Richard Dansky

There is no such thing as “writer’s block”.

More specifically, there is no such thing as “writer’s block”, if you are defining “writer’s block” – notice the clever use of quotes there – as some sort of externally imposed mental lump of concrete that – for no reason – stands between you, the author, and the precious, precious words that you need to continue writing.

Now, there is such a thing as “I don’t actually want to write this and can’t admit it to myself.” There is also such a thing as “This is going the wrong way and I don’t know how to fix it”, not to mention “I’ve written myself into a corner and don’t know how to get out of it but don’t want to throw away the stuff I’ve already written”, “I’m bored with this project but can’t let myself think that,” and “I’d rather be writing this other thing.” There are even instances of “I have to write this thing or else all these other bad things (contract cancellation, not getting paid, having your pet hamster get repossessed, etc.) will happen.

Any and all of these can bring your writing to a crashing, skidding, stuck-axle-deep-in-gooey-mud halt, simulating the symptoms of the mythical ailment called “writer’s block”. Certain other things also simulate the core symptom of “writer’s block”, including not being at your computer, spending hours playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, watching realtime score updates from the World Cup while following the vuvuzela’s twitter feed, and so forth. But really, “writer’s block” is an inaccurate catchall, a symptom labeled as a disease and about as accurate as declaring someone cursed with imbalanced humors, dropsy, or the vapors.

That’s not to say that at certain points, you won’t find it impossible to go forward on a particular project no matter how hard you try. There are various workarounds for this: jump tracks to another project, do some editing, try to bull your way through one painful adverb at a time. But the best and most efficient use of your time in that case is to figure out what’s really going on that your subconscious has decided that your muse has had a few too many and is getting cut off for the rest of the night. Figure out what’s really going on, from “I just need a nap” to “My hindbrain is telling me that I’d actually rather watch a Real Housewives of Harrisburg. Pennsylvania marathon than spend one more minute trying to pound it out”.

Be honest. Be unstinting in your scrutiny. Be willing to admit to yourself something you may not want to hear – like, say, the fifty three thousand words you’ve already laid down on that vampire novel are painfully derivative and deep down you know it – and act on it. And acting on it may be hard. It may mean starting over. It may mean mass edits. It may mean stepping away from a project for a while until you actually like it again, assuming you can afford to do so. But until you pinpoint the real problem and deal with it, you’re going to be dealing with its monstrous, unproductive offspring instead.

Which means no writing. And nobody wants that.

A while back, I got a pretty positive response to an essay about questions that you should never, ever, under any circumstances ask a writer. (I’m serious. Like, not even if they’ve got zombie plague and you’ve got the antidote, and it can only be administered through a ritualistic makeshift quiz show. Trust me.)

But with that in mind, I thought it was worth exploring the questions that you should ask a writer, the ones that will generally provoke an interesting and interested response. The ones that won’t cause a writer to transform into a snarling ball of maniacal fang-toothed fury. The ones they’re liable to answer in complete sentences, stone cold sober and with at least a faint hint of enthusiasm.

1-Tell Me About Your Book

This never fails, largely because almost all writers have enthusiastically and emphatically inscribed something into their latest book that nobody besides them – not the readers, the reviewers, the critics (and no, they’re not the same beast; cross-breeding them mules you out the dreaded Two-Starred Amazon Kvetcher), not anyone has teased out of the text. This is the one thing that (almost) every writer is dying to tell you about, the clever thing they did that they’re balloon-burstingly proud of.

Mind you, it often is clever, or subtle, or well-hidden. It is often worth hearing about, and knowing about it can often make the reading experience richer and more rewarding. Alternately, it can be where the author snuck the name of his favorite watering hole into the text (to be fair, I only ever did this in roleplaying books, not fiction), but even that can be fun, if taken in the right spirit.

2-Who Are You Reading?

Not “Who inspired you?” or “who are your favorite authors?” It’s “Who are you reading now”, with an implied “and can you tell me about the cool stuff.” Most writers actually like to read, and often do so voraciously. Being asked about what they’re reading lets them share the stuff they like – which everyone, writer or not, likes doing – and also presents an opening for the writer to talk about what he likes in someone else’s work. Rarely will you get something like “I’m reading [insert book title here], and it’s pretty good.” No, writers are an educated audience, and just like baseball stat geeks wanting to discuss the latest pitch data analysis they’ve seen, or Lost fans wanting to discourse on how precisely the series finale let them down, writers like to talk about cool writing they’ve seen and explain why it’s cool. It’s analysis and a show of appreciation and, every so often, an insight into the writer in question’s work as well.

3-What Are You Working On Now?

This one can be double-edged. Some authors prefer not talk about a current project, for fear of disrupting their mojo or getting it out in words instead of on the page, or having someone sprint down the hall and compose a similar-themed piece on their sparkly new iPad.  And that’s fine.

On the other hand, lots of authors do like to talk about a current project. Seriously. Check their blogs. The word count meters – 2045 words today on “The Vampire’s Ukelele!” Score! – alone are staggering in their omnipresence. So ask. Maybe the writer wants to talk about it because they’re looking for feedback.  Maybe they’re stuck on something and want to talk it out. And maybe they’re just doing something really cool, and can’t wait to share it because they’re xcited.

4-Which Book Do You Wish You’d Written?

If only to see how many variations on “The one that sold a zillion copies” you’ll get as a result.

5-What Were You Going For With This Thing In Your Book? (where “This Thing In Your Book” = something coherent, thoughtful, and actually evidentiary of the fact that you read the furshlugginer book with something approximating attention.)

Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book tends to go over well. Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book, liked it, and thought about it goes over better. And asking a question that indicates that you read it, liked it, thought about it and came up with something new and interesting to ask will make you a friend for life.

There is danger here, though. Asking a question that’s been heard a million times before? Asking a question that indicates you didn’t get further than the first paragraph of the back cover text (which was written over lunch by an overworked intern who had only the cover art to go by, and who has a psychological condition whereby they must use the word “mordant” at least twice per sentence or else become convinced they’re George S. Kaufman risen from the dead)? Asking a question you already know the answer to? And worst of all, asking a question that’s not really a question, but rather a chance to show off how brilliant you are when it comes to the author’s work. These don’t go over so well. Trust me on this one.

6-Can I Buy You A Drink?

Yes. Yes, you can. Next question.

7-What’s Your Process For Writing?

Not “How do I become a writer?” Not “Please tell me I’m doing the right thing with my own quirky, convoluted approach, any criticism of which will provoke an angry blog post and possibly an assault with a sock filled with quarters.” A genuine inquiry into how a writer works – really works, as in “puts butt in seat and starts typing” – can deliver valuable insight into how the act of writing happens for a particular author. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an honest answer along with some explications of the whys and wherefores of that process. If you’re not, you’ll at least get a story of how Famous Writer X was rude to you for no reason whatsoever, and you’ll be able to cadge drinks at conventions on that one for years.

Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re suggestion based on years of observation, discussion, and having to bail out writer friends from local holding cells after they beat one too many over-eager interrogators senseless with rolled-up convention programs. But if you do want to talk to a writer – really talk to one – you could do a lot worse than to start here.

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.

There are a couple of different types of people who don’t like the recent film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen. Some just don’t like it, either for its over-the-top violence or comic books-gone-wild subject matter. Some are hardcore graphic novel fanboys, who would only have found a movie satisfactory if it had consisted of loving close-ups of each panel in the book itself, narrated by Alan Moore as scantily-clad waitresses fed them skinless grapes and ambrosia.

(I’ll give you a minute to let that image dissipate. Terrifying, isn’t it?)

And then there’s the ones who just Don’t Get It. They don’t understand why the heroes aren’t heroic. They don’t understand how the superest of superheroes can’t actually manage to save the day, effortlessly. And they’re the ones who open pretty much every critique with a factoid from the film’s setting that they absolutely cannot get past: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon is President. How can this be, they ask. It’s wrong! It’s not what happened (an amusing commentary about a narrative that asks one to accept the possibility of a nearly omniscient, blue, omnipotent nudist)! And so on and so forth, and they hang their dislike off of that first, initial peg. If the film got that wrong, goeth the logic, then the rest of it must be disregarded. Start on a bad foot and never find your way, or something to that effect.

Why does this seemingly minor detail of setting matter so much? It’s because it’s a signifier, and it means much more to the narrative than it would seem. The Nixon presidency, trumpeted early and often, signifies that this is not our world. It tells the viewer that this is a place where the crooked are in power, where power has been kept in the same hands for too long, where Tricky Dick got away with Watergate.

(Those who wish to dive deeper into the murky waters of literary criticism and postulate that the four-term Nixon administration posited in the graphic novel is also a subtle commentary on the implicit fascist motif inherent in the superhero narrative are welcome to do so. Just not right now.)

Why that signifier? There are lots of reasons. It’s because it’s a powerful one – Nixon is one of the most polarizing figures in American political history, one whose mere presence is enough to evoke a strong emotional response. It’s because it instantly contravenes the rules we all instinctively know and observe – Presidents get two terms, not four; Nixon is dead, not the President – and that simultaneously gets our attention while pointing out that things are indeed sub-optimal.

In short, it uses a variety of techniques to go straight to the literary equivalent of the lizard brain, where it jacks up an immediate response with no exposition necessary. In other words, it acts as a highly effective signifier.

Signifiers are shortcuts. They’re instantly recognizable symbols that tell the audience something big in quick shorthand. For example, the movie Taken opens with a scene of Liam Neeson’s character hanging out in his living room with some empty Chinese food cartons on the table. These are, of course, the standard Hollywood signifier for “sad and lonely single man” because, you know, sad and lonely single men can’t cook. And through this quick visual shorthand, the audience instantly understands that Neeson’s character doesn’t really care about himself, doesn’t really worry about keeping things up, and so forth – in other words, that he’s a divorced middle-aged dude who isn’t terribly happy. That preps us for all the exposition that follows, wherein we learn that he’s divorced, has a daughter he’s trying to reconnect with, retired from his job and doesn’t do much with himself, etc. – all summed up in those lonely, empty cartons.

And of course, it works for books, too. Think back to every steampunk novel you’ve ever read. What’s the first thing on the page? The zeppelin. Why? Because it’s a potent symbol of a time that isn’t now and never quite was, an easy signifier for the time before technology took off in its current direction, and most of all it’s big.

Not just physically big, either. It’s a statement about transportation, about technology, about the politics and culture and world necessary to support commercially viable zeppelins. All of that is bundled into that solitary image of the giant gasbag soaring over the skyline, which says “this world is not yours.”

When used properly, signifiers are a tremendous help. They take away the need for a great deal of lengthy up-front exposition by hauling out a bulk set of reader expectations. This in turn allows the writer to get to the important stuff, like where the zeppelin is going, or why precisely Liam Neeson is now a shiftless slob of an ex-secret agent.

Then again, they’re not always used properly. Signifiers can and often do go really wrong, in which case they engender far more work than they eliminate. The first is the choice of a signifier that doesn’t resonate well. If your choice of signifier doesn’t mean what you think it means to your audience, doesn’t immediately call up everything you want it to stand for, then you’re in trouble. Here’s where it makes sense to channel your inner Carly Simon and remember that it’s not all about you. It doesn’t matter that two of the shiftless middle-aged slobs you know share the trait of leaving DVDs out of their packages on the coffee table. That’s not something that’s perceived as a universal character trait, one that helps define a class of character (except, perhaps, “people who hate DVDs”). It’s something that defines the specific people you know, and the people outside of your immediate circle – who, ideally, will make up the bulk of your audience, unless you know a lot of people – won’t view it as anything other than one particular character’s quirkiness. The signifier must stand for something that is accessible, not just to you, but to anyone who might pick up the book. Individuate it too much in the quest to dodge cliché, and you wind up with something that isn’t a signifier at all.

And that brings us back to Watchmen, and its initial declaration of unreality in the form of the extended Nixon Presidency. In the graphic novel, it was largely left out there by itself, a “wait-a-minute” spit-take inducer for those reading the text carefully. The film, however, doesn’t trust the signifier to stand on its own, instead offering up an extended montage of the movie world’s alternate history over the opening credits, the better to gently prepare the audience for what comes next. It lacks the all-or-nothing wager on the image that the iconic signifier contains, but then again, in theory it leaves far less room for wiggle and misinterpretation and misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, of the fact that this is indeed a corrupted alternate history. Ultimately, it’s a lesson in the power of strong signifying images to establish the terrain for a work, both for good and for ill. It’s also a cautionary tale for the would-be signifying writer to choose signifying moments and images carefully, and with good reason. A good signifier saves the writer a lot of less-interesting up-front work. A bad one runs the risk of poisoning the well for the rest of the project . And that’s all the more reason to be careful and sure when unleashing one.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go order some Chinese food to my hotel room. With luck, they’ll clean out the empty cartons in the morning.

Earlier this week, Gamasutra – the closest thing to an online industry bible that video game development possesses – listed me as one of the top twenty game writers in the world.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what “top” means, as opposed to “best”, “most notable”, or “most aggressively coiffured”, but I am aware that this is a signal honor, and one that I am both grateful and humble to have received.

There are names on the list who have created the stories for some of the most popular and most highly regarded games ever created. There are names on the list of people who made the games that inspired me when I first got into the industry, the folks whose shipped titles where the required reading of my education in game writing. I’m talking names like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) and Marc Laidlaw (Half-Life), and I am not ashamed to say that I learned more about how to write for games from playing their work than from any other source. To be listed among them means a great deal.

A look through the list reveals an interesting mélange of writerly types. There are freelancers and in-house types. There are folks who’ve been the sole creative force behind projects and people who orchestrated teams. There are people who take projects from A to Z, and one surprised-looking scribbler who is best known “as being something of a professional ‘fixer’.” In short, no two people on the list have the same job. In many cases, they’re not even close, and that begs the question: what is a game writer, anyway?

Ask me what a game writer is and I honestly can’t tell you. Despite nine years in the business and having worked on more titles than I can generally recall, I don’t have a straight up-and-down definition of “game writer”, and neither, I think, does anyone else. The role varies from studio to studio, project to project, and team to team.

And no, this is not some “pity the poor game writer” elegy. The simple truth is that the nature of the job is fluid. This is in part because the nature of making games is fluid – compare the process used to create a Final Fantasy title with the one behind, say, Diner Dash – and in part because the role of writing within games is evolving as rapidly as it has since the days of text-only adventures and players regularly getting eaten by grues.

What I can tell you, though, is what a game writer does, and that’s write games. More specifically, it’s to do whatever writing a game needs, alone or with other writers and always in conjunction with the rest of the development team, to provide all of the writing the game needs. That can be dialog. That can be story. That can be in-game artifacts or scripts for pre-rendered cinematics or help text or manuals or God knows what else. I’ve written everything on that list and more besides, depending on project requirements.

The other thing I can tell you is that we’ve finally gotten to a point where you can say that you’re a game writer, and people will have a vague idea of what you’re talking about. They won’t assume you’re actually the designer. They’re aware that a game – even a game that doesn’t have twenty thousand lines of dialog – does in fact require writing, and that writing is a real and integral part of a game.

God help me, it almost feels like a real job.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the Gamasutra list. Having read it back to front, and front to back again, I finally figured out what I liked best about it. No, not the fact that I was on it, though that certainly didn’t hurt. Recognition for the work one has done, when it comes from a source you respect and places you in the company of a great many people whose work you admire, means a great deal.

But what I liked best – and you can call me a Pollyanna, or a sap, or whatever the hell you want to – was the fact that in the debate below the article, there were a whole mess of other names that got proposed as folks whose work made them worthy of consideration for a list like this. (Whether they belong on it or not is not for me to say; I will merely note that I have enjoyed and admired the work of many folks who were not on the list, as well as the writers who were on it.)

That is what the political blogs like to call “having a deep bench”. More specifically, it means that there are a lot of game writers out there whom folks are aware of by name (as opposed to “that guy that wrote the game with the guns”). It means that there are a lot of game writers whose work people think is worthy of being held up for praise, and who by extension are considered praiseworthy practitioners of their craft. In plain English, there’s a lot of us out there. There’s more every day, and we’re getting better at what we do.

A couple of years ago, I did a Storytellers piece on the inaugural Game Writers Conference, now subsumed into the Austin Game Developers’ Conference. I talked about how it was exciting being there at the moment when we all walked into the big room and saw a bunch of other game writers there, how it was a stunningly good feeling to know that we weren’t alone, to find a community. I believe I even said something suitably gloopy about how it felt like the beginning of something that would only get bigger.

Well, it was. It has. Next month, the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group releases its third collaborative book on game writing, something that would have been unimaginable just a couple of years ago – not because of the concept of a third book on game writing, but rather because there are now more than enough qualified contributors to fill out a book like that. Competition for a spot on the next iteration of that list is just going to get tougher. As someone who selfishly likes seeing his name in lights, I could potentially see that as a bad thing. But as someone who cares about the development of his craft, I can’t help but look forward to it.

The last time I wrote about reviews, one of the discussions that felt out of it (both here and elsewhere) was the easy confusion between negative reviews and bad ones. There’s a reason for that; most negative reviews are also bad reviews, in the sense that a “bad” review is one that doesn’t do a very good job of being a review. Bad reviews generally fill one of two functions. If they’re positive, they reinforce the reviewer’s fannish appreciation of the book in question; if they’re negative, they’re about the reviewer being clever. In neither case are they actually about the merits or lack thereof of the book in question, and thus as such they fail as reviews. At best, they’re opinions, but since they don’t touch on the material in a real, interesting, or serious way, they’re not really reviews.

Of the two, bad negative reviews are more common and more interesting to talk about. In part, this is because it’s a lot harder to write a negative review well than it is a positive one. After all, if a book is good, then there’s lots of evidence for the thesis of the review stating that – good characterization, elegant language, really racy sex scenes, whatever. It’s not easy, but it’s certainly achievable to do a credible job of writing a positive, useful review simply by putting together the evidence and capping it off with “this is why it’s good. Now go read it.”

A well-written negative review, however, is tougher. It’s fun and easy to go kamikaze and show off – something I freely confess to having been guilty of on occasion, when I was young and foolish and untrammeled by pangs of conscience – as detailed in the last piece in this occasional series. What’s hard to do is to lay out, as a reviewer, a well-reasoned, informative argument as to why a book deserves a negative rating in such a way that the reading audience is served.

After all, that is the purpose of a review, to educate the audience as to whether a particular book is worthy of purchase. It’s not to make up their minds for them. It is, however, to provide them with a solid framework to base a key decision on: to read or not to read, to buy or not to buy. That means that even a negative review – indeed, especially a negative review – has to provide that framework, that context that allows the reader of the review to decide whether or not they want to become the reader of the book.

The framework in question consists of three parts: judgment, evidence, and counterarguments. This is not to say that every negative review needs to be or should be structured in a cookie-cutter fashion, hitting those three in turn. It just means that’s what I’ve come to consider the important stuff, the things I try to get into pretty much every negative review I write so as to ensure it is fair, useful, and in-depth.

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