I meet a lot of writers, young writers particularly, who feel like they don’t have anything new to say, no new stories to tell, no new ideas.

Now, for me, ideas are mostly shiny, plastic dross. When you first find them they look like emeralds on the beach, a rare fossil, an Important Discovery —

But most of the time, they’re just cheap trash dressed up to look nice. They’re tequila-shined Mardi Gras beads that escaped the gutter, somehow. Maybe that’s unfair to ideas, because ideas are the seeds from which most stories germinate, but even there, consider that when you plant a seed and the resultant plant begins to grow, it looks the fucking same nearly every time.

It’s a little stem.

It’s two leaves.

A sprout, that’s all.

(Seriously, it’s this shit right here.)

And growing a plant out of a seed is both an act of generative power (I DID IT, I BASICALLY HELPED CREATE LIFE) to the crushing reality that what you did is so common it’s disgusting (I PERFORMED A BARE MINIMUM ACT THAT EVEN A CHILD COULD ACCOMPLISH).

And writing a book or any kind of story — or really, making any kind of thing at all — is a lot like that, too, especially right when you start. I HAVE BEGUN AN AMAZING JOURNEY, you think, seconds before you decide, JUST LIKE MILLIONS OF FAILED DIPSHITS BEFORE ME OH GOD I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING OH SHIT THIS GROUND IS SO WELL-TRAVELED IT’S A PAVED, BRIGHTLY LIT PATH, THERE ARE SIGNS AND DOG POOP STATIONS

FUCK FUCK FUCK

And it’s at this point that some writers, myself included, experience a kind of narrative, existential vaporlock. You freeze up. And the worry comes that you’ve nothing to add to the canon of ideas, that whatever story you’re going to tell isn’t particularly original. Surely someone has told a story like this.

You’re right. They probably have.

In the history of storytelling, it’s very, very hard to have an entirely original take on something. When you’re pitching a book to an agent, or when your agent is pitching a book to editors, you might be asked what the “comp” titles are — meaning, what books are like it already. And in Hollywoodland, pitching a story is often you trying to feign originality by smashing up two pre-existing properties — “It’s like Terminator meets Gilmore Girls! It’s Pinnocchio, but set on the Titanic — in space! It’s as if Spongebob Squarepants took the meth from Breaking Bad and found himself living destitute in a pineapple just outside Nightmare on Elm Street!” And it’s a very cliched thing, and I assure you, having pitched film and TV on the Leftmost Coast, it’s also a very real thing. If you don’t distill the property down to those two or three already extant stories, they certainly will, and it can feel weirdly disheartening to find out that your story is considered to be as original as two unoriginal things staple-gunned together.

And so at the start of the work and at the end of the work, the originality is in question.

For many, this is troubling.

Don’t let it be.

I consider there to be very few Actual Truths in writing, in storytelling, in making cool shit — but this, I think, comes as close to Actual Truth as I can muster.

Every story has one original thing about it.

And that original thing is

You.

That sounds like some goofy-ass self-help shit, I know, but trust me, you’re it. You’re the thing. You’re the Original Idea, the Important Discovery, the One Untold Tale, the Unexplored Path, the Savior of Narnia, the Sword of Damocles, the Revenge of the Sith wait I’m getting carried away, sorry, sorry. Ahem. Moving on. Point is, it’s you. Look at it this way —

You’re a bundle of unexpected genetics. Two people fucked, and they made you. And to make each of them, two other people fucked, and on and on and on — you’re at the bottom of an inverted pyramid, the nadir of an unholy host of genetic material that has scrambled itself up and guaranteed that you are a random, uncountable confluence of atoms. And that’s just the genetic side.

On the memetic side — the side of ideas and information — oh my sweet fucking hell, are you ever an infinite, irreplicable* maze. You are a labyrinthine tangle of wants, desires, fears, experiences, anxieties, certainties, questions. You’re the sum total of the places you’ve been, the people you’ve met, the things you’ve seen. And you complicate that when you go more places, meet more people, see new things. You never get simpler. You just get more complex. Your uncertainties grow. Your maze grows larger even as you travel it. You’re an amazingly weird, bizarre, wonderful bundle of wires.

(Now, I don’t want you get a big head about you — yes, all writers are precious snowflakes, but also, acting like a precious snowflake will make somebody melt your ass right quick. You’ll be a microscopic puddle before too long.)

I think a lot of writers — again, younger writers in particular, and I certainly didn’t realize this when I was younger and trying to write — is that this unique aspect of the work (i.e. You) is not something to be avoided, but rather, something to enthusiastically pour into the work. You should put yourself in there. Wholly and without reservation. Complicate the work with your uncertainties and worries. Address your questions and fears. Don’t just breathe ideas gently into it — summon your ideas as a gale-force wind and they’ll blow the sails of the story in the way that no plot twist or fight scene can.

That’s okay. That’s as it should be.

The story isn’t you.

You aren’t the story.

But you’re in there as much as you want to be. Invisibly, perhaps, but vitally just the same — suffusing it as you see fit. Don’t worry about originality in plot or genre or whatever. Worry about bringing yourself into the world, onto the page, into the story. Write what you like. Write what you want to read. Tell the story and use the voice in the way that only you can tell it.

You’re the One Original Aspect, and that cannot be beat.

*not a word but should be

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

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

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

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Indiebound / Amazon / B&N

This a story about why I read true crime, and why I write thrillers. A true story.

It starts out a normal night working the desk at my dorm in college. Big place, over 1,000 coed residents in it on seven sprawling floors. Normally, there would be two people working the desk around the clock.

That night, after midnight, it’s just me.

At one a.m., a man who lives in the dorm and was, until recently, dating a friend of mine (also a dorm resident) drops by to talk for a while about a movie we’ve both seen. In the process, he asks me if his ex-girlfriend is in her room. I tell him she’s gone on a date.

Okay, he says, and puts an envelope on the counter. Then he walks away.

The envelope says TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. I hesitate. Is it to me? What the hell? I finally open it and read it as he heads down the hall toward his room.

In it, he states he plans to get a shotgun and sit beside her dorm room door, and once he sees her coming, kill himself “so she’ll never forget what she did to me.” He also implies that she might not survive either.

I call police immediately, and alert the dorm manager. The manager asks me if the man has a shotgun with him now. He doesn’t, as far as I could see. The manager asks me to follow the man at a distance and see if he’s really armed.

And, foolishly, I agree. I’m eighteen. I think I know what I was doing.

I do not.

The man sees me on the way back to his room and stops to talk to me as if nothing odd is going on. Then he opens his room door, picks up a shotgun sitting inside, and points it at me. He tells me to get into his room.

I obey.

I sit down, and he closes and locks the door. I tell him I’ve already called the police and they are probably already here and on the way to the room. He nods. For the next thirty minutes, he explains to me why he’s doing all this. He says he likes me. He doesn’t think that I should be in the middle of what he calls “his troubles.” I have no idea what else he says during that conversation; all I can remember is if he moves the shotgun toward me again, I’m probably going to die. I ask him to please put the gun away, because he’s scaring me. He shakes his head, but he keeps it aimed off to the side. It’s between us, but not threatening me directly.

Not yet.

Someone knocks on the door and asks if I am inside. It’s another dorm employee. I say yes, and ask my captor him if I can go. He says I can. Somehow, I walk calmly to the door, open it, and go outside.

The other dorm employee pulls me past the police line.

The man in the room surrenders without a fight. The two of us, the dorm employees, are sent in after to confiscate anything from the room that the man might use to harm himself or others … and why the police let us do that, I have no idea.

Half an hour later, my friend comes home from her date. She’s alive. She survived. And honestly: I’m not sure she would have if I hadn’t opened that note.

To Whom It May Concern didn’t have to concern me. But I’m glad it did.

That night was when the world changed for me. What I’d seen in that room baffled and terrified me. It was an introduction to a world where people weren’t what they seemed to be.

So … true crime isn’t just stories to me. It’s emotionally and psychologically valuable material about the world around me. When I read about crimes and criminals and victims, I’m trying to come to terms with those moments in my life where my view of humanity … shifted. And that shift? It might have saved me on more than one occasion.

I still remember the moment when my tire blew out on a Dallas freeway at midnight twenty years ago, and I had to park in a dimly lit stretch of shoulder to change it. (I was fully capable of changing it.) Three cars stopped. Two held men who were polite and took my word that I didn’t need them to rescue me.

The third man was different. When I waved and said, “I’m okay, almost done,” he didn’t stop coming toward me. There was something in his body language, something relentless. Every account of women murdered or raped in situations like this one ran through my mind. I stood up, faced him with the tire iron in my hand, and said, “You need to turn around now. I’m fine. Please leave.”

He kept coming.

I told him, “I’m not giving you the tire iron.”

He kept coming.

I backed up, took out my cell, and called 911. I held it out to show him the call.

He stopped. He called me a filthy bitch. Said I was a paranoid whore who deserved to be raped and left to die. I stood there, not moving, until he was back in his car and driving away. Then I shakily told the 911 operator that I was okay, but I gave her the license number of his car. I never heard back about him; maybe he was just an angry guy who never hurt anyone. But I’m still convinced that reading true crime stories, and having a reasonable understanding of how to read signals, saved my life that night.

I’ve since read a lot more true crime and it’s helped me understand the vast, dark range of human behavior. I listen to true crime podcasts for the same reason … to try to put some kind of context around the horrible things people do. And, in some sense, prepare for the worst.

It’s probably also why I write thrillers. Thrillers can be as grim, as terrifying, or as inexplicably horrific as the real cases, but when I write that scenario, I can control the narrative at last. The potential victim can escape. The killer can be stopped. And the scales can be balanced. Thrillers are, to me, a way to shape the story in a healthier way than often happens in real life.

Writing the Dead Air project with showrunner Gwenda Bond and cowriter Carrie Ryan was a real revelation, because although I’d thought that my brush with darkness was unique, turns out we three all have some level of insight into the darkness around us, and we were able to bring that sense of tension and fear into the story. It’s built around a rich background of Kentucky horse racing (Gwenda’s local knowledge!) and the lengths people will go to in order to find justice (something Carrie’s well-versed in). Plus, we all have an intense interest in podcasts that break down crimes and motivations, so we were all in agreement from the beginning about how we wanted this story to feel.

Dead Air is an ambitious dual offering of serialized novel and dramatic audio performances, all for one low subscription price. It also has a stand-alone podcast by the main character that tells the story of a “solved” murder that may not be quite as solved as the rich and powerful would prefer. We’ve been thrilled to work with the amazing publisher Serial Box, who has a wide variety of serialized novel/audio projects like Tremontaine and Bookburners you might also enjoy.

So how many degrees of separation are you from real murder? I’m only one … four times over.

It’s best to keep it in fiction.

Rachel Caine is the NYT, USA Today, and #1 internationally bestselling author of more than 50 novels, including the new Stillhouse Lake series. Her first thriller, Stillhouse Lake, was a finalist for Original Paperback Thriller from the ITW Thriller Awards, and is currently a finalist for Best Thriller at Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Awards. She’s on social media and can be found at rachelcaine.com.

About Dead Air:

Welcome to Dead Air, where M is for midnight, Mackenzie…and murder. 

Mackenzie Walker wasn’t planning on using her college radio show to solve a decades old murder, but when she receives an anonymous tip that the wrong man may have taken the fall, she can’t resist digging deeper. It doesn’t take long for Mackenzie to discover gaps in the official story. Several potential witnesses conveniently disappeared soon after the murder. The victim, a glamorous heiress and founder of a Kentucky horse-racing dynasty, left behind plenty of enemies. And the cops don’t seem particularly interested in discussing any of it. But when the threats begin, Mackenzie knows she’s onto something. Someone out there would prefer to keep old secrets buried and they seem willing to bury Mackenzie with them. Thankfully, she’s getting help from a very unexpected source: the victim’s son, Ryan. The closer she gets to him, however, the more important it is for Mackenzie to uncover the truth before he gets buried alongside her.

Read or listen to weekly episodes of the serial novel Dead Air from bestselling authors Gwenda Bond, Rachel Caine, and Carrie Ryan, and then check out Mackenzie’s podcast for a uniquely immersive experience. Does the truth lie in the serial, the podcast…or somewhere in-between? Subscribe to the serial here. Check out the podcast on iTunes, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pleased today to reveal the cover to John Hornor Jacobs’ newest — a novella of cosmic horror, and you can read the description below and check out the cover above. But first I feel that JHJ’s other work is deserving of a mention. Obviously, the world is made of writers. We’re fucking everywhere, like mosquitoes, and it’s hard to sort through the cloud of us winged things to find a creature of some beauty — a pretty moth, a fancy-ass butterfly. Sometimes we miss out, and sometimes a winged thing of especial beauty avoids our discovery for a time and —

Well, this metaphor has gotten away from me, so I’ll just speak it plainly: Jacobs is probably one of the best writers you’ve never heard of. His work is imbued with that really powerful thing that goes into all excellent stories from excellent storytellers, and one day I am convinced the world will figure that out and catch up — I mean, we’re talking the level of a Stephen King, a Robin Hobb, someone whose work is just right a lot of the time.

(See also: Kameron Hurley. Another perhaps unappreciated favorite of mine.)

I don’t know precisely where to tell you to start with JHJ, but my favorites are the Incorruptibles, the start of a trilogy that is an infernal mash-up of Lord of the Rings and the Gunslinger. (Print, or eBook.) Actually, I see the Incorruptibles is $3.99 right now for the eBook, so. Or try The Twelve-Fingered Boy, a YA tale of a boy in a juvie prison who discovers that he possesses a very special kind of power — and here, think a YA Shawshank paired with the X-Men, and you’re close. (Print, or eBook.) Both are trilogies, so you get a lot of bang for your buck, too.

Now, though, time to focus up on the novella —

The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky

Having lost both her home and family to a brutal dictatorship, Isabel has fled to Spain, where she watches young, bronzed beauties and tries to forget the horrors that lie in her homeland. 

“Hey, can you send me that JIF file–”

“HA HA WHAT DID YOU SAY? DID YOU SAY JIF.”

“Yes, JIF file, it’s a–”

“HA HA LOLWUT IS IT A JRAPHICS INTERLACED FILE? I WAS THINKING OF HAVING SOME VEGETABLES TONIGHT, MAYBE SOME JREEN BEANS WITH MAYBE SOME JARLIC AS SEASONING. WHO SHOOTS FIRST, IS IT HAN SOLO OR JREEDO? WASN’T IT FORREST JRUMP THAT SAID LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES? HA HA HA YOU DUMDUM IT’S GIF, HARD-G, BRO. LIKE ME. A HARD-G.”

“Oh. Okay. Hold on I need just to push this button.”

*trapdoor opens under Mister Hard-G, and he feeds the alligators in the pit, and his last words are, BUT ARE THEY CALLED ALLIJATORS HA HA OHH GOD THEY’RE EATING MY INTESTINES*

So.

Let’s talk about this.

I ranted a bit on Twitter this morning but feel like this needs to be carved into the digital space that I own, aka, this blog.

I ran a BBS when I was a kid — a bulletin-board-system, for those baby nerds not in the know. I did this unbeknownst to my parents, actually; I had a phone line that I essentially took over and plugged into my computer so instead of talking to people on the phone like a normal teenager, I was Proto-Internetting with Local Randos as a SysOp. (Sidenote: parents, keep up with technology or your kids are going to be able to do loop-de-loops around you. Just a tip.) I ran a few different instances, Telegard, WWIV, and the names of the BBS changed from Shadowlands to Bizarroworld to — shit, I forget the others. Whatever! I was vaguely plugged into computers and proto-hacker culture, I modded my own computer, I hosted warez and early bitmap porn and all that fun stuff. I then later became a Systems Technical Manager or some shit — meaning I was a one-man IT department for a (get this) fashion merchandising company. I also ran web stuff for a company that was basically just an advanced form of illegal radio payola, I worked for an internet provider, I did a lot of techie stuff despite not having a real techie background (I went to school for readin’ and writin’ dontcha know, what with all these fancy bookmathings I put out.)

And I, along with the people I worked with, pronounced GIF file as JIF.

It’s just how everyone I knew said it.

JIF. JIF File. Like the peanut butter. Like the saying, back in a jiff.

And then somewhere in the last 10-15 years, from the Shadows of Mordor, arose a peculiar kind of pedantry about it — yes, the acronym stands for GRAPHICS INTERCHANGE FORMAT, and it was said, with great certain gusto (or jreat certain justo?) that because of that hard-G word at the fore, the acronym just also be pronounced with the same unswerving, unyielding G.

Like gravity, you could not fucking deny it. It was suddenly Nerd Law.

And that’s fine if you wanna pronounce it that way.

Just don’t lecture about it.

Here’s why:

You’re wrong.

Not about your pronunciation! Again, I don’t care how you pronounce it, long as people understand what you mean. You’re wrong about your logic — you are writing a logical check that the history of language cannot cash.

You are asserting that acronyms must be pronounced a certain way based on the pronunciation of the words that form that acronym.

So, what about YOLO?

You Only Live Once.

The O in Once is pronounced… Wuh. Wunce.

So, do you pronounce it YOLO?

Or YOL-WUH?

What about LASER? Yep, laser is an acronym.

It stands for:

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

I’ll bet though that you pronounce laser with a z-sound for the s, right? But that’s wrong, by the logic of hard-G GIF, isn’t it? Should be pronounced lay-sser, like you’re Cobra Commander. (Or, if you’re really cuckoo bananapants about that pronunciation, layster.)

SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

But you probably say scooba not scuhbba, right?

What about…

JPEG?

That’s right, let’s talk about another graphical file format. The JPEG, like the GIF, is a pretty popular file format in the graphic/photographic space. And I’m gonna go ahead and make a brave, bold guess that you pronounce it JAY-PEG, right? And here you, imagined verbal sparring partner, will snarkily note that the G in JAY-PEG is that hard, turgid, erect ‘g’ because the G in JPEG stands for Group.

But what about the other letters?

JPEG = Joint Photographic Experts Group.

So, the P in JPEG is a soft Ph-sound, meaning, an F-sound.

So…

Surely, surely you will now pronounce it JAY-FEG, right? I mean, by your unswerving logic and infallible grammatical reality, you cannot possibly continue to pronounce it JAY-PEG, right? Except you will. Because that’s how people pronounce it.

Listen, I get it, in this day and age we like to have hard and fast answers about stuff, and we especially like to be haughty and know-it-ally when it comes to the English language, but the English language is a baby carriage stuffed with hot dogs, set on fire, and pushed down some steps toward a a bouncey-house full of schnauzers. It’s a fucking mess. Rough! Cough! Dough! Bough! Are any of those words pronounced the same? Why no, no they are not.

If I say JIF file and you say GIF file, we both understand what the other means, and that, ultimately, is the point. So, be not superior — soft-g or hard-g adherents — and accept that both ways are perfectly fucking fine, thankayouveddymuch.

Now please buy my books! Have you considered Damn Fine Story, which is pronounced Dammun Feen Storf, or Blackbirds, which is pronounced Fook-birbs, or maybe Invasive, which is pronounced Sir William Hottentot Schmeebly Fidget Junior? Have a great* day!

*jreat

The crab offers you a quest. Do you take it?

ANYWAY HEY HI HELLO what is up, my frandos.

So, some nice news —

Damn Fine Story is now out on bail!

*checks notes*

wait, no

Damn Fine Story is now out on audio!

There, that’s better.

It’s read by Patrick Lawlor, who does a very good job of… well, essentially pretending to be me? So, if you’re one of the people who have been waiting for this book on audio, we gotchoo covered.

Also, DFS continues to sell really well? So thank you? In BookScan, it has now outsold Zer0es — which is no small feat. Given the e-book of Zer0es, that still remains one of my biggest books in terms of total sales, alongside the first Miriam Black book, Blackbirds, but to see DFS do so well in its first year of release has been heartening. And I just pitched its sequel to Writer’s Digest, so, we shall see. It would be a more genre-focused version of DFS, some Advanced Level Story-Fu dealing with sci-fi and fantasy and horror and maybe a little mystery-thrillery-crimey goodness, too. Here’s hoping WD takes the bait, so I can have an excuse to do more obscene, absurd footnotes.

And speaking of that, I got to hang out at the Writer’s Digest Conference in NYC this past weekend, and got to meet Jeff and Ann Vandermeer and hear Walter Mosely speak (which is sublime, lemme tell you) and it’s always great connecting with writers of every level and age and publishing experience. Thanks for coming out and listening to me jabber.

And now, for some more wistful photographic remembrance of the PNW —