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.

* * *

Available for a short time:

The Gonzo Big eBook Bundle. Seven books. Pay-what-you want, starting at ten bucks.

I always love when writers — or anybody, really — talks about the jobs they took to get them to where they are now. It’s always such an odd assortment of work. (I shredded documents to hide from the EPA in one job, and in another, found myself working for an advertising agency where all the ad execs looked like porn stars and all their desks and offices were adorned with sex toys — so, uhh, maybe not an advertising agency? I worked for the ICRDA, the International Cash Register Dealers Association, where I crashed a tour van in a parking garage.)

So:

Weirdest job you’ve ever had?

Go.

Last week’s challenge: Pick an Opening Line and Go.

This week, I’ve given you 50 random character snidbits (gleaned from Seventh Sanctum character generators).

You will choose five of these and include them in a 1500-word piece of short fiction.

Post at your online domicile.

Link back here in the comments.

Due in one week — by May 2nd, noon EST.

Fifty Characters

(No super-spoilers, but this will talk in vague terms about the latest Game of Thrones episode.)

(You are warned.)

(No, really.)

(WARNING.)

(*flails*)

(THE BRIDGE IS OUT)

(FACEBEES)

(AAAAAAH)

Okay.

The latest Game of Thrones episode has a rather, erm, pivotal rape scene in it. Without getting too specific, a normally very powerful woman is very clearly raped during a moment of weakness. And it’s super-gross, in part because the sex in the books is — reportedly, as I have not read them — consensual. In part also because one of these characters has been undergoing some changes as of late and we have come to like this character quite a bit — and this character is also the rapist.

The super-grossness also extends to the commentary after the fact, which frequently flings past whether rape is appropriate in fiction and storytelling and settles on whether the scene was even rape — or, it discusses the granularity of consent, which is fine for legal battles but a little squicky in talking about what happens on-screen with a major pop culture property. The fact that the ensuing discussion was whether or not the victim’s pleas and no’s were loud enough, frequent enough, convincing enough. (Spoiler warning: they were.) Did she kiss back? Was she secretly giving into it? On a book page, this might actually be something you could get across, as we have access to internal dialogue. On-screen, we are left purely to text, only to visual, and what we’re left with is a character who says “no” up until the end, who struggles (albeit weakly), and whose rapist basically says “I don’t care.”

That’s rape. Despite what anyone will tell you, it’s rape. It’s the rape of a powerful (and somewhat unlikable) woman by a less-powerful (and more likable) dude.

It’s rape on-screen. It’s rape off-screen.

The granularity of “no” does not exist. Game of Thrones may be a world of many grays, but a “no” that never turns to “yes” before the sex begins isn’t beholden to any spectrum.

That part is black and white.

The discussion then must be: well, why is this a problem? Rape exists in fiction. And it has to be allowed to exist in fiction. It’s a rough, tough, terrible topic, but to ignore it is all the more sickening — to sweep it under the rug and not shine a line in that dark space is basically to deny it in reality, as well. One of fiction’s chiefmost strengths is that it allows us to bring up these things  and make us feel something about them — it’s addressing them, making us deal with it, and it’s being real about it.

That said, as storytellers, it’s vital to think about what we’re putting out there. There exists a mode of thought that says authors have zero social responsibility, and I’d argue that’s technically true in the same way that nobody anywhere has any social responsibility to anyone. We’re all basically just animals in a zoo, but what makes us human is thinking about the ramifications of our actions. And what makes us smart storytellers and capable authors is thinking about the ramifications of our stories. That doesn’t necessarily mean not putting scary stuff on the page (or on the screen). It just means being mindful of consequence.

And one of those consequences is that some of your audience will have been the victims of rape. This is the case because instances of rape and sexual assault against women in particular are very, very high. It leaves living victims. Victims who have to deal with the trauma off-screen. Putting it on the page or screen means forcing them to revisit that act. That’s not to say that, again, rape is verboten. But it does mean you should very seriously look at how you handle the topic. Are you handling it with maturity? With care? Is there a point other than the gratuitousness of it all? Are you using it as a cheap-and-easy plot point, or as a meaningful moment? Is it a lazy trope, or a crucial moment?

The problem, as I see it, with the rape scene in GoT, is many-fold.

First, it’s done in a world where rape is basically as common as horses. It’s referenced damn near every episode. Women are victims. Men are rapists. It’s practically becoming a thesis of the world. The worst thing done to women is rape. Rape, rape, rape. The show is getting rapey as shit. (More notable perhaps because the books aren’t quite so?) At this point, that’s drifting toward fetishistic and gratuitous — in part because it seems to revel in its statement.

Second, it’s more a trope than it is an actual thing. It’s lazy, cheap, short-shrifted. It’s code meant to again invoke that grayness of the characters — “Oh, look, even the most powerful can be laid low, and even those characters you like are basically pieces of shit.” The rapist-and-victim message, again. Really, we can’t do any better?

Third, it feels out of character and is a change from the book — a change that makes these characters worse and weaker than they have demonstrated in the past (at least, I’d argue).

Fourth, the rape was soft, weak, almost as ineluctable as gravity — the strong woman just sort of gives into it (and here you’ll want to discuss the was she really raped? question again but once more please be aware of the persistent lack of consent given) and makes rape look less like a violent act and more like a fact-of-life. (And it really is a fact-of-life in the GoT world, which is troubling in how it reinforces that “women = victims, men = rapists” vibe.)

The point I’m making is, if you’re going to deal with rape in your fiction, please give it weight and consequence. Do not let it drift toward being a lazy, cheap trope. Exercise every ounce of storytelling wisdom and skill and don’t just let it devolve into some half-ass plot point. It’s not a plot point in anybody’s lives. And last, remember that rape is real. It’s not the domain of fiction. It’s not granular, it’s not a spectrum, it’s not a shruggy hand-wavey sort of maybe-kinda-gee-I-dunno thing. Some of your audience will be victims of rape. Remember that, and think of them.

My newest e-book writing release is now available.

You have a handful of ways to buy this, were you so inclined.

First: Amazon, $2.99.

Second: direct from me using this button (or link):

Third: as part of a seven-book, $20 bundle using this button (or link):

Finally: B&N, $2.99.

Book Description

“Chuck Wendig’s Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey is full of the kind of writing advice I wish I’d gotten in school. Practical, brutally honest, and done with the kind of humor that will make it stick in your brain. Whether you’re a veteran writer or new to the craft, you’ll find something useful in here. Plus he says ‘fuck’ a lot, so, you know, there’s that.”

— Stephen Blackmoore, author of Dead Things

500 Ways To Write Harder aims to deliver a volley of micro-burst idea bombs and advisory missiles straight to your frontal penmonkey cortex. Want to learn more about writing, storytelling, publishing, and living the creative life? This book contains a high-voltage dose of information about outlining, plot twists, writer’s block, antagonists, writing conferences, self-publishing, and more.

All this, straight from the sticky blog pages of terribleminds.com, one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers (as named by Writer’s Digest).

This book contains the following chapters:

• 25 Bad Writer Behaviors
• 25 Hard Truths About Writing & Publishing
• 25 Steps To Becoming A Self-Published Author
• 25 Steps To Edit The Unmerciful Suck Out Of Your Story
• 25 Things To Do Before You Start Your Novel
• 25 Things You Should Know About Antagonists
• 25 Things You Should Know About Conventions & Conferences
• 25 Things You Should Know About Metaphor
• 25 Things You Should Know About Narrative Point-of-View
• 25 Things You Should Know About Outlining
• 25 Things You Should Know About Worldbuilding
• 25 Things You Should Know About Young Adult Fiction
• 25 Things Writers Should Beware
• 25 Things Writers Should Know About Traveling
• 25 Turns, Pivots and Twists To Complicate Your Story
• 25 Ways To Be A Happy Writer
• 25 Ways To Get Your Authorial Groove Back
• 25 Ways To Survive As A Creative Person
• 25 Ways To Unstick A Stuck Story
• 25 Writer Resolutions
• Appendix: 50 Rantypants Snidbits Of Writing And Storytelling Advice