Category: art

I’ve mentioned once or thrice here that one of the toughest lessons for a writer to learn is that something I wrote just might not be that good. I spent time writing, some more time editing it (hopefully), and now on my third or fourth pass I’m forced to admit it’s just… not good. Maybe it doesn’t really work with the character or this particular moment in the story. Maybe it’s really good but it just doesn’t fit in this book.

But also, let’s be honest. Sometimes… it’s just bad. We wrote something that’s crap. It happens.

When this happens, it’s tough, but we usually need to start cutting. Lines of dialogue. Whole paragraphs. Whole chapters. Subplots. Hell, I’ve cut whole characters out of a book and then stitched everything together again around their sudden absence.

And this is a rough thing, to let go of something that we invested time and effort into. I think that’s why people will fight so hard to keep some things. To rationalize why we don’t need to get rid of it. To rewrite and twist and push and try to find a way that makes it work.

Now, there’s two aspects of this I want to address.

First, like I said, the gut reaction is to fight against pulling stuff out of my work. I know I did for years. But as I kept trying to do this, I realized something. This was a natural part of editing. Things are going to go away. If we can accept that we might need to snip a word or three, then it makes sense we might need to snip ten or twenty. Or a hundred.

This is going to sound weird to a few folks, I know, but sometimes you’ve got to write something out to find out you don’t need it. It’s that thing I’ve mentioned once or thrice, that you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. And part of fixing something is realizing I don’t need that funny character bit or the flashback chapter or maybe the whole romance subplot. They’re ruining the pacing or changing the tone or breaking the flow.

And again, yeah, sometimes they’re just bad.

So we cut it. Tear it out. Delete it. Good riddance!

Well, hang on.

This is the second aspect of tearing things out. Yeah, some of this can go and we can never think of it again. Like blocking someone on social media. Hit the keys, gone, everything’s better. Again, there’s a chance it’s just bad and not worth the effort of trying to make it good.

I spent an afternoon two weeks back trying to structure a chapter for this funny character bit (oh ho, that sounds familiar) and ultimately realized it just wasn’t going to work. It didn’t make sense for at least one of the characters involved. And it ultimately wasn’t even that funny. Definitely not so much that it was worth all this effort. So… gone. No worries.

But some of this stuff… look, maybe we can seal this in virtual tupperware and stick it in the fridge for a bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like I mentioned above, that romance subplot might be good, just not good for this book. So why not hang onto it in case the right book comes around?

And this is where, I think, some folks have issues. Because if we’re talking about art, weren’t these words put together for this purpose? Didn’t I artisanally craft this dialogue to come from the mouths of these characters? I mean, if it’s that easy for me to just pull something from one story and toss it into another… well, maybe I’m just some kind of hack. Maybe I don’t care about art at all?

But this just isn’t true. I mean, it’s true that I can’t take that romantic subplot and stick it into another story unaltered. Hell, if nothing else, I’d probably need to change the names. And probably some speech patterns. And possibly references to where/when this is happening. But really that’s just, y’know, writing. If I was creating the scene from scratch, I’d still have to take all these things into consideration.

Also, if I’ve got something I pulled from a manuscript five or six years ago—like any leftovers that’ve been sitting around for a while—I may want to be extra-sure it’s still good. Dialogue shifts, styles change, pop-culture and tech references can get outdated fast. I’m not saying I should toss anything that’s X years old, just that it might need a little more attention before I offer it to anyone.

Y’see, Timmy, sometimes we write bad stuff. No question, everyone does it. But sometimes, we’re just writing good stuff in the wrong book. And when that happens, there’s no shame in packing it up and saving it for later.

But seriously… you’re never going to eat those noodles on the bottom shelf of the fridge. They’re three weeks old now. And they’re furry! Just throw those out.

Next time, I think I’d like to lighten things up a bit and talk about AI and the assassination of JFK.

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.

I’d like to start by telling you about my one of my favorite film edits of all time. Top five, easy. It’s a single, straight cut between one scene and the next and it’s beyond brilliant. There’s a simply unbelievable amount of character and plot development in it. No joke, it’s a level of storytelling that most filmmakers and authors (self included) don’t have a prayer of ever achieving. I say this with complete and utter sincerity.

And Sam Raimi did it in a Spider-Man movie.

You probably know the moment. Struggling student/ photographer/ superhero (shhhhh) Peter Parker has just been introduced to physicist/ genius/ role model Otto Octavius. Otto takes a moment to criticize Peter for his laziness, but they warm up to each other as Peter makes some insightful observations about Otto’s new fusion reactor. Then Peter asks a question and Otto answers it as they finish off dinner at Otto and Rosie’s apartment later that night.

D’you know that moment? Seriously, go watch it if you don’t. Alfred Molina’s freakin’ amazing as Doctor Octopus.

Anyway, point is, we instantly know what happened during that cut. All of it. We understand how the discussion went. How they ended up back here. How their views of each other have changed over the past few hours. Yeah, it’s clearly been hours and we all know exactly what happened during them.

And just to be clear for those of you who might like to look down on superhero movies, none of this is because of pre-existing knowledge. Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent were going in an all-new direction with Otto’s backstory and how it overlapped with Peter’s. They’d never been seen in this way before.

How many pages of storytelling did they fit into that cut?

Maybe a better way to look at it is, how many script pages did the movie not need because of that cut?

Truth is, most of us are pretty smart. We can figure out what goes between A and C. And between X and Z. As writers, we don’t always need to fill in every detail. Especially all the boring details. There’s lots of stuff we can skip over without hurting our story in the slightest. In a lot of cases, it’ll even make our story better.

I think this works on both a micro and a macro level. On the micro level, I’m talking about clauses and sentences and maybe paragraphs. I’ve talked in the past once or thrice about trimming away excess details. Steps in the process. Parts of the routine. Things the majority of readers will figure out happened. To put it another way, the thing that happens between A and B.

On the macro level, I’m talking about scenes or story beats or maybe even whole chapters. It’s the same idea as the micro, except we (the writers) have taken it even further, adding more details and nuance to what was already… well, unnecessary details. I’ve cut multiple pages and even whole chapters out of manuscripts once I realized the whole thing was a beautifully rendered and detailed scene that ultimately just wasn’t necessary.

And I’m sure someone just read that and said “whoa whoa WHOA! What about the art?! If that chapter’s beautifully written, isn’t that reason enough for it to be in the book?”

Well… no, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong. I love a beautiful turn of phrase or exquisite prose as much as the next guy. Probably more. I’ve read some things where other writers choose the absolutely perfect word or come up with a beautiful description and all I can say is “goddamn.” And sometimes “I’m jealous as all hell.”

The catch, of course, is those words are all describing something that needs to be in the story. It’s an aspect of writing I’ve mentioned once or thrice before. Just because something’s good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for my book. Something can be fantastic and still just not belong in there. For any number of reasons.

F’r example, one or two of you may have read a book called Paradox Bound. And you may have heard that, in the first draft my editor saw, I had a full chapter describing Eli’s bus trip across America after he flees the Faceless Men. It was about seven or eight single-spaced pages. And it was about Eli seeing the bigger world for the first time. The assorted people on the bus. The places they briefly stopped. The food he ate for a three day bus-ride, Sleeping sitting up. Wearing the same clothes for three days. And some clever observations about life and humanity and mass transit scattered in there too.

But ultimately, when viewed as part of the whole story, absolutely none of this mattered. It was about Eli getting on a bus in Boston and getting off a bus in Pasadena. All that quiet stuff in between… well, you would’ve just assumed most of that happened. Seriously. What else would he do on a bus for three days? How much of it would’ve been painfully obvious once he stepped off the bus?

Here are three general rules of thumb I’ve developed for myself when it comes to such things. I generally cut something if…

1) The average person would know, or logically assume, B had to happen between A and C. If my character leaves work and the next time we see her she’s arriving home with a Jack in the Box takeout bag, do you immediately assume I made a big continuity error? “She didn’t have that bag when she left work!!!” Or do you just assume she stopped at Jack in the Box on the way home? We make these kind of cuts all the time. We don’t show people traveling between two points. They go to the gym and suddenly they’re in workout clothes. We see two folks sneak upstairs at the house party and then suddenly they’re in bed– flopped on their backs, breathless, and (hopefully) looking kind of happy. None of us have any confusion about what we “missed” in any of these examples.

2) If B is completely irrelevant to A and C. We can safely assume it happened during the timeline of the story (see above rule), but it has no effect whatsoever on the tale I’m telling. Perfect example of this– how many books have you read that take place over three or four or more days? Probably a lot of them, yes? If anything, a story taking place entirely in one day is a bit of a rarity.

How many times have you read about someone using the bathroom? It’s something we all inherently know happens, but we also know it’s just not that important to most stories. So we don’t question when it’s not there. Same with eating. Did these people really go for a week without eating? Or did the author just not bother showing it and save a page or two?

3) If it just works better without it. Because sometimes it does. The paragraph reads better, the action flows better, the horror has a little more punch. Sometimes I don’t want to get bogged down in the details, and neither does my reader. And as I’ve been saying above, if people are probably going to figure it out anyway, why bog things down? To paraphrase a famous lawyer, we could skip all that and just, well… get to the good stuff.

And to repeat, all three of these are just rules of thumb. It’s not hard to find examples of some beautiful writing that contributes absolutely nothing to the plot or story. But I feel safe saying it’s also not all that common.

Y’see, Timmy, if I trust my audience to figure this stuff out on their own, they’ll appreciate that trust. They’ll know I trusted them to fill in the blanks. And when they figure something out on their own, even a little thing, they’ll love what they’re reading even more.

So look back over your manuscript, go over some of those beats… and maybe give your readers the benefit of the doubt.

Next time, unless anyone’s got a better idea, I’d like to talk about this personal teleporter I invented.

Until then, go write.

This is something I’ve talked about several times here on the ol’ ranty writing blog, but I realized I haven’t talked specifically about it in, well, many years. Too many years, really. Definitely not since I’ve tried to lean away from the more ranty, accusatory tone I tended to write in back at the start of this.

Look, reading all those movie scripts made me pull out a lot of hair.

I talked a month or so back about the idea of a contract between author and reader. There’s one other aspect to that contract, a sub clause, and I think it’s one of those “so obvious we don’t think about it” sort of things. To be blunt, nobody’s picking up one of my books to hear from me. Or to see me.

I mean, sure, they like a lot of the characters and worlds I’ve created. Some folks probably (hopefully!) like my style enough that they’re willing to try something new from me. But they still don’t want to see me. They want the story, and they definitely don’t want me getting between them and it.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m going to follow you home from the bookstore and stick my hand between you and the page or sing nonsense in your ear. It’s just that nobody wants me distracting them from the fact they’re reading my story. They just want to sink into that world and get lost.

Yeah, of course, on one level you know I crafted each of those sentences and paragraphs, chose where all

the breaks

should go, but we have this quiet understanding that I won’t be leaning over your shoulder asking “Did you like that? Did you see what I did there? Wasn’t that clever?” You just want to immerse yourself and forget about the world for a little bit. Or at least get to look at it from a neater angle.

That was jarring, wasn’t it? That weird paragraph break? It was only two lines, but it broke the flow for a second, and you stopped hearing my voice and started hearing your own instead. Probably saying something like “was that a mistake? Is he doing beat poetry? Was he trying to do something funny there?”

And this is the worst thing that can happen to a writer. I don’t want you thinking about me. I want you to be thinking about Hector and Natalie and the people they’re running away from. If you’re noticing me, thinking about what I’m doing… it means I’ve done something wrong.

Think of it this way. It’s the difference between the tough guy in a story who commits unimaginable acts of excessive violence to look tough… and the tough guy who doesn’t need to commit those acts. The one we understand is more impressive without seeing a blatant demonstration. Being able to restrain myself is usually more impressive than how excessive I can be. Less of us is more of the story.

So here’s four easy ways I can keep my literary head down.

Vocabulary— When I started out, I know I desperately wanted to show I had a better vocabulary than the average person. Because that’s a hallmark of a good writer, yes? I didn’t want to use common, pedestrian words, the words just anyone would use. I was a skilled anecdotist, after all, not some mere amanuensis.

And let’s be honest—I wasn’t alone. This is a phase a lot of us go through as we’re starting out. We latch onto (or more often, look up) obscure and flowery words for our literary masterpiece, as if we’re going to get a quarter every time the reader has to look something up. And if the reader doesn’t enjoy going to the Miriam-Webster site every three paragraphs? Well that sounds like their problem, doesn’t it? Not my fault you’ve got such a limited vocabulary.

Truth is, any word I choose just to get attention—to prove I don’t need to use a common word—is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing from context is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but nobody’s picking up my book hoping for a vocabulary lesson. When a reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and just decides to toss my manuscript in the big pile on the left… there’s only one person to blame.

(It’s not them, in case you had any lingering thoughts on the matter)

Structure— Just like obscure vocabulary, convoluted structure’s another common sign of writer ego. One of the most common forms of this is insisting on grammatical perfection. This usually mean a lot of rigid, formal text and very stiff dialogue. It’s when I get so insistent on proving I know the correct way to structure a sentence my words end up sounding forced and artificial. Also worth noting the flipside of this which is insisting I don’t need to follow any grammar or spelling conventions. Punctuation? Capitalization? Those are tired tropes for losers.

The second most common sign is needless complication. I can admit I used to write—or try to write—sprawling, impenetrable prose. Sentences that went on and on. Descriptions that never ended. It took someone two pages to step through a doorway because we had to know what kind of socks and underwear they were wearing and what flavor toothpaste they preferred. If they were mentioned in the text, I had to remind you of these facts and how they were posed at the exact moment they spoke. Believe me, if something could be explained or described in less than ten words, I’d find a way to do it in at least fifty.

And while I never got quite that bad, there are also some writers who choose arcane story structures or points of view or tenses. Just because they can. Things will go from non-linear first person musings to omniscient third person flashbacks to second person song lyrics and then to a telepathic gestalt mind that only speaks in one of those single, three page sentences I was just talking about. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, in a general sense, but so often they’re not there to serve the story. It’s just an attempt to look cool and do cool things. If I want to do something like this, I should be able to explain why I’m doing it. And the explanation needs to better than “y’know… reasons,” or I’m just going to leave my readers confused and frustrated as they get knocked out of my story again and again.

Said—Sad admission, kind of going with the vocabulary point up above. For many, many years I didn’t use said. Said was, in my opinion, the lowest common denominator of dialogue descriptors. It’s the kind of word used by writers who weren’t going places, writers not destined for greatness, like I clearly was. Not only that, I’d try to never us the same descriptor on a page twice. So in my early work my characters would respond, retort, exclaim, demand, muse, mutter, sneer, snap, shout, snarl, grumble, growl, whimper, whisper, hiss, yelp, yell, exclaim, or ejaculate. 

Oh, grow up. It was a common dialogue descriptor for years. Really.

Of course, once I finally got to sit down and talk with a professional editor and show him a few pages, this was the very first thing he commented on. Truth is, nobody notices said on the page. It’s an invisible word. Yeah, of course there’s going to be times when my characters are hissing or shouting or gasping. But I should save those words for then so their impact hasn’t been used up and weakened. The vast majority of the  time… stick to said.

Names—If used in moderation, names are also invisible. If you think about it, they’re just a shorthand note for the mental image of my character or MacGuffin or whatever. And they help us keep things straight if I’ve got a bunch of people all talking together.

It’s worth mentioning many fledgling sci-fi or fantasy writers feel the need to rename a lot of things. Or everything. Characters have all-new, correct-for-this-world names and so do their pets. And their gods. And their elements. And their system of weights and measures, their money, their units of time…  It’s great worldbuilding, but I’d guess 83% of the time this is just wasted words.  My elaborate sci-fi empire won’t collapse if I call mind-to-mind communication telepathy, but it might if I keep calling it intralobeech, which, as we all know, is short for “intralobe speech.”

Which, as we all know, is telepathy.

Always remember that moderation is key. Even a simple name like Bob can stack up and get distracting really quick. Which is why the ancient ones created…

Pronouns–when those proper names start to stack up, we switch to pronouns.  Just like names are shorthand for story elements, pronouns are shorthand for those names. When nouns start to clutter up my writing, they’re there to leap in and shoulder the weight.  It’s how Hector becomes he, that mysterious island becomes there, and a Hudson Hornet becomes it.

The catch here is I need to make sure my pronouns are clear. No questions exceptionally clear, ‘cause the moment someone gets confused about which her I’m referring to, they’re going to stop reading my story and start studying the page. We’ve all had to do that, right? Feel our way though a paragraph so we’re clear who she is. Or work backwards through the dialogue, trying to figure out who’s speaking which lines. I’m always super-careful with pronouns, because I don’t want that happening to anyone in my books.

Again—pronouns good. Pronoun confusion—bad. And it’s a writing rule you can apply to real life.

So there they are.  Four simple ways to keep our collective heads down so readers don’t see us standing there. Staring at them. Waiting to be noticed.

Y’see, Timmy, every time I make my reader hesitate or pause just for a second, I’m breaking the flow of the story. I’m encouraging them to skim at best, put the book down at worst. My reader should forget they’re paging through the latest Peter Clines novel, hopefully forget they’re reading altogether. And the easiest way to make that happen is for them not to see the writing.

It’s tempting to wave our arms and shout and try to get the reader to admit they can see us, but all this does is ruin things for everyone. It’s like Sherlock Holmes showing how he came to his amazing deductions or a magician explaining their greatest illusion. That moment is when the whole thing falls apart.

As writers, we need to go unnoticed. We want our characters to be seen and our dialogue to be heard, yeah. We want our action and passion and suspense to leave people breathless, absolutely.

But we’re just distractions.

Next time… hmmmmm. Not sure. I’m open to requests or suggestions if anyone has any. If not, I might tell you about a conversation I recently had with someone about getting published.

Until then… don’t let me see you writing.