Tag: 25things (page 6 of 12)

Recently I’ve been going through a process of “unfucking” a novel — parts of it fired really well, but it just didn’t feel right. Something about it just didn’t hang together, so it was time to break out all the tools a writer has in his arsenal — every scalpel, hatchet, reciprocating saw, Drilldo, and orbital laser I had in my cabinet of madness. The agent was instrumental in shining a light in dark corners on this book.

Thus I thought, “Well, hell, I should chronicle the grand unfucking at terribleminds.”

So, here we are.

This isn’t meant to be a list where you do everything on it. It’s a list where, when you discover your story may indeed be well and truly fucked, you come here looking for ways to reverse the heinous fuckery at hand.

First part of the list is geared toward helping you identify the fuckery.

Second part of the list is meant to help you provide the deep dicking your manuscript may require.

With that in mind, let’s commence to unfucking!

1. Find The Cancer

First up: root out the heinous fuckery at hand. Somewhere, your story went off the rails. The flow has been dammed up by some log-jam, some sewer-clog, and it’s your job to find out where the thing got gummed up. You cannot cure the cancer if you have no diagnosis indicating where it lives. Is it face cancer? Butt cancer? A deep and septic cancer of the soul? You need to know where to aim your editorial laser-knife.

2. Let It Sit And Pickle

Writers need time away from their work. Go at it too soon and you either hate it too much to let it live or love it too much to cut it with your steely knives. You need enough distance from the work to let you read it and believe that someone else wrote it — that distance allows you the cold, dispassionate dissecting the tale needs. Maybe that means you leave it for two weeks, two months, or two years. That’s on you to figure out. But when you dig back in, you’ll be amazed at the clarity a little time has afforded you. The trouble spots will start to stand out like a shadow on an X-Ray.

3. Read It Aloud

Another good way to get a feel for the story: read it aloud. Last week I interviewed author and alpha clone Dan O’Shea, and he said some characteristically smart shit about reading your work aloud: “Writing is just a system humans dreamed up because the sound of speech was transitory. … When you read something out loud, you catch things with  your ears that you don’t with your eyes. All the awkward little constructions that your eyes rolled right over, the word you are repeating too often, the dialogue that’s glaringly bad when read out loud – your ears will catch bullshit that your eyes never will.”

4. Solicit The Help Of A Story Doctor

Sometimes objectivity only comes at the hands of someone who plainly Isn’t You. Agent. Editor. Beta reader. Strange homeless guy who has a cardboard sign reading: WILL UNFUCK MANUSCRIPTS FOR BOTTLE OF RED WINE AND NEW PAIR OF UNDERWEAR. (Which is, for the record, a seriously good deal.) You can’t always WebMD this shit. Sometimes you need a proper story doc to diagnose the patient.

5. Determine Severity Of Fucked-Upedness

Okay, good. You now know that your story is bewitched by fuckery-most-foul. The question now becomes: just how befuckered is the tale? To what depths do the rancidity and rottenness go? I’ll suggest that the condition of the story will demand one of three courses of action (which we will call “The Three R’s”): it may need Refining, Repairing, or Rebuilding. Refining is easy enough — the story’s got grit in its panties and it just needs to shake out the sand. Give it a thorough washing, waxing and polishing and you’re good. Repair means getting handsy with it — move some chapters around, excise a supporting character, tinker with the overall architecture of the thing (“MORE FLYING BUTTRESSES”). Rebuild is… well. No good way to say it, is there? Time to pack the walls with C4 and bring the whole thing down. Only then can the phoenix fly free from the pile of ash you left on the linoleum. More on that last one later.

6. Carve A Prison Shiv From Your Prose

A story can be held back by the language used to tell it. The story itself may be in tip-top fighting shape, but a story that’s poorly-written won’t ever make it to the ring. Refining language is key. Go through every sentence with pruning shears. Cut out junk language like so many fatty tumors. Dead-head your darlings. The goal of a sentence is clarity above all else. (Shameless self-promotion time: 250 Things You Should Know About Writing features: “25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Fucking Sentence.”)

7. Rearrange The Revelations

No, I don’t mean the final book of the Bible — you can rearrange that book however you want, it’ll still read like an eschatalogical acid trip. (“Holy shit, is Jesus karate-fighting a dragon!?”) No, I mean, a narrative progression is about the revelation of your story, and sometimes you need to re-jigger the timing of how you reveal certain things. Put differently: rearrange the sequence of narrative events (also known as: “the plot”). Your story may be frontloaded with too much drama — or not enough.

8. Re-Outline That Sumbitch

I just did this, and Sweet Sally Sugarbottom did it do my story wonders: first, take your story and outline it as it exists. Now you’ve got the story’s bones laid bare before you (perhaps on index cards, if you’re so inclined) and it becomes easy at this macro level to start doing what I just said you should do: rearrange the pieces. But — but! — not only does it help you rejigger, it helps you find problem spots. I literally killed off a handful of chapters and re-outlined new ones. Suddenly, I could see the forest for the trees — and it helped me hunt down the tumor-bedraggled grizzly bear that was eating all my wonderful story bunnies. No, I don’t know what that means. I just wanted to write “tumor-bedraggled grizzly bear.” And “story bunnies.” And also, I ate fistfuls of peyote earlier. So, there’s that.

9. Learn To Be Fashionably Late

You’ve got this whole beginning, right? This whole first act where you establish characters and create exposition and set the setting and — ZZZzzZzzz — wuzza? Whooza? Who are you? Why are my pants undone? Fuck the beginning. Take a chainsaw and lop off the whole first act (er, roughly — the chainsaw is not a precision tool, after all). Start the story as late into the plot as you can possibly manage without completely obliterating reader comprehension. This is true of individual scenes, too — Chris Holm, in his interview here at terribleminds, said: “If there’s a scene you think just grinds the story to a halt, before you go chucking the whole damn thing, try deleting the first and last paragraphs of that scene. I’ll bet you it reads better.” See? Smart dude. High-five to him.

10. The Glue Of The Throughline

Obi-Wan Kenobi, before all that stinky Midichlorian hoo-hah, said something really cool about the Force: “It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the Galaxy together.” (Assuming he wasn’t talking about some bondage fuck-party at some Huttese orgy palace on Tatooine, I guess.) In terms of writing, Obi-Wan could’ve been talking about a story’s throughline. The throughline is everything. The throughline is the element (or several elements braided together) that is found on every page of your story. It’s theme and motivation and idea and conflict bundled up together. And guess what? Your story may not have one. Or, more likely, it may have an inconsistent throughline. Take time to identify a throughline. Then take the time to hammer that nail through the whole of your manuscript.

11. Unearth The Emotional Core

The emotional core is the molten hot heart of your story — but it remains properly concealed, because if unleashed it will burn the rest of your story in a scorching wave of fiery twee pap. (If you say “fiery twee pap” over and over again, an elf will appear and Taser you in the face. True story, try it out. Then film it and put it on YouTube.) That said, while you may not expose the emotional core, it should still power the story like a big ol’ battery. Have you identified the emotional core of the story — and, the emotional core of each character? Do you know the emotional component that drives them? Is that emotion present and keenly felt (if not entirely seen)? You may need to install an emotional core inside your tale. Which makes your story sound like a spaceship. Which is kind of fucking awesome.

12. Tighten The Gooshy Mushy Middle

The middle of your story can feel like everyone is lost in the desert. Like the narrative structure has dissolved into a gallumphing pile of gray, raisin-specked ooze. The middle needs tension. The middle needs structure. Consider a mid-point act break — smack dab in the middle of the story, change things. Pivot the tale. Let the narrative experience a state change (steam to water, water to ice). Make sure that escalation and conflict are continuing through the middle — don’t let the second act play out as a straight line connecting the first and third.

13. Ensure Every Scene Has A Porpoise

If a scene fails to have a dolphin or porpoise, then your story is a bonafide turd-blossom. *checks notes* Wait, that’s not it. Oh. Oh. Purpose! Heh. Hah. Oh. Let’s try this again. Each scene must have a purpose. Test each scene. Weigh it in your hand. Does it have narrative purpose? Meaning, does it just sit there, or does it get up and go to motherfucking work? Does it push the plot forward? Does it reveal something new about the characters? Does it tell us something we didn’t know before? If you can’t find its purpose, kill it. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to replace it, either (though a transition may be required).

14. Speaking Of Transitions. . .

Sometimes, transitions are all you need. A plot can feel inconsistent and inconsequential if you haven’t drawn the proper bridges connecting each event to the next. The opposite can be true, too. You may have too many needless transitions. Don’t spend 10 pages getting the characters to where they’re going. I mean, unless they’re riding jet-skis. BECAUSE FUCK YEAH JET SKIS. *vroom vroom splash eeee!*

15. Blow Shit Up, Boom

Fuck the status quo. Your story got boring, son. Hey, it happens. It settled like a sleepy snake taking a nap in a wheel rut. How to fix? Blow something up. This can be literal (as in Stephen King’s THE STAND, when a writing block in that story led him to blow up half the characters with a bomb), or metaphorical (meaning, you drop a “bomb” that reverberates throughout the entire rest of the story).

16. Not Enough Dialogue

Dialogue is story lube. We hit a patch of dialogue and we glide right over it — it’s textually light, easy on the eyes, and it damn sure keeps things moving. Yet it has great potential to carry forward plot, character, and theme. Look at the actual construction of language upon the page. Do you see lots of description? Great heaving tsunamis of text? Will the audience feel as if they’ve been walled away with the cask of Amontillado? Cut that down, break it up, and add liberal helpings of dialogue.

17. Faster, Pussycat, Write, Write, Write

Pacing is key — you want a story that moves, not a story that lays there like a fat old housecat on the windowsill. That’s not to say every story needs to whoosh forward like it has a bitey ferret shoved up the pooper, but certainly you want to take a long look at a story that has all the momentum of a moth caught in cold honey. How to increase pacing? First, language. Use shorter paragraphs and sentences. Get to the action quicker. Keep things moving — boom boom boom boom. Second, cut out plot fat. Anything that the audience does not absolutely need to know should not be told. Third, chop out heavy description and exposition. And remember that note about dialogue: story lube.

18. Breathe Oxygen Into The Tale

The other side of pacing is that things can go too quick — sometimes you need to cool your heels, hoss. A story needs oxygen. You need to cool down the tension so that the readers get to catch their breath before you push them off the cliff once more. Do things feel like they’re moving at a pace too frenetic? Stretch it out, like taffy. Interject some strong emotional beats to space out the action.

19. Tantric Storytelling

One of the reasons we read is to pursue mysteries. We are transfixed by variables; we are held fast by unanswered questions. So, unanswer some already-answered questions. Withhold revelation. Find those things you’ve already told the reader and pull back. Keep it obfuscated — answer as late in the story as you possibly can. A lot of storytelling is you being a dick and not telling the reader things. You’re promising them, “Oh, no, I’ll answer that question real soon,” and then soon as they dive for the carrot you pull it back another five inches. “Soon,” you say again. Then, just as you’re about to lose them: POW. Mystery answered.

20. Your Characters In Full 3-D And Smell-o-Vision

Your characters might be falling flat. Reason? They are flat. They’re too simple. Too predictable. They have all the depth and breadth of a hot pink Post-It note. Give your characters some complexity. Motivations and fears don’t always need to be so cut-and-dry. Desires can compete. Characters should zig when the audience wants them to zag. They should be able to still surprise us. Pull each character out and give her a good long look. Is she too simple? Too one-note and on-the-nose? Then either fill her with the breath of complexity or throw that boring-ass douche-cookie in the refuse bin. Mmm. Douche-cookies. So vinegary!

21. You’re Being Too Nice

A storyteller must possess a savage cruelty, a compunction to do great harm to both character and the audience who loves that character. Look over your story. Are you pulling punches? Does the story operate at maximum malice? Stop glad-handing it. It’s not your job to be kind. Show your teeth. Sharpen your claws. Let the audience gaze upon the terror of your FUCK YOU IMMA EAT YOUR CHILDREN face.

22. Hot Sub-Plot Injection

We like a layered story, a tale with lasagna layers of meat and cheese and sauce and unexpected spices (“Is this sage? Do I taste… marmoset saliva? Oh! These ivory buttons give it such crunch!”). Sub-plots help give a story added complexity. A sub-dermal love story? An off-the-books heist-gone-wrong? The reconciliation of two best friends long ago separated by one’s preference of cake over pie (the blasphemy!)? Whatever. The sub-plot should bolster the main plot and should offer more of that throughline we talked about earlier.

23. You’ve Lost The Thread

Theme is the argument you’re making with the story. All men are doomed to fail. Or, nature wins over nurture. Or, pie is delicious and anybody who says cake is better than pie is clearly a Manchurian Candidate put here to assassinate our leaders. Right? Right. Sometimes, though, you’ll find parts of your story — scenes, characters, whole chapters — that seem to entirely ignore your theme and go traipsing off on their own. Such portions will stick out like broken noses. Find those outliers. Either tweak to confirm theme or eradicate and put something better in their place.

24. The Disappointing Ejaculation

Your story’s ending is everything. A great story with a real poodle-fucker of an ending feels like a let-down and can take a whizz all over the rest of the story. It’s a grumpy panda playing a sad trombone. The ending might not make sense. It might be too predictable. Maybe you just tapped out early and descended into a flurry of senseless profanity. “And then the three elves went to the old wizard and FUCKDUNKING JIZZFARMING SONOFACOCKJUGGLING NIPPLE-THIEF.” Sometimes a fucked-up story just needs you go back in and hammer out a new ending. So, go do that. I’ll wait here. Shameless self-promo #2: 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer has within its digital folds: “25 Things You Should Know About Endings.”

25. Go All Dalek On They Asses: Exterminate!

When I first wrote BLACKBIRDS, that book was all over the place. It was like some hyperactive child upended his toy-box all over the floor — the tale had no cohesion, the narrative components were everywhere, it was more a “pile of shit” than a “lean mean tightrope walk.” Came a point when I realized I had a good idea — in fact, many good ideas — in there, but the lit-puke I’d yarfed up on the page was never going to cut it. And so I fixed it the same way we’re going to fix civilization after the Mayan apocalypse: I destroyed everything and rebuilt it from the ground up. Meaning, I rewrote it. I scrapped everything I’d done and started over. (After re-0utlining, if you must know.) Then, in a few short weeks, I had a much more sensible, streamlined draft — a draft that would go on to get me an agent, a book deal, a film deal, a moving van full of gold doubloons, and a harem of book groupies with astoundingly loose morals. (Okay, that might not all be true.) Point is, sometimes you have to blow it all up and start over. No harm in that. In fact, it might be the best — if not the most pleasant — thing for your story.

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

Seen a lot of folks giving advice to so-called “aspiring” writers these days, so, I figured what the hell? Might as well throw my dubious nuggets of wisdom into the stew. See if any of this tastes right to you.

1. No More Aspiring, Dingbats

Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It’s as ludicrous as saying, “I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor.” Either pick it up or don’t. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper’s full. Take it off or stop talking about it.

2. Kick Your Lowest Common Denominator In The Kidneys

You can aspire to be a lot of other things within the writing realm, and that’s okay. You can aspire to be a published author. Or a bestselling author. Or a professional freelance writer. Or an author who plagiarizes his memoir and gets struck with a wooden mallet wielded by Oprah live on primetime television. You should aspire to be a better writer. We all should. Nobody is at the top of his game. We can all climb higher.

3. Aspiring Writers, Far As The Eye Can See

Nobody respects writers, yet everybody wants to be one (probably because everybody wants to be one). Point is, you want to be a writer? Good for you. So does that guy. And that girl. And him. And her. And that old dude. And that young broad. And your neighbor. And your mailman. And that chihuahua. And that copy machine. Ahead of you is an ocean of wannabe ink-slaves and word-earners. I don’t say this to daunt you. Or to be dismissive. But you have to differentiate yourself and the way you do that is by doing rather than be pretending. You will climb higher than them on a ladder built from your wordsmithy.

4. We All Booby-Trap The Jungle Behind Us

There exists no one way toward becoming a professional writer. You cannot perfectly walk another’s journey. That’s why writing advice is just that — it’s advice. It’s mere suggestion. Might work. Might not. Lots of good ideas out there, but none of it is gospel. One person will tell you this is the path. Another will point the other way and say that is the path. They’re both right for themselves, and they’re both probably wrong for you. We all chart our own course and burn the map afterward. It’s just how it is. If you want to find the way forward, then stop looking for maps and start walking.

5. The Golden Perfect Path Of The Scrivening Bodhisattvas

Point is, fuck the One True Way. Doesn’t exist. Nobody has answers — all you get are suggestions. Anybody who tells you they have The Answer is gassy with lies. Distrust such certainty and play the role of skeptic.

6. Yes, It Always Feels This Way

You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you’re the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, or yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.

7. Figure Out How You Write, Then Do That

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won’t come naturally at all. Maybe you’ll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

8. Finish Your Shit

I’m just going to type this out a dozen times so it’s clear: finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit. Finish your shit! FINISH YOUR SHIT. Finish. Your. Shit. Fiiiiniiiish yooooour shiiiiit. COMPLETO EL POOPO. Vervollständigen Sie Ihre Fäkalien! Finish your shit.

9. You Need To Learn The Rules. . .

…in order to know when they must be broken.

10. You Need To Break The Rules. . .

… in order to know why they matter.

11. What I Mean By Rules Is–

Writing is a technical skill. A craft. You can argue that storytelling is an art. You can argue that art emerges from good writing the way a dolphin riding a jet-ski emerges the longer you stare at a Magic Eye painting. But don’t get ahead of yourself, hoss. You still need to know how to communicate. You need to learn the laws of this maddening land. I’ve seen too many authors want to jump ahead of the skill and just start telling stories — you ever try to get ahead of your own skill level? I used to imagine pictures in my head and I’d try to paint them in watercolor and they’d end up looking like someone barfed up watery yogurt onto the canvas. I’d rail against this: WHY DON’T THEY LOOK BEAUTIFUL? Uhh, because you don’t know how to actually paint, dumb-fuck. You cannot exert your talent unless you first have the skill to bolster that talent.

12. Oh, The Salad Days Of College!

Why are the days of our youth known as “salad days?” Is “salad” really the image that conjures up the wild and fruitful times of our adolescence? “Fritos,” maybe. Or “Beer keg.” I dunno. What were we talking about? Ah! Yes. College. Do you need it? Do you need a collegiate education, Young Aspirant to the Penmonkey Order? Need, no. To get published nobody gives a flying rat penis whether or not you have a degree. They just care that you can write. Now, college and even post-grad work may help you become a better writer — it did for me! — though, I’d argue that the money you throw into the tank getting there may have been better spent on feeding yourself while you just learn how to write in whatever mousetrap you call a domicile. You can only learn so much from someone teaching you how to write. Eventually you just have to write.

13. Reading Does Not Make You A Writer

That’s the old piece of advice, isn’t it? “All you need to do is read and write to be a writer.” You don’t learn to write through reading anymore than you learn carpentry by sitting on a chair. You learn to write by writing. And, when you do read something, you learn from it by dissecting it — what is the author doing? How are characters and plot drawn together? You must read critically — that is the key.

14. Here Is Your Tin Cup, Your Hobo Bindle, Your Rat-Nest Undies

You’re going to starve for a while, so just get used to that now. Don’t quit your day job. Yet.

15. Commerce Is Not The Enemy Of Art

If you think commerce somehow devalues art, then we’re done talking. I got nothin’ for you. Money doesn’t devalue art any more than art devalues money — commerce can help art, hurt art, or have no effect. The saying isn’t Money is the root of all evil. It’s The love of money is the root of all evil. Commerce only damages art when the purpose of the art is only money. So it is with your writing.

16. Overnight Success Probably Isn’t

Suddenly on your radar screen is a big giant glowing mass like you’d see when a swarm of xenomorphs is closing fast on your position and it’s like, “Hey! This author appeared out of nowhere! Overnight success! Mega-bestseller! Million-dollar deal!” And then you get it in your head: “I can do that, too. I can go from a relative nobody to America’s Favorite Author, and Oprah will keep me in a gilded cage and she’ll feed me rare coffees whose beans were first run through the intestinal tract of a dodo bird.” Yeah, except, those who are “overnight successes,” rarely appear out of nowhere. It’s the same way that an asteroid doesn’t “just appear” before destroying earth and plunging it into a dust-choked dead-sun apocalypse: that fucker took a long time to reach earth, even if we didn’t notice. Overnight successes didn’t win the lottery. They likely toiled away in obscurity for years. The lesson is: work matters.

17. Meet The Universe In The Middle

My theory in life and writing is this — and it’s some deeply profound shit, so here, lower the lights, put on a serious turtleneck with a houndstooth elbow-patched jacket over it, and go ahead and smoke this weird hash I stole from an Afghani cult leader. The theory is this: meet the universe halfway and the universe will meet you in return. Explained more completely: there exist components of any career (but writing in particular) that are well beyond your grasp. You cannot control everything. Some of it is just left to fate. But, you still have to put in the work. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t run out the storm. You must maximize your chances. You do this by meeting the universe halfway. You do this by working.

18. Self-Publishing Is Not The Easy Way Out

Self-publishing is a viable path. It is not, however, the easy path. Get shut of this notion. You don’t just do a little ballerina twirl and a book falls out of your vagina. (And if that does happen, please see a doctor. Especially if you’re a dude.) It takes a lot of effort to bring a proper self-published book to life. Divest yourself of the idea that it’s the cheaper, easier, also-ran path. Faster, yes. But that’s all.

19. No, Total Stranger, I Don’t Want To Read Your Stuff

I really don’t. And neither does any other working author. It’s nothing personal. We just don’t know you from any other spam-bot lurking in the wings ready to dump a bucket of dick pills and Nigerian money over our heads. That’s not to say we won’t be friendly or are unwilling to talk to you about your work, but we’re already probably neck deep in the ordure of our own wordsmithy. (Or we’re drunk and confused at a Chuck-E-Cheese somewhere.) We cannot take the time to read the work of total strangers. Be polite if you’re going to ask. And damn sure don’t get mad when we say no.

20. Your Jealousy And Depression Do Not Matter

All writers get down on themselves. It’s in our wheelhouse. We see other writers being successful and at first we’re all like, “Yay, good for that person!” but then ten minutes later we get this sniper’s bullet of envy and this poison feeling shoots through the center of our brain like a railroad spike: BUT WHY NOT ME? And then we go take a bath with a toaster. Fuck that. Those feelings don’t matter. They don’t help you. They may be normal, they may be natural, but they’re not useful and they’re certainly not interesting.

21. Talking About Writing Is Not The Same As Writing

Needs no further comment.

22. Pack Your Echo Chamber With C4 And Blow It Skyward

Aspiring writers lock themselves away in echo chambers filled with other aspiring writers where one of two things often happen: one, everybody gives each other happy handjobs and nobody writes anything bad and everybody likes everything and it’s a big old self-congratulatory testicle-tickling festival; two, it’s loaded for bear by people who don’t know how to give good criticism and the criticism is destructive rather than constructive and it’s just a cloud of bad vibes swirling around your head like a plague of urinating bats. If you find yourself in this kind of echo chamber, blow a hole in the wall and crawl to freedom.

23. Learn To Take A Punch

Agents, editors, reviewers, readers, trolls on the Internet, they’re going to say things you don’t want to hear. A thick skin isn’t enough. You need a leathery carapace. A chitinous exoskeleton. Writing is a hard-knock career where you invite a bevy of slings and arrows into your face and heart. It is what it is.

24. You Can Do Whatever The Fuck You Want

As a writer, the world you create is yours and yours alone. Someone will always be there to tell you what you can’t do, but they’re nearly always wrong. You’re a writer. You can make anything up that you want. It may not be lucrative. It may not pay your mortgage. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about what’s going on between you and the blank page before you. It’s just you and the story. If you love it and you want to write it, then wire your trap shut and write it. And write it well. Expect nothing beyond this — expect no reward, expect no victory parade — but embrace the satisfaction it gives you to do your thing.

25. The One No-Fooling Rule

Is “write.” Write, write, write, motherfucking write. Write better today than you did yesterday and better tomorrow than you did today. Onward, fair penmonkey, onward. If you’re not a writer, something will stop you — your own doubts, hate from haters, a bad review, poor time management, a hungry raccoon that nibbles off your fingers, whatever. If you’re a writer, you’ll write. And you’ll never stop to look back.

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

Around these parts, my so-called “Lists of 25” seem to get lots of love — which means it’s high-time for another collection! If you’re itchy for an avalanche of 500 tips and thoughts on the subject of writing and the writer’s life, look no further — because the next in the series is about to come tumbling down the mountain, smothering you beneath the blanket of its dubious penmonkey wisdom.

For $2.99, you can get your inky mitts on the e-book at:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (UK)

Barnes & Noble

Or, you can procure here (PDF or, by request, ePub/Mobi) by clicking the following:

(Please note that buying direct through terribleminds may take time for fulfillment — ideally you’ll receive the e-book within an hour of ordering, but if Paypal is slow to alert me or if I’m, say, asleep, then you can expect a slower turnaround. You should receive the file within 24 hours — if not, contact me at terribleminds at gmail. Also, you will receive PDF by default — please send a note with your order if you want ePub or Mobi.)

Also, for this first week (ending Sunday, Feb 26), I’m offering a special deal —

You give me $5.00, I’ll send you all three of the “List of 25” books, which means you get 250 THINGS, 500 WAYS, and 500 MORE WAYS (in PDF) for a mere five bucks. Just click the Paypal link below:

What The King Hell Is This?

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER is the sequel to 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER (which is itself a sequel to 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING).

Nab this book and you’ll find within a series of lists geared toward enlightening you with the short sharp satori smack of dubious writing wisdom. The book contains a veritable horse-choker of writing advice meant to help novelists, screenwriters and other storytellers better understand topics near and dear to the penmonkey existence. The book answers questions such as, “How do I find my voice? What should I know about procuring an agent? How do I find the proper story structure for my story? Where are my pants?”

500 MORE WAYS contains the following:

25 Financial F**k-Ups Writers Make

25 Mistakes To Look For In Your Writing

25 Reasons Readers Will Keep Reading Your Story

25 Reasons Readers Will Quit Reading Your Story

25 Reasons Writers Are Bug-F**k Nuts

25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called “Aspiring” Writers

25 Things Writers Should Know About Blogging

25 Things Writers Should Know About Agents

25 Things Writers Should Start Doing (As Soon As Possible)

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Starting Right Now)

25 Things You Should Know About Narrative Structure

25 Things You Should Know About Protagonists

25 Things You Should Know About Rejection

25 Things You Should Know About Setting

25 Things You Should Know About Suspense And Tension In Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Your Authorial Voice

25 Things You Should Know About Your “Finished” Novel

25 Ways For Writers To Help Other Writers

Appendix I: 25 More Writing Challenges

Appendix II: 25 Things You Should Know About Me

Several of those are brand new and are not replicated here at the website (Mistakes, Blogging, Setting, Challenges, About Me). Further, none of this is replicated in my other writing books.

The book is ~50,000 words of hot tasty content.

Why Buy?

Because it’s a face full of NSFW (and quite possibly NSFL) thoughts about writing, including how to properly describe your story’s setting, how to write a query without causing a potential agent to run screaming toward the Eject button, how to stop being an aspiring writer and become an actual writer, and how to keep the audience glued to the story you’re telling. The book takes my usual approach with so-called writing advice, which is that I aim to be in some way enlightening. When that fails, I aim to at least be humorous. And when that fails, I aim to dazzle you with creative profanity and repeated bludgeoning use of words like “unicorn” or “poop.” (But not, curiously, “unicorn poop.”)

Or, maybe it’s because you want to support terribleminds. This site has become more costly to operate (the higher view count has demanded a more “top-shelf” hosting plan so the site doesn’t go down), and further, I’m looking into making some changes around here (better comment system, e-book store, some squashed bugs). Doing that requires a little extra green in the billfold. Does anyone use the word “billfold” anymore? I mean, except sweater-clad grandfathers?

Or, maybe it’s because you want to help feed this little dude–

I mean, c’mon. He’s cute as a ferris wheel full of kittens, this kid.

Whatever the case, if you spread the word, I say thank you. If you procure the collection, I say double thanks. I can only do what I do because you terribleminds readers are the best around.

And nothing’s ever gonna keep you down.

*crane kick*

It seems like a good time for a spiritual successor to my earlier “Beware of Writer” posts — this time, jacked into the popular “25 Things” format here that all you cats and kittens seem to like. Plus, it’s sometimes good to speak to the non-writers out there, let ’em know why we get that spooky glint in our eyes once in a while. You wanna know why we’re a little wacky? I gotcher 25 reasons right here.

1. We Destroy Our Imaginary Friends

Authors invent people. Out of thin air. They reach into the moist and dewy folds of the invisible thought vagina and from that squishy space birth people who have never existed, and who will never exist. We give ourselves — and by proxy, the audience — reasons to care about these people. They become our imaginary friends. Then we take our imaginary friends and fuck them over ten ways till Tuesday. “This is Dave. We all like Dave. Good hair. Nice teeth. We can all relate to Dave. Uh-oh! Dave’s wife just left him. Stole the kids. And now he’s being hunted by a serial killer from the moon! HA HA HA HA SUCK A DICK DAVE.”

2. We Specialize In Creative Ways To Die

We’re basically murderers who just don’t have the balls to actually go out and kill some motherfuckers. It’s not just stories about aliens chomping on people’s guts or thugs stabbing other thugs — books and films and comic books are showcases for every form of misery and doom one could imagine. Once in a while you’ll be walking along and suddenly a thought will strike you: “I wonder if I could work it into a story where some dude gets his guts vacuumed out his boothole by an out-of-control Roomba. I bet I could. Time to murder some non-existent humans. To the writermobile!”

3. Behold The Bad News Boner

It’s not just murder. It’s all kinds of bad news. Bus crash! Small town swallowed by avalanche! Exploding nuns! Deadly form of herpes escapes lab on the back of a carnivorous shark-llama hybrid! Oh noes! Bad news! Yay! I want to rub it all over my body like a cream or unguent! I want to wear its stink and huff the stench of cataclysm and catstrophe to get me jacked up for my next story! Exclamation points! Can’t stop!

4. “I Was Once Born With A Tail!”

We are trained to be gifted liars. Anybody who writes fiction — or works for Fox News — is tasked with the job of convincing others that Things That Are Absolutely Not True are, in fact, Totally Fucking True. Our entire job is predicated on being good at spinning a complicated web of deception. Truth? Bo-ring. Lies? High-five! Lies make Story Jesus giggle as if you’re tickling his tummy. I imagine all writers have those moments where they’re sitting around their office, pantsless, an empty whiskey bottle spinning idly at their feet — they rub their eyes and mutter, “I don’t know what’s real and what’s fake anymore.” Then the writer hops on his rocket unicorn and goes to buy a cat-burger from the fish-faced Atlantean fellow down on Bumbershoot Street. See? The lies just fall out of me. Like chewing gum from a dead man’s mouth.

5. Quiet Loners

Whenever they find some whackaloon with a collection of severed heads in his freezer, they always trot out the neighbors and you get that classic line: “He was always so quiet.” And the assumption becomes, oh, that seemingly nice-and-quiet chap next door needed his quiet time because he was too busy with his hobby of decapitating dudes. On the other hand: hey, maybe him being quiet and alone all the time made him crazy. Maybe you spend too long cooped up with yourself the carpet starts moving and the wallpaper shifts and the room starts to whisper, You know what would be awesome? A sweet-ass collection of severed heads. Get on that. This is probably a good time to remind you that writers happen to spend a lot of time alone and cooped up with themselves. Just, uhh, putting that out there. What, this old thing? Just a hacksaw.

6. The Grotto Of Insanity

Our office spaces soon begin to reflect our quiet and lonely — and inevitably crazy — lifestyle. Teetering towers of books that threaten to crush us. Pens laying everywhere (and if you’re me, half of them are chewed on, the toxic ink and plastics long settled into my body). Over there, a plate of what may have once been a burrito but now looks like a brain made of fungus. Next to it, a small handgun. Next to that, a dead pigeon. Underneath the desk, a noisy pile of Red Bull cans, liquor bottles, and ammunition casings. Behind us, a cabinet full of freeze-dried severed heads. Our offices inevitably turn into wombs, that is, if wombs were responsible for birthing the raw stuff of crazy into the world.

7. The Nexus Of Madness Is Atop Our Wibbly-Wobbly Necks

If you think our offices are the domicile of the insane, you should see the inside of our heads. It’s the asylum from 12 Monkeys all up in these motherfuckers. And we live here all the goddamn time. No escape!

8. Creativity Is Seen As A Commodity Of The Lazy And Insane

You tell most people what you do and you get this look — it’s a look that perfectly contains a tempest of information, a tangle of thoughts (and none of them good). You get a mixture of, Oh, he’s one of those, or, Look, another hipster-slacker-socialist-asshole stealing all our precious unemployment, or, He doesn’t look like he’s starving so he must have a trust fund keeping him alive, or, Ugh, that’s not a real job. Swamp logger, that’s a real job. Writer’s just something you say when you like to smoke drugs all day. It’s really quite disheartening. You get those looks often enough it starts to crack your egg a little bit, dontcha know?

9. The Love-Me Hate-Me Two-Step

Here, then, is the critical dichotomy of our process: we have to love an idea so much we’re willing to spend the great deal of time shoveling it into the world, and then we have to switch gears and learn to hate the thing we just created in order to improve it. We puff up our ego, then lance it with a hot pin. It’s like giving birth to a child who you love with all your heart until you throw him out into the icy woods with a note pinned to his chest reading: this is how you learn to survive, you little turd. Writers are the tragedy and comedy masks whirling about, trading places again and again. And it’s all a bit barmy, innit?

10. Caffeine Poisoning

Writers drink so much caffeine that eventually the synapses start to break down like wires chewed by starving squirrels. And then those starving squirrels make a ratty nest of old leaves and smelly yarn inside our heads. We end up as gutted automatons piloted by a tribe of twitchy squirrels. Metaphorically.

11. Alcohol Poisoning

Coffee, then liquor, then coffee, then liquor. Okay, yes, I know, not every writer is a pickled booze-sponge, but some drink enough for all, I suspect. All that booze affects the liver and just as the liver is kind of the bouncer for the human body, detoxing all that bad voodoo, Plato felt that another function of the liver was to keep in check a human’s darkest emotions. Meaning, the liver’s purpose was to bottle up all the crazy. And what do writers do? OBLITERATE THE LIVER WITH DRINK. Be free, little crazies! Be free!

12. “I Got A Bad Case Of The Penmonkeys, Man”

We’re addicts for our wordsmithy. Over time, it just happens. One day you’ve been writing so long that when a day comes you don’t put words to paper it feels like that space between your heart and your guts is filled with a cluster of bitey eels that want out, and the only way to give them egress is to start writing again. We’re word-junkies, man. Ink-slingers. Fiction fiends. The only cure is another taste of that sweet story.

13. Control Freaks With Nothing To Control

Inside our stories, we’re gods among mortals — our hands are on all the buttons and switches. Outside our stories, we control a big bag of Dick Butkus. We don’t control publisher advances, book placement, trends, reviews, or that weird little deranged robot that computes the Amazon recommendation algorithms.

14. Crazy Money!

Yeah, by “crazy money” I don’t mean “money in such quantity it’s totally awesome,” but rather, “money that arrives in wildly inconsistent sums and on a madman’s schedule.” You hit this point where, okay, you have to learn to survive from January to March on this royalty check of $7.53, and then in March you’re supposed to get like, ten grand or something, but then that ten grand doesn’t show up until June, and when you get it you forget you need to buy groceries and instead buy like, a Wave Runner instead. Yeah. See? Nutty.

15. Books Books I Love Books Books Books Mmm Books

The one thing that e-readers have robbed from us is the ability to throw all the books we own into a room and roll around on them, naked. I mean, okay, sure, I can do that with an e-reader, but eventually someone’s going to pick it up and be like, “Is this a testicle-print on my Kindle?” What I’m saying is, some people hoard clothing, cats, fast food containers, ninja weapons, exotic primates — but writers hoard books. And eventually all those books — each a storehouse of utter unreality — bleeds into our brains via creative osmosis. Either that or they fall on us, crushing our weak little writer bodies beneath.

16. We Are Distracted For A Reason

It’s not new to suggest that writers are easily distracted: we’ve all gotten lost in an endless labyrinth of cat videos (and at the center of that labyrinth is a cat dressed like a minotaur, and he’s all like I CAN HAZ COW HED OH NOES THESEUS and — dang, LOLcats jokes just don’t cut it anymore, do they?). But here’s why we’re easily distracted: because our brains know it’s bad for us to stare at a screen full of tiny words all day. Our brain is telling us to look at something — anything — other than those tiny little ant-like words. It is unnatural to stare at words in this way. It nibbles holes in our gray matter.

17. The Internet Is Full Of Ragehate, And We Dive In, Headfirst

Once upon a time, authors would get reviews that were insightful, incisive critiques — “The author’s masterful use of language is sadly handicapped by a plot whose events fail to properly resolve.” Now we have to put up with internet vitriol like you’d find on the likes of a YouTube video where a guy gets hit in the nuts with a tricycle: “THIS BOOK IS FUKKIN STUPID IT BLOWS GIRAFFES THE AWTHOR IS A TARDCART.” And then they probably call you a racial or sexual epithet. It’s like asking for insightful criticism during a Call of Duty match on Xbox Live. It does little good for one’s sanity.

18. The English Language Makes As Much Sense As Snivel Bliff Fleekum Hork

Okay, this one is a little biased toward those writing in the English tongue, but seriously, trying to know all the rules in and around the composition of the English language will give you a goddamn nosebleed. Looking at all the rules — and then memorizing all the bizarre-o exceptions — makes you want to go back to the days of communicating with clicks and burps. Related: Brian Regan knows the real “I-before-E” rule.

19. At Some Point We Tried Really Hard To Understand The Publishing Industry

Predicting trends, imagining advances, contemplating the agency model, trying to figure out why anybody would publish any book by Billy Ray Cyrus ever — all this does is plunge your mind into the roiling black soup of unmitigated chaos. You can tell the moment any author’s sanity snapped, because it goes like this: “My book’s been out on submission for seven years, and now they’re publishing a book of scat marks written by that greasy orangutan, Snooki?” Listen hard enough, you hear a *plink* — that’s the sound of the little pubic hair holding the last vestiges of that author’s sanity together.

20. That Might Be Scurvy

No, that’s not the latest spin-off band by They Might Be Giants — it’s because we don’t have enough money for food and health insurance and because we didn’t eat a couple oranges now we’re losing our teeth and fingernails and turning into some raving froth-mouthed version of the Brundlefly.

21. Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me? Me!

It is in our makeup to be desperate for attention. We write our books, our films, our articles, and we’re not writing them so that we can just read them back to ourselves and have a jolly good laugh. We want you to read them, too. And you. And you! And you over there, hiding behind the shrubs. The more attention we get, the more successful we become — or, at least, feel. The ironic part is, many aren’t comfortable with that attention and yet seek it like junkies. Which, you guessed it, makes us a wee smidgen bit crazy.

22. Amazon Rankings

Click. Clickity-click. Refresh refresh. “Did my ranking go up? Or down? Or up? Or down? It stayed the same. What does that mean? Did I sell enough to stay afloat? Are the rankings broken? How often do they update? Is my book doing better than that other book? Is that good? Or bad? My finger is getting a blister. MY ENTIRE SELF-WORTH IS PINNED TO THIS GODDAMN NUMBER. *sob*” Click. Click. Refresh refresh.

23. The Idea Plague

Ask a writer: “Where do you get your ideas from?” And the writer will reply: “How do you make yours stop?” Then he’ll bat at his hair as if it’s on fire. I can’t walk ten feet without thinking of a new novel or script idea. It’s an idea that will almost certainly never yield fruit — which means I’m essentially committing an act of literary Onanism. So much idea-seed spilled on the floor. Infertile and inert. And smells like Clorox.

24. We Hang Out With Other Writers

Crazy people hanging out with other crazy people just creates a crazy people feedback loop where the crazy recirculates again and again like a bad stink in an old car. Crazy begets crazy begets crazy.

25. It’s Cool-Cool To Be Cray-Cray

Most writers aren’t actually crazy — but we certainly feel that way sometimes and furthermore, a helluva lot of our authorial forebears were definitely a bit, ahhh, unstable (Hemingway! Hunter S. Thompson! Emily Dickinson! Sylvia Plath!). As such, we’re cast into a realm where it’s okay, even expected, that our creative pursuits mark us on the charts between “a little bit eccentric” and “crazier than a shithouse chimp.”

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The other day, I asked where lots of folks had problems with their stories. “Plot” and “structure” came up a lot (and I feel your pain). Hence, here we are with 25 things you might wanna know about narrative structure.

1. Every Story Has Structure

Whether you put it there or not, no story goes from start to finish without structure. Structure is either something you design as a storyteller or something that just happens. Sometimes the structure is the right one. Sometimes it’s the wrong one. (You’ll know it’s wrong because the story will suddenly feel like it’s got a dick growing out of its forehead. “Something’s off,” you’ll say. And the story will respond, “Maybe it’s the swinging forehead dick?”) If you have a good gut for a story, then you will intuit a strong structure as you go. If your instincts aren’t that sharp, it helps to design the story’s structure before moving forward.

2. Think Of It As Story Architecture

Structure serves story; story does not serve structure. A cathedral is built toward certain considerations: the beauty of God, the presence of God’s story, the need for acoustics, the accommodation of seating, the sacrificial altar, the DJ booth, and so on. You design a structure to highlight the type of story you’re telling. Using a non-linear structure in a mystery story is so that you maximize on the uncertainty and use the rejiggered narrative to create suspense. Structure has purpose. Structure is where art and craft collide.

3. The Two Essential Pieces

Most stories have at their core two critical components: The Fuck Up, and Trying To Fix The Fuck Up. Something goes wrong or something changes — a divorce, the Apocalypse, a lost child, someone puts ALF back on the air — and then one or several characters strive to fix that which has gone wrong. (In effect, reversing or correcting — or sometimes exploring — the narrative change of state.) Maybe they succeed. Maybe they fail. Maybe they achieve a Pyrrhic victory where they succeed but not without significant cost. What this really reveals are the most critical components to structural storytelling: a conflict is essential as is the character agency to correct that conflict. Without those, your structure is naught but a straight line. A straight line is the most boring construction a story can take. Aim for any shape but straight.

4. Said Differently, From Order To Chaos

Storytelling is the push-and-pull of order and chaos, the horny tumble and tangle of limbs as each struggles to overcome the other. Signal moves up and down, transitioning from a clear frequency to an inky squiggle of chaotic uncertainty which in turn reveals the structure. And that structure highlights the up-and-down and push-and-pull. The flat lines of order give way to the ascent (or more properly, descent) into chaos.

5. Narrative Measurement

I have explained this before, but fuck it, you’re duct-taped to that chair nice and tight and I know you can’t squirm away HA HA HA: narrative, like all things, can be measured. You don’t have to measure it, same as you don’t have to measure that fish you caught or the fishing rod that caught it (insert your own keenly-veiled sexual metaphor here!). If you do measure, know that beats make scenes, scenes make sequences, sequences make acts, and between each act is a turn of sorts, a shifting of the story’s hips, cocking this way, or that. Ignore it if you like, but if you’re building a house, you might want to know what a brick looks like.

6. Sliced In Thrice Nicely With My Knife

You could argue that all stories fall into three acts — and, in filmmaking, if they don’t fall that way they’re damn well pushed. Act One is the Set-Up (first 25%), Act Two is the Confrontation (next 50%), Act Three is the Resolution (final 25%). It’s an imperfect description and damn sure not the only description, and in the grand scheme of things you could, if you chose, distill it down to beginning, middle, and end.

7. Microcosmos

Whatever structure you give to a story is also a structure you can give to an individual act. In this way, each act is like a story within a story with its own ups and downs and conflicts and resolutions. As an act closes the tale told there either evolves or transforms entirely to manifest new aspects of the tale. For an example, look to the stages of our lives: child to teen to adult to doddering Depends-wearing gadabout (or at least that’s how I hope my own final arc plays out). While we remain the same person through such life changes, our story grows and shifts and becomes something else. Thus is the way a story’s acts flow into one another.

8. Complexity Breeds Complexity

The more complicated your story, the more acts that story is likely to feature — it’s like how you get gremlins wet, they just make more goddamn gremlins? Like that. A bigger, stranger, crazier story is likely to demand a bigger, crazier, stranger structure. Reason a film tends to only have three acts is because a film is around 100 minutes long — and because audiences crave the comfort of simplicity for a number of reasons good and bad. Shakespeare, for instance, rocked a five-act structure.

9. Omne Trium Perfectum

That’s Latin for, “I’m sorry, there are two girls in my bathroom.” *checks notes* No, wait, that can’t be right. Oh! Oh. Here it is. Loosely translated, “Every set of three is complete.” Even if you ignore all other structural components, this is a good one to keep an eye on — the Rule of Threes suggests that all aspects of your story should have at least three beats. Anything that has any value or importance should be touched on three times and, further, evolve a little bit each time. Every character arc, ever act, every scene, every setting, every motif or theme, needs you the storyteller to call it back at least three times.

10. The Power Of The Pivot

The story must from time to time pivot — as the saying goes, the tiger must change his panties. *checks notes* Damnit, who wrote these? Stripes. Stripes. The tiger must change his stripes. Jesus. This is true of characters, too. Or the world and its rules. Change is a critical element to storytelling, but you cannot change aspects wildly and completely. It must be gradual and believable, moving only a single phase shift over, the way water becomes ice — it’s an expected and believable shift. It’s why I prefer to think of this and call it a pivot. That word intimates a turn of the body, not a dizzying backflip. Pivot points will mark those narrative moments when your structure turns and things change. When one act becomes another, for instance, that is when the story pivots for the audience. This could mean an evolution of conflict, a revelation of new information, a major character life change. Any major shift in the story will do.

11. Escalations And Reversals

Again, if you don’t care much about formal structure, just tune your intestinal frequency to these two ideas: first, the story must escalate, or in all-caps-speak, SHIT GOTTA GET DOUBLE-BIG FUCKED UP YO; second, the story must feature occasional reversals where One State (order, victory, hope) becomes the Opposite State (chaos, loss, despair), or in all-caps-speak, YO BRO THE STORY SWITCHED IT AND FLIPPED IT AND BOGGLED MY SHIT SON. Dang, if I could write a novel in all caps, I would.

12. Why The Ejaculatory Arc Works

We’ll talk a wee bit more about Freytag and his arcing glob of narrative jizz (it was Douglas Rushkoff who I first heard use the term “male ejaculatory arc” to describe the standard structural shape of modern narrative) in just a moment, but the reason this general shape works is because it reveals escalation — things grow worse or more complicated or more intense as the tale moves forward. A story in the reverse would be anti-climactic, which is I guess to say, like an ejaculation on rewind.

13. The Arc As Microstructure

Hard time thinking about plotlines or subplots or act structures? Think instead of how a story comprises a number of smaller and larger arcs — an arc just being a component of your story that begins and ends (or, even better, rises and falls). Characters, themes, events, settings — these can have arcs. Some fill a whole story, some are just little belt loops popping up here and there. Some arcs begin where others end. Many overlap, rubbing elbows or shoulders or other filthier parts. Television is a great place to study arcs (and if I may suggest a show: Justified, on FX). Comic books, too.

14. For Every Story, A Structure

Every story demands a different structure. No universal structure exists. It’s why that mopey old saw about there being only seven plots or some bullshit is, well, bullshit. If you distill them down to their barest (and in many ways most meaningless) essence, sure, that’s true. But the art is in the arrangement. The structure you build around the plot to support the story is where the elegance lies.

15. I’m Talking Motherfucking Freytag, Y’all

One structure you can look at: Freytag’s Pyramid. Or Triangle. Or Pubic Thatch. Whatever you care to call it. Gustav Freytag said, Mein Gott, all diesen plottenheimer schmeckt der same to meinein mouthenpartsen. Translated, every story features five key structural beats mirroring five acts: Exposition (introduce characters and world) –> Rising Action (conflict creates tension) –> Climax (confrontation leads to a major change) –> Falling Action (conflict resolves) –> Denouement (dangly bits are all tied-up or trimmed away). It is, like all structural explorations, equal parts “useful” and “a garbage scow set aflame.” Not every plot fits. Further, modern storytelling (which usually trims five acts to three) pushes that climax further toward the end, which means the falling action and denouement get squished, as if between two Sumo wrestlers.

16. From Five To Seven

Behold, a rough seven-act structure: Intro (duh) –> Problem or Attack (duh) –> Initial Struggle (character first tussles with source of conflict) –> Complications (conflict worsens, deepens, changes) –> Failed Attempts (oops, that didn’t work) –> Major Crisis (holy goatfucker shitbomb, everything’s gone pear-shaped) –> Climax and Resolution (duh). Not a bad look at the way many modern stories play out.

17. Ain’t Nothin’ But An Aristotle Thang

Two words: anagnorisis and peripeteia. Both from Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (and two words that if you get in Scrabble, you automatically win a balloon ride or something). Anagnorisis is a discovery made by a character. Peripeteia is a dramatic change (either positive or negative) within the story. Each feeds into the other in the same way I spoke of order and chaos earlier — a character’s discovery may lead to a change in fortune, or a change in fortune may lead to a new discovery. These two things tumble around and around like a pair of hedgehogs battling one another in a washing machine until finally they reach catastrophe, which in Aristotelian terms is what closes the story — either the character wins or is defeated by the conflict or by himself (and in true tragic form, the character often defeats himself).

18. The Monomyth: Storytelling Epiphany Or Sublime Bullshit — You Decide!

Ever since Star Wars hit, a lot has been made of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey — AKA, “The Monomyth.” It is neither The Best Thing Since Blowjobs or The Worst Thing To Happen To Modern Fiction. It’s just a thing — one more structural consideration you can choose to use or toss in the medical waste bin at your local health clinic. While it’s got a lot of extra fiddly bits, the Monomyth can be distilled as: Departure (hero leaves normalcy and comfort on an adventure spurred by some call to action) –> Initiation (hero meets trials and tribulations both personal and impersonal) –> Return (hero comes back to the world changed and brings with him boons for his buddies). It’s got 17 total steps (or 8, if you want the distilled version). Want to examine its application? Fuck George Lucas. Seek James Joyce.

19. The Morphology Of The Folk-Tale

I do not have the space or the time in this list to explore all 31 of Vladimir Propp’s structural steps which are meant to explicate the narrative nature of folk-tales (Russian folk-takes in particular). I mean, dang, I got shit to do. Like eat a sandwich. Or stare at the floor. Or gloomily masturbate. It’s a very specific rendering of narrative structure, but it could be enlightening in some fashion. I’ll trust your Google-Fu to get started.

20. Did You See Last Night’s Episode?

And no, by “episode” I do not mean, “that time when Chuck went apeshit at Arby’s and started slathering his nude goblin body in Horsey Sauce.” Different kind of episode. No, here I mean episode-as-narrative-structure. Television and comic books tend to be episodic, with any serialized elements packaged away as story arcs (noted earlier). Episodic storytelling tends to chop up each tale in neatly-packaged plot pieces, with each piece theoretically resolving by its end and then together forming a larger story. Generally, television works on acts separated out by commercial breaks. Episodic narrative may make your story feel more manageable — but, at the same time, placing an episodic structure inside a non-episodic format (say, a novel or a film) is likely to feel artificial and/or inauthentic.

21. My Porn Director Name Will Be “Therefore Butts”

Click here and get schooled by the South Park guys. The key thing they’re getting across with this is that scenes and events in storytelling don’t happen independently of one another. There must exist a chain of cause and effect, of action and opposite reaction, of consequence. Dominoes do not fall separate from one another. They fall against one another. Embroider that profound shit on a throw pillow.

22. From Aperitif To Digestif

Fuck you, I like food metaphors. So, here’s one — consider how the structure of a seven-course meal works in terms of storytelling. You start with a Aperitif (guests become acquainted over a drink) and progress through a series of dishes meant to both embody the meal and challenge the palate, with certain contextual shifts in taste (sorbet and/or cheese) to punctuate larger events. Dessert rolls along as kind of a climactic moment and then coffee and the digestif appear to give one final strong dose of taste-punching goodness in order to help the eater digest the meal he just consumed. You could chart it on a graph and it might look similar to narrative structure. Then again, maybe I’m just hungry.

23. You Can’t Structuralize Me, Man

Non-linear storytelling would seem to have a non-traditional structure, and that’s true, to a point. But what you’ll ultimately find is that, while the plot events may bounce around like a meth-cranked dormouse, the structure that occurs is still one that you can identify. (Which tells us that plot and narrative structure are there to complement one another but are not actually the same thing.)

24. Tend To Your Organic Story Garden, You Goddamn Hippie

Writing without structure is a challenge equivalent to writing with structure — if you do it right, you get something that feels organic and unexpected. If you do it poorly, you’ll end up with the storytelling equivalent of the Winchester House: doors that never open, stairways that end in walls, rooms that serve little purpose. If one method’s not working? Duh, try the other. Which leads me to…

25. The Final Word

If the application of structure helps you tell a better tale: use it. If you find it artificial and it only hampers your efforts: kick it in the mouth and chuck it down an open manhole cover. This stuff isn’t here to oppress you — it’s a tool for when you need it and invisible when you don’t. Some stories will call for the strong spine of structure. Some stories need to be altogether hazier, stranger, less pin-down-able. Just know that if you’re having some trouble grasping how the plot moves from one piece to another, it might be time to take a gander at borrowing from the many structural storytelling examples that exist. Either that, or maybe you need to eat a baggie of magic mushrooms or something. Your call.

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