Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 223

Not Every Writer Wants To Be A Publisher

This is something I see often enough: an author talks about losing a series or having some difficulties with a publisher or whatever, and someone from the crowd eventually says, “You should self-publish. We want more of you, the money’s better, we’ll support you. Plus, so many options! Amazon! Kickstarter! Bookflipper! Pub-Burger!” Sometimes it’s a polite suggestion, sometimes it’s double-barrel proselytization and they start spouting off “facts and figures” along with a dose of venom against the oppression of the traditional system.

I like self-publishing. I like it as an option. I have explored it and will continue to explore it.

But it’s not exactly easy.

It’s not moving mountains or shitting pre-constructed Ikea furniture, but it takes a set of skills that are wholly separate from writing: marketing, design, coding, editing. Some of these skills are valuable to the writer regardless of which publishing road she walks, but that doesn’t mean every writer is eager to pick up every skill nor is it a guarantee she’ll be good at them.

To hazard the doofusly obvious: self-publishing isn’t about writing, it’s about publishing.

Some writers just want to be writers.

They don’t also want to be publishers.

It’s just that simple. Neither wrong nor right. It’s a personal and professional choice.

Further, despite what some feel are absolute guarantees, self-publishing is not automagically the way to MORE MONEY than you’d get with a traditional publisher. It is a fact that the actual royalties (if you want to call them that, as Amazon and other entities act as distributor to the self-published, not the publisher) are better. Once again to bludgeon you all with the Mallet of Obviousness, 70% (or thereabouts) is higher than 25% (or thereabouts).

The outcome of publishing, however, is more complicated than those percentages.

If traditional publishing yields more sales (also not a guarantee), then that advantage shifts — 70% of $100 is a helluva lot less than $25 of $1000. Plus: rights, sub-rights, blah blah blah.

As I’ve noted in the past, self-publishing is all risk. It’s the opportunity to make zero dollars or a million dollars and potentially burn down your chance of entering that novel into the traditional space because if your book lands with a poop-plop instead of a big money splash, it doesn’t matter how fucking amazetesticles your book is, because it’s done, game over, so sorry.

(I’m using that correctly, right? Amazetesticles?)

Self-publishing is an act separate from writing.

Not every writer has the time, the talent, or the interest.

Both writing and publishing take work. Self-publishing demands the work of both.

Worth it for some, tricky or undesirable for others.

This isn’t meant to dissuade any author from going that route. It’s more to dissuade everybody else from haranguing authors about self-publishing when it’s just not in their wheelhouse.

(We’re still saying “wheelhouse,” right? Can we change it? Howzabout “primate house?” I like that one better. “Sorry, Bob, I don’t think I’m the man for the dildo salesman job. It’s just not in my primate house.” Though maybe dildos and primate houses don’t mix.)

The great thing about being a writer in the year 2013 is that there exists no one path to success. But each writer has to find the path that works for her — we all have our tunnel in the mountain, our path through the jungle, our needle to thread.

We just have to find it and let other writers find theirs, in turn.

How To Karate Your Novel And Edit That Motherfucker Hard: A No-Foolin’ Fix-That-Shit Editing Plan To Finish The Goddamn Job

Let’s get something out of the way:

Editing is writing.

At the end of the day, the actual execution of your editing process is writing. It’s you doing surgery and excising all the unsightly tumors from your work and filling in the gurgling wounds with better material: healthy flesh, new organs, cybernetic weapons, robot dongs. Sometimes it’s as simple as killing commas and adding periods. Other times it’s as complicated as dynamiting the blubbery beached whale that is your entire third act, picking up all the viscera, and filling in the hole with clean, pristine sand. Sometimes it’s a leeeetle-teeny-toonsy bit of writing. Sometimes it’s a thousand rust-pitted cauldrons of writing.

Writing is editing. Editing is writing.

Writing is rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting.

Problem, though: no editing plan is ever going to be quite as simple as a writing plan (especially the “Big 350 No-Fuckery Writing Plan” I outlined last week). Writing, particularly that first draft, is often a purgative push — equal parts digging a hole and puking into it. It’s not a sniper’s bullet; it’s a clumsy machine gun spray held in the hands of a spasming bath salts addict. Writing is the part of surgery where you’re just cutting open a dude. Editing is the part where you need to know what you’re doing once you’ve got a fistful of spleen.

Point is, editing requires a level of finesse and awareness.

Or, to return to the medical metaphor, you require a diagnosis.

You need to know what’s wrong before you go biting off warts and ripping off limbs. You don’t just kill every third chapter because you’re at a loss for what else to do (“I DON’T KNOW IT FELT RIGHT AT THE TIME”) — editing demands that diagnosis.

So, before we get into The Editing Plan Proper, let’s talk about how one obtains a diagnosis.

Two Columns

First thing to do? Take a piece of paper or a whiteboard or an Excel spreadsheet and make two columns: WRITING and STORYTELLING. Because those are the two overarching aspects of your work and while both have interplay with one another, the solutions for each are very different. Writing problems tend to be far more technical and objective; storytelling problems tend to be far more subjective and instinct-driven (meaning, far more in the neighborhood of “WTF?”). Further, you will want to tackle the storytelling problems first, the writing problems second.

Reason for this is that storytelling provides the architecture of your tale.

The writing is the presentation of that architecture.

So, you’d better fix the structure of the house before you pick out paint colors and wall sconces.

The Colonic Jury Of Your Intestinal Flora

Time to take a first pass at identifying the symptoms of disease, decay, and rampant drunken discord within your story. Which means you pick up the thing you just wrote and you read the thing from front to back. You can do so quickly. But you must re-read (do so aloud if you can).

A writer’s best friend is his instinct. This is not a thing that is born overnight like some kind of fast-growing vat-baby. This is part of why that advice of read a lot and write a lot matters — doing both of those things (and doing them critically) help you to cultivate instinct. I like to say that instinct helps us understand which way to jump. Meaning, in the midst of a moment, if forced to make a snap decision in the platform-jumping game that is our life, we’ll know which way to jump in order to not fall into a spiky pit of doom. And, in terms of fiction, when forced to choose whether a chapter stays or goes or how a character should really act in a given scene, you know the answer of how to execute without having to ruminate for long periods of time.

So: the first pass is the INSTINCT PASS. You read it. You consult the chorus of bacteria that populates your guttyworks. And you start writing down all the writing and storytelling problems you think you have in their appropriate columns. Don’t stop to think too long about it — if something tweaks your guts and puts your bowels in a kink, write it down.

When Instinct Fails Us: The Power Of Other People

Our instinct isn’t a perfect creature. Much as we like to think we know the score, sometimes we’re the worst judges of our own work because of a host of unsavory reasons like EMOTIONS and LIQUOR. Put more succinctly: sometimes we’re a lot fucking dumber than we’d like to think. We hate parts of a book that totally work. We love parts that don’t work but we want to keep anyway (our so-called “darlings”). We refuse to see problems that are as plain as a pair of dicks stapled to somebody’s chin. (“NO NO IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT *sob*”)

Which is why your second pass requires other humans.

Give people you trust a blank spreadsheet with those two columns (writing, storytelling).

Put them to work.

(A Brief Comment On Other Humans)

Working with other humans is an act of creative agitation — and while agitation doesn’t always feel great, sometimes that’s just how we scrape the barnacles off the narrative hull.

Just the same, it’s important to meet the right people — beta-readers, best friends and editors won’t do you much good if they’re too nice or too critical or worst of all, not readers of your genre or books in general. The critical relationship between writer and editor (amateur or otherwise) is, to belabor the obvious, still a relationship. It has to work. It has to make sense. IT HAS TO MAKE SWEET LITTLE WORD-BABIES.

Further, inevitably other readers will want to point out solutions rather than problems. In other scenarios, this is exactly what we want; challenges are expected to be met with ways to overcome those challenges. In fiction, it’s crucial to look for the holes while not asking others to fill them for you. Train yourself to listen for the issues at hand while ignoring the proposed “fixes” — when someone tells you, “I think Dave should be a cyborg instead of a robot and maybe he should just have sex with the copier machine instead of proposing marriage,” you need to recognize the problems (issue with Dave’s identity not working, concerns over his relationship with the copier) while dismissing the solutions (cyborg, copier-sex).

“What Am I Looking For, Exactly?”

I’ve covered this part pretty well elsewhere, and I risk redundancy if I list it all again and again, so I’ll just casually point you toward these two posts and hope you’ll click:

Edit Your Shit, Part One: The Copy-Edit

Edit Your Shit, Part Two: Editing For Content

Edit Your Shit, Part Three: The Contextual Edit

Those should give you a good starting list for potential symptoms to diagnose the patient.

Further, you might wanna check out a more recent post:

How Chuck Wendig Edits A Novel

The diagnosis takes as much time as it takes. Two days. Two years. I wish I could speed that up, but I can’t.That said, hiring a professional editor may get you there a whole lot faster.

Now, onto…

The Actual Zippity-Doo-Dah Motherfucking Editing Plan

Here’s the thing, right? You have a novel. It is, let’s say, between 300-400 pages.

It took you somewhere in the neighborhood of a year (or south of it) to write that.

You’re going to approach this in much the same way.

You’re going to edit for five days a week. You have weekends off so that means you can fill those two days with whatever activities you feel are appropriate.

(DRUNKEN NAKED SCRABBLEDOME WOOOOOO)

You will edit five pages per day.

This adds up to around 1000-1500 words per day edited.

At a rough guess, that’s about 18 weeks worth of work (3-4 months).

Sometimes a day of editing will be easy. It will be a few word choice issues that need fixing, a handful of little grammatical errors, whatever. Some days, this will be a lot harder. Those five pages will need rewriting. When new writing is necessary, you’re free to fall back on the same 350 words per day writing plan if that’s what got you here. That will probably tack on some editing time when that happens — so, let’s add another three months to the pile.

From start to finish, that means you’ll take one year to write the novel.

Then another six months to edit it.

A year and a half to a second draft of a novel.

Hell, let’s assume that life continues its ceaseless assault on your writing habits, just a constant fucking barrage of kitchen appliances catching fire and dogs getting sick from eating your baby’s diapers and some rare Namibian baboon-flu that keeps poxing the shit out your house and on and on. Even then let’s say it’ll take you another full year to edit and get to the next draft.

You might be thinking, “That’s two years of my life. That’s really shitty.”

Uhh, it’s totally not.

First of all, two years to write two drafts of a novel is better than two years to do absogoddamnlutely nothing. Two years may seem slow but Sweet Molly Monkeyshines, it’s better than nothing. And that is our goal: to defeat the specter of Nothing.

The ghost of Got Nothin’ Done, Son.

Second, that means in ten years time, you can have five completed novels.

You know how many so-called writers have gotten five novels to a second draft phase?

It’s probably some obscenely low percentage. Like, a number smaller than a ladybug’s pee-pee.

The Goal

Is a second draft. Plain and fucking simple.

The Other Rules

Poop noise to the other rules. None exist.

Things To Consider

Editing five pages a day need not happen in immediate succession. Steal five minutes from your day whenever you can — the baby’s asleep, the dogs are outside trying to hump a raccoon they’ve cornered, the boss isn’t hovering over your cubicle like a goddamn mosquito, whatever. Pilfer time. Abscond with moments. Use them to edit just one page. Do this five times.

If you feel like you can edit more than five pages a day, do so.

If you can’t manage to edit that many a day, tack them onto the next day.

Do this plan once, editing will get faster thereafter.

Sometimes you might need a third draft. Or a fourth.

You do as many drafts as you need to and you work your way through it at whatever speed you can manage. Doing something is better than nothing. Slow and steady will indeed win the race. The jackrabbit is an asshole. He’s high on coke. He’ll pass out before the finish line in a smeary streak of his own foamy drool. You are the tortoise. Resolute. Armored. Forever.

Think of it as a prison escape from your old life.

One spoonful of dirt at a time. Scrape, scrape. Scoop scoop.

A tunnel is dug.

You can see the light.

TIME FOR DRUNKEN NUDIE SCRABBLEDOME.

Shut Up And Edit

You can do this.

It takes a little bit of time and a little bit of effort. This is part of what it is to write. Writing is editing. Editing is writing. You have to tackle this. You want it to be right. Right takes time. And getting it right this way isn’t a Sisyphean epic. It’s not asking you to vacuum the whole house in a single given day. It’s asking you to like, polish that one Hummel figurine and maybe Dust Buster a merkin or two. This is replacing a frayed shoelace.

One word after the other.

Read them. Tweak them. Add to them. Take away from them.

Word by word. Page by page.

Until the book is done. Again.

Until your instinct is sharpened to a gleaming shiv.

It still won’t be perfect.

It’ll never be perfect.

But the perfect is the enemy of the good and this second draft of yours?

I’ll bet it’s actually good.

Five days a week.

Weekends off.

Five pages a day.

Rewrite at 350 words per day.

Edit. Write. Edit. Write.

Finish your shit.

Completo el poopo.

Amen.

Your Favorite Cons?

No, no, not convicts. Please stop sending confessed serial killers your underwear.

Conventions! Or, for a variant, conferences.

I’m noodling new appearances in the next couple years (scheduled this year: Writer’s Digest East, Balticon, Worldcon in San Antonio, and Genrecon) and I wanted to know which conferences and conventions you dig and attend? What are they and why? Would they support a bearded raconteur such as myself? Is there a bar? GODDAMNIT I SAID, IS THERE A BAR?

Ahem, sorry.

Please, if you’re so inclined, deposit your nuggets of convention/conference wisdom into the comments below. Your help in this matter is much-appreciated. *takes a bow*

Flash Fiction Challenge: Game Of Aspects, Redux

Last week’s challenge: “Write What You Know“

It’s the Game of Aspects, and you know the drill.

Grab a ten-sided die or click over to a random number generator.

Choose three random numbers between 1-10.

That corresponds to a subgenre / setting / element to include.

Those are now the parameters of your story.

(So, you might randomly get: superhero / Titanic / love letter, for instance.)

You have — well, let’s up the numbers a bit. You have 1500 words.

Due by next Friday, March 1st, at noon EST.

Post at your blog or online space. Link back here in the comments.

Now go forth and randomize!

Subgenre

Superhero
Erotic Fairy Tale
Sword & Sorcery
Slasher Horror
Bumbling Detective
Time Travel Romance
Zombie Apocalypse
Parallel Universe
Technothriller
Magical Realism

Setting

High school prom
On board the Titanic
In a vampire’s subterranean lair
At the gates of the Garden of Eden
A shopping mall
A Martian greenhouse
The capital city of a lost civilization
A king’s throne room
An amusement park after dark
In the home of the gods

Element To Include

Warring Families
A Love Letter
A Puzzle Box
Elves
A Talking Sword
Artificial Intelligence
A Mysterious Stranger
A Lost Painting
A Dream
A Magical Pocketwatch

 

Ten Questions About Seduction Of The Innocent, By Max Allan Collins

If you’re at all like me, right now you’re goggling your eyes — because, yeah, holy crap, it’s Max Allan Collins. (Preceded, perhaps, by the, as in, the Max Allan Collins.) He’s got a new detective novel hitting shelves that concerns the murder of a comic book censor in the 1950s. Want to know more? Here, he’ll tell you about it:

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

A storyteller is who the hell I am.  I have spent decades avoiding real work by telling elaborate lies (novels, short stories, comic books, graphic novels, screenplays) for money.  I occasionally tell the truth (non-fiction works like THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY and MICKEY SPILLANE ON SCREEN, documentaries like MIKE HAMMER’S MICKEY SPILLANE, featured on the Criterion edition of KISS ME DEADLY, and CAVEMAN: V.T. HAMLIN AND ALLEY OOP).  I am probably best known for writing the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION and the historical thrillers with Chicago private eye Nathan Heller, starting with the “Shamus” Best Novel winner of 1983, TRUE DETECTIVE, through last year’s TARGET LANCER.

Give Us The 140-Character Pitch:

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT is a tough but humorous mystery in the vein of Rex Stout or Ellery Queen, focusing on the 1950s McCarthy-era witch hunt leveled at comic books.

Where Does This Story Come From?

Two things — my desire to pay fairly light-hearted homage to the traditional mystery novels of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, a pastiche not a parody, but with the serious historical back-drop of the censorship that was unfairly, even stupidly imposed on comic books, stunting the growth of a storytelling medium out of a misguided concern for children.

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

I was a small, impressionable child when Dr. Frederic Wertham launched his jihad against comic books, and witnessed many of my favorite comics either disappear or continue in an emasculated fashion.  As an adult, I became a writer in two areas two that are pertinent to this novel — first, I wrote comic strips and comic books, and second, I specialized as a prose novelist in historical detective stories with 20th Century settings.  My Nathan Heller novels explored real crimes, and hew close to the events and even use mostly real names.  But Jack and Maggie Starr appear in historically based stories, with comic strip/book themes, that are more broadly depicted — murders added to historical subjects, names changed and so on.

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

Balancing the history and the mystery was tricky.  I submitted the novel with perhaps 10,000 words more of material pertaining to the history of comic books.  I cut this material back, as I already had the problem of the murder not occurring till midway in the novel.  That’s a problem or at least a challenge in a traditional murder mystery, because you want the murder as soon as possible, so the investigative proceedings can get under way.  But I like to have the eventual murder victim on stage for a while, to show why he or she is killable, and to introduce as many suspects as I can before the inevitable.

What Did You Learn Writing SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

The previous two Jack and Maggie Starr novels, written for a different publisher, had faced their own censorship — that publisher did primarily “cozy” mysteries, so I was asked not to get too tough with the action and violence, and to take it easy on the sexual content.  At Hard Case Crime, the more sex and violence the better, and while I did not go wild in either department in this novel, it felt very good to have the freedom for Jack to get tough and to swear a little and to even get laid.  So what I learned was that, even though I was working in the vein of Stout and Queen (neither of whom did much on-stage violence and sex), Jack and Maggie work better in a less restrained format.

What Do You Love About SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT?

Getting to have my say about the Wertham witch hunt era was very rewarding, particularly because I think I did it in an entertaining way.

What Don’t You Like About It?

It has been bought for movies or TV yet.

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

He shoved her hard from behind, like the guy on the cover of that Suspense Crime Stories comic book at the hearing, and she was falling toward me as I hurtled up the stairs.  She didn’t tumble, she had the presence of mind to grab onto a banister, which didn’t stop her fall, her hand sliding down the wooden pole just as she began to do a header, but I was up there in time to catch all that long-legged nakedness in my arms.

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

I have just completed THE WRONG QUARRY for Hard Case Crime, and my editor, Charles Ardai, will have his notes and a copy-edited manuscript for me to deal with next week.  After that, I will do a Mike Hammer short story for Otto Penzler, utilizing a fragment from the late great Mickey Spillane’s files, and then will do my draft of the next ANTIQUES mystery, working from my wife Barb’s rough draft — we write together as Barbara Allan.  Our latest book together, ANTIQUES CHOP, will be out in May.  The book I’ll be working on is called ANTIQUES A GO GO.

Max Allan Collins: Website

Seduction of the Innocent: Excerpt / Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write That Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No-Fuckery Writing Plan To Get Shit Done

Life will never be kind to the writer. Particularly those who stay at home. You go to a full-time job outside the house, everyone gives you a wide berth to let you do what you need to do. Stay at home to write a book and everybody interrupts you like all you’re doing is watching a Teen Mom marathon on MTV while chowing down on pizza-flavored Combos and Haagen-Daaz.

Life intrudes upon you. It kicks down the door and stomps all over a writer’s practical aspirations to write. Kids. Dogs. A full-time job. A part-time job. Cleaning. Cooking. Pubic grooming. Xenomorph invasion. Hallucinations. Masturbation. LIQUOR AND MONKEY WRESTLING.

As your shoulders bear the burden of carrying the multiple shit-sacks of life’s daily ordure output, it gets easier and easier to push writing aside: “I’ll do that tomorrow,” you say, and next thing you know you’re in diapers once more, this time at an old folks’ home gumming chocolate pudding topped with a skin so thick you need scissors to cut it. Procrastination is the affirmation of an unpleasant and unwelcome but all-too-easy status quo. You merely need to do nothing and yet at the same time feel productive because you’ve promised no really I’ll pinky swear to put down some words tomorrow. You know what I want to say to that?

Tomorrow can guzzle a bucket of vulture barf.

Yesterday’s gone the way of the dodo. You have one day, and it is today.

Your promises are as hollow as a cheap-ass dollar-store chocolate Easter Bunny.

I’m going to give you literally no excuse at all to write and finish that novel. You know the one. The one that lives in your head and your heart but not on the page. The one you always say, “I’m going to write that book someday.” The one you talk about. But not the one you write. The one that makes you blah blah blah “aspiring” rather than the “real deal.” I’m going to give you a prescription for a writing plan that is simple, straightforward, and contains zero heinous fuckery. It’s so easy, a determined ten-year-old could do it. You will have no excuse. None. Zip.

Fuck-all.

Because if you come back to me and say, “I can’t do that,” you might as well have told me, “I can’t pick myself up out of this pile of mule poop I accidentally rolled in. I’m literally just bound to lay here in this once-warm now-cold heap of mule turds. Forever. Until I die. I have no self-capability and I am less motivated than your average sea cucumber. Please kick dirt on me, and if the word writer ever comes out of my mouth again, just slap my face.”

Further, if someone tells you they aren’t able to write a novel — “I don’t have time! My life is too busy!” — just send them a link to this post with my blessing.

Ready? Here’s the rules:

The Big 350

You’re going to write and finish the first draft of a novel in one year’s time.

You are going to do this by writing five days out of the week, or 260 days out of the year.

You are going to write 350 words on each of those 260 days.

That means, at the end of one year, you will have written 91,000 words.

More than enough for an average novel length.

To be clear, 350 words? Not a lot. At this point in your reading, this post is already 500 words long. You can sneeze 350 words. It’s like a word appetizer every day. Some days it’ll take you 15 minutes, other days two hours — but you’re going to commit to those 350 words every day, whether you type them out, or scrawl them in a notebook, or chisel them into the wall of your prison cell. You will carve these words out of the time you are given.

You get 24 hours a day. As do I. As do we all.

Grab a little time to write a little bit every day.

The Goal

The goal is not to write a masterpiece. It’s not to sprint. This ain’t NaNoWriMo. The goal is to finish a novel despite a life that seems hell-bent to let you do no such thing. It is you snatching snippets of word count from the air and smooshing them together until they form a cohesive (if not coherent) whole. It assumes a “slow and steady wins the race” approach to this book.

A finished first draft. That is the brass ring, the crown jewels, the Cup of the Dead Hippie God.

The Other Rules

No other rules exist. Next question.

Things To Consider

Wanna do an outline? Great, go for it. Edit as you go or all in one lump? I don’t give a monkey’s poop-caked paw how you approach it. Do as you like. Just hit your target of 350 words per day.

Let me say that again: Just hit your target. Don’t turn off your targeting computer. Don’t listen to that weird old man. Use your targeting computer, Luke. The Force is some flimsy hoo-haw made by a bunch of loveless space cenobites. No, not those cenobites, goddamnit you’re confusing your movies. Stop fiddling with that ornate-looking puzzle box. CRIMINY.

Wrote more than your allotted and expected count in one day? Fuck yeah. High-five. Fist-bump. Slap-and-tickle. Give unto yourself the pleasures of the flesh and celebrate that you’re this much closer to the end goal. Didn’t write today? Well, goddamnit. Fine. Guess what? It’s only 350 words. Cram it into tomorrow’s word-hole. That’s still only 700 words. It’s not even a 1000 words. Some writers write that much before they wake up in the morning.

Make a spreadsheet if you have to. Track your 350 words per day (you’ll probably end up writing more than that consistently and hitting your tally quicker, particularly with a spreadsheet to remind you — you will discover it’s actually hard to stop at 350 words).

The word count is small enough and steady enough where you can comfortably fuck doubt right in the ear. You’re creeping through the draft like a burglar. One step at a time. Relax. Breathe. Like that one fish says to that other fish in the movie about all the fucking fish: Just keep swimming. Or for a differnt metaphor, you know how you eat an elephant? ONE BITE AT A TIME.

Contains Zero Fuckery

This is easy! You can do this! You can do better than this! This is a plan on par with, “Do one push-up every day.” This is, “Don’t pee on the salad bar.” This is a bare minimum, common denominator, common sense, zero fuckery writing plan. You can’t do this, you don’t want to be a writer. You don’t get to be a writer. Not least of all because you can’t carve just a little bit of fat from your day in sizzle up 350 words in your story-skillet.

Lend this plan a little bit of your time.

Give this plan a little bit of your effort.

And in one year’s time, you will have a novel.

It won’t be a masterpiece.

It will need editing.

But it’ll be a first draft of something real.

Something many so-called “writers” never achieve.

One year.

Weekends off.

Just 350 words for 260 days.

Shut up and write.

How To Read Like A Writer

All a writer’s gotta do is read and write.

That, the most simplistic piece of writing advice around. So dismissive of what writers do, isn’t it? As if writing is just practice, practice, practice. Nothing to learn here. No thought behind it. No understanding of the mechanics of language. No need to ever gaze into the bloodshot eye of publishing to learn its secrets. Just read and write, read and write, read and write, and poof –

You’re a writer.

IT’S GODDAMN MAGIC IS WHAT IT IS.

Ahem.

That’s not to say the advice is bad.

You do need to write a lot.

And you sure as hell need to read a lot.

But the truth of those statements cannot be contained in those statements.

Meaning, it’s a whole lot more complicated than all that.

You can’t just pick up a book, read it, and have its wisdom absorbed into you. Eating a microwave burrito doesn’t make you a chef. Sitting on a chair doesn’t make you a fucking carpenter. And reading doesn’t make you a writer.

My impetus for this post comes from the Passive Voice blog, which linked to a quote of mine regarding reading outside one’s comfort zone as a writer, and some of the comments in response troubled me a little bit — “…I get zero inspiration from what I read. All of my inspiration comes from the world around me. Reading is what I do to put my brain in neutral and coast for a while.”

Now, I certainly approve of the idea that one should grab inspiration from the world around them — I think the all a writer’s gotta do is read and write chestnut constantly misses that third and arguably most important axis: “…oh, and also, the writer should damn well live a life and experience the world all around him.”

But not gaining inspiration from reading? Jeez, really? How did one decide to be a writer at all if one is not inspired by the written word? That sounds to me like a special kind of hell.

Still: I get it. We’re accustomed to reading for entertainment. We want to be amused by the antics on the page. Excited by a scene of tension or terror or action. Griefstruck by a character’s death. Turned on by a mistress sticking the whip-handle up her submissive’s uh-oh-hole. We’re reading to elicit a certain emotional reaction. We’re not necessarily reading to be challenged.

Well, cram that up your uh-oh-hole.

You need to start reading like a writer.

Here’s how:

Be present in the text. Do not put your brain in neutral and coast. It’s great when a book takes us out of our own lives and draws is into the life on the page. But it’s precisely that moment you want to avoid: you don’t want to be lost in the text. You want to be aware. Because that writer’s ability to make you forget you’re reading a book? That writer’s doing something super-fucking-awesome. Don’t you want to know what it is?

Read to understand; dissect the page. Go back to the chef metaphor: a chef doesn’t just eat to enjoy. A chef watches how another chef operates. A chef wants to look at technique and then wants to see how that technique translates to the food on the plate: what ingredients are present? What textures and spices? What ancient shellfish from beyond space and time? The chef dissects the meal and so must the writer dissect the page and the story before him. You are not reading to be entertained. You are reading to understand.

Read with questions in mind. Always be asking questions. How did she write this? Why, if you can guess, did she write this way or choose the words she chose? Look at the placement of the words on the page. How much dialogue to description? How does she handle character, or setting, or action? Perhaps the biggest question of all: how would you have done differently? Not better. Not worse. But how would you have handled writing this?

Read to critique. The notion of critique has lost all its nuance in the Internet age — now critique is either a plate full of firecrackers and cookies and My Little Ponies or it’s a bowl full of llama diarrhea. Everything is either OMG AWESOME +1 LIKE RETWEET HERE ARE A THOUSAND EXCLAMATION POINTS or THIS WAS THE WORST THING I’VE EVER EXPERIENCED IT MADE ME STAB MY OWN MOTHER IN THE NECK WITH A BROKEN COKE BOTTLE. But remember – critique isn’t about love or hate. Critique is an analysis. Analyze the work.

Read deeply. Our reading is often quite shallow. Don’t let it be. Look beyond the words. Figure out what the author is trying to say. What themes are at work? What ideas are resonant throughout the piece? What secret childhood traumas can you discern? Was the author the victim of many so-called “swirlies” in junior high? I KID THE POOR BULLIED AUTHORS. Just the same — look for the author on the page and in the story. Try to seek subtext hiding behind text. Look for hidden purpose and the show going on behind the curtain.

Understand the interplay between writing and storytelling. Those are two separate skills (or crafts, or arts, or magical leprechaun incantations or whatever you want to call them) — the story comprises all those narrative components and the writing comprises the language that communicates those narrative components. Both have structure. Both utilize the other. Separate but then ask: how and how well do they work together?

Read from the screen. Watch television. Films. Games. Get scripts. Read those. You’ll learn a lot about dialogue and description. You’ll learn the architecture of story.

Read beyond the walls of your pleasure dome. If all you do is read in the genre in which you write and/or enjoy, you’ve created for yourself a narrative echo chamber — your own authorial intentions are boomeranged back to you. You gain nothing. You are a part of a giant genre centipede, consuming material and excreting it, passing along a series of tried (and tired) tropes and ideas, with the only advantage being that they first pass through your intellectual colonic flora. Don’t be afraid to read books that trouble you. Books that have found success beyond your understanding. Books that live outside your favored genres. Fuck comfort.

* * *

Now, all of this is not to say you can’t or shouldn’t read for pleasure. I wouldn’t rob you of that. I might steal your wallet or your shoes or your wife but never the pleasure you gain from reading the written word. Just the same, if this writing thing is what you want to do with some or all of your life, then accept that reading is part of the job. And this job demands that all the lights in your brain are turned on, not dulled to a dim room in order to passively absorb the haw-haws and ooh-aahs of entertainment. Read like a writer, goddamnit.

Blonde Roast, By Starbucks: My Review

On the Coffee Snob scale from 1 to 10 (1 being lowest, 10 being highest), I am a 7.5.

I like good coffee. I grind it and brew it myself. I’ll French Press some motherfucking bean juice now and again, but I don’t get crazy about it. I don’t require my coffee to be run through the intestinal tract of a rare Sumatran rat-monkey, but if you try to serve me Keurig coffee in one of those little pre-configured K-Cups, I’ll break all your fingers with my back teeth.

(Further, do not ever ever ever never ever serve me decaf coffee. You might as well piss in my gas tank. THAT WAY LIES DEATH AND LASERS. Just a friendly warning!)

Like I said: 7.5 on the Coffee Snob scale.

And so we come to Starbucks.

I like Starbucks espresso drinks well enough. They do fine in a pinch, and make a serviceable latte or cappuccino. If I have no other option and I see the sign for that saucy tail-flipping Seattle mermaid, fuck it, I’m happy to get my fix from the S’bux without complaint.

But their coffee sucks balls.

It’s like drinking coffee brewed from a crushed up charcoal aquarium filter. It tastes like burned gorilla pubes. I drink a Starbucks roast – any roast at all — and I get that first hit of “oooh, coffee” followed by “all I taste is ash and carbon on the tongue, a finish of frizzled scorched briquettes. (They call it “Charbucks” for a reason, after all.)

They seem incapable of a light roast. And a light roast? It’s my favorite coffee. You gimme a nice winey, fruity Ethiopian peaberry and I’m in heaven — plus, a lighter roast has the benefit of having a wee smidgen more caffeine and goddamnit, I’ll take what I can get in the go-go-juice department. And yet, any time Starbucks offers a light roast, I get a cup and it still tastes like I’m licking an asbestos roof shingle that survived a house fire. I have to imagine that in the back of every Starbucks is some diligent pyromaniac asshole with a micro-torch hand-scorching every fucking coffee bean that comes into the place. “I just want to watch the world burn!”

So, it was with some trepidation that I embraced the quest to try Starbucks’ not-so-new “blonde roast.” They’d begun a campaign to push this coffee and all the advertising seemed to contain the subtext of, “We know our coffee tastes like driveway gravel, so here’s this one light roast that’s actually a light roast and just shut up and try it and stop complaining.”

Today, I went into Starbucks.

I ordered a “tall” (fuck you, Starbucks, and your asinine sizing chart) blonde roast.

Then I went grocery shopping and consumed it.

The too-long-didn’t-read?

Mmnnneeh? Muh? Eh? Mmm? Guh?

Like, okay, it’s fine. It is lighter than the traditional “the burned-out core of a supernova star” brew. But even behind that lighter roast still lurks that tang of unpleasant bitterness one associates with amateur hour bush league coffee. This is more of a dirty blonde coffee, or a blonde highlights but technically it’s still dark hair coffee. I’ll admit that the longer I drank it, the more… appealing it became, and by the end (when it had cooled down to luke-warm temps) I started to get those winey, acidy undertones I was hoping to get right from the get-go.

But, for the most part, still a mediocre brew.

Sorry, Starbucks.

Signed, Sort-of-a-Coffee Snob

Authorial Sludgebody: How To Fix?

Once again, it’s that time of the year where I feel like a hibernating bear who suddenly wakes up in his cave surrounded by candy cane wrappers and choco-smear paw-prints and the bones from various turkey dinners. It’s that post-holiday wake-up call where your body reminds you:

“DEAREST SLUDGEBODY. IT IS WINTER AND YOU ARE NOW SWADDLED IN SLUDGE. FIX THIS, FLAPJACK. EITHER THAT OR JUST PUT ON 100 MORE POUNDS AND COMMIT TO THE SLUDGE.”

This is all pretty normal for me, though this year it seems a bit worse than in prior years (the curse of getting older? the doom of living with a toddler where it’s harder to amend my diet for the better?). I assume my routine will be the same as in former years, and the answer is of course a straightforward one — “Modify lifestyle by changing diet and increasing exercise.”

Still, I’m curious — the simple answer is a good one but I’m also curious about the more granular answers. For those of you who have tried or are trying to lose weight — what works? What didn’t? What diet? What exercise? Give a shout.

Curious to hear your experiments, expectations, and results.

If you don’t mind sharing, of course.

My hats off to those who do.

I’ll hang up and wait for your answer.

Click.

NO CARRIER

Flash Fiction Challenge: Write What You Know

Last week’s challenge: “Inspiration From Inexplicable Photos“

This challenge is a little different from all the others.

It plays off that oft-slung chestnut of writing wisdom, “Write what you know.”

In this case, I want you to do exactly that — but with a twist.

I want you to grab an event from your life. Then I want you to write about it through a fictional, genre interpretation — changing the event from your life to suit the story you’re telling. So, maybe you write about your first hunting trip between father-and-son, but you reinterpret that as a king taking his youngest out to hunt dragons. Or, you take events from your Prom (“I caught my boyfriend cheating on me in the science lab”) and spin it so that the event happens at the same time a slasher killer is making literal mincemeat of the Prom King and Queen.

Take true life.

Reimagine it through the lens of fiction.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post your story on your site, link back here.

Due by Friday the 22nd, noon EST.