It is the time of car chases.

Today, Mad Max.

A few weeks ago: the recent installment of the Fast & Furious series.

Car chases are awesome.

So, when I got an email from reader Scott Lyerly who said, “Hey, you should do a whole flash fiction challenge based around car chases,” well, dang, I thought he had the right idea.

That, then, is your mission.

You have 2000 words to write a piece of fiction that comprises a car chase. Doesn’t matter the genre or how you frame it — but it must feature and in fact showcase a car chase.

Post that fiction to your blog or other online space. Drop a link here so we can see it.

Your story? Due by next Friday, the 22nd of May, noon EST.

Start your engines.

Ready?

Set?

GO.

In a near-future Tokyo, every action—from blinking to sexual intercourse—is intellectual property owned by corporations, who take it upon themselves to charge licensing fees for your existence.

Amon Kenzaki is a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. If you go bankrupt and can no longer pay to live, Amon is sent to hunt you down and rip the BodyBank from your flesh. So what if you’re sent to the BankDeath Camps after, forever isolated from a life of information and transaction? Amon is just happy to do his job as long as he’s climbing the corporate ladder.

But the higher you climb, the farther you fall. Amon is tasked with a simple mission, one he’s done hundreds of times. Except he awakes the next morning having no memory of the assignment, and finds his bank account nearly depleted, having been accused of an action known as “jubilee.”

To restore balance to his account, Amon must work to unravel the meaning behind jubilee. But as he digs himself deeper toward bankruptcy, Amon begins to ask questions of the ironclad system he’s served his whole life and finds it may cost him more than his job to get to the truth of things.

* * *

Your writing is for other people, not just for you

I’m willing to accept that some people write certain things just for themselves and that’s awesome.

But if you have the faintest hope (or fear?) that someone else might read what you’ve written, (and 99.999% of the time you do), then you are not writing it just for yourself. Already you have an audience in mind. Once you recognize that, you can start forming a clear picture of who they are. Academics? Fantasy addicts? Inhabitants of a village in the Gobi Desert? Kurt Vonnegut claimed he wrote for his dead sister. It could be anyone!

Once you decide who you’re writing for, the number of forms your story can take is easier to choose. There’s nothing that lends itself to indecision, (or bad decisions), like too many options and no way to decide between them. But the audience in your head is like a narrative litmus test: when in doubt about your story, all you have to ask is “will my audience appreciate this?” If the answer is no, then you probably need to trash it, or rework it.

When I first came up with the idea for Cash Crash Jubilee about a decade ago, I had just graduated from high school and had these pretentious ideas about what it is to be a writer. I tried to turn my idea of a world where actions are intellectual properties into a novel, telling myself that my writing, my art, was for me and to hell with anyone that didn’t like it. I was an artiste, not some sell-out, dang it. But if I had been honest with myself, I would’ve sensed my deep need to share my creations and to know that others approved of them.

In part because of this attitude, my efforts to write the novel back then were a dismal failure. I floundered on the first few chapters. But about seven years later, I started to think more pragmatically about turning the idea into something that could be published and this forced me to consider who might read it, y’know, my audience; agents and editors of course, but, if I was lucky, many other readers as well. Once I had a clear goal and audience in mind, the unfolding of the idea into a story became an unstoppable process.

Listen Carefully To The Advice of Others

No two people see the world in the same way. There are things you can see that others can’t and things that others can see that you can’t. But since we’re unaware of what we can’t see, we often need someone else to point out our blind spots.

This applies to writing. Without the comments of friends, family, colleagues and others, you will often be unable to detect critical flaws or areas that need to be revised in your manuscript. Take Kazuo Ishiguro for example. In a recent interview, he said that his first reader is always his wife and that he radically revised his now critically acclaimed The Buried Giant based on her comments. So what I’m saying is, listening carefully to other people can save you from pumping out a clumsy story.

But taking criticism is painful. It hurts to be reminded that you’re not perfect. This is especially true when it comes to writing because of how much of yourself you pour into your story. In some ways your writing is more you than you are. It’s so full of concentrated doses of your identity that a mere suggestion can come across like an insult; well-intentioned remarks amplify into attacks in the echo chamber of pride. It’s also difficult to accept that you’ve made a mistake, because fixing it might require a lot of work. It could mean rewriting a whole paragraph or the whole damn book! But sending out an inadequate manuscript is only going to hurt more in the long run, so it’s best to listen up, accept the problem, and fix it early on.

Judge For Yourself Which Advice To Heed

If shutting your ears to criticism is writing’s Scylla, then accepting all of it is its Charybdis.

Here is a trap that some writers can fall into:

You write a draft and maybe you think it’s pretty solid or maybe you’re not sure what to make of it, but in any case you want some feedback, so you send it out to ten friends. One likes the break up scene. Another hates it. One thinks the ending is brilliant. Another thinks it runs astray after the middle. You want to make sure that all of their voices are heard, but everyone has a different opinion, so you start rewriting and rewriting. But no matter what form your story takes, someone’s comment is not being accounted for, and now your manuscript is in constant flux. It never gets done, and you realize that instead of pandering your creative talents to the taste of others, you might as well let them write the story for you or just have it crowdsourced.

If you want to write the best story you can, you need to learn how to listen carefully to others, But if you want to finish a story, you need to learn how not to listen to them.

Keep Going Until Everything Feels Right

If you write something and some part of it feels off, you probably need to rewrite it. In some cases, you may sense that a particular scene doesn’t sit right. This intuitive feeling of discomfort can be subtle and easy to miss in the rush of writing. The temptation here, if you even notice the feeling, is to ignore it, but from my experience this is always to your and your story’s detriment. This is the voice of your subconscious or daemon or god or whatever you want to call it warning you that you are in denial, that some section of your manuscript needs to be fixed. Fail to heed it, and you are likely to find yourself regretting it later.

This doesn’t mean you need to write a perfect story. It’s okay if it has flaws. In fact, writers like Haruki Murakami say that stories are better with a few rough patches. But if you discover a flaw, it needs to feel right. Then you will know that its being there is justified by how the whole fits together. Whether a detail is solid or faulty, if your gut tells you its wrong, you need to reflect on it carefully. It often takes a while to realize what you’re reacting to and how to resolve the issue, so give yourself time. Focus on other things, but keep it there in the back of your mind as a job still in progress. Eventually, given enough patience and unfocused attention, the problem will become clear and you will know what to do.

Writers Are Completely Alone: Only You Can Decide When The Manuscript is Ready

As Paul Valery writes, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” This of course applies to other kinds of writing (and arts). If you’re a perfectionist, you may want to keep on polishing your work forever. If you’re impatient, you may just break down at some point and begin submitting. But if you keep polishing the manuscript endlessly, you’ll never get it out there, and if you submit prematurely your work may never be taken seriously. You must learn when the right time is to abandon your story, whether that means stopping before it is too late (as with the perfectionist) or continuing on until the time is right (as with the impatient person).

In drafting your manuscript, advice from readers can be helpful, but you have to be able to distinguish what to accept and what to discard, charting a course between closing your ears to criticism and taking everything to heart. This is no easy task because it requires that you believe in yourself. This includes belief in your ability to write. You don’t need to think you’re the next Tolkien or Orwell or Dickens, but you need to at least believe that you’re good enough that your writing is worth all the sacrifices it requires. You also need to believe in your ability to make aesthetic judgments about writing in general, and more specifically about your own writing. There is no rule or formula that you can follow in evaluating what you have produced. Of course imagining your audience helps, but you’re still left with a wide range of possible versions that your audience might like. To decide amongst these, you need to know what you kind of story you’re going for and consider each bit of advice your readers give you and pay careful attention to their reactions (because people don’t always tell you exactly what they think) and decide what fits. All this requires a certain degree of self-confidence and instinct.

You can get help from readers in the form of feedback. You can read lots of books in your genre and advice from writers you respect. And all off this will help you. But at the end of the day, the final decision for everything lies with you. Only you can decide what works and what doesn’t. Only you can decide when the manuscript is ready.

In the final analysis, writing can be lonely, and if one is to survive it, they must believe in themselves.

* * *

Eli K. P. William, a native of Toronto, currently works in Toyko as a Japanese-English translator. Commissioned by one of Japan’s largest publishers (Shueisha). William is currently translating a bestselling novel by Naoki Prize–winning author Ryo Asai. Cash Crash Jubilee is his first novel.

Eli K.P. William: Twitter

Cash Crash Jubilee: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

DAILY BUGLE HEADLINE:

CHUCK WENDIG LIKED THE SUPERGIRL TRAILER

EXTRY EXTRY

READ ALL ABOUT IT

ahem.

Sorry.

So! The Supergirl trailer has landed.

And some people love it.

And some people hate it.

I’m going to casually fling my chips into the loved it side, and I’m going to tell you why:

1. Girl Power

I popped the trailer on my phone last night and my (oh god almost four-year-old) son was nearby and he’s like, “What are you watching?” So I invited him over and he hunkered down next to me in that precious tiny human way of not giving one hot shit about my personal space (seriously, he climbs up onto you like you’re a tree and he’s a spider monkey). He started to watch and he’s like, “What is this?” And I said, “You’ll see.” “Who is that?” “You’ll see.” And he watched, a little confused — confused, but interested. And then, when she starts to fly, he gets more excited. “Who is that?” And I’m just, “Dude, I know you have all the patience of a short-circuiting Roomba, but give it a second.” And then when she finally starts doing her Supergirl shit and she’s got the S on her chest and his eyes lit up. “Supergirl!”

Yeah, hell yeah. That’s Supergirl. And he dug it.

It’s a female-led superhero show. With some extra diversity thrown into the mix. I need my son to see stuff like this. He needs to see stuff like this. I don’t know whether or not Black Widow’s portrayal in Age of Ultron is sexist or not — white guys like me aren’t the best judges of that –but what I do know is, the Avengers in general is mostly five handsome white guys and one woman. And though she’s supremely bad-ass, she’s also routinely cast as a second-stringer, usually doing clean-up instead of leading the charge. (And one who doesn’t have her own show.) And it’s not like the situation is much better elsewhere. It’s white guys all the way down. Daredevil! Star-Lord! Bats! Supes! Flash! Arrow! Ant-Man! Wolverine! Woo! Sure, sure, some of these properties feature “strong female characters” (that still sometimes end up weak and powerless) but at the fore of each is one cool white guy doing his cool white guy schtick. Not one of these properties is woman-led, yet. (That’s changing, of course, but slowly, so very slowly.)

I need my son to see that sometimes you get Black Widow.

But sometimes you get Supergirl.

2. I Mean, Jesus Hell, Did You See The Jem And The Holograms Trailer?

Did you? Did you?

Where are the holograms?

Where is Synergy?

Where are the goddamn Misfits?!

What the actual crap happened? Let’s see, Jem was the #1 rated cartoon in ’86-87, and averaged 2.5 million viewers weekly. It wasn’t some short shrift cartoon. Jerrica/Jem ran a fucking record label. She like, helped orphans and stuff. She (by all remembrances) had a great deal of agency. And now we get a movie where it looks like the lead character is shuttled around, her entire persona created for her by a label, and she’s mostly like a paper boat in a storm-flooded river. She doesn’t say, “I want to be a rock star,” she says, “I don’t,” and then the world makes her a rock star anyway because ha ha girls can’t want things. Maybe the movie ends up painting her in a far stronger light, but so far, the trailer gives us some trauma-bombed YouTube star who has none of the rad-as-fuck vibe of Jem and all the vibe of a wet, forgotten handkerchief.

Supergirl, though?

She’s almost the polar opposite. She’s aware of who she is and what she wants, and destiny forces her hand and suddenly — she’s out there. And she likes it. Even in that preview, she’s claiming agency for herself. “I want this, so I’m going to go get it.” Not, “Society wants me to want this, so society has pushed me toward it, and I’m going to have to go along with that.”

3. Rom-Com

I see a lot of hand-wringing that this looks like a rom-com. (AKA, “Romantic comedy.”)

First of all, it loses that vibe somewhat about halfway through the (very long, very spoilery) trailer. (It’s very long and very spoilery because early previews for next season’s television shows showcase roughly the entire pilot of each show, so please know that going in.)

But even so — who gives a shit?

What’s so bad about romantic comedies?

Romance is awesome.

Comedy is awesome.

Pair that up with superhero antics and I’m jolly well fucking in.

Gilmore Girls is a romantic comedy.

The Mindy Project is a romantic comedy.

Why is that a problem? Superhero properties are sometimes overlaid with other genres — Winter Soldier is essentially a conspiracy thriller. Guardians of the Galaxy is a Star Wars-ian space opera. Why can’t we have some romantic comedy elements in Supergirl?

When done well, I really like romantic comedies.

4. Not Some Dour Sourpuss Show

Grr my parents are dead grr my planet exploded grr something-something gentrification of Hell’s Kitchen grr I want to put armor around all the world grr they cut out my babbies grr the secret is I’m always hangry grrrrrr.

Listen, I like dark stuff.

I write dark stuff.

But sometimes, I just want fun.

I like The Flash because it’s hella fun.

I loved Guardians of the Galaxy because it was weird, wonky shenanigans from start to finish.

Supergirl looks like its bringing its own kind of goofy glee to the mix.

It doesn’t look trauma-throttled or slathered in grim-grime. It doesn’t look desaturated and bleak. (Though it seems to tie to the Superman franchise at present, which is a little jarring.)

We don’t have to “adult up” every superhero property.

Did you see the photo above?

She’s smiling!

What mad hell is this?!

5. She Doesn’t Look Super Sexed Up

Hey, I’m just saying.

6. Because Fuck Yeah, Supergirl

I probably never would’ve read any Supergirl comics if friends hadn’t pushed me into it way back when. I had gotten it into my head that GRR BATMAN was what I liked and DUDEHEROES RULE and — I dunno, whaddya want? I was college-age and stupid. But man, so many great characters and great comic books that weren’t that, and one of them was Supergirl. It was lighter, airy, more fun. And the show seems to capture that same feeling for me. Supergirl’s awesome.

So fuck yeah, Supergirl.

I hope the TV show is good because I want this to stick around.

Mike — fine, “Michael” — is one of the good guys. You just know it when you meet him. It radiates from him in waves. Just look at this picture of him! He’s nice. He’s smart. He’s just an all around good dude. (Cue to the flash-forward scene where we discover a closet in Mike’s house that’s full of puppy skeletons.) So, when he was like, “Chuck, I’d like to –” and I was like, “SHUT UP AND KISS ME,” and he’s like “–write a guest post for terribleminds,” and I was like, “Ha ha ha, I gotcha, I was making the funny with the other thing, sure you can guest post.” So, here’s Michael. He’d like to talk to you about — *crash of thunder* — your writing process.

* * *

It occurred to me recently that I went from first draft of The Daedalus Incident, which ultimately became my debut novel, to the release of the final book in the trilogy, The Venusian Gambit, in about five-and-a-half years.

*ducks onslaught of thrown items from frustrated writers*

Guys, that wasn’t a humblebrag. For one, the concept behind the Daedalus trilogy was about seven years in the making prior to that first real novel draft. Prior to that, it was a d20 open-source RPG concept, a Word file full of random worldbuilding and a yellow legal pad full of mad scribblings and coffee stains.

More importantly, though, I’m kind of flabbergasted it went by so quickly already, but a lot of that has to do with my writing process. See, prior to this whole “Hey, I should totally write a novel” thing, glaring act of hubris that it was, I was a journalist for The Associated Press. I covered politics in Albany, N.Y., tech business out in Seattle and Wall Street in New York. So when I see writers on Twitter looking for peeps to do a 1h1k challenge, I’m all like, “Fine, but what do I do with the other 40 minutes?”

My writing process is, in a word, fast. Writing under the fire-eyed glare of underpaid, coffee-and-sweat-stained editors with angina and sleep deprivation will make you fast, man.

Like many of you folks here on Chuck’s blog, my wife Kate is also writing a novel. She’s also, I believe, a far better writer than I am. That’s not to say I suck – I smash words together with reasonable proficiency – but she really takes care with every sentence, and her prose has a sense of lyricism and crafted beauty I’ve yet to approach. I’m not sure I ever will.

On the other hand, she’s not as fast as I am. Her process doesn’t allow for fast. And you know what? That fine. Because her process is working for her.

My process involves taking 2-3 weeks to write an extensive, Excel-based outline, followed by a race to the finish to write the first draft in 3-4 months. (I have a day job and a family, so I do chunk it out over time.) Then I revise…and revise…and revise some more, followed by another revision. But all in a start-to-finish kind of way, and all fueled by the training I got as an AP reporter.

Kate is different. She doesn’t outline, and she tends to circle back and revise one section before hitting the next. And then if she makes a left turn on something, so to speak, she’ll loop back and revise more. If my process is a series of 50-yard dashes, hers is a stroll that tends to take the shape of that loopy white line of icing on top of a Hostess cupcake.

But she’s gonna get to the end of that cupcake with a kick-ass novel, and probably one that will really be something special. It’s going to be a beautiful work.

Now, there are definitely times when she and other writers look at my output and wonder what they’re doing wrong. And when they say that, I point them out to my host here on Terribleminds.com. While you’ve been reading this post, Chuck pounded out another novel and stuffed it in the guts of a dead tauntaun to keep it warm.

But they’re not doing anything wrong. And neither are you.

If I compared my output to that of, say, Chuck or Seanan McGuire, I’d get depressed quick. Comparing output and success? That way lies madness. Write to get the story out and get people to read it. Don’t write to try to keep pace with anybody. It’s not a race.

If you have a writing process that works for you – and by works, I mean that it helps you produce the level of fictiony goodness you’d be proud to have others read – then who cares how long it takes? Who cares when you revise, or how often, or where in the squiggly path between beginning and end it occurs? Outline or no, synopsis or no, doesn’t matter.

If you’re putting ass-in-chair and writing regularly, and you like what you’re getting out of it and getting a sense of progress with it, keep going. You’re not racing me or Chuck or anyone else. Just respect your process and make the most of the chances you have to make your story rock.

Of course, if all goes well, then you’re going to have to adapt your process somewhat, because someone will want to publish your novel and then you’ll have to start hitting deadlines and such. But you know what? I wish that problem on every aspiring writer out there. It’s a good one to have.

***

Michael J. Martinez is the author of The Venusian Gambit, the newly-released final book in Daedalus trilogy from Night Shade Books. He’ll also have a short story in the Cthulhu Fhtagn! anthology out later this summer from Word Horde. When not writing, he brews his own beer, travels a fair bit and engages in suburban-dad things like lawn mowing. He can be found online at http://www.michaeljmartinez.net and on Twitter at @mikemartinez72.

I was asked to join the official Twitter Fiction Fest, and last night was my slot, so I took two hours to write something that is equal parts warning and invitation from a mysterious figure known as @TheCompiler01 (who is further bound to a mysterious entity known as Typhon).

The Compiler would like very much to talk to you.

I’ve storified the tale at:

You Have Been Deemed Potentially Useful.

(The story connects to my upcoming novel, ZER0ES, about hackers who tangle with a sinister new government surveillance program. You can pre-order the book presently: Amazon, B&N, Harper, or from your favorite local bookstore using Indiebound.)

I may do more at that account leading up to Zer0es…

Storybundle Is Back!

If you don’t know Storybundle, it’s a package of DRM-free e-books centered around a single theme and you can choose your own price and how much goes to charity, how much goes to authors, how much goes to Storybundle. It’s really very cool. I’ve done it before and think it’s a great service and it nets you a bucketload of cool books in one fell swoop.

It’s back, this time with a writing-and-publishing advisory collection curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. And I’ve got a book in there —  30 Days In The Word Mines — which serves as a day-by-day writing guide over the course of 30 days. It’s advice that’s equal parts practical and philosophical. Part motivational, part reality check. It’s meant to help you get moving and then give you things to consider once you’re motoring along on the story. It’s there in the bundle with other books by Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Vonda McIntyre, Judith Tarr, and others.

Check it out now: Storybundle Writing Bundle.

Appearances

Hey! I updated my upcoming appearances.

I’ll now be heading out to both DragonCon and the Decatur Book Fest in Georgia, and will split my time between the two of them.

Also, my Phoenix ComicCon panels are now live! I have a metric bootyload of panels, which is awesome. And I get to sit on panels with some of my favoritest people in the whole wide world. (I mean, holy crap, y’all. Delilah Dawson, Kevin Hearne, Sam Sykes, Myke Cole, Max Gladstone, Greg Van Eekhout, Andrea Phillips, Jason Hough, Jay Posey, and more. Plus I get to finally meet Richard Kadrey and Cherie Priest? It’s true that my life is amazing. I’m just stunned I’m not on any panels with Stephen Blackmoore. I guess the con realizes that the two of us on a panel together basically opens yet another of the Seven Seals? WHATEVER.)

(Also looks like GenCon panels are up — though I have not perused them. More on that later.)

I’ve also got some bookstore visits and other trips around worth looking at.

And that’s all she wrote, folks.

WENDIG OUT.

*jetpacks away*

I received a very nice email from a very nice reader that said (and here I’m paraphrasing) that her problem isn’t writer’s block, but something bigger and yet, at the same time, less tangible. She said she’s a young writer, and then she went to say:

The cement wall in the subject line could be named lack of confidence, or even lack of vision if you like. Being where I am in life makes it hard to picture myself as the respected, published author I’d like to be one day. In theory, I know what it takes.But is it really as simple as, “just do the work and you’ll get there?” Or is there something I’m missing? Because there’s a part of me that feels like I might not have what it takes even if I work hard, my ideas are good, and trusted friends tell me I’ve got a gift.

I’ve been searching the net, but it doesn’t feel like a lot of people get the sentiment. So, I figured that the perspective a more experienced person could help me out. What were the biggest concerns/issues/toxic leeches attached to your back you had when you started out? Were they in any way similar to mine? How did you get around them?

My initial response on this was just going to be, “I’ll send her my advice on caring less, as maybe that’s the problem.” Everybody — not just writers — is afforded a Basket of Only So Many Fucks at the start of each day. And we spend those Fucks on whatever we can or must. It’s comforting and occasionally badassedly energizing to say, I’m all out of fucks to give, but for writers, that’s not really an option. You gotta give a fuck about this whole thing. You can’t just hit the bottom of the basket. But at the same time, some writers give too many fucks. They blow them all like a cokehead gambler at the Vegas roulette table: “PUT IT ALL ON RED 42,” and the lady is like, “The table only goes up to 38,” and the gambler’s like “SHUT UP AND TAKE ALL OF MY FUCKS.” A writer who spends it all like that puts too much pressure on herself, makes it too important, too heavy a burden, and then the risk can be paralyzing.

And then my next response is basically:

“Well, yeah, writers write, so go write.”

Then I drop the mic. But remain on stage to eat a pie rather noisily.

But I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here.

Here’s what I remember about being a young, untested writer:

I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

Like, I understood the principle. You sit down, you tippy-tappy out the word jabber on your typey machine, you arrange all the word jabber into the approximate shape of a “story,” and then ???? and then step three: cry under your desk. And maybe at some point in the future, Big Publishing knocks on your door, chomping a cigar made of old parchment and he’s all like, “HERE’S YOUR TICKET, KID, YOUR TICKET TO THE BIG TIME. YOU’RE A BESTSELLER NOW, PAL — A BONA FIDE AUTHOR-TYPE! HERE’S YOUR KEYS TO NEW YORK CITY AND NEIL GAIMAN’S PHONE NUMBER. NOW GET ON THE UNICORN AND LET’S RIDE, CHAMP.”

But really, what it feels like is that you’re the guest at a party. And you don’t know anybody. You don’t know the rules — are you allowed to double-dip a chip? Where is the guest bathroom and are you allowed to use the hand towels? Is that an orgy upstairs? What’s the orgy etiquette, exactly? Was I supposed to bring my own lube? Silicone or water-based?

Worse, it’s like everyone at this party is speaking a sorta different language. It’s still English, but there exists a lingo, a jargon, a sense that you stepped into a subculture that isn’t your own. Everybody and everything feels and sounds off-kilter, like you’re listening to a bunch of software programmers or Wall Street execs make up buzzwords while really, really high.

It’s not just about the writing — writing is, itself, not a difficult task. Like I said: tippy-tappy typey-typey and ta-da, you wrote something. But the problem lies in the hurricane winds of bewilderment that roar and whirl around that central act. What’s good writing? What are the rules? What is your voice? What’s everyone else doing? Will you get published? Agent? Editor? Self-published? What’s good storytelling? What the hell is a genre and why does it matter? Whoza? Wuzza? Why am I doing this? Why does my soul feel this way? Do I want to cry? Am I crying? I’m crying. I’m eating Cheezits at 3AM and I don’t have a shirt on and I wrote another short story and it’s probably not any good or maybe it’s really good I don’t know AHHHH I don’t have any context at all for anything that I’m doing.

And that’s the trick. We lack context. We lack experience and awareness and instinct.

So, we seek that out.

We look to other writers — and to the industry at large — for context.

We get advice. We load ourselves up with information. We crave context and so we gobble it down like that box of 3AM Cheezits and soon our fingers are dusted with Cheezit pollen and shame but we feel emboldened with new information.

And often, it’s shitty information.

It’s shitty because everyone is faking confidence.

They’re creating context by mostly making it up.

I do it, too. We all do. We all have our little rules of writing, our ways that things are done, and they’re nearly all smeared with at least a little bit — a dollop! a thumbprint! — of horseshit. “Don’t use adverbs,” someone says, except whoa, hey, lots of words are adverbs: then, still, never, anywhere, downstairs, seldom, soon, after, since, and the list goes on and on. “Never use a verb other than ‘said’,” except then you see how nearly every book uses dialogue tags other than said. He shouted! She asked! He growled. “Never open a book with” and here the list goes on and on — weather, a character regarding themselves, a line of dialogue, a prologue, a penguin on a jet ski, two vampires blowing each other, a math problem, a heretical screed, a Roomba endlessly tracking cat shit around a living room while pondering its own existential dread. And then, ta-da, you read like, ten books that break these rules. And sometimes the books that break these rules are bestsellers. Or are literary books that are well-regarded critically. Or is just a book that made it to someone’s book shelf at all. “But they did it!” you stammer frustratedly as the Roomba bumps fruitlessly into your boot, getting poop on your foot.

It only gets worse when you start taking publishing advice. I hear bad publishing advice all the goddamn time. “Nobody gets an agent from the query process,” I heard recently. Yeah, except me. And a whole dumpster full of writers I know that got agents from the query process. “Nobody survives the slush pile.” Totally true, except when it’s often not. “Urban fantasy isn’t selling,” and then you read about two more urban fantasy series coming to print, and you look at the bestseller lists and it features Butcher, Hearne, McGuire, Harris (and then you realize what they really mean is, “Nobody’s buying shitty urban fantasy right now”). Hell, even publishers don’t know things. You want them to. You think they should. But when a hot new trend kicks off through book culture like some kind of super-crazy-contagious syphilis, the best they can do is capitalize on the trend they failed to predict.

What I’m trying to say is:

None of us know what the fuck we’re doing.

I know we don’t because the deeper we go down this career, the less we seem to know. Oh, we have ideas. We’ll literally explode your ears with our self-important author talk, but at the end of the day, all the shit we say can probably be disproven by talking to five other writers, and mostly that look in the black of our eyes is one of utter bewilderment. Our greatest and most honest answer to you regarding all the questions you want to ask us would be a vigorous, exasperated shrug.

That’s not to say we’re entirely clueless, mind you. It’s like this — you’re at the bottom of the mountain looking up. We’re on the side of the mountain or even at its peak looking down. You have the climb ahead of you. We have the climb — or some of it, at least — behind us. We have a view of the valley. You have a view of only the mountain. We know a little bit about climbing. We know some of the gear. We have our limited perspective on getting up to where we are, at present. We can only tell you what we know and what we did — and that’s not entirely helpful.

See, up at the peak, we’ve just achieved a new level of cluelessness.

“What’s that body of water over there?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“How’d we survive crossing that SNOWY CREVASSE where the ICE WEASELS were nesting?”

“Luck, I guess.”

“How do we get back down?”

“I think we die up here.”

“Oh.”

There exists no well-marked, well-lit path up the mountain. You will find no handy map. No crafty app for your smartphone. The terrain shifts after everyone walks upon it. New chasms. Different caves. The ice weasels become hell-bears. The sacred texts we find in the grottos along our journey are sacred to us but heresy to someone else.

The person who wrote me the email, she’s probably saying:

“None of this is helpful.”

Which is likely true.

Though, hopefully, the lack of cluelessness that abounds through all the strata of This Thing We Do is comforting? It’s not like young writers are the only ones who don’t know what the fuck is going on or how things work. We’re all just making this shit up as we go. Some of us have a little more context for it — we’re the guests at the party, the ones babbling the jargon and the ones who know some of the orgy etiquette rules. But take heart: we’re just making the jargon up as we go. We’re inventing the orgy etiquette as the orgy unfolds because hey man, orgies aren’t math problems. ORGIES ARE ART. And writing is like that, too — it’s not a repeatable science experiment. It’s not, “Take this pill to relieve your headache.” It’s not X = Y. Instead it’s a lot of random: “Should I stick this in there?” “Yes?” “Bend over, I’m going to try this.” “I tried this in New Mexico and it didn’t work.” “Good to know.”

We share information, we do our best, and for the most part? We wing it.

I feel like I’m not helping.

So, let’s try this.

Out of all the bullshit about writing and publishing, I think you’ll find a series of constants.

These constants remain necessary to do the thing that you want to do.

And doing these things again and again will grant the confidence to continue. (And by the way? Don’t worry about whether or not you’re ‘good enough.’ Nobody even knows what ‘good enough’ means. That’s for someone else to worry about. You worry about whether or not you want to be a writer. And if you do, then be a writer and do your best to cleave to these constants.)

The Five Constants

1. Write A Lot (And To Completion)

2. Read A Lot (And Read Critically When You Do)

3. Think About Writing And Storytelling

4. Talk To Writers

5. Go Live A Life

That’s it.

I don’t even know if I need to explain those, really — they’re all pretty obvious, I like to hope. If you want to write, you need to write. No matter who you are or what problems you suffer: writers write. And writers write to the end. They finish their shit. And they read a lot, too. I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t read, same as you’ve probably never met a chef who doesn’t like food. You gotta give this thing we do time and thought and energy. And despite all of us not really knowing what the fuck is going on, it helps to talk to other writers. If only for solidarity. If only so we can all shrug together. If only so we can drive the car over the edge of the cliff as one, Thelma and Louise-style. And beyond that is life itself. A life that demands living. Life that will fuel the words, that will form the warts and blemishes and little bones of the stories you want to tell.

None of us know what the fribbly fuck we’re doing.

But to gain the confidence you need, you sometimes gotta pretend like you do.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest