Tag: writing (page 4 of 33)

Stuff About Writing

September 25, 2012 / 74 Comments

25 Things You Should Do Before Starting Your Next Novel

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

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

1. Get Your Expectations Firmly In Check

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

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

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

3. Draw The Map For The Journey Ahead

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

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

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

5. Know Thy Characters

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

6. Test Drive Those Imaginary Motherfuckers

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

7. Dig Up All Those Glittery Conflict Diamonds

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

8. Build An (Incomplete) World

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

9. Identify The Major Rules

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

10. Find Your Way Into The Tale

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

11. Also: Identify The Great Egress

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

12. Learn All The Appropriate Things

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

13. Suss Out The Fiddly Bits

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

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

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

15. Hell, Write The Whole Goddamn Query

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

16. Know Your Word Processor Intimately

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

17. Establish A Daily Schedule

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

18. Build a Timetable

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

19. Ensure That Life Accommodates The Book

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

20. Have A Publication Path In Mind

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

21. Clean Your Shitty Desk, You Filthmonger

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

22. The Backup Plan

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

23. Set It And Forget It

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

24. Commit, Motherfucker

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

25. Stop Doing All This Other Stuff And Write Already

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

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

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

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

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

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

September 24, 2012 / 54 Comments

On Cultivating Instinct As An Inkslinging Storyspinning Penmonkey Type

I get emails.

These emails, they’re drenched in impatience and uncertainty. Sopping with it. Drippy.

And I get it.

These are fundamental, deep-seated, stomach-squirming and gut-churning questions of, “Am I making a mistake? Can I do this? Should I do this? How do I know? Will I ever know? Am I really a writer? Am I any good? Will I ever get better? Do I smell burned toast? Do I hear ducks? Where are my pants?”

So: if you’re a writer of any age, any experience level, any stripe-or-polka-dot, let me say: it’s totally reasonable to be asking these questions. It’s completely normal to feel like a fucking lunatic, to feel like a half-assed failure, to feel like it’s inevitable that this house of snowflakes and eggshells you’ve built for yourself will fall apart above your head just as soon as someone notices what a fake-ass freak you are.

It’s completely natural to just not know. To not know your skill level, your talent, your future. To not know what comes next. Everything a big neon question mark like all your life is The Riddler just fucking with you, throwing riddle and rhyme upon you to always keep you ever-guessing.

It’s fine.

It is. Really. It’s fine, and normal, and much as it sucks: it’s totally cool.

And I’m going to tell you how you get past all this.

I’m going to give you Yet Another Holy Shit Writing Secret, the kind handed down from the Ancient Ink-Dark Gods to the Ululating Monks of the Temple of the Intrepid Penmonkey. Ready? Here goes.

You need to cultivate your instincts.

You’re not born with them. Okay, fine, some writers seem like they hatch out of a Mother Egg with all the talent and instinct required to be a fully-formed-and-forged Bestselling Author. But most? Not so much. Not me. Probably not you. We enter into this thing with only the desire. We don’t come complete with the skill-sets. We don’t come with the talent, the experience. We just plum don’t have the instincts.

Two ways you get the instincts —

First, age. And there ain’t shit nor shoeshine you can do about that. We all age one minute at a time, the days passing at the same rate for everybody, so — put that one out of your mind. Just know that as you get older, your instincts for most things sharpen (which is often in equal measure a recognition of how little we actually know, for our lack of certainty gives way to the birth of instinct).

The second way?

By doing it. By making it happen. By daily taking the dream and dragging in into the light of day where you make that sonofabitch as real as you can make it. What that means on a practical level is:

Reading and writing.

(And, to a degree, just living your life. But living is like intellectual fuel for your writing and storytelling and here I’m talking more about the talents and instincts needed, and those only come from the act of completing your desire by acting, of evoking talent by the very dint of doing that shit.)

You read, and you read critically.

You write, and you write critically.

And you do both of these things as often as humanly possible.

Which means: daily.

DAILY.

Daily!

This isn’t a thing that happens overnight. It’s not like you spend three months writing a novel and it’s suddenly — bam! “I get it now! I’m like Saul on the Road to Damascus! The hard crust of sleep-boogers has fallen from my eyes! I AM WRITER, BEHOLD MY GOLDEN STORY VOMIT.”

I didn’t just sit down and write Blackbirds out of nowhere. It didn’t just fall out of my fool head like yams out of an upended can. I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I started trying to write professionally at the age of 18 (and that’s when my first story was published). This has taken well over half of my life. I wrote six books before Blackbirds, all of them easily described with the quality of “mostly ass.”

And this is why the hardest but straightest-arrow advice for all writers is: write your way through it. Write your way through writer’s block, through plot problems, through everything. Write every day. Write unceasingly, without fear, without the need for certainty. Write blogs, tweets, short stories, short-short stories, novels, comic scripts, film scripts, drug scripts, whatever you can. Because over time, you find that you… just get better. And not only that: you start to know why and how you’re getting better. That’s instinct forming — equal parts callus and built-muscle. You soon start to get a handle on how words can and should go together. You start to not just see story as a mechanical clockwork thing, but rather, you start to get a feel for it. Less intellectual, more emotional.

And then, when you read, that makes more sense, too. You start to see the layers behind the layers. All the sub rosa shit that goes into a story — stuff that’s conscious and not-so-conscious and that forms the fabric of good story, bad story, and all the qualities in between. You write to put it in practice.

You read to see how others do the same.

Reading and writing, reading and writing.

Not just for pleasure. But to understand. To know what the fuck it all means.

But, like I said: doesn’t happen overnight.

Takes time. Often lots of it.

Which makes this the hardest advice of them all. Everyone wants a short-cut. Everyone wants an easy answer, like you can just take an aptitude test or go visit a fucking palm-reader or haruspex to give you the truth you seek. But the only truth is, it takes the time that it takes. Five, ten, twenty years. You can’t accelerate your age (at least not without evil science). But you can accelerate the other part. You can read as much as you can. And you can write as much as you can.

You do both of those things every day, and soon you’ll feel eyes opening that had long been closed.

That’s the secret.

TELL NO ONE.

(shhhh)

September 18, 2012 / 19 Comments

Ask A Writer: Building A Better Character

As always, if you want to ask a question that may be featured in this very space, go sally forth to the:

Ask page at the Terribleminds Tumblr.

Today, then, a focus on character, in which I field two questions that came winging into my inbox (not a sexual reference, but you can have it if you like it). Those questions are, drum roll please:

mstrimmer asks:

If you are aiming to make a character as three dimensional as possible, what is the best starting point for that exercise?

Kefirah asks:

Hey Chuck Love your blogs and tweets, and I have got scads of good advice from you over the year or so I’ve been following, but I don’t think I’ve seen a blog on how to describe characters/people in stories. Is there any big, massively effective way of doing this? Would you consider doing a blog about it? Thanks and love and all that Cath/ aka Kefirah

As with All-Things-Writing, I’d love to alight upon your shoulder like a weirdly-bearded bird and whisper in your ear the SECRET RULES TO WRITING GOOD CHARACTER, but in truth, no such rules exist. Writing works when it works, and sucks when it sucks, and what works for Mary Lou Monkeyballs doesn’t work at all for Big Danny Doucheballoon. Writing advice is only as good as the words you get from it.

Still, I can ramble and slur my way through some thoughts on how to build — and then describe — good character. And you’ll stay and watch because, hey, who doesn’t like it when I blog my way into a corner?

Also, I have you duct-taped to those lawn chairs. So, there’s that.

With character, we don’t have a blinky red button we can hit that Auto-Generates personas on the 3D printer we all have sitting to the right of our computer monitors (right?). Creating three-dimension in a character is an act of fortune and patience and heaps and buckets of thought.

But, I can give you a couple tips.

Use ’em, ignore ’em, blow ’em up with M80s. Your call.

First, ask yourself a handful of questions regarding the character.

What does she want, and why can’t she have it?

What is she afraid of and why is she afraid of it?

What made her who she is today?

Why the fuck do we care?

The first two questions are easy and form the scoliosis backbone of storytelling (scoliosis because it’s bent and wavy, not a straight line): every story is about status quo and the interruption of that status quo. Or, put differently, every story is a flat line heading in one direction until something changes, modifies, or halts that direction. The character generally is the one on that flat line, riding it the way Slim Pickens rides the missile in Dr. Strangelove. Except here the straightness and direction of the line is by no means inevitable.

Put differently again and this time with a refocus on character: every story is about a character who wants something and can’t have it. The “can’t have it” is the conflict of the story — the character is stopped from achieving his goals or fleeing his fears, and the story part of the story is about him finding a way to overcome. Or, in some more cynical modes, not finding a way.

Wants and fears and conflicts can change over the course of a story, of course. But we’re talking initiating factors here, and even when elements do shift through the course of the tale told, you can just go back to answering the same set of questions for each new “phase shift.” Or whatever you want to call it. (Just don’t call it late for dinner HAR HAR HAR *gun in mouth*)

Further, you can establish multiple wants and fears, though the “rule of three” here is good — going beyond three driving motivations for the character is just you muddying up the soup with too many ingredients. After awhile, it’s all just gross and brown. (You know what, here I’m going to be the bigger man and not engage in some kind of diarrhea-based humor. You owe me. You owe me.)

John McClane in Die Hard wants to be with his wife — with her in the smaller and larger sense. And of course, he has a number of things blocking him: the distance between NY and CA, the distance between he and his wife’s ideals and careers, and oh, right, A SQUADRON OF EUROTRASH TERRORISTS.

Onto the third question: what makes the character who she is at the inception of the tale?

A character is technically born out of nothing — but it can’t read like that on the page. They are who they are, just as we are who we are, because external events (abandoned by parents! attacked by robots! pooped pants during elementary school talent show!) and internal choices (addiction to a bad drug! loved the wrong person! betrayed one’s planet to the alien fungus!) conspire to create a quilt of who we are. And who we are equals the decisions we make — and the decisions we make further change who we are.

So: it helps to know where a character comes from. Suss out those external events and internal choices that lead to the character we see on the page or the screen. That doesn’t mean the audience needs to see all those events and choices laid bare — because, for real, fuck origin stories right in the ear — as a lot of story exists off the page and off the screen. A lot of story lives only in your head (and ideally, your notes). Again, to go back to the non-diarrhea soup metaphor: just because we can’t see an ingredient (say: salt) doesn’t mean we can’t taste it. It’s in there even if we cannot identify it by sight. Characters are like that. A whole bunch of invisible story is woven into the narrative DNA of each character.

Now: final question, and the hardest of them all.

Why the fuck do we care?

Critical question — because, if you can’t give the audience reason enough to care, we’re out. Character is everything in story (everything), and if we can’t muster a single squirmy fuck about the character in question, the eject button is within easy reach. Meaning, we turn off the DVD player, put down the Kindle, or banish the storytelling nano-cloud that delivers the tale to our neo-cortex with sharp spikes of narrative lightning (hey, whatever, just trying to stay future proof over here).

Asking why we care demands then we ask how we make the audience care.

Again, no easy answer, but why not try to stumble-bumble through out? Journey with me!

The audience wants to relate to the character. Meaning, they want to see some aspect of their own stories reflected in the story of the character. We need common experience shared. And here you’re (correctly) balking, saying, “Well, how can I ever tell a story different from the audience’s? Hell, how do I even know what the audience’s story is? The audience comprises a theoretical infinity of individual stories and interests and, and and–” Here your head goes BLOOSH. Wet goop everywhere. Delicious.

The point is to realize that the character on the page has his own unique story components, but those components speak to larger, more universal human elements of the human condition. The struggle of son versus father, the fear of death, altruism versus selfishness, whatever. No, we’ve never been a Jedi or a mob boss or a zombie hunter, but those struggles are emblems for other things.

The other way you make an audience care about a character is just by making her fascinating to watch. The character should be interesting. Not a dull everywoman with all the flavor of chalk dust but rather, someone who is fun, or funny, or weird, or ass-kickery, or some characteristic that makes us root for them and want to watch them for two hours or 300 pages. In short: fuck boring. Boredom is the enemy of story.

There exist other exercises, too, wherein you dig deeper into character and get to the heart of these questions: you might consider just opening a Word document and cracking open your brain with a metaphorical ice-hammer and blubbering into the word processor until you start seeing flecks of gold in all that muck. Which you then mine, discarding the rest as worthless dross.

You might also take the character for a ride on a narrative test drive: write a scene, a piece of flash fiction, a chapter from an imaginary book. All featuring that character, front and center. Doesn’t have to be something you’ll ever use or even show — but it just helps you walk around in that character’s skin for a while. It’ll be uncomfortable and itchy at first (and will chafe at the armpits and crotch), but over time, you’ll start to find the comfort there. You’ll start to know the character intimately (this is where I do my artsy writing teacher thing where I sweep my arms in a dramatic fashion and say loudly, You must learn to MAKE LOVE to your characters, you must lap at their love-puddles, you must spelunk into their darkest, moistest grottos.)

Final note on creating a fully-formed character?

The three-beat arc.

This doesn’t have to be a thing you stick to — as with any story-prep, no plan survives contact with the enemy — but it’s a thing that will help you get your head around the character and the journey she walks.

Establish three beats/traits/adjectives that mark the character’s journey.

A –> B –> C.

Selfish cowardly prick –> Goes to war; is tested –> Selfless heroic soldier. Or:

Angry –> Pushed to brink –> Finds tense peace. Or:

Robot –> Lives with new family –> Learns how to be human. Or:

Angry racist –> Jailed –> Reformed outsider (aka, American History X). Or:

Consider how the character of Coburn in Double Dead goes from Predator –> Protector –> Penitent. And three of the four sections of the book mark that journey quite plainly. There’s actually a fourth step in there (“Prey”), and that’s another thing to note: you needn’t be limited to three steps or stages. Insert as many as you need to map a journey.

Ultimately, this pairs well with expected and mythic character arcs, right?

Whether we’re talking childhood –> adulthood –> old age or its mythic counterpart, maiden –> mother –> crone (or prince –> king –> emperor), we’re charting and tracking change, whether that change is positive or negative growth. You can literally draw shapes from this.

Hell, at the end of the day, you might argue that character arcs like this always add up to:

Thesis –> Antithesis –> Synthesis.

Our lives work that way, don’t they? We feel a certain way during youth and adolescence, then adulthood tempers our expectations with quite a bit of pushback, then we move into our golden years as a summary of our experiences both positive and negative.

That’s character. Character lives in that space.

Now, to finalize:

How to describe.

Take your finger and thumb. Space them apart by two inches. In my mind, the character description on the page probably shouldn’t exceed that. Some authors refuse to describe characters at all, while others go hog-wild and give pages of description — I like a character to be painted in a few bold, notable strokes. What to define? Define what’s different and distinctive. Different-colored eyes. Strong nose. Ugly pants. Two penises wrestling for dominance. LASER NIPPLES. Whatever.

Again, cleave to the rule of threes if it suits you:

No more than three descriptive elements.

I go beyond this sometimes, but still: terse is good.

And you don’t need to lump all the descripty-bits into one section, either.

You can space them out throughout the first several chapters, if writing prose. (Just don’t wait until the end to tell us about the two-penis or laser-nipple thing. That’s a bit of information we should have early on.)

And that’s it.

My thoughts on character-building, in a way-longer-than-expected post.

Please to enjoy.

September 11, 2012 / 71 Comments

25 Of My Personal Rules For Writing And Telling Stories

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

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

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

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

Warning: long-ass post ahead.

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

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

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

2. Bleed On The Page

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

3. Write The Song That Sings To Your Heart

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

4. Show Now, Tell Later

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

5. Aim Big, Write Small

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

6. Character Is Everything

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

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

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

8. Plot Is Soylent Green

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

9. Conflict Is The Food That Feeds The Reader

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

10. Fuck Trust

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

11. The Dual Function Of Story

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

12. Embrace The “Holy Shit” Moment

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

13. Here Is How Description Works

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

14. The Rule Of Threes

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

15. Every Story Is An Argument

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

16. Metaphor Is What Elevates Us Above The Chimpanzees

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

17. Stories Are Like People: They Need Oxygen

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

18. Care Less

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

19. Realize Your Reach

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

20. Harden The Fuck Up, Care Bear

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

21. Completo El Poopo

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

22. Read Your Work Out Loud

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

23. Haters Gonna Hate

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

24. On The Nature Of Writing Advice

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

25. Write Like The End Is Nigh

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

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

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500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

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

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

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

September 10, 2012 / 53 Comments

Readers Are The Victims Of Bad Author Behavior

We’re all familiar with the recent spate of bad behavior by authors, right? Writers paying for false five-star reviews. Authors creating fake sock-puppet accounts (or “dick-puppets” as Blackmoore calls ’em) which they then use to pump up their own work, denigrate the work of others, and act as fake mouthpieces online. Then you have the response, where authors see that bad behavior and respond with their own, leaving one-star reviews as some kind of “Internet country justice.” We’re all clued in, I’m sure, by now.

My initial reaction to all of this was that it’s a bit inside baseball. It’s authors being dicky and tap-dancing on dubious ethical ground and waggling their penmonkey genitals about in an unpleasant display.

Except then I was online at Amazon (which already is notoriously assy in terms of filter and discoverability) and I was reading reviews and was suddenly struck by the horrifying notion —

I don’t know if these are real.

Suddenly I’m reading reviews with the same level of doubt and suspicion I reserve for reality television (we all realize that ‘House Hunters’ is a big lie, right?). It’s the same vibe I get when I go looking for reviews of restaurants. Locally we had a restaurant where the owner was caught leaving good reviews for himself, bad ones for his competition, and was also getting on forums as a sock-puppet and shouting down folks who said his food had dropped in quality (as it used to be great and isn’t anymore). Shitty behavior, right?

I read reviews for a toaster, my cynical mind flares up like a hot rash: “I’m sure the positive reviews are all left by employees of Big Toaster, and all the negative ones are left by proponents of some Anti-Toaster Coalition.” Casts all reviews in these areas as suspect. Which makes them beyond useless.

Now I’m feeling that way about books.

Maybe I should’ve been all along. Maybe I was naive.

It doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t good for anybody.

I once thought that the bad author behavior displayed here was bad for authors. And it is. Bad for authors, publishers, Amazon, B&N, etc. But, now I’m thinking they’re not the real victims here.

The real victims are the readers.

Readers, who want honest feedback. And who want to give honest feedback amongst equal honesty.

Readers, who love books, and who don’t want to get caught in bullshit author headgames.

Readers, who want to trust their authors outside the story (as you should never trust the author inside the story) and who are now confronted with the idea that the fiction that should’ve been contained to the books themselves has bled out of the pages and infected the relative purity of the author-reader contract.

So, let’s be clear here — if you’re buying up a bunch of bullshit reviews, if you’re out there putting on a series of Halloween masks and pretending you’re Joe Dicknose from Topeka and Betty Lou Buttplug from Albany just so you can boost your own reviews while hurting the reviews of others, you’re not only a scat-gobbling poop-fingered liar-face, you’re also actively punishing readers. You know, readers? The people who want to read all our books? The people who help us pay our mortgages? Readers, the ones who matter more than the authors because they’re the ones who allow us to be who we are?

Dicking around with the livelihood of other authors is dirty pool and you should be crotch-punched.

Dicking around with readers is like you dumping medical waste in the watering hole. We all drink from that water. You’re poisoning the relationship. You’re harming readers.

And that sucks, big-time.

So, stop doing it. Come clean or don’t.

But embrace shame and just stop.

You human canker sores, you.

September 5, 2012 / 52 Comments

The Death Of Genre: Drifting Toward A Post-Genre Future

*hands you a brick of C4*

It’s time to blow up genre. It’s time to explosively obliterate the very idea of separating our fiction into these neat little categories — these tropes and plots, these shelves and slots.

Genre of late has been a thing largely used to determine a book’s place at the point of sale — a bookstore, quite understandably, only has finite space. (Well, I’m told that the bookstore known as Herman’s Infinite Accumulation in Duluth figured out a way to rend a vent in the fabric of time and space and thus host all the books all the time, but Herman reportedly stole ducats from the Hyperborean Cat Mafia and he and his store ended up being eaten by moon sharks.) A bookstore cannot hold all the books, and so one must apply a meaningful organization to what lurks there. But the Internet has changed all that.

The Internet is, of course, theoretically infinite. Its shelves are fucking endless.

Once, an author had to ask — “Well, where the hell will my book end up?” A bookstore with clearly limited shelf-space was not so keen on buying a book that had no easy place on those limited shelves. So, genre — a thing that affects the point-of-sale retailer — was a necessary concern of the writer long before the point-of-sale. Genre therefore begins to codify the types of fiction we read: it creates pre-defined plots, character arcs, it relies on a series of shared and continued tropes. Genre at the inception of the story and at the point of shelving and sale then becomes a thing that helps to train both reader and writer.

Genre is comfort, after all. You know what you’re writing. You know what you’re reading.

Comfort in codification. But fiction often works best when there exists some measure of discomfort.

And again, there’s that nagging cloud of gnats hovering around all our heads…

The Internet.

We are readers and writers who grew up on multiple genres and multiple formats. We don’t just read deep in a single genre. Our reading tastes are a shotgun spray, not a sniper’s bullet — space opera to superheroes, horror to thriller, splatterpunk and steampunk and cyberpunk and monkeypunk, epic fantasy to urban fantasy, erotica to spec-fic to spy novels to comic books to movies to pornography to cat videos to whatever.

Our heads are full of this crazy shit.

The Internet brings all that together. In one place. And it fosters the power of remix culture — we like to take all the things we’ve absorbed and glom them together to see the pop culture Voltron we create. We’re the ones pouring maple syrup on bacon (to quote Adam Christopher a little), bringing together the sweet and the savory. We like to read and write the intellectual equivalent of fusion cuisine.

But genre is law. And the law doesn’t really make room for that, does it?

You mash-up two or three disparate genres in a single book, where the fuck does your book go? How do you tell an agent what to do with it? How does the agent tell a publisher, and how does a publisher tell a bookstore? (And here the secret is that bookstores are actually the ones doing the dictating, meaning that the power still lies with a dwindling supply chain and distribution system.)

If you’re an author mashing up genres outside a single book — you write one fantasy novel then move to something more toward “literary horror” — the story goes that you run the risk of alienating fans. That they’ll find your book on the shelf and read both and they wanted one thing from you and didn’t get the same thing every time and so they’ll come to your house and cry, “I WILL AUTOGRAPH YOUR DOOM” before plunging a fountain pen in your neck and signing their name on your corpse.

But the bookstore shelves? Not so populous anymore. And even when they do exist, the Internet is always in the background, able to support that theoretical infinite which then backs up the physical shelf-space.

Plus? Readers are growing savvier. And writers want to play in other playgrounds.

That’s a theme I noticed, by the way, at Worldcon — not just in our New Pulp panel, but in discussions with writers throughout. Genre can be a comfortable starting point — but it can be a bit of a prison, too. We want off our leash. We want to write what we want to write, and we trust that the readers will be with us (and whether that’s a naive trust or an earned and confirmed one, I don’t know).

So, I propose, it’s time to make genre go boom.

We assassinate the current codification of genre.

We liberate the writer and the reader.

VIVA LA REVOLUCION.

Or something.

The question now becomes: just what the fuck does this all mean?

More Granularity

Instead of obliterating genre in its entirety, consider the notion of committing to it in a deeper, crazier way — see, right now, genre is not particularly granular. We have a handful of very big boxes (fantasy, sci-fi, literary, whatever), and inside those boxes one set of smaller boxes (epic fantasy, urban fantasy, etc.), but then no more boxes within those. And once you’re in a big box, you very rarely get to have a project that can be slotted into another — “science fantasy” is a thing we talk about, but it’s not really a shelf designation. So, get rid of the boxes. Eradicate large categories.

Instead, dice up the elements of our fiction even more finely — mince those motherfuckers. Think of fiction as having aspects or elements (and those of you who game in the RPG sense will see the value of this) — a piece of fiction might have a “time travel” aspect, a “tragedy” aspect, a “detective” aspect. One novel might be “serial killer / robot / erotic love triangle.” Another might be, “dinosaur / noir / bioethics.”

What this ideally allows for is a greater breadth of what we find “interesting.” At a place like Amazon, filter and discoverability is utter fuckporridge — and this is bad for writers and readers. Think instead of a Pandora-like app that searches your e-book library and uses these very axes and aspects to help you discover new authors and stories. I want that! And I think we need it, too.

Less Granularity

An obvious thing was pointed out to me at Worldcon but I hadn’t really realized it before — Young Adult / Teens is frequently uncategorized. And, likely without coincidence, YA tends to be some of the bravest, weirdest fiction out there right now. You go to the shelf inside the bookstore and it’s just a big mash-up of books and genres. (Okay, B&N actually separates them out a bit — Teens to Teens Paranormal Romance to Teens Fantasy / Adventure.) But often, YA is just YA. An age range without genre limitations.

These teens are going to be the same eventual non-teens (aka “adults,” if such a distinction even matters anymore) — and if they’re not pinned down by genre conventions and they grow up with fewer expectation for genre, isn’t it time to start configuring our shelves for them and not for everyone else?

Author-As-Genre

The “New Pulp” panel at Worldcon was fascinating because it was essentially the three of us (Stephen Blackmoore, Adam Christopher, and some bearded bespectacled shitbird) trying to figure out what the shit we were talking about and why we were even there. At first that seemed terrifying but as we orbited the topic and closed in on an answer it became clear how powerful it was to not have a certain answer to this uncertain question. Through the panel one of the distinctions we seemed to come to was that we, as authors with great heads full of stories from all corners, wanted to write what the fuck we wanted to write.

And so it emerged that “author-as-own-genre” seemed a very lovely thing, indeed. After all, Stephen King writes “horror” only to those who don’t know any better. He writes a bit of everything, all told — fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, literary. He is himself a great big mash-up of influences and possibilities and you don’t go to a Stephen King novel looking so much for horror as you do looking for, well, a Stephen King novel. King’s novels contain all the trappings of King himself — his voice, his auteur aspects, his storytelling hooks.

To me, that’s a win for the author first and foremost — to be able to write not to genre conventions but rather to your own personal conventions is a very good thing. It becomes “double-plus-good” for the readers because we, the writers, are writing work that speaks to and engages us as creators, ideally meaning we’re writing more to our own strengths and thus producing more kick-ass stories.

Okay, Fine, Fine, Genre Isn’t All Bad

Listen, I’m not saying genre distinctions don’t have value. They do. You like X, so you go to X shelf. Sometimes that comfort is a good thing. We want readers to be comfortable.

But we also don’t want endless regurgitative human centipede storytelling. Genre and its rigorous classification is why we have epic fantasy that reads the same every time, or why we have urban fantasy stories and book covers that are so reiterative it starts to feel like a joke. We are not served well in storytelling by saying This is X and That is Y if all that does is give us the samey-samey time and again. Some of the greatest authors — whether we’re talking Gaiman or King or Mister R. R. Martin — exist because they carve open their own portals into different genres.

So, I’m not seriously suggesting that we obliterate genre as a “thing” — first, it’d never work, and second, yes, they have value. But I am encouraging a widening of that definition and a greater look at how a more diverse and deviant genre classification can allow us to deliver a more meaningful class of filter and discoverability for authors and the readers who read ’em. That’s a win for everybody.

Thoughts? Discuss.

Or I’ll Taser you in the mouth.