Writing

I don’t hang out with other writers much, because I hate talking about writing. Discussions about craft tend to get pretentious, quick, and discussions about the business side make me squirrelly, because I was raised to never speak of money, for some reason. I think my parents were in dire financial straits for a long time—like, lose the house straits—and never once mentioned any of it to my brother and I. The only reason I even suspect this today is a few stray comments made by my mother in her later years. As a result, I prefer to pretend that I am a Gentleman Writer who publishes solely for the acclaim and the glamor, never the money.

There are some exceptions, mainly with writers who like to drink whiskey as much as I do. Whiskey is the social lubrication of the gods, after all. When I do get together with fellow writers and talk a bit about our work, there’s one thing I can count on: We all hate our old books.

Past Me is a Hack

It’s unsettling when you pull out a manuscript you wrote a few years ago and thought fondly of, a novel you thought might be revised and massaged into something great, and discover that Present You now hates it, and wonders what drugs Past You was on when he wrote it. I used to assume this had something to do with my growing vision and talent as a writer—older books were terrible because I had gotten so much better at it, just like I no longer think The Dukes of Hazzard is a good TV show because my taste in television has gotten more sophisticated.

Now, though, I realize that’s not quite it. Past Jeff is not the same person as Present Jeff, just as I will not be the same as Future Jeff. That stranger wrote a book, and incorporated all these weird ideas, and none of it is the way I would do it. So I hate it. I will always hate my older books, no matter how old they are, precisely, and no matter how well they are received or how well they continue to sell. They were written by a weirdo with my name, a man I don’t know any more.

This is probably why time travel never seems to happen. People invent it, travel back to see themselves, and end up murdering themselves and the universe reboots.

I don’t know how other writers do it, or have done it—sell novels, get agents, all that jazz. All I know is how I did it, so that’s the limit of my knowledge. It’s very possible (very possible) that other writers are smarter than me, more charming and connected, and that they’ve got some secret I don’t. That’s a pretty common fear/assumption, isn’t it, that other people have it easier because they know something you don’t. So, stipulated: Other writers may know something I don’t.

For me, it was all just doing the work. Writing the query letters, mailing out the sample chapters, emailing folks, all that jazz. There was literally no secret to it, no special networking. I never left the house, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t go to conferences, and I didn’t read any books or blogs of advice. I just routinely sent out submissions to publishers and queries to agents, for years.

The Secret: There’s No Secret

That’s anti-climatic, isn’t it? And a bit dull. I wish I could say I had some amazing secret, believe me. But I just sat at my desk every day and wrote, and then sat a little longer and wrote funny, disastrously sloppy letters and then made photocopies of my typo-ridden manuscripts and mailed them out. Later, of course, the ridiculous cover letters became Word documents and the photocopies also Word documents and everything was via email, but it was essentially the same process. And somehow in 1999 this translated into a novel sold to a small publisher and in 2002 it translated into signing with an agent. All it took was a few hundred mailings and a lot of letters.

So, when people ask me for the secret to selling a book or landing an agent, I don’t mention conferences, pitch slams, or publishing events where I bought everyone cocktails, because for me those things didn’t exist. I just did my thing, for years, rinsing and repeating over and over again, until I found My People. My People get my jokes, forgive my typos, and generally think I’m a charming genius instead of a shambling mess. So the sum of my advice to folks who want to traditionally publish is: Find Your People.

Of course, when someone approaches me for advice of this sort I at first act all mysterious and imply heavily that there is a secret that I’ll tell them if they buy me, say, five whiskies. Because I’m an idiot, but I’m not a fool.

No one said writing was going to be easy. We choose this life because we can’t help ourselves; certainly no one decides to be a writer for the immense riches it offers. Sure, there are immense riches, but they’re not common.

So, you’re writing a story and it’s not heading where you want it to go. Whether a Pantser or a Plotter (or a Plantser), writing a story is like steering the goddamn Titanic in an asteroid belt—that is, not easy. After a certain point trying to nudge your plot back in the direction you want is like leaning against a mountain—it has no effect. You’re heading towards a brick wall and getting bored with your own story.

In these moments, I like to pull a Truck Driver’s Gear Change.

Watching the Clutch Sail Through the Air

What’s a Truck Driver’s Gear Change? In music, it’s when you suddenly modulate a song up into a new key. One famous example is Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson; at the end of the song everyone just soars up out of nowhere. It’s either a genius move or a cheap ploy to keep listener’s attention in a repetitive song.

In writing, it’s a sudden left turn. In my book The Unconventional Novelist, I talk about a Crazy Ivan, which is the same sort of concept but in more of a plotting sense. For Pantsers, a Truck Driver’s Gear Change can be dropped into any story. Say you’re writing a romantic story about a young couple on a first date. It’s sweet and lyrical, but whatever you initial goal for the story it’s getting boring. A Truck Driver’s Gear Change would be to suddenly have them attacked by werewolves, or aliens. A hard turn into a totally different genre, tone, and concept.

It’s saved several stories for me. The initial stuff remains as strong background and foundational material, supporting the sudden shift. It doesn’t always work, but if your story is dying right in front of you anyway, it’s often exactly the reckless move you need to save it from being a complete failure. Try it! It’s fun.

Let’s just say it straight out: Your ideas are not worth very much. Ideas are cheap because ideas are like hydrogen: They are the most common elements in the writing world. Everyone walking around all those conferences, bookstores, and readings? They are absolutely dripping with ideas. And those ideas are worthless, because all have them, and very often we have the same ideas.

What makes an idea worth something is the work you put into it. That’s why writers can actually sell their stories, after all; if it was just about generating ideas we could build some sort of machine and feed it ideas and it would write books based on them (it’s possible this has already happened and they replaced several popular thriller authors with such a machine, but I digress).

It’s what you bring to an idea, the execution, that makes your writing valuable. Here, let’s have an experiment.

An Idea Experiment

If you doubt me, just check out Reddit’s Writing Prompts subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/)—which has, by the way, more than 10 million subscribers. People throw ideas out there every single day, and so far there’s no shortage in sight.

I’m now going to dash off ten ideas for stories. I swear I haven’t prepared in advance; you’re just going to have to trust me that I’ll be doing this cold. Ten ideas off the top of my head—use them if you like; I might too. Here we go:

1. Man has always heard running water that no one else hears. When he was a kid it was a trickle, but recently it’s more like a heavy rain.
2. Thief breaks into a huge mansion in search of riches, discovers it’s an immense Mystery House-cum-Murder Mansion and becomes lost in the secret rooms.
3. Old man writes a memoir and tries to sell it to publishers, only to be accused of plagiarism because his life is essentially the plot of a famous novel.
4. Couple move into a new apartment and their next-door neighbors are super loud. A noise war ensues, getting increasingly absurd, until one day next door is … chillingly silent.
5. Embittered woman drunkenly decides to murder her unfaithful husband via poison. When she wakes up in a dazed hangover her family and friends have come to visit and she can’t recall where she put the poison.
6. Man joins an online dating service, checks no sexual preference, and keeps being matches with himself.
7. Woman has been keeping a diary since she was ten. During a house move she starts flipping back through them and realizes someone’s been editing them, and deleting information.
8. Aliens invade, conquer us brutally, and offer a choice to all survivors of the Six Week War: Be hunted and killed, or live out your life as zoo exhibits. Our protagonist accepts, then keeps escaping his enclosure on the alien world, and becomes a celebrity animal.
9. Time travel of a sort is invented; you can show where a molecule or group of molecules (e.g. a person) will be in a certain period of time. The main use is to show precisely when you’re going to die, and where.
10. In the near future subdermal chips are commonly implanted in employees (which is already a rare but real thing). Now they’re being used to enforce non-compete clauses, and after your fifth job in three years you literally aren’t legally allowed to work anywhere.

Obviously some of these could use some polishing—I just made them up, after all. This took me five minutes. It’s not the ideas—it’s the execution of those ideas.

I’ve always been a bit of a nerd, which I know is shocking, based on the many photos of me looking dashing that populate the Internet. I was that chubby kid with glasses who read a lot of fantasy novels that were way above his pay grade—I can still remember reading the rape scene in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant when I was ten years old and wondering who in hell had allowed me to buy that book. I got my first computer (a Commodore 64) when I was twelve, and spent countless hours typing in BASIC programs from Byte Magazine.

I’ve loved computers ever since. I’ve dabbled in programming, I’ve installed multiple operating systems, I’ve blanked my MBR and I’ve had to reinstall my OS from scratch while sweating bullets and praying to unseen gods. And while I resisted the initial smartphone wave, I do love my gadgets and my Apps. I love eBooks and have an extensive library of them so I’ll always have something to read, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

I’m no Luddite. Yet, when people ask about what kind of software or gadgets you need to write a novel, the answer is obvious and immediate: None.

The Void

I’m not a very organized person. The idea that writing a novel requires a spreadsheet, a notes App, a database, and specialized software makes me feel like I’ve inexplicably decided to become an accountant, and without attending one day of school I’ve already scheduled the licensing exam.

If I had my druthers, in fact, I’d still be writing novels on my old manual typewriter, which sounded like awesome thunder when you banged away on it, the ink in the ribbon slowly fading until the letters being printed on the page were theoretical at best. Believe me, if I could convince publishers to let me submit my novels typewritten like that, I would. I stick as close as I can to that construct, though: A simple word processor, a white screen, a keyboard. Sometimes I still make the automatic “carriage return” motion when I’m typing. I often smack people in the face because of this, and fights break out.

Now, if you like lots of software to help you write, I don’t care. And you shouldn’t care if I care. You write however you want, and I’ll continue to use a pen and paper and—grudgingly—a word processor, and nothing else. At least until I’m powerful enough to force my will on the publishing industry. Until then … I abide.

My very first powerful experience with reading came when I was in grade school and I discovered The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I’d seen an animated version of the story on TV not long before, and the discovery that things on TV might be based on books that I could read over and over again was kind of mind-blowing (I am old enough, remember, to have lived during the dark times when TV shows were on once and often never seen again—a time before streaming, before DVRs, before color and music). To then discover that there were six sequels was almost too much for me.

I took the Narnia books out of the library again and again for months, just bringing them in so I could check them out again. When I finally bought copies for myself with my allowance, I noticed for the first time there were other books I could read, too. And so began my Life as a Reader.

Beige

Naturally, for a long time my reading was confined to classic fantasy like Tolkien and any fantasy story that involved people traveling from this world into a magical universe. If the cover art implied high school kids fighting orcs, or businessman learning to fight for his life in a sword-based gladiator school, I was sold. And in turn its little surprise that the first five thousand things I wrote when I started working on my own stories were just pale imitations of that basic trope—kid from this universe travels to magical world. Because my reading was pretty monochromatic.

Read to Write

You’ve no doubt heard the advice that if you want to be a better writer, you should read more—more often, more widely, more deeply. Reading anything will teach you something, but you also need to read diverse books by diverse authors. You want to learn as many different lessons from as many different people as possible. So when someone tells you to read more, do it—but read outside your current channels as much as you can. Read other genres, read books by authors outside your cultural experience. Read YA novels, and literary novels, read history and academic works, read everything.

Diversity moves along the Y axis, too—time. It’s easy to get stuck reading only current authors. It makes sense, even; if you want to sell work to the market, it’s good to know what the market has embraced recently. But you should also delve backwards in time. Read books published long ago—and not just the received “classics” of literature. Read pulp, read dimestore paperbacks, read serialized 19th century novels by someone not named Dickens.

Don’t just read more—read it all.

The other night I was out with some writer and agent friends having drinks and spreading malicious gossip (as we do), and the subject of author jealousy came up. Someone was telling a story about an author behaving badly because another author was enjoying some great success, and even though author #1 was plenty successful they felt slighted.

Authors get jealous of each other all the time. We all simultaneously think we’re geniuses and fear we’re frauds, so when someone else sells scads of books or wins awards or gets a big advance we feel rage that we’re not getting those things (even if we’ve gotten them before) and then get really drunk, convinced we’ll never publish again, and end the evening weeping openly as we toilet paper some random stranger’s house, pass out in a dumpster, and wake up to write again.

The secret to jealousy isn’t to deny it, but use it.

Rage Against Other Novelists

I speak from experience. A few years ago I went to a conference and after the first day I realized that I was approximately the 256^th most important author there. Other writers had bigger deals, other writers had more support, longer lines—other writers, basically, had everything, and I got really depressed. I was convinced I’d had my shot and missed it.

On the place home, I wrote some of the best chapters of my life, chapters in a story that eventually evolved into We Are Not Good People. That book was partially fueled by rage and jealousy.

So, next time you’re feeling like other, less-talented authors (read: all of them, naturally) are getting the money and attention you deserve, don’t waste your time being an asshole, or a passive-aggressive frenemy to the other writers in your circle. Get to work. Take that negative energy and like Emperor Palpatine grow stronger from it, and write with a sense of desperation. It’ll pay off. And it comes with fewer police summonses.

One of the most difficult concepts for a lot of writers (myself included) to internalize is simple but powerful: Bad writing is subjective.

Let that sink in for a moment. We’d all like to think that great writing is somehow measurable, something we can apply science! to and create a formula that will allow us to accurately detect it. One of my secret fears as an author—and I can’t possibly be alone in this—is that I am secretly a terrible, terrible writer, and history will remember me as the 21st century Edward Bulwer-Lytton—the guy who wrote the famous line “It was a dark and stormy night” that is now used as shorthand for purple, tortured prose. It would be comforting to think there was a test for bad writing that would either confirm or refute this—but there isn’t. It’s subjective. All we have is general consensus.

The Sentence

After all, let’s consider Bulwer-Lytton’s famous sentence. The short version isn’t actually bad, is it? “It was a dark and stormy night” may not be the most inspired phrase ever composed, but it certainly isn’t so terrible. In fact, Wikipedia points out that the phrase had actually been used by Washington Irving decades earlier, and yet Irving isn’t pilloried for it. Part of that has to do with Irving’s generally higher literary reputation, of course, and part of it has to do with the rest of Bulwer-Lytton’s sentence, that is usually left out for brevity’s sake:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Okay, the terribleness of that sentence is more apparent now; it sort of just staggers to a period, doesn’t it? And yet, it is really the worst thing you’ve ever read? I doubt it. A few relatively minor edits and it would be an unremarkable but totally workable sentence.

It’s good to keep this in mind—there’s no scientific way of nailing down what, exactly, bad writing is—and styles come and go, making it more complicated. What was once a perfectly acceptable sentence in the style and genre of the time can slowly become the most-mocked sentence in history. So when you get feedback on your work in progress—or a review of a published book—and someone hates a sentence or a whole raft of sentences, remind yourself that bad writing is subjective. Revision and editing are often exercises in re-arranging perfectly fine words. And if you’re destined to be the next Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at least you’ll be famous.