Category: basics

             A quick pointer…

            Every now and then I throw open the floor here to suggestions.  What would people want to hear me ramble on about next?  What topics or elements are giving them trouble in some way, or maybe they just want a few pointers on something?  Pretty much every time I do this, someone will ask about agents or networking or publishing, and I will politely explain I don’t cover that stuff here.

            Why?

            When asked for screenwriting tips, Oscar-winner Billy Wilder would often remind would-be writers of a simple rule of thumb.  To paraphrase, a problem with your third act is usually a problem with your first act. 

            In other words, if the end isn’t working, it’s probably because of the way I did things in the beginning.  Perhaps I didn’t establish characters well or set up things for that twist.  Maybe the gruesome, depressing ending just doesn’t work after two acts of comedy and slapstick.

            My career as a writer has three acts, too.  A beginning, middle, and an end.  I learn the basics and practice a lot.  I write a good book.  Someone gets interested in the book and offers me money for it (either in a contractual or individual sense).

            So if I’m having trouble with that last part, the third act of my writing career, maybe the problem is in my first act. 

            Maybe it’s not that publishers and agents are jerks who won’t recognize my genius or try anything new.  Perhaps the problem rests in that first part of the equation.   Do I even know my basics?  Did I bother to practice and polish my skills?  Or did I declare the first thing I scribbled out perfect and leave it at that?

            It’s just possible, believe it or not, that I can’t get anyone interested because I didn’t write a good book.

            Next time, I’d like to share some thoughts about a new topic I’ve been researching.

            Until then, go write.

            As I often do at the start of the year, I wanted to blab on for a minute or three about what I try to accomplish with this little collection of rants and ravings.  And I think one of the best ways to accomplish that is to start off by mentioning a few things I won’t be doing here.

            First and foremost, this page isn’t about “when you’re done.”  I’m always coming across blogs and message boards where people want to know what to do with their finished manuscript.  How do I get an agent?  How do I promote myself?  How do I get an “in” with a publisher?  Should I self-publish?  How do I get blurbs?

            None of that here.

            Speaking of which, I also don’t use this page for self-promotion.  I may mention stuff that’s new or noteworthy, but that’s about it.  No sales or contests or interviews (not with me, anyway).  There’s some Amazon links on the side, yeah, but those are almost more for credentials purposes than sales.

            (Although if you want to buy them, I’ll never object to that…)

            Not to sound harsh, but this page also isn’t for inspirational ideas, mindless encouragement, or a joyous celebration of art.  I’m not really big on the special snowflake, “we can all succeed” mindset.  To be honest, I think it’s one of the most damaging things out there on the internet.  I’m also not a fan of those folks who see writing as some wild, bohemian expression of art where there are no wrong answers or directions.  They’re not far behind the special snowflake people.  If that’s the kind of “advice” you’re looking for… wow, this is so not the place you want to be.

            So, with all that out of the way… what is this place supposed to be about?

            Well, it struck me many years back that there aren’t many places online to find actual help with writing.  Not useful help, anyway.  Yeah, all that other stuff is important, but the writing is the big thing.  Nothing else matters if my writing is sub-par.  I can do tons of research on surfboards, wetsuits, skegs, surf wax, wave formation, and all that.  Thing is, if I don’t take the first step of leaving Nebraska, that’s all pointless information.  If I don’t have a decent book or script, it doesn’t matter how much work I put into self-promotion.

            I look around and I see a lot of folks making mistakes.  Sometimes it’s from inexperience.  Sometimes it’s from following bad advice.  And a few times… okay, sometimes I have no clue where people are getting their information from.  None whatsoever.

            I also see some would-be gurus offering hard-fast “rules” for writing.  Your characters must do this.  This element of your plot must unfold by this page.  And it gnaws at me because they’re just plain wrong.  There are a lot of rules in writing, but it’s not all rules.  If it was,  writing would just be mechanical fill-in-the blanks (granted, it seems like it is for some people).  One of the biggest things to realize is which rules can and can’t be ignored.  It’s finding the methods and styles that work for you within the frameworks that work for everyone else.

            That’s what this is all about.  Taking that idea in your head and fleshing it out and turning it into a few dozen or a few hundred coherent pages.  Hopefully pages other people will want to read all on their own without you begging or pleading or tricking them into it.

            Heck, maybe they’ll even pay you for those pages.

           So sometimes I point out the places where you really have to do this, but also the places where it’s entirely up to you.  Every now and then I’ll talk about a  recurring mistake I see a lot.  And most of the time I’ll just toss out a few ideas on how to work with (or work around) different issues that can come up when writing a short story or novel or screenplay.  Issues like spelling or structure or dialogue or characters or action or point of view or… well, there are a lot of them.

            Anyway, what makes me qualified to say these things and toss out these tips?

            Well, I’ve been trying to do this for over thirty years now.  I was stabbing at the keys on my mom’s old Smith-Corona before most of you ever considered writing as anything more than homework.  I tried to write my first book in third grade, then another one in seventh grade, plus two while I was in high school.  I spent years poring over different writing magazines and journals, pulling out every tip and hint and suggestion I could, and then trying all of them out (even the contradictory ones).  I took writing classes in high school and college.  I joined writing groups.  I made two attempts at the college novel, then the after-college novel, and then the “moved to California” novel.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say I probably submitted more manuscripts with paper and postage than at least half of you have done through the miracle space-age technology of email.

            And it all led somewhere.  I received personal rejection letters from editors at magazines and comic books encouraging me to try again.  One of my college writing professors, the multi-award winning novelist John Edgar Wideman, told me with absolute certainty that I was going to make it as a writer.  The first script I wrote got me a meeting with Ron Moore (of Deep Space Nine and later Battlestar Galactica).  Agents asked to look at my manuscripts.

            More to the point, people eventually started to pay me for my writing.  It’s not the only yardstick for success, granted, but I think we can all agree it’s the one that’s universally accepted and pretty much always has been.  My ability to write got me a job as an entertainment journalist.  I sold short stories to journals and anthologies.  I’ve sold half a dozen books to Permuted Press, and later to Crown Publishing, a division of Random House—and some of those books have sold very, very well and received a lot of praise (okay, so there’s a little self-promotion).  Amazon Studios hired me to develop a screenplay idea for them and write up a treatment.  For the past six years, I’ve supported myself by stringing words together in a way that pleased people enough that they paid me to keep doing it.

            So… that’s what I’m bringing to the table.

            If you’re interested, stick around.  Next time I want to talk a bit about the BFG-9000 plasma rifle in the forty-watt range and other firearms.

            Until then… go write.

            Let me make it easier.  Let me explain why I keep posting here.

            No, there isn’t time to explain.  I will sum up.

            (bonus points if you get that one)

            Two little stories.  Tale the first.

            I’ve wanted to tell stories as far back as I could remember.  I was setting up my Star Wars figures and Micronauts in little tableaus when I was in grade school.  By middle school I’d found my mom’s old electric Smith-Corona (complete with vinyl dust cover) in the back of the closet and I was sending clumsy “submissions” to Jim Shooter at Marvel Comics.  And by high school, well, by then my rejection collection was getting pretty thick.

            It’s gotten thicker since then, believe me.

            Tale the second.

            Not too many months back I stumbled across a link to a published author’s new blog.  He was about at the same level as me—years of trying to get in and finally had a few sales under his belt.  Two of them to a very big, respectable publisher.  Said author, much like myself, wanted to offer some tips for new writers who were just starting out.  However, unlike me, this fellow didn’t want to talk about how to improve your writing. He was going to offer tips on networking, promotion, blog tours, and so on.

            Of course, looking over his first four posts, there was one point he kept hammering home.  The best way to sell your writing is to have good writing.  The best way to spread word of mouth about your writing is to be an excellent writer.  This could not be stressed enough.  All the clever gimmicks and sales tricks and blog tours weren’t going to help in the slightest if you didn’t have something people wanted to read.

            But he wasn’t going to talk about that on his blog.  He was going to talk about clever gimmicks and sales tricks and blog tours.

            That’s kind of what got me started on this whole thing years ago.  At the time, I was seeing tons of articles and websites about the tricks and gimmicks, but very few about the actual craft of writing.  And, yes, I do feel pretentious talking about “craft” when I write books about superheroes fighting zombies.

            Anyway, I’d say a good sixty or seventy percent of the material I saw was tips on what to do after you’d written something.  How to get reps, how to get your books in stores, that sort of thing.  Which always seemed a little cart-before-the-horse, as people used to say in the pre-Segway world.  Perhaps even worse, a large percentage of the remaining material—the stuff that actually talked about writing– spoke about it in terms of absolutes and set down hard rules that didn’t seem to come from any sort of actual experience.  It was just people parroting some rule about storytelling they’d heard somewhere as if it were a quantifiable, scientifically-proven fact.  In some cases, as far as I could tell, these people had just made up their rules out of the blue. 

            And a few of these folks were asking for money. 

            At the time I was sitting on this half-assed Blogspot site.  I’d pulled a loosely Egyptian-themed name from the back of my head (Thoth was the god of writing), a title that I put even less thought into (seriously, check out how many “Writer on Writing” blogs and columns there are out there), and used the space to post a few spec columns I’d created for a magazine I was working for.  They’d been rejected (twice) so I’d thrown them up here as… honestly, I don’t know.  Just so it felt like I’d done something with them.  I thought they were fairly well written and made some good points—I didn’t want them to languish on my computer.  Maybe in the tiny, limited space that was the internet somebody would stumble across them and find them useful.

            Bonus fact.  It was maybe a year after I started posting here more-or-less full time that somebody pointed out Thoth-Amon was also the evil sorcerer in the Conan books and comics.  Completely slipped my mind when I picked this site.

            Anyway, as I worked my way further and further into the life of a full-time writer, I got exposed to more and more people’s work.  I read scripts for a couple different contests and got a bunch of exposure to it (reading 400+ pages a day will do that to you).  And one thing that amazed me was I kept seeing the same basic mistakes.  Often to headache-inducing levels.

            A large number of aspiring writers fall into one of two camps.  Some of them think writing and storytelling are mechanical, quantifiable processes that can be broken down to A1-B2-C3.  These are the folks who will quote the MLA Handbook to explain why their novel deserves to be published and use Syd Field as proof their screenplay is perfect.  The other group think rules are for old-school losers who don’t get that spelling, formatting, and structure just hamper the creative process and will get overlooked when people see the inherent art in the writing.

            Both groups are usually wrong, for the record.

            Note that I said “usually.”  Most folks think it’s all-or-nothing.  You have to be on one extreme or another.  The truth is that it’s more of a middle ground.

            Y’see, Timmy, there are things that are absolutely “right and wrong” in writing. I have to know how to spell (me—not my spellchecker).  I have to understand the basics of grammar.  If I’m writing a script, I’ve got to know the current accepted format.  A writer can’t ignore any of these requirements, because these are things you can get wrong and you will be judged on them.

            On the other hand, there is no “right” way to start your writing day or to develop a character, only the way that’s right for me and my story.  Or you and your story.  Or her and her story.  If you ask twenty different writers about their method, you’re going to get twenty different answers.  And allof these answers are valid, because each of these methods work for that writer.  But that doesn’t mean I can ignore every convention or rule I don’t like.

            And that’s what I’m doing here.  Prattling on about some of the hard rules and general suggestions I discovered during thirty-odd years of learning how to be a writer, along with some of my own I’ve developed after trying to write a hundred or so short stories, scripts, and novels.  It’s stuff I think might be helpful if you’re actually serious about writing for a living.
            And I’m going under the general assumption that if you’ve slogged through all this, you’ve got at least a basic grasp of this writing thing and are hoping to go further with it.  Perhaps even make a few dollars with it.  And if any of you have a specific question or topic you’d like me to prattle on about, let me know.

            Next time, speaking of right and wrong, we return to one of my favorite topics—spilling!

            Until then, go write.

So I was talking with a friend of mine on Facebook a while back. For the record, I don’t recommend it. Facebook really has to stop creating new profiles every three months and try fixing a few actual problems, like their stupid chat system.

But I digress…

Anyway, he wanted to know how I manage to sit down every day and pound out a few thousand words. How do I exercise the self control to plant myself in front of my desk and write? Which is a fair question.

Which I will answer with a story…

About ten years ago I was working on an alien invasion film for the Sci-Fi Channel (back when they had executives who knew how to spell) and messed up my knee. I was running up a staircase with a case of props for the alien autopsy scene and twisted too fast on a stairwell landing. My knee actually made a bubble-wrap noise. End result– two and a half months of walking with a cane and popping pills (Gregory House eat your heart out) before I got in to have my meniscus rebuilt. On my 30th birthday. Seriously. And then three months of rehab after that.

I finally get back to full mobility and guess what happens less than five months later? The other knee gets damaged on a straight-to-DVD movie. This time it was three months of waiting for workman’s comp to schedule surgery. At least the cane was broken in by this point.

So, after almost a year and a half of sitting around doing nothing I had put on some weight. And when I say “some” I mean it in the same sense people say “the Bush administration could’ve handled things better.” To be blunt, I’d packed on almost fifty extra pounds.

Fortunately, an actor friend of mine knew I was trying to lose weight and shared a few tips. He also had a great personal trainer and shared his name and number with me. Jerzy–a former Olympic weightlifter– showed me a few exercises, but for most of those first two hours we just talked. And one thing became very clear.

There would be no hand-holding, no prodding. I would get the instruction book, the rules, and then I’d be left on my own for a month. This was all my responsibility. If I was going to lose this weight, the only person that was going to make it happen was me. Jerzy gave me his home phone number, his cell, and his email. “But,” he said with a shrug, “if you really need me to tell you ‘don’t eat the chocolate cake,’ you can’t be that serious about losing the weight.”

See where I’m going with this?

Y’see, Timmy, there is no trick to sitting down and writing. You just do it. If you’re serious about this, you shouldn’t need to find some clever way to get yourself in the chair every day. You should want to be there. The real problem should be getting you out of the chair.

I lost sixty pounds in fourteen months with Jerzy. And in about two weeks I’ll be starting my fourth novel. The publisher liked the idea so much he wrote up a contract and paid an advance just off my pitch.

If that’s what you want, do I really need to tell you to sit in the chair and write?

Next time, let’s talk about gods, super-aliens, and other omnipotent forms of existence.

Until then… go write.