[Short] Piecing Together A Story, Step By Step.

WARNING: Post may be considered self-indulgent and boring. Skip if you are supremely uninterested in hearing how some amateur writer tries to write short stories.

'Breathing In Gerry Neimeyer' is well under way, but I thought I would put together a post that details how I go about piecing together a story from the original idea to the written word. Questions about where writers find their ideas tend to be the first ones asked by those who are not writers. The reason you'd never hear a writer ask such a thing is because they know how complex and improvised the process is. About as close as you can get to providing a satisfactory answer is to write a blog post like this one and try to include as much detail as possible.

More after the jump.

Why Do We Hate Bella Swan?

Post moved to the new site.

Distractions: A Writer's Guide, Part One

For the afflicted writer, I have compiled a list of distractions, their common symptoms, and what you can do to avoid being ensnared by them. Listed in no particular order, they are equal bastions of procrastination.

If I can save just one paragraph, it will have all been worth it.

The sneakiest of all distractions, books are able to masquerade as 'research' to convince you that you are not procrastinating. Don't believe them. They are lying to you.

Signs you are distracted:

• Intellectual Stimulation
• Vivid Fantasies, often accompanied by emotional highs and lows
• A sudden, unexplained increase in vocabulary
• Words Read : Words Written ratio beginning to sound like something C-3PO would say



The odds of successfully finishing a book at this rate are approximately 6,245,000 to One!

Solution: Read only terrible, truly awful books. Not only will you not be able to continue reading, you will be convinced that you could write a better book with one arm tied behind your back.

The junk food of the media world, Television and Video Games are good at what they do, which is stopping you from writing. In fact, a good enough game or TV show will make you forget to eat, which technically makes them even more insidious than junk food. I guess that means they're more like the Alien of the media world - the perfect procrastination weapon.

Signs you are distracted:

• Carpal Tunnel from mouse clicking
• A groove in your sofa that is supiciously the same shape as your arse
• Dozens, if not hundreds, of empty red bull cans scattered around the TV/PC
• Square eyes (And you thought your mother was joking)
• A mild form of Vampirism as you become ultra-sensitive to sunlight

Get away from that Manuscript, you BITCH

Solution: Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Oooh boy. You're Gollum, and the Internet is the Ring. You need it and it needs you. Of the two participants, User and Internet, one is the host body and the other is the tapeworm that lives in its guts. Which one is which is unclear at this time.

Signs you are distracted:

• You are reading this
• You know what a 'lolcat' is
• You have not bought a CD since 1996
• You have not bought a newspaper since 1997
• You own a PC.

NO IT DOESN'T, Cat.

Solution: There is no solution. Hercules thought it was hard to kill the Hydra? The Hydra is a skink compared to the Internet. The best we can hope to do is learn to live with the Internet and hope that it will continue to allow us some minimal freedom. All hail Internet.

Within the labrynth of waste that is the Internet lie smaller traps that can ensnare the unwary writer. Twitter - A website that appears to champion brevity by limiting discussion to 140 characters, but instead winds up directing you to every single interesting thing on the internet and consuming days of your time. Facebook - a website designed to keep you in touch with your friends and family, you will spend most of your time here stalking people you barely know and arguing with religious fundamentalist relatives that you would otherwise only see at Christmas.

Signs you are distracted:

• You begin all your character names with an @
• You know what kind of cocktail you would be, or which character in the simpsons you are
• You recieved an @ reply from Neil Gaiman once and now refer to him as your friend
• You know exactly how many words every other writer in the world is writing

I am not, Facebook! Shut up!

Solution: Get incredibly drunk and say some regrettable things in your social networks. You will not be welcome back there, leaving you plenty of time to get on with the task of writing!


And thus ends part one. I shall continue this list in the near future when I'm need of a good distraction. Oh, which reminds me!

.... No. Next time.

Next time.

A digression to shorts

Re-writes were going like gangbusters, but then I had to move house. Also, I've talked about that for the last few posts and I'm sick of it, as I am sure are you. This post is going to be about an area of writing that I've neglected for years.

SHORTS

 

That's right! To distract myself from endless, and possibly fruitless, re-writes, I have decided that a shorter term goal might be for the best to kick start the confidence levels. To that end, it's time to think like an Australian and get into some shorts.

This post is subtitled 'The Idea'.

See?

I'm a Sci Fi nut since birth and there are literally hundreds of online and print magazines that will accept short-form Science Fiction stories, so it was a natural place to start. At conception, my thought process can be fully mapped in the following way:

I'd like to write a short story. Clarkesworld accepts submissions. Holy crap, so do heaps of places. I will write one, then. Okay. Cool. Let's get on that.

The point being that I had absolutely nothing in the way of plot, character or theme in my writerly tank to commit to paper. This would have to be a from-scratch production. I perused some old short stories of mine, which was a waste of time. I really ought to post one or two of them to illustrate exactly how much of a waste of time it was.

Finding no help from my past self (who is a jerk, by the way), I turned to some professional writers. I have a book in one of my moving-house-boxes that contains a bunch of fantastic space opera stories called 'The New Space Opera', and it was a fantastically distracting read. I loved them all. But even so, at the end of six or seven of those tales, I had nothing.

I wish I'd been around to tell my past self this. THIS is what I should have said to myself.

Then my boss said something that sparked one of those weird neuron-bending thought exercises that we all get on occasion. It was a particularly hot day and he was complaining about the smell of some of the people we were working with. He said:

It's thirty-seven degrees and there's no air in here. I have to keep breathing in other people. I hate summer.

It was the way he said it. "Breathing in other people". It'd make a good title, thought I, and so I picked a random name and applied it, deciding that this would be my story title. I ended up with 'Breathing In Gerry Neimeyer'. From there, it was crazy how things snowballed.

Why were they breathing him in? He died in the life support tanks. Who is breathing him in? The 16 year old disaffected son of two Korean engineers assigned to the Titan Settlement Project. How'd Gerry get in to the tanks? He tried to stow away. Or did he? Maybe he tried to sabotage the vessel. Why'd he do that? Well...you get the idea. You've all done it.

My outline is sitting pretty at 600 words. In the next post I'll talk about actually writing it, and how it's different from the novel. In the post after, I'll talk about workshopping it. And finally, I'll keep a track on how it goes on the submission circuit. I'll make sure that I begin each post with [Short] so that, if you'd like to skip these more boring, 'this is what I'm doing' posts, you can.

Until then! I'm off to keep bashing out these words.

My Re-Write Notes Are Rubbish

I was tired when I was last scribbling down changes to be made to Chapter One.

Tonight, as I re-wrote, I came across this note scrawled in the margins.

HOW ELSE WILL PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT?

I can only imagine I was reading the chapter and, in my weariness, was struck by an unexplained detail: Just how the hell were these people staying on the ground? What, did they think they could just walk around, their kinetic output reacting with other forces to create movement and nobody would notice?? I must explain this otherworldly force to the audience in detail!

I kid. I am pretty sure I know what I meant. But let this be a warning:

Make your re-write notes very clear, and don't write them when you're deliriously tired.

Or you might end up accidentally writing a physics textbook.

My Thirteen Year Old Self Hates Me.

When I was younger, I wanted to know how you found and kept some Inspiration. I'd lost mine, you see--it had wandered off somewhere, perhaps to hang around with Genius and the Muse in one big non-existence club--and I needed to know how to get it back. Because by George, nothing was going to get written until that inspiration was found, fed and tucked up warm in bed once more, ready for the following hard day's inspirationalising.

If I had the power to send a single .gif image back through time, I would address the following one to myself and send it back to the exact moment that I felt the most 'uninspired'.

I'd probably hate the quote at that age. It goes against everything that my thirteen-year-old self believed about what writing, art and creativity was. Plus, what would some dude from the future know about it, anyway? All this quote does is call me an amatuer in a roundabout way, and damn it, I'm thirteen! I know every goshdarn thing in the world, and screw anyone that says I don't, they're an old idiot.

But older me is persistent and wants to try and help thirteen-year-old me. If I could stress one thing to myself at that age, it would be that all this 'inspiration' that people talk about--especially the ones who seem to have an especially good and intuitive knack for their craft--is just another bit of fiction. Given the opportunity, I would do my damndest to try and convince young me that inspiration doesn't exist. It'd go something like this.

Young Mitch: you're feeling uninspired right now. You have decided that until your ideas begin flowing quickly and easily once more, you won't sit down and attempt to write. I know why you've made this decision. After all, nearly every writer you know or look up to talks about that one idea they had that ran away with itself. It was just so good that it practically realised itself on the page. So naturally, all you need to do is wait for that stroke of inspiration to hit you, and everything will be fine.

Except that, in a month or two when it still hasn't hit, you'll start to get a bit uneasy. Maybe, you'll think, you really are just an amateur. Maybe you're not cut out for this writing lark. If you were a better writer, surely inspiration would have taken hold of you by now and forced a story out of your imagination and on to a page.

But I have good news! They were wrong. All those people talking about inspiration? They're misleading you, albeit unintentionally. There is no inspiration that lasts from first sentence to final paragraph. There's no driving force that will churn out a rollicking narrative in a few weeks, tops. There's absolutely no way to stay 'in love' with your story while you're writing it. The things you're feeling right now--frustration, boredom, distraction--they're all normal. The hallmark of a writer is not that they don't feel all those things. It's that they do feel them, and carry on anyway.

The way you feel right now is how every writer feels. How about that? You thought you were waiting for the moment inspiration turned you in to one, but it turns out that you're already more like one than you could possibly have suspected.

I'd probably still ignore myself.

But all the same, maybe it'd quicken the realisation that was delayed by years of misconceptions about what writing is. If I'd known that 'inspiration' was more often an excuse not to write than any kind of legitimate writerly thing, I might have saved myself some time.

So from now on, whenever someone asks about inspiration, I'm going to tell them the most inspiring thing I can think of. I'm going to tell them that inspiration doesn't exist, and that how they feel right now is exactly how they'll feel after they sell their hundredth novel. Things get easier, you get better, but it never happens on its own.

Let go of the idea of inspiration, and become inspired at how you never needed it in the first place.

Re-Writes of Re-Writes

This will be the fourth time I've knuckled down to re-write the first chapter of my completed MS. Actually, 'completed'--as any writer who's tried their hand at such a thing as a novel will tell you--is not the right word. There's no such thing as complete, just degrees of incomplete.

So technically, right now I'm taking it down from the third degree of incomplete to the fourth.

This is how much I found in one casual sitting that needs immediate change.

Hey there, Chapter One. Fuck you, too! :-D

Those red marks are the things that have to change before I begin re-writing in earnest. This is only the pre-re-write, and it took me three hours.

It's not unusual. I gutted it the first two times. I may yet still do it once more. There's only a few things that you can take away from an experience like this as 'positive'.

1) The first chapter is the hardest. You could write it a thousand different ways and no one of them would be perfect.
2) Each time you do this, at least one or two things that legitimately and objectively did not work for the manuscript are gone. Eliminated. Forever cast in to the abyss. You will never be tortured by their inadequacy again, ever.
3)In a way, the hard part of the MS--the creative bit, where you have to be on the ball and come up with solid ideas--is done. You've build the sword, now you just need to sharpen it. It's not all that hard if you're even a little bit serious about making your story the best that it can be.

And now, it's 12:30am. That's another inextricable part of re-writing: late nights. I better get myself to bed before my 5:30am rise for work.

Then I'll come home, and make this chapter awesome. Even more awesome than it has ever been.

How exciting.

Writing Is A Tuft Of Cotton Caught In The Breath Of The Chilly Death Throes Of Summer

A not unusually vitriolic article was published over at The Economist on the topic of NaNoWriMo. It gripes about the 'American' idea that everyone has a story that, if only they could release, would make them a household name. To me, this seems like a gross misrepresentation of what NaNoWriMo is all about, but then again what would I know? I'm just another one of those frothing amatuers.

But here's what gets my goat. Chris Baty is criticised by suggesting that novel writing involves grunt work. You get a bunch of your friends together and talk and write and don't get up until you've written a whole bunch of words. AC from London is quick to indicate that most serious authors (not him personally, by any stretch! Just dedicated authors, you must understand.) would not agree.

Most writers who are dedicated to the craft would beg to disagree. The more apt metaphor is that used by a New York columnist in the 1940s: “It’s easy: you simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

Not to be a stick in the mud, but there are two pieces of writing insight on offer here. Chris Baty says that there's no way around sitting down and churning out the words, so you might as well do it. The Much More Credible* New York Columnist says, in so many words, 'Writing is Pain and Hyperbole'.

There is simply nothing of value in hearing someone use flowery, only loosely-based-in-reality terms to describe the art of writing. What does 'Sit at a typewriter, open your veins and bleed' mean to somebody who is trying to further their writing skills? To be blunt about it, it doesn't mean anything. It's as useless as a musician saying that all music is made of love, or a chef saying her primary ingredient is sweat. Perfectly fine as sweeping, pithy commentary on their own work. Completely useless for anyone that want to know the first thing about the craft.

Why do we insist on doing this to writing? And music, for that matter? And anything that involves a speck of creativity? What is so boring and lifeless about the wonderously complex, immersive and fulfilling task of writing a fantastic, saleable and engrossing novel that people feel the need to dress it up in mythical and nonsensical bullshit?

Writing is not blood and pain. Writing is having an idea, using your fingers to write it, modifying your idea over and over again, taking advice on how to modify that idea further, and finally letting a bunch of people read your idea. That's it. Don't talk to me about characters so perfect they write themselves. Don't talk about inspiration that came on a bolt from the blue. Don't tell me about what a conduit you are for the stroy that was already written by the shared experiences of the denizens of this curse called humanity. That doesn't mean anything. That's authors appealing to their own ego, and the ego of others foolish enough to buy in to such rubbish.

Chris Baty knows that. Anyone who's tried to write a novel with realistic expectations ought to know that, too.

As I am constantly reminded when I put these kinds of opinions out there, it's horses for courses. One person's experience is just as valid as the next. So, really, it's up to you. You can sit down with friends, bash out your words and get something done. Or you can sit down at the keyboard and try and figure out what it means to open your veins and bleed, and how that applies to whether or not you need to split this chapter in half or cut a paragraph or two of extraneous prose.

Best of luck to those who choose the second option.

Agentsearch™ Update: It's a No after all.

Well, I posted a little while ago about how my Agent Search was faring. At the time things were quite positive, but I've received the official rejection letters from the agencies in question.

Oh well. This is what all those authors are talking about when they say you need to be persistent.

Positive things to come from this:

1- It was my first ever submission to an agent ever, and it got beyond query and in to full MS review. That's got to be encouraging.
2- I can canvass more agents at once now that I'm not under review from a specific agency.
3- I get to fix a typo that was sitting RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of my intitial query for the next set of agent eyes. That's going to make me feel approximately 2000% better about the next submissions.

Rather than disappear in to a wine bottle or declare myself more of a musician than a writer anyway, I plan on combing the manuscript this week and sending out a new round of queries on Monday morning.

Crisis Generation will live.

NaNoWriMo -- Link Roundup

I've decided to keep a round up of NaNoWriMo advice on my blog, as much for myself as anyone who happens to find them. These links will be gathered from Twitter, where there is a lot of traffic on the #NaNoWriMo hashtag. If you haven't got time to read it all, come on by here! I'll collate the ones I think are most useful.

General Advice


Tips for Keeping Your Sanity During NaNoWriMo by Jodie Cleghorn  :: One of the few bloggers I've seen brave enough to mention the dreaded 'D' word: Delete. Don't be afraid to delete your words. You can still count the words toward your total, and sometimes deleting a mass of uncooperative words can lead to a deluge of more agreeable ones.


Advice for new WriMos by TallulahLucy :: There are ten awesome tips for making it through NaNoWriMo here. I am a particularly big fan of having your planning and research done and ready. It might be a bit late for that if you haven't already, but the rest of the advice here is spot on. Avoid Criticism. Seriously, 50,000 words written in a month are not meant for critical eyes.

Nano For n00bs by Simon Haynes :: Probably the best advice I've heard in terms of making sure you hit your word targets. Are you busy? Time poor? This post will show you how you can make 1,667 words a day seem like a piece of cake. Again, note the emphasis on planning. As I've said here before, it's really, really useful.


Writing Tools

Don't like using word? Don't panic. You don't have to.

Nor do you have to spend a bunch of money on programs and apps to help you write. If you are of a mind to part with your hard earned cash, there's a list of great programs that can help you churn out thousands of words on this blog post by Steven Sande.

I would recommend against it. I'm a bit old fashioned this way. To me, buying programs like these is like sitting down to the infomercials late at night and thinking the AbFlexor is going to be your ticket to instant weight loss. I don't see how, if you're struggling to get the words out in a basic writing program, you'll fare any better in, say, Scrivener. It is up to you, however, and the list posted over at that blog is comprehensive.

However, if you'd like some excellent freeware...

The aforementioned Simon Haynes has a nifty little program that you can download FOR FREE called yWriter. If you don't necessarily like writing in chronological order and have a little time to dedicate to the learning curve, this is a nifty piece of software. I personally don't use it but I am a big fan of the potential for its applications. Did I mention it's free?

If you're writing scripts, there's only one program that you should be using if you don't have a thousand dollars to spare on 'professional software'. Celtx will produce a fully formatted script for a play, movie, tv show, radio drama, you name it. I love this program. I don't write scripts often, but when I do, I use this bar nothing.

Inspiration

I think the only thing I can post for inspiration before NaNo even starts is this blog post from last year. It's on The Creative Pen, and again is a list-based post. I think the sentence that sums it up best is this one:

NaNoWriMo 2009 changed my life.

Even if it's only in a small way, it might change yours aswell.

This will be my first NaNoWriMo, but not my first book. I can't wait to see what unique challenges are in store!

I will post a link round up like this once every few days to keep pace with where NaNoWriMo is at, and what new blog posts and inspirations pieces come to the fore. Until then, go forth, writers! Pick up pen. Put on your blinkers.

We've got writing to do.

Being Gay: A Second Job

Recently, there was a fantastic twitter chat (as there is most weeks) conducted by @thegayya account about the merits of gay characters being 'in' or 'out' of the closet at the outset of a young adult novel. There were a wide variety of opinions and the chat inspired this blog post by @movingmetaphor . I recommend checking it out.

@Malindalo pointed out, too, that it was important to deal with the aftermath of coming out. To have a look at the issues that come after the big crashing wave of angst and drama that is smashing down the closet door. I agree strongly with this point, and there's a little issue that I am constantly trying to raise and work in to these conversations that I wasn't able to bring up at the time.


Being Gay Is A Lot Of Hard Work.

Or so it seems to those who are yet to come out, anyway. I vividly remember thinking about this as a teenager and perusing the various books and forums that dealt with teenage homosexuality. Coming out was hard, sure. But once you do, holy shit! There's so much to do.

For a start, you have to argue with conservatives. Like, all the time. There are rallies to attend. You've got to make signs. You have to dress in bright colours and draw attention to the cause. You've got to be across the issues that affect you and be ready to defend your very existence on a second's notice, because ignorance is everywhere and it's up to you to put it right. Because...you know. Nobody else will, right? This is how it is on the TV. You become an out gay person and, by default, you become an activist.

That idea, I have to tell you, scared me even more than the prospect of explaining to my friends why I really liked watching all those games of rugby.

I'm fairly certain this only happened in my head.

I think it's really important that this is not a message we actively try to send young people. I've seen it plenty of times--on TV especially--that the gay kid comes out and suddenly becomes the president of the safe sex club and the homophobia awareness council. The very idea that this might be a thing that people are expected to do after coming out is enough to scare some kids right to the back of the closet, where resistance is minimal.

I think the message we ought to be sending instead is that it is not their responsibility to defend their own existence. It is not a requirement, and nor is it even a reasonable expectation, that they will have to justify themselves to anyone, let alone fight for rights that ought to be theirs in the first place. Some of them may choose to do this and all power to them -- I'm counting on a lot of them to do this. It just seems to me that the superior moral lesson to bestow, especially in YA books, is that gay people need do nothing extra than a straight person.

Also, cancel Terra Nova!

So let's see those stories about characters that came out some time ago. Let them deal with the unique issues that come with things like second relationships and break ups and friendships that grow distant. But think twice before making them crusaders for equality. That's a lot of weight of expectation to put on people who are only recently out of childhood.

Being gay ought not to be a second job. It's just that part of yourself that determines who you love. Anything and everything outside of that is optional.

Let Me Tell You Why ‘Pantsing’ Is Not A Real Option

I want to say a thing here. It might sound like a harsh thing but, really, it isn’t. It’s just a bit of common sense that we all know about ourselves, but sometimes are loathed to admit. Ready? You sure? I’m just going to say it.

If you’re reading this – and I include myself in that group, for I too am reading these words as I write – you are almost certainly not a prodigiously talented writer

I mean it. The odds on are so astronomical that I can say, with the reasonable expectation that I’ll never be proven wrong, that I am 100% sure that you aren’t a better writer than Stephen King. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Or Cormack McCarthy. Or whoever else you want to nominate as your favourite textual prodigy. It’s no insult to all of us to say that we’ll never be those guys. We could sell forty novels apiece – one hundred novels apiece – and have not a one of them be considered on a level like that.  Some people come out of the womb screaming and kicking, others come out screaming and kicking ass.

Ladies and gents, we did the former.

What the hell has this got to do with Pantsing? For that matter, what the hell IS PANTSING??

Sorry. I always forget to define my terms.

That’s one of the reasons why I don’t ‘Pants’, but I digress.

When I say ‘pantsing’, I’m not talking about the act of pulling someone’s pants down. That’s a cruel and hilarious thing you do to people during an argument when you can’t think of a witty thing to say.

For the purpose of this blog I’m talking about the act of writing your manuscript without an outline to guide you. Literally, sitting down to write without a clue as to what comes next. Maybe you have a vague idea of where you want to go, but getting there? That’s an adventure, man. That’s where the creativity kicks in and the fingers do the rest. The term comes from the idiom ‘flying by the seat of your pants’. You don’t need no stinkin’ forethought to get your ideas across. They’re all up there, waiting to be put on a page, and any attempt to try and capture the gist of them in a simplified, overall way will utterly destroy those ideas.

Perhaps the best way for me to put this will be to list a couple of common phrases I’ve heard to justify and promote Pantsing:

I don’t outline because it limits my creativity. I don’t want to be locked in to one narrative strain that has to go a certain way with no room for expansion or, if the fancy takes me, an entirely different plot to the original! I’d never put so severe a handbrake on myself as an outline. That’s like saying you’re going on a holiday but staying on the train the whole time

I like to begin writing and let my characters take over. They’re kind of like real people in my head, you know, and I just give voice to them. What they do is up to them, and I can’t wait to see where they take me! Also, I’m making dinner for them later. T-bones. Hope they’re hungry

I know what I want to say already. Outlining would simply be a waste of time. I’ve got this thing planned out scene by scene in my head. What difference does it make if it’s written down? Spare me your trivialities

Did you notice how I took a kind of cynical tone with all of those examples? There’s a reason for that.

They’re all bullshit

1 – Outlining Limits My Creativity

I hear this one so, so much

Some people seem to be operating under the delusion that writing an outline is somehow different from writing literally anything else. As far as I can tell, they imagine that once they write ‘The End’ at the end of their outline, there is absolutely no opportunity to go back and alter it in any way. The document locks. Their administrator privileges are set to ‘Read Only’ forever. Any hand written versions are despatched to that facility in Indiana Jones and hidden away in a warehouse so big that it’ll never be found again

I feel orders of magnitude stupider just typing this, but that's not true at all! Your outline is as amorphos as your imagination, and just as editable as any manuscript. Why on earth does having it prevent your imagination from changing the arc of your story on the slightest of whims? If anything, it's going to be far easier to alter an outline than it is a manuscript. Outlines can be chopped, changed and edited with little to no effort and -- this is important -- without sapping your excitement for the project altogether

Momentum is a fickle thing. I understand how it happens to us changeable, whimsical artistic types. You're writing away, creative energy leaking out of you like you're Boromir drinking a glass of water, when suddenly it happens. You get a slightly differeny but way better idea than you had originally. And if this character does that...then that will explain why...and then at the end we can...Oh ho HO! This is hot stuff! So long, story! You have held me back long enough! I'm going to start again, and this time do it properly with all these super awesome ideas.

Repeat. Ad. Infinitum.

Honestly, how many stories has this person ever completed? How many threads of narrative have they ever seen through from start to finish, making adjustments and refining as they go, but finally reaching the finish line?

I have no data. But I'm going to guess 'not bloody many'.

The fact is that without that outline - that vital direction to tell you where to go next when you're in the guts of bashing out those thousands of story words - you're little more than marking time until your brain gets bored with one idea and begs you to try another. You're sabotaging yourself from word one. And once you convince yourself that the story you're writing is inferior to the one you want to write, you'll never put pen to page on that project again. And if I know anything for sure in the universe, I know this: In the middle of your next project, the exact same thing will happen

Luckily, there's a way to test whether or not your story ideas are going to be able to sustain you until the conclusion. It's kind of like writing the whole novel, but in shorthand. It's like doing in 2, 3, or 4 thousand words what you'd otherwise be doing in 80 so that if you do need to alter or change your core ideas and concepts, you haven't wasted weeks or months.

Author, meet outline. Your new best friend.

2 - Only my characters know how my story is going to end!

If a famous author comments on this thread putting me wrong, I will gladly retract this initial statement:

I have only ever heard extremely amatuerish, hobbyist writers ever say this and mean it. I can nearly guarantee that no published author genuinely believes that their characters - either in a metaphorical or physical way - have a hand in deciding the outcome of a novel.

You've heard it so often. You might have said it yourself.

'It was amazing. I sat down with these two characters in my head, and they were so real that the words just came. It's like they were writing themselves.'

Incorrect. Here's a quick insight as to how these brilliant characters appear to write themselves. I'll continue the hypothetical I just began:

'So my character, she's a pirate captain, right? And it begins when she washes up ashore on an island without her ship - it's been stolen from her. She's so quirky and headstrong, though, that she doesn't even skip a beat! She tries to steal one from the very same dock, but gets caught by the guards. Not one to let this get her down, she orchestrates her escape and breaks in to the blacksmith's store to try and break her shackles. But then, my OTHER character appears - the hot but naive blacksmith's apprentice catches her! And I totally didn't realise they would do this, but they got in to a sword fight! HOLY CRAP, right! And so my MC loses and is sent to prison. But that night, her ship shows up to attack the island...'

If you haven't caught on to the plot of Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl yet, you'll at least be able to recognise it when you read it back.

Letting your characters write themselves is simply tapping in to your subconscious and plagiarising the shit out of whatever you last read/watched/listened to. I'm serious. Do not let your characters write your story - they are dirty little thieves. They are archetypes trying to fit themselves to a narrative, and you have got literally hundreds of ready-made ones swimming around in your head. You know where you got them from? Other people. Other authors. Filmmakers. Places that are not your own imagination.

There is a school of thought that says that there is no more creativity and all stories are simply plagiarisms of other works to some degree. Maybe so, but you're not going to notice or filter that if you've convinced yourself that your characters are in charge of the plot.

You know where it's easiest to spot the parallels between your story and every other story in the world?

You guessed it. The outline.

Is there nothing these magical documents can't do?

3 - Outlining is an unnecessary step akin to double handling my words

The drawback to this line of thinking ought to be quickly obvious.

So you're writing away, putting down every scene exactly as it is framed in your head. Only all of a sudden, at chapter seven, you realise that the two plot threads you are trying to weave together are not going to intersect at the right moment. Or you realise that your character's motivations are suspect and that to fix them you're going to need to change a vital element of their backstory. Or you realise that your villain shouldn't be introduced until chapter eight and you've shoehorned him in to every other chapter since the prologue.

Suddenly, in order to correct these narrative errors, you have to change the entire manuscript. Thousands and thousands of words, each with run-on effects and cause and effect issues. The potential to overlook a single reference to the 'old story' is enormous, leaving your 'new story' with dozens of non-sensical lines that make you plead with readers, 'that wasn't meant to be there!'.

The outline is where this all gets sorted out. The outline is your ticket to the finish line. The outline is permission to write your arse off in the manuscript phase without getting stumped on where you're going or how you should be assembling your narrative.

The outline is your friend.

Pantsing. (syn) Procrastination.

Seriously.

Guys, seriously.

I know the real reason that people don't outline. It's not any of these mystical and rad-sounding reasons about limiting creativity and letting the body be a conduit for the muse. The simple fact is that people won't outline because they are lazy. They don't want to have to deal with the minutiae of how this scene is going to fit with that scene because that's hard work. It's often difficult to decide exactly how we're going to get from point A to point B.

But all you're doing is putting off the inevitable. Procrastinating. Sweeping your problems under the rug, where they will congeal and rot. Keep in mind that at some point, you ARE going to have to look under that rug. You're going to have to deal with these problems of continuity and character development.

Would it not be best to do it before you've committed thousands of words and dozens, maybe hundreds of hours to your work? Doesn't that just make more sense?

Maybe not before you start, but somewhere about page 103 when you hit the wall? That advice is going to sound like that one guy standing on the dock as the Titanic pulled away shouting 'keep an eye out for icebergs!'. People probably thought he was an idiot at the time, huh?

Trust me. I've tried to write a lot of books. I have finished writing four of them. The only way I managed it was with a rigorous, robust and well-read outline at my side every step of the way.

If you're about to do NaNoWriMo, give it a try. There are, at time of writing, seven days to get your outline together. I'm going to make the bold prediction that those who get to their 50,000 word goal are the ones who already know how they're going to get there.

In the interests of full disclosure, I 'Pantsed' this blog entry.

That's why it's so sloppy and disjointed.

And also why this concluding paragraph is so abrupt.

NaNoWriMo - The Countdown

I have decided to do something I've never done before. A little while ago I posted about Cyberpunk and how elusive it seemed at the time. I mentioned I was trying to crack a story in my head that was nestled in the genre. Well, I did. I have an outline. It needs refining, but I like it.

And it so happens that NaNoWriMo is just around the corner.

If not for confirmation bias, I'd swear the 'writers drink lots of coffee' thing is a baseless stereotype.

If you've never heard of it (which, I am pretty sure, is only an outside chance), NaNoWriMo challenges you, the writer, to churn out 50,000 words worth of story in a month. Specifically, the month of November. That's it. There's no prize for winning, there's no punishment for failing. It's a wonderful way of motivating people to write. Essentially it throws us all together and says 'See? You aren't alone. Other people think stringing thousands of words together at a time is a good idea, too!'.

I have never done it before, and so I've decided to make November the month that I turn my 6,000 word Cyberpunk YA outline into the first 50,000 words of a first draft manuscript. I'll post updates here as frequently as I can, including a few lead up posts.

For now, here is a screenshot of the most exciting thing an author can think of: the title page of a brand new story that can't wait to be told.

Leave a comment if you're a WriMoer yourself! I'd love to follow others' progress.

Somebody fire that fuckin penguin.

It's happening again, guys. Come on. We need to get our act together.

Conservatives have discovered and exposed the gay agenda again.

This is like the millionth time we've been found out. It's bad enough that they saw through our thinly-veiled requests for equality in the equal marriage debate, now they're on to the Banned Book Week gambit. It's only a matter of time before one of these guys gets around to watching Glee and discovers Operation Klainebow in full swing. We can't subvert and destroy the fabric of society if people like Safelibraries.org and MissionAmerica.org are on the case, stitching it back together the second we rend it to pieces.

And somebody take Silo off the goddamn payroll. We paid that fuckin' penguin good money to play gay for us only to have him discover his male love for a female penguin. I said, didn't I, at the last agenda meeting? You cannot trust a penguin.

TRAITOR

Now we find ourselves in the awkward position of having to re-write 'And Tango Makes Three' to reflect the fact that the true story it was loosely based on has taken a different turn. I understand this to be a very common problem in the world of literature and entertainment. We can take our cues from Danny Boyle's apology for 127 Hours as a template for this:

"It is with great remorse that I unreservedly apologise for my film, 127 Hours. I understand that many people went to see it on the basis that Aron Ralston was forced to amputate his arm after a rock climbing accident. They were quite understandably outraged when they discovered that Ralston now has a prosthetic arm, rendering my depiction of him as a one-armed man quite false and very misleading. I have withdrawn the film from sale and will never make another film again."

Somebody get writing.

We made another classic beginner's mistake with Banned Book Week. Here's a summary:

Harvey said the ALA "has become a megaphone for leftist values and a disinformation tool to prevent traditional values from getting much shelf space in libraries."

I think we all see the problem here. It's obvious. The ten books that we are secretly trying to push into the hands of every innocent straight child in the world are FAR TOO BIG.

Shelf space is very important. These big gay books are taking up the space of maybe three or four traditional values books, and that's drawing attention to them. It's kind of hard to keep a low profile when the books we're subversively sneaking on to the bookshelves of sweet, unspoiled American libraries are taking up entire shelves that used to be occupied by stories about sensible, uneventful marriages. My recommendation, if it means anything to the board of gay directors, is that we pick another list of much smaller books as a matter of urgency. Maybe even just one or two page pamphlets that get right to the heart of the agenda.

Hello, young man. Kiss a boy, then adopt a baby!

There. That ought to do it.

I want this resolved by the next Agenda meeting, okay? Oh and Thommeusse, it is your turn to bring the plate of french pastries. Do not show up empty handed again.

Not sure if genuinely trying, or wasting time...

I'm in a bit of state of limbo at the moment. I'm juggling queries, waiting to hear back from people, and unable to touch any manuscripts for fear that someone will say 'please send me your work' and I'll only have a half-gutted draft. So what's a nervous aspiring writer to do?

Try something totally different, of course!

This is so different, however, that I'm kind of concerned that I'm completely wasting my time. I've outlined twenty-four half-hour episodes of a Sci-Fi Action/Adventure TV series called 'Sovereigns'. It's kind of a Firefly/Cowboy Beebop thing. I really like it, but I've never written screenplays before and I'm fairly sure that selling scripts like these is much harder than selling a novel.

All the same, here's the very first page of the very first episode, 'A Blackeye Junkie'. Exclusive to the Internet!

Currrently writing: Episode Seven. I might make it to episode 24 one day, who knows!

Gay Secondary Characters can slay the Dark Scary

I have a little fantasy that I sometimes allow to play out in my head when I'm bored. It requires that I make a few assumptions, big assumptions, listed as follows:

1) I have become an author successful enough to do a book tour.
2) I have written a successful series of books with a gay protagonist.
3) These books have generated a delicious amount of outrage in the conservative sectors of the world.

The fantasy begins in a Q&A session with avid fans of the books. Everyone, but especially me, is having an amazing time. The room's full of young gay readers who are stoked to find a leading man they can identify with. It's full of straight fangirls that just cannot contain their squees at the idea of two cute boys having a kiss and a cuddle. It's full of other straight readers and parents of children who are huge fans of the book's setting, plot and flavour. This fantasy is going swimmingly up until this point.

And that's when this one lady stands up. Or maybe it's a man, it doesn't matter. S/he is just old enough to have teenage children of his/her own, and they have an opinion they'd like to share. "Tell me," S/he begins, "what inspired you to write this mind corrupting filth? Was your goal the total collapse of moral framework in Australia/America/Europe/The World, or just the reckless destruction of the frail minds of my own children?" It is here, dear reader, that the fantasy goes into hyper-ego mode. What follows is nothing short of superiority porn.

"Sir/Madam," I begin, "this is normally where most authors would tell you that, if you are offended, you are welcome not to read the books in the first place. Common wisdom says that you're welcome to disagree with the content of a book and that nobody has a right to force it upon you. At the risk of offending, however, my response to you will be slightly different. Because you see, you are exactly the type of person that needs to read this book the most. Everyone in this room has seen and felt something positive after reading these books. The fact that you refuse to see the same things over such a trivial issue as the leading character's sexuality is proof positive that your horizons need broadening." 

At this point in the fantasy, I sound exactly like him.

Stunned by my wordy riposte, this imaginary sap doesn't even interrupt me. "You've walked yourself in to a nice little walled off section of literature, declared everything outside of it to be non-existent and dangerous, and slammed the door behind you. Well, knock, knock, sir/madam. Here I come. I hope you're afraid of the big, bad wolf, because I'm right outside. And I'm going to huff, and I'm going to puff, and I'm going to blow your goddamn house down."

Also, whenever I get to the wolf part in the fantasy, I look exactly like this.

The room erupts with wild applause and the deluded lady/gentleman that I've been addressing suddenly sees the error of their ways. All these people can't be wrong, they think, and even though I've just been used as a punching bag by an immature writer and had my worldview belittled and ridiculed, I'm prepared to forgive on account of it made me a better person. We look at one another and nod, having come to an understanding. Pizza arrives even though nobody ordered it. Then we all watch funny cat videos on YouTube for hours, occasionally laughing with our new found friend at how stupid their opinions were before they had their eyes opened.

As fantasies go, it is elaborate and snobbish in the highest degree. But it makes me smile, which is all a fantasy needs to do, and so it will always have a place in my repertoire of things to imagine when the internet goes down and I'm bored.


There are two nebulous reasons why this little fantasy could never be anything but a little piece of escapism (besides the fact that all of my assumptions listed above are most definitely false). The first is that I'm generally a polite and nice fellow and, even if I lucked out on being in the exact situation I'd been mentally preparing for, I would never say something so confrontational. The second is that such an exchange with somebody who was dead against gay themes in YA fiction would be utterly self-defeating and unhelpful.

I don't think I'll encounter many denials that people like the gender-neutral upstart in my fantasy exist. I mean, the campaigns to ban Harry Potter because of its 'inappropriate content' were widespread and well publicised -- and that was well before anyone discovered that Dumbledore had achieved an OWL in fabulousness.

If Grindelwald liked it, he should have put a ring on it.

There are always going to be those who are actively opposed to gay themes in fiction - especially fiction for children and young adults. On top of them, there are always going to be those who aren't necessarily opposed to them, but who also don't want to read these themes themselves. I'm paraphrasing that lightly. The way you might usually hear this is 'I don't mind that there are books with gay people in them, but I don't want them shoved in my face'. Actually, don't take my word for it. Here's a comment by 'Anonymous' on The Swivet that sums it up nicely.

As a reader, I don't want to be force-fed something I'm not comfortable with reading or dealing with. This goes for anything, not just homosexual content.

Do homosexuals exist? Do rapists exist? Do drug addicts and drug dealers exist? Do dark and scary things exist?

Yes. But that doesn't mean I want to read about it.

Please, readers, I'm asking you to put aside for a moment the fact that this person is conflating homosexuality with rape, drug addiction and 'dark, scary things'. We're all agreed - that says far more about this particular person's prejudice than it does about truth, reality and human decency in general. We know that they are wrong, we know why. So let's have a discussion about how we go about changing this particular reader's mind on the subject.

The chances that a fire-and-brimstone takedown of the like in my fantasy will work to expose a reader like this to the themes and the Dark Scary that they so hate are exactly zero percent. Likewise, the chances that a reader like this will pick up a book that looks, feels, sounds or smells even slightly 'gay' are exactly zero. This is a reader living within that walled off section of literature, barricaded off from the rest of the reading world. They've employed a bouncer to stand on the door. The policy is no gays allowed, and in their world there is nothing bigoted or wrong with that. It doesn't matter a single bit to them that, with minimal effort, they could discover that the Dark Scary they're so avidly avoiding isn't really anything to be afraid of in the first place. They just don't want to have to bother with it all.

The best way - and I'd be tempted to argue the only way - that somebody like this will ever be exposed to gay characters is if they exist in a secondary capacity. I know, I know - there's been a lot of work done and words written to drag the attitude of Gay YA readers and writers up to the point where it's agreed that gay people deserve their own stories. I'm all for that. I write queer protagonists, and probably always will. Stories with LGBTQ leads are incredibly important not only for LGTBQ youths, but straight ones that might be able to break through some old-fashioned ways of thinking and find new empathy for their LGTBQ peers.

That's not going to be helpful, however, if the perceived rainbow flags on the cover and in the reviews are going to turn a potential reader away because they simply do not want to be bothered with the Dark Scary within. So along with the sharp increase in books that focus on gay protagonists, which I'm looking forward to, I think we need to think about amping up the gay secondary characters while we're at it.

It's possible to do properly. I confess that I get a little bit annoyed with those who would dismiss every single gay secondary character that ever was as 'just a sidekick', as if the role of a sidekick has been worthless to every other type of character that ever filled that role. A properly treated and nuanced secondary character that is also gay can be just as, if not more, valuable than a properly treated and nuanced main character. Why? For the simple fact that readers who would not normally expose themselves to this kind of character are being shown things that they're not used to seeing. And wouldn't you know, the Dark Scary isn't all that bad after all.

I can name for you exactly one gay protagonist in a work of fairly mainstream science fiction: Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood fame. It's worth noting that the reason he became the main character in a TV series that is notching up 5 seasons is because he began as a sidekick in Doctor Who. There's a certain 'from little things big things grow' attitude that I'm advocating here. Not because I don't think gay characters deserve equal standing (they absolutely do), but because there's something to be said for introducing readers to ideas they aren't comfortable with slowly. Is it sneaky? Maybe. But in a good way. Like how maybe you never knew you liked olives until you accidentally got them on your pizza one day. Make sense?

Captain Jack, depicted here about to shoot the Dark Scary.

We need more gay secondary characters in books. We also need more gay protagonists, sure, but maybe we need secondary characters even more. The market for gay-themed books within the LGBTQ community is kind of static - it directly correlates with how many gay people there are that read books. Bringing new readers in to that market from outside the LGBTQ community is important not just for sales and the improved health of diversity in YA fiction, but for showing people like the ones in my fantasy that the Dark Scary actually ain't all that dark and scary. That's the way to open doors and identify with one another. That's the whole point of books - particularly YA books, surely.

Show curious readers that there exist gay characters who aren't stereotypes, who aren't annoying distractions, who aren't comic relief, who aren't morally bankrupt and, most importantly, who aren't much different from straight characters. Pack your books with gay secondary characters and make them real. If you were going to have two heterosexual leads anyway, then consider the rest of your story a blank canvass. Try and convince some readers that gay characters aren't Dark Scaries. The flow-on effects could be better than we imagine.

I Never Asked For This, Cyberpunk.

I finished Neuromancer and have gulped down most of 'Ghost in the Shell' as part of my attempt to become a Cyberpunk Aficionado. I've seen all the matrix films, seen both versions of Blade Runner and played to death the Deus Ex videogames. I've watched Youtube videos and listened to talks and interviews by Neal Stephenson and Philip K Dick. Thus far, I have to admit - the genre still somewhat eludes me. I get the high tech/low life part. That's fine. I am all about that.

Booze + Guns + Robot Arms + Cigarettes - Colour - Shirt = Cyberpunk?

But there's a knife edge to Cyberpunk that I'm not even remotely comfortable trying to balance on. A very, very fine line separates, on one glorious side, serious and gritty Cyberpunk and, on the other god-awful side, embarrassing and hammy Cybercheese. I'd love to try my hand at Cyberpunk one of these days - maybe even soon - but I just don't feel ready. After all this time and immersion, I don't know if I'm capable of producing something that comes down on the right side of that line.

I'm convinced that there's room in the market for a Young Adult Cyberpunk series. I've got a loose framework for a story (very loose, but nonetheless existent). I can't recall, off the top of my head, any series directed at the teen market that you might call Cyberpunk. The gap is there.

I suspect my trepidation comes down to two things. The first is that Cyberpunk, or most of it that I've read, emphasises style in a way that I'm not used to. I think the difference between successfully selling the idea of a water-soluble contact-lens Nanoimplant for Social Networking will depend on how cool you can make it sound. If you can convince people that this implant is the sort of thing that they'd really want to get the second it becomes available, it goes from being a silly piece of scifibabble™ to a plausible bit of future tech. Basically, if you want to write decent Cyberpunk, I think you need to be the kind of person that the R&D team at Apple would be happy to employ.

And therein lies my second concern. We're living in a time where the phones we have in our pockets right now are going to be, in three years or so, less phones than they'll be hilarious memories. In a decade or so we're going to look back and say things like 'Remember how we used to have a phone and a computer and a TV and they were all separate things? Simple times.' Did you know there are people born right now that are old enough to have never, ever seen a VCR?  In fact, that's incredibly common. In about 5 years, kids are going to look at you like you're a headcase when you talk about DVDs.

People--and especially kids--are very, very hard to fool. Writing a near-future Cyberpunk story is all about fooling people into thinking that your crazy ideas about where technology is headed might be even remotely plausible. Reach too far and people will baulk at your pie-in-the-sky dreams of humans that can traverse cyberspace as a packet of consciousness. Don't go far enough and young people will bring examples of technology that outstrips your future tech along to your book signings. I don't know that my grasp of futurism is strong enough to fully imagine a world thirty years from now, let alone fifty. It's a scary thought, actually. I have absolutely no idea where this bloody world of ours is headed.

That, too, is one of the awesome themes of Cyberpunk. Actually, I think that might be why I like it so much. Half the fun of it seeing where Stephenson and Dick and all the others got it wrong. Or even better, where they got it right.

I'm going to keep ploughing ahead, because it's absorbing and I like a challenge. In the meantime, any Cyberpunk fans that can set me straight on YA Cyberpunk works feel free to leave a comment.

Lost Post Rage

I had what I consider to be a rather decent blog post prepared dealing with sexuality and literature. It took me all evening to write and shape after mentally preparing it all day. Unfortunately, as these things go, I tried to post it from the new blogger interface only to find it consumed by the depths of the Internet, never to be seen again.

'Rage' doesn't seem to be the right word.

I will re-craft this post in the coming days and put it back up. I'll make it even better the second time. But tonight will be dedicated to indignant wallowing.

AgentSearch™ Update: Not A No

It occurred to me that I ought to explain why this reading/writing blog of mine appeared without warning. I'm an aspiring writer, you see, and I've no idea if I'm any good or not. But, like most folk that believe stringing thousands of words together at a time is a good idea, I'm stubborn enough to give it a try. I've put together a Young Adult Sci-Fi adventure, revised it, re-revised and around may this year finally got the courage up to seek representation.


I spent a great deal of time researching the ettiquette of preparing a query letter and waited for the best opportunity to submit. I carefully put together my cover letter, synopsis and went through chapter one with a fine-tooth comb. On a plane. While sleep deprived. It was a bad idea, but nontheless, I did it. I was sitting in the common room of a hostel in the middle of London when I pressed 'send', firing my submission off into the ether. The whole process, I was assured, would take about 8-12 weeks. What luck. I just happened to be on a European holiday for exactly 10 weeks.


The holiday flashed by (no, really, it was not long enough), and I returned to Australia.


A few days ago I recieved a response from the agency. And it wasn't 'no'. I was to forward the entire manuscript and, after a decent lag time due to reading backlog, they would get back to me once more.


And that is the best response I've ever recieved from an agent, ever. It's a better response than many first-time authors ever get, which makes me both extremely lucky and extremely grateful. It also means another three months of anxious waiting to be told 'yes, you're good enough' or 'thanks for trying'. I plan to cherish that feeling, for it may never come again.


So from time to time, I'll post a little update here on the AgentSearch™ process.


Who knows? Maybe one day I'll be able to see Crisis Generation: Divide for sale at my local bookstore.


That'd be something.

Dear Star Wars: A Love Letter

I can remember a time that I allowed the words ‘I don’t like reading’ to leave my mouth and was proud to have done so. I was five years old - possibly six - and I can remember where I was and to whom I was directing that sincere but misguided sentence. I wasn’t to know at the time, but it would only be a matter of days before events were set in motion to completely reverse my opinion on books. And how could I, or anyone, have guessed? After all, the catalyst for my love of reading - and by extension, my literacy - was not a book, but a film.