Category: The Ramble (page 128 of 464)

*ahem*

I have an announcement to make.

*opens mouth*

*ants pour out*

*ants collectively spell a message*

FBI Drama From Jerry Bruckheimer TV & ‘MacGyver’ EP David Slack Set At CBS

*ants return to mouth*

*maw snaps shut*

So, if you click that link, you’ll see a couple notable paragraphs:

CBS has put in development Unthinkable, an FBI crime drama from Jerry Bruckheimer Television and MacGyver executive producer David Slack. CBS Television Studios, where both JBTV and Slack are based, is the studio.

Written and executive produced by Slack, Unthinkable, based on Chuck Wendig’s 2016 novel Invasive, is about a brilliant futurist, trained to see danger around every corner, who’s recruited by an uncharacteristically optimistic FBI Agent to identify the threats only she can see coming – and stop them before it’s too late.

So, that’s the news.

It is very exciting news.

Technically, Invasive was optioned over a year ago. But, it wasn’t announced, so I sat on it, as is the way. (I may or may not be sitting on some news regarding another series, too.) And nothing was really happening, far as I knew —

Until David Slack and Bruckheimer TV got involved.

Then it got more serious.

Slack sent me the pitch for Unthinkable — which builds off of Hannah as a character, as the basis for the whole series — and it was a fucking grand slam, The Natural-style rain of glass and electricity. It’s the kind of pitch where I read it and was like, “Okay, this goes above and beyond the book, and if this doesn’t become a TV show that I can watch, I will kick over my TV in rage.” It’s that good. (Slack knows his way around a pitch. I’ve read pitches, and I’ve read pitches, and this was weaponized art. Before I day I aspire to be half that good.) Anyway! Point is, it’s jumped some hurdles, but while this is all very excited, I will caution you (and more me!) that this doesn’t mean it’s getting made into a show — just that it’s progressing forward, that it has amazing people behind it, and that there’s at least a shot. But it remains an option, so the wind blows the way the wind blows.

Still, we can all cross our fingers and toes.

If you haven’t read the book, nab it where books are sold.

Or, the e-book is still $3.99 for reasons unknown: Amazon | B&N | iBooks

Oh, and since someone might ask — will there be more Hannah Stander on bookshelves? Answer unclear, ask again later. We did not work out a deal with Harper for more books, but if a TV show really does come out of this (and it probably won’t!), then I’d not say no to writing more of her adventures, but who knows?

Sorrow Lovegood’s life has been shaped by the stories of the women who came before her: brave, resilient ancestors who settled long ago on an unusual apple orchard in Vermont. The land has been passed down through generations, and Sorrow and her family take pride in its strange history. Their offbeat habits may be ridiculed by other townspeople—especially their neighbors, the Abrams family—but for the first eight years of her life, the orchard is Sorrow’s whole world.

Then one winter night everything changes. Sorrow’s sister, Patience, is tragically killed. Their mother suffers a breakdown. Sorrow is sent to live with her father in Miami, away from the only home she’s ever known.

Now sixteen, Sorrow’s memories of her life in Vermont are maddeningly hazy; even the details of her sister’s death are unclear. She returns to the orchard for the summer, determined to answer the questions that have haunted her: Why has her mother kept her distance over the last eight years? What actually happened the night Patience died? What other long-buried secrets has the orchard been waiting for her to uncover?

You can rewrite an entire book multiple times without knowing what it’s about

I’ve heard writers say that the first draft of a novel is the one where we tell the story to ourselves. What I haven’t heard is that this can also be true of the second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts, because sometimes it takes that many tries to figure out what the hell we’re doing.

The Memory Trees began life as a very different kind of book. It was a classic ghost story: creepy atmosphere, excessive melodrama, flimsy-as-fuck murder mystery. And through many drafts, I tried to make that story work. I tried to fix the murder mystery. Added ghosts. Added confrontations. Added ominous fog. My editor got a lot of practice saying, “This revision is better! …but also not really better,” in politely ruthless ways.

She was right. For eighteen months of rewrites, revisions, edit letters, phone calls, outlines followed and discarded, she was right. I wasn’t making it better.

Only when I finally discarded the ghost story framework I had started with was I able to focus on the things that actually offered the makings of a decent book: the characters, their relationships, the many ways humans help and harm each other, and how those fierce, personal acts of love and hate can have repercussions that last generations.

Second novels are for unlearning what you have learned

After you finish your first book, a lot of people warn you that the second one will be harder. I expected that to be true. But what I didn’t expect–possibly because nobody warned me, but more likely because I wasn’t listening when they did–was that I would sit down to work on my second novel and have absolutely no idea what to do.

None of the revision techniques I used for my first novel worked anymore. None of the questions I had learned to ask of my characters helped. I could not make the story’s structure feel natural. I could not strike the right tone. I could not balance the pacing. Every change only made me more frustrated with how far the story was from being what I wanted it to be.

What I eventually figured out was that I had not learned how to write a novel. I had learned how to write that novel. Now I needed to learn how to write this novel.

It’s never too late to rearrange your entire novel on a whim

And that meant learning that while plot may be one damn thing happening after another, story is something else entirely.

Two weeks before my final final final deadline–I had already pushed back the publication date twice–I was forced to admit that while individual scenes worked, the characters were distinct, the plot had no holes, and the writing was strong, something in the book remained fundamentally broken.

That’s when I got the idea to blow up the whole structure.

I thought of it while walking to the gym–all the best ideas come while walking or showering–and I had absolutely no idea if it would work. I certainly didn’t have any time to spare. But I did it anyway: I broke off the first eight chapters (roughly 1/3 of the book), reshuffled them into a different order, and stuck them elsewhere, letting the emotional progress define their placement more than the sequence of events.

It did work–thank goodness, because I was out of ideas. It worked because this is a book about how the past informs the present, about the interplay between memory and truth, about how the actions of past generations still reverberate. In that kind of story, setting the past alongside the present makes sense–but I didn’t know that until I tried it.

How to delete men for fun and profit and the conscious deconstruction of internal bias

From the beginning The Memory Trees was a book the relationships between women. It’s about a teenage girl reconnecting with her mother and grandmother, all members of an old matriarchal family. That was always the plan: this is a story about women.

It wasn’t until my editor pointed out to me places where the central characters were taking a back seat to the men in their lives did I realize how deeply unintentional gender imbalance and bias can creep in. The solution, in retrospect, was obvious: for every character, for every scene, look long and hard at whose perspective is being favored, and take men out of the story when they had no reason to be there. Every single character got the “What is your purpose and does that purpose actually require a male character?” treatment.

The world has conditioned us as both readers and writers to accept that male characters are the natural default, while female characters need exceptional reasons for existing. That is both sexism and bad storytelling, and it takes conscious work to avoid both. It’s such a pervasive problem, such an ingrained habit, that even as a wildly progressive, grossly over-educated thirty-eight-year-old woman living in the year 2017, I still had to learn this lesson about letting women stand at the center of their own stories.

Stories are important when the world is crumbling

This book is forever tied in my mind to the unending escalation of horror that was 2016. There were many, many times when I looked up from my work and asked myself, “What the hell am I even doing? The world is a dumpster fire! Friends and loved ones and neighbors and strangers are in fear for their lives! Heartless sociopathic monsters are taking over our country! Why the fuck am I writing a book about magical apple trees?”

Since the mind-numbing shock of Election Day 2016–which also happened to be my birthday, fuck you very much–I’ve had many conversations with writer friends in which we asked ourselves: Why are we doing this? Who is this for? Does any of it matter?

Every writer has to find their own answers, and for me those answers are both complicated and painfully simple. Stories matter to children looking for both a mirror of their own lives and a window into a better world. Stories matter to teenagers who are righteously pissed off at how adults have fucked up the world so badly. Stories matter to anybody who needs to believe in beauty, justice, hope, and progress. A world in which art and beauty are encouraged to exist is what we are fighting for. A world in which long-silenced people are invited to shout their stories from the rooftops is what we are fighting for. A world in which young women can learn that their voices matter is the whole goddamned point.

Or maybe stories only matter because we’re all going to need to Scheherazade our way out of being eaten by roving bands of cannibals as we stumble wearily through the oncoming apocalyptic wasteland. That’s important too.

* * *

I love reading the “Five Things I Learned…” posts on terribleminds, and I’ve enjoyed writing them in the past. That’s what this post was originally going to be, and I did learn plenty while writing Spliced: about using viruses as vectors for gene splicing, climate change, animal personhood, computer implants, the difference (in my mind) between science thrillers and science fiction, and a lot about writing YA.

And there were plenty of other interesting discoveries that came before I even had the idea for Spliced. Part of what I love about writing the kind of books I write is the research. I write about things I find fascinating, so the opportunity to drill down deeper into those topics is often fascinating, too. And it invariably leads to other ideas. Some of the my best book ideas come from research for earlier books.

That’s how it was with Spliced.

I was researching Deadout, one of  my previous science thrillers, when I started reading about biohackers, who tinker with genetic engineering in their basements, much like people did with computers in the seventies and eighties. I found the notion fascinating, scary but cool—part of a long and proud tradition of citizen scientists. I knew I wanted to write about it somehow, and several more obvious ideas came to me (some of which I may revisit) before I thought of biohacking, several decades in the future, merging with body modification subculture. The idea excited me: disaffected young people splicing animal genes into their own to become chimeras.

As I brainstormed and outlined and started writing Spliced, some of the most interesting thoughts and central ideas seemed to come from within the book itself, as it basically told me what it was about.

Writers often talk about characters revealing themselves during the writing of a book, but the same thing can be true with the themes. The deeper you get into it, the more you realize that maybe it’s not about the thing you thought it was about. Maybe it’s about something else. Fortunately, as an outliner, I rely on the upfront thought work to help me figure a lot these things out before I start writing (and to avoid some of the  massive rewrites that can come from these revelations).

Spliced is not about biohacking, and it’s not about body modification, either, or at least not in the sense that we know it today. It’s about this other thing that came out of those things. I knew when I had the idea for Spliced that if such a technology became as readily available as it is in the book, there would be those who would use it. But what I didn’t know, at first, was why. Why would people choose to do this thing that was so drastic, dangerous, and disruptive to their lives? In order to understand, I had to more fully understand the world in which the book would take place.

I had realized early on that when writing a book set decades in the future, you either acknowledge climate change or deny it. But what began as an almost logistical consideration, unavoidable but peripheral, became one of the central themes. Peak oil had come and gone, and while energy usage has become smarter, the supply has become scarcer, with far-reaching implications. The climate has been knocked askew, and the extinction event that looms over us today is by then well underway.

These environment factors came to define the world of the book in many ways, and they also informed the motives of many of the characters who get spliced: For some, being a chimera is a fashion statement or an act of rebellion, but for others, it is an homage to extinct species, or a declaration of a symbolic separation from a humanity that seemed so intent on trashing the natural world. It is a statement—or many statements—and important ones, at that.

Once I had a grasp on the world that would give rise to chimeras, I had to consider what chimeras would give rise to: How would their presence shape the world around them? Unfortunately, I didn’t have far to look in our own world to see how some in society react with fear, anger, disgust, and hatred to those who are different—whether they ‘choose’ to be different or not—and to anything that upsets their perceived natural order or blurs lines they consider absolute. And, alongside them, of course, would be those ready to capitalize on that fear and hatred, to inflame it and use it as a wedge for political gain.

Once you have a wedge, you need something to drive it deeper. The biggest and most powerful hammer in the demagogue toolbox may be the dehumanization of the other, and that is the focus of the anti-chimera backlash: a law that declares anyone whose DNA is not one hundred percent human a legal nonperson.

Ironically, the person leading the charge to declare chimeras nonpersons achieved his wealth and prominence as a pioneer in computer implants—another form of transhumanism. Though maybe that’s more about hypocrisy, something that has never stopped a demagogue.

More ironic, maybe, is writing a book about people who choose not to be one hundred percent human being persecuted and oppressed by those who seek to dehumanize them. But a little irony has never stopped a writer.

In the end, as always, I did learn a lot while writing this book, and from many sources — web research, interviews with experts, other writers, and of course books. But as it turned out, this time, one of the books from which I learned the most hadn’t yet been written.

Jon McGoran: Website | Twitter

Spliced: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The game is rigged.

It’s not a surprise, not a mystery, definitely not news to a majority of the country’s population — women, people of color, the LGBT community, the disabled, immigrants.

But the election of the Naughahyde Narcissist to the Highest Chair in the Land has given 2017 a near-perfect view of the game, exposed — all its crushing gears and choking chains, all the mechanisms laid bare. All the uneven scoring, all the tilted fields, all the corrupt umps.

Harvey Weinstein is a serial abuser, and Hillary gets the blame. The women who never spoke out get the blame. Obama gets the blame. Harvey’s own agency in his own rapist predations is cast further and further from Harvey himself. The women are told, yet again, they were wearing the wrong clothes. That they probably egged him on. And on the other side, the fact they didn’t protest, didn’t fight back against a system that would’ve crushed them, didn’t do more to protect other women, that’s a scarlet letter staplegunned to their sleeve.

Black Americans get executed in the streets by a police force out of control, so Black Americans stand in the streets to defend against that — but they’re tear-gassed, beaten, made to disappear, threatened, sued, told to find a place to protest quietly, peacefully, non-violently. They’re called animals and thugs, treated like criminals even when they’re just standing there. Colin Kaepernick kneels during an NFL game — protesting the deaths of Black Americans quietly, peacefully, non-violently — and he’s a traitor, a quisling, shut up and play ball, dance when we shoot at your feet, hurt yourself for the pleasure of those in the stands. Use your platform for good, they cry, and he does, every day, but they don’t notice, and they don’t care.

Nazis in Charlottesville are just good old-fashioned protesters, though, just exercising their First Amendment Rights — and, more importantly, their Second, am I right? — they’re ‘white activists,’ they’re ‘historical cosplayers,’ they’re ‘Nazi-adjacent freedom-seekers.’ They kill a woman, but it’s okay, and besides, didn’t someone introduce legislation where it would be okay to mow down a protester with a car? That makes it okay. It must.

A white man opens fire in Las Vegas, he kills scores, wounds ten times those that he murders, and so begin the stories of what a good man he was, how nice he was, he was a lone wolf, not one of our tribe, oh no, just a man without a home, a family man, a friendly man — and we’re told now isn’t the time to talk about guns, not now, and not tomorrow because another shooting will come, and not the day after that, because another shooting will come. But he’s not a terrorist, he’s not a thug, not an animal or a criminal, just a good man who went bad. Not his fault. Never his fault. If he were Muslim or black, well… those people…

Puerto Rico drowns in darkness. And it’s their fault. Something about loans or their economy, something about their woman mayor playing politics, and all the while the Ding-Dong Dictator pisses and moans about how now one appreciates him, how no one sees what he’s doing, because really, isn’t he the victim here? Isn’t he the victim because we don’t see the hero that he truly is, our Orange White Man, our Rubbery Russian Puppet, our Inglorious Leader?

Protections for our LGBT population are whittled once again to splinters because really, aren’t protections for them actually the opposite of that for us? What about our freedoms to religiously persecute them? Giving them equal freedom surely, surely means taking away the freedom we have now to discriminate against them. The disabled, too — why should they have access to healthcare and bathrooms and compassion, isn’t it really their fault for being born this way, and if they weren’t born this way, certainly they must’ve done something to deserve it in this Ayn Randian Hellworld we’ve built for ourself, where the rich are special, where geniuses deserve their power, where altruism is a disease and the uneven distribution of wealth is simply a rational principle like the way water and shit both run downhill.

Isn’t it really just about ethics in videogame journalism? It’s definitely not about the unwelcome presence of icky girls or queerness or disability or differently-colored skin in our videogames, oh no. It’s about objectivity in game reviews, obviously, definitely, don’t you say differently, SJWs, or we’ll dox you and SWAT your house and unleash literal years of abuse online, abuse that nobody ever does anything to fix, because that abuse serves the platform on which it is trafficked. And then that platform, unmitigated and unrefined, still trafficking in abuse, will help to elect the Grabber-In-Chief, the Racist Ringleader, the Tiny-Fingered Tyrant, to the most powerful office in all the world, and we will stumble, shrugging, toward nuclear war, toward unstoppable climate change, toward a depressed economy, toward the throat-cutting of American nobility on the world stage…

Toward both the bang and the whimper.

But don’t worry. It’ll be okay.

Are you white? Then we will protect you.

Are you also a man? Oh, boy howdy, then do I have good news for you.

Cisgendered? Able-bodied? Right this way, sir.

Are you wealthy? Then please, accept this bag of money, and this nice car, and this beautiful house, not to mention these endless safety nets, these trampolines to always catch you and bounce you back up no matter how rampant your mediocrity, we will always protect you, here is your blame-resistant tuxedo, here is your bubble of clean air, here is your perfect place at the center of the universe where nothing can touch you, nothing can hurt you, everything is warm like bathwater. Nothing is your fault, don’t worry. You will be safe. Because the game is rigged in your favor. The doors will always open for you. We’ll give everything to you. It doesn’t matter if it destroys the world — there’s an underground bunker with your name on it, and a rocketship that will allow you to depart for cleaner, freer skies.

* * *

I don’t have any good call to action here.

I wish I did.

Just be aware of this stuff, People Like Me. Elevate voices that aren’t your own. Listen to those voices. Hear them. Pass the mic. Boost the signal. When you see the system working for you and against others, say something. Try to do something. Don’t worry about perfect, just be better, for Chrissakes. Stand tall for people who can’t, for people who will be crushed underneath the machine. Get out of the center of the universe. Give money to good causes. Vote for interests other than your own. Find empathy and critical thinking. Do something. Don’t just sit there and be the casual, happy recipient of love and favors. Share the road. And see the game for what it is, and how someone has cheated for you on your behalf.

[Note: comments are on and open, but the spam oubliette is open and ready for trolls and other shitbirds. I need not abide your nonsense.]

Writing advice is a little bit silly, as I’ve noted many times in the past. (Other times, I’ve put it differently: writing advice is bullshit.) It’s silly not because it’s fails to at times be useful, but because we expect it to be useful, we demand that it be rigorously true as opposed to, y’know, the opinion of some vaguely-experienced rando. Hell, Stephen King is an astonishing, terrifying force of wordsmithy, and On Writing remains one of the greatest writing books ever written — just the same, I don’t do what King does. I couldn’t. Because I’m not Stephen King. I love his book because it makes me challenge my own process and, at the same time, confirm my own process by proxy. Writing advice is not a treasure map with a chest of gold under a big red ‘X’ — it’s less recipe for success and more menu of food items you find may suit you.

I offer a lot of flim-flam shim-sham about writing and storytelling mostly because I want exactly that — I want to challenge you, I want to offer you possibilities, I want to once in a while make you think about something in your own work you hadn’t thought of before now. That’s it. No recipe. No secret handshake. No ancient occult ritual.

I mean, there is one, of course, but you only learn that after you publish five books, and then the Dread Angel Golzirath will darken your door with a fruit basket full of demon bezoars and an old VHS copy of Ghoulies, and then —

Well, I don’t want to spoil it.

The ritual or the movie.

(But be on the look out for Toilet Ghoulie. So cute!)

Regardless, just as one’s writing evolves over time, so too does the advice one might give around that process — and I thought what might be an interesting thing would be to offer a look at some more unconventional pieces of advice. Things you may not hear too often, some slightly more controversial chestnuts of wisdom — or, perhaps anti-chestnuts, which taste a great deal like the grief of a hungover party clown.

Here, then, are some of these nuggets of dubious wisdom. As with all such things, feel free to pick them up, regard them, wiggle your tongue over their crannies to determine if their taste is pleasing to you, and then consume or discard at your earliest convenience.

1. Fuck Your Critique Groups

I don’t mean that in the sexy verb way, but more in the way of wielding your disdain like a weapon. I mean that your critique group might be doing you more harm than good.

Maybe that’s not true. Maybe your writing group is amazing.

Yay. Good. Woo. *confetti erupts from exploding ponies*

But I present you with this to consider:

I do not much care for Tolkien’s work.

No, no, put down that broken beer bottle. Relax. I recognize that I’m the outlier there — it’s purely a thing with me where, mostly, Tolkien isn’t something I want to read. I’d rather eat wallpaper. It’d be faster and less dry. I like the movies, not the books. The end.

Now, I want you to imagine that Tolkien had a writer’s critique group, and I was in it, and I brought my nonsense opinion to that group. I planted that seed in his head — “Maybe this isn’t that good? Maybe I’ve gone on too long. Maybe I’m a hack. Fuck hobbits. Fuck them right in their hobbit holes. I will instead go and be an actuarial analyst in Manchester, good night.” That is, of course, an extreme view of what might’ve come out of that, but what I’m saying is, who gives a shit what I think? I’m not important. I shouldn’t matter to Tolkien’s work or process. And yet, if I have a voice during his early processes, maybe I would’ve derailed him. Maybe I would’ve changed the work for the worse. Instead of going back in time to chuck Baby Hitler in a well somewhere, I’d be going back in time to fuck up Lord of the Rings.

I’m not an editor. I have editorial skills that I weaponize against myself, but I shouldn’t apply them to you. I can tell you how to use a comma and how to make a sentence more clear, but I shouldn’t be imprinting upon you stylistically. And that’s chiefly the problem with a lot of critique groups — they understandably comprise writers, not editors. Their opinions on work are driven from the question of, how would I write this? which is analogous to changing how you have sex because some other weirdo gets off on different peccadillos. Not to say you cannot explore new things, but just because That Guy Over There digs sticking egg whisks up his ass doesn’t mean you need to change your own bedroom voodoo. Nor does it mean he should stop sticking egg whisks up his ass just because you’re not into it.

(For real though, please don’t stick an egg whisk up your nethermost hole. I mean, I guess as long as you don’t go in whisk-end first, you might be okay, but I don’t want to be responsible for your hospital bills or lost kitchen implements.)

Critique groups can be less than ideal. You get a bunch of writers together to explicitly pick apart one another’s work, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to end up with something better, but you damn sure might end up with something routinely not you. And the opposite can be true, too — they might all love what you wrote, despite the fact that the thing you wrote needs serious work. This is complicated further by social biases: friends don’t want to hurt friends, so maybe they withhold honesty or literally don’t see the problem. Friends also might unconsciously want to hurt friends because, well, we’re a bundle of terrible complexities and maybe there’s some jealousy involved or some kind of unperceived resentment, oh no. Plus, a critique group sometimes feels obligated to find problems just to make use of themselves, which means they’re inventing problems rather than highlighting existing problems, and you might feel obligated to make changes because you don’t want to be rude — but maybe you have your own resentments and disregard good edits because of them, and, and, and…

It’s just not ideal. It certainly can be, with the right group. But writers, again, are not editors. It can be dangerous when we treat them as such. And I’ve heard some horror stories of people who went along for far too long with a bad group, not really realizing that the group had gone toxic on them. At which time, it was too late.

So, if you’re going to use a critique group, or beta readers, make sure you’ve established a strong bedrock foundation of unshakable trust. Sure, yes, kill your darlings, but also know which hills are yours to die upon.

2. Write You Up Some Fan Fiction

Let’s get this out of the way first: stow your haughty elitism about fan-fic. Just shove it into what dark, fetid Opinion Hole exists within you, the one where you keep all your Bad Opinions. Stick it there, seal it shut with a pancake of Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and shush.

Let’s also get this out of the way:

I don’t write fan-fic, presently.

I used to! I was part of a group in high school where we passed around a notebook that mashed up a mighty tangle of pop culture properties, from Star Wars to Ultima. It probably wasn’t good. But it was fun. And I can legit say I learned not only how to write, but also how to write for an audience — because the audience was the other writers.

But I don’t do it anymore, and I’m sure someone here will say, But har-har, don’t you write Star Wars books, and isn’t that just fan-fic, and I mean, I guess if you really wanna call it that, whatever. I like to think that once a thing becomes canon, it’s not fan-fic because I’m not operating as a fan but rather as a Licensed Canon Wizard, where anything I say becomes automagically canon. Like, here, look:

Darth Vader is actually a stack of eight porgs in robot armor.

It overwrites all the other canon. It’s real. It’s truth.

It’s just not fan-fic. But to be clear, that’s not a knock against fan-fic.

I was at NYCC this past weekend, and I had discussions with a handful of professional, even full-time writers — and I discovered that they still write fan-fiction. Like, we’re talking unpaid fics across various fandoms, some popular, many obscure. And my first reaction to this is quizzical bemusement, like, wait, what? You write fan-fiction even now? And nobody pays you for it? You just do it? Because you love it?

And then it’s like, oh my god, of course you do. Because you love it.

They said: it’s fun. It reminds them sometimes that “writing is play.” (I’d quote the authors specifically to give them credit, but I don’t want to out private conversations.) And sometimes I think we get so focused on writing as craft we forget the play component. Writing fan-fic might actually return you to that, and that’s pretty amazing. (Further, they said sometimes things they wrote in fan-fic became something they could then tweak and use later in pro-work. So it’s also not useless from a craft standpoint, either.)

Brilliant. Amazing. Yes!

So, fuck it. Go write fan-fic. And if not that specifically, find time to write in a way where it’s fun, where it’s play, where it’s not you worrying about the market or a pay rate or what an editor is going to say. Find a sandbox, yours or someone else’s, and get dirty.

3. Read Less Fiction

Unconventional advice, maybe. Controversial, probably.

It’s funny, though, because I hear a lot of authors-of-fiction say that they don’t read much fiction these days — and, honestly, I read a whole lot less, too. Sometimes people jump their shit about that, because one of the supposed cornerstones of writing is, read more books. Which, while true, do those books always have to be fiction?

I say nay, they do not.

I read a lot of non-fiction for a few key reasons:

a) I don’t like to read too much fiction when I’m writing fiction, but I’m pretty much always writing fiction

b) Like a stage magician, I start to see through the tricks and the illusions, so it gets harder to read a book and really enjoy it

c) Reading your novel gives me your ideas, but reading a non-fiction book gives me new ideas that are all mine, mine, mine, and I’d rather not be part of some long human centipede chain of genre-reconsumption

If you want to strengthen your writing, I say, read fewer novels. Especially novels in the genre in which you tend to write. Read information. Read ideas. Read poetry. Read some classics. Read comic books and comic strips. Read cereal boxes, and the clouds, and the secret message I’ve stitched into your Tuesday underpants, and okay I think you grok my point.

4. If You Do Read Fiction, Dissect It Like A Frog In Biology Class

Did you dissect frogs in biology class? In AP Bio, they dissected cats. Cats. Not the Broadway musical, either, but actual cats.

They probably don’t do that anymore.

Anyway, the point is this:

When you do read fiction, destroy it.

Not literally. Put out the fire, Prince Zuko.

What I mean is, pick it apart. Not necessarily in a critical, I’M FINDING ALL THE BAD STUFF way. Rather, ask yourself, how does the author achieve what she’s achieving? What are her tricks? You can find the places where those tricks fail, sure, and you should also find where — and how — they work.

Which leads me to —

5. You’re A Manipulative Monster, So Might As Well Roll In It Like A Dog Relishing The Stink Of A Dead Gopher

I did not realize early on in my writing that I was a bad person.

Not a bad person, I hope, to the rest of the world. But to my characters.

And, really, to my readers.

Because a good author is a manipulative motherfucker.

Look at it this way: if you were designing a roller coaster, it would be perfectly in-character of you, the Amusement Architect, to say, “This is where I want the riders to have their sphincters clench up so hard it could bend rebar, and the next hill is where I want them to pee themselves. And not like, a little bit, but a khaki-soaker where they release all the urine they have.”

And so it is that you, as the author, are perfectly within your rights to say:

“I want the reader to be sad here, in this part. Right fucking here. Poke, poke, poke. I want to — I need to — make them sad. Then I want them to get mad. Then I want to make them happy again, at least for a little while, before I ruin half of their happiness with a hard choice and a complex ending.”

You are attempting to engineer how they feel.

Which is really, really manipulative.

You want them to laugh. To cringe. To cry. To cheer.

And you try to pull the puppet strings to make that happen.

Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you’re not, but it’s worth highlighting this not as a thing outside your control, and certainly not as a thing that is pure happenstance — it is something you should endeavor very much to articulate and then orchestrate.

Where do you want them to hurt?

How do you want them to heal?

Read the work and ask yourself:

What reaction do you want them to have? How do you engineer that? How can you manipulate them into feeling that way? The very best authors hide this manipulation behind the workings of prose and character — it’s not bold-faced, it’s not obvious. Like every good haunted house, all the mechanisms are in the dark, behind the curtains.

6. Learn Random Shit, Go Random Places, Try New Things

That pretty much says it all, but to unpack it a bit: travel, do things, learn things, embrace experiences you have not yet had, even if they’re not always good ones. Live life. So much of fiction is about filling the tanks for fiction, and so much of that is Doing Different Stuff. I don’t mean to suggest you need to have buckets of money to travel to distant lands — like, if you’ve never driven three towns over, go do it. If you’ve never gone fishing, go fishing. Eat a bug. Climb a tree. Stick an egg-beater up your — wait, no, we decided that wasn’t a thing to do. Change your perspective. Add to the list of things you truly feel comfortable writing about. No, you don’t need to always write what you know, but the things that you know — or better stated, that you have experienced — will be things you will want to write about.

7. Stress Test Your Process

The best thing you can do for yourself is to find your process.

My process is not your process. It’s why any writing advice that gurgles up out of my lips should be immediately suspect — I’m telling you what I do, and what I do is not at all what you do. I lube my fingers up with scented unguents and then quaff a mix of Red Bull and spider venom. You sip tea noisily and write bestsellers while riding on the back of a gentlemanly and gently ambling dromedary camel. I’m not you. You’re not me. Neither of us are Stephen King no matter how often we try to switch bodies with him.

You need to find your process.

And the best thing you can do for finding your process is to never be entirely sure that you’ve found your process.

Because once you’re sure, once you’re really for real sure that you’ve figured it out, you’ve closed yourself to change.

I’ve changed my process subtly over time. Sometimes by necessity. Sometimes because I hear how another writer does it and it’s a thing that sounds like it might work for me.

Sometimes the changes aren’t subtle. For instance, I used to never, ever, ever go back and edit the story while writing the story. Now, though, I do that. I don’t do it much, and I don’t do it far, but every day, before I start writing, I go back and I re-read the previous day’s work — and I spend a little time tinkering with it. Fiddling with the dials, jiggering some levers, that kind of thing. It reminds me where I was, and gives me a sense of once again immersing myself in the flow of the work.

I used to write at night.

Now I write in the morning.

One day maybe I won’t drink coffee when I’m writiAHHH haha ha yeah no of course I’m going to keep drinking coffee YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND GET YOUR NASTY HANDS OFF MY BLACK DEVIL’S BREW YOU GODLESS TRAITOR

Ahem, ha ha, oh, whoa, that went off the rails there.

But seriously if you touch my coffee you’ll reel back a stump.

Point is, sometimes you need to change your process. I’m fond of telling the story of how it took me five years to essentially fail to write the novel Blackbirds, and how learning how to write it essentially came down to learning how to outline the damn book. And there I became a pantser-by-heart, plotter-by-necessity. And some writers hear that lesson and they take the lesson to be: “I need to outline.”

But the lesson was actually, I needed to change my process.

I had a process that wasn’t working.

And so I had to change it.

We become so sure of our process that we refuse to budge from it. And sometimes it’s worth changing your process — or testing it, at least — even when you think it’s working, because maybe it’s not working optimally.

Fiddle with the dials.

Jigger the levers.

Stick the egg-beater up your — well, you know.

Change your process. A little here. A lot there.

Whatever makes the work better.

Whatever makes you better.

(And happier.)

So now, I ask you for your input —

What’s a piece of unconventional writing advice you’ve found helpful?

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Out 10/17:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

(See me, Kevin Hearne, and Fran Wilde on 10/17 in San Francisco, 10/18 in Portland, and 10/19 in Seattle. Details here!)

NYCC was, of course, a blast.

There, with a mighty plethora of authors, we launched the 40th anniversary Star Wars anthology, From A Certain Point of View, which dips in and out of the narrative of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope to highlight the goings-on of some of the stranger characters in the book — I wrote Wuher, the bartender, who has a particular thing against droids. The book contains so many awesome authorpeople, it’s nuttier than Mynock Salad. Daniel Jose Older? Mur Lafferty? Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction? Mallory Ortberg? Adam Christopher? Delilah Dawson? Claudia Gray? Zoraida Cordova? Wil Wheaton? Gary Whitta? I could go on, but I’d just keep filling this page with amazing names. It’s a great book, done for charity, check it out. And if you ever see editor Elizabeth Schaefer, high-five her, for her powers of mighty.

Del Rey deserves a special shout-out for not only putting that book together, but putting the panel together to support the book — and in general for being great to their writers. Their booth is always an island in the sea of sweat and chaos that is New York Comic-con.

As always, I failed to see cool people because it’s a busy, busy con — but I did meet a lot of fans and readers, which is forever a treat.

Let’s see, anything else happen?

Um.

Hm.

No?

OH YEAH WAIT

WE MET SPACE DAD

*gestures enthusiastically toward the lead image, which is totally not a macro image, but shut up, you shut it right now*

Yeah, that’s right, we met Mark Hamill. Me, Adam, Delilah and Elizabeth used our collective star power to get into Mark Hamill’s special Celebrity Star Chamber, and we got to hang out with him for most of the day and get spa treatments and he did his Fire Lord Ozai impression and then he adopted us as his Space Children and —

OKAY FINE SHUT UP that didn’t happen. We paid our money like proper damn fans and we got to bask in the glory of Luke Skywalker for like, three to five seconds. (It seriously is that fast. They shuffle you in, you gather ’round, and then it’s off to the races, click, click, snap, nice work, see you later.) He’s a consummate professional, efficiently chummy, and looks great after all these years.

So, yay.

What else?

Reminder that next week I’m gone again, this time to the Leftmost Coast, visiting San Francisco, Portland and Seattle with authors Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde. You can nab the details here for our events.

Damn Fine Story is out next week, but some people have gotten theirs early.

Invasive is still $3.99. (Oh, and for some publishing inside baseball, that book totally earned out. Earning out is a very exciting thing for an author, because it means the book was irrefutably successful. So, whew. Thanks all for checking it out.)

The Cormorant is $2.99 if you haven’t checked out the third adventure of Miriam Black, surly psychic woman, aka, “a garage full of cats on fire.”

My 10-book writing-and-novel-mega-ultra-bigass-bundle is just $10 off with coupon code NANOCTOBER. That coupon is good for this month, so check it.

If you haven’t heard me on Authors on the Air radio, hosted by Terri Lynn Coop, well, give your fancy ears a listen, won’t you?

Finally, I was part of and led a wonderful writing workshop of writers on Pelee Island in Canada, which meant I got to fly on a little Indiana Jones plane to an island on Lake Erie, and it was a good way to recharge the ol’ creative batteries. Thanks to Dawn Kresan for having me and Margaret Atwood for nudging me do it.

And that’s all, folks.