Category: guru

             I decided I was pretty much recovered from last night’s festivities and it was time to get back to work.  So I pulled open my current draft, glanced at the time (and date, just to make sure I hadn’t reallyoverslept), and realized it was Thursday.  The day I’m supposed to post new things.  And I know I just posted the end of the year wrap-up yesterday, and I’d said I probably wasn’t going to post anything today.

            But then, in the immortal words of Doctor Emmet Brown, I figured… what the hell.

            (see, clever and relevant pop culture reference…)

            Anyway, I’d like to continue my tradition of starting the year by explaining the ideas behind this page and what I’m trying to accomplish here.

            A better way to look at it, though, is what are you hoping to accomplish?

            This is the time when we all make a lot of promises to ourselves.  Resolutions, if you will.  We’re going to eat better, drink less, exercise more, quit smoking, visit Europe, and maybe finally get some work done on that manuscript.  Get it finished!

            Now, we all know the truth behind a lot of these resolutions.  Most people don’t follow through on them.  In fact, gyms make a ton of money off people who sign up for a one year membership in January and then stop showing up in… February.

            And we don’t think less of most of these folks when they don’t follow through.  If Wakko says he wants to lose ten pounds this year and then finds out he’s getting a promotion and he’s going to be a dad, well, his priorities are going to shift a bit.  We all get that and understand it.  Likewise, going to Europe is something Dot always wanted to do, but there’s nothing terribly urgent about it. If it doesn’t happen this year, maybe next year.

            The real question, in my mind, is why does someone want to do these things?

            Let’s say Yakko also wants to visit Europe, but he’s doing it as part of a career move.  Being able to talk knowledgeably about Edinburgh, Paris, and Berlin can make or break his promotion chances, and he wants that promotion. This may just be a vacation for Dot, but for Yakko it’s going to affect the next twenty years of his life. They’re going to approach it in very different ways.

            They should, anyway.

            I’ve already seen a ton of folks making writing resolutions.  To finish a screenplay or a book.  Maybe two books.  There were even a few daring people who wanted to get three books finished this year.

            But why?  Do I just want to write a screenplay because I’ve always wanted to try it?  Or am I hoping this could lead to a career in the film industry?  Am I writing this novel just for myself, or am I maybe looking to…well, make some money off of it?  And if so, am I looking at this as a nice hobby that will pay for some LEGO models, or is this something I’m hoping will be a full career?  Like a paying-all-the-bills career?

            I started this page many years back because I couldn’t find any good, practical writing advice anywhere online.  It was all either after-the-fact stuff about what to do with a completed manuscript or kind of vague, not-all-that-useful stuff like “read a book of poetry for inspiration, or try watercolor paints.”

            A good chunk of the advice I could find that actually pertained to the act of writing was kind of… questionable.  Always follow this structure.  Always write at least 1000 words a  day.  Don’t worry about spelling or editing.  Never use common words.  Never use said.  Name every character.  It all just seemed to be either something people were pulling out of the air or repeating after it had gone through a twenty-iterations version of the telephone game.

            And, as I mentioned, a lot of my own experience found this to be questionable.

            So that’s what I’m trying to do here—to fill a gap for people who’d like to improve their writing and move it toward something they could actually sell to a much larger audience and maybe not just… well, a hundred people they know on Facebook.

            That being said, there’ll be some harsh facts now and then. Also some very firm rules.  Some folks will argue with these (some folks always do) because some of those harsh facts and ugly truths are going to go against a lot of the “special snowflake” ideas they’ve based their writing around.  Others will be upset because some of the things I say might indicate they’re not quite as far along their career path as they thought.  Or maybe they’re not on it at all. 

            I apologize in advance if this ends up being you.  It’s nothing personal—it’s just the facts as I see them after about thirty-five years of trying to do this professionally. If it makes you feel better, there are very, very few screw-ups someone can make that I didn’t beat you to ages ago.

            I’ll also offer up some much gentler tips and advice (some of which you may have heard before as facts or rules…).  Some of these suggestions will work for you.  Some won’t.  Part of my job as a professional writer is to figure out what does and doesn’t work for me and to sort my tool chest accordingly.  If you want to be a professional, that’s part of your job, too.

            And, again, if writing’s just something you like to dabble with on weeknights because you enjoy it… cool.  Maybe you’ll find some stuff here that makes it more fun for you.  Or maybe you’ll just show up to laugh at those of us in the publishing rat race.  That’s cool, too.

            So…that’s the basic idea behind this page.

            Next time, on a semi-related note, I’d like to talk to you about your choice of friends.

            Until then, go write.

            Okay, I’ve had a couple of deadlines shift, so I’m not going to be able to talk about Clint Eastwood like I planned.  Instead, I’d like to share a few quick observations about the muse that crossed my mind a few days ago.

            There is no muse. 

            The muse is a lie. 

            There is only you. 

            Writing is work.  The muse is not going to do the work for you because the muse, as I said, is a lie.  The muse is not going to sort out that plot snarl or polish that dialogue or put down those one thousand words today.  The only person who will do that work is you.  That’s the ugly truth.

            The idea of the muse has been pulled from mythology and perpetuated by modern writing classes and gurus to excuse lazy behavior.  It’s an artistic, pseudo-intellectual scapegoat.  People who don’t feel like writing, who don’t feel like solving problems, they blame the muse.

            Waiting on the muse is another way of saying wasting time.  Every day you wait on the muse is a day someone else is writing more than you.  A day someone is getting more experience than you.  A day that someone is getting better than you.
            Stop waiting on the muse.
            Write.  If you want to write, if you want to be a writer, if you want to become a better writer, you need to write.  You’re going to write a ton of stuff and a lot of it is going to be crap.  But that’s how we get to the good stuff.  By working at it. 

            Not by waiting for the muse.

            Next time, Clint Eastwood.  For real.

            Until then, go write.

            No excuses.  Go write.

            As I often do at the start of the year, I wanted to blab on for a minute or three about what I try to accomplish with this little collection of rants and ravings.  And I think one of the best ways to accomplish that is to start off by mentioning a few things I won’t be doing here.

            First and foremost, this page isn’t about “when you’re done.”  I’m always coming across blogs and message boards where people want to know what to do with their finished manuscript.  How do I get an agent?  How do I promote myself?  How do I get an “in” with a publisher?  Should I self-publish?  How do I get blurbs?

            None of that here.

            Speaking of which, I also don’t use this page for self-promotion.  I may mention stuff that’s new or noteworthy, but that’s about it.  No sales or contests or interviews (not with me, anyway).  There’s some Amazon links on the side, yeah, but those are almost more for credentials purposes than sales.

            (Although if you want to buy them, I’ll never object to that…)

            Not to sound harsh, but this page also isn’t for inspirational ideas, mindless encouragement, or a joyous celebration of art.  I’m not really big on the special snowflake, “we can all succeed” mindset.  To be honest, I think it’s one of the most damaging things out there on the internet.  I’m also not a fan of those folks who see writing as some wild, bohemian expression of art where there are no wrong answers or directions.  They’re not far behind the special snowflake people.  If that’s the kind of “advice” you’re looking for… wow, this is so not the place you want to be.

            So, with all that out of the way… what is this place supposed to be about?

            Well, it struck me many years back that there aren’t many places online to find actual help with writing.  Not useful help, anyway.  Yeah, all that other stuff is important, but the writing is the big thing.  Nothing else matters if my writing is sub-par.  I can do tons of research on surfboards, wetsuits, skegs, surf wax, wave formation, and all that.  Thing is, if I don’t take the first step of leaving Nebraska, that’s all pointless information.  If I don’t have a decent book or script, it doesn’t matter how much work I put into self-promotion.

            I look around and I see a lot of folks making mistakes.  Sometimes it’s from inexperience.  Sometimes it’s from following bad advice.  And a few times… okay, sometimes I have no clue where people are getting their information from.  None whatsoever.

            I also see some would-be gurus offering hard-fast “rules” for writing.  Your characters must do this.  This element of your plot must unfold by this page.  And it gnaws at me because they’re just plain wrong.  There are a lot of rules in writing, but it’s not all rules.  If it was,  writing would just be mechanical fill-in-the blanks (granted, it seems like it is for some people).  One of the biggest things to realize is which rules can and can’t be ignored.  It’s finding the methods and styles that work for you within the frameworks that work for everyone else.

            That’s what this is all about.  Taking that idea in your head and fleshing it out and turning it into a few dozen or a few hundred coherent pages.  Hopefully pages other people will want to read all on their own without you begging or pleading or tricking them into it.

            Heck, maybe they’ll even pay you for those pages.

           So sometimes I point out the places where you really have to do this, but also the places where it’s entirely up to you.  Every now and then I’ll talk about a  recurring mistake I see a lot.  And most of the time I’ll just toss out a few ideas on how to work with (or work around) different issues that can come up when writing a short story or novel or screenplay.  Issues like spelling or structure or dialogue or characters or action or point of view or… well, there are a lot of them.

            Anyway, what makes me qualified to say these things and toss out these tips?

            Well, I’ve been trying to do this for over thirty years now.  I was stabbing at the keys on my mom’s old Smith-Corona before most of you ever considered writing as anything more than homework.  I tried to write my first book in third grade, then another one in seventh grade, plus two while I was in high school.  I spent years poring over different writing magazines and journals, pulling out every tip and hint and suggestion I could, and then trying all of them out (even the contradictory ones).  I took writing classes in high school and college.  I joined writing groups.  I made two attempts at the college novel, then the after-college novel, and then the “moved to California” novel.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say I probably submitted more manuscripts with paper and postage than at least half of you have done through the miracle space-age technology of email.

            And it all led somewhere.  I received personal rejection letters from editors at magazines and comic books encouraging me to try again.  One of my college writing professors, the multi-award winning novelist John Edgar Wideman, told me with absolute certainty that I was going to make it as a writer.  The first script I wrote got me a meeting with Ron Moore (of Deep Space Nine and later Battlestar Galactica).  Agents asked to look at my manuscripts.

            More to the point, people eventually started to pay me for my writing.  It’s not the only yardstick for success, granted, but I think we can all agree it’s the one that’s universally accepted and pretty much always has been.  My ability to write got me a job as an entertainment journalist.  I sold short stories to journals and anthologies.  I’ve sold half a dozen books to Permuted Press, and later to Crown Publishing, a division of Random House—and some of those books have sold very, very well and received a lot of praise (okay, so there’s a little self-promotion).  Amazon Studios hired me to develop a screenplay idea for them and write up a treatment.  For the past six years, I’ve supported myself by stringing words together in a way that pleased people enough that they paid me to keep doing it.

            So… that’s what I’m bringing to the table.

            If you’re interested, stick around.  Next time I want to talk a bit about the BFG-9000 plasma rifle in the forty-watt range and other firearms.

            Until then… go write.

            If you’ve been on the internet lately, especially to any writing-related sites, you’ve probably noticed a lot of what I like to think of as film-school mentality.  It applies to books just as much as movies, but I think it’s a mindset that really began with the spec script boom of the late eighties and early nineties.  The people who display this mentality toss around a lot guru-istic terms and can give you long, exacting lists of why your story doesn’t work, and they make it sound like they really know what they’re talking about.

            Now, I’ve talked a few times (although none recently) about criticism.  A good critic of my work is someone who’s going to be honest about what works and what doesn’t.  Someone who just says “this sucks” isn’t helping me in the slightest. They’re also going to be able to explain why those elements do or don’t work.  But not all of these reasons are going to hold, because sometimes they’re based on a faulty premise.

            Which brings us to reverse-engineering.

            Reverse engineering is when you study how a piece of technology is built, work backwards to its initial phases, then work forward in creating your own. 

            For example, let’s say a UFO crashed in New Mexico back in the ‘50s.  My crack team studies its propulsion system, figures out it works off some kind of magnetic drive, and then eventually figures out how to build their own magnetic drives for monorails and Mk VII Space Shuttles (shhhh, no one’s supposed to know about those).  That’s reverse engineering.

            It can also be something mundane.  I can buy a toy like Grimlock the Dinobot, take him apart, and isolate all the individual components.  Then I just recast those parts, reassemble them, and look at that—I’m making transforming robot dinosaurs that look and work just like the one I studied.

            Now you’ll notice I used two different machines in my examples.  One’s alien-level tech and the other’s a fairly complicated toy, but they’re both mechanical.  There’s a reason for that.  Reverse-engineering is a very mechanical process.  It relies very heavily on the fact that these processes work the same in each direction.  A to B to C, C to B to A, and then A back to B back to C.  I can’t take Grimlock apart, put the components back together again, and somehow end up with a Barbie doll.

            However…

            This isn’t true of stories.  Stories are much more organic.   They depend on a high degree of empathy between the writer and the reader. The elements of a story can go together many different ways, with many different results.  Sometimes, a story just works and no one can tell you why.

            Y’see, Timmy, unlike Grimlock, there’s lots of ways the individual elements of a story can go back together again.  Grimlock’s parts will make a robot dinosaur every time you assemble them, but story elements are fluid and mutable.  They can interact in different ways.  That’s why I can combine a lot of the same characters, plot points, and themes to get a series of radically different stories.  The Forgotten Door.  E.T.  Escape to Witch Mountain.  Starman.  Brother From Another Planet.  They’re all the same pile of story elements, but these are all very, very different stories.

            Think of it this way… let’s fall back on cooking as a parallel (as I have once or thrice before).  I want to reverse-engineer some waffles.  So if I break the waffles down I’ll find flour, sugar, milk, eggs, and some heat binding them together.  Maybe some chocolate chips, too.  But those ingredients could combine to make more than just waffles.  I could take those same ingredients and make pancakes.  Or muffins.  Or cookies.

            More to the point, these ingredients can also make lukewarm gruel.  Something watery and maybe even a bit slimy that will make you gag.  Just because they went together one way and worked, or even three ways, doesn’t mean we can make a hard fast rule that says all good things to eat have flour, sugar, and eggs in them.  Or that anything with flour, sugar, and eggs in it is good to eat.

            This is why I’m against most gurus and how-to writing books.  You can’t come up with solid rules for how to write a story by reversing the way you analyze them. Using story A to critique story B may work in a classroom, but it won’t work when I try to write a story.  Because we’re all writing different stories and we’re all writing them in our own way for our own chosen audience.  Just because a set of rules can be applied to a novel like To Kill A Mockingbird doesn’t mean a book like Carrie or A Princess of Mars is wrong for not following them.

            I’m sure most of us know someone (or several someones) who’s written a novel, screenplay, or maybe even just a short story that follows all the rules and tips from some guru or how-to writing book.  And these stories tend to be… well, kind of blah.  They’re acceptable stories, they’re just kind of mechanical.  And that’s because these stories weren’t written, they were manufactured.

            Writing just doesn’t work that way.  Analyzing stories does, but analyzing is not the same as writing.  Just because I know how to do one doesn’t mean I know how to do the other. 

            This is why I’m always a little leery when people begin to dissect and critique a story using terms like “turning points” and “redemptive moments” and “inciting incidents,” usually while giving hard page counts for when all these things musthappen in a story.  These are all guru terms that try to pin down very vague, general things that change from story to story.  The more specific those terms are, the less accurate and useful they tend to be, and when people insist on following these inaccurate rules to the letter… well, nothing good comes of it.

            Now, I’m not saying there’s nothing to be learned from studying stories or films.  That’d just be silly.  But I need to understand the difference between  a set of  general guidelines and a hard-fast formula.  I’m sorry to sound repetitive, but there is no formula for writing a good story.  None.

            Bruce Joel Rubin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Ghost (and also Deadly Friend) made the keen observation a while back that we experience stories through our gut.  That’s where every good story hits us, on one level or another.  Stories that go through our heads never work, because the minute we start analyzing we’re no longer immersed in the story.

            This works going both ways.  When I write a story, it needs to come from my gut.  It’s not meticulous or precise, it’s raw and emotional and often more organic than logical.  This is why stories that get written to a made-up formula—stories that come out of someone’s head—end up feeling like… well, the product of a formula.

            Next time… well, next time I want to talk about something I couldn’t care less about.

            Until then, put down the how-to books and go write.