Tag: writing (page 22 of 33)

I’m not here to predict the future for you penmonkeys.

Were I to predict such a future, I would suggest that in the next 10 years, we will all be hunted down by self-aware Verbo-Bots and Publispiders, crass automatons who seek to harvest our brains for the words they contain. The Publispiders pin us to the wall while the Verbo-Bots stomp up and trepan our skulls with a whirring drill. We smell our hair and bone burning. When the hole is complete, the robot penetrates our brain-space with some surgical tubing, then milks our minds of our delicate fictions. Then, just to be an asshole, the Publispider plants its robot babies in our colons.

You can see why I’m not allowed to predict the future.

What I can do, however, is ruminate frothily on the rigors of the present, which is exactly what I’ll do now. See, things are different for the writer these days. It’s a brave new world full of great reward and buzzsaw peril — step correctly and you’ll have laurels heaped upon your head, but step poorly and you’ll find your balls cut off with a garden trowel.

Let us then examine the state of affairs for the Penmonkeys Of Today.

Write More, Word Slave

*crack of lash*

Gone are the days when the writer could focus on her novel career and put out one book every year — at least, gone are those days for writers who want to accept “writer” as the day job.

Advances are down. Per-words on freelance and short story markets have dipped. Some markets are outright gone. Takes a while to get published, too. Point being, it’s getting tougher to “earn out” as a full-time writer — or, rather, tougher for those only focusing on a single path through the jungley word-tangle.

Sure, you’ve got self-publishing (and we’ll talk about that 800-lb mecha-gorilla in the room in just one sec), but to really succeed at self-publishing it seems right now that your best bet is to paint with a shotgun: you’re not served by posting one book and walking away but posting a book or project (or product, if you can stand that word) every couple months.

This makes the writer both honeybee and Great White Shark. First, you gotta be the worker bee and dance for your dinner — you want the honey, you’d better shake that buzzer of yours, buddy. Second, in what is becoming a probably overused metaphor, sharks must swim forward or drown, and so too must the writer be ever moving onto the next thing lest he sink into a fetid morass of bankruptcy.

Actually, let’s just hybridize that and say that it makes the writer the Great White Honeyshark.

Agreed? Agreed.

(Mmm. Honeyshark. Sounds like a delicious breakfast cereal. The fin stays crunchy in milk!)

Writers must produce. And produce. And produce. ABW: “Always Be Writing.” (PICK. THAT COFFEE. UP. Coffee is for writers only.) One book a year? Psssh. No. Focus only on novels? Not likely. Writers are no longer as free to work in a single sphere of writerly existence. Get used to writing short, long, script, game, non-fiction, etc. Be many-headed. Like the hydra. (The Great White Honey-Hydra?)

Now, this is a double-headed dildo axe. It fucks cuts both ways.

On the one hand, I kinda like it. I like that the writer is a worker. It means the craftsmen, the producers, the truly capable, will survive. Do work. Live to fight another day.

On the other hand, if we assume a slippery slope (and I always do, one lubricated with Astroglide and the tears of my enemies), then we can see where the profession of “writer” is becoming more and more watered down so much so that, in a few years, it’s going to earn less respect and fewer shekels than before. And trust me, the last thing we need is less respect. Last week, a homeless guy peed on me.

The Writing Life: Now With Actual Choice!

I don’t need to expound too much on this point, but know that the last year has seen an alarmingly fast shift in terms of self-publishing. That shift has been almost uniformly positive — the rise of e-readers and the market dominance of Amazon (who, like its namesake, is now the tallest meanest warrior-queen in the room) has really changed the game. The fact that capable, talented, and serious writers are going in that direction is a telling sign. It’s no longer the realm of Pure Uncut Slush (though I assure you, that’s still in there) and is now a viable choice for writers.

Writers didn’t actually have much of a choice before, after all. Self-publishing before usually meant getting fleeced by some vanity pub. Now you’ve got real — and awesome — options.

A Septic Tide Of Zealots

Some would have you believe that this choice is a false one. And this is true on all sides of the fence. Over there, you have the Defenders of the Realm, those who carry the flag for the “legacy” publishers, who say that the only legitimate way forth is to stomp that rag-tag army of barbarians into the mud from whence they came — it’s get your book with the Big Six or suck a pipe, pal.

On the other side of the fence are the self-publishing zealots, a froth-mouthed cult of author anarchists who believe that the One True Way is to publish yourself — after all, it’s easy! You’ll get rich! You have control! Damn the man! Burn the gates and their keepers! Anybody else is a chump.

Be not swayed by such false dichotomies. My advice to you is taken straight from my own approach: do both. Traditional publishing and self-publishing (sometimes called “indie” publishing, but damn does that term get people into a froth) each have their own ups and downs. Do both. One for you, one for you. Legacy publishing opens you to getting your book in stores, it gives you a path toward greater visibility and other publishing rights and awards and reviews. Self-publishing puts you in the hands of readers faster, and also lets you earn money (sometimes good money) more quickly.

Don’t let anybody tell you your brand new kick-ass choice is not a choice at all.

You smell the sweat-stink of a zealot, call him what he is and shut him down.

The Men Of Many Hats

You’re no longer going to survive as “just” a writer. Won’t happen. The responsibility falls to you to edit, to find markets, to pimp and promo your work, to know what sells and what doesn’t, to network, to do all the sexy dances. This is doubly true of the self-publisher who now takes on all the responsibilities of a micro-pub: design a cover, put the book together, hire anybody who needs to help the book come staggering to life like some rough-shod Frankenstein made only of stitched together nouns and verbs, and so forth.

As a sidenote, I like that term. “Micro-pub.” Better than indie, which carries its own debate. Better than self-published, which is a term that sounds about as dismissive and masturbatory as a term can get. (“I just ‘self-published’ my seed into this Kleenex!”) Ahh, but micro-pub! One man publishing. Like micro-brew.

Yeah. I like it.

I will hereby refer to myself as a “micro-pub.”

At least until I forget I came up with that term, which is in about — *checks watch* — ten minutes.

The Diminishing Value Of Books

Price versus value is almost like plot versus story, in my mind. The former is the hard definition — price is the cost set by seller, plot is the sequence of events set by the writer. The latter is a softer, hazier thing with ill-defined margins — value is the estimation of the product, story is the overall narrative. Price contributes to value just as plot contributes to story: the lesser a part of the greater.

As writers, we’d better get used to the fact that the value of books — novels in particular — is dropping. Part of this is driven by price: some micro-publishers and even some legacy publishers have significantly reduced the cost of books and e-books. Many haven’t — but that’s why value is not equal to price. The other part is an assumption — however correct or incorrect — that digital content is cheaper to produce than printed content. (For my opinion: hell yes it’s cheaper to produce.) It’s why you see so many folks (like me) irritated when an e-book costs the same or more than it’s print counterpart. I see that, I get sand up in my swim-trunks. My balls get gritty with rage. Overtime, a pearl of pure anger forms beneath my manly plums.

It’s why I applaud the efforts of my publisher, Angry Robot, who has their e-books offered for around five bucks a pop. That gets me to buy those books. But when I see an e-book that goes higher than eight, it better damn well be an author whose children I would bear and push out of my urethra. See, but even here, a degradation of value: last year, I didn’t feel the same way.

For the most part, I’m all for the reduction in value — and, subsequently, the reduction in price. I think books should be cheaper. I want books to be accessible. If books are precious (and as a result, expensive), then publishers win, readers lose, and by proxy, writers lose, too. Further, I want books to compete with other media. (I’m waiting for the day a Netflix-esque online “library card” hits the ‘Net — that day will awesome in the truest sense of the word.)

Of course, once again it’s not hard to see the slippery slope slick with guts and lube: go too low with our prices consistently and that value dips. I’ve said in the past (to some scorn) that the ninety-nine cent price point (for novels in particular) helps winnow down the value of books, and I still feel that’s true — that said, it’s worth mentioning first that any price point below standard publisher price has this effect and further, and second, this reduction in value is healthy (up to a point).

Ultimately, what it means for the modern writer of 2011 is: best get used to being better business people as well as better writers.

The Death And Rebirth Of The Short Story

I see the short story market as if it were Schroedinger’s Cat: both dead and alive at the same time.

On the one hand, the short story market — as in, I send in a story, you publish it — is maybe not doing so well, at least in terms of writers getting paid. I’ve seen in the last ten years what markets will pay for short stories either flatline or go down — meanwhile, the cost of living (especially for a writer without a steady day-job) has gone (duh) up. Not the ideal financial direction.

You send a story out there, you open yourself to readership and in some cases awards, but a lot of times it’s not financially sustainable to do all your short fiction like that.

Where the short story is gaining life, however, is in the self-publishing arena. Collections and individual shorts for sale seem to be gaining traction, and that’s pretty great. This is where that dollar price point maybe has more traction.  A buck for a short story is a price I’ll pay and a value I like.

(Again, the advice of “do both” rings true here — take some stories to market, take others to Amazon.)

Lawrence Block has a number of short stories out there for a dollar, and they’re all worth it. So too with the short fiction of Tobias Buckell. Know others? Tell us about ’em.

My God, It’s Full Of Distractions

Sad fact: one of the perils of modern life is that we are deeply distracted. We are bombarded by options. And that’s true of readers as it is of writers. That means as writers are are in danger from distractions on two fronts: on the first front, our audience has an unholy host of entertainment avenues, and so we’re competing less with other writers and more with Every Goddamn Cat Video On The Internet. It also means that our own time can easily be flushed down the ol’ terlet if we spend our time, ohhh, say, watching Goddamn Cat Videos instead of writing.

I’ve also seen comments that suggest that self-publishing has not generated a Tsunami of Crap and that quality work floats. Which is a poo-poo stinky-faced lie. Self-publishing has generated a lot of crap just as it has generated a lot of awesome work, and I assure you that, having downloaded a number of self-published titles, I’ve seen a lot of shit work do well and a lot of brilliant work do poorly. You’re naive if you think that quality is a magical unicorn who will carry your wonderful work aloft in a saddle made of adorable, squirming human babies. Shit floats, folks. The trick is, this is true outside self-publishing, too. Again, you’re competing with Snooki’s book. You’re competing with Goddamn Cat Videos. You’re competing with this blog that you’re reading right now, which is a sure sign that poop is woefully buoyant.

Amiright?

Your Turn

As always, everything I say here is just the opinion of one penmonkey ook-ooking into the grave abyss that is the Internet. I’m only half-convinced of my own opinions on any given day, so I’m always happy to hear dissenting ones. Further, feel free to jump in with your own opinions on The State Of The Union as it relates to writers. What new opportunities and new dangers await in 2011?

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

I’ve kicked your ass so many times, it’s a wonder you can poop with all those shoes of mine crammed up into your colonic cubby-hole. If anything, you’re probably shitting shoelaces by now. I feel like I come back here and I say the same thing over and over. It’s the same hard-ass, hard-nose advice. Endlessly reiterative. I froth. I spit. I kick sand. I make the face that my son makes when he’s trying to figure out how to belch or fill his diaper. I have an aneurism. I collapse in a puddle of my own blood and saliva. I lay there and wait until someone picks me back up and I forget I ranted and raved and then here I am, doing it all again.

Froth, spit, sand, diaper, aneurism, rant, rave, again, again, again.

You must be tired of me by now. Lord knows I’m tired of me.

And yet, I persevere. As I must. For you. For you.

…

HA HA HA HA! Who am I kidding? I love to froth! I’m happy to lose the occasional shoe to your grasping sphincter. I am addicted to punching you in the face meat with my dubious truth-making nonsense.

Even still, consider this my last official ass-kicking for a while, at least as an ass-kicking that comprises these core conceits. Let this be my final gospel to you, faithful readers. Let this be an exploration of the line that separates the common man — the guy who “has a book in him” but never manages to puke it up — from the hard-working, trench-crawling penmonkey.

We are separated by a line of shattered excuses and incomplete narrative.

On this side, action.

On that side, passivity.

Time to pound the lectern.

Penmonkeys Don’t Have Time, They Make Time

I have 24 hours in my day.

You have 24 hours in your day.

That guy? Twenty-four hours. That lady? She has 25 hours, but she sucked the Devil’s hell-wang and cut herself a deal. You don’t want that deal. It involves Justin Bieber.

Life fills idle time. It’s like water moving to empty spaces. It’s why the phrase “free time” is a fucking joke. Adults don’t have free time. Because when you’re an adult, shit gets real. It’s all mortgages and diapers and spreadsheets and shopping lists and cake recipes and suburban methamphetamine dealers just so you can have the energy to vacuum one more room, just one, just one.

Nobody “has” time. We don’t bank it like cell phone minutes. You can’t buy a gift card from Target. Writers are ever under the assumption that the rest of their lives comes first. Which it will, if you let it. And that’s true of anything. If you wait for the time to magically free itself, then you’ll be 80 and will have forgotten what you wanted to do anyway. Time must be managed. Time must be carved off, separated, crafted and shaped. You don’t have time. You make it. You pull a little bit from here and a little bit from there and you lump them together until you have a glorious hour of writing time.

You don’t wait for it to happen. Because if you do, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Because here’s the other secret? Time? It flows like a river, friend. Unless you dam it up, it moves on into the ocean.

And there you are raped and eaten by sharks.

True story.

Penmonkeys Have Heads Like Concrete Drain Boxes

Writing is a career that is endlessly reiterative. Talent matters, but it matters only in equal proportion to how much patience and perseverance you possess. You gotta be stubborn as a brain-damaged mule. Said for the many-th time: writing is about putting a bucket on your head and trying to knock down a brick wall. It’s either you or the wall. You’re either stubborn and pissed off enough to break on through, or eventually, the wall puts you on your ass. Up to you to conjure the fortitude.

The successful writers, the ones who work day in and day out, are usually ones who can tell you about beating down the brick wall. And the long road to get to that brick wall. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen over the course of a single year. Took me over 12 years to get where I am, and I’m not even anywhere all that special, yet. A penmonkey career is a long con, not a short swindle.

You’re either in for the long haul or you’ll be hauled out before long.

Penmonkeys Are Not Stopped By Your Earthly “Writer’s Block”

“Writer’s Block.”

“The Muse.”

Two sides of the same coin. A coin made of lies. And sadness. And babies.

Yes, yes, writers get blocked. And writers can be inspired. The first: a sad state. The second: a glorious boon. But neither have power beyond what you give them. You don’t need inspiration to work. Same as you don’t need to give in to whatever’s blocking you. Neither are made of anything real. They’re just imaginary. Hallucinatory. Best of all: transitory.

What, you’re sad? Of course you’re sad. You’re a writer. Bad day at the day job? Painful bunion? Kid won’t stop crying? Besieged by ninjas? Mind a gray gruel-like mush?

You have to move past it. You have to shut that out. Even just writing down a string of pages-long nonsense may help jar loose the scree and debris. If you can’t get shut of it, can’t tune out the nega-frequency, then I’m truly sorry. But know that the working penmonkeys out there hammering away in the word mines don’t want to hear about your writer’s block. They’ve got shit to do. And if you’re a tough cookie, you’ll join ’em.

Your mental state cannot stop you. If it does, know that it has a better name than “writer’s block.”

You might want to call it “self-sabotage.”

Penmonkeys, Like Honey Badgers, Don’t Give A Shit

Three words. Practice them with me now: “I don’t care.”

Or, even better: “It’s all good.”

Bad review? Hard rejection? Someone tells you your “dream” of being a writer is bullshit? Mean person on the Internet? Self-doubt? Plague of uncertainty nibbling at your brain-stem like a passel of vampire hamsters? Fear of failure? Fear of success? Is your idea original? Will your book get published? What will the cover look like? Will anybody read it? Are you just a fraud? When will they discover you? When will they see that you’re just wearing the costume of a writer?

Fuck it! Fuck all of it. Fuck it all right in the galactic dickhole.

No, I don’t know what a galactic dickhole is. I’ve been drinking. Just, shhh. Shhhh.

Find clarity in what you do. Remove noise and zero in on pure signal. All that matters is what you do. Put differently: don’t care so much. I know that runs counter to what you think, which is to care deeply, care strongly, care without reservation or reason. Note that I’m not saying to lose your passion, but eventually you need to throw up your hands (er, not puke them up because, ew — why did you eat your hands?) and say, “Fuck it.” You should care only about the thing that you’re doing, which is writing the perfect novel, script, manifesto, whatever. Any outside noise? Shut it out. At least until you finish.

Penmonkeys Do Not Find Better Things To Do

You always have the option to do something other than write. Clean your office. Run some errands. Walk the dog. See a movie. Hang out on Twitter. Digest porn. Sacrifice albino mammals to dark gods.

Life presents you with an endless menu of options. Writing is merely one choice amongst an infinity.

And penmonkeys make that choice every time.

Penmonkeys Know Their Craft

Being a writer actually features two primary tiers of craft (with lots of niggling little sub-tiers and micro-strata): writing, and storytelling. Storytelling is the larger scope, the idea of conveying a narrative and making it count. Writing is the smaller, more technical craft: you must find a way to convey the story you hope to tell. You need both of these skills.

My father was a great storyteller. And yet, I have a strong feeling he wasn’t a capable writer. Now, to be clear, he didn’t need to be: he was an engineer, a plant facilities manager, a gunsmith, at no point did he need to sit down and be a writer. Meaning, he didn’t want to be a penmonkey.

You do. So learn how to write. And learn how to tell stories.

And keep learning, too. You don’t stop just because you’ve written one thing. This isn’t a simple discipline. It doesn’t have easy margins. Penmonkeys always have more they can learn.

But Also, Penmonkeys Have Permission To Suck

You are not born a writer. Penmonkeys are made. Challenged by and forged within the fires of their own self-doubt, and pickled in a brine of gin, vinegar, salt, bourbon, and straight-up word sauce.

(For the record, word sauce is actually just steak sauce. Don’t tell anybody.)

Sometimes, what you do isn’t going to be great. Don’t get mopey. Don’t succumb to the Penmonkey Blues. You need to leave yourself that margin-of-error, that force field of occasional suckitude. Not everything you do is going to have that new car, new baby smell. Some of what you do is going to smell like the ruptured bile-sac of a sick possum. Penmonkeys don’t let this get them down. They move on. They fix what they fucked up or they write something new, something better, something that takes the lessons learned and puts them fast into play. Learn this phrase: “That’s okay, I can fix it in post.”

Penmonkeys Write Till It’s Right

You don’t write till it’s “Ehh, shrug, pbbt, poop noise,” you write till it’s right. Too many authors go off half-cocked. They jump in and jump out too fast — “Here’s my completed work!” — and then they submit a “final product” that has the shape and definition of a quivering blob of Ambrosia Salad.

With raisins in it.

With raisins.

Once, while in a bathroom in college, I saw that someone had written on the wall in black marker:

WORK THE CLIT.

Not bad advice in general, and for penmonkeys, this is good as metaphor. You gotta work the clit till the cookies pop. Work the story until it’s right. Not until it’s done. It’s easy to finish something. It’s hard to finish something and do it well. You need to bring that story to climax. Until it explodes its juices all over your chin, over your cordoruys, over that weird apparatus you’re wearing. Work the clit. Write till it’s right.

Penmonkeys Love To Write, Not To Get Published

This is easy enough: the writer’s goal should be to get published, but the writer’s love should be of writing. Too many writers are in love with the idea of writing-to-be-published and too few are in love with the act of writing. But tried-and-true penmonkeys love the craft, the act, the actual telling-of-stories.

They care about publishing. But they love to be writing.

Penmonkeys Do Work — And Don’t Quit

Penmonkeys work. Penmonkeys don’t fuck around.

Write every day. And finish what you started. And with each day of writing, learn something new about who you are and what you do. Penmonkeys don’t merely talk about writing (though, plainly, they do that quite a lot — I can’t tell you how many times I see writers pooh-pooh on writing advice and then lo and behold they leap to their own blogs to do what now? Offer writing advice). They actually also do the writing.

They aren’t hamstrung by fear. They don’t find better things to do. They don’t watch day in and day out as time fritters away. They don’t let others dissuade them from this path.

They write. Endlessly anon.

They don’t write because they “have to” — that’s an endearing writer’s myth, but a myth just the same. Penmonkeys write because they want to. They write because if they don’t, drum roll please, then nothing gets written. Writing is a difficult act of mountain climbing or cave spelunking: it’s work, hombre. But climb to the top or crawl down into the deepest dark and you’d be amazed at what you find there: rolling clouds, glowing bacteria, the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, cave crickets with human faces, gods and monsters and goblins and unicorns and Lady Gaga.

On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

The work is purifying and perfect even when it’s not.

This is a beautiful, if you let it be beautiful.

Above all else: writers write.

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF. Don’t forget to work the clit.

Point of fact: I’m the guy at parties who tells you that urban legend you’re passing around — about the AIDS needles in the McDonald’s playground ball-pit or the dead baby used to smuggle cocaine or the chihuahua-that’s-actually-a-rat — is bullshit. I don’t know why. Everybody has fun telling those kinds of stories and there I am, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, murdering misinformation — and, oh, fun — in equal measure. I’m just skeptical, I guess. You tell me that the punch in the punch bowl is spiked with vodka, I’m likely to ask, “Did you check Snopes? SNOPES OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.”

I bring the same measure of myth-killing (and subsequent accidental fun-murdering) to writing. Writers often live or die by magical thinking, and that’s all well and good when it’s not fucking with your mojo. But myths often contain secret dangers. The Mexican Pet legend — i.e. the chihuahua-that’s-actually-a-rat — contains a not insubstantial seed of xenophobia and racism. “Oh, those silly disgusting Mexicans,” it says, “with their dog-like rats and their rat-like dogs. You just can’t trust things from wacky Mexico!”

And thus I find it instructive to shine a light in dark spaces.

It’s probably annoying.

But, too bad. Here I am, once more kicking over logs inside the writer’s mind and seeing what squirmy little wormlets lurk underneath. Let’s tackle some more writing myths.

“All It Takes To Be A Writer Is To Read And Write!”

If ever there was a piece of advice that was more dismissive of the act of writing, I don’t know what it is. At the heart of the advice is this: if you really want to learn how to write, then the only things you need to do is read books and, in turn, write them. Boom. Done. From there, you’ll… I dunno, just figure it the fuck out.

Can you imagine if we believed that true of other skills?

“Piano? Ehh. Just listen to some Billy Joel and then go flop around on this Casio keyboard for an hour and a half. You’ll pick it up.” “Painting? Sure, sure, here’s a bunch of Bob Ross VHS tapes, just put those on and then fingerpaint a bunch of happy little trees for a few weeks. You’ll be Leonardo Picasso in no time.” “Truck driving? Yeah, fuck the CDL. Just watch me do it, then you have a crack at it. That’s all you need. No, don’t worry if you mow down a church picnic or some shit. Them churchies have had it too good for too long.”

Reading and writing are two critical components of learning to write. True. No argument. But to suggest that’s all it takes is ludicrous — this isn’t fucking Skee-Ball. Writing’s got a lot of moving parts, many obscured behind a metric butt-ton of abstraction. This idea misses first that going out and living your life is a critical component to being a writer: you learn about stories by living your own stories. You also learn storytelling by hearing stories told, not just by reading them or writing them. Further, this removes from the equation any power you might get from writing classes (compositional and up) and writing advice, both of which are not only functional, but for many, fundamental.

Newsflash: I read a lot as a kid and I wrote a lot, too.

It didn’t make me a bestselling author at age 12.

The classes I took? The writing advice I read? The conferences? The sit-downs with other writers? The notes from editors? All of it, instructive. All of it putting me where I am today.

“My Characters Control Me!”

Despite how it sounds, I don’t actually want to destroy the magic implicit to storytelling. A very real magic lives there, and while I believe that writing is a craft, I’ve come to further believe that storytelling is an art.

But for me, the focus of magic must be internal, not external. Magic shouldn’t happen to the writer; the writer should be the one in control of the magic. It’s the difference between having your penis stolen by black magic sorcerers or, instead, being the sorcerer who uses his magic to steal penises. Right? Right.

So it always amazes me when writers speak of their fiction — and, in particular, the characters within that fiction — as being somehow alive, as if they’re real people running rough-shod over your story because these characters just don’t give a raw red fuck what you, the writer, want. Does that mean I’ve never been surprised by my characters? Of course I’ve been surprised by my characters. But I don’t attribute it to them being real. Instead, I high-five my subconscious mind and say, “Nicely done, part of my brain, I approve of your decision.” I mean, it’s not like comic book writers are like, “Yeah, I don’t know why Superman just took a Kryptonian Super-Shit on Hawkman. It’s just, hey, that’s Superman. I don’t control him. That crazy motherfucker does what he wants. The underwear on the outside? His idea.”

Here’s proof that you control your characters. When next you sit to write, have one of your characters just take a handgun and shoot himself smack dab in the head. You can go back and erase it — but did he fight you for control of the gun? No. No he didn’t. (And if he did: seek help. Or call a penis-stealing wizard, because maybe that dude has some advice on controlling your shit.)

“I Write Because OMG I Have To Or I’ll Explode!”

Again, another thing that gives short shrift to writers and writing. Writers write because they want to write. We’re not compelled to by some outer force. We are not mouthpieces of the divine.

Further, writing isn’t a mental illness. (Though it may feel that way at times.) We are not compelled to do it like slavering word-junkies. Christ, if writers were truly compelled to write, you’d probably see a lot less video game playing and a helluva lot more actual writing getting done.

By acknowledging that we want to write and must force ourselves to do so, then… drum roll please, we actually do so. Don’t be so dramatic to think that you’re metaphysically or psychotically forced to write by elements beyond your control. You cede that kind of authority to spectral hands then when the day comes you don’t write, well, that’s probably because the Powers That Be demanded it. Oh well!

“By Performing That Action, I Will Have Given Away My Thunder!”

Your creativity is not a newborn rabbit, so frail that even the mildest startle causes its tender systems to shut down. And yet I continue to hear about how this or that (outlining, prep-work, revising, editing, etc.) somehow damages the author’s creativity by robbing the project of its rare magic. Or, put differently, “It’s just not fun anymore.” You wrote an outline and it ruined Christmas.

You know what’s not fun? A bad day of writing. You know what else isn’t fun? When your word processor poops the bed and crashes in the middle of writing a paragraph. Rejections aren’t fun either. Neither are bad reviews. Or paring down word count. Or excising a beloved character. Or, or, or. Point is, writing isn’t a giggly run through a tickle-factory. The process is host to an endless array of cold realities. If your story idea is so fragile and crystalline that doing prep-work — or simply talking about it with a friend — then your story wasn’t worth much of a shit to begin with.

A corollary to this features discussions about money and publishing, as if discussions surrounding those things tarnish the high-and-mighty art of writing. If money somehow cheapens writing for you, then your notion of writing was really too wan, too feeble, to survive. In this day and age, with a competitive market and a fast-exploding self-publishing market, talking about advances and book prices is meaningful and necessary. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean the adults don’t still need to have the conversation.

If you truly feel that way about money and art, great. Prove it. Don’t get an agent. Don’t contact a publisher. Give your work away. Online. On street corners. Wherever. Just hand it off. Because, fuck money, am I right? Fuck sustainability. Fuck feeding your kids or your dogs or paying for health care or buying bags of scrumdiddlicious Funyuns (or their snacky-food counterparts, Munchos and Bugles).

Go ahead. Just give it away.

The moment you say, “Well, I’d like to get something for it…” is the moment you enter the money discussion. And it’s also the moment where I stick a bomb in your dickhole. FOOOOOM.

“My Ideas Are Super-Secret-Smooshy-Special!”

There exists a notion that the foundation of the writing life — that the curly pubic-coil that comprises a penmonkey’s most basic DNA — is a foundation made of ideas. This is why the question is always, “Where do you get your ideas?” Because people place an incredibly high value on them.

Ah, but — this high value doesn’t hold a lot of water.

Ideas aren’t that meaningful by themselves. I’ve seen some writers stymied because they “don’t have a good idea.” An idea isn’t the backbone of a story. It’s isn’t the whole pig. It’s just the squeal and maybe the tail and that’s it. The idea’s the thing that gets you off the ground, but it’s not currency. It’s not a secret treasure. Most ideas aren’t even that original. I don’t know if stories even have original ideas.

What’s original — and what matters — is the execution of an idea. The question should’t be, “Where do you get your ideas?” but rather, “How exactly did you make good on this idea and sit down in front of the computer day in and day out and give flesh and bones to this notion and then, beyond that, how did you give breath to that flesh and bones and make that story get up and dance instead of being just a hollow gas-bag of unfulfilled, unoriginal, ill-arranged, who-gives-a-shit ideas?”

But I guess that question’s a little too wordy. And besides, if writing is just about ideas, then how easy it must be! Eeeee! Giggle snort! Tickle-factory, here I come!

What else? Your turn. What myths sustain — but can also harm — the writer’s life?

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If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.