Brian Hodge

We all have certain foibles whose antidotes we can’t be reminded of too often. One of mine is perfectionism.

I can’t really say when it started, but for years I’ve wrestled with periods of self-imposed expectations so acute that they verge on paralyzing. Putting something down becomes excruciatingly difficult, because, well, what if it doesn’t measure up? I have standards, ya know.

Intellectually I understand the folly of this. I know better. That nothing comes out so bad it’s beyond repair. With the written word, you always get a do-over. In the moment, though, just try telling that to the fear.

But, like the same coin always turning up In your path, there’s a polar equivalency I’ve kept running across during the past couple of years:

The opposite of fear is love.

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s what usually brings me back around and sets things aright again. The love of the game.

The latest reminder comes courtesy of Tim Ferriss’s Four-Hour Blog, whose most recent installment is primarily an excerpt from a new book, which in turns references another. The key passage:

“The author cited a University of Texas in Austin study of goal-oriented and process-oriented people in the workplace. Unexpectedly, it was not the hypercompetitive Type ‘A’ people who were doing more for the company, making more money, getting more raises and promotions. It was the folks who were enjoying their job.”

Forget about the outcome for now, is the main call-to-arms. The outcome will take care of itself, and nearly always for the better, if you instead focus on the process of doing.

“Focusing on the process lets you access your greatest skill and increases your fun.”

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s what usually hits the reset button and banishes the fear: falling in love with the process of storytelling all over again. Remembering why I started doing it in second grade and never stopped. Remembering that it should be fun.

Mostly the love, though.

Simple? Sure. Obvious? Obviously. But tough to remember sometimes.

And the reminders keep me going.

*****Speaking of process, you’re invited over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where we’re in the midst of an epic reader-request fulfillment, “From The First Draft To The Last.” Part 1 and Part 2 are up, with the final installment to come early next week.

[Photo by shmooth]

 

This may be taking much for granted, but I’m going to venture a guess that, as a writer, you have at least one of these end-goals in mind. Even if only at the level of a wistful, wouldn’t-it-be-nice daydream:

• To be the kind of writer who rewards repeat reading.
• To create work that fans introduce to their kids when they’re old enough.
• To do work that readers find speaks to them differently at different stages of their lives.
• To write books that people don’t just remember reading, but also remember the experience of reading — when, where, what was going on in their lives at the time, and why your work came along at just the right moment.

And so on. You may have some of your own that have never occurred to me.

Pretty much our entire raison d’etre here at Storytellers Unplugged is to explore the twisty, steep, and subtle paths for getting there.

This one today is more about how to ensure that you don’t.

2 Shocking Admissions!

Awhile back I was hanging with a writer friend. This may come as a shock, but when writers get together, they sometimes talk about … other writers. Not always kindly, either.

We’ll pause while you hoist your jaw up off the floor again.

One particular writer came up — let’s call him Author X — whom my friend once loved, years earlier, but admitted he just couldn’t read anymore.

I’d given Author X a couple tries and had never been able to warm up to his work. Not a flicker. Not even for a guilty weekend fling. I was pretty sure that I always understand why, too, based on something Author X said in an interview I read with him at the time.

Admission: That he wrote at a rate of about 15 minutes per page.

My reaction: It reads like something that was written at a rate of about 15 minutes per page.

When I related this to my friend, seeing the expression on his face was like watching a couple of missing puzzle pieces materialize and snap into place:

Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.

3 Obvious Guarantees

As long as there are readers, there will always be an audience, sometimes a substantial one, that is perfectly happy to read stolid,  prose that skates a filmy-thin surface from Point A to Point B to Point Z, then vanishes into the air with an inaudible poof without once having demanded anything of those readers.

Like asking an uncomfortable question. Or challenging a preconception. Or just getting them to vacate their own perspective for a while and really look at the world through another pair of eyes.

Instead, in essence, this is being content to put on a puppet show with paper dolls.

Now, if this is truly the experience you seek to bring, then Vaya con Dios, my friend.

But before you do, please stop and think for a moment.

Think about three things I can almost guarantee you:

(1) It was not work like that made you want to write too.

(2) The work that did, or that now lights you up in one or more of those four ways mentioned at the beginning … its authors spent a lot more on it than 15 minutes per page.

(3) Its authors have no idea how much time they actually did spend per page.

But Don’t Take My Word For It

For writers, one of the best bits of advice that came out of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers — which helped popularize the law of 10,000 hours — wasn’t in the book. Rather, it was at the bottom of an interview he gave while promoting it in the UK:

“The thing I keep coming back to, after 18 months on this book, is the work thing. I always say to young writers who are struggling, well, how many drafts do you do? And then I say, what, you only do three drafts? I do ten.”

Some metrics are worth counting. Worth bragging about.

Others aren’t.

Know the difference, and you just might earn readers for life.

***** Your next stop? Why not make it my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Making Space: The First-Of-The-Year Creative Enema,” is begging for a more polite title.

[Photo by meddygarnet]

Nearly all storytelling relies, at some point, on hitting the reader with something she hasn’t seen coming. Or thinks she hasn’t seen coming, but actually has, because you, the author, have prepared the way for it, then sprung it only after she’s forgotten about the groundwork you’ve painstakingly laid. Or never realized it was there in the first place.

Granted, some surprises really do come totally out of the wild blue. Some just need to, and work better that way. Sometimes life is delightfully, cruelly, random.

The others, though, the prepared surprises, nearly always seem more satisfying. Because when one is delivered well, it’s like a stealth puzzle piece clicking into place — “Ahhh, riiight, I forgot about that!” And most of us are hardwired for puzzles. As readers, as viewers, we love seeing them solved, love solving them ourselves.

But when you’re the one in control, you have to plant the right seeds, and — this is important — you have to disguise what you’re really up to. Maybe give the reader time to forget all about it, too.

To The Power Of 3

I’ve often seen such surprises pulled off — and done it myself — in a 3-step process. Which may sound formulaic, but it isn’t, because it can manifest in an infinite number of guises.

Step 1: Introduction Of The Key Element

Get it out in the open. Show it, talk about it, but above all, tie it into something immediate that makes it look as if it has relevance right then and there. If you don’t, it runs the risk of being too obvious, another of Chekhov’s guns hanging on the wall in Act One: Everybody will be expecting it to be fired by Act Three.

Better still if the weaving-in comes with emotional significance to the characters. This sells the sense of immediacy, and often makes the scene more memorable for later.

Step 2: The Reminder

Show it, talk about it, again. Preferably in a different context from the first time, but once more, it has to look free of ulterior motives. That the point is self-contained.

This is the bridge between Steps 1 and 3, a reinforcement of whatever you’ve put into play. Ideally, though, these first two appearances will be pulling double-duty, doing something in the moment that’s almost as important as what you have planned for later on … say, on the surface revealing something about your characters, while your delayed purpose lingers below, out of sight.

Step 3: The Payoff

Here’s where everything finally comes together. Either you’ve been subtle enough or buried the key element amid enough distractions to make the reader forget about it until its time comes … or everything you’ve laid it is now seen from a different perspective, a fresh context, a wider view.

And that’s it, the craft of surprise. Using something old in a brand new way.

It’s easy to describe, but easier still to point out in practice, so let’s take a peek at how this plays out in a couple of examples.

Case Study #1

In the movie version of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, the Power Of 3 is used to amp up and draw out suspense during the chaotic melee with orcs and their cave troll, in the Mines Of Moria. For several moments, we’re left thinking there’s no way Frodo could’ve survived being skewered by the cave troll’s giant spear.

But he did, of course, thanks to his shirt of mithril chainmail.

Step 1: Introduction

During their reunion at Rivendell, Frodo’s Uncle Bilbo gives him the mithril shirt, along with a sword (which slightly dilutes the impact a single gift would’ve had). “As light as a feather, and as hard as dragon’s scales,” he describes it. It’s an emotional scene, too. Bilbo is dealing with some heavy regrets over what his actions have led to, and in equipping Frodo for the journey, he’s not just investing in Frodo’s protection … he seems to be trying to make amends.

Step 2: Reminder

While the Fellowship hoofs it through the Mines Of Moria, we see the chasms glittering with mithril in its unmined state. Gandalf remarks that Bilbo once was given a shirt of mithril … a kingly gift, Gimli observes.

“I never told him,” Gandalf says, “but its worth was greater than the value of the Shire.”

That’s the really interesting part. We’re left wondering why, exactly, Gandalf withheld this information. For my money, it shows Gandalf’s protective nature, that he doesn’t want to introduce the corrupting influence of wealth into hobbit society … and maybe that he doesn’t entirely trust Bilbo to resist it. But we can only guess.

Step 3: Payoff

Frodo is skewered, but rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Open his shirt and … SURPRISE! The Reminder and the Payoff come surprisingly close together, but so much happens in those intervening minutes that most viewers completely forget about the shirt by the time it matters.

Case Study #2

In my crime novel Mad Dogs, I used the Power Of 3 to disguise the fact that I was bringing in a new character at a point when conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t: fairly close to the end. Her name is Petra Lanier, she’s a Hollywood makeup artist, and she plays a brief but vital role in preparing the main characters, actor Jamey Shepherd and career criminal Duncan MacGregor, for a climactic confrontation with someone who’s been busy stacking the odds against them.

The problem: Bringing in a pivotal new character this late would’ve come off too much like winging it … kind of like the cheeseball hero who, in a pinch, reveals that he just happens to have studied nuclear fusion during a semester at MIT. But there was absolutely no place to have brought Petra onstage any earlier.

There was still a way around this.

Step 1: Introduction

Petra was first brought up in conversation by Jamey’s fiancee, Samantha, in a heart-to-heart with a new friend, Dawn. It comes out that there was a never-acted-upon infatuation between Jamey and Petra in the past. The scene’s surface duty is to reveal Samantha’s insecurities about herself and her relationship with Jamey, and bond her with Dawn.

Step 2: Reminder

Petra comes up a second time in a conversation Jamey has with Duncan. This time you get the infatuation from Jamey’s perspective, and see that Samantha didn’t have nearly as much to worry about as she thought she did. It sheds light from another direction on the depth of Jamey’s love for and commitment to her.

And up to this point, it all just seems like a bit of she-said-he-said backstory, a potential fray in their emotional ties. Important, and valid, but hardly the only thing I’m up to.

Step 3: Payoff

When Petra finally gets her walk-on, she may not been seen before, but she’s certainly been a presence, the subject of a couple of heartfelt conversations. She has a unique enough name — this was no accident — that it’s likely to spark additional recognition. Her arrival isn’t a surprise the reader is likely to have seen coming, but under the circumstances it makes perfect, resourceful sense, and doesn’t come off like something I’ve whipped out in desperation to wiggle out of a corner I’ve painted myself into.

Ultimately, there are almost as many ways to surprise a reader as there are to tell a story. This is just one of them, but if you start looking for it, you probably won’t have to look very far.

The tripod, they say, is one of the most stable structures you can make.

***** Don’t stop now! If’n you please, swing over to my blog, Warrior Poet. The latest, the loud, true story of “The Chainsaw Massacre Of Focus: How To Creatively Cope When The World Won’t Stop Screaming In Your Ear.”

I like life lessons that are simple enough to apply across the board, and they don’t get much more stripped-down than lessons you can learn from boxing. Win or lose, there’s something every fighter wants to be able to say after a bout: “I left it all in the ring.”

You might have heard a variation of this during last month’s Winter Olympics, from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno: “I left it all on the ice.”

Meaning that by the time the final bell rings, or the race is run, that’s it for you. You’re done in. You don’t have any more left for that day, that hour, the very next minute, and in this moment, at least, the outcome pales beside one fact that can never be taken away:

You’ve given it everything you had.

I don’t think I ever truly, madly, deeply appreciated this until last December, when I took my Krav Maga orange belt test. At first it started out fun. Then it got a little challenging. Then a lot challenging. At about hour five I joined the push-it-til-you-puke club. Came back out and dug in to finish the last 45 minutes as strongly as I could, even though I was afraid I’d blown it.

Never in my life had I been this miserable without food poisoning being involved. Got home and could barely make it up a flight of stairs, two-handing it up the rail, clump-clump, clump-clump, one step at a time. I slumped into a hot bath and … OK, I didn’t pray for death, but if I’d noticed a scythe blade in the doorway, I’d’ve told the Reaper, “Come on, ya moldy bastard, there’s an extra five in it for you if you make it quick.”

Exhilarating, though? Like nothing else. Except for one thing.

The best writing experiences I’ve ever had have left me feeling the same way. The best writing experiences I’ve ever had were the ones that concluded with a collapse. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Sometimes it felt as if it were the rest of the world that had fallen away, and I lingered above it in floating tranquility.

These are the ones I remember in sensory details of time and place. These are the ones that make me wonder where the words really came from. The ones that spit me back into the world with the surreal, stumbling dislocation of a teleporting misfire. These are the ones in which I rode all the way to the end on a wave of jubilant terror that I wasn’t going to make it, but somehow did.

The ones when I left it all on the page.

As creators, we sometimes have a tendency to conserve, to hold back. Maybe it stems from the admonitions we’ve heard since childhood:

• Don’t spend it all in one place.
• Put away a little something for a rainy day.
• Be sure to save some for later.
• Put that back, you’ll spoil your dinner!

All those bits of code designed to program us into obedient, frugal, regulated little models of prudence and moderation.

Fine. Live like that away from the desk if you want to. But if you bring it to the page, it’s like showing up at the pub on Saint Paddy’s Day wearing a solemn face and a T-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I’m Amish.”

This creative reticence comes in two major forms:

(1) The temptation to hold back ideas

Tell me you haven’t been here before: You’re about to introduce a character, inject an idea, or just lay down a nice turn of phrase … and then stop. Not because it isn’t good enough, but because it seems too good for now.

You want to save it for later. Later in the same work. Later in life, for another work altogether.

Don’t. Don’t sit on it.

Introduce it, inject it, lay it down now.

You’ll never have quite this same blend of energy and enthusiasm and freshness again. Ideas left to ripen have a way of going stale, shrinking as the juice evaporates through their skin.

You’re sending yourself a bad message, too: that the well is running low, so you better not drink as deep, or that you’re incapable of coming up with an even better idea when you think you’ll actually use this one.

Ideas are there to be used, not rationed.

(2) The impulse to hold back ourselves

Like an archaeological dig, writing fiction proceeds in layers. When you do it right, you’re doing more than uncovering the intricacies of story and character, the minutiae you couldn’t be aware of during the planning phase. You’re revealing pieces of yourself, too, maybe parts you didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or were afraid to confront or embrace.

Sometimes it all spills out the first trip through. Other times it builds up little by little, another thin, sedimentary layer with each pass of revision.

Whatever works.

As a reader, the stuff that gets to me, stays with me, makes me want to come back for more, isn’t the stuff that skims the surface. It’s not the stuff that reads like a padded outline or a head exercise with no investment of heart. All top motion. All ripples and no undertow.

Instead, what hooks me are the ones where I get a sense of the writer having dived as deep as she possibly could to get to the truth of her tale, not stopping until she was up to her elbows in the silt at the bottom.

For myself — and from myself — I don’t want the novel, the story, that anyone could have written, given access to the same notes. I want the version only one of us could’ve written. The version pulsing with a feeling that, to the author, every day and every paragraph mattered as much as breathing.

I know — they all feel like they do, at the time. Even the ripple-skimmers.

It doesn’t always translate. Not when it hasn’t been pushed sufficiently hard. Whatever lay behind it, not everything made it all the way to the page. Instead of going for more sweat, tears, blood, and heart rate, somebody settled for his idea of close enough and called it a day.

The orange belt test…

As it turned out, I passed. But I had serious doubts. Didn’t feel one bit good about how I’d done, and they don’t pass you for showing up. They don’t even pass you for finishing.

Just as editors and publishers don’t say yes simply on the basis of your having a completed manuscript. The same way readers don’t love something just because you wrote “The End.”

Instead, Yes and Love are earned through toil that sometimes hurts. A lot. I got the impression I’d earned that new color coding not in the first five hours, but in those last 45 minutes.

It’s true, though — no single work can be everything to everybody. Regardless of how deep you dug or dove, not everyone is going to get it. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how many do.

The surest way to get there? Again, boxing has an answer, in something fighters are always wise to do: Never leave it in the judges’ hands.

Meaning that win, lose, or die trying…

They go for the knockout every time.

Early last month I had the agonizing good fortune of cracking open a notebook from the mid-1990s.

In one section I’d spent several months following some advice whose source I’ve since forgotten: keeping a log of daily writing progress. One day per line, bonehead-simple entries: date, project(s), page numbers, tally.

Cue reaction, January 2010: Holy hell! Look at those totals!

Comparing then and now, I felt I should’ve scribbled a note to accompany the final entry: “I will diminish, and go into the West.”

It wasn’t that I was no longer making progress on anything. Just not this kind of progress. Not the degree of progress that once constituted normal.

I undertook some serious pondering: What was different about then and now? Lots of things, but most had no relevance. When it’s go time, the basics are the same as they ever were. It still comes down to sitting in a chair, moving fingers, and making words march across a screen.

The factor that counted most, I decided, was my splendid technological isolation at the time.

My first computer was a humble workhorse that hardly gave me a bit of trouble over seven years of heavy use and still fires up today. And check the specs: 2MB of RAM. 40MB hard drive. 8 MHz processor. Internet? None. Even e-mail didn’t darken its ports until its final year of active duty.

Today I pilot an 8-core screamer with four hard drives whose combined capacity is up into terabytes. Yet with all that at my disposal I was working … slower? And Microsoft Word still doesn’t launch any faster than it used to.

Amazing and unpleasant things can transpire when you disengage the autopilot, stop accepting your behavioral status quo, and really start observing yourself. Here’s the self-image that began to form: a 5’10” lab rat pressing an e-mail lever in hopes of a random pellet of reward. You know the cruel effectiveness of the randomized reward, don’t you? That’s the distribution schedule that keeps the rats pressing the lever the longest. Go to a casino and you’ll see precisely the same behavior in the slot machine pit.

We have, legions of us, allowed ourselves to become history’s biggest source pool of stimulus-response conditionees. The chime. The lovely, melodious e-mail chime — it could be announcing anything! The links — ooo, who knows where they’ll lead?

And just where did the last two hours go again…?

I know: You’re making the “Well, duh” face. What, I didn’t realize the effect this was having?

Actually, I did. I was quite aware of it, and not fine with it. But the reward pellets were narcotizing enough to keep me thinking, C’mon, what’s one more quick check of e-mail, this forum, that blog. Then down the rat-hole I’d disappear. Until excavating that vintage notebook, I’d just never been punched in the face with the comparison-and-contrast results quite so starkly.

These were not bad habits that developed overnight. They accrued over years. They certainly weren’t in full bloom when we were still on a dial-up account. But by the time we switched to the always-on immediacy of broadband, I was well trained.

Worse, they didn’t even seem like bad habits. E-mail — in large part it developed out of a rapid response policy I wanted to use for nonfiction magazine editors I work with. The web — if I needed a fact or fact-check in the middle of something, it was out there. These looked like aids to productivity. The work would always be where I left it when I got back to it.

And it was. It had just gone cold.

Damage estimates vary, but the most recent I’ve seen is this: Jolt yourself out of the zone when you’re productively engaged in a demanding project, and it can take up to 45 minutes to bring yourself back up to speed. Keep the interruptions and focus-shifts coming, and you may never get there. It’s one more damning indictment against the myth of multitasking.

The solution was simple and ruthlessly effective. Pull the plug. Literally. It became January’s new, improved habit: Sit down to work and the Ethernet cable comes out of the router. Easy to reverse, but just enough of a fiddly act to force me to think about what I was doing and, thus, stop me from doing it.

And, back in the outside world, nothing bad happened. Astonishing. Nobody got angry. The globe didn’t flip its axis. Frogs never once rained from the sky.

Actual results? As much or more done in less or equal time. Consistently. January became the most productive month I’d had in years, with more time left for additional things that actually mattered. February is on track to be even better.

Now, regardless of what it looks like on the surface, this is not a Luddite rant against the siren song of the Internet. I still love me some Internets. But that may not be your call to the rocky shore at all.

Rather, it’s a case study in distraction, whatever the cause. Of deviating from the critical mission. Of veering off to glean the shiny, sparkly, but ultimately insignificant stuff scattered on top of the ground when the valuable stuff looks grubbier in the raw, and needs some rooting under the surface to get to it.

We all have our distractions, our sweet saboteurs, whether they pull us from the story we’re writing, or the story we’re living.

We also have the power to grind them beneath our heel and use the wreckage to plug the rat-hole.

There’s no greater ally here than awareness. Simple awareness. Stepping back to watch yourself in action, with enough brutal honesty to admit that it’s way past time to change the picture. Then looking for the simplest, most direct roadblock that will keep your feet and fingers on the path.

You have nothing to lose but inertia.

We humans are by nature social creatures, barring the occasional woeful exceptions. Like that guy down the street who, if greeted, will glare at you as though you’ve grown a syphilitic second head. And that desk clerk who couldn’t be any less approachable if she was wearing porcupine quills and a skunk’s tail. But the rest of us? We thrive in the welcoming light of others’ eyes and wither in the darkness of their apathy.

Writers in particular. For us, reader/peer appreciation ranks right up there with food and oxygen … even for those disdainful authors who claim they don’t give a flying fornication for what you think. But I daresay the hunger rages most frantically in those who have accomplished the least. Because they’re desperate for believers.

Which can turn them into their own most bubonically effective saboteurs.

Maybe, as kids, they were daydreaming during etiquette lessons. Maybe their artistic souls molded them from an early age into growth-stunted misfits. Or maybe it’s just a side effect of whatever divine madness impels a perfectly good machine cog to pick up a quill pen in the first place.

Whatever the cause, here’s the bitter paradox: a novice, an aspirant — or a fan, too, while we’re at it — who seeks the company of others of like mind, or those suspected of being of like mind, who craves their acceptance, who hungers for their validation of his or her essential core … and who then goes after it with all the comportment of that weird uncle who likes to demo his hernia at family dinners.

Seriously. In the world of high-, middle-, and lowbrow letters, there’s a scary number of people out there trying to sidle up to the creators, employing strategies that are the stuff of humiliation and restraining orders. And it’s only gotten worse now that we’re all out there with web sites and public e-mail addresses.

So. In the interest of getting things off on the right foot when paths do cross, here are a few thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots. Mostly shalt-nots. And pray you recognize yourself only as the receiver, rather than the perpetrator.

• Never tell a writer that the best thing he or she ever wrote was this piece of work from 10 or 15 or 43 years ago. Sure, you’re entitled to your opinion. It may even be objectively valid. Just the same, keep that nugget of flattery to yourself.

• If you want to get something signed via long distance, most writers are happy to accommodate. Just don’t expect the writer to foot the bill for sending it back to you, ya cheap bastard. Include a SASE, or loose postage and a mailing label.

• Don’t send a writer you don’t know your unpublished or self-published stuff out of the blue, unsolicited. We realize you only want to know what we think. We’ve been there, and we’ve felt your anxiety. But you probably have unrealistic expectations of what we can do for you … which ain’t much. We aren’t agents, most of us don’t run critiquing services, and we’re all swamped with our own work and some combination of relationships, families, side interests, day jobs, and all-consuming fetishes that leave us quaking and ashamed in the deepest dark of night.

• If you still want feedback, at least ask first, in the full knowledge that the answer will likely be no. The real reason most of us would rather pull out our eyelashes with tweezers than read the unsolicited, unpublished work of strangers? There’s a noxious strain of parasite out there just waiting for the chance to level a charge of plagiarism at someone for stealing his ideas. Not you, I know. Perish the thought. But the safest policy is still a blanket, all-purpose no. Your best bet: Prove yourself in the arena first, on your own, the way we all had to, and always be at your diplomatic best.

• Please disabuse yourself of the notion that published writers and their editors constitute some sort of secret cabal intent on keeping you out. It makes you sound like your headgear of choice is tinfoil. Plus it will resonate only with other foilheads, and all you’ll do is reinforce each other’s delusions. The truth is, most of us spend a lot more time talking to our dogs, cats, iguanas, and refrigerators than to each other.

• Never suggest a collaboration with a writer you haven’t been drunk with at least four times. Especially on your autobiography. I don’t care how many alien abductions or skin grafts you’ve been through.

• And don’t offer to share your ideas, especially when envisioning a division of labor that involves the writer doing all the work and you both splitting the money. If your ideas are so wonderful they belong before the goggled eyes of the world, take a class to improve your craft and usher them in yourself. My lack of faith in your project’s viability only means I can’t muster up sufficient enthusiasm to work on it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. I could be wrong. I’m wrong about lots of stuff. Yes, I am a retard for declining your offer. But I’m at least a retard with my own ideas.

• Even though we’re on friendly terms, and I really do like you, please quit asking when I’m going to dedicate a book to you. I’m sorry. But if it hasn’t happened by now, it probably never will, and every time you bring it up it gives me a six-second case of lockjaw.

• If you join a read-aloud/critique group, be it a formal local crew, or an impromptu gathering of friends and acquaintances at a convention, don’t sour your first impression by reading the entirety of a work that would thud if you dropped it. Brevity, remember, is the soul of wit. Be witty, lest you be the one who goes thud.

• And in that group, try to be mindful of your audience relative to your material. For instance: If that audience consists of anything other than knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers, they may not be the target market for your thinly-disguised rape fantasy featuring such lines as “He slapped the bitch to orgasm.” Yes, I’ve actually heard that one … and one or two of the contributors here can vouch for it, because they were present, too. You know what’s going to happen? “He slapped the bitch to orgasm” is going to become that group’s private punchline for a long, long, long, long time.

It could even end up in the title of an essay someday.

Bottom line, we all thirst for our little sip of immortality.

If you get it, just be sure it’s for the reasons you wanted.

by Brian Hodge

[Podcast edition available through iTunes, or here.]

It’s been an introspective year, 2007 has. Back in January — a month that doesn’t seem as though it should be coming around again so quickly — I felt compelled to spend some time really thinking about what I do, in the writerly sense, and how I’ve gone about it. The instincts and strategies that have helped move me forward to where I want to go; the blunders and bad habits that have done the opposite.

This seems like time especially well spent in a phase of transition, as I’ve worked lately to head in directions I’ve not gone before, or as much as I would like to, and slough off old skin as well.

And so: What continues to be relevant and helpful? Is there anything that used to be, but no longer is, yet I still do it anyway because that’s the way I’ve always done it? What should I never have done in the first place?

This month and next, I’ll be hitting much of what I came up with. If it has any value at all, it’s probably for newer writers still picking their way along. And even then, what worked for me won’t necessarily be right for someone else. The screw-ups, though? Those are probably best avoided on general principles. Bone-headed moves are always bone-headed, no matter who does them.

This month, the right of it all, and I hope nothing here comes off as arm-twisting back-pats of self-congratulatory wankery. I’ve lapsed on nearly all of them at one time or another. But they’ve at least been there like north on a compass, something to turn back to when I’ve gotten lost.

I concentrated more or less equally on short stories and novels.

This may be one of the top three questions beginning writers ask: “Which should I do: Concentrate on short stories at first? Or go right to a novel? Or both?”

The only answer, of course, is yes. Whichever you find most compelling. Whatever you’ll find the most creatively fulfilling. You might as well be fulfilled, because, to be blunt, when you begin nobody’s out there waiting for what you’re doing. Except maybe your mom. But if you’re at least doing what excites you most, that’s more likely to feed your momentum until someone out there actually is waiting for what you come up with next.

For me, it made the most sense to take parallel tracks. Short stories provided quick gratification, extra income, publishing credits, and early visibility. They were a home-study course in learning my craft, which couldn’t help but carry over to the novels. A few stories even grew into novels. Many stories have been resold, reprinted, translated … a source of further exposure and income that doesn’t require further work. I’ve rarely said no to an invitation to contribute to a book or magazine, because it’s a chance for more of everything.

Plus you never know who may be reading. The most longstanding relationship I’ve had so far with a book editor began when she read a story of mine in an obscure little magazine, and wrote to ask if I had a novel to send her. Within hours, by providential coincidence, a fellow editor brought her a manuscript of mine already under submission at the house, and said, “This seems more like your kind of thing.”

I put myself in situations where things could happen.

Writing is a profession whose business is largely conducted at long distances. Making living, breathing (not too heavily, though) contact with the people whose ranks you hope to join may be the closest thing to a fast track a novice writer can hope to find. It puts a face with a name, or at least connects to Woody Allen’s observation that most of life and success is just about showing up.

Getting my first literary agent came directly out of attending a weeklong writers conference when I had exactly one small press short story sale. I received the kind of encouragement there that can sustain a person through long, often discouraging struggle. Best of all, I made a couple of lifelong friends whose influence has been such that I can’t imagine life without having met them. Any one of which was worth infinitely more than the price of admission.

Quality control has always been paramount.

Near the end of his life, Orson Welles went stumping for budget vintners Ernest and Julio Gallo. He ended each commercial intoning the infamous line “We will sell no wine before its time.”

Wisdom doesn’t come from much cheesier sources than that, but something about it sunk in. Welles’s big, bearded face has hovered in memory like a scowling headmaster ever since.

Whether a project is on spec, or asked or contracted for in advance, I’ve always been loathe to send it out or turn it in unless I’m convinced it’s the best it can possibly be. That seems like a no-brainer, so fundamental it should go without saying. Yet more than once I’ve seen writers, pros even, admit that they’ve turned stuff in knowing it fell short of what they were capable of.

Personally, there’s no such thing as good enough if I feel it’s within my power to do better. That’s not to say someone else couldn’t have done it much better, or that I couldn’t have done it better myself at a later date … but at the time, it’s the best I can make it.

The most ludicrous example was a Shakespearian spoof. It took weeks to get the language feeling right, and the pay was miniscule to begin with, so I probably ended up slaving away for twenty-five cents an hour … but I’m still glad I did it.

I’ve tried to resist the notion that my words are too precious to benefit from editorial attention.

Every so often you’ll hear of a bestselling author who wrangles a contract that prohibits anyone at the publishing house from changing so much as one word of the manuscript.

Often, you can tell. And not in a good way.

Yeah, I went through an early cocky phase. What were those first few short story sales if not proof of gilded perfection? But then, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it was really quite amazing to see how much editors learned in the next few years.

I learned to love the revision process.

In the earliest days of my career, Robert R. McCammon told me that he disliked the rewrite phase; that once something was freshly done, further work on it felt to him like beating a dead horse. When I confessed that I honestly enjoyed revising, he told me this was going to serve me well.

I can only believe it has. Because, once something of mine is freshly done, I usually feel like I’ve just given birth to a dead horse. It’s hideous to behold: the stink … the five-and-a-half malformed limbs … and the faces, o god, its grimacing and accusatory faces! That repulsive scorched mass of king crab legs and Siberian Huskies in John Carpenter’s The Thing…? That’s my first draft.

But a funny thing happens. Some amputations and grafts, lots of cuts and suturing, an infusion of recombinant DNA and a few harnessed lightning strikes later, and that streamlined critter starts to twitch. It’s jolly fun, making order out of chaos. It’s alchemy and theurgy and sometimes the biggest set of Leggos in the world.

When it seemed relevant, I tried to work within the overlapping fascinations that I knew I shared with an editor.

More than once, when a story sale wasn’t a sure thing — I didn’t have a guaranteed slot in an anthology, say — I took a few steps toward securing that sale by trying to build the story around subjects and/or aesthetics that I knew would likely appeal to the editor.

Pandering? Not if what I’m writing about is something that cranks my passions as well. It’s more like trying to initiate a conversation that the editor and I can both participate in, with equal enthusiasm. And editors who really like what you have to say are more apt to come back to hear more. It’s worked out well, and in one instance a one-off story turned out to be an inadvertent proving ground that later led directly to a book deal.

If you were to ask my friend J.C. Hendee how to get published, you’d likely hear his standard answer: “Write something that someone will want to read.”

That starts with the editor. In other words, it never hurts to know your market, and your first market is the person who decides the fate of your work.

I try to remember to say thanks.

I don’t remember when, but at some point I got in the habit of sending notes to the editors of anthologies that had just come out with stories of mine in them, or magazines whose new issue had an interview, and so on. Just a quick note to say thanks. I read about someone else who did this and thought it was a good idea.

After one exchange, a prominent editor with a wall full of books to his credit, wrote back to say that “thank you” was something he hardly ever heard.

Time is a valuable commodity, yes, but it just takes a couple minutes to convey appreciation to someone, and a little goodwill can go a long way sometimes.

When online war breaks out, I turn Swiss.

Remember when you were in gradeschool and a fight would break out, and everyone scrambled over to watch? You can see that 24/7 on the internet.

Unfortunately, I’m one of those dull bastards who’d rather peacefully co-exist with others — or barring that, ignore them — than devote time and energy to ripping them new assholes … and thereby looking like one in the process.

Is this wise, since some writers seem to have successfully adopted hostile proctology as part of their promotional strategy? I don’t know. I can, however, guarantee there are writers I’m unlikely to ever read because of the way I’ve seen them treat other people.

It can be argued that one thing has nothing to do with the other. Here’s Orson Welles again, this time from a far better source, The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Point taken. Still, my bookshelves are too full of writers about whom I feel favorable, or neutral, to turn space over to those whose countenances seem to have taken on an odd, puckered overlay of pinkish-brown. And I doubt I’m alone in that.

I let the pain and loss of others be my motivation.

Apologies in advance. This is one of those things that can make people who don’t do it feel they’re being badgered for their own good. So, sorry … really.

The earliest computer-oriented tale of writer’s woe I heard came from a guy who’d recently whipped his new novel across the finish line in a blistering white heat, writing the last 20+ pages nonstop. During this entire gallop, he never once hit Save. And right as he got to the end, the power went out. Gone. All gone.

Oh, he re-created what he lost, but the trauma was still palpable in the telling.

I couldn’t imagine a reaction that wouldn’t involve a razor or a noose. This was never going to happen to me, I vowed. And it hasn’t. But hitting Command-S so often as to constitute a nervous tic is just the beginning.

The methods and thoroughness have evolved over time, but by now all my work, e-mail, contacts, etc., are backed up to an external drive on an hourly basis. The rest of the system, weekly or better. It happens automatically. It has to, because I’m lazy and can procrastinate on drudgework to the point of barnacle growth.

But there’s really no excuse anymore. Hard drive space costs dimes per gigabyte now, and backup software is cheap, sometimes even free with the drive.

Yet writers still gamble with years of their working lives. I saw the worst-case outcome again just the other day, a writer posting about a hard drive crash devouring her contacts, ongoing interviews, and more … and the kicker, a quote of $1000 for recovery services to retrieve lost files. Why do hard drive recovery techs charge so much? Because they can.

The math is easy: $100 for a capacious backup drive and an hour or two of set-up time? A bargain. The peace of mind? Priceless. In almost 17 years since migrating from typewriter to computer, I can’t recall having lost anything more than a few minutes’ work due to the occasional power outage, and if I were really fanatical about it, I’d get an uninterrupted power supply, too.

Bottom line, if I’m going to be egregiously late in delivering work, it shouldn’t be due to some entirely avoidable reason like my computer ate my homework. Nay, let it happen for some far, far better thing than I have ever done — say, something involving a case of Bushmill’s, a couple of America’s Next Top Model washouts, and four or five llamas.

But that’s a story for another installment. If, um, it happens.

Next month, the flipside of this one: the self-flagellation.