Tag: writing (page 21 of 33)

Fact: when executed poorly, exposition is a boat anchor tied to the story’s balls. It drags everything down. The plot cannot move. The plot grows fat and dies. Crows eat its eyes. Possums breed in dead bowels.

Fact: exposition remains necessary to convey information in storytelling.

Fact: exposition must be handled by a deft touch for it not to bog down your narrative ball-sack.

Fact: pterodactyls are really quite cool.

Okay, that last one maybe isn’t relevant, but it remains fact just the same. All I’m trying to say is, you want to write a story, you’re going to have to deal with exposition in some form, and this list is about that. I present to you, 25 ways to twist exposition to your will, turning it into a dancing gimp that will serve you…

…and serve the audience.

1. The Meaning Of Show, Don’t Tell

Like most easily-digestible protein-nuggets of writing advice, Show-Don’t-Tell is one that ends up confusing. After all, what we do is called storytelling, and then in the next breath we’re chided for telling and not showing. And yet, the advice remains true just the same. Exposition is often the biggest customer in terms of telling-above-showing, and it reeks of amateur hour karaoke. Here’s an example: consider the difference of you telling me “John is an assassin,” and you showing me the act of John stalking and killing a dude on the job. The former is dull: a narrative name-tag, a Facebook profile. The latter is engaging: action and example. This is the key to exposition always, always, always: stop telling, start showing.

2. Get In Late, Get Out Early

Leave yourself no room for exposition. Start the story as late into the plot as you can; extract yourself at first opportunity. You can’t eat ice cream that ain’t in the freezer. And by “ice cream” I mean “dead stripper.”

3. Imagine The Audience Is Sitting There, Staring At You

Everybody tells stories, and everybody’s had that moment where they start to lose the audience sitting in front of them. “C’mon,” they’ll say, making some kind of impatient gesture because, uhh, hello, the season finale of The Bachelor is on? You greedy asshole? God forbid you don’t get your reality TV fix, you mongrels. … uhh, sorry. Point is, when that happens you gotta ramp it up. You gotta get to the point. Imagine when writing your story — script, novel, short fiction, whatever — that the audience is sitting there, making that gesture. Even better: imagine them slapping billy clubs against their open palms. In other words: cut the shit and hurry it up. A guy’s got things to do. Like bury that “ice cream” in the Mojave desert.

4. Binge And Purge

Fuck it. Write a zero draft with as much exposition as you can fit in your fool mouth. Vomit forth great globs of word sauce ’til it hardens. On subsequent drafts, chop and whittle any exposition to a toothpick point.

5. Lock Up The Backstory In Its Own Plexiglass Enclosure

Open up a separate document from script or manuscript. Lock it away in its own cage. When parts need to come out and play, let them. Gas the rest with a nerve agent. Cover it with dirt.

6. Learn To Spot Expository Fol-de-rol

You can’t cure exposition unless you know how to spot it. Learn what it is. Learn to mark its footprints, its scat-tracks. Two characters talking about shit they should already know? One character descending into a bizarre, out-of-place soliloquy? Giant cinder block paragraphs that fall from the sky and crush the audience beneath them? Identify exposition where it lives, fucks, and eats. Then prepare the orbital laser.

7. Fold Exposition Into Action, Like Ingredients Into Delicate Batter

Dramatic action is — a-duh — action infused with drama, like vodka infused with elderberries and/or the screams of my enemies. As action unfolds, it reveals data you want the audience to have. Instead of putting forth a scene where characters plan a heist, get right to the heist — the heist reveals the plan. That’s not to say you can’t make a heist-planning scene evocative and with its own dramatic action and tension, but only serves to show that action needn’t be — and perhaps shouldn’t be — separate from exposition.

8. I Would Listen To That Guy Read The Phone Book

Listen, if you have to institute exposition to convey critical information, then you at least should do it with style, putting it in a voice that is not only readable, but compelling. I would read a fucking diner menu were it written by a writer with a great voice (say, Joe Lansdale) — so, if you’re going to take time out to foist information upon a reader’s head, then at least make it snappy.

9. Talk It Out, You Nattering Chatterkitties

Chatterkitty almost sounds like an Indian curry dish, doesn’t it? “I’ll take two samosas, and one vegetable chatterkitty. Medium spice, please.” Anyway, point is, characters can reveal backstory through dialogue — but it has to be done right. Like I said, two characters sharing data they should already know is a clear sign, as are long-winded monologues. An info-dump is still a steaming pile whether it comes from your ass or the mouth of a character. Characters shouldn’t ever give up great heaps of information — they should resist it. Revelation should be done with tension; a villain doesn’t want to give up his plan but must under torture.

10. The World Reveals Its Own Backstory

A war-torn city. A shattered hill-top. A modern megalopolis. A garden protected by angels. The details of setting show the wounds and scars of history. Environment reveals exposition.

11. Artifacts As Artifice

Further, the world offers up artifacts — newspapers, blogs, e-mails, epitaphs, relics, holo-discs, etc. — that convey expository detail. Characters can find these and learn them at the same time as the audience.

12. The Audience Is On A “Need-To-Know” Basis

Whenever you encounter the urge to info-dump, pause. Take a deep breath. Then ask: what does the audience need to know? Like, what information here is so bloody critical that without it the story loses its way, like an old person in a shopping mall? Separate “need” from “want” — I don’t care what details you want the audience to have. Determine only what is required to move forward. Everything else gets the knife.

13. Out With The Info-Dump, In With The Info-Bullet

Limit exposition to between one and three sentences per page. And lean sentences, too — don’t think you can get away with an overturned bucket of commas and dependent clauses poured over your word count. I can smell your chicanery the way a shark smells baby-farts. (Isn’t that what they smell? I might be getting that wrong. Wait, it’s blood? Blood? Are you sure? I think it’s baby-farts. I’ve heard it both ways.)

14. Tantric Storytelling (Or, “Nnnggh, Think About Baseball”)

Sting taught us all about Tantric sex, wherein you contain your orgasm in some kind of lust-caked mental hell-prison until you release it eight hours later, amplifying your delight. I am afraid of doing this as I fear it will send a hardened shiv of semen into my cerebral cortex. Regardless, it’s a good lesson for using exposition in storytelling: resist it as long as you can. You think, “Ohh, the audience really needs details right here,” but stave off that inclination. Do not pop your narrative cookies. Contain the exposition and reveal it late in the game until it can be restrained no longer.

15. Writus Interruptus, (Or, “Narrative Blue-Balls”)

Another way to sex up your man(uscript): use exposition to break tension. You’re amping up the suspense, you’re ratcheting action, it’s all escalation escalation escalation, and then — wham. You pull back from the action, and give a pause with a scene of exposition. Not so much where it overwhelms and frustrates, but enough where it creates that sense of narrative blue balls where you sharpen the audience’s need.

16. Exposition As The Answer To A Question

Exposition can serve as explanation. It’s all in the arrangement. If you present a question in the reader’s mind — “How exactly did Doctor Super-Claw lose his eye? And why does Satrap Fuck-Fang the Splendid want to kill him? Shit, there’s gotta be a good story there.” Indeed. Make them want the exposition so that, when you give it, it answers questions they already possess.

17. The Character As Exposition-Hungry Detail-Junkie

If the character needs the exposition for her arc and the plot to move forward, then the audience needs it — and thereby, it becomes more rewarding. Just assume the character is like the Space Sphere from Portal 2. The character needs the tricksy backstory, precious. We needs it. It’s also good if the character risks something to get at these details, thus revealing how critical it is and how it has earned a place in the narrative. “I had to fight my way through an infinity of ninjas to get you this information, sir.”

18. Exposition As Story Within A Story

Frame exposition not merely as details, not purely as data, but as a story. A micro-story within the larger narrative that abides by all those same rules: beginning, middle, end, tension, conflict, character.

19. The Flashback Flashbang

Exposition doesn’t need to be dry and dull as a saltine cracker in a dead lizard’s vagina — turn backstory into a scene by invoking the Ancient Pagan Law of Flashback. Fuck having the character recite details as if off a menu. Force her to relive it in flashback form. Don’t talk about the moment when she was thrown out of an air-lock by her mad Space King father. Time travel to that moment. Let us all see it as it happens.

20. Time-Travel Back In Time, And Kill The Expository Hitler

Another form of time travel — go back into your own story and rip out the need for exposition. Originally it’s all like, “Way back in the year of Fourteen-Splangly-Doo, in the Year of Dog’s Butler, the Dolphin Council of Krang suffered a cataclysmic failure to rule when they couldn’t agree on blippity-bloppity-snood…” Hell with that. Gut that history. If you need it, bring it to the foreground. Have it be happening right now. That way, it’s active, it’s present, and characters are discovering it at roughly the same rate as the audience.

21. Prove Your Motherfucking Thesis

Exposition is easier to swallow when it has a declarative purpose: in effect, a thesis sentence. Opening a page of text or some dialogue with, “The city hasn’t been the same since the unicorns took over,” gives you the opportunity to describe what that means. The audience is prepared to receive that information and, thus, the exposition fulfills the promise of its premise. Bonus points: violent conquistador unicorns.

22. Crack Open The Character’s Head

Like I’ve said before, the character is the vehicle for the story. They’re our way through; we ride them as monkeys on their backs. (Or, if you’ve read ZOO CITY, like Sloth on the back of Zinzi December.) What the character knows, we can know, too — and so you as the narrator are free to crack open the character’s skull like a coconut, allowing the audience access to the fragrant water within. The character’s perspective on information is still expository, but it’s tinted and warped through the lens of their experience, which means the exposition does double-duty. It both grants us details we need and also offers us a longer look at the character.

23. Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

A nice, trippy, totally fucked-up way of revealing backstory is through usage of dreams and visions. I did this in BLACKBIRDS and it was a fun way for me to convey creepy exposition without blurting it out like a kid high on the sugar from 14 bowls of Fruity Pebbles. Fun to write and, ideally, fun to read.

24. Exposition As Multi-Tool

Again, if you have to have to have to use exposition, make sure it sings for its supper and does more than just convey raw data. Let it communicate character, convey theme, move the plot forward (and backward), engage description, utilize compelling language, establish mood, and so on. The more work it does, the more it earns its place in your story.

25. Do Away With It Entirely

Go back through your work and find all the backstory, highlight all the info-dumps, and kill ’em. Just fucking murder it. Let stuff just hang out without any explanation — you’d be surprised how much of it will fly. Look to film in particular to see how many details are never explained and, further, how little that matters. That scene in DIE HARD where the two Aryan brothers are racing against each other to cut through… I dunno, “phone pipes?” I don’t know what they fuck they’re even doing there. Or why it’s a race. When you saw the first STAR WARS, did the film stop and explain what the hell the Clone Wars were? No! (And if only it had stayed that way.) Most of the things you think need to be explained don’t. They just don’t. So, fuck exposition right in its ear. If you go back through a subsequent draft and say, “Okay, I need a little something-something here,” fine, consult the rest of this list and see how you can make it your bitch.

Because if exposition is on the menu, then by god, you better know how to serve it right and make it tasty.

* * *

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

As storyteller, you are god. And to be frank, you’re not a particularly nice god — at least, not if you want your story to resonate with readers. A good storyteller is a crass and callous deity who treats the characters under his watchful eye like a series of troubled butt-puppets. From this essential conflict — storyteller versus character — a story is born. (After all, that’s what a plot truly is: a character who strives to get above all the shit the storyteller dumps on his fool head.)

Put differently, as a storyteller it’s your job to be a dick.

It’s your job to fuck endlessly with the characters twisting beneath your thumb.

And here’s 25 ways for you to do just that.

1. Your Proxy: The Antagonist

Gods have avatars, mortal or semi-mortal beings that exist on earth to embody the deity’s agenda. Avatars — be it Krishna, Jesus, or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man — are the quite literal hand of god within the material plane. And so it is that the antagonist is the avatar of the storyteller, at least in terms of fucking with the other characters. A well-written and fully-realized antagonist is your proxy in the storyworld who steps in and is the hand holding the garden trowel that continues to get shoved up the protagonist’s most indelicate orifice. The antagonist stands actively in the way of the protagonist’s deeds and desires.

2. The Mightiest Burden

The audience and the character must know the stakes on the table — “If you don’t win this poker game, your grandmother will lose her beloved pet orangutan, Orange Julius.” But as the storyteller, you can constantly adjust those stakes, turning up the heat, the fumes, the volume until the character’s carrying an Atlas-like burden on his shoulders. The world’s fate suddenly rests in his hands. Character fails at his task and he loses his wife, his family, and all the nuclear missiles in the world will suddenly launch. In unrelated news: Orange Julius is the best name for an orangutan ever. Go ahead. Prove me wrong. Show your work.

3. Never Tell Me The Odds

Impossible odds are a powerful way to fuck with a character. “It’s you versus that whole army of sentient spam-bots, dude. And they’ve got your girlfriend.” It certifies that the task at hand is an epic one, and is the dividing line between hero and zero. Confirming heroism means beating those odds. Confirming mortality means falling to them. Note that a character doesn’t always have to beat the odds. Failure is an option.

4. Torn Between Two Horses

Drop the character smack dab between two diametrically opposed choices. A character is torn between a love for her country and a love for her family. She’s torn between her obsessive devotion to science and her religious upbringing. She’s torn between saving the life of Orange Julius the genetically-modified super-orangutan or giving all the world’s children infinite ice cream. Okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, tie your character to two (or more!) difficult choices, and let those horses run like motherfuckers.

5. Life On The QT, The Down-Low, The No-No-Nuh-Uh

Give the character an untenable secret life: a forbidden romance, a taboo, a transgression. Confirm that the revelation of this secret life will destroy her. “As soon as they find out you’re really an android, Mary, I can no longer protect you.” The character must constantly protect her secret life, must constantly work against revelation. And you as storyteller will constantly threaten that, won’t you? Because you’re evil.

6. Deny Success With Speedbumps, Roadblocks, Snarling Tigers

This one? So easy. Whenever your character reaches for That Thing He Wants (a girl, a cookie, world peace, a leprechaun’s little hat), slap his face. Throw a tiger in his path. Chop off his hand. Thwart his every grope for the brass ring. That said, don’t let your story become torture porn. A character needs smaller iterative successes to match the longer, larger failures. “I didn’t get the leprechaun’s hat, but I got one of his little shoes. We can use it to track him.”

7. Go Down The “Do Not Want” Checklist

You frequently hear that a character is defined in part by what he wants, but you will find it useful to take the opposite tack, too. Take your character. Dangle that poor fucker by the ears. Give him a good look-over and pick, mmm, say, five things he does not want. Outcomes he fears. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him. He doesn’t want to die young. He doesn’t want to have his penis stolen by wizards. Now, your job, as Evil Mastermind Storyteller is to constantly put the character in danger of these outcomes coming true.

8. A Victory That Tastes Of Wormwood

An old classic: “We finally got the leprechaun’s hat! Ha ha, now we’ve the little basta — OH MY GOD THE HAT IS FILLED WITH BEES.” Die Hard has exquisite false victories. John McClane succeeds in calling the authorities and ultimately ends up causing a bigger shitstorm as a result.

9. Storyteller As Robber Fly

Everybody has something they love. Identify those things. Then take one away. Or more than one! “Sorry, dear character, in the fire you lost your house, your husband, and your mystical manrikigusari given to you by your immortal sensei.” You have a choice, here, of paths, a divergence of “lost now” and “lost forever.” Lost now intimates the story can continue, and in fact, the reclamation of lost things is a story unto itself. Lost forever moves the conflict inward, where a character must learn to deal with that loss.

10. Tickle Them With A Ticking Clock

If you ever wish to squeeze my heart and cause my blood pressure to build so that my brain is smothered by swollen arteries, give me a ticking clock time limit in a video game. Freaks me out. Do that to your character. Throw him, his goals, his story, between the turning gears of a ticking clock. “You have one week to save Orange Julius from the leprechaun cult. After that? He becomes one of them.”

11. Beat The Donkey Piss Out Of Them

Again we call upon John McClane, who ends up basically sticking a gun to his back in his own blood at the end of Die Hard. A simple way of dicking with your character is to hurt them. Again. And again.

12. Shot Through The Heart, And You’re To Blame

That being said, a broken jaw, shattered foot, or stapled labia has nothing on the betrayal by a loved one. Maybe it comes down to a simple, “I’m leaving you in this, the moment you need me most,” or maybe it’s, “For your own good, I’ve alerted the police. They’re on their way. I’m so sorry. Now hand me the orangutan.” However it shakes out, the treachery of a loved one is a deeply twisting knife.

13. Shattering Lives With Your Story Hammer

Think about all the pieces of the puzzle that add up to a picture of “you.” Now, do the same for your character. Imagine all those identifiers: lover, father, friend, sheriff, amateur chef, jazz fiend, leprechaun hunter. Now, break the puzzle apart. Throw away most of the pieces. Calamity and cataclysm rob the character of his fundamental identifiers. Force him to question who he even is anymore. What impels him forward? How does he rebuild? What is rebuilt?

14. Shatter Their Preconceived Notions

A deeper, more internal version of the last: take what the character thinks she knows — maybe about her family, her government, her childhood — and throw that paradigm out on its buttbone. The character’s comprehension of events and elements has been all wrong. And not in a good way. The character must respond. Must act. Can’t just go on living like everything’s the same.

15. Motherfucking Love Triangle

The love triangle. Never a more hackneyed, overwrought device — but, just the same, a device that works like a charm if invoked with skill and nuance. Becky loves Rodrigo and has since they were young. But Orange Julius vies for her attention and Rodrigo is off fighting the Spam-Bots in the Twitter War of 2015. And Orange Julius is one sexy orangutan. Who does she choose? Swoon! You needn’t stop at three participants. What about a love rhombus, aka the “lovetangle?” Point is, this is a more specific version of forcing the character into a difficult choice. Do it right and the audience will be right there with you, wearing their shirts, TEAM RODRIGO or TEAM SEXY ORANGUTAN. Gang wars in the streets.

16. The Scorpion Sting Of Deception

Lies form slippery ground, and by forcing the character to lie — or hear and believe another’s lies — you put that character on treacherous ground. We know their lies run the risk of exposure, and we know that a lie is rarely alone — they’re like cockroaches, you hear one, you know a whole wall full of them waits behind the paint. Further, if forced to believe another’s lies, the character begins to make decisions based on bad info.

17. Just A Simple Misunderstanding

Speaking of bad info, the “misunderstanding” has been the backbone of the American sitcom for decades, and it’s a trick you can use. “You said Blorp but I thought you said Glurp and now Zorg is coming to dinner! Oh noes! Hilarious awkward calamity ensues!” Note here the power of dramatic irony, which is when the audience knows the score but the character fails to possess such critical information. We know that the character is going to accidentally give her grandmother a set of small-to-large butt-plugs (for proper teaching of sphincter-stretching) when really she thinks it’s a collection of Sandra Bullock DVDs. Ha ha ha! Oh, a funny thing happened on the way to the dildo shop! Comedy gold.

18. When Two Goals Meet In The Rye With Swords Drawn

Put a character at cross-purposes. Two goals cannot easily be achieved together. The character is supposed to have a date night with his wife and save the world from the leprechaun terrorists? Egads! But how?

19. Dear Character, You Have Made A Terrible Decision

The audience feels sympathy and shame for character mistakes because our mind-wires are crossed. We see a character fuck up and some little part of our brain makes us feel like it’s us fucking up — we associate so closely with characters, we unknowingly get all up in their guts and self-identify. So, characters who make mistakes — or even better, willfully choose a bad path — can make your audience squirm in their seats.

20. Love At The End Of A Knife

Putting loved ones in danger is a powerful way to fuck with your characters. “Sorry, Bob — the Latvians have Betty, and if my intel is right, they’ve got a pit full of ravenous honey badgers to convince her to talk.” And of course, saving that loved one is never easy. Danger lurks. Hard choices await. And even after rescue, can Betty ever again trust that her life with Bob won’t be fraught with honey badger peril?

21. A Grim Game Of “I Never”

A character says, “I never want to become my mother,” but then lo and behold… begins exhibiting the traits of her mother. A cop says, “I’ll never let the job get to me,” and, drum roll please, the job starts getting to him. Everybody has negative identifiers — roles they never want to fill, but roles that have a terrible gravity, a grim inevitability to them. That’s a great way to torque a character’s emotions.

22. Poke The Character’s Weakness With A Pointy Stick

We’ve all got pits and pockmarks in our souls, and characters in fiction doubly so. Flaws and frailties ahoy, and it’s your job as storyteller to exploit those weaknesses. A character might have addictions, anger management problems, a physical debilitation, a soft spot for leprechauns — whatever it is, it’s your job to draw the poison to the surface and let it complicate the story. Because you’re a dick. A super-dick, even.

23. And At Night, The Ice Weasels Come

The environment can be a great antagonist. Sub-zero temperatures! Dangerous mountain pass! Wasp tornado! The setting can come alive to bring great misery to good characters.

24. Roosting Chickens With Razor Beaks

I don’t know why chickens “coming home to roost” is a metaphor for the past returning to haunt a character. I mean, chickens are about as non-threatening as they come. What about owls? Or falcons? Hell, forget birds. The saying should be, “Wait till those ninjas come home to roost.” But I digress. Point is, a character may be running from his past. Just as he thinks he’s escaped it, the past catches up with him — a crazy ex-girlfriend, an ex-partner looking for a last big score, a rogue Terminator. Though, I guess in the case of a Terminator, that’s more the future catching up with you. Whatever. Shut up. Don’t judge me.

25. Opportunistic Hate Crimes Against Beloved Characters

In the end what it comes down to is a willingness by you, the storyteller, to throw your characters under countless speeding buses. You may, like a parent with a child, want to be the character’s friend — you like the character, you want them to succeed, and that’s all well and good. But story is born of conflict and conflict is born of characters in trouble. That’s not to say you need to cause them ceaseless miseries — again, we’re not looking for torture porn. But you have to be willing to put the irons to their feet — a character’s success is only keenly felt and roundly celebrated when first he had to go through hell to get there.

Your Turn

How do you like to use and abuse your poor characters? When does such torment go too far?

* * *

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

Time again for another list of 25 — this time, a long hard look at the many ways to press hot irons to the feet of your writing and make it beg to get better. Flip through them, and then should you find you’ve got your own to add, well, hot dang, you know what the comments section is for. Time to measure up, penmonkeys.

1. Practice Makes Perfect, Little Princess

The easiest and most forthright way to become a better writer is, duh, to write. Write, write, write. Write regularly. Get on a schedule, whether it’s 100, 1000, or 10000 words a day. Writing is a muscle, like your biceps, your heart, or your private parts. Don’t use ’em, you lose ’em. And then they fall to the ground and rot like oxidizing apples and are in turn eaten by hungry gophers. Om nom nom.

2. Time To Eye-Fuck Some Books

The world is home to — *does some quick math on fingers, toes, testicles, nipples, and teeth* — 45 smajillion books. Each of them often containing somewhere north of 50,000 words. And new books hit the atmosphere every day. You do not need to read all of these books. But you should act as if that is indeed your task, carving your way through the world’s cumulative body of the written word one tome at a time. If you want to write, you’re coming in at the ground level of these 45 smajillion books written by 33 fnuhzillion different writers. You are a but a mote in the reader’s eye. You want to compete? Read. Learn what other writers are doing. Absorb it with that schnapps-laden sponge you call a brain.

3. Read Widely, Weirdly, Wisely

Here then is the prison that writers build for themselves: it becomes harder and harder to read purely for pleasure. Reading for pleasure often means sticking to a few genres, with a few authors — “Oh, I like fantasy, so I only read fantasy fiction,” or, “I love the Detective Cashew Pepper series by K. J. Staplebottom, and I’ve read up to #47 in the series.” That privilege has been revoked. You now must read widely, weirdly, wisely. Read everything. Move outside your desired library. Read obscure British literature. Read poetry. Read non-fiction. Read science-fiction even though you hate science-fiction. If you want to do what everybody else is doing, fine, read only in your pre-existing sphere of influences. But this is about improving your work, not treading water like a poodle who fell off a boat.

4. Don’t Be A Book Racist

Those who write books are occasionally “book racists.” They pump their fists and espouse Book Power while denigrating other forms of the written word. “TV will rot your brain,” they might say. As if the Snooki book will somehow do laps around an episode of THE WIRE. Books are not the only form of the written word. You may not even want to write books. Branch out. Watch television. Watch film. Read scripts. Visit great blogs. Play games. Don’t be a book racist. The storytelling cults can learn much from one another.

5. Whittle Your Mind Into A Straight Razor, ‘Cause It’s Time To Cut A Motherfucker

Another instance where improving your writing skill may come at the slow erosion of your pleasure. Read and watch stories with a deeply critical eye. Not to be a dick, but to instead ask: “What would I do differently? Why would I do it that way? Could I do this better? How would I write it to improve upon it?”

6. Unclog Those Ears, Wax Boy

Listen. Seriously, get your pinky into that ear, unplug it of all the wax and hair and sadness that’s built up in there and just… listen. We read with our ears as much as with your eyes and so it’s critical you know what sounds good as well as what reads well. Sit down at a bar, listen to a conversation. Turn on an audio book or a radio show. Listen to a stand-up comedian deliver jokes and stories. Write it down if you must — see how it lays on the page. It should lay there like Burt Reynolds with a snake draped delicately across his man-parts. In other news, I bet his man-parts have their very own mustache.

7. Go Forth And Do Shit, My Son

Write what you know means what it says but doesn’t say what it means. You know more than you know. Fuck fact. Embrace authenticity. Writers do not gain a sense of authenticity by sitting at the computer all day jizzing out word-babies. Have something to write about. To do that, you must go out. Into the world. Take a trip. Get in a bar fight. Hunt a white whale. Metaphorically. Please don’t kill whales. They are our benevolent alien masters and one day they’re going to get really pissed and call in an airstrike.

8. Learn What Words Mean And Where Punctuation Goes

Storytelling may be an art, but writing is a craft, and that means learning where commas go, how to spell words (like “clitoral” or “sesquicentennial”), and in general how to put together a fucking sentence. Read yourself some Strunk and White. Flip through a dictionary now and again. Scope out some Grammar Girl. Hear a word you don’t know? Go look it up. Improve your technical skills. It is the bedrock of your penmonkeying and without it, you’re just a punk-ass who won’t eat his vegetables.

9. Be Torn Asunder By Editorial Talons

It helps to submit to editors. Real editors. Tough love editors. Because sometimes your writing needs to get on its knees and have wax poured down its back while it receives a right-good nipple-caning from a whip-like willow branch. Your writing improves in the fiery gaze of a hellish editor. The flames will wick away the flopsweat and the amateurish urine stain. The barnacles will char and fall off. Submit to an editor.

10. Be Ripped Apart By Other Writers

Writers are not editors. (File under D for “duh.”) They have different priorities and different perspectives. (And they’re probably also raging drunkaholics. Editors are nice and drink wine. Writers will drink all the cough syrup at CVS if they can get their ink-stained fingers on it.) Whereas an editor will often highlight a problem, a writer will come up with a solution. That doesn’t mean it’s a solution you want, but it’s worth it to have that perspective just the same. Submit your work to other writers. Demand — with a gun in the small of their back if you must — that they not be kind. Mercy will not strengthen you.

11. Self-Flagellate

Pull up your pants, that’s not what I mean. I mean, you must smack your word count with the horse-whip of scrutiny! You must become your own cruelest editor, your jaw clenched tight with the meat of your own manuscript trapped between your teeth. This doesn’t need to be a consistent mode of operation, but once in a while it pays to take a page of your writing and go at it with a blowtorch, a car battery, and a starving honey badger. Cut your words. Make them bleed. Behold the healing power of bloodletting.

12. Throw Down Your Own Crazy-Ass Gauntlet, Then Run Through It Naked

Set challenges for yourself, then tackle them. Write a piece of flash fiction. Write poetry. Attempt to tell a story in a single tweet. Play with the second person perspective. Write a novel in sixty chapters, each only 1000 words. Treat it like a game where the rules are ever-changing.

13. Highway To The Danger Zone

Related, but different: write into your own discomfort. Escape your plexiglass enclosure and run toward peril, not away from it. Confront your many demons with your work and dissect them on the page. Write in genres with which you’re not at all comfortable. Know your limits, then take those limits, wrap them around a hand-grenade, and shove them up the ass of a velociraptor. Because, really, fuck limits. You wanna be a better writer, you’ll write outside your own proscribed margins.

14. Read Your Shit Aloud

I will pin your arms beneath my knees and scream into your face until I pass out from a rage aneurysm (an angeurysm?): read your work aloud. It will make you a better writer. I promise.

15. Embrace The Darwinism Of Writing Advice

Here’s what you do with writing advice (says the guy delivering a nigh-constant stream of dubious penmonkey wisdom): hunt it down, leash it, read it, absorb it, then let it go free once more. Let it compete with your other preconceived notions about writing. Sometimes the new writing advice will win and become a dominant meme inside your wordsmith’s brain. Other times your pre-existing beliefs will hold true — and will grow more tumescent, like a potent word-boner — through just such a test. You must take in writing advice and test it against your own notions. Tell all writing advice: “NOW YOU MUST FIGHT THE BEAR.”

16. Learn New Breakdancing Moves, Fool

You can’t be coming to the street with your stale-ass bullshit. The Worm? Really? The Robot? Classics, admittedly, but you’re going to get smoked by bigger and better b-boys, yo. So too it goes with writing. You must be willing to try new ideas. Not a plotter? Try plotting. Don’t like flashbacks? So write some motherfucking flashbacks. Make them your own. Try new tips, tricks, techniques. You should be able to say, “I wrote my last novel on the back of a dead hooker. With a Sharpie! Don’t worry, I outlined it first on the chest of my UPS man. He’s still upstairs in the tub! Hey, uh, know anyone who needs a couple kidneys?”

17. I Just Blogged A Little In My Mouth

You often hear, “writers should blog to build their platform,” to which I say, pants, poppycock, and pfeffernusse! (I know. Such a foul tongue!) I say: writers should blog because it keeps them writing, because it exposes their writing to the air of community, because it tests your skill in the open plains. Blogging is further a great place to play with language, to put words out there that aren’t headed to market, that aren’t forced to dance for their dinner. It allows you to use words like “poppycock” and “pfeffernusse.” True story.

18. Interface With Other Inkslingers

Sometimes you have to sit down over a pitcher of moonshine (or a hookah burning with the ash of an 1st edition Finnegan’s Wake) and confab the shit out of that palaver with other writers. Meaning: talk it out. Talk about careers. Techniques. Books you love. Writers you hate. Writer conventions and conferences are good places for this. Just remember: the writers are always at the bar. Like moths to a porchlight.

19. Wade Into The Mire Of Your Own Fetid Compositions

Time travel a little. Go back into your past and dredge up some writing from a year ago. From ten years ago. Read it. Learn from it. Also gauge how well you’ve grown. This can be instructive because sometimes you don’t know in what ways you’ve changed — further, you might identify darlings that repeatedly come up in your writing, darlings that deserve naught but the edge of your editorial chainsaw.

20. Do Not Defile The Penmonkey Temple

Your writing is the product of a machine, and that machine is your brain and body. The higher that machine functions, the better the writing that blubbers and spews from it. I’m not saying you need to treat your body like it’s a white tower of physical perfection — but we’re talking basic shit, here. Move around. Eat a good breakfast. Heroin is not a great snacktime treat. Fine, maybe you don’t need to treat your body like it’s a temple. Just don’t treat it like it’s the urinal in a Wendy’s bathroom.

21. Flex Your Other Artistic Muscles

Take photos. Paint a picture. Play the piano. Macrame a dildo cozy. Muscles work in muscle groups — your writing muscle is part of an overall creative cluster. You gotta work ’em all.

22. Find Your Voice By Not Finding Your Voice

Sometimes improving your writing is about letting go of your writing. Some writers become so obsessed with their voice that they forget they already have it — your voice is who you are, your voice is your natural default way of communicating with the written word. To find your voice and improve your wordsmithy, sometimes it pays to just relinquish ego, relinquish control, and stop fucking worrying so much.

23. Embrace Your Inner Moonbat

All writers are a little bit batshit. We’ve all got some combo-pack of Charlie Manson, Renfield and Bender from Futurama running around in our skulls. Embrace it. We’ve all got a head full of ghosts and gods and it behooves us to listen to them, to let them out and play on the page, to use the madness granted to us rather than deny it and walk the safe and sane line.

24. Veer Drunkenly Toward Truth

Be real on the page. Be you. Know your experiences, know your heart and head and whatever squirting fluids pulse between your bile ducts and put it all on the page. Be honest. Be bold. Don’t fuck around. Only by bringing yourself to the work will you find that your writing truly improves. Let it all hang out. By saying what needs to be said, you will see your writing get better, unburdened as it is by pretense and artifice.

25. I Am Jack’s Desire To Be A More Awesomer Writer

An alcoholic (or any kind of -aholic) only gets better when he wants to, and so it is with writing. To be a better writer you must truly want to be. Open yourself. Test your work. Be willing to change.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

* * *

Want more of the 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

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

Switching gears from the “25 Things” series (which is now neatly compiled in an e-book cheaper than a bottle of water of a hobo handy) and segueing into a more practical “25 Ways” list.

I do not believe in writer’s block. I believe it shares the same intellectual space as the bogeyman in your closet, as the serial killer under the bed. The more you fear it, the more it gains power. To be clear, I do believe that writers can be blocked, that writers can have bad days where the intellectual plumbing feels gummed up by an old diaper filled with soggy fruitcake — I just don’t believe this is unique to the writer. Everybody gets blocked. Everybody gets frustrated. Everybody can have a bad day where the brain-squeezin’s just won’t get squozen.

Even still, while the problem may not be unique, the solutions often are.

And so that’s what we’re tackling today.

Ready? Let’s crotch-kick writer’s block so hard, it tastes the poodle crap we stepped in on the way over.

1. Write Through It

You are confronted by a tangle of jungle vines and Amazonian thicket. The only way forward is forward. You have a machete. What do you do? You chop, motherfucker. Take the blade. Start hacking. Won’t be fun. Won’t be fast. But it’s the only way to gain ground. Your first way through writer’s block is just to write. Clench your jaw. Tighten your sphincter. And write. The key is to write badly if you must. Write without regard for quality or care. Flail about with your word-machete until the tangle is clear.

2. Write Through It, Part II: All Work And No Play

This is the same as the first but bears special mention: sometimes it’s not even about writing words in your story, sometimes it’s about just writing. Writer’s block is often about jarring loose stubborn bullshit — it feels like you’re trying to pull teeth out of a meth-cranked raccoon, but that’s an act of finesse. Put down the pliers, get out the hammer. Start swinging. Write crazy. Write big. Write insane. All work and no play makes writer-monkey a twitchy serial murderer. Write one word over and over. One sentence. One paragraph. Don’t worry about what you’re writing. Turn on the spigot. Let the madness flow.

3. The Blood Must Flow

Science lesson. Blood carries nutrients to your brain. One of those nutrients is imagozen, the vitamin that governs our imagination. I may just be making that up. But there’s some truth there: we do need good blood-flow to the brain to think clearly. Been sitting on your ass a while? All the blood and sweet, sweet imagozen is pooling in your ass-parts. Get up. Move around. Take a walk. Exercise. Do some push-ups. Hell, have sex. You gotta love a guy who will tell you to solve writer’s block by “banging it out.” Right? No, seriously, you have to love me. Take off your pants. Mine are already on the floor. LOVE ME.

4. Stick Energy Drink Up Ass, Tighten Buttocks Until High-Octane Enema Occurs

I am not actually recommending an energy drink enema, just so we’re clear. I will not be held liable for the embarrassing X-rays that make it onto the Internet. What I am saying is, caffeine? It’s your buddy. Caffeine can give your brain a much-needed jolt, as if from those electrified paddles. CLEAR. Bzzt. Start with tea. Tea has a mellower edge than coffee. That doesn’t work, try coffee. Mmm. Coffee. Speaking of — *slurrrp*

5. Booze Booze Booze Booze Booze *vomits*

Caffeine creates tension. But maybe what you need is recoil. Could be that you’re just too ratcheted up to write. No problem. Switch your chemical dance partner. From caffeine to liquor. I’m not saying you should make a habit of writing drunk — in fact, I’m suggesting you write merely tipsy. Whatever amount of alcohol lubricates your social gears may also lubricate your writing gears. Just this once. Just to ooze past this block. To get your mind chatting up the birds at the word-bar.

6. Chatty Cathy, Don’t Clip Those Strings

Talk to yourself. Seriously. Use your mouth. Vocalize words. Have a conversation with yourself. Talk about the story. Talk about what’s clogging the pipes. Yammer away like a crazy person. (For bonus points: do so at a public bus terminal.) If you’re so inclined, record the conversation. Label the file, “MY MANIFESTO.” E-mail to all the newspapers.

7. Reach Out And Touch Somebody

Perhaps a masturbatory chat with yourself isn’t quite enough. Fine. Find another human being (or, if you’re reading this after the year 2018, find a sentient appliance bot, like the Dishflenser 500, or the Toast-Aborter v2.0) and have this chat with them. Talk out your problem. Get their input. Human interaction can go a long way toward jarring loose whatever grubby suppository is stuck up inside your narrative butthole.

8. Converse With Your Imaginary Friend

This one will make you certifiable, so don’t perform it in front of any sensitive family members. But take one of your characters, and talk to them. Out loud or on the page. Do a little role-playing. (And any writer who hasn’t engaged in a little role-playing — either the kind with dice or the kind with a librarian’s outfit and an orangutan mask — is missing out on learning how to let your fiction find its path.)

9. Fuck With The Feng Shui

Get up off your ass. Pack up your writing. Go elsewhere. Across the room. To the kitchen table. To a Starbucks. To a Jersey rest-stop. Hell, wander outside, do some writing there. Sometimes just the change of scenery is enough to free the word-demons from their restrictive cages.

10. Tinker With The Guts

You ever get lost while traveling? “We’re supposed to be at the Aquarium. And yet here we are, atop an ancient hill, trapped inside a giant wicker effigy, surrounded by torch-wielding cultists. I think we took a wrong turn somewhere, honey. Sorry, kids.” Sometimes you have to backtrack. Find out where things went awry. So too with your fiction. Read back. Find where you fucked up. Your reluctance to continue writing may be born of the unconscious discomfort that something in your tale is wrong, like a picture hanging askew on the wall. Go back. Straighten the picture.

11. You Need A Motherfizzucking Map

It can be hard to see the forest for the trees when writing a big project. You feel like you’re wandering in the swamp, walking in weeds as high as your ears. Do you have a map? Probably not. Listen, some writers are pantsers. They love to operate off the narrative grid. You may not be one of them. Go back. Write an outline. Beat out the story the way you’d beat a confession out of a perp. Know where you’ve been and discover where you’re going and then go back and write. Sometimes writer’s block is just you missing the big picture.

12. Throw The Map In A Bag And Burn It

Alternately, maybe you need to pants it a little. Maybe you’re too married to an outline that just isn’t tickling your pink parts anymore. Fine. Fuck it. Throw caution to the wind. It’s time to do something dramatic. Christa Faust has a killer tattoo that cuts to the heart of it: “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” That’s a specific example, but you can blow up the story however you choose. Fire! Death! Betrayal! Cataclysm! Deception! Adultery! Whatever it is, take the map you’ve written, wrap it around a hand grenade, and shove it up the story’s ass. CHOOM. Harvest the sweet story blubber.

13. Put Lipstick On That Monkey

Sometimes, a cosmetic change goes a long way. Me? I’m a font whore. I like to find the right font that fits well with my story. Yes, this is ludicrous. Yes, this is a waste of time. Yes, I do it anyway. And once I take 30 minutes to find the right font, the story’s style locks for me. Try it. Or maybe you mess with margins. Or line spacing. Or you choose to write long-hand. Or carve your story into the back of a hooker corpse. Your call.

14. A-Scripting-We-Will-Go

Depart from your narrative, and turn your fiction into a script. Just for now. Just for the part that’s blocking you. Of course, if you’re already writing a script, then do the reverse — switch it up and move into the more languid and longer form afforded by prose. Again, this “switching of gears” can uncage the story-bears. By the way, “uncage the story-bear” is the metaphor I choose when I proclaim I am about to make love. I walk into the room, I scratch my beard, unmoor my pants, and I announce that in a booming voice. I just wanted to let you in on that part of my life. Thank me later.

15. Dear Missus Frittershire

Familiar with the epistolary? Any story that takes the form of a series of documents is considered epistolary. The novel might manifest as a collection of letters, e-mails, newspaper clippings, diary entries, tweets, the ravings of an impudent spam-bot, etc;. Try this out. I don’t mean for the whole story. But for today, try writing through your writer’s block by embracing this form. “Today, my character will write a blog entry.” “I will use the art of the takeout Chinese menu to tell this story.” Shit, you never know.

16. Wander Down An Alley

Er, not literally. I will not be held responsible if you are captured and eaten by Oscar the Grouch. (You gotta watch that guy. Terrible hungers.) Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Let’s say you’re banging your head on that novel the way a bumblebee bats his head against the window-glass. I want you to take the protagonist, or some aspect of the storyworld, and deviate. Write some flash fiction, maybe a short story, some ancillary, tacked-on, doesn’t-connect-directly-to-the-novel story. Indirect, yes. Direct, no. Take today and write only that. It may open doors for the larger project at hand.

17. Kill The Shiny

As modern souls we are besieged by distractions. Text messages and tweets and spam-bots and porn and TV-on-demand and cyber-LSD and digital cupcakes and only the gods know what else. Escape the gravity of your own distractions. Turn it off. Power it down. Use a program like Mac Freedom or Write Or Die. Close the door on all the piffling, waffling, middling bullshit and make sure it’s just you and the word count.

18. Hear A Buzzer, Start To Drool

Tell yourself, “If I write 1000 words, I get [fill-in-the-blank].” Doesn’t matter what it is. Ice cream? Another cup of coffee? An hour of television? A jet-boat made of pony bones? Like I said: whatever. But establishing a reward gives you motivation to do the one thing that really defeats writer’s block: writing through the anguish and coming out the other side. Covered in blood. And smiling.

19. The Penmonkey Diet

Carbs are great if you’re going to be, y’know, using that energy for something like, say, moving your laggardly slugabed body around. But writers live a sedentary existence, at least while working, and so it behooves you not to hoover a bowl of Corn Pops into your gut. Do that and the carbs will only drag you down, make you mentally foggy. Stick with protein while writing. By the way, bacon is protein. Just saying.

20. Hop Around Like A Coked-Up Jackrabbit

Nobody said you had to write your work in order. I like to write in sequence for the most part just because it keeps me on point — but if I’m at a section I’m just not “feeling” that day, I’ll skip around, write something else. “I want to write a fight scene between two stompy robots,” I’ll say. Hell, you’re the god of the story. You may experience it in whatever order you so choose.

21. Get Visual

I like to take photos. Or fuck around with Photoshop. You think I haven’t been vain enough to do up fake book covers for my as-yet-unpublished books? Oh, I have. Point is, sometimes writer’s block is just about flexing those creative muscles on the right side of your brain. Hell, you fingerpaint poop on your Plexiglass enclosure like I do and that counts. Seriously. Look, I drew a monkey! The flies are his eyes.

22. Down The Rabbit Hole Of Research

Research can be a trigger to get you moving again. No matter what you’re writing about, you will always find more to know, and in this case research qualifies as a “good” distraction as long as you keep a relative focus. You play it right, research can be the key that unlocks whatever mental door got slammed shut.

23. Recognize Why You Don’t Want To Write This Part

Sometimes you get stuck on a part and are too stubborn to do anything about it, so you just stand there and stare it down, growling and stomping your feet. Here’s a secret: maybe that part you’re stuck on is a part you just don’t want to write. And if you don’t want to write it, what are the chances that someone might not want to read it? You know what you do? Skip it. Kill it. Move past it. Find another way through.

24. Fuck Off For A Day, Willya?

You get one day. One. Free pass. No writing today. Just flit away, little butterfly. Flit, flit, flit. Clear your head. Have some fun. Tomorrow the work returns. The block, undone. Or it damn well better be.

25. Deny The Existence Of Writer’s Block

If you’re being skewered by a unicorn, the secret is: tell the unicorn he doesn’t exist. If you do that, he’ll disappear in a puff of Lucky Charms cereal. That’s true. That’s fact. Same thing goes for writer’s block. If it’s assailing you, an incubus clinging to your back, you just tell that mythological being that you don’t believe in him. You do that, you steal his power. Suck his breath away. Make him turn to so much vapor. You have to harden your heart and your head against it and believe that the one way through is that old saw that everybody repeats but they always forget: writers write. That’s the one tried and true way through writer’s block. Because a writer who writes isn’t blocked, is he?

* * *

Like this brand of booze-soaked, caffeine-addled, salty-tongued writing advice? Then I might recommend you take a look at 250 Things You Should Know About Writing and Confessions Of A Freelance Penmonkey, both available now. Please to enjoy.