Just a bit of random musing, not quite so writing related. Or maybe it is.

Did my taxes last weekend. Well, I did the part of my taxes where I sort through a box of receipts and notes and paperwork and try to organize them by deductible categories so I can hand them off to someone more knowledgeable than me. It’s a pain, but I admit I also kind of like doing it. No really. Yeah, even though half of it’s just meaningless numbers, things I saved for this line or that expense.

It’s the other half that makes it enjoyable. That’s the part that becomes a little time-capsule look at the past year. Meals out with friends. Date nights with my partner. Hey, look, there’s me buying myself the LEGO Bookstore set to celebrate the release of Terminus. Here’s the assorted gas/comics/food receipts from my monthly road trip up to LA for the Writers Coffeehouse and the Last Bookstore dystopian book club.

Which is what got me thinking, because last night was said dystopian book club. It was also the one year anniversary of the last time we all met in person (and where my number of receipts dropped drastically). We’ve been meeting on Zoom since then. Last March most smart people were already seeing the signs and realizing how bad this could be. And even though *cough* certain people kept going on TV and saying “it’s not a big deal, it’ll be gone in a few weeks, don’t worry about it,” the rest of us were thinking maaaaaaybe we should just shop really late at night when nobody’s around. Or how much does getting groceries delivered really cost?

I’m guessing most of you are in the same boat. We’re all hitting our personal Covid-versaries about now. It’s been a brutal year, and I think, alas, we’re probably still in for some brutality to come. The fight’s almost over, but there’s still time for a cracked rib or a black eye. In fact, I’m tempted to say there’s definitely a few body blows in our near future, collectively or individually.

It’s also been a rough twelve months creatively. I mean, at this point a year ago I was about halfway through the first draft of a project. And a few months later I was… still about halfway through the first draft. It took a while to get the mental gears meshing again, and that’s considering I’m in the very fortunate, privileged position where lockdown didn’t change my life that much. My partner and I both work from home, and we didn’t have to stress about losing work. We don’t have kids. We’re used to just spending time with each other and not going out much.

What I’m getting at is if this year messed up myability to write, I’m impressed as hell by all of you in not-as-favorable who’ve gotten writing done. If you worked up the energy and drive to get some pages done, that’s seriously great. If you managed to get some things edited, that’s just fantastic. If you managed to do a whole draft? Holy crap, that’s plain amazing. You got a whole draft done during this past year? That’s phenomenal! Talk about focus—you’re a friggin’ machine!

Did you get more than that done? Shut up. Nobody wants to hear you gloat about it.

No, it’s okay. You can gloat a little. Seriously, it’s unbelievable that you managed to stay the course during all this.

Again, if you got something done—anything—during this hellish plague year, you should be proud of yourself. Writing’s tough when things are great. If you can keep doing it during a year like 2020, well…

Think what you’ll be able to do once this is over.

Last week I mentioned I was starting a new project. A huge one. Easily the biggest thing I’ve ever done and very  probably the next two or three years of my life.

To call it intimidating is a bit of an understatement. It’s been ridiculously easy to find other things that I need to do. Not that I’m avoiding it, of course, it’s just… look, I’ve needed to paint these Space Marines for a while now. And, if you missed it, I bought a Shogun Warrior to restore, a Raydeen like I had when I was a kid. Not to mention, I really need to spend more time with the cats. They’re feeling a bit neglected, and I think I’m making some real headway with Doctor Wade Salem. Heck, we haven’t even discussed all these ranty blog posts.

Okay, yes, I’ve already started the big project. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think of other things I could be doing. Or maybe some I should be doing.

I mean, let’s be honest. There’s arguably a ton of stuff I need to do before I start a project. I should have a rough idea of who my characters are and what they want out of life. At least a bare-bones sense of a plot. Which could mean some degree of research.

Plus, it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I knew what my chosen genre’s expectations are. Or had a notion of what’s been done before in it.

If you’ve been following this collection of rants for over a year, you may remember the A2Q. It’s a dozen long-ish posts about how to take a novel from the bare bones idea through to a finished manuscript. And almost two-thirds of them were things to do before we started our first draft.

When we get right down to it though, there’s only one thing I really need to do to start a new project. And just based off my own experience (and some experiences I borrowed from other folks) it’s probably the toughest thing. I know I used to get caught up on it a lot.

So what’s the all-important, ultimate step to writing a project?

We start writing it.

I know that sounds stupid but, well, it really is what it comes down to. I can do a lot of research and practice and character sketches and pin a hundred index cards up on the wall with different colored yarn. I can block out scenes with action figures and act them out with friends and take long walks where I have silent conversations with myself. But at the end of the day… I have to start writing it. Until then it’s just prep work at best, procrastination at worst.

I know some people might take offense to such a statement and insist all those character sketches 100% count as writing. And the multiple outlines. And the four months of research. To which I say… sure, of course it does. Again, I wrote around 25K words last year about all the prep work you can do before starting a first draft.

But I also wonder why some of these folks are so quick to take offense. I mean, at least four or five times a year here I point out that my method is my method and your method is your method. No problem at all. But if the mere suggestion that my wall of index cards doesn’t count as writing gnaws at me that much… maybe it’s because I know it doesn’t?

Two or three times here I’ve told the story of Jerzy, a personal trainer who helped me to lose a lot of weight by just pointing out all I had to do was follow the schedule he’d given me. I could come up with a lot of reasons for not doing it or to put off doing it or… I could do it.

There’s a point where I’m doing that advance work, and there’s a point where I’m just not writing. And that’s the real goal here. Stringing sentences together and making paragraphs and telling stories. If that’s what I want to be doing… well, I need to do it.

Yeah. It’s scary and it’s work and it’s a commitment. And we all want to do it right, to create something fantastic. We can always find good reasons not to start, to put it off, to convince ourselves we’re not quite ready to do it yet. Because it’s going to be tough.

But it’s going to be a lot easier than trying to lose sixty pounds was, believe me.

Next time, I’d like to revisit that idea of throwing rocks at people in trees. Even if you’re doing it for a good reason.

Until then, go write. 

I follow a lot of writers over on Twitter (and I’m friends with two or three of them), and it’s not unusual for a lot of them (and me, too) to occasionally toss out storytelling advice of one kind or another. As best you can in 280 characters, anyway. Or a longish-thread. Sometimes it’s random encouragements or self-care reminders. A fair amount of time it’s basic guidelines or rules. It all depends on what sparked this particular bit of Twitter-musing.

When we’re talking about guidelines that talk usually revolves around publishing–the business side of things—and how it may affect our writing. Manuscript length. Genre definitions. The preferences of a certain agent or editor.

If someone’s talking about rules, it’s usually stuff every writer eventually has to learn. I need to know what words mean and how to spell them. I’ve got to have a solid understanding of structure. A firm grasp of grammar. My characters will need to measure up in certain ways. The stuff that we see come up again and again, oddly enough, when we talk about good writing.

And the sad truth is, learning the rules generally means study and practice and failure. Followed by more study and more practice and more failure. And eventually some success.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, anytime someone offers advice like this… there’s pretty much always someone who argues against it. They’ll mention an article they read about someone who did it differently or another tweet they saw about an editor who bought something that didn’t follow the guidelines. In short, they’re pointing to an exception to the rule in an attempt to disprove the rule.

A lot of the time, oddly enough, these folks are doing this to justify their own opinions and preferences.  I don’t like statement X, or what it implies, so I’ll find an example where X isn’t true and use it as proof that X is never true. Therefore, my opinions and preferences aren’t wrong.

Now, let’s be clear on one thing—there are always exceptions to the rule. Always.  Anyone who tells you that something is never-question-it, 100% always this way can be ignored. Especially if they shriek “no exceptions!!” I don’t care who they are or how many million copies they’ve sold (or not sold, as is more often the case)

BUT…

Exceptions to the rule are very, very rare. You could say exceptionally rare. That’s why they’re the exception and not the rule.

I mean, sure, there’s a double handful of authors who sold awful manuscripts filled with horrible spelling, bad grammar, and not the slightest clue about formatting. But the vast majority of those manuscripts never made it past the first reader for an agent or editor. We can point at a dozen or so people who sold their first book because they knew/ were related to/ were sleeping with the right people. But there are tens of thousands of writers (probably hundreds of thousands over the years)who broke in by taking their time and writing really good books. And, yeah, maybe I can point to a few people who sold the first draft of the very first novel they wrote. But I can also point to the tens of millions of people—actual, literal millions—whose first draft submissions were rejected.

Now of course, the downside of this is… well, it means most of us aren’t the exception. We’re all in the majority. And nobody wants that. Nobody likes the thought of eventually breaking in, we want all the success and recognition now! We want to be the exception!

And maaaaaybe we are. Maybe what we’ve done is good enough that it doesn’t matter I broke a ton of rules and guidelines. But we definitely shouldn’t assume we’re the exception. Because that’s where things get dangerous. Just ask Vesna Vulovic.

(yes, I’m going to tell this story again)

For those of you who never heard me explain this at the Writers Coffeehouse (either at Dark Delicacies or Mysterious Galaxy), Ms. Vulovic was a flight attendant back in the early ‘70s. And in 1972, the airliner she was working on was bombed in mid-flight. She was trapped inside the plane’s hull as it plunged over six miles to the ground. 

BUT…

Vesna didn’t die.  She fell 33,000 feet to the ground and survived. In fact, she was only in the hospital for a couple of months before being discharged. She recovered for a bit longer, but ultimately she was… fine. She ended up with a limp. That’s it. Seriously. She just died a couple of years ago, in her mid-sixties.

So… anyone here want to assume they’re that exception to the rule? Feel like taking that chance? Sure, the vast majority of people would die horribly after a six mile fall—I mean, assuming our hearts didn’t explode during the fall—but Vesna did it so I guess it probably applies to everyone, right?

What? No takers?

As I was saying, it can be dangerous to start with the assumption that I’m the exception.  That the rules or requirements don’t apply to me.  I’m always going to be bound by the same rules as pretty much every other writer, and I’m going to be expected to follow them.  Until I show that I know how to break them.  If I don’t know what I’m doing or why, I’m just a monkey pounding on a typewriter, unable to explain how or why I did something and also probably unable to do it again.

Now, again, I’m not saying exceptions don’t exist. That’d be silly—they clearly do.  But it’s important to understand they are the exception. They’re the unusual rarity, not the common thing.  That’s why we’ve heard of them—because it’s such an oddball thing to happen. Like, y’know, surviving a six-mile drop.

But exceptions can’t be my excuse not to learn those rules and guidelines. All these rules have developed over the decades for a reason, and they apply to all of us. 

Well… the vast, overall majority of us.

Next time… I’m kinda drawing a blank to be honest. I’m about to dive into something new and that’s occupying a lot of my headspace is right now. Feel free to toss suggestions or requests down below, and if I don’t get any, I guess I’ll come up with something.

Until then… go write.

If you’ve been following this blog (or me on Twitter) for any amount of time, you know one of my favorite Saturday thing to do is watch B-movies. I’ve always had a certain love for them, and I think it’s a place to find some unsung gems if you’re willing to dig. Plus, lots of chances to flex your storytelling muscles and figure out some stuff. Where did this go wrong? Am I doing this in my own writing? How could it be fixed?

One type that always puts me on edge is found footage movies. After movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield became huge hits, shooting movies in this style exploded. Especially lower budget movies. There are dozens and dozens of them out there, covering topics from US forces in Afghanistan to dinosaur lost worlds to Judgment Day itself. Although you do have to ask… who found that particular footage…?

The catch, though, is found footage is one of those storytelling methods that looks very simple and forgiving. In fact, it’s an incredibly difficult way to tell a story, especially if I want to do it well. Possibly one of the hardest ways. And I’ve thought a few times about scribbling up a bunch of points and warning signs to watch for in such things, but the simple truth is I don’t offer a lot of straight screenwriting (or filmmaking) advice here anymore. Nothing major, anyway.

But it recently hit me there’s a way this ties to prose writing, and that’s through the epistolary form. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s when the story’s told through letters, journals, news articles, and other bits of found media (aaahhhhh, sound familiar?). Dracula and Frankensteinare both classic epistolary novels. There’s a magnificent one that just came out from Dan Frey called The Future is Yours, which uses emails and blogs and text messages. I used it for a section of one of my own books, Ex-Communication, where we get a look at a young girl’s journal, and in the very first story I ever sold for cash money, “The Hatbox.”

But just like found footage, an epistolary novel or short story can look deceptively easy. And it turns out they hit a lot of the same basic problems as found footage movies. So I thought I could take a few minutes and talk about four major flaws I see in both of these related formats—the movies and the books..

As always, none of these are die-hard absolutes, and it’s always possible someone could do this in a movie/ novel and make it work beautifully. But I also think they’re common enough as flaws that I need to be 100% sure what I’m doing is flawless if I decide to use one of these devices, because the automatic assumption is going to be… it’s a mistake. And when people hit the third or fourth obvious mistake in my story, they’re probably going to move on to something else. And that’s all on me, not them.

So… first thing.

Mistakes must be deliberate and clearly be deliberate
A lot of storytellers see the found footage/epistolary style as, well, an excuse to be lazy. Yeah, they do. Sorry.

Sure, there are lots of spelling mistakes, but that’s only because my narrator doesn’t know how to spell. Yeah, there are gaping holes in the plot, but the narrator wasn’t there for everything—they can only tell what they know. Yeah, this isn’t what we want to see or hear, but it’s more believable they’d be writing about this or pointing the camera at that. And, whoa, did we not once get the actress’s face in that scene? Well, it’ll be fine, that’ll just look even more authentic.

What’s going on here is something I’ve talked about before. People are confusing reality—that thing we walk around in most of the time—with fictional reality. Often they fall back on this to excuse bad dialogue or behavior in prose. Here I’m using it to excuse my writing in general. Or, in the film case, horribly framed and/or lit shots.

The bigger aspect of this, though, is my audience (readers or viewers). I mean, we can all spot mistakes when we see them. Clearly I wasn’t supposed to see that crew member in the mirror, or the battery pack and wires for her mic pack, and we all know the difference between there and their and they’re (don’t we…?). So when we see these things, our automatic gut reaction isn’t “gosh, this seems so real,” it’s just “Mistake!!” and maybe a pointing finger.

That’s why I need to be super cautious about “mistakes” in this sort of storytelling, because they’re going to be interpreted as, well, actual mistakes. Not something wrong with my character’s spelling ability, but a failure on my editor’s part. Its just an actual mistake in the film or book. And that’s the kind of thing that ruins the flow.

Cause here’s the thing… Absolutely no one went into Cloverfieldthinking they were looking at actual footage of a giant monster attacking New York. They knew it was a movie (or a book in their hands). The format pulls it a little closer to home, maybe bulks up the willing suspension of disbelief a bit, but everyone still knew this was something that had been created and promoted for months in advance.

So if I’m going to make mistakes, they have to be super-blatant mistakes. Things nobody could’ve missed. Things a spellchecker would catch. I don’t want to put their instead of they’re, I want to see there’re or theyer. Really clear, very deliberate mistakes.

Cameras are not characters
There’s a scene (or series of scenes) in every found footage movie where the camera moves too much. It’s imitating the gaze of the character holding it rather than, y’know, being a camera they’re holding. These moments can be subtle and ring a bit false—looking back and forth between two things, for example—or they can be big and make the audience shout “Why are you stillholding the camera?!!?” Y’know, like when you stop to point the camera at the giant monster opening its mouth to eat you.

We all recognize in these moments that no human being would still be carrying a camera on their shoulder or holding a cell phone out in front of them. They definitely wouldn’t be turning, aiming, resizing, refocusing, and so on. It’s a cheat, and we all recognize it as one.

Likewise, there are things it’s tough to buy in epistolary form. A journal is close to first person POV, but it’s still something different and distinct. If I just spent six hours fighting the zombie horde with an axe, am I really going to sit down and write out those six hours in meticulous detail? Would I write out what all the zombies looked like, what I was thinking of when I decapitated them, some random observations about the human condition? Or would my entry just be—

Feb. 18th (??? Thursday???) – brutal day killing zombies. friggin exhausted. most everyone made it. maybe write more tomorrow if there’s time.

Heck, would I even write that much? I mean, with everything going on, am I really going to spend any of my precious downtime writing? And by… flashlight? Campfire?

And it’s not just fighting zombies. How much would you want to write after eight hours of hiking or a twelve hour work day? Seriously, think of the writing you’ve done in your own life. Letters, journals, diaries—how much detail did you really go into? How often? How many things did you just skim over? I know my attempts at journaling were never that great, and I know they would’ve been worse if I was in the middle of a custody battle or an alien invasion. Or both. Heck, I still write physical letter to a few folks, but there are long gaps between them and lots of stuff I never include. Yes, Kevin, I know I’m very behind—sorry.

I need to have amazingly rock-solid reasons for why people would continue to point that camera or keep up those journal entries. And doing this can’t conflict with that first flaw up above. There’s only so many times we’ll buy “oh, I thought I turned the camera off.”

Cameras are not eyes
When watching my Saturday geekery movies, it’s pretty common for me to give a movie crap for jump scares. Especially ones where the monster/ ninja/ cyborg is leaping into view of the camera but it clearlywould’ve already been in view of the characters. This is a really common problem in found footage movies—confusing what the camera sees for what the character sees.

This is more a mechanics of storytelling issue. Understanding there’s more going on than we’re seeing, and that my characters have thoughts and experiences beyond what they share with the audience. We know they’re hearing and seeing things the camera isn’t, so it’d be bizarre for them to act as if the only things they experienced were the things that appeared on camera.

A weird flipside of this that happens enough to make it worth mentioning—I can’t show something on a found footage camera and then say my characters didn’tsee it. Either they were looking through the viewfinder or they watched it reviewing the footage (because why else did they have cameras running?). So characters acting like they didn’t see what we, the audience, saw just makes them look stupid.

Likewise, journals aren’t really narrative. They’re one person’s very limited view of a narrative Even more limited than regular first person. We’re removed from the actual events by the narrator and by the narrator’s personal biases and limitations—again, how much they actually write and what they write about vs. what’s actually happening in the narrative.

If that sounds a little confusing, think of it in terms of an unreliable narrator. We know they’re telling us a story, but we also know it’s not the real story. Maybe they’re leaving things out or putting a spin on the facts or just don’t understand what’s going on around them. We understand we have to translate what they’re telling us and fill in some facts ourselves.

And this is what every journal is like. They’re all kinda unreliable. They’re filtered by our individual experiences, our knowledge, our maturity, and our own views. There’s always going to be more going on than what’s on the page.

Super short version of this–I can’t have piles of story beats that are only about how the audience will react to things—I need to consider the characters too. How are they interpreting and reacting to the events going on all around them?

It’s all just random incidents and coincidences
This is what usually happens when more than one of the above flaws happen. The narrative starts to break down because it can’t actually be supported in this form. A lot of time when this happens, filmmakers will give up on the found footage conceit altogether and just have random camera views from, well, anything. It was 90% cell phone footage until we had a car chase, so now it’s all random traffic cams or ATM cameras. How did we get that footage? Not important!

Likewise, as tension mounts in a story, it becomes less and less believable that someone’s taking the time to write out more and more details in their diary. It makes us aware that the zombies could burst in at any minute, but I took half an hour to scribble down all the gory details of how Wakko died. It’s either the story grinding to a halt or the story getting skimmed over because who has time to be writing right now?!?!

A common sign of this in both films and journals? The story just stops. It doesn’t end, mind you. It just… stops. The movie that goes black or the journal that ends in mid-sentence. Which, I mean, is still slightly better than…

I hope this letter gets to you somehow, Yakko, because I hear footsteps on the stairs. There’s no way out for me but remember what I told you! Oh no!! They’re right outside my door!!

Anyway…

There are the four common flaws I’ve seen in this type of storytelling. Each one is pretty bad. I think any two of them together will pretty much sink my story. So if I’m going with the found footage/ epistolary style, I need to make sure I avoid them.

But hang on! All of this means it’s going to be a lot harder to tell the story, right? I’m going to have to figure out new scenes and sequences. Probably change dialogue. Maybe restructure some things. And then still make it a good story?

Well… yeah. I mean, I chose to tell something in this format. This is what the format needs. What am I complaining about? Can you imagine if I started writing a romance novel an then said “awwww, geeez… there’s all this relationship stuff and kissing I have to deal with. I don’t want to write any of that.”

Like so many artistic things, I need to do a lot of work to make it look easy.

Hey, speaking of work and advice… WonderCon is coming up, and I’m going to be doing another Writers Coffeehouse with a bunch of professional writer-friends. We’re recording next week, so if there’s any writing-related question you’d like to get a consensus answer on, this is your big chance. Just toss it in the comments below or hit me up with it on Twitter. Outlining, characters, dialogue, daily schedules, editing, tell us what you need.

And next time here, I’d like to talk to you about the one time when all these rules don’t matter.

Until then, go write.

Or shoot something with your phone.