“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.” — Raymond Chandler
I don’t give much in the way of actual writing advice, for two reasons.
You kind of have to figure that stuff out for yourself, or it won’t stick.
I don’t actually pay that much attention to writing advice. The only ‘writing book’ I’ve ever finished is On Writing, and I have to reread it periodically, because what I don’t already know didn’t stick.
Also: I give bad advice, and you shouldn’t listen to me. (So that’s three reasons.)
Also also: I’m not sure it makes things that much better. Okay, yes: I avoid adverbs and prepositional phrases absolutely as much as I can, within reason. (You see what I did there?) I try to use punctuation correctly and I check my Strunk and White when I’m not sure. That’s just mechanics, though; proper tool use.
But any discussion on style and theme and premise and that sorta stuff? Masturbatory, is what that is. (IMO, YMMV, Offer Void, et cetera.)
‘Style’ is ‘how you write’, which (a) you already have and (b) is changing throughout your life anyway so don’t worry about it. It’s like thinking really hard about your socks every time you take a step.
Theme and premise? Hell if I know.
Theme and premise are the kinds of things that make people ask “What were you trying to say when you first introduced the duplicitous character, standing in front of a building with a facade?” (At which point I’m thinking: “I dunno… it’s a shitty little street. Shitty buildings on shitty streets have facades.”)
Thinking about theme and premise while you’re in the middle of your first draft (to bleed out my analogy even further) is like looking through a telescope to see where you’re going on your walk: you fall down a lot and you don’t see a goddamn thing where you actually are.
Anyway: that kind of stuff will come out unconsciously in little hints and ghosts as you go through the first draft. Revisions and 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th) drafts find those little ghosts and hints and strengthen them into recurring themes and (if you’re inclined toward it) A Message. They are not things you should dwell on during initial writing.
Now, all that stuff up above could possibly be mistaken for Writing Advice, but it isn’t. I’m not telling you about something you should do, I’m telling about shit you shouldn’t do. Should not, in fact, even think about.
Why do I even mention it, then?
Because today is Day Five, and sometime either today or tomorrow you’re going kind of get your bearings on the story — to get a sense of what’s actually happening. Your characters will stop flailing around quite so much and actually Set Out To Do Something.
And you might catch the barest hint of something that looks like a Theme. (Or a Premise, maybe; fuck if I can tell em apart.)
And in seeing that strange beast for the first time this month, you might feel compelled to pursue it.
Do not. Just keep piling on the words. Keep telling the story.
Don’t get fancy. Don’t have a style. Just write things the way you write things.
Let’s go back to the righteous Reverend Chandler.
“Throw up into your typewriter every morning.” – Raymond Chandler
Babble on, guys. Build the teetering, leaning, unstable tower. When you hit that point (and you will) where you realize that – maybe – you know what shape the thing should be when it’s done, don’t freak out. Don’t let on; don’t give it away.
“You fail only if you stop writing.” – Ray Bradbury
All right. Let me get this key bit out of the way:
Do not take my writing advice.
Have I published some stuff? Yeah. Have I written stuff and gotten paid for it? Yeah. Have I ‘found’ an agent who was willing to represent my longer work? Again, yeah.
But I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a total effing noob.
But NaNoWriMo? My people, I can do NaNoWriMo. To quote Samuel L. “Bad Motherfucker” Jackson, I’m the NaNoWriMo Foot fuckin’ Master.
One year, I got food poisoning and spent three days in intensive care. And finished. Another year, I did it with fifty people reading and commenting and bitching about each day’s output. And finished. Once, I started eight days late, landscaped my front yard, tiled my kitchen and master bath, and found out I was gonna be a daddy. And finished. I’ve done it as a big group project. Twice. I did one with a 3 year old underfoot. And finished.
Point is, I can’t give you much advice on writing (and what I can give you, you should fucking well ignore), but I know how to do this NaNoWriMo thing (and maybe have something decent afterwards), and I’d like to share a few tips on the how.
Just a few. Like… five, maybe. Let’s go for five.
1. When you’re writing, write
“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” – E.L. Doctorow
Here’s the thing. You aren’t going to have much time every day to write, unless you quit your job or something. (Pro tip: don’t quit your job.) What that means is when you get 20 minutes to write, you need to write. Don’t Google facts to fill in your story with. Don’t look up a n y t h i n g on Wikipedia. Stay the fuck away from tvtropes.org.
(Jesus, I just lost like half of you to tvtropes.org, didn’t I? Dammit. There’s half your day gone, and you people are going to blame me.)
If you think you need a fact in the story, make something up. If you don’t want to do that, then put some kind of flag in the text that tells you to come back LATER and fill in the fact. I use [these things].
“Are you fucking kidding me, Tom? It’s going to take us [fact here] days just to get to the base camp — no way will the time-lemurs survive.”
Like that. Except not crappy. Then you can just come back later and do a search for ‘[‘ or ‘]’, and find all the places where you need to fill stuff in.
The point is, if you have like a half-hour to get some words down right now, you’d better get some words down.
2. Four bites, every day
Roger Zelazny said:
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you’re going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You’re going to say “Oh boy!” and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say “Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That’s 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn’t goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I’ve moved as far as I have.
Dave quotes this bit quite a bit – he’s got a system based around this. Me, I just quote it to remember a few things:
Zelazny was cool.
Writing is work.
You have to do the work.
You can do the work a little at a time.
Zelazny was cool.
Listen. I am possibly the worst worker ever in the history of working. I screw around all. the. damn. time. Poke at a presentation for 20 minutes. Check GMail. Poke another ten minutes. Read the news reader. Answer two emails. Check on Twitter. Repeat. One of my bosses told me once that he’d never met anyone in his life that screwed around so much and still got more shit done than everyone else.
That last bit is key. Somehow, I still get the work done. I do that by taking small bites all day long. There’s an old saying about learning things that goes something like “you can’t eat an elephant all at once, but you can eat him one bite at a time.” That’s fine for learning, but it’s slightly different for writing.
I’m not trying to eat an elephant; I’m trying to kill that dirty bastard, and all I have are my bare hands and my teeth, so I bite the son of a bitch to death.
Takes me about a month.
Right? So make sure you find enough time to take, as per Zelazny, four bites a day. Four spots in each day when you can write for at about 30 minutes. Then, as I already said, make sure you WRITE.
Write rhymes with bite, according to my daughter. This is no coincidence.
3. Moods are for sex. Writing ain’t sex.
I don’t know how to say this any better. You need to be at your special table at your special coffee shop with your lucky cup and your specially-made NaNoWriMo iPod mix playing, so you can write?
That’s… special.
Screw that. Screw it right in the ear. Write EVERYWHERE. Write when you’ve got five minutes, waiting at Great Clips. I don’t care if it’s three goddamn words. I don’t care if it wouldn’t fill up a post on Twitter. Get em down.
I know this doesn’t entirely jive with the four bites a day advice. That’s because I’m inconsistent and what works one day doesn’t always work the next day, so you basically have to be ready to jump at the chance to write something down at any time.
Four bites is a minimum, but it isn’t like any of us need to be told how to snack between meals, is it?
Never stop at the end of the chapter
You want to stop each writing bite in the middle of the action or in the middle of whatever is going on. Stop at a cliffhanger if you have to, but better yet take a break in the middle of a conversation or just as someone pulls a trigger. Cory Doctorow suggests stopping right in mid sentence, but that’s him — he does a lot of shit that maybe only works for him. (Until four years later, when everyone starts doing it and realizes it’s no big deal and who the hell does this Doctorow guy think he is, anyway?)
The reason to leave your story hanging is so you can noodle over what’s going to happen next while you’re away. You want to leave stuff up in the air so your brain can juggle with it while you’re getting your oil changed or back waxed or whatever. Stopping at some comfortable end of chapter means you can take a mental break too.
Which means that when you come back to the story, you’re like “So, what’s next?” and your brain is like “I unno.”, cuz your brain is stupid. Stupid brain.
Related to this: take breaks. Go for walks in strange directions. Read a comic book. Take showers — let the water drum some ideas through your skull — I do that one ALL THE TIME; I’m the cleanest writer on the planet.
Word processors can suck it
Don’t use Word. Don’t use Open Office. Hell, don’t even use Google Docs. You want the simplest damn tool you can use and still make sense.
I’m talking about things like WriteMonkey. Write Or Die Desktop edition. Effing NOTEPAD. (Or Metapad, which doesn’t suck.) The world is full of distractions, so about how about you don’t use a tool that has a bunch of distractions built in?
Set your Status to Busy. Better yet: Offline.
Speaking of distractions, get the hell out of Google Talk. And YIM. And AIM. And Twitter. And Facebook. And mute your cell.
If you MUST stay connected, set your status to busy and make sure you enforce it. I’m connected to Google Talk all the time, but my status is set to busy cuz… guess what?
BUSY.
The people who ignore that and IM me anyway are the people who know it’s okay that they do that for the topic at hand, and then they go away.
The people who ignore it and … don’t? They get blocked. That’s whole different post.
Interrupt me for no reason, and Baby Penis Tank will DESTROY YOU.
So… where was I? Jesus, I stopped numbering my points didn’t I? Is that more than five? It looks like more than five.
More importantly, what’s my word count?
Eh. Doesn’t matter. Lemme sum up.
Conclusion
You can do this.
It’s not hard. It’s just work. You do work every damn day and it probably isn’t something you love. This is work you love.
I do this, and I am a dopey, lazy, easily distracted, tangential sumbitch.
Sums things up pretty well. “Adrift” is unfairly weighted, but aside from that? It’s a pretty fair impression of my daily life, honestly. In a hand-wavey kind of way.
Whatever. I like it.
Edit to add:
Here’s one that’s a little more accurate and less Adrift-tilted:
The Frankfurt TOC (Tools of Change) conference took place today, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair (going on this week). Like the TOC Conference earlier this year, FrankfurtTOC had a lot of folks there twittering the coolest ideas, giving a kind of stop-motion summary of the talks taking place.
What follows are the posts I saw that intrigued me in one way or another.
ON PUBLISHING
Think digital first, print maybe.
Focus on your verticals – the reason why genre fiction works in digital.
Digital change is completely changing the publishing industry. Nobody has THE RIGHT to survive.
Publishers/Writers should create a life-long URL for each work “don’t be fooled into allowing others control of your metadata”
ON DRM
DRM: “Retailers want to own the customer.”
The use of “unprotected” to describe DRM-free is very objectionable. Why not “unrestricted?” @doctorow
Any time someone mentions “interoperability” and “DRM” in the same breath, they’re engaged in wishful thinking. @doctorow
If DRM is always broken, in what sense does it “protect”? Restricts use, restricts interop, doesn’t protect.
ON AVAILABILITY
Let readers buy the book [as a bundle in all possible formats] & allow the reader to choose the format they want. (I just suggested that like… two weeks ago.)
…making “All books available to All”… one of the most ambitious ventures in the book industry. http://bit.ly/bIW1H
ON THE FUTURE
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. @v_clayssen
Substantial increase in Android Market. Looking at graph suggests in 2 years will have caught up with Apple app store
“Books: the fastest growing category in iTunes AppStore.” @innOva
My impression:
Publishing, at the moment, is stuck. There’s lots of talk about how publishers need to get with it, and where publishing is now, and what they don’t want to do to solve their problems, but there’s no grand solution proposed.
It seems that, like displaying Christmas decorations on prominent end-caps in grocery stores, people start talking about NaNoWriMo earlier and earlier every year. Not quite sure what’s up with that; wherefore art the joy of going in with no prep (no decision, in fact, about participation until the 11th hour)?
Anyway, all that chitter chatter got me thinking about it a little earlier than I might otherwise. (Read: before October 30th.) So, here’s what I’m planning:
I’m doing it. Obviously. Duh.
I believe I’m going to be working from an outline.
Kinda.
I’m actually going to take the twitter-posts for “Chapter 1” of Adrift, and write that as a full-blown story with, like, dialogue and stuff.
Interspersed with the action from Adrift, there will be a Princess Fairy Tale, I think.
This will let me flesh out a lot of stuff, and write some things that are going on my head with the story that I simply don’t have space to write out in once-a-day Twitter posts.
I avoids me wasting several hours every day figuring out what I should be writing that day.
If I write all of 500 words for each of the twitter posts that comprise Adrift Chapter One, that’s about 100k words.
I’m probably going to write it in WriteMonkey, because WriteMonkey is awesome.
I’ll be backing it up using Dropbox, so I can work on it pretty much anywhere. Might do weekly exports from WriteMonkey into OpenOffice as well, which is differently awesome.
I don’t know how/when/where I’ll be sharing this out for people to partake in during the month.
ONE idea I have it to read the daily output aloud and post said reading as a podcasty thing here on the blog. I’d like thoughts on that.
Somewhere*, sometime**, D was talking about writing things and said something like:
The only scene in a story with no conflict in it should be the epilogue at the end of the story.
I know that isn’t it exactly, but that’s the gist of it; when you’re telling a story, scenes should have conflicts in them, or they shouldn’t… you know… be scenes.
De also pointed out*** that you can cheat this a little bit in a scene without any obvious conflict by then revealing “Yeah, while it looked like Mom and Daughter were have a nice happy cup of tea for six pages, Mom had ACTUALLY CALLED THE INSANE ASYLUM TO TURN IN HER DAUGHTER!” DUN Dun dunnnn.
A good trick (one which I’ve used), but it doesn’t change the basic idea, which is (put into my own words):
Never stop fucking with the main character.
Yeah, yeah, “show, don’t tell” works, because if you are legitimately trying to “show” as you write a scene you’ll instinctively put in some kind of thing worth showing. A conflict. There you go. You’ve done it.
(Tangential thought I just had: This may be be a legitimate means of separating “porn” from “erotica”. Erotic has sex scenes with conflict. Porn just has scenes with people fucking. Maybe? Hmm.)
Now, none of this is particular epic storytelling trickery; people get this. People mention this kind of thing all the time.
What people are only slowly starting to get is how it applies to roleplaying games.
Let me tell you about this guy I know. Plays in my Wednesday game. Like most of the people who come in and out of the Wednesday game, he’s also runs games. As a person-who-runs-games, he has a bit of a reputation. A Nom-de-GM, even: people call him Weeda the Evil.
He’s earned this title and the attendant rep via a pretty simple means and method – he rakes his player’s characters over the coals. I’m pretty sure he used to give out certificates to anyone who died in a game he was running. There may have even been t-shirts.
He is, without a doubt, one of the most popular GMs in the Denver area. Probably, if you’re a gamer (or a reader, or an author) I don’t need to explain why.
…*crickets*…
BUT JUST IN CASE I DO, it goes something like this: no one ever gets the feeling from this guy that he’s screwing with you just to screw with you — he’s screwing with you because you’re the Big Cheese, the Main Character, the Hero. He believes you can take it, and he’ll Test to Destruction to prove his point.
He has a similar rule to the one I blocked up above. It is (not surprisingly) more concise.
Heroes Suffer.
Sometimes, your heroes will not appreciate your exciting plot twists.
Yeah.
The thing with RPGs is that, for a really really long time, the only tool that GMs had at their disposal was their own sense of drama and their desire to make sure the Hero Suffers. Take another guy without that sense and you have a lot of dead, boring fights. Take a different guy who only gets that you’re screwing with the characters, and not where that motivation comes from, and you just have some dick GM that everyone hates playing with.
(Take a writer who misinterprets this sort of guideline, or misreads what it is about one of their successful stories that makes people happy, and you get someone who thinks “the key to a successful story is doing horrible shit to my main character”, which somewhat misses the difference between ‘introducing conflict’ and ‘torture’. I’m looking at you, Vorkosigan series!)
Sometimes you just have to punch your favorite character right in the junk. That's fine. But it's way more interesting when you give a character a choice between junk-punching and something else, and they CHOOSE junk-punching.
Luckily, there’s a lot of great games out there that are figuring this out and helping GMs find that sweet spot between “I want to be fair and impartial” and “I need to put you through the wringer or you’re going to be bored.” It started in the good old days with GURPS and Champions and their Dependent NPC (8), but that sort of thing never really worked they way it should. Sorcerer figured it out and introduced “bangs” that pretty much made all of the GMs prep a process of building a list of tough questions the players had to answer. That was good. Primetime Adventures actually breaks if you don’t throw tough conflicts at the main characters and get the Fan Mail flowing.
And it’s gotten better. Fate/Spirit of the Century has the whole Fate Point/Aspect compels that give you a great Devil’s Deal kind of thing to use, but for my money, the best stuff out there right now that does this is Mouse Guard and Danger Patrol. I won’t get into they “whys” of this right now, because this is not the gaming blog, but MG pretty much builds an entire game around “Heroes Suffer”, and Danger Patrol is built around the idea that the only way you can help your fellow players out is by making the situation they’re in more and more Dangerous (potentially creating new dangers everyone has to deal with).
GM: “Okay, Tim is going to jump from one flying car to the other. That’s super dangerous, and worth some extra dice, but what other dangers are out there he doesn’t know about?”
Kate: “There’s a school bus coming the other way, and he’s going to force it to swerve into oncoming traffic.”
GM: “Okay… bonus dice.”
Chris: “And it’s full of kids.”
GM: “Another bonus die.”
Tim: “Umm…”
Kate: “And puppies! It’s ‘bring your puppy to school day!”
GM: “Bonus dice!”
Tim: *Groans*
NOTE: This conversation actually happened in a Danger Patrol game, just not mine – it was Brennan! (Thank you Brennan for helping me find that lost bit of info.
The result of a escalating series of Dangers in Danger patrol.
For the longest time, I had to remember to bring what I knew about conflicts from writing, and try to apply that to games I ran.
Now? I borrow tricks from the games I play and use them when I’m writing.
* – On her blog.
** – I couldn’t find the post.
*** – I couldn’t find this post, either.
Almost eight months, actually. That’s how long I’ve been writing my twitter-based bit of serial fiction and collecting/archiving it over on the “Adrift” blog. That amounts to just a bit over 200 posts, more than a few shootings, several deaths, lots of questions of loyalty and trust, one bloody zero-g amputation, and a friend left behind.
The story has proceeded largely without planning — one day’s post might get me thinking about what would happen next, and that might give me ideas for the next couple days (which, sometimes, I even remember when it comes time to post something the next day), but that’s about as far as it goes — when I comment on my main Twitter page that I’m excited to find out what happens next, I’m not self-marketing or being disingenuous — I don’t know what’s coming, and I am absolutely enjoying the story as much as any other reader (some of whom have been even more enthusiastic about spreading the word about the story than I have).
So I was a little surprised, yesterday, when I realized (about two hours after posting my update yesterday, then re-reading it), that I’d finished the first story — the first ‘book’, if you will.
It ended like this:
I tap in two messages, and send them in opposite directions. The first reads, “I am coming.” The second, “I am coming back.” Then I tell De to jump.
As I said, it was only thinking (and talking with Kate) about it later that I realized I’d written the last scene of the first story – the one properly labeled “The Drift” – and that we were moving on to the Next Thing.
Let's just see how bad it can get.
What’s the Next Thing? I’m no more sure of that than I have been with anything else pertaining to this yarn, but I know I’m not stopping any time soon. There’s a lot more story there, and a great deal of distance for Finnras to go (both forward and, possibly, down). Verily, we shall see. S’possible I might even write the whole first story up in proper novel format, using the twitterfiction as an outline, but who knows. In the meantime, I have a story to write. Heck, I’ve already posted the first entry in the next story arc, so it’s not as though there’s a big cliffhanger to wait on. Plus, I’ve got some revisions on Hidden Things to finish up, and a not-totally-exciting trip this weekend on which to work on them; there’s plenty going on. In fact, there always is; aside from the rather arbitrary moment marking the end of one arc and the start of the next, there really isn’t much reason to even stop here for this bit of reflection and naval gazing.
Except for the obvious; I’ve been doing this weird thing for awhile, and sometimes it’s worth pausing to see if you even know what you’re doing, or if you’re enjoying it.
I’m in one of those ‘twitchy’ creative stages right now – not a downswing, definitely not a low point, but also not one of those flurries of creative activity — in the vast, unending sine-wave of my life, the creative moon is waxing, but hasn’t quite hit the zenith. I feel like I’m about one ounce of inspiration short of super-saturation, at which point in time, DOING something with said energy will become a self-fulfilling prediction.
The problem is, there aren’t ‘good’ gaps in which I can use this energy right now, so rather than allowing myself to hit that super-saturation point, I’m bleeding off some of the energy in drips and drabs in various ways.
(Yes, I know; if I REALLY wanted to do something seriously substantive with this energy, I’d clear the distractions and get to it. I’m not at that stage yet, and believe me when I say that when I am, distractions get cleared. For now, just accept that’s not happening and move along.)
Some of it gets used on gaming. I call that a win. Some gets used on mini-stories that I jot into my notebook – another win.
Some of it’s getting used on Planning. I’m not sure if that’s a win.
What I mean is that, when I’m cooped up, can’t write, and don’t have another creative outlet immediately handy, I start planning stuff. This can be kind of frustrating, because such planning starts to fill up my calendar, perpetuating the situation in which I continue to not have blocks of time in which to do proper creative work (especially when some of my planning is for stuff to do in an MMO, where there’s ALWAYS something more to do). What shall we do on Monday night? Tuesday? And let’s figure out what we’re doing on the Wednesday game night. And THAT thing won’t work on a weeknight, so how about we put that in for a big six-hour block on Sunday? And we need to finish up the deck painting, so let’s do that on Saturday. Date night, we should go see that new movie… and Friday night we’ll do something with our friends whom we haven’t seen for weeks.
And the week is gone.
I’m not complaining — it’s enough that I (finally) notice that I’m doing it; it’s the first step to curtailing the activity — but does anyone else do this? When you can’t actually create something, do you reach for your daytimer?
