Author: peterclines

I had half a thought about networking I was going to expand on, but as i started to write it out I remembered I just ranted about networking, well… not that long ago, relatively speaking. And I don’t want you all thinking I’ve only got three or four pieces of writing advice. So I’m skipping ahead to talk about zombies. Sort of.

Honestly, I’ve ripped this one apart and put it back together three times now.

I’ve talked once or thrice here on the ranty writing blog about using obscure words and overly-elaborate language. Usually in the negative sense, because this kind of stuff often throws up barriers between me and my readers. Best-case scenario is they have no idea what I’m trying to say. Worst-case is they get frustrated, maybe because they realize I’m just doing this to try to look clever, and they stop reading.

Well, they stop reading my work, anyway.

This doesn’t mean I should never use obscure or specialist words. It just means I need to be better about how and where I deploy them. Over the years I’ve come up with two simple rules-of-thumb for using obscure words or jargon in my books.

First, have there be an actual reason to use an obscure word. And no, showing off my vocabulary isn’t an actual reason. These words should fit the character, the situation, the world I’m trying to build. It should make sense and sound natural (within these guidelines).

Second, define it in the story. There’s a bunch of reasons something might need to be explained in a story. Plot reasons. Character reasons. If there’s a real reason to use this word or term my reader probably isn’t going to know, there’s a good chance someone in my story doesn’t know it either. Which means I have a believable reason to explain it. Keep in mind, that explanation can come in a number of ways, but it should get explained in a believable way.

ProTip on that last bit. I don’t want to fall back on “as you know” to explain things. Or a thinly-veiled version of it.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I do it, and I’ve seen other folks do it, too. Again, just a rule of thumb, but if I’ve used glabrous to describe a character… maybe I should see if these two rules apply.

Want some examples?

Okay, well, this is where the zombies come in.

Shaun of the Dead begins in Shaun’s favorite pub where his (very-soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend Liz is explaining why things aren’t working out between them. One of her big reasons is that they don’t ever get to do anything alone because Shaun rarely goes anywhere without his best friend Ed (who Liz insists she likes), which leads to her often inviting her flatmates along (who Shaun insists he likes) which only exacerbates things. Which then leads Shaun to ask… what does exacerbate mean?

Look at that. First, we’ve got the added subtext that Liz is a bit out of Shaun’s league, casually using a word she thinks s pretty straightforward and he admits he doesn’t know. Then we have the explanation, because Liz is trying hard to be gentle here, and, you know, let’s stay on track with the breakup talk, okay?

Or how about this one– remember when Doctor Who introduced the word petrichor to millions of sci-fi fans? Short version, Amy and Rory were trapped in a TARDIS gone mad and had to unlock a door with a telepathic lock. And one of the “keys” was the word Petrichor.

So here we are again. First, it makes sense this would be a slightly obscure word (and a scientific one) because it’s essentially a password in the Doctor’s time machine. And it makes sense that Amy and Rory have to be told exactly what the word means because they’re dealing with a telepathic lock—it’s not just looking at the word on a screen, it’s looking at the word in their minds, at their understanding of it.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s nothing wrong with rarely-used, obscure words in my manuscript. I just want to use them in ways that strengthen my story, not one that pushes my readers away. Because pushing readers away is… well, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of this, doesn’t it?

Oh, and one last thing. I hate to be that guy, but… well, it is award nomination season for things that came out in 2025. Nebulas, Locus, Hugos. If you were they type of person who nominated things and wanted to put up God’s Junk Drawer, the Combat Monsters anthology, or even just my specific story from it “The Night Crew”… well, I’d be grateful.

Next time… okay, look, next time you’re just going to have to trust me and go with this next one, okay?

Until then, go write.

This is one of those things I’ve meant to revisit for a little while now. So, hey, let’s talk about the Children of Tama.

“Darmok” was one of the most popular episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation, but on the off chance you don’t know it (it’s been *cough* thirty years, after all)–the Enterprise crew is attempting to open relations with an alien race called the Children of Tama. All previous attempts have come to a grinding halt because the universal translator can’t make sense of their language. It can be rendered in Federation English, yeah, but the words and sentence structure are just… gibberish. Determined to solve the problem, Dathon–the Tama commander—kidnaps Captain Picard, dropping the two of them on a hostile planet where they have to learn how to communicate and work together in order to survive. Through the course of this, Picard comes to realize Dathon’s language isn’t based on individual ideas and concepts, but on stories and metaphors. The Children of Tama wouldn’t say “I’m so relieved and happy to see you,” they’d say something along the lines of “Carol, when Zosia returns to Albuquerque.” It’s been impossible to properly translate the Tama language because the Federation doesn’t share their history and folklore.

In a way, all of us do this every day. We reference movies, TV shows, books, pop culture events, and then we stack and combine them. And we know people will understand us because they get the reference. It’s why we understand memes and reaction gifs and emojis.

Heck, want to know what an ingrained aspect of our language this is? When Bluesky first opened up, it didn’t have the functionality for gifs yet. So for almost a year, people responded to posts by just writing out things like “DiCaprioToast.gif” or “CasablancaShocked.gif.” And then the next step was (no joke) screenshots of Dathon from the “Darmok” episode describing various gifs. No seriously, that was a thing for a while.

Now, we also do this on a smaller scale. All of us have jokes and references that are only understood by certain circles. Coworkers. People who share a common interest. I may not get that programming joke, you might not understand School Spirits references, and neither of us are going to get those hardcore biathalon jokes. Pretty much every job has its own “inner language” and shorthand.

And sometimes those circles get even more intimate. Friends. Family. Even individuals. My gaming group has a bunch of things we all say that nobody else would comprehend. I’m in an ongoing group chat with a bunch of writers and we’ve got a few inside references none of you would get. And heck… my beloved and I have little things we say and do that nobody besides us would really understand (it’s how we’ll identify each other when the pod people/ body swappers take over). But to an outsider they could sound rude or confusing or like, well… gibberish.

Now, I’m willing to bet you all understand what I’m talking about here. The real question is, why am I bringing it up on the ranty writing blog?

A not-uncommon problem I see from some folks is they write dialogue loaded with references and figures of speech from their own personal experience. It might make sense within the writer’s personal circles, but outside readers just end up scratching their heads. And when this gets pointed out, the writers responsible for this issue will try to justify their words in a number of ways…

One is that their friends talk this way, and their friends are real people. Therefore, people really talk this way, and there’s nothing wrong with it. The thing is, as I’ve brought up here once or thrice before, “real” doesn’t always translate to “good.”

Two is they’ll argue this joke or reference is common knowledge. They’ll say the material is generally known– universally known, even– so the problem isn’t them, it’s the uneducated, unaware reader. This one’s tough, because it can be hard to agree on what “everybody knows” or even what’s generally known. If somebody honestly believes that everybody knows who won Best Original Screenplay in 1938, there’s not much you or I can do to convince them otherwise short of assembling a large focus group.

Y’see, Timmy, I can’t just write for my five closest friends. I mean, I can, sure, but not if I want to have some degree of success. I’m not saying my writing has to appeal to everyone and be understood by everyone, but it can’t be loaded with so many in-jokes and obscure references that nobody knows what I’m talking about.

This is one of those inherent writer skills that we all need to be good at. We need to keep learning and being aware of the world. Not just the world as we want to see it, not just the parts that interest us—all of it. Because if a large swath of my story assumes you know the entire Japanese voice cast of Parasyte, Vietnam-era military jargon, or why talking about squirrel voices counts as sexy talk… it probably means I’ve just knocked my readers out of the story.

And knocking people out of my story is never a good thing.

In conclusion, the Children of Tama eventually joined the Federation. Lt. Kayshon was chief of security on the USS Cerritos and everyone could understand him. Most of the time. Commander Ransom, the first officer, even learned some Tama phrases.

Also, nobody won Best Original Screenplay in 1938. The category wasn’t invented until 1940.

You didn’t know that…?

Next time, I’d like to talk about what was really going on when we met.

Until then… go write.

There’s a little maxim you may have heard– work smarter, not harder. If you haven’t, what it means is some folks solution to every problem is to throw 100% of their effort at it. They’d throw 110% at if that was possible. But it’s not.

Meanwhile, another type of person will look at the problem and figure out how much effort it actually needs. Do we want to do the time and work to dig through the mountain when we could go over it? Or around it? And then we can save all that effort and energy for somewhere we actually need it rather than burning out early on problems we could’ve just, well, easily gone around.

I mention that so I can tell you a few stories. There’s a theme. Trust me.

A bunch of you know I worked in the film industry for about fifteen years. Mostly television, some movies. Some of it’s even stuff you’ve heard of.

An all-too common problem I saw from beginning directors (and let’s be honest– also from plain bad directors) was an urge to make every single shot special. Every one had to be Oscar or Emmy-worthy. Didn’t matter if it was a wide shot, a close-up, a master, or coverage. Didn’t matter where it fell in the story. Didn’t matter what the day’s schedule looked like. Every shot of every scene required hours of set up and rehearsals and discussions and little tweaks and adjustments.

Now, on one level, yeah, this is sort of the director’s job. To make it all look good. But there’s a lot of nuance there. I can make an individual shot look good, sure. But does it fit with the last good shot? Does it fit with the rest of the scene? Is the editor going to be able to cut these shots together in a way that works within the filmic, visual language we all know on some level? Heck, does it even fit in the story I’m telling?

Plus, well… this is going to be an awful shock for some of you, but there are a few capitalist aspects to filmmaking. Yeah, sorry you had to find out this way. Making a movie costs money. It has a budget, and one way that budget’s expressed is in how long you have to shoot something. Spielberg can take a week waiting for the absolute perfect sunset his heroes can ride off into, but I’ve got today and it took us too long to get to this location so I might get two tries at this if I’m lucky and that’s it.

Anyway, what this meant for the crews I worked with was we’d get stuck with a new (or bad) director and they’d spend hours on the first two or three shots of the day. Like I mentioned above, it didn’t matter what they were or were they fell in the story. These folks would spend the whole morning working on whatever scene happened to be first up, and then we’d come back from lunch and surprise we still have 83% of today’s schedule to shoot in the last six hours of the day. So we’d rush through all that stuff—again, no matter what it was—and then come in the next day and, well, usually watch them do the whole routine again.

And this was really bad, from a storytelling point of view. The final film or TV episode would end up uneven because there was all this visual emphasis on random scenes that didn’t need it and often very little on scenes that did. Heck, once or twice I saw folks spend all this time on a random “pretty” shot and it wouldn’t even get used because there was no way to cut it in. These directors were so focused on making individual shots look amazing—no matter what that particular shot was—that they didn’t stop to think of the film as a whole.

Okay, this actually reminds me of another fun story (still semi-related). A few years after I got out of the industry, my beloved took me to an Academy screening of Pacific Rim (yeah, she’s super cool) and Guillermo del Toro was there talking about the movie. One of the things he stressed was even though he knew large swaths of the movie were going to be mostly computer-generated, he didn’t want any sort of wild, impossible “camera moves.” You know, the ones where the camera’s essentially whizzing through the air and then it loops down under the monster’s armpit to come back up between punches from the giant robot and then it circles around the two of them before pulling back for the panoramic shot of the city in flames as they fight? We’ve all seen some of those, right?

Yeah, del Toro didn’t want any of that in Pacific Rim. He understood those sort of visuals becomes distracting very easily, and once the audience is thinking about them they realize how impossible these moves are. And suddenly a big chunk gets lopped off their willing suspension of disbelief. They become consciously aware they’re just watching a movie rather than getting drawn into the story. That’s why the CGI camera shots in Pacific Rim are all set up as if actual, physical cameras are there doing regular, normal shots.

Now… I told you all this so I could tell you about Krishna Rao.

I worked with Krishna on a show called The Chronicle, back when the SyFy Channel was called the Sci-Fi Channel. Krishna started out in the crew (one of his very first film credits is on John Carpenter’s Halloween) and over the years worked his way up the ladder (seriously check out his list of credits), becoming a director of photography and quite often a director as well. Which is how I knew him. He had a loose rule he tended to follow when he was filming an episode. Honestly, I’m not sure he ever even put it into words, because it didn’t really click in for me until the second or third time I worked with him.

Krishna would only really plan on one pretty shot a day. That’s it. Once a day we’d have a complicated move with the camera dolly or some other elaborate shot that required lots of set-up and rehearsal. Everything else would be simpler, workhorse stuff– masters, overs, some coverage if it was needed. And I’m sure a few folks reading that may have some thoughts about “real” directors or the lack of art in American television or whatever. But here’s a few things to keep in mind.

Krishna made his schedule pretty much every day. Because he didn’t overload himself trying to do too much, he could make sure all his material fit together just how he wanted. He still had at least seven solid, very pretty shots per episode—that’s a cool shot every six minutes in a standard 42 minute television episode. And because he was being careful about using them, they always landed where they’d have the most visual impact.

And, sure, like any rule, sometimes he’d bend it a bit. He wasn’t against doing something fun or clever if he could do it quick. Sometimes we’d do two pretty shots in a day, maybe because of stunts or special effects. But these were always the exception, not the rule.

And his episodes always looked fantastic,

Okay, all interesting, but what does it have to do with books? With, y’know, our kind of storytelling? We don’t deal with visuals.

Y’see Timmy, something I’ve talked about a few times here on the ranty writing blog is pointless complexity. In structure. In dialogue. In vocabulary choices. I’ve seen stories with the most confusing non-linear structure just because the writer… felt like using non-linear structure. There are folks who scoff at using pedestrian words like blue or house or said. They spend all their time figuring out how to bury their story (or hide the fact that they don’t actually have one) behind layers of complexity.

To be clear, I’m not saying any of this stuff is inherently bad in and of itself. Personally, I love a story with a clever structure, an author who knows how to use their full vocabulary, and some twisty-turny character motivations. But a key thing is that when they do this—when they make a choice that isn’t the basic, workhorse choice—is that it’s actually making things better. This added complexity is an improvement, not an affectation.

And one other thing to consider. Sometimes… we need the simple stuff. We need the workhorse to just come in and deal with this paragraph or page. Because if I try to make every single sentence/ paragraph/ chapter the one that gets me an award, what I’ve really done is make a flat, monotone manuscript. If every single line is the utterly amazing artistic-piece-of-beauty one, they all have the same weight. Nothing has emphasis. To paraphrase one of great modern philosophers, once everything is super… nothing is.

So think about where you’re putting your effort. And how much of it you’re putting there. And how much you might want somewhere else.

Next time, I may blather on about the Children of Tama. Haven’t talked about them in a while.

Until then, go write.

Well, hey… 2026 managed to go off the rails pretty quick, didn’t it?

I totally get it if you can’t get your head around the idea of writing right now. It’s tough to be creative when it feels like you’re trapped in a burning house. But I’m going to soldier on because, well, it’s my job. And the ranty writing blog is part of it.

That said…

It being the start of the year, a lot of us are setting goals of some kind. Things we’re going to achieve. Ways we’re going to change. How we’re going to improve. And yes, maybe some of this is writing related.

There’s a saying you may have heard– change is good. As I may have mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of it. It’s easy for change is good to become a defensive thing, a shield from criticism. After all, if change is good, and I changed something, my change must be good, right? It’s not my fault you can’t accept change.

What I prefer to say is that change is necessary. Change happens, whether we like it or not. And sometimes… yeah, we won’t. Styles go out of fashion. Preferences shift. Standards change. Lines get redrawn. What’s acceptable (or possible) changes. We learn new facts and (hopefully) shift our view of the world to embrace them. Not every change is going to be good, but… things are going to change.

As some of you know, I used to work in the film industry. At various times I found myself working with different producers. Knew a few folks who’d worked with others. And at some point I realized two of them made for an interesting study on creativity. Both of had begun their careers at the same point, making very similar movies and shows, but ended them very differently. And a lot of that had to do with their willingness to change.

Names shall be avoided out of basic politeness, but it wouldn’t take too much digging if you really had to know who some of them were.

At first, Producer One was the more successful by far. By a lot of metrics, the most successful producer of the decade—television or film. And the next decade too. He was the guy behind some filmmaking techniques people take for granted today. I could probably name half a dozen shows he did (or more) and I’d bet serious money you’d know every one of them

But as that next decade started to wind up… this producer started to lose popularity. Y’see… as audience and studio expectations progressed, he was continuing to make what were essentially the same shows in the same way. I worked with him maybe ten years after that point and he was still making the same shows. Same kind of characters, same kind of plots and storylines, insisting on the same kind of shots and edits that had worked for him twenty years earlier. It got harder and harder for him to get projects off the ground because his work just felt more and more dated. Heck, when a few of his earlier, better-known things got rebooted, I heard from a few folks that the studios openly paid good money for him… not to have anything to do with them. To stay away and not be involved at all.

On the other hand, producer B kept growing and changing. He’d been making the same sort of shows at first, but he paid attention to the shifts and changes in what audiences expected. And what filmmakers could do with stories, and what they could do within different formats. He kept making hit shows, because he was willing to learn and grow and change. Maybe more importantly, he was willing to let go of old ways of doing things and old ways of thinking. And that growth kept him relevant. And very successful well into the 21st century.

But I know what you’re saying. Pete, I don’t want to work in Hollywood. Being a producer means nothing to me. What is this all about?

Let me put it to you this way…

I knew a genre author a few years back who talked constantly about how big publishers made so many mistakes and how self-publishing was the only way forward. And a main part of this author’s proof that publishing was doomed was, well, twenty years earlier they (the author) had been huge in their genre. A damned-near superstar. They’d learned how to write at the feet of a fantastic editor in the genre back in the 90s, learned exactly how to do the characters, the story beats, the payoffs. They’d taken those lessons to heart and sold a lot of books back then.

But over the years their sales diminished more and more. When I asked what they’d changed, they were pretty adamant—nothing! They were still writing books just like they’d learned how to in the 90s. The right way. The problem, I was told, was publishers were just chasing new trends and not sticking with what worked. Which is why, they would tell me again and again, traditional publishing was doomed.

And when I tried to gently hint that maybe there was something to learn from some of these new books… well, that was nonsense. After all, they had learned exactly how to write these books. Twenty years ago. From a master. Why would they change?

Y’see, Timmy, it’s tough to be creative when I’m not willing to acknowledge new things. Creation is, literally, making something new. I can’t improve if I’m not open to growth and change.

I’ve mentioned The Suffering Map here once or thrice—my first serious attempt at a novel, finished back in my mid-thirties. And I’ve also mentioned it wasn’t that good. Bordering on bad. For a bunch of reasons. But I’ve gotten better since then. Because I made an effort to learn. To change how I did things and looked at things. To grow as a writer.

Hell, I’ve tried to grow as a person. I’m glad a lot of my views and opinions have changed from what they were when I first started taking this seriously twenty years ago. Or thirty years ago. And sweet jebus, let’s not even talk about being a teenager in the eighties. Sooooooo glad I’m not that stupid kid anymore. He had a lot to learn about so many things.

I can’t do anything new if I’m not willing to try anything new. I can’t be current if I’m determined to stay in the past. And I definitely can’t expect to catch a lot of attention with an idea (or a mindset) that was outdated thirty years ago.

So as we stride forth into this new year, maybe think about letting go of those outdated ideas. The worlds moving on with or without us. Let’s learn some new stuff and do cool thing with it.

Next time, speaking of the film industry, I’d like to tell you about one of my favorite directors I ever worked with.

Oh, and if you’re reading this just as it published, tonight (Thursday) I’m going to be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego talking with Jeff Rake and Rob Hart about their new book, Detour. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!

Until then, go write.