Author: terribleminds (page 151 of 454)

I’m off to THE YORK THAT IS NEW today for the big, bad NYCC (my sked is here), so this is a quick post, but I wanted to give you ten quick story tips to help you hard-charge your way through whatever the hell it is that you’re writing. Dig? Dug? Let’s do it.

1. Story is, as I am wont to remind, the destruction of the status quo. A story begins when the expected course of events deviates — it’s like a bone breaking. Compound fracture, crack. The inciting incident is that break. High school is high school until a new teacher shows up and changes everything. The magical fantasy kingdom is doing its thing until the king is murdered by a murderous murdercorn (aka a once-innocent unicorn that turned super shitty). This isn’t hard to see in stories that exist: the original Star Wars trilogy has the Empire serving as the status quo, and then Luke, Leia and the gang provide the match-tip to the Rebellion powderkeg and boom, status quo shattered. This is true for the inciting incident and also true as the story progresses — any time the story threatens to return to a “new normal” or some kind of status quo, it is your job to once again break that bone just as it heals. Plot is born of this.

2. Plot is also born of agitation. Agitation is best served as conflict between characters — aka, drama. The drama llama is a storyteller’s best friend. Love the drama llama. Ride the drama llama. Make love to the — wait, no. Sorry! *sprays bleach on your brain* Characters with competing agendas, desires, and emotions agitate one another simply by dint of pursuing (or denying) these agendas, desires and emotions. It’s like putting a bunch of spiders and centipedes and beetles in a jar and shaking it up — they fight and crawl and try to escape or eat each other. Story basically starts to write itself once you’ve got these fundamental elements, because the characters will forever push the narrative forward. This isn’t magical, though, and you’ll still need to control the characters. Otherwise they will be literally born and you will wake up surrounded by them. They will have knives. Okay, maybe it is magic. Whatever.

3. Secrets and lies power narrative. But don’t overdo it. We expect characters to keep secrets and to tell lies, but if it goes too far, it strains credibility. (Example of this is Lost, where as the seasons went on, it became totally unbelievable that they refused to share any piece of information with one another for dubious reasons.)

4. Transitions are one of the hardest parts of writing a story. Getting characters from Point A to Point B is mundane, boring stuff. You have two ways to deal with transitions: one, make them interesting, which is to say, make even transitional scenes heavy with consequence. Or two, just fucking skip ’em. If it’s something you can sum up later in a sentence or three, uh, yeah, do that. Don’t waste our time. Leapfrogging the story along is a vital skill — we sometimes expect it’s like a gameboard where we have to literally move the piece from section to section but sometimes you just pick up the piece and move it to somewhere cooler because that’s more interesting. It’s all about value in narrative. Bits of your story that don’t do double-duty, meaning, they fail to serve more than one narrative purpose, nnnnyeaaaah, no, they gotta go. Some folks say to kill your darlings, and that’s sometimes true. But also kill your unitaskers. Transitional scenes are often unitaskers, and are best served left in a bag, in a ditch, covered in ants.

5. Give the story a sense of movement both physically and temporarily. Creating a vibrant setting and moving the characters through it — whether that means NEW YORK TO MUMBAI or it means THE KITCHEN TO THE CREEPY BASEMENT — gives a sense of dynamism and action. Time matters too, though. Don’t cram. Let the story play out. Feel free to insert days, weeks, months into the periods of transition. (I love The Force Awakens, but it and a lot of blockbusters suffer from a lack of temporal movement. Everything in that movie feels like the story takes place over its literal two-hour running time.) These elements of movement are fine left as gaps — readers don’t mind the gap. (Insert London Underground reference.) We fill in the gaps. It makes a story feel fuller, richer, longer. It is narrative umami.

6. A story isn’t just about setting up stakes, but also about reminding us of them throughout. Stakes are what can be won, lost or gambled in terms of the characters and the world. (Note: character stakes are nearly always more interesting than world stakes.) You set them up, but always come back to them. Remind us. Revisit them. And then at appropriate intervals, dial them up. Turn up the volume. Raise the stakes or complicate them. As I have noted before, the shift from A New Hope to Empire Strikes Back shows us stakes not raised but rather, complicated. The stakes aren’t raised because we enter the film with the Rebellion at an advantage — an advantage that can be lost, and we see it starting to winnow when the Empire attacks Hoth. But the real complication comes in when Luke’s relationship to the Empire — through Vader — changes dramatically. He thinks Vader is his foe, an adversary. But really, Vader is (gasp) his accountant uncle, Hank Skywalker. Or something? Been a while since I’ve seen that movie. Point is, the stakes are complicated by Luke learning that his greatest enemy is actually family.

7. Give all the big moments their due. Sometimes we just want to rush from one thing to another in a story — and above, I even encourage that a little by telling you to skip boring transitions. But also know that when big events occur, you need to lead into them slow. I loved the new Ghostbusters, but where it fell down for me was when it tried to ape the bigger plot beats of the original film, and in doing so, kind of hastily moved toward them and then past them almost on the assumption that, “Well, you’ve seen this before, you know there’s an old creepy place and a ghost lady and — look, let’s just get to the cool part.” COOL PARTS are made cooler by slowing our entry to them. Build in tension. Build in antici —

— pation. Study horror films for how this works best — even if you’re not writing a horror story, that same modeling works.

8. TANTRIC STORYTELLING. Nnngh. Yeah. NNNNNN. Okay, sorry. The admittedly-shortsighted view of Tantric Sex is about denial of orgasm, about maintaining the ZEXUAL VIBRASHUNS as long as possible while staving off the, um, the cookie-pop moment. Right? Stories can work this way, too. If you’re about to give a character (and by proxy the audience) what they want, take a look at if there is a way you can deny that moment. Restrict the bloodflow. Abstain from narrative storygasm. Though, sometimes the opposite is true — sometimes it’s about getting to the storygasm, and then making the characters realize that what they really wanted is way more complicated, or that what they actually got has unforeseen consequences. Like a baby. A sweet, squalling story baby. I think this metaphor has gone weird so I’m ejecting. Not ejaculating. EJECTING. God, you’re so gross.

9. Maximize complication. Make choices that lead to interesting consequences. Killing characters is easy and often leads to fewer consequences than if you kept them around and changed their situation — forcing them to remain as an agitating element. Though, killing off characters is fine, too. DREAD LORD CTHULHU KNOWS I’ve done my share of it, and will continue offing motherfuckers with zero mercy. Best reason to kill off a character (besides simplifying a busy cast) is when the death of that character creates powerful, tectonic ripples through the earthen mantle of the story you’re telling. You want to create earthquakes. That’s a good thing.

10. Storytelling is a game of imagining what your audience believes you’ll do next. And at least half the time, you’ve gotta do differently. You fake them out — you set up events to make it look like you’re going to jump left, and then you duck right. But the other half the time is giving them the satisfaction of being right. They think you’re going to kill Very Important Character, and then you make it seem like maybe you’re not going to but ha ha ha no, yeah, you are. VIC is dead, now. The audience was right, high-five to them. They didn’t want to be right, but they were, and they feel both satisfied about the result and tense about the build-up to that moment. Storytelling is a weird act of mitigating expectations — sometimes you lean away from them, sometimes you lean into them. You do both in a balance to make the tale satisfying.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

Just around seven years ago, November 2009, I submitted a query to an agent named Stacia Decker for a book called Blackbirds. By December of that year, 2o09, she was my agent. (I’m sure she’s still kicking herself, if only because she has to field my daily emails.)

A year later, Blackbirds was on submission. This book, which had already taken me five years to figure out how to write, had been on submission since the start of 2010. And it just kept sitting there. It would go out, round after round. It would return from the wild with brand new rejections stapled to it, all of them kind, many of them glowing. Which is a strange thing, of course, to receive rejection messages that ostensibly read like acceptances. “WE LOVE THE BOOK IT’S THE BEST GOOD JOB oh hey by the way we can’t sell it.”

It became very frustrating.

Inevitably, like the scouring natural force of erosion, Stacia’s tireless efforts on behalf of the book somehow wore the padlock off the GOLDEN GATES OF PUBLISHING, and the door swung open half-an-inch, and not one to miss an opportunity, I shoved my way into the gap and slithered through, all snakey-like. Blackbirds was published in April of 2012, about two years after it went out into the world. And since then, things have been, well, pretty rad. The fourth Miriam Black book, Thunderbird, comes out in February. I’ve had the good fortune in just a handful of years to have published 18 (!) novels, with another batch of five or so on the way in the coming few years. It’s been a good run, and no, this is not me bowing out — barring any unforeseen circumstances (aneurysm, meteor, robot attack, the dystopia that arises post-Trumpocalypse), I’m just getting started over here. But I’m a fan of looking back as a way to look forward, to say, okay, how did I get here? And what lessons have I learned to carry me forward?

To sidetrack a little bit, a thing you should know about me is that I am something of a control freak. This is not necessarily a healthy way to be, mind you, and it can occasionally be stressful to be constantly reminded how little control I have over things. Especially with a five-year-old. Having a child is like spilling a bucket of tarantulas on the kitchen floor. You can’t control that. That swiftly changes from A THING I CAN CONTROL to A THING THAT JUST FUCKING HAPPENED OH WELL. The spiders are everywhere. They’re just a part of your house now. A kid is like that — the child will enter into your life and the first thing that happens is Ian Malcolm appears behind you and whispers chaos theory chaos theory in your ear. As I am fond of saying, every day with a child is like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors learn to open doors. Having children is a good way to remind you how woefully outmatched you are in all things.

More importantly, it reminds you how little control you have.

Lots of influence! Little control.

It’s a horrifying reminder, but it’s also a good — and necessary! — one.

To go back to the publishing thing, while Blackbirds was out in the wild collecting rejections the way a deer’s ass collects burrs, that was stressful. Because I did not control it. I didn’t have my hand on any of the levers, wheels or buttons. I wrote the book. The book left my hands and it went into the world. It wasn’t even in my agent’s control. It was, in a way, loose in the wind like a fucking kite — nobody controlled it but the weather. And even once the book was published, I still didn’t control it. I didn’t control people’s response. I didn’t control sales. I didn’t control reprintings or reviews or pretty much anything at all.

Again, that’s very frustrating. We work very hard in life to create for ourselves environments we control. We put this widget here, we put this duck over there, we hook that button up to that dongle and we endeavor to keep control of every aspect. When chaos creeps in like a clambering cockroach, we swat it and return order to disorder and get back to life. Publishing is like this. We want control over the whole process, from nosehole to butthole, snout to tail.

But all that’s a lie. This shit’s just a sandcastle. Sure, it’ll stay standing for a while, but eventually, man — *whistles* — eventually the ocean or the wind or some stompy little kid is gonna wreck your business. That sand castle is not long for the world. Your control is temporary, and all too often, a total illusion.

And that’s really hard, especially for someone like me. But I came to terms with one piece of advice that has helped me significantly in my writing career and that is:

Know the difference between influence and control.

Then, influence what you can influence.

And control what you can control.

The end. Game over. That’s it.

Influence is light, imperfect, improbable. Some aspects of my career I influence — again I go to the kite metaphor, because when you’re flying a kite, you don’t control a fucking thing, and yet, the illusion is that you remain in control, right? You’re the KITEMASTER with the spool and the string and you feel like that gives you an element of control, but it doesn’t. You don’t control the wind. You don’t control the kite once it’s up there. The best you have is influence — and that influence exists only over the kite via the string-and-spool. That’s it. The kite isn’t a drone. It doesn’t do what you want. It does what the wind wants.

The only thing you really control in that situation is you.

And so in writing, that means recognizing the limits of my control as well as the opportunities for influence. Influence means I can, I dunno, be a friendly person to other creative and publishing industry humans. Influence means I can do a book signing and meet the bookstore staff. Influence means I can (gasp) WEAR PANTS at a PROFESSIONAL EVENT —

Ha ha ha I’m just kidding I wouldn’t do that.

*burns pants in the fires of solidarity*

PANTS ARE THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES

PANTS ARE A TOOL OF THE OPPRESSOR

DOWN WITH THE MAN

DOWN WITH PANTS

DOWN WITH THE MANPANTS AND THE PANTSMAN

*deep cleansing breath*

Okay I’m feeling much better now. Sorry. Onward.

So, that’s my influence. I can urge the publishing kite to move a little bit, but I don’t control the winds. But the one thing I do control is: I can build the kite. I can fix a hole in a ripped kite. I can improve on my kite’s design and I can buy better string and —

You get that the kite is my book in this metaphor, right? I control the book. I don’t control much else, but that’s one area that’s mine. (And editors, if ever I or any other writer push back, understand that this is what we’re dealing with — our control is very limited, so we want to exercise it as much as we can.) I can control my time, the words, the work. And beyond that, I control me. I control my response to edits, to critics, to reviews. I control my reactions to the twists and turns of the industry. I control everything to the end of my own personal margins — and that’s pretty much it. Everything else beyond those margins is one big vigorous shrug emoji.

That helped me immensely. You’d think it might make me feel helpless, but it was to the contrary — it helped me bear down and focus on the aspects of the job I do control. In essence, it encourages me to do my part. I control what I control. I influence what I influence. And the rest of it is left to the GNOMES OF FATE.

I’ve recently begun to take this advice to life, too. Because in all things, I control alarmingly little. So much of what comes at us in a day is external. We can’t control it. We might have some influence over events, but not always. We can, at best, control how we react.

We control simple things. Like breathing. I can control my breath. Sounds small, but it feels so huge. It’s also obvious on the face of it, but not always so easy to see — when the shit hits the fan, it’s incredibly clarifying to realize that I control that one vital thing. To realize that I control me, and not much beyond that. (And even then, I don’t always control me as well as I like — though, the potential is always there, and it’s useful to know that in times when I feel out of control, I know that the control is theoretically potentially there.) It’s become something of a mantra — control what you can control — and that’s helped me deal with daily stresses and anxieties as they hit. Control what you can control. Influence what you can influence.

The rest can fuck off and go.

Helpful to you? I have no idea. But I thought I’d share it.

Go forth and be awesome. Do what you can do, because that’s all that you can do.

* * *

INVASIVE:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Out now where books are sold.

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

Self-doubt is one of those things you’re going to contend with as a creative person. It’s just how it is. It sucks. I know. And I’m sorry. Thing is, this isn’t math. Creative projects do not have an easy DO THIS, THEN THIS HAPPENS outcome. Like many careers, it’s wildly unpredictable, and given over to forces beyond your control — worse, we can easily doubt the parts we do control. We don’t trust ourselves and we fail to have faith in ourselves, and self-doubt worms its wormy fingers into the gaps and starts pulling us apart.

I spoke about this the other day on THE TWITTERS, and this is the result:

[EDIT, DAMNIT I DID THIS ONE ALREADY.]

[This is why writing posts early Monday before I’ve had coffee is a doomed plan.]

[Let’s try this again.]

[Okay! New mushroom photo. Much better. This one is one you can actually eat.]

First, both Atlanta Burns (book 1) and The Hunt (book 2) are on sale for $1.99 each for your Kindlemachine. A girl, her dog, her gun, and a town full of bullies await. Please note, though, that these books should be considered piled high with trigger warnings. Of all varieties.

Second, you saw my NYCC sked, right? Well, if you can’t make it to NYCC (or even if you can), Penguin Random House is having a Monday, post-NYCC coffee klatsch at their offices starting at 11AM. I’ll be there, along with some other amazing authors: Daniel Older, Myke Cole, Seanan McGuire, Naomi Novik, Sarah Kuhn, and more. You have to RSVP (details here), and note that they will not be selling books — you’ll have to bring your own if you want ’em signed.

Third, if you’ve ever read any of my books and liked ’em, boy howdy I’d sure appreciate a review somewhere. If you read them and didn’t like them, you should also leave a review, but in this case, you should yell the angry review into a pillow, or at a passing bird. The bird in particular will surely bring the review to me so thanks for your honesty.

And I think that’s it.

NOW GO FORTH AND HOLD MONDAY ACCOUNTABLE FOR ITS SINS.

IT IS NEARLY OCTOBER.

The time of Pumpkin Spice.

The time of Candy Corn.

AND THE TIME OF VISCERA-FILLED SCARECROWS WHO RISE UP FROM THE GROUND TO EAT YOUR EYES AND YOUR TONGUE AHHHHHH.

What, just me? Whatever.

Throughout October (and starting now), we’ll be going with the spooky Halloween vibe, and to start, I want you to write something non-fiction. I want you to remember a time where you were scared, where you felt you were experiencing something strange or supernatural or preternatural — some “glitch in the Matrix” moment, some scary, unreal event.

Due by 10/7, Friday, noon EST.

Write it here in the comments or at your blog with a link.

Time to sit around the campfire and tell some stories, folks.

I will not be watching the debate tonight.

I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m already an informed citizen. I know the candidates well.

I know one is a highly-qualified, globally well-respected figure, and I know the other is a greasy orange rectal discharge that came to life when struck by lightning one Halloween night.

One is complicated and flawed; the other is a demonic carnival barker.

One is a politician. The other, a plague unto man.

The debate’s gonna stress me out. Here’s how it’ll play out: I’ll put the tiny human to bed and then sit down for a warm, comforting, relaxing sleepy-time presidential debate, which will pull me tighter than a hangman’s rope. Christ, I’m already battling a bout of insomnia. Watching the debate just before crashing out, I might as well hoover up a bindle of cocaine and settle in for the NEVERSLEEP NIGHTMARE RIDE.

I know what happens at the debate. I know. We all know.

I’m going to watch Hillary being nuanced and clinical, and I’m going to watch Trump bloviating and blowing oily chunks of word-vomit into everybody’s mouths, and I know the Political Commentary Corps will ding her for being imperfect and celebrate him for not calling the moderator a racist epithet. (“It’s very presidential how he did not use bigoted language tonight. Though he did stomp on a bag of kittens, but sometimes being a president requires tough decisions. Did you see him on Fallon? So chummy! Hillary, on the other hand, did not successfully convince us that she is not dying from a secret monkey-flu. And would it kill her to smile once in a while? Even though when she smiles, we then say we wish she wouldn’t smile, and we use hilarious memes to mock her. Women are so silly, thinking everybody is always sexist.”)

The other day I suggested that Trump was an antibiotics-resistant strain of gonorrhea, and though that was a joke, the more I think about it, the more I consider the metaphor apt. We are used to politicians fitting a certain mold, and Trump doesn’t. In a given day, The Donald does ten things that would’ve handily disqualified more qualified candidates. Think Howard Dean’s YEEEYAAAY scream, for instance. Trump, though, threatens nuclear war before breakfast. He’s going to court for like, 357 different things, one of them being child rape. And yet, he persists. Because we weren’t ready. We built up antibodies for politicians. We have no antibodies for this oily fuckmonster. We don’t know how to defeat a reality TV star. His antics got right past our defenses and now he’s inside the system, like a septic infection.

So, I know who I’m voting for.

Just the same, I have to be willing to admit I’ll change my vote if Clinton really does fall down in some areas, and I thought it useful here to highlight what those things might be, just in case she’s reading this. HRC, you do any of these things, you have lost my vote:

1. Rip off your face and reveal the pale grinning 1980s-smarmy rich-kid movie villain rictus of Donald Trump, Jr. “And I would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddlesome fact-checkers!” Ha ha ha, just kidding, nobody’s going to fact check this debate.

2. Kill one of my pets or children on stage.

3. …

3. uhhh

3. whhh

3. *clears throat*

Okay, that’s literally it. There is no number three.

I tried thinking of other things like, “What if she set fire to the moderator,” or, “What if she answered every question with a line from a Vanilla Ice song,” or “What if she left a one-star review of one of my books,” and y’know, nope, sorry, still gonna vote for her. Because Trump is the worst candidate in my memory, and likely the memory of all American history. The guy is a Grade-A Narcissist who will chop this country up and sell the spare parts to Russia. Hillary — who I like, who I respect, who I do not consider the lesser evil — could literally be a new model of Terminator Robot sent to Earth to destroy us and I’d still be like, “Well, at least our deaths will be quick and clean, and maybe we can change her like we did the Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Resistance Infiltrator, and she can say things like, HASTA LA VISTA, DONALD and we’d all have a good laugh and a good cry as lava consumes her metal exoskeleton.”)

And of course I’m not going to switch my vote to a third-party candidate because I’d have better luck trying to defecate a living, breathing unicorn. As much as I wish we had a viable third-party system, we don’t, and the possibility of electing a third-party candidate — without electoral reform! — is a hair’s breadth from zero. (Never mind the fact that these two third-party candidates are a pair of chuckleheads anyway. Neither is qualified to lead a country line dance much less the actual country.)

So, my vote is set.

Pretty much no matter what.

Enjoy the debates. I’m gonna watch cartoons and eat a bowl of cereal.

Hillary, please don’t kill my pets, please and thank you.