Author: peterclines

I’m assuming most of you are familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein from his philosophical work involving mathematics, logic, and language. He’s considered the most noteworthy philosopher of the twentieth century. What he’s less known for is a fairly dry series of what we’d now probably call YA sci-fi stories he wrote at Cambridge, showing his idea of a utopia, what sort of problems could arise in such a utopia, and how the peoples of such a world would respond to said problems.

The reason you probably haven’t heard of that less known bit is because I just made it up. Or did I? You’ve got no idea, do you? But you’re going to keep reading to find out…

Another possibly made-up story I’ve heard about Wittgenstein is that one day he was walking in the city with someone, discussing history and knowledge in general, when his companion made the observation that people in ancient times must’ve been… well, really stupid. How could they possibly have thought the sun went around the Earth? I mean, it’s so obvious how the two interact once you stop to think about it. Were people just… a lot smarter back now?

And as the story goes, Wittgenstein nodded agreeably through most of the little tirade, and then, when he had a chance to respond, he wondered, just out of curiosity… what would it look like if the sun was orbiting the Earth?

While you’re dwelling on that, let me talk about the pandemic a bit.

Like a lot of folks, I ended up using the lockdown to work on my cooking skills. Watched a lot of YouTube videos. Ended up trying a lot of Korean recipes and even some vegan/vegetarian ones. I can make pretty good fried rice now. And some fantastic spicy broccoli noodles. Also, those plant-based meats like Beyond and Impossible cook up great in dishes that call for ground beef.

One of the biggest parts of this learning curve was learning the difference between preparing to cook and the actual act of cooking. Like a lot of you, I’m guessing, I tended to do a lot of stuff on the fly. And it usually led to me getting more and more frantic as I was looking for this ingredient or that implement and crap how long has that been in the water now? Crap crap crap turn the pan down and where the hell is the colander?!?

Anyway, point is, my cooking skills improved a lot once I started doing a little more prep work. Not to the level where I had ten silver bowls each one with an ingredient in it, but also… not far from that. I get all my veggies cut, get the sauces mixed, get individual spices or oils out. It takes a little longer, but my cooking’s consistently so much better.

The other cool thing about the prep work is that it’s kind of free-form. It doesn’t really matter what order I do most of it in as long as most of it’s done before I start cooking. Maybe I’ll pull out everything I need to make the spicy sauce. If my partner’s around, maybe I’ll cut mushrooms and peppers while we talk or watch something silly. Sometimes I make the sauce while I’m waiting for the water to boil for noodles. It doesn’t really matter as long as I get enough of it done that it’s not slowing me down once the timers get set.

Anyway, maybe some of you have figured out what I’m getting at here. And some of you are just getting hungry. Its okay, go grab something, I’ll wait.

One question that tends to come up a lot in writing discussions is how do you start? Do you need characters first? Should I begin with the plot? How much do I need outlined? Do I have to know my theme right out of the gate?

Here’s the ugly truth big writing degree doesn’t want you to know (“gurus hate him…”). It doesn’t matter. Seriously, doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Whatever little snippet of dialogue or character quirk or cool worldbuilding idea that sparks a story in your head—that was the correct thing to begin with. If the first thing you want to do is figure out a coherent theme or write out a beat-for-beat plot… fantastic. Character sketches? Big swaths of dialogue? That one big twist scene at the end that’s going to freak everyone out? Do it! It’s all good.

All of this stuff is the prep bowls. They’re the scattered ingredients we’re going to pull together to make our story. But it doesn’t matter what order we set them up in—it just matters that they’re there on hand when we turn on the heat and start working. I don’t want to be sixty pages in and find myself thinking “okay, and maybe our hero has a love interest who’s… a woman… who works at… her job… and has a… name.”

And the reason it doesn’t matter how I start is that nobody’s going to see this part of it. It’s like the first draft I don’t show to anyone, except this is pre-first draft. Nobody sees any of this. At best, it’s a two-minute story I get to tell in an interview about “where did you get the idea for this?”

Y’see, Timmy, what 99.9% of all people are going to see is the finished book. And even if you set up your prep bowls in the complete opposite order I did, nobody’s ever going to know. Because both of us are going to have completed, polished books with all those elements seamlessly integrated. Two very different processes end in the same result.

So stop worrying about starting with the right thing and just start with your thing. The thing that caught your attention. The thing that sparked your imagination.

Next time, well, I guess we should talk about that thing marking the spot. Or what used to be the spot.

Until then… go write.

We’re halfway through the year. That’s just amazing to me. Then again, the past decade has pretty much destroyed my internal clock and I have no sense of time anymore, so…

What can I tell you about?

I finished that last short story. Finally. I know I’ve told you about a few I’ve done lately, but the truth is I’m not great when it comes to short stories, especially for anthologies. I can come up with lots of great short story ideas, yeah, but a lot of the time I tend to freeze up. Especially when they’re very specific. “We’re doing an anthology about cyborg vampire motorcycle gangs—you in?”

In this case the specific aspect of the anthology came from, well, history. It’s a Carter & Kraft story, which have all been set during World War II, but this is the first time I’ve tied one to a very specific historical event. And that meant flexing and stretching and doing my best to make the story work within that framework. Fortunately the editor read the first draft, made some suggestions, and also assured me we didn’t need to be super-rigid with regards to history. So it got done, we’re both happy, and I can’t wait for you to read it. To read all of them, really.

And all of this means I’m back working on TOS, which I’ve mentioned here once or thrice. I’m thinking this could be really solid by the end of the month. At least a big chunk of it done. Which would be very cool.

In other news…

As I’m writing this, we’re mere days away from San Diego Comic-Con, and this is the first time in well over a decade I’m not going. And I live here in San Diego! I was thinking about it a few months back, and the sad truth is I haven’t had a release in over a year at this point (yeah, I know! Imagine how I feel about it). So if I went, I’d have nothing new to show anyone, just be taking space away from someone else, and—truth be told—probably not doing a lot with that space. Plus, to be totally honest… I wasn’t really thrilled about the safety protocols during last year’s SDCC (or at least, the lack of enforcement), and now that they’re just throwing the doors open, well…

(although on Friday the 21st I’ll be doing my own mini-panel on Instagram– all day Ask Me Anything. Old projects, new projects, film work, toys, cats, whatever)

Then again, with the film industry strikes (go union, burn this friggin’ system to the ground), this might be the best con in years for writers and artists. Who knows? All I know is next year I’ll be pushing to have a much bigger con presence wherever people want me.

And one more thing. I’m thinking of migrating this newsletter over to a different service. I’m really not liking the Substack business model, as I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, and after a few months of trying to balance things I’ve just come to the conclusion… they just don’t balance. Not for me, anyway.

That said, we’re all trying to be a little safer with personal information, so I just wanted to get a general vibe if most of you would be okay with me just shifting your email address over to another system (and then shutting this down). Generally yes? Absolutely not? How did I get on this mailing list?

Anyway…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— Still enjoying Strange New Worlds (as I type this, we’re less than two weeks from the Lower Decks crossover episode). Skull Island was surprisingly fun—I was expecting something much more kid-oriented.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading— I got to read the new one from Kristi Charish (which you’ll all probably get to read next year). About to dive into The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule and then another book to blurb.

Cool New Toys – I got the Spinnerette figure that was part of a Spider-Man two-pack. It’s basically “what if Mary Jane also had spider powers,” and I think we even glimpse her in the Spider-Verse. Through eBay I stumbled across a toy/ game/ comic shop (KC’s Rockets) which is ridiculously close to me and has been here for years. So I picked up the Red Guardian (from Black Widow), a classic Ravager Star-Lord, and Toybox versions of Cap and Spidey.

Hey, look! Lori made a request a few weeks back and we’re fulfilling that request. Because that’s how we roll here!

So, the question is details. How much is too much? How do you know if it’s not enough?

This won’t be great to hear but… this is pretty much impossible to answer. Mostly because writing is art and all art is subjective and a lot of the stuff we call “description” is a huge chunk of the art portion of this equation. Hypothesis? Theorem?

Anyway, my book isn’t going to be anything like your book. Your style isn’t going to be anything like my style. And we each probably have different ideas about how we want our respective stories to land. And that’s before we even touch on basic structure ideas, that different chapters and scenes are going to have different pacing and purposes and will need different levels of description and detail. Within the earlier restrictions I mentioned about our individual styles and all that.

Really filling you with confidence right now, aren’t I?

I thought about this a bit, and I think the best thing I can do is give you my own personal rules for how I tend to approach these things in my own writing. The sort of rules-of-thumb I use to decide if I spend a paragraph describing someone or something, or a full page, or maybe just half a sentence. And like any kind of writing advice, this is just what works for me, so it might not work for you. It definitely won’t work for that guy. But hopefully it’ll get you thinking and considering things in your own work…

So here’s my three guidelines for adding (or not adding) details/descriptions in my writing.

1) Are these details necessary

There’s an idea I’ve brought up once or thrice here before, Damon Knight’s information vs noise. Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we already know are noise. We like getting information and we pay attention to it. Noise is annoying, and we tend to ignore it whenever we can.

In my mind, describing objects, places, or processes that we all know is kind of a waste of my word count and the reader’s patience. Especially if these things aren’t somehow important to my plot or story. We all know what a smartphone looks like. And a grocery store. And how to pump gas. I don’t want to spend my precious words on things like this. I want to use them to describe the strange pendant that woman slipped into my pocket when she bumped into me. Or that alien in the middle of the road I might have just hit with my car.

What’s that in the back? Well, yeah, there are a lot of makes and models of phones out there. Very true. But honestly… how many of them look all that different, especially once they’re in a case? I mean, think of the BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. His smartphone was a huge part of his character and how he interacted with others, and the show itself changed how everyone does texting in television and movies.

Off the top of your head,…can you say if Sherlock’s phone was an Android or iPhone? You probably can’t because the truth is it’s completely irrelevant. It would’ve been a waste of time to make any sort of distinction.

In fact, as I’m scribbling this, I’d like to expand on the information/ noise idea a bit. I think the first few times we encounter obvious noise in a story, we tend to think there’s a reason for it. That the author has a purpose for describing something we’d otherwise consider not worth mentioning. I mean, they wouldn’t give us half a page of description of the waitress and give her a name if she wasn’t kind of important to the story, right? This has to be information. And that’s why this sort of thing can cause a lot of frustration, because at some point the readers realize the waitress is irrelevant and it doesn’t matter what kind of phone she uses and they’ve just been processing a lot of noise that isn’t necessary to the story.

Now, before anyone gets too grumpy, I want to move on to my next wishy-washy rule…

2) Do these details serve a purpose

A purpose? Wait, isn’t that what I was just saying? Am I having a stroke?

When I say a detail serves a purpose, I mean it might not be a necessary, integral part of my plot or story, but I still have a reason for including it. Maybe it’s helping me set the tone or the mood or it’s hinting at something about a character or location or an object. Whatever it is, if you asked I could explain the function of this bit of description.

For example, what color and model of car Yakko drives is probably irrelevant to my plot. It’s important that he has a car, but nothing hinges on him having, for example, an economy car vs a sports car. The reader could picture either and nothing would change in my story. But if I call it his fire-engine red midlife crisis on wheels? That’s giving you piles of extra information, isn’t it? It’s not necessary, but it serves a purpose.

A few key things here. First is word choice. Since I’m putting in this description for a reason, I should really make sure the words I choose push that purpose. Like with Yakko’s car. It could’ve just been a red sports car, but describing it the way I did told you it’s a red sports car and about Yakko, and about how I (or maybe the narrator?) want you to view him in this story.

Second is not to go overboard. It’s easy to describe more and more and more and come up with a rationalization for all of it. Like, if I want to show how wealthy someone is, I could give lush descriptions of every item in their office and it’d all fall nicely under the umbrella of “showing how wealthy they are.” But I could also probably do this by focusing on just one or two things– maybe that painting or the weird glass sculpture of.. whatever that is. Friggin’ modern art. Costs a bundle and I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a flower or a naked woman or maybe it’s just a shape? I don’t know. Some people have money to burn, right?

I’ve got one more details guideline for you. I really think this is the most important thing about including details. If you want to ignore the last two things, fine, but please consider this one…

3) Are these details affecting the pacing

Almost universally, things are going to get faster and tenser as my plot and story progress. That’s just basic narrative structure. It picks up its pace as it moves along. And I want my readers to feel that quickening of events, that rise of tension. I want it to carry them along like a wave carries a surfer.

Description almost always brings things to a halt. It can’t be helped. In the real world we can actually see/ hear/ feel things and absorb all those details almost instantly, but on the page we have to write them out. A single glance can take four or five paragraphs to cover everything we saw.

This means it’s very easy for details to mess up my pacing. If things are moving at even a mild pace, one or two paragraphs of description can slow things down and knock us out of the story for a moment. If we’re near the end and things have really picked up speed, hitting even a few lines of excess description can be jarring. So I need to be careful about where and when I deploy them.

It’s my own personal style, but I’ve mentioned before that I like action (as in fists and guns and swords and car chases action) to feel like it takes about as long to read as it would take to happen. As close as possible, anyway. It doesn’t sell a blinding-fast martial arts fight to write out each strike, each block, each counter. Same with running in sheer terror from the monster in the woods, which has two primary horns on each side of its head, three smaller curled horns clustered around them, and a sort of ridged brow over each eye, which are a fiery red. These are times when–IMHO–pausing to add a lot of detail can really kill the pacing or tension. It knocks us out of the fast-paced flow of the moment and suddenly we’re standing around counting eyebrow ridges instead of running for our goddamned lives.

Also, overall, I feel it’s better to describe things earlier than later. The pacing should be slower in the beginning of a story, so it makes a brief pause here or there fit in better. Plus, it makes sense to describe things when we first see them (or when we eventually stop running away from them)

And again, there could always be an exception to this. There might be an all-new element in the third act that has to be described in detail. But really, if you think about it, structure kind of demands these things be rare. If I’m introducing a lot of necessary stuff in my third act… something may have gone wrong somewhere.

So that’s it. Those are the three ways I tend to screen my descriptions and details to figure out if they’re good, excessive, or just completely unnecessary. Hope they help a little.

And if you’ve got a question or a topic request, please let me know.

Next time here, I’d like to talk a little bit about one of our planet’s great philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It’s going to be so much fun.

Until then, go write.

Okay, so…

I’ve been fascinated with ancient Egypt since I was very little. Not sure what sparked it, but by the time I was ten I could rattle off the names of a dozen Egyptian gods and their relationship to one another. My fifth grade science fair project was a model pyramid with numerous “reconstructed” tools and a chart of heiroglyphs.

Many years back I was dating a woman and maybe a month into our relationship she mentioned she was going to Egypt in a few months. Would I want to come along? Spend a few weeks traveling Egypt with her?

I tried not to seem too desperate when I said yes.

As someone who grew up in New England, I was used to the idea of having history around you. Not just grandpa’s history or old family history, but serious history. Lots of buildings and landmarks in my hometown in Maine date back to the early 1700s, and the town’s history goes back even further.

But wow… getting to Egypt? There is HISTORY there. Thousands of years of it. I wasn’t ready for the crushing awe of it. And the scale of it. It’s one thing to read about how big some of these monuments are, to see them on television, but you honestly can’t grasp the size of them until you’re right there. Or in some cases, until you realize what you’re seeing in the distance.

I was very lucky that we had no set schedule, so we could go somewhere and just… spend the day. We traveled from Cairo down to Aswan. Stopped for several days in Luxor. I’d just stare at temple walls, statues, and sometimes tombs. One time I just sat for an hour or so on a small cliff above the Valley of Kings and watched boats on the Nile.

Anyway, another thing I saw a lot of in Egypt was folks who spent a lot of time… well, today we’d probably say “taking selfies.” They’d pose in front of this or that, stand with this guide or that guard or hey, look, a camel! And then they’d race off to find the next thing to take a picture with.

It took me a while to realize these folks weren’t really interested in seeing Egypt. They were more interested in telling people they’d been to Egypt. They wanted to show off the photos and tell stories. For them, it was more about the secondary aspects of taking the trip. The after-effects, if you were.

So, while I’m sure this is incredibly fascinating to some of you, I’m sure far more are wondering what all this has to do with writing?

When we talk about writing, I think one thing that gets skimmed over a lot is what our actual goals are. What do we want out of this? Our endgame, so to speak. And this is important because if I don’t know what my real objective is—or I’m not being honest with myself about it—it’s going to be tough to find the right path to reach it.

Like, I’m willing to bet at least one of you reading this has thought “the goal is to get published.” Okay, cool. But what does that actually mean? Do I just want to be able to say someone paid me for a story and it saw print? That’s cool. I think for some folks there’s a degree of validation that comes with getting published, and maybe that’s all they need.

Maybe I just want to tell stories. That’s all that matters. Getting these ideas and situations and conversations out of my head and down on paper (down on electromagnetic bubble? Down on flash drive?) and sharing it with the world somehow. Or not sharing it. Maybe I just write because it’s what I do and it’s therapeutic on some level. Maybe I write a ton of stuff that nobody will ever see, and I’m totally cool with that. Nothing wrong with that.

Or am I hoping to maybe make money? Nothing wrong with that, either. More than a few folks write as a sort of side job. They’ve got their full-time career and writing’s what they do on weekends or the occasional late night, selling a short story or novella or even a full book. Or maybe the goal is to make writing itself the full-time career. To make enough money stringing words together that I can pay my bills, live in semi-comfort, and don’t need to do anything else.

But maybe the money’s irrelevant, and so’s publication. What I really want is for people to recognize that I’m good at this. Very good. Masterclass good. Maybe I want the accolades and the starred reviews and the numerous awards where I get to stand in front of people who understand how talented I am.

Or look, maybe I just want to be a writer because I want to be part of the club. That group gathered at the bar at the con. Those people online making clever comments to each other. I want to be in with them, and maybe I want people to look at me the way they look at those folks. It might sound a little silly but there are clearly people who only want to be writers for this… the same way those folks only wanted to say they’d been in Egypt. The want the destination, not the journey.

(yes, this may be me talking about a current hot topic)

Y’see, Timmy, there’s a ton of different reasons I may want to write. And whichever one is my reason… that’s fantastic. But I think it’s important to be aware of why I’m doing this. Because there are a lot of paths open to writers these days, and I don’t want to spend time and energy on a path that’s taking me away from what I really want.

So be honest. With other folks and yourself. What do you want?

Next time…

Actually, before I talk about next time, I wanted to bounce something off you. How many of you use the “categories” there on the side (also sometimes called tag or labels or…)? I was thinking of paring the list down a bit to make it easier to use. None of the tags will actually go away, they just won’t be in that list anymore. I was thinking I’d snip out all the proper names—nice easy way to lose twenty or thirty lines, and it’ s probably one of the least-used ways to search for things, yes?

Anyway…next time I’d like to talk a little bit about the devil. Specifically, the one in the details.

Until then, go write.