Last week: the first part of this very challenge.

A lot of you wrote stories featuring cliffhangers — meaning, the stories are incomplete. The audience and the authors dangling off the precipice. Time to change that.

Your task?

Pick one of the unfinished stories from last week and finish it.

No, you may not pick your own story. Jeez.

You’ve got the usual 1000 words. Due by next Friday, October 3rd. Post at your own online space. Link back here. (It may be helpful if you identify the author and original link of the first story part you choose. We may wanna read the first part again.)

Complete the stories.

Solve the cliffhanger.

Write What You Know.

So says the advice.

Four words. A tiny prescription.

But like the TARDIS, it’s much bigger on the inside.

That piece of advice is one of the greatest and worst writing advice nuggets in the history of all writing advice nuggets. It’s brilliant! And it’s right! And it’s frustrating! And it’s wrong! It’s open to ten kinds of interpretation. It can be a springboard to launch you through a story. Boing! Or it can be the wall you hit. BOOM.

It contains multitudes.

I’ve spoken about it before.

And I want to speak about it again.

Here, then, are five recent thoughts on the subject. Do with them as you will: read them, respond, rub them on your nude flesh, stomp on them as if they were skittering roaches.

Better Written As “Write What You Understand?”

On the strictest read, Write what you know sounds like a command to commit to paper only those facts and events you have personally experienced or studied — you played baseball, you studied the Revolutionary War, you’re an astrophysicist, and so all your stories must weave in these three things lest you be writing from a place of dire inauthenticity where readers will be able to smell your bullshit from 100 yards and they’ll pull your shirt over your head and laugh at you as the neighborhood dog humps your supine form. This is nonsense, of course: writing fiction as autobiography is limiting and boring.

But the advice can’t mean that. How absurd would that be?

It’s not about what facts you know.

It’s about a deeper understanding.

What it is, I think, is that in the writing of fiction — whether you’re writing about a broken marriage, a troubled assassin, a tribal war between the moonicorns and the comet-ponies — you’ll be writing about moments that will be strengthened by drawing on elements of your life. It’s about the things you understand, not merely the things you “know.” You understand what it’s like to come from a broken home. Or to fix a tractor. You remember losing your virginity, or your first taste of alcohol, or that time you killed a guy with a box full of syphilis-mad weasels. You get things. You internally understand stuff that is both specific to you but that also draws an emotional and intellectual bridge out to a larger readership — like, somewhere in your life you probably experienced heartbreak. The way you understand it is implicitly your own, but at the same time, nearly everyone has some explicit understanding of love torn asunder.

Your job, then, is to draw from that — to plunge a narrative hypodermic down through the amber casement of your memory and suck out the sweet DNA so you can inject it into your story. It’s not hewing only to facts. It’s about finding those moments from your life that will enrich your fiction with deeper, stranger, more personal — and yet potentially also more universal — details. You are, in a sense, trying to breed emotional familiarity through intellectual honesty.

You’re tying a moment in your story to some understanding from your own life. Which means you’re tethering yourself to the audience — placing your story in a context they can understand, in a way that enlivens the narrative and maybe speaks to their own experiences, as well.

We’re not supposed to steal from other people’s work.

But we can steal from history. From mythology.

And even better, from our own lives. WE CAN STEAL OUR OWN MEMORIES AND TURN THEM INTO MEAT FOR THE STORY MACHINE.

How fucking awesome is that?

Watching My Wife Read My Work

My wife, as a spouse is wont to do, will read my work, often next to me in bed at night. (She’s also a fantastic editor, by the by.) And as she reads, sometimes I’ll catch a movement of her head and I’ll notice a sly, sideways glance in my direction. And when this occurs, I know why.

It’s because she just found a moment in the story she knows is true.

Even though it’s a fake-ass made-up bullshit-ride of a story, she finds things in there that she knows are true. Moments snatched from my life and plugged into the fiction. Sometimes it’s a small thing: a word, a turn of phrase, an article of clothing, a taste of food. Other times it’s taking a story or a piece of one from my life and finding the appropriate contextual slot to cram it into. It’s maybe 10-20% of a book (more in some cases, less in others), almost a kind of storytelling punctuation, but I think the real value is that you’re putting yourself on the page.

You are there in the story.

Not as a character.

But as a ghost, haunting over the narrative proceedings.

A Key To A Locked Door

Many authors treat write what you know as a punishment levied against them. Like it’s a problem. But rather, I like to think it’s a solution to a problem — a key, in fact, to a locked door.

Consider: you hit your head on something in the story. Some plot point. Some low-hanging story obstacle. You don’t know how to move forward with a character, or a theme, or whatever. The maze seems unsolvable; the labyrinth, closed. So: look to your own life. It’s never a guaranteed solution, but you may find that something in your life, your history, answers the problem. A person you know. A thing you experienced. A feeling you understand with great intensity.

Sometimes, you are the key to the door.

And you are the sum of the things you know.

An Admonishment To Know More

If we assume that part of it really is about facts — like, say, “Don’t write about the Civil War unless you actually know some shit about the Civil War, dingbat” — then we can safely say that write what you know is not a restriction on your writing, but rather a suggestion that you can always know more, dumbass. Go learn more stuff! And write about it.

Or Perhaps: Write What You Love

Maybe value also exists in saying that we should write not just to our experiences and our understanding, but also to the things about which we feel passionate about. Maybe it means we should lean toward those things that we love (and to an opposite degree, the things that we hate, that cause us pain, that scare the Holy Jesusballs out of us), including them in our work. Or, to a lesser degree, the things that interest us. In school, we tend to do better in subjects we like, and I suspect the same is true in our fiction: we probably tell better stories when we’re writing about things we dig (and we probably know more about the things we dig, too).

So. There you go. Five slapdash thoughts.

Awaiting your own in 3… 2… 1…

Hi there, publisher!

I’m an author. Maybe you know me? I’m the Internet’s “Chuck Wendig.” AKA, “That Guy Who Curses A Lot In Interesting Ways.” I write stories. I have a beard composed of thousands of self-aware cilia that whisper those stories in my ear, stories I then transcribe for the world to read.

You’re a publisher. Or a person who works in publishing. Or a robot in the humanless future scouring ancient blog posts to try to discover exactly how people went extinct (spoiler alert: iOS9 became self-aware and killed us all).

I like you.

I think you do the Story Lord’s work in bringing books to to the world. People can bag on you all they like, but I say, without you and the authors you publish, my life would be a hollow, smelly carapace — like a turtle’s shell if you first scraped out all the vital turtley bits.

And that word, “vital,” applies to you. You are vital. A vital part of the ecosystem. A critical and competitive keystone of the entire book-reading, book-loving, book-smelling, book-humping culture. I love books. You publish books. So let’s be best pals, yeah? *cuts palm with a Swiss Army Knife, offers to shake your hand* LET US SEAL THIS FRIENDSHIP IN BLOOD.

Ahem. Sorry.

Still, as much as I like you, I think it’s time we had a conversation. I’ve noticed some things you do that, frankly, I think you could be doing better. Admittedly, I’m just an outsider — a rogue ronin author stalking the dustblown wastes, writing my stories during the day underneath collapsed highway overpasses — for at night I must flee the Yowling Hell-Warblers and their motorcycle riding Coyote Men. I’m an outsider who, I admit, is probably ignorant to The Way Things Really Are Inside The Publishing Machine.

Just the same, I’m going to opine loudly.

Because that’s how I do.

Let’s talk about you, you silly scamps, you.

DRM Is For Assbadgers

I get it. You like DRM. You think it’s valuable in staving off waves of book-thieving pirates.

And, hey, DRM by itself is not toxic. DRM is like GMOs or lasers or hybridized bat-shark-wolf monsters: fine on its own until someone comes along and implements it poorly.

And, for the most part, DRM is implemented poorly.

DRM is dumb. DRM does not work. DRM is the Empire is tightening its fist, which only forces more star systems to slip through its fingers. You know how our war on terrorism basically begets more terrorism? Like, someone blows up our shit, then we blow up some Yemeni daycare thinking that an Al Qaeda higher-up is hiding there, and then all the people affected by the blown-up daycare suddenly think, “The US kills kids so now we’re gonna be fight the US with tooth and nail?” Meaning, our war on terror just creates more terrorists?

Similar situation with DRM (with way fewer dead people, to be clear). You don’t want books to be pirated; you implement DRM. DRM mostly just pisses off regular users who suddenly have reduced access to the thing they thought they owned. They decide to become pirates, instead, because it’s easier and it gives them the access to the content in the way that they want it.

DRM creates — and then challenges — pirates.

It punishes regular readers.

I Will Buy The Physical Book And You Will Give Me The E-Book

No, really, I’m not kidding. You tell me, “You buy a hardcopy, we’ll give you an e-copy,” then I’ll take that deal every time. Practically and financially, this makes sense: I’m buying the story from you in one container (the hardcopy) already. You might as well give me the story in its more ephemeral, digital non-container (aka an e-book), too. It’s a great value. And it encourages that physical distribution chain we all love so much. I said a while back, “If you don’t do this, Amazon will,” and drum roll please, they have, with Kindle Matchbook. (And one of my publishers, Angry Robot, will now do this in the US with Clonefiles.)

Don’t worry, there’s still room for you at the party. Ever hear of a bookstore called “Barnes & Noble?” Could be a shot in the arm of their book business (and their Nook business). Plus, I keep hearing about these little magic pockets of book-love called “independent bookstores”…

Partner With Independent Bookstores

Indie stores are awesome. (I mean, in theory. Some suck ass, just as some fraction of everything and everyone sucks ass.) Indie bookstores want to sell books and spread the book-love around. And you, as publishers, are purveyors of those very books. Partner with them.

I don’t just mean, “Let them sell your books.” I mean, “Let them sell special editions that only they can sell.” I mean, “Let them sell e-books in new and interesting ways, such as on USB keys or by (as above) selling them with the physical editions.” Give them access. Opportunity. Unique entries in the canon and culture of sweet delectable bookishness.

Libraries Are Our Friends And, Also, Vital

You know another way that a lot of people learn to love books? Libraries. I mean, how awesome is a library? It’s a BIG BUILDING. Filled to the fucking ceiling with BOOKS and people who will help you find MORE BOOKS. It’s a book playground! A wonderland of reading and learning and fantasy and drama and information! And it’s great for people who can’t afford books. (Like, say, a whola lotta folks in this occasionally wibbly-wobbly fucky-wucky economy of ours.)

Help libraries. Help them. They’re customers. But even beyond that, they’re the drug dealers of the book world. They’re the ones giving out free samples of your work (which, to be clear, they paid for) and fostering a love of stories and a culture of books. Libraries are Willy Wonka factories where they make new readers instead of weird-ass child-endangerment candy. (Seriously, the government needs to step in and shut Wonka down. Last I heard he was drowning kids in a corn syrup river or something. He’s like a fucking Batman villain, that guy.)

Don’t obstruct their e-book lending library. Don’t make the library’s job more difficult. Help them! Give them aid and succor in this horrible time when our government has a real boner for this “austerity” bullshit (austerity sounds nice until you realize it’s a lot what happened when the Titanic sank — the rich people get their boats, the poor people get eaten by ice sharks). Do you want libraries to be places where people just get to use the Internet for free? Do you want libraries to just go away? No! You don’t! Libraries rule! Librarians are the curators of our culture!

HELP LIBRARIES.

GODDAMNIT.

Mmkay? Mmkay.

Change Starts From Within

SFF right now is going through a lot of growing pains in terms of straining its white dude diapers and trying to figure out how to accommodate, well, Those Who Aren’t Heteronormative White Dudes. This is a good thing. We’re starting to see that there exists a whole audience who maybe isn’t being talked to — this is good for society but also makes financial sense, too, because untapped audience is an audience who isn’t yet spending money with you.

A lot of this change happens inside publishing. It starts with hiring people at all strata within the industry from a variety of life experiences and social configurations.

Please do that! Thanks!

A Ten Dollar E-Book Is A Little Bit Of Bullshit

“BUT IT COSTS AS MUCH TO MAKE AN E-BOOK–” you start to say, and I cut you off with a frowny look and a cat’s hiss. Listen, I don’t care what your justifications are for selling an e-book at a price above ten dollars. You’re trying to slow the flight from the physical distribution model, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that you don’t know yet how exactly e-books fit into the staggered chain of release from hardback to paperback.

What I know is, a mass market paperback does not cost ten dollars.

Nor should an e-book. Ever.

I learned a very important lesson from author Maurice Broaddus at Worldcon this year, and it was this: if someone is saying or doing something you don’t like, threaten to pee on them. Threatening that seals the deal, gets the job done. So, publishers: if you keep offering $10+ e-books, I’m gonna pee on you. On your shoes. Your socks. On the legs of your khakis. God help you if you’re sitting down because then I can get better reach.

Cheaper e-books. Or I pee. On you. That’s the choice.

*stares*

*drinks a big glass of water*

*stares harder*

Authors Are Your Partners, Not Your Bangladeshi Climate Change Refugees

I’ve been happy with my publishers. I know a lot of authors who are happy with theirs, too, and who have signed smart contracts (usually through the intervention of their agents) and who are doing just fine. I also know authors who have seen (and sometimes signed) onerous contracts that are exploitative and nasty. Little clauses and line items that knock an author down at the knees. You try to grab rights that should never be yours, or offer up Byzantine rules so confusing and labyrinthine it’s like a math puzzle for MENSA meth addicts.

Here’s an actual line from an actual publisher contract:

“If you sell 4,312 copies, your percentage goes from 17.5% to 25%, unless it’s a Harvest Moon, in which case you are to be visited by three editors who will offer you three rare minerals and if you choose correctly than you will be allowed to pick your cover artist but the publisher will also claim eternal copyrights to your work in Bulgaria, and also if four trains leave Penn Station at 4:22PM, each carrying seven constipated random penguins –“

Okay, I might just be making that up.

So, let’s go back to the time where we all remember that publishers need authors to publish. Let’s also note that self-publishing has become a Very Real Thing and a Bonafide Actual Option, which means that even as the Big Six becomes the Big Five, you still have competition — competition in the form of authors who choose to become author-publishers, instead.

As such, it is best to approach authors as if they are a partner in this endeavor (as they are) and to bring value to that relationship instead of acting as if they’re making iPhones for you in a Brooklyn sweatshop. What I’m trying to say is —

Publishers: I like you! Do you like me? Then let’s get book-married. Because that’s what this relationship is: sure, it has a business component, but given that we’re both at our core bibliogeeks of some stripe or another, it looks a helluva lot like a marriage. You’re not my boss. Nor am I yours. PUT A RING ON IT. *mashes cake into your mouth*

Authors Need Some Motherfucking Data, Stat

Let’s assume you agree that we’re your partners and not an expendable resource like so much authorial lumber. Let’s also assume that while you will handle the lion’s share of Big Marketing, you will, just the same, expect us writer-types to do some more interpersonal marketing and to go on book tours and such in order to connect with our once-and-future audience.

To do this? We need data.

Constant, accurate, capable data.

Where are we selling? How much? To whom? What bookstores dig us? What bookstores have never heard of us? Where will we have the most effect? How’s Twitter at selling books? Facebook? Google Hangouts? If I get naked on YouTube, will that sell books? How many of my readers are bespectacled bearded men like myself? Are any of them ultraterrestrials from the Hollow Earth, and how best can I serve our chitinous subterranean secret masters?

Two things to note, here:

First, if you keep data from us, it might seem as if you’re trying to hide something. Again, we want to feel like partners, not like employees. What you know, we should also know.

Second, if you don’t give us the data, then — repeat after me — Amazon will. (That should become your mantra in the coming years, by the way.) And so enters a fundamental question: do you want us to see Amazon as our first ally, and not our publisher? That’s what Amazon wants, I’m guessing. So: help us. Data helps us sell books. And that is part of the point, right?

Stop With The Sneaky Vanity Publishing Stuff, Because, Ew

Archway Publishing, from Simon & Schuster. Author Solutions from Pengdom Ranguinhaus. Amongst others. They all offer self-publishing opportunities to authors for frequently absurd prices. Mmmyeah. No. Here’s the problem:

First, that’s actually not self-publishing anymore. Really, like, not at all. It’s actually just regular publishing, except now you’re charging me for it instead of paying me for it, which is so fucked up I can’t even discuss it without my words devolving into a series of BUH DUH WUH stuttering.

Second, self-publishing doesn’t actually cost that much money.

Third, signing up with these services often wildly exploits the author.

It’s bad news. It’s ugly business. And it just gives ammunition to those who say that publishers are giant Sarlacc pits ingesting authors and digesting them over the lifetime of their contracts. I get it. You’re a business and you want to do businessy things. But this? This is not how you do it, at least not without dirtying your blouse in the process.

Self-Publishing Is Calling From Inside The House

Author-based publishing is here and it’s not going anywhere. Author-publishers are all up the attic, like squirrels. I think over time that traditional publishing and self-publishing will start to squish together in a big wadded up ball, like a bunch of socks in the dryer. And that’s a good thing. Hybrid authors will become more of an important presence — authors who recognize that both paths offer unique benefits and increase audience and competition.

But that doesn’t easily happen when you see things like the vanity publishing stuff, mentioned above. Or when you see how some publishers are reticent to offer print rights separate from digital rights (print rights and print distribution, be advised, is where author-publishers still can’t get a great foothold). I think you’ll find continued value in treating the new class of author-publishers not as competition or as a vein of ore to be exploited but, again, as partners. And that means crossing the bridge and offering them some of the things they’re maybe used to getting: input on cover design, higher percentage rates (which means reduced advances, most likely), a measure of unprecedented control.

Authors are no longer as hungry for that big break — because, with electronic distribution becoming so easy, so accessible, so free — they can do it for themselves. Doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a good idea to do so (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t). The mere fact that the option exists as opportunity is enough for you to sometimes change the dynamic, to present new ways of partnering with authors going forward.

Publishers are still a critical component to this entire thing. They offer whole buildings full of people who love books, love authors, and who know a whole lotta important things about this bath salts Thunderdome called “publishing.” Hell, most traditional publishers have forgotten more about this industry than most author-publishers have yet known. But that isn’t enough. Not anymore. Relationships must evolve. The business models must change. Authors are starting to drive the bus — sometimes, okay, yes, off the cliff, but that’s where you can help. But you can’t help if the relationship isn’t equitable. If it doesn’t make sense.

Let’s cast our eyes forward together.

Let’s be nimble.

LET US SEAL THIS FRIENDSHIP IN BLOOD.

I mean, uhh, let’s publish some books together!

There’s a post going around naming-and-shaming authors who have reportedly bought favorable fake reviews from the likes of Fiverr.com — I’d encourage you to note that the post has no evidence of tomfoolery and also zero comments. I tried leaving a comment but, along with others, am apparently held fast in permanent moderation.

(No, I’m not going to link to it. No point in generating traffic for these folks, which for all I know is exactly what they want in the first place.)

I can believe that some authors do pay for reviews of that ilk (which to be clear is wholly separate from paying for legitimate reviews from the likes of Kirkus or Publishers Weekly, which invites an entirely separate conversation), but this post has no evidence to support it and feels ultimately like a hit piece. Plus, some of the names? Throwing stones at giants.

I’m not saying authors don’t sometimes behave badly (they do!), but you also can’t just SAY STUFF and have that be MAGICALLY TRUE (or, also, legal).

For the record, all my reviews — while occasionally solicited in the form of me flailing my arms to the general public and saying “I’d sure like some reviews!” — were not paid for by me, my publishers, my beard, or any other human or non-human proxy. All my reviews are free-range, grass-fed, zero-antibiotic, with no high-fructose corn syrup. No animals were harmed in the making of my book reviews, except for that one llama, AND HE KNOWS WHAT HE DID.

Semi-related — whenever there’s a kerfuffle I get people emailing me or tweeting at me for my comment. So, on the whole Goodreads thing where now they’re clamping down on (read: deleting) reviews that talk about authors but not books, I’ll just say this: that’s the right of Goodreads (or Amazon, now), since they own the space and can dictate the nature and tenor of the reviews left there. It’s not censorship (though it will be called this) because censorship is a whole different animal. It’s Goodreads’ lawn, and they can dictate what you do on it. Your concern over any changes is reasonable and understood and such concern should be met with finding (or, best case scenario, forming) a new place for book and author review.

I have occasionally found Goodreads to be a toxic place for authors, but I have also, far more often, found it to be interesting and enlightening, so hopefully all this will shake out in a pleasing way and we can all hold hands and do the maypole dance once more. Or something.

Now I go back to my edit-cave, where I am sinking beneath the tides on my edits of Blightborn, Book Two of the Heartland Trilogy. Wish me luck. *kersploosh*

I have come to the decision — since it is banned books week, after all — that my books are vile, wretched specimens of American pop culture. They prominently feature:

Crass profanity!

Caustic violence!

Gratuitous sexual exploits!

CHILDREN ARE READING MY BOOKS.

I’ve seen these children. On the playgrounds of America. Smoking cigarillos and drinking high-fructose corn syrup right out of the bottle. In each of their hands, a copy of Blackbirds, or Blue Blazes, or the gateway drug, Under the Empyrean Sky — a book I wrote specifically to hook the youth of America on my disgusting meth-candy prose. My god, who let me loose on the bookshelves? My books are a virus! A horrible, salacious virus featuring sex and drugs and sexy drugs and druggy sex and naughty words and cigarette-smoking and surly teenagers and knives and guns and whiskey and sentence fragments and rampant metaphors and —

FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

My books rend innocence the way cats claw sweaters.

So, I think the only solution is to ban them.

Ban them noisily! Loudly! In public! Get together your boycotts, your petitions. Call the news media! Call the principal of your school! CALL THE PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES. Buy several copies of my books — as many as you can carry! — to get this wretchedness off the shelves (the equivalent of sucking snake venom from a viper bite). Then stack up all those books and burn them. On television, if possible. Get pictures! For USA Today.

Kidnap Matt Lauer. Force him to understand. (Don’t forget to kidnap a cameraman, too.)

My books are a toxin.

A sexy, sassy toxin. That will ruin teenagers. And turn you all into sexy drug zombies.

I know the time is now.

Buy my books. All of them.

And then ban the crap out of them.

I eagerly await you doing the right thing.

I eagerly await all the banhammers and burnination.

*stares*

*waits*

*noisily sips Earl Grey tea*

Last week, we crowdsourced your essential epic fantasy reads.

This week? It’s noir.

Why? I dunno. BECAUSE THE BLACKNESS OF MY HEART DEMANDS IT.

What is noir? That’s for you to tell me. Discuss it amongst yourselves.

Here’s the trick: in the comments, you drop your three most essential noir reads. They don’t need to be “classics,” but they should ostensibly get across the message — from you! — that says, “This is what I think noir is.” That’s your job. See you in the comments section.