Author: peterclines

A few years back I was on a panel with Pierce Brown (back when cons were safe) and he made the great analogy that genre is like a compass. It’s a thing pointing you in a certain direction. You like sci-fi, go north. Fantasy is off to the west. Romance, head east. Sexy romance, you head south-east. You may not find the exact thing you want, but that’s the direction of things that’ll probably interest you.

I think genre is also a set of expectations. Really, I think genre sets expectations. If you tell me something is horror, at some point I’m going to expect something scary or creepy. If you tell me it’s comedy, I’m going to be waiting for the laughs. If it’s a murder mystery, where the heck is my body? I WAS PROMISED A DEAD BODY!

And I think this is where problems can arise. Because if I’m following that compass and I’ve got those expectations, it can be very disorienting to get something else. More to the point, no matter what it is, that something else is going to fail to meet those expectations I have. And when something doesn’t deliver like that, our automatic reaction is almost always that this thing is bad. It’s wrong.

Look at it this way. If you tell me we’re going to the LEGO store and instead we go to the book store… well, I mean, these are great and I enjoy them both a lot. But they’re still different places. And depending on how much I was looking forward to one, I might be less inclined to see the good points of the other.

Likewise, if I’m referring to something as the wrong genre, or leading people to believe it’s a different genre… they may view things with a harsher eye when they follow that compass to my work. I mean, you can try to defend it any way you like, but the simple truth is the latest Hellraiser movie is the worst-written, worst-structured romantic comedy you’re ever going to watch. It’s just horrible. Seriously, it misses every single romantic comedy benchmark you can think of. The two leads don’t even kiss at any point!

Of course, Hellraiser wasn’t trying to be a romantic comedy. Not remotely. It’s a fantastic horror movie, but that won’t matter when I’ve told everyone to judge it by romantic comedy standards. They’ll look through that lens and nothing will line up. It’ll all be… wrong.

And this holds of sub-genres, too. We all recognize that “horror” isn’t one, monolithic thing. There are so many different types and flavors of creepiness. Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy is horror, sure, but that doesn’t mean we immediately lump it in with The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Cherie Priest’s The Toll is horror, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the same things as Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard, which doesn’t approach things the same way as the Out There Screaming anthology. And none of these are like my own book, The Broken Room, which has a bunch of horror elements.

Why do I bring this up?

When most of us start off as writers, we flail a bit. We attempt to copy stories even though we don’t quite understand all the mechanics of them. We’re not sure where our own stories fit under that big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or…). We’ll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons. One is so I’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere. Two is that I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is. If I tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. My readers may toss it aside.

At the worst, they’ll all remember me as “that idiot” the next time they see something of mine.

Next time… well, for some of you November means NaNoWriMo. It used to, anyway. So I wanted to toss out a few quick thoughts about that.

Until then, go write.

Okay, yes, I said I was only going to do this biweekly now but this is me posting for the third week in a row. I messed up my schedule/lost track of time because… look, life is a mess sometimes. And now I’m trying to play catch-up because some of these were planned to come out on certain days and I want to pretend this is still slightly relevant.

Point is, the ranty writing blog is still biweekly. Mostly. With only a few exceptions.

Anyway…

If you’ve been following along here for any amount of time, you know I’m a big believer in the rules of writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what they said. There are rules and we have to learn them.

Now, granted, most of these rules are just in place to make sure we don’t end up in a metaphorical car crash before we’ve gotten any real experience. It’s like that driver ed instructor who screams at you to keep your hands at nine-and-three on the steering wheel. That’s a real thing. They’re not wrong to teach it and there’s reasons we need to learn it. But eventually we’re going to hit a point where we understand that a lot of the time we can relax a little bit while we’re driving. And that there are still absolutely times we want to keep two hands on the wheel.

One solid rule is spelling. Spelling’s important because that’s how we identify a word. If my readers can’t identify the word I’m using, they can’t understand what I’m trying to say. And if they can’t understand what I’m trying to say, well… It’s going to be tough to get them interested in what my characters are going through.

Of course, some folks will arrgue that spelling doesn’t really matter. I mean, really all those spellings were just made up anyway, right? Some random guy decided this was the right way to spell it and we all just went along with it. It’s not a rule. I don’t have to spell things that way. People wil figure out what I mean from context.

Maybe? Y’see, one of the other cool things spelling does is it lets us keep readign without any intruptions. Every time we notice a misspelled word, our brains sort of trip fir a moment. It might not completely knock us out of the story, but it breaks the flow a bit. And after the flow gets broken again and again… well, we’re not reading the stor yany more, we end up auditing it. Watching for the next typo to land

A solid follow up here is vocabulary in general. Sometimes I may know how to spell a ward, but I don’t actually know what it means. Other times I may know what it means, but I’m not entirely sure how to spell it… and maybe I’ve accidentally spilled something else instead.

You probably noticed both of these things in the past few paragraphs, didn’t you? Ha ha ha, he’s talking about spelling and he’s got typos. And that’s kind of my point. It knocked your brain out of reading mode. You were still working your way through the paragraphs, but it wasn’t a casual, gliding-along thing, was it? And that’s just here on a random blog post where I’m not really trying to draw you in. Imagine if you’d been trying to read a story?

Thank goodness for spellchecker, right?

Welllllllllll…

Here’s the problem. A spellchecker wouldn’t notice half the mistakes up above. I know, because I ran this post through mine. See, a spellchecker will notice a word that’s blatantly spelled wrong, but it won’t register a word that’s spelled correctly but being used wrong. For or fir? Ward or word? Spelling or spilling? A spellchecker doesn’t see a problem with any of these, so it doesn’t care which one I’m using.

But my reader? They’re going to notice. I mean, you noticed, right? Every one of those, ping, ping, ping

Well, that’s no problem, says random guy #23. I’ll just use one of those more advanced grammar programs, or maybe even an AI. They’ll understand the difference between a preposition and a noun. They’ll know the word I want.

Ha ha ha haa haaaaaa no they won’t. Sorry.

Kameron Hurley recently told a cute story on Bluesky about how she was looking through a blog about dentistry and the writer had capitalized the word tartar through several articles. When she asked why, the response was basically an internet shrug and “Grammarly told me to.” Because Grammarly can’t understand the difference between tartar (the build up on your teeth) and Tartar (an Asian ethnicity). This is a supposedly expert grammar program that doesn’t understand capitalization can drastically change the meaning of words. Which also should make you wonder about giving your Polish glassware a good polish, or that fine china you got in China.

Really, the more most of these assorted systems offer to do, the less they’re often capable of doing. I mean, heck, how many times have you gone looking for a specific book on Amazon and the algorithm instead recommends random Blu-rays? Or camping equipment? Or an anime t-shirt? None of these are bad things, but they’re definitely not what I asked the algorithm to find for me.

Again, spellcheck can’t solve all my spelling problems. A grammar program isn’t going to understand a lot of grammar situations. And this really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Human languages are complex, and English is one of the messiest, most confounding languages there is. Sometimes it’s hard for people to grasp subtext and nuance or even just basic meaning. So the idea that some guy threw together a machine that can understand all of that better than most people…?

Well, I mean, we’ve been talking about how they don’t. They just don’t. Sorry.

Let me be clear. I still use spellchecker all the time. But I’m not expecting it to do the work for me. It does help me catch the odd blatant misttake that crops us—and usually a lot faster than I could—but it also labels a lot of other things in my story as mistakes that aren’t. I still have to keep an eye on it and make sure it’s not screwing up. I don’t assume every correction or suggestion is right, and most of the time they aren’t.

Y’see, Timmy, too many folks get a result from a spellchecker or some half-baked LLM and they immediately accept it. It has to be right because… well, it’s a computer. It knows everything, right? That’s what decades of sci-fi has taught us. Computers are never wrong. Computers is geniuses.

This is why I need to know how to spell. I need to have a good vocabulary. Because ultimately, I’m the one who needs to be doing the writing if I want it to be my writing, saying what I want it to say.

As they said in the Princess Bride, anyone who says differently is spelling something.

Next time… well, crap, if I get back to biweekly posts, next time will be Halloween, so I guess we’ll talk about something scary. Or something we want to be scary, anyway.

Until then, go write.

Old person pop culture reference.

If you’ve been following along the ranty blog these past few months, or maybe subscribed to the newsletter, you may have picked up on a few subtle hints that the past four or five months have… not been great here. Sickness. Sleepless nights. Anxiety. Lots of stress.

Lots of stress.

One thing that’s helped me get through it is stories. This might not exactly be a surprise, but I love a good story. Reading them. Listening to them. Watching them.

But let’s face it, that should sort of be a default for us, yes? We take in material to produce material. Input—output. If I want to build muscle, I need to eat a lot of protein. If I want to grow nutritious food, I need soil with lots of nutrition in it.

And if I want to write… look, it only makes sense that I have to read, yes? Again, input, output. No input, no output. We have to feed the machine.

That’s why, even with all the crap that’s been going on in my life, I’ve still read twenty books in the past nine months. Plus a bunch of comics and short stories. And I was glad to do it. Hell, I definitely wouldn’t’ve been able to write half of what I did this year without these pauses to rest and recharge with some good stories.

Now, the reason I bring this up every now and then is… well, every couple of years I tend to see some”pro” or “coach” insist that “real writers don’t have time to read.” Time reading is time you should be writing, they’ll say. And the folks saying this sort of thing, politely, tend to be the people who like to talk very loud and very confidently.

Despite being, y’know, 100% wrong.

I mean, this is kind of like saying real drivers don’t have time to stop for gas. I’ve met lots of professional writers, interviewed a bunch of them, and read about even more. And the one thing they pretty much all have in common is… they love stories. They love input. Seriously, check out some of your favorite writers and see how often they’re talking about other books, shows. movies. They all love stories.

Also, quick pause here. I’m going to talk about “reading” a lot in the next dozen or so paragraphs, but I don’t want you to think this is some screed about “only the printed word counts” or anything like that. Audiobooks count as reading. And ebooks. You don’t like ‘em, fine, that’s you. But they count as reading.

I’m a big believer that a writer should have a regular diet of works in their chosen field. I think it lets me keep up on what’s currently out there and what’s been done before. Plus it also… well…

Look, I think a lot of the folks who push this view are coming from a place of “I took classes. I‘ve read textbooks about this. I know how to write!” And that’s great. I’m all for educating yourself and learning the rules. For the most part.

But as I’ve mentioned here before, writing isn’t really something you can teach. Never has been. Because all of us are going to be telling our own stories in our own ways, and my process isn’t your process and it’s definitely not his process. All these classes teach us is the baseline rules. They’re showing us how to avoid the easy, common mistakes.

It’s not until I start reading and exposing myself to lots of other work that I really start learning how to break those rules. That’s when I begin to see how what would be a mistake there is brilliant here (and vice versa). How great writers sometimes use the fact that you, the reader, also have a grasp of the rules to guide you through their story in mischievous ways.

But again, I have to read. To expose myself to that beyond-the-basic material. It’s a knowledge vs experience kind of thing.

Having said that, let me give you a few little provisos experience has taught me.

I know some folks try not to read similar things while they’re working on a project because they don’t want to be influenced. I think it’s fair to be a little concerned about that. But I also think this just serves as another bit of learning for us. Figuring out if we’re doing our thing or just copying someone else’s. Most of us learn by copying to some extent or another, but I think we’re also very aware of it and notice it happening pretty quick.

(I was going to tell you a whole story about how I inadvertently turned my weird western into an episode of Old Gods of Appalachia, but it’s just a little too long. Trust me, funny, relevant, very educational and relatable)

I also think sometimes this idea, trying to avoid influence, gets taken to an extreme and that’s where some of the “don’t read” mentality comes from. Don’t read. Don’t listen. Don’t watch. Definitely don’t talk to other writers!

Again, just my opinion, but I think this kind of advice ends up as more of a punishment. You’re a writer—don’t enjoy the written word! Don’t watch shows or movies with your friends! And while I know there’s some folks who believe being a writer is all about suffering, I’m a big believer that if my personal process makes me dislike writing, or openly hate it… maybe I’ve got a sucky process.

Read. Read everything you can. Read in the genre you want to write in. Read related genres. Read that genre you have zero interest in and see what the writers are doing there. Read that bestseller you can’t stand and try to figure out why it sold almost a million copies.

And as a bonus–you’re supporting other writers. And your local bookstore. Or maybe your local library. It’s all a win.

Next time, I want to talk about spelling. Yes, again. It’s been a while.

Until then, go write.

Well, my careful plan for a biweekly ranty blog has fallen apart. As plans always do. Best we can do is move on and try to get things back on track. And by we, I mean me. I’m not expecting you to do any of this for me…

Anyway…

Three or four weeks back I got a newsletter reply (you’re subscribed to the newsletter, yes?) asking about working on multiple projects. Did I tend to do one thing at a time or juggle a few things at once? And if I was a crusty juggler… how did I keep things straight?

This was kind of timely because when I got this question, I’d been working on this draft of TOS but just gotten an email from a magazine editor with suggested edits for a story I wrote back in… May? And I also got an email from Blackstone about some work we need to do on God’s Junk Drawer. Plus there’s this ranty blog and the newsletter. So this past month has had me working on a few different things.

So, yeah, I’m juggling stuff right now. But I think a key thing to remember, for this little discussion, is that I have to. No options. Writing is my full time job, and that means I’ve usually got two or three things at different stages

Now, left to my own devices, I usually just focus on one thing. I’m not against scribbling a few notes or thoughts for potential projects, but I rarely go that far with it. That’s just kind of my process. Also, mental note, haven’t really discussed my process here in a while. Let’s put that on the calendar.

That said… the magazine story was a dream project I’ve wanted to do for many, many years (for a few different reasons) so I couldn’t really pass it up. And I’m under contract with Blackstone, so no putting off those edits. And my agent’s waiting for TOS because… well, it’s the next thing. That’s how the job goes. I write stuff, he finds someone who wants to buy it.

So how do I juggle multiple projects?

Honestly, I’m not really sure.

I think, on a very real level, it’s a lot like any other job. Yeah, right now I’m trying to do payroll but somebody just walked in with a petty cash problem. I’m framing walls but right now we need all hands to unload a truck. I’ve been trying to get the warehouse organized but tomorrow’s the big spring cleaning day out in the store. We all do this, all the time. We’re working on one thing. We need to switch gears for a while. And then we go back to what we were doing before.

Granted, it can be a little tougher in the arts. For me, personally, going from one project to something completely different just means I need to get my head into the story, probably like how an actor (I’m guessing) sometimes needs to get into a role. I don’t need to call on my inner muse or anything, but I usually re-read some of my manuscript and maybe go over my notes. Bigger projects will probably take a little more reading and have more notes (novels vs short stories, for example) but doing that’s usually enough for me to remember what I was thinking and where/how I wanted things to go.

Of course, there are some writers who can flip back and forth with no problem at all. And some who may need a lot more work and effort to get back into something they’d set down. And some who are very much working on one project only and that’s it, from first word to publication. It’s very much an individual thing, and I can’t tell you what kind of writer you are. It’s one of those aspects of writing you’ll just have to play around with and figure out what works best for you.

I think my best tip would be, when I stop working on Thing One, I should be sure to use any of the tricks I’d normally use to make starting the next day easier. Get at least two or three sentences onto the next page. Make an all-caps note to myself right there in the manuscript. Don’t assume I’ll remember anything later—jot it down so it’s definitely there when I come back to it. Plot point, line of dialogue, song in my head, whatever. And if I’m only going to work for a while on Thing Two before going back to Thing One… well, do the same for it.

That’s kind all I’ve got for you there.

Not a super-satisfying answer, I know. Sorry.

But let me spin this another way.

If I wasn’t doing this full time—let’s say it’s the career I’m trying to jumpstart or maybe just something I’m having fun with on the side—I guess a better question might be why am I working on multiple projects at once?

I used to have a lot of different things I was working on. For all sorts of reasons. Shiny new ideas. Trends I’d try to follow. Different formats I was writing in. Fear I was working on the wrong thing and I should spend more time on something like that.

But eventually I realized I was jumping around so much I wasn’t actually finishing anything. Sometimes this was deliberate, yeah. A story idea was going nowhere, so I just moved on to something new.

Other times, though, it was just lack of focus. The minute something needed some actual effort—some serious thought about structure or tension or character motivations—well, that’s when I’d decide to slide over to something else. Keep lots of projects going, right? If this one stalls just move on to that one. Or that one. And then that one. And this one. And oh, y’know what I just thought of…

Y’see, Timmy, while I’m not against working on multiple projects, I know for me, at that point in my career, it became more of a way to sort of dodge really committing to anything, if you know what I mean. And said career moved forward considerably once I focused on one thing and actually, y’know, finished it.

Is that where you’re at? Only you know the answer to that one. But it’s something I might consider when looking at those three or four or fifteen different projects on the desktop.

Next time… well, I’m hoping to get caught up on my reading.

Until then, go write.