May 9, 2024 / 3 Comments

Art Dies Tonight

If you’ve been reading the ranty writing blog for a while, you may have picked up that I’m not a big fan of focusing on ART. And I’m even less of a fan of people who start to talk about ART in very lofty terms. Especially when they get dismissive of people who aren’t trying to make ART.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about art. Writing is an art, yeah, and I’m a big believer in that. I’m referring to those folks who go on and on about the ART of writing. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those people who really believe in the ART over all things.

Now, full disclosure, part of this may be a reaction to a writing TA who berated me in front of the class my junior year of college because I wanted to write, well… fun stories. Stories that entertained people. Said TA basically shredded the story I was working on (a sci-fi horror thing about a government teleportation experiment that went wrong) and told me in no uncertain terms, that if I wasn’t trying to CHANGE PEOPLE’S LIVES with my writing, then I was just WASTING everyone’s time!

Anyway…

As it happens, a year before that fateful class, I’d been studying early American literature and my class discussed Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown, first published in 1798. It’s considered an early American classic, the first noteworthy American novel, and its author died penniless and drunk in a snowbank. Story is, his own mother wouldn’t even buy his books. Seriously. He was pretty much unknown during his lifetime outside of a small circle (which shrank rapidly after his death) and it wasn’t until the 1920’s that he became semi-known and retroactively entered into the canon of literature.

Well, I decided to be bold and asked my professor about this. Why was the book being considered literature now? I mean, it’d failed back then, barely anyone knew about it today, so how does it qualify? If it was actually great, we wouldn’t need to be told that it was great, we’d already know, right? Why should we consider it relevant now when the author’s own mother didn’t even consider it relevant then?

Rather then telling me to shut up or tossing me out of his class, said professor congratulated me for bringing up a good point. What’s considered “great literature” changes all the time. Every time someone publishes a new paper on Brown or Shelly or Lovecraft or Dickinson… the canon changes. A lot of what people refer to as “the classics” now were looked at very differently then. A bunch of them were critical and/or financial failures. A number of them were… well, nowadays some folks would probably call them mass-market tentpole crap. Things written to appeal to the proles. They might’ve made money, yeah, but they weren’t literature.

They definitely weren’t ART.

Now, weirdly enough, at pretty much the same time I questioned my professor about Brown’s book, Robin Williams gave an AP interview and talked a little bit about a theater show he’d done with Steve Martin. “I dread the word ‘art,’” Williams said. “That’s what we used to do every night before we’d go on with Waiting for Godot. We’d go, ‘No art! Art dies tonight!’ We’d try to give it a life, instead of making Godot so serious.”

Williams understood something a lot of folks can’t wrap their heads around. We can’t make art. No matter how much I try or how long I work or how many guidelines I follow, art isn’t up to me. It’s up to everyone else. And how they define art changes all the time. With every new paper or critique or review, what was art suddenly becomes shallow and tired. And the fun, entertaining stuff that stands the test of time? Well, now that’s art. Or maybe not. Seriously, there’s no way to tell.

Y’see, Timmy, art in and of itself doesn’t suck. But I really, truly believe that trying to make art sucks. And usually (not always, but very, very often in my experience), the results of trying to make art suck. I think one of the big reasons why is that if I’m trying to make ART it means I’m trying to make my work fit a bunch of preconceived notions about what art should be. Maybe not even my own notions. Could be someone else’s.

So I end up less concerned with, y’know, creating something and more concerned with following rules and delivering messages. And it feels forced and pretentious. It’s so busy trying to be ART that it doesn’t feel alive.

In the early drafts of GJD, I tried to make art. I tried to convey my message. And I made sure that message got in there. Beat it in there. Hammered it into every little gap so people could see how clever I was. So they could see my beautiful ART.

And—looking back on it, being honest—the early drafts kinda sucked. Weird to think that all the beating didn’t make something great. One character specifically—arguably my protagonist in this ensemble piece—really suffered for it. He was just… well, a jerk. He was obnoxious. Irrationally, unbelievably stubborn. Completely unlikable. To the point that my agent cautiously suggested I might want to do a substantial rewrite.

Which I did. And the book was much, much better for it.

Look, here’s the ugly, simple truth. If I don’t have a good story, ART is irrelevant. Really. Because nobody’s going to know about my ART if nobody reads my story. Nobody walks into a bookstore and says “hey, do you have anything with really powerful symbolism?” If my characters are boring or annoying, it doesn’t matter that I’ve got the most magnificent sentence structure and vocabulary ever committed to paper. Because boring stories and boring characters are… well, they’re boring. And when readers get bored they stop reading. That sounds painfully obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore that in the name of ART.

Last time I ranted about this I mentioned a quote (really a quoted quote) from Star Trek: First Contact. “Don’t try to be a great man—just be a man. Let history make its own judgments.” The same goes for my story. It just has to be a good story. One people want to read. Someone else will decide if it’s art or not.

I just need to focus on writing the best story I can.

Next time, I’d like to talk about reading something for the second time.

Until then, go write.

December 21, 2023

Important Holiday Choices

Well, it’s that time of year again. Christmas movie time. Maybe you’ve got a bunch on DVD or BluRay. Perhaps you’ve gone all digital. Heck, I think most streaming services have playlists ready and waiting for you.

I thought I’d take shameless advantage of the holidays to revisit an idea that I haven’t talked about in a while. It’s writing in-general relevant, but as we’ll see it crops up a lot in holiday movies. Especially…

Well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Let’s start with basics.

A lot of story (in the bigger plot-vs-story sense) boils down to “what my character decides to do.” Are they going to play it safe, try to fade into the background, stay home and do those TPS reports? Or are they going take a stand, take a chance, and go on that adventure?

Usually these choices boil down to a binary. Do X or do Y. Suck it up or quit my job? Help the little girl or mind my own business? Tell the truth or try to keep it hidden for a little longer? There’s a few trillion examples of this. I tend to think of these as triangles. My character is one point (A), their two options (we’ll say B and C) are the other points. You’ve probably heard of romantic triangles, yes? That’s a pretty standard dramatic device that pops up in a lot of stories.

Now, here’s the catch. Triangles—of any sort—only really work when B and C are both viable options. If my choices are stay late at my soul-crushing job where I’m unappreciated or go see my kid’s school play… well, that’s not much of a choice, is it? and if my protagonist chooses to stay at work, well… what does that say about them?

Granted, there might be a very good reason to stay at work that counterbalances this. Maybe there’s a big bonus they really need for finishing on time? Could a promotion be in the balance? Heck, maybe they’re helping someone else out. No point both of us missing the play—you go, I’ll get all this cleaned up. All these are good, viable things. But they need to be there for that balance to work. Otherwise, my character’s just making bad choices.

This imbalance shows up a lot in romantic triangles. One person is sweet and funny and supportive and attractive and the other side is… well, horrible. Selfish. Self-absorbed. They scowl so much they have permanent wrinkles in their forehead—and they’re only 23! I mean, if my choice is to be with Sam or be with Roy, and Roy is a misogynistic Nazi… well, that’s not much of a choice, is it?

When we don’t have balanced options, there isn’t a lot of dramatic weight to the actual choice. It’s like Eddie Izzard’s old “cake or death” routine. It’s not that surprising that everybody picks cake. And if I base my whole story around “gosh, will Jamie pick cake or death? Which one’s she going to choose?!?”… I mean, it won’t really shock anyone when Jamie picks up the dessert fork, right? It’s not exactly a surprise outcome.

So when my characters needs to make choices, there has to be some value to each choice. It needs to be a choice that takes effort to make. If there isn’t, I run the risk of them looking… well, a little foolish at best.

Also, just to save someone the time, yes, sometimes my two options are both bad choices. But that’s still a choice with dramatic weight. Let your best friend die or let a hundred strangers die? Starve to death or cut off your own arm?

Now, on that note, I told you all this so I can talk about Christmas movies…

Christmas movies are a solid, dependable genre. And a subgenre of several other standard movies, too. People try to sound intellectual and artsy by talking about superhero fatigue, but in all seriousness—Christmas movies are the real machine. Look at Hallmark, Disney, and Netflix and add up how many new Christmas films and specials they’ve made between them this year. You’ll hit double digits, easy. Might even get close to triple digits. And that’s just three streamers! I mean, at this point Shudder’s got a very solid Christmas sub-genre going.

Now, one recurring theme we see a lot is the Christmas romance. Yeah, don’t lie. You’ve seen a lot of them. Probably this year. They can be oddly comforting, even though some of them are also really awkward and fumbly.

I’d like to talk about the awkward ones.

A pretty standard Christmas romance goes something like this. A young woman (it’s almost always a woman) falls for a guy who’s a few weeks away from getting engaged, married, etc. The two of them have chemistry, while his current partner rages away at her big corporate job, becomes a larval Bridezilla, or maybe is just a generally awful person. Eventually the guy comes to see the error of his ways and our two impossibly good-looking people end up together just in time to kiss on Christmas Eve.

(you know which movie I’m talking about, right?)

Now right off the bat, this is one of those unbalanced triangles I was talking about above. One good choice, one awful choice. Wow, what a shock how things went, right?

But there’s another problem here that’s a little tougher to notice at first glance. A really basic flaw in how a lot of these holiday movies set up their triangle. It’s why they always come across as a bit weird and the protagonists always seem a bit… well, wrong. And I think it’s one of those things that’s really easy for me to avoid once I see it all laid out

Let’s use that basic structure up above for our example. Our test story, so to speak. Alexis (A) has a meet-cute with Ben (B), who is in a relationship with Chloe (C). Amy and Ben have chemistry, Chloe is bordering on (if not openly) awful and clearly wrong for Ben. And it’s Christmas because… y’know, that’s when this always seems to happen.

Now, normally in one of these romantic triangle situations, our protagonist would be Ben. After all, he’s the one who needs to make a choice here, right? He needs to be active and decide if he wants to be with Alexis or Chloe.

But

See here’s where it gets weird. Our protagonist is Alexis, but she’s technically the B in our “choose B or C” triangle scenario. So Ben’s the one choosing (the A), and she’s the one getting… chosen? See, that’s confusing just typing it out.

Plus, the only way I can make Alexis active in this situation is to have her do some, well, questionable things. If she tries to improve her relationship with Ben—all those normal romance beats like long talks and quiet dinners and shared passions—well, that kinda means she’s undercutting Ben’s relationship with Chloe. Which is a little tough, morally, no matter what we think of Chloe. And geeeeez, if things get physical to any level, well, now they both look bad. Alexis is making moves on somebody in a relationship. And Ben’s hooking up with someone else? I mean, how awful does Chloe have to be for us to be cool with him cheating on her? And if she’s not that bad, then… well, yeah, he’s a jerk. So why does Alexis want to be with him?

Yeah, okay, sometimes odd things happen between people in really specific situations. Everybody reacts differently to stress and fear and all that. Firm embraces may happen. Maybe even a kiss or desperate proclamation. But that’s a reeeeeeeeally fine line. Scary fine. It’s so easy for that situation to go from somewhat one-time excusable to what-the-hell inappropriate.

Y’see, Timmy, as I mentioned above, when Alexis is this point in the triangle, she isn’t the one with a choice to make. Not a real one, anyway. So she has two options. She can do nothing (which ends the story pretty quick) or she can try to disrupt Ben and Chloe’s relationship. Those are her only paths, as far as our plot goes, and neither of them is a great one from a storytelling point of view.

I think when writers make this mistake, they’re confusing the outcome with the choices that lead to it. We’ve all heard “the ends justify the means,” but this tends to ignore that the means I use also determines what kind of end I get. And more importantly, how we perceive those end results. There’s a bunch of ways Alexis and Ben can end up together, but a lot of those paths can make one (or both) of them into characters we don’t really like or care about. In some cases, we may even be actively rooting against them. Cause they’ll be horrible people.

Don’t worry about outcomes. Outcomes are the conclusion of a story. Think about the path to that outcome. The choices my character has to make in order to get there.

Because those choices are my story. They’re my plot. And if there aren’t any real choices, or they’re all being made by supporting characters, or they’re all just questionable, really bad choices… well…

I shouldn’t be shocked if people think it’s a bad story.

Speaking of stories and holidays, here’s a shameless reminder that ebooks and audiobooks make fantastic last-minute gifts. Have I mentioned those two anthologies that just came out? I’ve got a story in Joe Ledger: Unbreakable and one in The Reinvented Detective. And both of them have loose tie-ins to other work (hint hint hint).

Next time, I’ll probably do one of those annual round up/ list of accomplishment things all the cool kids are doing.

Until then, go write.

And have a happy and peaceful holiday season.

August 3, 2023 / 1 Comment

Prep Work

I’m assuming most of you are familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein from his philosophical work involving mathematics, logic, and language. He’s considered the most noteworthy philosopher of the twentieth century. What he’s less known for is a fairly dry series of what we’d now probably call YA sci-fi stories he wrote at Cambridge, showing his idea of a utopia, what sort of problems could arise in such a utopia, and how the peoples of such a world would respond to said problems.

The reason you probably haven’t heard of that less known bit is because I just made it up. Or did I? You’ve got no idea, do you? But you’re going to keep reading to find out…

Another possibly made-up story I’ve heard about Wittgenstein is that one day he was walking in the city with someone, discussing history and knowledge in general, when his companion made the observation that people in ancient times must’ve been… well, really stupid. How could they possibly have thought the sun went around the Earth? I mean, it’s so obvious how the two interact once you stop to think about it. Were people just… a lot smarter back now?

And as the story goes, Wittgenstein nodded agreeably through most of the little tirade, and then, when he had a chance to respond, he wondered, just out of curiosity… what would it look like if the sun was orbiting the Earth?

While you’re dwelling on that, let me talk about the pandemic a bit.

Like a lot of folks, I ended up using the lockdown to work on my cooking skills. Watched a lot of YouTube videos. Ended up trying a lot of Korean recipes and even some vegan/vegetarian ones. I can make pretty good fried rice now. And some fantastic spicy broccoli noodles. Also, those plant-based meats like Beyond and Impossible cook up great in dishes that call for ground beef.

One of the biggest parts of this learning curve was learning the difference between preparing to cook and the actual act of cooking. Like a lot of you, I’m guessing, I tended to do a lot of stuff on the fly. And it usually led to me getting more and more frantic as I was looking for this ingredient or that implement and crap how long has that been in the water now? Crap crap crap turn the pan down and where the hell is the colander?!?

Anyway, point is, my cooking skills improved a lot once I started doing a little more prep work. Not to the level where I had ten silver bowls each one with an ingredient in it, but also… not far from that. I get all my veggies cut, get the sauces mixed, get individual spices or oils out. It takes a little longer, but my cooking’s consistently so much better.

The other cool thing about the prep work is that it’s kind of free-form. It doesn’t really matter what order I do most of it in as long as most of it’s done before I start cooking. Maybe I’ll pull out everything I need to make the spicy sauce. If my partner’s around, maybe I’ll cut mushrooms and peppers while we talk or watch something silly. Sometimes I make the sauce while I’m waiting for the water to boil for noodles. It doesn’t really matter as long as I get enough of it done that it’s not slowing me down once the timers get set.

Anyway, maybe some of you have figured out what I’m getting at here. And some of you are just getting hungry. Its okay, go grab something, I’ll wait.

One question that tends to come up a lot in writing discussions is how do you start? Do you need characters first? Should I begin with the plot? How much do I need outlined? Do I have to know my theme right out of the gate?

Here’s the ugly truth big writing degree doesn’t want you to know (“gurus hate him…”). It doesn’t matter. Seriously, doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Whatever little snippet of dialogue or character quirk or cool worldbuilding idea that sparks a story in your head—that was the correct thing to begin with. If the first thing you want to do is figure out a coherent theme or write out a beat-for-beat plot… fantastic. Character sketches? Big swaths of dialogue? That one big twist scene at the end that’s going to freak everyone out? Do it! It’s all good.

All of this stuff is the prep bowls. They’re the scattered ingredients we’re going to pull together to make our story. But it doesn’t matter what order we set them up in—it just matters that they’re there on hand when we turn on the heat and start working. I don’t want to be sixty pages in and find myself thinking “okay, and maybe our hero has a love interest who’s… a woman… who works at… her job… and has a… name.”

And the reason it doesn’t matter how I start is that nobody’s going to see this part of it. It’s like the first draft I don’t show to anyone, except this is pre-first draft. Nobody sees any of this. At best, it’s a two-minute story I get to tell in an interview about “where did you get the idea for this?”

Y’see, Timmy, what 99.9% of all people are going to see is the finished book. And even if you set up your prep bowls in the complete opposite order I did, nobody’s ever going to know. Because both of us are going to have completed, polished books with all those elements seamlessly integrated. Two very different processes end in the same result.

So stop worrying about starting with the right thing and just start with your thing. The thing that caught your attention. The thing that sparked your imagination.

Next time, well, I guess we should talk about that thing marking the spot. Or what used to be the spot.

Until then… go write.

July 6, 2023 / 5 Comments

My Left Foot

Sorry I missed last week. Was up against a deadline (which I ended up sort of hockey-stopping past anyway). Plus, I feel like… I mean, is it just me, or in a way does it feel like we’re all relearning the internet right now? One of the biggest social media site in the world’s collapsing and people are trying to figure out what to do now. Run to a new social media site? Focus on the personal site? Abandon the internet and start training carrier pigeons on the roof of your apartment building?

That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

But it’s given me time to think about a few things…

I want to bounce an idea off you. Another way to think about plot and story. I’ve talked about these things once or thrice before. To go back to my oft-referenced Shane Black-ism, plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters.

Today, I’d like to frame this in a different way, though. This idea crossed my mind, and the more I think about it, the more right it sounds and feels. To me, anyway.

Allow me to explain. And we’ll do it the best way possible. With a little story.

Let’s say I decide to lose thirty pounds. As of tomorrow, I exercise more, eat better, maybe cut back on the booze a bit. I do this for five or six months and wow—thirty pounds, gone.

So what’s happened here, from a storytelling point of view?

Well, simply put, I set out to do something and… I did it. It’s technically a plot, but not much of a plot. Not much story either. With no real conflicts or hangups, there isn’t a lot of room for self-discovery. So no real character arc.

Plot is conflict. It’s forcing my characters out of their comfort zones, into these fish-out-of-water sort of situations. And these are the situations where story happens.

So what’s story?

Well, if story’s what goes on inside my character, that would mean a character arc is a change in my character. An alteration of their views. Cowards become brave. The miserly become generous. The self-centered become sympathetic to others. Or vice versa—nobody said character arcs have to be positive. Lots of heroes have become villains, lots of good folks have been pushed to do horrible things.

Put another way, story is why I decided to lose 30 pounds. Did I do it for health reasons? For image reasons?

It’s very easy to have plot without story. Hollywood’s shown us that again and again. Hell, life shows us that all the time. I bet all of us here personally know one or two people who simply will not change their views—they won’t grow or advance in any way—no matter what they see, what they experience, what they do.

I’ve also talked once or thrice about “character-based” books and films, the ones that scoff at the idea of plot in favor of beautiful tales where… well, nothing happens. People sit around and have long talks and then… don’t change. Or they go through some very artificial, forced “growth.”

Thing is, nobody decides to change their views on their own. None of us ever wake up one morning and think “hey, maybe I should completely reverse my views on student loan forgiveness.” Nobody randomly decides to become a serial killer in the shower. We’re influenced by things outside of us. Around us. The people and events we’re exposed to, the things we endure, are what make us see the world in a different light. The external events motivate the internal changes.

Going back to my initial example. So I lost 30 pounds. Why? And why now? Obviously I’d been okay with my physical condition until now, so what made me suddenly decide to drastically cut my weight? Maybe someone died and made me realize I’ve got a lot of unhealthy habits that need to change? Perhaps I finally get to meet that online crush and worried what are they going to think of the real me? Maybe someone died and I realized I needed to become a rooftop-dwelling vigilante who haunts the night. What was it that got me thinking about losing weight?

I think plot tends to be active, but story tends to be a bit more reactive. We actively participate in the plot, but story kinda just… happens to us. We don’t have as much control over it. The reason so many of those artsy tales have poor stories is specifically because they don’t have a plot. There’s nothing new or different happening to encourage that internal change.

Y’see, Timmy, plot is the effect my characters have on the events, but story is the effect the events have on my characters. They push each other along. Like when I walk—pushing off the right foot lets the left foot move forward, pushing off the left foot lets the right foot move forward, and so on. if I try to move with just one foot it can get a little… erratic. And there’s a decent chance I’ll just faceplant.

Anyway, that’s what I’d like you to think about as you poke at your own manuscript. If I’m going to skimp on plot, what’s going to cause those inner changes? Do I have a real story, or is it just a forced, false change of view? And if all I’ve got is plot… why is anyone doing anything? What kind of arc do they have?

Next time…

Look, I’ll be honest. I feel like I’ve been rambling a bit and there hasn’t been a ton of feedback since pulling the ranty blog over here. Is everyone just happy with the rambling? Is no one reading this? Is it more of that online ennui I was talking about up top? Let me know something. Anything. A topic you might like or even one you’re sick of hearing about all the time. And if nobody says anything… maybe I’ll just talk about my trip to Egypt.

Until then, go write.

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