So, people do their “what I learned writing MAH BOOK” guest posts here and so I thought, well, hell, why shouldn’t I do one, too? So, here we go, a five things I learned post, this time about what I learned writing that big-ass apocalyptic book, Wanderers.

Let us begin.

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing (And That’s Maybe A Good Thing?)

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: I do not know how to write a book. By which I mean, I do not have a reliable way to write a book. I thought I did. We begin as authors, I think, to take in and accept certain truisms — if not about Writing In General, than about Our Individual Processes. We just say, “Well, this is how we do this. I outline the book, I think up some character arcs, I pray to the Dark Goat Slorgath, I pour a phial of demon saliva in a cursed inkwell, and then I write the book, two thousand words a day until it is done.”

This book just didn’t conform.

It was big and wiggly.

(That’s also the name of my Morning Zoo radio show. Big and Wiggly 97.5! BIG AND WIGGLY ON YOUR FM DIAL. Wait. Are there still Morning Zoo shows? Is there still an FM dial?!)

This book just didn’t conform to the way I thought I did things. The words came steadily, but in great swings of word count amounts, and sometimes the words came in huge fits and starts. I didn’t even outline it the same way: it was more I wrote a series of chapters and then kinda filled in the blanks. And there came a point where I was coming up on deadline and… wasn’t anywhere near finished. When that happened I snapped into freelance mode and was like, “Boom, I can hit deadline, just let me do a time jump and we’ll get to the third act and I can make it work with some killer thriller pacing and–” And blessedly, my glorious editor, Tricia Narwani, told me not to do any of that. She just said to write the book. Let it be long, we can always edit it down later. Forget the deadline: just get the best book I could out of it. And I think that’s what happened. I think this is my best work, and it was done by doing almost everything… differently.

I don’t mean to suggest we’re not, in a way, experts at what we do. And I think we do need to sometimes trust the process. But sometimes we need to go beyond that, outside that, and trust ourselves more than the process. The process is not the book, and the book is not the process.

Size Doesn’t Matter, And Neither Does Time

It’s a big book. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s 800 pages, ~280,000 words. And surprisingly, we didn’t cut much out of it. Maybe 5k, and mostly as line edits. And it took four years for the idea to marinate, six months to write, six months to edit, a year to shelves.

Books are gonna be what they’re gonna be. They’re gonna be as big as they gotta be and take the time that they need to take. That’s not to say every book should be this — and I don’t want you to think that the book is somehow sentient and will defy editing wisdom in order to stay a THICC, LORGE BOOKSON. And real talk: in most cases, if you’re a debut author, you’re not gonna have an easy time securing an agent with a 400-billion-page book. But sometimes, you just know what a book is, and what it has to be, and this book had to be what it is. Which is to say, a bonafide bison bludgeoner that took a long time to get here.

The First Steps Direct The Journey

In the first round of edits, there was one big problem with the book — one of the main characters, Benji Ray, a CDC EIS investigator, felt off. He was too together, too competent. He was too good and there wasn’t much struggle in the story beyond external circumstances. He felt more a mouthpiece than anything without much story to call his own. But characters need stories of their own; they must have agency and problems unique to them and separate from (if eventually intertwining with) the Bigger Story. Benji felt hollow, sadly.

Turns out, stuff like that nearly always cascades from the very beginning: stories can suffer from step on a butterfly here, make a hurricane there problems, and turns out, if you point the story in the wrong direction, even subtly so, from the get-go, you end up way off the fucking mark.

Took some changes at the beginning to his story to lock his whole narrative in, and braid it with the rest. And that change — which was adding the “disgraced” part to his role as “scientist” — lent not only him clarity, but also clarity to other aspects of the plot, complicating the entire moral dimension of the thing. This is a riff on the old saying that third act problems are really first act problems, and it’s true, to a point: sometimes you just have to fix the beginning to fix the ending.

A Good Editor Is Everything

Apropos to a number of these things I learned is a thing that I did not learn so much as was reminded of consistently through this process: a good editor is gold. Tricia is an astonishing editor. Her edit letters nail that perfect balance between being kind and brutal, and they aren’t afraid to really get into what the book is doing and what it’s saying. It means so much to have someone there who you trust with the story as much as, if not more than, yourself. Especially in those curious, vulnerable times where you’re just not sure what to do or where to go.

Trust me when I tell you: you won’t always have great editors. But when you do — it’s revelatory.

Light and Dark

In a book about the end of the world, you run a real risk of just being too damn dark. A ceaseless, grimdark parade. THINGS ARE BAD. DID YOU KNOW THEY’RE BAD? BAD BAD BAD BAD.

But I just can’t have that. I can’t have that first because I don’t want you to have to endure that kind of book, and also, I don’t wanna write that kind of book. Obviously, it’s not going to be a wacky fun-fest, writing the End Times, but my goal is to see that darkness and crank up some serious candlepower to blast a hole through it. And that means writing the darkness away with hope and heart and even humor. A campfire to push back the night.

The horror I like to write isn’t the kind where the horror wins. I think evil can be beaten — if only temporarily, and only after a vicious, sometimes Pyrrhic victory. I just can’t give into nihilism. Not now. Not with all that’s going on — both in the book, and off the page.

Part of the thing with this book is, it’s full of anxieties, right? My anxieties, but I’m betting, yours too. (I mean, have you read the news?) But I don’t want those anxieties just to be there on the page, running rampant, only there to scare your pucker shut. I want to treat it like a summoning circle: I’m summoning the demon and trapping it into the circle —

Because there, we can kill it.

Or at least wrestle it. Learn from it. Maybe even calm it down a little.

So, for me there’s value in bringing the darkness in —

And then pinning it to the floor with a spear of light.

You can’t beat all the darkness.

But you can beat back a little of it. And I hope Wanderers manages to do exactly that.

Hope you check it out and enjoy.

Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon

eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

And you can add it on Goodreads.

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Since I’m kinda on a bit of a schedule here (or in the UK, a SHED-YOU-ULL), I’ll make this brief with some quick news dips and dots, plus some photos, and then I’m outtie like belly button. Do the kids say that? The kids don’t say that? Well, shit.

News bits, beginning now:

• I did an interview on Tim Clare’s Death of a Thousand Cuts podcast, and it was a really great time and a fun interview and hopefully you’ll like it. *straps you down to a chair, stapleguns headphones to your ears* Oh how nice that you’ve chosen to listen.

• Speaking of the UK, Waterstones is offering signed copies of Wanderers.

• And yes you can order signed copies in the US, too, from various places — including my local stores, Doylestown Bookshop and Let’s Play Books.

• And holy craaaap the book is out in two weeks?! How did that happen? Here I remind you, poke poke poke, of the pre-order Shepherd pin you can nab…

• Plus, Wanderers is listed as a top ten book for July from LibraryReads…

• PLUS, best summer reading lists from Amazon, Bookish, Bookbub…

• FINALLY, another starred review from BookPage! “It’s not easy to write the end of the world. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it.” (That brings the total to four starred reviews! Maybe this book doesn’t suck?)

• I remind you that I’ll be in NYC tonight at the KGB Bar at 7pm doing a reading — plus DFWCon this weekend! Updated appearances listed right here.

All right, news-blobs dropped.

Onward to photography:

A long time ago, I read an interview from David Foster Wallace, and in it he talked about how writers are told to write what they know and what that means. He’d been taking a little bit of flak, apparently, for his reliance on modern/pop culture and its ephemera in his opus novel, Infinite Jest. Long story short, but Wallace said that his hyper-referential writing style was a product of his experiences. Like most of us, Wallace grew up on TV and video games and paperback novels. That’s the tapestry of our lives, just like the tapestry of Emerson’s life, or Thoreau’s life, was the naturalistic world. Atari and Saturday matinees, Wallace said, were his Walden Pond, and his writing couldn’t be anything other than a reflection of his experiences.

The thing is, we’re living in a weird time, creatively. Our world isn’t Emerson’s world; we’re smothered in information and art—through social media, through nonstop streaming options, wildly accessible entertainment, so on and so forth. In a sense, we’re influenced by influence. Let me give you an example:

I’ve written two novels—Black Star Renegades and its sequel, We Are Mayhem—and I like to sometimes joke that they’re just Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. Now, like any joke, there’s some truth to this: The story is very, very much inspired by Star Wars. I’m a Star Wars fanatic. Thinking in Wallace’s terms, if you look at the tapestry of my life, it’s Star Wars, Stephen King, John Carpenter, and a whole bunch of comic books. And I was lucky to grow up in a house that supplied me with all these things, and from a very young age. My parents were not only supportive of my weird interests, but they were also liberal about my entertainment intake. I watched Halloween when I was five years old; I saw A New Hope when I was four. And my mom, bless her, used what little extra money she had to get me comic books and paperback novels from garage sales whenever she could. I was never short on supply when it came to absorbing pop culture, and that absorption was (and still is) a big part of my life.

Getting back to Black Star Renegades, there’s no way I could deny that it wasn’t influenced by Star Wars (Lucasfilm, in fact, has hired me since, and I’m currently writing many of the all-ages Star Wars Adventures comic stories). I embrace that fact, fully—Black Star Renegades wouldn’t exist without Star Wars. But, there’s two things to say about this.

First, like I said before, we’re influenced by influence. Yes, you can jab at me for being so apparent with my influences, but Star Wars is also a sum of its influences. From classic sci-fi pulps to Kurosawa movies to silent films and a whole bunch of other stuff in-between, George Lucas’s space opera opus was the sum of many parts—all the things that influenced him. And all those things can then be traced back to various influences as well. This isn’t a groundbreaking revelation, of course; what’s important, though, is allowing your creative self to be okay carrying forth the DNA of other works. I’ve seen so many stories from talented writers wither on the vine because they were concerned with how much their work echoed things that have already been made. Solomon said there’s nothing new under the sun, and in my opinion that’s true (to a degree—if you dropped Solomon into our world, I’m sure he’d say “Holy shit! Look at all these new things under the sun!”). It’s so remarkably rare—like one in a million—to create something that’s nothing like anything else. We know it when we see it, and these rare instances are cherished, as they should be. And while striving for that is a noble pursuit, it’s also—and I’ve seen this with my own two eyes—the path to creative madness.

Of course, though, we can’t just go ripping off the things we love. That’s why I’m comfortable saying Black Star Renegades is a Star Wars knock-off—I know, in reality, it’s not. Here’s where the important trick comes in, a trick I’ve learned writing not only these two novels, but many, many licensed comic books.

So, as a comic book writer, I’m oftentimes asked to write stories for existing characters. I’ve written Superman, The Shadow, Cassie Hack, Adam West Batman, Nightwing, and more. And the thing I’ve learned in telling these stories successfully is this: You have to embrace the stories and their traditions for what they are. Nightwing is a sexy, fun version of Batman. That’s it. Therefore, when writing a Nightwing story, it wouldn’t really work to make him dark and tortured like Bruce Wayne—that’s not who he is. The job in writing for Nightwing is to write a story about a young, sexy dude who fights crime. But that’s only part of the puzzle. The other part, the most important part, is finding a way to embrace the core thing and make it your own. That’s the key. At the end of the day, the Nightwing story has to be a story that only I can tell—it’s my voice, it’s my point of view that the story is filtered through. Yes, I am embrace Nightwing completely—but I balance that with filtering everything he is through my own POV.

The thing is, the same goes for original creations. It’s the same balance of embracing your influences while maintaining your own voice. If you want to tell an epic fantasy but feel like it’s too much like Robert Jordan, remember that it’s you telling the story in your unique way. And the more you write, and the more your story takes shape, I’m confident that it’ll sounds less and less like Wheel of Time and more like your own thing. The same thing exists in Black Star Renegades. The Star Wars DNA is all over that book, but so is my DNA. There’s a lot of love for the galaxy far, far away in those pages, but there’s also a deconstruction of the messiah complex, and that dominant aspect of the book is all me. That’s my voice coming through, and it’s what makes that story what it is, and not just a Star Wars rip-off.

Now, this isn’t an endorsement of plagiarism—that would be bad. But we live in a world of influence that’s been influenced from other influence. There’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, owning it and making it your own.

Michael Moreci: Website

We Are Mayhem: Print | eBook

Tracy Townsend is back at terribleminds, this time talking about one of the more curious difficulties an author will have — writing the second book in a series! 

* * *

Friends, I come fresh from the battlefield of my second novel, The Fall. Now that it’s out in the world where you, too, can see it, I can tell the tales of how it was wrought. I would be a very poor guide, indeed, if I did not want you to learn from my mistakes.

So you’ve decided to hunt down a sequel to your first book! Brave, industrious soul. Perhaps you thought this journey would be just like the last one? A long, winding road, full of switchbacks and mysterious, distracting dream-peddlers, maybe a treasure hoard at the end, guarded by some hulking reptilian being?

Oh, poor dear. You did think that.

Well.

Here. Come closer. In the words of an old friend of mine, “It’s not safe to go alone. Take this.”

Take some notes about your last book, because whatever map you think you’re going to use to get to the end of this one, its legend and key are based off that first, big brother book. You’ll forget how far apart the oceans are, or which roads run north, or even whether the hedges that grew up against the side of the cathedral were boxwoods or junipers. I know I did. (Thank god for copy editors. Thank god for fifty thousand words of story bible. Never throw away anything, my friends. The devil truly is in the details.)

Take a plugin and install it on your web browsers. Go ahead. Do it. Tell it you get some wickedly paltry allotment of minutes to dip out of your writing and into the digital sandbox beyond. Tell it all your worst habit sites and draw crosses over them in blood. (If you are like me, this will also significantly decrease the influx of impulse-purchased graphic tees in your home.)

Take some friends – the sort you can text or email at any hour of the night, howling unspeakable oaths, knowing they will stroke your fur flat until the full-moon madness of I-can’t-do-this passes. (My friends are too many to list. If I chant their names together, they rise up like a great writing Patronus and remind me that chocolate consumption alone does not write books, however much I want it to.)

Take a digital backup. And a hard drive backup. And an emailed copy of your work. Take a pile of parchment penned a nearsighted monk, but please, take every chance to duplicate your work. (This comes from someone who did – or thought she did – and still had to rewrite the last twenty thousand words of The Fall in a single weekend when her backup done backed out on her. Save. Every. Thing. Save it everywhere.)

Take family. Take the people who loved you before you ever wrote a single word of fiction, and who will love if you never do it again. Let them remind you that you’re more than your output. (My son, for example, has helpfully observed that my real superpower is “making breakfast.” All shall love me and have high blood sugar.)

Take a willingness to tear up the map. Your sense of what you needed to write to bridge two books into an ongoing story will change, as surely as a flooded river might wash out a road or submerge a bridge. There are other ways to get there. Some of them might even tell better stories. (Ask me about the time an incidental news article on contract law changed a key plot point, and how I would build toward it. “Debt management and property law” wasn’t on the map when I started, but. . . *shrug*)

Take the courage to break up the band. You haven’t really been traveling alone, even before you came to this list. You had your characters, good people or villains or rapscallions though they may be. You’ve learned to live with them. You might even love them. But new journeys call for  new maps and new roads. There may not be space for everyone to walk abreast anymore. Be ready to break up the party and send them off on their own quests.

This one will hurt.

Take a deep breath.

Maybe they’ll come together again. Maybe not. Maybe you’ll need another book to show them the way home together.

Bio:

Tracy Townsend is the author of The Nine and The Fall (books 1 and 2 in the Thieves of Fate series), a monthly columnist for the feminist sf magazine Luna Station Quarterly, and an essayist for Uncanny Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in writing and rhetoric from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from DePauw University, a source of regular consternation when proofreading her credentials. She is the former chair of the English department at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an elite public boarding school, where she teaches creative writing and science fiction and fantasy literature. She has been a martial arts instructor, a stage combat and accent coach, and a short-order cook for houses full of tired gamers. Now she lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois with two bumptious hounds, two remarkable children, and one very patient husband. You can find her at Twitter @TracyATownsend, and online at www.tracytownsend.net.

The Fall: Indiebound / Barnes & Noble / Powells / Amazon / Audible