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Weekly Blog:

Date: 02/05/2009 So, where to begin:

My name is Ross. I’m a writer. Unpublished, so far, which is why I call myself a writer, not an author.

The purpose of this blog is mostly to get you coming back to my website so that if and when I do get published I’ll have some regular visitors to my site who I can then try to wheedle and manipulate into buying my work.

That said, my plan to get you to read my blog is to tell you my journey as a writer. It may not sound like the most interesting thing in the world, but it’s had its moments, and I’ll try to keep things brief and humorous. For those of you who do some writing of your own, I think you’ll find some of what I’ve learned informative. The rest of you will have the opportunity to point and laugh, and let’s be honest, what more can you ask for out of a blog?
Date: 02/12/2009 Let's Begin at the Beginning

Everyone starts somewhere. It’s a basic truth of life, so fundamental that we usually don’t even think about it: in order to get where we’re going, we start from where we are.

I’ve talked to two people recently who lacked confidence in their writing:

One, a man who attends a peer review group I’ve had the good fortune to become a part of, was feeling out of place. He didn’t think he had a lot to offer when reviewing other people’s work, and he’d come to realize that his own work required more work than he'd known before he'd joined the group.

The second, a good friend who I met through my roommate, confided in me that she felt her ideas were good, but she lacked the ability to put them down on paper in any way that satisfied her.

In both instances my mind moved immediately to the first story I ever remember writing. I couldn’t begin to guess how old I was at the time, but I distinctly remember watching my favorite cartoon at the time, He-Man, and deciding that I wanted to write a story about the characters.

Five or six years ago, when my parents were going through some old junk in the attic, looking for things to throw away, I stumbled across the notebook in question and reread my ‘story’. It was a lot worse than I remembered. About three lines long, with no discernable conflict or character development. If memory serves the basic plot was something along the lines of: 'The Good Guy finds a beautiful place. The Bad Guy finds the same place and threatens the Good Guy. The Good Guy scares him off. The end.' the sad thing is, it was only about twenty words longer than that. I have a vague memory of wondering if I could send the story in and get them to make it into an episode.

Stop laughing. No, really, stop.

In both instances I tried to explain that to the two people I was talking to, unfortunately I’m not very good at expressing myself when I speak, so I’m pretty sure I insulted the both, and possibly gave them the impression that I thought that their writing now is comprable to my He-Man story. That was NOT my intention.

What I was trying to say, what I meant to express, is that we all start somewhere. I’ve heard stories of people who started writing in their late fifties and people, like me, who started when they were five (or four, or seven, or whenever it was that I wrote that stupid He-Man story). We all start somewhere, and it’s almost never where we mean to be.

One of the first obstacles a person has to overcome when they start writing is the lie that they should already be at the finish line. If you woke up this morning and decided that, despite the fact that you’ve never run further than fifty feet in your life, you want to run a marathon, you wouldn’t go sign up for a marathon for next week. You’d work at it, you’d start with small goals, try to build up so that some day you could eventually finish a twenty-whatever mile race.

But because we’ve all read stories, heard stories, had ideas for stories . . . because you already know the language you want to write in, there’s a part of your mind that tells you that you’ve been training your whole life. Well, the person who decides they’re going to run a marathon has been walking their whole life. They’ve used the basic muscles, they’ve performed the basic action . . . but that ain’t training.

This is meant, not as discouragement, but as motivation, because we need motivation. At least, I need motivation. I’ve been writing for over two decades, and most publishers don’t even want to read my first chapter. There are people out there who get published at eighteen. There are people whose first book came out before they left high school. It’s easy to get discouraged. There are days when I think that the only thing I get out of writing is that deep ache of disappointment.

If you want to be a writer, if you’re wondering if you can do it, here’s the only question you need to ask yourself: 'am I willing to put in the time?' I’m not saying you’ll definitely get published. I can’t make that claim. What I will tell you is that if you are willing to put in the time, if you are willing to start moving in that general direction, you’ll get better. And better. And better. Along the way you’ll meet people who started closer to the finish line than you. Along the way you’ll meet people who seem to progress in leaps and bounds. Along the way you’ll meet a lot of people, and some of them will make you wonder if you can do this. If you should do this. My advice is take a deep breath, ask yourself exactly what you want, and start moving towards it. We all start somewhere, but if you want to get anywhere, you have to start walking.
Date: 02/19/2009 Strengths and Weaknesses

I used to suck at dialogue. I’m not saying I’m perfect now, but I have gotten compliments on it. Once, very specifically, I remember somebody telling me that my dialogue was the strongest part of my writing. For those of you who’ve read my writing samples, you may agree, you may disagree, but whatever you think I can assure you that it’s a thousand times better than it used to be.

A friend of mine, my former boss, actually, used to make me bokan (spelling?) fight with him on an almost daily basis. For those of you who don’t know, bokans are wooden swords. It was good exercise, but often a painful experience, especially considering how much better than me he was at it. One of the things that I quickly learned was that if he got a hit in on me with a particular stroke, he was almost certainly going to use that same stroke again soon afterwards, so I’d better figure out how to block it as fast as I could.

In writing you don’t have to worry as much about having your fingers smacked with a two and a half foot long piece of wood every time you make a mistake, but the basic principal is the same. A good story is an easy thing to ruin. Whether your dialogue isn’t believable, or your prose is sloppy, or if you simply neglect to give people characters they can empathize with, your readers can’t appreciate the brilliant way you’ve paralleled the lives of your three main characters or the uncanny genius behind your twist ending if they drop the book halfway through chapter one.

That isn’t to say that writers have to be absolutely perfect in all aspects of their writing in order to get a readership. If that were the case libraries would be the size of outhouses and there’d be a lot of space on the shelves.

BUT! You have to be competent at everything. Absolutely everything. Unlike my former boss, who was constantly looking for an opening in my defenses, your reader isn’t looking for a reason to put your book down. They want to read it. If they picked up your book and opened it to the first page, chances are they want to find themselves reading their new favorite novel. But make no mistake, the first time they see a glaring problem, they’re moving on.

And at one time my glaring problem . . . well, my most glaring problem, was my dialogue. I remember, very specifically, realizing one day that it wasn't good enough. I don’t remember the details, why I realized it, what I was reading . . . I just the feeling of it. And it was devastating. Seeing a failure in your writing feels like finding a failing in yourself. I felt horrible and useless for about a day, but once I took a breath and got over myself, I realized that I had a choice, a decision to make: pretend everything was okay, or fix the problem. It’s a choice I’ve encountered a lot of times over the years, and I’d be lying if I said that I’ve never closed my eyes, hummed a happy tune, and pretended that the problem wasn’t there. This time, thankfully, I dealt with it.

I read a blog a while back where a writer who was trying to get published said that one thing he found to be important was celebrating every major step on the way. Including his first rejection. It seems odd at first, but it’s actually quite brilliant. Everybody gets rejected. There may be an exception or two out there, but I’ve never met them. In my experience, absolutely everybody gets rejected. Not all of them actively celebrate it, but all of them face it, and the good ones, or the ones who become good, move past it. Similarly, absolutely every writer finds something, some part of their writing that falls far, far short of what it needs to be.

But not everybody moves past the rejection, and not everybody fixes whatever’s wrong with their writing. So when you get to those points, when you find something that needs to be improved, when your very first submission gets sent back with an impersonal form letter telling you that they just aren’t interested - Celebrate! You’re not celebrating a failure, you’re celebrating the fact that you know it isn’t a failure. That you’re not quitting. That you’ve jumped a hurdle and kept on running. And when you find something in your writing that doesn’t work - Celebrate! Mistakes happen, and they happen a lot. Most of the time mistakes slip by us, but not this time! This time you found it, and that means that you’re one step closer to perfection. So celebrate.

That said, the next morning take two advil, plop down in front of your computer and get to work, because just knowing you have a problem isn’t enough.

There are three basic steps to deal with a problem area: the first is analysis. Look at what you’ve done, try to figure out exactly why it doesn’t work. Find a section that doesn’t seem right to you and rewrite it. Rewrite it again. And again. And again. Don’t expect that you’ll fix it just yet, you’re looking for the root of the problem. Step two: read. Actually, you can do this first, it can be tricky if your problem is unique or if you don’t know of an author off the top of your head who you can look over for help. What you want to do, though, is keep in mind what you’re looking for whenever you’re reading. Stop every once in a while and ask yourself how this author is doing with your problem. As I said, in my case it was dialogue, so, for several months after I realized how bad I was at dialogue I’d scour books to find the best dialogue I could. I’d read it. I’d read it again. I’d read it out loud. I’d ask myself why it was good. Then I’d find places where they didn’t use dialogue. Places where I would have. When is a description as good as a verbal exchange? Step three: talk to someone better than you. Sadly this wasn’t possible for me at the time, I didn’t have a mentor or peer review group back then. But you should.

Learning from other people’s successes and failures is a lot faster than learning from our own. Believe me.
Date: 02/26/2009 Peer Review 1

I joined my first peer review group when I was twenty nine years old, give or take a month. The point is, it took me decades to do what I now wish I’d done before I turned twelve.

We’ve all had moments, whether we were reading a book, looking at a painting, listening to a lecture, when we noticed something that was, to us, a glaring problem. Maybe the speaker used a double entendre without realizing it. Maybe the woman in the picture appears to be picking her nose. Maybe the author accidentally used the wrong name, or the wrong there/their/they’re. Whatever it is, we see it as clearly as our hands in front of our face on a bright sunny day, but for some reason the author/painter/speaker is completely oblivious. Well, guess what, you do it too. So do I (chances are I’ve done it in this blog). So does everyone. It’s our nature. We know what we mean, and we know how we want it to sound, so that’s what we’re looking for, so that’s what we see. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone over a story a dozen times, looking for problems, looking for inconsistencies, and finding nothing, then had someone else glance over it once and find out I completely forgot to mention one of the key points in the story, or had my time table botched beyond recognition.

Being a shy boy, I had a hard time letting other people read my work. Eventually, after years of solitary effort I got up the nerve to ask my sister for her opinion. It helped. It helped a lot. A few years later when I got one of my best friends to start reading my stuff over and giving me feedback, it helped even more. But the best move I ever made as an author was when I was twenty nine (or maybe twenty eight, I really have no sense of time), when I found and joined a writing group.

I have to admit, joining the writing group was entirely accidental. I was between jobs and working on a manuscript, and the best way I’d found to focus was to get out of the house and away from distractions. I’d found a quiet, comfortable place to do my work, and had been going for almost a month. One day, as I was sitting at a table, staring at a paragraph that just didn’t seem to work, a guy leaned over and asked me if I was there for the writing group. I told him that I wasn’t, but I stuck around long enough to meet a few of the people and get information about the group, and about a month later, I started attending.

While I consider both the advice that my sister and the advice that my best friend gives me invaluable, having other writers read my work and critique it is uniquely helpful. Where my friend might tell me that one section of my work seems slow, and a little boring, my group will tell me that I have two paragraphs that don’t contribute anything to the story, and one paragraph that should be moved to the next chapter. Where my sister might tell me that an action sequence takes too long to explain and feels disjointed, my group will tell me that I need to describe the room at the beginning of the scene so I don’t have to break up the action to explain everything.

I don’t want to give the impression that my group replaces my sister and my friend. There has never been an occasion when I have given somebody something to read and they have not come back with something helpful, something useful, something that nobody has ever mentioned before. However, most of the time when I give somebody a piece of my work to read, they help me identify an area that has a problem in it. When I take something to my peer review group, they help me figure out how to fix it.
Date: 03/05/2009 Peer review 2

My last blog addressed the usefulness of peer review groups in determining how to fix problems. Today I’d like to address the usefulness of peer review groups with regards to helping other people fix their problems.

After I’d spent a little time in my peer review group I had two basic frustrations. The first frustration was that I only read once every other month. The group meets two days a month, with, generally, two readers to three readers per meeting, the net result being that I would read every fourth gathering, approximately. My second frustration is that about half the people in our group would only show up when it was their turn to read. Now, I’m not saying that I wanted twelve people around the table every single night, but there are a few people there whose opinions I find particularly valuable,and the only time I get their opinion is when we’re scheduled to read at the same time. And, I'll admit, there was a part of me that felt that if I was going to make the effort to show up regularly, maybe it was okay if I got a little bit offended when they didn't.

A little time has passed since I started, and I’ve gotten some perspective. It’s still a little frustrating sometimes, but I no longer mind having longer breaks between my readings. Well, not as much, anyhow. If time has taught me one thing, it’s that learning to edit is a skill every writer should hone.

Editing the work of a friend or colleague helps in several ways. The first is that it teaches us to read closely. A long time pleasure-reader, I developed ‘reader’s habits,’ as I call them. I tend to let my mind float across the story, ignoring potential problems, or trusting the author to deal with anything that I don’t immediately understand. As a reader, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As a writer, it can be. Remember, the fewer mistakes you allow into your writing, the less chance there is for the reader to set your book down and move on to other pastures. Also, we often find mistakes in other people’s writing that we can’t find in our own.

Maybe one of the other writers has a dead body in their manuscript which draws out a discussion of using senses besides sight and sound, something that applies to your work, but hasn’t really come up. Maybe it’s because they do the same thing you do but more often and to a greater extreme. Whatever the reason, distance gives us perspective, and it’s usually easier to find problems, even problems you have, in something somebody else has written.

The second way it helps us is by expanding our range. One of the members of my group occasionally writes comedic pieces. I love it. I can pull off comedy from time to time, but usually in a fairly dry voice. This friend of mine, he goes to extremes. Talking guns, villains dealing with unions; it gets very strange very fast. And it isn’t something I can pull off. But I’ve started to learn how ‘zanny’ works. Looking over his work, trying to find details that work well, places that things can be improved, I’ve picked up a few ideas that I never would have had before.

The third thing about editing somebody else’s work that helps our writing is finding our voice. It may sound a little odd, but it’s something that I’ve really seen more and more with the group. Reading along with something somebody else has written, I find myself stopping on a regular basis and asking myself, ‘how would I have said that?’ Not always because my way sounds better, but because I know I wouldn’t have done it the way they did.

So join a review group, and take pleasure in the pain of editing what other people wrote. And if, as in my childhood, you can’t find a peer review group, buy a super-cheap, used book somewhere, and go through it with a pen. Just make sure it isn’t a first edition.
Date: 03/12/2009 Screw Balance

So I’ve talked to a lot of people, and read a lot of books, and seen a lot of movies that talk about balance. Sometimes there are universes built around the concept of balance between good and evil, or balance between chaos and order, or movies where people’s lives are falling apart because they haven’t balanced family with work, and I’ve talked to people who tell me that the key to living life is balancing all aspects of it.

I don’t buy it. Life isn’t about getting everything sitting on a plate, perched on the end of a straw over your head. Life is about choices. You get a series of choices and those choices result in more choices which result in more choices, which result in more choices. Now, you can look at it all as a balancing act if you want, but to me that’s an oversimplification. Everybody’s life is different, so applying the same system to two people will make one happy, healthy and wise, and the other bitter, desolate and confused.

The best advice I can offer to anyone with regards to how to live their life, is figure out what’s important to you, then stop, and figure out what’s really important to you.

A few years ago, back when I was trying to get into the movie writing business I had a late dinner with a friend of mine. He confessed some frustration. I got the impression that he’d been dealing with a family member who didn’t think that he really had a shot at breaking into the movie business, something that he’d wanted to do for a lot longer than I’d known him.

I briefly considered offering assurances that we were going to make it, that everything was going to work out perfectly, and he’d be able to laugh about this in a few years. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The truth is, you never know for sure what’s going to happen. You can dedicate your life to accomplishing one thing, only to die with nothing to show for your actions. It’s a fact of life. People leave this world every day without having accomplished what they set out to do. If you say it can’t happen to you, you’re lying to yourself. Instead of comfort, or advice, I offered the only thing I could, honest sympathy, and the words that I thought best described the dilemma;

‘It’s a wonderful, terrible thing, to know what you want out of life. It’s wonderful because you aren’t stuck wandering around, trying to find a purpose, and terrible because everything you do that isn’t in pursuit of that dream feels like a waste of time.’

Well, those may not be the exact words, but they’re pretty close. I’m writing this, not as comfort, and not as advice, but simply because I know that there are other people out there who feel the same way. We go through life with the knowledge, the absolute certainty that this, this right here, is a necessary part of our life. For me it’s writing, for a friend of mine it’s starting a family. For other people it’s other things. I’m not saying that one thing will make me happy, or make you happy, I’m saying that it’s a necessary and, for lack of a better word, a true part of our life. Having it may not give us everything we need, but without it we’ll always feel that something is missing. Because it is. So for those of you out there who know what I mean, who’ve been where I am and have something very precise in mind for their lives, I’d like to take a moment and offer some advice.

One: life isn’t about balance. Pursue what you want with a passion, with verve, with certainty. But you also need to realize that every choice you face is a product of the choices you’ve made and will affect your choices to come. Understand what you’re choosing, both the effects of what you do, and the effects of what you don’t do. I realize that if I don’t write my life will feel . . . incomplete. But I also realize that if I only write, if I don’t have a job, I won’t have a place to live, and I’ll be doing my writing on the back of old newspapers while I hold a box over my head to keep the rain off. This isn’t balance, it’s a series of choices. We all have them.

Two: Endure. I can’t make a living as a writer at this moment. I can’t do it. Hell, I haven’t been able to get published yet. I could get published if I wanted to, but not the way that I want to. There are options out there, vanity presses, companies that will publish you if you buy the first x many copies of your book, to make sure they turn a profit. There are ways that I can get a fraction of what I want, but the choices come with consequences. A friend of mine recently told me that one of the worst things a writer can do is publish their first book before they’re properly prepared. I’m not prepared. So, while I would rather see my first book in print than still have my left hand tomorrow morning, I find myself needing to endure. Needing to wait. I can’t have what I want just yet, so I work a job that I don’t enjoy, spend a lot of my ‘freetime’ trying to understand the parts of the publishing process that I think should be the job of a publisher, and just generally grind through a part of my life that many people have told me I should be relishing. Why? Because I know what I want.
Date: 03/19/2009 Thank you

Mrs. Burns is my all time favorite teacher. She taught English in middle school, I think. I’m not very good about remembering exactly when things happened, but I’m pretty sure I remember the window to the classroom, which I’m pretty sure looked out over a courtyard that I’m pretty sure I remember from middle school.

That’s a lot of pretty-sures which add up to a kind of sure, but that isn’t really the point. The point is this: in all my years of schooling, Mrs. Burns was the only English teacher I ever had who had us write stories. As I would say, at the time, ‘she’s the first teacher I’ve ever had who’s as interested in what we write as how we write it.’

It was a monumental treat for me. I’ve always had bad handwriting, and while I’ve gotten better at grammar over the years, I’m still not always sure whether a comma should go here, here or here. But I’ve always wanted to tell stories, and with Mrs. Burns, for the first time in my life, somebody who wasn’t related to me wanted to read them.

I bring this up for two reasons, the first is that I don’t think I ever really told Mrs. Burns how much I appreciated what she did for me. I can’t trace the threads of my life out, but I strongly suspect I would be in a different place today if she hadn’t been a part of my life, and even if this doesn’t ever get to her, even if I never get to thank her, I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, who’s just a little bit like her will read this and realize that somewhere out there, somebody they’ve touched (in a good-touch way) is wishing they could say thank you.

The second reason is a little more on-point: in any artistic endeavor there are a lot of places we can go to learn more, and to grow more, but at a certain point it becomes our responsibility to teach. And that time is usually a lot sooner than we think. Most of the best advice that I put on here is drawn in from other sources. I’ve gotten advice from more traveled, more experienced members of my peer-review group. I’ve gotten good information off of blogs, and out of books . . . hell, outside of a few mildly interesting life stories, there isn’t much you’ll find here that you can’t get find a hundred other places.

But I need to say them. I need to say them both for myself, so that I can think over the lessons I’ve learned, and I need to say them for the sake of others. One of the great ironies of all artistic professions is that we are simultaneously in conflict, and in communion. We all want to be the best, but the better our competition is, the more we can learn, the better we can become . . . .

Okay, I’ve gone from contemplative to wistful. The point I’m getting at is this: the saying that those who can’t do, teach, doesn’t work for what we do. It is the responsibility of everyone who calls him or herself an artist to pass on knowledge, whether it’s to one person, or a hundred. So take a moment, think about what you have to offer, and offer it.
Date: 03/26/2009 Writing vs. Publishing.

I hate getting a job. Or more accurately, I hate pursuing a job.

I’ve had a number of jobs in my life. I’ve been: an usher, a dog cage cleaner, a warehouse employee, a stockboy, a floorworker and a manager at a bingo hall, the guy that answers the phone at a call center, a deposit puller for a bank, a produce guy at a supermarket, a farmhand, and one or two other fairly demeaning jobs. And I was good at all of them (except the call center job, I sucked at that hardcore). I remember, on four separate occasions, when I left my job my bosses told me that if I wanted to come back, I just needed to give them a call and they’d make it happen.

But I suck at getting new jobs. Not just a little. After I moved from Texas to Colorado, it literally took me a year to find a place that would hire me. And the place that did hire me? They have me stocking shelves. I have a four year degree, four bosses who’d hire me back in a heartbeat, and it took me a year to get somebody to give me a job taking crap out of boxes and putting it on shelves. Why? Because the skills required to get a job have absolutely nothing in common with the skills necessary to do a job. Take a moment and think about it. Getting a job requires you to recall and present your job history in a pleasing manner. It requires you to have a pleasant, but on point conversation with a complete stranger. You have to explain who you are, in the best light possible. It requires you to know the appropriate timing for calling back and asking about the position, and figuring out how to look willing and able without looking desperate. Now, there are certain jobs out there which use those same skills, but how many?

What does that have to do with writing? Nothing. As long as you’re writing solely for your own amusement, or are sleeping with somebody in the publishing industry. For the rest of us, it’s very important. Because as with any job, becoming a good writer and becoming a published author are two very different skill sets.

I spent years of my life trying to figure out how to be a better writer. I read, I wrote, I read what I wrote, threw away what I wrote, read some more, wrote some more, read what I wrote again, read what other people wrote, then reread what I wrote, threw it away and wrote again . . . you get the picture. I’m not going to say that my training to this point has made me a world class writer, or that everything I write now is golden, but I will say that one of the most frustrating experiences of my life was the first time I tried to get published. Was it because the publishers were mean? Was it because people told me what they really thought? No. It’s because I got nothing back. Hell, if I remember correctly, the response to the first dozen or so submissions I sent, amounted to one form rejection letter, and that’s it.

I can’t fault anyone for it, the more I’ve learned about the publishing business the more I’ve come to understand that it isn’t their responsibility to help me figure out how to publish, or how to write better. But that doesn’t take the sting out of it.

I still remember when I went online, desperately trying to figure out how to get somebody to read what I’d written. I found a small press sight that gave specific instructions on what they wanted, and the first thing they wanted, it seemed, was a query letter. I stared at that page for five minutes thinking, ‘what the hell is a query letter?’

Since then I’ve skimmed a few books and web pages on the subject, and whenever the book is written by someone in publishing there is, inevitably, an example of a bad query letter. To this day I am terrified, every time I go through one of those books, that this is the day I’m going to stumble across one of my old query letters.

When I first found a page requesting a query letter, I did a search on the term and came up with a short definition that basically said that it’s a letter asking a publisher if I can send in all or part of my manuscript to read.

That struck me as rather ridiculous. It seemed to me that it was rather like saying ‘can I ask you a question?’ The act of asking if you can ask doesn’t do you any good, it doesn’t do me any good . . . all it really does is waste everyone’s time. I therefore concluded that what a query letter was meant to do was give me an opportunity to convince the publisher that they wanted to read what I’d written. But I’d spent a hundred and something pages telling them my story, and they wanted something shorter, so I’d have to find another way to talk them into it.

I’m pretty sure I made every mistake I’ve ever heard about in my query outside of threats and bribery. I maintain that if anyone had ever taken the time to write back and tell me that I was going about this all wrong I’d be a lot further along than I am now, but as I said, that isn’t, wasn’t, and never will be their job. One of the things I’ve had to learn about writing is that, like getting a job, you can be the best in the world at it, but if you can’t get your foot in the door, nobody’s going to open a window for you.

In future blogs I plan to address publishing in general and query letters in particular, but everything I say on that note should be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe a sprinkling. You know what, just dump the whole damned shaker into that. As I’ve said, I haven’t been published. Not yet. If you really, really want to know how to write a good query, find a book by a publisher, or at the least, a published author.

Huh, I just advised you to find a book by a published author. Wow, isn’t that redundant.
Date: 04/2/2009 The fine art of the query

Let me start by saying, this isn’t my best subject. I’ve learned a lot about it over the years, but that’s a lot like saying I’ve learned a lot about driving since I turned eighteen. Technically it’s true, but only because I started out knowing practically nothing, and if you compare me to someone who drives a race car, I’m downright ignorant.

So, now that you have absolutely no confidence in me, let’s get started.

First things first, what is the purpose of a query letter? In a previous blog I compared it to asking somebody if you could ask them a question. That isn’t an entirely accurate statement. Finding an agent or a publisher is like dating, and a query letter is the minute long conversation you have while you’re both standing line at the coffee shop, and it should be approached in more or less the same way.

First, remember that you’re approaching them. They didn’t come knocking on your door. They haven’t promised you anything. they don’t owe you. Confidence is important, but there’s a difference between confidence and ego. I, like many other authors, tend to have a lot of doubts about my work. I don’t know if it’s good enough, and I have the horrible habit of being honest about that. But when I try to get over that doubt, I tend to overcompensate. The best thing to do is remember that you aren’t going to sell a book with a query letter. You aren’t supposed to, and you don’t need to try to. Like the girl in line at the coffeehouse, you don’t start the conversation trying to get her to marry you. You’re beginning a discourse, a dialogue, and the point of the dialogue is to convince the reader, not that they need you, not that they’d be lucky to know you, just that they want to keep on talking to you.

Second, you need to know your selling points. This involves some research. Actually, it involves several different types of research. You need to know about the publishing company. If the publishing company deals almost exclusively in biographies of celebrities, and you’re selling a novel about a cannibalistic tennis instructor, you might want to go somewhere else . . . . unless your book is about a real cannibalistic tennis instructor who’s got their own reality series. But even after you’ve found the people who specialize in your market, the guys who are all about your niche, your research isn’t done.

I submitted one of my best books to a major publishing comapny, and got a reply from an editor who liked my first chapter. So I sent the second and third chapter. After I submitted it, I looked her up and found out that she had a degree in children’s literature. The kicker was that the first chapter was about a fourteen year old. She liked that chapter. She was less thrilled with chapter 2, based around a sentient machine, and chapter 3, which followed a genetically engineered soldier. If at all possible, find a book that’s like yours, find out which editor was behind that, and contact them. Now, it won’t always be possible, but if you can get your book into the right person's hands, it can make all the difference in the world. Another bit of research you need to do, though, is research into your own writing. For this I highly encourage you to use friends, family, anyone you know who’ll read what you’ve written. Get advice, find out what the best parts of your book are, the best aspects, and emphasize those. I’ve found that if enough people read what I’ve written, they can tell me about themes I never noticed.

Third, this is not a getting-to-know-you conversation. This is a sales pitch. As with the conversation in the coffee shop, this is not the time to bring up your eleventh toe or the fact that you have a hole in your head from where your kid brother shot you with an arrow. You’re trying to convince them that you’re the kind of person they enjoy talking to. I bring this up because one of the mistakes I’ve made, on multiple occasions, was trying to make this about me, or about the publisher. I’ve had query letters where I’ve mentioned my frustration at not getting replies from other editors. I’ve had query letters where I’ve discussed my passion for writing, and how much I’d love to get published. But that’s basically the equivalent of telling the girl in line at the coffee house how frustrated I am with all the women who won’t talk with me, or how much I’d love to get into a relationship. Keep things casual, and remember that all you want to do is present the possibility of a real conversation. Tell them (the editor, not the girl in the coffee shop) what you’ve written, and how you know that they publish things in the same vein. If you have some special expertise, something that sets you apart from other people with the same interest, tell them that as well. Tell them that if they’re interested, you’d love to send them . . . . well, whatever it is that the publishing house they work for want as the next step, or if you don’t know that, then you’d love to send them whatever they’d be interested in looking over.

Fourth, be ready for the next step. When a publisher I’d written to wrote back asking for the first fifty pages and a chapter by chapter synopsis, I found myself in a bit of a bind. I’d never written a chapter by chapter synopsis before, and had no idea what it was supposed to look like. I ended up having to come up with one over the course of an afternoon so I could get it to a friend to review it for me by the end of the week, just so I didn’t keep the editor waiting. Ideally, if they’ve got their process explained to you on the website, be prepared to send them whatever is next on the list. Be aware that they may not ask for it, but have it ready, have it reviewed by somebody who knows what’s what, because you’re competing with a lot of people out there, while competent is necessary, prompt and competent is even better.
Date: 04/9/2009 Percolation and Patience

I’ve wanted to write books for most of my life. Unfortunately, my first, oh, let’s take a conservative guess here, eighty hundred billion attempts to write a complete manuscript ended when, looking back on my work, I realized that I was a complete idiot, and anyone who read two pages of what I’d written was pretty much guaranteed to throw the pages down in disgust, stomp them into the earth until there was nothing left but shredded bits of paper, and salt the earth, just to be safe.

In retrospect, I think most of my earliest stuff was actually quite a bit worse than that, but thankfully several computer crashes and what I like to call ‘the great culling of ‘88’ have purged the world of most of these monstrosities.

But don’t think for a moment that this means I regret what I wrote.

One of my least favorite questions, and yes, I have been asked this, is: ‘where do your ideas come from?’ I hate that question because most of the time, I don’t know. But more than that, I hate it because it really depends on which part of an idea the asker is referring to. If they’re referring to a part that’s actually decent, chances are I got the original idea so long ago I don’t actually remember the event anymore. A good idea, or more accurately, most of the good ideas I’ve had, have come into the world buried in a ton of really bad ideas. The story that, at present, I am most proud of, is something that I started writing when I was twenty eight. The thing is, the story is based on an idea I had when I was about eighteen. The idea was good, but for the life of me, I couldn’t make it work. It was a combination of not having enough to work with, and just not being a good enough writer.

If you’re anything like me, then you have a million and one ideas floating around in your head. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are somewhat less than brilliant. And some of them just need to be allowed the opportunity to fall into place.

It’s like there are dozens and dozens of jigsaw puzzles that were dumped into a box and set on a shelf underneath row of bowling balls for a year. I take out the box and dump out the contents and all I have is chaos. A lot of pieces have been pressed together, but whether they actually go together, or whether a bowling ball forced them together, I cannot say. The trick is to try to find pieces that fit, and when that doesn’t work, to shake things up and see if things look different afterwards.

I think that one of the most underappreciated steps in the writing process is percolation. I’ve had a lot of ideas over the years. Hundred. Thousands. Maybe more. Most of the stories I’ve written have fallen far short of what I was hoping for because I liked one bit of the idea so much that I clung to the story as a whole, hanging onto the dross and the mud along with the gem inside of it. Or maybe I should say, 'putting the bathwater to bed with the baby.' Some of the best stories I’ve ever written have come to me when, in a flash of clarity, I’ve simply left an idea alone long enough that when I looked back on it, I was able to find the bits and pieces worth saving.

As odd as it sounds, that’s my advice for today. If you’re stuck, if you can’t figure out what to do with something, do nothing.

At least for a little while.
Date: 04/16/2009 The worst book I ever bought

I was heading into Hastings to rent a movie at the time. I don’t remember what movie. What I do remember is the man standing in front of the door, next to a table.

He smiled and asked if I wanted to know about his book. Most of the time I just say ‘no thank you’ and get on with my day, but the picture on the front of his book was a dragon, or maybe the lochness monste. Either way it looked like a fantasy book and, being a writer who wanted to get into writing science fiction or fantasy myself, I decided to hear his pitch. It wasn’t particularly impressive, just a vague description of a businessman who finds a world filled with magical creatures or something, but I could tell that he was very proud of the two books he’d written, and he did have a book that he’d written and gotten published (no, I wasn’t aware of vanity presses at the time), which, I assumed, meant that it couldn’t be all bad. So I agreed to buy one, which he signed for me.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten home and flipped open to the first page that I realized what a horrible, horrible book it really was. The dialogue was weak, the characters were sloppy and one dimensional, and the writing was . . . bad. And that was page one. I’m not going to say that it was the worst thing I’ve ever read, but it was the worst thing I ever paid money to read. As it is a book, and a signed book at that (I don’t know why that’s important to me, but for some reason it is), I can’t bring myself to throw it away, but I also can’t bring myself to try to sell it to a second hand bookstore, or even give it away, for fear that somebody will flip it open and realize that I spent money on it.

I’m not writing this to humiliate the author, I’m bringing this up because I never, ever, in a million years would have paid for this book if I’d just stumbled upon it when I was skimming the shelves of a bookstore. I bought the book because I was buying it from the author, a pleasant, polite man who was excited about something that he’d written. Even though I only met him for a few minutes, the experience was important and meaningful for me, and the truth is, if I’d read the book and it had turned out to be okay, not good, mind you, just okay, I’d have bought the second book as well.

One part, one piece of the writing process that I’ve only recently become aware of is the fine art of self promotion. It’s not something that I find exciting, I’ve never been a salesman by nature, and I’m kind of terrified of the first time I have to walk into a room full of people I don’t know and try to convince them that they want to know me, but it is a part of the process. And if you take the right attitude, as that man did, it can be a beautiful part of the process. Why? Because like every artist we invest ourselves into our work. Not simply our time, or our blood, or our sweat, or our tears: we invest a piece of who and what we are into every page that we write. Anyone can put our book on the shelf. Anyone can put the product where a buyer can get to it, then take their money for it. The reason we’re expected to go to things like book signings, and readings, and whatever else is out there (One of these days I really have to find out what else is out there), is because we’re not just selling the product, we’re making the product something personal and meaningful.

Now, ideally what we sell will be a lot better than the book I picked up at Hastings that day, but the key point, the most important thing I learned that day wasn’t about writing, it wasn’t even about selling. While I hope never to read anything that man writes ever again, the thing that sticks with me about that day in that bookstore is how excited the man was to be there. I don’t know how long he’d been set up, and I don’t know how many people had walked by him that day without giving him a second glance, but I do know that when he saw me he was excited. He wasn’t excited because he knew he’d make a sale, he was excited because he had created something and he had the opportunity to share it. Now, it’s possible that he was a lifelong salesman, but if he was, he was good enough at his job that I didn’t see it. What I saw was somebody who loved writing enough that he was happy to have the opportunity to do the part of the job that I find the most stressful. He was excited enough to get me excited about it. He was happy enough to be there that I was happy to be there. And even though it’s the worst book I ever bought, I did buy it.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. I’m almost sure of it.
Date: 04/23/2009 40 percent

When I first joined my peer review group one of the longtime members stuck around afterwards one night and, in the course of a conversation, informed me that all advice should be taken with a grain of salt because, ‘even the best editor on the planet is only right about forty percent of the time.’

It came as something of a shock to me. I’ve done a lot of writing over the years, gotten a lot of people to look my writing over, and, generally speaking, I make about ninety percent of the changes that they recommend.

So did I spend most of my time making unnecessary changes? Or was he wrong?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking it over and I came to a unique conclusion: the best editors in the world are right about forty percent of the time, the worst are right about ten percent, and the ones in the middle are right seventy to ninety percent.

It sounds bizarre, but I’m actually fairly confident in my analysis.

Let me put it to you this way: I could send a manuscript to an English teacher, and in many cases the revisions they’d suggest would be one hundred percent correct. I say that because I’ve only ever had one English teacher who gave a damn about anything besides grammar. And they do know grammar. But even if I sent what I’d written to the most skilled technical editor on the planet, and they caught every misspelling, every poorly placed comma, every inaccurate use of the possessive . . . the story I’d have after their help would be exactly the same story I had before their help. It would just be a little bit easier to read. That, of course, is important, and while I’m still holding a grudge about a few papers where my moments of brilliance were ignored by somebody who thought that my use of a semicolon was just ridiculous, I do believe in the importance of clear communication.

But the best editors out there, the most helpful people you’ll ever talk to, do a lot more than circle where you used the wrong ‘your/you’re’. They make bad suggestions.

Some of the best editors I’ve ever had have given me suggestions that I am fairly certain would completely ruin everything I like in whatever story they’re critiquing. They often drive me insane, finding a passage that they think is foreshadowing, but that I was just using to make the paragraph a half a page longer, or because I had figured out a nifty turn of phrase that I wanted to try out. I’ve found myself sitting with clenched fists, trying to hold back howls of frustration when people have told me to get rid of an unnecessary character, or get rid of one of my favorite paragraphs in a chapter . . . . Recently somebody kindly suggested that I read a book on dialogue that he’d found helpful. While my dialogue isn’t perfect, it’s one of my strongest areas, and my first thought when I read his e-mail was to gnash my teeth and contemplate finding something he’d written to tear apart, whether or not it deserved it.

Yeah, yeah, pride is bad, blah, blah, blah.

The thing I had to remind myself, the thing I think that we should all take a moment to remember when somebody gives us a bit of advice that doesn’t sit well with us, is that grammar is easy. Well, that’s not entirely true. To borrow an expression from one of Jim Butcher’s books, ‘it’s like lifting an engine block. It takes a lot of power, but it isn’t complicated.’ I probably botched that quote, but the sentiment remains. Grammar takes study and practice, but it’s consistent and safe. If you use the wrong ‘there,’ or put a comma where I know one doesn’t belong, I can offer you ‘help’ without having to take a risk. If I tell you that I think one of your characters is annoying, I may be right, I may be wrong, and I may piss you off. I’m taking a risk, and that means that I’m investing myself in your work. The best editors in the world are only right about forty percent of the time, because they’re willing to give you six pieces of crappy advice, and four pieces of good advice, and trust you to know the difference.
Date: 04/30/2009 Best New Artist

Back when I lived in Texas and was thinking about a career in screen writing, I found out that one of the guys who was involved with the making of ‘The Sopranos’ was coming into town and was going to give a lecture at the university. I decided to attend.

The man had a lot of interesting stories, advice, and thoughts, but the thing that stuck with me the most was his take on the ‘overnight success’ of his show. He had, he explained to us, been in the business for years. Years and years. Years and years and years. He’d worked on a lot of different shows, dealt with a lot of different people, paid his dues, and made a number of sacrifices in the course of his career, so when the show he worked on hit it big, he didn’t see it as an overnight success. Everything he’d done had led to that point. All of the people he’d worked with had been in the business a long time, and they’d brought a lot of knowledge, and a lot of wisdom with them.

There is, in writing, the potential for great success. It isn’t a likelihood, and most of us are aware of that, but there is a chance at making it big. There are authors who have had amazing successes, unbelievable breaks, there are authors who make more money off of one book that most hard working people make in a lifetime. So there is a temptation that many of us, myself included, to see writing as a city of gold, hidden somewhere over the horizon, something that, once we get there, will solve all of our woes.

I like to call this the lottery ticket delusion. We find ourselves convinced that if we can just cross that one threshold (like, say, getting that first book published), we’ll have ‘made it.’ And we hold up, as ideals for ourselves, those who have ‘made it’ before.

But while a book may be an overnight success, while a movie may be an overnight success, the people behind them generally crawled there, on their hands and knees across broken glass. I recently submitted a book to a publishing company. If they accept the book tomorrow, publish it in a month, and I end up on the best seller list the very next day, there are people who will call it an overnight success. But it took over a decade from the time I first got the idea for the book and the day I started writing it. After that I spent over a year editing it, getting friends to read it and give me their thoughts, and I’ve submitted the book several dozen different times. I invested untold hours into making my book into what I wanted it to be.

I don’t believe in overnight successes. I believe that some books, some movies, some television shows, some paintings, some songs, some ideas are recognized for what they are suddenly, embraced suddenly, promoted and exalted suddenly, but I’ve never heard of anything that was ever good without enough blood, sweat, and tears to fill a swimming pool.
Date: 05/07/2009 Torture is good
Not everybody who reads needs to write, but if you write, you have to read. It isn’t just good advice, it is one of the most fundamental truths you’ll find in this business. The thing is, while you can read just for fun, it’s also a good idea to occasionally stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself a few questions. Ask yourself how much you like the book. Chances are you like it at least a little bit, otherwise you wouldn’t be on chapter fifteen; you’d have put the book down around chapter two and never gotten to this point. But how much do you like it? Is it one of your favorite books of all times? Is it something you’ll read once, then never bother with again? Are you going to seek out books by this author out in the future, or avoid them? Or is it a take it or leave it style, something where you won’t actively pursue reading more by them, but if you stumble across something else they’ve written . . . .

Now ask yourself why.

I was reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Jim Butcher, when I took a moment to think through what I was reading and why I enjoyed it so much. The answer didn’t come as that much of a surprise to me: he beats the crap out of his main characters. There are scenes with torture, brutal beatings, suffering, helplessness, misery, pain, hysteria, terror, and blind hopelessness. And I can’t get enough.

I bring this up because it highlights something that I personally have struggled with in my writing: too-perfect characters and too-easy plots. It’s a strange thing, the relationship between an author and his or her creation. In a bizarre way they’re like our children. They came out of us, we can see echoes of ourselves in them, and we know more about them than they know about themselves. The danger with this kind of relationship is that we can find ourselves in a position where we empathize with our characters to the extent that we don’t want to see them hurt.

This is a problem.

It is the responsibility of every author to make their characters suffer. The more you love them, the more you need to hurt them. Some people will tell you that this is simply an extension of conflict, that stories without great struggles are boring. I read one writer who said that suffering reveals character. While I don’t disagree with either statement, I think that these reasons are incomplete. If you ask most readers what world is more interesting, the one they live in or the one they like to read about, they’ll probably tell you that the real world is boring. But the real world, for all of its faults, inspires in us a fantastic range of emotions, from impassioned rage at the man who cut us off in traffic on the way to work, to desperate sorrow, when we realize that we’ll be working our dead end job for at least another five or six months before we can even think about quitting, to rapturous delight, when that cute man/woman smiles at us. A fantastic range of emotions that we mute. The guy who cut me off in traffic may make me scream and curse, but I can’t follow him to his house and beat him up on his lawn. I may hate my job, but I can’t fall to the ground weeping over it. The girl who smiles at me will probably run away if I start singing and dancing in the aisles of the supermarket. The emotions are there, but we’ve learned to shut them down because we’re pretty sure that they aren’t appropriate to situation.

But we still want to feel them.

In literature we allow people the excuse to feel more than they usually allow themselves to feel. Maybe a slight rudeness in traffic isn’t worthy of rage, but when our favorite character’s best friend is thrown off of an eighteen story building, we get to be angry. The stories we write allow people to feel the entire range of their emotions in a way that they usually don’t allow themselves. From the glorious to the abysmal. And our readers want to feel them all.

I have characters that I love, that I don’t want to see hurt, but I owe it to my reader to pile sufferings on their head, suffering to be overcome, to be endured, to be expressed. And I owe it to my characters to let other people love them enough to feel that suffering.
Date: 05/14/2009 The wall is Red

I gave the first two chapters of one of my books to my grandmother’s brothers son (is that a first cousin? A cousin once removed? Seriously, how does that work?) so he could give me a slightly different perspective than I’d been getting. His one complaint, he told me, was that he couldn’t see the places that everything I was writing about took place in.

Well, frankly, neither can I. Seriously. I’m not really that good at keeping a mental image of my own characters. If I’m working on a series of books I generally take notes as I’m writing it, just to be sure that I don’t accidentally describe the same character in mutually exclusive terms. I don’t know why that is, if I’m a product of my time, or some weird freak who thinks in sounds and emotions instead of images, I just know that the information isn’t just waiting for me when I close my eyes.

For the most part, that’s okay. As the old saying goes, you can’t please all the people all the time. But you can make sure that there’s a little something there for most people.

The thing that’s important to me in a story is understanding the characters. In real life I tend to be pretty oblivious to things like sarcasm and irony. It’s not that I’m stupid (well, I don’t think that I’m stupid, and if you do, you can just keep that to yourself, ‘mkay?), it’s just that when people talk to me they’re usually interrupting my train of thought and, being me, I can’t multitask, so I have to set aside whatever was going through my head, redirect my attention to them, process what they said, make sure I know the context of the statement, and respond. If, for whatever reason, they aren’t saying what they mean, that information has a way of getting lost in the shuffle. Well, either that or I just don’t get body language. Tomato tomato.

When I’m reading, my biggest issue is that I can’t hear their tone. It’s like an e-mail or a text message; all I have to work with are the word. If somebody is being facetious, or ironic, or lewd, or whatever, I want to be given a hint. So, in my own writing, I tend to overdo it. He didn’t just wink at her: he winked at her coyly. She didn’t just say it: she rolled her eyes as she said it. The reader probably could have figured that out, but I don’t want there to be a misunderstanding, so I try to make a point of describing expressions and styles of expressions, and meanings behind the styles of expressions. But I tend to ignore other important details. Does she wear a watch, or check the time on her cell phone? Are there flowers in the office? Are the shades drawn? If it isn’t specific to the story, I usually don’t think about it, and that can be a problem. Among other things, there’s the ten minute murder mystery problem. Growing up my sister and I used to get these ten-minute mystery books. You’d get a short story, about two pages long, describing a crime, and you’d be asked to solve it. The problem with a ten minute murder mystery is that it takes ten minutes. They don’t have a lot of time to offer you dozens of suspects and clues that turn out to be dead ends. Pretty much anything that the author tells you is specific to the plot. If they mention that the flowers in the vase are white, chances are that’s somehow important in figuring out how the maid was poisoned.

Just like the ten minute mystery, completely ignoring some aspect of your writing can be detrimental in so much as you’ll have trouble slipping important bits of information in without the reader noticing. If I spend eighty pages without describing any furniture in a room, then tell you in great detail about a painting sitting behind the CEO’s desk, hey, guess what’s important later?

But more than that, we, as writers, need to keep in mind that we are writing, not just for ourselves, but for our audience. The truth is that I don’t think much about how rooms look or what people are wearing, but some people who might be interested in my books do. To them the kind of watch a woman is wearing might say as much about her personality as whether or not she smiles when the man on the other side of the room buys her a drink. To them the conversation between the protagonist and the man who’s been hired to kill him becomes infinitely more interesting if the killer is wearing a lilac scented aftershave, never mind that I personally have no idea what lilac smells like. There’s a limit to what we can do that adds to a scene, and at a certain point we find ourselves dealing with diminishing returns, but it’s always important to look back over our work with somebody else’s perspective in mind.
Date: 05/21/2009 Let's talk Characters

When I first started writing, my characters were flat, lifeless husks. They were two dimensional beings that were either perfectly reasonable or perfectly unreasonable all the time. It took me a while to understand that each of my characters was motivated by something, each of them needed and wanted certain things and saw the world through specific goggles, and simply writing a character who was mean and nasty for no particular reason didn’t contribute to the story in the least.

In order to make characters whose motivations I could understand, I had to base them on somebody real. Somebody three dimensional, who I understood well enough to see both their faults and their strengths. Unfortunately I’ve never been particularly social, so the only person I knew well enough to turn into a character was, well, me.

Basing a hundred different characters on one person isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Frankly, we’re all a hundred different people. Depending on who else is in the room, how my day has been going, whether or not I have to go to work sometime soon, and a thousand other tiny details, I can be any number of people. A villain who lives his life with an unreasonable sense of entitlement is as much a reflection of my personality as a pious hermit who lives in a hovel a hundred miles from anyone and will gladly share his sparse meal with a hungry traveler.

But for all their differences, there’s a limit to the range of characters that I can come up with when I base them on my own nature. My attitude towards other people may change from day to day, but my diction does not. I might find myself obsessed with money one day, and disgusted by it the next, but my sense of humor will pretty much be a constant. Not that I won’t have days that I don’t find anything funny, but I’m not likely to wake up tomorrow and find myself suddenly a fan of knock-knock jokes.

My point is this: if you want to write characters well, and believably, you need to be able to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. My advice is to spend a week observing people and really thinking about how they see the world. Grab a blank notebook and a pen and carry it with you wherever you go. Three times each day, get out your notebook, look around, and pick somebody that you normally wouldn’t think about. Ask yourself what they’re doing, what motivates them, what inspires them, what they want out of life. Ask yourself any questions you can think to ask.

If you want to go the extra mile, I suggest that at the end of each day you go through your notebook, close your eyes, remember the people, and try to write a story from their perspective. It doesn’t have to be a long story; in fact I’d strongly advise against writing a long story; just take five or ten minutes to try to see the world as you think they might see it. Once you’re done, look back and ask yourself the all important question: were you writing what you think they were living, or were you writing about who you’d be if you were standing in their shoes.
Date: 05/28/2009 Let's Continue to talk Characters

I live in a house with three other people. One of my best friends in the world lives in the basement, in a room just off of a sort of makeshift living room where both he and I spend most of our time. I live on the second floor, in a small bedroom, just down the hall from the landlords, an engaged couple who I barely knew before a few months ago.

Now, I have specific relationships with each person that I live with, and each of them has a specific relationship with each other. I pay rent to one person, ask another how preparations are going for her wedding, and discuss things like politics, social woes, and people we both know who live back in Texas with the third. Each of the people who lives in the same house with me sees me as a slightly different person, because I am a slightly different person with each of them.

That’s the easy part. Realizing that somebody treats a five year old differently than their best friend, and their best friend differently than their grandmother isn’t that tricky. The tricky part is when their grandmother, their best friend, and a five year old are all in the room. One of the first things I learned when I started taking sociology was the concept that everybody plays roles. That isn’t to say that we lie about who we are, but we have a tendency to emphasize certain aspects of our personality depending on who we’re around. The result is that we can find ourselves in situations where we have to play two conflicting roles at the same time. My father is a very conservative man, politically. He’s also very intelligent, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, I respect his opinion, so I generally don’t talk about politics too much while he’s in the room. One of my roommates is particularly liberal and more than a little outspoken. Our perspectives are similar on about seventy percent of the major political issues of the day, and we often discuss what we see as the failings of the opposition. So what do I do when my father and my friend are in the same room and politics comes up? Well, mostly I keep my mouth shut, but sometimes I play devil’s advocate/peacemaker (bet you didn’t know that those were basically the same role) and try to keep the conversation from getting heated. Actually I’ve never seen my dad in a heated conversation in his life, my roommate on the other hand . . .

The easiest way to get around conundrums like this is to avoid putting people in that situation, the same way that I avoid being in the same room with my father and my friend when politics come up, but stories, unlike life, are driven by conflict, and a situation like the one described above creates an internal conflict that can draw a reader into the plot in ways that some supervillain bent on world domination never could.
Date: 06/04/2009 Again with the Characters

Stories are driven my characters (mostly), and characters are driven by conflict. But what makes a character, not just good, but great? What is the difference between a character that we enjoy reading about, and one that we become so obsessed with that we hunt up every mention of their name?

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one of the reoccurring themes in my favorite books is internal conflict. Good internal conflict. Throwing obstacles up in the path of your protagonist is a necessity for writing, but I’ve been known to pick up a story with amazing potential and drop it halfway through chapter one because, well, I just don’t give a crap about the characters.

The best characters in all of literature are, in my opinion, the ones that spend as much time fighting with themselves as they do struggling against whatever other problems you might have thrown in front of them. From Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, who can only function in a world that defies rational explanation, but disbelieving in the very existence of that world, to Harry Dresden, a wizard who spends several books fighting against the desire to take an easy path to power, then in later books must remain vigilant against the temptations of a fallen angel living inside his head.

In any novel your protagonist is dealing with two basic human dilemmas which are related, but not directly correlated. The first question: what to do, is the conflict we naturally see. But keep in mind, your character must also decide WHO THEY ARE. A much more complicated question, and one with greater implications. If you are writing a thriller wherein a man has planted nuclear devices around the world and your character must find them, that can be interesting. If your character captures the man who planted them and has to decide whether or not to torture the information of the man, or if that’s a line he/she can’t cross, that can be a hell of a story.
Date: 06/11/2009 Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Wrath

One day, sitting at home, twiddling my thumbs, I found myself thinking about the seven deadly sins, and I realized something: Sloth is my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, every single one of them plays a major role in my life, but there is a special place in my heart for sloth. Every morning, when my alarm goes off and my hand flies to the off switch, I find myself laying there quietly calculating, trying to figure out exactly how long I have before I absolutely, positively HAVE to be up. Do I have work that day? Is there anything special I need to do before then? How long is my morning shower going to be? Do I have to hunt down clean clothes or are they ready to go? One of the major appeals to me of becoming an author, somebody who can actually support themselves off of their writing, is the idea that someday, down the line, I’ll find myself in a position where I’ll occasionally wake up in the morning with absolutely NO reason to get out of bed.

You probably have a favorite sin as well. Frankly, we all do. Well, so do your characters. Whether we’re talking about heroes or villains, or just those guys who stand in the background leaning on staffs while they wait for someone to show up and put a knife through their gullets, all characters are, in some way, motivated by their own flaws. It’s entirely possible that they fight their own failings, but make no mistake, those failings are there. I’ve heard, time and again from a dozen different people, that when you’re writing a story you need to stop and ask yourself what each person wants, what they’re trying to accomplish, and that’s absolutely true. Whether the character is a mother who is trying to protect her child, or a soldier who wants to protect his country . . . or a soldier who doesn’t give a damn about his country, but is grateful as hell that joining up got him away from home, it’s important for the reader to know exactly what your character is trying to accomplish. But it’s also important to ask yourself what else drives them. Specifically what drives them away from their goal.

Addictions can be useful for this. If your character’s quest for the truth behind a conspiracy for world domination is constantly being interrupted by his craving for alcohol, you’ve just added another dimension to your story. But sometimes you don’t need to be that obvious. A simple addition to your story, an emphasis on a man’s frustration that someone he’d worked with for years was suddenly promoted above him and now makes twice as much money, takes characters out of the abstract and makes them into people that we can really understand and empathize with.

If you find yourself having trouble with one of your characters, whether they’re not realistic enough, or it’s hard to understand what motivates them, take a moment and ask yourself what’s wrong with them.
Date: 06/18/2009 Keeping Track of Your Ladders

One of the many, many jobs I’ve had over the course of my life was stocking shelves. After two weeks working in the main part of the store, I found myself working in the backroom, a position that involves a lot of high shelves, and thus, a lot of ladders. It didn’t take long to notice something that at first struck me as a peculiarity. The ladders we used for getting to the top shelves were about twelve feet tall, and the ‘doorways’ between the sections were only about seven feet high. There were ladders in each of the sections, so no matter where you were you could get your hands on one of them, but from time to time you’d either find that the nearest ladder was on the other side of one of the doorways, so you had to go hunting for the ladder for your section, or you’d find that whatever you needed was in a section where all the ladders were already in use, so you just had to wait until one became available.

At first it this seemed like a mistake. Poor planning. There were some nights when we had a tight schedule, and having to wait five minutes for somebody else to finish up whatever they were doing or having to move three carts out of the way so I could get a ladder where I needed it when there was another ladder six feet away just seemed inconvenient. But then I thought about my jackets. The problem that I have with jackets is that I can never get them when I need them. I put them on when I’m cold and take them off when I’m hot (obviously), but since I tend to be in particular places at particular points in the day, I find myself cold and hot at the same times and in the same places. Case in point: when I was working the stocking job, I was getting up in the evenings. Because it was evening I would often be chilly, so I’d throw on a coat before heading off to work. Once I was at work, actually moving around and exerting myself, I’d get warm and hang up my coat in the break room. Then, in the morning, when I was still warm from running around for eight hours, I’d head home, completely forgetting the jacket I’d brought the night before. I’d take another coat the next night, and leave it in the same place.

The ladders could very easily have suffered the same fate. After all, I generally started pulls in one particular area and finished in another, I could well have taken ladder after ladder with me until every one of them was in the same corner of the store. As things are, from time to time I would find myself having to turn a corner or two to find a way to get to the top shelf of wherever I was working, but I never had to drag a ladder all the way from one end of the backroom to the other.

What does that have to do with writing? One of the things that I’ve always had trouble with, in writing and in everything else, is accepting formulas. When somebody first told me that I needed to learn about three act structure to improve my writing, I was offended. The idea that all stories should follow the same format struck me as ridiculous. It was like the first time somebody told me about adding restrictions to give yourself more liberty in your writing. The thought that I would be able to be more creative if I limited what I was thinking about seemed bizarre. Then I tried it. The stories we write are not intended solely for our own enjoyment. The goal is to have other people read it and understand it and gain something from the experience. In order to give them that, we need to make sure that they can find what they’re looking for in each section of our story.

Something that I, like a lot of science fiction writers, have a tendency to do is invest heavily in the payoff of my story. I have written things wherein the entire plot revolves around one moment in time. I’ll spend pages and pages explaining the mechanics of an idea and the nature of a character, all of which leads to the last two paragraphs in which there is a payoff. But it requires some faith on the part of my readers to get to that point. Now, if my sister is reading the story over, that’s not really a problem. She has faith in me, so twenty pages of backstory and character description is something she’s willing to invest. But is somebody flipping through a magazine willing to give me that same benefit?

I still believe that a good story doesn’t necessarily need to follow the standard three act structure, but I have also come to realize that the structure is there for a reason. Like the dividers in the backroom of the store I worked in, they make sure that readers can find what they need when they need it, that they don’t have to get to the very end of the book to know whether or not it’s worth reading.

I also know that I’m not good enough to come up with my own format.

Yet.
Date: 06/25/2009 Setups and Payoffs

I remember one day, years ago, when I was watching a television show with my mother, and about ten minutes into it I told her how it would end. I’m not saying this because I think it’s impressive, I’m saying it because I know it isn’t.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of tv shows and a lot of movies and it only takes so many years of watching the same patterns repeated before you start to catch on. At first I was proud of myself when I realized that I could tell you who the killer was, or how the alien menace would be destroyed, but after a while it became a sort of buzzkill, to find out that the first fifteen minutes of a show gave me everything I needed to know. At the time I thought it was unavoidable: the format of television shows is such that they have a very limited amount of time to set up a problem, provide all relevant details, then solve the problem. Since then shows have come out that have broken the mold, but for a writer the original problem illustrates one of our great obstacles: how do you foreshadow without revealing?

To handle the problem we first need to define the problem. What is the point of setups and payoffs? Well, there are several purposes: first, it creates a pleasurable moment for the reader, giving them an opportunity to see a clever twist, to realize that the solution was presented ten chapters ago, etc, etc, but to me, that’s not the most important part. One of the cheapest tricks a writer can do is to pull a Deus Ex Machina, or a God from the Machine. In ancient Greek plays it was a common thing for a writer to do. They would take characters, put them in impossible situations, make it worse and worse and then, when things couldn’t be fixed, the gods themselves would step in and set the world aright. It was fine, as long as you were looking for religious propaganda, but in terms of stories, it was lazy writing. Not every story needs a happy ending, and not every plot line needs to be tied off at the end of a story, but nine times out of ten you want to rescue somebody from the fires before your burn the building down, and if your conflict works the way it’s supposed to, they should be buried pretty deep in those flames before you pull them out. So how do you rescue a character from their damnation? Well, you can throw something huge in at the very end that nobody saw coming, but whether that something is a new character, an unpredictable event, or a space ship from an alternate universe, it’s still god from the machine. So what you want to do is set up pieces of the resolution throughout your story. You need to build a pathway leading out of hell as you shove them farther and farther into it, but the more obvious the pathway, the less worried the reader is about them, and the less pleasure they get as your hero strolls out of the way before the meteor hits. Now, I have no idea how many metaphors I mixed in there, and frankly I don’t care. The point remains.

Oh, and the second reason for foreshadowing is symmetry. If the story starts with the main character conning somebody out of their wallet and it ends with the main character being conned out of their wallet (which, by the way, contains the stolen formulae that is actually a cure for cancer), well, that’s just funny. The universe I live in isn’t balanced, but it sure as hell can be ironic.
Date: 07/02/2009 Hunt for Rabbits, Hope for Gazelles

Something that I’ve found interesting over the years has been discovering the process of writing. Or perhaps, more accurately, I should say ‘discovering my process of writing.’

When I first began I would simply have an idea. Usually it wasn’t even an idea about a story, it was an idea about characters and/or the world they lived in. I got a picture of my characters in my mind, a picture of the world they lived in, and I just started writing. Generally speaking it took me between five and twenty-five pages to find myself in a place where I had no idea what to do next. I didn’t know where to go, what my characters should be doing . . . I had no direction because I hadn’t decided, at the beginning, where I wanted my story to end.

I know some very good writers who are very, very big on outlines. There are people who need to know almost exactly and precisely what information needs to be in each and every chapter of their book before they write the first page. I’m not that kind of writer, at least not yet, but I have learned the importance of having a target.

I don’t know what writing is for you, but for me it is, or it can be, a lot like hunting. Well, like hunting might be if I hunted . . . and if I didn’t have to worry about licenses and what animals were in season and which ones weren’t . . . okay, fine it isn’t much like hunting, but it is kind of like the way I imagine hunting to be. You want to have a feel for the terrain. It’s important to know what pitfalls to avoid, where you’re most likely to find your prey, what mistakes tend to roam around the area, all of that. But even knowing the terrain, you can never be sure what you’re going to find along the way. Trees can be knocked over, flooding and winds make subtle but important changes, and you never know what might race across your path. What I’m getting at is that it’s important to be prepared, to have a plan, but it’s also important to be able to recognize unexpected opportunities and flashes of inspiration. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been halfway through a paragraph and the entire course of the story has changed because of a single moment of insight, or even just an odd question coursing through my head. “What if he lost the election?” “Maybe she doesn’t just know what happened, maybe she did it!” “Is he even capable of that?” I remember reading once about an author who stated that he didn’t even know his main character had a son until he showed up on his father’s doorstep. Those are the big game in writing. The gazelles and the antelope that spring up along the way, those perfect moments that you can’t plan, but you have to be able to take advantage of.

Sometimes in art we work within very rigid guidelines: an architect cannot sacrifice safety to make a structure more aesthetically appealing. Sometimes in art we work with almost no rules: a painter might create a masterpiece based on photorealism, surrealism, or the abstract. What works best for me may not work best for you, but I am limited in my advice to my own experience, and in my experience writing a novel is based on a rigid structure containing a mass of goo (the goo being the options, goo is really, really flexible). I pick several areas where I know the hunting is good, decide what I want to accomplish at each point, make certain I’m armed for the experience, and I start walking. It’s important, in my experience, to have specific places to aim for. If you go out with no idea where you’re going, there is a chance you’ll stumble across something wonderful, but it’s a lot more likely you’ll simply get lost. Similarly, if you simply pick one destination, the end point of the story, there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself halfway there, worn out, with nothing to show for your work and no idea how to get over the ravine you’ve stumbled across. So pick your path, decide how to get from point A to point B by making a few pit stops along the way.

Keep in mind that your character should be confronting himself/herself along the way. Some people say that if a character doesn’t change over the course of the story, it isn’t a good story. I don’t know that I agree, as long as the character confronts situations where they have the opportunity, or perhaps the motivation to change and must decide who or what they want to be. Find those points in the story. Figure out how to confront your character with their own nature, and set up those scenes periodically throughout the book. This will both make your book more interesting, and make it easier for you to know what to write. After all, if the priest has to come to terms with the death of his gay brother, whom he hasn’t spoken to in eighteen years, just trying to shove the information in along the way makes your writing more difficult, but if you know you want him to have a conversation with his brother’s lover, you have a direction to move in. You know where to go. And knowing is half the battle (queue theme music).
Date: 07/09/2009 Setups and Payoffs

I remember one day, years ago, when I was watching a television show with my mother, and about ten minutes into it I told her how it would end. I’m not saying this because I think it’s impressive, I’m saying it because I know it isn’t.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of tv shows and a lot of movies and it only takes so many years of watching the same patterns repeated before you start to catch on. At first I was proud of myself when I realized that I could tell you who the killer was, or how the alien menace would be destroyed, but after a while it became a sort of buzzkill, to find out that the first fifteen minutes of a show gave me everything I needed to know. At the time I thought it was unavoidable: the format of television shows is such that they have a very limited amount of time to set up a problem, provide all relevant details, then solve the problem. Since then shows have come out that have broken the mold, but for a writer the original problem illustrates one of our great obstacles: how do you foreshadow without revealing?

To handle the problem we first need to define the problem. What is the point of setups and payoffs? Well, there are several purposes: first, it creates a pleasurable moment for the reader, giving them an opportunity to see a clever twist, to realize that the solution was presented ten chapters ago, etc, etc, but to me, that’s not the most important part. One of the cheapest tricks a writer can do is to pull a Deus Ex Machina, or a God from the Machine. In ancient Greek plays it was a common thing for a writer to do. They would take characters, put them in impossible situations, make it worse and worse and then, when things couldn’t be fixed, the gods themselves would step in and set the world aright. It was fine, as long as you were looking for religious propaganda, but in terms of stories, it was lazy writing. Not every story needs a happy ending, and not every plot line needs to be tied off at the end of a story, but nine times out of ten you want to rescue somebody from the fires before your burn the building down, and if your conflict works the way it’s supposed to, they should be buried pretty deep in those flames before you pull them out. So how do you rescue a character from their damnation? Well, you can throw something huge in at the very end that nobody saw coming, but whether that something is a new character, an unpredictable event, or a space ship from an alternate universe, it’s still god from the machine. So what you want to do is set up pieces of the resolution throughout your story. You need to build a pathway leading out of hell as you shove them farther and farther into it, but the more obvious the pathway, the less worried the reader is about them, and the less pleasure they get as your hero strolls out of the way before the meteor hits. Now, I have no idea how many metaphors I mixed in there, and frankly I don’t care. The point remains.

Oh, and the second reason for foreshadowing is symmetry. If the story starts with the main character conning somebody out of their wallet and it ends with the main character being conned out of their wallet (which, by the way, contains the stolen formulae that is actually a cure for cancer), well, that’s just funny. The universe I live in isn’t balanced, but it sure as hell can be ironic.
Date: 07/16/2009 The Seven Senses

As I have stated in previous blogs, I’m not great with description. It’s a failing that I’m working on in my own writing, so it’s one I feel makes for a good conversation piece.

In a conversation with some members of my peer editing group, one of our members told us that he has, for years, made a point of including descriptions of smells and textures in his writing. According to him it’s useful both because those senses are overlooked in so many books, and because they are more intimate examinations of a thing than merely looking at it or listening to it. The discussion was centered around a scene in a book where a man comes across a corpse. At the time I was thinking about the use of senses with regard to giving a powerful scene some extra punch, but recently it occurred to me how much the tone of a scene can change depending on what parts of the experience you emphasize.

In any given scene your character is experiencing seven senses, taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, sense of balance and . . . . I can never remember what it’s called, but it’s the sense that lets you know where different parts of your body are when you’re not looking at them [body sense?]. If you want to know more about that find a book called ‘the man who mistook his wife for a hat.’ It’s mentioned in there somewhere. Anyhow, the point is that in any scene where you’re describing how someone is feeling, you have seven mediums of description. If your main character is visiting her dying mother you can talk about how she looks, or how the room looks, how weak her voice is, or how noisy the hospital is, the texture of her hand, the smell of the room she’s in, how your main character’s meals have lost their taste, how dizzy your main character is, or how she feels like she’s floating (disconnected from feeling where her body is).

Take a moment and consider the difference between emphasizing how cold the hospital room is, and talking about how warm her mother’s hand is. One choice tells you that the main character feels detached, the other connected. Is her mother’s hand soft, or are the walls hard? One experiment I read about in one of my sociology classes involved asking different people the same questions using slightly different wording. For example, they might show one of their test subjects a video of a car crash and ask how fast each of the cars was moving. They’d show the video to one person and say, ‘how fast was the red car going when it hit the white car?’ Then they’d show the video to someone else and ask ‘how fast was the red car going when it slammed into the white car?’ Then for the third person they’d ask ‘how fast was the red car going when it nailed the white car?’ Just to be clear, I don’t know the actual wording, these are just examples. The point is that even having just watched it, having physically seen the same event, the estimated speed of the vehicle between the groups who were asked was different, to a statistically significant degree, depending on the words used to ask the questions.

If a person’s perspective on something they physically saw can be altered by how you ask them about what they saw, how much more power does an author have when they’re building a world from scratch? One of the things my peer review group keeps on telling me to improve my writing is ‘show us, don’t tell us.’ It’s an expression that, on some levels, seems rather ridiculous. As a writer, I can’t show you. I don’t deal in images, I deal in words, which means that I have to tell you what I’m showing you. But there are different ways to say the same thing. If I simply state that my main character felt disconnected from the other guests at the funeral, that’s fine to know, but it isn’t nearly as powerful as telling you that the place was too chilly, and the other guests all looked the same, with the same empty words of empathy and sorrow. If I tell you that the coffin was hard, and as smooth as a bullet, that the body inside smelled like a thing, not a person anymore, that has more of an effect than simply telling you how my character feels.
Date: 07/23/2009 My take on Genre

So one of the questions that very nearly every writer I know has come up against at some point or another is the question of genre. It’s not just a question for writers, I’ve had the same discussions with my sister while we searched a video store for a particular movie. For writers, however, the question isn’t just one of intellectual curiosity; it’s an all important debate, for several reasons. The first is practical: if you want to get published you have to get a publisher to read your work. If you want a publisher to read your work you need to get the right work to the right publisher. If what you’re writing is easily defined, that isn’t a problem: but what if you’re writing a mystery which just happens to take place when aliens have landed on the planet? Should you send it to a company that deals in mystery? Should you send it to a company that deals in science fiction? The second reason is networking: both pre and post publishing it’s important to get your name and your book out there, both for sales and for feedback. Hell, why do you think I’m doing this? But finding a readership or a good peer group can be like finding a publisher. Not just anyone will do. You need to find people that fit. The third reason is personal: At some point somebody is going to ask you about your writing, maybe a cute girl at a bar, maybe your pastor, and there’s nothing more embarrassing than to realize that you sound like you have no idea what you write. Well, technically that isn’t true, there are several dozen things more embarrassing, but not many of them are likely to happen at that particular point in time.

I’ve heard two particularly meaningful answers to this question. The first was from, if I’m not mistaken, Orson Scott Card. It’s been a while since I read this, but I’m fairly confident that it was him (if it wasn’t, I apologize). He was saying that at the beginning of his career he’d written a short story and sent it to a sci-fi magazine. They responded by telling him that it was very good but that it was a fantasy, not sci-fi, and he should send it to another magazine. He was surprised because the story he’d written was part of a larger series which, when all the facts were in, was obviously a science fiction series. The problem was that all of the explanations, all of the tech involved in the overarching series was missing from the story, and it read like a fantasy. In the end he concluded that another author (whose name I cannot for the life of me remember) was correct in their definition, “Science fiction is what I point at and say ‘that is science fiction’.” That’s not a perfect quote. Sorry. The point, though, is that it’s hard to come up with any hard and fast rules to bind a specific genre. His stipulation to this argument being that the person pointing and saying ‘this is science fiction’ needs to be someone qualified to make that assessment. I would argue that, more than who is saying it, it is a question of the author’s intent.

The second meaningful answer came from an editor who took a very practical view of the subject. Her definition was simply, “What section of a bookstore would I find this in?” This is probably the best definition when you’re asking yourself who to submit to, but frankly I never credited bookstores with much insight into what they’re selling. Besides, there are books that don’t fit anywhere, or that could fit everywhere, or that you can’t figure out how to place, and for those, the question becomes entirely moot.

So here’s my take: The problem with genre is that it’s a single term used to define two aspects of your writing. What do I mean? Well, let’s take one of my favorite movie examples: Shaun of the Dead. A horror comedy. Horror. Comedy. Now, don’t get me wrong, having comedy in a horror isn’t that hard. And having horror in a comedy . . . well, usually it’s on accident, but sometimes they mean to do it. But this movie is unique in that it doesn’t simply use one to contrast the other, it embraces both identities. Successfully. How is that possible? Well, one is the background, the other is the tone. The background is very much a horror movie. An extra terrestrial disease is infecting people, and everyone infected becomes an undead creature that longs to feast on the flesh of the living. But the tone . . . the story itself, is very much a comedy. A romantic comedy, yes, but leaning strongly towards comedy. A loveable loser’s life is falling apart and, when push comes to shove (or when push comes to gnaw on human flesh) he decides what’s really important to him is his mother and his ex-girlfriend . . . oh, and his favorite pub.

Perhaps the best way of explaining it is contrasting two movies that could be described as science fiction, or as westers: Serenity, a western style of story told against the backdrop of a distant planet in another solar system. And Wild Wild West, a science fiction story, told against the backdrop of . . . well, the wild wild west. I like this particular contrast because a quick viewing of each can show you the difference between background and tone. In Wild Wild West, for example, the technology takes center stage. Evidence is gathered using sophisticated devices. Disguises are ornate. In Serenity, human callousness and battles of will, bravery and desperation take center stage. Oh, sure, the technology is there, but it isn’t much remarked upon, simply identified and left to be used as needed by the plot. And the bad guys, they may drive space ships, but what makes them special isn’t their super duper guns, or their amazing technology; no, it’s their savage, sadistic, psychotic nature. You’re not afraid of being killed, you’re afraid of being taken alive.

My personal view is that when you’re describing your genre you need to ask yourself two questions: what is the world this takes place in, and what is the style of the story? When looking for a publisher the background is probably more important than the tone, but when you’re discussing it with a group, or looking for a readership, keep in mind that tone can get you a lot of crossover readers. You just have to make sure they know where in the bookstore to find you.
Date: 07/30/2009 Life Lessons, 1/12

Okay, I’m going to try something a little different. I’ve had a bunch of jobs in my life. Not too many, just more than I’d like to have had . . . the point is, I think that it’s important to learn something from everything you do, so I’m going to spend the next couple of blogs drawing lessons from my various careers and trying to apply them to writing in general. I don’t know exactly how this’ll turn out, maybe great, maybe horrible, but it’s important to try new things.

Let’s see, the first job I ever had was as an usher at a movie theater. Not the most rewarding job ever, minimum wage to clean theaters, tear tickets, and tell people that the bathroom is down the hall and to the left. Still, it was a first job, and first jobs aren’t about making major money or doing things that validate you. First jobs are about being able to say, “Yes, I can do pointless, demeaning work, I can work with other people, and I can learn.” I mean, unless you’re a child star, but in that case you’re just screwed anyway, so let’s not talk about that. I’m depressed enough already.

I suppose I could take the easy way out and say that first jobs are about paying your dues and so is a lot of the writing I’ve done so far, but I think I can do better than that.

One of the things I remember, rather distinctly, about my time working in the theater were the suspenders and bow ties. Not real ones. Bright, plastic suspenders and bright plastic bow ties which we had to wear along with white shirts and black pants. I didn’t mind the white shirts and black pants, but I, like most of the people who worked there, was not a fan of the suspenders and bow ties. I mean, seriously people, bad enough you have me dressing up like an eighty year old man -- you have to make me dress up like an eighty year old man who keeps his clothes too close to the nuclear power plant?

But it wasn’t without reason. The thing a lot of people don’t understand about theaters is that they don’t really make their money on the movies. I don’t know exactly what the breakdown is, whether none of the money goes to the theater, or just not much, but I do know that most of what you spend to see the movie goes to the people who made the movie. Theaters make money on the concessions. Why do you think they charge four bucks for fifty cents worth of popcorn and three dollars for fourteen cents worth of soda?

You know before you go that the food is overpriced. You also know that they don’t pat you down before you go in and they don’t exactly have dogs at the door sniffing people for food, so why do you pay? Simple, you might be going to the theater to see that awesome new action movie, but you’re also there for ‘the theater experience.’ It’s the same reason you’re willing to overpay for food at theme parks. Seriously, people have been known to go broke reading those menus.

Theater’s know that they’re selling you an experience. They know that they’re selling you a package deal. It’s in their best interest to enhance that feeling, like theme parks do. So having people dress oddly, making sure their employees always smile, making sure that the floors are as clean as possible, playing that crappy music . . . ooh, bad memories.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s all about the big picture. The truth is that I, or for that matter anyone else working at that theater could have put together a more pleasing, generally less embarrassing outfit easily. It would have been easy for them to give us more general guidelines, and we probably would have preferred the way we looked, hell, we might not have been made fun of quite so much. But the identical outfits, especially ridiculous looking identical outfits, contributed something (something very small, but something) to the overall experience. In the same way, sometimes pieces of a story have to be sacrificed for the big picture. There have been times, going through one of my stories, that I’ve found a scene that I like, but that doesn’t contribute to the whole. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it is something that you find and from time to time you’re faced with the awkward task of getting rid of a scene that you desperately want to keep.

When that happens just take a deep breath and remember that you may hate having to wear the plastic bow tie, but if that’s what it takes to make the story better overall, it’s a price you’ll just have to pay.
Date: 08/6/2009 Check back on the sixth (give or take a day)

 

 

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