Chris Baty's Blog, page 206

NaNo Prep: Using Setting to Reinforce Your Characters

Want more preparation exercises? Check out National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program’s Novelist Workbooks, which our nonprofit provides free-of-charge to more than 2,000 educators and 8,000 young writers around the world! 

It’s time to really nail down some of your novel’s settings. The setting is where and when your novel takes place. Of course, many novels have more than one setting, ranging from the general (a city, country, or world 100 years ago) to the specific (a character’s house or room during the Super Bowl). What’s great about setting is that you can use it to mirror or reinforce your characters.

For example, if you are writing about a mysterious person, you might place him or her in a dark, creepy mansion on a hill outside of town. Or, if one of your characters is feeling trapped in his or her life, he or she might live in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Here’s us just telling you about Larry:

Larry was having a hard time. He felt sad and trapped. He was once a famous author, but he hadn’t written a word for years.

And here’s us telling you about Larry, but through the space that he is living in:

Larry’s apartment was less of a living space than a glorified closet. The bathroom was just big enough to sit on the toilet without having his knees touch the sink, and the window was more like a ship’s porthole. The bed was so small his feet hung over the edge, and there was really not much to do but watch static on the television. The sound of that static often kept Larry company late into the night. 

The place did not have a kitchen, so he bought a camping hotplate to make his single-serving meals. He ate the same thing every night, but he did not seem to mind the monotony of his repeated dinner of rice, wilted spinach, and baked beans or the peculiar odor that the beans left on his sheets. 

The only item on the wall of Larry’s apartment was a framed, yellowed copy of the New York Times Best Seller list from 16 years ago. Larry’s name was at the top of it. Below the newspaper clipping, on Larry’s desk, sat an old, dusty typewriter and an even dustier stack of blank paper.

Larry doesn’t even have to speak for himself; his apartment speaks for him.

For each of the following characters, try to come up with a setting that will reflect or reinforce what you imagine about them. You’ll start by thinking about characters we made up, and then move into writing about some of your own.

As you write, try to be as detailed as possible. Don’t forget colors, sounds, and even smells.

A shy teenage girl who’s starting to come out of her shell:
A superhero who has lost his or her powers:
A corrupt politician:
An old, lonely woman:
Your protagonist:
Your antagonist:
One of your supporting characters:

Photo by Flickr user fsiddi.

Book Review: How to Tweak Your "Daily Rituals" for NaNoWriMo

There are many metaphors for NaNoWriMo: NaNoWriMo is a creative explosion, an endurance test, a writing party, a voyage to fantastical lands, an excuse to drink too much coffee.

I like all of those metaphors, but the one that speaks most to me is that NaNoWriMo is a creative experiment. NaNo’s very genesis was a creative experiment, after all. How do you write a novel? Try writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

There are always grounds to experiment within an experiment, though, so my question each year is what can I tweak, or downright alter, about my creative process? That’s why I read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The book tells the story of how 161 creators—everyone from Stephen King to Maya Angelou to Charles Darwin—approach the act of creativity each day.

“I wanted to show how grand creative visions translate to small daily increments; how one’s working habits influence the work itself and vice versa,” writes the editor Mason Currey.

Obsessiveness, Late Nights, and Hats

Some people’s rituals are obsessive. Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans each day for his perfect cup of coffee. Others are fraught with self-destructiveness. The painter Francis Bacon ate and drank with wild abandon late into the night, but still managed to work each morning until noon in his paint-splattered studio.

I particularly enjoyed reading about authors who wrote NaNo-style before NaNo was around. William Faulkner averaged 3,000 words per day during his most fertile period, and often wrote as many as 10,000. Stephen King writes 2,000 words every day of the year—including his birthday and holidays. He believes in a strict ritual of writing in order “to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.”

I envied such artists who had the luxury of adhering to a routine that supported their optimal imaginative time. Anne Beattie religiously writes from midnight to 3 AM. Conversely, Haruki Murakami wakes at 4 AM. and writes six hours straight.

Since I have children and work, however, I related more to Toni Morrison’s experience: “I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”

The art of writing “in between”: predawn (if possible) + weekends (betwixt soccer games) = my writing time. Not optimal, but the main thing is to do it because a little writing each day eventually adds up to a lot, right?

I was particularly inspired by Nicholson Baker, who sticks to a strict routine of writing, yet does something new with each novel. “It can be almost arbitrary,” he says. “You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work.” Baker wrote his last novel in a car—like Raymond Carver, who often did so to escape the ruckus of his household.

A fresh approach changes the whole endeavor, like adding spices to a stew. So here’s my plan: in lieu of writing in a car (which could get cold), I’m going to buy a special writing hat. Seriously. A hat invites in a new persona like nothing else (and I’m always looking for an excuse to buy a hat).

Beyond that, my friend Rachael Herron just told me she wrote 10,000 words in the last two days, so I might schedule a couple of super NaNo days in November and see how many words I can write. I’m also toying with the idea of writing with an outline this year (or at least my version of an outline)—a wildly aberrant act for a pantser like me, but then it’s in such deviations that new ideas are often discovered. 

I’m sure I’ll join Murakami at 4 a.m. or thereabouts as well. The one constant of my noveling is many, many cups of coffee, after all.

Are you going to experiment with your approach to NaNoWriMo this year? If so, how?

— Grant Faulkner

No Plot? No Problem!: In Which a Planning Limit is Proposed (Gasp!)

September is officially the start of NaNo Prep! To celebrate, we’re excerpting what some might call the NaNoWriMo Bible:  No Plot? No Problem!  by founder Chris Baty. Today, he proposes a (perhaps controversial) approach to planning your novel:

It may be counterintuitive, but when it comes to novel writing, more preparation does not necessarily produce a better book. In fact, too much preparation sometimes has a way of stopping novel writing altogether.

As reassuring as it is to embark on your writing journey with a mule-team’s worth of character traits, backstories, plot twists, metaphors, and motifs, it’s also a 100-percent viable strategy to walk into the wilds of your novel with nothing but a bottle of water and a change of underwear.

The planners out there should feel free to completely bury their homes and apartments in plot notes, character lists, story outlines, city maps, costume drawings, evocative photos, and encouraging quotes. All with one catch: You only get one week, maximum, to research your book before you start writing it.

I know one week seems like a very short amount of time for laying out an entire novel, but trust me: It’s perfect. Seven days gives you enough time to get some good ideas on paper, but it prevents the deadly onset of overplanning, which is dangerous for three reasons:

1. If you give yourself too much time to plan, you might end up stumbling across a brilliant concept for your novel. And the last thing you want heading into your noveling month is a brilliant concept. Every year during National Novel Writing Month, I get emails from people jubilantly informing me that they’re dropping out of the contest because they’ve found a story that they love, and they want to work on it slowly enough to do it justice.

When I check in with these people six months later, they’ve inevitably stopped working on the book entirely. Why? Because they’ve become afraid of ruining their book by actually sitting down and writing it.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise. Once you stumble across a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime idea for a book, it’s hard to treat that story with the irreverent disregard needed to transform it from a great idea into a workable rough draft. When you just give yourself one week to flesh out your concept, you won’t have time to feel overly protective of your ideas. And you will therefore stand a much better chance of bringing them to life.

2. Past a certain point, novel planning just becomes another excuse to put off novel writing. You will never feel sufficiently ready to jump into your novel, and the more time you spend planning and researching, the more likely you’ll feel pressure to pull off a masterwork that justifies all your prewriting work. Give yourself the gift of a pressure-free novel, and just dive in after one week.

3. Prewriting, especially if you’re very good at it, bleeds some of the fun out of the noveling process. Nothing is more boring than spending an entire month simply inking over a drawing you penciled out months earlier. With the seven-days-and-out timeline, you’ll still have lots of questions about your book when you start writing. Which is great. It makes the writing process one of happy discoveries and keeps the levels of surprise and delight high for you as an author.

Excerpted by Michael Adamson, with permission from Chronicle Books.

Photo by Flickr user Giulia van Pelt.

NaNo Prep: Creating External and Internal Conflict

Want more preparation exercises? Check out National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program’s Novelist Workbooks, which our nonprofit provides free-of-charge to more than 2,000 educators and 8,000 young writers around the world! 

Okay, so you know who your characters are. Excellent. Now it is time to figure out what your characters are going to do.

Most stories are ultimately about the same thing—the journey a protagonist goes on to get what he or she wants. Whether his or her goal is to get the girl or cure cancer, the journey is never easy, and your character will encounter many setbacks along the way. Though they’re painful for your protagonist, these obstacles are what will make your novel exciting to read.

Imagine a story about Jim who wants a sandwich more than anything in the world. How boring would the story be if all Jim had to do was walk from his bedroom to the kitchen, make a sandwich, and then eat it? That story is so uneventful it can be told in one sentence. But what if Jim is seriously afraid of the dark, the power is out in his house, and he has to walk down a dark hallway to get to the kitchen? And, once there, he has to fight his bratty younger sister, Emily, for the last slice of roast beef.

Though it may be simple, this story has both external conflict and internal conflict.

External Conflict
The external conflict is the one between a protagonist and antagonist. 

In the above story, the protagonist Jim has a goal (to eat a sandwich), but a motivated antagonist Emily has her own agenda (to also eat a sandwich). The struggle between Jim and Emily over the last slice of roast beef is the external conflict in this story.

Internal Conflict
The internal conflicts are the fears and insecurities that a protagonist has to overcome in order to get what he or she wants.

In the story above, Jim has to overcome his fear of the dark in order to get the sandwich he wants so badly.

If you have completed your character questionnaires, you already know a good amount about the major players in your novel. Now it’s time to answer some deeper questions about your characters’ hopes and fears in order to create the conflicts that will make your novel interesting.

Take out and review your character questionnaires, then fill in the blanks below.

Your Protagonist

More than anything in the world, my protagonist wants:
But he/she is afraid of:
And his/her greatest weakness is (is it something like “falling in love too easily” or “crossbows”?):

Physical Antagonist
Complete this section if you have a physical antagonist.

More than anything in the world, my antagonist wants (this can be as simple as humiliating the protagonist or something a little more ambitious like world domination):

My antagonist’s “beef” with the protagonist is:
My antagonist is afraid of (long-haired bunnies?):
His/her/its greatest weakness is:

Abstract Antagonist
Complete this section if you have an abstract antagonist.

The antagonist in my novel is not a living, breathing being. It is:
If my protagonist does not battle against this antagonist, it will eventually (ruin his or her life or cause death?):
My protagonist is battling against this antagonist by:

Congratulations! You now have the two basic ingredients for an excellent story: external conflict and internal conflict. Know that your internal and external conflicts will overlap throughout your novel. Once your characters find out about each others’ fears and weaknesses, you better believe they will use them against each other mercilessly as they fight to make their dreams come true.

Photo by Flickr user Stefan.

Book Review: 3 Great Inspiration Ideas from "You’ve Got a Book In You!"

Have you ever read a writing how-to book that encourages you to skip around and only read the sections that grab you? You’ve Got a Book In You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of your Dreams is that book.

Elizabeth Sims’ noveling handbook delivers on its promise of being stress-free. She emphasizes following your instincts and delivers a book that is in-depth, comprehensive and witty, but never complicated. The book is divided into practical sections, with goals and exercises at the end of each chapter.

Whether you have a few novels under your belt or are just considering diving into this strange and sometimes terrifying world of writing a novel, Sims’ positive, no-nonsense advice will speak to you, make you laugh, and think hard. The book bubbles over with ideas to get the ball rolling, including:

plotting your novel like a Route 66 placemat from the ‘50s,
embracing the power of tangents,
and writing a Statement of Truth on an index card to remind you of your purpose and your joy when you hit the doldrums.

The book uses a Q&A format, which taps into what you might be thinking, then answers the instant concerns, wonderings and fears that come up. It’s really a book about fearlessness, a guidebook to jumping right in to whatever it is you want to write.

When setting up a recipe for noveling, Sims says, “I call it a recipe rather than a formula, because recipes are by nature, flexible,” and that is the attitude she brings to the book as a whole. She discusses how many authors have cultivated the image of the writing process being a necessary evil, and challenges you to find joy in the process by giving you the tools to do it.

“The writing process itself will change you on a deep level […] it makes you whole,”she says near the end. “Before you write, you’re a guest on the planet. After you write, you own it.”

You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Novel of Your Dreams, by Elizabeth Sims, Writer’s Digest Books, 2013. $15.40, paperback.

— Emily Gordis

No Plot? No Problem!: Five Secret Steps to Story Building

September is officially the start of NaNo Prep! To celebrate, we’re excerpting what some might call the NaNoWriMo Bible:  No Plot? No Problem!  by founder Chris Baty. Today, he shares five ways to get your story roiling:

Once you have these steps down, you’ll be churning out books faster than Krispy Kreme churns out hot doughnuts.

Construct the Cannon. You might have already answered the question “What does your main character want more than anything else?” This question is so important that you’ll be answering it for all of your characters, including your villain. This will give you enough subplots for a trilogy!

Whether it’s true love, sweet revenge, or a cupcake-filled swimming pool, a character’s greatest desire is the cannon that propels her toward her destiny.

Build the mountain. If you want to write a book people will actually read instead of use as a face pillow, you’re going to have to inflict some pain on the character you’ve grown to love.

Create conflict, suspense, and heart-wrenching drama by stacking a mountain of setbacks (fears, weaknesses, villains, spider monkeys) in front of your protagonist. That way, when your protagonist finally does find the person, planet, or swimming pool of her dreams, it will be so much more satisfying!

Light the fuse. Like you or me, your main character is a creature of habit. In order to start him on his quest, you’ll need to literally light a fire beneath him. This event ignites the fuse on your character’s cannon; it’s the phone call from an old lover, the tragic loss, the trip to Vegas. It’s what makes it impossible for your main character to continue in his old ways.

Plot the problems. Conflict is the fuel that moves your plot forward. And we are not talking about just one big blowout at your climax. Exciting plots have characters encountering problems right from the get-go.

Think of the last comedy you saw. We bet our bottom dollar that the main character had to cleverly get himself out of one pickle after another until he had to wiggle his way out of the there’s-no-way-he’s-going-to-get-himself-out-of-this-pickle pickle at the climax of the film. The same should go for your book. Creating mini-problems to build up to the mega-problem is the best way to keep readers reading.

Meet him or her on the other side. The person that you load into the cannon at the start of your novel will be much different from the person you meet at the end, after she’s reached the other side of the mountain.

At the beginning, your protagonist may be a sad and reclusive computer nerd, but after saving the world from a nuclear holocaust she becomes a confident warrior. How your main character changes in your book might not be as simplistic as nerd to superhero, but it’s important that he or she does change and that your readers see the transformation unfold along the course of your novel.

Excerpted by Michael Adamson, with permission from Chronicle Books.

Photo by Flickr user ~db~.

NaNo Prep: The Official NaNoWriMo Character Questionnaire

Want more preparation exercises? Check out National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program’s Novelist Workbooks, which our nonprofit provide free-of-charge to more than 2,000 educators around the world! 

"Most people think that an intriguing plot is what makes a story good, but the truth is that exciting plots are made up of original and well-developed characters. Not only are characters with hidden depths and secrets more fun to read about, they’re also more fun to write about.

It’s a great idea for you, the author, to try and get to know your characters before you begin writing. We asked a team of scientists, mathematicians, and creative writing gurus from around the world: “What’s the easiest way for writers to get to know their characters?” Hands down, the experts all agreed the single best way is to fill out our 46-Question Character Questionnaire”:

Name:
Age:
Height:
Eye color:
Physical appearance:
Strange or unique physical attributes:
Favorite clothing style/outfit:
Where does he or she live? What is it like there?
Defining gestures/movements (i.e., curling his or her lip when he or she speaks, always keeping his or her eyes on the ground, etc.):
Things about his or her appearance he or she would most like to change:
Speaking style (fast, talkative, monotone, etc.):
Pet peeves:
Fondest memory:
Hobbies/interests:
Special skills/abilities:
Insecurities:
Quirks/eccentricities:
Temperament (easygoing, easily angered, etc.):
Negative traits: 
Things that upset him or her:
Things that embarrass him or her: 
This character is highly opinionated about:
Any phobias?
Things that make him or her happy:
Family (describe):
Deepest, darkest secret:
Reason he or she kept this secret for so long:
Other people’s opinions of this character (What do people like about this character? What do they dislike about this character?):
Favorite bands/songs/type of music:
Favorite movies:
Favorite TV shows:
Favorite books:
Favorite foods: 
Favorite sports/sports teams:
Political views: 
Religion/philosophy of life:
Physical health: 
Dream vacation:
Description of his or her house:
Description of his or her bedroom:
Any pets?
Best thing that has ever happened to this character:
Worst thing that has ever happened to this character:
Superstitions:
Three words to describe this character:
If a song played every time this character walked into the room, what song would it be?

Photo courtesy of Artsy Fartsy Mama.

NaNo Prep: The Official NaNoWriMo Character Questionnaire

Want more preparation exercises? Check out National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program’s Novelist Workbooks, which our nonprofit provides free-of-charge to more than 2,000 educators and 8,000 young writers around the world! 

"Most people think that an intriguing plot is what makes a story good, but the truth is that exciting plots are made up of original and well-developed characters. Not only are characters with hidden depths and secrets more fun to read about, they’re also more fun to write about.

It’s a great idea for you, the author, to try and get to know your characters before you begin writing. We asked a team of scientists, mathematicians, and creative writing gurus from around the world: “What’s the easiest way for writers to get to know their characters?” Hands down, the experts all agreed the single best way is to fill out our 46-Question Character Questionnaire”:

Name:
Age:
Height:
Eye color:
Physical appearance:
Strange or unique physical attributes:
Favorite clothing style/outfit:
Where does he or she live? What is it like there?
Defining gestures/movements (i.e., curling his or her lip when he or she speaks, always keeping his or her eyes on the ground, etc.):
Things about his or her appearance he or she would most like to change:
Speaking style (fast, talkative, monotone, etc.):
Pet peeves:
Fondest memory:
Hobbies/interests:
Special skills/abilities:
Insecurities:
Quirks/eccentricities:
Temperament (easygoing, easily angered, etc.):
Negative traits: 
Things that upset him or her:
Things that embarrass him or her: 
This character is highly opinionated about:
Any phobias?
Things that make him or her happy:
Family (describe):
Deepest, darkest secret:
Reason he or she kept this secret for so long:
Other people’s opinions of this character (What do people like about this character? What do they dislike about this character?):
Favorite bands/songs/type of music:
Favorite movies:
Favorite TV shows:
Favorite books:
Favorite foods: 
Favorite sports/sports teams:
Political views: 
Religion/philosophy of life:
Physical health: 
Dream vacation:
Description of his or her house:
Description of his or her bedroom:
Any pets?
Best thing that has ever happened to this character:
Worst thing that has ever happened to this character:
Superstitions:
Three words to describe this character:
If a song played every time this character walked into the room, what song would it be?

Photo courtesy of Artsy Fartsy Mama.

NaNo Prep: Planning vs. Pantsing, the Age-Old Debate

Are you still deciding on how best to prepare for NaNoWriMo? Rachael Herron, best-selling author, tells us about her own struggle, and about the webinar she’s hosting with Chris Baty and NaNo staff to fundraise for our nonprofit:

The air in September smells like pencils. I’ve been out of school for years and years, but just last week I was throwing elbows in my local office store, fighting with back-to-school moms over the very last package of sparkling glitter Sharpies and going head-to-head with small children over unicorn notebooks.

Every fall, I know: It’s time to write. And every fall, I think: How the heck do I do that again?

Because honestly, when I’m away from the computer for more than an hour, I forget how to write. (I just went to get a glass of water and had to check Twitter twice before I remembered I was writing this post.)

This fall, I’m honored to be working with with some people who do not write the way I do, thank goodness. We’re going to have a battle-to-the-death—What? Oh, wait. Grant says we don’t it that way anymore. Whew. I’m still a little tired from that tussle I had with a teenager over the large-sized gold stars.

I’ve already learned how Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo himself, flies by the seat of his pants when he’s writing, with nary a care or a plan to hold him up in the sky. I, myself, rebut his pants-position: without planning, you too-often end up in the mires of a land so dire they just call it Dire, where no Excel spreadsheet has ever opened correctly.

Tavia Stewart-Streit, NaNoWriMo’s deputy director, argues for freedom within constraints (rules about rules! But fun ones!), and Grant Faulkner, the executive director, is planning to look into his pantsing soul and tell us if he’s ready to seek help or if he’s just fine where he is, thank you very much for asking.

Seriously, as we prepare for this fall’s writing adventure, we’re going to talk about what works (and what doesn’t) for each of us when it comes down to the Really Hard Part: putting the words on the page. What moves us from thinking about writing to actually doing it? Lots of research and flow charts? The dream we had last night?

We want you to get in on the conversation, too. Tell us what kind of preparation works best for your noveling success here! Or, even better, come sit in on our workshop: Chris, Tavia, Grant and I will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday, September 17, about this very topic. Attendees will be able to raise their hands, ask difficult questions, and watch us squirm while we answer. Attendees will also be on the receiving end of the ceremonious Bestowal of the Power-Up Charm. Trust me, you want this little piece of magical goodness sparkling over your shoulder come November.

This webinar is a fundraiser for NaNoWriMo, which is reason enough to buy it. But I’m here to tell you the real truth: you should take this class because you’re greedy, because you want to take all our knowledge and use it for yourself.

That is, in fact, why I’m doing it, too.

See you there,

Rachael who is off to wrestle for the best scented erasers with astonishingly strong, car-alarm-imitating four year olds.

Rachael Herron completed her first novel during NaNoWriMo 2006. She has gone on to sell it (and five more books) to HarperCollins, Chronicle Books, and Random House Australia, and she is still stunned she can add the words “award-winning” and “international bestseller” to her bio. She lives in Oakland with her wife, seven embarrassing animals, and a lot of yarn. You can find her at her website and on Twitter.

No Plot? No Problem!: 3 Things to Keep In Mind While Brainstorming

September is officially the start of NaNo Prep: this month the blog is all things inspiration. We’re excerpting what some might call the NaNoWriMo Bible: No Plot? No Problem! by founder Chris Baty. Today, he shares three things to keep in mind while you storm up ideas for November:

We’ve got some good news and some bad news about your novel.

The good news is that, whether you realize it or not, you already have a ton of great material for your book. The juicy, hilarious, heartbreaking ideas that will eventually form the core of your novel are all around you now.

They’re hiding in conversations among your coworkers, they’re stuffed into your favorite songs, and they’re tucked into the machinations of the questionable reality TV show you watched last night. Some great ideas even stow away inside bad ideas—their brilliance becoming clear only when you work off the gunk concealing the genius. 

Now for the bad news. You won’t be able to fit every great idea or interesting scenario you come up with during these next few weeks into a single story. Your job now is twofold: to churn out great amounts of noveling fodder and then to cherry-pick the most intriguing ideas to blend up into a story. Happily, this is fun, inspiring work. In fact, some writers love the brainstorming phase so much that they forget to actually write the book they’ve spent years planning. This will not be your problem.

As you work to find new book ideas—or supplement ones you’ve already cooked up—there are three things to keep in mind.

Ideas are like celebrities. They’re unstable, they’re attention hogs, and they never do their share of the laundry. On the plus side, they’re also highly sociable—once you get a couple, others will show up to keep them company. Ponder your book whenever you have a free moment, and know that once you get an intriguing notion or two to show up at your brainstorming party, the entourage won’t be far behind.
Document everything. Fill a notebook with every creative spark the moment it occurs to you, no matter how small it seems or how confident you are that you’ll remember it later. Every writer is tormented by the unforgettable plot twist she ended up forgetting. Also, be sure to jot down interesting notions, even if you’re sure they won’t fit into your current novel. If they don’t fit in the story you’re writing now, they may be perfect for its sequel.
Two stormy brains are better than one. Whether you have  a few scattered ideas or a full-fledged plot, share what you’ve got with a friend, and then brainstorm some possible big-picture story directions together. If you end up using some of his suggestions, you can take him out for a thank-you dinner on your yacht when you first royalty check comes in.

Photo by Flickr user marcos c.