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Episodic Writing

Author: September 11, 2017 0 Comments

Every writer knows the feeling: You have the idea, you can feel its potential. You have a vague structure for the story, you have characters, you have an endgame. Whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter, you start work on the book and suddenly find yourself in a dark wood, uncertain of how to proceed. You have everything except a clear way forward to the bulk of your plot.

This can happen no matter what your process is, or how well-developed your idea/universe is. Sometimes writers think if they spend a year building the backstory, character bios, and universe they’ll be in a better position to write the story—and sure, that sometimes works. But no matter how well you know the universe of your book, you can still find yourself stuck at any point in the actual writing. Your characters stand around impatiently, waiting for you to figure out what’s next.

The problem sometimes lies in the need to always advance the plot. The advice that all the action in your story should in some way move your plot forward isn’t bad, but it can be misleading. Because sometimes the best way to advance your plot is to not advance the plot and engage in some episodic storytelling.

A Very Special Episode

Episodic storytelling is when you put aside the overarching plot and just have your characters interact with the universe you’ve built. It could be a series of self-contained stories, or even a longer mini-arc, or possibly a series of vignettes that don’t necessarily resolve into a coherent narrative. The point is to step away from your main plot and just explore.

In role-playing games and sandbox video games, there’s the concept of the Side Quest. You play the game and non-player characters (NPCs) will approach you with a mission. These side quests aren’t necessary to win the game, and don’t necessarily push you through the storyline of the game, but they allow you to experience aspects of the world, gain experience and capabilities, and extend the playing time.

That’s what episodic writing can do. Spend some time just wandering with your characters like the A-Team, getting into scrapes and learning about your universe. It’ll surprise you how it leads you back to your plot when you’re ready, and when you’ve finished a draft you can easily excise the episodes because they’re unrelated to the plot—or keep them in, possibly linking them up to the main plot. Worst case scenario is you have a lot of sections in your book that need to be removed—but chances are these episodes will contribute something to the overall story while enabling you to get there in the first place.

plot, worldbuilding, Writing

The Inverse Rule of Writing Fun

Author: September 8, 2017 0 Comments

I wrote my first novel when I was about twelve years old, and as a kid what I most remember about writing was the rush of constant ideas I was excited about. I wrote constantly, churning out novels and stories at a pretty prolific pace.

Part of this was a function of my ignorance and immaturity—everything seemed like a brilliant new idea to me because I wasn’t aware how much had already been done. And when I encountered things in other people’s writing, it was always a shocking new concept for me, which fueled my ability to just run off and bang out 50,000 words in a few weeks as I played with my new writing toy.

Another aspect of being immature and thus being able to write at a really fast clip was the fact that I wrote for myself. I didn’t bother revising; I finished an idea and moved on to the next. It was fun and exhilarating, but didn’t really result in material I could submit or sell. The more you work to polish, the more you work to produce writing that can actually interest people, the less fun it gets.

That Spark

Even today, my novels and stories always begin with that spark of excitement. It always seems like an idea no one else has ever had, or a technique no one else has ever tried. Usually, I’m wrong about that, because I’m kind of an idiot, but all that matters is that writing still begins in a molten moment of intense excitement for me.

That writing is fun. I can still tear through thousands of words in a few days, driven by excitement. But the closer your story gets to being really good, the slower things get, and the less fun it all becomes. That’s the strangest thing about writing: The inverse rule. The better your story gets the more like work writing becomes. If you’re lucky, you manage to balance this out—writing never quite becomes a chore, because you retain just enough excitement to keep pushing yourself along. But sometimes, usually when I get, say, the fourth round of revision notes back from an editor, you lose that balance and it just becomes work. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

Keeping yourself motivated when you’re way past that initial phase of intense joy is the piece of the puzzle most people struggle with. Writing is art, it’s creativity, and so it seems like it should always be exciting, and if you’re not excited you must be doing something wrong. But that’s not always the case, and navigating the Inverse Rule is the difference, often, between selling a novel and, you know, not selling a novel.

When it comes to dealing with the Inverse Rule, here’s a pro tip: Alcohol helps.

career, General, Writing

Leave Room for the Swerve

Author: September 6, 2017 0 Comments

A few weeks ago there was a leaked letter from George R.R. Martin to his publisher detailing his original outline for A Song of Ice and Fire. As Martin still has two enormous novels to go in his series and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones has become quite alarming in the insane plot department, there’s a lot of speculation regarding Martin’s most famous fictional universe, and aspiring novelists who want to craft their own fantasy worlds are paying close attention—or should be, because this is basically real-life writing craft spooling out right before your eyes.

The main lesson from the leaked letter is that whether you consider yourself a Plotter, Pantser, or Plantser, you should be ready for the swerve, because the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

The Swerve

Put simply, it doesn’t matter how meticulously you plot your books, or how in control you feel or how in tune with your instincts. George R.R. Martin is a pro, and his outline for ASoIaF demonstrates his sharp, professional approach to planning a series of fantasy novels. At the time he imagined the series as a trilogy. This was in 1993 or so, you know, twenty-four years ago. How innocent it all seems now.

The point is, Martin got into his story, and it swerved on him. The Swerve happens, and it happens when you least expect it. Simple stories get complex, stories you initially think will require sixteen dense volumes peter out after 30,000 words. The Swerve is something any novelist has to be ready for, because you’re never as in control of your story as you think you are. There’s a Shadow Writer inside all of us, living in our subconscious, and the Shadow Writer is always busy churning things in unexpected ways.

Putting in a ton of work and then watching your novel swerve out of your grasp is just the cost of doing business. Sometimes the Swerve works for you, sometimes it works against you. All you can do as a writer is accept the fact that it’s coming, and try to be ready.

Me, I’ve always been good with the Swerve because a similar thing happens every time I walk into a bar thinking I’ve to have three beers and no more.

General, Novels, plot, Writing

Hurry Up and Wait

Author: September 4, 2017 0 Comments

Writing anything is a lengthy process that requires a lot of patience and diligence. One of the biggest challenges that new writers face is dealing with the adjustment between excitement and difficulty that invariably sets in after the initial rush of creative energy fades.

We all know that feeling: You start off with a flash of inspiration, you sail into the first few hundred words or the first stages of plotting in a frenzy of excitement. And then you stall. Your narrative starts to get complex, a paragraph seems weak and uninspired to you and all of a sudden every word seems suspect, your plotting hits a wall around chapter 20 and you can’t see any way to bridge the gap.

It takes time to right the ship. It takes time to figure out what went wrong or if anything actually did go wrong and you’re not just doubting yourself for no reason. And then it takes time to link everything back up.

It takes time to write the first draft. Time to get feedback on it, to let it marinate in your Drawer of Dubious Ideas until you’re somewhat certain it’s not half-bad. Then it takes time to revise, to polish. Then it takes time to convince someone it’s worth going out on, or to convince readers that your new book is worth their money.

The Long and Winding Road (Is a Terrible Song)

It all takes enormous amounts of time. I first had the idea for Writing Without Rules sitting in my agent’s office sipping bourbon with her in February of 2016. We didn’t finalize the proposal until October, and I didn’t start writing the book until January 2017. I didn’t have a final draft to send to the publisher until May, more than a year after the initial idea. I still haven’t seen copy-edits, so the book’s not done yet, and the pub date is officially May 2018—more than two years after the initial idea.

And this has actually been one of the fastest roads from idea to published book I’ve ever experienced.

This is one reason why chasing trends is fruitless. Even if you’re in the habit of slapping unrevised, raw zero-draft books onto your DIY digital platforms of choice, the delay between your inspiration and delivery of a salable book is just too long. I don’t know about you, but the fastest I’ve ever written a complete novel from idea to THE END was three months, and I was a much younger man and the novel itself was garbage. Have brilliant novels been written much faster? Of course they have—and yet there’s always the delays of review, revision, and the other hard work.

In other words, settle in, it’s going to be a long ride.

career, General, Writing

The Intruder

Author: September 3, 2017 0 Comments

WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY???

My brother Yan and I meet up once a week to have lunch and drink beer, and insult each other savagely:

ME: Still older than me, I see. My goodness, you look like a zombie.

YAN: Still calling me Yan, huh? The creative writer can’t think of a better pseudonym?

Yan and I both like a bit of beer variety; when I was a youth I spent a long time drinking Coors Lite, the Silver Bullet, and I still feel a strong urge to do penance for that. So we usually try to find a bar that offers a decent selection of beers on tap. We also like our bars much like we like our souls: Empty. I’m an old man, so shouting over EDM is undignified, and we both just prefer a bit of space and the ability to actually get a bartender’s attention. Crowded bars are a young man’s game.

Empty bars have there own problems, of course. On the one hand they tend to go out of business, seeing as they’re empty all the time. On the other hand, when you’re the only people sitting at the bar, it leaves you vulnerable to The Intruder.

It Follows

The Intruder is that guy (and it is always a guy) who has nothing better to do but wander into bars on his own (because he is always alone) looking to have a conversation with … anyone.

Yan and I were sitting at the bar in this absolutely empty place, insulting each other, and The Intruder walked in, taking the form of a pudgy middle-aged guy in a bowling shirt. He made a joke about the place being empty when he walked in, and Yan and I made polite responses because we’re not, you know, animals.

The Intruder then tried to make conversation with the bartender, but lady bartenders are well-trained in shutting down eird guys who try to chat them up while they’re working, and she made short work of him. So he sat down right next to Yan and began his attempts to intrude on out conversation. Yes, the bar was empty. And he sat down next to us. As far as I am concerned that makes him a monster of horrific proportions, undeserving of mercy.

I was facing The Intruder, and in my peripheral vision I could see him repeatedly stare at us in a clear posture of wanting to make a comment and insert himself into our conversation. I began drinking faster.

Look, I know what some people might say: He’s lonely. He’s a lonely guy just out looking for some human contact, why couldn’t we include him in our conversation? First of all, fuck you. Second of all, he’s not lonely, he’s a monster. Third of all, in my gentler youth I did in fact sometimes treat Intruders kindly, and all it got me was a lot of conspiracy theories, conservative political diatribes, and, oddly enough, resentment. Plus, experience has taught me that the Intruder will never leave or stop talking. Once he latches onto a host, he will extract all of your garmonbozia, believe me.

So, we speed drank and called for the bill. The Intruder tried to start a conversation literally as we were walking away from him, but we employed the friendly-wave technique and just kept walking. We went to another bar down the street (one of the joys of living in bar-infested Hoboken) and continued our conversation in peace, and the Intruder, I assume, consumed several less savvy people that afternoon, growing large on their souls and offal.

The lesson? My brother and I are unfriendly assholes, certainly. But also that the Rules of Polite Society should be sacred, and one of those rules is: If people are having a private conversation, you should not intrude on it.

Bullshit

Tip: Other People are Not Alien Creatures

Author: September 1, 2017 0 Comments

One of the most important things a writer can develop is a healthy skepticism about their own assumptions and worldview. We’re all living in bubbles, in a sense, and people naturally assume their successes are the result of their own virtues—that luck, privilege, and circumstance have nothing or very little to do with it. Realizing where your own assumptions come from doesn’t mean you change your mind about everything, but it does mean you can analyze yourself—which means you’ll be better able to analyze your characters.

Oddly, this sort of awareness and analysis can be paralyzing when it comes to writing characters in your fiction, because the more you realize how much of your worldview is the product of upbringing, environment, and experiences, the more you realize how little you understand your fellow human beings. In other words, the more you understand yourself, the less you understand other people.

The Other

Now, this is healthy, because assuming everyone else thinks and experiences life exactly the way you do is what gives us the gift of our Drunk Uncles telling us that Donald Trump is our political savior. You should have a healthy sense of doubt and terror when writing about characters that are drawn from walks of life other than your own. But it’s a mistake to go too far and assume that just because someone is a different gender, race, or culture they’re so completely unknowable that you can’t write them. It’s a mistake for two reasons: One, you’re wrong about that, and two, it leads you to write characters who are just you in different clothes, which is kind of boring.

This isn’t to say that you can sit down and write about someone utterly different from yourself without doing some work to get it right. But people all over the world have similar concerns, so it’s a mistake to assume that, for example, women are alien creatures with incomprehensible motivations. All humans share some basics, and humans within a specific culture share even more basics. Writing the Other isn’t always easy, and there are plenty of ways to go wrong, but the easiest way to go wrong is to assume that people who don’t look like you or live where you live might as well come from Jupiter and eat like Brundlefly.

Back in my college days, of course, a surfeit of lite beer meant I did sometimes eat like Brundlefly. Let’s not discuss it, ever.

characters, Writing

Managing Tone

Author: August 30, 2017 0 Comments

Writing is a superpower in the way you can reshape your own past, present and future. I think most writers have used their own past humiliations, failures, and arrests as fodder for wish-fulfillment stories; I know I have. Plenty of my fiction, especially my short fiction, is drawn directly from what we’ll call Pants Drop Moments when I managed to make a complete ass out of myself through incompetence (emotional or practical), arrogance, or a tasty combination of the two. I take that greasy kernel of shame inside me and transform it into a story by writing about what I could or should have done, and mapping out how to get there.

Or, yes, sometimes the story is just retelling the humiliation without the wish-fulfillment, which can be depressing as hell, but sometimes makes for a good story.

A moire subtle way of wish-fulfillment in writing is making your characters impossibly glib and easy with their words—the Chandler Binging of characterization. It’s tempting to make your characters effortlessly smart and funny, always coming up with perfect responses and quips. And there’s nothing wrong with that—smart characters who always nail their lines are fun, for you and the reader. But you have to be careful, because chasing the Rule of Cool with your characters’ dialog can lead you into an abyss of tone dissonance.

The Abyss of Tone Dissonance

The problem with impossibly clever characters is you can wind up with scenes where they are supposedly having Very Serious Discussions but they can’t help by spout sarcastic, clever bon mots endlessly, undercutting the seriousness of your scene. A little clever goes a long way, after all, and if your character can’t stop laying down the savage quips, it becomes annoying and exhausting, like that one guy in your bar-hopping group who’s obviously on cocaine and can’t shut the fuck up already.

Tone dissonance can also be a sign that you don’t have faith in your own work, and believe you have to jazz things up with some sick one-liners. You have to be careful that your character’s zingers are naturalistic—appropriate for the emotional weight of the scene—and that they have flow. If they’re dropping like anchors in the middle of conversations, you’re working too hard, and your readers will notice, and the one golden rule of fiction is to hide all the hard work.

Of course, if you’re basing your character on me, then naturally I do have something clever to say about everything, all the time, and yes, it’s done me more harm than good.

characters, dialogue, Writing

The Hive Mind

Author: August 28, 2017 0 Comments

I was on a panel at the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference this year talking about World Building, and someone asked about staying on top of all the details of your universe. There was a great discussion, and the question made me think about the Hive Mind of your readers, and how you’ll never be smarter than the collective intelligence of the people reading your work.

We Are Legion

Writers take different approaches to managing details in their work. Some folks sort of wing it (my ears are burning) and don’t have any sort of “bible” or spreadsheet to help them keep it all straight. Other people more or less have their own private NORAD set up in their office to track details like what Mary was wearing in book 4, chapter 6 and whether or not Syd the Giant Spider is dead or not in the present iteration of the timeline.

That’s really just a preference in approach, like Pantsing or Plotting, and neither approach guarantees that you won’t make a mistake, because of the Hive Mind.

Your readers are many, and they have the Internet. Even a small fan base will find each other, exchange notes, and discover all your mistakes. You will never be able to cover every single base for the simple reason that your readers, as a Hive Mind, are smarter than you and your pitiful single brain.

The flip side to this is: Don’t try to fool your readers. They will figure it out if you’re faking something, or cheating with your own universe’s rules. Even if you get something past your Beta readers or your mother, the chances of getting it past every single person who reads your books are essentially zero, because someday they will meet a fellow fan in a subreddit and the shit will hit the fan.

I have two strategies when I get caught in a mistake: One, I shout “JEFF DURNK!” (note: yes, pronounce it durnk) and cackle drunkenly; two, I claim there is a deep, subtle riddle that explains all the inconsistencies in my writing, and then refused to answer questions about it. Call it the Lost excuse.

General, Uncategorized, Writing

Learn from Stuff You Hate

Author: August 25, 2017 0 Comments

One of the creakiest and most over-offered pieces of writing advice is to “read widely.” Not that it’s bad advice—it isn’t; it’s excellent advice. It’s just that like “show, don’t tell” it’s repeated so often, and so glibly, that many folks in the audience at panels just ignore it. “Read widely” is the “Wild Thing” of amateur guitarists: Everyone knows it, move along, nothing to see here.

The trick to reading widely isn’t to read a lot, or even to read outside your comfortable genres (although, yes to both those things). The real key to how reading widely can help you is to get into Advanced Reading Widely 405, a.k.a. learning good writing stuff from books you don’t actually enjoy.

Not My Books You SOBs

When people “read widely” they usually talk about getting outside their own genre or culture. And yes, if you’re a sci-fi writer, reading thrillers will give you lots of insight into pacing and plot. And if you’re, say, a middle-aged white cis American male who looks good in just about anything, reading books from other cultures and sub-cultures can open your eyes not just to different writing styles and techniques but different points of view that your characters can benefit from.

And that’s all great and necessarily. But the next level is to read books you don’t like, because what you’ll find is that genres and styles you despise have just as much to teach you—and those are lessons you’ll miss if you stay within the admittedly wider bubble of, you know, books you actually enjoy.

This can be true of wildly popular fictions that sell by the truckload but leave you completely baffled as to their appeal: Reverse-engineering that appeal might hold lessons for you, whereas smugly assuming that the millions of people reading those books are morons doesn’t do anything for you or your writing. And if a book is boring the pants off of you that doesn’t mean the author doesn’t pull off an impressive trick with their narrator, or have a dazzling sequence in the middle overflowing with ideas.

At it’s most basic, sometimes reading a terrible book just inspires you to steal the plot and try your own version of it in order to make it, you know, actually interesting (in your opinion).

Of course, reading widely also runs the risk of encountering a book so perfect and amazing you just give up on your own shabby efforts and just walk into the ocean, only to wake up on the beach being resuscitated by the teenage lifeguard and then mocked as you stagger home. Or is that just me?

General, Writing

Why Jon Snow’s Stupidity Matters

Author: August 24, 2017 2 Comments

Derp.

Note: This is discussing the TV show Game of Thrones specifically, ignoring the books.

Far be it from me to drag on people who are selling millions more books than I ever will, or attracting millions more eyeballs than anything based on my books ever will (unless I finally do my Pantsless Dancing exercise video, in which case: Watch out, world!) but it’s time to talk about how astoundingly dumb Game of Thrones has gotten in its later seasons—specifically the character of Jon Snow—and why it matters from a writing point of view.

We don’t know how close to the books the show is right now; Martin may have a much better handle on the story and the characters, and it’s been discussed to death how Game of Thrones is on an accelerated pace right now in an effort to finish the story before we all get collectively tired of it. I can forgive, therefore, the compressed and nonsensical time frame; after all, no one wants to have six episodes of Jon Snow slowly making his way to meet Daenerys in a damned rowboat, passing the time by chatting with Ser Davos about their unhappy childhoods and fighting sea monsters. Okay, maybe the latter, a little.

Side note: How is it possible there are no sea monsters in Westeros? For serious.

The time thing doesn’t bother me. Sure, it’s shitty storytelling, but there are economic factors pushing them, and I can still enjoy the show despite them. No, what bothers me is that Jon Snow is fucking stupid. And not in a defensible way.

Da King In Da Norf

Jon is a major character in this show (again, the future books may be different [and thus, better]), and might even turn out to be the ultimate hero/survivor in all of this. And the problem isn’t so much that he’s stupid, but that his stupidity would not exist in any slightly realistic universe. IN a realistic universe someone as stupid as Jon Snow would have choked on something as a child and died, or possible fallen down a hole and starved to death, or maybe have accidentally stabbed himself with a dagger. Here’s a few quick rundown of the disastrous decisions Jon Snow’s made in recent episodes, going back to the end of last season:

  • Allowed himself to be baited into a solo charge at the Battle of the Bastards, setting his army up for annihilation (prevented only by the fortuitous arrival of Sansa and Littlefinger)
  • Abandoned his kingdom to go personally visit Daenerys, bringing just a small honor guard
  • Allowed that honor guard to be immediately disarmed, like without even a shrug
  • More or less allowed himself to be a prisoner with no reason to believe it would work out aside from having copious amounts of Plot Armor
  • Came up with this absolutely shit idea that they needed to have a wight on hand to prove to people that the Night King for reals, yo
  • Decided that he had to manage this task personally
  • Then brought about a dozen people with him on the raid despite having a fucking army at his disposal, without bothering to tell his sister what he was up to as she sits in Winterfell ruling in his stead (this despite the fact that apparently he can send Ravens like super fast anywhere he wants)

I could go on. Should I go on? No.

The simple fact of it is that this is shit writing. Even if we assume for a fun moment that getting a wight to show off to the doubters is necessary, any sane King in the North would delegate the task to a trusted lieutenant (Tormund, we’re looking at you). There is simply no need for Jon Snow to actually be in the north personally. And we’re supposed to believe that Jon is a smart, solid choice to be King of the North. His entire character arc is a guy who was and literally knows nothing to the one woke bastard in all of Westeros who sees the true threat. So he really shouldn’t be this terrible at the job.

There is, however, a plot need for Jon Snow to be in the north. The showrunners want Jon to be the badass, they want him to be the one to put together the puzzle pieces for defeating the Night King, and they wanted to demonstrate the growing and completely icky and nonsensical love affair brewing between secret cousins Daenerys and Jon. So they sent him up there despite the fact that it’s dumb. In short, since Jon’s arguably the main character at this point (or at least the focal character for the moment), he needs to be in on all the major plot developments.

Forget the timeline. Forget the fact that the Night King has been marching his wights for about six months and is still miles away from the Wall. This is the problem: Shit writing. Shortcuts in the service of smart plotting I can forgive, but shit writing that ignores the rules of decent storytelling deserves to be mocked.

Of course, I’m still gonna watch the show, because watching dragons burn the everliving shit out of wights is fun, dude. Bad writing can be entertaining. It’s still bad.

As you were.

 

Bullshit