Category: The Ramble (page 158 of 462)

Our son, a bonafide kindergartener, had his first conference this week. Or, rather, we had his first conference, sitting with the teacher to hear how he’s holding up in THE GARDEN OF CHILDREN.

The conference was, by and large, a glowing one. I’ll brag a little here and say he’s excelling in school — despite him telling us how much he despises school and does not understand what’s happening at any point ever, the truth is that while there, he’s focused and interested and performing well above his five-year-old pay grade.

We are justifiably proud. I mean, I’d be proud of him if he licked wall sockets and rubbed gum in his hair, because he’s my kid and I love him. But as someone who is a writer, you know, I take a special thrill to hear how he’s leaping headlong into learning language and how he’s spelling words on his own just for the joy of spelling them. 

The only tiny ding in the conference was this:

He is very afraid to get things wrong.

He wants near-constant confirmation that what he’s doing is the right thing and not, say, the wrong thing. He wants to do things the right way from the beginning, and never wants to do them wrong. Because wrong is bad. It’s baked right there in the word.

Wrong is not right. Wrong is wrong. And wrong is shit.

We tried to think if we’re somehow inadvertently instilling this in him, but the teacher assured us: this is most kids. Most children want confirmation that they’re doing this right. I said, chuckling oh-ho-ho, that this is true of most adults, too, especially writers.

I said it as kind of a throwaway, but then I thought:

Yeah, no, that’s exactly writers.

It was me, certainly, once upon a time. Hell, it’s me even now. I remember writing a “book” in like, fifth grade, and I wanted it to be perfect. I remember writing short stories in high school and I wanted them to be like all the short stories I’d read and loved — meaning, I wanted to be operating at a master level while simultaneously being a dumb-ass 11th grade shitbird. It’s like wanting to go from “learning to crawl” to “performing perfect parkour over a shark tank.” It’s like turning on American Ninja Warrior and thinking not only, I want to do that, but worse, I want to do that right now, at that level. Even presently I start a book and I feel THE FEAR, the one that says, this needs to be right, this can’t be wrong, you know how to do this, don’t fuck it up or… I dunno, goblins will eat you or something, I’m not entirely clear on the consequences.

Except, I am clear on the consequences.

There exist no consequences for getting it wrong as a writer.

And so, I thought, let’s talk about getting it wrong.

Moreover, let’s talk about the fervid fucking joy of getting it wrong. Because I believe it is exactly this joy that will carry your ass through NaNoWriMo and out the other side.

1. To repeat: there exist no consequences for getting it wrong as a writer. If you’re splitting atoms or last-at-bat during the World Series or sniping aliens in the nega-zone, okay, sure, have some consequences. You don’t want to fuck some things up. But writing is one of those things where you have basically no consequences at all. You can get it wrong all day and nobody will die, your house won’t catch fire, your pets won’t go go mad and eat you. It’s not carcinogenic. You don’t have to pay money for every misspelled word. Yes, there are consequences should you choose to submit the wrong thing to the wrong people. And okay, yeah, you could argue that one consequence of writing badly is that you sacrifice your time, but to that I’d argue:

2. Getting it wrong is a vital part of getting it right. Spend the time getting it wrong because that’s how you learn to do this thing. The book you want to write is up there on a high shelf, and sure, you want to build a perfect, structurally-sound ladder to get to it. That is a fair impulse. But please understand that it is just as valid to build a mound of garbage that you climb like a hill to get to that top shelf. Still works. Elevation is elevation. It is the truest truth and yet it feels somehow like a lie that to do a thing at even the barest level of competency, you need to practice. That’s true whether it’s surfing or making soup or hunting vampires. It’s true in all the creative pursuits: painting, music, narrative orgy design, and of course, writing. You know how the first time you have sex it’s awkward and uncomfortable and wait where does this hand go and hold on why is there a desk lamp in my ass-crack? Yeah, you get it wrong then, too, and I think we can all roughly agree that it’s worth getting wrong so you can learn to get it right. What this means is, in writing, the time spent getting it wrong is not a sacrifice. It’s certainly no waste. It is, in fact, an essential part of doing the thing. You do it one way, you find ways to do it better next time. IN BOTH SEX AND WRITING. And, probably, writing about sex.

3. Fear of judgment is bad juju. Kids are afraid of getting it wrong because they’re afraid of being judged. That’s the consequence they fear. They’re young and untested little proto-people, and their job is to mimic adult people, so they want to convince us that they’re just like us in order to fit in and be allowed to do more cool stuff. It’s a natural inclination, but it’s one we foolishly carry with us. We bring that from childhood into adulthood, where we supplant “adult people” with “our peers,” so we are constantly trying to blend in with the rest of the tribe. We’re saying, look, look! We can do this. Don’t judge us harshly. We’re good, we’re fine. It’s doubly worse when we start to realize that art and creativity are not well-respected (despite them being vital parts of nearly every career out there), and so we want to get it right in order to prematurely defeat those who would judge us for choosing such a shit path in the first place. But that’s all garbage. Art, especially art in its formative stages, withers under the laser-like focus of judgment — particularly the judgment we imagine will happen, not the judgment that will actually occur. The judgment that comes later in the form of criticism — that is real, but even that, it can be useful and we must not fear it. (Ignore it? Sometimes. Fear it, never.)

4. Getting it wrong is fun as hell, man. The page is a safe space. It’s your space. It is a kingdom you invented. You can go do whatever you want there. I said this in my ‘official’ NaNoWriMo pep talk a couple years back — you can do whatever you want. It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a Ferrari. Stop thinking about getting it wrong, and start thinking of it as engaging in the forbidden. The forbidden is a no-no, a naughty proscription replete with finger-wagging and tongue-clucking. It’s rules and fences, and there is nothing more fun than giving the middle finger to rules and crashing through fences in a fast car. We love to break the law and countermand what we’re supposed to do. So, do that. Have fun. Behold the forbidden, then do it anyway, because nothing is more fun than that.

5. Nobody knows what the hell ‘wrong’ is, anyway. Wrong is bullshit. Right is bullshit. Art knows no such boundaries. Writing and story exists in this penumbral margin — yes, there is right by way of what an agent or an editor or the audience says, okay, but even there, it’s not like you have some stiff, unyielding definition. There exists no rigorously tested place of truth. This is a land of pure theory. It is lawless and wonderfully fucked. You can do as you please and in getting it ‘wrong’ you may already be getting it right. We often like to think of ‘right’ as being a replicable thing, a series of examples from those who came before. But also remember that many of the greatest successes in fiction are those who took a hard left turn away from HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DONE — they drove right off the cliff, and in that, did something new, something different, something very much wrong. Wrong is right and right is wrong and nobody can much tell which side is up and which side is down. Dogs and cats living together. Go forth. Embrace wrong. Nobody knows anything. Seize the freedom that comes with that.

To speak to that last point, and to bring it all back together:

Watch children play. Not learn in a strict academic environment — but play. That is when you see kids unburdened by judgment. That’s when you see them operate in a way unfettered, uncaring, and they perform feats of athletic impossibility and they spout gibberish that pinballs between batshit cuckoo and actual literal genius. That is where you need to be. You need to be unafraid to get it wrong. You need to view this as an opportunity not to get it right —

But rather, as an opportunity to play.

Go play.

And soon you realize one of the great secrets:

We learn more through play, anyway. Play is how we learn to do it right.

Have a happy National Novel Writing Month. Go play, go write, go get it way, way wrong.

* * *

Through the end of November, use coupon code NANOWRIMO on my Gonzo Writing Book Bundle to nab eight of my writing e-books for 25% off the $20 price (so, $15). Or, if you want something in print: hey, look, The Kick-Ass Writer.

About two years ago, right around this time, my wife and I had just let our heads hit the pillow, planning as one does to go to sleep. The boy was already asleep in his bed. A few moments passed in the dark and then —

A massive flash and the sound like the earth cracking open arrived together as one. Pulse and boom. We shot up out of bed, not sure what the hell was going on — but it was the start of a storm, a storm that had up and decided to announce itself literally out of nowhere with this cannon shot thunder and this coruscating crack of lightning. The storm came in fast, but that opening salvo was the worst of it.

In the morning, I went outside and surveyed the damage, and saw what happened.

Lightning struck a tree of ours about a hundred yards from the house.

The tree stood next to the driveway, and you could see along it where the lightning had snaked up the side of it in an erratic zag — and as it did so, it blasted the bark off the tree in a perfect line. You could walk out from the base of the tree and follow the trail of bark pieces.

And yet, the tree did not die. Not yet. Not then.

The tree was an old oak, and at the base of it we had growing a maitake — hen-of-the-woods — mushroom. Those mushrooms only come up near certain trees, as I understand it, and I was glad to have it around still. But, little did I know, that mushroom had one more year to come up before the tree would finally give up the ghost.

And, as it turns out, the tree would also give up its bones.

The bones it had been keeping inside of it.

(More on that in a moment.)

Once the tree was dead and done, it was starting to come apart, so we had our Tree Guy — a botanist who takes special care to keep the forest ecologically sound in a way that makes sense for the area in which we live — come on out and take a look at it and then cut the tree down. He and another guy came, they cut it apart, felled it away from the driveway, and… the end.

Or so I thought.

The innards of the tree had gone rotten. Looked like soft, rich dirt instead of tree. Some of it was pelleted, balled up into little mulchy Tic-Tacs. The rot had gone up through the tree in a cleft shape, and that was that. We decided we’d leave the tree there — most of the trees we bring down, we just leave because each dead tree creates its own weird little ecosystem. Pill-bugs and fungus all around, micrathena spiders hanging from the branches, deer and other mammals using the fallen tree as a hiding spot, for respite.

Here’s the thing, though. Out of the tree came two bones.

Looked like a pair of leg bones (one femur, one tibia, I think) from a deer. The ends, the knobby ends, had been chewed up, and the middle had been gnawed, too. (I’m not a bone expert, mind you, but we have a lot of deer around and further, I grew up on a farm where we raised whitetail deer.) The bones spilled out from the rotten middle of the tree.

I thought, well, that’s creepy. I mean, I recognize there was likely a logical explanation — I was not literally scared by the idea, but just the same, it was fascinating in a grim, grisly way. Lightning struck a tree that had contained actual bones, and now those bones were coming out of the tree. My mind spins stories out of that, as I’m sure yours does, too. The tree, eating animals or people. Or growing up around a buried human corpse, containing it in its bark as it grows larger and larger. Or a murderer hiding the body of a victim in a tree, thinking they’ll never be found until one day — flash, crack, boom. The bone tree, exposed.

Where it gets interesting is, the tree was not yet done yielding its osseous treasures.

Over the course of the year, more bones came out.

Some were little. Like the jawbone of the squirrel you’ll see below. Some were larger, like more bones from the deer — including, I believe, some deer teeth. The bones would come up out of both the stump and the fallen tree — and they’d either be on the stump or around its base. They weren’t there before — I know, because I went out with the camera and poked around pretty good looking for cool shots. Now, again, the explanation here is almost surely less grisly than you think — not that I want to pop anybody’s bubble, but squirrels chew bones. They do it for the minerals and to shorten their growing teeth. And, given that squirrels sometimes, well, squirrel away things into trees, it’s fair to say that this is exactly what happened here. Some squirmy, chattery bone collector squirrel was hiding his finds in a tree so other squirrels would not come upon them. (Or hell, maybe it was a SERIAL KILLER SQUIRREL.)

But, again, the story doesn’t really end here.

I found the new bones in May. With those bones, I also found a strange substance — it honestly feels (felt) like plastic. White plastic… not webbing, exactly, because it was not structured to any apparent design but was rather just a tangle. (I have a picture of it below.) It was all over. I tried to pull it apart, thinking maybe it was some kind of weird fungal growth, but it wouldn’t break. Again, like plastic.

Then, around August —

The bones were all gone. All but one, one of the femurs. And something had ripped up the side of the tree, pulling bark off. No claw marks that I could see, and no footprints — but something had pulled bark off the side of the stump. Further, that was also the day I found, down near the road (and about another 100 yards from the tree), parts of a dead deer. The parts I found were: a ribcage, with considerable meat upon it, and the lower half of a deer leg — the tibia, but with skin still on it, also the hoof. The smell was rank and stayed for days because it was hot and humid. The parts were in a grassy blind, right where deer like to sometimes lay and sleep during the day. Eventually vultures pulled the gory pieces out into the road, like a buffet — and they somehow pulled out what could best be described as a blanket of skin. This rotten deer leather literally tanned on the road for days.

I don’t know what happened or what any of it means. Occasionally I ponder on there being a bear around here — we do get them from time to time. A neighbor shot one a few years ago (which, by the way, you’re not supposed to do and he rightly got his ass in trouble for it). Our other neighbors also have a couple hellhound dogs which are about as unpleasant as you get. (Not the dogs’ fault, mind you, but they’re still some unfriendly beasts.)

Since then, a rank dead smell has come up out of the woods another three times since then, the most recent being last week — I’ve not yet been able to track these smells to their source. But the smell was strong enough it was more than just a dead mouse or something. (Oh, and yesterday I found half of a mole by our doorstep. Once again, probably nothing creepy: likely a red-tailed hawk who failed to eat the whole of its meal. We had a hawk at college who was fond of leaving squirrel heads around.)

It is what it is, I suppose. That’s life in the forest, man.

And that’s the story of the bone tree.

Happy Halloween!

(Pics at the end of the post.)

Now! Before I forget, some news-slathered snidbits:

The Forever Endeavor is out now! PRESS THE SHINY BUTTON. For $2.99, you get a story about the consequences of traveling back in time ten minutes, and how exactly that relates to a pumpkin patch full of matching identical dead bodies. It also has connections to the overall “Wendigverse,” and helps to bridge the Mookie Pearl and Miriam Black series in kind of a weird-ass fate-versus-free-will way.

Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo

Also, Sci-Fi Bulletin did a very nice review of Invasive:

“His key figure is Hannah Stander, an FBI consultant who has been brought up by survivalist parents, which stands her in good stead for the events of the second half of the book, as everything that you start to fear as you read the opening pages begins to come to pass. She’s investigating the work of a group of scientists, and their charismatic leader who may or may not be responsible for creating a new strain of ant that isn’t going to be easily dealt with. Exactly who’s done what is a key part of the novel and Wendig constantly throws curveballs at the reader, with one in particular making me want to kick myself for overlooking something that was obvious in retrospect!

“Wendig’s style is always punchy, providing just enough information about characters and situations for the reader to be able both to understand what’s happening and to get inside the heads of the people in the scene. It’s a skill he’s honed over the last few years and puts to good use here. If you don’t find your skin crawling at certain times then I’ll be very surprised.”

Invasive also gets a shout at BookBub as one of 12 books to read if you love Michael Crichton.

(If you’ve read Invasive, or any of my books, or really any book by any author, I’d appreciate a review somewhere. Reviews are currency in online marketplaces, for better or for worse.)

Finally, today is the last day to get Atlanta Burns and its sequel, The Hunt, for $1.99. Note, both books are very triggery in a variety of ways — the stories are rural YA crime/noir. They get nasty. Be advised.

Onto the pics:

I write horror novels, mostly.

I just don’t call them horror. They’re urban fantasy. They’re supernatural suspense. They’re near-future sci-fi thrillers. But definitely, totally, super-not-horror. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, a finger thrust up before my rubbery latex clown mask where I shush you long, low and slow, shhhhhhhhhh. Don’t worry! Not horror at all.

*squeaks clown nose to comfort you, honk-honk*

Except, psst: they’re totally horror. I don’t even necessarily mean they’re horror as a genre. Horror as a genre is a bullseye on the back of a galloping horse — sure, there are certain tropes and conventions that mark something as horror, but these usually mark it more as a subgenre of horror rather than an overarching convention. Horror, to me, is as much a mood as it is a convergence of tropes or ideas. That mood goes beyond merely invoking fright. It’s about traipsing into the dark, about shining a flickering flashlight beam on some nastiness, and probing fear and discomfort up and down the spectrum. From big stuff (surveillance state, religion, apocalypse) to little stuff (hey guess what there’s a guy in your closet covered in someone else’s skin and he has a camping hatchet covered in blood and hair). I love it. I grew up reading it. I write it. Zer0es is a wet-wired hacker thriller where the surveillance state is so intrusive it might literally be drilled into the back of your skull. Invasive is a fun thrillery Jurassic Park romp ha ha ha oh and did I mention it contains ants who will cut off your skin with their mandibles in order to farm your flesh snippets for delicious fungus? Miriam Black can literally see how you’re going to die, and people get eaten by flocks of birds and there are folks with no eyes and a guy gets chopped up in a garbage disposal. Doesn’t matter that nobody wants to call them horror — the Miriam Black books are horror novels from snoot-to-chute. Exuent will be apocalyptic in its scope, and though I’m sure it’ll be labeled a thriller, it is intentionally meant to be scary, creepy, unsettling in the same way you find The Stand or Swan Song. In other words: It’s horror.

(Okay, no, my Star Wars novels aren’t horror, really. Though they contain scenes of horror — the spiders from Kashyyyk, the Acolytes of the Beyond, and so forth. And the films contain scenes of horror, too: the scary-slasher-masks of the Tusken Raiders, the Wampa attack scene, the seduction of the Dark Side across all the movies and shows.)

It’s not just me. It’s not just my work I’m talking about. Lots of books are horror novels, and don’t really get labeled as such. Jurassic Park is, as noted, a fun thrillery romp, ha ha ha, but yeah, no, that shit is still horror. It’s maybe a sillier variant of horror, but not that silly. (A passage from the book: “Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly own to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick slivery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands.”) Recent novels I’ve read and loved that are clearly horror novels despite not generally being labeled as such:

Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance and Devil’s Rock and Head Full of Ghosts; Sarah Lotz’s The Three and its sequel, Day Four; Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls. Jason Arnopp’s Last Days of Jack Sparks is wry and twisted and often creepy as fuck. I don’t know what they called Scott Hawkins’ Library at Mount Char, but to me, it’s horror in the Barker mold — abstract, fantastical, and wonderfully unhinged. The work of Cherie Priest and Christopher Golden and Seanan McGuire is frequently scary as hell. And yet, very little of it earns the horror moniker and is eased quietly into other genres and marketing categories. Fantasy! Urban fantasy! Supernatural suspense! Scary thriller, oooooh!

Is Joe Hill horror? I’ve seen his work discussed as supernatural suspense, but c’mon.

C’mon.

*stares at you like Jim Halpert*

*stares at you like Jim Halpert with cockroaches pouring out of his mouth*

Other books lean into horror, even if they’re not horror novels. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon has chapters that read like they’re out of a horror novel. Game of Thrones takes on a new dimension when you view it less as epic fantasy and more as epic apocalyptic fiction — a fantasy variant less like Lord of the Rings and more like The Stand. The James S.A. Corey Expanse series frequently puts forward scenes of epic space horror with the advent of the Protomolecule. Again, here horror serving as both a reflection of mood and of its genre trappings, even if it doesn’t ‘take over’ the whole of the narrative.

These are books that, were they given the label of horror, would elevate the genre above the schlock some people believe it to be and give it the credit the genre is really due.

And yet, despite all this, horror really isn’t a thing. You won’t find many bookstores who have horror shelves anymore. (And here I pour a little on the curb for Borders, whose horror shelves were a dark land in which I dwelled often.) Publishers shy away from the label. Agents do, too.

And so do writers, then.

Because, as we’re told, “horror doesn’t sell.”

But that’s fucked. And it’s sad. It’s both fucked and sad because horror is having a moment. Horror is not a genre at the fringe. Walking Dead is arguably the biggest damn show on TV — and it’s about as straight-up nasty-ass horror as it comes. It’s not the only horror on TV, either. Black Mirror? Channel Zero: Candle Cove? The Exorcist?

Horror movies — especially when made with quality and care — cost little to make and tend to bring in bank (The Conjuring, Sinister, Lights Out). Ye cats and fishes, have you seen the trailer for Jordan Peele’s upcoming Get Out? Holy fucking fuck does that look creepy. (And socially relevant, to boot. Jordan Peele, you magnificent bastard.)

Horror comics? Sure, got those, too. Wytches, Afterlife with Archie, Outcast, Nailbiter, Clean Room, No Mercy, and of course, Walking Dead.

That’s all just a sample of what’s out there.

It’s great stuff. It’s astonishing fiction. It forms my diet.

And it’s part of a legacy, too. Stephen King is maybe the only one out there who gets to wear the horror moniker easily and proudly, because he’s so damn good and so damn old-school that if you try to take it away he’ll drag your ass behind the barn to fight you like he’s Uncle Joe Biden. But I grew up reading King, McCammon, Barker, Poppy Z. Brite (who is now Billy Martin, but who holy shit just released a brand new pair of stories, Last Wish & The Gulf under the Brite name), Yvonne Navarro, Caitlin Kiernan, and on and on. And then there are those authors I read who are horror-adjacent: Joe Lansdale, Robin Hobb (sure, the Assassin’s Apprentice series isn’t horror, but c’mon, it’s often horrific), Christopher Moore (funny horror!), Bradley Denton (holy fuck you guys, Blackburn). Consider the horrific dimensions of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

We need to look long into the dark. It’s part of who we are. We like to be scared. It gives us context. It gives us control. It helps us take the horror of the real world and give it shape so that we can conquer it, if only a little. Out of discomfort we find comfort.

I miss the days where I could find a shelf labeled horror. I miss the days where we didn’t shy away from that genre label as if it were a dirty, cheap word. Horror isn’t marginal, not at all, yet we still treat it like it is — like it’s the weird cousin who accidentally got invited to dinner, all the while failing to realize that the weird cousin grew up a long time ago and now runs a successful tech company and makes more money than the rest of us combined. It’s not that the genre isn’t well-represented. Like I said, it is. I just hope we get back to the point where we can call it what it is, loud and proud, with hiss and with shriek, with gibber and wail.

Me, I’ll be over here writing my supernatural suspense, my creepy near-future thrillers, my explorations of dark and urban fantasy. But you and I, we’ll share a little wink and a high-five, because we know what it is I’m really writing, and what it is you’re really reading. Then we’ll clink our butcher knives together and drag the latex masks down over our faces once more so we may resume our hunt for the blood of the innocent.

(Shout out in the comment your favorite horror novels — even if they’re not labeled as such.)

(Or even your favorite scary scenes in otherwise non-horror books!)

Imagine that you find a box. The box is red metal. On it is a button — black, shiny, inviting.

Imagine too that when you press that button, you are transported backwards in time.

By ten minutes.

And suddenly, you realize:

Here is a solution to all of life’s problems. Ten minutes in time may not seem like much, but it’s not much more than we’d ever really need. Want to bet on the winner of the big game? Want to go back and take back that thing you said? Or use a snappy comeback you thought of nine minutes too late? Or maybe you need it for bigger things: to save your life, or someone else’s. Most of our lives hinge on a series of decisions, some small, some big, and with a chance to go back in time ten minutes — it’s like a SAVE and RELOAD for your current game.

But, using the box has strange, dire consequences. As Dale Gilooly is about to find out.

Welcome to The Forever Endeavor. And it’s out now.

More formal flap copy:

Dale Gilooly has a problem. Well, Dale has a lot of problems. Addiction. Rent. A girlfriend he let slip away.

But Dale has a solution. It’s a Box. And it will let him go back 10 minutes in time. Enough to fix his new mistakes as they happen. And give him an edge to fix the old ones that haunt him.

Oh, but one other problem: Where did these other Dales come from?

Walter Bard has a problem. Well, Walter has twenty problems. Each of them a body buried in a pumpkin patch. And… they’re all the same. Down to the teeth.

But Walter has a solution. It’s his job. Solutions. He’s a detective, after all.

Publishers Weekly praised The Forever Endeavor for its “creative narrative and a sense for visceral action” and said “Wendig successfully busts the niche’s conventions wide open, and he throws in a few winking asides to his previous work that will evoke a grim chortle from his fans.”

A horror-laden sci-fi read with some nods to the Wendigverse! Hope you check it out and enjoy it. Cover art by the ever-astonishing Galen Dara. Thanks to Fireside for publishing this (it originally appeared inside the magazine), and don’t forget to check out Fireside’s other books here.

Buy now (ebook): Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo

So, you’re going to take part in National Novel Writing Month.

Good for you. Excellent. As John McClane said in Die Hard: “Welcome to the Party, pal.”

Here, then, is a list of quick advice nuggets. You may nibble on these and sample the many tastes. Some of this stuff I’ve said before, some of it is new-ish — whatever helps you, helps you. Whatever doesn’t, just wad it up and throw it into the nearest incinerator. Let’s begin.

1. You win when you finish the book. We set win conditions on writing a book in 30 days, and that’s cool. It is. But also, if you don’t, fuck it. The success is in finishing a first draft, whether that takes you 30 days or three months or three years.

2. This is the beachstorming draft. You’re just trying to get off the boat and up the sand without getting shot. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about survival. Survive to the end of the first draft and you deserve a cookie and a cold one. And by a “cold one” I mean chocolate milk. And by “chocolate milk” I mean a whole bottle of whiskey and by a cookie I mean an entire cheesecake.

3. Have a schedule. Seriously. If you’re going to try to hit a novel in 30 days, you’re better off setting a routine and sticking to it than trying to cram like it’s a high school history final. Slow and steady wins the race. Hitting 2k a day is not impossible, and it’s better than trying to evacuate your word bowels into a painful 10,000-word story-spree. That is how you prolapse your narrative anus. You know, between you and me, I regret ever writing the phrase “narrative anus,” but here we are. We came here together and we just have to deal with this now going forward.

4. Have a space. NaNoWriMo is effectively you taking on a full-time writing career in a very short span of time. One thing I can tell you, as I have told you before, is you need a space, and you need to vigorously defend it with tooth and claw and stabby quill. I don’t care if you’re writing on the toilet in the half-bath downstairs. I don’t care if you’ve chosen a quiet dumpster somewhere like you’re some strange mash-up of both Oscars (the Wilde and the Grouch). Pick a place and defend it. This is your home for thirty days.

5. The perfect is the enemy of the good. This is a vital truth in all creative acts. Tattoo it onto your eyeballs so you always see it. Hire somebody to whisper it into your ear.

6. Fuck impostor syndrome. Yes, you’re an impostor. We all are. This is a career of impostors. It’s okay. Embrace it. You don’t belong here. None of us belong here. That’s the awesome thing about a creative career — we’re all a bunch of stowaways and exiles.

7. Be aware of tracts of bumpy road. See them. Know when they’re coming. For me, I’m going to hit trouble writing a novel somewhere around the 33% mark and the 50% mark. I know a lot of newer writers, and this was true for me, had problems right at the start and then also around the middle. I dunno when they’ll be for you, but they’ll be there. The road will get bumpy. You just have to keep driving. Meaning, you just gotta keep writing. Put words on paper next to each other. One after the other, like footsteps.

8. Momentum is your friend. Progress begets momentum begets momentum.

9. Writing is not magic. It feels like it sometimes, and that’s rad. Other times it feels like raking leaves or running through quicksand. It is what it is and every day will be different. Don’t expect every day to feel the same. Don’t expect a good day to lead to good writing and a bad day to lead to bad writing. And don’t let it be magic. Magic is fickle. Let it be science: practiced, ritualized, with an outcome based on experience and effort and study. It can be magic again later.

10. The community is your friend. Other writers are great. I mean, really. In your genre and out, writers are — on a whole — lovely. You get a few peckers and jerkholes in there, but for the most part, when you feel like you’re falling, just whistle — the community will catch you.

11. The community is also your enemy. Writing is still an isolated thing. We can get lost in the community. We can take bad advice. We can compare ourselves to others. A bad pocket of community is as bad a pocket of poisonous air.

12. Have a plan. I don’t think outlines or other prep are an essential part of writing for everybody. I mean, they are for me, but I also find it necessary to drink coffee and dress up in a clown outfit and terrorize neighborhood children. That’s what gets my creative juices flowing. You gotta do you. However! NaNoWriMo is not necessarily a normal writing schedule. We’re talking an intense transitional effort. You’re going from ground to atmosphere as fast as you can, with yourself and your burgeoning novel strapped to a rickety-ass rocket. You may want to have a plan. That might mean an outline, sure. Or it might mean one of these 25 ways to plot and plan and scheme your novel.

13. Recharge your creative batteries. We have only so many IEP — Intellectual Energy Points — to spend in our day. And that tank is finite. You get some back from sleeping and eating. But you also have to take time to refill the coffers. Go for a walk. Read a book. Talk to other writers. Any activity that might jumpstart your UNICORN ENGINE, do it.

14. It’s not about getting published. Have your eye on the right goal — the goal is not publication, the goal is the writing and the finishing of that writing. Finish your shit.

15. Try not to read in the genre you’re writing. I find it confusing. I tend to accidentally start crossing wires — the book I’m reading might bleed into the book I’m writing. YMMV.

16. Have an idea. Like, an overarching idea. A theme. An argument. A thing that pisses you off or a thing about which you are passionate. Write it on a Post-It note. Stick the Post-It note to a 2×4. Bludgeon yourself about the head and neck with this 2×4 every day before writing.

17. Write down character traits and beats to keep in mind. Write down a few characteristics or emotional arc beats for different characters. Keep these notes visible. You can always use them as a lifeline to pull yourself through the narrative.

18. Seriously, it’s all about characters. Just remember that. It’s not about plot. It’s not about mechanism. It’s about characters. Characters are why we care. Characters are why we come to the page and why we read to the next page. Follow the characters to the end of their journey.

19. When in doubt, fuck shit up. Avoid comfort in fiction. If you start to feel stuck, make things worse for the characters. Someone makes a bad decision. Someone lies, or someone dies. Break something. Betrayals. Drama. A new threat. An evolved problem. It’s like a blender — you turn it up, then back down, then back up again. If the story has settled into a status quo, disrupt it. Create a new normal. Challenge the characters, advance the stakes.

20. Let the characters talk. Dialogue is lubricant.

21. Exposition is fine in a first draft. People hate on exposition, and I do it, too, as a lot of exposition is information delivered by wrapping it around a brick and then throwing it through the reader’s front window. It’s blunt, ugly, and occasionally boring. But this is a first draft. I like exposition in a first draft. I like to let myself talk through it on the page. I’ll cut it later.

22. Kill your editor. Er, not your actual editor? Like, the editor that lives inside your head. Now is not the time for the Critic. Now is the time for the Artist. Silence the Critic. Release the Artist. Again: you can always cut it later or fix it in post. Your book is not a stone monument. It is not a painting. It is a flowing stream. You can play with the flow as you go, again and again. You get as many drafts as you like. Reminder: please don’t actually kill anybody, kay, thanks.

23. Fuck the haters. Haters are a persistent presence in the universe. They’re the dark matter of humanity, spun up out of some sphincter-shaped black hole. People will hate on you for wanting to write, or not writing enough, or having the wrong process, or for daring to think you can do NaNoWriMo. Hate is like a dead bird around your neck. Throw it overboard and get back to your COOL CREATIVE BOAT JOURNEY.

24. Enjoy it. Or at least some part of it. Listen, this thing we do? This writey-writey story-making bullshit? It’s hard. And the rewards are often slow and minimal. Every day won’t be a fucking rain of happy balloon animals, and some days will be so tough and frustrating you want to literally bite your own hands off because of the crimes they have committed against narrative. Still — learn to enjoy it. Learn to find happiness — or even better, satisfaction — in it. Force a smile. Throw up jazz-hands. Roll around in it like a dog in the rotten paste of a dead squirrel.

25. Shut up and write. Wait till November 1st if you want. Or start now. Don’t talk about writing. Just write. Don’t get on Twitter or Tumblr to see how everyone else is doing. Just write. Write, write, write, then write some more. Write until you’re done.

Then have ice cream and a nap.

Or whiskey and a cheesecake.

Good luck. Have fun. Don’t chew your hands off.

* * *

So, starting now and through the end of November, use coupon code NANOWRIMO on my Gonzo Writing Book Bundle to nab eight of my writing e-books for 25% off the $20 price (so, $15). Or, if you want something in print: hey, look, The Kick-Ass Writer.

(Note: art of Leslie Odom, Jr. as Burr done by the inimitable Amy Houser, who did the cover for Irregular Creatures. You can find Amy’s Twitter here, and her website here.)

I was going to write a post about The Walking Dead. I don’t watch that show anymore, but even without watching it I’m roughly abreast of what’s going on there because, ha ha, social media can’t shut its mouth for 60 seconds, much less 60 minutes, and so I know who Negan killed in the opener of the current season. (Spoiler warning: Negan kills all our hopes and dreams.) And I wanted to talk about why I don’t watch it anymore, why I think the show has become something approximating PAIN PORN, why I think it’s gone too far down the rabbit hole of FEEL BAD TV, why I think it’s all pure surface now and has very little deeper going on — and, above all else, why I believe the entire conceit of the series summons my disbelief.

But, y’know, c’mon. I’d rather not waste my time or yours — plus, some people continue to love the show, as they should. Love what you love, and don’t let me pee in your pool. I mean, I already peed in your pool, so it’s too late on that particular front, but I mean, metaphorically, I don’t want to urinate in any of your cherished psychological spaces.

Instead, let’s talk about something I like.

Let’s talk about Hamilton.

Or, more specifically, the so-called Hamildoc — Hamilton’s America, a PBS program detailing both the rise of the musical and the history that forms its bones and its blood. As noted, I came to Hamilton late — I was particularly hesitant to listen to the musical once I discovered it had little to nothing to do with actual delicious ham. And once I did listen to it, I listened to it the wrong way: a slap-dash listen where I dicked around on the Internet as it played. Once I finally ceased all such dicking around, and once I sat with it and listened to it straight through, any resistance I had was sandblasted away. The musical planted its seeds. I still hum and sing it daily. My wife does too, now. In the car, the five-year-old-known-as-B-Dub will ask to have either Star Wars put on the radio — or Hamilton. (He also likes to use the name “HERCULES MULLIGAN” as his battle cry. He’ll just bust into a room, fists up, muscles out, and he’ll growl, “HERCULES MULLIGAN!” because he’s pretty sure that’s the best name of all time.)

So! I watched the doc with glee straining the ventricles of my poor mortal heart and I was not disappointed. More importantly, though, I took home a number of storytelling lessons as I watched it — because to me there’s nothing more fascinating than watching an interesting creator in the process of creation, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is nothing if not a very interesting creator, indeed. To be able to watch the genesis of the musical and the unfolding of the narrative was not only fascinating — it was informative.

And thus I present, five storytelling lessons I grokked from the doc.

Do with these as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

It Takes The Time That It Takes

It took Lin-Manuel six years to write Hamilton.

It took him two years to write the first two songs.

I think we have this idea in our heads that creation has to be fast and furious, that it’s either pyroclastic fucksplosion time or it’s nothing. And sometimes it is! Sometimes writing something is like having an INSPIRATION GRENADE shoved down into your undies and then it detonates, and the only thing you can do is ride the shockwave to a finished piece of something.

But sometimes, inspiration comes in threads. A red thread here, plucked out of the air. An orange thread there, found wound around your pinky. You find these threads over time and only over time do they start to come together into a proper rope to climb. I tend to write pretty fast, but Blackbirds famously took about five years. Atlanta Burns was a book that had all these separate parts that took a year or more to come together. Exeunt (recently announced!) has been in my head for about two years and it was all these ill-fitting but interesting pieces that needed just a few more bits and a couple dollops of creative glue to bring them together.

Point is, it takes the time that it takes.

It takes a week, a month, a year, six years.

The brownies gotta stay in the oven till they’re done, son.

Read Broadly, For Inspiration Is Fucking Weird

Lin-Manuel found the inspiration from Hamilton in Ron Chernow’s book. At least, that was the match that lit the powder keg — Miranda was sitting on an explosive barrel packed with hip-hop culture and historical musicals and his own life (and his own father’s life, too). There is an astonishing creative alchemy there, but it only happens when you let it. When, in a sense, you force it — or, rather, you maximize conditions. As I am fond of saying, lightning strikes are rare, but only because we try to avoid them. If you want to get hit by lightning, you can swaddle yourself in metal foil, grab an umbrella, and run out into a storm.

Miranda isn’t absorbing a creative diet of only other musicals. That’s part of it. But it’s also his life. His experience. And then it’s also about reading broadly. Go beyond the fence. Leave the comfort of the town and head out into the woods where unexpected books offer unanticipated mystery — and, better yet, unseen inspiration. Exeunt for me only started to come together when a few non-fiction books added the bridging components, bringing context to these disparate ideas. (I won’t say what books because, well, that’d spoil the story a bit.)

Let Your Fear Of Mortality Drive The Car Once In A While

Both Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda were driven by a fear of mortality. What days you have, what days you don’t, and how you choose to fill them. There’s no great lesson here except that, I think, fear of mortality is exceedingly common, as it is the one thing we literally all share. We all share that end. And you can be hamstrung by that.

Or you can use it.

There is an energy to that fear, if you can seize it.

You can use that energy to create. To fill your life with purpose.

Don’t wait. To wait is to die. (Just ask Burr.)

Just Write The Parts You Need

In the doc, Miranda is talking to Sondheim and Weidman about writing historical musicals, and Weidman recalls telling Miranda some pretty simple — yet amazing — advice. When talking about how much research and history there is to absorb, and further how to distill that down into a musical, Weidman said: “Just write the parts you think are a musical.”

*mind asplodes*

I can’t tell you how freeing and how clarifying that is. Not just about musicals, but about whatever you’re writing. Just write the thing you’re writing. If what you’ve got is not the thing you’re writing? Then scrap it. Write what you need. Keep what suits the work. You owe the story — and the audience, eventually — only that.

Dig Into Deeper Dirt

If you play Minecraft, as I have and as my son does now, you learn that the deeper you go, the better resources you find. You start to find coal and iron — then, deeper still, you’ll find gold, and even further down, you’ll find diamond. It’s a good metaphor for the act of creating a story, I think. Most of a story exists on the surface or near it, and that’s okay. It should. It can’t spend all its time down there in the dark.

And by “in the dark,” I mean in the loamy silt or hard schist of theme, metaphor, and motif. These components are often invisible, but can be sensed —

And, with repeated reads or listens, excavated.

Part of what’s great about Hamilton are those repeated listens. Listen again and again and you begin to find things you didn’t find the first — or the second, or the eighth — time through. You find flecks of gold and the hint of diamonds down there in the narrative, little character and story bits you missed, interesting turns-of-phrase or better yet, unrealized turns-of-narrative. And then you watch the doc and you see even more: like the way “Burn” takes a historical element and makes it a symbol of her character at that point. Or how the rap styles evolve throughout the work and through different characters. Or how Jefferson’s been gone away so long, he’s figuratively missed the cultural advancement into hip-hop storytelling and so his introduction is jazzier, older, out-of-touch. Lin-Manuel doesn’t shine too bright a light on those things; he has them there if you want to find them. No trail of breadcrumbs. No sign saying DIG HERE. But if you dig, you might find these bits over time.

And that’s vital for a storyteller. As I said, most of a story lives on or near the surface. But a lot remains invisible, and that doesn’t necessarily happen accidentally. That’s something you put there. These are things you hide in the dirt, unseen yet discoverable. Deeper thinking about what the story means, who these characters are, even how the mechanism of the narrative relates to the events of the narrative — that’s huge. Not only does it give the tale a stronger backbone, but it also rewards the audience who revisit the work.

It rewards the audience who grabs a shovel and digs.

Bonus Round: The Two Truths Of Every Character

I know, I said five, and this is number six.

I’m a writer, not a mathematician. Shut up.

In the Hamildoc, we see one thing discussed again and again in relation to these (very real, very historical) characters, and that is how they are both beings of light and darkness. They are angels and devils at the same time. Washington and Jefferson are the architects of this nation and of the freedom we enjoy, and they both also owned people. They both somehow believed all men are created equal while simultaneously demonstrating how untrue that was for them. Hamilton is driven by his own manic genius, but his heroism in the first half of the work burns him out, and soon he becomes grist for the tragedy mill by the second half. Burr is a villain in our history books but the culmination of his villainy is given context and empathy throughout. We see two sides of him as we see two sides of most of the characters. As Miranda notes in the doc: none of these people are saints. And, I’d argue, none of them are truly villains, either.

People are rarely all good or all evil. That’s true of characters. It’s true of people. People routinely do great things while believing bad ideas — and they do bad things in support of pure ideals. In this age of political bullshit, it’s important to see people as people, as wildly imperfect creatures. And as a writer, that’s vital. Every character is seeing themselves in a broken mirror. Every character is complicated and flawed — often to different degrees depending on the type of story you’re telling, sure, but flawed just the same.

It’s good advice for storytelling. And it’s not terrible advice in life, too.

*salutes Alexander Hamilton*

*salutes Lin-Manuel Miranda*

Your Obedient Servant,

C. Wen

(Note: you can watch Hamilton’s America in full right here.)