Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 3
August 12, 2018
I had a lovely chat on Horror with Marchese & Buller!
Hosts, Misters Marchese and Buller, are two cool and friendly horror authors. We had a great chat about authenticity, rejection, writing goals and way more!
Hope you enjoy!!
Other news:
I’m back from holiday and organizing new Losing the Plot guests and such. Pretty sure I remember who I said I was gonna get in touch with, but feel free to take the initiative and set something up with me!New story out with Every Day Fiction on Thursday! I’ll post back here about that.
July 20, 2018
New Short Story, out with Horror Sleaze Trash!
Head to Horror Sleaze Trash’s site to read WE TOUCHED A REAL DINOSAUR! (NOT CLICKBAIT)!
Super proud of this one and happy that a home exists for that trademark Robertson snark ;)!!
Cheers for reading!
New Losing the Plot, with author Kenneth W. Cain!
Listen here!
Kenneth W. Cain is the author of the novella “A Season in Hell” and the short story collection “Darker Days.” He also edited the anthology “Tales from the Lake vol. 5.” All three books are forthcoming with Crystal Lake Publishing.
We talk about helping other writers in the community, writing that next great story and the joys of making characters suffer!
As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!
Marshall, who provided Losing the Plot’s intro music, has a new album out! Check out “MARS HALL” at Captain Crook Records!
July 11, 2018
A quality checklist for writers
I’ve read a lot of fiction, written a lot of it too, and I’ve also given/conducted podcast interviews.
As a result of these endeavours, I came up with a checklist to identify areas in which I can improve. I thought you’d find it useful too!
Is this entertaining/interesting? If not, what purpose does it serve? (I don’t know if there is another valid purpose, but I doubt it!)Am I expressing what I truly believe or is it rather what I want to be read/heard stating that I believe? (Often different.)And to that end, if I find myself giving impassioned exhortations about global/social issues, how much of a personal stake do I have in these debates? Have I any real-world examples of when this issue affected me, or am I just setting up straw men—in someone else’s battleground?Here’s an example: look at most of that Count Dankula guy’s videos.
He became embroiled in a free speech argument that’s super important—but as for his content, so much of it is riding trends rather than original opinions. In which case, what does he add to any of these conversations but their regurgitation in a Scottish accent? Is that really how he’s supposed to use his time? Is that the best he can do?
Or look at this video by (conservative vlogger?) Theryn Meyer, where she has realised the consequences, for her soul and that of others, of bandwagon-riding.
The point is: What is bothering YOU, not someone else? What is closest to home?
The idea, of formulating your own opinions and observing your environment (starting locally) with scrutiny, is daunting—but exactly how else would you describe your task?
Am I outright stating something I read elsewhere? In which case I should cite the reference, unless I have added something to it or rephrased it in a way that I would express. If you don’t have your own way of adding to the conversation, that’s okay—life is so big, and we’re all learning always—as long as you admit it. In other words: Whereof I cannot speak, thereof am I silent? (Wittgenstein ;) )To that end, on occasions when I am implored to offer a comment on a particular issue, do I find myself resorting to the same arguments from a small number of books I read/things I heard too long ago? These are then the most pressing areas of weakness to work on next (if they are also areas of interest.)Am I capable of writing as if no one is reading/ speaking as if no one is listening? In other words, can I face/present pure ME?!If this seems odd, or even scary, here’s the caveat: The inherent bias here, if you can call it that, is my interest in you and your work—not in what anyone else wants you/your work to be. Not even what I would want it to be, but what it actually IS.
I unashamedly hope you develop in yourself sensors that pick up when any of these questions are relevant. Ask them and rectify any instance wherever the answer doesn’t satisfy you.
I hope the benefit to your immortal soul is so great that it trumps your desire to satisfy the demands of a large audience or market forces.
Here’s an example of that:
Charlie Kaufman is an unabashed favourite of mine.
(Before I continue, we can use this admission as an example of how to comply to the checklist: “How does this standard white guy choice represent YOU, Leo? Aren’t you violating your own rules?”
To that I would answer: I will risk being seen as cliché because I’m assured of how his work relates to me personally—therefore maybe it doesn’t outwardly appear a non-cliched choice but it meets my own criteria, so I’m satisfied and that’s fine. Plus, he’s part of a healthy artistic diet of others, a mix from a sufficiently large pool, which looks like no one else’s.
That’s all I’m asking you to think about with this checklist. Maybe you won’t end up changing anything about your speech/writing etc. You probably won’t in most instances—even so, an internal quality check will make you/your work/your assertions stronger.)
Anyway, his last film, “Anomalisa”, didn’t make its money back—which doesn’t surprise me too much, unfortunately. By most standards, it’s weird and dark and perhaps too depressing. Even so, what you can say about that film and few others is, “I’ve never experienced that before and now I can’t get it out my head.”
Off the top of my head, here are some other writers who, appear to fulfil these criteria: Sheila Heti, Clarice Lispector, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov. I could go on and on and on! But whatever you might want to say about them, what they all have in common is that I know their names and they were at the forefront of my brain when pressed for the names of originals.
And that’s what I want for you—because that’s what you’re supposed to be.
I’ve said this before: if your goal as a writer, as a human being, is to be the next Stephen King, get in line. Your ticket is #20345. (With ticket #1? Stephen King himself. He’s still the current Stephen King. With ticket #2 is his son, and both of them combined are far more than enough for most.)
If it’s to be the next Stephen King meets—I don’t know, Tom Clancy: congratulations! Your place is now #1023.
If you want to be the first you, your ticket number is #1. Thank God you’re here! We’ve been waiting for you! Right this way. I hope you weren’t too difficult to find…
Write in your own vein. EXIST in your own vein. Strip away anxiety and futility as you push yourself towards uniqueness, towards a place of zero competition.
Good luck!!
July 9, 2018
New Losing the Plot, with Cameron Mount (Broadswords and Blasters)!
Listen here!
Cameron Mount is a traditional literary poet with a taste for speculative fiction. He and author Matthew Gomez edit Broadswords & Blasters, “A pulp magazine with modern sensibilities.”
We talk about the content Broadswords & Blasters is looking for, pulp in the postmodern era, and L Ron Hubbard!
As always, if you’re a reader, writer, creative type, someone with something to say, you can always get in touch with me using losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. I look forward to hearing from you!
Marshall, who provided Losing the Plot’s intro music, has a new album out! Check out “MARS HALL” at Captain Crook Records!
Harsh truth 8 (of 8) for writers
People don’t take advice; they look for examples of what they want
Therefore you might argue that I’m just writing this for myself. I hope not. And I do thank you for reading.
Sobering truths are one of life’s most important components. How you respond to them determines how you will grow. And growth is the only justifiable option.
However, sobering truths are like the whole grains of your diet, or the cardio of a fitness routine. While perhaps healthy in moderation, if they’re all you consume, you’ll die.
So enough of all of this. You did well to get this far. And it counted as work, I promise you that.
I give you permission to watch 30 mins of silly YouTube videos—at least!
One last bonus harsh truth: Shun enforced breaks and silliness at your peril, writer friend of mine—for shunning fun will make you a worse writer, and, more importantly, a worse human.
July 6, 2018
Harsh truth 7 (of 8) for writers
You must slough off baddies
Networking is important. Networking with everyone is impossible and, quite frankly, a destructive thing to try.
It is your duty to stay away from people who are doing you no good. You know who they are. You might’ve had some in your life that you shed already. Great.
If you stick around with someone who makes you feel bad because you think they offer you something of value, you’re wrong. All they’re offering you is bad feels. By keeping them around, you are telling yourself, and the world, that this is what you deserve. By shedding yourself of them, you’re saying that you are worth better.
Freeing up your time, for the potential of having it filled by someone better for you, is so much more important than keeping someone worse for you around. And, my God, someone else will fill that time for sure! There are no shortage of people about!
If you like the people you associate with, fantastic. If you don’t, you need to spin that networking wheel again and hope you land on someone better.
Stay (blog equivalent of) tuned for a new harsh truth asap!!
July 4, 2018
Harsh truth 6 (of 8) for writers
Networking is important, but it’s not the same as “improving as a writer”
It helps us writers to know each other. The world of writing is one that requires constant work to remain within. Networking with other writers is a way of doing that.
But, being friends with an exceptional writer is not the same as being as good as them. That’s like if you said, “I have Elon Musk’s email, therefore I will send a Tesla into space next week.”
I’m super proud of that analogy for the following reasons:
The weakness of the connection to Elon Musk.For you to be successful, you’d have to do exactly the same thing he did.The idea that repeating his exact actions would make it as big of a success. It’s like saying, “It’s not important that I do good, original work, only that the work is done by me.”It completely disavows the hidden decades of hard work that might be necessary to accomplish something that appears simple on the surface.I only heard of the guy a few years ago, by which point he was decades into a career as an entrepreneur. That’s much the same as many top writers I read about: they’ve published a few books but have been writing for many more years than I have.
We must respect all that hidden work. Almost every successful writer today has f**king earned it.
Saying you’re a writer today is to say that, despite the many many other people out there writing, and all the literature already available, you have something sufficiently original to say—and you are good enough at saying it—that your writing deserves to exist. Vertiginous af!
The act of submitting something for publication implies that the above is true, whether you’ve even thought about it. Don’t pretend you think your story’s worth a damn: you do think it. Act like it!
On the other hand, as big as this is to imply—regarding the originality and competence of your writing—that’s all you have to imply about it. Don’t let arrogance convince you that you’re way way more amazing than anyone else. No one has a guaranteed acceptance coming. If you think your amazingness as a writer protects you from that, you’ll fall hard, become bitter and angry and a dick of a person to be around.
It’s implied by the fact that you present yourself as a writer and submit pieces for publication that you know what the hell you’re talking about. The skill of your writing, and nothing else, will prove your worth as a writer. Listing shit you’ve read, or people you know as if it’s equivalent to writing skill… ugh. Just do your damn job.
Again, it’s possible to do everything I’ve written about so far as a writer without understanding it. But quantifying things keeps you sane and improves your chances of doing something properly. Delusions make us unstable, make it anyone’s guess if we’re doing something properly or not.
Stay (blog equivalent of) tuned for a new harsh truth asap!!
July 2, 2018
Harsh truth 5 (of 8) for writers
You will end up sacrificing something for this
The first draft of this rule was just, “Quit drinking!” which was a bit more personalized than necessary! Though I’m guessing you understand what I meant by that. If not, I’m sure you know how important alcohol can be to others. But if drinking isn’t your thing, I recommend giving up whatever its equivalent is. I’m sure you’re picturing what that is now.
If you’re going to only sometimes use your spare time to read, or only sometimes write, we may never hear of you. If that’s fine by you, it’s fine by me. But don’t pretend it’s fine if it isn’t. That’s just making excuses.
This isn’t the same as saying, “Those of you with 80+ hour per week commitments elsewhere in life should forget about success.” That’s not the case at all. It may well take those people longer, and that’s fine. What I am saying is: commit, commit, commit, as best you can, however that means to you.
Writing is a sacrifice in itself, of course. We writers are wonderful people—but mostly because we write. In real life, lots of us are weirdos, incapable of formulating coherent sentences, with nothing to report of our own lives because we spent them in dark rooms with our imagination for company.
It tends to be true that the better the writer, the more boring a life that they lead; the more time spent writing, the weirder the person.
It’s a paradox I still haven’t wrapped my head around: how is it that these people who spend their time creating characters—that are if not likeable then at least relatable, and if not relatable, at least act in realistic ways—cannot function in public?
All that time spent alone can make a person narcissistic. It places too much weight on the person’s own problems versus those of others. It causes a person to exalt their own worth, given that they’re mostly what they know of the world and how it functions. Therefore, they wrongly assume they’re as important to others as they are to themselves. They spend too much time in their own heads.
When you do that, your head starts to eat itself. You’ll grow to hate yourself, and to talk too much about yourself, which makes the alleviation of these symptoms unattractive to those people who might help you the most.
That’s okay. That is simply the typical way in which writers are insane. I don’t think “insanity”, in my admittedly mild usage of the word, is avoidable. You can simply select the type of insanity you would like, or are willing to accept for the sake of some other goal. In this case, it’s the pain of narcissism for the sake of getting books with your name on them.
I read this interview with Matthew Barney, whose advice to artists was: “Making art is like quitting smoking. Unless you are 100% committed, it is not going to happen.”
Have you seen that guy’s work? It’s absolutely bananas insane. Look up his Cremaster series of films on YouTube, for example. I don’t understand them one bit, but I do know that you don’t get to do that type of work without an incredible amount of hard work and dedication to your vision.
Stay (blog equivalent of) tuned for a new harsh truth asap!!
June 29, 2018
Harsh truth 4 (of 8) for writers
You can’t do everything at once
I’ve thrown some daunting-ass figures at you, and perhaps muddied the water of what exactly your task is as an author.
Here is a short example of how I better identified/quantified my task as a writer.
I’ve become interested in science fiction of late, though it’s the genre that I find the toughest to write in. I’ve just never been sure exactly how much science I’m supposed to know, or use, or how realistic my stories are supposed to be.
Is the reader to believe this is possible, or are they happy for a non-existent premise if it reveals something new about the human condition?
(It’s a spectrum, is the answer—but I had limited knowledge of what that spectrum looked like!)
I started off by reading The Best Science Fiction of the Year. As I did, I thought about films and books I’d read growing up, and realised that my favourite type of science fiction was near-future, on Earth, and soft: Ballard, Lem, Clarke, Dick, Le Guin, Ellison, Delany.
(Very straight white American and male for sure, but we are talking the history of sci-fi lit…)
Having figured this out, I Googled “What life will look like in the year 2040.”
Surprise surprise, I’m far from the first person to have wanted to know the answer to this. There are whole societies dedicated to predicting technological advances and the like. They’re also willing to explain, through articles and videos, how these new concepts would work.
Finally, the more science fiction I read, the more I noticed technologies and concepts repeated by authors, and even between authors. They borrowed ideas from themselves and one another!
To summarize what I learned, then:
It isn’t my task, when I write science fiction, to invent every kind of future—rather, to imagine a particular type.It isn’t my task, when I write science fiction, to invent every new technology that appears in the world or is made use of. Given the wealth of science fiction stories out there, of every variety, it’s very unlikely that I would even be able to do this, or have to. Rather, focusing on a small subset of technologies and how they influence the world (number depending on story length—one is fine for a short story), and introducing the rest as “window dressing” for world-building purposes, is the best way to go.It isn’t my task when writing in any genre to even know how to explain that genre to someone else. Each original story, if it’s any good, will sufficiently redefine the genre that it works in. That takes a strong authorial voice, which knows its shit, demonstrates a wide breadth of reading. But not all-encompassing, because that’s impossible.Somehow I wanted my task to be tougher than it is. In my weakest moments, I have a predilection for unnecessary suffering (nothing more pointless or less brave.)
It was/remains important for my own writing that I define the curriculum I use to learn what I want and need to know. Writers are much like PhD students in that respect—just as lacking in reward for our daily work, except with less chance of achieving something at the end.
I still need to be imaginative, of course—but not quite as imaginative as I thought I had to. Had I embarked upon the task without having done my research, it would’ve been more painful, and I would have been incorrect about how inventive I had been.
Writing to some extent is constant improvisation. It’s “Yes, and”—ing the material that already exists. To pretend otherwise is to be deliberately uninformed. The existing body of literature doesn’t go away just because you pretend it will.
This idea of using pre-existing conventions applies to literature in many other ways. For example, read litmags and you will find a plethora of three-act structured stories, list-based stories, multiple choice stories and, on occasion, those that seem to proceed with entirely their own logic. (Like “The Metal Bowl” by Miranda July. She’s clearly a genius.)
There are many, many successful writers out there who never deviate from traditional story structures. You might think that’s safe of them, but it can be just as tough to adhere to a traditional structure as it is to use one of your own
Dan Harmon, co-creator of Rick and Morty, uses his own narrative model that he created from Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell formulated the hero’s journey narrative from his extensive research into mythologies from around the globe. The reason people keep using these structures is because they work. (Traditional structure is not the same as predictable. Or maybe the predictability of form is advised where wilder content is to be presented. Rick and Morty’s pretty wild, right?)
Decisions in writing, and life incidentally, are like a set of principles: there are actions that, if taken, will work over 90% of the time. That means you will mostly find yourself using them, but not always. But if you don’t use them, you need a reason not to.
You may know what that reason is or you may not. If you don’t, you’re rolling the dice and saying “I will implement Choice 4 here!” Where a master of the craft, in the same scenario, might say, “Based on my extensive storytelling skillset, I have devised that Choice 4 is the best way to proceed here.”
(You and the master came to the same conclusion in this example—but you got lucky! The odds are against you, and not her, next time!)
I’ve come very close to getting into exclusive mags a handful of times. But even when I submitted something else to the same mags, there was never a guarantee that the next story would fare as well. (Quite the opposite in most cases!) That may mean subjectivity blah blah, but what it probably means is, I haven’t always known what I did right.
Over time, I’ve accrued more acceptances and more rejections with added “please think of us for your next story.” I’ve been rolling the dice less and using my skillset more. It doesn’t mean I’ll ever necessarily be published by any particular venue, but it does mean I’m maximizing my chances of that happening.
Stay (blog equivalent of) tuned for a new harsh truth asap!!
