My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?
[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Friday. I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous. My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. If I don't get back to you right away, it may be just because I'm saving up for a themed Mailbox like this one.]
Getting a little low on questions here, so if you've been holding back, now's your chance. The popularity of The Mailbox seems to be growing and the dystopian future where you are weeping bitter tears because Chris was not able to answer your question is horribly close to becoming your dark reality. Right now, though, I don't need to choose who stays and who goes, I can get to them all (though I may save them for a themed grouping like this one), and so you should ask while the asking's good.
Joe asks:
Is it better to set writing goals by time, pages or by word count?
My reply:
Whatever works.
The only advice I can tell you that comes from multiple writers is that you should set goals--and probably before you sit down for a session (like maybe the night before). You shouldn't just sit down "to write" because it leads to unproductive sessions or getting up after a paragraph.
Whether that goal is three hours or 500 words or ten pages should be a product of what works for you. Some people can feel accomplished if they glare at a comma for an hour and decide to remove it, and others need to see that they've written at least two pages. Some need to know they've knocked out a number of pages, and some will find that word counts are better lest they have huge chunks of dialogue and one word paragraphs filling up their manuscripts from "lazy days."
It should be a hard enough goal that you're not knocking it out after ten minutes and strutting away saying "LIKE A BOSS!" and easy enough that you're not still sitting there after 12 hours, weeping, but only half way done. Neither of those things will help you. One of the reasons I don't really like NaNoWriMo is that its daily breakdown (1667 words) is quite a lot for a young writer. It does your sense of self-esteem no good to set goals so lofty that you are doomed to fail. You just end up masturbating in a pile of your own feces and saying "I'm no damned good...I'm no damned good...I'm no damned good...." But goals so small they don't keep you creative for any real length of time are not really any better. A half an hour should be your bare minimum, and really you want to aim for an hour as your low end if that is at all possible.
Who has two thumbs and just wrote an entire paragraph?
This guy.
Personally, I do different writing by different bellwethers. I write blog articles by the article. When I'm done with the article, I'm done. One of the reasons I've been having trouble getting ahead of myself here so that I can revise and edit articles one last time before hitting "Publish," is that it's very hard to sit back down and do more work after that feeling of "AHHHHhhhhhh DONE!" and I don't have very many days off. (I also suffer greatly from Parkinson's Law. No matter how much fucking time I seem to have for writing article, I use it every last second of it. This always happened in school too. Whether I had two days or two weeks to write a paper, I always got it in just under the wire--sometimes literally breathless from the run across campus.) So even though that's "working" for me, I probably need to address the parts that aren't, and it could be that sitting down for a few days to work for five hours whether I finish an article or not might help me get out of the rut.
With my fiction, I use time to measure how much I should do because it's usually not something I'm going to finish. I write for an hour or two depending on how much I've given the blog that day. But sometimes my time-based goals get muddled because I let myself be distracted by Facebook or I just sit there. Whenever I notice this happening--when time-based goals STOP WORKING--I switch to a word count goal for a while. That whips me into shape.
Obviously none of this accounts for revision which is an extremely important part of the writing process, and can't really be done by word count. Be ready to set all new goals during the revision process.
Anonymous asks:
Should I write in the morning or at night? I've heard both and been warned off of both.
My reply:
Whatever works.
The only advice I can tell you that comes from multiple writers is that you should do your best to write at the same time each day--whatever that time is.
Creativity, it turns out, is very much a habit. Whether you personify this as your muse knowing when and where to meet for the good juju, or you science up your explanation about how myelin sheaths are built by repetition and can be triggered by circadian rhythm and environment, sitting down to be creative at the same time every day is advice you will not just find amongst writers but pretty much all artists.
And I can't tell you how many writers poo-poo this idea and then bitch about writer's block pretty much 95% of the time.
Strictly speaking writing in the morning is more likely to be your own voice. Before you sit down and read, and let your style get influenced by what you read, you will write in a voice more uniquely you. This is one of the reasons Dorothea Brande's absolutely foundational exercise involves sitting to write in the morning before you do any other linguistic interaction. This also happens after you've been writing a while. I may "red-shift" towards shorter sentences if I've glutted on Raymond Carver all day long, but my voice is pretty established.
However, after finishing the morning writing exercise, even Brande goes on to say you should write when you feel most comfortable doing so. I particularly like writing at night. I find that I am most prolific on first drafts at night because I have a whole day of thoughts feelings and experiences to process. This helps me drive my creativity. However, that same factor can make it hard to focus on revision or writing that I might be less enthusiastic about. I had to give up and get some sleep on a lot of papers over the years, instead waking at insanely-ass-early-o'clock to finish them up.
The biggest factor in when you write is likely to be the logistics of your personal situation. Is it even feasible to write in the morning? Are you a morning person? Do you have free time before you go about your day (work, chores, whatever)? If not, then why is this even a conversation? If you are trying to jam square pegs into round holes because you're in search of the One True Way(tm) to write, you are more likely to make yourself miserable than anything. And that just leads to not wanting to write. Waking up at four in the morning won't get anything written if you're not a Grape Nuts commercial kind of person.
The only advice I can give you that comes from multiple writers is that your first draft is more for you and your revision should be more for the audience. One of the reasons people sit paralyzed in front of their first draft is that they start to second guess themselves about what people want to read instead of realizing that it's not going to be gold--in fact it's going to be shit--no matter what. (And not like mystical "Gosh I'm glad I'm eating more salads these days" shit either. I'm talking like post-"Way-too-much"-Taco-Bell caliber shit.)
However, even though you tend toward self-writing for a first draft and audience for revision, it's okay to have someone in mind when you're writing if that works for you. Stephen King writes for his wife--always thinking of how she's going to like it. Tolkien wrote for his kids. Charles Dickens wrote for 19th century mainstream readers.
So whatever you do, don't write for "the market" or "trends" or "what will sell," but if there's a person out there that would motivate you to write, you should write with them in mind.
If the thought that no one will ever read this crap and you're just having fun is what allows you to unplug, relax and do your writing, you should do that.
If the thought of your high school lover who spurned you reading your bestseller and then calling you up to beg for forgiveness (which you will allow only after unspeakable acts of oral sex threesomes with groupies despite their reluctance) is what fuels your grudge engines to keep you writing onward, then you should do that. I mean not that that's what I do or anything....
....
....
....seriously it's not.
Diane asks:
Should I write longhand or on the computer? My friend carries journals everywhere but I prefer to type. She's always telling me that using a laptop makes you write like you're writing an e-mail and good prose comes from longhand.
My reply:
Whatever works.
The only advice I can give you that comes from multiple writers is that you probably will notice a difference in the prose style between longhand and typing. Longhand takes longer--allowing for a fuller feedback loop of recursive thought and longer time to make word choices. You may even find yourself making writing choices based on aesthetics (like extending or shortening a paragraph to fit on a page, or picking a different word so that the top of a D doesn't connect with the bottom of a G on the line above it). You may also find this effect very subtle if you have been writing a long time and have a well established voice.
But different is just that--different. It may not be better or worse. Languid prose isn't always appropriate for your narrative voice, and it certainly isn't as popular for modern fiction. One of the reasons we like crisp, succinct writers these days is because we read a lot of fucking email. You may not necessarily want to cultivate byzantine grammar and vocabulary.
People who like writing in longhand may enjoy the act of writing, the beauty of good handwriting, the special pens and texture of good paper. There's nothing wrong with this. If an affectation is what you like about writing, enjoy. If it gets you writing, that's awesome. Nothing used to inspire me more than blank sheets of notebook paper. Every September after my mom bought school supplies, I would look at all the paper and stories would start jumping into my head. (Now, if you make excuses about how you can't write without such things, and then do not take exceedingly great pains to procure them right away, then you might be fetishizing the excuse rather than the implement. But that has little to do with which way is better.) If writing longhand is what does it for you, do it.
Personally I use longhand as little as possible. I had to go to special handwriting classes in school and used my computer even for my homework as soon as I was permitted to. I've been known to whip out a pen and paper at a writing group when my laptop was having trouble, though, so it's not like I'm too good for it or anything.
It's worth playing around with just to see how your writing might change and which you prefer, but if either causes you trouble or discomfort, use the other. And if you prefer one or the other, do it.
When it comes to writing--and art in general--you should be humble enough to accept the advice of the masters, open enough to try something outside your comfort zone, dedicated enough to give the effort that is required for what you want out of it, but also creative enough to figure out how to do all these things while also blazing your own trail.
You mean when you're not spraying yourself with pepper spray, getting your finger stuck in a drain for 45 minutes, or jumping full speed off a stairwell with a low ceiling and hitting your head so hard that you--and I'm quoting your friend now--flipped all the way over and landed on your stomach?
Shut up evil italics voice. All those things had...mitigating circumstances. Anyway, this is my story.
Once upon a time a slightly younger version of me was out with a group of my science and math friends and an argument broke out about whether a plane could take off from a conveyor belt. There was no way I could follow the science, so I just watched them talking past each other for about a half an hour. Things got heated, then superheated, and then one of my friends turned into plasma and melted through the floor.
I knew we had turned a corner from lively debate into something much worse when the nutritionist called the PhD in astrophysics a "fucking tard."
Well, the physicist looked at me and said, "Okay, since we're not listening to the physics doctorate about about physics anymore, what does the English major think?"
"I think there would be a conveyor belt airport if it were more than theoretically possible," I said.
My friends got a laugh out of that (largely, I think, related to the number of empty beer bottles on the table between us), and we went on with our evening with no further talk of planes or conveyor belts.
But seriously that was all I had to give. I understand the problem is one of perspective and there are considerations like the ability of the wheels to go twice as fast as the plane and the length of the conveyor belt or something. A plane still needs air under the wings for lift or some shit,so it won't just lift off from a fixed position, but it could get the speed it needs in a really short space by rocketing off the end of the belt. And something about two trains leaving from different cities or something. Anyway, I'm STILL not really clear on the science, but the point is both are kind of right and both kind of missing something, but in the end, even if it might be possible, it isn't really practical.
Actually I can take off on three joggers' treadmills if you position them right.
Fuck you. I'm a dragon. ..plane. A dragonplane.
Can we expect this diarrhea of the word processor to achieve some vague sort of point any time prior the Aztec apocalypse?
Shut up evil italics voice. I'm getting there.
I've had similar conversations about exercise. Being a on again/off again gym rat, people sometimes ask me how they should be working out. If you've ever had a friend who worked out for more than a month or picked up a fitness magazine or--God forbid, you poor, poor person--asked on a social media for some advice about losing weight, you are probably aware that there are a few...uh....competing theories out there about how best to lose weight.
Not only is every Pilates/Crossfit fad workout going to have its legions of born again fanatics who shamble up to you and desperately want to eat your brains, but just the whole idea of what you should be doing is in contention. Should you focus on cardio or on resistance training. Legions of weight lifters have things to say about muscles burning calories, metabolism, and how pointless long sessions of cardio can be. (They point to all those obese marathoners as evidence. Oh wait...) The health industry and another whole legion focus on cardio and burning calories. Cardio before weights. Cardio after weights. Nutritionists, doctors, physiologists, body builders, and even olympic trainers are all doing their best to recreate the Battle of Stirling. William Walace will be played by Ryan Gosling. ("Hey Girl.... They may take our LIVES! But they'll never take our....knowledge that the fashion industry is making billions promoting low self esteem.")
The third machine from the left is the one true way. All the others less than.
And a lot of people asked me, "Chris, what is the best work out?" And my reply to that is always the same. "The one you'll keep doing."
No one asks you for advice on anything body related...except maybe how to eat a lot of pizza.
Please shut up. This was back before my free time became so precious--back in the before era of the long, long ago. Back when we had reached the tipping point of the statistical probability that someone who said they hated Black Eyed Peas was not talking about southern food.
I don't care if it's playing squash with a friend, joining a derby league, reading a book while you jog for two hours, lifting weights with your buddy, or doing a Navy Seal workout routine, if you keep doing it, it will work. Unless you're bringing a bag of chips and just sitting still on a stationary bike to watch the free gym TV, if you're going to the gym three or four times a week, you will probably get results. So if something is fun and you like it, do that. If something is boring and you hate doing it, you'll probably start to find excuses pretty quickly.
I hate resistance training, and if I give that emphasis in a workout, it's not long before I start seeing working out as a chore that I'd rather skip. Excuses start rolling in, and then I'm gone. I also get bored easily doing cardio by itself. But if I bring a book, I'm happy for hours. I can burn 1500-2000 calories and not even notice. A few weeks of that three or four times a week, and you betcha I can tell a difference. So go ahead and tell me I should be lifting weights. Tell me ALL. YOU. WANT.
Still, my work outs aren't really the point of this article.
You should tell them about The Megathalon. ~snerk~
Shut up! It was...nothing. Forget about it.
A few months ago I wrote about how a writer really needs to find the time that works for them. The magic of creation is a personal thing, and someone else's routine isn't for you. You might do morning writing for a few months because you're employing the techniques of Dorothea Brande, but once you're writing smoothly every time you sit down, you probably are going to notice a time that works best for you.
But this really goes for anything.
It's not just time that is subject to this. All aspects of writing should be like this. Do what works. Do whatever works. And most importantly of all: do whatever works for you!
I once saw a person writing into a loose leaf folder with a really fancy fountain pen. "This is what X did," she said. I can't even remember who X was anymore: Bronte or Austin or Plath or someone. I asked her if that helped, and she said she didn't like it. She much preferred to write on a word processor because she could type much faster and keep up with her brain a lot better. Plus she could go on longer before her hand did it. Why on earth, I asked her, would you keep doing that then? "Because X did it."
Oh.
Standing on formality can sometimes be very, very ineffective though....
Some martial arts you can go learn at the local school are hundreds of years old. Many come with traditions of culture and etiquette and formality. You can't even take a class before buying a two hundred and fifty dollar uniform. You have to do a special bow when you come in. You treat the Sifu/Sansei with deference even though we don't treat any other teachers that way in the U.S. You don't learn a punch until you spend hours working on stances.
But many other martial arts are intensely pragmatic. They have no uniform; you just come in your sweats and a t-shirt. They have no deep stances; they just tell you not to stand straight on and if you forget the teacher pops you and you sure as hell don't forget again. You call the teacher by their first name. They aren't going to stand on ceremony. They aren't worried about stealing anything from any other form that might be effective. They are hybrids of five or six forms taking what works and leaving the rest like the raccoons of the martial art world--wily little thieves that get into everything and respect nothing. They care what works.
Jeet Kun Do is so non-formalized and focused on adaptation and improvisation that Bruce Lee kind of didn't want people to call it a form. Keysi incorporates half a dozen styles into something that is absurdly messy and looks kind of silly but horrifically brutal, and Krav Maga, of course, is the national Israeli martial art that trains people to kill fifty guys in a room using toenail clippers and the ripped off limbs of the dead and is SO fucking horrific that practitioners often report not using it in fights where no one pulled a knife, crowbar, or AK-47 because the stakes weren't high enough.
These martial arts focus on what works. They won't say that a straight on punch isn't in keeping with the balance of energies and circular motions of the yin and yang. They will say "try to hit the bridge of the nose so you shatter cartilage fragments into the asshole's brain!"
So...today we're going to do Writing About Martial Arts? Or just Writing About Nothing?
Shut up.
This pragmatic approach is what you want in writing. You want cartilage fragments in the brain! Metaphorical cartilage, of course. In the metaphorical brain. But metaphorically speaking...just like that. Don't get up at four if you don't like getting up early. Don't sit at a desk if you need to move. Don't use a fountain pen like James Joyce did if you prefer typing. You want to focus on what works. You want to focus on what gives you results. And you want to leave the formality and the ceremony of others behind.
Unless of course that formality is what's working for you....then you want it. But make sure it's your formal structure. If you do your best writing in the dead of night after you tuck the kids in and have a wonderful bowel movement, more power to ya. You can even bow to your fountain pen if you want.
I have conversations about my stories with a wooden dragon I got six years ago from Chinatown; I'm the last person with any right to take someone's affectations away.
My "Morning Writing-Fu" has destroyed your "After Work Fu."
There can be only one.....
.....way to write!
So what you're saying is that spending 3 hours a day on Facebook works for you? Also, that you can't fight?
Please shut up evil italics voice. I'm begging you. Please.
If the process of other artists gives you the springboard for ideas, that's wonderful, but don't be beholden to them. But when it comes to your art, do what works. Do whatever works. If you find writing at three in the morning while standing on your head works, do it. If you find writing two sentences every hour works, do it.
Be careful though!!
There are some general things that usually work. Really. Like writing every day. And only you really know (really) if something works better for you or if you're giving yourself permission to not work. A lot of people will say "that doesn't work for me" as an excuse not to put in any real effort--guess how their careers are coming along? But just don't be afraid to get under the hood and make any modifications that might help.
Artists need to be pragmatic. About time. About money. About creativity. About energy. About perspective. About everything they do, they can't afford to get caught up someone else's baggage and anyone else's bullshit.
So don't forget with any advice--even with MY advice, as sage and above reproach as it is--don't be afraid to toss it if it doesn't work.
Short answer:
I don't. My opinion is much more complicated. Read more than that one article!
Long answer:
I know the Internet is where nuance goes to die, and people become super stabby fucknoodles when it's their sacred cows receiving anything but adulation, and that NaNo is basically a cult that you can besmirch at your own peril, but sometimes the feedback on this issue really makes me wonder if people have done their due diligence before returning fire. I mean, people will read the one viral article I've written about NaNo, which might as well be titled "my problems with NaNo," and literally write me to ask: "what's your problem with NaNo?"
And I'm all like: "Bro, do you even bullet-point?"
I get that sometimes single articles go viral without necessarily the context of a broader body of a writer's works, and that people will respond to that article without knowing that I write from the persona of an evil version of myself that lives in the basement and loves NaNo (by the way if that metaphor is too much for you, I'm not sure what to say). But I often give advice about how to survive the month.
And even though I have answered this question, or questions quite a bit like it, a couple of differenttimes before it literally became "frequently asked."
And even though I have a "NaNoWriMo" tag that goes to all these articles, and a search bar where one could punch in "NaNoWriMo," and the "recommended articles" at the bottom are other NaNo articles I've written.
I mean it's not like I sit around and expect people to do research on me before sending a nasty-gram, but it's sort of weird that a self-identified writer (who, by definition must be a reader) doesn't even actually read the one article in toto either.
If you really want to make me cry by sticking it to me so very, very good. Try the following before you reach for that reply button –– get such basic facts correct as:
I've done NaNoWriMo several times before
What I think is good about NaNo (Literally "the good")
That I have conflicted feelings. CON. FLIC. TED.
That people who know what they're doing and how NaNo fits into the bigger process of writing should do whatever works
What my "problem" is
Exactly why I don't think that it is something that a new writer or a writer inexperienced at a daily word count should dive into
So I can appreciate that your sphincter tightened in rage as soon as you read that the title of the article wasn't "NaNoWriMo is the best thing since threesomes WITH sliced bread! (And that's why it's called a sandwich. NAAAARF!)" If you read more than the title of the sections (and maybe some picture captions). And if you are capable of handling the fact of professional writers (not just me) glancing sideways at your precious, let me try to answer this
One.
More.
Time.
I like NaNo. I often do NaNo. I have "won" NaNo multiple times. I enjoy the pressure. I like the discipline. I have even done it since I started blogging. But being aware of nuance is important with an event that 4/5+ fail to finish year after year.
To be clear, if you want to do NaNo, do NaNo. Knock your fucking self out. If it works for you, do whatever works. That's the only rule that really matters in art anyway. If you understand how lightning drafts fit into the writing process, rock rock on. If you really "grok" that your NaNo manuscript isn't going to get published, kick ass and chew gum. Don't let anyone tell you what to do. Least of all me.
However, I wrote that article because my opinion was specifically solicited, and I know too many damned good writers who NaNo has broken. I'm not just trying to pinch out a fat deuce in people's sandcastle. I actually don't think NaNo is neutral in a zero sum game and everyone should just do it or not depending on their whim. ESPECIALLY inexperienced writers who are putting all their eggs in its basket.
Look, trust me. I'm the biggest fan of people just writing for writing's sake that I know. I tell people every day not to worry about getting published, getting paid, getting famous, getting threesomes, getting anything, but to just WRITE because writing is fulfilling. And I'm also the guy telling you to write every day, even when it isn't easy. The circumstances in which I suggest anyone not write are few and far between and highly context dependent.
If I did not know HUNDREDS of writers who tried and failed NaNo's breakneck überpace and then became despondent, burnt out puddles of self-doubt because they were convinced a "real writer" would have been able to pump out 1667 words a day and clearly they weren't such a real writer*, I might have more of a laissez-faire attitude. If I didn't know publishers and agents who got thousands of manuscripts in December, I might think that the writers weren't ignoring the revision process of writing. If I didn't see literally thousands and thousands of "writers" who do absolutely no writing outside of November, frustrated beyond reason that they can't seem to launch a tidy career as a novelist. If I didn't see the harm the event did, you bet your ass I would suggest that everyone at least give it a try because why not?
But there is a why not. And if you directly solicit my opinion about it, I'm going to tell you what it is.
Some parts of NaNo are good, and some writers can handle it quite well. But most new writers need to learn to tackle a more reasonable pace, and need to learn to do it more than one month a year.
*Days in the last year I have pumped out 1667 words: zero. (And I make real money at this and am read by thousands, so this is not the mark of a "real" writer.)
One of the major difficulties I’m struggling with right now is my natural proclivities in writing longer works and that I’m currently in a place in my writing where only one form of fiction—the short story—really gets me much traction. I keep getting into a spiral where I feel like the only thing I should write ought to be “useful” short stories, but I’m almost never in the mood to write them, so I get a little stuck trying to force it, the creative engine stalls, I stare at blank screen a lot.
I once had an instructor--Janusprof--sneer at me. He asked me what I was “dying to write,” and my answer was “longer stuff.”
"That's not an answer!" he insisted.
Unfortunately, he didn’t really get how genuine that answer was for me. I’m pretty sure, even at the time, I knew what he was going for some touchy-feely internal conflict that has torn me apart and drawn me to the page, if only for the chance to express it. It’s born of this “high-art” ideal about the nature of art, and expression and what “counts” and what doesn’t (and seems to be the reason that most MFA programs produce a laughably huge outpouring of literature about the horror of middle class childhoods). It’s like he never read a Xanth novel or something… Somewhere along the line while the “high-art” instructors are wringing out their souls for inspiration, passing judgment on what isn’t art with the sly invective of “commercial,” they forget that most students are there for an actual, marketable skill set—not to be molded into a cookie cutting of the same bourgeoisie aesthetic.
The real bitch is that the question could possibly have been a valuable one from one in the position of mentor rather than merely teacher, but only if said mentor had not had a predetermined sort of answer in mind--which Janusprof obviously did.
The problem was I was being quite honest when I said it.
I was dying to get back to writing longer works. I really was. I was tired of the short story format that is most convenient both for reading and writing in college. It always felt a little artificial to me—not the way my creative mind naturally works. I was learning elements of craft and filling my writing toolbox in a bit of a contextual vacuum. I understand why we write short stories for college writing workshops or why they are convenient for teaching elements of literature. They fit tidily into the classroom structure. I also know that most people (including me) could stand to learn how to be concise rather than verbose. And I appreciate the short story as an art form probably more than the next guy—unless I happen to be standing next to a Pushcart editor or something. But what calls to me, what I yearn for—both in reading and in writing—is longer works.
I love reading novels. I can’t even remember a time when I would feel the girth of thick books and marvel at their potential to suspended me within another world for as long as possible. I read Gone With the Wind before I had acne, just because it was the thickest book I could find. I gathered cans from around town for two days to scrounge up the money to purchase Stephen King’s It, mostly because I was aware that it clocked in at over a thousand pages. I even tried my hand at War and Peace just because its heft felt so comforting to me—although I must admit that one never got finished. My principle complaint with my Kindle is that I can’t hold a book like 1Q84 and feel how deliciously hefty it is. I particularly enjoyed series books where I could stay in a world and with a character. More than once I blew months worth of savings on a run of novels because I’d enjoyed the first and I needed to be able to pick a new one up as soon as I was done with the old without any kind of interruption.
Unsurprisingly, I gravitate towards writing the same. I imagine full and developed arcs based on childhood books and movies, and sometimes even picture epic quests that I cannot tell outside of a trilogy (or more). One of my bucket list works (writers bucket lists don’t involve places they should go; they involve things they should write) is an epic high fantasy chronicle that sits firmly ensconced in my head that would be no less than five or six books if I wrote it. I was also always “writing books” from about nine or ten on. I sent more trees to their doom commandeering notebooks and legal pads in order to begin some opus or another on than I will ever admit to a nature conservationist. In high school, the successes and the failures in finishing manuscripts all began as novels I shared with my friends. It never even occurred to me to write a short story.
When I got into college, I wrote a lot of stuff I didn’t really want to write, but I did it as best I could because I figured every lesson that put a tool in my toolbox was a lesson worth having and a skill I wanted as a writer. I didn’t go to college on the this-is-how-you-win-at-life formula right out of high school, so I lacked most young people’s apathy and self-doubt.
I wanted to be there. Bad.
If I was going to stop working in my thirties to give that much time and effort to something, I was going to suck the marrow out of it, even if that meant writing what I didn’t personally care for. I wrote poetry and focused on my concrete imagery and word economy. I wrote drama and focused on dialogue and conflict. I wrote stories that were no more than two thousand words and did the best I could. I worked around the “no genre” pedagogy of the department. But even though I generated perhaps a dozen short stories (and three times that amount of single-page work with elements), writing those shorter works never felt completely un-forced.
Whenever I read some down to earth writing advice, after every last one of them gets done telling you to write a lot and read a lot, almost all say some variant of the following: write what you would want to read. Forget the snobby lit sommeliers that haunt the Humanities buildings of college campuses and concern themselves with how “literary” something isn’t, uttering phrases like “worthy of fiction” in a way that makes it clear they are imminently qualified to determine that your writing isn’t. Forget the promotional guru who has come up with a Vinn diagram outlining various demographics and where the most “accessible” story possible would be located. Ignore the well-intentioned family members who tell you should totally do a book just like Harry Potter/Twilight/Da Vinci Code/Whatever’s Selling Like Mad. Ignore them all. Write what you would want to read.
When I see that advice—write what you would want to read—I only think a little about speculative fiction, and a little about literary elements I appreciate the most like strong characters and plot. (Oh yes, my friends, I emerged unscathed by the “plot based fiction” naysayers of the literary world). But mostly what I think about when I hear that advice is “Write books. Write trilogies. Write epics. Create worlds. Make people regret turning that last page like they would regret saying good-bye to an old friend.”
Though my instructor found my reply to be uninspired, I found it enlightening, personally. My answer was firm and immediate. It came out of me almost before the question was finished. I didn’t even have time to mull it on a surface level. My gut knew something I didn’t. I don’t think until he asked me that, if I knew just how much I was really tired of being forced into the square pegs of short stories or how much I really yearned to get back to some of the unpolished and half-finished manuscripts that hide in the corners of my Dropbox folder like Tribbles.
The trouble is that right now, short stories are much more useful for me to be writing. In terms of a “career,” even though self publishing has changed the game for some (though mostly only people already well-known through blogging or journalism) and publishers and agents occasionally take a chance on a first-time writer’s longer works, the best way to get the attention of an agent or perhaps a publisher that will take unsolicited work is still to have a cover letter with accolades of short story publication on it. If you’ve been published, it shows them you are serious. It shows them that you have the skill to write. Mostly, it just sets you apart from the dozens—even hundreds—of trash manuscripts they get every year. They’ll pick up a manuscript with a cover letter sooner and give it a more considered read. So the best thing I could possibly be doing right now is churning out a body of short stories for publication and submitting the shit out them. Ironic that if I want to be a novelist, I should get cracking writing short stories, but true. While the publishing world is changing, keepers are still in front of many gates.
I also might like to take a crack at Clarion, but I know they too will to put me to work on short stories.
The problem of “needing” to write what I don’t really feel inspired towards and feeling almost averse to the kind of writing that is that’s stymied a lot of my creativity. It’s the kind of thing I can do under external motivation like a school assignment or paid gig, but that is amazingly difficult to self-motivate when the effort to reward ratio tips below a certain point. Of course, every artistic process has parts that are less fun. Every artist has days they have to push through feeling less inspired. You work through them for the money shot—that bliss that comes from creation. However, right now this onus of career-advancing short stories and what I “ought” to be writing is messing me up. It’s REALLY messing me up. I’m starting to dread the coming of that time when I retreat to work. I’m making up excuses for why I should take a day off here or there. When I think “fuck it, I’ll write a short story later” and go to one of my long works, I churn away for four or five hours happily blissed out of my mind, and stumble into bed as the sun comes up with a goofy smile plastered across my face.
When I say “okay, tonight I need to start a short story” I just sit there and stare at a blank screen.
[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Friday. I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous. My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. I'm happy to tell you about my process as long as I get to put in a few public service announcements about the topic in general along with it.] Amy Asks:
What does a day in the life of you look like in Revision Land? That is, how do you approach it (versus how you want to approach if that's applicable) in terms of mood/muse? Do you enjoy making enormous changes to the way the story unfolds, such as altering the timeline (perhaps switching from linear to flashbacks or whatever), completely changing character motivations, etc.? I ask this latter question because it's my favorite part of revision. It's like using powerful construction equipment to move enormous beams and other building materials. What I have at the end of the day is so different from what I had at the beginning of the day that I feel like my brain has gone on an all-day weight training binge.
My reply:
I love any chance to give people a tour of Revision Land. It's a magical world where the unicorns prance about in happy joy. Well, all the unicorns except Charlie The Too-Good-To-Revise Unicorn.
"Charlie it's time to go to Revision Land, Charlieeeeee."
"Yeah, Charlie. Revision Land, Charlie! Yay!"
"Yay Charlie! It's an adventure Charlie. An adventure to Revision Land, Charlie!"
"Come with us to revision land, Charlie!"
"I don't really want to go to Revision Land. I don't like Revision Land."
"Charlie, you have to go to Revision Land. Everyone has to go to Revision Land, Charlie."
"Yeah Charlie, Revision Land is awesome. It's an adventure, Charlie. An adventure to Revision Land, Charlie. How can we have good writing if we don't have an adventure to Revision Land Charlie."
"I don't really think Revision Land is that important. I think about my writing a lot before I write it, so I don't need to go to Revision Land."
"Shun the non-believer, Charlie."
"Shuuuuuunn!" "Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun"
If you don't get this reference, click this link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY
I can't say for sure you won't feel like you just lost five minutes of your life,
but at least people might believe you when you tell them you don't live in a cave
...a cave with no wifi
Now before I give Amy a tour of revision land, I want to make sure that something is perfectly clear to our readers at home. So imagine that I am turning away from Amy sitting in the seat next to me here in the studio, and looking directly into the camera...
I want everyone to pay attention to exactly what Amy asked me. She didn't ask me if I revised. She asked me how I revised. It didn't even cross her mind that I wouldn't. This is because Amy (who is a friend of mine) is a professional writer who makes money word smithing--sometimes even writing fiction. And Amy knows revision is a vital part of the writing process. Amy knows that it is as likely for a writer to be published or well-regarded without revision as it is for a band to attempt to sight read their songs at a concert or for a theater troupe to do no rehearsing before a show or for a visual artist to get rich off of concept sketches hung in frames at a gallery.
Art is about refinement and perfection. A number of writers talk about how shitty first drafts can be. Hemingway's first drafts, which have only recently shown up among his effects, were downright embarrassing. One of the best modern essays on revision is called "The Eleventh Draft" and it talks about how that is the point (at the 11th draft) that you really start to see the quality artistic stuff peaking through.
I need a little tiny hipster symbol for "This is pretentious as shit."
Simply put, if you want to be a writer for anyone but yourself, you must revise extensively.
Now there are obviously books on my bookshelf, some of which I even love, that haven't been through eleven drafts (a few seem like may not have even seen a third or fourth), but it kind of shows. Even writers you might classically think of as plot based storytellers with hastily written prose (like Stephen King, Dan Brown, or JK Rowling) admit to doing at least three complete drafts of their books before entering the fine-tuning stage, so even "commercial" work has had a fair bit of revision.
"Refinement and perfection are a part of the artistic process and writing is no different."
So before I tell Amy about Revision Land, let me just make sure that it's clear that this is how I navigate Revision Land. Every writer has a different process, and yours doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Do whatever works for you. I have met several writers (some with names an avid reader might even recognize) who do not look back when they are writing something until the very end. Then they go all the way back through and make major changes. I've met others who revise just a few pages behind where they are writing and are almost rigorous about "keeping up with themselves." Perhaps the most famous example of this would be Kurt Vonnegut who would rewrite a page on his typewriter dozens--sometimes hundreds--of times until the page he added to the stack was perfect, but once he had that perfect page, he was done.
Okay, back to revision land.
No. Not that kind of tweaker either.
I'm a tweaker. Not crystal meth, mind you, but a constant fiddler. When I'm writing something, I'm constantly going back and fine tuning what came before it. If I decide to add an aspect to a character, I go back through and find places where I can bring that aspect out.
In fact, most of my writing sessions on my fiction begin with some revision of what has come before to kind of jump start the process and if I've ever let a story rest for too long and the plot feels fallow and the characters stale, one of the best ways to get myself back into its groove is to go back to the beginning and read through what I've written so far with an eye on revision. Just getting involved in some brush up tends to remind me where my head was and get me back in the game.
I also notice that revision is, for me, a much more intellectual activity while the major drafting (first and second drafts) tend to be the deeply emotional parts of writing. I notice that for those who tend to make huge changes in revision, the revising is often a much more emotional task. For me, I can write my early drafts at any time of day, but I need a fresh head and a good night's sleep to tackle revision. But once my head is clear, I can sit and revise for hours and hours without even needing a break, basically until my fingers or eyes give out, but when I'm writing I have about four good hours in me (and maybe two more if I'm really on a tear) before I feel too emotionally drained to continue--like I've been arguing with a loved one all night or something--cathartic, but exhausting.
That's probably why my really successful marathon writing sessions involve several hours of revision and then several hours of writing afterward.
To answer your last question first, usually I am terrified by the big changes. That's actually the part I hate the most about revision. When I feel like something has to change and be completely rewritten, I kind of look at it like an oncoming train...filled with napalm. I hang my head and sort of feel about it the way you might if your teenager just drove a car through your front door. You can't sue your own kid and they're never going to pay for it out of their allowance. You pretty much have to resign yourself to the horror. Obviously that part of revision has to be done--and I respect the writing process to know that I can't do whatever metaphorical equivalent there is of hanging plastic sheets over the car-shaped hole in the wall and pretending it's not a problem. Those are my "darlings" and I need to "kill" them, but I really hate having to pull out all the parts and put them back together again.
So I tend to love the first draft and the 3+ draft and kind of hate the 2nd draft part.
My revision process after I have a rough draft on the page goes a little bit like this:
1- Clean up the glaring bullshit for the second draft.
There's always something that's just bullshit about my stories in a first draft. Just absolute total fucking steaming pile of bullshit. I knew it wasn't working when you I was writing it, but I powered through because "shitty first drafts" and "just write" echoed in my head and drove me forward. When I wrote Penumbra, my first draft had "Norma" calling the main character "cracker" every other word because that was part of the experience that was based on something that had really happened to me. But it didn't fit to reinforce that reverse racism narrative with story's broader themes, so that was one of the first bits to go. In Falling From Orbit, Millie's father was far too supportive in the original version--he needed to have more of a bite to him so I tweaked him to more closely represent those who assume so called "non-traditional relationships" are pretty much just about sex. I first wrote The Look as a play.
This is the time to filter through the really big mistakes. Characters who don't belong. Multiple scenes doing the same thing story-wise. Gaping continuity holes. That sort of thing gets fixed here. This is as close to heavy lifting as I willingly get when I am revising, especially if I can see that major parts of the story (like whole characters or entire motivations) are going to need revision. I do it because that's what the orgasmic haze of a finished artistic creation demands, but this is my least favorite part of the entire writing process.
[Let me turn away from Amy once more and back to the camera to give the reading audience one more bit of advice--one solid "rule" about revision amidst all this touchy feeling "whatever works for you" crap: The computer can make you too vested in what you have on the page. The ability to "tweak" without changing is too refined. Once upon a time we had to rewrite the whole manuscript no matter what because typewriters, so making a major change wasn't as scary. One of the reasons I'm so bad about second draft is that I cut my teeth writing on a word processor (way back on my Macintosh 512k) and you can change a lot without actually having to rewrite a manuscript. Computers can make writers afraid to make big changes, but those big changes HAVE to happen. They're like the difference between Game of Thrones and you telling us about your Dungeons and Dragons game last week. This is why almost every modern writer (and I'm included) says that you should print out at least your first draft and completely retype the whole thing into a new file. If you're rewriting the damned thing anyway, you will be more likely to accept big changes that your story really needs to be good.
And back to Amy...]
2- Take a break.
Now is the time to put my story in a drawer for a while. The longer the project, the longer it gets drawered. Ideally I want it in there long enough that I forget what I meant and can see it more objectively, but not so long that when I come back to it I have one of those, "Everything I wrote back in those ignorant days of ignorance was absolute crap!" reaction to it.
3- Tease out what I've found
Now I read my story, and as a careful reader, I'm going to find things I didn't even notice were there when I wrote it. This is a very, very normal part of the process, and virtually every writer talks about it. Almost every discussion we had with published authors in the Creative Writing programmed involved the phrase "Oh, I never noticed that" from the author, at least once, in reference to their own work. (And this was stuff undergrads caught after only one reading--like multiple references to angelic wings or a pervasiveness of the use of streamers of light.) A creative brain is just ROILING under the surface of careful work. It's one of the reasons you really can't just submit first drafts if you want your writing to be at all good. So much good stuff is just out of reach in that first draft. This process is more like careful excavation.
This is possibly the most difficult part of revision for me (even though I enjoy it) because I find that if I am in a very different mood I will see very different things hiding beneath the surface. So it can be both helpful and possibly confusing to approach a work multiple times from multiple frames of mind. I just have to be careful not to let a mood that is antithetical to the work affect me too much or I will change the tone of the piece. I often have difficulty intellectually deciding whether or not to change language, and I often end up changing things back and forth and back and forth during this part.
4- Consider the work artistically
This part will sound like so much bullshit to most, but this is the moment where I actually try to run through a checklist of craft elements and make sure that I've not simply neglected one or another. I basically want to make sure that every decision in the work is conscious--even if the decision is to leave it out. Though it is a bit of an artifice to consider the elements separately rather than as part of a tapestry, the list allows me to consider each of the main elements and whether they are working with the elements I discovered in the second draft. 5- Get some readers
Now comes the part I can't do alone. I need people to tell me what is working and what isn't. I need to find out if something I tried to be subtle about is ham handed or if something I thought I was overdoing was actually invisible. I can start with a few people I trust including the few folks I consider "my audience" (as in "write for your audience"). But eventually I'm going to need to get readers who might not want to bang me.
The trick (for me) with feedback is knowing that the more it stings, the more they're probably right. A writer who's never had feedback before or never been through workshopping might not know how to filter bad feedback from good feedback (which is one of the reasons to get some feedback flinging oneself into the shark infested waters of critical review), but I have a pretty good feedback-dar for what is worth listening to. Shitty feedback is easy to blow off. It's the stuff that nails me right in the feels that I know is dead on.
Most of my posted fiction is technically still in "beta readers" phase. That is to say that feedback from W.A.W.'s readers would be incorporated (either immediately if it were a small change or into a future version if I felt that the change required a fundamentally new draft).
6- Begin the process of refinement.
After this point, the story is probably mostly what the story is going to be. Changes beyond here usually have to do with specific word choices and/or proof reading. Little things. It's a process of refinement and feedback. You might know a plot or a main theme when you're drafting a story, but the more hidden and subtle stuff you don't know so it would be impossible to make choices that reflect them in earlier drafts. But now you have an idea of those things and even the choice between two synonyms can work for your overall vision. This is where you get down and basically think about just about every word and whether that is really the right word.
And because I'm not an MFA instructor or an editor of a "proper" literary magazine, I will probably abandon this process sooner than most who concern themselves greatly with "artistic integrity" might. I will settle for done instead of perfect and Janusprof will shake his head and sigh a deep sigh of sighfullness.
Of course, like any codified artistic process, these steps are rarely separate and distinct, but rather tend to bleed together into a gloosh of activity. I may be cleaning up bullshit on one part of a story while I feel like another is basically in its final stages of refinement. Art is never really as clean as artists make it sound. And they make it sound pretty fucking messy.
Usually the aggregate changes from all those little tweaks does the trick to get me to something I'm happy with. Like most art, writing starts out in broad brushstrokes and gets more and more detail oriented, so it's rare to discover that an entire character or plot needs to be removed after the first couple of drafts. Usually that second major rewrite takes care of the big shit like that, and I know I'm going to hate taking an axe to my darlings, but it must be done. However, every once in a while I do discover, even late in the game, that I'm simply going to have to make some major change, and that is generally when I bust out the fifth of Jack Daniels, put on my French Maid outfit, close my eyes and think of England how much better it's going to be when I'm done.
Pictured: all the translated books in the canon that are speculative fiction.
Good riddance!
Good evening. I'm Guy Goodman St.White your bloody British sounding host, and tonight, I want to do something a little different. We're saying farewell to the translated works of the Western Canon to focus exclusively on important British literature and eventually even some of that Yank stuff. However, I thought a few parting thoughts on the non-English Western Canon might be in order.
Oh who am I kidding? Chris keeps coming in here and changing his mind about whether I should do a segment praising Cervantes for his ruthless dedication to expunging speculative elements or if I should just take the whole day off. The worst part is, he keeps changing his clothes back and forth and acting like he didn't say the last thing and has no knowledge of what he said while wearing the other outfit. He's pretending that there's two of him--as if that isn't the most overdone cliche in all of literature!
Anyway, finally he said something about just doing whatever the hell I wanted and he couldn't go on living in the shadow and something like "that guy has everything that's mine." By that point, he'd wasted enough of my time that a thoughtful review was out of the question. Thus, I am simply going to say a few last words about the translated Canon of Western literature.
I've done a review of Beowulf, Judith, The Iliad, The Odyssey (with Lady Felicity's help), Plato, and The Divine Comedy. Frankly even if I hadn't been downsized from a segment a week to this...once a month shenanigans, I could do this for years. There is simply so much speculative tripe in the canon that at some point, it becomes an exercise in simple recognition. Gods, ghosts, magic, demons, the afterlife, talking animals, fairies, dragons, minotaurs, Fenris, Medusa, Grendel and more. There is high fantasy, low fantasy, utopian fiction, distopian fiction, and even conjecture about the future that would easily be considered science fiction by today's parlance. For all the praise the canon gets, it is akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet of unrealism and the readers of the world brought their extra stretchy pants. As if any of these hacks could say something meaningful about the human condition so far divorced from the gritty truth that marks real literature.
However, with all that said, it was never my intention to point out every failed attempt at true writing the canon has to offer. I picked a few of the most well known pieces of flotsam with some of the most dramatic examples of speculative excreta. At this point you have certainly gotten the point that the canon is filled with the kind of fiction that every real literary connoisseur knows is simply bad writing. We shall now turn our attention fully to works done in English. And believe me, there are many. Resting like it does, on a bedrock of unrealistic precedent, English literature delves time and again into failed attempts at being meaningful or poignant by succumbing to the siren song of speculative tripe.
So please join me next month when we stop reading the works of less civilized cultures, and start reading exclusively English canon works. All on the next episode of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls--and Not in the Good Way. I'm Guy Goodman St.White. Good night.
My "can't even" about the comments on my Facebook page went from figurative to literal.
At just shy of a million followers, gentle reminders have stopped working, admin-ing comments has become virtually impossible, delicately explaining is a waste of my time, and my patience for unacceptable behavior is exhausted. Too many people ordering a double helping of savage without even a side order of chill. The laws of large numbers are starting to ensure that even if thousands upon thousands of people understand the spirit in which something is presented, someone will be having a bad day or not read carefully or think they understand a phrase that they don't, or read in maximally bad faith....or even just be a troll in my dungeon.
Thus, the time has come for an official commenting policy so that folks won't be making their best I-just-ripped-this-guy's-helmet-off-and-it-turned-out-to-be-Robert-The-Bruce-Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace-during-the-battle-of-Falkirk betrayed faces when I ban their asses.
Here's the TL;DR part for those of you who don't want to have to read very much:
This isn't 4chan. You don't get to say whatever you want because of "free speech." It's my space. Think of it more like you are in my house and I am putting on a show for you. (I'm not sure how a million of you fit in the living room and only need one bathroom, but I'm definitely going to need more Cheez-its.) If you are abusive or contemptuous, comport yourself in such a way that any human being with feelings whose hospitality you were under wouldn't invite you to come back, use bigoted slurs, are dismissive or derisive about posts that would be commonly labeled as "social justice," promise to (or threaten to) flounce from the page, "dare" me to ban you, or post spam links to either your own writing or a commercial site you may be banned without warning.
Smol point- If you slam the door on your way out, it'll lock behind you. And if you dare me to kick you out, I always, always ALWAYS will. If you're joking around ("Blokt!") better make sure I know it.
I care about you and I care about you achieving your goals. What am I if not a supportive, but occasionally firm cheerleader? If you flounce, I'll help you stick to it because I know that's what you would want. If you tell me you're going to flounce, but don't seem to be able to find the door, I'll make sure you know right where it is. If you threaten to flounce in a spectacle, I'll make the decision much, much easier for you. I'm here for you, pal. Plus that's just rude.
Tiny point- No, I'm not going to stop posting links to my blog. Ever. At least twice a day (sometimes three,just to annoy the haters). That's the reason this page is here–to try to drum up a few hits and build an audience. And given my traffic analytics, it's only kind of worth the effort, but it's better than nothing. You don't ever have to visit the blog if you want to just enjoy the puns and the inspiration memes and whatever I find about writing that tickles my brain, but the snotty emails and whiny tears telling me that my page would be "so great if you just stopped all that self promotion" will be used to fuel my Genesis device.
Your tears keep me young. I'm actually 143.
Reasonably moderate sized point- I'm up to fifty or so PM's a day. (Deplorably, none are million dollar contracts! I mean why did I even want to be a writer again?) Most are spam or asking me for some kind of free editing or beta reading or to share their own page something. So I don't even reply to the majority of them. My freelance/tutoring rate is $50USD/hr and TRUST ME that you don't want me doing copy editing (though I'm pretty good at content/developmental end). If your solicitation for help does not include some indication that you plan to pay me or do me a comparable service, I will simply ignore it. (I get way way way too many of those every day.)
Check out my Facebook FAQ, and you'll probably find the answer to your question. At least you'll find the answer to 95% of the PM's I get.
Also if you PM me, please keep in mind that I'm just a human being. I listen to Hamilton, watch Jessica Jones through cracks in my fingers, play Fallout 4 and cuss when I stumble into an Alpha Deathclaw at 12th level, love Robert Asprin books despite myself, can't tell when someone's flirting with me, and try to write every day. I wear big shirts because I'm self conscious about the tight ones, worry about getting enough exercise with a sedentary passion, cry when large swaths of my friends excuse torture so long as it is done to the right sort of people, and have a bad next-day if I eat too much pizza. Messages demanding I do X immediately or take down Y post because you didn't like it or "HOW COULD YOU..." will be cheerfully ignored. Add in some schoolyard shit talk to this kind of bullshit, and I will do my best Strong Bad "DELETED!" as I ban you.
Kind of slightly large point- As of this writing, I cannot (and in many cases will not) read the comments on this page.
There are almost two thirds of million of you and one of me. I often max out the 99 notifications for this page in less than two or three minutes. I cannot POSSIBLY keep up with all the comments even if maintaining FB were my only job (it's not). Furthermore, what was once a playful community with the occasional legit jerkwad easily dealt with has become more and more like the bottom half of the internet and all that that implies. I actually avoid the comments unless I suspect it's a post which will attract bigots and I need to do my banning thing. When half a million people are seeing something, the law of large numbers suggests that someone, somewhere is going to be a complete anal seepage dripping asshole about it. I know it's a statistically tiny amount, but the number of people confusing shitposting with clever makes me weep, and when people think that disagreeing with something they see automatically means they can behave in the worst way imaginable. I know you just came here to attack and now you're feeling such a good time, but I like parading through people's rain. Seriously though, enough people are really, really mean that it hurts my soul. It's honestly not good for my mental health to even try to read them all.
Which means three things pragmatically:
ONE: if someone is being a complete ass in the comments, send me a link through PM, and I'll decide what to do. (Ban them. Warn them. Rickroll them. Whatever.) But I miss 90+% of what's going on in the comments, so don't count on me to step in if you haven't notified me–I probably don't even know it's happening.
TWO: I won't even see, and certainly won't reply to a lot of comments. I just can't. It hurts me in my tender fee-fees to try. I know some of you definitely are addressing the page admin with your comments, but you'll have to send me a PM if it's in some way urgent.
I've also ignored a lot of comments lately that either missed the point or clearly hadn't read the entire piece they were responding to. (I'm an English major and an English teacher, so knowing when someone hasn't done the reading is one of the skills in my set*.) It's not personal; it's just a time thing.
*Protip: demanding to know the answer to a question that is answered in the first paragraph of the post is generally a pretty good hint that you didn't do the reading.
And frankly, when you point out that someone should finish reading or maybe misunderstood something, they are more likely to attack on the internet than take the suggestion with some humility. If you really want me to reply, send a PM. Just remember that whole "human" thing if you tread that path or I will make 27 year old pop culture references at you by saying, "You chose.......poorly."
No.
THREE: I don't have time to gently warn everyone. ("Now now. Let's not be epic shitheels. There's a human being with feelings on the other end of your apoplectic abuse.") I'm assuming you already know how to be a decent person and that the internet sometimes helps you to forget. If I see bad faith behavior, I'll just start swinging the ol' Ban Hammer™Mjölnir [I call it M.J. cause we're THAT close.] You should know better than to behave that way (and you WOULD know better in any space that wasn't online). My warnings are reserved for folks who maybe didn't know they were on thin ice.
And they get exactly ONE.
Large point- This is my page. It's free content for you delivered straight to your computer on an average of 12 times a day (depending on the FB algorithm). This free content you enjoy takes me somewhere between 30 minutes to 90 minutes a day of unpaid labor. I'm going to post what I want. I'm going to post what I find fascinating. What I find interesting. What I find funny. What I find engaging.
And I'm going to post my blog even though it occasionally dips into the socio-political.
I welcome suggestions. I welcome dialogue. I welcome discourse. I welcome concerns. I welcome criticism. (As I said above, you will likely have to PM me to get my attention since there are so many of you, but I still welcome this stuff.) I will be especially receptive to the concerns that something I've posted has inadvertently engaged in some sort of institutional harm.
However, if you comment (or PM for that matter) like you're entitled to have MY page be whatever you want in the same way you might scream at the Spokane McDonalds night shift manager because there isn't lobsterthermidor on the menu, I can promise you that the conversation will go one of two ways: If you're just being boorish and demanding without regard for the fact that I'm not a robot in a skin suit sent from Khyron Beta Prime to please your every whim, I'll ignore while singing old Starship songs. ("And we can BUILD this dream together...") If you're being abusive, I'll ban you. There are 3/4 OF A MILLION of you. Even if I had an interest in keeping everyone happy, I couldn't. And I don't have any interest in keeping all of you happy.
So I'll be true to myself, and if that bothers you SO. FUCKING. MUCH. that you can't give the ol' scroll wheel finger a quick workout, then you get to talk to me like I'm a sensitive artist and shit. Because I am a delicate fucking creative flower. Goddamnit.
Add to an above demand a threat to flounce if I keep doing what you don't like, and I will just assume that I should show you the door.
If, on the other hand, you're just going to feel jilted if this page isn't exactly what you want to see all the time, you should feel absolutely free to spend the next five years posting 10-15 pieces of content every day about once an hour to build up your own audience, and then you can make that page whatever you want. No promises that I won't stop by and complain though. Just for funsies.
This goes just as well if I post a joke you don't "like." I care (deeply) if I've inadvertently dehumanized a group of people. I don't care that some didn't get the joke or didn't find it funny or it made fun of Christianity or something. If you don't stop to look up what a phrase meant before assuming bad faith, that's not my problem. And trying to guilt me by telling me there are children or second language learners who might take it seriously won't really get much traction either since children shouldn't be here and I'm not billing myself as an educational site. Learning to navigate a world in which some written rhetoric involves satire, irony, or sarcasm is part of the cost of business in English, and my job on this site isn't to act as those filters for others.
Again, if something bothers you that much, drop me a PM and let's chat. But remember the "catch." If you want to get a message back: you have to treat me like a human with feelings. Last I checked, the cybernetic brain overlay had yet to take.
Beyond Hella Huge Point (about social justice)-
Every goddamned time I post an article or meme or anything that deigns to intersect with how writing and writers affect social issues,
...or an interpretation of a work of art or entertainment that challenges the status quo, how language reflects societal prejudice,
...or how whitewashed, sexist, and anti-LGBT publishing is,
....or the narratives through which we define our world that could use scrutiny,
a new gaggle of jerkwads end up being shown the door.
Or hell, even just post a little Content Notice on something they think isn't a problem–so much so that it must be mocked.
It's not that they disagree. Disagreement I can handle. The comments all over this page are filled with disagreement–we're definitely no echo chamber. The problem is they either decide to react in the most dismissive and derisive way possible ("This is SJW crap!" "Ableism? That's insanely [r-word] you [c-word].") in which case this page is not for them, and I don't particularly want to have to deal with that shit post after post...OR they outright lose their composure and abusively attack other members or me for taking the time and energy to attempt to explain the frame of an issue or share a personal perspective on a topic.
If what essentially amounts to free tutoring about how language affects people who aren't exactly like you is going to be shat on because you wanted to "win" an argument, have the last word, condescend to the suggestion that the world is unequal and our print media might play a part in that, or treat people like crap for sharing an opinion that challenges the status quo, Writing About Writing is not for you.
There is a one-to-one echo that exists within this reaction that I am pretty sensitive to (mild CN for abuse dynamics): abusers gas lighting their victims. Instead of taking a moment to consider why someone is upset, that they are accurately able to assess their own mental state, that they can be trusted to relay when they are feeling hurt, or that their life experience of marginalization may be something worth listening to, often they are told they are being dramatic or ridiculous and dismissed outright. Their feelings and even their actual experiences are invalidated. We see this in a personal relationship and it raises our hackles (hopefully), but when a group in social power (like men) do it to a group they have social power over (like women or gender variant folks) on a massive scale, it is considered perfectly normal behavior. And it can even cause the people who are constantly being dismissed and derided to question their own perceptions of reality.
(I think abuse and oppression have a number of shocking parallels, but maybe a post for another time.)
Let me be blunt about this. (Cause I've been sweetly dancing around the point until now.)
Y'all are fucking writers, and this is a page about fucking writing. You fucking ought to know better than anyone that words carry tremendous fucking power...possibly even to invoke fucking harm. Nobody ever silently went to war or committed genocide without fucking words fueling them first. No one ever articulated a justification for racism or sexism that caused people actual PHYSICAL HARM without using fucking words to do so.
And nobody ever said "let's fucking commit human atrocities because we're just that evil" either. They always always ALWAYS fucking rationalized it away as necessary for their own protection....and they did so using fucking words. "Just" words.
So if you sit on your couch every November 5th watching a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask bloviate between the fight scenes that, "Words offer the means to meaning," and then starts a revolution because the "truth and perspectives" of his words are bulletproof, and then you imagine yourself leading said glorious revolution with your own martial arts skill and throwing stilettos, yet you then turn right around and roll your eyes at "those damned Social Justice Warriors" being all "oversensitive" to some slur you didn't mean "that way," you are DROWNING in the irony of social power dynamics and your own double standards.
I'm not going to have a conversation every single time I bring up an issue of social equality with folks whose main conceit seems to be: "writers should be able to write whatever they want." You already CAN write whatever you want. You can write your sausage fest story with no people of color and one woman who constantly needs rescuing, and ignore every bit of advice out there about how to make deep and interesting characters Literally no one will stop you. And if you're in a situation where you can't write whatever you want (politically or socially), it's certainly not upholding the status quo that is what you're not "allowed" to write. Further writers often do write whatever they want no matter how harmful or objectionable. Rarely are their careers even impacted and occasionally that's what launches them. If these writers stay off the pages that criticize them, they don't even have to have their feelings hurt. So if you're going to react with hyperbole and loss of composure to anyone asking you to consider how and what you write....on a blog about writing, Writing About Writing is not for you.
But CENSORSHIP, Chris! But FREEZE PEACH!
Do you know what I hear Danny? Nothing. No footsteps up the stairs, no hovercraft outside the window, no clickeyty-click of the little spiders. Do you know why I can't hear those things Danny? Because right now, no one is stopping you from saying whatever you want. I'm not a government agent. This page isn't a public park. You have conflated freedom of speech with entitlement of medium.....Danny.
In case that was too subtle.
If you've mistaken a governmentally protected freedom with the absence of consequence, feel free to study up on both again. (But for ten bonus points, see if you can identify the irony in trying to silence criticism by invoking your "free speech" ad nauseum.) And your little guilt trip, complete with a high school comprehension of the word "Orwellian," is not going to prevent me from moderating comments in my own space. This isn't even a social justice activism page. I'm going pretty easy on you comparatively. I don't expect you to be fully intersectional (or even to know what "fully intersectional" means). But the cliche that “You are awful and hate free speech if you block or ban people” is regurgitated mostly by the same entitled dillholes who don't like it when people have boundaries....at all....ever....about anything. I have like eighteen jobs and NONE of them are listening to you patiently explain why people shouldn't be allowed to define their own realities and tell their own narratives.
If you want to drop some hateful commentary, share my article in your own space with commentary. Otherwise be ready to be shown the door.
Frankly, I'd rather have a smaller following where those who normally run screaming from the comments sections on most of the internet feel comfortable participating in the conversation, than a large following where the Status Quo Defenders speak over and run roughshod over anyone who has the temerity to suggest that maybe arts and humanities do something wacky like affect social perceptions, that representation matters, and that once in a while we might ought to think about such things. The whole damned world will let the people in power decide what is ridiculous to care about (spoiler: it's always going to be anything that challenges their power in any way). Here I want an actually diverse conversation, not just more and louder and more hostile dismissiveness reinforcing the status quo and actively silencing such voices.
I care about how to question whether narratives are reinforcing institutional harm. I care about how much of the writing that exists (even wildly popular writing) often reinforces harmful status quos like racism, sexism, heteronormativity, transphobia, and more–things are ingrained in many of our narrative tropes or through our lack of or type of representation. If you want me to be vapid about the impact of writing and stick to linguistic prescriptivism that makes fun of legitimate English dialects (often in a vaguely racist and definitely classist way) or those who struggle to get the right homonym, drops the same dozen articles (and their knock offs) over and over on how to publish your novel/find an agent/write a query letter, and never really asks you to think hard thoughts about how powerful writing is in creating the stories shape our culture, Writing About Writing is not for you.
"Because maybe....JUST MAYBE, arts and humanities affect social perceptions and that's worth examining once in a while..."
If we can't at least consider and think about these things, we're just telling the same stories over and over again, not really exploring new ones.
In case that little Rantsalot moment was too gentle or esoteric: If your reply is nothing more than "This is PC bullshit!" or "This is crap. You're the real sexist!" or "Shut the fuck up with this pandering crap!" (or any of the thousands of variations on this theme that is intended to silence through dismissal that I've heard over the years) and certainly if you use bigoted slurs or double down on your "right" to be sexist, misogynistic, racist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, or fatphobic after you've been asked to stop, I will use my admin tools to show you the door*.
Don't worry. The other three quarters of a million of us will carry on without you.
You don't have to agree with me. You DO have to play nice in my playground.
Me and M.J. hitting the town. Get it? "HITTING" the town...never mind.
*Once upon a time when I was getting such comments once a month, and before loved ones had cancer and before there was a four year old in the picture and before I needed to write a novel in a year lest I be flayed alive by my Kickstarter backers, I had the time to warn and explain the problem gently with each person in an exhausting choreographed dance (that lead to a banning or a flounce 99% of the time anyway); however, I do not have the time or energy to continue to do this. I will simply protect this community from harm and/or that status quo defender bullshit. ADDITIONAL INFO The Just Not Worth It Clause You are in my space. (You are not entitled to be here.) You are generally welcome as long as you refrain from a few choice behaviors (see above). However, I am under no obligation to extend infinitely my hospitality to those who are constant sources of negative energy and make my work unpleasant so long as you technically don't break the rules. It might take a while for me to recognize your name, longer still to watch you for a while, and even longer to decide what to do, but if you are constantly argumentative, unpleasant, bellicose, condescending, and generally negative, I will eventually show you the door. Because this is my space, and it's just not worth it to me to have to put up with that on post after post. And if you're firmly and often representing yourself as unwilling to understand issues such as systemic inequality, the scripts of oppression, the difference between bigotry and pointing entitlement culture, or things like that, I may eventually decide that my space is not for you. Guest posts: I'll leave up anything (even if I don't fully understand it) unless it is to a commercial site or it is self-promotion. The former will be removed and the poster banned. The latter will be removed (and if it keeps happening the poster will be banned). If you want to promote something on my page, message me. Whether or not I say yes will depend on how much it has to do with writing. Basically I'm not going to let people spam my readers.
Pedantry: Knock yourself out, (lord knows I could use the help) but keep in mind the other rules before you decide that what your grammar fix needs is to be slathered in the gravy of bumptious superiority. I'll fix it if I can. The more obnoxious and condescending you get about it, though, the more I'm going to look at that ban button like Sylvester looks at Tweety. And if you are being classist and racist by mocking a legitimate dialect of English or a second language learner or something, Tweety's not long for the world. Links in comments: If they're not relevant, I'll erase the comment. If it keeps happening I'll swing The Ban Hammer™
Bot Commenting: The engagement is appreciated, but the generic reply-to-anything comment will eventually get you banned.
Post Attribution: I get macros from all over the intersphereweboverse. Pinterest. Other pages. Friends share things they find with me. Old posts. Even Tumblr. The internet is like that with people posting and reposting. Original attribution can be incredibly hard to find after things have been through multiple layers of reposting (even with things like reverse search images, which even if they always worked [they don't] add enough annoyance and time sink to an already thankless labor of love to make it not worth it). Plus many artists are happy to see their work proliferated just so long as it has their watermark on it.
As a content creator myself though, I know how much it sucks to watch something you made go viral for someone else without so much as a link or even attribution. If I've posted something that belongs to you or someone you know or have posted a webcomic with a watermark that you can't bear to see not linked with a URL, let me know and I'll edit the post.
Or if it's yours and you want me to just take it down, repost with attribution, or whatever to handle the situation. Unfortunately, there are some people will try to claim credit for something they didn't make, even editing out an existing watermark, so I'll be looking for some small indication of actual source-age. (Usually that's a trivial matter for a content creator of linking the original post.)
I am happy to do this. But please remember a couple of things: First, you need to message me (rather than just comment) if you definitely want me to see it because I don't reliably engage with comments (see above). Second, be kind. There are basically a million of you and one of me and I am putting up 15 posts a day, so what seems like a trivial effort to you on a single post may not be to me, especially over time. If you want to be the attribution police rather than just a friendly "Hey I found a source on that post for you!" feel free to go run your own page and find out what a headache it can be.
Responding to Posts (Especially Answering Mailbox Questions) Without Reading the Article Listen....
This one gets like four and a half stars.
I am a flawed, frail human being.
One of my human failings is that even though I understand the FB algorithm and how engagement helps, it really annoys me when I post something I spent an hour (or two or three or five or EIGHT or MORE) writing, and people jump into the comments to take it upon themselves to read answer the question CLEARLY without having read the article. It just irritates the fuck out of me.
It's like reading your own shit at another author's Q&A. It's like using your "question" at a convention to talk for five minutes and then say, "Do you agree?" to a panelist. I'm glad you found the question provocative (I really am!), but JOIN the conversation. Don't start a new one of your own in MY comments. Sometimes these replies don't even realize they're suggesting exactly the same thing I did or have used one or two of the same examples. It's great that we're all on the same page, but how rude! In the world of comments at the end of posts, you usually at least see people who have engaged with the article (sometimes they clearly didn't get past a certain point before commenting, didn't understand a part, or were reading in bad faith, but you generally don't get replies that disregard the source material whole cloth. Social media means an awful lot of people jump in to tell you what they think of the title and/or preview text. Knock yourself out (I guess), but be ready for your admin to hide or delete your comment.
You need to start your own blog for this shit If you want to reply to something, enjoy. If you want to disagree with me, have fun. (Just remember all the other rules.) However, if you want to write some shit that is seriously longer than the post you're replying to, go find your own platform. And if it's just some "take down" shit (especially of the I-didn't-manage-to-finish-reading-this-or-read-it-carefully-before-I-got-angry-and-slammed-out-many-paragraphs) variety, I'm probably just going to hide it. It's an admin power that pages have. You and your friends will be able to see it and give each other high fives, but no one else will. Arguing with "You should be writing" macros: Uh...whatever cooks your churro, boss. You do you.
However, let me add a couple of things: as I dig through the depths of the internet for and/or create such memes that aren't a profusion of sparkling hot white guys, keep the bigoted slurs out of your polemics if you don't want to get banned. You can yell at macros reminding you to write (or whatever) like old man yelling at cloud if that's your jam, but bigotry is no more acceptable as a reply to a You Should Be Writing macro than anywhere else in this space.
Second, I have a folder full of people thanking me. Literally hundreds, maybe thousands of messages basically saying that the daily reminders were wonderful for their motivation. I'm not going to stop because your complaints get more and more hyperbolic, but I will eventually assume that my page is not for you.
Arguing with other macros or posts: If you have a significant ideological problem with a quote or an idea or post, I first invite you to sit with it and think about what insight it might offer. Not everything is about you. It might not be saying what you think it is. Have you read it in the best faith or are you running it through an ideological lens and assuming that I'm saying something maybe I'm not? I post things regularly that are mutually exclusive because sometimes they're for beginners, sometimes for veterans, sometimes for people who are prescriptive about language, sometimes about people who think they don't actually need to learn grammar, sometimes for cocksure folks who won't suffer an editor, and sometimes for those who need a little pick me up to their confidence. Some things are for people who want to be capital W writers and need to stop making excuses. Some are for people with executive dysfunction who need to be kinder to themselves about what they can and can't do. If you can glean a point, a conceit, or a thesis that might be valuable to some writer, maybe it isn't quite so important that you kick in the doors, knock over a vase, and make sure everyone upstairs can hear you screaming that you don't love it.
Far be it from me to suggest that a single 280 character tweet is going to contain all the nuance or that a prescriptive tumblr post has advice that you won't be able to imagine an exception to, but if you can find something interesting, useful, or edifying to your writing, that's probably why I posted it.
Okay, you've had a deep breath or three and you still don't like it? It's okay to let people know you're doing the opposite of endorsing the message or that you see a glaring gap in context, bring the nuance! I welcome it. However, reading clinging to a worst faith read, assuming that any advice is panacea and that you are entitled to tear into it, the poster, anyone who agrees, or ME using the most hostile and hyperbolic language you can come up with because that's how the internet works will not go well for you. Not here. Save that shit for Reddit.
I posted a thing you REALLY disagree with: I post things I don't even agree with myself. (Not harmful things, but stuff about craft or process.) Not every writer is going to agree on every way to be a writer--beyond reading and writing a lot. Go ahead and disagree, but if you get into that "How ever could you POST shit like this?" territory, it might be a short conversation. Poll Nominations: If you don't go to the blog webpage and make your nomination a comment, it won't end up on the poll. If you don't go to the blog webpage and make your nomination a comment, it won't end up on the poll.IF YOU DON'T GO TO THE BLOG WEBPAGE AND MAKE YOUR NOMINATION A COMMENT, IT WON'T END UP ON THE POLL!
How can your poll possibly not have [thing I like]? Because no one nominated it? Or no one gave it a second? Or they did and it did not survive an earlier round? Everything is reader based. If you want to see your titles make it, get involved sooner.
J.A.Q.ing off You might think I can't tell the difference between asking questions and "just asking questions" about something but it's actually breathtakingly easy. (Particularly when combined with "It's really obvious that you haven't actually read that.") So understand that after thirty years of being online and 15 years of teaching, I know the difference between a sincere question and bait when I see it.
You're so Clever: One of the double edged swords of a community this large is that there is often a "race" to be the first to make a clever quip with almost every post. No problem when they're funny, but sometimes people mistake clever and mean. If the timber of these quips seems always to be discouraging or elitist (or some other variant of shitty), you may eventually find MJ thirsts to revoke your commenting privileges. Shitty comments: One of my admin powers as a page runner is to hide a comment so that only the person who made it and their friends can see it. I use this liberally when people are just being general jerkwads. You can cry your maudlin tears about free speech or whatever, but I make no bones about moderating the comments in my space. If you don't have the decorum to treat your unpaid host with a tiny bit of decency, he doesn't have to suffer giving you a platform.
I only ban people if they're being bigots or extremely harmful. (It's always particularly funny to watch people who say "Watch, now we'll get banned because we disagreed," go right on commenting.) If you imagine that you are seated around a table with everyone you're talking sipping a tasty beverage of your choice and being watched by a group of students taking a class on how to discuss issues like adults, you will probably do just fine.
Please also see my Facebook FAQ if you have more questions.
If you're enjoying this blog, and would like to see more, the writer is a guy with a rent and insurance to pay who would love to spend more time writing. Please consider contributing to My Patreon. As little as $12 a year (only one single less-than-a-cup-of-coffee dollar a month) will get you in on backchannel conversations, patron-only polls, and my special ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.
[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Friday. I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous. My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. If I don't get back to you right away, it may be just because I'm saving up for a themed Mailbox like this one.] 
