Tag: advice (page 9 of 25)

The other day, I asked where lots of folks had problems with their stories. “Plot” and “structure” came up a lot (and I feel your pain). Hence, here we are with 25 things you might wanna know about narrative structure.

1. Every Story Has Structure

Whether you put it there or not, no story goes from start to finish without structure. Structure is either something you design as a storyteller or something that just happens. Sometimes the structure is the right one. Sometimes it’s the wrong one. (You’ll know it’s wrong because the story will suddenly feel like it’s got a dick growing out of its forehead. “Something’s off,” you’ll say. And the story will respond, “Maybe it’s the swinging forehead dick?”) If you have a good gut for a story, then you will intuit a strong structure as you go. If your instincts aren’t that sharp, it helps to design the story’s structure before moving forward.

2. Think Of It As Story Architecture

Structure serves story; story does not serve structure. A cathedral is built toward certain considerations: the beauty of God, the presence of God’s story, the need for acoustics, the accommodation of seating, the sacrificial altar, the DJ booth, and so on. You design a structure to highlight the type of story you’re telling. Using a non-linear structure in a mystery story is so that you maximize on the uncertainty and use the rejiggered narrative to create suspense. Structure has purpose. Structure is where art and craft collide.

3. The Two Essential Pieces

Most stories have at their core two critical components: The Fuck Up, and Trying To Fix The Fuck Up. Something goes wrong or something changes — a divorce, the Apocalypse, a lost child, someone puts ALF back on the air — and then one or several characters strive to fix that which has gone wrong. (In effect, reversing or correcting — or sometimes exploring — the narrative change of state.) Maybe they succeed. Maybe they fail. Maybe they achieve a Pyrrhic victory where they succeed but not without significant cost. What this really reveals are the most critical components to structural storytelling: a conflict is essential as is the character agency to correct that conflict. Without those, your structure is naught but a straight line. A straight line is the most boring construction a story can take. Aim for any shape but straight.

4. Said Differently, From Order To Chaos

Storytelling is the push-and-pull of order and chaos, the horny tumble and tangle of limbs as each struggles to overcome the other. Signal moves up and down, transitioning from a clear frequency to an inky squiggle of chaotic uncertainty which in turn reveals the structure. And that structure highlights the up-and-down and push-and-pull. The flat lines of order give way to the ascent (or more properly, descent) into chaos.

5. Narrative Measurement

I have explained this before, but fuck it, you’re duct-taped to that chair nice and tight and I know you can’t squirm away HA HA HA: narrative, like all things, can be measured. You don’t have to measure it, same as you don’t have to measure that fish you caught or the fishing rod that caught it (insert your own keenly-veiled sexual metaphor here!). If you do measure, know that beats make scenes, scenes make sequences, sequences make acts, and between each act is a turn of sorts, a shifting of the story’s hips, cocking this way, or that. Ignore it if you like, but if you’re building a house, you might want to know what a brick looks like.

6. Sliced In Thrice Nicely With My Knife

You could argue that all stories fall into three acts — and, in filmmaking, if they don’t fall that way they’re damn well pushed. Act One is the Set-Up (first 25%), Act Two is the Confrontation (next 50%), Act Three is the Resolution (final 25%). It’s an imperfect description and damn sure not the only description, and in the grand scheme of things you could, if you chose, distill it down to beginning, middle, and end.

7. Microcosmos

Whatever structure you give to a story is also a structure you can give to an individual act. In this way, each act is like a story within a story with its own ups and downs and conflicts and resolutions. As an act closes the tale told there either evolves or transforms entirely to manifest new aspects of the tale. For an example, look to the stages of our lives: child to teen to adult to doddering Depends-wearing gadabout (or at least that’s how I hope my own final arc plays out). While we remain the same person through such life changes, our story grows and shifts and becomes something else. Thus is the way a story’s acts flow into one another.

8. Complexity Breeds Complexity

The more complicated your story, the more acts that story is likely to feature — it’s like how you get gremlins wet, they just make more goddamn gremlins? Like that. A bigger, stranger, crazier story is likely to demand a bigger, crazier, stranger structure. Reason a film tends to only have three acts is because a film is around 100 minutes long — and because audiences crave the comfort of simplicity for a number of reasons good and bad. Shakespeare, for instance, rocked a five-act structure.

9. Omne Trium Perfectum

That’s Latin for, “I’m sorry, there are two girls in my bathroom.” *checks notes* No, wait, that can’t be right. Oh! Oh. Here it is. Loosely translated, “Every set of three is complete.” Even if you ignore all other structural components, this is a good one to keep an eye on — the Rule of Threes suggests that all aspects of your story should have at least three beats. Anything that has any value or importance should be touched on three times and, further, evolve a little bit each time. Every character arc, ever act, every scene, every setting, every motif or theme, needs you the storyteller to call it back at least three times.

10. The Power Of The Pivot

The story must from time to time pivot — as the saying goes, the tiger must change his panties. *checks notes* Damnit, who wrote these? Stripes. Stripes. The tiger must change his stripes. Jesus. This is true of characters, too. Or the world and its rules. Change is a critical element to storytelling, but you cannot change aspects wildly and completely. It must be gradual and believable, moving only a single phase shift over, the way water becomes ice — it’s an expected and believable shift. It’s why I prefer to think of this and call it a pivot. That word intimates a turn of the body, not a dizzying backflip. Pivot points will mark those narrative moments when your structure turns and things change. When one act becomes another, for instance, that is when the story pivots for the audience. This could mean an evolution of conflict, a revelation of new information, a major character life change. Any major shift in the story will do.

11. Escalations And Reversals

Again, if you don’t care much about formal structure, just tune your intestinal frequency to these two ideas: first, the story must escalate, or in all-caps-speak, SHIT GOTTA GET DOUBLE-BIG FUCKED UP YO; second, the story must feature occasional reversals where One State (order, victory, hope) becomes the Opposite State (chaos, loss, despair), or in all-caps-speak, YO BRO THE STORY SWITCHED IT AND FLIPPED IT AND BOGGLED MY SHIT SON. Dang, if I could write a novel in all caps, I would.

12. Why The Ejaculatory Arc Works

We’ll talk a wee bit more about Freytag and his arcing glob of narrative jizz (it was Douglas Rushkoff who I first heard use the term “male ejaculatory arc” to describe the standard structural shape of modern narrative) in just a moment, but the reason this general shape works is because it reveals escalation — things grow worse or more complicated or more intense as the tale moves forward. A story in the reverse would be anti-climactic, which is I guess to say, like an ejaculation on rewind.

13. The Arc As Microstructure

Hard time thinking about plotlines or subplots or act structures? Think instead of how a story comprises a number of smaller and larger arcs — an arc just being a component of your story that begins and ends (or, even better, rises and falls). Characters, themes, events, settings — these can have arcs. Some fill a whole story, some are just little belt loops popping up here and there. Some arcs begin where others end. Many overlap, rubbing elbows or shoulders or other filthier parts. Television is a great place to study arcs (and if I may suggest a show: Justified, on FX). Comic books, too.

14. For Every Story, A Structure

Every story demands a different structure. No universal structure exists. It’s why that mopey old saw about there being only seven plots or some bullshit is, well, bullshit. If you distill them down to their barest (and in many ways most meaningless) essence, sure, that’s true. But the art is in the arrangement. The structure you build around the plot to support the story is where the elegance lies.

15. I’m Talking Motherfucking Freytag, Y’all

One structure you can look at: Freytag’s Pyramid. Or Triangle. Or Pubic Thatch. Whatever you care to call it. Gustav Freytag said, Mein Gott, all diesen plottenheimer schmeckt der same to meinein mouthenpartsen. Translated, every story features five key structural beats mirroring five acts: Exposition (introduce characters and world) –> Rising Action (conflict creates tension) –> Climax (confrontation leads to a major change) –> Falling Action (conflict resolves) –> Denouement (dangly bits are all tied-up or trimmed away). It is, like all structural explorations, equal parts “useful” and “a garbage scow set aflame.” Not every plot fits. Further, modern storytelling (which usually trims five acts to three) pushes that climax further toward the end, which means the falling action and denouement get squished, as if between two Sumo wrestlers.

16. From Five To Seven

Behold, a rough seven-act structure: Intro (duh) –> Problem or Attack (duh) –> Initial Struggle (character first tussles with source of conflict) –> Complications (conflict worsens, deepens, changes) –> Failed Attempts (oops, that didn’t work) –> Major Crisis (holy goatfucker shitbomb, everything’s gone pear-shaped) –> Climax and Resolution (duh). Not a bad look at the way many modern stories play out.

17. Ain’t Nothin’ But An Aristotle Thang

Two words: anagnorisis and peripeteia. Both from Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (and two words that if you get in Scrabble, you automatically win a balloon ride or something). Anagnorisis is a discovery made by a character. Peripeteia is a dramatic change (either positive or negative) within the story. Each feeds into the other in the same way I spoke of order and chaos earlier — a character’s discovery may lead to a change in fortune, or a change in fortune may lead to a new discovery. These two things tumble around and around like a pair of hedgehogs battling one another in a washing machine until finally they reach catastrophe, which in Aristotelian terms is what closes the story — either the character wins or is defeated by the conflict or by himself (and in true tragic form, the character often defeats himself).

18. The Monomyth: Storytelling Epiphany Or Sublime Bullshit — You Decide!

Ever since Star Wars hit, a lot has been made of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey — AKA, “The Monomyth.” It is neither The Best Thing Since Blowjobs or The Worst Thing To Happen To Modern Fiction. It’s just a thing — one more structural consideration you can choose to use or toss in the medical waste bin at your local health clinic. While it’s got a lot of extra fiddly bits, the Monomyth can be distilled as: Departure (hero leaves normalcy and comfort on an adventure spurred by some call to action) –> Initiation (hero meets trials and tribulations both personal and impersonal) –> Return (hero comes back to the world changed and brings with him boons for his buddies). It’s got 17 total steps (or 8, if you want the distilled version). Want to examine its application? Fuck George Lucas. Seek James Joyce.

19. The Morphology Of The Folk-Tale

I do not have the space or the time in this list to explore all 31 of Vladimir Propp’s structural steps which are meant to explicate the narrative nature of folk-tales (Russian folk-takes in particular). I mean, dang, I got shit to do. Like eat a sandwich. Or stare at the floor. Or gloomily masturbate. It’s a very specific rendering of narrative structure, but it could be enlightening in some fashion. I’ll trust your Google-Fu to get started.

20. Did You See Last Night’s Episode?

And no, by “episode” I do not mean, “that time when Chuck went apeshit at Arby’s and started slathering his nude goblin body in Horsey Sauce.” Different kind of episode. No, here I mean episode-as-narrative-structure. Television and comic books tend to be episodic, with any serialized elements packaged away as story arcs (noted earlier). Episodic storytelling tends to chop up each tale in neatly-packaged plot pieces, with each piece theoretically resolving by its end and then together forming a larger story. Generally, television works on acts separated out by commercial breaks. Episodic narrative may make your story feel more manageable — but, at the same time, placing an episodic structure inside a non-episodic format (say, a novel or a film) is likely to feel artificial and/or inauthentic.

21. My Porn Director Name Will Be “Therefore Butts”

Click here and get schooled by the South Park guys. The key thing they’re getting across with this is that scenes and events in storytelling don’t happen independently of one another. There must exist a chain of cause and effect, of action and opposite reaction, of consequence. Dominoes do not fall separate from one another. They fall against one another. Embroider that profound shit on a throw pillow.

22. From Aperitif To Digestif

Fuck you, I like food metaphors. So, here’s one — consider how the structure of a seven-course meal works in terms of storytelling. You start with a Aperitif (guests become acquainted over a drink) and progress through a series of dishes meant to both embody the meal and challenge the palate, with certain contextual shifts in taste (sorbet and/or cheese) to punctuate larger events. Dessert rolls along as kind of a climactic moment and then coffee and the digestif appear to give one final strong dose of taste-punching goodness in order to help the eater digest the meal he just consumed. You could chart it on a graph and it might look similar to narrative structure. Then again, maybe I’m just hungry.

23. You Can’t Structuralize Me, Man

Non-linear storytelling would seem to have a non-traditional structure, and that’s true, to a point. But what you’ll ultimately find is that, while the plot events may bounce around like a meth-cranked dormouse, the structure that occurs is still one that you can identify. (Which tells us that plot and narrative structure are there to complement one another but are not actually the same thing.)

24. Tend To Your Organic Story Garden, You Goddamn Hippie

Writing without structure is a challenge equivalent to writing with structure — if you do it right, you get something that feels organic and unexpected. If you do it poorly, you’ll end up with the storytelling equivalent of the Winchester House: doors that never open, stairways that end in walls, rooms that serve little purpose. If one method’s not working? Duh, try the other. Which leads me to…

25. The Final Word

If the application of structure helps you tell a better tale: use it. If you find it artificial and it only hampers your efforts: kick it in the mouth and chuck it down an open manhole cover. This stuff isn’t here to oppress you — it’s a tool for when you need it and invisible when you don’t. Some stories will call for the strong spine of structure. Some stories need to be altogether hazier, stranger, less pin-down-able. Just know that if you’re having some trouble grasping how the plot moves from one piece to another, it might be time to take a gander at borrowing from the many structural storytelling examples that exist. Either that, or maybe you need to eat a baggie of magic mushrooms or something. Your call.

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The epic mega-book: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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(Note: this post relates mostly to fiction authors seeking literary agents, though certainly has some bleed-over regarding those with screenplays or non-fiction proposals or what-not.)

1. No, You Don’t Need An Agent

Let’s just get that out of the way right now. You do not require an agent to survive or be successful in this business. If you are without an agent you will not be shot in the streets by roving gangs of publisher-thugs. It is a myth that you cannot get published or produced without an agent to get you there. You may want an agent. (I have one, and am happy I do.) But you do not, strictly speaking, require one.

2. Do Some Due Diligence

Heh. Doo-doo. Ahem. What I mean is, do your goddamn homework. Agents get a rap for being elitists or gatekeepers or whatever, but you have to have some sympathy for what they do: they basically open their digital doors to whatever anybody wants to send them. An agent says, “I represent literary fiction,” and just the same they get flooded with sci-fi and screenplays and kid’s books and long-lost Tesla blueprints and insane schizoid scrawls written in crayon and possum vomit. The agent’s job half the time is to pick through the mud-glop slurry to try to find the few potential pearls hidden deep in the mire. If every writer did research and learned to target the right agents for their manuscripts, the whole thing would probably run a lot more cleanly. So: do your research. Why willingly advertise yourself as a total dickbrain?

3. Put The “Social” In “Social” Media

Many agents are on social media. (And one might wonder why you’d want an agent who isn’t on social media.) Follow them. Find out what they’re looking for. Discover whether or not they’re closed to submissions. See if they have any pet peeves (like, say, you snail-mailing a query filled with glitter and a “mysterious white powder”). You can even — gasp — ask them questions.

4. (But Please Don’t Stalk Them)

The rules of our polite society still apply. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be an asshole. Act like a professional. Do not hide in an agent’s shrubs or sneak onto their fire escape. C’mon. Don’t be weird.

5. If They Say Jump, You Ask, “Can I Do A Karate Kick To Show You My Moves?”

Individual agents ask for individual things. This one wants the first chapter. That one wants the first five pages. A third doesn’t want any part of your manuscript until requested. A fourth asks that you send him a query while the moon’s in Sagittarius and then only via snail mail and using a query letter scented with the musk glands of a pubescent ermine. (Though why you’d want an agent who still only accepts queries via the Pony Express is between you and your Penmonkey Jesus.) If you’re going to query a specific agent, perform the particular tasks that agent requires. Your mother thinks you’re a rare and beautiful bird. An agent just thinks you’re another cuckoo.

6. Repeat After Me: “Money In, Not Money Out”

You do not pay an agent. If an agent asks for money to look at your submission or anything like that, you can be sure he’s either a) a scam artist or b) really bad at his job. You want neither of these things. Your relationship to an agent is the same as it is to a publisher: money in, not money out. They help you get paid, and an agent takes a cut of that. Easy-peasy stung-by-beesy.

7. My Query Formula

I split my query into three portions: the Hook, the Pitch, the Bio. All bookended by the usual pleasantries and greetings and gratitude. The Hook is a single-sentence logline that is meant to grab the agent by the short-and-curlies. The Pitch is a subsequent paragraph exploding out the Hook (synopsizing in a single paragraph as opposed to a single sentence). The Bio is a very short closing paragraph about you. You want to keep the whole thing contained on a single page, which means around 350-400 words max. You want to write with confidence, but not ego. You do not want to presume to tell the agent how to do the agent’s job. Simple. Direct. Clear. Confident. And again, blah blah blah, don’t be a dick, don’t be crazy, this is a professional document, etcetera and whatever. Oh: QueryShark. And AgentQuery. Love both.

8. Agents Are Trained To Smell Your Flopsweat

Another note about “confidence:” agents have powerful sniffers and can smell the stink of your desperation from three blocks away. I’ve read too many queries that have a wishy-washy vibe, that come spackled with fear and uncertainty and bring this sense of laying prostrate before the pedestal and hoping to be allowed to make with the slobbery ring-kisses. If you think your work is good enough to query, then write the query with that kind of authority. If you don’t think that it’s good enough to query? Then it probably isn’t, so don’t waste their time. Or, more importantly, your own.

9. Agents Have Seen Everything, But They Haven’t Seen You

Agents have seen it all. They are the first line of defense in the war against Bad Books and Shitty Storytelling. It’s a wonder that some of them don’t just snap and try to take out half of New York City with a dirty bomb made of radioactive stink-fist query letters and cat turd manuscripts. That’s a scary thought: they’ve seen everything already. But the one thing they haven’t seen is you. Just as I exhort authors to put themselves on the page of their stories, I say the same regarding your communication with potential agents. Described more directly: you have a voice, so use it.

10. The Polite Reminder

You will at times send out a query and hear nothing. Many agents will suggest a response time on their agency websites or social media pages, and most are reasonable (though every once in a while you read a whopper: “You will receive a response to your query sometime after the year when we first settle on Mars and start flying to work with jetpacks”). If you pass this window of time and have not heard anything, a very short and polite and totally not-crazy reminder is entirely appropriate. If you don’t hear anything after that, well — maybe time to write that agent off and concentrate your fire on another star destroyer.

11. You Manuscript Is Not Half-a-Dick

Do not try to query an incomplete and unedited manuscript. Don’t. Don’t. Seriously. Behold my steely gaze and my all caps blog-making: DON’T. You wouldn’t try to sell somebody a half-eaten cupcake. You wouldn’t wave around a half-a-dick. If you’re fortunate enough that the agent requests a full manuscript, you best be ready to deliver on that delightful demand. Oh, and make sure it’s formatted correctly, okay? I don’t know that an agent will toss your shit in a trash-can just because the manuscript font is Times New Roman instead of Courier (I think mine was in TNR, actually), but they will ditch it if the formatting makes reading it feel like you’re burning your eyes with lit cigarettes.

12. Agents Are Readers

It’s easy to imagine agents as iron-hearted gatekeepers guarding the gates of Publishing Eden with their swords of fire: marketing angels serving the God of the Almighty Dollar. Most of the agents I know and have met are readers first. They do this because they love this, not because it pays them in private jets and jacuzzis filled with 40-year-Macallan Scotch. They like to read. They love books. Which is awesome.

13. That Said, This Is A Business

Agents are called upon to make business decisions, too. That’s the sad fact of the penmonkey existence: your wordsmithy may be top-notch, your storytelling may be the bee’s pajamas, but if doesn’t seem like it’ll survive in the marketplace, then that’s just how the dung-ball rolls. They make these decisions based on what one assumes is past experience, current trends and a dollop of gut instinct. Just the same, it doesn’t mean they’re right — it’s not like they run your manuscript through a Publi-Bot 9009 and he BEEP BOOP BEEP computes the chances of your manuscript being a success or failure. Rejections from agents that suggest the story and writing are solid but they’re not sure it’ll sell is a sign to do one of three things: keep querying, try out some smaller publishers, or self-publish.

14. Your Heartbreak Is Their Heartbreak

Agents understand rejection. They have to — they go through it same as you do. They rep authors and the books of those authors and they write pitch letters same as you write query letters and they send those letters out to editors and they go through rejection same as you — they may be one step removed (as in, an agent did not write the book) but they’ve invested time and patience and blood and sweat into it, too. A book they rep gets rejected is sad for them same as it’s sad for you — and not just as lost money.

15. Hot Author-On-Author Action

Author referrals matter. They are not the end-all be-all of everything, but I know of many authors who ended up with agents when another author recommended them. That said, don’t cozy up to authors on the sole hope they’ll refer you to an agent — that’s a little sleazy. You gotta at least buy them drinks and dinner first. Me, I demand nothing less than a Tijuana panther show. What? Donkey shows are so passé!

16. A Deal In Hand Is Better Than A Bird In Hand Because, Y’know, Bird Poop

This is one of those paradoxical conundrums like, “Every job requires experience but a job is the only way to get experience.” The story goes that it’s easier to get an agent if you already have a deal, but of course a lot of publishers don’t offer deals to unagented authors. (Further twisting the nipple are the stories that pop up: “I had a deal in hand, went to agents, and they still turned me down.”) If you can get a deal pre-agent, then it’s a good time to get an agent — but, just the same, don’t believe anybody who tells you that it’s a necessary component. I, among many authors, did not have a deal in hand and yet still have an agent.

17. The Bones Of Literary Agents And Dodo Birds

Are literary agents going to go extinct in the New Publishing Media Regime? Fuck if I know. What am I, an oracle? Sure, I sometimes huff printer ink and decipher the secret hidden meanings in coffee grounds and mouse scat, but that doesn’t mean I have a good answer here. My guess is that agents aren’t going anywhere, just as the whole of the publishing industry isn’t going anywhere. It may slim down. It may cull those who are not forward-thinking. It may force them to adopt new roles. But I do not believe literary agents are on the endangered list. Now pass the printer ink. DADDY NEEDS TO GET GOOFY.

18. Some Agents Are Total Dickbags

Rant time. Some agents get the reputation as cold and callous rainmaking gatekeepers because they act like it. Not every agent is the shining embodiment of good-hearted book-reading do-it-cause-we-love-it folk. Some agents won’t write you back. Some will snark off about authors on social media (agents, seriously, please don’t do this — just as you wouldn’t want an author to do this to you, you shouldn’t do this to an author). Some will string you along. When I went out to agents with BLACKBIRDS, I was a little amazed that while agents demand professional behavior, several chose not to be professional in return — and we’re talking agents who belong to big agencies, not like, some sleazy bookmonger from Topeka. Some strung me along. Some requested full manuscripts while at the same time forgetting I ever existed. Some responded six, even eight months after I already had an agent. I’d say somewhere between 10-20% of my total experience with agents was negative. The occasional agent is an unprofessional prick.

19. (But That’s Just The Way People Are)

One bad agent doesn’t make all agents bad. I’ve seen reprehensible actions by publishers. I’ve seen asshole authors and woefully unprofessional self-publishers. Don’t let bad examples be representative of the whole.

20. Pick Proper

Just gonna put this out there: a bad agent will do more harm to your career than no agent at all. You should find the right match. Find an agent with whom you get along. Consult your intestinal flora.

21. A Good Agent Cultivates The Author

A good agent cares about the author, not just about the author as a delivery system for a single book (or, perhaps, a single book that comes inconveniently paired with the author). The right agent has your career in mind. The right agent buys you liquor and puppies. Okay, maybe not so much with the liquor and puppies. But if any agents are reading this, I’m just saying: let’s all get on board the liquor-and-puppies train.

22. A Good Agent Defends The Writer Against The System

I don’t mean to get all Rage-Against-The-Machiney on you, but the traditional publishing system can, at times, be a bit predatory. This is by no means universal but once in a while you hear a real horror story about an author who ends up signing a contract that basically guarantees that if his book makes it into print he has name his first son after the publisher and if the doesn’t become a NYT bestseller the author has to come and wash his editor’s car. An agent defends the author against such predation. The agent helps the author not just get a good deal but the best deal.  The agent makes sure the author doesn’t get fucked.

23. A Good Agent Is Savvy Toward The Future

Agents who look down on new media? BZZT. Agents who look down on self-publishing? BZZT. Agents who are afraid of digital? BZZT. Authors need to be much more versatile and media-savvy in this day and age to survive, and agents have to do the same. Don’t sign on with a backwards-looking agent. You want an agent who knows how to duck and roll, not stand there and get punched.

24. Sometimes, You Need To Break Up

If your agent isn’t working for you or you’re not simpatico with the agent, maybe it’s time for an old-fashioned break-up. It happens. It has to be hard to do (I’ve never done it and have no reason to do so), but why stay in a business relationship that isn’t serving either of your needs? Just don’t send a drunken text at 3:30 in the morning. Have some class. Go there in person and throw a potted plant through their window! (Okay, maybe don’t do that either. What do I know? I’m drunk right now!)

25. One Word: Symbiosis

The relationship between writer and agent is a two-way street. While it’s true that the agent works for you and you don’t work for the agent, this is still a relationship based on mutual gain — neither is the other’s bitch, but both should listen to and respect the other, even if it is the author who has final say (as it is the author’s life and career). I’m not suggesting that the author is crocodile and the agent is little bird who picks the croc’s teeth, but I am suggesting that each feeds off the relationship in positive ways. If you find that the relationship isn’t symbiotic, then maybe it’s time to take another look at #24, dontcha think?

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

The newest: 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 epic mega-book: 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

Consider this, if you will, a sequel to the gone-viral post, “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — sort of a mirrored-reflection be-a-fountain-not-a-drain version.

Now, a warning, just in the rare instance you don’t come to this site all that often:

Here There Be Bad Words. Naughty profanity. The sinner’s tongue. Lots of “eff-this” and “ess-that.”

If you’re not a fan of profanity, no harm, no foul. But you might want to turn your tender gaze away before your eyeballs foam up and ooze out of your poor innocent head.

Please to enjoy.

1. Start Taking Yourself Seriously

This is a real thing, this writing thing, if you let it be. It’s not just about money or publication — it’s about telling the kind of stories only you can tell. Few others are going to take you seriously, so give them a 21-middle-finger-salute and do for yourself what they won’t: demonstrate some self-respect.

2. Start Taking The Time

Said it before, will say it again: we all get 24 hours in our day. Nobody has extra time. You must claim time for yourself and your writing. Time is a beast stampeding ever forward and we’re all on its back. Don’t get taken for a ride. Grab the reins. Whip that nag to go where you want her to go. Take control. Hell, pull out a big ol’ electric knife and carve off a quivering lardon of fatty Time Bacon all for yourself. (As a sidenote, the Germans had a name for that phenomenon: Zeitspeck. True story I just made up!)

3. Start Trying New Stuff

Branch out. Get brave. Look at all the ways you write now — “I write in the morning, sipping from my 64-ounce 7-11 Thirst Aborter of Mountain Dew, and I pen my second-person POV erotic spy novels and it earns me a comfortable living.” Good for you. Now punch that shit right in the ear. Okay, I’m not saying you need to change directions entirely — what kind of advice is that? “Hey, that thing that works for you? Quit doing it.” I’m just saying, mix it up. Make some occasional adjustments. Just as I exhort people to try new foods or travel destinations or ancient Sumerian sexual positions, I suggest writers try new things to see if they can add them to their repertoire. Write 1000 words a day? Try to double that. Don’t use an outline? Write with one, just once. Single POV character? Play with an ensemble. Mix it the fuck up. Don’t have just One True Way of doing things. Get crazy. Don’t merely think outside of the box. Set the box adrift on a river and shoot it with fire arrows. Give the box a motherfucking Viking funeral.

4. Start Telling Stories In New Ways

Another entry from the “Set The Box On Fire” Department — with the almost obscene advances in personal technology (the smartphone alone has become more versatile than most home computers), it’s time to start thinking about how we can tell stories in new ways. A story needn’t be contained to a book or a screen. A story can be broken apart. A story can travel. Your tale can live across Twitter and Foursquare and Tumblr and an Android app and Flickr and HTML5 and then it can take the leap away from technology and move to handwritten journals and art installations and bathroom walls and — well, you get the idea. Let this be the year that the individual author need no longer be constrained by a single medium. Transmedia is now in the hands of individuals. So give it a little squeeze, and find new ways to tell old stories.

5. Start Reading Poetry

Poetry? Yes, poetry. I know. I see that look you’re giving me. “What’s next, Wendig?” you ask. “We all hold hands and dance around the maypole in our frilly blouses and Wonder Woman underoos?” YES EXACTLY. I mean — uhh, what? No. Ahem. All I’m saying is, all writing deserves a touch — just a tickle — of poetry. And do not conflate “poetry” with “purple prose” — such bloated artifice has no room in your work.

6. Start Saying Something

You are your writing and your writing is you, and if you’re not using your writing to say something — to speak your mind, to fertilize the fictional ground with your idea-seed in an act of literary Onanism — then what’s the damn point? You have a perspective. Use it.

7. Start Discovering What You Know

Ah, that old chestnut. “Write what you know.” Note the lack of the word only in there. We don’t write only what we know because if we did that we’d all be writing about writers, like Stephen King does. (Or, we’d be writing about sitting at our computers, checking Twitter in our underwear and smelling of cheap gin and despair.) The point is that we have experience. We’ve seen things, done things, learned things. Extract those from your life. Bleed them into your work. Don’t run from who you are. Bolt madly toward yourself. Then grab all that comprises who you are and body-slam it down on the page.

8. Start Writing From A Place Of Pain

You also know pain. So, get it out there. Don’t build a wall and hide from it. Scrape away the enamel of that tooth and expose the raw nerve — meaning, it goes into what you’re writing. Our pain is part of what makes us, and if we speak to that honestly in our writing, the reader will get that. Audiences can smell your inauthentic contrivances like a dead hamster in the heating duct. A reader wants to see their story in your story. They want to relate their pain to the pain on the page, and if that pain isn’t honest — meaning, it isn’t born out of experience or empathy — then your work will come across as hollow as a gutted pumpkin.

9. Start Upping Your Game

I don’t care if you’re good at what you do. I don’t care if you’re great at what you do. You can always improve. You can always be better. You know what happens to people who tread water? They grow inevitably weary and then they drown and hermit crabs use their body as a sex playground. That’s a fact. I read it in the New York Times. If anybody knows facts, it’s them.

10. Start Buying New Skills For Your Character Sheet

“Writer” is a piss-poor name for what we do because that verb, to write, comprises only a portion of our professional life. It’d be like if you called auto mechanics “brake light technicians.” Sure, they fix brake lights. But they also change oil and replace alternators and counsel troubled married couples. (What? My guy’s really good. Don’t judge me.) Like I said quite some time ago, writers have to edit, market, manifest business savvy, do math, hunt and capture wayward editors in the windswept tundra, and so forth. Further, fiction writers utilize all manner of absurd skills in their work. Writing about a hired killer? Why not learn how to use a gun? (Trust me, firing a gun and reading about firing a gun are two very different things.)

11. Start Cultivating Your Sanity

You’re crazy. No, no, it’s okay. I’m crazy, too. We’re all a little bit unhinged. Hell, I’m one broken screen door away from drinking a fifth of antifreeze and driving off a highway overpass on a child’s tricycle. Writing is not a particularly stressful job — I mean, you’re not an air traffic controller or an astronaut or some shit. Just the same, it’s a weird job. We hunker down over our fiction like a bird with an egg and we sit there alone, day in and day out, just… making up awful stuff. People die and hearts are broken and children are stolen by van-driving goblins and all that comes pouring out of our diseased gourds. So: cultivate your sanity. Take some time to de-stress your skull-space. Take a walk. Take a vacation. Drink some chamomile tea and watch the sunset. Chillax. That’s the new thing the kids are saying, right? “Chillax?” Yeah. I’m up on my lingo. Chillaxin’ is the hella tits, Daddy-o!

12. Start Escaping The Insidious Gravity Of The Black Hole Known As “The Internet”

The Internet is a time-eater, eating your hours in great gulping swallows. The Net has value, no doubt. Great for research. Ideal for communication and distribution. Pristine for pornography. Just the same: it’s not your priority. Your priority is to write, so you need to jam a metaphorical rocket booster up your hidey-hole and blast your way out of the Internet’s gravity, at least until the wordsauce is made.

13. Start Going Places

Get the hell out of your house. Open the door. Kick out a window. Escape. Go somewhere. I don’t care if it’s the corner store or the island of Kauai or Mount Kilimanfuckingjaro. Writers are often too insular. They think those two oft-cited pieces of writing advice — “Put your ass in the chair and write” and “read a lot” — are all it takes. Bzzt! Wrongo! You’ve got to see a bit of the world. Have some adventures. Experience what’s going on around you. Become a part of the whole crazy machine. Let it fuel your wordsmithy.

14. Start Reading More

You need to read more, too. Bury your nose in a book, or, I dunno, lick a Kindle or whatever the equivalent would be. And don’t just up your reading quota: read more broadly, more completely. Read beyond comfort or entertainment. Jump the genre fence you’ve built for yourself. Read history and sociology and pick up a romance novel and flip through some children’s books and read some classic works and — well, you get the idea. Just read, wantonly and without regard. And with a keen eye toward all the fiddly bits.

15. Start Helping Other Writers

We may not be an official community with like, trials and hazing and union dues, but we certainly are a de facto one. We all need help and so it behooves us to ask for it and give it in return. As I am nothing if not a rampant self-promotional strumpet, I’ll just leave this here: 25 Ways For Writers To Help Other Writers.

16. Start Working Like A Motherfucker

You want to write? Then it’s time to work. Work isn’t a bad word. Work may be a four-letter-word, but you know what? I like four-letter words. Commit to the effort. Give your work the due it deserves. If someone asks what you’re doing? Don’t tell them you’re writing. Don’t say you’re telling stories or penning the Great American Novel. Tell them, “I’m working. I’m down in the word mines breaking my brain to bring this ink into the world. Now shut the door and get me a quad-shot espresso.” Don’t just put your nose against the grindstone: rub your entire naked body against the grindstone. And then film it. And put it on Youtube.

17. Start Making Your Own Opportunities

You can’t just sit in your attic and hope that opportunity will find you there, writing your stories amidst the Christmas decorations and creepy dolls and Tibetan yak-bone butt-plugs. Opportunity does not find the writer; the writer finds opportunity. And when the writer cannot find it, he reaches for the doll-heads and the wrapper paper tubes and the yak-bones and he makes his own damn opportunity. I hate the word “proactive,” but fuck it, it’s spot on for what I’m talking about — be proactive. You make opportunity by writing the best stories you can write and then putting those stories out there for editors and agents and readers. Don’t wait for permission. You know who needs permission? Children and cowards. And, thankfully, robots. For now. For now.

18. Start Self-Publishing

Note again the lack of the word “only” here; you should not only self-publish. But you should self-publish something. It grants you a new channel to release your work and reach new readers. It teaches you different skills. It lets you show all those jackholes with their sloppily-edited crap-stain indie efforts with Comic Sans and Papyrus covers how it’s done, son. This year: self-publish. Do it. Try it. Taste it. You’ll like it.

19. Start Diversifying

You know what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket? Your basket doesn’t have room for other awesome shit. Like figs. Or G.I. Joes. Or yak-bone dildos. Right? Right. A writer these days thrives on diversity. When one vein of word-heroin dries up, you’ve got others that keep on feeding your habit. Over here it’s freelance articles and other there it’s short stories and that way lies a novel and beyond that is the ad copy you wrote for Big Steve’s Booty Barn (the finest low-cost brothel in the good state of Nevada!). Plus: many fingers in many pies means maximum pie deliciousness. Because, fuck yeah, pie.

20. Start Valuing Your Work

If you don’t value your work, why would anyone else? End of story.

21. Start Doing All That Shit You Said You’d Always Do

If you calculated all the people in the world that have at one time or another said the words, “I’m going to write a novel,” or, “I’m going to pen a screenplay,” you’d have to invent a brand new number. A number that would break the backs of all other numbers. Everybody says they’re going to write this or write that — well, it’s time to put up or shut up. This year: you’re going to do it. You’re going to take one of those projects you’ve always wanted to do and you’re going to punt that sonofabitch to the top of the pile. You’re going to give it priority. End the fantasy by making it a reality.

22. Start Taking A Long Look Forward

A writer without goals is a writer who ends up lost in the woods. Probably without pants. And dining on possum scat. You know that jerkoff question they ask you at job interviews: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” That question has value to authors. Set a realistic course for yourself and start knocking down some milestones one by one. Focus up. Gain clarity. Don’t just wander around without any idea of what you hope to accomplish. Envision your entire career. Then start working to make it motherfucking so.

23. Start Writing What You Want To Write

For some, life is short, for others, it’s unmercifully long — however it shakes out, take some time to write something that matters to you. Something personal. Something you want to write as opposed to something you have to write. We only get one go-around on the Great Hot Wheels Track that is life, so why not manage some slick jumps and loopty-loops before your car flings off into the oblivion beneath the couch?

24. Start Having Fun, Will You?

I tire of writers who don’t enjoy what they do. The next writer I see who mopes about being a writer gets attacked by bees. I mean, if you’re not writing because you love it, then why do it at all? The fat stacks of cash? The primo health care plan? The yacht full of supermodels?

25. Start Doing

Simple. Sweet. To the point. Writers need to be generative creatures — so, start doing. Start creating. Start telling stories. Start making it happen. But then, the corollary to that: finish what you started.

What will you start doing in 2012?

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One of the questions that’s been driving me of late is, “Just what the hell is an author’s voice and how does he find it and what does he do with it once he has it? Does it make smoothies? Can you shout a dragon out of the sky like in Skyrim? Would you eat it with a goat, would you eat it in a boat?” So, I figured I’d take to the Bloggery Zone and see if I couldn’t conjure 25 things I think about a writer and his voice.

Behold my insipid majesty on the subject:

1. One Word: “Style”

The traditional definition of a writer’s “voice” is, simply put, that writer’s chosen style. “John Q. Snarlmonkey writes with snark and panache, using tons of ellipses and lots of capital letters and made-up words. I love Snarlmonkey’s voice.” Voice equals style. That’s the easy answer.

2. Except, Okay, Fine, It’s So Much More Than That

Seriously, fuck easy answers. Easy answers are for babies and oxygen-starved kittens. A writer’s voice is an incomprehensible and largely indefinable combo-pack of — well, of just about anything. Style, dialogue, tropes, themes, genres, sub-genres, ideas, characters, stereotypes, archetypes, word choice, grammatical violations, and so forth. Anybody who tells you that David Foster Wallace’s voice does not include his obsession with footnotes should be shoved into a cannon and fired into the mouth of a great white shark. Voice is not one thing. Is is, in fact, the summation of a writer.

3. Revised Definition, Then

The writer’s voice is the thing that marks the work as a creation of that writer and that writer only. You read a thing and you say, “This could not have been written by anybody else.” That is voice.

4. That Makes It Yours, Which Makes It Awesome

If you believe that old chestnut, no original stories exist and every character is just a remix of another character who came before. Maybe true, maybe not. What the fuck do I know? I’m a writer, which is another way of saying, “Makes poor life decisions.” What I do know, however, is that a writer gets to own her voice. It’s hers and hers alone. It is her fingerprint, her retinal scan, her indelible and never-replicable identity. The craft of being an author is knowing all the elements that go into a good story. But the art, ahhh, the art is in the arrangement. And that arrangement embodies your voice. How can you not love that?

5. Sometimes Voice Defies Penmonkey Law

I’m just going to say this: sometimes a writer’s voice breaks The Rules, capital T, capital R. A writer makes certain stylistic choices and those choices may be objectively incorrect. That may — key word: may — be one of the strands of memetic material that runs through the DNA of an author’s voice.

6. Don’t Mistake Bad Writing For Good Voice

That being said, bad writing is bad writing. Any stylistic hangnails should be minor and made with full awareness of why they need to exist: don’t write like a shit-heel and call it part of your writer’s voice. Crap writing is indefensible. Try to pull that one over on a seasoned editor and they will stab you in the gonads with a red pen. And you will have deserved it.

7. You Can’t Force It

Forcing your voice is a futile endeavor. Like trying to hammer a cat through a mousehole (which is totally not some weird new sex move, by the way — UNLESS IT IS). Voice is a component of practice and maturity. Same way you can’t concentrate really hard to make puberty come earlier (“Grow, pubes, grow!”), you cannot artificially and prematurely discover your voice. Writers must cultivate patience (or perhaps patience’s rude and grumpy cousin, stubbornness). You’ll get there. Your voice will come.

8. “It’s A Trick. Get An Axe.”

You can try to trick your voice into appearing early, try to overwrite or use purple prose or engage in stylistic flourishes that plum don’t belong. Don’t bother. It’s just peeing with someone else’s dick — it’ll feel weird and alien, like some critical component does not belong.

9. We First Must Mimic

When you first start writing, you write like those writers you read most frequently. Maybe you mean to. Maybe it’s an unconscious thing. But don’t fight it. It’s all part of the process.

10. Other Authors Are Spun Into Our DNA

Eventually we stop miming the style of others, but along the way we still break off parts of other authors and graft them to our own styles. Some parts must be kept. No harm in that — we shouldn’t be upset with our influences. Why turn away from those who got us here? Those whose voices mattered most? As long as their voice does not take over our own, we’re good. It’s okay if we are in part the culmination of other voices. Like I said before: the art is in the arrangement.

11. This Shit Takes A Long Time

You don’t find your voice overnight. It doesn’t just appear like the fucking Tooth Fairy. I don’t know that it’s a function of time or a function of how much you write or some mutant hybrid of each, but it’s a slow discovery. You’ll catch glimpses of it once in a while, and you’ll cultivate it without even meaning to — and then, one day, it’s like, boom. Your balls drop and there it is: your voice. Or, if you’re a girl, your… vagina blooms? I don’t know what happens with your lady-parts, having none myself. I should get a set, just to see.

12. Evolution And Mutation

Your writer’s voice, like your real voice, changes. One day you’re all fresh-and-squeaky, and then calendar pages whip off the wall and suddenly your voice is scratchy and dry like you’ve been gargling watch parts and cigarette butts for the last ten years. Read any given author over a period of time and you see this — you can witness the Auteur Theory in action as their voice squirms and shifts.

13. Beware The Cardboardization Of Your Work

Some will try to beat your voice back, like they’re thwacking a tiger with an umbrella in order to urge him back into the bush. (Also not a weird new sex move.) Again, if you’re confusing bad writing with good voice, okay, fine, let others — be they agents or editors or readers — judge your voice and find it wanting. But also beware what happens when they want to milk your words of what makes them special in order to make something more marketable. Your voice is one of the strongest and most complicated weapons in your arsenal. Do not give it up without a fight. Poll your intestinal flora. Check your gut. You’ll know.

14. Not Just How You Write, But Who You Are

We assume voice to be a thing built of technical components. That’s it, but only part of it. Your voice is also who you are. How you bleed and spit and scream on the page. You are your voice. Your voice is you.

15. The Sexy Tango Of Honesty and Authenticity

Be honest. Be forthright. Be authentic. You believe things. You know things. You question things. All this crazy shit needs to spill out of your head and end up on the page and in that — in the choices you make, choices that come from questions only you could’ve ever asked — your voice will bloom. Like a vagina. A blooming, fragrant vagina. I might be confusing “vaginas” with “flowers” again.

16. What You Add Versus What You Subtract

It’s easy to suggest that a writer’s voice is what’s there when you write unbidden, unrestrained by the shackles of grammar or good taste or, y’know, sobriety. But your voice is not only a summation of those things you let out the door — it’s also a calculation configuring those doors you keep closed. It’s about subtracting as well as adding — pruning as well as cultivating. Voice can be a matter of writing small just as easily as it can measure the boldness of your stroke. HA HA HA STROKE MASTURBATION um, nothing.

17. Look To Your Body Of Work, See The Voice Emerge

Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.

18. Listen To Your Voice — No, I Mean Your Actual Voice

There lurks an intimate connection between the written word and the spoken word. We pretend it’s not true, as if the written word is somehow higher up in the food chain, somehow more exalted, but that’s a big brass bucket brimming with bullshit. Language exists initially to communicate from person to person — it is born of speech and sound. Words aren’t just symbols: they’re really how we say things. And so it is that your actual voice matters in this regard. Listen to what you say and how you say things: your authorial voice lurks in this. You should endeavor to write at least in part how you speak. By doing that, you capture the essence of how you say things. Related: always read your work out loud.

19. The Banshee’s Scream

Voice matters. Voice is important. But at the end of the day, if it takes your story and drowns it in a hot stockpot of scalding soup, then you’ve done yourself a disservice. In the Great Cosmic Chain Of Telling Bad-Ass Motherfucking Stories, voice is subservient to story, not vice versa. Voice helps you tell the story at the same time story helps you find your voice. But no matter what, story is the pinnacle, the zenith, the apogee, and other words that mean the “tippy-top” of the narrative mountain.

20. Regular Like A Morning Constitutional

Consistency in voice matters. It should day to day, page after page, hold together. The only way this fails is if you’re uncertain. If you lose your shit. If you freak the fuck out.

21. Don’t Panic

Breathe easy. Loosen your mind sphincter. Don’t panic. It’s like with sex — think too much and too hard about it, you’ll short circuit a synapse and put the kibosh on the mood. Serenity serves the writer’s voice.

22. Where Writer’s Block Is Born, Screaming And Keening

I wonder if writer’s block is actually a thing born of not yet knowing your voice. If we’re here to assume that part of a writer’s voice is knowing what to say and how to say it, then not being sure of — or comfortable with — one’s voice would lead to the fear that spawns the poorly-named writer’s block. It seems sensible. Then again, so did running through that Arby’s naked last night, sauced to the gills on ecstasy and wine coolers. Maybe I’m not the best guy to listen to on what’s sensible.

23. Eventually You Stop Being Afraid Of Yourself

Writers are at the outset a scared species. It’s not our fault: we’re told that it’s a bad idea and unless we want to prepare for a life lived inside a palatial piano crate we should just buckle down and become accountants. And so I think there’s a lot of bad psychic voodoo that clogs the works, and until we start to clear that out, it’s really hard to find out who we are on the page and what our voice looks and sounds like. Finding your voice is then synonymous with losing the fear of not just writing but of being a writer.

24. The Confidence Game

Confidence is key. I’ll say no more than that: confidence is key.

25. Don’t Write Like Anybody Else

At the end of the day, take the opportunity to write like you want to write. Actually, it’s weirder and deeper than that — what I really mean is, write like you need to write. Your voice might be a component of confidence, but it also might be an accumulation of obsessions and foibles and fears and frailties and all the crazy moon-unit shit that makes us who we are. I’m going to quote from another terribleminds commenter, found last week at “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — Amy Severson said: “When I finally realized that I was never going to write like the the authors I loved and just started writing how (and what) I wanted to, it was like someone blew out the little candle I was huddled under and flipped the switch on a dozen spotlights.” I think that says it all about a writer’s voice, don’t you?

* * *

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