Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 255

Dan O'Shea: The Terribleminds Interview

Today, we're publishing three — count 'em, three! — interviews here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds. On first pass, I don't like to crowd up with interviews, and I thought, mmm, maybe I'll spread these out. But here's the thing: these interviews talk to three writers who each share a kind of intellectual space. All three are cracking short story writers, all three come out of crime writing, all three have killer novels (two of them published, one on submission), and to boot, all three know each other. So, my thought is, let's let these interviews feed into one another. Right? Right.

First up? My alpha clone, Dan O'Shea. Dan's a grizzled bad-ass of a writer, but incredibly thoughtful and smart about how and what he writes. His prose astonishes me. This week he's got his first collection of short stories out — some of which originated here at terribleminds — and you need to check it the fuck out. It's called OLD SCHOOL and, I'll be honest, I wrote the foreword. You can find Dan's website here — danielboshea.wordpress.com– and track him down on Twitter (@dboshea).

When you're done here, check out the other two interviews:

Chris Holm

Hilary Davidson

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.

It's July in the Summer of Fishing, or that's how you remember it. The summer you bought that Diawa spinning reel over at Zayre, the summer you got over being afraid of the old black guys that would sit along the bank of Blackberry Creek by the old railroad trestle on the bike trail, drinking whatever it was they drank out of the bottle wrapped in the paper bag, the way they'd talk to each other, trading insults that would have been fighting words in your world, but they'd just laugh about them, at least the insults you understood. The guys that shook their heads at the rubber worms you'd tried to use. The guys that showed you how to catch carp and catfish with wadded up balls of Wonder Bread dipped in some foul smelling crap that they kept in a rusty Folger's can.

It's a month or so before you bought the fly fishing rod, before you and Brian tried practice casting with it in the gloaming after dinner and found out you could fly fish for bats. Almost a decade before Brian was the best man at your wedding. Of course, Brian's dead now, and even that's five years back.

The summer you found that lake.

You called it a lake, and I guess it was near enough to one in your experience, this part of Illinois not being much stocked with them. Fifteen acres maybe, all in. A pond really, and not a naturally occurring one. You know that now. An irregular pit bulldozed into some old wetlands, developers trying to contain the runoff, keep the water out of the subdivision up the small slope on the east end, back when Orchard Road wasn't Orchard Road yet, just a nameless gravel track. Now, it's four lanes. Now, the golf course would be across the street. Now, you'd be able to see Home Depot from here. Now, you're 52. Then, you were 13.

Your mom made you bring your brother with you, Patrick. He would have been what? Four? Maybe five?  Ruined the spirit of the thing. Because that summer, in spirit you were one man alone on the edge of wilderness, pitted against nature, trying to coax beasts from the deep. But if your mom sent Patrick along, then this wasn't any wilderness, no danger lurked near. If they let you bring Patrick, you were still just a kid fishing in some neighborhood pond. She dropped you off on the paved road at the edge of the subdivision, east of the pond.

You tried not to look east, because west it was still woods, still marsh, still wilderness. Wilderness to you, though it was really just saplings and scrub reclaiming an abandoned farm field, a field some developer had already bought, one they just hadn't torn up yet. Wilderness if you ignored the hum of tires to your left, probably a couple hundred cars an hour driving up and down Galena.

But these tires weren't on Galena. These tires were crunching along the gravel across the pond. An Impala, an old one, mid-sixties, the red paint faded to the color of diluted blood, the wheel wells and quarter panels lipsticked with rust. The car stopped where the pond pinched in, where it narrowed to a wasp's waist of mud and shallow water, maybe ten yards across, where you could wade from one side to the other without getting your ankles wet. Two guys in front, you could see that. They just sat there a minute, didn't seem to be looking at you, just sat there.

You knew you should leave. You knew you should take Patrick, walk up that embankment to the paved roads and the houses. You knew it and you cast your line back out into the pond anyway.

The passenger door opened and a guy got out. Twenty maybe, twenty five. Blue jeans, a ratty t-shirt, stringy blond hair to his shoulders, a Winston bobbing in his lips. He was carrying a crutch, but he wasn't using it. He smiled at you.

"You boys catching anything?"

You shook your head. "Not today."

He nodded. "Too hot probably."

"Probably."

Then he's sloshing across that narrow gap. Then he's standing next to you. Patrick's on the other side of him. The guy just stands there.

"What you using for bait?"

You reel in, hold up the tip of the rod, show him the little plastic minnow with the small treble hook behind the flashing Mepps spinner.

He snorts. "Shit kid, I doubt there's anything in this ditch big enough to get its lips around that."  And you know he's not going to help, not going to tell you about bread balls and stink bait. You know something bad is going to happen, but you keep trying to act like it isn't. You cast out into the pond again.

He finishes the cigarette, flicks the butt out into the water. It hisses, a sunfish rises and pecks at it, spinning it a little.

"You got any money?" he says.

And you don't. Not a cent.

"No."

He touches your ass, running his hand across the back of your pants. Your insides freeze. But he's just feeling your pockets for a wallet.

"Left you wallet home, huh?"

You just nod, knowing if you speak right now, your voice is going to crack. You don't want your voice to crack.

The guy bends down, opens your tackle box, dumps it out in the dirt, paws through it, takes a quarter he finds glinting in a gray pile of spilled splitshot.

"Waste of fucking time," he says and takes the first step back toward the car.

"I've got money," Patrick says. Little kid's voice, petulant, defiant. "But you can't have it." Turns out Patrick has a nickel in his pocket.

The guy stops, steps toward your brother, and all the embarrassment and rage and confusion short circuits you a minute and you whip the rod around, smacking it against the guy, the hook catching in his shirt, tearing it open as it rips away.

And the guy turns, the crutch he was carrying already in motion, him holding it down near the footpad, swinging it like an ax.

You shuffle just enough that it only glances of your head, slamming down onto your shoulder, the screw and the wing nut out sticking out in the middle where the handhold is bolted in bite into your flesh, gouge out a wound, and you backpedal into the water, trying to get some distance as the guy swings the crutch again, like a bat this time, in from the side.

You bunch your shoulder up, taking the first part of the blow on the meat, but the crutch skips up, hits you over the ear, and there's that moment where time stops, where the force and the feel and the sound of the blow translate into this flash of light inside your head, where any outside sight or sound is cancelled out so that when your sight comes back, it's skipped a frame, like a projector where the sprocket slipped, and you see that he's already in mid-swing again, a three-quarter angle this time, from the top and side, and you turn your back, bending, and he blow lands across your scapula, that wing nut biting in again, and you hear a crack and you think for a moment that your bone is broken, but then you hear a splash and most of the crutch is bobbing in the middle of the pond in a riot of fresh ripples, and you turn and the guy is holding maybe six inches of busted wood now, and you're screaming at Patrick to get into the water, to get behind you and Patrick is saying he'll get his shoes wet and you scream "Get in the water, goddamn it," you're thinking maybe the guy won't want to come in after you, won't want to get wet, and even that idea feels stupid, but that light strobing inside your head and it's the best you've got, and your brother gets it finally, the threat, the danger, gets it at the same time the guy does, the guy reaching for Patrick, Patrick running around him,  and he splashes into the water, crying now, and you put your left arm back, holding him behind you, and you remember the filleting knife on your hip, hanging from your belt in its leather sheath, and you remember how sharp that is and you pull that, backing into the pond, the water over your knees now, almost to Patrick's shoulders, so you stop, holding the knife out in front of you, not sure how far this is going, but knowing that, if the guy comes in after you, you have to start slashing.

But he doesn't. He kicks your tackle box into the pond, throws your pole in after it. Stands there looking at you a minute, pulls the pack of Winston's out of the pocket of the t-shirt that hangs on him ripped open, digs a lighter out of his jeans, blows a long stream of smoke out into the air.

"Fucking kids."

He splashes back across the wasp's waist to the Impala, and the car spins off in a rooster tail of dust and gravel, heading south back to Galena.

Later, at home, your back and shoulder bandaged, your scapula striped with bruise, the police come and gone, you hear that this Chris kid, a guy that had been two years ahead of you in school, big guy, star of every team, the date of every cheerleader, that guy had gone down to Starved Rock State Park that same day. He was fucking around with some friends and had fallen off a cliff. He was dead.

And you realize this. It is all wilderness.

OK, Chuck, you said a story. You said as true or false as I see it. That story is mostly one, some of the other.  But, as I read back through it, I find myself absently rubbing the scar on my left shoulder.

Why do you tell stories?

Maybe the only useful thing I learned from religion classes through thirteen years of Catholic schools, if you count kindergarten, is the power of parables. People listen to stories. You can convey a message through stories with a power that a lecture will never equal.

That, and the truth is boring.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Always read your stuff out loud.

Writing is just a system humans dreamed up because the sound of speech was transitory.  I have to wonder, if we'd had recording equipment back 5,000 or so years ago when writing first developed, if we even would have invented it. Would there still be documents if we already had a way to make speech permanent, or would everything just be on tape?  Language was oral first, writing is just a way to make speech permanent.

When you read something out loud, you catch things with  your ears that you don't with your eyes. All the awkward little constructions that your eyes rolled right over, the word you are repeating too often, the dialog that's glaringly bad when read out loud – your ears will catch bullshit that your eyes never will.

Maybe it's the frustrated actor in me, I don't know, but I really love to read my stuff. Here, try some.  Here's a reading of Shackleton's Hootch from my collection, Old School. It's appropriate that I run this one, because it was something I wrote in response to one of Chuck's occasional flash fiction challenges.

I really do like the whole audio thing – in fact, anybody that buys OLD SCHOOL will find an offer in there to get a free audio book version. Just a little something I'm trying to differentiate my offering from the burgeoning pile of e-books out there.

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

That moment when you are in perfect communion with a character, when you are channeling a person of your own creation as if you have tapped into an external psyche, when you completely understand a person you could never, yourself, be, and that person's world, their words, their being, all of that is spilling out through your fingers as if that character had opened a vein and you were writing with their own blood, that's  a hard feeling to top.

The business side of it, all of that sucks. This whole do I self-publish thing, all the Amazon crap, all the possible distribution channels and alternative ways to market – you could make a full-time job out of understanding that whole mess, and none of that appeals to me in the least.  It makes a little cloud of despair in my head when I think about it, so I try not to.

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

Impossible question. You've only got one kid right now, so you don't get it. Somebody asks you who your favorite kid is, that's easy for you. I've got three.  But we're writers. Words are our children, too.

Comes to words, there isn't even an exact answer to how many there are in the English language – 200,000 or thereabouts. I've read that the average person knows between 12,000 and 20,000 of them. I'd like to think that most writers know more. But a favorite?  I can't say I have one.

There are those moments though, as a reader and a writer, where you find the perfect word in the perfect place, usually one used a little off-center, one that jolts the reader into a new mindset. Hell, in the story I just sent you today, I said the rust on the old car was "lipsticked" around the wheel wells. I kinda like that. I think the reader will get that, but will get it in a more exact way than if I'd just said an old, rusty Impala. So maybe this morning lipsticked is my favorite word. And it isn't even a real word.

As to curse words, when I was in high school, my sophomore football coach was a nutjob guy who was raised in Brazil. He was also the Spanish teacher. There was some foreign phrase he used to scream at us in practice when he got pissed, maybe it was in Portuguese, maybe it was in Spanish, maybe it was some Creole of both, I don't know. But he wouldn't tell us what it meant. Years later, I saw the guy and asked him. He smiled, and told me when he got mad at us he would scream "You have the prick of a fish."  That's pretty good. Curse words alone aren't all that special. It's the constructions they're used in that make them pop.

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

I'm a Manhattan guy. I'll drink a lot of stuff, although not gin, never have liked gin, and I'm kind of meh on vodka, too. In fact, when it comes to rum, I'll take dark over light every time, so I guess I'm not big on clear liquors. Beer, sure, but something with body and taste – I think the Sam Adams people put out a fine line of products, and I especially like a lot of their seasonal offerings. Wine, yep. Red more than white. In the summer, there's nothing like whipping up a nice batch of sangria – I've got a couple of favorite recipes for both red and white versions – and, if it's a hot week, there's probably a pitcher of one of them in my fridge. Sangria, by the way, isn't just wine with fruit juice in it. There's brandy, or maybe peach schnapps, maybe some triple sec – there's something in it to give it a backbone.

But if I'm going with one drink, it's the Manhattan. It was my father's drink, I write at my father's desk. At the moment, I'm sitting in my father's chair. Filial loyalty.  Two measures of bourbon (rye if you have it), one of sweet vermouth, a splash of bitters (or a couple in my case), gotta have a cherry, and a little splash of the cherry juice from the bottle doesn't hurt, either. On the rocks in a rocks glass. If I go to a bar and they bring my Manhattan in a martini glass without ice, then I know the place is just too precious for me. So a Manhattan.  It's simple, it packs a punch and it makes me think of my dad.

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

I'm going to go old school on you. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. He's a guy too often overlooked in my book. Pick that up. Hell, anything by him. Saul Bellow's another one, a guy who seemed to have a much larger public literary reputation when I was younger, but who now has drifted into that obscurity of only being read in lit classes.

Funny thing, I guess, because you said great story, and when I think back on the books by either of these two, story isn't the first word that comes to mind. Character does. Atmosphere does. Mood does. Gestalt does. Of course, all of that has to be wrapped around a story of some kind, but story alone isn't enough.

Story matters more in genre fiction, I think. If I had to pick someone in the crime genre that consistently cooks up a great story, but still bakes in the good stuff, I might go with John Sandford.

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

Well, if the walkers have already eaten John Hornor Jacobs, I'll be the guy who still knows about his zombie herding idea. Not going to give it away here, spoil his This Dark Earth launch, but it is the key to final victory.

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

I've always found the last meal thing kind of paradoxical. From the executioner perspective, you're going to kill the guy because he's so horrible, so what's with stuffing him with his favorite eats first? From the executionee perspective, how much are you really going to enjoy this meal when the only thing you can taste is the idea of your own death?

Again, hard to say. Probably depend on my mood that day. Don't have to worry about my heart at that point, I suppose. Maybe a big slab of St. Louis style ribs, maybe a thick porterhouse, medium rare, slathered in minced garlic and sautéed mushrooms. A side of lobster newburg maybe.

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

How the hell should I know? My short fiction collection, OLD SCHOOL, comes today from Snubnose Press. I've got two novels out on submission, and a third one will be joining them real soon.  I'm writing a horror/crime thing now.

One of my novels, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is my Elizabethan first-person Shakespeare as a private dick thing. I've got a couple more ideas for ol' Will if that ever sells or, who knows, maybe even if it doesn't. But I'll work on what I'm working on now, and then I'll worry about tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.

OK, maybe I learned two things in religion class.

What's the art of telling a good short story as opposed to something longer form?

Funny thing is I'd never written a short story until after I wrote a novel. Before I finished the novel, I was just this guy who always wanted to be a writer, and who then was cursed by finding a way to make a living as one. But my living is writing marketing and educational material for professional services firms – primarily accounting firms as it has turned out. So I've spent thirty years writing about the tax code and such. If that won't make you want to write about killing people, nothing will.

I'd mess around with writing a novel now and then, but that never had a deadline attached, and it sure as hell never had a payday promised to it, so that always got shoved to the back burner. I had a family, responsibilities – writing's just a way to pay the bills, I'd tell myself, and I'd turned it into a pretty good career. This novel stuff? It started feeling like wanting to play third base for the Cubs. It started feeling like one of those childish things you put aside. And I pretty much did.

My best friend since fourth grade, best man in my wedding, he wanted to be a writer, too. Ended up being a cranberry farmer. We used to talk about the books we were going to write, and we'd both mess around with them. Coming up on five years ago, he crashed his car on Halloween night. I got the call the next day. He was dead. And when his family went up to northern Wisconsin to pack up his stuff, they found his manuscript, all typed up, all finished, in the desk drawer.

He was that friend you make once in your life if you are lucky, the one that is with you all the way from being a boy to being a man and beyond. He taught me a lot. Even in that final act, he taught me something. Taught me we only have so much sand in the glass, and none of us knows how much that is. If there's something you want to do, you'd best commence to doing it. So I commenced to writing a novel.  Found out there's just as much time for things as you make, and there was time enough for that.

But this whole online writing community? I knew nothing about it. Bouchercon, the other cons, the Facebooks, the blogs, the tweeting? Never heard of them. (Hard to believe, I know, given my profligate Twitter habit now.) But I wrote a novel, got an agent in about a month, figured I'd be Steven King by the end of the year. I mean hey, this shit seemed pretty easy. Of course, that was three years ago, and my agent is still shopping that novel today. Shows what I know.

But she told me I should think about a blog, maybe get on twitter, all that stuff. I did. And pretty soon I ran into my first flash fiction challenge.

Blame Patti Abbott, a fine writer in her own right who's collection, Monkey Justice, is a must read. I'd never heard of flash fiction, but somebody sent me a link to a challenge she was running on her blog – write a story, 1,000 words or less, set in or around a Walmart.

A thousand words, I thought. Impossible. So I had to try it. And the resulting story, Black Friday, reinforced for me one of writing's most valuable lessons – strip it to the bone.  Or, as the Bard once said, "When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain."

I was hooked. Short fiction became a major food group in my writing diet. Not just for the stories themselves, but as a kind of training for when I'm in the middle of a novel. When I'm writing a novel, I have a tendency to meander, to get a little flabby.

Meander, you say? You? Surely not. I mean it only took you what, Five or six paragraphs to even start answering Chuck's question?

Well, that's another lesson, maybe. Good storytelling isn't always a frontal assault. Sometimes one story starts out as another. Sometimes the real story kind of sneaks up on you. Sometimes a story is like a river, just a little trickle at first, flowing this was and that, picking up a tributary here and there until it builds its force. Then, it will carve a canyon through a mountain instead of going around it.

But yeah. I spend a fair amount of time on short fiction these days. A few hours back in the short fiction gym puts an end to the flabby shit. Maybe not to some of the meandering, because, like I said, meandering has its place. But there's nothing like a short story to remind me that the flabby writing has to go.  It reminds me that you can lose a reader any time. With this sentence, or with the next one. Strip it to the bone.

OLD SCHOOL published by a small e-publisher, Snubnose Press: what's the value of a small publisher over a larger one?

Because Snubnose is the only publisher I've had to this point, that's hard for me to answer. For me, it came down to this. I had a growing collection of short fiction. People seemed to like it. I wanted to pull it together, get it out into the world, see if I could get a broader audience for it.

The big publishers, they don't put out that much short fiction, especially not from new authors. Frank Bill is the one exception I can think of, and for damn good reason. If you haven't read Crimes in Southern Indiana yet, stop right now and do so. It's OK, Chuck and I can wait.

So my choices were pitch it to one of the smaller publishers or self-publish.

I just don't want to mess with self publishing. I don't want to design a cover, format a document, be the only set of eyes proofing or editing something.  A man's got to know his limitations.

And I had another concern. Amazon has opened the floodgates on self-publishing, and the vast majority of that flood has been a stinking river of effluvium. Badly written stories, barely edited, rife with errors, often offered for free or near to it. I think readers are beginning to drown in that cesspool and are looking for some beacon that offers hope that a download might be something other than just another half-dissolved turd bobbing in the piss warm stream of sewage that the self-publishing revolution hath wrought.

A publisher's name attached to a book offers that hope, even if it is a smaller publisher like Snubnose. It means somebody who cares enough about writing to set up a publishing company has vetted the book, given it their blessing, invested their time in it, attached their reputation to the author's. Even for a small e-house like Snubnose, the titles that make it through are a tiny fraction of those submitted. For the reader, that means the publisher has strained through the distasteful river of crap to pluck out the occasional tasty bits.

You hear a lot of railing against gatekeepers from the self-publishing crowd – how agents and publishers are artificial arbiters standing between the reading public and this damned up reservoir of genius. And there are some heady drinks of genius to be had from that reservoir. But you have to gulp down a disproportionate amount of foul treacle to find them.

How are the stories in OLD SCHOOL emblematic of Dan O'Shea?

The collection is entitled Old School because the characters in these stories all have some miles on them. TV and movies are the predominate forms of storytelling in popular culture, and if you drew your view of the world from those sources, you'd think most everybody was some hard bodied twenty- or thirty-something posing through life's dramas in a Hugo Boss wardrobe.

I don't write about those people. The protagonists in my stories tend to be middle aged or older. They've suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and often have not prevailed against them. But they also aren't the dispossessed loners that dominate a lot of noir fiction.

A popular meme in a lot of crime stories is that old saw that having nothing to lose makes a man dangerous, desperate, a better protagonist. I think that's bullshit. Having nothing to lose means you're playing with house money. It means the only ones with anything in the pot are everybody else. Might as well play out that hand, all it has is upside. Having nothing to lose means that all you have ever been is a loser.

No, having something that matters to you, bearing the scars that earning that something cost you, having known life's successes and its failures, but having shown that you have grit enough, guile enough, to have had some of the former, for me, that makes an interesting character. Show me a man who has worked his whole life for what little he has and now finds that in danger and I'll show you a desperate human being. A dangerous human being. And I'll write you a story.

You don't tend to write happy, fluffy stuff — where's that darkness come from? How do you temper the grim stuff for readers — or, do you?

The story I started out with, that's mostly memoir. Some embellishment around the details aside, that happened to me.

Now, as a kid, I lived as charmed a life as this nation offers. Dad was a doctor, and a good one, so we had money, creature comforts, good schools, loving parents, all of that. Dad was the kind of doctor that cared way more about his patients than he did about money. Dad was the doctor who, back in 1965, quit the local country club when the clinic he worked at hired a Jewish doctor and that club wouldn't let him join – got a lot of the other docs to quit, too. The club changed its policy, but Dad never signed back on. Dad was the doctor that was still making house calls in the 1990s. He was the doctor who kept patients for life, who was treating the grandchildren of the patients he started with by the time he retired. He was the doctor I'd find staring blankly over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table some mornings, still wearing the clothes he'd left in the day before, having been at the hospital all night because one of his patients was dying and, even if there was nothing he could do to stop it, he'd be there for it. At his wake, person after person came up to me to introduce themselves as "one of your dad's patients." I tried to think of a doctor I've had whose wake I'd bother to go to. I couldn't.

He was and remains the most decent human being I've ever known.

That caring extended to his family. I remember my freshman year in high school, we had a football game in Woodstock, maybe 30 miles from our house, way out in the sticks. Our freshman games were on Monday afternoons, started about 4:00. It was a shitty day, pouring rain, cold.  At some point in the fourth quarter, I'm running off the field after we scored, and I see my old man standing there on the sidelines, soaking wet, he's pants cuffed with mud, clapping for me. He'd knocked off work early, driven out into the boonies, just so he could stand in the rain and catch the last quarter of my game. He was like that.

So I was raised in the best of circumstance, yet that story I started with? That still happened. I still got mugged, I still had to protect my kid brother at knife point, and the very same day this other kid I knew, a kid who was pretty much a god in my eyes, that kid fell off a cliff and died. A few years ago, my best friend died in a car crash. A week ago, in Naperville, next town east from here, a town that's always making that list of Best Cities to Live In or Best Places to Raise Your Family, there was a fight in a bar. Not a biker bar, not some roadhouse. An upscale joint, the sort of place where one MBA who met another MBA on match.com might pick for a first drink. Some guys got drunk, got into it, and this twenty-two year old kid tried to play peacemaker, got in the middle of it, tried to break it up. Took a knife to the heart, bled out all over the nice oak floor.

One my favorite openings to a book is the beginning of Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Somewhere in the first couple paragraphs there is this line: The world has teeth, and it can bite you with them any time it wants.

We've all got some teeth marks on us somewhere, but fiction is usually about amplifying the everyday, so in my stories, life has bit down hard and locked its jaws.

I don't always temper that. Some of the stories are just dark, period. But in many of them, there is a note of redemption. Thin Mints comes to mind. That's probably the one story of mine that's gotten the most traction – been published in Crimefactory, showed up in the Noir at the Bar anthology, got nominated for some award last year. In that story, you have an everyday guy who throws away everything – family, job, self-respect – in pursuit of his selfish appetites. But in the end, he's confronted with a hard choice, finds a line he won't cross, redeems himself.

ROTTEN AT THE HEART sees Shakespeare-as-shamus: what's the trick to writing historical fiction? Do the facts ever get in the way of the fiction?

Chuck, you and I have famously disagreed on the role of planning (I say famously because it happened on your blog – what happens on my blog happens in obscurity). You like outlines and character bibles and such, I prefer a more organic process – placing characters I like in situations I find interesting, and then just following them around my head and seeing what they do.  Now, having written exactly one piece of historical fiction, I won't hold myself out as an expert, but here's what I found. I didn't need an outline for this one, because history provided it.

The story is set in the summer of 1596. Henry Carey, the First Baron Hundson, the Lord Chamberlain and the sponsor of Shakespeare's theater troupe, dies. That actually happened. A couple weeks later, Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, dies. That actually happened. I refer to the Rising of the North in 1569 and a Spanish raid on the southern English coast in 1595, those actually happened.  Marital tensions that I include between Shakespeare and his wife? They may not be true, but there is substantial speculation of the same nature offered by numerous Shakespearian scholars. A guy named Radcliffe, who was basically the Queen's designated torturer, plays a key role, as do George Carey, the Second Baron Hundson, some of the Queen's other ministers and Elizabeth I herself. And those are all real people performing their real offices.

Outside of historical events and people, there are realities of life in Elizabethan London that inform the story – the rise of Puritanism and its antipathy to the theater, the banishing of "entertainments" to districts outside the city proper, the growing power of the Bourse (the birth of what we would now call a stock exchange) and the beginnings of the competition between the power of the crown and the power of private capital.

Taken together, all of that formed a virtual outline for the story, provided a historical skeleton I had only to flesh out. So the facts drove the fiction, they didn't get in the way of it.  In fact, the most improbable part of the book – maybe the most improbable thing I've included in any of my books so far – is an event from history.  The famed Globe Theater, the venue most associated with the Bard, really was built in a day. Due to a real estate dispute, Shakespeare's troupe really did disassemble their theater in Shoreditch and, in a single night, transport the boards and timbers to the Globe's location in Bankside, where it was raised the next day – and without power tools.  Had that not actually happened, I would never have dared write it, but it did, so I did – and it plays a central role in the story.  Although, historically, that happened a couple years after 1596. I'm no Elizabethan scholar, so I'm sure I've made other historical errors, but moving that up a couple of years was the biggest liberty I took knowingly.

I like to say this: Rotten at the Heart didn't really happen. I don't think Shakespeare was ever blackmailed into serving as a royal sponsor's private dick. But it could have happened, because the facts presented in the story and the historical realities that provide the story's tension and motivations are all, to my knowledge, true.

Transmissions From Baby-Town: "Nine Months"

This week, the calendar pages come fluttering off the wall, and Baby B-Dub reaches nine months of age.

Which means he's been out as long as he was in.

And it's becoming increasingly clear that we're screwed.

 

* * *

 

He never stops moving.

The boy was always a squirmy one. But he is rarely content to be held. Or to remain in one place for more than, ohhh, 34 seconds. This kid wants to go go go. He wants to crawl. He wants to stand. Give him half a chance, he'll fling himself over the edge of the bed, the high-chair, the crib wall. He learned how to use the crib bumpers as ladders and climb up over the edge of the Baby Containment Unit. Just this morning I turned my head away from the high chair for two seconds to fetch a spoon and when I turned my head back, half his body was already out, his gooey food-slick face staring at the floor.

Gone are the days of the little lump baby.

Here are the days of Little Baby Daredevil.

 

* * *

 

We hear this saying a lot:

"Oh. He's one of those babies."

And then we get sympathetic head nods and shoulder pats.

 

* * *

 

Sweet Jesus, this kid can eat.

He's like a wood-chipper.

It's as if his stomach is a molten core, and any food poured into that fiery space is burned away to meager char and ash the moment it touches the walls of his gastrointestinal furnace. You know how some adult human beings can subsist on, say, a small yogurt and a banana for breakfast? Our nine-month son can eat more than that. Just yesterday we had to feed him four meals. You get through one container of pureed food and Baby Jabba over there is suddenly all BOSHUUDA NAY WANNA WONGA BLUEBERRY YOGURT which means it's time to go seeking a new food source before he starts eating his high-chair.

And you think I'm kidding. He gnaws on his high-chair like a starving badger.

Sometimes I'm forced to wonder, did our son accidentally eat another baby? Is he somehow feasting for two? Ye gods, man, where the hell is all this food going?

OH THAT'S RIGHT.

It goes into the diapers. We went from one diaper every few days to one diaper every seventeen minutes. His diapers get so heavy, I just leave them outside in the wintry cold and let them freeze over. Then, should any of my neighbors grow uppity, I shall launch these frozen turd-bombs at their house with some jury-rigged trebuchet. If only they had the icy-chunk diaper-made cannonballs in the Middle Ages. Siege warfare would've been a whole different animal.

 

* * *

 

Diaper changes are different, now. He is not content to just lay there dreamily. He twists and turns and writhes and squirms. Trying to escape our clutches at the worst possible time — when we're trying to wrestle a wet-nap from the box, when we're trying to pop the stubborn tabs on the goddamn diaper, when we've got poop on our hands. Now diaper-changing time is a full-contact-sport.

And it frequently requires two people.

 

* * *

 

It's like in all the war movies, eventually one side is forced to recognize: "We are overrun."

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he stands up.

On his own. This just started happening — he gets his legs under him, reaches out as if he's going to grab hold of something but then forgets that step and just — voooop — stands up.

He can make it for about three seconds.

Then he falls down. Whump, on his rump.

He's learned how to fall so that he can learn how to stand.

There's a lesson in there for all of us, I guess.

 

* * *

 

I pretend it's a very early, very sluggish game of proto-catch between father and son. There B-Dub sits in his high-chair or in his crib and any toys he can find end up over the edge and onto the floor. Then I go and I pick up the toys and I put them back in and, within 30 seconds, they're all back on the floor.

But I know the truth. It's not a game of catch.

It's a game of fetch.

And I am most assuredly the dog.

But I don't admit that often. The illusion of reciprocity is key.

 

* * *

 

I know now, when you have a baby, it's a game of buying your life back in five minute increments. Small things. "Oh, I'd like to go to the bathroom now. If I strap him in his high chair and give him a copy of the latest Field & Stream magazine, will that occupy him long enough for me to go and relieve myself? Will it? Will it?"

No, it won't.

But you have to try.

 

* * *

 

He shouldn't be faster than us.

That shouldn't be possible. He's tiny.

Oh, but he is. Plop him on the floor and play with him for a while, suddenly he'll get it in his head to dart off to the farthest-flung and most dangerous corner of the room. Oh, and he'll always go for the worst possible thing in the room, a thing that no matter how hard you baby-proofed still exists — "How did this Chinese throwing star end up under the couch?" Next thing you know you're struggling to reach him before he wings the Chinese throwing star at the dog and you're left dizzy with the notion that somehow this baby, this nine-month-old human who still poops his pants almost out-ran you.

And he can't even walk yet.

 

* * *

 

He shouldn't be stronger than us.

But if he gets hold of the spoon while feeding, I have to wrestle with him to get it back. And it's hard. How is that possible? I'm a fully-grown man. I've got bulk. I'm not a weight-lifter or anything, but this kid has the muscle-tone of a bag of marshmallows. How is he beating me? How is this even a competition?

One day science will prove that babies somehow possess secret chimpanzee strength.

One day.

 

* * *

 

He's very loud.

I'm sorry — maybe you couldn't hear me –

HE'S VERY LOUD.

It's not that he's upset. He's… talking. Except very, very loudly.

BAH BAH BAH BAH MAH MAH MAH DAD DAD DAD UGGY UGGY OOOOOOOO

 

* * *

 

Here's one way he's like his father:

Hates pants. Hates socks.

Gets rid of both at every opportunity.

Eat shit, pants. Go to hell, socks.

*fling*

 

* * *

 

He sleeps with us in our bed. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, you feel it. A presence. Staring you down. And, sure enough, there's our little shadow-baby, sitting between us and just… watching.

Like a hawk watching a little bunny cross the road.

 

* * *

 

He's trying to destroy us, physically. No matter how often you cut his nails he's got talons like an owl. He'll grab your lower lip and pull downward as if he's trying to close a garage door. He'll knock my glasses to the floor and then go for the soft melon-balls that are my eyes. He'll headbutt. He'll yank hair. He'll bite — well, gum — your nose. He's trying to wear us down. He's trying to get control.

 

* * *

 

Who the hell am I kidding? He's already got control.

He's got it and he's going to keep it not because he's the tiny pink-cheeked dictator that rules this house but in spite of that — he is, instead, the pink-cheeked dictator that rules our hearts.

(Cue the audio: "Awwwww.")

He's learning how to give kisses. Kisses that don't always come replete with a headbutt.

He's learning how to high-five us.

He's learning when to say Mama, or Daddy, or Doggy.

He'll try to feed us.

He's learning how to snuggle up and — almost — give hugs.

He smiles whenever we enter the room.

He laughs like they're about to make laughing illegal so he better get it all in right now.

His feet are ticklish. He likes to rub noses with you. He's still got the biggest bluest eyes and now, growing in upon his Charlie Brown head is a snowy white-blonde coat of wispy hair.

Sure, yeah, we're overrun.

But that's okay. We like it.

Happy nine months, kiddo.

25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called "Aspiring" Writers

Seen a lot of folks giving advice to so-called "aspiring" writers these days, so, I figured what the hell? Might as well throw my dubious nuggets of wisdom into the stew. See if any of this tastes right to you.

1. No More Aspiring, Dingbats

Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don't want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.

2. Kick Your Lowest Common Denominator In The Kidneys

You can aspire to be a lot of other things within the writing realm, and that's okay. You can aspire to be a published author. Or a bestselling author. Or a professional freelance writer. Or an author who plagiarizes his memoir and gets struck with a wooden mallet wielded by Oprah live on primetime television. You should aspire to be a better writer. We all should. Nobody is at the top of his game. We can all climb higher.

3. Aspiring Writers, Far As The Eye Can See

Nobody respects writers, yet everybody wants to be one (probably because everybody wants to be one). Point is, you want to be a writer? Good for you. So does that guy. And that girl. And him. And her. And that old dude. And that young broad. And your neighbor. And your mailman. And that chihuahua. And that copy machine. Ahead of you is an ocean of wannabe ink-slaves and word-earners. I don't say this to daunt you. Or to be dismissive. But you have to differentiate yourself and the way you do that is by doing rather than be pretending. You will climb higher than them on a ladder built from your wordsmithy.

4. We All Booby-Trap The Jungle Behind Us

There exists no one way toward becoming a professional writer. You cannot perfectly walk another's journey. That's why writing advice is just that — it's advice. It's mere suggestion. Might work. Might not. Lots of good ideas out there, but none of it is gospel. One person will tell you this is the path. Another will point the other way and say that is the path. They're both right for themselves, and they're both probably wrong for you. We all chart our own course and burn the map afterward. It's just how it is. If you want to find the way forward, then stop looking for maps and start walking.

5. The Golden Perfect Path Of The Scrivening Bodhisattvas

Point is, fuck the One True Way. Doesn't exist. Nobody has answers — all you get are suggestions. Anybody who tells you they have The Answer is gassy with lies. Distrust such certainty and play the role of skeptic.

6. Yes, It Always Feels This Way

You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you're the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, or yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.

7. Figure Out How You Write, Then Do That

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won't come naturally at all. Maybe you'll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

8. Finish Your Shit

I'm just going to type this out a dozen times so it's clear: finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit! FINISH YOUR SHIT. Finish. Your. Shit. Fiiiiniiiish yooooour shiiiiit. COMPLETO EL POOPO. Vervollständigen Sie Ihre Fäkalien! Finish your shit.

9. You Need To Learn The Rules. . .

…in order to know when they must be broken.

10. You Need To Break The Rules. . .

… in order to know why they matter.

11. What I Mean By Rules Is–

Writing is a technical skill. A craft. You can argue that storytelling is an art. You can argue that art emerges from good writing the way a dolphin riding a jet-ski emerges the longer you stare at a Magic Eye painting. But don't get ahead of yourself, hoss. You still need to know how to communicate. You need to learn the laws of this maddening land. I've seen too many authors want to jump ahead of the skill and just start telling stories — you ever try to get ahead of your own skill level? I used to imagine pictures in my head and I'd try to paint them in watercolor and they'd end up looking like someone barfed up watery yogurt onto the canvas. I'd rail against this: WHY DON'T THEY LOOK BEAUTIFUL? Uhh, because you don't know how to actually paint, dumb-fuck. You cannot exert your talent unless you first have the skill to bolster that talent.

12. Oh, The Salad Days Of College!

Why are the days of our youth known as "salad days?" Is "salad" really the image that conjures up the wild and fruitful times of our adolescence? "Fritos," maybe. Or "Beer keg." I dunno. What were we talking about? Ah! Yes. College. Do you need it? Do you need a collegiate education, Young Aspirant to the Penmonkey Order? Need, no. To get published nobody gives a flying rat penis whether or not you have a degree. They just care that you can write. Now, college and even post-grad work may help you become a better writer — it did for me! — though, I'd argue that the money you throw into the tank getting there may have been better spent on feeding yourself while you just learn how to write in whatever mousetrap you call a domicile. You can only learn so much from someone teaching you how to write. Eventually you just have to write.

13. Reading Does Not Make You A Writer

That's the old piece of advice, isn't it? "All you need to do is read and write to be a writer." You don't learn to write through reading anymore than you learn carpentry by sitting on a chair. You learn to write by writing. And, when you do read something, you learn from it by dissecting it — what is the author doing? How are characters and plot drawn together? You must read critically — that is the key.

14. Here Is Your Tin Cup, Your Hobo Bindle, Your Rat-Nest Undies

You're going to starve for a while, so just get used to that now. Don't quit your day job. Yet.

15. Commerce Is Not The Enemy Of Art

If you think commerce somehow devalues art, then we're done talking. I got nothin' for you. Money doesn't devalue art any more than art devalues money — commerce can help art, hurt art, or have no effect. The saying isn't Money is the root of all evil. It's The love of money is the root of all evil. Commerce only damages art when the purpose of the art is only money. So it is with your writing.

16. Overnight Success Probably Isn't

Suddenly on your radar screen is a big giant glowing mass like you'd see when a swarm of xenomorphs is closing fast on your position and it's like, "Hey! This author appeared out of nowhere! Overnight success! Mega-bestseller! Million-dollar deal!" And then you get it in your head: "I can do that, too. I can go from a relative nobody to America's Favorite Author, and Oprah will keep me in a gilded cage and she'll feed me rare coffees whose beans were first run through the intestinal tract of a dodo bird." Yeah, except, those who are "overnight successes," rarely appear out of nowhere. It's the same way that an asteroid doesn't "just appear" before destroying earth and plunging it into a dust-choked dead-sun apocalypse: that fucker took a long time to reach earth, even if we didn't notice. Overnight successes didn't win the lottery. They likely toiled away in obscurity for years. The lesson is: work matters.

17. Meet The Universe In The Middle

My theory in life and writing is this — and it's some deeply profound shit, so here, lower the lights, put on a serious turtleneck with a houndstooth elbow-patched jacket over it, and go ahead and smoke this weird hash I stole from an Afghani cult leader. The theory is this: meet the universe halfway and the universe will meet you in return. Explained more completely: there exist components of any career (but writing in particular) that are well beyond your grasp. You cannot control everything. Some of it is just left to fate. But, you still have to put in the work. You won't get struck by lightning if you don't run out the storm. You must maximize your chances. You do this by meeting the universe halfway. You do this by working.

18. Self-Publishing Is Not The Easy Way Out

Self-publishing is a viable path. It is not, however, the easy path. Get shut of this notion. You don't just do a little ballerina twirl and a book falls out of your vagina. (And if that does happen, please see a doctor. Especially if you're a dude.) It takes a lot of effort to bring a proper self-published book to life. Divest yourself of the idea that it's the cheaper, easier, also-ran path. Faster, yes. But that's all.

19. No, Total Stranger, I Don't Want To Read Your Stuff

I really don't. And neither does any other working author. It's nothing personal. We just don't know you from any other spam-bot lurking in the wings ready to dump a bucket of dick pills and Nigerian money over our heads. That's not to say we won't be friendly or are unwilling to talk to you about your work, but we're already probably neck deep in the ordure of our own wordsmithy. (Or we're drunk and confused at a Chuck-E-Cheese somewhere.) We cannot take the time to read the work of total strangers. Be polite if you're going to ask. And damn sure don't get mad when we say no.

20. Your Jealousy And Depression Do Not Matter

All writers get down on themselves. It's in our wheelhouse. We see other writers being successful and at first we're all like, "Yay, good for that person!" but then ten minutes later we get this sniper's bullet of envy and this poison feeling shoots through the center of our brain like a railroad spike: BUT WHY NOT ME? And then we go take a bath with a toaster. Fuck that. Those feelings don't matter. They don't help you. They may be normal, they may be natural, but they're not useful and they're certainly not interesting.

21. Talking About Writing Is Not The Same As Writing

Needs no further comment.

22. Pack Your Echo Chamber With C4 And Blow It Skyward

Aspiring writers lock themselves away in echo chambers filled with other aspiring writers where one of two things often happen: one, everybody gives each other happy handjobs and nobody writes anything bad and everybody likes everything and it's a big old self-congratulatory testicle-tickling festival; two, it's loaded for bear by people who don't know how to give good criticism and the criticism is destructive rather than constructive and it's just a cloud of bad vibes swirling around your head like a plague of urinating bats. If you find yourself in this kind of echo chamber, blow a hole in the wall and crawl to freedom.

23. Learn To Take A Punch

Agents, editors, reviewers, readers, trolls on the Internet, they're going to say things you don't want to hear. A thick skin isn't enough. You need a leathery carapace. A chitinous exoskeleton. Writing is a hard-knock career where you invite a bevy of slings and arrows into your face and heart. It is what it is.

24. You Can Do Whatever The Fuck You Want

As a writer, the world you create is yours and yours alone. Someone will always be there to tell you what you can't do, but they're nearly always wrong. You're a writer. You can make anything up that you want. It may not be lucrative. It may not pay your mortgage. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about what's going on between you and the blank page before you. It's just you and the story. If you love it and you want to write it, then wire your trap shut and write it. And write it well. Expect nothing beyond this — expect no reward, expect no victory parade — but embrace the satisfaction it gives you to do your thing.

25. The One No-Fooling Rule

Is "write." Write, write, write, motherfucking write. Write better today than you did yesterday and better tomorrow than you did today. Onward, fair penmonkey, onward. If you're not a writer, something will stop you — your own doubts, hate from haters, a bad review, poor time management, a hungry raccoon that nibbles off your fingers, whatever. If you're a writer, you'll write. And you'll never stop to look back.

Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Now Available: 500 More Ways To Be A Better Writer

Around these parts, my so-called "Lists of 25″ seem to get lots of love — which means it's high-time for another collection! If you're itchy for an avalanche of 500 tips and thoughts on the subject of writing and the writer's life, look no further — because the next in the series is about to come tumbling down the mountain, smothering you beneath the blanket of its dubious penmonkey wisdom.

For $2.99, you can get your inky mitts on the e-book at:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (UK)

Barnes & Noble

Or, you can procure here (PDF or, by request, ePub/Mobi) by clicking the following:

(Please note that buying direct through terribleminds may take time for fulfillment — ideally you'll receive the e-book within an hour of ordering, but if Paypal is slow to alert me or if I'm, say, asleep, then you can expect a slower turnaround. You should receive the file within 24 hours — if not, contact me at terribleminds at gmail. Also, you will receive PDF by default — please send a note with your order if you want ePub or Mobi.)

Also, for this first week (ending Sunday, Feb 26), I'm offering a special deal –

You give me $5.00, I'll send you all three of the "List of 25″ books, which means you get 250 THINGS, 500 WAYS, and 500 MORE WAYS (in PDF) for a mere five bucks. Just click the Paypal link below:

What The King Hell Is This?

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER is the sequel to 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER (which is itself a sequel to 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING).

Nab this book and you'll find within a series of lists geared toward enlightening you with the short sharp satori smack of dubious writing wisdom. The book contains a veritable horse-choker of writing advice meant to help novelists, screenwriters and other storytellers better understand topics near and dear to the penmonkey existence. The book answers questions such as, "How do I find my voice? What should I know about procuring an agent? How do I find the proper story structure for my story? Where are my pants?"

500 MORE WAYS contains the following:

25 Financial F**k-Ups Writers Make

25 Mistakes To Look For In Your Writing

25 Reasons Readers Will Keep Reading Your Story

25 Reasons Readers Will Quit Reading Your Story

25 Reasons Writers Are Bug-F**k Nuts

25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called "Aspiring" Writers

25 Things Writers Should Know About Blogging

25 Things Writers Should Know About Agents

25 Things Writers Should Start Doing (As Soon As Possible)

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Starting Right Now)

25 Things You Should Know About Narrative Structure

25 Things You Should Know About Protagonists

25 Things You Should Know About Rejection

25 Things You Should Know About Setting

25 Things You Should Know About Suspense And Tension In Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Your Authorial Voice

25 Things You Should Know About Your "Finished" Novel

25 Ways For Writers To Help Other Writers

Appendix I: 25 More Writing Challenges

Appendix II: 25 Things You Should Know About Me

Several of those are brand new and are not replicated here at the website (Mistakes, Blogging, Setting, Challenges, About Me). Further, none of this is replicated in my other writing books.

The book is ~50,000 words of hot tasty content.

Why Buy?

Because it's a face full of NSFW (and quite possibly NSFL) thoughts about writing, including how to properly describe your story's setting, how to write a query without causing a potential agent to run screaming toward the Eject button, how to stop being an aspiring writer and become an actual writer, and how to keep the audience glued to the story you're telling. The book takes my usual approach with so-called writing advice, which is that I aim to be in some way enlightening. When that fails, I aim to at least be humorous. And when that fails, I aim to dazzle you with creative profanity and repeated bludgeoning use of words like "unicorn" or "poop." (But not, curiously, "unicorn poop.")

Or, maybe it's because you want to support terribleminds. This site has become more costly to operate (the higher view count has demanded a more "top-shelf" hosting plan so the site doesn't go down), and further, I'm looking into making some changes around here (better comment system, e-book store, some squashed bugs). Doing that requires a little extra green in the billfold. Does anyone use the word "billfold" anymore? I mean, except sweater-clad grandfathers?

Or, maybe it's because you want to help feed this little dude–

I mean, c'mon. He's cute as a ferris wheel full of kittens, this kid.

Whatever the case, if you spread the word, I say thank you. If you procure the collection, I say double thanks. I can only do what I do because you terribleminds readers are the best around.

And nothing's ever gonna keep you down.

*crane kick*

Flash Fiction Challenge: Making A Sandwich

Last week's challenge — "The Unlikable Protagonist" — filled up with some of my favorite entries to date. Go and read the stories from that challenge — you'll find them interesting, I suspect.

Yesterday, I interviewed author James R. Tuck and Tuck said something that stuck with me:

"You can write a whole page on a character making a sandwich and if you do it right it will be gripping and compelling. Have your character make a banana and mayonnaise sandwich while they discuss killing someone, or divorcing their husband, or sleeping with their girlfriend for the first time. You can turn that sandwich into a load of character detail."

And I thought, well, shit, that's true.

Every scene has to be infused with drama and conflict — you have to make every moment count, even if it's just a guy making a sandwich or a girl squatting out in a field during a long road trip to take a piss.

Then I thought — hey, this should be a flash fiction challenge.

And so it is.

You have up to 1000 words to write a story — not a scene, but a story — where a character makes a sandwich. Any kind of character, any kind of sandwich, but the point is to infuse this seemingly mundane act with the magic story-stuff of drama and conflict. Make it the most interesting "person-making-a-sandwich" story you can possibly make it. It needs to grip the testicles. It must twist the nipples. It must not let go.

That's your task.

Same details apply: you've got one week (ends 2/24 at noon EST). Post story at your blog or webspace and link back here so we can all swing by and have a little looky-see.

Now get cracking.

Make that sandwich. Write that story.

What's The Poop, Wendig?

Some very quick news-scented bits:

• The Bait Dog Kickstarter went live yesterday around 1pm, and by 10:30 or so, the book was at 100% funding. So, Atlanta Burns will officially get her standalone novel where she goes toe-to-toe with a dog-fighting ring and a town-wide conspiracy built on the backs of bigotry. Thank you, awesome humans, for helping make that happen.

• That said, we've still got, ohhh, 30 days left on the clock. Which means it's time to talk about going the extra mile in terms of "unlocked rewards." Here's how it works: for every additional $3000, I will write a new Atlanta Burns novel. Anyone who has pledged at the $25 level or higher will receive every Atlanta Burns novel (in the e-book format of your choosing) that is unlocked during this Kickstarter drive. I don't know how long it'll take me to write each novel, but I'm going to loosely give each a three-to-six month window (I've got a few already outlined, so I've got a jump on new Atlanta tales). So, if you continue to pledge, not only will you earn the rewards of your pledge tier but you're also contributing toward more Atlanta Burns books.

• Yes, this means I've effectively committed to writing infinite novels.

• Yes, this probably means I'm crazy. But fuck it, I'm in it to win it. Go big or go home. Pedal to the metal! Rubber meets the road! I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum because bubble gum is delicious and I enjoy violence! And other pithy statements of triumph and encouragement.

• In case you don't know why you might want an Atlanta Burns novel, you can find the novella, Shotgun Gravy, free for a short time over at Amazon.

• Hey, hot damn, Blackbirds earned a short-but-sweet review at Publishers Weekly.

• Oh, and here's a Blackbirds review that calls the book "brash and brilliant." It goes onto say: "Blackbirds is one of those books that lingers with you a bit– in a good way. Wendig has such a bold style that the emotional payoff is as big as the characters. It's the kind of book that has the potential to put Wendig on the map as a 'must-read' author– I know he's made my list. Highly recommended." That's a squee-worthy review if ever there was one.

James R. Tuck: The Terribleminds Interview

Next up for the terribleminds interview — James R. Tuck, author of the recently released BLOOD & BULLETS, a Deacon Chalk story. James is the type to sell it straight and tell it like he sees it, so I'll leave him to get right to it. Welcome him here at terribleminds, and you can find James at his website, JamesRTuck.com, or on the Twittertubes @jamestuckwriter.

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.

"Respect your elders boy."

The young man looked at him, eyes bloodshot, a sallow cast to the whites of them. "My dad left before he even knew my whore of a momma was knocked up with me. Hell, he was gone before his drunk wore off." Long brown fingers stubbed out the joint delicately; white smoke wisping out the side of his mouth he leaned forward. "My whore of a momma didn't even have the courtesy to take me to my grandma before she split. Hell, she was gone before her drunk wore off too. My grandma had to take the crosstown bus for over three hours to come get me from the hospital. I love my grandma. I would kill for my grandma. I say ma'am to her, dress nice when I am over there, take her to church every Sunday and the Piccidilly afterwards. I do respect MY elders." The Glock appeared, pointed at Leon's chest. A smile with no humor touched the young buck's narrow, pock-marked face.

"The rest of y'all are just old."

Why do you tell stories?

Because I love it. Everybody says to write the story you want to read and that is exactly what I have done. I've been an urban fantasy fan for decades now, reading stuff that fit the genre even before I knew there was a genre. I've also always been an avid reader, always carrying a book and reading whenever the moment presents. I had just finished an urban fantasy book that was supposed to be dark, violent, and kick ass. It was the lamest, tamest, piece of crap I had ever read. Now I picked this book up because the reviews for it were off the hook. Many reviewers actually saying they were uncomfortable with the darkness of the book, the didn't know how the author had gotten away with writing something so violent, etc., etc., blah, blah, blahditty blah.

The book sucked balls. Not just balls, but big monkey balls. The ashy gray, wrinkly, and covered-in-tiny-hairs-like-wires monkey balls.

I put the book down and said out loud to myself: "I can write better shit than that." So I did. That made me sit down and write what would become BLOOD AND BULLETS, the first book in the Deacon Chalk series.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Quit using so many damn speechtags. Seriously, speechtags are of the Devil. They are lazy, worthless little filler words. I'm not saying never use them, but never use them.  If I see a whole page of he said, she said broken only by the occasional he exclaimed, then my eyes glaze over and I want to throw the book across the room. You can get so much more out of telling me what the character is doing instead of just telling me that they said something. Hell, that's the job of the quotation marks. You throw those bad boys around some words and I just know they were said by someone. Double duty your writing and let me know something about the character who is speaking by having them do something or describing something. Ditching speechtags and making use of descriptors will not only boost your writing but you will discover a whole world of subtext that will give weight to what your characters are saying, punching a hole in the reality matrix and bringing them to life.

Get them out of the white room and make them do something. You can write a whole page on a character making a sandwich and if you do it right it will be gripping and compelling. Have your character make a banana and mayonnaise sandwich while they discuss killing someone, or divorcing their husband, or sleeping with their girlfriend for the first time. You can turn that sandwich into a load of character detail.

Not bad for two pieces of wheat bread, a smear of Hellman's, and a banana.

(Don't knock it, that shit is delicious.)

Oh, and free second piece of advice.

Pull your head from out your ass.

Quit thinking you are so awesome you don't have to be polite to people. Seriously, a little consideration and manners will take you further than your talent will in some cases. Just take the two seconds to send a thank you email, or to repost the stuff put up by folks who help you out. Don't be the dick author that goes to a blog, does your guest post, and then trots back off to your masturbatory abattoir (masturabbatoir?) until the next time you need something posted. Life is about the give and the take. You should give more than you take.

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

I love being a writer. I love meeting fans and reader and people who think I suck. My favorite thing is being able to go up to writers whose work I admire and talking to them without seeming like a crazed fanboy. I can chit-chat on fairly equal footing with writers whose books I have enjoyed over the years. It's awesome.

The suck factor comes in for me  in that I have no idea how I am doing at any given time. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. How you sell. That is what matters in the publishing world. Not your talent, not your art, not even you story. Just did the book make money. If you made money then you get to write again, if not, then you and Geno have a meeting in the back with a Louisville Slugger.

The Illuminati keeps those figures locked up in the vaults just to drive people like me crazy. (Curse you Illuminati!)

What do you love about the urban fantasy sub-genre, and what do you hate about it?

Urban fantasy is my great love in reading. It is tied with crime fiction. I have always been fascinated with mythology and religion so pulling that into the "real" world really works for me. It just gets stuff moving in my bloodstream. Monsters and gun, hell to the yeah.

The biggest problem I have with urban fantasy right now is the way a lot of it follows in trends and the way it pulls back from the edge, trying to be more paranormal romance.

Now the first part of that is it seems like: "You know what's hot right now? Fairies. Vampires are dead, don't write about them, write about fairies. Fairies sell." Well, kiss my ass very much. I'll write about fairies when I damn well want to and because I have a new spin to throw at it. I wanted to write vampires as the bad guys in my first book because they kick ass when stripped of their humanity and made into monsters. It's a classic because it damn well works. I did hear that no one was buying vampires after the publishing world has turned against the Twilight franchise. People said to me. "Oh, vampires are over. Stephanie Myers ruined them."  "I wouldn't write that, vampires are so cliché."

Don't be an idiot. Write a good book. Shut the fuck up.

Vampires are over is just another excuse for you to not write a damn book. Hush now, the writers are talking.

And the proliferation of paranormal romance into urban fantasy is old news. Now I like a good paranormal romance and love is a huge motivating factor in characters. Love has a place in urban fantasy, hell yes it does. However, there is a thing with paranormal romance, one of it's defining characteristics, in which the love story IS the story.  All the other factors play second and third fiddle to the romantic element. If that is what you are writing, then go for it. Do it well and I will read it and enjoy it, but if you are going to write urban fantasy then write it. Give me monsters without redemption. Inject some horror in there. Make some characters who are totally screwed up, because if you had to deal with this crazy shit in real life you would be nine kinds of fucked up.

What's it take to write great urban fantasy?

Brass balls. (picture Alec Baldwin with a pair of shiny balls in his hand.)

Seriously, it takes a careful attention to character and propensity to write those characters getting fucked up. You need to be able to go there. Take the bus full of your characters and drive them to the heart of Weird Shits-ville and kick them out. Naked.  You need to be able to see that if you were writing reality these people would be damaged. You also need to keep your sense of humor, because unrelenting horror is, well, horror and not urban fantasy. But if you are writing urban fantasy then do yourself a favor and don't hold back. It's your job to tell me about the piece of gristle stuck in the canines of a Were-wolf. It's your job to imagine just how a vampire who drinks blood and never brushes his teeth smells when it is in your face talking to you. It is your job to crawl through the dark and bring me a damn story worth reading.

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

I really like the word eldritch. I have since I first read it used by the late, great Robert E. Howard. It's a terrific word that I don't get to use nearly as often as I would like since I am not H.P. Lovecraft.

(Side note: How cool is it that Lovecraft is now a descriptive word in its own right? Lovecraftian. You call something Lovecraftian and you have just shortcut a ton of description to one word.)

Favorite curse word…..hmmm. If you read my first drafts it would seem like it would be fuck. I use that like it's my last name when I am first drafting. But my favorite would probably be cocksucker, which I haven't used in a story yet, but in book two my main character does tell someone to "keep your cock-holster buttoned."

So, if Lovecraftian is a word that describes work that feels like it's been written by Lovecraft, what would the future adjective "Jamestuckian" imply?

Dark, violent, bloody, and a propensity to use sentences where the action happens before the subject.  I want folks to know what they are getting into when they see my name on the cover. It will really throw them off when I do write a paranormal romance. (Muwah-ha-ha) But I do think that my books will always have a high action content, even if they aren't dripping blood from the page. I mean I'm 42. I'm not finding myself here. This is what I like dammit, and this is what I write. Trends can suck it.

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

I love me some Red-headed Sluts. Takes about 15 to really do a number on me, but they are delicious and highly recommended.

1 oz Jagermeister

1 oz peach schnapps

2 oz cranberry juice

Preparation:

Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

Shake well.

Strain into a shot or old-fashioned glass.

Of course if I am drinking straight then give me a nice bourbon, rum, or Southern Comfort. I hate beer, hate wine, and can't drink straight vodka anymore. I will take a nice moonshine if you have it though, I mean I am Southern-born and Southern-bred, we don't turn up our noses to the bathtub brewery.

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

There is no better film than The Princess Bride. Seriously, everything works in that movie. The perfect blend of acting, directing, storytelling, and unicorn blood. Virgin unicorn blood. That damn movie is infectious like a rhesus monkey in the CDC.

Book- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The language in that book makes me weep in shame. True, the story is really not worth telling, you don't know shit that is going on, and the lack of character definition can be maddening, but the LANGUAGE is just breathtaking.

I also love the book and the film for High Fidelity.

I can't recommend a best comic book ever. I love comic books. I am a fanboy from way back in the day. I love comics like I love my spleen. Hello, spleen, good day to you, I love you so much. Closest I can come to a best comic ever may be Preacher by Garth Ennis. That is  a comic book that is not for the faint of heart.

I can't recommend a game because (gasp!) I am not much of a gamer. I play vidjah games to unwind about once every 2 months. I want a game that I can run and gun, no thinking, no figuring shit out. Just give me a lot of stuff to destroy and I can veg out for a few hours. To illustrate, the only game I have ever beaten was Devil May Cry.

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

I do carry a gun in real life and am a better than decent shot with it. My true skill though is a complete and utter lack of conscience. I could do the most jacked up stuff, the stuff you need to do to survive, and never once feel bad about it. I can be the go to guy for fucked up shit that has to be done to survive.

I am sure most folks here are watching the Walking Dead on AMC. Have you noticed how utterly badass Rick Grimes has become? It's like that Dave Chappelle thing that gets stuck in everyone's head: "I'm Rick James bitch!" has now, in my head switched to: "I'm Rick Grimes bitch!". If this was zombie apocalypse I could make that switch in your head to: "I'm James Tuck bitch!".

You like guns, huh? What's your go-to gun in any situation?

My Colt .45 1911. I have one and it is, hands down, the finest handgun ever made. The pistol is absolutely intuitive. When you snatch it out of the holster your finger just slips over the safety in a gentle caress. If you carry it cocked, locked, and ready to rock (hammer back, safety on, one in the chamber for those of you who don't know) then you can have your firearm ready in seconds.

Plus the gun is just gorgeous. I get it that some folks aren't into guns but I am in a big way. To me, the 1911 is a work of art. You see it in movies a LOT because it is so damn cool looking. It's a big, shiny handful of badass.

What do most writers get wrong about guns in their stories?

Same thing as Hollywood usually. They forget to count bullets. They have bullets flying and the characters not reloading.

Plus, it seems most writers have never fired a gun. You can tell when you read that most writers have never blown that black shit out of their nose after an afternoon at the gun range.  And I have read a lot of odd mistakes. Safeties being flicked off of semiautomatics that don't have them, hell, safeties being flicked off revolvers, hammers being pulled back on Glocks, that kind of thing. It's fine if you write your character as not knowing about guns so you can skim some stuff, but there are basic levels of research that can't be gotten online. Hell, if you are a writer and have a question about a gun drop me a line. Unless the floodwaters of deadline are sweeping away my house, I'll answer.

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

The seared flesh of my enemies.

Or a really nice steak and a Dragon roll.

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

Crime. I am writing the 3rd Deacon Chalk book now and after that I have the 3rd Deacon Chalk e-novella to knock out. After that I am writing a crime novel. Something really dark and violent like Tom Piccirilli's stuff. I want to switch things up with one Deacon book a year, which is urban fantasy, and one other book a year of my choosing. The rest of my time I want to fill with short fiction, comic book writing, and maybe some screenwriting.

But next up is crime. I have a list of crime fiction ideas as long as my freakishly gorilla length arm.

The Bait Dog Kickstarter Is A-Go

Atlanta Burns.

Teenage girl with a shotgun. Standing up for the used and abused, the bullied and the beaten. A little bit Veronica Mars. A touch of Raylan Givens. Add a dash of Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

Now, she wants a ride in her first novel, and so I give you: BAIT DOG.

Well, I don't give it to you yet, I guess –

Because now BAIT DOG has a Kickstarter drive.

I've got all kinds of cool rewards cooking — not just the e-book but a hardcover and trucker hats and a copy of Fireside Magazine (with another Atlanta Burns short story in it, "Shotgun Gravy") and, if you happen to be wealthy and/or insane, a chance to come visit me in Pennsyltucky and fire off the shotguns and shoot whatever the hell we can find. (I suspect nobody's going to bite the bullet on that one.) Be advised, too — you do not need to read SHOTGUN GRAVY first (though you can if you so choose). With a successful pledge of the Kickstarter $5.00 and up, you'll get access to all the information you need to know. BAIT DOG is a standalone novel; no previous knowledge required.

Also, for every $3000 earned, I'll write a brand new Atlanta Burns novel. So, theoretically, if we blow past the 100% point (though the Devil only knows if we'll even get to 100%), there exists the chance for not one but several of Atlanta's adventures as a teenage detective-slash-vigilante to come into the light.

Atlanta as a character means a lot to me. She's kind of the patron saint of kicking over anthills and whupping up on bullies who might think to put someone down because they're different in some way.

Hopefully she'll mean something to you, too.

As a sidenote, Sweet Sid and Marty Krofft it's tricky business putting together a Kickstarter video. I mean, on the surface, it's fairly simple: "Point face at camera and say smart things." It's that latter part I had trouble with. You know how many videos ended up with me mouthing off a machine gun chatter of profanity and then trying to bite the lens in half? I'll give a conservative estimate of… mmm, ohh, 95% of 'em. At one point I really figured I might just post a video of me throwing up and then crying into my own sick on the hopes that I'd earn a sympathy pledge.

But then somehow it came together and I managed to post a video that was not altogether horrid.

Regardless, thanks for checking out the Kickstarter drive. I do hope you'll take a look and spread the word and, of course, pledge. I don't know if Kickstarter is the future for creative types, but it's certainly a very interesting component of the present and I suspect it will be an entertaining and illuminating ride. Thanks for taking it with me!

The Providence Rider, by Robert McCammon

(Providence Rider art by Vincent Chong)

Here's how I know that I'm connecting with a book — or, if you prefer, a book is connecting with me:

When I lay down at night to read, the book will generally nibble away at my awakened state. It's not that the book is boring. It's just, reading all those little words on a the page or the screen leaves my lids heavy. I start to drift off, my mind shutting down one synapse after the other. After a half-hour or so, I know I'm done.

That's true nine times out of ten.

But around, mmm, 10% of the time, I find a book so good, my eyelids don't get heavy. They go the other way. Hell, they get jacked up like the awning outside a double-wide meth-lab. And that's what happened when I picked up a copy of McCammon's newest, The Providence Rider. Now, to be very clear about all this, I'm a sucker for anything McCammon writes. I've been reading this guy since I was a teenager. His novel, Swan Song, is one of the scariest I've read. Boy's Life made me want to be a writer. I am, without reservation, his target audience. I'm just that way with some authors — Joe Lansdale's another one. Or Bradley Denton. Or Robin Hobb. Whatever I read of theirs I know I'm going to like.

Now, McCammon's last novel — The Five, his trippy rock-and-roll horror terror opus — was great, but it was a slow go for me in terms of reading. I felt like I needed to take my time with it, to move cautiously through it, to pick apart all the musical riffs and let the cold septic creep settle into my bones.

My experience with The Providence Rider was the opposite — fast, fun, and frankly, all kinds of fantastically fucked up. (Sorry for the alliteration. It is what it is. Let's move on.)

The Providence Rider is next in McCammon's Matthew Corbett series, a pre-Revolutionary War set of stories featuring the up-and-coming "problem solver" (think detective but with a far wider purview). Each book has been a different creature than the one before it, which is a bold choice for a series — the first book, Speaks the Nightbird, has Corbett investigating a supposed "witch" in the Carolinas. It's something of a meditation on good and evil, faith versus science, a story at the moment the times and tides started to turn for this country in terms of enlightenment. The second book, Queen of Bedlam, is a raucous gallop of an adventure, a thick meaty book that takes Corbett to the early days of New York City and sees him accept a position the adventure-having, problem-seeking Herrald Agency. Then came Mister Slaughter, where Corbett's story turns into a gruesome manhunt for the brutal slayer-of-men, Tyranthus Slaughter. It's not exactly a horror novel — but it's pretty damn close.

And now, The Providence Rider.

Beginning with Bedlam, Corbett's been tangled up in the schemes of the imperator rex of the criminal underbelly, one "Professor Fell." Fell has been a distant player for the last two books, his influence keenly felt while he himself remained an elusive faraway figure.

Providence Rider changes that.

Fell comes calling. Though he's been trying to kill Matthew, he decides that he'll stay his executioner's hand if Matthew will come to his private Caribbean island and, during a gathering of Fell's top lieutenants, help Fell solve a mystery. I'm not big on writing spoiler-heavy reviews, so I'll just say this: the book is chock-a-block with action and adventure. Continuing on the tradition of doing something a bit different with each book, Providence Rider is Matthew Corbett in a far pulpier tale. We get explosions! Boat chases! Cannon fire! Fights galore! The evil Irish Thacker twins! The mysterious knife-throwing Minx Cutter! Impossible automatons! A lost Indian princess! A giant octopus! A global criminal conspiracy! An earthquake!

It's got everything. Humor. Sex. Action. Adventure.

(And it's also got one of the grisliest decapitation scenes in recent memory. McCammon really knows how to skeeve you out during scenes like this — whether it's the hand-go-bye-bye scene in Swan Song or this page-long description of a head being sawed off at a formal function, his descriptions will squick you out.)

It's an interesting approach, isn't it? I think as authors we assume that readers want the same from us again and again — we've got this comfort zone in our heads and expect that readers want to remain herded up and huddled together in this safe place where they receive something approximating the same thing each time. But McCammon disproves that — or, at least, he disproves it for me, and given the fact that more of these books continue to reach shelves I have to hope that it's paying off in terms of sales, too. But it goes back to what I said earlier in my "Don't Get Burned By Branding" post — what readers will ideally respond to is your voice as a writer, not the genre in which you write. Every author brings with him certain things, be they themes, motifs, character archetypes, unanswered questions, grisly scenes of limb dismemberment, whatever. The reader, in this weird way, wants to carry the author's baggage — but that doesn't mean the reader requires the same reiteration of story or genre.  You don't read McCammon — or Lansdale, or someone like Cherie Priest — and expect the same old recycled pap every time. What you can expect is a quality of writing and a another visit with those elements the author holds dear.

The Providence Rider was just what the doctor ordered. We have an infant in the house so it's hard to carve out as much time for reading — and when I do, I don't necessarily want something heavy. This book did the trick. It's lean, mean, and wild-eyed — a Caribbean adventure with buckled-swashes and pulp-soaked goodness. I had a blast reading it, and I suspect so will you.

If you haven't read any in the Matthew Corbett series, I might recommend jumping right in with Queen of Bedlam — then go back and read Speaks the Nightbird after the others as kind of a "prequel."

The Providence Rider drops in May.

You can pre-order direct from the fine feathered folks at Subterranean Press (click here).

Needless to say, looking forward to the next Matthew Corbett adventure.

25 Things You Should Know About Protagonists

Ahh, the protagonist. The main motherfucker. The top dog. The mover-and-shaker of your story. Feels like it's time to crack open the protagonist's ribcage and get a good long look at his still-beating heart.

Another list of 25, incoming. Check your six, and please enjoy.

1. Prime Mover

The protagonist is the prime mover of the story. He shapes the tale and is in turn reshaped himself. If you can remove the character from the story and the story still happens in the same way, then what you've written is not a protagonist so much as "some schmoe who wanders through events like an old person lost at the mall." Activity over passivity. The character should act upon the world, not merely react to the world. Put differently: the character is driving the car; the car is not driving the character.

2. Yo Yo Yo It's MC Protag In The House, Motherfizzuckers

Generally, the "main character" and "protagonist" are the same — that isn't an automatic, however. A main character can be the narrator telling the story of a protagonist. But, unless you're a particularly talented writer, that's probably going suck a bucket of bubbly hippo spit.

3. Wuzza Wooza Hero Buzza Booza Quest?

Yes, blah blah blah, your protagonist is a "hero" going on a "quest." Strike this language from your vocabulary, at least at the outset. It's not that these terms are wildly inappropriate — given certain modes of genre-writing, they are the hats the protagonist will wear. But for now, let's pretend that a protagonist is more complicated and nuanced and sophisticated than the overly-simplistic "hero going on a quest" allows. Even characters existing in a fantasy realm or fighting, I dunno, space bees in space, should all be written as real people with real goals and real problems. Real people are not heroes. Real people do not go on quests. Let the audience call the protag a questing hero. You should dig deeper.

4. Replace The 'K' With A 'V'

The old saying is that the protagonist should be likable. That we should want to go out and grab a beer with him and paint our nails and giggle as we rub our genitals together. Put that out of your head. Forget likable. Likable is not a meaningful quality. The audience says that, but they don't mean it — otherwise, they wouldn't be interested in the likes of Tony Soprano. Or Don Draper. Or Lisbeth Salander. (It's harder to pull off an unlikable female protagonist, but that's because we're a fucked-up society who embraces flawed men but not flawed women.) Instead of likable, aim for livable. Meaning, we need to find this character compelling enough to live with them for the duration of the tale. I don't want to get a beer with Lisbeth Salander any more than I want to get a beer with a Bengal tiger. But I'm happy to watch do their thing.

5. The Worst Crime You Can Commit. . .

…is create a boring protagonist. I'd rather loathe the protagonist than be bored by him. If your character has all the personality of chewed-up cardboard, I'm out, I'm done, I'm hitting the eject button. And don't try any of those excuses — "But the world is exciting! The plot is zing! Bang! Boom!" No, no, no. You take those excuses and cram them in your pee-pee hole on the end of a rusty ramrod. The protagonist is why we stick around. This is the problem with the Everyman protagonist, by the way — recognize instead that we're not all John Q. Who-Gives-A-Shit and that the Everyman is a false notion and embrace what makes each person interesting as opposed to what makes us all one slack-jawed superorganism.

6. Combat Landing

I need to know who your protagonist is right out of the gate. Don't fuck around. It's like a combat landing — drop hard and fast out of the atmosphere. From the first five pages of your book or five minutes of your script, I need to know why I care about your protagonist. Dally not, word-herder.

7. The Ability To Act Upon The World

I want to read about a character who can do something. I don't want to read about some dude who has no marketable skills — "I'm really good at watching Wheel of Fortune drunk" is not a compelling reason for me to stick around. I don't care if he's a ninja, a lawyer, a detective, a doctor, a boat captain, or Captain Doctor Detective Stormshadow, Esquire — I want to know he is in some way capable. Who wants to read about an incapable ninny? (Be advised, however: capable is not the same as perfect.)

8. Standard Questions May Apply

The four cardinal questions: Who is she? What does she want? What conflicts and/or fears are standing in her way? And what is at stake (stakes as in, what will be won or lost) if she fails?

9. The Three Beats Of Doctor Protagonist

At the bare minimum, track the protagonist's character arc by plotting three beats — these beats indicate change (positive or negative) in that character. Werner goes from self-destructive –> loses everything –> turns life around. Roy-Anne goes from cloistered farm-girl –> dragged along on crazy adventure –> world-wise but cynical. Bobo the Hobo has an arc of homeless otter whisperer –> half-robot hobo-machine –> destroys world in staticky burst of cybernetic rage. … okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, track the way the character changes for the better and/or the worse across the swath of the story.

10. Change Is More Interesting Than Stasis

Storytelling is the narrative accounting of how one thing becomes another. It is a fictional accounting of a change of state. The protagonist is the arbiter of this change and without change, we have a narrative structure that's basically just a straight line with a period at the end of it. In your story, either the world changes the protagonist or the protagonist changes the world. But something must change.

11. The Two Faces Of Change

A protagonist either changes gradually over time as he encounters new events and other characters or he changes dramatically in response to a dramatic situation. The degree of change must match the degree of the events that urge that change — you can't have a protagonist whose girlfriend breaks up with him and next thing you know he's throwing babies into the shark tank at the local aquarium. "NOBODY LOVES ME NOW I HATE BABIES RAAAAR." You must seek out believability by way of consistency — and, when consistency breaks, empathy. A protagonist who suffers trauma changes drastically because we expect and allow that change. We must accept it. To some degree we must even expect it.

12. Are You An Innie Or An Outie?

The protagonist tends to have an inner story and an outer story. The internal tracks the protagonist's emotional, mental, and spiritual state, where the external story tracks the character's actions and movements and corporeal health. The external story is obvious because, duh, it's external. The internal story is hidden on purpose — exposing it to the light makes it feel twee, cloying, artificial. This is how we are as humans: our physical lives are plainly seen but our inner existence is guarded, concealed, hush-hush. The two stories also don't need to go the same way: a character who karate-kicks all the villains to death reaches a positive outcome in his external story, but his internal story may be one of guilt and strife over the violence caused by his karate-wielding death-hands.

13. The Necessity Of That One Ass-Kicking Moment

We want to see the protagonist do something awesome. Sure, it can be some rad-ass karate bullshit, but it can just as easily be him telling off his villainous mother, or graduating high school when the odds were stacked against him, or saving a baby penguin from the slashing knife of a serial killer. A small version of that moment can come early (the Blake Snyder "Save the Cat" beat), but toward the final act of the story we need to see this again — crank the volume knob to Maximum Awesome.

14. The D&D Alignment Chart Is Not The Worst Thing In The World

This is overly simplistic, but bear with me — the D&D alignment chart (see this one for THE WIRE) can help get you started in terms of determining the shape of your protagonist's actions. Does the character lean more lawful, or more chaotic? Is she neutral, or does she take sides on either side of the moral spectrum? WILL SHE DO BATTLE WITH THE CATOBLEPAS, OR THE DREAD MIND FLAYERS? Okay, maybe not so much with the Monster Manual stuff, but I think you get the idea.

15. Know Which Way The Character Will Jump

Some authors will go deep into a protagonist's history and chart every breakfast she had since she was but a snot-glazed toddler. Do that if you'd like, but in my experience it's best to dig deeper into the choices the character might make. In other words: know what way the protag'll jump in any given situation. Who she was should work backward from who she is — at least, for you, the writer. Knowing how she'll behave and what choices she'll make will inform the history necessary for the protag to have gotten to this point. By the way, "protag" is short-hand for "protagonist." All the kids are using it. Just yesterday a 12-year-old was like, "Hey, what up, Protag!" Or maybe I have wrong. Maybe he was like, "Hey, what up, you old bearded asshole!" Same thing. To-may-to to-mah-to.

16. Painting With Shadow: The Power Of The Antagonist

The antagonist opposes the protagonist not just once but throughout. In this way the antagonist helps define the protagonist in the same way you invoke a shape by coloring in everything but that shape. Note that the antagonist needn't be another character — it traditionally is, yes, but any persistent conflict can be truly antagonistic. A looming house foreclosure, a cancer diagnosis, a tornado made of biting squirrels.

17. Lube Up For The Protagonist Gangbang

Yes, Virginia, you can have multiple protagonists. Multiple "main" characters just assumes that you have several characters pushing and pulling on the story. Any ensemble piece or story with strong multiple-POV characters could be said to have several protagonists. They should get equal time and have equal effect on the world lest they be demoted to the cast of supporting characters. AKA, "People who might get eaten by alligators or dispatched by Klingons somewhere in the story."

18. Time To Practice Your Most Insidious Laugh

I like Moo-hoo-ha-HA-HA-HAHAHAHA — start slow and quiet and then go loud and fast. Which is also how I masturbate, just in case you were wondering. And you were. Anyway. My point here is, you have to hurt your protagonist. You really do. You have to be willing to cut them to the marrow physically, emotionally, spiritually — you know the protag well enough to know what and where his most vulnerable tickle spots pressure points are. This works because you've drawn a connection between the audience and the protagonist. The audience cares — or, at least, wants to remain compelled by the character's journey. By fucking with the protagonist, you're fucking with the audience. Which makes you sort of a dick, so, way to go. No wonder nobody liked you in high school. Jeez.

19. Fake-Out, Sucker

You can have a "false protagonist." You set up one character as a protagonist, the audience buys into it, then you switch it. Often by killing that false protagonist and revealing the real one. It's kind of a dick move but we've already established that you're a dick. The key is to be an effective dick. Or something.

20. Theme & Character: Car Crash, Or Pubic Braid? You Decide!

The protagonist interacts with theme in one of two ways: intersection or interweaving. At an intersection, the protagonist crashes head-on into the theme in a perpendicular 20-car-pile-up. The protagonist is at odds with the theme and rails against it, eventually overcoming it, overturning it, or succumbing to it and proving it out. Or, the protagonist and theme are interwoven together, wherein each reflects the other.

21. The Definition Of "Mary-Sue"

You will find multiple definitions of a "Mary-Sue" (the male version is called "No Gnews is Good Gnews with Gary Gnu") — what you need to know is that your protagonist should not be a pap, waffling, twee stand-in for your most perfect ideals. An unconflicted, untroubled, unrealistic icon of flawless goody-two-shoedness is a shitballs protagonist no matter what you call her. So, don't do that.

22. We Love Characters For Their Imperfections

We want characters who have flaws. Flaws are interesting. We like to watch flaws. Maybe we see them as representative of our own damaged goods? Maybe we just like to watch awful stuff, like when a conversion van full of bees drives into a Kodiak bear stuffed with explosives and sticky honey. Further, flaws offer a practical component: they make for the source of excellent conflict — and, in fact, represent a nearly-perfect internal self-generating conflict because the flaw forces the protagonist to act as his own antagonist. HOLY POOPFIRE DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? Ahem. Sorry. Some protagonists are subject to a "fatal flaw," which is a tragic-in-the-truest-sense weakness that forever threatens to undo all the good that the protagonist has done. My fatal flaw is writing POOPFIRE in all caps. And doing heroin. Mmm, heroin.

23. Discover The Sadness

That sounds like a new Sarah McLachlan song, doesn't it? Anyway. I've posited this before and I'll posit it again: sadness lingers at the nucleus of every story. It may not be dominant or prominent but it's there — and I think you can find the same thing inside the protagonist. Every protagonist should be wounded in some way; the wound may be a small but potent one or it may be the all-consuming spiritual equivalent of a sucking chest wound, but it should be present. In this wound grows sadness, and by digging for this griefstruck little pearl and unearthing it you will expose a critical part of the protagonist's makeup.

24. Find Yourself Inside The Protagonist

I don't mean that literally, of course. (Sexy as it may sound.) I mean that, to discover what lies at the heart of your protagonist you should endeavor to find some shared human experience, some critical emotional core sample that is a match betwixt the both of you. It can be anything, of course — "We're both orphans! We both have anger issues! We both enjoy have enjoy having cocaine snorted off our perineums by drunken diner waitresses!" — but it helps to channel a bit of yourself into the main character. If only so you create that sense of empathy needed to grok the protagonist's motives, fears, and goals.

25. The Superglue Of Shared Story

And therein lies the secret. When we respond to a protagonist it's because we see a bit of Our Story in Her Story. That's the glue that affixes us to the character, that makes us want to cling to him or her like a cuddly little marmoset. The protagonist can be wildly different from us as long we can see in him some aspect of shared human experience, some piece of driftwood bobbing in the great big chaotic ocean that is that protagonist's persona. (This is, I'd argue, why we respond to Luke Skywalker but not to Anakin — it's easier to see ourselves in Luke than his father.) Don't keep the protagonist at arm's length by giving her traits and experiences understood by only a small subset of the audience. That's not to say the protag cannot be a serial killer, alien, or star fighter pilot — it just means that some part of that character's makeup must reach across the abyss between story and audience in order to create common ground.

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