Novels

The Less is More Approach to World Building

Author: October 18, 2017 0 Comments

I’m a writer who believes fervently that less is more in just about every aspect of writing a novel. Nothing you write will ever beat the magic movie machine that is your readers’ imaginations, and the more you let your reader infer, imagine, and guess at what lies behind stuff, the better your universe, characters, and mechanics will be.

Not every writer agrees, of course, and some of them are extremely successful. Some writers want to invent languages with complex grammars and extensive vocabularies. Or write book-length histories that will never be published. In other words, some writers are Method and want to have all this stuff under the surface that informs their work. That’s fine, but it’s not me, and if it’s not you, you have to be honest with yourself. The problem we all run up against is that the folks who believe more is, well, more are often the ones that get all the attention.

Seems Like Work

I’ll admit to being jealous of the folks who can invent languages and adapt existing religions into a wholly new form for their novels, but I’m also not very interested in doing so—unless those things are the point of the story I’m telling. When it comes to languages, specifically, I prefer to invent a few words, hint at a grammar, and leave it at that. In fact, for almost all the details of world-building I prefer to use hints and shadows instead of details and pages and pages of detail.

Part of this is admitting that you have to write the stuff that excites you and not the stuff that bores you, because your attitude towards your own material will come off the page like radiation. The other part is the diminishing returns of details: At first your reader will be excited to learn about the fundamentals of your universe, but familiarity breeds contempt, and if you don’t withhold some of the information you run the risk of your reader seeing you behind the curtain madly pulling levers, and the magic is gone.

The TL;DR version is: Don’t force yourself to do world-building work you don’t want to. It’s never worth it.

This applies to household chores, too, which is why I turned my crawlspace into one huge cat litter box. It’ll be years before I have to burn this place down, change my name, and start over.

Novels, worldbuilding

When It’s Not Ready for Prime Time

Author: October 16, 2017 0 Comments

I don’t know about you, but as a writer I tend to think every idea I have is brilliant, at least for a while. There’s the sunburst of inspiration, a period that can last anywhere from a minute to a year, wherein I am convinced I just changed literature forever. Then there’s a variable period of actually working on the idea, which as every writer knows usually involves suddenly realizing just how worthless and tired the idea actually is. And then, if you’re lucky, there’s the discovery a nugget of something shiny in all that collapsed shit, something you can polish and melt and cast into a book you want to write.

That’s not the hard part.

The hard part is when you finish a book after going through that process and someone—a Beta Reader, your agent, that insistent voice in your head, tells you that it’s not ready for prime time. Simply put, effort doesn’t always equal brilliance.

Patience, Grasshopper

This happens to me all the time. One specific example is a book I wrote long ago. Shortly after being signed by my agent, I was pretty psyched and confident. So I thought about what my next book should be—after all, once my agent sold Chum and it became a worldwide literary phenomenon, I would need to quickly offer up my next novel to my publisher, right? So I started working on an idea I had, and a few months later I sent it off to my agent, fairly confident she would be excited.

She was not.

Gently, she told me it just wasn’t ready. What she actually said is that it felt like half a story. Looking back, she was absolutely right, because what I wound up doing with that book (ten years later) was combining it with another not-quite-finished novel, and that Frankenstein’s Monster of a book did win my agent’s heart (we haven’t sold it yet, but give it time). The point is that being told your novel isn’t ready for prime time is far from the worst thing someone can say. And sometimes it’s going to take you ten years to figure out exactly what your book is missing.

In other words, just because you wrote a bad book doesn’t mean it can’t be a great book—someday. Uncork a bottle of something inebriating and drink until you can be honest with yourself, then start working again.

Be careful with the drinking-until-you’re-honest thing, though. Trust me: You can become too honest with yourself.

Novels

The Slow Down

Author: September 18, 2017 0 Comments

Creativity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who has composed a story knows the thrill of having made something, of having pulled together a fictional universe from thin air, using nothing more than words. It’s a form of magic.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work involved. And it’s usually low-paying, soul-killing work.

If you’re a writer, you know the feeling. You start off with an explosion of an idea in your head. You’re excited about it, and the universe that has taken form in your brain expands quickly, all hot gases and explosions of inspiration. Before you know it you’ve written a few thousand words, drawn some maps, and conducted a thorough casting call of the best actors in the world to play your characters.

That’s the easy part. The Hot Gas Expansion part of writing a novel. At some point, your Big Bang will cool off, expansion will slow, and you’ll run into a bit of trouble getting through the middle part. In fact, if you don’t put in enough work to keep all your galaxies and planets spinning, your fictional universe might experience Heat Death and start to collapse into a Big Crunch.

I wonder how many space metaphors we can cram in here?

The Slow Down

Almost every writer hits a wall after that initial burst of inspiration—or, if not a wall, a Slow Down. This is inevitable when you stop dealing with a rush of ideas and start trying to organize them into a plot, characters, and a stable universe in which to place them. It can be a frustrating moment for a writer, because you go rather suddenly from rushing along, having fun to crawling along, in the dark, with sweat stinging your eyes.

Pushing through the Slow Down is the only way you’ll get that book written, usually, but there are plenty of different ways to get through it. You can just push and push, of course, pouring words onto the page laboriously until the damn thing is done. Or you can step away and take a break, and come back when you’ve got the itch back. You can skip ahead and write a scene in the future of your plot because it’s more fun. Or you can decide that if you’re working this hard to write the scenes, your readers will have to work that hard to read them and you’ll scrap everything you’ve done since you hit the Slow Down and start again.

The key is to try to push through, because Slow Downs happen and they don’t necessarily mean your story is no good. A Slow Down might mean that, but to find out you have to put the work in first. And the key to working through Slow Downs is to know they’re coming, no matter how intense your excitement is at first.

If you’re very unlucky, like me, you might actually wind up with several WIPs in Slow Down Mode simultaneously. Which is when you just go on a bender.

General, Novels, Writing

When to Give Up

Author: September 15, 2017 0 Comments

We’re all gonna die someday. I know, I was pretty shocked when the reality of this hit me around age 28 or so; before then on some level I’d assumed I’d live forever through some fortunate combination of science!, the preservative qualities of alcohol, and my own specialness. Realizing that literally none of those things was going to apply was sobering, in the sense that it was the exact opposite of sobering in that I immediately launched a three-year bender.

But I digress: You’re going to die. And before you die, there’s a chance of a lengthy period of dotage. Which means you only have so many useful creative years in you, and there’s no way to know how many—which in turn means you only have so many books and stories in you. That means the biggest decision you have to make every day is what to work on, because your creative energies are a limited resource. And that leads to the big question: When should you give up on a book?

The answer is, you’re asking the wrong question.

Change the Conversation

We’ve all been there: You’re six months and tens of thousands of words into a new project, and it isn’t working. Or you’ve finished a draft, and no one likes it. The question looms: Should you spend another year trying to make it work? Or cut your losses and move on to something new?

There’s no need to be so final. A rough draft will remain just as rough if you let it sit in a drawer for five years, and it will have the same potential to be great and marketable a few years later. A draft that gives you the fits because it’s 60% awesome and 40% confusion and failure will still have that 60% awesome part if you come back to it. And a book that everyone likes but no one wants to buy might surprise you with a sale before you know it.

So the question should never be “Is it time to give up on this book.” Instead, ask if your time would be better spent on something else right now. Leave yourself open to going back to a book. It might seem silly, but the psychological impact can be huge. Tell yourself a book is dead and on some level your brain stops working over the problems. Tell yourself you’re just switching focus for a while allows the invisible hand that controls you (otherwise known as your muse) to keep sweating over that problematic story while you do other, less-frustrating things.

In other words, go full Winston Churchill and never surrender. Also, drink heavily and smoke cigars, and cultivate a speaking voice that is 50% lava and 50% sneering disdain, also like Churchill.

career, General, Novels, Writing

Leave Room for the Swerve

Author: September 6, 2017 0 Comments

A few weeks ago there was a leaked letter from George R.R. Martin to his publisher detailing his original outline for A Song of Ice and Fire. As Martin still has two enormous novels to go in his series and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones has become quite alarming in the insane plot department, there’s a lot of speculation regarding Martin’s most famous fictional universe, and aspiring novelists who want to craft their own fantasy worlds are paying close attention—or should be, because this is basically real-life writing craft spooling out right before your eyes.

The main lesson from the leaked letter is that whether you consider yourself a Plotter, Pantser, or Plantser, you should be ready for the swerve, because the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

The Swerve

Put simply, it doesn’t matter how meticulously you plot your books, or how in control you feel or how in tune with your instincts. George R.R. Martin is a pro, and his outline for ASoIaF demonstrates his sharp, professional approach to planning a series of fantasy novels. At the time he imagined the series as a trilogy. This was in 1993 or so, you know, twenty-four years ago. How innocent it all seems now.

The point is, Martin got into his story, and it swerved on him. The Swerve happens, and it happens when you least expect it. Simple stories get complex, stories you initially think will require sixteen dense volumes peter out after 30,000 words. The Swerve is something any novelist has to be ready for, because you’re never as in control of your story as you think you are. There’s a Shadow Writer inside all of us, living in our subconscious, and the Shadow Writer is always busy churning things in unexpected ways.

Putting in a ton of work and then watching your novel swerve out of your grasp is just the cost of doing business. Sometimes the Swerve works for you, sometimes it works against you. All you can do as a writer is accept the fact that it’s coming, and try to be ready.

Me, I’ve always been good with the Swerve because a similar thing happens every time I walk into a bar thinking I’ve to have three beers and no more.

General, Novels, plot, Writing

The Story Behind the Book: Lifers

Author: August 9, 2017 0 Comments

People often ask me about the process of writing and selling a novel, so I thought it might be useful to walk through the stories behind my published novels (and maybe after that a few unpublished ones that involved withcraft, spycraft, and being banned from several government buildings). So let’s start at the beginning with my first published novel, Lifers.

I wrote the first draft of Lifers when I was twenty-six years old, which means we’re traveling back to the mid-1990s, a magical time when people had aol.com email addresses (mine was linknull@aol.com) and I was still writing everything on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. I was pretty broke, so I rarely changed out the ribbon on that sucker, either, so the original first draft of the novel is written in type so faint it’s almost invisible ink.

The inspiration for the book was simple: I was spending a lot of time drinking in bars, hanging out with friends, and hating my job. So I wrote about that. Any time you’re lacking in inspiration, you can use this one weird trick: Imagine your life, then imagine something strange happening in it. Meteor strike? Future You appearing in a ball of energy and warning you not to eat that sandwich? Doesn’t matter. I imagined my life but with me deciding to commit grand larceny, and a novel was born.

I wrote the book pretty fast; it’s not a very long novel, clocking in around 40,000 words, which people will tell you is too short to sell. I revised it once—exactly once, mainly to produce a clean typewritten copy since back then you didn’t have to submit electronically, and often couldn’t. I didn’t really change any of the story or even the actual words—I just typed out a clean version making minor fixes as I went. That was it for revision (until the publisher asked me to add a sex scene, that is), so the published novel is about 96% the same as the first draft.

I thought it captured something about that moment in my life even though I resisted every urge to have anything dramatic happen. No one gets the girl, no one gets arrested, and no one’s life changes in the story, on purpose. At the time that sort of non-dramatic story felt powerful to me—and to be honest remains one of my worst habits, opting for a non-event climax to a novel. So, impressed by myself, I started submitting it to agents and publishers.

I’ve told the story of how I sold Lifers elsewhere, so there’s no need to repeat it her verbatim. It was the end result of a lot of submissions, though, which is the important bit. I worked my ass off mailing that manuscript out to the world, and two years after finishing it I sold it, and two after that it published. And I got some polite reviews and low sales and that was that, really, until 2011 when I re-released it as an eBook.

So what are our takeaways here? One, selling a novel takes a lot of grunt work, not even counting the actual writing. Two, selling a novel might not change your life in any way. And three, I need to get out that old manual typewriter and start working on it again. That thing is a monster.

Novels

Write a History

Author: July 31, 2017 0 Comments

There are times in every fiction writer’s life when they fantasize about writing one of those experimental novels that boldly go against all literary tradition—for example, a novel without characters, because characters are difficult, complicated imaginary beings. They often arrive in our stories flat and empty, and stubbornly refuse to become interesting no matter how much effort we put into them.

Sometimes characters fill out and become interesting through the organic process of telling the story and giving them something to do. Sometimes they never rise above the mechanics of their plot roles. When the latter happens, you can end up with a terrific story that has a surprising and interesting plot but no believable people to make your reader care about that plot.

Or, sometimes, you have the opposite scenario: Characters who pop off the page or screen as living, breathing personalities you’re certain your readers will want to spend time with, but your story meanders pointlessly. In either case, one way to jolt things into working order is to step away from the main plot and write up some history.

The Secret Histories

Recently George R.R. Martin broke hearts and shattered minds when he announced that he might not get The Winds of Winter out the door this year, but 2018 would see the publication of 2 Game of Thrones-related works, one being a history of Westeros called Fire and Blood. While fans tore their shirts over the steady delay of the sixth A Song of Ice and Fire book, I wonder if Martin needed to step back from his story to write that history as an exercise.

A history of your fictional world, or biographies of your fictional characters, don’t ever have to see the light of day. But they can clarify motivations, codify patterns of behavior, and give you heaps of material that inform your characters, fleshing them out, and give you hints as to where your story needs to go. History repeats, so if your secret histories yield up some interesting Noodle Incident, maybe bringing it into the main plot will move your story past your block.

A secret history or biography could be a few paragraphs jotted down, a complete other book-length work, or something in-between. I used to write lengthy histories of my epic fantasy universes, often with a brusque, academic tone, simply seeking to get ideas on paper, and it worked wonders for convincing myself that my fictional universe was real, and the characters I’d populated it with were living, breathing folks.

Next time you’re struggling, step back and write a history. And then pour yourself a drink. Not for any particular reason, just because drinking is fun.

characters, Novels, plot, Writing

The Insanity Button: One Approach to Plot

Author: July 10, 2017 0 Comments

There are as many ways to plot a novel as there are, well, novels. Anyone who claims there’s one way to do it is lying, or very confused, or possibly selling you something. Fact is, once you have the premise the rest is just coming up with a reasonable series of steps that take you from the beginning to the end. Like life, a novel is just one goddamn thing after another.

Okay, okay, it’s a little more involved than that. How to work out a plot is one of the most common questions I get, which of course led to the whole concept of Plantsing (a hybrid approach combining the best bits of Plotting with the best bits of Pantsing), but sometimes you need to get a little more granular, and sometimes you have to just get nuts. Sometimes, for example, you get stuck. You’ve boxed yourself into a corner and can’t see the way to the next plot point. There are a lot of ways to handle this, but one I like to use from time to time is a lot fun: I hit the Insanity Button.

Pick-a-Path

You can look at your novel as a Choose Your Own Adventure, in a way; at the end of every chapter or sequence your characters are in a certain situation, and must make decisions that drive the plot. Now, in any scenario there will be decisions that could be classified as rational, and then there are decisions that could be classified as Pantsless Crazy. For example, if I’m sitting in a restaurant and I realize I’ve left my wallet at home, I can discretely call for the manager and work something out, or I can take off my pants and feign food poisoning, loudly threatening to sue.

Why do my pants have to come off in this scenario? If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

You can try this in your plotting, too. If you’re stuck, if you have your characters in a spot and can’t see how to move them forward it’s possible you’ve unknowingly restricted yourself to rational decisions. Consider something crazy. Something self-destructive. Unexpected. Irrational and maybe even inexplicable.

If it works, your plot will suddenly rush forward, pushed on by this crazy energy you’ve unleashed. It will take your story in directions you didn’t foresee. If nothing else, it might entertain you and divert your brain long enough for a more sensible solution.

If it doesn’t work, in my experience there is always heavy drinking. It will never let you down.

Novels

What to Do When a Vengeful Universe Robs You

Author: June 12, 2017 0 Comments

This topic was suggested by Jon Gawne.

Writers, by and large, are simple creatures who live their lives according to a collection of old wives’ tales and myths, including a firm belief that you can turn magical thinking into a paying career and a firm belief that writing is a paying career. Ah, such innocence!

Another cherished belief many writers have is that their ideas are somehow wholly unique and original. I am reminded, ironically, of Paul McCartney’s story about writing the famous song Yesterday. He says the melody came to him and he was convinced he must have heard it somewhere else and nicked it unconsciously (something that would bite bandmate George Harrison in the ass years later) because it was too good. Only after spending months humming it to people and asking if they could identify it did he finally accept that he’d come up with it.

Writers should never do that with novel ideas, because if you’re looking for prior work that has more or less the same idea, you will almost certainly find it. Because there are no new ideas.

The President’s Dead!

A few years ago I wrote a novel about the designated survivor during the State of the Union Address—the member of the cabinet who is secured someplace just in case the entire line of succession is murdered in a terrorist attack or something. It was called Designated Survivor, which is also the title—and premise—of a TV show. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a new idea when I wrote the novel, and my treatment of the premise went in a weirdo SF direction.

Still, the TV show kind of kills any hope I might have had of publishing the novel. This stuff happens, though, because ideas are constantly being recycled, and half the battle in publishing is timing. What do you do if you’ve been working on a novel and suddenly someone else publishes something with a similar premise? Here are your steps to work through:

  1. DON’T imagine they somehow stole your idea. Put down your phone and step away from the lawyers, because your idea just isn’t that unique. Trust me on this.
  2. DO keep working on the story if you’re still excited about it. You might find ways to twist things and set it apart from your new competition, and even if you don’t, you’ll enjoy finishing the story and maybe learn something.
  3. DON’T start pestering the other party on social media about stealing your ideas. Also, don’t mention how you had the same idea years earlier at every goddamn party and gathering, because trust me: No one cares.
  4. DO chalk it up to the fundamental perversion of the universe, hit control-N, and start writing something new.

That’s it. This shit happens, there’s no defense, and you can’t do anything about it. Well, that’s not 100% true—if you write a version of that idea that is so wildly better done than any other version, you might yet sell it. Accept that challenge or move on to your next idea. It’s that simple.

ideas, Novels, Writing

Taking a Break from Butt-in-Chair

Author: June 1, 2017 0 Comments

When you start talking about writing a novel, you’ll eventually hear a variation of the phrase “butt-in-chair.” This is generally pretty good advice: You can’t write a book if you don’t make yourself, you know, sit down in front of a keyboard and write it. So making sure you get (and keep) your butt in the chair for good long intervals is sound advice.

Like a lot of advice or best practices or rules, the whole point of learning them and understanding their benefits is so you can break them judiciously.

Take a Nap

I always refer to Mad Men when I discuss creativity, because one thing that TV show brilliantly handled was creativity. Don Draper is a writer, a creative guy. And the show goes out of its way to show Don goofing off—or, apparently goofing off. Don goes to the movies in the middle of the day. He drinks in his office. He naps. He goes home. You would be forgiven for asking what, precisely, Don does aside from wear the hell out of a suit and be charming.

The point is, Don’s creativity often resembles goofing off. Creativity needs discipline, so butt-in-chair works. But creativity is also chaos and anarchy, so sometimes when it’s just not happening you really do need to just get out of the chair. Take a walk. Take a nap. Drink a half bottle of cheap bourbon and go running through the neighborhood shouting about flat-earth theories. Whatever it takes.

The point is, you can’t take advice too literally. Butt-in-chair is a good rule of thumb, but it doesn’t mean you force yourself to sit there until you’ve written some arbitrary number of words. It just means you have to get into the habit of working or you’ll never actually work. It doesn’t mean the occasional half bottle of bourbon and arrest for public intoxication isn’t just as good for your soul.

Novels, time management, Writing