Tag: 25things (page 5 of 12)

It’s possible I hate your main character.

Now, that might be on me. The list below? Entirely personal. And, as always, in the hands of a master, none of this shit applies. A masterful storyteller can break all the rules and make the breaking of the rules seem like that should’ve been the rule all along. Your Mileage May Vary, but just the same I thought it an interesting exercise to list those things that make me want to punt your main character into a pterodactyl nest. Where he will be promptly ripped into ribbons and gobbets of man-meat.

1. No Agency: Reactive Over Active

The protagonist helps to shape the story through her actions. It’s just how she rolls. Only problem is when the reverse ends up being true: the story forever pushes the character. It’s like in a boxing match — some boxing matches are dreadfully one-sided, with one poor sod taking a limitless pummeling, his head looking like a Ziploc baggy full of ground bison. That’s not a good mode for your story. Your protagonist should not be constantly on the ropes. Sure, the inciting incident might demand reaction (“My daughter was kidnapped by angry polecats! To action!”), but the character must have or claim agency for herself. I despise characters who never grab the reins of the story, not even by the tale’s end.

2. Even Worse: Passive Over Active

Passive is worse than reactive. They’re not just ducking and guarding and feinting — these characters lay down on the ground and let the story defecate on their chest while the audience watches. The character is not a leaf in the stream that is your story. The character is not just a piece of fucking furniture.

3. Zero Redemptive Qualities

I don’t demand a “likable” character. I think likability is overstated. As I say, we need to be willing to live with the character for two hours or 300 pages, not be his best buddy. Just the same, I can’t abide a character who has zero likable or redemptive qualities. He can be selfish and shallow and doomed to his own tragic flaws as long as I have something to grab hold of to pull me out of the swampy mire of those most wretched character traits. “Oh, he’s a dick, but he loves kittens! He kills people for a living but he saves orphans!” Something. Anything. Please.

4. Punches Kids, Kick Pets, And Other Vile Acts

You can give a character as many redemptive qualities as he likes, but for me there is a line where a character crosses over and performs truly execrable acts that cannot be forgiven. I think of this as the Anakin Skywalker problem — I’m supposed to believe that Darth Vader is deserving of redemption by his hillbilly moppet of a son. “There’s still good in him.” Except then Lucas made the prequels and has Anakin murdering Jedi children, Force-choking his wife in a case of domestic abuse and, I dunno, probably setting up a brutal dog fighting ring on Tatooine. I can’t get past that. Ruins the whole thing for me.

5. The Ben Stiller Effect

I don’t want to feel a sense of unending embarrassment for your main character. Watching him, I shouldn’t be constantly wincing, crossing my legs, furrowing my brow. Do not let conflict be driven by the character’s ceaseless stupidity. Endless humiliating self-driven failure ceases to be interesting.

6. The Forrest Gump Problem

Reverse problem: your character’s success is driven by his stupidity. Every time Forrest Gump steps in pile of horse-shit it’s another unqualified success, somehow — “Oh, ha ha ha, Forrest Gump accidentally threw a Frisbee and broke the president’s nose and now we won Viet Nam and chocolate cake for everybody!” I can’t get behind a character whose rampant dipshittery is a cause for celebration.

7. Muddy Motivation

I need to know what your character wants and why he wants it. That is the bare minimum psychic investment I must possess for your character — motivation is the engine behind a character’s actions, and if I have no idea why the character does what he does, then I’m floundering about on the beach of your fiction like a dying porpoise. You can obfuscate a lot about your main character. But not that.

8. “I’m So Good I’m Perfect!”

“I’m a noble fireman and an astronaut and I can do no wrong and I’m made of adorable river otters and I help create the dreams of young girls with ponies in their hearts.” I hate your Goody Two-Shoes Never-Does-Nothing-Wrong character. Hate ’em. You’ve turned that character’s goodness into a shining dagger which you then plunged into my breast (tee hee, breast). Conflict dies in the hands of a perfect protagonist. We love characters for their imperfections. So allow them to be imperfect.

9. Though Maybe Cool It On The Imperfections

You can, of course, go too far with the imperfections, flaws and frailties though, can’t you? “He’s a heroin addict! And a compulsive liar! And gets off on autoerotic asphyxiation. He’s got one leg. And gambling debts! His kids hate him his wife left him he lost his job and his house and he’s allergic to bees and…” You hit a point where it’s equal parts pathetic and downright unbelievable. Hang your hat on a core set of weaknesses. Don’t hamstring the character with an egregious and endless menu of foibles.

10. Her Quirky Quirks Are So Heck-Darn Quirky!

Quirks can be cute. They can be fun. Michael Weston on Burn Notice always eats yogurt. Great. Fine. But don’t let them stand in for genuine character traits. You know the old saying: “Too many quirks poop in the soup.” I think that’s a saying? Whatever. Point is, it’s awfully easy to let a laundry list of quirks pretend to be the foundation of a good character. But quirks are hollow. Too many overwhelm with a disingenuous sense: quirks are a stand-in for authenticity. Doubly true when the quirks mount and become all too twee.

11. “Blah Blah Blah, Toshi Station!”

Whining is not an attractive quality in anybody. Including your characters.

12. Had It Too Good For Too Long

Characters can and should overcome conflict. It’s part of storytelling: characters encounter conflict and struggle to overcome said conflict. But it should never be easy. You remember that kid in school? Had lots of money, teachers loved him, always had everything handed to him on a silver plate by his robot butler? You hated that kid. You hate him in real life and you hate him in fiction. Characters should not slide through the story like a baby covered in bacon grease. Conflict shouldn’t just be speed-bumps or walls made of tissue paper. If a character has it too easy, then I find it equally too easy to quit reading your damn story.

13. The Shoddy Character Copy Machine

Oh! Look! It’s Superman! Buffy! James Bond! Bleargh. I don’t want to see a carbon copy of another character. If I want to read about that character, I’ll go read about that character.

14. “The Type”

I don’t want to read the story of any kind of “type.” I don’t want to read about an archetype or a stereotype or a… I dunno, a what’s a daguerreotype? That’s a thing, right? It’s a character who… is good with… daggers? WHAT AM I A WORDOLOGIST? (Okay, fine, before I get a fusillade of smug pedantic comments, I know what a daguerreotype is. It’s the French word for “penis.”) A “type” is just a piss-thin coat of paint to slather on a faceless mannequin to give the illusion of having a genuine character there somewhere. Create people who are real in the context of your world. Do not lean on the crutch of “type.”

15. The Everyman: Duller Than A Butt-Plug

I’m done with the Everyman. He’s just — ugh. He’s a cubicle wall. He’s a chewed up wad of cardboard. He’s a blank piece of notebook paper. Yes, yes, I get it — he’s meant to represent all of us and be the fictional representation of The Common Man but yeah, you know what? He mostly just comes across as boring. Few of us are truly as common as the phrase “Common Man” suggests, so, let’s divest ourselves of that dull-as-fucking-wallpaper notion and move on. Yes? Yes.

16. Those Angles Don’t Add Up

I don’t want a boring character, obviously, and yet I do demand some degree of internal consistency. The things she does need to add up. They need to come from a place inspired by her fears, her motivations, her past. If we know all along she’s got a lady-boner for revenge, then it’s a hard pill to swallow when she continues to perform actions against that revenge. But it falls to little things, too — she got shot in the leg but doesn’t limp, she’s from Philadelphia but doesn’t know what a cheesesteak is, she’s got black hair one minute and the next minute she’s a sentient recliner named “Dave.” You know. Little things.

17. The Inexplicable Cipher

Mystery is good. I like mystery. I like not having all the answers and feeling like I’m following a trail of your breadcrumbs and, hey, who knows, maybe there’s a pile of gold at the end or some kind of bear-shark-robot hybrid that wants my intestines to host its sharkbearbot progeny. What I don’t like is a character who’s basically just one big question mark: an unsolvable and unknowable puzzle. The character is our way through this thing. She is the lens that focuses our view of the story. If that lens is covered in bird foulings and other schmutz, then everything is muddied. Ciphers can end up as a cheap and lazy trick. Such artifice will earn you a Krav Maga crotch-kapow from yours truly.

18. Atlas Pooped

A character is more than just his philosophies. We are not the sum total of our beliefs. We have friends and family. Hopes and dreams. Secret plans and bizarre sexual peccadilloes requiring an oil drum full of egg whites and Abe Vigoda in a too-tight wetsuit. If your character fails to possess those things and is just a mouthpiece for his (or worse, your) belief systems, then I will come to your house and beat you about the head, neck and butthole with a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

19. He Tells Me About Stupid Shit

The novel form is great in that it gives story and character room to breathe — but the novel form also offers authors enough rope with which to hang themselves and the whole audience. Just because a novel gives you room to talk doesn’t mean the character should sit there for page after page talking about completely inconsequential piffle. It has to relate back to the story in some way — if your character goes on for three pages about breakfast or toilet habits or animal husbandry and none of it reflects or relates to the story at hand, I am going to want to throttle that character for wasting my time. First draft is a great place to let characters off their leashes. Subsequent drafts should cage those unruly assholes.

20. Truly Fearless

Fearless characters don’t hold my interest. Oh, I like a character that seems fearless, that acts like she doesn’t have one scaredy-widdle-bone in her whole body. But just the same, real fears need to manifest — she must have things to lose, must have things she cannot abide, must have things that haunt her.

21. Not Actually The Main Character

I want the main character to be the protagonist. This doesn’t need to be true, technically, but fuck it, I like it and this list is all about me, nyah nyah boo boo. Sure, you can have a main character who is a witness to the protagonist’s journey and is an observer to the changing world and the unfolding tale, but you need to be really powerful talented to pull that off and get away with it. Let your main characters drive the story as protagonists. Don’t give us a main character who somehow remains secondary to the tale being told.

22. The Motherfucker Dies

Pet peeve time: kill off your main character and I get squirrely. Twitchy. Stabby. There’s an, erm, quite popular “vampire apocalypse” novel a few years back that did this and I had to put the book down. And stomp on it. And punch trees as I held them responsible for creating the paper on which the book was printed. You can maybe get away with this if your cast features an unholy host of “main” characters (I’m looking at you, GRRM), but it’ll still earn you the stinkeye.

23. Wait, Fellas, Come Back, Come Back!

I wanna spend time with your main character but then you run off, leaving me behind like a fat kid who just dropped his ice cream in the sand. I want to hang with great characters, I don’t want you to keep ditching me and having the action happen off-screen or off-page. Root me to the character. I want to be duct-taped to that sonofabitch. Don’t give me a kickass character and then abandon his perspective for half the story.

24. Stagnant As Swamp Water

The heroic mode allows main characters to not change but instead change the world. That’s totally viable. What burns me is when neither is true — the character doesn’t change, the world doesn’t change, nothing changes, it’s all one big status quo circle jerk. Something or someone must change.

25. There’s No There There

Worst case scenario: your character just has no substance. He has no soul. This isn’t a technical writing thing, and it isn’t even a thing you can stick with a push-pin and say, “Here, just give him dark hair, some Mommy issues, and a loyal sharkbearbot companion.” But for some reason the character fails to feel real, fails to allow the audience to transcend the page or the screen and see the character as a Real Boy rather than a Wooden Doll. It’s a sign, perhaps, that you just don’t understand the character you’ve written, that he is held at an arm’s length and you have not yet found that empathetic psychic bridge between the two of you. There’s no easy way to solve this conundrum, sadly — my only advice is to hunker down and figure out what it is you haven’t figured out about your main character.

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Fact is, a lot of writers work day-jobs unrelated to writing. And there is, obviously, nothing wrong with that. I did that for many years myself, and though it can be tricky, it guarantees stability.

For me, though, the dream was always to pack the cubicle farm walls with C4 and blow them sky-high. So, this is about that. This is about fulfilling the dream of working as a full-time writer.

Please to enjoy.

1. Best Get Mad Skills, Son

That might be “skillz,” with a ‘z.’ Sorry for any negligence on my part. The point remains the same regardless of spelling — you cannot survive as a full-time writer without the skills to back it up. You can’t just one day up and decide to make a living as a hard-workin’ trench-crawlin’ penmonkey if you cannot write well. Know your stuff. Get to a comfortable level. If you can’t play baseball, you don’t join the Phillies. You don’t join the CIA if you can’t fire a gun and spy on dudes. Don’t attempt full-time writing without first learning your craft. If you leap into the dark chasm, don’t forget to bring a flashlight.

2. The Slow Detachment

Most successful full-time writers don’t one day roll out of bed, brew a cuppa joe, then tell their day job boss to eat a bucket of whale dicks and then declare themselves the President of Writerland (capital: Inkopolis, population: one deluded penmonkey). Start by building a resume. Write part-time. Earn some cash. Then earn more. Gather clients and publishers while also writing some material for yourself. Build to it.

3. When To Punch The Eject Button

The best sign for when it’s time to take the leap? When your day-job is officially holding you back from earning out. When you’re able to say — based on evidence, not liquor-fueled guesswork — “Man, if I wasn’t working 40 hours at the Big Dan Don’s Nipple Clamps And Taintscratcher Half-Price Market, I’d start making some real coin at this inkslinger gig,” then you know it’s time to start pulling away from the day job.

4. Waggle Your Toes In Those Part-Time Waters

Diving into a cold pool or sliding into a hot jacuzzi, you ease in so as not to shock and/or scorch your privates into crawling back into your body. (Actually, I wouldn’t get into a jacuzzi. You ever check out the water jets on those things? It’s Hepatitis-City. All varieties: A, B, C, X, Z, Prime, v2.0, Exxxtreme Triple Nacho, etc.) Hepatitis aside, it helps to have steady income rolling in, even at reduced levels. Go part time with the day job (or pick up a new part time job). It reduces the financial shock, I assure you.

5. Your Own Personal Version Of The Hunger Games

Actually, these games are more like: “Am I still hungry? Did I eat all my Beefaroni? Did I lick the dust from the Ramen noodle flavor packet? I win! Or I lose! I’m so hungry I’m seeing angels!” Win or lose, expect to occasionally be hungry, both figuratively and literally. But that’s okay (as long as you don’t starve). Be hungry! Hunger to eat, hunger to pay rent, hunger to not die of exposure: all powerful motivators to force you to write. You learn a lot about things like “inspiration” and “writer’s block” when you’ll be kicked out of your apartment if you don’t put fingers to keyboards and start telling stories.

6. Like A Boss

It sounds great — “You’ll be your own boss!” You think, yeah, okay. I’ll get the executive toilet. I’ll get motherfucking foot massages. I’ll get a solid gold pen-holder that looks like a dude golfing and I stick the pen in his ass to make him putt (aka “The Putt Butt Pen Cup,” I just trademarked that shit, so, uhh, dibs). Thing is, being your own boss means you have to be your own hard-ass. Your own voice of dissent, your own chastising shadow. It means you have to be a little bit of a dick to yourself. “No Scotch before noon! No video games, and only a fifteen-minute masturbation break! Write, you little story-goblin, write!”

7. A Goal-Driven Life

Best way to be your own boss: set goals for yourself. Short-term and long-term. Set a word count goal for each day. Set aside portions of your time to hunt for jobs or seek places to submit your work. Plan to have the first draft of a novel written in three months, submitted to agents and editors or self-published by six. Plan for tomorrow, for next week, next year, and the next ten years. You can’t just wing this shit.

8. The Deadline Is The Lifeline

Deadlines you set for yourself or that are set for you by potential clients, agents, publishers, or the random jabbering machine-elves you see after you eat that moldy lunchmeat you keep finding in your fridge, will be your saving grace. Deadlines give you purpose, direction, clarity. They are a goal set externally. If someone doesn’t give you one and you’re, say, working on your own 10-book space opera cycle about Laser Moons and Star Dragons, set your own deadline. Put it on the calendar. Work toward it daily.

9. Tumble Outta Bed And Stumble To The Kitchen

…and pour yourself a cup of whisk… er, ambition! One thing, though: full-time writing isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It isn’t 40 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 30 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 60. Sometimes it means working on weekends. The luxury of being able to tell stories for a living means sacrificing some of that expected schedule. But hey, fuck it, you can nap on the job if you want and nobody’s going to fire you.

10. Hannibal, Mr. T, Face, And That Other Guy — Rorschach?

The full-time writer appears to undertake his mad crusade alone: out there on the bow of an empty ship, slicing stories into clouds with his épée. But you need a team. You might need a CPA to do your taxes, a lawyer to handle intellectual property issues, an agent to sell your rights, and further, self-published authors may need editors and cover artists and e-book designers, oh my. You can customize your team further: beta readers! Whiskey tasters! Ego-strokers! Frothing zealots! Choose your squad wisely. Full-time authoring is a gore-caked, blood-soaked, viscera-entangled battle for your very soul. Or at least for next month’s cable bill.

11. The Cup Should Rattle With Coins

Save up. Repeat: save up. Save your motherfucking money. Pile it in heaps and sit on it like a dragon nesting on his hoard. Money from writing will come, but it comes slow, unsteady, and inconsistent (insert crass joke about ejaculating). You don’t get a weekly check. You go into a full-time writing job with nary two pennies to rub together, you just dicked yourself hard. You’ll be eating your pets in no time.

12. “Is There A Line Item For Internet Porn?”

Also: learn to budget. Because the money you get comes in in fits and starts, you have to know you can pay your bills over the next many moons before the next check comes rolling in. Make sure you can pay your electric bill before you go buying some other fun-time bullshit. Pay ahead if you must. Pragmatism. Stability.

13. More Fun Financial Realities That Will Poke You With A Pointy Stick!

Taxes are going to be a knee to the groin. Some clients won’t pay on time and you have to turn into an asshole to get your money. Contracts will sometimes read like they were written in Aramaic, then translated to German, then mangled by an insane spam-bot. People will try to take advantage of you and your time. Financial institutions will barely consider you a human being. Stay out of debt because debt will shank you in the shower when you least expect it — credit card debt is in particular to be avoided. Credit cards are like little nasty Horcruxes or Sauron-infused Hobbit bait. So tempting to use. And a bad idea all around.

14. Critical Care For Your Lumpy Slugabed Body

Bold statement time: if you cannot afford health care — even bare bones bottom-dollar health care — then you may not be ready to go full-time with the writing gig. You need health care. If something happens to you — pneumonia! lung collapse! sucking chest wound! gored by a coked-up water buffalo! — and you don’t have health care, the debt you will take upon your shoulders will make Earth-wielding Atlas get the pee-shivers. It’s not nice, it’s not fair, but it is what it is: take not your health nor medical care for granted.

15. The Paradigm Shift Of Pay-For-Play

Ahh. The old day-job. When you could, conceivably, rise to the level of your own incompetence and sit around watching funny cat videos all day long and still get paid for it. Ha ha! Sucker. Those days are gone. You’ve now entered into a more pure relationship between effort and compensation, as in, the more effort you put into something, the more work you put out, which means the more money you earn. Fail to work? Fail to create? Then you fail to get paid. On the one hand, this is really cool: your every word matters. You can calculate how much you must write to buy coffee, pay for dinner, rent a van-load of strippers. On the other hand, it means you don’t get vacation days. You don’t get sick days. A day you don’t work is a day that accumulates nothing toward your needs. You’re the hunter, now. You don’t hunt? You don’t eat.

16. The Lie Of The Romantic Writer Life

Get shut of your illusions regarding a full-time writer’s life. Last week I told you about the Lies Writers Tell, but this is one I didn’t put on there — the writer’s life is needlessly romanticized. It’s not Parisian cafes and staring at clouds. It’s not wistful pondering and perfecting the Great Novel that we have within us. It’s pantsless and desperate and you grab lunch when you can and guzzle coffee because it’s there and you’re surrounded by papers and email feels like drowning and are those jizz tissues and why are my fingers blistered and bloody OH YEAH IT’S ALL THIS STORYMAKING. Nary a whiff of romance to it. But it’s still pretty bad-ass to do this for a living. So, stop complaining.

17. “But They Shall Not Take. . . My Wristwatch”

Working on your own there is a propensity to let time fritter away, whether by your own hand or at the behest of others (“Well, you’re at home, can’t you grout the bathroom?”). You will sometimes need to defend your time with sword and shield, with tooth and nail, with mecha-grizzly and cyborg-puma.

18. A Horse Of Every Color

The name of the game is diversity. It is no longer easy to survive as a full-time writer splashing around in only one pool. It’s hard to be Just A Novelist. Hard to be Only A Screenwriter. See this hat rack? WEAR THEM ALL OR STARVE. You’ll write blogs and articles and books and movies and games and secret vampire erotica and recipes and — well, whatever it takes to keep doing what you do. This is part of the “freelance penmonkey” moniker I assume — I’m ink-for-hire, man, I’m a rogue word-merc out on the fringe. And this diversity is what helps me survive.

19. The Slow-But-Steady Burn Of Self-Publishing

Self-publish. Do it. Seriously. Don’t do only it, but do it. Here’s why: first, while there’s no advance, you get a great return on the per book (especially if you also sell direct). Second, it’s steady money. Traditional publishing has a lot of value (and you should do it, too), but it’s freakishly slow sometimes. Write a book, edit, agent, publisher, pub edits, and on the schedule a year down the line. Self-pub starts to pay out slow and steady right from the beginning. Having it as part of your arsenal of penmonkey weapons speaks to that “diversity” thing I was just talking about. (Related: “25 Things About Self-Publishing“)

20. Kickstarter My Heart

If you’ve got fans, you could try Kickstarter. I’ll do a post on Kickstarter eventually but for now it’s worth mentioning that it is not and should not be treated as a Gold Rush or as easy money or as a guarantee. But it is an option for a penmonkey with some fans and an ability to throw together an interesting campaign on a story that might not otherwise exist without audience intervention.

21. Know The Many Faces Of Your Income

Know how royalties work? Or advances? Or per/word work-for-hire? How about rights? Or how Amazon pays out via KDP? You’ve got many options to earn out with writing, and it helps to have those options sliced and diced like an autopsy victim on your authorial desk. You also might earn some coin with speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, consulting gigs, hobo hand-jobs, feats of drunken heroism, etc.

22. Know The Value Of Your Work

That value is not “zero.” That value is not “cheap.” You know what’s cheap? Taco Bell. You know what’s free? Titty twisters. Chalupa diarrhea and nipple pain does not a writer career make. That’s not to say free and cheap can’t be part of your overall strategy. They can. But they are not the sum total of said strategy. Also: don’t write for exposure. There’s a reason getting caught outside and perishing is called “dying from exposure.” I mean, it’s probably a different reason, but shut up, it works metaphorically.

23. Shakespeare Got To Get Paid, Son

Nothing else needs to be said on that one.

24. Didn’t I Mention Wearing Lots Of Hats?

Diversity also means taking on other tasks as a writer: you are no longer just penmonkey; now you’re in marketing and advertising and publishing and editing and all that shit. Gone are the days when an author writes one book a year, sends it off to his publisher, and lets them carry the burden while he rolls around on a bean-bag stuffed fat with cash. Sad and perhaps not fair, but if you were waiting around for life to be fair, you might as well also wish on a star for a leprechaun to come and tickle your perineum with a dodo feather. Assemble many talents. Be like the Swiss Army Knife.

25. ABW

PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN. Coffee is for writers only. Ahem. Sorry. ABW: Always Be Writing. It’s easy to lose that in the full-time writing career — easy to fall prey to emails, to agent-hunting and marketing your books and doing book tours or whatever it is you need to do. The thing to remember is all must be subservient to the content. Be generative. Create. All else is slave to that; your writing is not slave to anything. The most important hat you wear, the most bad-ass motherfucking weapon in your authorial arsenal, is your work. Your stories are your world; they’re what help you do this thing that you love.

Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

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

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Ahh. The lies we writers tell ourselves. It’s a popular topic here, because as a man who has in the past been firmly rooted in the mud of his own self-slung bullshit, I think the best thing writers can do is get shut of illusions and myths and the deception — especially that which we create. Seemed high time to jack this into a “list of 25.”A greatest hits, if you will, and then some.

Let us now extinguish the conflagration of deception consuming our pants.

Argue these, if you choose, or add your own.

1. “I Don’t Have Time!”

Said it before, will say it again: I am afforded the same 24 hours that you are. I don’t get 30 hours. Stephen King doesn’t have a magical stopwatch that allows him to operate on Secret Creepy Writer Time. You have a full-time job? So do a lot of writers. Kids? So do a lot of writers. Rampant video-game-playing habit? Sadly, so do a lot of writers. You want time, snatch it from the beast’s mouth. And then use it.

2. “It’s Okay That I Didn’t Write Today, I’ll Do It Tomorrow!”

Another temporal lie. Oh. You didn’t write today? You’ll write tomorrow, you say? And I’m sure it wasn’t you who ate the last of my Honey-Nut Cheerios. Filthy cereal-stealing cock-bird! Ahem. Do not assume tomorrow will come. Car crash, heart attack, panda mauling; no promises that you’ll see the day after today. What you do get is today. You’re here right now, so don’t waste it. Today is always the day you have. Tomorrow is always a day away. Something-something Daddy Warbucks, hard-knock-life, blah blah blah.

3. “I’ll Come Back To This Story After I Write This Other Story!”

Yeah, that’s usually how it works. OH WAIT NO IT ISN’T. Ha ha! Thought you were going to sneak that squeaky wagon of bullshit past me, didn’t you? If you and your current manuscript pull a Ross-and-Rachel and “take a break,” you’re going to go and dip your wick in some other story’s puddle of word-wax. And — alert, alert, made-up stat incoming — 90% of writers who do that never return to the first story. And it forms a pattern that will happen again and again. It’s like you leaving a trail of half-eaten sandwiches. “Oh, ham-and-Swiss oh look pastrami-on-rye oooooh hold up hold up Italian hoagie OH SWEET SALIVATING SALLY is that a roasted bonobo monkey loin on brioche? CHOMP CHOMP.” Stop that. Finish the sandwich you’re eating. Er, story you’re writing. I may need to eat lunch. Anybody got a sandwich?

4. “Oh Noes, Writer’s Block Again!”

Writer’s block is not a real thing. You can be a writer, and you can be blocked. But don’t give it a special name. And don’t let it take up real estate inside your head. Writer’s block is an excuse afforded by the privilege of not having to write to feed yourself (mmm sandwich). When you suffer a thing you think is writer’s block, as with any demon or ghost, deny its existence. “The power of word count compels you!” you scream, flecking it with the holy water of writers (aka, whiskey). You get through writer’s block the same way you get through a door that’s closed: you open it or tear that fucker off its hinges.

5. “I Can Only Write When The Muse Allows!”

To the working writer, that means, “I can only pay my mortgage when the Muse allows.” True Fact Alert: Your Muse is a twatsicle. Hell with invisible fairy spirits who breathe the heady breath of inspiration in your soul. Own your work. It’s yours! That’s awesome! It’s not delivered to you by a shining knight galloping up on a golden unicorn. (Well, it is if you’ve gobbled copious fistfuls of hallucinogens.) Your story came from within. Fuck external validation. Let it all be you. Get away from excusing your lack of productivity on the capricious whims of a fickle butterfly-winged motherfucker some Greek made up once.

6. “My Creative Spark Hath Been Extinguished!”

Your creativity is not a baby rabbit. It doesn’t die of fright. Oh, I’m sorry, outlining hurt your poor widdle cweative self? Editing made your inner baby cry? Writing that query letter or reading that bad review huffed and puffed and blew your house of cards down? Dude. Dude. DUUUDE. Your creativity is made of tougher stuff. Kevlar and gravel and cast iron and… sandwiches. (Wait, I still didn’t eat lunch, did I? Is beer lunch? Yay! Beer!) The more you try to protect your idea of some frail, quivering flower living invisibly within your mind, the less you actually put words on paper for others to read.

7. “My Characters Are In Control!”

Stop that. This is another version of the “Muse ejaculates her story into my brainpan” lie: if you legitimately assume that your characters are in control, you’ve once again ceded intellectual and creative territory to imaginary entities. I’m not saying your subconscious mind fails to work through the story elements on the page. It does. It totally does. And, indeed, it feels at times like some kind of crazy moonbat magic. But from time to time you should remind yourself: this isn’t magic. Everything that’s happening is real. You control it. These puppets dance for you. This is your show. I wonder if writers tell this lie in part because it excuses failure and in part because it absolves them of responsibility — “Oh, didn’t like that story? Well, garsh, it’s what the characters wanted. I am just the conduit for their psychomemetic existence. Blame them!”

8. “That’s Not Bad Writing, That’s My Voice!”

Yeah, no, it’s just bad writing. It’s yours, all right. It’s just shitty.

9. “I Write Only For Me!”

Then don’t write. Sorry to be a hard-ass (ha ha, of course I’m not), but writing is an act of communicating. It’s an argument. It’s a conversation. (And yes, it’s entertainment.) And that necessitates at least one other person on the other end of this metaphorical phone call. You want to do something for yourself, eat a cheeseburger, buy an air conditioner, take a nap. Telling stories is an act we perform for others.

10. “I Don’t Need An Editor”

Ohh, but you do. Writers thrive on a little creative agitation. Your work is never perfect. You need someone to shave off the barnacles and, on a deeper level, unearth those things you didn’t realize were still buried. Maybe it’s a proper editor, an agent, a talented wife, a writer buddy, or a secret hobo genius. But someone needs to be there to tell you, “This works, this doesn’t, and have you considered this?” Their words are not gospel, but they’re necessary just the same. A high-five to editors all around. *slap*

11. “I Don’t Need To Do Any Planning!”

Your story is just born out of your head fully-formed, like Athena from Zeus? I don’t care if you’re outlining, drawing mind-maps, collecting research, or spattering notes on the wall in your own ropy jizz — you’d better be doing some kind of planning lest your tale flail around in the dark. Thing is, so many writers have convinced themselves that this is a totally viable course of action that they try it again and again, wondering exactly why the story can’t get off the ground or won’t make a lick of fucking sense. (And yes, I’m sure some people can actually accomplish this and accomplish it well. Those people are secret geniuses and I hate them and refuse to acknowledge them further lest I weep openly. DON’T LOOK AT ME WHEN I CRY.)

12. “I Have Nothing More To Learn!”

Dang! I didn’t realize I was speaking to a bodhisattva of the craft! You hung around on this mortal, ephemeral coil in order to lead the way by spiritual example? You’re the zenith! The pinnacle! The tippy-top of the penmonkey tit! *kicks you in the trachea* Sucker. You’re no such thing. Nobody is. Even the greatest writers can learn new things about storytelling, about writing, about the world in which we peddle our salacious word-born wares. You can always up your game. Seek opportunities to do so. Oh! And by the way, any of those writers who tout that line: “You can’t teach someone to be a writer, you either are a writer or you aren’t” are high on their own stench and just want to make themselves feel better. What kind of fucked-in-the-head lesson is that? You’re born a writer or you’re not? We’re beholden to some kind of creative caste system? It’s in our blood, like vampirism or syphilis? You can be taught. And you can teach yourself.

13. “I Need (Insert Some Bullshit Here) To Help Me Write!”

Whiskey? Coke? Crack? Ketamine? Salvia? Weed? Video games? Febreze? Pegasus blood? A sunny day? A winter’s night? A Carpathian prostitute? You need none of these things. Writing relies on very few things, my friend. All you need to write is your brain, a way to convey the story into existence (pen, computer, whatever), and a place in which to do it (office, kitchen table, lunar brothel). That’s it! Oh, and coffee. If a dude tries to take my coffee I will staple his hand to his face and push him down a hill.

14. “I Need To Write Like (Insert Some Other Asshole’s Name Here)!”

Let that dude or that lady write like that dude or that lady. You write like you write. Your voice is your own. Write to discover it, strengthen it, then own it. Don’t chase another author’s voice, style, genre, or story.

15. “If I Write It, They Will Come!”

It’d be great if all it took was to write a kick-ass story, comic, movie, or religious manifesto. That’s the myth. “Write the best book you can,” I sometimes say. Which is true. But doing that doesn’t cause rainbow beams to shoot out of your nipples that all the publishers the world around can see — “Twin rainbow nipple spires! A bestseller is born.” Writing the story is only part of what we do. The hard part is putting it out there. A great deal of work goes into birthing a book into the world — er, a good book, that is.

16. “Money Just Cheapens The Creative Process!”

Yeah, you know what else cheapens the creative process? Feeding my kids. Paying my mortgage. Stuffing grungy garter belts with sexy dollah-dollah bills y’all. Okay, that last one might actually cheapen it. Regardless! Money is not crass! It is not some vile thing that poisons the water of your creative well. Most of the art and entertainment you have enjoyed — if not all — was created by people who got paid (or, at least, hoped to get paid) in order to create that thing you loved so much. Even classic literature often earned its authors money. Money is good. Value your work. Nobody would fault you for earning out. Except jerks. But who cares what jerks think except other jerk-faced jerk-holed jerks?

17. “This Draft Needs To Be Perfect!”

Perfection is itself the most perfect lie. Well-defended, crystalline in its beauty, an elegant specimen to hold up: “Behold. I seek only perfection. Is that so wrong?” Actually? It is. Perfection is meaningless and impossible. And, worse, it’s maddening. You can spend countless reiterative hours “perfecting” a story, which adds up to you just spinning your tires on a road of greasy mud. You have to know when done is done. When good is good. When perfection is a thing that lives in the eyes of others and exists outside your control. It’s like worrying whether something is or is not art. Let someone else figure that out.

18. “My Crap Isn’t As Crappy As Some Other Crap!”

The other side of the coin, here. You see this sometimes (oft-touted by self-published authors of dubious merit), where they note that Piece-of-Crap X by Author Y made it into the marketplace and their sanctimonious drivel is at least as good as that, and gatekeepers can’t know quality and it’s all subjective and *barf yawn.* It’s all a slippery slope of self-deception bent on excusing lazy habits of writing and, in some cases, publishing. Are you seriously aiming for, what, a C+ grade? Lowest common denominator? “Grade E-but-Edible?” Don’t be a lazy knob. Be proud! Be awesome! Put out the best work you can.

19. “But First I Need To Build My Brand!”

Nobody wants to read a “product” by a “brand.” They want to read a story by an author. You’re a person, not a brand. You have a book, not a platform. Concentrate on the story first. The rest comes later.

20. “Nobody Has Ever Thought Of This Idea Before!”

Yes. They totally have. It’s your job to make it feel original. The art is in the arrangement.

21. “Writing Should Be Easy / Delicious Misery!”

We come to believe that writing should either be super-easy (“The words should just fall out of my face whenever I tilt my head forward!”) or that it’s a miserable activity (“OH GOD MORE WRITING I hate writing so much all this telling stories about imaginary people gives me a well-deserved anal fissure”). Further, when it’s not easy or not wretched, we feel like we’re not doing it justice. Put that lie aside. Some days will be easy. Some will be hard. Some days you dig soft earth, other days the shovel hits stone. But you dig just the same because that’s the only way the hole gets dug.

22. “This (Insert System Of Publishing) Is The Only Way!”

It’s easy to bet everything on one option. But easy doesn’t mean smart, and this is a lie that can get you into quite a bit of danger. Self-publishing is not the wave of the future. Traditional publishing is not an insurmountable mountain. Kickstarter is not a gospel. Free is not perfect. Authors are at a point where we have a great many options before us, and to ignore 90% of them to focus on one path is to deny the awesomeness of having options in the first fucking place. For a long time we had one way to get published. Now we’ve many more. Stick a finger in each pie. Why? BECAUSE MULTIPLE PIES, DUMMY. Yay, pie!

23. “I’m The Last Beautiful Dodo Bird On Earth!”

You want things to work a certain way for you because you’re special or talented or because you look really good in those jeans. Don’t think the publishing world will turn on its axis for you. Don’t think that readers aren’t savvy to all the tricks. Be the scrappy underdog, not the self-assumed victor-of-Thunderdome.

24. “Writing Is Not A Viable Career / I Can Never Do This Professionally!”

A dread deception sung by those who would seek to diminish the value of art and stories in the world. I read an article recently that suggested that the average annual take-home for authors is $9000. That is not viable. That is not money on which one may live. But I’m just one example of many entrenched penmonkeys earning a real living year after year. Paying bills! Buying stuff! Porn and sandwiches and whiskey! You can do this. It’ll take work. And time. Doesn’t happen overnight. But it can happen.

25. “I Suck Moist Open Ass!”

The darkest lie we tell ourselves: that we and our writing are not worth a bag of microwaved diapers. Listen, I don’t know how talented or skilled or capable you are. Hell, maybe you’re not that great. But nobody got better by feeling bad about it. You have one of two choices: you can be destructive to yourself or constructive. You can tear yourself down or find a way to build yourself up — and I don’t mean build yourself up with compliments but build yourself up with skills and abilities and the practice that gets you there. You suck? That thought sucks. Get better. Improve. Aim big. Give yourself the chance to fail — and then give yourself a chance to build steps from the corpses of your failure so you may climb higher every time. You don’t become a writer by feeling sad about your self-worth. The only sucking you need to do is to suck it up and do the work. Everything else is a consumptive distraction.

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This week, terribleminds is moving hosts. We got too big for our britches and we’re fleeing the warm embrace of Laughing Squid and diving deeper into the trenches of a LiquidWeb VPS server. I’m not anticipating any downtime, but one never knows in such an instance what will happen. So, I figured this wasn’t a good week for an entirely brand new “25 Things” list.

What I am doing, however, is giving you a tasty chocolate Whitman sampler of “25 Things” — these have never before been on terribleminds but can instead be found in their entirety in my writing books.

You’ll find this works on the following schedule:

Monday:

10 (of 25) things you should know about setting! (from 500 More Ways To Be A Better Writer)

Tuesday:

1o (of 25) things you should know about endings! (from 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer)

Wednesday:

10 (of 25) things you should know about screenplays! (from 250 Things You Should Know About Writing)

Let us begin.

10 Things You Should Know About Setting

1. What Is It?

Setting anchors your story in a place and a time. A short story or film may hover over a single setting; a longer-form film or novel may bounce across dozens of setting. You often have a larger setting (“The town of Shartlesburg!”) and many micro-settings within (“Pappy’s Hardware! The Egg-Timer Diner! The Shartlesburg Geriatric Sex Dungeon!”).

2. What Does It Do For You?

It props everything else up. It’s like the desk on which you write — it has function (it holds up all your writing tools, your liquor bottles, your Ukranian pornography), it has detail (the wood is nicked from where you got into that knife fight with that Bhutan assassin), it has an overall feel (the desk dominates the room, making everything else feel big — or perhaps the opposite is true, where the desk is crammed into the corner like you’re some third-rate citizen). Setting props up plot, character, theme, and atmosphere. And it gives the audience that critical sense of place and time so it doesn’t feel like she’s floating around in a big ol’ sensory-deprivation tank of recycled amniotic fluid. Which does not, despite its appearance, smell like bubble-gum.

3. Establish That Shit Early, Then Reveal Gradually

You don’t want to keep the reader in the dark as to the setting, because it’s disorienting and disconcerting. Even if the character on the page doesn’t know, you the author sure do, and it’s up to you to provide those hints (“She hears a church bell ringing and smells the heady stink of hobo musk”). You don’t need to spend two paragraphs outlining setting right from the get-go, though — we just need that filmic establishing shot to say, “Ohh, okay, we’re in a convenience store next door to an insane asylum. Boom, got it.” Then, as you write, you over time reveal more details about setting as they become important the story. Revealing setting should be a sexy striptease act. A little flash of skin that gradually uncovers the midriff, then the thighs, then the curve of the blouse baboons, then the OH MY GOD SHE HAS A TENTACLE IT’S GOT MY MMGPPHABRABglurk

4. Setting As Character

It may help to think of setting as just another character. It looks and acts a certain way. It may change over the course of the story. Other characters interact with it and have feelings about it that may not be entirely rational. Think about how, on those awful (and totally fake!) house hunting shows on HGTV someone’s always looking for a house “with character.” That means they want a house that is uniquely their own, that has, in a sense, a personality. And probably a poltergeist. Houses with character always have poltergeists. That’s a fact. I saw it on the BBC and British people cannot lie. It’s in their regal charter or something.

5. Paint In As Few Strokes As Possible

Play a game — go somewhere and describe it in as few details as possible. Keep whittling it down. See how you do. This is key for setting description (and, in fact, all description). Description must not overwhelm.

6. Exercise: Three Details And No More

Find any place at any time and use three details to describe it. You get to paint your image with three strokes and no more.

7. What Details? The Ones The Audience Needs To See

The details you choose are the ones that add to the overall story. Maybe they’re tied to the plot. Maybe they enhance the mood. Maybe they signal some aspect of the theme. Maybe offers a dash of humor at a time when the story really needs it. Each detail has text and subtext — the text is what it is (“a toilet”). The subtext is what it adds to the deeper story (“the toilet’s clogged and broken like everything else in this building, spilling water over the bowl rim” — saying this adds to the overall atmosphere and theme offered by the setting).

8. Abnormalities Are Your Friend

Another tip for finding out which details matter most: they’re the ones that break the status quo. It’s like this: I know what a Starbucks looks like. Or a pine forest. Or a men’s restroom. You don’t need to tell me that the restroom has a sink, a floor, a lightbulb, a toilet. You need to tell me there’s a mouse crawling around in the sink. That the fluorescent light above is flickering and buzzing like a bug zapper. You need to show me the weird guy sitting in stall three playing with himself while reading an issue of Field and Stream magazine. (“Oh. Yeah. I’m gonna stick it deeeeeep in your basshole.”) Show me the details that break my expectations. Those are the details that matter.

9. The Reader Will Do Work For You

No, I don’t mean the reader will come to your house and grout your kitchen. Or maybe they will? I should look into that. Anyway. What I’m saying is, the reader will fill in many of the details that you do not. In a variant of what I just said above, it’s your job to give the reader the details that she cannot supply for herself.

10. Description Should Be Active And Action-Based

Describe the setting as a character moves and operates through it — which means that it features action and takes into account that character’s point-of-view. You don’t introduce the Shartlesburg Geriatric Dungeon by giving a paragraph of setting description before the character even steps into the room. As the character sees it, the reader sees it. As the character picks up that riding crop that smells like Vicks Vaporub and horehound lozenges, the reader picks up the same.

(Check out the full “25 Things You Should Know About Setting” in the complete 500 More Ways To Be A Better Writer, available at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, and direct from this site.)

1. Let’s Just Get This Out Of The Way Now

As is my way, I’m going to use this list to say lots of hard-nosed stompy-footed scowly-faced things about creativity — blah blah blah pragmatism! Bippity-boppity-boo work work work! So, let me just say this upfront: creativity is fantastic. It’s a necessity not just for us wifty creative types but for all people everywhere — parents, astronauts, custodians, detectives, cowboys, Navy SEALs, harbor seals, custodial astro-cowboy detectives, and so on. Creativity is how new things are created. How old problems are solved. Creativity is fire, yes, but fire you use, fire you harness — it must not burn uncontrollably but be the match-flame that lights the fuse. Creativity is the fire we stole from the gods.

2. Key Word: Create

The key component of the word “creativity” is “create.” Meaning, to make something. It’s why I like the word creativity better than imagination — the former suggests the impetus for action while the latter suggests that everything is sealed away in the Sid and Marty Krofft hallucinogenic dream-house that is your mind (“OMG TALKING BUTTPLUG”). Imagination demands unreality; creativity demands reality.

3. “Oh. How Creative.”

The word “creative” inspires hasty judgment. A child who learns to fish around his diaper for fecal material which he then promptly paints on the wall gets labeled as “creative,” but it’s said with the faintest sneer and an imagined eye-roll. “Oh. Look. A poopy giraffe. How creative.” The way people say it, it sounds like a word reserved for mental patients and serial killers. “Oh. Look. A refrigerator full of eyeless human skulls. How creative.” Anybody in a creative industry is used to this. You tell someone what you do — writer, artist, musician — and they get that same poopy-giraffe head-collection look in their eyes, “Oh. Look. A writer. How creative.” Hey, fuck those people. Fuck ’em because they don’t grok the fact that creativity is what makes this whole human race not just function, but evolve.

4. Creativity Is Worthless Without Action

You can be as creative as you want, but unless you light a fire under your ass and shock-prod your brain-squirrels into powering the endeavor at hand, what’s the fucking point? Creativity demands action, direction, ambition. You tell me, “I want to write a novel about the persecution of magical ponies,” and then you sit there staring all slack-jawed, then the best you’ve done is committed an act of mental masturbation. Piss on inertia. Jump in. Get your hands dirty. Make something or shut up about it.

5. Creativity Is Dead Without Skill

Sucks, but there it is. “I want to write a novel about the persecution of magical ponies” is only going to be a functional expression of creativity if you have some measure of skill to go along with it — and yet, the irony is, you only gain a measure of skill by trying to do the thing you probably can’t do. Creativity is an eager beast, snorting and growling and ready to bust out of the stable, even if the beast is unready. You can’t walk until you can walk, but you still have to try to walk — even if that means falling on your face and shitting your britches in public. Mistakes must be made. Skill must be built. Creativity always runs ahead of your ability to perform the desired tasks, but hey, fuck it, that’s how we learn.

6. Early Frustration Indicative Of Imbalance

High creativity! Low skill. Sad trombone. Weepy panda. Creative-types often find themselves woefully frustrated by the process at hand. We feel like we’re beating our head against the wall, the ceiling, the floor. We experience that thing some might call “writer’s block,” or “painter’s obstacle,” or, uhhh, “flutist’s colonic obstruction.” Such frustration often grows out of that gulf between your rampant creativity and your nascent ability. You just have to push through the pain. Birth ain’t easy, people. It’s work. You’re going to turn your netherparts into microwaved bologna. It’s all part of the process. (See Ira Glass’ take on this problem here. Er, the problem of frustration, not of exploded birth canals.)

7. I Want To Rabbit-Punch The Term “Creative Writing” In The Kidneys

All writing is creative. Not just novels. Not just screenplays or games or the poetry you compose in your attic for all the little rats and roaches to read. All writing is creative. *bangs the gavel*

8. The Monkey With The Stick

The connotation of creativity is some goggle-eyed artist creating worlds with the tickling tips of his fingers — “Unicorns! Happy trees! Doodlebugs and space freighters!” — but that’s not what creativity is about at its core. Creativity is about problem solving. The monkey wants the ants in the hill and doesn’t know how to get them, so he breaks off a nearby stick and jams it in the anthill. Ten seconds later: delicious insect popsicle. Problems are an excellent motivator. Creativity needn’t trigger out of nowhere; it often activates when one is presented with a problem that needs an unexpected solution. Fiction requires this in spades: the author must solve problems he has created within the storyworld. Mmm. Delicious metanarrative conflictsicle.

9. The Frankenstein Monster Effect

The true power of creativity is gathering unlike things and glomming them together so that they function as one. For a storyteller, individual components needn’t be particularly original. The art is in the arrangement.

10. NF Over F, MFers

My bookshelves — comprising two full walls of my office — feature about 75% non-fiction, 25% fiction. Fiction does not generally inspire functional creativity. Reading fiction helps you to write fiction, yes, but over time you may find more creative value in gently shuffling your reading habits toward absorbing more non-fiction. Read broadly, widely, weirdly. Reading lots of non-fiction will expose you to a wide variety of those aforementioned “unlike things” and you’ll find this inspires more compelling arrangements than reading only fiction. A diet of fiction is regurgitory: it’s a Two Girls, One Cup version of the creative process. “I’ll poop in your mouth. Now you poop in my mouth.” Read a book about insects. Then read an article about the Hadron Collider. Then read about Shanghai in the 1930s. Your mind will find weird, glorious ways to cram these gears together in order to form a new machine.

11. Motes Of Dust To Mammoth Star Clusters

Creativity lives on the page at all levels, micro to macro. From word choice to worldbuilding, from sentence construction to story arcs. But the creative process must still be subject to organization. Creativity is not raw, unrefined whimsy. You don’t just fountain golden streams of infinite possibility from all your gurgling orifices. It has to work together. Shit has to make sense. But even then creativity lives in the margins and gaps: when something doesn’t make sense, creative problem solving will help Make It So.

12. Tickling Your Temporal Lobes

You can stimulate creativity. No, I don’t know how you do it. It’s as personal as What Makes You Laugh or What Gets You Off. Is it listening to music? Reading poetry? Going to a bar and drinking with your buddies and talking about whatever barmy goofy fucking shit comes into your fool heads? Do you draw mind-maps or outlines or write dream journals or light up your perineum with a quick blast from a stun-gun (BZZT)? Only way to know is to try anything and everything. Now take off your pants. (BZZT.)

13. The Zero Mind

Some rare flowers bloom at night, and sometimes creativity blooms in a vacuum of stimulation rather than as a result of it. If we assume that creativity is a muscle (it’s not, shut up, just pretend), then tensing it all the time is not productive. Sometimes it must relax. Sometimes it must be allowed to rest. Mow the lawn. Take a shower. Go for a walk. Get a massage. You can even set your brain like a slow-cooker before you go to sleep. In the morning? HARVEST ALL THE DELICIOUS IDEA CHILI. *nom nom nom*

14. You Catch More Bunnies With Tractor Beams Than With Giant Comical Wooden Mallets That Pound Them Into Bunny Fritters

You can coax creativity — but trust me when I say, you can’t force it. You can’t just grit your teeth and bug your eyes out and eject a litter of squalling idea-babies. NGGH POP. Doesn’t happen. You ever try to remember a name or word you can’t quite conjure? Or have sex when you’re totally not in the mood? Thinking extra hard about it and forcing it just doesn’t work. It usually just leads to frustration. It might mean your project is not yet ready. It may need time or (as above) stimulation. …and yes, “Bunny Fritters” is the pseudonym under which I write all my sexy romance novels.

15. Johnny Five Is Alive, And Also, Needs Input

Sometimes you need to jack new shit into your brain. You need to accept new Experience Modules as part of your human motherfucking program. Creativity may occur when you go out and try new things. Have new experiences. Eat foods you’ve never tried. Take a trip. Fuck somebody new (er, not if you’re in a committed loving relationship). Fly down a zip-line. HUNT AND KILL YOUR FELLOW MAN WHILE TRIPPING ON ACID. I mean, whut? Nothing. Point is, sometimes you need new input. You’d be amazed at how fresh experiences provide a defibrillator jolt to your creativity muscle. Which no, is not a euphemism for your wangle rod. And yes, “wangle rod” is a euphemism for penis. Shut up. I hate you so bad right now.

16. Prison Break From Your Comfort Zone

To build on that following point, you sometimes need to Hulk out, tear your purple shorts asunder, and bust free of the prison you’ve built out of your own routine and habits. It’s not just about new experiences but about new ways to work. Take risks. Experiment with a new style of writing. Sometimes creativity gets blocked behind an ice cube dam in your drinking glass and you need to rattle the cup and fill your mouth with the sweet milky fluid of… I’m suddenly uncomfortable. IN THE PANTS. Pow! Zing! Elbow nudge, elbow nudge! Ahem. Point is: sometimes you need to shake that shit up. Write in a different POV. Or tense. Or write shorter. Or longer. Or in a different genre. Fuck what people expect of you. The only thing they should expect is your best. Otherwise? Flail those Kermit arms and go crazy.

17. Explore Your Inner Art Teacher

Let your mind don the colorful frock! Drape a necklace made of whole conch shells around your neck! Bespectacle yourself in tortoise-shell spectacles! Okay, I mock the art teachers of the world, but seriously, to build again on the following points, sometimes it’s not just about finding new ways to write — it’s about finding new ways to create. I’m a sucker for photography and cooking. You might be into oil paints and the mandolin. That guy over there might be over macrame and the art of undetectable poisons. You’d be amazed at how a new artistic pursuit will widen your view and allow new creative synapses to fire.

18. The Muse: Substantial As A Ghost

The Muse is not real. Relying on the Muse is like leaning on a crutch made of playing cards. You are your own Muse. Inspiration comes from within, not from without. Dig deep into that pile of squirming viscera. Reach high into your gray matter. Find the pearl tucked inside your swiftly-beating heart. Stop looking elsewhere for that creative spark. You command it. It doesn’t command you.

19. You Cannot Damage Your Creativity

Some folks treat their creativity like it’s a baby mouse with a low fetal heart rate; someone sneezes in the next room and so dies the tiny beast. You cannot damage your creativity. It is not an expendable resource. Sometimes you hear people say that outlining diminishes their creativity. Or that if they write every day it somehow pees in the mouth of their peacock magic. If your creativity is so frail a thing, or if it demands highly specific circumstances to emerge like it’s some kind of precious lycanthrope, then you’re fucked. The professional life of a creative-type must stand up to buffeting winds and scorching temperatures.

20. I Smell Ozone And Can’t Feel My Legs

Your creativity isn’t broken and it isn’t “gone” — but push too hard and too fast and you’ll find that your interior intellectual space feels like it’s been rubbed raw with a rusted rasp. Ease off the stick, meth-monkey. Give yourself permission to suck. Take a break — but not too long of one.

21. The Left-Brain / Right-Brain MMA Cage Fight

“I’m right-brained,” said the wispy top-hat wearing Willy Wonka wannabe as he smeared paint on his own pallid buttocks. “That means I’m creative.” Pfft. Pssh. Piffle! The right-brain is not the keeper of creativity. Right-brain and left-brain work in tandem. Language is left-brained. Craft is left-brained. Plot logic is left-brained. The right-brain is the galloping stallion; the left-brain reins in the horse.

22. These Aren’t One-Handed Push-Ups

Creativity can be cultivated with the help of others. We aren’t alone. Bounce ideas. Share a meal. The act of creation need not begin, continue, or culminate in isolation. Fair warning: you may need to wear pants.

23. No One Tool, Method, Or Strategy

There exists no one shining path to access and grow your creativity. We’re not robots. I mean, I’m not. You might be, and I suppose your titanium chest-plate and telescoping eye-stalks should’ve given that away. But whatever. Most of us can’t just program our creativity to power on and off like a fucking lamp. It is what it is. We’re all different. We all have different tricks to allow us to pop our intellectual cookies.

24. Transformation Through Destruction

Shiva, god of destruction, is also a god of creation — that’s because transformation happens through annihilation. You may need to destroy your current manuscript. Or your excuses. Or your bad habits. Or your ego. Or the wretched soul-shackles we call “pants.” Sometimes creation is first about obliteration.

25. Sometimes, It Just Won’t Be There

Once in a while you’ll reach for your creativity and all you’ll find are empty shelves — but creative types do not always have the luxury of sitting on our hands until creativity decides to show its face. Doubly true when deadlines (and by proxy, money) is on the line. What do you do? You do. Meaning, you create anyway. You say fuck it and make shit anyway. If the pantry is empty you create food from whatever is near to hand: linoleum, chairs, guinea pigs, your children. You’d be amazed at how often you think you’ve got nothing left in the tanks and it turns out you hadn’t yet shined light in all the darkest corners. Confront the blank page. Being generative creates creativity. DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? *asplode*

1. A Series Of Word Choices

Here’s why this matters: because both writing and storytelling comprise, at the most basic level, a series of word choices. Words are the building blocks of what we do. They are the atoms of our elements. They are the eggs in our omelets. They are the shots of liquor in our cocktails. Get it right? Serendipity. Get it wrong? The air turns to arsenic, that cocktail makes you puke, this omelet tastes like balls.

2. Words Define Reality

Words are like LEGO bricks: the more we add, the more we define the reality of our playset. “The dog fucked the chicken” tells us something. “The Great Dane fucked the chicken” tells us more. “The Great Dane fucked the bucket of fried chicken on the roof of Old Man Dongweather’s barn, barking with every thrust” goes the distance and defines reality in a host of ways (most of them rather unpleasant). You can over-define. Too many words spoil the soup. Find the balance between clarity, elegance, and evocation.

3. The “Hot And Cold” Game

You know that game — “Oh, you’re cold, colder, colder — oh! Now you’re getting hot! Hotter! Hotter still! Sizzling! Yay, you found the blueberry muffin I hid under the radiator two weeks ago!” –? Word choice is like a textual version of that game where you try to bring the reader closer to understanding the story you’re trying to tell. Strong, solid word choice allows us to strive for clarity (hotter) and avoid confusion (colder).

4. Most With Fewest

Think of it like a different game, perhaps: you’re trying to say as much as possible with as few words as you can muster. Big ideas put as briefly as you are able. Maximum clarity with minimum words.

5. The Myth Of The Perfect Word

Finding the perfect word is as likely as finding a downy-soft unicorn with a pearlescent horn riding a skateboard made from the bones of your many enemies. Get shut of this notion. The perfect is the enemy of the good. For every sentence and every story you have a plethora of right words. Find a good word. Seek a strong word. But the hunt for a perfect word will drive you into a wide-eyed froth. Though, according to scholars, “nipplecookie” is in fact the perfect word. That’s why Chaucer used it so often. Truth.

6. No One Perfect Word, But A Chumbucket Of Shitty Ones

For every right word, you have an infinity of wrong ones.

7. Awkward, Like That Kid With The Headgear And The Polio Foot

You might use a word that either oversteps or fails to meet the idea you hope to present. A word in that instance would be considered awkward. “That dinner fornicated in his mouth” is certainly a statement, and while it’s perhaps not a technically incorrect metaphor, it’s just plain goofy (and uh, kinda gross). You mean that the flavors fornicated, or more likely that the flavors of the meal were sensual, or that they inspired lewd or libidinous thoughts. (To which I might suggest you stop French-kissing that forkful of short ribs, pervhouse.) To go with the food metaphor for a moment (“meat-a-phor?”), you ever take a bite of food and, after it’s already in your mouth, discover something in there that’s texturally off? Bit of gristle, stem, bone, eyeball, fingernail, whatever? The way you’re forced to pause the meal and decipher the texture with your mouth is the same problem a reader will have with awkward word choice. It obfuscates meaning and forces the reader to try to figure out just what the fuck you’re talking about.

8. Ambiguous, Like That Girl With That Thing Outside That Place

Remember how I said earlier that words are like LEGO, blah blah blah help define reality yadda yadda poop noise? Right. Ambiguous word choice means you’re not defining reality very well in your prose. “Bob ate lunch. It was good. Then he did something.” Lunch? Good? Something? Way to wow ’em with your word choice, T.S. Eliot. To repeat: aim for words that are strong, confident, and above all else, clarifying.

9. Incorrect, Like That Guy Who Makes Up Shit When He’s Drunk

Incorrect word choice means you’re using the wrong damn word. As that character says in that movie, “I do not think it means what you think it means.” Affect, effect. Comprise, compose. Sensual, sensuous. Elicit, illicit. Eminent, immanent, imminent. Allude, elude. Must I continue? Related: if you write “loose” instead of “lose,” I cannot be held accountable if I kick you so hard in your butthole you choke on a hemorrhoid.

10. Step Sure-Footedly

Point of fact: the English language was invented by a time-traveling spam-bot who was trapped in a cave with a crazy monk. Example: The word “umbrage” means “offense,” so, to take umbrage means to take offense. Ah, but it also means the shade or protection afforded by trees. I used to take the second definition and assume it carried over to the people portion of that definition. Thus, to “take umbrage” meant in a way to “take shelter” with a person, as in, to both be under the same shadow of the same tree. I used the word incorrectly for years like some shithead. If you’re uncertain about the use of any word, it’s easy enough to either not use it or use Google to define it (“define: [word]” is the search you need). Do not trust that the English language makes sense or that your recollection of its madness is pristine. It will bite you every time.

11. The Barbaric Barf-Yawn That Is Your First Draft

This is not a hard or fast rule (hell, none of this is), but in my highly-esteemed opinion (translation: debatable bullshit mumbled by a guy who thinks “cock-waffle” should be a part of our collective daily vocabulary), you don’t need — or want! — to refine your word choice in the first draft. That initial draft is, for me, a screaming weeping blubberfest where I just want to cry all the words out without any care in the world how they get onto the page. Second and subsequent drafts, however, are a good time to zero in on problems big and small. Don’t spend your first draft scrutinizing word choice.

12. Verbs: Strong Like Bull

For every action you’ll find a dozen or more verb-flavors of that action. You can drink your coffee or you can gulp, sip, guzzle, or inhale it. You can run down the street or you can jog, bolt, sprint, dash, saunter, or hotfoot it. You can have sex with someone or you can fuck ’em, hump ’em, make love to ’em, or ride ’em like Seabiscuit in a gimp mask. (Do they make gimp masks for horses? To the Googlemobile!) Use a strong verb that clarifies the action and makes sense in the context of the scene. A hostage escaping his kidnappers isn’t going to scamper away — he’s going to barrel, hurtle, bolt, or if you’re a fan of not-fixing-what-ain’t-broke, he’ll run like a motherfucker. If the base-level verb gives you maximum potency and clarity, then use it.

13. “I Like Playing With My Cats!” John Ejaculated From His Mouth

Mmmyeah, one caveat to the “strong clarifying verb” thing — it doesn’t apply to dialogue tags. No, no. Don’t resist. Hold still. Stop trying to chew through the duct tape. I know you want to your characters to yelp, blurt, scream, gibber, shriek, murmur, mumble, babble, explain, exhort, plead, interrupt, erupt, exclaim, and ejaculate constantly, but don’t do it. Do. Not. Do. It. Rely on “say/said” 80-90% of the time. You can, when seeking variety and clarification of action, use another dialogue tag.

14. The Verb “To Be”

Am. Is. Was. To Be. Will Be. Whatever. I’m not one of those who will tell you to cut out every instance of the verb “to be” in all its simple-headed forms because sometimes, simplicity is best. And yet, overuse of that verb may weaken your writing. Look for instances where the verb can be replaced by a stronger one or where it adds needless roughage to a sentence. “Barry is playing with himself in the corner” is better as “Barry plays with himself in the corner.” If you say, “It is my opinion that Rush Limbaugh should be stuffed with dynamite and exploded like a beached whale,” you’d be better off with, “I believe Rush Limbaugh…” instead. Oh, and if a sentence starts with “there is” or “it was,” you should attack that sentence with lasers.

15. The Word “Specificity” Is Really Fun To Say

No, really. Try it, I’ll wait. … Are you done yet? Specificity. Specificity. Spehhh-siiiihh-fiiiihh-sihhhh-teeee. Anyway. Moving on. Words help us define reality — nouns doubly so. Creature? Animal? Mammal? Cat? Panther? Housecat? Tomcat? Russian Blue? The North Canadian Spangled Bobtail? There I charted specificity to the point where it became useful and then crossed over into absurd bullshit. If I tell the reader that the cat is a “housecat,” we all get it. But if I say that the cat is a “Lambkin dwarf cat,” only a handful of cat geeks are ever going to grok my lingo. Aim for specific, but realize you can get too specific.

16. The Strong Spice Of Adverb And Adjective

Sometimes, a verb or noun just doesn’t tell the whole tale. I can say “housecat,” but I mean, “calico kitty with a sprightly attitude and a penchant for meowing loudly.” Calico. Sprightly. Loudly. These all modify the verbs and nouns present in order to paint a picture. Adverbs and adjectives provide both a deeper sense of specificity while also providing flavor or color to the world. They’re a strong spice. Use when you need, not when you want. Say what you mean and no more.

17. Adverbs Are Not Your Mortal Foe

Writers often bandy about that old crunchy nugget of of penmonkey wisdom — NO ADVERBS — as if it is bulletproof. As if a gang of adverbs shanked that writer’s mother in the kidneys as she stooped over to water the hydrangeas. Adverbs are not birthed from the Devil’s hell-womb. They’re just words. Did you know that “never” is an adverb? As is “here?” And “tomorrow?” You can rely too heavily on adverbs (and amateurish writers do). You can also use adverbs that are unnecessary or that sound clunky when staple-gunned to the end of a sentence. And adverbs paired with dialogue tags will often chafe one’s taint, but that doesn’t mean you need to hunt down every last adverb with a spear-gun.

18. The Thesaurus Is Not Satan’s Own Demon Gospel

The thesaurus is not a bad book (or, these days, website). I love the thesaurus because I have a brain like a rust-eaten bucket — shit slips through all the time. I’m constantly snapping my fingers saying, “There’s a word that’s like this other word but not quite and OH SHITDAMNIT I CAN’T REMEMBER IT WHO AM I AND WHY AM I WEARING LADIES’ UNDERWEAR?” So, I turn to the thesaurus not to look for a better, fancier word but instead to find the word my feeble mouse-eaten brain cannot properly recall. It is not the thesaurus that is the root of all evil but rather the love of the thesaurus that urges writers to commit the sin of pompous word choice. It is not a crutch; do not lean upon it.

19. Big Words For Tiny Penises

Smaller words are nearly always better than big ones. Big words put distance between you and the reader. Each added syllable is a speed-bump. Don’t use word choice to sound smart. Don’t talk circles around the reader. Your job is communication. Is your story a bridge between you and the reader — or is it a wall?

20. The Jingly Jangle Of Jargon

Jargon is when you rely on technical or area-specific terminology to get across your point. Jargon uses a limited vocabulary to speak to a small circle of people, and this is true whether you’re talking about some aspect specific to knight’s armor, a scientific theory, or the manufacture of space-age dildo technology. The test is easy. Ask yourself, will most people know what the fuck I’m talking about? If yes, carry on. If no, either use plain-spoken language or take the time to explain that shit you just slung into my eyes.

21. The Plumber Versus The Aristocrat

Certainly you have some leeway in terms of choosing the correct words for your expected audience. If you’re writing a novel about baseball, nobody would fault you for using a metric crap-sack of baseball terminology. You’ll certainly write different prose if you expect your audience to comprise plumbers instead of an aristocrats. Still, you’ll find value in reading to be read widely, not just by a subset of potential readers.

22. Junk In The Trunk

I’ll admit it: I love junk words. They are the greasy hamburger of prose, delicious to me and plump with empty calories. Effectively! In theory! Very! Happen to! Point is! You know? They offer minimal — if any! — functionality. Hunt them down with merciless abandon. Stomp them with cleated shoe until they squeal.

23. From The Department Of Redundancy Department

The repetition of one or several words can have a potent effect — but what happens a lot of time is, you repeat words accidentally. “The day was hot and heat vapors rose off the ground. The heat sapped Quinn’s energy.” Hot, heat, heat. A reader will trip on such repetition. And then he’ll fall down some steps and break his coccyx. Man, “coccyx” sounds like some kind of dinosaur bird, doesn’t it? THE MIGHTY COCCYX SWOOPS TO FEAST ON THE BABY TURTLEBUGS. I dunno. Shut up. Don’t judge me.

24. The Sound Of Words Matter

Words play off other words. Together they form rhythm. Choose words that pair well together, like red wine and steak. Or Pabst Blue Ribbon and hipster shame. Or heroin and delicious urinal cakes. Shakespeare knew that rhythm mattered and so chose words that slotted into iambic pentameter. The way you hear the rhythm of the words is to read your work aloud. Do that and you’ll find the flow — or, more importantly, find what’s damming the flow so you can fix it with proper word choice and sentence construction.

25. You Will Be Judged On The Words You Choose

Consider word choice to be a test posited by the audience. Make errors (lose/loose), they will see you for the rube you are. Write by relying on big words, heavy jargon and purple prose and they will see you as sticking your literary nose in the air. The result is the same: they will close the book and then beat you to death with it. They are also likely to violate your pallid carcass with various kitchen implements.

Write to be read. Choose words that have flavor but do not overwhelm, that reach out instead of pushing back, that sound right to the ear and carry with them a kind of rhythm. Write with confidence, not with arrogance. Don’t be afraid to play with words. But be sure to let the reader play with you.

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