Category: The Ramble (page 212 of 465)

Jim Hines is a dude who knows his way around funny, awesome fantasy — and now he brings his talent to the Fable franchise. Jim wanted to write a post about writing tie-in fiction, how could I say no? Frankly, Jim could say he wants to write about plaid sweaters, vintage recliners, or even chickens, and I’d let him. … wait, did I say chickens? Motherclucker.

* * *

A year or two back, my agent emailed to ask if I’d be interested in writing the official companion novel for the Fable Legends video game. The Fable franchise is fantasy with a good dose of quirky humor. Or “humour,” since the company (Lionhead) is based in the U.K. I said yes, and thus began what would come to be known as Fable: Blood of Heroes. And you know what?

It’s clucking poetry, man!

(Side note: Since both the Fable Legends video game and my tie-in are YA friendly, any profanity in this blog post has been automatically replaced by chicken-related terms.)

“Poetic” isn’t a word oft applied to tie-in works, but I think it applies. Bear with me here. Almost half a lifetime ago, I took a poetry course in graduate school. I learned several things that semester, one of which was that I’m pretty flocking bad at writing poetry. But it forced me to write in a different format with different constraints. I learning to tighten my writing, to cut away every extraneous word, and to use language in different ways. (That forced economy of language also gave me the foundation for some mad Twitter skills.)

That class made me think within a differently shaped box. Everyone talks about thinking outside the box. Outside of the box, you’ve got infinite space. You can write anything. You have total freedom, complete with Braveheart-style face paint and authorial battle cry! Sometimes that freedom is overwhelming. Sometimes you find yourself forging new paths. Sometimes you start to realize you’re trodding some of the same paths over and over again in your work.

Along comes a specific poetic structure or format. Suddenly, you’re forced to work within new constraints. To find new ways of fitting words together to evoke emotions and create images and tell stories.

Writing a companion novel pushed me in the same ways, with the added bonus of not having to listen to my professor tell stories about smoking pot with other poets.

With Blood of Heroes, I had the freedom to create my own story, but I needed to include eight predefined Heroes from the game. I had to write a book that would be accessible to new readers and at the same time familiar to those who’d played Fable before and were playing Fable Legends. I was writing in the world of Albion, a world other people had already mapped out and created and explored.

You might think having someone else do all that worldbuilding makes the book easier to write, and in some ways, that’s true. Lionhead’s maps are certainly prettier than anything I ever scrawled out for my own books. But it was also limiting.

You’re sitting there, plotting out your story, and your characters have to get from point A to point B. If you’re inventing your own world, you can mess with the map however you need to make that work. In my case, I discovered that given the problems I’d already dumped on the characters, you couldn’t get there from here. I sat back, glared at the map, and said something along the lines of, “Molting feathers!”

As annoying as that was, it forced me to be more creative, and to find a solution I might not have come up with in my own “original” work. The same thing happened with the characters. The work Lionhead had done developing the game pushed me to write about different kinds of characters, people (and non-people) I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

I understand Mister Wendig has also done a minor tie-in project of his own recently, so I’m sure he’ll agree with me about everything I’ve said here. Tie-in work doesn’t always get a lot of respect, but in this case, I found it to be not only fun to write, but also a way of pushing my own abilities and growing as a writer.

If I’ve done my job right, the end result should be a lot of fun for everyone. Fable fans will learn more about Albion and (hopefully) appreciate some insight into the new game. Readers who’ve never played a game in their life should enjoy a rather madcap adventure about larger-than-life Heroes fighting a unique team of villains. There’s action and comedy and flirting and fighting and a dead king who still won’t shut up, and much more.

I hope you’ll check it out. And to my fellow writers, if you get the chance to work with a good company and publisher on a tie-in project, I highly recommend it.

* * *

Jim C. Hines made his professional debut in 1998 with “Blade of the Bunny,” an award-winning story that appeared in Writers of the Future XV. Since then, his short fiction has been featured in more than fifty magazines and anthologies. He’s written ten books, including Libriomancer, The Stepsister Scheme, and the humorous Goblin Quest series. He promises that no chickens were harmed in the making of this book.

Fable: Blood of Heroes comes out on August 4. You can read the first few chapters on the publisher’s website.

Jim C. Hines: Website | Twitter

Fable: Blood of Heroes: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

And now, a guest post by a fella named S.A. Hunt, who is a cracking author you probably aren’t reading. His newest is Malus Domestica — I just opened this book up the other day thinking I’d just take a peek, and next thing I knew, I was like, 30 pages in. Amazing prose. Reminds me of some of the most classic horror writers. Hunt has a storyteller’s ear, as you’ll see below.

* * *

Some people collect action figures.

I collect people.

I don’t know how you feel about that first point. Action figures. Some of you will probably think it’s childish, or a waste of money, or both of those.

Some of you might throw down a dollar for that janky old Optimus Prime or loose-hipped Skeletor that you used to have twenty-five years ago, lurking in a thrift shop’s toy aisle. Some of you will drop a paycheck on a superdeluxe polyresin Batman from Korea with a cloth cape and thirty-six articulation points and four interchangeable faces so realistic you’d swear the figure contained an actual miniaturized human soul.

I still live where I grew up, a stone’s throw from the real river featured in Deliverance, but I wasn’t that quintessential uphill-both-ways kid that had to play with sticks and bugs, although I did own an impressive armory of gnarled branches. One of them was a three-foot stick as straight as a pool cue with a top end that hooked like a dragon’s talon. I hung a soapstone pendant inside the crescent, burned sigils into the shaft with a magnifying glass, and called it my wizard staff.

No, I had a whole entourage of action figures. He-Man and M.A.S.K. and Dino-Riders; Thundercats, Silverhawks, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; X-Men, Ronin Warriors, and Batman, and finally, the ultimate bauble, LEGO. I loved them all, usually to the exclusion of the world around me. Whenever I had a tiny plastic Leonardo (the original Playmates line, of course, bow-legged and wielding brown swords) or Wolverine (yellow and blue spandex, with retractable claws) in my hands, that was the only thing that existed for me.

(Speaking of Leonardo’s swords, in middle school my Harley-riding father, who could pass for a Sons of Anarchy extra and whose only hobbies were turning rattlesnakes into belts and keeping Anheuser-Busch in business, would buy me an honest-to-God samurai sword at a swap meet. As schoolboys are wont to do, I accidentally stuck it in my thigh in eighth grade—the first of many self-inflicted war wounds—and ruined a pair of pants. But that’s another story for another day.)

Some of the best parts of getting a new action figure was reading the story on the back. You might say it was their BACKSTORY, hahaaaaa.

• This blue guy is the team’s mechanic, trained in the art of Ninjitsu from the age of four
• This girl was raised by howler monkeys and was taught how to melt steel with nothing but her voice
• This one can fly and talk to birds because he is the son of the bird god
• This dude with permanent goggles rides Tyrannosaurs in his spare time and his favorite food is eggplant casserole
• This man is made of snakes because fuck you

And then I’d ogle the pictures of the other toys in that crowd of heroes and villains and wonder what their backstories were. Sometimes I would make them up. Moss Man spent too much time swimming in the moat and now he’s covered in moss. Slithe is six years divorced. The only thing that can beat this giant glow-eyed skeleton demon full of naked viscera is a quick wit. Lion-O prefers to bathe himself.

You’re probably wondering, “Who is this spoiled little bastard, over here drowning in toys like one of those Golden Ticket kids that got their sleeves caught in Willy Wonka’s death-candy clockwork and dragged screaming into diabetic sweatshop oblivion?”

Well, I don’t know if you could call it fortunate, but I guess I lucked out when it came to being a little boy, at least from a little boy’s perspective. My parents split when I was barely out of diapers, which left me with a mother that worked constantly (and still does), an alcoholic father that had to be cajoled every Friday into weekend custody, and grandparents who lived in Alaska, which might as well have been the other side of the world.

(“You didn’t have to get me this,” I would murmur, head bent, quietly building a sleek spaceship under the patient guidance of its manual. This became a common refrain when talking to my father’s mother Edith.

“I know; I do it because I love you,” was always Grandma’s answer, and then she would pack up and fly back to Anchorage for another couple of years.)

So I was surrounded by shadows that demonstrated their love in absent material ways, and I sat in my room alone and acquainted myself with fictional people. I lived in a trailer and wore hand-me-down clothes, but I never lacked for imaginary friends that rode cyborg alligators and carried their battleaxes to Shoney’s.

To this day, the people in my mind have seemed more real to me than most of the people around me. The fortresses where they lived were infinitely more vibrant than this remote meth-infested banjo jungle people call “Georgia,” that’s for sure.

If you know me, you probably think this all explains a lot. But there’s also the fact that until my mother remarried and I discovered dog-eared copies of The Jungle Book, The Wizard of Oz, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and Alice in Wonderland in the basement of my new stepfather’s house, the only book I had access to at home was a medical encyclopedia and back issues of Country magazine. I know where all your vital organs and arteries can be found, and I know all about your motherfucking gazebos.

***

When I was that little boy sitting in the kitchen with a box of plastic bricks, Earth ceased to exist.

Suddenly the kitchen table was a spaceport, and this little guy with his yellow jughead and cocked eyebrow was Rocko Starcrasher, ace pilot and genius ship builder. Or it was a lonely English moor, prime real estate for the skull-headed Dark Lord Necromungus to build a towering castle festooned with stiff plastic ivy.

Some of the reviews on my books claim that I’m a “mashup artist”, that I can bang together genres and make them play together seamlessly and effortlessly. The Outlaw King is a science fiction epic, wrapped up in a wilderness survival tale, buckled up in medieval trappings, disguised as a gunslinger western, posing as a cheesy 80s-style portal fantasy. Malus Domestica is a superheroine’s origin hiding in a magical-realism story masquerading as King-style horror.

Using one sole genre to tell a story feels confined to me… like driving a car in first gear or wearing nothing but shades of green. Incorporating a dozen disparate flavors in a suicide-soda of words comes naturally to me.

That probably comes from the action figure thing—at any given time I probably had one figure from a half-dozen intellectual properties. He-Man fought Panthro fought Egon Spengler fought Anubis. And then, of course, there was Lego, where you were as apt to find a raygun as a pirate cutlass, and just devise your own spacefaring robot skeleton knights, like you do.

***

Then there was the Video Game Renaissance, when my newly remarried mother could suddenly afford an NES.

Video games are also an integral part of my storytelling DNA. Zoot suit cats with grappling hooks. Flying skulls and walking mushrooms. Barbarians trudging through the magma vents of a volcano in specialized iron suits. Long afternoons in the back of the family car guiding Link through the bowels of Koholint Island.

When I finished a video game, I often restarted it and put the characters through my own stories, or obstacles of my own design. This was never more true than when I discovered debug modes and the Game Genie.

After I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2, I would use the debug mode to put down new traps or structures, or even craft furniture out of props. I would type nonsense sequences into the Game Genie to delve into hidden back alleys of garbled code in Super Mario Bros 2 or Super Mario World that nobody was ever meant to see. Scrambled, glitched-out panoramas of ripped faces and broken ghosts, impossible structures cobbled together out of the familiar. A tower made of crypto-garbage hiding the secrets of a secret universe, turtles all the way up to where the sky ends in a jagged stratosphere made of fourteens and flowers.

Parting binary curtains and journeying into the beating heart of a video game is probably how the characters in my novels end up looking into the abyss for the unknowable. Everything I write seems to veer through time and tide, ultimately, toward unearthing some Grand Cosmic Truth.

(And speaking of video games, like, ohmygah, Chrono Trigger? That was a huge influence on my storytelling. Y’all know what I’m talking about. Medieval fantasy, post-apocalyptic wandering, prehistoric romps, handsome hard-hearted magicians, Lovecraftian star-beasts? It’s left fingerprints all over me.)

These days I can build worlds on a grand scale in Minecraft—and I have constructed marvelous and complicated things, for me at least: sprawling Viking towns, hovering airships, glass-domed underwater villages, monolithic castles, mechanical gates that shutter open and closed like the eye of a camera.

But it’s not the same. The kitchen table is there and on it is the box of bricks, but Rocko and the Dark Lord aren’t there to sit in their cockpits and thrones. It’s a lonely Eden.

That’s the missing element: the characters. The figures.

This is the root of my creative vibe and process, I believe. I never stopped playing with action figures and building my spires, and imagining how they would overcome hardships and navigate treacherous terrain. The characters in my novels all have metaphorical kung-fu grips, holographic decals, glow-in-the-dark splatters of barium paint, interchangeable faces.

And they do come straight from the factory pre-packaged with a human soul—mine.

***

I think this is how I’m able to craft such livable, authentic characters, and why they’re always searching for cosmic secrets. These people are real to me. They are me. They are all fragments of my soul, and I’m constantly searching under the carpets and behind the baseboards of life, hoping to find what makes reality tick.

When I’m not writing, I’m building these action figures in my head, exploring their springloaded tricks and gimmicks, filling out the backs of their boxes. And when I sit down to write, I’m shutting myself up in a room with these people in my headspace, and playing with these mental action figures, playing with them for myself, for my own enjoyment.

And to me, that’s part of succeeding at creating enjoyable characters, really—you have to enjoy them yourself if you want your reader to enjoy them. You can explore emotional themes through them, but a character that’s all angst and inner turmoil can grate on your reader’s nerves. As an indie, I’ve gotten myself roped into reading many stories with sour, depressing characters in drab, depressing plots, and I can’t help but wonderwhy? Why do this to yourself? Okay, many people go for lit-fic to get that, but in genre fiction? You’re just shooting yourself in the foot. I think genre readers appreciate those action-figure characters: expressive personality, capable, dynamic, easy to empathize with, easy to identify with.

The best of these initially simple characters are deep and dark once you scratch through the surface, but nobody wants a mopey, defeatist, nobody-understands-me emo protagonist starring in their own My Chemical Romance version of A Christmas Carol. Now, I’m not talking about “grimdark” – a lot of that is ultimately, when you get down to it, either the power of the human spirit to prevail even in the face of despair, or it’s just the author burning ants with a magnifying glass. What I’m talking about are weepy, self-pitying emo-teenager protagonists starting at the bottom and just going lower, forced to wallow in every miserable tragedy of their short lives in inner-monologue vignettes. The characters never grow, the narrative never evolves, the situations never improve. Harry Potter lives under the stairs for the rest of his life and never gets to go to Hogwarts. There are a lot of indies that do this, and it’s all cookie and no chip.

Why? Why would readers want to subject themselves to that?

Okay, that might have been a bit of a rant. And a tangent.

The point is, to me, a compelling genre character is one that makes you want to read the back of the figure’s box. If you were sharing toys with another kid, this character is the one you’d slip off to the side and keep for yourself. Its plastic leer gleams from the shelves of the toy aisle, with a half-dozen strange accessories and a colorful backboard. You can’t wait to get home with it and get this tiny plastic hero into—and back out of—trouble. You see something in this character that you identify with.

I always identified with the offbeat supporting character, myself. The Panthro. The Knuckles. The Bluegrass. The Man-at-Arms. The Rocket Raccoon. The Catwoman. That bunch is who I saved for myself.

I like to be the Geppetto that giggles deviously as he’s carving that little wooden knight, knowing that this captivating character is soon going to be fighting wolves and leaping ravines in a reader’s hands. Be the toymaker, that’s what I do when I write. And I try to make all of my toys the ones you hide under your pillow when your cousin comes to visit.

***

S. A. Hunt is a U.S. veteran and the author of the award-winning Outlaw King fantasy-gunslinger series and dark-fantasy Malus Domestica. He lives in Lyerly, GA where he tempts fate by kayaking on the river from Deliverance with his friends.

The myth of the starving artist is a pervasive one.

And, like all myths, it has a kernel of truth. What I mean is this:

It is good to be creatively hungry. Hungry for the next deal. Hungry to write the next thing. Eager to tackle tale after tale with a junkie’s ambition. That kind of hunger has power. And it’s maybe why some young writers or even writers who are writing in the middle of their careers do so with a kind of viciousness, a kind of giddy desperation that you don’t necessarily see in authors operating at the ends of their careers. (And it’s why it’s always a shame to see young writers playing it so safe, so close to the vest, when really they should be straining against the preconceived restraints of past work and of industry expectations — but really, this is a digression best served for some other time and some other rant.)

It is awful, really very truly awful, to be actually hungry.

Note I don’t mean like, a little hungry — “Wow, breakfast was already two hours ago? THAT’S BASICALLY FOREVER please put as many donuts in and around your fist as possible and punch them into my mouth like a percussive donut piston.” I mean, for real hungry. Pervasively, consistently hungry.

And yet, that’s the myth. That’s the image, right? The wonderfully woeful author purified by his or her lack of attachment to material things, subsisting on whatever she can scrounge up — a half-romantic image of the artist sanctified by her own discomfort.

Fuck.

That.

Discomfort sucks. Starving is distracting. Art is the thing of a higher mind. Story is a thing of focus and discipline. You don’t create art while you’re starving. You don’t MAKE COOL SHIT when you’re trying to figure out where your next paycheck or worse, your next meal, is coming from. The trope of the starving artist is one propagated by people in power who do not value what you do and would very much like to get away with not paying for it, thank you very much. As I’ve said before, the idea is presented as some kind of noble sacrifice: certainly if you care enough about the creation of cool things then you will do it anyway. Oh, ho, ho, money is a corruptive influence. You “sell out” when you get money. You become tainted by it. But if it’s all about the art (cough cough and no money there to distort the sanctity of that art), then surely you’ll create something far greater than if you had a full belly and a warm sense of satisfaction. Satisfied artists don’t create! Only turbulent, troubled creatures create art. Art driven by hunger and thirst! Those emaciated horses whipped into a froth by the cracking lashes of desperation and uncertainty!

Fuck.

That.

Worse is when this myth is replicated not just by people in power but by people who should jolly well fucking know better. Other artists or critics, other writers or even the audience members. Folks who don’t feel that authors should be paid XYZ or who sneer at the opportunities presented in this new day via Patreon or Kickstarter or self-publishing.

What does this mean for you?

It means you need to be cautious.

Be smart.

Be confident.

But take certain, deliberate steps to keep yourself safe and sane.

Listen, I meet a lot of authors who are eager to just leap into the void of a full-time writing career. I’ve been there. It’s great when you can manage it. Hell, I’m there right now and, as you suspect, it’s pretty much awesome. I mean, it’s not I BOUGHT A HOT TUB FULL OF CONSTANTLY MELTED CHOCOLATE awesome, but it’s pretty rad to be able to feed yourself and your family just by plunking words down onto paper.

But that’s when it’s working.

And it’s easier to create words when you know someone is there to pay for them.

If they’re not? If you’re not sure? If you don’t have a guaranteed income or at least a good amount of money saved up to protect you during the Dark and Uncertain Times, screw that.

Keep your day job. Or transition to a part time job to split the difference.

Keep yourself fed. Keep your bills paid. The anxiety of a life in financial turmoil ain’t that interesting. It won’t keep you safe. It won’t help you make art.

And this speaks to a larger issue, too — overall self-care. Dearest penmonkey: take care of yourself. Once again the myth rears its head that authors are damaged people, and it’s the damage that drives them. That depression is just part of your toolbox. It is no such thing. Depression and anxiety are a pair of demons sitting on your shoulder dressed like angels. They lie. They’re not writer’s block, though we often conflate the two. They’re something entirely different and require real solutions. Therapy or medication or whatever it is that gets you clear.

Hell, even just sitting at your desk, writing — we wad ourselves up like Kafka roaches, hunched over the desk, our spine bending like Katniss’ bow. We fail to eat right, or exercise, or sleep right — and again, the creation of art goes all fucky. Stories and words come out of your brain. Your body is the engine that surrounds that brain. You need to take care of all of it. You need to get shut of anybody who tells you that your best mode of telling stories and making art is to suffer and sacrifice and starve. Guard your mind. Protect your body. Get paid for what you do. Be well.

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Coming 8/18 from Harper Voyager.

Read the first five chapters here, then pre-order from:

Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million

0: none of this is true unless you find it to be true.

1. If you’re bored, we’re bored.

2. Characters at every level of the story want something — love, revenge, cake, whatever — and when we meet them we’d better soon know what that thing is. Especially if it’s cake. We can all get behind a character who will kill for cake. I’d kill for cake. Wouldn’t you?

3. Are the characters feeling safe? Good. Now make them feel unsafe.

4. Do something unexpected in the story. Yes, right now. If not now, then soon.

5. If the audience trusts you, dear storyteller, you done fucked up.

6. The best tension isn’t the kind that comes from cheap tricks or lurid manipulation — though hey, those things are totally fine, shut up — but from the feeling the reader gets from believing that the entire story is on unstable ground. This is a kind of existential tension, the fear that the audience doesn’t quite know the rules, hasn’t sussed out the laws of this place. That is the tension of the reader who wisely distrusts you.

7. When you do something unexpected in the story, it has to work in the character and the context and the confines of the story you’re already telling. It can’t be out of fucking nowhere — a cat doesn’t become a dog, but a dog can become a wolf, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t know what I mean then *gesticulates wildly* there did my flailing hand movement convince you?

8. What I mean is, storytelling is magic. It’s not the magic of sorcery — you’re not a Druid summoning swamp-elves from the murk. You’re a stage magician. Practiced in the art of illusion.

9. One of your greatest skills is misdirection. You seed the truth of the magic trick early on in the story. Then you convince the reader that the truth isn’t the truth at all — until the time comes to reveal. And okay yes fine sometimes you are a Druid summoning swamp-elves out of the murk. Sometimes writing is sacrifice, not magic trick. Sometimes it’s all of those things.

10. The story presents opportunities to pivot — to change the expectations. To change the overall shape of the thing even as you’re drawing it. These opportunities come at, roughly, 33%, 50%, 66%, and sometimes 75% through the story. Mark interesting story shifts at these times to battle the dread beast known as the Mushy Middle. Which is basically a blob of pink, sluggy mucus that will gladly bog your story down like gum on a hot fucking sidewalk.

11. We don’t give too much of a shit about Big Things in stories. THE IMPERIAL DRAGONSWANG HAS COMMANDED A DECREE THAT A SPACE RANGER MUST TRACK DOWN THE SOUZAPHONE OF UNHOLY SHITFIRE and yawn boo bored who gives a hot cup of soup about all that. We care about characters and their problems.

12. Love, hate, jealousy, life, death, betrayal, lies, revenge: these are the widgets, levers and flywheels that keep the story running, and that keep us coming back. Lubricate the gears with blood and tears.

13. You can do whatever you want in a story but you have to convince us why it works. You have to earn it. Every bit of a story has to dance for its dinner.

14. A problem with the end of the story is a problem with the start of your story.

15. Characters must earn their victories.

16. Characters must also earn their losses. These things do not happen in a vacuum.

17. If you want to know why your characters keep getting in the way of your plot, that’s because it’s the characters’ job to get in the way of your plot. The solution to this is discard the plot and let the characters be the characters. We don’t read books for plots. We think we do. But we’re also dumb. Characters are everything in a story. “It had a great plot” is the sign of a story that’s been over-engineered — like pancake batter you mixed too hard and now the resultant pancakes are as beaten down and lifeless as a pair of ratty underwear on a well-traveled highway.

18. Make me care. That’s your job. It’s not my job as a reader. Make me care.

19. We care about characters we understand. So: make me understand.

20. Pretend while writing that your job isn’t to tell a story but it’s to manipulate and emotionally injure the audience. Because that actually kinda is your job. You monster.

21. Every character is a rabbit hole. Every character goes all the way down if you let them. Not every character demands falling down that hole — but every character should feel like it’s possible. Every character should feel like they possess hidden depths and secret motivations and a great big history all their own.

22. Fuck you, be interesting.

23. “Write What You Know” isn’t an obligation. It’s an opportunity.

24. Try to be funny sometimes. Stories that have no humor at all feel like a brick to the mouth.

25. Humor is the hardest emotion to get right. Here’s a tip: don’t treat it like humor. Humor is funniest when the characters don’t find it funny. They’re not telling jokes. They’re not self-aware of the humor or the absurdity. To them, it’s dreadfully serious. Sure, YOU think it’s funny that they’re fighting a bunny rabbit with giant human nipples for eyes and loud, eruptive fart sounds every time it attacks, but THEY don’t think it’s funny and in fact they’re probably really terrified.

26. Do not write any scenes involving bunny rabbits with giant human nipples or farts. What is wrong with you. Why would you do that? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anything I’m saying.

27. Every scene is multipurpose.

28. A scene moves the plot.

29. A scene gives us more about the characters.

30. A scene dials up or dials back tension.

31. A scene sets the mood and pings the theme.

32. If a scene doesn’t do all of these things, then consider punting the scene out of the airlock. Watch it scream soundlessly into the void of the stars. Cackle and laugh, for ejecting unworthy parts of our story is as much a cause for joy as writing the worthy stuff.

33. Characters are not role models. Characters should never ever ever be role models.

34. The audience doesn’t have to like the character. They have to believe in, care about, and be willing to live with the character for as long as the story exists. When you violate these things, the reader may close the book and never again open it. And then they’ll probably do something else.

35. There’s always something else for the reader to be doing. You are not competing against other writers or other books, but you are competing against the infinity of options open to your audience: games, toys, social media, sex, sex toys, sex games, corn murder, bee wrangling, monkey punching, gambling, sex gambling, exotic drugs created from household cleaners, falcon training, sex falcon training. Treat your reader as exalted. They have given you money and time. Do not punish them for their choice.

36. No part of the story is an island. All connects. Chekhov’s Gun is not about a gun, but about any element you introduce that must come back to haunt the story somehow. Everything returns.

37. Embrace dramatic irony: when the audience knows something characters don’t.

38. Every scene, every chapter, every part of the story — make sure to be answering questions and then asking new ones. Mystery is an open door we cannot help but walk through. The question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason.

39. Stories are a combination of entertainment and enlightenment.

40. Theme is the argument that the story is trying to make. Theme is a deep well of secret water feeding the roots and beasts of the narrative above. Theme is what your story is really about. Not the plot. Not the “WELL IT’S ABOUT THREE PENGUINS WHO GO ON A ROAD TRIP TO FIND THEIR BEST FRIEND, A LOST PIZZA DELIVERY ROBOT NAMED JIMJAM 9000.” It’s the deeper meaning of that. It’s what the story is really saying. You have beliefs. You have ideas. Use them. Mine them. Whisper them between words and sentences.

41. End chapters interestingly. Which means with uncertainty, suspense, excitement. Lace the end of a chapter with the equivalent of narrative heroin. Readers will turn a page to get the next hit.

42. But don’t always give them the next hit. Keep them waiting. Tantric storytelling. They want you to keep driving straight. So, for a little while, take a hard right. Make them want it harder. Give the audience a straining story boner. Narrative blue balls or whatever the equivalent to lady blue balls is. Cerulean Clitoris, perhaps.

43. Listen to how people tell stories.

44. Listen to how people tell jokes.

45. When characters speak we should ideally know who’s speaking even if there are no dialogue tags to identify them.

46. But please still use dialogue tags. Just use them sparingly. Remember too that dialogue and action speed up the narrative, while description and exposition slow it down.

47. Stories are written, not read, but in our heads we’re still reading them out loud. Which I know doesn’t make sense (OUT LOUD but IN OUR HEAD) and yet I don’t care. Life is full of abstractions and impossibilities. Get used to it, sucker.

48. The stakes of a story are what can be won or lost by all the characters and even by the world itself. Establish stakes early. Complicate the stakes throughout. Change them, even, if you must. But if you change them they must become bigger and worse, not smaller and easier.

49. Embrace Pyrrhic Victory: characters can win, but must ask, at what cost?

50. Don’t meander. Don’t wander aimlessly like a baby escaping the crib. You can wander a little — a butterfly temporarily drunk on nectar. But have a point. Have a direction. Be like a wasp diving toward its prey. Quick with a sting.

51. If you don’t have a point or a direction, try outlining. Even if you’re in the middle of the story — outline the road behind and the path ahead. Try it. Just fucking try it. Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t want to do it but life isn’t about doing all the things we want and none of the things we don’t. I don’t want to have to go to the DMV or the post office but sometimes we just have to swallow our medicine and quit grousing about it. *flicks you in the nose*

52. Let the characters talk as long as they want to.

53. Be prepared to cut a lot of what the characters say.

54. If you don’t know who a character is, write extraneous chapters with them. Chapters that don’t matter at all and may not even be real. They’re just exercises. Take the character on a test drive.

55. Invoke every paragraph with threat and uncertainty. Even safety should feel a little bit unsafe. As if things are good right now, but they might not be — *checks watch* — any second.

56. Storytelling is the balancing act of telling just enough to keep the reader reading, but also keeping information away from them in order to — you guessed it — keep them reading.

57. Reveal too much and a story becomes boring.

58. Fail to reveal enough and a story becomes bewildering.

59. Stop reading only in the genre you’re writing. That is the Human Centipede effect of genre. (AKA, “Gobblepoop,” or “Poopgobble.”) Just eating the genre and shitting it back into the mouths of the audience. So gross. Don’t do it.

60. Characters must make mistakes. But they cannot make only mistakes. They must have triumphs, too. A story isn’t an endless array of failure and disaster — we must have some sense of success to know why it must above all else (and against all odds) not be lost.

61. Stories can be therapy. But they mustn’t read like therapy.

62. Characters operate with or against each other. Parallel or perpendicular.

63. Characters who run parallel to the other characters may change and run perpendicular. This is how drama and conflict is born. Opposing desires, motivations, needs. Characters in competition.

64. Characters do not operate in a straight line. Forget plot. Think of it as a web of characters — they exist at every intersection. Over here, Dave does shit and tugs on the web and that has effects all the way on the other side. And now Shirley hates him. And Jimjam 9000 wants to murder them all and turn them into delicious Human Pizza.

65. Challenge the characters and the storyworld at every step. Take things away. Pit them against each other. Challenge their beliefs by the events they undergo.

66. The best villains are the ones we adore despite how much we hate and fear them.

67. The order of operations — the sequence of revelation inside the narrative — can heighten tension and suspense. Consider in what order you tell the reader things.

68. Point-of-view is our gateway in — it is a character-facing part of the story. Choice of POV impacts mystery, conflict, tension. It limits what can be known to your benefit and to your disadvantage. It exists at every level of the story and so its choice matters greatly.

69. If you’re having trouble with the story, switch from one POV to another. First to third, third to first. Intimate to impersonal. Or jump characters inside the text. Let us live with another character for a while. Demonstrate the character web that I was talking about.

70. If the opening of your story sucks, it’s dead. It’s like taking a first step and then twisting your ankle and falling face-first into a puddle of steaming horse piss. It’s awkward and everybody will laugh and nobody will believe in you ever again. Get the opening right.

71. Get the rest of your story right, too. Take the time to make it sing.

72. When in doubt, break your story up into segments. Parts, books, chapters, sequences, episodes, whatever. Maybe you use these so that the reader can see them (PART THREE: THE BUTTSTOMPENING. SEQUENCE FOUR: THE REVENGE OF STORG AND JAPERTHA). Maybe you spackle over the seams so they remain unseen. But a story is easier to envision when it’s less a sprawly, monstrous thing and more a thing you can get your hands around. For strangling. What? I didn’t say strangling. You said strangling.

73. Cause and effect. Action and consequence. This is the blood and bone of storytelling. Character wants shit, does shit, shit happens. Character discovers character is not the only character in the world and is in fact in a universe dominated by many other characters who want shit, too.

74. If you wanna know how to do any one thing about storytelling better, find a story (book, comic, movie, game, whatever) that you think does it well, then read it again and again and cut it apart with scalpel and hatchet until you think you know why it works. Then read it again. Then try to emulate. Then after all that try to do it your own way.

75. Fuck your fear. Write confidently. Go big, bold, weird. We don’t want timid storytellers.

76. Cut stupid shit. If the characters are being stupid, stop them. The audience learns to despise truly foolish characters — especially when those foolish characters are foolish only because the plot demands. Let them fail smartly. Let them make intelligent mistakes, not dumb ones.

77. Characters do not act according to “plot.” They don’t know there’s a plot. They only know what they want and what they’re willing to do or lose to get it. Full stop.

78. If you’re taking too long to get somewhere in the story, stop now and figure out how to get there faster. Stick a rocket booster up the tale’s ass and light the fuse.

79. Try to outguess your readers. They think you’re going somewhere with the story. Try to figure out what they would guess — or better yet, engineer it. Then? Go the other way.

80. Though sometimes you gotta go exactly the way they expect you to go. Some parts of a story are inevitable and that’s okay, too.

81. Facts don’t matter in fiction, but authenticity — meaning, the convincing appearance of truth — does. You can do or say whatever you want if you can convince me it’s true.

82. You can actually break any rule out there if you do it well.

83. Always wonder: why is this story happening now? Why is it urgent and necessary?

84. Are you having fun? Why aren’t you having fun? Find a way to have fun. I COMMAND YOU TO HAVE FUN. *points gun at you* *pulls trigger* *gun shoots fun particles into your mouth*

85. Shut up and get to the point. Stop dicking around.

86. Distrust plot formulas or preconceived story shapes. They’re useful when they’re useful. They’re dull, lifeless prisons when they’re not. Note I didn’t say not to use them. Simply distrust.

87. Actually, distrust most everything except yourself.

88. Active over passive. Character agency over character inertia.

89. All things beholden to rhythm. Music isn’t just a cacophony of notes garbled together to make a shrill, shrieking burst of endless static. Instruments meet together to form a symphony of sounds. Up and down. Fast and slow. Loud and quiet. Stories are this way, too. Listen to music. Emulate what you hear there. Across all things: character, tension, theme, mood, and so on.

90. Storytelling is an act of breaking the status quo. The story is itself a violation of the expected order. That is why This Story exists Right Now. Because the Way Of Things has been broken. If the status quo persists, then you have chosen the wrong part of the story to tell, or a story whose existence will never feel necessary.

91. All stories must feel necessary.

92. Leave things out of the story. The readers want to do work. Let them.

93. Don’t cheat. We’ll fucking know it, you Cheaty McCheaterperson.

94. Don’t be dishonest about yourself or about us or about the entire world as you personally perceive it. Come to the page with bold, bald honesty. About you. About everything. About what your ideas big and small. Authorial vision is a real thing. Don’t shy away from it.

95. Pat, tidy endings are the worst endings. Because we don’t believe them. Not even in fairy tales.

96. If you’re stuck, go do something else for a while. Get out of your own head. Have a different experience. Get the blood flowing. Eat some cake. I already told you that cake was awesome. Do not disbelieve me about cake. Fine, carrots are also pretty tasty. Especially in carrot cake.

97. You need to care about the story that you’re telling and if you don’t care, you need to figure out why. Tell the story that lives in your heart. It is a story that insists upon being told. It is the story that wants to jump out of your chest like a bloodslick xenomorph.

98. Storytelling is a series of promises, some broken, some fulfilled. Know which is which and know why each must be the way it must be. Fulfill more promises than you break.

99. The best stories make us feel giddy and afraid not only when we read them — but when we’re sitting there writing them, as well.

100. Stop fucking around and finish what you begin. Commit to that act: if you choose to begin, then know this means you have also promised to finish the story. Always go the distance.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

*slowly lowers you into the NEWS HIVE*

*where dancing, stinging NEWS BEES consumes your flesh and leaves you as bones*

Ahem.

I am back from the stinking heat pocket known as Indianapolis, fresh out of the whirlwind of games and writery stuff called the GenCon Writer’s Symposium. It was a wonderful time had by all (or at least me, for all I know the rest of them were miserable), whereupon I got to hang out on panels and bullshit about writing with other awesome writers. Many of whom are friends, too, and it’s great time and again to reconnect with other AUTHORIAL HUMANS to sort of share in troubles and triumphs and get your creative batteries recharged. These are Necessary Things.

Things I done did whilst there:

• Talked to writers of every level.

• Hung with writers I consider genuine pals — folks like Stephen Blackmoore, Delilah Dawson, Sam Sykes, Brian McClellan, Gwenda Bond, Kameron Hurley, JC Hutchins, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, and more — and got to meet writers I’d not yet met, too. Folks I admire, like Daryl Gregory. Or folks I’ve talked to for a long time but never actually encountered in the wild, like Elsa Henry. (And holy shit, Terry Brooks!) Or folks I just don’t see often enough like Scott Lynch, Jim Zub, John Hornor Jacobs, Maurice Broaddus. If talent were an obelisk, the size of said obelisk present at the Writer’s Symposium could’ve crushed a whole city had it toppled.

• Got to meet friends and fans I knew online but were not sure if they were just constructs of my imagination or not. Folks like Andrea Judy and Charlotte Moore!

• Three words: LIVE STORIUM GAME. Stephen Hood and Josh Whiting of Storium said to me, Dawson, Blackmoore, Sykes and McClellan, “Hey, you guys should play a live Storium game for the Worldbuilders Charity,” and we said, sure, sure, yeah, that totally won’t be a depraved drain-circle of sheer narrative perversity. We played a game that quickly descended into… something? Something that featured things like Assdazzler, Mooseknuckle, Brangelina, hammer dancing, Nickleback, ass bees, ecto-jizz, ecto-jazz, magical proctology, a vampire everybody ignored, Storg, Jamantha, Japertha, and so much more. We raised money. We ruined our careers. Glory be. Will that game ever be made public? Only the Storium gods truly know.

• Gwen Pearson of the Purdue Bug Barn said, “Hey, I’ll take anybody from GenCon who wants to go to hangout with me and a buncha bugs.” And so I said, “BUGGERY IT SHALL BE,” and then quickly revised that sentiment realizing what I’d just said. Me, Dawson, Blackmoore and Gladstone (the weirdest law firm ever) went and got a half-day lesson about ants, bees, beetles, spiders, caterpillars, millipedes, cloacal popping, phalloblasting, robots, dermestids, OBTs, ant-based thunderdomes, ants that smell like blue cheese, and more. I got to handle a tarantula named Rosie. It was actually awesome. She was gentle and slow and actually cute if you look at her up close. (Super derpy.) You may gaze upon my SPIDER DELIGHT here. Or you may take this present from Delilah, which is totally not a spider.

I probably did more shit, but there you go.

Thank you to Marc Tassin for putting it all together!

Zer0es Preorder Bonus

So, here’s a thing.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order Zer0es, my “hackers go against a self-aware NSA surveillance program” novel which is hopefully a lot of scary, thrillery fun.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order but then get SOMETHING EXTRA for your troubles.

Well, hey, here you go.

Pre-order either the hardcover or e-book edition from anywhere at all, and you can get the first two chapters of my next Harper sci-fi thriller, a novel I call Myrmidon, about an FBI futurist named Hannah Stander investigating a dead body in a cabin in upstate New York.

The link for the pre-order page (where you enter in your pre-order info!) is right here.

Pre-ordering is an awesome thing that tells booksellers how much to order and if the book has buzz. Plus, you buying a book like Zer0es lets me keep on writing other books and also running the blog. So if you’re one of those people who tells me you read this blog but have never read my books, now’s a good time to start, because hosting this sucker ain’t cheap. (/guiltprod)

You can preorder from:

Indie bookstores like:

Doylestown Bookshop, WORD, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Murder by the Book.

(Or, of course, from Powells or a local bookseller found via Indiebound.)

Plus: Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Google Play, Books-a-Million.

Amazon listed the book as one of the best books of August!

Typhon emerges — uh, I mean, Zer0es releases — 8/18. For related events, see Appearances.

Zer0es: First Four Chapters!

Let’s also say you’re all like, “MAN, I really wish I had some of that book to read right now.”

That, too, shall be done.

In fact, you can read the first four chapters right now.

And, if enough folks click that link and spread it around, a fifth chapter will be revealed.

IT WILL BE UPLOADED STRAIGHT TO YOUR BRAIN VIA A LOUD, SHRILL MONOTONE —

Okay, actually, it might just be like, a PDF or something, I dunno.

Cornell Collective!

I was very fortunate to be invited onto Paul Cornell’s newest podcast endeavor, The Cornell Collective! A delightful time was had as I joined Leah Moore and Christel Dee. Go listen!

Mockingbird On Sale

The second Miriam Black book, Mockingbird, is now only $1.99 for the month of August.

So, you know what to do.

KILL IN MY NAME.

*checks notes*

Uhh. I mean, “Go buy the book?”

*sheepish grin*

Blog Snafu

Some folks correctly noticed that I wasn’t approving unmoderated comments at the blog over the weekend while I was at GenCon. I had minimal access to Internet and for some reason my phone doesn’t always like me to administrate big chunks of bloggage on the fly. The iPad is better but I couldn’t get it to any meaningful wi-fi for that purpose. Apologies!

Comments released from their cages, now.

Today, I am off to the GAME-SLICK WILDS of GENCON, where I will talk a lot about writing and hopefully maybe sneak in a game or two and also did I mention the bad-ass Storium charity game that you should totally go to BECAUSE CHARITY?

Anyway, so to go onto the game theme, I figured I’d pose a pair of questions:

a) Favorite tabletop non-RPG game?

b) Favorite tabletop pen-and-paper RPG game?

Use the comments.

Get to answering.

GO.

And if you’re gonna be at Gencon — swing by, say hi!