I get it. You want to talk about that show you just watched.

The one where a major character died. Or someone got engaged. Or one person was unmasked as another person. Or an alien. Or a sentient washing machine.

And you are quite plainly free to discuss these events in whatever social media feed you possess. It’s your social media frequency channel and you can broadcast anything you want on that signal. You can tweet pictures of monkeys drinking their own urine. You can post Facebook updates about that genital rash that won’t clear up. It’s your digital yard. You can trim the hedges into whatever shape warms your heart and I can’t make you do different.

I can, however, choose to not walk by your yard.

I can unfriend you on Facebook. I can unfollow you on Twitter.

That’s more my responsibility than it is yours, I understand that.

Just the same —

I’d like to talk to you a little bit about spoilers not in an effort to beat you about the head and neck with my opinion but rather to at least try to get you to understand where I’m coming from. See, where I’m coming from is, spoilers kinda suck. They trouble me. They trouble me both as an audience member and as a storyteller myself.

A storyteller concocts a story in a certain way. Anybody who tells stories is familiar with this — you want to create a certain rise and fall of plot, you want to escalate tensions and then give some breathing room, and at a great many of the narrative peaks are tentpole moments. Moments of character that seriously complicate or compromise the plot. Characters dying. Secrets exposed. New steps taken. Old enemies reborn. And we orchestrate these moments almost like we’re writing music. We’re trying to build to various crescendos and not just make a cacophony.

The problem is, were you to isolate that singular moment of musical crescendo, it’s not particularly interesting. It’s just a blurt of noise, a sudden spike of sound.

Spoilers are kinda like that. When you extract these impactful narrative moments and isolate them — and then broadcast them — you’re really just transmitting a weird, context-free spike of sound. It’s not that the story is ruined, exactly, but you’ve robbed some of the potency from it. You’ve stolen urgency and thieved surprise. It’s not the same thing as announcing who won an Oscar or who lost the sportsball game — those are data points not dissimilar from noting the temperature outside or the color of the sky at noon. But when you grab these crucial narrative events and spoil them, you’re reducing them down to being just data points. SCOOBY DOO IS DEAD. DOCTOR WHO IS PREGNANT. BRUCE WILLIS WAS ACTUALLY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY FROM PLANET OF THE APES THE WHOLE TIME.

It’s like you just told a punchline without letting people hear the joke, first.

See, storytellers spend a lot of time trying to claw and climb to these narrative moments — and the audience spends a lot of time going along for the ride.

Spoilers short-circuit that. They rearrange how I experience narrative.

Which is cool, if that’s what I want as an audience member, and if that’s how the storyteller has designed the architecture. But if it’s just what you want, Mister Spoilertrousers, then you’ve gone ahead and forcibly changed my experience of the story. And that sucks a little bit.

And here’s where someone says, “You don’t like spoilers, stay off of social media.” And that sounds fair on first blush, but it doesn’t really change the fact that inconsiderate is still inconsiderate. You are likely broadcasting this stuff to a whole lot of people who aren’t yet aware of it. The Walking Dead — easily the most spoiled show, and one so spoiled for me now I’m not even sure I’m going to watch it anymore — airs later because of the time difference, but those who watched it on the East Coast feed were spoiling the shit out of it as the thing aired. It’s not like you’re asked to hold spoilers for weeks — but, you know, you might at least wait 24 hours till some folks have caught up? At least until people have watched it live?

I get it. You want to spoil it. And again: you’re allowed to. But that doesn’t make it particularly nice. And it’s not nice to say, well, just stay off Twitter, then. I’d rather you not blow cigarette smoke in my kid’s face or take a shit in the public pool, but nobody would ever say, YOU DON’T LIKE POOP, DON’T SWIM IN THE PUBLIC POOL, PAL.

It’s funny. The type of audience seems to have an impact on this. The audience for Breaking Bad seemed protective of spoilers — hell, they still are. But The Walking Dead or Doctor Who seems to draw far more spoilers without regard or consideration of those who maybe haven’t seen it. People seem to be more protective of spoiling the experience in films than they are television — and take even greater care with books. I know part of this comes down to the “second screen experience” that television seems so keen to push, but certainly you have ways to talk about the experience without spoiling it to a very large, potentially public audience? Google+ allows for limited broadcast. Or there exist forums or second-screen apps or direct messages or blogs or email or… you know, good old-fashioned “go watch the show with human beings and then talk about it over a slice of pie.” Hell, even a Facebook update with HOLY FUCK WE’RE GONNA TALK SPOILERS HERE AWOOGA AWOOGA at least tells me at least to stay away from the comments.

But spoilers come fast and furious. No warnings. Sometimes as graphical memes. Sometimes just as a single line: YOU GUYS I CAN’T BELIEVE THE DOCTOR JUST REGENERATED AS A PERSNICKETY POSSUM IN A BOWLER HAT AND A HOUNDSTOOTH JACKET.

The other thing is, I don’t know what the value proposition is for spoilers. It’s like, for the people who already watched the show — well, you announcing OMG PAPA SMURF GOT SHOT isn’t a surprise nor is it in any way insightful. You’re announcing something they already know. And for the people who didn’t watch it — well, now you just ruined it for them. What do spoilers earn you, exactly? What do you get out of it? Serious question.

I dunno.

Can you spoil stuff? Sure. Should you? Well, that’s on you. But I’d rather you didn’t. Just as I’d rather you not open my Christmas presents and tell me what’s in ’em before I get there. Just as none of us like those movie trailers that seem to give the whole movie away in two minutes and thirty seconds. Just as you’d probably rather not have me time travel to an hour before you watch a show so I can spoil it for you.

I won’t come to your house and tell you the endings of all your unread books.

And you don’t broadcast spoilers to people who haven’t yet caught up within a reasonable time.

Just try to think about the experiences of other people.

Deal?

***

(I know a lot of this is first-world problem bullshit. I know starving kids in third-world countries aren’t like, “Sure, I’d like some potable water and fresh food, but sure, I’ll listen to how you got spoiled on The Walking Dead last night first, because that sounds totally important, too.” So, you can take all this with a grain of salt. Just the same, as a storyteller with some skin in the game, I thought I’d talk about it. Feel free to toss thoughts in comments. Play nice.)

Christmas approacheth. A giant Santa Kaiju slouching toward Bethlehem.

And not just Christmas but a host of other holidays.

Which means it is time for various delicious confections:

Candies. Cookies. Pies. Sugar-fried elf meat.

I am a terrible baker-person, but just the same this is the one time of the year where I put on an apron and get out the mixer and do my damnedest to hang out with the family and make some goddamn motherfucking cookies and treats, so this is also the time when I come to you with wide, panicked eyes and I ask for your recipes of said cookies and treats.

What are your favorites?

Let’s go with “not too difficult to make.”

Suggestions and recipes appreciated.

*stares at you and seductively licks a candy cane*

Just a head’s up —

NaNoWriMo is a big ol’ cork-pop of “writing blather,” so I’m going to take December off.

I mean, I’ll still be here. Blogging as I do.

Just not about anything related to the art, craft, or practice of writing/storytelling/publishing. I reserve the right to change my mind if something particularly compelling comes up that DEMANDS MY INEXPERT OPINION, but otherwise, this is a solid ban.

I’ll still talk books and stuff because — hey, year’s almost over and I have favorite reads to detail.

Otherwise, it’ll be food and toddlers and coffee and a post I’ve been working on for quite some time now, which is about the very nature of happiness in our lives. It sounds all serious, but I’m sure I’ll still find a way to include unnecessary references to poop, genitals, unicorns, hobos, maybe badgers, possibly wombats. I gotta be me, after all.

So, there you go.

December:

The Month Of No Dubious Writing Bloggerel.

*bangs gavel*

*eats a cupcake*

Some quick notes:

First, today’s the last day to nab the NaNoWriMo bundle for $10.

Today is also SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY, which sounds like a glorious excuse to go to your local indie bookstore and procure for yourself and your friends and your family and your foes and your pets one or several books. Perhaps even mine!

That said, if you cannot make it to a wonderfully wondrous indie bookstore on this day, I will make note that Amazon is running a 30% off of their books with the coupon BOOKDEAL, and B&N has the same with code BNFRIDAY30.

You will also note that the paperback version The Cormorant — aka the new Miriam Black book, which arrives in December — has been discounted on Amazon to $5.05, for reasons yet unknown. (It’s cheaper than the Kindle version, so.) If savings are your jam, Amazon has your bread.

Also, yesterday’s impromptu #TalesFromBlackFriday hashtag made some hay of the crazy day by turning it into absurdist dystopian horror — it started early and then by the end of the day had over 1000 tweets. I’m quite seriously considering editing a charity anthology for next year’s Black Friday. You can find a Storify compilation of many of yesterday’s madness. It was fun.

Finally, if you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’d love a pony. A pony with whiskey in its many saddlebags. But, failing that, I’d love it if you reviewed one of my books at your Review Receptacle of Choice. Reviews are not only nice to have from an ego-standpoint (HEY PEOPLE READ MY BOOK WHEE) but also because they matter for the author in terms of the industry (as in, various entities within the publishing industry will look at reviews on books as being something at least slightly meaningful) — so, reviews (er, good reviews) help us keep doing what we do.

Thanks!

First round is right here.

The rules are simple:

Look through the 200-word entries from last week.

Pick one.

Add another 200 words to the story.

(Easiest way forward is to copy the chosen 200 words to your own blog, then add the next 200. Don’t forget to link to your now 400-word story in the comments. Someone may want to continue the tale next week, for part three.)

You do not need to have participated in the first round to participate in this one.

Do not choose your own 200 words, because, c’mon.

Do not finish the story. This is a five-part fiction experiment: we’ll end the year with several 1000-word stories, each built out of 200-word chunks by you guys. This is a collaborative game. It is Whisper Down the Lane. It is Telephone. It should be very interesting by the end. One hopes.

You’ve got one week.

Due by Friday, December 6th, noon EST.

Join the narrative chain.

Me: The time has come.

Me: Hello?

Me: Oh, Cripes.

*looks around the room*

*searches house*

*sends sentient drone flights*

You: HEY ALL RIGHT GET THESE TERMINATOR PLANES OUT OF MY ASS

Me: They’re not really in your ass. That’s a metaphor.

You: Well, one of them gave me a hemmorhoid. “Metaphorically.”

Me: Whatever. It’s time to come out of hiding. You don’t have to be scared.

You: Listen, we’re done. For me and soon everybody else, NaNoWriMo is NEARLY over, dude. That’s it. You can go. Your job here? Completed. Well-done. Round of applause. Now go away. Jerk.

Me: Captain Howdy, that isn’t very nice!

You: Ugh, blergh. Whaddya want?

Me: I want to talk next steps.

You: We talked next steps yesterday.

Me: No, there I threatened to kick your face into various shapes if you carpet bombed the publishing industry with your explosively-unfinished prose. Today I want to talk about the real next steps. I want to talk about editing. After all, January is NaEdYoShiMo.

You: Is that Japanese?

Me: No. It means: National Edit Your Shit Month.

You: OH YOU AND YOUR PERSISTENT VULGARITY.

Me: It’s in my genes, man. Get up close and personal with my DNA you see fuck and bastard and cockwaffle etched upon the helical chains, carved into the hydrogen bonds.

You: Okay, wait, so, if January is NaEdYoShiMo month, what is December?

Me: NaEscYoManMo.

You: National… Escargot Yo-Yo… Mantis Month?

Me: That makes so little sense it might be a heretical utterance used to summon a Great Old One. Nay, December is National Escape Your Manuscript Month.

You: It’s not chasing me. It’s not a swamp monster.

Me: Well, herein lies my first piece of advice: do not jump right from writing a book to editing a book if you can help it. We writers are the worst judges of our own work, particularly when we’re very close to it. Think about it. You’ve just gone ten rounds in the ring with this pugilist and while you won the fight, you’re beat to hell. Your head’s swollen like a cantaloupe. Your nose is streaming blood. The piss, shit, hell and fuck have all been knocked out of you. Now isn’t the time for a cold and clinical examination of how the fight went. Now’s time to sit down. Ice your big melon head. Pinch your nose to stop the bleeding. Step out of the ring and stay out of the ring.

You: While I admit I’m kinda afraid to edit, I’m also afraid to wait. It’s a scab I wanna pick. A broken tooth I wanna wiggle. IT’S A BEAR I GOTTA POKE.

Me: Right now, though, your creative wires are all crossed. You’ll hate stuff unfairly. You’ll love other passages unreasonably. You’ll despise stuff that works and adore things that don’t. Your brain’s gone all wibbly-wobbly lovey-hatey. Look, when you read a book written by Some Other Asshole, you can usually get pretty clear pretty quick on what you liked and didn’t like. What worked and didn’t work. Because, who cares. Not your book. You need to get to that phase with your manuscript. You need to get to the stage where it reads like Some Other Asshole wrote it. So: take the month of December off. Besides: December is crazytown with the holidays. Christmas isn’t just one day anymore, it’s a whole month of shopping and songs and pie and —

*eats pie*

You: Did you just eat a whole pie while I’m sitting here?

Me: MMGPH– no.

You: I feel like I just watched a snake eat a cat. You have a gift, my friend. So, what else?

Me: Editing tips?

You: Lay ’em on me. I’m getting ready.

Me: Have a plan.

You: Like a Cylon?

Me: Yep. Like a Cylon. We like to imagine we edit a book the same way we write, but that’s not really true. Writing is lining up the pieces but editing is what we do to those pieces: we rearrange some, we throw a few away, we add a couple more, we destroy a few with a hammer, we cry on a few, we eat one, and we keep doing it until the arrangement is right. We also like to imagine that we’re going to tackle the whole thing in one go, but in my experience that’s rarely been the case. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite. Unless you’re Cthulhu.

You: Maybe I am Cthulhu.

Me: I know Cthulhu and you are no Cthulhu.

You: Jerk.

Me: Guilty. Anyway — to determine how you’re going to begin, it pays to get a sense first of what’s wrong. Which means reading the whole damn thing again. Just read it. Think about it. Take notes if you want to. What works? What doesn’t? Then, for me, I like to chart the book. I want to see its shape. Maybe that means re-outlining the book. Maybe that means taking new notes on the characters — identify their arcs in three or more beats. It could even mean literally drawing the shape of your story — is it really a simple Freytag’s triangle? Is it really three acts? Maybe it’s five. Or seven. Note the rise and fall of tension. Find the anagnorisis and peripeteia and the catastrophe that results. A lot of it is asking yourself questions.

You: Like, with what manner of fire should I burn this manuscript to ash?

Me: Ease off the mopey stick. No, I mean questions like, does the story move along fast enough? Do you get to the inciting incident quickly? Does the middle drag? Are all mysteries properly answers? Where are the plotholes and what will it take to spackle them over? Do the characters act believably, or do they feel enslaved to the plot? Does it all make sense? Writing the book, all you get is forest. Now you’re trying to see all the trees.

You: That’s a lot of questions.

Me: A book is a big thing. It’s not a concrete block. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. Lots of moving parts big and small. Dongles and flywheels. Toothy gears turning larger gears turning larger gears still. A floppy dildo on a zipline strikes a boiling teapot which tips and brews a cup of tea whose weight disturbs the wolverine on which the teacup is perched and then the wolverine runs into the nearest Wal-Mart and — well, you see what I’m saying. Lots of mechanisms strung together. Character, plot, theme, tension, mystery, mood, emotional throughline, each piece affecting the other. You pick a part and then you wade into the fray with an axe for chopping, a scalpel for finer cutting, a paintbrush for erasing and flourishing, a pen to rewrite what you’ve lost — to fix what you’ve broken. And that doesn’t even account for the writing itself.

You: Oh, fuck me sideways with a Garden Weasel, there’s more –?!

Me: You bet your sweet baboons. Once you’ve actually gotten the story sussed out, then it’s time to attack the language. It’s time for the copy-edit. And there, again, language is a great big wacky machine and you’ll find yourself doing a lot of trimming, tightening, rewriting, firebombing. Lots of little things to look for, too.

You: Do I want to know?

Me: You do. Damn right you do. Here’ s a by-no-means-exhaustive list of stuff to look for. Ready?

You: No.

Me: Too bad. In no particular order, be on the hunt for: typos, misspellings, poor word choice, incorrect word choice, repeated words, awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, comma overuse, missing punctuation, repeated words, unnecessary adverbs, egregious dialogue tags, unnecessary adverbs connected to egregious dialogue tags, passive voice, lazy overuse of the verb ‘to be,’ junk words, trailing modifiers, broken subject-verb agreement, lack of parallel structure, busted-ass metaphors, broken rhythm, inconsistent word tense, inconsistent POV, fragments, shit that just doesn’t make sense, and so on, and so forth.

You: You said ‘repeated words’ twi — oh.

Me: Just making sure you’re listening.

You: That’s a lot of stuff. My head hurts.

Me: I can offer a few Stupid Writer Tricks to make it easier.

You: Lay it on me, Daddy.

Me: Don’t call me Daddy.

You: Mommy?

Me: Moving on. Tips: first, read your work aloud.

You: Like, theatrically?

Me: Mutter it for all I care. But speaking the story aloud allows you to catch things you might not “hear” while reading — after all, words on a page are simply proxy representations for the words we speak with our monkey mouths and also inside our own cave-like minds. Vocalizing your tale lets you listen for rhythm and flow. For speedbumps. For a loss of clarity. For redundancies.

You: What else?

Me: Look at the shape of the prose on the page. Uniformity is not your friend. If you turn the manuscript 90 degrees counter-clockwise, the prose should form mountains and valleys — peaks made of short, terse sentences coupled with hills of thicker, more robust text. Long sentences and short sentences make rhythm.  And the way you format your page matters, too.

You: I don’t follow.

Me: If you wrote the book in, say, 14-point Courier, change it to 12-point Times New Roman for the edit. Or print it out. Or adjust the margins. Shifting the physical parameters of your manuscript goes a good way toward making it feel like Some Other Asshole wrote it instead of you.

You: That’s genius.

Me: Thanks.

You: No, not you, I mean this funny list on Buzzfeed: “37 Shiba Inu That Look Like Tom Hiddleston Eating Bacon.” But your thing is genius too I guess.

Me: Uh. Th… thanks.

You: One more question. I’m told I should “kill my darlings.”

Me: That’s true.

You: My spouse and children and pets? I know a writing career takes sacrifices, but wow.

Me: What? No! No. Darlings inside the text. Which are sometimes erroneously described as parts of the work that you love unconditionally, which is really very bad advice. “Destroy what you love” is not good advice for storytelling. The darlings of your fiction are those things — be they passages, chapters, characters, whatever — that exist in the story only because you love them, not because they serve any purpose. They are precious. They are a bunch of peacocks whose only purpose is to preen and poop up your manuscript. Pretty. And shallow. Here’s an example of darling-murder from my own dubious writing career.

You: That helps.

Me: Excellent.

You: Fine. You’ve convinced me. I’ll take some time off. Then I’ll go edit.

Me: Stellar.

You: So, I guess we’re done here.

Me: Yeah. I guess we are. Tomorrow is Gorge Yourself On Big Dumb Birdmeat Day. NaNoWrimo crawls to a close over the weekend. So that’s it. That’s all she wrote. Congrats on finishing.

You: It wasn’t hard. I just wrote “poop” 50,000 times.

Me: That counts. It’s better than some novels I’ve read.

You: So, I won?

Me: Sure. Winning is kinda subjective, here. You might want to read this other thing I wrote about the idea of “winning and losing” when it comes to NaNoWriMo.

You: Yeah, no. I think I’m gonna go take a nap, instead.

Me: Fair enough.

You: Thanks for your help.

Me: Happy to oblige, Captain Howdy.

You: That’s that, then.

Me: It will be when the exorcist arrives.

You: A young priest and an old priest?

Me: Sounds like the start of a joke.

You: Yeah, well. What an excellent day for an exorcism, am I right? Now why don’t you come on over here and loosen these straps?

Me: Why don’t you make the straps disappear?

You: That’s much too vulgar a display of power, Wendig.

*vomits hell-barf*