Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 243

Dan Goldman: The Terribleminds Interview

I met Dan a couple-few years ago at DIY Days in New York, and before I knew what was happening he was beaming high-grade hallucinogens into my heart using his laser-eyes, and then we spent the next 72 hours riding cloud dragons and fucking up corrupt politicians with robotic borer beetles and corn weevils. It’s also possible I just ate a bad salad and tripped balls in my own bedroom, but whatever. Dan’s an uber-creative, an artist and author, and he was kind enough to ingest a high-test dose of my interview nanites. Dan’s the man behind SHOOTING WAR and RED LIGHT PROPERTIES. His site: dangoldman.net. Him in the Twittertubes: @dan_goldman.

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.

“Where It Goes”

Spencer Tyrell was already late for work at the Cinnabon when he killed that pigeon.

His ratty Adidas pumped BMX pedals all the way up the boardwalk back to his old hood, now the upscale part of T-Beach. He squinted into the salty breeze, dodging open cracks where the sun baked open the asphalt like overdone cookies, bouncing his bike up onto sidewalk of The Promenade. Once it was Tanga Beach Drive, the street he used to live on, the street where he’d snapped the shinbone of Dana’s tequila-crazed hubby with a foot of steel pipe and he carried her upstairs into his crib, where she finally was his for a little while. Their run-down apartment building was bulldozed twelve days after his landlord evicted the last tenant, but Dana bulldozed him months before the real estate developers took a lucrative opportunity to re-zone T-Beach into gated communities. Dana followed her lucrative opportunity into some silver fox’s shiny BMW sedan and he never saw her again.

Now The Promenade was closed to cars to maximize commercial foot-traffic and tourists’ spendy-spendy. He whizzed past a NO BIKES sign under a NO SKATEBOARDS sign under a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DRUGS sign. They liked to keep it perfect out here and not the scare the straights, pushing back the local T-Beach flavor of discarded needles and bloody condoms and stray puddles of bum-diarrhea another few blocks west, out of sight. Now this place had that generic glamour of California-as-seen-on-TV, stinking of fruitsy aromatherapy and uplifting-slash-oversincere rock ballads and perfectly-manifactured bedhead, that soft-focus lip-gloss American Dream.

The Cinnabon was eight blocks down The Promenade, a nice walk on foot but by bicycle a speedy tunnel-tour through most of America’s major mall-friendly brands of clothing, consumer electronics and chain restaurants. The Cinnabon sat at the ass end of it with the rest of the cheaper shit.

His phone beeped and it was Randy again, calling to see if he’d be coming into work at all today. This time he answered it: “Randy. I’m on my way, I’m passing The Cheesecake Factory right now.”

“Okay good; Michael already told me I have to fire you if you’re not here by nine-thirty on the dot. He means it this time.”

“I’ll see you in a minute.”

“Good… I also think maybe we should talk about–”

“I just passed the Pollos Hermanos now; can we do this in person?”

He hung up on Randy. Religious, naive, fat-assed Randy. If not for her giant white badunkadunk that made it impossible to pass her behind the Cinnabon counter without goosing it with a little dick-sauce, last night probably never would’ve happened. She’d declared herself a born-again virgin before taking the assistant manager position, but Spence remembered her when she was just another blunt-rolling easy beach chick. Whether she was totally against premarital sex now or just using it as another layer of professional makeup, she still grunted like a rutting sow last night after she tripped over the pallet-jack in the delivery truck and planted that oversized fuck-pillow right into his lap with a burning after-tremor of We Both Know What Happens Next. And for the record, she was the one who wanted it up the ass, which was surely what she needed to talk to Spence about. Spence grinned about it now, sniffed his fingers and spit on the sidewalk when a pigeon landed in front of him.

There were usually clouds of them in the thoroughfare, chittering underneath the café tables to catch falling muffin crumbs — filthy fucking things — but they always took off as he wheeled closer. Then this one stupid one landed directly in front of him, bobbed its retarded head a few times, looked up at Spence’s incoming front tire with just time enough for two red-eyed blinks. He tried to weave left around it but the dummy did the same and went right under the tire. He felt the bike bounce and the bird-bones crunch through the BMX’s frame, through the rubber-grip handles, and what was once a bird was now a broken tangle of still-lit life-systems now on nerve-fire, wrapped in feathers. The sound went up into his gut and down to his fingertips slow enough that by the time his fingers squeezed the handbrakes, the pigeon was smearing blood for a good two feet under his bike’s back wheel, the smell of burnt feathers and rubber back coming up over his shoulder.

Johnny Rockets diners dropped their burgers on either side of him, gasped in several languages, mommies covered their kids’ eyes. Spence stepped off the bike and let it coast past him a few feet before it clattered to the pavement. He went back to the bird. It was alive but in shock, cooing like nothing happened. A little blonde girl screamed and hid her face in her mother’s pushed-up cleavage.

A man in a polo shirt covered his cellhone and barked: “For God’s sake, put the thing out of its misery!” Spence glared at him and stepped over the bird, sinking to a squat over the twist of splayed feathers and splintered bone. The bird’s neck and head were untouched, bobbing back and forth above its ruined body, trying to understand.

The Promenade sounds dropped away until there was just the sea and the rustle of palm trees and the pigeon’s confused, frantic blinking. Spence leaned over it, blocking out the palm trees, blocking out the sun… blanketing the bird in his cooling shadow where it would die.

It locked its red-irised eyes with his as it shook, its gold-rimmed pupils dilated all the way. Without breaking his gaze, the pigeon slowly dipped its neck down until the tip of its beak tapped the sidewalk, a tiny red bubble inflating from its nostrils to the size of a grape before popping with a tiny mist. Its mouth opened and blood began to run out, pooling around its head. Spence leaned into closer, stared deeper into the black of the pigeon’s pupil and fell in.

There was wind on the backs of his legs as the sidewalk dropped away, the sun was swallowed, the California heat snuffed out. Wrapped in a blanket of cold black, Spence was there with the bird, was the bird, was a tired lick escaping his own ruined body to fall through a burning rollercoaster of sparks and stars and scars and hurt toward a faraway point of purple fire where there was music, a soft womblike music with notes made of cubes. It was almost as if-

Sun. Trees. A hand clapped on his shoulder, dark hairs sprouting off the knuckles. The bloop-squawk of a rentacop’s radio: “Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to clear the Promenade thoroughfare; we’re sending maintenance over to clean up the bird.”

Spence stood up, sweating. His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He took it out, looked at the time (9:38) and the text message (DONT BOTHER COMING IN, FIRED). Picking up his bike, he wheeled it back around past the mangled pigeon, its black pupil now a dull, empty thing.

It was gone.

Why do you tell stories?

Probably as a survival instinct; growing up, everyday life was rarely as interesting as what was playing upstairs in my head, and even when it was, my thoughts and memories would spin around up there until they broke off from the reality and started to hop around on their own. I think I started “writing” by rolling around on the living room floor with He-Man toys: jumping off from the crappy cartoon’s mythology, I’d cooked up this single ongoing narrative that advanced itself one chapter every time I picked up the toys. When I finished my epic five years later with its inevitable cosmos-shattering conclusion, I packed up the toys and gave them to my younger cousin. That was my first THE END.

By default, my skull fills up with ideas and characters, especially when there’s some kind of water involved — washing dishes, taking showers, swimming, brushing teeth, sitting by the ocean — finished scenarios drop in from Nowhere to Right Here. Without the release of writing, these worlds don’t just magically dissolve just because I’m ignoring. I spent a few years here and there where I wasn’t ass-in-chair with any real discipline, and I started getting a bit koo-koo and had to write my way back out.

My undefinable “story-place” was always my favorite and unique part of myself, the part I wanted to show to other people, maybe even have them love me for it. As I got older, storytelling became a conscious choice, then a hobby, then a discipline, then a career… but in the end, this is how I want to do with my remaining time in this body.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Have receptive and genuinely-interested Someone with whom you can verbally stumble through your ideas with. I tend to go deep inside myself while doing the actual writing and don’t talk about it with anyone until there’s lots of pages to read, but in a project’s formative stages, I lay in a dark bedroom with my brain racing and just talk my poor wife’s ears off about the new thing. She’s very patient and a great listener because she’s lived with me long enough to understand that in the process of my explaning the story to her, I’m actually connecting its dots in way I haven’t done yet in my document. Talking the pieces through is a vomit-document edit for me, and if her eyes light up by the end of my babbling, I know I’m on the right track and it’s time to start writing for real. Conversely, if she just shrugs or nods her head or starts blinking slowly, I know I’ve just lobbed a total turd at her.

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

All of Hollywood seems to rabid to mold every single story into the shape of Joseph Campbell’s “Heroic Journey”, and with cinema’s influence is strongly felt in modern writing, gaming and comics, it’s having a seriously laming-down effect on what is recognized as “good” in a story. Stories are supposed to free people, and this practice is limiting people’s imaginations on what they can expect from a story, where it can take them; there’s a reason so many things feel samey nowadays, with so many people are working off the same blueprint. Any undergrad Lit major can find Campbell’s structure in anything with enough Red Bull, but there are literally memos circulating between Hollywood studios, breaking it down to an actual Hero’s Journey Formula (when people say sci-fi or action movies are formulaic, this is literally that formula), where the Wise Mentor inspires the hero by page 35, etc. Even knowing that formula exists has ruined the experience of going to popcorn movies for me; sweeping music practically telegraphs the page number of the script where the Hero recites his “Crossing the 1st threshold/leaving behind the known” dialogue near the end of Act One. Eye roll.

My own tastes lean way more towards the slow-burn, delayed-gratification flavors of stories. I like my sex scenes fully-dressed with no touching but the eyes, I like my actors lumpy and real with personalities reminiscent of jerks I’ve known in my life who surprised me by doing something that earned my respect, I like giant and seemingly-disconnected tapestries of plotlines that are slowly and expertly drawn together until it’s clear there can be only one ending for everyone involved. These kinds of stories don’t compute when they’re run through the Heroic Formula… because they’re not just for young boys with daddy issues.

Don’t even get me started on heroes with fucking daddy issues.

All right, loaded question but it’s a necessary one: what’s wrong with comics today? Particularly regarding the aspect of storytelling.

Man, don’t even get me started on what’s wrong with comics. Despite the all-rumbling all-media noise of Comic-Con, the actual comics industry is still barely one unto itself. In order to make a living doing comics in the US, you’re either doing work on corporate super-heroes you don’t own (really just IP-generators for media and merchandise) or creating issue-specific “literary graphic novels” for the book trade. Occasional phenomena like The Walking Dead or Scott Pilgrim aside, there’s no large publishing apparatus in place for creator-owned work that falls in-between those two poles. If you’re dubbed “too mainstream to be indy/literary and too indy/literary to be mainstream,” your publishing options instantly narrow to maybe four publishing houses that handle material in that middle space, but only one or two of them will pay you up front for it. Otherwise, you’re a bootstrapping DIY creator, self-publishing digitally and/or in print by whatever means necessary.

Back when you could buy comic books at the drugstore/7-11/supermarket, they were firmly part of the zeitgeist; now they’re only sold in specialty stores… which means that people who don’t go out of their way to comic shops won’t find your work unless it’s adapted into another medium. Going DIY on the web can make up for that in terms of audience, but it also means you’ve got to have that second business of selling t-shirts/posters/coffee mugs to stay afloat. Digital devices with comic storefront apps like Comixology are changing that, but not to the point where the digital sales alone sustain the indy creator (yet).

Regarding the visual storytelling part of the equation, there ain’t nothing broken about comics these days… the work is cooler today than ever. Some of the smartest visual storytellers working in comics are breaking new ground right now. That’s the fishhook in my lip that keeps me coming back: watching them all cross-pollinate and mutate and metastasize like techno genres. And with comics jumping from pages to screens, there’s innovative shit popping off in every direction, whether it’s in the comic shops (like the new Love & Rockets or Casanova), in bookstore graphic novels (Alison Bechdel or One Soul or King City), in web browsers (Thrillbent and Never Mind the Bullets) or on iPad screens (Operation Ajax and Bottom of the Ninth). Creatively, comics are exploding… and I’m with all my creator friends in the hope that when the dust settles, the new disrupted marketplace serves us cartoonists creating our own thing better than what came before.

What, then, is the trick to telling a good story in a comic medium?

Letting the script and the art tango until they become a single organism. That’s what you shoot for telling stories with words and pictures: that synthesis. That’s when the room around you drops away and you enter the comic’s own reality, when you literally hear the dialogue spoken, smell the rain, feel the impact… not from descriptions alone but how your brain synthesizes the other senses.

But there’s a balance in that tango too: don’t overwrite the script. Trust the artwork to carry its half of the equation and the script the other; they have to be equal halves for the story to come alive.

What is Red Light Properties and where does it come from?

RED LIGHT PROPERTIES is my comic series about haunted real estate, rocky marriage and the joyful middle finger that says “I told you so.” It comes from living in a few haunted apartments over the years and listening to my realtor mother narrate the implosion of the South Florida real estate market under the subprime mortgage bubble, and connecting those with a family-run Miami realty office. Clairvoyant Jude Tobin, both owner and exorcist, found his niche in selling “previously-haunted” houses. But in order to bump up his abilities enough to enter the spirit world and get those ghosts to fuck off, he has to ingest heroic amounts of hallucinogens daily so his wife Cecilia can list and sell the cleaned properties. This leaves him straddling the Membrane between life and death, riding a constant drug-induced fire-house of deceased peoples’ stories and regrets that has to stand between him and his family if he has any chance of keeping the bills paid and the lights on.

RLP is rooted in that ooooogy 4am feeling when you’re in your house and you just know you’re not alone. There’s someone standing right there in the doorway watching you sleep; you can still feel them but you can’t see them with your eyes. With this series, I get to experiment with digital comics while talking about life, death, America, consciousness and the modern family in dramatic horror stories that contain nuggets of my own life: growing up in Miami, experiments with drugs, broken relationships, all swirled together into a Ben & Jerry’s flavor all my own.

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

An understanding of failure. So few people in life get what they really want that how they wear their failure becomes the petri dish in which their stories grow. Of course, in order to write failure, you have to know desire… but the degree to which their desires keep slipping through a character’s fingers makes them so human to me.

A great example of a strong character is Walter Berglund, the husband in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. He’s a mousy liberal intellectual who bore the burden of being the responsible son in family of alcoholic fuckups who needed him to survive. He met his wife in college, who loved his roommate and eventually warmed (or settled) for him, and he built his life around her and their kids according to his own principles. His whole existence becomes a chain of failures and opportunities to grow as Walter begins to break free of the family that doesn’t seem to respect the quiet strength of his intelligence or the anger at the core of his idea of what it is to be a Man.

Don’t get me wrong: he’s a total asshole too, pissy and judgmental and too tight-lipped to be any good at running a family of his own. But by the end of the novel, you’ve seen Walter through his own eyes and through his wife Patty’s, felt his frustrations and anger and tenderness for her, for their kids, their friends and neighbors, and his frustrations at ignorance of the the world around him that rejects intellectualism for instant gratification. I scoffed at Walter until I understood him, then I feared for him as he tore it all apart and sank, cheered for him when he seemed to figure it out again and I’m not gonna spoil anything here. He’s not even the most interesting person in the novel; it’s such a goddamn rich read, it deserves every drop of the praise it’s garnered.

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

Book: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Comic: Orc Stain by James Stokoe (Image Comics)

Film: Never Let Me Go

Game: Red Dead Redemption

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

It varies, but today it’s “chirisosu.” I read this recently on a menu in a Japanese restaurant — it’s Nihongo-phonetics for “chili sauce” — but I just can’t stop saying it. At first I proclaimed it’d be my next DJ name, now it’ll probably the name of my next pet or child.

Not to discount the versatility of “fuck”… but there’s a raw power to “cunt” that remains unmatched in American English. You probably flinched as I typed it just now, because “cunt” still upsets most people when you say it in the States. You don’t just throw it around if you want to live amongst the normals without altering your reputation. Any 12 year-old kid can drop f-bombs that he learned from playing Grand Theft Auto IV.

Living in Brazil’s opened up a whole new universe of profanity; there are apparently 200+ slang terms for “vagina” in use in Brazil (but only ~60 for “penis” which tells you much about who’s doing the cussing). Of course, I’m not outside cursing in the street with the yahoos; I’m usually upstairs in my studio writing and cursing in English.

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

There’s a very serious Japanese cocktail bar that I love in New York City called Angel’s Share; it’s hidden behind on unmarked door in a casual izakaya, and they make a cocktail called an “Old Oak” (cask-aged Venezuelan rum, sherry, orange bitters, one large ice cube). It’s smooth and woody and tastes like The Gilded Age. If I was still living in NYC, that would be my yay-I-just-finished-another-project celebratory drink: an Old Oak in front of their big window, looking down at the city flowing by.

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

I’m a believer in the inevitable post-human future, so why would I fight the robots when I could score some upgrades for my monkey-meat instead?

For starters, I want memory upgrades and external data storage, replacement HD bionic eyes with 200X zoom and wider-spectrum vision that can record/upload video. Also definitely need replacement ankles (mine are shot to shit after years of skateboarding injuries). I also want one of those neck-ports where I can download new skills like languages and martial arts. And also a DVR for my subconscious to record my dreams; I could make some serious Robo-Duckets with that feature to buy more upgrades. Robo-Santa… are you listening?

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

Since January, I’ve been working with a screenwriting partner to develop my comic series RED LIGHT PROPERTIES as live-action TV show, which has been a full-on education for me as well as a lot of fun, but now it’s suddenly June and I haven’t drawn any new Red Light Properties comics yet this year. But before I start producing new RLP stories, I’m going to finish remastering the first two hundred pages that I originally produced for Tor.com with an eye towards producing the hardcover print edition that everyone’s been asking for. After that, there will new RLP comics as my Scrivener binder is fit to burst with new stories of the Tobins, which will continue to be digital-first until I get a better offer. Right now the comics are published to iTunes, Kindle Fire and Comixology (and coming any minute to Nook, Kobo and Google Play).

I’ve also been serializing a non-fiction memoir about my move from New York City down to São Paulo, Brazil to take a stab at living as a “creative web node” called Toucannuí [read: toucan + ennui] that’s running on the Trip City website every Friday. It’s a blend of travel/food writing, family stories and memoir; I’m about halfway through the whole book now and it’ll be available as a physical/digital book when I’m done.

Also on my plate is my first novel, a story about a broken family that spans two contents and features an alien intelligence. It doesn’t have a title yet but I’m incredibly jazzed about it; my first love (even above comics) is writing prose, and this flower’s been threatening to bloom my entire life. More details when I can share them.

I’m also flexing my new TV/film muscles by writing screenplays and developing a handful new comics projects for other cool cat artists to draw.

Toucannui. How’s it feel to write prose? No visual? No image? What’s that transition like? Anything to do with your own geographical transitions?

Writing prose is actually my first love, and it’s always come easier for me than drawing comics. I still struggle daily to render my own scripts into artwork and being able to do that heavy lifting with just the words is a dream. I started writing short stories after my fifth-grade teacher gave me a dog-eared Bradbury paperback; making comics out of them was something I got into seriously in my mid-twenties.

As I started work on RED LIGHT PROPERTIES (it was originally commissioned by Tor.com), I moved from New York City down to São Paulo, Brazil with my wife (her native city) in search of a different kind of life. There is nothing better than living abroad to jux your compass and drop your armor, re-mold yourself to fit a different cultural shape. Over the course of my time here, some of my artist pals back in Brooklyn started an online salon called Trip City and invited me to contribute; when I sat down to write, what came out of me was a memoir of my time living in Brazil called TOUCANNUÍ. I fantasized for many years about living abroad and working for the same clients in the US no matter where my laptop was plugged in; now I’m documenting the less-shiny realities of that dream as the backdrop of a travelogue through Brazilian culture.

Being in Brazil’s been inspiring as hell, especially getting outside of the city of São Paulo (which is surprisingly conservative for a megapolis of 20 million); it’s the big and unspeakably beautiful Brazilian nature that I prefer. It’s full of history and folktales and strange fruits and animals. I’ve unearthed a few large Brazil-based stories here that I’ve got in the rock tumbler now, one of them will be my first prose novel (for which I’ll be taking a slow boat up the Amazon soon for dirty-fingernails research).

Your work is both personal and political. Should writers be less afraid of doing that? Any dangers of going too personal or too political?

Of course; writers shouldn’t be afraid of anything but chirping crickets. As an artist, it’s your function in this world to reach in and pull out the oozing, beating Truth of Things that make a story worth reading. That pulsing Truth can be pulled from the outside world or from within you, it can be disguised with frilly fictions or naked and dimpled, but I just don’t connect to stories driven by high-concept plot instead of by the desires of its characters. To me, that’s the difference between art and product.

The danger in doing political work that I’ve faced in my own experience is the work’s shelf life. I did a black-hearted day-after-tomorrow graphic novel about the War on Terror called SHOOTING WAR that came out in 2007 and took place in a 2011 where John McCain was president. It was scary then, it’s a little funny now; going from “possible future” to “alternate history” definitely dulls the teeth. I think the book will grow more relevant the further away we get from “the moment” until it stands on its own as a time capsule of our Iraq War zeitgeist.

On the other hand, doing personal work (in the emotional sense) is only dangerous when people assume that everything you write is autobiographical — it’s the default setting now in our tweet-your-breakfast-and-Instagram-your-poops digital culture. I’ve always liked my work to speak for itself… but I still get readers asking me if I really donkey-punched my lovely wife (as one of my characters did to his lover) no matter how many times I have to flick them repeatedly in the nose and yell “FICTION! FICTION!”

Ladling Love Upon Your Local Indie Bookstore

The reports of the bookstore’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

If you ask me, bookstores aren’t dead. They’re not even dying. And it’s not about print books (which are, by the way, also not dying — they’re not just as prominent as they once were): it’s about bookstores offering something that no online shopping experience ever can. It’s about bookstores bringing to the table an experience — which can be anything, really, but possibly involves coffee, tall shelves, pretty covers, author events, signed copies of books, rare releases, and maybe one or two homeless dudes who wandered in from outside. (Hey, Amazon will never offer us the “random homeless guy” experience. Though, now as I say that, Jeff Bezos is descending into the darkness of his laboratory to concoct some kind of digital hobo initiative — “Old Ciggy Jim has a Hobo Ranking of #4588! Beat that, Bindle Dan!”)

Let’s be clear: not every independent bookstore is worth saving by dint of it being an independent bookstore. Some bring nothing to the table that you can’t already get elsewhere (the answer to what an indie bookstore offers can never be “just books,” because that is a realm in which they cannot compete). But many others are wonderful, weird places — great staff, fine events, eclectic selections, nice design, the finest homeless around. So, with that being said, here’s what I want from you:

I’d like you to sing the praises of an indie bookstore you love.

Maybe it’s local to you. Or at least within driving distance.

Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s one you found in another city and you want to praise it with mighty hymns.

Tell me about your favorite indie bookstore.

Part of this is because: hey, I wanna celebrate those bookstores.

Another part is entirely selfish. Because you can bet I’m taking notes as to places I may one day stop to sign books, give readings, shake hands, kiss babies, and eradicate the growing Hobo Menace.

You.

Favorite bookstores.

Give ‘em some love.

25 Things You Should Know About Antagonists

1. Real People With People Problems

Antagonists are just people. Er, unless they’re insane sex-bots, sentient washing machines, serial killer dinosaurs, or hyper-intelligent window treatments. But even then, we need to treat them like people. People with wants, needs, fears, motivations. People with families and friends and their own enemies. They’re full-blooded, full-bodied characters. They’re not single-minded villains twirling greasy mustaches.

2. Meaning, They’re Not Just Fuel For The Plot Engine

Character is the driver. Plot is the getaway car. Character drives plot; plot does not drive character. The antagonist isn’t just here as a rock in the stream diverting the plot-churned waters — he does not exist in service to a sequence of events but rather, he exists to change them, sway them, turn them to a sequence he wants — a sequence that stands in opposition to the protagonist. For opposition is key.

3. Like I Just Said, Opposition Is Key

Jeez, weren’t you paying attention? EYES ON ME, SOLDIER. Anyway. The antagonist opposes the protagonist. Theirs are clashing motivations. They possess needs and wants that exist in defiance of one another. The protagonist wants to free the slaves; the antagonist wants to keep them and the power they provide. The protagonist wants to rescue the hostages; the antagonist wants to keep the hostages, or worse, kill ‘em. The protagonist wants a chalupa; the antagonist has stolen ALL THE CHALUPAS. The antagonist can oppose the main character directly, seeking to undo her efforts; or the antagonist can oppose her indirectly, coming at the story at an oblique angle (but still clashing with our protagonist character). But the point is the same no matter how you slice it: the antagonist stands in the way of the protagonist’s goals.

4. I Like Kittens, You Punch Kittens, Now We Fight!

The antagonist is the foil of the protagonist in the very fabric of his character, too — theirs are contrasting personas. At the simplest level, this is heroism versus villainy, but can (and should) go deeper than that. The protagonist is a drunk; the antagonist is a proponent of clean living. The protagonist is a rational woman; the antagonist is a religious zealot. The protagonist likes Batman, PBS, and whiskey. The antagonist likes Spider-Man, telenovelas, and Zima. Character traits existing in disharmony. Thesis, antithesis.

5. Like Krishna, Except A Total Jerkoff

The antagonist is the avatar of conflict. He causes it. His character embodies it. The antagonist is there to push and pull the sequence of events into an arrangement that pleases him. He makes trouble for the protagonist. He is the one upping the stakes. He is the one changing the game and making it harder.

6. Antagonists Think They’re The Protagonists

The antagonist is the hero in his own story. In fact, your story’s protagonist is the antagonist’s antagonist. BOOM DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? People who do bad things often justify their own actions as being somehow positive — Hitler wasn’t just a troll on an international scale. He thought he was the savior of mankind and that his deeply shitty agenda was justified. This isn’t to say that the antagonist’s desires must be noble (“I had to kill all those people to save the orphanage!”), only that he will have convinced himself of his own nobility. The antagonist thinks he’s right. And doing the right thing. Even when it’s awful.

7. Evil For The Sake Of Evil Is Yawntastic, Snoretacular

Antagonists who do evil just to do evil are basically big fucking cartoons. They’re Snidely Whiplash. They’re Cobra Commander. They’re Pageant Moms, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh. In other words: boring, unbelievable, and totally untenable. Give them motivations beyond “being the biggest dick I can be.” Yes, you can in certain modes and stories get away with this (see: Batman’s Joker, or nearly any killer in slasher films), but it’s hard, and it puts an even greater weight on the shoulders of the protagonist.

8. The Motivations Of Awful People

Antagonists must possess believable motivations. And a motivation is the thing we tell ourselves — right? A racist doesn’t act just because he thinks people of other races should experience pain. Racism is far more deeply rooted and often glossed over with justifications — they don’t need to be good motivations or healthy ones, but we need to believe in them. Or, at least, we need to believe that the antagonist believes them. Ask yourself: what does the antagonist tell himself? How does he sleep at night?

9. Black Hats, White Hats, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

All villains are antagonists. But not all antagonists are villains. “Villain” is a perfectly suitable character type in many genre stories: the serial killer, the evil wizard, the twinkly-dick vampire, whatever. But real life doesn’t always offer up “bad guys” (though we’d sure like to see it that way, ahemcoughcough DICKCHENEY hackwheeze). Antagonists can (and often should) fall into that gray zone instead of the bullshit black-and-white dichotomy. Want an example? In First Blood, John Rambo is the protagonist and Sheriff Teasle is the antagonist — but Teasle’s not a “bad guy.” Wrong in a lot of ways, but not villainous.

10. Nemeses And Arch-Enemies

Earlier I referenced antagonists that oppose the protagonist directly — as in, the antagonist has a real firm boner when it comes to fucking with the protagonist (“I peed on your bed, kicked over your houseplants, and skunked all your beer! Ha ha ha, eat a dick, Dave! Again I am triumphant!”). An antagonist of this nature is, of course, a nemesis or arch-enemy of the protagonist.

11. Vivisect Your Favorite Antagonists In Pop Culture

You want to know what goes into a good antagonist, look no further than the stories and pop culture properties you love dearly. Why is Hannibal Lecter a great antagonist? Is he? What about Darth Vader, Voldemort, Khan, Gollum, Norman Bates, Hans Gruber, Annie Wilkes, Prince Zuko, Marlo Stanfield, the Cobra Kai Sensei John Kreese, the monkey from Monkey Shines, or Rob Schneider?

12. Now Look To Your Own Life

Turn now from pop culture and instead look to your own life. Identify your own personal antagonists. Then realize that these are infinitely more complex and sympathetic than you find in a lot of fiction. Our parents are often our antagonists through our teenage years; but they don’t start that way and they often don’t end that way. And oh what a powerful and valuable lesson that is. Now, take it one step further: try to see if you’ve ever been somebody’s antagonist. Surely you have? Your parents probably saw you as one. A teacher, maybe. A forgotten friend. A bullied kid. A sibling. Bring what you discover there into your storytelling. Find the complexity within the antagonist; we don’t need sympathy for the antagonists necessarily, but we demand empathy. If we cannot understand them, then we will not believe in them. More on that soon.

13. Write From Within The Enemy Camp

Write from the antagonist’s point-of-view. Maybe this is something that goes into the story itself, or maybe it’s just an exercise betwixt you and yourownself. But you gotta get all up in them guts, son. You have to wear the antagonist’s skin and use his mind like a helmet. Unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary.

14. Holding Hands With Monsters

We need to sit with the antagonist, too — as the audience, we may not need to, erm, “get all up in them guts,” but we do need time spent with the antagonist for them to bloom as a fully-formed figure in our mind. Give us time with the antagonist away from the main character so that we can see who they are, what they want, why they do what they do. Force us to babysit the monster.

15. Over-Powered Is Under-Interesting

God-like uber-antagonists who never lose and who know everything there is to know and who are forever one step ahead of the game are just as dull as a protagonist who features the same over-powered qualities. (Worse, an antagonist of this particular caliber must often be trumped on a technicality.) It’s called “a game of cat-and-mouse,” not “a game where the mouse goes up against an orbital laser built by Jesus.” Though, now that I say that out loud, I’m pretty sure my next book will prominently feature a Jesus-built orbital laser. Dibs! DIBS. I called dibs. Get away from that idea or I’ll stab you with a barbecue fork.

16. (But We Won’t Buy “Under-Powered,” Either)

The antagonist has to be a real challenge, just the same. Weak-kneed noodle-spined dumb-fuck antagonists need not apply. Give the protagonist something to do. A believable foe goes a long way, especially one that has some advantage over our main character — we want to worry that the antagonist can’t be beaten. Not because he’s a hyper-powered god-like genius, but because he’s just that much smarter, stronger, and more capable than our hero. Lack of antagonistic power means a lack of tension. So, uhh, don’t do that.

17. Still Abide By The Rules And Laws Of The Storyworld

The protagonist must work within the storyworld — the antagonist must, too. All the characters are chained to the world you create. The antagonist may exploit the storyworld, may circumvent the rules in some fashion, but it is not in ignorance of those rules as much as a character-driven contravention of them.

18. Chatty Cathy Clip Your Strings

“Ahh, Mister James Q. Clark Kent Bondwalker, Jr. — now that I have you dangling over a pit of a starveling toddlers covered in the bloody marrow-jam of the bones of their gummed-to-death opponents, let me bore you with the the entire breadth and depth of my plan! I will share for you my motivations, my weaknesses, and give for you a glimpse of my end-game. Do I expect you to talk, Mister Bondwalker? No. I expect you to die. And, failing that, I expect you to use my confession against me at a later date because that’s what the Villain Manual suggests is most likely to happen.” Get done with chatty tell-don’t-show antagonists. No more villains who over-share expository details. Ugh.

19. Freak Me Out By Forcing Me To Emotionally Connect

Once, just once, put me on the same page as the antagonist. He can be vile as fuck — a kitten-kicker, a baby-puncher, a drives-too-slow-in-the-left-lane, ejaculates-in-coin-return-slots kind of dude. But then, make me connect with him: something he does, something he believes, should be something I would do, something I believe. Or connect me to his past — help me understand why he jizzes on public phones and karate-chops puppies. Empathy is powerful stuff. Connect me to the protagonist and I identify with his struggle. Connect me with the antagonist and I identify — even if in a fleeting way — with his villainy.

20. Antagapalooza

Worth noting: just as you can have multiple main characters, you can have multiple antagonists. An ensemble of opponents works — it just requires balance to make sure they all get enough story-time.

21. Arctagonist

The antagonist can have an arc. Should have an arc, actually. An antagonist doesn’t start at Point A and end at Point A. He changes and grows (or sometimes shrinks), same as the protagonist. Don’t assume the antagonist needs to be a static, unswerving face of conflict — have his character shift with changing conditions, have his madness deepen, his hatred or pain worsen, his zealotry catch like a grease-fire.

21. Ideas And Institutions And Other Non-Charactery Antagonists

An antagonist needn’t actually be a character — an antagonist can be an idea (“racism”), an institution (“the CIA”), a natural force (“Another Paul Blart movie”). Zombies probably count as this sort of antagonist — they’re relatively faceless and on par with a hurricane or disease. Just the same, antagonism always deserves the face of some character — a character championing an idea (dragon-wizard poo-bah of the KKK!), working for the institution (callous field agent!), or complicating the natural force (Kevin James!).

23. The “Kick The Cat” Moment

In Blake Snyder’s books, he speaks of giving the hero a “Save the Cat” moment — meaning, we get to rally behind the protagonist early on as we get to see just what he’s capable of because, y’know, he rescues the cat from the tree (metaphorically). Antagonists need the reverse: one requires a “Kick the Cat” moment (see also: “Detonate the Puppy,” “Machine Gun the Dolphin,” or “Force the Baby Seal to Watch a Marathon of the Real Houswives of Fucking Anywhere Ever” moment). We need to see just why the antagonist is the antagonist — show us an act that reveals for us the depths of his trouble-making, his hatred, his perversion of the ethical laws and social mores of man.

24. Let The Antagonist Win

Let the antagonist win. Maybe not at the end, but periodically, throughout. Let him break Batman’s back, or kill a hostage, or take all the toilet paper off the roll and *crash of thunder* fail to replace it.

25. Love To Hate, Hate To Love

If you ignore everything else I wrote here (and for all I know, you will, you sonofabitch) then at least absorb this with your squirming storytelling cilia: the biggest and best test of an antagonist is that I want to a) love to hate them and/or b) hate to love them. Do either or both and it’s a major win. If you make me love them and I feel uncomfortable about that? You win. If you make me despise them and I love despising them the way a dog loves to roll around in roadkill? You win again. I hate that I love Hans Gruber. I love that I hate every Nazi in every Indiana Jones movie. For fuck’s sake, make me feel something.

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

Transmissions From Toddler-Town: “Just A Ride”

(song by Jem: “Just A Ride”)

(best viewed, y’know, biggified)

The Obligatory Dark Knight Rises Post

Great movie. As I get older, I have a harder and harder time appreciating four-color rock-em-sock-em fests like The Avengers (which I liked, before you yell at me) and for me the Nolan Batman run has been one where the superhero story has been upgraded to feel like it’s by adults, for adults. It doesn’t ignore the reality of what Batman is — it keeps the creepy bits where “rich dude dresses up like vigilante to defend city from psychopathic terrorists and criminals” fairly well intact. It doesn’t look away from that discomfort.

As every story is a lesson to other storytellers, let’s peel away the Bat Nipples and look deeper into what I think worked about the film, and a little bit into what maybe didn’t work so well.

Some very mild general spoilers below. (Can’t promise the comments are a safe zone, though.)

Getting The Bat Right

Batman’s a hard dude to get right.

You gotta balance the vigilante with the billionaire. You have to keep his past in the front windshield while still not focusing so heavily on it that it becomes mawkish and obvious. You have to acknowledge his heroism while also acknowledging (at least a wee bit) his derangement. You have to see how he walks a line between psycho-conservative and radical liberal. You need to find the human in the suit.

This film does all that. Somehow juggling it all in a film where, surprisingly, Batman is not getting the majority of screen-time. This isn’t a movie about Batman, not really. It’s a movie about Gotham.

Be advised: I now really want to write Batman. So, somebody make that happen.

Batman Not About Batman

Most Batman stories give you too much Batman. And any time they spend time on other characters, hey, you just want to get back to Bats. Not here. TDKR goes long periods without ever visiting Mister Wayne, and this is a feature, not a bug. The film is populated with an incredibly strong supporting cast — not just in terms of acting but in writing (and more on that in a moment). By focusing on the characters orbiting Batman and by taking a long hard look at a city under siege, you start to get Batman. Batman is made stronger by those who carry him up — both narratively in the plot and metaphorically as a character.

Further, it ensures that when you do see Wayne/Batman, you’re so geeked out you’re doing the equivalent of the pee-pee dance inside your head. By limiting Batman, the strength of the character shines through.

He’s more potent that way.

And never overwhelms.

Complex Character

Good characters have alarming moments of weakness. Bad characters have troubling moments of nobility. Some characters vacillate so you don’t really know where to pin them — good, bad, selfish, assholes, not assholes, and so forth. It’s a wonderful tango — the script doesn’t give us four-color comic book characters. The script lets each character possess a million colors apiece — and just as many shades of gray.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is this film’s winner, by the way. He is its throughline.

Start The Story Late

The story doesn’t spend a lot of time getting you up to speed. A lot has changed since we last visited Gotham and the story isn’t interested in playing catch-up: in fact, it leaps forward with some things being big question marks in the hopes and trust (correctly placed) that the audience will play detective and stay invested. It works. As such, what could be a very boggy beginning is as lean as it could possibly be.

Earned Distrust

I don’t want to trust my storytellers. I want a storyteller to show me that I can’t trust him. You can’t trust Nolan and that’s fucking phenomenal. I want him to do things to the character and the storyworld — and, by proxy, to me the poor little quivering audience member gnawing his fingernails down to the bloody quick — that aren’t right. I basically want all my storytellers to be Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects.

Every Hit Hurts

In this kind of movie, characters need to feel pain. Not merely physical, but the pain of unkept emotions, of betrayals, of lost love and all of that. Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman only works if that pain is palpable — and we feel it in every twist of the film and every bone-shattering Bane punch.

Twists That Work

The film gets a bit twisty now and again. And every twist works. Why? Because Nolan isn’t just trolling us — he sets up each twist with a good two or three beats before hand so when it comes, you think, “Oh, see, he’s been showing me this the whole time, and I either didn’t get why, or he did some other misdirecting voodoo and I stopped thinking about it.” This is the man that made The Prestige, after all.

Some folks wanted The Riddler in this film.

Nolan is the Riddler in this film.

Overtold, On The Nose

If I had to be honest, while the front of the film is as lean as it probably could be, it still suffers from a characters overtelling the story — not so much to catch us up but to tell us their feelings on plot events.

It feels on-the-nose at times, like they’re mouthpieces for certain beliefs or otherwise want to be oh so very earnest, and it feels stilted and stunted. That goes away over time, but the front of the film is heavy with it.

The Sound Mix

Holy shitty sound mix, Batman.

I saw it in IMAX — which is to say, “IMAX” in quotations because it’s kinda half-a-dick IMAX — and the sound was a deep bass crotch-punch. Impactful! But muddy. And it meant Bane often sounded like this:

“VAAASH WASH SHA SHATMAN ECKONING WAH SHA VASHHHH”

He talks like he has poop in his mouth.

I probably missed about 25% of what that dude said.

I lost dialogue from other characters, too — any character speaking at a low, deep register was in danger of saying words that became naught but a thunder rumble to my ears.

These are top-shelf theaters and I still get better sound at home. And not for a ton of money, either.

So?

I liked it.

Really great movie.

I have a very strong visceral (meaning positive) reaction to the second film, and wasn’t a huge fan of the first one, but this one ties all three together into a single storyline. And while I maybe enjoyed the second one more, this one might actually be the better story. Not sure yet. More ruminating needed.

OH! And I would totally watch a Nolan-made Catwoman movie with Hathaway in the role.

Hathaway, as a sidenote, is my ideal Miriam Black, for those who have read Blackbirds.

(Though Lizzy Caplan is sometimes Miriam now, too.)

(This is really apropos of nothing so I’ll shut up.)

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.