Writing

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Writing Advice Sucks, Here’s Some Writing Advice

The internet is full of bad advice. Probably the only place more full of it than the get-rich-quick corner is the writers’ corner.

For a long, long time I struggled when it came to coming up with good, believable characters. I thought I had a handle on things other than that, having spent unbelievable amounts of time on things like world building and outlining. But when I finally put pen to paper and charged forward I inevitably ground to a halt ten, twenty, even forty thousand words later.

Why? Because I did not understand what purpose my characters played in the story, my narratives became aimless, airless. I did not grasp the interconnectedness of character and plot, how one drives the other. How one fashions the other.

But it wasn’t a long time until I understood how, exactly, to construct a character. How to weave a narrative from a character’s flaws, drive the plot based on questions and answers, or thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Sure, you can craft a gripping two-dimensional plot based purely on external motivations, but the impactful drama is derived from character and idea, and how the character embodies or probes that idea.

I’m not going to add my own to the ocean of bad advice out there. I come citing sources. But first, what doesn’t work.

Ditch the Questionnaires

Questionnaires are a waste of time. Your story will not be richer for you knowing a character’s favorite color, or what’s in their fridge. You will know when it’s important because it will have a direct, tangible impact on plot. Otherwise, a questionnaire only helps you procrastinate even more.

Don’t interview your character. Don’t answer 150 questions about family history, favorites, least favorites. Leave everything until the last second, because when it matters, you will know.

There should only ever be one question you ask: What is your character’s primary definition of herself? Or, if you’re asking them: “Who are you?” The answer to that question is going to be however they identify most strongly, the thing to which they have attached most value.

Before we Continue…

If you don’t want to read the random thoughts of a stranger on the internet, just read these instead and then close this tab:

If a book on craft starts to get prescriptive (as in, add the Inciting Incident by Page xx, and the Turning Point by Page yy), then politely close the book, find the nearest recycling bin, keep walking, and toss the book in the nearest fire instead.

The Character is a Robot

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “The machine doesn’t work unless the parts do.”

Robert J. Sawyer writes:

Real people are quite accidental, the result of a random jumbling of genes and a chaotic life. But story people are made to order to do a specific job. In other words, robots!

I can hear some of you pooh-poohing this notion, but it’s not my idea. It goes back twenty-five hundred years to the classical playwrights. In Greek tragedy, the main character was always specifically designed to fit the particular plot. Indeed, each protagonist was constructed with an intrinsic hamartia, or tragic flaw, keyed directly to the story’s theme.

(Read the rest of the article; it’s very good!)

In a well-fashioned story, the character and plot are so closely intertwined that one cannot exist without the other. The character exists for the plot, and vice versa. The best way to accomplish this is to start with one and then reverse-engineer based on the needs of the other. Got a cool theme, setting, or idea? Great! Make a character who suits it, whose virtues and flaws are complemented by it, who will grow because of it. Or, got a cool character? Great! What can we do to really put this person through the ringer, upset their worldview, help them become a more fully-realized and integrated person?

Build a plot that challenges the character, one which may be triggered by an extrinsic motivation. Your character sets out into the world to achieve a thing they want. But the world should not affirm their prejudices or reinforce their worldviews. It should surprise them, it should confront them with that thing they fear most, that one thing that is stopping them from being whole.

How the character reacts to this, and the events that unfold, are what can make a journey heroic or tragic. A character’s virtues can become darkly inverted and lead to their downfall. Or, they overcome their flaws and rise to the occasion, triumphing over the thing that had always held them back.

That’s all easier said than done, of course.

Questions and Answers

If a character is wary of commitment, then the crisis will force them to face losing someone they love (Casablanca); if a character is selfish, they are brought face to face with what they might lose by being so (Toy Story); if a character is timid then they will have to face up to what timidity might cost

John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story

When you have a character but struggle with plot, it’s time to fight dirty. John Yorke in Into the Woods discusses the fractal quality that narratives have. Each part of the story should contain all the necessary elements of the whole story: protagonist, antagonist, inciting incident, journey, crisis, climax, and occasionally resolution.

To put it simpler, in each chapter or even each scene, ask: what are the worst possible consequences of this decision? What happens if the character doesn’t want to change? Then, make that happen, over and over. And this works everywhere!

(It’s at this point that knowing trivia about your character might be useful. But only insofar as it can be used to drive the character to a crisis point. Otherwise, it remains trivia and is to be discarded accordingly.)

Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis

The dialectic pattern — thesis / antithesis / synthesis — is at the heart of the way we perceive the world; and it’s a really useful way to look at structure.

A character is flawed, an inciting incident throws them into a world that represents everything they are not, and in the darkness of that forest, old and new integrate to achieve a balance.

John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story

Sounds a little Jungian, doesn’t it? Assimilate the shadow to achieve an integrated self. If we want to keep playing fast and loose with definitions it can also be likened to the id / ego / superego.

The point is that good characters tend to be defined by their flaws more than their virtues. Because the conflict is driven by these flaws. Although they might not set out to do so at first, characters inevitably fight more against their weaknesses than any external foe. In lots of stories today, this tends to get masked by the fact that the antagonist tends to be the embodiment of that flaw, weakness, or fear.

Often, what a character initially believes to be a quality becomes the very obstacle they need to overcome in order to achieve their ultimate goal. They’ll need to turn to something they initially perceive to be a weakness in order to obtain whatever it is they need.

In a three-act structure this might look like this:2

  • Introduce a flawed character
  • Confront them with their opposite
  • Integrate the two to achieve balance

Why Any of This Matters

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

…

Through the wonder tales, symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

It is absolutely possible to write a story without any of this. The story can even be entertaining, enjoyable, make tons of money.

Nothing lasts that does not have these qualities. One- and two-dimensional stories have their place as popcorn, but they do not nourish us. They do not make us feel less alone, make us ask or ask us, “You, too?” They tell us nothing about ourselves that we do not already know. And since we are not rocks, we need sustenance. Substance.

Otherwise, why are we here?

On Writing Imperfectly

For a very long time I was a perfectionist, obsessed with doing things the Right Way. Whenever I would undertake some new task, I would frontload all my work with research. How do smarter people do this? What is the generally-agreed-upon best practice for this sort of thing? How do I make sure in some mythical future state of this project, I won’t hate my Present Day Self for laying shoddy groundwork?

In a professional context, this is not really a bad way to approach things. I’ve saved myself a lot of headaches by learning from really smart people and doing lots of long, hard Thinking before I set about big projects.

One thing that took me too long to learn, though, is that this is a wonderful way to kill hobbies.

The Tyranny of the Right Way

I have a graveyard of drafts for stories, novels, and blog posts. Some of them are impeccably outlined and structured; most are pretty much empty, forsaken for the absurdly long notepad where all the “research” went. All lie dead, unposted, unpublished.

Sometimes I would fizzle out and lose motivation halfway through. Other times, I would make good progress, then stop and think, “Does this really need to be said? Am I the right person to say this? Is it worth writing at all?” Usually, the answer to one of those questions would be a resounding No, and I’d move on.

Most of the time, however, I got lost in trying to perfect what I was doing. Outlining, structuring, plotting and planning. There would be times I’d sit at my screen for tens of minutes, trying to think of the right word when Good Enough would have done.

That’s the thing with writing. You read it often enough, but sometimes it takes multiple failures and years of writer’s block before you can actually internalize it.

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done.

Let it be shit. Let it flow, use placeholders, skip sentences or sections or entire chapters. Whatever it takes to keep writing.

Once I managed to keep this mindset front and center, I was able to really get stuff done. I went from two whole years of minimal writing to… checking notes… 66,599 words written so far this year. Sure it’s not a ton compared to others, but I’m running laps around my Last Year’s Self.1

That brings up another issue I struggled with…

The Tyranny of Statistics

A line chart showing a rising wordcount throughout the year, with a plateau in the middle of the year.

A chart showing my writing progress for the year.

For six years now, I’ve kept track of how many words I’ve written every single day. Each entry is assigned a project, which is the novel, story, or other thing (like a blog) I wrote for. Each entry also has a target word count, which I typically set at the beginning of the year or project, which I aim to hit each time I write. For some years, I even kept notes on reasons behind long gaps, but I long ago dropped this practice.

This was inspired by something I read about someone who kept a desktop calendar and crossed out each day he worked on his big thing. It was his major motivation: he didn’t want to lose that streak. I thought, “Wow, that’s a great idea! I’m doing that right now.”

But I didn’t think it entirely through. Like any big lifestyle change — diet, exercise, a new sleep schedule — I didn’t realize that jumping right in would inevitably lead to failure. It’s all about increments. Instantly, I’d internalized that if Line Go Up means Success, then a missed day was an automatic Failure. And that was more demotivating than the motivation I got from Line Go Up.

This semi-unhealthy obsession with metrics eventually invaded a lot of other parts of my life. From tracking the movies I watched to the music I listened to, to all sorts of other things, I wasted so much time and effort in an attempt to quantify my life without thinking about the reasons why. But that’s another blog post.

It took burnout to give up really caring about Line Go Up. In between starting this and burning out, I even wrote not one, not two, but three different applications using three different tech stacks in order to do this “novel project management.” Talk about procrastination.

I ended up wanting to see more and more words written without caring about the quality of the words. Until I missed too many days in a row and just quit. I attributed my lack of motivation to a lot of things, but this obsession with metrics was one of the larger factors.

Eventually I came back to it. I started writing again, and yes, I still tracked my word count. My reasoning is different now, though: I just think it’s neat. If I miss a day, it’s no big deal. If I miss my target, whatever. There’s always tomorrow. And a lot of my writing doesn’t go in the spreadsheet.

What matters more than words written is forward momentum. I can sit an stare at my screen without moving for an hour and make progress.2 After all, you need to know where to go before you can plan how to get there.

This Blog

That all brings it back to the blog. This site has laid fallow for years, untouched and filled with drafts. As a professional procrastinator, I’ve spent time instead swapping between various CMSs, static site generators, themes, etc., while only actually publishing a rare post as an afterthought.

I’m not going back to edit or review the draft graveyard; they’re dead and gone. RIP. But I do aim to start posting more. Posts may be semi-unstructured, a little ranty, maybe short or long. I won’t hold myself to any set schedule, post count, or word count. Posts will come when they, or I, please.

For too long I’ve let my head get all stuffy with thoughts or ideas and never released that pressure in the form of writing. That’s what this place will be for.

2020: Year in Review

I don’t generally agree with the way some services do their year-end reviews, like Spotify who does theirs at the beginning of December. The year’s not over yet – there’s still a whole month left to go! Typically I’d wait until January to really start thinking about the last year, but since it’s 2020 and I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks I’ve had some extra time to stew.

This year I went through several periods of idleness, though not inactivity, punctuated by a few bursts of productivity. I didn’t write nearly as much as a normal year, but I did take back up photography. I programmed some, but not as much as I’d have liked. And I watched a ton of movies.

Writing

Tracking my Progress

I keep a spreadsheet where each tab represents a year in writing. Over the years I’ve added or removed columns but it’s remained fairly consistent in its use. Although Scrivener does keep track of your progress over time, this is just on a per-project basis, and I like to have a broader view of things.

work tracker

I’ve started and restarted projects to turn this into a little app, similar to the NaNoWriMo tracker: goal tracking, project management, progress reports. Sometimes it has some social features, sometimes it’s desktop app, sometimes it’s just a command line interface. I’ve done this so often now that it’s basically become how I evaluate new programming languages or frameworks.

But no matter how I dress it up, or how refined I build my user interface, I still just come back to the spreadsheet. Apps introduce complexity. A spreadsheet is as simple and dumb as you can get. Very little is as useful as a plain spreadsheet.

This Year’s Word Count

word count progess

I think it’s obvious what happened here, at least in that first long horizontal line. But I’ll explain a little.

In the beginning of the year we moved to the city. Late last year I started a job that was 100% remote, and living in the suburbs was not cutting it for me. A little too much ennui, there. The hope was that living smack dab in the middle of the city would alleviate some of the problems working from home introduces.

And for the first month things were great! City life was awesome! Then the lockdowns came. That was okay, because at least outside my window wasn’t a lawn and another lawn and another lawn and endless quiet. Even under the lockdowns, there was still life outside my window.

But, it became difficult to keep up with things like writing or programming in my free time or doing very much at all, really. Being productive during a pandemic just wasn’t a priority. I had to reassess what it meant to me to be productive, or if I needed to be productive at all in order to feel satisfied with how I spent my time. The short answer was, I didn’t need to be productive; I just needed to be.

I’ve always written for myself more than anything else. I rarely share what I write, although I do sometimes talk about it. While I do think it would be nice to someday be published traditionally, that’s not the only goal and it’s not why I write. The problem here is that I didn’t really think much about the exact reasons why I write. It’s a compulsion, more than anything. Stories or premises appear in my head and I have to write them down.

Because of all this I think it was inevitable that I grew unhappy with my writing in general. The lockdowns and the stresses of the pandemic, of the protests that marched by my apartment, of everything else that happened, these all were handy excuses for taking a long break and really evaluating my reasons for doing what I do. The joy in writing had been evaporating, and it took all this for me to think about it deeply.

So these long horizontal lines are my time doing a little soul-searching, doing workshop exercises, trying to re-find and refine my reasons for writing as well as my craft.

Once I started back up, I think I made good pace! Even an emergency appendectomy didn’t stop my progress once I started. Minus the two days in the hospital.

Programming

All in all, I wrote nearly as many lines of code as I did words this year. Generally LOC are not a good metric for progress, but I thought this was an interesting metric, anyway. Maybe this is another reason I felt a little burnt out sometimes: 40,000 words written, and over 30,000 lines of code in a year! I guess I have been busy.

Photography

Earlier this year I bought a used Nikon D3 and have tried to revive and maintain my interest in photography.

I’ve learned, and re-learned, a few important things with this camera:

One, photography as a skill is not like riding a bike, and you really need to keep up at it to keep your eye. Otherwise you end up starting over, redeveloping skills you used to have and rebuilding muscle memory. This is frustrating and discouraging and the worst part of picking up any hobby after a long absence.

Two, post-processing continues to be the maker and breaker of photos. Few photos are perfect straight out of the camera. With a little extra care, many photos that at first seem unspectacular can really grow into something special.

Three, it’s just as important to look at photos as it is to take photos. This helps you figure out the things you like and gives you goals for styles to develop on your own.

Four, don’t pay attention to Instagram. It’s a toxic black hole of chasing likes, thumbs-up emojis, and pointless trends. Social media continues to be cancer to creative endeavors. I spent about a month maintaining an active photography account before I got tired of that rat race and moved on.

Movies

I watched over 150 movies this year! It doesn’t take much active engagement to just watch movies, though. I did semi-participate in Hooptober, where I watched a horror movie every day through October. This gave me the opportunity to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the horror canon. I love horror movies, but it’s taken me until now, my 29th year of life, to finally watch the Night of the Living Dead, which may have been made in the 1960s but feels as modern as anything released in the past year.

In Review

It’s easy to review the past year in terms of numbers when you’re a little metrics-obsessed. I track everything from the words I write to the music I listen to to the movies I watch.

Even so, there were long stretches of the year where I “did” nothing at all: nothing got tracked. This kind of unplugging, for me, really helped me keep my head on straight as it felt like things were getting more and more out of hand in the world around me. As spooky news became a pandemic, and protests turned to riots and businesses shuttered and never took down the plywood over their windows, as the election ramped up and petered out, as long as focused on my own little corner of the world and doing what good I could with what I had, I managed to stay okay.

#NaNoWriMo2018 – Day 19

The month has flown by. There is no Idea Series post this week, unfortunately, because a) I have been too into writing and my own head to remember to do anything else and b) I bought Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and spent the entire weekend playing it without break.

But there is still progress to report!

Continue reading →

#NaNoWriMo18 – Day 5

I’m going to be completely honest: I missed a day and a half, and have only caught up today. My “side” project has been untouched since Day 1, at least by my own hand. My co-writer has been plugging away at it, thankfully, and we are still making progress!

More after the break. Continue reading →

#NaNoWriMo2018 – Day 1

Because I am an insane person, I’m participating twice in NaNoWriMo this year. I will also try to blog about it as I go, as a warm-up and warm-down exercise, and as yet another way to publicly hold myself accountable.

If you’re unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, the goal is this: write a novel in one month. 50,000 words in 30 days; 1,667 words per day. Yes, people participate voluntarily. Yes, I might be a ball of frayed ends powered by caffeine and neuroses by the end. But it will be fun! Continue reading →

On Catharsis

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.1

“Content,” as it’s so often called, is more abundant and cheaper than ever.

We have access to more movies and television, more books, more music than ever before. We are glued to our screens. We scroll our feeds every day to see what everyone we know is posting, and we put up our own posts for others to see on their own feeds. All the while, not fully conscious of what all of this is: we are consuming narrative, and providing our own narrative in turn to be consumed.

Perversely, we seem more than happy to ignore the importance of narrative as an actual communicative device. It feels like too many people are ignorant, or all too keen to dismiss the idea, of narrative as a tool to learn about the world and the people in it; or as a coping mechanism for when you are going through hard times; or a way to connect you with your deeper self. Continue reading →