Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 84

An Oubliette Of Unconventional Writing Advice

[image error]Writing advice is a little bit silly, as I’ve noted many times in the past. (Other times, I’ve put it differently: writing advice is bullshit.) It’s silly not because it’s fails to at times be useful, but because we expect it to be useful, we demand that it be rigorously true as opposed to, y’know, the opinion of some vaguely-experienced rando. Hell, Stephen King is an astonishing, terrifying force of wordsmithy, and On Writing remains one of the greatest writing books ever written — just the same, I don’t do what King does. I couldn’t. Because I’m not Stephen King. I love his book because it makes me challenge my own process and, at the same time, confirm my own process by proxy. Writing advice is not a treasure map with a chest of gold under a big red ‘X’ — it’s less recipe for success and more menu of food items you find may suit you.

I offer a lot of flim-flam shim-sham about writing and storytelling mostly because I want exactly that — I want to challenge you, I want to offer you possibilities, I want to once in a while make you think about something in your own work you hadn’t thought of before now. That’s it. No recipe. No secret handshake. No ancient occult ritual.

I mean, there is one, of course, but you only learn that after you publish five books, and then the Dread Angel Golzirath will darken your door with a fruit basket full of demon bezoars and an old VHS copy of Ghoulies, and then —

Well, I don’t want to spoil it.

The ritual or the movie.

(But be on the look out for Toilet Ghoulie. So cute!)

Regardless, just as one’s writing evolves over time, so too does the advice one might give around that process — and I thought what might be an interesting thing would be to offer a look at some more unconventional pieces of advice. Things you may not hear too often, some slightly more controversial chestnuts of wisdom — or, perhaps anti-chestnuts, which taste a great deal like the grief of a hungover party clown.

Here, then, are some of these nuggets of dubious wisdom. As with all such things, feel free to pick them up, regard them, wiggle your tongue over their crannies to determine if their taste is pleasing to you, and then consume or discard at your earliest convenience.

1. Fuck Your Critique Groups

I don’t mean that in the sexy verb way, but more in the way of wielding your disdain like a weapon. I mean that your critique group might be doing you more harm than good.

Maybe that’s not true. Maybe your writing group is amazing.

Yay. Good. Woo. *confetti erupts from exploding ponies*

But I present you with this to consider:

I do not much care for Tolkien’s work.

No, no, put down that broken beer bottle. Relax. I recognize that I’m the outlier there — it’s purely a thing with me where, mostly, Tolkien isn’t something I want to read. I’d rather eat wallpaper. It’d be faster and less dry. I like the movies, not the books. The end.

Now, I want you to imagine that Tolkien had a writer’s critique group, and I was in it, and I brought my nonsense opinion to that group. I planted that seed in his head — “Maybe this isn’t that good? Maybe I’ve gone on too long. Maybe I’m a hack. Fuck hobbits. Fuck them right in their hobbit holes. I will instead go and be an actuarial analyst in Manchester, good night.” That is, of course, an extreme view of what might’ve come out of that, but what I’m saying is, who gives a shit what I think? I’m not important. I shouldn’t matter to Tolkien’s work or process. And yet, if I have a voice during his early processes, maybe I would’ve derailed him. Maybe I would’ve changed the work for the worse. Instead of going back in time to chuck Baby Hitler in a well somewhere, I’d be going back in time to fuck up Lord of the Rings.

I’m not an editor. I have editorial skills that I weaponize against myself, but I shouldn’t apply them to you. I can tell you how to use a comma and how to make a sentence more clear, but I shouldn’t be imprinting upon you stylistically. And that’s chiefly the problem with a lot of critique groups — they understandably comprise writers, not editors. Their opinions on work are driven from the question of, how would I write this? which is analogous to changing how you have sex because some other weirdo gets off on different peccadillos. Not to say you cannot explore new things, but just because That Guy Over There digs sticking egg whisks up his ass doesn’t mean you need to change your own bedroom voodoo. Nor does it mean he should stop sticking egg whisks up his ass just because you’re not into it.

(For real though, please don’t stick an egg whisk up your nethermost hole. I mean, I guess as long as you don’t go in whisk-end first, you might be okay, but I don’t want to be responsible for your hospital bills or lost kitchen implements.)

Critique groups can be less than ideal. You get a bunch of writers together to explicitly pick apart one another’s work, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to end up with something better, but you damn sure might end up with something routinely not you. And the opposite can be true, too — they might all love what you wrote, despite the fact that the thing you wrote needs serious work. This is complicated further by social biases: friends don’t want to hurt friends, so maybe they withhold honesty or literally don’t see the problem. Friends also might unconsciously want to hurt friends because, well, we’re a bundle of terrible complexities and maybe there’s some jealousy involved or some kind of unperceived resentment, oh no. Plus, a critique group sometimes feels obligated to find problems just to make use of themselves, which means they’re inventing problems rather than highlighting existing problems, and you might feel obligated to make changes because you don’t want to be rude — but maybe you have your own resentments and disregard good edits because of them, and, and, and…

It’s just not ideal. It certainly can be, with the right group. But writers, again, are not editors. It can be dangerous when we treat them as such. And I’ve heard some horror stories of people who went along for far too long with a bad group, not really realizing that the group had gone toxic on them. At which time, it was too late.

So, if you’re going to use a critique group, or beta readers, make sure you’ve established a strong bedrock foundation of unshakable trust. Sure, yes, kill your darlings, but also know which hills are yours to die upon.

2. Write You Up Some Fan Fiction

Let’s get this out of the way first: stow your haughty elitism about fan-fic. Just shove it into what dark, fetid Opinion Hole exists within you, the one where you keep all your Bad Opinions. Stick it there, seal it shut with a pancake of Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and shush.

Let’s also get this out of the way:

I don’t write fan-fic, presently.

I used to! I was part of a group in high school where we passed around a notebook that mashed up a mighty tangle of pop culture properties, from Star Wars to Ultima. It probably wasn’t good. But it was fun. And I can legit say I learned not only how to write, but also how to write for an audience — because the audience was the other writers.

But I don’t do it anymore, and I’m sure someone here will say, But har-har, don’t you write Star Wars books, and isn’t that just fan-fic, and I mean, I guess if you really wanna call it that, whatever. I like to think that once a thing becomes canon, it’s not fan-fic because I’m not operating as a fan but rather as a Licensed Canon Wizard, where anything I say becomes automagically canon. Like, here, look:

Darth Vader is actually a stack of eight porgs in robot armor.

It overwrites all the other canon. It’s real. It’s truth.

It’s just not fan-fic. But to be clear, that’s not a knock against fan-fic.

I was at NYCC this past weekend, and I had discussions with a handful of professional, even full-time writers — and I discovered that they still write fan-fiction. Like, we’re talking unpaid fics across various fandoms, some popular, many obscure. And my first reaction to this is quizzical bemusement, like, wait, what? You write fan-fiction even now? And nobody pays you for it? You just do it? Because you love it?

And then it’s like, oh my god, of course you do. Because you love it.

They said: it’s fun. It reminds them sometimes that “writing is play.” (I’d quote the authors specifically to give them credit, but I don’t want to out private conversations.) And sometimes I think we get so focused on writing as craft we forget the play component. Writing fan-fic might actually return you to that, and that’s pretty amazing. (Further, they said sometimes things they wrote in fan-fic became something they could then tweak and use later in pro-work. So it’s also not useless from a craft standpoint, either.)

Brilliant. Amazing. Yes!

So, fuck it. Go write fan-fic. And if not that specifically, find time to write in a way where it’s fun, where it’s play, where it’s not you worrying about the market or a pay rate or what an editor is going to say. Find a sandbox, yours or someone else’s, and get dirty.

3. Read Less Fiction

Unconventional advice, maybe. Controversial, probably.

It’s funny, though, because I hear a lot of authors-of-fiction say that they don’t read much fiction these days — and, honestly, I read a whole lot less, too. Sometimes people jump their shit about that, because one of the supposed cornerstones of writing is, read more books. Which, while true, do those books always have to be fiction?

I say nay, they do not.

I read a lot of non-fiction for a few key reasons:

a) I don’t like to read too much fiction when I’m writing fiction, but I’m pretty much always writing fiction

b) Like a stage magician, I start to see through the tricks and the illusions, so it gets harder to read a book and really enjoy it

c) Reading your novel gives me your ideas, but reading a non-fiction book gives me new ideas that are all mine, mine, mine, and I’d rather not be part of some long human centipede chain of genre-reconsumption

If you want to strengthen your writing, I say, read fewer novels. Especially novels in the genre in which you tend to write. Read information. Read ideas. Read poetry. Read some classics. Read comic books and comic strips. Read cereal boxes, and the clouds, and the secret message I’ve stitched into your Tuesday underpants, and okay I think you grok my point.

4. If You Do Read Fiction, Dissect It Like A Frog In Biology Class

Did you dissect frogs in biology class? In AP Bio, they dissected cats. Cats. Not the Broadway musical, either, but actual cats.

They probably don’t do that anymore.

Anyway, the point is this:

When you do read fiction, destroy it.

Not literally. Put out the fire, Prince Zuko.

What I mean is, pick it apart. Not necessarily in a critical, I’M FINDING ALL THE BAD STUFF way. Rather, ask yourself, how does the author achieve what she’s achieving? What are her tricks? You can find the places where those tricks fail, sure, and you should also find where — and how — they work.

Which leads me to —

5. You’re A Manipulative Monster, So Might As Well Roll In It Like A Dog Relishing The Stink Of A Dead Gopher

I did not realize early on in my writing that I was a bad person.

Not a bad person, I hope, to the rest of the world. But to my characters.

And, really, to my readers.

Because a good author is a manipulative motherfucker.

Look at it this way: if you were designing a roller coaster, it would be perfectly in-character of you, the Amusement Architect, to say, “This is where I want the riders to have their sphincters clench up so hard it could bend rebar, and the next hill is where I want them to pee themselves. And not like, a little bit, but a khaki-soaker where they release all the urine they have.”

And so it is that you, as the author, are perfectly within your rights to say:

“I want the reader to be sad here, in this part. Right fucking here. Poke, poke, poke. I want to — I need to — make them sad. Then I want them to get mad. Then I want to make them happy again, at least for a little while, before I ruin half of their happiness with a hard choice and a complex ending.”

You are attempting to engineer how they feel.

Which is really, really manipulative.

You want them to laugh. To cringe. To cry. To cheer.

And you try to pull the puppet strings to make that happen.

Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you’re not, but it’s worth highlighting this not as a thing outside your control, and certainly not as a thing that is pure happenstance — it is something you should endeavor very much to articulate and then orchestrate.

Where do you want them to hurt?

How do you want them to heal?

Read the work and ask yourself:

What reaction do you want them to have? How do you engineer that? How can you manipulate them into feeling that way? The very best authors hide this manipulation behind the workings of prose and character — it’s not bold-faced, it’s not obvious. Like every good haunted house, all the mechanisms are in the dark, behind the curtains.

6. Learn Random Shit, Go Random Places, Try New Things

That pretty much says it all, but to unpack it a bit: travel, do things, learn things, embrace experiences you have not yet had, even if they’re not always good ones. Live life. So much of fiction is about filling the tanks for fiction, and so much of that is Doing Different Stuff. I don’t mean to suggest you need to have buckets of money to travel to distant lands — like, if you’ve never driven three towns over, go do it. If you’ve never gone fishing, go fishing. Eat a bug. Climb a tree. Stick an egg-beater up your — wait, no, we decided that wasn’t a thing to do. Change your perspective. Add to the list of things you truly feel comfortable writing about. No, you don’t need to always write what you know, but the things that you know — or better stated, that you have experienced — will be things you will want to write about.

7. Stress Test Your Process

The best thing you can do for yourself is to find your process.

My process is not your process. It’s why any writing advice that gurgles up out of my lips should be immediately suspect — I’m telling you what I do, and what I do is not at all what you do. I lube my fingers up with scented unguents and then quaff a mix of Red Bull and spider venom. You sip tea noisily and write bestsellers while riding on the back of a gentlemanly and gently ambling dromedary camel. I’m not you. You’re not me. Neither of us are Stephen King no matter how often we try to switch bodies with him.

You need to find your process.

And the best thing you can do for finding your process is to never be entirely sure that you’ve found your process.

Because once you’re sure, once you’re really for real sure that you’ve figured it out, you’ve closed yourself to change.

I’ve changed my process subtly over time. Sometimes by necessity. Sometimes because I hear how another writer does it and it’s a thing that sounds like it might work for me.

Sometimes the changes aren’t subtle. For instance, I used to never, ever, ever go back and edit the story while writing the story. Now, though, I do that. I don’t do it much, and I don’t do it far, but every day, before I start writing, I go back and I re-read the previous day’s work — and I spend a little time tinkering with it. Fiddling with the dials, jiggering some levers, that kind of thing. It reminds me where I was, and gives me a sense of once again immersing myself in the flow of the work.

I used to write at night.

Now I write in the morning.

One day maybe I won’t drink coffee when I’m writiAHHH haha ha yeah no of course I’m going to keep drinking coffee YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND GET YOUR NASTY HANDS OFF MY BLACK DEVIL’S BREW YOU GODLESS TRAITOR

Ahem, ha ha, oh, whoa, that went off the rails there.

But seriously if you touch my coffee you’ll reel back a stump.

Point is, sometimes you need to change your process. I’m fond of telling the story of how it took me five years to essentially fail to write the novel Blackbirds, and how learning how to write it essentially came down to learning how to outline the damn book. And there I became a pantser-by-heart, plotter-by-necessity. And some writers hear that lesson and they take the lesson to be: “I need to outline.”

But the lesson was actually, I needed to change my process.

I had a process that wasn’t working.

And so I had to change it.

We become so sure of our process that we refuse to budge from it. And sometimes it’s worth changing your process — or testing it, at least — even when you think it’s working, because maybe it’s not working optimally.

Fiddle with the dials.

Jigger the levers.

Stick the egg-beater up your — well, you know.

Change your process. A little here. A lot there.

Whatever makes the work better.

Whatever makes you better.

(And happier.)

So now, I ask you for your input —

What’s a piece of unconventional writing advice you’ve found helpful?

* * *

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DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Out 10/17:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

(See me, Kevin Hearne, and Fran Wilde on 10/17 in San Francisco, 10/18 in Portland, and 10/19 in Seattle. Details here!)

Macro Monday Met Space Dad

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NYCC was, of course, a blast.

There, with a mighty plethora of authors, we launched the 40th anniversary Star Wars anthology, From A Certain Point of View, which dips in and out of the narrative of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope to highlight the goings-on of some of the stranger characters in the book — I wrote Wuher, the bartender, who has a particular thing against droids. The book contains so many awesome authorpeople, it’s nuttier than Mynock Salad. Daniel Jose Older? Mur Lafferty? Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction? Mallory Ortberg? Adam Christopher? Delilah Dawson? Claudia Gray? Zoraida Cordova? Wil Wheaton? Gary Whitta? I could go on, but I’d just keep filling this page with amazing names. It’s a great book, done for charity, check it out. And if you ever see editor Elizabeth Schaefer, high-five her, for her powers of mighty.

Del Rey deserves a special shout-out for not only putting that book together, but putting the panel together to support the book — and in general for being great to their writers. Their booth is always an island in the sea of sweat and chaos that is New York Comic-con.

As always, I failed to see cool people because it’s a busy, busy con — but I did meet a lot of fans and readers, which is forever a treat.

Let’s see, anything else happen?

Um.

Hm.

No?

OH YEAH WAIT

WE MET SPACE DAD

*gestures enthusiastically toward the lead image, which is totally not a macro image, but shut up, you shut it right now*

Yeah, that’s right, we met Mark Hamill. Me, Adam, Delilah and Elizabeth used our collective star power to get into Mark Hamill’s special Celebrity Star Chamber, and we got to hang out with him for most of the day and get spa treatments and he did his Fire Lord Ozai impression and then he adopted us as his Space Children and —

OKAY FINE SHUT UP that didn’t happen. We paid our money like proper damn fans and we got to bask in the glory of Luke Skywalker for like, three to five seconds. (It seriously is that fast. They shuffle you in, you gather ’round, and then it’s off to the races, click, click, snap, nice work, see you later.) He’s a consummate professional, efficiently chummy, and looks great after all these years.

So, yay.

What else?

Reminder that next week I’m gone again, this time to the Leftmost Coast, visiting San Francisco, Portland and Seattle with authors Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde. You can nab the details here for our events.

Damn Fine Story is out next week, but some people have gotten theirs early.

Invasive is still $3.99. (Oh, and for some publishing inside baseball, that book totally earned out. Earning out is a very exciting thing for an author, because it means the book was irrefutably successful. So, whew. Thanks all for checking it out.)

The Cormorant is $2.99 if you haven’t checked out the third adventure of Miriam Black, surly psychic woman, aka, “a garage full of cats on fire.”

My 10-book writing-and-novel-mega-ultra-bigass-bundle is just $10 off with coupon code NANOCTOBER. That coupon is good for this month, so check it.

If you haven’t heard me on Authors on the Air radio, hosted by Terri Lynn Coop, well, give your fancy ears a listen, won’t you?

Finally, I was part of and led a wonderful writing workshop of writers on Pelee Island in Canada, which meant I got to fly on a little Indiana Jones plane to an island on Lake Erie, and it was a good way to recharge the ol’ creative batteries. Thanks to Dawn Kresan for having me and Margaret Atwood for nudging me do it.

And that’s all, folks.

NaNoWriMo Prep: Bundle On Sale

PSST.

My Mega-Book Bundle is on sale for the rest of the month of October to celebrate the oncoming CREATIVE ONSLAUGHT of WORD SAUCE that will come GEYSERING OUT OF YOUR MINDHOLE. Ahem, aka, National Novel Writing Month.

The bundle is 50% off with coupon code: NANOCTOBER.

To buy:

Click here.

Enter code. $20 becomes $10.

Celebrate by pouring eight writing books on your head, with a bonus two novels (the Mookie Pearl duology) to shove in your maw afterward.

Alternatively, if you already have the bundle, hey, guess what’s coming October 17th? Damn Fine Story, my new book on storytelling and narrative, which features elk, surfer dogs, missing fingers, storytelling advice, Star Wars, Die Hard, and more.

Pre-order that now: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N.

Macro Monday Appears On Friday To Deliver My NYCC Schedule

This weekend, I am off to one of the WILD ISLANDS OF CANADA, Pelee Island, to teach a pair of writing workshops to willing and pliable minds, and then after that, I’m off like a rocket to New York Comic-Con. (Hence why I’m dropping this post early, so you have that schedule in hand, should you so require it.)

My schedule, whilst there, is as follows —

– Friday, October 6th, 2-6pm, Worldbuilders Party at the Hudson Mercantile Building! I’ll be running a RPG session there of Hunter: The Vigil, so if you want to join me for dice-rolling, monster-hunting goodness, and you wanna be charitable in the process, sign up — we have four slots remaining.

– Saturday, October 7th, 11am – 12:30pm, From A Certain Point of View panel at the Hudson Mercantile, where a bunch of the authors and Del Rey folks behind the 40th anniversary Star Wars anthology get together and froth mirthfully over our shared love of the GFFA.

– Sunday, October 8th, 11am – 12:00pm, Signing at the Star Wars booth, #2104-C

SO, YES.

Gaming!

Monster-hunting!

Dice-rolling!

And tons of charity (since the 40th anthology is also a charity anthology)!

Come say hi.

Come touch the beard.

Come stare into my eyes and see the spiders that hide there ha ha I mean, what, that’s not a thing, there are no spiders behind my eyes.

*blinks*

What else is going on?

I appeared on the Beltway Banthas podcast to talk politics and Star Wars. It was a blast, some of the most fun I’ve had on a podcast lately.

I am now watching The Good Place and why didn’t I do that before? It’s amazing. (I tried watching the first episode last year and it didn’t strike me as funny enough or clever enough and I tried again this year and — well, I was way forking wrong, holy shirt.)

Damn Fine Story is coming soon, October 17th. e-Book preorder now up. See you in San Fran (Oct 17th), Portland (18th) or Seattle (19th!) to sign books with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde? Maybe? BE THERE OR BE SQUARE which is to say I will shove you in a box and send you to Abu Dhabi, Garfield-style. Mondays, am I right?

Preorder for the 5th (and penultimate) Miriam Black book, The Raptor & The Wren, is up now too, so make with the clicky-clicky. That releases in January, and it features one of the most… um, startling third acts of any book I’ve written, setting up the last book, Vultures.

Invasive is… back to $3.99? For reasons? Shit, man, I dunno. You want it, grab it.

Exeunt is now up to around 190,000 words, and it, uhh, isn’t done yet. It was due this week, but thankfully, the editor is like, JUST MAKE IT GOOD, so I’m working real hard to do exactly that. It’s turned into a big, unruly novel, but I like to hope it’s got something special going on with its The Stand meets Station Eleven vibe.

I have other newsy-bits I can’t share. But they’re good!

OKAY BYE BYE

*jetpacks into the ceiling fan*

*dies*

(Oh, the macro at the top is an ugly but wonderful russet apple.)

(Also, here’s a webworm moth.)

Flash Fiction Challenge: Write About A Tree

Trees are amazing.

Trees are givers of life in many ways.

Trees, like this one, can be weird or scary.

Your job, this week, is to write a 1000-word piece of flash fiction about — you guessed it, a tree. A tree must be involved. It can be a character or a setting or some other part of the tale. It can be good or evil or neither of the two. It can be part of a horror story, a redemptive tale, a fantasy story, a crime narrative.

Whatever you want.

Due by: October 6th, Friday, noon EST

Length: 1000 words

Write at your own online space.

Link back here so all can read.

Begin.

Alethea Kontis: Five Things I Learned Writing When Tinker Met Bell

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Everybody knows that goblins and fairies can’t be friends. But that never stopped Tinker and Bell.

Bellamy Merriweather Larousse isn’t like the other fairies at Harmswood Academy, with her giant wings and their magical dust. “Southern Bell” works as a barista at The Hallowed Bean to help pay her tuition and remains active on the cheering squad, despite her insistence on associating with the unpopular crowd. Every day is sunny in Bellamy’s world and every cloud has a silver lining. The only way to upset Bell’s stalwart optimism is to threaten one of her misfit friends…or try to take one of them from her.

Unbeknownst to everyone–including him–outcast Ranulf “Tinker” Tinkerton is about to be named heir to the throne of the Goblin King, making him ruler of his fellow Lost Boys and the labyrinthine city they inhabit. Now that the time has come for Tinker to leave Harmswood behind, will he be brave enough to share his feelings for Bellamy? It’s no secret that he’s held a torch for her since the fourth grade, but no matter how long they’ve been friends, goblins will always be allergic to fairies.

Or will they?

* * *

 

IT IS POSSIBLE TO WRITE A BOOK WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A TITLE.

I met R.L. “Bob” Stine at a conference in San Diego in January and fell in love with him almost instantly. He’s that unassuming uncle everyone has at their family reunion, only everything that comes out of his mouth is smart and hilarious. I woke up at some ungodly hour of the morning to hear him deliver his breakfast keynote, sat in the front row, and took notes.

Bob Stine is the first author I’ve ever met who comes up with a title before even thinking about the rest of the story. (Say Cheese and Die being one of the most notable.) Once he’s settled on a title, he outlines the whole book. Only then does he sit down to write. How about that?

This was exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it. Until then, I had been quite nervous that all I knew about my second Nocturne Falls book was that I wanted the title to be When Tinker Met Bell.

But one has to start somewhere, and there are certainly worse authors to emulate than Bob Stine. So I brazenly wrote down the title. Then I did the author thing. You know, the thing where we annoyingly ask questions about EVERYTHING.

Bell, the heroine, would be Bellamy Larousse,  my cheerleader fairy barista best friend from the first book. What about her hero? Tinker would be…Ranulf Tinkerton, a goblin. But goblins and fairies can’t be friends. Why? Because goblins are allergic to fairies. Great. Now I’ve gone from Harry and Sally to Romeo and Juliet. How am I supposed to make a romantic comedy out of that? Well, I’ll…crown Tinker heir to the throne of the Goblin King! Why? Because the Goblin King is immune to fairies…

Before I knew it, I was on Chapter Nine. But I could tell something was off, so I sent it to my editor. Turns out the problem was:

IT IS POSSIBLE TO WRITE A BOOK THAT IS TOO GOOD.

After reading those first nine chapters, Casey sent me an email. “Can you quickly come up with an entirely new story starring two characters named Tinker and Bell? Because this book is too good. You need to keep it for yourself.”

Unfortunately for both of us, I am not a fast writer.

The thing about writing in someone else’s Intellectual Property—even when authors are given as much free rein as Kristen allows us—you still have to remember that you’re writing for a particular audience. The Nocturne Falls audience wants comedy, sweet romance (read: no sex), and a paranormal twist. They don’t necessarily want a funny and romantic sweeping fantasy epic.

See…what I had ultimately done was build a goblin mythology that solved the Labyrinth problem. There are decades worth of discussions online about why Jareth is so hot and the goblins are so not. Pretty sure none of those theories used Peter Pan’s Lost Boys to answer the question. But answering the logic problems in fairy tales with other fairy tales is what I’ve spent the last decade or so doing, so that’s what I did.

Lest you think I’m patting myself on the back, that first nine-chapter revision (roughly 35,000 words) was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to do since I was asked to rewrite Hero back in 2012. I had to cut characters, motivations, touching scenes, and an incredible amount of worldbuilding. But I promised myself, and Casey, and I’ll promise all of you right now—I am going to go back and write that goblin book.

And I definitely want to keep my friends happy because:

FRIENDSOURCING CAN BE THE BEST THING EVER.

Frank Baum began all of his Oz books with a letter to his readers. He let them know how much their enthusiasm motivated him. Readers young and old asked questions, suggested plot lines, and sometimes “ordered” him to write certain books. How much of these got incorporated into Oz, I’m sure no one could say.

I have thousands of incredibly intelligent friends on Facebook: authors, artists, librarians, lawyers, forensic scientists…the works. So when my writing grinds to a halt because I needed the names of, say, a few extra goblins, I just ask Facebook. Because you KNOW that’s totally what L. Frank Baum would do!

These have become some of my favorite threads of all time.

Yes, there are always jokers—I delete the unhelpful comments—but I have huge lists now of names for shops, towns, witches, goblins, trolls, princes and princesses. I even have a list of drink names that might appear on the menu of a Halloween-themed coffee shop…and some of those names made it onto the cover of this book!

I don’t do this every time: Ranulf Tinkerton just popped into my head one morning. Maker Deng and Quin Merchero were carefully selected after hours of researching the Lost Boys of the Sudan and Spain. Dean Momori Zuru was born after several more hours of research on tanuki legends.

But sometimes a writer doesn’t want to spend hours. She just needs a seed. A spark. Suddenly, not only am I inspired by my amazing community, but they are also now part of my story. And magic, I always say, is better when shared.

At which point I was forced to admit:

MAYBE DATING THE DM WASN’T SO BAD AFTER ALL.

For years I have been telling young girls to “never date the DM.”

See, I acted in—or worked tech for—every single play in high school. There was a subset of us Drama Freaks who got together every once in a while to play D&D. The DM eventually became my boyfriend.

There are many problems with dating the DM, most of them revolving around the fact that you both know too much. You know how much work went into creating that campaign, because you were probably present for a good chunk of that. And he knows how to push your buttons if you try and use any of that information to your party’s benefit. You’ll be having some seriously awesome side adventure with an NPC…right before you’re handicapped so you can’t communicate valuable information to your fellow travelers.

Yeah. It’s possible I’m still bitter about the spell that magically removed my tongue. Then again, he’s probably still annoyed that Patrick and Casey remembered the sign language alphabet Mrs. Harris taught us in the fourth grade. I’m definitely still pissed about him killing off my Queen of Thieves. One day, I will write the novel in which she lives forever.

But for this book, I really just wanted to write a scene where a goblin, a kobold, a were-sloth and his human sister all play D&D in a small town coffee shop. Not only was it totally subversive, it instantly branded them as the super-smart, overly-dramatic, tightly-knit outcasts. I KNEW these kids. It was like coming home.

So…FINE. I now must confess to the world: Dating the DM in high school maybe wasn’t so bad after all. I just didn’t realize how long it would take me to learn that.

But it took me even longer to discover:

WHY CASEY SMILES.

Yes, the Casey that is my editor is the same Casey who played D&D with me all those years ago. We met the summer before seventh grade. We were eleven. We loved all the same books and movies, and we both dreamed of being writers. Casey was my first writing partner. Many of my stories—then and now—have characters based on her. She was my Minna, my Erin, my Sunday Woodcutter. She is my Bellamy.

She was also my Obi-Wan Kenobi. I may be known in genre circles for being the brash, glittery, optimistic princess, but I learned all that from Casey.

Casey and I may have been as inseparable as Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, but back then, I was the moon to her sun. I was the dark to her light. (There’s a reason Sister Light, Sister Dark is my favorite Jane Yolen book.) She was a cheerleader, beloved by all, and I was a Poe-loving closet-Goth. People were often astonished that we were best friends.

Without Casey, and the optimism she taught me to incorporate into my own life, I’m not sure I would have survived my teenage years.

I have always given Casey credit for making me the Princess I am today. But until I sat down and asked myself one of those annoying writer questions—Why is Bellamy so optimistic?—it never occurred to me to ask Casey why she always was the way she is.

Thirty years and I never asked this question.

God, I was a shitty friend.

The answer was as simple as I expected it to be, but even more tragic. I knew Casey’s father had died when she was a little girl, but I had no idea how many close family members died horrible, unexpected deaths in that decade before we met. Casey’s off-the-charts optimism was her way of coping with life’s inevitable sadness.

Little did Young Casey know that her optimism would one day inspire another girl, a girl who lived to be a woman with a subversively magical life, who has written almost twenty books contributing to the delinquency…er…optimism of minors all around the world.

Wise Uncle Iroh said, “If you look for the light, you can often find it.” My light is, and has always been, Casey.

And thanks to When Tinker Met Bell, now I know why.

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Alethea Kontis is a princess, author, fairy godmother, and geek. Author of over nineteen books and contributor to over twenty-five more, her award-winning writing has been published for multiple age groups across all genres. Host of “Princess Alethea’s Fairy Tale Rants” and Princess Alethea’s Traveling Sideshow every year at DragonCon, Alethea also narrates for ACX, IGMS, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. Alethea currently resides on the Space Coast of Florida with her teddy bear, Charlie. Find out more about Princess Alethea and the magic, wonderful world in which she lives at: patreon.com/princessalethea

Alethea Kontis: Twitter | Facebook | Patreon | Website

When Tinker Met Bell: Amazon | Nook | Kobo | iBooks

Fran Wilde: How To Build A Monster!

Somehow, Fran Wilde keeps stealing the keys to terribleminds and posting her drawings and spreading her knock-knock joke propaganda all over the place. I keep changing the locks, but damnit, she’s wily. And apparently she’s convinced me to leave the comfort of THE FOREST to come to THE CITY tonight to celebrate the launch of her final Bone Universe novel at Barnes & Noble Rittenhouse in Philly? Frandamnit!

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Question 4: How Do You Build A Monster?

Heyyyy Chuck! It’s been a while!

I know I’ve been busy finishing the Bone Universe trilogy and sourcing cupcakes with your face on them for our event at Barnes & Noble Rittenhouse Square on 9/26 at 7 pm (RSVP and JOIN US, FRIENDS!), but I’m also aware that I have responsibilities to attend to Questionable Answers.

Today’s Question is “How Do You Build A Monster.” I won’t say who asked, but you may want to check B-Dub’s arts and crafts box. Hope your readers enjoy!

Ready?

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Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been nominated for two Nebula awards and a Hugo, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

She’s been sending Questionable Answers to Terrible Minds since 2015. And tells GREAT knock knock jokes…

A Message To My Younger Writer Self

I just did a series of tweets (which needs a better collective noun — the cool kids call it a “thread,” but perhaps a “regurgitation” is a better descriptor? — about some stuff I’ve been thinking about since I did a workshop aimed at teens this past weekend at B&N’s Bethlehem store. It’s all about who you are as a writer and WHY you are a writer and WHY you write and — well, I’ll let the regurgitation speak for itself.

Here are those tweets, or you can just click through to the Storify directly.

[View the story “What Would I Tell My Younger Writer Self?” on Storify]

Macro Monday Says, Buy Some Books, Help Puerto Rico

First up, let’s get this out of the way —

Puerto Rico is undergoing a humanitarian crisis thanks to Hurricane Maria.

It’s not good, and it’s getting worse.

It’s devastation, literally and emotionally, for the people of Puerto Rico — which, please remember, is an American colony that already gets the short-end of the stick, and it exists under a president that right now feels very comfortable railing about NFL players taking a knee to protest the oppression of black lives but who apparently has little interest in shining a light on an ongoing American crisis.

Anyway, to get to the meat of it —

For Houston, I donated sales to two of my books (Blue Blazes and Hellsblood Bride) to Americares. (As such, I was able to donate $250.) This time, I’m going to donate profits of my Mega Writing Bundle to the Hispanic Federation, taking a page from Lin Manuel Miranda. You are of course able to donate directly to that charity! But, for the next seven days, if you grab a copy of the Writing Bundle, which gets you ten books for twenty bucks (eight writing books and two novels), you’ll also be donating to the Hispanic Federation.

[Link to Writing Bundle: here]

[Also, Lin Manuel’s Twitter account is worthy of a follow, not just because it’s Lin Manuel, but also because he’s been charting some of the help that the Hispanic Federation is doing for PR.]

Anyway!

Other Updatery-Floo-Dee-Doo

Tomorrow, Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise, I’ll be in Philadelphia at the B&N Rittenhouse Square to help Fran Wilde usher in the third and final book in her Bone Universe series. (The one caveat is we’re dealing with a small bronchial plague in Das Wendighaus, so that’s a variable. I’m doing okay, my wife less so, so I’m hoping to make it.)

Then, next week I’m off to Pelee Island for the Pelee Island Writers Retreat.

Then: NYCC.

Then: back with Fran and Kevin Hearne in San Francisco (Borderlands!) on October 17th, Portland (Powells!) on Oct 18th, and Seattle Oct 19th. Quick deets at Kevin’s blog! Kevin is launching his most excellent Plague of Giants, Fran’s rocking Horizon, and I’ll be launching my new book about narrative and storytelling, Damn Fine Story.

Then: home again.

Uhh. What else?

Exeunt remains a giant book. I’m pretty sure I should be done it by now. It’s 800 pages (in Word), currently 182,000 words, and it just… keeps… going.

Invasive is still on sale: $4.99. Zer0es is, too. And the third Miriam Black book, The Cormorant, is now $3.99 for Reasons Unknown and for Timeframe Unclear.

I think that’s it for now.

Onto the macros.

The first of which I love very much:

Because though you’ve seen the ladybug, you haven’t seen the spider.

And another cool camouflaged spider:

Here, have some weird fungus! It’s in your brain now! It’s taking over!

And that’s it for now.

You can always find more of my pics at my Flickr account.

Shine on, you cuckoo rhinestones. Shine on.

Walt Williams: Five Things I Learned Writing My Memoir

Making a video game is like working for a blood-thirsty dictator – you spend a lot of time validating the player, who just wants to shoot people in the face. And if there’s one thing Walt Williams has learned from working in the blockbuster game industry, it’s that nothing good comes of validating people who aren’t him.

After his misguided attempts to become an air force chaplain, Williams made the bold choice to move from Louisiana to New York City to try his hand at becoming a writer. All it took were a few dead-end writing gigs and a depleted bank account for him to take an entry-level position at a top video-game publisher, opening his eyes to a brave new digital world.

In his revealing memoir, Williams pulls back the curtain on life inside the astonishingly profitable yet compulsively secretive game industry. Informative and comically irreverent, Walt exposes a world abundant in brainpower and outsized egos struggling to find the next great innovation.

ALL THE WORDS WERE MINE

This may seem like common sense, but somehow this came as a surprise to me. You see, I’ve spent the last twelve years exclusively writing video games. Writing a game is like writing a screenplay, except that every page or so, I write, “Bad guys appear; player fights them,” and then pick up writing ten to fifteen minutes later in the story. On top of that, the script is written while the game is still being developed. Characters, dialog, locations, set pieces, action beats – all can vanish or change at any moment. Writing games can be a dizzying, thankless endeavor. Sometimes it feels like speeding down a hill in a shopping cart while trying to disarm a bomb with a dull pencil. That’s why I love it.

Writing Significant Zero was different. There was no player, artist, or level designer waiting to step in and take control. I didn’t know what to do with that freedom. I’d spent so many years putting words in the player’s mouth, that I’d forgotten what it was like to have a voice of my own. It took the entire writing process for me to grow comfortable with my own words. Even now, I worry that certain parts might not be relatable to every possible reader. That’s the game writer in me. I shut him up by reminding myself that a book doesn’t have to be everything to everyone. A player wants to experience a game on their own terms, but a reader wants to step into the author’s mind and discover what joy and horror await them.

“HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY” ONLY APPLIES TO YOU

When I called my father to tell him I’d sold my book, the first thing he said was, “Son, I’m proud of you.” He then followed it up with, “I hope they’re paying you enough to make it worth pissing off all your friends.” That was something I had not considered.

When you write a memoir, you quickly realize that your stories are not yours alone. They also belong to your friends, family, and coworkers, none of whom asked to be in a book. So, I decided the only person who’d get thrown under the bus was me. This doesn’t mean I altered stories to make other people look better. I just went out of my way to use anecdotes that made me look worse. And do you know what happened when I did that? My book became more interesting and relatable. No one needs a book that makes my friends look bad. But a book about how I’m an idiot who somehow turned out okay is a book that might actually be worth reading. Of course, pulling that off is harder than it seems…

I HAD TO BECOME A CHARACTER

Writing about the past is hard, because we’re constantly changing who we are and how we feel. Whether we age like a fine wine, or devolve into some kind of primal, mutant jackass, we tend to view our past through the filter of our present. We judge ourselves, edit our memories to better fit our personal narrative, and even delude ourselves into believing things that never happened. It’s natural. Everyone does it. When writing Past Walt, it would have been so easy to smooth out his rough edges, make him seem cooler or more competent. Believe me, it was tempting. No one ever would have known, except for me and anyone who’d talked to me for longer than fifteen minutes.  But – and this is important – you’re not allowed to do that if you’re writing a memoir. When telling a true story, you can’t make shit up, even if it’s funnier. Non-fiction is tricky that way. To stop myself from falling into that trap, I had to mentally disconnect myself from Past Walt, and write him like he was a character, rather than a reflection of who I am today. His actions had to exist without my commentary or hindsight, leaving you to decide whether he’s charming, insufferable, or just kind of a dope.

FEAR WAS MY FRIEND

The further I got into the book, the more vulnerable I felt. I was scared of what people would think, not of the book, but of me as a person. My flight instinct would kick in, and I’d have to stop myself from erasing or reworking whole sections just to save myself from scrutiny. Eventually, I began to recognize my fear as a sign that I was on the right track. If I felt nothing that meant my writing was safe or inconsequential. However, if I was afraid… if I suddenly felt the need to fake my own death and run away to the wilds of Montana… then I knew I was writing something true. My fear became my compass. Every time I sat down to write I had to find it, feel it, and then dive in as deep as I could go.

YOU’VE DONE MORE THAN YOU KNOW

I once believed there were only four types of people who should write memoirs: rock stars, presidents, people who almost died, and those who were about to die. Everyone else lacked the experience necessary to write a memoir. Sadly, I am not America’s first rock star president who famously cheated death, buffed up, and then died again, all so I could kick the Grim Reaper’s ass. And that’s not for lack of trying. Still, what have I done that’s worth writing about? Everything, really. Same goes for you. Life can seem rote, but living through it is rarely boring. When writing about the past, describing an event is sometimes less important than how it felt. The feeling is what left an impression. That shared language of emotion is the one thing you and the reader will always have in common. When spoken properly, even the smallest actions can seem grand.

 

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Walt Williams lives in Louisiana with his wife and daughter, where he splits his time between writing and failing to keep his flowerbeds alive. He’s known mostly for writing video games, in particular SPEC OPS: THE LINE and the upcoming STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT II.

Walt Williams: Twitter | Instagram | Website

Significant Zero: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Audible