Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
BAM!
We had the launch event for Writing Without Rules last night, at the totally awesome Little City Books in Hoboken, New Jersey last night, and it was awesome! Beer, wine, and whiskey, Jeff sweating profusely in front of a crowd, The Duchess taking charge and orchestrating everything, my agent gently mocking me from the front row — what could be better?
If you missed it, here are some incredible photos taken by the incredible Bruce Meier.
I’ve talked before about putting out a zine; I published The Inner Swine for nearly 20 years, 100,000 words a year broken into four annual issues (until the last few years, when exhaustion got the better of me). The zine was always a way of getting my thoughts and fiction into print when no one wanted to actually pay me to do so, and it was a lot of fun. It was also the best training I could have put myself through.
The first issue of The Inner Swine came out in 1995. The Internet existed, of course, but it wasn’t what it is today—it was new and primitive and no one was really sure how it was all going to shake out. Twenty years before I started getting paid to write 500-word blog posts, I was coming up with short, pithy articles for my zine on a wide variety of subjects (many of which I was 100% completely unqualified to write about; circa-2000 Jeff certainly thought he was smart enough to expound on any subject or point of view, no matter how distant he was from it in reality).
By the time I launched a freelance writing career, I’d already trained myself to come up with pitches and article ideas, then develop those ideas into short articles. Without realizing it, my zine prepared me for my future career as a professional writer.
More importantly, I think, Writing Without Rules is kind of like a very special issue of my zine. It’s structure pretty much the same way and uses a similar writing style; every issue of The Inner Swine used to be centered on a specific theme, and I even did one or two writing-themed issues. In a lot of ways, WWR is a super-sized issue of The Inner Swine if it had a writing theme in the 21st century.
All of this is to say that no writing is truly valueless. Even if you’re not getting paid, or you have a small audience, every word you thoughtfully put down on the page or screen pays a small dividend, even if only in the sense of training yourself to write more effectively, efficiently, and energetically. When I got into a groove putting out four issues of a zine every year in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I had no idea I’d someday publish a book on writing. But nevertheless, The Inner Swine trained me to be able to do so.
It also trained me to be unaffected by negative criticism, because man that zine got some hate mail.
Writing novels ain’t easy. Heck, writing short stories ain’t easy. Well, in some senses it’s easy; sometimes having an idea is the easiest thing in the world, and even whole sections can fly off your fingers so fast and perfect it seems like you should be able to write, like, a dozen novels a month. Maybe more.
Ah, but then—as every writer knows—comes the doldrums, those slow times when not only can’t you seem to get the words right, you also can’t seem to even have an idea. Everything feels leaden and dead and the idea that you might ever write a complete story again seems depressingly ludicrous.
For those moments, I recommend drinking heavily. Actually, drinking heavily is my go-to medicine for just about any writing-related, but especially those horrible moments when it seems like your Muse has abandoned you.
There’s another horrifying moment for writers, one that gets a lot less attention than the big bad Writer’s Block. It’s the sudden downturn in energy and productivity that sometimes follows completing a major project—The Aftermath of a novel can be brutal. I should know, I didn’t just complete one novel, I completed two, as well as a short story. And I crashed hard.
I wrote several novels over the last 2 years—four of them, to be exact. Two weren’t quite great (and one of those I managed to pare down to a short story that contains the essentials, leading me to believe that I was way over-padding that premise). But two are very good, in my not-so objective opinion. I worked on them concurrently for the last few months, jumping back and forth between them. And when I finished them, very close to each other, I was very happy with the results.
Since then I’ve been … well, struggling’s not the right word. It’s been slow, though. I don’t have a big project in mind, and the smaller pieces I’m working on aren’t exactly pouring out of me.
I’ll get there, I always do. And that’s what’s necessary in these moments: Faith in yourself, in your own idea machine. You have to remind yourself that the tens of millions of words you’ve written over the course of your life (or the thousands, or the hundreds) all came after periods of struggle. It happens, it’s not a big deal, and it will pass.
Aside from, you guessed it, drinking heavily, my antidote to this crash is to work on as many short projects as possible. Short stories can get a lot of half-baked ideas out of your head—some of which might become fully-baked with a little time and effort—and keep your fingers moving until your lizard brain shrugs off the malaise and gets cranking again. When that happens, you want to be ready. Although the drinking never hurts either.
Writing is a glorious creative adventure wherein your imagination is free to roam infinite universes, but it’s also a craft and a skill. As the latter, sometimes it can get a bit … well, boring‘s not the right word. Familiar, maybe? The first time you pull off some literary trick it’s exciting. When you’ve written 600 short stories and twenty-five novels, some of your own bag of tricks get a little been-there, if you know what I mean.
Shaking things up is necessary from time to time. Working in a new, unfamiliar genre, or changing up your process can be remedies to a certain malaise that can set in. I’ve always been mystified by writers who act like their process is somehow an unchangeable fact of the universe, as if changing the schedule and mechanics of their writing will somehow result in disaster. I myself get into deep, comfy ruts when it comes to schedule and mechanics, but I also try to occasionally challenge myself and get out of that comfort zone—like writing a novel as a series of novellas, for example. Recently, I find myself contemplating a decentralized style of writing a novel.
I’m usually a pretty linear writer; even when my story jumps around in time or is otherwise complex, I start at the beginning of my story and proceed A—Z from there in the order that I conceive of the story. That’s how my brain works, so that’s how I write.
I have an idea for a novel right now that’s going to involve a frame story of sorts and then some individual episodes. Normally, as I said, I would start at the beginning and just go forward from there, but this time, for whatever reason, I want to try something different, so I’m going to just randomly write sections of the book until I’m done. Instead of starting with what would be Chapter 1 and moving forward linearly, I’m going to maybe start by writing Chapter 14, then Chapter 20, and so on.
Why? Why not? But mainly I want to keep things fresh and try something new. There’s such low stakes with little tricks like this, there’s almost zero reason not to try things once in a while in an effort to shake up your own complacency. Worst case scenario? I give up and restart with a more traditional approach to process. Or maybe I go insane and start wandering the neighborhood in a robe, muttering to myself … more often.
I’m psyched to announce a new short story set in the Avery Cates universe, The Drum Trial:
“New York is burning.
After the assassination of Dennis Squalor came the Monk Riots: Thousands of cyborgs, released from their digital prisons, expressing rage and suffering and insanity through violence and bloodshed. The System Security Force mobilizes with brutal efficiency to restore order, but they take losses—and they’ve been ordered not to go after the man they blame: A young Gunner named Avery Cates.
But the System Police aren’t used to being told that someone is untouchable. And they have no intention of obeying this particular order.
Also contains the bonus Cates story, ‘A Small, Red-headed Problem'”
People on the mailing list might know ‘A Small, Red-headed Problem’ as the story sent out as a prize to our last contest.
I really enjoy being able to just take an idea for Cates, bang it out, and publish it. As usual with these stories I’m trying something a little different; the POV in this story is not, for the first time ever, Cates himself. I hope you enjoy the shift in perspective as I fill in some of the gaps between the novels.
When I was in college, I once wrote a short story entirely in crayon. This was most likely because I was bored, but there was a story reason for the choice that I can’t recall (just as I can’t recall what the story itself was about, and I lack sufficient energy and motivation to dig it out of my files to find out), some sort of color theme. It’s one of the few times in my career I’ve tried to play around with the presentation of a story as opposed to relying on the words themselves to carry whatever message I’m trying to convey. Although I do have certain private peccadillos (only writing short stories in longhand, only using a blue pen) when it comes to publishing my work I don’t like to rely on font or design choices to carry anything, because those can be lost or misinterpreted. When the superadvanced roach species that rules this planet in the future finds my work (and they will), I don’t want half the point lost because they don’t have Comic Sans loaded on their futuristic devices.
I’m currently reading a novel that does rely on a lot of design work and special fonts, and it’s not working for me. For one thing, the special fonts are distracting; one is meant to resemble handwriting, but the perfect repetition of the letter forms betrays it and spikes me out of the narrative. For another, the special, heavily-designed sections meant to resemble specific modes of writing, time periods, and other aspects of the story are just kind of useless.
Your mileage may vary, of course; anything can be pulled off in a novel or story, it just requires that you have the talent and vision to do so. For example, I love House of Leaves despite (or perhaps because of) it’s use of font shenanigans and specific design choices. And would I love Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tail—which I named my blog after!—if it wasn’t so meticulously laid out?
Still, for myself, I’m a purist. I’d like to think I can convey anything I need to simply through my control of the language. And I kind of feel like that’s definitely where you should start, even if you do end up utilizing some font shenanigans or other design wankery to get a certain effect. All of your work should be design-indifferent, utlimately, in my opinion, with the frills added on later. I stick with italics for anything that’s not part of the main narrative, and if you’re confused after reading one of my stories, then it’s not the fault of the design or the font choices, but rather of my writing.
But then, what do I know? Depends who you ask. The Duchess will tell you I have some knowledge of housekeeping, but not much else. And she will go on at length on this subject, too, so clear some time.
When describing what it’s like to make money from creativity, I often like to refer to the TV show Mad Men because of the way it depicted resident creative genius Don Draper. In a nutshell, Draper was often shown napping in his office, sneaking out to a movie (or a date) in the afternoons, drinking excessively, and otherwise goofing off.
In short, there’s a lot of blank space in a creative life. When 90% of the work is mental, it can be hard for other folks to understand what you’re doing if you’re not madly typing constantly.
If that blank space is mystifying to other people, it can be downright terrifying to a writer; it usually follows months or years of intense effort, and then you send off your project—to a magazine, web site, publisher, agent, or beta reader—and enter into the Blank Space portion of your writing life. In short, one of the most difficult aspects of a writing career (as opposed to actually just doing the writing) is the waiting game that ensues after you submit something. You can drive yourself crazy interpreting silence. The best thing to do, in my experience, is to not think about submissions at all.
I send off a lot of submissions every year, both on my own (short stories and novellas to contests, anthologies, and magazines) and to or via my agent. And it’s always the same: There’s a ton of work that goes into thew writing, revising, and preparation of the story or book, and then there’s a ton of work that goes into preparing the submission itself—cover letters, synopses, proposals, etc.
And then: Nothing. The Blank Space.
The only thing to do is put it out of your mind. Forget all about it. Jump to the next project or take some time off, whatever you prefer, but don’t waste time thinking about what you just sent off. You can’t affect the odds now, what’s done is done. And the universe is not taking note of the amount of mental energy you’re pouring into the submission, so there’s nothing to be gained by going over it in your head, or worrying over what the delay or speed of a response means. Put it out of your mind and move on to the next thing so that the rejection or acceptance that comes down the pike will be a surprise, pleasant or otherwise.
Of course, there’s a downside to this: I often completely forget about submissions altogether, and thirteen months later I suddenly notice an open sub in my records and then realize I’ve accidentally simultaneously-submitted that story a dozen times. Or forgotten to follow up at all. Because when you’ve got a sieve-like memory, sometimes Blank Space is all you have.
When I was a few years younger I used to kid myself that I had some kind of control over my existence. You can, if you squint, convince yourself that you have cracked the code. If you limit yourself to six or seven whiskies a night, eat some kale, and occasionally break a light sweat, you could possibly live forever, and all those people dying are just idiots who have not, you know, cracked the code.
As you get older, though, your complete lack of control over your body or your existence becomes increasingly, disturbingly clear. Your body comes up with bizarre ways to demonstrate how little influence you have over it, physical events that are at turns ridiculous, amusing, horrifying, and fatal, almost always disconnected from every single concession you’ve made to health and aging and mortality. These events remind you, forcibly, that no one here gets out alive, and all your healthy bullshit is just that, because you really have no idea what’s going on inside the skin sack you call a body.
For example, a few months ago, out of the blue, I started snoring. I’d snored before, in isolated incidents, but The Duchess was now reporting thunderous, incredibly loud displays of volume on a regular basis, as if some vital part of my skull’s interior airways had collapsed or perhaps been eaten by some Cronenbergian parasite I swallowed when I was three years old and eager to eat everything it found, something that’s been excavating inside my for decades. When I woke up one day to find that my wife had decamped to the couch overnight to escape the endless roar, I knew I had to do something, because my wife is certainly not above smothering me in my sleep and blaming the cats.
Because I have many, many deep thoughts about writing, writing careers, and my own bad self.
HUZZAH.
Something that doesn’t get discussed a lot in the conversation about writing (and selling and marketing) stories is what happens when you finish something. Writers put so much energy into a novel, so many months or years of effort, so many restless night worrying over plot points and pondering why a character doesn’t seem to be gelling the story, that finishing a novel is sometimes more of a crawl over the finish line as opposed to a triumphant sprint.
Putting that kind of mental energy into a project means that for many writers there’s a crash after you’re done, a creative hangover of sorts that can knock you off your game for a long time.
For me, part of it is that by the time I get to the final act of a novel I’ve become really familiar and comfortable with the universe I’ve created and the characters I’ve filled it with. There’s a great deal of pleasure when you’re totally in control of a story. You’ve solved all your plot problems, you’re so familiar with your characters it’s like they’re real people to you, and everything becomes, at the end, effortless.
Then you finish. And you’re suddenly faced with the monumental task of starting over, from scratch. And the idea is simply exhausting. Even if you have a great idea you want to develop, actually, you know, developing it seems like lifting a building over your head.
Worse, of course, is when you finish a book and realize that it isn’t good. That you screwed it up somehow. All that effort, and your choice now is to either trash what you have and start over from scratch, spend another few months trying to sort out the problems without a total re-write, or start something new and hope it goes better.
Either way, there’s always a hangover after finishing something. My preferred way of dealing with it is to have multiple projects going at once. This overlaps the hangovers a bit, which mitigates them. If for some reason I don’t have something else already in progress, I sometimes find it’s bracing and curative to dash off something short and maybe a little crazy. To just take any crazy idea that pops into my head and write it fast and dirty, without planning or deep thought.
Or, you know, drink heavily until my body turns yellow and I’m confined to bed and having nothing else to do but write. Sometimes that.