Justine MuskJust another Storytellers Unplugged weblog

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I started Twittering a few days ago. For those of you who don’t know (or care) what Twitter is – www.twitter.com — it’s basically a way of microblogging from your mobile device. You can draw the attention of your ‘followers’ to a news item on Darfur or pose a Zen riddle or set up an impromptu meeting at the local Starbucks or hype some cool new person or service. You could also announce your arrival at Taco Bell and your intention to choose hot sauce over mild.

It was actually for this last – the Taco Bell kind of thing – that Twitter was purportedly designed. (Or maybe they designed the thing and tried to figure out what it could be used for and how it could be sold and this was the best they could come up with.) You can ‘follow’ – I’m from a generation that still equates this with ‘stalking’, but nevermind – other participants of Twitter and text them about all those little things that you would never bother to blog or email about. The fact that there’s a reason why you would not blog or email such things seems entirely beside the point.

Because it’s something you can do when you’re standing in line. Or stuck in traffic. Or waiting for the dermatologist. Or whatever.

It’s something you can do when you’re bored.

As I became acquainted with Twitter, I came across this idea so many times – you can Twitter people when you’re standing in line and you’re bored – that I started imagining Boredom as something like the First Evil in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer. An ancient menace so great and potentially overwhelming that society as a whole must come together and use everything in their employ – including and especially technology — to fight it off .

Because the gods forbid we be bored.

Or allow our kids to be bored.

People will say, “Oh, I get bored so easily,” as if they’re proud of this, as if it’s evidence of superior intelligence. As if it’s never occurred to them that maybe they could just carry around a good book.

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I remember a line from a Billy Joel song I heard countless times growing up: “…bored to death on Sunday afternoons.” What suburban kid of that time didn’t know what he was talking about? But this was when home entertainment was limited to twelve channels of television and whatever books happened to be in the house. Entertainment was like information: if we wanted it, we usually had to get off our asses and go out and find it.

Boredom drove us to do that. Boredom forced us, over time, to figure out just what it is we enjoy doing. Boredom might even force us to get good at it.

But now that flow has reversed itself. Instead of us going out to entertainment, information, stimulation — all these things come to us, beamed from a multitude of directions. You don’t have to leave the house. You don’t even have to leave your room. The Internet is redefining what it means to be alone — when entire social networks are just a click away.

And maybe it’s also redefining what it means to be bored. Surfing the Internet on a Sunday afternoon takes you from almost no choices to perhaps way too many.

You’re not competing for entertainment anymore. Entertainment is competing for you.

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I was born on the young end of the so-called Generation X, and we were pretty good at being bored.

Even as we grew up watching computers and video games and MTV infiltrate our homes, slowly becoming as commonplace as a lamp or a bed, only surprising you when it’s not there – we spent a lot of time being bored. We were the latch key kids who watched old reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Three’s Company and One Day At A Time and The Jeffersons. We got left to our own devices a lot. We graduated into a job market gridlocked by baby boomers who weren’t going anywhere. They made it hard to advance, and then, when the recession hit, it became difficult to get a job at all. We moved back home with our parents. We looked for work. We had time on our hands, little to lose, and very little trust in any future we didn’t create for ourselves.

The term Generation X was coined by Canadian writer Douglas Copeland. Copeland’s inspiration for it came from a lesser-known book by Paul Allen called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. It’s a witty, scathing, insightful dissection of the various classes and the sensibilities that define them. Class, says Allen, isn’t just income but a state of mind (and taste). This holds true whether you’re lower-lower or lower-upper or somewhere in the middle or lower-upper or upper-upper or so wealthy that you disappear into a parallel land of private schools and personal jets and walls and gates and extensive security systems.

But then there’s the alternative. The X class. The way out. X’ers are those who’ve cut themselves free from the old social hierarchies. “The young flocking to the cities to devote themselves to ‘art’, ‘writing’, ‘creative work’ – anything, virtually, that liberates them from the presence of a boss or superviser – are aspirant X people, and if they succeed in capitalizing on their talents, they may end up as fully fledged X types…Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theatres of class which enclose others,” states Allen.

In other words: Gen X’ers were those well-educated types who hung out in coffee shops a lot. They didn’t necessarily mean to be there, but it’s where the current of their time and place had put them.

You do what you can.

And out of that boredom, all that time to think and dream, a new cultural sensibility began to manifest itself through people like Cobain and Tarantino and Beck. As Richard Linklater put it in a Newsday interview: “Watching three movies a day and reading doesn’t sound productive, but it got me here.” Linklater seized on the word ‘slacker’ and definied it as “someone who’s being responsible to themselves…finding your own path through this maze of programming and pressures.” Linklater’s own path led to a movie called, appropriately enough, Slacker, and suddenly years of doing what appeared to be very little propelled him into a successful movie career.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a different branch of those quirky X types were doing the kinds of stuff that they thought was cool, like putting together lists of cool web sites on this new thing called the Internet. Some of these lists just kept growing and growing until they became a little company called Yahoo.

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So what I’m wondering is this: what would have happened if all those Gen X graduates had graduated right into the well-paying jobs they tried so hard and so desperately to find? If they hadn’t had the time and space to dream up alternative worlds and ways of being, until the very word ‘alternative’ became a mainstream kind of genre? It’s all very well to talk about ‘finding your own path’ and ‘escaping out the back doors’ of the established structures of society, but that always comes at a price, especially when you’ve already got a mountain of student debt to pay off. With Gen X, though, that kind of lifestyle – call it class X, bohemian, alternative, counter-cultural, whatever – became the norm, sucking in a lot of very smart, very hard-working young people who didn’t choose ‘slackerness’ but had it thrust upon them. So out of those states of frustration and boredom and stagnancy, people dreamed up new stuff. Some of those dreams got put into motion, by dreamers who were also skilled and hardworking enough to execute it well and make it mean something to others, to have an impact on the culture, to take ideas from the fringes and arrow them into the heart of mainstream thinking.

Creative work is hard work; a successful artist is a disciplined artist. I’m not trying to imply otherwise. It’s way too easy to pose as an artist or writer without doing the near-daily grind of struggle, practice, feedback, rejection, revision necessary to actually become one. But sometimes you have to just detach from everything and sit alone with yourself for a while and let yourself be bored. The mind, after all, needs to move. And if it can’t sit back and be entertained, if it’s forced to come up with its own ways and tricks of entertaining itself…then it will, and in the process you just might discover who it is you really are and what it is you truly want. In the silence and stillness of boredom, you hear yourself think. You have no other choice.

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Back to Twitter. I like Twitter. It’s the kind of thing that, when someone first explains to you, you think Why would someone want to do this? Why would I possibly want to ‘follow’ someone through the banal boring details of their day? I have enough banal boring details in my own day.

Then I had a conversation with Jason Calacanis, one of these cutting-edge techie types who understands this stuff so well he is now very wealthy (or, as he so delicately likes to put it, “blown out”). Jason talked about how an invention like this is like paper. Give paper to ten different people, they’ll do four or six or ten different things with it: draw on it, make paper airplanes, line the kitty litter, whatever. People will play around until some use for it emerges that seems so brilliant and obvious that not only will everybody start using it that same way, people will wonder how they ever lived without it. Twitter, Jason said, will be like that, is starting to be like that already. People are assigning it new reasons of being. They’’re already bored with the original ones. And soon it will take its place alongside email and Paypal and Amazon and blogs and Google and iPods and TiVo and all those things we can’t believe we ever lived without.

It could also be that Twitter will become the equivalent, in this day of overscheduled teenagers and hectic work lives and the kind of constant motion that keeps us moving away from each other, of slacking off in a coffee shop. Talking about stupid stuff while, underneath it all, bits of ideas go roaming and find other bits of ideas and join up in weird, quirky and wonderful ways. As I scroll down my list of those I’m ‘following,’ I’m exposed to fragments of multiple real-time conversations juxtaposed against each other, often about things I’d never discuss with people I’d never meet in places I’ll never go to. If nothing else, Twitter is yet another way for memes to replicate themselves, to travel in far-reaching, sly, insidious ways.

And one day, when I’ve had enough, I’ll turn it off temporarily – I’ll turn everything off. I’ll lose myself in my own head and listen to what’s going on inside it. And, when the pain of doing nothing – the pain of accumulated boredom — begins to outweigh the pain of actually writing, I’ll start a new novel or story or screenplay.

I’ll put my mind in a space where it is forced to entertain itself, and it will use everything at its disposal, everything it has gathered from the world, to do just that.

Maybe in the end that’s what art is – our collective need to entertain ourselves, to make something out of all the noise in our head, engage in something interesting, beat back the beast of boredom. We remove ourselves to places of solitude and find new ways of reaching out to the world. We go deep into ourselves and our own experience and find nothing less than the human condition. Boredom – with ourselves, our lives, our routine ways of doing and being – creates the very need for creation. And so as society – or at least prominent segments of it – moves more and more toward constant connection and neverending stimulation, we might have to seek out boredom the way we once had to seek out entertainment.

Which would be rather ironic.

But irony itself can be very entertaining.

—Justine Musk

–Justine Musk

So here’s the thing.

I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized:

I got nuthin’.

Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your writing when the writing becomes about not writing. It is time to refuel, wander the poppy fields and watch the comets in the sky. Time to let my mind turn over a few times, shake itself out, do a little yoga. I wouldn’t say I’m blocked, exactly. I’ve got stuff to work on, and I’m excited about all of it. But I also just finished a four hundred pound novel that I’ve been carrying around for a while. My muscles are sore. It’s a good kind of sore. But like I said:

I got nuthin’.

So I give you instead a novel excerpt. This is what happens around page 60 of LORD OF BONES, sequel to my first novel BLOODANGEL. The books are contemporary, urban fantasy shot through with currents of horror. I like to think this chapter is one of them.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Next month we shall return to our regular programming.

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN

(excerpt from LORD OF BONES, Roc/Penguin, July ’08)

In truth, the surfer had noticed something earlier that morning, although he put it out of his mind right after.

There had been one wave. One perfect wave. He saw it on the horizon and thought it must be some kind of heavenly gift, because this was one of those times when the sea wasn’t up to anything much; surfers saw you getting out of your truck with your board over your shoulder and greeted you with the dreaded, Hey, mate, should have been here yesterday. He agreed with them – he should have been here yesterday, meant to be here yesterday, except his girlfriend’s mother arrived early and threw his plans to hell.

But then this wave came out of nowhere, and he eyed and measured the moments and paddled out for it and man met wave in perfect salt-spray communion. He became more and less than a man, flowing out of the water and the board beneath his feet. The sea swept him high. He crouched and carved through this world of blue-green streaming wonder, salt on his lips and in his eyes, and he felt his heart roar along with the ocean.

Someone else was in the wave with him.

He registered it in pieces. The shadow rising inside the wall of water. The slithering touch across his shoulders, thick wet whisper in his ear. The sense of presence which had nothing to do with the sea, slipping through the spray and light. Riding the sea. Riding him.

Then it was gone.

So that was the first thing. Perhaps it was a warning. It might have helped him, saved him, if he had heeded it as such: a sign that the world was not quite right today. Better to get off the water, detach himself from his board, spend the day on the sand with his girlfriend in her fetching white bikini, her skin smelling of coconut oil, the icebox packed with beer and roast beef sandwiches and ice cream, part of her strategy to lure him away from the waves for at least a little bit, so she could spend quality time with him instead of her Peter Carey novel.

But he was a water baby grown into an ocean prince. The sea was his home. This presence he had sensed had nothing to do with the ocean. It came from somewhere else entirely. So he dismissed it as some odd, fleeting phenomenon, a trick of the light and the mind. Believing in it would be like believing in a ghost, and, despite what many in his family considered to be his highly flaky, New Age kind of nature, he was much too practical for that.

So he straddled his board, and floated, and meditated on the beauty of the day.

He was thirty-seven, lean and leathered from a lifetime spent outdoors. His long, straight hair had turned grey by the time he was twenty-five, silver ten years later. Around his neck he wore a tiger’s eye for luck and guidance, a shark’s tooth for power and virility.

Sunlight on his shoulders, sunwarmed water sweeping round his dangling legs. In the near-distance, Bondi Beach curved like a thick golden smile into the sea. Music and voices floated over to him – British and German tourists – but it was quieter here, on the south side, where rip currents made life more hazardous. He was a strong swimmer, always had been. He and the sea understood one another. He had survived a near-drowning experience as a child, an encounter with a tiger shark as a teen. The sea demanded his awe. Twice it could have killed him, but it chose to let him go. He loved it for that.

So when the shadow came up beneath him, he noticed it first with a sense of detachment. He thought, Shark?, and drew his legs onto the board, but it didn’t really move like a shark – rising and expanding, a blooming darkness in the water– and that was when he felt coldness along his spine and in his belly, because of the wrongness, because there was nothing in the ocean that should look or move like that.

And then the thing turned over.

Turned over slowly, slowly enough for him to realize there was a shape, a body to it, and he realized he was going to see its face as the water swelled and streamed beneath him and the board rose up, and a whimper escaped him and too late he thought to close his eyes because the face, the deep lipless pit of the mouth and rows on rows of teeth, the small ashy glints of countless eyes and they were all gazing straight at him, and he saw the intelligence in them, and he saw the black streaming limbs floating up towards him, leisurely, as if this thing had all the time in the world, and the surfboard flipped over with that same insolent laziness and he was in the water, thrashing, cold smooth blackness folding over him, hands skating across his body and latching on his calves, and he thrashed at the surface of the water and spat out salty water and screamed, not even screaming words, his mind had gone beyond words, and then he was screaming down through the water, watching the river of bubbles of his life force escaping from his wide frozen mouth as he felt himself pulled down, down, to where the sunlight filtered out completely and all warmth vanished and there was nothing but the cold and the dark.

Absorbed in her novel, Hilary looked up because she thought she heard something: a cry familiar yet odd, which had nothing to do with a sunny Sydney day at the beach.

Johnny? she thought. Except that couldn’t have been him.

And her mind circled back to a recurring nightmare: a great white somehow getting past the shark net and honing straight on Johnny. It was a fear which Johnny himself liked to laugh at. “That’s ‘cause you’re from Canada,” he would tell her. “You know how people here will assume Canadians get attacked by, like, bears and shit? It’s the same thing.”

“Canadians do get attacked by bears,” she said defensively. “I mean, every once in a while.”

“Every once in a while.”

“It does happen.”

“You know someone personally who’s been attacked by a bear? You know even a friend of a friend who got eaten by a bear?”

“There are shark attacks in the news. I read about them.”

“They’re in the news,” he said reasonably, “because they are news. If there was anything ordinary about them, they wouldn’t exactly be news, now would they?”

And he gave her that grin, that broad white grin flashing against his tanned face, deep lines radiating out from his eyes. All that man is, is a child grown older, Hilary’s mother had sniffed, but then Johnny had turned that same smile on her, called her ma’am and held open doors and asked what kind of wine she liked so he could go buy a bottle before putting the chicken and corn on the grill. A child grown older, Hilary’s mother had repeated, before relenting a little. But he’s got nice manners, that one. And he seems to treat you well. You seem happy.

Hilary stood up in the sand, scanning the water, twisting the small diamond ring along her finger.

She saw surfers in the distance, bobbing in the bright blue as they waited for waves that didn’t seem to be coming. They were too far away to see if one might be Johnny. The cry lingered in her mind, uneasily, like a dream you couldn’t remember enough to figure out why it disturbed you.

And then, along the stretch of water directly in front of her, she saw his silver head break the surface.

See, she thought, you were just being silly…but no denying the weakness in her knees, the long sigh escaping her.

Still.

Something odd about the way his face and torso were just…rising from the surface like that. Something odd, too, about the way the little kids acted. Busy with their pails and shovels and castle-building, they saw him coming and broke, scattering up the sand, one of them yelling “Mama! Mama!”

Water streaming off his body, that silver hair he was so proud of slicked along his head and shoulders. She saw he was naked. He had gone into the water in blue-and-white boardshorts and was coming out nude, just the tiger’s-eye necklace circling his throat, and the black leather cord with the shark’s tooth falling between his nipples, as unconcerned about his genitals swinging freely between his carved-out thighs as if emerging from the shower with only herself to witness.

Then his eyes locked on hers, and he came towards her in a way that seemed much too fluid, and he gave her a grin, white jagged teeth inside that tanned skin, and it was not the grin, the teeth, she remembered.

And Hilary felt, in that moment, the first unhinging of her sanity.

He was right in front of her and he smelled of seaweed and something else, something that made her remember her father’s coffin beneath a weight of roses, and he took her wrist in her hand. His grip was too tight and too hot. He brought her gently to the ground and knelt in front of her, the both of them on her oversized red towel, and he said, “What’s my name?”

“What—“

“What’s my name?”

“Johnny.”

He cocked his head. “Maybe we can think of something else. Where do I go?”

She stared at him.

His eyes were like sun-scorched discs of violet. No man had eyes like that. Those were not Johnny’s eyes. Johnny’s eyes were blue, like faded denim. This man’s pupils were like small black pits she could see all the way down into, to where things slithered at the bottom. The hot grip on her wrist, the dripping nakedness, were repulsive to her, and she tried to squirm away but he pulled her closer.

“Where do I go?” he said. “Where is the heart?”

“The heart?”

“The heart of things. The center. I have people waiting and I mustn’t be late.” Again, the grin. “It’s rude.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

It was very hard to get the words out.

She said, “What happened to Johnny? My Johnny?”

“Oh.” Casual flick of his head. “That one’s gone.” He lowered his face to hers, breathed in deep, his nostrils quivering. She was aware of her own long body, exposed in the white bikini. She felt very cold. The sun seemed to have gone away. Maybe that’s why she was trembling?

“Ahhhh,” he said, and smacked his lips. She caught again the sharp white teeth. Cannibal teeth, she thought. Didn’t cannibals file their teeth like that? And this person, this thing, who was not Johnny even though he was in Johnny’s body, rocked back his head and rolled it along his shoulders and said, “It’s good to be back. It is.” Then the scorched-out eyes leveled with hers and she tried to look away but he touched her jaw with his other hand and guided her face back to his. Once again she was spiraling into the black void of those pinprick pupils, pinpricks that widened and deepened as if to take her in and swallow her down. For a moment she thought he would kiss her and she felt, again, that odd freewheeling feeling of a mind coming loose, the first bricks tumbling out of a wall. “Look at you, little thing,” said the Johnny-thing, “I guess we could have some fun,” and he was tugging her to her feet, and she wanted to scream but her voice was snuffed out and she wanted to run yet felt herself padding after him, as he hummed and sang, as the beach stretched away on either side and surfers waited for waves and sunbathing tourists went about their day. As if it was any other.

By Justine Musk

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One of the most common questions people ask me about writing – other than “where do you get your ideas” (or, as my mother-in-law once put it, “How does a nice trophy wife like you come up with stuff like this?” I assume she was joking, or at least half-joking, because that question still cracks me up, although when I share it with others they tend to look slightly horrified ) – is “Do you outline?”

And one of the things that annoys me about talking about writing is that so many people tend to come down so definitively on one side or the other.

If you don’t outline then you risk aimless, self-indulgent writing and months or years of wasted time and you’re a fool!

If you do outline, then you risk rigid, formulaic, predictable fiction and you’re a fool!

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Ultimately when we talk about outlines, we’re talking about process, and the process behind novel-writing varies from writer to writer and book to book.

I made an experimental decision not to use an outline for the novel I’m working on right now. The result so far as been 100 pages of the strongest first-draft writing I’ve done in a long time. But to get to the point where I could feel confident writing a novel without an outline required many, many years of writing with an outline.

Outlines have worked for and against me. It’s important for me to understand why.

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I outline because plot and structure don’t come easily to me. So I get insecure. It was not enough for me to vaguely know how the thing would end 300 pages from now; I wanted to hold the shape and structure whole in my head before sitting down to write the first page.

The benefit of an outline is that it requires so much thought and happily musing, meandering note-taking that once I was finally working off a completed outline, I knew I would complete the book itself. I’m not one of those writers who has a lot of half-finished manuscripts languishing in a basement somewhere (since our Los Angeles home lacks a basement) – from as early as my teens I took great pride in the fact that even my crappiest manuscripts were whole and entire in their crappiness. So I not only learned about navigating middles and endings – tough to do if you always quit 50 pages into a novel — I also developed a sense of myself as someone who not only starts novels but finishes them.

This helped me in the early part of my marriage. BLOODANGEL took so long to write and involved so much lulling, musing, backtracking and rewriting that my husband worried that I would give up altogether and sit on my laurels – or rather, on his laurels, which by that point had become shockingly financially lucrative – and then go somewhere nice for lunch. When he raised his concerns – repeatedly — I could laugh and swat them away. I knew I would finish.

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So an outline lays out the bones of the story. You can take in with one sweeping glance how one thing leads to another leads to another, in a chain of action and reaction and proaction and ever-building consequence, while the stakes get higher and the characters get in deeper.

And an outline keeps me on track, particularly important since I’m happy to lose myself in the kind of backstory and tangents and details that turn out to be interesting to no one but me. Once I hit the bleak, thorny stretch of novel where you often feel so disoriented, muddled and lost – otherwise known as ‘the middle’ – an outline pointed me back to the path that led home to the end.

Sometimes this was a good thing.

Sometimes this was the problem.

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I was struck by something Josh Waitzkin said about his success in the chess world. Josh – the subject of the movie SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER, which I loved and have watched several times – was an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth. In his book THE ART OF LEARNING, he links his style of play to his personality and recognizes a major advantage:

“It is my nature to revel in apparent chaos.”

Unlike his child competitors, who relied on sophisticated opening gambits to win the game, then began to lose confidence and fall apart the longer and more complicated the game became, Josh liked to play the edge, found joy and interest there. He didn’t mind losing some advantage to his opponent in the beginning. He knew he could prevail by guiding his games “into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence that I would be able to sort through the mayhem more effectively than my opponents. I often sensed a logical thread to positions that seemed irrational….” (p 41).

I myself do not play chess. (My husband, however, plays computer games, and sometimes I like to watch. For a few minutes.) But Josh’s observation made me immediately think of all those movies and novels where the writer sets up an excellent first act – and then the story goes into decline, falls apart, disappoints.

Some of my practice novels failed for these kinds of reasons. I set up intriguing premises – that went nowhere. I was like one of those chess players with a good opening game that then fell apart. It was partly because I didn’t know the rest of the game as well as I needed to — had yet to absorb the knowledge of craft in order to truly work it – and also because I had an issue with artistic control. I wanted to dictate my process, instead of respecting the ebb and flow of the story as it evolved deep in my mind.

This is the thing about outlines. If I’m not careful, they give me an illusion of control that turns out to be just that – an illusion.

I used to think that, to be a writer, I needed to write pages of my novel everyday. I’ve since learned that this isn’t true. A lot of novel-writing takes place away from the computer screen, in that mysterious elusive territory of the unconscious – the ‘undermind’, as I call it. I can sit in front of my laptop for four hours and manage five pages. Or I can jot down some ideas, notes about the scene I plan to write – perhaps sketch it out briefly – and then turn it all over to my undermind and go out and have a life (or try to). Later, I return to the laptop and write five pages in what feels like minutes – and the pages are richer, deeper, my undermind serving up a new twist or insight or cool detail that I didn’t even know I had in me. I don’t know how that process works, but I know that it does work, and in order to write well – and efficiently, since my life now requires I use every moment in the day or else I’m sunk – I need to trust it.

The outline vs the undermind.

The conscious vs the unconscious.

The controlled, planned-out approach vs the freefalling leaps of intuition.

In recent years I noticed a pattern to my spats of ‘writer’s block’. I would be writing well and easily for many days in a row, the pages would be piling up and then – bam. Roadblock. Sometimes I would surrender to it, go days without writing anything, and then a lightbulb popped off in my head, usually while I was working out or driving –activities that lull me into a contented zoning-out while engaging in forward motion, a condition my undermind seems to quite like. I’d realize a new story insight, a change in direction. Perhaps I’d realize that the scene I thought I had to write I shouldn’t even write at all. Then the writing started moving again and I’d be humming along.

Sometimes I took a different approach. I would use the outline to grit my way through the writing of scenes that did not want to be written. Then, later, I would come back to those same parts that caused me trouble – during revision, often at the agent or editor’s request. It became clear that this was the point in the novel where the novel itself had gone wrong. Here, the outline and undermind had parted ways, formed a fork in the road – and, by relying on the outline, instead of respecting the STOP sign my undermind was throwing up, I had made the wrong choice and would pay for it. The only way I could make things right again was by backtracking to the fork and dumping pages of material — in the most recent case about three quarters of a 90,000 word novel – in order to try again. This time in the proper direction, inventing a new outline that respected and listened to the voice of the story as that voice steadily revealed itself.

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So I learned this: there’s a difference between using the outline to guide my undermind, and using it as a means of control, forcing my narrative into something that turns out wrong and unnatural. In order to learn how to properly use my original outline, I had to learn when to give that outline up. But doing this seemed a plunge into uncertainty and tension – that feeling of being muddled and lost, trapped inside your own story – and often I refused to do it even when I sensed I should.

“It was my nature to revel in apparent chaos…”

“…guide games into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence I would be able to sort through the mayhem…”

But when you surrender the original outline, you free up your mind to better ideas. The thing about the original outline is that you wrote it before you started writing your novel. Before you started exploring and learning the novel in the way you can only do by actually writing the damn thing – not by talking about it, not by jotting notes and doing ‘research’. It’s common knowledge that when brainstorming, your best ideas will not be your early ideas. The best ideas work their way up from a much deeper part of your mind; they require some time and thought and patience to let surface. They also require some trust. Trust enough, when writing a novel, to step off the edge of the cliff. To plunge into complexity and mayhem with no clear idea of how you’ll get out of it. To write calmly and confidently from that position of apparent chaos while the undermind finds the logical thread leading you to a triumphant endgame.

The novel I’m working on now – called SHADOW HILL– was originally intended to be a novella, which I figured would be a good length for my little experiment in writing a story without a detailed outline. I wanted to dream and mull and muse the beast along, follow my undermind wherever it took me, and see what resulted. Since this is very much a work-in-progress I can’t tell you exactly how this turns out; ask me later. But so far it feels pretty good.

My strategy of navigation involves a lot of rereading, paying attention to things that in previous projects I have blithely ignored — a too-prominent moment with a seemingly toss-off character, a recurring image, a suggestive piece of dialogue that opens up, if I would only let it, a new, exciting storyline. It’s not that I was oblivious to these things. My mind tagged them for what they were – signals from the undermind — but then I brushed past them, eager to stay in control and keep working the outline, which always seems easier than digging deep and readjusting my course. Inevitably, though, someone whose editorial opinion I trust would point out what I already suspected but did not want confirmed: “Your story is somewhere back here. Right here. This is where you lost the trail….or where the trail lost you.”

Let me give two examples.

During the writing of the first act of SHADOW HILL, I came across in my non-writing life an article about the evolution of the paparazzi in the age of the Internet, where hunger for images is obsessive and all-consuming and extremes are required to get the money shot. My undermind worked this into the story, which is set in Los Angeles and deals to some extent with the otherworld of celebrity. My protagonist and her romantic interest have a moment with a pap. The moment deepened, took on unexpected detail: I begin to see this pap in my head: he wasn’t speaking Italian like I’d originally thought, but Portuguese, because this guy was a hardcore dude with a beat-up face from the slums of Brazil who has a long-running adversarial relationship with the romantic interest and has made a lot of money off him already. Because I was indulging and exploring this moment, the scene – inspired by the article I’d read – became weighted in a way that made it ‘important’ which was not my intention. Instead of ignoring it, though, I posed myself a new question: “Okay, is there some way to use this, to make this pay off later? How can I justify keeping this material when it comes time to revise and streamline?” Later, when my undermind served up an answer, a big chunk of what has now grown into a novel clinked into place. By letting that moment grow, I found a ‘logical thread’ linking up a significant subplot to impact on the main plot.

Another issue involved my protagonist’s visions of – and conversations with – her dead brother. This book is not, however, a ghost story; it’s an urban fantasy that pivots around a hidden world that has nothing to do with ghosts. And yet the brother was there on page one and provides foreshadowing and tension to keep things compelling while I gradually introduce my vulnerable ex-academic bad-girl protagonist to the hidden world lurking in westside LA. So I knew the brother had to stay. (Besides, I like him.) I also knew that this was a problem. An urban fantasy novel requires a huge suspension of disbelief from the reader. You, the writer, only get one such suspension. One other-reality, hidden-world, element of the fantastic, whatever you want to call it: the reader is willing to roll with you assuming you establish the ‘rules’ of this reality and ground it within the everyday contemporary world.

My other-world in this novel concerns the true nature of certain celebrity characters my protagonist encounters. Throwing a haunting into the mix was, I sensed, too much. Too contrived. If I couldn’t find some kind of link between these two elements – so that the reason she sees her dead brother is directly related to the story’s ‘otherworld’ instead of incidental to it – I’d have to lose him. The easy solution – the original-outline solution – was to trot out that catch-all device of ambiguity, imply that perhaps she’s imagining him, he’s her way of interrogating herself or warning herself. But I wasn’t satisfied with this. Honest ambiguity can be great and necessary. False or lazy ambiguity is something else entirely: it’s the writer taking the easy way out, being obscure and mysterious and pseudo-artsy in order to cover up flaws in conception and craft. Falling back on some “is the ghost real or imaginary?” thing would be a cop-out. I needed a different idea.

So I wrote the first part of the book while absently mulling this over, posing the question and feeding it to the undermind. And when I did figure out the relationship between the dead brother and aforementioned celebrities, it was a different feeling from the paparazzi example above. The story itself remains unchanged. What happened, though, is that a new dimension to a particular set of characters opened up: the paranormal nature that forms the heart of this story acquired a power and originality that, I think – I hope – will set this book apart from the many other urban fantasies already out there. We will see. But right now, it feels good. It feels like I am writing in the right direction.

7

Although I am still relatively young – especially since female writers are allowed to age more slowly than, say, elite gymnasts or supermodels or Los Angeles trophy wives – I have been novel-writing for twenty years now. Some of those years were more productive than others, of course, but what strikes me is how long it takes to get a true sense of what the hell you’re doing, especially since the process itself will change from book to book. You don’t just need to learn to write a good novel, you need to learn to write the novel you’re wrestling with right now.

For me, an outline can serve as a teacher, introducing me to the basic movements of the novel that I need to learn. Perhaps a difference between a mediocre novel and a good novel, or a good novel and a great one, has to do with learning that story so well that you absorb it right into your bones. Rather like a dancer who learns her choreography so well with such skill that she transcends it: when you watch her, you don’t see her thinking through her technique, you see her becoming the dance and the dance becoming the music. Knowledge, intuition and technique come together, become something greater than the sum of their parts – not just art, but the fine, compelling kind.

When the writer truly learns the story, becomes in touch with the flow of the story, the outline itself becomes part of that flow. As the story moves and grows and changes, the writer steps to the outline to gain a long-range, heightened view, adapting and adjusting all the while. Then back into the story, moving farther and deeper, gathering new, intimate knowledge of the terrain only previously glimpsed.

Or at least, this is how I’ve come to understand my own process, given the nature of my personality. I am highly intuitive. I also appreciate a good plan. For me, the question of whether to outline or not sets up a false dichotomy: my own personal answer falls somewhere in between. I need to outline, but only if that outline keeps reinventing itself as my intuition sees fit for it to do. Otherwise I get stuck and my game breaks down.

The answer you figure out for yourself – as you absorb the lessons of others as well as from your own growing mountain of experience – will say a lot about who you are, not just as a writer but as a person. That, of course, is the fun of it.

— Justine Musk

By Justine Musk

(**Note from the “management**) This column was supposed to appear last month. It never made it from the overseas Kiosk to US e-mail, but we bring it to you now as Stan has company this weekend…flexibility is good. Justine wanted me to leave in the happy birthday to Skipp, but notes it’s over man…better late than never…
…..DNW)

(Happy Birthday John Skipp! Seems like just yesterday I was an impressionable young slip of a thing first discovering Splatterpunk….)

In the last few years I’ve often heard myself referring to “the writer’s personality” and so decided to sit down and take a look at some of the traits I think this ‘personality’ consists of.

Fascination

Persistence is important, but it’s not enough on its own. You can persist at a thing for twenty years and not get anywhere if what you’re actually doing amounts to the same thing in the same way over and over. Behind persistence is, I think, the engine that drives the whole process: a fascination with story, with narrative, with the process itself, and not just the vision of the book in the front window with your name in huge letters on the cover.

It’s that fascination that makes you choose reading over other activities and pastimes. It’s that fascination that propels you down the necessary road of writing, revision, rejection, more writing, more revision and more rejection; and which makes you pull apart other works of fiction to try to understand how and why they work in ways you haven’t quite managed yet.

Above all, it’s fascination that keeps you writing for the sheer sake of writing. Those who write for money, fame, publication, or just for the pose of being a writer — people who don’t find an inherent reward in the process itself — soon drift on to other things.

Curiosity

Margaret Atwood once observed that young poets focus inward, exploring the self; as they grow and mature their vision extends outwards, as they realize there’s a whole world out there that goes above and beyond them.

If you’re not curious about the world, other people, ideas, relationships, history, etc….then where the hell are you going to find stuff to write about?

The standard maxim delivered to aspiring writers — “write what you know” — was crippling to me for a long time. It helps to turn the phrase around — “know what you write”. Be curious, follow your obsessions, research the heart and soul and guts out of them. Give yourself interesting stuff to write about to go along with your developing craft.

Playful

I was struck by something bestselling YA author Holly Black (IRONSIDE) said at the start of her book tour with (also bestselling) YA author Cassandra Clare (CITY OF BONES). They were discussing fan fiction and the online communities that have risen up around it. Holly commented that when she discovered these communities, she was already very deep into her own original fiction and had forgotten that writing could be….fun, like it seemed to be with these fanfic writers who were telling stories for no other reason than their own pleasure.

Writers love to bitch about how hard writing is. And it is. This cannot be denied. But on the other hand, it’s not like we’re shoveling coal or digging ditches under a brutal summer sun. In my own progress as a writer I find it necessary to keep returning myself to the sense of writing, of storytelling, as play: messing around with what-if scenarios, with ideas and settings and characters, with language, with ways of dividing or chunking up the narration to get different kinds of effects. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, that’s what revision is for, and you’re wiser for the trial and error.

One of my favorite quotes is from an interview with eternal rock god David Bowie, who said something like, “Art is the one place where you can crash your plane and still walk away from it.” There are no lives or limbs at stake. We should take advantage of that knowledge and feel liberated to reach high, take risks, mess around — to play — maybe even embrace failure as part of the process of play. Children arrive at valuable life skills, awareness and knowledge through spontaneous, open-ended play. Sometimes we should maybe take our cues from them and just lighten up a bit, allow ourselves to slip out from beneath that sense of writing-as-burden.

Solitary

Writing is a freakishly solitary profession. This is a job where you turn your back on friends, family and the world in general and go into a little room and shut the door in order to spend hours in the company of people who do not exist outside your own rather questionable head. Of course, you can also take your laptop to the nearest Starbucks, but the fact remains that writing is an inward-looking, inward-dwelling activity.

So I would imagine that an unusual capacity for solitude is characteristic of a writing personality. Maybe some of us numbered among the popular kids in high school, our lives abuzz with constant social activity, but I myself sure as hell wasn’t one of them. It’s more likely that we were — as I was — the misfit who read too much and used too many odd words and couldn’t quite click with the peer group until you were old enough and free enough to go out and hunt down other members of your tribe.

And maybe it’s our drive to be alone — not all the time, certainly, but enough to read and dream and reset our mental energies in order to deal with People again — that at least partly impels the drive to write. Reading and writing become the bridge crossing us from our carefully guarded alone-zone into the world, into the human condition itself. We contain multitudes, and those multitudes contain us.

Tough

It takes a real mental toughness — even if it’s the kind that comes and goes — to put your ego aside in the way that’s necessary to develop as a writer, and I’m not just talking about the rejections.

You have to be willing to write a bad first draft. “All first drafts are shit,” declared Ernest Hemingway, and although this is more true in some cases than others, there’s a soul-releasing freedom in embracing the crappiness of first-draft writing. All you have to do is get it on the page. It’s allowed to suck: that’s what revision is for.

Which means you also need the strength to seek out the kind of tough love criticism from genuinely helpful individuals who will kindly but ruthlessly (and perhaps not even kindly) let you know just why and how that first draft is crap. When you finally pinpoint what is wrong, you can figure out ways to fix it, and the final shape and weave of your novel will begin to form in your mind.

You also need to understand just what a hard long haul it is to become a published writer (and the exceptions — the twenty year olds who get huge deals — only prove the rule). Two years of reading and writing seriously won’t do it. The general wisdom is that a writing apprenticeship takes ten years, sometimes fifteen. So you need to find pleasure in the process and take a long-range view.

—Justine Musk

Justine Musk

1

People who live in mostly-glass houses rarely throw stones. They’re not that stupid. They do, however, have to deal with the small corpses of birds who fly into the windows. There is a lesson in this, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

2

I read once that there are two kinds of readers. The first, and most common, is the bright, well-adjusted child with decent social skills who absorbs reading from his or her environment. There are many books in the house. Both parents model the act of reading on a regular basis. Etcetera.

The second kind of reader has a different narrative hunger: more obsessive: the child in question is unusually solitary. Readers in the second group find their way to books despite – and not because of – their environment.

This made me think of something Dean Koontz said in an interview. He was speaking about the poverty and abuse of his childhood, spent at the whims of a crazy, violent father. There were no books or magazines in his house. He found his way to them regardless. “It makes you wonder about fate,” he said. It certainly makes you wonder about genetics, how we come into this world already hardwired. He was a reader of the second kind.

There were many books in my house. My father not only gave me money for books – although sometimes he made me rake the leaves first — he brought home books from the elementary school he administered in order to “get my opinion”. My parents read frequently and often: cosy scenes involving fireplaces and Canadian snow blown against the front windows. I am grateful for this, but ultimately it would not have mattered. I fall into the second group.

This kept me out of sync with my peers for many years.

Eventually I found new peers. The way people do.

3

When I was a little kid, I knew a lot of bright little kids, and quite a few of them liked to read – none as much as I did, but as already mentioned, I was a bit freakish – and showed a flair for creative writing. My stories were singled out, but so were theirs. At some point, however, they pulled back, and I kept on going.

Throughout my twenties – and I’m making a bit of a leap here, but bear with me — I’ve been close to certain people, have had some wild times together, and I started to recognize how, at a certain point of hedonism, I pulled back, and they didn’t.

When I don’t write, I get anxious, edgy. Pressure builds inside me. I need to write in order to release it — fiction is the best, but a long email can be just as effective. I crave exercise the same way, which means I spend a lot of time on the treadmill or weight machines or in a dance/yoga studio. Joyce Carol Oates has written about her obsession with running, and I’ve often wondered if these things are linked – the urge to work out some kind of physical, complementary manifestation of a similar urge to write. Sure, I want to communicate, entertain, go deep, maybe find some fame and glory while I’m at it – what the hell? – but ultimately I suspect it’s a fairly primal drive. For release, escapism, calm. The calm lasts for a short time, and then the need builds again.

I write because it takes my crooked soul and lies it straight. The world is a better place when the writing goes well. There is a term – ‘graphomania’ – which refers to some kind of brain quirk compelling you to write, and maybe that’s what I have (although if that’s the case how come I’m not much more productive? 15 pages a day, every day?). Maybe all writers have at least a low-level case of it.

4

I read somewhere that the Japanese character for ‘inspiration’ brings together ‘elegance’ and ‘strength’. I love that so much I might get it tattooed.

5

China Mieville points out that the fantastic literatures don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. He agrees that 90 percent of fantasy writing is crap. He also points out that 90 percent of anything is crap. (Which reminds me of something a film professor told a friend of mine back in college: “People will tell you that for every opening in the film industry, 500 people will apply. What they won’t tell you is that ninety percent of those people are morons. The trick is not to be among the morons.” Easier said than done.)

I have a writer’s crush on China Mieville. I love how his book ‘Perdido Street Station’ is too long. There are these leisurely sections devoted to the exploration of his world and its cultures, characters attempting to define and redefine themselves in places where cultures intersect. He spends a lot of time fleshing out his themes in a way that doesn’t necessarily advance the plot, certainly not in the way of a typical genre novel. An American editor would have had him streamline the hell out of that baby (and his follow-up novel, which he worked on with an editor at Del Rey, did indeed emerge tighter and leaner). I’m glad ‘Station’ found its way into America only after it had made Mieville’s name in the UK.

Now that I think of it, I grew up on big books. Your average King novel could moonlight as a doorstop, of course, but it’s not like Peter Straub or Sidney Sheldon or Norman Mailer were turning out slim little volumes. There used to be this belief that a novel should be around 500 pages so the reader would feel he or she had gotten good storytelling value for the money. Now anything over 100,000 words – roughly 300 pages – is pushing it, especially if you’re a first-timer.

When I submitted ‘Bloodangel’ to my agent, I was advised to cheat in the way that books and articles always order you not to: alter the line spacing from 2.0 to 1.5 in order to come out with a manuscript that seemed a bit less of a blunt weapon. Apparently this makes it psychologically as well as physically easier for the editor to bundle up the damn thing and take it home.

My book sold, so conclude from this what you will.

This was after I’d already cut fifteen thousand words from the draft. Readers assume I deliberately set the book up for a sequel, or series. Although I was certainly never opposed to the idea, the truth is that I crammed as much of the story as I could into the space I felt I had to work with. In the end, there was story left over.

Funny thing – the leftovers end up seeding new story. At the moment I’m like Jack looking up at the beanstalk, wondering how high the thing is growing.

6

Before you are a writer, you are an individual of your culture and era. The Dickens of contemporary London would be a different writer than the Dickens of Victorian London. He would be the same man but shaped by different forces. So would his fiction.

The novel is like any other art form: it changes with the times, with the culture, with the advent of new technology. Technicolor and sound revolutionized films. Photography forced painters to reconsider the nature of painting, which started a drive towards the depiction of inner life – and color, and material itself — as well as the world around us. If Van Gogh was producing his works today, would people be paying millions of dollars for them? I suspect they would not. They would say, “This has been done.”

7

In Dickens’ day, the novel was a relatively new form – compared to drama or epic poetry – and people were just beginning to figure out its possibilities, moving from epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s‘Clarissa’ to a more integrated kind of narrative. Because the form was new, it had a taint of the trashy and sordid. This made the form acceptable and accessible for women, even if the ‘serious’ ones still had to use a male pseudonym. Which is why great women novelists have been with us pretty much since the beginning. So “yay” for the new and sordid.

8

I think one of the great illusions of writing – one that trips up a great many people – is the sheer accessibility of it. If you want to play the piano, you need to find a piano and a teacher and a place where you can practice without annoying the neighbors. If you want to make a movie, you need to gather enough crew and equipment. If you want to become a brain surgeon, it’s generally understood that medical school is the desirable route.

It often strikes me that people who say they want to write don’t fully understand how a writer’s education actually works. They think it’s enough to have pen and paper and a reasonable grasp of vocabulary, a sense of where to put the commas. Anybody can write a novel. This is true. But writing a novel that other people – especially people not related to you – actually want to read is another thing entirely.

When you talk to an aspiring writer you can get a strong sense of how good they’re likely to be and how far they’re likely to go just by asking them about their reading habits.

9

I have an academic streak, a literary bent, and a taste for the gothic. I read for language and character and meaning.

I also read for thrills.

Thrills are important. No amount of traditional English-major education could ever convince me otherwise.

10

A huge part of learning how to write is learning who you are. This is one reason I tend not to trust writers under 30. For every gifted soul — a Zadie Smith – there seem to be a handful of young things overhyped and oversold on the story (and author photo) behind the story. But in the end, people care about the real deal between the covers. You can curl up with an author photo for only so long.

To deliver story – and do it more than once — you need time and experience and practice and a great deal of seasoning.

But I like this about writing. I like how, four or five years from now, I will still be considered a ‘young writer’ – or youngish — simply because I’ll be under 40. This is not the perception in other professions, or within the culture at large.

11

Writers exist outside the established structures of things. Outside the normal commute to the office, the day-to-day existence within the office, the need to wear a pantsuit (or even anything at all). Outside the usual things that measure and define the kind of security that might, in the end, prove illusory anyway. Outside the kind of career track studded with developmental milestones that friends and family recognize as you go along. People understand what it means when you graduate law school. They don’t understand how great it is the first time you get a detailed, personal letter from an editor rejecting your work but encouraging you to submit again. They don’t see the huge forward leap from form letter to actual contact with a professional editor; all they see is the rejection, right up until you’re the overnight success story with copies of your book in Barnes & Noble you didn’t sneak in there yourself.

Part of the challenge of being a writer is finding the balance between living outside the world and inside it. The act of writing pulls you into your private space, out on the edges of things; when you are writing, you are not living in the world. You are living in your head. But you need to feed that head – and the writing – by living in the world, even though, when you’re in the world, you often feel you should be writing instead.

I’m still working this out.

10

Most of us start out thinking we’ll be famous – it is the privilege of young people to believe they have a 50/50 chance of being famous – but at some point a much harder reality sets in.

Many of us keep on writing regardless.

In the end, when we talk about writing, we’re talking about a form of obsession. This of course is true of many things. The difference between an obsession and an occupation is that our obsessions choose us; we decide whether or not to deny them.

This makes writing sound like some kind of Calling, but there is nothing particularly sacred about being a published writer.

It is, however, a cool thing to say at parties.

– Justine Musk

(so what the hell do I do now?)

Justine Musk

1

Perhaps theme gets a bad rap.

Its twin, Theme with a capital T, deserves all the potshots and ridicule and dressing-down that it gets. But if Theme is the pretentious dude decked out in Gucci and Prada who wears sunglasses at night and brags about how many thousands of dollars he dropped at his VIP table at Hyde or Les Deux the other night — which was a worknight because only wage slave losers save their partying for the weekends – I live in LA, so you’ll have to excuse these kinds of analogies – then its sibling, theme, is the cute one in jeans and t-shirt, hanging out at your local pub, inviting you over for an engaging conversation.

2

Theme’s ego has been greatly inflated by all those English teachers who inflicted all those essay assignments through high school and maybe college, in which you learned to digest various lectures and Coles notes and serve it back in some lukewarm rearranged stuff that, if cast into proper essay structure, would get you an easy B. As in: b for Bullshit, or so you chuckled to yourself, having merely scanned the book involved (you rented the movie, so who needs to read?) which looked very Boring anyway.

So when you first try to write a piece of fiction, Theme has a habit of sauntering in, smoking Gauloises and readjusting its beret in the mirror (this was before Theme realized that a fedora is a much cooler choice of headgear). And Theme talks very loudly to you and throws around a lot of big words and you think, Okay, maybe this guy really is Deep and Profound. I don’t think so, but I’m a neophyte and what do I know? It’s not like I speak with a French accent or anything, like Theme does. (Of course, Theme himself grew up somewhere in Iowa, but you haven’t figured this out yet).

Thing is, you want to write something that’s fun and compelling, sure, but also layered in a way that resonates. You have something to say, dammit, even though you’re not really sure what that is.

So you take what Theme likes to prattle on about and try to force some kind of story out of it. You take it to your writing group and your group throws around words like ‘contrived’, ‘pretentious’, ‘boring’. Or maybe you submit it to a number of places and one or two years later you collect the rejection slips. By then, you’re fed up with Theme’s endless monologuing and the way he clings to you and invades your space because he doesn’t have any real friends. You’re not his real friend either, but that’s only because he’s a longwinded self-important prig. You order him out of your life. He starts haunting artsy cafes and lecture halls looking for someone new to buy into his schtick and make him feel sufficiently admired.

3

On top of all his other personality flaws, I suspect Theme suffers from an identity crisis. He doesn’t know what he is, exactly. His name gets thrown around so much that he suffers from overexposure, and – much like other phrases (‘self-indulgent’, ‘a powerful new voice’, etc.) – the word itself has been rendered kind of meaningless.

And the poor guy is confused by his relationships with other things, the same things he likes to peer down his nose at (premise), or dismiss as far too plebian to ever bother bothering with (plot).

Thing is, theme and premise and plot are like Siamese triplets who share too many organs to ever separate successfully. Because of that, definitions get messy. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll take a whack.

4

A premise is a general sense of the milieu of the novel. It’s kind of like the storyworld in which the story takes place. In my novel UNINVITED, the final revisions of which I just handed in to my editor at 2 am and so the story is still painfully (painfully!) fresh in my mind, I would say the premise is the loose idea I started out with.

I wanted to write something about a teenage girl in a small town that somewhat resembles my own hometown. And she has this older, golden-boy brother whom she idolizes. But something triggers him to run away and stay away from home for over a year. One day he reappears. But he brings something menacing and dangerous back home with him, and the girl herself is somehow (and unknowingly) at the heart of it (both at whatever thing triggered his leavetaking in the first place, and the consequences that unfold upon his return).

If premise is your story’s storyworld, then plot is the road that leads the reader through it. Plot is the focused sentence or two that you can toss off to someone during an elevator ride between floor two and floor six (especially if it stops at three, four and five along the way). Although I know my premise going in, it takes me a lot of thinking and brainstorming and reflecting and writing (often an entire first draft) to figure out what my plot actually is. In the case of UNINVITED, it goes something like this: A troubled young woman mourns her beloved older brother, who disappeared from home after a car accident killed two of his friends but appears to have left him unharmed. He returns unexpectedly, and the girl must help him fight off a supernatural enemy who’s come to collect him, not realizing the extent of the bargain her brother has made with the bad guy, or how it involves her.

If plot is what you carve out of premise, then theme is what emerges naturally out of plot, kind of like Venus rising naked from the water. If Theme is something you try to hammer plot and premise into, the inner logic and organic growth of the story be damned (and some writers, don’t get me wrong, can actually pull this off, and with style), then theme is something low-key and relaxed, who gives a friendly wave at the beginning of your trip and whose relationship with you, the author, deepens over time and the work of several drafts.

Back to UNINVITED. You can look at the plot statements and a couple of things jump out of you. The brother-sister relationship at the core, siblings depending on each other to fight off some kind of mysterious menace (I named that menace Archie, by the way, in direct homage to Robert Cormier’s Archie in his books THE CHOCOLATE WAR and BEYOND THE CHOCOLATE WAR. The fact that Archie implies ‘archangel’ just made it much more perfect).

That, for me, was kind of the heart of the thing that I wanted to tell. UNINVITED is meant to be a fun, hopefully compelling, supernatural story that gives you a nice case of the creeps here and there, but running underneath is a kind of storyteller’s rumination on family vs. the abyss. In the last handful of years I’ve been either writing or attending to the details of creating my own family (or watching reality TV, but we shall not speak of such things), so it’s not surprising that I’d end up writing about family. I’m not interested in anything sentimental or saccharine (or the inverse of that, the look-beneath-the-surface-of-the-sunny-suburbs-and-find-dark-crawling-maggots kind of story, although I do enjoy those).

What I’d been thinking about has a lot more to do with how cold and difficult the world is, and not just because of the basic struggle of making a meaningful living, both physically and emotionally. But also for the vast temptation of its dangerous playgrounds, how you can get sucked into things and consumed, lose your soul (it’s no coincidence that the supernatural storyline runs parallel to, and intersects with, the protagonist’s experiments with a popular drug), how much we all need someone not just to watch our backs but help shield us from the cold and the wind.

So that, to me, was the ruling theme of the story. (Someone else might take something completely different from it, which is cool. That’s what stories are for.) Something about family vs. the abyss. Something about the balance between walking your own line and finding your own freedom while remaining connected to others in that way we need, in order to nurture and safeguard our souls.

5

Where I find theme really steps up, though, is in the end revisions (unlike Theme, who wants to run the whole show, usually loudly and obnoxiously, from the get-go).

Revising is awesome. The bloody, messy, difficult work of first-drafting is done. You know your story, your characters. The end is in sight. Instead of marking off your daily wordcount – 500 words, 800 words, 1500 words, yay, now I can go have a beer – especially those days when the writing comes hard and you have to push yourself along, you can lose yourself in the depths and nuances of this complete, pre-existing thing. By this time you’ve been living with the book for a while, so certain things are becoming clear to you. And clarity, as they say, is good.

If the early draft is all about getting the stuff from head to page, revising is about choosing what stays and what goes (and what needs rearranging or fleshing-out). What you’re supposedly ‘supposed’ to do is take each scene, each element of the book, ask yourself, “Does this advance the plot?” If it does, good, if it doesn’t, out it goes. (This is why it’s so important to figure out just exactly what that plot is in the first place. An obvious statement to make, yet any agent will tell you about all the well-written, engaging manuscripts they read that they’re nonetheless forced to reject, because, in the end, for everything it does right, the book just doesn’t hang together. It has a muddled, confused center. It lacks clarity, unity.)

The danger of abiding solely by this question is that you end up with a book that is too plot-driven, too stripped of color and nuance and life.

The simple fact is, characters cannot thrive by plot – or outline — alone. They have (or should have) lives that extend beyond the page. They have relationships with other characters, and they need to have conversations within those relationships that advance the plot, yes, but still create the illusion of full-bodied psyches and personalities at work, as well as an involvement (even if it’s a lack of involvement) in the world around them. They have personal histories. They are haunted by things. They’re living in an environment that goes on around them and impacts them even as they impact it. This is the kind of stuff that grows not just from whatever kind of outline you tend to use, but the actual novel-writing itself, and which the outline itself needs to fully incorporate and keep adjusting to as the writer moves along.

So how do you build on the bones of plot, how do you layer in meaning and substance and flair, without sandbagging the plot itself? How do you respect and use your outline without becoming a slave to it? How can you step away from it without losing sight of the road altogether?

Perhaps by realizing that theme is the thing nestled inside your plot, and by drawing it out more, you create a bigger story.

Perhaps by reaching a point in the process where, instead of asking, “How does this advance my story’s plot?” you start asking yourself, “How does this build on my story’s central theme?”

6

In the case of UNINVITED, by the time I hit the final draft I could recognize some of the push-pulls going on in the novel, the dueling forces and tensions of the narrative. If the book’s themes center on family and personal responsibility (one of the reasons why it’s more or less a ‘young adult’ novel), then the opposing forces have to do with the abyss (alienation, isolation, and the temptations that pull us in that direction), and also with notions of freedom and carelessness and recklessness, and the damage and consequence that can result. And if connecting with other people, having someone who gets your back while you get his, is what steers you away from the abyss, then I somehow wanted to weave that through the material also. So when I got the notes back from my editor, I was able to make decisions accordingly.

For example, my editor pointed out that one character’s motivation for helping out the other characters needed to be further explained and developed. So I invented a backstory in which the brother had helped out this character in the past, and the character felt obligated to return the favor. I had a lot of fun with the idea of the ‘abyss’, which, since this is a supernatural novel, gets to translate into literal terms, and also helped me understand the essential nature of my bad guy and how my protagonist could end up defeating him (and what she needs to discover in order to do so). If banding together helps the characters get strong, then longstanding baggage and fissures within their relationships make them vulnerable; the bad guy knows this and exploits those points of personal conflict to get closer to the thing that he wants.

Also, certain words reoccur throughout the narrative. The characters talk about ‘fixing’ things – whether it’s fixing a meal, fixing a problem, fixing each other. They talk, or argue, about living in the moment. And my young female protagonist is forced to redefine herself not just as younger sister to a protective, and often overshadowing, older brother, but as a soon-to-be older sister to unborn twin brothers, a relationship in which she will assume the protective, wiser, mentoring role her own brother takes with her. During one important plot point in the novel, she and her romantic interest (who need things to talk about and bond over in order to advance the subplot of their relationship) discuss stuff like this. The romantic interest conveniently (for the purposes of theme) has a younger brother of his own (who at one point is also endangered). Not to mention, my protag’s older brother’s psychology – what haunts him, what motivates him to make the decisions he makes that gets them into this mess in the first place – has to do with a backstory event in which he failed to look after his younger sister, and the guilt he’s carried ever since.

The danger of laying it all out like this is that it starts to sound a lot like Theme, and not theme, was at work here. Hopefully in my book this kind of stuff isn’t too obvious (and if it is, that’s a failing). Hopefully the reader will just skate along through the story, but when she closes the cover she’ll feel moved enough to recommend my book to a friend. Theme isn’t about a grand statement so much as one creative decision after another, one creative decision building on another.

In the end, what you find, hopefully, goes beyond a simple chainlink of action plus consequence plus another action plus another consequence. You end up with a story more thickly, deeply braided. Without theme to bring together the different strands, the story itself can get flat and one-dimensional – or messy, muddled, overlong, with a lot of extraneous and seemingly pointless material.

7

If premise is the world of your story, and plot is the road that guides you through it — weaves you over the mountains and through the desert and finally to the relief of the coast — then you might say that theme is the car you’re traveling in. It makes the people you pass take admiring notice, or look away in disgust or pity, or just shrug and get on with their day.

Needless to say, the kind of car you’re traveling in is totally up to you. Choosing is part of the fun of the ride.

And when you see Theme swaggering along the side of the road, thumb cocked with a lot more confidence than he’s actually feeling, you might want to speed up.

Or take pity on the guy. Pick him up. Buy him lunch.

You can always drop him off at the corner.

Justine Musk

1

So I was thinking a bit about serial killers.

We love our serial killers – in movies and fiction.

So much so that readers like me have been known to pick up a paperback on the New Releases table, groan, “Not another serial killer novel,” and toss it back. But I imagine that serial killers are like vampires: just when you think the genre has been done to death (no pun intended), someone comes and reinvents it, makes it hot all over again.

2

Vampires might come and go (and come back again), but sociopaths are always among us. You don’t have to kill to qualify as a sociopath; you can find perfectly legal ways of destroying lives and wreaking emotional havoc while remaining convinced that you and you alone are the world’s hero, martyr, and victim, and the only honest person to boot (even though you’re a pathological liar).

When I was a teenager I read a book called PEOPLE OF THE LIE by M. Scott Peck, in which – if I remember correctly — he tried to cast human evil into specific, diagnostic terms, so that you could identify ‘evil’ the same way you could schizophrenia or OCD. He pointed out that a person can be characterized as ‘evil’ not by the magnitude of his acts but by their consistency.

And one way you might begin to recognize a person as ‘evil’ – and he was talking from his experiences as a psychologist dealing with a certain type of patient – is that, although a sociopath can seem normal at first, intelligent and charming, eventually you will find yourself….not menaced or threatened by them (although maybe that too)…but kind of , well…baffled. Repeatedly baffled.

A sociopath personality, a ‘disordered’ personality, is like a wall that can’t be penetrated, no matter how many bones you break by hurling yourself against it. Sociopaths work off their own unique sense of reality and logic, which bears little resemblance to yours, or to anyone’s.

Something about them just doesn’t add up.

3

At the center of any definition of ‘sociopath’ – or ‘antisocial personality disorder’ or ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder ‘– is the inability to experience empathy, to see things from the viewpoints of others.

Empathy has been traced to the part of the brain known as the premotor cortex, which is responsible for planning movements. In 1996, scientists were examining the brain of a macaque monkey and noticed something curious. When the monkey made a movement or performed an action – such as reaching for a banana – a cluster of cells in the premotor cortex always fired. At one point they noticed those same cells were firing…even though the monkey himself was perfectly still.

What he was doing, however, was watching.

One of the scientists lifted his arm and reached for an object. The monkey’s brain responded as if the monkey was reaching himself. Further experiments bore this out: whether the monkey was performing a movement, or watching another monkey or a human perform that same movement, the cells in the premotor cortex fired the same. They made no distinction.

The neuroscientists named these cells ‘mirror neurons’ (or, unofficially, ‘monkey see monkey do neurons’) and soon established that in addition to mirroring actions, they also reflect sensations and emotions. They play roles in speech and learning, facial decoding, threat analysis, the perception of intentions and emotions; they contribute to social intelligence and theory of mind. Just as an average person doesn’t have to think about moving her fingers across the computer keyboard – it simply happens, the way it’s happening with me right now – nor does she have to think much about what her friend must be feeling when his dog gets hit by a car. Mirror neurons allow us to see ourselves in other people and other people in ourselves. This mapping of our own inner selves onto others allows a vast, deep network of relationships and shared experience and knowledge, which in turn produces art, literature, culture: all those things that take the personal and make it universal (or vice versa). We learn we aren’t alone, but part of something much bigger than our own petty selves — you might call it the human condition.

4

No one really knows what makes a sociopath. If all it took was a horrific childhood, someone like the bestselling novelist Dean Koontz, who has written frankly about his impoverished upbringing under the so-called care of a psychopathic father, should have made a career out of sociopathology to rival Ted Bundy’s.

He went another route.

Some theorize that sociopaths are (much like the rich, at least according to Scotty F.) simply different from you and me; something in the brain works oddly or not at all. Perhaps they were born like this. Or suffered a traumatic head injury as a child that somehow…changed them.

Take away a child’s ability to develop empathy, and you take away massive chunks of context in which that child comes to understand reality itself (or realize that reality isn’t something you can adapt to your own needs and desires, that talking out a fantasy isn’t enough to make it so). Those broken mirror neurons can’t map on to anything beyond the self, and it’s not even the ‘self’ reflected through the reactions and expressions of others, because the sociopath can’t interpret those reactions in the first place. All sociopaths can see are themselves, and not as they actually are but as they want to be: the self-image that must be preserved at all costs, no matter the gap between image and reality, no matter how transparent others find them. Just as they lack knowledge of the inner workings of other people, they also lack knowledge of themselves.

Or maybe they can’t bear to look.

5

Someone with malignant personality disorder — whom many, if not most, psychologists regard as untreatable (since the personality they’re treating actually is the disorder, and doesn’t consider itself disordered in the first place), and whose advice to anyone involved with a malignant narcissist would likely be to cut off all contact and keep your distance — is the original ‘hollow man’ (or woman). Narcissism is not about being in love with your self, but being in love with an image of yourself. The truth behind the image doesn’t interest malignant narcissists; they’re not convinced it exists..

They learn young that if they’re to win any degree of social acceptance at all, they must behave in certain ways. They must mimic emotions and reactions they don’t truly feel. Sociopaths are often the most sentimental people in the room, since sentiment itself can be defined as hollow emotion, melodrama: what it lacks in actual substance it makes up for with overblown affects, exaggerated gestures.

Knowledge like this can add an interesting wrinkle to fictional bad guy. Someone who might go out and strangle a prostitute, for example, and then take his new girlfriend to a revival theatre showing Gone With the Wind. And the girlfriend thinks he’s sensitive (maybe too sensitive, maybe she rolls her eyes) because she sees how he tears up when Rhett delivers that final line.

6

People take it for granted that other people can empathize. People will also assume that the problem is one of proper communication; that if only everybody involved could sit down together and air out their feelings, possibly with a medical health professional involved, resolution will slide into view.

But sociopaths often love to talk. They’ll talk for hours.

When a sociopath is in your life, and social workers and judges and shrinks and neighbors and whoever else gets involved, part of the frustration becomes having to explain the situation all over again to the latest newest person on the scene. People will be skeptical of you because they want to give everyone a fair hearing…and also because the stories you tell about the sociopath’s behavior sound so insane that they can’t help wondering if maybe you’re the one with a screw loose.

All you can do is be calm and rational and patient. Wait for the sociopath to implode or explode — since they can’t stay on their best behavior for long — and expose that personality in all its malignant glory.

Again.

7

What it must be like, to exist without the burden of conscience.

You do what you want. You take what you want.

You are never wrong, even when people keep insisting you are.

You never have to worry about anyone’s feelings.

You never beat yourself up about your mistakes…because you never make any (at least, not anything serious).

Sociopaths are often confident and charming. They have charisma. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of conscience, of empathy, could be the reason why. They are not being eaten alive by self-doubt. They’re the only real person in the room, and everybody else is just figments, shadows, bit players.

Of course they’re confident. The world is a movie starring them, and they’re just waiting for their Oscar.

And applause.

8

In 2005, Michael Platt and his partner Robert Deaner showed how monkeys will pay to gaze at images of the dominant members of their troop.

Male monkeys were set up in special chairs in front of computer screens. One screen remained grey. The other screen flashed images of monkeys from their troop.

Look at the grey screen, they got the same amount of ‘juicy juice’ squirted in their mouth every time. Reliable payment. Look at the image of the monkey, and the amount of juice varied. Not so reliable.

What the researchers discovered was that monkeys would ‘pay’ — give up their chance at juicy juice — in order to stare at pictures of the monkeys who ranked higher than they did.

But they had to be paid extra juicy juice to look at the subordinate monkeys.

They would ‘pay’ to look at images of female hindquarters…but had to be paid extra to gaze at female frontals.

There’s an evolutionary explanation for this. When the alpha males are asleep, or away, or injured or sick, the subordinates can seize their chance to sneak around and mate with the females. The monkeys best at watching and gathering information — about the leaders’ habits and activities, about which females are currently in heat and receptive to advances — stand the best chance of surviving and reproducing.

This could apply to humans. In prehistoric days, it helped a man to gather as much information as he could about his leaders. He could use this knowledge to build alliances or stage rebellions or conduct affairs with inappropriate women. A man with a talent for social information stood the best chance of passing on his genes.

In his book FAME JUNKIES, writer Jake Halpern suggests that this curiosity about the powerful is hardwired into us, naturally selected through generations of our ancestors. This skill for social information expresses itself now, somewhat uselessly, through our fascination with celebrity-watching and the popularity of entertainment magazines like Us Weekly, or blogs like www.socialitelife.com or www.perezhilton.com. We pay our own form of juicy juice to look at photos of Brad and Angelina…but we’d have to be paid a little extra to bother looking at photos of Howard and Jill who run the convenience store down the street.

Serial killers may not be our leaders — unless we’re extremely unlucky — but they are the apex predators. All the novels and movies and media stories and true-crime books we write and read about them could signal something more than lurid voyeurism or armchair thrillseeking; could be our instinctive, hardwired way of watching from a distance, gathering the information we need to survive them.

9

Before Anne Rice invented a new kind of vampire subgenre with her character Lestat, vampires were repulsive, alien creatures who spread death and terror. They were serial killers with a particularly ghastly signature.

We use stories to explore the things that scare us, to confront our fears and release ourselves from them. So we found ways of taming the vampire, first by stake and fire and decapitation, and then by making him a brooding romantic anti-hero, and sometimes even hero.

Now the vampire often gets a sympathetic first-person perspective.

We seem to be reaching a similar point with serial killers. Instead of crosses and holy water, storytellers used forensics and FBI profiling. Hannibal Lector evolved through a series of novels and movies from vicious monster to brilliant anti-hero with a tortured horrific past. Last fall, Showtime premiered a television series centered around a likeable guy named Dexter. Who happens to be a serial killer. But he wins our interest and sympathy because he only goes after other killers, the kind who get away with it.

Perhaps the next writer who reinvents vamp fiction in some new and startling way will take the vampire out of his rock-star duds and turn him into a monster again.

But the sociopath? Whether it’s the extreme of a serial killer cruising the highway for victims, or the more garden-variety kind, like your suburban neighbor who takes great pains to present the image of a perfect happy family while verbally and emotionally abusing his children (and when, as adults, they try to sit down and truly communicate with the man, clear the air, achieve some kind of healing, he will swear up and down and oh so vociferously that the abuse never happened, they’re either lying or imagining things or out to ’get’ him for some reason he can’t imagine yet will quickly invent), the sociopath remains among us after the final page is turned and the movie screen goes dark. Unlike the vampire, the sociopath is the one monster no storyteller had to invent. We only need to watch — and learn — and keep our distance.

–Justine Musk

by Justine Musk

1

You get attached to your characters.

You spend a great deal of time getting to know them.

I know I ‘have’ a character – I’m writing him or her in a way that feels vivid for the reader (some readers) — when I have a sense of his or her ‘mindset’ – a perspective, a mental outfit of that character’s knowledge, beliefs and experience I can slip into as soon as I tap out that name on my computer screen.

Some mindsets I ‘get’ very quickly and others take many attempts, several drafts, to get right. Or get at all.

Sometimes, when the writing goes well and I am in the zone, I come out of it a little surprised that these people I’ve been writing about aren’t a couple of houses over, having a party, expecting my arrival. They seem to move beyond imagination and exist in a permanent absent presence. Which sounds a bit kooky – okay, it is — but when you think about it, you carry strong mental constructs of people you know who are rarely or never in your day-to-day life. You take it on faith that they’re still out there, living their lives, be it a college roommate who moved to Australia or an ex-boyfriend you’ll never speak to again. Those constructs aren’t all that different from the constructs you form of your characters – if anything, you know your characters in greater more accurate detail and spend more time thinking about them and thinking through them. The former just happen to have a flesh-and-blood counterpart in the real world (which might or might not bear strong resemblance to your inevitably biased, incomplete idea of that person) …and the latter, well, do not.

2

One of the most delightful things about writing a novel with multiple characters told from different perspectives – one of the things I honestly didn’t anticipate, although now of course it seems so obvious – is that readers would form their own private relationships with and opinions of these characters. They choose their favorites, and sometimes they tell me (and I always love it when they do). It can be an interesting reflection on my friends and family members when they tell me who they liked best.

And sometimes I’ll get defensive on someone’s behalf – I remember when a woman I have a great deal of respect for referred to a certain character as a ‘loser’. Granted, he’s not a good guy, and doesn’t start the tale at a personal high point…but I’m still irritated she would say that.

3

The first time I became familiar with the concept of Mary Sue characters was when a good and brilliant friend of mine returned the first 60 pages of the first draft of what became my first published novel BLOODANGEL and said my protagonist, Jess, was “too much a Mary Sue.”

When she saw my blank look, she explained. A Mary Sue is a character (and of course many if not most of you already know this, so bear with me) who serves as an idealized version of the author herself. It is common in fan fiction, and signals that said author is not storytelling so much as vicariously living out her fantasies of being loved and adored by a particular set of people who don’t, of course, actually exist (outside of the world of mental constructs).

Everybody likes and loves and lusts after Mary Sue. They talk about how great she is. Mary Sue has no flaws.

I was insulted.

I thought I was a better writer than that.

I also thought my friend was wrong. I had things in common with Jess, but I have things in common with all of my characters. As incomplete as her mental construct still was back then, Jess existed in my mind as very much her own person. She was both tougher and more troubled than I was; she’d been through a tragic and hellish adolescence; she was urban and streetsmart where I’d been sheltered and provincial; she was a self-educated high school dropout and runaway making her way as an artist in the big bad city. She didn’t even look like me (she would look like Jennifer Connelly, actually, if Connelly wasn’t so movie-star beautiful).

But when I reread the pages, I saw my friend’s point. I was too gentle with this character, too indulgent of her moodiness and angst; all the other characters were going out of their way to support her in a way that felt a bit like…fan fic. The world of the story seemed to revolve around her in a way it never would in real life. (In real life, at least one friend would say, “Get over yourself!” and someone else would be tempted to slap her.) I revised, and the story’s pace picked up immediately, plus all the characters felt more real as a result.

I was thinking about this as I wrote the sequel, and now again as I begin to revise it. Truth is, of all the characters in this ongoing saga of mine, Jess remains the most slippery for me to get right (write). And I think I finally realized why this is.

The characters in BLOODANGEL who came easily – who sprang up from the page more or less fully formed – were Lucas Maddox and a demon named Del. Lucas is a thirtysomething rock singer turned junkie (or was at the story’s beginning) and completely amoral, who will do anything, sacrifice anything, for music. Del is fey, dangerous, enigmatic, unpredictable, and has been magically imprisoned for roughly five hundred years. I have little in common with either of them. But I had no trouble slipping into their respective mindsets: they were fully, deeply, there, and all I had to do was let them talk.

And – judging from emails and conversations with people who have read the book – the best-liked character in the novel is Ramsey, a teenage foster kid wrestling with the consequences of a supernatural event from when he was a small child. I am fond of the guy myself, and glad he didn’t meet the fate I’d originally intended for him, but wondered why I found it easier to write from the perspective of a teenage boy – and seemed to do a better job with it –than that of a woman near my own age with similar creative ambitions living in a city we both loved.

Then, during a recent visit to Miami, a friend I hadn’t seen since before my book came out said at dinner, “Why is it that some writers – like you, for example! – write such great bad characters, but the good characters aren’t as interesting?” She loved my villain Asha and wanted to know if Jess will ever hook up with Lucas.

I said something along the lines of, “Yes, that’s true, isn’t it? It’s the villains who get the best lines, are the most fun.” But I had always taken this as a given. Maybe I should examine it more closely. Is Clarice Starling really a less interesting character than Hannibal Lector? I think not; she’s as great in her own way as he is in his, which is why the dynamic between them is so powerful.

I’d always assumed that ‘good’ characters are less interesting because they are moral and they have a conscience. Maybe not always, but generally they want and need to do the right thing, and if they don’t start out that way they become so by the end (otherwise known as a Character Arc). So wouldn’t this make them predictable in some way?

‘Bad’ characters see things differently, and if a character is a true sociopath, he has no conscience at all. He has no ability to empathize, no ability to see things from any other perspective than his own. This makes him ruthlessly self-centered in a way most people find too alien to comprehend (and which makes them all the more vulnerable to the sociopath’s manipulations). A sociopath doesn’t even believe that other people are truly ‘real’, or at least not as ‘real’ as he is. Think, for a second, about what this would do to your sense of reality. If you don’t understand how other people feel and respond to things and why they do the things they do, it rips out whole chunks of context for you, and you’re forced to fill in the gaps with your own flawed and limited reasoning. You invent things (sociopaths are pathological liars). Since you can’t quite fit yourself into reality, or want to or feel you need to, you try to bend reality around you: through scheming and fantasizing and deluding other people and yourself. And when this doesn’t work, you go and sue somebody (sociopaths love to sue people) because nothing is ever your fault. It also means you give yourself complete freedom to do or say whatever you want, unbound by any sense of moral obligation whatsoever, any concern for anyone else’s feelings or wellbeing except your own.

This makes you unpredictable and outrageous and dangerous and infuriating.

This makes you a good character.

This is what I’d assumed.

4

Except there’s something else. When it comes to fiction, I like complicated bad people – people who have unexpected flashes of things that are admirable or endearing or sympathetic about them. It’s not that I want to explain away or ‘tame’ the evil with some pat theory about how the villain was abused as a child. In fact, my Big Bad in the novel I’m revising now is genuinely, innately evil in a way that my villain in my novel BLOODANGEL was not (she was enslaved by her society and driven mad by demon magic; let’s just say the girl had issues). I like that extra dimension, that ambiguity, the sense that a ‘bad’ character might start out in one place and end up someplace else. It keeps things interesting – for me and, I think, for the reader.

Which means that when I write my bad characters, it is my reflex to reach towards something at least remotely good or sympathetic within them. This, along with all their not-so-admirable qualities – and their outrageous unpredictable behavior — gives them shading and nuance.

And I finally realized that when it comes to writing my ‘good’ characters, I should be doing exactly the inverse. I should be reaching towards what is weak and flawed and unpleasant about them. Their fears. Their sins. The things they regret… or don’t know enough about themselves to regret. I was granting my ‘bad’ characters the freedom and power to do good – not often, to be sure, but at least it was there as a faint glimmer of possibility – without granting my ‘good’ characters the ability to be absolutely horrid. While I knew in theory that no character should be completely noble – it’s not only unrealistic, it’s also very boring, could make you throw the book across the room and thump the writer on the head and possibly even accuse her of writing a Mary Sue – but I still wasn’t doing what I should have been doing. I wasn’t writing from the flaw. I could explain what Jess Shepard’s flaws were, but I shied away from presenting them honestly. I didn’t trust the reader enough, or my abilities as a writer enough, to put forward a main character who is as every bit as problematic as, say, I am myself.

Thing is, though, we don’t want perfect main characters. If we meet someone in real life who seems much too polished, we tend to distrust and resent them. We appreciate virtue… but faults and foibles intrigue us. I love to analyze the hell out of them, both in the people I know and in myself. Yes, there is pettiness involved, and ego, and the desire to feel superior in some way; but there is also, I think, a basic curiosity, a hunger to learn about human nature. And we want, in stories, to see people as flawed as we are (if still somewhat larger than life) manage to triumph regardless, overcoming their own urge to self-sabotage just as much as any external obstacle…or if they don’t, we want to understand, maybe, why and where they failed.

5

One of my favorite writers is Paul Theroux, who came out several years ago with a book called SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW: A FRIENDSHIP ACROSS FIVE CONTINENTS. It’s a memoir of the rise and fall of his friendship with the writer V.S. Naipaul. Critics slammed him for his depiction of the man; they implied, or said outright, that Theroux was casting the “cold and cantankerous eye” of the jilted friend (and inferior writer).

They might have a point. A writer as skilled and intelligent as Theroux can’t help but dissemble at least a little bit, if just in the urge to turn something like life into a thing so ordered and compelling as narrative.

And yet. I loved the book. And I remember thinking at the time how the critics seemed to be overlooking the fact that nothing Theroux could do or say, no masterful writerly strategy he could summon forth in his presentation of Naipaul and his doomed relationship with him, could undercut the fact that Theroux had dedicated an entire book — all the energy and time and thought required — to an examination of this man and his experiences with him. Of course it was filtered through Theroux’s perspective and of course it was biased accordingly (which doesn’t mean that Theroux’s criticisms of the man might not be perfectly valid)…but just the act itself seemed an incredible compliment to Naipal.

In doing it, Theroux was saying: You fascinate me. You fascinate me enough to want to think and write and tell others all about you. To attempt to see you as a real, and thus flawed, individual, and not just the subject of my own projections and fantasies – or those of others.

And so it seems to me that I owe all my characters this kind of unflinching approach. This cold and sometimes cantankerous (yet always compassionate) eye. Theroux’s character V.S. Naipaul actually existed, of course, and my own characters never have…except in my head. Which, when I’m writing, is all the existence that matters.

— Justine Musk