Writing

Writing for Yourself

Some of you might know I used to publish a zine, The Inner Swine. For nearly 20 years I self-published four issues a year, 25,000 words an issue.

What was in it? Short stories. Occasional poems. And a lot of essays about whatever happened to be on my mind that month, that day, that year. Some of it has stood the test of time, some of it I’m embarrassed about. It was a lot of fun, though, and I learned a lot about writing simply by, you know, writing. More or less constantly for 20 years, because you don’t crank out a hefty novel’s worth of material every year if you slack off.

I never expected to make any money from the zine, or gain any sort of recognition. It was just self-indulgent and fun. I had a few hundred subscribers, was in a few stores. One of the main things I learned from the zine was this: Sometimes you have to write just for yourself.

The Brand

When your ambition is to make a living from writing, from telling stories, you can lose sight of that, sometimes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with trying to write something that has commercial potential—we all gotta eat. But it’s easy to get caught up in polishing pitches, collaborating and revising to get a book sold, or trying to constantly imagine what people will like and respond to. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing is to unplug from all of that and write something simply because you’re excited about it, find it interesting or entertaining, or want a challenge. Put aside any considerations about its marketability—or even if anyone else will “get” it—and just write for the sheer joy of it.

It isn’t easy, sometimes, with schedules. Sometimes you’re lucky if you get to work on anything, much less something just for the freedom of it. But if you can, you should.

Now, I have to get back to my epic poem composed in Esperanto. Which means I have to learn Esperanto, and soon.

Don’t Try So Hard

Writing isn’t easy. Well, no, it is easy in the sense that you’re not climbing a mountain without oxygen, or living with some terrible affliction, or working in a salt mine. Or maybe you are doing one of those things and writing is even harder because of it, I don’t know, I can’t see you. But writing a story is just thinking of an idea and then typing or scratching at a piece of paper until you’re done. It’s not exactly negotiating Middle East peace or performing brain surgery.

On the other hand, writing isn’t easy. Every writer has failed novels, abandoned projects, or juvenelia they would very much prefer to bury somewhere deep. For those of us who have two jobs, or debilitating circumstances, or other difficulties, writing gets even harder. Often the only time you have to write is after hours, or in snatches here and there throughout the day. Not everyone can just take off for a writing retreat, or easily find an hour every day to sit in a quiet, well-lit place and think.

So, take this advice with a grain of salt: Don’t work when you’re tired.

Screw the Word Count

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of word count as a metric of writing success. I understand a lot of folks find it useful and that’s great, but one reason I disparage its use is the way it makes people believe that pushing yourself to drop words onto the page long after you should give up, have a beer, and take a nap. Daily writing goals are great when they inspire you to produce quality work. The trick is to be critical of your daily production, and ask yourself whether the words you’re forcing yourself to write are any good.

Often, when I’m struggling with a scene or some other aspect of a story, the easy fix literally is easy: I quit. I go to bed. I go watch something. I read a book. When I’m tired and frustrated, the worst thing I can do is force myself to keep working.

And sometimes that’s tough, because maybe I’ve had a string of days where I haven’t gotten much done, and I’m getting that weird feeling I might never write anything good ever again, and all I want before I turn in for the night is to feel like I wrote a good sentence or paragraph, so I’ll have someplace good to pick up from the next day.

The trick is, I usually write that good sentence the next day.

You do you, by all means. But next time you’re bleary-eyed and yawning and wondering why you can’t hit that word count you set for yourself, maybe take a nap instead. Then again, I think pants are unnecessary in the modern age, so listening to me is dubious at best.

Fixing a Scene by Making Subtext into Text

IN the realm of writing advice offered by possibly Day Drunk authors currently hosting at least two cats on their laps, forcing them to type in a pose I call “T-Rex Yoga” (arms up and bent downward so you can hunt-and-peck), there are two basic flavors: General writing or career advice that covers whole universes of writing challenges, and extremely narrow and specific advice. This is going to fall into the latter category, as it applies specifically to scenes in a story that just aren’t working.

If you’ve tried to write a story, you will likely recognize this scenario: You know where you want the story to go, you have what seems like a good outline for getting it there, but every time you start writing it feels dead. Nothing is working. The starter is grinding but the spark plugs won’t fire.

When this happens to me, usually the problem turns out to be pretty simple: I’m being too clever by half.

Just Say It

When I’m working out the plot of a story and I’m looking forward, say, twenty chapters to a Big Moment, a twist or a reveal that’s pretty exciting, I usually have an idea of how I’ll handle that Moment, and it’s usually too smart by half. I always imagine the subtle hints leading up to it, and I always—always!—have a strong urge to resist anything that feels expected, or traditional. In short, I always want to be the smartest man in the room.

But invariably if, when I get to that Moment, I just can’t seem to get the gears to bite and the words just sit there, dead and lifeless, it’s because I’m trying too hard. I’ve got all this subtext, and subtlety. Like, my villain is revealing their plan—and naturally I don’t want this to turn into an Exposition Fest, so I’ve got this idea of how their evil plan will be revealed almost casually, in the course of telling another story altogether. In my head, it’s brilliant. On the page … a fucking disaster.

The answer is usually to dispense with subtlety and make subtext into text. In short, the solution is to just have the villain make a speech. Let them build a little Exposition Village and explain everything. Then move on and finish the story. I can always go back in revision and rub at that Exposition until its gone, and in the mean time I’m making progress.

It’s key to remember that while I’m no fan of excessive revisions, your early drafts don’t have to be perfect. If being clunky keeps things moving, then be clunky, and fix it later. That is also my romantic advice: Be clunky, and fix it later.

One Simple Trick to Better Characters: Don’t Let Them Explain Themselves

I’m reading a pretty terrible novel in fits and starts; I like to finish novels when I start them. In fact, there has been just one novel I’ve picked up in my life that I didn’t finish. That was a weird moment in my life, actually; I bought the book when I was probably 15 or 16 and felt this weird antipathy towards it. Like, I dreaded the book. I also hated the story, but I dreaded the physical object. So I decided to bring it back to the store for a refund, but when I got to the store I had a weird anxiety attack and so I wound up just leaving the book on the shelf again, no refund.

In another life, that’s the beginning of a horror story, somehow.

Anyways, other than that one time if I start reading a book I finish that son of a bitch, trust me. So I’m struggling through this one, and one of the main reasons it’s terrible is the way the characters routinely stop whatever they’re supposed to be doing to explain themselves. Everyone in this book is a Basil Exposition, constantly pausing to make a speech about their motivations.

Here’s a simple trick for better writing and better characters: Don’t do that. In fact, it’s better if your characters never actually explain themselves at all.

Sweet Mystery of Life

Exposition and how to do it is always a challenge, but having your characters stand up and make a speech is almost never the right way to do it. The Somers Rule for How to Do Characters Or Not Hey What Do I Know Rule states that your characters should behave like real people, within the bounds of the universe you’ve created. And real people don’t usually stand up and make speeches explaining themselves.

In fact, in my experience people are frustratingly prone to the opposite. People usually assume their motives are obvious, their innocence printed on their faces, their feelings towards you plain. Imagine if everyone around you randomly launched into lengthy speeches about their plans for the evening, the reason they’re not attending that meeting, that party, their lengthy designs on world domination and mass murder. It would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it?

So it is with characters. If the best way you can explain your plot or your timey-wimey bubble of special universe physics is to have everyone stop cold and make speeches, you are not writing a good book.

However—if you’re working on a zero draft and you’re using the speech technique just to map out the fundamentals, and you fully intend to revise these ugly speeches out when you get to later drafts that humans will be expected to read, that’s totally fine. Zero drafts are ugly, pus-filled horrors. All is forgiven if you rub enough revision salve on ?em.

Breaking the Rules

Sometimes people wonder at me about supposed rules in writing and publishing—mainly in the context of “what will get my manuscript immediately circular-filed?” but also in more artistic terms. What’s allowed? What’s a deal-breaker? Do I really need to have a firm grasp of grammar? Do I really need to read widely and know what’s been done before?

Yes and no. Yes, you absolutely must know these things. But the rules are made to be broken; the trick is knowing how and when to break them. What many folks fail to realize is that the writers who broke all the rules when they wrote classic novels had demonstrated a firm grasp of how to write according to the rules first.

Practice Makes Imperfect

That’s the trick—before you can write the insane post-modern novel that’s told from the POV of sixteen damaged androids who each only have one sensory input working and a portion of fabricated memories on which to base their emotional reactions, all told in the present tense without identifying any of the androids by name, you more or less have to spend some time writing a conventional narrative in order to demonstrate mastery of the basics.

Or, okay, you don’t—or, better said, some absolute geniuses don’t. Some people are just born with an ability to use words and language at a level beyond mere mortals. If you’re one of those people, by all means write your insane novel without spending any time in the trenches, but not before you tell me why in god’s name you’re reading this blog.

For the rest of us, writing a conventional novel (or two, or 15) following all the “rules” of construction, pacing, and dialog tags is an absolute necessity. When you can turn out a tightly-plotted story with well-rounded characters speaking like real human beings without breaking into a sweat, then you’re ready to start screwing around, breaking rules. You can just hop on a dirtbike and start doing sick tricks. You got to learn to ride that sucker first.

Unless you’re one of those aforementioned geniuses. In which case WHY DO YOU MOCK ME BY LURKING AT MY BLOG?

Creativity = Time + Distance

You’ve probably heard the line about comedy being tragedy plus time. Time is a pretty powerful force in this universe. It makes cool things uncool; I wore a baseball hat every day of my life from the age of ten to the age of twenty-five, and now photos from that era are embarrassing, to say the least. Time also renders every experience you’ve ever had into grist for your stories, but you have to wait it out, because it’s not just time that turns your worst moments into interesting stories to entertain others. It also requires distance.

Not geographical distance (though, yes, that sometimes helps) but mental and emotional distance. Those usually come automatically with time, but not always; I think we’ve all hung onto a grudge or a painful memory for far too long, cherishing that drama and suffering long past its sell-by date. There are a lot of good reasons to work through past traumas and put them behind you (that is, get some distance from them) but the best reason of all is that you can’t write about them effectively until you do.

Ideas = Suffering

It’s no secret that a lot of writers re-purpose their low times into stories; that’s pretty much how this works. The trick is waiting long enough. You might think you’re ready to turn your heartbreak and depression into a darkly hilarious novel, but if you haven’t gained enough time and distance from it, chances are all you’ll produce is therapy notes.

How can you know if you’re ready? One sign is when you no longer seek to punish the other parties in your writing. Another is when you’re ready to mock yourself and see your own role in your troubles instead of insisting you’re the hero of every story. Another is when you frankly can no longer remember why you were so worked up in the first place.

The good news is, once you get there, you’re golden. You can mine the fossilized remains of your tragedy and render them into a combustible fuel for your writing.

Just remember: Change the names. Always change the names.

The Art of Forgetting

I read somewhere long ago—so to be clear, this isn’t my idea, even if I can’t remember where I got it—that the best way to deal with a great idea is to immediately try to forget it. Don’t write down notes, don’t spend the next six hours in a frenzy of enthusiastic research or writing. Put it out of your mind.

The theory is, if it’s that rare and wonderful thing known as a good idea, it will come back to you. It will keep bobbing to the surface until you can’t ignore it any more. And only the ideas that you resolutely cannot ignore should be developed and worked on. If the idea just sinks under the mental waves, it was probably not a strong swimmer to begin with.

Can confirm: This works a charm.

If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free

My memory is a terrible thing. I routinely forget things like my own name, or why I’m walking pantsless along the highway carrying a small pig. My childhood is a vague and gray place, with most of the details of my life forgotten. I once told my wife in all seriousness that my Mother was Lutheran, which amused Mom to no end.

So forgetting things on purpose is anxiety-producing for me, and I have an urge to preserve every thought I’ve ever had on paper, just in case it’s good. But forgetting works, because most of my ideas are terrible. Most of your ideas are also terrible. Forget them. You won’t ever miss them. The few fragile good ideas you generate? in my experience yes, they will come back.

Forgetting ideas not only stops you from devoting hours of precious time to half-baked concepts while your more developed novels and stories languish, it also means you will simply have fewer ideas to worry over and thus more time to devote to the ones that come back to you. And trust me, even if a halfway decent idea never comes back to you, you’re not gonna miss it. Because you forgot about it. Jeesh, try to keep up.

So: Next time you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea throbbing in your head, forget it and go back to bad. Future You will thank you.

What You Give Up When You Write for Money

On September 26, 1991, I was 20 years old, and I went with a group of friends to see Anthrax and Public Enemy headline at The Ritz on 54th Street in New York. Primus was one of the openers; the show was incredible. My glasses were smashed in the mosh pit, I got shoved to the floor by a very large gentleman who took offense at my mere existence, I lost my friends and had to wander the streets of Manhattan penniless and nearly blind, sweat drying on my skin, ears ringing. The emotional catharsis of the evening remains with me to this day, a distant echo of my youth.

These days, more often than not, when I attend events and shows I’m there in a professional capacity, or as professional a capacity as a sketchy-looking middle-aged freelance writer can ever manage. I write about a lot of things, and get paid okay money to do so. One of the side effects of attending things is you’re never really there, you’re never part of the moment. From the moment you walk through the door, you’re building a narrative. You’re taking photos. You’re making mental notes. You’re a ghost.

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I attended a record release party recently. Local artist, very DIY. It was held in an old decommissioned church, a soaring, beautiful space; the owner of the property was struggling to keep it from being converted into condominiums, which has happened to a few other local churches recently. A hundred, maybe two hundred people were in attendance, wine and beer and food was being served. We all got a copy of the CD, and I spent a moment wondering at this physical object—who in the world still used CDs?

Cocktail hour, and I made the rounds, sipping beer and wine and chatting. I was never there, though; I was building a narrative. Noting details without experiencing them. The buzz of conversation, the quality of the wine (surprisingly high), the awful acoustics. The crowd looked non-local, imports from other locations.

When the band started playing, I angled about, taking photos, worming my way through clumps of people and snapping away. Then I stood watching as people danced in the front, stood blank-faced in the middle, and brazenly ignored the show in the rear, their cocktail chatter still buzzing much to the band’s annoyance. The band was great. I still wasn’t there. I was thinking of headlines for the piece I would write later or the next day. I didn’t dance in the front; I watched it carefully so I could describe it. I didn’t stand blank-faced, listening; I noted the lighting and the way everyone was dressed, so I could set the scene. I didn’t stand in the back with a drink in my hand chattering away, because I was a ghost.

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My memory is terrible. I have always lived in the present; the past recedes from me, becoming a murky, dense fog, free from details. The future always seems impossibly distant. I am consistently making the mistake of assuming the way things are right now is the way they will always be, forever. I don’t remember things I did last week, much less things I did ten years ago, or twenty.

When I go through my old ticket stubs, there are shows I can’t remember. Not because I was inebriated, but simply because sometimes you went to a club or stadium, the band played, and nothing was out of place or unusual or unexpected in any way. You enjoyed yourself, you went home, the next day you got up and went to work. Or you went to a show because friends were going and you were invited, or because you had nothing better to do. And over time my brain simply moved on. I wonder sometimes if the memories are still in there, buried, encoded, encrypted. Every now and then you have a Proustian Madeleine moment and something bubbles to the surface, dislodged by some random experience or observation, a flavor or smell, a sound.

Now every event I attend is remembered in detail. I have photos. Notes. Sometimes an interview. While the physical object of a CD feels strange, recording everything on my phone doesn’t, even though I grew up without such marvels. When I was a kid going out on the weekends, there was no way to record myself, to preserve experiences. Now I do it routinely, disdainfully, solely to augment my non-existent memory.

I observe everything in real-time with an eye towards that narrative, that story I will tell for fifty or a hundred or two hundred bucks. Even though my memory is still as unreliable and tricksterish as ever, I now have everything recorded for posterity, so I will always be able to reproduce the events of an evening, regardless of whether I enjoyed myself or crawled out of my skin with boredom or experienced something in-between.

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In order to build a narrative and write up an evening’s activities, you have to be once removed from everything. You have to hover just outside your body so you can observe. Your body, dumb and trained by muscle memory, continues to go through the motions. It nods and smiles, it bobs its head along with the rhythm of the music, it sips a domestic beer. You hover just above and behind it, paying attention, like someone in a bad story who is having a near-death experience, rising out of their body, then being whisked away by the Ghost of Release Parties Future to see your life the way an audience would.

As a result, nothing actually affects you. When the crowd responds to something the band does, you observe it like a visiting alien intelligence, intensely curious about human beings and their tribal ways, but unfamiliar with it. When the lights come on in the middle of the show, blinding everyone, you don’t experience it as another point in a matrix between the emotional pull of the music and the physical shell you inhabit. Rather you look around owlishly, scouring faces for reactions to shape your story. Are people excited by this technical gaffe? Annoyed? Is it perhaps a pre-arranged moment and you, invited not as a friend or a fan but as a conduit to the larger, largely disinterested world, aren’t clued into?

You’ll never know.

Back in 1991, of course, I was a more efficient machine. All I needed to survive was bad food and cheap beer, good music and a warm coat. Scurvy and dehydration were constant but my rent was $240 a month. I didn’t need electricity or fresh vegetables or expensive whiskies that were distilled decades before I was born. Now I’m older and require the economy of a small island nation to survive each day. I’m as nimble as an aircraft carrier and larded with expensive ailments. I have to monetize my time. I have to listen to my inner David Mamet, my inner Alec Baldwin and Always Be Closing. And so I attend things but I don’t go to them. I observe but I don’t experience. I make notes but I don’t remember. My calendar is full, but none of the memories stick, because that’s what you give up when you write for money.

The All-Singing, All-Dancing Inspiration

It’s been repeated endlessly that writers read—that an essential part of the creative process is taking in someone else’s work and ideas. If you stay locked in an echo chamber where your creative process is just your own work and your own reactions to it, your creative process winds up like that scene in Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich dives into himself:

https://youtu.be/lIpev8JXJHQ?t=48s

So, yes, read—read a lot. but you know what? Also go for other forms of art and other modes of creative expression, because some of the best ideas I’ve ever had occurred to me when I was mesmerized or slightly bored at a play or concert.

Mama Mia!

My wife, The Duchess, likes a certain kind of cheesy pop-culture show that I myself find kind of terrible. At home this manifests as sessions spent watching America’s Got Talent while I drink myself into an early grave. Other times it means she drags me to Broadway musicals like Mama Mia! or other atrocities. Or sometimes my one friend who still goes to concerts (I mean, I’m old, and concerts are loud and the booze is super expensive and you can’t sit, amiright?) drags me to a show. And inevitably at these entertainments I find my mind wandering. And I can enter a sort of trance: Someone else’s (admittedly awful) ideas being poured in, and me unable to do anything but stand there and experience everything. It tends to be a creative tonic.

For example, I got some of the basic plot for the third Avery Cates book, The Eternal Prison while being forced to watch a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. And I had a breakthrough on an unsold novel currently with my agent when I was enduring the aforementioned horrors of Mama Mia!.

This works in part because I’m out of my comfort zone and forced to exist in a way I’m not used to. And it works because the ideas I’m exposed to are foreign and kind of irritating, not something I naturally find compelling. And it works because it’s a few hours when I can’t do anything else. I can’t read, or write, or watch something, or fiddle with my phone. It’s a little like an isolation chamber. An isolation chamber in which ABBA songs are pumped endlessly, sure, but still.

Submission & Content Fees: Back Away from the Abyss

Look, the people who run our fine magazines and web sites where fiction is published are hard-working, good-hearted people who no doubt have nothing but the best intentions. And selling a story and getting it published someplace is a thrill as well as a professional achievement.

That being said, don’t pay submission fees. Or contest entry fees. Ever.

Some will disagree, and that’s fine; you are allowed to be wrong.

Death by a Million Cuts

Writing isn’t the most lucrative career in the universe, for the most part. For ever writer making a fortune, there’s a whole lot more making a living. And for every writer making a living, there are a whole lot more not making much at all. In fact, writing is one of those careers where you can be both relatively successful (in terms of publication credits, fan base, etc.) and flat broke.

So, no, a $3 submission fee to Literary Journal Run by Sophomores in College or Literary Journal Whose Subscriber Base is 100% Writers Hoping to Sell Stories isn’t a lot of money, and the arguments that these fees go to cover the costs of the market itself seem innocuous. But if you submit a lot of stories, that $3 adds up. If I’m spending $300 a year on submission fees, and I sell one story for, say, $100, then I am very, very bad at my career.

Personally I think the odds that the staff at these journals simply orders pizza every time some writer gives them $3 is pretty damn high. Then they pour a few fingers of Writer’s Tears into paper cups and laugh and laugh and laugh.