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Dealing with Deflation

Author: January 31, 2018 0 Comments

Man, ideas are hard. Not only are they hard to come by (good ones, at least), they’re also often hard to convey to other people in ways that capture the excitement and originality of the concept. And one of the worst experiences that every writer goes through is when they excitedly start explaining their new story or novel idea to someone and watch in horror as the other person’s eyes glaze over and your idea shrivels up, turns black, and dies.

I always think of the experience as Deflation: You start off all puffed up about your idea, then experience the slow deflation of that confidence and excitement, and walk away with your confidence zeroed out. It’s kind of awful. And there are two ways to deal with it, both of which are more or less prophylactic.

The Best Defense

First of all, the best way to avoid deflation is to avoid telling people about your story until you’ve written a draft. That’s not always easy, but if you shield your idea from deflation you can maintain your enthusiasm for it, and even increase it as you progress and feel better and better about what you’re pulling off. Does this mean you might waste your time on an idea that only seems great? Sure, that’ll happen—you’ll spend a year writing a novel draft only to realize that it was all shit from the very beginning. On the other hand, I think that scenario will be pretty uncommon. Much more likely is the scenario where you actually finish a book before people start tearing your ideas to shreds—because criticizing someone else’s book is so easy literally anyone can do it.

The other approach is to hone your Elevator Pitch way, way early. Normally writers don’t think too hard about how to sell their novels until they’re, you know, actively trying to sell it. That means that when you drunkenly announce that you’re working on a new book and start telling people about it, you don’t have a polished pitch, and you start to ramble like your Drunk Uncles at Thanksgiving. You will be actively smothering the life out of your idea as you go.

Instead, having a pithy couple of sentences that efficiently lay out the main ideas without a lot of unnecessary and potentially confusing details will let you get in and out without self-inflicted damage. It’ll also boost your confidence, because instead of getting mixed-up and confused about your own plot elements, you’ll already have the blurb ready to go.

These strategies won’t eliminate the dreaded unimpressed expression even your best friends will sometimes sport when you’re explaining your cool new SFF concept—but it will help. Does this mean you’ll probably write more bad books? Sure. In the words of Twisted Sister, that’s the price you gotta pay.

ideas, Writing

Never Bulk Up

Author: January 29, 2018 0 Comments

So you have an idea for a novel. You carve out some time to work on it, you put thought and care into the story, the characters, the setting. You diligently pound out words. And when you’re done, your story is 25,000 words long. It’s clearly not a novel. What do you do?

a) Go back and start ginning up material to bulk it up into book-length proportions

b) Accept that you’ve written a novella

Neither of those choices is going to be correct 100% of the time, but in general I’d argue that you’re almost always much better off choosing option B. Because bulking up a story is usually a very easy way to wind up with a really, really terrible novel.

No More Words

Let’s backtrack a bit and admit that there are scenarios where bulking up a manuscript makes sense. For example, if you have something that’s borderline when it comes to word count and your agent or publisher says they think they can sell it except it needs 5,000-10,000 more words to make publishers see it as viable in the market, that’s a good reason. Or if someone whose opinion you trust says that the book needs something that naturally adds bulk, that can be a good reason too.

In both of those scenarios, the novel is almost there and adding material isn’t a Herculean task, and arguments can be made that the bulking up is beneficial. But when you’re just pouring in words like so much concrete just to hit a random word count you’ve decided is important—well, that’s everything that’s wrong with using word counts as a literary metric in the first place.

Because sometimes when you hit THE END and you’ve got a novella, that’s because your story should be a novella. And yes, novellas are hella hard to publish unless you’re already somewhat successful, and yes, maybe you’re disappointed because you wanted it to be a novel. But some of the best stories of all time were actually novellas—and even some books marketed as novels are really novellas. Point in fact, my first novel, Lifers, is borderline: It’s about 40,000 words. Would it have been improved if I wrote an additional 30,000 words? Absolutely not. It would have become the go-to example whenever writers were discussing noodling.

Now, if more story occurs to you naturally and you want to revisit a short work with more material, no reason not to. But dumping in words just to bulk up a story is a terrible idea. Don’t do it.

Unless someone’s paying you to do it. My advice is to always do things you’re paid to do, no matter how ill-advised, illegal, or ill-conceived.

General, Novels, Writing

Throw Out Your Thesaurus

Author: January 26, 2018 0 Comments

I have an acquaintance who was trained as a kid to never use the same word twice within a paragraph. It’s one of those rules beaten into her by nuns that she can’t forget, and thus composing even simple emails is a chore of Olympian proportions when we spend hours searching for yet another word that means agreed.

This always makes me think of the posts that go around Facebook and other social media listing 50 alternate verbs or adverbs or what have you, with the implication being that if you keep using the word said for every dialog tag like an unimaginative loser your writing will be bland and dull.

Here’s the thing: Using oddball words to break up monotony won’t stop your work from being bland and dull. It might make it unreadable, though.

Priority: Being Understood

Look, a limited vocabulary can indeed be a problem, but you have to choose your battles. Having every dialog tag be some biazarro word like gawped or emitted (both actually suggested in some of these posts) will make your writing sound amateurish and, frankly, insane. On the other hand, having every character described as attractive will simply focus the reader on the fact that all of your characters are more or less physically the same.

So, yes, some word variety is necessary. But word variety should be the natural result of your own reading and word acquisition. Words you use naturally in your own conversation will flow into your prose and feel natural. Words you search-and-replace into your prose with a list of alternatives will always—always—feel forced and weird. And if a little word variety is necessary, a little also goes a long way. You don’t need 50 ways to say he said. You should definitely never say he keened (also one of the examples from an actual post about this).

Your priority when telling a story, especially in the first draft, is to be understood. To have your plot make sense, to make your characters into believable people. Vocabulary variety should be a natural consequence of your language skills—not a science project where you drop strange new words into rando sentences to see what happens. He importuned.

dialogue, Writing

Dealing with the Unspoken

Author: January 24, 2018 2 Comments

There’s a bit of bad writing I like to call The Moron Double Tap. It’s prevalent in TV shows, but can be found just about anywhere: The moment that bits of plot-important information are repeated because the writer doesn’t trust their audience to get it. It’s like this:

JEFF: I can’t go to jury duty. I’ve been drinking since noon … yesterday.

POLICE #1: <opening liquor cabinet> All these bottles are full!

POLICE #2: <gasps> But he said he’d been drinking since noon!

In other words, did you need that bit of info repeated? Of course not. But there are morons out there, morons incapable of retaining any sort of info. These are the folks who lean over to their date at a movie and literally need every single character identified and plot swerve explained, and if you want your story to have the biggest audience possible you’ll sink down to Moron Double Tap levels in order to ensure you don’t enrage the idiots when they become confused at your overly-complex story.

It can also happen to writers when they’re dealing with the Unspoken.

Don’t Speak

There are always many unspoken things between people. You don’t after all, greet your oldest friend by shouting “WHY HERE IS MY OLDEST FRIEND!” and you don’t refer to people as your spouse or boss in normal conversation with them. Normal interaction is riddled with unspoken subtext and context.

The trouble, as anyone who’s ever tried writing a story knows with soul-killing certainty, is that when you’re writing a story you have to find ways to get that unspoken stuff out there, and there aren’t many good choices. You can go with Exposition Dumps, which are awful and stop everything in their tracks (and read very artificial). Or you might wind up with a form of the Moron Double Tap by having everyone awkwardly identify their relationships or unspoken understandings verbally:

JEFF: Why look, it’s Tom, my literary nemesis!

TOM: Hello there; As agreed I will pretend not to notice the way you refer to me as if I’m a character in a story.

This is, obviously, shit writing, but it’s an easy trap to fall into, because you hear a lot about how exposition is bad, but not much about the Moron Double Tap, because it’s so widespread.

How do you handle the Unspoken, then? The trick is, don’t “handle” it. Go Method, and just keep your unspoken stuff in mind as you write, the same way we all do in real life. Let the unspoken stuff inform your characters’ decisions, statements, and reactions. Trust me, it’ll become clear.

Unless your readers are morons, of course, in which case a little MDT might be necessary.

characters, General, Writing

Read Widely Also Means Read Old

Author: January 22, 2018 0 Comments

One of the first and most useful pieces of advice writers receive is “read widely.” This is great advice for many obvious reasons, of course, and likely the most important advice you’ll put into practice. You simply can’t overestimate how much you’ll learn about writing simply by absorbing other people’s work—not to mention the inspirations you’ll get and, put simply, the ideas you’ll be able to steal.

For a lot of folks, though, reading widely translates too narrowly, and they wind up simply reading every single new book that comes out in their lane. In other words, SFF writers read all the new SFF, romance writers read all the new romance. Reading widely should include books outside your genre and comfort zone—but it should also include older books beyond the staples.

Evergreen Lessons

The power of The New is immense. Anything older than a few decades—outside of cultural touchstones like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings—is often considered a little corny and dull by current standards. And in some ways this is true: Watch an old movie from the 1940s and it feels all wrong. The pacing is weird, the dialog sounds stilted, the sets and costumes aren’t simply old-fashioned, they’re almost bizarre to the modern sensibility. It’s easy to decide that old stuff is so alien to the modern generation it’s useless; after you don’t want to learn how to write to an audience long dead.

It’s a little different in novels, though. Sure, the language and conventions are often old-fashioned, and techniques that were amazingly new in the 19th century are now simply fundamentals. But you can learn a lot from reading old novels. If nothing else, you can learn what’s been constant. And that’s powerful—what hasn’t changed? What is so fundamental to the form that it’s essentially unchanged since the first novels were published? What about Don Quixote still feels fresh and modern to you, and why do you think that is?

If nothing else, you’ll get a wider view of why modern novels employ the techniques and approaches that they do. You might just pick up a few master-level tricks, since you’ll be reading books that have withstood the test of time, unlike, you know, 90% of all the books out on the shelves right now.

Bottom line: You can learn from any book. But the narrower your lane is, the less effective your reading will be in terms of improving and strengthening your own work. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to discover how similar olden times often were to our own. Sure, they didn’t have Netflix, but you might be interested to know that alcohol has always been a thing. I sure was. It made me feel like I was part of something larger than myself.

General, Writing

Write it Now

Author: January 19, 2018 0 Comments

A friend of mine has a peculiar death fantasy. Whenever we discuss our mortality (more often than is healthy, probably), he insists that when the doctors tell him that he’s got X months to live he’ll sell the house, liquidate his savings, and head to Las Vegas so he can spend what time he has left living the high life, and hopefully keel over with a Scotch in one hand and a steak dinner in front of him.

I always politely point out the obvious flaw in this thinking: What if you, you know, don’t get the warning? What if a piano falls on you, or your doctor says you have X days left instead of months? And he has no answer. I try to urge him to live a little bit right now. Maybe don’t sell the house, but maybe take a vacation to Vegas and have that steak sooner rather than later.

The same goes for writing. We all have other things going on. We have Day Jobs and families and chores and leaking roofs and broken transmissions and sick kids and such. It’s easy to imagine that someday you will finally sit down and start writing that book that’s been nudging you in the brain for the last few weeks, months, years, decades.

The fact is, there’s no perfect time, no ideal moment. Start writing today, because, yep, a piano might fall on you tomorrow.

That Means You

This isn’t advice that only applies to aspiring writers or newcomers to the peculiar hell called Being a Writer. This goes for all of us. We all have projects we’ve put off—because it’s too complex or time-consuming, because we have to write for a living today, because we’re not sure we can pull it off artistically. And we all have to remind ourselves of the piano hovering over us, suspended by a thin wire, that could drop at any time.

Certain activities always seem pointlessly risky to me. I always say that I don’t want my last words to ever be Why did I do this? I don’t want my last words to be, why did I agree to skydive? Or, why did I agree to ride this insane rollercoaster? You can’t avoid death forever, but I never want my final thoughts to be all-consuming regret because I chose to do something that was obviously potentially deadly.

In the same vein, I don’t want to think gosh, I should have written that novel about cats where the cats are secretly angels trying to stop the apocalypse but their owners won’t let them out of the house. I may not finish every idea I have, but I’m going to fucking die trying. And so should you.

General, time management, Writing

Avoid Busywork

Author: January 17, 2018 0 Comments

Writing a novel (or, sometimes, even a short story) often requires a lot of work that isn’t writing. This could be research, or world-building no one will ever see, or getting your workspace set up in a way that’s conducive to your style. It might mean taking some time off and renting a yurt or something so you can dedicate yourself to the work. Or it might mean reading a ton of books in the same genre or category so you can get a feel for what’s current, what’s common, and what’s overdone.

All of that sort of work is sometimes necessary, but it can also become Busywork, and thus a way to feel like you’re accomplishing something without actually writing anything.

Writing Feng Shui

There’s an old cliché of someone procrastinating by obsessing over their workspace. They’ll get started on this novel as soon as they get the desk set up exactly the way they want, or as soon as they have perfect quiet, or as soon as they figure out the perfect word processing software that is ideal for their work style. They spend weeks ordering gadgets and arranging the furniture in their home office but never actually write anything.

That’s an obvious delaying tactic, but there are other ways of putting off the inevitable moment when you have to type CHAPTER ONE and begin the process of turning your ideas into a coherent narrative. This can come in the form of endless research, one source of info always leading to another, ad infinitum forever and ever world without end. Or it could mean working on minute details of your world-building backstory. Maybe you spend six months creating a language for your tribe of half-elk, half-men. Or maybe you spend a year sketching the coat of arms for every prominent family in your fictional city.

This stuff is fun, and it might serve a very good purpose for your creative process. But it can—not necessarily will, but can—also become a way of feeling like you’re doing good writing without actually, you know, writing anything.

Finding that balance can be challenging, but a good rule of thumb is simple: Did you actually write anything today? Then you’re not writing, no matter how much work you put into everything else.

One note: Drinking is never busywork and is always necessary to the creative process. And I will fight anyone who says otherwise <tears off shirt, screams>.

General, time management, Writing

Give Yourself Permission to Fail

Author: January 15, 2018 0 Comments

Writing is a messy business. You might imagine that as you progress along your artistic and professional path things get cleaner and simpler—that you’re able to bang out clean, powerful prose at any moment without all the mess of false starts and revision, but you’d be what Literary Scientists call ?wrong.’

Yes, you get better at certain things. Organizing your thoughts, jump-starting beginnings, crafting thesis statements and arguments. Research, process—there are plenty of things you get better at, including recognizing when the words you’ve just put down on the page or screen are absolute hot trash (note to self: Absolute Hot Trash is a great band name). But you’ll probably never hit a point where you can bang out a draft of a novel or story quickly and nail it every time. Maybe sometimes. Maybe when motivation or inspiration really smacks you. But in general you have to give yourself permission to fail.

Nothin’ but a Number

This can be difficult to accept when you’ve attained a certain amount of experience and success. After all, if you’ve written and sold novels, been anthologized, won awards you must know what you’re doing! And yet you’ll still write stuff that is the aforementioned Absolute Hot Trash. You’ll still get a novel 66% of the way and then watch it fall apart. You’ll still review yesterday’s work and be dismayed that your sentences have all the flow of a high school kid rapping for the first time after drinking an entire bottle of Jägermeister by themselves.

The best thing—the only thing—you can is to give yourself permission to fail. Permission to write Absolute Hot Trash. Permission to delete 10,000 words and start over.

The important thing to remember here is that failing in a creative endeavor is not only not unusual even for veterans, it’s healthy. It’s necessary. It’s like a controlled burn that clears out the dead underbrush and old growth so new saplings can emerge. It should be embraced.

Most importantly, recognizing that you’ve screwed the pooch on a piece of writing means you’re still able to tell the fucking difference between good work and bad. If you ever feel like you’re in some amazing Zone where everything breaks your way and you haven’t done shitty work in a long time, get suspicious.

Of course, don’t make my mistake: Remember to also give yourself permission to succeed. Whew, the wasted years!

General, Writing