Author: terribleminds (page 427 of 464)

WORDMONKEY

September 19, 2011 / 14 Comments

Guess What? Pig Butt

I will now make love to your mouth.

Uhh.

Let’s try that again:

Let my meat make love to your mouth.

Hrm.

Okay, forget all that, what I’m trying to say is, I’m going to give you now three recipes, and these three recipes will comprise your dinner at some point this week. Trust me, you’ll do it. You’ll do it, and you’ll like it. You’ll like it so much, you will give me money. And a gift basket. A gift basket of hookers. Because that’s how good these recipes are. Are you ready to receive my culinary insight? My gastronomical penetrations?

My meat in your mouth?

Step One: Pulled Pork From Pork Butt

Contrary to its name, pork butt — or “Boston Butt” — is not actually the ass-end of the pig. It’s the shoulder. They called it that because they used to store and ship it in barrels called “butts.” Either that, or they thought it was funny. “HA HA HA you’re eating butt,” those randy old New Englanders would say. And then they’d say “pahk the cah in the gah-rage wicked smaht” and “go sox” before throwing tea into a harbor.

Anyway. You’re going to need a big round rumpy-pumpy of pork butt.

Select a pork butt that is around three or four pounds.

Take it. Coat it first with a lacquering of olive oil.

Then coat it with a liberal smattering of:

a) kosher salt

b) chili powder

If you’re so inclined, wrap it up in Saran Wrap. Which, for the record, I am incapable of using. Because seriously, fuck Saran Wrap. The way they package that stuff is for assholes. Foil? I love foil. The cutting teeth of the foil box work as designed. Pull foil, tear down, riiiiip, blammo. Piece of foil. But the cling wrap shit, the teeth are on the opposite side. So you have to tear upwards. And the boxes aren’t sturdy enough for this. They bend and warp and the teeth aren’t sharp enough and the wrap resists, it resists as if it has a mind of its own. By the time I’m done putting Saran Wrap over something so simple as a mixing bowl, I’ve pulled out half the supply of cling wrap and it’s all bunched up over the top and it’s lost any semblance of static cling. I might as well cover that mixing bowl with one of my son’s diapers.

Of course, my wife wields cling wrap like a ninja. She walks over — riiiiiiip — then places then cling film over the bowl like she received training in a Shaolin kitchen somewhere. Lesson: she’s either been training with Buddhist kung-fu cooks or I’m a total dipshit. I’m leaning toward the “kung-fu kitchen” theory.

What I’m saying is, give the pork butt time to absorb the salty chili-ey goodness.

Now go to your grill. Turn that bitch on, then prep for indirect heat. Make sure the grill hangs around 300 degrees. If you have the ability to utilize smoke, that’s your call — for this recipe, I did not. Oh, and if any charcoal purists come over here and try to tell me you can’t do this on a gas grill, I will have my Shaolin wife come karate chop you in your gonads. A good gas grill will serve you well. Like a hound. A hound made of propane and metal and melting fat who breathes fire and chars animal-flesh.

You could probably do this in the oven, by the way. Same deal — 300 degrees.

But seriously: the grill does this better. I’m not fucking around. Don’t think that I am.

Anyway.

Get your pork butt HA HA HA HA HA butt. Just shut up. Shut up and go get it. Take it. Put it on the grill — indirect! not over flame! — and then close that bad bitch up.

Come back in five hours.

Step Two: The Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

This is not a red pepper coulis, exactly, but fuck it, you can call it that and I won’t tell. I won’t sick the gourmand police on you. Foodies will not descend from helicopters to punch you in the mouth.

You’re going to need some things for this.

You’re going to need one sweet onion.

You’ll need one large or two smaller tomatoes.

Then you’re going to need a fuckload of sweet peppers. (A fuckload is equal to one pound.)

Red, yellow, orange, whatever. I like the little guys, but your mileage may vary.

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Chop coarsely. Curse while doing so. Call someone’s mother a “whore-biscuit” or “canker-nipples.” While disparaging someone’s mother, also be sure to remove the seeds from the tomato and the peppers because, ew. Who wants to eat a bunch of seeds? Squirrels, that’s who. And I assume you’re not a squirrel. If you are, and you’re all up in my blog chewing the wiring and depositing your foul little squirrel pellets in the programming, I will shoot you with my .410, which is my squirrel-killing gun. And it’s also my chicken-killing gun, just in case you’re one of those. Because chickens are dickheads.

Put all this stuff in a roasting pan over foil, get it good and lubed up with olive oil, and then liberally sprinkle with some salt and some Herbs de Provence. Yes, seriously. Hush up and do it, for Chrissakes.

Put in oven for one hour, or until you start to see the peppers darken around the edges.

While cooking, stand around, smelling that smell. Mmm. So good. Rub yourself. Just a little bit. Not to be gross or weird or anything. Gentle circles. Mmm. Yeah. So nice.

Ding. Hour’s up.

Veggies out of the oven, let ’em cool, then pop ’em in a mixing bowl.

Get your immersion blender, penetrate the sauce with your whirring doom-stick, and blend the shit out of those veggies. Metaphorically. The veggies should contain no actual shit. If it does, then you need to check yourself. You need to say, “What’s wrong with me? Why did I put feces in my food? Why did I sabotage myself again? I’m not a success. I’m my own worst enemy. This is why my wife left me.”

When you blend, you don’t need to blend it to a complete slurry. I like it with some pieces of pepper still floating around. Give it a little texture. Your call, though. You do what you like. It’s your sauce.

Now, add to this sauce two things:

a) 1/4 cup of creme fraiche (or sour cream if you’re, y’know, a hillbilly)

b) 1 TBsp of softened cream cheese.

Stir. No need to blend. Just stir. Not with your finger. Or your penis. Put that away. You should really see somebody about that. Always sticking your extremities into moist foods.

Cool in fridge until meat is meatified.

Step Three: Corn Done Two Ways

This is like a Choose Your Own Adventure game where every adventure ends in corn-a-licious delights rather than, say, getting eaten by Snarveling Moon Beasts or some nonsense like that.

Get four ears of corn.

Cook ’em however makes you happy. Boil them for 8 minutes, grill them for 15 minutes, char them, whatever works for you. Just make a decision and cook the fucking corn already.

Then: de-corn the cob. Or un-cob the corn. I dunno. Cut the corn off the cob. Serrated knife FTW.

Option #1: CORN SALSA. Take the cut corn and put it in a mixing bowl and add in there: salt, pepper, one diced tomato, a de-seeded and chopped jalapeno, some melted butter, and the juice of one lime.

You could, quite seriously, add a splash of tequila in there. “Margarita Corn Salsa.” Awesome.

Option #2: CREAMED CORN. Chop up one small sweet onion or a handful of shallots and put ’em in a skillet to soften them in butter — dice up a couple-few cloves of garlic in there, too. Throw the corn in there after about five or ten minutes (when onion is beyond translucent and nice and soft). Milk the cob, too. (Pork pulled from pig butt? Milk the cob? Meat in mouth? No wonder they call it food porn.) By milking the cob, I mean, scrape your knife down the cut cobs and get the rest of that “corn juice” out of there. Into this goes salt, pepper, and whatever herbs you have laying around. Oregano and parsley are nice here. But you could go with those Herbs de Provence, again, since you’re lazy and you already have them within reach of your greasy hands. Then mix in there two TBsps of creme fraiche again. Or sour cream. You pedestrian.

Sticking The Landing

Remove pork from grill. It will be crispy on the outside and unctuous on the inside. Pull it apart with your mind. Barring an unforeseen lack of psychic powers: tongs and fork.

Slap the pork on buns. (Butt? Buns? Goddamnit.)

Glob a dollop of that roasted red pepper sauce on there.

Put some Corn Your Own Adventure on the side.

EAT LIKE A FUCKING CHAMPION. Snarl and pound the table in delight.

Don’t forget to order me my gift basket.

September 16, 2011 / 102 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “The Numbers Game”

“The Torch — last week’s challenge — is large and in charge and demands your eyeballs.

Here’s a number’s game for you.

I’m going to give you five words.

You must choose three of these words and incorporate them into a story.

That story may not be more than 100 words long. I didn’t say 1000. Rather: one hundred.

The five words, chosen by Random Word Generator:

Enzyme.

Ivy.

Bishop.

Blister.

Lollipop.

Again, you have 100 words only.

You may post your story directly in the comments if you so choose. Alternately, feel free to deposit them in your own post and drop a link to said post in the comments. Your call, Cochise.

You have until next Friday, September 23rd, at noon EST.

I will pick three of my favorites. Those three will get my short story collection IRREGULAR CREATURES (with thirty-nine 4- and 5-star reviews at Amazon) in either Kindle or PDF format.

Choose your three words. Spin them into 100. BTFO, emmereffers.

EDIT — WINNERS:

I can’t do it.

I can’t choose just three.

Thus, I pick… er, five.

Shut up.

The winners:

SUE ANN JAFFARIAN

BRIAN LINDENMUTH

CHRIS MACKEY

YOJIMBOJAPAN

JO EBERHARDT

You all need to contact me at terribleminds [at] gmail [dot] com.

September 15, 2011 / 18 Comments

Elizabeth Bear: The Terribleminds Interview

Let’s be upfront, here. Elizabeth Bear’s bibliography is such a long read you don’t know if it will ever end — it goes on for days, like an eternally unfurling scroll. But there is, of course, a reason for that — she’s hella-talented and even better, multi-faceted when it comes to genre. “E-Bear” — which is the nickname I call her when she’s nowhere near me because the last time I called her that she hit me in the face with a hot pan — kindly offered to strap herself into the whirring psychotropic machine that is the terribleminds interview process. Thank her for coming by. Check out her website — elizabethbear.com — and follower her on Twitter (@matociquala).

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.

It was on a Tuesday afternoon that Rudolfo finally exploded. But it wasn’t Tuesday itself that made him explode, or that somebody had used up the last of the creamer and he had to drink his coffee burnt and black, or having been up all night with a colicky baby. No, it was his eczema, which had started flaring up again and was driving him mad, inch by itching inch. He fought the urge to explode for a good long time, using calming breaths and meditation techniques, but eventually it all became too much for him.

He sat down on the office floor and put his fingers in his ears. His colleagues stepped back. One of them nearly called a manager, but first had to run down to Accounting with some paperwork, and by then it was all over.

Four minutes and six seconds later, the top of Rudolfo’s head blew off. There was a column of smoke and a good deal of noise, but no fire.

Human Resources showed up about half an hour later to collect the corpse for recycling.

It’s always the little things.

Why do you tell stories?

Compulsion. To justify my existence. To maybe let somebody else know they’re not as alone in the universe as they seem.

You’re a veteran penmonkey, as anybody who’s seen a list of your credits knows. Pick a favorite tale out of your venerable cabinet of stories and tell us why you wrote it.

Hah! Veteran penmonkey in output, maybe, but not in years. My first novel was published in 2005, after all. I’m still a wet-behind-the-ears novice, in a lot of ways.

But… okay. I think my best story so far is “Sonny Liston Takes The Fall,” which is part of my Promethean Age continuity, where very subtle and treacherous magic infests the real world and goes largely unnoticed. It’s about sacrifice and savagery and bloodsports, and the Corn King, and martyrdom, and how as a society we demonize people who fall on the wrong side of the race line, the class line, the political line. Sonny Liston was a boxer, the heavyweight champion of the world–and sort of the Mike Tyson of his day. But he wasn’t a boogeyman and he wasn’t a hero; he was a human being, made up of the usual assemblage of heroic and monstrous traits that comprise us all. And he helped change the world.

Now you’ve got to talk about one of my favorites — “Shoggoths In Bloom.” Where did that come from? It’s hard to bring anything inventive to Lovecraft, I think, and you not only threw me for a loop but also managed to bring in issues of prejudice and slavery. Why did you write it?

(“Shoggoths in Bloom“)

My friend and fellow writer Amanda Downum is *also* a jewelrymaker. Several years ago in Wisconsin, she presented me with a lampwork bracelet named “Shoggoths in Bloom.” And I was like, “I could write a story with that title.”

I grew up on Lovecraft. And there are things about his work that I still love — its existential bleakness, its sense of horror arising from the fact that the universe actually doesn’t give a good goddamned about us, humanity. I think he tackles that with a tremendous honesty.

But I think it’s impossible to engage with his work without engaging with its problematic aspects, which include racial determinism and prejudice and some class issues that are just as revolting.

So “Shoggoths” is my response to some of the unquestioned stuff in Lovecraft that I suspect he might have eventually interrogated a little more thoroughly himself, if he’d lived long enough to gain some perspective on his own unthinking prejudices. I may be giving him too much benefit of the doubt there, but I think of–for example–the contrast between the conventional sexism in early James White and what he was writing at the end of his life, and I want to at least remain open to the possibility that Lovecraft could have benefited from the mallet of perspective, eventually.

You write across many genres. Any advice for genre writers?

Stick to one, if you can. 😉

At least to start with: it’s easier to build a career that way. I think I’ve confused a lot of people, and if I’d kept writing near-future cyberpunk adventures indefinitely, my sales numbers would probably be a hell of a lot better now.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have the critical recognition I’ve garnered, so…

What would you say is wrong with modern genre fiction?

Absolutely fucking nothing. I think the field is richer and more inventive than it’s ever been; we have a diverse cohort of skilled and subtle writers coming up; and SFF has entered the mainstream in a big way. I keep telling people that this is the Rainbow Age of science fiction, and by god there is some *brilliant* work being done, building on the shoulders of the golden age and the silver age and the new wave and the cyberpunks and the urban fantasists. The spiritual children of Roger Zelazny and Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ and Fritz Leiber are kicking *ass* all over the place, quite frankly.

I think, critically speaking, we have a bunch of issues, though. We waste an awful lot of time pissing circles around subgenres and attempting to assert the moral superiority of one sort of SFF over another, and that’s a very human but utterly ridiculous activity.

I do think that one thing we’re missing is some recognition for the necessity of gateway science fiction. We lavish a lot of critical attention on books that are extremely dense and challenging — as impenetrable to somebody coming in to the genre as a new reader as improv jazz would be to an easy listening radio fan. This is not to say that the genre doesn’t *need* books like BRASIL or THE QUANTUM THIEF or THE COLOR OF DISTANCE or BLINDSIGHT, because of course we do. That’s the absolute cutting edge of the genre, the idea-and-eyeball-kicks coming fast and hard and unrelenting.

But we *also* need books that can train a reader in the skills necessary to follow THE QUANTUM THIEF. That’s one thing I’m enjoying about, for example, Robert Charles Wilson’s recent work. My favorite book of his is still BIOS, which is slim and savage and unrelentingly SFnal… but I think JULIAN COMSTOCK can appeal to and educate a wider readership, bring them into the fold as it were. And it’s still a damned fine novel.

I think Nalo Hopkinson is another excellent example of a crossover artist. Her work can be read as literary fiction, but the genre edge is there, and it’s handled in a way that opens doors for readers. I think THE SALT ROADS is one of the best SFF novels of the young century, and it has wide crossover appeal.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

“Tell the truth.” But tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson advised. Nobody likes to be preached to.

You’ve dispensed some writing advice. Now I have to ask: got any publishing advice for new writers?

Right desk. Right day. Right story. Write better.

Also: the only thing about publishing that you can control is the quality of your output. So make it good. *g*

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

It’s the best job in the world. I get paid to tell people entertaining lies. Unfortunately, I don’t get paid very much, and the checks show up irregularly.

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

Favorite word: “sesquipedalian.” Runner up: “floccinaucinihilipilificatrix.” Favorite oath of displeasure is probably “mother pusbucket.” Which isn’t technically a curse word, but it feels very satisfying to say. [ed. — my favorite word is *also* “sesquipedalian.” — cdw]

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

Good Scotch, preferably an Islay. Caol Ile is nice. Lagavulin. Mmm, Scotch.

My favorite cocktail is a Manhattan variant with Amara subbed in for vermouth, and orange bitters. It’s called a “Manhattanhenge,” and as far as I know was invented at peche, a wonderful quirky bar in Austin.

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

This year, the book I am selling to everybody is Caitlin R. Kiernan’s THE DROWNING GIRL: A MEMOIR, which I read an ARC of and which will be out early next year. It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and also a masterpiece.

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

Canning and pickling. Also, I can handle a rifle and a bow.

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

Sushi omakase with a really good chef. There’s something very awesome about sitting back, drinking sake, and watching somebody create art with food all on his or her own inspiration.

Of course, that would probably go over the $15 limit on last meals for convicts…

Sushi. SUSHI. Sushi! What do you like? I’m only a yellow belt in the Ways of Sushi, so I have to solicit recommendations where I can get ’em.

In the hands of a really good chef, I have yet to find anything sushi-related that I will not eat and enjoy. I particularly like, however, sweet scallops, salmon skin hand roll, unagi (doesn’t everyone?), tobiko (which is flying fish roe), and yellowtail. These days, I’m trying to limit myself to species that aren’t overfished, however. Oh, morality, how you collide with baser appetites…

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

I am currently avoiding working on book 2 of an epic fantasy trilogy set in an alternate central Asia (if most Western fantasy is set in not-Europe, this is not-Eurasia). That’s my big project right now.

Book one, called RANGE OF GHOSTS, will be out from Tor in March.

I’m also involved in an ongoing nifty online storytelling collective called SHADOW UNIT (www.shadowunit.org) with such people as Emma Bull and Holly Black. It is pretty cool, and I encourage anybody who likes modern-day science fiction horror to check it out.

September 14, 2011 / 168 Comments

25 Ways To Plot, Plan and Prep Your Story

I’m a panster at heart, plotter by necessity — and I always advocate learning how to plot and plan because inevitably someone on the business side of things is going to poke you with a pointy stick and say, “I want this.” Thus you will demonstrate your talent. Even so, in choosing to plot on your own, you aren’t limited to a single path. And so it is that we take a look at the myriad plotting techniques (“plotniques?”) you might use as Storyteller Extraordinaire to get the motherfucking job done. Let us begin.

The Basic Vanilla Tried-And-True Outline

The basic and essential outline. Numbers, Roman numerals, letters. Items in order. Separated out by section if need be (say, Act I, Act II, Act III). Easy-peazy Lyme-diseasey.

The Reverse Outline

Start at the end, instead. Write it down. “Sir Pimdrip Chicory of Bath slays the dragon-badger, but not before the dragon-badger bites the head off Chicory’s one true love, Lady Miss Wermathette Kildare of the Manchester Kildares.” Rewind the clock. Reverse the gears. Find out how you build to that.

Tentpole Moments

A story in your head may require certain keystone events to be part of the plot. “Betty-Sue must get sucked into the time portal outside Schenectady, because that’s why her ex-boyfriend Booboo begins to build a time machine in earnest which will accidentally unravel space-and-time.” You might have five, maybe ten of these. Write them down. These are the elements that, were they not included, the plot would fall down (like a tent without its poles). The narrative space between the tentpoles is uncharted territory.

Beginning, Middle, End

Write three paragraphs, each detailing the rough three acts found in every story: the inciting incident and outcome of the beginning (Act I), the escalation and conflict in the middle (Act II), the climactic culmination of events and the ease-down denoument of the end (Act III). You can, if you want, choose the elemental changes-in-state you might find at the end of each act, too — the pivot point on which the story shifts. This document probably isn’t more than a page’s worth of wordsmithy. Simple and elegant.

A Series Of Sequences

The saying goes that an average screenplay usually offers up eight or nine sequences (a sequence being a series of scenes that add together to form common narrative purpose, like, say, the Attack On The Death Star sequence from Star Wars or the Kevin James Makes Love To All The Animals In Order To Make The Audience Feel Shame sequence from Paul Blart, Zoo Abortion). So, chart the sequences that will go into your screenplay. If you’re writing prose, I don’t know how many sequences a novel should have — more than a film, probably (or alternately, each sequence is granted a greater conglomeration of scenes).

Chapter-By-Chapter

For novel writers, you can chart your story by its chapters. A standard outline is more about dictating plot and story without marrying oneself to narrative structure. This, however, puts the ring on that finger and locks it down tight. A chapter-by-chapter outline is visualizing the reader’s way through the novel.

Beat Sheet

This one’s for you real granular-types, the ones who want to count each grain of sand on your story’s beach (or, for a more terribleminds-esque metaphor, “count each pube on your story’s scrotum”). Chart each beat of the story in every scene. This is you writing the entire story’s plot out, but you’re writing it without much dialogue or narrative flair. It’s you laying out all the pieces. The order-of-operations made plain.

Mind-Maps

Happy blocks and bubbles connected to winding bendy spokes connected to a central topical hub. Behold: example. You can use a mind-map to chart… well, anything your mind so desires. It is, after all, a map of said mind. Sequence of events? Character arcs? Exploration of theme? Story-world ideas? Family trees? The crazy hats worn by your villains? Catchphrases? Your inchoate rage and shame made manifest? Your call.

Zero Draft

AKA, “The Vomit Draft.” Puke up the story. Just yarf it up — bleaaarrghsputter. A big ol’ Technicolor yawn. You aren’t aiming for structure. Aren’t aiming for art or even craft. This is just you getting everything onto the page so that it’s out there and can now be cleaned up. You’ve puked up the story, now it’s time to form it into little idols and totems — the heretic statuaries of your story.

In The Document, As You Go

AKA, “The Bring Your Flashlight” technique. You outline only as you go. Write a scene or chapter. Roughly sketch the next. Then write it. Onward and upward until you’ve got a proper story.

Write A Script

For those of you writing scripts, this sounds absurd. “He wants me to outline my script by writing a script? Has this guy been licking colorful toads?” Sorry, screenwriters — this one ain’t for you. Novelists, however, will find use in writing a script to get them through the plotting. Scripts are lean and mean: description, dialogue, description, dialogue. It’ll get you through the story fast — then you translate into prose.

Dialogue Pass

Let the characters talk, and nothing else. Put those squirrely fuckers in a room, lock the door, and let the story unfold. It won’t stay that way, of course. You’ll need to add… well, all the meat to the bones. But it’s a good way to put the characters forward and find their voice and discover their stories. Remember: dialogue reads fast and so it tends to write fast, too. Dialogue is like Astroglide: it lubricates the tale.

Character Arcs

Characters often have arcs — they start at A, go to B, end at C (with added steps if you’re feeling particularly saucy). Commander Jim Nipplesplitter, Jr. starts at “gruff and loyal soldier boy in the war against the Ant People” (A) and heads to “is crippled and betrayed by his country, left to die in the distant hills of the Ant Planet” (B) and ends up at “falls in love with a young Ant Squaw and he must fight to protect his ant-man larvae” (C). A character arc can track plotty bits, emotional shifts, outfit changes, whatever.

Synopsis First

You might think to write your query letter, treatment or synopsis last. Bzzt. Wrong move, donkeyface. Write it up front. It’s not etched in stone, but it’ll give you a good idea of how to stay on target with this story.

Index Cards

Index cards are a kick-ass organization tool. You can use them to do anything — list characters, track scenes, list chapters, identify emotional shifts, make little Origami throwing stars that will give your neighbors wicked-ass paper-cuts. Lay them on a table or pin ’em to a corkboard. Might I recommend John August’s “10 Hints For Index Cards?” I might, rabbit. I might. See also: the Index Card app for iOS.

Whiteboard

A whiteboard represents a great thinking space. Notes, mind-maps, character sketches, drawings of weird alien penises. Get some different color pens, chart your story in whatever way feels most appropriate.

The Crazy Person’s Notebook

Once in a while a story of mine demands a hyper-psycho notebook experience. My handwriting is messier than a garbage disposal choked with hair, but even still, sometimes I just like to put pen to paper and scribble. And I sometimes print stuff out, chop it up, and tape it into the notebook. (Example!)

Collage

You’re like, “What’s next? A shoebox diorama of the Lincoln assassination?” That’s a different blog post. Seriously, on my YA-cornpunk novel POPCORN, I took a whole corkboard and covered it in images and quotes that were relevant to the work. Then I’d just wander over there from time to time, stare at it, get my head around the story I’m telling and the feel of the world the story portrays. Surprisingly helpful.

Spreadsheets

Stare too long into the grid of a spreadsheet and you will feel your soul entangled there — a dolphin caught in a tuna net. Even still, you may find a spreadsheet very helpful. Track plots and beats to your heart’s delight. Seen JK Rowling’s spreadsheet for Harry Potter? High-res version right here.

Story Bible

Everything and anything goes into the story bible. Worldbuilding. Character descriptions. The “rules” of the story. Plot. Theme. Mood. An IKEA furniture manual. (Goddamn Allen wrenches.) The BIOSHOCK story bible was reputedly a 400+ page beast, which means that yes, your story bible may be bigger than your actual novel. The key is not to let this — or any planning technique — become an exercise in procrastination. You plan. Then you do. That’s the only way this works.

The Power Of Templates

Film and TV scripts already follow a fairly rigorous template, but you can go further afield. Look to Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT beats. Or Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Go weirder with the Proppian morphology of fairy tales. You may think it non-imaginative but the power of art and story lives easily within such borders as it does outside of them.

Stream Of Consciousness Story Babble

Slap on a diving bell and jump deep into the waters of the stream of consciousness. Order, you see, is sometimes born first from chaos, wriggling free from a uterus made from fractal swirls and Kamikaze squirrels. Open yourself to All The Frequencies: get into your word processor or find a blank notebook page and just scribble wantonly without regard to sense or quality. You may find your story lives in the noise and madness and that on that snowy screen you will find structure. Like a Magic Eye painting that reveals the image of a dolphin riding a motorbike and shooting Japanese whalers with twin chattering Uzis.

Visual Storyboards

Sometimes the words only come when given the bolstered boost of a visual hook. Sketch it out yourself. Get an artist friend. Find images from the Internet. Ingest some kind of dew-slick jungle mushroom and paint your story on the wall in an array of bodily fluids. Sometimes you really need to visualize the story.

The Test Drive

Take your characters, storyworld and ideas, and run them through a totally separate story. Let’s call it apocryphal, or “non-canonical.” It’s not a story you intend to keep. Not a story you want to publish. You’re just taking your story elements through their paces. Run them around a test drive. “This is where Detective Shirtless McGoggins solves the murder of the goblin seamstress.” Sure, your Detective lives in the real world, a world not populated by goblins. Fuck it, it’s just an exercise. A test run to find his voice and yours.

Pants The Shit Out Of It

All this plotting and scheming just isn’t working for you, so go ahead and pants the hell out of it. (Me? I don’t wear pants. Pants are the first tool of your oppressors.) Sometimes trying to wrestle your story into even the biggest box is just an exercise in frustration, so do what works for you and what doesn’t. Once again, however, I’ll exhort you to at least learn the skill of outlining — because eventually, someone’s going to ask for a demonstration of your ability.

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

September 13, 2011 / 94 Comments

Twenty-Sided Troubadours: Why Writers Should Play Roleplaying Games

Time to speak out with my geek out.

Writer-types, here’s your homework: go forth and play a roleplaying game.

No, no, put down that Xbox controller.

Here. Take these.

*hands you a pile of glittery multi-colored polyhedral dice*

They’re not pills. Don’t swallow them. They’re dice. You’ll choke. Stop that. Take them out of your mouth. Here, you’re also going to need some other stuff, too: a pencil, a character sheet, maybe some index cards, a bag of Cheetos, a 64 oz “Thirst Aborter” full of Mountain Dew, a 6-pack of beer, a pizza coupon, a can of spray deodorant, and a big overflowing bucket of your caffeine-churned imagination.

Playing a pen-and-paper table-top RPG is not going to make you a better writer.

It goes deeper than that.

It’s going to make you a better storyteller. And here’s how.

The Essential Ingredient: Characters In Conflict

Given the geeky composition of my audience, I assume that you grok the core experience of the average tabletop roleplaying game: a game-master orchestrates adventures for a group of players, all of whom control imaginary characters whose skills and abilities are laid out on a character sheet. A player says, “I want my character to see if he can use his Wombat Magic to steal the pocketwatch heart of the Toymaker’s Daughter,” and then he rolls dice in accordance with the rules to see if his Wombat Magic is a spell that can survive its own casting. Simple enough, yeah?

That’s really not the truth of the story, though. That’s just the nature of the rules.

The truth of the story — its essential element, its elemental essence — is that of characters put in conflict. And you see laid bare the nature of all our stories, right there: character-driven conflict. Even more awesome is what happens when you let the players just fuck around at the game-table without even trying to steer them. Eventually, they’ll start creating conflict. Tavern fights, dead cops, stolen items. While this may not always be true to the character it is true to the story: conflict must fill the vacuum and that conflict must be driven by the characters present in the narrative.

What’s more interesting to the players at the table is when their characters are at the center of the conflict. Not conflict driven externally by the world, but characters who are knee-deep in the thick shit.

This is their world, and their problems matter.

The Labor Contractions Of Birthing Good Story

Pacing is a really hard trick for storytellers. It’s ultimately too simple to say that escalation is the only order of pacing, because it’s not — you can’t just drop a cinder block on the accelerator pedal and let the story take off like a rocket. Eventually the engine burns out. The audience grows weary. Constant action is naught but the electric cacophony of a single guitar chord blasted over and over again.

This becomes abundantly clear at the game table. You know you have to ease off the gas from time to time. Let the players breathe a little. Let the characters talk to one another. Even the tried-and-true “our characters walk into a tavern” schtick reveals this, to some degree: they don’t kick open the door and start throwing punches. A tavern fight starts simple. Drinks. Laughs. A goblin says some shit. A paladin encourages restraint. A warrior gets all up in the goblin’s business. Someone throws a bottle. And then — explode. Spells and swords and shotguns and goblin venom.

And then you have the come down. The denouement as the fight ends. Wounds licked.

Session to session you can see the pace change, too — one session might be heavy on action, another session heavy on politics. Or introspection. Or melodrama.

You not only start to see exactly how important it is to keep the pace staggered but also how important it is to let this narrative chameleon show all his colors. A story is not one thing and it does not take off like a horse with a rattlesnake shoved up his ass — sometimes that horse needs to stop, drink some water, slow down the pace unless that old nag fancies dropping dead in the dust.

Writer’s Block Does Not Live At The Game Table

You can’t get writer’s block at the game table. Not as a game master, not as a player. You can’t be all like, “Yeah, I’m just not feeling my character’s actions today, let’s try again tomorrow.” It’s shit or get off the pot time, Vampire Cleric from Minneapolis. You gotta do something. Anything. Stab! Throw a Molotov! Hide under a car! Manifest your Vampire Cleric batwings and take flight above the city!

Same thing goes for writing. Shit or get off the pot. Do something. Throw a narrative grenade. If anything will remind you of this, it’s the act of rolling the bones with a couple-few like-minded gamer-types.

The Audience Is Waiting And Their Knives Are Sharp

They’re listening. And watching. And waiting.

Them. They. The audience. The other players.

This is a group activity. This isn’t something you do in isolation. You don’t sit over there in the corner fiddling with your dice and surreptitiously rubbing the crotch of your khaki shorts. You’re in the thick of it. Your words — whether as a player or, more importantly, as the game master — are the central focus. You can tell when you’ve hooked them, and can tell when you’re losing them. You shuck and jive and duck and weave and do any kind of narrative chicanery to keep the momentum going, to ensure that the table doesn’t spiral off into restless side-conversations (“Do you think an Alchemical Exalted would be able to beat Jesus, if Jesus were wearing like, Mecha Armor given to him by the Three Wise Men?”). You’re on stage. They’re on the hook. It is, as David Mamet writes, fuck or walk.

Your story is the story of the moment, and it reminds you just how important it is to keep the audience in mind — not just your intent as storyteller but their interests, their needs, their attention.

It also reinforces the cardinal rule:

Never be boring.

Because if you’re boring, they’re going to start talking about Dr. Who.

Unintended Emotional Resonance (Or, “I Like To Move It, Move It”)

Every once in a while, you’ll have a moment during a game session where it’s like, “Oh, holy shit. These other people are actually worked up over this story. I’ve inadvertently affected them.”

They’ll get mad at a villain. Pissed at one another for botching a plan. Sad at the death of a character. They’ll hoot and gibber, victorious over the death of the Necro-Accountant who’s been making their lives hell session after session. Their emotions worn plainly upon their faces, the masks worn away.

And then it hits you: this is part of your arsenal of storytelling weapons. To make people give a shit. Enough so that their heads aren’t in this alone; their hearts hop in the car, too, riding shotgun until the story’s told.

You learn how to do it there so you can do it on the page.

At The Table As On The Page: Anything Is Possible

You sit down at the game table and you start to realize: whatever I say is made manifest. Okay, sure, sure, maybe your skill check doesn’t let you automatically drive the car up the ramp formed by the crushed school buses and straight into the Kraken’s unblinking eye — but by god, you have a shot. And as a game master, this is multiplied infinitely upon itself, this god-like power to create realities from words in whatever direction you choose.

No constraints. Speak the word, and let it be so.

That, my friends, is the power of fiction. It’s the power of books, comics, film, and — duh — games. But it’s not just the obvious non-revelation that what you say at the game table is made into a fictional reality. It’s also the notion that you can say whatever you want. You aren’t contained by comfortable boxes of genre. You aren’t stopped by expectations and tropes. In fact, you’re often rewarded by jumping right just when everybody thinks you’re going to jump left. You begin to realize that the enemy to good fiction is doing the same thing over and over again. The enemy is fear, where you’re afraid of sitting there in front of an audience and telling the story as it lives and breathes. You don’t have to worry about the story as it lays dying in a cage shacked by rules of genre, trope, template or format. You have it all right there in your hand — a few dice in your palm, maybe a pencil, nothing more — all the elements of creation laid bare.

It’s an awesome — in the truest definition of that word — feeling.

One that will serve you well when you bring it to the written page.

Writer-Gamer Hybrid Types, Chime In

I know a good number of you came here originally from some of my game work or are yourselves gamers still — moreover, I know that the Venn Diagram of GAMER and WRITER has some big crossover in this audience. So add your two cents. Why should writers and storytellers play tabletop games? I know you have reasons I haven’t even considered. Spit ’em out like broken teeth!

(Oh, and again I’ll mention: if you haven’t checked out SPEAK OUT WITH YOUR GEEK OUT, well, get on it, won’t you? Go forth. Speak your geek. Own your nerdery.)

September 12, 2011 / 32 Comments

Dinocalypse Now!

So by now, you may have heard the news:

I am writing a SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY novel for Evil Hat games.

If it works out, I might be writing three of them, actually.

The first begins with —

DINOCALYPSE NOW!

All I’m saying is:

Psychic dinosaurs.

1935.

Get your head around that.

And once you have your head around it, I’ve some questions to ask you.

First up: if you’re a fan of the old pulps — and a fan of crazy adventure and pulp heroes and weird science and all that good stuff — then I gotta ask, what would you hope to see in a new pulp novel?

Second, if you’re a fan of SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY, what defines that game to you? What are the essential ingredients to any SotC adventure — both the adventure that unfolds with dice at your game table and the adventure that might unfold in, say, a novel? I’ve got a synopsis of the novel written down, but thus far I’ve got a lot of uncharted spaces. Which is why I’m here, looking to you to distill down what you feel — as a fan of the game — best embodies the awesomeness that is SPIRIT OF THE CENUTURY.

I’ll hang up and wait for your answer.

*click*