Tag: 25things (page 11 of 12)

As storyteller, you are god. And to be frank, you’re not a particularly nice god — at least, not if you want your story to resonate with readers. A good storyteller is a crass and callous deity who treats the characters under his watchful eye like a series of troubled butt-puppets. From this essential conflict — storyteller versus character — a story is born. (After all, that’s what a plot truly is: a character who strives to get above all the shit the storyteller dumps on his fool head.)

Put differently, as a storyteller it’s your job to be a dick.

It’s your job to fuck endlessly with the characters twisting beneath your thumb.

And here’s 25 ways for you to do just that.

1. Your Proxy: The Antagonist

Gods have avatars, mortal or semi-mortal beings that exist on earth to embody the deity’s agenda. Avatars — be it Krishna, Jesus, or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man — are the quite literal hand of god within the material plane. And so it is that the antagonist is the avatar of the storyteller, at least in terms of fucking with the other characters. A well-written and fully-realized antagonist is your proxy in the storyworld who steps in and is the hand holding the garden trowel that continues to get shoved up the protagonist’s most indelicate orifice. The antagonist stands actively in the way of the protagonist’s deeds and desires.

2. The Mightiest Burden

The audience and the character must know the stakes on the table — “If you don’t win this poker game, your grandmother will lose her beloved pet orangutan, Orange Julius.” But as the storyteller, you can constantly adjust those stakes, turning up the heat, the fumes, the volume until the character’s carrying an Atlas-like burden on his shoulders. The world’s fate suddenly rests in his hands. Character fails at his task and he loses his wife, his family, and all the nuclear missiles in the world will suddenly launch. In unrelated news: Orange Julius is the best name for an orangutan ever. Go ahead. Prove me wrong. Show your work.

3. Never Tell Me The Odds

Impossible odds are a powerful way to fuck with a character. “It’s you versus that whole army of sentient spam-bots, dude. And they’ve got your girlfriend.” It certifies that the task at hand is an epic one, and is the dividing line between hero and zero. Confirming heroism means beating those odds. Confirming mortality means falling to them. Note that a character doesn’t always have to beat the odds. Failure is an option.

4. Torn Between Two Horses

Drop the character smack dab between two diametrically opposed choices. A character is torn between a love for her country and a love for her family. She’s torn between her obsessive devotion to science and her religious upbringing. She’s torn between saving the life of Orange Julius the genetically-modified super-orangutan or giving all the world’s children infinite ice cream. Okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, tie your character to two (or more!) difficult choices, and let those horses run like motherfuckers.

5. Life On The QT, The Down-Low, The No-No-Nuh-Uh

Give the character an untenable secret life: a forbidden romance, a taboo, a transgression. Confirm that the revelation of this secret life will destroy her. “As soon as they find out you’re really an android, Mary, I can no longer protect you.” The character must constantly protect her secret life, must constantly work against revelation. And you as storyteller will constantly threaten that, won’t you? Because you’re evil.

6. Deny Success With Speedbumps, Roadblocks, Snarling Tigers

This one? So easy. Whenever your character reaches for That Thing He Wants (a girl, a cookie, world peace, a leprechaun’s little hat), slap his face. Throw a tiger in his path. Chop off his hand. Thwart his every grope for the brass ring. That said, don’t let your story become torture porn. A character needs smaller iterative successes to match the longer, larger failures. “I didn’t get the leprechaun’s hat, but I got one of his little shoes. We can use it to track him.”

7. Go Down The “Do Not Want” Checklist

You frequently hear that a character is defined in part by what he wants, but you will find it useful to take the opposite tack, too. Take your character. Dangle that poor fucker by the ears. Give him a good look-over and pick, mmm, say, five things he does not want. Outcomes he fears. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him. He doesn’t want to die young. He doesn’t want to have his penis stolen by wizards. Now, your job, as Evil Mastermind Storyteller is to constantly put the character in danger of these outcomes coming true.

8. A Victory That Tastes Of Wormwood

An old classic: “We finally got the leprechaun’s hat! Ha ha, now we’ve the little basta — OH MY GOD THE HAT IS FILLED WITH BEES.” Die Hard has exquisite false victories. John McClane succeeds in calling the authorities and ultimately ends up causing a bigger shitstorm as a result.

9. Storyteller As Robber Fly

Everybody has something they love. Identify those things. Then take one away. Or more than one! “Sorry, dear character, in the fire you lost your house, your husband, and your mystical manrikigusari given to you by your immortal sensei.” You have a choice, here, of paths, a divergence of “lost now” and “lost forever.” Lost now intimates the story can continue, and in fact, the reclamation of lost things is a story unto itself. Lost forever moves the conflict inward, where a character must learn to deal with that loss.

10. Tickle Them With A Ticking Clock

If you ever wish to squeeze my heart and cause my blood pressure to build so that my brain is smothered by swollen arteries, give me a ticking clock time limit in a video game. Freaks me out. Do that to your character. Throw him, his goals, his story, between the turning gears of a ticking clock. “You have one week to save Orange Julius from the leprechaun cult. After that? He becomes one of them.”

11. Beat The Donkey Piss Out Of Them

Again we call upon John McClane, who ends up basically sticking a gun to his back in his own blood at the end of Die Hard. A simple way of dicking with your character is to hurt them. Again. And again.

12. Shot Through The Heart, And You’re To Blame

That being said, a broken jaw, shattered foot, or stapled labia has nothing on the betrayal by a loved one. Maybe it comes down to a simple, “I’m leaving you in this, the moment you need me most,” or maybe it’s, “For your own good, I’ve alerted the police. They’re on their way. I’m so sorry. Now hand me the orangutan.” However it shakes out, the treachery of a loved one is a deeply twisting knife.

13. Shattering Lives With Your Story Hammer

Think about all the pieces of the puzzle that add up to a picture of “you.” Now, do the same for your character. Imagine all those identifiers: lover, father, friend, sheriff, amateur chef, jazz fiend, leprechaun hunter. Now, break the puzzle apart. Throw away most of the pieces. Calamity and cataclysm rob the character of his fundamental identifiers. Force him to question who he even is anymore. What impels him forward? How does he rebuild? What is rebuilt?

14. Shatter Their Preconceived Notions

A deeper, more internal version of the last: take what the character thinks she knows — maybe about her family, her government, her childhood — and throw that paradigm out on its buttbone. The character’s comprehension of events and elements has been all wrong. And not in a good way. The character must respond. Must act. Can’t just go on living like everything’s the same.

15. Motherfucking Love Triangle

The love triangle. Never a more hackneyed, overwrought device — but, just the same, a device that works like a charm if invoked with skill and nuance. Becky loves Rodrigo and has since they were young. But Orange Julius vies for her attention and Rodrigo is off fighting the Spam-Bots in the Twitter War of 2015. And Orange Julius is one sexy orangutan. Who does she choose? Swoon! You needn’t stop at three participants. What about a love rhombus, aka the “lovetangle?” Point is, this is a more specific version of forcing the character into a difficult choice. Do it right and the audience will be right there with you, wearing their shirts, TEAM RODRIGO or TEAM SEXY ORANGUTAN. Gang wars in the streets.

16. The Scorpion Sting Of Deception

Lies form slippery ground, and by forcing the character to lie — or hear and believe another’s lies — you put that character on treacherous ground. We know their lies run the risk of exposure, and we know that a lie is rarely alone — they’re like cockroaches, you hear one, you know a whole wall full of them waits behind the paint. Further, if forced to believe another’s lies, the character begins to make decisions based on bad info.

17. Just A Simple Misunderstanding

Speaking of bad info, the “misunderstanding” has been the backbone of the American sitcom for decades, and it’s a trick you can use. “You said Blorp but I thought you said Glurp and now Zorg is coming to dinner! Oh noes! Hilarious awkward calamity ensues!” Note here the power of dramatic irony, which is when the audience knows the score but the character fails to possess such critical information. We know that the character is going to accidentally give her grandmother a set of small-to-large butt-plugs (for proper teaching of sphincter-stretching) when really she thinks it’s a collection of Sandra Bullock DVDs. Ha ha ha! Oh, a funny thing happened on the way to the dildo shop! Comedy gold.

18. When Two Goals Meet In The Rye With Swords Drawn

Put a character at cross-purposes. Two goals cannot easily be achieved together. The character is supposed to have a date night with his wife and save the world from the leprechaun terrorists? Egads! But how?

19. Dear Character, You Have Made A Terrible Decision

The audience feels sympathy and shame for character mistakes because our mind-wires are crossed. We see a character fuck up and some little part of our brain makes us feel like it’s us fucking up — we associate so closely with characters, we unknowingly get all up in their guts and self-identify. So, characters who make mistakes — or even better, willfully choose a bad path — can make your audience squirm in their seats.

20. Love At The End Of A Knife

Putting loved ones in danger is a powerful way to fuck with your characters. “Sorry, Bob — the Latvians have Betty, and if my intel is right, they’ve got a pit full of ravenous honey badgers to convince her to talk.” And of course, saving that loved one is never easy. Danger lurks. Hard choices await. And even after rescue, can Betty ever again trust that her life with Bob won’t be fraught with honey badger peril?

21. A Grim Game Of “I Never”

A character says, “I never want to become my mother,” but then lo and behold… begins exhibiting the traits of her mother. A cop says, “I’ll never let the job get to me,” and, drum roll please, the job starts getting to him. Everybody has negative identifiers — roles they never want to fill, but roles that have a terrible gravity, a grim inevitability to them. That’s a great way to torque a character’s emotions.

22. Poke The Character’s Weakness With A Pointy Stick

We’ve all got pits and pockmarks in our souls, and characters in fiction doubly so. Flaws and frailties ahoy, and it’s your job as storyteller to exploit those weaknesses. A character might have addictions, anger management problems, a physical debilitation, a soft spot for leprechauns — whatever it is, it’s your job to draw the poison to the surface and let it complicate the story. Because you’re a dick. A super-dick, even.

23. And At Night, The Ice Weasels Come

The environment can be a great antagonist. Sub-zero temperatures! Dangerous mountain pass! Wasp tornado! The setting can come alive to bring great misery to good characters.

24. Roosting Chickens With Razor Beaks

I don’t know why chickens “coming home to roost” is a metaphor for the past returning to haunt a character. I mean, chickens are about as non-threatening as they come. What about owls? Or falcons? Hell, forget birds. The saying should be, “Wait till those ninjas come home to roost.” But I digress. Point is, a character may be running from his past. Just as he thinks he’s escaped it, the past catches up with him — a crazy ex-girlfriend, an ex-partner looking for a last big score, a rogue Terminator. Though, I guess in the case of a Terminator, that’s more the future catching up with you. Whatever. Shut up. Don’t judge me.

25. Opportunistic Hate Crimes Against Beloved Characters

In the end what it comes down to is a willingness by you, the storyteller, to throw your characters under countless speeding buses. You may, like a parent with a child, want to be the character’s friend — you like the character, you want them to succeed, and that’s all well and good. But story is born of conflict and conflict is born of characters in trouble. That’s not to say you need to cause them ceaseless miseries — again, we’re not looking for torture porn. But you have to be willing to put the irons to their feet — a character’s success is only keenly felt and roundly celebrated when first he had to go through hell to get there.

Your Turn

How do you like to use and abuse your poor characters? When does such torment go too far?

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Time again for another list of 25 — this time, a long hard look at the many ways to press hot irons to the feet of your writing and make it beg to get better. Flip through them, and then should you find you’ve got your own to add, well, hot dang, you know what the comments section is for. Time to measure up, penmonkeys.

1. Practice Makes Perfect, Little Princess

The easiest and most forthright way to become a better writer is, duh, to write. Write, write, write. Write regularly. Get on a schedule, whether it’s 100, 1000, or 10000 words a day. Writing is a muscle, like your biceps, your heart, or your private parts. Don’t use ’em, you lose ’em. And then they fall to the ground and rot like oxidizing apples and are in turn eaten by hungry gophers. Om nom nom.

2. Time To Eye-Fuck Some Books

The world is home to — *does some quick math on fingers, toes, testicles, nipples, and teeth* — 45 smajillion books. Each of them often containing somewhere north of 50,000 words. And new books hit the atmosphere every day. You do not need to read all of these books. But you should act as if that is indeed your task, carving your way through the world’s cumulative body of the written word one tome at a time. If you want to write, you’re coming in at the ground level of these 45 smajillion books written by 33 fnuhzillion different writers. You are a but a mote in the reader’s eye. You want to compete? Read. Learn what other writers are doing. Absorb it with that schnapps-laden sponge you call a brain.

3. Read Widely, Weirdly, Wisely

Here then is the prison that writers build for themselves: it becomes harder and harder to read purely for pleasure. Reading for pleasure often means sticking to a few genres, with a few authors — “Oh, I like fantasy, so I only read fantasy fiction,” or, “I love the Detective Cashew Pepper series by K. J. Staplebottom, and I’ve read up to #47 in the series.” That privilege has been revoked. You now must read widely, weirdly, wisely. Read everything. Move outside your desired library. Read obscure British literature. Read poetry. Read non-fiction. Read science-fiction even though you hate science-fiction. If you want to do what everybody else is doing, fine, read only in your pre-existing sphere of influences. But this is about improving your work, not treading water like a poodle who fell off a boat.

4. Don’t Be A Book Racist

Those who write books are occasionally “book racists.” They pump their fists and espouse Book Power while denigrating other forms of the written word. “TV will rot your brain,” they might say. As if the Snooki book will somehow do laps around an episode of THE WIRE. Books are not the only form of the written word. You may not even want to write books. Branch out. Watch television. Watch film. Read scripts. Visit great blogs. Play games. Don’t be a book racist. The storytelling cults can learn much from one another.

5. Whittle Your Mind Into A Straight Razor, ‘Cause It’s Time To Cut A Motherfucker

Another instance where improving your writing skill may come at the slow erosion of your pleasure. Read and watch stories with a deeply critical eye. Not to be a dick, but to instead ask: “What would I do differently? Why would I do it that way? Could I do this better? How would I write it to improve upon it?”

6. Unclog Those Ears, Wax Boy

Listen. Seriously, get your pinky into that ear, unplug it of all the wax and hair and sadness that’s built up in there and just… listen. We read with our ears as much as with your eyes and so it’s critical you know what sounds good as well as what reads well. Sit down at a bar, listen to a conversation. Turn on an audio book or a radio show. Listen to a stand-up comedian deliver jokes and stories. Write it down if you must — see how it lays on the page. It should lay there like Burt Reynolds with a snake draped delicately across his man-parts. In other news, I bet his man-parts have their very own mustache.

7. Go Forth And Do Shit, My Son

Write what you know means what it says but doesn’t say what it means. You know more than you know. Fuck fact. Embrace authenticity. Writers do not gain a sense of authenticity by sitting at the computer all day jizzing out word-babies. Have something to write about. To do that, you must go out. Into the world. Take a trip. Get in a bar fight. Hunt a white whale. Metaphorically. Please don’t kill whales. They are our benevolent alien masters and one day they’re going to get really pissed and call in an airstrike.

8. Learn What Words Mean And Where Punctuation Goes

Storytelling may be an art, but writing is a craft, and that means learning where commas go, how to spell words (like “clitoral” or “sesquicentennial”), and in general how to put together a fucking sentence. Read yourself some Strunk and White. Flip through a dictionary now and again. Scope out some Grammar Girl. Hear a word you don’t know? Go look it up. Improve your technical skills. It is the bedrock of your penmonkeying and without it, you’re just a punk-ass who won’t eat his vegetables.

9. Be Torn Asunder By Editorial Talons

It helps to submit to editors. Real editors. Tough love editors. Because sometimes your writing needs to get on its knees and have wax poured down its back while it receives a right-good nipple-caning from a whip-like willow branch. Your writing improves in the fiery gaze of a hellish editor. The flames will wick away the flopsweat and the amateurish urine stain. The barnacles will char and fall off. Submit to an editor.

10. Be Ripped Apart By Other Writers

Writers are not editors. (File under D for “duh.”) They have different priorities and different perspectives. (And they’re probably also raging drunkaholics. Editors are nice and drink wine. Writers will drink all the cough syrup at CVS if they can get their ink-stained fingers on it.) Whereas an editor will often highlight a problem, a writer will come up with a solution. That doesn’t mean it’s a solution you want, but it’s worth it to have that perspective just the same. Submit your work to other writers. Demand — with a gun in the small of their back if you must — that they not be kind. Mercy will not strengthen you.

11. Self-Flagellate

Pull up your pants, that’s not what I mean. I mean, you must smack your word count with the horse-whip of scrutiny! You must become your own cruelest editor, your jaw clenched tight with the meat of your own manuscript trapped between your teeth. This doesn’t need to be a consistent mode of operation, but once in a while it pays to take a page of your writing and go at it with a blowtorch, a car battery, and a starving honey badger. Cut your words. Make them bleed. Behold the healing power of bloodletting.

12. Throw Down Your Own Crazy-Ass Gauntlet, Then Run Through It Naked

Set challenges for yourself, then tackle them. Write a piece of flash fiction. Write poetry. Attempt to tell a story in a single tweet. Play with the second person perspective. Write a novel in sixty chapters, each only 1000 words. Treat it like a game where the rules are ever-changing.

13. Highway To The Danger Zone

Related, but different: write into your own discomfort. Escape your plexiglass enclosure and run toward peril, not away from it. Confront your many demons with your work and dissect them on the page. Write in genres with which you’re not at all comfortable. Know your limits, then take those limits, wrap them around a hand-grenade, and shove them up the ass of a velociraptor. Because, really, fuck limits. You wanna be a better writer, you’ll write outside your own proscribed margins.

14. Read Your Shit Aloud

I will pin your arms beneath my knees and scream into your face until I pass out from a rage aneurysm (an angeurysm?): read your work aloud. It will make you a better writer. I promise.

15. Embrace The Darwinism Of Writing Advice

Here’s what you do with writing advice (says the guy delivering a nigh-constant stream of dubious penmonkey wisdom): hunt it down, leash it, read it, absorb it, then let it go free once more. Let it compete with your other preconceived notions about writing. Sometimes the new writing advice will win and become a dominant meme inside your wordsmith’s brain. Other times your pre-existing beliefs will hold true — and will grow more tumescent, like a potent word-boner — through just such a test. You must take in writing advice and test it against your own notions. Tell all writing advice: “NOW YOU MUST FIGHT THE BEAR.”

16. Learn New Breakdancing Moves, Fool

You can’t be coming to the street with your stale-ass bullshit. The Worm? Really? The Robot? Classics, admittedly, but you’re going to get smoked by bigger and better b-boys, yo. So too it goes with writing. You must be willing to try new ideas. Not a plotter? Try plotting. Don’t like flashbacks? So write some motherfucking flashbacks. Make them your own. Try new tips, tricks, techniques. You should be able to say, “I wrote my last novel on the back of a dead hooker. With a Sharpie! Don’t worry, I outlined it first on the chest of my UPS man. He’s still upstairs in the tub! Hey, uh, know anyone who needs a couple kidneys?”

17. I Just Blogged A Little In My Mouth

You often hear, “writers should blog to build their platform,” to which I say, pants, poppycock, and pfeffernusse! (I know. Such a foul tongue!) I say: writers should blog because it keeps them writing, because it exposes their writing to the air of community, because it tests your skill in the open plains. Blogging is further a great place to play with language, to put words out there that aren’t headed to market, that aren’t forced to dance for their dinner. It allows you to use words like “poppycock” and “pfeffernusse.” True story.

18. Interface With Other Inkslingers

Sometimes you have to sit down over a pitcher of moonshine (or a hookah burning with the ash of an 1st edition Finnegan’s Wake) and confab the shit out of that palaver with other writers. Meaning: talk it out. Talk about careers. Techniques. Books you love. Writers you hate. Writer conventions and conferences are good places for this. Just remember: the writers are always at the bar. Like moths to a porchlight.

19. Wade Into The Mire Of Your Own Fetid Compositions

Time travel a little. Go back into your past and dredge up some writing from a year ago. From ten years ago. Read it. Learn from it. Also gauge how well you’ve grown. This can be instructive because sometimes you don’t know in what ways you’ve changed — further, you might identify darlings that repeatedly come up in your writing, darlings that deserve naught but the edge of your editorial chainsaw.

20. Do Not Defile The Penmonkey Temple

Your writing is the product of a machine, and that machine is your brain and body. The higher that machine functions, the better the writing that blubbers and spews from it. I’m not saying you need to treat your body like it’s a white tower of physical perfection — but we’re talking basic shit, here. Move around. Eat a good breakfast. Heroin is not a great snacktime treat. Fine, maybe you don’t need to treat your body like it’s a temple. Just don’t treat it like it’s the urinal in a Wendy’s bathroom.

21. Flex Your Other Artistic Muscles

Take photos. Paint a picture. Play the piano. Macrame a dildo cozy. Muscles work in muscle groups — your writing muscle is part of an overall creative cluster. You gotta work ’em all.

22. Find Your Voice By Not Finding Your Voice

Sometimes improving your writing is about letting go of your writing. Some writers become so obsessed with their voice that they forget they already have it — your voice is who you are, your voice is your natural default way of communicating with the written word. To find your voice and improve your wordsmithy, sometimes it pays to just relinquish ego, relinquish control, and stop fucking worrying so much.

23. Embrace Your Inner Moonbat

All writers are a little bit batshit. We’ve all got some combo-pack of Charlie Manson, Renfield and Bender from Futurama running around in our skulls. Embrace it. We’ve all got a head full of ghosts and gods and it behooves us to listen to them, to let them out and play on the page, to use the madness granted to us rather than deny it and walk the safe and sane line.

24. Veer Drunkenly Toward Truth

Be real on the page. Be you. Know your experiences, know your heart and head and whatever squirting fluids pulse between your bile ducts and put it all on the page. Be honest. Be bold. Don’t fuck around. Only by bringing yourself to the work will you find that your writing truly improves. Let it all hang out. By saying what needs to be said, you will see your writing get better, unburdened as it is by pretense and artifice.

25. I Am Jack’s Desire To Be A More Awesomer Writer

An alcoholic (or any kind of -aholic) only gets better when he wants to, and so it is with writing. To be a better writer you must truly want to be. Open yourself. Test your work. Be willing to change.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

* * *

Want more of the booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY — $4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING — $0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Switching gears from the “25 Things” series (which is now neatly compiled in an e-book cheaper than a bottle of water of a hobo handy) and segueing into a more practical “25 Ways” list.

I do not believe in writer’s block. I believe it shares the same intellectual space as the bogeyman in your closet, as the serial killer under the bed. The more you fear it, the more it gains power. To be clear, I do believe that writers can be blocked, that writers can have bad days where the intellectual plumbing feels gummed up by an old diaper filled with soggy fruitcake — I just don’t believe this is unique to the writer. Everybody gets blocked. Everybody gets frustrated. Everybody can have a bad day where the brain-squeezin’s just won’t get squozen.

Even still, while the problem may not be unique, the solutions often are.

And so that’s what we’re tackling today.

Ready? Let’s crotch-kick writer’s block so hard, it tastes the poodle crap we stepped in on the way over.

1. Write Through It

You are confronted by a tangle of jungle vines and Amazonian thicket. The only way forward is forward. You have a machete. What do you do? You chop, motherfucker. Take the blade. Start hacking. Won’t be fun. Won’t be fast. But it’s the only way to gain ground. Your first way through writer’s block is just to write. Clench your jaw. Tighten your sphincter. And write. The key is to write badly if you must. Write without regard for quality or care. Flail about with your word-machete until the tangle is clear.

2. Write Through It, Part II: All Work And No Play

This is the same as the first but bears special mention: sometimes it’s not even about writing words in your story, sometimes it’s about just writing. Writer’s block is often about jarring loose stubborn bullshit — it feels like you’re trying to pull teeth out of a meth-cranked raccoon, but that’s an act of finesse. Put down the pliers, get out the hammer. Start swinging. Write crazy. Write big. Write insane. All work and no play makes writer-monkey a twitchy serial murderer. Write one word over and over. One sentence. One paragraph. Don’t worry about what you’re writing. Turn on the spigot. Let the madness flow.

3. The Blood Must Flow

Science lesson. Blood carries nutrients to your brain. One of those nutrients is imagozen, the vitamin that governs our imagination. I may just be making that up. But there’s some truth there: we do need good blood-flow to the brain to think clearly. Been sitting on your ass a while? All the blood and sweet, sweet imagozen is pooling in your ass-parts. Get up. Move around. Take a walk. Exercise. Do some push-ups. Hell, have sex. You gotta love a guy who will tell you to solve writer’s block by “banging it out.” Right? No, seriously, you have to love me. Take off your pants. Mine are already on the floor. LOVE ME.

4. Stick Energy Drink Up Ass, Tighten Buttocks Until High-Octane Enema Occurs

I am not actually recommending an energy drink enema, just so we’re clear. I will not be held liable for the embarrassing X-rays that make it onto the Internet. What I am saying is, caffeine? It’s your buddy. Caffeine can give your brain a much-needed jolt, as if from those electrified paddles. CLEAR. Bzzt. Start with tea. Tea has a mellower edge than coffee. That doesn’t work, try coffee. Mmm. Coffee. Speaking of — *slurrrp*

5. Booze Booze Booze Booze Booze *vomits*

Caffeine creates tension. But maybe what you need is recoil. Could be that you’re just too ratcheted up to write. No problem. Switch your chemical dance partner. From caffeine to liquor. I’m not saying you should make a habit of writing drunk — in fact, I’m suggesting you write merely tipsy. Whatever amount of alcohol lubricates your social gears may also lubricate your writing gears. Just this once. Just to ooze past this block. To get your mind chatting up the birds at the word-bar.

6. Chatty Cathy, Don’t Clip Those Strings

Talk to yourself. Seriously. Use your mouth. Vocalize words. Have a conversation with yourself. Talk about the story. Talk about what’s clogging the pipes. Yammer away like a crazy person. (For bonus points: do so at a public bus terminal.) If you’re so inclined, record the conversation. Label the file, “MY MANIFESTO.” E-mail to all the newspapers.

7. Reach Out And Touch Somebody

Perhaps a masturbatory chat with yourself isn’t quite enough. Fine. Find another human being (or, if you’re reading this after the year 2018, find a sentient appliance bot, like the Dishflenser 500, or the Toast-Aborter v2.0) and have this chat with them. Talk out your problem. Get their input. Human interaction can go a long way toward jarring loose whatever grubby suppository is stuck up inside your narrative butthole.

8. Converse With Your Imaginary Friend

This one will make you certifiable, so don’t perform it in front of any sensitive family members. But take one of your characters, and talk to them. Out loud or on the page. Do a little role-playing. (And any writer who hasn’t engaged in a little role-playing — either the kind with dice or the kind with a librarian’s outfit and an orangutan mask — is missing out on learning how to let your fiction find its path.)

9. Fuck With The Feng Shui

Get up off your ass. Pack up your writing. Go elsewhere. Across the room. To the kitchen table. To a Starbucks. To a Jersey rest-stop. Hell, wander outside, do some writing there. Sometimes just the change of scenery is enough to free the word-demons from their restrictive cages.

10. Tinker With The Guts

You ever get lost while traveling? “We’re supposed to be at the Aquarium. And yet here we are, atop an ancient hill, trapped inside a giant wicker effigy, surrounded by torch-wielding cultists. I think we took a wrong turn somewhere, honey. Sorry, kids.” Sometimes you have to backtrack. Find out where things went awry. So too with your fiction. Read back. Find where you fucked up. Your reluctance to continue writing may be born of the unconscious discomfort that something in your tale is wrong, like a picture hanging askew on the wall. Go back. Straighten the picture.

11. You Need A Motherfizzucking Map

It can be hard to see the forest for the trees when writing a big project. You feel like you’re wandering in the swamp, walking in weeds as high as your ears. Do you have a map? Probably not. Listen, some writers are pantsers. They love to operate off the narrative grid. You may not be one of them. Go back. Write an outline. Beat out the story the way you’d beat a confession out of a perp. Know where you’ve been and discover where you’re going and then go back and write. Sometimes writer’s block is just you missing the big picture.

12. Throw The Map In A Bag And Burn It

Alternately, maybe you need to pants it a little. Maybe you’re too married to an outline that just isn’t tickling your pink parts anymore. Fine. Fuck it. Throw caution to the wind. It’s time to do something dramatic. Christa Faust has a killer tattoo that cuts to the heart of it: “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” That’s a specific example, but you can blow up the story however you choose. Fire! Death! Betrayal! Cataclysm! Deception! Adultery! Whatever it is, take the map you’ve written, wrap it around a hand grenade, and shove it up the story’s ass. CHOOM. Harvest the sweet story blubber.

13. Put Lipstick On That Monkey

Sometimes, a cosmetic change goes a long way. Me? I’m a font whore. I like to find the right font that fits well with my story. Yes, this is ludicrous. Yes, this is a waste of time. Yes, I do it anyway. And once I take 30 minutes to find the right font, the story’s style locks for me. Try it. Or maybe you mess with margins. Or line spacing. Or you choose to write long-hand. Or carve your story into the back of a hooker corpse. Your call.

14. A-Scripting-We-Will-Go

Depart from your narrative, and turn your fiction into a script. Just for now. Just for the part that’s blocking you. Of course, if you’re already writing a script, then do the reverse — switch it up and move into the more languid and longer form afforded by prose. Again, this “switching of gears” can uncage the story-bears. By the way, “uncage the story-bear” is the metaphor I choose when I proclaim I am about to make love. I walk into the room, I scratch my beard, unmoor my pants, and I announce that in a booming voice. I just wanted to let you in on that part of my life. Thank me later.

15. Dear Missus Frittershire

Familiar with the epistolary? Any story that takes the form of a series of documents is considered epistolary. The novel might manifest as a collection of letters, e-mails, newspaper clippings, diary entries, tweets, the ravings of an impudent spam-bot, etc;. Try this out. I don’t mean for the whole story. But for today, try writing through your writer’s block by embracing this form. “Today, my character will write a blog entry.” “I will use the art of the takeout Chinese menu to tell this story.” Shit, you never know.

16. Wander Down An Alley

Er, not literally. I will not be held responsible if you are captured and eaten by Oscar the Grouch. (You gotta watch that guy. Terrible hungers.) Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Let’s say you’re banging your head on that novel the way a bumblebee bats his head against the window-glass. I want you to take the protagonist, or some aspect of the storyworld, and deviate. Write some flash fiction, maybe a short story, some ancillary, tacked-on, doesn’t-connect-directly-to-the-novel story. Indirect, yes. Direct, no. Take today and write only that. It may open doors for the larger project at hand.

17. Kill The Shiny

As modern souls we are besieged by distractions. Text messages and tweets and spam-bots and porn and TV-on-demand and cyber-LSD and digital cupcakes and only the gods know what else. Escape the gravity of your own distractions. Turn it off. Power it down. Use a program like Mac Freedom or Write Or Die. Close the door on all the piffling, waffling, middling bullshit and make sure it’s just you and the word count.

18. Hear A Buzzer, Start To Drool

Tell yourself, “If I write 1000 words, I get [fill-in-the-blank].” Doesn’t matter what it is. Ice cream? Another cup of coffee? An hour of television? A jet-boat made of pony bones? Like I said: whatever. But establishing a reward gives you motivation to do the one thing that really defeats writer’s block: writing through the anguish and coming out the other side. Covered in blood. And smiling.

19. The Penmonkey Diet

Carbs are great if you’re going to be, y’know, using that energy for something like, say, moving your laggardly slugabed body around. But writers live a sedentary existence, at least while working, and so it behooves you not to hoover a bowl of Corn Pops into your gut. Do that and the carbs will only drag you down, make you mentally foggy. Stick with protein while writing. By the way, bacon is protein. Just saying.

20. Hop Around Like A Coked-Up Jackrabbit

Nobody said you had to write your work in order. I like to write in sequence for the most part just because it keeps me on point — but if I’m at a section I’m just not “feeling” that day, I’ll skip around, write something else. “I want to write a fight scene between two stompy robots,” I’ll say. Hell, you’re the god of the story. You may experience it in whatever order you so choose.

21. Get Visual

I like to take photos. Or fuck around with Photoshop. You think I haven’t been vain enough to do up fake book covers for my as-yet-unpublished books? Oh, I have. Point is, sometimes writer’s block is just about flexing those creative muscles on the right side of your brain. Hell, you fingerpaint poop on your Plexiglass enclosure like I do and that counts. Seriously. Look, I drew a monkey! The flies are his eyes.

22. Down The Rabbit Hole Of Research

Research can be a trigger to get you moving again. No matter what you’re writing about, you will always find more to know, and in this case research qualifies as a “good” distraction as long as you keep a relative focus. You play it right, research can be the key that unlocks whatever mental door got slammed shut.

23. Recognize Why You Don’t Want To Write This Part

Sometimes you get stuck on a part and are too stubborn to do anything about it, so you just stand there and stare it down, growling and stomping your feet. Here’s a secret: maybe that part you’re stuck on is a part you just don’t want to write. And if you don’t want to write it, what are the chances that someone might not want to read it? You know what you do? Skip it. Kill it. Move past it. Find another way through.

24. Fuck Off For A Day, Willya?

You get one day. One. Free pass. No writing today. Just flit away, little butterfly. Flit, flit, flit. Clear your head. Have some fun. Tomorrow the work returns. The block, undone. Or it damn well better be.

25. Deny The Existence Of Writer’s Block

If you’re being skewered by a unicorn, the secret is: tell the unicorn he doesn’t exist. If you do that, he’ll disappear in a puff of Lucky Charms cereal. That’s true. That’s fact. Same thing goes for writer’s block. If it’s assailing you, an incubus clinging to your back, you just tell that mythological being that you don’t believe in him. You do that, you steal his power. Suck his breath away. Make him turn to so much vapor. You have to harden your heart and your head against it and believe that the one way through is that old saw that everybody repeats but they always forget: writers write. That’s the one tried and true way through writer’s block. Because a writer who writes isn’t blocked, is he?

* * *

Like this brand of booze-soaked, caffeine-addled, salty-tongued writing advice? Then I might recommend you take a look at 250 Things You Should Know About Writing and Confessions Of A Freelance Penmonkey, both available now. Please to enjoy.

Time for another iteration of the 25 Things series. This, I suspect, may be my last one here on the blog for awhile, but I’m contemplating putting together a small e-book of these lists with some new ones thrown in for good measure (already written part of 25 Things You Should Know About Publishing and Writing A Fucking Sentence). In the meantime, enjoy this one, and don’t hesitate to add your own in the comments.

Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

25 Things You Should Know About Revisions

1. Dialogue Is Easy Like Sunday Morning

Our eyes flow over dialogue like butter on the hood of a hot car. This is true when reading fiction. This is true when reading scripts. What does this tell you? It tells you: you should be using a lot of dialogue.

2. Easy Isn’t The Same As Uncomplicated

We like to read dialogue because it’s easy, not because it’s stupid. Dialogue has a fast flow. We respond to it as humans because, duh, humans make talky-talky. Easy does not translate to uncomplicated or unchallenging. Dialogue isn’t, “I like hot dogs,” “I think hot dogs are stupid,” “I think you’re stupid,” “I think your Mom’s stupid,” “I think your Mom’s vagina is stupid.” Dialogue is a carrier for all aspects of the narrative experience. Put differently: it’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I think I’m supposed to add “motherfucker” to that. I’ll let you do it. I trust you.

3. Sweet Minimalism

Let’s get this out of the way: don’t hang a bunch of gaudy ornaments upon your dialogue. In fiction, use the dialogue tags “said” and “asked” 90% of the time. Edge cases you might use “hissed,” “called,” “stammered,” etc. These are strong spices; use minimally. Also, adverbs nuzzled up against dialogue tags are an affront to all things and make Baby Jesus pee out the side of his diaper, and when he does that, people die. In scripts, you don’t have this problem but you can still clog the pipes with crap if you overuse stage directions. Oh, heavy dialect and slang? Just more ornamentation that’ll break the back of your dialogue.

4. Uh, You Do Know The Rules, Right?

Learn the structure of dialogue. If a screenplay, know the format. Capitalized name, centered above parenthetical stage direction and the line of dialogue. VO, OC, OS, contd:

SCOOTER (VO)

(shouting)

I always said that life was like a box of marmots. You

never know which one’s gonna nibble off your privates.

In fiction, know when to use a comma, when to use a period, know where the punctuation goes in relation to quotation marks, know that a physical gesture (nodded, f’rex) is not a dialogue tag.

“Fuck that monkey,” John said.

“But,” Betty said, “I love that dumb chimp.”

John nodded. “I know, Betty. But he’s a bad news bonobo, baby. A bad news bonobo.”

5. Use It To Set Pace

You want a pig to run faster, you grease him up with Astroglide and stick a NASA rocket booster up his ass. You want your story to read faster, you use dialogue to move it along. Like I said: dialogue reads easy. Dialogue’s like a waterslide: a reader gets to it, they zip forth fast, fancy and free. Want to slow things down? Pull away from the dialogue. Speed things up? More dialogue. Throttle. Brake. Throttle. Brake.

6. Shape Determines Speed

Short, sharp dialogue is a prison shiv: moves fast ’cause it’s gotta, because T-Bone only has three seconds in the lunch line with Johnny the Fish to stitch a shank all up in Johnny’s kidneys. Longer dialogue moves more slowly. Wanting to create tension? Fast, short dialogue. Want to create mystery? Longer, slightly more ponderous dialogue. Want to bog your audience in word treacle? Let one character take a lecturing info-dump all over their heads.

7. Expository Dialogue Is A Pair Of Cement Shoes

One of dialogue’s functions is to convey information within the story (to other characters) and outside the story (to the audience). An info-dump is the clumsiest way to make this happen. Might as well bludgeon your audience with a piece of rebar. And yet, you still gotta convey info. You have ways to pull this off without dropping an expository turd in the word-bowl. Don’t let one character lecture; let it be a conversation. Question. Answer. Limit the information learned; pull puzzle pieces out and take them away to create mystery. Let characters be reluctant to give any info, much less dump it over someone’s head.

8. Showing Through Telling

And yet, you have to do it. Dialogue is a better way of conveying information than you, the storyteller, just straight up telling the audience. The curious nature of dialogue, however, is that it would seem to rectally violate that most sacred of writing chestnuts — show, don’t tell. I don’t open my mouth and project fucking holograms. I tell you shit. And yet, the trick with dialogue is to show through telling. You reveal things through dialogue without a character saying them. This means it’s paramount to avoid…

9. The Wart On The End Of The Nose

“On-the-nose” dialogue is dialogue where a character says exactly what he feels and what he wants for purposes of telling the audience what they need to know. When a villain spoils his own sinister plan, that’s on-the-nose. When a protagonist says, “I cannot love you, elf-lady, because an elf once touched me in my no-no hole,” that’s on-the-nose. Trust me, we’d live in a better, happier world if real world dialogue was all on-the-nose. On the other side, we’d experience duller, shittier fiction. Characters — and, frankly, real people — reveal things without saying them.

10. The Words Beneath The Words

Text versus sub-text. On-the-nose dialogue versus dialogue that is deliciously sub rosa. Meaning exists beneath what’s said. The best real world example of this is the dreaded phrase spoken by men and women the world around: “I’m fine.” Said with jaw tight. Said with averted eyes. Said in sharp, clipped tongue. Never before have two words so clearly meant something entirely different: “I’m fine” is code. It’s code for, “Yes, something is fucking wrong, but I don’t want to talk about it, but actually, I do want to talk about it but I want you to already know what’s wrong, and what’s wrong is that you had sex with my mother in a New Jersey rest-stop and put it on Youtube you giant unmerciful cock-waffle.”

11. Pay No Attention To The Dead Man Behind The Curtain

Put differently: pretend that dialogue is more about hiding than it is about revealing. The things we the audience want to know most — who killed his wife, why did he rob that bank, did he really have a romantic dalliance with that insane dancing robot — are the things the character doesn’t want to discuss. Dialogue is negotiating that revelation, and it’s a revelation that should come as easy as pulling the teeth out of a coked-up Doberman. Meaning, not easy at all.

12. Where Tension, Suspense And Mystery Have A Big Crazy Gang-Bang

The fact that characters lie, cheat, conceal, mislead and betray all in dialogue tells you that dialogue is a critical way of building tension and suspense and conveying mystery. Characters are always prime movers.

13. Quid Pro Quo, Clarice

Hannibal Lecter susses out the truth through dialogue. (Oh, and he also eats people.) But he’s also performing meta-work for the audience by sussing out character through dialogue. Clarice Starling is painted in part by Lecter’s own strokes. A character’s blood, sweat, tears, ball-hair and breast-milk lives inside their dialogue. How they speak and what they say reveals who they are, though only obliquely. After writing a conversation, ask yourself, “What does this say about the characters? Is this true to who they are?”

14. Let The Character Sign Their Own Work

Each line of dialogue from a character is that character’s signature. It contains their voice and personality. One speaks in gruff, clipped phrasing. The other goes on at length. One character is ponderous and poetic, another is meaner than two rattlesnakes fucking in a dirty boot. Don’t let a character’s voice be defined by dialect, slang, or other trickery. It’s not just how they speak. It’s also what they say when they do.

15. Dialogue Is A Theme Park

Theme is one of those things you as the author don’t really speak out loud — but sometimes characters do. They might orbit the theme. They might challenge it. They might speak it outright. Not often, and never out of nowhere. But it’s okay once in awhile to let a character be a momentary avatar of theme. It’s doubly okay if that character is played by Morgan Freeman. God, that guy’s voice. He could say anything — “Beans are a musical fruit” — and I’m like, “There it is! Such gravitas! Such power. It’s the theme. It’s the theme!”

16. Dialogue Is Action

We expect that dialogue and action are separate, but they are not. Speak is a verb. So’s talk. So’s discuss, talk, argue, yell, banter, rant, rave. Verb means action. That means, duh, dialogue is action, not separate from it. Further, dialogue works best when treated this way. Don’t stand two characters across from one another and have them talk at each other like it’s a ping-pong game. Characters act while speaking. They walk. Kick stones. Clean dishes. Load rifles. Pleasure themselves. Build thermonuclear penile implants. Eat messy sandwiches. This creates a sense of dynamism. Of an authentic world. Adds variety and interest.

17. The Real World Is Not Your Friend

I’m not talking about the MTV reality show, though one supposes there the lesson is the same (so not your friend). What I mean is, if you want to ruin good dialogue, the fastest path to that is by mimicking dialogue you hear in the real world. Dialogue in the real world is dull. It’s herky-jerky. Lots of um, mmm, hmm, uhhh, like, y’know. If you listen really hard to how people speak to one another, it’s amazing anybody communicates anything at all.

18. For The Record, You’re Not David Mamet

Yes, yes, I know. David Mamet writes “realistic” dialogue. Everyone interrupts everyone. They say inexplicable shit. They barely manage to communicate. Subtextapalooza. It’s great. It works. You’re also not David Mamet. I mean, unless you are, in which case, thanks for stopping by. Would you sign my copy of Glengarry Glen Ross? All that being said…

19. Again: Not A Ping-Pong Match

Characters don’t stand nose to nose and take turns speaking. People are selfish. So too are characters. Characters want to talk. They want to be heard. They don’t wait their turn like polite automatons. They can interrupt each other. Finish one another’s sentences. Derail conversations. Pursue agendas. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat. It’s a battle of energy, wits, and dominance.

20. Conversation Is Conflict

Dialogue can represent a pure and potent form of conflict. Two or more characters want something, and they’re using words to get it. Before you write conversation, ask: what does each participant want? Set a goal. One character wants money. Another wants affirmation to justify her self-righteousness. A third just needs a fucking hug. Find motive. Purpose. Conscious or not. Let the conversation reflect this battle.

21. Authenticity Trumps Reality

“But it really happened,” is never an excuse for something to exist in fiction. Weird shit happens all the time in reality. Ever have something happen where you say, “Gosh, that was really convenient?” You put that in your story, the audience is going to kick you in the gut and spit in your cereal. Dialogue suffers from similar pitfalls. Just because you hear it in reality doesn’t mean it works in the context of story. Story has its own secret laws. You can make dialogue sound real without mimicking reality. One might term this “natural” dialogue; authenticity is about feeling real, not about being real.

22. Sometimes, You Just Gotta Babble That Shit Out

Writing dialogue sometimes means you just let two characters babble for awhile. Small talk, big talk, crazy talk. Let ’em circumvent the real topic. Give them voices. Open the floodgates to your sub-conscious mind. And let the conversation flow. Write big, write messy, write long. Cut later in comfort.

23. Nothing Wrong With Banter

You might write two characters just sitting down and shooting the shit and think, “I’ll cut this down later.” But don’t be so sure. Sometimes characters just need to chat, babble, mouth off. Who they are can be revealed in two people just fucking around, seeing what comes out of their heads. That can work if it’s interesting, if it puts the character on the map in terms of the audience’s mental picture, and if it eventually focuses up to be something bigger than how it began. Oh, and did I mention it has to be interesting?

24. The Greatest Crime Against Humanity Is Writing Boring Dialogue

Like I said, dialogue is easy to read. Or, it’s supposed to be. Anybody who writes dialogue that’s dull, that doesn’t flow like water and pop like popcorn, needs to be taken out back and shaken like a baby. Find the boring parts. The unnecessary stuff. The junk. Anything that doesn’t feel a) necessary and b) interesting. Stick it in a bag and set it on fire. Want to read great dialogue? Sharp, fast, entertaining, witty-as-fuck, with a lot going on? Go watch the TV show GILMORE GIRLS. No, I’m not kidding. Stop making that face.

25. Double-Duty Dialogueing

Heh, “duty.” Heh, “log.” Shut up. If you take one thing away from these 25 nonsense nuggets gems of wisdom, it’s this: let dialogue do the heavy lifting and perform double- or even triple-duty. Dialogue isn’t just dialogue. It’s a vehicle for character, theme, mood, plot, conflict, mystery, tension, horror. Dialogue does a lot of work in very short space: it’s the goddamn Swiss Army knife of storytelling. Or Macgyver. Or Trojan Horse. Or Macgyver hiding in a Trojan Horse carrying a Swiss Army knife. Didn’t I tell you to shut up already? Where’s Morgan Freeman when you need him? He’ll tell you to shut up and you’ll listen.

Corollary: “Everything Is Dialogue”

Part of why dialogue reads so easy is because it’s conversational, and conversation is how we interact with other humans and, in our heads, with the world. We talk to inanimate objects, for fuck’s sake. (What, you’ve never yelled at a stubborn jar of jelly? SHUT UP HAVE TOO.) There’s a secret, here, and that is to treat all your writing like it’s dialogue. Write things conversationally. Like you’re talking to the audience. Like you and the audience? Real BFFs. You can abuse this, of course, but the point is that in conversation you’ll use straightforward, uncomplicated language to convey your point — no value in being stodgy and academic when you’re just talking. So too is it with writing, whether it’s description in a screenplay or in fiction, you’ll find value in straightforward, uncomplicated, even talky language. Talk with the audience, don’t lecture at them. Everything is dialogue. Some of it’s just one-sided, is all.

So. How about you?

What are your rules of writing dialogue?

* * *

Did you enjoy this post? Guess what? Chuck has a book chock full of the same kind of booze-soaked, profanity-laden writing advice you found here. Look for CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY. Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

1. Forging The Sword

The first draft is basically just you flailing around and throwing up. All subsequent drafts are you taking that throw-up and molding it into shape. Except, ew, that’s gross. Hm. Okay. Let’s pretend you’re the Greek God Hephaestus, then. You throw up a lump of hot iron, and that’s your first draft. The rewrites are when you forge that regurgitated iron into a sword that will slay your enemies. Did Hephaestus puke up metal? He probably did. Greek myths are weird.

2. Sometimes, To Fix Something, You Have To Break It More

Pipe breaks. Water damage. Carpet, pad, floor, ceiling on the other side, furniture. You can’t fix that with duct tape and good wishes. Can’t just repair the pipe. You have to get in there. Tear shit out. Demolish. Obliterate. Replace. Your story is like that. Sometimes you find something that’s broken through and through: a cancer. And a cancer needs to be cut out. New flesh grown over excised tissue.

3. It’s Cruel To Be Kind

You will do more damage to your work by being merciful. Go in cold. Emotionless. Scissors in one hand, silenced pistol in the other. The manuscript is not human. You are free to torture it wantonly until it yields what you require. You’d be amazed at how satisfying it is when you break a manuscript and force it to kneel.

4. The Aspiration Of Reinvention

I’m not saying this needs to be the case, and it sounds horrible now, but just wait: if your final draft looks nothing like your first draft, for some bizarre-o fucking reason you feel really accomplished. It’s the same way I look at myself now and I’m all like, “Hey, awesome, I’m not a baby anymore.” I mean, except for the diaper. What? It’s convenient. Don’t judge me, Internet. Even though that’s all you know. *sob*

5. Palate Cleanser

Take time away from the manuscript before you go at it all tooth-and-claw. You need time. You need to wash that man right out of your hair. Right now, you either love it too much or hate its every fiber. You’re viewing it as the writer. You need to view it as a reader, as a distant third-party editor flying in from out of town and who damn well don’t give a fuck. From subjective to objective. Take a month if you can afford it. Or write something else: even a short story will serve as a dollop of sorbet on your brain-tongue to cleanse the mind-palate. Anything to shift perspective from “writer” to “reader.”

6. The Bugfuck Contingency

You’ll know if it’s not time to edit. Here’s a sign: you go to tackle the edit and it feels like your head and heart are filled with bees. You don’t know where to start. You’re thinking of either just walking away forever or planting a narrative suitcase bomb in the middle of the story and blowing it all to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. That means you’re not ready. You’re too bugfuck to go forward. Ease off the throttle, hoss. Come back another time, another way. Cool down.

7. The Proper Mindset

Editing, revising, rewriting requires a certain mindset. That mindset is, “I am excited to destroy the enemy that resists good fiction, I am ready to fix all the shit that I broke, I am eager to shave off barnacles and burn off fat and add layers of laser-proof steel and get this motherfucker in fit fighting shape so that no other story may stand before it.” You gotta be hungry to fuck up your own work in the name of good storytelling.

8. Go In With A Plan Or Drown In Darkness

You write your first draft however you want. Outline, no outline, finger-painted on the back of a Waffle House placemat in your own feces, I don’t care. But you go to attack a rewrite without a plan in mind, you might as well be a chimpanzee humping a football helmet. How do you know what to fix if you haven’t identified what’s broken? This isn’t time for intuition. Have notes. Put a plan in place. Surgical strike.

9. Don’t Rewrite In A Vacuum

You write the first draft in isolation. Just you, your keyboard, a story, some industrial lubricant and a handgun. All other drafts are part of a team initiative. SWAT, kicking in windows, identifying perps. Beta readers, editors, agents, wives, friends, itinerant strangers, hostages, whatever. Get someone to read your nonsense. Get notes. Attend to those notes. Third parties will see things you do not.

10. Embrace The Intervention Of Notes

You get notes, it’s tough. It’s like coming home and being surrounded by friends and family, and they want you to sit down and listen as they talk about getting you unfettered from your addiction to obscure 80s hair-bands and foul Lithuanian pornography. But listen to those notes. They may be hard but they’re both instructive and constructive. They are a dear favor, so do not waste them.

11. But Also, Check Your Gut

When someone says “follow your gut,” it’s because your intestinal tract is home to an infinite multitude of hyper-intelligent bacterial flora. It knows what’s up if you can tune to its gurgling frequency. You get notes and they don’t feel exactly right, check the gut. Here’s the thing, though. Notes, even when you don’t agree, usually point out something about your manuscript. It may highlight a flaw or a gap. But it can also be instructive in the sense that, each note is a test, and if you come up more resolute about some part of your manuscript, that’s okay, too. Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves. Welcome to Chunderdome.

12. When In Doubt, Hire An Editor

Editors do not exist to hurt you. They exist to hurt your manuscript. In the best way possible. They are the arbiters of the toughest, smartest love. A good editor shall set you — and the work — free.

13, Multitasking Is For Assholes

It is the mark of the modern man if he can do multiple things at once. He can do a Powerpoint presentation and mix a martini and train a cat to quilt the Confederate Flag all at the same time. Your story will not benefit from this. Further, it’s not a “one shot and I’m done” approach. This isn’t the Death Star, and you’re not trying to penetrate an Imperial shaft with one blast from your Force-driven proton penis. You have to approach a rewrite in layers and passes. Fix one thing at a time. Make a dialogue pass. A description pass. A plot run. You don’t just fix it with one pull of the trigger, nor can you do ten things at once. Calm down. Here, eat these quaaludes. I’m just kidding, nobody has ‘ludes anymore.

14. Not Always About What’s On The Page

Story lives beyond margins. It’s in context and theme and mood — incalculable and uncertain data. But these vapors, these ghosts, must line up with the rest, and the rest must line up with them.

15. Content, Context, Then Copy

Behind, then, the layer cake of editing. Start with content: character, plot, description, dialogue. Move to context: those vapors and ghosts I just told you about. Final nail in the revision coffin is copy: spelling, grammar, all those fiddly bits, the skin tags and hangnails and ingrown hairs. Do these last so you don’t have to keep sweeping up after yourself.

16. Evolution Begins As Devolution

Two steps forward, one step backward where you fall down the steps and void your bowels in front of company. Here is a common, though not universal, issue: you write a draft, you identify changes, and you choose a direction to jump — and the next draft embodies that direction. And it’s the wrong direction. Second draft is worse than the first draft. That’s fine. It’s a good thing. Definition through negative space. Now you can understand your choices more clearly. Now you know what not to do and can defend that.

17. Two Words: Track Revisions

You know how when there’s a murder they need to recreate the timeline? 10:30AM, murderer stopped off for a pudding cup, 10:45AM, victim took a shit in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, etc? Right. Track the timeline of your revisions. Keep a record of them all. First, if your Word processor allows you to track changes and revisions, do that. If your program doesn’t (Word and Final Draft both do), then get one that does. Second, any time you make a revision change, mark the revision, save a new file every time. I don’t care if you have 152 files by the end of it. You’ll be happy if you need to go back.

18. Fuck Yeah, Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets seem anathema to writing, because writing is “creative.” Well, rewriting is clinical and strategic. A spreadsheet can help you track story beats, theme, mood, characters, plot points, quirks and foibles, conflicts, and so on. Any narrative component can be tracked by spreadsheet. Here’s one way: track narrative data per page or word count. “Oh, this character drops off the map for these 10 pages of my script.” “This plot needs a middle bit here around the 45,000 word mark.” “Not nearly enough laser guns and elf-porn at the turn of the third act.”

19. A Reiteration Of Opinion Regarding “Creativity”

If you looked at that note about spreadsheets and thought something-something blah-blah-blah about how it will destroy your creativity and ruin the magic of the story, then form hand into fist and punch self in ear. If you need every day of writing to be a nougat-filled boat-ride through Pez-brick tunnels, you’re fucked. Rewriting is hard. Creative comes from “create,” and often, revision is about destruction. In other words: harden the fuck up, Strawberry Shortcake, ’cause the boat ride’s about to get bumpy.

20. Put The Fun In Fundamentals

You can’t revise if you don’t know how to write. Same if you don’t know the tenets of good story. How would you fix basic fucking problems if you can’t find them in the first place?

21. A Trail Of Dead Darlings

Don’t misread that old chestnut, “Kill your darlings.” Too many writers read this as, “Excise those parts of the work that I love.” That would be like, “Beat all the positive qualities of your child out of him with a wiffle ball bat.” You should leave in the parts you love… if they work. Killing your darlings is about that word: “darling.” Elements that are precious preening peacocks, that exist only to draw attention to themselves, those are the components that deserve an ice-axe to the back of the brain-stem.

22. Look For These Things And Beat Them To Death, Then Replace

In no particular order: Awkward and unclear language. Malapropisms. Punctuation abuse. A lack of variety in sentences. A lack of variety in the structure of the page. Plot holes. Inconsistency (John has a porkpie hat on page 70, but a ferret coiled around his head on page 75). Passive language. Wishy-washy writing. Purple prose. An excess of adverbs. Bad or broken formatting. Cliches. Wobbly tense and/or POV. Redundant language. Run-on sentences. Sentence fragments. Junk language. Cold sores. Mouse turds. Light switches that don’t turn anything on. Porno mustaches. Dancing elves. Or something. I need a nap.

23. Clarity Above Cleverness, Or, “How Poetry Lives In Simplicity”

Poetry gets a bad rap. Everyone always assumes it’s the source of purple, overwrought language, like it’s some kind of virus that infects good clean American language and turns it into something a poncey 11th grade poet might sing. Poetry lurks in simple language. Great story does, too. You don’t need big words or tangled phrasings or clever stunting to convey beautiful and profound ideas. In subsequent drafts, seek clarity. Be forthright in your language. Clarity and confidence are king in writing, and the revision process is when you highlight this. Write with strength. Write to be understood. That doesn’t mean “no metaphors.” It just means, “metaphors whose beauty exists in their simplicity.”

24. Don’t Make Me Say It Again: Read. Your Shit. Aloud.

I don’t care if the dog is looking at you like you’re crazy. If you’re on the subway, hey, people think you’re a mental patient. Oh well. Seriously though, I hate to repeat myself but I am nothing if not a parrot squawking my own beliefs back at you again and again: Take your work — script, fiction, non-fiction, whatever — and read it aloud. Read it aloud. READ IT ALOUD. When you read your work aloud, you’ll be amazed at the things you catch, the things that sound off, that don’t make sense, that are awkward or wishy-washy or inconsistent. Read it aloud read it aloud read it aloud read that motherfucker aloud.

25. Loose Butthole

Ultimate lesson: clinging to a first draft and resisting revision is a symptom of addiction — you may be huffing the smell coming off your own stink. The only way you can get clean is when you want to get clean, and the same goes with revisions: you’re only going to manage strong and proper revisions when you’re eager and willing to do so. Relax your mind. Loosen your sphincter. And get ready for war. Because revising and rewriting is the purest, most fanfuckingtastic way of taking a mediocre manifestation of an otherwise good idea and making the execution match what exists inside your head. Your willingness to revise well and revise deep is the thing that will deliver your draft from the creamy loins of the singing story angels.

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If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.