NaNoWriMo Tip

November 6, 2017 / 1 Comment

NaNoWriMo Tip

Hey, y’know what I realized over the weekend? It’s NaNoWriMo! Who’s trying it this year?

I’ll be honest. I’ve never tried it myself. By the time I first heard of it, as it was just starting to gain popularity, I’d already been writing professionally for a year or two. Might’ve even already been writing full time (non-fiction, but still). For the past eleven years… well, every month’s been about word count for me.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas and thoughts on NaNoWriMo. In fact, a lot. At this early point in the month, I have one very firm reassurance, and one solid tip.

Which I shall share with you now.

First piece of reassurance. No matter who you are, I can tell you with absolute certainty, you are not going to sell the manuscript you write this month. No agent will consider it. No editor will look at it. It’s just not going to happen.

HANG ON! This isn’t a kick-in-the-gut thing. This is liberating. It’s freeing.

I’m not saying nobody will ever buy this book. But what we’re doing during this month is a first draft. A rushed first draft at that. It’s going to have plot holes and factual errors and typos. It will, trust me. It’s a fantastic starting point, but it’s going to need more work after November 30th. No question about it.

Again, this is a good thing. Stop worrying about if an agent or editor or your significant other is going to like this. They’re never going to see it. This draft is for you and you alone. Be selfish. Go crazy. This is the “dance like nobody’s watching” part of the process. Let your creativity run wild, eat nothing but chips, drink nothing but whiskey, run naked in the coffeeshop, and don’t worry about anyone else and what they may think. They can see the second or third draft, maybe, but not this one. Do what you want to do with it. Do anything. Because this is just the first draft.

Okay, don’t actually run naked in the coffeeshop. Yeah, I know they smile at you a lot there, but they’re paid to be nice to you. They don’t want to see that. Especially not in a place that sells food.

Second thing—the solid tip.

Write.

That’s it. Just write.

I know that sounds kind of flip and arrogant, but stop and think for a moment. Like we just said, this draft isn’t for anyone else. We’re not going to worry about spelling, research, current hot genres, book advances, any of that. All that matters for this month is getting words on the page.

Sooooo… get the words on the page.

In my first drafts, I change character names halfway through. I snip off plot threads and remind myself to pull them out later. I snip off some characters halfway through, and then jump to the alternate timeline version of the book where I killed them sixty pages ago (like I now know I should’ve done in the first place). And I can do all this because this is going to get another draft.

For now, the most important thing is to just write. Put words on paper or on the screen or on your arm or your friend’s shirt or whatever medium you’ve decided to work in. Stop trying to filter or rein in your creativity and get it all out.

So for now…

Go write.

November 2, 2017

Always—Maybe—Never

No, we’re not talking about an M-F-K type game.

I don’t know. Some of you are very clever and inventive. Maybe we are…

Big surprise, I know a lot of writers. Honestly, I’m still surprised to be accepted into their ranks. Any time I’m at a signing or a con party, I kind of feel like Jane Goodall quietly being accepted by the gorillas…

(by which I mean I’m quietly waiting to be mauled)

However, there’s one writer I don’t have that problem with, and that’s the ever-wonderful Elena Hartwell, author of the Eddie Shoes mystery series. Elena and I have, we recently realized, known each other for almost a quarter-century. We met back in our early twenties when we were freelance electricians for various San Diego theaters, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Yeah, I’m not sure how the math works, either. Met in our early twenties, pretty sure we’re both in our mid-thirties now… Maybe it’s like Reaganomics. In that it doesn’t really work.

Anyway…

I got to attend a signing event Elena did recently in my neighborhood, and during the talk she mentioned a wonderful rule of thumb when it comes to research. More to the point, when it comes time to start incorporating that research into my writing. Tattoo this one on your arm. Or commit it to memory. Or maybe just bookmark it…

For her books, Elena’s talked to a lot of professionals in various branches of law enforcement and other public servants. And she noticed a lot of their answer to her questions tended to fall into certain groups…

“We always do this. No matter what, this is a priority.”

“Well, you think it’d go that way, but the truth is… well, it’s a little more flexible than a lot of people realize.”

“That never happens. There’s a couple different reasons why, but… it just doesn’t.”

This didn’t really surprise me. As someone who worked in the film industry for many years, I was very aware of those kind of divisions. Usually when dealing with people who had a lot of textbook ideas about how the industry worked. And then having to explain to them, “yeah, here’s how that actually goes.” Or, far more often, “ha ha ha, no, that never happens…”

I think most jobs work that way. There’s stuff that always happens, stuff that never happens, and then there’s that gray area where things aren’t well defined or nobody generally talks about it. The stuff that usually happens or, y’know… it’s not unheard of.

I talked to a scientist a while back about lab equipment. What happens to stuff from old experiments or discontinued projects? And I wanted to hear it from her because—like in the film industry—I was willing to bet there was the official, rulebook way that everyone gets taught, and then there’s… well, the simple reality of it. And she laughed and told me, yeah, there’s the expected rules, and for some things you follow the rules to the letter with no deviations. But for a lot of stuff… turns out people are a bit less concerned with what happens to that case of old test tubes or the laptop from 2006.

So, what does all this mean to you, fearless writer?

When we’re doing research, it’s really tempting to bend the facts to fit the story we want to tell. We have something we like, reality goes against it… so we just choose to ignore reality. I mean, that’s what fiction is, right? Just ignoring reality to tell a good story.

Not exactly.

When I sit down to do my research—be it books, bugging professionals, or even risking the internet—I should put all the answers into one of three categories. Always. Maybe. Never.

If it’s always true, I need to get it right.

If it’s never true, I shouldn’t have it happen in my story.

If it’s maybe true, in certain cases… now I can tweak according to what my story needs.

That’s it. Simple and quick.

Y’see, Timmy, doing this will make my story so much stronger, especially if I’m trying to set it in the real world. Because by doing this, I’m enforcing those real-world rules. Heck, even if my story’s set in the kaiju-infested dystopia that is 2217, I should be doing this with my facts. It’s just me staying true to the rules of that world.

Always. Maybe. Never.

Next time, I’d like to talk about bullies.

Until then… go write.

Always go write.

Hartwell research Timestamp tips

October 26, 2017

Metaphorically Speaking

It’s the Halloween season, so I thought this’d be a good time to tell you about this nightmarish thing I saw once.

I mean, it was just hideous. This thing was like Lucifer and the heat death of the universe had a child together. And not a wanted child. One of those “we got seriously drunk and shouldn’t’ve done this and it wasn’t even that fun but now I guess we’re parent together” children. Yeah, there’s no question this thing knew its parents didn’t love each other and only stayed together for it. You could see it in the eyes. It had eyes like those island wells Conan used to find in all the old Robert E. Howard adventures. Conan finds a lost city at the center of the island’s jungle (or at the top of a hill or plateau) and there’s always a big stone plaza with some kind of pool or well, swirling with water or blood or eternal, stygian darkness. One of those sort of wells

Its whole body was like that, really. It was the kind of thing you’d read about in pulp supernatural stories or old horror comics, where the writers would throw together a few adjectives to create something that was just visually repellent on one level or another. They’d exaggerate this limb or that feature to the point your mind just couldn’t help but register it as unnatural. Alien, even.

And the smell! If you left someone to die alone of exposure on a mountainside, with just enough food and firewood to give them faint hope but not enough to actually keep them alive—the few minutes before life left their body, that’s just what it smelled like.

Okay, there’s more (believe me, I’ll never forget this thing) but if I don’t stop now we’ll never get to the actual point I wanted to make.

Every now and then I see a writer so desperate to be artsy, to write “literature,” that they load their work with metaphors and similes. I mean dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Why just call something redwhen we can describe it as the color of blood and roses and UMass sweatshirts, right?

That last item is kind of a hint where this is going.

Of course, blood and roses are the obvious choices if I’m going to describe something as red without… y’know, actually saying red. So some writers feel the need to come up with seriously obscure visuals or tortured similes in order to not go the “obvious” route. Yeah, you can all guess what color a UMass sweatshirt is because I just lined it up with blood and roses. But if I told you the sky was the color of a UCLA sweatshirt is that… good? Bad? Unnatural?

This is really similar to—a natural outgrowth of, really—an issue I’ve brought up a few times before. Some writers go out of their way to find rarely-used, little-known words they can use in their manuscripts. A few of them go one step further and use these words to create their metaphors. Or they’ll use such obscure or personal references that the description means nothing. Telling you the beast had fur the color of my first childhood cat doesn’t really tell you what color its fur is.

I can still do worse, though. Remember that nightmarish thing I saw, the one I described up above? Let me ask you a question.

Do you have any idea what this thing looks like?

Can you describe it at all? Any specific aspect of it? Height? Weight? Color? Heck, do you even know if it’s alive or dead? Am I describing a creature or a statue or a really poorly-designed rocking chair?

Sometimes we get so caught up in evoking a certain image or mood or sensation that we… well, we never actually describe anything. Our attempt to viscerally describe the horror actually leaves us with a horror-shaped hole on the page. It’s scary for half a beat, but then we realize there’s not anything there. It breaks the flow as we have to stop and figure out what something

In screenwriting, this kind of thing is even more deadly. Screenwriting’s a really precise form where I need to correctly convey a message to multiple people. The director, the actors, the prop people, the wardrobe folks. the makeup artists, maybe even a special effects team. We need to all be on the same page regarding what the demon prince Ognaron looks like. Because if we’re not, well… our shooting day is going to have a lot of delays.

Back when I used to do interviews, David S. Goyer told me he got (playfully) chewed out once by Guillermo del Toro for a weak bit of metaphorical description he’d used in a script they were working on. And then Goyer admitted he was telling me this because he’d done the same thing again—to himself—when he got to direct his own screenplay.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I freakin’ love a good metaphor. A clever, descriptive turn of phrase is like a shot of good whiskey. It’s a hard kick that makes me feel all warm and soft in the gut. It’s not unusual to hear me make a small gasp or sigh after one.

But…

Y’know what happens if someone does shot after shot after shot after shot? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not pleasant. Yeah, some folks have more tolerance than others, but by the twelfth or thirteenth, well, most people are in a bad place. Especially if they’ve been doing them one after another. Too many in a row without something solid in there… that’s a recipe for disaster.

Y’see, Timmy, like whiskey shots, I don’t want to have nothing but metaphors. They’re fantastic and lovely, but for them to really work I need some solid stuff, too. Hell, there’s a reason people say to have a lot of bread before a night of drinking. It’s plain and kinda boring… but it’s a solid foundation that makes the other stuff a lot easier to swallow

So get out there and celebrate the wild, crazy horror that is Halloween.

But, y’know, don’t be scared to actually describe it now and then.

Next time, I’d like to share a bit of advice about something you should always never do.

Sometimes.

Until then, go write.

description goyer Horror metaphor simile