General

How the MEMO Method Ruined My Life and Turned Me into a Writer and Book Lover

Author: March 21, 2023 0 Comments

I was supposed to be entering the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, dammit.

I had a normal childhood, at first: My brother, Yan,1 and I would cover the living room with plastic army men and engage in complex war games that always ended with Godzilla decimating entire battlefields2. I played a series of complex games with the other urchins of my neighborhood, each with fluid rules, some of which have not, technically, ended yet. And I dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Or a magician, if that didn’t work out; it seemed likely that the skills were pretty transferable.

A few years later, everything had changed. Suddenly, I was a pudgy kid in enormous glasses who had the dexterity of a rock. Was it hormones? Dark magicks? The sudden, late-night realization of my mortality? Well, yes to that last one, but also, no, it was something else entirely: I was forced to read a book.

Minimum Effort

During that brief, happy period of my life when I was a skinny idiot who won every footrace he was challenged to on my block (and that’s a lot of footraces3), things came relatively easy to me. I independently developed the philosophy known as MEMO: Minimum Effort, Maximum Output. I approached every assignment and problem with the absolute minimum effort required to accomplish it. To this day I do not understand why people do more than the absolute minimum in any situation.

So when my teacher forced the entire class to walk six blocks to the local library and select a book we would then have to read and write a report about, I immediately knew what I would choose: A book of magic tricks. My reasoning was unassailable:

  1. Probably very few words.
  2. Probably a lot of pictures.
  3. It would simultaneously be training for my backup career4.

And then the plan went to hell and my life changed, because several months earlier I had watched The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe on television.

Maybe I should back up.

The Memory Hole

I am an old, old man5 and the world has changed a lot since my carefree youth. When I was a kid, television was terrible, but to compensate for this terribleness the universe had made it also very transient. There would be a truly terrible program—maybe an episode of The Love Boat, literally any episode—and it would make the world a worse, dumber place while it was airing6. But then it would be over, and it would be gone, because back then there was no recording. No VCRs, no DVRs, no cloud storage, no Internet. You watched a show, it ended, and that was it. Some shows were re-broadcast, but not everything, and not reliably.

There was an animated adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe on TV and I was transfixed. And then it was over and I returned to my regular schedule of eating crayons to see if my poop turned colors7. And then I was herded into a library to select a book to read, and there was The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Being something of an idiot, it had never occurred to me that TV shows might be based on something like a book. I was stunned, and for the first time in my young life, I wanted to read a book.

I took all seven Narnia books out, read them all, and then read them again. I repeated this process over and over again, staying up late under the covers to read by flashlight, my hair turning white, my eyes failing, my desire to learn how to throw a curveball fading. Instead of learning how to find quarters behind people’s ears—a skill that would have set me up for life—I started writing my own stories. A skill which has not set me up for life8.

Now here I am, a Gollum-like creature who hisses at the sun and spends his days in the glow of a screen, writing stories and novels and self-serving essays that make me—and likely no one else—giggle in a very unattractive manner. And it’s all because I was forced to read a book. I may sue.

Bullshit, General, Writing

When Description becomes a Delaying Tactic

Author: May 30, 2018 0 Comments

WE’VE all probably read at least one of those lengthy old classic novels where the author spends copious amounts of verbiage describing things—endless rafts of detail. You read something like Swann’s Way, for example, where the intense detail-drenched description is part of the whole point, and you think, well, why not me?

Every young writer goes through a phase of insane, intense wordiness; it’s part of either trying on different writing personas like hats or simply experimenting with different approaches. I know that even in my dotage when I read an exciting new writer I often find myself mimicking their style and stealing their tricks. Eventually it all gets sanded down into your style (hopefully), the individual bits lost.

Except sometimes things become bad habits. Like excessive description; if it’s part of your style, if it’s purposeful, that’s fine. Just be careful that you’re not spending 10,000 words describing how the room smells because you’re not sure how to move forward.

Spin Those Wheels

We all have tricks that we use when we get stuck. Whether you’re a Pantser who gets caught without any clue how to get your character out of the locked room you’ve put them in, or a Plotter who has suddenly realized that your genius plot twist in Chapter 23 makes zero sense, we all get stuck and hit a wall from time to time. And sometimes that means you have a choice: You can just stop dead while your underbrain works it all out, or you can just keep writing nonsense in the hope that the physical act of pouring words onto the page will shake something loose.

And this can work, it’s true. Sometimes when you get stuck, just going ham on describing everything in minute detail can get you moving. You just keep disgorging words until something shakes loose.

But you have to do this thoughtfully. Don’t get confused and think that this sort of mindless automatic writing is good—it might be, but don’t assume it is. Sometimes excessive description is just a way of filling up pages and keeping your fingers moving. Useful, sure, but not necessarily something you’re going to keep. Knowing when you’re just treading water like that is powerful. It means you’re completely in control of your writing.

Of course, maybe you are the sort of writer who spends 10,000 words on how the room smells. That’s fine, too. As long as it’s purposeful, as long as it’s intentional and wielded skillfully, it can work. You just need to be in control of it.

When I’m stuck I don’t dive into description, though. I usually just open a new bottle of Scotch and see what happens. Works every time.

General, Writing

Zine Training

Author: May 17, 2018 0 Comments

I’ve talked before about putting out a zine; I published The Inner Swine for nearly 20 years, 100,000 words a year broken into four annual issues (until the last few years, when exhaustion got the better of me). The zine was always a way of getting my thoughts and fiction into print when no one wanted to actually pay me to do so, and it was a lot of fun. It was also the best training I could have put myself through.

Blogging Before Blogging

The first issue of The Inner Swine came out in 1995. The Internet existed, of course, but it wasn’t what it is today—it was new and primitive and no one was really sure how it was all going to shake out. Twenty years before I started getting paid to write 500-word blog posts, I was coming up with short, pithy articles for my zine on a wide variety of subjects (many of which I was 100% completely unqualified to write about; circa-2000 Jeff certainly thought he was smart enough to expound on any subject or point of view, no matter how distant he was from it in reality).

By the time I launched a freelance writing career, I’d already trained myself to come up with pitches and article ideas, then develop those ideas into short articles. Without realizing it, my zine prepared me for my future career as a professional writer.

Rules Before Rules

More importantly, I think, Writing Without Rules is kind of like a very special issue of my zine. It’s structure pretty much the same way and uses a similar writing style; every issue of The Inner Swine used to be centered on a specific theme, and I even did one or two writing-themed issues. In a lot of ways, WWR is a super-sized issue of The Inner Swine if it had a writing theme in the 21st century.

All of this is to say that no writing is truly valueless. Even if you’re not getting paid, or you have a small audience, every word you thoughtfully put down on the page or screen pays a small dividend, even if only in the sense of training yourself to write more effectively, efficiently, and energetically. When I got into a groove putting out four issues of a zine every year in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I had no idea I’d someday publish a book on writing. But nevertheless, The Inner Swine trained me to be able to do so.

It also trained me to be unaffected by negative criticism, because man that zine got some hate mail.

 

General, Writing, zines

The Aftermath

Author: May 9, 2018 1 Comment

Writing novels ain’t easy. Heck, writing short stories ain’t easy. Well, in some senses it’s easy; sometimes having an idea is the easiest thing in the world, and even whole sections can fly off your fingers so fast and perfect it seems like you should be able to write, like, a dozen novels a month. Maybe more.

Ah, but then—as every writer knows—comes the doldrums, those slow times when not only can’t you seem to get the words right, you also can’t seem to even have an idea. Everything feels leaden and dead and the idea that you might ever write a complete story again seems depressingly ludicrous.

For those moments, I recommend drinking heavily. Actually, drinking heavily is my go-to medicine for just about any writing-related, but especially those horrible moments when it seems like your Muse has abandoned you.

There’s another horrifying moment for writers, one that gets a lot less attention than the big bad Writer’s Block. It’s the sudden downturn in energy and productivity that sometimes follows completing a major project—The Aftermath of a novel can be brutal. I should know, I didn’t just complete one novel, I completed two, as well as a short story. And I crashed hard.

The Come Down

I wrote several novels over the last 2 years—four of them, to be exact. Two weren’t quite great (and one of those I managed to pare down to a short story that contains the essentials, leading me to believe that I was way over-padding that premise). But two are very good, in my not-so objective opinion. I worked on them concurrently for the last few months, jumping back and forth between them. And when I finished them, very close to each other, I was very happy with the results.

Since then I’ve been … well, struggling’s not the right word. It’s been slow, though. I don’t have a big project in mind, and the smaller pieces I’m working on aren’t exactly pouring out of me.

I’ll get there, I always do. And that’s what’s necessary in these moments: Faith in yourself, in your own idea machine. You have to remind yourself that the tens of millions of words you’ve written over the course of your life (or the thousands, or the hundreds) all came after periods of struggle. It happens, it’s not a big deal, and it will pass.

Aside from, you guessed it, drinking heavily, my antidote to this crash is to work on as many short projects as possible. Short stories can get a lot of half-baked ideas out of your head—some of which might become fully-baked with a little time and effort—and keep your fingers moving until your lizard brain shrugs off the malaise and gets cranking again. When that happens, you want to be ready. Although the drinking never hurts either.

General, Writing

Decentralizing a Novel

Author: May 3, 2018 0 Comments

Writing is a glorious creative adventure wherein your imagination is free to roam infinite universes, but it’s also a craft and a skill. As the latter, sometimes it can get a bit … well, boring‘s not the right word. Familiar, maybe? The first time you pull off some literary trick it’s exciting. When you’ve written 600 short stories and twenty-five novels, some of your own bag of tricks get a little been-there, if you know what I mean.

Shaking things up is necessary from time to time. Working in a new, unfamiliar genre, or changing up your process can be remedies to a certain malaise that can set in. I’ve always been mystified by writers who act like their process is somehow an unchangeable fact of the universe, as if changing the schedule and mechanics of their writing will somehow result in disaster. I myself get into deep, comfy ruts when it comes to schedule and mechanics, but I also try to occasionally challenge myself and get out of that comfort zone—like writing a novel as a series of novellas, for example. Recently, I find myself contemplating a decentralized style of writing a novel.

Literally Linear

I’m usually a pretty linear writer; even when my story jumps around in time or is otherwise complex, I start at the beginning of my story and proceed A—Z from there in the order that I conceive of the story. That’s how my brain works, so that’s how I write.

I have an idea for a novel right now that’s going to involve a frame story of sorts and then some individual episodes. Normally, as I said, I would start at the beginning and just go forward from there, but this time, for whatever reason, I want to try something different, so I’m going to just randomly write sections of the book until I’m done. Instead of starting with what would be Chapter 1 and moving forward linearly, I’m going to maybe start by writing Chapter 14, then Chapter 20, and so on.

Why? Why not? But mainly I want to keep things fresh and try something new. There’s such low stakes with little tricks like this, there’s almost zero reason not to try things once in a while in an effort to shake up your own complacency. Worst case scenario? I give up and restart with a more traditional approach to process. Or maybe I go insane and start wandering the neighborhood in a robe, muttering to myself … more often.

General, Writing

Gettin’ Fancy

Author: May 1, 2018 0 Comments

When I was in college, I once wrote a short story entirely in crayon. This was most likely because I was bored, but there was a story reason for the choice that I can’t recall (just as I can’t recall what the story itself was about, and I lack sufficient energy and motivation to dig it out of my files to find out), some sort of color theme. It’s one of the few times in my career I’ve tried to play around with the presentation of a story as opposed to relying on the words themselves to carry whatever message I’m trying to convey. Although I do have certain private peccadillos (only writing short stories in longhand, only using a blue pen) when it comes to publishing my work I don’t like to rely on font or design choices to carry anything, because those can be lost or misinterpreted. When the superadvanced roach species that rules this planet in the future finds my work (and they will), I don’t want half the point lost because they don’t have Comic Sans loaded on their futuristic devices.

It’s Not a Rule, Though

I’m currently reading a novel that does rely on a lot of design work and special fonts, and it’s not working for me. For one thing, the special fonts are distracting; one is meant to resemble handwriting, but the perfect repetition of the letter forms betrays it and spikes me out of the narrative. For another, the special, heavily-designed sections meant to resemble specific modes of writing, time periods, and other aspects of the story are just kind of useless.

Your mileage may vary, of course; anything can be pulled off in a novel or story, it just requires that you have the talent and vision to do so. For example, I love House of Leaves despite (or perhaps because of) it’s use of font shenanigans and specific design choices. And would I love Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tail—which I named my blog after!—if it wasn’t so meticulously laid out?

Still, for myself, I’m a purist. I’d like to think I can convey anything I need to simply through my control of the language. And I kind of feel like that’s definitely where you should start, even if you do end up utilizing some font shenanigans or other design wankery to get a certain effect. All of your work should be design-indifferent, utlimately, in my opinion, with the frills added on later. I stick with italics for anything that’s not part of the main narrative, and if you’re confused after reading one of my stories, then it’s not the fault of the design or the font choices, but rather of my writing.

But then, what do I know? Depends who you ask. The Duchess will tell you I have some knowledge of housekeeping, but not much else. And she will go on at length on this subject, too, so clear some time.

General, Writing

Submissions: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Author: April 25, 2018 0 Comments

When describing what it’s like to make money from creativity, I often like to refer to the TV show Mad Men because of the way it depicted resident creative genius Don Draper. In a nutshell, Draper was often shown napping in his office, sneaking out to a movie (or a date) in the afternoons, drinking excessively, and otherwise goofing off.

In short, there’s a lot of blank space in a creative life. When 90% of the work is mental, it can be hard for other folks to understand what you’re doing if you’re not madly typing constantly.

If that blank space is mystifying to other people, it can be downright terrifying to a writer; it usually follows months or years of intense effort, and then you send off your project—to a magazine, web site, publisher, agent, or beta reader—and enter into the Blank Space portion of your writing life. In short, one of the most difficult aspects of a writing career (as opposed to actually just doing the writing) is the waiting game that ensues after you submit something. You can drive yourself crazy interpreting silence. The best thing to do, in my experience, is to not think about submissions at all.

Set It and Forget It

I send off a lot of submissions every year, both on my own (short stories and novellas to contests, anthologies, and magazines) and to or via my agent. And it’s always the same: There’s a ton of work that goes into thew writing, revising, and preparation of the story or book, and then there’s a ton of work that goes into preparing the submission itself—cover letters, synopses, proposals, etc.

And then: Nothing. The Blank Space.

The only thing to do is put it out of your mind. Forget all about it. Jump to the next project or take some time off, whatever you prefer, but don’t waste time thinking about what you just sent off. You can’t affect the odds now, what’s done is done. And the universe is not taking note of the amount of mental energy you’re pouring into the submission, so there’s nothing to be gained by going over it in your head, or worrying over what the delay or speed of a response means. Put it out of your mind and move on to the next thing so that the rejection or acceptance that comes down the pike will be a surprise, pleasant or otherwise.

Of course, there’s a downside to this: I often completely forget about submissions altogether, and thirteen months later I suddenly notice an open sub in my records and then realize I’ve accidentally simultaneously-submitted that story a dozen times. Or forgotten to follow up at all. Because when you’ve got a sieve-like memory, sometimes Blank Space is all you have.

career, General, Writing

Curing the End of Book Blues

Author: April 19, 2018 0 Comments

Something that doesn’t get discussed a lot in the conversation about writing (and selling and marketing) stories is what happens when you finish something. Writers put so much energy into a novel, so many months or years of effort, so many restless night worrying over plot points and pondering why a character doesn’t seem to be gelling the story, that finishing a novel is sometimes more of a crawl over the finish line as opposed to a triumphant sprint.

Putting that kind of mental energy into a project means that for many writers there’s a crash after you’re done, a creative hangover of sorts that can knock you off your game for a long time.

Out of the Groove

For me, part of it is that by the time I get to the final act of a novel I’ve become really familiar and comfortable with the universe I’ve created and the characters I’ve filled it with. There’s a great deal of pleasure when you’re totally in control of a story. You’ve solved all your plot problems, you’re so familiar with your characters it’s like they’re real people to you, and everything becomes, at the end, effortless.

Then you finish. And you’re suddenly faced with the monumental task of starting over, from scratch. And the idea is simply exhausting. Even if you have a great idea you want to develop, actually, you know, developing it seems like lifting a building over your head.

Worse, of course, is when you finish a book and realize that it isn’t good. That you screwed it up somehow. All that effort, and your choice now is to either trash what you have and start over from scratch, spend another few months trying to sort out the problems without a total re-write, or start something new and hope it goes better.

Either way, there’s always a hangover after finishing something. My preferred way of dealing with it is to have multiple projects going at once. This overlaps the hangovers a bit, which mitigates them. If for some reason I don’t have something else already in progress, I sometimes find it’s bracing and curative to dash off something short and maybe a little crazy. To just take any crazy idea that pops into my head and write it fast and dirty, without planning or deep thought.

Or, you know, drink heavily until my body turns yellow and I’m confined to bed and having nothing else to do but write. Sometimes that.

General, Writing

Spin Those Plates

Author: April 17, 2018 0 Comments

As you might suspect from a blog tied to a book called Writing Without Rules, I generally don’t believe there is any “correct” way to write. You Do You tends to be my reaction to people’s declarations of process, writer’s block cures, or systems for developing characters or plots. All that matters is that you get words on the page or screen, and that you’re excited about those words. However you get there is immaterial.

I do, however, have opinions based on my own experience. It’s important to note that these are just opinions, personal expressions of personal experience filtered through my own preconceptions and assumptions. Still, it’s useful to see how other people do it. Sometimes finding out that another writer does things the same way you do is heartening. Sometimes seeing another process or an alternative view of the business or craft of writing fiction and/or non-fiction suddenly prompts you to change your approach.

For example: Concurrent projects. Some writers fixate on a single project. They devote themselves to it, doing research, planning and plotting, then writing and re-writing, revising and excising until they’re satisfied. They work in a linear fashion.

Not me. I usually have several projects going at once, usually a few novels, a short story, and any number of other things. And that’s not even counting the freelance work and promotional blogging that I do. What can I say—I think there are distinct advantages to spinning plates.

WIPs All the Way Down

I just completed two novels that I was working on concurrently, and I have a third novel begun while those two were in process, plus a monthly short story, another one-shot short story set in one of my established universes, and two other ideas that will either be novels or … something else, who knows. And I recently stumbled onto another short story that I’d half completed and then forgot about, so I jumped in to finish that.

I like having all these projects going for three main reasons:

  1. Variety. If i get bogged down in one story, uncertain how to proceed, I can just jump over to another one. And while I’m working on the second, I’m subconsciously recharging my batteries for the first. Plus, I get to indulge two genres at once, if I want.
  2. Confirmation. Ideas are funny—they jump into your brain electric and buzzing with potential. Then some of them die off, withering away, while others just get stronger and brighter. Working on a bunch of different things means that if one withers away and goes nowhere it’s not nearly as devastating as it otherwise would be.
  3. Preservation. For me, ideas don’t last too long unless they’re developed. A concept that seemed ingenious last month might turn into ash if I don’t hang some words on it.

I don’t divide my time and attention equally. One project can rise up and claim all of my attention for a time, especially if it’s near the end. I don’t have any rules about this. I just work on whatever I want to, regardless of what else is on my dance card. Including this blog.

General, Writing

The Great Compression

Author: April 4, 2018 0 Comments

As a writer, I like to finish things—more than finish them, I like to whip things into marketable shape. On the one hand the psychology of this is obvious; as I’m fond of saying, you sell exactly zero of the books and stories you don’t finish. My legacy on this world is going to be my writing, so the more of it I can publish and get seen, the better.

On the other hand my obsession with finishing things and extracting some sort of publishable value from my writing goes beyond simply practicality, and I’m not sure where it’s rooted in my life. All I know is, once a work gets to a certain bulk, I’m determined to make the effort of writing it worthwhile by finishing it and then polishing it into something that might, conceivably, get published.

One side effect of this obsession is an eagerness to try new techniques or crazy ideas. I get super excited with experiments that might lead to stronger material—experiments that go beyond polish and revision. One example is when I Frankensteined two failed novels together to make one great novel (something I discuss in detail in Writing Without Rules). Another is something I just mentioned on Twitter last week: Boiling a novel down to a short story.

The Great Compression

I’ve been planning to submit a story to an anthology, but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write a fresh story to match the theme or see if I had something already in the can that would work. I realized that a novel I completed last year was actually a perfect fit, theme-wise. The only problem? The antho had a word count limit of 6,000 words and the novel was 63K+.

This novel has a long history. It started off as a short story I wrote in the early 1990s; I really liked it but could never sell it anywhere, and so a few years ago I started trying to work it into different formats, eventually ending up with an unsatisfactory novel last year. I still thought it had great potential, so the story was still alive in my head, but it wasn’t right.

The idea of trying to cut 90% of the story? Exciting. Like, thrilling. I love stuff like that, extreme challenges. Could I excise most of the novel and still have the core of it?

It was dismaying easy, actually. Dismaying, because it implies that 90% of that novel was just bullshit I poured in there to bulk it up, something I expressly advise people not to do. My only defense is that I didn’t bulk it up on purpose. And I like a lot of the writing I deleted. In practical terms, one reason the story was easy to compress is the structure I used in the novel—it has three timelines, so step one was simply to choose the timeline in which the main, core story occurred, and then delete the others. Just like that, 50% of the words were gone.

Next, I compressed characters. In a novel you can be subtle and granular with your characters. In a short story every character has to be essential. So I eliminated characters whose roles could be passed on to other people. That took care of another chunk of words.

All of this work took me: One day. And I had a story that was still coherent at about 9,000 words. The rest was shaving and shaping, and I really like the story I ended up with at 6K.

Is there a lesson here? The only lesson, I think, is that it’s worth it to push yourself, to try crazy things, to go beyond NaNoWriMo and see what you’re capable of. I can’t swear I’ll sell this story to this anthology or anywhere else. But it was fun to do this, and ultimately successful.

For my next trick, I’m going to try compressing an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into one night. I may not survive. You may not survive. But someone’s got to try, dammit.

General, Writing