Last week’s challenge: Fifty Characters.

So, last weekend I was at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference.

It was great stuff — highly recommended.

One of the days I did a workshop on theme, a topic that, for me, is quite beloved. One of the exercises was that we had a bunch of folks in the room come up with various themes — then I picked one and had people write to that theme. Follow me? So, one of the themes they picked was:

“We’re all human, even when we’re not.”

So, I’m going to grab that, and that’s now your theme.

Use it and write a 1000-word piece of flash fiction in service to that theme.

Write it at your online space.

Link back here via the comments.

Due in one week, by May 9th, at noon EST.

The lone gunman Three is gone.

Wren is the new governor of the devastated settlement of Morningside, but there is turmoil in the city. When his life is put in danger, Wren is forced to flee Morningside until he and his retinue can determine who can be trusted.

But out in the Open, they find a border outpost infested with Weir in greater numbers than anyone has ever seen. These lost, dangerous creatures are harboring a terrible secret – one that will have consequences not just for Wren and his comrades, but for the future of what remains of the world.

***

1.  If you MUST do something you love, you might occasionally forget you love it. (But you’ll remember again!)

It wasn’t really a surprise necessarily to discover just how much a deadline could affect my personal level of writing enjoyment, but boy oh boy did I ever get a reminded of it with this sequel.  I’m fortunate to have a day job that involves writing, so I thought I was really used to this whole writing-on-a-deadline thing.  What I neglected to recognize was that for me writing novels had been a special place for me alone where I could play with MY ideas on MY schedule (which of course on the first go-round meant it took me about three years to do six months of work).

With Morningside Fall, knowing I had some very fine folks counting on me to keep up my end of the bargain added a new dimension of pressure that I hadn’t really been expecting.  I let it get to me more than I should have, and there were many, many nights that trudging up to the office to work on The Book was a real struggle.  Sometimes I stared at my laptop bleary-eyed wondering why I ever thought this was a good idea.

The important thing was to keep at it, to keep pecking around the edges and making progress, until I found myself at those scenes and moments in the story that had driven me to start writing the thing in the first place.  My appreciation for certain reveals, or certain character resolutions was heightened, or maybe deepened, or maybe both by the slog through the set up.

2.  Keeping a record of daily productivity is very helpful.

Likely not a revelation to anyone else out there, but this was one of those things I figured I probably should be doing, but just never did.  I’ve never been much of one for lists and spreadsheets and data points and measuring, but a couple of months into writing Morningside Fall, I realized I was counting my productivity more by how many hours I spent in front of the computer rather than by how many words I had on the page.   Imagine my shock when I discovered that just sitting there in my office for three or four hours didn’t necessarily mean I’d made any real progress.

Word count might not be the most accurate thing to use to measure progress, since it’s perfectly possible to write several thousand words that don’t actually move your story forward at all, BUT it’s far better than having nothing at all to go by.  And having that record of daily work gave me some unexpected benefits, too … if I was feeling particularly burned out on a night, I could look back at my recent progress and make an informed decision about whether or not I could afford to give myself a break, or if I needed to buckle down and save the rest day for later.  It also helped me identify my overall velocity at different stages of the book, which is helping me now as I write the third installment of the series.  Knowing that I was crawling along in the early stages and practically flying towards the end is helping me stay more grounded in my expectations for Book Three, which is helping stave off some of that anxiety I suffered during Book Two.

3.  Being honest with yourself is hard, but necessary.

My original deadline for Morningside Fall was July (of 2013), but as I was getting into May I had to take some time to evaluate where I was in the story and how much time I was going to be able to devote to it over those coming months.  (This was another spot where having that Daily Record really came in handy.)  My pride kept reassuring me that WE CAN DO IT, insisting that I could write thousands of words every night between now and then and all of them would be perfect and require no editing whatsoever because hey I’m a professional!  I spent a couple of days wrestling with myself, not wanting to admit that I was in trouble.  But I was in trouble.  And I knew it, no matter how much I wanted to pretend I had it all under control.

I wrote my editor (the excellent Lee Harris of Angry Robot Books fame) a quick email to inform him I hadn’t made the progress that I’d wanted to by that point, and asking if maybe there was any wiggle room on the deadline.  It didn’t take him long to respond, but I of course spent most of that interval imagining the response was going to be somewhere between “No, it’s a hard deadline, get back to work, you hack!” and “No, it’s a hard deadline and we should have known you were a talentless hack, we’ll never work with you again and you still have to give us the book anyway!  On schedule!  Hack!”

Of course Lee’s actual response was something along the lines of “Hey, no problem, how about an extra month?  And thanks for letting us know so early!”

It wasn’t fun to admit I wasn’t hitting my targets, but it was a whole lot better to admit it eight weeks out instead of the weekend before.

4.  Sometimes your characters know themselves better than you do.

I’ve had that thing happen before where characters on the page seemed to take on a life of their own, or started making decisions I wasn’t expecting, but never to the degree that it happened while I was writing Morningside Fall.  At one point, I’d reached an important turning point in the story that I’d known was coming for a long time, and it involved a couple of characters sneaking off without anyone else knowing.  And lo and behold when I got to that moment, literally when the characters were at the door, there was another character sitting there.  My fingers typed it and my brain stopped and said “Wait, no, what?  No.  That’s not how it goes!”  But no matter how much I wanted it to go the way I had planned, once I’d seen it on the page, it just didn’t make sense any other way.  That opened a whole new branch of the story, but in the end, it was much more consistent with what had come before, and added some unexpected depth.

More startling was the character that inserted himself into the book without telling me who he was or why he wanted to be in it.  I wrote several of his chapters before I learned who he really was and what he was about.  And when I realized it I actually said “WHAT?” out loud, which was marginally embarrassing.  It’s pretty rare for me to be able to surprise myself like that.  And maybe a little unsettling.

5.  Being and Doing are different things.

I am Jay Posey.  Sometimes I write books.

If you’ve read the previous points, it probably comes as no surprise that writing Morningside Fall was really tough for me.  There were a variety of contributing factors but one thing I discovered through the process was that I’d let myself put my identity into something that couldn’t sustain it.  I’d bought into the idea that my value as a person was directly tied to my ability to produce.  Since I was A Writer, I was supposed to be Writing, and on the days when I just didn’t have it in me, I let it affect me at a much deeper level than it should have.

I’d developed an unhealthy connection between my output and my self-worth, and at times I got into a death spiral where a bad writing day brought on extra anxiety and fear, which made it harder to write the next day …

Writing is hard work, sure.  A novel is a long work that takes patience, discipline, and sometimes a little grit.  But writing a book should never cause an existential crisis.  Knowing that I need to guard that boundary between who I am and what I do was the most significant of these five things I learned writing Morningside Fall.

***

Jay Posey is a professional typist with a face for radio and a voice for print. He’s the author of the novels THREE and MORNINGSIDE FALL, published by Angry Robot Books, and is a senior narrative designer at Ubisoft/Red Storm Entertainment, where he has spent many years contributing as a writer and game designer to Tom Clancy’s award-winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises.  He blogs occasionally at jayposey.com and spends more time than he should hanging around Twitter as @HiJayPosey.

Jay Posey: Blog | Twitter

Morningside Fall: Amazon | B&N | Robot Trading Co

When murdered sinners fail to show up in Hell, it’s up to Salim Ghadafar, an atheist warrior forced to solve problems for the goddess of death, to track down the missing souls. In order to do so, Salim will need to descend into the anarchic city of Kaer Maga, following a trail that ranges from Hell’s iron cities to the gates of Heaven itself. Along the way, he’ll be aided by a host of otherworldly creatures, a streetwise teenager, and two warriors of the mysterious Iridian Fold. But when the missing souls are the scum of the earth, and the victims devils themselves, can anyone really be trusted?

1. SEQUELS ARE HARD

Writing my first novel, Death’s Heretic, was deceptively easy. As a full-time book editor, I’d seen inside the sausage factory enough to finally remove the paralyzing awe that had always surrounded novelists for me, and learned how an outline can hold the terror of the blank page at bay. And so, brimming with the hubris that comes from seeing professional authors in the literary underoos, I threw a bunch of my favorite ideas from the Pathfinder campaign setting together, then shook the jar to see what would happen.

To my delight, people liked it, and the kid inside me who’d waited twenty years for this moment rejoiced. I had written a book! It didn’t suck! Surely I knew what I was doing now, and the next one would be even easier, right?

Except that now I had an expectation for myself. What if my next book sucked? Would I fall prey to the dreaded sophomore slump? It had been years since I began writing Death’s Heretic—did I even remember how to start a novel? And was my formerly mysterious protagonist even interesting if you had already read the first book and knew his backstory?

In the end, despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I reminded myself that a book is neither good nor bad unless it’s done, and that the only solution was to write now and worry about the quality later. Thankfully, as often happens in such situations, when I went back and read it afterward, I was astonished at how much I enjoyed it.

Time and distance can make even your own books seem larger than life, but don’t let that psych you out. Books are like your children: No matter how polished they may seem now, don’t forget that they used to wet the bed regularly. And while other people may judge them against each other, your job is to love each of them for their own merits.

2. BLENDER YOUR GENDER

If you’ve been paying attention to the speculative fiction community, you’ve probably noticed that gender (and race, and sexuality, and…) is a hot-button issue. A common theme is that of representation: for instance, women make up more than half the population, so it only makes sense that they’d make up half the characters in your story, right? Thus, if you’re looking at your story and all the characters are male, you should strongly consider shaking things up.

“But why should art be subject to political correctness?” you might ask. Leaving aside for the moment all the myriad reasons why it’s good to care about people’s feelings, as well as the fact that you just put on a salami vest and walked into the lion cage of the Internet, I’m going to totally nullify that question by saying that even if you don’t care about the political or social justice angles, gender balance makes your art better.

After Death’s Heretic came out, I had a friend tell me that while she liked the book, she’d noticed that there were basically no women in it. I was flabbergasted—one of the two protagonists was female! But she pointed out that there were very few women in supporting roles—walk-ons with a few lines or wandering past in the background—and that the resulting all-male world really disrupted her suspension of disbelief. She couldn’t imagine herself in the world, because she wasn’t represented.

With The Redemption Engine, I went in with gender balance in mind—and promptly hit a snag. My main character was male, his two sidekicks were male (because I really wanted to write a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser dup as a married gay couple), and their scrappy local guide had already been established as male in other books. In short: total sausage-fest. So I made a list of other characters the book needed—the villains, the competing investigator, the recruited warriors—and tried to add women until it felt more balanced. I also tried to pay attention to the background, to make sure that there was representation among the walk-on characters as well.

Do you always need to have gender balance? No, of course not. I recently sold a military SF story where the soldiers were all gay men fighting alongside their lovers, and in that instance, it made sense for everyone to be male. But character demographics matter, and if your default is to make everyone male (or white, or straight, or…) you’re unnecessarily alienating part of your potential audience.

3. CUT YOUR TAGS

Dialogue tags are often one of the easiest places to cut words, as character actions or beats can convey the information just as well. Compare these two passages:

“Look at that!” James said, and pointed. “Chuck’s being eaten by squirrels!”

vs.

“Look at that!” James pointed. “Chuck’s being eaten by squirrels!”

See how the action renders the dialogue tag unnecessary? Sometimes rhythm alone is enough:

“Did you write me that blog post?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Wendig, sir!”

I notice this especially with audiobooks, where the voice acting really highlights unnecessary dialogue tags, so when writing my new book, I did my best to take out all but the most load-bearing tags.

4. ARCS AREN’T JUST FOR NOAH

In my first book, I had the luxury of writing an odd-couple romance, which gave me an easy, classic arc for my two protagonists: at the beginning, they can barely tolerate each other, but by the end, they’ve grown to love and respect each other. It’s something we see constantly, from Pride and Prejudice to Sherlock, and most of us can tell that story on autopilot. (And before you try to correct me about Sherlock, I’d argue that every buddy cop show is a romance, regardless of who they kiss.)

In The Redemption Engine, however, I didn’t have a love interest. Salim, my main character, is flying solo the whole time, and while he makes a lot of friends, I had trouble figuring out what he was feeling. About halfway through the manuscript, frustrated by his cardboard acting, I sat down and decided that I needed to give him a character arc. And not just him—his whole damn team.

In the end (spoilers!), Salim’s arc ended up being relatively subtle: He goes from serving the death goddess against his will to realizing that, while he may resent his servitude, he actually agrees with her cause. He’s finally able to admit that, at some level, he likes his job. Once I understood that, it made it far easier for me to get inside his head and make him a sympathetic character.

5. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

This isn’t some axiom about creating danger and tension in your manuscript. This isn’t really even about writing at all, but it is the most important thing I learned while writing this book.

Someday, you are going to die.

So am I. And whether I write one book or a hundred, someday I’m going to close my eyes for the last time, and that will be that.

And I find that incredibly comforting.

See, I pay a lot of attention to other writers. You probably do, too. I see their announcements on Twitter, and I think, “Wow, they just put out another book?” And then my Productivity Demon pipes up and starts musing about how much more successful and satisfied I would be if I just spent more time writing. Knuckled down. Kept my nose to the grindstone. After all, don’t all those writing advice articles say that a real writer sacrifices for their art? That if you can stand to not write, even for a few days, then you’re not a real writer?

And that, my friends, is bullshit. Worse, it’s dangerous bullshit. Because when you’re an achievement junkie, as so many writers are—why else would we trudge through all the rejection and unpaid hours?—there’s no such thing as enough. Start following that rabbit hole, and pretty soon you’re feeling guilty for all the time you’re not writing. The rest of your life becomes an impediment. An obstacle.

And that’s no way to live. Fuck sacrifice. Write because you like writing, because the hard work brings a correspondingly deep satisfaction, and if you find that it’s interfering disproportionately with the rest of your life, stop. Go kiss your spouse. Play the guitar. Lie in a sunbeam with a dog and watch the wind in the trees. Because this is all we get, people. This right here. And whether you’re Stephen King or a newbie with a single sale, if you aren’t enjoying your life, no amount of publication is going to fix that.

Realizing that allowed me to finally relax and quit feeling like I’m constantly falling behind all my incredibly talented colleagues, and instead spend time on all the different people and activities that bring me joy. And you know what? I’m still writing. I may not be quite as fast as I used to be, but I enjoy it a hell of a lot more. And isn’t that why we all got into this in the first place?

Someday, you will die. Use your time wisely.

* * *

James L. Sutter is the Managing Editor of Paizo Publishing, as well as a co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. He’s the author of the novels Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine, the former of which was ranked #3 on Barnes & Noble’s Best Fantasy Releases of 2011 and was a finalist for both an Origins Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. In addition to numerous game books, James has written short stories for such publications as Escape Pod, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Geek Love, and the #1 Amazon bestseller Machine of Death. His anthology Before They Were Giants pairs the first published short stories of speculative fiction luminaries with new interviews and advice from the authors themselves.

James L. Sutter: Website | Twitter

The Redemption Engine: Amazon | B&N

The second book in the flintlock epic fantasy Powder Mage Trilogy, following Promise of Blood. 

Tamas’ invasion of Kez ends in disaster when a Kez counter-offensive leaves him cut off behind enemy lines with only a fraction of his army, no supplies, and no hope of reinforcements. Drastically outnumbered and pursued by the enemy’s best, he must lead his men on a reckless march through northern Kez to safety, and back over the mountains so that he can defend his country from an angry god.

In Adro, Inspector Adamat only wants to rescue his wife. To do so he must track down and confront the evil Lord Vetas. He has questions for Vetas concerning his enigmatic master, but the answers might lead to more questions.

Tamas’ generals bicker among themselves, the brigades lose ground every day beneath the Kez onslaught, and Kresimir wants the head of the man who shot him in the eye. With Tamas and his powder cabal presumed dead, Taniel Two-shot finds himself as the last line of defense against Kresimir’s advancing army.

1) WRITING IS A JOB

You know that scene at the end of Disney’s Aladdin, where our titular hero convinces Jafar to wish to be a genie? Becoming a published author is kind of like that; you get everything that goes with it. The Crimson Campaign is my second book, but the first one I wrote under contract, which means I now had deadlines and editors and fans and holy crap people expect things of me now. It changes your whole way of looking at the whole “writing” thing.

2) TITLES ARE HARD

I think a huge part of writing a book is self-exploration. You find out your strengths and weaknesses, and you do your best to improve upon the latter and write to the former. One of the many things I discovered is that I am terrible at titles. You can go any number of routes: evocative, obvious, action-packed, or more. I tried a little bit of everything, slinging titles at my editor until my arm hurt, and we finally settled upon The Crimson Campaign. Which I do love, by the way.

This is one area that I’ll admit some professional jealousy, over Steven Erikson’s titles. Toll the Hounds. Dust of Dreams. Memories of Ice. So cool.

3) THE WRITING DOESN’T ALWAYS GO AS PLANNED

I had a hell of a time trying to start The Crimson Campaign. It began with me writing a huge chunk of a novel based on the outline I had originally handed my editor, (an outline, I’ll add, that I was very happy with) and I hated every minute of it. I tried again and still didn’t get anywhere. The writing was making me ill because of how forced it felt. My agent finally told me that it was more important to write a good book than it was to follow that outline. So I threw it out and started fresh and was able to write the book fast enough to meet my (extended) deadline. I hate to think of what would have happened if I had stuck to that original plot. I would probably still be angrily revising it to this day.

4) MINOR CHARACTER HAVE LIVES TOO, AND READERS DIG IMMERSION

While writing The Crimson Campaign, I spent a lot of time thinking about minor characters. Some of these show up for just a few pages or a chapter, or maybe they don’t even show up at all and are only alluded to throughout the narrative. Usually these characters are important in some way, whether they helped shape the world in a previous era or whether they are simply an obstacle for the hero.

I found myself thinking about how much I liked these characters and how vital they really are to a good work of fiction. If your main characters are the meat and potatoes, these side characters are your spices and really give the world its flavor. But why are they were here, now, in my world? Where did their stories start?

Using that thought experiment with a side character from Promise of Blood and The Crimson Campaign, I wrote a short story called “The Girl of Hrusch Avenue” about a young girl on the cusp of her power. To my surprise the response was overwhelmingly positive. I found out that readers wondered the same thing I did and that they love to see the world fleshed out in positive ways like this. I’ve done the same thing with “Hope’s End,” about a doomed infantry charge, and Forsworn, a novella about living with forbidden sorcery. As people keep gobbling up the stories, I’ve discovered that compelling immersion is never a bad thing.

5) FLINTLOCK GRENADE LAUNCHERS ARE A THING

See?

* * *

Brian McClellan is an epic fantasy author. He studied writing under Brandon Sanderson and was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future Contest. His first novel, Promise of Blood, was praised by critics and readers alike, is on the short list for the Gemmell Morningstar Award, and was a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Debut Goodreads Author.

Brian is an avid player of video games and reader of epic novels and history. His hobbies include making homemade jam from local berries and tending to his hive of honeybees. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, two dogs, and cat.

Brian McClellan: Website | Twitter

The Crimson Campaign: Amazon | Amazon UK | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | Indiebound

Two weeks ago I went to Penn State Erie because a women’s studies class was studying Blackbirds as part of a “women and superheroes” class. (Fascinating takeaways from that class: the class was evenly split on whether or not Miriam Black is a superhero, anti-hero, or something else; they correctly saw that the book was very much an “anti-romance” novel; they also saw, to my delight, that the princess in the tower that needed saving was actually big burly truck driver, Louis, and Miriam was the one who had to save him.)

Then, this past weekend I sat on a fantastic panel about diversity in genre fiction with authors Gail Carriger, Carol Berg, and Jim C. Hines, and DMLA agent bad-ass, Amy Boggs.

Oh, spoiler warning: I’m a firmly-middle-class heteronormative white dude.

Basically, I’m one of the Career Tributes in the Hunger Games. I get all the cool snacks and weapons. I’ve already got a bunch of cards up my sleeve. Hell, sometimes I don’t even feel like a Career Tribute but one of the damn Gamemakers. To carry this metaphor to its naturally absurd conclusion, the odds really are ever in my favor.

And so it’s weird to me to be invited to talk about diversity. I have almost no stakes in the game. Hell, I should probably be continuing to tilt favor toward us folks living up on Heteronormative White Dude mountain because, hey, prime real estate. My son’s a little white dude, so why not keep the deck stacked for him, you know? And in a sense, getting to be on panels about diversity and giving talks about the same feels Trojan Horsey to me — like a littler version of me is gonna pop out of my own skull and be like, “HA HA HA WHITE POWER! MEN’S RIGHTS!” and then kick over a desk before running out of the room, cackling.

Further, I don’t feel particularly good at it. Speaking about diversity, I mean. I try. I really do. But I make mistakes. And even in making mistakes there’s this vibe that I’m so brave for speaking out about it when really, it’s easy-breezy for me to talk about this stuff. I don’t see myself losing readers. I might even gain readers. Any hate mail I get is pretty tame and, honestly, fairly infrequent — and has yet to ever invoke anything resembling a death threat or a threat of rape. So, it’s not particularly “brave” of me to bullhorn my opinions from this Very Safe Iron-Walled Bunker up here on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain while those living off the mountain are catching hell even when they don’t speak up.

So, why do I do it?

Is it privilege-flavored guilt? I like to think it’s more than this, though I’ll note that — like many of my ilk — I grew up in a family that could, at times, be considered casually and comfortably racist. Where gender roles were more firmly polarized and imbalanced. (I had friends, male friends, who sometimes wore skirts and that, ahhh, didn’t go over well?)

Is it that I wanna be a white knight? Oooh, god, I hope not. That thought makes my guts curdle. I don’t wanna play anybody’s hero. I’m a shitty hero. If I’m your champion… *low whistle* then everybody’s pretty much fucked. I get this stuff too wrong too often to be a hero. I’d much rather be your squire and try to cultivate a world where you get to be knight. Or maybe I’m the standard-bearer — the flag-bearer carrying the banners for a greater ideal. Maybe mouthpiece, or ally, or pit crew. So, nope, no white knight desires, here. I’m way too introverted to wanna be a white knight.

Part of it is a whole host of selfish reasons, honestly. I could probably subsist very well on writing to white guys, but just the same, I look around at a changing world where white guys aren’t always top of the pops anymore. I look at a world that is increasingly diverse at the street level, if not yet the institutional level, and — again, selfishly! — I don’t want to talk over or around people who don’t look or live like me. I don’t want to ignore them. I want to include them. If I speak to more people (selfishness alert), my audience grows (translated: I can sell more books). Monocultures aren’t healthy. Not in an ecosystem, not in a financial portfolio, not in a group of friends or a family. Monocultures are weakness. Diversification and diversity — polyculture — is strength. It’s how we keep on keepin’ on, y’know?

Part of it is because I am racist and I am sexist. I dunno if there’s a biological component at work there, but I do know there’s certainly an environmental one — and growing up white in America, with a male identity that matches what lurks within my Iron Man Underoos, you kinda get this stuff drilled into you a lot of the time. Sometimes actively, sometimes passively, in much the same way that rape culture isn’t always overt (or has been overt for so long it feels like part of the fabric rather than as a flaw in the design). I can still feel, like a turning worm, that flinching reaction of ingrained racist, sexist bullshit — and it’s honestly pretty gross. (A good example of how this exists in a practical way is that all-too-common moment when other crappy white dudes assume you are just as crappy as they are and they find you and in a low voice say something toxic about that woman over there or that Arab guy across the room or gay marriage and you’re like, “Ohh, hey, no, I’m not on your team, you rancorous shit-bird.”)

Sometimes it’s just that once you try to embrace the duel-wielding power of empathy and logic you start to see a lot of flaws in a lot of systems and, in turn, you start feeling like that’s fucked up. The data points of rape culture. Or the fact that American prison culture is the new slavery. Or the castigating bullshit surrounding gay marriage. Or cop stops or TSA stops or anything in the news ever. You just start to see that everything is weighted for me and everything is weighted against you. It’s like, I’m born, and they give me a high-five and a soft pillow. Someone unlike me is born and they cut your hamstring before drop-kicking your ass out of the crib.

(Shit, maybe it is guilt, I dunno.)

As a writer, it’s that I wanna talk to more people. Not at more people. But as part of a two-way, we’re-all-at-the-same-table conversation. Even when I’m getting it wrong. And it always strikes me as ironic that science-fiction (HEY LOOK THE FUTURE) and fantasy (WE CAN MAKE UP ANYTHING WE WANT) are so frequently mired in the narrow Heteronormative White Dude paradigm. You can do anything you want in these worlds and yet somehow they end up always looking like the samey-samey worlds that came before them.

Which brings us to Star Wars.

I won’t go into this too deeply, and yes, I recognize that we may see more casting yet. But they announced what appears to be the primary cast and it looked a lot like the composition of, well, every other science-fiction film you can think of, which is to say one woman, one non-white guy (John Boyega rules, by the way — go see Attack the Block), and a bunch of other white lads. A major piece of pop culture like that would be improved by being representative of all the audience in potential, you know? I played Star Wars as a kid and had a panoply of roles I could comfortably drop into because damn near everyone on screen looked like me. My cousin, a girl, played, mmm, ohhh, Leia. (What, was she gonna play Mon Mothma? A Jabba slave girl?) And no, it’s not that she was unable to change gender roles and play a boy — it’s that to begin with, she had no representation on screen except for one (admittedly pretty bad-ass) woman.

And here someone might flinch and say “something-something quota” or “blah blah politically-correct,” but it’s not about mandates or forced heterogeneity so much as it is trying to speak to more people and not make your entirely made-up world look like something less progressive and less inclusive than actual reality.

Fiction, and genre fiction in particular, has a Human Centipede problem, I think. We keep ingesting and regurgitating the same stuff. Tolkien! BARF. Heinlein! BARF. You eat the same, you puke the same, and we call just scoop it up again and put it back on the plate (AND NOW YOU KNOW THE ORIGIN STORY OF TACO BELL). Anything that breaks the cycle is jarring — but, also, necessary. It was interesting that, at the diversity panel in Colorado, the topic of “blind people feeling people’s faces” was brought up (by, if I recall, Jim Hines), and how basically, that’s total bullshit. And yet you see it everywhere, don’t you? Why do we see it everywhere? Because it’s a (false) data point that we keep scooping up and barfing back.

It’s a fly that’s been in the soup so long we think it’s an ingredient, not an invader.

(That, perhaps, is an apt metaphor for a lot of this stuff.)

Now, the larger question is —

Why the hell am I talking about diversity to anyone?

Why do I get to do that?

I assume, in part, because it’s the reverse-version of that “impromptu KKK meeting” vibe I mentioned above, where white dudes feel comfortable being shitty around other white dudes. Like, sometimes the message needs to reach the residents of Heteronormative White Dude Mountain, and so sometimes that message gets carried by a fellow resident. I can use that same vibe of straight white guys listen to each other and use our shared frequency for good, not evil.

I assume, also in part, because it’s just another advantage conferred to to already-advantaged.

Mostly, my hope is that  I can make some small effort to not diminish evil — because I don’t know that I have that power — but diminish ignorance. Both in myself and those listening to me.

That is why I talk about diversity.

This past weekend, I served as faculty at the wonderful Pike’s Peak Writing Conference in lovely Colorado Springs, Colorado. There, my first job on the first day of the conference was to take part in a roundtable blind critique session of the first pages of several manuscripts.

It’s very cool to be asked to do that, because rarely do I have the opportunity to crush souls and milk dreams of their precious dreamjuice in person. Like, I could critique a page and even though the manuscripts were blind and I did not know to whom they belonged, I could still gaze out into the audience and find the author there, eyes wet and trembling as I bit into their writing with my dread incisors. And then I bellowed “DOOM” and ate the ashen pages as they wept.

Okay, not really. I do not relish the chance to destroy dreams, and I always tried to temper my criticisms with HEY I ALSO LIKED THIS because, quite truthfully, each page always had something I liked. In fact, almost all of them had at least one sentence that I wish I had written.

What was interesting to me, however, was that while each story was very different, my criticisms of those stories often kept to a few common themes. And I thought, as I always do, HEY, HOLY CRAP, BLOG POST. I can pass along my dubious critique and maybe you writers young and old can do something with them. Or maybe you’ll think, “That bearded fucktart can go pound sand,” and that’s fine, too. And bonus points for calling me “bearded fucktart.” SEE, I LIKE YOU.

(As a sidenote, I had originally thought to label this as advice for “aspiring writers,” but I will remind you that aspiring is often the same as dreaming of, but never doing, and really, fuck that noise. This blog is for writers who write. Full stop.)

The First Page Is Vital

You don’t realize how much that first page matters until you have to judge a story based on that first page. And then you’re forced to ask the question: “Would I keep reading?”

That first page is the start of the fulfillment of promise of your premise.

It’s saying, “Here is what this story is.” It’s the first taste of a meal — and if someone doesn’t like that first taste, they aren’t always so inclined to continue unless they’re starving for content. And in this day and age? Nobody is starving for content.

You’re Totally Overwriting

You are using too many words to say too few things. And the words you’re using are too big, or poorly chosen, or feel awkward. You’re using exposition where you don’t need any. You’re invoking description that is redundant or unnecessary. You’re giving your characters a wealth of mechanical details and actions that go well-beyond a few gestures and into the territory of telegraphing every eyebrow arch, every lip twitch, every action beat of picking up a coffee mug, blowing on it, sipping from it, setting it back down, picking it back up, drinking from it, on and on.

You’re overwriting.

You’re placing all this language on the page that serves no purpose except its own existence.

You’re not James Joyce.

Cut. Tighten. Aim for rhythm-and-beat, not droning cacophony. Seek clarity over confusion. Early on, seek action over explanation. Mystery over answer. Leave things out rather than putting everything in. That’s not to say you cannot engage in a few flourishes of language. That’s not to say there won’t be a kind of poetry to your description, or a certain creative stuntery in terms of metaphor. But those are not the point of what you’re doing. Those are enhancements. They serve mood. They are a kind of narrative punctuation. They are single bites, not whole meals.

If your whole meal is just a wall of language, it’s both too much and not enough. It’s too much language, and not enough of why the fuck would I keep reading? Words are what we read, not why we read. They do not exist to serve themselves but rather, the purpose of conveying information. And the information you’re trying to convey is: story.

Kill exposition. Trim description to the leanest of cuts.

The fat will come later. The conversation will deepen as the story grows.

Do not build a wall of words.

Stop overwriting.

More on this later.

Character Above All Else

Everything is character.

Because character is story.

This is not exaggeration. We read stories for characters. Characters are the prime movers of story. They say shit and they do shit and they want things and they are afraid of things and that’s it. That’s plot, story, that’s all of it. We may stay with a story for a whole lot of reasons, but our driving reason is character. Character compels us because we are people reading stories about people. Even when they’re robots or dragons or robot-dragons or orangutan secret agents, they’re still people for purposes of our narrative consumption. We see ourselves as characters in our own stories and so we seek characters within stories. It’s like an empathy bridge.

Your story must connect us to character immediately.

Because otherwise, I just don’t care. No threat or suspense or mystery is particularly engaging if it doesn’t have a character to reflect and represent it. Without strong character shot through the first page, everything you’re giving me is a data point.

I don’t read stories to consume data points.

If your story begins and I have no sense of character or why I should give a single slippery fuck about them, what’s the point? I’m looking for connection. I want to tether myself to a character. I want to care enough to continue reading. Make me care. It’s not enough to make me think. You can worry about my intellectual connection to the story later. Right now? Hit me in the emotions. Make me feel something. PUNCH ME IN MY HEARTBUCKET.

Make Something Happen

I’m bored. Your first page has bored me. Because nothing is happening. I don’t mean that the first moment should be cataclysm and clamor — but something needs to happen. Or be in the midst of happening. Repeat after me: action, dialogue, action, dialogue. Quick description as connective tissue. Short, sharp shock. Activity over passivity.

And hey, I get it. This is easier said than done. What I just told you above about character makes this part doubly tricky, and only goes to show just what an amazing trick it is to write a jaw-dropping face-kicking sphincter-clencher of a first page. It’s threading like, seven different needles in one swift movement. You’re trying to convey action and conversation but not without also giving us enough character to care but not so much character that you’re overwriting and you’re trying to say what you need to say at the bare minimum while still trying to maintain style and energy and you wanna offer mystery but not confusion and you want to inject genre without being ham-fisted and you wanna worldbuild a little bit but not write an encyclopedia…

It’s hard.

I get it.

But damnit, penmonkey, you gotta try.

And you’re best starting off with:

Something Is Happening.

Right fucking now. And that’s why the story must be told and heard right fucking now.

Urgency! Impetus! Incitement! Excitement!

Get The Fuck Out Of The Way Of Your Story

And here, the biggest lesson of them all, and a summation of all the problems.

You are in the way of your story.

Hard truth: writing is actually not that important.

Writing is a mechanism.

It’s an inelegant middleman to what we do. It’s a shame, in some ways, that we even call ourselves writers, because it describes only the mechanical act of what we do. It’s a vital mechanism, sure, but by describing it as the prominent thing, it tends to suggest, well, prominence.

But our writing must serve story.

Story does not serve writing.

This is cart-before-horse stuff, but important to realize.

Listen, in what we do there exist three essential participants.

We have:

The tale, the teller of the tale, and the listener of the tale.

Story. Author. And audience.

That’s it.

You are two-thirds of that equation. You are the story (or, by proxy, its architect) and the teller of the story. The telling of the story is most often done through writing — through that mechanical act, and because it’s the act you can sit and watch, it’s the one that is used to describe our role. I AM WRITER, you say, and so you focus so much on the actual writing you forget that there’s this other invisible — but altogether more critical — part, which is what you’re writing.

So, what happens is, early on, you put so much on the page. You write and write and write and use too many words and too much exposition and big meaty paragraphs and at the end all it serves to do is create distance between the tale and the listener of the tale.

It keeps the audience at arm’s length.

Quit that shit.

Bring the audience into the story. This is at the heart of show, don’t tell — which is a rule that can and should be broken at times, but at its core remains a reasonable notion: don’t talk at, don’t preach, don’t lecture, don’t fill their time with unnecessary wordsmithy.

Get. To. The. Point.

And the point is the story. Not the words used to tell that story.

Here, look at it this way: you ever have a conversation with someone and they tell you a story — something that happened to them, some thing at work, some wacky sexual escapade featuring an escaped circus shark and a kale farmer named “Dave” — and you just want to smack them around and tell them to get to the actual story? Like, they just dick around in the telling of the tale, orbiting the juicy bits and taking too goddamn long to just spit it out? Maybe they think they’re creating suspense, but they’re only creating frustration. Or maybe they know — as we all do, sometimes — that the story they’re telling is actually ALL HAT, NO COWBOY, and they’re trying to fill the time with hot air in much the same way you might pad a college paper with several shovels of additional horseshit to lend it weight (and, incidentally, stench)?

Stop doing that.

Stop wasting time.

Get the fuck out of the way of your story.

You are a facilitator. Writing is a mechanism. It can be an artful and beautiful mechanism, but without substance behind it — without you actually saying something and sharing a story — it is a hollow, gutless art. The story is what your audience wants, needs, and cares about.

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