Category: guru

It strikes me that if I’m going to keep doing this biweekly (which I have to admit, I’m kind of liking right now with everything else I’ve got going on) it feels like a much bigger shift when I suddenly swap topics for the week. Apologies if the last post threw you a bit.

But getting back on track…

If you’ve been writing, or even thinking about writing, for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard someone talk about three act structure. Doesn’t matter if you’re working on novels, screenplays, or short stories, I’m willing to bet you’ve come across this term or had it pushed at you.

Now, I’m a big believer in three-act structure. I think a good number of flawed stories can tie their problems back to it. Or more specifically, to a lack of it.

But I also believe three act-structure gets misunderstood a lot. And I think there are a lot of folks out there arguing for (or against) three-act structure who… well, don’t have any clue what they’re talking about.

It’s also important to note right up front that three-act structure doesn’t quite fit in with the other story structures I’ve talked about in the past—linear, dramatic, and narrative. Another one it gets confused with a lot is the five act structure that a lot of network dramas have (which leads some gurus to champion six- or seven-act structure or some such nonsense). But this type of structure is just an artifice of the way commercials are arranged in a time slot. Again, not really related to three act, linear, dramatic, or narrative structures.

I think these distinctions cause some confusion when folks start talking about structure. Because structure sounds like it should be one topic and not lots and lots of different, just-barely-connected things. It’s a type of story structure, but it’s not the same kind of story structure, if that makes sense? It’s like how an apartment can have a plumbing system and an electrical system, but we all understand they’re very much not the same kind of system even though they’re part of the same overall thing (the apartment).

So what is three- act structure? Well, I think I can explain it to you in pretty simple terms. Ready with the notebooks?

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

That’s three act structure.

No, seriously. That’s pretty much it. Three act structure in a nutshell.

Okay, fine, if we want to go into a little more detail…

In storytelling we have names for each of these three acts. And again, you’ve probably heard them before. We call them establishing the norm, introducing conflict, and then resolution.

Establishing the norm is just what it sounds like. We show our audience (our readers in our case) how things are on a normal day. This is when my characters go to work, pay bills, spend time with their loved ones, and so on. It’s when we often find them at their most relatable. It’s me, the storyteller, establishing a baseline so my readers understand when something amazing happens.

Remember that everybody has their own “usual day.” For me a usual day is taking care of cats, sitting at my desk, and maybe just posing an action figure or two on said desk. But for someone in Kenya or Palestine or stationed at the South Pole… well, their usual day is likely going to be different than mine. Heck, for Wade Wilson, a usual day probably involves a lot more severed limbs, gunfire, and decapitations, while for someone in Starfleet there’s scanning and analyzing and maybe some synthohol at the end of their shift. A usual day for someone is all very much a matter of context.

It’s important to have some sense of this, what a normal day is like for my character, even is my story’s set right here in the real world. Because if my characters don’t have a normal day, they can’t have an abnormal day. Make sense?

Introducing conflict is when that abnormal thing happens. It means something’s knocking my characters out of their comfortable little world and forcing them to take some sort of new action. A mysterious stranger shoves a jump drive into their hands. The building manager says they’ve got to pay all their back rent by the end of the month or get evicted. Their reflection tells them they’re actually a mercenary and also the avatar of an Egyptian god. They find out Wakko—Wakko of all people—is going to ask Phoebe to the prom.

Also worth noting that conflict has to cause, well, conflict. By definition, conflict requires some kind of opposing force. It doesn’t need to be some massive, overwhelming force of non-stop action, but there needs to actually be something between my characters and them immediately dealing with this issue or problem that’s appeared during their up-until-now normal day. If I introduce a conflict that doesn’t bother my protagonist or takes no effort to deal with… I mean, that’s not actually a conflict, is it? That’s just boring. And if it’s boring to them, it’s going to be boring to my audience.

Resolution is when things get resolved. Yeah, look, it should’ve been clear up front this isn’t really that complicated. Usually because my protagonist has taken some action and made things come to an end. It’s when answers are made known, hidden things get revealed and plot threads all come together. Hopefully.

So, all clear now?

I’m a big believer that pretty much every story needs these three acts. If it’s done right, any reader can tell you when these acts begin and end in my story. And I believe that we can all instinctively tell when one of them isn’t there.

Now, there are a few caveats to all of this, of course. A lot of stories start in the middle or maybe even close to the end before they go back and explain the beginning. “In medias res” some folks like to call it. We could probably list hundreds of great examples of books and movies that do this.

The thing to remember, though, is all these stories still have a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if they’ve been juggled around a bit in how they’re told. As we’ve talked about before, the narrative structure of a story doesn’t change the linear structure. The events have a definitive starting point. The characters have a baseline the audience sees them at. There’s a progression brought about by conflict. And it all leads to a definitive conclusion.

Y’see, Timmy, a story that’s missing one of these three parts has a sort of… meandering quality to it. We’re left trying to figure out if actions and reactions are odd or normal. Characters do things without any apparent reason to do them. And geeeeez… if I try to impress an agent or editor with “to be continued” what I’m really telling them is “I don’t have an ending for this.” And they won’t be impressed.

So look at your latest story and break it down. Is there any sort of norm established? Is there a point where things deviate from the norm for the protagonist(s)? Do things actually get resolved? ‘Cause if so… you’re probably doing okay.

Next time… somebody recently asked me about working on multiple projects. I think that could be an interesting thing to talk about.

Until then, go write.

I almost didn’t do this one because I couldn’t figure out the exact way to phrase it, and it’s obviously an important one. Wouldn’t want someone to miss out because I used the wrong word. Plus, to be honest, I’m waaaaaaaay behind this week between a birthday weekend combined with StokerCon weekend and friends in town and a shingles vaccine that made me kind of useless for a day, so I almost didn’t do this at all.

But here I am. And here you are. So let’s do this.

Are you ready for the ultimate networking tip? You should probably get ready to write this down. It’s going to change everything for you. Bookmark this page, at the very least. Right now, before we go any further.

Damn. I could’ve had t-shirts made up. Finally an excuse for a merch store…

Anyway, ready? Here it is. My ultimate networking tip that’s going to make your attempts at networking so much easier, more efficient, and much, much more effective. Ready?

Stop trying to network.

Seriously.

Just stop.

I got to see a bunch of writer friends this past week, and—especially with StokerCon as the backdrop—I thought a bit about how we’d met. How we connected. And so often it was really mundane, non-writery things. My first real conversation with two writers I’m friends with was about Doctor Who (and weirdly enough, now that I think about it, both were Dalek-related). Another one was about fencing (the with-swords type). One time I was talking with someone and discovered we both had a connection to the weird little amusement park in my hometown. Plus so many chats about the film industry and different aspects of it.

And yeah, sometimes we’d talk books. Rarely our own, but other people’s we’d enjoyed or loved or perhaps even quietly been, y’know, less than impressed with. Or publishing. Many long talks about publishing, sales, marketing, social media, all that sort of stuff.

But the key thing is, I wasn’t trying to bond with them over any of this. It wasn’t a calculated ploy. It was just stuff that came up. Things we were interested in. They were the kind of casual conversations you’d have at someone’s cookout or a party or a random bar meet-up.

I know I’ve said this before but active networking is dead. It’s been dead for decades. Seriously, people were pushing it as the big secret to Hollywood success thirty years ago and you might notice that Hollywood’s still just as difficult to break in to. And then this belief slipped over into publishing circles and… well, I’m sure most of you know how easy it is to succeed in publishing these days.

Simple truth is active networking has never worked and never will. It just comes off an weird, intrusive, pushy, and sometimes just flat-out creepy. And I know some folks would respond by saying hey, if there’s only a one in a million chance of it happening, that’s still a chance! Someone just told me recently that’s how it was explained to them.

But here’s the thing. It’s also a 999,999 in a million chance of being labeled as weird, intrusive, pushy, or maybe creepy. So what do you think’ll happen when that one in a million editor/agent talks to any of their colleagues about this writer who just showed up in their mailbox…?

So stop networking. Right now. No more handing out business cards to every single person you meet. Please, please, please stop showing up places or randomly mailing things. Don’t seek people out just so they’ll carry you further along the path you want to walk. And I’m begging you not to give some guru money for their very exclusive networking event that will take your career to the next level.

Y’see, Timmy, don’t worry about networking. Just make friends. Friends you actually care about and respect and share interests with and like being with.

Believe me, we all need friends in this industry.

Next time, I’d like to talk about what happened last time.

Until then, go write.

How did I miss blog posts for all of September? What the hell? And how is it already October?

Well, okay… September was a bit of chaos for me. I was working on that Rashomon idea I mentioned last time, but I couldn’t quite get it to work the way I wanted it to, and it’s a delicate topic so I really wanted to stick the landing on that one. Then there was some work chaos and life chaos and then more work chaos (but this time on the better end of things).

Anyway, I’ve been working through all of this, but a few things slipped through the cracks. And this was one of the things. Sorry about that.

Of course, I just saw another author I’m acquainted with mention how she hasn’t sent out a newsletter in over a year. And another one I know writes more newsletters in a month that I do newsletters and blog post combined. And all of that on top of all of us juggling a few different writing projects.

It all comes down to what you can do, and what system lets you do it.

Which, hey, is a cool thing to talk about.

Look, even in our crumbling age of social media, there’s a lot of folks out there offering writing advice. And probably even more who—one way or another—are setting examples. Posting about today’s word count or their method for blocking out action scenes or plotting character arcs or whatever. And on one level, this is great. It’s wonderful to get a peek behind the curtain and get a glimpse of the artist’s process, right? I mean, that’s pretty much what I try to do here with the ranty writing blog and my newsletter.

At the same time, though…

I think it’s not always made clear that my process—the schedules and tricks and methods that work for me—is probably not going to be your process. Sometimes it seems like I’m saying everybody has to start the day with a two mile jog or three cups of coffee and if you haven’t written four pages before lunch, well, I guess it’s sort of cute that you treat this as a hobby. I mean, I’m successful and it’s what I do, but I mean, sure, do whatever you want….

Truth is, we’re all individual people with our own brain chemistries and life-situations. And we’re writing our own individual books. Every one of them is a little different and requiring a slightly different approach, a new angle, more of this, less of that. As I’ve said here many, many times before, what works for me won’t always work for you. And it definitely won’t work for that guy. He’s doing his own thing in his own way and… look, it’s his thing. He’s happy. We can leave him alone over there.

A big part of writing is figuring out how you like to write. What level of outlining works best for you. What level of output. What timeframe. What time of day. What location. What environment. What’s going to let you write the most, the best, the most painlessly. And it’s all unique. For each of us, and for each project.

I wrote one book, –14-, with almost no outline. I scribbled down a lot my pages late at night while my partner was conked out in the other room. But I wrote a good chunk of Paradox Bound in a coffee shop with my pods in. And big swaths of my current book– TOS if you subscribe to the newsletter—were written out on the deck in a yellow pad with a cold drink, a huge outline, and a grumpy black cat glaring at me.

But a year or two back I tried to do a comic pitch. And I’d never done one before, so I talked to a friend with a lot of comics experience about how they usually did it and followed all their tips and advice. But their method wasn’t really… me. My pitch ended up being a really stilted, awkward thing that didn’t get across half of the excitement and creepiness and awe I wanted it to. And fortunately the editor I sent it to was pretty good-natured and we had a laugh at a con later about how it wasn’t the worst comic pitch they’d ever gotten…

(fun fact– said editor later did a series of posts about what they liked to see in a comics pitch and it was much closer to what I probably would’ve done on my own if I hadn’t asked my friend how they did it)

What I’m trying to say is, every writer has their own way of doing things. How they start the day, the tricks they use to stay motivated, their daily goals, their overall strategies. Don’t get obsessed with how other people do it. Figure out how you’re going to do it. Which method works best for you? What tricks and schedules let you do the most, best work? Because that’s a huge part of getting good at this whole writing thing. Figuring out what works for you. We all do it. We stumble across methods and tips and ideas, try them out for a while, and then decide which ones work for us and which ones don’t.

And yeah… it’s going to take time to figure this out. Maybe lots of time. Sorry. There’s just no way around it. It’s not like trying on a shirt where I can immediately go “whoa, this is waaaaay too tight across my broad, muscular chest.” Think of it more like dating. Sometimes, yeah, it’s obvious ten minutes into the first date this isn’t a good match. But sometimes it might take two dates or three weeks or four months to realize what works doesn’t outweigh what, well, doesn’t work and this just isn’t sustainable.

But the plus side is you’ve still been writing and you’ve still learned something from this. And that’s something you can carry over to the next thing you work on. And the next handful of tips you happen across.

So don’t be worried about trying something new. And don’t be afraid to say “this isn’t working for me,” no matter who said it works for them. Find what works for you.

Next time, I’d like to talk about driving waaaaay past the speed limit.

Unless there’s something different you’d like me to blather on about? The comments section is so lonely…

Until then, go write.

I stumbled across this old train-of-thought document a few weeks back, which I guess I’d written out… looks like sometime early in lockdown? Maybe in response to some social media discourse of the time? I don’t know. But parts of it struck with me and I’ve been flipping it over and over in my mind, so I thought I’d share it with you.

I’m kind of 50-50 on writing instruction, for lack of a better phrase. All those articles, lectures, books, and blog posts that tell you what/ when/ how/why to write. Which probably isn’t a great thing to confess here on the ranty writing blog. But really, I think if you look at most of that stuff with a critical eye, we’d find there’s a lot of good stuff you can get out of them, but also a lot of useless stuff, depending on our particular situation. Some might even be classified as harmful.

And it struck me that part of this is that “writing instruction” covers so much stuff. I mean, we all probably had a bunch of basic writing classes in grade school, right? Everybody had those. But maybe you also had creative writing classes in high school? Not the same thing. And I had a class in college that tried to teach writing, but also another one that tried to teach you how to be a writer.

Hopefully you can see the subtle nuances in all of these. I try to make it here a lot of the time. This blog is about writing (turning the idea in your head into a finished manuscript) but overall I tend not to talk as much about writing (the life, the career, the source of 83% of my stress and worry).

So let me tell you about a few writing classes I took. One in high school, two in college.

Also probably worth mentioning up front, I’d been writing for years before that first class. It was all garbage, sure, but I’d been writing and submitting and getting professional feedback. I’d already collected a good number of rejection letters from assorted editors at Marvel and a few different fiction magazines.

Class #1 was high school. In retrospect I’d call it harmless. It was approached more as a potential hobby than anything else. The teacher gave us writing prompts, would give us simple deadlines, taught us some bare bones stuff about character and imagery and critiques. But there wasn’t any in-depth discussion of anything, art-wise or career-wise. This would’ve been spring of ‘87– no public school was going to encourage a kid to go into the arts. Writing wasn’t a real career, after all.

I stumbled across one of the stories I wrote for this a few months back. It’s a kind of fun, fairly predictable story about two little kids (almost) being tricked into letting a monster loose. I remember the picture he showed us that inspired it, too

Class #2 was junior year of college. In theory, a general creative writing class. In reality just a bad experience overall. I liked a lot of my classmates, but the instructor had very literary aspirations. He talked a lot about ART and berated anyone in class who wasn’t trying to write the great American novel. I wrote a sci-fi/ horror short story for one assignment and was told (loudly) in front of the class that it was just mass-market garbage. If I was just writing to entertain—if I wasn’t trying to change people’s lives with my words—I was just wasting everyone’s time and should probably leave.

There wasn’t much instruction in this class of any sort. It was really just a critique group where the instructor encouraged people to be as harsh as they could with said critiques. All in the interest of “making them better writers,” of course. I ran into one of my classmates a year later and she told me she’d kind of given up on writing after that…

(fun fact—the story the instructor tore apart in front of the class was called “The Albuquerque Door,” about an experimental teleportation gateway gone wrong, and I always liked it even if he thought it was nonsense. It was (eventually) the inspiration for a book…)

Class #3 was my final semester of college. It was simply amazing. I was lucky enough to spend five months with John Edgar Wideman as a professor at UMass. Yeah, we’re naming people now that it’s a really positive experience. He made me look deeper at my writing and showed me how real life could still be the foundation of the strangest characters or situations. He was also the first person to point put that sometimes writing meant not sitting at your desk. It was good to shake things up now and then. Today… you know what, let’s just go down the hall to another classroom. I think 216 is empty. Today we’re going to have class under that tree out there. Today… everyone’s 21, yes? Let’s go get a drink at the bar in the campus hotel.

I have to add Professor Wideman was also the first person to ever tell me he thought I was going to be a successful writer. Direct, flat out, no qualifiers. My writing was very good, I could do this.

So… what’s the point of this stroll through my memories?

Every one of these classes was titled “Creative Writing,” even thought there was a huge range in what the instructors were offering. And what they delivered. Some were teaching about writing, others touched on being a writer, and really none of them were about writing as a paying career. Depending on what I was looking for—or needed—they could’ve been absolutely perfect or a complete waste of my time. Or even worse, the thing that makes me decide I hate writing.

I think, when we approach any kind of writing instruction, we should be really clear about what we need and what we’re hoping to get. And if it’s possible, maybe get a better sense of what this book/ class/ site/ conference is actually offering. If I’m really invested in the art and nuance of writing, a course about how to game the social media and Amazon algorithms to promote sales probably isn’t for me. If I want to work on going from my first draft to an edited second draft, a book of writing prompts and encouragements won’t be of much use to me. And if you just want a couple people to tell you your writing isn’t horrible and you should keep at it…

Well, you definitely didn’t want to be in that junior year writing class I was in. I should’ve dropped out. You could’ve too, and we could just go encourage each other at the Bluewall.

Anyway, next time I wanted to talk a little bit about Rashomon. I seem to recall you liked that movie, yes?

Until then, go write