Last week I did a… let’s be charitable and call it “unhinged” fusillade of tweets about how you, Dear Person, should go forth and —

*clears throat*

*bangs the timpani*

*screams*

DO THE THING.

And I thought, I should really bring that over to the blog. And I should, in turn, answer some KEY CRITICAL QUESTIONS about DOING THE THING.

So, here it is, a Frequently Asked Questions about Doing The Thing. Did anyone actually ask these questions? No! Probably not! Whatever! Quiet, you!

Let us begin.

Q: When should I do the thing?

A: Now. Right now. You should do the thing now. Not tomorrow. Not ten minutes ago. Now.

Q: But I don’t have time right now.

A: Nobody has time. We do not collect time like coins or eggs. Time is water in the river, you gotta reach out and grab a cupful as it passes. Also that’s not a question.

Q: Okay, a question, then: how do I make time for the thing?

A: To once again devolve to semantics, nobody really makes time. You’re not a Time-Shitter, who just prances about, Pooping Temporal Waste everywhere. Time is not feces. It’s a precious resource. You mine it. You steal it. You carve it out of the schist and bedrock.

Q: You just said time was water, and now it’s rock?

A: I’m a writer and therefore I have poetic license. It is a real license for which I applied at a local DMP, aka, the Department of Metaphor and Poetry. The greater point, aside from my poetic deviation, is that time is a thing you must seize for yourself before you die. Because you’re going to die. I’m going to die. The entirety of the Earth is going to die.

Q: This is getting bleak.

A: That is not a question.

Q: Fine, sorry. Why is this getting so bleak?

A: It’s not meant to be bleak, it’s just meant to be a reminder that our lives are a limited resource. We each have an end, and we do not know when that end will be, and so it behooves us to Do The Thing now, not tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Because you may not get tomorrow, or next week, or next year. This may sound bleak, but with a bit of a twist on your perspective, it actually becomes quite empowering. It’s like how a TV show does better when it has a finite number of seasons — Lost versus, say, Breaking Bad. The former had to go on and on as long as ABC kept renewing it, thus forcing the show to streeeeetch its story and parcel out its actual narrative. Breaking Bad was five seasons strong, and that’s because it was able to have a start and an end and know that its narrative had limits. When we recognize that we are expecting an end, we can start to actually make decisions and take actions, which is empowering and freeing rather than floating in some kind of wishy-washy middle limbo.

Q: What is the Thing I should be Doing? Is it writing?

A: It can be. I don’t know, I’m not you. Sure, I sometimes knock you out with ether and dress like you and try to sample your life in fits and starts, but that still doesn’t make me you. Maybe your thing is to write the book, maybe it’s to make a movie, or to tell someone you love them, or to clean your desk or hide a body. I don’t know. Every day we have a whole Menu of Things we can do, and you should do at least one of them, I think, in order of some importance.

Q: Can we go back to the part where you said you ether me and dress like me in order to experience what it is to be me?

A: No, we’re moving on.

Q: Ugh, fine. What if Doing The Thing is hard?

A: Then that’s good.

Q: Why is that good?

A: Because the most difficult things are often the most important. As I’ve said before in this post about Having A Bad Writing Day, it’s supposed to be hard. The most worthwhile things are also, inconveniently, the most challenging things.

Q: What if I’m not ready to Do The Thing?

A: That’s legitimate. Maybe you’re not. I have a book to write and I’m not yet ready to Do The Thing. The last book I had kicking around my head for five years, and I wasn’t ready to write it until I was. But that also doesn’t mean I just sat on my hands and stared at the wall. I found Other Things and Fucking Did Those.

Q: Like what?

A: Well, sometimes it meant writing the book I was ready to write. It also meant devoting supplemental energy to the book in ways — Writing The Book, in my case, is not the sum total of Doing The Thing. The actual authoring of said book is just the visible peak of that iceberg, but a lot of stuff goes into the book. Thinking. Outlining. Researching. More thinking. Stroking my beard. Making hmm sounds, and ahhh and even no, that’s not right. Going to a coffee house and pretending to be an author. You know, shit like that. It’s true of all the Things you must Do that a lot goes into Doing the Thing that isn’t the culmination of the Thing. The trick is not to fall into an oubliette of excuses.

Q: What the hell is an oubliette?

A: Haven’t you ever watched Labyrinth?

Q: I did, but was held rapt by David Bowie’s magic yambag.

A: That’s fair. It was hypnotizing. I wonder if that’s where he gets his crystal balls. Anyway. To answer the question, an oubliette is a pit, a prison, a trap.

Q: What excuses are you talking about, then? 

A: This is one of those really tricky things where a person has to be fairly, authentically honest with themselves. There is a very thin line between giving yourself a undeserved pass (aka, an excuse) and recognizing when you have a real reason to not yet Do The Thing. It’s also the same kind of hazy interstitial terrain between being hard on yourself and going too easy on yourself. I can’t tell you where that line is, or how to navigate that terrain — you just have to, over time, be self-aware and actualized enough to say, “Hey, I need to practice self-care,” versus, “Wow, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time on self-care and not a lot of time on Doing The Thing.” Sometimes, self-care is Doing The Thing, and sometimes it’s just you avoiding Doing The Thing. That calculus is different for all of us.

Q: Wait, I have to learn fucking calculus?

A: Emotional calculus, yes. Not fucking calculus. Fucking calculus is about angles of entry on a fuck chair and the various calculations behind lube.

Q: This is getting weird.

A: It was weird to begin with, you just didn’t realize it. Also, not a question.

Q: What if I don’t know how to Do The Thing?

A: Then you’re in good company. Nobody really knows how to Do The Thing. We’re all just guessing with varying degrees of instinct, luck, and success. I possibly know less how to Do The Thing than when I started.

Q: Isn’t that counterintuitive? Aren’t you going backwards?

A: Nope. Knowing that I know less frees me up to try more things. Believing you know how to exactly Do The Thing puts a lot of pressure on you when actually Doing The Thing. Being free of that knowledge is liberating. It lets you experiment.

Q: Experimenting? Is this a sex thing again?

A: Not unless you want it to be, I guess.

Q: Okay. So. What if I fail to Do The Thing?

A: The only damaging and dangerous failure is quitting before you Do The Thing. Pre-rejecting yourself and prematurely quitting because you suspect you won’t do the thing well is the worst. Otherwise, failure is the greatest teacher and serves as powerful medicine. It isn’t medicine that tastes good, necessarily, but it can become an acquired taste. The other thing is setting reasonable results for yourself. Let the Thing-Doing be the result. Don’t let the reaction to the Thing-Doing be the result. You can control the former. You ain’t got shit to do with the latter. You just Do The Thing as Best As You God Dang Can.

Q: Real-talk, though, the world is very stupid right now. It’s hard to Do The Thing. How do I Do The Thing in the face of such wanton fuckery?

A: It’s an understandable problem. We are at Stupidity Level 99, and turns out, it doesn’t end at Level 99. Here’s the thing, though: Doing The Thing won’t make the world any worse. And it may actually make it a little bit better, be it for you or for an audience or for someone who needs the Thing you Just Did, whether that thing is a book or a webcomic or a declaration of love or a body you need buried. The fuckery is the fuckery. There is persistent fuckery at varying levels of intensity. But the world is still turning. You’re still you. We still need art and love, we still need to work and create and tell truths. The Thing still needs Doing.

Q: So you’re saying I should Do The Thing?

A: You should, indeed, Do The Thing. Because the Thing Needs Doing.

* * *

THE RAPTOR & THE WREN: Miriam Black, Book Five

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate!

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Kinda love this photo. It is very clearly a toothbrush with intense anxiety. What gives a toothbrush anxiety? It sounds like a joke, but I really don’t know. Plaque? Whatever. (FYI: “Anxiety Toothbrush” is the name of my Jaeger robot in PACIFIC RIM 3.) Point is, I like this photo, and it’s a new macro, so please enjoy it. Or don’t. You’re not my puppet.

OR ARE YOU.

Anyway.

The other day, I took this photo:

And today, I took this photo:

So obviously, spring has been radicalized by winter. Visiting weird Winter Forums and hanging out on Winterstagram. Learning its ways.

Stupid weather.

Also, this photo:

Which, obviously, is a very colorful egg from a very colorful bird.

And now it’s hatching.

OR MAYBE IT IS AN EGG THAT I DYED and uhh, dropped?

Shut up.

So! What’s going on? How’s everybody doing?

Here’s what’s new in Wendigville:

Both Atlanta Burns and its sequel, The Hunt, are on sale in e-book right now at Amazon for $0.99 — which puts the first book as the, erm, #1 seller in Amazon’s Teen & Young Adult Physical & Emotional Abuse Fiction category. Which is a thing that exists, I guess. And is a thing that roughly tells you the tenor of these books, so please: assume a trigger warning for, like, *gestures widely* all the things.

And also reminder that I’ll be joining the mighty Kevin Hearne and freshly-Hugo-nominated Fran Wilde at the Doylestown Bookshop this coming Saturday (Doylestown, PA) at 7PM. Kevin is releasing the newest — and final! — Iron Druid book, so Fran and I are happy to help him celebrate this release. Be there or be frowned upon from a great distance.

I also pitched a new book to my editor at Del Rey, and she seemed to dig it, so I’m off to the races on that one — time to start doing research and plotting a rough outline and imbibing various hallucinogenic draughts. I mean, ha ha, what.

And that’s it for me, folks.

Have an excellent week, and remember:

DO THE THING.

Two words:

“New life.”

Lot of power in those two words, and a lot of ways to interpret them.

I want you to take those two words, and use them as the basis for this week’s challenge — write a story using those two words as a springboard. Again, feel free to get creative — you don’t need to interpret these words in any one way, but however you choose, using whatever genre you like.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, April 6th, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

See you on the other side.

Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies.

Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves.

The Book Won’t Happen Without You

I spent years waiting for a toga-draped muse and Time incarnate to come together in a Wonder Twin powers, Activate! moment. Waited for the clouds to part and light to shine upon my keyboard like it did for King Arthur’s sword. Oddly enough, this never happened.

I waited for vacations and wrote only when I had three or more hours to rub together. I picked and pecked, lost my grip on the plot, and started over multiple times, re-writing new threads of ideas when I began to doubt in what I’d written.

When I engaged a developmental editor and we agreed my malignant tumor of words needed to be put aside to write a new, clean draft, I braced myself for another twelve years of putting this story together. I begged life for more long stretches of Saturday afternoons when I could write and still no such time materialized.

Then I had an odd thought: What if I write every day? What if I get up a bit earlier in the morning, write for an hour before work, and see what happens?

A month later I had a new draft. Four months later I had a revised draft.

I wasn’t writing faster. I was writing consistently for the first time. 1,500- and 2,000-word sessions added up fast. I recorded my writing practice in a YouTube series I call Asimov Hour, which stands as proof that not only was I able to scrape up an hour to write, I also scraped enough minutes together to edit a new video series.

The time didn’t appear to me. I seized it, wrestled it, and pinioned its limbs. I set my alarm earlier, put my ass in the chair, and made lots of tappity on the keyboard.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to write Every. Damned. Day. But for me, consistent effort kept my plot lines moving on a single plane. Claiming time and space to do the work built a habit that became my new normal (two years later, I still put my ass in the chair every morning). Through daily practice, I found that, for me, writer’s block was temporary and writing is less a cosmic orgasm of creative inspiration and more a matter of showing up and doing the work.

Please Stop Revising (Never!)

During those years of inconsistent effort, I believed there was no point engaging the services of a professional editor until I had a mostly perfect, final draft. I wrote and re-wrote, tacking on new ideas, putting friends through the misery of reading multiple versions of the same shipwreck of a story. New threads and new twists would fix existing problems, and I could patch any hole with more plot and more exposition. And I always kept my mind open to changing a major detail, even if it led to me writing everything over. And over. And over.

You might expect that I was heartbroken when the editor I finally hired told me it was time to strip out all that stuff (pretty sure he used a stronger word) and write a clean draft. Twelve years, wasted! I might have moaned, back of hand to my forehead, draped across a settee of emotion.

But instead I felt freed, untethered, given a new chance. It was like a hot shower at the end of a long day of yard work. I could be proud of what I did, only clean and not stinky.

Suddenly I had energy for the novel again. I had guidance, a path laid out for me, an outline free of plot holes, and new purpose.

I don’t think, given a hypothetical time machine, I’d go back and stop myself from writing and re-writing all those drafts. Those were words I had to invest into my craft in order to get better and mistakes I had to make to know what better felt like. But I will say, with one-hundred percent certainty, that getting serious, putting aside my fear, and reaching out for help propelled both my novel and me ahead at full speed.

Still, You Can Revise It If You Need To

While over-revising was definitely my favorite crutch, it also gave me a sense of freedom to write the story without fear of it being too strange or too out-there. My setting is strange. My combination of story elements is improbable. As my publisher has said, publicly, “Nothing in this book should work…” It wasn’t written to market. It wasn’t written to trends. It cracks a whip over the reader’s head right off the start, shattering preconceived expectations, and it never apologizes.

And the only way I could write such a story – to have the grit coarse enough to put this book out there – was to promise myself I could always change it later if I needed to. Could always rein it in if it got too strange. Luckily, the resulting strangeness is the very thing that draws readers to the story.

Lots of details did change. Some elements were revised when they needed to be, pumped up or deflated to better fulfill a few bonus genre expectations. Other things were revised to increase tension or improve world-building. More subtle but no less important changes were made, as well, no matter at what stage in the production we were (and I cannot thank Parvus Press enough for being willing to do right by the story even when it would have been way more convenient to let certain things go). Every change made the story better.

That’s all awesome. All good reasons to revise. Way better than combing back over it one more time just so I didn’t have to do something scary like actually publish the thing. Revisions aren’t a thing I fear. Revisions, admittedly, are a shield I use to defend myself against the things I fear. They’re also the safety harness that made me brave enough to let loose and write an impossible, improbable story, wild, free, and head-strong. And why the entire quote from my publisher is, “Nothing in this book should work and it does and it’s amazing and I love it.”

Characters are People First

One of things I knew, in an unexpressed and intangible way, was that I loved well-rounded characters. I enjoyed villains who thought they were the only one doing the right thing. I loved that their goals were often the same goals the “good guys” had, but that they were willing to do drastically different things to get there. I loved that they needed the exact same building blocks of character that my protag needed.

I love characters that might be real people. Sure, I love a good Skyscraper Action Movie with memorable one-liners, but I love getting to sympathize with their broken marriage and not just the broken glass in their bare feet. Their skill set helps them defeat the antagonist, yes, but their motivations and emotions connect me to their story and make me care whether they win or die trying.

When I wrote intuitively these kinds of characters appeared on the page without much extra effort. But when I followed the outline too closely, worried too much over my world-building, or whether this-or-that steampunk device might work the way I described it, or focused on turns of phrase, I sometimes glossed over who these characters were, what they wanted, and what they were willing to do to get there.

But in my final draft, I allowed my characters’ personalities and motivations to drive the plot instead of my delusions of writerly cleverness. Given agency, my characters made the magic happen on their own, without meddling on my part and the story came together in a gripping, cohesive whole.

Don’t Wait to Behave Like the Writer You Want to Be

It wasn’t patience that allowed me to write for twelve years and still be willing to start over. It was fear. Deep, vagus nerve-level fear, as one might feel for spiders. Out of proportion with the things I was actually afraid of, it elevated my emotional reaction from a shrug to a scream. Fear of the simple unknown became terror that I’d release the book, be found out as a fraud, and be laughed all the way back into obscurity where I belonged. It kept me hemming and hawing over the plot, the characters, the world, the production plans. Kept me from moving forward until everything the was perfect: the words, the cover, the weather, my health, the economy, the computer I wrote on. These details were an excellent shelter for my fears. They piled up to hide me and kept me safe.

Except in being safe, I was unpublished. My ultimate, primary goal – to get my story out there and find readers who get as excited about it as I do – could not happen as long as I remained safely swaddled in the self-protective behavior those fears inspired in me. I had to take the risk, jump, go, go, go. Put my arms up and run through the cobwebs no matter how horrifying the thought of spiders in my hair or how awful the feeling of their sticky silk clinging to my face and arms.

Now? I’m still me. I still worry about my mask being pulled off by meddling kids. But I don’t let it stop me. Not because I’m suddenly brave, but because I discovered what can happen when I choose to live as the version of me that I want to be true. The version of me who has Wendig-quantities of books to her name. The version who makes a living off her writing. The version with passionate readers who get excited over her new releases.

Only premonitions of these things are true today, but if I want them to be my reality, I can’t let fear convince me that they never will be. I’m a writer, so I write. I’m a published author, so I finish the books and release them into the wild.

* * *

R J THEODORE is hellbent on keeping herself busy. Seriously folks, if she has two spare minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them.

She lives in New England with her family, enjoys design, illustration, podcasting, binging on many forms of visual and written media, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee.

Book One of the Peridot Shift series (Parvus Press), FLOTSAM is Theodore’s debut science fiction novel, available now in print, digital, and audio.

R J Theodore: Website | Twitter | Facebook

FLOTSAM: Excerpt | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | IndieBound

DANGER RUNS DEEP.

New York. City of millions. Home to the largest subway system in the world. Miles of tunnels stretch far underground, home themselves to a vast, displaced populace.

But now someone—or something—is slaughtering these homeless. Along with anyone else foolish enough to venture underground.

And whatever it is, it is slowly rising toward the surface.

Can a young empath, a finicky professor, a flighty linguist, a foreign hunter, and a lone cop stop the threat before it spills out into the rest of the city?

* * *

Knowing Isn’t Enough

Digging Deep is set in New York City. My parents were both born and raised in New York City. I wasn’t, but I used to visit my grandparents here when I was growing up, my wife and I moved here many years ago, and I’ve lived and worked here ever since. Which means I know this city pretty well. More than well enough to write about it.

Or so I thought.

Turns out, there’s a lot I didn’t know about this city. Oh, sure, I can tell you where there’s a good Thai restaurant in Midtown (Topaz, 56th between Sixth and Seventh) or the nearest Citibank to my office (the one on 53rd and Fifth is marginally closer than the one on 53rd and Park) or which subway is the quickest way to World Trade (the E goes straight there but the 4 or 5 to Fulton is a lot faster, and only a block away). But I didn’t know which subway station was the deepest underground (that would be the 191st Street stop on the 1) or that NYC doesn’t have a SWAT unit (it’s called ESU here, Emergency Service Unit, instead).

These are all things I needed to know for my story, though (well, the subway info and the police info, not the bank or restaurant locations).

Which is why it’s crucial to do your research, even if you think you’re already an expert. Because all it takes is for one reader to go “Hey, wait, NYC doesn’t have SWAT!” and they’re thrown out of your story. Then they’ll tell their friends, “Eh, don’t bother, he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

And okay, maybe it isn’t critical to your story whether the cop is in SWAT or ESU. But it is critical to earn the reader’s trust. It only takes a few minutes of Google-fu to find the right answers, and a read-through by a few other locals to make sure you didn’t miss anything obvious.

Why not take that time to be sure you’ve got it right?

The Three Types

With the exception of the DuckBob novels, I tend to write in third-person limited (“Malana felt the pain and grief and terror washing over her again. She reached out toward the cops with her mind or soul or whatever it was that felt such things, using them to anchor her so that the wave couldn’t sweep her away.”). In Digging Deep, I switch between the main characters from chapter to chapter, so that each one gets proper attention. One of those characters, a rather uptight anthropology professor named Tidijin, refers to everyone by last name (“Ms. Tai” instead of “Malana”). My editor wanted me to change that—not in his dialogue, just in the narrative for his chapters—to keep it consistent.

One thing I’ve figured out over the years is that notes from editors and beta readers fall into three categories, which I call “D’oh,” “Eh,” and “Um”:

D’oh: These are the ones where you say, “Crap, why didn’t I catch that?” This is why you have beta readers and editors, though, because often you’re too close to your own manuscript to see the actual words on the page. You’re still seeing the glorious construct in your head, so you need someone who doesn’t have that to tell you “hey, you’ve got him shrugging on a heavy coat here but a page ago you said it was sweltering out.”

Eh: These are the comments where you think, “Yeah, okay, I guess.” It’s like when you’re getting ready to go out, hold up two shirts, and ask your wife, “Which one?” You don’t really have a preference. For that matter, if your wife said, “Why don’t you wear your green one instead?” you’d probably shrug and say, “Okay, sure.” You’re not sure these changes really enhance your manuscript, but they don’t hurt either, so why not make them?

Um: These are the ones where you scratch your head and wonder, “did I do such a bad job conveying what I meant, or did it just not work for you?” With a good editor, this becomes the start of a conversation, as you explain what you were trying to do and either figure out how to do it better or realize that there’s simply a disconnect between what you wanted and what they think should happen here, and decide where to go from there. The “Um’s” are the ones you fight for, but you need to be careful. Not every comment is an “Um,” and you need to pick your battles. Only fight for the ones that really matter to you because they really change the intent or the feel of your story.

In my case, I thought about it, talked to my editor, and finally said, “no, I’m not changing that. I think the readers are smart enough to remember that Malana’s last name is Tai, and changing the names in those chapters is necessary to convey Tidijin’s mindset.” And my editor said, “okay, fine, have it your way, it’s your book.”

Listen Closely and Learn to Parse

After I finished the first draft I sent Digging Deep out to several friends, most of whom have beta-read for me before. Two of them are fellow writers, two of them are avid readers. All four of them came back with really good feedback. Not all of it consistent, of course—one character annoyed the hell out of one beta-reader, for example, but the others didn’t have a problem with him at all. But all of it useful.

Of course, once I’d gotten their notes I had to collate them and compare. As a general rule of thumb, I divide comments into the three categories I mentioned above. Then I look at frequency. If all four readers gave me essentially the same “Eh” note, that’s reason enough to make that change. If more than one reader gives me the same “Um” note, I really need to take a hard look at whatever they thought needed to be changed, because clearly it’s not working for a number of people. But if only one person made an “Eh” comment, I probably wouldn’t bother. If only one made an “Um,” I queried the other readers, like I did about that one character, to see if it was really an isolated incident or if they’d also had problems with that element but hadn’t even realized it consciously.

It’s crucial to be able to make those distinctions between what’s affected several readers and thus is a real concern and what just tweaked one person the wrong way. If you were to make every change every beta-reader or editor suggested, you’d wind up with a horrible mish-mash—book by committee—and it wouldn’t be recognizable as your story anymore. But you don’t want to ignore feedback either—you are ultimately writing for an audience, and if a significant portion of that audience has a problem with some aspect of the story, you need to figure out why and address that.

I had several “D’oh”s on Digging Deep, thanks to my beta readers, and wound up rewriting a large chunk of it. The book was infinitely better as a result, which is why I make sure to send each story out to them and the others on my list every time.

Change Is Good

Some of the characters in Digging Deep are new, but four of them had shown up elsewhere:

• Wendell “Mack” Macklemore, the founder of OCLT and its resident tech-guru, first appeared in my OCLT co-creator David Niall Wilson’s novel The Parting, and then showed up again in my first OCLT novel, Incursion;

• R.C. Hayes, OCLT’s head honcho, first featured in my OCLT novella “Brought to Light” and then again in Incursion;

• Isabella Ferrara, the Italian monster hunter, appeared in Incursion;

• Malana Tai, the young empath from Tuvalu, was the main character of my short story “Clarity of Mind,” which was included in the anthology Apollo’s Daughters.

Mack and R.C. are only incidental in Digging Deep, but Malana is one of the main characters. This was the first time I was writing her as part of an ensemble, though—or, for that matter, the first time R.C. wasn’t taking center stage. That’s a very different dynamic for both of them, which meant I had to handle them differently.

I could have gotten myself all tied up in knots worrying about how writing them like this was going to affect them both. They’re both really good characters, and I really like them, both in the sense that I enjoy writing them and in the sense that I think they’re actually good people, and I didn’t want to screw either of them up.

But in the end I forced myself to relax about it. I had a story to tell, and they were in that story, and if I worried too much about bending them out of shape I’d wind up distorting my story instead.

So I just wrote it. Wrote them. And they were fine. In fact, they were better than fine. Seeing R.C. as just support cast him in a whole new light, illuminating facets of his character that weren’t evident when he was forced to carry the weight of the narrative. And forcing Malana into situations where she had to react to, and work with, other people, people with their own unique skills and traits but with the same mission she had acquired, allowed her to grow a great deal.

Trying to keep those characters who they were in the previous stories would have done them a serious disservice, and marred Digging Deep as a story as well. I’m glad I let them change and grow instead.

Nothing Wrong with the Occasional Deviation

I get flack from my friends sometimes for how rigid my writing process is. I come up with an idea, then write up a short pitch, then turn that into a full summary, then flesh that out into a proper chapter-by-chapter outline, then sit down and start writing. Once I start, I work through from beginning to end, start to finish, with all my focus on that one project alone.

Except when I don’t.

The first time I deviated from this was when I wrote the first DuckBob novel, No Small Bills. A friend had dared me to do something different, and I hadn’t written comedy before, so I decided “what the hell?” It was also the end of October, and I’d always meant to do NaNoWriMo properly (I’d written parallel to it a few times), but that meant no time to outline. So I wrote the entire novel by the seat of my pants, no outline at all, only a vague idea of where I was going, mainly just letting DuckBob bang into things along the way and seeing what happened next as a result. That worked out pretty well—at least, I’m happy with the book, and the people who’ve read it have told me it’s a ton of silly fun—but I’ve never been able to replicate that completely carefree, no outline approach.

Digging Deep started out the usual way, for me. Except that the process got interrupted. I wound up having to set the manuscript aside when it was only half done and take care of a few other projects with more urgent deadlines. A few months later, I was finally able to sit down, get back to Digging Deep, and finish the first draft. It was strange for me, though. I’d never taken a break halfway through a novel before. I had to reread Digging Deep from the beginning, of course, and that was odd too, because it had been enough time that I’d gained some distance. I felt like I was reading it for the first time. There were pieces I really liked, which was cool. And others where I thought, “What was I thinking?

In the end, I’d say Digging Deep was a lot stronger because I got that new perspective on it. Because I deviated from my norm.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to be taking a break in the middle of all my novels from now on. But maybe when something forces me out of my usual pattern I’ll see it as an opportunity instead of an irritation.

* * *

Aaron Rosenberg is the author of the best-selling DuckBob SF comedy series, the Dread Remora space-opera series, the Relicant epic fantasy series with Steve Savile, and the O.C.L.T. occult thriller series with David Niall Wilson. Aaron’s tie-in work contains novels for Star Trek, Warhammer, World of WarCraft, Stargate: Atlantis, Shadowrun, Eureka, and more. He has written children’s books (including the original series STEM Squad and Pete and Penny’s Pizza Puzzles, the award-winning Bandslam: The Junior Novel, and the #1 best-selling 42: The Jackie Robinson Story), educational books on a variety of topics, and over seventy roleplaying games (such as the original games Asylum, Spookshow, and Chosen, work for White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, Fantasy Flight, Pinnacle, and many others, and both the Origins Award-winning Gamemastering Secrets and the Gold ENnie-winning Lure of the Lich Lord). He is the co-creator of the ReDeus series, and a founding member of Crazy 8 Press. Aaron lives in New York with his family. His new novel Digging Deep is available now from Crossroad Press.

Aaron Rosenberg: Website | Twitter

Digging Deep: Amazon | Crossroad Press

The workshop I gave this past weekend was about characters — specifically, how you make characters become architects of narrative rather than part of the architecture. Meaning, they build the house around them as they move through it. They design their space by making choices. They decorate. They are like earthworms chewing dirt and excreting plot behind them.

That’s right. I said it.

Your characters are best when they’re PLOT-POOPERS.

Crawling through the dirt.

Poopin’ plot as they go.

Or something, shut up, don’t @ me.

The point is that, as storytellers — specifically when we’re telling stories in the genre space — we can at times be a little over-reliant upon building the world (aka, the house) and then hastily shoving characters into it instead of letting characters lead the way.

And when asked to further explain this during the workshop, I came up with a suggestion to think about the dichotomy this way, as a manifestation of:

History versus Destiny.

Destiny, in this context, is a thing you cannot escape. It is a framework of mythic narrative that the character does not choose and is, ultimately, a prison — whether we’re talking a literal destiny in the context of the story or an enforced plot structure from the storyteller, it’s effectively a trap. (/Ackbarred)

History, on the other hand, is a thing that people make up as they go. What I mean is, in the truest sense, history is a thing you create for yourself and your world. We may view history as predesigned, but that’s only because it involves us looking back on it in reflection, but while it feels passive, it was active when a person helped to make it. Alexander Hamilton, as our largest historical-figure-slash-pop-culture-crossover, was not destined for shit. He carved his name on the bedrock of American history, changing fate instead of falling prey to it. (Now there’s an argument there too that he falls prey to a certain kind of destiny, but I’d argue that’s literally untrue and serves more as a literary device of him engineering his own downfall, which is a feature of the best tragedies. The difference here being he as a character and an actual historical figure created this for himself rather than the storytellers [Lin-Manuel Miranda and, I guess, American Jesus?] creating a paradigm for him and then forcing him into it.)

Point being, you can over-design a world and over-construct a plot — which threatens the agency of the characters in that world.

And to remind you, this is how I presently define character agency, as seen in this post:

Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

Multiple characters with agency creates an opportunity for a lot of interesting drama and conflict — which is exactly what you want in a good story. What you don’t want is a lot of characters feeling like, no matter who they actually are as characters, they have been given a role and a fate as dictated by plot: aka, a destiny. And again, I don’t necessarily mean a destiny in the world of the story, I mean a destiny outside the narrative, one levied by you, the storyteller, to force them into the plot you’ve created.

In a roleplaying game context, think of how a subpar dungeon master might overly try to control the narrative. Five players create five adventurers in a tavern, and the DM lets them know, “You hear the roar of a dragon somewhere near, burninating the countryside with his fire breath.” The DM then leans back, confident the players will have their characters run out into the countryside with their swords and scepters drawn, but of course, people are like cats, they’re utterly uncontrollable, and so instead the players say, “Our characters have devices that we will remain inside, and we board up the doors and windows and drink a lot of Goblin Ale and we fight the orcs by the bar who have been giving us the literal stink-eye all night.”

Now, a a bad DM here cleaves to destiny and says, but that’s not the story that I, the mighty Dungeon Master, created for you, and finds some way to force them outside to fight the dragon. He keeps pushing and pushing until they have no choice but to address the dragon’s scourge. This is, of course, the act of “railroading,” and can be done both at the game table and in video games, too.

A good DM instead relies on the characters, via their players, to write their own history and say “eat shit, destiny.” The DM helps them facilitate their drunken barfighty “shelter-in-place” moment, realizing that a) it makes more fun for the players (aka, the audience) to get to do what they want to do and b) it makes for a more interesting story because we’ve all seen the ADVENTURERS FIGHT DRAGON narrative but maybe haven’t seen the ADVENTURERS SHELTER IN PLACE AT A TAVERN DURING A DRAGON ATTACK AND USE THAT TIME TO SWILL MAGIC BEER AND PUNCH EACH OTHER. The latter also has the narrative advantage of being something that isn’t predictable, because it doesn’t fall into known patterns.

The ‘tell’ that comes when you’ve pushed characters into a narrative destiny is that you have a moment when you realize, “I need Character A to perform Task B in order to reach Outcome C.” Meaning, you’ve created for yourself a performative, outcome-based model for the story — “I really need Dave the Barbarian to be at Castle Ogredong by morning to stop the Kobold Incursion, even though he’s a barbarian and really shouldn’t have any interest in stopping the Kobolds.” Which means you’re arguably closing off more narratively interesting options in order to cram Barbarian Dave into the outcome you’ve set. It shows a lack of flexibility and creativity and fails to let the character make his own destiny — would it be more interesting if Dave joined the Kobolds, instead? Maybe. So do that. Let Dave find his history and fuck the tropes and the standard scope of the tale as you have designed it.

You’re not designing adventures (aka, destiny).

You’re empowering characters (aka, history).

(This is good storytelling both in books and in games, by the way.)

(At least, IMNSHO.)

Curiously, the Star Wars prequels can, depending your (ahem) certain point-of-view, fit both of these modes — on the one hand, internal to the narrative, Anakin Skywalker does a very good job of rejecting his destiny as some kind of chosen one / Force-balancer / midichlorian private-dancerer character — he is too stubborn and willful to be trapped in the rules and life that this destiny demands of him. The Jedi Order says, “You’re the Chosen One!” and then Anakin says, “Actually, I’mma kill these baby Jedi just to show you how little fucks I give about that,” and then he gets punted into some lava.

On the other hand, externally, prequels often suffer from the problem where the fate of the story and its characters is already written. Not only written, but precisely pinpointed — the end of any prequel narrative must line up perfectly with the anchor-point beginning of the subsequent (but already told) tale, or the two will be out-of-sync. In that case, prequels are nearly always a case of destiny over history, and you have far less wiggle-room in terms of creating characters who can Be Interesting and Make History. Because history has already been made for them.

This, by the way, invokes the danger of overrelying on architectural story design, like the kind you’d find with Save the Cat — I dearly love that book and the pattern it sets as a starting point, but it dictates a series of milestones almost as if they’re sales targets. Art and story do not do well when they follow patterns and tropes and stereotypes again and again — yes, you can still use those patterns and tell a great story, but it’s also just as likely you’ll find them overly restrictive in how fluid it allows the characters to be when making their own way through the world you’ve given them. It forces us to declare that the plot is more interesting than the characters, which is almost never the case: we like stories and choose to enter them and remain in them precisely because of characters, because of the empathic bridge a good storyteller builds between us (the reader) and the characters on the page.

Note that this isn’t an anti-outline approach, should you be the type of person who is called a “plotter” rather than a “pantser.” It may seem anathema, but it’s really not: you just have to write an outline that’s character-driven, one that unfolds due to character choices rather than storyteller choices. (Yes, technically that is a bit artificial in its definition — character choices are always storyteller choices, because characters aren’t fucking real. They’re not prancing about in the ether just waiting for you to be their conduit into the CORPOREAL NARRATIVE PLANE, though it’s certainly allowed to feel that way.) What I mean is, the choices you choose to make in the story are better when executed based on the characters you’ve created rather than the exoskeleton of plot or world. Characters represent an organic, internal musculature and skeletal structure — plot and world represent something far too external and artificial.

We come for the characters.

So let the characters lead.

To sum up, when it comes down to characters either creating plot or falling prey to it, it’s worth realizing which is the cart and which is the horse — all that PLOT DESIGN and WORLDBUILDY GOODNESS and those COOL RULES don’t mean shit-on-toast if you have to cram the characters into it like a squirming, bitey raccoon into a trash bag. Characters are the center of the story, even if they don’t know it. Let them be makers of their own history…

….not victims of your railroaded narrative destiny.

* * *

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.

Out now!

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N