Richard Dansky

1-Where do you get your ideas?

Various famous author-types have tackled this one with answers as diverse as Schenectady (upstate New York), Utica (upstate New York) and “the world around me”, which can be boiled down to “everywhere, including upstate New York”. The correct answer, then, is “Upstate New York.” If you wish to become a serious writer, you should immediately sell all of your possessions, buy a charming bed-and-breakfast in the Finger Lakes region, and acquire a taste for Gennesee Cream Ale.

Either that, or find your own source of inspiration. I’m told it can be done as far south as Maryland.

2-I have a great idea for a novel. If I tell it to you, will you write it so we can share the profits?

No.

3-Could you write me into your next book?

With the exception of one specific former coworker, who asked to be included in one of my novels in the guise of a water nymph (and a less nymph-like fellow you cannot possibly imagine), the answer to this is almost invariably “No.” This is for one simple reason: if I do it, you will get mad at me over the results. I mainly write A)horror novels and B)video games wherein lots and lots of people get shot. If I write you into anything, odds are that the fictional version of you is going to die. Horribly. And then you’ll be mad.

4-Do you know what you should have done with your last book?

Two things. One, written it faster. Two, added more llamas. Llamas are a clear sign of quality. Anything else?

5-Can you get me a copy of [insert name of highly anticipated best-selling book] in advance, because you’re a writer? I know all of you writers hang out together.

Sadly, it’s true. J.K. Rowling actually lives around the corner, and frequently admonishes me to keep my cat out of her carefully tended begonias. We regularly go bowling with Mitch Albom, Clive Cussler, and P.G. Wodehouse (remarkably good English on his ball, especially for a dead guy) because all writers do in fact know each other by virtue of being in the same profession. As such, we are more than happy to randomly fling copies of books by any and every author out there around as requested, in a sort of Pacman Jones “making it rain hardbacks” scenario.

But, since reciprocity is only fair, I asked a friend of mine who’s an orthodontist if he could get me some free veneers from a cosmetic dentist in LA. Because, after all, they’re in the same business so they must know each other.

6-Seriously. Why don’t you want to write this awesome book I had the idea for?

Because my time is, sadly, finite, and I don’t have enough of it to write half of my own ideas.

Because your idea may or may not be that good, and if I tell you it isn’t, you’re going to get mad.

Because writing “your” idea means that you are invariably going to meddle in my writing process, which is going to make the writing process less enjoyable for both of us.

Because I like my ideas better.

Because I am a selfish jerk and unwilling to devote my time to your vision.

Take your pick.

7-I want to be a writer. What should I do?

Scientific studies have shown that roughly 86.4% of all people who ask questions about “how do I become a writer?” actually mean “How do I become a best-selling author without actually taking the time to sit down and write?” The answer, of course, is “make a sex tape and release it on the internet.” Unwanted side effects include the possibility of having multiple reality shows on E!, so consider yourself warned.

Actually sitting down and writing has proven to be a far less effective and far more time-intensive approach, but there are those who still insist on following it.

We have names for those sorts of people, but I’m not going to print them in a family blog.

8-Why do you write?

Because I’m lousy at math.

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.

Most of my best writing teachers have been books.

Since graduating high school, I have taken precisely one formal full-length writing course. It was entitled “Writing For the Stage”, an undergraduate seminar at Wesleyan taught by an irascible Mancunian poet named Tony Connor. I learned a great many things from Professor Connor, not the least of which was what it sounds like when you try to get Harold Pinter out to the pub for a pint. What I didn’t learn in this, the last extended writing instruction I’d ever receive, was much about the writing of prose. (Drama, yes. Prose, no. And the less said about the discussion in English 201 about “Alien Death Fleet”, the better.)

What that meant, ultimately, that most of what I learned about writing came from other teachers, ones who didn’t dwell in classrooms. It came from editors like Ed Hall at White Wolf, who was the first one to make me think about word choice as it related to character motivation. It came from writers like Storytellers’ own Janet Berliner and Jim Moore, who took me under their respective wings, poked and prodded at the writing I showed them, and lovingly eviscerated my work in a way that helped make it – and me – better.

But mostly, it came from books. It came from reading endlessly and finding things on the page that I could learn from, that I wanted to achieve and knew that I couldn’t, at least not yet. It came from finding authors who were no-doubt-about-it better than I was and reading them twice; once for pleasure, and once to dissect what they did in hopes of getting a glimmer of how they did it.

Then I’d try it, and fail, and try again. Mind you, I suspect that in most cases, I’m failing still. Now, though, I know enough to try, and that means a great deal.

And so, on this Thanksgiving, here’s a list of ten authors whose work I am thankful for, for they have been my teachers. They are not the only writers I have learned from or enjoyed or admired; indeed, far from it. But they are, however, the ones whose writing set off singular lightning bolts of what I devoutly hope is understanding, and for that, I can only express my appreciation.

• Charles L. Grant, whose descriptions could only be called impressionistic, and who could gracefully paint a scene in a handful of words without losing a single detail.
• John Myers Myers, whose Silverlock serves as a constant reminder of the joy of telling stories, and how those stories can resonate and mingle.
• Julian May, whose juggling of immense dramatis personae provided the key to infusing even minor characters with distinct personalities and memorable roles.
• H.P. Lovecraft, for demonstrating the art of describing without description, the definition of what something is not being much more effective than a clinical recitation of what something is.
• Raymond Chandler, whose Simple Art of Murder is a masterclass of calling bullshit on all the writerly tricks that are so tempting to use and abuse.
• Thomas Ligotti, whose phrasing drove me to commit attempted euphony, and with malice aforethought.
• Manly Wade Wellman, for providing an object lesson on how regional dialect and color can be much more than mere window dressing – and harsh reminders on the importance of getting it right.
• T.E.D. Klein, for inducting me, all unknowing, into the cult of the well-meaning nebbish protagonist. I remain a faithful devotee to this day.
• Tim Powers, whose lesson to me was that you don’t have to make it all up, not when the real world has already provided such astonishingly rich source material. Obvious in hindsight, yes, but earth-shattering to someone raised on the graph-paper-and-funny-name school of epic fantasy novels the size of cinderblocks.
• Stephen King, for the constant reminder that in amidst the blood and thunder, what actually matters in a horror novel is not the monster, nor the gore, nor the hypothetical special effects budget, but instead the people.

For all these, and for many others, I am thankful. But most of all, I am thankful that class is still in session and always will be; that there are still authors out there to be discovered whose works I can learn from, and new works from authors I know that I have not yet explored.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some homework to do. And yes, I’m looking forward to it.

One of the consistent excuses given for the quality (or lack thereof) of videogame writing is that we are, and I quote, “a young industry”. While it’s a lovely and convenient excuse for the endless parade of stubble-jawed ex-space marines out for interstellar vengeance that haunt the shelves, it’s hogwash. I know. I write the bloody things for a living[1], and that means playing them – good and bad – as they come along, to see how high the professional bar has been raised[2].

For one thing, there’s plenty of good writing out there, and there has been for years. Doubt me? Go back to the classic Infocom adventure games like Planetfall or Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, twenty-five plus years ago. Check out the King’s Quest adventure game series, or decade-old gems like System Shock or Tim Shafer’s Grim Fandango. Then follow the lineage to today’s titles, games like BioShock or Mass Effect. There’s good writing out there in games, in every genre. What’s more, there always has been.

That’s not to say all of the writing in games is good. Indeed, far from it. Some of it comes from bad writers, some of it comes from competent or even good writers who haven’t wrapped their heads around the unique demands of video games, and some of it even comes from marketing insisting that a focus group in Tuscaloosa has convinced them that the hero of your epic fantasy game needs to be a hard-bitten, stubble-chinned space marine. I’ll be the first one to call out bad game writing when the situation calls for it, because to pretend it isn’t there is to avoid doing what’s needed to rectify the problem. But there’s a bigger issue that depresses the overall quality of game writing, one that I’ll get to in a bit.

And before we dismiss all game writing as bad, it’s worth looking at this in perspective. Are there badly written games? Of course there are. Then again, there are also badly written books, and lots of them. Surely you, Gentle Reader, have read one or two in your time[3]. That certainly doesn’t mean all books are bad, though, just as the presence of the infamous Zero Wing[4] means all video game writing is irredeemable.  But the possibility and the proof of good writing is there, in games as it is in books, and each title deserves to be judged on its own merits.

What people are really getting at when they say “we’re a young industry” is that we are, in fact, an immature industry. That, more than anything, has been damaging to the quality of writing in games, because we’re still figuring out how to do writing in games. Not the words, but rather the process is the question.

Part of the issue is technology. A book is a book is a book – cover, spine, pages – and apart from the invention of the pop-up, the core technology really hasn’t changed much since Gutenberg. We know how to write a book, we know how to put a book together, and we know how to get a book out there. It has, after all, been done before, and the methods for doing so are time-tested and proven.

Video games, on the other hand, change, and change constantly. The technology that comprises them doesn’t stand still, and I’m not just talking consoles here. Successive titles, even on a single, stable platform, will show remarkable technical improvement as the developers learn the ins and outs of the box, and put that knowledge to good use. And use it they do, with consequences for everyone, even game writers.

Doubt me? Then think about this. When you get a better set of facial animations for the characters in your game, the list of things you can do with characters suddenly changes – and so does the necessary writing to go with it, because now you can write sequences focusing on people’s faces when before you couldn’t. Get enough storage space on your disc media to support a fully fleshed out branching campaign, and that’s more and different writing. Able to put more characters onscreen? That’s more and different writing, too, and so it goes from development cycle to development cycle. And because the technology is advancing during the development cycle, the plan for the writing can change from the beginning of the cycle to the middle to the end.

The bigger part of the problem, though, is process, or the lack thereof. While the video game industry is nearly forty years old, in that time we’ve reinvented the way we do games time and time again. We’ve gone from “one guy in his garage” to multi-hundred person teams spread out across multiple continents and reinventing agile development techniques on the fly, but with very few exceptions, we still haven’t figured out where the writing goes in the schedule, and how to give it the love it needs.

Video game development is, in large part a cascading chain of dependencies, which is a nice way of saying that in many cases that the other guy’s got to get done with his stuff before you can take a swing at it. You can’t write the dialogue for level 14 until level 14′s been at least designed, and in many cases built. And you can’t tell if the dialogue you’ve written for level 14 actually works unless you record a version of it, drop it in the game, play it through and see how it plays as part of the larger experience.[5]

In a perfect world with perfect process, this happens, and then the writer has time to do rewrites, re-records, and re-tests, working on things iteratively until it’s as good as it can be (budget and schedule permitting). That’s how we do other game elements, after all. We build levels iteratively, with multiple passes and polish phases and critique sessions. We test gameplay iteratively as well – is that jump too long? Are there too many guys in this encounter? Can we add an objective because it’s over too fast? – much to gameplay’s benefit. We do the same for characters and sound passes, we build them and test them and polish them until we get them right, and we know how to do that.

With the writing, not so much. Because writing is so heavily dependent on other aspects of the game to get nailed down, it’s often not nailed down until very late in the project, when there’s precious little time for iteration. Because voice recording (not to mention studio time and post-production) is so expensive, it’s often not an option to keep going back to the well to re-record as desired. And because game writing is still finding its feet as a game discipline, there isn’t necessarily someone at the higher levels of the project – or of the company – who can fight for the time that the writing needs to get that polish that brings it up to the level of the other elements of the game. So we don’t quite have the proper safeguards and steps in place to give writing the time and institutional support it needs to have a chance to get done right more consistently.

It’s getting better, of course. More and more companies are realizing that good writing helps them make good games. In their own ways, they’re trying to find ways to make that good writing happen, which means finding time in their development cycles for the writing to occur. Some of the steps are slow, some are in the wrong direction, and some are quite frankly, backwards. But they’re steps, and we’re taking them.

Because we’re not young, not any more. We’re just a late bloomer.

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[1] And before you ask, no, I’m not referencing anything in particular, or anything I’ve specifically worked on here. Furthermore, I have never written a game featuring a hard-bitten ex-space marine.

[2] Or, on occasion, lowered.

[3] Or three, or four, or a half-dozen during a particularly heinous vacation to Disneyworld when it rained all weekend and all the hotel gift shop had available was a stack of murder mysteries about a winsome spinster who solved bake-sale poisonings with the aid of her suspiciously intelligent ginger cat, who is named Basil. Not that this ever happened to me, of course

[4] Of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” fame. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, then this probably isn’t the essay for you. Check back tomorrow.

[5] Side note: There are a million ways for game writing to go bad above and beyond the quality of the writing itself. Sound design, voice acting, timing of lines, timing of action sequences – all of these and more can affect how the writing comes across in the actual game in ways the writer can’t control or affect

Memory hits in the damndest places.

Halfway across the Atlantic, for example. It’s the day after a business trip to Paris, and I’m bone-weary. The flight is full; no empty seats for stretching out this time, and the woman in front of me had reclined her seat into my lap even before takeoff. A coworker’s got the seat next to mine, intent on her portable DVD player and hoping vaguely that nobody’s seated a kid where they can see the gory vampire shenanigans unfolding onscreen. The in-flight movie’s a non-starter, not with the back-of-seat screen shoved down roughly to the level of the oddly shaped pizza that passes for an in-flight meal.

So I doze. A baseball podcast I’ve heard five or six times before loops on my headphones, lulling me to sleep with promises of slugging third basemen who’ve reported to camp in the best shape of their life. Outside, it’s a grey airplane wing keeping me from seeing grey clouds over grey water. I close my eyes and try to sleep, wearily aware that the 5AM wakeup call I’d set for myself was midnight back home, that the trip had been too short for anything but wallowing in jet lag, and that I normally don’t go to bed until two hours, body clock time, after the damnable French alarm clock had gotten me up.

(A note to the curious traveler: French hotel rooms almost never feature clocks, alarm or otherwise. They have television sets with clocks and alarms built into their bases, and said television is generally plugged into the one available wall socket near whatever passes for a desk and thus serves as an appropriate spot for a laptop. If you’re going to use your laptop, you must first unplug the television/clock/alarm. This leads to untold quiet panic when you finish, plug the TV back in, and attempt to reset the clock manually so as to avoid the possibility of setting it wrongly, oversleeping, missing your plane, and being stranded in France without  any clean socks as a result. This somehow never ends up being a problem, however, as the sheer worry over the possibility of a possibly incorrect clock translates nicely to a night full of panic-stricken awakenings every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. But I digress.)

And so I doze, and I remember a night, fifteen years gone. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just a memory of driving around a part of Boston called Allston on a rainy fall night, trying to find a parking space near a friend’s house.

Then I wake up, and I think about what had just crawled out of my subconscious. There was no particular reason for this memory to emerge, nothing on the trip that would invoke it. There was nothing coming up that would summon it, either – no trips to Boston, no visits to the friend’s house I was seeking in memory. Hell, it wasn’t even the right time of year.

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually dozed back off, right back into that same memory. Back into the bare black tree trunks along the narrow streets, slick with rain as water dripped off the branches. Back into the long straight drive along the cemetery wall that marked the edge of the neighborhood, with the distant sound of the Commonwealth Avenue traffic whispering on through. Back to shining, cold streets twisting and turning past too-tall, too-thin houses squeezed in against one another like an overcrowded bookshelf. Back to a moment and a time long gone, one that hadn’t seemed particularly significant when it happened.

At that point I shook myself awake again at that point, a bit confused, a bit restive. There was a bit of brow-furrowing as I tried to figure out why this particular memory had chosen this particular moment. Nothing about it stood out; I seemed to recall that at the time, I was mostly more irritated than anything else over the complete and utter lack of parking to be had. I was late, or at least I remembered being late, and being irritated with myself for precisely that reason. And being late, and being on the hunt for parking, I spent those moments staring at the serried rows of cars that wrapped up both sides of those Allston streets. I didn’t look at those trees. I didn’t look at that cemetery wall.

Or at least, I didn’t think I did. Yet here they were, vivid in memory, in imagination.

I stayed up for a while, played for a little while on my Nintendo DS, read a bit of one of the books I’d brought with me. Put on my iPod, too, with fancy noise-reduction headphones and a whole lot of writing music on the hard drive. All of that bought me an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then I was out again, back in Allston, a passenger in memory.

Truth be told, I was no closer to figuring out why that memory had emerged. As I write this, I must confess, I still don’t know. What I do know is that all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that memory was there for the taking. White streetlamps reflected off the road, purple clouds scudding overhead, sidewalks humping up at odd angles because of over-aggressive tree roots – all of them were available. I didn’t remember seeing any of this at the time, but clearly I did, clearly I had, because now it was all there for the taking. Yes, the memory of annoyance lingered, along with hints of panic and urgency and oh-Jesus-I’m-late-again-and-they’re-gonna-kill-me. But that’s not what matters now. What I see, what I remember are those black branches, twisted in the thin bits of moonlight. It’s the solitary man walking his dog, seeing me cruise by and turning away. It’s the hiss of tape in the cassette deck and water under the tires,  the creak of worn-out windshield wipers and the thunk of a suspension that was never made for Boston potholes.

And all of that is now available, waiting to be summoned up again. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had, of things I didn’t realize I’d seen. But they were there, surely enough, real enough to be picked up out of the corner of my eye and kept against the day when they were needed, or wanted, or perhaps just worth taking a look at once again. I’m sure I’ll find a use for those trees sooner or later. Maybe not in the book I’m working on now, maybe not for a while, but they’re in the inventory, there to be called upon when I need them. The same goes for the sounds of that night, and for the wet stone wall with its locked cemetery gates and array of empty beer bottles standing sentinel up top, and for every other bit of that evening that’s told me it was important enough to stay with me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’m sure there are other memories like that, waiting for their moment to emerge, using their own inscrutable logic to decide when they’re needed. I’ll welcome them, and look forward to revisiting what they have to show me. I’ll look forward to seeing what they can give me for the next story, or the one after, the found gems of memory that I didn’t know I needed at the time. The readers need never know where those pinched, angular houses came from, or how that cemetery gate was just a flash in a rearview. They don’t need to know, and they never will. It’s enough that I do, and that for whatever reason, at whatever time, I remembered where to look for them.