Tag: advice (page 22 of 25)

Ever go into a room and you forget why you went in there?

Yeah. Me too.

Used to happen when I would go into record stores, too. Remember those? You’d saddle up the ol’ Triceratops and head on out to buy some “used CDs?” I’d go into the store with a head full of bands and albums I wanted to check out, and soon as I stepped through that threshold — whoof. Gone. Kaput. Brain: tabula rasa. Then the clerk would point to my crotch and be like, “Dude, you just wet yourself.” And I’d be like, “Shut up!” and he’d be like, “I’m just saying,” and then I’d get some urine on my hand and go quick wipe it on his face. Hipster asshole. Now you got pee on your face! Boom!

It’s easy to forget little things. Especially if you’re me. If I try to go to the grocery store without a list, dude, I am fucked three ways from Sunday. I will come home with an armload of jelly beans, Swiss chard, cat food, and Clamato juice. Meanwhile, all the stuff we needed — milk, bread, eggs, uranium for my particle accelerator — is stuff we still goddamn need because I didn’t pick it up.

What the hell am I trying to say, here?

I’m saying, if I can’t remember what the hell I was supposed to do in the kitchen, if I can’t remember a band’s name or that we need to pick up milk, how the crap am I supposed to keep an entire unwritten novel straight in my head? Short answer: I’m not. And neither are you.

My name is Chuck Wendig.

I am a reformed Pantser.

The Disclaimer Before The Froth Flies

Many excellent writers are pantsers. (If you aren’t familiar with the definition — a “pantser” writes without doing outlines or other prep-work, while a “plotter” tends to outline and perform other preliminary planning efforts before diving into the book. Good? Golden.) Stephen King reportedly writes without an outline. Great writers and great minds tend to have no problem just springing forth like a whipped gazelle and tearing ass across the open meadow without fear, without concern, without a plan in sight.

For them, I say, well done.

I am not a great writer. I think I’m a good one. As a good-but-not-great writer, and similarly as a guy with a brain like a porous swatch of moth-eaten cheesecloth, I must advocate planning over pantsing.

I have in the past gotten a little zealous over the subject, and in this post I will again get a little zealous. Because who wants to read wishy-washy advice? Isn’t it more fun for you if I pound the lectern and throw chairs at the students? Well, it’s more fun for me, anyway. That said —

I do not seriously believe that pantsers cannot write excellent novels. They can. They do.

What I do believe however is that while some writers are natural pantsers, others are pantsers-by-default, pantsers-by-laziness. They do not plan, they do not outline. They don’t because it’s hard. And frustrating. And irritating. That’s why I didn’t used to do it.

But if not writing an outline works for you and has earned you the result you’re looking for (ideally, publication), then keep doing that. I don’t care if you wear a hat made of raccoons when you write — if that hat gets you the stories you want, wear the hat. But if you find yourself hitting a wall, if you find yourself spinning around in circles until you throw up, may I offer a suggestion?

Try doing some planning.

Now? Time to throw some chairs!

Stand Up Straight, You Lazy Slobbering Muckabout!

I wrote… mm, I guess five or six novels via the Pantser’s Execution. Actually, the novel that’s on submission with my agent, Blackbirds, was initially written without plan or direction, too. This is in addition to the two or three dozen completely unfinished novels that, you guessed it, all underwent the “Let’s Just Open The Word Processor And Run Amok!” method of writing.

They were all awful. Only when I finally was told to step back and outline Blackbirds did I suddenly gain the ability to see the story for what it was. Only then could I line up all the pieces and make the plot work. Since it has at its core a kind of reverse murder mystery, the plot elements needed to line up for it to make sense and ‘click.’ By plotting, I drew a path through the maze before I had to walk it. Before I could get lost.

But I resisted. Oh, Lawds A Mercy, did I resist. My gut trembled. My sphincter tightened so hard I could’ve shattered a ruby. I had my excuses. “But it’ll steal the creative spark.” “But I’m not writing a term paper.” “But then there’s no sense of discovery!” What it really translated to was:

“I’m actually quite lazy. I might even be allergic to work. Also: I don’t wanna.”

Then I cried and threw my sippy-cup across the room.

Then I did the outline.

Then I learned the truth:

Planning and prep-work may cure what ails you as a writer. How, you ask?

First, Let Me Shoot Some Myths In The Head

Outlining does not steal your creative spark. In part because “creative spark” is not a real thing. It is a myth, like Bigfoot, Nessie, the Muse, and Writer’s Block.

I liken it to the notion that finding out the sex of your baby before the birth somehow “ruins the surprise.” Pfft. It does not ruin anything. It merely changes the timing of that surprise. So too with outlining and prep-work. You’re still “writing” the novel and still going on that path of discovery, you’re just doing it in a tighter, more truncated way.

Planning doesn’t limit your sense of discovery. It isn’t a prison. You don’t have to religiously stick to your plan. Planning won’t write the book for you. It just puts down trail-markers. I planned a drive and hike for us in Kauai, but planning isn’t the same as experiencing. I didn’t experience beauty in the planning phase, but I did during its execution. Your writing is still a journey. Doesn’t hurt to have a map is all.

So, then, how does planning help soothe your ills?

Planning Helps Strike Down The Fear Of The Blank Page

One of the worst feelings is the “Blank Page Syndrome.” You open the story in the morning. You stare at the white snowy expanse of screen. You are overwhelmed by both the raw potential your story holds and your inability to pluck a single cogent thread from that hoary no-nothing nowhere void. You void your bowels. You take a nap, quivering in your sleep. You dream of your mother’s safe bosom.

An outline will go to great lengths to defeat this.

Imagine that in the morning you open the file, then you look to your left and you see, “Oh, here I am, on Chapter 14: The Dragon’s Barbed Nipples, wherein the hero must steal the goblin milk from the craggy peaks where the Hell-Harpies hold their infernal book club.” You know where you left off. You know your place. You know roughly where you’re going next.

You have a map. You have a safety net. Every day is not a sudden crush of cold water as you dive in to deep, dark channels. You have breadcrumbs. You have torches. Move forward without fear.

Planning Will Crotch-Kick Your Self-Doubt

You get in the middle of a longer work and next thing you know, you’re crippled by uncertainty and self-loathing. You just want to close the file, delete it, format your hard drive, then hit yourself in the nuts with a ball peen hammer. No. No. Don’t do that. Fuck that shit. Get shut of the doubt. Don’t let the doubt crotch-kick you. You need to crotch-kick your doubt.

Planning will help you do that.

When you plan, you lay the story out. You build confidence in it before you even truly begin. It’s like this — say you have to get up and give a talk in front of 1000 people. Would you rather give that talk utterly unprepared? No notes? No research? Nothing? “Just gonna wing it!” As you gain confidence in the topic, you gain confidence in your ability to execute.

Further, you can have others look at your outline, make sure it gets a thumbs-up.

It dissolves some or all of your doubt. Trust me on this.

Planning Helps You Write Faster, Like Meth-Cranked Ninja

Without planning, some of your time must be spent in deep thought. Often a day of unprepared writing is accompanied by that period of, “Uhhh. Well. Hmmm.” But, with a map, with an outline and some prep-work around characters and worldbuilding, you can move more swiftly. You already spent time in the contemplation chambers. Now it’s just time to write, write, write.

Planning Will Cut Down Number Of Drafts With A Machine Gun

Your first draft is your worst draft. This is true whether or not you’re a pantser or a plotter. Ah, but, your first draft will often be a better draft if you’re a plotter. Why? Because you had a map. Because you had focus and direction from the get-go. What this means generally is that you won’t need as many drafts to get to the final one. It’ll tighten the draft. It’ll cinch up the middle (generally, the second act). A little work on the front end saves you a lot of nasty gruntwork on the back-end.

(Heh. Back-end. Grunt!)

(Shut up.)

Planning Will Hone Your Discipline To A Hair-Splitting Sharpness

Writing requires discipline.

Creativity is raw and flickering like fire — you want to make use of it, you have to bring often ugly, unpleasant metals to it and forge that shit into the shape you desire. It’s hard, sweaty, sometimes grumpy work. Nobody wants writing to be about discipline. We all would love it if it were the equivalent of catching fireflies in a moonlight meadow. We wish it were fun and goofy, like icing cupcakes in zero gravity.

But it’s not. It’s tough work. Satisfying work, yes. But tough just the same.

What many writers struggle with is the ability to find the sticktoitiveness necessary to complete something. Discipline isn’t gained overnight. It’s farmed over time — sown, seeded, grown, harvested.

Discipline is the product of your habits.

You plan your work, you’ve started a habit. That habit is itself a kind of discipline. It reinforces itself. Discipline begets discipline. No, really, it does. You feel good for having completed something — an outline, a synopsis, character notes — and that impels you forward. It helps you put your ass in the chair every day and write. It’s what helps you belly crawl through the mud and the blood.

And that means, ultimately…

Planning Will Help You Finish

Planning draws the map. Outlining shows you the end of the road. And it helps you get there.

After all, that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? To finish something?

Try planning. Never mind the fact that someone is going to ask you to do it someday anyway and so you might as well be prepared (no, really, someone will demand it of you — don’t believe me? I’ve often been asked to provide an outline before committing to the work). It’s good for you as a writer. It’s good for the story, too. You don’t have to be an outline lawyer. Nobody’s forcing you to marry it. I’m just saying —

Try it.

I hate to do it. I still do. But I’m always happy when I have it, and cranky when I don’t.

Fuck laziness. Eat your vegetables. Drink your milk. Do the writing.

And if planning doesn’t give you the results, then I would say… fuck it, try pantsing that bad-boy, instead. (Pants it good and hard. Nnnngggh. Yeah. You like that? You like that.)

Do what must be done to complete the work.

ABW.

Always. Be. Writing.

Cue sad Sarah McLachlan song such as “Full of Grace.”

Gaze over images of various writers trapped at their desk with their sad faces, quivering lips, and snot-bubble noses. One writer extends a gruel cup in an inky paw. Another is missing an eye, uhh, just because. A third writer wears nothing but a dirty pair of Hawaiian shorts — he feels his very-visible ribs with one hand as he shoves his keyboard into his mouth with the other, gnawing like some kind of squirrel.

“Did you know that fewer than 1% of writers are able to make a living wage, or even scrape together enough money to buy black market Ramen flavor packets from dubious Laotian street merchants? Every minute, three people give up their dreams of being a writer and become inept middle managers. Every hour, seven writers die on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, and for some really weird reason, Sedona, Arizona. But you can help stop the tears. By donating no less than $25,000 a year — less than the cost of 25,000 cups of coffee — you can contribute to and keep afloat our Instruct Writers How Not To Starve And Die In Sedona fund. Only you can keep stories in the world. Only you can stop writers from putting out their eyes with fountain pens.”

Here, then, is how you feed yourself, clothe yourself, and pay rent or a mortgage with naught but the power of your writing. Ready to roll? First, three caveats.

Caveat The First: Am I Really Talking To You?

Let me separate this out by talking first about fishermen.

Let’s assume, however falsely, that two types of fishermen exist in the world. The first identifies as a fisherman when he is asked, “What do you do in your spare time?” The second identifies as a fishermen when he is asked, “What do you do for a living?” Nothing fundamentally wrong with either answer. But each answer says something different about each type of fisherman.

Ask yourself the same question about being a writer. Is it a spare time thing? Or is this an, “I want to do this for a living” thing? Sounds obvious, but if you’re in the hobbyist camp, no harm, no foul to you, but this post probably isn’t for you.

Caveat The Second: Your Dream Of Creative Integrity Is Cute And All

I am a huge fan of creative integrity. I am also a huge fan of unicorns. My Trapper Keeper? Covered in unicorn stickers. And yet, despite my love of unicorns, I also realize that they are not real, or, even if they are, they’re not helping me pay the mortgage. At least not without taking them to the abattoir and selling their precious meats (or making weapons from their horns).

Creative integrity is a good thing to have and it will at times serve you well, but if you steadfastly hold to some kind of lofty notion of your work — say, you fall more on the “artiste” side of things than the “craft” side of things — then it will be more difficult for you to make a living wage. You may create more transcendent, beautiful work; I dunno. But with it you are unlikely to feed your baby (or your unicorn sticker addiction) with it. Once again, I may not be talking to you in this post.

Caveat The Third: This Will Not Happen Overnight

No “Magical Ink Fairy” exists.

You will not get an apprenticeship at the Wordsmithy.

Tomorrow, I am not going to quit being a writer and suddenly transform into a marine biologist. So too are you not going to eject from your job and become a full-time paid writer. Sure, it happens, but only if you take a writer position or writer job. Most writers I know do not have “in-house” writing work. (And those that do: I’m not talking to them because those lucky gits have it covered.)

Self-Evaluate Honestly And Find An Hourly Wage Or Salary That Keeps You Alive

Oh-ho-ho, you might be saying, “Hey, writers don’t make an hourly wage,” which is technically true. You also don’t make an annual salary. But you still need to determine those numbers. You enter into the fray with only a hazy cloud of possibility in your head, then only a hazy cloud will return to you by the end of the year. Which means — yup, back to the street to hit up the Laotian for more Ramen flavor packets. (“Ooh, this one’s called ‘Oriental.’ How exotic! It tastes like soy sauce and boot leather!”)

Let’s say the bare minimum of what you need to be making before taxes is $35k a year. If you’re where I am, that might do you okay — but if you’re in LA or NYC, you’re probably going to have to crank that number up because I think that’s how much the average homeless person makes in the city and they’re, y’know, homeless. So, you take that magic number — $35,000 — and figure out, okay, how much do I need to make per week to live?

Consulting my abacus and these pigeon bones, it looks like you’ll need $650-700 a week.

Second thing to figure out: how much work can you accomplish in an hour? I write about 1000 words an hour on average. Generally speaking, I get paid five cents to $0.25 per word, but let’s look at the bare bottom of five cents. A thousand words at five cents is fifty bucks an hour, which means I’d need to work a total of 14 hours a week to earn out. Kind of awesome, but betrays the reality: first, you have editing time to factor in there (the better you get, the more you’ll cut this down), and second, you may have a hard time constantly scaring up work. Be ready for inconsistent work schedules.

Will You Work Freelance, Or Is It All Creator-Owned?

If you work freelance, you will always be trying to hunt down work and deadlines will be your best friend and worst enemy. But you will earn a steady rate and have contracts that bolster your efforts and you’ll be building up a resume in a professional arena.

Creator-owned is a little more personally satisfying, but also the harder road. (By “creator-owned,” I mean you’re going to rely on putting out and selling your own work, whether that work is short fiction, long fiction, screenplays, comic books, and whether or not that work is self-published or published through traditional channels.) If you were to choose to thrive on short stories alone, let’s say, and you publish short work that is paid the minimum pro-rate of five cents a word, you’d need to write and sell —

*spells BOOBS on a calculator*

— 140 short stories in a year. Which is not impossible, but it’s pretty fucking epic just the same.

Some work pays a helluva lot better than others. Film and TV pay very well, especially compared to novel-writing. The average novel advance these days is, according to Tobias Buckell, $5,000. Now, playing Herr Doktor Pessismist, I’ll assume you won’t ever surpass that advance, which means you’d need to write about seven novels a year (and sell each one of those crazy sumbitches) just to earn out.

What does this tell you?

Always Be Writing, And Diversify That Shit

This is when Alec Baldwin steps to the chalkboard and writes ABW, “Always Be Writing” across it. And then you go to pour some coffee and he tells you to put that coffee down, coffee is for writers only. Then something something, fuck you is my name, something something, set of steak knives.

You need to always be writing. I don’t necessarily mean that you need to fill every hour with word count (screw food, so what if my baby is crying, I can just pee in this Snapple bottle — best stuff on Earth, bitches, hahahaha *sob*), I just mean that you need to peg a daily word count and hit that word count every day you can manage. If you take weekends off, fine, fuck it, but fold that word count into your week.

Also: diversify. Do not rely on one revenue stream. When I asked the question above about freelance versus creator-owned, it’s something of a false dichotomy — I set a trap for you, and you fell right into it. And now I will eat your sweetbreads. Which are not breads at all, but rather, your delicious pancreas. Wait, whuh? I dunno. What I’m saying is, you can and perhaps should do both. Novels and short stories combine together to form part of your Wordmonkey Voltron. Throw in there some freelancing, some scripting, some under-the-table smut writing, whatever, and you start to see the whole package emerge.

And by “whole package,” I do not mean genitals. So calm down.

Have The Right Tools

Tiny point: have the right tools. Have a good computer. Have a good word processing program. You don’t need the best, but you do need what fits you and what works. Writing, like any other self-involved career, is an investment — it costs a lot less than a start-up restaurant, so spend a little bit of money to get the bare minimum of equipment you need. Once you start making money, hey, look, tax deductions!

Wait, Where Do I Find Freelance Work Again?

Ehhh. Uhh.

*knocks over a stack of plates, runs for the exit*

No, seriously? I don’t know. Here’s the thing, though: writers make the world go ’round. You wouldn’t think it looking at some writer pay rates, but it’s true. In nearly everything that exists, some kind of writing went into its making. Somebody has to write menus and placemats and planograms. Somebody has to write technical manuals. We are the word of God. We say “light,” and by Sweet Molly McGoggins, there is light.

Okay, that’s a little overwrought, but the idea is firm: writers are everywhere, and this is true of creative content. Turn on the TV. Pick up a magazine. Check out a website. Writers are there. If not like gods, then like roaches, we’re that ubiquitous. So, the work is out there. You just have to keep your eyes focused on finding it. Gaining work is some mystical combination of knowing the right people, seizing opportunities when they arise, and building up a small portfolio of work in that realm.

(It also involves saying “yes” a lot and nailing the shit out of deadlines.)

You might ask, “But what about sites like eLance?” To that I’d say, I dunno. I’ve never used it. From what I can see, it feels like a race to the bottom in terms of pay, and a lot of the jobs there look a little dubious. It doesn’t seem like a great way to work a living wage, but alternately, it might be a way to get started and get some paid credits under your belt. If anybody has used a site like that, sound off.

Also, those of you out there who are freelancers: share your sordid tales of how you got your work the first time. I tell people that working your way into a full-time freelance life is like digging a tunnel through a mountain and then detonating it behind you — every path in seems to be different.

So, Self-Publishing Is The Future?

Sure, maybe, I dunno. I don’t live in the future, though, I live in the present. (You know how I know it’s the present? No jet packs. No teleporters. No hoverboards.)

I do not think you should jump right in and hope to subsist on a self-publishing revenue stream. Again: diversify. But that does mean it behooves you to try it out. If you self-publish something and it’s good enough to get you $1000 over the course of the year, well, now you’ve only got $34,000 to go.

Slow Like Molasses

I got my first short story published (for $$$) when I was 18 or 19 or something. I started freelancing when I was 23 or 24. I was able to go full-time and earn a living wage when I was 30 or 31. Again: not an overnight sensation. And it’s still a struggle, every year, because it’s not something you can sit back and allow to happen. But that is also part of the joy. To go back to the fisherman, you get money for every fish you sell. It’s an elegant form of commerce: I did this thing, and this thing is worth money. At a desk job, for every spreadsheet you do you get… well, what? You get a check every week no matter how many spreadsheets you do. The commerce is muddy. The reward, uncertain.

Me, I like being a writer. It requires a bundle of sacrifices. And it makes you crazier than a shithouse owl.

But it feels good to go down in the ink mines with my pick-ax and chip away at the word count clustered on the wall like pretty, pretty crystals. *chip chip* *sob*

Final Notes

No, this doesn’t cover the breadth and depth of the topic. It in fact is merely a hangnail — if I start to pick it, a strip of skin will peel back all the way to my elbow and suddenly you’ll be tasked with reading a 5,000 word blog post, and nobody wants that. This is long enough already. I can’t say how useful this post actually is — it ultimately covers the generalities, but it’s a start, at least. Future posts down the line will deal with more specific tidbits (dealing with editors, managing money, and so forth).

Also —

Yes, I had to crawl inside a deer carcass to get that picture at the fore of the post.

I dunno. Shut up.

Drop comments, questions, add-ons, marriage proposals, or hateful screeds in the comments below!

I stand here planning for a new project, and this new project demands all manner of monstrous monstrousness (or, rather, creature-flavored creatureology), and in that, I want to wrap my head around the world in which the project’s tale will take place. In doing so, I envision the task before me…

…which manifests as a deep dark hole waiting at my feet. Occasionally I see shapes squirming down there in the tenebrous depths: glinty flinty eyes and writhing labial squid beasts and snot-slick hell-squirrels flying little rotflcopters and other assorted hallucinations of one’s infinite (and utterly diseased) mind. Horrific as it may sound, as a writer I am delighted by such morbid fantastical explorations and it is therefore quite tempting to leap boldly forth and pirouette in mid-air and plunge into that fictional chasm where the monsters lurk, where realms untold await, where the hell-squirrels worship their belching hell-squirrel god.

I could truly get lost in there.

I could wander its disturbed creative depths, a man lost in a maze of his own making.

Ah, but I am given pause. I have a story to tell, after all. I have a book to write from this. If I engage with my made-up world endlessly anon, then the book will never get done. And it is then that I am reminded (as I have said this in the past): worldbuilding is a kind of masturbation. It is not in and of itself a bad thing so much as it can be a fruitless endeavor given over only to the expression of onanistic narrative ejaculations — *fap fap fap* and blammo! Upon the page I eject my wad and leave behind in crumpled-up story tissues endless pages revealing the lineage of the unicorn-kings, the ancient language of the Flarnsmen of Jibeau, the secret geomantic architectural blueprints of the chattering hell-squirrels.

My thesis, then, is this:

Worldbuilding should be a slave to storytelling, not vice versa.

Okay, Squid Beast, What The Hell Does That Mean, Exactly?

It means, quite simply: in terms of doing any prep-work for your story, it behooves you to first conceive of the story you want to tell at all levels of complexity (from the barest level of boy meets girl to the more complex outline, treatment or synopsis) and then use the world to prop up your story. Worldbuilding can:

Fill in blanks, drive home theme, untangle plot knots, accentuate the characters, it can even bring about fresh and unexpected conflict. (It can probably do more, I just got lazy and stopped thinking about it.)

But my opinion  is that worldbuilding can only easily do these things for you if you let it serve the story (rather than putting a gun to the head of the story and forcing it to serve the setting).

Here There Be Hell-Squirrels: The Dangers Of World-Building

To be clear, I am not saying that worldbuilding is itself bad — how I could I possibly justify that as a guy who (much as I myself hate to do it) puts outlining and prep-work on a pedestal?

What I’m suggesting is that worldbuilding-before-story-conception threatens you, the intrepid penmonkey, with a number of perils which could ensnare your best efforts.

What perils, you ask?

First, as noted, it’s quite easy to get lost in worldbuilding and do so endlessly without ever accomplishing anything of substance. When I recently stared down the barrel of this upcoming project, I opened my notefile and started furiously taking notes and then — an hour later, I was left to wonder, what the hell am I doing? None of this matters in terms of the story I want to tell. It’s just piffle, waffle, kerfuffle, and other words ending in -ffle. Was it a fun distraction? Sure. It was lovely. As a pure creative exercise I guess it had some merit. But it did nothing to help me understand my story better. I was just playing with myself.

Second, a story offers you boundaries. You work on an outline or at least have an idea in your mind as to the story you want to tell, that story is like a fence or, better still, the dark lines of an image in a coloring book. You’ve created margins, and from that point, worldbuilding is about staying in the margins. If you lead with world creation, however, you’re in danger of going so far astray that you have no focus, no purpose, no theme or mood or character hooks or whatever. It’s like going to Home Depot and buying up the whole tool department just to hang a fucking painting. Rein yourself in, you frothy stallion, you.

Third, it’s easy to become obligated to the storyworld over your story. “Oh,” you say, “I worked so very hard on describing the psychic pseudo-cultural breeding habits of the unicorn-kings, and even though I don’t really have any place for them exactly, I don’t want to waste the 11,000 words I’ve expended on this subject. And so I shall include a chapter in my book about it. The reader will consider it bonus material!”

Fourth, and this is related to the last point: uncontrolled worldbuilding threatens to intrude upon your tale in the form of the much-and-correctly-reviled… infodump. “Here! I will now force-feed you the fruits of my world-building labors!” *splurch*

And Now A Deviation Into Kidney-Punching Fantasy Novels

I used to like fantasy novels as a kid, but less so these days. It’s not that I don’t still enjoy them — theoretically, I do — but rather that I never know when a good fantasy series is going to suddenly become mesmerized by its own worldbuilding. Too many novels devolve this way and go goo-goo ga-ga over their own sense of setting and culture. It drives me a bit buggy. A popular series of fantasy novels which rhymes with The Meal Of Wine or perhaps The Glockenspiel Of Crime started off at a rip-roaring pace. But then each book got slower and slower, trapped deeper and deeper in its own mire of story-world minutiae. By Book Number Seventy-Four-And-A-Half, the entire 1,242 page epic took place over seven minutes and spent approximately 14,000 words on the subject of fabric.

Then again, these books sold approximately one jizzillion copies, so maybe you shouldn’t listen to me.

Writer Paul S. Kemp (whose website is here and who writes awesome Star Wars books using his mighty thews) said something interesting on Twitter yesterday, though: “Incidentally, one of the reasons I love Sword & Sorcery is the de-emphasis on worldbuilding and focus on characters.” I say this without having devoted a great deal of effort to disprove it, but I agree with him. I think part of it is procedural: pulp writers didn’t have a lot of time to dick around with worldbuilding. They just had to get their hands dirty and jump right in. Even still, it’s an interesting lesson.

This Is Less True (And Perhaps Not True At All) If You’re Writing Games

By the way, and maybe I should’ve said this earlier, I don’t consider this lesson all that hearty if you’re working on game narrative rather than something more linear. I’ve noted in the past that traditional storytelling is about communicating the story of the author, whereas game-based storytelling is about communicating–or, rather, facilitating–the story of the game player.

In that case, worldbuilding is king. I come from the roleplaying industry, and there it’s very much about getting muddy in the trenches and talking up the crazy culture of vampire horticulture or about the designer drugs of mystic hobo hermaphrodites. There you have a license to sort of create wantonly, but in traditional storytelling you are more reined in.

How does this figure into transmedia? Uhhhh. Answer unclear, ask again later? No, really, I don’t know. I think to some degree transmedia efforts sometimes feel hollow or shallow (or perhaps even shollow!) because they spend so much time on the worlds they build and so little time on the stories that drive the experience. Then again, if the transmedia components are largely game-based, well…

*throws down smoke bomb, avoids topic, lets you people talk about it*

I Like Italics

Seriously, just look around. Italics everywhere.

YMMV, IMHO, Bippity-Boppity-Boo

I’m not saying you cannot worldbuild.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t worldbuild.

I am merely saying that the worlds you build should be in service to the stories you want to tell. You may choose to do otherwise, and you may in fact choose to do otherwise quite successfully. But, as always, terribleminds is very much about the writing life I happen to lead, and this is one of those things I believe about myself in terms of Getting The Job Done With Minimum Fuss And Narrative Masturbation.

Feel free to slip-and-slide down in the comments. Am I crazy? Am I full of shit? Am I onto something despite my crazy full-of-shittedness? Sound off, my little hell-squirrels.

Sadness is not a particularly jazzy topic, is it? It’s actually rather enervating. You bring up “sadness” and it’s not like — “Whoo! Haha! Fucking yes. Wendig is talking about sadness! Grief? Regret? Sorrow? Loss? Uhh, hello — yes, yes, yes and yes. Hot diggity dog! This is like an amusement park ride inside my brain!”

*rad guitar lick*

*fills pants with the effluence of joy*

Who the fuck wants to talk about sad shit? Blech. I don’t know what day it is in your house, but it’s Monday all up in mine, and on Monday, I’d much rather be looking forward to more delightful topics: “Yesterday, I had a wonderful spot of tea with a particularly irascible leprechaun and his wombat steed! The finger sandwiches were made of children’s laughs! Unbridled wonder and pegasus dreams!”

Alas. It just ain’t to be. Because today I want to talk about sadness in storytelling.

I’m going to say something now — a thing that is unproven and only barely thought of (shut up, it’s Monday, I can hardly feel my legs), but slosh it around your brain-mouth, see how it tastes:

At the heart of every good story lurks sadness.

I’ve talked in the past about a story’s “emotional core” (in a post where I also refer to it as the “narrative vagina”), but here I’m wondering if the emotional core has a core all its own — like the black cyanide seeds at the heart of an apple — and that core is composed of raw, unfiltered sadness.

I don’t mean to suggest that sadness lurks at the heart of only sad stories — to that, I offer an exclamatory “duh!” and I roll my eyes and make jerk-off motions with both my hands, to which you then say, “Chuck, both hands? That’s overkill, don’t you think?” And I nod gamely and then cry into my big heaping bowl of Frankenberry cereal. (This should at least explain why my beard is both pink and milky.)

What the fuck was I talking about?

Oh! Right. Sadness doesn’t merely lurk at the heart of sad stories, but rather, at the heart — the heart’s heart — of all stories. Or, at least, all good ones. The sadness needn’t be overt or outright. It doesn’t have to be the driving force behind a protagonist’s goals and desires, but it feels like it should still be there, behind the scenes. Let’s take two films that are not ostensibly sad and find the sadness in them.

First up: DIE HARD.

Die Hard is not what anybody would call a “sad movie,” unless you’re someone who gets choked up at the needless loss of yet another charming, smarmy German terrorist-thief. Ultimately, it’s a tense, kick-ass, high-octane and sometimes hilarious action movie. It is, in some ways, the Big Daddy of all actioners.

And yet, I posit that at the heart of the film nests a squirming knot of sadness.

Think about the motivations behind the protagonist: John McClane hasn’t seen his wife in a while because they are ultimately distant and estranged. They have children who are with her, not him. He’s a guy who’s too good at his job, and she’s a lady who’s too good at hers, and we get the sense that only some kind of cataclysmic movement is going to shatter their pride and get these two crazy kids back together.

Holy shit, that’s fucking sad, man. Isn’t it? Broken marriage? Disrupted family? The sadness is only exacerbated when their first meeting ends with a fight which is in turn interrupted by, ohhh, a bunch of cranky Germans with automatic weaponry.

Then you have Powell, who is a sad sack if ever there was one. He’s not pathetic, not exactly, but his story is tragic: he shoots a kid, ends up at a desk afraid to use his gun, gets fat, is played mostly as comic relief until we realize at the heart of this underdog is a goddamn police dog — loyal and ready to come off the leash.

Note that the story doesn’t have to end on sadness — I’m just saying that sadness has to be in there, it has to be in the mix, it has to live at the very nucleus of your fiction.

Second not-sad-but-secretly-actually-sad: STAR WARS.

Sure, sure, at it’s heart is a giddy yahoo space opera galactic romp across the Cosmic Wild West, but goddamn, you peel back the skin and you find a lot of sadness in there across both trilogies: in the “first” movie (A New Hope), we’re punched in the face by sad news time and time again. Dead father (who, okay, isn’t so much dead as he is evil machine guy)! Crispy aunt and uncle! Exploding Alderaan! Tortured princess! Sacrificial mentor! Porkins asplodes into bacon bits! The other films don’t lack for sadness, either: Daddy issues, dead Yoda, murdered children, lost limbs, executed Jedi, a mother who gets… I dunno, molested by Sand People, and so on, and so forth. Sadness runs rampant.

Shit, the very end of Return of the Jedi features what is ultimately a happy triumph over evil, but even buried in that is a deeply sad and common human experience: a son’s death-bed reconciliation with his estranged father. Yes, the reconciliation is ultimately a positive thing, but it is an event supercharged with the power of regret and grief. Makes you blubber and weep.

Sadness is a powerful storytelling component.

So. What does this mean for you, the storyteller?

I think it means this: when you embark upon a story, you should ask yourself, “What sadness lurks at the heart of this tale?” Find it. Dig for it. If none exists, create it. It’s a fucked up thing we have to do — manufacturing sadness — but it’s ultimately as necessary to good fiction as conflict. In fact, one might wonder if sadness is the secret impulsion that fuels good narrative conflict.

Find the sadness. And keep looking for it as you write, too. Nothing is more powerful to us than grief and loss — we then look to the storyteller to answer a fundamental question of, can we overcome it, or will it overcome us? What can be done with sadness? How will we ever reconcile grief and tragedy?

What I’m trying to say is —

Happy Monday, everyone!

(Feel free to throw more examples below in the comments — or, alternately, challenge the assertion. Is sadness really a necessary component to good storytelling? Or am I just talking out of my ass?)