Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-10-interview-with-chuck-tingle-breaking-the-rules

 

Key Points: Any number of ways to approach art. Failure is a learning opportunity. Capture the truth of the moment that it's written. Try punk rock writing. If you can't fix it, feature it. Message first, then character and plot. Be the slippery slope you want to see in the world. Take the road less travelled. Come at them as an equal. Art is more than just the words in the book. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 20, Episode 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Interview with Chuck Tingle: Breaking the Rules.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today by our special guest, Chuck Tingle. Who... Let me just say, as we start off, I'm so happy to have you here because love is real.

[Chuck] Oh, wild. Do you know... Want to know why I'm happy to be here, along with that? I think there's some buckaroos that believe we are one and the same, or at least...

[Laughter]

[Chuck] About a decade ago did. I guess this kind of clears it up unless you have a little soundboard and you're flipping between sound modulations. But actually this is pretty good evidence that we are two separate entities.

[Howard] That would be...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] Impressive to fake.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Very talented performer. So...

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. It's amazing. You're actually my cat. But...

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] For readers who are unfamiliar with you, would you mind telling them just a little bit about some of what you write and who you are?

[Chuck] Yes. So I started off self-publishing erotica. I still do that. I have about 350 erotica shorts called Tinglers, and then I recently have signed a deal with Nightfire, which is part of Tor, part of McMillan, traditionally published horror novels. The second of which just came out. And then I just announced that I've got four more coming. So, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [This is… Garbled]

[DongWon] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] This is very, very fantastic. I became aware of you first because of your erotica. Then when I started seeing that you were going to be doing traditionally published things, one of the first… The assumption that I made was that it was going to be similar to what you were doing. The reason that we have you in to talk about breaking the rules is that your path to publishing traditionally is extremely unconventional. But the other thing is that you are ignoring a piece of conventional wisdom, which is that you are supposed to put yourself into a niche and stay in that niche. If you're going to do two different niches, that you need to have [garbled] for those.

[DongWon] Yes. So…

[Chuck] I think pretty much everything about my career has been pretty untraditional. Unconventional. The writing itself, I think there's a lot of rules that I break. It is something that I like to talk about. Because I think there's a lot of buckaroos out there who are creators, not just writers, but in any sort of medium who kind of get discouraged if they don't fall into a specific path of kind of traditional creativity. There's a reason for a lot of those paths. I mean, obviously, like, there is a system to getting a publishing deal and everything. But I like to talk about my own journey, because there's some really incredible things that happen if you kind of chart your own path. Sometimes that can lead to astonishing failure, and sometimes that can lead to something really beautiful. Not just beautiful, but kind of push mediums forward sometimes. I mean, it's… That's such an important role out there. So, I just think it's important to talk about it, and not discourage those that think, well, that's not how I think. Because there's any number of ways to approach art.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is… Any number of ways to approach art is something that is like a flag that I will ride to. You have my sword.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that we are fond of saying here at Writing Excuses is tools, not rules.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's one of the things… When you're talking about art, that there isn't a right way to approach it, because we're all coming from a different point.

[Chuck] Yes.

 

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to pick up on in there, too, was, Chuck, you mentioned the possibility of astonishing failure, I think is how you put it. What I… One of the things I love about you bringing that up immediately is it such a possibility in any creative endeavor, in the artistic endeavor. Learning to not be afraid of that failure, but to also embrace it as an opportunity to learn more and explore and discover what works for you, and what doesn't work for you, for me, I think, is incredibly important. But to start out almost, like, on the negative, the downbeat note, and, like, what are those moments of failure that you've run into that you found instructive for you in terms of figuring out how you wanted to move forward? What were the paths that made sense to you?

[Chuck] That is a great question. You've caught me, a little bit, because…

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] I use that… Well, I use that word, because we're communicating through words. It's semantics. We're just… We are speaking, we need a word to put value to an idea. But if you were to really, like, dive deep, and I guess that's what we're doing here, get philosophical about it, I kind of think an art failure doesn't actually exist. I'm using the word to make a point, but in reality, when I look at the process of any career, but I'm just going to talk about my own. Anything, anytime, let's say I had a Tingler that came out that I thought was going to do really well and didn't, I just… Failure's the best word for it, because we all know what that means. But if you actually look at it, that is literally just a… That is a learning opportunity. It is an experience. It is, honestly, the stuff that life on this timeline is made of. It is so beautiful, in fact, it's equally beautiful to success. So I… It was… If I'm really going to get in touch with the depths of my feeling about it, I just… I don't think that it exists, it's part of the process. Making great art is not just some trajectory upward into the sky like a rocket. It is a river that flows in various directions, and all of that is important. It's equally important, I think.

[Howard] To paraphrase badly Mahatma Gandhi, be the try-fail cycle you want to see in a good book.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Absolutely.

[Howard] We see this in all of the things that we consume as entertainment. We see this idea of a try-fail cycle. As long as the failure is not something that stops you completely, it can be part of a process that leads to the success that you were aiming for.

[Mary Robinette] This is… Yeah. This is a thing that I love, is the part of a process. There's a thing in film and television where you only need to get the perfect shot once. Right. When you're watching the Muppets, they fling puppets all the time. There is this outtake reel that I love from Emmet Otter's Jug Town Christmas… Err, Jug Band Christmas, where they need a drum to roll out of a store.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It rolls out of the store and fails so many different times in different hysterically funny ways. This blooper reel is now one of my very favorite things. But they only need to get it right once. I think one of the wonderful things about writing is that you can try something and you don't have to put it out into the world until it's… Until you have successfully gotten the drum to roll the way you want it to roll. Then, even if someone is like,, whatever, that drum is not perfect for me. It's like, well, that's fine.

 

[Chuck] Yes. I also tend to believe that the quote wrong way of the drum to roll is actually more perfect than the quote perfect one. I think that with art, a lot of the things… Like, for me, it's not about capturing the perfect story. It's about capturing the truth of the moment that it's written. That's the goal for me. So, Tinglers are a perfect example of that. I think of my writing, specifically with Tinglers, as, like, punk rock writing.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] If you look at other mediums, if you look at, like, music for instance, if you have a song and you play it a little too fast and it's a little out of tune and it's a little sloppy, someone will listen to that and say, wow, that's a perfect punk rock song. If you do that in painting, you can say, oh, that was something like, oh, you really captured the movement and the emotion or something, if you don't fix those mistakes. In writing, for whatever reason, I have just found that there's a strictness that I kind of like to push back against. So the mistakes, like, spelling errors or things in my erotica shorts, I don't… I don't even see those as errors, I see them as punk. It is capturing the moment that it was made. A lot of those I wrote in 24 hours about a news item, and the idea that I should make it seem like it wasn't written in 24 hours just seems silly to me. I… It's a piece of art and I'm capturing the moment. So I kind of like to look outside of the conventions of any sort of genre, but specifically the medium of writing, and think, well, what do these quote mistakes actually mean if we're actually just trying to capture the moment?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a thing they say in puppetry… I think other places too, but… If you can't fix it, feature it.

[Chuck] Oh, beautiful. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] As a cartoonist, I'm fond of saying that art for art's sake is allowed to take its time. Art for money has to run like it stole something.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] That's a great one, too.

[Howard] It's… Because the mistakes… Mistakes isn't the right word. That first stroke you throw down with a pen as an energy to it, and enthusiasm to it, that repeated strokes trying to get it right won't have. So, boy, sometimes you just gotta roll with the first take.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like there's a joke right here about repeated strokes and Tinglers, but…

[Chuck] Oh, there you go. [Garbled] Just wait until this episode comes out and you see a fresh Tingler…

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Directly referencing Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness. Any time we're talking about things coming out, it's always exciting for me.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But before we do anything more on that, I think we're going to take our pause. As I break my [garbled] podcasting.

[We're fine. We're all fine.]

[Mary Robinette] We're fine. So let's take our pause for a thing of the week.

 

[Chuck] So, going with the theme of this episode of breaking the rules, and as a Writing Excuses fan myself, I listen all the time, I have yet to hear anyone recommend food. So I have… I would like to recommend the Franken stand, which for anyone either living in Los Angeles or visiting Los Angeles, it's a vegan hot dog stand that serves horror-themed hotdogs.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] So, every week, you show up and you're not sure what you're going to get. Maybe the Mummy with a nice pale alfredo drizzled across the top, wrapped up. You could get the Swamp Thing, which is more like a chili dog. There's all kinds of things. It's just really incredible. It's the… You have to follow them on Instagram to find out where they're going to be. Normally they are some days in front of a horror shop called the Mystic Museum out in the big valley. Yeah. So my thing of the week is a delicious vegan horror-themed hotdog at the Franken stand, and their Instagram is the hotdog_franken.

[DongWon] As a new resident of Los Angeles, I am excited to go and track this one down and see what they have to offer.

[Mary Robinette] And I am thinking that anyone who is coming on the Writing Excuses cruise that is cruising out of Los Angeles in September is probably also going to make a slight detour too.

[Chuck] Oh, there you go. You've gotta get a haunt dog. That's what they call them.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Not hotdogs. Haunt dogs.

[Mary Robinette] This is amazing to me.

[DongWon] I've had some hotdogs that I felt haunted by. So…

[Chuck] Yes.

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. So, as we come back in, I want to talk about some of the rules that you feel like other people get trapped by that you just kind of stomped over with great joy and enthusiasm.

[Chuck] Wow. I feel like there's two categories of that. There is… There are the rules of kind of the business side of things. There's the rules of the creative side of things. I think that… I mean… Part of both of these is that while… I am a masked buckaroo. It's funny. In the introduction, we didn't even mention that, but for those listeners not familiar, I am anonymous, and I wear a pink bag over my head. I would say that… I mean, just to list a few, actual… Well, the way I do book tours is certainly different. I don't do readings. Because, really, they didn't make sense to me. I thought if you're trying to get new readers, what are you going to do? Show up and talk about a book that nobody's read and have spoilers? I found it to be kind of fundamentally broken, so, like, I do my own thing with some shows. I think that in the creative side of things, I kind of disagree with the idea that you should only show, never tell. I think that you need to do both.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] Which you've actually done an episode on that was pretty wonderful. So [garbled] your listeners, go back to that one. I also… There's this whole discussion of sort of should you write with character or plot, is the big thing, or, well, who's in the driver's seat? I think most of the time you're supposed to say character. I would argue that that… I like to write message first. I always put the message in the driver's seat. Kind of the what am I delivering to the reader, what is the gift of this, and then I would say probably character second and then plot third. There's all these things that I come out it with… And that come back to the anonymous thing. Many buckaroos have tried to guess my real identity.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] All the time I have kind of… I'm breaking off… Breaking down the layers. But I will say, for those listening, because I have said this before, that many assume that I am, like, a writer under this [garbled], but I am not. Which I think becomes apparent. I mean, I'm a writer now, but coming into this, I did not know this industry at all. Which I guess moves on to the… Kind of the business side of things, which, DongWon, my agent, who happens to be here…

[Mary Robinette] Shocking.

[DongWon] Amazing coincidence.

[Chuck] Experienced firsthand, which is just kind of… I think that my path… I used [garbled] since about the querying and all that stuff. Actually, I just… I wrote the book, I wrote Camp Damascus, and then I went on Twitter and said I have a book. I think I'd like a traditional publisher. Does anyone want to put it out?

[DongWon] Literally, just tweeted it out.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Yes, I just tweeted it, and then old McMillan said, I guess that's a good one, let's do that. That is the short version. It's more entertaining. You could also look at it like I spent eight years building my fan base, writing erotica, creating kind of this whole thing outside of the books itself. I prefer the short version because I think it's funny. But…

[DongWon] I love the short version.

[Chuck] The short version is very fun.

 

[DongWon] But I have a question, which is, you came into this, you're saying, that you didn't know much about the publishing industry. Yet, years ago, you started writing the Tinglers and putting them up is self published. What was the thing that led you to that choice? Right? Like, when you were starting, before you knew what the rules even were, before you knew that you were breaking any what was the thing that got you to say, hey, I want to write these. I'm going to put them up here. Here's how I'm going to do it. Then, you developed a very distinctive style since then, of course. But…

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] What was that inception there?

[Chuck] So, I always have… I've been a creator my whole life. So… I just thought, as a medium, that the fact that you could self publish something and kind of work through an idea and it could be out in 24 hours and have an audience, I found to be pretty fascinating and also kind of underused in the sense of, like, hey, if this works, I could talk about current events, I could express myself in this way. I would say that there was a sort of a personal kind of version of that, and a political version. The personal version was that I am on the autism spectrum, so I am [garbled] typically masking all the time. The idea of being able to create this art in, like I said, a punk rock way where I said, well, I'm just going to… My autism really shows itself in how I organize things. I'm so strict about things, and I thought, well, if I have 24 hours, I want to write these quickly. I'm not going to have time for that, and it's going to be kind of therapeutic, which it very much ended up being. Then, also, my queerness as a bisexual buckaroo in a hetero presenting relationship… Actually, I thought, I don't get to express my queerness [garbled], so, actually, kind of therapeutic personal reasons that I suspected would be very helpful for me, and ended up literally changing my life. So that was a good guess. Then, politically speaking, the kind of crux of the idea was that I was always fascinated by conservatives… There was this line a long time ago, kind of the gay marriage line was, well, if we let two buckaroos marry, what's next? Are we going to marry free trees? Are we going to marry a sentient automobile? I always thought…

[Howard] They're already marrying their cars.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] Well, there you go. I always thought that kind of slippery slope argument… It was always kind of trotted out like this dystopian landscape. And every time they said it, even back then, I thought that sounds wonderful.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] What a utopia. So part of writing a Tingler, as, like a larger piece of all of these books was that if I just wrote about this world where that conservative nightmare was kind of just you let it run wild and show that that's actually more of a utopia than a dystopia. So… Those were the two pieces where I thought, okay. Writing these quick shorts is going to be an interesting way to do that. Let's see if it can work. And it did.

[DongWon] You gotta be the slippery slope you want to see in the world.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] It's fascinating to me that your path to publishing… Yeah. You broke rules. But now we look at self pub to trad pub and that's not really rule breaking so much as it is a road less traveled.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Howard] 25 years ago, when I started putting Schlock Mercenary on the Internet, it was the same sort of thing. It was very rule breaking. Web comics were the new thing. Now you look at them and, oh, it's… Everybody knows what that is. Oh, it's a web comic. So in part I think some of the pattern here may be that if you break rules or if you break from a form, if you break from a process, and do something in a new way and succeed, the next generation is going to treat that as an accepted form, an accepted pattern, an established way of accomplishing things.

[Chuck] Oh, yes. Absolutely. I hope the lesson that they can take… That goes one step beyond that, too, which is I hope another generation, listeners to this, thinking, well, how am I going to break into it, not only could you say, well, I could trod the path that Chuck did, but the broader idea of I could just come at things from a totally different angle. Something that I have that Chuck has never thought. It's like that is the beauty of art right there. So I just I would love to encourage others to do that. I'm so proud that it has kind of worked out into a career that supports itself by kind of trodding this outsider path. And, thank you, DongWon, for being a part of that.

[DongWon] Thank you for letting me be a part of it. In terms of… You spent all that time building up your profile, having a career, doing the Tinglers, building that audience. You built… What you built outside of the traditional rules of publishing, even outside the rules of like indie publishing. Right? Like, even on the indie side, people work doing what you were doing in terms of the, like, punk rock methodology of writing in terms of, like, doing it in 24 hours, embracing the medium itself as part of what your message is. What then made you pivot again into sort of breaking through all of those rules now into doing something with a traditional publisher? Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] Like, in terms of making that move… Why put yourself back in all the boxes that traditional publishing creates and loves to reinforce and loves to build around all of us?

[Chuck] So, this is kind of, I guess, that's a great question. Why I encourage others… Like I… You can trod the traditional path, but, like I said, you can break off… The one thing I think breaking off really has going for it is that if you get the opportunity, if it resonates with this timeline and means something to buckaroos, then when you do want to reach more through a traditional means, you can enter that conversation a completely different way than most are used to. Because you come at it as a sort of equal. I wanted to do traditional publishing because I knew that I had the ability and the strength because of my own situation that I could come in and make sure I only signed a deal with someone who would also let me do my Tinglers. Who would listen to exactly what I say and kind of treat me as sort of like an hauteur author almost where it's… I am very involved in every aspect of it, where I think some other authors might not be, as far as, let's say, cover decisions or edits or things. Because at this point in my career, it's like, why would you sign a deal with Chuck Tingle and not want him to write a Chuck Tingle book?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Chuck] So I'm allowed to basically do whatever I want as if I was self published, but with this massive company behind me because I've already proven it. I think there's something with… Not just with publishing, but with all types of mediums where the hopefuls who want to be career artists almost see it as a lotto ticket. I think that's a very unfortunate way to look at it, because you're essentially, like, begging someone to notice for you. Never come to the big record label, the giant film studio, the big five publisher saying please, please, notice me. Come to them as an equal. I always think back to the show American Idol where everyone was competing for a quote record deal. It always blew my mind because I would see it and think, well, what's the deal? What is the record deal? Is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Why are we competing for this nebulous idea that is not a good thing inherently? I feel like in book publishing too, you see that as, like, if I could only get this big five publishing deal… What big five publishing deal? Is it going to be a good one or a bad one?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think one of the things that you said about coming to the table as an equal is something that… That people just don't… They get hung up on the dream. It's something that you don't have to have a huge platform already to bear in mind, that publishers exist to publish things. They do not exist without your work.

[Chuck] Yep. Absolutely. Yes. It's almost a mentality.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] It doesn't have to be. You just have to go and be willing… Go into it and think if I don't like this deal, I'll say no, because I'm a great writer.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Chuck] So few buckaroos seem to do that.

[DongWon] The way I frame it is you have to be undeniable. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Because if you are deniable, they will deny you. Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] Part of being undeniable is being willing to walk away from a thing that may be what you've dreamed of, but is on bad terms or isn't with the right partner or at the right time. Right? All of those things, we all… All of us here we know too well can really derail you in a variety of ways. So it's not just reaching for a literary agent or a book deal or a opportunity, it has to be the right one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The way you get the right one is by manufacturing it, by creating it. Like, playing within the boundaries of how people expect you to behave won't always get you there. I mean, now you have to be respectful, you have to treat people…

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] With courtesy and respect and on the terms that they are requesting for a variety of different reasons. But, provided you're living up to civility and treating people like people, you don't have to conform to the expected channels. Like, most of my clients did not come to me through the query process. Right? Most of my clients in one way or another didn't end up in the same sort of set of traditional rules that we talk about in terms of how you get a book deal. Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Well, what publishers are looking for a lot is the thing that Chuck is delivering, which is a book that no one else could have written.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I think that when we get hung up in rules, when we get hung up in the this is the way things are done, what we're doing is that we are putting ourselves into boxes, and that we're trimming off the pieces of ourselves that don't fit into those boxes, and those pieces are often the things that make our work the most interesting. [Garbled] Howard was using the metaphor of that first initial rough sketch, and then you draw over and over and over again. I see early career writers editing themselves out of the story in an effort to meet all of the rules.

[DongWon] Which is why the rawness of the Tinglers works so well. Right?

[Chuck] Yep.

[DongWon] You mentioned that you lead with message, not with character or plot. You lead with message. But then you also made the medium itself the message. Like, for you, how is leading with message driving what you choose to work on and how you write and how you publish?

[Chuck] Yes. Well, I've always looked at art as more than what's between the… For the example of writing, it's more than just the words in the book, and I think it really drives. I have found authors do not like this. But I'm going to go with it. There was a sort of thing of, like, well, I just want to write the books. I don't want to have to be a brand. I'm sure you probably have 10 episodes of the same podcast about it. Fortunately, for me, I have always loved that because I don't think that there is a difference. I don't think that art ever stops when the medium ends. I think when you read the last page of the book, that the art is in what you dream of that night when you go to bed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Chuck] It's in what you eat for dinner. I think that the song doesn't end when the track stops. It's everything that you know about that singer. It's everything that you don't know about that singer. It's… So this idea of art in a vacuum, I think is really held onto tight by a lot of writers who are thinking, well, I don't want to have to be anything else. Being something else… Not being something else, that in itself is a statement. But, fortunately for me, I always thought, wow, how many different ways can I find to make art more than just the product, more than just the book? How can I make it everything that surrounds it? How can I show it's not in a vacuum? So I just spent a lot of time doing that because I love it. I kind of just got lucky in that fortunately for me… In an office, they call that branding. For me, I call it art.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like…

[DongWon] For me, I call that just being alive.

[Chuck] There you go. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think this is a great opportunity for us to go ahead and move to our homework, because otherwise we will be talking for several hours.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Chuck, I think you have some homework for us.

 

[Chuck] I do have some homework. So, whatever your work in progress is, find a section, whether it's a chapter or just a page, and think of the writing rule that you believe is kind of the North Star of sort of not necessarily your personal rule, but the writing at large, the English department would hammer into you. Take that rule, whatever you think it may be, and try to rewrite that section either without that rule or doing the opposite. Then look at it and see what change does that make? Is there a version of it where you can use this as a tool, not a rule?

 

[Mary Robinette] I love that homework. Thank you so much for joining us, Chuck.

[Chuck] Oh, my gosh. Thank you for having me. And before I go, I've just got to say, it is truly an honor. This is… I came to this, like I said, not knowing anything about writing, and actually, listening to this podcast taught me a lot. So I am so honored to be here and I just… I love it. So it's really wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Well, you all have heard that here. So, now you are out of excuses. Go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-46-nanowrimo-week-3-raising-the-stakes 

 

Key Points: Raising the stakes! Consequences! Try-fail cycles. Plan A, but... Multi threads! Ground increasing the stakes in what your character would do. Layer failures! How could this be "blank"er? Bigger, or deeper emotional reaction? What is already on the table, and how can I threaten that? Physical reactions! Establish the conflict first, then introduce emotional stakes. Dramatic irony! Be mean to your characters. Put them in difficult situations. Use the kind of stakes you have in your own life. Add try-fail cycles. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 46]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[DongWon] So this week, as we're entering into the third week of NaNoWriMo, we're going to talk about sort of the next step in developing your story, and developing the book that you're working on. Which is, raising the stakes. So, now that you've had your inciting incident, now that you've introduced your characters and your setting, we're going to talk about starting to introduce some consequences for your characters. So, yeah, I'm just going to turn it over to the group. How do you guys think about the next phase here? How do you start revving the engine, as it were?

[Dan] Well, we talk about try-fail cycles a lot. I think one of the great ways to raise the stakes is to have a plan A, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but either way, it's going to go horribly wrong. Right? This is the yes-but, no-and. I keep talking about Star Wars. I'm going to keep talking about Star Wars. In the inciting incident gets them off the planet and their plan is to fly to Alderon, and that's plan A. Do they succeed? Yes, they fly to Alderon. Does that help? No, Alderon's been exploded, and then they get captured by the Death Star. Like, it is a completion of their first goal, sort of, kind of, but it's also this drastic failure that ruins everything. On the other hand, look at Toy Story. What would he wants to do is be the favorite toy. He's decided that his… That's his super objective. Being the favorite toy. His objective is I need to get rid of Buzz. Does he succeed in doing that? Yes, he does. He gets exactly what he wants. But it just goes horribly wrong. He kicks Buzz out of the window, and he feels like it's his fault. He tries to rescue him and that spins off the whole rest of the story.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with with raising the stakes and the idea of consequences is that I… Stories are not like just one track. There's multiple things going on all at the same time. So I enjoy interrupting the progress towards one goal with another goal. Where it's like, "Am I able to do this thing? No, because…" So I think of this as… Because I often think in terms of MICE Quotient, as single thread versus multi thread. So in single thread, the consequences of one action, like, are continuing straight in that line. So using… Continuing our Star Wars…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When we've got the rest doing the princess thing, it's a milieu. We get in, we have to rescue the princess, we have to get back out. So are they able to rescue her? Like, they're being chased by Storm Troopers. What's the smartest thing they can do? They can try to shoot out this vent and get into a chute. Does it work? Yes, but they wind up in a trash compactor. Or a garbage chute, actually, they don't know it's a trash compactor yet. What's the smartest thing they can do? Well, not actually the smartest, but very… The Luke-ist thing they can do…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is try to shoot…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Their way out. Does that work? No, and they wake up something under the water. But the entire time, they're still dealing with environment. It's all milieu until finally they get a yes resolution which is R2 letting them out. Multi thread does a different thing, though.

[Erin] Oh. I… You know what, keep on going.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In multi thread, the consequences of one action affect another goal. You most commonly see this with event threads, where you have to give up something that is precious and personal in your character thread in order to make the event move forward. It's like do I… My going to be able to unlock this? Yes, but only by sacrificing my grandfather's pocket watch. So it's one of these things where you can interrupt one. It's also very useful in mysteries, where you're trying to ask someone a question, and then something goes wrong with the environment that causes you to not be able to finish asking that question.

[Erin] Yeah. I got so excited…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And interrupted your thread.

[Laughter]

[This is multi thread]

 

[Erin] but what I got excited… When you said it was the Luke-ist thing they could do, because it really reminded me that the increasing of stakes works the best when it's really grounded in what your character would do. Like, there are things that can be done that will make the stakes worse, but feel like they're out of nowhere. I feel like if you think like what's the worst decision that your character could make at this moment, and then be like let's convince them to make it, like, that often raises the stakes, but it also reinforces what it is that your reader really likes about the character.

[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I think about on that front as well is so much of, for me, of what does raise the stakes, what makes me so invested in character, is their relationship to each other. Right? How they feel about each other, or how a character feels about themselves. Right? We think of, like, life-and-death situations as great stakes, but I actually find that those can be really flat. What's interesting about Alderon getting destroyed isn't the fact that all those people died, it's about we're seeing it through the eyes of someone who watches their home destroyed. That raises the stakes for the entire galaxy. What's interesting about the trash compactor isn't necessarily are they going to survive this or not, but we see 3 different approaches to solving a problem as these characters are in conflict, of Leia making fun of Han, of Han just shooting things for no reason, and then Luke being the one who is, kind of the [garbled], they need to keep rescuing throughout this whole sequence. So we start to see the dynamic that is going to form the core of these movies for the whole trilogy, of these 3 characters interacting and their feelings about each other starting and deepening in these moments. Now we have stakes. Now we care about how Leia sees Luke. Now we care how Han sees Leia. All of these different parts of the triangle, some of them become very important, and now I'm emotionally invested in this movie at a whole different level than I was when it was just Luke being sad about his parents.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is a great point. One of the things that there are 2 things that are happening in the trash compactor scene. One is they have to get out of it. But the other is Luke is trying to impress Leia.

[Yeah. Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So when you can have… One of the ways that you can raise the stakes is not by making the individual failure point, but by layering two failure points onto a single action.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that you can do, is, like, hang more on it. Which is, I find, a lot of fun.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing I love about that… Sorry, this is turning into the compactor scene episode…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Luke's entire character arc in that movie is that he has to learn to rely on something that is larger than himself. What is his solution to get out of the trash compactor? It's he calls for help, he relies on R2-D2. Which is a really nice little nod toward he's not trying to do it all on his own, he's trying to rely on outside help. That is setting him up to be able to make the choice he makes at the end of the movie.

 

[Erin] I really feel like I should have seen Star Wars more than one time in my life…

[Laughter]

[Erin] In order to participate in this conversation. So, I'm going to take it, sorry, turn away, as I don't know nothing about no trash compactor.

[Wait! Star Wars podcast! Garbled]

[Erin] To talk a little bit about zombies. Something that you said, DongWon, maybe think about it, because when we were doing Zombies Run, we were always like, "What can the zombies… How can the zombies become…" They chase you all the time, every single episode. So you kind of get like, "Oh, zombies again." But are they closer, are they scarier, are they bigger, are there more of them? But instead of thinking of these as life or death space, I like taking them and moving them into whatever situation you're in. So, the fact that like there's a normal-sized zombie, and then a giant zombie, that's bigger. But something can also be bigger in terms of, like, it just has more impact. It will do more damage if it catches up to you. So, giving a speech in front of a lot of people is one thing. Giving a speech in front of a lot of people that include your crush, who, I guess is Leia… Are there other speeches in Star Wars? Like, is bigger. Like, the impact is larger. So one way to raise the stakes is by being, like, could this be blanker, and just take any word of your choice, that's a… Any word of your choice. I'm not going to hold you back.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Think, can this be blanker? Then figure out how do you do that. That's one way to also to raise the stakes.

[DongWon] On that note, as we think about how to make things more blanker…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Let's take a break, and we will start digging into what exactly that means when we are back.

 

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turned to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

 

[Dan] Hi, everybody. It is week 3 of NaNoWriMo. You're halfway through. You've been writing this thing, and you have, at this point, pretty good sense of your pace. How far are you into it, how much longer is it going to take. More than anything, at this point, you're probably thinking, this is the worst thing anyone has ever written. That's okay. What I want to do today is give you permission to write an imperfect book. I give you permission to write a bad book if you need to. I wrote 5 books that were terrible before I finally wrote one that was good. This is good. This is a good thing. Is more important for you to learn how to finish a bad book then how to endlessly spin your wheels perfecting a book that is never going to be perfect. Perfect is out of our reach. So, I give you permission to write a bad book. Finish this. Leave some scenes unfinished. Leave some dialogue clunky. It's okay. What you are doing right now is learning how to write the next book. That is going to be best if you turn off that internal editor and just crank through it and learn how it feels to finish a book. I believe in you.

 

[DongWon] Okay. So. As we're coming back from the break, we've been talking about how to make things bigger, and we've also been talking about how to make things more, deeper in terms of the emotional reaction. So, one of the ways that I love to do that, is to really start to draw out the personal connections. I kind of touched on this a little bit before, but going back to your zombie example, the way that the zombies always become so upsetting and so threatening is, one, the visual or them approaching en mass, but there's always that moment where the character you cared about gets bit. Now you have to deal with the awful consequences of the slowness of them starting to turn. Right? So, for me, I think that's such a perfect example of how to make the stakes almost unbearable by adding this emotional quotient that relies on the personal connections that you have between the characters. How do you guys build to that? What are the things that you can introduce that, like, start establishing those stakes so that you can pull that trigger when you need to.

[Mary Robinette] Well, one of the things that I will do, especially during NaNoWriMo, is that I will look at the things that I've already put on the table. So, in an ideal world, I am laying down groundwork and I thought ahead and… But, in reality, especially during nano, I'm often at the point where I'm like, "Okay. I have to make this work. What have I already established that they care about? And how can I threaten that thing?" So most of the work that you have to do is actually before you get to the point where you raise the stake. It's establishing some relationship, something that will make the person feel like it's a failure, so that when you get to this, you can threaten it. Like, one of the things that I think about sometimes is, like, someone's house being robbed is bad. Okay? But someone's house being robbed and their grandfather's pocket watch being taken, that's worse because it's a specific personal thing. But if it's… I always, like, "How can I make this worse for the person?" If they weren't supposed to have it out of the house, and they had taken it with the intention of getting it repaired, and then it's stolen… That's worse. Because now there's multiple layers of failure that are accompanying that. So, for me, it's not so much that I have to make it bigger or flashier, but, looking at the character's connections. One of the other tools that I'll use for that is their physical reaction to it. Like, just the… All of the… Like, thinking about all of the visceral reactions that happen to your body when you're in failure mode can really make a character like…

[DongWon] I love this idea of making stakes felt in the body. Because, I think when you can make your reader feel the things that your character is feeling in a physical way, that's, I think, like a huge success.

 

[Dan] Another way to do this is to approach it backwards. Rather than establish emotional stakes first and then introduce a conflict into it… I'm thinking, for example, of the movie RRR which establishes the conflict first. Two people on opposite sides of a revolution are trying to find each other, trying to capture each other. Then they meet in disguise, they don't know who the other one is, and they become best friends. So, suddenly you have raised the stakes, not by adding that conflict, but by adding the dramatic irony of, "Oh, no, inevitably they will find out who the other one is, and this beautiful friendship will be destroyed."

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really great point. That a lot of times when we're talking about stakes, that we think in terms of direct conflict, and that it doesn't have to be that, it can be a layer of tension that you give to the audience, where they are waiting for… Everyone is waiting, when they're watching that film, for the moment when the two of them realize who the other person is.

[Dan] There's multiple near misses. It's just excruciating every time.

[DongWon] This is where dramatic irony can be such a useful tool in raising stakes. Right? To return to Star Wars, I'm a big fan of the Clone Wars era of Star Wars. Which is so wonderful, because you know what's going to happen at the end of this, because we've seen the movies. We know things don't work out for these people, and that most of these people were interacting with over the course of the show are either going to be dead or gone in some way by the end of it. So it creates incredible stakes over and over again as we're in this sort of prequel mode of thinking, because we know where things are going to end up. So you can use really heavy foreshadowing in your story, as in this RRR case, and rely on your reader's knowledge of just how stories go sometimes, what genre you're in, what beats are coming in this story. Returning to the zombie example as well, we know someone's going to get bit. Right? There is no zombie movie that ends with the whole cast surviving. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] If it is, that's a very low stakes zombie movie. I'm not sure I want to watch it. Right? So you can rely on your audience's awareness of category, of story, and of the stakes that you're setting up to sort of increase that tension. You can be very playful with that as a creator. That can be really fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Did anyone else just feel the moment when someone out there said, "That's it. No one in my book is getting bitten!"

[Laughter]

[Erin] It happened in my brain. Out there? In here!

[DongWon] To use Erin's recommendation, you want to make sure you're going with more biterer.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That really works for any word, but…

[Dan] More bite-ier?

[Erin, Mary Robinette] Bite-ier.

 

[Dan] Well, it's… This is may be a good time to mention that you, as the author, you have created these characters, you love these characters. You have to be mean to them. I used to describe my job is that I was just mean to John Cleaver for a living. Because that's how all of these books are constructed. There has to be conflict, there has to be something horrible happening to the characters. Sure, maybe they recover from it, and that's great. Maybe they don't and someone else moves on and recovers. But you have to be willing to pull the rug out from under your characters and put them through the wringer.

[DongWon] Even if you're telling a cozy story or a romance or something like that. There are still… I mean, you might change the settings so it's not going to 11, you're going to 7…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But you're still… You're putting them in difficult situations. Right? Even if you're doing a coffee shop hey you kind of thing, somebody's going to get their order wrong or somebody's going to be… You're going to run out of milk. I don't know, whatever it is. But your stakes can change in terms of scale, but the technique is still the same. The core principle is still the same. Your story will need stakes of some sort. [Garbled]

[Dan] Well, it goes back to what you were saying about that emotional core. I would argue that in a romance, raising the stakes can often be to an 11. I'm going to be alone forever because the person I am in love with doesn't love me back. That's an 11.

[DongWon] Oh, absolutely.

[Dan] To that person.

[Erin] Yeah. Something to remember is that in our own lives, while… Not to speak for any of you, most of us are dealing with stakes that are those kind of stakes, the romance stakes, the coffee shop getting our order wrong stakes, and our lives often feel very dramatic to us.

[DongWon] Oh, dear me, it's always an 11.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? I think sometimes we feel like in fiction we have to, like, add all this outside force, and you can. But sometimes you can think about the ways in which your individual life feels like it has stakes, and go with those types of stakes within your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, one of the things that happens in your real life, the things that make it feel worse, is when you have more try-fail cycles. Like, I just want to make a cup of coffee, and… Or I just want to record a podcast, and first, they're using grinders outside, and then they're pounding on metal, and then there's a drill, and you're like, every time, it's like, "Really? Are we gonna finish this ever?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So sometimes you can make it worse for your character just by adding in a try-fail cycle. Making it harder for them to solve a problem that you've already set up.

[DongWon] I think, on that note, you are entering into week 3 of NaNoWriMo, and it's time for you to raise the stakes and get to that word count.

 

[Mary Robinette] And we have some homework for you. I know that this part of NaNoWriMo is often a little challenging, so our homework this time is just designed to help you move forward with your work in progress. Pick an aspect of craft that you feel weak on, and choose to focus on it during your next writing session. So instead of trying to think of everything all at once, just pick one thing. Just say, "You know what, I'm going to really nail dialogue this time." Or, "This time, it's all going to be about description." Will you have to go back and correct and balance some things later? Yeah. Probably. But it allows you to move forward and feel like you're making progress in making your craft better without having to worry about getting the scene exactly perfect.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/28/15-26-taking-the-chance-with-david-weber/

 

Key points: Taking the chance, taking risks, is the only way to be successful. "He who will not risk cannot win." To succeed, take the risk of failing. If you don't submit, you can't make a sale. Be a storyteller. At some point, it will turn into work. Keep going. When you can't get the platonic ideal book on the page, what do you do? Write the damn book. Learn from it. Characterization is critical. You have to be you. Write the story that interests you. Choose your verbs wisely. Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. Sentences are what you build books out of. Characters are what stories are about, sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Taking the Chance, with David Weber.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, David Weber. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us.

[David] Thank you for inviting me.

[Brandon] David Weber is one of the best-selling science fiction writers of all time, so we are super excited to have him. We are alive again at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause!]

 

[Brandon] So, this topic was one that you suggested, David. The idea of taking the chance, meaning taking risks with your writing. What made you want to do this topic?

[David] Well, it's not just taking risks with your writing once you're an established writer. I cannot tell you how many people I've encountered who I think could have been successful writers, except that they were afraid to take the chance of failing at something that they had dreamed about. I could have been published easily 10 years earlier than I was if I hadn't kept finding excuses to do other things instead. That means I've been publishing for 30 years and I've lost a third of the time that I could have been published at this point. I mentioned in the preshow when I was talking to our hosts that there's a quote from John Paul Jones which has become increasingly important to me over the years, and it has nothing to do with not giving up the ship. But Jones said that, "It seems to be a law inflexible unto itself that he who will not risk cannot win." So if you don't take the risk of failing as a writer, you can never succeed as a writer. So you're sitting there, and you have this dream that says I could be a writer. Perhaps you could. But if you keep saying I could be a writer long enough, one day you wake up and it's turned into I could have been a writer, but the opportunity is gone now. Okay? So if you want to write, you have got to take the chance of being rejected, and possibly being rejected over and over again, until you find the right first reader, the right publisher that says, "Oh. I could do this." Okay? You have to remember while you're doing this, you control, or writers in general control a resource that publishers have to have. Publishers exist to publish. That means they need things to publish. Which means that they are constantly on the lookout for things to publish. Yes, they get a lot of dreck and there's… the first readers pile is the slush pile, and people read it and they go, "Oh, my God." I actually know of one book that was submitted on brown paper written in purple crayon. Okay? You don't get read when you do that kind of submission. But if you don't submit, you cannot possibly make a sale. I cannot emphasize… Over emphasize how important it is to be willing to do that. The other thing that I think you need to bear in mind is you can learn to write better with editorial support and with the practice. You can learn to write better. But what you have to be to make it work in this business is a storyteller. You have to have that bug. You can increase the skill with which you exercise that need to be a storyteller. But that's a critical element. If you don't feel that inside, if you don't feel the story that needs… That's growing that needs to come out, then you don't need to try and be an author. Because you're going to be fighting your own nature the entire time that you're trying to write a story. Unless that is what it is your nature to be. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, storytellers have to tell stories. That's certainly true in my case.

 

[Brandon] Howard, you had something you wanted to say?

[Howard] Yeah. I was just going to… I like the John Paul Jones quote. We've had the opportunity to visit NASA a couple of times. They have that famous slogan, failure is not an option. Because there are times at which, boy, you just… You can't allow yourself to fail. I created a maxim within my own universe, which is "Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."

[David] Yeah.

[Howard] The idea there… I mean, that doesn't get you past the John Paul Jones quote, which is that you have to take that chance in the first place. But I am always reminding myself that I am going to fail. It's just gonna happen. All I get to choose is whether or not I learn from it and whether I let myself quit.

[David] Well, NASA's failure is not an option stands on the shoulders of every single thing they did that failed as they were doing the engineering, when they were developing…

[Howard] They blew up so many rockets.

[Laughter]

[David] Absolutely. Okay? Failure is not an option means that ultimately we must succeed. It doesn't mean that we won't have the occasional catastrophe along the way. That we won't have Columbia. That we won't have…

[Dan] But, to your point about the whole premise of this episode, if NASA had never done anything that could have failed, they never would have gotten into orbit, they never would have gotten on the moon.

[David] Exactly.

[Dan] They had to be willing to take those risks and screw up horribly in order to achieve what they eventually have achieved.

 

[David] That's absolutely true. It's… Okay. No task worth doing springs fully blown and fully performed from the brow of Zeus. Okay? You have to go out there and make it work. All right? Now, most of the successful writers that I know would write whether anyone was buying their work or not. We have to do it. That's part of that storytelling bug that I was talking about. Okay? Whether we're writing for our own entertainment, our family's entertainment, or just because, my God, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, I gotta do some more writing, we write. If you don't have that kind of… Robert Asprin once said, and Robert and I did not necessarily see together on all things…

[Laughter]

[David] But he said, "Successful authors are like rats. If we don't wear our fingers down on the keyboard every day, our fangs grow through our brains and kill us.

[Laughter]

[David] Okay? It's still a valid metaphor, even though I use voice recognition software when I write now. But it's true. If you… I have this need to be crafting stories. Okay? Now, for the last year or so, I haven't been, and that's because I face planted into a cement floor in Atlanta the day before Dragon Con and gave myself a concussion, broke my nose into places, stitches inside my mouth, the whole 9 yards. It has taken me effectively a year to recover from the concussion status to where I am once again really writing. Okay? It's been a real trial for me and for people who were expecting books from me and everything else, but sometimes, the need to tell stories is sort of temporarily stymied by the fact that, you know what, my brain's not working.

[Howard] One of the first things that I learned about… I'm a web cartoonist, and one of the first things I learned in this regard was when I still had a day job, early 2000's, we would take… I was in the software industry. We'd take two weeks off around Christmas, because kind of the whole industry wound down. For that two weeks, I told myself my Christmas present to me is that I'm going to pretend I'm a cartoonist full-time. I'm just going to do this. I would tell my plan to people. They're like, "You're going to pretend to have a job over Christmas?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, one, you're a broken human, and, two, what does your family think?" What I found is those are some of my fondest memories of this. Yeah. Storyteller gotta stug… Gotta story tell."

 

[David] There comes a time, in a given project or whatever, where it turns into work. Where you have to drive yourself to it. You have to do that. I have, in every book, I have what I call the chapter. That's the point at which I say, "This entire book is dreck. What was I thinking? Oh, my God, I can't get this to come together." The only thing that I can do is just keep grinding it out and saying, "Boy, this is sucky." Okay, that kind of thing? Then, when I get to the final edit, I can't identify the chapter.

[Howard] I was going to say, you've refined your process to the point that only happens for one chapter doing a project?

[Laughter]

[David] No, that's… Pretty much, yeah. You know. It's this kind of thing.

[Howard] Winning.

[David] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and… Let's stop for a book of the week, then we'll get back to it.

[David] Okay.

[Brandon] You have our book, or books of the week, this week.

[David] I have two. One is The Gordian Protocol, which came out in May, with Jacob Holo. Who is a BMW engineer in an alternate universe. I think that our backgrounds, the synergy was really, really good. He's got three or four self published novels out. This will be his first traditionally published novel. Is his first traditionally published novel. This was not one of the two I was thinking about, but he has just handed me the draft of the Valkyrie Protocol, which is the sequel. It's pretty much ready to go. We have to wait for him to get a hiatus in that real-life job to do a little tweaking that I pointed out to him. The other book that I've just handed in is the sequel to Out Of the Dark, which, yes, is the one with vampires in it. This one is rather cleverly titled Into the Light. I did it with Chris Kennedy, of the Four Horsemen universe and whatnot. He was my co-author on it. I'm really pleased with the way that it worked out. The vampires are a little flamboozled when they begin finding out some things about their own past and their own existence that neither they nor the earlier writers who didn't like the vampires didn't know. Okay? For… I won't go any deeper into it than that. But suffice it to say, that Vlad Tepes was a tiny bit mistaken about exactly how and what he became when he became it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

 

[Brandon] This topic's very interesting to me, because I work with a lot of aspiring writers. I teach at the University, and of course the podcast, and things like this. Looking back at myself when I was first making the choice to start writing, one of the things that I think holds back new writers, and I've kind of found some language that I can describe this more recently, is that, for me, there was this beautiful book I imagine somewhere out in the aether, right? It was like the Platonic ideal of a book. As, having read for many years, and sitting down to write the first time, it was like I knew this book was out there, but then my crude fingers could not get that book on the page. It was really frustrating to me. Because it felt like… It wasn't fear that I think stopped me, it was this sense that I was taking something beautiful and I was making it something flawed and terrible, because my skill wasn't good enough. I've found multiple other aspiring writers that kind of have this same attitude that… Less fear, more like, I guess I must not have done enough worldbuilding or I must not have thought it through enough, because this beautiful story, I just can't make it come out on the page.

[David] Well, that's…

[Brandon] So, I guess my question to you is strategies for writers who are having trouble making that transition, taking that chance, giving themselves permission to fail. What are some strategies that people could use to do that?

[David] Write the damn book.

[Laughter]

[David] And when you're done, if it's not what you thought you were going to come up with, file it under this was a learning experience, these are the things that I can see that I did wrong. Do those right in the next book. I have an entire file cabinet at home that has probably 300 short stories in it, that were written solely because they were things that I wanted to play with as a writer. How was I going to describe this? How was I going to handle this bit of characterization? You… Basically, this is one of the crafts that the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. There's not a credential program somewhere that is going to say, "Okay. Now you have a diploma. You'll go out there and be a successful writer." Okay? There are all kinds of courses that you can take and training that you can seek that will help you, give you tools that you might not have otherwise. But there's nobody out there who can teach you how to be a writer. Anybody who says we will teach you how to be a writer is taking your money. Okay? Because what they can do is they can teach you how they are a writer. They can teach you how these three guys over here are writers. They can't teach you how you're a writer. Okay? Characterization. Characterization is a critical component of any story you're going to tell. How do you build a character? Okay? One of the things that I do when I'm doing writing workshops is I rollup a character from one of the role-playing game series. I tell my students, I say, "Okay, this is the character that you have. This is the age, this is the gender, everything else. Go home, and between now and the next session, write me an explanation for why this character exists with these skills, these abilities, these disabilities." They frequently turn it into what is actually a very good short story. Okay? In getting out who this character is. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to build on your own. I can give you that assignment, and tell you to go home and do it. But I can't say to you, the first way that you should do it is by doing thus and so, because the best that you could learn from that is how I do it. What makes a writer succeed is that writer's voice. You can take exactly the same story, the exact same plot, even the exact same characters by name. Okay? And have two different writers do the story. You have two totally different stories. Okay?

[Brandon] Absolutely.

 

[David] One of them is going to be the way that you tell the story, and one of them is going to be the way that somebody else tells the story. What makes you a successful writer is your voice finding its audience. You cannot do that trying to be someone else. You have to be you.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Finding that voice of your own is critical and it is difficult. I like to think about this in terms of Ender's Game. Because they had the kids in the Battle School, and they would fight against each other. Then there's this really critical scene towards the end of it, where Bean stands up in the lunch room and says, "Guys. We are doing the same strategies over and over and over. We will never learn anything new until we give ourselves the freedom to fail." That's when they kind of throw out the whole competition system and they say, "Okay. We're going to try this, and it probably will be awful, but we'll learn something from it.

[David] Yeah.

[Dan] So I imagine someone out there listening to this podcast thinking, lack of risk-taking is not my problem, I've tried everything I can think of. It's… I'm just not selling anything. Maybe what you need to do is something ridiculous. Maybe you need to change genre. Maybe you need to try something new. Maybe you need to put that big golden book that Brandon was talking about, that idealized thing that you have in mind, put that on a shelf and write something different.

[David] Okay. Let me tell you one of the most critical things that you should bear in mind as a writer. Write the story that interests you. They say, write what you know. Well, I don't know anybody who's been a starship captain. Okay? I'm sorry, there just aren't too many of them around for me to go interview, that kind of thing. But if there's a type of story that is especially suited to you, that you enjoy reading, etc. Point number one, you're not unique. That means there are other people who enjoy reading that same sort of story. It may not be what's currently hot. But publishers don't necessarily look for what's currently hot. They look for what they expect to be durable. Some publishers do. They want to push you into writing whatever is selling right now. Avoid them. Okay? I'm sorry. But you should. Okay? Now, if they say, "We'll pay you a stack of money to write it," then you can say to yourself, "Okay. They'll pay me a stack of money. I'll get some practice writing, and then I'll be able to go do what I want to do." But, point number one, if you like it, other people will like it. Point number two is if you like it, you will write it better than something you are writing that you feel that you have to write in order to be hot, in order to sell your work. Okay? Point number three is publishers are constantly looking for things to publish. Now, some publishers, for whatever combination of reasons, have blinders on or at least blinkers. Okay? Maybe, it's like, I don't agree with the political philosophy in that book. There's all kinds of idiosyncratic factors that can come into play. But the bottom line is publishers need stuff to publish. Keith Laumer once said that there's not the great unsold novel. There's only the great unwritten novel. Because if you write it, and it is good and you submit it long enough, you will sell it because publishers are looking for things to publish. The editor who discovered Thomas Wolfe… Thomas Wolfe had been rejected about eight or nine dozen times. Okay? Then this guy found… Discovered Thomas Wolfe and made his entire career out of the fact that he was the guy who discovered Thomas Wolfe. He was asked by another editor at one point. The guy said, "I read the first quarter of a million words, and it sucked. Where did you realize…?" He said, "About word 300,000."

[Hmm, hmm, hmm.]

[David] Okay? What I'm saying to you is that eventually, if what you have done is publishable, it will find a buyer. Sometimes, even if what you've done isn't punishable… Publishable. Punishable? There was…

[Laughter]

[David] I've read some horrible books before. But even if what you've written in its current form isn't publishable, sometimes you'll get that little comment back that will tell you why it wasn't. More often than not, you'll get a form letter that says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't really meet our needs at this moment. Etc., etc." But sometimes you'll get that little flicker of a response, and you go, "Oh!" Now, I've been doing this… I've supported myself as a writer since I was 17. I'm 67 this year. So I've been writing… I've been earning my living pushing words around for 50 years. Okay? I've been a published novelist for… Well, we sold the first… I sold the first book in April 1989. So this is the 30th year since I sold the first book. In the course of that time, I like to think I've learned a few things. Okay? There are some very simple things that an author… Okay. For example. Any aspiring writer should realize that the most important word in any sentence is the verb. Choose your verbs wisely. Don't say, "He came quickly to his feet." Say, "He leapt to his feet. He jerked to his feet. He jerked upright." Okay? Never use an -ing verb when you can avoid it, unless you want the voice of what you're writing to be passive. All right? Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. If there's dialogue in a paragraph, start the paragraph with the dialogue and arrange the internal mechanics to make that work. Okay? Don't worry about choppy paragraphs. Worry about where you want to direct the reader's eye. You're setting the cadence, you're creating the rhythm. Maybe you need short choppy sentences and paragraphs at this point. Maybe you need one line paragraphs for emphasis. Okay? Maybe the one line paragraph that you need is, "In the world blew up." Okay? Because you're in the middle of a combat situation, there's a missile incoming, the character you're writing about doesn't know it. There's combat chatter, they're saying, "We're under fire," the character's turning around. Then the world blew up. As a separate paragraph. So think about those sorts of things when you're writing. That's not a question of my telling you to write in my voice. Because these are things that any writer can profit from, in the way that they construct and craft sentences, and sentences are what you build books out of.

[Brandon] We could probably sit here for another hour and listen to this.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because these are excellent points. But we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon. Thank you guys.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Mr. Weber for coming on the podcast.

 

[Brandon] Do you have a writing prompt you can give to our listeners?

[David] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[David] Something to do. I would say, go home and create a character. Okay? Not one that you set out to build because this is going to go in your story. But give yourself the assignment of taking a character that you didn't create because you rolled it up or whatever. Then, build in your worldbuilding bible, in your tech bible, whatever, build why that character is who that character is. Because stories are about characters. If the character is not interesting to the reader, the story will go nowhere. If the character is not interesting to you, and understood by you, you will not be able to communicate it to the reader. Your characters will still, if you do this long enough, the characters will evolve in the storytelling, and they should. So, as the life experience of that character is shared with your readers in multiple books, you have to understand how that character changes and incorporate it. Characters are what stories are about. Sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right, and the story will usually succeed. A weak story that is well told will succeed, where a strong story that is weakly told fails.

[Brandon] Awesome. I don't know that we could put it better than that. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.