This may be my favorite holiday of the year.

No, not because of THE SWEET DEALS.

But rather, because of the fiction that grows out of it.

If you don’t know #talesfromblackfriday, well, it’s a bit of a tradition, now. I’m not even sure when I started it? I wanna say three years ago, but maybe it’s been longer. It’s certainly taken on its own life, since then, which is awesome.

Here’s what you do:

Go to Twitter. Don’t have The Twitters? Now’s a good time to get an account.

Then, tell a horror-ish story about Black Friday using the hashtag, #talesfromblackfriday.

Here’s an example, and here, and here — or, just go peruse the hashtag.

The tales you tell can be short (a single tweet) or long. They can be Night Vale-ish, or more cosmic horror-y, or Twilight Zoney — or, really, whatever you want to do with it.

Go. Descend into the retail labyrinth. Shuffle past the snapping doors.

FIND YOUR DEALS.

TELL YOUR TALE.

Listen, so there’s some guy in YA who stepped in it — the long and short is, he came out of nowhere, sold a six-figure debut out of a self-published YA book, and then took some time to step up to the podium to maybe kinda sorta shit on young adult literature and bluster about female characters and — well, you know how it goes. This is not really new. If you want to follow the story back more completely, you’d do well by looking at the Twitter feed of someone like @bibliogato, who is unpacking some of this stuff right now and linking to other smart people. Go look. (And you can also check out the #MorallyComplicatedYA hashtag.) (Ooh, also, Victoria Aveyard has a good pulling-apart of the problem here at her Tumblr.)

I’d like to speak about this in a more general sense — and, quite likely, I’m going to be talking more implicitly to my fellow WHITE DUDES who are living up on HETERO WHITE DUDE MOUNTAIN, because while this problem is by no means exclusive to us it certainly seems to gather around us like a cloud of flies who are feasting upon our eye-watering ego-stink.

Privilege is a weird thing.

It teaches us by example that we own the house — the house metaphorically being, well, everything all around us. As such, we view all the things in the house as ours. We own this stuff, we think. We own these rooms. And so we move freely from room to room without hesitation. We muddy the carpets because they’re ours and we can dirty them all we want, goddamnit. We control what’s on the TV, we get to decide what everyone eats, we determine where to piss (toilet, toilet seat, potted plant, sink, the northeast corner of every room).

This is of course an illusion. A pretty gross one, though one that society often goes out of its way to maintain (in part because hey patriarchy and yes the patriarchy is real as it takes very little to see that men control a whole lot more than women and hey by the way, Scott Adams, you wonky Dilbert-fucker, the fact that women possess sexual consent and agency does not make our world some kind of dystopian lady-realm).  It also would seem to give us license to saunter boldly into a space that’s new to us and pretend like it’s new to everybody. We take a shit in it and pretend we’re planting a flag instead of, y’know, taking a giant shit where other people are already hanging out. “I claim this space in the name of me!” you scream, hauling up your drawers and leaving behind a steaming present while ignoring everyone else standing around gaping at the horror-struck literal shit-show you just performed.

You must unlearn what you have learned, Jedi.

This isn’t your manifest destiny. You’re entering into spaces that have already been built and shaped by people who aren’t you. You’re not colonizing it — except maybe only in the grossest ongoing historical sense, where you invade territory and overpower those who dwell there already. And you damn sure shouldn’t come into a space with the desire to “fix” it, either. I wrote a YA novel about a teen girl and crime-flavored moral complications. I was not the first to do it and I will not be the one to put the capstone on it. Neither will you, rando. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t make it better. I don’t own it. I’m sharing it. And I’m sharing it by the grace of those who came before me. (And I don’t shit on genre work, or teenagers, or Twilight or Hunger Games or any of it, because I don’t get to exist as I do without them.)

You do not honor or create your own success by ignoring or crapping on the successes of those who came before. That is gross and weird. Don’t do that. Be humble. Look back and point others to look that way. Look all around you at the present and look ahead, too. See that you are not alone — you are not the peak of this mountain and you are not the owner of this house nor its sole occupant.

It’s like borrowing a ladder from your neighbor and then pretending that you built it. Or worse, pretending that you invented the concept of the ladder, or that the mere act of you ascending its rungs has improved it in some incalculable, cosmic way. (Then you kick the ladder away to make sure nobody else ever climbs to the same height. Jerk.)

Don’t be crappy.

Give respect to others.

Admire and acknowledge their success.

Do not overtake their achievements and claim them for yourself.

Whoever you are, see yourself as part of a whole and not the sum of it.

You owe them. They don’t owe you.

Give them thanks, too — that in the spirit of tomorrow’s holiday, perhaps. (Though here I could probably get into the sick moral tangle of a holiday where colonizing pilgrims took over native lands and probably pretended like they invented turkey and corn and dinner, which is maybe altogether more apropos — but, ahem, that can be a conversation for another day.)

In fact, let’s take a moment below to give some thanks to some YA writers and books — in particular, if you care to uncover them, “morally complicated YA” novels, particularly YA novels by women. Pop ’em in the comments below, talk about what those books mean to you. 

Some quick news bits:

First, Zer0es on Amazon Kindle is $1.99 for the week — ending Cyber Monday, I believe! Feel free to go check it out, and if you care to spread the word, then I will Cyber Hug you. I mean, only if you want. ONLY CONSENSUAL CYBER-HUGS. Otherwise, it’ll be a long-distance cyber-high-five. Anyway! If you want a book about five very different hackers going up against a sinister self-aware NSA surveillance program, please to enjoy for under two bucks, limited time only, free Cinnabon with purchase wait not so much that last part.

Second, the Goodreads Choice Awards is still open for voting until the end of today. And AFTERMATH was written in during the last round (yay). So, go vote for it or any other book that you love. Lots of great books demanding your attention there.

Third, I’ll be at Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr this coming Saturday at 10AM for Small Business Saturday — lots of bookstores are having authors hang out that day, so check with your local indies. Love your local bookstore, folks.

Finally, had a great event in Charlotte this past week courtesy of Queens University, where I actually attended school when I was a WEE, BARELY-BEARDED COLLEGIATE. Thanks to Mike Kobre and Melissa Bashor for having me, and to the great engaged audience (including members of the 501st!). Thanks to Park Road Books for selling books, too. Plus got to see some old friends (who I got to spend far too little time with thanks to a very limited schedule).

So, Friday I wasn’t able to lock and load a new flash fiction challenge — I got back too late from traveling, and whilst on the road it’s incredibly difficult to actually work on new blog stuff (WordPress in mobile format makes that trickier than I’d like). But, really, that’s probably okay — the flash challenges go by the wayside during the month of November for obvious reasons.

As such, I’d like to posit a different challenge:

Go to your online space.

Grab 1000 words of your NaNoWriMo work-in-progress (or, really, even if you’re not participating, any WIP of yours), and slap those 1000 words online for all to see.

Grab the 1000 best words — or, at least, the ones with which you are the happiest.

Then link that post back here in the comments.

That’s it.

No criticism necessary.

Just sharing the work. Camaraderie and commiseration.

DO IT NOW OR YOU GET THE HOSE

Eddy Rivas is one of the writers behind Red Vs. Blue, and it seems only appropriate that he’s here to talk about writing habits both good and bad he got from video games.

Bad: Tutorial Levels

You’ve just started a new game. You’re a zombie monkey slaying space marine with biceps that border on cancerous. It’s time to start teaching those undead monkeys who’s boss in this galaxy, but first, you’re going to have to listen to a technician teach you how to look up. And then down. And then maybe around in a circle for good measure (sometimes those biceps mess with your muscle memory).

The technician explains a bunch of Shit You Already Know about the world you’re about to lay to waste with amazing futuristic weaponry fine-tuned for ultimate zombie monkey destruction. You humor the kid because the game just started and you’re still not sure which button you should press to sprint headlong into adrenaline-fueled heroism.

This learning and teaching phase is somewhat necessary to orient a player with the mechanics of a game world, but makes your writing more hopelessly stuck than a beached whale who just ate its own weight in donuts. One of the things I have to ask myself when laying down info in the first chapter of a new project: does the reader absolutely need to know this information for the story to make sense at this moment?

Often, because I try to be clever, the biggest offender of this is dialogue between two characters that no sane person would actually utter in day-to-day conversation, like:

“Joe. You’re my brother-in-law and my partner in zombie monkey slaying. We went through training together at monkey slaying academy.”

I’m pretty sure Joe would look at you as if you were having a stroke, before wondering if maybe you’ve got the zombie monkey sickness. If it feels like it belongs in a videogame tutorial, it’s probably best to tuck away for future use.

We all skip those levels anyway.

Bad: Vanilla Character Builds

Because I’m a coward whose favorite type of ice cream is vanilla, I tend to play it safe when it comes time to build my characters in RPGs. This is most troublesome when assigning attribution points. Afraid to miss out on any particular stat (what if I need my intelligence high later on for the testicle-burning spell that I’ll probably never use because it requires too many skill points), I create a character more boring than AAA video games’ brown-haired white guy.

Unfortunately, this middle-of-the-road attribute character creeps into my writing as well. There have been times when I’m reading over my first drafts and have to ask the painful question: “why else should I root for this guy, besides the fact that he’s who we meet on page one?” I don’t always have an answer.

A good friend of mine just started Fallout 4 with a character who has max luck and max intelligence, and basically zero of every other stat. I’d be too terrified to play through the game that way, but it certainly is an interesting approach to creating a memorable character. What if we thought about our own characters in that way, maximizing particular traits to the derailment of every other part of their lives? We might end up with more Miriam Blacks, a true force of nature who tornados her way through each of her books from start to finish.

This is also one of the things I love about Red vs. Blue, the longest running show on the Internet (you’ll have to forgive my fanboy-ing, I literally wrote the book on it). The show’s characters basically have one trait maxed to 111, with all other traits somewhere in the negative threshold. It makes each character memorable and easily identifiable (the brightly colored armor helps, too), and is no doubt a huge contributing factor to why the show has outlasted so many others of its kind, and why it’s attracted an audience that rivals some of cable’s biggest shows.

Bad: Follow the Waypoint

“Master Zombie Monkey Killer, we need you to run over to Bullshit Canyon to take care of a generic problem because of Reasons. Clear out as many of those zombie monkeys as you can, and may God have mercy on your soul when you find out the secret twist that this is all leading to.”

In videogames, it’s usually pretty critical to have a destination marker of some kind (unless you’re in a Call of Duty, which is basically a long hallway disguised as a videogame, filled with explosions and bad guys). Much of the design of every space is meant to subtly (or not-so-subtly) push you forward, telling you where to be and when to trigger the next event.

I tend to treat my characters the same way.

While I’m a huge fan of outlines, one of the trappings of mapping everything out beforehand is that you start treating story beats like videogame waypoints. “Go here,” you tell the main character. “Learn this startling revelation.” “Join in on this rising action, fool.” “Get all up on that denouement.” But stories need to be more organic than that.

Trust me, I get it – we want to be sure we know where the story is heading at all times, so we can make it easier on ourselves. But what I usually find is the sections that are working the least are the ones that I plopped into the middle of the story from a very early stage, completely unwilling to budge on its inclusion. I created a waypoint, and I told the main character to get there because of Reasons.

Good: Co-Op Makes Everything Better

My regular Destiny fireteam bros hates me, because I refuse to do any mission by myself. I’m the needy guardian, constantly pestering people to join me to run through the new daily, even if it’s something that I’m totally capable of doing on my own.

What can I say, I love a good co-op experience.

In the same way that certain games become exponentially more fun the more humans you add to your play session (Borderlands comes to mind), our stories become instantaneously infused with tension and fire when we pair our heroes up with someone else – and the more conflicting their ideologies or goals, the better.

It might make sense to travel alone through a wasteland in a videogame, but our characters need other humans to butt heads with. They need someone else standing on the other side of the central conflict, or someone who sees the central conflict in a different way than they do, to really throw some lighter fluid into every scene. I can’t tell you how many of my early drafts put my main character traveling from point A to point B by herself, mulling over what happened in the previous chapter or wondering what’s going to happen in the chapter that follows. I’m usually left wondering who I can put in her path that might really piss her off her ruin her day even further.

So really it’s not that much different from playing co-op games at all.

Good: The Steady Build

The best videogames, like the best stories, meticulously build on themselves until the final chapters. What a good game does in the background is teach you how to play and defeat its next challenge, drip-feeding you new mechanics and variations to the ones you thought you’d previously mastered.

Nowhere is this displayed better than in the Portal games, which are basically tutorials for how to play the Portal games. By the end of each game, there is a zen like moment in the final chapters where you are using every jumping, portal-ing, twisting, momentum-gaining trick in the book to make you feel like the ultimate badass. It’s a steady, methodical build that gets you there, but one that pays off because the game is delivering on what it promised from the very start.

The best writing does this as well. It’s more than foreshadowing, and more than simply paying off a plot twist that was so subtly hinted back on page 2. The best stories build on themselves, creating a feedback loop of character motivation, central conflict and overarching theme that’ll eventually blow the speakers and send you careening through the air like Marty McFly. There’s a similar Portal-like zen moment that happens when you’re in the middle of a book that has also pulled this off, and there’s honestly nothing else quite so satisfying.

So the next time you boot up Zombie Monkey Killer, pay attention to how you’re being guided to the next zombie monkey to annihilate, what you’re learning to do and what comes next. Now turn that same attentive eye to your story.

You might just learn a thing or two about your own writing – for better or worse.

* * *

Eddy Rivas is a writer from Houston, Texas and the author of Red vs. Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide, after being a fan of the show for more than a decade. A copywriter by trade, he moonlights as a writer for a number of web productions. His contributions to online video include Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue, X-Ray & Vav and Day 5, as well as Web Zeroes, Revision 3’s first scripted sitcom, which he also starred in. When he’s not at work, playing video games or training in Krav Maga, Eddy writes for The Know, a popular gaming news show on YouTube.

Red Versus Blue: The Ultimate Fan Guide: Indiebound | Amazon

Yesterday, I wrote ten tips to get you tightening up the middle of your story, and the way to do that is to focus on the midpoint of the narrative. Right? Right.

I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS. SIT COMFORTABLY. STRAP IN. PLEASE HOLD STILL AS ROBOTS ADMINISTER MY THOUGHTS TO YOUR BRAIN WITH AN IDEA-INJECTOR.

The midpoint, as I noted, is not a long flat line — it’s not a stretch of horse-killing swamp or a sad pair of rain-soaked underwear hanging on a clothes line. It’s a knife in the table. It’s a sword cutting a rope. It’s a portcullis slamming down or a heart ripped out of a ruptured chest. It is a breach. It is drama and conflict. It is a state change, a pivot, a curtain pulled back to reveal the real show that’s been playing all along.

But it’s something else, too.

The midpoint creates tension between the first half and the second half of the story.

Let’s say you built two structures — towers, maybe — that will stand poorly on their own. We have a tree like this in our yard — two massive forking trunks that will inevitably fracture. The way we keep that from happening, and the way you would keep those two towers from falling, is by cabling them together. You let the weight of each pull against one another. They’re always just about to fall but never do, because of the tension held in that cable. Your story is like this.

The first half of your book is the beginning of the tale — the inciting incident, the introduction of the characters, the revelation of the problem. And then it’s what builds up from that. The second half of the story is a difficult, dangerous move to resolution. Maybe it’s a further climb or an uncontrolled descent, but the point is, you’ve got the end and climax coming, and you’re working toward that. The characters have taken agency. The stakes are bigger, or maybe they’re different than anyone thought they were. The midpoint provides tension between the build up of the first half and the unspooling of the second half. It is the cable forcing tension between the beginning and the end, and letting the weight of each provide that tension.

Practically speaking, that means that the midpoint is momentous. Something has to happen here. It isn’t just talk. It isn’t hemming and hawing. But it isn’t just some random event, either. A hard choice arises and must be made. A revelation arrives, or better yet, is forced. A character’s weakness is exploited. The character takes agency for herself, or sacrifices something. The character reaches a nadir and must climb out of it — or climbs to what he believes is the pinnacle and then is knocked from a great height. The midpoint must be a state change for the narrative — things go from solid to liquid, from order to chaos (or the reverse, sometimes). Something big has to change. Sometimes, everything changes at the midpoint. Character in particular is key to the midpoint. The big change isn’t just something that happens to the universe. It’s something that urges the characters or is urged by them. It’s linked to them, their goals, their problems. It exposes them, or demands they take action, or destroys their expectations. It may change their goal or even change who the characters believe themselves to be.

In the Star Wars original trilogy, that midpoint represents Luke shifting from believing Darth Vader is some faceless enemy to realizing that he is his father. It is the moment when he starts to shift his goal from defeating Darth Vader to believing he must redeem him. It is both so much better and so much worse than he ever knew. A straightforward physical goal becomes a complex, emotional one. Plus, the stakes are raised across the board. And our heroes, not the Rebellion, suffer a great loss at Cloud City. Han is gone — his debts have caught up with him. Leia is left reeling. Lando betrays them and then doubles back to betray the Empire. C-3P0 is in pieces. Vader, too, hits this midpoint. He has had a similar revelation from a different angle — he knows that he has a son, and he chooses not to kill him but instead to try to recruit him to the Dark Side. And he fails at it! It’s like Lucas kicked the story right off a cliff. That moment is huge! It ties the two ends of the whole story together. (The entire middle film of Empire Strikes Back does this really well, actually. It proves quite capably that the middle of a story needn’t just be filler.)

Here, then, is an exercise for you —

Pick a story. Movie, comic, book, whatever.

Or something you’re currently writing.

Identify in the comments —

What’s the midpoint?

What happens? Why is it momentous? What is the shift?

GO.