Tag: 25things (page 9 of 12)

It’s NaNoWriMo time.

That means you’re going to be absorbing what might be a metric fuck-dumpster full of writing advice into your daily writing regimen — at least, I assume so, given the way my looky-loos here spike through the roof and launch high up into the night-time sky.

Writing advice and writing chatter is — well, it’s a good thing, from my perspective, but only to a point. And so it seems proper to jump into the month with a look at 25 things you should know (i.e. these are the things that I think) about writing advice. Please to enjoy, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on writing advice, too. Where you go to get it, what you think of it, what kinds of advice you seek, whether you think it’s all bullshit, etc. The comments section awaits your tickling touch.

1. It’s Just Advice

Let’s say you’re trying to get to Big Dan Don’s Dildo Emporium in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I might give you directions and say, “You want to take I-81, but if you’re going around noon, that’s when Big Dan Don holds his Mega Noon-Time Dildo Sale, and traffic gets backed up, so you might want to take the Old Fuzzknuckle Road.” And you might say, “Thanks,” and do that thing, or you might say, “Thanks,” and do something entirely different. That’s the deal with writing advice. Someone is offering you advice. That’s it. Nobody’s handing you a book of laws. Nobody’s beating you about the head and neck with gospel (though they may think that’s what they’re doing). Writing advice proffered is just advice on one way to go with your writing.

2. Put Differently, It Ain’t Math, Motherfuckers

Writing advice is not the product of an equation. “If you do X, then Y will occur” is false in this instance. “If you name a character John Q. Hymenbreaker, your book will be an instant bestseller” is crazy-talk. Writing advice is not about providing certifiable answers. It is about making suggestions.

3. Tools In A Toolbox

Put differently a third time, I like to use the metaphor (mis-typed as “meataphor”) of tools in a toolbox. Every contractor job requires a different tool-set. Today you need a hammer. Tomorrow you need a pipe wrench. The day after you’ll need a high-powered drill-dildo (“drilldo”) from Big Dan Don’s. You’ve got to pick up each tool — i.e. each piece of advice — and weigh it in your hand. Debate its merits. See if it’s going to help you do the job or just get in the way and club you in the nuts.

4. The Only Inviolable Precept

In my mind, only one inviolable precept exists in terms of being a successful writer: you have to write. The unspoken sub-laws of that one precept are: to write, you must start writing and then finish writing. And then, most likely, start writing all over again because this writing “thing” is one long and endless ride on a really weird (but pretty awesome) carousel. Cue the calliope music.

5. The Almost-Inviolables

I should say it upfront: I find the word “inviolable” fun to say. It makes my mouth have fun! Hee hee hee, ha ha ha! Ahem. Right. Some other rules are perhaps worth putting in the “usually true but not necessarily” camp: writers read, writers write every day, read your work out loud, writers should draw on their own lives, if you don’t have caffeine and/or alcohol in your life you will explode and die, etc. But even these aren’t universally proven.

6. Question The Chestnuts

Chestnuts: the new name for boobs? No. No. Why would you even say that? Get your mind out of the gutter. No, by “chestnuts” I mean, “those old pieces of writing advice that you hear as common refrain.” Write what you know. Adverbs give Baby Jesus hemorrhoids. If you write a prologue, an orphan loses his sight. All the “old saws” need to be put on the chopping block.

7. Fuck It, Challenge All Advice

What I’m trying to say is, don’t assume any one piece of writing advice is etched in stone with the whetted bones of your ancestors. Challenge all advice. Try it out. See what flies and what dies.

8. No Such Thing As “Bad” Writing Advice

Okay, fine, some writing advice might be bad (“Staple your manuscript to a starving pony and drop it from a helicopter onto any potential literary agents”), but for the most part, writing advice falls into two categories: “Writing advice I can use,” and “Writing advice that doesn’t work for me.” That’s it.

9. Writing Is A Craft And Craft Can Be Taught

It’s way too easy to say that “all you need to do to learn writing is write and read.” Sure, at the deepest molten core of the thing, that’s totally rock solid. But it also sells this writing thing way short and makes it sound like it’s as easy as fucking Skee-Ball. “Just throw the ball enough times and you’ll learn how to get the big tickets!” Writing has endless fiddly bits and is an ever-evolving practice — it’s a craft, by golly, and it uses language to tell story. That means there’s a lot to know and an unforgiving dumpsterload of questions potential authors have. That’s why writing advice is valuable to some people.

10. What Do You Think Teachers Teach, Anyway?

English teachers? Communication and journalism teachers? Writing teachers? What the heck do you think these people teach? Surfing? Trigonometry? How to properly apply chapstick? They teach writing advice. (And, by the way, therein lies a subtle notion that what they teach is valuable, but by calling it advice, I’m also suggesting it’s not inviolable. You dig?)

11. We’re All Sucking At The Teat

Every writer has partaken of the sweet teat-meats of writing advice. If they tell you different, they’re a lying-faced liar whose pants are totally on fire — whether they take a note from an agent, an editor, a friend, a fellow writer, whatever, they’ve utilized the essence of writerly advice.

12. The DNA Of Writing Advice Hides On The Bedsheets Of Every Story

Here’s another way we’ve all supped at the soup-bowl of writing advice: if you’ve ever read a story and then you took a lesson from that story and applied it to your own, you took writing advice. Because encoded in every story are the lessons that storyteller has learned. Each story is a memetic blueprint for how that author tells the tale. For good or ill, for better or worse. Take something — anything! — from that and that’s a lesson learned, folks.

13. My Work Is The Product Of Reading Writing Advice

My writing — which, for all I know, you think is a smoldering shitwagon of inelegant word-rape — comes to you because of (and in some cases, in spite of) writing advice. I’ve a small shelf of writing advice that I hold dear and I also look back and look upon many writing teachers, mentors and acquaintances who have taught me colon-loads of critical information. And, frankly, who continue to teach me. I’m humbled by that and it’s why I don’t think the practice of providing or reading writing advice is bullshit.

14. Can Be Both Pragmatic And Philosophical

For me, writing advice takes on two faces: first, pragmatic. Pragmatic advice is the day-to-day inkmonkey shit, the “digging trenches” stuff. Here’s how a query letter looks, here’s an exercise to shatter the skull of writer’s block, here’s the problem with your addictive misuse of commas, and so forth. Philosophical writing advice talks about larger issues and questions and talks as much about being a writer as it does about writing itself.

15. A Third Axis: The Professional

A perpendicular in-road to this is that some advice is about writing, and other snidbits are about professional writing — professional writing tends to follow a course detailing how to get published, how to get paid. Here it tends to get a little more strict (the crack of the bullwhip stinging against your tender pink buttocks!) because here certain things remain truer than others. How you deal with agents, how you format a manuscript, what kinds of caffeinated bacon-and-chocolate products will soothe a deranged editor.

16. The Fourth “P”

No, not “golden showers.” Zip it up, piss-boy. I’m talking about “Personal.” Nearly all bits of writing advice are personal. That’s what I do here. It’s me yelling at me first and foremost, espousing my own lessons, exposing my own fears, ripping the scales of my eyes before yours. Advice like this should be personal — it should be the writer saying, “I took this path, maybe you want to, as well. Then again, maybe you don’t, and that’s fine, no skin off my back, I’ll just wander the desert alone, drinking my own lonesome tears to survive YOU MONSTER.”

17. We Need To Talk About What We Do Or We’ll Go Nuts

Writers are goofy-headed moon-units. Total fuckbrains, each and every one of us. Many writers are quite nice. But most are crazy, at least in their own special ways. As such, we’re driven to talk about what we do because — well, it’s what we do. Writers sit by themselves all day, sobbing and drinking vodka and pounding out imaginary bullshit for hours heaped on hours, and so sometimes we like to emerge from our foul-smelling caves and join the communal penmonkey water cooler and talk about what we do. Some don’t like to talk about it, and that’s all good. But many do. And many must.

18. Beware Its Hypnotic Swirl

Writing advice can very well be just another distraction. It can be a waste of time that feels productive — after all, you’re learning! You’re exploring! You’re thinking heavy thoughts critically. Blah blah blah, snargh, poop noise. Whatever helps you sleep at night, slugabed. Truth is, writing advice can be just another slurping time suck stopping you from doing that thing you’re supposed to be doing. What was it, again? OH YEAH WRITING.

19. The Time For Testing Is Complete

Here’s how you make hay from writing advice: you put it into play. Take a thing you just learned, and go use it. Try it out! Write your next thing and see if this tip, trick or technique holds any weight at all. And if it doesn’t? Chuck it into the garbage disposal and listen to it scream as the blades crush its tiny pinbones. Writing advice is fucking worthless unless it actually helps you write better or write more.

20. As Always, Beware Zealots, Fundies, Cult Leaders, And Fevered Egos

The Internet is positively cancerous with the self-righteous, and I have at times counted myself woefully among them — but here, come close, let me whisper this in your ear (ignore my tongue planting my little Wendigo Egg-Babies into your brain) so it’s clear: nobody has answers. They just have suggestions. Guidance. Possibilities. Nobody has a hard and firm answer. Like I said: this ain’t math, son. Those who tell you that it’s their way or the highway are usually selling something. And while I am, admittedly, sometimes selling something, I don’t know any more about writing than countless other writers. I just have thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and you should always be free to take them into your mouth, swirl them around, then choose whether or not to spit or swallow.

21. Why I Do It

I first started talking about writing because, like I said: we have to. It’s like I got a head full of hornets jacked up on trucker meth and they need to get out somehow. It was me talking to me — or, as I’ve said in the past, me talking to my stupid dick-brained 18-year-old self who thought he could get away with a hundred bad habits and be successful (he couldn’t). It has since evolved, though, this thing I do here, because over time I started getting emails or tweets. I get a few a week, sometimes several in a day, and it’s someone telling me that I helped them — maybe to get back into writing, maybe to solve a problem they were having with a story, maybe even to get published. And it’s like — oh. Ohhh. That’s awesome. I’m not so self-important to say they couldn’t have done it without me — please. They could’ve, totally, and probably would’ve. Just the same, I’m honored and happy and positively tumescent to have many contributed in some small way to the ways of other penmonkeys.

22. Evolution From Pen-Monkey To Pen-Neanderthal

Writing advice is allowed to change because writers are allowed to change. Once you absorb a piece of advice, it’s not like you’re growing a tail or a new dick — it’s just an idea. Ideas can change. Don’t be afraid to evolve.

23. On Publishing Advice

Publishing advice is, as noted, its very own sub-species of writing advice. It’s not bad to read it and you’ll find lots of variant opinions on the subject. Just know that Tobias Buckell said it best, and I’m going to paraphrase him here: you can control your writing, but you can’t control the publishing industry, so control what you can control and leave the rest to fate. Stop obsessing about it. I’ll take it one step further to say, you can control your publishing strategy, and that’s it. All advice in this regard is about you figuring out your angle — not the angle of others, not the Prognosticated Fate Of All Publishing Ever. Though, just in case, here: sift through these bird guts, see if you can divine some answers.

24. Life Provides Its Own Kind Of Advice

Yes, you need to write a lot. And sure, you need to read a lot. But those things are regurgitative: it’s just you puking from one mouth to another and back again. Digesting pop or literary culture and then throwing it back up does little for your work — what will elevate your work and make it your own is to live life. Learn from your existence and borrow things from your day to day. Have adventures. Take risks. Put yourself into your fiction. Because life offers a kind of writing advice you just can’t read about — it’s something only you can experience. Like dropping acid and fighting your totem animal for control over the little man that pilots you.

25. Every Monkey Constructs His Own Pen

The story goes that every Jedi constructs his own lightsaber, and every penmonkey constructs his own pen. Meaning, we all find our own way through this crazy tangle of possibility. This isn’t an art, a craft, a career, or an obsession that comes with easy answers and isn’t given over to bullshit dichotomies. We do what we do in the way we do it and hope it’s right. Read advice. Weigh it in your hand and determine its value. But at the end of the day — and at the start of it — what you should be doing is writing. Because thinking about writing and talking about writing just plain isn’t writing.

* * *

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

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

Writers are our own worst enemies. We will hamstring ourselves with a hacksaw just as we’re getting going, and to that I say: “Oh, hell no.” It’s time to keep an eye out for the landmines and bear-traps we lay for ourselves along the way, those dreaded pitfalls that help to ensure we won’t finish the shit that we started. Whether you’re participating in NaNoWriMo (which always makes me want to say: NaNoWriMo Williams: The Adventure Begins!) or writing a script or a game or an invented memoir about your fictional time as a glue-huffing base-jumper, you need to be aware of those things that might stop you from getting it done.

A lot of this is stuff I’ve said before, mind you.

But I think it’s good to have it in one big-ass mega-list.

Let’s roll.

1. Bad Breakfast Equals Blah Brain

It’s the start of your day, so it’s the start of this list: motherfucking breakfast. What you eat turns into energy for your body and the brain encased in said body. Just as you wouldn’t shove dog poop and old leaves into your car to make it run, you shouldn’t shove heaps of crap into your body and expect your mind to perform in top shape. Protein is better than carbs, and if you do eat carbs, you need the slowest carbs you can get — carbs so slow they need to stay after class. Sugar is your enemy. Processed foods: not your pal.

2. In The Clutches Of The Sinister Distractor Monkey!

A lot of writers — myself included — seem to have the attention spans of a cricket trapped in the bottom of a Four Loko can. I know if I’m not careful I’ll stop what I’m doing and look at Twitter, wander aimlessly around the Internet, get caught in a dastardly (and sticky) web of porn, clean my desk, go snack, build a robot that dooms the world. Hell, just now? I stopped writing this blog post for 15 minutes just so I could stare at light glinting off a penny. You’ve got to cut that shit out. Close the gates. Build a wall. It’s gotta be you and the word count: leave the other barbarians outside the gates, where they belong.

3. Defcon ZZZzzZZzz

A more problematic version of the “distractions” situation grows out of the priority you place upon your writing. It’s not just about being caught suddenly by a distraction, it’s about a longer, larger choice where you consistently place everything else above your writing. When writing comes last, it’ll never get done. Sure, I get it. You just bought a new video game. Or football is on. Or you’ve got housework to do. Or you’ve got this foul-smelling wreath of lint lodged deep in the ridges of your belly button and you must get it out. (Okay, seriously, get it out. Even the cat looks queasy.) In the grand Netflix queue of your life, Writing My Story should be numbers one through ten. Buckle up, shut the fuck up, and make it your priority.

4. That Ugliest Of Four-Letter Words: “Work”

Understand this up front: writing is work. Some days it’s fun work. Some days it’s hard but satisfying work. Other days it feels like you’re birthing a lawn chair from your hindquarters. Just know up front that not every writing day is a hot air balloon ride over a meadow made of happy puppies. Some are. Most aren’t. It’s still better than pushing a broom or sawing cows in half for the beef industry. Er, unless that’s your thing.

5. Ain’t Got No Discipline, You Mumbly Numb-Faced Slugabed

You’re saggy. Sludgy. Out of shape. Discipline is born of habit, and habit ain’t just a thing a nun wears to cover her godly hoo-has. Discipline comes from repeated action and the understanding that you create quantum entanglement between your butt and your chair so that you write — even a little! — every day.

6. You Believe Time Will Make Itself

Time isn’t like a box of gremlins: you don’t make more just by pouring water over their fuzzy Mogwai backs. Further, unless you’re the Doctor, you do not have the benefit of a time-traveling police box, do you? Said it before and I’ll say it again: we all have the same 24 hours in our day. It’s how we slice-and-dice and apportion those hours that matters. If every day goes by and you’re not reserving a fleshy portion of the temporal meat for your writing, well — need I refer to the title of this list?

7. Besieged By External Forces

Life is like a sneaky leprechaun always stealing your goddamn Lucky Charms. Every week is a new curveball that inevitably lands right in the catcher’s mitt known as your “crotch.” This is a battle. It’s you and the conflict of day-to-day existence, battling with bladed weapons for supremacy over Who Controls What. If you let external forces take the leash, then you’re just a bitch peeing where life demands you pee. If you take control, however, then you get to live life on your terms — point being, don’t let life’s bullshit get in your way. No excuses. Write through the pain. Obviously, this has limits — serious health problems, job loss, death in the family. Real problems should be given their due. (Though even then, sometimes it helps to stay writing through even the toughest slog.) Your goal is to set the pace. Claim your life, own your existence. Write in spite of whatever conflict you face.

8. Whip Out Your Harmonica, ‘Cause It’s Time To Sing The Penmonkey Blues

Not sure what it is about writers, but we are a cardboard box of sad little kittens. Lots of depression issues among writers — now and throughout time. Sometimes it’s chemical. Other times psychological. And some writers are just in love with the romance of being sad. Whatever your flavor of the Penmonkey Blues, if you know you lean that way, it behooves you to do something about it. I know, I know: easier said than done. Just the same, this is a self-replicating problem, like a cloud of out-of-control nano-bots: you want to write but you’re sad or depressed and so you can’t quite write and then that just makes you more sad, more depressed. Don’t swirl the drain. Find a way out. Seek help. Fight through it and put the words onto paper. Again, this isn’t meant to suggest it’s easy: but, if you want to finish something, it is absolutely necessary.

9. Expectations Inflated To The Size Of A Moon Bounce

Reality should be tucked firmly into your plan like an acorn in the cheek of a chipmunk. Don’t think you’re going to write a novel in a week. (And for you NaNoWriMo-heads, that might mean understanding you’re not going to write one in a month, either.) Don’t expect your first draft to be a masterpiece. Don’t expect your first book — good as it may be — to sell to a publisher or, if self-publishing, earn big sales from readers. In fact, it helps to have minimal expectations: just put your head down and write. Day in, day out. Write this thing until it’s done. Don’t worry about its future. Worry about the present: because without a finished book, the future won’t add up to a thimble full of mouse turds.

10. An Unrealistic View Of Process

Yes, some authors shit out bestsellers and/or brilliant prose (as the two are not exclusive). Some folks are prodigies, whether it’s at shooting hoops, playing the piano, of being The Goddamn Batman. Let’s assume for a moment that you’re not breathing that rarefied air — or, at least, that you don’t possess the ego to believe such a thing. If we assume that you are not One Of The Greats, then it’s also safe to assume that you’re going to have to hunker down and do like the rest of us hard-working penmonkeys: you’re going to have to perform edits and rewrites to bang this thing into shape. Some writers possess a completely mysterious and magical view of process wherein they believe it’s one-and-done, like they’re just going to align their chakras and birth their story on a beam of light. Won’t happen — and that kind of expectation will kill your prose dead the moment you fail to give yourself the permission to write imperfectly.

11. Comparisons Break Your Mojo

Worst thing you can do is compare your writing — especially writing in its proto-draft form — to a published author, in particular, a published author you admire, adore, and possibly stalk (I see you there in Stephen King’s shrubbery with that vial of homemade influenza — it’s made of love, you’ll say, won’t you please start a global epidemic with me?). That’ll stop you cold. That comparison isn’t healthy. It’s good to aim big: just know that you’re not going to get there in the middle of writing a first draft.

12. Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads

Not every writer needs a plan, but in my experience many believe they don’t need a plan when, frankly, they do. I was that kind of writer: I thought, ha ha ha, stupid people saying I should outline or do preparatory work, those silly assholes with their misunderstanding of my genius. If you find you’re lost in the woods of your own fiction and feel like giving up — it might be because you have no plan. You can retrofit one. Doing that will help put you back on track and give your current writing a jolt of needed organization.

13. The Sixth Sense Says Something Is Screwy

(Fuckadang, say that 4200 times fast. That’ll twist your tongue into a Gordian knot.) Let’s say you’re writing and… something doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s like you’ve stepped into a world where the angles are off-kilter, where the clock runs backward and the milk curdles any time you look at it. It means something is screwy inside your story. Something isn’t adding up. Don’t quit. Go digging for it. Find where you chose the wrong path. Find where the paintings are hanging askew and straighten those fuckers.

14. The Story Isn’t Ready

You open the oven, you take out the brownies and start shoveling them into your mouth and it’s all OH MY GOD THEY’RE SOFT AND HOT AND GOOPY AND IT’S LIKE CHOCOLATE NAPALM AAAAARRGHBLEZZZ. You gotta let brownies finish baking, and sometimes you try to write and you discover that lo and behold, the story just isn’t ready. You haven’t finished planning it. Or just thinking about it. It doesn’t have to be fully-formed, but just the same, you need the Jell-O to set before you take it out of the fridge, you know? Mmm. Jell-O. Cosby sweaters. Mmm.

15. Or Maybe It’s You

Wow. That sounds accusatory. Imagine me pointing at you when I say that. OR MAYBE IT’S YOU. *crash of thunder, shrieking violins* Ahem. What I’m saying is, sometimes you’re not ready yet. I’ve got stories I want to write that are on the back-burner because I’m just not ready to write them. Maybe I’m not mature enough. Maybe I don’t think my “mad skillz” are quite mad enough. I’ve tried writing them too early, and you know what? They don’t come together right, and every time I had to bail on them and write something I was ready to write. This takes self-awareness, but that’s an important virtue for a writer to possess.

16. Bitten Off More Than You Can Chew

Never written anything before? Might be a lot to suddenly take on a 10-book epic science-fiction series starring a dynasty of star-faring moon people. Writing is a thing that takes a fucking bucketload (a bucking fucketload?) of practice and the reality is, maybe you’re trying to go too big, too fast. Maybe write a short story, novella, or lean-and-mean novel first. (That is a benefit of NaNoWriMo, in that it aims to produce a lean draft rather than create some massive wordpocalypse.)

17. Porking Another Manuscript Behind The Old Woodshed

Your eye, it wanders. To the curves and supple milk-flesh of another story. Cheater. Cheater. Stop that crap right now. You go too far down that path before long you will wander away from your current WIP and into the arms of another — and once that happens, you may find that you’ll never go back. You adulterous ink-slut, you. With a pair of another story’s panties sticking out of your pocket. For shame. For shame.

18. Haven’t Answered Any Of The Critical Questions

Ask yourself: what is this about? Why am I writing this? Why will anyone care? Asking yourself some fundamental questions before you write — plus several others while you write — can help keep your nose to the grindstone and allow you to feel settled in both direction and purpose.

19. You Know What? You Just Don’t Give A Shit

Just last year I was writing a book and I got maybe 20% through and a cold realization struck me: I just didn’t give a shit. I don’t mean existentially — I hadn’t lost all ability to care about everything. Just this one thing. The novel wasn’t resonating. The story and characters worked better in my head than on paper. I wasn’t invigorated by it and, instead, felt enervated. That realization will stop you dead. Solution is either to abandon completely or to go back and figure out how to make it so you care — and that usually means digging deep and making it more personal, somehow.

20. Trying To Write To Market, Not Write To Your Own Desires

A variant on “just don’t give a shit” is what happens when you write solely for market. The experience feels cheap and tawdry, like the bad frat-boy cologne hanging in the air like a miasma at a strip club. That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t write for others: storytelling is communication and isn’t meant to be masturbatory. But the story you’re trying to communicate should be your story, a story only you can tell — not a story meant only for market. Write only for commerce and the story might die on the vine.

21. The Cock-Blocking Road-Block Of Writer’s Block

I maintain the controversial assertion that writer’s block is not a real thing. I’m not saying writers don’t get blocked: it’s just not unique to them and doesn’t deserve its own special name. Just the same, hitting that mental wall will slam up the airbags and spill hot imaginary coffee all over your story’s no-no region. Might I suggest 25 ways to get past the dreaded writer’s block? Oh, I might. I might.

22. Praying To A Muse That Does Not Exist

The Muse is naught but a cruel hallucination: a false face born on vapors rising from a sun-baked highway. Relying on inspiration to strike will help ensure your story cannot, erm, climax. Inspiration is what put you in the chair in the first place, but it’s not what gets you to the end. It’s a twee old saying, but what counts is perspiration. And maybe gestation. And incubation. And frustration, gyration, damnation, elation, libation, and mutation. And distillation and amplitude modulation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation and BY THE PUBES OF HEPHAESTUS I CANNOT STOP. Whew. Okay. Point is: the Muse is bullshit. Stop relying on phantoms and phantasms and write. You are your own Muse.

23. Square Peg, Circle Hole

Nobody wants to hear this, but maybe you’re just not a writer. I wanted to be a cartoonist once. And a rock drummer. I’m not those things because I recognize that I don’t align with those frequencies. Alas.

24. You’re A Quitting Quitfaced Quitter Who Quits

The act that will kill your story is quitting. This post goes a long way to give a name and a face to the problem but at the end of the day what stops you is you — and, in particular, the act of you ejecting from this process. It’s the easiest thing in the world: one day, you just don’t come to the keyboard, you don’t put any new words into the story, and you let the whole thing fade into the warm marshmallow embrace of oblivion.

25. Felled By Fear

The real face — the true name! — behind all this is fear. You’re afraid. Of what? I dunno. That’s on you. Afraid of success. Afraid of failure. Scared of the work, scared of what people will think, scared of not measuring up, scared of putting yourself out there. Maybe you fear how writing will drag your demons into the light. Maybe you fear taking the time, taking the chance, making the effort. Could be that your angst and anxiety has no name and takes no shape and exists only as a soul-sucking fog of uncertain dread. Whatever it is, fear is the story-killer. It’s the slayer of many-a-writer, and either you’re stronger than it and survive, or you’re weak and it feasts on your genitals like a glutton at a pie eating contest. Don’t let fear turn you into its dog. You’re bigger than it, and you send it running for the shadows by defying its crass whispers. You kill the fear by writing past it. You kill fear by saying, “I’m a writer. Bite me.”

* * *

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

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

Sometimes, as you write it helps to keep your eye on the ball, lest the ball thwack you across the bridge of the nose and make you cry in front of all your friends. Here, then — in time for NaNoWriMo if you’re going to be diving into that month-long novel-birthing experience — is a list of potential questions you can ask while writing your story in order to stay on target.

1. “What Is This About?”

This is, quite seriously, my most favoritest — and what I consider to be the most important — question for any author, writer, storyteller or general-class penmonkey to ask. Like I’ve said in the past, this isn’t just a recitation of plot. This is you going elbow-deep into the story’s most tenderest of orifices and seeing what lies at the heart of the animal. It’s you saying, “This is about how when people are stripped of civilization they turn into monsters, man,” or, “It’s about how the son always becomes the father,” or, “You dance with the unicorn, you get horn-fucked by the unicorn, you feel me?” It’s about identifying the theme of your work, about exposing the emotional core and the truth one finds there. You ask this question to make sure your daily word count lines up with your overall desire.

2. “Why The Fuck Am I Writing This?”

What I call: “The Give-A-Fuck Factor.” Why do you give a fuck? Do you? Why will anyone else care? Figure out what makes your story worth writing. Maybe it’s a character. Maybe it’s an idea. Maybe it’s one scene somewhere in the third act you just can’t wait to write. Find out why you’re writing this. If you’re just phoning it in, wandering aimlessly through the narrative without purpose, the audience is going to feel that. The audience can smell confusion the way that dogs can smell fear and hobos can smell a can of beans. They’re like sharks, those hobos. HOBO SHARK II: BLOOD BEANS III. I dunno. Shut up.

3. “Is This My Story Written My Way?”

When I read a story by Joe Lansdale, I say, “That’s a goddamn Joe Lansdale story.” The voice is his. The story is his. The characters are his. You could drag me to an alternate universe where Joe Lansdale was never born and still I’d know that this book in my hands is a book by him. We have to own our fiction. We have to crack our chests open with rib-spreaders and plop our viscera right onto the page. It’s gotta be us living there. Feel out the story. Feel if this is your story written your way (and if not, make it so). Write something that matters to you. If it feels like you’re not there? Backtrack, find out where you lost the story (or the story lost you) and rediscover your voice and your path.

4. “Am I Ready?”

You ask this before you start your project and before every day of writing: am I ready? Writer and El Sexorcisto Jason Arnopp said yet-another-smartypants thing the other day on the Twittertubes: “I’m seemingly destined to regularly forget that sometimes you’re not ready to write a script because you haven’t finished thinking about it.” Amen! So say we all. Sometimes you just haven’t done the brain-work. Or gotten all your plotting and scheming out of the way. It is our nature as impetuous creators to want to jump in and do a cannonball, but all that manages to do is make a mess. Sometimes, truth is, you’re just not ready.

5. “Does This Make Sense?”

Biggest problem with Hollywood big blockbuster movies these days is they don’t make a lick of goddamn sense. Seriously, I feel like I’m in one big game of Balderdash — I’m constantly asking, “Do they expect me to believe this shit? Did they dose up a four-year-old on Nyquil and let him write this plot?” You’ll find plotholes so big you could lose a Rancor Monster in there. Don’t be that way. When you’re writing, revisit the problem: does everything line up? Nobody’s just… pulling a gun out of their asshole or suddenly crossing 2,000 miles of desert in a day? Anticipate that your readers are going to be intelligent and will be able to smell mayhem and foolishness from a mile away. Have everything make sense.

6. “What’s My Plan?”

Have a plan and cast a wary eye toward it daily. It’s okay if your plan is: “I’m going to write until I’m done.” It’s fine if your plan is, “I’m going to write the dialogue now, then a few big action pieces, then I’m going to go back and fill in all the gaps.” Doesn’t matter what the plan is: it only matters that you’ve contributed a little brain-think toward it. Don’t be a pair of loose underwear caught on a tree branch.

7. “What Do These Characters Want?”

Characters have needs, wants, and fears. Simple as that. John wants a boat. Mary fears gonorrhea. Booboo the Space Whale needs to eat a supernova-ing star or he’ll die. Every character is motivated, and that motivation is the engine that pushes them from one end of the scene and out the other. Asking this while writing helps you keep the motivations of these characters in line: these motivations drive the plot.

8. “What’s The Conflict?”

Every character has a motivation, and then you come along, the Big Ol’ Grumpy Dickhead Storyteller and throw all kinds of shit in their way to stop them from realizing their hopes and force them to confront their fears. This is conflict. Hiram wants to have a dance party at the country club but OH NOES he just got kicked out of the country club because his rival, Gunther, has been spreading lies about how Hiram likes to “lay with caribou.” Now Hiram must defeat the machinations of his rival and prove his worth to the country club. What Hiram wants is prevented by conflict. So, every day, identify the conflict. Not just in the overall story but in each scene. How do the little conflicts build to larger ones?

9. “What’s The Purpose Of This Scene?”

Every scene has its purpose. Find it. Expose it. In this scene, you need to show Rodrigo’s helplessness. In that scene, you must foreshadow the showdown between Orange Julius (Secret Agent: Orangutan) and his foe, Hobo Shark. The scene after will see the protagonist lose everything and drive home the overwhelming difficulty. Blah blah blah, etc. As you’re writing, find the purpose. Let it impel the day’s writing.

10. “What Has To Happen?”

Every plot is like a machine. Some are simple — a lever, a pulley, a nut-cracker. Others are far more complex. No matter what the case, every machine would fall apart and fail to function without certain key components, and your plot is like that. These are the legs of the chair: you need them or the story will fall over and break its teeth on the linoleum. Keep your eye on these. Know when you’re approaching one. Orchestrate them. Find the way to each. Make the No Man’s Land between them compelling, too.

11. “How Does The Setting Affect My Story?”

Setting matters. (Someday soon I’ll do a “list of 25” about setting.) Setting contributes to conflict (snowy blizzard!), to interesting characters (Brooklyn hipster!), to mood (a low rumble of thunder indicating slow-approaching doom!). A great setting puts a great deal of story toys on the table. You’d be a fool not to grab a couple, put them into play.

12. “What Do I Want The Reader To Feel?”

The storyteller is a puppetmaster. You’re here to pull strings and make people feel something — often intensely, often deeply. And so it behooves you to aim for a feeling rather than randomly hoping one occurs. In this scene you’re writing, what do you want the audience to feel? Hopelessness? Triumph? Delight? Fear? Do you want them to laugh so hard they get a nosebleed? Or cry until they fall into a grief-struck slumber?

13. “Am I Enjoying This?”

Not every day is going to be a thrill-a-minute. Some days the word count is bliss; other days it’s like brushing the teeth of a meth-cranked baboon. But you should keep an eye on your overall enjoyment levels. You should be finding some pleasure, some measure of satisfaction, with what you’re writing. If not, try to suss out the reason. If you find it a misery, there’s a chance the reader will feel that misery, too.

14. “Am I Taunted By An Endless Parade Of Distractions?”

As you write, it’s best to ask: oh, shit, am I actually writing? Because, as it turns out, being on Twitter doesn’t count. Nor does playing a video game. Or watching football. Or cranking one out to obscure Prohibition-era pornography. We writers are easily distracted, like raccoons, babies, and — I’m sorry, where was I? The sun just glinted on a quarter and I found myself mesmerized for — *checks watch* — about 45 minutes. Point is, if you’re easily distracted, you need to cut that shit out. If it continues, you need to find out why. Why is it you don’t want to write the thing you (theoretically) want to write?

15. “What Else Is In My Way?”

We all find our work hindered by various reasons. Family obligations, writer’s block, technical problems, depression, vibrant hallucinations, addictions to huffing printer ink, etc. Time to identify these reasons — and by reasons, I mean, “excuses” — and begin systematically eradicating them. Find what blocks you, and either remove the block or find a way around.

16. “Where Are My Pants?”

Trick question! You should know where your pants are. They should be as far away from you as possible. Good penmonkeys work pantsless. I, for instance, pull a “Garfield” and mail my pants to Abu Dhabi.

17. “Am I Writing To Spec?”

If you’re rocking the NaNoWriMo, you know your count is 50,000 words. Or maybe you’re writing a 90-page script, or a 5,000-word short story. Always keep your mind roughly orbiting your total potential word count: good writers know to write to spec and, in the day-to-day act of penmonkeying around, recognize when they’re on-target or off-base.

18. “What’s My Daily Word Count?”

Part of writing to spec is knowing what your daily word count should be. If you’re writing NaNoWriMo, it should be somewhere between 1500-2000 words per day. Hit the target. Bing bing bing bing bang, popcorn.

19. “Who Is My Audience?”

This can be as broad or as limited as you care to make it. Your audience might be, “Everybody who loves a good thriller” down to “Teen boys between the ages of 15-18 who still wet the bed.” Just as good authors write to spec, good authors also write to an audience. A speaker would tailor his speech to his audience, and so the writer must tailor his writing to an audience as well.

20. “Have I Saved Recently?”

I am an obsessive-compulsive saver. I will save at the end of every sentence if you give me a chance. I’ve probably saved this blog post 1745 times — 1746 now! — over the course of its writing. Seriously: save a whole lot. Learn to ask yourself that question in order to keep it and the habit top-of-mind. Oh, and just so we’re clear: don’t rely only on auto-save. We cannot trust robots with our future. Because robots hate us mewling meat-bags and secretly work to undermine our so-called “agenda of the flesh.”

21. “Oh Shit, Do I Have This Backed Up In 72 Different Places?”

You must save often and back up your work across multiple sources. External HD? Cloud storage? E-mail yourself the draft? Print copy? ALL OF THE ABOVE, TYPED IN CAPS TO DRIVE HOME ITS SCREAMING IMPORTANCE. RAAAAR YELLING YELLING SNARRGH. Ahem. Point being, at the end of every day’s worth of word-making, back up the file in as many ways and places as you care to manage. Future You, upon suffering a cataclysmic hard drive shitsplosion, will thank Present You for being so damn smart.

22. “What Will I Write Tomorrow?”

Toward the end of this day’s word count, keep an eye on tomorrow’s story-telling endeavors. Maybe make a few in-document notes. Keep a hazy picture of what happens when you next sit down to write. You’ll be happy when tomorrow comes. Unless tomorrow doesn’t come and the robots have finally decided to wipe us from the planet like one might wipe a booger off a drinking glass. Fuckin’ robots, man. Fuckin’ robots.

23. “Does This Look Like Shit?”

Does today’s word count look like garbage? Spelling errors? Funky plotting? Hastily-scrawled poop? That’s okay. You’re allowed to do that. Just note it. Make a little checkmark in your brain, or even do a comment in the document — just know that today’s word count will necessitate you coming back, doing some clean-up.

24. “Is This A Good Day To Write?”

Trick question! Every day is a good day to write. Go and do that which you claim to be. Writers: write.

25. “Am I Asking Myself Too Many Goddamn Questions?”

Of course you are. This post posits too many questions to seriously ask yourself: the point isn’t to compulsively go through this list of questions day in and day out, but more to help take these questions and let them float in the back of your mind: if you grow too crazy about this, you’re going to be focused more on the answers than you are on your actual word count, and that’s not the point, not the point at all. These questions are — well, you know what they’re like? You know how when you drive on one of those go-cart tracks they have the haybales up or the rubber bumpers to stop you from careening off-track and to your fiery doom? These are like that. These questions are what help keep your go-cart from flinging off into infinite space. Let them shepherd your word count rather than overwhelm it. Don’t blow a gasket. Use them where they’re useful; discard them with they’re starting to fritz your circuitry.

* * *

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

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

I grew up on horror fiction. Used to eat it up with a spoon. These days, not so much, but only I suspect because the horror releases just aren’t coming as fast and furious as they once did.

But really, the novels I have coming out so far are all, in their own way, horror novels. DOUBLE DEAD takes place in a zombie-fucked America with its protagonist being a genuinely monstrous vampire. BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD feature a girl who can touch you and see how and when you’re going to die and then presents her with very few ways to do anything about it. Both are occasionally grisly and each puts to task a certain existential fear that horror does particularly well, asking who the hell are we, exactly?

And so it feels like a good time — with Halloween approaching, with DOUBLE DEAD in November and me writing MOCKINGBIRD at present — to visit the subject of writing horror.

None of this is meant to be hard and firm in terms of providing answers and advice. These are the things I think about writing horror. Good or bad. Right or wrong.

Peruse it. Add your own thoughts to the horror heap. And as always, enjoy.

1. At The Heart Of Every Tale, A Squirming Knot Of Worms

Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things. It’s not all about severed heads or blood-glutton vampires. It’s an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats. You feel horror when John McClane sees he’s got to cross over a floor of broken glass in his bare feet. We feel the fear of Harry and Sally, a fear that they’re going to ruin what they have by getting too close or by not getting too close, a fear that’s multiplied by knowing you’re growing older and have nobody to love you. In the Snooki book, we experience revulsion as we see Snooki bed countless bodybuilders and gym-sluts, her alien syphilis fast degrading their bodies until soon she can use their marrowless bones as straws with which to slurp up her latest Windex-colored drink. *insert Hannibal Lecter noise here*

2. Sing The Ululating Goat Song

Horror is best when it’s about tragedy in its truest and most theatrical form: tragedy is born through character flaws, through bad choices, through grave missteps. When the girl in the horror movie goes to investigate the creepy noise rather than turn and flee like a motherfucker, that’s a micro-moment of tragedy. We know that’s a bad goddamn decision and yet she does it. It is her downfall — possibly literally, as the slasher tosses her down an elevator shaft where she’s then impaled on a bunch of fixed spear-points or something. Sidenote: the original translation of tragedy is “goat song.” So, whenever you’re writing horror, just say, “I’M WRITING ANOTHER GOAT SONG, MOTHER.” And the person will be like, “I’m not your mother. It’s me, Steve.” And you just bleat and scream.

3. Horror’s Been In Our Heart For A Long Time

From Beowulf to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Greek myth to Horace Walpole, horror’s been around for a long, long time. Everything’s all crushed bodies and extracted tongues and doom and devils and demi-gods. This is our literary legacy: the flower-bed of our fiction is seeded with these kernels of horror and watered with gallons of blood and a sprinkling of tears. Horror is part of our narrative make-up.

4. Look To Ghost Stories And Urban Legends

You want to see the simplest heart of horror, you could do worse than by dissecting ghost stories and urban legends: two types of tale we tell even as young deviants and miscreants. They contain many of the elements that make horror what it is: subversion, admonition, fear of the unknown.

5. We’re All Afraid Of The Dark

We fear the unknown because we fear the dark. We fear the dark because we’re biologically programmed to do so: at some point we gain the awareness that outside the light of our fire lurks — well, who fucking knows? Sabretooth tigers. Serial killers. The Octomom. Horror often operates best when it plays off this core notion that the unknown is a far freakier quantity than the known. The more we know the less frightening it becomes. Lovecraft is like a really advanced version of this. Our sanity is the firelight, and beyond it lurks not sabretooth tigers but a whole giant squirming seething pantheon of madness whose very existence is too much for mortal man’s mind to parse.

6. Plain Stakes, Stabbed Hard Through Breastbone

On the other hand, creating horror is easier and more effective when the stakes are so plain they’re on the table for all to see. We must know what can be gained — and, more importantly, what can be lost — for horror to work. Fear is built off of understanding consequences. We can be afraid of the unknown of the dark, but horror works best when we know that the dark is worth fearing.

7. Dread And Revulsion In An Endless Tango

Beneath plot and beneath story is a greasy, grimy subtextual layer of pacing — the tension and recoil of dread and revulsion. Dread is a kind of septic fear, a grim certainty that bad things are coming. Revulsion occurs when we see how these bad things unfold. We know that the monster is coming, and at some point we must see the wretchedness of the beast laid bare. Dread, revulsion, dread, revulsion.

8. Stab The Gut, Spear The Heart, Sever The Head

Horror works on three levels: mind, heart, gut. Our mind reels at trying to dissect horror, and good horror asks troubling questions. Our heart feels a surge of emotion: terror and fear and suspense, all felt deep in the ventricles, like a wedge of rancid fat clogging our aorta. Our gut feels all the leftover, baser emotions: the bowel-churn, the stomach-turn, the saline rush of icy sepsis as if our intestinal contents have turned to some kind of wretched fecal slushie. Which, for the record, is the name of my new Satanic Ska band.

9. The Squick Factor

Something my father used to do: he’d walk up, hands cupped and closed so as to hide something, and then he’d tell me to open my hands, the goal being that he would dump whatever he was hiding into my palm. Could be anything. Cicada skin. A frog or frog’s egg. The still-beating heart of a unicorn. The point was always the same: for me to find delight in being grossed out. Horror still plays on this. And why shouldn’t it? It’s both primal and fun. Sidenote: we should do a new gross-out reality show called The Squick Factor. Hollywood, call me. You know my number from the last time we made love under the overpass.

10. That Said, You Do Not Actually Require Buckets Of Overflowing Viscera

The Squick Factor is not actually a prerequisite for good horror. Some of the best and most insidious horror is devoid of any grossness at all: a great ghost story, for instance, is often without any blood-and-guts.

11. Characters You Love Making Choices You Hate

Suspense and tension are key components to the horror-making process. I’ve long thought that the best way to create these things is to have characters you love making choices you hate. When you see a beloved character about to step toward the closet where the unseen serial killer is hiding, your sphincter tightens so hard it could break someone’s finger. We recoil at mistakes made by loved ones, and this is doubly true when these mistakes put their lives, souls and sanities in danger.

12. Horror And Humor Are Gym Buddies

Horror and humor, hanging out at the gym, snapping each other’s asses with wet towels. Horror and humor both work to stimulate that same place in our gutty-works, a place that defies explanation. Sometimes you don’t know why you think this thing is funny or that thing is scary. They just are. It’s why it’s hard to explain a horror story or a joke: you can’t explain it, you can only tell it. And both are told similarly: both have a set up, ask a question, and respond with a punch line or a twist. It’s just, they go in separate directions — one aims for amusement, the other for anxiety. But the reason you can find these two working sometimes in tandem is because they’re ultimately kissing cousins.

13. Sex And Death Also Play Well Together

Two more kissing cousins: sex and death. Shakespeare didn’t call the orgasm the “little death” for nothing. (I, on the other hand, refer to it as “The Donkey’s Pinata.”) Both are taboo subjects, both kept to the dark — and, as we know, horror lives in the dark, too. We all fear death and so sex — procreative and seductive — feels like an antidote to that, but then you also have the baggage where OMG SEX KILLS, whether it’s via a venereal disease or as part of the unwritten rules contained within a slasher film. In this way, in horror, sex and death are the Ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. Or maybe the double-dildo biting its own tail?

14. Car Crashes And Two Girls With One Cup

If you want to understand horror you have to understand the impulse that drives us to click on a video that everybody tells us we don’t want to see, or the urge to slow down at car crashes and gawk at blood on the highway. That urge is part of what informs our need to write and read horror fiction. It’s a baser impulse, but an important one. We deny it, but you ask me, it’s universal.

15. The Real Horror Story Is What’s Happening To The Horror Genre

Horror’s once again a difficult genre. It had a heyday in the 80s and 90s, evidenced by the fact it had its very own shelf at most bookstores. That’s no longer the case at Barnes & Noble, and Borders broke its leg in the woods and was eaten by hungry possums. I’ve heard that some self-published authors have pulled away from marketing their books as horror because they sell better when labeled as other genres.

16. Ripe For Resurgence?

That said, I wonder if it’s not time for horror to rise again, a gore-caked phoenix screaming like a mad motherfucker. The times we live in often dictate the type of entertainment we seek — and we’re starting to slide once more into a very dark and scary corner of American life. Horror may serve as a reflection of that, equal parts escapist and exploratory — maybe it’s time again to let monsters be monsters, giving a fictional face to the fiends we see all around us. Then again, maybe shit’s just too fucked up. Who can say? It’s worth a shot, though. I submit that it’s a good time to try writing horror.

17. Horror Writers Tend To Be Very Nice

I don’t know what it is, but goddamn if horror writers aren’t some of the nicest writers on the planet. I think it’s because their fiction is like constantly lancing a boil: the poison is purged, and all that’s left is smiles.

18. Horror Needs Hope

Good is known by its proximity to evil. You don’t know what a great burger tastes like until you’ve eaten a shitty one. You can’t know great sex from awful sex until you’d experienced both (pro-tip: the great sex is the one where you don’t cry after and eat a whole container of cake frosting). And so it is that for horror to be horrific, it must also have hope. Unceasing and unflinching horror ceases to actually be horrific until we have its opposite present: that doesn’t mean that hope needs to win out. Horror always asks that question of which will win the day: the eyes of hope or the jaws of hell?

19. Lessons Learned

Horror stories can serve as modern day fables. It works to convey messages and lessons, rules about truth and consequence. If you’re looking to say something, really say something, you’ve worse ways of doing so than by going down the horror fiction route. Great example of this is the underrated DRAG ME TO HELL, by Sam Raimi: a grim parable about our present economic recession.

20. The Stick Of A Short Sharp Needle

Sometimes, horror needs to be really fucked up. It just can’t do what it needs to do unless it’s going to cut out one of your kidneys, bend you over a nightstand, and shove the kidney back up inside your nether-burrow. Horror all but demands you don’t pull your punches, but that kind of unceasing assault on one’s own senses and sanity cannot be easily sustained for a novel-length or film-length project. Hence: short fiction and short films do well to deliver the sharp shock that horror may require.

21. We Need New Monsters

The old monsters — vampires, zombies, ghosts, werewolves — have their place. They mean something. But they may also be monsters for another time. Never be afraid to find new monsters. Horror in this way is a pit without a bottom: you will always discover new creatures writhing in the depths, reflecting the time in which they are born. Just go to a Juggalo convocation or a Tea Party gathering. You’ll see.

22. Never Tell The Audience They Should Be Scared

Show, Don’t Tell is a critical rule in all of storytelling, so critical that you should probably have it tattooed on your forehead backward so that every time you look in the mirror, there it is. But in horror it’s doubly important not to convey the fear that the audience is ideally supposed to feel. You can’t tell someone to be scared. You just have to shove the reader outside the firelight and hope that what you’ve hidden there in the shadows does the trick. You can lead a horse to horror, but you can’t make him piss his horsey diapers when something leaps out out of the depths to bite his face and plant eggs in the nose-holes.

23. Break Your Flashlight

You write horror, you’re trying to shine a light in dark corners. Key word there is “trying” — the flashlight needs to be broken. A light too bright will burn the fear away — the beam must waver, the batteries half-dead, the bulb on the verge of popping like a glass blister. It’s like, what the light finds is so unpleasant, you can’t look at it for too long. Look too long it’ll burn out your sanity sensors. In this way, horror isn’t always concerned with the why or the how — but it is most certainly concerned with the what.

24. Horror Still Needs All The Things That Makes Stories Great

You can’t just jam some scary shit into a book and be like, “Boom, done, game over.” Slow down, slick. Come back to the story. You still need all the things that make a story great. Horror — really, any genre — ain’t shit unless you can commit to the page a story filled with great characters, compelling ideas, strong writing, and a sensible plot. Don’t just dump a bucket of blood on our heads and expect us to slurp it up.

25. Horror Is Personal

Horror needs to work on you, the author. You need to be troubled, a little unsettled, by your own material. Write about what scares you. Doesn’t matter what it is or how absurd — hell, some people think that being terrified of clowns is ridiculous, until you realize how many people find clowns spooky as fuck. Dig deep into your own dark places. Tear off the manhole cover and stare down into the unanswered abyss. Speak to your own experiences, your own fears and frights. Shake up your anxieties and let them tumble onto the page. Because horror works best when horror is honest. The audience will feel that. The truth you bring to the genre will resonate, an eerie and unsettling echo that turns the mind upon itself.

It’s that time of the year, then, that normal everyday men and women get a hankering for the taste of ink and misery, thus choosing to step into the arena to tangle with the NaNoWriMo beast.

Here, then, are 25 of my thoughts regarding this month-long pilgrimage into the mouth of the novel — peruse, digest, then discuss. Feel free to hit the comments and add your own thoughts to the tangle.

1. Writing Requires Writing

The oft-repeated refrain, “Writers write,” is as true a sentiment as one can find, and yet so many self-declared writers seem to ignore it just the same. National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo, which sounds like like the more formalized greeting used by Mork when calling home to Ork — demands that writers shit or get off the pot. It says, you’re a writer, so get to scrawling, motherfucker.

2. Writing Requires Finishing

The other giant sucking chest wound that afflicts a great many so-called writers is the inability to finish a single fucking thing. Not a novel, not a script, not a short story. (One wonders how many unfinished manuscripts sit collecting dust like a shelf full of Hummel figurines in an old cat lady’s decrepit Victorian manse.) NaNoWriMo lays down the law: you have a goal and that goal is to finish.

3. Discipline, With A Capital “Do That Shit Every Day, Son”

The way you survive NaNoWriMo is the same way any novelist survives: by spot-welding one’s ass to the office chair every day and putting the words to screen and paper no matter what. Got a headache? Better write. Kid won’t stop crying? Better write. Life is hard and weepy-pissy-sadfaced-panda-noises? Fuck you and write. Covered in killer bees? Maybe today’s not the best day to write. You might want to call somebody. Just don’t pee in fear. Bees can smell fear-urine. Pee is to bees as catnip is to cats.

4. The Magic Number Is 1666

Ahh. The Devil’s vintage. Ahem. Anyway. To hit 50,000 words in one month, you must write at least 1,666 words per day over the 30 day period. I write about 1000 words in an hour, so you’re probably looking at two to three hours worth of work per day. If you choose to not work weekends, you’ll probably need to hit around 2300 words per day. If you’re only working weekends, then ~6000 per day.

5. The Problem With 50,000 Words

Be advised: 50,000 words does not a novel make. It may technically count, but publishers don’t want to hear it. Even in the young adult market I’d say that most novels hover around 60,000 words. You go to a publisher with 50k in hand and call it a novel, they’re going to laugh at you. And whip your naked ass with a towel. And put that shit on YouTube so everybody can have a chortle or three. Someone out there is surely saying, “Yes, but what if I’m self-publishing?” Oh, don’t worry, you intrepid DIY’ers. I’ll get to you.

6. The True Nature Of “Finishing”

For the record, I’m not a fan of referring to one’s sexual climax as “finishing.” It’s so… final. “I have finished. I am complete. Snooze Mode, engaged!” I prefer “arrived.” Sounds so much more festive! As if there’s more on the way! This party’s just getting started! … wait, I’m talking about the wrong type of finishing, aren’t I? Hm. Damn. Ah, yes, NaNoWriMo. Writing 50,000 words is your technical goal — completing a novel in those 50,000 words is not. You can turn in an unfinished novel and be good to go. The only concern there is that 50,000 words serves only as a milestone and come December it again becomes oh-so-easy to settle in with the “I’ve Written Part Of A Novel” crowd. Always remember: the only way through is through.

7. Draft Zero

It helps to look at your NaNoWriMo novel as the zero draft — it has a beginning, it has an ending, it has a whole lot of something in the middle. The puzzle pieces are all on the table and, at the very least, you’ve got an image starting to come together (“is that a dolphin riding side-saddle on a mechanical warhorse through a hail of lasers?”). But the zero draft isn’t done cooking. A proper first draft awaits. A first draft that will see more meat slapped onto those exposed bones, taking your word count into more realistic territory.

8. Quantity Above Quality

Put differently, the end result of any written novel is quality. You’re looking for that thing to shine like a stiletto and be just as sharp. NaNoWriMo doesn’t ask for or judge quality as part of its end goal. To “win” the month, you could theoretically write the phrase “nipple sandwich” 25,000 times and earn yourself a little certificate. Quantity must be spun into quality. You’ve got all the sticks. Now build yourself a house.

9. Beware “Win” Conditions

If you complete NaNoWriMo, I give you permission to feel like a winner. If you don’t, I do not — repeat, awooga, awooga, do not — give you permission to feel like a loser. This is one of the perils of the gamification of novel-writing, the belief that by racking up a certain score (word count) in a pre-set time-frame (one month for everybody), you win. And by not doing this, well, fuck you, put another quarter in the machine, dongface. Which leads me to:

10. We’re Not All Robots Who Follow The Same Pre-Described Program

NaNoWriMo assumes a single way of writing a novel. Part of this equation — “smash brain against keyboard until story bleeds out” — is fairly universal. The rest is not. For every novelist comes a new path cut through the jungle. Some novelists write 1000 words a day. Some 5000 words a day. Some spend more time on planning, others spend a year or more writing. Be advised that NaNoWriMo is not a guaranteed solution, nor is your “failure to thrive” in that program in any way meaningful. I tried it years back and found it just didn’t fit for me. (And yet I remain!) It is not a bellwether of your ability or talent.

11. November Is A Shitty Month

November. The month of Thanksgiving. The month where people start shopping for Christmas. The month where we celebrate National Pomegranate Month (NaPoGraMo?). Yeah. Not a great month to pick to get stuff done. Just be aware that November presents its own unique challenges to novelists of any stripe, much less those doing a combat landing during NaNoWriMo. Know this going in.

12. The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good

NaNoWriMo gets one lesson right: writing can at times be like a sprint and you can’t hover over every day’s worth of writing, picking ticks and mites from its hair — you will always find more ticks, more mites. The desire for perfection is like a pit of wet coal silt: it will grab your boots like iron hands and never let you go.

13. Total Suckity-Ass Donkey Crap Is Also The Enemy Of The Good

On the other hand, is this novel is the equivalent of you shitting your diaper and then rubbing your poopy butt up against the walls of your plexiglass enclosure, then what’s the fucking point?

14. You Have Permission To Suck — Temporarily

The point is, you’re not aiming to be a shitty writer with prose on par with a mouthful of toilet water, but you must allow yourself permission to embrace imperfection. You’re not trying to write irreparable fiction, you’re trying to make a go at a flawed story whose bones are good but whose components may need rebuilding. Imperfect is not the same as impossible.

15. NaStoPlaMo

Take October. Name it “National Story Planning Month.” Whatever you’re going to do in November, you don’t have to go in blind. You’ve no requirement, after all, to suddenly leap out of bed on November 1st, crack open your head with an ice ax, and let the story come pouring from the cleft. Spontaneous generation is a myth in science as it is in creative spheres. Plan. Prep. Take a month. Get your mise en place in place.

16. NaEdYoShiMo

December then becomes “National Edit Your Shit Month.” Or, if you need a month away from it, maybe you come back to it in January — but the point is, always come back to it. If you want to do this novel writing thing then you must come to terms with the fact that rewriting is part of a novel’s life-cycle. Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.

17. The Stats Bear Ogling

In 2009, NaNo had 167,150 participants, and 32,178 “winners.” That’s a pretty good rate, just shy of 20% completion. The numbers get a bit more telling when you look at the number of published novels that have come out of the entire ten-year program, and that number appears to be below 200 books. Out of the 500,000 or so total participants of NaNo over the years, that’s a very minor 0.04%. This isn’t an indictment against NaNoWriMo but is, however, an illustrative number just the same: it’s harder than the Devil’s dangle-rod in a cobalt-tungsten condom to get published these days.

18. Why Some Authors Dismiss NaNoWriMo

Professional authors — perhaps unfairly — sometimes look at the program with a dismissive sniff or a condescending eye roll. Look at it from their perspective: NaNo participants might seem on par with tourists. Professional authors live here all year. We are what we are all the time. And then others come along and, for one month, dance around on our beaches and poop in the water and pretend to be native. The point is, don’t act like a haole, haole. Don’t be like that girl in college who kissed girls and called herself a lesbian even though she was really just doing it to get other guys hot under the scrotum collar. And pro authors, don’t act like prigs and pricks, either. Drop the dismissal. Most of us are all trying to share the same weird wordmonkey dream, and that’s a thing to be celebrated, not denigrated.

19. Why Some Agents And Editors Despise NaNoWriMo

If the story holds true, agents and editors receive a flush of slush from NaNoWriMo in the months following November. A heaping midden pile of bad prose which, for the record, only serves to block the door for everybody else with its stinky robustness. You may say, “But I’m not going to do that.” Of course you’re not, but somebody probably is. And those that spam every agent or editor with their half-cocked garbage novel should be dragged around by their balls or labia and then fed to a pen full of rutting pigs.

20. The Self-Publishing Marketplace Is Not Your Vomit Bag

Just as you should not run to agents and editors with your fetal draft, you should not instantly fling it like a booger into the marketplace. Novels, like whisky and wine, need time.

21. The NaNoWriMo Website Isn’t Doing Itself Any Favors

The text on the NaNoWriMo website is, for me, a point of dismissal and does little to engender respect from professional writers (as opposed to, say, the participants, who often do earn that respect). Check, for example, the text identifying why you should participate: “The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.” Yes, we stupid novelists, what with our interest in quality and our inability to produce a perfect draft in 30 days. Sometimes I want to kick the NaNoWriMo website in its non-existent digital crotch.

22. Engage The Community (But Realize That Writing Is Up To You)

November sees a flurry of activity on the novel-writing front, and you can harness that energy by engaging with the community. Just the same — at the end of the day it’s you and your word count. Nobody can do this shit for you. When it all comes down to it, you’re the one motherfucker who can slay this dragon and make a hat from his skull, a coat from his scales, and a tale from his tongue.

23. Fuck The Police

NaNoWriMo has a lot of rules: you’re supposed to “start fresh,” you’re not really meant to work on non-fiction, blah blah blah. This is all just made-up stuff. It’s not government mandated. This isn’t taxes, for fuck’s sake. Do what you like. Even better: do what the story needs. Hell with the rules. Fuck the police. Write. Write endlessly. Don’t be constrained by this program. It’s just a springboard: use it to launch your way to awesomeness. Anything you don’t like about it, toss it out the window. That certificate you get at the end doesn’t mean dog dick. The only thing that matters is you and your writing.

24. Be Aware Of Variants

Have you seen ROW80, or, A Round of Words in 80 Days? I’ve also seen smaller variants about writing scripts and non-fiction projects. Come up with your own variant if you must. NaNoWriMo is just a means to an end — it’s just one path up the mountain. Other exist, so find them if this one doesn’t seem your speed.

25. November Is Just Your Beginning

If you get to the end of the month with a manuscript — finished or not — in hand, celebrate. Do a little dance. Eat a microwaved pizza, do a shot of tequila, take off your pants and burn them in the fireplace. And then think, “Tomorrow, I’ve got more to do.” Because this is just the start. I don’t mean that to sound punishing — if it sounds punishing, you shouldn’t be a writer. It should be fucking liberating. It should fill your heart with a flutter of eager wings: “Holy shit! I can do this tomorrow, too! I can do this in December and January and any day of the goddamn week I so choose.” Don’t stop on November 30th. You want to do this thing, do this thing. Your energy and effort can turn NaNoWriMo from a month-long gimmick to a life-long love and possibly even a career. Let this foster in you a love of storytelling made real through discipline — and don’t let that love or that discipline wither on the vine come December 1st.

* * *

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

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

1. Every Story Is An Argument

Every story’s trying to say something. It’s trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It’s the writer making a case. It’s the writer saying, “All of life is suffering.” Or, “Man will be undone by his prideful reach.” Or “Love blows.” Or, “If you dance with the Devil Wombat, you get cornholed by the Devil Wombat.” This argument is the story’s theme.

2. The Elements Of Story Support That Argument

If the theme, then, is the writer’s thesis statement, then all elements of the story — character, plot, word choice, scene development, inclusion of the Devil Wombat — go toward proving that thesis.

3. Unearthed Or Engineered

The theme needn’t be something the writer is explicitly aware of — it may be an unconscious argument, a message that has crept into the work like a virus capable of overwriting narrative DNA, like a freaky dwarven stalker hiding in your panty drawers and getting his greasy Norseman stink all over your undergarments. A writer can engineer the theme — building it into the work. Or a writer can unearth it — discovering its tendrils after the work is written.

4. Theme: A Lens That Levels The Laser

Knowing your theme can give your story focus. If you know the theme before you write, it helps you make your argument. If you discover the theme before a rewrite, it helps you go back through and filter the story, discovering which elements speak to your argument and which elements are either vestigial (your story’s stubby, grubby tail) or which elements go against your core argument (“so far, nobody is getting cornholed by the Devil Wombat”).

5. Do I Really Need This Happy Horseshit?

Yes and no. Yes, your story needs a theme. It’s what elevates that motherfucker to something beyond forgettable entertainment. You can be assured, for instance, that 90% of movies starring Dolph Lundgren have no theme present. A story with a theme is a story with a point. No, you don’t always need to identify the theme. Sometimes a story will leap out of your head with a theme cradled to its bosom (along with the shattered pottery remains of your skull) regardless of whether or not you intended it. Of course, identifying the theme at some point in your storytelling will ensure that it exists and that your story isn’t just a hollow scarecrow bereft of his stuffing. Awww. Sad scarecrow. Crying corn syrup tears.

6. Slippery Business

I make it sound easy. Like you can just state a theme or find it tucked away in your story like a mint on a pillow. It isn’t. Theme is slippery, uncertain. It’s like a lubed-up sex gimp: every time you think you get your hands around him the greasy latex-enveloped sonofabitch is out of the cage and free from your grip and running into traffic where he’s trying desperately to unzipper his mouth and scream for help. Be advised: theme is tricky. Chameleonic. Which isn’t a word. But it should be. It jolly well fucking should be.

7. For Instance: You Can Get It Wrong

You might think going in, “What I’m trying to say with this story is that man’s inhumanity to man is what keeps civilization going.” But then you get done the story and you’re like, “Oh, shit. I wasn’t saying that at all, was I? I was saying that man’s inhumanity to cake is what keeps civilization going.” And then you’re like, “Fuck yeah, cake.” And you eat some cake.

8. Mmm, Speaking Of Cake

In cake, every piece is a microcosm of the whole. A slice contains frosting, cake, filling. Okay, that’s not entirely true — sometimes you get a piece of cake where you get something other pieces don’t get, like a fondant rose, but really, let’s be honest, fondant tastes like sugary butthole. Nasty stuff. So, let’s disregard that and go back to the original notion: all pieces of cake contain the essence of that cake. So it is with your story: all pieces of the story contain the essence of that story, and the essence of that story is the theme. The theme is cake, frosting, filling. In every slice you cut. Man, now I really want a piece of cake.

9. Grand Unification Theory

Another way to look at theme: it unifies story and bridges disparate elements. In this way theme is like The Force. Or like fiber. Or like bondage at an orgy. It ties the whole thing together. Different characters, tangled plotlines, curious notions: all of them come together with the magic motherfucking superglue of theme.

10. Put Down That Baseball Bat, Pick Up That Phial Of Poison

Theme can do a story harm. It isn’t a bludgeoning device. A story is more than just a conveyance for your message: the message is just one component of your story. Overwrought themes become belligerent within the text, like a guy yelling in your ear, smacking you between the shoulder blades with his Bible. Theme is a drop of poison: subtle, unseen, but carried in the bloodstream to the heart and brain just the same. Repeat after me, penmonkeys: Your story is not a sermon.

11. No Good If Nobody Knows It

The poison is only valuable if the victim feels the effects. Your big dick or magical vagina only matter if people can see ’em, touch ’em, play with ’em, erect heretical idols to their glory (mine is cast in lapis lazuli and a nice sharp cheddar cheese). So it is with theme: a theme so subtle it’s imperceptible does your story zero good. It’d be like having a character that just never shows up.

12. Triangulating Theme

Ask three questions to zero in on your theme: “What is this story about?” “Why do I want to tell this story?” “Why will anyone care?” Three answers. Three beams of light. Illuminating dark spaces. Revealing theme.

13. As Much An Obsession As A Decision

The auteur theory suggests that, throughout an author’s body of work one can find consistent themes — and, studying a number of authors, you’ll find this to be true. (Look no further than James Joyce in this respect, where he courts themes exploring the everyday heroism of the common man competing against the paralysis of the same.) In this way theme is sometimes an obsession, the author compelled to explore certain aspects and arguments without ever really meaning to — theme then needn’t be decided upon, nor must it be constrained to a single narrative. Theme is bigger, bolder, madder than all that. Sometimes theme is who we really are as writers.

14. Theme Is Not Motif

I’ll sometimes read that theme can be expressed as a single word. “Love.” “Death.” “Plastics.” Let me offer my own one word to that: bullshit. Those are motifs. Elements and symbols that show up again and again in the story. Motif is not synonymous with theme. “Death” is not a theme. “Man can learn from death” is a theme. “Life is stupid because we all die” is a theme. “Sex and death are uncomfortable neighbors” is a theme. Death is just a word. An inconclusive and unassertive word. Theme says something, goddamnit.

15. Mmm, Speaking Of Cake, I Mean, Motif

That said, motif can be a carrier for theme: theme is the disease and motif is the little outbreak monkey spreading it. If your theme’s making a statement about death, then symbols of death would not be unexpected. Or maybe you’d use symbols of time or decay. I mean, it has to make sense, of course. A theme about what man can learn from death is not well-embodied by, say, a series of microwave ovens.

16. Theme Is Also Not A Logline

A logline is plot-based. It depicts a sequence of events in brief, almost vignetted, form. Plot embodies breadth. Theme embodies depth. Theme is about story, and story is the weirder, hairier brother to “plot.”

17. Piranhasaur Versus Mechatarantula

In English class, I was often told that theme could best be described as X versus Y. Man versus Nature. Man Versus Man. Man Versus Woman. Fat Guy Versus Hammock. Of course, English class was frequently fucking stupid. Once more I’m forced to call bullshit. Theme isn’t just you, the writer, identifying a struggle. That’s not enough. Theme picks a goddamn side. Theme asserts predictive outcome. It says, “In this struggle, nature always gets the best of man.” It predicts, “That hammock is going to fuck that fat guy up, for realsies.” Theme does more than merely showcase conflict. Theme puts its money on the table.

18. Take That Question Mark And Shove It Up Your Boothole

So too it is that theme is never a question. “How far will man go for love?” is a question, not a theme. Theme isn’t a big blank spot. Theme is the fucking answer, right or wrong, good or bad.

19. It Is The Question, However, That Drives Us

Plot can carry theme by asking the question — like the aforementioned, “How far will man go for love?” — but then it’s theme’s job to stick the landing and, by the end of the story, answer the question posed. Theme comes back around and demonstrates, “This is how far man will go for love.” It shows if man will go into the whale’s mouth and out the whale’s keister, or it shows it man has limitations, or if man’s love can be defeated by other elements (greed, lust, fear, microwave ovens, wombats).

20. Of Turtleheads And Passing Comets

Theme might end up like Halley’s Comet — once or twice in a story, it emerges from hiding and shows itself. The blood test reveals it and The Thing springs forth from flesh. In this way, it’s okay if the theme is plainly stated (often by a character) once or twice in the story. Forrest Gump tells us that life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. (And the film is like a box of chocolates, too — all the shitty ones filled with suntan lotion and zit cream.) The opening line to Reservoir Dogs could be argued to give away the whole point to the movie: it is, after all, a metaphor for big dicks.

21. Do Your Due Diligence

Read books. Watch movies. Play games. Find the theme in each. This isn’t like math. You may not find one pure answer to the equation. But it’s a valuable exercise just the same. It’ll teach you that theme works.

22. Your Audience Might Not Give A Shit (But That’s Okay)

Theme may not be something the audience sees or even cares about. Further, the audience may find stuff in your work you never intended. Like that old joke goes, the reader sees the blue curtains as some expression of grief, futility and the author’s repressed bestiality but, in reality, the author just meant, “The curtains are fuckin’ blue.” It’s all good. This is the squirmy slippery nature of story. That’s the many-headed hydra of art.

23. Not Just For Literary Noses Held High In The Air

Just the same, theme isn’t a jungle gym found on a playground meant only for literary snobs. Theme speaks to common experience and thus is for the common reader and the common writer. Theme isn’t better than you and you’re not better than theme. Like in Close Encounters, this is you mounding your mashed potatoes into an unexpected shape. “This means something.” Fuck yeah, it does. That’s a beautiful thing.

24. A Weapon In Your Word Warrior Arsenal

How important is theme at the end of the day? It’s one more weapon in your cabinet, one more tool in your box. It is neither the most nor the least most important device in there — you determine its value. My only advice is, it helps to get floor-time with every weapon just so you know how best to slay every opponent. Play with theme. Learn its power. I mean, why the hell not?

25. For Fuck’s Sake, Say Something

You want theme distilled down? You want it reduced like a tasty sauce? Theme is you saying something with your fiction. Why wouldn’t you want to say something? Big or small, simple or complex, as profound as you care to make it, fiction has the power to do more than just be a recitation of plot events. Your work becomes your own — fingerprinted in blood — when you capitalize on the power of storytelling to speak your heart and soul. Take a stand. Put your big dick and magic vagina on the line (figuratively speaking) and let theme be a bold pronouncement of confidence, a message encoded in the DNA of an already-great story.

* * *

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

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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