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Advice You Should Probably Ignore

25 Reasons This Is The Best Time To Be A Storyteller

I am an occasional fan of doom and gloom. Doom and gloom are interesting! As a storyteller, I am intimately attracted to conflict, to drama, to signs of beautiful disarray. And looking at the options for storytellers, it’s easy to see big soggy clouds hanging over all our heads, dumping rain and hail and dead otters on our fool heads.

But, hey, you know what? Fuck that. Let’s lift our chins. Let’s find the sunshine. Let’s punch those dead otters in the face with our gauntleted fists of unmitigated optimism. Why is this a good time to be a storyteller?

Read on, readerheads.

1. The Power Of The Individual

For a very long time there existed one door. That door read EMPLOYEES ONLY, and it was locked until you… well, became an employee of someone — perhaps not a literal employee with the badge and the keycard and a Tupperware container of goulash in the fridge, but just the same you were someone who worked for a corporate entity in some fashion. They unlocked that door for you. Ah. But now a second door exists: the Do It Your Own Damnself door. It’s just a hole kicked in the drywall, the door itself fashioned out of whatever scraps lay nearby. On it a placard that reads, in hasty graffiti, INDIVIDUALS ONLY.

2. The Leverage Of Individuals

You may think this is some kind of FUCK THE OPPRESSOR anti-traditionalist screed, but it’s not. You don’t need to walk through that second door but you should be thankful it’s there just the same — that second door is a new option that did not exist for the last many decades. The fact you can publish your own work or make your own movie or draw your own damn comic is powerful art-fu. And it puts leverage on the larger corporate entities to recognize that they are no longer the only option on the table. When you’re the only dude in the room, your offer doesn’t have to be a good one. But now there’s competition — not merely from other corporate entities but from individuals deciding to go their own way. Individuals who choose to DIY that shit no longer end up automatically in the cold, their sweat-slick private parts unmercifully affixed to a frosted metal pole. The competition of options is a feature, not a bug. In this, storytellers win.

3. Increasingly Connected Audience

The distribution of the Internet is not infinite but for practical purposes it might as well be. It connects an audience in a very big, very real way. People who love a thing can love a thing together and can proselytize that love as loudly and as vociferously and as lovingly as they choose to. And reach hundreds, thousands, even millions by doing so. My god, it’s full of stars.

4. Increasingly Active Audience

No, I don’t mean “active” in the sense that they’re out jogging together in a giant lemming-like throng (sadly, one of the downsides of the Internet is that it doesn’t force us up off our doughy meat-bag asses), I mean “active” in the sense that they’re engaged. Before, audience participation was passive. You sat. You read, you watched, you consumed. Maybe you talked it over with some friends and a slice of pie. Then you went home, gloomily masturbated, and slept. Now you run to the Internet. You tweet. You update Facebook. You write a review on Goodreads. You photobomb your friends with related memes. If there’s additional content, you snorfle it down like bacon-wrapped chocolate-covered espresso beans. Active engagement!

5. Finally, An Increasingly Fractured Audience, As Well

Oh, that sounds bad, doesn’t it? Fractured. Fractured is never good. Broken window. Shattered femur. Kingdom torn asunder. Except here I’d argue it’s a very good thing. Big corporate art culture wants big corporate art — lowest common denominator work that will be a failure if it cannot attract the seething, teething masses by the million. But small audiences can be very supportive. An artist can thrive more easily on connected and engaged pockets of totally awesome people. A fractured audience is the sign of a shattered monoculture. And a shattered monoculture means diversity, and diversity means new niches and rabbit-holes into which storytellers may gleefully tumble.

6. Hybridized Story Pollination (AKA “Transmedia”)

Stories are no longer content to remain imprisoned in a single medium. Stories that need to can dynamite the door and jump from book to film to blog to comic and back to book. They can be games and diaries and flyers stapled to telephone poles. They can be both active and passive at the same time. Stories always could be this way, of course, but we’re tossing about in a perfect storm of opportunity — all the other things in this list fly together to form a stompy Voltron of raw possibility. *stomp stomp stomp*

7. Pretty New Hats For Pretty New Audience Members

An increasingly active audience coupled with increasingly diverse storytelling possibilities creates new roles for audience members. Before, those in your audience had to be content with passivity — but now they can do shit. Sure, they can remain passive. Or they can witness how others interact with the story. Or they can be themselves prime movers, engaging with creator and story (and the characters and world of that story).

8. Everybody Can Tell Stories

You can make a film or paint a masterpiece on your iPhone. You can download free word processors and graphic editors. You can make porn with two soup cans and an old Nintendo 64. Okay, maybe not so much that last one. Still — telling stories and putting them out there is cheaper and easier than it’s ever been. That’s not to say you don’t still need to know what you’re doing — but the barrier to entry used to be a big-ass brick wall. And now it’s just a speedbump. Or maybe a dead hobo. Drive over it and don’t look back.

9. Community, Community, Community

No, not the TV show, though that’s been pretty great, too. (Troy and Abed as Bert and Ernie!) I mean, the community of storytellers. Writers. Editors. Producers. Directors. Artists. Musicians. Content managers. Continuity assassins. Time-traveling liquor procurement robots. We are living in a golden age of connectedness and that doesn’t just mean connecting us to our audience. It means connecting us to other creators. It means that the wheels of collaboration are greased with the Astroglide of delight.

10. Handily Form Your Own Super-Team

What this means is that you can start to form your own storytelling super-team: people you can go to time and again and who help you achieve your vision (and whom you help in return).

11. Crowdfunding, Motherfucker

You mean I can go to the people and say, “I have this story I want to tell,” and they can either confirm its reality or deny its existence? HELLO, FUTURE, MY NAME IS CHUCK, PLEASE HAVE SOME PIE.

12. Throw A Pebble

Every story you write and put out there is a pebble. Every blog post, tweet, and photo is another pebble. Every time you interact with another human and foist another positive piece of yourself upon the world — sploosh — another pebble thrown into the water. And every pebble creates ripples and those ripples cross one another and sometimes reach untold shores. It’s chaos theory in action — a butterfly flaps his wings in Tokyo and a giant diaper-clad orangutan destroys San Francisco. Or something. Point is, the vibrations of your storytelling are farther-flung, and that’s a wonderful thing.

13. Word-of-Mouth Just Got A Major Upgrade

The way those ripples work is via a jacked-up uber-upgraded version of “word-of-mouth.” Used to be that word-of-mouth was parlayed between like, six people. And sure, those six people overlapped with another six people and a slow-moving orgy of interest can rise in a sluggish tangle of limbs. But now word-of-mouth is like, 50 people. Or 100, or 1000. And those circles still overlap. The audience’s voice is louder and bigger than ever. Your story can crowdsurf on them for miles.

14. Remix Culture

Storytellers have been repurposing content since the days of Homer (the blind storyteller, not the donut-eater) — but we’re seeing a surge in remix culture where a story can be broken apart into memes, fanfiction, trailers, t-shirts, whatever. Some of it is shallow, some of it is deep, but the repurposing all points to this: the value of our stories has increased and they can travel a much greater distance than you intend.

15. Yep, I’m Gonna Say It: Piracy

Your blood pressure just went up, didn’t it? I see your eye twitching. Your lip quivering. And yet here I am persisting past your potential aneurysm to say that, piracy may very well be a good thing for storytellers. It’s not that I’m condoning it or that I think it’s the proper moral choice — but I will say that I think piracy has the potential to be an opportunity instead of a pit of pure peril. Think of piracy less as theft and more as a way to gain new fans. Think of it as a very fertile seed-bed. Remember that, during the wanton days of music piracy, music pirates bought more music, not less.

16. Back From The Dead

Sure, the datastream moves fast. You’re not careful, your raft will get sucked under and dashed against the rocks, and then piranha will eat your face. Or you’ll encounter one of those little fishies that swims up your urethra and lodges itself in there like a fat kid in an amusement park waterslide. What were we talking about? Ah. Right. Old is new. Used to be that something would hit the market, and it either took flight fast or got run over by a lawnmower. The lifecycle for pop culture was tiered and limited — but now, stories live on. They loiter like surly teens in shopping malls. And you never know when an old story will gain new life. (Every once in a while, an old blog post on this site catches fire and burns bright for a few days.)

17. The Hive-Mind Is Here

Got a question? Research? Opinion? Grammar issue? Liquor poll? Ask the hive-mind. Storytellers have a wealth of humanity accessible by a few clicks and clacks of the ol’ mouse-and-keyboard.

18. The Water-Cooler That Is Social Media

Social media isn’t just a hive-mind. It’s the water-cooler. Hey, say what you will, but storytellers used to sit in the darkness of their own fetid closet-offices, mumbling to their aloe plants and their cairn of balled-up underwear and their collection of empty gin bottles — but now we can talk to other people. Not to mine them for information. Not to pursue an agenda. Just to shoot the shit and be humans.

19. Cassette Tape Days

Digital content is in the days of the cassette tape. This is Betamax/VHS time. We’re just getting started with e-books and digital film and mobile gaming — these are the days of electronic prehistory in terms of digital content. And things are ramping up fast. What will things be like in 10 years? 25? What will e-books look like in the year 2022? Will my Kindle mist me with the smell of old books? Will my iPhone be a psychic device? CAN MY SAMSUNG TV IMPREGNATE ME WITH A HIGH-DEFINITION STORY-BABY?

20. The Quality Of Our Liquor Has Greatly Improved

I’m just saying, we’re drinking a lot better these days. At least, I am. NO MORE TOILET VODKA FOR ME. Well, okay, maybe a little more toilet vodka. What? It’s good. Shut up. No, you shut up.

21. Sweet Mobility

Stories can go anywhere now. Okay, sure, a book could go most places, but now a single item — a phone, a tablet, a laptop — contains multitudes. Shows! Comics! Novels! Movies! So many stories in one little space. An advantage for the audience is an advantage for the storyteller. Now you can can go where they go. Now you’re in their pocket. With that old roll of Mentos. And that… suspicious bulge.

22. The Age Of The Rockstar Is Over

The rockstar — those figures in pop culture who command all the sales and all the attention — is part of the monoculture and the monoculture is waning. When the really big, greedy fish leave the ocean, the smaller fish get more food (and are themselves less likely to be food). Fewer rockstars mean more craftsmen. They leave more room for the rest of us to come in and do our thing. Or so I like to believe.

23. Divergent Formats

Just as certain creators enjoy a rockstar-like existence, so too do some formats — the novel, the film, the television show, the big-budget game release, the popular superhero comic. Their reign is over. Short stories? Short films? Indie games? Comics not about superheroes? Digital narratives? ARGs? Live theatrical experiments? Chick tracts? UFO manifestos? Peyote visions? Tattoos of Bea Arthur eating a Tyrannosaurus Rex stuffed in a hot dog roll? There exists no limit to the format. No one medium shall rule them all. Well. Except maybe cat videos.

24. Content Remains King

And yet, at the end of the day, in the great Pop Culture Darwinism, content will remain king — and, in fact, will become even kinglier (is that a word?) in this grand storytelling future. Whyzat, you ask? Because we’re less subject to marketing manipulations. Because word-of-mouth is multiplied tenfold. Because the audience is getting savvier, smarter, more interested. Sure, you’ll still have your 50 Shades of Gray and your latest Office Doctor Detective Esquire television procedurals, but you’ll also see braver work surviving longer. Content rules. Crap storytelling drools.

25. We Are The Media

Amanda Palmer said it: “We are the media.” And she’s right. She nabbed a million dollar Kickstarter tally. And you might be saying, “Well, sure, but she’s Amanda Fucking Palmer.” To which I’d respond: my mother has no idea who that is. My wife? No idea who that is. And yet: million-dollar Kickstarter. Do Call of Duty-playing fratboys know who Double Fine productions are? Mmnope. Yet they raised over three million. There’s no disputing the fact that storytellers are in prime demand. And you know who’s demanding it? THE MIGHTY HUMANS OF PLANET EARTH. Erm, aka, “your audience.”

That is why this is the most glorious time to be a storyteller, yo.


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The Secret To Writing?

I get asked that, sometimes. Over e-mail. In person. By invisible leprechauns.

“What’s the secret to writing?” Or, even better, “What’s your secret?”

My secret is long-kept. It’s a brash, brassy alchemical recipe that, frankly, most writers simply cannot replicate. Its hoary, frothy reagents are direly specific, pointing the way toward forgotten and forbidden penmonkey magicks-with-a-k-and-made-plural. And yet, I’ve been sitting on this too long. This dread sorcery is burning holes in my tighty-whities. It is both chafing and chapping my nether-cheeks. It sometimes squirms as if I’ve underpants full of eels. Electric, bitey eels.

What if I die without giving away my recipe?

What will my legacy be?

How will any other writer ever be successful if I don’t transcribe these hidden truths onto a digital scroll? If I don’t light the path with the flaming torch-skulls of my fallen writer enemies, who will?

Thus I spill the secret to you here, now, today. No matter that I will be hunted for giving away such precious, preening truths. The Council shall come for me, and I shall be waiting with eyes of ink.

You can see it in the digital scroll (created with Ye Olde Fotoshoppe) above, but just in case your eyes are burned out of your head by such heretical Internet enchantments, the secret is:

Write as much as you can.

As fast as you can.

Finish your shit.

Hit your deadlines.

Try very hard not to suck.

(The magic incantation is WAFHT. Which sounds like you’re really drunk and trying to say, “What the fuck?” Or, perhaps, trying to verbalize the acronym for said phrase, WTF.)

It’s quite complex, I know! Nearly impossible to replicate. To reproduce such maddening cosmic geometry you’d have to thread the needle perfectly — calling upon dark powers in such a way that it requires the mystical dexterity necessary to tattoo an ancient sigil on the testicles of a Kodiak bear blasted on sweet Columbian nose-candy. But, I dare not contain the secret of my ways any longer.

May you keep the secret or spread it wantonly, like ringworm.

(Feel free to share that graphic. I’ve opened it on Flickr with a Creative Commons license)

25 Ways To Fight Your Story’s Mushy Middle

For me, the middle is the hardest part of writing. It’s easy to get the stallions moving in the beginning — a stun gun up their asses gets them stampeding right quick. I don’t have much of a problem with endings, either; you get to a certain point and the horses are worked up into a mighty lather and run wildly and ineluctably toward the cliff’s edge. But the middle, man, the motherfucking middle. It’s like being lost in a fog, wandering the wasteland tracts. And I can’t be the only person with this problem: I’ve read far too many books that seem to lose all steam in the middle. Narrative boots stuck in sucking mud.

Seems like it’s time for another “list of 25” to the rescue, then.

Hiyaa! Giddyup, you sumbitches! BZZT.

1. The Solomonic Split Of The Second Act

Fuck the three-act structure right in its crusty corn-cave. See, right there’s your problem — first act is small, third act is small, and the second act is the size of those two combined. Go for a four-act structure, instead. Take the second act and chop it clean in half. Whack. Each act is its own entity — though it connects to the rest and still has its own rise and fall. Allow each its own shape, its own distinct feel. And don’t forget that when one act moves to another it is a time of transformation and escalation.

2. Fake A Climax

Hey, when you fake an orgasm, you gotta commit. You can’t just do a few eye-rolls and go “oooh, ahh, mmm, yes,” and then sit up and flip on CSPAN. You’ve got to sell it. Make ’em think it’s the real deal. Scream so loud the dog starts howling. Break a lamp with a flailing limb. Release the fluids. And that’s what you gotta do in the middle of your story. The “false climax” is a powerful trick — you make it seem like things are coming to a head, that the pot is boiling over, that the fluid-release cannot be contained. You want the audience to be all like, “Whoa, this feels like the end but I’ve still got 200 pages left in the book. SHIT JUST GOT REAL.” (Of course, do make sure the actual climax is even bigger, yes?)

3. Fewer Curves, More Angles

The shape of a story — especially the shape of a story’s middle — is a lot of soft rises and doughy plateaus and zoftig falls. Each hill giving way to a bigger knoll. But sometimes, a story needs fewer hills and more mountains. Angles instead of curves. Fangs instead of molars. Think of inserting a few jagged peaks and dangerous ditches — take the story and the characters on a harder journey. Let things change swiftly, accelerate the plot, go left, feint right, don’t let the audience feel complacent and comfortable. Rough ground can be a good thing in the middle of a story. Some stories need more turbulence.

4. Opening Presents On Christmas Eve

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was the most interminable time because, y’know, Christmas morning is everything. All else is chaff and dust and ash in your greedy little mouth. If setting fire to the tree would make Santa come earlier, shit, you’d do it. So, what do some parents do? They let a child open one gift on Christmas Eve. Adopt this strategy as a storyteller. All this time you’re introducing mysteries and conflicts and character arcs that you promise will be resolved by the conclusion of the story. Take one, conclude it early. Give the audience some payoff. (I’d argue if Lost gave viewers a few early Christmas presents the show wouldn’t have dragged its itchy doggy ass across the carpet for the middle seasons.)

5. Introduce A Character

Sometimes, a story needs a bit of new blood in the form of a new character — someone interesting. Not, y’know, “Dave the Constipated Cab Driver,” or “Paula the Saggy-Boobed Waitress,” but rather characters with an arc, characters who will have an impact on the story. You don’t need to replace your protagonist (and probably shouldn’t), but a new strong supporting character may grant the story new energy.

6. Introduce A Character. . . To The Grim Reaper, Moo Hoo Ha Ha!

Sometimes, a story just needs blood. Kill a character. Off the poor bastard. Axe, bullet, disease, chasm, death-by-irritable-wombat, whatever. Blood makes the grass grow. Bread and circuses, motherfucker.

7. Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated”

The middle can feel like a vernal pool that fails to dry up, turning it into naught but a mosquito breeding ground (aka “skeeter fuck party”). That’s because there’s no movement of the water; stagnation sets in. One way to “move the water” (note: not a reference to urinating) is to change the relationship between characters. Get them together. Break them apart. Lies! Betrayals! Exposed secrets! New hate! Old love! Unexpected butt-play! Drama and conflict born of that relationship shift can fuel the rest of the story.

8. Karate Kicks And Car Chases Chop Vroom Boom

Find approximate middle of book. Plant there a kick-ass action sequence. One that is perfectly married to plot, story, and characters. An action scene with ninjas and centaurs and ninja centaurs and Ducati motorcycles and fucking velociraptors and velociraptors fucking and a gladiator named DOCTOR MEAT. Okay, maybe not so much with all of that. Point is, throw in some action in the middle. If not action, anything that creates tension, putting the character’s mission (or life or love or soul or sanity) in doubt.

9. Action! Cut! No, Wait! Cut The Action!

Sometimes, action doesn’t need to be added — it needs to get cut. Quite paradoxically, action can be very boring. Sometimes it’s meaningless — an exercise for the sake of having it. Sometimes it fails to connect to the larger plot. Or have ties to the characters (or feature them at all). Or have any consequence in any way. Action in this mode will drag the story like a colostomy bag filled with buckshot. Cut it. Kill it. Move on.

10. Map Quest

You’re in the middle of the story. You’re wandering around in circles like you’re drunk and got a bad limp. It’s weedy. Swampy. You’re lost. You have to pee. You need a map. You need trail markers and a compass and a magic GPS robot who follows after and is all like BEEP BOOP TAKE A RIGHT AT THE STUMP AND BEWARE LUSTY MOOSE. It’s time for an outline. It’s time for a plan. Pull away from the daily writing. Sit down and start drawing your map — scene by scene, chapter by chapter, however you have to do it. Find your next steps. Discover your narrative landmarks. That’ll get you out of the woods and back onto the road.

11. The Art Is In The Arrangement

Fuck the map. What you need is a time machine. Crash your Delorean into a big blue police box and start hopping around in time — whoever said your story’s narrative needed to be a straight line from Point A to Point Z? Sometimes the middle gets mushy because the arrangement is too conventional. Hopping around in the timeline of the story creates tension and allows you reveal some things early and hold back on other things that might normally be revealed. Rejiggering your story’s time-space continuum can keep it feeling fresh. Like the cooling vinegar winds of a Summer’s Eve. Or something.

12. Escalation, Escalation, Escalation

A karate dude can’t just break one board. He puts two boards down and breaks those. Then three. Then ten. Then he’s karateing bricks and toilets and drop-kicking yaks in half. Point is, he doesn’t just stand there and break one board, then one board, then one board. He ups the difficulty. The effort escalates. You must escalate the conflict in your story throughout the middle. Things become harder and harder. False victories give way to the audience feeling like all is lost. This isn’t just physical. Emotional conflict ratchets tighter. Social turmoil boils over. As you move throughout the middle, ask yourself: “How can I tighten the nipple clamps on this motherfucker?” Add a little tension each time. One board after the other.

13. Tighten Your Own Nipple Clamps

Sometimes writers don’t put enough pressure on themselves — and so, the mushy middle is less about a problem in the story and more a problem with the writer. Tighten your own metaphorical nipple clamps (though mine are not metaphorical and, in fact, are painted like tiny tigers, raaaar). Plan to write more each day. Bring your deadline up by weeks or even months. Sometimes increased pressure on the writer leads to stronger productivity and improved output — take the slack out of your rope.

14. Or: Maybe Switch Back To the Smaller Buttplug

Coal under pressure can make a diamond. But most of the time it makes a pile of coal dust. Could be you’re under too much pressure. Stress and anxiety can do funny things to a writer’s brain. You start to feel like you’re an old person lost in a shopping mall — “I know I came here for a reason but I don’t remember why. Where are the bathrooms? Janice? Janice? Is that you? Oh. You’re just a potted plant. I’ll pee in you.” Cut yourself some slack. Walk away from the story for a day or three. Give yourself the time to think the story through. Then come back to the writing or editing table reinvigorated with the crystal meth of new ideas.

15. Bludgeon Your Doubt With A Nine Iron

Doubt is one of nature’s most insidious creatures — it creeps in through tight spaces, equal parts bedbug and rat, tick and termite, mold and jock-itch. Doubt has an erosive, corrosive effect on the work, too, whether you’re writing a first draft or editing the one hundredth — you lose confidence in your abilities, you miss the distinctions between good and bad, and as a result the middle of your work grows muddled, fumbly, and numb. You can’t purge doubt, exactly — but you can damn sure ignore it. Shoulder past it like it’s just some guy in a crowded hallway. Doubt is an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one.

16. Go Weird Or Go Home

When all else fails, take a hard left turn and drive into the ocean. If you really feel like your story is stale and sluggish, you may be able to give it a jolt by throwing in some kind of epic twist — and not the kind of twist that happens at the end of the film, either (“OMG BRUCE WILLIS WAS A SHARK THE WHOLE TIME”), but the kind where the story transforms in the middle. This can backfire, sure, but a glorious backfire is better than the slow gas-leak emitted by a sleeping beagle.

17. Variety Is The Spice Of Life (Or, If You Prefer, Variety Is The Multi-Purpose Sandworm Excrement Harvested By Fremen)

Scan your mushy middle and ask yourself: “Is it too one-note?” Are you focusing too much on one thing? One character? One conflict, theme, setting, something, anything? Mix it up. Make sure that all aspects of character and conflict are covered — physical, emotional, social, intellectual. A long car ride through a desert is boring because it’s all desert. We wanna see some mountains, a coastline, a village of albinos, a tiger eating a bicyclist, something, anything. Complexity can breed new interest.

18. Rewrite The Beginning (Wait, What?)

I’m sorry, did I just say, “Rewrite the beginning” in a list where we’re talking about the middle? Oh, I did. I’m crazy like that. Crazy like a fox. Crazy like a fox wearing diapers and smoking cigarettes. The middle of any structure relies on a strong foundation and if the foundation is wobbly, the middle will be weak. They say in screenwriting sometimes that third act problems are often first act problems, but the reality is, a lot of problems are first act problems. You need to go back to the beginning. Rebuild the foundation. Make it strong like bull. Bull who wears body armor and shoots a bazooka.

19. Eschatology

I once wondered if “eschatology” was the study of poop, or maybe future poop. Or Sandworm excrement. It’s not — it’s the study of The End (capital letters necessary). Religious scholars look for symbols and signs leading to the end of history as we know it, and while that’s a terrible way to live your life, it’s a most excellent way to build the middle of your story. The middle needs to build toward an ending. If you find the middle is flabby and without purpose or purchase, start building specifically toward the story’s conclusion. Move characters and plot points into place. Start dropping hints. Start hitting harder on the theme. Symbols, signs, motifs. Building to the end can give tension to the middle.

20. Threading The Throughline

Several threads must run through your work to tie the whole thing together. Sometimes the middle of your story needs those threads to tie a corset together in order to pull its blubbery manatee gut tighter. This is your throughline — any and all elements that run from beginning to end. Your middle may be missing one. Want to read more about the throughline? Look no further.

21. Your Robot Brain Needs New Logic Accelerators

I don’t know what it is about Hollywood blockbuster films these days, but half of them don’t make a lick of fucking sense and appear to follow the logic of a scatterbrained four-year-old after he just ate a bowl of Red Bull and Fruity Pebbles. The middle of your story will go all wibbly-wobbly if shit don’t make sense. The audience might break an ankle in a noticeable plot hole. Writers tend to write toward the goal of this has to happen without ever thinking, does it make sense if this happens?

22. Kill The Noise, Crank The Signal

Some stories become way too complicated. A thorn-tangle of plot, a gooey mess of conflicting ideas, an unruly pubic thatch of character motivations — simplify. Prune that ugly ungroomed tree into Bonsai.

23. Run Out Of Rope

You ran out of story and now you’re stretching it thinner and thinner until the whole thing is practically transparent. Here the middle isn’t flabby so much as it is the hollow ghost of a proper second act. You need more meat in the story’s belly. More plot. More motivation. More fat instead of less.

24. Shrinky Dinks

Cut. Get out your scissors, scalpel, hatchet, Sawzall, jaws-of-life, nail clippers, guillotine, and your orbital laser, and chop shit out of your untamed middle. It’s gotten too long. Too big. Too bulky. Bloated like me after I eat too much cheese (“OH GOD BRIE OH NMMMPHMM GOUDA JEEZ DID YOU GUYS SEE GGRRMPPH WENSLEYDALE CHEDDAR GORGOZOMMMPHGRBLE i don’t feel so good”). Cut. Chop. Kill. Sometimes the act of tightening the middle is really the purest act of that tightening: cut a fuckity-bucket of words. Start with 10%, and cut incrementally until the story has sexy abs.

25. Find The Boring Parts, Put Them In A Bag, Set Them On Fire

I continue to hammer on this point for writers, but hey, sometimes a good point demands reiteration. Your middle is perhaps mushy because you have committed the most grievous sin of them all: you wrote a bunch of boring shit. Now, there’s a danger in labeling things that are interesting but not exciting as boring — “Wait, why isn’t every scene a dude with two Uzis riding a jet-ski through time?” — but there’s an equal or worse danger in writing 30,000 words that are the creative equivalent of dry Melba toast. Survey readers. Follow the whispers gurgling up from your gut. Find the boring parts. Then hang them in the town square.


Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

25 Things To Know About Writing The First Chapter Of Your Novel

1. Every Book A Hook (And The First Chapter’s The Bait)

A reader walks into a bookstore. Spies an interesting book. What does she do? Picks it up. Flips to the first chapter before anything else. At least, that’s what I do. (Then I smell the book and rub it on my bare stomach in a circular motion and make mmmmmm noises.) Or, if I can find the first chapter online somewhere — Amazon, the author’s or publisher’s site, your Mom’s Myspace page — I’ll read it there. One way or another, I want to see that first chapter. Because that’s where you grab me by the balls or where you push me out the door. The first chapter is where you use me or lose me.

2. Fashionably Late To The Party

Bring the reader to the story as late you possibly can — we’re talking just before the flight leaves, just before the doors to the club are about to close, just before the shit’s gonna go down. Tension. Escalation. Right to the edge of understanding — no time to think, no time to worry, no time to ponder whether she wants to ride this ride or get off and go get a smoothie because too late, you’re mentally buckled in, motherfucker. The first chapter is the beginning of the book but it’s not the beginning of the whole story. (This is why origin stories are often the weakest iterations of the superhero tale.)

3. The Power Of A Kick-Ass Karate Chop Opening Line Kiyaaa!

A great first line is the collateral that grants the author a line of intellectual credit from the reader. The reader unconsciously commits: “That line was so damn good, I’m in for the next 50 pages.” I could probably do a whole “list of 25” on writing a strong opening line, but for now, I’ll say this: a good opening line is assertive. It’s lean and mean and cares nothing for fatty junk language or clumpy ten-gallon words. A good opening line is a promise, or a question, or an unproven idea. It says something interesting. It shows a shattered status quo. A good opening line is stone in our shoe that we cannot shake. Writing a killer first line to a novel is an art form in which there are a few masters and a great many apprentices.

4. The Gateway Drug To The Second Chapter

I’ve been to multiple Christopher Moore book talks, and each time he reveals something interesting about storytelling (and, occasionally, whale penises). At one such book talk — and this is me paraphrasing — he said something very interesting and a thing I’ve found true in my own reading experience: the more the reader reads, the more you can get them to read. Sounds obvious, maybe. But it goes like this: if you get them to read the first page, they’ll read to the second. If they can read to the first chapter, they’ll at least finish the second. If they read to page 10, they’ll go to 20, if they read to 40, they’ll stay to page 80, and so on and so forth. You’re hoping you can get them to the next breadcrumb, and as the novel’s story you space out the breadcrumbs — but early on, those first breadcrumbs (in the form of the first chapter) are in many ways the most important. Did I mention Christopher Moore knows a lot about whale penises?

5. Your Protagonist Has One Job: To Make Me Give A Fuck

If I get to the end of the first chapter and I don’t get a feel for your main character — if she and I are not connected via some gooey invisible psychic tether — I’m out. I don’t need to like her. I don’t need to know everything about her. But I damn sure need to care about her. Make me care! Crank up the volume knob on the give-a-fuck factor. Let me know who she is. Make me afraid for her. Speak to me of her quest. Whisper to me why her story matters. Give me that and I’ll follow her through the cankered bowels of Hell.

6. Give Her The Talking Stick

I want the character to talk. Give me dialogue. Dialogue is sugar. Dialogue is sweet. Dialogue is easy like Sunday morning. And dialogue is the fastest way to me getting to know the character. Look at it this way: when you meet a new person do you want to sit, watching them like Jane Goodall spying on a pair of rutting chimps from behind a duck blind? Or do you want to go up and have a conversation?

7. Conflict Is The Key That Unlocks A Reader’s Heart

Yeast thrives on sugar. Monkeys eat bananas. I guzzle gin-and-tonics. And conflict is what feeds the reader. Begin the book with conflict. Big, small, physical, emotional, whatever. Conflict disrupts the status quo. Conflict is drama. Conflict, above all else, is interesting. Your first chapter is not a straight horizontal line. It’s a jagged driveway leading up a dark mountainside — and the shadows are full of danger.

8. Steak’s On The Table

The reader will only keep reading if you provide them with an 8 oz porterhouse steak and — *checks notes* — oh. Ohhh. Right! Stakes. Stakes. Sorry. Let’s try this again: the conflict you introduce? It has to matter. We need to know the stakes — as in, what’s at play, here? What are the costs? What can be gained, what can be lost? Love? Money? One’s soul? Will someone die? Can someone be saved? Is there pie? The first chapter doesn’t demand that you spell out the stakes of the entire book in big blinky letters, but we do need a hint, a whiff of the meaty goodness that makes the conflict matter. And if all that fails, maybe try that “give the reader a steak” idea. Or pie. Did someone say I can have pie? I’ll have Key Lime, thanks.

9. Wuzza Wooza?

In the first chapter it’s essential to establish the where and the when of the story, just so the reader isn’t flailing around through time like a wine-sodden Doctor Who. But this also doesn’t mean hitting the reader over the head with it. You don’t need to spell it out if it’s fairly obvious, and you also don’t need to build paragraph wall after paragraph wall giving endless details to support the when and the where.

10. Mood Lighting

First impressions matter. Impressions are in many ways indelible — you can erase that thing you just wrote in pencil or tear up the page with the inky scribbles, but the soft wood of the table beneath still holds the impressions of what was written, and so it is that the first chapter is where the reader gets his first and perhaps strongest taste of mood. Make a concerted effort to ask, “What is the mood I want the reader to feel throughout this book? What first taste hits their emotional palate?” (Two words: PSYCHIC UMAMI. That is also the codeword that will get you into my super-secret super-sexy food-and-porn clubhouse.) That doesn’t mean you need to wring a sponge over their head and drown them in mood — you create mood with a few brushstrokes of strong color, not a hammer dipped in a bucket of clown paint.

11. Theme As Thesis

An academic paper needs a thesis — an assertion that the paper will then attempt to prove (“DONUTS ARE SUPERIOR TO MUFFINS. BEHOLD MY CONFECTIONERY DATA”). A story is very much like that. Every story is an argument. And the theme is the crystallization of that argument. Sometimes it’s plainly stated other times it lurks as subtext for the reader to suss out, but just the same, the theme of your story — the argument the tale is making — is critical. And just as the thesis of a paper goes right up front, so too must your theme be present in the first chapter.

12. The Mini-Arc Is Not Where All The Mini-Animals Go

Every story has a dramatic arc, right? The rise and fall of the tale. An inciting incident leads to rising tension which escalates and grows new conflict and the story pivots and then it reaches the narrative ejaculation and soon after demands a nap and a cookie. The first chapter is perhaps best when thought of as a microcosm of the macrocosm — the chapter should have its own rise and fall, its own conflict (which may become the larger conflict of the narrative). That’s not to say the first chapter concludes anything, but rather that you shouldn’t think of it solely as a ramp up but rather as a thing with a more complicated shape.

13. In Which I Contradict Popular Advice About Opening With Action

Opening with an action scene or sequence is tricky, and yet, that’s the advice you’ll get — “Open with action!” The problem with action is, action only works as a narrative driver when we have context for that action. Specifically, context for the characters involved in said action. Too many authors begin with, “Holy crap! Someone’s driving fast! And bullets! And there’s a robot-dragon chasing them! LAVA ERUPTION. And nano-bees! Aren’t you tense yet? Aren’t your genitals crawling up inside your body waiting for the resolution of this super-exciting exxxtreme action scene?” Not so much, no. Because I have no reason yet to care. Without depth of character and without context, an action scene is ultimately shallow and that’s how they often feel when leading off the first chapter. Now, if you can get us in there and make us care before throwing us into balls-to-the-wall action, fuck yeah.

14. Better To Lead With Mystery

You ever turn the television on and find a show you’ve never seen before but you catch like, 30 seconds of it and suddenly you’re hunkering down and watching the thing like you’re a long-time viewer? It’s the question that hooks you. “Wait, is Gary the secret father of Juniper’s baby? What does the symbol of the winged armadillo mean? WHO SHOT BOBO’S PONY?” (By the way, Who Shot Bobo’s Pony? is the phrase that destroys the universe. Do not say it aloud.) It’s mystery that grabs you. It’s the big swoop of the question mark that hooks you around the throat and forces you to sit. While action needs context, mystery doesn’t — in fact, one of mystery’s strengths is that it demands the reader wait for context.

15. Eschew Exposition, Bypass Backstory

The first chapter is not the place to tell us everything. Don’t be like a child overturning his bucket of toys — then it’s just a colorful clamor, an overindulgence of information. Exposition kills drama. Backstory is boring. Give us a reason to care about that stuff before you start droning on and on about it.

16. A Fine Balance Between Confusion, Mystery, And Illumination

It’s a tightrope walk, that first chapter. You want the reader drawn in by mystery but not eaten by the grue of confusion, and so you illuminate a little bit as you go — a flashlight beam on the wall or along the ground, just enough to keep them walking forward and not impaling themselves on a stalagmite.

17. Flung Off The Cliff

TV shows generally follow a multi-act structure, with each act punctuated (and separated) by commercial breaks. The trick to television is that it seems like a story-delivery medium that carries advertisements but really it’s an advertising medium that carries story: the networks need you to stay through the commercial break, not just to come back to the story but to sit through the advertisements. And the way they do this is often by ending each “act” with a cliffhanger of sorts — a moment of mystery, an introduction of conflict, a twist of the tale. Your eyes bulge and you offer a Scoobylicious “RUH ROH” and then sit down and wait (or, like me, you just fast forward on your DVR). This trick works at the end of the first chapter. A cliffhanger (mystery, conflict, twist) will help set the hook in the reader’s cheek.

18. K.I.T.

Keep it tight. Also, keep it short. Don’t go on and on and on. The first chapter is not a novel in and of itself.

19. Voice Like Bull

You never want your writing to feel limp and soggy like a leaf of lettuce that’s been sitting on the counter for days, but this is 1000% more true when it comes to the first chapter. Your voice in that chapter must be calm, confident, assertive — no wishy-washy language, no great big bloated passages, no slack-in-the-rope. Your voice must be fully present. All guns firing at once: the full brunt of your might used to sink the reader’s resistance to your writerly wiles. BADOOOOM. *splash*

20. On The Subject Of Prologues

The prevailing advice is, “Prologues can eat a sack of wombat cocks, and if you use one you will be ostracized and forced to eat dust and drink urine, you syphilitic charlatan.” Harsh, but there it is. Also, wrong — a prologue should never be an automatic, but hell, if you need one, you need one. Here’s how you know: if your prologue is better used as the first chapter, then it’s not a prologue. It’s a first chapter.

21. Fly Or Die, And Why

Since you’re a writer, you probably have bookshelves choked with novels. So, grab ten off the shelf. Read their opening chapters. Find out what works. Find out what sucks. What’s missing? What’s present?

22. Sometimes The First Chapter Is The Hardest To Write

Writing the first chapter can feel like you’re trying to artificially inseminate a stampeding mastodon with one hand duct taped to your leg. That’s okay. That’s normal. Do it and get through it.

23. More Time Under The Knife

What that ultimately means is, a first chapter may see more attention — writing, editing, rewriting, and rewriting, and then rewriting some more — than any other chapter (outside maybe the last). That’s okay. Take the time to get it right. It’s also okay if the “Chapter One” you end up with looks nothing like the “Chapter One” you started with many moons before.

24. An Emblem Of The Whole

You’ll notice a pattern in this list, and that pattern is: the first chapter serves as an emblem of the whole. It’s got to have a bit of everything. It needs to be representative of the story you’re telling — other chapters deeper in the fat layers and muscle tissue of the story may stray from this, but the first chapter can’t. It’s got to have all the key stuff: the main character, the motive, the conflict, the mood, the theme, the setting, the timeframe, mystery, movement, dialogue, pie. That’s why it’s so important — and so difficult — to get right. Because the first chapter, like the last chapter, must have it all.

25. For The Sake Of Sweet Saint Fuck, Don’t Be Boring

Above all else, don’t be boring. That’s the cardinal sin of storytelling. If you ignore most of the things on this list: fine. Don’t ignore this one. Be interesting. Engage the reader’s curiosity. The greatest crime a writer can commit is by telling a boring story with boring characters and boring circumstances: a trip to Dullsvile, a ticket to Staleopolis, an interminable journey to the heart of PLANET MONOTONOUS. Open big. Open strong. Open in a way that commands the reader’s interest. Fuck boring.


Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

25 Reasons You Should Quit Writing

Time for my annual, “Nope, you shouldn’t be writing, quit now, run away, go on, shoo” post. This time, in the form of the “25 things” lists that all you crazy cats and kittens seem to love so much.

1. It’s Really Hard

OMG YOU GUYS. Writing? It’s hard. It’s like, you have to sit there? And you have to make stuff up? For a living? And there’s all this… typing involved. You know what’s easier? Being an adult Baby Huey. Diaper-swaddled. Able to just pee where you sit. Your food liquified into a nutrient slurry and fed to you via a tube pushed through the grate of your giant human hamster cage. Okay, I kid, I kid. Writing actually is work. Intellectually and emotionally. You actually have to sit, day in and day out, and trudge through the mire of your own word count. Quit now. Save yourself from pulling a mental hammy.

2. You Probably Don’t Have Time

Writing takes time you do not possess. You’ve got that day job and those kids and, hey, let’s not forget your 37th replay of the entire Mass Effect series. Your time is all buttoned up in a starchy little shirt. Sure, Stephen King carved out his first novel one handwritten line at a time in between moments at his factory job, but if I recall, that didn’t pay off for him. (He should’ve just stayed working at that factory. Uh, hello, have you ever heard of medical benefits, Stevie? A pension? Lunch breaks? Duh.) Besides, eventually you’re just going to die anyway. Time won’t matter and it’s not like they’re gonna let you read your own books in hell. Better to quit now. Free up some time for drinking and masturbation. Er, I mean, “parenting.”

3. You May Have To Write A Whole Lot

Recently it came out that for writers to survive, they might have to buckle down and write more. Well, that’s just a cockamamie doo-doo bomb is what it is. That means writers might need to write — *checks some math, fiddles with an abacus, doodles a bunch of dongs in the margin* — more than 250 words a day?! Whoa. Whoa. Slow your roll, slave driver! I mean, it’s not like writing is fun. It’s an endless Sisyphean dick-punch is what it is. (See, Sisyphus carried an old CRT television up a dusty knoll, and when he got to the top, a faun punched him in the dick and knocked him back down the hill. That’s Greek history, son.) Write more? Eeeesh. Better to complain about it, instead. Or, better still: quit.

4. I Bet You’re Not That Good

I’ve seen your work. C’mon. C’mon. This is just between us, now. It’s not that good, is it? Lots of spelling errors. Commas breeding like ringworm in the petri dish that is a hobo’s crotch. All the structure of an upended bucket of donkey vomit. The last time an agent looked at your work, she sent it back wrapped around a hand grenade. So, you’ll do what so many other mediocre, untested, unwilling-to-work-to-improve writers have done: you self-publish, joining the throngs of the well-below-average with your ill-kerned Microsoft Paint cover and your 50,000 words of medical waste. Why do that to the world? Have mercy!

5. Hell, Maybe You’re Too Good

Alternately, you might be too talented. Your works are literary masterpieces, as if Raymond Carver, James Joyce and Don DeLillo contributed their authorial seed and poured it on the earth where it grew the tree that would one day be slaughtered to provide the paper for your magnum opus. And meanwhile, someone goes and writes porny Twilight fan-fiction and gets a billion-dollar book deal thanks to the tepid BDSM fantasies of housewives everywhere. You’re just too good for this. As you seem unwilling to write the S&M fan-fic version of The Hunger Games for a seven-figure-deal… well. This way to the great egress!

6. Ugh, Learning, Ptoo, Ptoo

“All you have to do to be a writer is read and write,” they said. Which seems true of anything, of course — “All you have to do to be a sculptor is look at sculptures and sculpt some stuff,” or, “All you have to do to be a nuclear physicist is read signs at a nuclear power plant and do a shitload of nuclear physics.” But then you went and read books and blogs and Playboy magazine articles and the backs of countless cereal boxes and then you tried writing and oh snap it turns out you still have more to learn. And learning is yucky. Ew, gross. Dirty, dirty learning. Not fun. Takes effort. Bleah.

7. Finish Him, Fatality

“I’m writing a novel,” you say. And they ask you, “Oh, is this the same one you were writing last year? And the year before that? And the year before that?” And you say, “No, those were different ones. I decided that–” And at this point you make up some excuse about publishing trends or writer’s block or The Muse, but it all adds up to the same thing: you’re not very good at finishing what you start. Your life is littered with the dessicated corpses of countless incomplete manuscripts, characters whose lives are woefully cut short by your +7 Axe of Apathy. You’re so good at not finishing, embrace this skill and quit.

8. Rejection Will Make You A Sad Koala

You will be buried in the heaps and mounds of rejection. And it’s never nice, never fun. Sometimes you’ll get the cold and dispassionate form rejection slips with a list of checkboxes. Sometimes you’ll get the really mean, really personal ones that stab for your heart with a sharpened toothbrush shiv (I once got a rejection slip early in my career from author and then-editor Thomas Monteleone that pretty much… savaged me rectally). Rejection will ruin your day. And, if you do get published, bad reviews will haunt you the same way. Did you know that every time I get a one-star review for Blackbirds, my eczema flairs up? I get all scaly and itchy and then I’m forced to fight Spider-Man as my supervillain persona, “The Rash-o-man.” (My comic book is told from multiple perspectives!) Anyway. Point is, rejections and reviews hurt. Don’t thrust your chin out so it can get punched. Hide in your attic and eat Cheetos, instead.

9. You Don’t Want It Bad Enough

You have to want this writing thing really bad. Sure, the saying goes that “everybody has a novel in them,” but thank fuck most of those people are too lazy to surgically extract said novel. I’ll just leave this one to the wisdom of Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

10. Writing Really Cuts Into Your Internet Addiction

The Internet is like a… delightful hole you fall into, a Wonderland of porn and memes and tweets and porn and hate and cats and porn. I’m always wishing I had more time to just drunkenly fumble around the Internet, feeling its greasy curves and exploring its hidden flesh-knolls, but all this damn writing keeps getting in the way. “Oh, god, if I didn’t have this stupid book to write I’d be tweeting scathing witticisms and scouring the web for free ‘people-dressed-up-as-trees-and-flowers-and-pollinating-one-another’ porn.” (If people who dress up as animals and do it are called “furries,” what are people who dress up like plants? “Leafies?” “Greenos?”) Anyway. Quit now. Free up your time.

11. Writing Isn’t Just Writing, Which Is Super-Bullshit

The title “writer” is the piss-pooriest description of the job I’ve ever heard. Total. False. Advertising. Man, writers have to like… edit, blog, market, learn good business practices, engage in public speaking, train on typewriter repair, cultivate liver constitution, and learn how to select and seduce mates based on the strength of said mate’s health care plan. That’s a bummer. A major bummer. Hell, it’s an ultra-bummer.

12. Rife With Indignities And Disrespect

Admitting to someone you’re a writer is like admitting to them you like to you’re a closet My Little Pony fan, or you’re a self-made eunuch, or you like to have sex with raccoons. Tell someone you’re a writer and she’ll nod, embarrassed for you, and then take a gentle step back so she doesn’t catch whatever cat-shit parasite made you crazy enough to want to be a writer in the first place.

13. Hullo, Mister Fatbody

Writing is a sedentary activity. You sit on your butt all day. The only parts that move are your flitting eyes as they follow the cursor and your fingers as they piston-pound out text. The rest of your body slides inevitably toward atrophy, layers of blubber and gristle slowly wreathing your frame in its salty slugabed deliciousness. You’ll probably get fat and then people will make fun of you and then you’ll die.

14. Back And Eye Problems

In addition to becoming a lumpy word-goblin, you also sit there all day in one chair staring at a freakishly bright square of light and the ant-like words and images that dance across it. Your back will become a quilt of twisted muscle, your eyes like grapes covered in a greasy film. Save your body. Quit now.

15. The Disintegrating Value Of Your Words

The professional pay rate for short fiction is now “a half-of-a-Dorito per word.” The average advance for a novel is a punch to the neck and a nuclear-fuchsia Snuggie. Analysts predict that most self-published works of fiction are trending toward an average price of $0.13 per 120,000-word novel. Which leads to…

16. The Average Salary Is $9000 A Year

The federal poverty level is at $11,170, and the average author annual salary is $9,000 a year. Homeless people earn better salaries. Seriously. If a homeless guy can beg thirty bucks a day, he’ll do better than you. You clearly cannot make a living writing. Studies show that only four writers alive make a living writing, and those jerks have the whole thing sewn up. They’re like the 1%-ers of authors, those dicks. Better to quit now before you find yourself on a ruined mattress under the overpass, eating bedbugs for sustenance.

17. Your Chances Ain’t Good, Hoss

Everybody and their ugly cousin wants to be a writer. You know how many query letter submissions the average agent gets per day? Enough to crush the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (In fact, that’s how the dinosaurs went extinct: they all wanted to be writers and starved to death. The meteors were just a cruel afterthought by an unmerciful god.) The chances of your work ever being seen — by an agent, then by a publisher, then by an audience — are about as good as the chances of you giving birth to a zebra riding a jet-ski. Which, admittedly, I have seen a few times. And it isn’t pretty. Oh, and don’t forget about…

18. The Septic Tide Of Self-Publishing

Now everybody and their ugly cousin can be writers! All it takes is a hasty lack of afterthought and a shameless willingness to click a PUBLISH button on the Internet. Abracadabra, your poorly-cobbled-together word-abortion is now available for anybody who cares to see it! Am I saying that good authors don’t self-publish? Hell no! Many great authors have self-published. Oh, but here’s the rub: discoverability on the Internet sucks. Trying to discover a new author on the Amazon or B&N marketplaces is about as effective as searching an above-ground pool full of dirty adult diapers for a half-eaten Snickers bar. Your work is just one more diaper on the pile. Or one more candy bar lost beneath the waste.

19. Gatekeepers? More Like Hatekeepers, Am I Right?

You know who’s preventing you from getting published? A buncha jerks. Editors and agents and publishers — all grumpy bouncers at the door of this SUPER-ELITE WRITER’S CLUB and any time you try to come on through they Taser you in the face and laugh as you flounder around in the gutter for an hour. The system is a Rube Goldberg machine that powers itself on your shame. Don’t let the bullies win. Better instead to take a nap and forget the whole thing.

20. Have You Been To A Bookstore Recently?

The bookpocalypse is upon us. All Barnes & Noble sells anymore is coffee and board games, except in the back where you can find a couple Franzen novels and 72 copies of a 1989 Pontiac Grand Am user manual. Indie bookstores appear haunted by the damned — it’s all trauma-bombed eyes and trembling gray shades, each of them willing to show you on the doll where Amazon touched them. I drove by a bookstore the other day and it was filled with feral cats. Caution. Cuidado. Verboten.

21. Publishing Is Now One Big-Ass City-Stomping Kaiju Battle

The Big Six publishers have formed into some kind of drunken papier mache Voltron in order to fight the tentacled galactic e-beast known as Amazon, and all us little writers are getting tromped by their stompy feet. Sure, try to show the world your novel: you’ll get lasered in the face. Better to hide in a bunker somewhere, wait out this monster battle. Your wordsmithy will just get you killed.

22. When The Great EMP Comes, All Our E-Books Will Be Destroyed

Print books are being hunted in the streets like stray dogs. E-books will soon be all books, but then eventually China’s going to attack us with an elecromagnetic pulse or Russia will invent an ion cannon like from Star Wars and then all of our books will evaporate in the data-blast. All your hard work will be lost — ephemeral information cinders on the wind. Why even try?

23. And If Not, The Future Will Be All Writer-Bots Anyway

It’s not going to be long before spam-bots figure out how to produce new content. The next wave of self-published books will be written — sorry, “written” — by a hive-mind colony of self-aware spam-bots. They’ll have titles like “The Girl Who Kicked Over The Cialis Machine” or “Ugg Boots Informational Article Post” or “Ituqxufssjcmfnjoet The Real Estate Computer Repair Warrior.” Don’t get in the spam-bots’ way.

24. You Just Don’t Like It Very Much

I don’t think you like writing very much. Mostly you just complain. Boo-hoo pee-pee-pants sobby-face wah-wah existential turmoil. Writing is hard, publishing is mean, my characters won’t listen to me, blah blah blah. I don’t get the sense you really enjoy this thing, so why don’t you take a load off? It’s not like the pay-off from writing is huge. If it’s just an endless gauntlet of miseries, maybe go find something else to do. I’m sure the nearest bank is hiring. Or, as we’ve discussed, hobos do pretty well for themselves. And hoboing is an unbridled delight! Ask any hobo and he’ll say, “At least I’m not a writer.”

25. Because Some Asshole On The Internet Said So

If you’re willing to listen to me, and my words have given you pause, then you really should quit writing. And there’s no shame in that. Most folks who want to do this thing honestly never will — and maybe it’s best to maximize your opportunity and find your bliss somewhere else. But, if you’re reading all this and all you feel is the repeated urge to come find my house and flat-punch me in the trachea, good for you. If your response is to kick and hiss and spit and assert your writerly rights and then push past me so you can plant your pooper down in the chair to write your aforementioned pooper clean off, then to that I give you a high-five, a chest-bump, and a sloppy open-mouthed kiss (here, have my gum). Because to want to do this thing, you need that kind of fuck you, I’mma do it anyway attitude. And the last thing you need to be doing is listening to some Internet Asshole telling you to give up. Shut up. Go write. Be awesome.


Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

25 Ways To Earn Your Audience

I keep noodling on the idea of how you earn — not build, necessarily, but earn — your audience as a creative type. I’m not sure I have all (or any of) the answers, but here’s a good shot at it. Note that this list isn’t meant to be a bunch of checkboxes — you don’t need to do all of these (or even any of them, beyond the first). It’s just meant to offer thoughts and options. Use what you like. Discard the rest.

1. It’s All About The Story

Normally this is the type of thing I’d put as the capstone #25 entry — “Oh, duh, by the way, none of this matters if you write a real turd-bomb of a book” — but it’s too important to put last because for all I know you people will fall asleep around #14. So, let’s deal with it here and now: your best and most noble path to audience-earning is by having something awesome (or many awesome somethings) to give them. Tell the best story you can tell. Above all the social media posturing and bullshit brand-building and stabs at outreach, you need a great “thing” (book, movie, comic, whatever) to be the core of your authorial ecosystem. Tell a great story. Achieve optimal awesomeness. Build audience on the back of your skill and talent and devotion. You can ignore everything else on this list. Do not ignore this one.

2. Swift Cellular Division

The days of writing One Single Thing every year and standing on that single thing as if it were a mighty marble pedestal are long gone. (And, if you ask me, have been gone for a lot longer than everybody says — unless, of course, you’re a bestselling author.) Nowadays, it pays to write a lot. Spackle shut the gaps in your resume. Bridge any chasm in your schedule. This doesn’t mean write badly. It doesn’t mean “churn out endless strings of talentless sputum.” It just means to be generative. ABW: Always Be Writing. Take more shots at the goal for greater likelihood of hitting the goal. One book is less likely to find an audience than three. Put that coffee down. Coffee is for generative penmonkeys only. (Homework: read this article.)

3. Painting With Shotguns

The power of creative diversity will serve you well. The audience doesn’t come to you. You go to the audience. “One book is less likely to find an audience than three?” Correction: “One book is less likely to find an audience than two books, a comic, a blog, a short story collection, a porn movie, various napkin doodles, a celebrity chef trading card set, and hip anonymous graffiti.” Joss Whedon didn’t just write Buffy. He wrote films. And comics. And a webseries. The guy is all over the map. Diversity in nature helps a species survive. So too will it help the tribe of storytellers survive.

4. Sharing Is Caring, Or Some Bullshit Like That

Make your work easy to share. This is triply true for newer storytellers: don’t hide your work behind a wall. Make sure your work is widely available. Don’t make it difficult to pass around. I have little doubt that there’s a strategy where making your story a truly rare bird can serve you — scarcity suggests value and mystery, after all — but the smart play for creative types just setting out is to get your work into as many hands as possible with as little trouble as you can offer. This is true for veteran storytellers, too. Comedian Louis C.K. made it very fucking easy to get his new comedy special on the web. And that served him well both financially and in terms of earning him new audience while rewarding the existing audience.

5. Value At Multiple Tiers

Your nascent audience doesn’t want to have to take out a home equity loan to try your untested work. If you’re a new author and your first book comes out and the e-book is $12.99, well, good luck to you. More to the point: you’re probably fucking fucked (you poor fucker). Now, that might not be in your control, so here’s what you do: have multiple expressions of your awesomeness available at a variety of value tiers. Have something free. Have something out there for a buck or three. Make sure folks can sample your work and still support you should they choose to do so. Be like the drug dealer: first taste is cheap or free, baby.

6. Build The Sandbox

I think I hate the “sandbox” metaphor because, I gotta say, I did not like sandboxes as a kid. What, like I want gritty sand in my asscrack? Hey, great, my Yoda figure’s limbs don’t move well now because he’s got sand in his plastic armpits. Oh, look, Tootsie roll! *nom nom nom* OH GOD CATSHIT. Anyway, as a metaphor I suppose it holds up, so let’s stick with it — these days the audience has a greater percentage of prime movers and participants, people who want to be more involved, who don’t want to just be baby birds waiting for Momma Bird to regurgitate new content into their open gullets. They want some participation in… well, something. The story. The characters. The creation. The author. Needn’t be all of the above, but something is better than nothing. Let them in. Let them invest emotionally and intellectually.

7. Sometimes It’s Just About Not Discouraging

Even if you don’t want to encourage — damn sure don’t discourage. Authors who bristle against fan-fiction are authors who don’t appreciate how wonderful it is to have an active and engaged audience.

8. Be You

(Ignore the fact that rhymes with “pee yoo!”) The best audience isn’t just an audience that exists around a single work but rather, an ecosystem that connects to the creator. The audience that hangs with a creator will follow said creator from work to work. That means who you are as a storyteller matters — this is not to suggest that you need to be the center of a cult of personality but rather the humble creator of many things. You’re the hub of your creative life, with spokes leading to many creative expressions rather than just one. Put yourself out there. And be you. Be authentic. Don’t just be a “creator.” You’re not a marketing mouthpiece. You’re a human. For all the good and the bad.

9. Um, Unless “You” Are A “Total Dick”

If you’re a total asshole, then it might be wise to sew that shut and instead just… make up a persona. Or have a computer do it for you. Maybe an AI? Hell, hire a person to be the public non-asshole face-of-you. This is probably bad advice because I can name a handful of total dickhole writers who do really well. They are true to themselves and are, in fact, totally authentic fuckheads who happen to sell a lot of books. I’m just trying to prevent there from being more jerks and jackasses in the world, thanks. Is that so wrong?

10. Be A Fountain, Not A Drain

Put differently: be a fountain, not a drain. Take all that negative shit, throw it in a picnic basket, duct tape it shut and feed it to a starving bear. The world is home to enough rank and rancid human flatulence that you don’t need to add to it. An audience is likely to respond to negativity in a negative way — is that who you want to be? Fuck that. Go positive. Talk about the things you love rather than the things you hate. Voicing your insecurities and fears and sorrows is okay from time to time but soon as it starts to overwhelm, you’re just going to start bumming people out. Who wants to engage with a sad, simpering panda?

11. Have Opinions

Some authors are all afraid of having opinions. That by saying they vote Democrat or go to Church every Sunday or they prefer Carolina barbecue over Texas barbecue that they’ll collapse their delicate little author platform (which is clearly made of fragile bird bones) and end up alienating the audience. I urinate on the head of that idea. Your audience is way tougher than you think. And if they’re willing to abandon you because you’re going to vote for Ron Paul or didn’t like The Avengers then they were probably going to ditch you anyway.Opinions are fine. They make you human. Why sterilize yourself and your beliefs? The key to having an opinion is obeying Wheaton’s Law: don’t be a dick and a corollary, Wendig’s Tenet, don’t have and/or offer crazy-person opinions. “I think all the Jews should be sent to the moon” is not a sane position, so maybe you just want to button that one up and go away.

12. The Passion Of The Penmonkey

To add onto that last point: reveal your passion to the world. Be passionate about your story. About other stories. About… well, whatever the fuck it is that makes your grapefruit squirt. That energy is infectious. And don’t you want to infect the audience with your own special brand of syphil… uhhh, “passion?”

13. Engagement and Interaction

Very simply: talk to people. Social media — though I’m starting to hate that phrase and I think we should call it something like the “digital conversation matrix” or maybe just “THE CYBERORGY” (all caps necessary) — is a great place in which to be you and interact with folks and be more than just a mouthpiece for your work. The audience wants to feel connected to you. Like with those freaky tentacular hair-braids in Avatar. Get out there. Hang out. Be you. Interact. Engage. Get sloppy in the CYBERORGY.

14. Head’s Up: Social Media Is Not Your Priority

Special attention must be made: social media is a side dish, it is not your main burrito. See #1 on this list.

15. Fuck The Numbers

Just as I exhort you to be a human being and not an author carved out of marble, I suggest you look at all those with whom you interact on social media as people, too. They’re not resources. They’re not a number. They’re not “followers” — yes, fine, they might be called that, but (excepting a few camouflaged spam-bots hell-bent on dissecting your life and, one day, your actual body) they’re people. Sure, as you gaze out over an audience the heads and faces start to blur together in as if in a a pointillist painting, but remember that the audience is made up of people. AND PEOPLE ARE DELICIOUS. Uhh. I mean, people are really cool.

16. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help

An earnest plea to your existing audience to help you find and earn new audience would not go remiss, provided you’re not a total shit-cock about it.

17. Share Knowledge

As you learn things about the process, share them with others. Free exchange of information is awesome — if I may toot the horn of one of my publishers, this is why Evil Hat gets a lot of love and continues to find new fans. Evil Hat shares all the data they can manage. It’s insightful and compelling and human. This doesn’t mean being a pedant about it — “Here are my experiences” is a lot different than “YOU’RE WRONG AND HERE’S WHY, LACKWIT.” It just means being open and honest. It means being useful. We like useful people. We like folks who will walk out onto the ice floe naked and report back with their findings. “Day Three: Testicles have crawled up inside my trachea. Seals have eaten my feet. Send cookies.”

18. Shake Hands, Kiss Babies

The real world is awesome. They call it “meatspace” because you can go out there and eat meat. You can even hunt and kill your own sources of meat. And, while out there, you are encouraged to share meat with other human beings. Kiss some hands and shake some babies. Face-to-face interaction is probably worth more than that you get over social media. And, if someone responds poorly to your physical presence, kill them. They then become meat which you may eat and share with other humans. Mmm. Long pork.

19. Embrace Feedback

Reviews, critiques, commentary, conversation — feedback is good even when it’s bad. When it’s bad, all you have to do is ignore or. Or politely say, “I’ll consider that!” and in the privacy of your own home print out the feedback and urinate on it with wanton disregard. When it’s good, it’s fucking stellar, and connects you all the more deeply to the audience. The audience is now a part of your feedback loop, like or or not.

20. Do Set Boundaries

That feedback loop is not absolute. I’m not a strong believer in creative integrity as an indestructible, indefatigable “thing” — but, I recognize that being a single-minded creator requires some ego. Further, the reality is that once something is “out there” it is what it is and there ain’t poop-squat you can do about it. So, you have to know when to turn off comments or back away from social media or just set personal and unspoken boundaries for yourself. Just because we interact with our audience doesn’t mean we are subject to their stompy boots and groping hands. I mean, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

21. Be Generous With Time And Tale

Put yourself and your work out there. To reviewers. To interviewers. To that hobo on the street who will run up to bike messengers and beat them about the head and neck with your book.

22. Foster Other Creative Types

You’re not a lone author batting back the tides with his magnum opus novel. You’re not the only creator who’s ever wanted to write a movie or ink a comic book. Other creative types are out there. And you love them. They’re why you do what you do — I’m a writer because other writers have given me so much and shown me the way. Like that time Stephen King and I went fishing down at the creek and he taught me how to bait a hook and then afterward we made out under the willow tree and we both fought a giant spider in the sewers. Or something. I may be misremembering. Point is, you have peers in the creative realm and you’re also audience yourself — so, forge the community foster other creators. Don’t just bring people to your tent. Point them to other tents, too.

23. Don’t Wrassle Gators If You’re Not A Good Gator Wrassler

What I mean is, don’t try to be something you’re not. If you’re not good in public, for fuck’s sake, don’t go out in public. If writing guest blogs is not your thing… well, maybe don’t write a guest blog. Again, this isn’t a list where you need to check off every box. These are just options. Avoid those that plunge you into a churning pool of discomfort. You don’t want to lose audience more audience than you earn.

24. Take Your Time

Earning your audience won’t happen overnight. You don’t plant a single seed and expect to see a lush garden grown up by morning. This takes time and work and patience and, y’know, you earn the attention of other fine humans one set of eyeballs at a time. It’s why you put yourself out there again and again.

25. Have Fun, For Fuck’s Sake

If it feels like what you’re doing is some kind of onerous, odious chore, I’m going to tune out. OMG A THOUSAND SISYPHEAN MISERIES, you cry, wailing and gnashing your teeth with every grumpy tweet and every miserably-written short story. Hey. Relax. Enjoy yourself. This isn’t supposed to be torture. You should have fun for two reasons: first, because, people can sense when you’re just phoning it in or worse, when you’re just a mope. Second, because fun is fun. Do you hate fun? Why? I like writing. I like putting my work out there. I like interacting with people in person and online. If you don’t like these things? Don’t do them! Why would you punish yourself like that? It’s like watching you stand there stuffing your face full of candy you hate. “Mmmphh these Swedish fish are so gross grrpphmble oh god stupid gross Necco wafers mmmphhchewchewchew I hate myself so bad right now.” Don’t put yourself through that. And don’t put your (potential) audience through that, either.


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