Tag: writing (page 26 of 33)

Stuff About Writing

May 3, 2011 / 120 Comments

Why Writers Drink

“I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach.”

— Faulkner

*slides glass of whiskey over*

There. That one’s on the house.

Fact: writers drink.

Every writer drinks. Total boozemonkeys to the last. Sure, you say, “But I don’t drink,” except, you probably do. You go to sleep, fugue out, and your writer hindbrain takes over — it’s like flinging open the cage door and letting out an enraged, deranged orangutan. Just because you don’t consciously drink doesn’t mean your crazy orangutan soul isn’t up at 3AM, dousing himself in the mini-bottle of tequila you unknowingly hid in the Holy Bible. So, don’t tell me the story that you don’t drink. Next you’ll try to tell me you have a mannequin for sale that only comes alive at night, when I’m alone with her in a department store.

Man, I’d so bang that mannequin.

What were we talking about?

Right. Writers. Drinky-drinky. You drink. You don’t drink, then you might not be a real writer. Being a real writer isn’t about how much you write in a day or how many books you’ve published. It’s about how big your liver is. Your liver doesn’t look like a lumpy kickball, then you and me, we’re not on the same page.

I get two comments frequently here about this site. One, “You sure do use a lot of profanity.” Well, I’m sorry. Profanity is fun. Profanity is a circus of language where the clowns are all insane and the elephant just stepped on a trapeze artist and something somewhere is on fire. Two, “You sure do talk about drinking.” Well, I’m sorry about that, too. We writers drink, and we like to talk about drinking, and we like to talk about drinking while drinking. It’s just our thing. Deal with it. And drink this while you’re at it.

You want to know why? You want some deeper instruction on the booze-sponge that is the penmonkey?

*clink*

Here goes.

Wistful Poetic Romance

Hemingway’s daiquiri. Faulkner’s mint julep. Stephenie Meyer’s “no-no juice.”

Okay, I’m not really sure about that last one. Point is, writing and drinking have long been paired together, arms locked in a poetic tangle — we envision the writer by his typewriter, a glass of Scotch in one hand, an elephant gun in the other. The whisky lights a peat fire in his belly, sends smoke signals of bright and bitter brine to his head, fills the chambers of his mind with the fermented bullets of inspiration.

It’s absinthe and poetry, brandy and prose, a lovable drunkenness leading to the potency of fiction.

Of course, the reality hits home when it’s 10:30 in the morning and we’re sauced on boxed wine, idly wondering when we got vomit in our own hair (it’s been long enough that it crusted over, a crispy bile-caked cradle-cap). Later we’ll look back at the work we wrote during that time (“Is fluvasham a word? Is this a grocery list? Funions? Really?”) and recognize that the romance and inspiration we so dearly sought is as empty as the wine box we’re presently using as a foot-rest.

Because Other Writers Do It

You know how like, there’s a state-bird? “It’s Iowa! Our state-bird is the one-eyed caviling corn grackle!” Well, if the state of Writerdom had a state-bird, it would be the whiskey-sodden rum-warbler.

Try this experiment: go to a genre convention or writer’s conference, wait till… well, it’d be optimistic to say 5pm, but let’s go with that, and then ask around to try to suss out where the writers are. Seriously, don’t even bother. Because I know where they are. They’re like elephants and tigers and flamingos who have found the one fucking watering hole in 1000 miles of Kalahari hell. Hint: They’re at the bar, dipshit. Drinking. They might not have money for food, but by a good goddamn they certainly have money to wet their writerly whistles. Where did you think you would find them? The library? The health food store? Okay, sure, you might find them at a pet store holding turtle races or playing mind games with ferrets, but that’s just because they spent all their allotted booze money.

You want to hang out with writers, you go where writers drink. And if you don’t drink with ’em, they will sense that you’re different. And like rats who smell an imposter, they will nibble you to bloody ribbons.

Because Holy Fucking Shit, The First Draft, That’s Why

That first draft can be a beast. I’m constantly in search of a good metaphor for what writing a first draft of anything long-form is like, but for now, let’s just go with “drowning in a sea of bees.”

So we get to feeling like, dang, I could really use a little something to take the edge off, you know? Something to dampen the misery of endless stings. We might try, I dunno, stretching, or a cup of tea, or a few bites of chocolate. And that’ll tide us over to the 20% mark, but somewhere along the way we need a life preserver to keep us afloat. We need a goddamn drink. (Well, frankly, we probably need an insidious mix of black tar heroin, methamphetamines, and ayahuasca — we can vacuum the roof, write a bestseller, space out with machine elves, then battle the gods of Xibalba over a game of severed-head-basketball. Thankfully, those things are difficult to procure. Unless you know an Inca.)

One gin and tonic might keep us afloat. Two gin and tonics eases the coming of the first draft, a kind of chemo-spiritual pelvic widener to help birth this story-baby. Seven gin and tonics and we end up soiling ourselves and drawing pictures of boobs on our computer monitors in permanent marker. Or we end up writing The Da Vinci Code. To-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe.

Still, you drink, you feel 100 feet tall and bulletproof. Stephen King ain’t got nothing on you. I mean, except the fact he’s lucid and doesn’t suffer blackouts that require him to wear a diaper.

Celebrate Good Times, Come On

“I just finished the book! Time for some wine.”

“I just sold a story! Time for some wine.”

“I just got through a particularly rough chapter. Time for some wine!”

“I just got halfway through a sentence. Wine wine wine wine wine.” *drunken pirouettes*

Eventually we end up in a piano crate under an overpass with a three-legged incontinent terrier named “Steve,” and we tell passersby how we “just finished that novel,” and they’re all like, “Sure, whatever, homeless-person-who-smells-like-Maneshewitz-wine-run-through-the-urinary-tract-of-a-diabetic-raccoon.” And we wave our manuscript at them. And by manuscript, I mean “genitals.”

Aww, Sad-Face Need Boozytime

The opposite end of the spectrum arrives. Hey, rejection. Hey, book’s not selling. Hey, a bad review. Time to drown your sorrows in booze the way one might drown squirrels in a rusty washtub! Die, sorrows! Die!

It seems like a good idea until you remember the idea that alcohol can serve as a depressant. Then you end up on the lawn with your laptop, yelling at some rejection letter or negative review. “You don’t know me. You don’t know shit about shit about — urp — shit, buster. I wrote my fugging heart out of my butt for you and this is what I get? I’mma genie! Genial. Genius. That’s it. You shut up. Quit lookin’ at me, possum.”

The Bottle Muse And Her Lugubrious Liquor-Fed Lubrications

We get stoppered up, our word-fluids corked up and bricked off like the poor fucker in Cask of Amontillado and we suffer that most mythical of conditions, the bloated beast known as “Writer’s Block.” And so, to answer one myth we turn to another myth by seeking our Muse, and in seeking our Muse we figure, hey, screw it, why not throw a third axis of mythic deliciousness in for good measure? Thus we seek to conjure the Muse in the vapor of our own boozy ruminations, guzzling some manner of alcoholic spirit to stir the metaphorical (and thus entirely unreal) spirits that purportedly guide our writing lives and have power over our own mental blocks.

It rarely works as intended. Oh, it provides lubrication, all right. We end up inspired. We find ourselves inspired to eat a box of microwave taquitos and drunk-dial a passel of exes before kneeling down and praying before the Porcelain Temple of the Technicolor Hymn. It’s just, y’know, the one thing it didn’t help with was putting words on paper. But at least we get a good story out of it.

Because Holy Fucking Shit, The Final Draft, That’s Why

You hit a point where it’s like, I have these 80 billion copy-edits, I have to cut limbs off this baby before anybody will adopt it, and I have to do it all on deadline. Daddy needs some vodka.

The story goes that Hemingway said to write drink, but edit sober, but man does that feel counter-intuitive, right? Editing is like surgery. And you wouldn’t go into surgery without anesthetic, would you?

Once again, however, there exists that cruel line. A drink or two might make the process more palatable, but a baker’s dozen and, whoo boy. Before you know it you’re slurring made-up racial slurs at your own manuscript, and in a sudden sweeping rage you highlight 20,000 words right in the middle and — *click!* — delete it, and then just to be sure it’s dead, you salt the earth by erasing all your backup copies and shattering your external hard drive with a croquet mallet.

It’s The Only Way The Demons Will Stop Jabbering

I’ll just leave that one there without comment. Do with it as you will.

SHUT UP QUIT SPEAKING YOUR INFERNAL POETRY IN MY EAR TUBES GRAAAAAAFRGBLE THE STORIES ARE TRAPPED INSIDE MY HEAD LIKE A GOURD FILLED WITH SPIDERS

Uhhh. I mean, what? Nothing.

Sauce Up, Writer Folk

So, what do you drink, writer-types? What’s your favorite drink? Even better — favorite drinking story?

And yes, for the record, awooga, awooga, disclaimers: I am not an alcoholic, you should not be an alcoholic, and writing is not made better or more magical by drinking. This is just a funny post (with maybe a hint of truth to it) about how writers are so frequently drinkers. So put down that oak cask with the squiggly drinking straw shoved in its bunghole. And get back to work.

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

— Raymond Chandler

May 2, 2011 / 24 Comments

What Novelists Can Learn From Screenwriters

You will, at times, encounter a somewhat cocky, snobbish attitude (we’ll henceforth refer to this attitude as the attitude of the cocksnob, or as an act of snobcockery) that elevates the book above the film or TV show.

This is, of course, a microwaved platter of gopher diarrhea.

It is in fact the attitude of those nose-in-the-air, lips-frozen-in-an-everlasting sneer literary types who have elevated the novel to places where most people cannot reach it. They cite television shows or films (“Uhh, hello, Jersey Shore? Transformers 2?”) as emblems of how this visual format might as well go stick its head in doo-doo. Of course, these people fail to ever mention the most powerful illustrations of the TV and film format, whether we’re talking The Wire or Mad Men or Casablanca or UHF starring “Weird” Al Yankovic. Further, this act of literary snobcockery often fails to gaze toward those examples of the written form that are so rank and vile that one must assume they are gassy corpses: let us all bow our heads and remember the time when the greasy orange homunculus known as “Snooki” got herself a book deal.

Books, films and television shows all aim to do similar things, and chief amongst all those things is tell the audience a story. They tell different stories or, more accurately, tell stories differently.

But that’s a good thing.

And it’s a thing from which we novel-monkeys can learn.

Screenwriting has its own tips and tricks of the format, and that’s something novelists can look and learn from if one were to choose, and that’s what I’m talking about today. What, then, can you learn?

The Purity Of Narrative Movement

A screenplay reduces the storytelling form to a very simple form, and that form is this: characters act and talk and in doing so, move the story forward. It’s almost like playing with action figures or dolls when you were a kid: Tomax and Xamot siege the Ewok Village and save Strawberry Shortcake who had been captured by Wasteland Barbie. (Damn, did I just give away the plot to my next book? Sonofabitch.)

Characters talk. Characters act. The narrative steps forward.

What lives on the page — and by proxy, what lives on the screen — is all the audience gets. The internal life of the narrative is only given if it’s made external; glimpses of it are assumed, but never confirmed.

That means the screenplay is the ultimate version of show, don’t tell. Because that’s all it can do.

Now, should you do this with your novel? Probably not, no. A novel has its own host of unholy powers, and one of those powers is the ability to wander off the beaten path and move into dark spaces. The novelist can rip away the story’s facade and show the internal workings in ways the screenwriter cannot.

That said, we’ve all read novels that get boggy, right? That feel like you’re stomping through clayey mud? That make us shake the book like a baby and cry, “I need something to happen, godsdamnit.”

Here novelists can turn to the narrative purity of the script: while you should never be afraid to move toward the internal, you also should master the external, because a lot of subtext can live there. Master the movement of, “Character does shit, character talks about shit, and then the story jogs-runs-leaps-karatekicks-forward.” A script must always be moving forward, and so too must your novel.

The Economy Of The Page

A screenplay has very little real estate with which to work. You’ve got your ~110 pages, and the formatting on those pages is precise. Can’t cram a lot in there. The best scripts out there have an almost poetic grace (and some of the worst offer pages that look like brick shithouses, just blocks and blocks of text). Mastering the screenplay is in part mastering the format, which is to say, understanding the economy of the page.

Novelists don’t always learn this from the get-go. Hell, you find yourself as an English Lit major and one of the novels you read is James Joyce’s Ulysses: a book so big and uneconomical Luke Skywalker could’ve used it to choke the fucking Rancor Monster. It’s a beautiful, strange book, no doubt there, and novelists can learn a lot by reading Joyce. The economy of the page is not one of those things.

A script must rely on short sharp shocks. Description for an entire scene comprises little more than a short paragraph. Characters are created and built in hard, brief strokes: in a single scene, page, or line of dialogue you must perform double- or triple-duty to get those characters established neatly in the minds of the audience. Dialogue, too, cannot go on for pages and pages — you ever try to write dialogue in a screenwriting template? It’s like watching gremlins multiply. Like watching a garter snake breeding ball. Like watching Jabba the Hutt eat those little froggy critters. Okay, I don’t know what that means, I just know I can’t stop thinking about Return of the Jedi all of the sudden. You know how David Lynch was once on the docket to direct that movie? Imagine if James Joyce had written Return of the Jedi. Man, that’s weird. That hurts my brain. I instantly come up with:

“The ineluctable modality of the Force: at least that if no more, thought through my mind. Signatures of all droids I am here to scan, lightsaber and mynock, the vaporators of moistness, that rusty robot. Two-suns, starfields, sand: villainous hives.”

Man, I should rewrite all the Star Wars movies in the mode of James Joyce.

What the hell was I talking about?

Ah. Right. On the script page, dialogue builds bulk fast, and in scriptwriting, it helps to stick the landing and nail your page count. Only way to do that is to keep control of your descriptions and dialogue. But eventually, you learn to use this to your advantage: you can start using spare but elegant language and storytelling tricks to pack more oomph into every page. Novelists, take note. Monitor then the economy of your own pages. A page shouldn’t exist unless it deserves to be there, unless it pulls its weight, unless it does more than one thing. Don’t bloat. Don’t go long just to go long. Concentrate the story. Include only those things that you feel must must must be included.

ZZZzzZZzz… Bo-ring

Think about all the ways you could take a film and drag it through the mire to make it as boring as possible. What would you do? “Not much happens for 30 minutes.” “Two characters stand and talk to each other.” “Nobody says anything.” “Long internal monologues.” “No nudity or flamethrowers or nude flamethrowering.” Ta-da, you’ve just found some of the same stuff that threatens to make your novel boring. Novels don’t get a pass. Why some novelists feel a novel should be dull as a potato to read, offering as much fun or entertainment as a brick to the tits and/or testicles, is beyond me.

Find the boring parts, and do the same thing the film editor would do: chop ’em out, leave ’em on the floor.

Cede Your Authority

A screenwriter only has so much power. You’re writing a blueprint. A highly-detailed and terribly valuable blueprint, but a blueprint just the same. So many others will bring effort to the table in terms of telling the story, other writers, actors, the director, the cinematographer. A film or show is a team effort, and this makes editing a screenplay oddly easier, at least for me. Even though you know the script still has to rock out with its [insert euphemism for male genitals here that just so happens to rhyme with “rock”] out, you still know that it’s a group effort. You’ve less ego baked into these brownies.

With your novel, relinquish some mental authority and recognize that the manuscript still remains a team effort (though arguably one where you remain the quarterback, pitcher, or some other arbitrary controller of team sports). You’ve got agents, editors, beta readers. Other hands will mold this clay. And that’s freeing. With some of your ego extracted from the equation, you may find it easier to attack future drafts.

Structure Matters

Scripts are written with structure in mind. Even if you’re not a fan of the three-act structure (and I’m amazed at how often I read screenwriters trotting out the same tired “fuck you” to the three-act structure), screenplays are still hammered out according to structural beats: beats into scenes, scenes into sequences, sequences into acts. You have very clear breakdowns of when one scene ends and another begins. You simply cannot avoid it.

In novels, you can avoid structure all day long, ceding to structure only when it’s complete and recognizing that some skeleton has crawled his way into the skin of the thing to help it stand up.

Except, don’t. Go the other way. Embrace it, if only for a time. Think in the same structural sense that you would with a script: imagine the beats, build beats into scenes, and add scenes into sequences. Consider act breaks and turning points. Think about catalysts for action, about inciting incidents and dramatic shifts. Don’t resist them. Open yourself to them. Bend over the barrel and spread the ol’ flapjacks and allow structure to enter your body. (Wow, that got weird. Did I just refer to buttocks as “flapjacks?” Eeesh. ) I was just saying to my writing partner the other day that the mark of a storyteller isn’t in how he resists these beats or these structures but how he owns them, how he turns them to his will.

Nobody ever looks at a flash fiction challenge and barks about how it’s “too strict” or about how the structure of the challenge is “stifling.” Yet that’s what you often hear in regards to narrative structure. I’ve said it before and here I’ll say it again: if your creativity is defeated by structure, you weren’t that goddamned creative to begin with. *poop noise*

View it as a challenge, and accept it.

Own structure the way the best screenwriters do.

An Imperfect Fit

Again, novels are not screenplays and screenplays are not novels (this is a tip from my forthcoming book, “Duh, No Shit, And Fuck You, Sherlock: Writing Advice Tips From Herr Doktor Obvious, Esq.”). You shouldn’t try to make one be the other; they are their own creatures and deserve to abide by their own crazy rules and break those crazy rules in their own unique ways.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn some lessons.

So, noodle it. What am I missing?

Further, what can screenwriters learn from novelist? (First answer there: “A novel has to be a compelling read and so too does your script. Just because it’s a blueprint doesn’t mean it shouldn’t leap off the page.”)

What else?

Your turn to school me, Internuts.

April 28, 2011 / 12 Comments

Portal 2, And The Enduring Legacy Of Missing Story Components

Man, that sounds like the dullest Indiana Jones movie of all time. “Indiana Jones And The Pretentious Story Analysis! He fights a swarm of metaphors! He punches Nazis off the top of the story arc!”

So, the wife and I finished Portal 2.

Single-player, at least.

This post will contain no spoilers, so you can go ahead and read it (I can’t promise that the comments section will be the same, as anybody who wants to discuss the game and its story may need to get all spoiler-flavored). (Speaking of flavored, did you see that there’s cupcake-flavored vodka? It’s true.) (Indiana Jones chops hashashayyin assassins with deadly parentheses!) (Shut up.)

You wanna know one of the things I really love about both the first Portal game and its largely-superior — which is saying a lot – sequel? It’s that they leave a great deal to the imagination. In this day and age, with the epic leaps forward in special effects and graphics, it’s easy to put everything you want in the story and the in the storyworld right there on the screen for all to see. Books do this but by dint of a different principle: they’re so chockablock with all those pesky words and pages it becomes difficult not to throw every ingredient into the pot. It’s the Kitchen Sink method of storytelling.

But Portal 1 & 2, not so much.

Here’s what I mean: Portal is, at its core (pun not intended until now), the story of a girl being put through a series of tests by a deranged wing de-icer slash artificial intelligence. It is a battle of wits and survival using the mighty portal gun, which creates a pair of connected teleportation portals on flat surfaces. Big crazy hilarious sci-fi action-puzzle game. That’s it.

You could stop there and, hey, fuck it, a winning equation.

But Valve goes the extra distance and creates layers to that experience, layers that are not entirely grasped or seen (though one could argue that they are keenly felt), layers comprising the story of the mad AI, of the testing facility and all of Aperture Science, of the “Rat Man” in the walls and the life of little turrets and so on and so forth. The characters they’ve created in this space — GlaDOS, Cave Johnson, Wheatley, the Rat Man through his scrawlings — are again fully-felt but not necessarily fully-formed.

That sounds like a bad thing.

It is the furthest thing from it.

In fact, it’s pretty damn rad.

Because what happens is, you still get the core (there’s that pun again) experience and story, and you also get all this added voodoo. But because the voodoo has gaps — unanswered questions, vague links, hinted suggestions — you end up as the player/audience member stepping into the breach and solving those variables yourself with your own story-bridges. On various forums you’ll find endless speculation who Chell is, who her parents are, who the Rat Man is, how all this stuff connects, how it connects to Half-Life, to Gordon Freeman, how the ending plays out versus how it “really” plays out. People are finding all these great little Easter Eggs and finding ways to incorporate them into this pastiche of story (some such incorporations are brilliant, others entirely boggling).

But what it does is, it creates this legacy — it ensures that the game is (another incoming and originally unintentional pun in 3… 2… 1… ) still alive long after it’s been shelved. Hell, the song “Still Alive”…

…contains its own weird little story clues and gaps, right? You beat the game, you think you know what’s up, then the end comes and this song plays and you’re like, “Maybe there’s more going on than I originally figured.” You think about it. You talk about it. You laugh about it. This legacy of mystery — created by not answering all the questions and not building concrete connections — endures.

Really fucking cool.

But it’s hard to do. Hard to do in a way that leaves people satisfied and wanting more as opposed to unsatisfied and being fed up with your rampant jerkery. So, I ask: who did it right? Who did it poorly? Games, movies, books, comics, whatever. Think about those stories that never fully put it all together and demanded that you, the audience, do some legwork (while still maintaining the essential story and experience). Here’s a fascinating sidebar, though, and it maybe leads to a much bigger question —

Some (a lot?) of this stuff in Portal is by accident. As I understand it, Jonathan Coulton in crafting “Still Alive” had some leeway there and wasn’t forced to adhere to some canon-that-never-really-existed. Further, one of the big story twists in Portal 2 (which I won’t name in the post due to ANTI-SPOILER REDACTION SYSTEMS) was, again, a total accident due to a casting choice.

I’ve seen this happen in roleplaying games at the table — you craft a very brief throwaway character and pop them in for a session and suddenly the players either really like that character and/or they believe that throwaway character has far greater significance than intended. Audience desire and design changes the needs of the game. That’s harder to do in more linear narratives, but therein perhaps lies one of the genuine benefits of transmedia (a benefit all-too-rarely sought).

Noodle it.

And let’s chat this shiznit up.

P.S. We totally own a plush companion cube.

P.P. S. I would stab a dude in the gills for this plush Portal turret.

April 26, 2011 / 139 Comments

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

An alternate title for this post might be, “Things I Think About Writing,” which is to say, these are random snidbits (snippets + tidbits) of beliefs I hold about what it takes to be a writer. I hesitate to say that any of this is exactly Zen (oh how often we as a culture misuse the term “Zen” — like, “Whoa, that tapestry is so cool, it’s really Zen“), but it certainly favors a sharper, shorter style than the blathering wordsplosions I tend to rely on in my day-to-day writing posts.

Anyway. Peruse these. Absorb them into your body. Let your colonic flora digest them and feed them through your bloodstream to the little goblin-man that pilots you.

Feel free to disagree with any of these; these are not immutable laws. I don’t believe these things the way the religious believe in their moral or spiritual tenets. This is all just food for thought. (Mmm. Food. Thoughtfood. ZOMBIE BRAIN HUNGER ASCENDANT NOM NOM NOM.) Also, don’t hesitate to drop into comments and add your own Things You Think About Writing.

Buckle up. Let’s Zen this motherfucker right in the eye!

1. You Are Legion

The Internet is 55% porn, and 45% writers. You are not alone, and that’s a thing both good and bad. It’s bad because you can never be the glittery little glass pony you want to be. It’s bad because the competition out there is as thick as an ungroomed 1970s pubic tangle. It’s good because, if you choose to embrace it, you can find a community. A community of people who will share their neuroses and their drink recipes. And their, ahem, “fictional” methods for disposing of bodies.

2. You Better Put The “Fun” In “Fundamentals”

A lot of writers try to skip over the basics and leap fully-formed out of their own head-wombs. Bzzt. Wrongo. Learn your basics. Mix up lose/loose? They’re/their/there? Don’t know where to plop that comma, or how to use those quotation marks? That’s like trying to be a world-class chef but you don’t know how to cook a goddamn egg. Writing is a mechanical act first and foremost. It is the process of putting words after other words in a way that doesn’t sound or look like inane gibberish.

3. Skill Over Talent

Some writers do what they do and are who they are because they were born with some magical storytelling gland that they can flex like their pubococcygeus, ejaculating brilliant storytelling and powerful linguistic voodoo with but a twitch of their taint. This is a small minority of all writers, which means you’re probably not that. The good news is, even talent dies without skill. You can practice what you do. You practice it by writing, by reading, by living a life worth writing about. You must always be learning, gaining, improving.

4. Nobody Cares About Your Creative Writing Degree

I have been writing professionally for a lucky-despite-the-number 13 years. Not once — seriously, not once ever — has anyone ever asked me where I got my writing degree. Or if I even have one. Nobody gives two rats fucking in a filth-caked gym-sock whether or not you have a degree, be it a writing degree or a degree in waste management. The only thing that matters is, “Can you write well?”

5. Speaking Of Luck

Luck matters. It just does. But you can maximize luck. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t wander out into the field covered in tinfoil and old TV antennae.

6. This Is A Slow Process

Nobody becomes a writer overnight. Well, I’m sure somebody did, but that person’s head probably went all asplodey from paroxysms of joy, fear, paranoia, guilt and uncertainty. Celebrities can be born overnight. Writers can’t. Writers are made — forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities — over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same writer you become.

7. Nobody “Gets In” The Same Way

Your journey to becoming a writer is all your own. You own it for good and bad. Part of it is all that goofy shit that forms the building blocks of your very persona — mean Daddy, ugly dog, smelly house, pink hair, doting mother, bagger at the local Scoot-N-Shop. The other part is the industry part, the part where you dig your own tunnel through the earth and detonate it behind you. No two writers will sit down and tell the exact same story of their emergence from the wordmonkey cocoon. You aren’t a beautiful and unique snowflake, except when you are.

8. Writing Feels Like — But Isn’t — Magic

Yours is the power of gods: you say, “let there be light,” and Sweet Maggie McGillicutty, here comes some light. Writing is the act of creation. Put words on page. Words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to 7-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don’t give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn’t control him. Push aside lofty notions and embrace the workmanlike aesthetic. Hammers above magic wands; nails above eye-of-newt. The magic will return when you’re done. The magic is in what you did, not in what you’re doing.

9. Storytelling Is Serious Business

Treat it with respect and a little bit of reverence. Storytelling is what makes the world go around. Even math is a kind of story (though, let’s be honest, a story with too few space donkeys or dragon marines). Don’t let writing and storytelling be some throwaway thing. Don’t piss it away. It’s really cool stuff. Stories have the power to make people feel. To give a shit. To change their opinions. To change the world.

10. Your Writing Has Whatever Value You Give It

Value is a tricky word. Loaded down with a lot of baggage. It speaks to dollar amounts. It speaks to self-esteem. It speaks to moral and spiritual significance. The value of your wordmonkeying has a chameleonic (not a word, shut up) component: whatever value you give it, that’s what value it will have. You give your work away, that’s what it’s worth. You hate your work, that’s what it’s worth. Put more plainly: what you do has value, so claim value for what you do. Put even more plainly: don’t work for free.

11. You Are Your Own Worst Enemy

It’s not the gatekeepers. Not the audience. Not the reviewers. Not your wife, your mother, your baby, your dog. Not your work schedule, your sleep schedule, your rampant masturbation schedule. If you’re not succeeding at writing, you’ve nobody to blame for yourself. You’re the one who needs to super-glue her booty to the chair. You’re the one who needs to pound away at his keyboard until the words come out. It’s like Michael Jackson sang: “I took my baby on a Saturday bang.” … no, wait, that’s not it. “I’m talkin’ ’bout the man in the mirror.” Yeah. Yes. That’s the one. Shamon.

12. Your Voice Is Your Own

Write like you write, like you can’t help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It’ll take time but it’ll happen as long as you let it. Own your voice, for your voice is your own. Once you know where your voice lives, you no longer have to worry so much about being derivative.

13. Cultivate Calluses

Put differently, harden the fuck up, soldier. (And beard the fuck on, while we’re at it.) The writing life is a tough one. Edits can be hard to get. Rejections, even worse. Not everybody respects what you do. Hell, a lot of people don’t even care. Build up that layer of blubber. Form a mighty exoskeleton. Expect to be pelted in the face with metaphorical (er, hopefully metaphorical) ice-balls. It’s a gauntlet. Still gotta walk it, though.

14. Stones Are Polished By Agitation

Even the roughest stone is made smooth by agitation, motion, erosion. Yeah, the writing life can be tough, but it needs to be. Edits are good. Rejections are, too. Write with a partner. Submit yourself to criticism. Creative agitation can serve you well. Embrace it. Look into that dark hole for answers, not fear. Gaze into the narrative vagina, and find the story-baby crowning there. … okay, too far? Too far. Yeah.

15. Act Like An Asshole, You’ll Get Treated Like An Asshole

Agitation is good. Being an agitator, not so much. Be an asshole to agents and editors, editors and agents will treat you like an asshole. Be an asshole to other writers, they’ll bash you over the head with a typewriter, or shiv you with an iPad in the shower. Be an asshole to your audience, they’ll do a thing worse than all of that: they’ll just ignore you. So, for real, don’t be an asshole.

16. Writing Is Never About Just Writing

Writing is the priority. Write the best work you can write. That’s true. But it’s not all of it, either. Writing is ever an uncountable multitude. We wish writing were just about writing. The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.

17. This Is An Industry Of People

They say it’s “who you know,” which is true to a point but it doesn’t really get to the heart of it. That sounds like everybody’s the equivalent to Soylent Green — just use ’em up for your own hungry purpose. That’s not it. You want to make friends. It means to be a part of the community. People aren’t step-stools. Connect with people in your respective industry. Do not use and abuse them.

18. The Worst Thing Your Work Can Be Is Boring

You’ve got all the words in the world at your disposal, and an infinite number of arrangements in which to use them. So don’t be boring. Who wants to read work that’s as dull as a bar of soap?

19. No, Wait, The Worst Thing Your Work Can Be Is Unclear

Clarity is king. Say what you mean. You’re telling a story, be it in a book, a film, a game, an article, a diner table placemat. Don’t make the reader stagger woozily through a mire just to grasp what you’re saying.

20. Writing Is About Words, Storytelling Is About Life

Everybody tells you that to be a writer, you have to read and write a lot. That’s true. But it’s not all of it. That’ll get you to understand the technical side. It’ll help you grasp the way a story is built. But that doesn’t put meat on the bones you arrange. For that, you need everything but reading and writing. Go live. Travel. Ride a bike. Eat weird food. Experience things. Otherwise, what the fuck are you going to talk about?

21. Everything Can Be Fixed In Post

Stop stressing out. You get the one thing few others get: a constant array of do-overs. Writing is rewriting. Edit till she’s pretty. Rewrite until it doesn’t suck. You have an endless supply of blowtorches, hacksaws, scalpels, chainsaws, M80s, and orbital lasers to constantly destroy and rebuild. Of course, you can get caught in that cycle, too. You have to know when to stop the fiddling. You have to know when to get off the ride.

22. Quit Quitting

It’s all too easy to start something and not finish it. Remember when I said you were legion? It’s true, but if you want to be separated from 90% of the other writers (or “writers” depending on how pedantic you choose to be) out there, then just finish the shit that you started. Stop abandoning your children. You wouldn’t call yourself a runner if you quit every race your ran halfway through. Finishing is a good start. Stop looking for the escape hatch; pretend your work in progress just plain doesn’t have one.

23. No Such Thing As Bad Writing Advice

There’s only: advice that works for you, and advice that doesn’t. It’s like going to Home Depot and trying to point out the “bad tools.” Rather, some tools work for the job. Most don’t. Be confident enough to know when a tool feels right in your hand, and when it might instead put out your eye.

24. Though, Nobody Really Knows Shit About Shit

We’re all just squawking into the wind and nobody really has the answers. Except you, and those answers are only for you. Everybody else is just guessing. Sometimes they’re right. A lot of times they’re wrong. That’s not to say such pontification isn’t valuable. You just gotta know what weight to give it.

25. Hope Will Save You

The hard boot is better than the tickling feather when it comes time to talk about the realities of writing, but at the end of the day, the thing that gets you through it all is hope and optimism. You have to stay positive. Writers are given over to a kind of moribund gloom. Can’t let the penmonkey blues get you down. Be positive. Stay sane. The only way through is with wide-open eyes and a rigor mortis grin. Don’t be one of those writers who isn’t having any fun. Don’t let writing be the albatross around your neck. Misery is too easy to come by, so don’t invite it. If writing doesn’t make you happy, you maybe shouldn’t be a writer. It’s a lot of work, but you need to let it be a lot of play, too. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point? Right? Go push a broom, sell a car, paint a barn. If you’re a writer, then write. And be happy you can do so.

April 25, 2011 / 36 Comments

Stupid Writer Tricks

The writer’s mind is an unruly chimp.

He steals your beer. He throws your Sports Illustrated football phone through the glass patio door. He defecates in your blender and makes a monkey dung smoothie. He mauls you and eats your extremities.

Like I said: unruly.

The only way Mister Tinkles is going to stop making your life a living hell is if you get down to some hardcore chimpanzee training techniques. You’ve got to fool that monkey into primate compliance. For the record, none of that is meant to be a euphemism for engaging the chimp in sexual activities. That is not what Darwin had in mind. I’m just saying, you need to tame the monkey. Non-sexually.

Same goes with taming your writer brain. Your mileage may forever vary, but me? I’m constantly my own worst enemy in terms of Getting The Work Done, and that’s just not good eats. You need to start tricking yourself, giving a leg-up here and there to get you where you need to be day in and day out. And so I give unto you: STUPID WRITER TRICKS.

These are little tips, tricks and techniques that bear minimal relation to one another except for the common bond that each are geared toward Finishing The Shit You Done Started, Wordmongers.

Let us open the cabinet of curiosities.

The Mini Tiny Itty Bitty Micro Outline

Two words: trail of breadcrumbs. (Wuzza? That’s three words? Shit. See, this is why I’m an ink-slinger and not a sorcerer of numberology.) Writing any big project, be it a novel or a screenplay or a giant epic game doc, an outline provides a way through the madness, looking both forward and backward. But, some folks don’t dig on the outline proper, and that’s okay: whatever gets the shit done.

That said, do consider the option of the micro-outline.

Here’s how it works: when you stop your writing for the day, take five or ten minutes to write a quick slapdash paragraph of what you plan on accomplishing during your next day’s worth of writing. “Jimbo slays the Humbaba. Mary-Ellen becomes queen of the vampires. Jojo eats some bad eggs.” You’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs not to look back, but to make your way forward.

It helps me because my thinking organ is riddled with so many holes you’d think termites live there. So, when I open the document the next day and there’s a paragraph — I highlight it yellow because, mmm, yellow is the color of caution and crazy people — telling me what I wanted to do, I feel relieved. “Oh, right, I forgot that I wanted to have Gerry meet the dolphin in this scene. Nice. Thank you, Me From The Past! A little nipple squeeze from me to you, bro. Tweak!”

Maintaining Your Word Boner

The same thing that gets readers through reading your book should be the same thing that gets the author (erm, you) through writing the damn thing. The reader must have sustained excitement.

And so too must the writer.

So, you know how a cliffhanger creates suspense? Leaves the reader’s mouth and other orifices juicy with narrative need? This is that. End your writing day in the middle of something. As penmonkeys we are often trained to finish things, not leave them hanging, but here as a course of action leaving your writing for the day a bit open-ended can help you complete the project in the long term.

The goal of this is to get you excited for the next day of writing. Sometimes starting a new chapter or scene can cause you to suffer some of that same sluggy and uncertain ennui you might have felt at the beginning of the project when all you had was the ceaseless snowy expanse of the white page to taunt you, so ending in the midst keeps your mind champing at the bit (word-nerd trivia: not chomping at the bit) to get back and complete the scene. Leave yourself room for excitement. End with the need to go back and keep working.

Behold The Fanciful Power Of The Newfangled “Inter-Net”

You may be saying, “Whaaaaat? What’s that? What’s an… Inter…net?” And to that I respond: “You’re soaking in it!” And then we all share a laugh and do lines of blow off this dead hooker coffee table.

Still, you’re probably saying, “Your big writer trick here is to… tell us to use the Internet? Yeah, that’s great, Wendig. Should we also, I dunno, use our words to tell stories? Because, wow, revolutionary.”

Shut up, you. The Internet is soggy with snark these days, innit? Anyway. The Internet is home to resources you may not at present be considering in terms of your day-to-day storytelling. First, if you’re writing about a world that is not a fantasy realm or some weird sci-fi future and you need to know what Main Street in Duluth looks like, or you want to check to see what’s on the corner of Numbered Ave and So-and-So Street in New York City, ta-da: Jesus invented Google Street View just for you.

Second, Flickr. Flickr is a great resource for finding all kinds of inspiration. Looking for some descriptive meat? Or a location? Or an animal? Go to Flickr, search for the term. You’ll get an unholy host of images, many of them quite beautiful, and many of them beautiful in a way that might stir a new layer of metaphor and description that you’ve been looking for.

Third, social media hive-mind. Get on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever hot new social media tool is out there by the time you read this article (“I use Circlehole!” “Won’t you become my companion on Flurg?”), and you can ask folks questions that Google can’t quite grok.

Embrace Your Inner 12-Year-Old Girl

Make a collage.

No, yeah, I get it. You’re an adult human being. What’s next? Shoebox dioramas? (Don’t be ludicrous. That’s reserved for a later post.) “Collages?” you stammer. Yes. That’s right. Collages.

Wait, sorry — collages, motherfucker.

I’m working on a personal project right now and I wanted to get my head into a certain space with it, so I whipped out a sack of National Geographics and went to down on those sumbitches with a pair of scissors (safety scissors, as the government mandates I not be allowed the real deal — also, if you ever see me with an uncorked fork, run for the fucking hills because somebody is gonna bleed). Next thing I know, I’ve got a wall full of cool images and neat quotes about all manner of awesome shit. I go over to that collage, meditate on it for a couple-few, and my head neatly aligns with the story and the world. Snap-tight.

Next week: training bras, and how they can help your creativity blossom!

Make Out With Marginalia

Marginalia: scribbled notes in the margins of a book.

A delightful practice, and I love to see it in books I pick up, whether I take them out from the library or steal them from a frozen hobo. “Oh, on page 5,462 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this person has written, And Molly Bloom represents Penelope out of the myth. On page 5,463, someone else has drawn a lobster with a giant human penis. And hey, look! Oh page 8,922, bloodstains!”

Sometimes, you’re chugging along on your own manuscript and you start to get bogged down in something — maybe you’re not sure about a name or don’t really know the word you want to use but damn sure know that “semen-shellacked” isn’t it. Instead of slamming on the brakes and cutting your rhythm in twain, jot a quick note in the margins and move on.

Most word processing programs have some kind of note or comment function — so, use that. Highlight the word, paragraph, or bloodstain, drop a quick comment into the margins, and sally forth.

Do The Editmonkey Shuffle

Hemingway reportedly said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” I would amend this to, “Write without pants, but drunk; edit with pants, but maybe also still drunk if you want to, because, y’know, mmm, drunk.”

Whatever the case, the takeaway from that isn’t so much that you should write whilst pickled on bourbon and edit whilst clear of head. For me, the takeaway is more about the change in state.

When editing, shift as much as you can away from the way you wrote, which is to say, edit differently than you wrote. I don’t know why this is, but by shifting certain elements, it becomes easier to view the edit more objectively. What kinds of state changes are we talking about here? You’ve got multiple options, and surely you’ll come up with your own, but here are a few:

Change the font size. Change the font. Print it out instead of editing on the screen. Edit in a different word processor. Edit on a different computer (desktop -> laptop, for instance). Put two pages on screen at a given time instead of one. Edit naked and covered in bacon grease. Whatever it takes to view the work in progress differently so as to more easily catch those things you need to catch.

Oh, also?

Track all changes when editing.

And read the work aloud.

I don’t consider many pieces of writing advice inviolable, but for me, this one comes close: reading your work aloud is the best way to catch mistakes and sense problems in rhythm.

If you don’t read your own work aloud, you make Story Jesus foul his diaper.

That’s gospel.

Spreadsheets Suck Unicorn

(Remember: if something sucks unicorn, then it is awesome.)

I sometimes see a sentiment that puts forth the notion that using a spreadsheet during the writing or editing of Your Big Writing Project will kill the creativity necessary to complete that thing. To this I say, if your creativity is killed by a mere spreadsheet, it must have been a weak and wormy thing, like the sad wang of a mangy anorexic possum. Be careful, because exposure to any of the banalities of life (checkbooks, mailmen, bowel movements) could easily destroy your papier-mache “creativity.”

Seriously, spreadsheets are the bee’s boobies. (That’s a thing, right? “The bee’s boobies?” I always feel behind all the hot new slang.) You can use a spreadsheet to do any of the following:

Track word count. Track deadlines. Determine character arcs. Do outlining (light to robust). Figure out plot tentpoles and the rough word count for those tentpoles. Figure out (and rearrange) plots and sub-plots. Track freelance payments. See how often a character shows up. Track critical beats like those from Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT. Track days without pants. Chart your descent into madness. And so forth.

Your Turn

You writer-types out there. Surely you’ve got your own weird little bucket of tricks. Whip one out, dangle it in front of our dewy eyes and tell us all about it. Share and share alike. Join the hive-mind.

April 18, 2011 / 99 Comments

Six Signs You’re Not Ready To Be A Professional Writer

“I want to be a writer when I grow up.”

Sure you do, kid. Sure you do. I wanted to be an astronaut once upon a time, but then I realized, I’m afraid of outer space. Well, not so much “outer space” as the “space dragons that live in outer space.” Oh, I know. You’re saying, “Chuck, dragons do not live in outer space,” and to that, I scoff. Just because CNN isn’t talking about it doesn’t mean our astrophysicists don’t know the truth. Dragons hide behind moons. And they wait there for unsuspecting astronauts so they can plant their spiky dragon ovum into the moist orifices of our space-walking heroes. This is all true, don’t look at me like that.

Okay, one part of that isn’t true: I never wanted to be an astronaut. I pretty much wanted to be writer from like, eighth grade on. The point I’m illustrating here is that, were I to desire membership in the great fraternity of astronauts, I would be deemed UNFIT by a big red stamp on my Astronaut Application Papers. Reason: “Unready due to unreasonable fear of space dragons.”

Unreasonable. Uh-huh, NASA. Sure. *wink wink*

We both know what’s up.

Anyway, point is, you’re maybe sitting over there thinking it’s time to hike on the ol’ hip-waders and go slogging through the mire that is the life of the professional writer.

And I’m here to tell you that you might not be ready. You might earn a big red stamp — *fwomp* UNFIT — on your Authorial Acceptance Exam. Not sure if you’ve got what it takes to carry the pens? To churn and burn through barrels of ink? To march forth across the bleached and cracked earth with only your word count on your back?

Let’s check you out, then.

You See Yourself As King Of This Castle

It’s easy to feel like King Shit of Turd Castle when you’re a writer. You sit there in your impenetrable bubble of creativity, banging out masterpiece after masterpiece that nobody ever sees, a Muse in your own right, one of Hell’s own glorious maestros. (Or Heaven’s, but let’s be clear: we probably see ourselves more as diabolical geniuses than as the artificers of God’s own glory.) Time to lance that blister, Sugar-Boobs. Being a writer means lurking far lower on the totem pole than you’d prefer. I don’t mean that to be a good thing or a bad thing: it’s just a thing. A thing you can’t change except by getting better at what you do and earning respect. But even still, you are ever at the feet of clients, publishers, and editors. Check your ego — which has swollen in isolation, like e. coli on an agar plate — at the door.

I Still See That Glint Of Magic And Hope In Your Eye

At a distance, writing is a magical thing: it’s candy-floss made of God-stuff. It’s the weaving of tales, the singing of bard-songs, the creating of characters that will gain life like Frankenstein’s monster with a bolt of lightning shot from your own magnificent mind. A lot of things look nice at a distance. Hell, I flew over Detroit once, and I was like — “Aw, what a nice-looking city.” Once you get up close and personal with the writing life, though, the magic dies on the vine. You rip down the facade and find there a kind of abattoir, the floors thick with the chunky blood you’ve spilled in order to make a deadline. Somewhere you hear the sound of a saw chewing through bones punctuated by the hoarse wails of the broken and deranged.

You cannot maintain the illusion of writing being this precious act when you’re working to make a living wage. I mean, I guess you can if you’re Stephen King. But me? And you? This illusion is dismembered by the reaper’s scythe. Writing is a job. A wake-up-at-the-perineum-of-dawn-and-churn-out-a-fast-two-thousand-words job. The kind of job where, if you don’t write, you don’t get paid, and if you don’t get paid, you will die in a gutter wearing only that one pair of pants you own. (Who am I kidding? We do not wear pants.) If I can tell you a little secret, though, this, to me, is a kind of magic all its own. Er, not the dying pantsless thing, but the “writing as a job” thing. But it’s a real magic — or, rather, a science. And science is hella tits. (Do the kids say that? “Hella tits?” Spread that lingo for me, will you?)

You Still Suffer From Writer’s Block

Living the life of a professional writer will either a) remove your illusion that writer’s block is a real thing (it isn’t) or b) remove your ass from living the life of the professional writer. Writer’s block is not real. It’s just some fake-ass mental shit that writers made up (during the Grandiloquent Penmonkey Council of Dusseldorf in 1456) so they can excuse a day of not-writing. You get writer’s block, you don’t write, and you don’t write, you don’t get paid, and, well — see earlier comment, re: gutters, pants, death. You don’t hear about other professions suffering this kind of nonsense, do you? “I’ve got Spreadsheet Malaise.” “I suffer under the callous yoke of Engineer’s Ennui.” Writer’s block? Pfft. When your actual income depends on the words you produce, you get shut of that shit reaaaal quick, hoss. The only writer’s block that matters is the kind where a horse steps on both hands and breaks all your fingers. That’s all you get.

You Are A Uni-Tasker

Ever hear the term “biodiversity?” An ecosystem thrives when it has greater biodiversity, meaning, a greater variety of life forms. Diversity is also the king of investment: if you don’t have a diverse portfolio, then when that one stock you own goes down the poop-tubes, so does your fortune. Once the public learns that Bobo’s Hot Dog Hut uses cat meat to make its sausages, your stock in that company is done for, son. Life thrives with diversity. Financial portfolios depend on diversity.

The writer survives on diversity, too. If you do one thing really well — “I write snarky articles about Doctor Who!” — then good for you. Your blog appreciates it. But that way is not the way of the pro-writer’s life. You best be ready to write all kinds of shit you didn’t expect to write. Thou shalt not earn a steady living as a single-serving uni-tasker. I’ve written: pen-and-paper roleplaying games, video games, articles about video games, essays, transmedia projects, short stories, novels, films, ad and marketing copy, brochures, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, crime, and so on, and so forth. You need diversity in projects as well as diversity in clients. You will learn that, starting out, the word “YES” is more your friend than “NO.” That changes over time as you become more established, but early on, the word “no” might as well be, “no, I don’t want to eat this week, starvation is awesome.”

Linking Writing And Commerce Makes Your Butthole Itch

Writing is the act of putting words on paper. Professional writing is the act of ~~beating oneself about the head and neck with a tire iron~~ putting words on paper for money. That last part is key: “for money.” Some writers, you bring up money and business in terms of being a writer, they twitch and spasm and make faces like you just jizzed in their milkshake. Pssh. Amateurs. These folks are the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time writers. You wanna go “pro,” you have to embrace what “pro” means — which is to say, this is your livelihood. Going pro means doing all kinds of things that go against that idea that writing is this lordly, artsy profession. It means attending to deadlines. It means reading and understanding contracts. It means pushing past the pain and learning how to create a spreadsheet that shows income, expenses, writing schedules, liters of Bourbon consumed, tears shed. It means knowing how to create and send invoices. There’s a whole seedy sub-layer to being a pro-writer that, for some reason, writers don’t want to deal with. Fuck that. That’s like owning a toilet and not knowing how to unclog it. Elves don’t come and handle it, for Chrissakes. This is your job. Keyword: job. Oh, and for the record, if you’re one of those fuck-hats who sneers whenever anyone puts “art” and “money” in the same sentence, do me a favor: take off your shoe, and smack yourself in the crotch again and again like you’re trying to kill a centipede.

You Love Stability, Loathe Disorder

You know how some people make, like, $50,000 a year? And then next year, they make that again? And the year after, they make, I dunno, $52,000 a year? And that’s their life? And you know how these people get things like health care, vacations, 40-hour-work-weeks, and the respect of their families? Wad all those things up in a ball and feed them to a goat. Those are gone. Done. Kaput. Stability and certainty is not the life of the writer. Even a writer who writes full-time and gets all those benefits is more likely on the chopping block because writers are seen as expendable. (Never mind the fact that we write the world into existence. It’s like nobody appreciates gods anymore.) Still, for the most part, pro-writers are freelance, or hop from job to job. As such, your yearly income? Not steady. Health care? Pay for it yourself or be lucky enough to have a spouse who brings that home. Vacations? I just laughed so hard I threw up. Hell, you don’t even get paid immediately for a job. Sure, you wrote “NET 30” on your invoice. You might as well have written on there, “And please deliver my check duct-taped to a pink pony.” That money’s still going to take six months to wind its way through the proper channels to get to you. If there was an ad in the paper advertising a freelance writer’s job, it would read, “WRITING WORK AVAILABLE. MUST LOVE CHAOS AND BUDGETS. ALSO: LIQUOR AND SHAME.”

Check Yourself ‘Fore You Wreck Yourself

Pro-writing is not a gig for those with weak constitutions, frail bladders, or creative integrity. Think very seriously before stepping into that arena, because you walk into that battle largely unarmed and unarmored. You’ve got to measure up. You’ve got to ask yourself the hard questions. I’m not saying it’s not satisfying; it is. But you may not be ready for that kind of life. Not yet, at least.

After all, Here There Be Space Dragons.