Matt Forbeck

My editors almost never call. Most of them, I’ve never met. Often our only contact is via e-mail and Federal Express. It can go on that way for years, and has.

As long as everything’s fine, there’s no need to talk. I land an assignment for a novel, I’m thrilled. I turn it in on time and it rocks, the editor’s even happier. And it’s all done in the most efficient way possible for busy people racing around the dawn of the 21st century. No time for chats with people we don’t really know.

So, when the phone rings, you know it’s trouble.

Last week, I didn’t even hear the ringtone on my cell phone. (It’s the opening bars of the freelancer’s rock anthem: “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive.) It wasn’t until I heard my editor talking on my voice mail I knew something was wrong. I called her back despite that.

Erin Evans is probably a wonderful lady. She’s never been anything but kind to me. Hell, she commissioned a fantasy novel from me for Wizards of the Coast.

But sometimes circumstances force wonderful people to do rotten things—things that, while they may kick you in the teeth personally, are for the greater good. It does suck, but I have to respect people brave and classy enough to do it over the phone. Giving bad news via the written word is too easy. The right thing to do is to call someone up, talk them through it, and risk having him bite your head off, and it takes guts to pull it off right.

Politely and professionally, Erin informed me Wizards was sadly no longer interested in publishing the novel she’d commissioned from me. This decision did not reflect upon me at all. The entire subline of which the novel was to have been a part had been killed. Not too surprised (the phone call had tipped me off, after all) I took it pretty well, and both Erin and I left the door open to work on another project together at some future date.

Management at Wizards apparently wants to do something different with the book department, although I’m not privy to what it is. They’ve removed a number of books from their schedule recently, including (others have told me) a subline of Dragonlance novels and their entire Wizards of the Coast Discoveries line of original fiction.

This is the second time I’ve gotten news like this from Wizards. The last time one of my editors called me, it was Nina Hess telling me that their Knights of the Silver Dragon line had been canceled. I’d already written three books in that series (which I’d created for them) and had been contracted for two more when that axe fell.

Nina was just as fantastic and regretful about it as Erin. While I may not always agree with the decisions the managers at Wizards makes, they sure do hire good people.

Honestly, this wasn’t horrible news for me. I’ve had too much to do lately to spend any time on the book. It wasn’t due until December, but Erin had been asking me for a full outline for much of the spring.

All I ever put on paper for the book was the initial pitch, which ran about three pages. Despite that, Wizards kindly asked me to keep my initial advance, so I really can’t complain. It’s decent money for a few pages worth of work, and I now have a bit more time to tackle more pressing things without feeling guilty about pushing that outline off.

The news is a bit sadder for the people who’d gotten farther along on their work, like Jeff LaSala, Marcy Rockwell, Paul Kemp, and Ari Marmell, plus Steve and Melanie Tem and many others I probably don’t know about yet. They all have my sympathies.

Still, I’m confident we’ll all live to write another day. Nobody broke our fingers. Our word processors still work. And our imaginations burn brighter than ever.

No matter how much it may hurt to land on your rump when the rug gets yanked out from under you, we’ll all dust ourselves off and continue on.

Look for new and better books from every one of us—soon.

My latest work in comics just hit stores this week: Blood Bowl: Killer Contract #1 from Boom! Studios. It’s the first in a five-issue miniseries of comic books based upon my Blood Bowl novels, which are in turn based upon Jervis Johnson’s Blood Bowl board game.

I’ve written a handful of comics before, but this was the first time I’d tackled such a long story arc. Before I jumped in, I decided to see if anyone had come up with any new tools for writing comics that hadn’t been around the last time I’d given it a shot.

Unlike many other forms of writing, comics has no standard format. With a novel, there’s a certain accepted way in which to turn in your manuscript: generous margins, double-spaced text, numbered pages, etc. The format for screenplays has even less wiggle room.

With comics, though, the format can be whatever works best for you as the writers, as well as for everyone else you’re working with. Traditionally DC Comics works with a full script, which means you describe every page, every panel, every spoken, thought, or captioned word, and even every sound effect as you write the script. Marvel Comics, on the other hand, used to have the writer turn over page-by-page plots to the artist and then go back and fill in all the words later.

Today, most writers use full script, although not all, and many of those use something close to a screenplay format for their scripts. Some use Microsoft Word, Open Office, or another standard word processor. Others use Final Draft, the most popular of the screenplay-writing programs. This automatically pops in the correct indentations and styles that give a screenplay its distinctive look.

Me, I chose something entirely new: Scrivener. This is a new type of word processor that’s available exclusively for Mac OS X. It comes with all sorts of tools designed to help creative writers of all stripes in their craft. This includes a simulated corkboard for helping you breakdown a story scene by scene and then shift things around until it all works; a handy outliner; the ability to open and look at multiple parts of a project within a single window; even a full-screen mode that blocks out everything but the writing program, freeing you from other distractions.

I’ve used Scrivener for other projects, but for most books I go back to either Word or Pages. When it comes to comics, though, Scrivener really shines.

Comics have a strict format and many inherent tropes that writers have to keep in mind at all times. Most issues feature 22 pages of story. These pages are laid out in 2-page spreads, and the best time to build tension to a peak is on the last panel of a spread. The big reveals work better if they come after the reader turns a page after reading one of those pressure-ratcheting final panels.

In Scrivener, I use a free template that Antony Johnson devised for his comic book scripts. It’s proved so popular that it’s now included in the basic installation. In the template, you make each page into its own sub-document inside of the issue, and then make each panel into a sub-document of a page. This gives you a lot of flexibility for moving panels, pages, or entire scenes around in an intuitive and powerful way. You can fiddle with everything until you think you’ve got it just right.

Once I’m done, I export the document to Microsoft Word format so that my editor can read it, and the template automatically generates and includes page and panel numbers no matter how many times I’ve jiggered around any part of it.

I just finished writing issue #5 of Blood Bowl: Killer Contract last week, and I’ve put Scrivener away for a while. I’m already on the hunt for more comics to write, though, if only so I can put the program through its paces again.

When I start out a book, it never seems like I’ll have a chance of finishing it. Although I’ve written several, it’s like standing at the foot of a mountain and wondering how I’ll ever top it. Doing it over and over again gives me a semblance of confidence, but since each book is its own challenge, it’s like climbing a different mountain in the range each time. I know I should be able to make it to the top, but I have to find a different route every time.

Like most climbers, I enjoy the challenge, and part of what keeps me going is the lure of new peaks to top. A perverse part of me wants to look for bigger, steeper pinnacles to reach, and for some reason I keep giving in to that.

Once I’m done with the book, I get that same exhilarating sense of accomplishment. And—I don’t know if climbers feel this way, but I sure do—I never want to see that book again. I’m done, it’s behind me. Reading it only reminds me of the many unsure choices I made some of which I might have made differently had I known how it was all going to end up. I just can’t bring myself to do it.

A few months after that, though, I have to. The edits come back from the publisher, and it’s my job to go through and make sure that the suggested corrections are in fact correct. That means slogging through the manuscript one more time, watching someone else point out where I went flat wrong and second-guessing some of my other choices.

Once I get through that, the book can sometimes come back to me yet again for a last-second galley check. Changes at this point are expensive to implement, and I’m often tempted to just report back that the book is fine as is without even bothering to open the package in which it arrived. Instead, though, I always go through it once more, making sure that it’s as good as the editorial team and I can make it. It’s my name on the cover, after all, and I owe that much to anyone who pays for it.

It’s not until months or years later that I can go back and enjoy the book. This most often happens when I have to write a sequel and can’t recall what happened in the first book in the necessary exacting detail such a project requires. It’s then, after I’ve forgotten the contents of the book, that I can come back at it fresh.

It’s at these times that I’m least critical of my work and I can finally read it with new eyes. It’s almost like I’m reading someone else’s book, written by an author who knows exactly how to push all my buttons—in the best way. Having put that particular mountain so far behind me, I can now marvel at it along with (hopefully) everyone else.

I call myself a writer, but it’s not really enough. It’s a small word to encompass all the different things I do professionally. For instance, over the past several months, I’ve worked on the following things:

1. Wrote some of the scripts for a Blood Bowl comic book miniseries for BOOM! Studios, based on my Blood Bowl novels for the Black Library.
2. (Re)wrote a screenplay for a feature film for Reactor 88 Studios, based on my Brave New World roleplaying game.
3. Wrote a “non-fiction,” coffee-table book about orcs.
4. Revised my novelization of the Mutant Chronicles feature film, based on a roleplaying game I used to work on in the early ’90s.
5. Wrote the story for an upcoming game for the Wii.
6. Wrote the story and initial cutscenes for an upcoming game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
7. Wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Superheroes and Villains, Illustrated.
8. Designed the mechanics for an electronic game for a major toy company.

I’ve also signed on to write another nonfiction book, plus my next novel for Wizards of the Coast, and I’m pitching around a few other novels around, so I haven’t given up on the form at all. I love writing novels and don’t plan to ever abandon them.

However, there are so many other things out there to do—to write—that I don’t ever want to hem myself in by claiming I’m solely a novelist. It’s like saying “I’m a father.” Sure, I am that too, but it’s not the only thing that defines me.

Perhaps I need to find a way to focus, to zero in on my strengths with laser-like precision. The world seems to prefer specialists, and as any gamer can tell you, you can only maximize your preferred skills by ignoring others. As a game designer, I understand how that works and why it’s made that way. It provides the player with interesting choices and ways of differentiating their characters from others.

In real life, though, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I like working on all sorts of different things. Although I admire the inventiveness and tenacity of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades developing a single world in glorious detail, that’s not for me. I’d rather take a dip in many different ponds than soak forever in one.

This is how I keep creative juices fresh and flowing. I sample from everything I can get my hands on, and I try my hand at anything offered to me. In the past few years, I’ve also edited novels, designed a collectible card game or two, designed puzzles for a children’s book, created the user interface and operating system for a handheld gaming unit, directed voiceover work for an animated comic-book I wrote and produced, written hundreds of trivia questions, scripted and designed large chunks of a computer game, written cutscenes for another computer game, and—among all that—written about a dozen novels.

I like it this way. The world is too big, too amazing, too wonderful for me to want to stick to looking at it from one angle, to try to capture it using a single set of tools. It’s said if you have a hammer then everything looks like a nail. I want to carry around a whole box of tools instead, and I’m always hunting for new things to add to it.

In the end, though, all these things require writing skills to one extent or another. They all combine to make me a better writer. The skills I learn to use in one form can inform and inspire my work in another.

So, maybe “writer” is a plenty big enough word after all.

Or maybe I’m just suffering from an advanced case of ADD.

I’ve been trying to write this novel for a year now. It’s the first in an original, young adult, fantasy series that’s been burning a hole in the dark corners of my brain for far longer than that. But I just can’t seem to get around to it, and it bugs the hell out of me.

Since I’m a full-time writer (and game designer, but that’s a post for another board, I think), you might ask what the problem is. After all, don’t I have all day long, every day, to write?

Sure, in a sense. But just like most people I have other things that occupy at least some of my hours: wife, kids, family, friends. While I write most of the time, I have other obligations too, and I try to fit some flat-out, needless (but not to me) fun into what I have left.

I treat my writing like a job. I sit at my desk for hours every day and smash my calloused fingertips into my keyboard, stringing words into sentences, into paragraphs, into chapters, into books. I write. I write a lot.

This year, I’ve already worked on four different computer games, written three non-fiction books and two novels, crafted an operating system for an electronic toy, created a number of other games, and signed on to write a comic book miniseries. It’s nuts. I often have to check my own website to remember what I’ve done.

And there’s the dilemma. As a working writer, I don’t have extra time to write. What time I do have is already dedicated to paying projects, those birds in the hand that I end up juggling instead of charging headlong into the bush after original work.

To sit down and write that original YA novel means that I’d have to give up the income for the time I spent on it. Instead of turning over a book for a check, I’d give it to my agent and wish her the best of luck in selling it.

In essence, I’m not giving up that income for that time. I’m investing it into a gamble instead, one that could net me a nice chunk of change but could also cost me every dime of that time instead. It’s a roll of the dice, and when you have a mortgage, car payments, and many mouths to feed, it gets harder to pull myself away from the security of the job that’s already there.

So I’m going to do it. I’m going to grab those dice (6d$) and toss them against the table’s back bumper. I’ll take the risk and write that damn book.

Just as soon as I hit my next deadline or three.

Here’s one trick about writing: Sometimes you have to do it even when you don’t want to. If you write full-time for a living, as I do, it happens more than you (or I) might want to think about.

Writing is a dream, right? Something a lot of writers do to get away from their day jobs, their families, their lives. The idea that you might be able to do it all the time and make a living at it, well, you’d be a fool to complain, wouldn’t you?

Yes. Yes, you would.

While writing on command about any particular topic, even one you choose, can sometimes be like pulling an angry tiger’s teeth, it still beats most other jobs all hollow. You get to sit in front of a computer in an air-conditioned room, coming up with things that intrigue you—and hopefully your readers—while other people must slave away in the hot sun or the freezing cold or spend endless hours doing mindless work that they hate. To complain that writing doesn’t always beat skydiving for thrills is churlish at best.

Sometimes, when the words flow from your fingers like water through a broken dam, writing can take you away. Writers live for those moments, and they happen far less often than any of us would like. The rest of the time, we have to just sit down, strap ourselves in, and start typing.

That, though, is why anyone pays for writing. Professional writers come up with the right words—or at least the next best thing—when they’re needed. They don’t wait for the muse to strike. They hunt down that damned muse and strike her until she coughs up the goods.

Some people think you can’t force inspiration. Maybe they’re right—for them. Me, though, I find nothing as inspiring as a deadline coupled with a blank page. That, and my mortgage, my car payments, and all the other bills that come along with a young family of seven.

We all write for our own reasons, of course, and for many of us those reasons change over time. Maybe we manage to exorcise the demons of our youth. Perhaps we finally find a way to tell that story that’s been burning in our hearts for so long. Sometimes that’s enough, and those people stop writing. They are no longer writers. They wrote.

Those of us who keep coming back to it, though, have to find something that keeps us going, that lures us back to that empty page. For me, it’s the sense of exploration, of discovery, of coming up with something new every time I approach a project, no matter the topic, time, or place.

Coming up with new ways to say new things, that’s easy. The novelty is inherent in the subject. The topic pulls the reader along no matter how artful or artless the prose.

Devising new ways to say the same things, though, to keep people reading—to keep yourself writing—on topics so well-trodden that writers have laid strata over them, like building over the ruins of Rome, that’s the true challenge. To do that, you have to love not what the words are about but the words themselves and the process of putting them together in better ways.

That’s what makes me love to write, even when I don’t want to.