Category: Suffering Map

There is no pop culture reference this week. There’s a good one on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t get it. So I just went with this.

Anyway, let me tell you things I like in stories, and a few I don’t.

I like casual dialogue, but I really dislike it when it descends into jargon or affected accents. I like exotic settings, but not alien, unrelatable ones. I like action and maybe a bit of a mystery or puzzle. I love a good twist. I prefer that the sex and violence be a bit more implied and bit less graphic. I enjoy seeing a smaller story set against a broader canvas. I like writers who use the scalpel over the sledgehammer and don’t feel the need to sink to the lowest common denominator. I love smart humor and subtle wit. I’m not much on romance novels, get really bored by inner-city “gangsta” films, and I despise pretentious material, but past that I read in almost every genre, even westerns.

What does all this have to do with your writing?

Absolutely nothing.

Seriously. Doesn’t mean a damned thing.

A bad habit most of us have when we give criticism is to mistake what we like personally in a book or film with actual corrections that need to be made. If someone gives me a story loaded with explicit violence and sex, it may not be to my taste but that doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong. I didn’t see the point to any of the Hostel or Saw movies, but in and of itself that doesn’t mean the writers were off course. These franchises have brought in several hundred million dollars, so it’s clear they appeal to quite a few people.

A far worse habit, though–the one a fair amount of fledgling writers fall into– is to accept those likes and dislikes as valid criticism. A lot of folks don’t have the confidence or experience to sift out the useful comments (“You switch tenses here and here. And you spelled misspelled wrong.”) from the more personal and subjective ones some people give (“Zombies are overdone. You should make them all Frankenstein monsters.”)

A few random examples…

I’ve mentioned my college attempt at a novel, The Suffering Map, once or thrice. Started in college, finished almost exactly ten years later. Once it was done, I showed it too a few friends and associates. Most were fairly positive with a few notes here and there. Another could have even been called pretty enthusiastic.

One, though, probably burned through two or three red pens. As he saw it, there were some major flaws in the story. The biggest was that Miguel, a former gang member, didn’t go running back to his gang for protection when things started getting scary. Later on, when things were full-on dangerous, he should have a dozen gang members with him, because he should’ve gone back earlier when things were getting scary. As I read on through his notes, it became clear that my friend had a very different idea of what direction my story should’ve gone in. What the story was didn’t interest him at all–he was critiquing it based off what it thought it should be. The further I read, the harsher his comments got because the story was (as he saw it) going more and more off track. About twenty or so pages before the end he scribbled a note that he’d stopped reading because I’d just gotten everything wrong.

Story the second…

A friend of mine was visiting L.A. a while back to pitch a screenplay he’d been working on. It was a dark crime drama that aimed very high. The mysteries unfolded slowly and some weren’t fully spelled out for the audience. Some motives remained murky. In the draft he showed me, even the end was a bit vague (although I think he tightened it up later). A very nice story, but definitely not one for the mass market.

I tossed out the idea of a frame. Perhaps the film could begin at the climactic stand-off moment, the hero’s decision, then jump back to “three days earlier” to show us the events that led up to that stand off. It would begin with a bang (a bruised and battered man held at gunpoint and told to make a choice) to draw the audience in, then settle down to tell the story once they had that hook in their mouths, so to speak.

He considered it overnight and told me the next day that he’d decided against the frame. He had his story and he didn’t want to change how it was being told. If someone didn’t like it–no big deal. Odds are there’d be someone else who would. I agreed with him and that was it–we moved on to talking about a series of magazine articles I’d been working on.

And if I wanted to open a real can of worms, I could bring up LOST as story the third and talk about the fair share of people who didn’t like the ending. But we’d probably end up getting sidetracked into time-travel debates and mysteries vs. resolutions and stuff like that. So I’ll plant that seed in your mind, but we won’t go there…

Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day, you’re the one writing the story. Just because someone doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. You need to be telling the story you want to tell.

Now, I know this may sound a bit contradictory to some things I’ve said before, but it isn’t. There’s a bunch of stuff you must do a certain way in your writing, and you must get these thing right. Things like spelling, grammar, believable characters, logical structure, and so on.

However, the writing process is entirely your choice. You don’t have to outline or notecard or write beat sheets or anything if you don’t want to. Feel free to start on page one with no clue what’s going to happen at the end of your story. How you write is up to you.

Likewise, what you choose to write about is your choice. And no matter what anyone tries to tell you, your choice can’t be wrong because… well… it’s your choice. You can’t be wrong for wanting to write about zombies or gothic romances or investment bankers any more than I can be wrong for liking Almond Joy bars, pizza, and the end of LOST.

Keep in mind, I’m still not saying anyone will want to buy your story. Or even read it. Being true to your vision does not always and immediately equate to a contract and money in the bank. Heck, there’s always that chance your story could be complete crap (God knows some of mine have been). But it’s still your story. If you’re trying to meet someone else’s expectations and desires, your writing is going to feel forced and fake.

And yes, it will show.

Next time, I’d like to speak with you about communicating via interlobal trans-psion pulses, if Grolthaxia is willing.

Until then, go write.

A multi-purpose title, as will hopefully become clear.

Submitted for your approval is one Theresa Cano. Theresa was a character in the early drafts of The Suffering Map, my first solid attempt at a novel. She’s a young woman who works as a cleaning lady in San Diego to pay for her night courses in computer engineering. Theresa’s going to build the first thinking computer, you see. As it turns out, one of Theresa’s regular employers is an antique store owner named Lois Antanello. Lois is kind of an old bitch, to be honest (she is one of the lesser villians of the book), but she pays well so Theresa bites her tongue when Lois snidely refers to her “immigrant accent.” Theresa has no accent, you see, because her family’s been living (legally) in southern California for about fifty years longer than the Antanellos, who showed up just after World War II. As it happens in the story, Theresa is working there in the antique shop one day when Lois gets a disturbing phone call from her namesake, her Uncle Louis, who is, as some folks might say, a very bad man.

Keep all that in mind. We’ll be getting back to Theresa in a bit.

Names and descriptions are a kind of shorthand for readers. They let the readers know this person is important. They could be the protagonist’s best friend, an old lover, or an old rival. Maybe we’re supposed to note the color of their eyes or just remember them when their dead body shows up fifty pages from now. We don’t know yet why they’re important because the story’s just beginning. But when the writer takes the time to give us someone’s name and what they look like, that’s a sign to us we need to remember this person. They’re an actual character.

As such, a horrible mistake beginning writers tend to make is when they name and describe everyone. Every single person on the page gets a name, age, body type, ethnicity, and a quick (or not so quick) personal history. This is great for your main character, but it really sucks for the waitress who’s just saying “your drink, sir,” and putting a glass on the table.

The problem is that naming everyone clutters the story with characters. Yes, characters are great and they really make your writing. You can’t have good writing without good characters. However, pointless characters just drag on a story. As the reader, I’m trying to keep track of the important people and getting bombarded with the unimportant ones. An excess of characters is like that lady on the sinking ship who keeps insisting she needs to bring all fifty items of luggage into the lifeboat. All we really need to get moving is to get her in the lifeboat, but as long as she’s taking her time with hatboxes, makeup cases, and steamer trunks we’re not going anywhere.

Did you catch that? The sentence where I listed out all the types of luggage was kind of clumsy, wasn’t it? Because we don’t need to know all that. Your mind trips over it because, as an experienced reader, you instinctively know it’s not that relevant.

In his book Creating Short Fiction (check out the carousel at the bottom of the page) Damon Knight explains that a fact we don’t know is information, but a fact we already know is just noise. I’d add to that by saying a fact we don’t need to know is also noise, it just takes a bit longer to recognize it.

This mistake is lethal in scripts. Would you spend a full paragraph describing that waitress in so much detail in a novel? Then why would you do it in a screenplay, where the object is to make your writing as lean and tight as possible? Think about it. One hundred and fifty words spent on the hopes and dreams and legs of the cute waitress is 150 words you don’t get to spend on your main character. Or on that climactic action scene. So why waste those words on someone who doesn’t matter? There’s a reason people in film production refer to those folks as “background” or “extras,” and not as cast members. If we know she’s a cute waitress, that’s all we need to know.

Can you imagine reading the lobby scene in The Matrix if every person was named and described? The four cops at the metal detector when Neo and Trinity walk in. The two dozen guards who come filing out into the lobby. The whole scene would drag like nobody’s business. It’d be four pages of description before Neo even pulled out his second set of guns. Sure, maybe those guys have wives, kids, rich lives, and a lot of that, but for the purposes of this story they’re just there to catch a lot of bullets and a few kicks from Trinity. The screenwriters of The Matrix knew that none of those guys mattered, which is why that scene is barely half a page long.

And, yes, I used to do this myself. Remember Theresa? She existed for no other purpose but to overhear the start of a phone conversation. We never saw her before. We never saw her again. When I removed her from The Suffering Map it didn’t even cause a ripple. She was nothing more than a clever way to get into the scene and fill an extra two pages. Once I realized that, I knew she had to go.

It’s not just excess characters, though. Any decription can be rich and lush and vivid, but what it will be, no question, is a pause in the story. A big description means a big pause and a big pause gives me time to wonder if I should be doing the laundry rather than reading. Do we need to know exactly what this apartment looks like? Every detail of how Yakko is dressed? Each line and panel and rivet of that armored exo-skeleton? The readers are going to fill in a lot of that for themselves, so if you’re spending time doing it–especially on elements that have no real bearing on the story–you’re just shooting your writing in the foot.

Now some folks might argue that such elaborate descriptions of every character, major and minor, is what makes writing great. To a small extent, they are right. To a far larger extent, they’re wanking off. Leonardo wasn’t scared of painting empty space when it was needed. Shakespeare knew sometimes a soldier was just a soldier and a crowd didn’t need to be anything more than a crowd. If you think you’ve got a better sense of art than them, knock yourself out.

When you write, make sure you’re focused on the foreground, and not spending your time and energy and pages on those distracting background elements.

Next week, something a bit more definitive. I’m going to prattle on something the reader should never, ever see in your writing.

Until then, go write.

Pop culture reference. It’s been a while.

So, first up, I have to do that awful self-promotion thing. Sorry. If you don’t want to see me stoop to shameless commercialism, skip ahead to the paragraph after next.

Over on the side bar, you’ll notice a new addition. The Amazon link for Ex-Heroes, my new novel which came out earlier this week. It’s a story about superheroes battling the zombie apocalypse. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll have a lot of fun. If you’re not, it might change your mind and you’ll still have fun. If nothing else, you’ll be able to go back over the rant blog here and understand some of the references I’ve made to this book over the past year and a half or so. You can also hop over to Facebook and join my fan page to get updates on various writing projects, interviews, and the like.

See? Told you it was shameless.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled rant about writing…

A few years back I got to speak with a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell She tossed out an interesting little statistic–one I think has probably expanded in recent years. According to her, out of every 100 people who call themselves writers, only one of them will ever actually finish a project.

One out of a hundred. That was five years ago. I’d be tempted to say it’s probably closer to one in 200 these days. What, with the number of people starting serial novels on the web and such.

By an astonishing coincidence, the number of people who succeed at writing is a somewhat smaller percentage than that. According to Drusilla, it was one out of ten of those folks who completed a manuscript. I think that number’s probably shrunk a bit, too, but not by any more than the other one’s expanded. Maybe one out of twenty or so. I don’t have any hard numbers to back it up, but I have a couple of really solid hunches and chains-of-logic I can share if anyone really wants to see them.

As I mentioned above, a lot of people have trouble finishing stuff. More than 99% of the people who like to say they’re writers never do. There are a couple different reasons for this.

The most common one, of course, is real life. We meet someone who demands more of our time. Something unexpected comes up. Work wants a little more out of us. Sometimes it’s just impossible to give writing the commitment it needs

Some people use it as a sort of fail-safe excuse. Until I finish it I can’t submit it or show it to anyone, and as long as no one sees my writing it can’t be rejected or criticized. So, consciously or not, some people come up with various excuses never to finish anything.

And then there are the folks who just thought it would be easy to write. I mean, anyone can write a book, right? It’s not like it’s a skill you have to learn or practice. We all learned how in grade school, fer cripes sake. These folks get a few dozen pages in and discover writing isn’t easy and it does take a commitment. Some give up quietly while others fall back on some excuse. Worse, a few of these folks actually do rush out an ending just to have it, and often get angry when this slipshod conclusion gets criticized.

I joke a lot about Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth, but here’s an ugly truth about it. I never finished it. Yeah, it was written on yellow paper and twenty-three pages is still impressive for a third-grader, but in the end it was never completed. Even when I revisited it in seventh grade and added illustrations and a shovelful of Arthurian legends. I also didn’t finish the cliché-filled sci-fi epic Piece of Eternity, a God-awful fantasy thing I’ve been trying to block for years (we’ll chalk that one up to excess hormones at puberty), my Boba Fett fan-fiction novel (long before there was such a term as fan fiction),or even the college novel I’ve mentioned a few times, The Trinity. Not one of them finished.

By an astonishing coincidence–the same one I mentioned above, in fact–not one of them sold.

The first long-form project I ever finished was a script for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called “Point of Origin.” It got me fifteen minutes in a room with Ron Moore to pitch story ideas, plus repeated invites to come up and pitch other stories at the Star Trek offices.

The first novel I finished was The Suffering Map. It got several requests from agents. Big agents, as people like to call them.

A large part of my success as a journalist is the editors know they can toss me an assignment and I will finish it on time. The fact that I’m a competent writer is a big part of it, too, of course, but a lot of it is just the simple fact that they know an article that gets assigned to me will get done by the deadline.

Y’see, Timmy, the point I’m trying to make is that no one’s going to be interested in a partial manuscript or a script fragment. You have to finish something in order to achieve any sort of success. Unless your name is King, Rowling, or Brown, you will not sell an idea to anyone. Don’t assume it’s any different in Hollywood, no matter what some vehement film professor–or film student– tells you. I keep track of script sales for a living and the last time I remember hearing of someone selling a raw idea was five years ago, when David Koepp sold his idea for the film Ghost Town. In other words, to the best of my considerable knowledge on the subject, the last time anyone at a film studio bought just an idea it was a small, indie film concept that was coming from one of the top ten money-making screenwriters in the world.

In other words, for the purposes of all of us here at the ranty blog, it doesn’t happen. You will not succeed as a writer until you finish something. It doesn’t matter that you did nine-tenths of the work and you know how it’s going to end, people want to see all of it–especially that spectacular finish.

We have to write. And we have to finish what we write. If we don’t, we’ve got nothing.

Next week, if no one suggests a new topic, there are going to be some cuts.

Until then go write.

Looks like no one’s been reading lately. That’s okay. I’m used to people not listening to me.

And now you’re probably all at Horror Realm.

Bastards.

Then again, maybe I just need to rant about better topics.

Speaking of which, we were going to discuss that ever-growing backside of yours. And when I say backside, what I really mean is backstory. They’re pretty much interchangeable, because nobody wants to look at your backstory unless it is just perfect.

A few months back there was a response here from loyal follower #11 (who has since moved on to read Craig Mazin’s very informative blog, The Artful Writer) that rather than getting tighter, he often found his manuscripts growing as he did draft after draft. The characters became more nuanced, the story filled out, and the page count went up. I’ve had this happen, too. I think it was the second or third draft of The Suffering Map that introduced Theresa, the cleaning woman who overheard many things that took place at the Memory Lane antique shop. And I’ve also mentioned police detective Barroll and his partner, Lt. Cheryl Vacha.

Y’see, Timmy, a lot of stories get bulked up on backstory, because people keep introducing stuff in draft four, eight, or fifteen and assume this is essential material simply because it’s in a later draft. After all, I said a while back that by your sixth draft you should be more or less solid, yes? So by my own words, anything in the sixth draft must be essential, right?

Wrong.

What I eventually came to realize was that these weren’t later drafts of The Suffering Map. This was still me working on the first draft. I hadn’t figured out who these people were, what their motivation was, or why they all looked at each other nervously at a mention of Uncle Louis. What I thought was refinement and polish was still just me getting the raw materials together. The serious cutting hadn’t even begun yet.

The real problem with backstory is that it means moving back, and you want your story to go forward. Every page of character history means two pages you have to write to get the story to a new point. God help you if you decide to start with ten or twenty pages of backstory, because that means you’re in the hole on page one.

Not to mention the fact that so much backstory is completely unnecessary. At least four or five of you keep reading this collection of rants even though you have no idea what my brother’s name is, the name of the first girl I kissed, or what the first story I wrote was about. Does it keep any of you from absorbing or mocking what I say here? Not at all. It’s unnecessary.

It all comes down to what the reader needs to know. I gave the example once that no one talks about Masada at any point during Raiders of the Lost Ark because that film has nothing to do with Masada. In a similar vein, we don’t need to know how Ferris Bueller got his two-tone leather jacket, what Atticus Finch’s mother was like, where Hannibal Lecter studied for his doctorate, or which mission the Colonial Marines were on before the events of Aliens.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that these aren’t interesting stories. In the hands of skilled writers, many of them would probably be very entertaining. The key thing here is all these stories were in the hands of skilled writers, and those writers chose not to include any of this. I was reading a film review a few weeks back and the critic, Nathan Rabin, made the very keen observation that stories like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings saga succeed despite their elaborate, epic backstories– not because of them. Backstory can be an amazing, powerful thing if it’s used at the right time and in the right quantities.

If it helps, think of being a writer like being a bodybuilder. One of the skills of being a competitive bodybuilder is to develop all of your muscle groups equally. You can’t ignore your shoulders while you do constant abdominal work, and your legs will suffer if you focus too much on your arms. More to the point, we’ve all seen the people with the unusual physiques who do these unbalanced workouts. The folks whose arms hang away from their bodies or whose shoulders always hunch forward. The ones with no neck. These people developed one muscle group so much it overpowers others and distorts the overall image. They’re phenomenal muscles, don’t get me wrong , and they could probably crush my flimsy writer hands with… well, whatever part of their anatomy you picture we’re talking about… but they fail as bodybuilders because they’ve developed things in the wrong proportion.

If Mr. Berenson the grade school teacher suddenly displays an amazing aptitude for wiping out ninjas and hijackers with nothing but a stapler and his bare hands, it might be worth mentioning he spent seven years in the Special Forces and how he ended up teaching kids the right way to use an apostrophe. However, if the PTA meeting got snowed in and they’re just sitting around waiting for a plow, telling that same story is now just a bit of excess padding.

There is a flipside to this, of course. To stick with the bodybuilder analogy, it’s when the writer doesn’t put in anything and the characters are left looking like anorexics. The readers are left wondering who all these characters are, why this action is happening, and why everyone speaks cryptically about “The Omega.”

Your characters need a backstory, believe me. It has to be there, and you as the writer should know it backward and forward. But that doesn’t mean you need to tell all of that backstory and nuance to the reader. A lot of it’s going to be irrelevant. Some of it you’re going to want to keep shrouded in mystery.

And, yes, some of it you’re going to need to tell.

Next time, it struck me that I’ve been ranting for ages about stuff that goes into stories, but I’ve never really said anything about the stories themselves. So let’s hope the deadline gods are kind to me so I can pontificate about that for a bit.

Until then, go write.