Writing

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.

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Editor here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliché and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatisfaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

Morons, All of them

The Moron Line is, quite simply, a line of dialog that is spoken only to help those in the audience who either haven’t been paying close attention or are mentally incapable of understanding anything even remotely complex or fanciful. Here’s a totally made up example:

<In the sewers beneath Los Angeles, The Villain is seen placing a large bomb against one slimy wall. A few scenes later, the Hero and his Sidekick stumble upon the bomb.>

HERO: Look!

SIDEKICK: Jeepers! A BOMB!

HERO: It must have been left here by the villain, earlier, when we weren’t here.

Most of that dialog is not only unnecessary if you have a heartbeat and an attention span of any length, it’s actually annoying, because it’s like that guy at a party who keeps telling you things you already know in a tone of voice that strongly implies he doubts you have the brainpower to know such things. It’s like an echo.

One of the popular uses for Moron Lines is to remind the audience of subtle plot points; having a character regurgitate a little exposition in the guise of summing up or arguing a point. Another is the time-honored Salazar Gambit, where a character—usually the villain—appears onscreen and, just in case you just wandered in from another movie—someone hisses their name:

<The Hero enters SALAZAR’s OFFICE. Cut to SALAZAR, grinning behind his desk.>

HERO: Salazar!

Again, the only people in the room who would be confused as to Salazar’s identity (assuming, of course, that he was in the story previously and this is not some complicated switch of identity or some other potentially confusing plot gymnastic) are folks who fell asleep shortly after the lights went down. Yet the Moron Line survives, because a) it often sounds dramatic to untrained ears and b) a lot of people creating entertainments for the rest of us have nothing but contempt for us, believe me.

ONCE YOU SEE IT …

Once you notice the Moron Line, you can’t unnotice it, and it starts popping up everywhere: Characters describing the clearly visible actions of other characters, characters repeating names and facts for no other reason than to make sure you remember something that happened, oh, fifteen minutes before in the narrative. Often these examples will be paired with quick-cut flashbacks, just to make sure you really notice what you’re being hit over the head with. This last technique could be called The Sixth Sense Are You Paying Attention Technique.

Are there people who need the Moron Line? Probably. I’ve been out to movies where future Nobel Laureates sit and have lengthy conversations about other movies while a movie is playing, and no doubt the Moron Line helps them keep track of at least the Bullet Points of the plot. And sure, there are probably a few functioning morons out there who need the Moron Line. Should these fine folks be abandoned? Of course not. What we need are a sort of reverse Director’s Cuts, where all the Moron Lines and redundant flashbacks are edited in, with a normal cut released for the rest of us with functioning brains.

————————————–

From The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 1, by the way.

The conundrum is classic: They tell you, as a young writer, that you should always “write what you know.” The idea is sound enough: If you stick to things you know something about from personal experience — be it people to base characters on, or outlandish stories that actually happened, or the infinite details of a trade or hobby — then your writing will always ring true. It was shimmer with that special realistic gravity that sucks people in.

There are limitations, of course. Say you’re halfway through your novel and the plot problems would be solved if someone, say, joined the army. Great! Except you’ve never joined the army. In fact, uniforms, exercise, and weapons — the three main ingredients of military service, peppered with humiliation, violence, and busy work — are so not your thing. You wind up facing the horror that Lazy Writers everywhere fear most: Research.

The Bad Old Days

Of course, in the Bad Old Days, research generally meant either hitting the books at a library or actually doing the thing you needed research on. The former, while affordable and possible no matter your circumstances, was often deadly dull. The latter was only possible if you were a Gentry Writer living off the fumes of a trust fund or something — the rest of us, proles all, were forced to work Day Jobs and do our research on the margins.

Ah, but then the Internet! Suddenly, Lazy Writers like me could just look stuff up. Need to know what a street looks like in a small town in France? Try Google Street View. Everything is out there if you dig hard enough, and you don’t have to put on pants and walk out into the sunlight to the library, or book a flight to France just to snap some photos.

The Bad Old Now

However, disaster looms for we Lazy Writers, because, as usual, Trolls are ruining everything. Wikipedia has always been a dubious place to do real research — you would never have used Wikipedia as the basis for anything serious. Novel research, however — why not. After all, 90% of a novel is made up anyway. Wikipedia was filled with misinformation and politically-motivated edits, yes, but for quick, basic stuff you could at least use it as a starting point.

No more; the Trolls have ruined it. A decline in working editors, an ever-expanding and torturous set of rules in an increasingly insulated Wikipedia, and a growing amount of bullshit going uncaught in the online encyclopedia has put the nail in it: If you want to be a Lazy Writer, you’re screwed.

Worse, a recent experiment found that small errors purposefully introduced to Wikipedia lingered for very long periods of time, meaning that your chances of picking up a detail you think makes you sound smart will actually make you sound incredibly stupid. This, of course, is the fear of the Lazy Writer.

So what does it all leave us with? A lot of novels about being sad, mildly-employed alcoholics, because now all of us Lazy Writers have to Write What We Know.