Category: voice

Okay, not so much rant.

Well, no more than usual, I guess.

I try to have a running list of seven or eight topics for future blog posts. That way if nobody asks a question or something doesn’t leap out at me, I’ve got something to fall back on. One of the ways things end up on the list is that I’ll be dropping links into a post, pointing back at when I previously talked about this or that, and I’ll suddenly realize I haven’t talked about whatever it is for six or seven years.

At which point I’ll usually let out this tired sigh and think something like holy crap I’ve been doing the ranty writing blog for a long time.

Which brings us to me ranting.

No, wait. That brings us to dialogue.

Hopefully we all understand how important dialogue is, yes? It’s how we bring characters to life, making them sound and speak like real people (sort of—more on that in a moment). It’s also the absolute best way to communicate information to my readers (or any audience) about the characters, their world, or the situation they find themselves in.

Likewise, dialogue is one of the easiest, quickest ways to alienate a reader. If my characters sound forced or stilted or just… well, unnatural, it’s going to push my readers away. So it’s something I’ve got to get right.

I know! There’s so many friggin’ things I need to get right for this to all work. But this is why so many people give up and you’ve stuck with it.

Anyway, I’ve talked once or thrice recently about different aspects of dialogue—vocabulary, subtext, arguments—but it’s been a while since I did a big “here’s a dozen or so tips” rants. So what I’d like to do is toss out a bunch of general “hey, think about this” things I’ve picked up from years of screenplay reading and manuscript reading. Just little things I should to keep an eye on in my dialogue. If it’s something I’ve ranted about in a bigger way at some point, I’ll link back to it.

And, as always, not every one of these is going to apply to every situation in every book. Nobody knows your book better than you. No one. That’s why it’s up to each of us to figure out exactly how this character sounds and speaks to move my plot along, to develop their story, to keep my narrative going, and so on.

Here we go.

Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your own life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English. Our tenses don’t always match. Verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. A lot of “spoken” English can look awful on the page. And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile those words with the voice in their head. When I lean into grammar I lose that natural aspect of language in favor of the strict rules of grammar, and I end up with a lot of characters speaking in a precise, regulated manner that just doesn’t flow.

This doesn’t mean toss grammar out the window and write however you want. People still need to understand what my characters are saying and that I’ve chosen to have them speak this way. But dialogue does give us a little more freedom in how we say stuff. See?

Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar thing I just mentioned. Some folks avoid contractions because they’re trying to write correctly! But most of us use contractions in our everyday speech—even scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone. It’s just human nature to make things quick and simple. Without contractions, dialogue sounds stilted and wooden. If there’s a reason for one of my characters to speak that way, then by all means do it. If my characters are regular, native English-speaking mortals, though…

As a bonus, using contractions also drops my word count and page count. Win-win.

Transcription– Okay, some of you know I used to be a journalist and did lots and lots of interviews. One thing it taught me is, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot when they talk. We have false starts. We repeat phrases. We trail off. We make odd noises while we try to remember words. It’s really common and normal

BUT… anyone who’s ever read a strict word-for-word transcription of a conversation (or typed up a lot of them) will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words. This kind of ultra-realistic dialogue will drive readers (and editors) nuts. Plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines. This sort of rambling can work well in actual spoken dialogue, but it’s almost always horrible on the page.

Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking. People from Maine don’t talk like people from California, people living in poverty don’t talk like billionaires, and fantasy elven princesses don’t speak like futuristic bio-engineered soldiers. My characters should be individuals, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them. If a reader can never tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.

On The Nose—If you’ve ever heard someone call dialogue “on the nose,” they mean the characters are saying exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety or subtext whatsoever. It’s the difference between “Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sex in my living room right now?” There’s no inference or implications, no innuendos or layered meanings. And the truth is, we’re always layering meaning into what we say.

Pro tip—I’d guess nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose dialogue. It just works out that way. I’d guess half the time it’s just exposition (more on that in a minute).

Humor—Here’s another human nature thing. A lot of us tend to make jokes at the worst possible times. Breakups. Office reviews. Funerals. It’s just the way we’re wired. The more serious the situation, the more imperative that release valve is for us. In fact, be honest… people who never crack jokes make us a little suspicious or uneasy. Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all, ever, it just feels wrong.

Plus, how a character jokes says something about them. Do they make non-stop raunchy jokes? Do they have a dry sense of humor? A completely awful sense of humor. Do they have any sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to tell a certain joke?

Flirting—Flirting’s like humor in that it’s almost universal. People show affection for one another. They flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers. Sometimes—like with humor—at extremely poor times. It’s not always serious, it can take different forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in a lot of casual dialogue exchanges.

Flirting is also like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue. Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings. If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, I might want to take a second look at things.

Profanity—Yet another ugly fact of human nature. We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes. We react verbally. We throw out insults. How we swear and respond to things says something about us. Phoebe doesn’t swear like Wakko, and Phoebe doesn’t swear in front of Wakko the same way she swears in front of her mother. Or maybe she does. Either way, again, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.

Fun fact—some profanity is regional. The way we swear and insult people here is not how they do it there. So this can let me give a little more depth to characters and make them a bit more unique. I mean, I had a character who often shouted “tarnation” or “pissbucket!”

Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue… Writing characters with accents. There are a handful of pros out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—a handful. The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd “language” tics will drive readers and editors nuts.

I usually show accents by picking out just one or two key words or sentence structures and making these the only words I show it with. Just a bare minimum. Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.

Dialogue Tags—I just talked about this a few months ago, so we won’t spend long on this. I don’t always need to put Yakko said, Dot replied, Wakko said, because after a point it should be apparent who’s talking. Plus with less words, dialogue gets leaner and faster. Tension builds in the exchanges because the reader isn’t getting slowed down by ongoing reminders of who’s talking.

Names—Related to those dialogue tags, if I don’t need names around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue. Pay attention the next time you’re on the phone with someone. How often do they use your name? How often do you use theirs? Heck, if my friends call my cell phone I know who it is before I even answer—and they know I know—so I usually just say “Hey, what’s up?” We don’t use our names, and we definitely don’t use them again and again in the same conversation. If I’ve got two established characters, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names. Especially if they’re the only ones there.

Monologues – Here’s another observation. Most of us don’t talk for long. We don’t give lectures or monologues. We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best. When I have big blocks of dialogue, I usually think about breaking them up. Is this person just talking to themselves (see above)? Is nobody there to interrupt them with a counterpoint or question or a random snarky comment? Is this monologue even necessary? Does it flow? Could I get all this across another way? Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four-paragraph speech? Especially if it’s the fifth or sixth four-paragraph speech…?

Cool lines— Our latest ugly truth (so much truth in this rant)—everything becomes mundane when there’s too much of it. If everybody can sink a basket with a hook shot from the three point line… sinking a basket isn’t that impressive, is it? If everyone can fly, being able to fly doesn’t seem like such a big thing, does it? As a wise supervillain once said, when everyone’s super… no one is.

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that stands out and sticks in the reader’s mind forever, but that’s the catch. They’re memorable because they stand out. They’re rare. If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, none of them are going to stand out. When everything’s turned up to eleven… well, it’s all at eleven. It’s monotone.

Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and that one teacher who just read right out of the textbook? Just raw, boring facts poured out in front of you, often without a lot of context? That’s what exposition is like to my readers.

Simple test. If a character ever gives an explanation of something the other characters in the room should already know (or my reader should know)… cut it. Seriously, just slice it out and see if it really makes that much difference. If nothing gets tripped up and things move faster…

“As you know…” – Closely related to exposition. I’ve mentioned this once or thrice before. I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with “As you know” or one of its cousins. “As you may recall…” “You all know…” Once I’ve found these, I need to delete them.

Think about it. A character saying “As you know” is openly acknowledging the people they’re talking to already know what’s about to be said. I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience. If I’ve got a rock-solid, lean-and-mean manuscript, I might be able to get away with doing this once. Just once. Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.

Listen to It—You may have seen the suggestion to read your manuscript out loud to help you see how things flow. Personally, I think this works great for catching errors, but not as good for catching dialogue issues. Since I wrote these lines, so I know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey. When I read them aloud, there’s a chance I’ll be reading things that aren’t on the page, if that makes sense.

So if you’re worried about dialogue… get somebody else to read it out loud. A real person, not a text-to-voice program. Just a few pages. Let a friend or family member who doesn’t know it read it out loud and see what they do with it.

And there you have it. A big pile of tips which should help your fictional dialogue seem a little more real. Fictional-real, anyway. Not real-real.

Next time…

Holy crap! WonderCon is this week! Like, tomorrow! If you’re going to be there, I’m doing a Friday night panel called Neighborhood Nightmares, a Sunday afternoon session of The Writers Coffeehouse, and a later-Sunday autograph session. Plus I’ll probably be wandering the floor before/after those. If you’re going to be there, please stop by, say hello, ask a question or two!

Anyway… next time here, because it came up on Bluesky… I’d like to talk about twists.

Until then, go write.

I’m planning out this massive book tour for God’s Junk Drawer at the end of the year and it’s kind of freaking me out in a few ways. Once or thrice now I’ve sort of stopped and quietly shifted my attention to… something else. Anything else. Because then I don’t have to think about how I’m doing all this traveling and signing and talking in just ha ha ha ha like two months. Holy crap, it’s seriously only two months away now.

So let’s talk about something else.

Well, no, hang on. Let’s talk about that. About being a little scared and freaked out. And how it can effect us.

I think a lot of time when people say they have writer’s block, what they really mean is they’re worried that the thing they want to write just isn’t good enough. That their take on it isn’t good enough. Heck, maybe they’re not even the person who should be writing it. It’s not worth doing, especially not with everything going on in the world! Is this page, that paragraph, this sentence as good as it could be? Is this the best way to describe this? Will my writing sell, win awards, or get me mocked on TikTok?

Most of us go through this at one point or another. We start over-analyzing our work and second-guessing everything we put down. And eventually… we don’t so anything. I’ve mentioned the term paralysis by analysis before, which sums this up perfectly. We get so scared at the thought of doing the wrong thing—something that isn’t perfect—that we don’t do anything.

And it’s kind of understandable, right? None of us want to waste time writing the wrong stuff. Putting down a lot of words that we know aren’t the right ones. That’s not how real artists do it.

We’ve talked about this before, though. Not getting it perfect the first time is pretty normal for writing. I need to get past this idea my work should be flawless out of the gate and just admit my first draft isn’t going to be perfect. Maybe not the second draft, either. It’s going to need editing. Maybe lots of editing. Possibly even major rewrites. That’s just the way this whole writing goes.

Once I can admit this to myself, I can get past that block—that fear—and my productivity will go through the roof.

Another cause of writer’s block is a voice issue, or possibly an empathy issue. A lot of us tend to write the way we speak, especially when we’re just starting out. Maybe a little cleaner or clearer, but it’s not unusual for our narrative voice and character voices to use all the same words and phrases and metaphors that we do in our day to day life. It’s normal because it comes naturally. It’s us telling stories about characters who also talk like us.

But at some point—maybe early on, after a few months, maybe a few years in some cases… things stop matching up. We realize that high elf ladies of court and interdimensional aliens probably shouldn’t talk like stagehands from San Diego. They’re not going to see the world the same way a retail clerks from Amherst would. They’re going to have different vocabularies and cadences. They’re not going to sound like me.

And suddenly I’m not writing “naturally” anymore. It’s not that easy gush of words. I need to put myself in a different headspace and look at the world—even this made-up fictional world—in different ways. It takes effort! It’s work.

For some folks this becomes writers block. It’s not that they can’t write, they just can’t understand why it’s become an effort. Because writing should be glorious and effortless, yes? And if it isn’t… well, I should probably wait for the muse to return and the words to flow.

There’s one other big thing that I think can cause writer’s block. And it’s a painful one.

Sometimes people have writer’s block because they don’t have anything to write.

There’s a lot of reasons people sit down and try to write. Could be I have a clever idea, but no real story. Perhaps I just think it’ll be an easy side-hustle to make some money. Maybe I want the adoration for a finished work more than I want to… well, write something.

I know this sounds harsh, but I also know most of us—one way or another—are acquainted with someone like this. Someone who likes the idea of being a writer more than the reality of being a writer. And these folks will talk about being blocked when the truth is they just have no real interest in the act of writing. But I mean if they’re blocked… I mean, that can’t be helped, right?

You may notice one thing I haven’t mentioned is “all this crap going on in my life.” And these days… yeah, there can be a lot of it. It can feel overwhelming and exhausting and oh sweet jebus how do some people find time to write? How is he getting so much done?!?

But that’s not being blocked. That’s just being tired. It’s a self care issue. A scheduling problem. It’s reality, and we’re all living in it (well, most of us). Sometimes, we all have to put the writing aside for a while and deal with, well, life. That’s just the way it goes.

Y’see, Timmy, I don’t really believe in writer’s block. I think it’s just a big, catch-all name we throw over other problems. Fear. Inexperience. Lack of interest. It’s intimidating when it’s a vague concept, but once we break it down and actually identify it, we can address it. And deal with it.

And beat it.

<insert Rocky music here>

Oh, minor segue– if you’re in the San Diego area this Sunday, I’m filling in for Jonathan Maberry and hosting the Writers Coffeehouse at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, noon to three. It’s absolutely free, no requirements, no sign-ups, no minimums, no secret password needed. Just show up and talk about writing, publishing, and some of the weird spots where they overlap (or don’t talk and just lurk). Bring your questions and I’ll try to bring some answers. And if I don’t have them, someone else there probably will.

Next time… okay, I know people are still reading this thing, but I feel like I’m just throwing stuff out there. Much like the Coffeehouse, is there anything in particular anyone would like me to talk about or address? Just drop a comment down below. Otherwise I’ll… I don’t know, give you a top ten list or something.

Until then… go write.

Okay, so last time I talked about using said. Just plain, basic said. It’s the workhorse that makes all those other dialogue tags special and not just static on the page.

This time I kind of wanted to go the other way and talk about not using said.

In fact, let’s talk about using nothing at all.

One thing about dialogue is it’s almost always between two people. A binary system, if you will. Ninety-something percent of the time, it just goes between me and you and back to me and back to you.

Think of it like playing pickleball. Too hip? Okay, think of it like playing tennis. Except we’re just lobbing the ball back and forth and back and forth. And the ball (our dialogue) can only ever be between two players, right? Even if there’s four people on the court, right now it’s only going between me and you and me and you.

Now because of this back and forth aspect of dialogue, there’s a lot of times I can skip tags altogether. If I know it’s me then you then me then you, well, you know who speaks next, right? And who speaks after that? And then the next logical person is…? Honestly if it’s just the two of us and I speak first, there’s only one other person who can be speaking.

Tell you what. Here’s a little peek at the first chapter of God’s Junk Drawer…

———————–
Kyle moved toward the front of the bus. “Why’d you even sign up for this if you’re dumping him?”

Olivia let out a long sigh. Let her shoulders slump. “It was a surprise. He signed us both up without telling me. And I’m not dumping him.”

“Yeah?”

“No.” She finally stood up. Slung her coat into her armpit. “Dumping implies we’re in a relationship.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“He thinks you are.”

“Having sex a couple times a week isn’t a relationship. It’s just having a workout buddy you see naked sometimes.”

“So it’s not working out anymore, I guess?”
—————————

Barely any dialogue tags there at all. But it’s still pretty easy to follow, right? Back and forth, back and forth. When you got to the end, was there any confusion who got in the last word?

Even if I’ve got a bit with more than two characters in it, it’s pretty much always me to you to me to you. If someone else chimes in (or, to keep our metaphor, I knock the ball to someone else)? Then it’s me to you to me to her to me to her. Back and forth. Back and forth. Always a binary.

Sticking with our tennis metaphor just a bit longer, here’s an easy rule of thumb. If I’m sending the ball back to the same character who just sent it to me, I probably don’t need to identify them. I can skip the dialogue tag. But if someone new hits the ball, I should say who they are.

Here– let me give you one more bit from that same chapter of God’s Junk Drawer…

—————————
Olivia adjusted the backpack’s strap on her shoulder. “We should probably get going.”

Logan jerked his head at the far side of the parking lot. “I think I might hit the bathroom.”

“Better be quick,” she told him, “or we’ll have to leave you here.”

“We’re not in a rush.” Kyle shook his head. “So fucking dumb.”

Logan shot him a look. “Seriously, stop saying dumb.”

“Whatever. You both know we don’t need to be there exactly at sunset. It’s not like the universe is going anywhere.”

Olivia shrugged. “Maybe the part he wants to show us is.”
—————————

Three people talking, but when you hit that line starting with “Whatever” were you confused?

Now I’m not going to lie. This is a bit tougher to pull off. I’ve got to have a good ear for dialogue and my characters need to have a strong voice. I also need to have a good sense of timing—how long can I keep that ball in the air before I need to address who just hit it? We’ve all had that moment, right? We’re reading a long stretch of dialogue with minimal or no tags, and then there’s suddenly that jarring moment of “Wait… he’s saying this?!?” And then we work backwards up the page trying to figure out where the rhythm broke and we lost track of who was saying what.

And I won’t lie. It’s not unusual for me to get a note or two from editors or copy editors as they go through a manuscript, just checking if we need to clarify who’s speaking at a given point. It’s worth pointing out, though, that one time when they were asking for this clarification it was because they’d deleted a line of dialogue… and now the rhythm was broken. It was back and forth and back and back and forth and back. Of course it seemed confusing now.

We don’t need that many tags. Again, this isn’t true 100% of the time. Not much is when you’re writing. There’ll be times when people are arguing—maybe lots of people—and shouting over each other and I want to use more dialogue tags. Just to be safe. But these are going to be the exceptions.

So trust your tennis game. Or writing game. And see how often you don’t need to use dialogue tags.

Next time, I’d like to talk to you a bit about, well, how to deal with things. One specific thing.

Until then, go write,

Oddly enough, not a Halloween-themed post. Although… maybe it is. It’s all perspective, I guess.

Since I first started taking this whole writing thing seriously, there’s been a general mindset I’ve seen bubble to the surface once a year or so. Maybe more in some places. It’s the idea that I can’t write about X if I haven’t personally experienced X. Can’t write it well, that’s for sure. If X hasn’t been an integral part of my life at some point or another, I’m just wasting everyone’s time by trying to write about it. Definitely by putting that writing out there. It’s a version of the old “write what you know” superball that gets bounced around. If you’ve never known X, you certainly can’t write about X.

Starting out in the horror community, I’d see this again and again. The folks who’d insist it just wasn’t possible to write horror without a horrific, awful background. You want to write horror? Real horror, not this weak “vampires and demons and zombies” crap? Well you better have fought in a war and had several people killed in front of you. Or had a horribly abusive family. All your pets better be dead, and most of your friends too, and if you’re not dealing with it through life-crippling addiction to something, you’re just a goddamn tourist who has no business in this genre.

Because of this, I’d see some folks get scared off from their chosen genre. Have I experienced real, soul-wrenching love? I mean, really experienced it? Maybe I shouldn’t be writing romance. My parents loved me a lot, I get along well with my brother, and I’ve got a bunch of really cool friends. Maybe I don’t have any business writing horror. And, heck, I’ve never even killed a human being before. I guess murder mysteries really aren’t for me.

At least, that’s what notorious serial killer Sue Grafton always said.

And a friend of mine recently pointed out this is such a pervasive idea that even some readers believe it. There’s no way I could write about a character that awful unless I myself am truly that awful, right? I mean, somebody couldn’t just make that stuff up, right? If one of my characters has sex more than twice, I’m clearly a sex addict (and let’s not even talk about what their chosen sex position says about me). Heck, I think I’ve talked before the weirdness that can happen when you name a character after a family member or friend without thinking about it.

Now, before I go any further… as I mentioned above, this has all been proven wrong again and again. Seriously. Yeah, there’s definitely some horror writers out there who’ve seen some awful stuff and I’ve known one or two folks over the years who’ve written intense erotica as an outlet when, y’know, no other outlet was available. There are some action writers out there who have very intense backgrounds in the military or private security, and a few sci-fi writers with pretty solid scientific credentials.

But I also know a ton of horror writers who had really nice childhoods and now live very happy lives, without a single dismemberment or traumatic beating or other ghastly event in their past or present. I know action writers who haven’t been in a single barfight or high speed chase or gun battle. I know people with no military experience  who write very successful military books. There are more than a few sci-fi writers who haven’t traveled in time or even left earth orbit once. And I know people who write sex scenes in their books who have, if I may be so bold, fairly vanilla sex lives. At least, going off all the pictures one of them showed me. Like, insisted on showing me.

That was a really weird brunch.

Anyway…

I think all of this ties back to a few things I’ve talked about here a few times. So I thought  maybe it’d be worth mentioning a few totally valid ways we can write about things we haven’t actually experienced. For example…

Voice—A big step for all of us is the day we realize midwestern grocery store clerks don’t talk the same way as third-generation bio-apocalypse survivors. Dwarven warrior queens have a different vocabulary than techbro CEOs. And fresh-out-of-grad-school schoolteachers don’t sound the same as battle-hardened Army sergeants. And getting that voice right, knowing how she’d say this vs. how he’d say it vs. how I’d say it is a big step in our growth as writers.

Research—seriously, we live in a freakin’ golden age of resources for writers. I’ve been doing this just long enough that I remember ads in the back of magazines for small press books about what it’s really like to be a doctor or a homicide detective . Or I’d spend hours in the library trying to find pictures of Paristhat didn’t involve the Eiffel Toweror a museum. These days, if I need to know something I have access to so many sources. I can find research papers or anecdotal accounts or heck, even actual people who will answer my questions or help me find the answers, and usually tell me some other useful things if I’m paying attention.

Extrapolation— I’ve never been shot in the knee, but I’ve had the meniscus behind my kneecap rupture (and collapse again and again and again). I’ve never done super heavy drugs but I’ve been very drunk a few times. I’ve never been able to fly, but when I was a kid there was a bridge in my hometown we all used to jump off into the river. Yeah, these experiences aren’t the same, but I can use them as building points. If this registers as a six, what would a nine be like? If it felt like this for ten seconds, what would it feel like after twenty? Or thirty? I stayed conscious here but would that much short out my brain for a few seconds (from pain or pleasure or excessive introduced chemicals)? It’s a basic creativity exercise. 

Empathy—I’ve talked about empathy here a few times, and I have to say once again it’s the most important trait a writer can have. Seriously. It’s what everything here really boils down to. Being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes. I’ve never had a parent die, but I’ve had friends who did. I’ve never served in the military, but I have family who did. I’ve never been married or had kids or burned dinner when someone’s coming over I really want to impress. But I look at my friends and family, I listen to them, I take note of what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and I try to relate it to things I’ve gone through. I try to imagine how I’d feel in a similar situation, based off my own experiences. And I use some of that in stories.

In fact, let’s take this one step further and address one of the points that started this off. If I’m going to tell someone they can’t write great horror unless they’ve been through awful stuff (like I have)… well, isn’t that kind of implying I don’t have great empathy? I mean, think about it. I’m saying I can only write this because I experienced it, and I’m also admitting I can’t imagine being a person who can write it without experiencing it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that’s something I should be bragging about.

Y’see, Timmy, much like “write what you know,” this mindset assumes people can’t learn or grow or imagine anything. And if I want to be a good writer, I have to be able to do that. I can’t tell myself not to write about bank robbery until I’ve actually tried to rob a bank. Hell, where does that people who write murder mysteries? Or giant robot sci-fi? Or dark period fantasy. I mean, if you haven’t had sex with at least three people from the twelfth century, how do you expect to write medieval romance? I need to understand most writers research things, extrapolate feelings and reactions, get inside their character’s heads, and just try to have an honest sense of what someone else would feel in this situation.

Look, the truth is, if I’m doing my job right, you should feel like all my characters are real people in real situations. The janitor. The nymphomaniac barista. The half-human, reluctant cultist. The little kid with PTSD. The burned-out secret agent trying to forget most of his life. The world-ending cosmic event that they’re all tied up together in. And when we read a description of a real person, when we hear about the believable, relatable aspects of their life, it’s natural for us to assume they’re… well, real.

And the obvious real person is me, the author, telling you this story. So it’s not surprising some people think I must’ve experienced these things firsthand.

But I shouldn’t need to.

Anyway…

Next time, I want to throw a bunch of characters at the wall and see which ones stick.

Until then, go write.