Happy Birthday to me. Well, belated birthday. Monday was a day of action figures and LEGO sets and many games and drinks with my fully vaxxed friends. It was a wonderful way to turn <<–DC REBOOT–>> years old.

Anyway… now that I am somewhat old and wise, I wanted to take a moment to blather on about something that’s been itching at my brain for a while. And I know it’s going to be a touchy subject for some people, so I’ll try to tread lightly.

MFA programs. Why do these things even exist?

See! I told you it’d be touchy! Just to be clear right up front, this is absolutely not a swing at anyone who made it through an MFA program and got a degree. I know MFA writers are popular punching bags for some people, and this is not one of those posts. I’m a huge believer that pretty much all education ends up being useful (even if not always in the way it was intended) and I’ve got massive respect for anyone who actually did it. I enjoyed my four years at UMass, but I also know I wouldn’t’ve had the stamina (or the resources) to make a graduate degree happen. So this is, again, not coming down on anyone who scraped and clawed their way up through a higher level of higher education and came out on top.

You absolutely rock. Seriously. Never doubt it.

The people who gave you that MFA though…

Probably a good point to mention before I get going is none of this has been triple-checked or peer reviewed or anything like that. But within my own experience–including a degree of research specifically about this–I haven’t found anything to contradict any of it. Like, a disturbing number of things line up with this half-assed theory I’m about to present to you.

So… one of the main reasons writers and other artists tend to get the liberal/ fruity/ beatnik type labels is because, traditionally, if I wanted to learn one of these fields I just did it. People didn’t go to school to learn how to write, they just wrote. They dropped out of “productive society” and wrote a lot. For the vast majority of folks this meant finding a dirt-cheap apartment in a city close to publishers (to save postage costs), drinking cheap booze, having cheap affairs, and skipping two meals a day to pay for supplies. Eventually (hopefully) I learned from experience, got better, and then people started to pay me. That’s where the stereotype of the starving artist comes from—most of these folks went hungry while they learned their art. I talked about this at length a few birthdays back…

Yeah, if I was really lucky I might find some kind of mentor to show me how to hold a brush, where to hit the marble with the chisel, or to read the first half page of my story and offer a dozen notes right there. But these were kinda few and far-between. I mean, think about it. In terms of any general population (pick your favorite city or state or country) there are only going to be so many successful artists. So out of that limited number, I need to actually find one of them, and it needs to be someone in the field I want to study, and they need to be willing to offer some sort of mentorship, AND they need to have space/ time for me, personally. I mean, there’s probably hundreds of other people looking for mentors too, right? It absolutely happened, no question… but it probably didn’t happen a lot, just applying a little common sense.

Now the reason people had to learn this way is universities and colleges didn’t teach the arts. No painting or dance or acting or writing. Really. They were professional institutions. People went there to learn engineering, medicine, chemistry, law. You know… real jobs.

Worth noting there were a very small number of these schools with writing classes. But even in those cases this wasn’t something you got a degree in. It was just a side thing—some exercises to maybe help you write a better closing speech for the jury.

And yes, I know—there were a few specialist art school out there. Very few, comparatively speaking. The odd music academy or dance conservatory. But this wasn’t considered higher education. It was—at best—more like we’d consider a vocational school. And if you think about it, that kind of makes sense. Sure I can teach you how to write notation for sheet music and how to blow on a flute. But I can’t teach you how to compose the song in your head. And as we’ve talked about here many, many times, somebody can’t teach you the “correct” way for you to write. We all need to figure that out for ourselves.

So what changed? How did writing (and the other arts) suddenly become a “teachable” thing? Well, two things happened. Actually, one thing happened, but a second thing had a very powerful impact on that first one.

In reverse order, the second one was Nazis. Hate those guys, right? In case you missed that week of grade school history, in the mid-late 1930s a right-wing fascist group gained a ton of power in Germany and made life miserable for pretty much everyone in Europe. And a lot of people in Africa. And Asia. Eventually the US joined in the fight (to quote Eddie Izzard, “after a couple of years, we won’t stand for that anymore!”) and sent sixteen million people off to fight.

After WWII, a lot of folks—like with WWI before it—were just left wrecked by the scale of it all. The things they’d done. The things they’d seen. I mean, by the numbers, the odds were you saw someone die every single day. For maybe four years. So when the war ended, most US servicemen got a slow boat home. A deliberately slow boat. So these soldiers had time to breathe, to look at the waves, and to talk. Most importantly, to do it with a bunch of people who’d just gone through the same things they did.

And when they got home, that first thing I mentioned was waiting for them.

Y’see, the US Government had come up with something called the GI Bill. WWI (and its aftermath) was still fresh in a lot of folks’ minds and everybody wanted to make sure this new wave of veterans were taken care of when they came home. So the government said “When you finish your tour, go to college on us! We’ll cover it.” Because it was a win-win for the United States. We’re taking care of veterans and we’re making more doctors, engineers, and scientists. Wooo! Yay us! We rock!

So these guys got home, Big Government pulled out the big checkbook and said “Congrats on surviving–what college do you want to go to? What do you want to study? Law? Medicine? Rocket science? We’re going to need some more rocket scientists pretty soon.”

And a lot of guys took that offer. But a bunch of them said “Y’know… I think I might just take a year or three off and process all this some more. Work through it. Maybe write a book or some poetry, put some of this stuff in my head down on the page while I try to figure out what I’m doing next.”

Now this wasn’t the first time Uncle Sam had heard something like this (again, WWI just thirty years earlier). So he shoved the checkbook back in his pocket, put a firm hand on their collective shoulders and said “Good on you, man. You go do what you need to do to get right.”

And that would’ve been it. Except… suddenly the collective colleges and universities of America said “Whoa, whoa, WHOA! You promised us all this GI Bill money! You said hundreds of thousands of soldiers were going to be signing up for college!”

”Yeah,” said Big Government, “but they don’t want to be doctors or lawyers now. They just want to write a book about their experiences.”

”Well, let’s not be hasty,” said the CEO of Colleges, Inc. “I mean we… we’ve got writing… programs.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. A whole department. Several departments. They could absolutely get a degree in… in the arts. In fine arts, even! You just write those checks, Big Uncle Sammy, we’ll have everything ready by September.”

Worth noting my friend M.L. Brennan (college professor and vampire author) heard this line of thought from me a while back and pointed out all of this continued (arguably got a lot worse) in the ‘90s when college loans became a serious for-profit business. Higher education became less about, well, education and more about making money. So it’s not surprising MFA programs multiplied like bunnies shortly after that. You want to go to college for what? Yeah, sure, we’ve got a program for that. Just sign your loan papers…

And that’s how writing became something that’s taught. Colleges and universities just wanted the money. Which also meant now they needed to make up rules and guidelines and formulas to try to teach all these things. Because if there weren’t any rules, they wouldn’t be able to issue grades. Some students couldn’t do better than others. Which would mean this “degree” I got is… well, kinda pointless. Maybe even worthless.

Which brings us to the last thing I’m going to say about MFA programs—their abysmal success rate. Seriously. For most college degrees (of any level), we say “making a living at it” is more or less the end goal of getting the degree. If I go to school to be, say, a high school teacher, and 83% of us in that program become high school teachers, that’s a pretty successful program, right?

With that in mind, as another friend, Kristi Charish, has pointed out…what would you think of a school where less than 5% of education graduates end up making a living as teachers? What could we say about an engineering program where only one or two students out of the entire graduating class actually become engineers?

I mean… seriously, does that sound like a successful program? A terribly useful degree? Especially if there are dozens of other people becoming successful teachers or engineers without that degree? I mean, Kristi told me at her school the science department had produced more successful novelists than the MFA program.

And again, I want to stress, this isn’t about the people who got those degrees. As I said at the start of this, I’m impressed by anyone who makes it through a graduate program. And I absolutely think some useful learning comes out of it.

But if someone’s about to make that choice, I’ve got to be honest… I’d tell them it’s probably not worth it. They might get something out of it, yeah, but odds are they could get that thing somewhere else. Probably a lot easier and definitely a lot cheaper.

Also again… none of this has been rigorously reviewed. There could very well be a dozen facts I missed just sitting out there, ready to tear this whole chain of thought apart brick by brick. And if so, please give me those facts. I’m always glad to know more.

Next time… I want to talk about the story that happens five years later. Or really, the opening that happened five years ago.

Until then, go write.

I touched on something a few weeks back that I thought was worth revisiting.

It’s not unusual for us to set stories in fantastic worlds that are close to our own, or maybe not close at all. Maybe it’s our world but with magic. Maybe it’s a futuristic sci-fi utopia or a historical zombie apocalypse. I’ve talked here once or thrice about the Marvel Universe, and how living there would require an entirely different worldview.

There’s a certain kind of worldbuilding we could probably call  “everything you know is wrong” or maybe “revealing the world behind the world.” It’s one of those stories that starts off as the real world, or maybe a real world, except then our heroes come to learn that there’s a lot more to their world than they believed. We establish that we’re here on Earth, in the real world, and then BAM! Aliens are real, and they live among us! Reality is actually a complex computer simulation.  Secret vampire cabals rule the world.

We’ve all seen some version of this, yes? This moment usually comes right before we start our second act. Now that my characters know what the world really is, they can learn what challenges they’re really up against.

That’s what I mentioned before, but wanted to focus on a bit today. The idea that worldbuilding has to happen in the start of my story. I can fill in details later, but the broad strokes stuff needs to happen early on. Definitely in the first half, I’m tempted to say preferably in the first act.  

The reason it needs to happen this early is context. I’ve talked about this a bit before, too. In this case, it’s how we know what’s possible—or what my character thinks is possible—within the world of the story. If we don’t know what’s normal in a story, how do I know what’s supposed to surprise us? I mean, what would be unbelievable in this world? How do I know if my characters are reacting appropriately? If I’m going to keep altering the rules of the world as the story goes on and on, it makes it harder and harder to get invested in the world and the characters.

So if I’m doing some major worldbuilding in act three… it probably means I’m cheating a bit. I’m rewriting the rules in a big way at the last minute. Suddenly, with less than a hundred pages to go, there’s time travel or ghosts or aliens or teleportation or something that puts a whole new spin on everything! And odds are I’m doing it to create some suspense or a new challenge or to get my characters out of a challenge.

And, well… that’s cheating.

Actually, think of it like playing a game. We should have a general sense of all the rules before we really get going. Even if we just handwave over things for now and say “Fighting the basilisk, ehhhh, we’ll get to that one if it ever comes up,” this still tells us there’s the chance of running into a basilisk and there might be special rules for fighting it. So it won’t be a surprise when these rules show up and get explained later. None of us want to play with that person who at the last minute says “Oh, I forgot to mention… I get 100 extra points just for being the blue dwarf.”

But wait, WAIT, says internet guy #23. Hang on! There are LOTS of stories that don’t tell you things up front. That change the rules at the last minute. He was dead all along! They were on Earth the whole time! She’s actually the Viscountess Isabella!

And this is true. Sort of. Third act twists are very common—and freakin’ amazing when they’re done well, BUT…

One of the basic rules of a twist is that it doesn’t violate anything we’ve seen before—it just makes us look at it in a new light. Most of the example twists I just (vaguely) gave don’t change the core premise of their established worlds at all. For example…

SPOILERS!! BIG SPOILERS FOR THE SIXTH SENSE (AMONG OTHERS)!!

When we find out Dr, Malcolm has been dead the whole time, this isn’t new worldbuilding. I mean, we’ve known ghosts are real for most of the movie. We know little Cole can see them. He even flat out told us “some of them don’t even know they’re dead.” The big twist here doesn’t change any rules or limits of the world as they’ve been explained to us, it just changes how we look at Malcolm and his interactions with it.

Want to use the old classic Planet of the Apes. Or any number of Twilight Zone episodes)? In all of these a key thing is establishing interstellar travel one way or another, so it’s not breaking any rules to say we might be on another planet, or these aliens are from another planet. All of these stories involve the inherent assumption of what planet we’re on. So again, the story isn’t cheating—it’s just playing us because it knows what we’re going to assume about the world we’re being shown.

End Spoilers!!

But if, in his final showdown with Harry, we found out Voldemort was a cyborg alien from the future, that’s breaking the world we’ve established for the past six books. Likewise, if the next season of Picard has him bringing Data back to life using ancient Vulcan sorcery… that just sounds like nonsense on a bunch of levels, doesn’t it?

Go build incredible worlds. Have fun with them. Just don’t cheat.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you.

Next time… well, this Monday’s my birthday. So next time we see each other I’ll be older and wiser. That being the case, I’ll probably have share some of that newly found wisdom with you.

Until then, go write. 

I’m going to be honest with all of you. The clown thingisn’t coming together. I’ve got an idea but I haven’t been able to focus on it enough. My attention’s been split a couple of ways with that big pitch document I told you about and a few other things I can’t tell you about (not yet, anyway). Plus, while you’re reading this, there’s a good chance I’m in the twisty line of cars at the Del Mar Fairgrounds while my lovely partner gets her second shot.

Have you gotten your shots? Faster we all get ‘em, the faster we get to an actual herd immunity. Which means faster we get back to Writers Coffeehouses, conventions, book signings, book clubs… all those things where we get to meet face to face. Get vaxxed!

Anyway. No clowns. We’re putting that one on the back burner.

For now, I’ve got another question from Tantilloon, who decided to push their luck and see what other bits of advice I might have. It’s a bit of a submitting/ publishing question… but it also isn’t.

“I’ve created some drawings, maps, and renderings of things from the story. Do you think these supplemental materials add value when trying to find an agent?”

This is the main question, although Tantilloon also brought up blogs and playlists. And it’s one of those questions that has the answer in it. Which makes it great for me on days like this where I’m a bit behind.

Really, all of this boils down to “supplementary material.” It’s stuff that, well, supplements the work. Stating the obvious, yeah, but it’s one of those things where I think it’s important to make the distinction. Supplemental material, pretty much by definition, is separate material that adds to my work. But it can do this in a couple of different ways…

First off, it’s really common—I’m tempted to say it’s standard—that we create more than we put into a manuscript. We know details about characters that never get used. We write out whole scenes that get cut. We have diagrams in our head showing where and when and how things happen. This is a normal part of the writing process, for all this background material to exist. And, as I mentioned above, for it not to be in the book. But its existence still adds to the book and enhances it.

For example, I scribbled out a bunch of base diagrams for Dead Moon. I knew how the Caretaker bases were laid out. I had three or four diagrams for Luna City—big overall ones and smaller ones that had details for the different streets. And these added to the story because it let me write about Osiris and Luna City as if they were real places.

Which brings me to the second kind of supplemental material. Sometimes this behind the scenes stuff I just mentioned (or other, original stuff) gets used for marketing purposes. Little added bonuses to tease people who haven’t read my book and please those who have. Because I think a lot of folks like seeing that other layer of things. To get a peek behind the curtain, or to get parts of the story from a slightly different point of view. And when it’s so easy to spread things across multiple media… why wouldn’t you? Lots of folks release free short stories involving the settings or characters of their books. Sylvain Neuvel did a fantastic (and very educational!) series of videos about rockets and the space race to promote his latest book, A History of What Comes Next. Hell, I called in a bunch of film favors and created some book trailers for the Ex-Heroes books (about four months before they moved to Broadway Paperbacks). I also made up a side-blog about the Kavach building and its residents for 14. And an early chapter that got cut from Paradox Bound became a digital bonus for a PageHabit promotion.

Important sub-note. If you’re actually a fan of my writing, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of any of this. This stuff is great, but most of the time getting our bonus material seen takes just as much effort as getting our actual work seen.  Which really means my marketing plans were really more like cautionary tales.

And all of this brings us to the third type of supplemental material. I see… well, I don’t know if I should say “a lot,” but I definitely see a number of folks who view the supplemental stuff as part of the whole storytelling experience. They need this other material to understand the story. The readers will find hidden clues to the mystery if they check out those two or three blogs, more details in the lyrics from my playlists, and a better understanding of the nuances of my protagonists’ relationship if they sign up for the OnlyFans account I created.

The catch here is that what I’m describing is less a book and more of  a… a multi-media experience. Or cross-platform non-linear narrative. Whatever buzzphrase currently describes this kind of thing. Point is, it’s not a complete, contained book. Not if I have to go hereto understand the plot and there to make sense of their motivations and subscribe to that if I want Chapter 16 to make any sense whatsoever.

Y’see, Timmy, complete books are what agents represent and publishers buy. Not most of a book. Not 83% of a book but all the character arcs are right over there on a website I set up. If I’m submitting to an agent or an editor—especially as a first time writer—I need to have a coherent, contained manuscript. If this playlist is necessary to understand something in the book, then it needs to be part of the book.

And if I don’t need it… then it’s probably a marketing tool. Nothing wrong with that, but it means nobody needs to see it until after the book’s found a home somewhere. Maybe not for a while after that, even. Even for an agent, that’s real cart-before-the-horse stuff.  I’m talking about wedding venues and they haven’t even decided if they want to go on a first date.

“But… I mean, come on. Won’t they be glad to know I have a plan to market the book? It has to improve my odds a little!”

Look, think about it this way. A publisher’s either going to have their own plan to market the book (one thought up by their marketing and publicity people), in which case my plan’s very likely irrelevant to them. Or they’re going to be expecting me to take care of all the marketing and publicity myself, in which case it’s still irrelevant to them because I’d be doing it no matter what.

And I feel like I’m babbling now. So to end on a slightly happier note… here’s a picture of my friend Tammy dressed as Stealth for those book trailers I mentioned, They’re still up on YouTube if you go look.

Oh, also–this Sunday at 5:00 (Pacific) I’m doing an online interview with my friend Elena Taylor, talking about writing and publishing and whatever else you might have to ask. It’s completely free and open to everyone, just sign up to reserve a space and have your questions at the ready.

Next time, I may have a little worldbuilding tip for you. Or maybe I’ll be answering another question. Only one way to find out…

Until then, go write.