of Cool with your characters’ dialog can lead you into an abyss of tone dissonance.

The Abyss of Tone Dissonance

The problem with impossibly clever characters is you can wind up with scenes where they are supposedly having Very Serious Discussions but they can’t help by spout sarcastic, clever bon mots endlessly, undercutting the seriousness of your scene. A little clever goes a long way, after all, and if your character can’t stop laying down the savage quips, it becomes annoying and exhausting, like that one guy in your bar-hopping group who’s obviously on cocaine and can’t shut the fuck up already.

Tone dissonance can also be a sign that you don’t have faith in your own work, and believe you have to jazz things up with some sick one-liners. You have to be careful that your character’s zingers are naturalistic—appropriate for the emotional weight of the scene—and that they have flow. If they’re dropping like anchors in the middle of conversations, you’re working too hard, and your readers will notice, and the one golden rule of fiction is to hide all the hard work.

Of course, if you’re basing your character on me, then naturally I do have something clever to say about everything, all the time, and yes, it’s done me more harm than good.

characters, dialogue, Writing