Latest Posts

Characters: The Forgotten

Author: October 23, 2017 0 Comments

Writing a first draft is always fun; in a recent conversation with Lee Child, he told me that he loved starting a first draft because he hadn’t screwed anything up yet—the book might still be great! While most writers put pressure on ourselves to get it right the first time, first drafts offer a lot of flexibility. Whatever doesn’t work you can revise, remove, or replace, after all, and no one ever has to see your tortured, confused, meandering first effort, unless, of course, you become incredibly famous, at which point you won’t mind showing off your genius process for writing novels.

But first drafts can also get a little messy. I generally produce pretty clean first drafts; if things go off the rails in a first draft for me, I usually don’t even finish the attempt, and if I finish the draft revision is generally just cleanup. As clean as my drafts usually are I still sometimes get into trouble, most frequently with that dreaded writing boogie man, the forgotten character.

Who Were You, Again?

This happened to me very recently. I started a new novel, and seeded in five main characters connected in a group. At around the 30,000 word mark, I suddenly had a realization: I hadn’t mentioned one of those five characters in several chapters. This meant that for weeks of work time, I’d completely forgotten that this character is in the novel.

Now, this can be a sign that your character shouldn’t be in the novel. After all, if you, the creator and miniature god of your fictional universe, can’t keep a character in your head, there’s probably a reason. I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest (“Kill Your Darlings”) about dealing with characters who might not need to be there, and one technique I mentioned is combining characters, which might be just what this book needs.

On the other hand, the characters are in a group, and I worry that thinning that group down too much might make it less believable. So, for the moment, I’ve decided to keep the character in there by the simple expedient of mentioning his name every now and then and giving him meaningless dialog to chime in with. This way, he’s still there, and if I find a use for him later, great! And if I don’t, I can eliminate him secure in the knowledge that he has no purpose anyway.

Of course what I really should be worried about are the real people in my life that no one else seems to see or hear. But that can wait until this book is done.

characters, Writing

The Unexpected Journey

Author: October 20, 2017 0 Comments

Life’s funny. When I was younger, I never imagined I’d someday be a Contributing Editor at Writer’s Digest Magazine with a book on writing coming out (Writing Without Rules, natch) and a solid freelance writing career going. There was also a time when I didn’t see myself as a science fiction guy, and yet seven of my nine published novels are SFF.

On the other hand, I also never saw myself married and living with five cats. Make of that what you will.

FIVE GODDAMN CATS

The point is, your writing career may not go exactly as you imagine. When I sold my first novel, Lifers, I thought it was the first step in a very literary career; I saw myself as writing a series of realistic novels with subtle genre twists. When the book got reviewed by The New York Times I thought that was the next step. And then literally nothing much happened until I sold the sci-fi cyberpunk novel The Electric Church that I didn’t even tell my agent about until it had sold.

Every time I thought I knew where my career was going—or where it should go—I’ve been pretty much wrong. I’m at a point where I’ve stopped trying to guess—I just follow my opportunities combined with my imagination and passion, and hope that the combination of the two leads to something interesting. There’s just no point any more of trying to figure out whether a certain book will sell, or some kind of master plan for literary domination. I’m just along for the ride.

It can be frustrating to realize you’re at the mercy of forces. Forces like the market, which may or may not be buying what you’re writing. Forces like your agent or editors, who may or may not like your latest project. Forces like the fact that you need to make a living and therefore take writing jobs you might not have ever imagined yourself taking—which in turn lead to unforeseen moments of grace.

So, just write, submit, revise, and say yes to opportunities. No other strategy makes any sense.

I’d also suggest “drink heavily” as a way of blunting the horror that is writing for a living, but that seems like something y’all will figure out on your own.

career, General, Writing

The Less is More Approach to World Building

Author: October 18, 2017 0 Comments

I’m a writer who believes fervently that less is more in just about every aspect of writing a novel. Nothing you write will ever beat the magic movie machine that is your readers’ imaginations, and the more you let your reader infer, imagine, and guess at what lies behind stuff, the better your universe, characters, and mechanics will be.

Not every writer agrees, of course, and some of them are extremely successful. Some writers want to invent languages with complex grammars and extensive vocabularies. Or write book-length histories that will never be published. In other words, some writers are Method and want to have all this stuff under the surface that informs their work. That’s fine, but it’s not me, and if it’s not you, you have to be honest with yourself. The problem we all run up against is that the folks who believe more is, well, more are often the ones that get all the attention.

Seems Like Work

I’ll admit to being jealous of the folks who can invent languages and adapt existing religions into a wholly new form for their novels, but I’m also not very interested in doing so—unless those things are the point of the story I’m telling. When it comes to languages, specifically, I prefer to invent a few words, hint at a grammar, and leave it at that. In fact, for almost all the details of world-building I prefer to use hints and shadows instead of details and pages and pages of detail.

Part of this is admitting that you have to write the stuff that excites you and not the stuff that bores you, because your attitude towards your own material will come off the page like radiation. The other part is the diminishing returns of details: At first your reader will be excited to learn about the fundamentals of your universe, but familiarity breeds contempt, and if you don’t withhold some of the information you run the risk of your reader seeing you behind the curtain madly pulling levers, and the magic is gone.

The TL;DR version is: Don’t force yourself to do world-building work you don’t want to. It’s never worth it.

This applies to household chores, too, which is why I turned my crawlspace into one huge cat litter box. It’ll be years before I have to burn this place down, change my name, and start over.

Novels, worldbuilding

“Halt and Catch Fire”: The Beauty in Failure

Author: October 16, 2017 0 Comments

Spoilers, because fuck spoilers. You been warned.

The fourth and final season of Halt and Catch Fire, the show least likely to make four seasons in the history of all shows, has gotten a fair bit of attention for sheer simple quality. Of course, part of the reason there have been so many love letters to the show this month is the unlikely nature of that quality; the first season of HAFC wasn’t exactly terrible, but it was decidedly meh, to use a technical term. And so a million Think Pieces were born this year when the unlikely fourth season turned out to be a pretty fantastic story about characters that fans have come to enjoy, against all odds.

Other people have written persuasively about how this show, so mediocre in its beginning, came to be so highly regarded among the very, very small audience it managed to build. For me, though, what I came to really appreciate about HACF is simpler: Everyone on this show was a failure, and the show decided to find the beauty in that.

Beautiful Failures

The fake-out of HACF is that it presented its characters as brilliant, and we as the audience were well-trained to accept that even if we didn’t quite buy it. After all, most characters in prestige dramas are presented as special, and the audience is supposed to go along with it (see Don Draper, Walter White, literally everyone else).

The main characters as presented in season 1 were all primed to be secret geniuses: Joe MacMillan, the tortured mystery man modeled so obviously on Don Draper, who has an audacious plan to manipulate two companies into building a market-defining personal computer; Cameron Howe, brilliant but socially-screwed young programmer; Gordon Clark, brilliant engineer simmering with rage at the compromises of his life and where they’d landed him; Donna Clark, brilliant engineer frustrated by the limitations of being a woman in a tech world dominated by assholes.

It should have been the story of these eclectic geniuses as they conquered the world. Instead, it’s the story of people failing upward and ultimately letting go of their dreams. And that’s the genius of the show.

They don’t build that incredible computer; instead they build an adequate machine that sells well enough to make some money, and destroy the company they work for in the process. They go on, in subsequent seasons, to be smart enough to anticipate the Internet, social media, and the World Wide Web, but they’re never able to move quickly enough or be brilliant enough to actually invent the amazing things. Someone else comes out with the Macintosh. Someone else builds AOL. Someone else builds Netscape. Our lovable losers are always a day late and a dollar short.

And the beauty of the final season is that they all accept this, to a point. Now, none of these people are failures in a conventional sense; they all participate in enough startups and product launches to be relatively rich and well-known by the end of the show’s run. Donna is a very successful partner at a venture capital firm. Joe has had a piece of several lucrative businesses that were bought out by bigger, better competitors. Cameron had a career as a game designer and is more or less widely regarded as something of a genius in the field.

Gordon, of course, is dead, but he was head of a successful if not world-changing company and had a fair amount of money.

But none of them had accomplished what they most wanted: Change the world, come up with “the thing” that changed everything. Their ideas always curdled into semi-success. Money, sure. Some sales. The sort of resume most people would love. But not the thing. As the show ended, Joe becomes an educator, finally realizing that this is what he’s wanted all along, to shape and mold the future. Gordon, as I mentioned, is dead, but before his death he’d achieved a quiet dignity in realizing his own limitations as a person, growing less angry and more giving as he gave up trying to assert himself as a genius. Donna and Cameron are about to embark on a new venture, it’s strongly implied, but they’re doing so out of a sense of excited connection, not because they think they’re going to change the world. They know they probably won’t, but they’re excited to work together again, a small-scale ambition.

That‘s what this show got right: Most of us, we don’t invent, or write, or compose the thing. We might have success, and we might do all right financially, but we don’t get the thing. Almost no one does. And HACF is one of the few shows to ever understand that a story about people not getting the thing could be great.

Because that story is almost universal.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

When It’s Not Ready for Prime Time

Author: October 16, 2017 0 Comments

I don’t know about you, but as a writer I tend to think every idea I have is brilliant, at least for a while. There’s the sunburst of inspiration, a period that can last anywhere from a minute to a year, wherein I am convinced I just changed literature forever. Then there’s a variable period of actually working on the idea, which as every writer knows usually involves suddenly realizing just how worthless and tired the idea actually is. And then, if you’re lucky, there’s the discovery a nugget of something shiny in all that collapsed shit, something you can polish and melt and cast into a book you want to write.

That’s not the hard part.

The hard part is when you finish a book after going through that process and someone—a Beta Reader, your agent, that insistent voice in your head, tells you that it’s not ready for prime time. Simply put, effort doesn’t always equal brilliance.

Patience, Grasshopper

This happens to me all the time. One specific example is a book I wrote long ago. Shortly after being signed by my agent, I was pretty psyched and confident. So I thought about what my next book should be—after all, once my agent sold Chum and it became a worldwide literary phenomenon, I would need to quickly offer up my next novel to my publisher, right? So I started working on an idea I had, and a few months later I sent it off to my agent, fairly confident she would be excited.

She was not.

Gently, she told me it just wasn’t ready. What she actually said is that it felt like half a story. Looking back, she was absolutely right, because what I wound up doing with that book (ten years later) was combining it with another not-quite-finished novel, and that Frankenstein’s Monster of a book did win my agent’s heart (we haven’t sold it yet, but give it time). The point is that being told your novel isn’t ready for prime time is far from the worst thing someone can say. And sometimes it’s going to take you ten years to figure out exactly what your book is missing.

In other words, just because you wrote a bad book doesn’t mean it can’t be a great book—someday. Uncork a bottle of something inebriating and drink until you can be honest with yourself, then start working again.

Be careful with the drinking-until-you’re-honest thing, though. Trust me: You can become too honest with yourself.

Novels

Bad Ideas: Speaking in Speeches

Author: October 13, 2017 0 Comments

Everyone loves a good dramatic speech. Whether it’s the hero taking a stand against one final act of evil or humiliation, or the villain declaring his hatred for humanity on a grand scale, or even a supporting character suddenly making their case for their very existence in a story, a speech can be a powerful moment. There’s a reason, after all, that even people who’ve never read Hamlet can quote the beginning of his most famous soliloquy—because speeches kick ass.

Which is why it’s tempting to basically make your story a series of impassioned speeches by your characters. This temptation is supported by a lot of current pop-culture, as there are several TV shows on the air right now where characters basically communicate through lengthy, impassioned speeches. The folks on these shows and in these types of stories stop on a dime and launch into eloquent, frequently well-written speeches defining their worldview, or justifying an odd life decision, or just dragging another character on the carpet for bad behavior. It can be thrilling.

It’s also very bad writing.

Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

Speeches are powerful because of their inherent drama; in real life people rarely make lengthy speeches aside from the boring kind made at events. If someone in real life stood up in a crowded place and made a five-minute speech about why they love you, or hate you, or why they’re about to drive into the desert and leave everything behind, it’s a powerful, unexpected moment.

Like all powerful moments, you’ve got to meter your usage of them. Building up to a powerful speech for a character over the course of chapters and thousands and thousands of words? That’s effective. Having characters pause every three pages to make a speech? That’s lazy, and every time you do so you take away some of the power of the speech. Eventually, as we see on TV, speechifying becomes so familiar it becomes the new normal, and at that point the Speech as writing technique has no power left. It’s just characters interacting in stilted, unrealistic ways.

This rule isn’t limited to speeches—any writing technique can be overused. Right now speechifying has a certain currency because it retains its power while also being overused in hit TV shows and books, so it’s tempting. But bad writing is bad writing even if it’s currently having a Moment.

On the other hand, I kind of just made a speech against speeches, didn’t I? Goddammit.

General, Writing

Be Prepared

Author: October 11, 2017 3 Comments

You have no idea what men of power can do.

After Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed the bottom half of my house and cost a bazillion dollars to recover from, I went on a small-scale preparation tear. You always prepare for the last war, or in this case the last natural disaster, so no doubt all my efforts are in vain, but I figured the only thing worse than not being prepared for an unknowable disaster was not being prepared for a disaster you knew full well was possible.

So, my disaster prep was more or less dictated by our experience during Sandy. We bought RTE food because the grocery stores and restaurants were closed for a week. We bought battery-operated water alarms in case the flood came while we were asleep. We bought flashlights that double as lanterns. We bought jugs of water. We bought a huge 7,000 RPM generator because the power was off for a week. I got a propane model with an electric starter because pulling that fucking ripcord is for people who have some level of physical fitness, and I don’t need to be out in the rain crying because I’ve been pulling that fucking cord for three hours and my hands are bleeding.

I realize that other folks suffered much worse—and other folks are suffering much worse right now in some areas. We were lucky, even if it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Of course, I’m generally speaking an incompetent man. Despite being an Eagle Scout, I am not very good at the whole be prepared schtick. Or I should say I’m very good at being physically prepared in the sense of having the tools and materials you’re supposed to have, but not very good at making those things work in an emergency. It’s like when I was in the Boy Scouts: I technically knew how to build a shelter out of leaves and branches, how to make a fire. But any time I had to actually attempt those things under pressure, it was what scientists call a shitshow. Much like my entire Boy Scout career, ha ha! (bursts into PTSD tears).

And so when the power went out at the Somers Compound in Hoboken recently, I began to sweat. Because I was going to have to use the generator.

The Leviathan

I live in an attached rowhouse with 0 ground-level outdoor space. That’s right, 0. No yard. We do have a second-floor deck that is quite nice, but the house is 100% lot coverage as a result of 1970s/1980s-era Hoboken wheeling and dealing; this town used to be the Wild Fucking West when it came to zoning and work permits. So when I ordered our generator I figured we’d put it on the deck, NBD. Except the generator weighed like 5,000 pounds and appeared to be made of solid pig iron, or possibly be merely a habitat for several dozen incredibly dense beings of pure energy. A friend of mine helped me carry it up to the deck, but I was already sweating the Judgment of The Duchess.

My wife, The Duchess, is a sweet and lovely woman who long ago accepted my incompetence as part of the Price of Loving Jeff. My cheerful inability to manage simple tasks just amuses her, these days (there was a brief period of trying to shame me into competence, but it was a long time ago and I emerged as cheerfully useless as ever). A side effect of this, of course, is that anything I claim will work she immediately assumes will not. It’s that simple. And so she took one look at the generator and assumed it would either a) never be needed, making it a waste of money or b) never actually work, making it a waste of money.

Years go by. The generator sits there. I fire it up every now and then and let it run a few minutes. But I’m haunted by all those fires I couldn’t start as History’s Worst Eagle Scout (aka the Eagle Scout who Smoked and Drank a Lot and Faked His Way Through at Least 50% of His Merit Badges), and I knew someday the lights would go out and The Duchess would suggest that it might be time to run the generator … and I worried I wouldn’t be able to get it going.

And then the lights went out when The Duchess had a huge project to finish that required the Internet.

Dead Squirrels

The lights went out due to two adventurous but doomed squirrels who blew up two transformers on the block within a few days of each other. The poor things were splattered everywhere, and the lights went out for about four hours. The Duchess began to freak about her project, and so I went to fire up the generator just to get the Internet back up. Every step made me nervous, because this was the pattern of my life: A decently reasonable idea about how to stay alive during a non-emergency like a few inconvenient hours without Netflix magically transformed into humiliation. I opened up the gas line, adjusted the choke, and hit the starter button.

And nothing happened. I knew then I would have to simply climb down from the deck in my bare feet and start walking, starting a new life wherever I happened to find myself. My new name would be Derek, I thought, and I would live a simple life without any sort of electricity as a sort of penance for this. I would certainly never be able to face The Duchess again. She would force me to carry the generator down the stairs by myself while she taunted me with cruel insults.

I adjusted the connections to the battery and tried again, and the generator fired up. Five minutes later we were the only house on the block with electricity, and I felt like Tom Hanks in Castaway when he makes fire for the first time.

What does this prove? Nothing. I didn’t engineer the generator, extract and process the propane, or do anything except press a button. But believe me, pressing a button is so often beyond my capabilities it was still a momentous occasion, and I wondered, briefly, if maybe I did, after all, deserve this Eagle badge.

Probably not, but a man can dream.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Freelancing: Never Say No

Author: October 11, 2017 0 Comments

The title of this blog and the book I’ve written is Writing Without Rules, so naturally enough I’m going to talk a bit about a writing rule, and how it changes over time.

The thing about a lot of writing advice, whether it’s about career or craft, is that rules change meaning over time, depending where you are in both. For example, a good rule of thumb for freelance writing is to never say no.

No Habla No

When you’re first starting out as a freelance writer, this advice is good because you need the one thing you don’t have: Clips. You need to get experience, examples, and to prove that you can hit deadlines and write to someone else’s style guide. You need jobs, so you really shouldn’t be too picky unless you have the platform and/or connections to just dive into well-paying, high-profile work.

That’s solid advice when you’re just starting out, but what about when you’ve advanced your career a little and you have more choices? Surely you have to start saying no to low-paying jobs, or jobs that involve subject matter or workflows you don’t enjoy?

Yes, that’s true. But the rule of Never Say No doesn’t go away—it changes. I argue you still shouldn’t say no to jobs. You should instead decide how much money it would take for you to do it. In other words, saying no ends the conversation. Saying, I’ll do it, but you’re going to have to pay me a mint might have the same effect but it keeps your options open.

Say an old client you used to write boring catalog copy for a penny word contacts you; they have a dull writing project and they want you to help out. Your instinct is to say no—you make too high a rate now, and you’re writing about subjects you enjoy—why would you ever go back? But instead of saying a flat no and ending the conversation on a sour note, think about what they would have to pay you to make it worthwhile. A dollar a word? Two dollars? Don’t get into the weeds of whether or not it’s a reasonable ask, or whether or not they’ll accept it. Once you decide the rate you’d need to take the work you can’t lose: If they turn down your pitch, you didn’t want it anyway, and if they accept you’re getting a ton of money.

Best of all, even if they turn you down they don’t think of you as the person who simply laughed at their job, they think of you as someone who’s out of their price range.

To do this at a Somers level, of course, you have to go beyond your per-word rate and demand the client supply free whiskey and address you as Lord Somers in all correspondence. So far no one’s taken me up on it, but a guy can dream.

freelance, Writing

A World of Pure Imagination

Author: October 9, 2017 0 Comments

Every writer struggles with ideas sometimes. A lot of writers work on a specific idea for a long time, something that’s haunted and inspired them for years, and when they finally finish they have no idea what else to work on. Some writers just hit a wall and no new ideas inspire them. Call it Writer’s Block if you want (though I’d argue Writer’s Block doesn’t exist as a single affliction, but is instead a collection of problems writers run into), but whatever it’s called it’s distressing. Writers deal in ideas, after all, and if you’ve got no ideas you’re in deep trouble.

Relax, it happens to everyone. The longest I’ve ever gone feeling like every idea I had was terrible as a few months when I was a much younger man—for a while every single thing I wrote seemed stupid and trite. I did keep writing, though, because step one of working through a lack of ideas is to keep grinding. Work with what you have, even if what you have are lame retreads of overused tropes and half-baked concepts that fall apart when you work at them.

And if you’re going to say you literally have no ideas, I don’t believe you. Because like Seinfeld once said: That’s a show.

And the Show Must Go On

Seinfeld of course used that line when it was explaining the concept of a “show about nothing.” But the key mechanic applies to any writer struggling with ideas: Just think about what you did today, or yesterday, or last week. That’s a story. Or it could be—if nothing else, it’s the beginning of a story. If John Updike can write a classic about shopping at the A&P, why can’t you write a story about your trip to the Post Office, or your day at the museum, or how you would solve the rush hour traffic problem if you had the power to set people on fire with your mind.

Sorry, I already wrote that last one: Watch the World Die.

The point is, sometimes we can be a bit too precious about our ideas, demanding that they be absolutely amazing and unique and tremendous from the get-go. The truth is, ideas are rarely amazeballs from the moment you have them. To paraphrase Don Draper, that’s what the writing is for, to take a modest idea and make it amazeballs.

Speaking of Don Draper, it’s time for a drink. It doesn’t matter when you’re reading this, exactly, chances are I’m pouring myself one right now.

ideas, Writing

Characters: Write Until You Meet One you Like

Author: October 6, 2017 0 Comments

Writing a novel or a story of any kind always begins in that infinite white expanse, that void. It’s like you’re beamed down to this arctic wasteland with a bag of tools and it’s up to you to build a shelter, get a fire going, and hunt down some people to help you create a whole universe. Those people are your characters.

This can all go different ways. Fairly often, the shelter you build will be flimsy and leaky, the fire you start will gutter and smoke, and the people you drag out of the featureless wilderness will be the sort of assholes you can’t bear to spend one minute with. That’s when you pull out the satellite phone and call for the chopper, soak the campsite in gasoline, and set the whole place ablaze as you hang from a rope ladder being carted off to the next featureless campsite.

Even if you manage to get a toehold in one of these wildernesses, the problem of populating it can remain. Sometimes your characters just don’t work out. And sometimes you just have to hang around trapping characters until you meet one you like.

The Most Dangerous Game

Our characters are usually based at least in part on people we actually know, either consciously or unconsciously. And that means that sometimes the people we sketch out in an early draft are not people we want to spend any time with, which can poison the whole story. Even villains need to be entertaining and interesting on some level; after all, we don’t always like the people we spend time with, do we? But sometimes those people are goddamn entertaining.

The trick with characters, sometimes, is twofold. On the one hand you have to remember that characters can be portable—just because a story you’re working on isn’t working doesn’t mean that one or more of the characters you’ve created can’t be moved into a different story, a new setting. On the other hand, coming up with characters you want to spend time with is sometimes just a matter of hanging out in a story long enough to meet one you like. In other words, just keep inventing people until you Frankenstein one that catches your interest.

Once you have one or two worthwhile characters, you can surgically remove them from the mess you’ve been working on and start fresh—and now that you have characters you like, the story might come easier, because just imagining two characters interacting often results in a story more or less organically.

Of course, as in life, sometimes you’ll find yourself in that wasteland of ideas until 4AM, headachy and bleary-eyed, surrounded by assholes. When that happens … gasoline and a chopper.

characters, Writing