Latest Posts

It’s Not Impostor Syndrome if You’re Actually Faking It

Author: May 21, 2017 0 Comments

Jeff, I think you know why we’ve called this meeting: You absolutely must start wearing pants to the office.

AS AN author, I hear about Impostor Syndrome a lot. This syndrome, if you have somehow lived this long without encountering it, is when perfectly capable, competent people believe their own success (or lack of failure) is the result of sheer luck and circumstance—that they are, in fact, frauds.

Writers are easy marks for this kind of corrosive self-doubt; no matter how successful you are as a writer, of course, there will be a group of people who consider your work to be terrible, and most writers wind up in that Twilight Zone of mid-level success: A few publishing credits to your name, but no significant sales breakthrough, meaning you make a few pennies and get some recognition, but you’re still working a day job and still hustling every minute of the day instead of lounging by the pool of chocolate pudding in your tropical estate. Or something; your fantasy of being rich and wildly successful may vary.

So when you sell a story or a novel, it’s easy to think you just got lucky, and many of us do just that. I often have that urge to mutter joke’s on you, suckers! as I sign a book contract, so I’m no stranger to Impostor Syndrome. The thing is, while I’m not an impostor as a writer, I certainly have been an impostor throughout much of my adult life, because I am a firm disciple of the Fake It Til You Make It religion of sleeping in and not doing the research.

The Miracle 18

Up until a few years ago, I had a Day Job. In a sense, I still do; I’m not a full-time novelist, I’m a full time writer, which means a lot of what I write I do in order to earn a living. But writing as a Day Job is a perfect fit for me, because I’m good with the words. What I did for 18 years of my life in a professional capacity was not a good fit, because it required three things I do not possess: Attention to detail, organization, and the ability to wake up in the morning.

So, if I was terrible at my job, how did I keep it for nearly two decades? Here’s a timeline of events that hold some clues:

  1. When I got my first job in the industry, I was a chubby, tow-headed kid of 23 who wore enormous glasses and whose clothes were always 2 sizes too large (that is not a joke) and so I firmly believe my bosses during the first 3 years or so simply took pity on me.
  2. Over the first 5 years or so, the company I worked at went through several mergers and re-organizations, and I had about 6 bosses over that time, so no one ever had the chance to appreciate my incompetence and apathy.
  3. At some point my bosses realized I was the only person in the office who could write a Visual Basic script, and I had a shadow career creating toolbars and widgets . At one point, despite this having nothing to do with my actual job description, I probably spent 75% of my time doing this.
  4. By the time I was forced to actually focus on the core work my job demanded, I’d had a decade to more or less memorize the basic shortcuts, which meant that as long as the other people I worked with were competent, I could fake it.

Eventually, of course, the whole house of cards collapsed. Looking back, I’m impressed that I was able to fake it for as long as I did, and I have to say that making a living doing something I’m actually good at is an incredible feeling. Some people have been feeling this their whole lives! That seems incredible, but it’s true.

What’s the moral of this story? Sometimes that creeping feeling that you’re not very good at something isn’t Impostor Syndrome, it’s reality knocking on your door. Of course, I was lucky that my incompetence applies to something I didn’t want to do in the first place, and that sheer luck or the power of my charm (which is potent) kept me employed.

Or possibly the moral of the story is that if you work hard enough you can in fact earn a living without wearing pants.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

When to Give Up

Author: May 19, 2017 0 Comments

Like most writers I have met, my mental health is suspect. No one chooses this career out of rational sanity; it’s a lot of work for (mostly) low pay, and all you really get is criticism and mounting suspicion that you did not really think through your plot before settling down to write. And so you wind up spending all of your energy arguing that yes, the fact that a character you described as one-armed in chapter one did, in fact, grow a second arm over the course of the book (the hidden literary clues are there, man, you just have to be smart enough to notice them), all over a book you sold approximately 33 copies of, 23 to yourself as you tried to correct a maddening kerning problem in your Word Doc.

So, stipulated: We’re all crazy. When are we craziest? When our work-in-progress (WIP) isn’t going well. Because we so often give up.

Take It to The Limit

So, when should you give up on your new novel? You gonna get differing opinions on this, and some folks will have a pretty complex equation involving word counts and palm readings and what quadrant of the sky Mars is currently sailing through, but here’s my answer: Don’t.

Don’t give up on your projects. I don’t care how borked they are (borked being a legal term meaning “incoherent and incomprehensible”), there’s gold in there if for no other reason than the simple fact that you were inspired enough to start writing. There’s a few thousand words or a plot twist or a single golden sentence in there that’s worth saving, so instead of giving up on a WIP that’s not working, start cutting. Hit Save As and start stripping away all the non-working stuff, starting with the most recent work you’ve done. When you start hesitating about the deletions, stop. Think about what you can re-purpose, what could be revised, re-used, stolen.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be a novel. Maybe it’s a short story or novella that got uppity, or maybe it’s an epic poem, or a scene from another novel, or the backstory to something else. The point is, use the material you’ve created, somehow. Don’t just walk away from it.

Novels

Book Promotion: Readings Are the Worst

Author: May 18, 2017 0 Comments

The classic question of an author’s existence is, if you write a novel and no one ever reads it, does it exist? I think most of us would be relatively unsurprised to discover one day that all of our terrible buried novels had simply disappeared, as if the universe had decided to give us a pass and burn their thread from the pattern, setting us free.

But what about the books you do like, once you’ve written them? Generally speaking you’ve got to get out there and try to sell them. Whether this involves finding an agent and a traditional publisher or self-publishing that sucker, the next step is to, you know, try to sell them. Which means promotion and marketing, which means, very likely, someone will suggest to you that you organize a reading. or will announce they’ve already done so.

Punch them. Punch them hard. Readings are terrible. And what’s more, they don’t accomplish much.

Welcome Back My Friends

Look, in theory Readings are perfectly reasonable. They give you something to advertise and promote, they offer your fans a chance to meet you and hear you read your novel, and you might sell some copies.

The reality is somewhat different. Now, if you’ve got a lot of fans you’ll likely get a decent showing, and they might buy your book to get it signed, or because it’s launch day and they couldn’t buy it beforehand. That’s all good! And yet it’s not worth it, because Readings are awkward horrorshows and you will never sell enough books to make them worthwhile, for a number of reasons:

  • The probability that the people who will come to your reading are already fans and would buy your book anyway is at least in the high 90s.
  • Chances those same people would buy a copy just to chat with you and have you sign it even if you didn’t bother doing a reading is about 100%.\
  • The chances that a person who has never heard of you will choose to attend your reading and then be persuaded to buy your book is very, very close to 0%.

So, what you get is a stressful performance conducted by people who were not put on this Earth to perform (most writers are the sort, like me, who hiss and spit whenever sunlight hits them), all in the service of selling books to people who would buy it anyway.

You might enjoy doing readings. Certainly they can offer promotion beyond the actual physical event, if you get some press coverage and the like. But don’t imagine for one moment that they’re really worth the effort, because they are soul-killing humiliation pits, and everyone who comes to laugh and jeer at you would have bought your book anyway.

promotion, Writing

Short Stories Ain’t Novels

Author: May 17, 2017 0 Comments

When people talk about the craft of writing, there’s a tendency to focus on novels. Everyone’s writing a novel, hoping to sell a novel, or discussing someone else’s novels. Few writers seem all that interested in the short story; in fact I sometimes get the impression that a lot of writers view the short story as a quaint concept not worth exploring, or as a receptacle for failed novels—if your idea didn’t have the legs for 80,000 words, settle for 15,000 and call it a day.

Now, that can work, actually, and I’ve done it. And short stories don’t pay well (neither do novels, really; if you do the math I was paid 7 cents a word for The Electric Church) or sometimes at all, and for a long time now short stories haven’t exactly made anyone famous. But the fact that short stories aren’t like novels is precisely why you—yes, you—should be writing them. Every writer should be working on short stories, in fact.

The Pressure’s On

Short stories can be anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 words—the exact word count definition varies depending on who you talk to. In general if you’re going to try to sell stories anything over 10,000 words will have a limited marketplace, but just from a writing point of view this range is fine. Because of their brevity, a lot of writers avoid working on them because they’re much more difficult than novels. In a novel, you can wander about and noodle for 10- or 20,000 words and no worries. In a story, you have to be a lot more efficient, which means you have to know pretty much what you’re doing.

The skills that short stories teach you are numerous, however:

  • How to resolve a plot quickly, efficiently, and entertainingly
  • How to boil a story down to the basic essentials
  • How to establish a setting, sketch a character, and establish a premise in a very short amount of time
  • How to plot around tight corners

I could go on. Basically, writing successful short stories is like a tiny writing class each and every time. I strongly suggest you work on short stories regularly. You can always try to sell them if they’re any good, and if they fail the extra credit benefit here is that you’ll have shit the bed with an idea in a short story you spent a few days or weeks on, instead of a novel you spent six years and and 100,000 words on.

And if you really want to push yourself, try your hand at Flash Fiction, 1,000 words or less. Here’s the shortest story I’ve ever written, 204 words:

Fick Meines Lebens

by Jeff Somers

 

HE knew, on some level, that nothing had really changed, but it felt different, and that was all that mattered. He’d taken action, and the end result was indistinguishable from success.

Until the storm.

The texts had begun as annoyances. Someone somewhere had mis-typed a phone number into a text and he’d been looped into a conversation in German. He ignored the incessant blooping of his phone as the texts rolled in, sometimes several every minute, one after the other. Then he replied asking to be removed from the chain.

The texts came faster.

He ran some through a translation web page. They were a running commentary on his decisions: The clothes he wore, the route he rode his bike to and from work, his diet, his shoes, his musical taste.

He downloaded blacklist Apps that didn’t work. He changed his number, and the texts came. Frantic, one day he carefully wrapped the phone in plastic and submerged it in a plastic container of water, and then put the container in the freezer.

And that worked. Until the thunder, the lightning, and the pounding rain. With a click, the lights went off.

And he thought: Fick meines Lebens.

General, Novels, Writing

Conflict is Easy

Author: May 16, 2017 0 Comments

We all know what conflict is, right? It’s one of those essential ingredients to a story. You need a setting, you need characters, and you need those characters to have to fight for or against something—i.e., you need conflict.

You get much deeper into the weeds of what conflict means in terms of good storytelling, but essentially that’s all it is—something for your characters to struggle for or against. It’s kind of necessary so that your story isn’t just 100,000 words of people sipping tea and commenting on the weather. At the same time, conflict doesn’t necessarily mean evil wizards, despotic kings, assassins, or even office rivals. In her classic book Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin boils conflict down to an even more essential element: Change. “Story,” she wrote, “is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

The Change

Where a lot of writers go wrong is in assuming conflict must be huge and oversize. It must be fighting Nazis or slaying dragons, murdering husbands or surviving terrible torture. But of course there are plenty of stories that exhibit low-key, subtle conflicts, and our everyday lives are filled with conflict that doesn’t qualify as epic.

And that word—epic—is the problem, often enough. Writers can get so fixated on the idea of “epicness” (no matter the genre) that they start to imagine stories where every single scene is like something out of The Matrix movies, with rain pouring down and people shouting as they fly through the air, metaphorically or literally. You can’t craft a successful story where the emotional charge is always at 10, and your conflict doesn’t have to be “something something save the world” or “something something we’ll all die horribly otherwise” or any sort of similarly “big” problem.

It’s also a mistake to think that you have precisely one conflict in a story, or that your conflict has to be a thread through the whole story. Think about what Le Guin says, again: Conflict is change. Thus it can change. The conflict that motivates your character in the beginning of a story might be resolved and replaced—or augmented or transformed. Say your character has been hired to break into a safe in an old mansion. The first few chapters are about their research, prep, and hiring a team to help. Then they get into the safe—and discover a portal to another dimension inside and are promptly sucked in. The conflict changes.

Of course you could make it your goal to write the ideal conflict-less story, but there’s a good chance your characters will still be sipping tea by page 300.

Novels

My Library as Metaphor for Me

Author: May 15, 2017 0 Comments

In a recent New York Times article, the author Jo Nesbo informs us that he arranges the books in his library at home alphabetically. This is sensible; I wish I’d started doing that a long time ago. Writers always like to boast about how many books we’ve read and own, moaning on and on about how difficult it is to move house when you own literally every book ever written, including some of those really large intimidating ones that scare people. You know the drill. But it’s true! I own a lot of books. And they are in complete chaos.

Years ago, my books were arranged carefully by author and series, and I would spend a lot of time after every move carefully unboxing the collection and arranging them again. When I moved into the house that has been the Somers Compound for the past decade or so, I was simply too tired to do that, so I just tossed books onto shelves in any order. And there they have stayed.

The Flood

Things have only gotten worse over the ensuing years, too. Shelf space is tight, for one thing, so I am forever making shelving decisions based solely on space and geometry. Plus, now that I write so much on books online, I get a lot of freebies from publicists and such. Which have to go on the shelves, because, as I may have forgotten to mention, I never get rid of a book I’ve read. Never. I don’t throw them away, sell them, or loan them out. If I read it, it’s mine forever.

So I obviously regard my books as part of me, as representative of me in some way. So the fact that I’ve allowed total disorder to descend on the collection is worrying, in a way. If it somehow represents my inner world, my inner world is like the universe in Stephen King’s Dark Tower books: Slowly dying.

I have now depressed myself.

I often think that if I’d been born 20 years later I could have amassed this library and habit using eBooks and saved myself all the trouble; except that my experience with MP3s tells me I’d have lost like 500 books in various platform and storage missteps, which would be an even worse metaphor for my inner world. So it’s back to learning higher math in order to squeeze one more bookshelf in the house.

General, Writing

Leeroy Jenkins that Story

Author: May 14, 2017 0 Comments

I’ve often discussed the different approaches to creating the plot of your novels, from Pantsing (yay!) to Plotting (10 GOSUB 20), to Plantsing, which is, in my humble opinion, the only way to go. I’m a Pantser by nature, but a Plantser by professional necessity. Sometimes you just have to stop what you’re doing and Plot out a little, no matter how much fun Pantsing is.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find yourself in a scenario like this: You have at the center of your plot a pretty amazing feat. Maybe it’s a locked-room murder with an elegant, brilliant solution or a plot twist that will give people whiplash in the best possible way. The problem? You have no idea what the actual solution is. You have the greatest set up in history, you just have no idea how it works.

Some would assume you have to figure that part out before you start writing. Me, being Day Drunk and unconcerned with things like propriety or making sense in first drafts, I say you Leeroy Jenkins that son of a bitch.

Leeeeeeroy Jennnnnnkins!

If you were alive and online a few years ago you might have heard about Leeroy Jenkins, who was a member of a World of Warcraft guild. Faced with a huge number of enemies, the guild was resolved to take them on for Leeroy, who needed something from the area. While Leeroy was away from his computer making dinner, the guild constructs a complex, intricate plan in order to give them a chance against overwhelming odds. Then Leeroy comes back to his computer and, ignorant of the plan, just charges in, shouting his own name as a battle cry. The intricate plan falls apart and the entire guild is killed as a result.

Leeroy has become shorthand for a stupid charge into certain death—which is exactly what you should do if you have a premise that’s super cool but you can’t figure out.

Really, what’s your downside? You might write a lot of words that lead nowhere. Don’t even pretend you haven’t done that before, many times. This time, do it intentionally. If you have no idea how your protagonist committed the clever murder, or how you’re going to work the reveal that the hero is actually the evil mage everyone is fighting against, just dive in. Keep writing. Write what you have figured out, and hope to hell you get the rest by the time you run out of blacktop.

Will it work? Damned if I know. I myself am rocking probably 50% on that score. But it’s always illuminating, and if you don’t figure it out, the idea wasn’t all that great to begin with.

Novels

The Art of Rejection

Author: May 13, 2017 0 Comments

If you intend to traditionally publish any of your writing, you’re going to have to become intimately familiar with rejection. In self-publishing rejection is a bit softer; unless you literally sell zero copies of your book, someone out there accepted you. But if you’re doing the traditional publisher or short fiction market thing, you’ll end up with quite a number of rejection notes.

I know, because I’m an expert in rejection. I have thousands of rejection notes. I even have a lot of them on paper, in a file, because I am an Old and back in The Day we sent our fictions through the mail like animals. But whether email or print, rejection is rejection, and you’re gonna have to get used to it.

Types of Rejection

There are, in my experience, generally three kinds of rejections:

  1. Form rejections, which are comprised of a stock sentence or two and convey nothing about the mood in the office when your story was written or anyone’s reaction to it;
  2. Feedback rejections, when an editor takes the time to jot down some thoughts about your work;
  3. Assholes.

The vast majority of rejections I’ve received have been #1, and that’s fine. We’re all busy and when I submitted my short story to your magazine I did not purchase any sort of editorial service, so we’re good. I’ve gotten a lot of #2s, and they’re always nice, but I rarely do any revision based on them, because I’m arrogant and lazy. The few times I have revised based on a rejection note’s feedback, it has never changed any minds. Let it drift.

I’ve also had a few #3s. Some people just think that their position as Dispenser of Pennies to the Poor Unwashed Writers gives them the right to be nasty. The only thing to do is scratch that market off your list. Don’t worry, they’ll be out of business soon enough.

What do you do with rejection? Make a note of it, take a moment, and immediately submit the story or novel somewhere else. Rejections are just one person’s opinion (maybe two or three, depending). If you still love your story, just keep moving with it. And someday your pile of rejections will be a hilarious detail in a blog.

General, Writing

Criticism and How to Take It

Author: May 12, 2017 0 Comments

Once you make the dubious life decision to pursue writing as a vocation or avocation, there are a couple of things that are absolutely, 100% certain to happen:

  1. Someone will start calling you “Shakespeare”;
  2. Someone will ask you if you’d be interested in writing their genius idea for a novel in exchange for, say, 20% of the profits;
  3. You’ll have to deal with criticism of your work.

From the author’s point of view there are two kinds of criticism: The kind you agree with and see value in, and everything else. The first kind is easy because it usually indicates that you yourself thought there was a similar problem with the book, and you’re just getting objective confirmation. It doesn’t feel too awful because there’s a good chance on some level you’ve already dealt with it.

The latter though can be difficult, because when people make criticisms of your work that you think are ludicrous, it’s easy to just shrug it off and assume they’re just not very good readers. But not only should you always be appreciative of anyone who is willing to give you feedback on your work, you should probably also not ignore criticisms that seem off the wall. In fact, if you’re first reaction is to frown in puzzlement at a piece of feedback, chances are this is exactly the feedback you should be paying extra attention to.

The Zone of Discomfort

It’s easy to accept negative feedback when it lines up with what you’re already thinking. The hard part—and thus the necessary part—is to listen to feedback that seems completely off-target and objectively evaluate it.

Why? Because you will never control how people react to your work, and if you’re not regularly confused and outraged by the feedback you get, you may be in a bubble where only people who see things the same way you do get to read and comment on your work. You’ve got to seek feedback that scares you a little bit, that confuses you. You might ultimately reject it just as your initial instinct told you to, but you have to at least consider it. It’s the only way you’ll ever see your writing from a point of view outside your own experience.

Also: Don’t challenge critics to duels. It never ends well.

General, Writing

Don’t Give Your Characters Capes and Parrots

Author: May 11, 2017 0 Comments

Most stories have what literary scientists call characters; fictional people who the reader chooses to believe are real. Or the reader chooses to believe this if you manage to make those characters at least halfway believable as people and at least 56% interesting.

A lot of writers think the first part (believability) is hard and the second part (interesting) is easy. After all, making characters pop off the page can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from a distinctive accent or catch-phrase-laden dialog to costuming, physical appearance, and perhaps really crazy hair. You can almost tell you’re reading a pretty awful story simply by stepping back to observe the characters, because there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of the story and what the characters are wearing.

It boils down to: The crazier you make a character’s defining characteristics, the less believable they are. Because if a man walks into a room wearing a cape, with a parrot on his shoulder, no one thinks look at this fascinating man! They think, who in the world wears a cape? and they pop out of your story as if shot out of a cannon.

Unless, of course, you’re writing a story set in a place where capes are common, in which case: Carry on, but you get my point.

People Be Crazy

In real life, people who dress outrageously aren’t the cool characters of your story, they’re the people you don’t want to sit next to on the subway. Defining your characters by a verbal tic, accent, or strange appearance is easy—guy in a cape, got it—but the cape doesn’t make them a distinct character on the page, it just means your reader can’t think of anything else when they’re doing something.

You’ve got to make your characters distinct the same way people around you make themselves distinct. We all (or most of us) play along with certain conventions of society. We dress within a fairly narrow range of acceptable fashions. We speak certain ways to strangers, slightly differently to friends. Within a spectrum, everyone basically behaves the same way because as George Costanza once said, we’re living in a society here and that’s part of it.

So how do you tell your friends apart if we’re all within this range of normalcy? Their opinions. Their backgrounds. Their way of speaking (which may actually include an accent or catch-phrase, to be fair, though that’s rarely the only thing that distinguishes them). Not using the easy physical markers to define your characters will force you to dig a little deeper and make them into people with motivations, back stories, and subtle traits that make them stand out.

Unless your character is a magician-pirate, in which case go with the cape and the parrot.

General, Writing