Year: 2021

I’ve mentioned experience once or thrice over the past few posts, and I figured it might not be a bad thing to blather on about. It’s one of those things we all talk about and acknowledge, but also all like to believe we’ve got enough and don’t need any more. Mostly because… well, how much is enough? How do you even measure experience? Are there real-world units of experience?

Anyway, let me toss out a few things we can all think about. Like this story you may remember. It’s funny and I’ve told it before.

As it says over on the About page, I’ve got really old New England roots. I mostly grew up in Maine, but I spent my high school years down in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Yes, with the Rock and the Mayflower and all that. One of the big tourist attractions there is Plimoth Plantation, a sort of ongoing LARP museum/interactive show of the original colony in the year 1627. Likewise, all the actors there are playing specific, actual historical figures from that year. You can walk in, talk to the different “residents,” and they’ll answer questions about what they’re doing at the moment or “current events.” Sometimes, depending, they’ll also ask about your odd and extremely improper clothing (young lady, are you showing your shoulders?!? In public?!?)

(weird fun fact—if you’ve ever seen that late ‘80s movie Warlock, the whole “Boston Colony” sequence they show at the beginning with the little town is actually Plimoth Plantation)

Anyway… a friend of mine from high school worked at the Plantation. They assigned her an age-appropriate historical role, and part of that role was getting married at the end of the summer to another character, Experience Mitchell (ahhh, Puritan names). The thing was, my friend kinda had a behind-the-scenes thing for another Pilgrim. So on the big day, she told me one of her co-workers gave her a “wedding gift” in the changing room, a t-shirt that said…

            Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

It was a clever pun, yeah, but the phrase stuck with me because… well, it’s true.  If you talk to anyone who’s considered experienced, it’s because they failed or screwed up. Probably a lot.

Now—somewhat back on track—in one of the Sandman books, I remember someone (I think it was Eve?) told Matthew the Raven that everyone has at least three great stories in them. This is true, but I think there’s also an unspoken corollary there which is just as important. And it gets ignored a lot.

Yes, we all have at least three great stories in us, but we also have all have lots and lots of bad stories in us. Dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. We have awful characters, contrived plots, cringe-worthy dialogue, and some incomprehensible structure. We’re not even going to talk about those horrible twists or the very awkward sex scene.

Yes, I’m saying we. I’ve written sooooooo much bad stuff none of you are ever going to see. My third grade attempt at a novel, Lizard Men From the Center of the Earth.  My middle-school sci-fi novel.  My Boba Fett and Doctor Who fan-fiction. My junior high fantasy novel.  My high school werewolf-detective novel.  My college novel, The Trinity.  My after-college-moved-to-California novel, The Suffering Map. And mixed in there are a ton of comic scripts, short stories, screenplays, and I think even one solid attempts at a stage play. Thousands of pages.  Thousands of hours of work.

And pretty much across the board, all that work sucks.

It sucks on different levels, for different reasons, but don’t doubt that most of it sucks hard. I spent weeks and months and years in one case writing stuff that should never again see the light of day. I’ve got no problem admitting it. In fact, being able to admit it let me move from being a random dabbler to a serious writer. I spent about twenty years digging through all those bad stories and found the good ones underneath.  Maybe even one or two great ones.

Writing all those stories was my experience. I had to get them out. Whenever you hear about an overnight success or an amazing “first” novel, odds are that writer’s got a really long string of awful work behind them. Sure, there’s always a chance they really are an overnight success—sometimes those great stories are right on the surface, the way a prospector might kick over a rock and find a gold nugget just sitting there. But for the most part, becoming a good writer means a lot of, well, not getting what you want. Doing the work and then doing… more work.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s an all-too-common belief that just finishing something means it’s good. I mean, I made it all the way through to the end on my first try. That’s a lot of writing. That novel must be worth publishing and being read, right?

But the truth is, the vast majority of first novels are awful. And that’s okay. The second ones are pretty bad, too. Ex-Heroes was my first published novel, yeah , but it was my seventh-and-a-half attempt at writing one. And, as I hinted above, I’m really glad it was the first one people saw.

Because that junior high fantasy novel… jeeeeez, less said about that one the better. So embarrassing. On so many levels.

Sometimes we pour our hearts into something, spend weeks or months or even years on it, and we still don’t get us what we want. But at least we get some experience. If we admit we need it.

Next time, I think I want to talk about what was happening a few days before this.

Until then… go write.

So, I talked about prologues recently, and I wanted to toss out one more thought on them. Well, y’know, one more for now. This one’s an easy warning flag to look for as I’m trying to figure out if my prologue is worth saving or not. It’s not a guaranteed catch, but I’d bet at least three out of four times, that flag’s popped up for a good reason.

If you’ve ever followed along with my Saturday geekery, you know a common B-movie complaint I have is the opening where everyone dies. A bunch of people show up, have some bare bones character development, maybe flash some skin… and then die horribly. Usually by monster, but sometimes it’s a serial killer. Or lava.

Anyway, there’s a slight offshoot to this, and I’ve seen it in book manuscripts too. It’s when our main story doesn’t start until

SIX WEEKS LATER

You’ve seen this, yes? I’d guess 83% of the time that opening scene’s about someone dying. Or doing something vague and “mysterious.” Or maybe it’s really clear what’s going on but it just feels irrelevant because, seriously, who are any of these people?

And then we flip the page and see that header right under “Chapter Two.” Or maybe it got a page of its own. In the movie, they probably did a fade-to-black and then maybe a little chyron at the bottom of the next shot—Two Years Later

Like I said, this isn’t a guaranteed problem. Not so much a red flag as maybe a safety orange one.

And also, just to be clear, the problem isn’t the timestamp (so to say) itself. Just like with prologues, the problem doesn’t magically vanish just by saying “Okay, I won’t tell the reader it’s four months later, I’ll just let them figure it out.” This isn’t going to take care of anything and it’s probably going to cause more problems.

Y’see, Timmy, that tag is a warning to my reader—and it should be to me. It’s making it clear just how disconnected this opening is from the actual story on the temporal measuring tape. And if it’s that set apart from my main story… how important is it?

Seriously, look at all the different rules and conditions we’ve talked about before when it comes to prologues. No, go look—I linked to most of them up above. I’d bet you four out of five times, if the story opens with a scene or chapter that gets followed with SIXTEEN DAYS LATER (or something similar, don’t get pedantic), it’s breaking a bunch of those rules. Which means I’ve probably got an unnecessary opening. Heck, my manuscript might be a lot stronger without it.

Sure, this isn’t an absolute. There are lots of examples of stories that start here and then jump days, weeks, or months ahead. But there’s also really solid reasons why those examples work with those stories. We can break down exactly why that separation between then and now is so important for this book or movie.

So if you find out you’ve added that flag, maybe take a moment and give that opening a good look. Does that separated beginning really add anything? What does the big distance between them bring to my story? What does pointing out that distance add to it?

So says the guy who just started a new book, and the only thing on page five is

ONE THOUSAND YEARS LATER 

Next time, there’ll be some more experience to share with you.

Until then, go write.

Happy Birthday to me. Well, belated birthday. Monday was a day of action figures and LEGO sets and many games and drinks with my fully vaxxed friends. It was a wonderful way to turn <<–DC REBOOT–>> years old.

Anyway… now that I am somewhat old and wise, I wanted to take a moment to blather on about something that’s been itching at my brain for a while. And I know it’s going to be a touchy subject for some people, so I’ll try to tread lightly.

MFA programs. Why do these things even exist?

See! I told you it’d be touchy! Just to be clear right up front, this is absolutely not a swing at anyone who made it through an MFA program and got a degree. I know MFA writers are popular punching bags for some people, and this is not one of those posts. I’m a huge believer that pretty much all education ends up being useful (even if not always in the way it was intended) and I’ve got massive respect for anyone who actually did it. I enjoyed my four years at UMass, but I also know I wouldn’t’ve had the stamina (or the resources) to make a graduate degree happen. So this is, again, not coming down on anyone who scraped and clawed their way up through a higher level of higher education and came out on top.

You absolutely rock. Seriously. Never doubt it.

The people who gave you that MFA though…

Probably a good point to mention before I get going is none of this has been triple-checked or peer reviewed or anything like that. But within my own experience–including a degree of research specifically about this–I haven’t found anything to contradict any of it. Like, a disturbing number of things line up with this half-assed theory I’m about to present to you.

So… one of the main reasons writers and other artists tend to get the liberal/ fruity/ beatnik type labels is because, traditionally, if I wanted to learn one of these fields I just did it. People didn’t go to school to learn how to write, they just wrote. They dropped out of “productive society” and wrote a lot. For the vast majority of folks this meant finding a dirt-cheap apartment in a city close to publishers (to save postage costs), drinking cheap booze, having cheap affairs, and skipping two meals a day to pay for supplies. Eventually (hopefully) I learned from experience, got better, and then people started to pay me. That’s where the stereotype of the starving artist comes from—most of these folks went hungry while they learned their art. I talked about this at length a few birthdays back…

Yeah, if I was really lucky I might find some kind of mentor to show me how to hold a brush, where to hit the marble with the chisel, or to read the first half page of my story and offer a dozen notes right there. But these were kinda few and far-between. I mean, think about it. In terms of any general population (pick your favorite city or state or country) there are only going to be so many successful artists. So out of that limited number, I need to actually find one of them, and it needs to be someone in the field I want to study, and they need to be willing to offer some sort of mentorship, AND they need to have space/ time for me, personally. I mean, there’s probably hundreds of other people looking for mentors too, right? It absolutely happened, no question… but it probably didn’t happen a lot, just applying a little common sense.

Now the reason people had to learn this way is universities and colleges didn’t teach the arts. No painting or dance or acting or writing. Really. They were professional institutions. People went there to learn engineering, medicine, chemistry, law. You know… real jobs.

Worth noting there were a very small number of these schools with writing classes. But even in those cases this wasn’t something you got a degree in. It was just a side thing—some exercises to maybe help you write a better closing speech for the jury.

And yes, I know—there were a few specialist art school out there. Very few, comparatively speaking. The odd music academy or dance conservatory. But this wasn’t considered higher education. It was—at best—more like we’d consider a vocational school. And if you think about it, that kind of makes sense. Sure I can teach you how to write notation for sheet music and how to blow on a flute. But I can’t teach you how to compose the song in your head. And as we’ve talked about here many, many times, somebody can’t teach you the “correct” way for you to write. We all need to figure that out for ourselves.

So what changed? How did writing (and the other arts) suddenly become a “teachable” thing? Well, two things happened. Actually, one thing happened, but a second thing had a very powerful impact on that first one.

In reverse order, the second one was Nazis. Hate those guys, right? In case you missed that week of grade school history, in the mid-late 1930s a right-wing fascist group gained a ton of power in Germany and made life miserable for pretty much everyone in Europe. And a lot of people in Africa. And Asia. Eventually the US joined in the fight (to quote Eddie Izzard, “after a couple of years, we won’t stand for that anymore!”) and sent sixteen million people off to fight.

After WWII, a lot of folks—like with WWI before it—were just left wrecked by the scale of it all. The things they’d done. The things they’d seen. I mean, by the numbers, the odds were you saw someone die every single day. For maybe four years. So when the war ended, most US servicemen got a slow boat home. A deliberately slow boat. So these soldiers had time to breathe, to look at the waves, and to talk. Most importantly, to do it with a bunch of people who’d just gone through the same things they did.

And when they got home, that first thing I mentioned was waiting for them.

Y’see, the US Government had come up with something called the GI Bill. WWI (and its aftermath) was still fresh in a lot of folks’ minds and everybody wanted to make sure this new wave of veterans were taken care of when they came home. So the government said “When you finish your tour, go to college on us! We’ll cover it.” Because it was a win-win for the United States. We’re taking care of veterans and we’re making more doctors, engineers, and scientists. Wooo! Yay us! We rock!

So these guys got home, Big Government pulled out the big checkbook and said “Congrats on surviving–what college do you want to go to? What do you want to study? Law? Medicine? Rocket science? We’re going to need some more rocket scientists pretty soon.”

And a lot of guys took that offer. But a bunch of them said “Y’know… I think I might just take a year or three off and process all this some more. Work through it. Maybe write a book or some poetry, put some of this stuff in my head down on the page while I try to figure out what I’m doing next.”

Now this wasn’t the first time Uncle Sam had heard something like this (again, WWI just thirty years earlier). So he shoved the checkbook back in his pocket, put a firm hand on their collective shoulders and said “Good on you, man. You go do what you need to do to get right.”

And that would’ve been it. Except… suddenly the collective colleges and universities of America said “Whoa, whoa, WHOA! You promised us all this GI Bill money! You said hundreds of thousands of soldiers were going to be signing up for college!”

”Yeah,” said Big Government, “but they don’t want to be doctors or lawyers now. They just want to write a book about their experiences.”

”Well, let’s not be hasty,” said the CEO of Colleges, Inc. “I mean we… we’ve got writing… programs.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. A whole department. Several departments. They could absolutely get a degree in… in the arts. In fine arts, even! You just write those checks, Big Uncle Sammy, we’ll have everything ready by September.”

Worth noting my friend M.L. Brennan (college professor and vampire author) heard this line of thought from me a while back and pointed out all of this continued (arguably got a lot worse) in the ‘90s when college loans became a serious for-profit business. Higher education became less about, well, education and more about making money. So it’s not surprising MFA programs multiplied like bunnies shortly after that. You want to go to college for what? Yeah, sure, we’ve got a program for that. Just sign your loan papers…

And that’s how writing became something that’s taught. Colleges and universities just wanted the money. Which also meant now they needed to make up rules and guidelines and formulas to try to teach all these things. Because if there weren’t any rules, they wouldn’t be able to issue grades. Some students couldn’t do better than others. Which would mean this “degree” I got is… well, kinda pointless. Maybe even worthless.

Which brings us to the last thing I’m going to say about MFA programs—their abysmal success rate. Seriously. For most college degrees (of any level), we say “making a living at it” is more or less the end goal of getting the degree. If I go to school to be, say, a high school teacher, and 83% of us in that program become high school teachers, that’s a pretty successful program, right?

With that in mind, as another friend, Kristi Charish, has pointed out…what would you think of a school where less than 5% of education graduates end up making a living as teachers? What could we say about an engineering program where only one or two students out of the entire graduating class actually become engineers?

I mean… seriously, does that sound like a successful program? A terribly useful degree? Especially if there are dozens of other people becoming successful teachers or engineers without that degree? I mean, Kristi told me at her school the science department had produced more successful novelists than the MFA program.

And again, I want to stress, this isn’t about the people who got those degrees. As I said at the start of this, I’m impressed by anyone who makes it through a graduate program. And I absolutely think some useful learning comes out of it.

But if someone’s about to make that choice, I’ve got to be honest… I’d tell them it’s probably not worth it. They might get something out of it, yeah, but odds are they could get that thing somewhere else. Probably a lot easier and definitely a lot cheaper.

Also again… none of this has been rigorously reviewed. There could very well be a dozen facts I missed just sitting out there, ready to tear this whole chain of thought apart brick by brick. And if so, please give me those facts. I’m always glad to know more.

Next time… I want to talk about the story that happens five years later. Or really, the opening that happened five years ago.

Until then, go write.

I touched on something a few weeks back that I thought was worth revisiting.

It’s not unusual for us to set stories in fantastic worlds that are close to our own, or maybe not close at all. Maybe it’s our world but with magic. Maybe it’s a futuristic sci-fi utopia or a historical zombie apocalypse. I’ve talked here once or thrice about the Marvel Universe, and how living there would require an entirely different worldview.

There’s a certain kind of worldbuilding we could probably call  “everything you know is wrong” or maybe “revealing the world behind the world.” It’s one of those stories that starts off as the real world, or maybe a real world, except then our heroes come to learn that there’s a lot more to their world than they believed. We establish that we’re here on Earth, in the real world, and then BAM! Aliens are real, and they live among us! Reality is actually a complex computer simulation.  Secret vampire cabals rule the world.

We’ve all seen some version of this, yes? This moment usually comes right before we start our second act. Now that my characters know what the world really is, they can learn what challenges they’re really up against.

That’s what I mentioned before, but wanted to focus on a bit today. The idea that worldbuilding has to happen in the start of my story. I can fill in details later, but the broad strokes stuff needs to happen early on. Definitely in the first half, I’m tempted to say preferably in the first act.  

The reason it needs to happen this early is context. I’ve talked about this a bit before, too. In this case, it’s how we know what’s possible—or what my character thinks is possible—within the world of the story. If we don’t know what’s normal in a story, how do I know what’s supposed to surprise us? I mean, what would be unbelievable in this world? How do I know if my characters are reacting appropriately? If I’m going to keep altering the rules of the world as the story goes on and on, it makes it harder and harder to get invested in the world and the characters.

So if I’m doing some major worldbuilding in act three… it probably means I’m cheating a bit. I’m rewriting the rules in a big way at the last minute. Suddenly, with less than a hundred pages to go, there’s time travel or ghosts or aliens or teleportation or something that puts a whole new spin on everything! And odds are I’m doing it to create some suspense or a new challenge or to get my characters out of a challenge.

And, well… that’s cheating.

Actually, think of it like playing a game. We should have a general sense of all the rules before we really get going. Even if we just handwave over things for now and say “Fighting the basilisk, ehhhh, we’ll get to that one if it ever comes up,” this still tells us there’s the chance of running into a basilisk and there might be special rules for fighting it. So it won’t be a surprise when these rules show up and get explained later. None of us want to play with that person who at the last minute says “Oh, I forgot to mention… I get 100 extra points just for being the blue dwarf.”

But wait, WAIT, says internet guy #23. Hang on! There are LOTS of stories that don’t tell you things up front. That change the rules at the last minute. He was dead all along! They were on Earth the whole time! She’s actually the Viscountess Isabella!

And this is true. Sort of. Third act twists are very common—and freakin’ amazing when they’re done well, BUT…

One of the basic rules of a twist is that it doesn’t violate anything we’ve seen before—it just makes us look at it in a new light. Most of the example twists I just (vaguely) gave don’t change the core premise of their established worlds at all. For example…

SPOILERS!! BIG SPOILERS FOR THE SIXTH SENSE (AMONG OTHERS)!!

When we find out Dr, Malcolm has been dead the whole time, this isn’t new worldbuilding. I mean, we’ve known ghosts are real for most of the movie. We know little Cole can see them. He even flat out told us “some of them don’t even know they’re dead.” The big twist here doesn’t change any rules or limits of the world as they’ve been explained to us, it just changes how we look at Malcolm and his interactions with it.

Want to use the old classic Planet of the Apes. Or any number of Twilight Zone episodes)? In all of these a key thing is establishing interstellar travel one way or another, so it’s not breaking any rules to say we might be on another planet, or these aliens are from another planet. All of these stories involve the inherent assumption of what planet we’re on. So again, the story isn’t cheating—it’s just playing us because it knows what we’re going to assume about the world we’re being shown.

End Spoilers!!

But if, in his final showdown with Harry, we found out Voldemort was a cyborg alien from the future, that’s breaking the world we’ve established for the past six books. Likewise, if the next season of Picard has him bringing Data back to life using ancient Vulcan sorcery… that just sounds like nonsense on a bunch of levels, doesn’t it?

Go build incredible worlds. Have fun with them. Just don’t cheat.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you.

Next time… well, this Monday’s my birthday. So next time we see each other I’ll be older and wiser. That being the case, I’ll probably have share some of that newly found wisdom with you.

Until then, go write.