Getting Started With A Story

There are two general ways I attack a story idea.  I'm not going to get into where stories come from, because they don't come from anywhere, you just stumble across them, like finding shark's teeth on a beach.  But once the idea is known to exist, here's what happens.

 At first, I write whatever pops into my head.  A few punchy opening pages, something that suggests the tone or voice of the story, establishes the scene, and gives me an interesting event to work with. 

Then I back up, take stock of what I've written, and decide if I like it enough to work out the story properly.

That's almost universal for me.  I have to charge up on the thing at least once.  I might do this sort of blue-sky beginning on a story idea four or five times, looking for the right tone, that arresting detail.  If it doesn't eventually click, I put the story away.  If it clicks, I start writing in earnest.

Work begins in one of two opposing ways, of which I endorse only the former: writing an outline, or not writing an outline.

The latter first: sometimes, I think I know what I'm going to write, all the way through, and it works out fine.  No outline necessary because I have a good sense of the terrain.  This is a reckless and unreliable way to write.  I almost wish it didn't work.  But when the story is coming out in bucketfuls, who am I to argue with my own methods?  Suffice it to say the outline is critical -- but not vital.  (Nor is it ever sacred.)
I wrote my second novel in this manner.  That story just tumbled onto the page.  The entire book required one month and one day to write -- because I took Christmas Day off.  Now it's with my publisher, and they're deciding whether to buy it.

How sure was I that the material existed for an entire book?  Very sure, but the feeling was based on extremely limited evidence.  A vague idea of the story, plus a few scenes, had occurred to me out of nowhere -- appearing almost instantaneously in my mind.  I wrote what was probably a one-page synopsis so I wouldn't forget any of the important story beats, then commenced to type.

My schedule went like this: I wrote furiously each day for 10 or 12 hours, then spent half an hour noting what I thought I'd do the following day.  In the morning, I'd start fleshing these notes out -- as often as not, doing something different from what I intended.  I repeated this until I had the story done.

Lucky me.  That's no way to write novels, in my opinion.  I'm simply not clever enough to yank everything out of the air, in normal circumstances.  I need to reflect on different ways of reaching the destination, organizing together the disparate ideas that have aggregated into the idea.  There are many false starts.  That's why I usually outline.  That white heat of writing the first few pages is well and good, but then it's time to examine the thing and figure out, as much as possible, what will happen.

My outlines take several forms.  I used to pin up 3x5 cards in a row, each one containing a scene, with further cards cascading below those for scene details, scraps of dialogue, and so forth.  I've also written screenplays (as with my first novel) that wanted to become something longer and more detailed than a script could sustain.  So the screenplay would become the outline, with further material jotted in the margins and written out in detailed notes.  Finally, as I'm doing now, I will sometimes write a detailed treatment of the story in rambling form, full of notes and observations, then tighten that up into a few pages I can keep at my elbow while expanding it (the story, not my elbow).

I believe outlines are important because it is possible to tell a great story badly, or a bad story well, and in either case you're cheating yourself and the reader.  A wonderful idea may be enough to keep the reader turning pages until the end, but it may also fail to deliver as much as it promises.  That's a disappointing waste of a good idea.  I won't mention any specific examples because I might run into Dan Brown socially, some day.  But you know what I mean.  On the other hand, sometimes a book is chock-full of brilliant writing, wonderful scenes, and exciting ideas, yet it doesn't make a lick of sense from one end to the other, and ends up telling a different story from the one the author set out to relate.  I hope to meet Stephen King someday, too.

So when in doubt -- and I am always doubtful when I begin -- go ahead and attack the story, just to see if it's what you want to spend the next months or years of your life working on.  But don't go too far.  Stop when you find yourself having to think about what happens next.

Then back up, take notes, chew on a lot of pens, stare into space.  Work out what you think the story is about, and what happens, and to whom you think it happens.  These elements, in combination, act as a scaffolding on which the tale can be erected.  The level of detail you require for the outline depends on how much specific material is required to deliver the narrative to the reader.  A detective novel full of clues, tricks, and reveals will need a detailed outline, as it must end in a perfectly conclusive way.  An anecdotal story about the end of a long-term relationship can be more formless, with a variety of acceptable outcomes.  You'll know on an instinctual level when the outline is ready to expand.

But if the story is pounding at the door, yelling full-throated to get written, and such niceties as outlines must be dispensed with -- go ahead and write it.  It doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you get it written.

Day Jobs

One of the hardest parts of writing is finding the time and headspace required to do so.  

 I have a day job.  It's one of those careers a lot of people would kill for -- instead of flipping burgers or sorting mail, I get to design theme parks, museum exhibits, resorts, urban centers, and attractions of all kinds.  All over the world.  This can be a lot of fun, and my passport sure looks fancy with all the strange visas and stamps in it.  But it's a crappy kind of job if you want to write an 800 page novel. 

There's no possibility of writing useful copy during business trips.  The work is unpredictable -- three months of total inactivity can be followed by three months of chaotic, 18-hour-a-day deadline crunches.  I often don't know what I'll be doing in the morning when I crawl away from my desk at night.

This is terrible for writing.

You want a nice, predictable job, even a little bit boring, if you're a writer.  Enough room to daydream and still get the work done, and when you go home, all that creative fizz is ready to escape onto the page.  Having a crazy, creative job like mine means I can't establish regular writing hours, which is vital to a steady output -- the muse walks in, and if she sees you're not at your keyboard, she walks out again.

Another consideration is the creative "muscle."  The same mental structures get worked out when writing, drawing, making music, or any other creative endeavor, just as athletes use the same muscles to perform different feats of physical strength.  So if I spend all day painting a birds' eye view of a theme park, for example, I wear out my creative energies.  By the time I'm recovered and ready to write in the evening, it may be quite late -- so I'll write less, or less well, or maybe I'll be too tired to write at all.

Having said all that, there's a good reason most Americans don't write books while they're unemployed.  Nothing -- I mean nothing -- saps the creative energies faster than unemployment.  So you need a job.  Not a poverty-level job, if you can help it, but take what you can get (in this economy, settle for anything, of course). 
J. K. Rowling may have churned out Harry Potter while she was on the dole, but in the UK, the attitude towards joblessness is considerably less punitive.  The powers-that-be over there acknowledge that a permanent state of less-than-full employment requires a large segment of the population be unemployed, and so it's not stigmatized the way it is here.  American culture is extremely disapproving of unemployment, and regards it as a personal failing, no matter what the economy is like; if you want to write a book while in that situation, good luck. 

Los Angeles is crammed with unemployed writers, sitting around coffee shops 14 hours a day with their notebook computers and a cold, sour cup of Americano at their elbows, trying to remember what made them think they could finish a screenplay.  They're one of those real-life clichés.  I have nothing but sympathy for these folks. When you try to write without an income, it's like jumping into the air and hoping to fly.  You'll make it 4 feet.

So I recommend a day job less fascinating than mine.  Don't go in for creative work and expect to be able to pull out a second shift of creative results in the evenings (or mornings, or lunch breaks).  It can be done, but it's exhausting.  Beyond that, go for something predictable and stable -- government work, for example.  So it's meaningless drudgery, so what?  At least it's not demanding.  But don't try to write unemployed.  It's heartbreak.  Better to wash dishes at a crappy restaurant or shingle roofs, than not to have work. 

Writing requires time and mental energy.  If your writing pays for itself, well done; you now have 100% of your time and mental energy reserved for writing.  If it doesn't, find something to do.  It doesn't even have to pay.  Volunteer somewhere with interesting characters.  But until this country starts respecting the arts like they were real jobs, the stigma of "creative idleness" will continue to sap a writer's energy even more than a job bagging groceries.  It's just one of those strange logical inversions we have to live with.

And whatever you do, for God's sake, don't design theme parks.

A Great Cure For Writer's Block

I've found that having more than one project going at a time is the best way to avoid writer's block. 

Not everyone works that way, of course.  I often do too many things at once.  But the second project can be anything -- a diary, blog, or the lyrics to a pop song.  The idea is to keep writing, because when you stop, that's when the trouble begins.

I think of writer's block as a kind of clog in the mind.  Ideas are flowing, the words make sense, and suddenly the thing just stops right up.  If you only have one project, there's nowhere for that back pressure to go, and it gets worse and worse.  If you have a second project, your "flow" has somewhere to run.  The pressure doesn't build up.

An important caveat: I've never found myself just completely blocked.  I imagine some people get so packed up they can't write anything at all.  It is fortunate not to be so inclined, but I think the reason for it is training.  By slowly developing the ability to do multiple stories at once, I've created more channels for the creativity to run down, if that analogy makes sense.

So for me, at least, writer's block does occur, but only on one project at a time.  So by having more than one project, I can reduce the chances the block will become total.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau

I've read The Island of Dr. Moreau something like ten times.  It inspired me as a young feller to imitate that gruesome, scar-puckered, visceral style of writing -- I believe Moreau is the first truly modern horror novel -- with slavish dedication.  But the stuff I wrote was merely copy-work.  It wasn't until I understood the underlying mechanisms, the elements deeper than prose style that make it such a horrific story, that I enjoyed a breakthrough in my own writing.  When I understood what it is that makes the story so effective, I discovered an underlying truth that could be applied to any story.

This doesn't mean opening my Big Book of Writing Revelations every time I want to knock out a piece of prose.  Rather, when I am involved with a horror project (in this example), it means I look actively for which underlying fears associate themselves with the idea.  Then I devise means to exploit those fears.

H.G. Wells' novella came along at a time when empire was at its height, and questions of race, religion, and received morality were of tremendous importance.  "Going native," or adopting the habits (and worse, marrying the women) of the conquered peoples among whom so many Englishmen were thrown, was an unspeakable thing. 
Seen in this light, Moreau is a critique of the Great White Father as God, "humanizing" the lesser races, demanding his creed be kept: “Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” 
The mad Dr. Moreau demands his Untermenschen behave like men -- and yet, is himself the greatest monster of them all.
But that's not what makes the story so damn creepy.  That comes from his deliberate dehumanizing of the "lesser races," until they are literally animals in the shape of men.  Everybody has a racist bone or two within them.  Wells extracts those bones and makes us examine them -- and then shoves them back in place.  They never sit quite right again.

So Wells wrote a story in which the main character chiefly wants to avoid being torn apart by Orangutan Boy or turned into a semi-human walrus or something like that, but even better, in which the highly Protestant loathing for "lesser" races is also terrifyingly caricatured.  Wells ups the ante by suggesting that the protagonist will become subhuman just through exposure to the barbaric existence of the island's repulsive inhabitants -- exploiting our fear of becoming lesser, simply by becoming the other.

From that can be derived a larger, pretty much universal message.  Do I go around worrying about becoming "the other?"  No, or I'd live in a different neighborhood.  But do I deny that I have certain fears, loathings, or preconceptions about "the other?"  Pow!  I confess.  "Oh look, that woman driving erratically is Chinese.  Chinese women can't drive."  I don't regard this kind of idiotic mind-habit as a manifestation of fear, but it certainly has roots in that soil.  I deny that I'm capable of racism, or sexism, or whatever it is, and yet it comes easy.  So I have a blind spot there, right where the denial is located.  Blind spots are vulnerabilities.  A predator can exploit them.  You know, like a horror writer.

Here's what I learned from The Island of Dr. Moreau:
The fears we are least willing to acknowledge are the fears to which we are most vulnerable.  

How To Be A Writer

This is not a how-to-be-a-writer blog.  Rather, this is where I'm parking about 30 years' worth of thoughts and discoveries about writing -- it's as much for me, as anybody else.  I'm not a famous guy with a long string of bestsellers behind him, or even an obscure author beloved of a handful of dreadfully clever academics.  I'm like the vast majority of writers -- someone that does it for the love of writing, regardless of the outcome.

Which is not to say I resist the idea of my upcoming novel from Gallery Books (a recently formed imprint of Simon & Schuster) becoming a big fat commercial success.  I would have written it regardless of having a publisher, that's all.

I can tell you how to be a writer in a few words -- so few, it doesn't require a blog.  So let's get this useful information out of the way.

Here's how to be a writer:
1. Sit down and write.
2. Get it read.

Once people are reading what you wrote, congratulations -- you're a writer.  If you write things and then hide them away, because, you know, your writing might not be any good, then you are not a writer, even if you've written twenty 175,000 word novels.  Put it this way: "writing" is the act of stringing words together on some kind of page.  A "writer," however, is a storyteller.  It requires another person to witness the work.

To be a writer, your writing must be transmitted into another person's mind.

Please: if you must, say "disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer," and then hand people what you wrote and get it read. 
Even if it's awful stuff and people tell you so, who cares?  The minute they slap their moist, meaty eyeballs on that text, you become a writer.  That's why it's so awesome that writing can be categorized as "good," "bad," "funny," "serious," "literature," and "a bloody, apocalyptic epic with an intimate tragedy at its core."*  Who cares if people don't like your writing?  They don't like your writing.  That means... you're a writer!

*I was aiming for the latter of these categories, seeing as anything with zombies in it is disqualified as "literature" since the Oslo Narrative Accord of 1978.  Jane Austen got in under the wire.

Harold Pinter On Character

The great playwright Harold Pinter said:

"It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort."

That's from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  You can see why he ended up with the thing.

An Idea Is Compounded Of Ideas

Every great idea is composed of two lesser ideas.

Or five lesser ideas.  I've found that when I have an idea that seems like it ought to take wing and turn into a book or screenplay, but won't, the missing ingredient, more often than not, is another promising idea that also won't fly.

When I talk about "ideas," I mean "story notions."  These can be as small as a fragment of dialogue, a character sketch, a situation, or an interesting description.  Usually they're bigger than that.  My ideas are usually along the lines of "what if Bigfoot turned out to be an escaped gorilla," which doesn't get me very far.

That's where the second idea comes in.  Bigfoot?  Who cares?  So I'll throw other fragments of material at the idea and eventually (maybe 10 years later) something will catalyze and I have a great idea (within the limits of what constitutes a great idea for me, which might not be at the same level as a great idea by Nabokov, for example). 

The second idea might be totally unrelated: "a Midwestern ex-football-player-turned-car-dealer, highly conservative type of guy with three kids in college and a fading trophy wife, discovers he's gay while on a business trip to Las Vegas." 

Somehow, that idea connects with the Bigfoot idea, and the next thing you know, I have a story about a Las Vegas entertainer whose hobby is dressing up as Bigfoot and scaring people in the woods, until he gets shot by a car dealer who then nurses him back to health in a remote mountain cabin.  They fall in love.*

This approach works at any stage of the writing process.  You might be 300 pages into a novel when you realize the premise you started with has simply worn itself out.  So toss in something you like from another project and see how that energizes the material.  Your unfinished story about astronaut sex might be just the thing -- the recently divorced housewife of the first half meets an astronaut in the second half.  All of a sudden the character dynamics change, you have a fresh milieu to work in, and progress begins anew.

So if you're stuck for a concept, consider mashing false starts, scribbles, and vague musings together.  You can never tell which idea will combine with another, resulting in a third, much stronger idea that you can actually write.

*I mean, I don't, but I could have such an idea.  This is just a hypothetical idea.

Outlines and Characters

When writing characters, you're getting to know them, and at the same time, you're finding out what they did.  

That's why having a strong story outline is a good idea.  With an outline, you already have some idea of what happened.  So when the characters start acting as free agents and won't listen to your ideas any more (this is one of the weirdest phenomena in writing, and the whole point of the exercise), you can direct their actions to achieve more or less the outcomes you have in mind.

Then again, if a character really jumps off the page and starts making up new dance moves, go with it.  Scrap the outline and keep on writing this character.  You'll end up with a completely different story than the one you intended.

Which is what second drafts are for.  Once you have a character that strong, you can rewrite events to coerce this individual into doing what you had planned, more or less.

And if you get a character like that, you win, by the way.  It can happen once in a writer's lifetime.

Character In Fiction

In fiction, character is the act of doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

That's why "white hat" type heroes are so often characterless.  They do the right thing for the right reason, and who cares?  Any Tom Clancy novel will suffice for example.

Bad villains are the same, inverted.  Wrong reason, does wrong thing, ooh, bad guy!  Terrible, even.

In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne gets it on.  She's not supposed to.  It's the wrong thing to do.  But it's so right for her!  Consequently she's a vivid character.  Captain Ahab in Moby Dick is another good specimen.  There's a couple of kids in Romeo and Juliet that get into trouble that way, too.

Switching to film, there's Yojimbo, in which the eponymous no-goodnik samurai does the wrong thing for his own right reasons, and all goes swimmingly -- until he does the right thing for the right reason.  And then he gets his ass kicked.

The main reason I propose this idea of character is because I'm sick of the old "character is action" bit.  It's true, sure.  But it's just a subset of a larger concept, which is that story is action.

When I'm fooling around trying to sort out what the heck storytelling is all about*, I'm looking for useful tools, not truisms.  So character may be action, but so is going to the store and buying a half-pound bag of figs.  On the other hand, if character is said to be "doing the wrong thing for the right reason," suddenly I can turn that into a writing exercise.  I can take a flat character, apply that concept, and the character will show signs of life.

Incidentally, that's not the same thing as handing out flaws.
Typical "this will make the character more interesting" flaws include alcoholism, sexual kinks, and slovenliness (all three, in detective stories).  These aren't evidence of character, they're characteristics.  But if the sexual kink, for example, means the character makes a serious, damaging compromise in order to satiate that need -- which plays out later in the story -- by gum!  That's character.

Incidentally, I am 100% guilty of violating this premise, pretty much full-time.

*As a means to avoid writing

The First Rule Of Writing

There are only three motives in all of literature: sex, power, and revenge*.

 *Atonement is simply revenge against the self, so don't go telling me there are four motives.