Month: July 2023

One of the pleasures and challenges concerning writing my novel Song to the Siren was that the book took place over several years. The main character, cult rock figure, Reed Sinclair, started out as a gifted eight-year-old. The book then took him through his teenage years, his young adult years, and well into adulthood.

The challenge was to make Reed a charismatic but realistically-written gifted child, then a rebellious teenager who may or may not have had mental problems, then a young adult musician, and then the adult who became a legend in rock-snob circles for not only his music, but his wild behavior. Reed had to remain Reed throughout the whole book, yet he had to mature with age.

Now, the main problem with such an undertaking is keeping the character not only in character, but also keeping the character not just recognizable, but also likeable.

Too often in such undertakings, I see authors who make their characters quite compelling when the characters are younger, but totally depressing messes as adults.

For instance, take the novel Brideshead Revisited. One of the characters, Cordelia Flyte, was a serious, religious child, but one who was quite likeable because of her childlike faith. As Cordelia aged, she was the same person without a bit more maturity or humor, and she was no longer likeable. In fact, the book showed her to be, ultimately, a tragic character. The same thing happened to every character in the book. Everyone was so likeable at first, even though they were flawed beyond belief. By the time the book was done, I hated everyone in it. Is life really so fatalistically tragic that not a single character had a ray of hope in them? Apparently not. The book became a slog for me to read. But apparently, it became a classic because every ray of hope was extinguished?

I ended up feeling pretty depressed by the end of the book, because people I’d grown to like turned into people I couldn’t stand.

So, when I was writing Reed Sinclair, I said, “Keep him likeable. Keep a little bit of hope alive, even though there’s tragedy. Don’t depress the reader. Depressing them will make them slog through the book instead of turning the pages eagerly.”

How did I keep hope alive? Simple. Reed had one big, redeeming quality, even when his career hit the skids and he started having substance abuse problems. He had the capacity to love others, especially his friends, and especially the young woman he’d loved since he was a child.

Even in tragedies, a ray of light shows the characters’ humanity. Hell, in the last act of Hamlet, even Hamlet had time to show some pluck, humor, and cleverness.

Song to the Siren was a modern-age bildungsroman, which is just a fancy term for, to quote Wikipedia:

a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung (“education”, alternatively “forming”) and Roman (“novel”).

I like that: character change is important, whether it’s a period of years or months. All characters change over time. But the audience has to keep liking the character over time. If a character in a series of novels becomes a nothing but a bitter jerk without hope, at a certain point, the character loses the audience.

It’s like that with all human relationships. We’ve all had that friend that we liked a lot when we were younger, but how they ended up as adults was so depressing, we left that person behind, because we had no way to relate to them. 

Don’t let your character be that friend the audience has to leave behind because the friend painted themselves into a corner and has no capacity for change or growth or making things better for themselves.

But it’s also important that the character does change and grow up. Without change, the character can become boring.

That’s not always true. Sherlock Holmes didn’t change, except he kicked cocaine and his roommate, Dr. Watson, got married and left 221B Baker Street. Oh, and Holmes “died,” but that didn’t last long, because the audience wouldn’t stand for it. But Holmes is an icon more than a human being, so let’s say he’s an exception to the rule.

I remember reading a detective series where I liked the detective a lot. Apparently, the author did too, as she refused to let him change and grow. Six novels in, I realized that I could come back to the series, and nothing would change except who was murdered. When I realized that, I stopped reading the otherwise-enjoyable series.

Years later, I picked up the most recent volume of the series. I was right– nothing had changed at all. I laughed, then put the book back on the shelf, because every book was still the same: the same characters doing the same things, telling the same jokes, trotting out the same trite catchphrases, and so on.

They were stuck in time, while I had moved forward, and away from those books.

Evolve your characters over time, but never forget to add the qualities that make them likeable.

A lot of writerly advice tells you, “Just write! It doesn’t matter if you have a good idea, just write!”

Personally, I think this is bad advice.

In my opinion, writing without a good idea is like that joke about the kid who went to the horse stalls and started shoveling horse shit. When someone asked the kid why, the kid said, “With all this shit in here, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere.”

You have to have the pony first, or else all the shit you’re shoveling is sweaty, smelly effort for no purpose.

Now, when you’re first starting out as a writer, shit-shoveling builds your writerly muscles. You gain experience, and as I always say, “Only experience makes a writer a writer.” But here’s the deal. That shit you’re shoveling is practice, not art. The art of professional writing takes time, patience, and a dedication to honing your skills.

I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, but in America, there is a strange idea that hard work—nothing more, necessarily, just hard work all by itself, entitles you to success. People write their first novel, and put in the work. They’ve written their eighty-or-so-thousand words. So, they expect success.

Not so fast. Just because you worked hard on something doesn’t mean it’s any good. Yeah, you wrote a rough draft, but where’s the editing and the proofreading? Even if you do those things, too, it doesn’t mean that you’re ready to be a professional author.

You need a product that people like.

The first step to writing a work that people like is a good, inspired idea.

It amazes me how many professional writers deride the concept of inspiration. Just look up “Waiting for Inspiration to Strike” on Google and you’ll find article after article about going ahead anyway, soldiering through, even if you only have a crappy idea, or no idea at all.

I think writers think that if you’re sitting around “waiting for the gift of sound and vision,” to quote David Bowie, you’re not really writing. They must think that novice writers are just sitting around all day, drinking coffee in a coffee shop, procrastinating, pretending to be writers, never accomplishing anything, and never getting a word down on paper. Yeah, I admit, this does happen to some people. But the answer isn’t to make the writerly life into an assembly line of words, day after day, typing yet another 1000 words, even if those words are uninspired crap.

Remember the old saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” 

A lot of modern writers tell you that writing is one hundred percent perspiration.

No wonder so many books are boring, uninspired affairs.

You need a good idea. That’s the foundation of your novel. Yes, it’ll take months of dedicated effort to make that idea into a reality, but you need that germ of inspiration if you’re going to do something worth publishing.

So, take the time to find that good idea. And when it finally comes to you, work like a mofo to make it a reality. Otherwise, it’s all shit-shoveling and no pony.

My husband and I have a saying that comes from a Mitch Hedberg comedy routine: Don’t force the trip.

Mitch Hedberg said:

I was in Ireland. I got to drink absinthe in Ireland. Absinthe is a liquor that they outlaw. It’s supposed to make you trip hallucinogenic-ally. So, I got excited, because I like to hallucinate. So, I started drinking lots of shots of it. But really, it’s just a liquor, so really, I was just getting f****d up. I wasn’t even remotely tripping. After 10 shots, I fell to the ground. I was trying to force the trip. “Why is the floor as low as I can go?” I was just faking it, you know.

He wanted inspiration. Instead, he just got f****d up.

I’ve learned, over time, that when I’m trying to find inspiration, I’ve sometimes tried selling my husband on an iffy story idea. He just smiles and blinks, as opposed to getting excited about the idea. When that happens, I say, “I’m forcing the trip, aren’t I?” He just nods at me. Whenever it’s obvious to both of us that I’m just faking it, I dump the idea and wait for the “trip” to happen. 

When the right idea comes along, I get excited, and I push myself to my utmost to write the rough draft, sometimes writing three thousand words a day, because the idea is pushing me to make it a reality. It feels good, like a legal high. And when I get that excitement in my brain, I know that I’ve found a good idea. The writing flows, and when I’m done with it, I know I’ve written something inspired.

When you’re lucky enough to have one of those ideas, you feel like you’ve got the world’s greatest job. Nothing is more joyful, more honest, more exhilarating than making that idea come to life. 

So, yeah, waiting on that great idea does take time, and it requires faith, but it feels a lot better than sweating my ass off in a stable, looking for a pony, but only ending up shoveling shit and saying “Look at how hard I’m working as a writer.”

I talked in an interview once about how to deal with writer’s block… and the interviewer seemed shocked by my advice.

Most writers, when they talk about dealing with writer’s block, tell you to sit at your computer and stare at the screen until an idea comes to you.

To me, that’s a not a good idea because:

1/ Staring at the computer screen makes a person feel panicked. That white screen feels like a reproach, as if it’s saying, “You’re no writer. If you were, you’d be typing instead of staring at the screen.”

2/ In a state of panic, you grab the first idea that comes into your head, even if it’s not a great idea. You grab it because it’s better than staring at the screen. That bad idea might tank a good story.

3/ Then, the next time you have writer’s block, you feel even more panicked, which causes more writer’s block.

4/ During all of this, your inner critic is yelling and screaming at you that you’re not really a good writer, that you’re just a hopeless dreamer, and so on. Inner critics can be your worst enemy, so don’t let the inner critic live rent-free in your head.

So, my advice is to stop looking at the computer screen, save your file, and go do mindless housework.

When you do a basic task such as unloading the dishwasher, you’re calming yourself down, which gives the subconscious mind a chance to mull over the scene you’re stuck on.

Make sure that the task is mindless, though. If you do your taxes, for instance, you are focusing on mental work instead of letting your subconscious mind do its work. Don’t listen to music, unless it’s something without words such as classical music. If you listen to music with words, then the song’ll get into your head, and instead of an idea, your brain gets stuck singing “Hooked on a Feeling” or whatever all day.

When you’re doing mindless housework—which after all has to be done at some point—you’re telling your inner critic, “I am accomplishing something, even if it isn’t writing, so lay off.”

It’s like when people study for a test. At a certain point, they can’t look at the book or notes any longer, so they do something else. Doing something else refreshes the brain. Don’t do something like playing a video game, because your inner critic will say that you’re just procrastinating. Also, video games require a lot of focus and concentration.

Doing housework doesn’t require that kind of focus and concentration. As a side note, don’t do anything that requires operating heavy machinery or a hammer or a saw or anything else you could accidentally injure yourself with. When your mind is working on a story, your attention is half on the task, half on the story—and you don’t want to end up in the ER because you picked the wrong task.

If that doesn’t work, take a walk or have a nice lie-down. I’m a big believer in “a change is as good as a rest.”

If none of these things work, express your frustration to someone who cares about you. Articulating your problem out loud can sometimes be the key to solving your problem.

Writer’s block happens to all of us, so like the Guide in The Hitchhiker’s Guide says: Don’t panic.

In a previous post, I decried how many modern novels start with an in media res start to things—that is, they start the story already mid-plot and expect the audience to catch up, which is not just confusing to the reader, but may also alienate the reader, because it means they’ll have no idea who the action is happening to.

But literary agents, being busy people, only want to see the first chapter of your novel. So, people work to make their first chapter the mother of all first chapters, because they simply must capture the agent’s attention.

It’s gotten to the point where, if you don’t have a start to a novel that’s what I call a Crash Boom Bam (CBB) first chapter, agents may turn down your manuscript. 

Now, you may ask, what’s so bad about a CBB first chapter? Don’t they draw the reader in?

While I get your point, CBB chapters are—among other problems—ruining slow-burn suspense novels. See, I love finding authors who know how to do a slow burn well, especially those who write in the horror or suspense genres. When you have a CBB first chapter, though, you destroy that slow-burn gradual building-up of suspense.

I’ll give you two examples of the beginnings of novels that I love, but modern agents would turn down flat.

The first novel is called Bedelia, by Vera Caspary, also the author of Laura, which was later turned into the classiest film noir ever. In Bedelia, the whole first chapter is a staid affair, talking about an ideal marriage between Charlie and Bedelia. Charlie considers himself to be “the luckiest man in the world.” And from all indications in the first chapter, he well might be.

Then, at the beginning of the second chapter, all hell starts breaking loose. Every page after that is a real nail-biter. I was hooked like a fish on a, uh, hook.

But if Vera Caspary had sent in that first chapter to a modern agent, without being able to send in the second chapter, her book never would’ve been published, because every agent in the world would say: “That’s boring. Why aren’t you giving me action?”

Well, the reason why there’s no action in the first chapter is to lull the reader into a quiet complacency and a false sense of security. But when the second chapter starts reeling the fish in, it’s too late for the fish to struggle. If the book started out with CBB instead, then some people might have said, “Nah, I’m not into this.” Luring the reader requires time and patience, but it works at least as well—maybe even better than—the CBB first chapter.

My second example is a book I read on a whim during the initial pandemic lockdown. I’d seen the movie the book was adapted from, and it wasn’t quite my sort of thing. But once the pandemic started, I was grabbing for any book that looked interesting.

Anyway, the book started out in a cozy little way. A young actor and his wife had just signed a contract to rent an apartment that they weren’t exactly keen on. But then, the apartment that they wanted had a vacancy, so the husband managed to wriggle out of the contract, and the couple rented the first apartment. They met their neighbors, who seemed very friendly. Heck, the apartment and the neighbors seemed so nice that anyone would jump at a chance to live there.

Sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it?

Well, wonder if I told you that the wife’s name was Rosemary Woods and that she and her husband wanted to have a baby? Yeah, that’s right: I just described the start of Rosemary’s Baby.

The book deliberately takes its time warming up. It is a slow burn. But three or four chapters in, I couldn’t put the book down. It’d hooked me because the author turned the heat up slowly, as opposed to quickly.

I’ve read horror novels that turned up the heat faster, and I didn’t finish a lot of them, because I wasn’t lured into the book—I wasn’t given breadcrumbs to follow. Instead, I was given CBB, and it was a turn-off for me.

Yet if Ira Levin had just turned in the first chapter of Rosemary’s Baby, the world would never know that Rosemary’s baby would have his father’s eyes.

As someone who’s written a few slow burn novels, it’s frustrating that agents need instant gratification first chapters. They seem to think that a slow burn first chapter means that you don’t know how to write a chapter that will “draw the reader in.” Unlike readers, who are understanding (as long as the writer knows how to write), agents seem to lack that kind of forbearance. And—I get why! Agents are busy! But the world needs slow burn novels, and we’re not getting enough of them, because writers can’t write them and write for a busy agent, too.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s a problem, as well as a sad state of affairs.