Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 240

A Small Place For Nice Things

With the news out of Aurora this morning it’s hard not to feel out of sorts. This especially after a morning I spent researching mass murder for a scene in a book and then next thing I know there’s this news rolling in about dead people at a movie theater and gunshots and hurt kids and suddenly it’s a whole lot of bad feelings. Feelings that go toxic, septic, pretty fast.

On the other side of it, I saw something yesterday that was making me feel pretty good: there’s a local food stand that popped up within walking distance of the house. Nice little covered wagon with produce and some homemade jam and fresh-baked bread. Nobody there — just a cash box. The prices are all cheap, y’know, you can grab more potatoes than you’d need for a whole week and it won’t cost you more than two bucks for that giant basket of potatoes. And the people who put this farm stand up, they have a sign that says, ”If you’re down on hard times, just take what you need, we understand.”

Which is pretty great.

And it leads me to this, and this is something I said on Twitter and Facebook this morning:

We balance out the horrors of a day like this by willfully doing good for others.

So, hug your kids, give to a charity, rescue a puppy, something, anything.

Evil can’t be undone, but good can outshine it.

So, if you feel like it, post something below in the comments that’s good and nice in this world. Don’t talk about the shooting or other bad shit. Don’t politicize anything (today is not a real good day to defend the second amendment, or talk about naughty pop culture or liberal-conservative fol-de-rol). Just post something nice. A story. Charity. Something your kid said or did. Anything at all.

This not in service of forgetting tragedy or ignoring it, but rather, to remind ourselves that people aren’t all bad and that one aberration a species does not make.

If you’re up for it, of course.

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Must Love Time Travel”

Last week’s challenge — “The Android and the Wondering Chamber.”

Yesterday I had the fortune of interviewing Misters Hornshaw and Hurwitch (who sound the purveyors of fine meats) about their funny book on time travel (So You Created A Wormhole).

As such, I thought, well, let’s carry the ball forward a little bit.

You have 1000 words in which to write a story where “time travel” is a prominent feature.

Anything and everything else can feature –

As long as it has time travel.

Post at your online space, then link back here in the comments.

You have, as always, a wee widdle week. Due by noon EST on Friday, July 27th.

NOW GO, TEMPORAL WIZARDS, GO.

Hornshaw & Hurwitch: The Terribleminds Interview

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Behold! A two-fer! A BOGO! A real steal! Today in the electric chair we’ve got Phil Hornshaw and Nick Hurwitch, authors of the wildly hilarious and deeply irreverent So You Created A Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide To Time Travel. I met these two miscreants and deviants at the LA Book Festival, where they came tumbling out of a police box eating Sumerian churros. And I said, you must swing by and submit to an interview! And they said, “Not before we travel back in time to ensure that the aliens never enslaved us in 1832,” and I was like, “Right, like you can make that happen.” You can find these gents at timetravelguide.com, or at their individual Twitter locations — @PhilHornshaw and @heWIZARD.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So tell us a story. As short or as long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

“Winky Finger”

This time, when he came out the other side of the wormhole, Delbridge Langdon III found himself about 12 feet off the ground and whipping through the air. He landed on his back and slipped like a stone on a still pond across intermittent patches of snow and thin grass, coming to a stop a second later with a groan that rumbled in his lungs and pain that rippled across his limbs.

“Crap,” Langdon moaned, knowing that his high-velocity re-entry was 100 percent his own fault. When you jump through time, you leave a planet moving at around 30,000 kilometers per hour (a number he’d discovered by Googling it) – and so you are traveling at 30,000 kilmometers per hour. And then you have to land on a planet also traveling that speed, but of course, since you’re moving through time, the planet is obviously somewhere else: somewhere else in its orbit, somewhere else in its rotation, and generally just moving at a high rate of speed. He must have fudged the calculation on the last one – what was this, jump five? – and come out of the wormhole slightly at odds with the motion of the world beneath him. Now he had a bruised head and probably a paper mill’s load of slivers in his ass.

He brushed himself off and stood up. Hell, at least it was light out this time. But he still had no idea where he was, and he was running out of scratch paper to do calculations. Before long he wouldn’t be able to keep up this idea of searching for civilization to study through random acts of temporal dislocation.

Five jumps and he was nowhere nearer to figuring out the practicalities of time travel. Sure, he was time traveling, but all the issues he’d been warned about by the greater scientific community – displacement, temporal drift, planetary reciprocity (er, velocity), potential injury – were affecting him exactly as he had been warned. “Don’t time travel,” they’d said. “It’s incredibly stupid,” they’d said. “It’ll get you killed,” they’d said, “and there’s nothing much you could really learn anyway.”

And yet here he was.

Still, he hadn’t wound up in orbit yet, so at least the Googly information was accurate, Langdon thought.

He started walking. This was the second part of the routine: land first, walk second. The idea was to find a settlement, maybe meet some locals, maybe explore the past. Maybe trigger a paradox (Wouldn’t that be something, Langdon thought, giggling. Suck it, naysaying Science jerks!). So far he hadn’t found anything but trees and vegetation in various states of growth. One time he’d almost fallen over a desert cleft. While he wasn’t technically traveling through space, the movement of Earth beneath him made his landing locations haphazard at best.

This time, as he walked, Langdon’s face fell into a frown as he breasted a hill and found himself standing at the edge of a wooded valley. Pines or some approximation thereof formed a thick, endless army, standing at strict attention or chittering in the wind for miles in all directions. A steep drop waited ahead of him – nothing but forest in all directions.

Defeated, Langdon let himself drop like a moppet with cut strings. Nothing. Again. He figured if he could find a settlement, he could puzzle out an approximation of the year. As it was, with no point of reference, he had no real way of calculating the return trip back to his proper temporal casaba. Er, casa. Home.

That was weird, Langdon thought. Spanish? He didn’t even know Italian. He’d taken German in high school and they said that if you knew Latin you could speak all the Bromance languages, but even then, he’d only pulled down a C in Bromance anyway.

He shook it off. His brain was doing weird things, probably because he’d just jarred it (Next time, wear a helmet, Langdon thought. Ooh, a pink one with tassels.)

Pulling off his pack, he had another bite of the granola bar he’d been nibbling as slowly as possible for something like six hours. It tasted like cardboard and farts, which he imagined approximated hamster food, and in his frustration, Langdon threw it over the ridge. Littering somehow felt empowering, and he considered what else he could throw to soil the booty he was seeing before him as he pulled out the last of his notebook paper to make another set of jump calculations.

Langdon paused, lifting the pen off the paper and staring at the numbers. They looked all…wonky. As if there was something wrong with the way he was writing them. And the pen felt strange in his hand, now that he was thinking about it. Like it was smaller than he remembered.

Shifting the pen into his other hand (What was French for pen? Was it le pen? That sounded right…), Langdon held up his right hand in front of his face and spread his fingers. He eyed each digit carefully, looking for any abnormalities. Had be broken one of his fingers in the fall?

No…all six seemed straight as always, if a little try and cracked. Although his winky finger felt a little tingly.

He dropped his hand. What about that seemed strange?

Raising his other hand, Langdon looked first at one, then the other. No tumors that he could see, which was good – you never know what might give you a tumor while time trebling. Although, wait… something was off. Something about his winky finger.

Winky finger. What the hell is a winky finger?

It hit Langdon like a kick to the groin and he almost puked from the force of it. What the hell was a winky finger and why the hell did he have one on his right hand? Holy shit holy shit holy shit hol—

He leapt up, looking around frantically. Should he cut it off? Yes. Cut it the hell off. It was probably a tumor that just looked like a finger! Langdon grabbed it with his other hand to see if it felt gooey like he imagined a time travel-induced finger-like growth would probably feel, but it felt like a finger – which is exactly what a winky would want him to think, he thought.

Spinning around and attempting to dart away from the ridge in panic, Langdon ran himself straight into a tree. It was exceedingly helpful.

Lying on his back, for a second, the haze cleared from his mind. The bad calculations. The winky finger. The weird words darting through his mind. He had discovered something on this trip after all: some kind of chronological displacement that occurred among cells in his body. Probably his brain was all miswired just like his hand was. Who knows what had been duplicated or expanded or smashed together as he was hopping through wormholes; somehow, traversal from one time point to another was screwing him up at the molecular level.

Well then. Time to just relax a bit, Langdon told himself, somewhat self-satisfied with his successful time travel discovery, although the iron ‘e’ was not lost on him. No reason to be too hasty. He’d need time to work this out.

He wished he had his granola bar.

Someone offered him a hand and Langdon took it readily, pulling himself up. As he reached his feet, he was somewhat confused to see himself staring back at him. He looked back down at the ground where he’d lain – no, nobody there – and back at the face of the kind stranger, Langdon.

“Howdy,” Langdon chirped, grinning and offering a short wave. “How’s it going?”

Langdon’s brow furrowed as he offered a few tiny twitches of his wrist and palm in return.

“I feel weird.”

“Yeah, that’ll pass,” Langdon offered, squeezing Langdon’s shoulder. “It gets essayer.” Noticing the winky finger, Langdon offered a slanted smile. “We’re stuck with him, though, I think.”

“How’d you get here?” Langdon asked. “Did the winky send you?”

“In, like, 20 minutes, I decided to try jumping again, so try to remember what I say to you. Because you need to say it to you.”

“Oh.”

“Or you could just stay,” said Langdon with a shrug. “I think we ought to build a criminalization. These woods kinda suck.”

“Yeah, okay,” Langdon replied, still a little confused. “Hey, isn’t that dangerous? With paradoxes or something?”

“Eh,” Langdon frowned back. “I don’t see any butterflies around.”

“I guess there’s a good pint,” Langdon said, scratching at his chin with his winky and looking down.

“Hey,” he piped up as a thought hit his brain like a bullet. “Do you have a granola bar?”

Langdon shook his head. “We threw it away, remember?”

“Oh,” returned Langdon, trying not to show his disappointment.

Why do you tell stories?

Phil: We all tell stories. Everything we do is about telling stories. When you think about it, all of human society is built on stories, from religion to law, culture and art, all of it is about sharing the experiences we have with others. Some of those stories are a little less interesting than others, but they all serve a purpose. Somebody needs to tell stories that include zombies, robots and insane machines. If we don’t step up, who will? Lots of people, that’s who, but they might not have enough zombies. But for me, it’s what being human is all about. I love hearing stories and I love telling them because it’s the most powerful way to connect with anything and anyone. Whenever I read something it just makes me want to write something, to keep pursuing that connection with other people.

Nick: If I’m being honest with myself? Because to be really good at something, you have to choose. Growing up I was a nerd, but loved and played sports. I could get lost in a book, or spend the weekend at the movie theater. I took every art class I could, but couldn’t get enough of AP Biology. Without getting all Wonder Years on you, Phil and I were editors in chief of our high school paper together. Our adviser, who had just had a baby, told me she hoped her son would be as “well rounded” as me. I wasn’t sure how to take that at the time, because well rounded might easily imply “good at many things, great at none.” I wanted to be great at something, dammit! Then I realized it was very much a compliment: I had the ability to choose. Eventually, you have to put your head down and dedicate yourself to something. Telling stories is the thing that affords me the greatest opportunity to combine all the things I love in any way I see fit. Brain magic!

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice.

Phil: There’s buckets of good writing advice out there; a lot of it can be found right here on this blog. The one thing that’s benefited me more than anything else I’ve ever been told about telling stories has boiled down to a simple axiom: show, don’t tell. It’s so stupidly simple that it’s kind of annoying, but in the years I spent as an editor, in the classes I took in college, it really was the one thing that the most writers I came across really needed to know. Don’t tell people what happened, show them. Play out those scenes you’re breezing past. Avoid summarizing. You’re a writer — so write.

Nick: The oldest one in the book is, “Write what you know.” But the flip side of that axiom is the more important one: “Know more about what you’re writing.” It’s one thing to set your story in the streets of 1920s London. It’s a much greater thing to actually know what those streets were like, geographically or otherwise. It’s one thing to write a story about computer hackers. It’s quite a different thing to know how computer hacking is done. Research can be daunting, but you know what’s worse? Presenting only the tip of the iceberg because that’s all you have, and your reader can seeing right through your melty facade.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

Phil: We both are lucky enough to work as freelancers, and that means we both spend all day writing, every single day. That’s basically the dream — spending all day, every day, dumping out your brain onto a keyboard and rearranging it. Sometimes really amazing stuff comes out, even if you’re the only one who finds it amazing. All the time, though, it’s just about sitting around and playing pretend in some form or another, whether it’s imagining characters and then ruining their lives or trying to find the deeper meanings of the ending of Mass Effect 3. We’re professional thinkers, basically, and we get to constantly challenge ourselves to do it different, do it better. What’s a better job than thinking?

The very worst thing? It becomes mechanical. For a long time I worked as a copy editor for a real estate website, and it quickly became a mind-numbing exercise in discovering just how many times I could replace the same incorrect phrase. Writing for a living boxes you into a space where you either have to be clever on command, which is never easy, or in which you find yourself tapping out the words in the proper sequence without really giving it the portion of yourself that it deserves. Writing as a job can destroy itself if you’re not careful, and then everything great becomes terrible. It’s like being an architect who only designs prefabricated subdivisions. You need to explore when you write. It’s a must.

Nick: My favorite writing-related quote (with the exception of the contents of “500 Ways To Be A Better Writer”) comes from German writer, Thomas Mann: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” There are a lot of people who will just say (to writers in particular), “I can’t write.” But the truth is, neither can writers. The difference is that writers make themselves write. No matter how good, how bad, how successful, or how unheralded, all writers have this in common: they have to sit there and make the next word come. This sucks. It never gets any easier.

However, this is also great. Because eventually, those words become sentences and dialogue and books and scripts and then you have it there, projected onto the backs of eyelids and the insides of imaginations. Over and over again you get the satisfaction of making something that didn’t come easily. So if you happen to be a writer and someone ever tells you, “Oh, I can’t write,” say, “Neither can I. I just do.”

How’d you two find or know one another? Also: what is the secret to good collaboration with a creative partner?

Phil: Nick and I have been best friends since elementary school. We lived close by one another in the Metro Detroit area and we’ve been nerdy about all the same things, including writing, since roughly the third grade. So one secret to collaboration has been that we’re friends, we like the same things, we think similarly about a lot of things and we have a collective history that we can draw on of things we liked, things we’ve done, and so on. That makes writing a lot easier, because we’re often on the same page really early in whatever process were in.

The other secret, I’d say, is trust, We’ve been working together for so long now, on so many things, that I know I can bring an idea to Nick and find out if it’s actually a shit sandwich or not, and hopefully vice versa. I help Nick identify his latent reverse-racism and he helps me keep my crippling fear of pirate peg-legs from coloring everything we create. But more than that, I trust that if I really like something but it doesn’t work, Nick will let me know. He won’t pull any peg-legs. And then we can talk it out, fix it, throw it away, whatever — it helps not to be married to ideas, but more than anything, I think we do a good job making each of our ideas better. Even when we’re not collaborating, I run most everything I write past Nick and he brings me stuff for notes all the time.

It’s almost an extension of “Kill your darlings.” Collaboration means you’ve got to be willing to kill darlings, like, all the time. It’s a darling holocaust out there. Ideas are constantly getting aborted. But if you trust your collaborator, you know that they’re there to make the work better, and you can part with ideas, the result is always a genetically superior supersoldier.

Nick: Though I’m sure we knew each other beforehand, my first memory of Phil is from the 4th grade. We were walking down the hall with a mutual friend, and Phil was deriding me for my lack of knowledge regarding slang terms for “penis.” A lifelong friendship was forged (and I have long since surpassed him in this field). We once spent the summer between 8th and 9th grade writing a sci-fi/fantasy book, which we realized pretty quickly after completing was just an amalgamation of all the stuff we thought was cool at the time (Final Fantasy games played a big role.) We went on to become terribly well-behaved teenagers, were editors-in-chief of our high school newspaper together, and eventually I convinced him to follow me out to LA.

Writing partnerships are difficult. You can’t just throw any two creative people together and get a new, better result. It has to work. Even beyond the creative, the process of working with someone else whose ideas get equal weight requires deference, patience and an open mind. The writing process is almost by definition one of seclusion. Shutting out the world to make the voices in your head louder. People assume we sit in the same room and write together–we don’t. And in fact when we try we don’t get very far. We’ll have lunch or drinks and brainstorm, or outline, and from there it’s really about volleying things back and forth until one of us has set the other for a spike.

My favorite knowledge nugget about writing partnerships comes from Terry Rossio & Ted Elliot, the writers behind movies like Aladdin, Shrek and Deja Vu (sorry, guys). It’s something to the effect of, “For a writing partnership to work, both parties have to feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.” It may be as simple as that.

Phil: I don’t remember that penis conversation.

Tell the world why everyone ever should buy So You Created A Wormhole. No modesty. Put your book-balls on the table and slap them mightily.

Nick: “The book is fucking funny.” –Chuck Wendig

But also–it is everything you think is cool wrapped into one book. As the first and only field manual for the intrepid time traveler on the go, So You Created A Wormhole will teach you everything you need to know to time travel. And even though the tone is zany and off-the-wall, we did do actual research about the science(iness) of time travel, wormholes, blackholes, potential paradoxes, making batteries that run on the electricity-producing microbes in dinosaur poo, etc. The parts of the book I’m most proud of are those that manage to take really out-there concepts, like special relativity, or paradoxes by inaction, and explain them in lay terms. And because you’ll be laughing the whole way, it doesn’t even feel like learning!

It’s also a book for the meme generation. We pull from and riff on the tropes of a lot of pop culture–pretty much anything that relates to time travel, space travel, mummy fighting and dino riding. Okay, one more pitch: It’s like The Zombie Survival Guide only it doesn’t take itself seriously and with time travel instead of zombies. And I don’t think need to tell any of your readers how much cooler time travel is than zombies.

Phil: Nick pretty much covered it, but allow me to add: it’s illustrated. Hilariously.

Nick: By Aled Lewis! Who is amazing. And British. Everyone should check him out.

The book *is* fucking funny. Forgive the impossible-to-answer question but, how the hell do you “be funny?”

Nick: Firstly, thank you. I means a lot to us whenever we hear that. And to your question: turn your filter way the fuck down. Better yet, turn it off–you can polish yourself back up to an acceptable level of decorum during editing. Or not. You may even surprise yourself. I think the thing that worked best for us was to just let go and be ourselves. The book has a very particular tone, but a lot of that was cultivated from two decades of friendship banter. The best part of writing this book was passing sections back and forth and making each other laugh. If we could do at least that much, we were on our way to making other people laugh, too. I think it’s a lot more difficult to say, “Man, we need a joke here, let’s be funnier here, hey, do you think other people are going to laugh at that?” When you let the humor flow naturally from the material, you’re going to have much more success.

Phil: I obsess over this all the time. When Nick says, “Try not to ask “Is this funny? We need a joke here,” that’s me, I’m the one who’s looking at it from a standpoint of needing to improve, be funnier, make better, and I’m constantly worried about it. Nick’s right, you need to just throw it all out there and let the editing cut back the things that don’t work, but for me, I find myself analyzing a lot. What makes this funny? What about it is unexpected?

Volume is definitely important, and self-censorship doesn’t help anything on the first pass. But I think the ability to analyze, to break down a joke or an idea and say, Here’s where it works, is really important for anyone who wants to do humor. I’ll readily admit I haven’t mastered it.

Make yourself laugh. Focus on that. Then see if it makes other people laugh. For comedy, I think, it’s about feedback.

Obligatory time travel question: if you could time travel, where would you go and what would you do there?

Nick: I would wake up, make myself a Dodo omelette, and sling myself back to the Late Cretaceous period. Then I’d make nice with some herbivores and ride a triceratops. We’d laugh, roll around in the grass, then fight a T-rex because we have horns and your arms are short, I don’t care how big your mean, razor-tooth face is. We’d grab a late lunch at Trike’s favorite grazing field, then we’d say our goodbyes and I would fling myself forward several million years to the year 3000 AD. I’m hoping that by then, if we haven’t all killed one another, humanity will be pretty well on its way to galavanting around the galaxy, and science will have solved the most trying issues of our times, like having sex in anti-gravity, and space suits that bend at the elbows. After a nice, long dinner on Kepler-22b, I’d come back to my own time–only, about 30 years earlier. See, I’ve got really curly hair, so I’ve always figured the fact that I didn’t live as an adult through the ‘80s was some kind of galactic miscalculation. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’d get a lot more writing done before the invention of the Internet.

Phil: First, to the future, where I would procure my free complimentary spaceship, since everyone from the future has one. Then, it’s time to form my ragtag team of heroes, aliens and robots from throughout time. Bill and Ted had the right idea, but they didn’t go far enough — first, you get Lincoln, Napoleon, Socrates, an assassin droid, an alien concubine, Billy the Kid and King Arthur together. Then, you fight evil. Naturally. Probably it would be us hunting down and stopping evil time travelers, but I’m not really willing to limit the scope. There are adventures to get into, and I want to get into them. Also space travel. That doesn’t really need to have an actual goal behind it. My life as Star Trek would be just fine.

Favorite word? And then follow up, favorite curse word?

Nick: Lately I’ve been combining fruit with well-known curse words. Asspineapple comes to mind. Cucumbernuts. Kumquattwat. Really, though, I doubt I’ll ever outgrown a good old “Fuck.”

As for favorite word, I think it’s hard to go wrong with cupcake. My guess is that most writers would go with something more descriptive, but there are few words that can be separated from their meaning completely and still remain sweetly satisfying. Go on, say it. Cupcake.

Phil: “Anthropomorphism.” Not only is it fun to write and to say, but it gives you an inflated sense of your intelligence in most situations. Plus the very concept is exciting — giving human traits to things — in this fantastical way. It always conjures up the idea of magic and hidden characteristics for me, the kinds of things that trigger your imagination when you’re a child and as you get older turn into the underpinnings of horror stories. I love the idea of fantasies turning to nightmares and vice versa.

Curse words are something else entirely. I can’t say I have much of a vocabulary in that department because I routinely circle back to old standbys. A biology teacher once told me I should use “cloaca” because in birds its a catch-all area that handles basically everything gross, but there’s no elegance in it. I think I prefer “shit.” It sounds as bad as it is in all cases. The more disgust you put into the word, the more disgusting the situation you’re describing. It’s not often that a word can reflect the exact amount of emotion you invest in it.

You said the magic word: Cupcake. What is your favorite kind of cupcake?

Phil: …Red. Brown. Red and…brown, I guess. I’m sort of unclear on the idea of “kinds” of cupcakes. A cupcake appears, I eat it. They are indistinguishable.

Nick: Yeah, same here. My entire life I have battled a devastating illness known as “a massive fucking sweet tooth.” But for the sake of affability, I’ll say red velvet. Oo! Or confetti! Or–

Phil: What the hell is a confetti cupcake?

Favorite alcoholic beverage?

Nick: I’m a whiskey guy. If I’m in a cocktail bar, I’ll treat myself to an old fashioned. Anywhere else, Jack & Ginger (Jack Daniels & Ginger Ale) is my standby.

Phil: I wish I could claim a favorite. Sadly, I know nothing of alcohol, having failed to use my college education to its fullest. Now I drink cheap things I mix with other cheap things. As I answer this, there happens to be Bacardi here, and Coke Zero, and thus that is my favorite drink until my next drink. Also whiskey is good.

Recommend a book, comic book, film or game: something with a great story.

Nick: I’m also [secretly] a filmmaker, so I’m gonna go ahead and recommend a film. This Argentinean movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film a couple years ago, The Secrets In Their Eyes, is one of the best movies to come out in the past decade in any country. It’s this epic, winding, well-structured, beautifully shot, dual storyline suckerpunch that manages to be utterly harrowing and funny at all the right moments. The soccer stadium scene will make you crap your pants. The rest will keep you trapped there in your own squish until the final frame. Watch it now.

Phil: I’ve been spending a lot of my time consuming time travel fiction over the last year, both as research and out of curiosity. There’s a film I stumbled on at one point, this horror movie called Triangle, that’s just dynamite. Everything else I’ve been into lately has been pretty mainstream; Triangle has a bit of a cult classic feel, it’s a little bit obscure, and it’s pretty mind-bendingly phenomenal.

What skills do you bring to help humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Phil: Of course, a viable knowledge of zombie survival, having spent a vast amount of time considering the situation. Zombie survival situations inevitably break down out of issues of panic, ineptitude, or complacency. Your one true advantage over a zombie is your brain, so while others might have survival skills or impressive braun, we have the ability to know not to wander off alone, how to keep quiet in heavily populated areas, what kind of structures are best to reinforce, where the most viable locations for repopulating the planet will be, which other survivors are poisoning the group with their idiocy and so forth. We’re the guys who you can turn to when you’re wondering, “Should I throw a molotov cocktail into that crowd of undead?” We’re there to tell you, “No, jackass, zombies don’t feel pain and then they’re going to wander around aflame, setting everything on fire.” We’re integral to the winning of zombie wars.

Nick: I consider myself a pretty good judge of character, which means I’ll be the one deciding who lives and who dies. There will be no room for racists and narcissistic sociopaths with twitchy trigger fingers in the new zombie apocalyptic reality. You’re welcome.

You committed crimes against humanity. They’ve caught you. You get one last meal.

Nick: It would be some kind of coconut, olive and mushroom puree souffle, because I hate all of those things with a passion, and fuck the sadistic onlookers, that’s why. Also it would be pretty funny if I puked on the executioner’s kicks.

Phil: Something with a cyanide tablet. Or what was that drug McCoy gave Kirk so Spock would think he’d killed him? Whatever that was. Put it in a baked potato. Obviously we still have supervillainy to take care of, seeing as we’re all about committing crimes against humanity in this scenario, so staying captured is not an option. There’s no time for dinner!

What’s next for you guys as storytellers? What does the future hold?

Phil: There are plenty of half-formed ideas in test tubes right now, but so far we’re just riding the So You Created a Wormhole wave and trying to get the word out about the thing. We’re thinking about a couple of follow-up ideas — books seem to work well for us, so we’d like to keep at them — but really we’ve got ideas across lots of different media, and it’s not even all time travely. Although, admittedly, we do have a TV pilot draft we need to work on that is, in fact, all time travely. Also steampunkish. And gunslingeresque. On the whole, I think we’re both ready to do something more narrative than Wormhole. That book tells something of a meta story of time travel, but I for one am itchy to develop some characters and make them miserable.

Nick: I’ve got one short film under my belt (My Barista) and the trailer for Wormhole, too. I’d like to shoot another short by the end of the year and finish another feature script or two. We also have a 10-episode season of webisodes based on our book written, which we’d like to shoot once we get some financing. It’s sort of our take on the buddy comedy, set inside a secret time scientist laboratory at QUAN+UM (our fictional governing body of time travel). They’re tasked with sending regular dispatches to time travelers in the field, often with disastrous and hilarious results. Getting our first book published is a drunken conversation come true, but we’re always looking at new ways and different mediums to tell our tales. Hopefully in the future, we’ll be doing a lot more of that.

Amongst The New Pulpeteers (Or, “What The Good Goddamn Is ‘New Pulp,’ Anyway?”)

I don’t know what New Pulp is.

But I think I’m it.

Or, in it. Or, part of it. Maybe I’m soaking in it?

Whatever.

A brief hop-skip-and-a-jump history:

The Guardian shouts out the idea of “New Pulp,” shouts out me and Adam Christopher as part of it.

Then, article author Damien G. Walter takes a look at New Pulp at his blog. (There you’ll find a bevy of links and definitions attempting to figure out just what the hell it even is.)

Yesterday, Do Some Damage talked up the notion of New Pulp.

And here we are.

So, just what is New Pulp? By my meager definition, at least?

New Pulp Cares Not For Your Mortal “Genres”

I’ve long admired writers who bend genres to their whims instead of being bent to the strictures of genre — a guy like Joe Lansdale is all over the fucking map in terms of what he writes. Everything from crime thrillers to sci-fi to satire to Southern Gothic to Weird Westerns to whatever the hell wants to come out of his head at any given moment. Sometimes this turbid genre muddiness is found in a single book. Hell, look at Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. What is that? Horror? A little. Fantasy? A little. Western? A little. It’s its own thing, that series. You might describe it using one of my favorite non-words: “unpindownable.”

A New Pulp writer doesn’t know what to call himself. He can’t say, “I’m a thriller writer,” or, “I write crime.”

He just writes. Whatever crazy-ass shit enters his head goes to the page one way or another.

It isn’t just psychic dinosaurs. Or noir tales of moral doom. Or sex, or heroism, or Batman, or serial killers, or steampunk assassins or any of that stuff. It isn’t about what’s written. It’s about what can be written.

New Pulp says, “Fuck genre.” Then it clubs genre on the head like a sailor clubbing an unruly tuna.

New Pulp Has A Hot Flush Of Literary Injection

For all the wars about “genre” versus “literary” (a bullshit line in the sand if ever there was one), I like to think that New Pulp plays a little loosey-goosey with language and story — I sense a faint poetic throughline in New Pulp. In the sense that jazz is a kind of ordered chaos, New Pulp brings a level of noise to the signal — a little messy, a little unkempt, a little wild-eyed with the metaphors and the structure.

I don’t know that the art or poetry is in there on purpose or whether it shows up unbidden.

But I think it’s in there just the same. Unsummoned but present.

New Pulp Is Jackrabbit Fast

New Pulp moves fast. Production. Creation. Fresh fast content. I hate to call it “fast food” — that’s a metaphor that for me doesn’t hold up. Fast food is notoriously shitty: low quality, high churn, “cheap” instead of “inexpensive.”

Better metaphor: food trucks. New Pulp is food trucks. Still fast food, just not in the traditional sense.

It’s street food, but street food produced fast and reliably and with a little of that… sense of poetry and playfulness I mentioned. It’s cheap art. Beautiful trash. And it comes out lickity-quick.

New Pulp Is About Writers Writing

New Pulp is as much about the writer as about what’s written. And the writers of New Pulp are, I suspect, workers. Meaning, it’s nose to the grindstone time — these are authors who aren’t writing only to be read but who are producing in order to pay bills, feed families, keep the goddamn lights on. They’re here to get shit done. A blue collar ethos is on the table in terms of New Pulp, I think.

Which means that New Pulp is a whole lot about the attitude.

New Pulp Refuses Rules, Defies Definition

As much as I’m trying to define it, it keeps squirming out of my grip like a python lubed with Astroglide.

The very nature of New Pulp is that it doesn’t want to be kept in any one box, and maybe that’s its most telling definition of all — that is has no definition. And I like that. I like that a whole lot.

I like when people ask me about Joe Lansdale, I can find something they like which lets me recommend him honestly. I like that when they ask me about Blackbirds I can find something they dig — horror, fantasy, female protagonist, whatever — that maybe gets them interested.

I like that New Pulp doesn’t want to wear any one hat and thinks it looks good in all of them, goddamnit.

Of course, what the hell do I know?

You tell me. What’s New Pulp to you? What should it be? What can it be?

Ask A Wendigo: “Just What The Fuck Do You Do, Anyway?”

Time then for another installment of, Ask A Wendigo. Or WWCWD. Or Interrogate The Penmonkey. Or Hide The Salami. Wait, that last one might be different? Whatever.

Want to ask me a question about writing or storytelling? Then here’s the link.

Once again, two related questions came in around the same time:

The Mechanical Doctor Anonymous asked:

“Chuck, something that I’ve been wondering about is the mechanics of your writing. I generally start out with pen on paper. I do a little light revision on that paper before typing it into the computer. From there, I save successive drafts as separate files until I’m done. At that point, I keep the separate files, but get rid of the original paper draft. What does your process look like, and how much do you keep after you’re done?”

And Mister Crankypants asked:

“On the subject of “how much do you write every day” your answer is superficial. 2-4k of new content. That’s, what, a few hours, right? Then there’s the blog stuff — maybe a couple more. Take time off for lunch, take a shit, or a shower, whatever. Before you know it the whole day is gone. When does the stone polishing happen? What about the 150k words you wrote months ago & have forgotten about completely? When is there time for that? What about planning? How to you keep track of it all?”

To me, both questions are asking a fairly straightforward — and completely complicated — question. That question is: how do you write? Or, just what the fuck do you do around here, anyway?

Setting aside all the non-writery stuff I do (hover over Twitter like a hungry fly, play with my 1-year-old, stalk and kill mutant caribou, drink coffee, drink gin, gloomily masturbate), I suppose I can get into the nitty-gritty of my overall “process.” But here is where I must throw up (*barf*) a warning:

YOUR PROCESS DOES NOT NEED TO LOOK LIKE MY PROCESS.

What you do needs to be what you do. For me, writing advice is always and forever just a polite suggestion, not a gospel carved in a brick which is then used to bludgeon you about the head and neck.

If something works for you, adopt it.

If something does not work, discard it.

That said, let’s rock.

The Out-Of-Control Idea Factory That Is My Brain

I’ve said similarly before, but the big question one should ask an author is not Where do you get your ideas? but rather, How the hell do you make your ideas stop? Because my brain is like a moon colony force-field constantly being pinged by fiery spears of idea debris. I can’t stop the ideas.

The spigot is busted. The water just keeps running.

I take any ideas that survive the Identification and Scrutinization Process (which is to say, I take a long stare into the idea’s dark heart to see if there’s anything there or if it’s just a hollow wiffle ball rattling around my skull-cage), and I write those down. This is a somewhat broken part of my process because I fail to have one consistent place where I organize this material. Sometimes the phone. Other times a notebook. Occasionally I input ‘em right into Word. I completely fail at having my ideas wrangled into a single enclosed space. I do eventually rustle ‘em up and throw ‘em together, but it takes me far too long to do so.

The good news here is, ideas that continue to bubble up to the surface regardless of their scattershot rag-tag nature are usually the ideas that matter most to me — they demand my attention instead of scurrying away.

The Chalk Outline

I outline because I must, not because I particularly enjoy it. I am a pantser by heart, a plotter by necessity — without outlines, my novels spiral drunkenly toward utter incoherence, breaking like a dropped cookie.

The way I outline is different for every book, but here’s the general gist of it:

I figure out my major story turns, broken out into acts.

Then I start jotting down plot beats — this happens, then this happen, then that, then this. Maria dies. The unicorn ascends to the Aluminum Throne. John steals the Camero. The end. How many of these beats I outline isn’t preset; I just keep going until the thing is done. The beats are generally large and sequence-shaped rather than small and scene-flavored. The key thing is to make sure I hit all my tentpoles — meaning, those plot events that are needed for the story to stand up and not collapse upon itself.

Sometimes I use spreadsheets.

I don’t generally outline much in the way of character or dialogue or even the bigger, broader story — because I have a hard time with plot, it’s important that I get the story sequence down right from the get-go.

Those other pieces I prefer to discover within the outline. Though once in a while I’ll write down three key character elements that mark the arc — meaning, the character’s transition from A–>B–>C.

I outline whenever I have time. Afternoons, nights, weekends. I often outline a number of novels far ahead of the writing; I’ve long had a rough outline for the third Miriam Black book, The Cormorant, f’rex.

The Actual Writing

For writing, I tend to begin at 6AM and end around noon.

As noted, I write 2-4k per day, most days. Toward the end of a project I may see as much as 10k in a day.

I write the actual book inside Microsoft Word, though my (admittedly slow) transition to Mac may see me soon writing a first draft in Scrivener and then porting over to Word for edits.

(If I’m writing a script, I use Final Draft.)

I have to unearth the “proper” font for every project. It’s one of my few writing rituals.

I write nothing in pen because my handwriting looks like the bloody footprints of a wounded sparrow. Or, if you prefer a different metaphor: the sloppy hieroglyphics of a meth-addled Pharaoh. YOU DECIDE.

Upon each new day of writing I like to read over the last scene or chapter just to freshen myself up. At the end of each day of writing, I tend to jot down a couple quick notes for the following day’s efforts.

I also like to stop writing in the middle of a scene instead of at the end. I used to try to get to a conclusion point but I find cutting in the middle gives me unexpected energy to jump back into it.

I work in one file on my actual computer, but I save multiple copies across DropBox, one per day of writing. I also have a backup drive that my file goes to. If I’m feeling particularly paranoid, I’ll email it to myself.

I also save obsessively. Every five minutes I hit the save hotkey. This, erm, “saves” me a lot of frustration.

I do not write new blog content during the week, usually. That’s reserved for the weekend.

To Fix It, You Must Break It

That is a thing I believe about writing and, in fact, most things: to fix something, you sometimes gotta break it. And editing is often about breaking a thing apart — I realize I’m repeating myself, but it’s my bloggy and I’ll reiterate if I wanna: writing is when you make the words, editing is when you make them not shitty.

I edit in the afternoons. A couple-few hours every day, provided I have a project to edit. I do not edit a story as I go, but only after it’s complete. (Once in a while if I identify a problem very early on I’ll do some major rewriting before I finish, but for the most part I find to be productive I have to churn and burn through the draft before I get to the editing phase, where the story is truly born.)

Ideally, I let the story sit for a month or three.

At that point I tend to do a pass on my own, and get a second draft out of it.

I then move that draft onto… well, whoever. Readers. Editor(s). Agent. My toddler. Your Mom. Etc.

I do my own notes and expect notes back using Word’s Track Changes function. Comment bubbles and in-draft redlines are key to my process. No word processor I’ve found has this function down outside Word.

How badly I edit the story really just depends on the story. Blackbirds saw years of writing and rewriting, but when I actually had a finished draft, very little of it changed from that draft to the one that published.

But Popcorn, the first book of my upcoming YA trilogy (“Heartland”), saw a year’s worth of rewriting. I wrote it the month before my son was born, and spent the rest of the year hammering it into shape at the behest of my agent. And the edits I’m sure are far from done — I’ve got new edits coming in from my editor at Amazon Children’s Publishing. (And I’m very excited to see those.)

Post-Coital Shame

A project is never done but there comes a point when I say, “It has to be done whether I like it that way or not,” and deadlines really help to form that critical and creative Rubicon.

When I’m done, I send it off to whoever needs it (agent, editor, a cat in a spaceship orbiting Pluto), and that’s that. I feel a wave of excitement and triumph and sometimes reward myself with “something” (new music, ice cream, a cat in a spaceship orbiting Pluto), and then somewhere thereafter I feel a sense of post-masturbatory shame — like, a great yawning emptiness brimming with the ghosts of shame and guilt and creative undoing, all of which are nicely mitigated by me going back to the beginning (idea! outline! writing! editing!) and riding the storytelling carousel around for another go.

*insert creepy calliope music here*

And that’s it.

That’s my process.

Every book is different, of course.

And every writer is different.

Now go and find your own process. Plant a flag. Buy intellectual real estate.

And dance upon the gassy corpses of anybody who said you can’t do this.

Because fuck those people right in the face-holes.

Things That Are Happening Now Or That Will Happen Soon: An Update!

Time to wiggle my toes in the waters of Wuzza, Wooza, Wendig?

Here’s what’s going on:

Sabrina Ogden is one of the nicest and most genuine people I have ever encountered in this life (and likely in any other). She’s also a darling book blogger and an all-around wonderful human being. At present, Sabrina needs surgery on her jaw that health insurance will not pay for, and so a bunch of authors have joined an anthology to help her get what she needs. I’m in there, along with folks like Tommy Pluck, Stephen Blackmoore, Dan O’Shea, Joelle Charbonneau, Steve Weddle, and others. The anthology is up at IndieGoGo — “Feeding Kate” — and money raised will go toward paying for the surgery. Money raised in excess will go toward a Lupus charity. Please consider giving even a fiver (which earns you an e-copy of this anthology). Great stories in your hand and a great person helped by your effort.

Have you met Mookie Pearl? Mookie the Mook! Mookie the Meat-Man! You can read a little bit about him here — he’s the protagonist of my short story, “Charcuterie,” which shows up in an upcoming anthology called “The New Hero, Volume I.” Ah, but there’s more. Mookie’s also front and center of my next Angry Robot release, The Blue Blazes, which drops sometime next year. (That’s Mookie at the top of the page; art by the mighty Gene Ha.)

Hey! Look! A new series from Abaddon — Gods & Monsters — with the first novel by yours truly. It’s called Unclean Spirits and you can read more about it riiiiiiight here.

Bait Dog is done and in reading/editing — so far, I think I’m on track to have the book into backers hands by the end of this month, unless everybody comes back to me and tells me it’s a big bag of awful. (If that happens, I’ll spend a few days sobbing into my Hello Kitty pillow then I’ll get back on the hell-beast I call my steed and we’ll ride forth toward a new plan.) Physical copies of the book will take a little more time, obviously, as summoning a digital object into meatspace is no swift task.

Mockingbird, the follow-up to Blackbirds, hits very soon — end of August, as a matter of fact. First review is in the door! The British Fantasy Society says: “There’s a particularly inventive killer and some especially vulnerable girls in danger, and Wendig grabs you by the face and drags you through those 384 pages with the pacing of a craftsman.” You can preorder here at Amazon — other pre-order links as I get ‘em.

Next appearance: WorldCon in Chicago (Aug 30 – Sept 3rd), with I believe a book signing at The Book Cellar that Friday night alongside Gwenda Bond, Kim Curran and Adam Christopher!

Then I’m at Crossroads Writer’s Conference in Macon, GA from Oct. 5th to the 7th.

Then I’m at Storyworld in Los Angeles from Oct. 17th to the 19th –

And I remain in LA for the Writer’s Digest Conference West from the 19th to the 21st.

Just in case you missed my promo fusillade: my new writing e-book is out! 500 Ways To Tell A Better Story. $2.99.

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Android And The Wondering Chamber

Last week’s challenge? “The Fairy Tale Upgrade.”

A few weeks back I was playing with that random sentence generator used in another flash fiction challenge, and I got what was, for me, a truly fascinating story-inspiring sentence.

That sentence:

“The noticed android walks past a wondering chamber.”

I don’t know what the fuck that means, but I like it.

So, your flash fiction challenge should utilize this sentence.

In fact, it should be your opening sentence.

After that, you’ve got up to 1000 words to tell the story, whatever that story may be.

Post online at your space, then drop a link here so we can all see it.

Due by Friday July 20th at noon EST.

Lisa Cron: The Terribleminds Interview

Lisa Cron wants to help you write better not just by teaching you better skills but by cracking open your brain and showing you how it’s wired to tell those stories. Since I’m all about smashing open people’s heads with a rock (though Lisa assures me that’s not how it’s done), here she sits down for an interview. Wired for Story now available! Check out www.wiredforstory.com and seek her on Twitter (@LisaCron).

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

Many years ago a friend of mine was traveling with a buddy. They were down on their luck, and often got so low on money that they only had enough for gas. They never went hungry though, thanks to a tip they got from an aging hobo. Every night they’d pull up behind a hotel banquet room at about ten and go into the kitchen. They’d say that they were on the road and had run out of dog food, and the stores were closed, and could they just have some scraps. It always worked. No one wants a dog to go hungry.

Why do you tell stories?

Because people listen to stories. They can choose whether or not to listen to facts or headlines or “truths” but stories? They can’t help it.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Remember, the reader believes that everything in your story is there on a need-to-know basis, so they assume that everything you tell them is critically important to their understanding of what’s going on. They trust you implicitly on this. That means that when you tell them things that they don’t actually need to know, they’re going to spend time inventing reasons why you might have told them, which means that pretty soon they’re reading an entirely different story than the one you’re writing. And as soon as they figure that out, they defenestrate* the book and go see what’s on TV.

* Oh, one more thing, the bigger the word, the less emotion it conveys — not to mention meaning. Handy case in point: defenesrate, otherwise known as “chucking something out of a window.” I always wanted a real reason to use that word. Thanks!

What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t outline. If trust your muse and just write, the story will appear.

What goes into writing a strong character? Bonus round: give an example of a strong character.

A strong character is a character who’s conflicted, which means you need to figure out what issue they’re struggling with, internally, before you begin writing. The goal is to dig deep in their backstory, but with the guidance of a treasure map, not by tearing up the whole damn yard. You’re looking for the specific issue that’s holding them back, not everything that’s ever happened to them.

You want to pinpoint two things: First, the event in their past that knocked their worldview out of alignment, triggering the internal issue that keeps them from achieving their goal. Second, the inception of their desire for the goal itself, which tells us what achieving it really means to them.

Only then can you construct a plot that will compel them to either deal with their issue, or give up. Which is why digging into their past is so important. After all, everything a character does is based on how they see the world (just like us, in real life). We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. So knowing how they see the world – and where and why their interpretation is off — not only allows you to write a strong character, but to create a compelling plot that will force said character to actually be strong.

And – this is the brilliant thing – it will tell you what it is they have to learn at the end in order to succeed. In other words, their “Aha!” moment – which is ultimately what the story is about.  As T.S. Eliot so elegantly said, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.” A strong character learns to let go of how he or she saw things, and see it fresh, with new eyes.

A perfect example of a strong character who does exactly that, although he seems utterly genteel in present company, is George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

Books: The book I’ve read recently that grabbed me from the get-go and never let up is a debut novel called Cannibal Reign by Thomas Koloniar.  I loved it because beneath its pounding post-apocalyptic thriller heart, beats a nuanced novel about what it means to be human when all bets are off.  It’s a visceral ride, and one that allowed me to experience just how precarious our social contract really is.  It had never dawned on me that because men are physically bigger and stronger than women, should society collapse, women could easily become fair game.  Sure, I might have thought about it, but this novel made me feel it, and that made all the difference.  Yep, gonna finally take a self-defense class.

Movies suck. It’s been years since I saw a movie so absorbing that I forgot I was watching a movie. And DON’T get me started on The Avengers; there’s something scary afoot that such a ham-handed, story-less, pointless, ultimately bland-if-you-think-about-it movie would do so phenomenally well.  I’m really curious about it. It has no story. It’s about a bad guy who wants power – more power than anyone has ever had, we’re told. Power to do what? To what end? Why? No clue. And the so-called “Avengers”? They never risk anything, nothing ever costs them anything, they don’t learn anything, and everything always works out, so who cares? And the CGI? Sheesh. Half the time I thought I was watching an upgraded episode of The Power Rangers.

These days, I think the best visual storytelling around is in long form TV — The Sopranos in particular – it doesn’t get better than that. I watch it over and over, and every time I see something new.  The third and fourth seasons of The Wire are brilliant, (although you still have to watch it from the start for it to make sense).  The best current show, I think, is Homeland. Here’s hoping it has a long run.

You’ve been in publishing and in Hollywood: what’s the biggest thing that stories get wrong? What should stories do better?

The biggest thing writers get wrong is that they mistake the plot for the story. In other words, they believe that the external things that happen are what the story is about. The truth is that the external things only happen in order to force the protagonist to deal with an inner issue that’s keeping her from getting what she wants and thus solving the story problem. The moment of realization – the “aha” moment — is what the story is actually about.

I can’t tell you how many manuscripts I’ve read where if someone asked me what it was about, all I could say would be, “It’s about 300 pages.” Not to mention how many screenplays I’ve read where I’ve thought of the author, “Okay, this is the person who’s never seen a movie.” It goes back to Flannery O’Connor’s observation: “I find most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” My goal is to change that.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

My favorite word is clobber. I just love how it sounds. Especially in this poem, which my best friend’s entire first grade class collectively wrote for their school paper, The Dixie Canyon Chronicle:

Coconuts, coconuts in a tree

One fell down and clobbered me

As for curse words, I love them all. I love swearing. My favorite? Is fuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! a word?

And can I add that when used as a verb, fuck is also one of my favorite words? Substituting the phrase “make love” makes my skin crawl. Ditto using “passed away” for dead. Words pack power, to edge away from that power is to edge away from the really interesting part of life, the part we can’t really tame or domesticate. That’s why I don’t trust people who make a point of never swearing.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I love red wine best. But it can’t be sweet at all. I loathe sweet drinks, even a hint of sweet turns me off. Someone gave me a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, and while it was real smooth, it had a slight underlying sweetness that made me crave rot gut (not that I’ve ever had rot gut, mind you, but I watched enough Westerns to know).

But when it comes to mood altering substances, my drink of choice is caffeine. I could easily give up alcohol, but I couldn’t live without coffee  – the darker the better.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable war against the robots?

I don’t rust.

Wired For Story attempts to train storytellers in “cognitive storytelling strategies” to help them tell better stories by essentially appealing to the crazy science of the brain. What drove you to dive deep into the gray matter of this topic?

Great question! I’d been working with writers for decades, formulating my theory about story, but back then I used “wired” as a metaphor. Sure, I believed it was fact, but I couldn’t prove it. Meanwhile, I’d always been interested in neuroscience, and then suddenly one day every article I read seemed to relate to what I’d always known about how story affects the brain – and even better, why. It was the biggest “aha” moment of my life. In one fell swoop the theory I’d spent years developing, honing and sharpening was revealed as fact.  We are wired for story. Understanding what a story actually is and why our brain evolved to respond to it is a game changer for writers.

After my epiphany, I dove into neuroscience in a big way, reading everything I could get my hands on.  It’s unbelievably fascinating because, as that movie producer at the beginning of Citizen Kane barks, “There’s nothing more interesting than finding out what makes people tick.” That’s exactly what neuroscience is doing. And you know the really crazy thing? Neuroscience is proving what writers have always known: that the pen is mightier than the sword. Writers are the most powerful people in the world.

What surprises you most about the human brain?

What surprised – and delighted — me most about the human brain is that feelings are physical, not ephemeral, and evolved as the basis of how we determine what things actually mean, and every action we take – “reason” then plays catch up. And here’s the kicker: this is a good thing, rather than what we’ve been taught to believe — that emotion undermines reason. As science writer Jonah Lehrer says, “If it weren’t for our emotions, reason wouldn’t exist at all.”

You can’t imagine the wild glee I felt when I learned this – especially given that our society was built on marginalizing women for being “emotional” whereas real men never let emotion cloud their rational, logical “accurate” judgment. Take that, boys!

And of course this brings us right back to story: just like life, all story is emotion based. Story is about what it costs the protagonist – emotionally – to overcome the internal issue that’s keeping her from attaining her goal, and not about the buildings and bridges she has to blow up to do it.

There exists a glut of writing advice books out there (I should know, having clogged the pipes with my own suspect opinions): why should writers take a second look at yours?

Oh what the hell, I might as well say it straight out: I think every writer should read my book first, before they read any other book. Why? Because it’s not about writing, it’s about story. The trouble with starting with any of the other writing books out there is they tend to focus in on the mechanics of language and writing, or the glory of unleashing your creativity, or both. There’s nothing wrong with that per se (I love your take on writing), but in so many of those books there’s the tacit implication that by learning to “write well” you’ll know how to write a story. It couldn’t be less true.

Sure, learning to write well is a good thing, but only once a writer really understands what a story is – I’m not talking story-structure, mind you – but story itself. Knowing what the reader’s brain is really responding to when they can’t put the book down, and how to craft a story that delivers it, is the most important thing a writer can learn. It’s also the first thing a writer should learn.

Right now, no one else is writing about what I do – in fact, on one else is teaching it. I just finished teaching a nine month master class in novel writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program – these were accomplished writers who’d spent years studying writing, including one who’d just received an MFA from one of the country’s most prestigious universities – and the thing I heard most often was that they wished they’d read my book before they started writing. Especially the woman who’d just gotten an MFA.

Sheesh, self promotion has never come easily to me, and I’m not saying I’m brilliant or anything, just that I’ve stumbled onto something that no one else is talking about – and run with it.

Do you plan to take the storytelling lessons learned and apply them to your own work? Will we see a novel or a film from you?

Maybe! But for now, there’s nothing I love more than working with writers, and helping them wrestle the story in their head onto the page.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

I want to take my message about how the brain processes story far and wide.  It’s such a game changer, and my goal is to help writers understand what story is before they start writing.  The scary thing is that right now, it’s advertisers, right wing politicians and televangelists who really understand the power of story, and how to wield it.  I want to change the equation, so that many more writers, the nonprofit world and politicians who need to learn how to use story (Democrats, are you listening?) have that same power.

Transmissions From Toddler-Town: “Feed Me, Seymour”

Baby B-Dub continues to be an adorable human tornado. He is in many ways the butterfly that spawns the storm and the storm the butterfly spawns. He is chaos theory. He is delight.

I mean, he’s not always delight.

There’s the separation anxiety, and the teething, and the moodiness.

You know. The toddler stuff.

But one of the fun things now is feeding him food that is adult or almost adult in origin — stuff that doesn’t need to be pureed or chopped quite so finely, stuff that he can gnaw through even with his meager two bottom teeth. Sometimes, the kid is a bonafide eating machine.

So, I come to you Parental Humans Of The Internet and I ask:

What do you (or did you) feed your toddlers?

I’m looking for recipes, if anybody is willing to share.

25 Bad Writer Behaviors

Lately, I’ve seen some writers acting like no writer should. And it occurs to me that there’s an unholy host of behaviors that writers sometimes manifest — myself included! — that we need to watch. So, here’s a whole list of said “bad behaviors.” These are not all equal and they’re not all going to bury your career or anything, but you should stand vigil against them just the same.

1. Being An Unprofessional Fucking Asshole

Most of the items on the list fall into this category, but it feels like this needs to be said just to act as a net to catch all the naughty writerly behaviors that will slip through — don’t let your “brand” become, “That unprofessional flaming shit-bird who did that really unprofessional shitbird thing and now it’s a stain on his career like a permanent skidmark that bled through his tighty-whities and onto his khaki shorts.” If ever you’re about to perform a questionable action in person or online, ask yourself: “Is this how a professional acts? Or is this how a rampant jabber-jawed cock-waffling jerk-monster acts?” Choose wisely!

2. Responding To Negative Reviews (With More Negativity)

Fact: some people are not going to like your writing. Some people will not like your writing for reasons that are incomprehensible to you or for reasons that may cause you to sit and simmer and twitch and pee a little. Some will write negative reviews that are insightful. Some will write negative reviews that have all the wit and wisdom of a moldy stump. Do not engage. Or, at least, do not engage with negativity. Sometimes, I like to kill them with kindness. Crushing them in an eerie robotic embrace where I politely thank them and recommend for them another work of mine or perhaps the work of another author I respect. But they’re due their opinion, even if their opinion is, “I read the first five-and-a-half pages and it made me so mad I had to write this cranky one-star-review on Goodreads.” Such is the Internet. Leave it alone.

3. Fighting With Other Authors

You know who wins when authors battle authors online? Time-traveling Nazi grizzly bears. Because they win whenever anything bad happens. Authors: don’t get in a scuffle with other authors. Or, frankly, with anybody. Disagreements are one thing. Discussions, fine. Arguments are even okay, long as everyone stays polite. But don’t let it become a scuffle. Don’t be prickly. Don’t call anybody names. Because even if you’re right, you’re wrong. Wrestle with pigs, you’re gonna get muddy. Not worth it.

4. Not Reading Submission Guidelines

Submission guidelines — be they for a literary magazine, a blog, an agent or a publisher — exist for a reason. They’re not arbitrary. A bunch of editors didn’t just get high one night and giggle-snort their way through a bunch of absurd guidelines (“I’m supposed to include an SASE, a hamster, and a naked photo of my mother?”). They’re not pulling the wings off a fly; these guidelines exist for a reason. It’s making somebody’s difficult job (a job that entails fishing through dumpsters of sludge to find a rare gem) just a wee bit easier. Guidelines aren’t suggestions. Follow them.

5. Querying An Unfinished Manuscript

“Here, I half-cooked a chicken. White on the outside, pink and gooey on the inside. I call the raw parts ‘cluck butter.’ It’s like salmonella sashimi. It’s so good.” You don’t hand someone half-cooked food. You don’t half-paint a room then trumpet your proud accomplishment. So don’t query your half-a-dick manuscript (or, for the ladies, a half-a-vagina manuscript) to the world. Finish. Finish strong. Then send.

6. Annoying Editors And Agents

Editors and agents have it tough. They get a lot of shit for being gatekeepers, but here’s what happens at the gate: they stand there, arms and mouths open while a garbage truck backs up (beep beep beep) and unloads a mountain of submissions upon them daily. And, spoiler warning, ninety percent of those submissions won’t cut it. Hell, a not unreasonable percentage are toxic enough that I’m surprised Homeland Security doesn’t show up with hazmat suits and flamethrowers. So, when you annoy them with constant emails, unedited manuscripts, work that’s already been self-published or with crazily presumptive tweets, well, it just puts them one step closer to a water tower with a rifle. I’m not saying every editor and agent is a shining example, but they don’t deserve you acting like a grit of sand in the elastic of one’s underoos.

7. Responding To Rejection With Rageface

I’ve gotten some really strong rejections that taught me about the work. I’ve received rejections that were as tepid and nutritional as a cup of warm salt water. I’ve gotten rejections that were mean — mean the way a yellowjacket is mean, mean the way an unsexed Internet troll is mean. Your response should be to learn something, then move on. Your response should not be to kick a hole in your drywall and then formulate the perfect scathing response (“I REJECT YOU, SCUM-SLATHERED GUARDIAN OF THE ELITIST PUBLISHING GATES”). Calm down. Drink some chamomile.

8. Rageface, Part II: Revision Time

Your work is an ugly rock that, when thrown into the rock tumbler, comes out a polished stone. The rock tumbler is, in this clumsy metaphor, the process of revisions and that often involves getting notes from others aimed at improving the story. Such critical notes are by no means automatically helpful, but what you should never do is dig your heels in and act like a petulant whiny-head who feels threatened by the editorial process. Editors and note-givers are trying to help. Be nice, even if you disagree.

9. Drunkenly And Tweeting Awful Things To People

Yeah, don’t do that.

10. Spamming Anybody With Anything Ever

There exists a not-so-fine line between self-promotion and spamming-the-shit-out-of-people. The line is, in fact, thick as a brick. Self-promo becomes spam promo soon as you become annoying with it. Soon as you stop pushing anything but your ME ME ME solipsistic fap-wank and gain equivalence to some out-of-control spam-bot. Yes, you can promote your work. I don’t follow a writer hoping he’ll keep shut about his new book, film, comic, or pornographic memoir. I just want him to talk about other stuff too. Your self-promo needs to be a pair of pom-poms, not a pair of claw hammers. Oh! And if you Auto-DM me anything ever I will find you and throw you out of one helicopter and into the spinning blades of another. Your blood-mist will rain down on an unsuspecting populace and they will cheer me.

11. Acting Racist, Sexist, Misogynist, Any Of The Hateful -Ists

I don’t even need to tell you this and, if I do, you’re probably not going to listen anyway. But don’t be a prejudiced, hate-fueled fuck-muffin. Okay? Not on purpose. Not accidentally. Not at all. As they say on the tough streets of America: “You best inspect thyself beforest thou misdirect thyself.” Or something. I’VE GOT STREET CRED SHUT UP. *gesticulates made-up gang signs then weeps quietly under desk*

12. The Authorial Meltdown

Ahh, the writer. Greased up in his own fluids, sloppily slamming himself against the walls of his Plexiglas enclosure. Melting down in public (and trust me, “on the Internet” soooo counts as being “in public”). Something-something gatekeepers. Something-something some publisher did. Something-something Amazon. Or maybe just inchoate wails of gibberish. Button that up. No meltdowns. I know that’s easier said than done — it’s not like we control our meltdowns, exactly, but forewarned is forearmed.

13. Plagiarizing Somebody Else’s Hard Work

That’s a dick move, dude. And also so obvious I shouldn’t need to tell you that writers live and die by the things that come pouring out of their headbuckets and when you repurpose their creative brain-juice as your own, Zombie Ernest Hemingway rises from the grave with a double-barrel shotgun with one barrel for your face, and the other for your crotch. We are what we write. You be you. I’ll be me.

14. Blowing Out Your Deadlines

Somebody didn’t just draw your deadline out of a deck of cards. It’s a date that somebody needs you to hit so that things can happen as they’re supposed to happen — editing and design and whatever. You miss it, you just made someone else’s life harder. Now, if you’re a writer who assumes himself the center of the creative universe, well, hey, fuck it. But if you’re a writer who realizes his impact on others: maybe hit your deadlines so that somebody isn’t scrambling to cut the slack in your rope.

15. Ignoring Your Assignment

If you’re a freelance writer, you are likely to receive instruction — “I need 2,000 words on bear-sexing by Tuesday.” What you should not do is come back on Tuesday and say, “I’ve written 5,000 words on how Ukranian falconry created the secular celibacy boom of the late 1980s.” Do the work that is assigned to you. When developing games I saw this with some frequency, and man, it always irritated my peehole into a ragged, flaming crater. Though that might’ve also been, uhh, something else.

16. Making A Butt-Ton Of Excuses

I see you, writers. And I judge. Because I’m a judgey-faced judge-hole from Planet Motherfucking Sizing-You-Up whose sole hobby is analyzing the cut of your jib. I see you on the Twitters. On the Faceyspaces. In your bloggery cottages. I see your excuses. Time. Children. Work. Sick. Writer’s block. Sleepy muse. Elk attack. Ennui. And all I think is, “It’s awfully easy for us to dig a hole with a shovel made of our own excuses.” What you think are reasons, mmm, well, probably aren’t.

17. Writing Without Editing

Writing without editing is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Or dressing yourself with your eyes closed. Or trying to have sex with a bear without ever having read a manual on bear-sexing and also without wearing chainmail, which is a critical part of the “bear sex” equation, I’ve found. Haven’t you?

18. Self-Publishing Your Worst Instead Of Your Best

“I invented this thing when I was drunk last night. It, like, chops onions really fast. I guess. So, I’m going to slap my name on it and stick it on the shelf at Target. I wouldn’t let any children touch it because I’m pretty sure it’ll cut their fingers off. It’s also dog-fuck ugly, like, I mean, it looks like mannequin poop. But my name’s on it! It’s all me! Tell your friends!” Nobody does this anywhere but publishing, I suspect — and yet, that’s basically what too many “indie” authors do, they shove a blob of Play-Dough onto a dirty paper plate and call it a meal. Stop that. You earn a special place in Author Hell for that.

19. Fighting In The Trenches Of The Any Imaginary War

Indie punches traditional, Amazon karate-chops B&N, print pees in the eyes of digital, whatever. The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story.

20. Flinging Sour Grapes At Authors More Successful Than You

Your envy is not productive. Not when you keep it inside and, when you let it out, it actually runs the risk of being counter-productive. Eat a fistful of sour grapes, you’ll get that “looks-like-smells-shit” face. And nobody wants to be around anybody making that face. Jealousy is unattractive. And frankly, boring.

21. Bludgeoning Folks With Your Ego

Guy rides by on a super-noisy motorcycle or whips by in some psycho-fast sports car, I like to smile and wave and loudly compliment that dude on his very tiny penis. The louder and more ego-fed you are, the less you usually have to back it up. It’s like a butterfly trying to look like an owl. Fuck that. Be the owl. The owl doesn’t need to advertise because he’s a motherfucking owl, son. Cool the ego. Nobody wants to see it.

22. Acting Like A Bully

Taking the ego up a notch is when authors act like bullies. They have an opinion or a story or some measure of success and they use it to shove everybody around. It’s gross. You should be ashamed.

23. “Hey, Will You Read My Manuscript?”

First, this: “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script.” Second, consider aspects not mentioned there: like, say, the fact that there exist legal concerns for an author reading another author’s unpublished work — I read your book about Hot Mummy Erotica and then decide one day I want to write my own Completely Different Hot Mummy Erotica tome (50 Shades of Mum-MAY? I’m so sorry), then you’re going to get all litigious on me. As a sidenote, this is very much one of those laws I broke early on. I asked Christopher Moore to read something of mine and he was very nice and very polite in putting me in my place.

24. Failing To Appreciate Your Audience

Don’t be rude to your audience. Don’t dismiss them. Don’t treat them like idiots or like they owe you something. They’re the reason you’re here. They’re the reason you get to do what you do.

25. Talking About Writing Without Actually Writing

I distrust writing advice from writers who appear to never write anything. So too do I see too many writers talking about writing without actually committing pen to paper (or fingers to keys or, I dunno, ink-dipped genitals to linoleum floor), and that’s a super-huge-mega-no-no. Now, I’m not averse to talking about writing. I talk about writing a lot. What do you think I just did for the last 2200 words? But I also wrote 2000 words today not in the blog, 2000 words today of “I’m walking the walk, talking the talk, slinging the ink, punching the panda.” Talking about writing is just another way to waste time, in public, except here the clever ruse is how very productive it feels. It ain’t. Writing means writing. Writing doesn’t mean talking. So get off the soapbox. Set aside the microphone. Pick up that pen before I stab you with it.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING: $0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY: $4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF