Writing

Learn from Stuff You Hate

Author: August 25, 2017 0 Comments

One of the creakiest and most over-offered pieces of writing advice is to “read widely.” Not that it’s bad advice—it isn’t; it’s excellent advice. It’s just that like “show, don’t tell” it’s repeated so often, and so glibly, that many folks in the audience at panels just ignore it. “Read widely” is the “Wild Thing” of amateur guitarists: Everyone knows it, move along, nothing to see here.

The trick to reading widely isn’t to read a lot, or even to read outside your comfortable genres (although, yes to both those things). The real key to how reading widely can help you is to get into Advanced Reading Widely 405, a.k.a. learning good writing stuff from books you don’t actually enjoy.

Not My Books You SOBs

When people “read widely” they usually talk about getting outside their own genre or culture. And yes, if you’re a sci-fi writer, reading thrillers will give you lots of insight into pacing and plot. And if you’re, say, a middle-aged white cis American male who looks good in just about anything, reading books from other cultures and sub-cultures can open your eyes not just to different writing styles and techniques but different points of view that your characters can benefit from.

And that’s all great and necessarily. But the next level is to read books you don’t like, because what you’ll find is that genres and styles you despise have just as much to teach you—and those are lessons you’ll miss if you stay within the admittedly wider bubble of, you know, books you actually enjoy.

This can be true of wildly popular fictions that sell by the truckload but leave you completely baffled as to their appeal: Reverse-engineering that appeal might hold lessons for you, whereas smugly assuming that the millions of people reading those books are morons doesn’t do anything for you or your writing. And if a book is boring the pants off of you that doesn’t mean the author doesn’t pull off an impressive trick with their narrator, or have a dazzling sequence in the middle overflowing with ideas.

At it’s most basic, sometimes reading a terrible book just inspires you to steal the plot and try your own version of it in order to make it, you know, actually interesting (in your opinion).

Of course, reading widely also runs the risk of encountering a book so perfect and amazing you just give up on your own shabby efforts and just walk into the ocean, only to wake up on the beach being resuscitated by the teenage lifeguard and then mocked as you stagger home. Or is that just me?

General, Writing

Leave Yourself Hanging

Author: August 23, 2017 0 Comments

Inspiration is a tricky thing. I think every writer has had the unfortunate experience of having what seems like a fantastic idea that then melts like an ice cream in the summer sun—the more you try to pull it onto the page or screen, the less solid the idea becomes, until it’s gone and you’re weeping while sipping from an unmarked jug of homemade wine.

It’s bad enough when this happens at the outset, and you can’t even get a story going. What’s worse is when you’re deep into a story and suddenly the ideas run dry. For me, this happens most often after I tie off a Big Moment or a challenging sequence in the plot; I hit CTRL-ENTER to start a fresh page for the next chapter or scene and … nothin’.

One little trick I’ve developed to guard against this is simple enough: I always stop writing when I still have one idea for what happens next.

Peeking Around the Corner

I have a need to finish things. It might be a mental disorder, the science is unsettled, but when I begin a story I have a burning need to finish it even if it’s terrible. This compulsion starts off weak and gets stronger as I progress; I can quit a story easily enough when I’m 300 words in, but when I’m 10,000 words it’s almost impossible, because I know that with some shitty writing kung-fu I can turn it into a half-assed novella and call it done.

When I was a younger writer, living off of lite beer and hot dogs, one side-effect of this compulsion was that I would keep working at night until I’d finished a scene, finished however far into the future I could see on that particular story. And then the next day I’d wake up hungover and pantsless in some dumpster, creep home and try to pick up the story again, but since I’d in a sense “finished” the night before, my brain would deliver up a succession of flatlines.

Today, I always stop just shy of “finished.” In other words, I stop working on a scene when I still have a button that I know will go on the end, or before I’ve written the final exchange with some revelation. In short, I stop while I can still see the path ahead of me, even if for only a few steps.

The effect is simple: When I start working next, I can immediately dive in and start working. I don’t have to come up with my next move, because I already know it. This doesn’t guarantee that the inspiration will just flow from there, but my track record has been a lot better since I started to leave myself hanging a bit every night.

My improved inspiration may also have something to do with the introduction of leafy greens into my diet, of course, but no one’s done any studies on the effects of scurvy on creativity so, again—the science is unsettled.

General, ideas, plot, Writing

Bruises Build Character

Author: August 21, 2017 0 Comments

My brother and I were once discussing movies we love and turned to the subject of Raiders of the Lost Ark, casually getting into why Indiana Jones was so appealing (aside from the innate charisma of Harrison Ford, of course), and I suggested one reason was the fact that Ford played Jones as a plausibly human hero who actually got hurt. Action films often have the hero surviving things that would kill real people—not only survive them, but walk away unscathed. You see thing like people being shot and still being able to fight on. I referred to Indiana Jones as Johnny Take-a-Beating, and that’s become shorthand between us for a protagonist who actually suffers when the plot hurts them.

I’m currently reading a sci-fi novel whose main character is basically indestructible. There are plot reasons for this having to do with their nature and the technology surrounding them, but just because you can come up with a reason to make your main character a tiny god in your fictional universe doesn’t make that a good writing decision. It’s always lazy writing.

Lazy, Lazy for Loving You

It’s always tempting to make your protagonist indestructible. One reason is it streamlines your storytelling, because no matter what kind of pickle you place them in, they can break free. Another reason is the simple fact that having your main character kick ass all over the place is thrilling, for a time; you can set them up against all sorts of strawmen and comically evil characters and it’s kind of fun as a reader to imagine having the power to instantly master any situation through insane violence that would kill any normal person.

The trick is, if you set your character up as indestructible, it should be leading to a fall. Strip them of their power, remove their technological crutches, and have a plot reason for it all. Not only is having a previously super-powered character suddenly vulnerable kind of thrilling, it can turn all the dumb tractionless violence of the early story into set up for the real payoff.

Otherwise, all you have is a boring character who can’t be harmed. If you can’t be harmed, nothing means anything. It’s like revealing that the entire book has been a dream, so joke’s on you if you thought any of it had consequences.

Plus, I hate reading about people who can run and jump and fight without having to sit down and rest all the time. It’s kind of virtually exhausting.

characters, Writing

I Am Jack’s Lack of Control

Author: August 18, 2017 0 Comments

Writing is a funny thing, a private act of artistic invention whose endgame involves trying to convince everyone in the goddamn universe to read your words. You sit for years in a lonely room, typing away, and then you run around all crazy-eyed begging folks to read what you’ve done.

And then they do, and immediately get it all wrong and subvert your vision.

You people have stood in my way long enough. I’m going to clown college!

If you’re writing a novel, you must on some level expect and desire it to be read. If not, if you’re planning to write THE END and then burn the manuscript (and then the computer, and then the printer, and then the server farm where your cloud files were stored) then you’re either insane or the baddest badass performance artist of all time, badder even than the guys who literally burned a million pounds a few years ago.

The rest of us write believing that someone’s gonna read it. But we also write in an attempt to control that experience, don’t we? We intend the reader to see certain things, to take away certain things.

The problem? Once we hit PUBLISH, we lose control over that. And you have to be good with that.

Sure, you could get into endless arguments with folks about their interpretations of your work. You could berate people for not “getting” it, or lecture them on how to read your work, but ultimately, that’s supposed to be baked-in. Ultimately, people get to own your work and decide what they think of it. And ultimately, let’s face it: Someday you won’t be here to argue or lecture, and your work will mean whatever the fuck the future literature students of the world think it means—and as a former literature student, I can assure you some of those ideas are gonna be crazy.

And you’re going to have to just take it, because that’s how all of this works. You send out ideas, people ruin and destroy them, and hopefully some tiny kernel survives.

That’s why I plan to be frozen when I die, so when they cure death I can come back and lecture everyone about what my books really mean.

General, Writing

Points for Style

Author: August 16, 2017 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned before how non-original your basic ideas must be. Just about every creator pivots from something that’s already been done, for the simple reason that everything’s been done. No matter what your idea for a novel is, chances are it’s been done before, in some way.

So, it’s not the premise itself, it’s how you write it—the style and execution. And you get a lot of points for style. Rather than a superficial metric, style is actually a pretty important aspect of writing, and it can be the difference between an idea being seen as tired and over-done or being seen as exciting and new.

Use the Force

Case in point: Star Wars.

There’s really not a single new idea in Star Wars, and to his credit George Lucas has been pretty up-front about that. It’s a mash up of a bunch of ideas that would have been common enough for someone born in the 1940s to have encountered, starting with sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and incorporating stuff from 1950s Westerns and other sci-fi classics like Metropolis. It’s a re-hash from beginning to end, and yet it was a huge hit and now influences subsequent generations.

The reason? Style.

Lucas took the raw materials of his influences and gussied them up in a look and sensibility—not to mention editing and screenwriting—that was wholly new and fresh at the time. The set and costume design, the music, the look and feel was something no one had seen before, and thus made a pretty shopworn plot sing.

In short, you get points for style. A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t telling a story that’s revolutionary, it’s telling a story in a revolutionary way. So don’t get too hung up on the idea of having an idea that’s somehow so unique it does all the heavy lifting for you. There are only so many stories in the universe, and they’ve pretty much all been told. There’s an infinite way to tell those stories, and that’s what you should be focusing on.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the lab to develop new ways of drinking whiskey. I’ve got an idea involving a pheasant and a trampoline that I don’t think’s been tried before.

General, ideas, Writing

Forgetting as a Writing Tool

Author: August 14, 2017 0 Comments

Ideas are funny things. They come at random moments, and often prove to be so fragile they melt away the moment you take a good, hard look at them. While ideas aren’t worth much by themselves, they are the spark that can ignite the writing kindling and turn into a novel, so they’re kind of necessary. But anyone who’s tried to write a novel knows that ideas can be difficult to control—they’re slippery, and often prove more elusive than you’d like.

I’m not the first person to think of this, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true: The best thing to do with an idea for a novel is to forget it immediately.

What Was I Saying?

It seems a little crazy at first, but it works, trust me. Your first instinct when you have what you think is a great idea is to capture it, to nail it down. If you don’t make some notes, you’ll lose it.

What happens then? Well, you work on it, develop it, and eventually—whether days or weeks or years later—you realize whether or not it’s really worth your time. And if it isn’t worth your time, then all that effort you just sank into it was a waste.

What I’ve found to be true is that instead of trying to capture that idea, you should immediately try to forget it. Just put it out of your mind. Inevitably, the ideas that have real power behind them—the ideas that have the potential to be great books—will come back to you. A week, a month, a year later they’ll be triggered and you’ll remember them. What seems to happen in the mean time is that your subconscious continues to work on the idea, developing it and strengthening it. If the idea doesn’t come back to you, it very likely wasn’t worth your time.

I don’t have anything scientific to put behind this. In my experience when I jump on an idea immediately in a surfeit of enthusiasm, it usually goes nowhere. When I put it out of mind and it returns, it works.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a heavy day of forgetting things and drinking beer to get back to.

ideas, Writing

Get Used to It

Author: August 7, 2017 0 Comments

Writing can be a brutal career. Not brutal in the sense of getting shot at, or breathing in coal dust, or having your loved ones kidnapped by supervillains and held hostage while you battle enormous mechas to save a city from destruction, but, you know, brutal. There’s a lot of rejection, even when you’ve attained a certain level of success. I’m no Stephen King, but I’ve published nine books with the tenth on the way, a few dozen short stories, and I supply about 67% of all the content on the Internet related to books. Yet my career is still soaked in rejection, because that’s the nature of the business.

First there’s my own inner rejection, when I suddenly realize that the story I’m working on stinks, and tell myself to give up or re-work it. That’s always a pretty crappy moment. Then there’s the regular, run-of-the-mill rejection when a beta reader or my agent reads something and tells me in no uncertain terms that it’s just not that good. There are short story rejections, heavy revisions from editors, rejected pitches for freelance stuff, bad reviews—it goes on and on. Rejection comes in many forms.

It’s part of the game, and you have to let it roll off your back. Which is why you need to push your work out there, no matter what.

Can’t Hide

I have a writing acquaintance who has rarely submitted work, either for potential sale or even just for feedback. He writes and writes and never shows his work. And now I suspect that he’s waited so long that sending out work and getting feedback is terrifying.

This is why you should submit your work, start submitting early, and submit it often. Because you’re gonna get kicked in the crotch by negative feedback and rejection, and the more you get, the more inured to it you’ll become. I got my first rejection letter when I was twelve years old. The more you try to avoid that sort of negative reaction, the harder it gets to move forward.

So, stop waiting for perfection. Just submit your story, your novel, your novelty rap song. Take your licks and get used to it. The big mistake some folks make is assuming that if they stay under cover and work at their craft, when they finally do emerge they’ll have diamond-sharp writing to show that will be critique-proof. There’s no such thing. If you submit often and recklessly, you’ll get a lot of rejection—and soon enough rejection will just be something that happens, a tool you can use to improve or learn or make a sale.

Unless I’m the only one getting all these rejections. In which case, don’t tell me.

career, General, Writing

The Han Solo Rule of Technology

Author: August 1, 2017 0 Comments

Research continues to be the great bugbear of many writers’ lives. Writers in general trend to suffer from pretty severe Impostor Syndrome because we just sit around making shit up instead of doing literally anything else, and so there’s a certain sense that we have to become literal experts in anything we write about, so we can take on all comers when someone complains about the way we imagine space travel in our interstellar ice pirate epic.

This is tosh, of course. When writing sci-fi and dealing with speculative technology or science—even stuff based on real-world science—the key is similar to lying. As long as you believe it, you’re golden. In other words, look to Han Solo in Star Wars and worry less about scientific accuracy and more about sounding like it all makes sense.

The Spaces Between

In the original Star Wars, if you recall, Han Solo brags that his ship the Millennium Falcon is the ship that did the “Kessel Run” in 12 parsecs. The Kessel Run is a great example of a Noodle Incident—a cool-sounding feat that is never actually explained. Why is the Kessel Run famous? Why is speed important? You can imagine answers to those questions, but you don’t have them.

Now, saying you did the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs sounds pretty cool and impressive, especially when delivered with Harrison Ford’s trademark sarcastic charm. But it’s meaningless. A Parsec is a measurement of distance, not time, and it isn’t even very commonly used. So Han Solo dropped some grade-A gibberish on us.

(Note: Some super fans have twisted themselves into knots trying to argue that it actually does make sense, but these arguments are by and large kind of dumb.)

So, the lesson here is simple: Don’t sweat the science. Take a page from George Costanza from Seinfeld, who once famously advised that something is not a lie if you believe it to be true. Your science doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to sound good. Making it sound good is the challenge, here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tend to my quantum particle fields.

General, Science Fiction & Fantasy, worldbuilding, Writing

Write a History

Author: July 31, 2017 0 Comments

There are times in every fiction writer’s life when they fantasize about writing one of those experimental novels that boldly go against all literary tradition—for example, a novel without characters, because characters are difficult, complicated imaginary beings. They often arrive in our stories flat and empty, and stubbornly refuse to become interesting no matter how much effort we put into them.

Sometimes characters fill out and become interesting through the organic process of telling the story and giving them something to do. Sometimes they never rise above the mechanics of their plot roles. When the latter happens, you can end up with a terrific story that has a surprising and interesting plot but no believable people to make your reader care about that plot.

Or, sometimes, you have the opposite scenario: Characters who pop off the page or screen as living, breathing personalities you’re certain your readers will want to spend time with, but your story meanders pointlessly. In either case, one way to jolt things into working order is to step away from the main plot and write up some history.

The Secret Histories

Recently George R.R. Martin broke hearts and shattered minds when he announced that he might not get The Winds of Winter out the door this year, but 2018 would see the publication of 2 Game of Thrones-related works, one being a history of Westeros called Fire and Blood. While fans tore their shirts over the steady delay of the sixth A Song of Ice and Fire book, I wonder if Martin needed to step back from his story to write that history as an exercise.

A history of your fictional world, or biographies of your fictional characters, don’t ever have to see the light of day. But they can clarify motivations, codify patterns of behavior, and give you heaps of material that inform your characters, fleshing them out, and give you hints as to where your story needs to go. History repeats, so if your secret histories yield up some interesting Noodle Incident, maybe bringing it into the main plot will move your story past your block.

A secret history or biography could be a few paragraphs jotted down, a complete other book-length work, or something in-between. I used to write lengthy histories of my epic fantasy universes, often with a brusque, academic tone, simply seeking to get ideas on paper, and it worked wonders for convincing myself that my fictional universe was real, and the characters I’d populated it with were living, breathing folks.

Next time you’re struggling, step back and write a history. And then pour yourself a drink. Not for any particular reason, just because drinking is fun.

characters, Novels, plot, Writing

The Lingering Joy of Edit Letters

Author: July 28, 2017 0 Comments

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.

General, Writing