Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 100

A Cooling Mist Of NaNoWriMo-Flavored Novel Writing Advice

So, you’re going to take part in National Novel Writing Month.

Good for you. Excellent. As John McClane said in Die Hard: “Welcome to the Party, pal.”

Here, then, is a list of quick advice nuggets. You may nibble on these and sample the many tastes. Some of this stuff I’ve said before, some of it is new-ish — whatever helps you, helps you. Whatever doesn’t, just wad it up and throw it into the nearest incinerator. Let’s begin.

1. You win when you finish the book. We set win conditions on writing a book in 30 days, and that’s cool. It is. But also, if you don’t, fuck it. The success is in finishing a first draft, whether that takes you 30 days or three months or three years.

2. This is the beachstorming draft. You’re just trying to get off the boat and up the sand without getting shot. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about survival. Survive to the end of the first draft and you deserve a cookie and a cold one. And by a “cold one” I mean chocolate milk. And by “chocolate milk” I mean a whole bottle of whiskey and by a cookie I mean an entire cheesecake.

3. Have a schedule. Seriously. If you’re going to try to hit a novel in 30 days, you’re better off setting a routine and sticking to it than trying to cram like it’s a high school history final. Slow and steady wins the race. Hitting 2k a day is not impossible, and it’s better than trying to evacuate your word bowels into a painful 10,000-word story-spree. That is how you prolapse your narrative anus. You know, between you and me, I regret ever writing the phrase “narrative anus,” but here we are. We came here together and we just have to deal with this now going forward.

4. Have a space. NaNoWriMo is effectively you taking on a full-time writing career in a very short span of time. One thing I can tell you, as I have told you before, is you need a space, and you need to vigorously defend it with tooth and claw and stabby quill. I don’t care if you’re writing on the toilet in the half-bath downstairs. I don’t care if you’ve chosen a quiet dumpster somewhere like you’re some strange mash-up of both Oscars (the Wilde and the Grouch). Pick a place and defend it. This is your home for thirty days.

5. The perfect is the enemy of the good. This is a vital truth in all creative acts. Tattoo it onto your eyeballs so you always see it. Hire somebody to whisper it into your ear.

6. Fuck impostor syndrome. Yes, you’re an impostor. We all are. This is a career of impostors. It’s okay. Embrace it. You don’t belong here. None of us belong here. That’s the awesome thing about a creative career — we’re all a bunch of stowaways and exiles.

7. Be aware of tracts of bumpy road. See them. Know when they’re coming. For me, I’m going to hit trouble writing a novel somewhere around the 33% mark and the 50% mark. I know a lot of newer writers, and this was true for me, had problems right at the start and then also around the middle. I dunno when they’ll be for you, but they’ll be there. The road will get bumpy. You just have to keep driving. Meaning, you just gotta keep writing. Put words on paper next to each other. One after the other, like footsteps.

8. Momentum is your friend. Progress begets momentum begets momentum.

9. Writing is not magic. It feels like it sometimes, and that’s rad. Other times it feels like raking leaves or running through quicksand. It is what it is and every day will be different. Don’t expect every day to feel the same. Don’t expect a good day to lead to good writing and a bad day to lead to bad writing. And don’t let it be magic. Magic is fickle. Let it be science: practiced, ritualized, with an outcome based on experience and effort and study. It can be magic again later.

10. The community is your friend. Other writers are great. I mean, really. In your genre and out, writers are — on a whole — lovely. You get a few peckers and jerkholes in there, but for the most part, when you feel like you’re falling, just whistle — the community will catch you.

11. The community is also your enemy. Writing is still an isolated thing. We can get lost in the community. We can take bad advice. We can compare ourselves to others. A bad pocket of community is as bad a pocket of poisonous air.

12. Have a plan. I don’t think outlines or other prep are an essential part of writing for everybody. I mean, they are for me, but I also find it necessary to drink coffee and dress up in a clown outfit and terrorize neighborhood children. That’s what gets my creative juices flowing. You gotta do you. However! NaNoWriMo is not necessarily a normal writing schedule. We’re talking an intense transitional effort. You’re going from ground to atmosphere as fast as you can, with yourself and your burgeoning novel strapped to a rickety-ass rocket. You may want to have a plan. That might mean an outline, sure. Or it might mean one of these 25 ways to plot and plan and scheme your novel.

13. Recharge your creative batteries. We have only so many IEP — Intellectual Energy Points — to spend in our day. And that tank is finite. You get some back from sleeping and eating. But you also have to take time to refill the coffers. Go for a walk. Read a book. Talk to other writers. Any activity that might jumpstart your UNICORN ENGINE, do it.

14. It’s not about getting published. Have your eye on the right goal — the goal is not publication, the goal is the writing and the finishing of that writing. Finish your shit.

15. Try not to read in the genre you’re writing. I find it confusing. I tend to accidentally start crossing wires — the book I’m reading might bleed into the book I’m writing. YMMV.

16. Have an idea. Like, an overarching idea. A theme. An argument. A thing that pisses you off or a thing about which you are passionate. Write it on a Post-It note. Stick the Post-It note to a 2×4. Bludgeon yourself about the head and neck with this 2×4 every day before writing.

17. Write down character traits and beats to keep in mind. Write down a few characteristics or emotional arc beats for different characters. Keep these notes visible. You can always use them as a lifeline to pull yourself through the narrative.

18. Seriously, it’s all about characters. Just remember that. It’s not about plot. It’s not about mechanism. It’s about characters. Characters are why we care. Characters are why we come to the page and why we read to the next page. Follow the characters to the end of their journey.

19. When in doubt, fuck shit up. Avoid comfort in fiction. If you start to feel stuck, make things worse for the characters. Someone makes a bad decision. Someone lies, or someone dies. Break something. Betrayals. Drama. A new threat. An evolved problem. It’s like a blender — you turn it up, then back down, then back up again. If the story has settled into a status quo, disrupt it. Create a new normal. Challenge the characters, advance the stakes.

20. Let the characters talk. Dialogue is lubricant.

21. Exposition is fine in a first draft. People hate on exposition, and I do it, too, as a lot of exposition is information delivered by wrapping it around a brick and then throwing it through the reader’s front window. It’s blunt, ugly, and occasionally boring. But this is a first draft. I like exposition in a first draft. I like to let myself talk through it on the page. I’ll cut it later.

22. Kill your editor. Er, not your actual editor? Like, the editor that lives inside your head. Now is not the time for the Critic. Now is the time for the Artist. Silence the Critic. Release the Artist. Again: you can always cut it later or fix it in post. Your book is not a stone monument. It is not a painting. It is a flowing stream. You can play with the flow as you go, again and again. You get as many drafts as you like. Reminder: please don’t actually kill anybody, kay, thanks.

23. Fuck the haters. Haters are a persistent presence in the universe. They’re the dark matter of humanity, spun up out of some sphincter-shaped black hole. People will hate on you for wanting to write, or not writing enough, or having the wrong process, or for daring to think you can do NaNoWriMo. Hate is like a dead bird around your neck. Throw it overboard and get back to your COOL CREATIVE BOAT JOURNEY.

24. Enjoy it. Or at least some part of it. Listen, this thing we do? This writey-writey story-making bullshit? It’s hard. And the rewards are often slow and minimal. Every day won’t be a fucking rain of happy balloon animals, and some days will be so tough and frustrating you want to literally bite your own hands off because of the crimes they have committed against narrative. Still — learn to enjoy it. Learn to find happiness — or even better, satisfaction — in it. Force a smile. Throw up jazz-hands. Roll around in it like a dog in the rotten paste of a dead squirrel.

25. Shut up and write. Wait till November 1st if you want. Or start now. Don’t talk about writing. Just write. Don’t get on Twitter or Tumblr to see how everyone else is doing. Just write. Write, write, write, then write some more. Write until you’re done.

Then have ice cream and a nap.

Or whiskey and a cheesecake.

Good luck. Have fun. Don’t chew your hands off.

* * *

So, starting now and through the end of November, use coupon code NANOWRIMO on my Gonzo Writing Book Bundle to nab eight of my writing e-books for 25% off the $20 price (so, $15). Or, if you want something in print: hey, look, The Kick-Ass Writer.

Five Storytelling Lessons From Hamilton’s America

(Note: art of Leslie Odom, Jr. as Burr done by the inimitable Amy Houser, who did the cover for Irregular Creatures. You can find Amy’s Twitter here, and her website here.)

I was going to write a post about The Walking Dead. I don’t watch that show anymore, but even without watching it I’m roughly abreast of what’s going on there because, ha ha, social media can’t shut its mouth for 60 seconds, much less 60 minutes, and so I know who Negan killed in the opener of the current season. (Spoiler warning: Negan kills all our hopes and dreams.) And I wanted to talk about why I don’t watch it anymore, why I think the show has become something approximating PAIN PORN, why I think it’s gone too far down the rabbit hole of FEEL BAD TV, why I think it’s all pure surface now and has very little deeper going on — and, above all else, why I believe the entire conceit of the series summons my disbelief.

But, y’know, c’mon. I’d rather not waste my time or yours — plus, some people continue to love the show, as they should. Love what you love, and don’t let me pee in your pool. I mean, I already peed in your pool, so it’s too late on that particular front, but I mean, metaphorically, I don’t want to urinate in any of your cherished psychological spaces.

Instead, let’s talk about something I like.

Let’s talk about Hamilton.

Or, more specifically, the so-called Hamildoc — Hamilton’s America, a PBS program detailing both the rise of the musical and the history that forms its bones and its blood. As noted, I came to Hamilton late — I was particularly hesitant to listen to the musical once I discovered it had little to nothing to do with actual delicious ham. And once I did listen to it, I listened to it the wrong way: a slap-dash listen where I dicked around on the Internet as it played. Once I finally ceased all such dicking around, and once I sat with it and listened to it straight through, any resistance I had was sandblasted away. The musical planted its seeds. I still hum and sing it daily. My wife does too, now. In the car, the five-year-old-known-as-B-Dub will ask to have either Star Wars put on the radio — or Hamilton. (He also likes to use the name “HERCULES MULLIGAN” as his battle cry. He’ll just bust into a room, fists up, muscles out, and he’ll growl, “HERCULES MULLIGAN!” because he’s pretty sure that’s the best name of all time.)

So! I watched the doc with glee straining the ventricles of my poor mortal heart and I was not disappointed. More importantly, though, I took home a number of storytelling lessons as I watched it — because to me there’s nothing more fascinating than watching an interesting creator in the process of creation, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is nothing if not a very interesting creator, indeed. To be able to watch the genesis of the musical and the unfolding of the narrative was not only fascinating — it was informative.

And thus I present, five storytelling lessons I grokked from the doc.

Do with these as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

It Takes The Time That It Takes

It took Lin-Manuel six years to write Hamilton.

It took him two years to write the first two songs.

I think we have this idea in our heads that creation has to be fast and furious, that it’s either pyroclastic fucksplosion time or it’s nothing. And sometimes it is! Sometimes writing something is like having an INSPIRATION GRENADE shoved down into your undies and then it detonates, and the only thing you can do is ride the shockwave to a finished piece of something.

But sometimes, inspiration comes in threads. A red thread here, plucked out of the air. An orange thread there, found wound around your pinky. You find these threads over time and only over time do they start to come together into a proper rope to climb. I tend to write pretty fast, but Blackbirds famously took about five years. Atlanta Burns was a book that had all these separate parts that took a year or more to come together. Exeunt (recently announced!) has been in my head for about two years and it was all these ill-fitting but interesting pieces that needed just a few more bits and a couple dollops of creative glue to bring them together.

Point is, it takes the time that it takes.

It takes a week, a month, a year, six years.

The brownies gotta stay in the oven till they’re done, son.

Read Broadly, For Inspiration Is Fucking Weird

Lin-Manuel found the inspiration from Hamilton in Ron Chernow’s book. At least, that was the match that lit the powder keg — Miranda was sitting on an explosive barrel packed with hip-hop culture and historical musicals and his own life (and his own father’s life, too). There is an astonishing creative alchemy there, but it only happens when you let it. When, in a sense, you force it — or, rather, you maximize conditions. As I am fond of saying, lightning strikes are rare, but only because we try to avoid them. If you want to get hit by lightning, you can swaddle yourself in metal foil, grab an umbrella, and run out into a storm.

Miranda isn’t absorbing a creative diet of only other musicals. That’s part of it. But it’s also his life. His experience. And then it’s also about reading broadly. Go beyond the fence. Leave the comfort of the town and head out into the woods where unexpected books offer unanticipated mystery — and, better yet, unseen inspiration. Exeunt for me only started to come together when a few non-fiction books added the bridging components, bringing context to these disparate ideas. (I won’t say what books because, well, that’d spoil the story a bit.)

Let Your Fear Of Mortality Drive The Car Once In A While

Both Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda were driven by a fear of mortality. What days you have, what days you don’t, and how you choose to fill them. There’s no great lesson here except that, I think, fear of mortality is exceedingly common, as it is the one thing we literally all share. We all share that end. And you can be hamstrung by that.

Or you can use it.

There is an energy to that fear, if you can seize it.

You can use that energy to create. To fill your life with purpose.

Don’t wait. To wait is to die. (Just ask Burr.)

Just Write The Parts You Need

In the doc, Miranda is talking to Sondheim and Weidman about writing historical musicals, and Weidman recalls telling Miranda some pretty simple — yet amazing — advice. When talking about how much research and history there is to absorb, and further how to distill that down into a musical, Weidman said: “Just write the parts you think are a musical.”

*mind asplodes*

I can’t tell you how freeing and how clarifying that is. Not just about musicals, but about whatever you’re writing. Just write the thing you’re writing. If what you’ve got is not the thing you’re writing? Then scrap it. Write what you need. Keep what suits the work. You owe the story — and the audience, eventually — only that.

Dig Into Deeper Dirt

If you play Minecraft, as I have and as my son does now, you learn that the deeper you go, the better resources you find. You start to find coal and iron — then, deeper still, you’ll find gold, and even further down, you’ll find diamond. It’s a good metaphor for the act of creating a story, I think. Most of a story exists on the surface or near it, and that’s okay. It should. It can’t spend all its time down there in the dark.

And by “in the dark,” I mean in the loamy silt or hard schist of theme, metaphor, and motif. These components are often invisible, but can be sensed –

And, with repeated reads or listens, excavated.

Part of what’s great about Hamilton are those repeated listens. Listen again and again and you begin to find things you didn’t find the first — or the second, or the eighth — time through. You find flecks of gold and the hint of diamonds down there in the narrative, little character and story bits you missed, interesting turns-of-phrase or better yet, unrealized turns-of-narrative. And then you watch the doc and you see even more: like the way “Burn” takes a historical element and makes it a symbol of her character at that point. Or how the rap styles evolve throughout the work and through different characters. Or how Jefferson’s been gone away so long, he’s figuratively missed the cultural advancement into hip-hop storytelling and so his introduction is jazzier, older, out-of-touch. Lin-Manuel doesn’t shine too bright a light on those things; he has them there if you want to find them. No trail of breadcrumbs. No sign saying DIG HERE. But if you dig, you might find these bits over time.

And that’s vital for a storyteller. As I said, most of a story lives on or near the surface. But a lot remains invisible, and that doesn’t necessarily happen accidentally. That’s something you put there. These are things you hide in the dirt, unseen yet discoverable. Deeper thinking about what the story means, who these characters are, even how the mechanism of the narrative relates to the events of the narrative — that’s huge. Not only does it give the tale a stronger backbone, but it also rewards the audience who revisit the work.

It rewards the audience who grabs a shovel and digs.

Bonus Round: The Two Truths Of Every Character

I know, I said five, and this is number six.

I’m a writer, not a mathematician. Shut up.

In the Hamildoc, we see one thing discussed again and again in relation to these (very real, very historical) characters, and that is how they are both beings of light and darkness. They are angels and devils at the same time. Washington and Jefferson are the architects of this nation and of the freedom we enjoy, and they both also owned people. They both somehow believed all men are created equal while simultaneously demonstrating how untrue that was for them. Hamilton is driven by his own manic genius, but his heroism in the first half of the work burns him out, and soon he becomes grist for the tragedy mill by the second half. Burr is a villain in our history books but the culmination of his villainy is given context and empathy throughout. We see two sides of him as we see two sides of most of the characters. As Miranda notes in the doc: none of these people are saints. And, I’d argue, none of them are truly villains, either.

People are rarely all good or all evil. That’s true of characters. It’s true of people. People routinely do great things while believing bad ideas — and they do bad things in support of pure ideals. In this age of political bullshit, it’s important to see people as people, as wildly imperfect creatures. And as a writer, that’s vital. Every character is seeing themselves in a broken mirror. Every character is complicated and flawed — often to different degrees depending on the type of story you’re telling, sure, but flawed just the same.

It’s good advice for storytelling. And it’s not terrible advice in life, too.

*salutes Alexander Hamilton*

*salutes Lin-Manuel Miranda*

Your Obedient Servant,

C. Wen

(Note: you can watch Hamilton’s America in full right here.)

Flash Fiction Challenge: Finish That Scary Story

Here’s the prior round!

Same rules apply.

Go there. Read up on the stories. Pick one that already has its second part written as per the last challenge. Then, it’s time to finish it. Do not choose one where you have already written. Choose a new one. Continue the tale and, more importantly, conclude the tale. Make sure to drop links to the previous two stories — and author credit to those writers! — in your new post.

Due by Friday, Oct 28th, noon EST.

Write up to 1000 words.

Leave a link in the comments below, and again, be sure to share credit where due.

Tee Morris: Five Things I Learned About My Writing Career While Running A Half-Marathon

If you follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you’ll know I’m a bit of a runner. Have been for a long time. I’ve been running the odd 5Ks here and there, but I wanted to really reach for a goal. A full marathon, I’ve accepted, is just not in the cards for me. I will never have that kind of time to train. Not on a writer’s schedule. But a half-marathon? Yeah, that felt right. Something I could train for.

Here’s the thing about half-marathons, something I learned around Mile Marker 4. You are going to run. A lot. For the same length of time as an average summer blockbuster movie. So with a lot of time and a lot of running ahead of myself, I focused on trying to find a zone where I wouldn’t worry about the mileage…

…and wouldn’t you know it, over the thirteen-point-one miles of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Half-Marathon, I came across a few connections between this half and my own writing career.

Don’t Mind Others. This is Your Career. Not theirs.

For the first handful of miles, all of us were running to the left. I wasn’t sure why until I saw just shy of Mile Marker 4 a police car coming in the opposite direction. I heard a runner behind me say, “Here comes the lead.” The pace car passed us, and right behind it was a guy easily keeping an 8-minute mile and he was showing no signs of stopping. Same for the runner only a few hundred yards behind him, and the pair of runners behind him by a quarter-mile or so. I was one of the runners cheering them all on before getting back to my own run, watching some continue to pound the pavement ahead of me while others needed to walk it out. Now those people in the lead? Those are your Neil Gaimans, your Chuck Wendigs, your Elizabeth Bears, and your Delilah S. Dawsons. They are setting the pace for the rest of us, but that doesn’t mean you compare yourself to them. You don’t say “I must suck at writing because I’m not there.” The pace setters never start at the head of the pack. They train for that shit with each book. They hit personal bests on sunny days. They slog through to the end on the worst. They focus on the story in front of them, not the stories and storytellers around them. As Chuck would say, you do you.

Set a pace. Stick with it.

This race would be the first time I would ever be running any distance taking on double digits. Race rules stipulated “You’re committing to finishing the race at a time less than 15-minutes a mile.” I found that maintaining a ten-minute mile was hard. I could easily pick up the pace, sure, but I was only at Mile Marker 5. Eight to go. No, I wanted to end this race strong, not stumbling across the finish line. Any of this sound familiar? Because it should. You want to finish that book in you, but if you try and shit out a metric fuckton of words you might find yourself struggling just to type out “It was a dark and stormy night…” the following day. Same goes for that pledge of “I’m going to hammer out 2000 words tonight…” only to hit those writing blocks where you may score only 500 words at the end of the day, 750 the next. You might start feeling a little disheartened. This is why setting a pace is so important. Maybe “2000 words a day” is good goal to shoot for, but start off with a 500-word count. Keep with that for a month. Get into a constant, consistent zone of productivity. Remember, this is a long game we’re playing. Not a sprint.

Step up that pace when you’re ready.

At Mile Marker 9 I checked my average pace and had slipped a few seconds. I was still feeling good though, considering this is the farthest I had ever run. I knew if I could keep this pace, I would have enough in the tank for finishing at a confident stride. From the writer’s perspective, this is what you work towards—a pace that, once you got it down, can pick up. Roughly a month later of consistently hitting, if not shattering, that 500-word goal, push your count to 1000 words. Then stick with that regimen for a spell. Then, if the consistency is there, raise your regimen by another 250 or 500 words. Pace makes a difference in your progress; but when you have it down, raise the bar and step it up. You will want to finish strong.

Never stop pushing yourself.

When I hit Mile Marker 10, I had hit a serious milestone. If I was lucky, I would finish the race in two hours-fifteen minutes. If I was lucky. At this point, all that was left was three miles. Roughly five kilometers. My feet and legs were wanting a bit of a break, but I only had three miles to go. Fuck it. I’m all in. No different than when you challenge yourself in your writing. Once upon a time, I didn’t do short stories. I couldn’t keep it tight like short stories demand you do. Now, I’m cranking them out every season with Tales from the Archives and editing anthologies. Once upon a time, I was working a novel a year. In 2016 alone, I’ve got two novels, a novella, and a new season of short stories to launch. While you have to set a pace, you should strive to push yourself to be better, to work harder, to write better.

Fucking Finish the Damn Race.

It was an incline. A long, slow incline. At Mile Marker 11. Well, fuck me running. Literally. I made it 11.25 miles and my body finally said, “Walk. Now.” So I walked for roughly a quarter of a mile. Yes, I was frustrated. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I was seriously thinking about just sucking up my pride and walking it out to the end. I watched the distance tick off, did the math in my head, and said to myself “Finish this. Finish this before two hours and thirty minutes. Finish the fucking race.” At 11.5 I started running again. I didn’t feel graceful, I didn’t feel powerful, but goddammit I was running again. Regardless of the 30-degree incline ahead, regardless of the pain, regardless of the lost time, I pushed on. Rounding the corner, I was off the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and saw the finish line ahead. My time on crossing—2:22:53. My wife, Pip, had never been so proud of me, not even after we hit Number #1 on three of Amazon’s Steampunk lists only two days prior. That—right there—is so important to your writing career. Your novel, novella, or short story, remains nothing more than an idea and words on paper until you finish it. Finish that story. Finish strong. Finish confident. Fucking finish the story.

The Wilson Half was an amazing experience, but I remember getting home, fired up to write. Honestly, I can’t remember if I did or not. There was a lot of napping and re-hydration after I got home. Still, would I do it again? Yes. Oh hell, yes! Running a half-marathon offered me a lot of perspective on this crazy career as a writer.

Plus, I’ve got to step it up my regimen. Considering what Jim Hines, Chuck, and I have agreed to do for charity, we need to look our best for whatever ridiculous pose people vote for us to recreate.

Lace up, gents. We got some miles to shred.

Katie Fetting: Five Reasons Writers Choose To Break History

Hanna is a 1st gen American of German immigrant parents. When WWII breaks out, she seeks to prove her allegiance to the U.S. After rigorous training at Camp X (Google it!), she becomes a spy. Our graphic novel opens in early 1945. Hanna’s assignment? Take a German officer from Munich to Genoa — avoiding the Nazis, the Russians, the Americans. Why? Well, maybe this assignment isn’t exactly ‘authorized’…

Ever see a movie with a know-it-all?

If you haven’t, you probably are that know-it-all. If so, you relish pointing out every inconsistency possible. “There were no such things as chastity belts.” “Eva Peron was a terrible person who didn’t sing with a suitcase.” “No way Braveheart banged the Princess of Wales. He would have smelled like a farting Shetland pony.”

So… I’m one of those know-it-alls. And it can be delightful to point out discrepancies, misinterpretations and general fuck-ups in historical adaptations.

But what if you’re on the other side of it? Do writers really not know their history? Did they not spend months and years researching? Are they inept morons?

OK, probably some of them are. But as someone who’s written five projects based on real events – each with its own historic inaccuracies – I can tell you, most of us make deliberate decisions to benefit the overall story.

Why do we do this? Well, there’s a lot of boring shit that’s happened in 3,000 years. A helluva lot of waiting in doctor’s offices. Blow-drying hair. Scooping kitty litter. Watching CSPAN…

So here are five criteria I use to determine whether to break with documented history. Use and abuse at your own peril.

1. Pace

From moment-to-moment are you keeping the reader engaged?

A reader must want to know what happens next. If you lose this, pages stop turning. The overwhelming majority of stories already truncate time to some degree, so ask yourself if a minute, inessential historical detail pushes the reader forward or stops him in his tracks.

2. Space

Can your overall narrative survive going off on Dostoyevskian tangents?

You may be keeping readers reasonably engaged from moment-to-moment, but most of them have overarching expectations for a narrative and how it should move. It’s possible, if you’re Steinbeck, you can get away with an entire chapter on a turtle early in your narrative. However my guess is that, you, Sir, are no John Steinbeck.

Mostly, tangents work more like the begets and begots of Genesis. You see how crazy long the Bible is… and how you’re only on Chapter 5 of the first book… and, yeah, I think I’ll watch Orphan Black.

3. Interest

Does adding accuracy add interest?

In my screenplay for about the 1924 teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, I tried to scrupulously follow the recorded history. But at times, in order to do so, I’d be adding scenes unnecessary to the plot – which would have slowed the tempo, added money to the budget and been, well, tedious.

For example, in real life, when the ransom call for their victim came in, only the mother was at home. This seems odd as if my child were kidnapped, certainly my partner and I would BOTH be there waiting for the call. Therefore, to be accurate to history, I would either need to 1.) leave the audience wondering where Dad is or 2.) show where Dad is – which was at his hoity-toity gentleman’s club seeking more information (which he didn’t find).

Did that last graph put you to sleep? Exactly.

So in the script, Dad and Mom are together to get the call – there’s no unnecessary scene and no weird questions in viewers heads. But it’s not accurate.

4. Room for interpretation

Do we even know the established history is accurate?

This question came up when I was working on a project about the Borgias. So anything before recorded times – and I mean film, vinyl, photograph, sex tape – is potentially suspect. Especially when it comes to European history during the Renaissance.

Basically, the people writing shit down were either paid by the subjects themselves or by people who loathed the subjects with the passion of a thousand suns.

So which is accurate? Probably neither.

5. Intent

Have you stayed true to the event / character it/herself?

In my latest project, a graphic novel called RATLINE, an OSS agent is tasked with transporting a Nazi out of the shit-show that was central Europe in the waning days of World War II. She’s instructed to avoid all of the armies, including our own, in order to sneak this dude out.

IRL, the U.S. DID have an official, top secret operation called BLOODSTONE in which we enlisted known Nazi war criminals to help us in our post-war struggle with the Russians.

There were also things called “ratlines” that operated like an Underground Railroad for escaping war criminals.

Now there is no evidence that they were as operational as I made them in April/May of 1945. And there is no evidence a U.S. agent ever escorted a Nazi through them. But possible? Hell yes. And true to historical intent.

* * *

Bottom line: With every choice, ask yourself does the “reality” of this contribute to the overall understanding of the narrative / story / philosophy? Does the absence of it invalidate the history?

Bottom bottom line: Writers usually know the history they’re messing with.

Bottom bottom bottom line: Did you make it this far?

Katie Fetting is a screenwriter and aspiring graphic novelist whose first graphic novel RATLINE with illustrator Mark Rehill is currently in the midst of an IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign . Those who donate will get into heaven.*

*No money back guarantee.

Macro Monday Is A Cup Of Currant Affairs

GET IT

CURRANT AFFAIRS

BECAUSE IT’S A CUP

OF CURRANTS

GET IT

okay, shut up.

ICYMI: new book deal announcement!

Happy Monday, y’all.

Flash Fiction Challenge: A Scary Story, Part Two!

Psst.

Yeah, you.

*pulls off werewolf mask*

Click here.

See in the comments? People have written scary stories — or, rather, the first part of a scary story. Your job now is to continue the tale. Grab one you like and write PART TWO of it –

But once again: do not end it. You are not to conclude the story! But rather, leave it open.

Write part two at your online space, but please make sure in your tale to link to the first part.

Your second chapter is due by Friday, October 21st, noon EST.

Length should be ~1000 words.

GO FORTH AND BE SCARY.

Announcing: Exeunt

HEY, LOOK, A BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT.

From Publishers Marketplace:

NYT-bestselling author Chuck Wendig’s EXEUNT, a post-apocalyptic novel pitched as in the vein of THE STAND about a mysterious event in which a thousand people begin walking together to the same unknown destination — and the loved ones who follow along to protect them, and a second untitled novel, to Tricia Narwani at Del Rey, by Stacia Decker at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

I am very excited about this.

I am so geeked to be continuing my relationship with Del Rey, and especially with Tricia, who is aces. (Tricia helped edit Three Slices, which contains the Miriam Black novella, Interlude: Swallow, and also contains stories by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson.) Exeunt is a book that’s been juggling around my brain for several years now, and only recently did it kind of coalesce into a proper novel. It’ll be epic and scary and ahhh. I hope you like it. See you in 2018.

Nik Abnett: Five Things I Learned Writing Savant

His mind can save the world, if she can save him from the human race… 

The Shield is Earth’s only defence. Rendering the planet invisible from space, it keeps humanity safe from alien invasion. The Actives maintain the shield – no one is sure how – but without them, the Shield cannot function.

When an Active called Tobe finds himself caught in a probability loop, the Shield is compromised. Soon, Tobe’s malady spreads among the Active. Earth becomes vulnerable.

Tobe’s assistant, Metoo, is only interested in his wellbeing. Earth security’s paramount concern is the preservation of the Shield. As Metoo strives to prevent Tobe’s masters from undermining his fragile equilibrium, the global danger escalates.

The Shield must be maintained at all costs…

* * *

Just how obsessive I can become.

I’ve never been a writer who writes every day. I know that’s what writers are supposed to do… I’ve seen the rules. I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to write, you might want to make your own rules.

I’ve always written in fits and starts, but when I get started I can’t stop. That might have been one of the things that prevented me from finishing longer pieces of fiction before I wrote ‘Savant’. I used to force myself to stop.

The writing starts slow, but, boy, when I hit my stride there’s no stopping me. Literally, nothing stops me writing. If I wake up clear-headed, I might even write all day without once thinking about getting out of my PJs. And when I say ‘all day’, I do mean sixteen or eighteen hours a day, sometimes for weeks. Towards the end of a book, I can write fifteen thousand words in a session. The hoovering doesn’t get done, and I forget to eat, but it turns out, that’s OK, because the faster I write, the faster it’s all over. I also discovered that I live with people who can fend for themselves, perfectly well.

What comes before informs what comes afterwards.

Not only do I not need a plot before I begin a novel, I don’t want one. When I began ‘Savant’, all I had in mind was a theme. I wanted to write about unconditional love. If I’d plotted that book, it would’ve been very different from the one I ended up with. Of course, having so little at the outset meant I had to be patient with the process. I spent a lot of time going back, changing things around, and rewriting the first third of the novel. But, during that period, the characters grew, the world emerged, and the theme took a new turn. The book evolved during the writing process, and that, for me, at least, feels like a good thing.

Not everybody will understand what you’re doing, but that’s OK.

I learned this over a long period of time, longer, probably, than it needed to be. The first few people who saw ‘Savant’, including a writer, a reader, a publisher and my first agent didn’t get it. I assumed that meant it wasn’t good. When the book fell, almost by accident, into Jonathan Oliver’s hands, he was the first person in six years to get excited about it.

That I had a novel in a folder on my desktop for six years was my own fault. I should have shown it to more people sooner. Have a little confidence. Trust what you’re doing. Knock on doors, and keep knocking.

Keyboard skills are important.

I learned to touch type when I was eight or nine (don’t ask). I can type a hundred words a minute, accurately, when I’m in full flow. I hadn’t realised what an asset that could be until I was churning out scads of words every day of the last week or two of writing this novel. It’s pretty tough to write fifteen thousand words a day. I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t able to type. I guess It’s like driving a car; if you want to go faster or master tricky manoeuvres, it’s a good idea to be well practiced in handling those pedals and that gearstick.

There’s irony in the fact that we all use keyboards, all the time, but few of us take typing classes.

You can’t write for an audience.

Or, at least, you can, and I do, regularly. I’ve written tie-in fiction, but there’s a certain discipline in that: knowing the IP, plotting, re-plotting… It’s about giving the client what he wants.

Writing independent fiction isn’t like that at all. If I’d had an audience in mind while writing this book, I think I would’ve been missing the point. I wrote the book I wanted to write. I told the story that I wanted to tell. I did what mattered to me. I gave no thought to the audience… Any audience. I didn’t think about impressing an agent or a publisher, and I didn’t think about the reader.

In the movie, ‘Field of Dreams’, Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, hears a mysterious voice. It tells him, “If you build it he will come.” This is regularly misquoted as “If you build it they will come.” And, it’s misquoted for a reason.

No writer should be compromised, and neither should any artist. Feedback comes in so thick and fast in the internet age that it’s tough for a writer, for any artist, to ignore that stuff. A first time novelist doesn’t need to have that on his or her radar. No one is breathing down anyone’s neck. I know established writers and artists who are forever being told by their audiences what should come next.

The point of the writer must always be the reader. I get that. I say it all the time. Here’s the thing, though: No writer has more freedom than the first-time novelist. Nobody is trying to mould that story; nobody has a vested interest in it, yet. That isn’t true of second and subsequent novels.

I was lucky to learn this while writing ‘Savant’, because I was already in the industry. I tried to take advantage, to write what I wanted to write, and not what others might want me to write, or what they might expect from an SF novel. I urge all first time writers to enjoy that freedom.

Nik Abnett: Website | Twitter

Savant: Amazon | B&N | Kobo

Cassandra Khaw: Five Things I Learned Writing Hammers On Bone

John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.

He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.

As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He’s infected with an alien presence, and he’s spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.

Words are hard (but not impossible)

When I first started out, I wrote about 200 to 300 words of fiction every other day or so. It was a good day when I hit 500 words. Which is a paltry sum compared to the output of true professionals. According to what I’ve heard, 2000 words is basically the industry average.

And that knowledge is intimidating. Like, seriously so. I spent more time agonizing about my output than anything else, I think. Not craft, not quality of prose, not narrative structuring. Those are skills you can learn, can workshop, can develop. But the idea of coming up with so many words every single day was daunting.

Coming from a journalism background, I’m used to producing content on a tight schedule. In other words, there’s really not much time to weave through drafts so I edit as I write. Which is a terrible idea in fiction, as anyone can tell you. But Hammers on Bone managed to propel me to a 1000 words-a-day average. (I’m slogging towards 2000 words a day. It’s long, sad climb.)

The weird thing about that was this: all that advice about making space for these words? It’s true. I wrote most of Hammers of Bone across the course of January, between navigating the spectacle of Las Vegas. I was bored. I wanted it done. (And to be honest, I think I wanted to prove to C.C Finlay that I knew how to let a story breathe.)

So I gave myself two weeks to hit 15,000 words. I sectioned off my day to include fiction. I made it a point to sit down and write. After all, if Ken Liu can carve a handful of minutes each day from a lawyer-y schedule and Chuck Wendig can write 10,000 words in a day, I could do something, right? [I almost never write 10k a day! — cw]

And it worked.

I know it sounds obvious on paper. Self-discipline? Of course, that’s how you do it. But when you’re faced with a blank document, with the idea of writing for weeks, with the thought of committing yourself to thousands of words that may never see publication? Common sense gets squeezed out of the window and anxieties set in. What I learned writing Hammers on Bone, though, is this: you can totally be the boss of those fears.

You need to give a story room to breathe (but not too much)

A story is a puppy: it starts out small and cuddly, full of potential, practically quivering with a rambunctious desire to please. You and your puppy – you can be anything, anyone. You can go anywhere, have a variety of adventures. You will be best friends.

Of course, puppies grow up, shedding their wobbly-legged cuteness in favor of whatever they were meant to be. And like dog owners, writers are going to need to adapt to these circumstances. A Pomeranian is going to be perfectly happy in a one-room studio, but a German Shepherd will quickly tire of the limited space, simultaneously withering in its confinement and laying havoc on the room.

Er.

Complicated metaphor aside, the point that I’m trying to make here is that stories always start out the same way: with the sense that anything can happen. Then, it gets going and what’s interesting is that the story doesn’t always accommodate us. Sure, we might say that this was intended to be a piece of flash fiction. Sure, we expected a 10,000-word novelette. And sometimes, that’s true. (For plotters, in fact, that might always be true.)

But sometimes, it’s not.

Hammers on Bone was a 3,000 word story that I wrote up in two weeks and sent to F&SF, hoping that it might resonate with editor C.C. Finlay. To an extent, it did. He rejected it, of course. But not without first telling me that this was a story that had merit, but also a story that needed room to breathe.

So I gave it room to breathe. Slightly begrudgingly, of course. I was the dog owner who’d expected a lap-puppy, but ended up with three-times-a-day walkies. But I let Hammers on Bone breathe. I mapped out spaces for tension. I gave Persons and McKinsey room to be alpha dogs at each other. I sketched in the world that existed in my head.

And then I stopped. Because I’d said everything I wanted to say about the story. Things had happened, events had transpired. It was time to go. Sure, I could have given the tale another POV character, maybe write in more lore, but this was a story with a limited time frame. It had to go from point A to point B very quickly, and any detours would cause some grumpiness.

Was I right about that? Was Charlie right about his critique? Yes, I guess. It found a home with a wonderful publisher, in the end. Stories really need space. Sometimes, 14,000 words worth of space.

Noir is very casually sexist

Classic film noir, along with the hardboiled fiction that inspired it, has always been exceedingly masculine in tone. The hero is inevitably an alpha male. He is ruthless, indomitable, alluring, immune to feminine wiles. He is the mercenary, the ronin, the man that will never be tied down, a creature of endless adventure, destined to just the right amount of hardship. In other words, he is a fantasy.

The problem with fantasies, though, is that they are intrinsically selfish. By and large, noir was disinterested in women, preferring to see them as either adversarial elements or objects of licentious desire. I like to imagine that this approach to female characters wasn’t always driven by ill intentions, that some of the authors were simply trying to stay true of the genre.

But regardless of how you cut in, the language of noir is very casually sexist. Women are never their names but instead a litany of diminutives: toots, babe, skirt, bird. You ‘shack up’ with a ‘roundheels,’ and ‘chew’ and ‘neck’ and ‘mash’ and ‘fumble’ your way into the boudoir of a saucy little ‘dish’ The sharp ones are always careful to be ‘sheiks,’ avoiding the trap of bar-haunting frills. Don’t be a ‘boob.’ You don’t want a ‘tramp’ to make you a ‘twist’, do you?

What’s also interesting is how easy it absorb all that by intellectual osmosis. While writing Hammers on Bone, I tried my best to keep the women in my book from suffering unnecessarily. After all, they were, by consequence of the plot, already going through horrific things. They didn’t need to be put down, objectified, reduced to a foil or a sex toy. But while the book was going through edits, I discovered something I hadn’t even really thought of. John Persons was still very flippantly chauvinistic. And it genuinely floored me as to how much.

Reading through the novella months later made me realize how much of that is true, and how much we glaze over things like that at first glance. I’ve thought about toning those elements of Persons down but for various reasons, I didn’t. Partly because it fit the plot, partly because it fit what I needed Persons to be, and partly because I wanted to remind myself of how easy it is for anyone to slip.

Shock factor is seductive

Hammers on Bone is a rough book. There is a lot of violence, both on-screen and off-screen. People get hurt in gruesome ways, and one of the climatic scenes in the end is straight out of my childhood nightmares of John Carpenter’s The Thing. (Thanks, mom. Thanks, dad. Having a 9-year old watch that movie was a great idea.)

That said, there are only three occasions where a woman is physically harmed in the novella. None of it is played for titillation. At least, I don’t think so. When I started writing, I made a promise with myself to not have the marginalized suffer gratuitously. If something happens to them, it won’t be in a space where it can be savoured, be reinterpreted into a cause for pleasure. (Thank you, college mates, for showing me that some people will publicly cheer at rape scenes. Ugh.)

Despite all those grandiose plans to do better, the temptation to play up certain scenes did manifest while I was writing Hammers on Bone. And it surprised me as to how easily that happened. Popular media had coded certain expectations into me: masculine character development is prefaced by a tormented woman.

Breaking it down, that trope makes a horrendous kind of sense. The desire to protect something weaker than yourself, to safeguard the vulnerable, to hold onto the people you love – these are the universal impulses that have fueled miracles. What better way to motivate someone than to tell them that everything that they love is at risk? What better way to prompt change than to take away everything that anchors a character to current reality?

Most importantly, it is an easy, reliable solution. In some ways, most of the work had been done already. Wasn’t I proof? For better or for worse, we all know that the pain of a woman kickstarts a revenge plot, or something subtler but no less potent.

So I wrote that.

I had wanted to create a tragic moment, something heart-wrenching. I wanted people to care. I wanted the characters to think about what they’d done, and who they were, and how all this affected their humanity. And then I looked down at what I’d written, retched a bit in my mouth, tore out the paragraphs, put them into a meat grinder, and sat in cold, clammy revulsion. Because I’d done that thing. I’d exploited one of my own characters. I had done it to shock, to appall, to move someone else’s character arc.

From a clinical perspective, it’s fascinating as to how that could even happen. As a queer Asian woman, you’d think I’d know better, especially since I had promised myself I wouldn’t do something like this. And I do.

But at the same time, decades of Hollywood and mainstream literature had apparently left an indelible impression. I had to catch myself. I guess my point here is that no matter where you’re coming from, there’s deprogramming to be done, there are biases and problematic thoughts to deconstruct. We’re all flawed people and no matter our good intentions, we will fuck up. So we better be watching for it, and we better be ready to fix it, and if it gets into the wild, we damn well better be ready to own up to it.

The world is full of monsters

Another no-brainer. At least, in theory. But we forget, sometimes. By and large, popular media defines our understanding of the world, flattens it to two-dimensionality. We buy into tropes, into the idea that our villains bristle with capes and menacing tattoos, that they announce their intentions in a dramatic manner, framed by the clamor of an unsuspecting city or a background of lightning.

We imagine child predators to be men in brown trenchcoats, balding and sweaty, possibly mustached, unmistakably creepy. We expect men with smiles like sharks. And it is always men because the sexual advances of a woman are never undesired, because men never say no to sex with a woman, and everyone knows that queerness is a joke to be played out on loop.

Popular media tells us we know who the bad guys are.

We don’t.

I’m writing a separate post somewhere else that digs into the statistics of domestic abuse, about how often the sexual assault of men and boys go unreported, and the culture that leads to this lack of visibility. As such, I’m not going to go into it too deeply here. But I wanted to touch on something related.

The story behind Hammers on Bone is real. There are two boys out there who were victimized for years, who went to school and met with their relatives, who had birthdays, who acted slightly-out-of-bounds but were largely treated as rambunctious kids, a little damaged from a difficult home situation but otherwise fine. There’s a woman who was afraid to leave, a woman who whispered about how her abusive partner got into her head, how he kept her pinned down with her own fears. There is a monster in London who is living quietly, awaiting proper conviction, gleefully unrepentant.

But you wouldn’t know he was a monster from looking at him. You wouldn’t have known that there were problems in that household. You would only have seen the family, only seen their outings together, only seen their laughter and all those things they wanted you to see. Because people are good at keeping their darker impulses under control. Tigers have their stripes. Humanity has a different kind of camouflage.

Predators need an edge, you see?

***

Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. When not otherwise writing press releases, she writes fiction of grotesque dimensions. Her short stories can be found in places like Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Fireside. HAMMERS ON BONE is her first novella with Tor.com

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Hammers on Bone: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads