Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 117

Firewatch: What Storytelling Lessons Can It Teach Us?

The first five minutes of Firewatch are sweet until they are harrowing. At their end, you are left gutted of your stuffing — and then, only then, does the game begin.

This is an important moment, narratively. You as the player have been hollowed out much as your on-screen avatar, Henry, is hollowed out. You are an empty person waiting to be filled up. It’s almost like being a house so empty it invites a haunting — and boy howdy, this game is haunting. It’s not only that, of course. The game is funny, exciting, tense. It’s also frequently beautiful in ways both visually and emotionally.

But it is haunting.

Those first five minutes are harrowing not in a genre sense — it’s not like, OH, DANG, MY GIRLFRIEND WAS TAKEN AND KILLED BY NINJAS, NOOOOO, I WILL AVENGE YOU, BETTY-SUE. It’s not even quite in the vein of UP, where you watch a man’s life and marriage zip by in fast-forward to an unfortunate, if inevitable, conclusion. I won’t spoil how this game opens, but I will say that the emotional collapse that awaits the character of Henry is one that is painfully adult in nature. Mature not in the sense of, OMG IT’S PEE PORN, but mature in the way that adult life sometimes throws challenges at you you would’ve never before imagined. Challenges that are purely emotional, that are difficult because adulthood is frequently about setting up expectations for yourself and yet sometimes, sometimes, those expectations are dashed against the rocks of reality until dead. This leads us to our first lesson, actually –

The Earliest Moments Matter

Here it’s the first five minutes, same as it might be with a film or a TV pilot. Maybe in your book it’s the first five pages. In a comic the first five panels — whatever.

Point is — you gotta get in early and make those first moments count.

Those opening moments are an opportunity to chum the waters with narrative blood — then the audience comes swimming closer, looking for bait, and that’s when you draw in the net or use a gaff hook or something-something some-other-fishing-metaphor.

What’s interesting with Firewatch is that we assume those initial story moments must be PLOT-focused, right? As in, SET UP THE PLOT PROBLEM WITH AN INCITING INCIDENT BECAUSE OH NO ROBOTS ARE GOING TO LASERBOMB THE SUPERBOWL. Firewatch on the other hand uses this opportunity not to set out a plot problem but rather, a character problem. It does not establish physical stakes, but rather, emotional stakes for one character. It lays waste to the character’s emotional interior and then that personal apocalypse launches into not the mechanics of the plot but instead, the character’s connection to and the necessity for the plot.

To translate that, when we see the character take the lonely role of “firewatch” (meaning, he lives at a firewatch station and monitors the park for forest fires), he does not do so because he has some love of parks or fire or because some Sinister Villain has driven him to this. No, the guy is just alone and fucked up and wants to be more alone and so he goes to be isolated. The decision to be where he is (and for the game to be what the game is) is not because of hammering home some plot point but because that’s where Henry wants to or needs to go.

He has a problem [emotional devastation] and his solution to that problem is to go hide from the world in the wilds of Wyoming, taking a job that requires very little of him except isolation.

(If you want further thoughts on characters and plot and how the story lies between a character’s problem and a character’s solution — my Zero Fuckery Guide to kick-ass characters.)

(See also some earlier thoughts on simplicity and elegance in plot and character.)

The trick here is that it’s not enough to simply present that emotional devastation like a cat offering a dead rat (I MADE DIS SORTA). It also does it artfully — those initial moments are a seduction. Storytelling is often an act of seduction, albeit a really twisted one where you are seduced into trusting the story just so it can throw you in a bag and drive you off a cliff. The opening moments of the game are that way. Firewatch brings you into feeling emotionally compelled as you (all done through text) form a relationship with a new person, and then it slowly sticks a knife between your ribs, gently twisting and twisting as the consequences of this relationship are revealed.

It’s not enough to just plop it on the ground.

You’ve gotta get tricky with it.

It is the act of stage magic: the art of showing you a thing, then misdirecting you, and then transubstantiating that story matter into something else entirely.

Storytelling as stage magic: revelation, misdirection, and betrayal.

Revelation — Look, my assistant is getting in this box.

Misdirection — Now I shall spin the box around and do all sorts of frippery and ritual.

Betrayal — Ha ha ha fuck you I’m cutting my assistant in half, sucker. It is both everything you expected and not what you expected and now you’re wondering how I did it or how I’ll top it.

(Or, if you like The Prestige – the pledge, the turn, the prestige.)

In storytelling, it goes like:

YOU THINK THING IS ABC123

I DO A LOT OF NARRATIVE CONTORTIONS TO MESS WITH YOUR HEAD

HA HA HA YOU FOOL IT’S REALLY 321XYZ.

Or, with my own work in particular:

LOOK AT THIS APPLE

*hides apple under a sheet*

HA HA HA IT’S REALLY A RABID FERRET BITING YOUR FACE.

To get back to Firewatch, the game makes a lot of hay with those initial moments — and it’s not your classic videogame opening where you’re under attack by an alien ship or breaking out of your cryo-cradle or whatever. This is all about building up a sand castle, then sending in a big-ass wave to wash it all way. And that leaves you with the vital question of: holy shit, what now?

“Holy Shit, What Now?”

That question is a good one, I think, in terms of driving the audience to stay with the tale at hand. There’s no great overarching lesson here other than, when in doubt and when feeling stuck, there is some value in looking at what you’ve got on the pages before you and asking how you engineer the audience asking that question:

Holy shit, what now?

You get them to ask that question by surprising them, upsetting them, or delighting them. You’ve got to betray, or reveal, or surprise. (A good example of a story that does this: Orphan Black.)

On the other hand, you can do this too much. (And occasionally, Orphan Black does that, too.) You can present a ceaseless barrage of twists and turns — having your story act like a frenetic child (LOOK AT THIS. NOW THIS. LOOK AT THIS OTHER THING. WATCH ME DANCE. WATCH ME WIGGLE. I HAVE TO POOP) gives us no time to breathe. That question of holy shit, what now is an important one — but it’s also just as important that we have time to ask it and think about it.

The Glory Of Mundane Moments

Firewatch works like this:

Henry, the aforementioned firewatch, talks to his boss Delilah on the radio.

He performs seemingly mundane tasks in service to the job.

He uses his map and compass to find and perform these tasks, which takes him through amazing visual setpieces — while he wanders, Delilah occasionally chimes in or you are given a chance to talk about a thing you see (like, say, a meadow) with Delilah.

This normalcy of the job and these interactions is broken up by a set of increasingly strange events — not X-Files strange, but strange enough where you start to feel extra alone and threatened by people or systems you can’t quite see. The core of it is: imagine you’re supposed to be alone in somewhere and you slowly realize that you’re really not.

The thing is, the game parcels these tentpole plot moments out. We aren’t pummeled with a barrage of one-after-the-other events. Instead, an event occurs to deepen and complicate the mystery, and then it’s back to the job. This is vital to build tension. The game stabs with a knife, then twists — but doesn’t keep on stabbing. It lets us bleed. It lets us heal a little, or scar over.

To flip the subject a little bit, let’s talk about another game.

This game is the game where I hide somewhere in our house and I jump-scare our four-year-old. And then he does it to me in return because he thinks it’s hilarious fun (and I suspect he’ll one day be a fan of horror movies because of this).

I understand the game.

He does not understand the game.

That okay. He’s four. Four-year-olds understand a lot more than we think, but just the same, they’re kinda all over the fucking map in terms of grokking shit. I mean, trying to zip a zipper on his sweater gives him fits, so. But here’s how he plays the game:

B-Dub hides. Sometimes effectively, sometimes not. He jumps out, BOO. I am either actually startled or I fake being startled — “Oh, ha ha, I peed a little, good job.” And then he immediately does it again. And with literally zero finesse. He will step behind the nearest corner. I will watch him step behind the nearest corner. And then five seconds later he’s jumping out again: BOO. And it’s like, dude, kid, lad, that crap won’t work a second time. You have to up the ante. You have to change the game. He either needs to fool me — trick me into thinking he’s really just stepping behind the corner while really he’s climbing into the vents like John McClane where he’s going to drop down out of the ceiling (and if my son ever comes out of the ceiling I will most certainly brown my trousers). Or — or –

He needs to give it some time.

This is the part of the game I get that he does not. I’ll scare him, and then I’ll stop. I’ll ease off. I’ll go do some other nonsense and he’ll be there waiting with a suspicious smile thinking, is it about to happen again, is he going to scare me, are we still playing the game or what. Then I’ll misdirect him — “Hey, what’s that over there?” — or I’ll simply let enough time go where he’s gotten comfortable.

Then I scare him again.

BOO.

I don’t just sit there and yell at him. BOO. BOO. BOO AGAIN. BOO SOME MORE.

He needs time to giddily worry. He needs time to think about what’s coming — to anticipate it, to ponder from where I may jump out. And then he needs that time to grow comfortable, mostly certain that the game is over and I in fact will not jump out at all and scare him. At which point, I drop down out of the ceiling covered in spiders.

Firewatch knows that we need time. We need time to be tense, but also that we need time for that tension to unspool a little. The rope can’t always be tight. Sometimes it needs slack. (Want more fishing metaphor? You might catch more fish with a slack line than a tight one.) The ratchet, recoil and slack of the narrative allows us time to ponder questions, amplify our fears, play with characters, and ultimately grow comfortable in the narrative (often just in time for it to deepen our discomfort). It is an artful balancing act.

Mystery Makes Tension

This is a very simple thing, but important to understand:

As I have said before, question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they drag us into the narrative. But Firewatch further proves that unanswered questions create tension. At the most fundamental level this is reflected by our very human fear of the dark. The dark is the unknown. The dark is the theoretically infinite. The dark is the ultimate unanswered question. The unknown is fearful. The unknown makes us anxious.

And it doesn’t have to be anything huge, either. You go home and find your door unlocked. Or a knick-knack obviously out of place. It’s not actively sinister, and could probably be explained away by something fairly mundane — but without really knowing, your mind conjures an unholy host of options. Firewatch does this so well. Bits of trash left around. Someone watching you. Someone in your firewatch tower. The questions mount, and in classic storytelling fashion, answering one question with a half-ass-answer only offers up three more questions — the mysteries multiply like wet Gremlins.

The Power Of Skipping Ahead

Another thing I love about Firewatch — it isn’t afraid to pole-vault over its own narrative. You start off in standard day-by-day fashion, DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE. Then next thing you know? DAY 9. DAY 15. DAY 33. DAY 64. And it’s like, whoa, what the fuck.

Skipping ahead has three big advantages, I think.

First, it cuts ahead of boring stuff. In games particularly, we expect to play out every moment. And novels sometimes dwell overlong on boring parts. Solution? Skip ahead!

Second, it creates a mystery in and of itself. A jump in time leaves us wondering now not just about what is going to happen but what has already happened.

Third, it lends us a sense of movement through time. It’s odd how that movement deepens my investment — it’s an illusion, but a functional one. While The Force Awakens is one of my most favorite cinematic experiences of recent memory, I was struck by how rushed it felt. Like the events of the story took two hours of my time in the theater and two hours of the characters’ time. Letting Rey and Finn have the Falcon in space for a full day or a week would feel more complete than having them immediately launch into space where HEY NOW THERE’S HAN and then HEY NOW THERE’S GANGS and HEY MAZ KANATA.

Firewatch doesn’t play out the missing time — but it lets us know it happened.

The One Firewatch Failure

You could say a lot of things about the narrative and about the game (and even about how the narrative is the game), but the one place where the game falls down for me is in the conclusion of its story. And here, by the way, we are venturing deep upriver to SPOILER TOWN.

ALERT

AWOOGA

LLAMA BLEAT

WILD GESTICULATIONS

WELCOME TO SPOILERS

The game does a very good job at presenting us with deepening, simple mysteries that when viewed together seem to point to a larger… something. A conspiracy. A murder. A dangerous delusion. You’ve got missing teen girls. You’ve got a missing firewatch man and his son. There’s a mysterious research station behind a fence — and god, how elegant is that fence? It’s so simple! HERE IS A FENCE IN THE WAY WHERE YOU DO NOT EXPECT A FENCE TO BE. You get so mad at that fence! Fuck that fence! What’s beyond it? NNNGH I WANNA KNOW. Someone is listening to you. There’s an unexplored cave. And then there’s the characters’ backstories — Henry and Delilah are so perfectly realized and wonderfully acted, and you realize both are incomplete people whose lives are not mysterious but are filled with mistakes. Henry in particular has a wife who is at an early age falling prey to dementia and that’s really important because it is key to his character and key to how the character deals with these mysteries.

Because he asks himself: am I the one falling prey to dementia? None of this stuff adds up. And as the characters become more paranoid about their situation, you as the player are forced to reckon with an unholy host of possibilities. Maybe there IS a conspiracy. Maybe there ISN’T and your shared paranoia with Delilah is driving you to commit terrible acts in service to an imagined attack. What about the missing kid? The teens?

But ultimately what happens is that the details all add up to a fairly soft revelation — the missing boy and his father are still in play. The boy is dead and the father never left the park and he’s kinda gone south mentally, and he’s just been fucking with you.

Which is fine. That works. But it works too easily. And you mostly figure that out by the time you get to the final act, and then you still have to get through the final act where you expect some further mystery or revelation — but mostly, everything is fine. The one twist is that we learn that Delilah lied on the radio and said that there never was any boy up there at all, which means his death is at least a little bit on her shoulders. The problem here is the order of that revelation. Learning that before you find the dead boy dampens the impact. If we instead learned it after, it would be a revelation rather than a soft unveiling.

What this leads to is a bit of a glitch in the magic trick.

Firewatch shows us the woman getting into the box.

Then it spins the box around and around and it gets out the saw.

The sawblades gleam. The woman cries out.

Then Firewatch puts the saw away and the woman gets out of the box.

Safe and unharmed, she toddles off the stage.

TA-DA, it cries. Except there isn’t much ta-da.

It’s maybe part of the point that the isolation and loneliness is not ideal for your mental state, and maybe running away from your problems just makes you invent new problems in their stead. Thematically it works, but narratively, it feels less than satisfying. It does not fulfill the promise of its premise. Okay, I guess? Neh? Meh?

That said, the game is still one of the most amazing I’ve played. It is a — well, whatever the equivalent of a “page-turner” would be in the video game sense. It’s a great mystery and has some of the sharpest writing I have ever encountered in a video game format. I adored these characters. It was worth the time and worth the money, and just wandering around the beautiful Olly Moss-inspired wilderness is its own reward. I just wish that in terms of the story, the ending had more to give us — that it allowed us some final twist, some wink, some last ta-da. There is a betrayal, but it is gentle and sad and disappointing in its dullness.

Do not let that be a counter, though, to you buying it.

Buy it.

Study it.

Study it some more.

Figure out what it does right and what it doesn’t do as well.

Then make that work for your own stories, regardless of their form.

Simplicity And Elegance In Storytelling

I went off a bit the other day on Twitter regarding overcomplexity in fiction — I’ve seen it too many times now, especially across SFF and across thrillers or even horror novels, where convoluted characters motivations and plots get in the way of a damn good story.

A chief example of this in film right now is the James Bond franchise. The re-do of Casino Royale is a nearly perfect package — its packaging of the character and the plot are compressed so tightly, it turns an otherwise coal-black franchise into a shining fucking diamond. It’s a lesson they forget in the follow-ups, where the work just gets more bloated and convoluted and everyone seems to act in thrall to a blither-blather knot-tangle plot rather than acting in service to the elegance of the first Daniel Craig installment. Actually, Tarantino’s films have gone this way, too — Reservoir Dogs is about as tightly woven as they come. Then, with each successive release, his films get bigger and more tangled and seem more in service to his style and his lack of narrative control rather than to telling the aforementioned damn good story.

There’s a pretty good test for this, by the way — if you can take a character or a plotline and summarize it cleanly and concisely (bonus points for compellingly), you’re probably okay. If the summary ends up feeling convoluted and over-oxygenated in its unpacking, you might — not necessarily, but might — have a problem. This isn’t to say you can’t do a story that is big and sprawly and complex. But know that doing so takes special finesse — and even then, you’re better off building that sprawling story with simple bricks.

Even the most complex architecture is built with simple materials.

Here then is the Storify of the tweets in question (or click here if it fails to embed).

 

[View the story “Simplicity In Elegance In Storytelling” on Storify]

Macro Monday: Tidal Freeze

That is easily one of my most favoritest shots. And given that I’m told we’re getting a bit more snow — and some ice — here in Pennsyltucky, I figured this snap was appropriate.

Also, since the above photo is chilly-feeling and I am nothing if not a benevolent bloglord, here is a bit more warmth with another glimpse of THE MIGHTY SNOOBUG.

Snoobug is, by the way, doing very well.

She’s over her HEY IT’S COOL THAT I’M PEEING BLOOD phase.

We’ve gone many days now without an accident in the house.

She’s learning to use the sleigh bells we have at the door to tell us she needs to go.

She and our PRESENTLY EXISTING DOG, Loa, are fast friends. They may actually be hot for each other? They’re making out all the time. Just sloppy canine kisses. It’s like, hey, get a room, girls. And they’re like, THIS IS OUR ROOM ALL ROOMS ARE OUR ROOMS NOW SHUT UP AND LET US CANOODLE, STUPID HOOMAN. Fine, jeez. They chase each other and bound around and play fight (and occasionally real fight, which is totally normal boundary-setting stuff).

She’s affectionate, but not needy.

She’s great with our son.

I think Snoob actually likes my wife more than she likes even me.

She eats well, she runs, she plays, she does all the things you’d hope a DOG-LIKE CREATURE would do. She hasn’t chewed anything she shouldn’t have. She drops things she picks up in her mouth that you don’t want her to have — in fact, just this morning she started to play fetch, which is new and also neat. Kinda waiting to see if there’s a naughty pupper side ready to come out, but so far she is the poster child for GOOD DOG WHO GETS A SCRITCHY SCRATCH WHO WANTS A PIECE OF HOT DOG YESH YOU SHO CUTE.

Also her nose is totally boopable.

GO ON, BOOP IT RIGHT NOW. TAKE YOUR FINGER AND BOOP IT.

MAKE THE SOUND. YOU HAVE TO SAY “BOOP” AS YOU DO IT.

IT WILL MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.

I WON’T TELL ANYONE.

*waits*

Anyway, yeah. Good dog is good dog. Huzzah, shelter pup. I mean, she can’t do my taxes or anything, which is a huge disappointment because I’m pretty sure what’s why you have dogs.

SO THERE YOU GO.

Before I check out — a quick reminder that this is February and seven of my books are on sale this month digitally which is like a perfect alignment of the stars. You will find the three Heartland books, the three Miriam Black books, and the first Atlanta Burns book, all on sale. BEHOLD THE LINK, MAKE WITH THE CLICKY CLICKY. Also, the second Atlanta Burns novel, THE HUNT, came out last week…

And to tie it all together with precious guilt, you buying my books is how I get to feed Snoobug. If you don’t buy my books, we will all die, cold and starving. Okay, maybe not quite that bad.

 

Flash Fiction Challenge: Revenge Of X Meets Y Pop Culture Mashup

This’un is another of my favorite challenges, as it’s always a hoot to see the results. Here’s how it works: roll a d20 or use a random number generator, once for each of the two tables below. (Or, if you really want, just pick two that tickle your pink parts.)

Then, take each of the results and mash them together in a flash fiction story.

The goal is not to tell a literal fan-fic story set in those pop culture storyworlds — though, I guess if you wanna do that, hey, YOU DO YOU. The goal is to take the spirit of those two properties and find a story that embodies the weird mashup. (The origins of this particular challenge come from that old Hollywood conceit of pitching your original story to executives as X meets Y — “It’s The Flintstones meets Nightmare on Elm Street ha ha ha right? BOOM NAILED IT.”) So, you might get 50 SHADES OF GREY MEETS D&D or MINECRAFT MEETS THE SHINING or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS MEETS JONNY QUEST and then you have to a tell a story representative of that mashup, not a story that literally mashes up those properties. Dig it? Dug it? Done.

You have, oh, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due back by next Friday, 2/19, noon EST.

Post the story at your online space.

Give us a link in the comments below so we can follow it back.

Now, the two tables –

Table X

Scooby-Doo
The Wheel of Time
Die Hard
Star Wars
Silence of the Lambs
Superman
Batman
The Martian
Godzilla
Friends
Gone Girl
Minecraft
Neuromancer
50 Shades of Grey
X-Men
World War Z
Fast and the Furious
Sherlock Holmes
Police Academy
Alice in Wonderland

Table Y

Orphan Black
Paranormal Activity
Looney Tunes
Jonny Quest
Jurassic Park/World
The Hunger Games
The Shining
Reservoir Dogs
Planet of the Apes
Gilmore Girls
Friday Night Lights
Dungeons & Dragons
Transformers
When Harry Met Sally
Rosemary’s Baby
The Muppets
The Last Starfighter
Mad Max
The Purge
The Fly

On Sentence Fragments And Other Stylistic Jibber-Jabber

I received this comment here at the blog:

Dear Chuck,

“Can you help me? There’s something I need to do, but I haven’t got the strength to do it.”

From one Star Wars fan and student of English to another, I came here today looking for answers. Respectfully: I didn’t like what I read of your book, but I also have a serious question. This was the first book of yours I ever tried to read, and I just couldn’t get into the choppiness of the writing style. So far, the wookieepedia entry on your book is more syntactically coherent than the book itself. It actually made me grateful that Amazon Kindle has a preview option so that I got to sample your “strong” voice before I spent any money on the book. Honestly, I found your style to be unreadable, which was a disappointment to me because I really wanted to read the stories you were given the opportunity to tell, and I’d hoped to read your subsequent novels as well.

In contrast to the style I read in Aftermath, I notice that you write in complete sentences here on your blog. So here’s my serious question: why did you *choose* to use so many sentence fragments in Aftermath? It’s become clear to me that you did it on purpose, not because the rules of English grammar escape you. So what was your authorial intent? What were you trying to express that conventional English doesn’t allow? Since you used such a choppy style on purpose, what was your purpose?

Thank you for acknowledging my freedom to Not Like Things. But, maybe I’m missing something, and a clue to your stylistic choices might help me see the light. All told, I’d rather like something than not like it, especially when it comes to STAR WARS. I want to be on your side. Help me understand.

Thank you,

Kevin

And I thought I’d answer it.

I’ll take it on good faith that this post isn’t actually a trolling rib-jab (which honestly, I’m not too sure about given some of the snark present in the comment) — even so, it’s something to talk about, so goddamnit, I’m talking about it.

Before you do anything else, please go read this link from Grammar Girl on the subject of sentence fragments. In it she uses the work of a very fine author, Scott Sigler, as an example. In his book Nocturnal you’ll find passages like:

Echoing gunfire from above. Pookie looked in that direction and saw something amazing. A man leaping off the cavern’s ledge. Rising up, then arcing down, his legs bicycling beneath him … 

and

“You’re not welcome here, Paul.”  Most places in the world, a statement like that sounded normal. Unfriendly, perhaps, but still common, still acceptable. Most places, but not at a Catholic church.

I’ll add some passages from some other authors –

Here’s a bit from Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters:

He’s lying on his side, his legs pulled up, eyes closed, face serene. The recovery position. Only he’s never going to recover and those aren’t his legs. Skinny as a beanpole. Beautiful skin, even if it’s gone yellow from blood loss. Pre-adolescent, she decides. No sign of acne. No scratches of bruises either, or any indications that he put up a fight or had anything bad happen to him at all. Above the waist.

Here’s a bit from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind — wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

Here’s a bit from Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps:

Buffalo riders? Were they? Yes! Look at the beaded leathers, the long locked hair, their complexion not some singular color like other peoples, but three shades at once. How did it go? Oxblood, amber, good earth… Everything just as in the tall tales and melancholy songs brothers told or sang at nightly camps.

A bit from my own Blackbirds:

The man, the trucker, the Frankenstein. Louis. He is going to die in thirty days, at 7:25 pm. And it is going to be a horrible scene. Miriam sees a lot of death play out on the stage inside her skull. Blood and broken glass and dead eyes form the backdrop to her mind. But it’s rare that she sees murder. Health problems, all the time. Car accidents and other personal disasters, over and over again. But murder. That is a rare bird.

Or, finally, a bit from the book in question, Aftermath:

Chains rattle as they lash the neck of Emperor Palpatine. Ropes follow suit—lassos looping around the statue’s middle. The mad cheers of the crowd as they pull, and pull, and pull. Disappointed groans as the stone fixture refuses to budge. But then someone whips the chains around the back ends of a couple of heavy-gauge speeders, and then engines warble and hum to life — the speeders gun it and again the crowd pulls — The sound like a giant bone breaking.

I’ll stop, but I think that helps cover it.

So, the question here is, are sentence fragments okay? Technically, they are the dreaded “bad grammar,” which is to say they are red-stamped as INCORRECT and if you use them, a Grammar Agent will rise up from a pool of mist gathering upon the floor and the agent will bludgeon you about the head and neck with a sock filled with dangling prepositions.

But here’s what we need to understand: grammar is not math. Math is a set of pre-defined, provable rules. TWO plus TWO equals FOUR and you can demonstrate that on your wiggly fingers or fugly little toes. But grammar is a series of stylistic proscriptions. It defines what you cannot do not by provable experimentation but simply because someone, somewhere, chiseled that shit in stone based on subjective choice. That’s not to say those proscriptions are bad! They are a very good base from which to begin, just as if you’re going to draw a person’s face, it is very good to learn that the eyes go here and the nose goes just below them and the mouth goes just below that and OH HEY HERE COMES PICASSO and he basically just shakes human facial features up in a Yahtzee cup with two hits of acid and then, bam, art.

And even still, there are people out there who don’t give a hot cup of fucks about Picasso. They look at his work and despite any recognition he has received, they just don’t like it.

Which is fine. Nobody requires you to like everything.

Stylistic choices are choices of presentation, and presentation is not universally liked, loved or loathed — it is simply the way that the author or artist sees the world and chooses to portray it. James Joyce had his own way of writing. So did Langston Hughes and e.e. cummings and T.S. Eliot. In music, I remember when people said Nine Inch Nails “wasn’t music.” And people once said rock and roll wasn’t music. Punk isn’t music. Dubstep isn’t music. Music that doesn’t feature entreaties to the Glories of God Almighty aren’t music. And on and on and on.

Sentence fragments are one such stylistic choice in an author’s cabinet. And they are totally okay. Just as it is totally okay not to like those choices. I, for one, really like them. I like reading them (when in the hands of a deft author) and I like writing with them (whether or not I count as a deft author or a daft author is up to you). Why do I like them? Because to me, reading is only partly done with the eyes. The rest is done with the ears. What I mean is, words are really just crude scribbles on paper meant to symbolize a spoken language. Writing is a translation of spoken and heard sounds. It is interstitial. It is a middleman. Sentence fragments, when handled well, mimic human speech in an interesting way — because people don’t speak in crisp, grammatically correct sentences. (Practically speaking, this also helps turn a book into audio. It provides something that reads more like a natural, organic script rather than a formal reading of narrative. And the Aftermath audio is damn near a radio play, so it was ideal to nail that tone for audio. I like to hope it sounds good to the ear.) I read words on the page and ‘hear’ them inside my head, and so I’m interested in breaking out of stilted, formal structure so as to find my way to something more rhythmic — occasionally staccato, occasionally more flowing, but something that mimics sound and speech and song rather than something in concretized prose.

That’s not to say one should write in all sentence fragments. But using them is fine.

I’m fond of saying that we need to learn the rules of writing in order to break them, and we need to break the rules of writing in order to learn why we need them in the first place.

(I’ll note here that the strong distaste by some for both the fragments and the present tense in Aftermath is, I think, because those are stylistic choices you don’t see very often in tie-in fiction, which usually cleaves to straight-down-the-middle prose. So, those who have read like, 400,000 Star Wars novels have never really seen present tense or fragments used in such a way, and as a result, that can be understandably jarring. Those choices are far more common in YA, thrillers, crime, and so forth, and I write those things in part because I like those conventions. I wanted Aftermath to have that broken, lyrical punch — a sense of urgency and rhythm. I like to hope I was successful, but, as with all things, YMMV.)

So, I don’t know what to say other than, it’s okay to make strange stylistic choices and to break the rules of grammar, and it’s also okay to not like when they’re implemented. (That said, those choices do not automatically render a work “unreadable.” That is a harsh axe to drop and pretty much any officially-published novel will meet the bare minimum of being “readable.” Further, the presence of an audio book pretty much confirms the book to be readable, unless the narrator stops in the middle of the book and just starts weeping and babbling Lovecraftian gibberish.)

Writing involves a series of stylistic choices.

Sometimes these choices mean breaking rules.

It’s okay to make these choices as an author.

It’s okay to not like these choices as a reader.

The end.

Out Now — Atlanta Burns: The Hunt

After many miles and many moons, the followup to Atlanta Burns is out!

This is: The Hunt.

It’s Atlanta’s senior year of high school, and she is officially infamous. Not only has she saved herself from a predator, brought down an untouchable dogfighting ring, and battled a pack of high-school bullies, but she’s also proclaimed to the Internet her willingness to fight for anyone who needs help. And Atlanta can’t believe what’s coming out of the woodwork. From an old friend to a troop of troubled girls with connections to a local fracking company, there’s definitely fire in the water. As always, the girl with the unforgettable name is not afraid to burn it all down if it means making things right. But as high school races toward its inevitable end and the hornets begin to swarm from all directions, Atlanta must decide how much of herself and her growing group of friends she is willing to risk… before it’s too late.

Buy now: Amazon Paperback | Amazon Kindle | Audible

(You can also check Indiebound, though I didn’t find it listed there. It is an Amazon-specific release, published by an Amazon publisher, Skyscape.)

And so continues the story of Atlanta Burns, a high school girl with an Adderall problem, a .410 squirrel shotgun, and a penchant for stirring up trouble, solving mysteries, and helping those who need it the most. Atlanta’s like if Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars smooshed together and high-tailed it to the hills and towns of Pennsyltucky.

(The first volume is on sale now for just $1.99 if you haven’t checked it out.)

It’s really great to have this book in the wild, and I hope you like it.

Two more things, though –

Trigger Warning

This book and the first one require trigger warnings. For what? Let’s just assume a little bit of everything. They’re young adult, but they’re pretty tough stuff. Be advised!

The Kickstarter

Approximately one glacial epoch ago, I did a Kickstarter to fund the book Bait Dog, which would eventually become part of Atlanta Burns (book one). Stretch goals added on an extra book, a book that was originally called Frack You but has now become this book, The Hunt.

If you were one of those Kickstarter backers who pledged at that level — email me, will you? Terribleminds at gmail dot com. I’d sure like to get you a copy of this book.

Other News Num-Nums

Hey, Atlanta Burns isn’t the only book of mine on sale digitally — check out the list here.

Also, I gave an interview to the kind folks at CBR about Hyperion, upcoming next month from Marvel! (I am loving writing this book. Fingers crossed you’ll dig it, too.)

Finally, LitReactor ran a column called the Anatomy of an Action Scene, and the writer talked about the positive use of present tense — and Star Wars: Aftermath gets some lovely dissection in that regard, so make with the clicky-clicky, motherclickers. (Aftermath also is on the Locus Bestsellers list again, which is very exciting, so thanks to folks for picking up the book.)

OKAY THANK YOU I AM DONE NOW

TELL YOUR FRIENDS

*jetpacks away*

Snoobug, We’re Home

That precious goob, that glorious doof, is our new pooch, Snoobug.

AKA, Snooby, Snooby Dooby Doo, Snoobins, Snoob, Bug, Snoodlebug, Floofmonster, Snoob Doggy Dogg, Snoob Snoob Snoobio, Snoobs, Snooie, Snoobacca, and probably like, 30 other nicknames.

She’s a shelter dog — a couple years old found as a stray with her collar embedded into her neck (potentially from her growing up from a puppy with the collar too tight around her neck). We adopted her a couple weeks ago but could only bring her home this past week due to a bout with kennel cough and a need to get spayed.

We had a whole slate of potential names for her — she entered she shelter as “Sascha” only because the shelter needed a name for her so they made one up. Our other dog is Loa (think Hawaiian, not Voudoun), and so we thought this one could be named Kea We then asked our four-year-old, HEY TINY HUMAN, WHAT WOULD YOU NAME HER?

He rattled off a half-dozen completely absurd names like Patootie and Dartoonie and Poop and then said SNOOBUG and we were like, holy shit, that’s adorable. I mean, sure, we’re going to have to be the ones occasionally yelling for a dog named Snoobug, but fuck that. WE SHAN’T BE EMBARRASSED. #noshameforsnoobug

We don’t know what the hell she is, breed-wise. Okay, we can tell she’s part German Shepherd because her body is like a GSD who had a half-a-dose of shrink-ray run over her. Her head is — well, it’s like the DOGE GOD Photoshopped a Corgi head atop a German Shepherd body. That’s our best guess. Big ears and boopable nose and giant tongue and all that good stuff.

She’s sweet. Pretty chill (though that may change after she bounces back from surgery and sickness). She gets along well with our son and she and the other dog seem to enjoy each other’s company (though she has raided the other dog’s toy chest and pulled half of its contents into her crate, as if to give herself comfort).

ANYWAY. Huzzah, shelter dog.

Adopt when you can!

More pictures below:

 

 

Macro Monday: Observatory On The Glob Planet

Part of the joy of macro photography for me is the exploring at that level — getting down on your hands and knees in a three by three square can yield you a world of images. Kicking around a forest is an unholy bounty. This shot was one nabbed doing exactly that — I was toodling around our woods and found an old bottle. The old bottle was open at the top, and inside all manner of gunk and grime and bubbling moss made way for something rather goopy and strange, and so I put the macro lens against the mouth of the bottle and snapped a few pics.

One of them is this photo:

(Click image for larger size.)

It’s fantastic because it looks like something out of another world: an observatory station on a planet of mucus, which is pretty much exactly how I feel right now, having yet another cold gleaned from the preschool petri dish. (Seriously, I am a slow-oozing leak of pine-colored face-tar.) Not only does this image capture what I love about macro photography, but it also captures HOW MY SOUL FEELS RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I HAVE ANOTHER GODDAMN COLD.

*blows nose*

*weeps*

I said as much on Twitter and I’ll repeat it here — young children are covered in a forever sheen of bacteria and viruses. Each child is an individual outbreak monkey. I have learned that having a preschool age child means constantly swimming in pox. We spoke to our family doctor and he’s like YEAH THAT’S PRETTY MUCH YOUR LIFE NOW. GOOD NEWS IS, IF YOU SURVIVE TILL HE’S IN FIRST GRADE YOU’LL HAVE BULLETPROOF IMMUNE SYSTEMS. So, onward to survival.

Happy Monday, flipperfloppers.

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Subgenre Tango

This week, we return to a classic. I will give you 20 subgenres. You will pick two from the list either using a d20 or random number generator (or use tea leaves or falcon guts or something), then you will write a short story that mashes up those two subgenres. (So you might get Kaiju Noir, or Superhero BDSM, or Parallel Universe Whodunit!)

This time, you’ll get 1500 words.

This is due by next Friday (2/12), noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link to it in the comments below. So we can all read it!

THE SUBGENRE LIST:

Kaiju
Cli-Fi (Climate Change Fiction)
Southern Gothic
Zombie
Weird West
Mythology
Body Horror
Grimdark Fantasy
Whodunit?
Military Sci-Fi
Comic Fantasy
Technothriller
Superhero
BDSM Erotica
Heist / Caper
Magical Realism
Parallel Universe
Noir
Time Travel
Alien Horror

Emmie Mears: Hi, Hello, We’re Here to Revoke Your Artist Card

Impostor Syndrome is one of those topics that I think we all instinctively grok. We all feel like we’re stowaways, and success really doesn’t ameliorate that. They could give us the captain’s hat and we’d still be all HOLY SHIT I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING HERE WHAT IS A BOAT IS THAT THE OCEAN OH FUCK FUCK FUCK. Emmie Mears had a cool take on it and she wrote that take up for you all to read. Behold!

* * *

A Face pops up over the shoulder of the person I’m talking with. Beatific smile, too-thin lips, very even but too-small teeth. Hair that belongs in a barber shop quartet. Too much pomade. The Face exudes a sour smell, like a dirty sock that fell in a catbox. That smile stays plastered on the Face like it’s been rolled up there with wallpaper glue.

“You don’t belong here.” He says it in a nasal, bureaucratic tone, floating over the shoulder of my conversation partner. “Really, they’re all better than you. You really ought to just walk away. And just wait until they catch you here.”

I get this feeling like I’m about to be picked up by the scruff of the neck until I curl my feet up under me, duck my head, and T-rex my hands in front of me. I force myself to keep smiling anyway, trying not to make eye contact with the Face even though it’s right beside the person I’m talking to.

“They’ll find out,” he sing-songs.

My own smile is starting to feel plastered. I forget what I was talking about. I filter back through the actual conversation happening. Release dates? Audiobooks. Mutual friends. Right. Right! That’s what it was. I was supposed to tell one of the guests this person says hello. Not the Face that keeps popping up over his shoulders. The actual person.

“I’m sorry; I won’t take up any more of your time,” I say, ignoring the floating Face.

I get a what-are-you-talking-about sort of look that shows he’s oblivious to the presence of the spectre behind him and the way it’s making me splutter.

“No, I’m glad you stopped me! It was awesome to meet you! Tweet me your book.” The co-executive producer of my favourite show walks away, leaving me in the middle of the floor at New York Comic Con, half beaming, half about to pass out.

Right. So that happened.

As my Patronus of a TV writer disappears in the crowd, that insipid Face hovering in the air does not.

“Do you seriously think he meant that?” The Face scoffs it at me. “He’s not going to read it.”

I feel that sinking feeling that the Face immediately recognises as me acknowledging he’s right.

Who am I to think I’m anyone?

***

I’m in Artist Alley, admiring the work of an extremely talented woman. Her line work is fantastic; her shading is impeccable. She’s got style and voice in each panel I look at, and I praise her work loudly. She beams.

My brother’s an artist, and her work reminds me a bit of his. They both do exquisite shading in ink — the textures are stunning. I say so, and I pull up a couple of my brother’s pieces.

I can almost hear the Face poof into existence behind me this time.

“Oh, wow — yeah, no. I’m nothing like him! Your brother’s in another stratosphere. He’s amazing!” The woman’s voice goes up a couple pitches, and I see her head shaking as if she’s agreeing with the floating, plastered-grin head I can feel behind me. He’s not focused on me right now. It’s all her.

“But no, your work is amazing!” I tell her this with as much sincerity as I can muster, because it’s true. My cheeks feel hot.

She almost backs away from her table as if she wishes she had a smoke bomb to smash so she could vanish into the aether.

Fuckles.

I rattle off some more praises, trying to keep the I’m sorry! from flinging off my tongue.

As we walk away, I hunch, turning to my friend. “I feel awful. I totally just invoked Impostor Syndrome in that woman.”

***

Impostor Syndrome. The Fraud Police. The Men With Clipboards. Whatever you want to call the Face (you read how I picture it).

I spent the weekend in New York last October, with one day at Comic Con and the rest running to and fro between various meetings and shindigs. It was a fantastic weekend. I met heroes in the flesh. Had breakfast with the Illustrious Owner of This Here Blog. Got a couple snazzy gifts for friends. Went four hours without peeing because I was waiting for a limited signing. Saw Orlando Jones’s beautiful, beautiful self lurking between Felicia Day and Danny Glover. Saw an epic Magenta and Riff-Raff cosplay. Ate way more delicious food than I am used to encountering, and I didn’t have to make it myself!

I spent a lot of time talking with writers, artists, agents, editors, actors.

And sometime in the middle of all that, I had the strangest epiphany.

It slowly detached from me like one of those B’loonies from the 80s you inflated like a giant bubble through a straw until you were lightheaded.

The common thread in every conversation I had with someone who arts for a living?

At some point in the conversation, literally every single one of them said something like this:

“I mean, it’s fucking BIG NAME. Like….somehow I ended up with them.”

“I had to ask BIG NAME for a blurb. He even remembered me!”

“Oh, I mean, well. Thanks. I’m uh….glad you like it!” *foot scuff*

“Every project I have just went kaput. I’m starting from scratch. I don’t know what to do.”

These people I was talking with? I already mentioned one was a co-EP on a major network show. Actors with a couple million Twitter followers. People who make books happen at major publishers. Bestselling authors. Also new authors, newly agented or sold. Artists breaking in, like the one I mentioned. That last quote was one of the actors.

This shit is real.

And I sure felt it. In pretty much every one of my meetings I primped and shellacked myself and tried my damndest to look the part because I was 99.999238% sure that when I opened my mouth, the warbly yodel of a turkey would come out because I grew up in a barn and who knows, maybe while I slept on the other side of the tarp from the turkeys I inhaled turkey DNA and it lay dormant for fifteen years, waiting to manifest the moment I was face to face with People Way More Established Than I.

GOBBLE GOBBLE.

I watched the Face hovering over their shoulders all weekend, taunting me like somebody was about to turn up behind me, stuff my head into a burlap sack that smelled of rotten anchovies, and haul me off the island of Manhattan. After which I would dust off any old Real Job (™) and never write again because I wasn’t allowed in the club and they’d caught me playing dress-up in author clothes.

But.

That epiphany.

I’m not the only one who sees that awful Face.

We all see it.

When I was fangirling to peers about meeting that EP, inside my head I was thinking, “Why did he even TALK TO ME?” But looking back in that conversation, he was just as shocked that I’d stop him to tell him how much I love his art as I was that he gave me the time of day. (He didn’t actually give me the time of day, but I bet he would have if I’d asked because he was very nice.)

This isn’t a thing that goes away.

It’s now 2016. I have five books out in the wild. I’ve made deals that paid real advances. I occasionally get fan mail/tweets/one star reviews. I still see the Face. I still think about that epiphany that we all have our own Face whispering that we’re faking it.

Part of me felt really depressed after that rubber cement smelling epiphany bubble burst into a cloud of fumes. It settled over me, making my eyes burn. This Face was going to keep haunting me. And all the arty people I know.

Earlier this year, I got to go see Neil Gaiman speak. Someone asked him when he felt like he’d made it. He said when he won the Newberry Medal in 2009, thirty-some-odd years into his career. That was the day he realised the Men With Clipboards weren’t going to come take him away.

So I guess all the arty people feel this way except Neil Gaiman.

(I’m willing to bet he’s felt it again since then, though. Feelings are tricksy like that.)

After a lot of pondering on the subway, I realised something else.

If we all feel like we don’t belong — if at any and all stages of our careers we feel like we’re acting our little hearts out to keep anyone from noticing that we’re interlopers in our field — maybe the secret to beating the Face until it poofs back out of existence is to gang up on it.

Own the feelings that we have something to prove. Own our insecurities. Own our desire to throw the word “but” after someone compliments us.

And maybe the secret to fighting it is talking about it. It can be hard, especially if you know people whose careers seem a lot more established than yours. But we all are allowed to feel this way, whether we’ve just landed an agent and our friends haven’t, whether we’ve got two books out or twenty, whether we work on a successful TV show or make web videos, whether we peddle our art at Comic Con booths or have just put together our first portfolio.

Making art for a living is hard.

The Face makes it worse, because it tells us we don’t deserve the success we’ve had to wrestle from this path until our knuckles bled and our teeth were caked in mud. It tells us someone’s going to notice and that they’re going to boot us back to where we came from. It tells us we’re never going to break in, break out, break free of its awful-awful whispers.

(GOBBLE GOBBLE)

But I for one would rather sit side by side with my fellow art-makers and listen, then link arms with them and all kick the Face in its too-small teeth until even the pomade won’t hold it together anymore.

Fuck that Face.

So you — yeah, you. Whatever you’re doing to make your art, keep doing it. You belong. You can sit with us. It’s a lot easier for me to extend my hand to you than it is to offer the same to myself. I’m trying. But for you, we’re not going to police you out of here, so don’t believe the Face. Keep working. Keep trying. Someone else’s success does not diminish you or your work. We can all be awesome together.

* * *

Emmie Mears is an author, actor, and person of fannish pursuits. Born in Texas, the Lone Star state quickly spit her out after three months, and over eight states and three different countries, Emmie became a proper vagabond. She writes science fiction and fantasy and is the head of a pride of cats in Maryland. Slightly obsessed with Buffy and Supernatural, she haunts the convention circuits and joins in when she can on panels and general tomfoolery. She is the author of the Shrike series and the Ayala Storme series. Emmie is open to bribery in the form of sushi and bubble tea. Emmie may or may not secretly be a car.

Ayala Storme series: Amazon

Shrike series: Amazon