Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 179

The Question Mark Is Shaped Like A Hook: Question-Driven Plotting

I’m about to blow your mind.

I’m about to bake your lasagna.

I’m about to tweak your mind-nipples until the milk of enlightenment sprays you in the eye and eradicates all illusion, which is pretty much exactly what happened to Saul on the Road to Damascus, if I read my Bible correctly (which is to say, while drunk at 3 AM). You ready?

Are you?

Really?

Here comes the boom:

CAT BEARDS.

*waits for applause*

*checks notes*

Wait, that wasn’t it.

Shit shit shit shit.

All right. Let me compose myself.

Okay, here we go again.

I gift unto you: A BRAND NEW WAY OF PLOTTING, PLANNING, AND SCHEMING YOUR STORY.

*thundering timpani drums*

In storytelling, you have all these disparate components. Over here are the characters. Over there is theme. Plot is everywhere. You’ve got mood and pacing and POV and so on and so forth. Ah, but what if I told you that instead of sitting down and deciding all of these separately — taking copious notes and making head-asploding outlines — you could instead sit down and create a single organic document that addressed all of these things and it addressed them using the same technique, which is to say, by asking questions and sometimes answering them?

In this theory, everything cleaves toward mystery.

Mystery is a genre, but it’s also a subtextual element that drives every great story. Every unanswered question is the rung of a ladder; every question mark is a bread crumb in a very long trail winding through the dark forest of the narrative. This is why we withhold information in stories: readers (and writers, who should also be readers) seek answers big and small. They want to know about all the big cosmic shit and all the little fiddly bits, too.

The question mark looks like a hook for a reason.

Readers are driven by the need to know. They are hooked. Compelled. Dragged toward the tale.

Which means you have a new way of charting your story: you can identify those questions that will drive both you the writer (thus preserving that sense of magic and mystery that compels us as storytellers) and the reader swept away by a great narrative.

And that’s what we want: for all of us to be swept away by the story.

Now, I admit I’ve maybe oversold this a little bit: this is by no means some great revolution in outlining, but it hopefully ends up as an interesting way to dissect any story you hope to tell. Let’s take a look at the whole process and what it means for your story.

Not An Outline, Exactly

In plotting your story it’s not about “Plot Point A to B to F to R to X” (note that this spells: ABFRX, name of the LORD OF MIDNIGHT CUPCAKE BINGES).

An outline tends to be “Here’s what happens, then what happens next, now the ending.”

Except, y’know, pages of that.

This isn’t that.

This is you taking a notebook or a Word doc or a Scrivener file or your own little weird-ass Voynich Manuscript and filling it with questions and answers. Answers that often lead to new questions. It’s not an effort to help you have the plot-ducks all arranged in a tidy little row (the duck poop alone ensures it will not be truly tidy), but rather, an effort to help you know so very much about your story, the characters, and the conflicts that when writing the manuscript you’ll never be far from figuring out where to go next.

This may actually help you diminish that dreaded goblin, writer’s block.

(A note on writer’s block: I find that writer’s block, that mythical demon, can come from a place where you’re not confident or knowledgeable enough about your own material. I don’t mean knowledgeable enough in the research sense, but in the “I intimately know these characters, their problems, and their secrets” way. Sometimes writer’s block is simply a case of not knowing where to jump to next. So: try this Q&A thing. See if it flies.)

Character Questions

These are questions you might ask about individual characters related only to those characters. And, by the way, the reason I put this first before anything else is because to my mind, a story is nothing without its characters. We ride them, piggy-back, through the tale.

You might say, “Ah, but isn’t plot first?” Yeah, no. Plot is either a thing you see built out of a series of characters pushing and pulling against each other and against the world via a series of desires and fears or it’s a thing that you the storyteller lay externally over the proceeding. As I’ve noted many-a-time, the former is like the bones inside a skeleton (hidden but animating), while the latter is like bones duct-taped to a boneless body (obvious and mechanical). Plot is not a thing for you to slot characters into; it is the thing created as a result of their words and actions.

Put differently, characters are not wandering through a maze of your creation.

Characters are creating the maze as they go. Each path born of a decision made.

That’s not to say we cannot have event-driven moments in a story; certainly the storyteller’s job is to sometimes challenge the characters with external tests. But those events should always reflect the character’s choices and the story’s themes in some way, otherwise you’re basically just writing the plot of an early Atari-era video game (YOU’RE FLOATING ALONG EATING DOTS AND OH SHIT NOW THERE ARE GHOSTS TRYING TO FUCK UP YOUR SHIT NO I DON’T KNOW WHY SHIT JUST HAPPENS, MAN, WHATEVER JEEZ, ARE WE ENTERTAINED?).

So, if we are to assume that Plot is Soylent Green (it’s made out of people), then our stories are best-served by us talking to and asking about our characters first.

Character questions might look like the obvious and expected:

What does she want? What is she afraid of?

But we can get deeper, too. More specific. Answers we find are likely to lead to more questions (and I am wary of answers that don’t), which is awesome.

Why does she hate her mother? Why as an adult does she carry around that stuffed rabbit? Where did she get that pistol? Why is she obsessed with that orangutan? Where are her pants?

We ask the questions that interest us.

We ask the questions whose answers yield new questions.

Be sure to ask questions related to your protagonist, antagonist, and supporting characters.

On The Subject Of Killing Snakes

For you, the author, there exists value in asking as many questions as you can — letting those motherfuckers come fast and furious, each punctuated with a Scooby Doo ruhhhh? But it’s important to know the value too in limiting the questions that reach readers.

This is the problem of “letting more snakes out of the bag than you’re able to kill.”

Questions are good, as noted. They keep a reader reading. But they can also overwhelm. Every unanswered variable is a hole, and too many holes means the reader is going to break their poor foot in all that broken ground. A few big questions and twice as many little questions are always good to keep juggling at any given time; any more than that you threaten to confuse the reader and leave them thinking you don’t know your plot from your pee-hole.

So: ask yourself lots of questions.

But make sure the reader isn’t left bewildered by them.

Relationship Questions

From asking individual character questions we can then move to the relationship questions — we want to take the questions and answers we’ve drummed up for particular characters and find those links between those individuals. How they fit together. How they dwell in shared emotional space. What conflicts are common between them — and what stakes they share, too.

Does Eddie love Jenny? Does she know about his betrayal? Does he know about her orangutan? Why does the orangutan want revenge on Pim-Pim the giant panda? Why did Pim-Pim kill that meth dealer in Fresno? And on and on.

The questions we ask and the answers we get are like the rungs of a ladder. As noted earlier: we use this sense of mystery climb through the story.

These questions further allow us to climb through the characters of the story. We wind through their hearts and minds, through the tangled skeins of love and hate, through all the betrayals and desires and uncertainties and fears and orangutans and pandas.

We want questions that stir up conflict and drama.

We do not want to quash conflict and drama.

Plotty Questions

As suggested, I believe the best plots occur by the hands of the characters, not by the hands of the storyteller. As such, a lot of plot questions might seem answered (or answerable) while looking closer at characters, but here it’s at least worth considering the mechanics of what the characters intend. The schemes of the terrorists in DIE HARD — or the on-the-fly attempts of John McClane to undo their schemes — have to actually work in the eyes of the audience. (Complaint: too many Big Budget Films nowadays conjure plots that don’t have plotholes so much as they have plotcaverns that common sense falls into, shattering its sad body into a thousand bony bits.)

You ask questions and create answers that help you to understand the mechanics. Imagine dissecting a heist this way. Okay, so, they want the jewels. Why? What are they going to do with the jewels once they have them? How will they break into the museum? What tools will they need? Will Emmett and Pike put aside their differences? What if they don’t? What if the jewels are moved? What happens when the guards show up? And so on, so forth.

What if? is always a great question to ask.

As is why?

Also worth asking the simple questions of either therefore? or but?

Great quote from the South Park guys, Matt and Trey, on storytelling:

“We found out this really simple rule… we can take… the beats of your outline, and if the words “and then’ belong between those beats, you’re f**ked, basically. You’ve got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’

“So you come up with an idea and it’s like ‘this happens… and then, this happens.’ No, no, no! It should be ‘this happens… and therefore, this happens.’ [or] ‘this happens… but this happens.’”

Think about logic. Consequence. Clarity. Simplicity. Elegance.

Ask questions that lead you toward these things, not away from them.

Worldbuilding Questions

This is a rabbit hole, admittedly — one where the rabbit’s about the size of a Cadillac Escalade. You start asking questions about the world, you can fill an actual book with the answers and follow-up questions. And maybe that’s okay — if what helps you get to the novel is first writing 300 pages of a WORLD BIBLE, hey, whatever makes your grapefruit squirt. But if you want to control that, then the Q&A should be focused solely on things that seem to matter to the characters and their experiences, not digressions that seem out of pocket for the tale you’re hoping to tell.

Regardless, questions in the worldbuilding vein can go toward… well, anything in the world. Religion. Plant life. Sexual customs. Food. Politics. Architecture. The religiously architectural sexual customs of plant life at political dinners. And so on, so forth.

Again, the goal here is to create a deeper knowledge base and confidence when telling stories in this particular world — it’s not about chasing down every side dish or religious hymn.

(See earlier note: “on the subject of killing snakes.”)

Thematic Questions

Theme: the argument your work is trying to make.

More succinctly: what the fuck are you trying to say with your story?

That can be question number one, but other questions might follow after: What does the scene in Dubai say? What does the interaction between Thrax and Dongweather tell us? Who best represents the argument I’m trying to make in terms of characters? What does it all mean, man? Where are my pants? WHO PUT THIS CATBEARD ON ME.

May have gotten carried away there, but I think you get my drift.

Point is: ask questions that help you dissect the core ideas behind your story.

Do they stand up? How are they represented? Are you really saying something else?

Other Lines Of Inquiry

Mood questions. Metaphysical questions. Big story questions versus little story questions. Subplot (B-Plot, C-Plot, Z-Plot). Questions about sequels and backstories.

Lots of options. Lots of avenues to explore.

Find those that are critical to enhance your understanding your own story before you write it.

Ask. Then answer.

Look At It Another Way

Think of it like this: this is a Q&A where you’re interviewing yourself about the story. Or hell, maybe it’s an interrogation — you demanding the best of yourself, sniffing out plotholes, motivations, problems, conflicts, a bona fide dramahound on the case for good story. This is less about a cold, inert outline and more about a dynamic, flowing document that peels back the skin of the tale you want to tell one layer at a time.

Curious to see if anyone tries this, and how it works for them.

Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

* * *

Cover Reveal: Blightborn (Heartland, Book Two)

Blightborn (the second book in the Heartland Trilogy) now has a cover. Which I adore.

And, you can pre-order the book.

And, if you pre-order the book now, you get immediate access to a new short story set in the Heartland — a Gwennie-focused tale (“The Wind Has Teeth Tonight”).

You can pre-order here. It’s available in Kindle, hardcover and paperback — all formats will release on July 29th of this year! (Skyscape has been a great publisher, I should note.) This book was a blast to write, and is almost twice as large as the first book in the series. As the cover suggests, it takes readers up off the ground and out of the corn and into the skies as we follow Gwennie and Merelda onto one of the flotillas — and meanwhile, we get to meet the Blight Witch, the Sleeping Dogs, the Peregrine, a Pegasus, another Pegasus, Erasmus the Grackle…

So much fun to write.

Check it out.

First book is available! (Only $3.99 on Kindle.)

Cover art by Shane Rebenschied.

SFWA: To Join Or Not To Join?

*gunfire*

*gunfire stops*

GROSSER: Comrade! Hey, comrade!

MARTIN: What?

GROSSER: Why don’t you just join the Union? We’ll go upstairs together and cap Daddy!

MARTIN: This union, is there gonna be meetings?

GROSSER: Of course!

MARTIN: … no meetings.

*gunfire commences*

* * *

I’m nesting on the idea of joining the SFWA.

I like what they represent, in theory. And given a lot of the, erm, fun that’s been going on there in the ranks lately, maybe adding a positive voice to the mix would have some value. Plus: Writer Beware! Such useful. Very service. Wow. I also know a lot of great people in the organization and, oh, hey: I am a science-fiction writer. In America. SO I GUESS I QUALIFY AND STUFF.

On the other hand: that Grosse Pointe Blank video above is kinda me? Like, I dig that writing is a community but at the end of the day this whole thing has a distinctly Ronin-writer-without-clan vibe to it. And right now my time is strained so hard the elastic in my schedule’s waistband is about to snap. If this just means I get more emails that I have to answer (and will probably fail to answer), woooo, jeez, please, no. And finally, given the, erm, fun that’s been going on in the ranks lately, I see some voices abandoning ship.

(A discussion on SFWA’s relevance to self-publishers is here. The comment section is a mix of interesting, thoughtful, and worthless, but that’s increasingly par for the course there.)

I joined HWA once upon a time and had a hard time seeing any benefit from it. And being there significantly increased the noise in my life rather than decreasing it.

So: you people.

What are your experiences? I’m not looking for a list of benefits available from the SFWA — I can see that from their website. I’d like to hear from writers who have joined, left, or chosen not to join — and why? What did you contribute? What did you get out of it? So on, so forth.

500 Ways To Write Harder: Coming Soon

Flash Fiction Challenge: Random Song Challenge

Last week’s challenge: “Twisted Love“

This week’s challenge is simple enough.

Take a random song (use iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc. to accomplish this).

That random song’s title is now the title of your short flash fiction.

Now: write that flash fiction. Once again: 1000 words. Any genre will do. Post it at your online space, link back here in the comments. Due by next Friday, February 28th, noon EST.

That’s it. Whaddya waiting for?

Jane O’Reilly: Five Things I Learned Writing Indecent Exposure

Quiet, sensible Ellie Smithson is a highly respectable photographer by day – but there are only so many wedding photo-shoots you can take without your mind wandering to what happens when the blissfully happy bride is swept off her feet and straight to the honeymoon suite’s sumptuous four-poster bed…

So after dark, Ellie takes pictures of a more…intimate nature – a dirty little secret she’s kept from her accountant Tom. Until now. It seems Tom is the subject of her next racy shoot!

It isn’t just the blurring of work and personal boundaries that’s the problem; secretly Ellie has always had fantasies of a most unprofessional nature about the almost illegally gorgeous Tom. With such temptation on display, how will she ever stay behind the camera?

1. I love writing in 1st person present.

I’d always written in 3rd person past before, which is pretty much the standard route for romance novels. But 1st person present is so immediate, so visceral. You are right there with the character, living the story as they live it. I loved it so much that I then wrote 90K of my next manuscript in it. (I regretted that later. It was completely the wrong choice for that book). I have seen some readers say that they’ll reject a book based purely on the fact that it’s written in 1st person present, but I wouldn’t use that as an excuse not to write a book that way if you want to. Just accept that those people aren’t your readers and get on with it.

2. There is a tremendous sense of freedom in writing erotica.

I was able to say all the things I’d never been able to say in my contemporary romances. Use all the bad words and explore all the desires of the heroine, Ellie, that wouldn’t have been acceptable in a contemporary. Erotica is very honest and raw, and I don’t think you will find a more accurate portrayal of female desire. Anyone who wants to understand female sexuality should read some.

3. You can have too many connections between the hero and heroine.

It helps a story to have some, because it gives some backstory, some conflict. But when they went to school together and her studio is in the shop his parents used to own that he burned down and he’s her accountant and he’s had sex with her best friend, it’s too much. Fortunately, the editor who bought Indecent Exposure pointed this out. And made me fix it.

4. You won’t die from embarrassment if one of your sex scenes is read out loud in front of a group of strangers.

I took a scene from Indecent Exposure to a writing sex workshop run by novelist Julie Cohen. There were about 8 of us there, as I recall, and only one other person had brought some of their work with them. I felt reasonably content with my ability to write sex scenes – I’d sold some of my contemporary romances by then, and they have sex scenes galore, although not featuring anal sex and pornography. Ahem. Someone else read my scene out to the rest of the group – I was too busy dealing with the shame – and there was a moment, a really precious moment, where everyone went very quiet and no-one breathed. I knew then that the scene worked. And if that scene worked, maybe the whole thing would.

5. When people find out that you’ve written erotica, they’re going to ask you if you find writing it exciting. And you’re going to have to think of an answer.

When I was first smacked between the eyes with ‘did writing it turn you on?’ I was completely floored. How very rude, I thought to myself. How very personal. I’ve been asked since, though the question has been put more gently. Do you enjoy it? Is it exciting? It’s not difficult to know the answer, though it is difficult to say. It was funny really, after writing stories about women struggling to deal with the way society views women and sex, to find myself struggling to answer that question. To tell the truth, or to deny it? To say yes, writing a scene in which the gorgeous hero pleasured himself was fabulously arousing, or to pretend it was nothing more than words on a page? Like the heroine of Indecent Exposure, Ellie, I tried denial. It didn’t work.

* * *

Jane O’Reilly started writing as an antidote to kids’ TV when her youngest child was a baby. Her first novel was set in her old school and involved a ghost and lots of death. It’s unpublished, which is probably for the best. Then she wrote a romance, and that, as they say, was that. She lives near London with her husband and two children.

Jane O’Reilly: Website | Twitter

Indecent Exposure: Amazon US / Amazon UK

Rhiannon Held: Five Things I Learned Writing Reflected

The Were have lived among humans for centuries, secretly, carefully. They came to America with the earliest European colonists, seeking a land where their packs could run free. Andrew Dare is a descendant of those colonists, and he and his mate, Silver, have become alphas of the Roanoke pack, the largest in North America.

But they have enemies, both within their territory and beyond the sea. Andrew is drawn away to deal with the problem of a half-human child in Alaska, leaving Silver to handle the pack and his rebellious daughter just as a troublemaker from Spain arrives on the scene.

1. Sex scenes are complex

I thought about making this title “Sex scenes are hard” but besides the potential puns, what I learned about sex scenes while writing Reflected was actually back one step in the process. Sure, the actual scene may be difficult to write, but first you have to decide whether to write one at all. My position is that if you want to make your readers hot and bothered, the best way is to show how hot and bothered your characters are, not to catalog the actual sex acts. A list of sex acts is certainly sometimes hot and bothersome (Erotica? Yes please! But separate from a novel) but not equally to every reader. What turns one person on might turn off or bore another. If, however, you instead establish how turned on your characters are and fade back, leaving a sex-act-shaped blank, the reader’s imagination eagerly rushes in and fills that blank with what turns them on down to the tiniest detail. And you didn’t even have to use mighty author powers of clairvoyance to predict every single reader’s kinks!

That’s what I did with the first two books in my series. There’s plenty of sex had by the characters, but few explicit sex scenes. Reflected was different. Felicia, the rebellious daughter mentioned above, gets it on with her crush in chapter one. It’s their first time with each other, so in the end I decided to write much more of the scene. Why? Because her emotions were complicated and changed throughout the sex. Because it was their first time together, and seeing how they learned each other (or didn’t) illustrated their relationship. And because I wanted to make it clear that even though she was a teen, they weren’t having birds-and-bees sex.

Remember the first line of the proverbial Talk? “When two people really love each other…” Adult characters can have no-strings-attached sex, or friends-with-benefits sex, or a fling simply for the intimacy of it. But so often teen characters either really love each other, or it’s a Bad Choice that leads to Bad Consequences. Why can’t a teen be intimate just to be intimate? So I decided to follow the sex scene to explore that idea. But it was a decision I had to come to, based on complex factors.

2. When you can, find an informant

Reflected was a research heavy book—the characters deal with police, law, and therapy professionals all in one book. Even one of those arenas has a whole pile of jargon, rules, and details involved in portraying it properly. I quickly realized I needed knowledge organized for problem-solving, something Google, or your preliminary source of choice, isn’t set up to do. It all depends on whether your plot turns on the cause or effect of a character’s actions. Does your character need to set something on fire, and you want to find out the consequences should the police arrive? Or do you want the character arrested but you don’t know for what? Google can help you with “maximum penalty for arson” but type in “what can someone be arrested for that is serious, but not too serious?” and you’re not going to get much in the way of helpful results. Finding causes for plot-fixed effects is tricksy to the extreme and—probably needless to say—was the situation I found myself in for Reflected.

Of course, you can certainly read everything about a subject until you’ve found every single possible cause and can choose among them. But that’s assuming you have that much time to spare and have a love of research for its own sake (I don’t). Or you can ask the right person.

When it came to police procedure, I was aware of things like citizen’s academies that could give one a good general grounding in police procedure, but I wasn’t sure who to ask specific questions. I didn’t know anyone personally, and of course I didn’t want to bother anyone who was busy keeping me and others safe. I contacted the local department’s public information officer, though, and she pointed me to the police training academy. The commander himself invited me to visit and talk to him, and it was one of the most fun, friendly research interview experiences I’ve ever had. I came away with not only correct information, but exactly the kind of situation I needed for my plot!

3. Reality isn’t exciting enough

When it came to the therapist scene in the novel, I thought I was good to go. I found my informant, wrote the scene, and felt pretty confident. What did my beta readers think of my impeccably researched scene where the therapist does a mental competency evaluation on my character?

They thought it was completely unrealistic.

Most of my readers thought the therapist was too “nice” and that the scene felt more like he was giving the character therapy rather than evaluating her. I went back my informant and relayed the readers’ comments in confusion. She said, “Often, an evaluation would be like the beginning of therapy.” So I was completely correct, just not narratively gripping enough.

If you’ve never been in that situation before, let me assure you, it’s incredibly frustrating. In the end, I returned to the problem-solving brainstorming I had to do above, looking for things that were also realistic, but were a little bit more exciting. My breakthrough came from a friend who told me stories about a therapist she really hadn’t clicked with. She said he’d gotten an idea in his head, and refused to let it go even when she repeatedly assured him she didn’t feel that way. Once I started thinking of my therapist character as a fallible human being, likely to have a misconception or two, the whole scene snapped into focus and readers declared it plenty exciting.

4. Many people don’t conceptualize gender like an anthropologist

You probably read that title and frowned a little suspiciously. Possibly you said, “duh?” It’s a thing I had to learn, though. After years of academia and anthropological theory for my day job as an archaeologist, I take my gender conceptualizations for granted. The number of gender categories we have, where we draw the lines between, and how fluid they are, are all culturally influenced. I mean, obviously, right? That’s why some cultures have a third gender, others allow people to choose one of two despite whatever their biological sex might be, some allow people to take on some characteristics of other genders, but not others…all kinds of variety! If you think it’s a continuum, if you think it’s neat boxes, that’s all influenced by your culture.

Knowing that, in Reflected, I gave the werewolves—since they’re a species, with their own culture from birth—a conception of sexual orientation slightly different from the Western norm. In one scene, a Were explains to a human that the Were differentiate between sexual encounters and long-term relationships. Or as someone once said pithily on a sex advice podcast: “My heart wants one thing, but my genitals sometimes want something different.” Most Were, in Western terms, would be bisexual, except for in long-term relationships when they’re gay or straight (and sometimes bisexual) instead.

When I sent the novel out to beta readers, one reader looked at me in critique session and said, “I don’t get it.”

I flipped to that paragraph and reread it. “What don’t you get? They mentally split between sex and relationships.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t get it. I guess I kind of do now, listening to you talk about it. But it didn’t make sense.”

And that’s when I thought (and did not say) Sorry, I don’t get what you don’t get.

But I did rephrase the explanation in that scene to try to clarify. Since not everyone has a degree in anthropology.

5. Proto-adults are hard to write

So fictional teenagers, right? Plenty of fiction dives straight into the sheer emotional intensity of that period in our lives. But I’ve always been much more interested in the rise of emotional maturity. Not a teen taking on adult responsibilities, but the fundamental mental change that takes place, perhaps later than the advent of those responsibilities. It’s a change formed of learning at least some part of better delayed gratification, empathy, bullshit detection, and an ability to game out consequences far into the future, as the tide of emotional intensity finally ebbs.

I knew I wanted to place a character right on the cusp, when instincts have formed, but the character doesn’t know what they are yet. It’s the point between “What you’re offering sounds dangerous and FUN. WHEEEEEE,” and, “Woah, I call bullshit. Back off,” when maturity taps you on the shoulder and you think, “That sounds like fun, but something seems…off. I’m totally uncomfortable. Why am I uncomfortable? Maybe I better not.”

The trouble was, that’s a teetery sort of cusp to be living, much less to write. I worried that Felicia would seem older than her eighteen years, but early readers mentioned she sometimes seemed young. As near as I can tell, that’s because she read as mature enough they started to hold her to adult standards of sensible behavior, when she still had plenty of emotional intensity left. In the end, I let her be more sensible, and used the plot to close some of the sensible avenues once available to her. I wrote her using the memory of my own time teetering on that cusp of maturity, and hopefully it will resonate with others’ memory of that time as well.

Rhiannon Held: Website | Twitter

Reflected: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Goodnight, True Detective

[vague, sorta spoiler warning for True Detective]

*

*

*

*

In the old burned church

there was a flock of birds

and a yellow fear

And a picture of

A girl kneeling dead on the wall

And there was an antler crown and black stars falling down

And two little bird traps and a pair of murder raps

And a little meth house and a cheating spouse

And a gun and a crime and the grit and the grime

And a quiet dead girl in the flat circle of time

Goodnight Rust

Goodnight dust

Goodnight racist thugs on angel dust

Goodnight Lang and the Yellow King

Goodnight traps and murder raps

Goodnight search, goodnight church

Goodnight drugs and goodnight thugs

Goodnight yellow hue, Goodnight LaDoux

Goodnight Dewall, goodnight dance hall

Goodnight Cohle and goodnight dread

Goodnight nobody, goodnight dead

And goodnight to those that are found in the shed

Goodnight black stars, goodnight nobody knows-ya

Goodnight from the voices of lost dim Carcosa

Baboon Fart Story: Now Available Here For Your, Erm, Pleasure?

Baboon Fart Story is now available, for free.

Though, I’d like to ask that if you do want to grab this to please take a moment first and deposit a few chits and ducats — even just a dollar! — to one of the following charities:

The African Wildlife Foundation: Donate here.

The Colon Cancer Alliance: Donate here.

StoryCorps: Donate here.

Donate for the baboons. Or the colons. Or the preservation of story.

(All three charities rated three or four stars by Charity Navigator.)

To download Baboon Fart Story:

ePub | Mobi

The Story, So Far

If you missed the, ahem, thrilling narrative –

The other day I said a thing about how technically, yeah, self-publishing has no gatekeepers, meaning: you could upload a book containing only 100,000 instances of the word “fart” — just slap a baboon urinating into his own mouth onto the cover and voila, upload that mad bastard right to Amazon. (That post: “Self-Publishing Truism Bingo.”)

Then, a lovely gentleman with whom I was previously unacquainted — “Phronk,” AKA Mike, a dude who has a PhD in Psychology — decided to do exactly that. (I was unaware of this, nor was I consulted. I did not compose the arrangement. Most I did was signal boost.)

And so, Baboon Fart Story reached Amazon.

It lived there for about 12 hours.

It attracted over 30 reviews, some from notable authors (Daniel Abraham, Tiffany Reisz).

It landed about 21 sales, give or take some from foreign Amazon installations.

It ended up at an Amazon ranking of #14,246.

And at #9 in: Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Books & Reading > General.

Then, earlier today, it got pulled from Amazon by Amazon.

The reason given to Phronk was:

“We’re writing to let you know that readers have reported a poor customer experience when reading the following book: Baboon Fart Story.”

He asked them to reconsider, and they told him, in short: “No.”

And that was that, though it gained some traction across social media (Facebook, blogs, Twitter). Some folks found it hilarious. Some found it just plain stupid. Others found it mean-spirited or damaging to self-publishing efforts. A sampling:

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grumpymartian

@ChuckWendig wait. If BABOON FART STORY becomes a best-seller does that prove or disprove your theory? I’m so confused.

2/17/14, 10:29 PM






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prisco

BABOON FART STORY, a metacritique of self-publishing that is “fart” 100K times, has 18 reviews on Amazon. Well, there goes my soul.

2/17/14, 11:49 PM






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Gollancz

Somebody takes @ChuckWendig at his word. And the word is ‘fart’ written out 100,000 times. And its selling on Amazod. http://t.co/N67PfMq9M1

2/18/14, 9:27 AM






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saladinahmed

The word ‘fart’ 100K times with a baboon pissing in its own mouth on the cover is now outselling my novel on Kindle. http://t.co/wdrrnpAtfa

2/18/14, 9:29 AM






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scalzi

Arguably the highest achievment of humanity — or baboon. http://t.co/jv9YnQshe7

2/18/14, 9:32 AM






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markokloos

I bought a Kindle copy of the Baboon Fart Story before Amazon took it down. THE BIDDING STARTS AT $5,000. Ultra-rare! CENSORED BY AMAZON!

2/18/14, 9:45 AM






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texistential

I suppose this’ll become a new freedom of speech issue. No, I don’t think it’s fucking funny at all. I’m not 12. http://t.co/ggx6y3r2xp

2/18/14, 9:53 AM






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texistential

Congrats on throwing DIY back into the dark ages.

2/18/14, 9:53 AM






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felixplesoianu

Dear traditional writers: if Baboon Fart Story proves anything at all, it’s that self-published books can’t get away with crap.

2/18/14, 2:12 PM






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spratte

Heard Apatow was in a heated bidding war for BABOON FART STORY. Maybe that’s why Amazon pulled it down?

2/18/14, 12:47 PM






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Tammy24_7

The whole baboon fart story debacle is making me howl with laughter. The reviews were even more hilarious. Pity someone spoiled the fun.

2/18/14, 10:21 AM

Etc. etc.

Charlie Stross had some things to say about it (“Baboon Fart Odyssey“).

The Daily Dot ran a story.

So did Metro NY.

It now has a Goodreads page.

It’s all a delightful bit of silliness that proves very little but, it seems, has invited some conversation just the same. On the one hand, it would seem to satirically criticize the unmanned gates of self-publishing, but on the other hand could not exist without the unmanned gates of self-publishing. The more interesting focus is maybe on what it says about Amazon — there, a rather epic bastion of self-published works, reportedly itself an unkept gate except, as of late, they’ve been kicking various authors and stories out of Eden (monster porn, certain varieties of erotica, STORIES ABOUT BABOON FLATULENCE). And this one seems to have been pulled because people complained — folks that I think (having followed a few Twitter conversations) might’ve been some indie-pub authors who were a bit bristly over the whole affair. Which then makes me wonder if you can get any book pulled if enough people complain. Curious.

And that is that. I admit now that I wish it had remained, if only to become a receptacle for what were truly some of the funniest reviews I’ve read on Amazon in a long time.

You can find an archive of some of those reviews at Kay Camden’s website.

Thanks, Phronk, Kay, and everyone else for making this, you know… really, really weird.

High-fives and baboon farts all around.

“Baboon Fart Story” Is Now An Actual Thing

The other day, in my “self-publishing truism bingo” post, I said:

‘I can literally write the word “fart” 100,000 times and slap [on] a cover of baboon urinating into his own mouth, then upload that cool motherfucker right to Amazon. Nobody would stop me. Whereas, at the Kept Gates, a dozen editors and agents would slap my Baboon Fart Story to the ground like an errant badminton birdie.’

That book, Baboon Fart Story, now exists on Amazon.

Cover and text descriptors remain accurate.

Link here.

I am not the person who posted it, nor did I know it was a thing. It was created by a psychologist who goes by the name “Phronk,” which I think is also the sound our taco terrier makes when she’s snoring. It now has 24 reviews. Which is more than some of my books have.

I am sorry and you are also welcome.

[EDIT: 9:48AM, EST]

It would seem as if the sweet ride that was BABOON FART STORY is over, 24 hours after it began. The link is dead. The dream has died. (More seriously: I don’t know if THAT SURLY GATEKEEPER KNOWN AS “AMAZON” removed it or if the author did or what, but for now, ’tis gone.

*viking funeral for baboons and farts*