Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

(My apology for being a day early, but there is no one slated for the 31st, and Josh Boone sent his apology - they are in final edits of the script for his movie Parallel, and he was unable to get here with an essay yesterday. He’ll be back soon with some real insights into the film making process, but in the mean time you’ll have to be satisfied with me …)

My current project, which started out as a biography, has gotten me thinking about history again. The recent hoopla over a million little half-truths and made up facts pushed me deeper into the same thoughts. Any of you who have known me for a long time will remember my going off on this subject a time or two. I won’t call it a pet peeve, because that phrase is a pet peeve of mine…but what is history, really?

I don’t remember how old I was when it first occurred to me that a thing being written in a history book did not make it so; that the news didn’t necessarily happen just as it was reported, and that baseball radio announcers might not even be calling games the way they actually saw them. That’s an eye-opening factoid for a young man, let me tell you, and formative in ways that other life-lessons can never be.

Maybe it was the year in high school I accidentally signed up for both Ancient History and Western Civilization. Ancient History was the college preparatory class, and Western Civilization, as it turned out, was for those with less aptitude and concentration to spare. They covered the same period in history, and they covered them differently. One class taught that Babylon was the first great civilization, while the other talked about ancient Sumer, the Zoroastrians, and drilled down into the deeper facts. Fool that I was, I pointed this out to the Western Civilization teacher, thinking that maybe he was just ill-educated, and didn’t know about ancient Sumer. Maybe he really thought the Babylonians were first, and it was my duty to set him straight.

I was removed from the class and enrolled in “Individual Research in Social Studies,” where I had to write a fifty page research paper, and history continued down its two separate roads without a hitch in its giddy-up over my concerns. In any case, that was the start of it. I don’t think I gave it much more thought back then because I had a week to catch up on researching my paper “The Opium Trade Between China and Great Britain in the 1840s,” and I didn’t have much time on my hands.

It hit me again standing in a news stand one day and reading headlines about what appeared to be the same events, but with entirely skewed “facts”. I started wondering which attitude was written into the history books, and where one could find a true accounting of anything if everything ever recorded was subject to bias. The annals of history crumbled in my mind, and I began to think more for myself. It was a good thing, I’m convinced, but one that had to be kept in check and watched constantly. If you worry over it too much you start to think that if enough people say it long enough the textbooks will report the second gunman on the grassy knoll as fact, and that H. G. Wells was the first reporter with a bird’s eye view of the Martian invasion. It’s funny, and it’s not, because repeated over and over enough times, words become history.

Words that are not repeated enough times slip through the cracks, as well, leaving people with the impression that some things never happened, when they did. It’s an impossible conundrum. You don’t know who or what to trust, so you become a historian, of sorts, in your own right, hoping to patch together a sequence of historical events that is comfortable to you, and that you can live with. It’s best if you can find a good, solid support group of like-minded pseudo-historians to back up your theories.

How does this apply to writing? In the case of the biography I’m writing, which is the story of a psychedelic band from the 1960s, it’s crucial. Running through the stories and memories of the band members, I find threads of things they all remember, and believe. I find stories only one of them remembers, or that some fan told them about, but that none of them remember. Dates are jumbled, names and places run together, then apart, and my determination, after long thought, is that it doesn’t matter. If I capture the spirit of the days when the band was working its way to fame, then I’ve done my job. If the events, dates, relationships, and hair-colors don’t match up to exact history, what difference does it make? If the four guys involved don’t’ remember the details, who does? Do they even exist, at this point in time? I’m not sure. I am sure that there is an amazing story waiting to be told, and that if I get mired in the detailed history of it, it will bog down and never get written, but if I go with the flow and apply myself to getting “in character,” I can produce something that will give the reader the “feel” of that time, and that band. The experience is what is important, and what remains of those now are the strongest parts – the parts that time couldn’t kill. Those are what matter most. What happened in the 60s – for all intents and purposes – appears to have stayed there in large degree, but we can visit it, recreate it, and find the magic that gave four college boys with dreams, an RCA recording contract and a chance to stand on stage with Iron Butterfly and Dick Clark. And we can experience what it was like to have that, and just walk away.

Years from now readers may study this book, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To Woodstock,” and spread it as gospel. It may become a definitive history of the band, or it may sink into oblivion as so many other books have done, unnoticed. If any of you run across such a reader, and they start babbling to you about the exact events of a night in 1967, or a concert in 1969, just smile and nod, and say, “Yeah, that Dave Wilson sure knew his stuff.” History is full of little secrets like that.

DNW

Just over a decade ago, I wrote a story (“Petey in La-La Land”) that featured two characters whose dialogue I patterned after a couple of quirky fellows I occasionally worked with. One of these gents, a computer service tech, came originally from the former Soviet Union, and while his English wasn’t bad, his attempts at colloquial speech often had the office gang in stitches. Expressions such as, “I do this only once in a moonlight,” “You are not wanting to buy me a cup of coffee?” (when he actually wanted one), and “You are who, the boss of the world?” flowed melodically from his Russian tongue, and the levity that accompanied his visits occasionally brought on a collective hankering to see the office equipment go on the fritz so we could call for service.

Never one to let unwitting creative contributions go to waste, I worked our serviceman’s manner of speaking into a suitably colorful character and played him off another chap, whose dialogue was far less exaggerated but no less authentic — and unique.

Two editors later, I had a pair of rejections that in effect said, “No one will ever buy this dialogue.”

“But…but…but…it’s real!”

Really, of all the nerve. Well, I did some hard looking, and it took some time, but I eventually decided I might have crammed too much of this distinctive dialogue into too few pages, and it was choking the story. Okay, so I pour in a jigger of judicious editing, submit the sucker again, and — voilà! An acceptance, and even some kind remarks regarding the characters and their witty repartee.

In this case, it wasn’t the exaggerated dialogue per se that failed, but the cramming of too much of it into too few pages, the effect of which was to make it patently unbelievable. Even if it was “real.”

Dialogue can be difficult because, if you try too hard to capture speech as it actually emerges from people’s mouths, it may come out just this side of incomprehensible (or if the characters talk like my young adult daughter, it may cross on over). Dialogue is a balancing act between making characters talk as if they were real people and propelling the story without lapsing into stilted exposition. All of you have no doubt read examples of terrible, descriptive dialogue, where a character will glibly tell another something like, “If we don’t stop Doctor Pampellone from combining all these disparate elements in such incalculable proportion, we could be looking at a violent interaction between the flow and the dynaflow!”

Tyros in particular are notorious for trying to avoid narrative exposition by letting the characters do it for them. Beware…

In real dialogue, information usually flows in bits and spurts. Rarely does someone sit down and explain a process from start to finish in intricate detail — at least without putting you to sleep — and that’s doubly true when you’re trying to engage a reader by way of your characters’ expressive prowess.

One of my favorite suggestions for writing dialogue came from SF maestro Orson Scott Card, and that was to write out the characters’ lines in logical order, conveying all the information that ought to be. Then go in and excise a few lines. Doesn’t matter which ones. Throw a couple of others out of sequence. Remove a few adjectives and adverbs. Hack the last few words from a few more. At the end of it, you’re getting a lot closer to the way people really talk.

Naturally, this little scheme isn’t always appropriate, and it always requires some finesse; but it’s a neat trick to keep in mind, and using it cannily can help keep the reader a little more connected with the characters and the writer a little more on his toes.

Knowing your characters intimately — their background, their education, their social status, where they come from, who they know — and being able to paint their words in uniquely identifiable strokes is what will ultimately bring their dialogue, and thus them, as people, to life. Being one who writes with what I consider a “cinematic” mindset, I sometimes find myself casting specific actors as my characters. It’s easy to imagine how so-and-so would deliver a particular character’s lines, regardless of the plot at hand. I can tell you right now, in my novel BALAK, a young Michael J. Fox portrayed lead character Mike Selby. And in my upcoming novel, BLUE DEVIL ISLAND, a 30-year William Holden would play Navy pilot Drew McLachlan, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Bear in mind, just as with the former example, this is not a writer’s device to rely on, but a starting point for finding focus. If you’re succeeding with your characters, if they’re becoming living, breathing people, as they should, they’ll soon be talking to you and telling you what to do, in their own unique voices. My advice is to listen to them.

As with any aspect of writing, honing dialogue can be an ongoing learning process, and it’s always one of the most critical ingredients in a story’s recipe. Not long ago, a review of THE LEBO COVEN reminded me of this fact; the reviewer wrote that many of my characters spoke too-perfect English, even though they were supposed to be poorly educated southerners. Well, I must disagree to an extent; in the novel, it’s made plainly clear that the primary characters in fact have extensive education, and in looking back at various passages from the book, the characters who oughta speak poorly pretty much do.

But while I think the reviewer may have overstated that particular aspect of the book, it seems plain that I must have fallen short with at least certain key pieces of dialogue, which were memorable enough to color that reader’s overall perceptions. To me, this exemplifies the importance of conveying characters’ speech properly, everywhere, at all times, without fail — and why even seasoned writers need to keep their ears open.

You don’t listen to your people, they may betray you. Listen, then.

–Mark Rainey

A question that I get a lot is “How do I write for video games?” The answer, of course, is “by hitting the keys on the keyboard so that words come out,” but what’s really being asked is “How do I get into the industry?” And that, inconstant reader, is a whole other kettle of worm-like mixed metaphors.

The first, and most important thing one must do if one wants to be a professional game writer is take it seriously. This is a profession like any other, not something to do be done off to the side or “just that game stuff”. There are literally millions of dollars poured into game development projects these days, sometimes tens of millions, and that is, as they say, serious money. It’s also the day job for numerous artists, engineers, designers, QA testers, and the like, and they tend to take game development very seriously. Viewing game writing as something that can be done off-hand or without full attention is not the sort of thing that these dedicated folks, many of whom have been working 70 hour weeks in order to get the recoil on a two-handed alien plasma rifle juuuuust right, won’t take well.

The second thing that one must do if one wants to write games is, curiously enough, play games. Lots of them. It also helps if you like games – enjoying your work is often a big plus. Too many of the folks who ask me about writing games don’t play them, and are dismissive of the notion. (”I don’t have time” is a big excuse, along with “That’s kid stuff”, “I don’t want to spend the money for a console” and “My wife is playing World of Warcraft and has this level 54 Tauren shaman that she’s trying to max out so I haven’t been able to use the computer in four months”. And if you know what that means, you don’t need to read the rest of this.) On one hand, it’s silly and unprofessional. Playing games is research for writing games. You wouldn’t write a novel set in along the banks of the Miskatonic without reading a little Lovecraft; you wouldn’t write a story about a philatelist without looking up what the heck a philatelist actually does. Why, then, would someone consider trying to write a game without checking to see what games are like?

The other half of that particular equation is the necessary recognition that games are, well, games. They’re not movies, they’re not novels, they’re not puppet shows or comic books or really extended haikus with blasters, they’re games, and they have their own conventions, demands, and necessities. Failure to nderstand this produces one of three things: unusable content, a really long development cycle wherein the newly fledged game writer re-invents the wheel, or someone else being brought in to rewrite everything last minute at great expense and emotional turmoil. (Trust me. I know about this one.)

Think about it. In a novel, the author controls the action. The narrative is the story of the protagonist, events unfold, and sooner or later you get to the end. In a game, however, the narrative is the story of the player’s experience as the protagonist. He can say, “I want to go over here” and, not to be too blunt about it, completely screw the storyline, the scripting, and if the designer isn’t careful, the game as a whole. And you have to let him do that – that’s the point of a game, player choice and player control. If you can’t wrap your head around that, you can’t write a game – or at least not a good one.

The good news is that there’s a tremendous resurgence of interest in game writing these days. The Game Writers’ Conference is one sign of it, the WGA paying attention to game writing is another, and the fact that I actually got myself quoted in The Hollywood Reporter talking about how I’m a smash hit at bar mitzvahs these days is a third. Game scripts are getting longer – many clocking in at a couple of hundred thousand words – and more polished. The fans aren’t sitting still for wooden acting and talking heads any more. That means there are opportunities out there, and they’re increasing all the time. But they’re professional opportunities, and need to be treated as such.

What I’ve left untouched is the practical, as opposed to the professional, side of getting into video game writing. That’s a whole other issue, but if you don’t handle these two items – now games, play games - you’ll never get that far. So go. Play some games. Then we can figure out what you might want to do next.

——–

Richard E. Dansky

Writer, Game Designer, and Cad

(Not necessarily in that order)

by Janet Berliner

We writers justifiably complain that we’re underpaid, undervalued, underappreciated–and we certainly are. National Geographic pays well. Reader’s Digest pays well. Porn pays with regularity. Playboy? Sure. But for the most part, if you ain’t a Biggie, you ain’t nothin’ at all. So, like lyricists turn to writing jingles, we supplement our incomes with writing-related jobs like editing, ghost writing, and working for ad agencies.

There’s a cute commercial for a certain credit card (sorry about the alliteration). After the commercial quotes the value of three different items, it shows the viewer a fourth–generally something that fits right in with happiness being a warm puppy. Then comes the tagline, which is inevitably something like: “Flying kites with your grandchild? Priceless.”

Those things, the ones that don’t carry a dollar sign, are the priceless perks that we so often fail to take into account when we total the plus side of the balance sheet.

In the mid-eighties, the owner of a boutique in Monterey offered to give me a pair of 1920s black satin shoes in exchange for a signed book; in 1989, in Tel Aviv, I swapped a book for a pair of earrings; a year later, on a Sunday, I locked myself out of my car in a mall in Oregon. The locksmith saw one of my books in the trunk and recognised my photo. He asked me to sign it in exchange for work done. Last week, the library of my High School in South Africa asked for a signed copy of a book for their library; yesterday, a man who came to measure a window in my house treated me with more than ordinary respect. I couldn’t figure out why until he said that he was a reader and had read everything of mine he could find.

Twenty years ago, a woman in Los Angeles sent me a copy of RITE OF THE DRAGON to sign because, she said, I had clearly modelled Negwenya, the dragon, on her.

Most significantly of all, more than one concentration camp survivor has thanked me for my Holocaust novel.

Priceless Perks.

But wait. There’s more. Like the people you would never in your wildest dreams have believed you’d meet, let alone with whom you’d work and socialize.

Here’s one example: In the early 90s, I wrote a proposal for an anthology and sent it to David Copperfield. I’m talking about the illusionist; I’m old, but not old enough for it to have been the other one. It was a really good proposal, but I put it on a mental back burner and began working on a new book.

Early one morning, I was awakened by a telephone call.

“Hello. This is David.”

“David? David Who?”

“David Copperfield. Get your tail over here. I’m ready to talk to you.”

My first meeting with David was interesting…in the Chinese sense of the word. He owns a massive converted warehouse on the outskirts of Las Vegas. At the time, it was fronted by a bra shop. In order to get into the inner sanctum, my assistant and I had to use a buzzer disguised as the right nipple of a torso displaying a teddy.

His bodyguard, a big ex-New Orleans cop, who really liked me and quickly became one of my favorite members of David’s large retinue, showed us inside. He was a member of the inner circle, in fact I remember seeing David borrow three hundred dollars from him to go to the movies, this although I had seen thousands in his wallet. Seems he and Claudia wanted to go to the movies “like normal people”. In their case, that meant buying every seat in the movie house, so maybe he did need the extra three hundred.

Back to the warehouse.

The downstairs is mostly offices and a huge conference room. The walls are plastered with photos of him at all ages and stages. Somewhere, there is a second hidden entrance to his Museum of Magic. Upstairs, there’s a tanning booth, a bedroom, an exercise room, a dressing room (his closet, then, contained dozens of black sweatshirts and black pairs of slacks, all identical), and a viewing room with plush leather sofas and chairs.

David was upstairs, leaning over what looked like an architectural design, a preliminary drawing for a new illusion he told us later.

He turned the drawings face down, stood upright, and gestured to the sofa with his oh-so elegant hands. All I could think of was that he looked like a young kid, tall, tanned, and very thin. He excused himself for a moment, then returned with what looked like a thick manuscript.

“Before we get started, read this and tell me what you think. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Five minutes! I saw my assistant and David’s look at each other and roll their eyes.

What David had handed me was a TV proposal that must have cost the offering company ten thousand dollars to put together. They wanted David, and wanted him badly. Fortunately, I had taught myself to speed read in college and, more fortunately still, I had time to spare before David returned because my analysis came to me well before I was halfway through.

The proposal was great, the TV show was interesting, but there was one thing glaringly missing. None of it seemed to me to have anything to do with the heart and core of David Copperfield.

Which is exactly what I said when he returned to the room and sat down beside me.

He took the proposal, tossed it onto a glass table, and said, “I agree completely. Now lets talk about what we’re going to do together.”

There followed discussions about the writers he wanted in the anthologies–I had provided him with an initial wish list in my proposal–negotiations between his people and mine, discussions with publishers, contacting some of the best known writers in this country, most of whom I had met personally, and warnings from his staff that I would never be able to keep him focused. Only two things mattered to him, they said: his work and Claudia Schiffer.

On the way out that first day, we were shown the part of the warehouse that was used for storage, with labeled containers stacked to the ceiling. David told me that, among other things, those containers held the very first magic trick he had learned, when he was eight and living in New Jersey. His mother told me later about the frequent long trips to replenish his supplies and buy new tricks. His father, always there when she was, smiled proudly and told me that he was the head of David’s fan club. That part of the warehouse was also used for building and storing his large-scale illusions. I started to run my finger along a blade of his fan illusion and he stopped me. “Want to lose fingers?” he asked. His assistant took two Polaroid photos of me being levitated by David and asked me to sign them. I said sure, “As long as David signs them, too.” David pointed at other such photos on the wall. “I didn’t sign any of those,” he said. “Tough for them,” I said. “That’s my deal.” He started to laugh. “I can see you’re not going to be easy, Berliner,” he said, signing the photos.

There’s a lot more to the David story, which will probably show up in its entirety as a chapter of RIVER OF STONES or as an Amazon Short. Here, I’ll add only this. Two years ago, after selling one of the anthologies to China, we redid the photograph and sent it to the Chinese publisher. They put it inside the book and had life-sized cutouts made and distributed around Beijing and other places where there were books.

Now I know that doesn’t pay the bills, but it sure is fun to contemplate.

It’s one of those Priceless Perks.

The only thing I can bring to this blog is my everyday experience of being a writer, which at this point in time is decidedly unglamourous. My book has been out for a month and I’m still waiting for that call from Oprah, although that may change once it’s revealed that THE UNWELCOME CHILD is actually a memoir. As a first time novelist, I knew it was absurd to expect to be sent out on book tours or receive royalty checks, but I never thought I’d have to join the Doubleday Book Club just to get hardcover versions of my own novel. Now, for the next two years I’ll have to be hyper vigilant so I don’t end up with a library full of books I don’t have room for nor ever intend to read.

In all seriousness, I can’t complain about my first publishing experience. It turned out to be exactly how I was told it would be. You may not believe this, but my favorite part of the whole process was the actual campaign to get this little piggy to market. I liked researching prospective literary agencies and editors. Reading their profiles, finding out their personal interests, whether they preferred camping to political activism, wasn’t unlike searching for a prospective mate on one of those on-line dating services.

Admittedly there were some aspects I detested, such as the composition of the dreaded query letter, where the essence of a three hundred page book has to be distilled into three sentences or less. And I wasn’t crazy about assembling all those mail packets, a tedious albeit crucial step in the marketing process that had to be undertaken with utmost care lest a letter addressed to one agent be put into an envelope addressed to another. But the real joy came from opening my mailbox and seeing all those responses to my querying. It’s true the majority were rejections, but that only made the occasional request to read the entire manuscript that much sweeter. When I finally did find my agent, (Ann Collette, she’s wonderful) it was like being part of a crime-fighting duo. She was WonderWoman to my SuperGirl, battling the evil conglomerates (publishers who declined my book) in order to bring light to the dark world of publishing. Needless to say, in the end justice prevailed for both bookworms and impulse buyers everywhere. Not only can THE UNWELCOME CHILD now be found in bookstores and on-line, it can also be found at check out lines in supermarkets of quality everywhere.

But now it’s back to the drudgery of writing. SuperGirl has turned her tights in for sweat pants, and these days the only thing I’m fighting is the urge to raid the fridge whenever I hit a frustrating patch of prose. It’s a battle I appear to be losing, considering that during the writing of this essay I’ve consumed a ham and cheese sandwich and nibbled off all the chocolate from a humongous peanut butter cup. (I’m not a total glutton; I left the filling for my husband). Is this depression? No, it’s just reality. Yes, after all these years of striving I can now say I am a legitimate writer. I’ve been paid, I’ve been published. But has it really changed anything in my life? Even if my book had been one of those million in one success stories I would still be back at square one, sitting at my computer struggling with plot inconsistencies, character glitches and bad similes. One thing I’ve learned from this whole experience is that whether you’ve been published or not, it never gets easier. No wonder I liked the marketing part best! Anyway, if I ever hope to be published again, I’d better get back to work. Right after I finish off the rest of that peanut butter cup.

- Jeffrey Thomas

It’s our pop culture, our technological environment. We’re living in a movie, and our lives need a soundtrack.

When not talking on our cell phones, we walk down the street with music pumped into our ears, so that our every step has a rhythm, ala John Travolta in the opening of ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ The first thing we do when we get home from work is turn on the TV, or the radio, or put a CD on. We play soothing soundscapes of trickling brooks, falling rain, pounding surfs to fall blissfully asleep to. When working in the office, we listen to the Muzak. When working at factory machines, we run our favorite songs through our heads. And the imp of the perverse can even play a song we absolutely despise over and over in our heads, for a day or longer.

How did our ancestors get through their lives before the advent of this technology, that can record the sounds we make – captured in a moment in time – and play them back to us? Well, I’m sure they thumped the side of a fallen tree like bongos, hummed to themselves while they flayed their mammoths. We have to announce ourselves to the universe. We have to hear ourselves constantly. It’s just part of being the creative, narcissistic, noisy entities that we are.

So it’s only natural that if we’re writers, we want to write to a soundtrack. As I say, it’s all about being a generation nursed at the twin nipples of movies and TV. I’m sure there are those writers who best summon the muse in silence, just as there is the occasional movie that dares go without a musical soundtrack. But I suspect most writers are like me, and prefer working with some music in the background. What that music is, though…well, the possibilities are wide open. It all depends on various factors. Your individual taste in music, naturally. (And that in itself depends on your age, your region to some extent, your personality, your upbringing, and so on.) Then there is the kind of story you’re writing. Sure, a movie soundtrack can make some unexpected choices. You can hear ‘Singing in the Rain’ while Alex and his droogs wreak havoc in ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ or watch Mr. White sever an ear to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ in ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ but I suspect that when perusing his/her CD collection, a writer is going to select music that complements the work at hand most appropriately.

Let’s talk about me. Just for an example. Just for shits and giggles. Just because this is my day to blog and just because I like talking about me. Anyway, what do I listen to when employing my craft? What gets me in the mood, when I’m ready to get down to it? Well, my love life is none of your business – let’s stick to the topic of writing here, if you please. But yes, yes, we like to accompany THAT to music, too. (And I bet you listen to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ you sick freak.)

Where was I before you so rudely interrupted me? Oh yes, what do I listen to when writing. Well, it doesn’t HAVE to match up precisely – in tone and mood, in ambience and atmosphere, in texture and flavor – with what’s on my computer screen. For instance, as I write this essay I’m listening to Fiona Apple’s brilliant new CD, ‘Extraordinary Machine,’ and that’s simply because I bought it yesterday and because it’s extraordinary. But often I do choose a certain CD because I want the art of that performer to urge my own art to greater heights. I guess it’s almost a collaboration of sorts.

I don’t write kickass Bubba vs. the Undead kind of stories, so I don’t listen to kickass raucous music like AC/DC while I write. Or ever. Not that I don’t like loud, fast, energetic. Heavy metal’s just not my cup of Budweiser, dude. Pass me the Absinthe. Not being a snob; hey, there’s a book and a radio station for everybody here. Like I say, I do love charged music, but a lot of times I listen to that sort of thing outside of my writing. (My favorite performer, and no one else comes close for me, is Elvis Costello, and I never listen to him while I’m writing because I don’t want to do anything else but savor every moment of his stuff while I listen to it. I’d be too intimidated by his writing to do any writing of my own!) I work best with something a little less obtrusive. It can have vocals. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ melancholy and lovely ‘The Boatman’s Call’ works nicely for a wide range of writing experiences, for me. Poe’s ‘Haunted’ complements her brother Mark Danielewski’s amazing novel ‘House of Leaves,’ but it works just fine for me, too.

But also, I very much like writing to music without vocals. It’s more like I’m writing the words to the song, then. It’s more like a real movie soundtrack to the action unfolding on the silver screen of my monitor. And I often listen to actual movie soundtracks while I’m writing. (Though some of these, like the ones for ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘Lost in Translation,’ ‘Kill Bill,’ etc. largely consist of vocals.) If I want wild and crazy, I’ll listen to the Dust Brothers’ ‘Fight Club’ score. When writing a recent novel of mine involving samurai-like demons and a tragic love story, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ worked wonders (and that soundtrack has moved me to tears). When I wanted to get REALLY sad, I listen to one of the saddest-sounding scores I’ve encountered, the one for ‘The Wings of the Dove.’ Not lately, but in the past I wrote to ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘The Godfather.’ (Must have been my DeNiro phase.) Bernard Herrmann’s supremely lush score for Brian De Palma’s ‘Obsession.’ Philippe Sarde’s gorgeous score for Polanski’s ‘Tess.’ But these days I especially like writing to the clanging and clanking industrial weirdness, faraway organ music, whining mutant baby, and song of the radiator woman on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead.’ Hell, it even has an extended dance track!

Then, there are the CDs that aren’t movie soundtracks but which have that kind of vibe, and create the perfect aural environment for all kinds of my work. My favorite of these was recommended to me by Michael Cisco (and if it helped him concoct his brilliant novels ‘The Divinity Student’ and ‘The Tyrant’, then it HAS to be good). This is ‘Metavoid’ by Lustmord. It is like sound recorded in another, dark and creepy dimension. It may be hard for you to find it. Good. I don’t want you to dip into my bag of magic! It’s mine, I tells ya! Another top favorite of this type is still a soundtrack, but for a video game rather than a movie. It’s the music for the eerie game ‘Silent Hill 3,’ and the CD came with the game as a bonus disk. The composer is Akira Yamaoka. There are some vocals here, the male singer doing a major Bowie imitation, but it’s all quite awesome. I loved it so much that I had another writer burn me a copy of the soundtrack for the next game in the series, ‘Silent Hill 4 – the Room,’ and it’s nearly as good.

I’m sure a lot of writers listen to classical, or jazz. (I’ll sometimes put on radio stations playing those, myself.) Rap. Country (gasp). Like I said, it’s all good – if not for me, then for you. Whatever matches your movie. Whatever makes your muse nod its head…play bongos on its thighs…and tap its feet. Whatever tune best inspires your fingers in their dance across those keys.

By Jeff Mariotte

Since I’m in the last days of a novel’s first draft (and because it’s germane to the conversation here at SU, I’ll say that I’m in the camp of writers who power through to the finish to get the whole story out, and then go back and worry about the niceties), this month’s essay won’t be entirely original, but will instead point you toward a conversation begun on my blog Friday and expand a bit on that.

Here’s the original post. The whole thing started because I read that there was a new, authorized sequel to Peter Pan coming out, and it struck me that Peter Pan in Scarlet, along with books like The Godfather Returns and Scarlett, are tie-in books every bit as much as novels based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Wars or Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The difference is that they’re not treated as if they are. Instead, they’re given more “legitimacy,” by publishers, press, and public. They are published in hardcover to great fanfare, they are extensively advertised, they are reviewed and they sell many, many copies, earning their authors big advances and nice royalties.

They are, of course, based on familiar properties, beloved by millions. Then again, so are Buffy and Star Wars. CSI has become every bit the 21st Century cultural touchstone that The Godfather was in its time. As the top-rated TV show for several years running, exported around the world, it’s been watched by more people than ever read the original Godfather novel, and probably more than have seen the movie. It has influenced everything from real criminal trials to the number of people studying for careers in criminal forensics to cinematography styles in other shows and movies. There’s no reason, except base prejudice, that every new CSI novel is not a huge hardcover bestseller.

The problem is that tie-ins live in a literary ghetto. They get no respect from society at large. What concerns me is not that the lack of academic attention—there’ll probably never be graduate courses on epistemological truth as revealed by Data in Star Trek novels of the late 20th Century, and that’s fine. But respect in the greater sense translates into attention, which translates into sales, which translates into money. For someone who makes a living at this game, and would like to be able to put money away against the possibility of a day when he won’t be able to do so, that is an important point indeed.

Thinking about that, I realized that the two ways I make most of my income are by writing tie-in novels and comics and by writing original horror novels and comics. Sometimes I even get to combine horror with tie-ins, as in the many novels I’ve written based on the Angel TV show, in which I got to tell ghost stories, haunted house stories, Cthulhu Mythos stories, and more. The book I’m just wrapping up is largely about Superman, the DC Comics character, but because I love horror and Westerns, he is teamed with the Phantom Stranger and the Demon, and he travels back to the old West to battle alongside Jonah Hex, El Diablo, and more of DC’s Western characters.

And if there’s another literary ghetto with just about as much social acceptance as tie-ins, it’s horror.

There are two basic responses you can have to working in the ghetto. The easiest, I think, is to embrace it. Horror is by its nature about outsiders. It doesn’t play well with others. It focuses on the monsters around us and the monsters within us. If members of polite society enjoy it—or even “get” it—then the writer hasn’t done his or her job, and it’s not horrific enough. Put on the black T-shirt, turn up the death metal, and ignore the rubes passing by outside. This option, I believe, leads to further marginalization, to focus on small presses and internet publication, and ultimately to impoverished writers—poverty being a state to which I am opposed.

I prefer the second option, which is not to accept literary ghettos. There is excellent writing to be found in horror, just as there is in tie-ins. Conversely, there is some truly wretched writing to be found in the mainstream, and in other, more socially approved, genres. It is not the bookstore classification that defines quality, and it should not be the classification that creates a self-fulfilling sales prophecy. A good horror novel or a good CSI novel should have the potential to earn just as much money as a good mainstream novel.

Horror, too, has its exceptions, like the Godfather and Gone With the Wind tie-in books I started this discussion with. There are always the handful of horror writers who sell lots of copies and earn millions—the Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzs, Clive Barkers and Anne Rices (although Kooontz claims not to write horror, and Rice has turned her attention to religion).

But Dean is a horror writer, and there are plenty of other writers putting out one horror novel after another. These books don’t get claimed by the genre, and therefore there are readers who “don’t read horror” who are happily plunking down $30 for each new hardcover. James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Michael Gruber spring immediately to mind; you can surely think of others.

And horror has a distinguished history as long as literature itself. The first stories told around campfires at the dawn of humanity were about spirits working for good or evil, and how their work affected people. Beowulf, often acknowledged as the first work of pure literature, is a horror story. Its modern companion, Grendel, by literary darling John Gardner, is both horror and a tie-in—someone tell the universities!

I believe those of us working in these noble professions should take every effort to point out to the world at large that they do read horror and they do read tie-ins and hell, they even read Westerns, every time Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy puts out a new book, and it wouldn’t hurt them to drop the blinders and delve a little deeper into those genres. Or they should forget genre altogether and read what interests them from one day to the next, one book to another.

If we don’t, no one else is going to.

By
Richard Steinberg

When Bram Stoker was halfway through the first draft of Dracula, he showed it to his friend and employer Henry Irving (the legendary British actor) to get his opinion. Stoker had already sold several short stories, and had published two novels: Under The Sunset (1882) and The Snake’s Pass (1890.) By all standards, he was a creative and commercial success and well on his into the London literary power structure.

When Irving unwrapped the brown paper from around the package he’d received at his summer home, he found the following note pinned to the first page:

“This is very likely not good, I’m sorry.”

The most common question I get from aspiring writers – a question I’ve seen in the comments section of this website many times – is: “How do I know if what I’m writing is any good?” It’s an obsession of nascent writers, a fixation of those who’ve managed that first hurdle . . . getting going in a serious manner on a project; and their darkest fear in the middle of the night:

“Am I wasting my time because I’m/it’s not good enough.”

Well, having just completed my 18th novel, and sent it out into the world for universal praise or derision, having written scores of short stories, thirty-one columns, and way too many e-mails, I think I’m in a position to answer that question for you. It’s an answer well known to experienced writers, most if not all of the contributors here, and certainly to any and all of your literary heroes. So here it is, with all its profundity and complexity:

The question is irrelevant.

Disappointed? Let me expand the thought.

“Good enough,” suggests that there are arbitrary standards of literary excellence. That somewhere there is written down or codified a list of those things “good,” and those “bad.” It suggests that publishing – on all its levels – is an industry peopled only by those who’ve “got it” and repels those who don’t. Even more, it implies that unless you can decrypt this mysterious cipher (figure out and write up to those wholly subjective demands) you are doomed to failure and tears.

Well, you’ve chosen to make your way in the arts . . . so there are going to be tears. Nothing much you can do about that. But failure because you weren’t good enough?

Please . . .

Internet literary critic (and living Goddess) Harriet Klausner proclaimed my novel, The Four Phase Man, as having bestowed “master status” upon me. A major Pacific Northwest daily said that the same book was: “an ecological disaster; in that trees had to die to create the paper this trash was printed on.”

And while I prefer to believe the Goddess over the hack; in truth, neither review of 4Phase’s relative “good enoughness” matters. What matters is more personal, far more intimate and insightful; some questions that I ask myself before, during, and most certainly after every project I’ve ever completed.

Did I say what I wanted to in the story?

Did I say it in an entertaining manner?

Will readers be comfortable reading my writing style?

Do my characters make sense, are they realistic enough, are their conflicts drawn from those mortal dreads we all share?

Did I spend too much time on really cool – but essentially extraneous – subplots? A weakness of mine.

Does the story start early enough, is the central conflict clear enough, and are those things resolved by the end that need to be?

And nowhere therein is the question: is it good enough?

The bestseller lists are often filled with creative typists as opposed to skilled writers. Hacks who, I assure you, are NOT “good enough” sell millions of books per year; while many brilliant writers go unpublished for too long periods of time. This is a result of the commerce grinder for which “good enough” is meaningless; replaced, instead, by: is this an easy enough publish for us? This is the way of the publishing world and bitching and moaning about it serves little purpose other than momentary entertainment value.

Which I do indulge in far too often . . . but then I’m still working on the perfection of my being.

Don’t worry about being good enough . . . write!

Don’t waste time trying to find the magic recipe that if followed will produce perfection . . . write!!

Don’t doubt yourself because you think there are standards or demarcations of skill that must be met . . . write!!!

If you have to ask yourself some questions (and asking questions IS essential to improving) try some of the above, create your own, or maybe try the “Thixton Rules.”

Robert Thixton is not only my manager and literary agent, he is also one of my closest and most cherished friends on the planet. And less than three weeks into our now ten year professional relationship, he gave me some guidelines through which I could judge my work. Things that had nothing to do with “good” but all to do with the things that matter. Guidelines that I continue to review during (and immediately upon completion) of every project I write. They are:

1: Cut the cute!
2: Can you feel anything?
3: Are you being clear?
4: Are you writing in your own voice?
5: As long as it comes from you, from inside you, it’ll be great. The rest is just professional technique, and that can be learned.

And while you’re at it, try not to doubt yourself, to compare yourself with the literary flavor of the month. Try not to spend too much time looking for the arbitrary good . . . it doesn’t exist and can only create a negativeness that will infect everything you do. And understand that all of us have those doubts; those gnawing creatures chewing on the sides of that dark and gooey place within us all that the writing springs from. Having those doubts is your dues for joining our exclusive little club.

Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita was reviewed as: “a book that should be buried under a rock at the bottom of the sea for ten thousand years.”

Frank Herbert’s Dune was called: “the worst piece of writing to get published in the history of civilized man.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, upon the release of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, was described as: “the worst writer in the Western world . . . proof that if you have the right friends even bat guano can be published.”

Which brings us back to the insecure Mr. Stoker.

As Irving sat back on three consecutive summer evenings to read the pages his friend had so morosely sent him, he was inspired to take pen in hand and send Bram a note, which included the following:

“I can say with true conviction that I do not know if this work is good or not. I do not even pretend to understand what it is that you are trying to say within these pages. But this much I do know: this book is drawn from either Heaven or Hell and most certainly could not have been written by any save you. And you should no more judge it than you should cease to breathe. Bravo, sir!”

Works for me.

Believe!

by Justine Musk

I had a conversation at a party in a cute Spanish bungalow in LA. The guy asked me who my publisher was, I told him, and he gave the most dramatic reaction I’ve gotten so far (in my experience, people initially assume you mean some version of self- or vanity publishing, since everybody seems to know someone who ‘published’ a really crappy novel that way).

“Wow!” he said. “Wow, you’re one of the lucky few! You won the lottery!” He went on like this for a minute or so – “You won the lottery!” – as if my manuscript had been pulled out of a giant plastic ball on national television.

On the drive home, my husband commented, “That guy was annoying.”

“This is true.”

“You didn’t win the lottery,” my man said with real loyalty. “You wrote a book that other people want to read. Simple as that.”

Right. Simple.

I started writing young. Young enough to stay cocky for years. Of course publication was in my future! Just a matter of time, perseverance, and work. (Lots of work, I would discover. Lots and lots and lots of work). Luck didn’t really enter into it. I was the stylist of my own fate.

I now know too much about traditional publishing to ever feel that cocky again. I also know too many absurdly talented, experienced, hard-working writers still hunting for their first mainstream break.

So how lucky was I?

(Let me be clear. My humble little paperback original is hardly THE HISTORIAN. But I got to join that club of people who can walk into any Borders or Barnes & Noble in the country and locate their novel on the shelves. It’s very cool.)

I was entering my late twenties when I began seriously thinking about the book that became BLOODANGEL. By that point I had written five novels; the first while I was in my early teens, the fifth while I was graduating university and then teaching ESL in Japan. A couple of those novels I discarded not long after finishing them; they were practice exercises, nothing more. One came close to selling to a Canadian publisher while I was still in high school. I didn’t have my license yet, so my father drove me across southern Ontario to meet with the interested editor (the other editors, alas, proved not so interested).

The fifth novel, the one that preceded BLOODANGEL, landed me my first legitimate agent. She submitted the manuscript (and my photo) to editors at all the big houses and I was rejected, rejected, rejected. The feedback I received – via the letters the agent passed on to me – was brutal and illuminating. These editors thought I wrote well. They liked some of my characters. They were, however, concerned about the plot. The book didn’t seem to have any. The story, as one editor put it kindly, “unfolds awkwardly.”

The agent suggested I revise, but after two attempts it became clear that I didn’t really know what I was doing. As the agent so delicately put it: “The book just isn’t getting any better. Sorry.”

I felt the most burnt out and discouraged I had ever felt, about anything.

If I was going to keep on with this, I realized, I needed to hook back into the fun and joy of storytelling. Because I was writing what I felt I ought to be writing, which, at that time, was literary fiction. I needed to reconnect with what I wanted to be writing…which turned out to be the supernatural thriller, King and Koontz kind of stuff that had thrilled me so much as a teenager. I remembered times when I’d have to stop reading just to walk off the excitement those books had inspired in me.

I needed to be excited again.

I knew, during the unexpectedly long process of writing BLOODANGEL, that I had broken through to a new level in my evolution as a writer. My so-called literary and genre sides had met, hit it off, and eloped. This book felt like mine. It’s not that BLOODANGEL is so stunningly original; it takes its influences from a number of places, some of which are pretty evident and some of which will remain my bemusing little secret. But the way these influences wove into each other – the way they synthesized — felt uniquely mine, and like something I’d been working towards for a long time.

And I loved the story. Even at my most discouraged, I could not abandon it. The protagonist was a woman near my own age, and I felt secure enough with that voice and perspective as the center to experiment with the other POV characters. I took more risks and stretched myself more than I ever had in my literary fiction (one reason why my litfic, I realize now, fell short).

At the same time, I also thought it was a…weird book. In my own mind I was following in the epic multiple-perspective footsteps of King and Koontz (BLOODANGEL was originally intended as a much longer story than its 90,000 words allow it to be, which is why it sets itself up so nicely for a sequel), but the book was female-written with a female protagonist. I wasn’t sure where it fit. It didn’t feel like true horror. It didn’t feel like true fantasy. I identified it as dark urban fantasy – a mix of horror and fantasy set within a contemporary reality– but there didn’t seem to be much, or any of that, kicking around on the bookshelves.

At least not then.

Nobody’s gonna want to publish this, I thought to myself more than once.

Then I finished and submitted it.

And walked into a land of what my editor termed “post-Buffy fiction.”

Laurell K Hamilton was everywhere. So was Kelley Armstrong.

And BLOODANGEL fell neatly into a hot and trendy genre that I didn’t even know existed, or was about to exist, while I was actually developing the manuscript.

It certainly wasn’t any strategy on my part.

But is it so surprising? I am a child of my popular culture. I was born in 1972 and picked up a taste for supernatural thrillers early on – I remember dragging my entire family to see POLTERGUIST — but I wanted heroines. Cool, real-woman heroines, not the busty leather-clad video-game caricatures. I wanted Ripley in ALIENS and Sarah O’Conner in TERMINATOR 2 and Clarice in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I wanted a female Jedi Knight, dammit. I was frustrated when POINT OF NO RETURN (the American remake of LA FEMME NIKITA) flopped at the box office and Hollywood decreed, with its usual logic, that audiences weren’t ready for kick-ass women. Um, hello? Hello?

I wanted Buffy.

So many of us wanted Buffy.

What I’ve learned is this: like everyone obsessed with books and movies, I have different kinds of hungers for different kinds of stories. Some of that hunger gets satisfied. Some does not, and as a writer I need to stay attuned and alert to that, because it’s those missing stories I need to be writing. I’m not the only reader with an ache in her belly.

So I’ll tell those tales myself, to the best of my ability.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be lucky.

By Weston Ochse

We all started somewhere. None of us appeared as fully-formed writers able to detect passive voice after that first gurgling breath.

This was especially true for me. My journey to grammatical confidence was a long one. Even after high school, it took a while to figure out what the teacher really meant when she explained to the whole class the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. I was too busy reading ahead in my literary reader, so it wasn’t until later that a friend in a critique group pointed out the difference to me along with the usage.

Grammar came to be at odd times. Sometimes I’d parse the information on my own while reading a novel or the bathroom wall at a truck stop. Other times I’d have to ask, usually depending on fellow writers, professors and critique groups for charity. On rare occasions, an editor would point out my flaws in a crimped and harried hand, barely legible instructions scrawled in the margins of a form rejection which I treasured and tried to decipher as if it were a map I’d been handed to the secret island of Published Professionals, hidden behind a layer of clouds far out in the Sea of Perseverance. On the rarest of occasions, an editor would set aside his or her own time and prepare a rejection letter detailing my grammatical malfeasance in such a way that I could not help but realize that my writing has been grotesquely suffering from ignorance.

This happened to me in 1997 the first year I began to write. Among the stories that will never see print is one called A Popular Judgment– a preachy morality tale thinly disguised as a JRR Tolkien meets Judge Roy Bean meets LA Law sword and sorcery melodrama. I remember thinking at the time that my talent was extraordinary, my plotting visionary, and the story an amazing contribution to literature. I knew in my heart of hearts that the story was destined to be placed in the Hall of the Literary King so that those few worthy souls who dared the perilous trek to grammatical excellence, could look upon it with reverent awe at the Temple at the End of the World, knowing that they could never equal the story in quality or insightfulness.

What was amazing was that it didn’t end up in the trash. For my first rejection for this story was from the magazine World’s of Fantasy and Horror, formerly and currently known to the world as Weird Tales. The rejection letter ran four pages of evenly spaced, informative and forever helpful guidance on all of the rules of grammar I’d deftly avoided while writing the story. This was no form letter, but a personalized indictment on my skill as a fictionalist, one which I took as divine guidance, instead of devilish damnation.

Among the many rules I’d trampled in my haste to see my words in print had to do with a little known (to me) concept called ‘the antecedent.’ You may have heard of this pesky invention, particularly in reference to pronouns. Clearly I had never heard of it, for the phrase ‘your continual and repeated misuse of antecedents to their pronouns rendered many passages indecipherable’ caught me entirely off guard. At first I was certain the editors were having their way with me. I figured they’d jerked the word from the ether, laid it on the page, and sent it to me, them all sitting on their thrones in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, snorting beers and laughing at my expense. So, not quite believing that my stellar writing was as indecipherable as described, and thinking the editor may have been a few beers short of an 18 Pack, I checked the dictionary. To my profound amazement, I discovered that the word did exist. Antecedent was an actual word.

Here–

From Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Main Entry: an•te•ced•ent
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Medieval Latin & Latin; Medieval Latin antecedent-, antecedens, from Latin, what precedes, from neuter of antecedent-, antecedens, present participle of antecedere to go before, from ante- + cedere to go
1 : a substantive word, phrase, or clause whose denotation is referred to by a pronoun (as John in “Mary saw John and called to him”); broadly : a word or phrase replaced by a substitute.

Seeing as how it was a real word, and not something created in an anagram engine, I was beginning to see an inkling of what they meant. After all, I had a whole bunch of pronouns in the story. I thought I knew what they were doing, but maybe they’d gotten out of control, which pronouns were prone to if left unattended.

Deciding that I’d go to the Master of All Things Grammatical to solve this problem, I called my mother and the conversation went something like this–

Me: “Hi mom. What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean?”

Mom: “Hi son. I’m fine thank you. So is your father, although I keep telling him he needs to lose some weight. Too much butter, you know. Now what was your question?”

Me: “What’s incorrect use of an antecedent to a pronoun mean? I mean if I was to use this antecedent-thingy incorrectly what would happen?”

Mom: “Did you get another rejection?”

Me: “Saying I did, and pretending that I got a letter telling me that I incorrectly used the antecedent to pronouns, what would that mean?”

Mom: “You know you really should have finished college.”

Me: “Mom. Concentrate.”

Mom: “I’m just saying. They would have taught that to you in college had you attended and not decided to party your scholarship away.”

Me: “Mom. I’m going to hang up.”

Mom: Sighing dramatically, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “What are you– Oh! That’s easy. Jack fell down.”

Mom: “And you know that because there is only one male in the preceding sentence to which the pronoun ‘he’ referred. Now, try this one. Jack and Bill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. He fell down and broke his crown and he came tumbling after. Who fell down?”

Me: “That’s just crazy. Why would Jack and Bill go up a hill?”

Mom: “Concentrate and answer the question.”

Me: “I can’t answer the question. Who’s this Bill guy anyway? I’ve never even heard of him. I have no idea who fell down. I don’t know who broke their crown. I can’t tell if it was Jack or Bill? “

Mom: “Exactly. Now go look at your story and see if there are any Jack or Bills.”

Me: “What? Who?”

And she left me to figure the rest of it out on my own. Now my Mom was a HS English Teacher, so she had more than a passing acquaintance with the rules of grammar and in her inimical way was able to teach me what I’d failed to comprehend in school, glean off the page of a novel, or parse from the wall of a men’s room. Additionally, I’ve never consciously made that mistake again, often reading back over a manuscript specifically looking for antecedent errors.

Antecedents can be troublesome. I’ve included a link for some rules and examples of other ways they can be misused. Some of you will be surprised.
Here’s the link.

Since I received that rejection letter back in 1997, I’ve been fortunate to publish a lot of stories, columns, reviews and a novel, and to each of these, I owe that King of Prussian editor a small piece of credit. You never know when good advice is going to come your way, so be open to it, or your work will never find it’s place in the Hall of the Literary King at the Temple at the End of the World–or for that matter, published at all.

Now take a look at the title of this article. See anything interesting?