Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 408 of 464)

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February 7, 2012 / 144 Comments

25 Reasons That Writers Are Bug-Fuck Nuts

It seems like a good time for a spiritual successor to my earlier “Beware of Writer” posts — this time, jacked into the popular “25 Things” format here that all you cats and kittens seem to like. Plus, it’s sometimes good to speak to the non-writers out there, let ’em know why we get that spooky glint in our eyes once in a while. You wanna know why we’re a little wacky? I gotcher 25 reasons right here.

1. We Destroy Our Imaginary Friends

Authors invent people. Out of thin air. They reach into the moist and dewy folds of the invisible thought vagina and from that squishy space birth people who have never existed, and who will never exist. We give ourselves — and by proxy, the audience — reasons to care about these people. They become our imaginary friends. Then we take our imaginary friends and fuck them over ten ways till Tuesday. “This is Dave. We all like Dave. Good hair. Nice teeth. We can all relate to Dave. Uh-oh! Dave’s wife just left him. Stole the kids. And now he’s being hunted by a serial killer from the moon! HA HA HA HA SUCK A DICK DAVE.”

2. We Specialize In Creative Ways To Die

We’re basically murderers who just don’t have the balls to actually go out and kill some motherfuckers. It’s not just stories about aliens chomping on people’s guts or thugs stabbing other thugs — books and films and comic books are showcases for every form of misery and doom one could imagine. Once in a while you’ll be walking along and suddenly a thought will strike you: “I wonder if I could work it into a story where some dude gets his guts vacuumed out his boothole by an out-of-control Roomba. I bet I could. Time to murder some non-existent humans. To the writermobile!”

3. Behold The Bad News Boner

It’s not just murder. It’s all kinds of bad news. Bus crash! Small town swallowed by avalanche! Exploding nuns! Deadly form of herpes escapes lab on the back of a carnivorous shark-llama hybrid! Oh noes! Bad news! Yay! I want to rub it all over my body like a cream or unguent! I want to wear its stink and huff the stench of cataclysm and catstrophe to get me jacked up for my next story! Exclamation points! Can’t stop!

4. “I Was Once Born With A Tail!”

We are trained to be gifted liars. Anybody who writes fiction — or works for Fox News — is tasked with the job of convincing others that Things That Are Absolutely Not True are, in fact, Totally Fucking True. Our entire job is predicated on being good at spinning a complicated web of deception. Truth? Bo-ring. Lies? High-five! Lies make Story Jesus giggle as if you’re tickling his tummy. I imagine all writers have those moments where they’re sitting around their office, pantsless, an empty whiskey bottle spinning idly at their feet — they rub their eyes and mutter, “I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake anymore.” Then the writer hops on his rocket unicorn and goes to buy a cat-burger from the fish-faced Atlantean fellow down on Bumbershoot Street. See? The lies just fall out of me. Like chewing gum from a dead man’s mouth.

5. Quiet Loners

Whenever they find some whackaloon with a collection of severed heads in his freezer, they always trot out the neighbors and you get that classic line: “He was always so quiet.” And the assumption becomes, oh, that seemingly nice-and-quiet chap next door needed his quiet time because he was too busy with his hobby of decapitating dudes. On the other hand: hey, maybe him being quiet and alone all the time made him crazy. Maybe you spend too long cooped up with yourself the carpet starts moving and the wallpaper shifts and the room starts to whisper, You know what would be awesome? A sweet-ass collection of severed heads. Get on that. This is probably a good time to remind you that writers happen to spend a lot of time alone and cooped up with themselves. Just, uhh, putting that out there. What, this old thing? Just a hacksaw.

6. The Grotto Of Insanity

Our office spaces soon begin to reflect our quiet and lonely — and inevitably crazy — lifestyle. Teetering towers of books that threaten to crush us. Pens laying everywhere (and if you’re me, half of them are chewed on, the toxic ink and plastics long settled into my body). Over there, a plate of what may have once been a burrito but now looks like a brain made of fungus. Next to it, a small handgun. Next to that, a dead pigeon. Underneath the desk, a noisy pile of Red Bull cans, liquor bottles, and ammunition casings. Behind us, a cabinet full of freeze-dried severed heads. Our offices inevitably turn into wombs, that is, if wombs were responsible for birthing the raw stuff of crazy into the world.

7. The Nexus Of Madness Is Atop Our Wibbly-Wobbly Necks

If you think our offices are the domicile of the insane, you should see the inside of our heads. It’s the asylum from 12 Monkeys all up in these motherfuckers. And we live here all the goddamn time. No escape!

8. Creativity Is Seen As A Commodity Of The Lazy And Insane

You tell most people what you do and you get this look — it’s a look that perfectly contains a tempest of information, a tangle of thoughts (and none of them good). You get a mixture of, Oh, he’s one of those, or, Look, another hipster-slacker-socialist-asshole stealing all our precious unemployment, or, He doesn’t look like he’s starving so he must have a trust fund keeping him alive, or, Ugh, that’s not a real job. Swamp logger, that’s a real job. Writer’s just something you say when you like to smoke drugs all day. It’s really quite disheartening. You get those looks often enough it starts to crack your egg a little bit, dontcha know?

9. The Love-Me Hate-Me Two-Step

Here, then, is the critical dichotomy of our process: we have to love an idea so much we’re willing to spend the great deal of time shoveling it into the world, and then we have to switch gears and learn to hate the thing we just created in order to improve it. We puff up our ego, then lance it with a hot pin. It’s like giving birth to a child who you love with all your heart until you throw him out into the icy woods with a note pinned to his chest reading: this is how you learn to survive, you little turd. Writers are the tragedy and comedy masks whirling about, trading places again and again. And it’s all a bit barmy, innit?

10. Caffeine Poisoning

Writers drink so much caffeine that eventually the synapses start to break down like wires chewed by starving squirrels. And then those starving squirrels make a ratty nest of old leaves and smelly yarn inside our heads. We end up as gutted automatons piloted by a tribe of twitchy squirrels. Metaphorically.

11. Alcohol Poisoning

Coffee, then liquor, then coffee, then liquor. Okay, yes, I know, not every writer is a pickled booze-sponge, but some drink enough for all, I suspect. All that booze affects the liver and just as the liver is kind of the bouncer for the human body, detoxing all that bad voodoo, Plato felt that another function of the liver was to keep in check a human’s darkest emotions. Meaning, the liver’s purpose was to bottle up all the crazy. And what do writers do? OBLITERATE THE LIVER WITH DRINK. Be free, little crazies! Be free!

12. “I Got A Bad Case Of The Penmonkeys, Man”

We’re addicts for our wordsmithy. Over time, it just happens. One day you’ve been writing so long that when a day comes you don’t put words to paper it feels like that space between your heart and your guts is filled with a cluster of bitey eels that want out, and the only way to give them egress is to start writing again. We’re word-junkies, man. Ink-slingers. Fiction fiends. The only cure is another taste of that sweet story.

13. Control Freaks With Nothing To Control

Inside our stories, we’re gods among mortals — our hands are on all the buttons and switches. Outside our stories, we control a big bag of Dick Butkus. We don’t control publisher advances, book placement, trends, reviews, or that weird little deranged robot that computes the Amazon recommendation algorithms.

14. Crazy Money!

Yeah, by “crazy money” I don’t mean “money in such quantity it’s totally awesome,” but rather, “money that arrives in wildly inconsistent sums and on a madman’s schedule.” You hit this point where, okay, you have to learn to survive from January to March on this royalty check of $7.53, and then in March you’re supposed to get like, ten grand or something, but then that ten grand doesn’t show up until June, and when you get it you forget you need to buy groceries and instead buy like, a Wave Runner instead. Yeah. See? Nutty.

15. Books Books I Love Books Books Books Mmm Books

The one thing that e-readers have robbed from us is the ability to throw all the books we own into a room and roll around on them, naked. I mean, okay, sure, I can do that with an e-reader, but eventually someone’s going to pick it up and be like, “Is this a testicle-print on my Kindle?” What I’m saying is, some people hoard clothing, cats, fast food containers, ninja weapons, exotic primates — but writers hoard books. And eventually all those books — each a storehouse of utter unreality — bleeds into our brains via creative osmosis. Either that or they fall on us, crushing our weak little writer bodies beneath.

16. We Are Distracted For A Reason

It’s not new to suggest that writers are easily distracted: we’ve all gotten lost in an endless labyrinth of cat videos (and at the center of that labyrinth is a cat dressed like a minotaur, and he’s all like I CAN HAZ COW HED OH NOES THESEUS and — dang, LOLcats jokes just don’t cut it anymore, do they?). But here’s why we’re easily distracted: because our brains know it’s bad for us to stare at a screen full of tiny words all day. Our brain is telling us to look at something — anything — other than those tiny little ant-like words. It is unnatural to stare at words in this way. It nibbles holes in our gray matter.

17. The Internet Is Full Of Ragehate, And We Dive In, Headfirst

Once upon a time, authors would get reviews that were insightful, incisive critiques — “The author’s masterful use of language is sadly handicapped by a plot whose events fail to properly resolve.” Now we have to put up with internet vitriol like you’d find on the likes of a YouTube video where a guy gets hit in the nuts with a tricycle: “THIS BOOK IS FUKKIN STUPID IT BLOWS GIRAFFES THE AWTHOR IS A TARDCART.” And then they probably call you a racial or sexual epithet. It’s like asking for insightful criticism during a Call of Duty match on Xbox Live. It does little good for one’s sanity.

18. The English Language Makes As Much Sense As Snivel Bliff Fleekum Hork

Okay, this one is a little biased toward those writing in the English tongue, but seriously, trying to know all the rules in and around the composition of the English language will give you a goddamn nosebleed. Looking at all the rules — and then memorizing all the bizarre-o exceptions — makes you want to go back to the days of communicating with clicks and burps. Related: Brian Regan knows the real “I-before-E” rule.

19. At Some Point We Tried Really Hard To Understand The Publishing Industry

Predicting trends, imagining advances, contemplating the agency model, trying to figure out why anybody would publish any book by Billy Ray Cyrus ever — all this does is plunge your mind into the roiling black soup of unmitigated chaos. You can tell the moment any author’s sanity snapped, because it goes like this: “My book’s been out on submission for seven years, and now they’re publishing a book of scat marks written by that greasy orangutan, Snooki?” Listen hard enough, you hear a *plink* — that’s the sound of the little pubic hair holding the last vestiges of that author’s sanity together.

20. That Might Be Scurvy

No, that’s not the latest spin-off band by They Might Be Giants — it’s because we don’t have enough money for food and health insurance and because we didn’t eat a couple oranges now we’re losing our teeth and fingernails and turning into some raving froth-mouthed version of the Brundlefly.

21. Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me? Me!

It is in our makeup to be desperate for attention. We write our books, our films, our articles, and we’re not writing them so that we can just read them back to ourselves and have a jolly good laugh. We want you to read them, too. And you. And you! And you over there, hiding behind the shrubs. The more attention we get, the more successful we become — or, at least, feel. The ironic part is, many aren’t comfortable with that attention and yet seek it like junkies. Which, you guessed it, makes us a wee smidgen bit crazy.

22. Amazon Rankings

Click. Clickity-click. Refresh refresh. “Did my ranking go up? Or down? Or up? Or down? It stayed the same. What does that mean? Did I sell enough to stay afloat? Are the rankings broken? How often do they update? Is my book doing better than that other book? Is that good? Or bad? My finger is getting a blister. MY ENTIRE SELF-WORTH IS PINNED TO THIS GODDAMN NUMBER. *sob*” Click. Click. Refresh refresh.

23. The Idea Plague

Ask a writer: “Where do you get your ideas from?” And the writer will reply: “How do you make yours stop?” Then he’ll bat at his hair as if it’s on fire. I can’t walk ten feet without thinking of a new novel or script idea. It’s an idea that will almost certainly never yield fruit — which means I’m essentially committing an act of literary Onanism. So much idea-seed spilled on the floor. Infertile and inert. And smells like Clorox.

24. We Hang Out With Other Writers

Crazy people hanging out with other crazy people just creates a crazy people feedback loop where the crazy recirculates again and again like a bad stink in an old car. Crazy begets crazy begets crazy.

25. It’s Cool-Cool To Be Cray-Cray

Most writers aren’t actually crazy — but we certainly feel that way sometimes and furthermore, a helluva lot of our authorial forebears were definitely a bit, ahhh, unstable (Hemingway! Hunter S. Thompson! Emily Dickinson! Sylvia Plath!). As such, we’re cast into a realm where it’s okay, even expected, that our creative pursuits mark us on the charts between “a little bit eccentric” and “crazier than a shithouse chimp.”


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February 6, 2012 / 75 Comments

Tunes For The Penmonkey

I don’t tend to listen to much music while writing. Editing, sometimes — or, maybe during prep. But during writing, I like things quiet. Chill. Shhhhh.

But! But, I’ve been playing with music a little bit — not so much during the writing but before it to get pumped up and “in the mood” and then at punctuated points during the actual process.

Which makes me want to ask you people:

Do you listen to music when you write?

What do you listen to?

A deeper, more granular question would be:

Given that different music is valuable to different writing moods or to writing different scenes, what do you like to write when working on certain types of scenes? Say, when you’re writing action? Or drama? Or sex? Or ACTION DRAMA SEX? (That will be the name of my memoir, by the way. Look for it in the year 2034. Provided we all survive the Hyperborean Sharkpocalypse of 2032.)

So.

You.

Music.

Writing.

What’s the score?

Pun not intended until now.

February 3, 2012 / 39 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: One Small Story In Seven Acts

The “write in the present tense” challenge is just wrapping up. Won’t you check it out?

Earlier this week I was all like, “Blah blah blah, here’s 25 things about story structure.”

And in there I offered one particular structure for a story —

A seven-act spread.

There I wrote:

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).

…and now I want to see those seven acts put into play.

In a 1000-word example of flash fiction.

From you.

Yes, that’s right. I want you to take your 1000 words and orchestrate a full seven-act arc from intro all the way to the climax and resolution, not missing a step in the middle.

You have, as always, one week. February 10th by noon EST.

Post your story at your blog or online somewhere, then drop a link to the comments so we can find it.

One story.

Seven acts.

Get writing.

February 2, 2012 / 13 Comments

Myke Cole: The Terribleminds Interview

All I gotta say is, Myke Cole? Bonafide bad-ass. Furthermore, an all-around nice guy. He’s also a guy with a book out this week — the military-meets-magic CONTROL POINT (AKA “Black Hawk Down” meets the “X-Men”). I managed to get a moment of Myke’s time in between, I dunno, punching tanks and playing Frisbee Golf with landmines, and here he sits down and submits to the terribleminds interview. Read it, and then visit his site — MykeCole-dot-com — and follow him on Twitter (@MykeCole).

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

During my first tour in Baghdad, I was sitting in my hooch at around 0200. I couldn’t sleep, so I was playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my laptop. It was over 100 degrees, so I was sitting in my underwear.

Whoosh. Bang. Whoosh. Bang. Incoming rounds. From the sound and the shivering impact, I guessed they were 107s.

And I panic. Instead of doing what you should do (hit the deck), I grab my go-bag and my pistol and go flying out of the hooch, racing for the bunker, making myself a giant upright target for any low-flying shrapnel.

A round comes in danger-close, just on the other side of a cinder-block wall. It doesn’t detonate, but the bang is loud and the shaking so dramatic that I can swear that it did (if it had, I surely would have died).

The attack is over. I’m lying in the dirt, completely coated in dust. My ears are ringing and there’s a cloud of sulphur/cordite hanging over me. I’m only wearing underwear. I have no idea where my go-bag and weapon are. I think I may have pissed myself.

I’m one of the lucky guys who has a cellphone. When it rings, I find my go-bag.

It’s my mom. She’s calling to let me know how frightened she is that I’m in Iraq.

Why do you tell stories?

To communicate. To get a reaction. To know that other people are hearing what I have to say and that it is impacting them. I am no Emily Dickenson and I absolutely cannot understand people who operate like that.

I also do it to pay back. Stories saved me, reared me, created me. They are the reason I live. I know there are people out there who are the same way. They need them as much as I do. If I can add to the body of work that makes lives wonderful, then I have truly done something worthwhile.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Cowboy up. Novels don’t write themselves. Don’t wait for your muse. Don’t wait until you “have the time.” Don’t wait for inspiration to strike. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re wasting your time, or if you suck. Shut the hell up, and get to work.

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

I’m going to Confusion (a convention in Detroit) this coming weekend. At that con, I will be sitting down with many of my favorite authors: Peter V. Brett, Patrick Rothfuss, Brent Weeks, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch.

We will be playing a game of 1st edition D&D, with a classic Gygax-written module, probably KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS.

The fact that I get to do crap like that is, frankly, transcendent.

The worst thing is poverty. Even with a major book deal, full-time writing is uncertain at best. If it weren’t for the health insurance and slight income stream I get from serving in the reserve, I would be homeless. I frequently tell people that I love everything about my life except for how poor I am. But I also firmly believe that money is the easy-part and you can figure that out eventually.

I suspect a lot of authors are or were gamers — tabletop in particular. What did gaming teach you about writing and storytelling? Positive or negative lessons.

I was *just* talking about this last night. I really feel that DM’ing D&D campaigns taught me incredibly important lessons about storytelling. I played with Peter V. Brett in college and watched him craft incredible campaigns that were as engaging as any novel, and then I tried to match them. You have to be willing to do a TON of worldbuilding that your “readers” will never see. I would pour hours into drafting incredibly detailed NPCs, only to have my players just come out and kill them without so much as saying hello. You also have to willing to change course on a dime. Your players can just decide that they don’t want to open that door when the campaign DEMANDS that they OPEN THAT F*&KING DOOR! That agility is critical to being a good novelist.

That author game sounds fucking phenomenal. Let’s extend that. If you could play D&D with, say, five different authors (living or dead), who would they be?

Oh wow:

– Gary Gygax (yes, he’s an author, by god).

– George R. R. Martin.

– Richard K. Morgan

– Naomi Novik

– Ernest Cline

And the module? Tomb of Horrors. Because I’m fantasizing, there’ll be this mind-ray that makes us all forget the module, so that none of us know where any of the traps are and how to get around them.

I get to be the Human Paladin. With at least a +3 Holy Avenger. That’s very important. Dude. Seriously. I’m not f$#king around here.

Gaming is big in the military, or so I hear. What other games have you played?

Gaming is HUGE in the military, as is all other SFF-genre loving activities (most importantly, reading). I love any tabletop word game (Scrabble and Boggle) and also the classic board/card games (San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Settlers of Cataan. Though, I should admit that I’m new to some of them). Talisman (with all its expansions) is OUTSTANDING.

I will play Magic if someone brings their decks, but I don’t own any of my own.

Then, there’s wargaming. I am a big fan of historical ancients/medieval games (I prefer 15mm) and my favorite rule set for that is DBA. I don’t really do napoleonic, but I will if I have a good mentor.

And, of course, there’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. There are no words for how unspeakably cool that universe is.

But the most important thing in gaming is the players. I really don’t care what I’m playing, so long as I’m at a table with a bunch of really cool people who are fun to hang out with.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

My favorite word, hands down, is “Contact.” There are SO many awesome meanings and implications, both science-fictional, military, and every day.

My favorite curse is “Balls.” I know, it’s not technically a curse, but I like the fact that it can be used in both positive and negative ways.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

Hard cider (best I’ve ever hard is Hornsby’s). I love going to the UK because they take it seriously there. In America, if I have a drink with my sailors and order a hard cider, inevitably one of my chiefs will ask, “Why don’t you just order a Flirtini, sir?”

Okay, so, tell us about CONTROL POINT — what is it, and why did you write it?

CONTROL POINT is a book that asks the basic question “What if the modern, counterinsurgency-focused military had magic? What would a fire-team look like if you had 2 riflemen, a support-weapon and a sorcerer?” Now that’s the fun squee part “how does an Apache helicopter gunship match up against a Roc?” But it also raises bigger issues about the nature of big bureaucracies and how they handle sudden and dramatic social change. A lot of these questions were asked by the X-Men comic book series. I expand on those in SHADOW OPS.

I wrote the book because I was walking around the Pentagon in 1998, wondering how these regulation obsessed bureaucrats would handle magic. What if the monsters from D&D were real? How would the law deal with that? Those questions HOUNDED me. CONTROL POINT was my way of getting them to shut up.

How is CONTROL POINT a book only you could’ve written?

I’m probably flattering myself here, but I feel like I have a somewhat unique blend of loving-to-write, nerd-roots and military experience. I have been to war and responded to major domestic disasters. I am raised on comic books, D&D and mass-market/spinner-wire-rack fantasy novels. I have been writing all my life. I am sure there are lots of folks with two of those attributes. But all three? Well, maybe so. Maybe CONTROL POINT *isn’t* a book that only I could’ve written. But I’m the guy who wrote it. Here’s hoping folks are happy with that.

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

Book: Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle series, which is (so far) The Warded Man and The Desert Spear. He is, hands-down, one of the best writers I’ve ever read. I frequently use those books to woo non-fantasy readers who I am trying to get into genre, and it has never failed me.

Comic Book: Ed Brubaker’s Captain America Omnibus. It’s as thick as a phonebook, and you’ll wish it were twice as long.

Film: Les Pactes des Loupes (The Brotherhood of the Wolf). Watch the extended edition, in French, with sub-titles.

Game: Sword and Sworcery for the iPad. Beautiful, haunting and the Jim Guthrie soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

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

I’ve been to Iraq 3 times. I was a responder to both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Irene. Crisis is what I do. I’m a good shot and was a competitive swordsman in my halcyon days, both in kendo and the SCA. If there’s a guy you want on your six when the chips are down and the undead come calling, I’m him.

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

A NYC deli style BLT, but only because they’re held together with those little plastic swords you see in cocktails. I’d use that to carve up the place and escape.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

I’ve just turned in FORTRESS FRONTIER, the sequel to CONTROL POINT. I have recently been commission to write a novella in a media tie-in universe, and hopefully that will lead to novels. I am turning and burning on my efforts to get the comic book and video game industries interested in my work. A Hollywood agency has picked up CONTROL POINT and is trying to get film/TV folks interested in it. The long and short is this: I want to be able to write full-time, in genre, without having to do anything else besides serve in the reserve (which I love), for the rest of my days. A failure scenario sees me having to go back to a full-time day job.

Okay, so, tell us about CONTROL POINT — what is it, and why did you write it?

* CONTROL POINT is a book that asks the basic question “What if the modern, counterinsurgency-focused military had magic? What would a fire-team look like if you had 2 riflemen, a support-weapon and a sorcerer?” Now that’s the fun squee part “how does an Apache helicopter gunship match up against a Roc?” But it also raises bigger issues about the nature of big bureaucracies and how they handle sudden and dramatic social change. A lot of these questions were asked by the X-Men comic book series. I expand on those in SHADOW OPS.
I wrote the book because I was walking around the Pentagon in 1998, wondering how these regulation obsessed bureaucrats would handle magic. What if the monsters from D&D were real? How would the law deal with that? Those questions HOUNDED me. CONTROL POINT was my way of getting them to shut up.
How is CONTROL POINT a book only you could’ve written?
* I’m probably flattering myself here, but I feel like I have a somewhat unique blend of loving-to-write, nerd-roots and military experience. I have been to war and responded to major domestic disasters. I am raised on comic books, D&D and mass-market/spinner-wire-rack fantasy novels. I have been writing all my life. I am sure there are lots of folks with two of those attributes. But all three? Well, maybe so. Maybe CONTROL POINT *isn’t* a book that only I could’ve written. But I’m the guy who wrote it. Here’s hoping folks are happy with that.
Ah, you’re a gamer. I suspect a lot of authors are or were gamers — tabletop in particular. What did gaming teach you about writing and storytelling? Positive or negative lessons.
* I was *just* talking about this last night. I really feel that DM’ing D&D campaigns taught me incredibly important lessons about storytelling. I played with Peter V. Brett  in college and watched him craft incredible campaigns that were as engaging as any novel, and then I tried to match them. You have to be willing to do a TON of worldbuilding that your “readers” will never see. I would pour hours into drafting incredibly detailed NPCs, only to have my players just come out and kill them without so much as saying hello. You also have to willing to change course on a dime. Your players can just decide that they don’t want to open that door when the campaign DEMANDS that they OPEN THAT F*&KING DOOR! That agility is critical to being a good novelist.
That game with the other authors sounds fucking phenomenal. So let’s extend that out — if you could play D&D with, say, five different authors (living or dead), who would they be?
* Oh wow:
– Gary Gygax (yes, he’s an author, by god).
– George R. R. Martin.
– Richard K. Morgan
– Naomi Novik
– Ernest Cline
And the module? Tomb of Horrors. Because I’m fantasizing, there’ll be this mind-ray that makes us all forget the module, so that none of us know where any of the traps are and how to get around them.
I get to be the Human Paladin. With at least a +3 Holy Avenger. That’s very important. Dude. Seriously. I’m not f$#king around here.
Gaming is big in the military, or so I hear. What other games do you or have you played?
* Gaming is HUGE in the military, as is all other SFF-genre loving activities (most importantly, reading). I love any tabletop word game (Scrabble and Boggle) and also the classic board/card games (San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Settlers of Cataan. Though, I should admit that I’m new to some of them). Talisman (with all its expansions) is OUTSTANDING.
I will play Magic if someone brings their decks, but I don’t own any of my own.
Then, there’s wargaming. I am a big fan of historical ancients/medieval games (I prefer 15mm) and my favorite rule set for that is DBA. I don’t really do napoleonic, but I will if I have a good mentor.
And, of course, there’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. There are no words for how unspeakably cool that universe is.
But the most important thing in gaming is the players. I really don’t care what I’m playing, so long as I’m at a table with a bunch of really cool people who are fun to hang out with.
February 1, 2012 / 38 Comments

The Experiment Ends (And Other News)

As noted on Monday, I was trying a little experiment: I flung my Atlanta Burns novella, SHOTGUN GRAVY, up onto Amazon’s exclusive Kindle “KDP Select” program which purports to offer authors two key benefits: first, the ability to take part in Kindle lending which further grants authors access to a large “pot” of money monthly; second, the advantage (or, some might say, “advantage”) of putting your work up online for free.

As of late, a number of folks have noticed a phenomenon. You put your work up for free, and then when it once more re-enters paid gravity, suddenly the book becomes a Purchasing Magnet whereupon droves and flocks and herds and gaggles of Amazon readers come out of the woodwork to buy the recently-free book. A lot of authors have been attempting to jump this promotion’s bones (evidenced by the sudden flurry of “My work is free suddenly!” broadcasts).

Well, I figured, let’s try it.

SHOTGUN GRAVY‘s a novella that did well in its first month but kind of tapered off — it gets a sale or three a day, which is fine and adds to the whole pile, but it’s not exactly a rocketship to the money moon. Further, if I’m going to justify putting out the sequel, BAIT DOG, I figured I damn well better get the book into people’s hands. Free or not.

I originally put the book up for five days. You only get one five-day-period during your 90-day reign of exclusivity, however — so, I figured, I’d better chop it down to two.

Here’s how it went.

Putting the book up for free amassed a sudden burst of books distributed (I dare not use the word “sold” since, well, you don’t pay for a free book with anything but a stab of your finger on a mouse button). Right out of the gate, had about 100 people nab the book. Which was curious — where the hell did they come from? Are they real people? I don’t even know.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, I amassed over 5000 copies distributed free to readers. A nice enough number. Happy to have the book on a heap of Kindles, though one supposes that a good percentage of those will never read the book — perhaps I’m being cynical, but I know that the less I pay for a book, the lower it falls in my To-Be-Read pile. By yesterday morning, the book had reached #44 in the Top 100 Free and so I thought, now’s a good time to cut short the five days to two days. I went to end it thinking that I’d still get two full days of the promo — but within 30 minutes of asking the promo to end, it ended, lickity-split.

Which is fine, but I didn’t expect it to work that fast. Amazon can be notorious for veeeeeery sloooowly updating things — even a simple price change can take up to 48 hours to populate.

So, then. Results?

I did not initially see any boost in sales. Hour or two went by and the e-book didn’t move one whit. But then, ping — a sale. Okay, fine. Then another, and another. Steadily — and slowly, mind — the e-book sold about 60 copies. (This is as of 7:00PM last night.) It’s since not moved again in about an hour. The book crested to Amazon ranking #1,793. Further, it garnered another six reviews during that period (all four- and five-star).

(I’d politely ask that if you procured my book — or any book! — for free, leave a review upon reading it?)

Now, many have reported that a bigger sales boost occurs two to three days after the free promo ends. Not sure if that’ll happen here, but I’m damn sure gonna keep my eyes peeled.

Assessment of results?

Good, I guess. I’m happy to have the novella in the hands of 5000 more theoretical readers. I would have preferred they pay the buck for it, but if that means I’ve got more folks willing to chip in for BAIT DOG or other work of mine, that’s great.

This leads to the question, did I experience a sales boost of my other e-books?

I did not.

Quite the contrary, actually.

Soon as I triggered the free promo, my e-book sales over that two-day period were cleanly halved in twain. That’s kinda weird. I mean, I have no evidence that it has anything to do with the free promo — why would it? Surely it’s coincidence. Only thing I can think of is that there seems to exist some strange internal Amazon promotional algorithm that us Human Beings cannot access lest it overload our mental circuitry. Something about how books achieve rankings and show up under other books and appear on the main page and so on and so forth. If this is true, one could theorize that triggering the SG free promo… I dunno, rearranged the promotional eggs in the digital egg basket Amazon built for me.

Which makes little sense, but there it is.

We’ll see if sales rebound. Gods, I hope so — January has been a really stupendous month in terms of getting the e-books out there. Which leads me to…

Brand New E-Book Promo

Buy any of the following books on writing during the month of February:

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

And I’ll comp you a copy of:

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING.

If you procure via PDF, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll get 250 Things automatically.

If you procure via other methods (Amazon, B&N), send me proof of purchase to:

terribleminds at gmail.

Other Stuff

Let’s see, let’s see…

Just finished the first official (third unofficial) draft of MOCKINGBIRD. Off to the Robot!

Will today also finish the first draft of DINOCALYPSE NOW.

The Washington Post calls me a “death blogger” and “macabre mastermind” in a piece about my collaborative storytelling and art Tumblr project, This Is How You Die. Reminder, of course, that the How You Die blog is always taking submissions — text, photo, song, art of any variety, all about how you might die. (More information here.)

I also get a shout-out at Huffington Post courtesy of Amy Edelman and Melissa Foster in a piece called, “The Big Reasons Indie Authors Aren’t Taken Seriously.”

BLACKBIRDS gets its first official review (from Fantasy Nibbles, tee hee) — and it’s glowing! (“…a truly unforgettable heroine driving the action. The writing is razor sharp throughout, and I’m genuinely concerned that I might be a little bit messed up for enjoying this one so much.”)

Oh, and then the book gets another glowing review from New York Journal of Books! Woo. (“Author, screenwriter, and writing advice guru Chuck Wendig creates a compelling tale with an even more compelling protagonist in Miriam Black: a tough, street wise survivor who finally escapes her troubled childhood only to find that she can’t escape herself. Despite her fairly macabre lifestyle, Miriam has a strength and sarcastic wit that makes her very likeable and strangely sympathetic.”)

And My Bookish Ways throws DOUBLE DEAD into the review machine and gives it a 5 outta 5, baby. (“Double Dead is a terrifying, violent, American road trip through zombie hell.”)

Finally, TALES FROM THE FAR WEST — a rad-ass Wild West Wuxia mash-up short story collection based on Gareth Skarka’s Far West storyworld drops in e-book format (and soon, print). I’m in here surrounded by some of my favorite people — Will Hindmarch, Eddy Webb, Ari Marmell, Matt Forbeck, Jason Blair. My story — “Riding the Thunderbird” — is about a girl, an outlaw, and a herd of storming thunderbirds.

January 31, 2012 / 72 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Story Structure

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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