Supporting Spaghetti

Oh, back again so soon? Well, I guess that’s as much on me as it is on you. But I did have another thought I wanted to bounce off you.

This is something I’ve seen several times in books and in bad B-movies, but it only recently struck me what was actually going on. How the storytellers were twisting things in a really unnatural way to solve a problem. So this may make you (and me) look back at some older posts I’ve done in a slightly different light..

But first, let’s talk about pasta.

I got into cooking during the pandemic. Started watching lots of cooking videos. Trying some things that were kind of new and daring for me. Maybe some of you did too. I’ve found all the prep and cooking kept my mind off other things but still working in creative ways. And now I can make really good stir-fried noodles.

Speaking of noodles, you’ve probably heard of the spaghetti test. When it’s cooked properly and ready to eat, you can throw a strand of spaghetti at the wall and the moisture and starches and, I don’t know, pasta epoxy will make it stick. If it isn’t done cooking yet, it just falls off or does a slow downward tumble like one of those Wacky Wall Walkers.

There’s another phrase you may have heard which grew out of this spaghetti test. “Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It shows up a lot in the development stages of all sorts of things. We’ve got thirty ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to work? Well, let’s just do all of them. We throw all the spaghetti at the wall—the whole pot—and everything that sticks is good and ready to go and whatever doesn’t... isn’t. Sound familiar?

I think most of us have tried this sort of blunt, brute force approach on something. I know I’ve rewritten conversations severaltimes to see if it works better with Yakko taking the lead, or Dot, or Wakko, or Phoebe, or... who’s that guy? Let’s see what happens if he takes the lead in this. Same thing with names. Holy crap, Murdoch in Terminus went through sooooo many different names. Sometimes for whole drafts, sometimes just for a page or three. But then I found Murdoch and it was perfect.

Thing is, there’s a weird sort of flipside to this. Or maybe an inverse? Freaky mutant bastard offspring? Anyway, I talked a while back about shotgun art, and I think this is what’s going on here.

Sometimes, in books and movies, we’ll see storytellers who just pile on the characters. One after another after another, many of them with only the thinnest connection to the main plot. It’s the cousin of the best friend of a supporting character in one plot thread. Or, y’know, even less than that. I read one story where we spent two whole chapters with a character who’s only purpose was to bump into one of the main characters in a third chapter. That was it. She served no other purpose in the story except to be that two page delay in his day And, y’know, fill out the page count a bit.

What struck me a few weeks back is when storytellers are doing this—layering on dozens of simple, almost stereotypical characters and conflicts—is they’re taking the spaghetti approach and just throwing everything at the wall. Rather than developing any of these characters or elements to any degree, they’re just giving us lots and lots of quick, shallow ones. I mean why spend time making a complex character when I could just create five characters with only one character trait each? It’s so much less effort, right? I mean, ex-wife, former best friend, alcoholic rival, pregnant woman, aggressive military guy—there’s got to be something there that strikes a chord with my reader, right?

That example I gave up above? The woman who served no purpose except to bump into one of the protagonists? She was late for work. That was it. That was her entire character. I mean, she had a name. She had some dialogue. She had a pet in a tank in her apartment (some kind of lizard, I think). But that was it. The only other thing we knew about her—her alarm didn’t go off, she overslept by almost two hours, and she was late for work. We never learned why her alarm didn’t go off (power outage? forgot to set it? sabotaging pet lizard?). We never learned why she was so tired she overslept by two hours (drastically overworked? got blackout drunk? a wild hookup that left her exhausted?).

Heck, weird as it sounds, we never even found out why being late was a bad thing (on the verge of being fired? abusive boss? big presentation?). We just knew she was late, had to get showered and dressed fast, had to get to work, and that was supposed to be enough for us. Anything else would require more thought about who she was, what she wanted out of life, and what she was actually getting.

And this book had over a dozen characters like her. Seriously. It spent a significant amount of time with people who could be 100% completely summed up with things like “Wakko needs some drugs,” “Dot’s worried about her dog,” or “Yakko is a no-nonsense soldier.” That’s it. That’s all of who they were.

One place you may recognize this from (tis the season after all) is old slasher movies. Okay, and some modern ones. Most of the cast is one note characters with just barely enough depth that we can tell the machete went through them. They’re the bulk filler of the plot. The serious woman. The goofball. The jock. The nice girl. The drunk/ stoner. They just exist to be minor obstacles between our killer and the one or two survivors.

Now, again, the idea is that the reader (or the audience, if this is a B-movie) has to find something more-or-less relatable in these broad stereotypes. I mean... you’ve known somebody who’s late for work before, right? Or was a jock? Or a serious woman? Okay, well... I bet you knew someone who was worried about their dog at some point, right?

I think people do this for two reasons. One is that they’re nervous about creating complex characters. Maybe they don’t think they’ve got the skill to do it, or possibly just not the skill to do it in the number of pages allotted to it. Perhaps they think their plot can’t function with only three or four threads. Or possibly they’re worried about having such a limited number of viewpoints.

I think the other reason is they’re worried about having characters with no traits. Like that woman running the register at the gas station. She doesn’t even have a name tag. She’s just there to sell the protagonist gas and a couple snacks. She’s got no arc or backstory or tragic flaw. That doesn’t seem right. We have to give her something, right? Maybe she could be, I don’t know, late for work or something?

Thing is, no matter what my reasoning is for this flood of one-dimensional characters, this always ends up leading to one of two things. Either we mistake their lack of depth for deliberate avoidance (“Hmmmmmm... why isn’t the writer saying why she was up late last night? Is she the murderer???”) and then we get frustrated when this goes nowhere. Or we recognize these characters don’t actually serve a purpose and get frustrated waiting to go back to someone who’s actually going to affect the plot in some way.

I also think it’s worth noting the three traits of good characters I’ve mentioned here a few dozen times—likable, believable, relatable. And yeah, I’ve also mentioned that supporting characters can sometimes get away with only two of these traits. Catch is, when characters are this flat and undeveloped, they almost always end up unbelievable—their actions and reactions just seem ridiculous because there’s no depth to ground them in. So we’re down one good trait already! Then my shotgun approach means they’re going to be randomly relatable at best, and lots of folks fall back on “snarky jerk” as a default personality, soooooooooooooo... Not a lot going for these folks.

Y’see, Timmy, burying my story in simple characters doesn’t work because it’s forgetting a basic truth of the spaghetti test. All those noodles that didn’t stick to the wall? I don’t sweep them up off the floor and put them back in the pot. The whole point of doing it all was to see what did and didn’t work—to figure out what shouldn’t be in my story.

So said noodles definitely shouldn’t be part of my finished entree.

Everyone gets the food-book metaphor here, right?

Anyway... next time...

Wow. Already halfway through October. I guess next time I could do the obligatory horror post. Or maybe talk about NaNoWriMo? Any preferences?

Either way, go write.

Non-Standard Cake

At this point I’ve blabbed on about my weekend movie/Twitter habits more than a few times. I won’t bore you with them again. Just wanted to say that’s what inspired this week’s blathering.

I’ve mentioned once or twice before that there are some very standard shots in filmmaking. Decades—almost a century, really—of natural selection in the editing bay has established these as the solid basics. The foundation of a visual storytelling language we've all picked up on. Once you know these shots, you’ll spot them again and again and again in every show or movie you watch.

Of course, they’re not the only shots used in filmmaking. Some clever filmmakers figure out how to combine these basics with a push in or some other camera move, making what would be a static shot a little more dynamic at a key moment. Others may skip over one type of shot in a certain scene to heighten tension, or maybe to decrease it. And some figure out how to toss all of those shots and create something new that does the job they need done better than anything else could.

Which brings us, naturally, to cake.

I’ve mentioned growing up poor here once or thrice before. One aspect of this is we didn’t have treats in the house that much when I was a kid (or, y’know, food in general sometimes). So my mom was always looking for ways to save money and cut corners—a lot of stuff we’d call lifehacks today. One she stumbled across one time was a magazine article suggesting (you may have heard this one) mayonnaise in cake recipes instead of eggs and cooking oil. I mean, that’s what mayo is, right? Eggs and oil. My brother and I were highly skeptical and voiced our well-thought-out concerns (“Eeewwwwwwwww!”), but my mom tried it anyway.

Much to everyone’s surprise, it worked fine. The cake looked and tasted like... well, cake. We couldn’t even tell the difference. Granted, my palate was a little less refined back then, but to a generally picky kid who wanted chocolate cake... it was chocolate cake.

Here’s another fun cake story. I’m a big fan of German oatmeal cake. When I (finally) grew out of little kid basic-chocolate love, German oatmeal became my new favorite. And still is. My partner’s made it several times for my birthday, even when we were dirt poor and the whole thing was 99¢ Store mix and frosting. Since then she’s made it from scratch a few times, too.

But... it was never quite right. It wasn’t bad, by any means (and I always ate way more than I should’ve) but something about it didn’t quite line up with how I remembered it as a kid. And then this year she stumbled across a version of the recipe saying to broil the cake for a few minutes once it had been frosted, which would let the frosting melt, sink in, and even caramelize a tiny bit. And it was fantastic. It wasn’t bad before, but this alteration to the recipe made it so much better.

Of course, we all understand that these aren’t random choices. There’s a reason that mayo substitution trick works, but we couldn’t do the same thing with any condiment and expect the same results. Horseradish mustard in cake mix? I feel safe saying it’s not going to be all that tasty. Likewise, there’s a big difference between tweaking the recipe to broil the cake as opposed to, say, grilling it over an open flame. We definitely won’t get the same results.

And just because these results worked in cake doesn’t mean they’ll work anywhere else. This mayonnaise-for-eggs trick isn’t going to work if I’m trying to make an omelet. Definitely won’t work for steak tartar. Heck, I might not even be able to make it work in pancakes and they’re pretty close to being... well, cake.

Also worth noting.. the mayo cake wasn’t really any better. It wasn’t suddenly the best cake I’d ever had. As I mentioned, one of my few solid memories of this is all of us talking about how you couldn’t notice the difference at all. It just tasted like... cake. So –barring some weird dietary restrictions—it’s not really worth a new recipe. It’s just a good trick to remember if I happen to run out of eggs.

I’ve used cooking a few times before as a metaphor for writing, so hopefully at this point you’ve got a vague sense where I’m going with this.

There’s nothing wrong with trying new and different things. Really, it’s what we’re all trying to do, right? To find a new way of telling an old story, or a completely unexpected way to tell a new story. To solve those storytelling problems in a way nobody’s ever solved them before.

But the key point here is I want my new and different solutions to be better than the standard way of solving these problems. If I figure out a way to do something in my story—a trick with the structure, maybe a clever way of phrasing things, perhaps a very cool way to have a big reveal—and it works so much better than the standard way of doing it... I mean, that’s fantastic. I’ve improved on the original recipe, so to speak, and my end result is even better because of it

If I decide to do things in a new way and it works just the same as the old way, no better no worse, well... personally, I’m a little torn. I mean, it’s not like my new idea’s failing in any way, as far as the story itself is concerned. But I think—and this might just be me—that it’s distracting. Now I’m doing something different and there’s no real point to it except... to be different. I’m doing it just to do it, not to actually make the story better. And that seems—to me, anyway—like I’m trying to draw attention to myself (the author) rather than to my story.

And if my new way of doing things works worse than the old way... well, why would I do that? Why would I want a structure that makes the story much harder to follow? Why would I use phrases or formats that knock my readers out of the story? I mean, it’s (sort of) understandable I might be tempted to try chocolate-and-horseradish mustard cake, but hopefully I can be honest with myself about what came out of that oven and just, y’know, destroy it, rather than forcing the members of the culinary school admissions board to each try a slice.

Y’see, Timmy, people talk about how change is good, but there are times this phrase gets used as more of a defense than a reassurance. Yeah, it’s absolutely okay to try to change things and I shouldn’t worry about trying. But something isn’t automatically good just because it’s a change. Sometimes I’m changing things just to change them, and the only thing different about the final work is me yelling “I changed things!” And other times... well, it’s just bad. I’ve done something that didn’t work and didn’t get the response I wanted. I’ve pushed my reader away rather than drawn them in.

And that’s not going to get me any cake.

Next time... I don’t know. If nobody’s got any questions, maybe I’ll talk about spoilers or something.

Until then, go write. 

Hatching The Plot

I haven’t had to come up with an idea in weeks because all of you keep asking questions. And I’m really grateful because my attention’s been split, like, nine different ways lately so having one task where I’m just being told what to do is kind of relief. Seriously.

That said... we did the Writers Coffeehouse at WonderCon again this year (many thanks to Sarah Kuhn, Stephen Blackmoore, Fonda Lee, and Greg van Eekhout for taking part) and tried to answer a lot of your questions about writing. But after we finished recording, I realized someone had sent a question I hadn’t seen. Probably because social media algorithms tend to be jerks. Anyway, Tomasthanes asked...

”How did you learn how to plot? Did you take a course? Did you work through 50+ spreadsheets? Are you ‘gifted’ and just do it? What does the product of your plotting look like?”

Personally, I think there’s a bit of a mystique element to questions like this. Some of you may remember I’ve talked once or thrice about the difference between the textbook ability to write and the ability to compose a narrative. A simple analogy I’ve used is the difference between being able to cook and being a chef. It’s something I think a lot of us come to realize on some level when we start really examining this whole writing thing in a serious way.

However—and this is just my thoughts on this, don’t take them as gospel truth—I think this realization can also backfire on us for a bit. Some folks assume there must be some specific “pro level” they need to achieve for every aspect and element of writing. They must absorb the life-energies of ten other writers and then they'll know how to pick the grade-A ideas and create master-class characters and have, I don’t know, gold star spelling ability.

Truth is, most of these skills and tools work the same way on the expert levels. It’s just that those folks have more experience using them. It’s like thinking chefs get some kind of special knife that lets them chop faster or make interesting cuts. It’s not any different than the knives you or I probably have. They’re just more experienced with it and have learned a few tricks that work well for them.

And when it comes to plotting... the truth is, most of us already know how to plot. We learned from comics and cartoons and movies and fairy tales yes maybe even from books (wilder things have happened). We understand the basic chain of cause and effect that makes up every story.

So I don’t think it’s so much learning how to plot. It’s just figuring out how to get better at it. Finding a workout routine that works best for us, whether it be working through 50+ spreadsheets or... something else.

Anyway, here’s an easy something else for you to try.

Think of a story you loved as a kid. Not in the YA range, but more single digit. Maybe it was a book or a comic, possibly a movie or TV show. Something you know you loved.

Here’s the catch—it needs to be something you loved then, but you’ve since revisited and discovered it’s not as great as you remembered. Maybe it feels a little goofy or simplistic now. I mean, it might just be flat-out stupid. A plodding structure, a complete lack of worthwhile challenges, painfully obvious clues for the transparent "mystery.” I bet if you’re the type of person who reads these little rants, you can think of at least one story like that, right?

(I know I can)

So... think about how that story’s bad. Why is it silly or goofy? What would need to change, structure-wise, for it to be better? Something more suited for an older, somewhat more savvy audience?

Does it begin at a good point, or does it need a new one? Is there some sort of antagonist? Should there be? Are there real stakes? If not, what needs to be done to the story to increase them? What did our hero do to accomplish their goals? Were they actually challenged? Is there a satisfying ending? Or at least, satisfying in terms of the story I'm telling?

If you can explain why alongside any of these answers, even better.

A lot of these tweaks will probably also mean making adjustments to my characters. They might need to be a little more complex to justify some of their decisions and actions in the story. And that means they may end up having an arc of some kind, a story, and well, I’ve talked about that feedback loop. Plot pushing story, story driving plot, which lead to the plot again having an effect on the story...

Whoa! Hey, look at that. We’re plotting stuff. Just like the professionals do.

Will this be perfect? No, probably not. Like I said up above, there is an experience aspect to this as well. Some folks might have a knack for it, others may need a little more work, but none of us are going to be phenomenal at it right out of the gate. Maybe not out of our fifth or sixth gate. But it’s not because we don’t know how to do it. It’s just because we’re still figuring out our way of doing it.

And speaking of doing it...

Next week I’ll be trying to finish a huge pitch document for this new project, so I’m probably not going to have a post for you. Unless one of you gives me a really amazing question that I feel compelled to answer as soon as possible. But check in here anyway and I may have a cartoon or quick thought for you.

Then after that... clowns. Probably.

Until then, go write.

To Start With...

Well, here we are in 2021. A serious sci-fi year. 2021! It feels like it should be in a cool chrome font, doesn’t it? We should all be heading to work in flying cars, jetpacks, or giant robots. And instead we’re dealing with a pandemic. Oh, and an attempt to overthrow the government of the US by a bunch of domestic terrorists inspired by an unstable President.

But other than that... Happy 2021!

Anyway... hey there! I was thinking about my usual start-of-the-year post and trying to think of something new I could bring to it. I’ve talked in years past about how I started doing this and what I’m trying to do here. I thought maybe this year I’d talk about you and what you might get out of this. And what you won’t get.

This collection of scribbled essays is probably 83% writing advice. Straight writing and storytelling. Not publishing, marketing, networking, or any of that. Those are all other things, and being clear about that—really understanding it—is a big step in becoming a better writer. I do talk about them here sometimes (thus, the above links) but they’re the minority topic by far. Maybe 15-16% If that’s the kind of thing you’re really interested in, there are a lot of better places to get it, and more regularly than I’ll talk about it.

That last one or two percent? Cartoons. A tiny bit of politics. Maybe con schedules, back in the clean days when we all went to cons.

But let’s talk about that writing advice. I think there’s a bunch of conditionals that should get applied to any advice someone gives. Or gets. Seriously.

That’s pretty much conditional number one. If you’ve been following me for a while, that’s my Golden Rule here—what works for me probably won’t work for you, and it definitely won’t work for him. I’m not saying my advice—or anyone else’s—is necessarily bad. But the simple truth is we’re all different writers with different projects at different points in our career, and trying to make advice a one-size-fits-all thing just isn’t going to work.

I’ve mentioned before that a big part of maturing and growing as a writer is figuring out what works for you. Because that’s all that matters. What makes it easier for you to write, and what helps you write better. I don’t care if the advice is from Stephen King, N. K. Jemisin,  Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or whatever author you consider your writing idol. It doesn't matter that it works for them—if the advice doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t be following it.

Which brings me to conditional number two. There’s a difference between advice and rules, and—much as some folks hate to hear it—there are rules to writing. Yes, there are. Spelling is a real thing. So’s grammar. And structure. These are real, quantifiable things I can get wrong.

However... this is art. You’re an artist (don’t say wordsmith don’t say wordsmith don’t say wordsmith). And that means we get to bend and break rules when we need to. Again—key thing—when we need to. Not on a whim. Not because we don’t know the rules to start with. Not to show those gatekeepers they’re not the boss of me! There’s got to be a reason for rule-breaking, and there still need to be enough rules in play that other people can understand me.

And this brings me to my third and probably final conditional for advice. Unless I think of a fourth one while I’m writing this out. Third is that I need to be aware most advice is intended for people at different points in their writing development. If I get asked the same question by a pro, by someone just breaking in, and by somebody just starting out, there’s a chance I’m going to give a notably different answer to each of them. And it could be really harmful if someone’s following the wrong advice.

Okay, that feels a bit clumsy so let me try it this way.

I’ve talked about cooking as an analogy for writing a couple times, and I’ve compared the ranty blog to a sort of cooking school. But it struck me a while back that even that’s a little off, because I can take a beginner cooking class at my local community college or I can take a course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But I think we can all agree those are two very different things.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what they teach at Le Cordon Bleu. It’s one of the world’s greatest culinary institutes and the instructors have a lot to teach. That said, a huge amount of what they teach is assuming I know a lot of basics, and probably a few advanced techniques as well. Again, world famous institute.

If I can’t tell the difference between sifted flour and corn starch, I can waste a lot of time and money at Le Cordon Bleu. Good chance I’d develop a bunch of bad habits, too, as I try to absorb and implement lessons I don’t have the foundation to fully understand. Heck, I could even come out of there a worse cook than I went in, trying to spatchcock a lobster thermidor or something like that.

This collection of rants is kind of a cooking school, but it’s maybe a second or third level community college class. I’m expecting everyone can tell salt and sugar apart, that you know how to softboil an egg, and you understand the difference between baking and broiling. And, maybe most importantly, that you actually want to learn more. I mean, that’s the whole point of taking a higher-level class, right? You don’t take it to argue with the instructor or tell all the other students how you don’t need to be there.

Well, okay, there’s probably some people who take classes for those reasons...

But you get my point. The advice I’m offering is for people who’ve written a few short stories, maybe a few chapters, maybe even a first novel. You’re already a few rungs up the ladder and I’d like to help you go a few more. But if you’ve had a book or two published, maybe a good string of short stories... you’re already near the top of that ladder. There’s not much I can do for you that you probably couldn’t do quicker and easier on your own.

So that’s what I’m serving here. Advice and tips and maybe pointing out a few rules. If any of that sounds good to you... stick around. And if there’s something in particular you want to hear me blather on about, just let me know down at the bottom. I feel all warm and special when people leave comments.

Next time, to start us off, I’d like to talk about success.

Until then, go write.

The Golden Rule

I’ve been doing the A2Q thing for a while now and I wanted to take a moment to talk about a related matter.

Since I started this ranty blog way back when, there’s one thing I’ve tried to be clear about. This is mostly all just advice. And the thing about advice is... you can take it or leave it. It’s not required and it definitely doesn’t fit every situation.

I do dabble in rules now and then, yeah. Lightly. I do firmly believe writing has some some rules and it’s important to learn them. Knowing them will only help me. Heck, knowing them can help me break them.

But overall, this is just advice. Some of it’s going to work for you, on this particular project. Odds are a lot of it isn’t. That’s how this whole writing-art thing goes. You get a huge pile of thoughts and ideas and advice dumped on you and it’s your job as the writer to sift through all of it and figure out what’s going to work for you and what isn't.

It can take a while. Maybe even years. And nobody wants to think it could take years for them to figure out how to write. That’s why some people like the idea that this is all very teachable. That it can get broken down into equations and page counts and formulas. Do this, then this, then that, and BAM New York Times bestseller right there. Now give me $250 for sharing my secret method with you.

Because I mean it’s that or... doing the work. And none of us want to do that. Believe me, if there was an easier way, I’d be on it in a heartbeat. But there isn’t. That’s the Golden Rule I’ve been pushing here for... hell, over a decade now.

What works for me probably won't work for you.

And it definitely won't work for that guy.

The way I write isn’t going to be the way you write. I know this because I have a lot of writer friends and I don’t write like any of them. They don’t write like each other, either. You can probably find some similarities, some common threads, but for most of us our process is our process.

And I know this might seem a little weird and hypocritical because this is exactly what I’ve been doing here for the past three months. The A2Q is one long ongoing series of “here’s how you do this...” How can I spend all this time telling you how to do things and then say none of it’s going to work for you?

Well, I’ve used cooking as an analogy for writing before, and I think that’s a good way to explain the A2Q. Don’t think of it as a book, think of it as a recipe that I’m teaching you. Maybe for pizza. And I’ll show you how I do the crust, the sauce, how I cut the veggies, what cheese and spices I use, oven settings, all of it. Beginning to end.

Yeah, there’s a chance you can follow all these steps and do it exactly like I do, even though you’ve never once cut vegetables or crushed garlic. But if you’ve never done this you’re probably going to end up making a few practice pizzas. And more than likely... you’re going to want your crust a little different, maybe a little thicker or more chewy (are you one of those deep-dish weirdoes?). Maybe you don’t want veggies, you want more sausage and pepperoni. Plus, it could use a lot more sauce and, heck, why am I even using red sauce when there’s perfectly good pesto to put on pizzas?

Hell, you might be one of those pineapple monsters.

So you’ll try my recipe once, perhaps twice, and then you’ll tweak it to work better for your tastes and preferences. You might decide there’s only one or two bits that work well for you (brush olive oil on the outer edge of the crust? Hmmmmm...) and ignore the rest. Or maybe none of this will work for you, because you and I just have some very different ideas of what makes a good pizza and how to make it.

That’s great, whatever you do. It’s absolutely fantastic. If my recipe gets you to a better pizza, than my work here is done—even if it just means realizing you don’t want to do it my way. Process of elimination is part of the process, y’know? Figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t.

The A2Q is me trying to give you a nice, easy recipe for a book. You’re supposed to fool around with it and change it. Maybe do things in a different order. Perhaps start in a different place. Some of my ideas and suggestions might not work for you, and that’s cool. The idea is to get you thinking and considering these different elements, maybe making you really aware of some of them for the first time. And then you’ll figure out how to use them in a way that works best for you and gives you the results you want.

That’s the Golden Rule.

I just thought it might be good to bring it up again.

Anyway... next week, back to the A2Q. There’s still more work to be done.

Until then, go write.

What Are You Looking For?

            Welcome to 2019!  A dystopian world unlike any you could’ve imagined...

            I wanted to start the year by just tossing out a couple introductory thoughts for you about writing.  Or why we’re writing, really.  Maybe something to consider while those resolutions are still firming up.

            Really, it all kinda boils down to one question.

            Why are you doing this?

            It’s a question I think a lot of folks don’t ask themselves, and it’s kind of important.  What I actually hope to get out of an activity should really effect how I approach said activity.  Is writing just a hobby for me?  Is it a form of artistic expression?  Do I just want to make a little money on the side with it or am I hoping to make a career out of this?  Do I just want all the little side perks that come with being a famous writer? Maybe some combination of some or all of these things?

            Almost all of these are valid ways to approach writing.  But if I don’t know—or I’m not honest with myself—about where I want to end up, I can waste a lot of time on the wrong path.  And when I don’t get where I wanted to go... well, there’s only one person I can blame.

            Now, I’m willing to bet some folks reading this are already grumbling.  Internally if nothing else.  Experience has taught me that a lot of people don’t like talking about writing in a concrete way like this.  If I had to guess why, I think it’s because keeping things vague and soft is comfortable.  It’s easy. If I don’t declare what my goals are, it’s pretty much impossible for you to tell me I’m not getting closer to them.  I can just keep doing whatever I want in this big hazy cloud of possibilities and declare success.

            So let’s not talk about writing.

            Let’s fall back on one of my favorite parallels—cooking.  We can talk about cooking without anyone getting mad, right?  It’s a safe, simple topic.
            Why do you cook?

            I mean, we all cook to some degree or another.  Maybe it’s just using the microwave or the toaster, but I think everybody reading this can at least feed yourself without resorting to ordering a pizza, right?   Some of us might even be able to make pizza from scratch.  Or maybe go all the way to ravioli in vodka sauce with homemade garlic bread.

            (I might be a bit hungry while I type all this—just warning you now)

            So yeah, some people might be happy just having those bare basic skills and maybe some folks want to do a bit more.  Maybe you’re just really into pasta or baking or soups and you have a lot of fun experimenting with them.

            Or maybe I want to go all the way with this.  I want to be a chef.  Like, a trained and accredited chef.  Do they accredit chefs?  You get the idea.  I want to wear that white jacket and the apron and work in a restaurant.  Hell, maybe I want to own a restaurant! 
            It’s possible to approach cooking a lot of different ways, depending on where I want to go with it.  And there’s nothing that says I can’t change direction at some point.  I can just play around with pies and cakes for my own amusement and maybe one day decide I want to open a bakery.  But I need to acknowledge that’ll mean a big shift in how I approach things.  Baking cookies for me and my friends is not the same as baking them for the Wednesday lunch rush.
            Another thing about cooking—we can all agree there are some rules to it.  There are tons of recipes that’ll have flexibility, sure, but in the end, it needs to be edible.  Some ingredients need to be cooked certain ways.  Yeah, breaking these rules is possible, but it’s really important that I know how to break them.  Like, I can do things with raw eggs, but it’s risky.  If I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, I might make someone sick.  Like full-on poison them.  Fatally.

            And that’s not going to get me a lot of repeat dinner guests.

            Or repeat customers, if I’ve decided to go pro with this.

            That’s a nice lead in for my last point about cooking.  The business side of it.  Yeah, maybe you don’t want to go that way, but it’s worth at least thinking about for a minute.  I think the vast majority of us wouldn’t mind making money at our cooking, right?

            (everybody remembers this is an extended metaphor, right?)

            The minute I decide to start thinking about cooking in a business sense, I need to start thinking about it... well, like a business.  If I want to open a restaurant or a bakery, I need to consider what my customers want, sales numbers, investment returns, and more.  It’s painful to say, but at this point I need to ignore the art side of things for a bit and start looking at hard numbers.

            Like, okay, cooking’s always going to have a personal edge to it.  I really like things on the spicy side.  My partner’s a vegetarian.  Maybe you hate anything that doesn't include bacon.

            But once we’re talking about cooking as a business, it’s not all about us anymore.  It’s about them—my potential customers.  What do they like?  What are they going to spend money on?  What are they going to take a chance on?  Yeah, my maggot brulee might be the most amazing (and carbon-friendly) dessert you’ll ever have, but I shouldn’t be too shocked if nobody wants to try it.  Customers probably won’t want to eat it (not enough to support a restaurant, anyway) and investors probably won’t want to back my little writhing cafe.

            And again—this doesn’t mean the maggot brulee is bad.  This isn’t about good or bad, it’s about making smart business decisions.  Cooking professionally means not doing as many adventurous things, and being very smart about the risks I take and the rules I break.  It means finding that perfect sweet spot where I can make my customers (and investors) feel very safe and comfortable while also getting them excited about trying something new.

            It’s tough.  That’s why so many restaurants fail.  Depending on which numbers you look at, it’s generous to say only one out of five restaurants lasts three years.

            Which, honestly, is still better numbers than most writers.

            That’s what we’ve been talking about, remember?

            Y’see, Timmy, there’s no “correct” endgame with writing.  You wanting to do it just for the art isn’t any worse or better, decision-wise, than me doing it for a living.  They can do it for fun, she can do it as therapy, and he can do it as an ongoing social-psychological exploration as what it means to be a brilliant mind trapped at the mall food court serving orange chicken to capitalist sheeple every day (it’s too deep for you to understand, just deal with it).  Whatever I want to do with writing... that’s the right choice for me.  And whatever you want to do is the right choice for you.

            Just make sure you’re on the right path to get to that goal.  Or at least headed generally toward it.  Path A could be a smooth, unchallenging run, but it doesn’t lead to D.  And path C lets me take the moral high ground, but it’s not going to get me to E.

            I freely admit, this blog is overall about getting on a career path with writing.  Or maybe getting over some of the rough parts of that path a little easier.  And you may find some tools here you can use on other paths.  Rope’s very helpful with mountain climbing, but you use it a lot in sailing, too.  Some writing advice is like that.  It can get you closer to publication, but it can also make your Dungeons & Dragons blog really pop.

            So... that’s what we’re going to do this year.

            And maybe a tiny bit of self promotion for a couple projects coming out.

            Next time, well... we should probably talk about getting started.

            Until then, go write.

It’s Not Like Anything Else

            I wanted to prattle on a bit about character development.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and the way it can sometimes be a stumbling block.  And I think I’ve got my thoughts in an order where they’d make a semi-coherent post.

            So, first, a little story.

            A friend of mine has a semi-popular travel show on PBS.  She’s also been working on a book about how she ended up travelling and one of her first big solo trips (that’s her thing).  She’d been working on it for a while and asked if I’d be willing to take a look at it and maybe offer some thoughts.  Maybe help her think of a title for it.

            I’ll be honest.  There’s always a bit of nervousness when a friend asks for your opinion on something.  I bet most of you can relate.  But I said yes.

            Turned out, no big worry. It was a fun book about her trek through Italy.  No nightmarish spelling or grammar mistakes.  Great voice.  Good description.

            There was one issue I noticed though—it just took a little while to pin down.

            (no, don’t worry,  She and I have talked about this.  And she knows I’m mentioning her book this week)

            Y’see, the book had tons of good elements.  Travel.  History.  Comedy.  Some soul searching.  A little romance.  A touch of sex.  Even a kind of creepy night in a haunted building.

            Thing is, none of these was a dominant element.  They were all more or less equal.  A little more of this here, a little less of that there.  Okay, the creepy factor only lasted four or five pages, but past that... it’d be really tough to pin down the main theme of the book.  An informative travelogue?  An introspective journey to sort out a life?  A passionate summer in Europe?

            Yeah, lots of stories have multiple elements like this.  My own book, The Fold, has sci-fi and horror elements, but also mystery, some action-adventure, a bit of comedy, some sexy romance, and even a touch of political stuff.  At the end of the day, though... it’s pretty much sci-fi and horror.  The other things were side dishes, so to speak.  They were fun and flavorful, but they weren’t the main course.

            See, without that main course, the meal is nothing but side dishes.  And while there’s nothing wrong with that, it becomes very difficult to answer the simple question of “what did I have for dinner?”  Sure, I can say, “side dishes,” but that doesn’t really answer the question, does it?  It’s like asking what I’m wearing and I say “not a green shirt.”  It’s an answer and it’s true, but I haven’t really told you anything useful.

            I need to have some kind of answer to the genre question, because people are going to ask it. People like readers. And agents.  And editors.  And if I can’t give them a real answer, it’s going to be really hard for me to get anyone interested.  If you’ve been reading the ranty blog for a while, you may remember a little tidbit I once heard from an agent named Esmond Harmsworth—“It’s not like anything else is very hard to sell.”

            This brings me to the second half of this little rant...

            I’ve mentioned before that you can follow me on Twitter.  If you do, you get to watch every weekend as I rant about sci-fi and horror B-movies in real time.  Over the years—watching them and working on some of them—I’ve developed a theory about why they turn out so bad.  Not all of them, granted, but a good number of them.

            Genre comes with expectations.  Science fiction and fantasy each have their own standards, benchmarks, and tropes.  These are radically different from the ones we hold for horror, or for mystery stories, or for romances.  Seems straightforward, yes?

            When these expectations aren’t met, or when my story departs radically from them, things begin to stumble. Maybe my story recovers, but sometimes that stumble ends with a full-on faceplant.  I’m willing to bet most of us have read a book or seen a movie where we discover the big twist is aliens did it or angels did it or Bob was a deranged serial killer all this time.  And this made us roll our eyes and find something else to do.

            So, here’s my theory.

            I think sometimes, at one stage or another, a story gets tagged with the wrong genre.  And this creates problems.  Sometimes I look at one of those B-movies I mentioned and I see what may have started out as—for example—a really fine sci-fi movie.  But someone decided it was a horror movie, and they filmed it as a horror movie. And now the sci-fi story has horror timing and emphasis and angles—all those standards we expect from those films.  But they don’t really fit this story. And that awkwardness is why the movie never really hits its stride.

            A great example of this was the latest Fantastic Four movie.  Director Josh Trank has done Chronicle, an indie movie widely hailed as a superhero story. But if we take a good look at it, it was really a superpowers movie.  Then Fox gave him the FF franchise and, well, Trank made another superpowers movie.  He forced the FF out of their natural genre and into a different one. 

            And we all know how that went.

            I’ve seen the flipside of this, too. When something gets made as, say, a sci-fi movie, but we’re told it’s a horror movie, by the advertising or the interviews or whatever.  So we walk in with those standard expectations, and suddenly the movie is “wrong” because it’s failing as a horror movie—which it was never intended to be.  I’ve seen books that were marketed as dark fantasy that were supernatural romance. Movies marketed as horror that were pretty straightforward sci-fi or fantasy.  Or even blog posts that were marked as character development when they’re all about genre...

            From our point of view as writers, this can be deadly.  If I’ve got an agent who wants to see sci-fi, I say my book is sci-fi, and then I send her or him literary horror...  Well, that’s going to get rejected really quick.  Yeah, even if it’s a fantastic horror story. 

            Heck, even if said agent reps horror as well, they can get soured just by those failed expectations.  They can go into it expecting sci-fi, like they were told, and maybe they’ll eventually self-correct.  But even then...  I may have lost those two or three vital ticks off their mental scorecard.

            And those two or three ticks can mean the difference between ending up in the big pile of the left or the very small pile on the right.

            Y’see, Timmy, I need to be sure what my genre is.  And I need to be honest about it, no matter how popular some other genre might be right now.  Because I want to score all the points I can with editors.  And agents.

            And especially with readers.

            Next time I want to talk about one of my favorite topics.  And a little bit about numbers.

            Until then, go write.

            Oh, and if you wanted to toss a buck or two at my friend’s travel show, public television needs all the help it can get.  Thanks.

Procrasti Nation

            You remember the Procrasti from Deep Space Nine, right? They were that race from the Gamma Quadrant that was going to come through the wormhole someday...

            Geek joke.

            I saw a thing floating around Twitter a month or three back, one of those clickbaity “this article EXPLODES one of the biggest myths about writing...”  And that myth was that writers need to write every day. Which, granted, the vast majority of professional writers—myself included—will all tell you to do if you want to do this for a living.  But according to this little piece, that’s complete nonsense.  If I only write once a week, good for me.  If I need to wait for inspiration, that’s fine.  What’s important is that I'm writing at a rate that’s comfortable for me.

            Now, in all fairness to the article, I’ve said similar things here.  If you can only write on Sundays, standing on your head while wearing that “enhancing” corset you bought at the ren faire last year, but you always write 15,000 words in a session... well,  congratulations.  It’s a damned weird system, but it works for you.  So what if you don’t write the other six days of the week.  Fifteen thousand words a week is fantastic.  I know some pros who don’t hit those numbers consistently. Hell, I usually don’t hit those numbers.

            However...

            If I’m only cinching myself into the corset once every two or three weeks, and only writing a hundred words when I do... there’s a chance I just may not be taking this whole writing thing that seriously.

            And there’s nothing wrong with that in a larger sense.  If I just want to scribble blog posts or fan fic as the mood strikes me, that’s fine. I know a few people who write as more of a therapy thing, some who do it for fun, and one who did it as a sort of... well, she’d been single for a while.  Let’s leave it at that.

            Again, no big deal if that’s how I approach it.  To fall back on an analogy I’ve used once or thrice, not everybody who cooks needs to be a chef.  Or wants to be.  I love cooking, playing around with spices, trying new things with pizzas or pasta... but I’m never going to be a chef.  I’m fine with that.  I’m just doing this to have some fun on the weekends.

            But... if I wanted to be a chef, to actually get paid for cooking, I’m probably going to have to put some work into it. And that means doing it more often than when the mood strikes me.  It means sometimes I’d need to stay home and cook rather than going out with friends. 

            And, yeah, sometimes that work can mean other things. It can mean reading cookbooks. Or watching cooking videos on YouTube.  Maybe even eating out sometimes.

            But in the end... it means I’m going to be cooking.  A lot.  There’s really no other way to do it.

            Same with writing.  If I want to make money off this storytelling thing—if I want to do it for a living—I’m going to have to write. A lot.  On a fairly regular, consistent basis.

            I wrote my first three novels and a good-sized novella while I was working full time as an entertainment journalist. And reading scripts on the side.  So I was often doing four or five thousand words a week to put food on the table and pay rent, then staying in the chair to do another six or seven thousand on the stuff that I wanted to be paying rent with.

            Hell, I know two full-time, professional writers (about to be three) who had babies this year.  Little, squishy new-humans who pretty much need constant attention (granted, I’ve never had one myself, so that’s just conjecture on my part).  And those three are all still writing.

            It’s fine to tell myself that I’m waiting for the muse.  Or that I’m reading a how-to book about crafting the perfect first sentence.  Or that playing Dawn of War III is going to be a vital part of my creative process.  We all have our own methods when it comes to writing. Like that corset.

            But there is also a point that... well, I’m just not writing.

            Again, depending on what I want out of this, that may be fine.  If I only post on my blog once a month... so what?  If I just write slash-fic when I’m bored, hey, it passes the time.  If this is just a hobby that I do every couple of weeks... awesome.

            If I keep telling you how much I want to be a chef, though... wouldn’t it be weird if I only cooked one or two meals a week?  Or two or three times a month? 

            I mean, that just doesn’t make much sense, right?

            Next time, I want to talk about something crazy.

            Until then, go write.

            Oh!  And if you’re in the Los Angeles area, this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.  Noon to three, open to writers of all levels.  It’s completely free—no sign up or anything, just stop by and pull up a chair.

            Okay... now go write.

Over-Elaborate Paint Schemes

            Hope you all had a nice week off and got a lot of writing done.  Or at least a lot of relaxing so you’re fresh and ready to write again.

            As it turns out, this little rant has turned out to be well-timed... but we’ll get to that in a bit.

            For now, I wanted to talk about paint and simplicity.

            As one or two of you might know, I am a bit of a miniature wargamer, or, as they’re known to the greater world at large, a geek.  Yep, I build little toy soldiers and beasties, scale scenery, vehicles, the whole deal.  I used to be much more into it than I am today, but I still enjoy building the models and playing with my group now and then.

            Recently I was painting some models and remembered an old article I’d read ages back in one of the hobby magazines I subscribed to (again, used to be much more into it).  They had a regular column on painting techniques for little toy soldiers, and one month a guest columnist wrote about what he called “non-metallic metallics.”  It was a style of painting where you made swords, guns, armor, and so on look like steel and gold without actually using steel or gold paint.  Instead you’d use lots of whites, blues, grays, oranges, and yellows—all different shades—to create highlights and reflections and the appearance of shiny metal.  Make sense?  So much better, he said.  So much more realistic.  It really brought the miniatures to life.

            Now, the very next month they ran an article from another painter—their regular guy, in fact—and his article amounted to “no, no, NO!”  He was very much against the whole non-metallic metallics thing.  As he explained, it was using a lot of time and extra paint to create the same effect you’d get naturally by just using the metallic paints.  Plus, the non-metallic style was completely angle-dependent.  It worked well for displays and dioramas, but wasn’t appropriate for models that would be out on a tabletop battlefield and viewed from many different directions.  That’s when the non-metallic illusion would break down.  As he explained, why buy seven or eight pots of paint to achieve what—for these purposes—you could do much better with one?

            That was the last painting column, if memory serves, and the regular guy was never mentioned again.  The company that published the magazine also sold the paint.  Draw your own conclusions about what happened there.

            Now, aside from the capitalist warning, what’s the message here?

            There’s a subset of folks who insist things can’t be simple.  Simple is stupid.   Simple is for amateurs, they’ll tell you, not professionals.  You’re not going to use that common, easy paint scheme, are you?  Because you’ll never be considered an expert that way

            Unfortunately, too many of these people consider themselves gurus of some kind or another.  They’ll charge you good money for bad advice. Advice they’ll usually try to pitch as rules.

            There’s nothing wrong with simple.  Having a simple paint scheme let me paint the bulk of my Space Marine army in a few weekends rather than a few months.  I had close to a hundred little soldiers the size of my thumb—I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours on each one.  

            But...

            There were a couple models I did lavish with some extra time.  Captain Machiavel got a lot of fine detail picked out on his armor.  I put highlights on Veteran Sergeant Constantine’s sword.  Veteran Dreadnaught Faustus has a ton of scrollwork on his weapons and purity seals.

            (Yes, I named some of my little toy soldiers—stay on topic, okay?)

            Just like there’s nothing wrong with simplicity, there’s nothing inherently wrong with complexity, either.  It’s all about having the experience to know when each is appropriate.  I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours painting each of the rank-and-file soldiers, because I didn’t want a hundred individual paint jobs distracting from the look of the army as a whole.  That said, I’m still going to make the army commander, squad leaders, and big models look good because... well, they’re the ones people are going to focus on.

            See where I’m going with this?

            As an aspiring writer, I encountered lots of folks trying to tell me my writing wasn’t sophisticated enough.  That my vocabulary was too simplistic.  And I listened to them.  I started using a lot more adverbs.  I tried to use metaphors and similes in the description of every person, place, and thing that appeared in my stories.  Hell, for a while I made a point of  never using the same dialogue descriptor twice on a page.  And I never, ever used said.  Said was stupid.  It for amateurs, and I was a professional

            Thing is, none of this made my writing any better.  Oh, sure, it was boosting my word count a lot, but it wasn’t really improving my ability.  In fact, one of the first times I ever got to sit down with an actual professional editor—someone who could pay me money for my work—his two big pieces of advice for me were to cut all my adverbs and go back to using said.

            Let’s do a quick test.  Grab a novel or anthology that’s near you.  Not a Kindle, if that’s possible—a real book will work better for this.  Preferably something you’re familiar with.

            Got one?  Flip through it, or just open at random once or thrice.  You’re looking for a page with dialogue, not exposition.  Found it?  Count up how many times said appears on that page.

            I’m willing to bet it’s there a decent number of times.  And I bet you never noticed until I just asked you to count them up.  Said is invisible.  When I use said, readers can enjoy my overall story rather than getting caught up in individual sentences that break the flow.

            Y’see, Timmy, using complex phrasing and obscure words doesn’t automatically make me a good writer.  Especially if there’s no point to my complexity and I don’t understand the words I’m using.  If that’s the case, trying to do this can actually make me a worse writer.  I’m suddenly the guy trying to do fine detail work with a paint roller, or trying to cook a five course meal when I haven’t quite figured out the toaster yet.

            Again, there’s nothing wrong with being more sophisticated, or to using ten-syllable words over two-syllable ones.  There just needs to be a point to it.  It needs to serve a purpose in my telling of this story.  If it’s just me, the author, trying to show off how impressive I am and how extensive my vocabulary is... well, that’s not really helping the story.  It’s just the literary equivalent of hanging rubber testicles on the back of my truck.

            I mostly use said in my writing.  Mostly.  I’m not against having my characters shout or mutter or snap or whisper or shriek or hiss or call out.  When they do, though, I have a solid reason for making that bit of dialogue stand out on the page.

            So ignore those folks saying you must be more complex with a wider vocabulary.  And the ones telling you to always keep it simple. Just focus on telling your story the best way you can.

            And that’s that.

            In other news... It is, alas, that time of year.  So, if I may, I’d like to direct your attention to my usual Black Friday offer for those who need it, the standard Cyber Monday appeal to consumer capitalism, and the suggestions of much better stuff to give the readers in your life.

            I’d also like to point out that my publisher, Penguin Random House, is doing a fantastic online campaign this season called Give a Book.  If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, just use the hashtag #giveabook when you talk about buying books for friends, family, loved ones, and so on.  Every time someone uses the hashtag, from now until December 24th, PRH is going to donate a book to the First Book literary charity.  The goal this year is to hit 35,000 books (last year they aimed for 25,000 and hit 37,000).  So take a minute out of your holiday frenzy and do something for a good cause.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about the people we enjoy reading about.

            Until then... go write.