Richard Dansky

Most writers I know have rituals. These run the gamut from adjusting their desks a certain way to writing by candlelight to setting a glass of perfectly innocent booze on fire before each writing project as a sacrifice to the Writing Ancestors. They may sound silly, or wasteful (perfectly good booze, after all) or unintuitive, but in their own way, they all make sense. And by make sense, I don’t mean that the individual rituals themselves are constructed on a foundation of adamantine logic and garbed in shining steel armor of unassailable rationale. I mean that the idea and practice of rituals themselves makes pefect sense, particularly for us writer types.

Why? Because rituals are, in large part, about comfort. They are about adjusting one’s surroundings in a particular way in hopes of achieving a desired result, and once that change has been accomplished the ritualist is in a more comfortable place. More comfort means less brainpower devoted to worrying, to nagging thoughts and “what ifs” and everything but the task at hand (in this case, writing). More energy devoted to the task at hand generally means more and better work. The idea of doing more and better work becomes associated with the performance of the ritual, which makes it even more comforting, and, well, you see where this goes.

Now, I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that the performance of a ritualized behavior induces a shamanic trance, an ecstatic state of creative being. Others can debate that to their hearts’ content; that sort of thing really isn’t my style. What I can say definitively, however, is that I do have certain rituals built into my writing process, and that when I perform them faithfully, I tend to write better. I find myself less easily distracted, I write better, and I write longer and more quickly.

And again, I don’t think there’s a mystic or psychic or religious component to this. Rather, it’s just my way of lowering myself into the writing mood, which is all that it needs to be.

Like anything else, rituals evolve. Once upon a time, I’d put a finger of scotch (not the good stuff) out on my desk every time I sat down to write. Later, once I acquired a better appreciation for scotch (and found myself doing a lot of my writing in a building where a any hooch left unattended for more than eight seconds wasn’t safe), things changed. I did most of my writing late, late, late at night in those days, which meant mainlining caffeine, which meant mainlining Coca-Cola. Eventually it got to the point where I conflated writing with the presence of the sweet nectar of downtown Atlanta (Seriously. Downtown Atlanta is positively coated in the stuff. It’s terrifying) and found myself unable to get into a writing mood unless I’d Coked myself up. The fact that I rarely found myself able to sleep before 7 AM on the nights when I did this, well, we’re all young and stupid at some point.

And when the caffeine and the tooth-melting sweetness got to be too much for my aging dentition and sleep habits, I found rituals evolving again. As ridiculous as it sounds, there was a dry patch in there (no pun intended) after I kicked the Coke habit but before I found a comfortable routine to replace it. I lapsed a couple of times, went on binges when I felt desperate and blocked and in dire need of word count. After all, a frosty red can just said “writing” to me in a way that more sensible beverages didn’t. Without it, I felt uncomfortable and distracted, not out of any particular love of Coke products, but rather because drinking Coke was part of getting my brain in a receptive state for writing. It took, literally, years to retrain myself, including a sad and desperate fling with Caffeine Free Diet Coke (truly, the drink of the self-delusional).

These days, the daily ritual is, if nothing else, better for my teeth. Clear the desk, shut the door, start the music and, if I’m hoping to be particularly productive. It’s the pre-project ritual that’s gotten more complicated, a lengthy and reverent process of putting together a writing playlist that reinforces the mood and tone of what I want to write. Firefly Rain was Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and southern rock out the yin-yang; the work I did on Splinter Cell: Conviction was 98% action movie sountracks (instrumental only, thanks) mixed with a light sprinking of Foo Fighters. Why Foo Fighters? I have no idea. It just felt right, and once it felt right, I didn’t feel right not writing to it.

Like I said, ritual.

Perhaps the notion of sorting out a writing playlist has deeper or more logical underpinnings. After all, sorting out what music is or isn’t appropriate for writing a particular project is in large part defining what the project itself is or isn’t. You can’t know if something fits unless you have a good idea – conscious or otherwise – of what you’re going to be writing to that particular piece of music. After all, that piece of music can either reinforce or break the mood you’re trying to achieve – I at least tend not to get a lot of writing done when my lizard brain forces me to sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, for example – and so it’s a litmus test, a way of gut-checking whether I know what I’m writing well enough to actually get down to it.

Like I said, comfort. Purpose. Ritual.

And less flaming booze, which is always a good idea.

Case in point:

There was one lurking in the closet in my home office. As closets go, mind you, it’s not terribly exciting. It’s used for storing books and shipping materials; it’s where the unloved eBay auctions go to die. But today, there was something different..

This morning, I found a case in there, black plastic and metal trim. It’s not mine. I don’t know where it came from, or how it got there. Maybe my wife’s nephew left it behind after his stay and it’s just come to light, maybe it belongs to the writing student who’s living in our guest room. Maybe it came from somewhere else; when enough relatives live nearby and have keys to your house, things magically appear in strange places as a matter of course. Pairs of shorts, for example. Heating trays for party food. Sweaters – Mom won’t always fess up to it, but there have been multiple incidents of drive-by sweatering for me and my wife.

But this doesn’t look like that. It’s tucked away, someplace it shouldn’t have gotten to. Carefully, I take it out and lay it down.

It’s a musical instrument case, I can see that now. I don’t recognize the brand, but that’s not surprising. It’s been a while since I took out my clarinet, ten years and counting. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that it’s a musical instrument. Strange things have moved through this house in strange cases. Magic the Gathering cards. Shotguns. Arsenic ore and Chinese silk, French chocolate in irregular shapes and books a hundred years old. It could be anything in there, anything at all.

So I open it. Inside, there’s a saxophone, an alto. It’s not mine; I have two and they’re both tenors, both accounted for.

Scattered through the case are dried roses and playing cards. I pick a card up. It’s the jack of spades, curved slightly with time or pressure or too close a relationship with the saxophone’s bell. I put it back gently and pick up another card. Another jack, another spade – so it goes for all of them there,

The dried roses? They crumble to the touch.

Carefully, I put the last card back in the case and shut the lid. I sit it gently against the wall, not quite ready to put it back into hiding, and step over to my desk. There’s a notepad there, kept against emergencies of information or inspiration. I pick up a pen – dayglo green, a relic of a long-ago Microsoft party at a long-ago GDC – and write a few words down. Case. Roses. One-eyed jacks. Who wants it? Who left it behind? Why?

The story hides in the spaces between them. I haven’t found it yet. Someday, I’ll go looking. Tonight, I just know where it came from. That’s enough for me.

One of the hotter discussion topics of late among genre fiction writers and readers I know is the Mayan calendar-level apocalypse known as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Depending on whom you ask, it’s either A)a brilliant literary mashup, B)a cute pastiche that’s better in the concept than in the reading, C)a sign of the impending doom of all that is Good, True and Beautiful in the literary world – if not some combination of the above. Adding to the geshrying is the cavalcade of announcements of followup or piggyback titles. Vide author Seth Grahame-Smith’s hefty deal for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, not to mention the various upcoming projects reinventing Austen’s estimable Mr. Darcy as a vampire, and, well, you get the idea. It’s getting thick on the ground in Austen Mash-up land.

All of this adds up to a lot wailing and moaning and rending of garments and whatnot – some of which, I confess, I’ve indulged in – over how “originality is dead” and “why is this stuff getting published when good books are going begging for publishers” and “that’s all so fanfic”; cries of “Batman versus Spider-Man” and “I ran that as a roleplaying game in college” can be heard, if you listen hard enough. Surely, there is merit to these claims, yes? Surely we as writers can do better than mash-ups of existing literary tropes and characters, or taking historical figures and slathering dollops of speculative fiction goodness all over them. There are standards to be upheld, durnit, rigorous vetting to be done at the gatehouse of the imagination to ensure only the appropriate ideas get through.

Except, of course, when you see a story – a marvelous story – like John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus”, which introduces Dr. Victor Frankenstein to Miss Mary Bennett, both with impeccable literary pedigrees. “Pride and Prometheus” is currently thundering through the awards season like Bo Jackson with a clear route to the end zone, its re-imagination of existing literary characters clearly no impingement to the recognition of its quality.

Or  how about John Myers-Myers’ beloved Silverlock, which features the entire cast of the western literary canon gone gadabout on some lovely island real estate? Or Riverworld, an acknowledged classic of the speculative fiction canon, which happens to feature everyone who ever lived (with Sam Clemens front and center)? Or Fred Saberhagen’s team-up of Sherlock Holmes and Dracula? Or H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard teaming up to fight Lovecraft’s own literary creations in Barbour & Raleigh’s Shadows Bend (not to be confused with Nick Mamatas’ Move Underground, wherein it’s beat poets instead of weird fiction authors going up against ol’ squidface and his minions). Or…

Clearly, there’s a lot of this stuff out there. Clearly, a lot of it is good, and well-written, and entertaining, and professional. Clearly, a lot of it is worth reading. To quote Ramsey Campbell in his essay “Plagued by Plagiarism II”, “ideas matter less than execution, and borrowing is not a crime”. If the concept of P&P&Z is what’s bothersome to some folks, then they’ve got a long line of literary forebears – anybody remember Balzac’s Melmoth Reconciled? – to disapprove of as well. If the issue is not the notion of the literary mash-up, but rather that these particular ones seem to be lacking in specific merit, or to be enjoying success disproportionate with any merits they might have, well, that’s another issue entirely.

In other words, commenting on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for its quality, or lack thereof – your mileage may vary, and your response is your own – as a specific book certainly is fair game. Dinging it as an exemplar of all literary evil, or even a horrific trending in genre fiction, is less so. I don’t have a particular dog in this fight – my experience with P&P&Z consists of hearing about it, being amused by the cover art, and chortling over the well-constructed first paragraph – but if you want to tear it down, or praise it to the skies based on its own merits, then by all means, go ahead. It is certainly every reader’s and every writer’s right to either applaud or kvetch  about what they’ve seen and read. If you don’t like the book, you don’t like the book, and that’s fine. But to zap it for literary sins of a sort that have been largely condoned before is a less convincing argument.

That being said, the most elegant response to the whole kerfuffle is to figure out why a particular manifestation is appealing, and to do better. Admittedly, it’s less fun than unrestrained kvetching. More work, too. But the end results might be a bit more tangible, and, as a bonus, you’ll be providing something to the reading and writing community: The chance to bitch about your horrible literary crimes. And if that’s not giving back to the community, I don’t know what is.

If you are reading this, you are most likely someone who reads extensively about writing. You have no doubt read or heard a great many bits of advice, suggestions and recommendations as to how to make your writing better. You have almost certainly been told multiple times what the secret/key/Maguffin to good writing is, often in ways that contradict each other with jagged and relentless ferocity. You have been told to do everything except dip yourself in lemon herb butter and conjure the spirits of the ancient lobster gods of Lemuria before sitting down at the writing desk and taking quill in hand.

And I am here today to tell you that the secret is none of the above.

At this point, having spent the better part of twenty years writing novels, roleplaying games, book reviews, nonfiction, video games, academic papers, blog posts, book reviews, and internet humor columns under the pen name “Elfpants”, I can say that I have found precisely one factor that correlates 100% with writing well. Everything else has its ups and downs, its pluses and minuses, but there’s one element that, time and again, matches up with when I’ve done my best, my fastest, my cleanest work.

Get enough sleep.

That’s it.

Look, I know some of you were hoping for something earthshattering. Sacrifice a spotless purple goat on the new moon, maybe, and get the magical power of adverbs. Do a specific exercise and in just 3 sessions per week of 30 minutes each, your writing abs will be rock-hard and cut like a Belgian diamond. Keep yourself on a strict diet of no prepositions. Whatever. The gimmicks don’t have it. The gimmicks are often precisely that: gimmicks. What matters is putting yourself in the best position to do your best work, and that starts with getting enough sleep.

Get enough sleep, and your brain functions better. Your brain functions better, and you think more clearly. You think more clearly, and your ability to do silly little things – like utilize language constructively -  is improved. In short, you write better. If, on the other hand, you don’t get enough sleep, pretty soon your brain starts running like Atlanta public transportation during a snowstorm. Surprise, buttercup: If you’re not thinking well in general, the parts of your brain that are thinking about writing well aren’t going to be magically exempt, even if you have a deadline.

This is not to say that getting up an hour early to get some writing in before work is a bad thing. On the contrary, a scheduled, structured approach that includes a solid sleep schedule is a great thing for writing. It means forgoing sleep excessively, for whatever reason, will ultimately negatively impact your writing.

Don’t believe me? Consider this possibility: You stay up late writing because you’re on a really good roll and don’t get to bed until the wee hours. In the morning, you get up at your usual time, still exhausted, and don’t get a lot done at work. Because you’re not getting stuff done and you have a deadline, you stay at work a little later, just to make sure everything gets done. That, in turn, means you get home a little later. Which means by the time you sit down to write in the evening, it’s already getting late. Plus, you’re still tired, which means it takes longer for you to get the amount of work you want in, which keeps you up even later to make your word count, and…

You get the idea. As romantic as the idea of the magically inspired writer pounding heedlessly away into the wee hours, fueled by the sheer glistening fires of artistic creation might be, it’s not a sustainable model. Sleep debt is the sort of thing that racks up interest in a hurry, and it takes payments right out of the middle of your brain. I know for a fact that on days when I’ve gotten enough sleep, I write better. I have more ideas, and better ones. I work faster, and cleaner, and just plain better. And on days when I’ve pushed too hard or too far the night before, I lose the good ideas before I can write them down. I work slower. I get distracted more easily. I need more breaks, and I’m a helluva lot worse at Facebook Scrabble.

Anecdotal evidence? Sure. But ask a lot of writers, and I’ll bet you get a lot of similar anecdotes.

So read all the other stuff. Pay attention to it. Learn it. Try it. Do it, if it makes sense to you. Find what works for you – exercises or word counts or schedules or writing groups or whatever – and go for it. But if you want it to have the best shot at succeeding, if you want to give yourself the best chance to do good work, do this one thing.

Get enough sleep.

Back when I was working in tabletop games, we had a fairly well defined social hierarchy of appropriate geekness. Because I worked in tabletop RPGs, tabletop RPG players were of course at the apex of the pyramid. Beneath them were the miniatures gamers, who at least knew how to paint. Below them were the LARPers, and below them were the wargamers, and lowest of them all were the collectible card game players, who cluttered up the hallways of our precious conventions with sudden outbreaks of Magic: The Gathering and suchlike. It was all very cozy, really. Everyone who’d been sneered at had someone else to sneer at, except the CCG players, who, I have it on good authority, turned around and sneered at those weirdos who played games with books and couldn’t finance a new stereo system with proceeds from selling off a couple of unopened booster packs.

It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized that what we’d been doing could best be described as “more gamer than thou.” Our way was the true way of gaming, and everyone else was lesser because they weren’t doing it right. It was ludicrous, of course – the archetypal schoolyard bully wouldn’t care if you were a Nosferatu or a Snorlax-hugger – but it was a way of comparing ourselves to one another and finding affirmation that we were doing things right. And of course, we couldn’t be doing things right unless that guy, over there, was doing things wrong.

That’s WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, and let’s wave some torches and pitchforks while we’re at it, shall we, folks?

Scroll forward now. Years pass, and I’m a writer. I meet other writers. I work with them. I bump into them on message boards and mailing lists, collaborate with them on projects, and generally find myself increasingly immersed in writer socialization networks.

And far too often, I find myself stumbling across – and recoiling from – a single notion that remains as ridiculous now as it was when it was being applied to rosy-cheeked forty year olds clutching their Atogs and Llanowar Elves for all they were worth.

I refer to, of course, the dread disease of “More Writer Than Thou”, the older and equally pernicious sibling to “more gamer than thou”.  MWTT (as I shall call it from henceforth) is as hard to define as the coastline of an amoeba and as hard to eradicate as the common cold. There’s medium-driven MWTT – “Oh, he’s just a game /television/comics/soup label” writer. There’s content-driven MWTT, as witnessed by the Sisyphean struggle of tie-in writers to garner any respect for their work. There’s genre MWTT. There’s education-based MWTT; “real” writers sneering at those who dared go get college degrees in writing for being weak and formulaic, while the college grads pooh-pooh right back at what they view as non-Euclidean grammar and unenlightening subject matter. There’s regional  denigration – think about the term “regional writer” for a minute, won’t you – dismissal of writers who don’t sell and writers who sell too much, and the list goes on and on. And all of it washes up in endless angry, masturbatory emails and forum posts and drunken convention rants and God knows what else.

Digression time.

My wife once introduced me to an acquaintance of hers, whom, she explained, was a writer. Of course we had to meet, because, well, we were both writers, and thus we had to meet. This, incidentally, was well before either my wife (also a writer) and I had gotten wise to the ways of writer socializing, and understood that a strange writer is best approached with a chair and bullwhip until proven friendly, housebroken and unarmed.

Within three minutes of our introduction, this person (I’ll call her May) had told me that her proudest writing achievement was a piece of Justice League fanfic wherein she had, and I quote, “re-invented Batman as a really dark character”. She had also gone on a lengthy and vicious rant against a particular fantasy writer of immense popularity, to the point of wishing him grievous bodily harm.

I asked her if she’d read any of the author in question’s work. She hadn’t, not past a quick skimming of one of his titanic fantasy slabs. I asked if he’d ever done anything to her personally. Again, no. Befuddled, I asked why she hated him so much, then, if she’d never met him and hadn’t read his books.

“Oh,” the answer came back. “He sells too many books. He’s not a real writer.”
Now, I pass no judgment here. If May was happy writing fanfic (though reinventing Batman as a “dark” character is a lot like reinventing chocolate ice cream as a dessert), more power to her. But in unleashing her torrent of sheer hatred on the one unfortunate bestselling author, she’d indulged, nay, wallowed in, More Writer Than Thou.

Let’s think about that one for a second. Leaving aside the fact that this demonstrates MWTT to be a universal complaint – after all, if one of the least original fanfic writers this side of Krypton is denigrating one of the leading lights of her supposed favorite genre as “not a real writer”, it’s pretty clear that everyone’s a possible purveyor or target (or both) – one must ask, what good did it do?

The answer, I suspect, is not much. It certainly didn’t affect the bestselling author in question, who went on to continue writing books, selling gobs of copies of them, and cashing the immense checks that came along with doing so. Nor did it benefit May, who spent oodles of time denigrating said bestselling author instead of, well, writing. And the false sense of achievement that she got out of it, because she had somehow decided that she was a “better” writer than this particular individual, was a sop to any lingering inclinations she had about improving her craft.

That’s the real danger of More Writer Than Thou, I think, the false injection of egoboo, as exciting and destructive as anything that ever went into Roger Clemens’ pasty buttocks.  The false comparison with another writer or group of writers, always favorable to the one doing the comparison, is a diversion from the actual task of writing. It’s a way to feel good by putting down what others have or haven’t done, instead of based on what the writer themselves has done.

In other words, it ain’t about the writing. It’s a dangerous, pointless habit to get into, and if you find yourself doing it, stop it immediately. You are not a really more true bona fide grade A writer type  than anyone else because you A)sold more books than they did B)sold less books than they did C)got a degree from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop D)did not get a degree from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop E)wrote novels instead of short stories F)wrote short stories instead of novels G)wrote short stories and novels instead of video games H)didn’t write a particular book you didn’t like I)had an idea for a book you liked but the other guy wrote it before you did or J) don’t sully yourself with Twitter, only blogging, Facebook, Myspace, a website, a podcast, and innumerable small convention panels.

To be blunt, none of that crap matters. What the other guy does doesn’t matter, except in the sense that if the other guy writes a better book than you and gets it to the publisher first, then you’re probably out of luck. What does matter is not wasting the time building a little pillow fort of the subconscious to make you feel better about your writing instead of doing the one thing that can actually affect it.

Which is, of course, writing.

Or, to steal a page from my day job, you don’t level in writer. There’s no objective comparison, no hard and fast set of qualifications, no way to quantify who is “more” of a writer than anyone else. Time spent trying to figure it out – or more accurately, to come up with reasons to put down other writers instead of doing more of your own writing – is as useful and productive as trying to count angels on the head of a syringe.

Which is the sort of image that no real writer would ever come up with, and the guy who just wrote it is a worthless hack. Right? Right.

With apologies to Facebook and the memeage therein:

1-The world is under no obligation to tell you how great your writing is. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that at least one person on there is going to hate it with the sort of hatred that inspires open-mouth frothing, Hulk-like spasms, and negative amazon.com reviews which may or may not be written in complete sentences. This is because we as a species are primates, and the only thing we can all actually agree on is the fact that oxygen is useful. If the thought of even one person not adoring your stuff makes you upset, then you need to consider another vocation. Either that, or never show your work to more than six people, all of whom owe you large sums of money.

2-Finding good readers is important. You particularly want readers who will tell you what doesn’t work and why, when you’ve accidentally changed character names, species, or planets between paragraphs, and if what you’ve written seems an awful lot like last week’s episode of “House”. You particularly do not want readers who tell you that everything you write is awesome, who will tell you that everything you write is terrible, or who tell you how they would have written it instead.

3-There are no prizes for wanting to write a novel. There are particularly no prizes for wanting to have written one. Sit your ass down, stop talking about the brilliant book you’re going to write, and write it already. Either that, or confess that you’re never actually going to write the book and switch topics to your fantasy football team instead, because it’s never too early to start wondering who to draft at wide receiver.

4-Writing is hard work. If it weren’t, everyone would be doing it instead of telling everyone that they’re going to do it.

5-Writing is really hard work. But the more you do it, the better you get at the craft of it. In this sense, it is no different from woodworking, pilates, or making homemade cole slaw. If you are not willing to put in the time to figure out how to put words together well – which you do by putting them together poorly, throwing them out, and trying again – then you’re not going to get better.

6-Writing involves putting your ass down in the chair. And then, as William F. Nolan said, you make tappity motions with your fingers and words, hopefully, come out.

7-Writing involves getting your ass out of the chair every once in a while. Because if all you ever do is write, you’re probably not meeting interesting people, seeing interesting places and/or things, and otherwise refreshing your store of interesting things to write about. No, your latest triumph in Facebook Scrabble does not count.

8-Everyone thinks they can write. This is not true. Many people can barely type. This does not keep them from trying to write, or more importantly, telling you how you should write.

9-Some people actually can write, or can tell you how to make your writing better. Find them and listen to them. This is just as important as learning how to ignore, go around, or placate the people who can’t write but who absolutely will not cut you a check until you add a lesbian dinosaur romantic subplot to your tightly-knit World War II espionage drama.

10-Many people who represent themselves as authorities on writing are, in fact, full of it. This may or may not include me. The trick is to see what each so-called expert actually offers by way of advice and information, as opposed to the shiny italicized bits of their resumes (which may in fact bear only the slightest of relationships to their actual work history), and then figuring out if it’s useful for you.

11-You can in fact put something aside and then pick it back up later. There is no prize for finishing things in order. Sometimes you’re just not in the right place to finish a project, and you need time, distance, or a mysterious encounter with a six-foot invisible rabbit to get yourself to a place where you can actually see where the story’s really going.

12-This is not an excuse for giving up at the slightest adversity. Just because the words don’t flow like spiced Night Train going downhill the very instant you sit yourself down doesn’t mean that you can or should walk away at the first opportunity.

13-The world is not going to love your writing just because it’s your writing. In other words, you’re going to have to promote it. That means talking to people. That specifically means talking to people who aren’t A) other writers, B) your aforementioned six-person writing group or C) your immediate family.  All of these people will almost certainly expect free copies of your book, except the writers, who will claim that they hate to ask but they need a free copy so they can write a review of it for some website, magazine, or interpretive dance troupe you’ve never heard of. No, you will need to talk to the public, those wacky people who actually buy books, and whose time and money is eagerly sought after by movies, television, video games, other books, magazines, online pornography, Japanese sand gardening supply houses, minor league baseball teams, and destitute bankers performing barbershop quartet music on subway platforms throughout the greater New York area. If you do not talk to them and explain to them why they should buy your book, they will not buy your book. More importantly, they will probably not even know your book exists.

14-There is a difference between talking to your audience and making an ass of yourself. I, however, have never actually figured out where that line is.

15-Revision is not beneath you. The odds of you writing something perfect the first time are somewhere between infinitesimal and none. Or, to put it another way, if Moses had looked on the back side of Sinai, he would have seen a giant pile of stone tables with cross-outs, spelling errors, and stuff like “#7: Thou shalt eat lots of fiber, for it shall make you regular and more pleasant to be around.”

16-Don’t look at revision as a bad thing. It’s a chance to catch the errors you missed on the previous draft, and it’s a lot nicer to catch them yourself when you can still fix them than, say, when the book is in print and people are coming up to you at a convention asking questions like “Where’s Page XX? I can’t find it in here.”

17-That being said, there’s a time to stop revising. You can usually ascertain for yourself when this point has been reached. It’s the moment when you find yourself cackling, “Aha, misplaced serial comma! Thou didst think thou could elude me, but now thou shalt pay for thy insolence with thy life!” to yourself whilst preparing to hit the DELETE key. (Note: Members of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, most of the major LARP groups and regular watchers of The Tudors may be exempt from this particular example because they talk like that all the time anyway.) At a certain point, you need to let it go, or you’ll find yourself in a sort of late-period Peter Lorre dementia where you promise to never, ever let anyone else see the story until it’s perrrrrrfect. This, as you might expect, has a negative impact on your chances of getting the damn thing published.

18-It is not all about you. And your novel probably shouldn’t be, either.

19-That goes double for your favorite Dungeons & Dragons/LARP/World of Warcraft character. With, of course, a few notable exceptions. But even then, if you are going to inflict your campaign adventures on the world, at least have the decency to rewrite it in such a way that it reads and has the pace of fiction, not a series of die rolls and debuffs. And for God’s sake, if you’re going to recount a campaign from a system that you yourself did not create, have the decency to file off the serial numbers and change the names.

20- Write your ideas down when you get them. Contrary to what you tell yourself when that moment of inspiration strikes, you will not in fact remember it later. You will, however, spend an hour actually slamming your skull into various solid objects in hopes of jarring the memory of that brilliant story idea loose. This, as you might expect, will hurt.

 21-When you write it down, write it down legibly. It took me three weeks to figure out what the note I wrote to myself that read “zombie cannibal ocelots” actually meant.

22-If you don’t have anything new to say, don’t say it the same way the last guy did. Even if you’re working with a well-worn trope, at least find a new way to say it. If you feel absolutely compelled to write a brooding, romantic vampire novel, consider setting it somewhere other than New Orleans. Have your zombies shout “spleens” instead of “brains”. Offer something that’s uniquely yours, or there’s no reason to read your interpretation.

23-Use your spellchecker. And be sure to add all those funny italicized terms you’ve made up for your continuity, so that it doesn’t flag “snurgleflorf” each and every one of the four thousand times you dunk it into your manuscript.

24-Even if it’s good, a magazine is under no compulsion to buy your story. Spending your time talking about how you’d run your theoretical magazine is permitted for precisely twelve hours after you get a rejection from an editor who clearly does not understand your genius, unless you are actually going to put together a business plan. Otherwise, you’re just stalling. Send the story back out to someone else, and write another one while you’re at it.  

25-When it comes to writing, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. And someday, at great length, you won’t either.

Los Angeles is not my usual stomping ground, so visiting twice in a month is quite the event. One trip was for Book Expo America, while the current trip is tied into a recording session for a Game Which Shall Not Be Named. Both trips seem straightforward – go in, take care of business, go home.

But around the edges, you can always find stories. Here are six.

ONE

Never before have I been haunted by Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

I first saw her in the corridor between the West and South Halls of the Convention Center, a block-long carpeted slog liberally bespangled with posters, banners, and ads carefully attached to the very ground the attendees walked on. I was in discussion with my agent and he looked over my shoulder and said, “Look. Dr. Ruth.”

I turned around and looked. There she was, motoring down the hall at a goodly pace, her people hurrying to keep up with her. She looked much as she did during her basic cable heyday, instantly recognizable.

I had no idea she was going to be at BEA. I had no idea why she was at BEA, as the sort of book I’d assume Dr. Ruth to be involved with isn’t generally my cup of tea. That being said, I certainly have nothing against Dr. Ruth, and I watched her sweep by, impressed.

I did not stop her, or ask for an autograph.

Later that day, I ran into her again on the sidewalks of Figueroa Street. We nearly bumped into each other. I said, “Excuse me.” She said something that I think was “Of course,” and we went our separate ways.

I called my wife that night. “You’ll never guess who I saw,” I told her. “Dr. Ruth. Twice.”

“Huh,” my wife said. “What’s she doing at BEA?”

I thought about that for a minute. “I think she sells more books than I do.”

And that, I thought, was that. My brush with celebrity at the conference, my semi-six-degrees moment. I saw Dr. Ruth, and it would make for a good story.

That afternoon, there was a signing in the Wizards of the Coast booth for the first few authors on the new Discoveries imprint: Myself, Joe McDermott, Rob Rogers, and Steve and Melanie Tem. We sat ourselves down in our respective corners, readied our signing hands, and prepared for we knew not what. (Rob, Joe and myself, at least – Steve and Melanie were cool as cucumbers, and Steve’s Magical Signing Pen was a subject of widespread awe and wonder).  The doors opened, metaphorically speaking. The people swept in. We signed, we schmoozed, we joked, we occasionally surreptitiously rubbed our wrists when we thought no one was looking.

When suddenly, through the middle of the crowd, swept Dr. Ruth. The people parted for her. She had no entourage, did not yell, did not need to announce her presence. She simply was there, and the next second there was a space around her.

She marched up to where I sat, shook my hand, and then grabbed a copy of Firefly Rain off the pile. We spoke very briefly about what was in the book, and then she said, “I would like you to autograph this for my grandson. He is quite precocious.”

At least, that’s what I think she said. Most of my brain was locked down with the enormous task of Not Saying Something Incredibly Stupid, like “Hey, I was a big fan of yours when I was a teenager” or “You know, I tried one of the things I saw on your show and it didn’t work.”

You know. Stuff like that.

Instead, I concentrated on making my signature legible. On the other side of the desk, another author was trying to force a copy of her boon on Dr. Ruth, who ignored her magnificently, took the book from me, and vanished into the crowd

It took about thirty seconds for the booth to return to normal, if normal is the right word for it.

And I’d signed a book for Dr. Ruth.

TWO

The lure of BEA for the casual attendee is free books. Publishers will set down piles of freebies like the lost treasures of Croesus, encouraging passers-by to take them. Some of these books will be arranged artfully, in effigies that mimic the giant termite mounds of Africa or the spirit-touched menhirs of Glastonbury Tor. Others will be stacked neatly, for greater ease in plundering. Some were clutched in the arms of attractive women who generously handed them out, along with fulsome praise for the books they were sharing. Some were cast haphazardly, perhaps victims of drive-by freebee-ing.

I’d heard tales of the wondrous riches of BEA, of the ever-flowing springs of free reading material. I’d received books from friends who attended, handed off with the words “I saw this at the show and you might like it”, as if it was the easiest thing in the world just to abscond with books. In my heart, I lusted after the opportunity, the chance to wander among the aisles picking low-hanging literary fruit.

But when I got there, I discovered something: I’m not very good at taking free things.

After all, I didn’t know which books were there for the taking and which ones were there for display purposes only, and nightmare visions of taking the one book that wasn’t up for grabs haunted me. What if I took something that wasn’t supposed to be a freebie? Would I be summarily chased from the floor, stoned with remaindered paperbacks and banished into the lobby? Would I simply attract whispers as “the guy who took the wrong book?”

The fear was paralyzing. I put my hand out near a titanic pile of copies of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, then pulled it back. Reached out again, pulled it back again. Made eye contact with the woman minding the booth, who was busy adding copies to the monolith. And then stepped back, and let someone else reach in and snatch up a copy before finally daring to do it on my own.

“Thank you.” I said to the woman who was standing there. She looked surprised before answering with a “You’re welcome.” And I realized, in the time I’d been standing there watching and preparing to avail myself of freebies, no one had said thank you. They had just swooped in, made their grabs, and flitted on to the next score, the next pile, the next freebie.

Something about that struck me as sad. Why take a book you wouldn’t appreciate? Why not appreciate the fact that someone had taken a moment to put the book out for you?  If the name of the game was relentless acquisition, what separated BEA from, say, the endless thotchke-fest that was E3, or GenCon, or a baseball card convention.

I picked my books carefully from that point on, and said thank you when I could.

THREE

At times, it pays to be greedy.

I’d picked my selections carefully, but books are still books, and books are heavy. The key word in the wood pulp that makes up book paper is “wood”, meaning that that book you’re holding is in fact a soft pine brick between two glossy covers. Get a bunch of them, and you’ve got your triceps workout for the day.

But many of the BEA booths offer, in addition to free books, free totes for carrying books. The ones from Viz, a manga publisher, are particularly striking. After all, they’re purple.

I grabbed on the first day of the show. Saturday, when my book-nabbing confidence had grown, I filled it. With my hotel a few blocks from the convention center, I was faced with a choice: haul my loot back to drop it off, then start the cycle again, or simply nab another tote and fill that as well.

I decide to be dignified. I take my tote and head back to the hotel. I believe at one point on the walk back, I was whistling.

And then, around the corner from the hotel, I hit an uneven seam in the sidewalk and rolled my foot.

I stopped and tested it. It didn’t seem too bad. I shrugged, finished my trip back, and carefully unloaded my spoils. I tested my foot again, and it didn’t hurt much. I’d rolled my foot before, after all, and it rarely had done much to slow me down. Besides, it was BEA. When would I pass this way again?

So I headed back, empty tote in tow. In the first hour or so back on the floor, I refilled my tote. My foot was throbbing a little, so rather than shlep back, I nabbed another tote instead. I felt mildly silly with two, until nearly getting run over by someone with a bulging backpack and three.

A few more books went into the bag. I rearranged them. My foot really started hurting. The inescapable fact that under the pretty carpet, the show floor was concrete, was making itself known.

By this time, I was limping and horribly self-conscious. A half hour later, I couldn’t walk. In agony, I hopped down the long corridor to the side of the convention center where the shuttle buses waited. I heaved myself into a seat and clenched my teeth with every bump and pothole.

Eventually, the shuttle got to the hotel. I hopped off, literally. Hopped to my room. Gulped down a handful of Tylenol. Tried to figure out what to do next, with a bum pin and two totes full of books. Tried walking across the room, and literally could not do it. The painkillers in my travel kit seemed a long way off, the ice machine on the sixth floor impossibly far away. I experimented. Shoved my foot back into my shoe (sans sock – there was no room) and tried to hop.

Which is why, ten minutes later, I was propped up in bed with one foot shoved into a purple tote bag filled with ice, reading. The second bag was full of neatly stacked books, right next to the bed.

Sometimes, it pays to be greedy.

FOUR

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” the cabbie says. “I’m an LAX cab. This is Burbank cab territory.” But he lets in anyway, and takes us off to Hollywood Boulevard for a friend’s birthday party. We pass Nickelodeon, we pass Vivid, we pass Warner Brothers and marvel that the infamous water tower of Animaniacs fame is real. It’s a long drive.

Eventually, we talk, as fares and cabbies do. He asks us what we’re doing here, and Mike (Lee, author of seven novels for Black Library) and I tell him we write video games. He tells us he’d had another fare who did that, and who’d encouraged him to get into the business.

“You write?” I ask.

He writes. Back home on the East Coast, he’d been a playwright. He’d had his work produced in Philadelphia and New York, among other places.

In LA, he drives a cab.

“Good luck with the writing,” he said. “And I can drop you off a block from the club, in case you don’t want to be seen pulling up in a taxi. Lots of people don’t want to be seen pulling up in a taxi. They may live in a shack, but if they’re going out, they’ve got to show up in a limo.”

Mike and I look at each other. “We’ve got no problem with a taxi,” I say. “We’re writers.”

FIVE

There is no mercy in the recording studio. The lines get laid out there, naked. They’re interpreted by a director who doesn’t know what was in your head, read by an actor who hasn’t heard the way you heard them in your head when you wrote them.

They’re naked, and defenseless. Weakness is exposed mercilessly. Bad word choice, run-on, awkward word sequence, too many sibilants in a row – they’re all held up for review. They crash on the ear. The actor stumbles and stutters. The words just sound wrong.

With luck, there aren’t too many. With luck, the director is good and you’ll have the chance to fix them, to suggest an alternate take or a rewrite. With experience, you train your ear to know instinctively where the lines could go wrong, to head them off before the actor ever sees them.

But you never catch them all, and there will always be that moment when your words are inescapably bad, inescapably wrong.

You leave your ego at the studio door. Really, you have no choice.

SIX

Back to BEA.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the show. It’s as big as E3 used to be, forty thousand book people pushing books, signing books, taking books, advertising books, showing off books, making deals for books, you name it. Books are very much a commodity there, and a lone writer wandering the hallowed halls for the first time feels very much a tiny cog inside a titanic machine.

And then, Saturday. I swung by the WotC booth to check in, and as I talked to one of the folks there, a woman rushed in. Right past me she went, and up to the estimable Jessica Blair, with a question:

“Does Richard Dansky have anything else out? I really loved Firefly Rain.”

Jessica kept a straight face, looked at me, and said, “Why don’t you ask him?”

The woman looked at Jessica. Looked at me and tried to reconcile the guy she saw with the bearded, slightly dyspeptic guy in the dust jacket photo. Looked back at Jessica. Looked back at me.

And got the biggest damn smile on her face.

Recently, someone used the user review function over at amazon.com to pan my novel Firefly Rain. The book’s crime? Incorrect use of the word “y’all”. Apparently the way I’d trawled my y’alls did not jibe with the reader’s understanding of how y’all is supposed to be used, and as such, he had no use for the rest of the book as well. He gave the book two stars and made impolite noises on the way out, and that was that.

Now, there are a couple of ways to respond to something like this. The easy way would have been to puff up my chest, print out copies of all of the nice user reviews, and fan myself with them vigorously while declaiming to all and sundry that the uncomplimentary reviewer has no bleepin’ idea what he’s talking about.

But this, as they say, would be wrong. The guy read the book and he didn’t like it. He’s entitled. He’s also entitled to share his opinion, whether I agree with it or not, and at least he cared enough to post something. So, there’s nothing to see here.

There are other options. I could dig up proof that the reviewer was in fact incorrect. I could post evidence demonstrating that I had in fact used “y’all” correctly, as defined by some arbitrary authority or other, buttress my argument with anecdotal evidence, and attempted to wage war over Amazon stars on the rarefied plains of pure logic and citation.

This would also be the wrong thing to do. Once that debate starts, it never ends, and it sucks down time like a fourteen year old chugs down Mountain Dew. Reference, counter-reference, my cousin’s from Mississippi, well I know a guy from Tennessee, and away it goes and goes. There’s no closure there, no benefit and no reason to pursue it. Those who disagree most likely won’t be convinced by anything I can show, and I’m certainly not in a position go back and retroactively adjust apostrophes. There’s no win there.

Or, I could ignore it. I could look at the other, positive reviews, tell myself it’s an aberration, and go on with my literary life as before.

All together now: this would be another mistake.

Why? Not because I particularly agree with the comment. If I did, I wouldn’t have written the book the way I did. In all honesty, I’ve been living in the South (or at least in areas surrounded by the South) for nigh unto thirteen years now, and from what I’ve seen the debate over the appropriate use of “y’all” – Is it singular? One of a group? Singular and plural? Singular, with “all y’all” used for the plural? – is about as heated and unlikely to get resolved as the argument over what would have happened if Stonewall Jackson hadn’t gotten himself shot at Chancellorsville. Right way, wrong way – it depends on whom you talk to. But even that is a diversion; the argument itself is a null issue. The correct usage isn’t what’s important here.

What matters is that a reader felt I got something wrong, and by their lights, I did. From where that reader is sitting, I made a sloppy, inexcusable mistake, one that was bad enough to imply that I had done none of my research and thus nothing I wrote would be valid. By his lights, I used “y’all” wrong, and that was enough to discredit the rest of his reading experience.

That’s it. End of story. Like I said, for purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter whether I was right, wrong, or just another goddamned carpetbagging Yankee looking to take advantage of the South to pocket a shiny nickel or two. We’re talking about something else here, something a lot bigger than me or thee or, dare I say it, y’all.

The important thing is that I butted up against a reader’s understanding, their perception of the way things actually are. And once you go up against what a reader knows to be true, you can’t win. Either you agree, or you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong there goes any willingness that reader might have to buy into what you’re putting on the page.

Digression – This is not unique to fiction writing. In fact, it’s something I run into in my video game work all the time. Everyone knows, for example, that tanks move very slowly. This is because they are large and made of metal, and in the World War II movies that formed a lot of popular opinion about matters military, tanks did the armored division equivalent of running like a catcher. So, the conventional wisdom is that Tanks Are Slow, and God save anyone who puts a fast tank in their game from the savaging they’ll get from critics and fans. Never mind that your average US main battle tank can cruise at around 45 MPH; everyone knows tanks are slow, and not delivering on that expectation is just asking for trouble. The expectation trumps the reality, and having that expectation violated – even by honest-to-Murgatroyd truth – detracts from the player’s experience. They’re getting cognitive dissonance instead of immersion because of that one detail that they know is wrong, and that hits the player’s enjoyment like a sock full of pennies to the back of the neck.

It works on the other side, too, incidentally. I once had a collaborator on a fantasy-themed project tell me that “dwarves aren’t really like that!” when I tried to make them something other than axe-wielding ZZ Top impersonators with comedy Scottish accents. The image of the “truth” of this pop-culture mythical race was so strong to him that he couldn’t see them any other way, even when given carte blanche to do so. Think about it.

All joking aside, though, I don’t mean to denigrate either the importance of reader perception or the depth of the issue. It matters what the audience thinks, and every time a creator gives them something other than what they were expecting, that creator is walking a tightrope between reader surprise and reader rejection. It bears repeating; if the reader has to adjudicate between what they read and what they know, then they are shunted outside of the narrative and become aware that they are in the act of reading a book. And if they’re aware that they’re reading, they’re not immersed in the story, and suddenly, the magic goes poof in a cloud of fractured pixie wings.

What to do, then, what to do? It is impossible to know what every single potential reader thinks, and catering to all of those no doubt contradictory reader assumptions is purely impossible. On the other hand, it does make a certain amount of sense to stick a finger in the figurative wind and figure out what the audience’s preconceptions on your subject matter are likely to be. It makes more sense not to deliberately contravene those assumptions without good reason, and to acknowledge that you are in fact making a different choice. This can be as simple as having a character say “I thought all tanks were slow” and allowing an expert character to refute the point, but however you do it, you’re letting the reader know you’re aware of their potential issue and challenging them to change their views, instead of leaving them to disagree in solitude and grumbly silence.

Which takes me back, I suppose, to where all of this started. What comes out of all of this is a reminder to remember that the audience’s understanding of the world and mine are not precisely congruent, that the things I take for granted in my writing may be strange and jarring and incorrect to a reader. I’m not happy to get a bad review, of course, but I do appreciate the reminder. It’s a good one, and important, and appreciated.

Y’all know what I mean? I thought so.