January 5, 2012 / 4 Comments

Why Are We Here?

            I don’t mean that in some vague, metaphysical sense.  It’s pretty straightforward.  Why are you looking at this web page?  What are you hoping to find here?

            Let me make it easier.  Let me explain why I keep posting here.
            No, there isn’t time to explain.  I will sum up.
            (bonus points if you get that one)
            Two little stories.  Tale the first.
            I’ve wanted to tell stories as far back as I could remember.  I was setting up my Star Wars figures and Micronauts in little tableaus when I was in grade school.  By middle school I’d found my mom’s old electric Smith-Corona (complete with vinyl dust cover) in the back of the closet and I was sending clumsy “submissions” to Jim Shooter at Marvel Comics.  And by high school, well, by then my rejection collection was getting pretty thick.
            It’s gotten thicker since then, believe me.
            Tale the second.
            Not too many months back I stumbled across a link to a published author’s new blog.  He was about at the same level as me—years of trying to get in and finally had a few sales under his belt.  Two of them to a very big, respectable publisher.  Said author, much like myself, wanted to offer some tips for new writers who were just starting out.  However, unlike me, this fellow didn’t want to talk about how to improve your writing. He was going to offer tips on networking, promotion, blog tours, and so on.
            Of course, looking over his first four posts, there was one point he kept hammering home.  The best way to sell your writing is to have good writing.  The best way to spread word of mouth about your writing is to be an excellent writer.  This could not be stressed enough.  All the clever gimmicks and sales tricks and blog tours weren’t going to help in the slightest if you didn’t have something people wanted to read.
            But he wasn’t going to talk about that on his blog.  He was going to talk about clever gimmicks and sales tricks and blog tours.
            That’s kind of what got me started on this whole thing years ago.  At the time, I was seeing tons of articles and websites about the tricks and gimmicks, but very few about the actual craft of writing.  And, yes, I do feel pretentious talking about “craft” when I write books about superheroes fighting zombies.
            Anyway, I’d say a good sixty or seventy percent of the material I saw was tips on what to do after you’d written something.  How to get reps, how to get your books in stores, that sort of thing.  Which always seemed a little cart-before-the-horse, as people used to say in the pre-Segway world.  Perhaps even worse, a large percentage of the remaining material—the stuff that actually talked about writing– spoke about it in terms of absolutes and set down hard rules that didn’t seem to come from any sort of actual experience.  It was just people parroting some rule about storytelling they’d heard somewhere as if it were a quantifiable, scientifically-proven fact.  In some cases, as far as I could tell, these people had just made up their rules out of the blue. 
            And a few of these folks were asking for money. 
            At the time I was sitting on this half-assed Blogspot site.  I’d pulled a loosely Egyptian-themed name from the back of my head (Thoth was the god of writing), a title that I put even less thought into (seriously, check out how many “Writer on Writing” blogs and columns there are out there), and used the space to post a few spec columns I’d created for a magazine I was working for.  They’d been rejected (twice) so I’d thrown them up here as… honestly, I don’t know.  Just so it felt like I’d done something with them.  I thought they were fairly well written and made some good points—I didn’t want them to languish on my computer.  Maybe in the tiny, limited space that was the internet somebody would stumble across them and find them useful.
            Bonus fact.  It was maybe a year after I started posting here more-or-less full time that somebody pointed out Thoth-Amon was also the evil sorcerer in the Conan books and comics.  Completely slipped my mind when I picked this site.
            Anyway, as I worked my way further and further into the life of a full-time writer, I got exposed to more and more people’s work.  I read scripts for a couple different contests and got a bunch of exposure to it (reading 400+ pages a day will do that to you).  And one thing that amazed me was I kept seeing the same basic mistakes.  Often to headache-inducing levels.
            A large number of aspiring writers fall into one of two camps.  Some of them think writing and storytelling are mechanical, quantifiable processes that can be broken down to A1-B2-C3.  These are the folks who will quote the MLA Handbook to explain why their novel deserves to be published and use Syd Field as proof their screenplay is perfect.  The other group think rules are for old-school losers who don’t get that spelling, formatting, and structure just hamper the creative process and will get overlooked when people see the inherent art in the writing.
            Both groups are usually wrong, for the record.
            Note that I said “usually.”  Most folks think it’s all-or-nothing.  You have to be on one extreme or another.  The truth is that it’s more of a middle ground.
            Y’see, Timmy, there are things that are absolutely “right and wrong” in writing. I have to know how to spell (me—not my spellchecker).  I have to understand the basics of grammar.  If I’m writing a script, I’ve got to know the current accepted format.  A writer can’t ignore any of these requirements, because these are things you can get wrong and you will be judged on them.
            On the other hand, there is no “right” way to start your writing day or to develop a character, only the way that’s right for me and my story.  Or you and your story.  Or her and her story.  If you ask twenty different writers about their method, you’re going to get twenty different answers.  And allof these answers are valid, because each of these methods work for that writer.  But that doesn’t mean I can ignore every convention or rule I don’t like.
            And that’s what I’m doing here.  Prattling on about some of the hard rules and general suggestions I discovered during thirty-odd years of learning how to be a writer, along with some of my own I’ve developed after trying to write a hundred or so short stories, scripts, and novels.  It’s stuff I think might be helpful if you’re actually serious about writing for a living.
            And I’m going under the general assumption that if you’ve slogged through all this, you’ve got at least a basic grasp of this writing thing and are hoping to go further with it.  Perhaps even make a few dollars with it.  And if any of you have a specific question or topic you’d like me to prattle on about, let me know.
            Next time, speaking of right and wrong, we return to one of my favorite topics—spilling!
            Until then, go write.
September 22, 2011 / 3 Comments

Do You Read Sutter Cane?

And if you get that title reference, you know the answer really determines what kind of person you are.

A character sketch is one of those things that comes up a lot in the storytelling world. Novelists and screenwriters talk about them, but in a variety of ways. Sometimes very indy films are even called “character sketches.” So it’s understandable the term could cause confusion, especially when some folks talk about them as vital, necessary things for a writer to have without really explaining what they are.

In a visual-artistic sense, a sketch usually isn’t a finished work. It’s when you use a few quick lines and textures to suggest an image rather than forming a complete image. It’s inherently incomplete, but implies something more than itself.

In a similar sense, a character sketch shouldn’t be an exhaustive list that covers every possible detail. It’s supposed to give you, the writer, a sense of the character you can refer back to as a guideline. It’s notes about how they talk, how they move, what they like, and what they hate.

Like a fair number of the things I pontificate about here on the ranty blog, a character sketch is going to be something that’s unique to each author. Probably to each character, as well. Some characters may need pages of exhaustive notes. Others may only need a line or two. And with a few, you may never need to write a single note because they’re perfectly in your mind.

In the book I’m working on right now, I sketched out a short paragraph about each character. Most of them got two or three lines, and a few of them got five or six. For the most part, though, I let character elements develop as I went, growing off those initial impressions. I didn’t know Xela was a nudist or Clive was a recovering alcoholic, so neither of these fairly defining traits are in their simple character sketches.

However, there are a number of surprises and reveals in this story. The characters end up reacting to a lot of things. By the third draft, it was clear I needed to know just how everybody would react. Debbie and Clive were pretty clean-cut. Nate, Veek, and Roger, on the other hand, would definitely swear. But how would they swear? After all, profanity’s just as much a part of someone’s speech patterns as whether or not they say pop or soda. So I do know precisely how everyone swears.

Now, on the flipside, I got to talk to filmmaker Stephan Elliot a while back about his film adaptation of Easy Virtue. When I asked about how he developed the character of Furber the butler, Elliot laughed and said one word—“Hate.” That’s it. That was the entire character sketch. Furber completely, openly loathes his employers, and his contempt is clear every moment he’s forced to be on screen with them.

So, what is a character sketch? It’s whatever works for you. I’ve found one of the easiest ways to create one, though, is just to ask questions. Not only does this help you get various answers about someone, it also generally leads to other questions about them that develop the character more.

For example… let’s talk about Phoebe.

For the record, I have never, ever in my life met someone named Phoebe (to the best of my knowledge). That’s why it’s my fallback name for things like this (along with the Warners). If I used a name like Tammy, Stephanie, Becky, Colleen, or half a dozen others when I make these examples, I would catch sooooooooooooo much crap from someone, somewhere. It’s the writer’s curse. If I have a character with the same name as someone I know, I must be talking about them. Heaven forbid I give the character my name, because then I’m just a raging egomaniac. Or, at least, I’m finally admitting it openly.

Anyway… we were talking about Phoebe. Let’s ask a couple questions. Answer as you see fit. You don’t need to write them down, but you can if you want to .

Where did she grow up?

Does she get along with her family?

Did she go to college? Did she live at college?

Did she do any “experimenting” during her college years?

Did she finish college?

Republican or Democrat?

What does she do for a living?

What does she want to be doing for a living?

How much does she spend on her hair each month?

Does she brush and floss regularly?

Does she have any hobbies or collections?

Does she go to church? What church?

Where does she live?

Where does she want to live?

Does she have roommates?

How does she swear? Like a sailor? Like a prude?

Phoebe’s five favorite movies? Books? Bands?

How old was she when she had her first drink?

How often does she go out with friends?

Are most of her friends male or female?

Does she smoke?

Has she ever done drugs?

Does she go to the gym?

What kind of car does she drive?

What kind of car does she want to drive?

Does she have pets?

If you answered half of those questions, that’s a ton of information about Phoebe. Plus, as you’ve probably noticed, a lot of it implies other facets of her personality. Even if you don’t use all of it, it’s going to give you much better insight into how she talks and reacts to the world around her and how she might react to a different world (figurative or actual) if she were to suddenly find herself in one.

Now, let me jump back to the artistic analogy of sketches. There’s another term you’ve probably heard called negative space. It’s when you define shapes by the emptiness around them rather than by the shapes themselves. And sometimes, alas, that’s how some writers try to define their characters.

For example, have you watched any of the GOP debates? You’ll notice the one resounding theme among them—among most politicians—is who they are not. They are not Washington insiders. They are not part of those over-educated elitists trying to create socialism. They sure as hell are not President Obama. They’re nothing like him, and they’ll get angry if you dare hint otherwise.

The question is, though, who are they? They’re so busy establishing what they aren’t, they rarely talk about what they are. In the rush to tell you what doesn’t work and what they won’t do, they never get around to what does work and what they will do.

Now, I’m sure there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. Does a hole punch make 1/4” circles of paper or does it make 1/4” holes in paper? Does it make a difference which it does since both are technically correct?

Y’see, Timmy, the problem with defining by negatives is that it’s like trying to prove a negative. That kind of definition leaves too many variables for it to be clear. If I tell you the shirt I’m wearing right now isn’t red, does that really tell you anything about the color of my shirt?

Sure, say some folks—we know it isn’t red. Okay, so what is it? Is it blue? Green? Black? Tan? White? Gray? Striped? Plaid? If I tell you to picture a not-red shirt, everyone here’s going to picture something different. And if all you know about someone is that they’re not Obama… well, that narrows it down to about five billion people. You need positives to define characters—even unlikable characters and flat-out villains.

Finally, one last point I brushed against up above and I also mentioned last week. Just because you come up with stuff for a character sketch doesn’t mean you need to use it in your work. Oh, you’ll use all of it in that greater “grand tapestry” sense, but just because I came up with a background element doesn’t mean I need to use it.

Y’see, Timmy (yep, two Y’see Timmys in one post), an all-too-common mistake is when people come up with lush backstories and then feel the need to shoehorn every single line of them into their manuscript. Again, a character sketch is for the writer, not the reader. It’s good for me to know Malavika’s a third-generation Indian who graduated high school a year early and had her first sexual experience at age twenty… but none of this is really relevant to the story I’m telling now.

So I didn’t bother to put any of it in.

And neither should you.

Next week, we take care of the bad guys once and for all. Hopefully.

Until then, go write.

You’ve probably heard at least half of this week’s title before. If you’ll indulge me for a bit, I’ll explain the other half.

Since I’ve been waist-deep in the drafting process, I figured I could toss out a rough guide of what that usually means to me. I’ve given lots of suggestions about this sort of thing before, but I thought it might be cool to show a step by step, solid example of how I take a project from a pile of rough ideas to something I’ll show friends, to something I consider worth showing to… well, people who might give me money for it.

Before going into this, I also want to remind everyone of the golden rule.

What works for me might not work for you, and it almost definitely won’t work for that guy.

As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, we all have our own way of writing. Doing these drafts in this way helps me, but you might need to do something a little different.

That being said…

The 1st Draft— This is just the “get it done” stage, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t worry about catching typos or crafting every subtle moment in the plot. I just want to finish this draft with a beginning, an end, and the majority of points in between.

I tend to skip around a lot in the first draft. I’ll scribble down random beats or dialogue exchanges that occurred to me while the idea was fermenting in my head and drop them more or less where I think they’d go. This serves as a very, very rough outline, just enough so I can start writing on page one and go.

At this early stage, if I get stuck on something (an awkward conversation or complex action scene), I’ll just skip it for now. I know I’ll be able to go into the exact details of Wakko’s nervous breakdown later, so I’d rather keep moving forward and leave those snarls 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.

I also don’t hold back here at all. I let dialogue, descriptions, and action scenes go on forever. 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. I mentioned this visual once before. Think of the first draft like prospecting for gold. If you wanted to find a pound of gold, how much soil would you dig up? Seventeen ounces? Five pounds? Five hundred pounds? Where are your best odds for finding that pound of gold?

I don’t show this draft to anyone. My lovely lady may get an out-loud reading or a little peek if I think I’ve done something exceptionally clever. There have been one or two times she’s called me out on something that sounded good in my head but was kind of flat and awkward in someone else’s. I also don’t do much past a night off to celebrate the end of this draft before diving into…

The 2nd Draft— Now it’s time to smooth it out. All those problems I left for Future Peter to deal with need to be dealt with. Gaps get filled in. All those awkward knots get worked out. Because I can see a lot of these elements in relation to the whole story now , 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.

Keep in mind this doesn’t mean I do show it to people. It just means I should be able to. Really, the only person who might see this is my lady-love, and not even her always. Sometimes she has to wait.

A few people have argued with me these two drafts really just amount to me doing a first draft in two stages. That may be true, but they’re not writing the ranty blog, are they?

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 extra (I need it after three or four months at my desk), build little toy soldiers, or maybe even scribble up a few ranty blog posts in advance. Sometimes I’ll play with a short story idea. 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. And then…

The 3rd Draft–Stephen King says to start cutting on draft two, but as I said, my draft two is what some people may call a solid first draft. As such, I usually wait until draft three to start slashing. This is where I hunt down adverbs, adjectives, pointless dialogue descriptors, and so on. Two fun rules I’ve mentioned here before–

2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%

one adverb per page, four adjectives

One thing I really go after here is the padding phrases I have a bad habit of dropping in everywhere (sort of, somewhat, kind of, more or less) that don’t really do anything. One of my regular readers dubbed this Somewhat Syndrome, and I like to tell myself I’ve gotten better about it now that I’m aware of the problem. Sometimes I also like to tell myself that Famke Janssen and I would have a really deep, emotional connection if we ever met…

Anyway, at this point I’ve gone through the whole manuscript at least twice, so a few larger cuts should be visible. The long description of Wakko ceremonially sharpening his katana. Dot’s flashback to the summer she lost her virginity during a midnight swim with a handsome stranger. That impassioned speech Wakko gives against taxing the rich. That’s some beautiful writing there, but is it actually doing anything?

This tightening process is also when I can usually spot flaws in the overall structure. In larger stories, it’s not uncommon to end up with “floating” events that are important, but aren’t tied to a solid point in the script. This one may be here right now, but with all of the story in front of me I might realize it would work better there.

If I haven’t already, this is when I let the lady love have a look. She’s my first set of eyes to let me know I screwed up something (10%) and I’m too close to see it.

For the record, this is where Ex-Patriots is right now.

The 4th 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? Transitions still good? Parallels parallel? Arcs smooth? Did Dot just pull a skeleton key out of her pocket that she shouldn’t have yet? Did Yakko just turn into a woman for a few minutes in the middle of the chapter?

This draft doesn’t take long. Just a day or two. It’s just one slow, careful read of the story.

Once I’ve got the fourth draft all shiny, this is the one I show to folks for comments. I generally send it out to five people. They’re a carefully selected bunch, all of whom have some level of literary background, and I don’t think there’s one among them I’ve known for less than five years. One’s actually been reading and critiquing my work for over two decades now, and she still doesn’t cut me any slack. The key thing is they’re all people who will give honest, useful criticism.

This goes off into the world and it may be a month before I look at it again. The trick here is to resist messing with it while those people are looking at it. Again, it’s a great time to flex different mental muscles. Maybe I’ll do a lot of research on an upcoming project. Maybe I’ll build a model tank. Or maybe I’ll just get caught up on laundry.

The 5th Draft— Now I’ve gotten notes back from whatever folks I cajoled into reading this thing. I sit down with all the comments and go through the whole manuscript page by page. This is one of those times that having a second monitor’s very helpful, because I can have three or four versions open and visible at once.

So, what did everyone think of page one? What comments were there on page two? How’s page three look? As I’m doing this, I’ve also got my own copy of the 4th draft that I’m using as a “master document.” This way I can get all the notes assembled in the relevant place and make whatever changes are required. This document is more or less the 5th draft, and it can take another two weeks or more to finish it with a full book manuscript.

I mentioned above that I get five people to make comments for me, and that’s so I can get a broader sampling on each issue that comes up. If four people like something but one doesn’t, odds are I’ll call that good. Nobody’s going to get every joke or like every chapter. If three don’t and two do (and of course I do, or I wouldn’t’ve written it), I’ll sit and give it a good look. And if nobody likes it, well… I’m smart enough to know when I’ve screwed up something doesn’t work.

6th Draft— This one’s yet another smoothing, polishing draft. I need to make sure everything still works now that I’ve made those tweaks and changes from my reader’s notes,. So, yet another line by line reading, adjusting as I go.

And honestly, at this point… this is usually 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. If it’s not ready to show to a publisher by now, it probably means I screwed up something big right at the start. Perhaps when I first thought I could adapt To Kill a Mockingbird into a hardcore tween vampire romance starring the Animaniacs.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s a real danger that if you keep trying to come up with reasons to do another draft, you’ll keep finding them. I’m sure we all know someone who’s just been working on the same manuscript for years and years and years because they’ve got another one or two drafts to put it through. After a while of that, your story stops looking like a coherent tale and a bit more like the Frankenstein Monster. And not the nice, clean Boris Karloff version. I’m talking about the seriously messy Roger Corman one.

Maybe even, dare I say it, Mr. Stitch.

Next time it’s going to be Christmas. Well, the Eve of Christmas Eve. So I might prattle on with some ideas about how you can have holiday fun.

Until then, go write

January 15, 2010 / 1 Comment

The Golden Rule

Just to be clear up front, this is not about doing unto others. Sorry.

When I started this blog way, way back in the dusty year of 2007, there wasn’t much to it. To be honest, it really started as a column I was pitching to one of the editors at Creative Screenwriting. If you look back at some of those early posts you can still see that more formal edge to them. Anyway, I pitched the idea and a few sample columns to one editor, then to the editor that replaced him, and then casually to the publisher once at a party. Then I said screw it and tossed them up at Blogspot under the best name I could come up with in fifteen seconds. Where they sat for many months until I decided I wanted to spew about something else I was seeing new writers doing. I think I’d just finished reading for a screenwriting contest and was just baffled how so many people could keep making the same mistakes again and again.

It was also about the time I was giving up crew work in the film industry to start writing full time. It meant I was browsing a lot of other blogs and message boards. It struck me that while there were all-too-many folks offering “useful advice” about getting an agent, submission formats, publishing contracts, and so on, there were very few that offered any help with writing. Which seems kind off bass-ackward, as old folks say to young folks. Also, the few folks that were speaking about writing tended to do so with absolute certainty, despite a lack of credentials of any sort whatsoever. Worse still, a huge number of people were blindly following those folks and their bizarre “rules” of writing..

Now, I did lots of writing stuff as a teenager, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered how many markets there were, and how many magazines devoted to the craft of writing. Again, old fashioned as it may make me sound (granted, there was a different guy named Bush in the White House then), this pile of magazines did something the internet doesn’t. It actually forced me to learn the material rather than just plopping it in front of me. I had to search every article, every column, and read through them in their entirety hoping to find a hint or tip on how to improve my writing skills.

One thing that became apparent pretty quick, even to not-yet-legal-to-drink me, was that a lot of these tips contradicted each other. Here’s an article about how you should write eight hours a day, but this one says four, and that one says don’t write unless you’re inspired. She says to outline and plot out everything, he says to just go with the flow and see what happens. One columnist suggests saving money by not asking for your submission back, but another writer points out that this creates the instant mental image that your manuscript is disposable.

Y’see, Timmy, if you ask twenty different novelists how they create a character, you’re going to get twenty different answers. If you ask twenty screenwriters how they write a scene, you’re going to get twenty different answers. And all of these answers are valid, because all of these methods and tricks work for that writer.

Which is the real point of the ranty blog. I want to offer folks some of the tips and ideas I sifted out of all those articles and columns, along with some I’ve developed on my own after trying (and failing and trying again) to write a hundred or so short stories, scripts, and novels.

To be blunt, I don’t expect anyone to follow the tips and rules here letter for letter. Heck, as I’ve said before, I don’t follow all of them myself. I sure as hell wouldn’t call it a sure-fire way to write a bestselling novel or anything like that, because writing cannot be distilled down to A-B-C-Success. The goal here is to put out a bunch of methods and advice and examples which the dozen or so of you reading this can pick and choose and test-drive until you find (or develop) the method that works best for you. That’s the Golden Rule here.

What works for me probably won’t work for you. And it definitely won’t work for that guy.

There are provisos to this, of course. Not everything about writing is optional. You must know how to spell. You must understand the basics of grammar. If you’re going into screenwriting, you must know the current accepted format. A writer cannot ignore any of these requirements, and that is an absolute must. Past all that, you must be writing something fresh and interesting.

I think this is where most fledgling writers mess up. They assume it’s all-or-nothing. Not only do you have the artistic freedom to ignore the strict per-page plot points of Syd Field or Blake Snyder, you can actually ignore plot altogether. You’re also free to ignore motivation, perspective, structure, and spelling.

It doesn’t help that there’s a whole culture of wanna-bes out there encouraging this view because… well, I can only assume because they’re too lazy to put any real effort into their own writing. If they get everyone else doing it, then it means they’re not doing anything wrong.

To take veteran actress Maggie Smith slightly out of context (she was talking about method actors): “Oh, we have that in England, too. We call it wanking.”

Anyway, I’m getting off topic. I hope I’ve made it clear what the cleverly-named ranty blog is about, and that most of you will still tune in next week to see what I decide to prattle on about.

Speaking of which, next week I wanted to talk about prattling on.

Until then, go write.

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