Author: terribleminds (page 437 of 464)

WORDMONKEY

July 5, 2011 / 110 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Dialogue

Time for another iteration of the 25 Things series. This, I suspect, may be my last one here on the blog for awhile, but I’m contemplating putting together a small e-book of these lists with some new ones thrown in for good measure (already written part of 25 Things You Should Know About Publishing and Writing A Fucking Sentence). In the meantime, enjoy this one, and don’t hesitate to add your own in the comments.

Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

25 Things You Should Know About Revisions

1. Dialogue Is Easy Like Sunday Morning

Our eyes flow over dialogue like butter on the hood of a hot car. This is true when reading fiction. This is true when reading scripts. What does this tell you? It tells you: you should be using a lot of dialogue.

2. Easy Isn’t The Same As Uncomplicated

We like to read dialogue because it’s easy, not because it’s stupid. Dialogue has a fast flow. We respond to it as humans because, duh, humans make talky-talky. Easy does not translate to uncomplicated or unchallenging. Dialogue isn’t, “I like hot dogs,” “I think hot dogs are stupid,” “I think you’re stupid,” “I think your Mom’s stupid,” “I think your Mom’s vagina is stupid.” Dialogue is a carrier for all aspects of the narrative experience. Put differently: it’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I think I’m supposed to add “motherfucker” to that. I’ll let you do it. I trust you.

3. Sweet Minimalism

Let’s get this out of the way: don’t hang a bunch of gaudy ornaments upon your dialogue. In fiction, use the dialogue tags “said” and “asked” 90% of the time. Edge cases you might use “hissed,” “called,” “stammered,” etc. These are strong spices; use minimally. Also, adverbs nuzzled up against dialogue tags are an affront to all things and make Baby Jesus pee out the side of his diaper, and when he does that, people die. In scripts, you don’t have this problem but you can still clog the pipes with crap if you overuse stage directions. Oh, heavy dialect and slang? Just more ornamentation that’ll break the back of your dialogue.

4. Uh, You Do Know The Rules, Right?

Learn the structure of dialogue. If a screenplay, know the format. Capitalized name, centered above parenthetical stage direction and the line of dialogue. VO, OC, OS, contd:

SCOOTER (VO)

(shouting)

I always said that life was like a box of marmots. You

never know which one’s gonna nibble off your privates.

In fiction, know when to use a comma, when to use a period, know where the punctuation goes in relation to quotation marks, know that a physical gesture (nodded, f’rex) is not a dialogue tag.

“Fuck that monkey,” John said.

“But,” Betty said, “I love that dumb chimp.”

John nodded. “I know, Betty. But he’s a bad news bonobo, baby. A bad news bonobo.”

5. Use It To Set Pace

You want a pig to run faster, you grease him up with Astroglide and stick a NASA rocket booster up his ass. You want your story to read faster, you use dialogue to move it along. Like I said: dialogue reads easy. Dialogue’s like a waterslide: a reader gets to it, they zip forth fast, fancy and free. Want to slow things down? Pull away from the dialogue. Speed things up? More dialogue. Throttle. Brake. Throttle. Brake.

6. Shape Determines Speed

Short, sharp dialogue is a prison shiv: moves fast ’cause it’s gotta, because T-Bone only has three seconds in the lunch line with Johnny the Fish to stitch a shank all up in Johnny’s kidneys. Longer dialogue moves more slowly. Wanting to create tension? Fast, short dialogue. Want to create mystery? Longer, slightly more ponderous dialogue. Want to bog your audience in word treacle? Let one character take a lecturing info-dump all over their heads.

7. Expository Dialogue Is A Pair Of Cement Shoes

One of dialogue’s functions is to convey information within the story (to other characters) and outside the story (to the audience). An info-dump is the clumsiest way to make this happen. Might as well bludgeon your audience with a piece of rebar. And yet, you still gotta convey info. You have ways to pull this off without dropping an expository turd in the word-bowl. Don’t let one character lecture; let it be a conversation. Question. Answer. Limit the information learned; pull puzzle pieces out and take them away to create mystery. Let characters be reluctant to give any info, much less dump it over someone’s head.

8. Showing Through Telling

And yet, you have to do it. Dialogue is a better way of conveying information than you, the storyteller, just straight up telling the audience. The curious nature of dialogue, however, is that it would seem to rectally violate that most sacred of writing chestnuts — show, don’t tell. I don’t open my mouth and project fucking holograms. I tell you shit. And yet, the trick with dialogue is to show through telling. You reveal things through dialogue without a character saying them. This means it’s paramount to avoid…

9. The Wart On The End Of The Nose

“On-the-nose” dialogue is dialogue where a character says exactly what he feels and what he wants for purposes of telling the audience what they need to know. When a villain spoils his own sinister plan, that’s on-the-nose. When a protagonist says, “I cannot love you, elf-lady, because an elf once touched me in my no-no hole,” that’s on-the-nose. Trust me, we’d live in a better, happier world if real world dialogue was all on-the-nose. On the other side, we’d experience duller, shittier fiction. Characters — and, frankly, real people — reveal things without saying them.

10. The Words Beneath The Words

Text versus sub-text. On-the-nose dialogue versus dialogue that is deliciously sub rosa. Meaning exists beneath what’s said. The best real world example of this is the dreaded phrase spoken by men and women the world around: “I’m fine.” Said with jaw tight. Said with averted eyes. Said in sharp, clipped tongue. Never before have two words so clearly meant something entirely different: “I’m fine” is code. It’s code for, “Yes, something is fucking wrong, but I don’t want to talk about it, but actually, I do want to talk about it but I want you to already know what’s wrong, and what’s wrong is that you had sex with my mother in a New Jersey rest-stop and put it on Youtube you giant unmerciful cock-waffle.”

11. Pay No Attention To The Dead Man Behind The Curtain

Put differently: pretend that dialogue is more about hiding than it is about revealing. The things we the audience want to know most — who killed his wife, why did he rob that bank, did he really have a romantic dalliance with that insane dancing robot — are the things the character doesn’t want to discuss. Dialogue is negotiating that revelation, and it’s a revelation that should come as easy as pulling the teeth out of a coked-up Doberman. Meaning, not easy at all.

12. Where Tension, Suspense And Mystery Have A Big Crazy Gang-Bang

The fact that characters lie, cheat, conceal, mislead and betray all in dialogue tells you that dialogue is a critical way of building tension and suspense and conveying mystery. Characters are always prime movers.

13. Quid Pro Quo, Clarice

Hannibal Lecter susses out the truth through dialogue. (Oh, and he also eats people.) But he’s also performing meta-work for the audience by sussing out character through dialogue. Clarice Starling is painted in part by Lecter’s own strokes. A character’s blood, sweat, tears, ball-hair and breast-milk lives inside their dialogue. How they speak and what they say reveals who they are, though only obliquely. After writing a conversation, ask yourself, “What does this say about the characters? Is this true to who they are?”

14. Let The Character Sign Their Own Work

Each line of dialogue from a character is that character’s signature. It contains their voice and personality. One speaks in gruff, clipped phrasing. The other goes on at length. One character is ponderous and poetic, another is meaner than two rattlesnakes fucking in a dirty boot. Don’t let a character’s voice be defined by dialect, slang, or other trickery. It’s not just how they speak. It’s also what they say when they do.

15. Dialogue Is A Theme Park

Theme is one of those things you as the author don’t really speak out loud — but sometimes characters do. They might orbit the theme. They might challenge it. They might speak it outright. Not often, and never out of nowhere. But it’s okay once in awhile to let a character be a momentary avatar of theme. It’s doubly okay if that character is played by Morgan Freeman. God, that guy’s voice. He could say anything — “Beans are a musical fruit” — and I’m like, “There it is! Such gravitas! Such power. It’s the theme. It’s the theme!”

16. Dialogue Is Action

We expect that dialogue and action are separate, but they are not. Speak is a verb. So’s talk. So’s discuss, talk, argue, yell, banter, rant, rave. Verb means action. That means, duh, dialogue is action, not separate from it. Further, dialogue works best when treated this way. Don’t stand two characters across from one another and have them talk at each other like it’s a ping-pong game. Characters act while speaking. They walk. Kick stones. Clean dishes. Load rifles. Pleasure themselves. Build thermonuclear penile implants. Eat messy sandwiches. This creates a sense of dynamism. Of an authentic world. Adds variety and interest.

17. The Real World Is Not Your Friend

I’m not talking about the MTV reality show, though one supposes there the lesson is the same (so not your friend). What I mean is, if you want to ruin good dialogue, the fastest path to that is by mimicking dialogue you hear in the real world. Dialogue in the real world is dull. It’s herky-jerky. Lots of um, mmm, hmm, uhhh, like, y’know. If you listen really hard to how people speak to one another, it’s amazing anybody communicates anything at all.

18. For The Record, You’re Not David Mamet

Yes, yes, I know. David Mamet writes “realistic” dialogue. Everyone interrupts everyone. They say inexplicable shit. They barely manage to communicate. Subtextapalooza. It’s great. It works. You’re also not David Mamet. I mean, unless you are, in which case, thanks for stopping by. Would you sign my copy of Glengarry Glen Ross? All that being said…

19. Again: Not A Ping-Pong Match

Characters don’t stand nose to nose and take turns speaking. People are selfish. So too are characters. Characters want to talk. They want to be heard. They don’t wait their turn like polite automatons. They can interrupt each other. Finish one another’s sentences. Derail conversations. Pursue agendas. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat. It’s a battle of energy, wits, and dominance.

20. Conversation Is Conflict

Dialogue can represent a pure and potent form of conflict. Two or more characters want something, and they’re using words to get it. Before you write conversation, ask: what does each participant want? Set a goal. One character wants money. Another wants affirmation to justify her self-righteousness. A third just needs a fucking hug. Find motive. Purpose. Conscious or not. Let the conversation reflect this battle.

21. Authenticity Trumps Reality

“But it really happened,” is never an excuse for something to exist in fiction. Weird shit happens all the time in reality. Ever have something happen where you say, “Gosh, that was really convenient?” You put that in your story, the audience is going to kick you in the gut and spit in your cereal. Dialogue suffers from similar pitfalls. Just because you hear it in reality doesn’t mean it works in the context of story. Story has its own secret laws. You can make dialogue sound real without mimicking reality. One might term this “natural” dialogue; authenticity is about feeling real, not about being real.

22. Sometimes, You Just Gotta Babble That Shit Out

Writing dialogue sometimes means you just let two characters babble for awhile. Small talk, big talk, crazy talk. Let ’em circumvent the real topic. Give them voices. Open the floodgates to your sub-conscious mind. And let the conversation flow. Write big, write messy, write long. Cut later in comfort.

23. Nothing Wrong With Banter

You might write two characters just sitting down and shooting the shit and think, “I’ll cut this down later.” But don’t be so sure. Sometimes characters just need to chat, babble, mouth off. Who they are can be revealed in two people just fucking around, seeing what comes out of their heads. That can work if it’s interesting, if it puts the character on the map in terms of the audience’s mental picture, and if it eventually focuses up to be something bigger than how it began. Oh, and did I mention it has to be interesting?

24. The Greatest Crime Against Humanity Is Writing Boring Dialogue

Like I said, dialogue is easy to read. Or, it’s supposed to be. Anybody who writes dialogue that’s dull, that doesn’t flow like water and pop like popcorn, needs to be taken out back and shaken like a baby. Find the boring parts. The unnecessary stuff. The junk. Anything that doesn’t feel a) necessary and b) interesting. Stick it in a bag and set it on fire. Want to read great dialogue? Sharp, fast, entertaining, witty-as-fuck, with a lot going on? Go watch the TV show GILMORE GIRLS. No, I’m not kidding. Stop making that face.

25. Double-Duty Dialogueing

Heh, “duty.” Heh, “log.” Shut up. If you take one thing away from these 25 ~~nonsense nuggets~~ gems of wisdom, it’s this: let dialogue do the heavy lifting and perform double- or even triple-duty. Dialogue isn’t just dialogue. It’s a vehicle for character, theme, mood, plot, conflict, mystery, tension, horror. Dialogue does a lot of work in very short space: it’s the goddamn Swiss Army knife of storytelling. Or Macgyver. Or Trojan Horse. Or Macgyver hiding in a Trojan Horse carrying a Swiss Army knife. Didn’t I tell you to shut up already? Where’s Morgan Freeman when you need him? He’ll tell you to shut up and you’ll listen.

Corollary: “Everything Is Dialogue”

Part of why dialogue reads so easy is because it’s conversational, and conversation is how we interact with other humans and, in our heads, with the world. We talk to inanimate objects, for fuck’s sake. (What, you’ve never yelled at a stubborn jar of jelly? SHUT UP HAVE TOO.) There’s a secret, here, and that is to treat all your writing like it’s dialogue. Write things conversationally. Like you’re talking to the audience. Like you and the audience? Real BFFs. You can abuse this, of course, but the point is that in conversation you’ll use straightforward, uncomplicated language to convey your point — no value in being stodgy and academic when you’re just talking. So too is it with writing, whether it’s description in a screenplay or in fiction, you’ll find value in straightforward, uncomplicated, even talky language. Talk with the audience, don’t lecture at them. Everything is dialogue. Some of it’s just one-sided, is all.

So. How about you?

What are your rules of writing dialogue?

* * *

Did you enjoy this post? Guess what? Chuck has a book chock full of the same kind of booze-soaked, profanity-laden writing advice you found here. Look for CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY. Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

July 4, 2011 / 28 Comments

The Penmonkey Incitement

Wow. THE PENMONKEY INCITEMENT sounds like a lost Robert Ludlum novel.

Never mind.

I would like to sell more copies of CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY.

I have, at this exact moment, sold 328 copies over the last six weeks.

For the record, I’m not unhappy with that number. It actually makes me giddy. I see that number, I do a little dance. In my pants. Hah, just kidding, I don’t wear your oppressive Earth pants. PENMONKEY is actually poised to out-earn IRREGULAR CREATURES despite the latter being on sale since January and having sold twice as many copies. So, hey: thumbs up.

Even still, I want more copies of PENMONKEY in the world.

I seek nothing short of total dominance of the “writing advice” market, where me and my hunter-killer robots storm across the barren wasteland of the publishing industry, eradicating bad writing left and right with our laser beams and pinching claws. I want a throne built of slushy manuscripts and lined with the teeth of those writers who had sense knocked into them (and molars knocked out of them) by my book.

I also want a Lamborghini. I mean, c’mon. I had the poster as a kid. Lamborghini. Hot bikini chick. Maybe a python or some shit. And I suspect that my little bloggery-book on writing advice is the way toward such fame and fortune. And toward a chick with a constrictor snake inside a hot late 80’s sports car.

Okay, I kid. But I would still like to get more PENMONKEY out there, regardless of my lack of Lamborghinis or doom-bots. Right? Right.

To do so, I thought, okay, maybe an incentive program. Maybe, if I don’t sell 100 copies every week, I would do something horrible. “You don’t buy my book, I’ll shoot this unicorn.”

Except then I figured, ohh, ohhh, nobody’s going to buy the book because everybody’s going to want to see the unicorn shooting. And they’re going to wanna see how I dispose of all those unicorn carcasses.

So, I went back to the wise words of my Kung Fu mentor, Wily Cheung Dragon, who said:

“Be a fountain, not a drain.”

Which, it turns out, was just advice on how to pee, but hell with him, he was old and smelled like wet dog.

Point is, incentives should be positive.

So, here then, are the incentives for CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY. Ready?

Every 50 Copies Sold: Did Somebody Say “Postcard?”

I sell 50 copies, I will mail you a postcard. In the real mail. In the corporeal world. This postcard will be — well, I don’t know what the hell it’ll be. Maybe a PENMONKEY postcard, I dunno. But I do know what the postcard will say, and that’s a postcard-sized piece of single-serving writing advice. I will not duplicate this advice across any postcards. It will be handwritten, which means you get to gaze upon my calligraphy, which is about as legible as if you cut off a chicken’s head and stuck a fountain pen in the stump and then let him flop around on a piece of paper. Still: free postcard.

Every 100 Copies Sold: Free Motherfucking T-Shirt

Folks have been clamoring for a PENMONKEY t-shirt. Well, I’m not selling one. What am I, a t-shirt shop?

No.

I am, however, giving one away.

That shirt will probably be this shirt:

Since I’m only giving away these shirts, that means it will be rare and worth millions of dollars. Okay, maybe not that last part. But rare! Definitely rare. Yeah.

That said, I reserve the right to change the t-shirt at any time. I probably won’t, because I’m lazy, but I’m also unpredictable. Like a homeless guy with a knife and a drinking problem.

I only promise that the t-shirt will contain the word: PENMONKEY.

(That shirt also says terribleminds on the back, by the way. I did it with Zazzle.)

Every 200 Copies Sold: I Edit Your Shit

For every 200 copies, I will pick someone at random and offer them the chance to get a single editing pass on 5000 words of their content or 50 script pages of a screenplay from yours truly. I will give it a robust single pass of copy, content and context, and further, I will always be tactful but make no aims to be nice. Know that going in (then again, if you read this blog, you know I’m a tough-love type — I love you, sure, but my love comes stapled to the end of a Louisville slugger).

You may say, what are my qualifications beyond being just some fuckface with an author’s blog and a book containing dubious NSFW writing advice? I’ve been writing professionally now for over 13 years, and further, I’ve done quite a bit of editing and developing work. For example, I hired writers, developed content, and edited the writing across the entire Hunter: The Vigil game-line. Those writers I hired will likely tell you that they hated me and envisioned my death, but I also believe they’ll tell you that I improved their work. (If any of those writers are here now, feel free to pop in and say so. Or, tell me you still hate me.)

Every 500 Copies Sold: Some Awesome Fucker Gets A Kindle

Yep. For every half-a-thousand sold, I’ll pick someone at random and give them a Kindle. I’m not made of wampum over here, so it’ll be the “regular” Kindle that comes bundled with special offers (THIS GUY right here). If you already have a Kindle, then feel free to either say, “Send it to [insert person’s name here]” or “No, thank you, please pick the next person on the list, as I am one magnanimous muhfucka.”

The Deets

Here, then, is the 411, the deets, the down-low.

This, er, “incentive program” is only open to those in the United States of America. I can’t pay international shipping, and further, may not be able to give international work a good proper edit. [EDIT: That said, if you’re international and you want me to edit your work, so be it, I will.]

I will run this for the next 1000 sales of PENMONKEY (starting with sale #329) or for the next year, whichever comes first. After that, I may continue, discontinue, or change the parameters and have my doom-bots add new “incitement protocols.”

I will keep a running tally somewhere on this site, soon as I figure out where that goes best. Sidebar? Maybe.

Any “incentives” will be received within 60 days of notification, though I have little doubt it’ll get to you a lot sooner. (The only tricky one is the edit, which may take time, so I want that 60-day cushion.)

This program is open to those who have already procured PENMONKEY (i.e. those first 328 purchasers) provided they live in the United States.

If you bought a PDF, I already have your email address and you don’t need to do anything at all.

If you bought a copy via Amazon or B&N, I need proof of sale and and e-mail address. Proof of sale can be a screen cap of a receipt or a photo of the book on your e-reader device. I reserve the right to be a jerk and test you and quiz you. Because that’s just how I roll. (Though recall: I also roll lazy. So I probably won’t.)

You can send proof of purchase to a special address I’ve got set-up for the whole shebang:

terribleminds at gmail dot com.

“Incitement Recipients” will be chosen at random via spreadsheet + random number generator.

If you have any questions, use the comment box below.

To procure PENMONKEY:

Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

I politely request that you spread the word on this, as it doesn’t work unless… well, people know about it.

Let the doom-bots begin their incitement.

I look forward to my hot-chick-in-a-Lamborghini.

July 1, 2011 / 40 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Fourth Of July

Check out last week’s players in the “Sub-Genre Mash-Up.”

Monday’s the Fourth of July. In this country, that means grilled meats, flag-waving, fire-crackers, humidity, parades, patriotism, picnics, baseball, families, and so on, and so forth.

It’s a day of celebration.

But fiction, well. Fiction likes a taste of the dark stuff. Fiction seeks to subvert happiness with a foul tincture of darkness. That, then, is your task for this week. Take the Fourth of July and muddy it up.

The flash fiction must be set on the Fourth of July.

This is a good challenge for horror or crime fiction, I think. Less so for fantasy and sci-fi, but if you think you can make it work, do it. Just be sure you show how long the shadows are on this hot summer holiday.

Once again: 1000 words.

Post it on your blog, and link back here, then make sure to let us know in the comments where to look for the fiction. You’ve got a week. Closing up shop Friday, July 8th, at 12 noon EST.

Load up them bottle rockets.

Jump into the pool.

Tell the grillmaster how you like your burger.

And be sure to hide the bodies.

June 30, 2011 / 12 Comments

“Decisions, Decisions,” by C.Y. Reid

Okay. Here goes, the first weekly terribleminds guest post — this one by C.Y. Reid, who would like to talk to you about his experiences writing a Choose Your Own Adventure Android app. Welcome him, and don’t hesitate to drop down into the comments section and ask the dude some questions. Please to enjoy.

Have you ever made a really difficult decision? One that’s plagued you for days on end, the resulting nervous state of emotional limbo never quite seeming to dissipate despite what you’re doing, where you are, or what’s doing its best to distract you? We’ve all been there, and it’s tough.

Now, I’m not talking about the stuff that holds a conventional sense of gravitas. One university or another. One car, one coffin, one career or another. I’m talking about the ridiculously bizarre decisions we fixate on to the point of generating our own internalised state of OCD. Which sandwich to have for lunch. Which bus to get. Which film to watch.

These decisions are what we agonise over more often than those with more serious consequences (though I’d argue that a bad sandwich is pretty serious), because they occur more often, and sometimes form part of an overall set of choices that define our lives. With choose-your-own-adventure writing, you’re not offering people constant, life-changing choices – you’re offering them the small beat-by-beat movements, occasionally punctuated by cliff-edge decisions, like how to fight a dragon, or how best to shut down your imagination while reading Chuck’s search term bingo posts.

It’s best to think of a choose-your-own-adventure novel like the roots of an old oak tree. You’re starting out from the trunk, the body of work that forms the basis for everything else – the world-fluff. Every smattering of nutrients you suck up through exploring the roots travels back up towards the surface, contributing to an ever-growing understanding of the world you’re exploring, page by page, in a far more direct and interactive way than you’re usually allowed to.

But each branching path can’t just be an obvious choice; a long, spiralling, weathered finger of wood with the resilience of aeons underground, or a short, dead stump. You have to make every single fork in the road matter just as much, and that means you can’t simply write sword-or-white-flag choices. A lot of recent videogames have featured choose-your-own-adventure elements, from Fable’s simplistic good-and-evil system to Mass Effect’s conversation wheel.

But the problem with these choices, and a lot of the choices I see in choose-your-own-adventure fiction is that they’re all based around an underlying theme of black-and-white morality. That theme is what is going to not only kill off half your pages, due to the fact that most readers will elect not to rape and pillage the townsfolk, rather than save and reassure them, but it’s also going to mean that the reader’s choices are simply a reflex.

Indecision generates fear, and I think that’s one of the reasons we get so stressed out about whether or not to dash to the duty-free just when our gate number is due at any moment. There’s that internal sensation of horror that pervades our decision, and I think by making people stop and think, you’re generating an adventure that means something to the reader.

Some storytellers think that they need an action beat every so many pages. But with this, every page in a choose-your-own-adventure tale is an action beat. Life isn’t a passenger experience, and if you’re offering someone a sense of interactivity within your fiction, you have to commit – half-arsing it just leaves them feeling like they’re playing within a sandbox, but you’re only letting them have the ambulance and the Tonka truck, rather than the Hot Wheels dream machines you’re dabbling with in the background.

If you want to write a choose-your-own-adventure novel (please do, it’s an art form that deserves more attention), I salute you, because as a writer, it’s brave of you. To hand one of the reins over to the reader and step back, knowing that they might only see less than a third of the pages you’ve written, perhaps never even reading through again to get a different ending, is bold. So be bold, and allow them to choose adventure.

C.Y. Reid is an SEO copywriter by day (boo, hiss, etc), and a passionate creative writer by night. He blogs at www.cyreid.com, tweets as @ReidFeed, and you can find Scoundrel’s Cross at this link.

June 29, 2011 / 63 Comments

Strangling Mermaids: More Writing Myths That Need To Die

Point of fact: I’m the guy at parties who tells you that urban legend you’re passing around — about the AIDS needles in the McDonald’s playground ball-pit or the dead baby used to smuggle cocaine or the chihuahua-that’s-actually-a-rat — is bullshit. I don’t know why. Everybody has fun telling those kinds of stories and there I am, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, murdering misinformation — and, oh, fun — in equal measure. I’m just skeptical, I guess. You tell me that the punch in the punch bowl is spiked with vodka, I’m likely to ask, “Did you check Snopes? SNOPES OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.”

I bring the same measure of myth-killing (and subsequent accidental fun-murdering) to writing. Writers often live or die by magical thinking, and that’s all well and good when it’s not fucking with your mojo. But myths often contain secret dangers. The Mexican Pet legend — i.e. the chihuahua-that’s-actually-a-rat — contains a not insubstantial seed of xenophobia and racism. “Oh, those silly disgusting Mexicans,” it says, “with their dog-like rats and their rat-like dogs. You just can’t trust things from wacky Mexico!”

And thus I find it instructive to shine a light in dark spaces.

It’s probably annoying.

But, too bad. Here I am, once more kicking over logs inside the writer’s mind and seeing what squirmy little wormlets lurk underneath. Let’s tackle some more writing myths.

“All It Takes To Be A Writer Is To Read And Write!”

If ever there was a piece of advice that was more dismissive of the act of writing, I don’t know what it is. At the heart of the advice is this: if you really want to learn how to write, then the only things you need to do is read books and, in turn, write them. Boom. Done. From there, you’ll… I dunno, just figure it the fuck out.

Can you imagine if we believed that true of other skills?

“Piano? Ehh. Just listen to some Billy Joel and then go flop around on this Casio keyboard for an hour and a half. You’ll pick it up.” “Painting? Sure, sure, here’s a bunch of Bob Ross VHS tapes, just put those on and then fingerpaint a bunch of happy little trees for a few weeks. You’ll be Leonardo Picasso in no time.” “Truck driving? Yeah, fuck the CDL. Just watch me do it, then you have a crack at it. That’s all you need. No, don’t worry if you mow down a church picnic or some shit. Them churchies have had it too good for too long.”

Reading and writing are two critical components of learning to write. True. No argument. But to suggest that’s all it takes is ludicrous — this isn’t fucking Skee-Ball. Writing’s got a lot of moving parts, many obscured behind a metric butt-ton of abstraction. This idea misses first that going out and living your life is a critical component to being a writer: you learn about stories by living your own stories. You also learn storytelling by hearing stories told, not just by reading them or writing them. Further, this removes from the equation any power you might get from writing classes (compositional and up) and writing advice, both of which are not only functional, but for many, fundamental.

Newsflash: I read a lot as a kid and I wrote a lot, too.

It didn’t make me a bestselling author at age 12.

The classes I took? The writing advice I read? The conferences? The sit-downs with other writers? The notes from editors? All of it, instructive. All of it putting me where I am today.

“My Characters Control Me!”

Despite how it sounds, I don’t actually want to destroy the magic implicit to storytelling. A very real magic lives there, and while I believe that writing is a craft, I’ve come to further believe that storytelling is an art.

But for me, the focus of magic must be internal, not external. Magic shouldn’t happen to the writer; the writer should be the one in control of the magic. It’s the difference between having your penis stolen by black magic sorcerers or, instead, being the sorcerer who uses his magic to steal penises. Right? Right.

So it always amazes me when writers speak of their fiction — and, in particular, the characters within that fiction — as being somehow alive, as if they’re real people running rough-shod over your story because these characters just don’t give a raw red fuck what you, the writer, want. Does that mean I’ve never been surprised by my characters? Of course I’ve been surprised by my characters. But I don’t attribute it to them being real. Instead, I high-five my subconscious mind and say, “Nicely done, part of my brain, I approve of your decision.” I mean, it’s not like comic book writers are like, “Yeah, I don’t know why Superman just took a Kryptonian Super-Shit on Hawkman. It’s just, hey, that’s Superman. I don’t control him. That crazy motherfucker does what he wants. The underwear on the outside? His idea.”

Here’s proof that you control your characters. When next you sit to write, have one of your characters just take a handgun and shoot himself smack dab in the head. You can go back and erase it — but did he fight you for control of the gun? No. No he didn’t. (And if he did: seek help. Or call a penis-stealing wizard, because maybe that dude has some advice on controlling your shit.)

“I Write Because OMG I Have To Or I’ll Explode!”

Again, another thing that gives short shrift to writers and writing. Writers write because they want to write. We’re not compelled to by some outer force. We are not mouthpieces of the divine.

Further, writing isn’t a mental illness. (Though it may feel that way at times.) We are not compelled to do it like slavering word-junkies. Christ, if writers were truly compelled to write, you’d probably see a lot less video game playing and a helluva lot more actual writing getting done.

By acknowledging that we want to write and must force ourselves to do so, then… drum roll please, we actually do so. Don’t be so dramatic to think that you’re metaphysically or psychotically forced to write by elements beyond your control. You cede that kind of authority to spectral hands then when the day comes you don’t write, well, that’s probably because the Powers That Be demanded it. Oh well!

“By Performing That Action, I Will Have Given Away My Thunder!”

Your creativity is not a newborn rabbit, so frail that even the mildest startle causes its tender systems to shut down. And yet I continue to hear about how this or that (outlining, prep-work, revising, editing, etc.) somehow damages the author’s creativity by robbing the project of its rare magic. Or, put differently, “It’s just not fun anymore.” You wrote an outline and it ruined Christmas.

You know what’s not fun? A bad day of writing. You know what else isn’t fun? When your word processor poops the bed and crashes in the middle of writing a paragraph. Rejections aren’t fun either. Neither are bad reviews. Or paring down word count. Or excising a beloved character. Or, or, or. Point is, writing isn’t a giggly run through a tickle-factory. The process is host to an endless array of cold realities. If your story idea is so fragile and crystalline that doing prep-work — or simply talking about it with a friend — then your story wasn’t worth much of a shit to begin with.

A corollary to this features discussions about money and publishing, as if discussions surrounding those things tarnish the high-and-mighty art of writing. If money somehow cheapens writing for you, then your notion of writing was really too wan, too feeble, to survive. In this day and age, with a competitive market and a fast-exploding self-publishing market, talking about advances and book prices is meaningful and necessary. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean the adults don’t still need to have the conversation.

If you truly feel that way about money and art, great. Prove it. Don’t get an agent. Don’t contact a publisher. Give your work away. Online. On street corners. Wherever. Just hand it off. Because, fuck money, am I right? Fuck sustainability. Fuck feeding your kids or your dogs or paying for health care or buying bags of scrumdiddlicious Funyuns (or their snacky-food counterparts, Munchos and Bugles).

Go ahead. Just give it away.

The moment you say, “Well, I’d like to get something for it…” is the moment you enter the money discussion. And it’s also the moment where I stick a bomb in your dickhole. FOOOOOM.

“My Ideas Are Super-Secret-Smooshy-Special!”

There exists a notion that the foundation of the writing life — that the curly pubic-coil that comprises a penmonkey’s most basic DNA — is a foundation made of ideas. This is why the question is always, “Where do you get your ideas?” Because people place an incredibly high value on them.

Ah, but — this high value doesn’t hold a lot of water.

Ideas aren’t that meaningful by themselves. I’ve seen some writers stymied because they “don’t have a good idea.” An idea isn’t the backbone of a story. It’s isn’t the whole pig. It’s just the squeal and maybe the tail and that’s it. The idea’s the thing that gets you off the ground, but it’s not currency. It’s not a secret treasure. Most ideas aren’t even that original. I don’t know if stories even have original ideas.

What’s original — and what matters — is the execution of an idea. The question should’t be, “Where do you get your ideas?” but rather, “How exactly did you make good on this idea and sit down in front of the computer day in and day out and give flesh and bones to this notion and then, beyond that, how did you give breath to that flesh and bones and make that story get up and dance instead of being just a hollow gas-bag of unfulfilled, unoriginal, ill-arranged, who-gives-a-shit ideas?”

But I guess that question’s a little too wordy. And besides, if writing is just about ideas, then how easy it must be! Eeeee! Giggle snort! Tickle-factory, here I come!

What else? Your turn. What myths sustain — but can also harm — the writer’s life?

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

June 28, 2011 / 36 Comments

The Five, By Robert McCammon

THE FIVE is Robert McCammon’s messiest, strangest work of fiction.

That may not sound like a good thing.

You’d be wrong.

See, this is a novel about the last days of a hardscrabble indie rock band — the titular “The Five” — and the horror they endure at the hands of a schizo sniper, a horror that ultimately brings them together before properly setting them apart. Contained within the story is this ghostly vein of the supernatural, a delicate component of good versus evil that never shows its full face, that always remains hidden in the margins of shadow that McCammon paints.

So, when I say “messy” and “strange,” I mean it in the truest rock-and-roll sense. Think if you will of the The White Stripes. Or The Doors. Or Jimi Hendrix. Or late Beatles. Or Sleater-Kinney. Or any garage band playing music that isn’t about perfection but about what lies beyond and within each note — the messy thump of a bass drum, the fuzz of a grinding guitar, the trippy vertigo strains of an organ. We’re not talking the measured bleeps and blips of pop music: we’re talking about the unkempt margins of rock-and-motherfucking-roll, son.

I don’t know how McCammon does it, but both the story and the execution of that story mimic that kind of garage band rock. It’s loose and messy, it deviates from expected courses, it escalates just when you think it’s going to ease off and eases off just when you think it’s going to escalate, it’s trippy and slippery. Above all else, it offers a kind of genius from a storyteller who has in my mind achieved a mode of transcendence — here, then, is McCammon as storytelling Bodhisattva, staying around this crass publishing arena to show the rest of his what it’s like to write from the heart and make it count.

Another way of thinking about it is by talking about James Joyce. Weird, I know, but bear with me: if you read Joyce’s work, his fiction doesn’t become more buttoned-up — it gets bigger, broader, more personal, and certainly weirder. Even comparing PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN with ULYSSES is a fascinating exercise: the first fairly lean, the second similar but with a far greater storyworld. ULYSSES shows Joyce beyond the top of his game — he’s climbed the ladder, gotten to the top, and kicked it down behind him — and reveals an ultimate expression of the novel. He’s not afraid to deviate, either. He wanders down alleys you didn’t even know where there, with Leopold Bloom as our vehicle through the mundane chaos, the heroic normalcy of an everyman’s day.

(Let’s not talk about FINNEGAN’S WAKE right now.)

THE FIVE is McCammon’s ULYSSES.

That’s a wacky statement. I know. But I think it’s true. This tale of “The Five” — Nomad, Ariel, Mike, Terry, and Berke — takes those same trips down dark alleys, concerning itself less with a mechanical thriller-slash-horror plot and more with the nature of these characters and the power and madness of rock-n’-roll in this day and age. This is actually marketed as a horror novel, and… it is, I guess, but only barely. That’s not to say it’s not scary. It’s rough stuff at times. But again the supernatural component, while present, is barely there — a stroke of subtlety rather than overt paranormality.

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure about the book for the first… 20, 30 pages. But then you slip into the vibe of it and it reveals itself. Soon your heart’s thumping like a kick-drum.

If I had one complaint it’s that early on McCammon seemed more interested in describing the technical beats of the music as it played — problematic for a guy like me who has the musical inclination of a cantaloupe. (Confession: I once played the drums. Second confession: I probably wasn’t very good.) But eventually he moves away from that and describes the music in cleaner, more poetic beats — paving the way to let you know how the music’s supposed to feel rather than the rote mechanics of how it’s played. It conjures to mind that this is a novel with the potential for transmedia extensions, if only in the form of us getting to hear the music of “The Five.”

Anyway. Point being, I recommend it. Two drumsticks thrust up and twirling. It’s a powerful, profound, trippy novel that’s troubling and unsettling throughout. This isn’t like anything else McCammon has ever done — again, it’s far fuzzier at the margins. But Stephen King was right to call it “full of rock and roll energy.” It isn’t McCammon’s easiest read. But, ULYSSES isn’t an easy read, either. Even still, both novels are some of the best of the form.

The caveat applies here that McCammon is easily my foremost “totem spirit” in terms of writers who influenced me. The guy’s one of my literary heroes and it’s nice to see him not just working, but at the top of his game. I’m looking cuh-razy forward to THE PROVIDENCE RIDER and whatever horror novel he’s got after that. (I still need to see if I can get my hands on his new WOLF’S HOUR stories, though. Dangit.)

All right, cats and kittens.

Your turn.

Recommend a book.

And go read THE FIVE while you’re at it.