Writer and writing teacher J. Robert Lennon wrote a post recently, “The Ass-In-Chair Canard,” which takes aim at that oft-uttered snidbit of writing advice, a piece of advice seemingly universal across all those writers who dare to give advice on the subject of writing:

Put your ass in the chair and write.

Regarding that piece of advice, Lennon says at the fore of the post:

It goes without saying this is an incredibly vapid cliché, and one that should never be repeated, if only for fear of boring one’s listeners to death. “How to write: write.” Uh huh. But its implications run deeper than that: the phrase is in fact an insult to almost everyone who has ever struggled with the creative process, and as a teaching tool is liable to do more harm than good. It embraces several dangerous lies: that writer’s block is the result, first and foremost, of laziness; that writing (indeed, any creative pursuit) is like any other form of labor; and that how hard you work on something is directly correlated with how good it is.

He is both very right and terribly wrong all at the same time.

How is that possible? Is he like the Schroedinger’s Cat of writing teachers? Trapped in the infinite uncertainty of his classroom, caught between both being totally right and terribly wrong all in the flux of the same quantum moment? Sadly, it’s less exciting than all that.

He’s right in that this is not a particularly stunning piece of writing advice in the sense that it fails to teach you how to write. It offers us nothing about craft or technique, nothing about theme or motif. It doesn’t help us conjure a character or set a scene or deal with unruly exposition. It gives us a big empty bag of fuck-all regarding adverb use or first-person-narrative or dialogue attributions. It is, in fact, saying that to write, you must write.

And yet, while it’s not a particularly nuanced piece of advice, that’s still true, isn’t it? To write, you must write? And here he (and perhaps you) say, “Well, that’s obvious, though. Nobody’s particularly confused about that point, are they?”

To which I’d say: aren’t they?

I’m not suggesting laziness. I’m not suggesting indolence or stupidity or any of that. What I’m saying is, the creative process is alarmingly internal. A great deal of it goes on up in our — *taps forehead* — brain-gourds, stirring around in a great bubbly froth. It’s imaginary. It’s intellectual. It’s ephemeral, if we let it be. It’s fairy dross and pegasus dreams, man. The only way to take what is imaginary and make it a reality is to put your ass in the chair and write.

And this isn’t just a piece of advice for newbie writers. It may seem to be — and certainly when I was a young wide-eyed writer fresh around the gills I spent more time thinking and talking about being a writer than actually, urp, being a writer. Hearing writers like Joe Lansdale say I had to actually sit the fuck down and shove a bunch of words out of my head and onto the page was honestly helpful. But this is advice for the seasoned writer, too — because we live in an age of great distractions, from Twitter to Facebook to Netflix to deviant Tumblr pornography to bath salts. We live in an age where it feels productive to write blog posts (like this one) or to tweet about writing or to read writing advice. It seems like we’re doing something when at the end of the day we’re just spinning our creative tires in invisible mud.

It’s work. It’s not always pleasant work. Sometimes it invokes a deep, almost psychic pain — an anxiety that blooms into an acid-spitting flower corrosive to confidence and craft. And yet, the words are the words. They only matter when they manifest. And you’re the magician that summons them into existence — their manifestation is on you and you alone. Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody’s saying you have to write thousands of words per day. You write what you can write. But that verb is still in place: write. Whether you write ten words or ten-thousand, they still involve you taking off your pants, setting your coffee onto its coaster, petting your spirit animal, then sitting your ass into the chair and squeezing words from your fingertips until you collapse, unable to do any more. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. Not now.

It only matters that it’s done.

Put your ass in the chair.

No, that doesn’t tell you how to write.

But it does tell you where it begins and where it ends: with you. You are a character with agency. You are a god in this world. Creativity is a worthless state of being without the verb that triggers it: to create. Creativity is the match. You still need to strike it and light the fire.

You can’t just always bully your way through a story, true. A great deal of writing remains in the head. And it comes with patience. And craft. And with your burgeoning intuition. Just the same, the end result of writing is the written word.

And the words only get written when you fucking write them.

“Hybrid author.”

Sounds like we were made in a lab. A squirmy worm-mote in a test tube. Growing at an alarming rate. Genetics forged from a hundred different authors — Joyce, Woolf, Dickens, Rowling, King, a dash of Lee Child, a squirt of Neil Gaiman, an injection of Danielle Steel. A thousand books in our blood spinning, whirling, forming a helix-pudding of raw literary puissance. We swell. We burst from our enclosures. We run amok. We form tribes.

We create, and then we destroy.

Okay, maybe not.

The “hybrid” author is not so exciting as all that, I’m afraid.

The hybrid author merely looks at all the publishing options available to her. She is told she is supposed to check one box and move on — “Stay within the clearly-marked margins,” they warn. “Check your box, choose your path, then shut the door gently behind you.” But the hybrid author checks many, even all the boxes. The hybrid author refuses to walk one path, instead leaping gaily from path to path, gamboling about like some kind of jester-imp. She says no to coloring within the lines of a traditionally-published or a self-published drawing.

She opens all the doors. She closes none of them.

“Do one thing?” she scoffs. “Do all the things!”

Then she mutters something about “fucking the system” and she takes a poop square in the eye of The Man, whose expectations for her were far too restrictive. His poop-eye is deserved.

The term “hybrid author” is getting lots of traction these days (though I’ve been using it for over a year at this point — and, if I may toot my own boobies, I’ve been suggesting authors “do both” since 2010), and I think as a term and an idea it’s going to only grow. Diversity is good in biology, in the people with which we surround ourselves, in investment portfolios, in pretty much everything. And so it is with writing and publishing: diversity is a winner. When one door closes we’ve already pried open five others and maybe a window and some fucking duct-work, too. The hybrid author is squirrely. Flexible. Better. Faster. Stronger. ROBOT.

Okay, not a robot. (And not “better,” either, before you get your nipples in a twist.)

Still, here’s the thing: for all the talk of how awesome it is to apparently be a hybrid author, a lot of authors still lean one way or the other. And that’s totally normal, by the way, because it’s not like you can perfectly bisect the publishing world into equal portions. Just the same, it’s a thing to be aware of, because you’ll still find proponents on both sides of the fence who give lip service to a hybrid approach but at the end of the day wear biases on their sleeves.

(A recent post by Barry Eisler based on a conference keynote makes a strong case for the hybrid author while also noting the complexities of how publishers handle digital distribution. Though I’d argue he muddies the waters and shows his biases by removing nuance and simplifying publishing as being nothing more than a paper distribution system, ultimately kind of hand-waving away editing and cover design and marketing as non-essential functions. It’s this kind of dismissive attitude that fires up the self-publishing base but still does a lot to suggest traditional avenues are in some way inferior. That said, I choose to focus on Eisler’s point that this is no longer an either/or world, which I totally dig.)

Hell, I’ve been accused of “pouring cold water” on self-publishing at the same time I endorse it. Which I’ll agree to, though I pour I think just as much cold water on traditional publishing too because I’d much rather splash you in the face with a shock of ice cubes than gently warm your nethers with hot stones and lure you into a state of false comfort.

So, in the interest of making sure the cold water gets splashed on all of you for all the reasons, let’s take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of the various publishing approaches. This is not an endorsement of any one path but only an endorsement that you should examine all paths and attempt to discover which one suits you and your books THE MOST BESTEST.

Let us begin. (And if I miss stuff, shout it out in comments.)

Traditional Publishing

+1: Money up front! Maybe really good money!

-1: Could be shit money, too!

+1: Gatekeepers ensure that material of relative quality gets through the door.

-1: Gatekeepers are also notoriously risk-averse. (And occasionally: dicks.)

+1: Access to pro-grade editors, cover artists and kick-ass marketing systems.

-1: Sometimes the marketing is left to you, poor author, because fuck you, that’s why.

+1: Likelier access to: film rights, foreign rights, reviews, actual bookshelves

-1: Holy shit, it’s fucking slow!

+1: Entrenched systems have value (i.e. “not building parachute on way out of the plane”)

-1: System does not respond well to change.

+1: Better discoverability of books published this way, so far.

-1: If your publisher shits the bed, you might be fucked.

-1: If another major bookstore chain shits the bed, you might be fucked.

+1: You will learn a lot about writing/publishing via this path; it will improve you.

+1: You will earn more respect and prestige, if that’s a thing you care about.

-1: Occasionally punishing contract clauses and low-ass royalties. Which leads to:

+1/-1: You need a good agent. Hard to get, but worth it to have.

Self-Publishing

+1: You have a lot of control over how the book exists in the world. Editing, marketing, cover design, e-book design, promo, and on and on.

-1: Money investment up front means more financially risky (may spend money, gain none). Anticipate spending anywhere from $500 to $5000 to get that book “out there.”

+1: Great percentage of the money earned stays with you (~50-70%).

-1: Significantly reduced access to film rights, foreign rights, reviews, bookshelves, etc

+1: Strong self-publishing community full of resources!

-1: Gets a little cultish sometimes, brimming with motivations based on bitter rejection.

+1: Allows you to offer riskier materials in format (short fiction, novellas, serials) or content (edgier work, genre mash-up material, weird stuff) that publishers might not touch.

-1: Some genres don’t do well self-published, yet.

+1: Some genres do fucking gangbusters!

-1: A lot harder than it looks because it means being a publishing company as well as an author.

+1: New options every day (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, direct sales, etc).

-1: Based overly so in digital; trad-pub is still the strongest way to print.

+1: It’s as fast as you want it to be! (Just click “publish.”)

-1: It’s as fast as your impatient twitchy self wants it to be! (Don’t be so fast to click “publish.”)

+1: You retain all rights to your work!

-1: A rising tide of turd-froth in terms of self-published bilge; must rise above or die. (The often poor discoverability of new self-pub authors can be murderous.)

+1: You get to bypass a potentially archaic and outmoded system for publication.

-1: Easier to self-publish when you already have earned your audience, however small.

+1: Digital shelf-life is largely eternal, or at least until SkyNet nukes us from The Cloud.

-1: Amazon is the 800-lb gorilla here; if Amazon shits the bed, so do you; if Amazon changes the percentage split, not much self-publishers will be able to do about it.

+1/-1: No agent required, but honestly, one is recommended anyway.

At The End Of The Day…

All of this only matters if you write the best book you can and give it the right amount of time and love and nether-massage it needs to flourish both on the screen and in the marketplace. This is simplified, of course: lots of bad books have done very, very well, but really, fuck that. We also eat lots of shitty foods and drive lots of shitty cars and do lots of shitty things and “shitty but successful anyway” is a pretty piss-poor hoop to aim for, don’t you think?

If you have written what you believe to be The Best Damn Thing You Were Able To Write and you want to know what to do with it, well, hopefully  that list above will at least get you started considering how both paths are separate-but-equal and how the modern author is best-served by placing books in both “chutes,” so to speak. You do that, you gain the advantages of both (while still admittedly wrestling with the downsides, too). Further, when one ocean dries up (as it inevitably will), you are not left upon a rotting raft moored on a dead coral reef somewhere, baking to death in the sun with all the other bloated whales.

Some folks will espouse a particular magical order to this process — “Self-publish first,” they might say, even though plenty of authors published traditionally first and then used the audience built there to self-publish, even though an author like me did both paths at almost the exact same time. Blah blah blah. Point is, as always, we have many ways up the mountain. Walk as many of them as gives you comfort and confidence.

NOW PLEASE REPORT TO THE LAB FOR HYBRIDIZATION AND EAT THESE BOOKS

*scans you with ticklish gene-warping laser*

If I have studied the entrails of this pelican correctly, and if scholars are correct in that the Seal of Baal-Ashtoreth has finally split in twain, that means it is my birthday. I am, by all reports, “no longer young,” but also, “not quite old,” which means I’m “middle-aged.”

I’ll buy my sports car next year.

For this year, I’ll buy myself a book.

Because books and birthdays go together like chocolate and more chocolate.

So: recommend to me a book you liked that you read recently.

Please do not recommend your own books because this is not that time.

Last week’s challenge is, “Choose Your Opening Line.” Winners will be chosen in a week or two because lawds-a-mercy, you folks sure turned in lots of entries!

This week is a simple one.

I want to you to come up with a title.

Just one. A single title to a future and unwritten flash fiction story.

Post it in the comments below. I’ll pick my three favorites and they will get RANDOM GOODIES FROM ME. Somehow. Then, the following challenge will be for you folks to write stories based on the chosen titles. You picking up what I’m laying down?

You may enter once.

Enter by next Friday, the 26th. Noon EST.

Now, name that story.

Random news bits flung into your eyeblobs:

First up: whoa, the Guardian suggests I’m one of the best young novelists in the SFF universe. *eyes pop out of my skull* Well, that’s all a bit unexpected, isn’t it? Doubly amazing here is that I’m put with a list of incredibly talented people: Seanan McGuire, Joe Hill, Tom Pollock, Lauren Beukes, Saladin Ahmed, James Smythe, Catheryn Valente, Robert Jackson Bennett, Madeline Ashby, China Mieville, Carlton Mellick, Hannu Rajeniemi, Nnedi Okorafor, Elizabeth May, NK Jemisin, Joe Abercrombie, Aliette de Bodard, Francis Hardinge, and Hugh Howey (who may not like being on that list with me at this point, I dunno). Point is: holy list of amazing people. Triply amazing is how some of these people are people I consider friends, which makes me the luckiest little jerk in the whole wide world.

(You better watch for the day that Seanan McGuire and I combine forces. The world will hear our murder ballad, by gosh. AND IT WILL SONG ALONG AS IT PERISHES.)

Let’s see, what’s next?

Oh! Hey holy crap, I’m going to have four novels out in the next few months. For those unaware, that means: Gods & Monsters, The Blue Blazes, Under The Empyrean Sky, and Beyond Dinocalypse. It’s a veritable Wendig-palooza and for that, I apologize. I’ll try to keep the self-promo noise to a manageable level, a sweet seductive murmur in the background of your daily signal. BUT I GOTTA TALK ABOUT MY BOOKS because that’s how I feed my child and oh yeah also my wanton gin habit. (Seriously, spring and summer come around and bottles of gin come and go like hobos riding the rails, man.)

*checks notes*

Ah! Right.

Wanna read the first chapter of The Blue Blazes? Tor.com has you covered.

Need to read a review? Well, in this review, the reviewer notes [sic]:

“The pacing is just short of break neck, but Wendig gives readers a well placed moment or two to catch their breath. But don’t be shocked to find yourself reading well into the night. The action sequences are bombastic, brutal set pieces that leave the surrounding landscape in reduced to gleefully described rubble. It’s all a hair’s breadth from over the top, but Wendig manages never to lean on the gas enough to send the story into a tail spin. It’s a blancing act to keep from slipping into parody  but Wendig manages it deftly.”

And —

“As I’ve said, the real star of The Blue Blazes is the prose. Wendig writes with blunt force choreography, full of brutally disturbing descriptions, and wrecking ball action. Noir sensibilities are in full force here, and Wendig uses them brilliantly to craft a portrait of a New York that is at the same time instantly recognizable and disturbingly alien.  The staccato rhythm of Wending’s prose fits beautifully with the story he tells, and I’ve rarely seen such an usual voice used so effectively.”

We’ll just ignore the fact he misspelled my last name as “Wending.”

Need more? WELL OKAY. Another reviewer notes:

“This is urban fantasy, horror and gangster noir all rolled into one tight, fast-paced drug trip of a story – and the drug trip part is literal a lot of the time. New York City is sitting on top of an open gateway to Hell, and monsters aren’t the only exports. The ‘Blue Blazes’ of the book’s title refers to a mineral, mined from the rock of the Great Below, that allows those who use it to see the true nature of Hell’s denizens through whatever illusions they use to appear human. In the time since Hell broke loose, this mineral has become a new drug of choice, particularly among New York’s criminal organization – but there have been rumours of other kinds of drug. Different-coloured minerals, that are said to have even crazier effects – even one that can help the user to fend off death itself.”

Finally, there’s this German review. Translating a snippet here…

“After I had read Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig and Mockingbird, I knew pretty much what to expect. However, with The Blue Blazes again but he puts up a notch and skin so right on the plaster. Anyone who takes a book from Chuck agile in the hand must be prepared that is cursed without end that are not exactly sympathetic character through the series that the atmosphere from beginning to end is depressing and gloomy that it is not in force come up short and you will not be sure in terms of action on the track.”

Okay, so Google Translate maybe isn’t ideal, there.

I think they liked the book.

So: there you go!

News. Enjoy. Tell your friends. Drink some gin.

Ah, memes.

I love you, memes, I do.

Surly pets! Tubby children chasing bubbles! Various hedgehogs!

I fucking love hedgehogs.

Which is different from “I love fucking hedgehogs,” by the way, so don’t get it twisted.

Anyway.

One such meme going around has appeared in multiple guises, the latest (and it’s really not that recent, but I see it pop up again and again) is The Care and Feeding of an Author, and you know, I totally appreciate the sentiment. We’re authors. It seems like we can barely take care of ourselves. (“Did you shower? Did you forget to eat today? Are you even wearing underpants? YOU NEED TO BREATHE, STUPID AUTHOR.”) And we are genuinely allowed to exist because of readers. Not publishers. Not distributors like Amazon. At the end of the day all that matters are that we have readers who support the hell out of us, helping us and our books find other readers. Like some kind of imaginary story virus that transmits via recommendation instead of sneeze.

I just want to clarify that, while we appreciate it, you don’t owe us anything.

Really.

You’re not obligated to care for us or feed us. That’s not the kind of relationship we have. I appreciate it. Certainly if you like a book I want you to be enlivened enough to share the book with others in whatever way you feel excites you best. But I want you to share it because you want to share it, not because of some idea that you’re obligated, that it’s your responsibility.

I mean, damn, the menu of actions you must undertake to do to care and feed us in that list is pretty intense. I don’t even do all those things and I love me some books and some authors. It’s like, by the time you’re done, your whole day is gone because you’ve spent hours clicking like buttons and +1s and copying links and taking out Craigslist ads and instituting sinister hallucinogenic meme viruses — that’s awfully punishing to you, the reader.

What’s next, you have to let me use your couch? Eat your food? Borrow your dog?

Warning: I will borrow your dog if you let me.

(The list is also very Amazon-specific. It assumes you buy all your books there. And, maybe you do, and that’s totally fine — you buy books however you like, by golly. But other folks buy them from bookstores or Wal-Mart or use these old things called “libraries,” which I hear are pretty awesome if you can find one OH WAIT THEY SHOULD BE EVERYWHERE.)

Seriously: fuck yeah, libraries.

Anyway.

All this is just to say, you don’t owe us anything.

Not a click, not a drink, not a buy, not a review, not a hand-job or butt-tickle or nipple-squeeze. We appreciate any attention you give us. We doubly appreciate any money you care to cart our way in trade for our storycraft. We triply appreciate you going beyond all that and using whatever means you like to share the book with other people. (Caution: please do not touch authors unless the authors ask to be touched. We’re like aquariums: don’t tap on the glass.)

You do not owe us anything.

It is we who owe you.