Archives (page 439 of 458)

May 6, 2011 / 25 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Profanity Is A Circus Of Language”

As noted earlier this week in my “Why Writers Drink” post, I am not a man who shies away from profanity. In fact, I leap toward it, arms open, my sticky jam-hands ever-reaching. What I said then was: “Profanity is fun. Profanity is a circus of language where the clowns are all insane and the elephant just stepped on a trapeze artist and something somewhere is on fire.”

And thus, this week’s flash fiction ~~sonofabitch~~ challenge is born.

Here’s all you gotta do:

Write a story where profanity features in the title.

Yep. That’s it.

Bonus points if:

a) The profanity is creative or otherwise uniquely used.

b) The profanity carries over into the tale (perhaps even as a part of a character’s name!).

c) Your squealing love of profanity comes through in the tale told.

As usual, you have 1000 words with which to tackle this motherfucking challenge. And you’ve got one week to do it — the deadline is next Friday morning, before noon o’clock.

Post to your blog. Link back to here if you’d like. Then drop a link in the comments here so we know that your story exists so that we may scurry over and read its goddamn brilliance.

Please to enjoy.

And further, beard the fuck on.

May 5, 2011 / 26 Comments

In Which I Pretend You Give A Rat’s Ass About What I’m Up To

Sometimes I hate to do these cursory updates, because it assumes you can actually muster a fuck as to what I’m up to. Hell, I don’t blame you for not caring. I’m not sure I care all that much, and it’s me we’re talking about. Really, I’m kind of boring. It’s like, “Hey, Chuck, what are you doing?”

“Oh. Well. The usual.”

“Does that mean…?”

“Mm-hmm. Sitting here, scraping lint out of my belly button with a pistachio shell. Drinking gin out of a dirty pencil cup. Making things up inside my mind and then writing them down.”

“The sexy life of a writer.”

“The sexy life of a writer, indeed.”

*scrape scrape*

Let me ask up front: do you like these updates? Do you read them? Feel free to answer honestly (though, also, tactfully — please no, “Dear Shitbeard, I don’t give two rats fucking in a jizz-lacquered gym-sock whether or not you update us as to what’s going on in your life. Love, The Internet”). For now, however, I am left to rely on my ego to get me through the writing of this post. Hence: please enjoy the stuff I am doing.

Monsters With Uncertain Bowel Habits

It’s been, mmm, let’s see, two weeks since I said, “Hey, errrrbody, I’d like to pick up some more sweet sales of Irregular Creatures because it is a short story collection that features flying cats and hell-vaginas and it’ll make you laugh and it’ll make you cry and also I need to buy some more coffee soon so DEAR GOD PLEASE HELP ME.” I said I’d like to get another 400 sales and I also said I’d update you crazy kittens as to how that plan is doing. And so here I am. Update in hand.

Well, in two weeks time I’ve sold 76 copies, which is nice. Especially since the previous two weeks saw only about 20 copies sold. So, 76 out of 400 means I’m… *counts on fingers, toes, nipples, nosehairs* just about 20% of the way toward my goal. That’s lovely, and thanks all for helping spread the word. Cat-Bird and the Magical Hobo Hermaphrodite thank you, too.

I must also thank Fred Hicks, who shouted out to Irregular Creatures over at Jim Butcher’s bloggery-space, and I’ve zero doubt that this shout-out also helped contribute to sales.

If you wish to procure Irregular Creatures directly through me, you can buy via THIS LINK via PayPal.

If you want it through Amazon (US), THIS LINK is your best friend.

If you’re across the pond, Amazon (UK) offers you THIS LINK right here, mate.

Thanks, too, for the many who’ve left amazing reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Where You Can Find Me

I’ve now contributed nine articles to The Escapist, with, I believe, a tenth on the way. You can find all my articles here, but were you inclined to see what I’ve been doing there recently, you might wanna check out:

First: How Games Get Zombies Wrong. A little ditty about how video games don’t quite grok the narrative potency of the zombie sub-genre, of which I am notably a fan.

Second: Evolution, Not Deviation. In which I discuss how when doing a sequel, it’s easy to do “more of the same,” but on the other hand, it’s dangerous to do different.

Speakazombies, a casual reminder that you can pre-order Double Dead from Amazon (Pre-Order US or Pre-Order UK). Described by me as, “A vampire in zombieland.”

Hey! Look. The Forsaken Chronicler’s Guide is out.

Human Tales is out. I’ve a short story in it!

What I’m Working On At Present

I’m working on a new novel while I wait for Double Dead edits. The new novel — CODENAME: SHUCK RAT — is coming along nicely. Too nicely. That’s how crazy we writers are — it’s going so well, I’m worried. “Why am I enjoying this? This feels so right. It’s not supposed to be right. Where’s my fear? Where’s my gut-churning acid-burn? Why isn’t my heart in my throat? Nurse. Nurse!”

I’ve got a cover coming in for Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey as I finalize edits and add my own “director’s commentary” to the book. It’s a biggun. It’ll top 100k when all is said and done. Chocablock with writing advice and whatnottery. I’m loosely soliciting quotes from folks if anybody feels like blurbing the pants off this monkey motherfucker. Gimme a shout.

Got some film and new media projects bubbling on the stove.

Also will soon be open for summer work. You need a penmonkey, please do not hesitate to contact me. I work clean, fast, and friendly. Plus, I’m having a baby soon. Don’t make me shake him at you.

The baby is the other thing we’re working on. We now are loaded to bear with baby shower gifts. And something called a “diaper cake.” Which is not a delicious cake made of diapers. I mean, okay, fine, it’s adorable, but totally inedible. I know. I tried gumming that thing for hours. All it did was soak up every drop of saliva in my body. Absorbency, man. Absorbency.

Things I’m Enjoying

Almost through with Robert McCammon’s THE FIVE, which is an incredible psycho-horror rock opera as a band is hunted by a sniper. Totally different than anything McCammon has done.

Laughing at two new sitcoms: Workaholics on Comedy Central and Happy Endings on ABC.

Digging the new Beastie Boys album.

Portal 2 was crazy good.

Dragon Age 2 was crazy good, but in a different way.

And I think that’s all she wrote.

Beard the fuck on, friends.

Go forth and suck unicorn.

May 4, 2011 / 13 Comments

WWYD: “What Would Yaga Do?”

I think I’m supposed to be using my bloggery-space today to talk about the death of Osama bin Laden. Eh. Nah. You’ve already heard it all and the great thing is that we live in a country where we’re all allowed to express whatever it is we think, be it triumph or bloodthirst or outrage or fear. For my perspective, I was raised in a house where a kind of frontier justice was the order of the day, so do with that as you will. Even still, today’s post then perhaps comes at a good time, where I decide to turn my old dog’s blissfully ignorant ways into a brand spanking new religious path. Please to enjoy.

The old religions just ain’t cutting it no more. And so I like to let my brain visit the territory of “new religions,” coming up with spiritual paths that have not yet before been seen, imagined, or followed. It’s like, I’ll run into the living room and I’ll yell to my wife: “Tacos! What about a religion based on tacos? It could be, I dunno, Tacoism, or, The Church of Fuck Yeah, Tacos. What do you think? We could write the holy book on a flour tortilla, the words written with grill marks!” And at that point she looks at me like the lunatic I am, and I run off to…well, probably chase moths or gum a light-switch if I know me.

And boy, do I know me.

This time, however, the idea for a religion was not mine, but rather, hers.

We were in the car a day or two after putting our old shepherd, Yaga, to sleep, and we were reminiscing: how she’d chase him around the living room, how he’d eat great muzzle-fuls of snow, how he’d lay under the table and get up suddenly and whack his head on the table without giving a shit. We joked, even with tears in our eyes, about how even though he was gone he’d never be gone because we will endlessly find piles of his hair in untold corners — they’ll blow in like tumbleweeds, a fuzzy reminder of the dog we had, the dog we loved. I even said, hey, if we really wanted, we could just collect some of that dog fur and tape it all together, then stick on a pair of googly eyes and we could have another Yaga — if not a doppelganger, then at least some kind of hairy idol, a graven image of the old beast.

Mostly, though, the talk orbited what a good, sweet, and dopey dog he was.

It was then that she said, “We should aspire to be more like him. Instead of What Would Jesus Do, it could be WWYD, What Would Yaga Do?” It seemed like a good idea. Our modern lives are filled with a number of woes and stresses that are largely manufactured for no other reason than to fill spaces: whether it’s getting angry in traffic or feeling self-conscious about X, Y or Z, we all have our own self-spun stressors.

So, I thought, hell with it. Let’s do it. Let’s print that shit. Let’s get a gospel together and throw together some tenets and — boo-bam — we have ourselves a religion. I always say that those we love gain immortality through our memories, right? Why not take it one step further and make a whole damn religion? That requires, though, that I come up with some precepts based on WWYD, and here they be.

Yagaism. The Gospel According To Goofball. WWYD?

Ignorance Is Truly Bliss

Yaga wasn’t dumb, though you’d think it, sometimes. He’d have this look on his face like… “What? Is something happening? Where am I?” Hell, other times you wouldn’t even glean a confused internal monologue: instead in that stare you’d hear crickets chirping, brooks babbling, a breeze shaking a field of wildflowers. But he wasn’t dumb. He figured things out all the time: doors, baby-gates, how to steal food when nobody was looking.

Instead, I prefer to think of him as blissfully unaware. Life was just easier when he could sit there and pant and stare. Doubly true when allowed to do so outside a car window.

The lesson: sometimes it’s good to turn your brain off. Shut that shit down. Take some time and tune out the noise: the news, social media, work, your nagging inner monologues.

Become the cricket chirp, the brook babble, the wind-in-the-wildflowers.

Pain Is Fleeting

At some point, Yaga must’ve gone from cat to cat and stolen their many lives. He was a stone’s throw from immortal, that dog. Rat poison, chocolate, onions, elk attack, Lyme disease, cancer of the paw, falling down steps, a ride in a cop car. And none of that speaks to the daily indiscretions of Yaga thunking his head on something. He’d stand up or look around and — bam — nail his head into the corner of a TV stand or the underside of a coffee table.

It never fazed him. Even the rat poison. (Not that I recommend feeding your dogs rat poison, mind you. He learned how to open a cabinet and ate a whole box of D-Con. See? He was smart. But also: ignorant.)

The lesson: Do not let pain and indignity affect you. Let it roll off you.

Endure the head-whacks, the elk-attacks, the bellies full of rat-killer.

Sometimes, You Just Gotta Stop And Sniff Some Asses

Asses and crotches, actually. I was told that he was a mix between a Belgian Shepherd and a Chow-Chow, but you ask me, he was a hybrid designer pooch born of a certified Crotch-Hound and Ass-Terrier. Come to think of it, he also had a fondness for smelling the pee-spots of other pups, wherein he was clearly deciphering some secret message left behind by the Subversive Canine Network. I guess that means he was at least 33% German Piss-hund (aka “The Urine Spaniel”), right? Yeah. Point is, he always took time out of his day to suck in a stubborn noseful of urine, crotch, or dog butt.

The lesson: Take some time out of your day to enjoy the little pleasures.

Inhale the sacred pee-fumes, crotch-vapors, and nether-scents.

When In Doubt, Pee On It

Speaking of pee, Yaga frequently contributed his own “golden messages” to the world. Tree? Lawn chair? Shrub? Small child? He’d pee on it. You give him half a chance, he’d pee on the little dog, too — she’d be squatting down and he’d figure, “I’ll add my own secret message to the puddle!” except the only problem was, he was so eager, he’d start up before she was even finished, forcing her to dart out of the way of his incoming stream. Let’s just be thankful she was quick on her feet, yeah?

The lesson: One of two, choose your own.

Either, “Mark your territory and own what’s yours,” or, “Reality is determined by those things upon which you can urinate; if you cannot cast your urine upon it, then it does not exist.”

Behold the golden truth, the gleaming stream, the pee-pee dance of leg-lifting enlightenment.

Life Is Too Short To Poop In One Place

I just can’t stop talking about one’s bodily waste, can I? Well, this is terribleminds, after all. Hey, shut up, it’s relevant. See, Yaga was not a conventional pooper. Your normal dog, well, he’ll find that one magic place to poop and there shall he deposit his little contribution. Yaga, on the other hand, was not content to merely sit still. He walked when he pooped. That’s right. He did what you might term “The Dooky Shuffle,” or, as we sometimes called it, “The Circle of Love.” He’d poop and be all like, “Hey, I want to smell that flower over there,” and so he’d shimmy his way over toward the aforementioned flower, dropping the equivalent of an upended can of syrupy yams as he went. He did this all his life.

The lesson: Life is short so be like the shark (or Snow Shark) — poop forward, or drown. Embrace life and never stop moving. Put differently: don’t let your shit weigh your down.

Unfetter yourself of spatial anchors, heavy weights, needless waste.

Unconditional Love Will Get You Through The Day

Yaga was a beast made of love (and, well, 80 pounds of black, wispy hair that had the ability to choke even the most stalwart of vacuums). He loved anyone and everyone without fear, without condition. A serial killer could kick down the door wearing the skins of our neighbors and Yaga would greet him like that serial killer was a lost uncle deserving of only hand-licks and crotch-nuzzles. I’m sure many found Yaga’s unhindered love unsettling — our other dog, the Taco Terrier, is far more like us as humans. She’s distrustful and uncertain. You come at her with a free hand she’ll wonder what you plan to do with that hand. Something sinister? Probably. Thus it is deserving of scorn.

Yaga had no scorn. Hell, the little dog would sometimes bite his face and he was totally okay with that. Tail wagging even as she clamped down on his slobbery jowl. Because, y’know, man. Love. Sweet love.

The lesson: Love beyond the margins. Love unconditionally. Find trust. Don’t be so pissed off and suspicious all the time. Bliss out. Radiate dopey-faced happy-making kindness.

Exude love despite the facey-bitings, the interlopers, the heaps and mounds of cynicism and distrust.

The Best Thing You Can Do Is Be Near To The Ones You Love

Yaga’s number one goal in life: to be near to those he cared about. He was a Velcro Dog through and through. Wherever you were, well, that’s where he wanted to be. You feel bad now because, at the time, it feels annoying. “Hey, do you mind not being up my ass? I’m trying to do laundry.” “I love you.” “I know you love me, but I need to move and not trip and die.” “I love you so much.” “Fine, yes, I love you too.” “Okay.” He was the canine version of a six-shooter or colostomy bag: forever at your hip.

It was, I suspect, his greatest pleasure. He’d sleep by our door at night. He’d hew close if outside. You move from one room to the next, even in his last days, he’d slowly rouse his numb haunches and follow you.

The lesson: The ones you love and who love you in return are the ones who count.

Become Velcro, duct tape, and super-glue when love is on the line.

WWYD?

Some dude cuts you off in traffic? Ask yourself: WWYD? What Would Yaga Do? He’d love that guy unconditionally. Or pee on his car.

Lose your job? Smash your toe on a house robot? Suffer a breakup? WWYD, motherfucker. He’d ignore the pain. He’d pretend everything was all good. No questions asked, buddy.

Not sure where to go? What to do? Confused? Dub-Dub-Why-Dee. Yaga wouldn’t think twice. He’d just void his bowels and keep on trucking. Long as he’s near the ones he loves, it’ll all work out in the end.

All hail the mighty slack-jawed tongue-wagging prophet.

All hail, Priests of Yagaism.

All sing the hymn of the question, What Would Yaga Do?

Amen, so say we all, and woof-woof.

May 3, 2011 / 120 Comments

Why Writers Drink

“I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach.”

— Faulkner

*slides glass of whiskey over*

There. That one’s on the house.

Fact: writers drink.

Every writer drinks. Total boozemonkeys to the last. Sure, you say, “But I don’t drink,” except, you probably do. You go to sleep, fugue out, and your writer hindbrain takes over — it’s like flinging open the cage door and letting out an enraged, deranged orangutan. Just because you don’t consciously drink doesn’t mean your crazy orangutan soul isn’t up at 3AM, dousing himself in the mini-bottle of tequila you unknowingly hid in the Holy Bible. So, don’t tell me the story that you don’t drink. Next you’ll try to tell me you have a mannequin for sale that only comes alive at night, when I’m alone with her in a department store.

Man, I’d so bang that mannequin.

What were we talking about?

Right. Writers. Drinky-drinky. You drink. You don’t drink, then you might not be a real writer. Being a real writer isn’t about how much you write in a day or how many books you’ve published. It’s about how big your liver is. Your liver doesn’t look like a lumpy kickball, then you and me, we’re not on the same page.

I get two comments frequently here about this site. One, “You sure do use a lot of profanity.” Well, I’m sorry. Profanity is fun. Profanity is a circus of language where the clowns are all insane and the elephant just stepped on a trapeze artist and something somewhere is on fire. Two, “You sure do talk about drinking.” Well, I’m sorry about that, too. We writers drink, and we like to talk about drinking, and we like to talk about drinking while drinking. It’s just our thing. Deal with it. And drink this while you’re at it.

You want to know why? You want some deeper instruction on the booze-sponge that is the penmonkey?

*clink*

Here goes.

Wistful Poetic Romance

Hemingway’s daiquiri. Faulkner’s mint julep. Stephenie Meyer’s “no-no juice.”

Okay, I’m not really sure about that last one. Point is, writing and drinking have long been paired together, arms locked in a poetic tangle — we envision the writer by his typewriter, a glass of Scotch in one hand, an elephant gun in the other. The whisky lights a peat fire in his belly, sends smoke signals of bright and bitter brine to his head, fills the chambers of his mind with the fermented bullets of inspiration.

It’s absinthe and poetry, brandy and prose, a lovable drunkenness leading to the potency of fiction.

Of course, the reality hits home when it’s 10:30 in the morning and we’re sauced on boxed wine, idly wondering when we got vomit in our own hair (it’s been long enough that it crusted over, a crispy bile-caked cradle-cap). Later we’ll look back at the work we wrote during that time (“Is fluvasham a word? Is this a grocery list? Funions? Really?”) and recognize that the romance and inspiration we so dearly sought is as empty as the wine box we’re presently using as a foot-rest.

Because Other Writers Do It

You know how like, there’s a state-bird? “It’s Iowa! Our state-bird is the one-eyed caviling corn grackle!” Well, if the state of Writerdom had a state-bird, it would be the whiskey-sodden rum-warbler.

Try this experiment: go to a genre convention or writer’s conference, wait till… well, it’d be optimistic to say 5pm, but let’s go with that, and then ask around to try to suss out where the writers are. Seriously, don’t even bother. Because I know where they are. They’re like elephants and tigers and flamingos who have found the one fucking watering hole in 1000 miles of Kalahari hell. Hint: They’re at the bar, dipshit. Drinking. They might not have money for food, but by a good goddamn they certainly have money to wet their writerly whistles. Where did you think you would find them? The library? The health food store? Okay, sure, you might find them at a pet store holding turtle races or playing mind games with ferrets, but that’s just because they spent all their allotted booze money.

You want to hang out with writers, you go where writers drink. And if you don’t drink with ’em, they will sense that you’re different. And like rats who smell an imposter, they will nibble you to bloody ribbons.

Because Holy Fucking Shit, The First Draft, That’s Why

That first draft can be a beast. I’m constantly in search of a good metaphor for what writing a first draft of anything long-form is like, but for now, let’s just go with “drowning in a sea of bees.”

So we get to feeling like, dang, I could really use a little something to take the edge off, you know? Something to dampen the misery of endless stings. We might try, I dunno, stretching, or a cup of tea, or a few bites of chocolate. And that’ll tide us over to the 20% mark, but somewhere along the way we need a life preserver to keep us afloat. We need a goddamn drink. (Well, frankly, we probably need an insidious mix of black tar heroin, methamphetamines, and ayahuasca — we can vacuum the roof, write a bestseller, space out with machine elves, then battle the gods of Xibalba over a game of severed-head-basketball. Thankfully, those things are difficult to procure. Unless you know an Inca.)

One gin and tonic might keep us afloat. Two gin and tonics eases the coming of the first draft, a kind of chemo-spiritual pelvic widener to help birth this story-baby. Seven gin and tonics and we end up soiling ourselves and drawing pictures of boobs on our computer monitors in permanent marker. Or we end up writing The Da Vinci Code. To-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe.

Still, you drink, you feel 100 feet tall and bulletproof. Stephen King ain’t got nothing on you. I mean, except the fact he’s lucid and doesn’t suffer blackouts that require him to wear a diaper.

Celebrate Good Times, Come On

“I just finished the book! Time for some wine.”

“I just sold a story! Time for some wine.”

“I just got through a particularly rough chapter. Time for some wine!”

“I just got halfway through a sentence. Wine wine wine wine wine.” *drunken pirouettes*

Eventually we end up in a piano crate under an overpass with a three-legged incontinent terrier named “Steve,” and we tell passersby how we “just finished that novel,” and they’re all like, “Sure, whatever, homeless-person-who-smells-like-Maneshewitz-wine-run-through-the-urinary-tract-of-a-diabetic-raccoon.” And we wave our manuscript at them. And by manuscript, I mean “genitals.”

Aww, Sad-Face Need Boozytime

The opposite end of the spectrum arrives. Hey, rejection. Hey, book’s not selling. Hey, a bad review. Time to drown your sorrows in booze the way one might drown squirrels in a rusty washtub! Die, sorrows! Die!

It seems like a good idea until you remember the idea that alcohol can serve as a depressant. Then you end up on the lawn with your laptop, yelling at some rejection letter or negative review. “You don’t know me. You don’t know shit about shit about — urp — shit, buster. I wrote my fugging heart out of my butt for you and this is what I get? I’mma genie! Genial. Genius. That’s it. You shut up. Quit lookin’ at me, possum.”

The Bottle Muse And Her Lugubrious Liquor-Fed Lubrications

We get stoppered up, our word-fluids corked up and bricked off like the poor fucker in Cask of Amontillado and we suffer that most mythical of conditions, the bloated beast known as “Writer’s Block.” And so, to answer one myth we turn to another myth by seeking our Muse, and in seeking our Muse we figure, hey, screw it, why not throw a third axis of mythic deliciousness in for good measure? Thus we seek to conjure the Muse in the vapor of our own boozy ruminations, guzzling some manner of alcoholic spirit to stir the metaphorical (and thus entirely unreal) spirits that purportedly guide our writing lives and have power over our own mental blocks.

It rarely works as intended. Oh, it provides lubrication, all right. We end up inspired. We find ourselves inspired to eat a box of microwave taquitos and drunk-dial a passel of exes before kneeling down and praying before the Porcelain Temple of the Technicolor Hymn. It’s just, y’know, the one thing it didn’t help with was putting words on paper. But at least we get a good story out of it.

Because Holy Fucking Shit, The Final Draft, That’s Why

You hit a point where it’s like, I have these 80 billion copy-edits, I have to cut limbs off this baby before anybody will adopt it, and I have to do it all on deadline. Daddy needs some vodka.

The story goes that Hemingway said to write drink, but edit sober, but man does that feel counter-intuitive, right? Editing is like surgery. And you wouldn’t go into surgery without anesthetic, would you?

Once again, however, there exists that cruel line. A drink or two might make the process more palatable, but a baker’s dozen and, whoo boy. Before you know it you’re slurring made-up racial slurs at your own manuscript, and in a sudden sweeping rage you highlight 20,000 words right in the middle and — *click!* — delete it, and then just to be sure it’s dead, you salt the earth by erasing all your backup copies and shattering your external hard drive with a croquet mallet.

It’s The Only Way The Demons Will Stop Jabbering

I’ll just leave that one there without comment. Do with it as you will.

SHUT UP QUIT SPEAKING YOUR INFERNAL POETRY IN MY EAR TUBES GRAAAAAAFRGBLE THE STORIES ARE TRAPPED INSIDE MY HEAD LIKE A GOURD FILLED WITH SPIDERS

Uhhh. I mean, what? Nothing.

Sauce Up, Writer Folk

So, what do you drink, writer-types? What’s your favorite drink? Even better — favorite drinking story?

And yes, for the record, awooga, awooga, disclaimers: I am not an alcoholic, you should not be an alcoholic, and writing is not made better or more magical by drinking. This is just a funny post (with maybe a hint of truth to it) about how writers are so frequently drinkers. So put down that oak cask with the squiggly drinking straw shoved in its bunghole. And get back to work.

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

— Raymond Chandler

May 2, 2011 / 24 Comments

What Novelists Can Learn From Screenwriters

You will, at times, encounter a somewhat cocky, snobbish attitude (we’ll henceforth refer to this attitude as the attitude of the cocksnob, or as an act of snobcockery) that elevates the book above the film or TV show.

This is, of course, a microwaved platter of gopher diarrhea.

It is in fact the attitude of those nose-in-the-air, lips-frozen-in-an-everlasting sneer literary types who have elevated the novel to places where most people cannot reach it. They cite television shows or films (“Uhh, hello, Jersey Shore? Transformers 2?”) as emblems of how this visual format might as well go stick its head in doo-doo. Of course, these people fail to ever mention the most powerful illustrations of the TV and film format, whether we’re talking The Wire or Mad Men or Casablanca or UHF starring “Weird” Al Yankovic. Further, this act of literary snobcockery often fails to gaze toward those examples of the written form that are so rank and vile that one must assume they are gassy corpses: let us all bow our heads and remember the time when the greasy orange homunculus known as “Snooki” got herself a book deal.

Books, films and television shows all aim to do similar things, and chief amongst all those things is tell the audience a story. They tell different stories or, more accurately, tell stories differently.

But that’s a good thing.

And it’s a thing from which we novel-monkeys can learn.

Screenwriting has its own tips and tricks of the format, and that’s something novelists can look and learn from if one were to choose, and that’s what I’m talking about today. What, then, can you learn?

The Purity Of Narrative Movement

A screenplay reduces the storytelling form to a very simple form, and that form is this: characters act and talk and in doing so, move the story forward. It’s almost like playing with action figures or dolls when you were a kid: Tomax and Xamot siege the Ewok Village and save Strawberry Shortcake who had been captured by Wasteland Barbie. (Damn, did I just give away the plot to my next book? Sonofabitch.)

Characters talk. Characters act. The narrative steps forward.

What lives on the page — and by proxy, what lives on the screen — is all the audience gets. The internal life of the narrative is only given if it’s made external; glimpses of it are assumed, but never confirmed.

That means the screenplay is the ultimate version of show, don’t tell. Because that’s all it can do.

Now, should you do this with your novel? Probably not, no. A novel has its own host of unholy powers, and one of those powers is the ability to wander off the beaten path and move into dark spaces. The novelist can rip away the story’s facade and show the internal workings in ways the screenwriter cannot.

That said, we’ve all read novels that get boggy, right? That feel like you’re stomping through clayey mud? That make us shake the book like a baby and cry, “I need something to happen, godsdamnit.”

Here novelists can turn to the narrative purity of the script: while you should never be afraid to move toward the internal, you also should master the external, because a lot of subtext can live there. Master the movement of, “Character does shit, character talks about shit, and then the story jogs-runs-leaps-karatekicks-forward.” A script must always be moving forward, and so too must your novel.

The Economy Of The Page

A screenplay has very little real estate with which to work. You’ve got your ~110 pages, and the formatting on those pages is precise. Can’t cram a lot in there. The best scripts out there have an almost poetic grace (and some of the worst offer pages that look like brick shithouses, just blocks and blocks of text). Mastering the screenplay is in part mastering the format, which is to say, understanding the economy of the page.

Novelists don’t always learn this from the get-go. Hell, you find yourself as an English Lit major and one of the novels you read is James Joyce’s Ulysses: a book so big and uneconomical Luke Skywalker could’ve used it to choke the fucking Rancor Monster. It’s a beautiful, strange book, no doubt there, and novelists can learn a lot by reading Joyce. The economy of the page is not one of those things.

A script must rely on short sharp shocks. Description for an entire scene comprises little more than a short paragraph. Characters are created and built in hard, brief strokes: in a single scene, page, or line of dialogue you must perform double- or triple-duty to get those characters established neatly in the minds of the audience. Dialogue, too, cannot go on for pages and pages — you ever try to write dialogue in a screenwriting template? It’s like watching gremlins multiply. Like watching a garter snake breeding ball. Like watching Jabba the Hutt eat those little froggy critters. Okay, I don’t know what that means, I just know I can’t stop thinking about Return of the Jedi all of the sudden. You know how David Lynch was once on the docket to direct that movie? Imagine if James Joyce had written Return of the Jedi. Man, that’s weird. That hurts my brain. I instantly come up with:

“The ineluctable modality of the Force: at least that if no more, thought through my mind. Signatures of all droids I am here to scan, lightsaber and mynock, the vaporators of moistness, that rusty robot. Two-suns, starfields, sand: villainous hives.”

Man, I should rewrite all the Star Wars movies in the mode of James Joyce.

What the hell was I talking about?

Ah. Right. On the script page, dialogue builds bulk fast, and in scriptwriting, it helps to stick the landing and nail your page count. Only way to do that is to keep control of your descriptions and dialogue. But eventually, you learn to use this to your advantage: you can start using spare but elegant language and storytelling tricks to pack more oomph into every page. Novelists, take note. Monitor then the economy of your own pages. A page shouldn’t exist unless it deserves to be there, unless it pulls its weight, unless it does more than one thing. Don’t bloat. Don’t go long just to go long. Concentrate the story. Include only those things that you feel must must must be included.

ZZZzzZZzz… Bo-ring

Think about all the ways you could take a film and drag it through the mire to make it as boring as possible. What would you do? “Not much happens for 30 minutes.” “Two characters stand and talk to each other.” “Nobody says anything.” “Long internal monologues.” “No nudity or flamethrowers or nude flamethrowering.” Ta-da, you’ve just found some of the same stuff that threatens to make your novel boring. Novels don’t get a pass. Why some novelists feel a novel should be dull as a potato to read, offering as much fun or entertainment as a brick to the tits and/or testicles, is beyond me.

Find the boring parts, and do the same thing the film editor would do: chop ’em out, leave ’em on the floor.

Cede Your Authority

A screenwriter only has so much power. You’re writing a blueprint. A highly-detailed and terribly valuable blueprint, but a blueprint just the same. So many others will bring effort to the table in terms of telling the story, other writers, actors, the director, the cinematographer. A film or show is a team effort, and this makes editing a screenplay oddly easier, at least for me. Even though you know the script still has to rock out with its [insert euphemism for male genitals here that just so happens to rhyme with “rock”] out, you still know that it’s a group effort. You’ve less ego baked into these brownies.

With your novel, relinquish some mental authority and recognize that the manuscript still remains a team effort (though arguably one where you remain the quarterback, pitcher, or some other arbitrary controller of team sports). You’ve got agents, editors, beta readers. Other hands will mold this clay. And that’s freeing. With some of your ego extracted from the equation, you may find it easier to attack future drafts.

Structure Matters

Scripts are written with structure in mind. Even if you’re not a fan of the three-act structure (and I’m amazed at how often I read screenwriters trotting out the same tired “fuck you” to the three-act structure), screenplays are still hammered out according to structural beats: beats into scenes, scenes into sequences, sequences into acts. You have very clear breakdowns of when one scene ends and another begins. You simply cannot avoid it.

In novels, you can avoid structure all day long, ceding to structure only when it’s complete and recognizing that some skeleton has crawled his way into the skin of the thing to help it stand up.

Except, don’t. Go the other way. Embrace it, if only for a time. Think in the same structural sense that you would with a script: imagine the beats, build beats into scenes, and add scenes into sequences. Consider act breaks and turning points. Think about catalysts for action, about inciting incidents and dramatic shifts. Don’t resist them. Open yourself to them. Bend over the barrel and spread the ol’ flapjacks and allow structure to enter your body. (Wow, that got weird. Did I just refer to buttocks as “flapjacks?” Eeesh. ) I was just saying to my writing partner the other day that the mark of a storyteller isn’t in how he resists these beats or these structures but how he owns them, how he turns them to his will.

Nobody ever looks at a flash fiction challenge and barks about how it’s “too strict” or about how the structure of the challenge is “stifling.” Yet that’s what you often hear in regards to narrative structure. I’ve said it before and here I’ll say it again: if your creativity is defeated by structure, you weren’t that goddamned creative to begin with. *poop noise*

View it as a challenge, and accept it.

Own structure the way the best screenwriters do.

An Imperfect Fit

Again, novels are not screenplays and screenplays are not novels (this is a tip from my forthcoming book, “Duh, No Shit, And Fuck You, Sherlock: Writing Advice Tips From Herr Doktor Obvious, Esq.”). You shouldn’t try to make one be the other; they are their own creatures and deserve to abide by their own crazy rules and break those crazy rules in their own unique ways.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn some lessons.

So, noodle it. What am I missing?

Further, what can screenwriters learn from novelist? (First answer there: “A novel has to be a compelling read and so too does your script. Just because it’s a blueprint doesn’t mean it shouldn’t leap off the page.”)

What else?

Your turn to school me, Internuts.

April 29, 2011 / 59 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “A Good Dog”

I’ll warn you in advance that the post below is going to get all sappy and mushy and sad and for all I know it’s going to be hard to read because three hours ago we took my dog, who I’ve had for all 13 of his goofy insane years, to be put to sleep. Still, it’s Friday, and I think that storytelling offers us great power in terms of… well, if not understanding emotion, then at least sorting through it and getting a picture of how big it is and what it means. I hesitate to call writing “therapy” because, it certainly doesn’t ever need to be, but it can be, it can be a place where you take what’s going on in your head and your heart and dump it all out like a big shoebox of LEGO bricks. Then you build. And dismantle. And build some more.

So, if you want to read all the stuff below, go for it. If you’re here only for the flash challenge, then the challenge is this: I want you to write about a good dog. It can be any kind of story you want, but a good dog should be present somewhere in the tale (“tail”). Adhere to those three words (“a good dog”) and you’re good to go. A thousand words, if you please. One week to do it (by Friday, May 6th).

Think of this as a many-author tribute to my dog, your dog, and dogs in general.

EDIT: If you want a different (and lighter) flash fiction challenge, I’m hosting a challenge over at Flash Fiction Friday blog featuring the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, so click over and check that out. And, Dan O’Shea is running a Tornado Relief Challenge (“Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”). Onto the rest of the post.

…

Last night, my wife dreamed we had to take Yaga to the vet. A prescient vision, it seems.

I woke up on this bright-but-rainy morning and found our Belgian shepherd sleeping in my office, which was… odd, because normally he sleeps in the hall right by our door. Even though his hips were wobbly as a stack of teacups, every night he’d still struggle his way up the steps and sleep by our door while we dreamed. We tried to block him from doing this, but those with shepherd dogs know you don’t separate the shepherd from his flock. He’d bark all night. He’d manage to knock over baby gates that even I couldn’t knock down easily. He’d always find a way. But, again, he’d sleep by the door. Never once in my office.

So, I thought that was strange, but… hey, he’s old, and dogs are weird.

But then I smelled something. Smelled like he’d gone to the bathroom which wasn’t unusual in these last weeks — he’s had a few messes, for which we procured the mightiest cleaning tool in our arsenal, the SpotBot (which itself looks like a small terrier-vacuum hybrid). I went downstairs and didn’t see anything. I came back up, still smelled it.

His tail was wagging, but he wasn’t getting up.

Then I saw. He’d gone to the bathroom where he lay. (Take of this what you will, but we’d put a few tax-related documents on the floor by the closet to be filed, and he went to the bathroom all over the tax papers. I guess he did what we all feel like doing once in a while.) I tried to get him to stand but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. His breathing was real shallow and he wasn’t even lifting his head much. The old boy had cancer and hip dysplasia, so I already knew his days were subject to grim accounting, and at that moment I realized that today was it for him.

It took the air right out of me, that realization. You think, “Oh, god, this is it, isn’t it? This is the day I say goodbye to a constant companion, a bearer of unconditional love, a buddy, a family member, a good dog.”

So we started calling around. Vet didn’t open for a few hours but we had some emergency numbers and thought, okay, we’ve got farms around so clearly they can send vets out to euthanize at the house. You get a horse or a bull who gets sick you don’t load him up into your pickup — the vet comes to you. But no, nobody would come out. Then you think, and it’s a horrible thought but, “Maybe I can do it.” Right? That’s how we did it on the farm. Dog got sick, Dad shot the dog. And I’m thinking, okay, I can’t shoot my own dog. I don’t have the stones for that. But crazy shit goes through your head. “Okay, I can… suffocate him with my hands. No. A bag? Maybe if I scare him, he’ll just… die. Or what if I convince him? Like, I’ll whisper in his ear, I’ll coax him to sleep, and he’ll just drift off like an angel leaning back on a comfy cloud.”

Like I said, crazy thoughts.

We knew what we had to do and where we had to go, and the big thing was getting him downstairs. He’d lost a good bit of weight but he was still 70+ pounds, and I knew that me carrying him downstairs would either a) fuck up my back or b) suffocate him since it was hard for him to draw breath already. And I sure didn’t want to drop him down the steps. The wife — who has so far kept me sane today — had a great idea which was, shower curtains. We slid two shower curtains underneath him, forming a kind of gurney for him. We pinched the ends closed and were able to get him downstairs.

He was… in and out of his oblivious kind of bliss, sometimes panting with bright-eyes and a floppy tongue, other times just sort of laying there with fast shallow breaths. Before we brought him down the wife had the idea to give him some ice, and we did that, which seemed to make him happy. He didn’t want any treats, though, refusing them. Still wouldn’t get up. Still couldn’t lift his head.

And then came this moment: his eyes rolled back in his head, and he seized up. Legs curling in. And he hitched a few times and I yelled for Michelle and I thought, okay, here it is. He’s dying. He’s dying right in front of our eyes and all we can do is be with him. And it called back to when I saw my father die because that’s how it happened there, too — he was sitting down and my uncle called for me and we were on either side of him and he just… died. And a part of me thought, “Shit, this is horrible to see and I don’t want him to suffer but this is good that it’s happening with us here and at home and…”

Then his eyes shot open, he gagged, and puked.

And then his body unclenched and his tail thumped a few times — like, “Whew, just had to do that, sorry!” — and he was slightly refreshed.

Still couldn’t get him to stand, but he was lifting his head more. And again the wife with the good idea, who sent me to the fridge to get last night’s leftover grilled chicken. He hadn’t been eating treats, but fuck, it’s grilled chicken, right? Not some bullshit Snausage made from, I dunno, polyurethane and squirrel bones. So I fed him a piece of chicken and he took it happily. Went and got more chicken, washed it, brought it to him. Again, he ate it all, relishing every bite.

It’s at this point we decided to try to get the littler dog, our chihuahua-terrier mix to, I dunno, give a shit. She has all the empathy of a tin bucket sometimes, or maybe she just didn’t know what’s going on — but those sad and precious stories of one dog lamenting another’s loss did not manifest itself so easily on this day. I had to coax her over with chicken so she’d kind of hang out near Yaga, but I don’t know that the situation really presented itself.

Then, the rain stopped and the morning cleared. The sky brightened with the sun so we moved the old dog outside and lay him on the front walkway and sat there for a while, petting him, giving him ice. Trying to shoo the ants away who apparently thought, “He’s old and slow, we can eat him!” Stupid creatures, ants.

Half-past the hour came and it was time to go. We put him in the car and he seemed happy, like, actually happy. I was pleased to have cultivated in him a love of riding in cars and even a love of going to the vet. (You know how most dogs hate getting on that metal scale? He thought it was some kind of ride.) (I’ll also note here I keep writing about him in the present tense and it’s killing me that I have to keep correcting myself and write about him in the past tense, I don’t even know why I’m writing about this right now except I just… I dunno, want to talk about it, want to write about it, is that fucked up? It’s a good thing you can’t see me right now, I look like a goddamn glazed donut.) Anyway. Him going on that last ride in the car was therefore not a fearful trip. Nor did he see the vet as anything but a beneficent place where occasionally a nice man would stick a cold thermometer up his pooper.

On the way over, 30 seconds into the drive the sun beat a hasty retreat and a few fat rain drops started to fall. Then, another two minutes into the trip, the heavens opened. It was apocalyptic, I haven’t driven in rain like that in years. Couldn’t see. Sounded like we were being hit by ball bearings. (We did not know this at the time, but we were under Tornado Warnings, which is very odd for this area. In our first house the wife and I rented, a tornado came along and sideswept our landlord’s house right next door, and twisted up a bunch of trees out back like corkscrews.) More crazy thoughts went through my head: for one, you think, okay, this is a sign, I’m not supposed to do this. I should just turn around and head home and when I open the door he’ll leap out of the car, reinvigorated as a young lamb, and all will be well. But then you think, okay, that’s nuts, but what’s totally not nuts is just how horribly perfect the weather is syncing up with the day, which further leads you to believe, okay, I’m actually the protagonist in this movie and everybody else is a weird simulacrum and this solipsistic imagining must be true because of how elegantly it all dovetails.

Whatever.

We get there and it’s just — you know, it’s morose city, we’re like, the mood-killers. Everybody in the vet’s office knows why you’re there. Everything collapses in these little awkward moments: an old couple at the “you need to pay us” counter won’t look you in the eye, a young woman brings in her big dog and she tries to keep him from you like maybe the dog might catch some kind of communicable sadness, the woman behind the counter has a piss-poor bedside manner but so help me god she’s trying but she can’t help but ask if we want to go ahead and pay for this now, upfront, before we’re reduced to a blubbering jelly-like mess (“And do you want a group cremation or a private cremation?”), and you see the one attendant sneak over and steal away a box of tissues and take it into a room and you think, “Shit, I know what’s going to happen in that room, don’t I? I know who those tissues are for, too.”

The vet techs came out and helped get Yaga onto a gurney. He still seemed happy. Confused, but happy. A little brighter. Still wasn’t getting up. The one vet tech, a guy, kept calling Yaga “honey” and “sweetie,” and I knew right then what was happening — our boy dog was once more mistaken for a girl. Even at the end, a beautiful lady, was he. They wheeled him in.

Took him into the room where the tissues already waited. They lowered him down on a pile of colorful Christmassy blankets. Covered half of him with a sheet and told him we had as much time as we wanted. We petted him for a while. I’d brought ice from the car, so we gave him some more of that. The doc came in, told us what to expect — he’s a very awkward, curt vet, and you can tell he really wants to be sympathetic but that it doesn’t come precisely natural to him, but he’s still as nice as he can muster. He explained that they were going to give Yaga an overdose of anesthesia, and that when he died we could expect him to spasm even after death. Then he said something that set off klaxons in my head: “Oh, he’s not breathing as heavily as I would’ve figured,” and then suddenly I’m like, holy crap, let’s hit the brakes, maybe the dog’s okay? I even asked, well, maybe it’s just his hip? But the doc pointed out that the dog has lung cancer, and it’s bad, and hip or no hip this ride only goes in one direction — you can’t stop it, you can only slow it, and at this point, so you really want to slow it just to engage deeper suffering? Still, you think, “Jesus, this dog’s been through so much, through elk attacks and Lyme disease and a whole belly full of rat poison and maybe he can escape death one more time, maybe he’s some kind of immortal beast, some pup from Cerberus’ litter,” but that’s insane, it’s not true, that while legendary he’s not immortal, and that to stall this or halt this is for me more than it’s for him and do I really want this suffering to tumble endlessly forward?

I don’t. I didn’t. So the vet shaved a spot on Yaga’s leg, then whipped out a comically large (and comically bright blue) syringe and put it in Yaga’s leg. And he went fast. Very fast. Before the syringe was a quarter gone the vet whispered, surprised, “He’s already gone.” And he was. No spasms, no shaking, just a peaceful drift, like an angel leaning back on a comfy cloud.

And that’s that. He’s gone. Immortal not in body but in perhaps the tales we will tell of him. He was a good dog. Sweet as sugar and dumb as a box of driveway gravel. Goofy enough to be happy until the end. We should all be so lucky, I guess. I miss him terribly. The house feels emptier without him. I’m sad he’ll never meet my son because he would’ve been great with kids.