Latest Posts

Characters and Motivation

Author: March 11, 2020 2 Comments

Writing a story is easy. You create some characters with names and recognizable human traits, you give at least one of them a conflict, and then you explore how they do or don’t get past the conflict to get where they want to be. Easy!

Of course, it isn’t that easy, as anyone who’s ever tried with a modicum of objectivity about their work has discovered. And while any aspect of the storytelling process can befuddle and frustrate, the hardest is probably characterization. There’s a reason most non-writers who have a ‘surefire idea for a hit novel’ will give you an extremely plot-heavy pitch: Plot is often the easy part in the sense that cobbling together a bunch of plot points from other stories and hanging them on a plot arc isn’t so hard. But characters can be hard.

Or, more accurately: Good, believable characters can be hard. The secret to success is motivation.

Micro Motivation

The trick of it is, there are two kinds of motivation to worry about. One is the macro stuff, the big-ticket motivation that pushes your characters through the story — like, they want revenge on the bully who ruined their life, or they want to murder their next door neighbor, or they want to save their daughter from a serial killer. This is something most writers figure out early on, the need for their characters to have a reason to be in the story in the first place.

What a lot of writers don’t figure out is the necessity of micro motivation for all the other decisions your character makes. For example, let’s say you have a character named Chuck who has just been abducted by aliens, and your plot requires him to do a bizarre dance the aliens teach him. Now, you’re god in your own story, so all you have to do is write

Chuck thought about this bizarre dance and decided he would do it. To hell with dignity!

And mission accomplished. Except, of course, that you’ve given the reader no reason why he’s decided to do this. And that can be crucial, because readers can smell when something is done Because Plot. Characters shouldn’t do things simply because the plot doesn’t move forward unless they do it. There should be a reason behind their actions.

Does that mean you have to explicitly state that reason every single time?

Chuck chose to dance, because he suddenly remembered being in high school and never dancing at the school dances where all the other kids danced. His dying mother had said, I hope you dance, so now he would dance!

It does not. Your character’s motivation should be organic, a part of them, and preferably something that doesn’t require a block of exposition to explain. Sometimes the best way to explain motivation will in fact be some quick epiphany on your character’s part, of course, but that should probably be an exception.

Then again, what do I know. I spent the whole day wearing mis-matched socks, and my pants are three sizes too large.

Writing

In Praise of Failure

Author: February 26, 2020 0 Comments

Life if short, don’t I know it, and that terrible knowledge can lead to some pretty awful decisions, usually centered around various Happy Hours and the seductive realization that someday there will be no more Happy Hours, at least for me personally, and so I’d better enjoy the ones I have to the fullest extent of my liver’s capabilities.

Knowing that life is short can also have a strange effect on your reading decisions, or so I’ve noticed, in the form of a fear of wasting your time on a book that is ultimately disappointing. This is usually in conjunction with a ‘serious’ or ‘difficult’ novel, because the idea of investing some days or weeks or months in reading a thick book that requires you to keep notes and do ancillary research, only for it to be something less than perfect or genius, is kind of horrifying.

For example, I recently read Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year. It’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative often compared to Ulysses in terms of complexity and wordplay, and usually (if kind of inaccurately) described as one single run-on sentence.

I’ve noticed that when I mention the book to some folks, their reaction is suspicion — mainly the the odds are pretty good they’ll find the whole thing pretentious and the ‘gimmick’ unsatisfying. And so they just refuse to read it in the first place, as if you can’t stop reading a book 100 pages in and throw it across the room.

Here’s the thing: You absolutely should read a book even if you think there’s a high chance it will frustrate you.

Beautiful Failure

It’s easy to be cynical. As a writer, I find it sadly easy to be cynical about every other writer who isn’t me, actually, and to assume they’re all hacks who are stealing my advance monies. And as a consumer of entertainments I find it easy to assume that any book that is ambitious is doomed to failure.

But here’s the thing: So what?

This idea that a work of literature (or a song, or a movie, or what have you) must be perfect or else it’s a waste of your time is kind of nuts. So is, by the way, not writing a book or what have you because you’re not sure you can pull off the trick or gimmick or genius reinvention of narrative tropes you have in mind.

So read the weird, complicated books and worry about whether they worked or not later, whether you like them or not later. Not everything you read has to be enjoyable for you, or even successful. And not everything you write will be successful. If you insist on waiting until you have an idea that is guaranteed to be a success you’ll be waiting a long time. Sometimes you just have to take the chance.

And a novel you didn’t enjoy is not a waste of time, because you’ll probably take something from it, if only a better sense of what you enjoy — or maybe a trick you can use in your own writing; I’ve had a few stories stem from observing a literary trick that I thought I could do better (I usually can’t, but not for lack of trying). And a novel you wrote that doesn’t work out isn’t a waste, either, because you probably learned something from that as well.

Ducks, Newburyport is fascinating, btw. And kind of surprisingly enjoyable!

Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Writing Practice: Focus

Author: February 19, 2020 0 Comments

FOR a man with the social skills of a small goldfish and the misanthropy of a much larger person, I’ve met a lot of fellow writers over the years. At conventions, book signings, and parole hearings, I’ve discussed writing a lot, with these conversations usually beginning with me insisting I don’t know anything and concluding with a four-hour presentation by me as I attempt to explain how I write novels despite clearly being an idiot.

What my fellow writers want from me largely depends on their level of experience. Older, more experienced writers usually want my secret moonshine recipe for making liquor out of old socks. Younger writers want surprisingly precise answers to questions like how many characters am I legally allowed to have in a novel or is ‘Randy’ an acceptable name for my sentient toaster detective character? Which means I have to expend energy explaining that there are no rules, really, which then leads to a subset of question regarding how to figure all this stuff out if there are no rules.

The answer to that, invariably, has two parts. First, read. Reading a lot of other people’s fiction inside and outside your comfort zone and sphere of interest will show you some pretty amazing things, and impress upon you that the only limitation to what you can do in a story is what you can sell to your audience.

The second part is, of course, to write. Write a lot. More importantly, challenge yourself when you write. If you dream of publishing dinosaur erotica, naturally you’ll write a lot of dinosaur erotica. But you shouldn’t write only dinosaur erotica. Just as with your reading, your writing should be varied and challenging.

One technique I’ve used a lot is to restrict myself to a specific tool, like dialog, or exposition. In other words, treat your writing practice like a gym workout and concentrate on specific aspects of the craft that need work.

Don’t Skip Leg Day

The word practice throws some people off, because writing is supposed to be an explosion of emotional truth, an artistic expression. And it sure is. But so is writing a song, but no one argues that you shouldn’t learn how to play and know something about music theory — and then work every day to master techniques. It’s really not that different with writing.

In music, you practice stuff like scales, training your fingers and hands to find notes in a pattern, training your ear to notice when you’re out of key, and stretching your muscles to learn new shapes. You can do something similar with your writing by trying to write a story using just one aspect of writing mechanics.

For example, many years ago I wrote a series of short stories that were entirely dialogue. I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could write a successful story without any exposition, or stage direction, or narration. If I could shape a character on the page just from their speech. If I could avoid confusing the reader without any tags. It was a lot of fun and some of those stories turned out really well, and I learned a lot about my tics when it came to dialogue, lessons I still use today.

It’s best to think of practice like this as experiments, because there is a very good chance the end result won’t be marketable; getting something that works as a story in general is a benefit, but not the goal. The goal is to get a sense of your own level of control, and to identify (or shore up) weak spots. Have trouble with characters? Write a story that is just a character study, an obsessive neighbor observing someone. Trouble with pacing? Write a story that has a new plot twist every paragraph, for the sense of control, like you’re shifting a car’s gears while driving through the mountains. Forget about balance and artistry and just do one thing for 5,000 words, like you’re doing musical scales.

Of course, this advice is free and you get what you pay for. And consider that the other thing I practice regularly is whiskey appreciation. So, you know, it’s always a 50/50 shot whether you’re getting real writerly brilliance or the incoherent ramblings of an inebriated man.

Writing

The Joker is Our New Hamlet

Author: February 16, 2020 0 Comments

Actors and musicians sometimes encounter a challenge other artists and creatives don’t: Interpreting the work of others1. Sure, writers might twist a classic into a modern form or tell an old story in a new way, but it’s not precisely the same2. Actors and musicians often find themselves asked to reinterpret a role or song without fundamentally changing the words and other aspects of the performance. Think about that—you have the same words, the same basic stage direction, the same overall form, and you’re supposed to do something new and exciting with it3.

For actors, as a result, there’s usually a role that everyone has tried at some point or another in their career. For a while that role was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the glum and slightly crazy Prince of Denmark charged by his father’s ghost with avenging his murder4. When Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to poke fun at his limited range and thick Austrian accent in 1993’s Last Action Hero, he imagined himself reciting the infamous ‘Yorick’ soliloquy from the play, riffing on the idea that Arnie might try his hand at a serious role like that. It was pop culture shorthand. Almost every ‘serious’ actor has tried to put his own stamp on Hamlet, your Oliviers and Gielguds, and when Kenneth Branagh was riding the crest of his Hot Young Classicist phase, he used his currency to make a 4-hour film version of the play that let him chew some serious scenery5. For actresses there are, unsurprisingly, fewer such roles—fewer such characters—with which to define themselves, but the Austen roles of Emma and Elizabeth or perhaps Brontë’s Jane Eyre come around every few years, and can make a career in similar fashion.

Recently, Hamlet has fallen out of favor. Not among Shakespeare fans or classicists (or even among actors), but in a pop culture sense; there hasn’t been a screen adaptation since 2009 and you sure don’t hear any buzz about the role when actors take it on6. Into this vacuum we have a new role, a new character that actors will try to make their own: The Joker.

Why So Serious?

Credit where credit is due: The first iconic performance in the role of The Joker was Cesar Romero on the 1960s-era Batman TV show. In part because it was television (there was a theatrical film starring Romero as The Joker, but it was really just a super-sized episode) and in part because it was a terminally silly show, Romero’s performance is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the actors that followed, but it is a remarkable performance. Romero brings some real manic pixie dream Joker energy to his performance. His Joker is constantly laughing, playing pranks, and always in motion, and yet there’s a sour thread of real menace there. Romero’s Joker is always laughing at you—at your pain and suffering—never with you.

But to be fair, Joker wasn’t an iconic role in the 1960s, and Romero’s robust performance has little to do with its late bloom as the new Hamlet for actors. That began in 1989 with Jack Nicholson.

Tim Burton’s Batman is a terrible movie. You might have fond memories of it—as I do7—but it is … not good8. It was, however, a smash hit and a cultural phenomenon, in part because of Nicholson, who was still an A+ movie star, a serious actor, and an outsize celebrity personality back then. Hearing that an actor of Nicholson’s caliber had signed on to portray a character previously portrayed by Cesar Romero was surprising, and instantly elevated the role to a higher status. If Nicholson could play The Joker, after all, anyone could play The Joker, even the biggest names in Hollywood.

And Nicholson’s performance is good-to-great. He’s not sure how to handle the silliness, which was still a part of Joker’s DNA in 1989; you can almost see the drugs in Nicholson’s eyes when he’s forced to prance about like a silly clown. But he also brought a real sense of psychotic danger to the role; you can see echoes of Nicholson’s brutal shifts from maniacal silliness to coldblooded violence in more recent portrayals, and some of his line readings are absolute classics. Nicholson took the role seriously, and thus made it a role that you could take seriously.

Which opened the door for Heath Ledger two decades later. Ledger’s performance is legendary, of course; he won an Oscar for it, after all9. Consider Cesar Romero in 1966 and Heath Ledger in 2008—the same role, and yet so vastly different in gravitas and approach. Ledger’s performance is in every way brilliant, from the flat, nasally Midwestern accent he affects to the twitches and tics he indulges in, to the sudden growl he puts in his voice when he echoes Nicholson and downshifts from silly to homicidal. More than anyone else, Heath Ledger made The Joker the new Hamlet10, a role that can define a career (for good or bad, as we’ll see) and which young actors will aspire to when they want to assert themselves as serious actors.

The Crucible

Ledger’s performance is what made The Joker the sort of role that serious actors would accept with the intention of leaving their mark on it. Jared Leto attempted to make the role his own in 2016’s Suicide Squad with disastrous results; his take on the character is what a fifteen-year old kid who shares memes about releasing their inner demons would come up with. While the performance is … bad, what’s notable is how Leto clearly wants to make the role his own. There’s obviously a sense that The Joker is the sort of iconic role that you are remembered for, and Leto’s frenzied, desperate energy in the performance reflects that11.

Which brings us to Joaquin Phoenix and 2019’s Joker, which has raked in awards and made Phoenix a serious contender for Best Actor. Phoenix’s interpretation of the role is quite different from all the other Jokers, and the film’s success (and the success of his performance) has solidified the role’s new stature. Phoenix hasn’t pursued the sort of career that would normally bring him into a superhero universe like D.C.’s, and it’s hard to imagine him appearing in an effects-heavy fight scene with Robert Pattinson’s Batman12, so it’s easy to speculate that what attracted him to the role was, in part, its iconic status. Simply put, if you want to make a splash as an actor, try your best to get cast as The Joker. If you nail it, people will take you seriously.

Which is, in some ways, perfect for our current moment. There’s something appropriate about this shift from Shakespeare’s glowering Prince of Denmark to a comic book villain as the defining role for actors, something appropriate in having a maniacal clown as our most important fictional portrayal. The world has become a darkly funny place. To paraphrase another kind of fictional joker, “Once you realize what a joke everything is, being The Joker is the only thing that makes sense.”

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

The Pitch

Author: February 12, 2020 0 Comments

One thing that unites all writers (aside from depression and the habit of using uncommon words in common conversations and having to desperately explain the definitions to people rapidly tiring of your bullshit) is The Pitch. Whether you’re shopping a novel to an agent or publisher or trying to land a freelance gig, you’ll more than likely find yourself having to pitch an idea to someone — someone who more than likely does not give a crap. Most pitches fail.

And that can be rough. There’s nothing worse than slaving over a pitch only to get a blank-faced, far too polite rejection the second you stop speaking. It’s easy to think that if your idea doesn’t gain traction, it must not have been a very good idea. But I am here to tell you that probably isn’t true. You just have to keep pitching that idea until you find someone who agrees with you regarding how awesome it is.

Sorry To Bother You

Pitches and synopses and the like are tough for writers because they’re like 10% of the idea. They’re all bone, and sometimes a story relies on details and grace notes. Not every premise is mind-blowing when boiled down to its raw form, and the worry is that an idea that has you really excited can get a blank stare from people when you pitch it because you can’t spend two days explaining every detail and reverse-engineering your shocking-but-plausible twists. The end result can be excruciating.

But here’s the thing: You don’t need everyone to love your idea. You don’t even need a committee of people. You need one person at a time. First and foremost, you need: You. You yourself have to like the idea you’re pitching. Then you need to create a chain of Your People, folks who also love your idea. One at a time. If someone pulls a face when you pitch and says “Next!” well, move on. Keep pitching until you find your people.

Of course, this process requires you to get a lot of rejection smeared all over you. But that’s what the whiskey’s for.

Writing

The Competence Myth

Author: February 4, 2020 2 Comments

FRIENDS, I am an incompetent person.

No one who has ever interacted with me is surprised to hear this. I am generally the sort of man you expect to find wearing two trashbags taped together as some sort of clothing, the sort of man who can literally forget something within seconds:

THE DUCHESS: Don’t forget your keys!

ME: Of course! <leaves house, closes door, pauses> Dang it. Forgot my keys.

This extends to my writing career in many hilarious and frustrating ways. I am also, it turns out, the sort of man who can (and will) confuse several different style guides, forget to save changes, and make a lot of really dumbo mistakes. And yet, I have a pretty solid writing career going here. Which is only notable because there is a belief out there that in order to be a professional writer you have to be uber-competent and make exactly zero mistakes. Which I disprove simply by existing.

Say Nothing. Act Casual

Now, don’t misunderstand me: You should certainly try to be competent. As should I! But we need to dispense with the idea that you have to be absolutely perfect in everything you do. That your pitches must be perfect. That your query letters must be perfect. That your manuscripts, communications, headshot, and synopses must be perfect. I’m here to tell you that there’s a margin of error. And in my experience it’s kind of huge.

This is because writing is a subjective thing, and also a profession. With the former, most of the mistakes you’re gonna make aren’t really mistakes at all, but rather different interpretations of instructions, guidelines, or feedback, and most of the people you’ll work with understand this. With the latter, there’s a lot of professional courtesy out there. I’ve had many, many variations on the ‘Sorry about that oversight / don’t worry about it NBD!’ exchange with people paying me to write things for them.

Because, here’s the thing: I’m getting paid to write things because that’s not something just anyone can do. So as with any professional partnership, there’s an allowance for mistakes and oversights. Of course, there’s a difference between the occasional screwup and, you know, being absolutely crap at your work, but as long as you stay on the right side of that spectrum you’re generally fine.

Now, I have lost jobs because of the aforementioned trashbag clothing. But those were office jobs where apparently people are offended when you show up wearing trashbags with a duct tape belt. In other words: Snobs.

Writing

‘A Christmas Story’ is The Greatest Horror Film of the 20th Century

Author: January 22, 2020 0 Comments

LIKE tens of millions of other people, I traveled over the holiday season. My wife, referred to in my writing as The Duchess in order to protect her reputation from my public incompetence1 and ramshackle approach to fashion, has family in Texas and so every year we board a plane at some ungodly, pre-sunrise hour on Christmas Day and emerge, starving and confused, in the humid air of Austin some hours later2.

We then have a visit. Greeting people you literally see once a year is a strange and awkward proposition, made doubly strange and awkward due to my natural state of strangeness and awkwardness. But The Duchess’ family is welcoming and the dinner they prepare is huge and delicious, so the day usually goes well3. The bulk of the trip, however, is spent visiting The Duchess’ mother, a woman in her nineties, spry and typically ensconced in a comfortable chair in front of her television. Which means we spend a lot of time sitting and watching TV with her. It usually falls to me to find something appropriate for us to watch; even at my advanced age watching something with your mother-in-law can be nerve-wracking. No one wants to suffer through a Fifty Shades of Grey-like experience with a woman whose DVR is filled with videos of a nun reciting the rosary4.

The key is to balance wholesomeness with entertainment that The Duchess and I can also enjoy, which isn’t easy because apparently we are much more jaded than we might initially appear5. This year I settled on A Christmas Story, which seemed holiday-appropriate and as wholesome as they come; after all, this is a film whose central conflict involves a toy gun. But as I sank into the pink recliner I’d been provided and we watched the movie in the perpetually-dim room, I slowly realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Because A Christmas Story isn’t wholesome at all. It’s terrifying.

(more…)

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

Author: January 19, 2020 0 Comments

Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash

SO, this is going to be a post about the dishwasher. Fair warning.

I grew up without a dishwasher. As a kid, washing dishes was one of the chores our parents assigned to my brother and I in exchange for our allowance. It was also one of the chores that they more or less had to re-do after we were finished because we were trash at it. As an adult, Present Day Jeff is disgusted by Past Jeff’s willingness to run a dish under lukewarm water and call it clean. But hey, I was, like, 10 years old.

In college, I was kind of a dick roommate. I was that guy who literally took all the dirty dishes out of the sink and put them in my roommate’s bed, to make a point. Which was not made. I can remember making tiny fists of rage every time one of my roommates took a dish out of the sink, washed it, cooked something, and then put it back in the sink and walked away.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized I was kind of the dick in that situation, trying to force people to live according to my rules. I now embrace the fact that I am pretty much always the dick in every situation; this attitude has clarified many things for me.

Flash forward to today: I have complex feelings about dirty dishes and dishwashers. They’re triggering.

Is It Weird That We Only Own One Cutting Board?

The Duchess is a firm believer in the power of convenient modern appliances, and she has resolved to never wash a dish by hand, ever. I can respect this, actually, I really can. The problem is that we only have a finite number of dishes, utensils, and cookware pieces. And we’re only two people. When you do the math on that, it means that if you use the one and only example of a certain item — say, a cutting board — on Monday, and then put it in the dishwasher, it sits there until you accumulate enough other dirty dishes1 to justify running the dishwasher.

Which is madness. I need that cutting board every day.

Maturity — adulthood — is often more or less the humiliation of your younger self. Where once I saw myself as a rebel who refused to do the dishes well in order to spite my parents, now I am a man who does the dishes constantly in an effort to always have a cutting board available. I am, in other words, a small man shaking tiny fists of rage at my own dishes. No wonder I drink so damn much. You would too.

I wind up washing many, many dishes by hand every day in order to ensure I have them when I want them, but I admit this also contributes to the problem: Because I hand-wash so many dishes, the dishwasher never fills up enough to justify running it. Which in turn means I hand-wash more dishes, onward and downward until we’re all pants-shittingly drunk on the kitchen floor, laughing uproariously at our own incredible stupidity and meaninglessness. I mean, a star exploded billions of years ago in order to supply the atoms that I currently use as a flesh shell, and here I am getting pants-shittingly drunk while washing dishes.

Why We Write

This is why I write, I think2. In my fiction, I control the universe, and thus even if it never makes it to the page I can rest assured that the people in my fictional universe handle the dishwasher properly, at least according to my weird Universal Weak Theory of Dishwasher Protocol.

The urge to impose your will on the universe shouldn’t be discounted as inspiration; we love to talk about ‘storytelling’ and ‘world-building,’ but sometimes it boils down to a desire to create a sandbox where you can impose what you think is the right way to do things and then use a sequence of thought experiments to see how it might actually play out. At the end, having a marketable manuscript is just a bonus.

I also only have one vintage Playboy shot glass left to me by my father, and that baby gets a lot of use, so it gets hand-washed constantly. Just sayin’.

Bullshit, Writing

Creating Optimism

Author: January 15, 2020 0 Comments

I often joke about my poor memory and how I live in the present like someone with brain damage. This is reinforced by the fact that I greet each and every day with a song in my heart, the sort of cockeyed optimism that only people with brain damage ever actually experience. Sure, by 5PM I’ve been worn down to a whiskey-guzzling nub and I’m ready to set myself on fire rather than face another second, but every morning I’m good.

The secret is short story submissions.

Never Tell Me the Odds

The secret to my bright and sunny mornings is possibilities. I submit a lot of stories, I respond to a lot of freelance jobs, and I usually have novels on submission and other projects in play. The vast majority of these efforts won’t pan out, but every day begins with the possibility that it will end with good news.

That’s powerful stuff. And it’s an addendum to my usual motto that you write exactly zero of the stories you don’t begin, and sell exactly zero of the projects you don’t submit: You also get to be excited about zero of the submissions you don’t make, or the jobs you don’t apply for.

That excitement is like oxygen. Every morning I wake up and it just might be the day I sell a story, or get a new freelance job, or learn someone is going to grossly overpay me to make a film adaptation of one of my novels. Or something else, who knows? The point is, because I keep my level of open potential opportunities high, I get to start every day with this rush of possibility. And, friend, let me tell you: It works. I don’t understand writers who don’t submit and have something in the works all the time for this very reason. Sure, 99% of my submissions, applications, and naked requests for free money fail. Doesn’t matter, because every day I wake up with a fresh scorecard, and that gets me through the rough times.

Of course, my liver also starts each day with a clean(ish) slate, and that helps too, not gonna lie.

career, Writing