Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 51

Alek Rzeszowski on “Dancing in the Club” (Interview)

Alek Rzeszowski is a Polish-born director, actor, editor and composer who has established himself as the affordable all-rounder in the independent Canadian movie scene. He brings his experience to bear developing new outlets for auteurs in film, television and the web.

I met Alek on my first day of university, back in 1998, and we have been separable ever since. His great claim to fame was starring in my directorial debut Spoony B, and since then I spend about 30% of my time dreaming up cool projects starring Alek that I fail to get funded or completed. One day I will make him a star. In the meantime, I thought I’d interview him about his amazing video Dancing in the Club. Take a look:

How did this film develop? There was a period there where you wrote a ton of songs, did you have the song first?

It all began with the commission to do a song for a short film named How Spoony B Got His Ho Back by one Jonathan Ball. It began a period of my life that was dedicated to making music. Not all of it was any good but I was obsessed. The “Dancing in the Club” track was written at this time. It was composed haphazardly by my friends and we improvised the lyrics and recorded the whole thing in very short order. It was years before it was suggested that I could make it into something visual.

Where did you get the idea for him/you to rip off the dancer’s arms?

As some of the more astute viewers might realize, the whole music video is in part an homage to Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Specifically the part of the movie where Quaid — played expertly by Arnold Schwarzenegger — grabs the villain Richter’s arms and allows them to be sheared off by the elevator they are both riding. Once you see this scene all will become as crystal clear as Kuato’s eyes.

Of course — I didn’t make the connection because Rob Vilar is playing the video’s Richter, who keeps his arms. There’s a real sense of a narrative in the video, which is lacking from the song — why was it important for you to have the video move a story forward and escalate rather than repeat or illustrate the lyrical content?

Music videos haven’t had a narrative since the 1980s, if you don’t count the R. Kelly oeuvre, but I think we should bring the narrative back. I sat down with a writer friend of mine — Jason Parker Quinton — and we hashed out a little story that would fit the song and build in intensity. Sort of fill in the gaps in the music. There was a rich and strange world I saw when I listened to the song. Exciting and aggressive. And I cast myself as Hans because if I’m not going to do it, nobody will.

I teach this video when I teach “escalation” in narratives — one of my core contention about writing is that you can do anything you want, you can totally pervert traditional narrative structures and even abandon narrative entirely as long as you escalate. There are a few clear examples here: the first dance partner is too passive, the second a fighter but no match, and the third holds her own (and keeps her arms) so is his match. At the same time, the phone calls to Richter escalate — first he just nods, then he responds, then he appears. Were you thinking through things in this way, or using some other patterning to organize things?

It’s a good assessment of something that was once described as “the weird part of the Internet.” I definitely subscribe to the notion that a story must escalate to remain watchable and particularly enjoy the pathos of a protagonist’s fight against odds that are ever increasing in absurdity. However, in Dancing in the Club, Hans is the bully on the dance floor. He is the obstacle and the aggressor. It is the world that must adapt to his demanding dance extremism. The impending arrival of the mysterious Richter hovers like a threat over everything, but whether it turns out to be amazing is not really the issue. The building tension and anticipation is enough.

One of the great visual jokes here is that Richter just nods on the phone the first time, as if his nodding could be heard. And then you have the wonderful visuals as he makes his way to the party, plus a visual reference to Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. Could talk specifically about developing some of these visual ideas?

We threw everything we could into these sequences. I wanted Richter to be the coolest cat that did the coolest things. A lot of it is simply missed due to the density of the visuals, so if you kids want to pause things and enjoy the tableaux, you won’t be disappointed.

Since making this thing I’ve realised that it’s not helpful to “diddle the viewers to death” as my friend Matthew Rankin once told me. Despite shortening attention spans, you just can’t do that to people. The brain synapses only fire so fast.

The Dalí Lobster phone had to be flown in from Toronto at great expense. In the end it became the production’s most expensive prop.

Where did you get the wonderful idea to match Richter’s wink to a drum hit, and also for his dancing to simply be him standing still? It’s brilliantly counterintuitive and displays him as the ultimate dance-master; he doesn’t even need to dance to be the best of all dancers.

Just the threat of him dancing is more effective than anything I could have come up with. In my extensive experience on dance floors over the years, I’ve noticed that even if you can dance well, standing in the back with a drink in your hand, looking handsome is still a more effective way to get the ladies.

I think of you primarily as an editor (and comic actor) — can you talk a bit about how you approached the editing for this film, and if there was anything interesting that you had to kill (in defiance of your intentions as the writer and director) when it came to making editing decisions?

I’ve edited plenty of music videos, so I thought I knew the tropes and tricks to the art form. When it came down to editing, however, I noticed that this thing was stranger than anything else I’ve worked on. The visual gags had to match the lyrics. The dancing/fighting sequences were oddly shot and had to be timed to the beats, plus cutting back to Richter in his lush surroundings made for a lot of headaches.

On top of it all, there was almost no coverage, so what you see in the video is almost all that we shot. I wanted to strangle the director!

Dancin’ also became a victim of its own oddness. Since it was a music video but not a real music video, as well as a short film but not really your typical short film, it was un-programmable. No festivals wanted it. It played once on Bravo Television and then became a Straight-to-Vimeo release. It is kept alive on the Internet and played at YouTube parties all around the world when the conversation dries up.

Which I’m totally cool with.

What You Should Do If You Come Into Contact With Poetry

If you come into contact with poetry, always treat it as potentially infectious.

If you prick yourself with a used poem, hold the affected limb down low to get it to bleed. Do not squeeze the wound or soak it in bleach. Wash the area with warm water and soap.

If you are splashed with an image or metaphor and your skin has an open wound, healing sore, or scratch, wash the area well with soap and water. If you are splashed in the eyes, nose or mouth, rinse well with water. If you have been bitten by a poet, wash the wound with soap and water.

If you feel any emotions after exposure to poetry, go to the hospital emergency department as soon as possible. Reporting the incident immediately after exposure can help to ensure that as much evidence as possible is obtained, to prevent the poet from writing again.

If you have come into contact with poetry in any of the ways described above, you may need a vaccine or medication as soon as possible to protect against infection. It is important that you are assessed as soon as possible after the contact.

GMB Chomichuk and Jonathan Ball (interview), Part 2

GMB Chomichuk (writer, teacher, mixed media artist, graphic novelist and proud Winnipegger) agreed to an interview only if I allowed him to also interview me — so this is Part 2 of a two-part, twinned interview (the first part was posted last week).

Chomichuk won the Manitoba Young Writers Award when he was 15. He won the Manitoba Book Award for Best Illustrated Book in 2011, and again in 2015. His graphic novel series The Imagination Manifesto was nominated for Best Canadian Graphic Novel in the 2012 Aurora Awards. He is the founder of Alchemical Press and is always on the lookout for literary oddities. You can follow him on twitter @gmbchomichuk and see some of his work in progress at www.comicalchemy.blogspot.com.

His latest books are the picture book Cassie and Tonk (McNally) and the graphic novel Infinitum (McNally | Amazon).

Ball: One of my favourite stories is how you asked Lovern Kinderski, a local legend in the larger comics industry (having working with Neil Gaiman, among a host of others) to assess your artwork, and he basically told you that you sucked and should give up. Yet now you are illustrating a book he’s written. Tell me again how you bridged that gap.

Chomichuk: Hahaha. 

What had happened was that I was working as an art director on an ill fated science fiction project. ( Sad because it was a great property written by Steven Erikson.)  The screening was done and were sitting around having a laugh.  Lovern shows up and I think “perfect, I’ll get the insight of a true comics pro.”

Which is what I got.  I asked him what he thought and, well if you know Lovern, you know he won’t hold back if you ask for the truth. He said , “this is amateurish.  I’d think it was student work except it is so consistent.  You’ve got a long way to go to work in comics.” Which  some might think of as harsh but I asked the important follow up and listened closely.  What should I do to get better? At which time he gave serious and considered critique. Every failing he found in that work was true from his point of view and I had to learn to improve from my point of view. 

Fast forward a few years and five hundred or so finished pages of illustration and Lovern approached me to illustrate Underworld, his book with Renegade Arts Entertainment. I like to think that it had more to do with him knowing that he would be able to give honest feedback and that I could take it than anything else. Once we got to work on it I saw that it was meant to be, but that’s a much longer story. 

So, Dr. Ball: film, poetry, journalism and prose all seem to be in your wheelhouse. Are they all the same voice in different conversations or if not, how do you change your “writing mode”?

Ball: I don’t believe in developing your own “voice” and “style.” I think that’s death for serious writers, who want to have long careers — it helps make you marketable in the short term, but it dooms you to irrelevancy in the long term, since you inevitably become trapped in your style and self-parody.

I approach everything as a new project, and I work to develop a new style for that project. I work like a technician. I’m analytical and obsessive about the work, and able to emotionally dissociate from it, although I also throw myself into it as much as possible because I want it to stay visceral.

My primary concern is to master modes and then blend modes. I create a lot of work that is what I would consider a technical exercise, and then I see my main work as projects that draw on what I have learned to construct odd hybrids — that’s why I say things about my work that seem odd at first glance, like my poetry books are really fiction, and I’m really a horror writer, and so on. That’s why I have never published a collection of my poetry — most of my poetry consists of technical exercises and I publish those in journals just to prove to myself that they are of publishable quality, and then I throw them away and develop a larger project.

Things like the journalism and much of my (non-book) poetry and prose and even a film like Spoony B — while I obsessed over these projects and strived to master their forms as much as possible, I see projects like this as technical exercises, and precursors to what I consider my real work, which is to dissect and then blend these genres and modes into strange hybrid forms.

Right now, for example, I am focused on a short story collection that contains a range of works, a lot of diverse stuff, from relatively “normal” stories to stranger fare like “The War with the Dead,” which is like an essay that is also a short story (the way that “Psycho” from The Politics of Knives is a blend of an essay on the Hitchcock film Psycho and also a short story and a poem at the same time). An earlier version of “The War with the Dead” appeared in Poetry Is Dead recently. It reads like a weird Baudrillard essay:

Art, like all else, is a weapon employed by both the living and the dead. The living use art to comprehend dead objects, to imbue them with a living mystery, and in this way exorcise the demons that the dead trapped in these objects. The dead laugh. The dead use art like any other dead object. They take it from the living, draw it into the past, and cast it forward to the future, so that it ends up in the present to destroy.

Thus the art of the living becomes the objects of the dead, alien documents, incomprehensible. The dead imbue these things with death, and then return them to the living. The living, not understanding the nature of art, and of death, make the same mistake that they make when approaching all dead objects. They attempt to enliven them, to incorporate them into the realm of the living. They interpret, analyze, over-interpret, study, proclaim the undying, universal, classical nature of the dead’s art.

All of these actions are designed to defuse this art, to dampen its disruptive power. To cut the red wire, to stop the bomb. But the bomb has already gone off. Life crosses into its continuing explosion.

Tell me about creating your forthcoming book Infinitum (McNally | Amazon). As you know, I read it in manuscript, and was impressed at the number of narrative challenges you took on with this book. How did you approach tackling the difficult terrain of the time-travel story, and why did you choose to publish with ChiZine rather than with your own press?

Chomichuk: I love time travel stories and I’ve always been terrified by them as a writer.

They are impossible to get right. But my father always says “I didn’t know it was impossible until I had already done it.” I wanted the challenge and I had the idea so I kept at it until it had the shape I needed.

When I set out to work on Infinitum I looked at most of the tropes and rules of time-travel stories and all of them got hung up on paradox. I said to myself, I’m going to make a time-travel story that puts that out front. The machine runs on paradox, it isn’t bad, and all of spacetime doesn’t unravel if you change it. It just changes. The idea I had was this: A time-traveler would have no more affect on a culture or society than a traveller from another country has when they land in Paris. They might be able to alter localized events around themselves, but French society and culture as a whole could not be affected. It would take a society of time-travellers to really mess with things. That what the Infinitum are, a diaspora of time-travellers.

The other main thing other time-travel stories try to avoid is a character meeting themselves. This is also essential in Infinitum. 9 is able to do what he does because when the going gets tough he goes back into his past to help himself solve the problems he now has prior knowledge of. He’s his own back-up from the future.

My early draft was a mess of tangled causality diagrams. A total f**kshow of this then this then this then this before that, that before this, this cancels that and so on. At first I was caught in the mechanics of the science fiction. To bust out of that trap I remembered that the time travel alters the moves of the story, but it doesn’t change the need for moments. Stories are about the character’s interactions with each other, their moments, that’s the drama. Once I convinced myself of that, the rest was much easier.

The bigger challenge for me was making the story noir without making it totally misogynistic. Noir film has a wonderful twisted narrative structure, a dystopian bent, wonderful visual style. Noir film has a lot of good stuff in it. It also has an unhealthy in-balance of ‘woman as object,’ ‘woman as victim,’ ‘women without agency’. I didn’t want to follow that as a guideline as I had followed the other noir elements.

Technically Infinitum fails the Bechdel test, but I feel that no one can read it and feel that my main female character is just a plot device or sexual outlet. I had a scene that would have allowed me to pass the test, but I cut it for pace. Which is the hard lesson of creation verse conscience; sometimes despite your noble intentions, the story has to go it’s own way.

I wrote about whose ‘fault’ I think that Infinitum is in the foreword to the book so I won’t retread that. I will say that I chose to publish with ChiZine because they are doing great things in genre publishing and bending plenty of “rules” for Canadian publishing and I knew I’d have things to learn there. Every new project should give you new perspective, new friends and new ideas about how to do things differently or better. I pitched ChiZine two graphic novels and they took them both. Infinitum is out June 2015 and Midnight City will be out in 2016. They’ve since added Ghost Doctor Thirteen to their roster as well and the first comics short of that will be available at TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival] in May.

I’ve got projects in development or placed with traditional book publishers, comic book publishers, self-published work, co-published work, work in theatre, film and television, and every new avenue or business model I try is about what is needed to get the work out there. I’ve many stories to tell and I’m always looking to collaborate. Things we can place with another publisher for mutual benefit is great, and sometimes to make something exactly as you want it, you do it yourself, which is freeing.

Some creatives need to do one project at a time. I admire that in them, that focus and self-restraint is admirable. I need to have multiple things moving to keep the momentum up. The more I work with people the more I find that it seems to be one way or the other with creatives. Which sort of creative are you and why?

Ball: It occurs to me that a lot of my stories would fail the Bechdel test simply because there are no human characters in them (often no characters at all) or only one character, which is an oddity I had not considered before.

To return to my distinction above, I can work on a lot of what I would consider “technical exercises” at a time, but I can only work effectively on a single major project at once. I used to work on a lot of different projects at once, jumping to another when I was stuck on one, but I found that I was not finishing projects. I just bailed when the work became difficult, while fooling myself and thinking that I was accomplishing something.

Then I instituted a personal “rule” — I could only work on one major project at once, and in fact I had to work on the one that was closest to being completed. Or abandon it forever. After I instituted that rule, I finished three book-length projects in short order (and abandoned many others). I actually dislike this rule, but I can’t argue with results.

Imagine you could have 10 projects that were 80% complete, or one project that was 100% complete. Which is better? The one at 100%. Imagine the perspective of the world outside: nobody knows or cares about the 10 projects that are almost done. They can’t. They can only know and care about the one that they see, the one you can pass along to them. You need to have that one thing at 100%! Working on a lot of projects is better than not working on any, but it’s not as good as working on one project. We’ve seen study after study that shows multitasking doesn’t work, and I think the same is true of multi-project management.

As well, my temperament is that I have to focus and dig down on a project to take it where I want to go. Sometimes I need to rewrite a single page for two weeks. Not always, and thankfully not often, but if I allow myself to jump to another project then I will do that instead of finishing the stupid, stubborn page.

One thing I do allow myself, from time to time, is to break up large projects into smaller sections that stand alone in some way and then move from one to the other. It’s a way of jumping between projects that is more structured and allows for more flexibility while still letting me stay focused. The reality is that it’s not realistic, for a lot of reasons, to just work on one thing all the time, even though that is the best. But even then I try to stay focused on a single major project and just work on preliminary material like notes or technical exercises and so on.

For example, my main project right now is a short story collection. I am focused on the smaller part of this one story called “Judith.” Then I will finish rewriting a treatment for a forthcoming project, a screenplay called Edenbridge. Then I will work on a short story called “The Lottery,” also for that same book, while the director reviews my treatment. Right now, the treatment is a “minor” project but when I am actually in the scripting stage then Edenbridge will be a major project and I will basically just stay focused on that.

I might take a break from the major project sometimes too, maybe I will just write blogs for a week, which are sort-of how I do my class prep now. When I do stuff like that I don’t delude myself — I am taking time off from the major project, the book. I’m being unproductive on that, which is fine from time to time. Just as long as I don’t fool myself into thinking I am accomplishing something important. Sometimes you need a break, but I like to just write (relatively) unimportant stuff during my breaks, because you always have to keep writing. So my “breaks” are me writing things for money or other task-like writing, things that don’t take a lot of energy, like this interview.

I cried when I read your latest book, the picture book Cassie and Tonk (McNally), which I never do. I think the last time I cried with a book was reading The Road (McNally | Amazon). Why did you make my cry, Greg?

Chomichuk: For me, I look at the day as total possible creative output in the given circumstance.  I’m a teacher and a father and a husband as well as being a writer and and illustrator.  Each piece of the creative things I do fits into a corresponding shape of time in the day.  

I keep a writing schedule.  You must.  But the day is full moments that other fun things can fit into.  So I work on lots of things.  I use my schedule to finish things, and my moments to create them. 

I’d also like to say what an absolute creative partnership Cassie and Tonk became.  Justin and I have recently made Butterfly Collection (not for kids) and have a few other all ages projects on the horizon. Justin has a dozen creator-owned projects he’s got in various stages of development and I’m very happy to be partnered with him on a few of those.  

Cassie and Tonk was intended to make you cry.  We aimed for it, so to speak. Justin and I sat down and actually said, “How can we make the parents cry?” and tried to come up with pacing and beats that would make the emotional temperature.  

We wanted to make a story that addressed something everyone would have to go through and try to make the story have a simple but meaningful message.  Justin had an idea for Cassie and Tonk that spun up out of a drawing he had done. We shaped it into a story by working up the storyboards together and talking over the metaphors and he pacing. 

It was originally going to be a “silent” story. We were just going to do the whole thing with images. But as the story came out, the desire to add a layer to the narrative was too strong. We wanted the perspective from someone looking back on an important event in their childhood with a more mature understanding. I wanted a way to soften the ending with wisdom.  

  

What I am still grasping is how Cassie and Tonk has turned into a letter to myself when I would need it the most.  During the making of Cassie and Tonk my mother was diagnosed with cancer and within only handful of months, she was gone.  She got to see the book, which remains a comfort to me, but her decline followed Cassie and Tonk‘s premiere at the Toronto International Book Fair. 

It’s a story that faces a hard truth: We all have someone we love who we may lose.  My mother’s death was sudden in one sense but also painfully prolonged. Working through that last draft was what I think honest writing can be; healing and resonant.  

Some of that experience also made it into Infinitum.  I could say that the parts I needed to face as an adult are in Infinitum, and the parts I need to hear as a son are in Cassie and Tonk. 

The experience with my mother underlined my desire to do my own thing, my way, for my own reasons.  Plenty of people don’t know how I can write scary books and serious books and books for kids and teach in a high school and do live art in gallery shows.  I don’t need anyone to “get it”. Life is too short for that.  

I’m off to TCAF this weekend and bringing Ghost Doctor Thirteen into the spotlight there along with a preview for Infinitum.  Once I get back I have a few more questions for you, Dr. Ball.

GMB Chomichuk and Jonathan Ball (interview), Part 1

GMB Chomichuk (writer, teacher, mixed media artist, graphic novelist and proud Winnipegger) agreed to an interview only if I allowed him to also interview me — so this is Part 1 of a two-part, twinned interview (the second part will post next week).

Chomichuk won the Manitoba Young Writers Award when he was 15. He won the Manitoba Book Award for Best Illustrated Book in 2011, and again in 2015. His graphic novel series The Imagination Manifesto was nominated for Best Canadian Graphic Novel in the 2012 Aurora Awards. He is the founder of Alchemical Press and is always on the lookout for literary oddities. You can follow him on twitter @gmbchomichuk and see some of his work in progress at www.comicalchemy.blogspot.com.

His latest books are the picture book Cassie and Tonk (McNally) and the graphic novel Infinitum (McNally | Amazon).

Jonathan Ball: Why did you decide to start Alchemical Press?

GMB Chomichuk: I had been getting serious about the idea of visual story telling. I had a conversation with a friend who said that a people need to sell their strengths and buy their weaknesses, and on the same day got a call from a producer asking me to come and talk about doing a comic adaptation and some set design. When I was asked to use the likenesses of the cast for the comics, I figured doing so under the umbrella of a legal entity would be prudent. It just seemed the time. All ideas have their time, and I guess this was the time for Alchemical Press. Lots of things were changing in my life, and alchemy is change.

How does a poet/horror writer make a movie and sell it to The Comedy Network?

Ball: Don’t say horror, or I’ll never get published again. I used to say something else, like my work is “struck through with Gothicism” or “darkly fantastical” (I owe Hiromi Goto for that one). Since I am what people call, redundantly, a “literary writer,” I have to feign a pretentious investment in the marketing term “literary fiction.” Although to be honest I have gotten bored with that stance and started to call myself a “horror writer” in the press recently, even when not talking about horror.

I believe in the value of always doing something. I’ve been writing seriously for about 15 years at this point, which is about how long you have to work in order to reach Square One. The film you’re referring to, Spoony B, I decided to make a number of years ago, in order to learn the basics of filmmaking. I figured if I wanted to do some screenwriting, I should learn to think like a director, and the best way to do that was to become one. So I cobbled together about $500 and thought, “What kind of film can I make with only $500?”

I knew I couldn’t afford lab fees, so I developed all the film by hand in buckets and transferred it from my kitchen wall with a digicam. I put my friends in it and shot it as a silent film, like an old Keaton or Chaplin film, so that I didn’t have to record sound, because I couldn’t afford to record the sound well.

It turns out I have a small bit of talent for being a director (very small!), because The Comedy Network bought it almost immediately. Really, it was a happy accident that the film ended up being any good, and then Matthew Etches, who was the distribution coordinator for the Winnipeg Film Group managed to sell it, it was one of the last things he did before he quit that job. In many respects, I don’t know how it was sold, basically it sold because the Winnipeg Film Group sold it for me. The rights are available again now, if somebody wants to license it from the WFG!

What are your goals for Alchemical Press, and how do you see it as different from other presses?

Chomichuk: Alchemical Press is not a traditional press, it’s a story engine. We are a mercenary strike force of creative people that use art and words to fight our battles. We are a collective of innovative storytellers. We publisher the work of others, and we publish our own in collaboration with Absurd Machine Films and Vagabond Brigade, and Electric Monk Media web services, which allows us to be peer-reviewed while retaining creative control.

Too often peer review means “Give someone else the rights and revenue potential but keep the credit.” Don’t get me wrong, I love the book industry, but they do their thing, we do ours. Alchemical Press is a hybrid model that works with the direct sales market of the comic stores and the returnable market of the book seller, and the online make-it-up-as-you-like markets of the Internet.

Poetry, Prose, Pictures, Collage, Video, Digital Art. We aren’t interested in you doing things our way, we’re interested in getting things done.  If people have an idea worth sharing, we want to help.

Our goals are to get talented people the exposure they deserve. To allow those who are working with the medium of story for the medium of story, (Guys like Dave Ryan and his War of the Independents) to get their ideas out there and inspire people.

What’s your creative process, from idea to gestalt? Concept to page? Tell me your secrets I’ll tell you mine.

Ball: I never go out in search of ideas, because I have so many, a huge backlog of projects I will never have time to complete. Some of them are great projects too. But when I get an idea I stop whatever I’m doing and roll the idea around for a while. I make a note or two if I’m concerned about forgetting something, just a good sentence or two. Then I just let the idea retreat and go back to whatever I was doing.

The idea has to compete for survival amongst the thousand other ideas. If I find myself sticking with it, turning my mind to it over and over again, making more notes, and not letting it go, then eventually I’ll schedule some writing time to work on it. It might be years from when I think of an idea to when I write word one.

After I have a first draft, I produce a summary/outline based on that draft. Then I make all my major editing decisions based on this outline. I’ll cut pages, note where to add things, restructure, and so on, based on the outline. Then I’ll retype the entire document, rewriting as I go. I don’t go back and edit the original computer file, I type a new one so that I don’t feel bound to the first draft in any way and feel freer to rewrite rather than merely revise.

I hope to abandon this practice soon, because it is so time-consuming, but it works great so I can’t. I’m getting close to where I think I can let go of the practice, however. I started using Scrivener (Mac | Windows), and it separates the formatting from the text in a sense (because you have to output and finalize the formatting in Word, since the publishing industry uses Word). So far, I feel like mentally I’m not bound to the text when I play around in Scrivener, so maybe it will finally let me kill off this unproductive but useful practice.

After the second draft every draft is a revision unless there are some major issues. A structural edit might also entail changing things entirely, like turning it from a poem into a short story, or cutting out whole scenes and chapters and characters or whatever. Unless somebody has requested the manuscript, I think about where to send it when I start the revision process (usually with draft three, although I often complete up to eight or ten substantial drafts). Then it’s just a matter of finishing it, sending it wherever, and getting started on the next thing.

I used to work on a lot of projects at once but wasn’t accomplishing much. Now I try to stick to no more than two, switching when I get stuck on one.

What about your process? If I remember correctly, The Imagination Manifesto was at one point a novel called Strangeseed. So how did the idea develop, and go from being a prose work to a graphic novel?

Chomichuk: The Imagination Manifesto (McNally | Amazon) began as a prose novel that was just too visual to remain as text alone. Because my writing style often references allusion and mythology as a literary device, but sometimes I’m talking about figures from mythology, I realized that the book contained too many things that seemed like metaphors, and too many things that seemed like descriptions which the reader can misattribute.

If someone is described as like a snake, but they look human, you know it’s just an adjective, but here the women who looks like a snake is a snake-woman. I had started getting a bit of work in film, and the storyboard needs of some projects really solidified, at least for me, that this part of the tale had to be illustrative. There are many chapters of the tale that will contain long bits of prose, but only when words say it better than pictures and vice versa.

It sounds a bit silly as I write it, but most of my ideas come from dreams. I believe firmly that we can go looking for things when we sleep. Our memory is built up from patterns, but dreaming really lets one experience their own lives in a unique way. If something follows me back from a dream, I take notice, and try to give it somewhere to live. Sometimes as a character, sometimes as a setting, sometimes as a line of dialogue. I do my best to give my dreams a good home.

Ball: I’d like to hear about your process also insofar as how you choose or develop projects. I know you’ve turned down work in favour of edgier fare, and have often turned offers to “work” into offers to be a creative contributor — what’s your attraction to edgier, unconventional work, and why does having some degree of creative control mean so much to you, even when you’re working as a gun-for-hire?

Chomichuk: Collaboration is the point for me. The whole idea of alchemy is the process of mixing strange ingredients and intents and creating something new and vibrant.

When I do work-for-hire art I offer different pricing. One price is for the work I do with the understanding that I keep and control the original art and the right to remix the original images into new work as I see fit. The other price (much higher) gives the client control of the original art. What this usually does is open a dialogue about what art should be and the strengths of collaboration versus outright control.

When everyone is invested in a project, both creatively and financially, the discussion orders itself around the work, and the story, rather than who is in charge. There is a lot of ego floating around in this business, and I find that if/when I set the terms like this, then people I would not enjoy working with for the long haul aren’t the ones interested in working with me anyway.

A person’s portfolio should reflect the work they want, not just the work they’ve done. We all start somewhere, but you need to be assertive about what you want for yourself from any creative endeavour. I want creative autonomy when I work with someone, and I’m interested in working with people who want the same things.

Focus on Today, Not on the Book: Using Scrivener’s Project Targets

I do all my writing in Scrivener (Mac | Windows) now. It’s a powerful, wonderful program, but it also has a steep learning curve, and so I want to show you one of my favourite features.

A very simple thing, but incredibly useful, especially if you are working on a long project, something that is overwhelming and that you need to break down into small, manageable chunks you can work on day by day.

It’s very easy to worry about the whole project and lose focus on what you have to do today, right now. Scrivener has a great function that helps you do this, which is called Project Targets.

In this screenshot video, you can see me (over)explain this simple but powerful feature:

I hope you can see the power of this … Scrivener is calculating my work for the day!

I actually went and dumped all my critical writings into that file, and I already have almost 150,000 words of decent stuff (not counting a bunch of other stuff). I would never have known that I already have enough for a book of critical writing if it wasn’t for this feature. You can just drag and drop stuff into a project, whereas before I really had to do some math or suture stuff in a Word file, to figure this kind of thing out.

Am I going to pare it down to a book of critical writing? I don’t know. Publishing a book of critical writing seems somehow too egotistical. But I could! I set a new goal of 250,000 words. When I have around 3-4 books worth of good material, then maybe I will trim it down to a single decent book.

Me and Scrivener: A Love Story (Coda)

I love Scrivener (Mac | Windows). For many, many, many reasons. I recommend it to everyone.

But it is NOT easy to learn.

I found that, while I could use it right away and it was useful immediately, even in the trial version, it was frustrating to feel like it could do WAY more for me, if I could just master its ins and outs.

I then thought of a great business idea, for once in my life … I would invest my time in learning Scrivener, and make a series of videos (like the one above, but way better) and then create a whole online course about how to use Scrivener! I would sell it and make some serious money and become a Scrivener king!

As soon as I had this idea, I discovered that someone else already did it, in a course called Learn Scrivener Fast. I purchased his course (since it had a money-back guarantee), thinking I would scope out the competition and then outdo the sucker.

Unfortunately, the course is great. So I’m not rich. And I didn’t ask for my money back, so I am actually poorer. But I know how to use Scrivener!

If you are a serious writer, I recommend Scrivener (Mac | Windows). I recommend Learn Scrivener Fast. I love them both. I became an affiliate of both, so if you want to support this site and you intend to purchase either, please do so through the links on this page.

Yes, both are investments in time and money, but if you are serious about writing then you should already be in the habit of investing your time and money to become a better writer. The software is powerful and has amazing potential to revolutionize your way of working.

Maybe you don’t care about that, because what you do already works for you. If that’s the case, then don’t worry about Scrivener. You might want to play around with it, but if you are happy with what you’re doing then you should focus your writing time on writing.

I wasn’t. I needed, among other things, software that would let me work on massive writing projects, and non-linearly. Scrivener is that software.

But I was wasting my time learning it. As pricey as the Learn Scrivener Fast course seemed, it was ultimately money WELL spent. I tried the books about the software, but they weren’t for me. It is just so much easier to grasp software, for me, from videos than from pages. Normally, I prefer learning from books, but not for software training, and I figured with a money-back guarantee it was safe to give it a shot.

However, if you DO buy the course, I wouldn’t worry about the “bonus” thing about “using Scrivener with an editor.” It’s useless. Yes, it works, but the fact is that it is pointless. If you are going to be a publishing, professional writer, then you MUST shift to Microsoft Word once you are in the editing/publishing process, and dealing with an editor in any professional context.

Do you, like me, hate Word? Tough. Word is where you will edit your book. I am sorry. It’s not my fault, or Scrivener’s fault. You can never escape Word. But with Scrivener, you can blissfully forget about Word for as long as possible.

If you already use Scrivener and have other cool tips about it, then let me know! I want to stab myself when I think that I wrote five books without Scrivener. Gah. It would have saved me years of my life.

Advice to Graduate Students

I earned an MA from the University of Winnipeg in 2005 and a PhD from the University of Calgary in 2009. While completing my PhD dissertation (a book I have not yet revised for publication) within four years, I also drafted five books. I threw two of them away, and published the other three (with subsequent revisions): Ex Machina, Clockfire, and The Politics of Knives.

Yet I am no productivity god. I wasted a lot of time, and wish I had done more. There are many graduate students who are also creative writers, and struggling to determine how to balance their studies and their writing. Here’s my hard-won advice.

I have framed it in response to an e-mail I received some time ago, from a self-described “budding author.” His basic question concerned going to do an MA (with an academic focus, not a creative thesis) yet also wanting to remain a creative writer.

How to focus on creative work and academic work at the same time? How to be a writer and a scholar at once?

Set Clear, Attainable Goals.

No matter what you work to achieve, you need to set goals that are clear and attainable. (For more on goal-setting for writers, see my interview with Chadwick Ginther).

The worst kinds of goals are vague, unattainable ones, like “hit the bestseller list.” Which bestseller list? When? How will you take meaningful action towards this vague goal? If you punch a copy of Quill & Quire, have you accomplished your goal? If you artificially manufacture some situation where your book ends up on the bestseller list (which is a current trend among self-help writers), will you check off your goal? Or will that fail to satisfy you ?

“Publish a novel” is a better but still-bad goal, as is “Complete my MA.” They are not terrible goals — at least you know when you’ve accomplished them. A novel gets published or doesn’t, and an MA hangs on your wall or does not.

A better goal is “Complete final polish on my first novel manuscript before the world ends on Dec. 20, 2012” or “Defend my MA thesis before I get married on Jan. 15, 2017.

Sometimes you’ll hear the annoying acronym “SMART,” as in “Create SMART goals.” Annoying though it might be, the advice is sound. You want your written (yes, write them down!) goals to be:

Specific — You want to “finalize the manuscript for Vampire Sex Music,” not “write a book.” What does it mean to “write a book”? If you write a first draft, do you check off the goal? Or is a final draft your goal? Or a third draft?

Measurable — You need to know when you complete a goal. If “lose weight” is your goal, then go to the bathroom. Mission accomplished! “Lose 5 lbs” is a better goal (in terms of being measurable — it’s a bad goal in other respects, since you could just sit on the couch and lose 5 lbs of muscle).

Attainable — “Publish a novel” is a bad goal because it requires an outside party to intercede. In this case, a publisher needs to accept your novel, and in fact they will be the ones to publish it. (If you want to self-publish, then the goal would be attainable.) All meaningful goals should be possible to accomplish without the intercession of others. Although more wordy, something like “produce and submit a final draft until it is published” is better than “publish.”

Realistic — If you have never written your name, then writing a novel is perhaps unrealistic (unless you have a long timeline). Often people are more unrealistic with their deadlines than with their abilities. I find that too many people are under-ambitious and in a sense too realistic given their abilities, but some people have a deranged sense of the marketplace or industry or their own selves. Research is usually the key to determining if something is realistic or not.

Time-Sensitive — Everyone works better with a deadline. If nobody gives you a deadline, give yourself a deadline!

My goals going into the PhD programme were as follows:

Complete all of the required course work within the first eight months
Complete each stage of the program as fast as possible (I set additional, more specific timeline goals for each stage)
Complete all requirements for graduation within four years (I ended up going a few more months, because I was offered extra funding for those additional months, and I didn’t want to turn down free money)
Apply for every grant or scholarship for which I am eligible (deadlines specific to each) — both academic and creative
Complete a book and submit it to publishers before I graduate (i.e., within four years) … as noted above, I ended up completing and submitting more than one, and two were accepted for publication before I graduated
Complete and submit as least three academic essays to academic journals (I ended up publishing all three)

Despite wasting a lot of time playing Wii, I did all this stuff. I did a bunch of other stuff as well, other goals I set after I entered the program. I don’t say this to brag, just to show you that if you are realistic about it, and you set clear and attainable goals, then you can accomplish a lot.

Notice that my goals are both creative and academic.

Note that I didn’t set a goal to publish anything. Again: you can’t control whether or not somebody accepts your work for publication, and even if they do accept it, you can’t control when they will publish. (I am still waiting for an essay I had accepted over seven years ago to be published!)

All my publishing-related goals were to “complete and submit.” Even if I’d published nothing, I would have met these goals. However, I was determined to publish (I wanted to publish a book before I turned 30 — thankfully, Ex Machina came out just one month before my birthday!), so I kept “submit” in my goals.

The Deep, Dark Secret of Graduate School

Are you ready?

Ready for your life to be changed?

Ready to learn secret knowledge kept hidden in the darkest wood, buried a hundred miles below the roots of an ancient tree, in a lead-lined tomb?

Okay … if you think you’re ready. Here it is:

Nobody cares about your grades. Getting good grades is your least important concern.

Not an unimportant concern, but your least important concern. In other words, when you are in graduate school, straight-As are the bare minimum.

Everyone else will get As. You’d better get them too. But if you spend all your time trying to do well in class and get As, then you are wasting your time.

What you need to do is set yourself apart, without being an aggressive or competitive jerk. What people care about, when you enter the so-called “real world” after graduate school, is everything else that you did. In other words, while you are in graduate school, you need to concern yourself with gathering publications, awards, and experience.

When you finish graduate school, and are sweating in a stuffy auditorium while you wait to receive your degree, look around you. Look at all those people graduating with you, in your cohort. Now multiply that group by every other cohort at every other university graduating at more or less the same time.

Guess what? All those people have straight-As. They all passed. They all have degrees now, just like you. You’re all brilliant. But how many of you have actually done anything, other than getting good grades.

If you don’t do anything outside of graduate school, you look like a total loser to a potential employer and you’ve been putting your life on hold for no payoff. Lose-lose. Which leads me to remark:

Don’t put your life on hold!

There are no substantial rewards after graduate school. The jobs are scarce, the jobs don’t pay well (for the education you actually have and the time you put in), and you don’t get the respect you deserve. Not even from your Mom.

Moreover, putting your life on hold is a great way to look myopic and like you can’t manage your time properly. If you can’t get through graduate school without having time for outside activities, then how can you possibly teach a full course load and conduct research? Never mind have an actual, um, what do you call those things … “life.”

When I hear “I can’t imagine forgetting about my novel for a year!” I shudder. This is exactly the kind of thinking that is foisted on people. “You must put all aside and focus on your studies!” saith the dean.

But I will say it again: I wrote five books in first draft (two in final draft) including my thesis, and finished within the four-year (and a few months) “minimum.” And I’m not that special.

The reality is this:

Completing your novel, instead of putting it on hold, is the most important thing you could do for your future career.

If your novel is your thesis (i.e., if you’re doing the creative thesis option), then I would hope that this would be obvious. But even if it’s not, as in this example, even if you’re doing an academic thesis, then your novel is still the most important thing.

Why? Because everybody else is also going to have a completed thesis when they are done. Because everybody else has As. Because everybody else got award X or scholarship Y.

Everybody else is going to publish in at least one refereed journal (and it goes without saying that you’d better submit academic work to journals, along with getting As and winning awards, and writing your novel or poetry book or whatever).

How can you set yourself apart? Not by competing in-class to prove your intellectual superiority. You’ll look like a jerk (actually, you’ll be a jerk) and people will shun you. Not by getting an extra RA or TA job. Everyone else did that. But who else is completing and (hopefully) publishing a book? Or a schwack of essays?

Almost nobody. When people look at your CV, they should have to turn the page. They should have to turn 10 pages. They should maybe have to turn 20 pages. They should have to turn more pages than they did with everyone else’s CV.

At the same time, bear in mind that they are hiring people, not pages. Who would you rather hire:

Somebody who has been hell-bent on graduate school to the expense of having a personality?
Somebody who managed to tag all the bases, including drafting up a strong thesis, and craft a novel? (Or run a magazine, or produce a short film, or whatever.)

Who sounds more interesting, more organized, more capable, and more fun to chat with in the common room?

Nobody is impressed by my transcript with all its As and A+s and awards, aside from seeing the SSHRC on there. It looks just like everybody else’s transcript. Except, maybe, that I completed my studies on time.

Complete the program on time, and as fast as you can.

There’s a lot of bullshit competitiveness in grad school. Sidestep it all. Be nice to people and make friends. And quietly complete the program as fast as you can, faster than your peers.

You’re not struggling against them, you’re struggling with them, and against yourself. Nobody cares about your grades, unless they are low. Not even the department you’re in.

What do they care about? They care about how far along you are in the programme.

When I started my PhD, the first thing I did was look over all of the departmental policies. I read all of the policy documents I could. It was a nightmare, but I learned my most important lesson. I learned that the policy was, all other things being equal, when the department had money to give out, they would give it to the person who was the furthest along in the programme.

So, I completed all of my course work in eight months. Nobody else did. As a result, I received tens of thousands of dollars of free money, simply because out of my cohort I was the furthest along in my programme.

Even if there are not specific policies that would benefit you in this way, getting your work done efficiently and effectively will give you more time to have one of those lives you keep hearing so much about. And it will impress the people around you. You’ll be competitive without having to compete.

When I was done, my thesis needed a lot more work. I’m slowly doing that work now, in between other projects. I could have done all of this work earlier, but the goal is not to craft a perfect, publishable thesis. Your goal is this:

Craft a workable, defensible thesis — then get the hell out of there!

Polish and rewrite and get your thesis perfect and publishable on your own time. You’re getting a degree, not publishing a book. You can publish your book later. The longer you stay in the programme, the worse you look to an outside observer.

Nobody expects you to get your book accepted the moment you’ve graduated. They expect you will have to rewrite it anyway, and “get the dissertation out” before it’s publishable. They had to rewrite their dissertations, why shouldn’t you?

Other Concerns

In the original email, I was asked about an MA program, but I talked about my doctoral studies because the answers are relevant to both MA and PhD programmes.

The above is an overview of my general advice regarding graduate school. Below are more specific answers to particular questions and comments.

“Did you feel like you were compromising your creativity?”

No. I was careful. I minored in literary theory, which is broadly useful in academia and also of use and interest in a personal approach to writing. And I majored in Canadian literature, which helped me get a sense of where there was a gap in the literature of this country and where I might attempt to find a niche as a writer myself.

For me, this made sense and fed my interests; another writer might justify another field in another way.

If you’re going to have two careers, you need to make them complement each other. It’s hard enough to have a single career. You don’t need the hassle of a second one. You have to find a way to merge them and to view/present your creative work as an asset, not a distraction — as a form of research-creation (without crafting boring, theory-heavy books).

I didn’t do anything in graduate school unless I felt that it was going to help me as a writer in some way. Or improve my teaching abilities (because I love teaching and think it’s important to teach, a form of community service, like this website). And I made the time to write, regardless of how busy I was, even if I only wrote for 10 minutes.

So though I often bemoaned my lack of time, as I continue to do now, I was still slowly progressing on both creative projects and academic ones.

Where I did compromise too much was in not doing the creative thesis option immediately.

I entered the PhD programme with an academic thesis project and held onto it for almost a year. It was a mistake. I should have jumped in. It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble.

Not because writers should always do creative theses, but because my academic thesis was a worse idea. You should just go with the best idea, whether academic or creative.

Your most impressive project should be your thesis. Your second-best project can be your secondary focus. It sounds obvious but it’s not always obvious when you’re on the inside.

You can’t be tactical and careerist in your choice of projects. It will show in the work. You need to be doing your best work, no matter how sexy that work might seem in the marketplace. Your best work is always your best option, because it shows you at your best.

“I’m learning increasingly that writing is not only about talent, but mental perseverance, time management, organization…”

Hallelujah! This is, to my mind, the biggest misconception about art in general —that you don’t need to be organized, persistent, or efficient … just “talented.”

Whatever that means.

Talent is for wimps. Whoever told me that “Hard work is more important than talent” was right (it was either Maurice Mierau or David Bergen).

“[What about] negotiating between the writing mind and the scholarly … not only the varying mental spaces, but also how to go about establishing a routine that can accommodate both…”

It’s hard, but for me it’s not the transitioning that’s hard, since I have an analytical mind and don’t write from a place of emotion, necessarily. It’s the “only so many hours in a day” thing that’s difficult. I struggled with this then, and I still do, but even though it’s hard, the answer is simple: you have to prioritize both (though of course at different times, since by definition you can only have one priority).

(And, as noted above, you need to think of your writing as a branch of your broader research and think/plan/work accordingly, without getting into a headspace where you end up producing clunky, academic fiction, or wispy, non-rigourous academic work.)

I have written elsewhere about what to do when you have too many ideas, and you can more or less substitute the word “projects” for “ideas” here. The key is that, in your working life, your priority will shift. You need to understand and accept that: again, remember that by definition, you can only have one priority at any given time.

The trick is to make your priority an important, non-urgent project — and train yourself to work on that before the urgent, less-important things that can occupy your time.

Every day, try to take at least one concrete step towards completing this priority project. I define a concrete step as writing a certain amount of words, but you might want to include research tasks or other activities.

I insist on having clear priorities that are pre-defined, so that I don’t get wrapped up in what I feel like doing. I also set quotas for the week or day. Actually, I let my writing software, Scrivener (Mac | Windows) set my quotas for me.

I try to do more. But I focus on not doing less.

Even if I feel like garbage. Try to remember this: even if you write nonsense that you’ll later delete, this is better than writing nothing. It helps you think, and it helps you build discipline, and it helps to practice.

If you write a single usable sentence, then you’ve done more than if you put it off until tomorrow, when you’ll (supposedly) have more time or feel refreshed.

If you only work when you feel like working, then maybe you should quit. Stop deluding yourself. You’re a hobbyist.

Which is fine! Just own it.

Don’t act like you are more than a hobbyist. Don’t stress yourself out about these things, and don’t waste time reading articles like this, because they aren’t relevant to you. Relax and enjoy your hobby.

If you don’t want writing to be your hobby, then guess what? It is now your job. Even if you don’t make any money doing it. (I didn’t say it was a good job…)

So you have to go to work even when you don’t want to. Your job as a writer deserves and demands at least as much dedication and loyalty as your job at Tim Hortons, which you drag yourself to even when it’s raining and you’re tired.

Also, importantly:

Don’t trap yourself in reading/researching when you should be writing.

You need to do both. But your reading and research should not get in the way of your writing. Even if you are doing preliminary reading/research to prepare to write something (like an essay), you should be writing something else (maybe a different essay) or writing notes and draft material alongside your reading.

It will be easy (ha!) because you will:

Write according to a schedule.

I have written about this at great length, but the short story is that if you write according to a schedule you will be much more productive (like, produce 3-5 times as many pages) than if you write in large yet irregular blocks (writing like this, people tend to only write slightly more than “controls” told to write nothing unless circumstances force them to write).

The most important thing to do if you plan to be a writer and a scholar is to remember that AND. You have to commit to BOTH.

You don’t put one on hold while you work on the other. Trust that your success in one area will feed into the other — I’ve been hired to teach creative writing courses based solely on my publication record — and get yourself organized, get disciplined, and work efficiently.

Commit yourself and treat both your studies and your writing as a job.

Serious writers and scholars schedule time to write and don’t know what other people are talking about when they talk about inspiration.

So-called writers and scholars work when they “find the time” or when “inspiration strikes.”

Those people are pretentious losers. Don’t let them influence you. Don’t use them as role models.

The joke of the universe is that some of them have a lot of talent. And so, they get by. Imagine how well they could do if they actually worked, and honoured their talent rather than squandering it. The joke of the universe is that since they get by, they don’t even realize they are squandering their talent. Just imagine if they did not.

You have to imagine, because you will never know. Because they never will. They will always just get by. They will take your job, and churn out the same crappy essay for the next ten years, and get promoted, instead of doing something that matters to the world.

And so they will always be pretentious losers, even as they drink expensive wine while you swill box wine. None of which is any of your concern. Your concern is the work.

Don’t Attribute Dialogue

Conventional dialogue in fiction follows a formula: “I am saying something,” said Character X, “and nobody can stop me.” That part in the middle, said Character X, is called dialogue attribution. The phrase attributes the dialogue in quotation marks to Character X, using the verb said. Writers write attribution all the time, but why? Why would anyone ever write dialogue attribution?

Conventional Wisdom

Many of the articles about dialogue attribution, or even just about dialogue, focus on the quality of the attribution rather than questioning the existence of attribution itself. The bugbear here, for many good reasons, is the adverb. Writers caution other writers against sentences like this:

“Maybe,” she said vehemently.

The problem with adverbs in dialogue attribution is the same as with adverbs anywhere: they are either redundant or, more dangerously, they mask the presence of a weak verb. So, instead of “said vehemently,” it would seem, I should use a more precise verb, liked “shouted.” But this is no better:

“Maybe,” she shouted.

Why isn’t this better? Well, dialogue is an odd case where the adverb’s appearance masks not the use of a weak or imprecise verb, but an error of another order. “Said” is weak and imprecise, but it is acceptable in dialogue attribution — in fact, much of the conventional wisdom here is that you should only use said, which is fine as far as it goes.

The problem, of course, it that it doesn’t go far enough. But before I get to that, let’s identify the real problem here, which the adverb tries to mask: “Maybe” is not something you say vehemently, not something you shout.

The dialogue itself is weak and imprecise, and the adverb is attempting, after the fact, to mask the problem, by telling the reader how they should have read the dialogue, since it was too poorly written to have been read properly in the first place.

So what’s the lesson? Restrict dialogue attribution to “he said” or “she said” and so on? It almost sounds good — except that the very presence of dialogue attribution weakens dialogue and muddies character action.

Moreover, dialogue attribution is always unnecessary if dialogue is well-written.

What Dialogue Attribution Does

This may seem obvious, even tautological: dialogue attribution attributes dialogue. Let’s interrogate this further. The function of “Bob said” is to tell us that Bob said something. Why would a writer ever need to do this?

The answer, of course, is if Bob is saying something that another character could have said. There are two basic situations where this might occur. The first is the most common:

Action in the Scene is Too Minimal

In other words: the context of character actions, the geography of the scene, or other factors that boil down to what we shall call action remains underdeveloped. For our purposes, we’ll call action the prose that surrounds the dialogue and describes what characters are doing and where they are located relative to one another, and so on.

When there is enough character action, dialogue attribution becomes unnecessary, because readers always assume that the character taking action in the text closest to the dialogue is the speaker of the dialogue, except in rare cases. For example:

“You’re dead meat.” Bob ran his tongue along the knife’s blade. Sarah winced.

How do we know that Bob said “You’re dead meat”? We don’t. We assume it. Why don’t we assume that Sarah threatened Bob, then Bob defiantly ran his tongue along a knife’s blade, and big-talking Sarah winced in response? Because Bob’s name is closer to the dialogue.

It is really that simple, in most cases. Notice that we don’t need “Bob said.” In fact, let’s rewrite to add it.

“You’re dead meat,” Bob said. He ran his tongue along the knife’s blade. Sarah winced.

Not only does “Bob said” add nothing, it detracts. I have to put a comma after “meat” instead of a period, so it is less declarative. The reader does a split-second replacement of “He” with “Bob” in the second sentence, so that sentence’s tone shifts down to seem ever-so-slightly less threatening.

One of the great “rules” of writing is that every word you add pulls power away from every other word. “Less words, better words” is the editor’s credo. (For conventional writing; with experimental work, you may have other editing goals, as we shall see below.) Cutting the dialogue attribution entirely is good editing practice in this sense.

It also helps you avoid a problem in first drafts, which is that if I was used to writing things like “Bob said,” I would probably write this:

“You’re dead meat,” Bob said. Sarah winced.

I don’t actually need the line “Bob ran his tongue along the knife’s blade” — the coolest part of the section. I don’t need to describe the character’s action, because I wrote “Bob said.” So, maybe I won’t. If I write dialogue attribution, I can get away with crap like this. But I cannot get away with this:

“You’re dead meat.” Sarah winced.

Sarah didn’t say it — Bob did — so I don’t want the reader getting confused. So I need boring old dialogue attribution, or I need character action. We’ve already seen which works better. Or I could do this:

“You’re dead meat.”

Sarah winced.

Here, at least, the blandness of the scene (without Bob’s tongue on the knife’s blade) is more obvious, and something I would catch in revisions, probably. But if “Bob said” accomplishes precisely as much as empty white space, then it is easy to see how worthless “Bob said” truly was.

Now what’s the second problem?

Characters Say Things Other Characters Could Say

If written well, the way a character speaks and the things a character says should be so specific to them that dialogue attribution is unnecessary. We know Bob is speaking because he says things like “The world has a slowness to it and though we rush we cannot overtake this,” while Sarah says stuff like “You sound like how Cormac McCarthy might sound if I bashed in his skull.”

Speaking of McCarthy, let’s see how he operates. Here’s a great dialogue exchange from No Country for Old Men (McNally Robinson | Amazon):

Where’d you get that pistol? she called.

At the gettin place.

Did you buy that thing?

No. I found it.

She sat up on the sofa. Llewelyn?

He came back in. What? he said. Quit hollerin.

What did you give for that thing?

You dont need to know everthing.

How much.

I told you. I found it.

No you never done no such a thing.

He sat on the sofa and put his legs up on the coffeetable and sipped the beer. It dont belong to me, he said. I didnt buy no pistol.

You better not of.

Here you can see that McCarthy is only using dialogue attribution to kill time where a pause should go (it is more or less the equivalent of writing “he paused”). Look at all the character information that McCarthy packs into this exchange, subtextually, without stating any of it.

Because of how they talk, we now know (or, rather, we can assume) that they are married, that she’s younger than him, that they don’t have a lot of money, that they live in the American South, that she trusts him but not entirely, that he won’t lie to her even though he doesn’t feel the need to tell her the whole truth.

When Characters Don’t Talk to Each Other

Not only does jettisoning dialogue attribution force you into a position where you need to better describe character action and write better dialogue that is more specific to the characters, it also operates like a poetic constraint that can help you develop experimental dialogue forms.

One of my favourite tricks is threading strings of dialogue together where characters are talking to themselves but appearing to have a conversation on the surface. Here’s an excerpt from a story called “Costa Rican Green”:

“It is good to see you. It’s been so long.”

“It’s good to see you too.”

“The wind is picking up.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“The wind is salty, so strange.”

“Here, let me show you some pictures.”

“Amazing.”

“I want to stop and write out some postcards.”

“Maybe I can send that letter.”

“This is my dog — but you’ve seen my dog in pictures already.”

“It would be nice to swim tomorrow, if it’s warmer.”

“Have you ever gone snorkelling?”

“I wonder how the water tastes, if it tastes like the wind.”

The next line of dialogue in this scene is quite long. What I’ve done here also is cut all action around the dialogue so that it appears with no context. The result is an ambiguity about who is speaking (although it is more clear if you have read the rest of the story).

In this moment, I am starving the reader of action and scene description because I want to pack it into the chunk of dialogue that appears next. Here are the next lines in the story — note how the action of the characters is being suggested by the dialogue and the scene is described here as well.

“Look at that. Those houses. They’ve fallen into the sea. All that stone. Just broken off like that, one wall standing, the rest below. Come here, look. Do you see? I wonder how it happened. Solid stone, must be cement. See down there, in the water, parts of the floor and the roof, sticking out. There must be five houses. Maybe there were more before. I wonder when it happened. Look out those windows. All those grey walls, then the road and the trees beyond it. Or if you look the other way, into the house, there’s no glass in the window, and nothing inside, just the sky and the sea where there should be a wall. No doors. All the doors must have faced the sea. Think of all those doors now, buried in the sea bed. I wonder if they are opened or closed. Do you think that anybody was hurt? Where did they go, after? I don’t see any other houses around here. We’re too far from the town, just the beaches and the cemetery and these houses. Put that camera down. I wonder about those doors.”

In this moment, the line “Put that camera down” clarifies who has been speaking but not until the end. Of course, the recording character (with the camera) is also the narrator (recording now through text) so I am playing a bit of a metafictive game here. The ambiguity about who has been speaking gets clarified at the end because then it draws attention to the silence of the other character (he picked up the camera and stopped talking) and the dynamic between the two.

You can play around with the form of the dialogue and experiment with its construction more fully when you have more room for ambiguity. Dialogue attribution, by its very nature, robs the scene of ambiguity.

Over-Attribution

Here is the most normal case of dialogue over-attribution:

“Where did that pistol come from?” Her voice trembled with curiosity as she yelled to him in the other room.

How does a voice “tremble with curiosity”? Never mind the awkwardness of all of this. Notice how McCarthy did it better.

So far, I’ve only discussed how worthless dialogue attribution is, and how it is worse than worthless in that it actively encourages bad writing. But what if I wanted to break my own rule? Here’s how I would do it: by over-attributing, by going to an extreme with dialogue attribution.

Why might I do this? Well, there could be any number of reasons. Here’s an example of how you might over-attribute dialogue for a particular effect:

“No,” she said as she plunged the knife. She said it again. She said it again and then said it again. She said it again and again, and again and again, and she said it again and again and again and each time she plunged the knife. 

Here the dialogue attribution starts to operate like a species of onomatopoeia. Sometimes, when you do something, it is best to overdo it, if you do it at all.

Of course, you should never underestimate the power of not doing it at all.

How I Built This Website

I grew up in a small town in Northwestern Ontario, and in those pre-Internet days, we were very behind the times. When I heard Kurt Cobain died, I was watching the news with my grandfather. “Who’s that?” he asked. “Some musician, I think,” is what I said.

I had heard of Nirvana but had never heard one of their songs, because we only had two radio stations: Oldies and Country. There were no music stores and no book stores unless you drove an hour and then crossed the border into the U.S. The gas station rented a few movies, but if I wanted to see a movie in the theatre, I had to drive over an hour (one-way) and then cross into the U.S.

So, when the Internet did come to my small town, it was mind-blowing. However, at the same time, it was also sort of lame. It’s hard to explain to younger people now, but if you’re my age or older, you may remember when there really wasn’t actually much of anything on the Internet. For many years, I refused to get an e-mail address, because I thought they were a fad.

I saw the potential of websites immediately, however. When I was in high school, the band Radiohead had a website. It had no information about the band on it. It appeared to be hand-programmed by Thom Yorke and just had a bunch of weird, surreal poetry linked in a complex maze to other weird, surreal poetry. (Looking back, it was probably a major influence on my book Ex Machina.)

When I discovered that Radiohead site, I realized that the web would become the publishing platform of the future, somehow. If I had any business savvy, this revelation might have changed my life. Even in my un-businesslike haze, as soon as I could, I bought the domain www.JonathanBall.com. I learned HTML basics and programmed a series of websites for myself. They were all way too much work, but I liked to mess around with them. In 2014, I revamped the site for maybe the tenth time, into its current incarnation, and started feeling like I finally knew what I was doing (or at least what I should do) online.

Over the years, each new incarnation of my website has appeared relatively complex (even if it wasn’t), so people often ask me how I built this site and how I run it. This is one of the most common questions I am asked over e-mail.

The purpose of this post is to answer that question, but I wanted to provide that long preamble first, so that you would understand something very important: I am not an expert in building websites. I just happen to have built this one.

Here’s how.

Hostroute

I buy all my domains and hosting plans through Hostroute, because they are inexpensive and have great customer service. That’s an affiliate link, and so if you end up also using Hostroute then use the coupon code JBALL to get 20% off any of their hosting packages. I don’t know how Hostroute compares to other companies, because I’m not a tech guy. I just know they are cheap and work and have great customer service, so I stick with them.

Make sure you buy a domain with a hosting package. Don’t just use the free hosting that often comes with domain name purchase. It’s not worth it in the long run, trust me. It will be a nightmare of headaches and hassles. You need to be able to support a database if you don’t want to learn code or spend forever updating your site.

If you aren’t sure whether you want a website, buy the domain anyway (the name by itself, without a hosting plan) just to save it for later. If you don’t buy your domain name now, somebody else will. Trust me.

WordPress

I run WordPress off of my site. I like WordPress because it is easy to update and has a lot of theme options, and is very customizable with various widgets and plugins. In the early days, I coded my site by hand in HTML. I don’t recommend that. Use a database content management system like WordPress. If you know some code, it helps, but WordPress is designed for people who know nothing about code.

Whether you end up using WordPress or one of its competitors, you will need a hosting plan that supports databases (sometimes it says MySQL). I don’t know what those words mean, but I do know that WordPress requires that your hosting plan supports a database since that’s basically what it is, if I understand things correctly, which I probably don’t. And look — I am running this website! WordPress is simple but robust.

Get Noticed! Theme

You can get a lot of free and cheap themes to run off of WordPress, and they work great. I started with a free theme, but at the time they were very limited. Now, they are much better. A free theme is probably good for most people.

For most of the others, an inexpensive theme is probably great. I have used a couple of different paid, but not pricey, themes over the years. Some of them looked excellent. You can always tweak these themes yourself, or (better yet) hire a designer to tweak them for you. WordPress is extremely customizable, either through installing free or paid plugins or through manipulating the actual code like a designer might.

I don’t have any particular ones to recommend. It just depends on what you want. Spend a lot of time picking out a theme, especially if you plan to pay for it or hire someone to customize it. Keep in mind that you can always change your site’s theme. It only takes about a minute. You can try out all sorts of different ones, and change it up whenever you want. WordPress is great because you can totally redesign your entire website in five minutes if you want.

You can also get some expensive, high-end themes. That’s what I did. I ended up with the Get Noticed! theme, which was designed by Michael Hyatt.

Before I go into the details of why I chose this theme, let me repeat that you do NOT need an expensive, high-end theme like Get Noticed! That’s just what I use. I like it so much that I would become an affiliate for it, but it doesn’t have a program so I’m not. I don’t get anything out of recommending it, and it’s expensive, and probably more than you need. Nevertheless, I won’t recommend anything else, because I don’t use anything else.

Here’s why I pulled the trigger and splurged on Get Noticed!

The point of this section is not to convince you to buy that theme (I don’t make money from selling that theme or anything), but to show you how it’s important to determine what’s important to YOU, and then find the theme that works for YOU. Be willing to pay a little (though maybe not a lot) for what YOU want and need.

When I explain here why I splurged, the point is not that these should be important considerations for you — probably they shouldn’t. The point is that you should think about what you want and why, and then find the online tools to support your needs.

I wanted to paint myself into a corner. I felt that if I spent some “real money” on a theme, then I would feel compelled to use it heavily, so as to get my money’s worth. In for a penny, in for a pound. I never said it was a good reason. However, there’s something to be said for psychologically “pulling the trigger” and convincing yourself to take your website seriously by investing in it.

It looks great out of the box. The theme I’m using right now is Get Noticed! with NO customization (design-wise). I’ve added widgets, and changed some settings, but I haven’t even altered the colour scheme yet. I haven’t designed the site to look nice. I knew I wouldn’t have time and money for that sort of thing for a while, and I wanted to focus on writing and adding content, not tweaking its look, so I wanted a theme that would look professional and clean right away — and would also be very customizable by a designer later.

It works great on mobile devices. You want to make sure your theme is “responsive,” which means that it will redesign itself to look better on mobile phones and iPads and such. The Get Noticed! theme does that, and does it better than any other theme I’ve seen. It even moves certain sidebar items, like the sign-up box, to a more noticeable place on mobile phones than similar themes. It’s a very smart responsive design. Probably it will get copied and so the cheaper themes may be doing some of this stuff soon, if they don’t already.

It has a bunch of “mini-post” options. I really wanted to have a way to post a lot of stuff on my site that was NOT treated the same way as a “full” blog post. A lot of themes allow this in a limited way, but the Get Noticed! theme has a ton of options. I don’t use some of them, and others I use heavily or in unintended ways. It’s very flexible, and it keeps all the “fluffier” stuff separate from my more “serious” weekly posts.

It has “landing” page types. I create a bunch of pages that are not accessible from the main site, which are special pages intended for special audiences. They are technically available through Google, but mainly available through links I give out exclusively. These might be intended for students, or people listening to a podcast appearance, or publishers, or other smaller audiences that I want to send to some specific page for some reason. For example, I have a landing page meant for editors to whom I’m trying to sell my “Haiku Horoscopes” column. Take a look and notice how the sidebar on this page goes away when you click that link. There are a ton of reasons you might want to have a page like this. They work great for “ad”-type pages. I don’t do much of that, but you might.

Again, I want to stress that this is all just what I use and therefore recommend. I don’t ever recommend anything I don’t love and use. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t something better I’m not using, that also deserves love. I’m not the expert when it comes to websites, I’m just the expert when it comes to this website. This site works, so this stuff works. That’s all I know.

Coda

I have some other websites, where I do things differently, although they all run off of Hostroute and use WordPress. My site at What Rappers Are Saying just runs some free theme called “Decode” by Scott Smith. (That site is basically a placeholder for a more developed, future site. I set the whole thing up in less than half an hour, which just goes to show you how easy this stuff can be. Don’t be intimidated! Start your own website.)

My site at Haiku Horoscopes uses a theme that was custom-built for me by Ryan Hill. That’s another option, if you know what you are doing — just build your own custom theme! Or hire somebody to do it, if you don’t know what you are doing, and you have some coin to invest in yourself and your site. You can do this stuff very cheaply. Even going with an expensive, high-end theme, you will be out only a few hundred dollars at day’s end.

I hope this is helpful for you, but really, I think you just need to try things. But DO try things, and DO get yourself a website. You’ll need it later, if not now. Also, bear in mind always that you have to ingest recommendations like these cautiously. Your website has to be what you want. Sometimes, it takes years to figure out what you want. It took me over a dozen years to decide how to develop this site. In a dozen years from now, it’ll probably be unrecognizable.

To cap this off, I’ll suggest what I always suggest: Experiment. If you build a site, link to it in the comments, and I’ll check it out. Tell me what works for you.

Daedalus

I wish that I was Daedalus. Traveling in Central America. All these people, the bars on their windows, the cages around their homes, barbed wire and broken glass. I would build them wings, so they might rise, but they would say, Are you crazy? The sun is too bright here, we would plummet, dripping wax.

The poor here, the poor on the streets of Winnipeg. Poor everywhere. I would build them wings, but they would say, Leave us, we are tired, we are hurting no one. What use are wings? Can we eat them? Sell them? We are tired, let us sleep. Can they clothe us, save our bones from the wind? We are clinging to the world, trying not to float away, and you bring us wings.

Later, swimming in the Caribbean, talking to fish. They tell me the seas are dying. I would build them wings, I say, but they laugh their bubbling laughs. You must be joking. Keep your wings, put them on planes, fly to Mars, pretend there is escape. You are always trying to change things. Are you never happy? Keep your unhappiness to yourself. Leave us, let us die in peace. Give us silence, show respect. You talk of wings.

I wish that I was Daedalus. Walking through ruins, civilizations gone, murdered, driven to suicide. I would build them wings, so they might fly from their graves, fill the sky. But they would say, Where are you, who is speaking? Who talks of wings? We cannot see them, we do not feel them, we have no bodies now, no way to hold them. We are dust and screams. Our dreams are gone now, our desires and our memories. What are wings?

Then, there are my words. I would build them wings, if I could, if I was Daedalus. Would they soar, say the things I want to say? No, they would fly away from me.

And my friends. I know that they cry sometimes, that they feel trapped, bound to earth. If only I was Daedalus. But I wish for so much, so many things.

All this time I’ve wasted. May it come flying back to me.

Chadwick Ginther on Goal-Setting for Writers (Interview)

Originally from Morden, Manitoba, Chadwick Ginther was fascinated by Norse Mythology at an early age. Today, he spins sagas of his own set in the wild spaces of Canada’s western wilderness where surely monsters must exist. Chadwick’s short fiction has appeared in On Spec magazine, Fungi, and The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir. He is a contributor to Quill and Quire, The Winnipeg Review, and Prairie Books NOW. His novels,  Thunder Road and Tombstone Blues (Ravenstone Books), were nominated for the Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel. He lives and writes in Winnipeg.

I have become a reluctant convert to “goal-setting” although I struggle to craft a streamlined, reliable, and effective process. What is your goal-setting process, and how effective do you find it to be?

“Process” might be a bit generous. I don’t know that what I do is streamlined or reliable … yet. But it has mostly worked for me. My goal setting is largely deadline-driven. If I have a story or article due in with an editor, that obviously takes precedence on any more “recreational” writing. When I’m told to deliver something “whenever,” or not given a specific deadline, that item tends to drift away from my consciousness and takes forever to be completed. Which is probably why it took me so long to get this interview back to you. So my apologies.

I also find my goal-setting process to be something that is still under constant evolution, as my life has been quite different, year-to-year since starting this project. One year saw me change dayjobs, the next year saw me add teaching workshops to my to-do list. This year more closely resembles the last, and so while the year is still young, I find my planning is either more realistic, or my fulfilment of those plans is more effective. Maybe next year I’ll be able to say with more certainty.

When and why did you start writing down goals?

My first flirtation with public goal setting and blog accountability came in the lead up to the launch of my first novel, Thunder Road. I’d taken some time off prior to the launch to prepare (and worry and panic out of the public eye). I also set down a long list of everything I wanted to do during those two weeks. It was a very unrealistic list. However, I was still pretty happy with the results even if I didn’t immediately follow through with posting goals every month.

Early in 2013, (12:05am, January 1st, I believe) while under pressure about New Year’s Resolutions, which I never make, I realized I liked the term “Goals” better than “Resolutions. Goals can be altered due to changing circumstances. I suppose resolutions can too, but there is more of a concreteness to the term resolution. Goals may be altered, but resolutions are broken. It seemed like writing-based resolutions were only setting myself up to fail.

I wanted to do something though. I knew from experience that if I made plans for what I wanted to do writing-wise it was more likely to get done. Having a deadline, even a self-imposed one, made it easier to schedule the time to write. I also knew that even when I didn’t hit my self-imposed deadlines, I was always further along than if I’d said “it gets done when it gets done.”

Why did you decide to start sharing goals publicly on your website?

Accountability, mostly. There’s no ignoring the goal once it’s out there and public. Writing down my self-imposed deadlines made them feel a little more real. Once I started setting my goals publically, however, I found that I was getting good responses from my blog followers, and they turned out to be some of my more popular blog posts, so I decided to keep up the practice. I still don’t hit everything I set out to do, but I’m certain that I always accomplish more than I otherwise would if I didn’t think, and plan, and say what I was going to do, and when.

Aside from posting your goals publicly, is there any other way that you hold yourself accountable to others?

I suppose I could add that I occasionally get together with writing friends for “Writeoffs” where we sit in the same room and ignore each other and write or edit. I find these weekends very productive. Watching everyone else work away is a good motivator to stay off of Facebook and Twitter. I’ll also occasionally use Twitter to join up with other writers for a short 30-60 minute “Writing Sprint” where we write hard for the designated time, and then call out our word counts when we’re done.

You routinely post annual and monthly goals. Do you make goals on any other timeline — weekly goals, or a five-year plan, etc.?

At the moment, I concentrate on monthly and yearly timelines. When I set my monthly goals, I try and consider which weeks I might work on which of the named goals but that’s about it. I don’t break the month down for my readers that way. I also don’t set a word count goal for each week, although if I’m doing a lot of drafting, I like to hit at least 1000 words a day. Most of my long-term goals which might fit a “five-year plan” tend to be things that are not in my control:

Landing an agent.
Selling my next series of novels.
Selling a short story to a specific prestigious market.
Making a year’s best short story anthology.
Being a convention guest of honor.

I try not to sweat about those sorts of things. The only thing I can do to achieve those sorts of goals is to write as often as I can, and finish and submit the work. The more novels and stories I finish and submit, the better my odds, but there are still no guarantees.

Do you make use of any software or system to set or track goals?

I built a very simple spreadsheet for tracking words/day and one for short story submissions (sales and rejections by market). I’ve been tracking my short story submissions pretty much from the moment I started sending them to editors. The word count spreadsheet is new this year, so I’m still figuring its place in my system, but having a field to plug in everyday, is a motivator for me to get at least a little bit of work done every day, even when I’m exhausted, hung over, or stressed out about car repairs and if this winter is ever going to end.

I keep a master list on a Word document of everything I need to do for the year (and its deadline) and everything I want to do (and its deadline) as well as everything I’ve started working on, but haven’t finished. As the beginning of a month looms, I look at the master list and see which items are a good fit.

When Too Far Gone is off to press, I want to experiment with Scrivener.

Scrivener (Mac | Windows) might help with your goal-setting, since it has a number of great word-target features that help with planning. I’ve found it helpful because it lets me focus on the writing session, the work right in front of me, rather than the giant and unmanageable project that a book is, by nature. How do you keep yourself focused on the task at hand that day, and not get overwhelmed with the immensity of the project?

I’m a fast drafter, which helps me keep focus. With most larger projects I’ve been able to push through a first draft in a few months which keeps my mind on that phase of the creation. It is in tackling revisions where I always find myself bogged down by the immensity of what remains to be done (probably because I draft fast, and try not to edit as I go). It’s also when I tend to get distracted by the next story that I want to write, usually at the expense of the one that I need to fix.

I combat The God of Shiny New Stories by breaking my editing down into phases. Big story-level changes come first. Looking at character arcs, insinuating worldbuilding, reviewing pacing, and fact checking come next. Finally, and once I feel everything else is in place, I get into polishing the prose. While I don’t go looking for them, it’s hard not to clean up awkward phrasing, or fix typos when I spot them, so taking multiple runs at the manuscript helps keep the final polish from being too much of a trial, but there’s always something to find. The last thing I do is make a giant pot of tea and read the entire thing aloud to catch anything that sounds wrong.

How do you know when your goal is too lofty or not lofty enough?

I guess if I hit all of my goals with time to spare they weren’t lofty enough, and if I didn’t succeed I bit off more than I could chew. I’d say I probably set loftier goals for the year than are necessarily feasible more often than is the case with my monthly goals.

Over the last two years I’ve learned a bit of what works and doesn’t work for me, planning-wise. For example, editing always takes me longer than I think it will, and I always seem to forget about goddamned February only having 28 days. I also set lighter goals in months where I know I will be travelling now. I was on the road a lot last year, and I made grand plans to do some writing while I was flying, or in the hotel before I’d head into a conference, and that work rarely materialized.

In 2013, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, but that November happened to coincide with me having a table at C4 (the Central Canada Comic Convention) and being on tour for Tombstone Blues. I managed my 50,000 words that month, but it was more work than it needed to be. As I’ll likely be on the road again this November for Too Far Gone’s book tour, I left NaNoWriMo off of my yearly goals list for 2015. And besides, if things change, and I’m travelling in October, I can always add NaNoWriMo back in as one of my monthly goals.

Why did you make participating in NaNoWriMo a goal in the past? Can you walk through that specific goal in some detail? When did you set it, why did you set it, what was your thought process in selecting that goal, and what techniques did you adopt to help yourself succeed? (I assume you succeeded …)

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo three times, 2011, 2012, 2013, and “won” twice, 2011, 2013. I had to bow out in 2012 in week one, I injured my arm and couldn’t type after I’d hit my first 4000 words. Even trying to write by hand was too painful (and impractical) to continue. I tried voice recognition software, but didn’t have the patience to teach it to recognize the Icelandic and mythological words that would be necessary.

I didn’t have much desire to participate in NaNoWriMo prior to working with someone who was a champion of Novel Month. I was vaguely aware of it as a thing, but not much more. I was comfortably drafting around 30,000-40,000 words a month at that time, so I didn’t think NaNoWriMo would be much of a challenge, but it turned out those extra words were harder than I’d thought. I’ve come around considerably on NaNoWriMo since then, obviously, having participated three times.

This is one of those every writer is different and everyone’s process needs to work for them moments. At the time, I was working in retail, and committing to starting a novel at my busiest time of year, when I was already exhausted and the worst was still to come, was hard. Even now that I’m away from the retail world, NaNoWriMo isn’t something I’d want to do every year, but it still has its uses for beginners and pros.

I know lots of writers who use it as an excuse to just join a community of likeminded folks seeking to (usually because of a looming deadline) get a lot of words down in a short period of time. Others use it as a push to finish a project they’ve already started, or to get a bunch of short fiction done. I’ll probably used all of these motives at some point or another.

Getting to 50,000 words in a month was also a good learning experience. It also broke down my normal writing process and made me stretch to find and steal more time to write whenever I could. I realized that “pantsing” a novel as I had with Thunder Road and Tombstone Blues and a few other unpublished works wasn’t the best NaNoWriMo option for me.

While I don’t usually outline, I also only tend to start working on a book after the story, world, or main character has been rolling around in my head for a while. I had none of those things the first time out. Instead, I started with two ideas that had collided together at the last minute and I spent the four days I had at the end of November frantically brainstorming to try and fill a novel’s worth of story.

That book was an utter mess, and I’m still fixing it. The 2013 NaNoWriMo project wrote a lot smoother at the time, but I learned from my first mistake and outlined a little more thoroughly than I normally do (I’m usually content to work with mix-tape style soundtrack and call it an outline) and while I haven’t tried to edit that book yet, I’m more confident that it will hold up better, if, for no other reason than I was more experienced when I wrote it, and hopefully internalized some of my editorial notes from my previously published works.

I think if you want to be successful at Novel Month, having a good foundation for your story and goal is necessary. I’ve used lots of strategies from my gaming hobby to help me be able to improvise on the fly, so that I don’t waste time working on things that don’t add to the word count, lists of names that I like, random character tics, folders with pictures of people and places which look interesting, etc. I also have a file of all the little notes I make while I’m on the bus, or out for a walk that don’t necessarily belong to another project. I mine those notes before I start something big to see what might fit in. If I’m going to do a Novel Month, I try to block out at least the month prior to brainstorm on what I want the book to be, some major plot points, and make myself a writing soundtrack for how I want the story to feel, that I will listen to while I write. You can change that outlined framework later, but having some sort of map in mind will help hit the ground running. I feel like those who outline prior to NaNoWriMo are more likely to end up with something they’re able to revise, and sell, more swiftly.

I also don’t write in chronological order, necessarily. If I’m not sure what comes next after I finish a scene but I know what comes after that I’ll write ahead, and usually by the time I’ve finished that, I know what the earlier section of the book will need. Once I’m certain of the ending, I write that immediately, and then write the rest of the middle towards that end goal.

As I was promoting Tombstone Blues at the time I was writing my 2013 NaNo novel, I mostly had only my coffee breaks, and lunch breaks to put down words. But in those panicked 15 minute and hour bursts, I’d usually write more than if I had a leisurely four hour block of time, because those short stints were all I had. I tried to not fall behind during the week, and then write ahead on the weekends. One of the tricks I used for that was to leave ragged sentences at the end of a writing session, so I knew what I needed to do to finish that sentence, and once it was done, I was already writing, instead of thinking about how I wanted to start. Similarly, I’d never end on a chapter or scene break. I’ve found that brings my writing momentum to a halt. If I finish a chapter or scene, I usually know what comes immediately after, and will start writing the next chapter or scene. Depending on how many words I’ve got, or how much time I have left in my writing day, usually a paragraph is enough to ensure I can start up quickly again the next time I sit down to write. Once I hit a bit of a critical mass on the book (this usually happens in one of two places—10,000 words or 30,000 words, momentum takes over, and I start racking up more serious word counts. I tried writing on the road, during my book tour, but wasn’t able to keep the pace I’d hoped for, so I still needed a 7000 word weekend to finish of the book. Which is where publically stating my goals helped. There was no way I was going to bow out that close to success.

You’ve turned in the final book in your trilogy, but what now, Chadwick? What now?

Since submitting Too Far Gone to Ravenstone Books, I’ve mostly been working on short stories, and clearing out the to-do list of things that I abandoned as my contract deadline started to loom. I have the first book a new potentially on-going series drafted, and am revising it for submission to editors and agents. I have another first book in a different series drafted, but have not begun to tackle any of its edits. Both of those books will feature different takes on contemporary fantasy than the Thunder Road Trilogy, and while both will be influenced by myth and folklore (because that’s what I love to write about), they’ll have less of a direct line to one specific myth cycle.