'It' Leads to Disaster

While I'm waiting around for a new comic book project to appear, I'm taking some of Willingham's advice and finishing a novel. I have a few bad writing habits that manifested while writing my first novel that I finished last week. Writing that first mystery was a tough staggering fight and I just made it to the end like a punch drunk boxer looking for that final bell. When I'm working I can get a lot of words down on the page each day, but my bad habits bloom. One of those has to do with the word 'it' which in most cases is a place-holder for a much better term.

So after a few days tending to other projects, I was ready to knock that word out of the manuscript as best I could. I set up a Find/ Replace operation where the computer would find the next instance of the lazy word and I would manually make some sort of change. Then I would move on to the next and so on. Well, I have a trick computer that sometimes throws the cursor around and adds keystrokes. The machine had one of its spells as I was in that find/ replace mode. Then I saved the document. A little poking around in the novel revealed that the computer had replaced the word 'it' with nothing. Thanks to that fluke, 'it' had been removed from the entire document, all seventy thousand words. That disaster tore apart words like wait, white, with, within, security, reality, etc. Those of you who live in Austin may have heard my profanity-charged tirade. Birds scattered. Dogs were silent.

My just-a-quick-polish draft turned into a word-for-word careful examination of the novel. It hurt, but it focused my mind on the manuscript in a unique way. The Milk Run is a better book for it. Still, I hope that never happens again.
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Born Standing Up

Steve Martin uses this wonderful biography* to chart the development of his stand-up routine. It starts with his first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland and ends with him walking away from that life on the road to make his first movie, The Jerk. He is by turns harsh to the people that never followed through on showbiz promises made and kind to comedy giants such as Johnny Carson and Carl Reiner. His relationship with his Dad and women on the road are a little too intimate for me, but this is a fascinating and well-written book.

The wonderful thing for me was discovering the genesis of his act and seriousness required to make it hum. His stories of failed attempts and stumbles are as entertaining as his impressions of Saturday Night Live alum like John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. His anecdotes and clever approach to being silly really makes me want to go back and listen to that old vinyl. It almost erases the stench of some of his recent movie projects.

More importantly for those of us who make a living with stories of 'jokes and punching' is the constant analysis of what he was doing and what he learned from that. In the beginning, he carefully considers breaking the old structures to create something new in comedy. There are dozens of entertaining and charming parallels between the writing life and the comedy writing life. This should be a primer for anyone considering a life in entertainment.


* I know the term is autobiography. But he makes the point that he is writing about the man he used to be, so I am using his terminology.

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Serendipity is the Enemy!

As a mystery and crime writer I like to believe in cause and effect. Beyond the poetry of the prose, there lay the nuts and bolts of story construction. My characters have to figure things out, so I have a series of objects placed in front of them and the correct construction of the right clues will show a solution. It is like being a puzzle-maker, but I use things beside jigsaws and lumber.

I recently hit a wall in a certain plot and had a character just stumble across a thread that would lead to a momentum- changing clue. To me it feels like a cheat. That moment of serendipity stands out like a sore thumb. It's the bathroom with the bad drain in the brand new house. With luck, I will be the only one to notice. Rather than going back and fiddling with it endlessly, I'm working on the next thing. But it is rather irritating to have a coincidence propel a detective story.

Clockwork folk, how often does this kind of thing happen to you?


(Yes, when it gets cold enough, I dress like a manga character.)

It's true that cockroaches have eaten an awful lot of my best work.

When Kurt Vonnegut died recently -- yes, 2007 is recent, because I'm getting old and the years are passing much quicker now -- many who loved him and his works passed around his list of eight writing rules. That's when I first became aware of them. They're pretty good rules. At least one of them surprised me -- I mean really surprised me. I thought I'd share them with you, with my own notes and commentary appended.

1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

I agree. Part of the unbreakable contract with the reader is that you won't waste his time. I would add that this includes an imperative to do away with all artsy fartsy writing, designed primarily to show off your amazing skills and talents. Quit trying to impress your reader and tell him a story instead. I suspect this is also a call to get to the point. Quit beating around the bush.

2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I mostly agree, but the challenge of this statement does tempt me to one day see if I can write a compelling story wherein every single character is a despicable fiend with hellish goals. I'm trying to think if there are any good examples of that -- not just the antihero, but one with no redeeming qualities at all.

3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

I think this pretty much speaks for itself. Some variation of this rule shows up in every writer's advice on how to create "real" believable characters.

4) Every sentence should do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

I think I mostly agree. But what about describing the setting? Can that be done totally within the context of revealing character or advancing the plot? Aren't you in danger of unduly burdening otherwise tight and concise sentences if the character and action parts also have to get bits of setting and physical description injected into them from time to time?

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

I agree and this is one of those bits of advice, obvious in hindsight, that freed up my own writing considerably. A lot of dead weight got lifted with this rule.

6) Be as sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they're made of.

I agree wholeheartedly. This is the rule that frustrates me most, because it is so self evident, and yet it causes the most problems with a modern readership that is more and more composed of angry "we're constantly looking for ways to take offense" indignation groups. If your characters are black, or gay, or female, or any other sort that can be shoehorned into some category for which there is a vocal, self-elected and angry group of protectors, you're going to take some flak for what you do with them. Do mean things to someone of theirs and they will howl bloody murder. The thing you must constantly remind yourself is that these folks are few, no matter how loud they may be, they do not speak for the majority of whatever group they pretend to represent, and you must ignore them and soldier on, continuing to do nasty things to those characters, because doing otherwise is boring, which is among the worst offenses a writer can commit. You need to remind yourself that you will never hear from the thoughtful, reasonable reader, the way you always will hear from the indignation groups. But they are out there, and they are your true audience.

7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

This rule is most often expressed as "write for yourself" or "write to please yourself." I mostly agree with this. I tend to write for a very small, very select group, but not just a single person. I write to please and make sense to the other folks in the Clockwork group. But the entire purpose of forming the group was to be surrounded by those of like minds and similar tastes. Writing simply to please myself smacks just a bit too much of narcissism, and I know I'll never hold my own feet to the fire for my self-indulgences the way the other Clockworkers will. They will not let me get away with any self-indulgent crap.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible, as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This was the one rule that really opened my eyes. Before this I was all about keeping the suspense, which usually translated into keeping the readers in the dark, until The Big Reveal! Now I see that the big reveal was much overrated. I now think of my relationship to the reader(s) as leading a group of trusted comrades on a commando mission. If I die en route, they should be able to carry on and blow up the Bridge without me (and, guys, please make sure you shoot Alec Guinness, if for no other reason than to see if he comes back all ghostly and reveals you've been hot for your own sister for the last two movies).

Four Good Rules

Massively talented writer of various Marvel comic books and urban fantasy novels, Marjorie Liu, recently posted this short litany of writing advice she finds helpful to remind herself from time to time: Get to the point. Get back to basics. Do it with a little pizazz. Don't lose your edge.

It's pretty much self explanatory, but why should I let that stop me from explaining it? Okay, not really explaining it, but I thought it would be fun to break it down to its four component parts and examine what I have been able to glean from it so far.

Let's proceed, shall we?

1) Get to the point.

In other words, quit dicking around by showing off your stellar wit and finely crafted prose and get the story told, with expedience, clarity and honesty. I'm sure we're as impressed as you are with your artistic turn of phrase and your intricate and poetic word constructions, but those don't mean a thing if you don't get the story told.

Orson Scott Card, one of the finest writers in our field, takes writing advice questions on his blog, fielding one from a fellow who was worried about his writing style, and complained his inability to refine his own style was causing serious blockages to getting his novel written. I deeply paraphrased the question and now I'll do the same with the answer. Card replied that it was a silly distraction to worry about style. Just tell the story as simply as possible. Do that and your style will be whatever comes out of just telling the story.

I mentioned that exchange because, whether it helped that fellow or not, it was a Damascus Road experience for me. The scales fell off of my eyes at the simplicity and obviousness of the advice. I had been struggling to learn prose writing, was finding it difficult, next to impossible, and was about ready to pack it in and stick with comic book writing for the rest of my career. And then Card said that, and it made sense. It was actually a freeing moment, in which a ton of metaphorical weights seemed to drop right off of me.

Don't worry about theme, or style, or any other extraneous nonsense, and just tell a clear story. Let your readers eventually decide those other matters. And, if you run into trouble between two wonderfully crafted scenes that need to be connected, just write the minimum material you need to do that, almost like notes to yourself on what needs to happen, and that should remove the blockage. Later on you may find that it's the simple terse connecting material that is the better stuff and those two artfully constructed passages are what needs to go, or at least be slimmed down.

2) Get back to basics.

I see this as, "don't try to reinvent the wheel." The stuff of good story isn't going to change. Trying to do something that's never been done before, such as writing a novel that's simply one run-on sentence, or purposely constructing indecipherable passages to "challenge" the reader, or any of a vast number of so-called new literary conventions, are all hooey. At best they're stunts. At worst they're purposely malicious. My job is to communicate an interesting story to my readers, and communication can only occur when the reader knows what the hell I'm saying.

3) Do it with a little pizazz.

When Marjorie first posted this, fellow Clockworkian Chris Roberson mistook it as: "Do it with a little pizza," and said as much, which put pizza in the minds of many of those of us who read the small exchange. I wonder how much pizza was ordered that night as a result of the misunderstanding? I know they got me, and my editor at IDW.

But tastiness aside, pizza is not required to write well. In fact it may be an impediment, if you like to keep a clean keyboard.

Here's how I think Marjorie's third rule applies to me. It's not a repudiation of what I just wrote above about ignoring style. We still ought not to worry about our writing style, because that can only grow organically from our actual writing. I think it has something to do with confidence -- as in we should have some. Do it with a bit of a swagger.

Humility is all well and good, and a character trait much to be admired. But it has limited use to a writer. If I don't have enough ego and confidence to believe I have an interesting story to tell, then why am I wasting everyone's time by jumping up on the metaphorical stage and shouting, "Give me your money, your time and your attention for as long as I want it, because I have a great story to tell you!" That is an act of bravado bordering on arrogance.

This business isn't for the timid. Writing is an act of leadership, and no one follows an overly timid leader. When you write, bring your swagger. Bring your confidence. Bring your pizazz.

4) Don't lose your edge.

I've lost my edge before. Hell, I've lost the whole damned blade. I think the only way to keep your edge is to keep honing it. Keep writing or your tools get dull and useless. If I go a few days without writing it's like I'm starting all over again when I start up again. Ultimately writing means sitting alone in a room getting hours of work done one day, and then repeating it the next day and so on, for far too many days in a row. If you can't stand to be alone with yourself in a room for protracted lengths of time, then you can't do this. You will all too quickly lose your edge.

That's what I take, so far, from Marjorie's four admonitions. I know as I ponder further I'll get other wisdoms from them. That's the nature of good advice. I wonder what the other Clockwork boys take from the same four rules. Maybe they'll share as much in their own posts.

For those who want to go to the source, or maybe find out for yourselves why we're Marjorie Liu fans here at the Clockworks, you can find her and her books here.