Year: 2016

October 7, 2016

Procrasti Nation

You remember the Procrasti from Deep Space Nine, right? They were that race from the Gamma Quadrant that was going to come through the wormhole someday…

Geek joke.

I saw a thing floating around Twitter a month or three back, one of those clickbaity “this article EXPLODES one of the biggest myths about writing…”  And that myth was that writers need to write every day. Which, granted, the vast majority of professional writers—myself included—will all tell you to do if you want to do this for a living.  But according to this little piece, that’s complete nonsense.  If I only write once a week, good for me.  If I need to wait for inspiration, that’s fine.  What’s important is that I’m writing at a rate that’s comfortable for me.

Now, in all fairness to the article, I’ve said similar things here.  If you can only write on Sundays, standing on your head while wearing that “enhancing” corset you bought at the ren faire last year, but you always write 15,000 words in a session… well,  congratulations.  It’s a damned weird system, but it works for you.  So what if you don’t write the other six days of the week.  Fifteen thousand words a week is fantastic.  I know some pros who don’t hit those numbers consistently. Hell, I usually don’t hit those numbers.

However…

If I’m only cinching myself into the corset once every two or three weeks, and only writing a hundred words when I do… there’s a chance I just may not be taking this whole writing thing that seriously.

And there’s nothing wrong with that in a larger sense.  If I just want to scribble blog posts or fan fic as the mood strikes me, that’s fine. I know a few people who write as more of a therapy thing, some who do it for fun, and one who did it as a sort of… well, she’d been single for a while.  Let’s leave it at that.

Again, no big deal if that’s how I approach it.  To fall back on an analogy I’ve used once or thrice, not everybody who cooks needs to be a chef.  Or wants to be.  I love cooking, playing around with spices, trying new things with pizzas or pasta… but I’m never going to be a chef.  I’m fine with that.  I’m just doing this to have some fun on the weekends.

But… if I wanted to be a chef, to actually get paid for cooking, I’m probably going to have to put some work into it. And that means doing it more often than when the mood strikes me.  It means sometimes I’d need to stay home and cook rather than going out with friends.

And, yeah, sometimes that work can mean other things. It can mean reading cookbooks. Or watching cooking videos on YouTube.  Maybe even eating out sometimes.

But in the end… it means I’m going to be cooking.  A lot.  There’s really no other way to do it.

Same with writing.  If I want to make money off this storytelling thing—if I want to do it for a living—I’m going to have to write. A lot.  On a fairly regular, consistent basis.

I wrote my first three novels and a good-sized novella while I was working full time as an entertainment journalist. And reading scripts on the side.  So I was often doing four or five thousand words a week to put food on the table and pay rent, then staying in the chair to do another six or seven thousand on the stuff that I wanted to be paying rent with.

Hell, I know two full-time, professional writers (about to be three) who had babies this year.  Little, squishy new-humans who pretty much need constant attention (granted, I’ve never had one myself, so that’s just conjecture on my part).  And those three are all still writing.

It’s fine to tell myself that I’m waiting for the muse.  Or that I’m reading a how-to book about crafting the perfect first sentence.  Or that playing Dawn of War III is going to be a vital part of my creative process.  We all have our own methods when it comes to writing. Like that corset.

But there is also a point that… well, I’m just not writing.

Again, depending on what I want out of this, that may be fine.  If I only post on my blog once a month… so what?  If I just write slash-fic when I’m bored, hey, it passes the time.  If this is just a hobby that I do every couple of weeks… awesome.

If I keep telling you how much I want to be a chef, though… wouldn’t it be weird if I only cooked one or two meals a week?  Or two or three times a month?

I mean, that just doesn’t make much sense, right?

Next time, I want to talk about something crazy.

Until then, go write.

Oh!  And if you’re in the Los Angeles area, this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.  Noon to three, open to writers of all levels.  It’s completely free—no sign up or anything, just stop by and pull up a chair.

Okay… now go write.

cookingmuseprocrastinationtips
October 5, 2016

Amazon Review Policy, Pt III

            Two months since I first started all this.  The goal was simple—we’ve all heard anecdotal stories about reviews being deleted for a number of reasons, but they tend to be kind of random and rarely have a lot of other information about them.  Also, Amazon’s policies change a lot and seem to go through… well, random enforcement.  I wanted to create a big set of data that people could refer back to when they talk about such things.
            I did this by taking thirty books I’d read over the past year (thirty really good books, to be clear) and doing a review a day for the entire month of August. Okay, almost the entire month.  I recorded the title, the author, the day the review posted, and every social media or publicity connection I could think of to said author (supposedly, this is one of the big things Amazon keeps an eye on).
            It’s been a little over thirty days since the last of those review posted. 
            What’s happened in the weeks since then?
            Okay, lots of stuff.  But as far as this goes…?
            Well, I went back and checked all the reviews.  They’re all still up as I write this.  Six of them even got marked with the little “X out of Y people found this review helpful.”  One of those is a control book, too.
            I’ve heard nothing from Amazon. Nada.  Zip.  No warnings or alerts or even a mild slap on the wrist.  Nothing on my account or in my email.
            And keep in mind—some of these reviews should be deleted.  They blatantly violate the review rules. There’s a bunch of control reviews where I have a big conflict of interest by offering my “unbiased” thoughts.  Heck, I even admit in them that they’re biased.
            Plus—I haven’t exactly been secretive that I’m doing this. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and on Twitter, and it was shared/retweeted a fair amount. More than a few of the authors mentioned their reviews publicly, and I’ve usually mentioned this little experiment in the responses.  I’m not going to say this was trending anywhere, but things haven’t been dead-quiet, either.
            So if there’s a social media bot/algorithm searching social media for connections… it’s doing a pretty poor job. 
            Anyway, what can we learn from all this?
            A few ideas…
            Firstis that there might be more to the reviews that have been deleted than we’re being told.  Maybe I logged in to my Amazon account through my author-friend’s computer and some bot registered that?  Or possibly that we share the same IP, depending on just how close I am to said author-friend.  Perhaps I’m very, very bad at sockpuppeting?  Maybe I wrote in all caps and set off a different bot?  There’s so many things that could be a possible trigger, it’s hard to be sure exactly why something was deleted.
            This feeds into my second idea which is that my reviews might only get pulled when someone reports them to Amazon.  Perhaps having the same last name as the author, related or not, made someone shout “J’accuse!”  Maybe somebody’s a bit timid and was offended by some of the colorful terms I used to show how much I liked this book.  Possibly it’s a new form of clever attack by paranoid folks—I can’t write a nasty review of your book to bring down its rating, but I could tell Amazon those two very positive reviews were actually written by your best friend/significant other/somebody you paid.  Heck, if I’m trading reviews with you, it’s even possible the deletion is an attack against me, not you.  How often have we seen some crazed nut chase somebody around social media responding to any and everything they post…?
            Third,  over the past year or three I’ve sometimes wondered if this is actually a clever trick by Amazon to encourage self-policing.  I mean, if we all know our potentially nepotistic reviews are going to be taken down, we probably won’t waste time putting a lot of them up, right?  Right there, that could cut 50% or more of potentially troublesome reviews—and all it cost them was a press release about their latest policy.
            I know I did this for ages.  There’s about a two or three year stretch where I didn’t write any reviews because everyone had me convinced Amazon would pull them immediately.  And I had stuff to do so… why use up that time? Instead I’d often get in touch with the author somehow, let them know how much I liked their book, and offer a blurb if either of us thought my name could offer any weight for them. 
            But I didn’t write any reviews.
            Fourthis something Chuck Wendig suggested to me.  After the reviews went up, he got in touch on Twitter and bounced an interesting idea off me, based (I believe) off a few observations and some of the more… aggressively negative reviews a few of his books have attracted.  His thought was that the automatic deletion is more likely to happen to people who’ve had reviews deleted before.  If one of my earlier reviews was reported for breaking one of the rules, Amazon would be more likely to apply their uber-algorithm to my later reviews.
            This actually makes sense. More than a few folks have pointed out the raw amount of data the algorithm would have to process for every review of every book on Amazon (easily, say five million), and then cross-referencing them with every social media contact said author has (we could probably say, what, five thousand as an average, since Amazon is counting both ways).  By my rough math, that’s like a batrillion calculations.  It’s not a complicated thing to do if you’re just searching for a connection, but as brute-force work goes that’s a fair amount of number-crunching. 
            However, if we’re going to limit it to authors/reviewers who’ve already been reported “manually,” so to speak, those numbers probably shrink by a very large percentage.
            If that was true (and again, we’re just spitballing—it’s barely a hypothesis), it might explain why some people have reviews that never even post while others (like myself) can put up a couple dozen with no problem—even on the ones that should be problematic.
           
            Which of these are true?  No idea.  There’s a bit of potential overlap.  All four of them fit the small amount of information I was able to glean from this.  And there’s probably other theories that would fit, too.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of them, or on your own based on what we’ve got here.
            What we can say is that Amazon definitely isn’t deleting all reviews.  Not immediately and especially not based off social media connections.  We’ve got thirty examples to prove that right here. 
            So the next time someone tries to tell you that a bunch of reviews get deleted for no reason, you can point them to this
            Which I think brings us to the end of this little experiment.  The links are all there if anyone wants to check back at any point to see if anything’s happened. Maybe I’ll check back in six months (April or so)  just as a late follow-up to see if anything’s happened.  And if anything happens before then, I’ll definitely let you know.
            Come back in two days when I’m going to talk about…
            Well, maybe three days.  I’ll get to it eventually.
            Until then… go write.
AmazonCharishreviewsWendig
September 30, 2016

Artsy Character Redux

            I wanted to revisit a topic I discussed a while back. If you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, this’ll probably seem familiar. And if not, well, I promise it’ll be as semi-informative as anything else I put up here…
            A few years ago, on one of the message boards I used to frequent, someone once accused me of being horribly biased against anything that’s “character driven” or lacks a plot.  I didn’t feel the need to address it there, but it did get me thinking.  Am I horribly biased?
            After wondering about it for a brief while, I realized… yes.  Yes I am.
            Horribly biased.
            Keep in mind what bias means.  We tend to think of it as something evil (especially during an election season) but all it means is someone has an automatic tendency to lean toward or away from something when it comes to judgment.  If I have the choice of watching a sitcom rerun or Agents of SHIELD, my personal bias is to watch Agents of SHIELD.  If one salad is made with spinach and one with kale, I’ll probably choose the spinach.  It doesn’t mean Agents of SHIELD beats every sitcom or that spinach is always better than kale—it’s just the way I roll.
            Unless the spinach is cooked, which is disgusting.
            By the same token, if I have the choice between a story where extensively-defined protagonists do absolutely nothing and a fun story with good characters and an arc… well, I’ll go with option B every time.
            So, yeah, I’m biased.  In fact, if you check the numbers, you’ll find most people are.  We like compelling characters, but we also want to see things happen.  Check out a list of bestselling books or films or plays.  How many of them involve people sitting on their butts for long periods of time?  How often do we look at a list of Academy award nominees and realize we haven’t seen 3/5 of them… if not more?
            The sad truth is, that kind of stuff just doesn’t sell.
            Please keep in mind before you leap to the comment section–I’m not the only one saying this.  People have been saying it for decades.  Probably centuries.  There’s a reason so much of Charles Dickens’ popular crap survived and most people can’t even name three of his contemporaries.  Stephen King has had a storytelling career for five decades now, but how many other authors followed him out of the 1970s?  People want to be entertained.  Silent film director Marshall Neilan humorously pointed out (about a hundred years ago) that there are two kinds of directors—the ones who make artistic movies and the ones whose movies make money.
            Are making money and popularity the only yardsticks of success?  Hell no, not by a long shot.  But they’re the common ones that most folks use.  If I tell you that I wrote a phenomenally successful book, you’re not thinking I made my dad proud, or impressed my tenth grade English teacher, or really touched three dedicated readers.  When I say “phenomenally successful” it means the book hit the New York Times bestseller list, sold a few million copies, and I’m writing this out for you next to my kidney-shaped pool while Jennifer Lawrence works a knot out of my shoulders.
            All that being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with stories that focus more on character than on action.  There are a lot of character-driven stories that are just fantastic.  They’re vastly outnumbered by thebad ones, no question, but saying all such stories are bad would be just as lazy as the folks who dismiss all genre work as pedestrian and simplistic.  Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is far more a slice-of-life story than it is a courtroom drama.  Fiend is about drug addicts stumbling through a zombie apocalypse.  Contact is people studying and deciphering radio signals from the stars while figuring out what this discovery means for humanity.  The film (500) Days of Summer is far closer to a character study than a romantic comedy.  I’m sure anyone reading this can name three or four more.
            So, if I want to write something that leans far more on character then action, here are three tips for making it something people will still want to read.
1) Have compelling characters
            Somewhere along the line a lot of people got it in their heads that the only way a character can be interesting is if they’re seriously messed up.  This became the yardstick for “mature” fiction.  My character’s a drug-addicted, abuse-surviving, cancer-ridden, sexually-frustrated, self-loathing, dishonored soldier with a horrible case of Tourettes Syndrome currently working as a waiter at Denny’s.
            While such a person may have a great deal going on under the surface, you’ve got to wonder how my reader’s supposed to relate to such a character.  Or how they’re supposed to like them.  Even if this is some kind of redemption tale… how do I have somebody come back from going that far off track?
            If I’m going to make my story all about characters, I need to make it about characters my readers will actually like.  They don’t need to be perfect, by any means, but they also don’t have to be so flawed we wonder why they’re not in prison or an institution.  Someone facing an uphill battle is great, but someone facing a sheer cliff is just pointless.
2)Have something happen
            This is probably my biggest complaint with 99% of such stories that I read.  Nothing happens.  The week this story covers is the same week a few million other people have had.  Heck, it’s indistinguishable from the same week these characters have had fifty-two times a year.  Mundane.  Average. Unspectacular.  There’s nothing special or noteworthy about it in any way.
            Now, nobody has to fight off a killer AI android for a story to be interesting.  They don’t need to rob a bank or save the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis or steal the Declaration of Independence.  But they need to do something.  If my characters don’t have a reason to aim a little higher while we’re watching them, then we’re seeing static characters.
3) Have an arc
            Once I’ve got a compelling character and I’ve got something happening, I need to have an arc.  By its very nature, an arc implies we end somewhere else.  Arcs that end in the same place are called circles, and there’s a reason you haven’t heard of well-structured character circles.  You’ve heard of people running in circles, though, haven’t you?  And that’s never a good thing, is it?
            The whole point of a story is to get from A to B.  People grow and change.  If there’s only going to be A, that’s just a plot point.  Plot points can be fascinating, but they also tend to sit on the page if they’re all alone with nothing backing them up.  Just as something needs to happen in the observed life of my character, something needs to change. 
            And that’s it.  Seriously.  It’s really that simple. Three tips to writing a character-driven story that will still make audiences cheer. 
            Because cheering audiences pay better.
            Next time…
            Well, I’ve got an idea for next time, but I guess we’ll see if I get to it or not.
            Until then, go write.
actionarcartchallengecharacterexceptionsplotstructure
September 24, 2016

Re- Formatting

            Not so much a pop culture reference as a tech reference.  Came up with that title and then remembered working with my first computer when I was… nine?  I remember having to format floppy discs before you could use them.  Anyone else remember that?
            Very sorry I missed last week.  Deadline crunch. Which I’m still in, really, but I didn’t want to miss two solid weeks in a row.
            Anyway…
            I was rewatching some episodes of an old show recently, and it struck me that it had a major format problem.  And as I mulled on it, it struck me I’ve seen this problem a few times before. Sometimes firsthand, happening right in front of me.
            I want to point out something… well, I’d say it’s obvious, but I don’t think it always is. I think it’s been muddled by a lot of would-be gurus and experts spreading bad information.  And since that’s what led to the ranty blog in the first place, well…
            Anyway, let me throw some wisdom at you.
            Novels are not comic books.
            Comic books are not television scripts.
            Television scripts are not movie scripts.
            Movie scripts are not stage plays.
            Stage plays are not novels.
            As I said, should be obvious, right?
            Thing is, each of those storytelling formats is unique unto itself.  Seriously. I can rattle off at least half a dozen inherent differences between any of them.
            We always hear people complain about changes when something is adapted from a book into a movie, but the simple fact is things have to change.  I cannot tell a story in a screenplay the same way I’d tell it in a book.  And I can’t tell a story in a motion picture script the same way it’d be told in an episodic television script.
            Let me give you some examples.
            Based off my own experience—as a crew person, a contest reader, and a screenwriter–I’d guess that 99.9% of all film, television, and stage work is done from the audience point of view.  The only parts that aren’t are the very limited POV shots that sometimes crop up in horror movies or thrillers(usually outside windows, inside closets, or across parking lots) and the rare experimental film like Hardcore Henry that was funded entirely by the powerful carsickness/nausea lobby.
            Contrast that with a book, where the author, with full control, can shift to any point of view they want. I can make the reader see, hear, and experience everything through one character’s senses, knowledge, and memories… and then shift to a different character.  There’s no real way to do that on film.
            However… a book is, for a lack of a better term, a one-source format.  I have to write things out.  There’s no way for the reader to know George has blond-brown hair without me putting “George has blond-brown hair” down on the page.  I might be able to get a little subtle with it, maybe pull some literary sleight-of-hand, but at the end of the day all I can do is put words on the page.  That’s it.  I can’t slip in some details in the background, because everything in a book is presented in the foreground—right there in front of my reader on the page.
            If I’m writing for television, I also need to be aware of the very specific format that most television writing requires.  Episodic shows are usually done with a four or five act structure (not to be confused with three act structure, which is kinda-sorta something else) which requires my story to have a series of mini-cliffhangers where the commercial breaks will be.  If it’s a show with an arc, it also needs to address that a week’s passed since the last episode, and some story points may need to be repeated or re-addressed to cut down on audience confusion.

            Of course, if I’m writing for, say HBO or Netflix, then that doesn’t apply and I have a bit more freedom, structure-wise.  These episodes are almost more like mini-movies.  Except that now I need to be clear people may be binging these stories, watching them back-to-back-to-back, and take that into account.

            Stage writing is also unique because it’s happening right in front of us. There’s an inherent storytelling conceit that we’ll accept these actors don’t see us.  Or that they’re not actually in a forest.  Or they can’t hear that guy behind the tree bellowing his lines out to the back of the theater. This is a different kind of storytelling mechanic, and that’ll be reflected in my writing.
            And none of these are like comic books. Comics are this fantastic medium where we can have an active, flowing story that’s being told completely through static images.  So my comic script has to reflect this. Each panel has to be a single moment, and it has to be the right moment to convey the most impact and information while still flowing smoothly into the next moment I choose to continue the narrative.
            You’re wondering why I’m talking about all this, yes?
            These days it’s not uncommon for a story—or a storyteller—to jump mediums. As I mentioned above, we’ve all seen a ton of books and comics adapted for the movies.  I know several novelists and screenwriters who’ve worked in comics.  I’ve worked with theater directors and playwrights on film projects.
            Thing is, a story can’t go directly from one format to another.  The devices and mechanisms I use here won’t always work here.  Usually won’t, in fact. And I need to be able to make those adjustments.  A really common mistake I’ve seen is when people just yank a story from one format to another with no changes.  Or when they start using the conventions of one format in another
            That show I mentioned up at the top?  In one episode it had three reveals. Thing is, each one was essentially revealing the same thing.  But the filmmakers had assumed since Yakko was the main character for that scene, and Dot was the central figure in that scene, and Wakko was the focus of the final scene… well, they could do the dramatic, big music reveal for each of them.  Alas, it just doesn’t work that way, because—as I mentioned above—we can focus on different characters but it’s all really audience POV.  So the second time around it was more eye-rolling than dramatic and the third time was… well, laughable.
            Last year I had a chance to be in an X-Files anthology.  Truth is, though, the main spine of my short story actually came from a spec script I’d written for an old TV show called The Chronicle.  And I had to make adjustments for that.  Most notably, all those mini-cliffhangers in the story had to be smoothed out.  Some things had to be described much more than they were in the script, because now all those details actually had to be on the page.
            Y’see, Timmy, if I want to shift a story from one format to another, I better understand the conventions and limitations of each one.  And if I want to write in a different format. I need to learn that format as well as I know my current one.  I can’t just go in assuming it won’t matter, or that I’ll be the exception who gets to slide.
            So know what you’re writing.  And how you’re writing.
            Next time, I’d like to talk about some artsy character stuff.
            Until then, go write.
adaptationscomicsexceptionsformatGame of Thronespoint of viewscreenwritingtransplantsX-Files

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