(ha ha ahem, let’s try a less controversial blog post today, shall we?)

I maybe hate your character.

And it’s not the character’s fault.

IT’S YOUR FAULT, YOU MONSTER.

When I talk to you about your character, and you start to tell me, “Well, she has to find the DONGLE OF MAGIC to fight the WIZARD OF BADNESS and then she tames HORBERT THE MANY-HEADED DRAGON,” I immediately start to cross my eyes. I emit drool. I have a small seizure and then fall into a torpid grief-coma. Grief over what you’ve done to the human condition.

And what you’ve done to the human condition is ignore it utterly.

You callow, callous motherfucker.

First, we need to understand a thing that I have said many times but bears careful reiteration: plot is not a thing held in your left hand, and character is not a thing held far away in your right. Instead, take both of these hands and smash them together. Plot and character should not be isolated aspects of storytelling but rather, smooshed together like two delicious pies that are turned into one super-excellent hyper-delicious pie. The VOLTRON of PIES.

(The Voltron of Pies is my favorite Tarot card amongst the Major Arcana, by the way.)

What I mean by this is very simple:

People see plot as this external thing. An exoskeleton instead of a skeleton hidden beneath layers of scrumptious human meat. And particularly in genre fiction, you have this feeling sometimes that the “quest mechanic” drives the sequence of events. A thing happens and needs another thing to get fixed and so generic hero-bro or sassy space-pilot-lady go and do more things to fight the bad guy and get the thing to fix the thing and save the day and ugh barf-heave.

Stop. Stop that right now.

The impetus for character action is not plot-driven.

The impetus for character action is character-driven.

Your story is not a video game. In a video game, the protagonist is in effect the player. The player has agency by dint of holding the controller. But in a story, the character must have agency. (Quick reminder on what character agency is, if you feel devoid of my definition.) A character doesn’t care about the WIDGET OF MAJESTY or the GIZMO OF FLARNIDONG unless those things suit something altogether more personal. Meaning: the character cares most about things personally relevant to the character. Not global, galactic, kingdom-wide concerns. But concerns about that person’s intimate sphere of influence.

Characters care about family, friends, jobs, love, hate. If they care about money or power, it’s because they see it as something they need personally. If they have larger, grander principles, those principles must be rooted in something intimate to the character.

Look at it this way: we don’t care about Buffy Summers because she fights vampires. The teen girl versus vampires thing might get us to the table, but the part that’s going to make us stay — the part where we are going to care — is when we recognize her struggle. Nobody recognizes fighting vampires because none of us has actually fought vampires (though man, I am tired as hell of punching all these werewolves). But Buffy is a teen girl who just wants to be a teen girl. That? We get. Buffy is in a relationship with a man who is sometimes amazing and sometimes a monster and a lot of us understand that, too. Buffy cares about her friends, her mom, her normal life, and yet she’s thrust into situations she cannot control. Like we all are!

John McClane’s struggle isn’t that he’s fighting terrorists. It’s that he’s trying to repair a marriage on the verge of shattering irrevocably. (And at Christmas, no less!) His struggle — to fight through Nakitomi Plaza and survive and save people — is because his wife is in there. And it’s not just, aww, he loves her. It’s that their relationship is strained. That’s a very human thing.

Walter White’s sin is pride, but it’s all too easy to see him as a power-hungry pride sponge when really what’s happening is here’s a guy who was burned years ago by his business partners. Who has been living in a fog of half-failure — who is driven by the revenge born of regret — for most of his adult life. It’s not just the METH KING OF THE SOUTHWEST stuff. It’s all the stuff about his family, his job, his inability to overcome past failures and betrayals.

We don’t sympathize with Luke’s galactic ambitions. We sympathize with him wanting to get off that dirtfuck hillbilly planet. We totally grok him wanting to be something greater than he seems to be — the desire to stop being some blue-milk-slurpin’ sandfarmer and become the last of the Jedi, well, shit, who doesn’t want to accelerate past our seemingly mundane destinies?

And it’s from this — from the part where the characters cleave to their personal goals, ideas and problems that we see them start to make changes. They do things in support of wanting things or trying to overcome problems or cleaving to their personal principles and hopes and dreams and fears. And when that happens, when they act, they create plot.

As I am also wont to say:

Plot is Soylent Green. It is made of people.

And it’s not just one person. It’s multiple characters operating in a shared world. Some want the same thing and work together to achieve it — working parallel. Some want the same things and work in opposition — working perpendicular. Some want wildly different things but see shared paths (parallel), and some want different things and will fight each other to the motherfucking death to get it (parallel). Protagonist. Antagonist. Main character. Supporting characters. All of these individuals believe that their personal crusade or vendetta is the most vital. And they push and they pull on each other. Sometimes characters who are parallel will turn perpendicular (think of Sam and Frodo or Willow and Buffy). Sometimes characters who are perpendicular will turn parallel (Buffy and Spike).

A plot is not a chain of events. It is not a sequence of rungs like a ladder.

Plot is a spider web. Threads plucked and tightened. Sometimes cut. Sometimes restrung.

And what’s most interesting to us — what’s most understandable and relatable to us — is when the characters who make up this web are not there to serve as PLOT POINTS but rather there to execute on CHARACTER AGENCY that is supported by THE GODDAMN HUMAN CONDITION.

When we read a story, we read the story to look for our own story.

Meaning, we look for things we understand. (And here may be the truest exploration of “write what you know” — it’s less about the facts and data and details and more about the authenticity of the human experience that you should draw upon. You don’t know what it is to karate kick a yeti, but you do know what it is to suffer loss and lies, to want love and experience hate, to have parents or kids or heartbreak or to see death or all those things that comprise the experience of being a person wandering aimlessly around this blue-green marble in space.) If we cannot see things we intimately understand in your characters, then we’re out. If we don’t see humanity, we’re done. If we can’t see ourselves — just a little bit — then we’ll close the book.

If we look for our story and we see nothing we recognize, it’s game over.

Look at your characters.

Who are they?

What do they really want?

What is it about them that we understand? Not the BIG STORY stuff. The little story stuff. The personal stuff. A thing with her mom. Or a lost love. Or a friend who lied. Or the desire to move away from home. Or the need to mend a broken relationship. You can still have the dragons and spaceships and dragonships and whatfuckingever, but find a way to mine the emotional depths of the character. You need to go smaller. Go deeper. Inside, not out.

Stop worrying about all the external stuff.

That still will fit in when you start thinking hard about the internal stuff.

The human condition is the stuff of drama. It’s maybe not why we pick up your book.

But it is why we’ll keep reading.

* * *

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Amazon

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Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

I am a creature of enormous privilege.

Like, it’s pretty big? I get that. I’m not just a white dude, I’m a white dude with a pretty big social media footprint. And sometimes I think I can use my privilege and my social media to do Good Things™ and instead I’m like Wreck-It-Ralph who just breaks the building and shits up the cake instead and then nobody can have the cake or the building. Or something. Think Godzilla stomping on a city not because he hates the city but because he was trying to help someone who dropped their phone on the sidewalk —

“HERE I WILL GET THAT FOR YOU OH GOD I JUST CRUSHED A BUS FULL OF CHILDREN.”

Today I peeled back the Internet curtain and looked into that #AskELJames hashtag and thought, “Well, there’s some ugly stuff going on there and it’s against a woman,” and, man, I dunno, I thought I’d speak truth to power but I think I actually am the power? And maybe EL James is the power, too? Some folks pointed out that I was punching down and ignoring a lot of the really awful things James has done and it became increasingly clear that I am speaking from a place of ignorance and that runs the risk of doing more harm than good. Like, my goal is not to use my privilege to take over conversations that aren’t mine. I’m not here to police people. Particularly women. I think of myself as feminist, but maybe I’m not a particularly good one.

And it feels like if I want to be a better one, then it’s more appropriate for me to take a backseat instead of clumsily pawing at the steering wheel and driving us all into Mansplain Gulch.

In other words, I’m going to stop talking about stuff like this because I don’t own this space, I don’t own this place, and I’m reminded of that somewhat regularly. There are better, smarter people who can talk about this stuff, and I’ll signal boost them, instead. Far better than than me being all like I’LL FIX THAT FOR YOU WITH MY LILY WHITE MANSTICK HERE JUST LET ME EXPLAIN SOME THINGS LITTLE LADIES. I hate to think I’ve been that guy.

Instead, I’ll focus more on the whole writing-advicey, pop-culturey, kid-havingy stuff. I’ll cop to that some of this is also a little self-care-related. Like, I know I’m out there pissing people off — I foolishly vanity-search myself on social media, so I see that folks think I’m sea-lioning and mansplaining and all the things I hope I’m not doing but, shit, maybe I am? It’s not my intention, but again: see earlier reference to Godzilla. Some folks think I get some kind of special mileage out of this (sales, maybe, or attention, or cookies or whatever the slang is), but mostly, I think I’m just stressing people out, and then that stresses me out because I feel like I’m not achieving my goals. I’m trying to be a good ally, whatever that means, but I fear it’s making me a worse one, instead. A fellow author exhorted me to “butt out, dude,” so —

This is me, butting out.

I’m watching the #AskELJames hashtag like a stock ticker reporting on the market of online human shame, and it’s fascinating in the way that watching hyenas eat a sick lion is fascinating.

I don’t really know E.L. James, and I’ve only read portions of her books. I am not impressed with the origins of the work, or her wordsmithy, or her particular take on the genre she’s writing. (If I can suggest that you drop whatever you’re doing right now and go read Tiffany Reisz. Really, seriously, perform this task ASAFP for how shit is done.) Certainly I am not impressed with E.L. James’ publicists, who apparently thought some good would come of that particular hashtag. If she doesn’t fire them — like, out of a cannon and into a brick wall — then I will be surprised.

Further, I think because her books are controversial (both in terms of their fan-fic origin and their stance or non-stance on consensual BDSM relationships), I feel like it’s totally understandable to want to grab that hashtag and ask her serious questions about those serious issues. An open forum like that is, despite her likely desires to the contrary, valuable if it addresses those things. And I don’t think the response, don’t like them, don’t read them is a meaningful one. I think when it comes to big cultural things like this, it’s meaningful to talk about even if you’re not a “fan.” You don’t have to buy into the conversation with the currency of purchase. If there’s toxic shit surrounding this work, then it’s worth stirring it around and seeing what bubbles up.

But that’s not entirely what’s happening, here, is it? Sometimes the criticism isn’t really criticism but instead, a snarky performance dressed up as criticism. And sometimes? It’s just abuse. (I’m hesitant to point out any of these directly, which I fear would only complete the SHAME CIRCUIT, but one tweet called James the lady-c-word while chastising the abuse found in the book — which sounds like abuse about abuse, a cruel ouroboros where the snake bites down hard on its own tail.)

When it stops being a criticism of the book and becomes an attack on the author, that gets scary to me. The whole thing just gives me a kind of queasy discomfort, like I’m reading Lord of the Flies or Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (Doubly weird to see some professional authors on there piling on. Trust me: it can happen to you, too, authors.) Like, what’s your goal by getting onto that hashtag and being shitty? Satire and snark can work if you’re good at them (hint: a lot of people are not actually good at them). But the sheer overwhelming tide of it just starts to feel septic. Like everybody’s just choosing to projectile vomit on a person, and not even for the effect of making the person feel it but more for the effect of making sure everyone else sees you doing it.

I am reminded of Cersei Lannister made human to the audience when she was forced to march, naked, covered in excrement, the Shame Nuns dogging her steps and ringing their Shame Bells.

SHAME *clong*

SHAME *clong*

SHAME *clong*

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of getting to a point that I think isn’t often well-made —

We use the acronym IRL to differentiate things that happen IN REAL LIFE versus things that happen ONLINE, but I’m here to tell you, the online space is real life.

It’s not an MMORPG.

We’re not all playing World of Twittercraft or the Facebook RPG.

It’s real.

The people here — bots excluded — are real.

Sometimes I wonder if all the shittiness online is because we’ve been sold that it’s all fake. That it’s a game of characters and personas, or a performance by people on a stage. We’re all participating in a grand narrative, we think. One of heroes and villains and right and wrong. But that’s not really true. It’s real life as much as it is if you met these people on the street, or at the mall, or in their own houses. We line up to say all kinds of things to people — and I’ve done it, too, I’ve been someone flinging shit and I’ve been someone who has had a little shit land on his brow from time to time (sometimes earned, sometimes ennh?) — but the question is, would we have done the same if it were in person? As @mittensmorgul said: “it’s amazing what people are willing to say on the internet they’d never say to someone’s face.”

I don’t think we have to be nice for the sake of being nice.

But I question too why we have to be mean for the sake of being mean. And I don’t connect a line between criticism and cruelty. It is not cruel to criticize. It is not cruel to engage critically and to ask real questions about real things. But you actually have to try to do that. You actually have to try to engage earnestly. Ill-made snark and meanness dull the effectiveness of your criticism; they do not often sharpen it. Is it bullying? Maybe not taken individually, but when it becomes a crashing tide like that — I don’t care who you are, that’s not healthy for your mental well-being.

Whatever the case, I think it does us well to remember:

Online is IRL.

It’s all real.

This is all really happening.

We’re all (mostly) really actually people. Not robots or bugs or swamp monsters.

It’s not a show, no matter how much we want it to be.

[Note, comments are open, but don’t be jerks. The spam oubliette awaits.]

Here’s the deal: Fireside Fiction is awesome. They continue to do amazing work, publishing great stories by great authors (myself willfully excluded from that adjective) and actually — gasp! — paying them well in the process. And it’s that pay rate Brian wants to talk a little about, today. What I’m also going to tell you up front is that Fireside is now eschewing Kickstarter as a funding platform and instead going with Patreon — which mean, Fireside needs funding to keep telling beautiful stories by authors who are awesome. Here’s Brian to talk a little more about it —

* * *

I could go on about people telling stories to their dinosaur friends around a fire way back when. Or about the power of a narrative to raise empires and shatter dreams. Or about a lonely kid who got by largely on sci-fi books, keeping him company on lonely afternoons and providing a handy weapon against bullies. (Thanks, Dune!)

I could, but I don’t need to. You know why stories are important.

I don’t want to talk to you about why we need to care about storytelling. I want to talk to you about why we need to care about storytellers.

You know. Those pantsless marvels who pull the puppet strings on characters we fall in love with, build worlds we want to soar through, and smash our hearts with a hammer over and over again. They work hard to bring us these stories, these escapes and adventures and visions. Hell, a lot of you reading this probably ARE telling stories. It’s hard work. Hours of writing, hours (so many hours) of revising, maybe coding ebooks and marketing too. It’s real, goddamn work.

And here’s the thing. Storytellers gotta eat.

So if you’re a storyteller, this means probably you probably have a day job. Or a night job. Maybe it’s a job outside the confines of space-time. I don’t know your life.

Point is, most storytellers don’t make a living off their writing.

When I started Fireside magazine back in 2012, we had two bullet points on our mission statement: publish great storytelling regardless of genre, and pay writers well. And we’ve been able to do both now, 24 issues and counting. We pay 12.5 cents a word, enough that a 4,000-word story nets $500. That’s money that can help pay for rent, for groceries, for 50 viewings of Mad Max: Fury Road. Is one well-paying story going to change anyone’s life? No. But publishing is an ecosystem. We want to be a nourishing part of that.

(Speaking of ecosystem, you should check out some of the other great magazines that are out there. To name a few: Daily Science Fiction. Lightspeed. Clarkesworld. Shimmer. Nightmare. Crossed Genres, Podcastle and Pseudopod and Escape Pod. Have your own favorites? Throw ’em in the comments!)

Fireside’s pay rate has been our greatest asset, and our greatest challenge. We’ve attracted a wide range of great storytellers, and it’s made the magazine, we think, interesting and strong.

But it’s also expensive. Fireside is free to read online, but each issue costs between $1,500 and $1,750. Almost all of that is going to pay for stories and art. We’ve had five Kickstarters between 2012 and 2014, raising over $70,000. They’re hard. On us, on our fans, on everyone who has the misfortune to follow me on Twitter. We’re holding a subscription drive right now, both for ebook subscriptions direct from our site and via Patreon, where people can join Fireside starting at two bucks a month (for a bit more, there’s lots of Galen Dara’s illustration goodies).

We want to publish 10,000 words a month in Year 4, which begins in October. We have done two serialized longer works in Years 2 and 3 (Chuck’s The Forever Endeavor and Lilith Saintcrow’s She Wolf and Cub), but Year 4 will be all about short stories.

10,000 words a month. Every time we’ve had open submissions, we end up turning away good storytellers because we just don’t have the money to buy all of the good stuff they send our way. We want to buy as much of it as we can, and share it all with the world.

Right now? We’re funded for about 1,800 words a month.

We need your help. Let’s feed some storytellers.

Brian White’s night job is as a newspaper copyeditor. He lives around Boston with his wife and an illegal number of cats. You can find him at talkwordy.com and @talkwordy. He also has a completely nonsensical newsletter.

I’ll be going through your epic list of potential flash fiction suggestions next week, but for now, it’s time to revive one of the classics: the random song title challenge

Way this works is:

Go to your music player of choice, pull up a random song, and use that song title as the title to your story. You don’t need to make the story about the song or inspired by the song (unless you want to) — all you really need is the title to run with. On iTunes, it’s shuffle, I think, but if you google “play random song” you’ll find plenty of ways to conjure one from the chaos.

Write the story with the song title as your story title.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Write it at your online space, give us a link in the comments so we can all read it.

Due by July 3rd, noon EST.

AHOY, FELLOW HUMANS.

WHAT A NICE DAY WE ARE HAVING. OXYGEN IS AT PLEASANTLY SUFFICIENT LEVELS.

IT IS I, DEFINITELY NOT AN EVIL ROBOT MASTERMIND, CHUCK WENDIG. I AM A “HUMAN AUTHOR” WHO HAS INFORMATION OF THE NEWS-SCENTED VARIETY.

PLEASE HOLD STILL AND LISTEN WHILE I UPLOAD IT INTO YOUR FACE CIRCUITS.

LET US BEGIN.

– Hey, look! A new really awesome blurb from a really awesome author:

“With complex characters and feverishly paced action, ZERØES is a sci-fi thriller that won’t stop blowing your mind until the last page…. It left me rooting for the hackers!” —DANIEL H. WILSON, bestselling author of Robopocalypse

– ZERØES also has gotten a kind review from RT Book Reviews (subscription only): “…an engaging, diverse cast of characters, a pace that almost never lets up… these hacker heroes have layers, filling those few quieter scenes with emotional complexity… you’ll find this book to be an unbelievably thrilling ride.” I’m also interviewed in the latest issue about the book and stuff.

– I’m in this month’s Star Wars Insider, talking my top five creepiest moments in the Star Wars trilogies. (What are yours? What creeped you out during the movies, shows, comics, books?)

– Under the Empyrean Sky and Blightborn (books one and two of my Heartland trilogy) remain $1.99 for your Kindle, though no idea for how long. If you like bloodthirsty corn, hover-boats, floating cities full of rich people, murderous hoboes, helpful hoboes, and SHEER BLOODY-MINDED TEENAGE ADVENTURE, well, hey, check ’em out.

– And don’t forget to pre-order The Harvest because holy crap that’s out in like, three weeks or something?! It concludes the trilogy, which is really weird for me, emotionally. Whatever. Anyway, please behold how cool it is looking at the three of these covers together:

– Oh, and there’s a Goodreads giveaway for the third book, too.

– Wanna see me talk in public? I’ll be at Seton Hill in Greensburg, PA this Saturday (the 27th) giving a public talk at 7pm. And I’ll be signing books. And tapdancing in the nude. Wait, I’m just checking my email from the organizers of the talk and it says “NO tapdancing in the nude,” so…  it’s an ongoing negotiation, is what I’m saying.

– I just finished one awesome book and have begun another awesome book. Adam Christopher (my writing partner on The Shield) wrote a novel called Made to Kill, which is yet another demonstration of why Adam’s genre-bending imagination is a gift to us all (think robot noir). And I’m now halfway through Day Four by Sarah Lotz, which is an indirect continuation of The Three (kind of an apocalypse-adjacent horror novel). Day Four is maybe not as directly artful as the presentation in The Three, and yet, it’s a more traditional horror novel with a more forthright narrative thrust — and it’s fucking creepy as shit. Both books are amazing. I read The Three (which features four simultaneous plane crashes) while on a plane. Thankfully, I’m not reading the newest on a cruise ship (which is about the terror that unfolds on a cruise ship that breaks down in the middle of the ocean), but you can bet I will never ever ever take a cruise in my goddamn life after reading this book.

– Oh, snap. Two more books came out that I blurbed: Trailer Park Fae, by Lilith Saintcrow (which is a book so awesome I honestly wish I’d written the damn thing and by the way go look at that awesome cover) and Tin Men by Christopher Golden. Tin Men is a gut-punch of a book, a great near-future war thriller — has kind of a Saving Private Ryan meets Edge of Tomorrow vibe.

– What are you reading right now? SPEAK BOOKS UNTO ME.

And that’s about it, folks.

Reminder:

You can preorder ZERØES now from one of the bookstores I’ll be visiting —

Doylestown Bookshop | Murder By The Book | WORD | Joseph Beth

Or from other online venues:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Books-A-Million | iBooks | Powells

And you can add it on:

Goodreads