Category: The Ramble (page 327 of 462)

If you think of yourself as “aspiring,” you might be doing it wrong.

If you’re more interested in a book’s metadata than its theme, you might be doing it wrong.

If you’re more concerned about publishing the book than writing it, you might be doing it wrong.

If you talk, tweet, think or write about writing more than you actually write: doin’ it wrong.

If you always find an excuse why you’re not writing, then UR DOIN’ IT RONG.

If your writing life is filled with the blubbery carcasses of unfinished manuscripts lying about like dynamite-exploded whales and you’ve never finished a story, you’re doing it wrong, hoss.

If you keep cheating on your current manuscript by porking other, momentarily-sexier manuscripts behind the barn, yep, that’s some wrong-flavored wrongness with hot wrong sauce.

If you’d rather play video games or watch movies or masturbate to at twerking videos on Tumblr — in other words, if you’d rather be doing anything else but writing — you’re doing it wrong.

If you think that there’s one way up the mountain — and that you or someone else is the magical sherpa who will guide you up that mountain — oh yeah, you’re doing it wrong.

If you self-publish because you’re bitter at the traditional publishing establishment and not because of the very many valid reasons for self-publishing, you’re doing it wrong.

If you think any kind of publishing is a get-rich-quick-scheme lottery-ticket: YOU WRONG.

If you think writers or other artists shouldn’t get paid: YOU DOUBLE WRONG.

If you think you don’t need an editor: you are Mister Wrongyfaced Wrongypants, Esquire.

If you’ve inhaled the aerosolized horseshit and buy into the divide between literary and genre fiction, BZZT, that’s some wrong-ass shit, chief.

If you believe in any of the tribal breakdowns in writing and publishing (trad-pub versus self-pub, Amazon is god or Amazon is the devil, women don’t write as well as men), then let me spell it out with these Scrabble tiles, here… D O I N I T W R O N G

If you can’t make us care about your characters… drum roll please, doin’ it wrong.

If you’re not willing to try new things in writing — new characters, new POVs, new plotting or planning styles, new something, new anything — then you sure ain’t right.

If you rely on magical thinking and it hurts you more than it helps you: du machst es falsch!

If you let writer’s block win, you got it all wrong.

If you’re a writer who doesn’t read, ooh, holy shitkittens, you’re super-mega-ultra-wrong.

If you’re a writer who only reads for pleasure, who never reads non-fiction, who refuses to read outside a single beloved genre or medium, yeah, you’re probably pretty wrong over there.

If you hate bookstores, you’re Mayor Wrongdong of Wronglesburg, Population: YOU.

If you’re an asshole to your audience, you’re BIG SUPER CRAZY FACE WRONG.

If you spend a lot of your time getting into fights on the Internet, you’re a big bucket of wrong.

If you don’t like writing and yet you persist at being a writer: wrong, wrong, wrong.

If you’re not writing, then you’re motherfucking wrong.

So get right — and go write.

(Last week was paranormal romance.)

Space opera.

Like with all the subgenres, the definition floats a little bit, but for now we’ll cleave to the Wikipedia definition, which is: “a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, usually involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities.”

Time to ask you:

What are your three essential space opera reads?

Drop ’em in the comments!

Last week’s challenge: Last Lines First.

This random plot scenario generator cracks me up.

And it also comes up with some pretty good narrative seedlings, to my surprise.

So! This week, we’re using it.

Go click the link.

Conjure a random plot scenario.

Use said plot scenario as the basis for your flash fiction challenge this week. You have, as always, up to 1000 words. Post on your space, link back here. Due by Friday, July 26th. (And as a note: please do not post entire stories in the comment sections. I delete those.)

Now click, think, and write.

(I thought about doing this post as a series of animated GIFs, but by golly, I am a writer — I am not your dancing GIF monkey. *makes harrumphy noises and frowny faces*)

So, you just had your book published.

And you want to know what’s going to happen now.

Here is — roughly, potentially, maybe — one scenario.

For a variable amount of time, let’s call it a week, you’re going to be flying high. Hell, flying high doesn’t even cover it. You’re going to be flitting around the big blue heavens with a pair of magical laser dolphins as shoes. You’re going to be past the moon. You’re going to feel like you’re snorting comet dust and making sweet love to asteroids.

Because you wrote a thing.

And now that thing is really for real a really real thing.

Like, holy shitsharks, it’s a book. That you wrote. That people can buy!

This is the best thing ever.

(That is not going to last. Your first high is always your best high.)

When you’re not vibrating through floors and walls, you will do things in support of your books. You will write guest blogs. And you’ll go to bookstores to sign books. You’ll tweet about it, or say things on Facebook. Maybe you’ll make a book trailer. Maybe you’ll do some interviews. It’s still exciting! You wrote a book! You birthed it out of your head-womb! This squally word-baby needs your love and the love of everyone around you!

But the feedback loop isn’t as robust as you’d like.

The guest blogs you wrote maybe don’t get as many comments as you would have imagined. Or the tweets about your book haven’t been retweeted as far and as wide as you might have hoped. You did a book reading and only three people came. Or hell, thirteen. Or thirty. Is it enough? You don’t know. You don’t even know if this stuff has an effect. Is it just you belching into the abyss? Throwing words into the void? Again you ask: is any of this enough? 

And you start to wonder: well, shit, what is enough? You don’t know.

How’s the book doing? Is it selling? You literally can’t tell. You don’t have enough information. So you start trying to suss out information. You go to the bookstore. Maybe they have plenty of copies on the shelves which is good, until you realize that maybe it means they haven’t sold any. Or maybe they have no copies which could also be yay but could also be oh shit they never ordered any in the first fucking place.

So, you go and look at your Amazon ranking. Which is a number that has almost no discernible meaning, and yet you stare at like it’s a Magic Eye painting where eventually you’ll see the image bleed through the chaos. You try flicking the number on the screen with your finger like maybe you can make the number jump up — tap tap tap — until you realize you want it to jump down, not up, and then you wonder if you’d be better off sacrificing a pigeon or a lamb or at the very least attempting to divine some news about your book from the guts of said pigeon or said lamb. You know people are buying the book and so you do another promotional salvo and three hours later the number increases, it gets bigger, which means it’s going the wrong fucking way, and in three hours it gets bigger again like it’s a snake that just ate a heavy meal.

Then you see there’s an Amazon Author Ranking, which is a number that may not be hooked up to anything at all, but it purports to place you in some kind of Penmonkey Hierarchy, some Authorial Thunderdome where you aren’t a champion, where you aren’t within 1000 miles of a champion, and where you are in fact sandwiched between the author of How To Avoid Huge Ships and some algorithmic spam-bot biography of the guy who played Potsie on Happy Days.

Ah, so, time instead to look at reviews, because even if you don’t know how many copies you’re selling you can at least see what people think. And the reviews might be glorious — readers have written epic paeans to your wonderful book and authorial presence and for one fleeting moment it’s like you’re back huffing comet juice and banging meteors with those magical laser dolphin shoes until — until! — you see that someone has written a one-star review, or worse, a completely milquetoast mediocre review where they say such awful things about your book. They take to task your voice, your characters, your plot, your face, your fashion sense, your very existence, and it’s like someone flung a booger into a perfectly good bowl of ice cream. Because no matter how good that ice cream was, now it is utterly booger-fucked.

After a few weeks you can at least start to see Bookscan numbers through Author Central at Amazon. And the numbers are, you know, they’re not great. You’ve at least sold some! So that’s good. Though they’re reportedly way inaccurate. And they don’t show Kindle numbers. And they don’t show Amazon’s own sales numbers for physical copies because while Amazon is happy to give you other people’s numbers their numbers are a trade secret HA HA HA STUPID AUTHOR.

The news isn’t helping. Barnes & Noble has decided that the only thing the Nook is good for is to sell to North Koreans to control the nuclear missiles that will eventually irradiate the Californian coast. JK Rowling published under a pseudonym and only sold like 400 copies which sounds bad except then you realize it’s really good and you haven’t sold 400 copies and oh, shit.

And then you start to look to see how other authors are selling compared to you, and fuck-me-sideways-with-a-set-of-horsehead-bookends that is not a good idea. Even if you’re selling well, somebody’s always doing better. They have more reviews, more fans, more “to-be-reads” at Goodreads. Then you’re gonna find that one self-published author with the ugly book cover and the misspelled book description who’s probably outselling you by a margin of 137 to 1 and so that night you soothe yourself by reading a good book and suddenly you’re all like oh shit this book is way better than mine I’m fucked my book is fucked we’re all fucked this is the fucking bookpocalypse for me fuck fuck fuckable fuck.

But you calm down. You got an advance. You have money. Book money, as a matter of fact, which is money you made from selling books which you used to buy dinner or pay some bills. And that’s exciting! Okay, it’s not as much money as you once thought it would or could be — hell, even a low six-figure book deal on three books (one book per year) is like, barely cutting it financially. But you made money. On your writing. You breathe. You scrub the panic urine spots out of your office chair. And then maybe some other good news trickles in: an agent just sold foreign rights for your book to some distant country — Libya, or Ancient Hyperborea, or Canada. Maybe there’s an audio rights sale. Or an options sale for some guy who wants to write the script so it’ll be an episodic YouTube smash sensation.

And you start to get emails here and there — people have read the book and they liked it. Some people have loved it. Those emails are kite-string and and a strong wind — they lift you, buoy you, send your spirits maybe not quite as cosmically high as they were, but you’re still doing barrel rolls and loop-de-loops in the clouds now and again.

So you do what you must. You do what you’re made to do.

You sit back down and you start writing the next fucking book.

And you love it. And you hate it. And the days come where you want to throw it all on top of a giant garbage fire. And the nights come where you secretly remember why you love what you’re writing and your heart pinballs around the bumpers and flippers inside your soul.

You soon are reminded that you can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

And you realize that you can’t manufacture luck, but you can maximize your chances.

You write the next book. And the next after that. And the one after that.

Somewhere along the way you realize that the happiness of publication is fleeting. The second published book isn’t quite as exciting as the first, maybe. It’s chasing the dragon. The first high remains the craziest and best high. But what happens is, you get to be okay with that.

Because at some point you recognize that this isn’t why you write.

This isn’t why you tell stories. You tell stories because you like to tell stories, not because you like to sell books. That’s what gets you through. You marvel at the craft. You drown in the art. You roll around in it like a dog covering himself in sweet, sweet stink. It’s not that you don’t care about being published. It’s not that the money is meaningless. The money is a lifeline. The money lets you do this in a bigger, more real way. But all the publishing piffle — the Amazon rankings, the guest blogs, the tweets and marketing and Kirkus reviews and drinking and existential dread — it’s all out there. It’s extra. It’s connected to it, but it’s not it.

You do it because you love it.

You do it because you want to be read.

You tell stories because you’re a storyteller. And because stories matter.

And so whether you sell four million copies or whether you sell forty, you keep going. You keep taking your shot. You keep writing your books, your comics, your movies. You write shorts and novellas and you publish some stuff traditionally and you publish other stuff directly and you find satisfaction not in the high of putting books out but in the power of doing what you do, day in and day out. It is the work that sustains you: the work of taking a dream and making it real.

You don’t write to be published but rather, you write to write, and to be read.

Because that, for really real, is the truly best thing of all.

1. Story As Game: Why Stakes Matter To Us

Storytelling isn’t a game, except when it is. Part of what keeps us coming back to play a game is part of what keeps us coming back to read a story. In a game, we want to beat the odds, duck the punches, cut the balls off our enemies, and play the royal flush to win the pot of gold coins from that shitty little leprechaun — and in that game, we are frustrated by conflict and lost battles and that can push us to play again with greater verve and viciousness. A story isn’t quite so straightforward, but the analogs are there: we see the protagonists and we want them to beat odds, duck punches, cut balls, and steal from shitty little leprechauns. We are further frustrated by the conflicts and the lost battles and so we read on with faster flips of the page.

2. Win, Lose, Or Draw

As in a game, it is crucial we know what is to be gained or lost in the battle or during the journey. Literally, what is at stake? Life? Love? Money? A precious plot of land? The loyalty of an old friend? A wish? A curse? The whole world? Galaxy? Universe? All of time itself trapped in a magic snowglobe held in in the paws of a jaunty hedgehog? Further, what are the conditions of victory? What will mean loss? These don’t need to be perfectly clear (nor must they be correct), but both reader and character should be able to guess at them, even if the guess is wrong.

3. The Stakes Damn Well Better Matter To The Characters

The characters are the engine that drives any story, and if the stakes don’t mean shit to the characters, the story becomes artificial — a cardboard story blown over in the most inconsequential of breezes. Why do they care? If they don’t give a damn, why will we?

4. Wants, Needs, Fears

If we envision the stakes as that which pins the characters to the story, we can further conjure more metaphorical story-whimsy and assume that the cord that tethers them to the stakes are their wants, needs, and fears. Every character has these: Victor fears the loss of his child. Henrietta wants nothing more than to get home and watch the new SyFy original movie, EELVALANCHE. Bob needs bath salts. For Victor, the stakes stop there: as the detective battles his nemesis, the space-rending godborn serial killer known as John Henry Zeus, his son is kidnapped and so his fear — and the stakes surrounding that fear — are made manifest. Henrietta’s stakes go deeper than her professed want: by not seeing Eelvalanche, she won’t have anything to talk about at work tomorrow, and the jerk she likes, Dave, won’t respect her, and she’ll continue on feeling alone and loveless with her house of cats. Henrietta’s stakes are a complicated, tangled skein of yarn. Bob, on the other hand, wants bath salts, and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll eat your face. In that story, there’s your stakes: BOB GONNA EAT YOUR FACE. Then again, once he gets his bath salts, he’s probably gonna eat your face anyway, so.

5. Chart The Stakes For Individual Characters

Every character won’t necessarily gain and lose the same things in a story. What’s fascinating is when you pit the stakes of one character against the stakes of another (and one might argue this is exactly what creates the relationship between a protagonist and an antagonist). A gain for one is a loss for the other. The expert thief Billy Bold wants to steal Picasso’s lost painting, The Monkeys of Pamplona, as his last score so he can leave the money to his daughter before he dies of face cancer. But Detective Jane Jermagernsern knows she’ll lose her job and her pension if she can’t catch Billy before he pulls off the heist. Their stakes oppose one another.

6. Personal And Internal Versus Impersonal And External

Stakes can be internal/personal — meaning, they relate directly to the character herself and her emotional investment in the story’s stakes is what’s on the line. Stakes can also be impersonal/external — meaning, they relate to a larger conflict involving but also well-beyond the character’s nature and demeanor. A smaller (and/or more literary) story likely has at its core stakes that are personal and internal (“If I don’t quit drinking, I’m going to die”). Genre work may focuses more on impersonal and external (“The fate of the Royal Galactic Star Imperium is in my hands!”). If you want my opinion (and if you don’t, why are you here?!): a mix is best.

7. The Small Story Is Larger Than The Big Story

It’s all well and good to have some manner of super-mega-uh-oh world-ending stakes on the line — “THE ALPACAPOCALYPSE IS UPON US, AND IF WE DON’T ACT LIKE HEROES WE’LL ALL BE DEAD AND BURIED UNDER THE ALPACA’S BLEATING REIGN” — but stakes mean more to us as the audience when the stakes mean more to the character. It’s not just about offering a mix of personal and impersonal stakes — it’s about braiding the personal stakes into the impersonal ones. The Alpacapocalypse matters because the protagonist’s own daughter is at the heart of the Alpaca Invasion Staging Ground and he must descend into the Deadly Alpaca Urban Zone to rescue her. He’s dealing with the larger conflict in order to address his own personal stakes.

8. Stakes Tied To, But Different From, Goals And Conflicts

Let’s say I’m having a dinner party. My goal is to cook dinner and have a successful party. It’s a pretty straightforward goal. The stakes are all the consequences of me meeting, exceeding, or falling short of my goal. It’s all the stuff attached to but outside the goal. If I fuck up the dinner party, your happiness during those two hours is on the line. So too is my social standing. And my own happiness and success. And maybe your physical health just in case I forget that I’m not supposed to jizz in the bean dip. The conflicts are all the things that block me from my goals and put the stakes at risk. The oven breaks. I burn the potatoes. The blender gains sentience and tries to eat my hands. The Devil shows up as an unexpected party guest. You know: the usual.

9. What This Means For Plot

We like to talk about plot as if it’s this thing that the storyteller installs into a story — but that’s like trying to install a person’s skeleton after they’re already born. The plot is an integral, organic part of the story; it grows as the story grows. Plot is people. Or, more specifically, plot is the result of characters making choices and acting on those choices. Or, even more specifically, plot is the expression of characters aware of the stakes and who form goals in response to those stakes (correctly or incorrectly) and who attempt to overcome conflicts in service to those goals. It gets more complex than this, of course — but we’ll talk more about that in a sec.

10. Stakes Force Choice

Put a different way, it’s important to see how the story’s stakes — meaning, what’s on the line for the characters or even the world — force choices from the story’s characters. Consequences are in play. Things are in flux. Risk is mounting. Goals must be formed. Choices must be made.

11. Dial Up The Stakes, Tighten The Tension

The larger the payout, the greater the threat, the higher the stakes. And the higher the stakes, the greater the tension for the characters — and, by proxy, the audience.

12. Positive Stakes: The Win

A story with positive stakes suggests that a successful outcome will be a gain: victory over the bad guys, a magic sword, a big score, romantic love, a fire-breathing ice-farting hell-pony.

13. Negative Stakes: The Loss

A story with negative stakes suggests that a successful outcome will merely be avoiding further loss or exploring/exploiting the losses that have already happened: forestalling the apocalypse, solving a murder, killing a mad king to end his reign, revenge over a bag of stolen Funions.

14. A Complicated Tapestry

Many stories are a combination of positive and negative stakes — a mix of win and lose conditions. Game of Thrones is an excellent example of this: we have a mix of “I want to be the king!” versus “The kingdom is in danger by outside forces!” Some characters are trying very hard to gain, whether they’re gaining the throne or a bride or just big bags of sweet Westerosi gold. Others are trying to stave off White Walkers or frankly just fucking survive (because man, life in Westeros is just one iron-gloved nut-punch after the other). Game of Thrones offers a wild mix of stakes on the line — positive and negative, internal and external.

15. Escalating The Stakes

In a poker game, you may be called to pony up more cash to stay in the game, and that’s true of storytelling, too. As the story goes along, you put more on the line. More to win. More to lose. Bigger reward. Higher risk. Sometimes we escalate the stakes so much that by the end it appears that the protagonist must succeed with an unwinnable hand — which challenges both storyteller and audience with a sucker-punch made of pure tension. “You thought you were just fighting to save your life? Now it’s the life of your daughter. Oh! Now it’s all of Los Angeles. NOW IT’S THE ALPACAPOCALYPSE.” *bleat bleat bleat*

16. Complicating The Stakes

We can escalate stakes by complicating them and we have at our disposal many ways to cruelly complicate those stakes. A character can complicate the stakes by making bad choices or by making choices with unexpected outcomes (“Yes, you killed the Evil Lord Thrang, but now there’s a power vacuum in the Court of Supervillains that threatens to destroy the Eastern Seaboard you foolish jackanape.”) Or you can complicate the stakes by forcing stakes to oppose one another — if Captain Shinypants saves his true love, he’ll be sacrificing New York City. But if he saves the millions of New York City, he’ll lose the love of his life, Jacinda Shimmyfeather. Competing complicated stakes for characters to make competing complicated choices.

17. Changing The Stakes

You can change the stakes as you go. The character may resolve a conflict and thus “cash out” one set of stakes (something lost and/or something gained). A show like Breaking Bad puts this into play quite nicely (uh, spoiler warning, 3… 2… 1…): at the fore of the series, the stakes are Walt’s life and his family’s finances thanks to his costly and debilitating lung cancer. But fate and his burgeoning meth empire (“methpire?” or is that a meth-addled vampire?) answers the problem and grants Walt a clear win — the cancer is gone, his bills are paid. But new stakes always fill the vacuum of the old: now the stakes are his family, his freedom, his “business,” and most troubling of all, his wildly spinning moral compass.

18. Never, Ever Remove The Stakes

If you remove the stakes from the story, it’s like stealing food from a toddler. It’s like smothering a pretty little kitten with a pillow. Removing the stakes robs a story of tension — it guts it of its urgency, it thieves the narrative impulsion from the characters and the audience. It’s a flabby floppy body with no bone, no muscle. Don’t suck the oxygen out of the room. Don’t make Story Hulk angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Because then he’ll tell you a really boring story, then beat you to death with a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

19. Sub-Plotty Stakes

A series of lesser stakes involving the protagonist or the supporting characters can be used as the basis for sub-plots inside your story. And sub-plots are, of course, plot threads that have to do with submarines. *is handed a note* I mean, sub-plots have to do with the obtaining of submarine sandwiches *is handed another note* JESUS FINE, I mean, sub-plots are smaller storylines that weave in and out of the main plot. *is handed a final note* Aww, I love you too.

20. Think About What’s At Stake In Each Scene

Stakes smaller than those able to prop up subplots — let’s call ’em “micro-stakes” — can instead be used to support a scene. When entering a scene, you should ask: “What are the stakes here?” The characters in any given scene are here in the scene consciously or unconsciously trying to create a particular outcome for themselves or for the world around them. Something is on the table to be won or lost: a dinner date, a sexual encounter, a piece of critical information, a phial of enchanted tears from a constipated elf. The stakes needn’t be resolved by the end of the scene, and may carry forward to other scenes, but do enough of this and you might start seeing one of those sub-plots I was talking about…

21. Hell, Let’s Throw Dialogue In There, Too

Dialogue can also have stakes. In real life we communicate for all kinds of reasons — to fill the air with sound, to shoot the proverbial shit, the relay a few quick details about shopping lists or bowel movements — but fiction isn’t meant to necessarily encapsulate that kind of dialogue. Dialogue in a story is purposeful: it’s conversation held captive and put on display for a reason. Dialogue in this way is frequently like a game, a kind of verbal sparring match between two or more participants. Again: things to lose, things to gain. Someone wants information. Or to psyche someone out. Or to convey a threat. Purpose. Intent. Conflict. Goals. Steaks on the table. *is handed another note* FINE I MEAN STAKES GOD YOU’RE SO ANNOYING

22. More On The Line Than The Characters Realize

Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something one or several characters do not. The stakes can be a part of this equation and this can significantly increase tension — we know that if the character doesn’t Unscramble the Widget and Decipher the Cipher, then All Hope Will Be Motherfucking Lost, but the character doesn’t yet realize that. Consider too a kind of “reversed stakes,” where what the character hopes to gain is something the audience knows would be bad fucking news — drugs, a gun, revenge, an angry coked-up screech owl.

23. Stakes Must Be Believable And Interesting

Do I need to explain that? I don’t really think so.

24. The Stakes Can Be On The Table Long Before The Story Begins

We don’t need the stakes to bloom with the story. They can have been in play for a very long time. This is the power of beginning a story as late as you can, in medias res — we jump in with the slow realization that this struggle has been in play for a while, and we’re about to witness how it all shakes out. We’re not watching a slow poker game from the start. We’re jumping in just as it’s getting real interesting — just as conflict mounts.

25. We Have To Know The Stakes

The audience has to know the stakes, and they have to know them sooner rather than later. The longer we go without being made to understand the stakes, the more lost we feel in terms of understanding the story and the characters’ motivations for interfacing with that story. Why do they struggle? Why take the journey? The stakes are key. Look at it this way: buried deep in every story’s program is an if/then statement. If X, then Y. If our hero defeats the demon, her soul is safe. If our antihero can’t recover the drugs, the crime lord will take his nuts as a prize. If this, then that. Cause, effect. Quest, treasure. Truth, consequence. What are the stakes? What’s on the table? What can be won, what may be lost?

* * *

This Wednesday, the 17th, at 7pm, I’ll be at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn with T.L Costa (Playing Tyler) for “Angry Robot Night!”

We will sign books, take questions, maybe do a little reading. We’ll talk genre fiction and YA and whatever else you want us to talk about. It’ll be awesome.

YOU WILL COME, YES?

Yes.

I will see you there, then.

*stares at you until you decide to show up*

Details here!