Writing

If you’re pursuing any sort of professional writing career, kids, there’s something you need to get used to right now: The infinite nature of feedback.

When writers discuss feedback they often fixate on the immediate kind—the kind you seek out from beta readers, the kind you expect to get from an agent or editor. And those forms of feedback sure do exist and dealing with them in a reasonable manner is absolutely an essential part of writing professionally, but if you think it stops there you are fooling yourself.

Kids, feedback is forever.

Infinite Seas of Feedback

I wrote the first draft of my novel The Electric Church in 2004, and submitted it to a website that agreed to publish it. My wife read it, and offered me her assessment, so I revised it using some of her notes. I was assigned an editor, who worked on each chapter discretely, giving me oodles of great feedback.

I revised.

When the website crumbled, the book got picked up by Orbit books. Before sending it off, my agent had a gander and gave me feedback.

I revised.

My editor took the new draft, reviewed it, and sent me a 10-page edit letter.

I revised.

The book got published, and the revisions stopped … but not the feedback. First, there were reviews. Then there were personal notes from readers.

To this day, I get feedback on that book. We’re talking ten years after publication. People still occasionally review the book or send me emails telling me what they did or did not like about it.

Nothing wrong with any of it, of course, but you have to get ready for it: Feedback is forever. People will never stop telling you what you did wrong with your book, or what you did right. You simply have to get comfortable with criticism, because there is no discrete end to it. None. It’s forever.

Sort of like my epic guitar solos, which I routinely beam into space to greet alien races.

No one ever said plotting is easy. Telling a story that has truth and power as well as internal consistency and logic is something that every writer fails at more or less constantly; it’s part of the job. Your first, second, and possibly tenth draft of a story may not necessarily be airtight when it comes to plot and plot holes—or even coherent.

Sometimes what happens, of course, is that you reach a fork in the old plot and you have to decide what happens next. And this is where more than one talented writer has paused for several years or even decades, frozen in terror, because the next step in your plot might destroy all that has gone before if you’re not super careful about it. You have plenty of ideas, each of which takes your story in a different direction. But which one is right? Which one to choose?

Here’s a thought: Don’t choose. Write them all.

Pick-a-Path

You might have encountered a “pick-a-path” adventure book, otherwise known as “choose your own adventure” books. These tell a story that pauses at regular intervals to let the reader choose the next plot event. At the end of each chapter the reader has a choice: open the door, turn to page 34. Answer the phone, turn to page 109. Set the place on fire and hum a Van Halen song as you slow-walk away from the fireball, turn to page 344.

Sometimes the choice put you on the path to a “good” or “bad” ending. Sometimes it killed you. Part of the fun was trying to make your way through all of the possible plots—but the point is, the hard-working authors of those stories had to come up with all possible plotlines. So why not do the same?

If you’re having trouble seeing the next step in your story, you can Plot your way through it, Pants your way through it—or go with some Extreme Plotting and literally develop every possible branch of your story, all the way down to the ending. This can be a clarifying exercise that reveals the hidden weaknesses of some of your ideas, and it can also lead you to some surprising brilliancies that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.

And if it still doesn’t help you get to the end, you can always set the place on fire and walk away humming a Van Halen song. Personally, I recommend Running with the Devil.

Time, as they say, is one thing no one’s making nay more of. Well, they also say that about land, but as a sci-fi guy I’m pretty certain someday we’ll either terraform another planet or find one we can live on, so that possibly won’t be true forever. Time? Well, we might find a way to slide along the timeline a bit, sure, but at some point the Heat Death of the Universe is going to arrive and that’s all she wrote.

Writers know the icy touch of time better than most, because we’re almost always struggling to find time to work on our genius fictions in-between a day job, raising a family, staying out of jail on bogus public urination charges, and other annoyances like eating and sleeping and playing video games 16 hours a day. Writing a novel within one normal lifespan is hard enough. Writing more than one is mega-difficult, and writing novels on a regular basis, especially if you’re under contract, can be maddeningly difficult.

Writers try a lot of different approaches to achieve the disciplined productivity that requires. I’m always dismissive of word counts, of course, though I freely admit that forcing yourself to write a certain number of words every day works for a lot of people when it comes to productivity. My complaints about word count are out there; let it drift. Here’s another strategy that works for me: Microbursts.

Float Like a Butterfly

The Microburst is grabbing any extremely short period of time and writing. Five, ten minutes, scattered throughout the day. Sitting on the bus to work. Waiting for the boss to arrive at a conference call. Waiting on friends to arrive, or your coffee to be served—basically, using all those wasted moments that everyone’s life is cluttered with. We all get robbed of moments throughout our day, empty spaces in-between the bigger tasks. The Microburst approach simply makes use of those small periods of time to get a sentence, two sentences—a paragraph!—written.

It’s worked for me in the past, mainly in the zero-draft stage when having a 100% coherent plot isn’t always required, because it does mean there’s no time for reading back and checking notes. You find yourself with five minutes before lunch, you dive in and write whatever comes to mind for five minutes. If you pause to check your notes for the spelling of that character’s name, by the time you’re done your five minutes are gone.

It can be a hectic, crazy way to write, but that energy sometimes translates into the story, giving it a crackling sense of urgency otherwise lacking. And during periods where finding a solid hour or two to write involves staying awake for 72 hours straight and realizing everything you’ve written appears to have been poorly translated from the secret language you invented as a child, the Microburst approach adds up. Think about all the wasted time in your day, and whether it might just combine into a solid hour of writing.

Or, if you’re me, you might realize that more writing time probably just means less drinking time, and then you get sad.

I have a lot of trouble leaving things unfinished. I’m not sure where it comes from, but once I start something, I have a low-level compulsion to finish it, whether it’s my dinner or a bottle of wine or a novel.

This is great when it comes to home projects, because all I have to do is literally put one brushstroke of paint on the wall and I am locked in to painting the whole fucking house no matter what. No. Matter. What. It’s not so great when I over-order lunch and grimly force myself to eat all three hamburgers because by god I do not leave things unfinished.

It’s also great for the writing, because I finish all my writing projects, which makes for a lot of material. This is a good thing, and something more writers should engage in, because finishing a novel or story is a skill that will serve you well.

Marathon, Not a Sprint

Here’s the thing: Just about every creative project you ever engage in will lead you to a low point where you want to abandon it. The novel will get messy and you’ll wake up one night convinced that the premise is stupid and you’re screwing it up anyway. The story will lose its forward momentum and the brilliant twist ending will seem less and less brilliant as time goes by. Your rhyme scheme for the epic poem about your cats will sound harsh and uninviting to your ears. That sort of thing.

It’s soooo easy to give up. So easy to just close the file and shrug—oh well, it didn’t work out. And this is occasionally backed up by the times your writing is effortless, which happens for me sometimes. Sometimes I go from idea to completed novel in a few months and it’s like a dream. And when that happens it’s easy to imagine that’s how it should always happen.

Except, it doesn’t, really. Writing is usually gonna be hard work, and so learning how to force yourself to finish things is a skill you’re gonna be happy to have. And getting that skill starts right now: By finishing that crappy novel you’re ready to give up on even thought it’s 40,000 words and almost coherent. Get back in there and begin training yourself to finish stuff. It’ll pay off.

Noodle Incidents are one of the most powerful world-building tools you have at your disposal. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a Noodle Incident is a never-explained event in the past that the characters of a story refer to but never, ever flesh out. The term originated in an old Calvin and Hobbes comic and has been appropriated for literary technique discussion ever since.

Noodle Incidents are fantastic, because they have no limits, no shape, no beginning and no end. You refer to them with a cool, hilarious name, and you let the reader do the heavy lifting of filling in the blanks and shading the corners. Letting the reader do the work is actually the main benefit of Noodle Incidents, as the soaring imagination of your reader will always do a better job of fleshing out your half-baked Noodle Incidents then you will, and peppering your story with them gives the back story and world-building a mysterious, expansive boost you can’t match no matter how good a writer you happen to be.

Once you start using them, however, you have to stick to one Gremlin-like rule: Never explain them.

Day Old Pasta

The power of the Noodle Incident is in its mystery. The urge to explain them grows proportionally to the length of your story, the complexity of your universe, and how long you’ve been writing about a particular group of characters. In other words, the more you write about characters and their environments, the more desperate you can become for new material. And after you’ve told all the main stories, and even the side stories, the Noodle Incidents can start to look an awful lot like whole new veins of story material.

Except, because you’ve invited your readers to imagine them for so long, no matter what you come up with will never be as good as what they’ve come up with. You will lose that war, and losing an imagination war with your readers is not a good look. Let your Noodle Incidents do their work, and find another way to expand your story.

Of course, Noodle Incidents exist in real life. All of mine involve my pants, or lack thereof.

One of the easiest mistakes a writer can make in just about any genre, but especially in any story that features a mystery, is to assume that your mystery has to be mind-blowing and convoluted.

The fact is, most mysteries, once revealed, are pretty pedestrian. What makes a mystery work is that the author knows the solution and the reader doesn’t, and that gives the author incredible power. They can mess with the reader all they want. They can deceive, dissemble, and misdirect. And, most importantly, they can heavily imply that the mystery is a brilliant knot that only their weary protagonist can solve, when the mystery itself is actually pretty obvious once revealed.

Even in the most celebrated mysteries of all time, like the Holmes and Christie stories, the solution is usually a bit of a let down. Oh, they all killed him, you say? Oh, it was a poisonous snake placed in the room, you say? I’m not saying these aren’t clever, it’s just that once you know the secret the mystery is usually something perfectly rational and even obvious.

The trick is, your reader doesn’t know that.

The Obvious Child

That means that you really shouldn’t spend too much time trying to come up with a mind-blowing mystery that will shatter people’s psyches. The trick is, any crime becomes mysterious and enticing when it’s not explained. Start with a simple murder—say a husband killing his cheating wife—and then work backwards, erasing clues and coming up with coincidences. By the time you get to the beginning of the story, the mystery will be pretty thick and you’ll be able to sell your reader on its difficulty simply by dint of it being obfuscated.

The simple fact is, 99% of all mysteries are let downs. Once you see how a trick was done, it’s kind of disappointing. The joy isn’t in the solution, it’s in the journey—so stop wasting time trying to be too clever by half, and just work backwards.

Plus, make your detective a ventriloquist. There’s never been a ventriloquist detective. It’s genius. Like Jay-Z says, I’m just trying to give you a million dollars worth of game for $9.99.