Tag: advice (page 3 of 25)

I’m about to tackle a new novel (The Blue Blazes, coming in something-something 2013!), and also, I see the green flash on the horizon that indicates the coming reality storm that is “National Novel Writing Month,” so this seems like a good time for a post like this one, yeah?

Do you actually need to do all these things? No, of course not. This is merely a potential checklist. Scan it. Pick and choose what works, ditch the rest. End of story.

1. Get Your Expectations Firmly In Check

Writing a book is like a long trek through unfamiliar wilderness. It doesn’t take long before you feel lost, disoriented, hungry, ready to give up, lay down, eat your hands, and let the book die on the ground next to you like a gut-shot coyote. Know this going in: we build into this experience expectations that are unreasonable. We expect every day to be bliss. Every chapter to be perfect. Every word and sentence and paragraph to click in some kind of shining sidereal alignment. Some days will be bliss. Some chapters and words really will be perfect. But you also have to build room for things to suck. Because they will. Parts of this book will be the literary equivalent of you dumpster-diving through dirty needles and old Indian food just to find some spare change. Get used to it. Remember: this is just the first draft. Others will come. The work is ahead, but the work is clarifying. You have time. You have space. Be ready for hard days.

2. Find Your Own Personal “Give-A-Fuck” Factor

Seriously: why the fuck are you doing this? Not just writing a novel, but writing this novel. Are you excited? Does the prospect of writing this thing both geek you out and scare you in equal measure? It should. If you don’t, this might not be the story you want to write. People ask me sometimes, “How do I know which story to write right now?” Write the one that engages you. That lights up your mental console like a pinball machine on full fucking tilt. Write the book you care about writing. Find out why you want to write it, too — there’s great meaning in discovering your own attraction to the characters, the story, the themes.

3. Draw The Map For The Journey Ahead

I don’t care if you write an outline (though it remains a skill you should possess as one day, someone will ask you to do so and a lack of familiarity will leave you twisting in the wind), but for the sake of sweet Saint Fuck, do something to map your journey. Listen, a novel? It’s a big deal. It’s many tens of thousands of words shoved together. And in there are all these moving parts: character, plot, theme, mood, past, present, future, text, subtext. Gears and flywheels and dildo widgets, spinning and sparking and hissing. Don’t go in totally blind. You don’t need to map every beat, but even three hastily-scrawled phrases on a bar napkin (“narwhale rebellion, yellow fever, Mitt Romney’s shiny grease-slick forehead”) will be better than nothing. Bonus link of some relevance: 25 Ways To Plot, Plan, Prep Your Story.

4. Become Wild West Scrivening Inkslinger “Quick-Note McGoat”

Have a way to take notes. Sounds obvious, so let me add another squirt to the salad: have a way to take notes quickly and unexpectedly. It is incredibly awful to wake up in the middle of the night, or while out walking your dog, or in the midst of one of your Satanic meetings in the basement of the local Arby’s and suddenly have an epiphany about your coming novel that you think you’ll remember but, of course, it’ll slip through one of the many mouse-holes in your mind-floor. You get it all figured out and then the idea is gone, baby, gone. So: fast notes. Notebook. Or a note app on your phone. Or a tattoo gun.

5. Know Thy Characters

I talked about this last week, but seriously, with your characters: get all up in them guts. It’s not the worst thing to recognize that all of our characters are in some small ways representative of the author — even if it’s just us chipping off the tiniest sliver of our intellectual granite to stick into the mix, it’s good for us to find ourselves in each character (and find the character inside us). Er, not sexually.

6. Test Drive Those Imaginary Motherfuckers

I will advocate this until the day I die. (Or the day someone clocks me with a shovel and turns me into the mental equivalent of a wagon full of cabbage.) Grab your main character, and take him for a test drive. (No, I said not sexually. Holy crap, tuck that thing back in your lederhosen, weirdo.) Write something, anything, featuring that character. Flash fiction. Short story. Random chapter from the book. Blog post. Don’t worry: you don’t have to show it to anybody. Look at it this way: it’s like taking a new car for a spin. First you sit down, everything feels uncomfortable — “How do I turn on the wipers? Where’s the A/C knob? Is there a place for my pet wombat, Roger?” But then after you take it down a few roads, you start to feel like you ‘get’ the car. It starts to feel like a part of you. And Roger likes it, too!

7. Dig Up All Those Glittery Conflict Diamonds

Every story is about a problem. A story without a problem is like a drive through Nebraska: flat, featureless, without form or meaning. Identify the problem engine pushing the story forward. Heist gone wrong! Spam-Bots gain sentience! Murderous husband! Lost wombat (ROGER NOOOOO)! Sidenote: Problems born of and driven by character are more interesting and organic than those created as external “plot events.”

8. Build An (Incomplete) World

Just as the story and plot need a map, the setting needs one, too — you’re god, here. This is your genesis expression  — no, we’re not talking about you, Phil Collins, get out of here! Shoo! Cripes, that guy’s like a rash. He just keeps turning up. ANYWAY. This is your let-there-be-light moment. But worldbuilding is like a game — you’re trying to predict what you’ll need without going overboard. You don’t want to create every last granular detail of the world (“Bob, there’s a section in your story bible titled THE TEETH-BRUSHING HABITS OF TREE-ELVES.”), but you also don’t want to hit a patch of the story where you feel like you’re floundering for details you totally forgot to determine. Try to build the world around the story instead of building the story around the world. That’ll provide a more focused — and more relevant — approach.

9. Identify The Major Rules

This is true more for genre fiction than anything else — but sometimes, a story’s got rules. The vampire drinks blood but doesn’t fear the sun. The spaceship is made of hyperintelligent fungus. All ghosts are lactose intolerant, unicorns are the Devil’s steeds, and when that dude from Nickelback marries Miley Cyrus or whoever it is he’s sticking it to, the child born of such a union will be a soulpatch-wearing robot bent on the domination of meat. Suss out the rules early on. Then cleave to them like a needy puppy.

10. Find Your Way Into The Tale

Every tale is a mountain and we have to figure out a way inside. When Day One of your novelstravaganza begins, you don’t want to shave off hours just staring at this massive wall of rock trying to figure out how the fuck you’re going to get into it. You should already know how it begins. First line, first chapter, whatever. Know your point of entry or spend your first day flailing around like a shock treatment spider monkey.

11. Also: Identify The Great Egress

This is a point of contention, and rightfully so — but BY GOSH and BY GOLLY I have my convictions and I’ll spread them before you like warm cheese on a crostini, and those convictions tell me to have your ending figured the fuck out before you even begin the story. Even if you don’t outline, even if the whole of the work is guideless and without aim, know your ending before you begin. Here’s why: the ending matters. Like, really matters. It’s you, sticking your landing. It’s the last bite of narrative food the reader gets, and if the meal has been good up until that last shitty bite, it means you ruined it with a bad ending. Planning an ending allows you to aim for that ending. To write to it. To lead your tale to that moment. Do you need to stick to it? Fuck no! You will almost certainly envision something better through the course of the writing, but that’s okay — but what you don’t want is to cross over into the final leg of your story with zero idea how to wrap things up. Because, you do that, next thing you know you’ll be all like, I DUNNO NOW THEY HAVE TO FIGHT A GIANT SPIDER OR SOMETHING AND QUIT LOOKIN’ AT ME.

12. Learn All The Appropriate Things

At some point I’m sure I could do a whole new “list of 25” on the subject of research, but for now, just know that you need to get some of it out of the way before you actually suction your tush-meats to the office chair to begin the book. You can research as you go, too (and I’ve written drafts where whole sections get notes like, LOOK UP THE SEX RITUALS OF THE ALIEN ASTRONAUTS AND STUFF), but researching early gives you confidence. And also gives you new ideas. My means of researching is simple: identify topics I know that require researching, then, uhh, research the hell-fuck out of them.

13. Suss Out The Fiddly Bits

A novel has a lot of little fiddly bits: theme, title, mood, narrative tense, POV, and so forth. Know what’s what before you step into the draft. The more of these you have figured out, the more comfortable you are when stepping through that manuscript-shaped doorway the first time. And, by the way, that’s the entire purpose of this list: to give you comfort. Writing a novel can be a weird, dark time. Some discomfort is good, and knowing when to discard preparations is critical. But just the same, you want to walk into the thing with confidence, and confidence comes out of having your literary mise en place ready to rock.

14. The 13-Second Closing-Window-Of-Opportunity Pitch

I don’t know how often a logline or “elevator pitch” really helps new authors get a deal, so this isn’t about that. But learning to distill your story down to a single sentence is a powerful thing. It’s like squeezing it until you can fill a small phial with its most potent essence and that allows you to find out two things: first, just what the crap is this book about, and two, what makes it awesome? Plus, it gives you an easily spit-out-able line of information at parties. When someone asks, “What’s your book about?” you don’t want to be standing there for 20 minutes telling them. HA HA HA JUST KIDDING nobody’s ever going to ask you that. Silly writer.

15. Hell, Write The Whole Goddamn Query

As above: finding ways to express the most elemental elements (shut up) of your book is a clear win. Write the query letter. Yes, query letters suck — I’ve often said it’s like putting a 100-lb. pig in a 1-lb. bucket. Still, try it. Find clarity in brevity. Aim for two or three paragraphs explaining the hook, the story, the critical bits, and so forth. It’ll feel good. You may even have one of those moments where you’re like, “Ohhhh, that’s what the book is about. I didn’t even realize the whole thing was a metaphor for how the American political process would be improved by adding more ponies.”

16. Know Your Word Processor Intimately

I don’t mean you should actively “love up” your word processor — I use Microsoft Word and it’s far too cranky and ugly to ever be my digital lover. (Scrivener, on the other hand, keeps flashing me stretches of milky thigh.) What I mean is, know your tools. Work that word processor till you have its smell all up in your nose. You don’t want a day one question of, BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAVE THIS DOCUMENT SWEET CRISPY CHRIST THE POWER JUST WENT OUT.

17. Establish A Daily Schedule

Write every day, sure, duh. But more importantly: figure out how much you’re going to write on each of those “every days.” Five hundred words? A thousand? Five thousand? FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND? Okay, don’t do that last part. I did that one time and my brain supernova’ed and formed its own Wendigian universe where all is beards and liquor and everyone watches porn based off the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s. Point is, establish your daily schedule. Then, uhh, stick to it.

18. Build a Timetable

From there, you can build the first timetable. Because, if you know you’re going to write 1000 words a day and this is going to roughly be a 90,000-word novel, boo-yay, looks like the book will take about 90 days to write. Then, you can build secondary timetables — figure out how long it’ll take to edit, to write a second draft, to wallow in your own treacly misery and muddy despair.

19. Ensure That Life Accommodates The Book

Tell people you’re going to be writing the book. No, not because this way you establish a clear line to the shame associated with failure (“How’s that novel coming along, Dave?” “It’s fine, I’ve been writing it for sixteen years now and OKAY FINE I GAVE UP ON IT GO FUCK A DONKEY I’M GOING TO DROWN MYSELF IN THE PUNCHBOWL KAY THANKS BYE”). But rather because, you need the people in your life to know that This Is An Important Thing to you. That they’ll need to accommodate your writing hours. That if you don’t come out on Friday night, it’s because you’re masturb… I mean, writing. The people in your life deserve to know. And they deserve a chance to help you accomplish this thing you want to accomplish.

20. Have A Publication Path In Mind

It’s a bit “cart before the horse” (or, for a more futuristic metaphor, “the hover-rickshaw before the taxi-bot”) to think about publication before you’ve even written Word One of your Literary Masterpiece, but peep this, peeps: knowing a (rough) publication path helps you steer the story a little bit. Knowing you’re going to self-publish helps you know that you are not bound by any rules (which sadly can include “the rules of making a book readable,” but, y’know, don’t be that guy). Knowing you’re going to go the traditional path (agent, big publisher) tells you that you may want to write something more mainstream, hewing closer to genre convention. It is as with the narrative: knowing the ending helps define the journey.

21. Clean Your Shitty Desk, You Filthmonger

Is that a pair of dirty gym socks brining in a glass of Kool-Aid? Why all the receipts from Big Dan Don’s Dildo Emporium? Why does your desk smell like old jizz and Doritos? Clean your desk, you disgusting cave-dweller. Do so before you dive into the book. The desk will, over the course of the book’s writing, once more return to its primal state of divine chaos, but start clean lest you get distracted by all the science projects scattered around (“The gym socks have developed a nervous system. They respond when I call their names, which, incidentally, are ‘Loretta’ and ‘Vlornox the World-Eater.'”)

22. The Backup Plan

Figure out how you’re going to back up your novel. One backup should go to The Cloud. Another should be carved into the bedrock of an external device — and no, not your power drill dildo — I mean like, a USB key or hard drive, you silly sexy kook, you. A third might get carved into the back of a captive foe.

23. Set It And Forget It

In the weeks preceding the start of this book, use your brain like it’s an overnight slow-cooker. Go to bed thinking about the story at hand. Envision problems. Ask questions. Drum up the research of the day from the slurry of thoughts and focus on it. Then, slumber, young penmonkey. Your brain will absorb this stuff like a corpse taking on river-water. When it comes time to write, you will find it disgorges what it absorbed — and then some. (This isn’t backed by any kind of science or anything, but I believe it works, so there. I also believe in Bigfoot. So. Uhh. Maybe you shouldn’t trust my instincts.)

24. Commit, Motherfucker

Mentally commit. Seems simple. Kinda isn’t. Take this idea of writing this novel and then take your heart and all the willpower that lives in it and smash the two together in a flavor explosion that tastes like GETTING IT THE FUCK DONE. Sometimes there is great power in committing to something in an emotional, intellectual, even spiritual sense. I mean, what, you’re going to hit Day One and say, “Maybe I’ll finish this, maybe I won’t?” Piss on that flimsy whimsy — hunker down, dig your heels in, ball those soft hands into hard fists, and commit to writing this motherfucking book.

25. Stop Doing All This Other Stuff And Write Already

Just to be clear: you actually have to write the thing. Which means all this stuff? Do it. And then stop doing it. There comes a point when you have to stop outlining, stop researching, stop thinking and dicking around and fiddling with your intellectual privates in order to put pen to paper and finger to keys and write that book. Once any of these tasks becomes a distraction — a disease instead of the remedy — then it’s time to shovel that aside and get to work. Because at the end of the day, nothing is as clarifying as just going through the paces and building words into worlds and sentences into stories.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

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

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

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Okay, what follows are really just mottos or sayings or made-up platitudes that I happen to live by, and for all I know I’ll only live by them for a couple weeks until I realize they comprise a fetid heap of horseshit.

But, I thought I’d like to write them down just the same.

Some of this is  “greatest hits” stuff, no doubt — you’ve heard a good bit of this before. But a lot of it is also an evolution of my thoughts on writing and storytelling (and one’s thoughts in this domain should ever be shifting, squirming, changing). This seems like a doubly good time to lay this foundation coming into the stretch before NaNoWriMo strikes like a typhoon.

You don’t need to live by these. You do as you like, little penmonkey.

Warning: long-ass post ahead.

Put on your swimmy caps and arm-floaters. Let’s dive into dark waters!

1. Don’t Write What You Know; Know What You Write

Saying write what you know limits us from the outset — we only “know” a limited number of things, after all. I know the smell of honeysuckle on a summer’s day. I know what it’s like to have a toddler, to be a terrible bowler, to slurp up gin from my rat’s nest of a beard so as not to waste its herbal booziness. We should certainly write to our experiences, but we cannot limit ourselves only to that. We should be encouraged then to have new experiences. To know and learn — gasp! — new things. Write with authority and authenticity. Marry experience with imagination in a ceremony upon the story’s page.

2. Bleed On The Page

Don’t write purely to escape pain and fear. Mine it. Extract those wretched little nuggets of hard black hate-coal and use them to fuel the writing of a scene, a chapter, maybe the whole goddamn book. Cut yourself open. Color the words with your heartsblood. I am an advocate of finding the things you fear and opening old wounds to let them splash onto the characters and inform the tale at hand. We’ll know. We’ll feel it, too. This is where your experience matters — it’s not necessarily in the nitty-gritty of mechanical experience but rather in the authenticity of your emotional life. And this is true for the opposite, as well — write about the things that thrill you, that stir hope, that deliver unto you paroxysms of tingly exultation. Be true to yourself and we’ll all grok your lingo, Daddy-O.

3. Write The Song That Sings To Your Heart

Brands are for corn chips and car commercials. Trends are great for pop music and night-clubs. But you? Write the book you want to write. It’s not like being a writer is a fast track to a dumpster full of cash — so, why waste time writing stories that don’t speak to you in some way? Besides, the books that you wrench free from your own heart and mind will be far greater and far more meaningful than anything delivered to you from the expectations of others. Find the story in you. And find yourself in your story.

4. Show Now, Tell Later

Show, Don’t Tell is another one of those ‘false dichotomy’ nuggets of advice — anytime a piece of forbidding advice exists, you can nearly always produce a corollary example where X, Y and Z stories utterly violate that precept with great heaping helpings of success. It seems to be fairly well-regarded that a lot of the time it’s best to default to show, but sometimes, hey, tell is good, too. Only problem: when? Here’s a good guideline: never tell in the beginning. Always show first. You don’t want to begin the story with an expositional lecture. You read the cereal box as you eat the cereal, not before — you gotta get that first spoonful of Honey Boo-Boo Bombs on your tongue before you’re ready to settle in and read an ingredients list, yeah? Order of operations is key. Dessert first. Veggies later. Show now. Put off telling long as you can.

5. Aim Big, Write Small

Writers need goals. I don’t mean one goal. I mean a nearly endless and evolving series of goals — you don’t just say, “I’m going to write a novel.” Because, duh. That’s bare minimum shit. You want to have a career planned out. This isn’t a short game. It’s a long con. Look as far down the line as you can — to retirement, to cremation, to the time when nano-bots resurrect you to write one more bestselling holo-vid. That way, you can always course correct to try to move yourself further toward those goals. But — but! — whereas your career is a long-con, each story really is the short game. You want to keep your head in that story. You want to treat it like it’s everything, like everything hangs on this one project. (In part because it may.) To put it differently, have the larger path plotted out — but focus on each step upon that path as if it is your last.

6. Character Is Everything

Here’s how you know that character is the most important component of storytelling — when you remove it, the story dies. It’s like yanking the walker out of an old dude’s hands. You can remove the plot, and characters will still make one. Setting? Story can work without one. Hell, no setting is a setting. Theme? Someone will add their own. Mood? You can steer the mood but you can’t control it — mood, like art and profanity, is in the many eyes of the monstrous D&D beholder. Character is why we show up. It’s why we watch movies and read books. Character is the lynchpin of story. To unpack that a little more…

7. Audience Is The Monkey On The Character’s Back

See, here’s the deal. We’re all humans. (Well, except you over there, YOU ROBOT ASSHOLE. No, no, don’t talk to me. I shall not abide your bleeps and blorps and murderous metal intent.) Humans tell stories and when we do, we tell them about other humans. And here you say, “Wait, that’s not right, we tell stories about unicorns and intelligent spaceships and mole-men,” and yes, technically true. But those are always stand-ins for people. We view all characters through the lens of our own humanity. (It’s the same reason trees only read magazines about trees. Printed on the flesh of humans. The circle of life!) Character is how the audience gets through your story. Character is the vehicle.

8. Plot Is Soylent Green

Said it before but let me codify it now: plot is not externally-driven. I mean, it can be, fine, yes. You can create a laundry list of external events that occur where characters are dropped into the proceedings like a pukey four-year-old forced to ride a roller coaster. But that’s not the strongest — nor the most organic — way to approach plot. Plot is Soylent Green. Plot is made of people. Characters create, drive, and modify plot. They’re not strapped into the ride. They’re building the fucking roller coaster as it barrels forward. They change the story with every bad decision, every punch thrown, every intense desire and madcap fear. Too many storytellers force events — they shove the plot around like a schoolyard bully. Let the characters handle it. Let it be on them. The simplest plot is: Your Characters Do Things; Other Characters Respond.

9. Conflict Is The Food That Feeds The Reader

Characters exist in a flat line until we challenge them — sometimes they challenge themselves, sometimes they’re challenged by other people, by nature, by robots, or by fungal infections in and around one’s nether-country. Stories need conflict across the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual spectra. Accidents, betrayals, cataclysm, desperation, excess — these are the letters in the alphabet of conflict.

10. Fuck Trust

We think we want trustworthy storytellers. Trust is a positive trait and why would we want anything different in a storyteller? The audience thinks it knows what it wants: happy endings, triumphant protagonists, defeated villains, a book that dispenses Chicken McNuggets at the end of every chapter as a reward. But getting what we want, what we expect, is *poop noise* SNOOZETACULAR. Trust in a storyteller is overrated. Safety is meaningless. The storyteller has to do what the storyteller has to do. Which is, hurt the character. And by proxy, the audience. The storyteller is like an evil dungeon master or a tricksy dominatrix — what the audience really wants is to acquiesce to the tale told. They want to be surprised by a particularly inventive dungeon trap or shocked when someone closes alligator clamps on your wriggly bits. We want to trust our storytellers only so far as to say, “I trust that I cannot trust you.”

11. The Dual Function Of Story

Good story serves two functions: one, it makes coffee, and two, it shoots lasers. Wait, that can’t be right. *checks notes* Oh, see, sorry, wrong page. Those are the two things I want my cybernetic arm to do. WHATEVS. Story! Yes. Story. Good story does two things: one, it makes us feel; two, it makes us think. It engages us emotionally and intellectually. Some authors misunderstand the story’s purpose and spend too long mired in action and entertainment and forget that we actually have to care about the characters, about the outcome, that it’s essential we come out of the book having both a visceral reaction and a reaction that makes us want to sit down with friends over pie and whiskey to talk about what we just read. Making someone think and feel is not “entertaining” in the strictest sense — but it’s why stories matter.

12. Embrace The “Holy Shit” Moment

I want to punch you in the stomach. With my words! With my words. Relax. Put down the restraining order already. When you read my work, the ideal thing for me is to provide you with at least one moment where you gasp. Where your eyes go wide and your jaw hangs loose like a broken porch swing. Where you let out three, maybe four drops of pee because the story caused you to lose your bearing for just that moment. It’s key as a storyteller to try to orchestrate those moments where you violate expectation and drop a bunker buster on the characters — be careful, though. The trick to the holy shit moment is that it needs to feel organic. So that, after the smoke has cleared and the trauma is worn thin, the events that transpired seem in retrospect like the only way it could’ve ever happened.

13. Here Is How Description Works

A persistent question in terms of writing is, what, and how much, do I describe? Lovecraft describes every lamp and carpet fiber with intimate, bewildering detail. (Which he could get away with and you most likely cannot.) Here’s how you know what to describe. Ready? Is your mind quivering like the dumpy haunches of an overweight pony? Describe those things that break the status quo. That defy expectation. We know what a chair looks like — so, you don’t need to describe it. Unless it’s got a broken leg. Or is of some unusual art period. Or has blood on it, or is made of mouse bones and rat whiskers, or sings showtunes. The things that need description are the things that, to risk redundancy, the audience needs described. If they cannot escape this chapter without knowing how This Thing smells, then you’d talk up that stench posthaste.

14. The Rule Of Threes

When in doubt, the rule of threes is a rule that plays well with all of storytelling. When describing a thing? No more than three details. A character’s arc? Three beats. A story? Three acts. An act? Three sequences. A plot point culminating in a mystery of a twist? At least three mentions throughout the tale. This is an old rule, and a good one. It’s not universal — but it’s a good place to start.

15. Every Story Is An Argument

Every story is you saying something. That’s theme. Maybe it’s the theme that the audience discovers, maybe it isn’t — but just the same, every story is you making a case for something. It’s a thesis you’re trying to prove. You’re trying to say that love is everything. Or love is hopeless. Or that nature will defeat man. Or man will defeat himself. Or bees will defeat bears. Or robots are fucking awesome. I DUNNO MAN, I’M NOT YOU. Have a point of view. Have a perspective. Let your fiction state a case and argue that shit till it’s blue in the face. It’s not about being right or being wrong. It’s about saying something.

16. Metaphor Is What Elevates Us Above The Chimpanzees

I’m just going to leave this here, wink a couple times, maybe nudge you, and walk away.

17. Stories Are Like People: They Need Oxygen

All aspects of a story need time to breathe. Your story isn’t one of those amusement park rides that shoots you 100 feet straight up into the air — a story isn’t a race to the end. (Plus, that kind of thing will surely cause you to void your bowels upon whatever meth-scarred carny is operating that so-called “amusement” ride, a ride that hasn’t been serviced since 1972 and still has the blood of the teenage girl who died on it greasing all its diabolical gears.) Let the tale have peaks and valleys — peaks of action, tension, violence. Then valleys of reflection, emotion, fear, desire. The oxygen is thin at the peaks, thick in the valleys. The peaks get taller as the story goes, and the valleys grow deeper. To go back to the show-versus-tell thing, it’s better to show at the peaks, and tell only in the valleys.

18. Care Less

This is a recent revelation for me but one I’m keeping close for the near-future — sure, it seems an odd thing to suggest that we should care less than we already do. It seems dismissive. Disrespectful, even. But authors care too much, in my experience. We care well-beyond the gates of rationality. We let The Perfect sit in its impossible-to-reach treehouse pelting us with sticks and stones and pieces of old GI Joe figures when really we should be happy aiming firmly for The Good. Caring less frees you. It frees you to write a bad draft and fix it later. It frees you from feeling stung by every not-five-star review. It frees you from the fear of the editor’s slashing pen. It frees you from the paralysis of rejection. IT FREES YOU FROM ESCAPED RUSSIAN CIRCUS BEARS WHO WANT TO SEX YOU UP WITH THEIR URSINE — whoa, wait, no, actually, I’m still afraid of that. Um. Where was I? Ah. Yes. Care less. Note that the lesson here isn’t don’t care. You should care. But you should also calm the fuck down a little, is all I’m saying.

19. Realize Your Reach

You can only control so much. You can’t control agents. Or publishers. Or the audience (unless you’re some kind of Pied Piper Svengali, which actually explains how some tremendously poopy books gets such rabid fan-throttling). You can control your story. You control characters, plot, the words on the page, rhythm, pacing. You control the quality of the work. So: control that. Write the best book you can possibly write. Everything else is a leaf on the river — you can maybe puff out your cheeks and blow it (heh, blow it) this way or that, but so much is left to the vagaries of fate. Control what you can control. Abide the rest.

20. Harden The Fuck Up, Care Bear

The writer’s back is studded with arrows, blow-darts, quills, one-star-reviews, red pens, rejection letters rolled up into tight little tubes and shellacked with editor spit so as to form the equivalent of prison shivs — it’s hard out there for a wandering penmonkey. We don’t have the equivalent of a hobo code, with chalk marks on the sidewalk indicating Dangerous Vanity Press Lives Here or Deluded Self-Publisher Blog High On His Own Ego Incoming or Thatta Way Lurks A Mean Old Editor-Face. So: cultivate calluses. Secrete enzymes to build your own authorial exoskeleton. Learn to take a punch. No glass-jaws in writing, pal.

21. Completo El Poopo

Finishing a story will separate you from most of the other writers — er, sorry, “writers” — out there in Authorland. Finish your work, space-case. Here, let me put it to you this way: finishing the worst piece of shit story you’ve ever written will feel a thousand times better than not finishing the most brilliant tale you’ve even spun. ACHIEVE NARRATIVE ORGASM. Ngggh. Yes.

22. Read Your Work Out Loud

Don’t give me that look. Read your work aloud. Don’t argue. Don’t fight. It will help. I promise. I promise. I guarantee it. If you find it didn’t help you, lemme know. I will let you Taser me in the face. And by “me,” I mean, some other guy who will be my stand-in. Probably some real estate agent or tollbooth attendant.

23. Haters Gonna Hate

Fuck ’em. They’re part of the ecosystem. Drink the hate like it’s a Kahlua-and-cream. Inspiring love and hate is better than inspiring a middle-of-the-road mushy moderate shrug. I’d rather have, “YOUR STORY MADE ME MAIM THE MAILMAN JUST FOR DELIVERING IT TO ME” than a quavering “meh.”

24. On The Nature Of Writing Advice

Writing advice is neither good nor bad. It just is. It either works for you or it doesn’t. No one piece of advice is truly golden (with the exception of maybe Finish your shit and Don’t be a dick) — it’s all just that. Advice. It’s no better or worse than someone telling you what route to take to get to the zoo or what shirt to wear to that trailer park wedding. Like with every tool, pick it up, test its heft, give it a whirl. It works? Keep it. It fails? Fucking ditch it. Give writing advice no more importance than it is due.

25. Write Like The End Is Nigh

Best advice I can give right now: write like you have no time left. Write like you’ve got a slow-mo bullet tumbling toward your head and you can’t get out of the way. Write like the end times are here, like the Mayans were right and in a few short months we’re all going to die in a tidal wave / earthquake / pyroclastic shit-fit / bird attack. Think about that: let’s say you had two years left on your clock. What book would you write? What story inside you struggles to get to the front of the line, screaming and yelping and waving its arms like a drowning man? Write that story. It doesn’t have to be the only thing you write. You can take paycheck jobs. But make time for that kind of writing. Writing isn’t just about giving the audience something. It isn’t just entertainment. It’s about giving to yourself, too. Because, bad news: maybe you have two years left, maybe you have twenty, or forty, or sixty, but we’re all gonna end up under the Grim Reaper’s riding mower. So get busy writing what you want to write, or get busy sucking exhaust.

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1. Comparing Two Unlike Things

A metaphor is a little bit of writing magic that allows you, the writer, to draw an unexpected line between two unlike things. You are comparing and connecting things that have no business being compared or connected. How is a wasp like an auto mechanic? A banana like a storm cloud? How do you talk about a nuclear winter while evoking a beautiful symphony? The metaphor is the writer holding up one thing (“a double-headed dildo”) and asking — nay, demanding — that the reader think of something else (“a floppy slice of freshly-baked zucchini bread”). It is a subversion of expectation; a sabotage of imagery. Metaphor is metamorphosis. You can tell that’s true because they both have “meta” and “pho.” Or something.

2. Because Comparing Two Samey Things Is Silly

A metaphor fails if it’s obvious. Comparing two alike things is meaningless in terms of providing engagement and enlightenment to the audience. “That horse is like a donkey” simply isn’t meaningful. We already know that. We describe the things that need describing. You wouldn’t say, “This double-headed dildo is like a single-headed dildo” and call that a metaphor. All you’re doing there is thwacking the audience about the head and neck with your +5 Double-Headed Dildo of Obviousness.

3. Literarily, Not Literally

Further, a metaphor is not to be taken literally. “A snake is like a worm” is literally true, and thus fails as a metaphor. Metaphors operate best as purely figurative. Life is not literally a bowl of cherries. The power of metaphor is in its ability to transcend the real; in this way, metaphor is like an artsy-fartsy version of sarcasm. It is a beautiful lie. I say one thing, but I mean another.

4. Simile Versus Metaphor

A simile uses like or as to connect things; a metaphor eschews both words. Simile: “My love for you is like old lunchmeat. Still here, but way past its expiration date.” Metaphor: “My love for you is a zombie. Dead but still walking around.” The simile creates a little distance; this is like that. Not same, but similar. A metaphor undercuts that distance. This is that. Not just similar, but absolutely (though abstractly) the same.

5. A PhD in Symbology

Metaphors and symbols are not the same thing. A metaphor is stated outright. I say it. I write it. I don’t hide from it. When I say that “her vagina is like the blown-out elastic in a pair of old underpants,” or, “his dick is like soft serve,” I’m not trying to hide what I think or feel. I’m shoving the imagery right into your eyeholes. A symbol is far cagier, far more guarded. A character who symbolizes something (sin, colonialism, addiction, zoo-keepers, reality television) does so in an unspoken way. The author never takes the time to complete that picture. A metaphor draws the line between two unlike things. The symbol never draws the line — it just casually gestures in the direction of the other thing, hoping you’ll connect the dots yourself.

6. Take Literary Viagra To Extend Your Metaphors

A metaphor that kicks open the door to its cage and runs around a little before being put down is an extended metaphor, or a “conceit.” It refuses to be kept to a single iteration, and will get its roots and shoots all up into the paragraph where it initially appeared. The metaphor continues — it’s not enough to say that “urban development is like a cancer” and leave it at that. The metaphor grows and swells, blister-like, using the whole paragraph to explore the metaphor to its fullest: gentrification is metastasis, developers are like free radicals, rich guys like tumors, and so on and so forth.

7. Elegance In Simplicity

Err on the side of simplicity rather than complexity. The weightier and more Byzantine a metaphor becomes, the more likely that it becomes unstable, untenable, overwrought. When I say, “John’s a dinosaur,” the message is clear: he’s old-school, probably too old-school, and if he’s not careful he’s going to get face-punched by a fucking meteor. But I don’t need to say all those things. I don’t need to beat the metaphor into the ground until it’s a pulpy, shitty mess; it’s not a watermelon, and I’m not Gallagher. The audience wants to do work. They want to take the metaphor and help draw the line. Hand them a simple machine, not a Rube Goldberg device.

8. Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge

Some metaphors are implied. When you say, “Gary’s coming for you, Bill — that guy can smell blood in the water from a mile away,” we’re using a metaphor to imply that Gary is a shark, but without actually saying that he’s a shark. The power here is in letting the audience bring a little something to the table. The danger here is you reach too far and fail to make the implication click.

9. Broken Metaphors Are Brick Walls

Some metaphors just don’t work. You maybe think they do, because in your head you’ve drawn a line that makes sense to you and… well, nobody else, you fuckin’ goon. The reader’s sitting there, scratching his head, wondering just what the hell a blue heron has to do with a head cold and what happens is, it stops the reader dead. Every component of your writing is binary — it’s either a 1 or a 0, it’s either Go, Dog, Go, or Guy Running Full Speed Into A Tree. It’s lubricant (facilitates the reader reading), or a fist (forces the reader to stop). A broken metaphor asks the reader to stand over the confounding imagery, chewing on it the way one must jaw hard on a hunk of gristly steak. Make sure you’re not putting out metaphors that are clear to you and only you. Think of the reader, not of the writer.

10. Mixed Metaphors Make Us Throw Red Bull Cans At Your Head

If I wanted to mix metaphors, I might take that love/lunchmeat/zombie metaphor and smoosh those fuckers together: “My love is like a zombie — it’s dead and walking around long past its expiration date.” It’s mixed because it’s in effect creating a metaphor within a metaphor: love is like a zombie, and a zombie is kind of like lunchmeat in that it has an expiration date even though human bodies and zombies don’t usually have expiration dates and love isn’t really a zombie and besides, zombies aren’t real anyway. So, it’s asking the reader to draw the line and say “love = zombie, but zombie = lunchmeat.” It’s not the worst mixed metaphor ever (as one could suggest that a person’s date of death is his ‘expiration date’). You can, of course, get a whole lot worse — the worst ones build off cliches (“Don’t look in the mouth of a upset gift horse of another color before the apple cart or… s… something.”)

11. Cliches Make Me Kick-Stab You Through A Plate Glass Window

Let me define for you: “Kick-stab.” It means I duct tape a diver’s knife to the bottom of my boot, and then I focus all of my chi (or: “ki”) into my kick as I drive my knife-boot into your chest so hard it explodes your heart and fires your ragdoll body through a plate glass window that wasn’t even there before but the force of the kick was so profound it conjured the window from another universe. All this because you had to go and use a cliche. Cliches are lowest common denominator writing and serve as metaphors for unimaginative, unoriginal turd-witted slug-brains. KIYAAAKAPOW *kick* *stab* *krrsssh*

12. Show Us Your Brain

Ew, no, not like that. Put your scrotum back in your pants, you monster. No, what I mean is: metaphors represent an authorial stamp. They’re yours alone, offering us a peek inside your mind. When a reader says, “I would have never thought to compare a sea squirt to the economic revolution of Iceland,” that’s a golden moment. The metaphor is a signature, a stunt, a trick, a bit of your DNA spattered on the page.

13. They Are The Chemical Haze That Creates Unearthly Sunsets

Look at it another way: a sky is a sky is a sky. But when we cast against the sky a chemical haze or the ejecta from a volcanic eruption, it’s like a giant fucking Instagram filter — it changes the sky and gives us heavenward vistas and sunsets or sunrises that are cranked up on good drugs, revealing to us unearthly beauty we never expected to see. The haze or the ejecta are entirely artificial — applied to the sky, not part of the original equation — but it doesn’t matter. That’s metaphor. Metaphor is the filter; it’s a way to elevate the written word (and the world the word explores) to something unexpected, something unseen. Metaphors are always artificial. But that fails to diminish their magic.

14. Hot Mood Injectors

Metaphors do not merely carry tone; they can lend it to a story. The metaphors you choose can capably create mood out of the raw nothing of narrative — a metaphor can be icky, depressing, uplifting, funny, weird, all creating moods that are (wait for it, wait for it), icky, depressing, uplifting, funny, or weird. A metaphor is a mood stamp. A tonal injector. Consistency in the tone of your metaphors is therefore key.

15. Metaphor As Rib-Spreader To Show Us A Character’s True Heart

A metaphor used to describe a character tells us more about the character than a mere physical description — saying a character is gawky is one thing, but then saying he “walks like a chicken with a urinary tract infection” paints for us a far more distinctive and telling portrait. Evoking those things (the chicken, the yellow of urine), suggests cowardice. It also suggests that he probably puts his penis in places he shouldn’t. Like hamster cages and old Pringles cans. Or chickens. #dontfuckchickens

16. Fuck The Police

Metaphor is part of description and we use description when something in the story breaks the status quo — when it violates expectation and so the audience must have a clear picture of it. You don’t talk about every tree in the forest; you describe that one tree that looks different, the twisted old shillelagh where the character’s brother hanged himself. Metaphor operates the same way: you use a metaphor when you want us to know something new, something different. It’s you pointing us to a thing to say, this thing matters.

17. Metaphors Operate By A Beautiful Short Circuit Of The Brain, Part One

Metaphors aren’t just some shit writers invented so they can strut about like pretty purple peacocks. It’s not just a stunt. Metaphors are part of our brains — not just writer’s brains (which are basically rooms where armed chimpanzees force drunken dogs to chase meth-addled cats all day long), but the brains of all humans. Here’s the cool thing about metaphors: our minds know the difference between the real and the metaphorical, and yet, our brains respond to metaphors often the same way they would to reality. You call someone a “dirty bastard,” and our brain pulls the chemical triggers that make us think of, or even feel, a moment’s worth of uncleanliness. How fucking bad-ass is that? THE BRAIN BE STRAIGHT TRIPPIN’, BOO. (Article: “This Is Your Brain On Metaphors.”)

18. Metaphors Operate By A Beautiful Short Circuit Of The Brain, Part Two

Another awesome thing the brain does with metaphors? We’re sitting there, reading, right? And the part of our brain that’s active is the part associated with reading and language. Ahh, but when we encounter a metaphor, our brain short-circuits and leaves that area — it freaks out for a moment, and kung-fu kicks open the door and runs to the area of the brain more appropriate to the sense triggered in the metaphor. In describing a smell or a touch, the brain goes to those areas and highlights that part of your skull’s mental meatloaf. Example: words describing motion highlight your motor cortex. What this means is supremely bad-ass: it means that good description and powerful metaphor are real as real gets. They trick our brain into a reality response! Stupid brains! Ha ha ha, eat a dick, brain! I just fooled you with words! (Article: “The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction.”)

19. The Sensory Playground

This tells us then that metaphors should use all senses, not just the visual. Mmkay? Mmkay.

20. Down In The Metaphor Mines

You can stimulate metaphorical thinking. At the simplest level, just make a concerted effort. Walk around, look at things, feel them, smell them, try to envision what those things remind you of — a summer’s day, a calculator watch, a used condom, a wicker basket heavy with roadkill, James Franco. Take one thing and then ask, how is it like another? Find the traits they share, both literal and abstract (hint: it’s the abstract ones that really matter). You can also force such stimulation: sleep or sensory deprivation will do it. So too will the right amount of al-kee-hol (not too much, but not too little, either). Probably the biggest category of “metaphorical stimulator” comes from hallucinogens, which are illegal and you should never do them. BUT IF YOU DO NEGLECT MY ADVICE AND WOLF DOWN A PALM FULL OF FUNNY MUSHROOMS AGAINST MY DOCTORIAL PROHIBITION, you’ll find that your brain makes crazy leaps between things — the very nature of hallucinations is due to the powerful tangling of sensory neurotransmitters (note: not a brainologist). Hallucination is metaphor; metaphor is hallucination.

21. Poe Tray

Another critical way to train your brain to love the metaphor: read poetry. Lots and lots of it. Old and new from every geographic region. Then: write it. Poetry is often a doorway to a metaphorical wonderland. You know what else is a doorway to a metaphorical wonderland? Churros. Mmm. Churros.

22. Profanity Is A Kind Of Metaphor

I want to point this out because, well, me and profanity? We’re buds. We’re bros. We’re in the Fuck Yeah Sisterhood. We went to space camp together and sold Girl Scout Cookies together and lost our virginities togeth… you know, we don’t need to keep talking about that. What I’m saying is, when I say, “Dave is a shithead,” I don’t mean he’s actually got a literal pile of feces roosting on his shoulders. When I say, “Fuck you” in anger, I don’t mean I actually want to fornicate with you. (I mean, probably.) Profanity is abstraction. It’s dirty, filthy, gooey abstraction. And it is wonderful.

23. Metaphor Is A Strong Spice

Don’t overuse metaphor. Every paragraph can’t be a metaphor for another thing — sometimes you just have to say the thing that you want to say without throwing heaps and mounds of abstraction on top of it.

24. Blood Makes The Grass Grow

No, wait, sorry, I mean, “Practice makes perfect.” Silly me! If you’re not particularly comfortable with metaphors, if they make your throat tight and your body tense and cause you to pee two, maybe three drops of scaredy-urine into your Supergirl underoos, you merely need to practice. Sit down. Write metaphors. Let your brain off its chain and see what it comes up with. Write a whole page — hell, a whole fucking book — of the damn things. Nobody’s reading these. No pressure. Care little. Just write.

25. Metaphors Are Part Of An Artistic Frequency

Narrative can, at the basic level, exist in a way where it tells us what has happened or is happening. Right? It serves as a simple explanation, the story being the literal actions taken and words spoken. John went to the grocery store. There he saw Mary. John and Mary kissed by the cantaloupes. John said, “I love you.” Mary Tasered him in the nipples. John died. Mary took his shoes. Whatever. But our storytelling can have levels that go above and below our words, that exist outside the literal flow of events and dialogue spoken. We have subtext. We have authorial intent. We have theme and symbol. And, drum roll please, we have metaphor. Metaphor elevates our narrative. Subtext is an invisible layer but metaphor is very visible, indeed: with metaphor we’re adding new colors to the sensory and experiential wavelength. This is why we use metaphor: to elevate storytelling to more than just the story told.