Jeff Mariotte

By Jeff Mariotte

I once worked for a comic book artist who, when he decided he wanted to be a professional comic book artist, set himself a schedule and put in eight hours a day drawing comic book pages. By doing so, he accomplished two significant things: he learned that he could, indeed, handle the grind of a daily stint at the drawing board, and he created a portfolio of samples that got him work in his chosen field. Today, he’s one of the most popular and successful artists in the history of that medium, and his popularity shows no sign of waning.

I’ve also known people who wanted to be writers, but whose primary efforts in that direction consisted of hanging around bookstores and coffee shops talking about what they would be writing, if in fact they were writing instead of talking. Now they still hang around coffee shops. Fortunately for them, the explosion of big box chain bookstores has resulted in many stores having coffee shops right inside, saving gas money—a plus when these folks are spending more on coffee than they’ll ever make writing.

The difference is professionalism.

Also drive, determination, and probably talent. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s take talent for granted. That’s less controllable than the other factors that go into making a professional—it can be honed, strengthened, but I don’t believe it can be acquired through sheer force of will.

The aspects of the job I want to talk about today, however, can be. Through my three-part connection to the world of publishing—as bookseller, editor, and author—I’ve seen a lot of behavior, professional and not, and I’m here to tell you that acting like a pro can have a positive impact on your career, while acting like an amateur can often keep you at that status forever.

As a writer, your goal is to sell to editors (and, via that route, ultimately to readers). But the editor is your first customer.

Talent, as I said, being a given, you might well be able to sell to editor A the first time simply by writing a good book. Beyond that point, though, it would serve you well to remember a few facts about editors, and behave accordingly.

Editors—like the rest of us—are very busy people. At the lower-to-middle echelons of publishing, they are vastly overworked, have few assistants to help them deal with the day-today paper pushing their jobs entail, read manuscripts at home, on the train, on the john, and they are not paid well enough for all the hours they put in. Nonetheless, when they really love a book they shepherd it through the various processes and dearly want it to succeed in the marketplace.

If you, as the writer, act like a professional—by which I mean meeting your deadlines, keeping a line of communication open that respects their schedule and the other demands on their time, respond promptly to editorial queries, page proofs, etc., and have reasonable expectations of the editor’s role in sales, promotions, and advertising—then editor A might be interested in your next book.

If you’re a pain in the ass regarding any or all of those things, then (unless your sales are stratospheric, in which case you can disregard this whole essay), then editor A has a big stack of other submissions that might seem a lot more interesting than your next project.

Editors are interesting people. They spend their time working on good books, they know great stories about writing and publishing, and they’re fun to hang out with. I wouldn’t, however, recommend getting roaring drunk with them, for instance, because you don’t want to do or say something in an inebriated moment that’s going to color your professional association with them. Remember: the editor works for the publishing company, not for you. His or her first interest is keeping his or her job, and sometimes that will require making decisions you might not like or agree with. The editor wants to keep the company in the black, not throw millions in your direction just because you’re pals. Business and friendship don’t always mix, and editors can be put into very difficult positions by trying to force those two relationships into one box. The two editors I know best socially, I have never sold to. On the other hand, most (but definitely not all) of the editors I have sold to I do know socially, to at least some degree.

You, as the writer, have a job to do. It involves writing a publishable book, then helping see it through to final publication by making yourself available to the editor when he or she needs you. After publication, your job might also involve working to promote the book to the ultimate consumers, the readers. Professionalism counts there, too.

If you are offered the opportunity to do an interview, take it. Don’t be late for the interview, whether it’s on person or on the phone. If it’s via e-mail as so many are these days, don’t file the questions and forget about them—tackle them as soon as you can and get them back in a timely fashion. The interviewer likely has plenty of other demands on his or her time, and is probably a freelancer, like you, who won’t get paid until the work is done. Consider the interviewer’s time at least as important as your own, because, after all, that interview’s ultimate purpose is to promote your work, not the interviewer’s interrogation skills.

If you’re offered the chance to sign at a bookstore—and it doesn’t cost you a ridiculous sum to get there, or take you away from the writing of the next book for too long—go. For 98% of writers, there is no guarantee anyone will show up. But they might, and the bookstore staff will be there regardless. For both audiences, staff and public, you should be on time, if not a few minutes early to discuss exactly what is expected of you. You should be reasonably dressed—suit and tie not required for men, evening gown not required for women—but a black Marilyn Manson T-shirt and torn jeans is not exactly appropriate attire, either, for most occasions (although it can be for certain books and audiences). You’re there to interest the public in your work, and you want to create the impression that you’re someone they wouldn’t mind spending a few (figurative) hours with as they read your work. Again, the relationship with the reader is a balancing act—you don’t need to be their friend, but you do want to come across as a trustworthy professional who can deliver the goods.

Not to harp on the drinking angle, but keep in mind that a bookstore appearance, even if it’s called an autograph party, is not really a party, and a book tour is not an extended party. I know of a case in which an author started drinking on the plane to an event, and never made it to the event or the several scheduled to follow. That’s a good way to make booksellers lose interest in promoting, or even carrying, your books. I also witnessed a case in which three co-authors appeared at a store to sign, and one of them was close to falling-down drunk. The lesser-known of the three authors, seeing his collaborator’s state and realizing the man would not calm down, ended up going outside the store to talk to fans and sign in relative peace. He made new fans, that night, by the score, because of his professional approach to the situation. The other co-author stayed inside and tried to ignore the drunk’s obnoxious behavior—both of them lost fans. No doubt in today’s web-connected world, word of the impaired author’s behavior would have spread much farther and wider than it did at the time, possibly having a greater impact on his sales (and certainly on the willingness of other booksellers to invite him to their stores).

Writing is many things: art, craft, calling, avocation, but when you do it for money, it’s also a business. Put in the hours, do the job to the best of your abilities, treat the people with whom you have to work with respect, an

d do what you promise to do.

Last year my July essay for Storytellers Unplugged was due the day I got home from the truly exhausting Comic-Con International: San Diego. I completely forgot about it and missed my SU deadline, for the first and only time. This year, my date is during the con. Knowing I’ll be surrounded by 140,000 or so people, keeping late hours, running around madly trying to do business and have fun, I’m interrupting the final chapters of a novel manuscript to write it a week in advance.

I don’t get paid for writing SU; in the greater scheme of my career, it’s a lesser deadline.

But it’s still a deadline, and a commitment. I’m a professional writer. Professionals honor their commitments.

If writing is the job you want to do, approach your writing like you know it’s your job.

By Jeff Mariotte

The question commonly asked of writers by people who don’t really understand writing is the old chestnut, “Where do you get your ideas?” By this, they usually refer to the overarching idea for any given book. We each have our own way of answering the question, whether it’s a genuine attempt to describe the genesis of a project or a joke, along the lines of “From a factory in Hackensack.”

On further reflection, though, I think the question, as stated if not as intended, is a legitimate one, and the answer we give, whatever it may be, is usually to a question that wasn’t asked.

Certainly there are books that are built predominantly on one “high-concept” idea. What if dinosaurs could be cloned and brought back to life? What if Jesus had a family, and the Vatican would do anything to keep it a secret? What if a friendly Saint Bernard dog were infected with a particularly virulent form of rabies that turned him into a four-legged death machine? (As a partial digression, I still remember the morning-show interview with Robert B. Parker and Stephen King, shortly before Cujo’s release, when King was trying to be cagey about just what Cujo was really about. Parker goaded him and wouldn’t let up until King finally exploded with, “Okay, it’s a dog! Are you happy? It’s a book about a dog!” Or words to that effect. It was all done in good humor, and Parker cracked up at King’s response. But King was right to be cagey. Cujo is about a dog, but it’s about so much more than that, too, and that, dear reader, is what I’m getting at here.)

Because most of our books are not those easy “elevator pitch” books, but are much harder to summarize in one pithy line. And every book, no matter how high the concept, contains not one or two or ten ideas, but hundreds or thousands. And the getting of those ideas is about half of what we as writers do that non-writers don’t or can’t do. The other half is setting those ideas down in sentences and paragraphs. All the language skills we might possess, however, don’t do us a jot of good if we can’t snatch the ideas from the idea fairy’s basket in the first place.

The thing our questioners don’t really understand is that every page of every book contains a plethora of ideas. Sure, the basic thrust of the book is the result of an idea (or more commonly, I believe, of two or more ideas jammed together in an unexpected way). But page by page, line by line, the ideas have to keep coming or the book doesn’t go anywhere. Who is the protagonist? What was her family life like? What did his father and mother do for a living? How many siblings? Where did they live? Why? Did they move? Where to? Why? Where does the protagonist work now? Why? What is her romantic life like? Does she have children? Is he left-handed? Does he listen to hip-hop? Country? Classical?

The answer to each of these questions, and thousands more like them, for every character in the book, every location, every situation, are ideas had by the writer, grasped and set down in type. Some of them are minor, but others will lead the writer to greater understanding of his or her story, and therefore will relate directly to the artistic success of the book. A few wrong ideas can set it rolling in the wrong direction, while the right ideas, put together in the right order, will create a satisfying and worthwhile read.

To illustrate my point, let me discuss the most recent book I’ve finished. Last month in this space I wrote about waiting, and one of the things I said I was waiting for was to learn whether or not a book (that I wrote while waiting for various work-for-hire gigs to come about) would sell. Turns out it did, and it will be published in mass-market paperback next year.

The book is called Missing White Girl, and like most books there were a couple of big ideas that came together, in addition to the thousands of smaller ones.

The first—a true story that has haunted me for more than a decade—is the story of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca found himself shipwrecked and stranded on America’s Gulf Coast in 1528. He lived as a slave among the natives, until he escaped. Eventually he found three companions, two Spaniards and a Moor, from his expedition. The four men traveled ever westward, either across Mexico or southern Texas, encountering various tribes. They developed reputations as powerful healers, which they attributed to the intercession of the Christian God and which their patients attributed to magical powers. Finally, having won the trust of the native populations, they led a procession of thousands, until they were reunited with Spanish soldiers in Mexico—soldiers who were busy killing and enslaving the local native population, the sorts of people who had become such good friends of Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades.

These four were the first non-Indians to enter the American southwest (depending on which interpretation of their route one chooses to believe). They practiced magic among people to whom magic was second nature. They united tribes, survived against incredible odds, and lived exactly as the natives did, until they found their own kind, whose goals were entirely at odds with their own experience. It’s a great story, and I have long wanted to do something with it.

The other main idea that occurs in Missing White Girl is just what the title implies—I wanted to look at the recent media phenomenon, the circus that a missing white girl inspires, especially in 224-hour cable news. Natalee Holloway is a prime example, although far from the only one. Her story is a tragic one, but is it different, substantively, from the story of a black hooker who disappears in Seattle and is assumed to be a victim of the Green River Killer? Or a Mexican girl who disappears in Juarez, possibly to become one of the 400 or so murder victims there in the past several years? Or any young person who disappears anywhere? Why do we fixate on some and essentially ignore others?

There’s another missing white girl in the novel, as well, but you’ll just have to read it to find out what she’s all about.

I set the book in the region where I live, in Arizona’s rural Sulhpur Springs Valley. The basic premise is that a missing white girl in a nearby community has sucked up all the media attention and therefore all the law enforcement resources, so when a black/Hispanic girl goes missing from a rural community, the local Sheriff’s office, run by Lieutenant Buck Shelton, himself a rancher as well as a cop, has to investigate with very little support from anyone else.

The book is a supernatural thriller, which means there are paranormal elements to the investigation and the puzzle. The Cabeza de Vaca story winds up playing an important role in the plot, because one thing that fascinates me, in fiction as in life, is history’s impact on contemporary life. Because the book is set where it is, on the US/Mexico border, immigration and border issues also come into play.

Each of the elements described are ideas, and built around these ideas are the smaller ideas I talked about earlier. Each character, each setting, each action was another idea. It’s the cramming together of all these ideas into a cohesive narrative that makes a novel.

No writer can live in a vacuum and simply pull ideas from vapor, my crack about the idea fairy notwithstanding. A book comes from observation and interpretation, from reading and watching and experiencing life, and from those things generating the ideas and the technique for putting them together. These thousands of ideas are what give a work of fiction its life, its interest. The writer has to be
receptive to these ideas, and to those moments of inspiration that spark them. The writer has to keep an open mind so the ideas will come when they’re needed (and has to know which to discard and which to nurture).

Because border issues interest me I read about them, in local papers and national ones, in books and magazines. I got to know a reporter who covers them locally, and through him met Border Patrol agents. Because Cabeza de Vaca fascinated me, I read multiple accounts of his journey and learned that one possible route brought him right through my valley, possibly right across my property (although probably not). Because my mind was open to possibilities I saw a way to combine those elements with the missing white girl phenomenon, and then to layer in the smaller ideas that supported these major ones.

I just returned from a trip to Texas, and while on the trip I was exposed to things I would not have seen had I not gone. Some of these things tie in to thoughts that have been germinating in my head for a while for another book—which, now, may well be set in Texas. I’m not sure yet that all the major ideas that have to be stuffed together have come to me, but enough of them have that I can massage them and make the rest show up.

Ideas aren’t hard to get. They’re hard to manage, and managing them is what writing is all about. Keeping an open mind and being available to the right ideas at the right time—then taking those and structuring them into a story—that’s the trick.

That, to close on another chestnut, is why we get the big bucks.

By Jeff Mariotte

Writing for a living involves a lot of waiting, sometimes for things that you will never, ever get. We put a lot of ourselves down on every page, we writers, and often we’d like to hear from editors that they were moved, or amused, or scared, or thrilled, by what we turned in to them. Wait as long as you like, but some editors just don’t provide that kind of feedback. You’ll hear what’s wrong, you’ll see a copyedited manuscript in which all your mistakes are called out for you—you’ll even, eventually, get the delivery check, which is the best praise of all.

Once a book is finished, we wait to see it in print. This can take many months, sometimes a year or more. After that comes yet more waiting to see how the public will respond to it.

Other waits are even more exasperating, though (because another truth about writers—at least, many of us—is that we already believe what we wrote is worthwhile, even without hearing it from our editors or fans. If we didn’t, we’d never send it in, never expect strangers to be willing to shell out money for our tales).

Much of my income comes from writing licensed fiction, or work-for-hire. With this type of book, an outline is essential because the licensor wants to know what you’re planning to write before you actually write it. After the outline is finished, you’re in for a wait while the editor, and then the licensor, reads and comments on your outline.

I finished my last work-for-hire novel at the end of January. Currently, I’m waiting for a phone call with a TV producer to hammer out some final details about a novel based on his show (which comes after waiting since mid-February for feedback on the outline). I’m also waiting on a collaborator to finish an outline for a different novel. Because it’s how the universe works, both of these will finally be ready on the same day, and due the same week. Wait, then scramble, then wait some more.

During the time that I’ve been waiting to start these two paying gigs, I have written: an original supernatural thriller (which my agent is shopping now—the most excruciating wait there is), two short stories (one sold to an anthology and paid, one not yet submitted), one short comic book script (sold and paid) and three full-length comic book scripts (back-end deal, not paid until after publication), and four Storytellers Unplugged columns, not to mention random blog entries, web updates, and other lesser bits of prose.

If the original novel sells, great—that time wasn’t wasted (financially speaking, not creatively). But since the regular, steady gig is the work-for-hire stuff, and that’s all been in the waiting stages, there haven’t been regular paychecks for much of the year so far. Which brings us to another aspect of Waiting for Writers 101—waiting to be paid.

Publishers like to hold onto their money as long as they can. So do I, but the grocery store likes to be paid when you take their food away, and the power company likes their money on time. The writer doesn’t get to make that kind of demand from the publisher, though (in 99.9% of cases, anyway). So we wait, and when the publisher feels like cutting a check, they do. As a writer, you’ve got to be careful about cash flow so you can survive those long periods of no money coming in, then everything owed you showing up at once.

A professional writer (at my level, I’m not talking about the Thomas Harrises and Dan Browns of the world) can’t afford to relax on the beach during these long waits. I have to keep working, keep exploring new avenues, new angles. Working keeps the creative muscles flexed, allows me to continue honing the skills necessary to improve my craft. Exploring in different directions can lead to opening up new markets that might pay off down the line.

Somewhere during the development of the English language, I’m convinced, a mistake was made. Waiters who work in restaurants don’t really wait—if anything, we wait for them to bring us our food and the check (especially when we’re late for a movie). They should be called “servers.” Writers wait. Even as we’re writing, we’re waiting (and while we’re waiting, we should be writing). “Waiters” definitely applies to us, but if we tell people that we’re writers and waiters, they get the wrong idea.

This is something that should be fixed. This is also the kind of thing that occurs to writers with too much time on their hands.

Too much time spent waiting.

By Jeff Mariotte

I’d been thinking for some time that I might write about outlines for this month’s installment. Joe Nassise touched briefly on the subject a few days ago. Then I saw this post by my friend Lee Goldberg, writing about another friend, John Connolly. In it, Lee writes, “In talking with other writers, I’ve noticed that the ones who hit the wall the most are the ones who make up their plot as they go along, preferring to be ‘surprised’ by their characters and the turns in the story.”

These incidents combined to make me think that the question of “Do I outline, or what?” has not gone away, and probably never will as long as writers write.

I’ve known authors who do it both ways. James Ellroy once told me his outlines ran far more than a hundred pages long. His books are incredibly densely plotted, with solid motivations for everything that happens, populated by characters with richly developed lives. It would be hard to imagine that he could work out such intricate plots without a very detailed outline.

On the other hand, my feeling when he told me that was that writing such a long, complex outline would use up much of the creative energy that I’d want to plow into the book itself. After creating a massive outline, would I still be interested in the project? Or would the joy of discovery, which is one of the main reasons I like writing, fade after the outline stage?

Another, purely pragmatic problem arises when I contemplate an Ellroy-ish outline. I’m not at the level where I can afford to write a book a year and still feed the family. I’m writing five or six books a year, plus comics and other projects. Taking time out of the year to write an outline that might run to 180 pages or so would essentially mean replacing one book with an outline, and you don’t get paid for an outline.

But if you analyze Ellroy’s plots, it’s hard to argue with his results.

Other writers, like the ones Lee mentioned above, don’t outline at all. These, often, are the ones who like to let their characters “run away” with the story. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like they mean that metaphorically, but like they become possessed by characters who make them type certain words on the keyboard in a certain order. I prefer to think of it less concrete terms—those characters are the ones who engage the subconsciously creative part of the writers’ brains, so they’re the ones whose stories the writers think about when they’re driving or showering or mowing the lawn. Having become consumed by those characters, when they get back to the keyboard, describing the events they’ve seen in their mind’s eyes becomes the first priority for those writers.

The lack of an outline, for these writers, means that they don’t have any outside mechanism with which to put the brakes on those runaway characters. And sometimes, of course, the characters lead the writers on a journey that turns out to be effectively plotted and builds to a satisfying conclusion. I have to believe, however, that in those cases it’s the writer’s innate mastery of structure that gets them to that ending, not the will of a character intent on dragging her author down an unmarked trail.

For my part, I use outlines, except when I don’t.

To be more precise, much of my work is in the realm of licensed fiction. In this type of work, outlines are required. The license-holder wants to know what the writer will deliver before the final manuscript is done. The license-holder’s primary concerns are that the book be an accurate reflection of the original property—that the characters in the book don’t do things the original characters wouldn’t (without a very sound explanation), that they and their world are treated with respect, and that, if the book needs to fit into a certain continuity, it does so.

Before a writer types in word one, that writer—unless he or she is overly eager and/or confident and/or facing a ridiculously punishing deadline—makes sure to get approval on an outline.

Even after that stage, the license-holder can, and sometimes does, change its mind (speaking of it as a corporate entity, although it isn’t always). In that case, a new outline has to be drafted and approved. No, the deadline doesn’t move back—such are the demands of licensed fiction.

Once that outline is approved, the book must conform to it in all particulars. If the writer decides some character needs to die for the plot to work, or someone else has to move to Ohio, the writer can plead to the editor, who will (perhaps) plead to the license-holder. Sometimes the change will be approved mid-stream, other times not. Either way, time’s a wastin’. Shoulda thought of that the first time around.

I also use a detailed outline when I want to try to sell something before I write it. In the case of my original teen horror series Witch Season, for example, I outlined all four books, in thirty pages, and included another couple of pages of brief character sketches. It worked, and I sold the series before writing more than the first chapter. When you do this for a living that’s a good way to go.

In that case, no one had to approve my outline but me, and I was free to change it at will. I had thought it out pretty thoroughly, though, and while thirty pages certainly didn’t cover every detail (leaving me plenty to discover on my journey) it did hit the important plot points that needed to happen.

My editor asked me to deviate from the outline once, because she had become enamored of a character who died late in the series. She hoped there was a way to save that character, so she didn’t have to say goodbye. I tried to help her out, but no matter how I looked at it, the character had to go. In that instance I stuck with the outline over my editor’s objections, and we both agreed that the book was the better for it.

When I’m writing purely on spec, though, I tend not to outline, at least not in much detail. I’m not sure why outlining is so difficult at those times. I wrote my horror novel The Slab with no outline, except that now and again I would jot notes about things I had realized should happen in upcoming chapters. Recently I completed another spec original, and ditto—I tried to outline it several times, got nowhere, and finally just launched into it.

I tend to write quickly, and once I have a first draft down that functions much like an outline. If I need to change things or flesh out some aspects and eliminate others, at least I have the skeleton down so I don’t forget what goes where. If I took a year or more to write a book, I’m sure an outline would be an absolute must, otherwise I’d forget what I meant to put in. Writing more than one project at a time, an outline is also handy, as a road map to where you left off and where you’re going.

So there you have it—the final word on the question, “Do I outline, or what?” The definitive answer is, “yes, outline, or what.” If you’re working on your first novel, I would say you should absolutely outline, because it might save you from spending six months writing yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. If you’re working on your fortieth, you might be a little more comfortable with issues of plot and structure.

But then, if you’re working on your fortieth, you’re probably also challenging yourself to keep improving your work. I think it’s rare to get to that kind of number without the drive to continually learn and re-learn your craft.

So maybe you should still think about outlining.

Or what.

Okay, well, better late than never. Maybe.

Since Jeff Mariotte was apparently looking over my shoulder and swiped the subject of collaborating right out from under my keyboard, I am hereby scrapping that essay (fortunately, I wasn’t far into it) and offering something altogether different. Don’t do it again, Jeff!

As most readers here probably know, I edited DEATHREALM magazine for ten years (1987-1997) and have edited (or co-edited) three anthologies — SONG OF CTHULHU, EVERMORE, and DEATHREALMS (though the latter doesn’t really count, I suppose, since all the stories came from the magazine). I’ve also written a fair amount of fiction over the last couple of decades. Many writers have an editor’s hat as well, and I imagine most of them are better writers for it. I like to think the experiences with both have worked wonders for me.

I consider every story, every novel, every piece of prose I write an exercise with a lesson to be learned somewhere in the process. Ditto for every issue of the magazine, every anthology I’ve ever edited. I look for the best lessons by reading other writers. Good ones. Great ones. Those whose work has already been through the editorial process. From these, I can get subtle pointers (and sometimes not-so-subtle) on style, on structure, on characterization, on everything associated with a work of fiction. I can learn what’s been done to death and what needs revitalizing. Little other than reading something that is on a level beyond my own better encourages me to practice and develop my own authorial voice. That, as much as plain old enjoyment of reading, keeps me looking forward to the next book in the TBR stack. Some disappointment is inevitable, of course, but in that stack, there are also plenty of lessons about what not to do.

Yes, and that last bit is taken to a whole ’nuther extreme when your TBR stack is a slush pile.

Frequently, the DEATHREALM slush pile actually consisted of two to three piles, each a foot or more high; it wasn’t just a matter of odds, it was an outright certainty that the vast majority of them would be unacceptable, if not utterly dreadful (and after several years of this, that fact becomes rather depressing). But there was plenty to be learned all the same. Needless to say, I could scarcely read beyond a few paragraphs, sometimes a few sentences, to determine whether the story might be a keeper; the ones that did lure me to the end were few and far between. Negative reinforcement came aplenty, and I certainly learned many things that were valuable to my own writing, one in particular being the aspect of characterization. Way back when, during my early development as a writer, I often wanted to humanize my characters by giving them foibles; as much as good writing was teaching me how, the slush pile taught me definitively how not.

During my tenure as DEATHREALM’s editor, I came up with a character I call Bilge. He’s the fellow who starred in countless stories from countless aspiring writers whose work reeked distinctly of bilgewater. Bilge was so prevalent that I finally added a checkbox to my rejection slip that read, “This is a Bilge story,” the detailed description of which could be found in my submission guidelines.

If the Bilge box on a writer’s rejection sheet was checked, that writer would have a pretty good idea that Mr. Deathrealm was not pleased.

Bilge’s character had a few variations, but by and large, he was a beer-swilling, misogynistic lout who almost always opened his stories by yelling “Fuck!” (sometimes followed by an objective pronoun), and who took great pleasure in the torture and mutilation of his victims — generally a woman, though occasionally a gay male. (“You F’ing whore!” was probably his most oft-blurted exclamation.) Bilge had no human traits other than the most wicked; in fact, two-dimensional is way too generous a term for him. Though once in a great while the victim in question had actually wronged him, more often than not, Bilge indulged in his maladjusted pastimes just because he was an f’ing bastard. As you might guess, at the end of the tale, the tables were always turned, and Bilge found himself in a world of hurt, inevitably at the hands of his victims, newly emerged from the grave. (As a twist, sometimes they even vampires!) In about 90 percent of his tales, poor Bilge was castrated without anesthesia. (Though I remember one where his entrails got yanked out through his mouth. I gave that one a half-point for style.)

I always wanted to feel bad for Bilge, but none of the writers ever allowed me to. Bummer, isn’t it?

Tyros (including me, back in the day) find vengeance a most compelling subject matter, and it can be, given a unique treatment that includes things such as depth, motivation, and perhaps an ounce of internal struggle. But the single-mindedness with which many approach the subject, thus birthing Bilge, is an issue that, to my mind, ought to be worked out prior to springing the story on a bunch of all-too-suspecting editors.

I haven’t read slush in several years, but based on Bilge’s continued appearance in the occasional small-press publication, I’d be willing to bet he’s still a pervasive character. (I might add that, largely because of Bilge, I learned one valuable editorial trick that I have since performed religiously: Invite-only.)

If Bilge lurks among your stable of characters, fire him. Fire him now.

And editors — if you’d like to use the “This is a Bilge story” checkbox on your rejection slip, please feel free. I’m happy to share.

–Mark Rainey

By Jeff Mariotte

My first (published) novel, Gen13: Netherwar, was a collaboration with Christopher Golden. Since then I’ve also collaborated on novels with Nancy Holder, Scott Ciencin, and Steve Niles (and on nonfiction with Nancy Holder and Maryelizabeth Hart, with whom I have also collaborated on children and marriage). In addition to these books, I have written dozens upon dozens of comic books, each of which—since I don’t do the pencils, inks, coloring or lettering—is an artistic collaboration of a different sort.

But then, every collaboration is of a different sort than the one before it, because no two writers work together the same way. For that matter, the same two writers can work different ways on different books. I’ve had many people ask me what it’s like to collaborate, how the process works, and since I usually give the somewhat facile answer that it’s always different, I thought I’d go into it in a bit more detail here.

I once heard Stephen King and Peter Straub talk about their collaboration on The Talisman. Steve was doing most of the talking, and he said, “I played with my big Wang at my house, and Peter stayed home playing with his big Wang, and before we knew it we had a book.” That was obviously a while ago, when there were Wang computers and people would admit to using them, but as a description of the process it’s not all that different than some of my collaborations.

That first one, Gen13: Netherwar, for instance, was written bi-coastally. Chris lives in Massachusetts, and I lived in California at the time. It was before we had fast e-mail—I still don’t—and we worked by sending diskettes back and forth. I was on a Mac, and Chris wasn’t, so we also had to worry about document format.

That’s the technical side of things, though, which is the easiest to work out in most cases. The creative side is where things get tricky. Chris had collaborated before, so had at least some background to draw on. The book was to be a novel about comic book characters that Chris and I had both written comics about. A packager hired Chris to write the book, and he generously invited me to join him. The first step was agreeing on a basic plot. Once we had that, we divided it into chapters. It turned out that Chris had way more on his plate than we did, so we agreed that the division of labor (and advance money) would be 75/25, with me doing 75% of the work and taking that proportion of the cash.

Then it was time to sit down with the little Mac and the diskettes. I wrote three chapters and sent the disk to Chris. He added a chapter and sent it back. We went on like this—days the Post Office would be thrilled to have back again.

Finally, we reached the end of the book. At this stage, I went over all the chapters one last time, then sent him that file, and he went over it again. The idea here was to smooth out the rough edges, the awkward transitions, and to disguise the fact that two different writers had their hands all over the thing. This is crucial—a successful collaboration can’t read like it was written by two writers. It should appear to be the work of a single writer who is not Writer A or Writer B, but a third individual with a different set of skills and life experiences than either of them.

My collaboration with Scott Ciencin was pretty similar, except that it was performed via e-mail and was a 50/50 split. Once again, it was on a Gen13 novel, and once again (although I was the one approached by the packager) Scott had far more experience than I, and provided the voice of sanity and reason.

I worked more often with Nancy Holder than with anyone else. We did the two nonfiction books, Angel: The Casefiles Vol. 1 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide Vol. 2 with Maryelizabeth (Nancy had written the first Watcher’s Guide with Chris), and Nancy and I collaborated on a Buffy/Angel crossover trilogy and an epic-length Angel novel that was to be the first Angel hardcover, called Endangered Species.

The process was different in that Nancy and I lived in the same city. We didn’t have to rack up the long distance bills to hash out story points, and although we usually worked at our own houses, trading chapters by e-mail, when we needed to we could work in the same room if necessary. The basic process was similar as with the other books—come up with a detailed outline first, break it down into chapters, then divvy up the chapters in some mutually beneficial fashion. On Endangered Species, for instance, Nancy took all the chapters set in Hawaii, where she has lived, and I took the chapters set in the California desert because I was a long-time desert rat and had spent a lot of time there. Sharing the expertise of years is a good reason to consider collaboration–if, for instance, you have a brilliant idea for a medical thriller but no medical background, you might team up with a doctor who doesn’t have time to write a novel herself.

Nancy and I didn’t always keep up with one another, pace-wise, which made for some more complicated gymnastics later on. If Writer B is doing chapter 17 and Writer A hasn’t yet done 15 or 16, then, no matter how detailed the outline is, Writer B is going to have to make some guesses about what happens in those chapters, and those guesses aren’t always going to be correct.

At least in a tie-in book, both authors know who the characters are because they exist outside of the novel. Collaborating on an original, which both Chris and Nancy have done but I have not, strikes me as more difficult, and even more crucial that he work be done in order instead of piecemeal, because the characters and their world are being created from whole cloth as the story is told.

With Steve Niles, I wrote my most recent release, horror/vampire novel 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead. This one broke most of the rules I’ve already laid out here. It’s a tie-in, based on a comic book series created and written by Steve. He did a fairly comprehensive outline (although I had to tweak it in spots), and then I wrote the bulk of the novel from that outline. Interspersed in the narrative are excerpts from a fictional book called 30 Days of Night that plays a major role in the comic book series (also called 30 Days of Night), and I left spaces for those excerpts, which Steve wrote after I was done with my draft of the main narrative. Steve took the narrative, did his own pass over it, and added in the “excerpts.” Since he is the originator of the characters and concepts, his is the final word on those, which is unusual in tie-in writing (one rarely has the chance to write an Angel novel with Joss Whedon or David Greenwalt, for instance).

Collaboration can be a frustrating experience because there’s another pair of hands and an independent brain working on what can be an intensely personal project. But it can also be a creative eye-opener, allowing you a rare peek into another writer’s mind, creative processes, tricks and techniques. For a beginning writer, it can be invaluable, because you can learn things there’s no other way to discover, and you can wind up with a published work, providing both income and a level of confidence that you can do it again, solo. There will be arguments and compromises, and I recommend laying out the ground rules—how do you work, how do you divide the labor, and how do you divide the money—before you start. Ideally on pap
er, as a written contract, however informal. I’ve heard about collaborations that have ruined friendships, but have experienced collaborations that have cemented them.

If you’re thinking about a collaboration, I recommend the experience. Be wary of the traps and look for the blessings. The result of all the work you do will be a book with your name on it that you could not have written by yourself, but also could not have been written without you. That’s a pretty cool thing.

By Jeff Mariotte

I can’t remember which writer it was who said (or wrote) “I write the books I’d like to read, if only someone else would write them” (paraphrasing here; since I can’t remember who it was, I certainly can’t remember the exact words. But that was the meat of it).

It’s a good approach, though, whoever said it. Or as Rick Nelson put it in song, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”

Another bit of writerly wisdom (albeit less sound) is: “write what you know.” We’ve all heard that one, and it’s true to a point—but only to a point. It’s true that a lifelong Manhattanite who has never left the city and whose entire understanding of the historical West comes from reruns of F Troop will likely not write a very good historical Western. It’s also true that, while very few of us have ever been serial killers, we have some things in common with them. We may never have stalked a human through a darkened, unfamiliar apartment, but most of us have walked through an unfamiliar space in the dark, even if it’s just a hotel room or our own house the day after moving, when we don’t know where anything—even the light switch—has ended up. We’ve also known anxiety that something we’re doing might go wrong. We’ve known desire—for a mate, a new job, a new car, a rare book—that we can translate into the killer’s desire. Writing what you know doesn’t have to mean that we can only transcribe our own life experience (how boring would that be?), but that we take aspects of our experience and apply it to different characters and situations.

I actually prefer to combine these two bits of received wisdom into one: write what you want to know. I bring this up now because of a couple of recent reading experiences, when things that I know slammed up against things that I read in such a way as to pull me out of the story, and that’s never a good thing. One was in a recent Jonah Hex comic, when DC Western character Bat Lash (full disclosure: both Jonah and Bat appear in a novel I just finished for DC Comics, called Superman: Trail of Time) was playing faro, and claimed a “full house.” In faro, however, players don’t have poker hands, and there’s no such thing as a full house. The artist researched and drew a proper faro layout, but the writers didn’t put the effort into knowing how the game was played.

The other incident was in Stephen King’s Cell. As a preface, I think King is one of the best popular novelists the English language has ever had, and I love to read him. But in Cell, protagonist Clay Riddell has just been to Boston, where he sold a graphic novel to Dark Horse Comics for a substantial piece of change. As the city goes nuts around him, he carries his portfolio containing “…his Dark Wanderer pictures (to him they were always pictures, never drawings or illustrations)…”

What’s wrong with all this? (Besides the fact that six pages earlier, we had the sentence “All but a dozen or so of his Dark Wanderer drawings were in there, and it was the drawings that his mind seized on”—the drawings/pictures slip is a contradiction a copy editor should have caught, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about today.)

With more than 15 years of experience in virtually every aspect of the comics industry, I can say these things are almost universally true:

a) Dark Horse, located in Oregon, isn’t going to send someone to Boston to view a proposal by an unknown (or even a known). They’d tell Clay to mail it to them, or to come to a convention they’ll be at anyway. Most comics proposals are done via mail or e-mail, not in person.

b) Said unknown isn’t going to sell a “graphic novel” for big bank. Maybe he’ll get a commitment for a comic book miniseries, if the work is good enough. “Graphic novel” and “comic book” aren’t synonymous.

c) No pro artist—not even any artist who’s been around comics long enough to know what size to draw his pages—calls his pages “pictures” or “drawings” or “illustrations.” Clay would call them “pages” (which he does once or twice, but not consistently). That’s what they are, after all—parts of a whole, not individual stand-alone pieces of art. He might have a few drawings in the portfolio too—character studies, that kind of thing, to back up his proposal, but Dark Horse would want to see the pages, not the drawings.

How many readers, of the millions Steve has earned, will be bothered by these mistakes? A small handful. Those of us who are, though, will find Cell less real than many of his other books simply because we can’t believe in the initial motivation for the character to be in Boston when things go haywire, and that’s the set-up for everything that follows.

I’m not going to suggest that Steve did no research for that aspect of the book, but chances are he’s been around comics long enough to think he knew how to phrase what he wanted to say, and he was wrong.

Doing research is fun if you’re learning about things you want to learn about anyway, have a reason for doing so (which comes with a paycheck), and can deduct your research costs from your taxes. What could be better?

You might spend days, weeks, months or years writing a novel that a reader can get through in a few hours, so you’d better be interested in what you’re writing about. If you’re interested, you might as well learn what you can and strive to get the facts right. And if you’re not, that lack of interest will surely come across in the finished work, causing your reader to lose interest as well.

Knowing more about your subject matter can help you add the telling detail, the specificity that makes a book come alive to the reader. Writing about a comic artist, for instance, if you have her working on Blue Line Pro art boards, then you’ve got an amateur or a newbie, who picks it up at her local comic shop but doesn’t know that the word Pro in the name doesn’t mean it’s what the pros use, because they almost never do. An actual pro is far more likely to use DC or Marvel illustration board left over from her last job for those companies, because it’s better board and hey! It’s free! The handful of readers who are comics artists, or know one, will nod knowingly at this, because it rings true. It pulls them into the story. The rest of the world will appreciate the insight into the way that business works, because one of the fulfilling aspects of fiction is that it takes us into worlds we wouldn’t or couldn’t visit otherwise.

I get things wrong from time to time, too, of course. None of us are perfect. In my Andromeda novel, I apparently did my interstellar math wrong (although I was working from a map of the Andromeda universe, as determined by the show’s producers) and put too many parsecs between one point and another. More commonly, in TV tie-in work, things are revealed on the show after your book is done but before publication, or before a given reader sees the book, that contradict what you thought was true when you wrote it. So it’s wrong even if it was beyond your control.

For my next book (to be released by Pocket Books a week from today—check it out!), 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead (written with Steve Niles, who created the original comic) I learned facts about FBI agents (which including asking questions of one as well as online research), details about Barrow, AK and its airport, where streetwalkers m
ight stroll in Madison, WI (it’s amazing what you can find out online), incidents of disappearances of entire communities throughout history, and many other fun bits of knowledge. Doing so helps keep me interested in what I’m writing and helps keep the book real (even though it’s about vampires, which I hope are imaginary).

Learning new things is never bad. Learning them and applying what you’ve learned to your craft is something you owe yourself and your audience. So write the book you wish you could read, and to do it, write about something you wanted to learn anyway. There’s no down side.

By Jeff Mariotte

Since I’m in the last days of a novel’s first draft (and because it’s germane to the conversation here at SU, I’ll say that I’m in the camp of writers who power through to the finish to get the whole story out, and then go back and worry about the niceties), this month’s essay won’t be entirely original, but will instead point you toward a conversation begun on my blog Friday and expand a bit on that.

Here’s the original post. The whole thing started because I read that there was a new, authorized sequel to Peter Pan coming out, and it struck me that Peter Pan in Scarlet, along with books like The Godfather Returns and Scarlett, are tie-in books every bit as much as novels based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Wars or Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The difference is that they’re not treated as if they are. Instead, they’re given more “legitimacy,” by publishers, press, and public. They are published in hardcover to great fanfare, they are extensively advertised, they are reviewed and they sell many, many copies, earning their authors big advances and nice royalties.

They are, of course, based on familiar properties, beloved by millions. Then again, so are Buffy and Star Wars. CSI has become every bit the 21st Century cultural touchstone that The Godfather was in its time. As the top-rated TV show for several years running, exported around the world, it’s been watched by more people than ever read the original Godfather novel, and probably more than have seen the movie. It has influenced everything from real criminal trials to the number of people studying for careers in criminal forensics to cinematography styles in other shows and movies. There’s no reason, except base prejudice, that every new CSI novel is not a huge hardcover bestseller.

The problem is that tie-ins live in a literary ghetto. They get no respect from society at large. What concerns me is not that the lack of academic attention—there’ll probably never be graduate courses on epistemological truth as revealed by Data in Star Trek novels of the late 20th Century, and that’s fine. But respect in the greater sense translates into attention, which translates into sales, which translates into money. For someone who makes a living at this game, and would like to be able to put money away against the possibility of a day when he won’t be able to do so, that is an important point indeed.

Thinking about that, I realized that the two ways I make most of my income are by writing tie-in novels and comics and by writing original horror novels and comics. Sometimes I even get to combine horror with tie-ins, as in the many novels I’ve written based on the Angel TV show, in which I got to tell ghost stories, haunted house stories, Cthulhu Mythos stories, and more. The book I’m just wrapping up is largely about Superman, the DC Comics character, but because I love horror and Westerns, he is teamed with the Phantom Stranger and the Demon, and he travels back to the old West to battle alongside Jonah Hex, El Diablo, and more of DC’s Western characters.

And if there’s another literary ghetto with just about as much social acceptance as tie-ins, it’s horror.

There are two basic responses you can have to working in the ghetto. The easiest, I think, is to embrace it. Horror is by its nature about outsiders. It doesn’t play well with others. It focuses on the monsters around us and the monsters within us. If members of polite society enjoy it—or even “get” it—then the writer hasn’t done his or her job, and it’s not horrific enough. Put on the black T-shirt, turn up the death metal, and ignore the rubes passing by outside. This option, I believe, leads to further marginalization, to focus on small presses and internet publication, and ultimately to impoverished writers—poverty being a state to which I am opposed.

I prefer the second option, which is not to accept literary ghettos. There is excellent writing to be found in horror, just as there is in tie-ins. Conversely, there is some truly wretched writing to be found in the mainstream, and in other, more socially approved, genres. It is not the bookstore classification that defines quality, and it should not be the classification that creates a self-fulfilling sales prophecy. A good horror novel or a good CSI novel should have the potential to earn just as much money as a good mainstream novel.

Horror, too, has its exceptions, like the Godfather and Gone With the Wind tie-in books I started this discussion with. There are always the handful of horror writers who sell lots of copies and earn millions—the Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzs, Clive Barkers and Anne Rices (although Kooontz claims not to write horror, and Rice has turned her attention to religion).

But Dean is a horror writer, and there are plenty of other writers putting out one horror novel after another. These books don’t get claimed by the genre, and therefore there are readers who “don’t read horror” who are happily plunking down $30 for each new hardcover. James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Michael Gruber spring immediately to mind; you can surely think of others.

And horror has a distinguished history as long as literature itself. The first stories told around campfires at the dawn of humanity were about spirits working for good or evil, and how their work affected people. Beowulf, often acknowledged as the first work of pure literature, is a horror story. Its modern companion, Grendel, by literary darling John Gardner, is both horror and a tie-in—someone tell the universities!

I believe those of us working in these noble professions should take every effort to point out to the world at large that they do read horror and they do read tie-ins and hell, they even read Westerns, every time Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy puts out a new book, and it wouldn’t hurt them to drop the blinders and delve a little deeper into those genres. Or they should forget genre altogether and read what interests them from one day to the next, one book to another.

If we don’t, no one else is going to.

By Jeff Mariotte

I don’t know if Charles Dickens originated the Christmastime ghost story with his “A Christmas Carol” or if that subgenre of horror predates him, but by now it’s a grand tradition, familiar to generations of horror writers and readers. It’s common in Britain to read ghost stories around the fireplace during the holidays, and the BBC once ran an eight-year program adapting some of the Christmas ghost stories of M. R. James. I have a friend who used to write a ghost story for his wife every Christmas season; some of these stories were published in places like Night Cry Magazine, I believe, back when there was such a thing.

Since it’s almost Christmas, I’ll tell you a ghost story of my own.

Many years ago, I moved with my family to Germany because my father, who worked for the Department of Defense, was transferred to the city of Worms (the Germans pronounce it Vorms, but we who’ve read our Lovecraft know better) to work at the U.S. Army base there. Worms was a fascinating place to live. It was captured by the Romans in 14 BC, and built up in typical Roman fashion. I used to be able to touch, on a daily basis, a high, arched wall built by Roman hands. The town’s historical museum was full of artifacts from that era and others. The Worms cathedral, the Dom, was begun in the 10th century, and my high school graduation was held inside. Worms is also famous for the ill-named Diet of Worms (although there were, in fact, many of these, and the most notorious one is the Reichstag of 1521, at which Martin Luther was proclaimed an outlaw after his speech refusing to recant his religious beliefs).

But I was talking about ghosts.

We moved there shortly before the beginning of my senior year of high school. My older brother was away at college, so it was my parents, my little sister, and me. We arrived in Germany a few days after the terror incident and killings at the Munich Olympics, and the country was essentially an armed camp.

For the first month or so we lived in a hotel while looking for a more permanent home. After that, although we still had not found our own place, a co-worker of my father’s offered to let us use his house while he and his family spent some months stateside. We took him up on the offer and moved out of the hotel. I offer this perhaps excessive detail so you’ll know that by the time we moved into the house, I was no longer suffering from jet lag or the tension of moving to a strange, new country with heavily armed troops and police everywhere. I had started school, I had lived in Europe before. For the most part I was fairly well settled in.

The house we took over was small for us, with only two bedrooms. My parents got one, and my sister the other. I was to sleep on a long, comfortable couch downstairs. I would essentially have the entire finished basement to myself, with its own bath and a couple of rooms, but no real bed.

Except that first night, when I went downstairs and tried to sleep, I could not. I was tense. I had that skin-prickling feeling of being watched. I got up, turned on a light, tried to read for a while. Soon I’d get sleepy, I told myself, and it would all be fine.

I didn’t. I got out of the makeshift bed, wandered around, tried to look out the little ground-level windows to see if there really was someone looking in at me. I wasn’t simply tense. I was genuinely frightened. My skin was crawling with fear.

Finally, I gave up trying to fight it and went upstairs. Curled up on a much smaller sofa and fell fast asleep. In the morning, my parents found me there, without even a blanket or pillow.

For the rest of three months we lived in that house, I never felt comfortable in that basement. I went down occasionally, if I had to. I didn’t stay any longer than necessary, and I never again tried to sleep down there. Even though I was a teenage boy and my privacy, up in the living room, was nonexistent, I couldn’t bring myself to shift back down. The upstairs sofa was small and stiff, while the downstairs couch was longer than me, and plenty comfortable. It was the basement that was wrong, not the furniture in it. When we finally moved into an apartment of our own, just before Christmas, I heaved a sigh of relief and was thrilled to have my own room again.

That’s it. I never saw any apparitions, any spectral figures, or heard the clanking of chains or eerie howls. I never forgot about the basement, but I didn’t obsess on it, after we were gone. I might have just decided that the feeling I had there, the sensation that the place was just bad in some way, was simply teenage hormones gone amuck in some way.

Except that years later, after I was living in California and my parents had moved to South Carolina, I was visiting them during the summer and the subject of that house came up. I mentioned the basement, and how I had never liked it, and my mother said, “Of course, that murder took place there.”

I had not heard about any murder. It turned out that she didn’t hear about it for at least another year after we left the house, long after I had returned Stateside for college. She had never thought to mention it to me before. Worms was not a big city, and homicide was almost unheard of there, only a handful over the course of the 20th century.

One of them—the harsh, nasty bludgeoning of a teenaged boy by an older man who had tried to imprison the boy—had occurred in that basement.

The basement that felt bad, that felt wrong, in some chilling, terrible way.

Electrical impulses? The soul of the victim, looking for justice or some elusive peace? The memory of violence living on in the bricks and floors and glass that made up the basement?

I don’t know. I won’t even speculate.

But I always hated that place.

Happy holidays, and a Merry haunted Christmas to you.