Year: 2023

So, rather than talk about writing, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about doctors.

I’m guessing most of us have dealt with a doctor at some point in our lives. I know I’ve dealt with a bunch. General practitioners, sure, but I also had a long bout with a nose and throat specialist that ended with… well, a lot of stuff cut out of my head. I’ve also seen doctors for a pair of knee injuries that I’ve talked about once or thrice. And another doctor for one of those, well, men-over-a-certain-age examinations. And one of those led to another specialist doctor, and another surgery, where I believe a few other specialist doctors were in attendance.

That’s not even counting dentists and orthodontists. People like to make jokes, but they’re doctors too. When I finally fought my way out of poverty, well, my mouth was a mess. I hadn’t seen a dentist in over a decade. I’d had one tooth actually crumble in my jaw. Another one cracked in half. I probably count as a cyborg with all the metal and ceramic in my head now.

Plus, I had a high school biology teacher who was very firm that we call him doctor, not mister. He had a doctorate and he wanted to be sure everyone knew it. And I mean, most of my college professors were doctors. English literature, comparative literature, astronomy, art history, anthropology, and more. Hell, I had one anthropology TA who had his doctorate, he just couldn’t get a better position, job-wise.

Oh, and my friend Mary (credited in the back of several books) is a doctor, and she puts up with so many bizarre questions from me about drugs, injuries, zombies, stuff like that

Point is, I’ve known a lot of doctors. You probably have, too. We all understand that doctor can mean a lot of different things. I don’t want an art history professor operating on my throat, and I probably have a better understanding of early American literature than my proctologist, even though he’s got a doctorate and I don’t.

And there’s nothing wrong with this. We’re not putting anyone down, we’re just acknowledging that doctor is a term that can mean a lot of very different things. The advice my dentist gives about, well, dental matters is not going to apply to art history. And vice versa.

Okay, yeah, I’m really talking about writing.

Structure is one of those things people talk about a lot, but so often it’s clear (to me, anyway) they don’t really know what they’re talking about. They’re that guy whining that their art history professor can’t treat cancer or Jill Biden isn’t really a doctor. They’ve chosen one definition for structure and they discard (or mock) anything that doesn’t meet said definition. One example I see a lot is folks railing against three act structure, but I’ve found most of them don’t seem really clear about what three act structure is. Especially in relation to other types of structure.

Structure can be confusing in writing because there are so many different types. Three act structure is a thing, yes. But so is dramatic structure. And linear structure. And narrative structure. And network TV shows and movies tend to have a four or five act structure (or even six in some cases) but that has to do less with storytelling and more with how many ad breaks said network insists on.

I think the problem some folks have is that when the idea of three act structure got more or less loosely codified, it became something they could point to. Especially people who… well, didn’t know what they were talking about. What was supposed to be guidelines suddenly became RULES. Solid, well-defined rules, which meant I could now say you were breaking the rules or following them.

The problem was, they were trying to apply the rules of three act structure on television’s five act structure. Or they’d insist narrative structure had to follow the rules for linear structure. Which, again, is like insisting Jill Biden isn’t a real doctor because she doesn’t do open heart surgery. Which would also apply to Dr. Mendelsohn, the guy at UCLA who spent several hours poking around inside my neck and skull, as mentioned earlier. He’s clearly not a real doctor.

(He is. He’s fantastic. Honestly saved my life)

Anyway… my point is, structure is a big umbrella with a lot of things under it. And if we want to get good at this, we need to understand the differences between them, but also how they work together to create a good story. I can’t just take one type of structure and say this is the only one that matters. Especially if I’m applying the basic rules of another type of structure to it.

Think of it this way (to use our doctor analogy again). Your body has a digestive system. And a nervous system. Circulatory, endocrine, skeletal, so many systems. We understand they’re all separate things that operate in different ways. The rules of one don’t apply to another.

But we also understand all these systems need to work together. Even on our basic, layman’s, non-doctor level we can see the places they overlap or brush up against each other. How changes to this one will affect that one.

And that’s how stories work. We’ve got several types of structure, each with their own individual rules, each working in their own way. But they rub up against one another, and this structure is going to affect that structure. Making some blanket, universal edict that covers all of them just shows I don’t really understand any of them.

And I need to understand them if I want to tell good stories.

Yeah, I’ve mentioned a lot of different types of structure. There are links to more detailed posts about almost all of them. Which also means I need to go clean up at least four or five older posts so they don’t look too chaotic when you click on those links.

Anyway, next time… I wanted to talk about getting the last word.

Until then, go write.

Of course, just as I decided to relaunch and combine all this stuff, my life turned into pure chaos and stress…

Anyway, here’s the April newsletter. In May. The goal (moving forward, ha ha ha) is to put it up on Substack, then put it up here a week later. And maybe at some point, ehhhh… maybe I’ll just phase out Substack. I think a lot of us are already getting newletter fatigue. Let’s be honest–how many of the one you’re subscribed to do you actually open?

But for now, newsletter goes out on the middleish-of-the-month Monday, gets reposted here on the following Monday (without this introductory explanation), and Thursdays will be normal ranty writing blog stuff. Sound good?

All that said…

* * * *

Oh, hey, there.

Wait, there’s even more of you? How did that happen? No, no, never mind. We’ll make it work somehow.

Let’s just get to it, shall we?

You may remember from last time, I’d sent one project. GJD, off to a few beta readers. At this point, I’ve heard back from most of them, so May will be the month of notes and editing and probably sushi. Which means—if all goes well—my agent will be shopping that book around this summer.

I’m a little over 31K into the new book, the one after GJD. I think we’re calling this one TOS. And I just realized if you follow me on the social media you may have figured those initials out by now. Anyway, not a ton since last month, I know, but the horrible truth is, I’m a self-taught typist and I’m kind of awful. Seriously, I’m maybe three steps above hunting-and-pecking. My handwriting’s awful, too. So yeah… transcribing a full legal pad can take some time. As I mentioned last time, though, this also serves as an early light editing pass.

Oh, and I’m working on an updated version of the FAQ—also on the website—to get a lot of answers out there.

And there’s a few small projects that are still small and not quite worth talking about yet. But maybe soon. Relatively speaking.

Other news…

Some of you from the Twitterverse may have watched the end of Saturday Geekery this past weekend. If you didn’t know, it was just me live-tweeting B-movies and pointing out what I saw as frustratingly bad storytelling/filmmaking issues (and giving credit when I stumbled across a little gem of a movie). I’d been doing it for seven years, but to be honest… it wasn’t as much fun as of late. There were times it was, sure. And there were times I got something out of it myself (like the core idea for a book).

But more often than not, for the past year or so, the thing that was supposed to be my day-off relaxation activity just left me feeling… tired. On a few levels. Sometimes even stressed out. It had become more of a self-imposed obligation than an enjoyable activity. Add on the general chaos of Twitter lately—reach being throttled, algorithms manipulated in foolish ways, never being sure which features will work at any given point—and it was just time to end it. And by sheer luck it ended almost exactly seven years to the day from the first time I did it. So I look like I was smart and had a plan.

Forget that whole thing I just said about sheer luck. Very smart, absolutely had a plan.

I mean, this isn’t saying I’ll never, ever live tweet a movie again (or whatever it’ll be called on whichever social media platform we all end up on—live toot? Live shout? Live barf?). But if I do, they’ll be movies I love and enjoy, ones where I can name names. Maybe toss out random fun facts I happen to know. ComicCon weekend’s always a good time for a watch-along, right?

Hey, speaking of movies and TV shows I really enjoy…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— Lockwood & Co, Star Trek: Picard, The Mandalorian, finally saw Encanto

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading— The Murderbot books by Martha Wells. Something new from Scott Sigler I don’t think I can talk about quite yet. Also just got the last Silvers novel from Daniel Price. Really, I’ve been working my way through a big pile of books-to-blurb.

Cool New Toys – The new Nebula and Rocket for Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I also got a few of the new Disney wave collectible minifigs from LEGO (626-Stitch, Mulan, and Doctor Faciler)

Okay, now back into it for real.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so forgive me if I’m a little rambly to start.

There’s a dialogue issue that I’ve seen pop up in books and movies and comics, and it was something I’ve never been able to pin down. It was one of those things where I could tell the story was kind of losing its way, but I couldn’t figure out why. Definitely wouldn’t be able to explain it. What was the common thread? Why did the dialogue go from good (or at least adequate, in some cases) to eye-rolling?

And then, as so often happens in nature, a pterodactyl brought a bundle of enlightenment to my doorstep.

Two months ago I was watching this Saturday geekery movie about a group of women who were getting out of the city for what was supposed to be a bachelorette weekend and had instead turned into a “that cheating bastard didn’t deserve you” weekend. A lot of initial, awkward conversations about was it him, was it me, why didn’t I see it sooner, usually cut off by none of that, let’s drink, look, that park ranger’s checking you out. And then, y’know, pterodactyls attacked. As they do. So now this weekend in the mountains is a battle for survival.

Except…

Every time the women ended up somewhere—in a car, in a cabin, hiding behind a boulder, whatever—the conversation would drift back to was it him, was it me, why didn’t I see it sooner. Long conversations about that relationship, and relationships in general and that cheating bastard. And not, y’know, the pterodactyls stomping across the roof or gathered outside the cave or tearing apart the park ranger on the front lawn. Seriously, this happened again and again and again. Not the park ranger, the conversation thing.

It was then that enlightenment struck.

But first, one quick-but-related segue, since it’s been a while…

An idea I’ve brought up here several times is plot vs story. Plot is external. It’s what’s going on outside my characters. Story is internal. It’s all the things inside my characters that they’re dealing with.

It’s also worth noting that plot is active while story tends to be reactive. Plot is things happening, story is how my characters deal with those things and are shaped by them. My characters respond to events based on who they are, but the outcomes affect how they respond to future events. A fancier term for this is a character arc.

So the story advances the plot while the plot advances the story. When it’s done right it’s a beautiful, symbiotic relationship between the two elements, each one lifting the other to new heights. As all the links in these past few paragraphs imply, it’s something I’ve talked about a few times.

Also—one last bit—you may have heard something like this before but your college literary professor insisted “story” actually refers to the driving narrative of the protagonist as seen through the lens of something. Cool. Whatever. If you want to call these two concepts yin and yang or fabula and sjuzhet or Mirabel and Bruno, that’s all great. Whatever works for you. Don’t get hung up on what we’re calling it and ignore the idea behind it.

Okay, got all that? Cool. Let’s get back to the pterodactyls.

So in the situations I described above, there are clear, active plot events going on, but the characters are using this time to talk about our heroine’s story. Yeah, the park ranger’s being torn apart outside but what if this means I’ll never get married? I mean, so many of my relationships go bad like this. They always have, ever since high school.

And if that made you smile a little bit, the funny part is I’m not exaggerating. That’s exactly how it happened in the movie. That was the actual topic of discussion during that specific event.

Now, granted, it’s an extreme example. And I understand why this particular group of filmmakers did it. To be honest, I’ve seen them do it a lot on a few different projects. They’ve created a plot they can’t actually put on film, for whatever reason, so they’re trying to fill space with all these random deep, emotional, and completely unbelievable conversations.

But I think that’s not why this gear-shift feels so inherently fake. I mean, people talk about weird things at weird times. We laugh at odd moments. We finally remember the thing and blurt it out at a perhaps inappropriate time. There’s nothing wrong with doing it now and then. Although I’m sure the park ranger would appreciate maybe being a little more the center of attention during this difficult time for him.

So here’s my new rule of thumb for you. Not a law, not an ironclad thing that applies to every single situation. But I think it’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind when characters start giving monologues.

Talking about plot feels honest. Talking about story feels contrived.

It makes sense when characters talk about plot. We accept it. Of course they’ll be talking about the things going on around them, the events that will have an affect on them or other people. This is believable dialogue.

On the flipside, when characters talk about story–when they’re talking more about what’s going on inside them than what’s going on around them–it often feels wrong.. Bringing up all that internal stuff, forcing it out into the world, it tends to feel… well, forced. Unnatural. Especially when none of it relates to current events.

NOW… before anyone rushes angrily to the comments to correct me, toss out an example, and point out how awesome it is when characters talk about their feelings, I’d like to point out two things. One is what I just said a minute ago. This is a rule of thumb. It’s a guideline. All writing advice is iffy at best, and I’m openly telling you this one’s a little more iffy than most.

Second is that, in most our favorite books and movies, when characters are talking about their inner feelings and conflicts, they’re using that wonderful tool we call subtext. Chris isn’t talking about their feelings, ha ha ha, no. They’re talking about the carwash, and how great it’s going to be when the mortgage is paid off and we can all, y’know, work on other things. And if Sam wants to stick around to help run the carwash, I mean, yeah, sure, that’d be, yeah, great. Cool.

Want a solid example? In Spider-Man: Homecoming, when Tony Stark tells Peter Parker to hand over his suit, is Peter actually worried about losing the suit? I mean, he still has his old, homemade one. And the web fluid and the shooters, those are his own design. As we see later, he can still fight crime, just like he did before Stark came knocking. So losing the suit can’t really be that big a deal, right?

Except we all understand this scene isn’t actually about the suit. It’s about Peter being terrified his future is suddenly slipping away from him. He’s a poor, nerdy kid from Queens who had a shot at the big leagues, at having Tony’s approval, of being part of Stark Industries and part of the Avengers, at finally being—in his mind—someone who matters. And suddenly it’s all being taken away.

But Peter doesn’t talk about being scared. He talks about the suit. And how he’ll be nothing without it.

So if I’ve got a character about to deliver a heartfelt monologue about their inner feelings and desires and conflicts… maybe I should pause and look at it again. Yeah, there’s a chance it’s perfect as is. This is one of those cases when someone can flat-out say exactly what they’re feeling with no subtext and it sounds fantastic

But maybe—especially if I’m doing this two or three or four times—it’d be better if a lot of it was implied rather than explicitly said. Maybe I could bring it out it with some plot-relevant subtext. Or maybe I could show it with their actions and decisions. Story advancing the plot and all that.

Because it just makes people uncomfortable when we talk about that stuff.

Next time, unless anyone has some other suggestions, I thought I’d blather on a bit about that other type of structure.

Until then… go write.

(wow, haven’t said that in a while)

Oh, hello there. I didn’t see you come in. Please, take a seat and join me for a while. Apologies for the dust, I’m still freshening things up. No, no, take the good chair. It’s fine.

Well, let’s get caught up, shall we?

I started the ranty writing blog about sixteen years ago. I was going to bore you with the exact how and why, but its not really important, is it? I mean, some of you know, but I’m betting overall most of you don’t really care. No, it’s okay, I get it. To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, I don’t need to know where the stuff I like comes from.

Anyway, I’ve been offering tips and advice for a while now. Just tips and advice, because ultimately writing is an art and we all approach art in our own ways for our own projects. That’s my golden rule for this stuff. What works for me probably won’t work for you and it definitely won’t work for him. A huge, often overlooked part of being an artist is finding the tools that work best for you. Which often means figuring out the ones that don’t work for you.

And I’ve found I like blathering on about this stuff. It helps you with stuff, and every now and then it helps me with stuff, too. And I like helping where I can. Here, at the Writers Coffeehouse, at cons. Remember cons? Good times…

“Well, hang on there,” says RealWriter677147, their voice rising up from the depths of the internet. “If you like helping other writers so much, where’ve you been for the past year?”

Fair point.

After lockdown more or less puttered out (but our covid crisis continued), I was just feeling… beat. 2020 was a grueling year—personally, creatively, nationally. 2021 was marginally better, but only in the sense of breaking both thumbs not feeling that bad after you’d already broken both knees. Rolling into 2022 I was just… beat. Exhausted. I’d hit the point where it was hard to care about a lot of stuff, but I was just pushing ahead and doing it anyway. Which just made me more fatigued, and then we were in one of those vicious circles you hear about.

So I took a break. A long break. And kind of looked at a couple things and how I’d been approaching them.

And well, all this (he said gesturing around) was one of the things I wanted to fix. I’d gotten spread out a lot over the past decade and a half on the internet. We had the ranty blog, sure. But we also had the Lovecraft Zombie Almanac, which was me sort of parking my own name on blogspot in a just-in-case way. And there were a bunch of different social media accounts. Plus a personal website Penguin Random House had created for me years ago when they discovered I owned my domain-name but had never done anything with it. So I asked around and somebody recommended a designer who could pull all this together under one umbrella, so to speak.

It felt weird to start posting again when everything would be moving to another website in a month or two, so I held off for a little longer. And then certain people with more money than sense decided to get into the social media game and well… that knocked things around a bit, too. I enjoy doing this, yes, but I won’t lie to you– there is a business aspect for me as well. I’m not planting subliminal messages for you to buy my books (probably), but it definitely helps to make sure people remember I’m still alive, y’know? So, his Muskiness made me rethink a few things. I was fortunate to have a patient web designer who didn’t mind my swings between complete indecision and almost obsessive focus. And then it was the holidays and, look, everybody’s got lives and loved ones.

And then holy crap it’s been like a year since I really posted anything here. It’s time to get back to it, right? Let’s go!

Well, first…

I may be doing a few new things here. I also started a newsletter in this downtime, but it’s through Substack and… jeeeez, speaking of people with more money than sense, right? I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to convince myself this is a good thing. Either way, I’d already decided I’m going to also post the newsletter here on the ranty blog. So once a month you’ll get a general update about what I’m working on, where different projects are at, and also just some quick updates on other things of interest like books, movies, toys, and so on.

Also, you may notice some little hiccups here and there throughout the blog. The designer did an amazing job bringing everything over and keeping 95% of the links and formatting intact. But the truth is, at this point we’ve got some posts that are old Word docs which were cut and pasted into Blogspot’s editor which were then ported over to this system. There’s some rough patches out there and I’ll try to clean them up as I stumble across them.

Oh, and last thing. I won’t be taking down those Blogspot blogs. I won’t be adding to them, but I’ll probably just lock the comments and direct people here. Point is, if in the past you linked to a post for some reason, you won’t lose that. But if you want to update it to here… that’d be cool.

I’ve got a few things on deck for upcoming topics, but I’m always up for suggestions. Maybe something specific you were looking for help with or just wanted a few nudges in the right direction. Let me know in the comments down below.

Speaking of which, next time I’d like to talk about the things we talk about.

Until then, go write.

And thanks for checking out the new place.