Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 138

May 12, 2015

Dear Writers: None Of Us Know What The Fuck We’re Doing


I received a very nice email from a very nice reader that said (and here I’m paraphrasing) that her problem isn’t writer’s block, but something bigger and yet, at the same time, less tangible. She said she’s a young writer, and then she went to say:


The cement wall in the subject line could be named lack of confidence, or even lack of vision if you like. Being where I am in life makes it hard to picture myself as the respected, published author I’d like to be one day. In theory, I know what it takes.But is it really as simple as, “just do the work and you’ll get there?” Or is there something I’m missing? Because there’s a part of me that feels like I might not have what it takes even if I work hard, my ideas are good, and trusted friends tell me I’ve got a gift.


I’ve been searching the net, but it doesn’t feel like a lot of people get the sentiment. So, I figured that the perspective a more experienced person could help me out. What were the biggest concerns/issues/toxic leeches attached to your back you had when you started out? Were they in any way similar to mine? How did you get around them?


My initial response on this was just going to be, “I’ll send her my advice on caring less, as maybe that’s the problem.” Everybody — not just writers — is afforded a Basket of Only So Many Fucks at the start of each day. And we spend those Fucks on whatever we can or must. It’s comforting and occasionally badassedly energizing to say, I’m all out of fucks to give, but for writers, that’s not really an option. You gotta give a fuck about this whole thing. You can’t just hit the bottom of the basket. But at the same time, some writers give too many fucks. They blow them all like a cokehead gambler at the Vegas roulette table: “PUT IT ALL ON RED 42,” and the lady is like, “The table only goes up to 38,” and the gambler’s like “SHUT UP AND TAKE ALL OF MY FUCKS.” A writer who spends it all like that puts too much pressure on herself, makes it too important, too heavy a burden, and then the risk can be paralyzing.


And then my next response is basically:


“Well, yeah, writers write, so go write.”


Then I drop the mic. But remain on stage to eat a pie rather noisily.


But I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here.


Here’s what I remember about being a young, untested writer:


I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.


Like, I understood the principle. You sit down, you tippy-tappy out the word jabber on your typey machine, you arrange all the word jabber into the approximate shape of a “story,” and then ???? and then step three: cry under your desk. And maybe at some point in the future, Big Publishing knocks on your door, chomping a cigar made of old parchment and he’s all like, “HERE’S YOUR TICKET, KID, YOUR TICKET TO THE BIG TIME. YOU’RE A BESTSELLER NOW, PAL — A BONA FIDE AUTHOR-TYPE! HERE’S YOUR KEYS TO NEW YORK CITY AND NEIL GAIMAN’S PHONE NUMBER. NOW GET ON THE UNICORN AND LET’S RIDE, CHAMP.”


But really, what it feels like is that you’re the guest at a party. And you don’t know anybody. You don’t know the rules — are you allowed to double-dip a chip? Where is the guest bathroom and are you allowed to use the hand towels? Is that an orgy upstairs? What’s the orgy etiquette, exactly? Was I supposed to bring my own lube? Silicone or water-based?


Worse, it’s like everyone at this party is speaking a sorta different language. It’s still English, but there exists a lingo, a jargon, a sense that you stepped into a subculture that isn’t your own. Everybody and everything feels and sounds off-kilter, like you’re listening to a bunch of software programmers or Wall Street execs make up buzzwords while really, really high.


It’s not just about the writing — writing is, itself, not a difficult task. Like I said: tippy-tappy typey-typey and ta-da, you wrote something. But the problem lies in the hurricane winds of bewilderment that roar and whirl around that central act. What’s good writing? What are the rules? What is your voice? What’s everyone else doing? Will you get published? Agent? Editor? Self-published? What’s good storytelling? What the hell is a genre and why does it matter? Whoza? Wuzza? Why am I doing this? Why does my soul feel this way? Do I want to cry? Am I crying? I’m crying. I’m eating Cheezits at 3AM and I don’t have a shirt on and I wrote another short story and it’s probably not any good or maybe it’s really good I don’t know AHHHH I don’t have any context at all for anything that I’m doing.


And that’s the trick. We lack context. We lack experience and awareness and instinct.


So, we seek that out.


We look to other writers — and to the industry at large — for context.


We get advice. We load ourselves up with information. We crave context and so we gobble it down like that box of 3AM Cheezits and soon our fingers are dusted with Cheezit pollen and shame but we feel emboldened with new information.


And often, it’s shitty information.


It’s shitty because everyone is faking confidence.


They’re creating context by mostly making it up.


I do it, too. We all do. We all have our little rules of writing, our ways that things are done, and they’re nearly all smeared with at least a little bit — a dollop! a thumbprint! — of horseshit. “Don’t use adverbs,” someone says, except whoa, hey, lots of words are adverbs: then, still, never, anywhere, downstairs, seldom, soon, after, since, and the list goes on and on. “Never use a verb other than ‘said’,” except then you see how nearly every book uses dialogue tags other than said. He shouted! She asked! He growled. “Never open a book with” and here the list goes on and on — weather, a character regarding themselves, a line of dialogue, a prologue, a penguin on a jet ski, two vampires blowing each other, a math problem, a heretical screed, a Roomba endlessly tracking cat shit around a living room while pondering its own existential dread. And then, ta-da, you read like, ten books that break these rules. And sometimes the books that break these rules are bestsellers. Or are literary books that are well-regarded critically. Or is just a book that made it to someone’s book shelf at all. “But they did it!” you stammer frustratedly as the Roomba bumps fruitlessly into your boot, getting poop on your foot.


It only gets worse when you start taking publishing advice. I hear bad publishing advice all the goddamn time. “Nobody gets an agent from the query process,” I heard recently. Yeah, except me. And a whole dumpster full of writers I know that got agents from the query process. “Nobody survives the slush pile.” Totally true, except when it’s often not. “Urban fantasy isn’t selling,” and then you read about two more urban fantasy series coming to print, and you look at the bestseller lists and it features Butcher, Hearne, McGuire, Harris (and then you realize what they really mean is, “Nobody’s buying shitty urban fantasy right now”). Hell, even publishers don’t know things. You want them to. You think they should. But when a hot new trend kicks off through book culture like some kind of super-crazy-contagious syphilis, the best they can do is capitalize on the trend they failed to predict.


What I’m trying to say is:


None of us know what the fuck we’re doing.


I know we don’t because the deeper we go down this career, the less we seem to know. Oh, we have ideas. We’ll literally explode your ears with our self-important author talk, but at the end of the day, all the shit we say can probably be disproven by talking to five other writers, and mostly that look in the black of our eyes is one of utter bewilderment. Our greatest and most honest answer to you regarding all the questions you want to ask us would be a vigorous, exasperated shrug.


That’s not to say we’re entirely clueless, mind you. It’s like this — you’re at the bottom of the mountain looking up. We’re on the side of the mountain or even at its peak looking down. You have the climb ahead of you. We have the climb — or some of it, at least — behind us. We have a view of the valley. You have a view of only the mountain. We know a little bit about climbing. We know some of the gear. We have our limited perspective on getting up to where we are, at present. We can only tell you what we know and what we did — and that’s not entirely helpful.


See, up at the peak, we’ve just achieved a new level of cluelessness.


“What’s that body of water over there?”


“Fuck if I know.”


“How’d we survive crossing that SNOWY CREVASSE where the ICE WEASELS were nesting?”


“Luck, I guess.”


“How do we get back down?”


“I think we die up here.”


“Oh.”


There exists no well-marked, well-lit path up the mountain. You will find no handy map. No crafty app for your smartphone. The terrain shifts after everyone walks upon it. New chasms. Different caves. The ice weasels become hell-bears. The sacred texts we find in the grottos along our journey are sacred to us but heresy to someone else.


The person who wrote me the email, she’s probably saying:


“None of this is helpful.”


Which is likely true.


Though, hopefully, the lack of cluelessness that abounds through all the strata of This Thing We Do is comforting? It’s not like young writers are the only ones who don’t know what the fuck is going on or how things work. We’re all just making this shit up as we go. Some of us have a little more context for it — we’re the guests at the party, the ones babbling the jargon and the ones who know some of the orgy etiquette rules. But take heart: we’re just making the jargon up as we go. We’re inventing the orgy etiquette as the orgy unfolds because hey man, orgies aren’t math problems. ORGIES ARE ART. And writing is like that, too — it’s not a repeatable science experiment. It’s not, “Take this pill to relieve your headache.” It’s not X = Y. Instead it’s a lot of random: “Should I stick this in there?” “Yes?” “Bend over, I’m going to try this.” “I tried this in New Mexico and it didn’t work.” “Good to know.”


We share information, we do our best, and for the most part? We wing it.


I feel like I’m not helping.


So, let’s try this.


Out of all the bullshit about writing and publishing, I think you’ll find a series of constants.


These constants remain necessary to do the thing that you want to do.


And doing these things again and again will grant the confidence to continue. (And by the way? Don’t worry about whether or not you’re ‘good enough.’ Nobody even knows what ‘good enough’ means. That’s for someone else to worry about. You worry about whether or not you want to be a writer. And if you do, then be a writer and do your best to cleave to these constants.)


The Five Constants

1. Write A Lot (And To Completion)


2. Read A Lot (And Read Critically When You Do)


3. Think About Writing And Storytelling


4. Talk To Writers


5. Go Live A Life


That’s it.


I don’t even know if I need to explain those, really — they’re all pretty obvious, I like to hope. If you want to write, you need to write. No matter who you are or what problems you suffer: writers write. And writers write to the end. They finish their shit. And they read a lot, too. I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t read, same as you’ve probably never met a chef who doesn’t like food. You gotta give this thing we do time and thought and energy. And despite all of us not really knowing what the fuck is going on, it helps to talk to other writers. If only for solidarity. If only so we can all shrug together. If only so we can drive the car over the edge of the cliff as one, Thelma and Louise-style. And beyond that is life itself. A life that demands living. Life that will fuel the words, that will form the warts and blemishes and little bones of the stories you want to tell.


None of us know what the fribbly fuck we’re doing.


But to gain the confidence you need, you sometimes gotta pretend like you do.


* * *


The Kick-Ass Writer: Out Now


The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?


The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.


Amazon


B&N


Indiebound


Writer’s Digest

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Published on May 12, 2015 06:16

May 11, 2015

What Lessons From What Stories?

Writers can’t just read books. Or watch shows. It’s no longer reasonable to expect that we can just turn our brains off like a bedside lamp — click — and force our storyteller brains to go dark. (Some stories let us do this, still, and those are frequently the sign of a truly powerful tale.) But it’s our job to read and watch stories with a critical eye. Not just critical of the tale being told but just to pick it apart — to see how the bones fit together on each mad animal. So, that’s what this post is about. The tl;dr is that I want you to jump into the comments and talk about a lesson you learned form some story you read or watched recently. But first, lemme tell you a lesson I learned.


So.


I just finished the first season of the Netflix show, Bloodline.


It’s an amazing show. It’s a nicely textured crimey story wrapped up in the sweaty sheen of a family drama. The bad sheep brother comes back to town — played by the inimitable Ben Mendelsohn (go watch Animal Kingdom right fucking now) — and throws a seemingly good family way the hell out of whack.


It’s powerful from the first shot. It’s often tense not in a gun to your head way, but in a slow, creeping dread way — like a septic infection settling into your blood.


But.


But.


We just finished the show the other night –


And here I’ll try very very hard not to spoil the show in any big way, because I want you to watch it.


Just the same, here’s a little spoiler space.


Spoiler space.


Spoiler space.


Sometimes spoilers punch your face.


Spoilers leak


Plotty bits


They make some people


Have ragey fits


LOOK OUT


Here goes the spoiler space.


Ahem.


The end to the season (apparently leading into a season 2?) felt alarmingly rote to me. Rote as in, it telegraphed the ending and that’s how it went down — no surprise, no Usual Suspects moment, no twist of the knife. Further, they took one particular character off the table, one really great character, and sometimes taking characters off the table permanently is tricky — it can be like kicking the leg out from under a chair as someone is sitting on it. If your show relies on something, then removing that thing is a risky proposition.


Here’s the thing, right? A story is, in a way, a magic trick. The author is a stage magician. You are showing off the trick at the fore — “Look, here’s a goddamn bunny, and here’s a fucking hat, and now I’m going to stick the goddamn bunny right in this fucking hat and — oh, holy shitkittens, voila, the bunny has turned into a Taco Bell chalupa.” And the way you make that trick work is you do a lot of setup and misdirection, so that way people don’t see you perform the switch — but when they see the result, they’re all ooh and ahhh.


But this show felt more like, “Look, goddamn bunny, fucking hat, and now I’m going to stick the bunny into the hat and –” *flips hat back around* — “Look, the bunny in the hat has become, drum roll please, a bunny. The same bunny. The one I showed you. I told you it was a bunny and now look: BUNNY.” It’s not even like, “Look, one bunny became ten,” or “the white bunny is now black,” because that’s still magic. That still works. This is like a very literal version of Chekhov’s Gun — “This is a gun and I’m going to shoot that guy over there BOOM look I told you I was going to do it. I told you the ending and that ending happened.” The trick is that there’s no trick.


Bloodline is this, in a way — it tells you ultimately what’s happening or going to happen, and then that thing sorta happens. It works as a tragic piece — and there are some nice emotional and intellectual twists and turns that happen. It’s still a helluva show. Lusciously shot and acted with menace and might by all the players on the scene. Amazing texture throughout. But at the same time, the show also sets itself up as something crime-flavored, something thrillery and mysterious. And so when the last couple of episodes roll around, you wait for the big twist. And it never really comes. Everything’s a bit too obvious.


A trick that’s not a trick can work.


But it can also leave the audience disappointed.


Were they expecting a trick?


Then, uh-oh.


And then removing that character from the story is like removing a step from the trick. It simplifies it. Maybe overmuch. It makes you wonder — would you come back to the show without that character? Does the table still stand without that one leg? Does the trick still work? Is it still compelling? If Teller left Penn and Teller, would the stage act work? It’s a meaningful question.


So, that’s my story lesson for you:


Storytelling is like a magic trick. And managing audience expectations is part of that trick.


(And maybe a sub-lesson in there — be careful about setting up one type of story and then not playing by at least some of the rules and expectations. It’s one of the values of knowing your genre — because knowing genre offers a little value toward what people expect. You can subvert those expectations. You should subvert those expectations. But you shouldn’t ignore them entirely.)


Now, I turn the forum to you.


Think back recently to a story you have consumed with your STORY MAW. A book, movie, comic, whatever. And I want you to tell us all a lesson you intuited from that story.


Drop into the comments.


Get to work.

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Published on May 11, 2015 04:34

May 8, 2015

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Subgenre Boogie!

This week, again we will take 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.


This time, you’ll get 1500 words.


This is due by next Friday, noon EST.


Post at your online space.


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


THE SUBGENRE LIST:

Haunted House
Dystopia
Revenge
Zombie
Weird West
Wuxia
Body Horror
Grimdark Fantasy
Whodunit?
Military Sci-Fi
Comic Fantasy
Technothriller
Superhero
Erotica
Heist / Caper
Alternate History
Parallel Universe
Noir
Time Travel
Demonic Possession
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Published on May 08, 2015 08:59

May 7, 2015

Gwenda Bond: Five Things I Learned Writing Lois Lane: Fallout


Lois Lane is starting a new life in Metropolis. An Army brat, Lois has lived all over—and seen all kinds of things. (Some of them defy explanation, like the near-disaster she witnessed in Kansas in the middle of one night.) But now her family is putting down roots in the big city, and Lois is determined to fit in. Stay quiet. Fly straight.


As soon as she steps into her new high school, though, she can see it won’t be that easy. A group known as the Warheads is making life miserable for another girl at school. They’re messing with her mind, somehow, via the high-tech immersive videogame they all play. Not cool. Armed with her wit and her new snazzy job as a reporter, Lois has her sights set on solving this mystery. But sometimes it’s all a bit much. Thank goodness for her maybe-more-than-a friend, a guy she knows only by his screenname, SmallvilleGuy…


How to channel my inner Lois Lane.

The first question everyone asks me about this book is how it came into being. Was it my idea or theirs? How did I score such a sweet gig? (I always want to say: Believe me, I don’t know what they were thinking either! I’m just grateful.) The answer is that I was approached via my agent about whether I was interested in writing Lois Lane as a teenage reporter. I asked if I’d have freedom to flesh out the concept, and the answer was yes. So my answer was YES PLEASE.


With a side helping of terror and secret worries that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Because, truth is, I adore Lois Lane (and Superman) and always have. This was a dream project, dropping from the sky into my lap at the exact perfect moment when I could say yes and get started right away. But . . . what if I screwed it up? Well, you can’t be so afraid to screw up that you aren’t willing to try.


I had to channel my inner Lois and be determined to do my best, while developing the superpower of shutting out the worries about being the person who screwed up a showcase for one of the greatest characters ever created, one known around the entire world. I think, though, that this lesson is applicable beyond this specific book—at least, I plan to treat it that way. If we’re not challenging ourselves to do something a little or a lot terrifying as writers, where failure is possible and has consequences, then we probably should be making bolder choices. That mix of terror and determination is where good writing lives.


Exploit the strengths of your chosen form and genre.

Lois is obviously one of the best known characters in pop culture, period, the end—and for good reason. Since her first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938 (also Superman’s first appearance), she has been an inspiration for so many of us. She’s a working woman, a truth-seeking journalist willing to do anything to get the story. And her boyfriend has traditionally been pretty interesting too. ;-) Lois Lane is probably one of the few characters in the world that we could all list off traits for and hit most of the same ones: stubborn, loyal, tough, witty, driven. She’s a hero. A superhero, even though her lone superpowers are her personality, her pen, and commitment to justice.


She’s had many, many incarnations. Some wonderful, some . . . er . . . less so. But one of the things that makes a character an icon is the ability to survive good and bad portrayals.


What I wanted was to truly use the thing that novels provide that other forms of storytelling can’t in quite the same way: a close-up of the character’s interior life. Getting the balance of Lois’s tough exterior and more vulnerable interior right was challenging, and my editor helped me with that lots, but it was key in hopefully making my teenage Lois feel not just like the versions who’ve come before (though I did want to reflect them), but like my Lois too. This is Lois becoming who she is and finding her place in the world, something young adult fiction is uniquely poised to portray.


My process is still changing.

Never in a million years would I have thought myself capable of writing as detailed an outline as I did up front for this book, and—largely—sticking to it. But it’s what was required to make sure everyone understood my concept of the book and its world and characters, as well as how the story would unfold, and so I did. And it came remarkably fast.


The lesson I learned here is that sometimes by deciding we know exactly what we’re capable of as writers and defining too strictly what our processes are we may box ourselves into the same old thing when a new approach is required. I’m much more open to considering different methods of preliminary work on a story now, or even if I hit a wall during the writing. Outlining in depth doesn’t require that I stick to it devotedly if a better idea comes up in the writing itself—but it did make me stop and question. Am I making a change that’s actually better or just different?


If I don’t enjoy living in the world of the story or the point-of-view character’s head, what are the odds the reader will?

This isn’t a likeability thing at all, but it is an experience of the story thing. I know for some writers, having their work described as fun makes them want to run screaming from the room. But I actually want my books to show the reader a good time, particularly this one. To me, fun isn’t antithetical to deeper layers of meaning or characterization. The two can go hand in hand.


Lois fans are the best.

This speaks for itself, but the dedication and smarts and support of the Lois Lane fans out there since the book was announced up through today (and I’m guessing tomorrow and the day after that!) is something—like this project—I could never have known to dream for. And something, like this project, for which I’m tremendously grateful.


And I hope if you aren’t a Lois Lane fan already, Fallout will make you one. Join us.


Bio: Gwenda Bond is the author of the young adult novels Lois Lane: Fallout and Girl on a Wire, among others. She has also written for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie.


Gwenda Bond: Website | Twitter | Tumblr


Lois Lane: Fallout: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powells

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Published on May 07, 2015 03:56

May 6, 2015

Andrea Phillips: In Praise Of The Small Press

Andrea Phillips is one of those writers I’ve known for a good while, now — we fought in the Transmedia Wars of 2018 together. We played live-action Ultima on the rings of Saturn. We ate fudge. Well, she made fudge? And I ate it? Because she really makes very good fudge. Whatever. Point is, I consider her a genuine friend. And now she has a book out — Revision, about a young woman who discovers that edits made to a Wikipedia-like site actually change reality — and it’s with Fireside, who I adore. Here, Andrea talks about working with Fireside and her experience with a small press. So listen up, word nerds. She has the floor.


* * *


Used to be, if you wanted to call yourself an author, the one true path was to persuade a publisher that your book was a great bet. Then the publisher would print up copies and persuade bookstores to stock them, who would in turn persuade readers to buy them. Nowadays, thanks to the same series of technological marvels that bring us never-ending fonts of porn and cat pictures, you have the option of going straight to persuading readers to buy your book your own bad self.


War has ensued. Pointless but amazingly heated war. Because if someone makes different decisions than you, they’re bad and stupid and wrong and deserve to be murdered by having their lungs filled with chicken feed, amirite?


Wiser heads know it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many paths, and it all comes down to what’s right for you. Me, I’ve been on both sides of the field. I’ve been published by one of the big New York operations. I’ve been an author-publisher, as our dear host Mr. Wendig likes to call it. I’ve crowdfunded, I’ve done work-for-hire, I’ve even put stuff out there on the internet for free-as-in-beer for exposure and funsies.


Reader, let me tell you about a middle way you may not have considered: working with a small press.


My upcoming novel REVISION is published by Fireside Fiction Company. They don’t have the staff of a Penguin or Hachette. They don’t have distribution at Barnes & Noble. They don’t have a PR machine, or deep pockets for advance money and a whopping print run. Hell, mine is the very first book they’ve ever published, so they don’t even have experience!


Sounds like a pretty bad bet, doesn’t it? Why in the WORLD would I sign up to work with a sketchy shop like that, when I could go straight to KDP and keep 70% of the cover price? Have I gone off my rocker? Do I hate money? Am I just prone to making gut-wrenchingly terrible life decisions? In the future, will others look at the burning husk of my life and point it out to their children as an object lesson?


Hey, maybe so, I’ll let you be the judge of that. But working with a small press isn’t one of those terrible life decisions. In fact, I think it’s one of the most fantastic decisions I’ve made in my career (and I think I’ve had a pretty great career so far, too.) Here’s why.


Not Just a Cog in the Machine

When you work with a big publishing company, it’s a lot like dating someone when you’re wayyyyy more into them than they are into you. They’ve got other booties to call. A full calendar of authors to edit, ship, and promote. Some of their books will be great and some of them won’t be, but eh, no big for them if some of those books they’re juggling fall down and roll under the sofa.


This sucks for you-the-author, because you’ve only got the one book, and writing the next one is the work of weeks, months, years. If this one book fails, you just might be screwed and unable to sell the next book.


But a small press will have fewer books to juggle, so the success of any one given book is proportionately wayyyyy more significant. Maybe even as important to them as it is to you. It’s great to feel like your publisher actually, you know, cares a lot if your book does well.


Awwww Yeah Creative Control!

That sense of being important to your publisher changes the whole power dynamic of the author/publisher relationship. They need you the same as you need them. And that makes a difference in how everything else plays out.


When I was published by McGraw-Hill, as lovely as all of my editors and publicists and so on were, I definitely didn’t feel like I could rock the boat. Since I was the little fish and they are the grandmomma shark, they could change my title, give me any old cover they liked, push off the release date, and all I’d be able to do is smile and nod and be glad they didn’t change their minds about publishing me at all.


I mean I could complain, I guess, but so what if I do complain? That doesn’t mean they have to change anything.


But working with a small press tends to be a lot more collaborative. Your voice can be a little louder, and your opinions as the author have more weight. You’re not underneath fifty other people on the totem pole.


Not all small publishers will likely be quite as collaborative as Fireside — you guys, I got to weigh in on kerning for the print edition. You can be sure McGraw would’ve laughed in my face if I gave them my strong opinions on inside page design.


…TEMPERED Creative Control

But at the same time, the author isn’t always the best person to make great decisions about the book and how to sell it. Honestly it’s hard to know what your writing looks like from the outside, which makes it hard to choose the right approach for cover design, for marketing strategy, and on and on.


When you’re publishing your own work, you don’t have anyone to talk you down from your own bad creative decisions. Maybe that joke on page 233 comes off as a mean-spirited slur and not a cute play on words. Maybe your cover design idea is boring and makes it seem like you’re writing a nineteenth century French epistolary drama, not science fiction.


You can hire professionals, sure, but copy editors and cover artists are fundamentally there to do what you tell them to — and as professionals, they’ll do the best they can, but they don’t ultimately have a stake in your book’s sales, nor any leverage to save you from yourself. It’s all on you to direct their skills or professional feedback and wind up the best book possible. But a publisher has enough power to push back against your first instincts. And sometimes your first instincts are bad, you guys. So it helps a ton to get a reality check on your choices from another party who has just as much skin in the game as you do.


Less of That Pesky Admin Work

Now, I’m capable of self-pubbing. I’ve done it with ebooks and with print, I have the skills, I can do a pretty good job. But it kind of sucks?


The process of publishing a book involves a lot of busywork. Emailing, scheduling data entry, making spreadsheets. Not all of it is difficult (though some of it is!) but it sure is time-consuming. Formatting pages, entering copy edits, uploading files, going back and forth with printers or designers… gahhh, I’d rather be writing more work, you know?


So when you work with a small press, you have someone to offload all of that tedious scutwork to. Someone you can trust, because again, this is someone who cares about the success of the book just as much as you do. And meanwhile, you can keep on truckin’ with writing, the thing you’re in this game to do in the first place.


Capital Infusion

I’ve mentioned that my deal with Fireside is no-advance; that means I haven’t been paid a dime for REVISION yet. But I haven’t paid anything out of my pocket, either — as a self-pubber, by now I’d be out a good chunk of change for editing and cover design services, at the very least.


As the publisher, Fireside is handling all of that, and taking on all of the risk, too. So not only is it costing me less time to get the book out the door… it’s costing me less money, too.


Two Promoters Are Better Than One

So OK, a small press might not get you onto brick-and-mortar shelves, much less put you on endcaps and featured-author tables and all that other sweet, sweet in-store promotion. And yeah, that’s a disadvantage, I won’t lie. Point: traditional publishing.


But going with a small press instead of going it alone means I’m not relying on only my social network and resources to promote the book, either. It means I have an advocate who isn’t me going after guest posts and reviews. It means I’m not only selling to my friends and maybe their friends; it increases the scope of my potential audience.


There’s some overlap, of course, because SF/F publishing is a small community at the end of the day. But still — it never hurts to get your message out to a wider circle, right?


The L-Word

No, not THAT L-word, the other one: legitimacy.


The stigma of the author-publisher is fading. But it’s nonetheless true that a publisher, any publisher at all, opens doors that are otherwise padlocked tight. An example: my book got a glowing starred review in Publishers Weekly; but self-pub books go through a substantially different review process, and aren’t covered in Publishers Weekly at all. Other major reviewers have similar policies. When they review the works of author-publishers at all, it’s segregated, and sometimes breathtakingly expensive.


And that perception of legitimacy ripples out through the whole of the promotional process. I’m not acting as the primary contact for this book, which means the whole endeavor gets a credibility boost. There’s less chance of it being canned as spam, you know? Because some of us author-publishers sometimes go a little overboard on promotion, and it’s made the field a little twitchy on the rest of us.


More Money

In exchange for not getting an advance, I’m getting a whopping royalty — basically me and Fireside are splitting the revenue halfsies between us, after third-party distribution fees are said and done.


That means I’m getting half as much money as I’d get if I were to go to KDP myself, to be sure. But for that money, I’m getting all of the same services a major publisher offers — editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, publicity — and I’m getting two to three times as much money per every book sold than I would if the book had gone to one of the Big Four.


Should this book go Hugh Howey big, it might look like a bad bargain on the surface; are those services worth hundreds of thousands, even BAZILLIONS of dollars? My answer to that is: fuck yeah, because without them, the book would never have reached as many people in the first place, it wouldn’t have been as well designed, it wouldn’t have been as widely available, it wouldn’t have been as good.


Working with Fireside has made my book a better product, cover to cover. It’s been a tremendous and positive experience, and I have no regrets about the choices we’ve made together — even if it only sells a hundred copies. And even if it sells a hundred million.


* * *


Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter


Revision: Amazon | B&N


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Published on May 06, 2015 04:21

May 5, 2015

In Which I Critique Your Story (That I Haven’t Read)


This past weekend, I bopped by San Antonio, Texas to punch a couple bulls, hide a bicycle in the basement of the Alamo, eat buckets of tacos, and also work as faculty for this year’s Paradise Lost writing program. I got to hang out with some fellow pro-grade writers (Delilah S. Dawson, Robert J. Bennett, Marko Kloos) and work with some semi-pro up-and-comers, all under the vigilant stare of the madman known as Sean Patrick Kelley. The program had both a retreat track and a critique track, and I did a couple sessions of critiques with a handful of writers each time.


Now, whenever I do these things, I like to come back and noodle on some of the issues that pop up from time to time — stuff that isn’t just held fast to one story but persistent issues I’ve seen in the stories of some of these writers and, frankly, in the early drafts from a lot of penmonkeys (including yours truly). That’s not to say the stories are bad. Many were quite good, and have a great deal of potential — but every story could use some improvement.


As such, I figure I’d unpack some of the critiques I had, because honestly? They probably apply to your stories, too. These are common potholes on the road to story excellence — even though I haven’t actually read your story, hey, just pretend I have. Pretend I’m sitting there with you now. Staring at you. Quietly massaging your manuscript. With a knife. I have a creepy grin, like maybe I just ate the neighbor’s cat? And I’m touching my nipple. Whatever. Point is: check your story for these problems. See if they apply to you. And if they do? Get to fixing.


Let us begin.


Lack of Urgency, Tension, Conflict

The standard shape of a story isn’t a straight line. It isn’t a straight flat line, it isn’t a straight inclined line. Stories have swoops and jiggles and jaggles — it is a craggy and dangerous mountain, not a safe and code-standard wheelchair ramp.


But here’s what happens: your story has too straight a line. You have robbed your tale of tension. You have undercut the conflict. You have urinated in the mouth of urgency. And what results is this kind of gutless, gormless narrative. It’s a pair of underwear with the elastic blown out. It’s just laying there on the highway shoulder. Slack and sad. It’s covered in ants. Nobody wants to pick it up because nobody feels compelled to pick it up.


I want to feel that when I read your story, shit’s serious. I want to feel that the characters are being urged to action. I want to feel driven to the precipice of a cliff, whipped by the lash of the story — I don’t want to feel casually perambulated to the precipice of a curb where I will then get over the curb so I can have ice cream at this lovely ice cream stand there. I want danger! Risk! Fear! I want emotion and consequence. I want stakes on the table — something to be won, something to be lost, something to matter. I want to know that somebody wants something and that the world stands against them getting it. Life! Death! Love! Hate! Things exploding! Lemurs on fire! AHHHH.


Here’s the trick, right? In life, we avoid conflict, but in fiction, we seek it. Or, rather, we should — but what happens is, authors model story after life. They want the story to work. They want the characters to do well. They want the characters to win, yay, woo, huzzah. They’re afraid to punish. They worry that the stakes are too high. (Spoiler: they probably aren’t.) And so they race to the end of the story and they establish three boring beats that go like this:


1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM


2. HEY LOOK A SOLUTION


3. THE END YAY


That is not nearly enough story.


A story should look more like:


1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM


2. I’M GONNA JUST GO AHEAD AND FIX THAT PROBLEM AND –


3. OH GOD I MADE IT WORSE


4. OH FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING IT WORSE TOO


5. WAIT I THINK I GOT THIS –


6A. SHIT SHIT SHIT


6B. FUCK FUCK FUCK


7. IT’S NOT JUST WORSE NOW BUT DIFFERENT


8. EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED 


9. ALL IS LOST


10. WAIT, IS THAT A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?


11. IT IS BUT IT’S A VELOCIRAPTOR WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN ITS MOUTH


12. WAIT AN IDEA


13. I HAVE BEATEN THE VELOCIRAPTOR AND NOW I HAVE A FLASHLIGHT AND MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED IN PART BUT NOT TOO NEATLY BECAUSE TIDY, PAT ENDINGS MAKE STORY JESUS ANGRY, SO ANGRY THAT STORY JESUS GIVES EVERYONE MOUTH HERPES


A lot of the complexities and consequences that should be found are often skipped or zipped past — but all of that (which you could roughly lump under the single term UH-OH) should not be avoided. You should instead be hovering over that turmoil. In a flight, we want to get past the turbulence as fast as we can. But in fiction, we thrive on turbulence.


Do not hurry past it.


Your tale — and the reader’s investment in it — is fueled by tension, conflict, urgency. The feeling that all this has to happen. That things matter. That this is of significant consequence.


Begins At The Wrong Moment

You are beginning your story at the wrong moment.


And now it’s super-boring.


Listen, storytelling is an act of breaking the status quo. It is a straight line interrupted — and it’s that interruption, that fracture, that chasm, that makes the story interesting. It’s why the story matters. It’s why the story must be told right now.


But you have chosen to begin it at a time of no consequence. And so the first three pages are about as interesting as watching two garden slugs make love to a tube of Chapstick.


I understand the inclination, here. You think: But to get people to care, I need to give them context, and to give them context we have to settle into the bones of this thing and see the characters just living their lives and once we’ve met the characters and set the stage, only then will people care when I set fire to the curtains.


Problem is, that opening section is taking up my time. If after the first page I have no sense of where the thing is going, I’m going to put it down and go eat a taco or something. I have better things to do than read stories that refuse to commit, that won’t make a promise to me, that make no effort to hook my interest at the starting line. We don’t watch baseball expecting that the first hour will be batting practice. We don’t expect the pilot episode of a TV program to give us an hour of character introductions only. We don’t go out on a date only to meet our date’s parents first and look through hour after hour of photo albums and yearbooks and baby booties.


Get to the part where shit happens. Get to the gunfire! The robot! The drama! The fucking!


The saying goes, “Start the story as late as you can.” Which means: push, delay, wait until the story not only begins but has already begun. Throw us into event, action, reaction — a murder, a chase, a betrayal, a scene of struggle, a moment of mystery.


Ask Yourself The Question: “Why Now?”

All this leads into: you don’t know why this story is happening right here, right now. But you need to know that and you need to tell it to me, your faithful reader. You need to make it clear that this story has to happen in the here and now. It’s why I’m reading. I assume you’ve chosen this point in the story’s timeline and marked out this plot of narrative real estate for a reason. It’s not random. It’s because the character’s lover is about to leave (or has already left). It’s because the enemy has seized all the other homes but this one and this is the last stand. It’s because the disease has killed 90% of the world and if they’re going to save the last 10% with the new information they just discovered it’s gotta be right fucking now.


Load the moment with meaning.


Too Easy With Answers

You introduced a mystery. That’s good! As I am wont to say: question marks are shaped like a hook for a reason. They embed in our brain meats and drag us through the story.


But just as you should not immediately solve a conflict upon creating it, you should not solve a mystery upon introducing it. You must let it sit. You must let us pickle. You must be cruel.


The best storytellers are cruel storytellers. They are slave-drivers and tormenters. They are monsters and sociopaths. Your inclination to be nice is itself nice. It is also way wrong-o.


Hold off answering questions. Embrace Tantric storytelling. Delay satisfaction.


Hold off as long as you can while still maintaining structural narrative integrity.


And when you answer one question:


Introduce another — or three! — as a result.


Fails To Fulfill The Promise Of The Premise

Your story is sending off signals. Chemical markers. Pheromones.


And it’s telling us something. It’s telegraphing for us what kind of story it intends to be. Sometimes these are subtextual signals and sometimes they’re more overt, but no matter what, your story is making a promise to us.


You have to fulfill it.


Chekhov’s Gun is not about a gun. Chekhov’s gun is about the promise of the premise — it’s about laying something out on the table and having it mean something, having it be a thing that matters to the story. It’s a treasure map with burned corners, an instruction manual with pages missing, a corpse with its fingerprints burned off. You have to make good on what you’re telling us. You can hand me a cup and tell me only that it’s an alcoholic beverage — and I’ll be interested to find out what kind of alcoholic beverage. But when I drink it and get a mouthful of ants, I’m going to be pissed off.


You can’t show me that it’s a fantasy novel and then tell me it’s sci-fi.


You can’t introduce a whodunit without telling me whodunit.


(Originally mistyped as “WHODONUT,” which is a story I would like to read. And then eat.)


Point is:


You cannot break your promise.


That’s not to say you can’t do something unexpected. But that unexpected thing has to make us go, “OH COOL,” and “HOLY SHIT THE HINTS WERE THERE ALL ALONG,” and not make us go “WHAT MANNER OF FUCKERY IS THIS.” You can’t write a whodunit where some unseen rando was the murderer — that works in noir, but not in a real-deal murder mystery. “Oh, it was the car wash guy you never met ha ha ha suckers.” You can’t switch gears and make the story become something different — you have to warn us. You have to promise.


And then you gotta pay your narrative debts, motherfucker.


The Protagonist Is Wallpaper

You’ve created a fascinating story full of great characters and nifty notions and then you stuck in there a protagonist whose entire job is to be the wallpaper that witnesses the whole thing.


Do not do this. Stop right there.


The protagonist is the agent of change. The protagonist gets shit done. She has agency. She has meaning. And she has to be interesting. A fully-fledged character with wants and needs and fears and stuff to say and things to do. The protagonist is not a tour guide. She is not an exposition machine. She is not a pair of animated binoculars. Delilah and Robert had a conversation about this at the event, where they referred to this as sticking a GoPro camera onto a remote control car and just wheeling that little fucker through the story.


No, no, no.


The protagonist isn’t a passive participant.


She is the active agent of effort, conflict and change.


She is front and center, not hiding in the back row.


Nothing Going On Beneath The Surface

A first draft of a story is often: “This happens, that happens, she says this, he says that.” It’s a sequence of events. Maybe one clumsily laid out, maybe one artfully arranged. But ultimately?


Superficial.


Your goal is to lift that piece of plywood and see what squirms in the dirt and grass underneath. Go deeper. Sink your fingers into the rich and heady earth. Tell us the theme. Figure out for us what you’re trying to say. What’s really going on? What’s the argument the story is trying to make? Why does this matter beyond mere event and action? The story isn’t just a robot. It’s got a soul.


You need to find that soul and remind us of it.


We need glimpses of skin. Salacious looks at something secret. Something special.


Go deeper.


You Never Figured Out The Rules

Every story has rules.


Those rules are not written on the wall, usually — and if they are, someone (the author) paints over them so that they cannot be seen, so that the suspense about what’s really going on remains.


But the author still has to know the rules.


And many don’t. You start the tale and there’s magic or a murder or a conspiracy or a spaceship (OR A MAGICAL MURDERSHIP CONSPIRACY IN SPACE), but you don’t know all the details. You don’t know the rules. You’re just making it up as you go. Which is fine! We all do that. But by the end? It all has to hang together. This thing you wrote — it must, must, must have rules. And it cannot betray them or break them (unless you organically establish a way to break them, but even there, that’s actually just another unwritten rule, isn’t it?).


You have work to do. This thing has to make sense. The plot isn’t just a sequence of events — all the pieces of the plot snap together and interlock. They’re LEGO bricks, and they’re building something. You have to know what, and why, and how. Order is revealed in the chaos. The reader will know if you haven’t figured it out. Because the reader is like a bloodhound. The reader can smell your bewilderment because it’s coming off you like rank halitosis.


* * *


The Kick-Ass Writer: Out Now


The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?


The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.


Amazon


B&N


Indiebound


Writer’s Digest

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Published on May 05, 2015 06:36

Miriam Black Knows How You’re Going To Die

 






The time has come, folks.


Everyone’s favorite psycho psychic is back –


The Miriam Black e-books have returned to sale!


In Blackbirds, she has to undo a murder that she causes; in Mockingbird, she must hunt the serial killer stalking the students at a girls’ private school; in The Cormorant, she falls into a trap set for her — one that puts her mother’s life in mortal danger.


(Print copies will stagger their releases over the next several months — Blackbirds will come out 8/25, Mockingbird 10/20, Cormorant 2/23, Thunderbird on 4/5.)


And not only have those books returned for sale, but also out now is the collection Three Slices, which is an anthology of novellas by Kevin Hearne (an Iron Druid story), Delilah S. Dawson (a Blud story), and me — it features a Miriam Black story called Interlude: Swallow, set between Cormorant and the upcoming fourth book, Thunderbird. In it, Miriam goes on a quest to undo her curse, but begins to see signs that an old adversary is not as dead as she thinks…


Blackbirds: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible


Mockingbird: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible


The Cormorant: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible


Three Slices: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible


Miriam Black Book Trailer


(Saga covers by Adam Doyle; Three Slices art by Galen Dara)


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Published on May 05, 2015 04:27

May 4, 2015

Your Favorite Obscure Star Wars Character?


FOURTH THE MAY BE WITH YOU. — Yoda.


Ahem.


So! Hey. Star Wars.


Of all the films, shows, books, and so forth, I gotta know –


Who is your favorite obscure Star Wars character?


(They don’t need to be all that “obscure” — just not one of the “main cast.” No Luke, Leia, etc.)


Me, from the original trilogy, I love me some Nien Nunb.


I don’t know why.


I like that the joy he expresses when they win.


I like his workman’s attitude. He seems like the kinda Sullustan you’d want on your side. Or at your barbecue. He just looks like a good dude. I mean, sure, his face is super gross? It’s like, a bunch of moist folds stacked on top of each other. He’s like several layers of animated mortadella bologna just flapping wetly at you, but hey, whatever. You can’t judge him on that.


If I had to go deeper –


The bounty hunter Sugi, from The Clone Wars.


It’s easy to love the bounty hunters, but she’s even easier because she seems noble, somehow — not just your standard mercenary scum, but Scum With Honor. She’s pretty obscure — I think she only shows up in two episodes? But I like that there’s more going on there than what you see. You get the sense of larger story, somehow.


So, your turn.


Fave third-tier, obscure character? GO.

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Published on May 04, 2015 07:15

April 30, 2015

Flash Fiction Challenge: A Story In Search Terms

I saw a great tweet this week.


Search History:


Cat armor


Buy armor for cats


Cat jousting tournaments


How to stop armored cats


Cat army how to stop


national guard phone #


— Alone Shark (@AbrasiveGhost) April 26, 2015


Search terms tell a story. We’ve seen it used in advertisements. It sometimes plays as a joke on Twitter.


This is your challenge.


I want you to take six to ten search terms.


And I want you to tell a story with them. A narrative progression.


That’s it.


Short, simple, easy.


It can be funny, scary, tragic, whatever.


This time, there are stakes.


Prizes.


I’ll give away three physical copies of my upcoming Z-List Hackers Vs. Evil Government Surveillance Program novel, Zer0es. (This means you’ll need to be in the US to receive those copies unless you want to pay the shipping costs to receive the book elsewhere.)


I’ll pick my two favorites and choose one random winner, too.


You’ve got one entry.


One week to do it — due by next Friday (5/8), noon EST.


Put your story directly in the comments below.


Go forth and rock.


 


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Published on April 30, 2015 21:01

David Kazzie: Five Things I Learned Writing The Immune


THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. 


On a warm summer night at Yankee Stadium, a monstrous plot to eradicate the human race is set into motion. 


Within days, the deadly Medusa virus is racing across the globe like a wildfire, leaving behind a handful of terrified survivors in a world unlike any they have ever known. 


One of those immune – Dr. Adam Fisher – discovers that his college-aged daughter in California may share his rare resistance to the virus. With a raggedy band of other survivors, he treks across a ruined American landscape to find her, discovering along the way a dangerous new enemy that threatens their fragile existence and learning that his daughter may have become their latest victim.


 * * *


“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

You really need to trust your gut.


 


I fell in love with post-apocalyptic fiction after reading The Stand in 1993. Since then, I’ve read and watched countless books and movies in the genre. I’ve always been attracted to these kinds of stories – ordinary people living in a very recognizable world with suburbs and Twitter and Taco Bells suddenly thrust into a new world emptied by plague, ravaged by zombies, irradiated by nukes, whatever.  For years, I’d longed to write a post-apocalyptic tale – but I never did it. I wrote other books instead.


 


Finally, in 2011, I sat down and started writing The Immune. I banged out about 40,000 words in two months. I loved writing it. And then I stopped, probably the most damn-fool decision of my writing life, having been advised that there was no market for such a book. Despite every fiber of my being screaming not to give up on The Immune, I wrote yet another book. That book wasn’t very good (and it remains locked in solitary confinement on my hard drive). I floundered for months trying to come up with something else marketable and didn’t write a thing. And then I decided I was either going to finish The Immune or I was going to stop writing entirely.


 


So on November 12, 2012, I went to a coffee shop and pounded out 4,000 words. None of those words made it into the final draft, but I was off and running. I didn’t care about the industry or the market. I never looked back. I wrote the book that deep down I wanted to write, the one my gut had been telling me to write for years.


 


There’s a reason people tell you to write what you love. When you do it, two things happen – the work gets done, and you’re driven to do your best work.


“Your friend is quite the mercenary. I wonder if he cares about anything.”

Look, no one cares if you ever write a book.


 


Nothing puts up a bigger headwind than the pursuit of the arts. I think this fact kills more writing dreams than anything else. Once you announce that you’re going to write a book, you’ll get an “Awesome, can’t wait to read it!” and 38 Facebook Likes. And then everyone will promptly forget about your silly book writing and you will be all alone.


 


Even worse? No one will be tapping his/her watch and saying, “honey, don’t you have a thousand words you need to bang out here?”


 


The world would keep on spinning just fine if I stopped writing, if you stopped writing, even if Chuck stopped… (*Writing Shed starts to rattle*). Well, Chuck is different.  SORRY SHED.


 


Repeat after me. No one cares. Your mom or dad or spouse or kid or best friend will love you just the same if you walk away from that book forever.


 


But it’s so freeing. No one else needs to care, not right now. I wrote the very best story I was capable of writing, free of the shackles of worrying what others might think about it.


“No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”

You’ve got more time to write than you think.


 


The first draft of The Immune weighed in at about 180,000 words. After my coffee shop get-r-done! epiphany, I wrote about 140,000 of those words in five months.


 


When you decide to seriously pursue writing fiction, you will probably be doing it at a time that you have about forty other VERY GROWN UP obligations and then fuck, can’t I just sit and watch this Big Bang Theory marathon while eating this here Chinese food because I’ve had the longest goddamn day?


 


I lead about the most suburban life you can imagine – I’m married with two kids and a job and a dog and I do most of the cooking and yard work. We have soccer games and practices, Girl Scout meetings, PTA meetings, I’m even on the board of the homeowners association.


 


But I always make time to write. It may not be the same place every day, It may not be the same time every day, it may not even BE every day. It could be fifteen minutes here, an hour there. At soccer practice. Waiting for the pasta water to boil. A couple hundred words at lunch. But it gets done. Because I want it to be done.


“Many Bothans died … to bring us this information.”

To a writer, a novel is a bit like the Death Star. It’s big, constantly under construction, and it looms over everything in your life. And to attack it, you need a blueprint.


 


There are more novel-writing strategies out there than there are naughty words in a Chuck Wending blog post so you know that’s a big number. In the end, they probably all work to some degree in that they force you to give some serious thought about where you’re ultimately headed with this hostage crisis I mean story. This is incredibly important because if you’re going to write a book in 15 or 60-minute slivers (and the truth is, you’re almost certainly going to have to if you’re just starting out), you want that time to be productive. A blueprint is incredibly comforting in the lonely weeks and months when you’re in the no-one-cares stage, when it’s just you and your keyboard and your tequila-Cherry-coke slammers.


 


Chuck has a great post called 25 Ways to Plot, Plan & Prep Your Story. Read it, arm yourself with the weapons you like, and launch your assault on your personal Death Star.


“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

When things go off the rails, and they certainly will, your characters will tell you what needs to happen.


 


HAHAHA no, I don’t really mean that they actually tell you I’m not a psycho. At some point, things will go off the rails. You’ll cry, scream, beg, drink, eat Cheetos and you will want to give up and try that shiny new idea tickling you in your writerly parts.


 


You have to get past that. And this is how you do it.


 


Think about what your characters want. Everyone wants something – it could be an internal thing (be a better parent) or external thing (get tickets to sold-out Meghan Trainor concert). It could be both. Achieving one goal could get your character the other. Failing at one could mean success at the other.


 


On the surface, Breaking Bad was a show about a mild-mannered teacher who wanted to provide for his family in the face of his impending death from lung cancer. He used who he was (a brilliant chemist) to make that a reality via a very pure and very lucrative formula for crystal meth. But it went deeper than that – the man he’d been before the events of Breaking Bad played a significant role in driving the lengths that he would go to in order to achieve that surface goal. And as the story unfolded, we learned that Walter’s true goal was something much darker and more terrifying.


 


If you know your characters well, you’ll know what they want beyond the surface goal (and I don’t mean to discount the surface goal’s importance, because the surface goal is often the thing that brings the deeper goal to light), much like Vince Gilligan clearly knew what Walter White’s true goal was.


 


And those goals, filtered through the prism of whom your characters had been before the story began, will often light your way through the narrative and deliver a richer story.


* * *


 


David lives in Virginia with his family. His first novel, The Jackpot, was a No. 1 Legal Thriller on Amazon and will be published in Bulgaria later this year. He’s also the creator of a series of short animated films, including So You Want to Write a Novel, which have been viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube and were featured in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.


 


Links:


David Kazzie: Blog | Twitter


The Immune: Amazon

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Published on April 30, 2015 03:00