Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 386 of 464)

WORDMONKEY

25 Things You Should Know About Antagonists

1. Real People With People Problems

Antagonists are just people. Er, unless they’re insane sex-bots, sentient washing machines, serial killer dinosaurs, or hyper-intelligent window treatments. But even then, we need to treat them like people. People with wants, needs, fears, motivations. People with families and friends and their own enemies. They’re full-blooded, full-bodied characters. They’re not single-minded villains twirling greasy mustaches.

2. Meaning, They’re Not Just Fuel For The Plot Engine

Character is the driver. Plot is the getaway car. Character drives plot; plot does not drive character. The antagonist isn’t just here as a rock in the stream diverting the plot-churned waters — he does not exist in service to a sequence of events but rather, he exists to change them, sway them, turn them to a sequence he wants — a sequence that stands in opposition to the protagonist. For opposition is key.

3. Like I Just Said, Opposition Is Key

Jeez, weren’t you paying attention? EYES ON ME, SOLDIER. Anyway. The antagonist opposes the protagonist. Theirs are clashing motivations. They possess needs and wants that exist in defiance of one another. The protagonist wants to free the slaves; the antagonist wants to keep them and the power they provide. The protagonist wants to rescue the hostages; the antagonist wants to keep the hostages, or worse, kill ’em. The protagonist wants a chalupa; the antagonist has stolen ALL THE CHALUPAS. The antagonist can oppose the main character directly, seeking to undo her efforts; or the antagonist can oppose her indirectly, coming at the story at an oblique angle (but still clashing with our protagonist character). But the point is the same no matter how you slice it: the antagonist stands in the way of the protagonist’s goals.

4. I Like Kittens, You Punch Kittens, Now We Fight!

The antagonist is the foil of the protagonist in the very fabric of his character, too — theirs are contrasting personas. At the simplest level, this is heroism versus villainy, but can (and should) go deeper than that. The protagonist is a drunk; the antagonist is a proponent of clean living. The protagonist is a rational woman; the antagonist is a religious zealot. The protagonist likes Batman, PBS, and whiskey. The antagonist likes Spider-Man, telenovelas, and Zima. Character traits existing in disharmony. Thesis, antithesis.

5. Like Krishna, Except A Total Jerkoff

The antagonist is the avatar of conflict. He causes it. His character embodies it. The antagonist is there to push and pull the sequence of events into an arrangement that pleases him. He makes trouble for the protagonist. He is the one upping the stakes. He is the one changing the game and making it harder.

6. Antagonists Think They’re The Protagonists

The antagonist is the hero in his own story. In fact, your story’s protagonist is the antagonist’s antagonist. BOOM DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? People who do bad things often justify their own actions as being somehow positive — Hitler wasn’t just a troll on an international scale. He thought he was the savior of mankind and that his deeply shitty agenda was justified. This isn’t to say that the antagonist’s desires must be noble (“I had to kill all those people to save the orphanage!”), only that he will have convinced himself of his own nobility. The antagonist thinks he’s right. And doing the right thing. Even when it’s awful.

7. Evil For The Sake Of Evil Is Yawntastic, Snoretacular

Antagonists who do evil just to do evil are basically big fucking cartoons. They’re Snidely Whiplash. They’re Cobra Commander. They’re Pageant Moms, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh. In other words: boring, unbelievable, and totally untenable. Give them motivations beyond “being the biggest dick I can be.” Yes, you can in certain modes and stories get away with this (see: Batman’s Joker, or nearly any killer in slasher films), but it’s hard, and it puts an even greater weight on the shoulders of the protagonist.

8. The Motivations Of Awful People

Antagonists must possess believable motivations. And a motivation is the thing we tell ourselves — right? A racist doesn’t act just because he thinks people of other races should experience pain. Racism is far more deeply rooted and often glossed over with justifications — they don’t need to be good motivations or healthy ones, but we need to believe in them. Or, at least, we need to believe that the antagonist believes them. Ask yourself: what does the antagonist tell himself? How does he sleep at night?

9. Black Hats, White Hats, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

All villains are antagonists. But not all antagonists are villains. “Villain” is a perfectly suitable character type in many genre stories: the serial killer, the evil wizard, the twinkly-dick vampire, whatever. But real life doesn’t always offer up “bad guys” (though we’d sure like to see it that way, ahemcoughcough DICKCHENEY hackwheeze). Antagonists can (and often should) fall into that gray zone instead of the bullshit black-and-white dichotomy. Want an example? In First Blood, John Rambo is the protagonist and Sheriff Teasle is the antagonist — but Teasle’s not a “bad guy.” Wrong in a lot of ways, but not villainous.

10. Nemeses And Arch-Enemies

Earlier I referenced antagonists that oppose the protagonist directly — as in, the antagonist has a real firm boner when it comes to fucking with the protagonist (“I peed on your bed, kicked over your houseplants, and skunked all your beer! Ha ha ha, eat a dick, Dave! Again I am triumphant!”). An antagonist of this nature is, of course, a nemesis or arch-enemy of the protagonist.

11. Vivisect Your Favorite Antagonists In Pop Culture

You want to know what goes into a good antagonist, look no further than the stories and pop culture properties you love dearly. Why is Hannibal Lecter a great antagonist? Is he? What about Darth Vader, Voldemort, Khan, Gollum, Norman Bates, Hans Gruber, Annie Wilkes, Prince Zuko, Marlo Stanfield, the Cobra Kai Sensei John Kreese, the monkey from Monkey Shines, or Rob Schneider?

12. Now Look To Your Own Life

Turn now from pop culture and instead look to your own life. Identify your own personal antagonists. Then realize that these are infinitely more complex and sympathetic than you find in a lot of fiction. Our parents are often our antagonists through our teenage years; but they don’t start that way and they often don’t end that way. And oh what a powerful and valuable lesson that is. Now, take it one step further: try to see if you’ve ever been somebody’s antagonist. Surely you have? Your parents probably saw you as one. A teacher, maybe. A forgotten friend. A bullied kid. A sibling. Bring what you discover there into your storytelling. Find the complexity within the antagonist; we don’t need sympathy for the antagonists necessarily, but we demand empathy. If we cannot understand them, then we will not believe in them. More on that soon.

13. Write From Within The Enemy Camp

Write from the antagonist’s point-of-view. Maybe this is something that goes into the story itself, or maybe it’s just an exercise betwixt you and yourownself. But you gotta get all up in them guts, son. You have to wear the antagonist’s skin and use his mind like a helmet. Unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary.

14. Holding Hands With Monsters

We need to sit with the antagonist, too — as the audience, we may not need to, erm, “get all up in them guts,” but we do need time spent with the antagonist for them to bloom as a fully-formed figure in our mind. Give us time with the antagonist away from the main character so that we can see who they are, what they want, why they do what they do. Force us to babysit the monster.

15. Over-Powered Is Under-Interesting

God-like uber-antagonists who never lose and who know everything there is to know and who are forever one step ahead of the game are just as dull as a protagonist who features the same over-powered qualities. (Worse, an antagonist of this particular caliber must often be trumped on a technicality.) It’s called “a game of cat-and-mouse,” not “a game where the mouse goes up against an orbital laser built by Jesus.” Though, now that I say that out loud, I’m pretty sure my next book will prominently feature a Jesus-built orbital laser. Dibs! DIBS. I called dibs. Get away from that idea or I’ll stab you with a barbecue fork.

16. (But We Won’t Buy “Under-Powered,” Either)

The antagonist has to be a real challenge, just the same. Weak-kneed noodle-spined dumb-fuck antagonists need not apply. Give the protagonist something to do. A believable foe goes a long way, especially one that has some advantage over our main character — we want to worry that the antagonist can’t be beaten. Not because he’s a hyper-powered god-like genius, but because he’s just that much smarter, stronger, and more capable than our hero. Lack of antagonistic power means a lack of tension. So, uhh, don’t do that.

17. Still Abide By The Rules And Laws Of The Storyworld

The protagonist must work within the storyworld — the antagonist must, too. All the characters are chained to the world you create. The antagonist may exploit the storyworld, may circumvent the rules in some fashion, but it is not in ignorance of those rules as much as a character-driven contravention of them.

18. Chatty Cathy Clip Your Strings

“Ahh, Mister James Q. Clark Kent Bondwalker, Jr. — now that I have you dangling over a pit of a starveling toddlers covered in the bloody marrow-jam of the bones of their gummed-to-death opponents, let me bore you with the the entire breadth and depth of my plan! I will share for you my motivations, my weaknesses, and give for you a glimpse of my end-game. Do I expect you to talk, Mister Bondwalker? No. I expect you to die. And, failing that, I expect you to use my confession against me at a later date because that’s what the Villain Manual suggests is most likely to happen.” Get done with chatty tell-don’t-show antagonists. No more villains who over-share expository details. Ugh.

19. Freak Me Out By Forcing Me To Emotionally Connect

Once, just once, put me on the same page as the antagonist. He can be vile as fuck — a kitten-kicker, a baby-puncher, a drives-too-slow-in-the-left-lane, ejaculates-in-coin-return-slots kind of dude. But then, make me connect with him: something he does, something he believes, should be something I would do, something I believe. Or connect me to his past — help me understand why he jizzes on public phones and karate-chops puppies. Empathy is powerful stuff. Connect me to the protagonist and I identify with his struggle. Connect me with the antagonist and I identify — even if in a fleeting way — with his villainy.

20. Antagapalooza

Worth noting: just as you can have multiple main characters, you can have multiple antagonists. An ensemble of opponents works — it just requires balance to make sure they all get enough story-time.

21. Arctagonist

The antagonist can have an arc. Should have an arc, actually. An antagonist doesn’t start at Point A and end at Point A. He changes and grows (or sometimes shrinks), same as the protagonist. Don’t assume the antagonist needs to be a static, unswerving face of conflict — have his character shift with changing conditions, have his madness deepen, his hatred or pain worsen, his zealotry catch like a grease-fire.

21. Ideas And Institutions And Other Non-Charactery Antagonists

An antagonist needn’t actually be a character — an antagonist can be an idea (“racism”), an institution (“the CIA”), a natural force (“Another Paul Blart movie”). Zombies probably count as this sort of antagonist — they’re relatively faceless and on par with a hurricane or disease. Just the same, antagonism always deserves the face of some character — a character championing an idea (dragon-wizard poo-bah of the KKK!), working for the institution (callous field agent!), or complicating the natural force (Kevin James!).

23. The “Kick The Cat” Moment

In Blake Snyder’s books, he speaks of giving the hero a “Save the Cat” moment — meaning, we get to rally behind the protagonist early on as we get to see just what he’s capable of because, y’know, he rescues the cat from the tree (metaphorically). Antagonists need the reverse: one requires a “Kick the Cat” moment (see also: “Detonate the Puppy,” “Machine Gun the Dolphin,” or “Force the Baby Seal to Watch a Marathon of the Real Houswives of Fucking Anywhere Ever” moment). We need to see just why the antagonist is the antagonist — show us an act that reveals for us the depths of his trouble-making, his hatred, his perversion of the ethical laws and social mores of man.

24. Let The Antagonist Win

Let the antagonist win. Maybe not at the end, but periodically, throughout. Let him break Batman’s back, or kill a hostage, or take all the toilet paper off the roll and *crash of thunder* fail to replace it.

25. Love To Hate, Hate To Love

If you ignore everything else I wrote here (and for all I know, you will, you sonofabitch) then at least absorb this with your squirming storytelling cilia: the biggest and best test of an antagonist is that I want to a) love to hate them and/or b) hate to love them. Do either or both and it’s a major win. If you make me love them and I feel uncomfortable about that? You win. If you make me despise them and I love despising them the way a dog loves to roll around in roadkill? You win again. I hate that I love Hans Gruber. I love that I hate every Nazi in every Indiana Jones movie. For fuck’s sake, make me feel something.


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The Obligatory Dark Knight Rises Post

Great movie. As I get older, I have a harder and harder time appreciating four-color rock-em-sock-em fests like The Avengers (which I liked, before you yell at me) and for me the Nolan Batman run has been one where the superhero story has been upgraded to feel like it’s by adults, for adults. It doesn’t ignore the reality of what Batman is — it keeps the creepy bits where “rich dude dresses up like vigilante to defend city from psychopathic terrorists and criminals” fairly well intact. It doesn’t look away from that discomfort.

As every story is a lesson to other storytellers, let’s peel away the Bat Nipples and look deeper into what I think worked about the film, and a little bit into what maybe didn’t work so well.

Some very mild general spoilers below. (Can’t promise the comments are a safe zone, though.)

Getting The Bat Right

Batman’s a hard dude to get right.

You gotta balance the vigilante with the billionaire. You have to keep his past in the front windshield while still not focusing so heavily on it that it becomes mawkish and obvious. You have to acknowledge his heroism while also acknowledging (at least a wee bit) his derangement. You have to see how he walks a line between psycho-conservative and radical liberal. You need to find the human in the suit.

This film does all that. Somehow juggling it all in a film where, surprisingly, Batman is not getting the majority of screen-time. This isn’t a movie about Batman, not really. It’s a movie about Gotham.

Be advised: I now really want to write Batman. So, somebody make that happen.

Batman Not About Batman

Most Batman stories give you too much Batman. And any time they spend time on other characters, hey, you just want to get back to Bats. Not here. TDKR goes long periods without ever visiting Mister Wayne, and this is a feature, not a bug. The film is populated with an incredibly strong supporting cast — not just in terms of acting but in writing (and more on that in a moment). By focusing on the characters orbiting Batman and by taking a long hard look at a city under siege, you start to get Batman. Batman is made stronger by those who carry him up — both narratively in the plot and metaphorically as a character.

Further, it ensures that when you do see Wayne/Batman, you’re so geeked out you’re doing the equivalent of the pee-pee dance inside your head. By limiting Batman, the strength of the character shines through.

He’s more potent that way.

And never overwhelms.

Complex Character

Good characters have alarming moments of weakness. Bad characters have troubling moments of nobility. Some characters vacillate so you don’t really know where to pin them — good, bad, selfish, assholes, not assholes, and so forth. It’s a wonderful tango — the script doesn’t give us four-color comic book characters. The script lets each character possess a million colors apiece — and just as many shades of gray.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is this film’s winner, by the way. He is its throughline.

Start The Story Late

The story doesn’t spend a lot of time getting you up to speed. A lot has changed since we last visited Gotham and the story isn’t interested in playing catch-up: in fact, it leaps forward with some things being big question marks in the hopes and trust (correctly placed) that the audience will play detective and stay invested. It works. As such, what could be a very boggy beginning is as lean as it could possibly be.

Earned Distrust

I don’t want to trust my storytellers. I want a storyteller to show me that I can’t trust him. You can’t trust Nolan and that’s fucking phenomenal. I want him to do things to the character and the storyworld — and, by proxy, to me the poor little quivering audience member gnawing his fingernails down to the bloody quick — that aren’t right. I basically want all my storytellers to be Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects.

Every Hit Hurts

In this kind of movie, characters need to feel pain. Not merely physical, but the pain of unkept emotions, of betrayals, of lost love and all of that. Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman only works if that pain is palpable — and we feel it in every twist of the film and every bone-shattering Bane punch.

Twists That Work

The film gets a bit twisty now and again. And every twist works. Why? Because Nolan isn’t just trolling us — he sets up each twist with a good two or three beats before hand so when it comes, you think, “Oh, see, he’s been showing me this the whole time, and I either didn’t get why, or he did some other misdirecting voodoo and I stopped thinking about it.” This is the man that made The Prestige, after all.

Some folks wanted The Riddler in this film.

Nolan is the Riddler in this film.

Overtold, On The Nose

If I had to be honest, while the front of the film is as lean as it probably could be, it still suffers from a characters overtelling the story — not so much to catch us up but to tell us their feelings on plot events.

It feels on-the-nose at times, like they’re mouthpieces for certain beliefs or otherwise want to be oh so very earnest, and it feels stilted and stunted. That goes away over time, but the front of the film is heavy with it.

The Sound Mix

Holy shitty sound mix, Batman.

I saw it in IMAX — which is to say, “IMAX” in quotations because it’s kinda half-a-dick IMAX — and the sound was a deep bass crotch-punch. Impactful! But muddy. And it meant Bane often sounded like this:

“VAAASH WASH SHA SHATMAN ECKONING WAH SHA VASHHHH”

He talks like he has poop in his mouth.

I probably missed about 25% of what that dude said.

I lost dialogue from other characters, too — any character speaking at a low, deep register was in danger of saying words that became naught but a thunder rumble to my ears.

These are top-shelf theaters and I still get better sound at home. And not for a ton of money, either.

So?

I liked it.

Really great movie.

I have a very strong visceral (meaning positive) reaction to the second film, and wasn’t a huge fan of the first one, but this one ties all three together into a single storyline. And while I maybe enjoyed the second one more, this one might actually be the better story. Not sure yet. More ruminating needed.

OH! And I would totally watch a Nolan-made Catwoman movie with Hathaway in the role.

Hathaway, as a sidenote, is my ideal Miriam Black, for those who have read Blackbirds.

(Though Lizzy Caplan is sometimes Miriam now, too.)

(This is really apropos of nothing so I’ll shut up.)

A Small Place For Nice Things

With the news out of Aurora this morning it’s hard not to feel out of sorts. This especially after a morning I spent researching mass murder for a scene in a book and then next thing I know there’s this news rolling in about dead people at a movie theater and gunshots and hurt kids and suddenly it’s a whole lot of bad feelings. Feelings that go toxic, septic, pretty fast.

On the other side of it, I saw something yesterday that was making me feel pretty good: there’s a local food stand that popped up within walking distance of the house. Nice little covered wagon with produce and some homemade jam and fresh-baked bread. Nobody there — just a cash box. The prices are all cheap, y’know, you can grab more potatoes than you’d need for a whole week and it won’t cost you more than two bucks for that giant basket of potatoes. And the people who put this farm stand up, they have a sign that says, “If you’re down on hard times, just take what you need, we understand.”

Which is pretty great.

And it leads me to this, and this is something I said on Twitter and Facebook this morning:

We balance out the horrors of a day like this by willfully doing good for others.

So, hug your kids, give to a charity, rescue a puppy, something, anything.

Evil can’t be undone, but good can outshine it.

So, if you feel like it, post something below in the comments that’s good and nice in this world. Don’t talk about the shooting or other bad shit. Don’t politicize anything (today is not a real good day to defend the second amendment, or talk about naughty pop culture or liberal-conservative fol-de-rol). Just post something nice. A story. Charity. Something your kid said or did. Anything at all.

This not in service of forgetting tragedy or ignoring it, but rather, to remind ourselves that people aren’t all bad and that one aberration a species does not make.

If you’re up for it, of course.

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Must Love Time Travel”

Last week’s challenge — “The Android and the Wondering Chamber.”

Yesterday I had the fortune of interviewing Misters Hornshaw and Hurwitch (who sound the purveyors of fine meats) about their funny book on time travel (So You Created A Wormhole).

As such, I thought, well, let’s carry the ball forward a little bit.

You have 1000 words in which to write a story where “time travel” is a prominent feature.

Anything and everything else can feature —

As long as it has time travel.

Post at your online space, then link back here in the comments.

You have, as always, a wee widdle week. Due by noon EST on Friday, July 27th.

NOW GO, TEMPORAL WIZARDS, GO.

Hornshaw & Hurwitch: The Terribleminds Interview

Behold! A two-fer! A BOGO! A real steal! Today in the electric chair we’ve got Phil Hornshaw and Nick Hurwitch, authors of the wildly hilarious and deeply irreverent So You Created A Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide To Time Travel. I met these two miscreants and deviants at the LA Book Festival, where they came tumbling out of a police box eating Sumerian churros. And I said, you must swing by and submit to an interview! And they said, “Not before we travel back in time to ensure that the aliens never enslaved us in 1832,” and I was like, “Right, like you can make that happen.” You can find these gents at timetravelguide.com, or at their individual Twitter locations — @PhilHornshaw and @heWIZARD.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So tell us a story. As short or as long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

“Winky Finger”

This time, when he came out the other side of the wormhole, Delbridge Langdon III found himself about 12 feet off the ground and whipping through the air. He landed on his back and slipped like a stone on a still pond across intermittent patches of snow and thin grass, coming to a stop a second later with a groan that rumbled in his lungs and pain that rippled across his limbs.

“Crap,” Langdon moaned, knowing that his high-velocity re-entry was 100 percent his own fault. When you jump through time, you leave a planet moving at around 30,000 kilometers per hour (a number he’d discovered by Googling it) – and so you are traveling at 30,000 kilmometers per hour. And then you have to land on a planet also traveling that speed, but of course, since you’re moving through time, the planet is obviously somewhere else: somewhere else in its orbit, somewhere else in its rotation, and generally just moving at a high rate of speed. He must have fudged the calculation on the last one – what was this, jump five? – and come out of the wormhole slightly at odds with the motion of the world beneath him. Now he had a bruised head and probably a paper mill’s load of slivers in his ass.

He brushed himself off and stood up. Hell, at least it was light out this time. But he still had no idea where he was, and he was running out of scratch paper to do calculations. Before long he wouldn’t be able to keep up this idea of searching for civilization to study through random acts of temporal dislocation.

Five jumps and he was nowhere nearer to figuring out the practicalities of time travel. Sure, he was time traveling, but all the issues he’d been warned about by the greater scientific community – displacement, temporal drift, planetary reciprocity (er, velocity), potential injury – were affecting him exactly as he had been warned. “Don’t time travel,” they’d said. “It’s incredibly stupid,” they’d said. “It’ll get you killed,” they’d said, “and there’s nothing much you could really learn anyway.”

And yet here he was.

Still, he hadn’t wound up in orbit yet, so at least the Googly information was accurate, Langdon thought.

He started walking. This was the second part of the routine: land first, walk second. The idea was to find a settlement, maybe meet some locals, maybe explore the past. Maybe trigger a paradox (Wouldn’t that be something, Langdon thought, giggling. Suck it, naysaying Science jerks!). So far he hadn’t found anything but trees and vegetation in various states of growth. One time he’d almost fallen over a desert cleft. While he wasn’t technically traveling through space, the movement of Earth beneath him made his landing locations haphazard at best.

This time, as he walked, Langdon’s face fell into a frown as he breasted a hill and found himself standing at the edge of a wooded valley. Pines or some approximation thereof formed a thick, endless army, standing at strict attention or chittering in the wind for miles in all directions. A steep drop waited ahead of him – nothing but forest in all directions.

Defeated, Langdon let himself drop like a moppet with cut strings. Nothing. Again. He figured if he could find a settlement, he could puzzle out an approximation of the year. As it was, with no point of reference, he had no real way of calculating the return trip back to his proper temporal casaba. Er, casa. Home.

That was weird, Langdon thought. Spanish? He didn’t even know Italian. He’d taken German in high school and they said that if you knew Latin you could speak all the Bromance languages, but even then, he’d only pulled down a C in Bromance anyway.

He shook it off. His brain was doing weird things, probably because he’d just jarred it (Next time, wear a helmet, Langdon thought. Ooh, a pink one with tassels.)

Pulling off his pack, he had another bite of the granola bar he’d been nibbling as slowly as possible for something like six hours. It tasted like cardboard and farts, which he imagined approximated hamster food, and in his frustration, Langdon threw it over the ridge. Littering somehow felt empowering, and he considered what else he could throw to soil the booty he was seeing before him as he pulled out the last of his notebook paper to make another set of jump calculations.

Langdon paused, lifting the pen off the paper and staring at the numbers. They looked all…wonky. As if there was something wrong with the way he was writing them. And the pen felt strange in his hand, now that he was thinking about it. Like it was smaller than he remembered.

Shifting the pen into his other hand (What was French for pen? Was it le pen? That sounded right…), Langdon held up his right hand in front of his face and spread his fingers. He eyed each digit carefully, looking for any abnormalities. Had be broken one of his fingers in the fall?

No…all six seemed straight as always, if a little try and cracked. Although his winky finger felt a little tingly.

He dropped his hand. What about that seemed strange?

Raising his other hand, Langdon looked first at one, then the other. No tumors that he could see, which was good – you never know what might give you a tumor while time trebling. Although, wait… something was off. Something about his winky finger.

Winky finger. What the hell is a winky finger?

It hit Langdon like a kick to the groin and he almost puked from the force of it. What the hell was a winky finger and why the hell did he have one on his right hand? Holy shit holy shit holy shit hol—

He leapt up, looking around frantically. Should he cut it off? Yes. Cut it the hell off. It was probably a tumor that just looked like a finger! Langdon grabbed it with his other hand to see if it felt gooey like he imagined a time travel-induced finger-like growth would probably feel, but it felt like a finger – which is exactly what a winky would want him to think, he thought.

Spinning around and attempting to dart away from the ridge in panic, Langdon ran himself straight into a tree. It was exceedingly helpful.

Lying on his back, for a second, the haze cleared from his mind. The bad calculations. The winky finger. The weird words darting through his mind. He had discovered something on this trip after all: some kind of chronological displacement that occurred among cells in his body. Probably his brain was all miswired just like his hand was. Who knows what had been duplicated or expanded or smashed together as he was hopping through wormholes; somehow, traversal from one time point to another was screwing him up at the molecular level.

Well then. Time to just relax a bit, Langdon told himself, somewhat self-satisfied with his successful time travel discovery, although the iron ‘e’ was not lost on him. No reason to be too hasty. He’d need time to work this out.

He wished he had his granola bar.

Someone offered him a hand and Langdon took it readily, pulling himself up. As he reached his feet, he was somewhat confused to see himself staring back at him. He looked back down at the ground where he’d lain – no, nobody there – and back at the face of the kind stranger, Langdon.

“Howdy,” Langdon chirped, grinning and offering a short wave. “How’s it going?”

Langdon’s brow furrowed as he offered a few tiny twitches of his wrist and palm in return.

“I feel weird.”

“Yeah, that’ll pass,” Langdon offered, squeezing Langdon’s shoulder. “It gets essayer.” Noticing the winky finger, Langdon offered a slanted smile. “We’re stuck with him, though, I think.”

“How’d you get here?” Langdon asked. “Did the winky send you?”

“In, like, 20 minutes, I decided to try jumping again, so try to remember what I say to you. Because you need to say it to you.”

“Oh.”

“Or you could just stay,” said Langdon with a shrug. “I think we ought to build a criminalization. These woods kinda suck.”

“Yeah, okay,” Langdon replied, still a little confused. “Hey, isn’t that dangerous? With paradoxes or something?”

“Eh,” Langdon frowned back. “I don’t see any butterflies around.”

“I guess there’s a good pint,” Langdon said, scratching at his chin with his winky and looking down.

“Hey,” he piped up as a thought hit his brain like a bullet. “Do you have a granola bar?”

Langdon shook his head. “We threw it away, remember?”

“Oh,” returned Langdon, trying not to show his disappointment.

Why do you tell stories?

Phil: We all tell stories. Everything we do is about telling stories. When you think about it, all of human society is built on stories, from religion to law, culture and art, all of it is about sharing the experiences we have with others. Some of those stories are a little less interesting than others, but they all serve a purpose. Somebody needs to tell stories that include zombies, robots and insane machines. If we don’t step up, who will? Lots of people, that’s who, but they might not have enough zombies. But for me, it’s what being human is all about. I love hearing stories and I love telling them because it’s the most powerful way to connect with anything and anyone. Whenever I read something it just makes me want to write something, to keep pursuing that connection with other people.

Nick: If I’m being honest with myself? Because to be really good at something, you have to choose. Growing up I was a nerd, but loved and played sports. I could get lost in a book, or spend the weekend at the movie theater. I took every art class I could, but couldn’t get enough of AP Biology. Without getting all Wonder Years on you, Phil and I were editors in chief of our high school paper together. Our adviser, who had just had a baby, told me she hoped her son would be as “well rounded” as me. I wasn’t sure how to take that at the time, because well rounded might easily imply “good at many things, great at none.” I wanted to be great at something, dammit! Then I realized it was very much a compliment: I had the ability to choose. Eventually, you have to put your head down and dedicate yourself to something. Telling stories is the thing that affords me the greatest opportunity to combine all the things I love in any way I see fit. Brain magic!

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice.

Phil: There’s buckets of good writing advice out there; a lot of it can be found right here on this blog. The one thing that’s benefited me more than anything else I’ve ever been told about telling stories has boiled down to a simple axiom: show, don’t tell. It’s so stupidly simple that it’s kind of annoying, but in the years I spent as an editor, in the classes I took in college, it really was the one thing that the most writers I came across really needed to know. Don’t tell people what happened, show them. Play out those scenes you’re breezing past. Avoid summarizing. You’re a writer — so write.

Nick: The oldest one in the book is, “Write what you know.” But the flip side of that axiom is the more important one: “Know more about what you’re writing.” It’s one thing to set your story in the streets of 1920s London. It’s a much greater thing to actually know what those streets were like, geographically or otherwise. It’s one thing to write a story about computer hackers. It’s quite a different thing to know how computer hacking is done. Research can be daunting, but you know what’s worse? Presenting only the tip of the iceberg because that’s all you have, and your reader can seeing right through your melty facade.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

Phil: We both are lucky enough to work as freelancers, and that means we both spend all day writing, every single day. That’s basically the dream — spending all day, every day, dumping out your brain onto a keyboard and rearranging it. Sometimes really amazing stuff comes out, even if you’re the only one who finds it amazing. All the time, though, it’s just about sitting around and playing pretend in some form or another, whether it’s imagining characters and then ruining their lives or trying to find the deeper meanings of the ending of Mass Effect 3. We’re professional thinkers, basically, and we get to constantly challenge ourselves to do it different, do it better. What’s a better job than thinking?

The very worst thing? It becomes mechanical. For a long time I worked as a copy editor for a real estate website, and it quickly became a mind-numbing exercise in discovering just how many times I could replace the same incorrect phrase. Writing for a living boxes you into a space where you either have to be clever on command, which is never easy, or in which you find yourself tapping out the words in the proper sequence without really giving it the portion of yourself that it deserves. Writing as a job can destroy itself if you’re not careful, and then everything great becomes terrible. It’s like being an architect who only designs prefabricated subdivisions. You need to explore when you write. It’s a must.

Nick: My favorite writing-related quote (with the exception of the contents of “500 Ways To Be A Better Writer”) comes from German writer, Thomas Mann: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” There are a lot of people who will just say (to writers in particular), “I can’t write.” But the truth is, neither can writers. The difference is that writers make themselves write. No matter how good, how bad, how successful, or how unheralded, all writers have this in common: they have to sit there and make the next word come. This sucks. It never gets any easier.

However, this is also great. Because eventually, those words become sentences and dialogue and books and scripts and then you have it there, projected onto the backs of eyelids and the insides of imaginations. Over and over again you get the satisfaction of making something that didn’t come easily. So if you happen to be a writer and someone ever tells you, “Oh, I can’t write,” say, “Neither can I. I just do.”

How’d you two find or know one another? Also: what is the secret to good collaboration with a creative partner?

Phil: Nick and I have been best friends since elementary school. We lived close by one another in the Metro Detroit area and we’ve been nerdy about all the same things, including writing, since roughly the third grade. So one secret to collaboration has been that we’re friends, we like the same things, we think similarly about a lot of things and we have a collective history that we can draw on of things we liked, things we’ve done, and so on. That makes writing a lot easier, because we’re often on the same page really early in whatever process were in.

The other secret, I’d say, is trust, We’ve been working together for so long now, on so many things, that I know I can bring an idea to Nick and find out if it’s actually a shit sandwich or not, and hopefully vice versa. I help Nick identify his latent reverse-racism and he helps me keep my crippling fear of pirate peg-legs from coloring everything we create. But more than that, I trust that if I really like something but it doesn’t work, Nick will let me know. He won’t pull any peg-legs. And then we can talk it out, fix it, throw it away, whatever — it helps not to be married to ideas, but more than anything, I think we do a good job making each of our ideas better. Even when we’re not collaborating, I run most everything I write past Nick and he brings me stuff for notes all the time.

It’s almost an extension of “Kill your darlings.” Collaboration means you’ve got to be willing to kill darlings, like, all the time. It’s a darling holocaust out there. Ideas are constantly getting aborted. But if you trust your collaborator, you know that they’re there to make the work better, and you can part with ideas, the result is always a genetically superior supersoldier.

Nick: Though I’m sure we knew each other beforehand, my first memory of Phil is from the 4th grade. We were walking down the hall with a mutual friend, and Phil was deriding me for my lack of knowledge regarding slang terms for “penis.” A lifelong friendship was forged (and I have long since surpassed him in this field). We once spent the summer between 8th and 9th grade writing a sci-fi/fantasy book, which we realized pretty quickly after completing was just an amalgamation of all the stuff we thought was cool at the time (Final Fantasy games played a big role.) We went on to become terribly well-behaved teenagers, were editors-in-chief of our high school newspaper together, and eventually I convinced him to follow me out to LA.

Writing partnerships are difficult. You can’t just throw any two creative people together and get a new, better result. It has to work. Even beyond the creative, the process of working with someone else whose ideas get equal weight requires deference, patience and an open mind. The writing process is almost by definition one of seclusion. Shutting out the world to make the voices in your head louder. People assume we sit in the same room and write together–we don’t. And in fact when we try we don’t get very far. We’ll have lunch or drinks and brainstorm, or outline, and from there it’s really about volleying things back and forth until one of us has set the other for a spike.

My favorite knowledge nugget about writing partnerships comes from Terry Rossio & Ted Elliot, the writers behind movies like Aladdin, Shrek and Deja Vu (sorry, guys). It’s something to the effect of, “For a writing partnership to work, both parties have to feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.” It may be as simple as that.

Phil: I don’t remember that penis conversation.

Tell the world why everyone ever should buy So You Created A Wormhole. No modesty. Put your book-balls on the table and slap them mightily.

Nick: “The book is fucking funny.” –Chuck Wendig

But also–it is everything you think is cool wrapped into one book. As the first and only field manual for the intrepid time traveler on the go, So You Created A Wormhole will teach you everything you need to know to time travel. And even though the tone is zany and off-the-wall, we did do actual research about the science(iness) of time travel, wormholes, blackholes, potential paradoxes, making batteries that run on the electricity-producing microbes in dinosaur poo, etc. The parts of the book I’m most proud of are those that manage to take really out-there concepts, like special relativity, or paradoxes by inaction, and explain them in lay terms. And because you’ll be laughing the whole way, it doesn’t even feel like learning!

It’s also a book for the meme generation. We pull from and riff on the tropes of a lot of pop culture–pretty much anything that relates to time travel, space travel, mummy fighting and dino riding. Okay, one more pitch: It’s like The Zombie Survival Guide only it doesn’t take itself seriously and with time travel instead of zombies. And I don’t think need to tell any of your readers how much cooler time travel is than zombies.

Phil: Nick pretty much covered it, but allow me to add: it’s illustrated. Hilariously.

Nick: By Aled Lewis! Who is amazing. And British. Everyone should check him out.

The book *is* fucking funny. Forgive the impossible-to-answer question but, how the hell do you “be funny?”

Nick: Firstly, thank you. I means a lot to us whenever we hear that. And to your question: turn your filter way the fuck down. Better yet, turn it off–you can polish yourself back up to an acceptable level of decorum during editing. Or not. You may even surprise yourself. I think the thing that worked best for us was to just let go and be ourselves. The book has a very particular tone, but a lot of that was cultivated from two decades of friendship banter. The best part of writing this book was passing sections back and forth and making each other laugh. If we could do at least that much, we were on our way to making other people laugh, too. I think it’s a lot more difficult to say, “Man, we need a joke here, let’s be funnier here, hey, do you think other people are going to laugh at that?” When you let the humor flow naturally from the material, you’re going to have much more success.

Phil: I obsess over this all the time. When Nick says, “Try not to ask “Is this funny? We need a joke here,” that’s me, I’m the one who’s looking at it from a standpoint of needing to improve, be funnier, make better, and I’m constantly worried about it. Nick’s right, you need to just throw it all out there and let the editing cut back the things that don’t work, but for me, I find myself analyzing a lot. What makes this funny? What about it is unexpected?

Volume is definitely important, and self-censorship doesn’t help anything on the first pass. But I think the ability to analyze, to break down a joke or an idea and say, Here’s where it works, is really important for anyone who wants to do humor. I’ll readily admit I haven’t mastered it.

Make yourself laugh. Focus on that. Then see if it makes other people laugh. For comedy, I think, it’s about feedback.

Obligatory time travel question: if you could time travel, where would you go and what would you do there?

Nick: I would wake up, make myself a Dodo omelette, and sling myself back to the Late Cretaceous period. Then I’d make nice with some herbivores and ride a triceratops. We’d laugh, roll around in the grass, then fight a T-rex because we have horns and your arms are short, I don’t care how big your mean, razor-tooth face is. We’d grab a late lunch at Trike’s favorite grazing field, then we’d say our goodbyes and I would fling myself forward several million years to the year 3000 AD. I’m hoping that by then, if we haven’t all killed one another, humanity will be pretty well on its way to galavanting around the galaxy, and science will have solved the most trying issues of our times, like having sex in anti-gravity, and space suits that bend at the elbows. After a nice, long dinner on Kepler-22b, I’d come back to my own time–only, about 30 years earlier. See, I’ve got really curly hair, so I’ve always figured the fact that I didn’t live as an adult through the ‘80s was some kind of galactic miscalculation. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’d get a lot more writing done before the invention of the Internet.

Phil: First, to the future, where I would procure my free complimentary spaceship, since everyone from the future has one. Then, it’s time to form my ragtag team of heroes, aliens and robots from throughout time. Bill and Ted had the right idea, but they didn’t go far enough — first, you get Lincoln, Napoleon, Socrates, an assassin droid, an alien concubine, Billy the Kid and King Arthur together. Then, you fight evil. Naturally. Probably it would be us hunting down and stopping evil time travelers, but I’m not really willing to limit the scope. There are adventures to get into, and I want to get into them. Also space travel. That doesn’t really need to have an actual goal behind it. My life as Star Trek would be just fine.

Favorite word? And then follow up, favorite curse word?

Nick: Lately I’ve been combining fruit with well-known curse words. Asspineapple comes to mind. Cucumbernuts. Kumquattwat. Really, though, I doubt I’ll ever outgrown a good old “Fuck.”

As for favorite word, I think it’s hard to go wrong with cupcake. My guess is that most writers would go with something more descriptive, but there are few words that can be separated from their meaning completely and still remain sweetly satisfying. Go on, say it. Cupcake.

Phil: “Anthropomorphism.” Not only is it fun to write and to say, but it gives you an inflated sense of your intelligence in most situations. Plus the very concept is exciting — giving human traits to things — in this fantastical way. It always conjures up the idea of magic and hidden characteristics for me, the kinds of things that trigger your imagination when you’re a child and as you get older turn into the underpinnings of horror stories. I love the idea of fantasies turning to nightmares and vice versa.

Curse words are something else entirely. I can’t say I have much of a vocabulary in that department because I routinely circle back to old standbys. A biology teacher once told me I should use “cloaca” because in birds its a catch-all area that handles basically everything gross, but there’s no elegance in it. I think I prefer “shit.” It sounds as bad as it is in all cases. The more disgust you put into the word, the more disgusting the situation you’re describing. It’s not often that a word can reflect the exact amount of emotion you invest in it.

You said the magic word: Cupcake. What is your favorite kind of cupcake?

Phil: …Red. Brown. Red and…brown, I guess. I’m sort of unclear on the idea of “kinds” of cupcakes. A cupcake appears, I eat it. They are indistinguishable.

Nick: Yeah, same here. My entire life I have battled a devastating illness known as “a massive fucking sweet tooth.” But for the sake of affability, I’ll say red velvet. Oo! Or confetti! Or–

Phil: What the hell is a confetti cupcake?

Favorite alcoholic beverage?

Nick: I’m a whiskey guy. If I’m in a cocktail bar, I’ll treat myself to an old fashioned. Anywhere else, Jack & Ginger (Jack Daniels & Ginger Ale) is my standby.

Phil: I wish I could claim a favorite. Sadly, I know nothing of alcohol, having failed to use my college education to its fullest. Now I drink cheap things I mix with other cheap things. As I answer this, there happens to be Bacardi here, and Coke Zero, and thus that is my favorite drink until my next drink. Also whiskey is good.

Recommend a book, comic book, film or game: something with a great story.

Nick: I’m also [secretly] a filmmaker, so I’m gonna go ahead and recommend a film. This Argentinean movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film a couple years ago, The Secrets In Their Eyes, is one of the best movies to come out in the past decade in any country. It’s this epic, winding, well-structured, beautifully shot, dual storyline suckerpunch that manages to be utterly harrowing and funny at all the right moments. The soccer stadium scene will make you crap your pants. The rest will keep you trapped there in your own squish until the final frame. Watch it now.

Phil: I’ve been spending a lot of my time consuming time travel fiction over the last year, both as research and out of curiosity. There’s a film I stumbled on at one point, this horror movie called Triangle, that’s just dynamite. Everything else I’ve been into lately has been pretty mainstream; Triangle has a bit of a cult classic feel, it’s a little bit obscure, and it’s pretty mind-bendingly phenomenal.

What skills do you bring to help humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Phil: Of course, a viable knowledge of zombie survival, having spent a vast amount of time considering the situation. Zombie survival situations inevitably break down out of issues of panic, ineptitude, or complacency. Your one true advantage over a zombie is your brain, so while others might have survival skills or impressive braun, we have the ability to know not to wander off alone, how to keep quiet in heavily populated areas, what kind of structures are best to reinforce, where the most viable locations for repopulating the planet will be, which other survivors are poisoning the group with their idiocy and so forth. We’re the guys who you can turn to when you’re wondering, “Should I throw a molotov cocktail into that crowd of undead?” We’re there to tell you, “No, jackass, zombies don’t feel pain and then they’re going to wander around aflame, setting everything on fire.” We’re integral to the winning of zombie wars.

Nick: I consider myself a pretty good judge of character, which means I’ll be the one deciding who lives and who dies. There will be no room for racists and narcissistic sociopaths with twitchy trigger fingers in the new zombie apocalyptic reality. You’re welcome.

You committed crimes against humanity. They’ve caught you. You get one last meal.

Nick: It would be some kind of coconut, olive and mushroom puree souffle, because I hate all of those things with a passion, and fuck the sadistic onlookers, that’s why. Also it would be pretty funny if I puked on the executioner’s kicks.

Phil: Something with a cyanide tablet. Or what was that drug McCoy gave Kirk so Spock would think he’d killed him? Whatever that was. Put it in a baked potato. Obviously we still have supervillainy to take care of, seeing as we’re all about committing crimes against humanity in this scenario, so staying captured is not an option. There’s no time for dinner!

What’s next for you guys as storytellers? What does the future hold?

Phil: There are plenty of half-formed ideas in test tubes right now, but so far we’re just riding the So You Created a Wormhole wave and trying to get the word out about the thing. We’re thinking about a couple of follow-up ideas — books seem to work well for us, so we’d like to keep at them — but really we’ve got ideas across lots of different media, and it’s not even all time travely. Although, admittedly, we do have a TV pilot draft we need to work on that is, in fact, all time travely. Also steampunkish. And gunslingeresque. On the whole, I think we’re both ready to do something more narrative than Wormhole. That book tells something of a meta story of time travel, but I for one am itchy to develop some characters and make them miserable.

Nick: I’ve got one short film under my belt (My Barista) and the trailer for Wormhole, too. I’d like to shoot another short by the end of the year and finish another feature script or two. We also have a 10-episode season of webisodes based on our book written, which we’d like to shoot once we get some financing. It’s sort of our take on the buddy comedy, set inside a secret time scientist laboratory at QUAN+UM (our fictional governing body of time travel). They’re tasked with sending regular dispatches to time travelers in the field, often with disastrous and hilarious results. Getting our first book published is a drunken conversation come true, but we’re always looking at new ways and different mediums to tell our tales. Hopefully in the future, we’ll be doing a lot more of that.