Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 274

"Decisions, Decisions," by C.Y. Reid

Okay. Here goes, the first weekly terribleminds guest post — this one by C.Y. Reid, who would like to talk to you about his experiences writing a Choose Your Own Adventure Android app. Welcome him, and don't hesitate to drop down into the comments section and ask the dude some questions. Please to enjoy.

Have you ever made a really difficult decision? One that's plagued you for days on end, the resulting nervous state of emotional limbo never quite seeming to dissipate despite what you're doing, where you are, or what's doing its best to distract you? We've all been there, and it's tough.

Now, I'm not talking about the stuff that holds a conventional sense of gravitas. One university or another. One car, one coffin, one career or another. I'm talking about the ridiculously bizarre decisions we fixate on to the point of generating our own internalised state of OCD. Which sandwich to have for lunch. Which bus to get. Which film to watch.

These decisions are what we agonise over more often than those with more serious consequences (though I'd argue that a bad sandwich is pretty serious), because they occur more often, and sometimes form part of an overall set of choices that define our lives. With choose-your-own-adventure writing, you're not offering people constant, life-changing choices – you're offering them the small beat-by-beat movements, occasionally punctuated by cliff-edge decisions, like how to fight a dragon, or how best to shut down your imagination while reading Chuck's search term bingo posts.

It's best to think of a choose-your-own-adventure novel like the roots of an old oak tree. You're starting out from the trunk, the body of work that forms the basis for everything else – the world-fluff. Every smattering of nutrients you suck up through exploring the roots travels back up towards the surface, contributing to an ever-growing understanding of the world you're exploring, page by page, in a far more direct and interactive way than you're usually allowed to.

But each branching path can't just be an obvious choice; a long, spiralling, weathered finger of wood with the resilience of aeons underground, or a short, dead stump. You have to make every single fork in the road matter just as much, and that means you can't simply write sword-or-white-flag choices. A lot of recent videogames have featured choose-your-own-adventure elements, from Fable's simplistic good-and-evil system to Mass Effect's conversation wheel.

But the problem with these choices, and a lot of the choices I see in choose-your-own-adventure fiction is that they're all based around an underlying theme of black-and-white morality. That theme is what is going to not only kill off half your pages, due to the fact that most readers will elect not to rape and pillage the townsfolk, rather than save and reassure them, but it's also going to mean that the reader's choices are simply a reflex.

Indecision generates fear, and I think that's one of the reasons we get so stressed out about whether or not to dash to the duty-free just when our gate number is due at any moment. There's that internal sensation of horror that pervades our decision, and I think by making people stop and think, you're generating an adventure that means something to the reader.

Some storytellers think that they need an action beat every so many pages. But with this, every page in a choose-your-own-adventure tale is an action beat. Life isn't a passenger experience, and if you're offering someone a sense of interactivity within your fiction, you have to commit – half-arsing it just leaves them feeling like they're playing within a sandbox, but you're only letting them have the ambulance and the Tonka truck, rather than the Hot Wheels dream machines you're dabbling with in the background.

If you want to write a choose-your-own-adventure novel (please do, it's an art form that deserves more attention), I salute you, because as a writer, it's brave of you. To hand one of the reins over to the reader and step back, knowing that they might only see less than a third of the pages you've written, perhaps never even reading through again to get a different ending, is bold. So be bold, and allow them to choose adventure.

C.Y. Reid is an SEO copywriter by day (boo, hiss, etc), and a passionate creative writer by night. He blogs at www.cyreid.com, tweets as @ReidFeed, and you can find Scoundrel's Cross at this link.

Strangling Mermaids: More Writing Myths That Need To Die

Point of fact: I'm the guy at parties who tells you that urban legend you're passing around — about the AIDS needles in the McDonald's playground ball-pit or the dead baby used to smuggle cocaine or the chihuahua-that's-actually-a-rat — is bullshit. I don't know why. Everybody has fun telling those kinds of stories and there I am, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, murdering misinformation — and, oh, fun — in equal measure. I'm just skeptical, I guess. You tell me that the punch in the punch bowl is spiked with vodka, I'm likely to ask, "Did you check Snopes? SNOPES OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN."

I bring the same measure of myth-killing (and subsequent accidental fun-murdering) to writing. Writers often live or die by magical thinking, and that's all well and good when it's not fucking with your mojo. But myths often contain secret dangers. The Mexican Pet legend — i.e. the chihuahua-that's-actually-a-rat — contains a not insubstantial seed of xenophobia and racism. "Oh, those silly disgusting Mexicans," it says, "with their dog-like rats and their rat-like dogs. You just can't trust things from wacky Mexico!"

And thus I find it instructive to shine a light in dark spaces.

It's probably annoying.

But, too bad. Here I am, once more kicking over logs inside the writer's mind and seeing what squirmy little wormlets lurk underneath. Let's tackle some more writing myths.

"All It Takes To Be A Writer Is To Read And Write!"

If ever there was a piece of advice that was more dismissive of the act of writing, I don't know what it is. At the heart of the advice is this: if you really want to learn how to write, then the only things you need to do is read books and, in turn, write them. Boom. Done. From there, you'll… I dunno, just figure it the fuck out.

Can you imagine if we believed that true of other skills?

"Piano? Ehh. Just listen to some Billy Joel and then go flop around on this Casio keyboard for an hour and a half. You'll pick it up." "Painting? Sure, sure, here's a bunch of Bob Ross VHS tapes, just put those on and then fingerpaint a bunch of happy little trees for a few weeks. You'll be Leonardo Picasso in no time." "Truck driving? Yeah, fuck the CDL. Just watch me do it, then you have a crack at it. That's all you need. No, don't worry if you mow down a church picnic or some shit. Them churchies have had it too good for too long."

Reading and writing are two critical components of learning to write. True. No argument. But to suggest that's all it takes is ludicrous — this isn't fucking Skee-Ball. Writing's got a lot of moving parts, many obscured behind a metric butt-ton of abstraction. This idea misses first that going out and living your life is a critical component to being a writer: you learn about stories by living your own stories. You also learn storytelling by hearing stories told, not just by reading them or writing them. Further, this removes from the equation any power you might get from writing classes (compositional and up) and writing advice, both of which are not only functional, but for many, fundamental.

Newsflash: I read a lot as a kid and I wrote a lot, too.

It didn't make me a bestselling author at age 12.

The classes I took? The writing advice I read? The conferences? The sit-downs with other writers? The notes from editors? All of it, instructive. All of it putting me where I am today.

"My Characters Control Me!"

Despite how it sounds, I don't actually want to destroy the magic implicit to storytelling. A very real magic lives there, and while I believe that writing is a craft, I've come to further believe that storytelling is an art.

But for me, the focus of magic must be internal, not external. Magic shouldn't happen to the writer; the writer should be the one in control of the magic. It's the difference between having your penis stolen by black magic sorcerers or, instead, being the sorcerer who uses his magic to steal penises. Right? Right.

So it always amazes me when writers speak of their fiction — and, in particular, the characters within that fiction — as being somehow alive, as if they're real people running rough-shod over your story because these characters just don't give a raw red fuck what you, the writer, want. Does that mean I've never been surprised by my characters? Of course I've been surprised by my characters. But I don't attribute it to them being real. Instead, I high-five my subconscious mind and say, "Nicely done, part of my brain, I approve of your decision." I mean, it's not like comic book writers are like, "Yeah, I don't know why Superman just took a Kryptonian Super-Shit on Hawkman. It's just, hey, that's Superman. I don't control him. That crazy motherfucker does what he wants. The underwear on the outside? His idea."

Here's proof that you control your characters. When next you sit to write, have one of your characters just take a handgun and shoot himself smack dab in the head. You can go back and erase it — but did he fight you for control of the gun? No. No he didn't. (And if he did: seek help. Or call a penis-stealing wizard, because maybe that dude has some advice on controlling your shit.)

"I Write Because OMG I Have To Or I'll Explode!"

Again, another thing that gives short shrift to writers and writing. Writers write because they want to write. We're not compelled to by some outer force. We are not mouthpieces of the divine.

Further, writing isn't a mental illness. (Though it may feel that way at times.) We are not compelled to do it like slavering word-junkies. Christ, if writers were truly compelled to write, you'd probably see a lot less video game playing and a helluva lot more actual writing getting done.

By acknowledging that we want to write and must force ourselves to do so, then… drum roll please, we actually do so. Don't be so dramatic to think that you're metaphysically or psychotically forced to write by elements beyond your control. You cede that kind of authority to spectral hands then when the day comes you don't write, well, that's probably because the Powers That Be demanded it. Oh well!

"By Performing That Action, I Will Have Given Away My Thunder!"

Your creativity is not a newborn rabbit, so frail that even the mildest startle causes its tender systems to shut down. And yet I continue to hear about how this or that (outlining, prep-work, revising, editing, etc.) somehow damages the author's creativity by robbing the project of its rare magic. Or, put differently, "It's just not fun anymore." You wrote an outline and it ruined Christmas.

You know what's not fun? A bad day of writing. You know what else isn't fun? When your word processor poops the bed and crashes in the middle of writing a paragraph. Rejections aren't fun either. Neither are bad reviews. Or paring down word count. Or excising a beloved character. Or, or, or. Point is, writing isn't a giggly run through a tickle-factory. The process is host to an endless array of cold realities. If your story idea is so fragile and crystalline that doing prep-work — or simply talking about it with a friend — then your story wasn't worth much of a shit to begin with.

A corollary to this features discussions about money and publishing, as if discussions surrounding those things tarnish the high-and-mighty art of writing. If money somehow cheapens writing for you, then your notion of writing was really too wan, too feeble, to survive. In this day and age, with a competitive market and a fast-exploding self-publishing market, talking about advances and book prices is meaningful and necessary. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the adults don't still need to have the conversation.

If you truly feel that way about money and art, great. Prove it. Don't get an agent. Don't contact a publisher. Give your work away. Online. On street corners. Wherever. Just hand it off. Because, fuck money, am I right? Fuck sustainability. Fuck feeding your kids or your dogs or paying for health care or buying bags of scrumdiddlicious Funyuns (or their snacky-food counterparts, Munchos and Bugles).

Go ahead. Just give it away.

The moment you say, "Well, I'd like to get something for it…" is the moment you enter the money discussion. And it's also the moment where I stick a bomb in your dickhole. FOOOOOM.

"My Ideas Are Super-Secret-Smooshy-Special!"

There exists a notion that the foundation of the writing life — that the curly pubic-coil that comprises a penmonkey's most basic DNA — is a foundation made of ideas. This is why the question is always, "Where do you get your ideas?" Because people place an incredibly high value on them.

Ah, but — this high value doesn't hold a lot of water.

Ideas aren't that meaningful by themselves. I've seen some writers stymied because they "don't have a good idea." An idea isn't the backbone of a story. It's isn't the whole pig. It's just the squeal and maybe the tail and that's it. The idea's the thing that gets you off the ground, but it's not currency. It's not a secret treasure. Most ideas aren't even that original. I don't know if stories even have original ideas.

What's original — and what matters — is the execution of an idea. The question should't be, "Where do you get your ideas?" but rather, "How exactly did you make good on this idea and sit down in front of the computer day in and day out and give flesh and bones to this notion and then, beyond that, how did you give breath to that flesh and bones and make that story get up and dance instead of being just a hollow gas-bag of unfulfilled, unoriginal, ill-arranged, who-gives-a-shit ideas?"

But I guess that question's a little too wordy. And besides, if writing is just about ideas, then how easy it must be! Eeeee! Giggle snort! Tickle-factory, here I come!

What else? Your turn. What myths sustain — but can also harm — the writer's life?

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

The Five, By Robert McCammon

THE FIVE is Robert McCammon's messiest, strangest work of fiction.

That may not sound like a good thing.

You'd be wrong.

See, this is a novel about the last days of a hardscrabble indie rock band — the titular "The Five" — and the horror they endure at the hands of a schizo sniper, a horror that ultimately brings them together before properly setting them apart. Contained within the story is this ghostly vein of the supernatural, a delicate component of good versus evil that never shows its full face, that always remains hidden in the margins of shadow that McCammon paints.

So, when I say "messy" and "strange," I mean it in the truest rock-and-roll sense. Think if you will of the The White Stripes. Or The Doors. Or Jimi Hendrix. Or late Beatles. Or Sleater-Kinney. Or any garage band playing music that isn't about perfection but about what lies beyond and within each note — the messy thump of a bass drum, the fuzz of a grinding guitar, the trippy vertigo strains of an organ. We're not talking the measured bleeps and blips of pop music: we're talking about the unkempt margins of rock-and-motherfucking-roll, son.

I don't know how McCammon does it, but both the story and the execution of that story mimic that kind of garage band rock. It's loose and messy, it deviates from expected courses, it escalates just when you think it's going to ease off and eases off just when you think it's going to escalate, it's trippy and slippery. Above all else, it offers a kind of genius from a storyteller who has in my mind achieved a mode of transcendence — here, then, is McCammon as storytelling Bodhisattva, staying around this crass publishing arena to show the rest of his what it's like to write from the heart and make it count.

Another way of thinking about it is by talking about James Joyce. Weird, I know, but bear with me: if you read Joyce's work, his fiction doesn't become more buttoned-up — it gets bigger, broader, more personal, and certainly weirder. Even comparing PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN with ULYSSES is a fascinating exercise: the first fairly lean, the second similar but with a far greater storyworld. ULYSSES shows Joyce beyond the top of his game — he's climbed the ladder, gotten to the top, and kicked it down behind him — and reveals an ultimate expression of the novel. He's not afraid to deviate, either. He wanders down alleys you didn't even know where there, with Leopold Bloom as our vehicle through the mundane chaos, the heroic normalcy of an everyman's day.

(Let's not talk about FINNEGAN'S WAKE right now.)

THE FIVE is McCammon's ULYSSES.

That's a wacky statement. I know. But I think it's true. This tale of "The Five" — Nomad, Ariel, Mike, Terry, and Berke — takes those same trips down dark alleys, concerning itself less with a mechanical thriller-slash-horror plot and more with the nature of these characters and the power and madness of rock-n'-roll in this day and age. This is actually marketed as a horror novel, and… it is, I guess, but only barely. That's not to say it's not scary. It's rough stuff at times. But again the supernatural component, while present, is barely there — a stroke of subtlety rather than overt paranormality.

I'll be honest. I wasn't sure about the book for the first… 20, 30 pages. But then you slip into the vibe of it and it reveals itself. Soon your heart's thumping like a kick-drum.

If I had one complaint it's that early on McCammon seemed more interested in describing the technical beats of the music as it played — problematic for a guy like me who has the musical inclination of a cantaloupe. (Confession: I once played the drums. Second confession: I probably wasn't very good.) But eventually he moves away from that and describes the music in cleaner, more poetic beats — paving the way to let you know how the music's supposed to feel rather than the rote mechanics of how it's played. It conjures to mind that this is a novel with the potential for transmedia extensions, if only in the form of us getting to hear the music of "The Five."

Anyway. Point being, I recommend it. Two drumsticks thrust up and twirling. It's a powerful, profound, trippy novel that's troubling and unsettling throughout. This isn't like anything else McCammon has ever done — again, it's far fuzzier at the margins. But Stephen King was right to call it "full of rock and roll energy." It isn't McCammon's easiest read. But, ULYSSES isn't an easy read, either. Even still, both novels are some of the best of the form.

The caveat applies here that McCammon is easily my foremost "totem spirit" in terms of writers who influenced me. The guy's one of my literary heroes and it's nice to see him not just working, but at the top of his game. I'm looking cuh-razy forward to THE PROVIDENCE RIDER and whatever horror novel he's got after that. (I still need to see if I can get my hands on his new WOLF'S HOUR stories, though. Dangit.)

All right, cats and kittens.

Your turn.

Recommend a book.

And go read THE FIVE while you're at it.

25 Things You Should Know About Revising And Rewriting

Previous iterations of the "25 Things" series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

1. Forging The Sword

The first draft is basically just you flailing around and throwing up. All subsequent drafts are you taking that throw-up and molding it into shape. Except, ew, that's gross. Hm. Okay. Let's pretend you're the Greek God Hephaestus, then. You throw up a lump of hot iron, and that's your first draft. The rewrites are when you forge that regurgitated iron into a sword that will slay your enemies. Did Hephaestus puke up metal? He probably did. Greek myths are weird.

2. Sometimes, To Fix Something, You Have To Break It More

Pipe breaks. Water damage. Carpet, pad, floor, ceiling on the other side, furniture. You can't fix that with duct tape and good wishes. Can't just repair the pipe. You have to get in there. Tear shit out. Demolish. Obliterate. Replace. Your story is like that. Sometimes you find something that's broken through and through: a cancer. And a cancer needs to be cut out. New flesh grown over excised tissue.

3. It's Cruel To Be Kind

You will do more damage to you work by being merciful. Go in cold. Emotionless. Scissors in one hand, silenced pistol in the other. The manuscript is not human. You are free to torture it wantonly until it yields what you require. You'd be amazed at how satisfying it is when you break a manuscript and force it to kneel.

4. The Aspiration Of Reinvention

I'm not saying this needs to be the case, and it sounds horrible now, but just wait: if your final draft looks nothing like your first draft, for some bizarre-o fucking reason you feel really accomplished. It's the same way I look at myself now and I'm all like, "Hey, awesome, I'm not a baby anymore." I mean, except for the diaper. What? It's convenient. Don't judge me, Internet. Even though that's all you know. *sob*

5. Palate Cleanser

Take time away from the manuscript before you go at it all tooth-and-claw. You need time. You need to wash that man right out of your hair. Right now, you either love it too much or hate its every fiber. You're viewing it as the writer. You need to view it as a reader, as a distant third-party editor flying in from out of town and who damn well don't give a fuck. From subjective to objective. Take a month if you can afford it. Or write something else: even a short story will serve as a dollop of sorbet on your brain-tongue to cleanse the mind-palate. Anything to shift perspective from "writer" to "reader."

6. The Bugfuck Contingency

You'll know if it's not time to edit. Here's a sign: you go to tackle the edit and it feels like your head and heart are filled with bees. You don't know where to start. You're thinking of either just walking away forever or planting a narrative suitcase bomb in the middle of the story and blowing it all to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. That means you're not ready. You're too bugfuck to go forward. Ease off the throttle, hoss. Come back another time, another way. Cool down.

7. The Proper Mindset

Editing, revising, rewriting requires a certain mindset. That mindset is, "I am excited to destroy the enemy that resists good fiction, I am ready to fix all the shit that I broke, I am eager to shave off barnacles and burn off fat and add layers of laser-proof steel and get this motherfucker in fit fighting shape so that no other story may stand before it." You gotta be hungry to fuck up your own work in the name of good storytelling.

8. Go In With A Plan Or Drown In Darkness

You write your first draft however you want. Outline, no outline, finger-painted on the back of a Waffle House placemat in your own feces, I don't care. But you go to attack a rewrite without a plan in mind, you might as well be a chimpanzee humping a football helmet. How do you know what to fix if you haven't identified what's broken? This isn't time for intuition. Have notes. Put a plan in place. Surgical strike.

9. Don't Rewrite In A Vacuum

You write the first draft in isolation. Just you, your keyboard, a story, some industrial lubricant and a handgun. All other drafts are part of a team initiative. SWAT, kicking in windows, identifying perps. Beta readers, editors, agents, wives, friends, itinerant strangers, hostages, whatever. Get someone to read your nonsense. Get notes. Attend to those notes. Third parties will see things you do not.

10. Embrace The Intervention Of Notes

You get notes, it's tough. It's like coming home and being surrounded by friends and family, and they want you to sit down and listen as they talk about getting you unfettered from your addiction to obscure 80s hair-bands and foul Lithuanian pornography. But listen to those notes. They may be hard but they're both instructive and constructive. They are a dear favor, so do not waste them.

11. But Also, Check Your Gut

When someone says "follow your gut," it's because your intestinal tract is home to an infinite multitude of hyper-intelligent bacterial flora. It knows what's up if you can tune to its gurgling frequency. You get notes and they don't feel exactly right, check the gut. Here's the thing, though. Notes, even when you don't agree, usually point out something about your manuscript. It may highlight a flaw or a gap. But it can also be instructive in the sense that, each note is a test, and if you come up more resolute about some part of your manuscript, that's okay, too. Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves. Welcome to Chunderdome.

12. When In Doubt, Hire An Editor

Editors do not exist to hurt you. They exist to hurt your manuscript. In the best way possible. They are the arbiters of the toughest, smartest love. A good editor shall set you — and the work — free.

13, Multitasking Is For Assholes

It is the mark of the modern man if he can do multiple things at once. He can do a Powerpoint presentation and mix a martini and train a cat to quilt the Confederate Flag all at the same time. Your story will not benefit from this. Further, it's not a "one shot and I'm done" approach. This isn't the Death Star, and you're not trying to penetrate an Imperial shaft with one blast from your Force-driven proton penis. You have to approach a rewrite in layers and passes. Fix one thing at a time. Make a dialogue pass. A description pass. A plot run. You don't just fix it with one pull of the trigger, nor can you do ten things at once. Calm down. Here, eat these quaaludes. I'm just kidding, nobody has 'ludes anymore.

14. Not Always About What's On The Page

Story lives beyond margins. It's in context and theme and mood — incalculable and uncertain data. But these vapors, these ghosts, must line up with the rest, and the rest must line up with them.

15. Content, Context, Then Copy

Behind, then, the layer cake of editing. Start with content: character, plot, description, dialogue. Move to context: those vapors and ghosts I just told you about. Final nail in the revision coffin is copy: spelling, grammar, all those fiddly bits, the skin tags and hangnails and ingrown hairs. Do these last so you don't have to keep sweeping up after yourself.

16. Evolution Begins As Devolution

Two steps forward, one step backward where you fall down the steps and void your bowels in front of company. Here is a common, though not universal, issue: you write a draft, you identify changes, and you choose a direction to jump — and the next draft embodies that direction. And it's the wrong direction. Second draft is worse than the first draft. That's fine. It's a good thing. Definition through negative space. Now you can understand your choices more clearly. Now you know what not to do and can defend that.

17. Two Words: Track Revisions

You know how when there's a murder they need to recreate the timeline? 10:30AM, murderer stopped off for a pudding cup, 10:45AM, victim took a shit in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, etc? Right. Track the timeline of your revisions. Keep a record of them all. First, if your Word processor allows you to track changes and revisions, do that. If your program doesn't (Word and Final Draft both do), then get one that does. Second, any time you make a revision change, mark the revision, save a new file every time. I don't care if you have 152 files by the end of it. You'll be happy if you need to go back.

18. Fuck Yeah, Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets seem anathema to writing, because writing is "creative." Well, rewriting is clinical and strategic. A spreadsheet can help you track story beats, theme, mood, characters, plot points, quirks and foibles, conflicts, and so on. Any narrative component can be tracked by spreadsheet. Here's one way: track narrative data per page or word count. "Oh, this character drops off the map for these 10 pages of my script." "This plot needs a middle bit here around the 45,000 word mark." "Not nearly enough laser guns and elf-porn at the turn of the third act."

19. A Reiteration Of Opinion Regarding "Creativity"

If you looked at that note about spreadsheets and thought something-something blah-blah-blah about how it will destroy your creativity and ruin the magic of the story, then form hand into fist and punch self in ear. If you need every day of writing to be a nougat-filled boat-ride through Pez-brick tunnels, you're fucked. Rewriting is hard. Creative comes from "create," and often, revision is about destruction. In other words: harden the fuck up, Strawberry Shortcake, 'cause the boat ride's about to get bumpy.

20. Put The Fun In Fundamentals

You can't revise if you don't know how to write. Same if you don't know the tenets of good story. How would you fix basic fucking problems if you can't find them in the first place?

21. A Trail Of Dead Darlings

Don't misread that old chestnut, "Kill your darlings." Too many writers read this as, "Excise those parts of the work that I love." That would be like, "Beat all the positive qualities of your child out of him with a wiffle ball bat." You should leave in the parts you love… if they work. Killing your darlings is about that word: "darling." Elements that are precious preening peacocks, that exist only to draw attention to themselves, those are the components that deserve an ice-axe to the back of the brain-stem.

22. Look For These Things And Beat Them To Death, Then Replace

In no particular order: Awkward and unclear language. Malapropisms. Punctuation abuse. A lack of variety in sentences. A lack of variety in the structure of the page. Plot holes. Inconsistency (John has a porkpie hat on page 70, but a ferret coiled around his head on page 75). Passive language. Wishy-washy writing. Purple prose. An excess of adverbs. Bad or broken formatting. Cliches. Wobbly tense and/or POV. Redundant language. Run-on sentences. Sentence fragments. Junk language. Cold sores. Mouse turds. Light switches that don't turn anything on. Porno mustaches. Dancing elves. Or something. I need a nap.

23. Clarity Above Cleverness, Or, "How Poetry Lives In Simplicity"

Poetry gets a bad rap. Every always assumes it's the source of purple, overwrought language, like it's some kind of virus that infects good clean American language and turns it into something a poncey 11th grade poet might sing. Poetry lurks in simple language. Great story does, too. You don't need big words or tangled phrasings or clever stunting to convey beautiful and profound ideas. In subsequent drafts, seek clarity. Be forthright in your language. Clarity and confidence are king in writing, and the revision process is when you highlight this. Write with strength. Write to be understood. That doesn't mean "no metaphors." It just means, "metaphors whose beauty exists in their simplicity."

24. Don't Make Me Say It Again: Read. Your Shit. Aloud.

I don't care if the dog is looking at you like you're crazy. If you're on the subway, hey, people think you're a mental patient. Oh well. Seriously though, I hate to repeat myself but I am nothing if not a parrot squawking my own beliefs back at you again and again: Take your work — script, fiction, non-fiction, whatever — and read it aloud. Read it aloud. READ IT ALOUD. When you read your work aloud, you'll be amazed at the things you catch, the things that sound off, that don't make sense, that are awkward or wishy-washy or inconsistent. Read it aloud read it aloud read it aloud read that motherfucker aloud.

25. Loose Butthole

Ultimate lesson: clinging to a first draft and resisting revision is a symptom of addiction — you may be huffing the smell coming off your own stink. The only way you can get clean is when you want to get clean, and the same goes with revisions: you're only going to manage strong and proper revisions when you're eager and willing to do so. Relax your mind. Loosen your sphincter. And get ready for war. Because revising and rewriting is the purest, most fanfuckingtastic way of taking a mediocre manifestation of an otherwise good idea and making the execution match what exists inside your head. Your willingness to revise well and revise deep is the thing that will deliver your draft from the creamy loins of the singing story angels.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Sub-Genre Mash-Up

Once again, last week's challenge is worth your look-see — "MUST LOVE ROBOTS." Scan the comments. Find the delicious robot stories contained within.

And now for this week's challenge.

Here, then, is a list of six sub-genres:

Steampunk.

Superhero.

Noir.

Erotica.

Farce.

Men's Adventure.

Your job is to choose two of these and mash them up into one crazy flash fiction tale. Superhero Erotica? Steampunk Noir? Men's Farcical Adventure? Mix, match. Go nuts.

You've got 1000 words.

Due by July 1st (Friday) at noon (EST).

Here's the second thing, though: I'll pick my favorite story out of the bunch and offer that writer a critique of up to 5,000 words of fiction (short story, part of a novel, whatever).

So, jump in. Get writing. Write so it rocks.

See you on the other side when you invent your own sub-sub-genres.

What Ails You, Penmonkey?

First, as a head's up: I triumphantly declared Thursdays to be reserved for guest posts and interviews, and you'll realize that, erm, this isn't that. I've got some good guest posts and have some incoming interviews (and have to send more out — be advised that this baby we have is some kind of goddamnable time vampire the way he eats hours of our lives), so those will come.

But — but! — for those weeks when I don't have something in the pipeline, I figure I'll bounce the ball into your court. Ask you a question. See what you got going on.

Today's question is about: you and your writing.

In case you've been locked in a steamer trunk deep down in the darkest cavern, here at terribleminds I talk a lot about writing and writers, and I like to think I'm talking about stuff people find useful, but fact is, I never really know. This is one way for me to know. So, I ask you here: tell me about your current projects and, specifically, any problems you're having as a writer. Anything at all. Babble away. Read other comments, too — maybe what one person considers a problem is something you've already figured out. Help each other. And this helps me, too — it lets me know how to gear future writing posts.

Sit on my lap. Tug on my wizened beard.

And tell Old Man Wendig your problems.

… okay, that sounds weird.

BUT I LIKE IT WEIRD.

Ahem. Anyway. You know the drill.

You. Comments. Go. Deposit your think juice in my blog box.

Search Term Bingo Stole My Dingo

Time again for SEARCH TERM BINGO, little babies. If you don't know how this works, here it is: people discover this website via some of the strangest search terms one could imagine. I pluck these search terms out of obscurity and dissect them for gits and shiggles.

Let us begin.

ejaculation cordoruys

This is my favorite new Hipster Beard Ironic PBR Shop Teacher Eyeglasses band out of Portland.

dont do that, chuck

*pops thumb out of the lion's butt*

*douses flaming hatchet in pail of angel spit*

*wheels the stripper cake back into the moving truck*

Fine. Fine. I won't do that. Now you've ruined everything. I had something really great planned. Now nobody gets to see it. This is why we can't have nice things.

ghost story amish melonhead

Oh! The tale of the spirit of the Amish Melonhead! Young Ezekiel Stolzfus, with his head the size of a rain-swelled cantaloupe, was out playing one day with an unadorned wooden block as his toy, a block he named "Old Esau Blockface," and so rapt was he in his playing with his lump of wood that he failed to notice the horse and buggy rocketing toward him at a clip of five, maybe six miles-per-hour. The horse hooves clomped over Ezekial's body and the buggy wheel ran over his face but still he did not die. Nay, what killed him was that his favorite toy, Old Esau Blockface, bounced away and fell into a rain gully and was swept away. Young Ezekiel then died of a broken heart, and now it's said he haunts the old Creamery Road. You know his ghost is coming when you hear the sound of stomping horse feet.

Some folks say they see a glowing shape in the darkness. A shape holding an unadorned block of wood.

*crash of thunder*

how did ancient babies sleep

Ah. Yes. The ancient babies. The "olde babbies," as it were. The ancient babies slept inside the coal-warmed corpses of white stags, sucking on river pebbles, their fists clenched around the puffy gloved fingers of the alien astronauts who founded the first civilization in Catal Hayuk. The ancient babies were protected by dire wolves. They dreamed of spearing pterodactyls. They slept well, the ancient babies. We've lost that, I think. We've really lost something special. I blame Phineas and Ferb. Whatever they are.

foreign fucking vowels!

Yeah! You damn foreign vowels! Stealing jobs from American vowels! With your goddamned Nazi umlauts! I saw a good old-fashioned American 'u' on the side of the highway the other day. Not just panhandling, ohhh no. Offering to suck dicks for money. I mean, he's got the right shape for it, I'll grant him this, but there's no dignity in that. This is the end of the American Empire. Or should I say, ÃmërÎcæn Èmpírę?

i have lice

Well don't bring that shit around here, pal. I got enough problems without inviting lice up in this place. I'm having a hard time getting rid of the bedbugs and the chlamydia. Now I gotta worry about lice?

many people die from frozen feces

Great, now you've given me something new to worry about. How many people? HOW MANY? I'm going to be walking around all day thinking my feces is going to freeze inside my body. Or that someone's going to make a bullet out of frozen feces and shoot it into my tender doughy body! (If I don't die from the trauma, I will die from some kind of out-of-control poop amoebas.) People everywhere! Dying from frozen feces!

It's not worth going outside the house anymore.

things to know as a writter

The first thing would be how to spell "writer."

a big dick should suck itself

I've said this many a time. A guy's gonna have a big bullhorn, a super schwanz, a mega-magic-wand, a muscled baby's arm, then that thing should be like a snake biting its own tail — it should jolly well suck itself. Get that on some t-shirts. On bumper stickers. On dasher, on dancer, on thrasher and prancer! … no, I don't know what I'm talking about. Just go along with it. Don't ask questions. Shut it.

cant get my dick inside a pussy so is castration a good idea?

Yes. If you can't get your manhood inside a lady's baby-maker, then your only recourse is to pop that bad-boy onto the tree stump and take a camping hatchet to it. Or you could go the chemical castration route. Don't pay an expert, by the way. Chemical castration is like social media — any self-proclaimed "experts" are just Snake Oil salesmen. You want to chemically castrate youself? A can of Raid wasp-killer spray. Hose your big dog down with that for about, ohhh, seven cans or so. Done. Boom. No more swimmers. Your balls as dry and inert as the Salton Sea.

crowdsourced diapers

Crowdsourcing is plainly the future. It takes a village, and all that.

Here's what I propose: a bunch of you people come over — say, a dozen of you — and each of you will form your hands into a giant bowl, and you shall then place this hand-woven bowl beneath my child's pooper, and so when he makes yellow rain or squeezes out some newborn "caramel sauce," you all catch it in your hands. Boom. Crowdsourced diapers. The future is here. High-five, Internet!

entity evil sex lube
harmless animals that can crawl into your genitals

Any animal that crawls into my genitals is not harmless. Let's just get that straight right now. An animal that crawls around my genitals — like, say, a fuzzy koala, a sloth baby, or a slow loris — is a whole other story.

how long will my new beard hurt?

UNTIL YOU STOP RESISTING IT.

i am seeing dead birds

Then you should take them off your desk. They've been there for, what, a week now?

i have made an alien what could i make for a body (creativly)

Wh… uhhh. Eh? I don't… ennh?

Seriously, no idea what you're asking. Just make the whole thing out of mashed potatoes.

what is i love you in baby language?

The baby says GOO-ga, then pees in your eye. That's "I love you." Note, however, if the eye-pee is accompanied by goo-GA, instead — that means, "I will destroy you, giant human." With babies, it's all about intonation. And the target of their spraying urine stream. You might need to find a baby whisperer to help you. You can hire one on CraigsList. Or so I've heard.

i really wanna be with you, love ponies

This is my favorite Judy Blume book.

ima forage for an orange while i look at the corpse of a whore

This is my favorite e.e. cummings poem.

it only hurts when i laugh fire gas

HAHAHAHA *blorch*

*fire jets from mouth*

OW GODDAMNIT OW

Yes, one imagines it would hurt when you laugh "fire gas."

knife-wielding baboons

How'd you know what my next novel is going to be about? GET OUT OF MY MIND, INTERNET.

kodiak bear reading poems

This would be the best single-serving Tumblr site ever. Someone get on this. The Kodiak bear should begin by reading, "To An Athlete Dying Young," by A.E. Housman. Then, he should follow-up with e.e. cumming's "forage for an orange." Poetry is so beautiful, especially when read by a man-eating bear.

monkey DNA flowers

Ahh, the sophomore album by the Ejaculation Corduroys. If I'm being honest: disappointing.

tits on a lawn mower

Once again the Internet turns me on to the hot new lingo paraded about by youths in America. "Tits on a lawn mower, dude! I just did a gnarly 360-degree wallaby pube-laser on my hover-board!"

Of course, it also reminds me that the world would be a better place if lawn-mowers did have big, luscious breasts dangling there. Men would never not mow the lawn. They'd be out there all day, just mowing and mowing. "Nancy, what's Dave doing out there?" "He said he thinks he 'missed a spot,' but you ask me, he's just out there fondling the tittles on that there Husqvarna."

we're gonna smoke that motherfuckin christmas tree

Every year in this country, more and more kids get hooked on smoking these motherfucking Christmas trees. Huffing pine-tar. Crumbling up delicate ornaments into their candy cane pipes and cooking it down with a candle that smells like egg-nog or mulled cider. "Chasing the Reindeer," they call it. That first high, you catch the reindeer and just bang the jingle right out of that reindeer's bells — but after that, the reindeer is ever elusive, running faster and further with every high. That's not a metaphor, either. Every time you smoke a motherfucking Christmas tree, you get to pork one of Santa's reindeers. True story.

what celebrities say about emu meat

Brad Pitt says, "It's emu-licious!"

Meg Ryan says, "Emu meat destroyed my lips but I don't care because I will shank a motherfucker for some emu meat!"

Jim Varney says nothing. BECAUSE JIM VARNEY IS DEAD.

Let's all have a moment of silence.

Of course, I joke, but soon I'll find out that a rash of American celebrities are doing Japenese "emu meat" commercials or something. Goddamn celebrities. Goddamn Japan. Ruining the fun.

what to do when your body produces too much turmeric or cumin

I harvest the turmeric from my nipples and scrape the cumin as it accumulates like pollen on my thighs. Then I make some kick-ass emu-meat tacos. Why? What the hell do you do with all those bodily spices?

what do a witch's tittys look like?

Termite mounds.

why do murder mysteries cause women to masturbate?

You find out, you let me know. Every time I'm at the airport, though, whoo-dang. Ladies sitting at the gates reading some sweet-ass murder mysteries, sitting there and doing the old "murdering the little man in the canoe," if you know what I mean. Something about the delicate combination of death and mystery just gets the women-folk all juicy-goosey.

In other news: what the fuck are you talking about?

my wife will not listen to my advice about the baby

That's because your advice is terrible. C'mon, seriously? "Swaddle him with bungee cord. Let him nurse on the nose of this dead possum I found — he needs the bacteria to strengthen his physio… bio… babylogical system. If he gets cold at night we'll just kill a pony and let him sleep inside the animal's warm guts. What? Han Solo did it with a Taun-Taun. That shit works, hombre!" And also, why are you calling your wife 'hombre?' You might want to think long and hard about that.

sometimes you just have to fuck the demons out

Please don't touch me.

Chick-Fil-A Versus The Homosexuals

I don't eat a lot of fast food.

Mostly because, well, it's shit. Delicious shit, in many cases, but last time I checked, pets think antifreeze is delicious: doesn't mean I'd recommend it as a fucking snack.

I'll eat fast food (Wendy's, McDonald's, what-have-you) if I'm on the road for something because it's often difficult to do otherwise. This is fairly rare.

I'll eat "higher-end" fast food if it's the only choice — Five Guys, Panera, Chipotle — but again, we're talking a fairly rare event, here. (Actually, I take an annual pilgrimage to Five Guys. Because, c'mon.)

And, finally, I'll eat Chick-Fil-A.

Why not? Tasty food. Always gets high marks in terms of quality ingredients and relative healthfulness. We've one close by, and the people there are incredibly friendly. Beaming smiles and bright eyes and the epitome of politeness. Plus they have a giant cow tottering to and fro, and sometimes that big fuzzy motherfucker will come right up to your table and clear it for you. They have family nights. Kids get their faces painted. A sense of community lingers.

Of course, while their food is delicious, it turns out, their politics are not.

They have a raging hate-boner for same-sex couples.

Well, goddamnit.

Way to go, Chick-Fil-A. Way to be a dick. (I'm sure given their almost sexual fascination with chickens there's a "cock" joke in there somewhere. I'll leave it for you, my intrepid readers, to discover.)

It's one thing to know that, say, a CEO is a dick. That's no good, but you could maybe justify not caring so much — after all, I haven't vetted every employee of every corporation that produces every product I consume. I don't know that Steve Jobs isn't a fetus-munching Scientologist or the guy who made my frozen burrito isn't some kind of violent Eskimo-hater. Further, I've heard some folks say, "Well, they are Christian," as if every Christian human has a secret agenda against the LGBT community. But here, the real rub is that Chick-Fil-A is actively opposed to gay marriage and LGBT rights, which is another way of saying they oppose human love, rationality, and human rights.

Which means I have to oppose their delicious chicken sandwiches.

It's stupid, but my initial thought was, "Well, I can sometimes still eat the sandwiches, right?" Having a new kid, I have no intention of plugging his growing body up with fast food but I thought, "Well, we can take him to Chick-Fil-A. He can see the big cow. He can get his face painted on Tuesdays. Delicious milkshakes!" Except, fuck, fuck, every dollar I spend there means it's a dollar that can go toward them being dicks.

"Here," I say. "Here's five dollars for this delicious meal."

"Thanks!" chirps the Chick-Fil-A smiley-bot girl. "We're going to donate twenty-five cents of your order toward making sure gays remain at sub-human legal levels! Would you like waffle fries with that?"

Actually, their chirpy, uber-polite veneer now takes on a Village of the Damned-esque quality, doesn't it? Like, out back behind the franchise you'll find a bunch of smiley blonde white girls with promise rings whanging homosexuals in the head with shovels and throwing their bodies into barrel fires. "God loves you!" they cry. "It's a nice day at Chick-Fil-A!" The big fuzzy cow will totter up and laugh — hurr hurr hurr hurr – before taking a big ol' cowflop on the bill of rights.

Point being, of course I can't eat the fucking sandwiches. Not if I want to ever pretend my convictions have substance greater than that of cotton candy in a warm mouth. Is that what I'm going to teach my son someday? "Son, you have to standup and do what's right. Taking the righteous path isn't about taking the easy path. Stand by your convictions. Unless, of course, the enemy of those convictions is selling you a delectable chicken sandwich. Because then? Yeah, fuck that noise. You compromise your ideals for a sandwich like that. I'd shoot an Eskimo right in his cold heart just to eat a trio of waffle fries, my boy."

I mean, shit, if Hitler's Third Reich had the Chicken Deluxe Sandwich, are we to believe everyone might've just looked the other way when it came to the concentration camps?

("That Hitler sure knows his breaded chicken!")

I dunno. Point being, if you believe in something, then you have to at least be willing to commit the bare minimum toward that conviction, and here the bare minimum is "not eating their food." I ate there just a week or two ago, and to my regret, that will have to stop. At least until they learn to play nice with the human race. You chicken-fucking bastards. (That's why they're all smiling. They're banging chickens by the box-load. Don't buy their bullshit. They love cock.)

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

I figured, okay, I just finished the first draft of a new novel. Just got a book deal for another one. Got DOUBLE DEAD coming out in November. Maybe a list of "25 Things" to do with writing a novel. Specifically. The other lists apply, of course — plot, character, storytelling — but this one about the mechanical act of smacking your face again and again into the meaty thighs of a novel. Only problem: I had a list that went well-beyond 25 things. So, I had to trim and trim and trim, and this is the list I came up with. It's incomplete, of course. They all are. So, if you're so inclined: get into the comments, add your own.

Previous iterations of the "25 Things" series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

1. Your First And Most Important Goal Is To Finish The Shit That You Started

Let's get this out of the way right now: if you start a fucking novel, then plan to fucking finish that fucking novel. Your hard drive is not a novel burial ground. It's like building your own Frankenstein monster — robbing a grave, stealing a brain, chopping up the body — and then giving up before you let lightning tickle that sonofabitch to life. The true author finishes what he begins. That's what separates you from the dead-beats, from the talkers, from the dilettantes. Don't let dead metaphysical weight slow you down.

2. That Means Momentum Is Key

Say it five times fast: momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum. Actually, don't say it five times fast. I just tried and burst a blood vessel on the inside of my sinuses. The point remains: writing a novel is about gaining steam, about acceleration, about momentum. You lose it every time you stop to revise a scene in the middle, to look up a word, to ponder or change the plot. It's like a long road-trip: don't stop for hitchhikers, don't stop to piss, don't stop for a Arby's Big Beef and Cheddar. Just drive. Leave notes in your draft. Highlight empty spaces. Fill text with XXX and know you'll come back later.

3. The First Draft Is The Beach-Storming Draft

It's you and hundreds of other soldier-penmonkeys clawing their way up the enemy beach of the People's Republic Of Novelsvainya. Most of those other poor sots are going to take a stitching of bullets to the chest and neck and drop dead in the sand, flopping around like a fish, their bowels evacuating. Your only goal is to get up that beach. Crawl through mud, blood, sand, shit, corpses. It doesn't matter if you get up that beach all pretty-like. Or in record time. Nobody cares how your hair looks. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

4. Be Like The Dog Who Cloaks Himself In Stink

Find joy and liberation in writing a first draft without caring, without giving one whittled whit. It's like pouring paint on the floor or taking a sledgehammer to some kitchen counters. Get messy. Let it all hang out. Suck wantonly and without regard to others. Let that free you. Have fun. Don't give a rat's roasted rectum. You'll think that all you're doing is upending a garbage can on the page, but later, trust in the fact you'll find pearls secreted away in the heaps of trash and piles of junk.

5. The First Draft Is Born In The Laboratory

Take risks on that first draft. Veer left. Drive the story over a cliff. Try new things. Play with language. Kill an important character. Now's the time to experiment, to go moonbat apeshit all over this story. You'll pull back on it in subsequent drafts. You'll have to clean up your mess: all the beer bottles, bong water, blood and broken glass. But some of it will stay. And the stuff that does will feel priceless.

6. Writing Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is

Said before but bears repeating: writing is when you make the words, editing is when you make them not shitty. The novel is born on that first go-around but you gotta let that little bastard grow up. Do this through rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. As many times as it takes till it stands up and dances on its own.

7. You Have As Many Chances At-Bat As You So Choose –

A Marine sniper doesn't get infinite shots at his target. A batter only gets three strikes. A knife-thrower only has to fuck up once before he's got a body to hide. The novelist has it easy. You can keep rewriting. Adding. Fixing. Changing. Endlessly anon until you're satisfied.

8. — But You Also Have To Know When To Leave Well Enough Alone

Seriously, you have to stop sometime. You whip mashed potatoes too long they get gluey. Comes a time when you need to stop fucking with a novel the same way you stop tonguing a chipped tooth. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Write till it's good, not till it's perfect. Because you don't know shit about perfect. Aim squarely for a B+, and then it's time to let others have a shot in getting the novel to that A/A+ range.

9. Know When To Bring In The Motherfucking A-Team

You're not Lone Wolf. You are not Ronin-Ninja-Without-Clan. A novel is a team effort. You need readers. One or several editors. Potentially an agent. True story: writers are often the worst judges of their own work. You spend so long in the trenches, it's all a hazy, gauzy blur: a swarm of flies. It's like being on acid. Sometimes you need a trip buddy. Someone to tell you, this is real, this is illusion. "The pink unicorn is just a hallucination. But the dead body in the middle of the floor, dude, that's real, WE GOTTA FUCKING GO."

10. Escape The Gravity Of The Hate Spiral

Every 10,000 words is a new peak or valley on this crazy-ass roller coaster ride. You loved the novel last week. This week you want to punch its teeth down its throat. That's normal. Write through it. The hate spiral will kill you in if you let it. It's one of the reasons we abandon novels. It's also nonsense. Sometimes your best work is your worst, your worst is your best. Everything is ass-end up. Fuck worry. Just write.

11. QFT

The other day on Twitter, the author J. Robert King said something that rang true: "No balanced person writes a novel." You sit down at the desk, shackle your mind to the project, wade into an imaginary swamp with made-up people. For days. Weeks. Sometimes even years. That's fucking batty.

12. Gotta Abandon Your Baby? Butcher Him For Spare Parts

Don't abandon your novel. Don't do it. Don't make me kick you in the nuts. There. I did it. I kicked your nuts. Taste that? In your mouth? Them's your nuts. Still. Sometimes it's going to happen. Hopefully not often, but it does: a novel just isn't working. Fine. Fine. But don't let it go without a fight. Chop it apart. Break it into its constituent parts. You put work into that. Take what works and apply it elsewhere. Build another robot using parts you stole from yourself. Eat your body to sustain your body.

13. You Can Write A Novel Pretty Fucking Fast

It's hard but not impossible to write, say, 5,000 words a day. A novel is roughly 80k. At 5k/day, you can finish a novel in about 16 days. Just know that it won't be good. Not yet. Can't write and rewrite that fast.

14. For Fuck's Sake, Say Something

A reader is going to spend those 80,000 words with you. Hours of his life, given to you. Make them count. Say something about anything. Have your novel mean something to you so it can mean something to them. Bring your guts and brains and passion and heart and for the sake of sweet Sid and Marty Krofft, a message to the table. Don't just write. Write about something. Do more than entertain. You're not a dancing monkey. You're a storyteller, motherfucker. Embrace that responsibility.

15. The Shape Of The Page Matters

A novel page shouldn't look like a giant wall of text. Nor should it look like an e.e. cummings poem. The shape of the page matters. Balance. Equal parts emptiness and text. Void meets substance.

16. A Novel By The Numbers

The ideal novel is 48% action, 48% dialogue, and 4% exposition and dialogue. I just made that up. Probably totally inaccurate. Possibly I might could maybe sorta be drunk right now. Drunk on words, or on Tito's Vodka? You decide. Point is, a novel gets bogged by boggy bullshit like heavy description and blathering exposition. A novel is best when it lives in the moment, when its primary mode of communication is action and dialogue linking arms and dancing all over the reader's face.

17. I Just Lied To You Back There, And For That, I'm Sorry

Dialogue is action. It's not separate from it. It is it. Action is doing something. Dialogue is talking, and talking is doing something. Even better when dialogue manifests while characters do shit: drive a car, execute some baddies, make an omelette, build a sinister dancing robot whose mad mechanical choromania will reduce the world to cinders. Characters don't just stand in one place in space and talk. They're not puppets in community theater. Find language with movement and motion.

18. Description Is About Signal To Noise

Description is best when subtle. Too much description is static. Paint in short strokes. A pinch of spice here. A delicate garnish there. Description is not a hammer with which to bludgeon the mooing herd. Pick one, two, or three details and stop there. I've heard this said about large breasts and we'll reiterate it here for description: anything more than a mouthful is a waste.

19. The Reader Is Your Mule

Up to you whether the reader is a mule carrying your prospector gear up a canyon path or a mule carrying doody-balloons of hard drugs in his butt-pocket; the point remains the same. The reader wants to work. The reader doesn't know this, of course, so don't tell him. SHHH. But the reader wants to fill in the details. He wants to be invested in the novel and to make his own decisions and reach his own conclusions. You don't need to write everything. You can leave pieces (of plot, description, dialogue) out. The reader will get in the game. His imagination matters as much as yours. Make that fucker dance for his dinner.

20. Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor

A novel can have too many characters. It's not a set number or anything. The number of characters you can have is limited by your ability to make them fully-realized, wholly-inhabited people. If you don't have the time or the room to give them a soul, to lend them wants and needs and fears and foibles, then fuck it, chop their heads off and wipe their blood from the page.

21. Genre Matters, Except When It Doesn't

A good story is a good story, and that translates to novels: a good book is a good book. You write the novel you gotta write regardless of genre. But eventually you have to think about it. Agents, publishers, bookstores, Amazon — they care about genre. Your book has to fit somewhere. The secret is, it doesn't have to be a perfect fit. Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and hobo handjobs. Maybe not that last one.

22. Beware The Saggy Mushy Middle

The beginning's easy because it's like — BOOM, some shit just happened. The ending's easy because — POW, all the shit that happened just lead to this. The middle is where it gets all gooshy, like wet bread or a sloppy pile of viscera. Combat this in a few ways. First, new beginnings and early endings — the peaks and valleys of narrative. Second, keep the pressure on the story and, by proxy, yourself. Third, treat the second act like it's two or three acts in and of itsownself.

23. Like I Said: Imagine A Long-Ass Road Trip

Variation. In scene. In character. In mood. In setting. In everything. A novel can't just be one thing. Mix it up. It's like a long car ride. Take an eight-hour trip down a bland mega-highway and you pretty much want to suck on the tailpipe. Take an eight-hour trip through scenic mountains and pretty burgs and ghost towns, you no longer want to eat gravel and die. Put differently: don't be boring. If the story buys a house and gets a job in Dullsville, you need to burn Dullsville to the ground and push the story down the road a ways.

24. No One Way Through The Labyrinthine Mire

Plotter. Pantser. Five-k a day. Two-k a day. In sequence or out. Nobody writes a novel the same way, all the way down to which font folks like. Individual novels have their own unique demands. You write it however it needs to be written. Nobody can tell you how. Only that it needs to get done. We each cut our own way through the dark forest. In the deepest shadows, look for your voice. Your voice is what will get you through.

25. Writing A Novel Is Easy, But Writing A Publishable Novel Is Hard

Writing a novel isn't hard. You throw words on a page, one atop another, until you've got a teetering Jenga tower of around 80,000 of the damn things. Same way that building a chair isn't hard: I can duct tape a bunch of beer cans and chopsticks together and make a chair. It won't look pretty. And it's an insurance liability. ("I'm suing you because I smell like beer, I have cuts on my legs and I've got two chopsticks up my ass, perforating my colonic wall.") But writing a good novel, an original novel that's all your own and nobody else's, well, there's the rub, innit? The way you do it is you tell the story like you want to tell it. You learn to write well and write clearly and put a pint of blood on every page until you've got nothing left but spit and eye boogers. Learn your craft. Learn your voice. Write it until it's done, then write it again.

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If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

Wait, What? Who Let Me Be A Father?

And like that — poof — I'm a father.

Didn't have to fill out a form. Didn't have to get a license. Didn't have to kill a wild boar with my spear and eat its still-beating heart. No test. No spirit quest. No nothing.

Just a paroxysm of delight — a darling dalliance with my beautiful wife — and now we've a little drunken homeless man in our life that we call "Baby Ben."

Holy shit.

In italics, this time: holy shit.

The strange thing is, for the last several years now, Father's Day has been something of a maudlin day for me. My father passed a few years ago, as you may know, and so when this day rolls around it's about a day of conspicuous absence, a day where the void of exclusion is felt most keenly. Hey! Not going to send him a card. Not going to call him. Not going out to dinner with him. Not sharing a glass of blackberry brandy.

In that canyon, a swirling stinging sirocco of never-gonna-happen-agains.

Ah, but.

Here, I am, in a different role. Now I've got a child — even moreso, a son — of my own. On the one hand, therein lies further cause for sadness here today: Ben has one grandfather now, an awesome guy, a guy who will handily own the job and embrace it the way a bear embraces a falling tree full of honey, but he's down one grandfather. He'll never meet my Dad. And damn, my Dad would've been a bitchin' grandfather. He was a good father, but we didn't always have the best relationship — but he'd have been a great grand-dad (or Pop-Pop or Grampa or whatever the hell he would've been called). That's even sadder, right? Here's my son and he'll never have my Dad to show him how to fish or shoot cans off a fence-rail or look for deer or find weird rusted treasures at creepy flea markets nationwide. In that way, the void just yawned wider: the canyon walls crumbling and stretching to accommodate a deeper oblivion.

But then, on the other side, there I am. The kid has a father. (Uh, me, in case you haven't been paying attention. Or the mailman, if I haven't been paying attention.) And my Dad's not here to show him how to fish or shoot cans or any of that, but I am. And through me, those things flip and switch from never-gonna-happen-again to gonna-happen-again-someday. My father's ghost, his callused hands (and missing pinky finger), maybe getting a second life through me. It won't be the same, of course — like I've said before, we're all just blurry, blotchy fascimiles of those who came before us, each generation thinner and cut with more water than the last — but it's something. And I'll bring new things to the table, too, and in that the weird goofy DNA of fatherhood keeps on going.

Point is, I miss my Dad, but I'll bring him back through the stories I can tell to my son and through the things I can teach and the adventures we can have.

It's not everything, but it's something, and something is better than nothing.

Miss you, Dad. Love you, Dad. Hope you can pause in your wild romp across the Happy Hunting Grounds and look down upon your grand-son and maybe give him a wink and a waggle of your ruined pinky.

Happy Father's Day, everybody else.

(Sidenote: that photo above is from an early pheasant hunting trip when I was a kid. That's my gawky, beardless self there second in from the left, and my father the one with the NRA hat. I may be a bespectacled intellectual moderate, but you can be damn sure my son's going to have a fishing rod, a knife, and a rifle if he wants it. And he'll learn to use and respect each of those in kind, just as I had done. I won't make him hunt, but if he wants to, we can do that. Hell, you'll note that I went just last year to bag more pheasants in honor of the old man. Though, I just can't hunt deer.)

(Second sidenote: some folks think that B-Dub looks like me, and that might be true. Heck, he even does my one cocked eyebrow look — a dubious, incredulous face. But a lot of the time I see my father's face in there, too. Which is at times spooky, but at all times, heartening.)