[Warning: deeper into this review, you will be walking onto the muddy streets of lawless SPOILERTOWN. Ye have been warned.]

This will be less a review of The Last Jedi (Episode VIII) than it will be… my thoughts? An analysis? Me opening my head like a flip-top Pac-Men and seeing what globs of brain-goo I can grab and hastily smack into the screen?

If you want my review, it’s this:

WOOOOOO

YAAAAAAY

OH WHOA

WAIT

WOW

AHHHHHH

*pant pant pant*

NO WAY DID THEY JUST

THEY DID

AND NOW

BUT THEN

OH HOLY SHIT

WAIT BUT THAT MEANS

*gesticulates wildly*

And, close.

I fucking loved it.

That’s it. That’s my review. It’s mostly just a series of excitable sounds with the occasional twirling around until I’m dizzy. But I’d rather look past my gibbon-like hoots and my strange, erotic dances and see what lies within. What lurks deeper. What do I see when I enter the DARK SIDE CAVE to have the truth revealed to me?

Your Expectations Will Not Be Met

Fandom is a tricky bear to wrestle. We love a thing so deeply, we entwine ourselves within it. We thread a little bit — sometimes a lot — of our identity into the thing. And we come to believe we own that thing, and further, we join a tribe of fellow owners who all have threaded themselves into it both intellectually and emotionally. We feel excited by what this thing can bring us. We develop pet theories. We craft and conjure the path we would take if we were ever handed the keys to the Thing We Love. We become excited and obsessive, a little bit. Sometimes a lotta bit.

But here’s the thing:

Stories can never be written for the fans.

Fan service isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it is sometimes a fairly lazy thing — it’s a comfortable signal, a soft chair, it’s Norm from Cheers where everybody knows his name. It’s to say, “You’re lost here, but look, here is a familiar friend to help you through. It’s to let you know that despite all the strange flora and the eyes glowing in the dark, you’re still a known quantity in a known land. This is a safe place.” When done overmuch, fan service does more than just introduce a few friendly faces. It burns down the trees. It lights up the dark. It slides a jukebox over and slams the top of it like it’s fucking Fonzie and suddenly, the Greatest Hits begin to play, just as you love them. Maybe in an order you don’t know, but still the songs you know and you adore.

The Last Jedi is not without its fan service moments, but they are few and far-between, and even when they exist, they exist to challenge you more than they do to bring you succor.

The Last Jedi will not meet your expectations.

Oh, it knows them.

It is well-aware of them, in fact, and is well-aware that you have them. And it willfully… I don’t want to say disregards them, precisely, but in a sense, it has weaponized them against you. It knows you’ve seen all the movies. It knows you know the narrative beats, the tropes, the rhyming couplets of George Lucas, and then it gently puts them all in a magician’s hat, and then it reaches into the hat, and instead of pulling them back out, it pulls out a porg.

And then the movie hits you with the porg.

Whap.

That metaphor may have gotten a little out of hand, but I think you grok me.

The Last Jedi cares very much about your expectations.

It’s just not going to meet them.

You, a fan, have explicit ideas about what a Star Wars movie can and should do, and it’s going to use that against you. And it’s going to play for a larger audience, as it must. It can’t work just for you, dear fan — never mind the fact that fandom is not a singular, globular entity, like a giant amoeba with one set of desires to be met. It has to go bigger. It has to please a wide variety of viewers while trying to make new fans along the way.

This message is clear within the first 20 minutes of the movie.

[Once again, turn back, for HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.]

We expect Luke to take his old lightsaber — really, Anakin’s old lightsaber — and regard it as the way one should regard something that was last seen in your pre-severed hand. I mean, if last time I saw a Hummel figurine was in my hand that got lopped off, and then decades later you traipsed up to me on my creepy hermit island and handed me that very Hummel figurine, I’d look at you like you were Jesus Christ Himself, because, what the fuck. But that’s not what Luke does. He regards the lightsaber and instead, chucks it behind him, where a couple of porgs try to murder each other with it.

We expect Poe’s half-wit fly-boy hero plan to work, because in these movies, the dimwit hero plan always works — Han Solo always gets them out of a scrape by doing something very Han Solo, for instance, and so we trust that Poe is living by his instincts, and those will save the day. Except that’s not what happens. His efforts fuck it all up. Arguably, much of the film is based on his gigantic fuck-up. Lives are lost because of Poe Dameron.

We expect Vice Admiral Holdo doesn’t know what she’s doing, and that the snappy man who demands the plan is in the right. But he’s not. We expect incorrectly. She’s right. He’s wrong. She doesn’t owe him shit. And yet he, the demanding man, is assured that he is right and must be told the plan, and his Sexist Hero Man routine gets people killed.

We expect Rey to turn. Or Kylo to turn. They don’t.

We expect Snoke to be a grand puppetmaster, the Emperor Palpatine of the trilogy, and that he’ll — ooh, oops, he’s now cut in half? Or more than half? Was that a hand still sitting on the arm of his throne room chair? Somebody get some antibacterial ointment in that joint, post-haste.

We expect that our heroes must be chosen ones, that they come from special families, that they have been born of destiny — not that they are the children of drunken junkers, not that they once mopped a star destroyer, not that they are a lone mechanic weeping over the loss of a sister.

Often, our expectations are based on what we know of the former films — we know that the big AT-AT battle means a scrappy band will take some of those AT-ATs down and they’ll escape, but this escape is not so plucky, nor does it begin the film. It ends it. And it nearly ends the resistance. The heroic sacrifice of Finn — an expected moment — is thwarted by Rose, who kisses him. (We expected that to be Rey, didn’t we?)

In the throne room, we expect it will go like it did in Return of the Jedi — and it does, a little. Snoke is ultimately the Emperor, in that he’s a Sinister Puppetmaster with a lot of buildup but not a lot of meat on those bones. (Remember: Palpatine/Sidious only gets those deeper character beats much, much later, long after ROTJ left theaters.) The dark apprentice does turn on his master to save another, but Kylo’s turn is not the sacrifice of Vader but rather, a Sith-like move to eradicate the master and take on a new apprentice: Rey. Kylo does not turn to the light-side. He simply turns against Snoke. He fulfills the Dark Side’s wishes. (And then promptly begs and negs Rey when she won’t take his hand. “You’re nobody,” he tells her. “Please.”) And all of this happens in the second film of the trilogy, not the third — another subversion.

And that’s the word to note.

Subversion.

Another word:

Mutation.

Chaos theory.

Butterfly effect.

Ripples from thrown stones.

Or —

A Mirror, Slowly Cracking

It goes like this:

The Force Awakens was a little bit comfort food. It needed to be. It needed to play off our nostalgia. It needed to have the cut of A New Hope’s jib. We needed a reminder that we know this thing, that we love this thing.

But to go back to the jukebox metaphor, it didn’t play The Greatest Hits only. Or rather, it played them, but they were played by a new band, or performed live, or remixed, or played in a different key. The Force Awakens was comfort food, but with a few odd ingredients thrown in — “Wait, what the fuck is shiso? Is this bison? Are persimmons a real thing? Is this a persimmon or are those fruits you get in Narnia?”

The Force Awakens birthed mutations into the narrative code of Star Wars. It threw rocks into water. It chipped the mirror into which we were all staring — introducing just a few small cracks in the reflective glass. When Kylo Ren faces down Finn and Rey at the end of that film, he tells them, “It’s just us, now.” He’s telling us that the baton has been passed. “It’s not their story anymore. It’s our story.”

And then, The Last Jedi continues that.

The mutations are passed down, and the monster evolves.

The rocks in water created ripples, and now we’re seeing those ripples move toward the shoreline, some of them becoming waves.

The cracks in the mirror are growing bigger, distorting the image we expect to see reflected back at us, ruining the comfort of a mirrored image and breaking our assumptions into shards and islands of glass.

Every time we, as viewers, reach out to touch the mirror — as Rey does, in the cave — we only make more cracks. We don’t resolve the image. We don’t save the mirror. We further the breaking of the glass through our clumsy, monkey-handed expectations.

The comfort food of the Episode VII has become the molecular gastronomy of Episode VIII — ingredients we thought we knew, resolved into new forms: foams and suspensions, gelees and pancakes and cocktails, a thing we expect to be sweet is suddenly sour and salty, another thing is disassembled and deconstructed, a third thing isn’t supposed to be edible but somehow, it is.

The Last Jedi is not our comfort food.

It is not going to let your nostalgia be enough.

It’s A Fucking Mess, This Movie

The movie’s a mess.

And it needs to be.

I love that it’s a mess.

It’s not a formless mess. It’s not without purpose or shape.

But it’s a mess.

Let’s switch gears for a second.

Go to this link and watch the video — no, it’s not porn, it’s a brief clip from A Chef’s Table, featuring chef Grant Achatz talking about — well, you’ll see.

I, as a writer, take a lot of inspiration from this show, A Chef’s Table, not just because I like to watch pretentious chefs plate pretentious food pretentiously (though my word, I do love it!), but rather because I really appreciate seeing how each chef comes to the kitchen and to the plate and to the very idea of food differently. They are each singularly obsessed with their craft, but each in a wildly different direction — how they do it, why they do it, their ethos behind doing it, how they treat their staff, how they frame a plate, how they invent and reinvent themselves and their work? It fascinates me. And it inspires me.

Achatz in that clip says, to paraphrase, that he doesn’t want to be defined by the traditional margins of… well, preparing and serving food. He takes inspiration from modern art and for a dessert, removes the plate from the equation and lets the tablecloth serve as canvas:

That, an image of said dessert at Alinea, his restaurant.

That dish is a mess, in the literal sense of the word.

A wonderful mess. An elegant, articulate mess.

But a mess, just the same.

Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that The Last Jedi is quite so avant-garde — it’s not a shattering of the mold, it’s not giving us some David Lynchian view of the Star Wars franchise, but it is giving us a Rian Johnson view. And I’d argue, without knowing Rian Johnson’s precious and weird and wonderful heart, that he — like Achatz — did not want to be bound by the rigors of the plate. Because he did not make a film that followed the bouncing ball. It does not follow the classic narrative Hollywood blockbuster beats. (Nor, for the record, does Empire Strikes Back, by the way. I talk about how that film subverts the pattern in my book — plug alert — Damn Fine Story.) Johnson does not make a film pinned to the corkboard by the tropes of the Star Wars universe. It sees them. It uses them. And then it willfully discards them, locking eyes with you so you see that it’s doing it. And it results in a messy, bumpy, strange film.

One that needs to be messy, bumpy, and strange.

Because then, only then, are we truly free from the pattern.

I explained to my wife that The Last Jedi is like The Matrix Reloaded, if The Matrix Reloaded was actually good. That second film of the Matrix trilogy is a fucking mess, and it tries very hard to look into its own heart and challenge the assumptions you have about it — but it was too soon, and it too easily betrayed what the first film was without understanding why it was doing it. And it did it all in a haughty, nose-in-the-air, intellectually-elite way. (As with all things here and everywhere, YMMV.)

This film tries and messily succeeds.

And the resultant mess — the splatters, the ripples, the broken glass, the unfolding mutations — changes our understanding. It frees Episode IX from fitting a known pattern. It frees us from knowing what’s to come — we are gloriously, wonderfully lost. Just as the characters are themselves lost. I pondered that this film could’ve just as easily been called The Lost Jedi, because that’s how it feels. Luke is wayward. Rey is lost to her own powers and place in the world. Kylo is lost in his rage, fallen into the chasm of his heart and spirit. Poe is unmoored from his heroism. Finn is pinballing between his cowardice and his own heroism. Rose is lost without her sister. Leia is lost without Han and the Republic. The Resistance is lost under the might of the First Order. Everyone is lost. Everyone is failing. The entire movie presents us with failure after failure: characters trying to do the right thing and missing a step, every damn time.

But it presents failure in the way that the dessert table of Grant Achatz is a failure: it’s broken, yes, but into new shapes, new tastes. It’s failure in the way a mirror is broken: one image becomes many, distorted and new and beautiful in its way. It’s failure as the butterfly effect. It’s failure as Yoda tells it: the greatest teacher, failure is.

This failure of Luke, of Rey, of the Resistance, of all the characters, leads to a resurrection — the Phoenix Firebird of the Rebellion — rising anew.

This failure of these characters is a success for the film.

It’s a mess in the best way. Because in that mess, the patterns are lost, the expectations are destroyed, the tropes are broken and bent. For the first time in a long time, I had literally no idea what was going to happen, and that felt like madness in the best way.

This is a mythic remix. A resetting of the game board.

In being lost, we have become found.

That Coda, At The Ending

At the end of the film, we see the fathier stable-boy gently summon a broom to his hand and look to the night sky, a Resistance ring on his finger, the music of Luke Skywalker rising. It’s an odd coda in that none of the Star Wars films give us anything like that — but it’s beautiful to me in several ways. It’s beautiful because:

a) It continues the theme of Rey, Finn, Rose, where power and rebellion and heroism needn’t come from special bloodlines — it’s in all of us, all the way down to this one stable-boy.

b) It serves as a refutation, in fact, of the wealth and spectacle of Canto Bight, full of people who think they’re special but who are decidedly not.

c) It continues what for me is one of the chief themes of Star Wars, in that the actions of a small group can change the galaxy — Rose and Finn meet a boy who one day may become the face of the new Resistance; they have inspired him, they were the spark.

d) It makes me think of our own time, and the need for resistance against a rising autocratic regime, and it tells me that there’s a whole other take waiting on The Last Jedi, showing how it (and Episode VII) are telling us a lot more about our current political climate than we’d like. The film flirts for a while with an angle of Whataboutism, with Bothsidesism, where Kylo tells us that he wants to kill the past, where DJ the slicer tells us that all sides are bad, Luke hates the Jedi — but the movie concertedly, decidedly tells us that’s not true by the end. Rey picks her side, as does Kylo. Finn refutes DJ’s assertion. No Grey Jedi exist. Evil is evil, oppression is oppression, and the light will rise to meet it — here, now, with this young boy and his FORCE-BROOM.

and finally

e) Because my son loved that part. My son is six years old and responded to that kid by wanting to be that kid. HE HAS THE FORCE, my son said immediately after leaving the theater, DID YOU SEE THE BROOM OMG THE BROOM. This storyworld has long been generational: each generation now getting a trilogy for them, unique to them, and this is that, here. I love that. I love that this trilogy is more for him than it is for me. It doesn’t kill all the old stuff, it doesn’t shutter the past entirely, but it does break it apart, and remake it for kids my son’s age — and kids who aren’t just my son, either, kids who don’t look like him, kids who don’t have to look like Luke Skywalker but can instead look like Rose or Finn or Poe or Rey.

The Challenge

The challenge comes for the viewer is this:

Do you need need your Star Wars to be comfort food? No harm, no foul if you do. Some look to Star Wars and need it to be the perfect mirror it has been — they don’t want that mirror broken so that other stories can be told, so that other people can see themselves in the shared shards. Some want the tropes. They want the familiarity. They need nostalgia.

And this movie burns it all down.

A lightning strike setting fire to a sacred tree.

It’s okay if you didn’t like it.

But it’s worth appreciating what it did, and why, even if you don’t.

Me, I loved it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to return to my wild gesticulations of joy.

See you around, kid.

(A few complaints and concerns about the film will be in the comments.)

Since Election Day 2016, there’s been a steady stream of comments and memes on social media comparing the United States to [fill in your favorite/popular/overhyped dystopian fiction]. From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu to cracks about the Hunger Games, just when we thought dystopian fiction had worn out its welcome and it’s finally time for sexy yetis or magical narwhals or whatever to be the Next Big Thing, the world changed dramatically almost overnight, and now we cling to those dystopian books as more than escapist fantasies—they’re primers for dealing with daily life and planning the revolution.

2016: Trump won’t win.

2017: President Trump can’t do that, can he?

2018: You watching The Hunger Games tonight? I hope my District wins.

— Eric Smith (@ericsmithrocks) March 2, 2016

Or maybe people are just reaching for the easy jokes. But good comedy is usually based at least partly in truth, and humor is a longstanding coping strategy when things get completely awful. All kidding aside, for an increasing number of people living in America, things are getting pretty bad. The worst. People are literally dying as a result of the choices our current administration is making every day. If a self-interested, likely corrupt and compromised government hell-bent on disenfranchising, deporting, discrediting, dehumanizing, and outright killing its own citizens isn’t a dystopia, then I don’t know what is. So, perhaps we cling to dystopian stories now because as bad as things are, at least it isn’t quite that bad yet—or to help us prepare for what’s coming—just as children and teens read young adult fiction to get a preview of the embarrassment, relationships, and challenges that lie ahead for them.

These days, for many years now, dystopian fiction and YA go hand in hand. There are lots of reasons for that—high school is a kind of dystopia, adults are the establishment, and so on—and consequently in the early days of 2017, many people, including myself, made references to waiting for teenagers to save the world.

Contrary to some comments I’ve seen: I’m glad my friends and I have kids. We’re gonna need teen protagonists to fix this dystopia we built.

— E. C. Myers (@ecmyers) November 9, 2016

Again, going for the easy punchline, but with an underlying flavor of truth. It makes sense that young adults would gravitate towards stories where teens tackle gross social injustice and change the world for the better, while picking up a boyfriend or girlfriend or two along the way. But a tremendous number of not-so-young adults are also reading this stuff, and always have been. Depending on who you ask on a given day, upwards of fifty percent of YA sales are to grownups. What’s up with that? What could possibly be of interest in these books for people on the wrong side of high school graduation?

The heart of good YA fiction is a character learning about their world and figuring out how they fit into it, and that doesn’t stop once you become an adult with student loans and mortgages, jobs and children of your own—and a world filled with big, seemingly impossible problems to solve like climate change and expensive healthcare and rampant sexual harassment and too many subscription services for streaming video. Back in the golden, olden days, when the world lived on the brink of nuclear war, people tended to stay in the same job for their whole lives. But these days, it’s more common for people to change jobs every few years, maybe go back to school for a graduate degree, live on unemployment for a while, start their own business, and so on. We are all constantly reinventing ourselves as we find new places for ourselves in a changing world. Newsflash: adults don’t have their acts together any more than teens do, and we’re desperately searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. Yeah, we can still relate to YA fiction, and we need escapism more than ever.

But another key element of YA fiction, especially dystopian YA fiction, is that one person—or perhaps a band of preternaturally beautiful, scrappy, snarky teens—can make a difference, albeit often at great personal sacrifice. They can change the world. They can save the whole damn world. And that’s what all those jokes are about. We need that kind of optimism right now. Only just as your average YA protagonist can’t wait for adults to come along to make everything better, it turns out that we can’t wait for our kids to grow up and fix our mistakes.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with ReMade? Fortunately, the teens in our series were killed before the 2016 presidential election, though they awakened in a distant future that clearly has seen its share of dystopias and is deadly in its own right, what with the lack of food and a surplus of killer robots. They have literally been remade—faster, better, stronger—and now, with the entire future they had planned lost to them forever, along with their friends, family, iPhones, and Instagram, most of them seize the rare opportunity to change their identity. Realizing that no one is coming to save them and there’s no going back to the way things were, they rise to the challenge of surviving and saving the world.

And I’m seeing that happening now in America. A year after the election, people have stepped up in surprising, inspiring ways. Many who hate talking on the phone and to strangers have called their representatives, sent e-mails and letters, marched around the country for what they believe in. People who never had any interest in politics are running for office—and winning! People are subscribing to and reading freaking newspapers again, which has to be a sign of the apocalypse. People are speaking up and speaking out against institutional racism and harassment, raising funds for human rights organizations and disaster relief. People are voting, even for local elections. If the America we know died on the night of January 20, 2017, then we have the opportunity to remake it, and ourselves and decide what kind of a nation we want to be.

So imagine this farfetched scenario. Your parents are absent or dead. You’ve just realized or accepted that the world is an ugly place and you can’t trust your own leaders. You’re under constant surveillance, manipulated by social media, and more people are suffering and dying every day. The polar ice caps are melting. What are you going to do?

We are each the protagonist of this dystopian nonfiction. Forget about making America great again, whatever that means. It’s always had room for improvement. Let’s work together to remake it better than ever. No one is coming to save us, and it’s up to us the save the damn world.

* * *

E.C. Myers: assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published numerous short stories and four young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, The Silence of Six, and Against All Silence.

His most recent work includes contributions to anthologies Feral Youth, Behind the Song, Where the Stars Rise, and A Thousand Beginnings and Endings(forthcoming). He is also co-writing the YA science fiction serial ReMade for Serial Box Publishing, which begins its second season on 11/15/17. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter: @ecmyers.

E.C. Myers: Website | Twitter

ReMade: Read @ Serial Box

I was a teenager in New York City in the 1980s. My parents were artists, and I was queer. Which meant that, by the time I was 15 years old, almost everything in my world – from school reading assignments to dinner conversations — was about AIDS. AIDS and my bisexuality didn’t feel separable any more than AIDS and art did. I spent a lot of those years, and the ones that followed in university, lying to my parents and fighting our government. And in all the books I read, everyone always died.

When I first encountered Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint in the 1990s, it was lent to me by a suitor with little explanation. I read it, somewhat dutifully (I love when people recommend books to me, I less enjoy the time pressure of having them lent to me), with a constant startlement.  Wait, I’d ask, are those guys dating?!? I had to keep flipping backwards and starting scenes over to be sure I was reading what I thought I was reading.

Some of that disbelief in my own comprehension was a product of the time; I was not familiar with queer narratives that weren’t about AIDS. I hadn’t read any, I hadn’t seen any, and, to a large extent, I hadn’t experienced any either. But Swordspoint, of course, isn’t set in our world. And Ellen’s deftness as a writer means that the world she created was saturated with a constant overt queerness that was always never announced. In the neighborhoods of her unnamed city in an unnamed land, same-sex attraction is so normalized and bisexuality is so ubiquitous, terms for them don’t even seem to exist.

But this queerness has not been, in many ways, what makes the world of Riverside (the city may not get a name, but its most infamous neighborhood certainly does), so remarkable. More, for me, it is the amalgam of time periods and class-related dilemmas that so reflect the New York I grew up in. In the world of Riverside everyone is brash, everyone is proud, and everyone is just trying to survive their particular and peculiar dilemmas.

These days, Swordspoint is anything but a historical artifact of when I first saw queerness without loss in fiction. Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s serialized prequel to the World of Riverside books is now in its third season. Created and led by Ellen Kushner and with a team of writers, Tremontaine explores the City fifteen years before readers first found it.

While all of us are working within a set of existing rules created by the Riverside books and stories – Tremontaine represents a number of peculiar freedoms for each of us on the team. The collaborative nature of the process, based on a TV writers room, means we never have to suffer in solitude with challenging first draft, an abrupt case of writer’s block, or a sudden inability to find just the right word. But because of the source material — and Serial Box’s commitment to underserved voices — Tremontaine also means we never, ever have to worry about having too many queer characters.

In fact, queerness is so the overwhelming default in Tremontaine that the writing team (which is also significantly skewed towards queerness) occasionally has to be reminded to let a character or two be straight.

Freed from the constraints of our world, we don’t have to note that a character enjoys relationships with multiple genders before portraying those relationships. No one ever has to write a coming out scene. Our villains can be queer because our heroes can be queer. And, perhaps most importantly for our proclivities as writers, we can be as tragic and murderous as we want, because none of our characters ever die for being queer. In the world of Riverside, that’s just not possible.

Growing up as I did, the legacy of the AIDS era as reflected both implicitly and explicitly in queer creative work is incredibly important to me. I often argue with younger people about the need for both a freedom from our tragic stories as well as an ongoing acceptance of their necessary reality. It is 100% true that people – of all identities – need to see queer heroes and queer victories. It is also 100% true that the history of villains and tragedy in queer art created by queer people is not one that should be excised from the cultural narrative.

People who have lived those losses, and those fears, remain right here among us. I’m even one of them. Several people on the Tremontaine team are. While those stories are largely long ago and far away both personally and from the world of Tremontaine, they are not absent.

When I first read Swordspoint in my early-20s, it was revolutionary for me. While queer characters now abound in the books I read and the books I write, the world of Riverside as it has been expanded through Tremontaine remains special. For we have always been there just as we have always been here.

But in there, in that unnamed City, in our queernesses we are also always safe and never sick. We hope you’ll join us there in ambition and adventure.

* * *

Racheline Maltese can fly a plane, sail a boat, and ride a horse, but has no idea how to drive a car. With Erin McRae she writes romance about fame and public life. She is also a producer and writer on Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s adventure of manners, swordplay, and chocolate that’s a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s gay lit classic, Swordspoint. 

Racheline Maltese: Website | Twitter

Tremontaine: Read @ Serial Box

Yesterday, a literary agent on Twitter stepped into a big pile of Twitter poop. One assumes this agent meant well. He, the agent who shall remain nameless as he has since deleted his tweet, popped on with a bit of intense, over-the-top writing wisdom (“wisdom”) that said, paraphrased, cut out all of the adverbs and adjectives from your book. All of them. Every last one of those little motherfuckers — axe ’em. They are ill beasts to be put down.

My response, was of course, to go even bigger:

DELETE ALL REFERENCES TO PLACE AND TIME IN YOUR BOOK. ALL OF THEM. GET RID. YOUR BOOK SHOULD FEEL TIMELESS AND AS IF IT IS FLOATING IN THE NETHERVOID.

DELETE ALL NAMES IN YOUR BOOK. EVERY LAST ONE. PURGE THEM. NAMES MARK US AS INDIVIDUAL BEINGS AND TRUE STORYTELLERS KNOW THAT WE ARE ALL ONE TERRIBLE, NAMELESS ENTITY.

PUNCTUATION IS A CRUEL VIOLATION OF THE SACRED WHITE SPACE OF THE PAGE, AND TO SUMMON READERS YOU MUST ELIMINATE ALL PUNCTUATION. BE SHUT OF THESE HUMAN, FLESHBAG NEEDS. YOUR READERS WILL THANK YOU IN DREAD ULULATIONS

SOON YOUR WORK WILL BECOME TRULY SUBLIME. YOU WILL HAVE CUT OUT THE FAT. AND THE TENDON. YOU WILL HAVE BECOME RID OF THE RUINED MEAT OF EXISTENCE. THE BOOK MUST BECOME ONLY BONE. SHARP, HEART-KILLING BONE.

REMOVE ALL WORDS FROM YOUR BOOK. GET. RID. OF. WORDS. THE BOOK MUST BECOME A SERIES OF GRUNTS AND ANGRY GAZES. THAT IS HOW YOU WRITE A BESTSELLER. YOUR BOOK IS A DEFIANT, WORLD-CLEANSING WIND. IT IS THE GASP OF A DYING GOD. THE FLASH OF A STAR IMPLODING.

And of course, that’s all very bad advice.

It’s very bad advice because there exists this occasional movement toward severe austerity cuts inside fiction, as if every bit of prose should be cut down to the bone, and then the bone whittled to a spear that can be thrust cleanly through the reader’s heart. There’s nothing wrong with austerity in prose, if it’s what you seek and if it’s what the story demands. There’s also nothing wrong with adding fat to the prose in the form of descriptive language. One’s voice as an author and in terms of the book you’re writing is useful, even vital, to preserve; I often note that originality in fiction is utter bullshit, except in the area where it really matters, which is to say, YOU. You, the author, are the one original component that can be brought to a story. Your ideas. Your fears. Your preferred arrangement of elements. And, obviously, your voice.

Now, that’s not to say that BUT IT’S MAH VOICE is a good reason to keep bad writing. Bad writing is bad. But bad writing does not mean, “writing that includes adverbs and adjectives.”

Adjectives and adverbs should be kept when they are impactful and provide clarity to the narrative. Use them with intentionality. Use them because without them, the work cannot be properly conveyed. Removing adjectives will force us not to describe things, and while over-describing things is bad, describing essential parts of the story is just fine. We want the reader to know what they’re seeing. And never mind the fact that the constant tolling of the anti-adverb bell always seems to misunderstand that adverbs don’t just mean SHE RAN OVERLY SORROWFULLY THROUGH THE GARDEN, it also means words like “later,” or “everywhere,” or “never” or “alone.” And so the advice really should be, don’t use adverbs or adjectives when they sound awkward, or when they fail to tell us something that we need to know.

All this goes toward the old chestnut of SHOW, DON’T TELL in fiction. But even that is an oft-misunderstood chestnut, innit?  SHOW DON’T TELL is half-nonsense because, spoiler warning, you’re always telling a story. It’s why it’s called storytelling. It’s why your book isn’t a fucking movie. You must use words to — oh no — tell it. SHOW DON’T TELL isn’t a rule; it’s a trick. You’re trying to trick the reader into feeling like they’re being shown a thing rather than told a thing. Which is fine and admirable to attempt.

Whatever.

All this, really, is beside the point.

The point today is that you should beware writing advice from people with power inside the publishing industry — which, I know, sounds terribly counterintuitive. But please, follow the bouncing ball of my logic:

Writing advice, as I am wont to note, is bullshit.

And yet, I give it. I give it because I like to think about this stuff and talk about this stuff and often talking about writing helps me unpack the problems I’m having with writing. So, yes, writing advice is bullshit. Bullshit can fertilize; it has value. But you still gotta know that it’s bullshit. I also increasingly like to make clear that writing advice is nothing more than giving an opinion, and it is similar to the opinion as to how one should wear their hair or parent their child: while there are a few cardinal rules, for the most part, it’s DO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU LIKE, BECAUSE WHATEVER WORKS IS WHATEVER WORKS.

Nearly every piece of writing advice can be taken, tested, and found wrong. Because inevitably there exists a novel — a popular novel, either bestseller or an award-winner or both — that does exactly the thing you’re Not Supposed To Do. Or it doesn’t do the thing that Everyone Is Supposed To Do. Novels break the rules all the time because ultimately, no rules exist. (The one rule that does exist is that you must finish your shit. A book can never exist until you finish it, and so all books pass that indestructible law.)

The problem is when people inside the industry — writers, yes, but more notably editors and agents and other publishing folk — make declarative statements about writing and style and story without first letting people know, “This is my preference, not an ironclad rule.” Newer writers, aka LI’L BABY PENMONKEYS WANDERING THE DARK WOODS OUTSIDE WRITERTOWN, take this shit as Golden Law. They accept it to have been given from On High, and so now it is Sacred, even though it’s no more sacred than the steaming load that falls out of a bull’s ass.

So, I just want to note that you should be wary of writing advice from people inside publishing — not that you should dismiss it or disregard it. To the contrary, you should try using the bullshit to fertilize your own narrative fields, and see if anything grows there. But take nothing as chiseled into stone. Make no assumptions about the indefatigability and righteousness of their advice. It’s just advice. They’re just telling you how they prefer you wear your hair. But they also don’t know. For every bit of writing wisdom they believe that they believe, they will probably have that faith tested — and defeated — again and again, because what works works, and what doesn’t, doesn’t.

If you’re a person inside publishing giving out writing advice, try to be cautious how you frame it. I’ve grown increasingly aware that the impact of my assertions can be dangerous; indeed, what works for you, what you like, may help someone. But it may set others off the path, and the best thing you can do is to frame your advice with a lot of flex in the joints, ensuring that people know full-well that what you’re offering is only your opinion, and nothing more.

NOW PLEASE GO AND READ MY BOOK ABOUT STORYTELLING

see, that’s how you pivot to sweet, sweet marketing, everyone

*beams*

* * *

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

As you may well know, I sell an ART HARDER, MOTHERFUCKER mug through the Zazzle store, and today, for some reason, the mug is on sale for like, 60% off. You get that discount, you simply click here and then use the coupon code ZHOLIDAYSAVE.

That coupon code also works on the clean version of the mug, though why you would ever want a coffee mug that doesn’t curse at you is beyond me.

And there are other mugs, too:

Certified Penmonkey

Caffeine, Motherfucker, Do You Speak It?

Writer Juice

And finally, the Secret to Writing mug.

All open to that 60% off with ZHOLIDAYSAVE.

Just putting that out there if you require gift ideas for the Penmonkey in your life.

Whilst in Florida, we went to the J.N. Ding Darling Wildlife Preserve on Sanibel Island, and I saw a bird — a white ibis, I believe — fishing at low tide. The bird stabbed into the water and withdrew what looked to be a fish, though upon closer examination, that’s a weird fish. I’m sure it is a fish, and I’m sure it’s not a cryptozoological find, but — well, take a look and tell me what you see.

(Note: click the pic to embiggen it.)

Here’s another bird — a snowy egret:

Let’s see, what else is going on?

WELL, tomorrow Alabama tries to elect a credibly-alleged child molester, so that’s fun. And the FCC is voting to dismantle Net Neutrality, which may one day mean you won’t be able to reach this website unless you pay more or I sign up with some special host or — well, the possibilities there are endless, but do understand that Net Neutrality going away means your Internet experience will suddenly be a lot more like your Cable TV experience. As with all things, call your reps, make noise, use 5calls.org, use Resistbot, whatever you gotta do.

Couple of my books this week are getting the EL CHEAPO e-book treatment

Atlanta Burns

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt

Each is $0.99.

Note, these are trigger warning-laden. Assume there’s a lotta dark-bad stuff going on in these books. But, as a bonus, there’s also a lot of punching and shooting small-town Nazis, so?

Also, if you’ve read any of my books, leaving a review of said books is a super helpful thing you can do. Especially with a book like Damn Fine Story, whose sales are strong, but who could use more reviews on a site like Amazon.

Is there more going on?

I DUNNO, PROBABLY.

At the end of the week is The Last Jedi, which I’m deeply geeked for, and contrary to people’s beliefs, I know literally nothing about the movie. I mean, no more than the average individual; I am no longer privy to Special Secret Star Wars Stuff. (Well, at least, nothing related to this movie.) I’m just a regular Citizen of the GFFA, folks.

Also, if you spoil the movie for anybody, you will be thrown into the Mighty Sarlacc, where you will be digested blah blah blah thousand years blah blah blah angry desert tentacle butthole.

Have a nice Monday!