Category: exceptions

            Okay, look… there’s a good chance this post will piss you off.

            Two things I ask you to keep in mind, going in.

            First is that this comes from a place of kindness.  If you’re reading this, I want you to succeed.  All of you.  Well, okay, not him, but the rest of you, absolutely.  So I’m saying these things because… well, they need to be said.  And you need to hear them.

            Some of you really need to hear them.

            Second is that everything I’m going to be talking about is something I’ve personally experienced.  Not that I’ve seen another writer doing it—I’ve done it.  I’ve believed it.  I’ve been the person needing that smack in the face.

            And I learned from it.  And got better because of it.

            Writing’s tough.  It’s hard work.  I know this, because I’ve been doing it for a living for over a decade now.  When someone tells me how easy and wonderful and fun writing is, I’m often tempted to point out…

            Well, look.  There was a point when I thought writing was easy and fun.  It was back when I wasn’t taking it seriously.

            My writing ability started making huge leaps when I was finally able to admit a few things to myself.  I think that’s true of most people in most fields—if we can’t be honest about where we are, it’s hard to improve.

            That being said…

My first attempts at writing will suck—This sounds harsh, yeah, but… well…  Too often when we’re starting out, we just can’t get past the idea that something we wrote isn’t good.  I know I couldn’t.  My work was typed.  It was a full page long!  My mom liked it!  Of course it deserved to sell.  It deserved awards!  International awards!

            Seriously, there was soooooo much writing before my “first novel.”  There was Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth (two different versions).  A trope-filled sci-fi novel.  Some Boba Fett and Doctor Who fan fic.  A fantasy novel  fuelled by a sudden influx of hormones during my teen years (enough said about that).  The Werewolf Detective of Newbury Street, The Trinity, The Suffering Map, about half of a novel called Mouth.

            And then…Ex-Heroes. 
            It’s just against human nature to spend hours on something and then tell yourself you just wasted a bunch of time.  Why would I write something I couldn’t sell?  Obviously I wouldn’t, so my latest project must deserve a six-figure advance.

            The problem here is the learning curve.  None of us like to be the inexperienced rookie, but the fact is it’s where everyone starts.  Surgeons, chefs, pilots, astronomers, mechanics… and writers.  Oh, there are a few gifted amateurs out there, yeah—very, very few—but the vast majority of us have to work at something to get good at it.  And we can’t improve until we accept that we need improvement.

My first draft is going to suck—There was a point where I’d fret over my first draft.  I’d spend hours laboring over individual words, each sentence, every paragraph.  I’d get halfway down the page and then go back to try to fix things.  It meant my productivity was slowed to a crawl because I kept worrying about what had happened in my story instead of what was going to happen.

            The freeing moment was when I realized my first draft was always going to suck.  Always.  And that’s okay.  Everyone’s first draft sucks.  Everybody has to go back and rework stuff.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

            With those expectations gone, it became much easier for me to finish a first draft, which is essential if I ever wanted to get to a second draft.  And a third draft.  And maybe even a sale.

            No, needing another draft doesn’t make me a lesser writer in any way.  Every single professional writer I know (and I know a lot of them at this point) does a second draft.  And usually a third and fourth.

My writing needs editing.  Lots of editing—As I mentioned, I’ve been doing this for a while.  Surely by now I’ve hit the point where my stuff rolls onto the page (or screen) pretty much ready to go, yes?  I mean, at this point I must qualify as a good writer and I don’t need to obsess so much over those beginner-things, right?

            Alas, no.  Like I just said, my first draft is going to need work.  We all make the easy first choice now and then.  Things slip past us.  We misjudge how some things are going to be read. I’m fortunate to have a circle of friends and a really good editor at my publisher who all call me out when I make these mistakes or just take the easy route when I’m capable of doing something better.

            As I mentioned above, part of this is the ability to accept these notes and criticisms.  I’m not saying they’re all going to be right (and I’ve been given a few really idiotic notes over the years), but if my default position is that any criticism is wrong then my work is never going to improve past the first draft. 

            Which, as I mentioned above, sucks.

My writing needs cuts—Sticking to the theme, if I believe my writing is perfect, it stands to reason all of it is perfect.  It’s not 90% perfect with those two odd blocks that should be cut.  When I first started to edit, one of my big problems was that everythingneeded to be there.  It was all part of the story.  Each subplot, every action detail and character moment, all of the clever references and in-jokes.

            The Suffering Map was where I first started to realize things needed to be cut.  I’d overwritten—which is fine in a first draft as long as I can admit it in later drafts.  I had too many characters, too much detail, subplots that had grown too big, character arcs that became too complex.  It took a while, but I made huge cuts to the book.  It had to be done.  Heck, I just cut a whole subplot from the book I’m editing right now.  About 2500 words gone, snip-snip, in about five minutes.

            And the book it better for it.

My writing is going to be rejected –Know what I’ve got that most of you reading this will never have?  Rejection letters.  Paper letters that were mailed to me by editors.  I’ve got dozens of them.  Heck, I’ve probably got a dozen from Marvel Comics alone.  And since then I’ve got them from magazines, big publishers, journals, magazines, ezines…

            But when that first rejection from Marvel came… I was crushed.  Devastated.  How could they not like my story?  It was a full page!  I included a colored pencil rendering of what the cover should look like.  Did I mention it was typed?!

            It took me weeks—whole weeks, plural—to work up my courage to try again, and then they shot that one down, too.

            Granted, I was eleven, and those stories were awful.  I mean… really awful.

            Rejection is part of the process.  I still get rejections today.  I expect I’ll be getting then for the foreseeable future.

            Which is a good time to mention…

Rejection does not automatically mean my writing is bad—Getting that email is tough, like a punch to the gut.  It’s easy to let it get under the skin and fester.  Self-doubt feeds on rejections, so it’s important to think of it as “still looking for the right home.”

            Like I said, I’m still getting rejections today, even with the fairly solid list of credits and accolades after my name.  Editors and publishers are people too, and nothing is going to appeal to everyone.  Getting rejected became a lot easier for me when I realized it didn’t show up on my permanent record and it wasn’t a personal attack  It was just a person who didn’t connect with that particular story for some reason.

            Now, there’s a flipside worth mentioning here…

Rejection also doesn’t automatically mean my writing is good—There’s a lot of memes and recurring stories and a few general mindsets that push the idea that if my work gets rejected by an agent or editor it mustbe good, because all those people are idiots.  And it can be a comforting thought.

            It’s also kinda close to conspiracy-theory reasoning, if you think about it.

            Going right back to the beginning of this little rant, there’s a decent chance my work just isn’t good.  No big deal.  Like I said, I had dozens and dozens of rejections before I started to get some sales.

            But if I refuse to back away from the idea that it might be me—if I take dozens of rejections as proof the system is stupid rather than admit the possibility my manuscript wasn’t ready to go out—then I’m never going to improve.

            If I can admit these things to myself, it can only make me a better, stronger writer.  It’s not a flaw or a weakness.  In fact, if I look at the above statements and immediately think “Well, yeah, but none of that applies to me…” it’s probably a good sign I’m in denial about some things.

            And that’s not going to help me get anywhere.

            Speaking of getting anywhere, if you’re in the Atlantaarea I’m at Dragon Con this weekend.  Come find me and we can talk about books and writing and is Clark Gregg coming back to Agents of SHIELD or what?

            Next time, I’d like to put a few things in context.

            Until then, go write.

            I’m relatively new to Twitter.  I mean, I’ve been there a couple years now, but there are some early-adopters who’ve been there for ten years or more.  I remember a while back when Ernie Cline finally got verified, and he noted that he’d been on Twitter longer than the Twitter verified account…

            Anyway, I follow a lot of writers, and most of them (and me, too) tend to toss out storytelling advice of one kind or another.  As best you can in 140 characters, anyway.  Sometimes it’s threads, random encouragements, simple reminders—there’s all sorts of stuff.

            Of course, like any statement made on Twitter, this advice is often followed by a response like “Well, actually…”  You’ve probably seen it applied to a lot of things beyond just writing advice

            In simple terms, this kind of response is people pointing to an exception to the rule in an attempt to disprove the rule.  And a lot of the time, they’re doing this to justify their own opinions and behaviors.  I don’t like statement X, or what it implies, so I’ll find one or two examples where X isn’t true and use it as proof that X is never true.

            Here’s the thing about approaching writing—or anything in life—with that kind of mindset.

            Vesna Vulovic.

            For those of you who came in late, Vesna was a flight attendant back in the early ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned her here once or thrice before, and a few times at the Coffeehouse.  Y’see, her DC-9 was bombed in mid-air back in 1972.  She was trapped inside the plane’s hull as it plunged six miles to the ground. 

            However…

            Somehow, through a near miraculous series of events and conditions, Vesna survived.  She fell 33,000 feet, was in the hospital for a couple of months afterwards, and left under her own power.  No wheelchairs.  No artificial limbs. No iron plates in the skull.  She was fine.  They did a whole Mythbusters episode about her fall.

            Vesna lived a very full, rich life for another forty-four years, just passing on back in December.  She ended up working as a political activist for most of her life. And she still holds the Guinness Record for an uncontrolled fall.
            So… this means one of my characters can fall six miles and live, right?  It really happened, so it must be believable.  Heck, I could probably say they fell a mile without even needing hospital time.

            Let’s be clear on one thing—there are always exceptions to the rule.  Always.  Anyone who tells you that something is 100%, never-question-it always wrong–especially in art–can be ignored.  Especially if they shriek “no exceptions!!”

            Here’s the catch. Exceptions to the rule are very rare.  Exceptionally rare, you could say.  That’s why they’re the exception to the rule and not the rule. 

            For example, maybe I can point to a dozen people who sold the first draft of the first novel they wrote.  But I can also point to the tens of millions of people—actual, literal millions—whose first draft submissions were rejected. 
            Yeah, there’s a double handful of authors who sold manuscript full-to-the-brim with horrible spelling and bad grammar and not the slightest clue about formatting.  There are hundreds of phone books full of people, though, whose manuscripts were tossed out almost immediately because of these same issues.

            And sure, we can point at a dozen or so people who got their first book sold because they knew the right people or were related to the right people or were sleeping with the right people. But there are also the hundreds of thousands, probably (again) millions of writers who broke in by taking their time and writing really good books.

            The downside of this is… well, none of us want to be in the majority, right? Nobody likes the thought of eventually breaking in, we want all the success and recognition now!  We want to be the exception!

            And, yeah, some folks have gambled everything on being the exception. That’s their entire business plan. I don’t want to take the time or do the work or try improving myself and my skills.  So I’ll latch onto anything that says I don’t have to, anything that proves the advice from that experienced pro is wrong.

            Okay. Fine. Just ask yourself one question…

            D’you want to go skydiving without a parachute?

            I’m willing to bet a fairly large-denomination bill that right now someone is itching to write a “well, actually…” down below that will explain how this isn’t the same thing.  Or that you can go skydiving without a chute. Or that there are two or three schools of thought that Ms. Vulovic maybe didn’t fall quite as far as all the reports said.  It’s just human nature. Some people need to argue the way you and I need to breathe.

            Even if it amounts to arguing against parachutes when you go skydiving.

            When professional writers offer advice, they’re handing out parachutes.

            So, here’s my bit of advice for you, and it’s one I hope you’ve seen underlying most of the stuff I’ve said here since the first post you may have read.

            Y’see, Timmy, the best thing I can do is assume I’m not the exception to the rule.  No matter how clever, how witty, how perfect my writing is, I should not consider myself to be the one person who gets to ignore all the established standards.  The absolute worst thing I can do is scoff at the rules and think they don’t apply to me.  No matter how vastly superior my work is, I should always assume I’m working under the same conditions as everyone else.

            The reason I should assume this is because the person readingmy work is going to assume it.  That’s what I’m fighting against when I plan on being the exception to the rule.  My audience—whether it’s an editor, and agent, or just someone reading my story for free on their Kindle or on Wattpad.  All these folks have seen attempts to break the rules again and again and again, and the overwhelming majority of these attempts have been simply awful. 

            Remember—exceptions are rare.  Very rare.  The vast majority of would-be writers who break the rules do it for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways.  So when I veer away from the rules, most everyone is just going to go with the numbers and assume my work is simply awful, too.

            Does that mean all these things won’t happen or can’t be done?  Not at all.  My writing may be so utterly, mind-bogglingly spectacular the reader will forgive and forget those atrociously dull opening pages.  The structure could be so rock-hard that no one notices the abundant typos.  It’s even possible my idea is so fiendishly, unbelievably clever that nobody will pick up on the fact that every single character is carbon-copied from Game of Thrones   Yeah, even my dwarf, my teenage assassin, and my Princess of Wyverns.

            A nice, simple rule of thumb.  If at any single point I find myself questioning if something matters—I should assume it does.  Does my main character need to be developed more than this paragraph?  Will a reader care that I misspelled forty or fifty words?  Do I need to make that part of the story clearer?  Should I bother to look up the exact format rules for this?

            My default answer for all of these questions needs to be yes.

            Again, I shouldn’t be scared to do something new, because if I break the rules—break them well, mind you—I’ll get noticed and rewarded for it. 

            Just remember a lot of people break the rules because they don’t know what they’re doing… and I don’t want to get lumped in with them.

            Next week—okay, I have to be honest.  The next few weeks are going to be rough for me, from a blogging point of view.  One week from tonight I’m going to be down in San Diego at Mysterious Galaxy, talking with Daniel Price about his new book The Song of the Orphans. If you’re in the area, stop by and hang out with us.

            And then the week after that I’ll be back in San Diego for SDCC. I’m doing at least one panel, possibly two (but I haven’t heard back on that one, soooooo…), and I think there may be a signing or two and some cool Paradox Bound swag we’re giving away…

            So we’ll see what happens next week.  As always, please feel free to make requests below.

            Until then, go write.

            I wanted to revisit a topic I discussed a while back. If you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, this’ll probably seem familiar. And if not, well, I promise it’ll be as semi-informative as anything else I put up here…

            A few years ago, on one of the message boards I used to frequent, someone once accused me of being horribly biased against anything that’s “character driven” or lacks a plot.  I didn’t feel the need to address it there, but it did get me thinking.  Am I horribly biased?

            After wondering about it for a brief while, I realized… yes.  Yes I am.

            Horribly biased.

            Keep in mind what bias means.  We tend to think of it as something evil (especially during an election season) but all it means is someone has an automatic tendency to lean toward or away from something when it comes to judgment.  If I have the choice of watching a sitcom rerun or Agents of SHIELD, my personal bias is to watch Agents of SHIELD.  If one salad is made with spinach and one with kale, I’ll probably choose the spinach.  It doesn’t mean Agents of SHIELD beats every sitcom or that spinach is always better than kale—it’s just the way I roll.

            Unless the spinach is cooked, which is disgusting.

            By the same token, if I have the choice between a story where extensively-defined protagonists do absolutely nothing and a fun story with good characters and an arc… well, I’ll go with option B every time.

            So, yeah, I’m biased.  In fact, if you check the numbers, you’ll find most people are.  We like compelling characters, but we also want to see things happen.  Check out a list of bestselling books or films or plays.  How many of them involve people sitting on their butts for long periods of time?  How often do we look at a list of Academy award nominees and realize we haven’t seen 3/5 of them… if not more?

            The sad truth is, that kind of stuff just doesn’t sell.

            Please keep in mind before you leap to the comment section–I’m not the only one saying this.  People have been saying it for decades.  Probably centuries.  There’s a reason so much of Charles Dickens’ popular crap survived and most people can’t even name three of his contemporaries.  Stephen King has had a storytelling career for five decades now, but how many other authors followed him out of the 1970s?  People want to be entertained.  Silent film director Marshall Neilan humorously pointed out (about a hundred years ago) that there are two kinds of directors—the ones who make artistic movies and the ones whose movies make money.

            Are making money and popularity the only yardsticks of success?  Hell no, not by a long shot.  But they’re the common ones that most folks use.  If I tell you that I wrote a phenomenally successful book, you’re not thinking I made my dad proud, or impressed my tenth grade English teacher, or really touched three dedicated readers.  When I say “phenomenally successful” it means the book hit the New York Times bestseller list, sold a few million copies, and I’m writing this out for you next to my kidney-shaped pool while Jennifer Lawrence works a knot out of my shoulders.

            All that being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with stories that focus more on character than on action.  There are a lot of character-driven stories that are just fantastic.  They’re vastly outnumbered by thebad ones, no question, but saying all such stories are bad would be just as lazy as the folks who dismiss all genre work as pedestrian and simplistic.  Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is far more a slice-of-life story than it is a courtroom drama.  Fiend is about drug addicts stumbling through a zombie apocalypse.  Contact is people studying and deciphering radio signals from the stars while figuring out what this discovery means for humanity.  The film (500) Days of Summer is far closer to a character study than a romantic comedy.  I’m sure anyone reading this can name three or four more.

            So, if I want to write something that leans far more on character then action, here are three tips for making it something people will still want to read.

            Somewhere along the line a lot of people got it in their heads that the only way a character can be interesting is if they’re seriously messed up.  This became the yardstick for “mature” fiction.  My character’s a drug-addicted, abuse-surviving, cancer-ridden, sexually-frustrated, self-loathing, dishonored soldier with a horrible case of Tourettes Syndrome currently working as a waiter at Denny’s.

            While such a person may have a great deal going on under the surface, you’ve got to wonder how my reader’s supposed to relate to such a character.  Or how they’re supposed to like them.  Even if this is some kind of redemption tale… how do I have somebody come back from going that far off track?

            If I’m going to make my story all about characters, I need to make it about characters my readers will actually like.  They don’t need to be perfect, by any means, but they also don’t have to be so flawed we wonder why they’re not in prison or an institution.  Someone facing an uphill battle is great, but someone facing a sheer cliff is just pointless.

            This is probably my biggest complaint with 99% of such stories that I read.  Nothing happens.  The week this story covers is the same week a few million other people have had.  Heck, it’s indistinguishable from the same week these characters have had fifty-two times a year.  Mundane.  Average. Unspectacular.  There’s nothing special or noteworthy about it in any way.

            Now, nobody has to fight off a killer AI android for a story to be interesting.  They don’t need to rob a bank or save the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis or steal the Declaration of Independence.  But they need to do something.  If my characters don’t have a reason to aim a little higher while we’re watching them, then we’re seeing static characters.

3) Have an arc

            Once I’ve got a compelling character and I’ve got something happening, I need to have an arc.  By its very nature, an arc implies we end somewhere else.  Arcs that end in the same place are called circles, and there’s a reason you haven’t heard of well-structured character circles.  You’ve heard of people running in circles, though, haven’t you?  And that’s never a good thing, is it?

            The whole point of a story is to get from A to B.  People grow and change.  If there’s only going to be A, that’s just a plot point.  Plot points can be fascinating, but they also tend to sit on the page if they’re all alone with nothing backing them up.  Just as something needs to happen in the observed life of my character, something needs to change. 

            And that’s it.  Seriously.  It’s really that simple. Three tips to writing a character-driven story that will still make audiences cheer. 

            Because cheering audiences pay better.

            Next time…

            Well, I’ve got an idea for next time, but I guess we’ll see if I get to it or not.

            Until then, go write.

            Not so much a pop culture reference as a tech reference.  Came up with that title and then remembered working with my first computer when I was… nine?  I remember having to format floppy discs before you could use them.  Anyone else remember that?

            Very sorry I missed last week.  Deadline crunch. Which I’m still in, really, but I didn’t want to miss two solid weeks in a row.

            Anyway…

            I was rewatching some episodes of an old show recently, and it struck me that it had a major format problem.  And as I mulled on it, it struck me I’ve seen this problem a few times before. Sometimes firsthand, happening right in front of me.

            I want to point out something… well, I’d say it’s obvious, but I don’t think it always is. I think it’s been muddled by a lot of would-be gurus and experts spreading bad information.  And since that’s what led to the ranty blog in the first place, well…

            Anyway, let me throw some wisdom at you.

            Novels are not comic books.

            Comic books are not television scripts.

            Television scripts are not movie scripts.

            Movie scripts are not stage plays.

            Stage plays are not novels.

            As I said, should be obvious, right?

            Thing is, each of those storytelling formats is unique unto itself.  Seriously. I can rattle off at least half a dozen inherent differences between any of them.

            We always hear people complain about changes when something is adapted from a book into a movie, but the simple fact is things have to change.  I cannot tell a story in a screenplay the same way I’d tell it in a book.  And I can’t tell a story in a motion picture script the same way it’d be told in an episodic television script.

            Let me give you some examples.

            Based off my own experience—as a crew person, a contest reader, and a screenwriter–I’d guess that 99.9% of all film, television, and stage work is done from the audience point of view.  The only parts that aren’t are the very limited POV shots that sometimes crop up in horror movies or thrillers(usually outside windows, inside closets, or across parking lots) and the rare experimental film like Hardcore Henry that was funded entirely by the powerful carsickness/nausea lobby.
            Contrast that with a book, where the author, with full control, can shift to any point of view they want. I can make the reader see, hear, and experience everything through one character’s senses, knowledge, and memories… and then shift to a different character.  There’s no real way to do that on film.

            However… a book is, for a lack of a better term, a one-source format.  I have to write things out.  There’s no way for the reader to know George has blond-brown hair without me putting “George has blond-brown hair” down on the page.  I might be able to get a little subtle with it, maybe pull some literary sleight-of-hand, but at the end of the day all I can do is put words on the page.  That’s it.  I can’t slip in some details in the background, because everything in a book is presented in the foreground—right there in front of my reader on the page.

            If I’m writing for television, I also need to be aware of the very specific format that most television writing requires.  Episodic shows are usually done with a four or five act structure (not to be confused with three act structure, which is kinda-sorta something else) which requires my story to have a series of mini-cliffhangers where the commercial breaks will be.  If it’s a show with an arc, it also needs to address that a week’s passed since the last episode, and some story points may need to be repeated or re-addressed to cut down on audience confusion.

            Stage writing is also unique because it’s happening right in front of us. There’s an inherent storytelling conceit that we’ll accept these actors don’t see us.  Or that they’re not actually in a forest.  Or they can’t hear that guy behind the tree bellowing his lines out to the back of the theater. This is a different kind of storytelling mechanic, and that’ll be reflected in my writing.

            And none of these are like comic books. Comics are this fantastic medium where we can have an active, flowing story that’s being told completely through static images.  So my comic script has to reflect this. Each panel has to be a single moment, and it has to be the right moment to convey the most impact and information while still flowing smoothly into the next moment I choose to continue the narrative.

            You’re wondering why I’m talking about all this, yes?

            These days it’s not uncommon for a story—or a storyteller—to jump mediums. As I mentioned above, we’ve all seen a ton of books and comics adapted for the movies.  I know several novelists and screenwriters who’ve worked in comics.  I’ve worked with theater directors and playwrights on film projects.

            Thing is, a story can’t go directly from one format to another.  The devices and mechanisms I use here won’t always work here.  Usually won’t, in fact. And I need to be able to make those adjustments.  A really common mistake I’ve seen is when people just yank a story from one format to another with no changes.  Or when they start using the conventions of one format in another

            That show I mentioned up at the top?  In one episode it had three reveals. Thing is, each one was essentially revealing the same thing.  But the filmmakers had assumed since Yakko was the main character for that scene, and Dot was the central figure in that scene, and Wakko was the focus of the final scene… well, they could do the dramatic, big music reveal for each of them.  Alas, it just doesn’t work that way, because—as I mentioned above—we can focus on different characters but it’s all really audience POV.  So the second time around it was more eye-rolling than dramatic and the third time was… well, laughable.

            Last year I had a chance to be in an X-Files anthology.  Truth is, though, the main spine of my short story actually came from a spec script I’d written for an old TV show called The Chronicle.  And I had to make adjustments for that.  Most notably, all those mini-cliffhangers in the story had to be smoothed out.  Some things had to be described much more than they were in the script, because now all those details actually had to be on the page.

            Y’see, Timmy, if I want to shift a story from one format to another, I better understand the conventions and limitations of each one.  And if I want to write in a different format. I need to learn that format as well as I know my current one.  I can’t just go in assuming it won’t matter, or that I’ll be the exception who gets to slide.

            So know what you’re writing.  And how you’re writing.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about some artsy character stuff.

            Until then, go write.