Category: Charish

            Expensive/Questionable value/not recommended: All Star/Celebrity/NYT Bestselling/Intensive Author Workshop and/or Cruise. They range from two to six weeks, cost upwards of four grand, and often boast a rotating roster of world class authors as instructors. You do get one on one time with the authors as advertised and that might be incentive enough for the odd superfan. I don’t recommend them. The instructors might be star studded novelists but that doesn’t mean they can teach and their alumni track records leave much to be desired. In comparison, self-driven, free writer’s groups have a staggering publication success rate. A new laptop and a trip to a remote cabin to write is arguably a much better return

            It’s come up once or thrice that I’m a lover of bad movies.  Partly for the laughing aspect, partly because I think you can learn as much from bad storytelling as you can from good.  Partly because I need to justify my drinking, and some of these movies make it reeeeeally easy.

            A while back I tossed out a list of really basic things a lot of these movies messed up.  Film school 101-level stuff that people were getting wrong.  Even though some of them went to film school.  And I wondered if it might be possible to do something with stories in general.
            Kristi Charish (of the fantastic Kincaid Strange series—book two coming soon) recently mentioned this idea (for a different topic) in a much better way—the invisible handshake.  It’s sort of an unofficial, unspoken contract between the author and the reader. If you’re picking up my book, there are certain automatic assumptions you’re making about what I’ll be providing you with, and I should be meeting these assumptions.  Basic things about plot and structure and character that are just… well, basic.
            At the end of last year I read a book that fumbled that handshake.   Fumbled it bad.  It was like that awkward moment with someone at the end of the night where you’re not sure how to say goodbye, so the two of you make a bunch of half-moves toward different things.  Do we hug?  Shake hands?  Peck on the cheek?  Write an awful book? 

            We’ve all been there, right?

            I ranted a bit about said book on Twitter, but even then I was thinking I should revisit a lot of those issues here.  And while said book was very rant-worthy, I’ve been .trying to keep things a bit more on the positive side here.

            So, a few general things I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.  I’ve mentioned most of them before, but I thought a general, all–at-once

            First, I need to be clear who my main character is.  If I spend the first four chapters of my book with Yakko… everyone’s going to assume Yakko’s the main character.  This book’s clearly about him, right?  So when he vanishes for the next seven chapters… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to him.  Because he’s the main character.

            Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be spending time between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first three or four chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm in this book.

            Secondis that I need to keep my point of view consistent.  This kinda goes with the first point—being clear who my main character is.  Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Wakko’s shoulder and then driiiiiiiiiiiiiift over so we’re suddenly looking over Dot’s.

            Again, it’s cool to switch POV and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need to make it clear to my readers that I’m doing it. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow.  That’s never a good thing.
            Thirdthing I need to do is be clear who my actual characters are.  Who’s part of the story and who’s just… well, window dressing.  If my two protagonists go out to dinner, there’s going to be other people in the restaurant.  But I shouldn’t describe them all. Or name them all. 

            Names and descriptions are how I tell my reader a character’s going to be important and worth remembering.  Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.”  So if I’m telling the reader to keep track of people for no reason, I’m wasting their time and my word count.

            I want to note a specific way people do this, too.  I’m calling it “describe and die” (trademark 2018).  This is when the author introduces a character, spends five or six pages describing them, their history, their goals, their loves, their life—and then kills them.  We’ve all seen this, yes?  Here’s Yakkoshiro, a twenty-nine year-old salaryman who spends all his free income on Gundam models and always wears long sleeves to the office because he won’t stop wearing his fathers watch, even though nobody wears watches anymore and looking behind the times like that could hurt his chances at a promotion so… long sleeves, never rolled up, even when the air conditioner dies (which happens a lot). And tonight he has a date with the beautiful woman from the Gundam store, who he’s exchanged nervous banter with for months now and, oh, he’s dead.  A kaiju stepped on him.  Now, back to our heroes…

            Don’t do that.

            Fourthis that I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Wakko trying to save the family car wash, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the romance subplot or the backstabbing partner subplot or the Uncle Gus has cancer and wants to travel around the world before he dies subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about saving the family car wash or escaping that Egyptian tomb.  I should be working toward that first—meeting those expectations.

            If I’m spending more time on a subplot than the actual plot, maybe I need to revisit what my story’s actually about.

            Fifth, closely related to four, is that my subplots should relate to the main story somehow.  They should loop around, tie back in to the main plot, or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull out a subplot out of my story and it doesn’t change the main story in the slightest… I probably need to reconsider it.

            And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, seriously, I’m wasting pages at that point.  Not to mention this all starts getting, well, distracting.  I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building in my main plot by putting it on hold for eight or nine pages while I deal with… well, something completely unrelated.  It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. Nobody’s saying what’s on the other channel is bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

            Sixth…

            Okay, this is an odd one.

            Remember how much fun it is when you meet someone you’re interested in and there’s all these fascinating little mysteries about them?  We want to learn all their tics and hidden secrets.  Where are they from?  What’d they study in school?  What movies do they like?  How’d they develop a taste for that?  Why do they have that accent?  Where’d they get that scar?  Just how big is that tattoo?

            But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a book report.  We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, go on road trips, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch.  It’s how we get to know real people… and it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Pages and pages of backstory often makes characters less interesting because it leaves me with nothing to reveal about them.  It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

            There’s nothing wrong with me having all that backstory, but I don’t need to use it all in book.

            And I definitely don’t need to reveal it all in the first two or three chapters.

            Seventhand last is flashbacks.  Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device, but they get used wrong a lot.  And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.

            A flashback needs to be advancing the plot.  Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information.  In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.

            But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.

            Seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story.

            Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire a pastry chef for my bakery, there’s always a possibility this particular one doesn’t use a whisk.  There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against them.  

            Because if that same pastry chef also doesn’t use a spatula…  Or butter… Or flour…

            Again—the invisible handshake (trademark K. Charish, 2018). 

            It’s a legally binding contract in forty-two states and four Canadian provinces.

            Next time, I’d like to tell you about something that happened off-camera on a TV show I worked on years ago.

            Until then, go write   

            I wanted to talk about writing advice a bit.  The good stuff and the bad stuff.  I just did a few months ago, yeah, but this is a little different. 

            This time, I want to talk with you about taking those words to heart… or not.

            Here’s an ugly truth about writing advice. 

            I’d guess a good 40% of it is just people telling you what worked for them.  Here’s how I do characters, here’s how I do dialogue, here’s how I plot, here’s how I write fifty pages a week.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this advice—it clearly worked for that particular professional.  It’s just a presentation problem.  It assumes every writer and project is like every other writer and project.

            Still, that’s better than the 50% of people who are bellowing advice that hasn’tworked for them.  The only thing sketchier than someone  with a lot of credits insisting “this is how it’s done” is somebody with no credits insisting “this is how it’s done.”  Or somebody who had a credit twenty-five years ago.

            What? A twenty-five year old credit should still count?  I mean, on one level I agree with you—it’s a credit.  But it’s a credit from another era.  Seriously.  Johannes Guttenberg may be the father of printing, but he’s not going to be much help if my Brother 5-in-1 gets a paper jam.

            Let me put it in these terms.  Let’s say we were talking about computers. Let’s say I knew someone who’d been a kinda-known name in computers twenty-five years ago. And hadn’t really done anything since.  How seriously would you take their advice about computer engineering?  Or programming?  Or breaking into the industry?

            Actually, I take it back. There’s one thing worse than somebody with no credits insisting “this is how it’s done.”   It’s when somebody with no credits wants money to tell you “this is how it’s done.”

            Anyway, that leaves us with, what… 10%, roughly?  Math isn’t my thing.  What’s that last ten percent of advice?

            You’ve probably seen it. It’s the folks saying “try this.”  Or maybe they’re a couple of provisos before or after their statements.  I’ve mentioned the idea of this here a few times.  It’s called the Golden Rule.

            No, not that Golden Rule. I made this one up.  The Golden Rule is one of the core things I try to put out with all the writing advice I offer here.  It goes something like this.

And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

            You see, writing is a very personal thing.  In the same way I can’t say “urban fantasy is the best genre,” I also can’t say “writing 500 words before lunch every day and another 500 words after is the key to success.”  Because it’s not. 

            Oh, it might be for some people, sure, but it isn’t for everybody.  There are people who write in the afternoon.  There are people who only write in the morning.  Some like massive outlines, some like very minimal ones.  If you ask a dozen different writers how to do something—anything—you’re going to get a dozen different answers.  Because we’ve all found what works for us.  That’s the golden rule.

            There’s a joke I’ve used  a couple times to explain this.  If the only time you can write is Sunday afternoons, and the only way you can write is standing on your head, wearing that “enhancing” corset you bought at the Ren Faire last summer, using voice-recognition software, but doing this lets you write 15,000 words…

            Well, that’s fantastic.  Seriously.  I know professional, full-time writers who don’t always get 15,000 words down a week.  I can maybe hit those numbers once a month.  If that’s what it takes for you to do it, and you can do it consistently—power to you!

            See, at the end of the day, how I write my book doesn’t matter.  Perhaps I write first thing in the morning or maybe late into the night.  I could work exclusively on a laptop, on my phone, on a typewriter, or on yellow legal pads with a #2 pencil.  Maybe I reward myself after every thousand words with half an hour of reading, a video game, twenty minutes of exercise, booze, sex, whatever.  Do I do one long, constantly reworked draft or two dozen drafts each with a few minute, specific changes?

            However I do it, that part of writing doesn’t matter.  As long as I’m working, I’m doing fine.  People can insist whatever they want, but at the end of the day it always comes down to the golden rule.

And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

            And none of us write like you. We don’t have your habits, your preferences, your thoughts, your goals.  We’re not telling your story your way.

            Which is why you shouldn’t worry about writing like us. Sift through all the hints and tips.   Learn which ones do and don’t work for you.  Don’t worry if four of the six people above do X, find out if X works for you.  Find your way to write.

            And if your way happens to involve a corset… hey, who am I to judge?

            Next time… I want to talk about babies.  I hate those guys.

            Until then… go write.

            Hey, folks.  Sorry about last week—I had, alas, a family emergency I had to fly back east for, and there just wasn’t time to get a ranty blog post put together.  So, now that I’m back, I thought I’d give you this for now and return to our usual semi-useful writing stuff on Thursday…

            As I have in the past, it’s time for me to toss out a few more titles and names for you.  Essentially, these are a bunch of books I really wish I could say I wrote.  They’re not in any order, and I don’t even think they all came out this year, but if you’re looking for something new and different for somebody (or for yourself), it’s going to be tough to go wrong with any of these. In fact, you may have heard me mention some of them before…

            As before,  I’ve put links to a few of them, but you can also just go to your local bookstore.  You may spend an extra buck or two, but you’ll feel better about yourself in the long run…

The Unnoticeables/The Empty Ones by Robert Brockway– This is a fantastic, twisted little series about punk rock and stuntwomen and angels.  It manages to swing back and forth between damned funny and seriously unnerving, sometimes on the same page.  The first book works as a stand-alone, which is why I was stunned when he pulled off the second one.

Experimental Film by Gemma Files—If someone you know is a horror fan, they’re going to love this book.  If they also happen to be a film fan (as in, the process of filmmaking), this is going to be their new favorite book.  It’s about a film student who starts researching one of the early pioneers of filmmaking in Canada, a woman who had some very eerie subject matter.  This is one of the very few books I’ve read in recent years that  freaked me out and actually made me feel nervous about shutting lights off at night. Seriously.

Rise of Io by Wesley Chu—If you know his Taobooks, this is the first of a new series set in the same universe.  Although now things are flipped—Ella is a smart, savvy street-urchin in a future-shantytown who finds herself sharing headspace with one of the most incompetent Quaslings on Earth.  It’s got action, humor, a touch of romance, some political intrigue—it’s just fantastic and a beautifully smooth read.

Anamnesis by Eloise Knapp—This overlooked gem is half identity crisis, half biomedical thriller.  Ethan’s a low-level drug dealer whose life began a few years ago when he woke up on a beach with full amnesia.  He stumbles across the new thing hitting the streets—a drug that erases recent memories—and feels compelled to help people affected by it.  Now imagine every creepy thing you could do with that drug… Wonderful character stuff with a creepy-as-hell plot

Invasive by Chuck Wendig—I’m sure you’ve heard about Wendig’s Star Wars books, and if that’s your thing you should definitely check those out (they’re fantastic).  Invasive is for everyone, though.  Unless you have a thing about bugs.  And if you don’t now, you will by the end of this.  Hannah’s a brilliant character, and the premise is skin-crawling.

The Voodoo Killings by Kristi Charish—This is another one I got an early peek at, and then I was kind of annoyed because I couldn’t talk to anybody about it for another four or five months (and now I’m waiting for her to finish book two so I can whine and plead to see that one early).  This book takes zombies back to their voodoo roots, and imagines a world where the supernatural is real, publicly known, and so heavily regulated that our main-character, sorceress Kincaid Strange, has to pay the bills by summoning up dead rock stars for frat parties.  And then an illegal zombie shows up in her neighborhood…

Panacea by F. Paul Wilson—If all goes well, this book is the start of a fantastic ‘80s homage series.  This one starts with a simple premise—what if there was a substance that could cure anything?  And then think of all the different reasons people might be searching for it. It also has, hands down, one of the most horrific death scenes I’ve read in years.  So there’s that…

The Crooked God Machine by Autumn Christian– Do you like Ray Bradbury?  The Addams Family?  Small town America?  Dystopia?  If you can answer yes to any of these, you’ll love this story of the life of Charles, his family, friends, and the girls he falls in love with. It’s dark and beautiful and one of my absolute favorite things I read this year.

Made To Kill by Adam Christopher—This is a noir detective novel about a robot assassin, Ray Electromatic, in 1960s Hollywood.  And if I need to say any more than that to make you pick up this book, you are dead to me.  Seriously.

Breaking Cat News

The Last Adventure of Constance Verity by A. Lee Martinez—I just finished this one a few days ago on a plane (it had been on my Kindle for a while) and I absolutely love it.  A young child, Constance was blessed (or cursed) to have a life of action and adventure.  Now, after over two decades of fighting monsters, cults, ninjas, clones, and killer robots—having stopped wars and saved the world countless times—she just really, desperately wants to have a normal, boring life.  This book is to the action/adventure genre what Shaun of the Dead was to zombies.

            And there you have it.  Eleven books I’ve really loved.  Please check ‘em out, or feel free to mention anything I’ve overlooked down below.

            Next time, long overdue… I’ll be shouting at you.

            Until then, go write.

            And maybe do some Christmas shopping and pick up a few books.