Category: golden rule

October 18, 2018 / 3 Comments

Chalk Outlines

Oh, hey, it’s Thursday again.

A few weeks back I asked for possible topic ideas and somebody mentioned outlines. It’s a good topic, and a good time for it since I’m early into a new book.

Fair warning up front. This whole post is very much going to follow the golden rule. Outlining is an intensely personal process, and it changes from author to author and even from project to project. Figuring out what works best for me (or you) might take four or five or twenty attempts.

Hey, nobody said this was going to be quick and easy.

Nobody who knew what they were talking about, anyway…

Outlines are tricky things. Depending on who you ask, they’re the most important part of the process or a complete waste of time. They just need to be a few rough lines of notes or pages and pages of meticulously planned out beats. They can make things incredibly restrictive or let me spit out pages without a moment of hesitation.

As I mentioned above, I think outlines are incredibly personal. I’ve talked once or thrice before about how everyone has their own method when it comes to storytelling. Maybe outlines are part of that method. Maybe they’re not.

A good analogy—one that’s going to come up a lot here—is travel plans. There are lots of different ways to travel. Some of them might make perfect sense to you. Some of them might be terrifying. Again, it’s all about what works for you.

So let me blab about how outlines fit into my method a bit.

Or how they’ve fit over time.

First, there’s a pair of terms you may have heard before—plotters and pantsers. It’s (supposedly) the two big groups writers can get divided into. Plotters are the folks who plan everything out in advance. Pantsers make it up as they go along—by the seat of their pants. Get it? Hahaa, funny stuff.

This is pretty simplistic, though, and I’ve had a couple discussions with other writers about the problems with such basic classifications.

I started out as a pantser. I’d sit down at the keyboard and just type and type and type. New characters, plot points, subplots… the book just went where it went, y’know. This was how a lizard man from the center of the Earth ended up finding a crystal cave and wielding Excalibur. Yes, that Excalibur.

Granted, I hadn’t even hit puberty yet. But even after I did, most of my attempts at writing were usually just me coming up with one clever idea, starting at a point that I knew would take me straight to that idea, and filling in the rest as I went along.

And there’s nothing really wrong with that method. It’s kinda like grabbing that special someone, throwing some clothes in a bag, and just going. Pick a direction and drive. Choose a flight at the airport. Just go and see where you end up.

I still remember when I made the next big leap in my sophomore year of college. A lunch conversation with a woman I was dating sparked an idea for a story about an immortal wandering the world. Which sparked the story of another immortal. Which implied a third. And suddenly I realized this would be the beginning of a really cool book.

A week or so later, in the midst of writing all this down, it struck me that I had no idea what this book would actually be about. I knew the characters, had cool origin stories for them, but past that…

So, for the first time, I sat down and figured out—in advance—more or less how this story was going to end. I came up with a pretty solid idea what actions the heroes and villains would be taking on the final page. Who was going to win. Who was going to lose. Even a clever denouement. And I knew it was a denouement because I’d just learned that term a few weeks earlier.

This is the slightly more planned trip, if we want to keep using that analogy. Also in college, one of my best friends and I talked about driving cross-country after graduation. We knew we wanted to end in California, but past that… The rough plan was just grab clothes, maybe cameras, and go west. Probably in her car, which was much more suited to a roadtrip than mine. We knew eventually we’d hit California and the Pacific and who knows what along the way.

We never ended up going.

Anyway… time passes.

My next big outlining leap was kind of a bookkeeping thing. I tended to scribble out five or six key plot points, but kept most of the story in my head. Even with big, novel-sized projects. When I decided I really wanted to start taking this seriously, one thing I started doing was writing everything down. Every plot point, every idea, every snippet of action or page of dialogue. When I finally sat down to write, I’d already have five or six pages of jumbled… stuff. I might spend an afternoon putting it into a rough order and then—done. Outline.

If we want to stick with our road trip analogy, this is when we know we’re taking the southern route across the USon our way to Los Angeles. We’re also going to be stopping in Gracelandand Roswell. A pretty good idea of direction with a few markers along the way.

Again, perfectly acceptable method. Fine way to do things. The first four books I sold (sold for actual money) were all written that way. My book -14- had a little over eight pages of notes, and that included two and a half pages of character sketches.

It was right around this time that I ended up with Crown Publishing (a division of Random House) and became a writer with a contract. I mean, I’d had contracts before, but this was the first time the contract came first. Everything I’d done up until this point had essentially been on spec, me writing the book at whatever pace I wanted and then hammering out a deal afterwards.

What I was really dealing with now was a schedule. A timetable of when things had to be done. This wasn’t just about me anymore. People had given me large advances based on the idea I could stick to these schedules.

My first contract with Crown was rough. Exciting, but rough. I ignored a lot because holy crap I was a Random House author now!!!

My second contract…

I’ve got to be honest, the second one was brutal. I’m still kinda aching from it. Aching in that “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve asked Conor McGregor if he wanted to step outside” way. It was about two years of near-constant stress trying to get through three books, start to finish.

And to be very clear—it wasn’t about them. Despite what you may hear on some sites, the folks at Crown weren’t evil taskmasters or uncaring overlords or anything like that. Hell, my editor gave me extra time whenever I even hinted at needing it. he wanted the best book they could get. Of course, extra time on book one meant I was getting into book two later, so I’d have less time for that… But still, that was all me. He was fantastic and accommodating pretty much every time an issue came up. Everyone there was. So don’t even think of using this as evidence of how “mean and demanding” traditional publishers can be. It was absolutely, 100% nothing of the sort.

No, all that stress was on me. My ambling, feeling-things-out-as-I-go method of writing was fine when I could go at my own pace. But now I was on a schedule. Those spaces in the outline where I still needed to figure things out had to be a lot smaller, because I just didn’t have time for them.

So—with some gentle prodding from my agent—I started doing larger outlines. Now I actually figured out the majority of the story points and plot beats and character arcs in advance. All the twists. I had to have an ending—an entire ending—mapped out.

If we want to fall back on travel plans, this is when you’re going past “plans” and into more of an itinerary. Things are mapped out hour-to-hour now. Most notably, when you’re done traveling. I just had that trip to Texas last weekend and honestly… having a full itinerary set up for me was kind of comforting. Of course, my mom tried doing a family trip like this for us when I was twelve and it was… well, a bit less than fun.

My first couple outlines like this were just shy of twenty pages. And really, that’s nothing. The book I’m working on right now has a forty-two page outline. I’ve got the next book about 2/3 plotted and it’s already close to thirty.

Want to hear impressive? Back when I was doing a lot of screenwriting interviews, I talked with Tony Gilroy about his script for Duplicity. He had, by his guess, a sixty page outline. For what would eventually be a120-130 page screenplay. He had the whole thing nailed down.

And to be clear, this took time. Lots of time. It flexes different mental muscles to be examining the story in a much more clinical way. And twice I had to junk half my work and start again. A week or so of work—gone.

I spent about three months last year working on a handful of outlines (one of which I may never do anything with, after all that hammering and rewriting)

To be honest… I’m still not entirely sure I could say outlining saves time. It may cut four or five weeks off the writing time, but if I spent four or five weeks working on the outline… well, it all just balances out, doesn’t it?

I guess we’ll have to revisit this six or seven months from now.

Again, please don’t take this as me saying you have to use this last method if you want to be a successful writer. There are no such guarantees and it’s all going to vary from person to person. Like I just said, I’m still not 100% sure it’s going to help mebe successful. You may try a few of these versions before you figure out which one works for you. Or you may find a different one altogether.

So think about the path you want to take.

Next time… I’d like to talk about why this is all happening. To be more exact, why it’s all happening right now.

Until then, go write.

July 5, 2018 / 7 Comments

Feeling a Draft

Okay, yeah. That’s a friggin’ lazy title.

I’m pressed for time. Sorry.

Why am I pressed for time? Well. I’m trying to pack up my apartment (and my office), while at the same time finish a final polish on this book and write the ranty blog and prep for a Writers Coffeehouse this weekend and holy crap San Diego ComicCon is in two weeks.

Now that I think about it, it’s kind of amazing how well I’m keeping up with this…

Anyway, while you read this I’m finishing a draft of my current project and it struck me that I haven’t talked specifically about drafts in… well, a couple of years now. So it’s definitely a topic worth revisiting.

Some people hate doing drafts. Others get caught in this endless loop of writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and…well, you probably know someone like that. And there are folks who skip “drafts” altogether, convinced their words are NYT bestselling gold the minute they’re set down.

What I wanted to do here is sort of a step-by-step guide of what I do to get something to the point that I’m willing to turn in to an editor. And by “editor,” I mean “someone who will give me money for these words I’ve written.” This is final step stuff. Here be dragons. If you think of editors as scaly, fire-breathing folks.

Of course, all that mother of dragons stuff being said, it’s important that we all remember the Golden Rule

What works for me might not work for you,

and it almost definitely won’t work for that guy

I’ve mentioned once or twice or thrice before that we all have our own methods of writing. Doing drafts this way helps me a lot, but it’s not a guarantee of success for anyone except me. You might need to modify these steps a bit. Or a lot. But all things considered, I think this is a good base to start from.

So…

Here’s what I do.

While I’m working on a book, I’m usually scribbling down random thoughts about the nextbook. Characters, dialogue, action moments, reveals… all sorts of different elements. I’ll shuffle these around into more or less the order I think they’ll end up. Over the past two years or so, I’ve become a bigger fan of outlines than I used to be, but not enough that I’d say “This is the one and only true way! Bow before your meticulously outlined god!!!!” I shuffle things around, maybe plan a few extra beats, and get a sense where I want to start and where I’m going.

Once I’ve got all that and the current project is done, I dive into…

Draft One—So, for me, this is the “just finish it” draft. I just want to this draft to go from beginning to end with… well, most of the points in between. I don’t worry about typos or crafting nuances here. It’s just the “plow through and get it done” phase of writing.

At this early stage, I don’t hold anything back. I let dialogue, descriptions, and action scenes run on a bit longer than they probably should. I know I’ll be cutting eventually, so there’s no reason to worry about length now. For this stage, it really is quantity over quality.

Also, like I hinted above, if I get stuck on something at this point… I just skip it. Seriously. My first drafts look like old silent movies with the little “Scene Missing” card that pops up for twenty or thirty seconds. I know I’ll be able to go into the exact details of that conversation or this sequence later, so I’d rather keep moving forward and leave that stuff for Future Peter to deal with. Again, for me, the most important thing is to get the overall framework done. It’s a lot easier to think about the little things when the big things aren’t looming over you.

Depending on the book, this process takes me anywhere from two to three months. I had one book take about six weeks, but that was pretty rare for me. If I factor out the time I lost to some personal stuff, this last one was just over three.

A key thing to remember. I don’t show this draft to anyone. Not my girlfriend, not my agent–nobody. The first draft isn’t meant to be seen, it’s just meant to give me something to work with

I may work on something else for a day, maybe even take the whole weekend off, and then it’s right back for…

Draft Two—So, all those problems I left for Future Peter to deal with? I’m him now. Those need to be dealt with. Gaps get filled in. Characters get fleshed out a little more, and sometimes renamed. All those awkward knots get worked out. Now that I can see a lot of these elements in relation to the whole story, I’ll usually find the answers to these problems are more apparent.

The goal with this draft is to have a readable manuscript. No more little notes to myself or trailing paragraphs that need to get connected somehow. Someone should be able to pick this up and read it start to finish without thinking they lost a few pages or only got my notes on a chapter.

Again, keep in mind—this doesn’t mean I do show it to people. It just means I should be able to.

For some writers, this would really be their first draft. That’s one of those personal preference things—again, advice over rules. Personally, breaking it up like this takes a lot of pressure off me, and I think that’s a good thing when you’re trying to treat writing like a real job. No one likes a high-pressure job.

Okay then, so… now I step away for a couple of days. Maybe as much as a week. I’ll watch movies, work out a little more, maybe even scribble up a few of these ranty blog posts in advance. The goal is to push the manuscript as far out of my mind as possible. Don’t look at it, try not to think too much about it.

Draft Three—And now, the long night of a thousand cuts begins. Two great rules-of-thumb I’ve mentioned a few times—

one adverb per page, four adjectives

2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%

Yeah, the second rule (courtesy of Stephen King) goes off the previously mentioned assumption that my first clean, readable draft is my first draft.

I spend this draft tracking down adverbs, adjectives, pointless dialogue descriptors, and so on. One thing I also go after here is common padding phrases that don’t really do anything (sort of, somewhat, kind of, more or less). One of my regular beta readers dubbed this somewhat syndrome a while back, and I still call it that. I like to tell myself I’ve gotten better about it now that I’m aware of the problem.

Hey, we all have the little lies that get us through the day.

And this little stuff adds up fast. In my current manuscript I cut 200 instances of that. Almost a full page gone, just by checking on one word.

Again, to be clear, though—these are rules of thumb. They’re guidelines. I want to stick close to them, but there’s going to be times I want a couple adverbs and a good double handful of adjectives. No editor will freak out if there are three adverbs on one page. But if there’s four or five on everypage… well…

At this point I’ve gone through the whole manuscript at least twice, so a few larger cuts should be apparent, too. Overcomplicated descriptionsthat slow down the narrative. Awkward sentence structures. Extensive character moments that add nothing to the character, the story, or the plot. Many of these things get tightened or cut in this draft.

I spend a week or two doing this.

The Fourth Draft–This is the first big polish. I go through sentence by sentence, looking for words that come up too often or stilted dialogue. I also make sure all the cuts and swaps from the last draft haven’t messed anything up. Are the logic chains still complete? Did I forget to change Gilford’s name to Gillyman anywhere? Does Gordon have a pistol or a baseball bat in this scene? Are there any odd character tics that I forgot to remove or add? Does the whole thing have a good flow to it?

This draft doesn’t take long. Just a day or two. It’s just one slow, careful read of the story. And, yeah, sometimes I still miss stuff.

Once I’ve got this clean draft, I send it off to my beta readers to get fresh eyes. I generally use four or five friends I’ve know for years. They’re all professional writers and editors who know how to give useful criticism. Not to beat a dead horse, but by professional I mean… they have actual credentials. Some folks may decide to hire a professional editor at this point. Nothing wrong with that. The important thing is to get an unbiased opinion I can trust, even if I have to pay for it.

A few folks might argue that editing is the publisher’s job. Okay, sure, you could look at it that way. I need to get a publisher first, though, and why are they going to bother acquiring my crap manuscript that wasn’t even edited?

Anyway… this draft goes off into the world and it may be a week or three before I look at it again. For me, at this stage in my career, it usually depends on deadlines. But I don’t look at it during this time. I try to relax a bit, scribble down ideas for later books (see above), or flex different mental muscles.

For example, as I mentioned before, right now I’m packing up a lot of my office. Turns out I’ve got a ton of LEGO and Warhammer and Gundam models and comics all piled up in the closet here. Who knew?
Well, okay. I kind of suspected…

The Fifth Draft—So, I’ve gotten notes back from those wonderful folks I begged/ blackmailed/ paid to read this thing. Now I go through the whole manuscript page by page with their comments. At one point I did this with multiple monitors.

So, page one… what did everyone think? What about page two? How’s page three look? This way I can see all the notes at once and make whatever changes are required. I’ve also got my own copy of the fourth draft that I’m slowly rewriting into the fifth draft as we go.

I mentioned I ask four or five people to make notes for me. That gives me a broad sampling on each note/ issue that comes up. If four people like something but one doesn’t, odds are I’ll call that good. Nothing’s going to work for everyone. If three don’t and two do (and of course I do—that’s why I write it), I’ll sit and give it a good look. If nobody likes it, well… I’m smart enough to admit when I’ve screwed up and something doesn’t work.

This draft can take another two weeks or more to finish with a full book manuscript.

The Sixth Draft— This one’s another polishing draft, just like the fourth. I need to make sure everything still works now that I’ve made those changes and tweaks from my reader’s comments. So, yet another line by line reading, adjusting as I go. And at this point… this is when I’m done. There’s only so much a given writer—in this case, me—can do with a given story. There comes a point when further work accomplishes nothing and I’m just rewriting for the sake of rewriting. If my manuscript’s not ready for a publisher (or film producer) by now, it probably means I screwed up something big right at the start.

Next time… well, if there’s anything next week it’ll be really quick. As you may have figured out, I’m moving, and the big day is a week from today. And then the week after that is San Diego ComicCon! Oh, hell– and the Writers Coffeehouse is this weekend. If you’re in LA,stop by Dark Delicacies noon to three on Sunday.

But, yeah, next time… I’m sure I’ll have something
Anyway… go write.

criticism cuts drafts editing feedback golden rule SDCC

June 22, 2017

In This Club We Have One Rule…

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.

What works for me probably won’t work for you.

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.

What works for me probably won’t work for you.

And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

I don’t write books the way Victoria Schwab does. She doesn’t write books the way Andy Weir does. Andy doesn’t write like Sarah Kuhn. Sarah doesn’t write like Chuck Wendig. He doesn’t write the same way as Kristi Charish. And she doesn’t write like me.

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.

advice Charish golden rule Kuhn rules Schwab Weir Wendig

March 16, 2017 / 4 Comments

Our Aluminum Anniversary Post

So very sorry I missed last week. There were copyedits. I got about 3/4 of a post done in my spare time, but I was never quite happy with it, and then last Thursday was here and gone.

And now here’s Thursday again.

As it turns out, though, this turned out to be a fantastic bit of lucky timing.

This, my friends-students-lurkers-haters-et al, is the 400th post here on the ranty blog. Yep. Four. Hundred. I know that doesn’t really mean much, in the big scheme of things. There are some folks who post way, way more frequently than I ever will.

Still, though… that’s a lot of random writing rules and advice I’ve been spouting out over the years. Granted, there were a couple of amusing pictures mixed in there, plus I’ve revisited the same topic a few times, but…c’mon, it’s a pretty cool milestone.

Okay, fine. You’re not impressed. How about this, then…

Sunday, it’ll be ten years since I first started said ranty blog.

TEN. YEARS.

To put that in perspective, the first Iron Man movie, the one that kicked off the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe? That was nine years ago. Ten years ago nobody’d heard of Breaking Bad or Fifty Shades of Grey. Hell, ten years ago nobody’d ever heard of Sarah Palin.

To be honest, nobody’d ever heard of me, either.

Probably also worth mentioning there’ve been a little over 770 comments posted here in that time. So many thanks to all of you who’ve stumbled across this pile of rants. It’s always nice to know I’m not shouting into the void.

Ten years.

This revamp’s long overdue, yes? Blogger’s overhauled many of its formats. A lot more of you are reading this on tablets or smartphones (something else that would’ve been a mystery ten years ago). This whole page could be a lot more mobile-friendly.

Plus, let’s be honest. I’m ten years older. Some of you are, too. Most of you are going to be. The white-text-on-black setup wasn’t helping anyone.

Soooooooo… Whadda you think?

Okay, talk about that down in the comments. Since we’re looking at a big momentous anniversary (and did anyone get me an aluminum ring? No!) and I’ve been doing the Writers Coffeehouse for over a year now, I wanted to be clear on something. I’ve kind of talked about this on and off, but it struck me it might be worth saying in really clear, absolute terms.

I am not a writing guru.

Hell, forget guru, I’m not much of a writing teacher. I’m barely a writing adviser. Most of the Coffeehouse folks can vouch for this. At best, I’m kind of the old writing hermit up in the hills. You can ask me questions and I’ll shake my fist and shout some kind of answer, but I’d guess at least half the time my answer won’t work for you. Probably closer to 2/3 of the time.

That’s the Golden Rule I’ve mentioned here once or thrice. Writing is a very individual, very personal process. What works for me might not work for you. It definitely won’t work for him.

So… how is that different from being a guru?

Well, because I’m admitting it might not work. Not for everyone. I’m telling you that up front. There is no “right” way to do this. At best, we can pin down some methods that work better than others and a few more that are more likely to hinder than help. But past that…

Okay, I’m going to tell you a really old, really stupid joke. I apologize in advance, but it’s kind of important. Ready?

A man goes to the doctor’s office. He holds his arm out, rotates it counter-clockwise at the shoulder, and says “Doc, it hurts like hell whenever I do this.”

The doctor looks at him, shrugs, and says “Don’t do that. That’ll be twenty dollars.”

Yep, twenty dollars for a doctor’s visit. Told you it was an old joke.

Now, on a basic level, the doctor has taken care of the patient’s problem. And it’s kind of a win-win for the doctor. If the man keeps doing it and the pain persists, he’s going against the doctor’s orders and the doc was right telling him to stop. If he doesn’t do it and there’s no pain, then the doctor was right telling him to stop.

The catch here, of course, is that the doctor hasn’t actually done anything. And that’s how a lot of gurus operate. They know how tough it can be to succeed in this business, so they charge a lot of money and offer foolproof advice. Foolproof in the sense of it can’t fail, because the advice is not to do anything.

I used to see this mentality in the film industry a lot. A script will normally go through what they call “clearance.” It’s when a lawyer or legal assistant goes through the screenplay looking for possible legal issues, usually with names, addresses, and prominently mentioned items. Is this character name common, or is there only one person with this namein that city? Should someone bitch and complain about Microsoft products by name on screen? The clearance people are supposed to do some research and then give everything a thumbs down (because you might get sued) or a thumbs up (you’re in the clear).

Guess what, though? About nineteen times out of twenty, they just say don’t do it. Don’t use that name, don’t mention that product, don’t refer to that person. No matter what it is, you might get sued, so don’t use it.

Y’see, Timmy, if I tell you not to do something and you don’t, there’s no problem—I was right. If I tell you not to do it, you do anyway, and nothing happens, then you were lucky—and I was right. If I tell you not to do it, you do anyway, and you get sued… well, I told you not to do it. It’s not my fault. No matter what the actual outcome is, by saying no, I’m always correct.

This is what I see overwhelmingly from gurus (both prose and screenwriting). Rather than actually teach anything, far too many of them just give lists of what not to do. Don’t do flashbacks. Don’t use passive voice. Don’t take too long to introduce characters. Don’t have your inciting incident any later than page nineteen. Don’t use “we see.” Don’t use “said.” Don’t do voiceover in scripts.

And, again, they’re never wrong, because saying no is always correct.

On the other hand, I try to explain how these things work. Of course you can use flashbacks. Introduce characterswhenever it’s appropriate for your individual story. And please, please, please try to use “said” morethan any other dialogue descriptor. These devices wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work—they would’ve died out centuries ago. Actual centuries. It’s just easier and quicker to say “don’t use them” then it is to explain how to use them correctly.

Especially if said guru doesn’t know how to use them correctly.

There’s another way I’m different from a guru. I have actual, recent experience. Not references or testimonials—experience. I honestly can’t tell you the number of self-proclaimed experts I’ve seen who haven’t had a single sale in their chosen industry in years. Assuming they’ve ever even had a sale. One of my favorites was a “script doctor” I’d never, ever heard of (keeping in mind, I worked in the film industry for fifteen years and then reported on it for another five) who assured would-be clients that he’d worked on lots and lots of big box office films… none of which he was allowed to name for confidentiality reasons.

Remember, real professionals don’t have testimonials—they have credits. Recent credits. Every industry changes over time. Publishing, filmmaking, programming, farming—all of them. The longer it’s been since I’ve done something, the less likely it is that my knowledge of said industry is any good. You might remember a couple weeks back I mentioned I wasn’t going to offer screenplay advice anymore because it’d been a while since I actively did anything in the film industry. I don’t want to mislead anyone with out-of-date advice about how to put a screenplay together.

Yeah, there are still format posts here if anyone wanted to go digging (look, here’s one), but it’s also clear these aren’t current. So I’m going off the basic assumption that if someone finds their way here, they’re smart enough to think twice before blindly following something from a year ago.

I mean, let’s just approach this logically. If Wakko really knows how to write a novel that publishers will pay half a million for… why is he nickel-and diming you and me? Why are we paying him $500 for a three-day weekend course when a film studio might give him $750,000—plus residuals?

Don’t get me wrong. There are a bunch of very talented, very experienced people out there offering writing advice and asking for a couple of bucks. I personally know at least half a dozen writers who’ve put out books of writing tips and advice. I’ve toyed with the idea myself. But, again, they’re all professionals. Offering writing advice is a side business, not their primary one.

Which is, y’know… writing.

And that brings me to my last point. It’s not a hard fast rule, but I’d say it’s a pretty solid rule of thumb. Most of the professionals who offer writing advice… just offer it. They don’t want a huge amount of cash up front. They’re not asking $85 for a self-published textbook.

The reason for this is pretty simple. The vast majority of us who’ve made it up here to the top half of the ladder only got here because we got help and encouragement from other professionals along the way. I can look back and know I only made it here because of advice and tips I got from several writing professionals along the way, almost all of whom gave me that advice for free (one was a college professor—and a two-time Pen/Faulkner winner with nine books to his name at that point).

The question I need to ask myself is… is that big pile of don’ts from somebody with no experience worth $650? Or maybe a grand? Hell, is it even worth fifty bucks?

And that’s why I’m not a guru.

And it’s part of the reason I’ve been writing out suggestions and tips and not-so-gentle nudges here for the past ten years.

Again, thanks for being here.

Next time, I’ll probably prattle about words, like I said I was going to do last week. Or maybe I’ll talk about this really cute foreign exchange student I knew in college. One of those things.

Until then… go write.

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