Tag: writing (page 9 of 33)

1. Your Story Must Be An Incomplete Equation

A complete equation is 4 + 5 = 9. It’s simple. Clean. And it’s already resolved. Stories are not simple. They are not clean. And we most certainly don’t want to read stories that have already been resolved. We read stories that evolve and evade as we read them. Their uncertainty feels present — though we know the story will finish by its end, a good story lets us — or demands that we — forget that. A good story traps us in the moment and compels us by its incompleteness. The equation then becomes X + 5 = 9, and we are driven to solve for X. It is the X that haunts us. It is the emptiness of that variable we hope to fill.

2. Every Story Is A Mystery Story

This isn’t a list about murder mysteries. This is a list about every story out there. All stories need unanswered questions. All stories demand mysteries to engage our desperate need to know. We flip the little obsessive dipswitches in the circuit boards of our reader’s mind by presenting enigmas and perplexities. Why is our lead character so damaged? What’s in the strange mirrored box? How will they escape the den of ninja grizzlies? Storytelling is in many ways the act of positing questions and then exploring the permutations of that question before finally giving in and providing an answer.

3. Your Story Is The Opposite Of The News

A news story is upfront. Tells the facts. “Woman wins the Moon Lottery.” “Man sodomized by a zoo tapir.” “New Jersey smells like musty tampons, says mayor.” (Musty Tampons was my nickname in an old Steve Winwood cover band.) A journalist is tasked to answer the cardinal questions (the five W’s and the one H): who, what, where, when, why, and how. But your job as a storyteller is to make the audience ask these questions and then bark a sinister laugh as you choose not to answer them all. Oh, you answer some of them. But one or two remain open, empty. Unanswered variables. Incomplete equations.

4. Leaving Out The Egg

Put differently, have you heard the one about Betty Crocker and the Egg? Well, run quick and edu-ma-cate yourselves. The point is, the audience wants to do work. Needs to do work. They want to bring part of themselves to the table. They want to help you fill in the blanks because that is human nature. Maybe it’s ego and selfishness, or maybe it’s a kind of selflessness. Doesn’t matter where it comes from, it only matters that when you leave pieces out of the story, the audience will try to bring those things in. And once you do that you drop the cage on ’em and now you’ve got dinner an engaged member of the audience.

5. The Characters Are Your Coal Mine Canary

Not every mystery is a worthy one. Not every question deserves to be answered. How do you know? Well. You never really know, but a good test is finding out what mysteries engage your characters — if it’s a mystery the characters care about, and the audience cares about the characters, by proxy they will care about the mystery at hand, as well. This is why arbitrary mysteries — mysteries that exist for their own sake and no other — fail. Mysteries are anchored to character motivation. They affect the stakes on the table. But not the steaks on the table. Because those are mine. I bought those. LAY OFF MY MEAT, BEEF-THIEF.

6. The Power Of “What The Fuck?!” Compels Us

A good ol’ big-ass mystery is a meteor that punches a hole in that once-complete equation we were talking about. Many stories thrive on One Big Question (think: What Is The Matrix, or, Why Are These Transformers So Racist?), and that’s okay, because sometimes that’s a hole the audience wants to fall into. But know that such a mystery is not enough. You still need a cogent plot, strong characters, and a unifying theme to serve as a throughline. An epic HOLY CRAP WTF mystery can feel hollow and without substance should those other elements not exist. Mystery by itself is not enough.

7. A Warm Quilt Of Small Mysteries

Instead of one big mystery, consider instead (or in addition) a series of smaller mysteries: little mini-arcs that rise on the question mark and fall toward the answer. A character needs her keys but cannot find them (where are they, and what will she do if she cannot find them?). Someone has been vandalizing the shops around town (who, and why?). The mayor claims New Jersey smells like musty tampons (why does it smell and what does the mayor hope to gain and how does he know what musty tampons smell like?).

8. Sometimes Not A Question But An Incorrect Answer

A tiny point, but one worth mentioning: sometimes creating mystery is not an act of asking a question but the deed of providing a clearly incorrect answer. Let the audience seek the truth by showing them a lie.

9. Sue Spence And The Mystery Squad

To create suspense and invoke tension, offer the audience a mystery. An unanswered question, a lingering puzzle, a nagging cipher — the longer it goes unanswered, the greater that bezoar of tension grows.

10. It Kills The Vampire Or It Gets The Hose Again

A mystery must have stakes — we must know why it exists, and what it means for it to go unanswered. Tying in conditions of consequence to unsolved mysteries is critical — if the character doesn’t find her keys, she can’t get to the hospital, if she can’t get to the hospital, she won’t learn the identity of the man who saved her from that busload of pterodactyls, if she can’t uncover his identity, she won’t learn why she’s being hunted by that busload of pterodactyls. The audience must feel that the mystery has weight and meaning and pterodactyls. Okay, maybe not so much with the pterodactyls.

11. Colonel Exposition Did It, In The Foyer, With A Heavy Lead Pipe

Exposition is the mystery-killer. Exposition is an explanation. Sometimes it’s necessary, and this isn’t a screed against exposition so much as it is a plea for you to understand that exposition shines a light in dark spaces and, sometimes, it’s best to leave those spaces dark. Well-lit clearly-defined spaces become dull for the audience. The audience must not be left comfortable. They should be forced to stare at those dark corners for as long as they can stand it. The light of exposition expels the shadows of mystery.

12. Be Like Tantric Fuckmaster, Sting

Tantric sex is reportedly about withholding “the Big O” (or if you like your orgasm references more Elizabethan, “the little death”) as long as possible in order to maximize the tsunami power of your lusty eruptions. Masturbate and “arrive” on your computer monitor after 45 seconds, you feel a crushing sense of wasted potential, then shamefully wander downstairs to eat half a sleeve of refrigerated cookie dough. Ah! But if you take seven hours to pop your cork, it feels like you accomplished something. Apply this to your story. By withholding information about the plot or the characters, you create a deeper satisfaction upon finally answering the mystery. For the record, I will now refer to ejaculation as “answering the mystery.” At the point of sexual climax I will proclaim loudly: “I AM ANSWERING YOUR MYSTERY.”

13. The Longer The Mystery Persists, The More Satisfying The Answer Must Be

All that being said, you shouldn’t drag out mysteries if their resolution isn’t satisfying. You can’t spend 300 pages or two hours just to get to, OMG THE KEYS WERE IN HER SHOE THE WHOLE TIME. *crash of thunder* The longer you let a mystery hang out there, the more satisfying the mystery — and its resolution — must be. How to gauge this? Hey, you just gotta go with your guttyworks.

14. Plot And Character: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

Mysteries are often tied to plot or character. (What is the Matrix? is a plot-driven question, for instance.) Ideally, though, mysteries are wound through both. Plot, after all, is like Soylent Green — it’s made of people. A murder mystery operates best when the death is tied to the characters at hand (and nothing is less satisfying than the murderer revealed to be some random jerkoff we’ve never met — “It was the Census taker! Oh noes! …wait, the fucking Census guy did it? Goddamnit.”).

15. The Quantum Entanglement Between Question And Conflict

Conflict and mystery go hand in hand. The very nature of conflict offers a situation whose outcome is in flux — we do not know what will happen and so conflict is emblazoned by a big ol’ question mark. Conflicts that are easily resolved are like mysteries that are easily resolved: major poop noise. PPPPBT.

16. Narrative Rejiggering

You can create mystery by breaking the traditional narrative flow and pulling apart the pieces, then rearranging them in whatever order gives you maximum mystery and maximum payoff. If we see part of the ending at the beginning, we glimpse changed circumstances and seek to unravel the complex knot you just dropped in our lap. If we come in toward the middle we want to know what got us here and where we’re going. Part of storytelling is the tension and recoil release of question versus answer, and changing the flow of the narrative can do a great deal toward tightening the questions and super-charging the revelation of the answers. (Homework assignment: go watch the film 21 Grams for a good example of this.)

17. Those Cagey Fuckers

Characters can be cagey fuckers, and that — thankfully, blessedly — creates mystery for readers. Characters do not make the right decisions all the time. Nor should they. A character fails to tell others the truth about what’s going on? A character who obfuscates or lies? A character who tries to cover something up? All this goes a long way toward creating mystery in the audience. Which is a total win, if you ask me. You know what else is a win? Cupcakes. Please send me some cupcakes or I’ll blow up your house. Kay, thanks, bye.

18. The Labyrinth At The Core Of The Human Heart

The greatest mysteries lurk at the center of human experience, inside the emotional tangle where the Minotaur of our worst inclinations lives. (Whoa. I need to stop with the peyote buttons.) Seriously, though, a character’s motivations and fears (and you as the author guarding those elements or at least withholding some components of them) provide the most profound payoff in terms of offering and then answering mysteries. Each character should be a mystery — not a cipher, not an endless unsolvable puzzle — but rather a question to be answered. Don’t tell us everything. Hold back. Ease off the stick, Stroker Ace.

19. Creating Mystery In The Edit

Uh oh, spaghetti-o. Maybe your first draft doesn’t have enough gooshy mysterious plasm for you and the readers? Easy-peasy stung-by-beesy! Think of your edit like a Jenga tower. Reach in. Grab a block. Yank it out. If the whole thing still stands — you’re good to go. Keep doing this. Pull pieces out. Withhold. Retreat. Release and reveal as late as you can. The edit is a great place to massage mystery and create whole new moist vaginal pockets of uncertainty in your tale.

20. One Answer Can Create More Questions

Mysteries can be like The Hydra — chop off one head, nine more sprout in its place. This is a good thing… mmnnnyeah, to a point. Eventually, there comes a moment when you end up letting more snakes out of the bag than you can properly kill. (Example: the TV show Lost.) We have to get a sense that this isn’t some explosive Pandora’s puzzle box, some infinitely-replicating Rube Goldberg mystery machine that produces ten new questions for every one answer offered. You have to know when to stop releasing snakes and just start killing those slithery sumbitches. Er, not literally. Put down the machete, psycho.

21. You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here

Mysteries and endings. A tricky subject. My essential advice: answer all mysteries by the ending. Every last one of ’em. The audience wants those answers. The introduction of a mystery is an unofficial promise to answer that question. But. But! Sometimes, that’s just not in the cards. (See: Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid, which is a story as much about the subject of mystery as it is about the mysteries present in the story.) Sometimes it’s good to leave folks hanging on things. Because when you do that it’s like the book is still open. The story is ongoing. They remain a part of it — entrenched and unable to escape. MOO HOO HA HA HA. (But only savvy storytellers need apply!)

22. The Dangers Of The MacGuffin

Hitchcock rocked the MacGuffin — the MacGuffin being the mysterious-and-frankly-not-all-that-important-by-itself-item that drives the plot and urges the characters forward. The MacGuffin is a mystery potentially never answered and, if turned about in the hands of a clumsy muffinhead of a storyteller, it feels like what it ultimately is: artifice. Best way to think of a MacGuffin is not as a plot driver but rather as a focus point for the mysteries and conflicts and worst inclinations of the characters who seek it. It’s like a magnet for bad juju.

23. It’s The Reason Jaws Worked

A late-in-the-list sidenote: mystery is why Jaws worked. That robot shark was acting up, being an asshole, and they couldn’t use him like they wanted to. As such, the script called for a greater deal of mystery in the first and second acts — what the shark was, how big, what it could do, why it wanted to do it. Spielberg had to pull away which in turn left us with questions which in turn made us feel like scared little ninnies who suddenly became afraid to drop a flip-flop in a fucking puddle from that point forward. Mystery — unintentional as it was — made that movie.

24. “Guess What?”

That’s how the stories we tell to friends and loved ones and co-workers often begin, isn’t it? “Guess what?” We begin with a question. We lead with that — because that’s the fishhook in the cheek of the audience. And the way we tell the story is like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs — not whole loaves, just crumbs — for the listener to follow. We say things to get attention, to lead the audience in with us — “Man, Jenkins fucked up bad today!” — and the listener is all like “WHOA WHAT’D THAT ASSHOLE JENKINS DO NOW?” As Admiral Ackbar would say: “It’s a trap!” Oh, but what a wonderful trap storytelling is.

25. Bondage & Discipline

Being a storyteller like BDSM: you need to find a partner — in this case, the audience — who is willing to trust you with (and stick with me here) a complete lack of trust. They’re willing to say: “I trust that I can’t trust you,” and then they let you perform whatever deviant manipulations you care to visit upon body, heart and mind. Same thing with creating mystery in your story: mystery is one way you show the audience that they can’t trust you but, at the same time, that they trust in this implicit lack of trust. They know the questions you pose will be troubling. They know that the answers will have consequences they did not imagine. But they trust in you to answer these mysteries, to manipulate without making them feel manipulated, to not leave them hanging upside-down with a ball-gag in their mouth and a My Little Pony-branded buttplug up their… well, no need to be redundant. You and the audience have a contract (though no safe-word): they trust that you cannot be trusted. Mystery is one of the sexy tools on your sexy Bondage Batman tool-belt. What? You don’t have a sexy Bondage Batman tool-belt? Amateur.

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The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

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The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

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Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

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The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

1. The Story Is The Thing

“Publishing is on a collision course with the sun! Amazon has eaten all the books and shat them out as e-books! Development funds are drying up! Writers are shanking each other with Bic pens over a 1/4-cent-per-word!” Stop. Breathe. Refocus. Media companies will rise and fall. Technologies come and go. The story remains constant. More to the point, our need for stories remain constant. Storytellers and writers aren’t going anywhere. They may need to bend with the wind. They may need to find new ways to thrive. But they — we — will always have a place. The audience will be there. We just have to find them.

2. Old Stories, New Faces

As storytellers, we must adapt by adopting new ways of doing things — or, rather, new ways of telling stories. . The old roads may still work, but new paths through the jungle must be cut with our word-machetes. When you see a new piece of technology or social media, ask the question, “How can I use this to tell stories?” If you see a new publishing option (one that does not exploit the author), it’s wise to try it — if only to see if you can find new audience and a new vehicle by which to tell your tales.

3. Thrive, Don’t Survive

New models and new means open new ways for you to make a living by telling stories. That’s the goal, right? It’s certainly my goal. Yours might be, “Barely have enough to pay rent and buy myself a 9-pack of Ramen,” but I say, aim higher. Point is, if the old way isn’t giving you the living you need, you need to mix that shit up. Diversify. Feint right, then duck left — break free of the Conga line and do your own spasmodic seizure-dance on the Disco floor. You need to learn your own moves. Shake what your Momma gave you.

4. Embrace All Tools

In any career, it pays to learn all the tricks and tools of the trade. A carpenter doesn’t just know how to build chairs. A dominatrix doesn’t just know how to spank an upturned bottom or shove mascara brushes into pee-holes. A carpenter learns how to use the Laser-Nail 9009. A dominatrix learns how to build her own cat-of-nine-tails from the entrails of her gimp. (Okay, this is probably why I’m neither carpenter nor dominator.) Writers should learn tools old and new. Don’t just learn how to write a novel. Write short. Write long. Write scripts. Write games. Write blogs. Write creative non-fiction. Write psycho-vids for the HoloNet. Learn it all. Do it all. Stay relevant and diversify. The shark swims forward or he drowns. The monkey kills the monkey or the monkey doesn’t get the cupcake. Or something. Shut up.

5. The Myth Of The Perfect Path

Amazon is the savior! Amazon is a monster! The Big Six destroy authors! The Big Six will save publishing! Kickstarter! No, wait! Indiegogo! Love agents! Fuck agents! Hollywood rules! The studio system sucks balls! Brain! On fire! Fritzing out! Too many exclamation points! Too many opposing viewpoints! Can’t feel legs! Ahem. No perfect path exists. No one company or model is ideally suited to anybody and everybody. Amazon helps many. Amazon hurts others. Traditional publishing has fucked over some authors, and has unfucked just as many. No perfect path exists. We all choose which angels and devils to place upon our shoulders. Accept your nuanced and imperfect options.

6. Tribes Are Fucking Stupid

To build off that last point, tribes are fucking stupid. We create tribes to stroke our own egos, to confirm our choices to the world at large when we only need to confirm them to ourselves. Detonate your tribes. Destroy your cults. Tell your leaders you’re leaving for the secular life and if they fight you, bludgeon them with a femur and move along. Embrace a single inclusive tribe: the tribe of storyteller.

7. The Power In Clumsily Flailing About Like A Drunken Orangutan

Say “yes” more than you say “no.” Sometimes trying new things and learning new skills isn’t about a focused strategy or a well-meaning plus/minus pro/con list. You need to be savvy in business but you’re also a creative human being, goddamnit, and sometimes creativity is about wildly pirouetting and crashing into lamps and trying new things just because you got a bug up your ass to do it.

8. Your Work Has Value, So Claim Value For What You Do

Deny anybody who wants you to work for free. If you work for free, that’s something you do, not something someone asks of you — doubly true where they’re making money and you’re not. They might as well ask you to bend over and stick tennis balls up your poopchute for the pleasure of an audience without you getting even the benefit of a reach-around. Or health care. Or free tennis lessons! Stories have value. Storytellers have value. Anybody who says different should be thrown into a wood chipper and used for mulch.

9. Free Is Part Of A Strategy, Not The Whole Damn Strategy

That says it all but it bears unpacking: you can’t just give everything away and hope to thrive — or, frankly, even survive. You can give some stuff away. But don’t give it all away. Free is a zero sum, zero value game.

10. The Crass Reality Of “Monetization”

It’s an ugly word. “Monetization.” I gag a little when I say it. Whenever I hear it, a little trickle of blood oozes from my earholes. Just the same, storytellers need to eat, pay bills, support their deviant sexual habits, and that takes money, and that means you either work as a bag-boy and give your stories away for free or you find a way for your stories to help you make money. Sometimes that’s selling direct. Sometimes it’s a more circuitous path to the bill-paying and deviancy-having. Creativity without business sense will leave you starving. When you tell stories, ask the question (much as you may hate it): “How does this help me survive, and then thrive?”

11. The Internet Changed Everything

I’m not telling you something you don’t already know (and by the time you read this there will probably be something new, like, “THE MEMEGRID CHANGED EVERYTHING” or “THE NANO-BEES COLONIZED OUR STORY-PODS,” but fuck it, whaddya gonna do?), but I feel the need to remind storytellers that the Internet has made the tools of story creation and dissemination cheaper, easier, crazier, and farther-flung. Farther-flunger? Shut up. This is good in that it gives you and the audience greater connection, and troubling because it amps up competition and changes value. It is what it is. Take advantage.

12. Mother May I?

It’s time to stop asking for permission. Storytellers have been cast in a submissive role for a long time — “Please, Mistress, may I have another?” *WHACK* — and the worm is turning. Nobody’s doing you a favor by helping your story come to life. It’s not a treat placed on a dog’s nose while he waits patiently to chomp it down. This isn’t about killing gatekeepers so much as it is about redefining the gates. This isn’t about going DIY so much as it is about finding people — agents, editors, publishers, artists, other storytellers — who see you as a partner, not a peon. Symbiosis, not parasitism.

13. Bookstores Can Be Vital Places

This is not to say that new trumps old. That’s not the point. The point is, both exist, and both are likely to continue to exist. The real world — aka “meatspace,” aka “IRL,” aka “that place where I go to the grocery store and fondle overripe fruit” — is where people actually exist. And bookstores (and libraries, and movie theaters, and anywhere the audience gathers) still remain vital places. Reality trumps the digital space. Find ways to connect with the living, breathing audience. Leave room for those physical connections, which is not to say you should all be having some kind of author-audience orgy. I mean… y’know, unless you’re into that. *takes off pants, gently strokes mushy cantaloupe while moaning*

14. Speaking Of The Orgy

You can’t do this alone. Don’t think you can. Don’t think you can exist without some combination of partners, editors, artists, producers, agents, liaisons, lion-tamers, bee-wranglers, tweeters, whiskey procurement agents, sandwich-preparation-techs, and fluffers.

15. Other Writers Matter

Other writers are as crazy as you are, and trust me, I’ve seen what you do. (For the love of all that’s sacred, cover up those crotchless Naugahyde trousers. And put down the river otter.) Just the same, community in the writer’s world is key. Writers help writers. Storytellers help storytellers. They’re not competition. They’re partners. Cohorts. Drinking buddies. Folks who know how to properly dissolve a dead body.

16. The Audience Is More Active Than Ever

When fire touches water, the molecules go all batty and twitchy and that’s how water boils. The audience is the water, and they’re set to boil. The audience is an active element. They tweet, blog, post to Facebook, email the author, and create a generous (and alarmingly fast) feedback loop. And they’ll do you one better: prime movers in that space will create fan-fiction or involve themselves in the story in a big way. Open your door to the audience. Join the feedback loop. Get shut of notions of creative integrity and leave room for audience engagement, collaboration, and emergence.

17. Oh, And By The Way, You Need That Audience

Some creators treat their audience like an enemy. Do that and you’re dead. They’ll gut you like a fucking fish and stick a grenade where your heart used to be. The audience is the most important team member in any storyteller’s crew. Without the audience, you’re just a naked weirdo screaming at himself in the mirror.

18. Your Work Won’t Be For Everyone

The audience isn’t total. The audience is more and more fractured these days, like a hunk of hard toffee broken into pieces. But that’s okay. Smaller audiences are often more invested ones, creating a more vibrant ecosystem for creators. The age of the rockstar is fading, and that’s true across most of the artistic spectrum. But the death of the icon doesn’t mean the whole thing is going to collapse. When the big fish dies, the little fish can fill the space. You may not get to be Stephen King, but you can be a storyteller who makes a living — a good living — doing what he loves to do, and there is perhaps no more perfect thing than that.

19. It Puts The Word In The Mouth Or It Gets The Hose Again

Word of mouth is still the best driver for stories — it is the infection vector we all use and desire. But it’s changed. The Internet has widened the mouth so it can accommodate more words — our “circle of trust” has grown significantly bigger with the advent of social media. It’s no longer just the 10 people we hang out with at work or the bar. It’s the 100 people on Twitter, the 1000 on Facebook, the blogs and reviews we read.

20. Piracy Is Not Theft

A controversial point, but I want to put it out there: piracy, good or bad, is not theft. It is perhaps a kind of parasitism? Combat it where you can, find value in it where you can’t. Which leads me to…

21. You Can’t Control The Tides

Some forces lay outside an author’s control. You may be able to change some small things here and there, and you can certainly find new paths — but just the same, elements of this life will always be outside your control. Whether we’re talking e-book pricing or piracy or audience interest or Amazon or publishers or whether or not there are viral YouTube videos of me randily humping fruit at your local grocery store, some things are outside your control. When that’s the case, you can either go with the waves or walk away from the beach, but standing there and yelling at the tides will do you little good.

22. Be Generative

Do. Don’t just talk about it. Or think about it. Or play pretend. Put yourself out there. Tell stories. Lots of them. Learn the skill. Harness your talent. To be creative is to create. It’s all on you, motherfucker.

23. Storytelling And Writing Are Two Different Skills

I’ve said it before but I like it so much I plan on keep shoehorning it into your brain-hole: writing and storytelling are two different skills that feed off one another — a Yin and Yang, a pair of snakes biting each other’s tail. You must know the art of the story and the craft of communicating that story. One without the other is like a two-legged pony, dragging himself around all sad-ass, the most griefstruck pony in the world. Also, “Griefstruck Pony” was my nickname in the Crips. Or was it the Bloods? Whatever.

24. Maybe Time To Call Yourself A Storyteller?

I’m wondering if “storyteller” is more versatile than “writer?” Of course, it’s also probably worth even less respect on the open respect market. Try telling someone you’re a “storyteller” and they probably think you dress up like a goof and tell stories to wandering children for mere tuppence. Just the same, it’s a good way to differentiate between “I write technical VCR repair manuals” and “I write stories for an engaged audience.” And it also doesn’t pin you to any one format, platform, or medium. Shit, I don’t know. By the time I get to item #24 on these lists I’m usually drunk and dizzy. My nude body covered in fruit guts. So. Y’know. Enjoy that visual. *high-five*

25. A Good Story Is Your Best Defense

Your best defense against changing conditions and an uncertain environment is a good story. Book, comic, movie, game, cartoon, cave-based pictographs, whatever. By being capable and crafty, by being generative and progressive, by knowing how to do that thing you do, you insulate yourself from the chaos of the industry. The audience will always be there. The story matters to them, and they matter to you.

Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

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

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The day has come.

Blackbirds hits shelves — online and off — today.

I feel like a great big hand has reached into my chest and pulled something out of me. In a good way. Like, “Oh, hey, those chest pains you were feeling? Your keys were lodged in your aorta.” *jingle jingle*

So, let’s get this out of the way up front: I hope you’ll consider nabbing a copy today. This book is my baby. I mean, okay, my baby is my baby, but this is my book baby. A seriously disturbed, very fucked-up, hopefully hilarious and also sweet (in its own sick way) book baby. Your procurement options are as follows:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (UK)

Barnes & Noble

Indiebound

Hopefully you’ll take a chance on the book. Hopefully you’ll see that all the writing-related gobbledygook I talk about here ideally — ideally — stacks up and comes from and went into writing this story and character.

In the meantime, I figured I’d cobble together a “list of 25” orbiting the book and talking about what I learned through writing it, submitting it, and publishing it. Please to enjoy.

1. Bleed On The Page

Give it your all and put it out there. This is your book. This matters. Story matters. And it has to matter to you first before it matters to anybody else. Don’t be milquetoast about it. Don’t just spit and piss on the page. Blow a hole in your chest with a booger-glob of C4 and grab your heart from within the bone-splinter wreckage and squeeze it like a sponge over the tale you’re telling. Blackbirds is me in many ways — it’s about my fear of death, my need for control, my love of profanity, my frailties and foibles and weirdnesses. It features places I’ve been, things I’ve seen, and dreams I’ve had. It made it easier to write. It made it so that it mattered to me.

2. Your First Novel Usually Ain’t

My backyard is a cemetery of muddy dirt mounts and unlabeled stone graves, in each a novel I never finished or a novel I did finish which likely sucked a big bucket of pickled undead monkey balls. They were all practice drills leading up to the big fight, baby. Lessons learned, pitfalls identified, characters and ideas stolen from myself. Blackbirds is my debut original novel, but it damn sure isn’t the first one I wrote. It’s just the first one that mattered. It’s the first one that deserved to live.

3. The Flywheel Of Story, The Gearwidget Of Writing

I wrote Blackbirds a buncha times. And it never quite worked and I didn’t know why. I know why now: storytelling and writing are two different skills. When I first wrote Blackbirds (and all the dead forgotten books before it), I knew I could write. The writing was fine. Capable. Occasionally even good. But the story was — nyyeaah, bleargh, barf noise, gag sound. It didn’t hang together. It didn’t have shape — it was like a bunch of wilted half-erect man-wangs lashed together with fraying bungee cord and left to float (and then sink) in a rusted wash-tub. I learned soon the obvious truth to which I was oblivious was that the mechanics of story and the mechanics of writing are two separate machines. They fit together. So learn both.

4. Completo El Poopo, Motherfucker

The first many iterations of Blackbirds lay unfinished. (Back then, the book didn’t even have a title, though I sometimes called it Vultures.) The book isn’t real until it’s done. It’s perhaps the most important lesson: before you can do anything else, before you rewrite, edit, query, publish, whatever, you have to finish your shit. Nobody wants to shake hands with your wrist-stump of a story. *spurt spurt spurt*

5. You Gotta Write For The Movies, Kid

Novelists can learn from screenwriters. I would not have finished Blackbirds if it was not for workshopping the pre-existing mess of a story as a screenplay through a year-long mentorship. It comes back to that thing I was talking about earlier, how writing and storytelling are two separate skills? Well, screenwriting focuses more strongly on storytelling than writing — and in writing a screenplay, you start to see the bones of the story and how they can be arranged to form whatever skeleton you want. I don’t mean that novels are equal to screenplays: each is a format deserving of its own features and bugs. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a bucket of stuff to learn from each format.

6. Language Holds Hands With Action And They Traipse Along La-La-La

Writing and storytelling may be two separate skills, but they still are two funky-toothed gears that fit together and spin one another. Language should reflect the story you’re telling. As the story moves into a languid space, so does the language stretch out, fill the sails with oxygen. As the story tightens into a fight scene or a scene or some tension, the language can tighten, too — sentences that are short and sharp and simple: a prison shiv of story delivery. *stab stab stab*

7. The Power Of Present Tense

Blackbirds is the first time I thought of tense as a meaningful choice. Everything I’d written before that defaulted to the past — in fact, the earliest drafts of Blackbirds were that way. But screenwriting is present tense and in writing Miriam Black’s story in that mode, I found that tense gave me two things. First, present tense makes a story feel more urgent, more present not just in the sense of time but in the sense of place. Second, and building from that, that was appropriate to Miriam’s story: Miriam is an agent of free will in a world of fate. Tense here for me was able to do double-duty and reflect the themes at hand — past tense would be an assumption of fate (“it has already been written”) while present tense reflected Miriam’s free will (“it has not been written and, in fact, is being written right now as you watch”).

8. The Outline Is The Thing

I hate outlining. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate it with a syphilitic burning, I hate it like I hate eggplant or pageant moms or really big potholes. And for a very long time I refused to do it. I was an artist, thank you. My story was a living, liquid thing. It could not be contained by an outline. The outline was a prison: lock my story away in a preliminary outline and it would go on hunger strike until it was a withered, quivering thing sitting in its own mess. All this I proudly proclaimed upon my throne of shitty incomplete manuscripts. Eventually, my screenwriting mentor said: “You need to outline because you need to outline so just shut up and outline.” And I groused and grumbled and fought my captors and then finally rolled over and outlined. And the plot presented itself like a beautiful vagina made of gold-leaf and pegasus dreams. Or something. Point being, it solved the problem I was having. Blackbirds would fail to exist if not for this lesson. I am a pantser by heart. A plotter by necessity.

9. To Fix It, You Must First Break It

I had several incomplete versions of Blackbirds. What it took to fix it was — after all that outlining, after all that screenwriting — to blow up everything I had and start over. The versions that existed were kludgy and clogged with old panties and eyeless teddy bears. Sometimes to fix a broken pipe, duct tape won’t do. You gotta rip that shit out. You gotta put in new pipe. I destroyed Blackbirds to save Blackbirds.

10. The Characters Carry The Book On Their Backs

This is a lesson I’ll repeat until I am dead in the ground (or until I change my mind, I guess) — Plot is like Soylent Green: it’s made of people. Miriam Black and the characters who surround her shape the story and the plot. The story and plot do not shape the characters. A plot is, at the end of the day, the motivations of many characters pushing on one another, birthing a conflict that forms a gauntlet for the audience to walk. Miriam Black, as an agent of fate, of chaos, of warring selfishness and selflessness, pushes on the story.

11. The Key To Unlikable Characters

You can make the most unlikable character in the world as long as she’s fun or compelling to watch. I’ve heard from many that one of the most vile characters in the book — the assassin Harriet — really grabbed them by the lapels and, in some cases, actually aroused sympathy despite being a total fucking monster. I hated her, but loved to write her, loved to watch her work.

12. The Empathetic Psychomemetic Soul Bridge

HERE HAVE SOME MORE ACID DUDE. Okay, not so much with the acid? Fine. I tried to find in all the characters a connection to myself — not always a part reflective of me but an empathy. Not a sympathy, but a thing where I can look at that character and, as the Devil’s own advocate say, “I get this character, I grok their voodoo, I see why they are the way they are for better or for worse.” I have strong feelings for some of these characters; they’re not just mechanical exercises, not just ink on a page. Me loving to write these characters ideally translates into you loving to read them. I hope.

13. Write What You Want To Read

Life’s too short and novels are too long to waste time writing stuff for other people. Write the story you want to write. Not least of all because your passion for what’s on the page will bleed sticky onto the reader’s hands. It’s just one more reason to not chase trends — write what gets you geeked.

14. The Pitch Is A Bitch (But You Gotta Do It)

Remember how I said I hate writing outlines? I hate writing queries more. It’s like, “I just spent years of my life writing this goddamn novel and now you want me to take the whole thing and condense 300 pages down to one? MY BRAIN IS BURNING.” But fuck it, you gotta do it. Even self-publishers have to write an Amazon description, and trust me, the vibe is the same. In fact, there’s my query secret: don’t think about writing a query, pretend you’re writing the back jacket marketing copy for the book. It works.

15. Some Agents Are Kinda Douchey

Many — perhaps most — agents are really cool humans. Some are not and have earned the reputation that agents have, as prickly gatekeepers guarding the gates of Eden with a flaming book stamp that says FUCK NO. I received some very nice rejections and some very cool interest from different agents. I also received a helluva lot of No Responses At All (and several that came to me six months or more after the fact), and I received a few agents that straight-up jerked my chain. They were cagey, hard to get responses from, made me feel like a cat chasing a laser pointer. They ask for professionalism, then don’t offer it in return.

16. Your Agent Needs To Dig Your Vibe, Wordomancer

I knew I had my agent — Uber-Ultra-Super-Agent-Queen Stacia Decker — because she got it. She totally understood Blackbirds. Loved the character. Had the right ideas for it. And she was fast with her interest and professional in her communication and she loves bacon and has dogs and has a twisted sense about her. Done and done. I occasionally hear horror stories from other authors where their agent doesn’t really talk to them or seems to represent only the book but not the author (or worse the publisher over the author), and I’m hella glad I don’t have any of those problems.

17. The Value Of Trodding The Old Roads

I believe authors thrive on a hybrid approach to publishing. Blackbirds walks the “traditional” path, and I’m glad for it. It’s not always about straight-up cash (though I’m happy there, too) — it’s also about the opportunities afforded to trad-pub authors. Would I have that kick-ass cover by Joey Hi-Fi? I would not. Would I have gotten the passel of great early reviews? Mmmnope. Would I have a shot at awards or foreign rights or be able to talk to agents and film companies in Los Angeles about the story? Not likely.

18. The Old Roads Are Long, Though

From the time of procuring an agent to the time of publication, you’re looking at a very long road. A year would be a fairly short margin. With Blackbirds, we’re looking at… two-and-a-half years? Something like that. It’s a slow, long line to the front. Now, a few things: in that time, the book was refined, made better. But I also didn’t sit on my asscheeks, eating Cheetos and watching marathons of 16 and Pregnant. I wrote other stuff. And some of that I self-published, and that stuff created energy for Blackbirds, and Blackbirds in turn creates energy for those things.

19. Surf The Tsunami Of Rejection

Rejection is a temporary state. Blackbirds went through a helluva lot of it, from agents, from publishers. I’m not saying that with persistence, every book will find a home. Some books are dead dogs — they won’t ever roll over. But as an author, persistence and practice will eventually carry you beyond the margins of rejection. It’ll drive you to the brink of madness. Just don’t let it push you over.

20. A Team Of Robot Ninjas Is Better Than An Army Of Tanks

Angry Robot Books are the fine metal lords and ladies publishing Blackbirds. Couldn’t be happier. They’re small. Versatile. Author-friendly. And willing to take risks. It’s that last one that matters most for me: Blackbirds played host to an unholy number of rejections, many of them orbiting the same theme: “I love it,” the editor would write, “but I can’t get it past our marketing board, as they think it’ll never sell.”

21. Genre Is A Moving Target

What genre is Blackbirds? Fuck, I dunno. It’s got crime in it. It’s paranormal — or is it supernatural? A dollop of romance. Lot of blood. Buckets of mystery. Thrills and chills, I like to think. Angry Robot calls it urban fantasy. Some reviews call it horror, or noir (though I’m disappointed no one has mashed that up into “noirror,” as yet). The one genre I know it ain’t is science-fiction, I guess.

22. People Will Judge The Book By Its Cover

I won the cover lottery. And I hear from folks the cover is hooking them left and right. Now I have to hope that what’s inside the book measures up to the raw bad-assery on the cover. Uh-oh.

23. Pebbles Thrown In A Pond

Little things add up. I’ve heard from folks who came to the book via this blog, or Twitter, or Goodreads, or even the experimental death-themed Tumblr, “This Is How You Die.” You have to try something. Every attempt is a pebble in a pond — you never know how far the ripples might go.

24. The Sequel Is Harder And Easier All At The Same Time

It took me years to write Blackbirds. It took me 30 days to write the sequel, Mockingbird. Slipping back into Miriam is like wearing an old coat (whose goosedown feathers frequently stab you through the fabric), but you also grow paranoid: “Am I writing this one like the last one? I need to be similar, but different, but not so different that I lose people, but not so similar that it feels like the sequel to a different book and NURSE GET ME MY XANAX LOLLIPOP.”

25. I Can’t Feel My Legs

Writing — and querying, and publishing, and marketing, and loving, and hating — a book takes a lot out of you. It feels in some ways like a great gym workout, in other ways like a weird (not bad, not good) breakup. You’re left flapping in the wind, your little book-baby all-groweds-up, out in the world doing things without you. You can only hope the book doesn’t embarrass you.

Fly, little book. Fly.

And bring me money if you find any.

Let’s get this out of the way, now — this, like many/most of my other lists, could easily be called “25 Things I Think About Transmedia.” It does not attempt to purport concrete truths but rather, the things I believe about the subject at hand. I am something of an acolyte and practitioner in the transmedia cult, and sometimes give talks on the subject (as I will be doing next week in Los Angeles).

So, here I am, putting my transmedia ducks in a row.

Please to enjoy.

1. The Current Definition

The current and straightest-forwardest (not a word) definition of transmedia is when you take a single story or storyworld and break it apart like hard toffee so that each of its pieces can live across multiple formats. This definition features little nuance, but hey, fuck it. That’s why this list exists — to gather up the foamy bubbles of nuance and slurp them into our greedy info-hungry mouths.

2. The B-Word

Transmedia is, admittedly, kind of a buzz-word. And it’s not entirely new, though the Internet helped this flower bloom. But it’s a very charming buzzword, innit? It makes me feel like I’m from the future. “I have arrived in my temporal pod to uplift your species with the pop culture genetics of — I’ll say it slowly so you can absorb it — traaaansmeeeeedia. Stop shaking that femur around, monkey. Time to learn.” In the end, though, whether you call it transmedia or cross-media or new media or hybridized-story-pollination (HSP), it’s still just storytelling. Though it’s storytelling in a bigger, sometimes weirder, way.

3. Reality Coalesces Into A Story Carapace Around Our Soft Human Brains

The rise of any new or altered media form sees an awkward transitional period where everyone wants to define it. And that’s good, to a point — hell, what do you think I’m doing right now? Rules are starting to appear. Hard definitions. “Well, transmedia needs to be on X screens and across Y platforms and you need at least one robot.” (I just made the thing up about the robot, relax. Though, to be clear: ROBOTS IMPROVE ALL STORIES.) Part of me likes the Wild West nature of the thing, though, where transmedia exists in this state of flux, this uncertain haze where the rules are weak and the practitioners are hungry and the experiments come flying fast and frenzied. Also worth mentioning: the rules are not precisely agreed upon by all practitioners. My writing partner and I worked on a digital storytelling thing called Collapsus, and I have been told that it’s not strictly transmedia. (To which I shake my fist and say, “Fie, fie.”)

4. Still Gotta Give Good Story

Good storytelling is still good storytelling. Doesn’t matter how the story is being told. And this is where transmedia stops being a buzzword, ceases to be a gimmick — no matter what you call it, no matter how many screens you slap it on, no matter how experimental you choose to get, you still have to know the ins and outs of strong storytelling. You cannot and should not lean on the crutch of transmedia.

5. To My Woe, Strongly Marketing-Centric

Transmedia these days is strongly marketing-centric. Which, to me, as a storyteller, goes against the power of this thing. I want to tell stories, not sell widgets and dongles.

6. True Heart, False Face

I find that a lot of what people call “transmedia” fits the technical definition (as noted at the fore of the post) but fails to take into account what for me is more important: the philosophical definition. For me, what makes true transmedia unique and beyond the buzzword, past the gimmick, is when it carries two corollaries to that earlier definition: first, it offers audience investment and lets them act as collaborators; two, the story was intended to be a transmedia experiment from the very beginning.

7. Tree Versus The Forest

Stories are generally a single tree, sometimes grown by a single practitioner. But for me, the transmedia storyworld is far more fertile and compelling when seen as an entire forest growing up together at the same time. The forest for me is the perfect metaphor for transmedia — I live in the woods and I see how all these trees grow together, how some find light and others fail, how it’s all one big organic collision of life that thrives on organized chaos. You can certainly admire the forest for its individual pieces (“What a lovely elm,” or, “Those two squirrels seem to be having crazy methamphetamine sex on top of that turtle-shaped rock”), but you can also gaze out and see a much larger picture: the ecosystem. Therein lies the beauty and elegance — and yes, squirrel-banging chaos — of transmedia storytelling.

8. The Crass Retrofit

A lot of what I see bandied about as transmedia really isn’t. Not for me. It’s not taking one successful property and then staple-gunning other stories — or worse, a re-hash of the original story, where someone makes a video game out of a film or a film out of a comic book or a best-selling erotic novel out of a Denny’s menu — to the original. What Marvel is doing with their film series? Ehh. Not transmedia. It smells of transmedia. And it’s very cool stuff. But Marvel didn’t start out building a universe that was intended to thrive across multiple formats. They built one bulk comic book universe and then shopped it out so that the stories could be re-told across films and books and whatever. Further, the audience investment is minimal, if not zero. The audience has no hand in shaping the Marvel Universe.

9. Sometimes, You Gotta Let The Audience Drive The Dune Buggy

Here’s why transmedia storytellers need to put their auteur egos off to the side — because the audience needs to control a chunk of the action. This can be overt, where the audience is literally allowed control (or even provenance) over the narrative, and their input changes the entire experience. This can be covert, where audience investment helps to shape the output if not directly change it. But the audience must be part of the feedback loop — and in this increasing age of interactivity, the audience wants their slice.

10. Yes, Blah Blah Blah, Star Wars

I dig Star Wars and in transmedia you won’t be able to easily get away from it. The Star Wars Universe is generally transmedia-flavored. Lucas and his phalanx of creators built together a strongly-connected and well-defended universe that crossed a metric jizz-load of media properties. You could argue for audience investment across games and toys (though there I’d argue it’s weak on the transmedia front). As to why this is more transmedia and the Marvel Universe is less transmedia, well, that’s a whole other post.

11. Your God Is My Alternate Reality

You want to look farther back than Star Wars, well, look no further than religion. Like, any of it. Multiple stories and characters across a storyworld that crosses multiple platforms (books, oral tradition, friezes, scrawled on the backs of temple eunuchs) and is profoundly affects and is in turn affected by its audience? George Lucas ain’t got shit on the entire breadth and depth of religion. Religion is transmedia.

12. The Ejaculation Of Game DNA

Shine that UV light over these transmedia bedsheets, and you’ll find many stains shaped like space invaders or puzzle ciphers — that’s because transmedia often absorbs DNA from games. That’s not to say transmedia requires a game-based component, only that games offer philosophical components that other stories do not. Games are active, not passive. Games demand something from the audience. Games are fun, exploratory, experiential. Most traditional narratives do not offer these things: reading a book is passive. Watching a movie demands nothing of me and my input doesn’t do dick. There’s little that’s exploratory or experiential about watching TV. But that changes with transmedia storytelling. The game-ist DNA runs rampant — a virulent thread of chaotic delight. (Some of this comes from the fact that ARGs — Alternate Reality Games — serve as a springboard for transmedia endeavors.)

13. But Please Don’t Say The Word “Gamification”

This probably doesn’t deserve its own list item but fuck it, it’s my list and I’ll rant if I want to. I hate that word: “gamification.” I like games. I like to play. I like putting game elements into play where appropriate. But gamification often relies on shoddy collection mechanics to beef up an already un-fun idea. “We just gamified your gynecology appointment! You just got seven cervical coins! Ding. You’re now mayor of vagina-town! You just collected the Speculum Is Colder Than An Ice Cube In A Yeti’s Mouth badge!”

14. The Word I Like: “Emergence”

I’m starting to feel that the success of a given transmedia project lives or dies on how much emergence it affords — emergent gameplay being unexpected or unintended game interaction, and emergent narrative being stories growing out of the experience that you did not plan for or anticipate (and note that both are strongly driven by audience). You cannot demand or force emergence, but I think you can cultivate it by leaving room for it, by designing aspects that cede  authorial control (or some portion of it) to those who are participating in your story. It also may work if you just hand out buckets of hallucinogens.

15. You Can Lead A Horse To Water But Can’t Make Him Tweet About It

More to the point, you can’t ever force participation. A portion of the audience — perhaps a large portion — will never want to engage with a property beyond a cursorily active (or entirely passive) experience. They just don’t operate that way. Games change this to a point, in that audiences are getting used to feeling handsy with narrative (hello, Bioware). What this means is, you leave room for collaboration, but let the audience walk through the door. They won’t all walk through, because some are just here for the show.

16. The Perfect World Scenario

My perfect world scenario for any transmedia experience is that my path =/= your path. What I experience in the storyworld is not precisely the same as what anybody else experiences. I want to be telling someone about the story and I want them to be surprised that I was able to interact with the T-Rex, or that the painting on the wall of the Hyperborean Castle was one I actually painted.

17. Faster, Transmediacat, Kill, Kill!

It’s probably worth a note that pacing in transmedia is a different animal. Everything moves a little more quickly — the oxygen that the novel or even screenplay format allow is now potentially provided by the audience and by the gaps in their experience. I don’t think this is universal, and I think you could still tell a slower, more relaxed story through transmedia, but I suspect it’ll be trickier. I also suspect that my neighbor is transmitting hate speech into my brain using a super-tweaked Flowbee. So. Um. Yeaaaah.

18. Bridges And Holes, Bridges And Holes

Transmedia relies on strong transitional elements — how do you move the audience across the many spaces? How do you remove obstacles? How do you get them to want to overcome the obstacles you’re incapable of removing? Story bridges and rabbit holes — places they can cross knowingly or spots they can fall into the narrative unexpectedly — are necessary components to the infrastructure.

19. Writer As Swiss Army Knife

The transmedia writer must be like the Swiss Army Knife. You are a many-tooled motherfucker. Screenwriting, game design, flash fiction, belt punch, compass, crack pipe, wakizashi, and so on.

20. Cheap As Free

The perception of transmedia storytelling is that it’s expensive. And it can be. But it doesn’t have to be. The Internet has made content delivery easy as Sunday morning. A great many tools are free — ask Jay Bushman how an entire story can be told over Twitter. Many tools you already possess — like, say, your phone — have content creation tools already built into them. (We’ve long passed the time when a phone is just a phone. Mine is made of nano-bots. It knits sweaters!) It’s getting cheaper, and maybe even easier.

21. Break Me Off A Piece

Audience investment needn’t be directly related to or buried in the actual narrative. Transmedia storytelling is a great place to break out the individual components of storytelling — idea, motif, theme, mood, plot, character — and highlight them in different ways across different platforms. This Is How You Die, related to my novel Blackbirds, explores the themes and ideas of the novel without changing the novel.

22. The Cast Is All Here

Transmedia is like any grotto carved out of pop culture — you have visionaries, cult leaders (and their cultists), craftsmen, auteurs, skeptics, critics, haters, weirdos, shamans, fixers, and so on, and so forth. Worth realizing, though: it’s a fairly small community. And a lot of really awesome work is being produced at all levels. (If you’re so inclined, recommend some in the comments.)

23. The Hoax Is Over

Hoaxing has been a way into transmedia: tricking people into believing something is real or genuine when in reality it’s, er, not in reality at all. I kinda feel like maybe the “hoax” component is done, kaput, pbbbt. This is also a good time to mention you should be checking out Andrea Phillips. Behold: “Cautionary Tales in Transmedia Storytelling.” She’s also got a book out soon: “A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling.”

24. Not Every Story Requires It

Transmedia isn’t a big pop culture Snuggie. It is not one size fits all. Some stories just don’t demand that kind of treatment. They’re better off as single-serving entities — book, film, show, comic, deranged hallucination, Scientology pamphlet, whatever. But on the other end of the coin, transmedia isn’t a genre-only thing. I mean, it often is in practice. But it shouldn’t be. And it doesn’t have to be.

25. You Won’t Know Until You Try It

Go. Splash around in the transmedia pool. Look at what’s been done. Find transmedia creators and pick their brains (they’re a surprisingly accessible group and the community aspect is strong right now). Think about the stories you’re planning on telling — could any of them be told this way?

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