Jeff Mariotte

by Jeff Mariotte

It should go without saying—but these days, it seems even the most obvious sentiments need to be expressed or people will assume they’re not felt—that last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech were an abominable act performed by a seriously disturbed person.

What was worrying from a long-range perspective was the amount of attention paid to the shooter’s writings, apparently violent and full of rage. That attention seems to have been eclipsed for the moment by consideration of his multimedia “manifesto,” but I still fear that we’ll return to it in the months to come.

Americans are already living in an environment where a student’s writings about a fictional presidential assassination can trigger a visit form the Secret Service, and where students can be suspended for “violent” writings. We should all remember—and where necessary, remind “the authorities”—that the world of the imagination and the world we live in are two different places. Very seldom does anyone confuse the two, as the VT killer seems to have done. Young people in particular struggle with all kinds of powerful emotions, as their bodies change and their minds are exposed to new information and they try to follow their individual paths toward adulthood. Through writing, they can express some of those emotions, study them, understand them, and to take those writings as literal statements of intent is foolish in the extreme.

Fiction is about conflict. Since the beginnings of literature, that conflict has often been expressed in violent action. I believe that writing about violence has a therapeutic effect in most cases, and is rarely, if ever, a genuine spur toward violence on the part of the writer. Has Thomas Harris, after all, really enjoyed brain sherbet? Has Stephen King mangled victims with laundry equipment? Has Lee Child shot dozens of people?

And on the flip side, this past week also brought the tragic anniversaries of Waco and Oklahoma City and Columbine and the birth of Adolph Hitler. Had the people responsible for those deaths written stories of rage and murder? Not that I’ve heard about. Now, though, the shooter responsible for more deaths than any other was an English major and an amateur writer, so it’s assumed by the media and the so-called experts that his writings, properly examined, could have predicted his future actions.

That’s nonsense, and they should know it, and they should not jump to that conclusion the next time a writer expresses boiling anger on paper, or even tells a story of extreme violence just because it’s what speaks to him at the moment. We’d be better off, I think, to let people work through those issues on paper, and maybe cancel the third week of April altogether, because all those anniversaries piled upon one another bring a terrible psychic weight to bear on us all, and that, more than any story or play, seems destined to lead to more violence.

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I wrote, several months ago, about the pleasures of writing about what you want to learn about. Knowing there might be a check at the end of the research makes the time spent on study more enjoyable and worthwhile, and the more a writer knows about his or her topic, the more informed and convincing the final book can be.

These past few months, I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I wrote two novels based on TV shows, one on the CW series Supernatural and one on the CBS program CSI: Miami. For Supernatural: Witch’s Canyon, my editor suggested that it might be cool for the Winchester brothers to visit someplace they haven’t on the show, like the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t been to the Canyon since moving to Arizona anyway, and love seeing it, so I made the trip, did some research on the region (since the story itself doesn’t take place in the National Park or right at the canyon) and enjoyed every minute of it. The words flowed when I got to the keyboard. I think the book is good, although that’s not something I’m in a position to judge for myself yet.

For CSI: Miami: Right to Die, however, I didn’t get to go to Miami. I’ve been there several times before, and I had books and maps and the internet to help me. Location wasn’t the tricky part in that one, though. As on TV, the science in the book has to be right, even when the application of that science (CSIs investigating murders beginning to end, for instance) is not accurate. And science is not something I have ever been (or will ever be) entirely comfortable with.

The language of science, like the German language, seems to believe that there’s no word that can’t be made better by the introduction of several additional words that may or may not seem related at first blush.

Writing the novel, I not only had to try to understand scientific language, but to translate it into something I could describe in real words. It’s not enough to grasp how cyanoacrylate fuming or tetramethylbenzidine testing works, but in a novel that has to be expressed in sight and sound and smell. Which, if you’re scientifically challenged like me, makes the work much harder. I think it all works, but again, someone else will have to determine that—I’m still too close to it.

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Recently I’ve taken on various tasks that pull me away from writing. I’m a judge for this year’s World Fantasy Awards, and behind me in my office are—no, I don’t have time to count them; let’s just say about a hundred books that have arrived in the past couple of months, with more showing up all the time. I’m chairing a subcommittee for the International Thriller Writers, and after having spent yesterday in the mountains there are more than forty emails in my in-box about that work. And I’ve been doing whatever I can to promote my supernatural thriller Missing White Girl, which goes on sale next month. Any of these could easily become full-time work, at least temporarily. None of them come with a check attached, and only the third of those works to my semi-immediate financial benefit. But only after spending plenty of time and money on the process.

Which leads back to time management, and the necessity of saying “no” once in a while. You can bet that’ll be my answer the next few times I’m asked to take part in something above and beyond. It’s too easy for a full-time writer to think, sure, I’ve got an hour I can spare here and there. When those hours grow into days and weeks, they can become a problem. It’s one I’ve managed to avoid, but now, suddenly, I’m in the middle of it. Anybody got a shovel?

by Jeff Mariotte

Spring came to the Flying M Ranch before I was quite ready for it. One minute, nighttime temperatures were in the 20s, and the next daytime highs were in the 80s. It’s a heat wave; it’ll break, they tell us, in the next few days, and then there’ll be some more spring before it’s really summer. But the other, surer signs of spring are all there. The cottonwoods are suddenly bursting with leaves. The grass is greening, wildflowers blooming, as is algae in the pond. Crickets have begun to mysteriously appear on the family room floor, and since my office is at the far end of the family room, I have to run their gauntlet to get from here to the rest of the house. Moths, likewise, find ways to slip inside at night, strafing the light fixtures. We had a wetter summer than any in the last decade or more, and a fairly wet winter, and it’s going to be a banner year for bug life.

I’ve lived most of my life aware of the weather, but not connected to it in the way that I am now. In cities, it’s either convenient or it’s not. Rain snarls traffic. Sunny days invite walks outside, maybe yard work. Longer evenings suggest barbecues. “Put weather in,” advises brilliant mystery writer Joseph Hansen. It’s easier to do that when you know what real weather is.

Now that I’m living in the country, ten miles from the nearest town, weather is more apparent, more immediate, and more necessary. It helps, too, that the Flying M is located someplace where weather is more extreme. After more than two decades in San Diego, almost anyplace would have more extreme weather, but here in Southeastern Arizona we have tumultuous summer monsoon thunderstorms, withering heat, biting cold, snow, hail, and in every season, wind.

At the beginning of this year I accepted two tie-in novel jobs, with relatively short deadlines at the end of March and April. To do them, I set aside an original horror novel I was working on, because they promised immediate paychecks and the novel didn’t. By the time this essay sees (digital) print I’ll have turned in a novel based on the CW TB series Supernatural. I’m now immersed in one based on CSI: Miami. It’s currently the most-watched TV show in the world, but no pressure….

To get them done on time, I marked up a calendar, creating a schedule to which I would have to adhere. Three thousand words a day, five days a week. If I missed a day, or didn’t make my word count, I’d have to make up for it on weekends. Otherwise, my weekends were free to do other projects, like the original graphic novel script I turned in last week, or essays like this one, or promotional efforts for my forthcoming original novel. Or simply to relax, to enjoy the family, maybe catch the occasional movie.

Three thousand words a day isn’t punishing, most of the time. It’s ambitious, but I’ve done more words in a day before. There was a time, when I had a day job, that I could only write on weekends, and shot for five or six thousand words a day on those days.

The plan has worked so far. Even with a scheduled-in trip to the Grand Canyon, I finished the first draft of the Supernatural novel on the allotted day. CSI: Miami is proceeding according to plan as well.

At three thousand, I have time left in the day for other things. Sometimes that’s reading—as one of this year’s World Fantasy Award judges, I have plenty of reading to do. Sometimes it’s more promotional efforts for the book. Sometimes it’s the thing I’d rather be doing—working outside on the ranch,

It’s not a real working ranch; we’re not raising cattle or goats or chickens or anything like that. And it’s not a farm, growing vegetables or fruits. Mostly what grows here is what grew here before we came. With the exception of invasive plants like Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed, most of what grows here is what grew here, as far as we know, before anyone came. Mesquite, creosote bush, various native grasses, and weeds. And the aforementioned wildflowers, which are just weeds with attractive reproductive bits.

But there’s much to do. Spring, between the wet winter season and monsoon season, is a dry time, with hot winds that sap the moisture from the land. It’s fire season (as is fall) and the growth that came up during the wet season has to be cut back, a fire break built around the house to make sure in the event of disaster, we’ll have a defensible perimeter. We keep a few patches of lawn, mostly for the enjoyment of the dogs, and those patches have to be kept relatively weed free. We have a lily bed that has to be tended. The pond needs to be maintained. Mesquite needs to be cut down so that it’ll be dried out and ready for next winter’s woodstove season.

Writing always seemed like all I would be good for, but it turns out that I have to spend more time than I ever expected working with power tools, or working with shovels and rakes and pitchforks, or cutting wire, or mending fences, or hauling rocks.

As physically demanding as that work can be, it recharges the part of me that can be wearied by a schedule of three thousand words a day, every day. The characters about whom I’m writing go outside with me sometimes, their problems kicking around in my head as the wind kicks up dirt and grass into my face. Other times, the process of changing into my work boots, old jeans, and cowboy hat chases them away and I leave the project completely behind, all my focus and energy going into the task at hand.

Every writer finds his or her own way to recharge, to set the reset button in order to go back to keyboard or page with a fresh perspective and a wakeful mind. Others have been discussed in this forum in the past. It can be a day at the beach, a night at the movies, a mani-pedi or a nap. To me, it’s not just a recharge, it’s as important to the work as the schedule and the discipline to stick with it. For me, working outdoors in every kind of weather connects me to the seasons, to the spinning of the Earth. Walking with the tracks of coyotes and jackrabbits, snakes and birds, occasional visitors like deer and javelina, brings me closer to the creatures we share our planet with (although I’d prefer that they, like the moths and crickets, remained outside the house). I write about the planet and the land and all its inhabitants, and I need to be in contact with them from time to time.

If I didn’t have that—didn’t have dirt under my nails and mud on my boots and sun on my neck and wind in my face—well, I’m sure I could still do the three thousand words a day. After all, that’s the job, that’s what you sign on for when you take money to write a novel.

But if I couldn’t get away from it and go outside once in a while, it might start to feel like work.

by Jeff Mariotte

Like many writers—most, probably—I’m often asked for writing advice. Because virtually everyone who speaks the language can put a pen to paper or jab at some keys and write a reasonable English sentence (although often not two in a row), many, many people think they could be writers of one kind or another, if only they knew the secret tricks. I try to dissuade some, while encouraging the more promising.

The advice I give most often, because it seems most true to me, is basically this: write, write, write. When you’re not writing, read. Then write some more.

This has felt, anecdotally, like the best advice I could come up with. Writing, I believed, is an activity that uses a particular set of “muscles,” and as with pole vaulting or hammer throwing, exercising those muscles often improves one’s performance. Writing a lot and consistently has made me a better writer, and I can’t help but think it would work for others as well. I don’t think any amount of exercise can make a bad writer good or a good writer great, but most of us fall somewhere in between those extremes, and strive diligently to improve our skills, to “master” our craft (only to find that, having gotten better at one aspect of it, other faults become glaringly obvious).

But it was all a gut feeling, without anything other than my own perception of my own experience—close-up and no doubt far from unbiased—to back it up.

Until now.

Now a writer named Sharon Begley has written a book called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. I haven’t read the book yet, although I hope to soon. But I read an excerpt from it in TIME, and from its descriptions of studies in neuroplasticity, it convinced me that my gut instinct was on the money.

In the excerpt, Begley talks about a Harvard study in which volunteers practiced a five-finger piano exercise, then took a test while a coil of wire sent magnetic impulses into their brains. This transcranial-magnetic-simulation test showed how much of their motor cortexes were used to control the finger movements they needed for the exercise. After just a week of practice, the bit of motor cortex used had literally spread, in Begley’s words, “over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.”

More significantly, the researcher running the experiment had another group of volunteers merely think about doing the piano exercise, without actually doing it, holding their hands still. Like the first test group, these people experienced expansion of the region of motor cortex that controls the fingers—even without using their fingers.

As Begley writes, “the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.”

There is, of course, much more to the article (and doubtless, to the book) than this. But just reading this much, combined with what I already believed about how writing begets better writing, caused an almost literal spark to ignite in my mind. The brain, Begley tells us, can be literally rewired simply through thought.

Tying this back into writing, the theory goes, by sitting and writing, one is exercising whatever region of the brain controls writing. Not just the movement of the fingers across the keyboard (although that is also something that gets better with practice, and is likely the result of motor cortex expansion of a particular sort). But mentally as well. What separates writing from typing is, after all, the mental activity underlying it. The use of the imagination, combining with what we know of stylistic standards, with inspiration about characters and plot points and turns of phrase, remembering seeds planted early in a story and bringing them to fruition later on (or remembering the flowers we “saw” in our mind’s eye and making sure to plant the seeds in the right place)…these are some of the things that our minds are up to, almost without our conscious participation, while we sit at that keyboard or with that notebook and write.

Doing all of these activities at once is not easy, and it’s a testament to the power and intricacy of the human mind that we can do them at all and not fall out of our chairs or choke on our own spit. (And I am not, lest you wonder, denying having either of those experiences while writing. But I’ve survived them.)

My experiential judgment that my writing improves by the doing of it leads me to believe that writing frequently and consistently—and just as important, thinking about writing, pondering plot twists and character arcs, visualizing scenes, the daydreaming in the shower or the car or tilted back in my desk chair with my hands locked behind my head—is physically rewiring my brain. I don’t know what parts of it are giving up ground—the part that does math, I’d guess, and maybe the part that remembers who gave me what for my birthday last year. But I don’t miss those parts as much as I’m appreciative that my skills continue to grow, that I haven’t hit a plateau as a writer, that maybe it’s not possible to do so unless some other, less helpful brain wiring mechanism kicks in and overrules the rewiring.

We’ve all read writers who start out good but then get better and better as they age. We’ve probably read others who get worse—but not as many, and there are very likely reasons for that deterioration—overuse of alcohol or drugs, laziness, creeping dementia, or others. For most of us, age brings experience, practice, maybe something resembling wisdom. And our brains have been fixing themselves to operate more efficiently at whatever it is we do most.

Does practice make perfect? Of course not—there’s no such thing as a perfect work of creativity. If there were, we might stop striving toward that goal. But does practice make better? Of course. Now we know at least part of the reason why.

By Jeff Mariotte

The Morton Syndrome

“When it rains it pours.” That’s what it says on the side of the Morton Salt can in my pantry, but it could as easily describe the summer monsoon rains or the way work can show up unexpectedly, all at once—or the alternative, which is worse.

I’m a full-time writer, which is another way of saying that my work schedule—and my income—can fluctuate wildly. Unless you’re a regular on the bestseller lists or have a spouse with a steady income, you’re probably the same way. I work all the time, either on original novels or work-for-hire novels, and occasionally on short stories or comics. But the WFH stuff usually comes with short deadlines attached—and up-front money—so there are times that original work has to be pushed aside to take on a tie-in project.

Just after the first of the year, I achieved a new record, for me. I’ve previously accepted a couple of three-book deals, but never before have I been approached on the same day by three different editors—two offering WFH book contracts and one soliciting a short story for a science fiction anthology. I accepted all three. It’ll mean a lot of work in a hurry, because the two novels are due on March 26 and May 1. And it means putting off the original that I started in November.

I took the jobs, because an extended period last year had been, for a variety of reasons beyond my control, short of contracted work. I wrote and sold original supernatural thriller Missing White Girl during that period, but even so, a dry stretch like that is hard to cope with financially. This, folks, is why they tell writers to keep their day jobs. It’s hard to put the food on the family, in our president’s terminology, when there’s no bread in the bank.

To make matters more complicated, as I launched into these two new projects, I also had a flash flood of page proofs that needed to be checked—for two novels and a short story. The long book I was reading (Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King—beautiful, so far) has been set aside while I work on the proofs and the research required for the new novels. Because both WFH projects are novels based on TV shows, I have a ton of DVDs to watch, in addition to the regular sorts of research that are required for any novel. In the middle of all this I also had to do the paperwork and proofreading associated with having a short story, “Walkaway,” accepted by the Amazon Shorts program, and study contracts for a couple of original graphic novels.

Then there are appearances, travel, conventions, promotion, networking…all of these will be happening between now and those two deadlines, and I’ll have to fit them in without jeopardizing the work itself. And my tenuous grasp on sanity.

What it comes down to is management. Writing is an art but it’s also a business, and you have to manage your time and your finances. If you can’t manage those things, then maybe you’re better off as a part-time writer, with your daily life controlled by a “legitimate” job. In some ways it’s harder because it means squeezing your writing into smaller chunks of time. But there’s a lot to be said for having a regular income.

Having known many hundreds of writers over the past couple of decades, I’m very aware that some have been phenomenally successful, while others have been completely unable to keep their careers going and have had to take other jobs. Becoming a full-time writer is, like any sort of entrepreneurial enterprise, a risky proposition, and not everyone makes it.

In the end, you—and the market forces that dictate your success as a writer—will have to make the decision for yourself. I don’t regret my decision (very often), even though it causes hardship from time to time. And I consider myself very fortunate indeed to remain in demand as a tie-in writer, as well as being able to sell my original work. It’s the best of both worlds.

I started by talking about salt—but if you manage your career well and you have the talent, you can also afford to treat yourself to dinner at Morton’s (the excellent steak house, not the salt mines) once in a while. That’s definitely a bonus in my book.