How I Learned to Stop Worrying…

July 17, 2014 / 3 Comments

How I Learned to Stop Worrying…

Classic movie reference. Come on, broaden your horizons. Watch something made before 1976.

Anyway, I’d like to start today by telling a story or two. They’re examples of a problem I see crop up now and then, and one I just finished wrestling with myself. It’s one of those issues where it’s easy to either write myself into a corner or (worse yet) write something where characters are acting in an unbelievable way.

Oh, and by the way, before I forget, there’s a thermonuclear warhead in the apartment next door. Something like ten megatons, if I read the specs right. Armed and everything. Just thought you should know.

Anyway, let me tell you the first story.

In my often-referenced novel The Suffering Map (unpublished, for good reason), one of the main antagonists is Uncle Louis. Louis is an old-school mobster with a legendary temper, and he’s rather upset that someone (we’ll call him Rob) threatened his niece (who’s in her late fifties). He sends a man to rough Rob up a bit, and that man ends up dead with his body horribly mutilated. So Louis sends two men to kill Rob. They both end up dead and mutilated. And when this news reaches Louis he decides…

Well, actually, he decided to wait for three days and then go after Rob.

See, I had this whole structure of days worked out, and it turned into kind of a vicious circle. I needed three days to pass, so Louis had to wait. Which meant I needed to come up with stuff for everyone else to be doing. By the time I abandoned that structure, though, I’d grown kind of fond of the reveals and character moments I’d created. Now Louis had to wait so I’d have room for those bits, no matter how strange and out of character it seemed. It wasn’t until my fifth draft that I realized this was just dragging things and creating a huge lag in the plot.

Though not as huge as that bomb sitting next door. I looked it up. That’s almost fifty times the size of the bomb they dropped on Nagasaki. Think about that. I mean, I think it’s small compared to some missiles and such, but right here in the middle of Los Angeles that could still kill a lot of people. Millions, easy.

Anyway, back on track.

Here’s another example of what I wanted to talk about today.

A few years back a woman I knew wrote an urban fantasy story and asked me to look at it. A single mom activates a portal and she and her kids are transferred to a mystical realm. There’s some magic, some disobeyed instructions, and all three kids vanish. Invisible? Teleported? Dead? We don’t know, and Phoebe, our heroine, was desperate to find out.

Well… until she ran into the handsome barbarian chieftain, anyway. Then Phoebe became aware of just how shredded and torn her clothes were after coming through the portal… and how much skin they exposed… and how much skin the chieftain was showing. Tight, tanned, well-muscled skin, and Phoebe started wondering if there was a Mrs. Chieftain, and if not… just how prudish were people in this semi-medieval world?

Speaking of kids… Hmmmm. Sounds like one of the little kids next door is hitting the warhead with something. Maybe a hammer. Yeah, there are kids next door, too. Didn’t I mention that before? I guess one’s technically an infant and the little girl’s a toddler, but they third one is seven or eight. He’s hammer-competent.

Well, probably can’t do anything about it. At best, he might turn on the timer. If he hasn’t already.

But I’m wandering away from the point again…

Or am I…?

Y’see, Timmy, there are some threats that are just too huge for me to ignore. Either as physical threats or emotional ones. One of my children vanishing. A man in a hockey mask stalking toward me through the forest. An armed nuclear bomb.

Once I know about these things… that’s that. I can’t establish a huge threat and then ignore it. If I tell you there’s a nuclear bomb next door, that has to be the priority. Not being polite. Not property laws. Not getting a good night’s sleep and dealing with it in the morning.

In my new book, the characters found out about an immediate global threat. Not a ten years down the road thing—this time tomorrow half the planet will be dead and by the weekend all of it will be. And it put me in an awkward spot when they did, because at that point nothing else could matter. Nothing. Once they realized how big that threat was, they couldn’t be thinking about anything except taking care of it. Yeah, they could have little asides or chuckles, but nothing that distracted them.

It forced me to restructure the end of my story. But it also made the end much stronger. And nobody’s standing around wondering about that bomb next door.

Alas, I’m going to miss next week because of the San Diego ComicCon. Please swing by the Random House area (technically the Crown/Broadway booth) on Friday after 2:00, say “hullo,” and call me a talentless hack in front of important people.
When I come back, odds are I’m going to be very fatigued.

Until then, go write.

August 15, 2013

Admissions Board

This is going to be one of those posts that sounds a bit harsh at first, but hopefully you’ll stick through ‘till the end before posting those angry responses. If you’re feeling a bit thin-skinned, maybe you should come back next week.

Writing is tough. It’s hard work. I know this, because I do it for a living. When someone tells me how easy and wonderful and fun writing is, I’m often tempted to point out that they’re probably doing something wrong.

Instead, I bite my tongue and scribble notes for a ranty blog post or two.

There was a point when I thought writing was easy and fun. To be blunt, that was back when I wasn’t taking it seriously. My plots were either contrived or derivative (some might say that hasn’t changed). My characterization was weak and my motives were… well, whatever they needed to be at the moment to make that weak plot move along. I rarely edited.

Perhaps most important of all… I thought I was a literary genius. My stories didn’t just deserve Stokers and Hugos, mind you. Once I got around to finishing them and sending them out, they were going to get Pulitzers and Nobels.

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

That being said…

My writing sucks—This sounds harsh, yeah, but it needs to be. Too many beginning writers just can’t get past the idea that something they wrote isn’t good. I know I couldn’t. It’s just against human nature to spend hours on something and then tell yourself you just wasted a bunch of time. Why would I write something I couldn’t sell? Obviously I wouldn’t, so my latest project must deserve a six-figure advance.

The problem here is the learning curve. None of us like to be the inexperienced rookie, but the fact is it’s where everyone starts. Surgeons, chefs, pilots, astronomers, mechanics… and writers. Oh, there are a few gifted amateurs out there, yeah—very, very few—but the vast majority of us have to work at something to get good at it.

You noticed I said “us,” right? Lots of people think of Ex-Heroes as my first novel, but it wasn’t. There was Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth (two versions), a God-awful sci-fi novel called A Piece of Eternity, some Star Wars and Doctor Who fan fic, a puberty-fuelled fantasy novel (which I haven’t admitted to in twenty years or so), The Werewolf Detective of Newbury Street, The Trinity, The Suffering Map, about half of a novel called Mouth… and thenEx-Heroes. And I can tell you without question that most of those really sucked. It doesn’t mean I didn’t try to sell some of them (we’ll get to that in a minute), but I couldn’t improve as a writer until I accepted that I needed to improve.

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

The freeing moment was when I realized my first draft was always going to suck, and that’s okay. Everyone’s first draft sucks. Everyone has to go back and rework stuff. It’s the nature of the beast. With those expectations gone, it became much easier for me to finish a first draft, which is essential if I ever wanted to get to a second draft, and a third draft, and maybe even a sale.

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

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

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

Which, as I also mentioned above, sucks.

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

The Suffering Map was where I first started to realize things need to be cut. I’d overwritten—which is fine in a first draft as long as you admit it in later drafts. I had too many characters, too much detail, subplots that had grown too big, character arcs that became too complex. It took a while, but I made huge cuts to the book. It had to be done. Heck, with one of my more recent ones, 14, I needed to cut over 20,000 words. That’s a hundred pages in standard manuscript format. All cut.

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

But when that first one came from Jim Shooter at Marvel… I was crushed. Devastated. How could he not like my story? It was a full page! It was typed! I even included a rendering of a cover suggestion in brilliant colored pencil. It took me weeks—whole weeks, plural—to work up my courage to try again, and then he shot that one down, too.

Granted, I was about eleven, and those stories were really awful. But even good stuff gets rejected. Heck, even with the list of credits I’ve got now, the last two short stories I sent out were rejected. Editors and publishers are people too, and not everything is going to appeal to everyone. I came to accept being rejected once I realized it wasn’t some personal attack (okay, once it was…), just a person who didn’t connect with my story for some reason.

And, sometimes, because my stories sucked.

If I can admit some of these things to myself, it can only make me a better, stronger writer. It’s not a flaw or a weakness. In fact, if I look at the above statements and immediately think “Well, yeah, but I don’t…,” it’s probably a good sign I’m in denial about some things.

And that won’t get me anywhere.

Next time, I’d like to say a few clever words about saying the word said.

Until then, go write.

drafts editing exceptions Lizard Men marvel Shooter Suffering Map tips

March 22, 2012 / 1 Comment

What is ‘Real’? How do You Define ‘Real’?

Pop culture reference. Easy one, cause it’s been awhile…

So, one thing we all strive for in our writing is realism. We want our characters to feel real. We want our dialogue to sound real. We want our settings to have that level of detail that only comes from authentic knowledge and experience.

To do this, writers will people watch and eavesdrop and travel to obscure places just to get an idea of what the air smells like. They’ll labor over the dialogue to make it as real as possible. They’ll add random events to their narrative to give that sense of uncaring fate. They will make their story as close to reality as possible.

Here’s the problem, though…

Nobody wants reality.

Not real reality, anyway. Oh, they may say they do, but that’s kind of a lie. Most people want fictional reality. They want clean dialogue. They want characters who win (maybe not cheerfully or without scars, but they do win). They want things to make sense.

Allow me to explain.

When people talk in reality, they make false starts and pause a lot and trip over their words. They can drone on for several minutes at a time. They talk over each other. If you’ve ever looked at an unedited transcription of a conversation, you know that real dialogue is the worst possible thing for fiction. People would claw their eyes out, and everything would take forever to say. When I used to interview writers for articles, it was just understood that I was going to clean up their words a bit to eliminate all that stuff. It would just be incredibly distracting in an article.

So fiction writers don’t write real dialogue. They write “real” dialogue, lines that have a certain verisimilitude, if I may be so bold, which appeals to people. They get cleaned up and tightened and measured out. These are the lines that make readers say “Wow, her dialogue felt so real, like she was someone I’d meet on the street.” That’s what we all want, right?

Did you catch that, by the way? The dialogue wasn’t real—it felt real. Think of how often things get phrased that way. An open (and often unconscious) admission that this isn’t how real people talk. But it feels like how real people should talk.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve made this mistake. I copied real people’s speech patterns into The Suffering Map, then had two different editors mention that as a specific reason I was being rejected. It didn’t matter that it was real dialogue, because it wasn’t “real” dialogue.

Make sense?

On a similar note, odd, unbelievable stuff happens in reality all the time. There are amazing coincidences. Lucky breaks. Unexplained things just happen. Heck, people die in freak accidents and that’s it. Story’s over, no matter how many things are left unresolved.

I’ve interviewed several screenwriters who did biopics or “based on true events” movies, and one thing most of them talked about was the material they didn’t use. The events that were so ludicrous people just wouldn’t believe them. A few different folks have said that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to be believable, and these writers realized that. So they removed true events that would’ve made their story seem silly or implausible.

Here’s another example I’ve used before (and will continue to use again)– Vesna Vulovic. She was a flight attendant back in the ‘70s (which technically means she was a stewardess) on a flight that was bombed by terrorists. Vesna fell six milesthrough the air and survived. Not in the sense of held alive in an iron lung on life support, mind you—she’s out there today walking, talking, having drinks with friends and laughing about things. She wasn’t even in the hospital for three months.

Is that the kind of event I should include in my realistic fiction? Of course not. Nobody would believe that.

Should I kill my characters at random, leaving their arc unfinished and their secrets unrevealed? Will readers applaud me for my daring and realistic writing? Not a chance. When I’m a writer I’m the God of my world, and if something doesn’t serve a greater purpose I’m a piss-poor god at best.

Y’see, Timmy, reality is a messy thing. Every aspect of it. And I don’t want my writing to be messy. I want it to be clean and polished and perfect.

Even when I’m making it “real.”

Next time… well, I’m on a diet right now, and it’s kind of gnawing at me. So I’ll probably end up talking about that.

Until then, go write.

character dialogue real Suffering Map

March 16, 2012 / 5 Comments

What Lies Beneath

First off, a little poll for all of you reading this. I’ve been thinking of taking a bunch of the posts here and making a condensed, somewhat more organized document that might pass as a book on writing. If I put something like that out in ebook format for $1.99 or so, would anyone have any interest in such a thing? I’m also thinking of pairing it with The Suffering Map, released as a cautionary tale about first novels, probably for just a buck. Does any of that sound vaguely interesting to anyone? Let me know in the comments section.

Now, on to a long-overdue rant about dialogue.

I’ve said here once or twice or thrice that dialogue can make or break a story. That’s because dialogue is how we learn about the characters, and they’re what the story’s all about. So if my dialogue is good, it can lift an okay story that much higher. If it’s bad, it can sink even the most Pulitzer-worthy piece.

A key element in great dialogue is subtext. A couple years back I got to interview actor Chris Eigeman about his screenwriting/ directing debut, and he told me a wonderful quote by Edith Wharton, which I’m now about to butcher for you because I’m quoting someone who quoted a quote to me. According to Wharton, dialogue is the foam at the tip of a wave. The wave—all the stuff under the foam and supporting it—is your character, their backstory, their motivation, and everything going on in the story. But no matter how big that wave is, the thing we all see–the thing that always draws our eye—is that foam.

On the flipside of that, most bad dialogue has no subtext. To stick with our previous imagery, if good dialogue is foam on the tip of a wave, bad dialogue is a stagnant tidepool with no motion and no life in it. Not all of it mind you—some people are very creative and unique in their badness. But I’d say a good sixty or seventy percent of the awful stuff I’ve seen would vanish if people weren’t so on the nose with their writing.

I’ve mentioned that phrase a few times here, and some of you may have seen it on feedback forms (for other people’s manuscripts, of course). On the nose dialogue is when someone says precisely what they mean or what they’re doing without any subtlety or characterization whatsoever. It comes across as flat because… well, there’s no depth to it. There’s nothing implied, no innuendoes, no meaning at all past the words themselves.

If you think about it, most of us are subtle in real life. We prefer to imply things rather than say them aloud, and when we do speak a lot of us skirt around the things we’re trying to say. We’re inherently big on subtext and body language, and people who are too straightforward kind of creep us out. Consider some recent conversations you’ve had. Think about what you said vs. what you meant.

There was a wonderful show on years ago called Keen Eddie, where the Human Target was forced into sharing a London apartment with the Baroness from that god-awful G.I. Joe movie. At least once an episode they’d shout “I hate you!” “I hate you, too!” back and forth at each other, and while it was pretty dead-on the first few times, it soon became more of a habit with them. Eventually, even though they kept using the same phrase, it became pretty clear they didn’t hate each other at all, and were using “hate” instead of another word.

And then Fox cancelled Keen Eddie. Because that’s how things go when your show’s on Fox.

But I digress.

Check out this example.

“Hey, fellas,” said Wakko, “what do you think of my new painting?” He turned the easel to his brother and sister.

“It’s very, ummm… colorful,” said Dot after a few moments.

“Yeah,” said Yakko. “Yeah, I was going to go with colorful, too.”

Now, considering that I didn’t really describe it at all, do you think Wakko’s painting is any good? Do you think Dot and Yakko like it? Probably not, because most of us pick up on little things. There was that pause before they answered, and the kind of stammer to Dot’s response. We’ve all been in this situation, and we all understand the little white lies (or maybe big, whopping lies, depending on the painting) that are being told here.

Here’s a few more examples of statements with subtext…

“Rico, you’re like family to me. That’s why I’ve chosen you for this job, because I know you won’t disappoint me.”

“Actually, the partners and I have talked about it, David, and we feel you’d probably be more comfortable in a different position—something with an easier pace.”

“Hey, it’s not too late. Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?”

There’s a hidden message to each of these statements, and again it’s one most of you probably picked up on immediately, even out of context. This is the other thing about subtext—it lets the reader feel smart. When my characters are spelling out every single thing they’re thinking and doing, it comes across like I’m over-simplifying things for my audience. Another way to say “over-simplifying,” of course, is “dumbing down,” and we all love it when people think they need to dumb stuff down for us, right…?

I’m not saying every single line has to be packed with subtext, mind you. That kind of writing becomes impenetrable because it requires too much effort on the part of the reader. As I said above, though, consider how often your own words are layered in real life.

Because when your characters start talking like real people, that’s when they become real people.

Speaking of which, next time I wanted to talk real quick about reality vs. reality.

Until then, go write.

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