The other day on Twitter I went on a bit of a tear about how I’d gotten away from photography over the last few years. Since the TINY HUMAN was born and with deadlines out the no-no-hole, it’s been tough securing say, an hour or two just to wander in the woods and take random-ass photos. I’m not a professional photog (though I do have a few lucky pro credits to my name, surprisingly), but I find there is intrinsic value in having creative outlets that aren’t writing. Not only does it clear my head from writing and give me a low-pressure mode of expression, but for me photography triggers the visual side of the creative spectrum, which can only (I hope) accentuate the written one. Macro photography in particular is a passion: itty-bitty worlds writ large! A simple waterdrop on top of a shampoo cap can look like a whole other world.

As such, I thought, well, fuck it. I’m gonna get back into it. I’ll make the time. I’ll take the time, rather — I cannot excrete hours from my pores. ONLY THE DREADED CHRONOVORE CAN DO THAT. Plus, I’m upgrading my camera game a little bit. New camera, new photos, a new year.

Every Monday for the foreseeable future, I’ll pop in here and post a macro photo.

Maybe I’ll add commentary sometimes.

Some weeks I probably won’t.

If you want to use the photo for story inspiration, go for it.

If you want to ignore it entirely, I dig that.

But this will be here, I think, as a fixture this year of reminding me to get off my ass and go wander the world a little bit with a camera in my hand. Sometimes I’ll post new photos. Sometimes I’ll dig back through the archives to find some cool ones. You’ll see a lot of macros, I think: waterdrops, fungi, flowers, random shit, foodie shit, and most definitely, bugs.

I won’t post any spider ones directly for you arachnophobes.

But I may offer links to them, like to this little lady right here.

I own all photos. I took them all. Copyright me, goddamnit.

Today’s photo:

The Lightbulb.

Really, just a waterdrop hanging from a withered nubbin of poison ivy vine.

But to me, it looks like a goddamn lightbulb.

It’s not the greatest photo. Clarity could be tighter. But I like it just the same.

Please to enjoy.

I went to a website and asked it to generate five random book titles for me, and it did. And then I had it generate five more for giggles. (I didn’t just as this of some random website, by the way — I didn’t like, go to CNN or Amazon and yell at it to give me titles. I used this website right here.)

That gives us ten random titles.

You will choose one of these titles and write a story using it as the title.

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words this go-around.

Write it. Post it at your online space. Drop a link here so we can all see it.

Due by next Friday, Jan 22nd, noon EST.

Your ten titles are:

The River’s Mask

The BookFeet

Future Graveyard

Across the Parlour and the Exile

Out of the Carnival and the Soul

The Crow of Nine-World

To Dance Beyond The Hand

The Living House’s Rabbit

Muddy Stars

The Goblet of Lost Chicago

Now go write!

That dragonfly is dead.

David Bowie is gone.

So now is Alan Rickman (who probably would’ve done a bang-up job playing Bowie), too.

Shit goddamnit shit.

And also the familiar, oft-repeated refrain:

Fuck cancer. Times a thousand. Times a million. Times infinity.

Art at its core is, I think, driven by death. It’s there to help us look away from death. Art is there to help us understand it. Art is there to romanticize death — or to stare it square in the face.

And death is also something that motivates artists.

When we’re born, we’re guaranteed two things: one breath and death. Everybody who lives gets those two certain narrative beats to their story, birth, death, born, died. It is not a morbid fantasy to note that I’m going to die and so are you. It’s not a threat. It’s a promise earned by life — that grim balancing of the scales is not reserved for one person over the next, for you but not for me, for the under-served but not the privileged. We all have wildly different journeys but when our time is up it’s like game design: we are all funneled toward the same ending, the same inevitability. Some of our life is about ignoring death and pretending it isn’t there. Some of our life is geared toward trying to prevent death — or, for some, running headlong toward it.

The fear of death can destroy you.

But the epiphany of it can also motivate you.

People ask why I work so hard or why I’ve been so single-minded to be what I want to be and that’s because I don’t want deathbed regrets. I don’t want to get there and then look back over my shoulder and look at all the closed doors I wanted to open. I don’t fear death; I fear purposeless death. My work, my writing, is very explicitly motivated by the reality that I could get gored by a moose tomorrow, I could get crushed by a bulldozer in ten years, I could get prostate cancer and die in my 60s like my father, I could get pneumonia (again) and die when I’m 99. It’s coming. I know it. And so I cleave to the act of creation both to spite and to make sense of the ineluctable destruction. I don’t know what happens after we go. That’s an adventure either of realms beyond life or becoming food for trees and worms (both of which sound very nice in their own special way). Concentrating on what’s past the mortal gates, though, is a very bad way to live.

As such, I’ll say here what I said on Twitter this morning:

Everybody dies.

Love those that you have while you have them.

And do what you love while the world has you.

Bowie did that. Rickman did that. Be like Bowie. Be like Rickman.

Live. Make. Love. And then, only then, die.

So, here’s the deal. Bookburners is a piece of serial fiction about demon hunters — and it just wrapped up its first season. It’s published by Serial Box in weekly episodes (in both e-format and audio). With the whole first season done, that primes the series for binge reading via SerialBox.com, their app, or an e-retailer of your choice. 

Thing is, while I am a sucker for serial fiction, I’m extra-suckery for serial fiction written by several of my favorite people. Like, for real. Mur Lafferty? Max Gladstone?! Margaret Dunlap?!? And Brian Francis Slattery, who, admittedly, I don’t really know? But if he hangs out with these three, then it is safe to assume he is similarly made of the same awesome meteor-forged metal. 

They wanted to pop by and do a guest post, and the idea for said guest post was too good to pass up — four authors offering up their take on what would happen if they personally had to do the job of “demon-hunter.” Thus it is time to meet the Bookburners – the real ones, at least. Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead and the Craft Sequence), Mur Lafferty (The Shambling Guide to New York City and the I Should be Writing podcast), Margaret Dunlap (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and The Middleman), and Brian Francis Slattery (Spaceman Blues and Liberation).

Mur Lafferty

Max is our fearless leader, strategy is his game and he’s good for swinging a 2×4 to knock off a zombie’s head. I’ve seen it.

Brian, him I don’t trust. If you read the very weird shit he writes, you know that he’s got to have some inside knowledge. Dude writes scary-ass demons so well because he drinks with scary-ass demons on Tuesday nights down at the Wild Wings (Monday night is Ladies’ Night, Tuesday is Demons’ Night. Although some demons who identify as ladies do visit both nights.)

Margaret is our quartermaster, she keeps all of the weapons cleaned, sharpened, and ready to go. She always knows who has what weapon, and who put a scratch on the silver sword. * But don’t touch her gun. She can drop a vampire at 100 yards with a wooden bullet, and was the cause of last year’s Halloween Eve riot down at the Wild Wings. You see, this face-eating demon, who is also fond of mild wings, got her order switched with Margaret’s super hot wings. That lady was very offended that Margaret had eaten half of her basket of wings without batting an eye. Demon tried to eat her face. Margaret wasn’t having any of it. That was a big clean up night at the Wild Wings.

Then there’s me. I’d be considered the fool, the Zeppo, the Xander, the bait. I am the one who is an ethics test for new recruits; when doing their first field test of running away from demons, I have to fall down and hurt my leg. If they come back for me, they pass. If they don’t, they fail, and I get eaten. Luckily we’ve only recruited ethical people so far, but new Season 2 writer for the team, Andrea Phillips, nearly failed when she paused to consider before she turned around and helped me up. I also moonlight as a bartender down at the Wild Wings and manage to get my team discounts when they come in on Ladies’ Night and Demons’ Night.

* I said I was sorry!

[murverse] [@mightymur]

Margaret Dunlap

Okay, first of all, I don’t know who decided it was a good idea to put together a demon-hunting team made up entirely of writers, but if you’re looking for someone who is secretly trying to sell out humanity to the forces of evil, magic, and hot wings, that’s where I’d look for suspects first. When I signed up for this gig, we were just trying to revolutionize serial fiction on the internet. That’s what they told me anyway.

Of course Max is our fearless leader. Partially, this is because he is the tallest, and it turns out that all of those studies that say tall people tend to get ahead in life are actually on to something. Plus, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We had already put in him in charge of the writing team, and it saved us having to work out the hierarchy again to just go with that when fighting demons got added to the mission brief. Since none of us have died yet (I totally had a bead on that demon if Andrea hadn’t come back for you, Mur!), I’d say he’s doing a pretty awesome job.

Mur is our chief intelligence officer. She wrote a series of guidebooks for supernatural creatures. She knows where they go, how they take their coffee, how spicy they like their hot wings. She can *blend.* Not that this makes us question her loyalty. The guidebooks are obviously a clever double-blind. Make the monsters think that you’re on their side, tell them where they can gather, and then use that information to keep an eye on them. She’s playing a very deep game.

(That’s why I won’t accept her apology for scratching the silver sword. Because I know she didn’t do it. I’m not sure why she’s taking the fall for Max. Maybe he put her up to it, maybe this way he’ll owe her a favor later on. But it was obviously Max. I mean, he fences. Who else in this crowd would even pick up a sword?)

And then there’s Brian. Brian knows how to live off the grid, chops wood, and has a stockpile of olive oil cans in his kitchen. Sure, he says it’s because he “cooks Italian” a lot. Riiiiiight. Personally, I’m not sure what’s up with Brain, I’m just glad that he’s on our side. At least, I’m pretty sure he is. I do know one thing for sure: I wouldn’t want to cross a man who knows how to transform an accordion into a guitar.

What do I do around this joint? Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that. Whatever needs doing. I was worried the demon fighting was really going to cut in on the writing time, but it turns out I just watch less HGTV. So, if that’s all you needed to know, would you mind passing the hot wings?

[Margaret on IMDB] [@spyscribe]

Max Gladstone

First, if I’m the leader, we’re all in deep trouble.  Which we might be!  But under my leadership we’re definitely going to give the demons a bit of an easier time.  In point of fact I’m probably more like the tip of the phalanx.  Let’s charge into the problem!  Tackle the big thing with the thorns and the seven eyestalks head-on, even though the head is where all the teeth are.  Never tell me the odds!

(Actually, please do tell me the odds.  Odds are helpful for decision-making and not getting eaten.)

I figure it’s Margaret actually keeping the team together—quartermastering, sure, but also coordinating from behind the lines.  She’s the one who knows the demons’ weak spots, while the rest of us bash in and flail about.  “Let’s try silver!” says I.  “Guys, silver doesn’t—“ “Too late, trying it anyway.” *roars, crashing of trees, people tossed through walls* “That didn’t work at all.”  “I TOLD you,” says Margaret.  “Just cut off the head, it’ll be fine.”

Of course, cutting off the head is easier said than done.  ‘Coz the head, to repeat, is where all the teeth are.

Mur’s team ninja.  It’s the humor that disarms—she’s all calm and collected on the surface, nothing weird here, no problem whatsoever, got a great joke or three—and then the knife slides in.  She’s most likely to take out the critter in the end.  Making it look easy, all the way along.

Brian’s the one who will doom us all.  He’s great for dealing with demons—maybe even too great.  Because if you summon a bigger demon to eat the demon you’re currently fighting, then you’re stuck with the new, even more enormous demon hanging around.  And then where are you?

In deep trouble.

Which, to be fair, is where we started off.  So it’s probably all for the best.

[MaxGladstone] [@maxgladstone]

Brian Francis Slattery

Maybe this is giving in to the consensus, but I agree with Mur and Margaret that Max is our leader. How can he not be? If you saw him at our meetings, you would agree, too. I also agree with Max, Margaret, and Mur that Margaret and Mur are the real brains of the operation, in addition to being the most effective, funny, and organized. And they are all being a little too modest. Against the three of them, few demons stand much of a chance.

But I guess I’m wondering why we’re fighting the demons in the first place. I know it’s our assignment and all, but haven’t we all read I Am Legend? I’m serious. I know the demons are horrible for us. Terrible things happen when they’re around. But what if we’re even more horrible for them than they are for us? What if the unholy power they unleash in our world, which boils people’s brains and destroys cities, is nothing compared to the havoc we wreak on them? For all we know, every time a human summons a demon from its realm, a toxic, gelatinous substance is left behind where the demon was standing, and that toxin spreads and infects everything it touches, so that no other demons—not to mention the nine-legged food they eat, or the spiraled castles they live in, or the very purple soil they walk on—is safe. For all we know, we have caused their ancient metropolises, once so vast they looked like mountain ranges from a distance, to melt into piles of poisonous slag. Their continents are slipping into the orange oceans that surround them, and the demons are crowded on the few spots of dry land left, begging for some power even higher than they are to intervene, even as the earth softens beneath their feet. We have ruined an entire plane of existence, and all become we’re lonely, or bored, or greedy, or we want revenge, or some other small human concern. Who are the demons now, you know?

So Max is right: Maybe it’s better to just be where we started off in the first place. Pass the wings. Extra spicy.

[BFSlattery]

* * *

Magic is real, and hungry — trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.

Bookburners: Serial Box | The App! | Amazon

Eleanor and Esmerelda are identical twins with a secret language all their own, inseparable until a terrible accident claims Esme’s life. Eleanor’s family is left in tatters: her mother retreats inward, seeking comfort in bottles; her father reluctantly abandons ship. Eleanor is forced to grow up more quickly than a child should, and becomes the target of her mother’s growing rage.

Years pass, and Eleanor’s painful reality begins to unravel in strange ways. The first time it happens, she walks through a school doorway, and finds herself in a cornfield, beneath wide blue skies. When she stumbles back into her own world, time has flown by without her. Again and again, against her will, she falls out of her world and into other, stranger ones, leaving behind empty rooms and worried loved ones.

One fateful day, Eleanor leaps from a cliff and is torn from her world altogether. She meets a mysterious stranger, Mea, who reveals to Eleanor the weight of her family’s loss. To save her broken parents, and rescue herself, Eleanor must learn how deep the well of her mother’s grief and her father’s heartbreak truly goes. Esmerelda’s death was not the only tragic loss in her family’s fragmented history, and unless Eleanor can master her strange new abilities, it may not be the last.

Dumb, blockheaded persistence sometimes wins the day

Let’s just get this one out of the way, right up front: This book took a long, long time. Nearly fifteen years long. That kind of long. And let me be clear: This isn’t a badge of honor. This isn’t Look how many hours I worked this week, did you work that many hours? No? You’ve probably worked with people like that. And you know that those people probably work more inefficiently than you do. There’s a reason you didn’t work seventy-six hours this week. You can get your work done in the usual forty. And that’s exactly the case here. Eleanor took nearly fifteen years for a lot of reasons, most of which had to do with my inexperience, my inefficiency, my tendency to be derailed by shiny objects—like the nearly two years I spent adapting it into an amateur comic instead of working on the novel—and some of which were more practical, like:

Sometimes you aren’t ready to write the book you’re writing

I was twenty-three when I began working on this novel. I wasn’t a newcomer to the idea of writing books—I’d already written and shelved three of them—but it was immediately apparent to me that Eleanor was the first personal novel I had attempted. This was a book that was going to answer some big questions that I had about life, the universe, et cetera. There’s a problem with that, though: when you’re twenty-three, you don’t know the answers. Or if you do, your answers are pretty damp and unformed, not yet tested by age and experience. In my case, Eleanor—at least in those early, long-ago drafts—was struggling to reconcile some major questions I had about faith, belief, the existence of god. I grew up in the Pentecostal church, where questions like that weren’t only dodged, but discouraged. In my early twenties, I was finally trying to face them head-on, using Eleanor, my novel-in-progress, as my tank. I didn’t know how to drive a tank then, and still don’t.

I chipped away at this novel until about 2010—the comic detour—and then again until late 2012, when I put Eleanor aside entirely. My wife had found a novel-writing competition, and suggested I enter. It seemed disingenuous to try to rush Eleanor to completion for the sake of a contest I probably wouldn’t win, so I wrote something else, and finished it in record time—about three weeks. I skipped the contest altogether—I never win contests anyway—and self-published this lark of a novel. It found some readers, and gave me a high I’d never experienced. People were reading my work! It was as if a dam had burst: in the next eight months, I wrote and self-published three more novels.

I returned to the lump that was Eleanor after that, having restored my writerly confidence, and to my surprise, discovered another major impediment to my earlier progress:

Sometimes the book you’re writing wants to be a different book

Remember all those big questions I was asking? And how I was using Eleanor to try to answer them? Yeah, well, more than a decade had passed since I first started down that road. I’d gotten married; I’d become a father. When I returned to the novel in 2013, I realized that not only was Eleanor a failed self-help book masquerading as a novel, I’d long ago stopped asking those big questions. I’d already resolved my personal opinions about faith and belief and god and such, and here was my old book, still throwing pebbles at that hurricane. I couldn’t relate to it at all. I expected this to depress me, I think, but instead, it was utterly liberating. I didn’t have to write that book anymore.

But the characters stuck with me. I’d known Eleanor and her family for more years than I’d known most of the tangible, real human beings in my life. Giving them up wasn’t that appealing. So instead of throwing them away, I just threw away the story I’d constructed for them, and began looking for their story, one that wasn’t my own. And it turned out that the story I discovered was way, way more interesting than my own derailed, earlier draft.

Writing is fun (sometimes), but revision is magical

Okay, writing isn’t always fun. Most of the time it isn’t fun, even. There are good days, but mostly you just have to do it. It took several novels for me to learn this particular truth, but once it finally sunk in, it stuck: you don’t have to write a perfect draft the first time out, or the second, or the ninth. You just have to make each one better, a little at a time.

Revising a book is pure, unadulterated magic. You step back, you look at what you’ve made, and suddenly, if you look long enough, you start to see the threadbare parts, or the areas where too much fabric piled up. It bunches too tightly in this area; it’s too taut over there. You tug here, snip there, and suddenly entire sections of the garment begin to hang just right. In the case of Eleanor, the biggest themes emerged after I’d finished writing the new draft. Once I saw them, I could work my way back through the book, drawing them out a little more.

Beware, though: once you fall in love with the editing process, you might have a hard time ever stopping. Eventually, you have to put your hands up, push away from the table, and call a thing done. There’s always something more you could tweak. You’ve got more stories to tell, though. Right? I definitely do.

There are, like, seven thousand ways to get to the finish line

When I was eighteen years old and I wrote my first novel, I set a goal: by twenty-five I’d be a big literary star. (Oh, those heady teenage dreams.) Five years later I started Eleanor, not knowing I’d be approaching forty before the book was complete. (And boy am I grateful that self-publishing wasn’t as easy and accessible when I was eighteen years old. Hoo, boy.)

When I finished Eleanor, I half-heartedly sent it to a few agents and editors, but then I did what I knew how to do: I self-published it, in the summer of 2014. If that’s all that had happened, it would have been enough. People were reading the book, sharing it with their friend. It found an audience, and that audience connected with the book in ways I genuinely didn’t expect. I was surprised when the book shot up the Amazon bestseller list—I think it peaked at #25 or so, to my amazement—and even more surprised when an email arrived from a Hollywood producer who was interested in the film rights. That was a conversation I wasn’t prepared to have on my own, but it helped me find an agent who could help. And then things just kept going: the agent helped me sell the novel to a major publisher (Crown), and then several foreign rights sales followed. Months of additional editing came after that, and then my first journey through the mechanisms of the publishing world began. I’ve crossed so many different finish lines with this book now that I’ve lost track. I’ll be thirty-eight this year, though, and I feel like I’ve just crossed the starting line.

* * *

Jason Gurley is the author of Eleanor (Crown, 2016) and the fiction collection Deep Breath Hold Tight. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and various anthologies. He lives and writes in Oregon.

Jason Gurley: Twitter | Website

Eleanor: Amazon | Penguin Random House | Powell’s | B&N | iTunes

I’ve seen the movie — *checks calendar* — 473 times in the theater.

FINE JEEZ NOT REALLY.

But I have seen it three times, and for a person with alarmingly little time, that’s saying something. The Force Awakens has been a big deal around this house, obviously. For one, it ties into a little self-published novel I wrote called SPACE JARS: AFTERPANTS. But more than that, this is the first theatrical release my wife has seen in almost five years. And it was the first theater-going experience for our son, B-Dub. My wife never really had a Star Wars of her own — but now she does. She’s seen it twice and wants to see it again. She has, to my knowledge, never seen a film more than once in the theater.

Like I said: big deal around this house.

(Sidenote, this is why I think you have the effect of some folks being extra-resistant to negativity around the movie, particularly that snarkier brand of criticism. It’s because this isn’t just a movie. In some ways, it’s not a movie at all. It’s a puppy. The fanbase hasn’t had a puppy in a while and now we have one and it’s cute and enthusiastic and lots of fun even though it has its proper puppy flaws, but when a stranger comes and calls your new puppy ugly or rambunctious or gassy or whatever, some folks take that less as criticism and more of an insult. Perhaps not fairly, but emotions are rarely fair, I’m afraid. Star Wars is entangled with a great deal more than just movie culture. It ties into larger pop culture, true, but it also is braided in with friends and family and childhood and — well, that’s a complicated knot is all I’m saying.)

But I wanted to take a look at the film for some of the storytelling lessons it offers — in this case, not negative lessons (of which you could find some, I’m sure), but rather, positive takeaways that might wet your mind whistle when it comes to thinking about your story or other stories or, I dunno, delicious enchiladas.

Mmm. Enchiladas.

*clears throat*

ARE YOU READY, CLASS?

*hands out lightsabers*

LET US BEGIN.

(oh, some light spoilers found below.)

Worldbuilding Can Be About What You Don’t Show

Epic fantasy novels are wont, sometimes, to put all their worldbuilding on display. That’s why some of them are big enough to snap a horse’s neck — I’ve literally read a few that demonstrated roughly 40% story, 60% worldbuilding. Not much actually happens, but we sure do learn a lot about royal crests and dishware and the sacred toe-washing techniques of faraway lands. Some of these books are soggy with details — and that’s a thing people want to read, sometimes. So, it’s cool. It’s not my bag! But if you like it, then go forth and enjoy.

Just the same, one of the things I really adored about the original SW films 30 years ago was that they took a shrugworthy FUCK YOU attitude when it came to providing details. What were the Clone Wars? What the shit is a Bothan? Where did the Empire come from and why do they have such a space-boner for planet-destroying super-weapons? (Answer to that last one: the same boner most Earth countries have for reiterative superweapons, I’d guess. “What’s next, Admiral Bob?” “BIGGER SHIPS BIGGER BOMBS BIGGER BLOW-EM-UPS.”)

The prequels had less interest in that level of mystery. In fact, they worked very hard to answer the mysteries. Which is not a bad thing, it’s just worldbuilding in the other direction — heavier on the “soaking up the details” part of the equation.

The Force Awakens goes back to the storytelling roots of the films 30 years ago, and it just puts shit out there. Why is there a Resistance? Where did the First Order come from? What is that pig thing? (Answer: a happabore.) WHY DOESN’T SNAP WEXLEY HAVE A BODYGUARD MURDER-DROID NAMED MISTER BONES AS HIS ASTROMECH? Okay, fine, that last question is probably mine alone, but whatever. I’m still asking it and I expect our next President to address it.

In fact, let’s take one particular mystery — THE OLD DUDE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE. The movie opens and there is Max von Sydow in a dirt hut with Poe “So Pretty” Dameron, and he isn’t named, we don’t know who he is, and despite being a seemingly vital character, he is immediately executed (er, spoiler!) by Kylo Ben. If you watch the credits or read supplemental material, you’ll learn his name: Lor San Tekka. Supplemental material also provides some other information, none of it properly vital. And you might think that’s a huge gap. Some do, even still, think it’s an issue that the film didn’t explain much. But for me, the movie is an exercise in providing the very bare minimum to get you to the next scene. We don’t need to know who this guy is — in fact, he becomes quite tantalizing a figure given how his language indicates that this very moment is the culmination of his character arc. He hands over the Map to Skywalker and says, “This will begin to make things right.” Whoa, what? What went wrong? Why does he have the map? Why has he been keeping the map secret? What the hell? And then, VZZRAOWKSZZH the guy is torn down like a pair of ugly curtains.

And that’s all you get.

Sometimes, worldbuilding is better in the mind of the audience. It gains strength there. It multiplies like an image in a house of mirrors. Mysteries compel us. Unanswered questions draw us forward. Now, they become frustrating when the lack of answers stop us from comprehending the story, but that’s not what happens here. We know just enough to move forward.

This isn’t a solution for every story, but it’s an interesting test — if you strip out a bunch of the worldbuilding, does your story still work? It’s vital, I think, that it does.

Orchestrating Key Moments Is, Well, Key

Every story has flaws. Flaws are not by themselves bad things — the bugs only become bad when they remove us from the story, and they remove us from the story when they outnumber or outweigh the features. One of the features of The Force Awakens are moments that are almost perfectly designed to be moments you talk about later. Moments you remember. Moments you anticipate on a rewatch. The best stories have these scenes and beats — Die Hard is practically a conveyor belt of those holy shit moments. TFA has several. I won’t name them here because honestly, not sure I have to. (I bet you’ve already thought of at least one.)

It’s interesting when you hear the filmmakers talk about this movie, because you learn that they began with a question: how do we want the audience to feel? Not “how will this make them feel?” But rather, how do we engineer a narrative to stir certain feelings? Feelings of nostalgia and sadness and triumph — the mythic resonance of the old films remixed in a new way?

It’s not just about drawing a map to Skywalker. It’s about drawing a map toward certain emotions. One of the ways that the filmmakers do that, I think, is by plotting these big moments. Not just moments that are exciting (though they are likely that), but moments that are big in terms of the characters — big in terms of their emotional impact on the audience. It’s worth considering how you can do this for your own work. What do you want the audience to feel? What moments will get them to these feelings? How do you draw the map to that?

Characters Who Like Each Other? A Pop Culture Miracle!

Listen, I know we all want Poe and Finn to steam up the windows of an X-Wing with their sloppy tongue-hockey skills — but for my mileage, what’s greatest about all three protagonists is how much they seem to like each other as characters. They meet and near-instantly have a rapport. They may fight or argue, but it feels like a fight between people who intrinsically belong together. They are enthused to be together. It’s not bitter or a struggle to watch them interact — the conflict comes from the larger narrative, not from characters wanting to always choke each other. They have the delight of dogs meeting other dogs. They may be guarded for a moment but then it’s like, WOO I LIKE YOU AND YOU LIKE ME AND LET’S GO HAVE SOME MOTHERFUCKING ADVENTURES. The audience sees this and they feel like a part of it. Like we’re all part of some D&D adventuring group meeting up in a tavern for the first time.

This isn’t appropriate for all story modes, obviously. But for this kind of thing? It’s a great way to smash characters together and then propel them forward on the nosecone of a narrative rocket.

Fuck Yeah, Subtext

There exists a kind of meta-narrative component to The Force Awakens. Sure, the movie is totally about STARS and WARS and AWAKENING FORCE and all that good stuff, but it’s interesting, too, that the characters inhabit a world filled with the junk of the world we left behind 30 years ago as an audience — Rey lives inside a destroyed AT-AT on a planet of debris. She flies an even junkier version of the Falcon through the bowels of a super star destroyer (which, cough cough, is the Ravager from Aftermath). Kylo Ren is a literal fanboy for the Dark Side. He’s got like, a foam finger waving about (DARTH VADER #1! WOO!) and he’s clearly adopted the Dark Side’s fashion sense, too.

Max Gladstone (who wrote a fantastic piece about TFA through the lens of Star Wars roleplaying) pointed out to me that the line of Kylo Ren’s — “It’s just us, now” — is as much about the characters on-screen as it is about the audience. It’s about generational shifts — I’m a parent now, giving over the trilogy to my son. Just as Lucas has given the trilogy over to Abrams and Disney. The film itself has its own tangled messages about parentage, about the effect a parent can have on a child. It’s a coded message to the audience that this is a passing of the story torch, man. This is an old story with new characters. Not a reboot, but also not exactly a sequel. And then you can factor in various culture-leaning feelings — if Kylo Ren is a fanboy for the Dark Side and for Vader, his petulant, pathetic rage-pleas to Rey (“YOU NEED A TEACHER…”) sound a whole lot like he’s calling her a Fake Geek Girl (“…FOR MAGIC: THE GATHERING.”). And you could lean even further that Kylo Ren starts to vibe a whole lot like fans inside pop culture who feel betrayed by the changes of their fandom (“it’s about ethics in Dark Side fashion, that’s all, and also the SJJ Social Justice Jedi are taking over the galaxy and winning all the awards even though they’re a marginal order because really Vader was much more popular…”).

Don’t be afraid to play with subtext. Know your audience and to learn to speak to them not just with what’s overt, but also with themes and ideas buried beneath a layer or two of the story.

Extra Fuck Yeah, Inclusion

I am a white guy talking about diversity, so that should already make you narrow your eyes a little bit, probably — but I think it’s vital to realize that your audience is potentially far more than just, well, people who look like me. Cultural appropriation is its own sticky subject, and as authors, it’s a damn fine idea to make sure we’re not stealing someone else’s story or experience for our own. But, a film like TFA doesn’t have to worry as much about that — it’s a book about SPACE GUNS and GALACTIC WIZARDS and isn’t really in danger of appropriating any kind of actual human culture, which means it has full license to include all kinds of people in its ranks. That has huge meaning. The new film has a much bigger female audience than other films of its genre, and its two other leads are people of color. It’s worth considering as a storyteller if your characters are monochromatic and exclusive rather than inclusive of the audience you have — or an audience you could have if you decided to actually talk to them once in a while.

(Bonus, you know who my son sometimes pretends to be? Rey. And other times? Finn. He doesn’t see why they can’t be heroes or why he can’t look up to them and try to inhabit them — it’s a big change from a pop culture world that usually asks that little girls and children of color pretend to inhabit the stories and arcs of white male heroes.)

And just in case you hear that refrain that inclusion can’t sell — please remember three non-white-male protagonists have led the biggest box office film ever. That’s no small feat, and easily disproves the lie that films with women or people of color are somehow marginal.