This time around I discuss my short story No Great Trick, which was written when I was still commuting into New York City every day for my job, skulking in an office full of cubes and exhausting personal drama.
The story was published in 2003 at the defunct Drexel Online Journal, but I pubbed it here on this blog a few years ago, so you can read along with me if that’s your thing!
Ah, freelanced writing: The ideal career for people who hate comfort and serenity. It combines a few terrible things with one awesome thing: You get constant change and a lack of security, constant nerve-wracking negotiation and the occasional dispiriting edit, but at the end of the day you get to write things for a living, and that is marvelous.
It’s also mysterious and opaque for a lot of folks, which inspires some magical thinking. One question I’ve seen frequently concerning freelance writing as a career concerns tools: Things like Grammarly or FocusWriter that either purport to make your work better or help you to work better.
There’s nothing wrong with using (or paying for) tools that legitimately help you, and experienced writers can make those decisions on their own. But the questions I’ve seen recently concern the need for these tools — as in, do you need certain tools to be successful as a freelance writer?
And the answer is simple: Absolutely not.
Read Moar Books
The idea that you can pay a subscription to the right service and instantly (and easily) improve your writing and/or your income is fantasy. Grammarly is often required by clients, and I understand why, but let’s be blunt: Grammarly is trash and at least 50% of its suggested revisions make your writing arguably worse (it does often catch boneheaded mistakes that can slip past a tired eye, so it’s not worthless — but it won’t transform your work in any meaningful or positive way, aside from apparently eradicating the phrase “in order to” from the English language, for some reason). And if you need help focusing, why not use an App or plugin designed to help you do so — but that doesn’t mean your work will be appreciably better as a result.
The only way to be a better writer is to read more. For fiction, that means books and stories. For freelance, it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing in your niche, especially folks writing for A-List web sites or mainline print venues. Study their tricks. Mimic their ledes. Just absorb it all as enthusiastically as you can — that’s how you’ll get better. All the Apps in the world won’t help.
Of course, once the next iteration of GPT-3 starts producing writing that doesn’t read as if it were written by your slightly creepy older cousin who spends their spare time reading the dictionary, we’ll all be redundant anyway. And, I assume, the phrase “in order to” will cease to exist.
LIKE a lot of writers, I read a lot of books. If you’re a writer who doesn’t read a lot — and read widely — reconsider your life choices, because I can tell writers who don’t read, or who only read narrowly. The former write like they’re describing a movie, and the latter write in a specific, usually quite stilted style (I have one writer acquaintance who thinks everything written after 1950 or so is trash, and their work reads like a gentleman of leisure in 1870 decided to try his hand at popular fiction).
Reading widely can be a burden, of course. In my professional life I review books, which means I sometimes encounter truly terrible novels written by people with more ambition and discipline than talent. I admire anyone who writes a novel — truly — but the desire to write isn’t always enough to produce something great.
But reading these bad novels gives me plenty of insight into what people get wrong. An example that’s come up a few times in recent books I’ve read is the Vanishing Character. It goes like this: The story begins with Character A, an spends a goodly amount of time with them — sometimes dozens of pages, multiple chapters worth of story. Then Character A vanishes for a long, long time. Like, completely, totally, entirely vanishes.
John Travolta in Pulp Fiction Looking Around in Confusion
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing a character, even for a very long time. But you have to consider how your reader will react, and you have to have a very clear purpose. If your character is vanishing because you ran out of story to tell about them, you need to rethink your story and its structure. If you have a plan for that character that involves making the reader forget about them so you can surprise them later, you need to think objectively about whether you’re pulling that off — about whether your readers will be fooled, or if they’ll spend the middle section of your story wondering why the character disappeared.
Because the real risk is that your story will feel like two separate books, pasted together — especially if your vanished character never turns up again, their purpose served. If the character’s purpose is purely back story or set up, think about how much time you’re spending on them. Readers can more readily accept a vanished character in what’s clearly a prologue or short back story chapter as opposed to half the novel.
Finally, consider tone and genre. I recently read a book with a vanished character where the beginning of the story is soaked in magic and occult happenings. Then the character vanishes, and the middle section of the book reads like a completely different story, with exactly zero of those things. You can get away with one of those things, but rarely both.
Some people ask me if reading bad novels can rub off on you and make your own writing worse just as great novels can make your writing better. The answer is, gobs, I hope not <uncorks bottle and drinks directly from it for several seconds>.
Just about every writer has That Book. You know the one: You started it when you were a much younger person, filled with hope. It keeps dying on the vine. Sometimes you make it 50,000 words through before it melts away like an ice cream in the rain, sometimes you write 65 versions of the first paragraph before setting yourself on fire.
But you always go back.
You go back because there’s something there. Maybe it’s a premise you love, but can’t make work. Maybe it’s a character that continues to live in your brain rent free. Maybe it’s just some especially good writing you haven’t been able to marry to a coherent story yet. Whatever the reason, the project goes in and out of drawers and recent files lists, never quite abandoned, never quite finished.
The Balance
I have a writer friend who has been working on the same novel his entire life. Literally, one novel. He’s written a very small number of other things, but this one novel has been his obsession for decades. Technically, he’s finished dozens of versions of it — complete, coherent novels. But he’s never quite satisfied, and he keeps going back to it and starting over. He tries different approaches, tweaks the characters, updates the setting, changes the rules. Sometimes he stops work on it for years at a time and just lives his life, not writing anything.
That last part is alien to me, but I wonder sometimes if I should take a note or two from the rest of his approach. I’m generally a fast writer. I like my first drafts (probably too much) and usually tear through a story pretty quickly. But I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t, if maybe I might benefit from letting more stories sit and marinate for long periods. But who has time? I’m going to die someday, kids. I can’t take the risk that I’ll be leaving a notebook filled with idea I never got around to working on.
I do have a novel I can’t quit. It’s been two years now, which I know for some writers isn’t very long, but for me that’s unusual. I love all the parts of the novel, but I don’t like the whole they Voltron into. And so I keep putting it aside, then tearing it open and trying to find a new path for the characters and setting and bits of business in there that I do love.
I’m not sure this book will ever be a success, but unlike almost all my other weird failures, this one is still alive in my head. Usually when I hit a certain level of frustration with a book I start to drift away from it, and slowly forget it. Sometimes, if I’m 95% to an actual novel, I’ll put in the effort to cruft up a serviceable ending because I’m a completist, but that’s with the full knowledge that the book is going into a drawer probably forever after that. But this one keeps whispering to me that there’s a plot that will pull it all together, I just have to find it.
Strategery
So, if you’ve got a book that won’t gel but also keeps flopping around, refusing to suffocate, what can you do. Here’s how I’m going to try and get this thing finally off the ground:
1. Plantsing. As some of you no doubt know, I’m a Pantser by nature. I take an idea and run with it, and sometimes after several months of running I have a novel, sometimes an enormous mess. But when I’ve got a novel that’s a hot mess like this one, it can sometimes be very helpful to chart the plot I have, then plot out the rest of the book. The shift in approach often clarifies things.
2. Brain Salad Surgery. Sometimes when your plot sputters out halfway through like this, the problem isn’t figuring out where to go next, but to figure out where you went wrong 100 pages ago — or even further back. So if the Plantsing doesn’t yield fruit, I’ll probably try starting fresh with a brand new beginning, then slowly fold in stuff I like from later in the story. Sometimes that jolts things back to life.
3. Go Episodic. And sometimes the solution is to just keep writing. Just keep writing little vignettes and short stories and subplots and backstory and whatever else I can think of. The material produced probably ends up being cut in the theoretical future of this novel, but in the mean time my Underbrain might tease a solution out of the material. And if nothing else, some of those episodes might turn into standalone short stories.
I’ll keep y’all posted. In the mean time, if you’re working on a novel that just won’t give in and become great (or at least coherent), maybe try one of these tricks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start drinking. Don’t look at me that way. It’s my process.
In which I watched Terminator: Dark Fate so you don’t have to.
1984’s The Terminator is a delightfully deranged, violent sci-fi story that somehow combines Linda Hamilton’s 1980s feathered hair and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexplicable Austrian accent and improbable body into a near-perfect story. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s very good trash, at least for some of us.
A sequel should have been a disaster. It shouldn’t have worked. But somehow James Cameron avoided simply remaking his first film with a bigger budget and managed to surprise viewers with a story that cleverly flipped the hero/villain dynamic. Making Arnold’s Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator the good guy, then having it stumblingly learn why human life is important, was a (slightly stupid) very cool plot twist, especially when coupled with Robert Patrick’s slender-but-relentless Series 1000.
Alas, like Daffy Duck’s gasoline and dynamite schtick, it’s a trick that only works once. Watching the horrifyingly terrible Terminator: Dark Fate the other day, I was struck by the fact that the diminishing returns on the T-800 Terminator learning how to be human have slipped down into negative numbers. This is an idea that has to stop.
Villain Decay
Since the glorious days of 1992, there have been four major films in the Terminator franchise: Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys, and 2019’s Dark Fate. Rise was a second sequel, and was relatively successful despite being a pretty boring retread of the previous films’ tropes. But at least it still had a relatively young Arnold Schwarzenegger (he was 55 during filming) who could at least look like a deathless killing machine.
After that, the franchise fell into a pattern: For three films, they’ve been trying to reboot the series, failing miserably, and then trying again.
2005’s Salvation tried something different. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, it tried to leave Schwarzenegger behind; Arnold only appears as a brief, CGI version of his 1984 self, the original T-800 model in a tiny cameo. If only Salvation had been a brilliant film and a huge hit, because the last two movies have been stuck with Grandpa Terminator, and it is terrible.
Everyone likes Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there’s no sin in growing old. But after the failure of Salvation, the film studios took a look around and obviously concluded the film failed because of a distinct lack of Arnold-style Terminators. And the only solution they can think of is to keep bringing Arnold back as an increasingly ludicrous killer robot.
WHY DO YOU CRY
The explanation for why a soulless killing machine would age and grow old is just barely acceptable, and then only if you’ve already suspended your disbelief to the sky-high levels these movies require: The T-800 is covered in real human flesh, complete with blood vessels, in order to fool the future scanners of the resistance. That flesh ages, even as the robotic chassis beneath it remains immortal or as close to it as technology can make it.
Sure, that makes no sense, and doesn’t explain why Old Man Terminator walks like a stiff, 73-year old man in pretty good shape, but fuck it: It’s Terminator Town. I’ll allow it.
The real problem is in Dark Fate‘s extension of the learning-to-be-human trope established in Judgment Day, where John Connor gives the T-800 simple lessons in how to be human, culminating in a line of dialogue that still makes me want to kill someone every time I hear it:
The whole “robot learns value of human emotions” isn’t exactly a new trope, and the decision to double down on it with Grandpa Terminator in Dark Fate is a terrible storytelling decision in a film filled with them. The T-800 in Dark Fate isn’t the same one from either of the two original films. There were several Terminators sent back in time, and after the end of Judgment Day one of those other ones found John Connor and, er, terminated him. Then it walked away, its mission accomplished, and instead of self-destructing or something else a real, programmed machine would have done, it goes off, starts a drapery business, and hooks up with a single mother.
This is real. This happened.
So we have Grandpa Terminator pretending to be the asexual stepfather of dreams, because apparently all Terminators have secret subroutines or unlockable achievements concerned with being a father figure. Which is a remarkable thing for an evil AI to introduce into the design, if you ask me. This leads to Grandpa Terminator doing all sorts of goofy old man schtick, like a lengthy monologue about talking a customer out of some really bad drapery decisions, and the sight of Grandpa Terminator sitting in a lawn chair that miraculously supports his 400 pound weight, passing out beers to everyone.
There’s a broad strokes argument for this sort of nutty twist, but it falls apart in practice. This is just terrible character work, necessitated solely by the desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film as the T-800 without just going ahead and animating him.
So: Mistakes were made. Someone made this movie, for example. And I watched it, as another example. Take some lessons from my shame: Playing around with making your villains into anti-heroes is fun, but it comes at a price, and that price is usually the ruination of the character. It’s a trick that works once, and you should be aware of it before you go Grandpa Terminator in your own story.
Something non-creative folks don’t understand is the private rush that accompanies creation. For me, as a writer, nothing feels better than writing THE END on a story I’ve been working on, whether it’s been days or years since I started.
And that rush is especially powerful if I’ve tried something new. I write a lot, and much of my work is fairly standard — I have my ways of doing things, the tics and subjects that grab my attention, the tics and techniques I like to use in my storytelling. I start with an idea, imagine characters, and go to work.
But sometimes there’s an innovation, what in chess is sometimes referred to as a ‘brilliancy.’ These don’t have to necessarily be brilliant, it’s more like they’re ideas or techniques that are new to me. An innovation can be exhilarating, it can remind you why you started this lonely, low-income life of words in the first place. And when you pull off a brilliancy like that, you want to show off. You want to rush that story out and flex on everyone, say ‘see what I did? DO YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE WROUGHT?!?!’
The flex ain’t worth it. Brilliancies are exciting stuff. But remember, an incredible technique doesn’t make a good story, necessarily.
Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!
It’s easy to be so struck by some new idea you have, some new trick, that you let it cloud your assessment of the overall work. You write an entire novel in a breathless stream-of-consciousness style that really sings! But you forgot to tell a compelling story doing it. Or you managed to pull of the sort of epic, mind-bending plot twist that comes around once in a lifetime, carefully dropping seeds throughout your plot in an assured way that often evades you! But you forgot to make your characters interesting, three-dimensional people.
Brilliancies are great. They’re often the oxygen that keeps us going creatively because they get us excited about writing all over again. But it’s important to remember your fundamentals. It’s crucial that your brilliancy serve the story and not the other way around.
Of course, sometimes you have to wallow in the great idea for a bit, just enjoy yourself, and then go back later and make it into an actual story. The sad fact is, you often have to use an exciting new idea until it stops being so exciting, and then you can use it like a tool instead of showing it off like a new toy.
Of course, as a writer, my most recent brilliancy involved rigging up one of those beercan baseball hats to feed me sips of whiskey while I work, so … I may be the smartest human alive.
Growing as a writer — or any kind of artist — is often a slow process that you notice all at once.
As many of you are aware (unfortunately, for you), I am an amateur musician. If you’re curious, you can check out my music alter-ego here. Because I am a Basic White Guy of a Certain Age (BWGCA), I’d always wanted to learn how to play guitar, but because I am a Lazy White Guy Who Coasts on Privilege (LWGWCP) it always seemed like a lot of work. Then, in 2008, my wife The Duchess purchased a guitar for my birthday, along with some lessons, and kind of forced me to finally do something about this.
I have zero interest in playing other people’s songs, except as a way to steal their musical ideas. I don’t give a fuck about being able to play songs around a campfire for people, I want to write my own music, even if no one gives a shit about it (and y’all are pretty aggressive about not giving a shit about my music). And I am certainly no musical genius, I just do this for my own satisfaction.
But it’s interesting to look at where I was musically in 2008 and where I am today. I started writing when I was ten years old or so, and long ago lost the thread of my artistic development. I hope I’m still learning and growing as a writer, but it’s hard to see that progress clearly, because I hit a baseline of competence a very long time ago.
But with music, that baseline of competence happened relatively recently. So, for example, here is the first ‘song’ I ever recorded, way back in October of 2008. Herewith the awesomeness that is ‘Ditty in G.’
Wow … that’s something, right? At the time, though, I was incredibly proud. It’s recognizably a song, after all, and I was very stoked to have created it. I mean, it’s … not good, but it’s also something I literally couldn’t have done a few months earlier.
Here’s the most recent song I’ve composed, the creatively titled ‘Song 1200.’
(Yeah, that means it’s the 1,200th song I’ve composed. Be amazed.)
Here is where I pause to assert that I know I am no musical genius, and I’m not presenting Song 1200 as something amazing. The point is, whether or not you think it’s any good it’s certainly more complex and sophisticated. And that’s the point here: Years of practice and experimentation have definitely made me a better musician. Years of practice and experimentation will definitely make you a better writer, even if you can’t always easily see it.
If you’re interested, I occasionally inflict my musical stylings under the name The Levon Sobieski Domination. If you’re not interested, that is, apparently, perfectly normal.
As you may or may not be aware, I have a little podcast called The No Pants Cocktail Hour where I discuss a short story I wrote while drinking some delicious whiskey and then read the story with some half-assed production (sound effects, etc). It’s fun! And, I hope, interesting to both folks who write professionally and those who aspire to write professionally.
The most recent episode focuses on a story I published back in 2007, Mr. Benders New House. It’s an unusual story for me, and I’m quite proud of it. If you’re curious about it (or why I’m proud of it) you can listen to the podcast, natch. But something that stuck me while recording this episode might be useful to other writers. Because something I see a lot of is young writers who worry a lot about how their work will be received. Whether they’re good enough, whether they have the right to use a certain POV, whether a subject or plot device has been over done.
Mr. Bender’s New House reminded me that those are all concerns for after you’ve finished the story. Step One is write the damn thing. Step Two is worry about whether it’s good, or if you didn’t pull it off, or anything else.
In other words, when it comes to first drafts, write like no one is reading.
Future You’s Problem
It’s kind of vital to remember that on the privacy of your own screen or your own notebook page you can write anything. No one ever needs to know about it, or read it. That’s incredibly freeing, and you should run with that.
That means working on an idea you’re not comfortable with, or you’re not sure you can pull off. Maybe it’s a romance, and you think of yourself as a hardboiled crime writer. Maybe it’s deeply personal and reveals ugly truths about yourself. Whatever it is, the rule of thumb is that if it scares you it’s worth writing about — but it’s important to keep in mind that when you’re working on a draft it’s just for you. It’s private. There’s no law that says you have to publish it, or show it to Beta readers, or put it into a blog post.
In fact, it’s often helpful to assume you won’t show it to anyone. Tell yourself this is just an exercise, for your eyes only. Then go to town. Write about your darkest fears or desires. Reveal yourself. Try crazy literary experiments. Try whatever the hell, because when you’re done you can just tuck it away. Or destroy it, if that’s your jam. Or put it out there if you feel good about it.
In Mr. Bender’s New House, I tried a kind of subtle trick, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Or that anyone would notice. If I’d thought about it while writing I probably would have given up. I probably would have decided it wouldn’t work, or I’d make a fool of myself trying to be a kind of writer that I’m not really. But I finished that story, and I sold it, and it was published, so I did something right, although it’s possible I still failed at what I was trying to achieve. If I’d given in to the worry, I wouldn’t have that story today.
The key is to not let worry over its reception stop you from working on it. Just write as if no one will ever see it. If Future You decides differently, that will be their problem, not yours.
Of course, this can be applied to any creative activity. Or non-creative activity. The one thing I’d advise is never apply this to dancing. Don’t cance like no one’s watching. ONe thing I’ve learned is that someone is always watching.
Question of the day: If you want to write stories that involve far-away (or entirely fictional) places, do you have travel to be able to do so believably? That’s an actual question you hear from writers, and the idea that you must travel widely before you can write (this actually comes up in epic fantasy a lot, his argument that to write a fictional universe you must experience many cultures and geographies up close) is surprisingly common even among writers who should know better.
Short answer: No.
Slightly longer answer. No, and this sort of exclusionary bullshit is just silly. But I’m not here to pile on a writer who has just had their nose rubbed in their own privilege, I’m here to talk about the writing part.
Make Shit Up
It’s amazing that you have to remind writers that they are, in fact, writers, and that their main function in life is to make shit up. It’s also amazing to think that we have to remind people that Google exists.
If you’re wondering whether you must travel to Nepal in order to experience the climate, culture, and wildlife firsthand before you craft your epic fantasy that is set in a fictional version of Nepal, the answer is no, of course not. In fact, your fictional version of Nepal doesn’t even need to resemble Nepal very closely, does it, since it’s, you know, fictional?
And even if you do want it to be accurate, there’s this thing called research.
Now, if you can travel places to do firsthand research, by all means do it. Nothing wrong with firsthand experience. And nothing wrong with allowing the places you do get to visit to influence and inspire you. Heck, one reason I set a key sequence of The Electric Church in London was because I’d recently taken a trip there, and the memories were vibrant and it seemed like a fun idea.
But if you can’t travel — whether due to the slow apocalypse we’re experiencing or run-of-the-mill budgetary and lifestyle limitations — don’t fret. You don’t need to in order to write a book. Through a combination of fakery, research, and imagination, you can very likely craft a convincing mirage of the place you’re using as a setting. Even if you have actually been there, you’re probably going to fictionalize a little bit anyway. Just turn that knob to 11.
For some reason people seem determined to invent things you absolutely must have, do, or know in order to write a novel. None of it is true. You don’t need anything. And I certainly don’t know anything, and I’ve published nine novels.
I read a lot of books. This doesn’t make me particularly smart or special; it just makes me someone who reads a lot of books. I read books for fun, of course, but also as a paid reviewer. The reviewing gig is great, because I get to read books I wouldn’t normally choose. Sometimes that is delightful. Sometimes it is … not. But I always get something out of it.
One problem I’ve encountered in some of the books I’ve been reading of late is a tendency to go for AWESOMENESS in the prose style. You might call it Purple, or just overdone — every description is a superlative, every action is incredible, skilled, decisive. It’s like the author dialed their writing up to 11 and then tinkered with the wiring to milk a few more watts out of the power supply IN ORDER TO MAKE IT ALL AWESOMER.
Tip: Don’t do that.
Superlatives for the Loss
It might seem counter-intuitive, but the more you tell me that your character is awesome and the best at what they do, the more adjectives and adverbs you pile into your sentences, the less convinced I am.
This is a case where ‘show don’t tell’ can actually be a very useful piece of advice. The more you have to tell me how awesome your character, story, and settings are, the less I believe you. If you want to convince me I’m reading something epic, you have to demonstrate it.
Some young writers think that they need to ‘punch up’ their writing to convey the excitement they feel when they’re making up the story, but this is the exact opposite of what you need to do. The more ‘awesome’ you drop into the story, the worse the writing gets, as a rule.
The thing about description is that the more AWESOME it gets, the less universal it is, as a rule. Because superlatives and modifiers are crutches. Readers should be excited about your story because it’s interesting, clever, and emotionally resonate. They should care about your characters because they feel real. None of this has much to do with piling 13 AWESOME words into every sentence.
In fact, a good exercise is to write a story with a limited number of modifiers — a restricted vocabulary, maybe, with just a short list of basic adjectives and adverbs, or a certain number you can use per 100 words. Restricted writing like that rarely produces great work, but it’s almost always a learning experience for the author.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to this story I’m writing about Ripper Mojo, whose fists are like steam-powered locomotives humming with violent rage and whose eyes are as deep and unblinkingly penetrative as a midnight sun.
I done did it again: A new episode of The No Pants Cocktail Hour is up for your listening enjoyment.
