I don’t know if it’s still common, but it used to be an oft-professed desire to write a book. How hard can it be? After all, you can read and write, and that’s all it takes, right? To get started, that is really all you need. Eventually you will turn out forty to a hundred thousand words if you just start cracking. The problem is, you don’t want to write A book, because your one book will suck. So if you want to write a good book, write that first book, chuck it, write a different one, chuck it and repeat. Eventually you will hone the secondary skills required. That of characterization, exposition, description and dialog. These all feed into storytelling. This, of course, assumed that you are writing fiction. Fiction is easier, you don’t actually have to know anything, you just have to string together an entertaining yarn.
It turns out that a lot of those people who were expressing an interest in writing a book were not interested in the act of writing. What they wanted was to have written a book. Whether it is for the bragging rights or the passive income doesn’t matter, because they will never write a book. It’s simply because the amount of time it takes to sit down and puts tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of words down on paper is a barrier to entry all its own. If you do not enjoy the act of writing for the sake of writing, the probability of finishing the volume drops to minute. In my case, I started writing stories back in high school. These stories were crap, but I wrote them to entertain myself. I needed to provide my own fiction, because the literature being foisted upon us public school students was specifically selected to make the students hate books.
The first obstacle is scene flow. A novice writer will often have a vivid picture in their head, but the words on the page do not convey all of it. They will also know where everyone is going next but frequently fail to chain the scenes together in a manner that someone not privy to the contents of the author’s head could follow. It becomes a nightmare if they try their hand at non-linear storytelling, as you combine the problems above with a format that is inherently harder to follow. The pieces of the scene should be laid out in order and strung together in a coherent pattern. It seems obvious, but early on this requires a conscious effort. The frequent counterpoint to disjointed scenery is the ‘and then’ syndrome. Where a character does something, and then something else and then a third thing. A list of actions and events with no color or engagement. While it can be followed, it ends up boring.
The second obstacle is description. The mistakes often fall into two categories – over-describing and under-describing. Under-describing is often from the same problem as the issues with flow. The picture is complete in their head, and they don’t fully put it on paper. If it’s not on the page, you don’t get credit for it. The opposite end of the spectrum would be trying to get every detail of the picture down on the paper, even when it doesn’t contribute to the reader’s understanding. This can come out spontaneously, or as an over-correction to a novice who had previously been bitten by not describing enough. Finding the balance is infuriating and ironically difficult to describe. Because there is no one good amount of description. Some things don’t need to be covered, while plot- and character-relevant components should be given sufficient attention.
After the first two, novice authors become more individualistic in their flaws. Some are terrible at developing characters. Others can’t create a plot to save their stories. I have always been the latter. One of my early books started from a seed of “Twenty-five pages of nothing.” The characters were alive, the dialog entertaining, and the scenes well-set. The problem was, nothing happened. It was just a couple days in the life of a nineteenth century gentleman. Strangely, people were still entertained. My solution to break out of that rut was to focus on what I was good at. I let the characters run loose and develop the plot from their interactions. This required knowing them as people and understanding their motivations. It also tends to meander and generate a lot of banter. I’ve had to trim down otherwise entertaining banter for the sake of scene flow because it got in the way.
For people who can write plots but not character… I got nothing.
I never had that problem and have no advice beyond this – write more. Like all skills, storytelling and characterization improves the more it gets practiced. So the more works you churn out, the more you will learn from you mistakes. There is a point of diminishing returns, obviously, and there will be works that are not as good as those that preceded them. That is just how it goes. But it is a craft you can practice as long as your brain functions.
I should probably address bragging and passive income. I do have passive income from my books. Last month it was $25. Most writers have to write as a sideline to a day job or other means of support. The sort of people whose writing generates sufficient passive income to live on are household names. Then there’s the matter of bragging rights. When I meet someone, I tend to say I work in IT. I’ll still talk about my writing with anyone who asks, but I’m usually not the first to bring it up. A lot of these people think they’ll go to cocktail parties and tell the local cosmos “I’m the author of…” But these people won’t ever be in that situation. They’re not the sort who’d spend their Sunday night tapping out 3,100 words in their active work, then turn around and write a thousand word article on writing for their local Libertarian preserve.
Comments
294 responses to “So You Want To Write A Book”
I fall into the “can’t create a plot” bin. Back when I used to try to write, I could come up with interesting characters, detailed settings….and nothing for them to do.
It’s a book about nothing.
Chipfeld?
The Most Interesting Man in the world looked out at the Most Interesting View Ever and said “meh”. Then he watched some pr0n and beat his meat.
– Actual story submitted by Chip
Well, as they say, so much of fiction is autobiographical.
Was the pr0n Mike likes in which the guy blows his load on a fully clothed woman?
That actually sounds like a plot that could be turned into a decent short story. Sort of a modern-day Ecclesiastes.
Fake news. The real King Solomon would go have an orgy with his harem instead of watching porn.
Otherwise, pretty accurate.
Wait, how could anything have been more interesting than the pr0n?
Ask what the characters want, how they would go about getting it, and what might go wrong.
It’s the most basic plot seed you can find, and if you know your characters, a story will emerge. It’s the method I used to write Shadowboy.
Chip’s story after I punched it up following UCS’ SureShot Formula.
I had a high school English lit teacher who taught us that plots can generally be boiled down to four structural categories: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. society and man vs. himself. This helped me tremendously with dragging my story writing skills out of word salad territory.
I’ve never heard that, but it sounds exactly right.
That’s a standard part of the curriculum. I’d more or less forgotten about it because formal literature education was almost custom-made to prevent people from enjoying books.
You don’t think that a Tom Joad getting foreclosed on in Oklahoma and traveling to California speaks to the universal experience of being a 14 year old suburbanite in New England? Or a play written for adults to remind them of how young and stupid they were twenty years ago when they were teenagers? Or expecting any 14 year old, anywhere, anywhen, to understand Russian literature?
That’s crazy talk!
The only English teacher worth a damn I ever had taught me the same thing.
Sexist! You forgot Man vs woman
Somewhere, I saw that there are only two stories, or maybe only two beginnings for stories, can’t recall which:
(1) Someone goes on a journey.
(2) A stranger comes to town.
What struck me was, those are both the same story, just told from different perspectives. My story-seeds seem to be “someone goes on a journey”.
I seem to recall stories where no one comes or goes. Unless you count getting killed as going on a journey.
/too many murder mysteries.
Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
Yeah, I can write. I just have no idea what I want to write about.
What do you daydream about? That’s where my stories live, for now.
Nobody wants to read about that.
Rule 34 says otherwise.
Electric sheep?
Is Rhywun an android?
Is he Scottish and anti-social?
Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “I have always wanted to write a poem but I never could think of a poem to write”.
Bro do you even hard sci fi?
You can be constrained by the laws of reality and still have good characters.
Heh.
Excellent article, UCS. I was nodding my head throughout.
I, too, have the plot problem, but as I write romance, I have leeway in writing character-driven stories. I build the characters, give them a problem to solve, and see what they do. Right now I’m stuck on my tension-build to the black moment and I’m beginning to actively hate this book. That has never happened to me before.
🙁
If you don’t have a deadline, I’d suggest shifting to another project for a while. Though that’s my default tack when I run into any issues while writing. It lets other parts of my mind mull over the matter without as much pressure.
If you do have a deadline… that’s rough.
No, I don’t have a deadline. Problem is I’m working with history and I have to work WITH it and AROUND it, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that and still get the effect I want. Also, gangster ties in the 20s and 30s were a cobweb and I can’t keep them all straight.
Speaking of getting the effect I want, it took me 25 years to write my pirate/privateer Rev War novel because I knew I didn’t have the chops to fulfill my vision. Until I did.
I see, accuracy a verisimilitude are important to you.
Yes, very much so. I like to think I can make the most outrageous things believable, but I failed badly with one book that I know of (the one I excerpted a few weeks ago). That’s the book I consider my klunker. I may go re-edit at least one problematic issue out.
In the pirate book, there was one thing I fudged (on purpose) and a pirate LARPer reader called me out on it in a review, and that was the speed at which the sailing ships moved. However, she was also very forgiving about it. Someone here (I can’t remember who) said that would make him mad too, and I totally understand that.
Do you need to keep them straight? Can you afford to be vague about some pieces?
Also, might the characters get the ties wrong too, since they’re so complicated?
I can be fairly vague about the big names, but the Kansas City gangster scene was insular. KC was an open town, unlike New York and Chicago, who didn’t dare mess in KC’s business (for good reason), so I have a limited number of (local) villains I can call upon.
I need to find/create a secondary villain who is willing to threaten the wife and baby of the male protagonist (because women and children were generally off limits), for a secondary reason. And build that tension. I gotta kill a few people and they can’t be historical figures, capisce?
IOW, normal sagging middle.
Ah.
This is among one of many reasons I avoid using real people as actual characters. That constraint would drive me right up the wall. I’d be obsessing to the point of trying to track down their exact movements within the time frame and going “was he even in Kansas City during that time? Did he take a trip to meet someone?”
But that’s my neuroticism showing.
I do that. I weave those moments into the plot. For instance, in April 1929, there was a meeting in Atlantic City amongst the big gangsters in the country. John Lazia (the Italian part of KC organized crime) went. It was to put forth the idea of a national syndicate, uniting all the families from all the nationalities. That didn’t go over well with the old guard (Masseria, notably).
ANYHOO. I used his absence from Kansas City as a small plot point.
I can’t keep them all straight
So you write that kind of romance.
No, but if I did, I’d make a killing churning those fuckers out.
What you need are more masculine-presenting, non-op transgender lesbians like yours truly.
(Yes, I’m going to beat that to death until I get banned)
Been done. Probably better than I could do it.
In a romance novel? Here ya go.
LOL
Actually it involves theeats, raids, bombs, tommy guns, and killing lots of people.
It’s romance. All they do is fuck.
BTW, this is too damned funny not to link, off topic or not. Some guy I’ve never heard of goes after Iowahawk, bragging about how he’s a blue check but Iowahawk isn’t.
I like that the guy with the blue check going after him for not being important has 1/4 of the followers that Iowahawk has.
It gets even funnier when you learn that half of those are bots.
https://www.twitteraudit.com/markbland
“Writers write…commentators commentate”
*begins aiming orbital railgun*
My problem when writing is I’m very critical of what I write, to the point I talk myself out showing people my work. I have brilliant ideas in my head then when I put them to paper it reads like a kindergartener wrote it. Another problem I have is the whole citation thing. I want to write about history but I’m never sure when I should be citing something. The citation rules are vague to me.
I can’t help with citations. I write fiction for good reason.
We all are, especially at first. Criticism can be tough, and not everybody is going to like it. Opening yourself and your work up like that is scary.
I have brilliant ideas in my head then when I put them to paper it reads like a kindergartener wrote it.
Perhaps you should write children’s literature?
My problem with writing is that I never review my work, ever, in any context. Since I can’t write publishable fiction in a first draft, I’m destined to not be a writer. (you can see the laughable results somewhere in the Glib archives)
Writing is damn hard work. I’ve churned out a handful of novels and even more novellas. But I’ve lost my muse and don’t write too much any more. I’m currently working on a Viking book but it has been hard going; these days life keeps getting in the way.
I worked best getting the dern story on paper no matter how rough… and then go back to re-work, re-write, add detail, improve, etc etc etc until I, and the proofreaders / editors – deemed it good.
The few times I’ve been dim enough to share a 1st draft of anything I’d written with friends of anything I’d written, the awkward silence said more than any string of random vulgarities could. I often put in “placeholder” dialog, events, etc. which is meant to move the story along, but which is horrible on its own.
“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” –Faulkner
Like everyone who writes for someone else for a living, I daydream about writing fiction too. (I write enough of what could be considered non-fiction that I don’t have that itch per se). I don’t have any illusions about the fact that I’ll never actually write it. I just make these outlines sometimes to stop the voices in my head.
My most recent outline was finished in 2016. Its a sci-fi trilogy targeting ideas around entrenched power, reduced communication costs, and this leading to political violence in an environment where technology has high development costs but near 0 replication costs. Well, nice to know that if I actually wrote it it would have been topical.
Having read many, many (many) comic books, I also have outlines for comic books. My eternal frustration with the way the Fantastic Four is written has produced a bunch of FF outlines, which is funny because I hate that book.
In any case, thanks for the impetus for a walk down memory lane USC.
Like everyone who writes for someone else for a living – but does making powerpoints for corporate meetings count as writing?
Do weekly progress reports count as fiction?
No, but timesheets do.
Powerpoint slides is my very favorite kind of writing. You get to say whatever you need to say in 10 bullets and don’t have to fiddle around with all that detail bullshit.
I really enjoy writing. My problem is that I’m only good at writing non-fiction, philosophical opinion-type shit. Which is why I typically use this place as my brain toilet.
15 years ago I self-published a collection of essays touching on some of the stuff I talk about here. Predictably no one bought it. No one reads my stuff here either. Oh well. I do it mostly for the catharsis.
And I won’t link you to the book since it would instantly dox me.
Musings on the Female Form?
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Big-Breasts/dp/383653214X/
NB: I have seen this book and it’s pathetically amateurish. I could have done a much better job.
My problem is that I’m only good at writing non-fiction, philosophical opinion-type shit – this statement is reasonably easy to troll
I read your stuff and enjoy it. I realize there is more to you than the appreciation of the feminine form, Oh Bringer of Tits.
Thanks dood.
Funny, Ovation has a show about Roald Dahl on right now.
I have a dozen pretzel rolls on right now. About five minutes baking time left.
And This is how they turned out
I am happy.
Those look fabulous, nice work. You’re wasting your time on this book thing, you should open up a pretzel cart outside my office building.
I come up with a plot and the characters write themselves…except you know the stuff I write here that is based on what’s going on in the real world, then the characters just make it up as they go along. I have no damn idea where Harvey and Ted are going, but they’ll let me know, eventually.
So You Want To Write A Book – I do. I have the title all planned out. Now I need the pages
I don’t know if it’s still common, but it used to be an oft-professed desire to write a book. How hard can it be?
Same thing with opening a bar. Starting is not that hard. Being sucesful is different. Especially with eastern Europeans torrenting books and skipping on the check.
I never cease to be amazed at the people who start a bar or restaurant with no clue as to how the business actually works. Its sad, really – I know a couple people who completely destroyed their finances and damaged their family relationships that way.
A recurring theme I hear is people retiring to open a bar because they confused wanting to retire and hang out in a bar with not retiring and investing their savings in a career change instead.
In my tourist trap of a home town, there are a few resorts that get sold over and over again. Every 5 years or so some couple from Iowa or one of the Dakotas will buy the resort thinking it will be the perfect semi-retirement deal.
They have been visiting the area for 20 years and have always dreamed of living there. This is the perfect deal. They will run a resort and get to fish every day. Sure they will have to clean a few rooms every day and check a few people in, but it has to be easier than farming.
After a bit they realize that even though 90% of their guests are great, the 10% make their lives a nightmare. They break shit, they bitch about everything, they complain and complain and complain. The owners also discover that there is always something that needs to be done. And your employees are all lazy bums who you have to watch over.
And there is never really time to get out fishing. Or even just relaxing and taking a break.
After about 5 years the hard workers have kept their heads above water, but are sick and tired of it and want to sell and get out. The ones who weren’t ready to bust their asses have lost enough that they are desperate to sell and get some of their money back.
The only good news for them, is that there seems to be an endless supply of farmers who are willing to buy the resort from them.
And the name of that resort is The Monkey’s Paw.
I’ve had countless people ask me why I haven’t gone into brewing professionally. I explain that the average head brewer salary is less then my current IT salary, it’s a lot of hard work, and it requires lots of skills I don’t have on the professional level. I can make a good batch of homebrew, but scaling that up from 5 gallons to 160 gallons is another level entirely. Add to that the only restaurant I’ve ever worked at was fast food in my teens, and it all means more work, for less pay, and a less secure future.
I’ve had many people ask why I don’t brew professionally. I give similar explanations. The pay is low and the work is hard physical labor.
I completed a 9-month vineyard management certificate program through the local college. I spent $250 to learn I never want to own/run a vineyard.
I then completed a 6-month winery management certificate program through the same local college. So another $250 spent to learn that I never want to own/run a winery.
I have become close friends with a young couple that runs a professional meadery. I live vicariously through them.
And I continue to homebrew.
Growing up, I was lucky enough to a.) have a father who was an excellent cook, and b.) realize it at the time. I mean, the man had a real gift. He also hated his day job. I asked him once why he didn’t just quit and become a professional chef. He said, “Because I love cooking too much to have to do it for a living.”
I spent $250 to learn I never want to own/run a vineyard.
A friend of mine wrote a book, First Big Crush about a year he spent working at Allan Scott Wines in New Zealand.
It’s a fun book, but a passage that always stood out to me:
Opening a bar requires dealing with customers. I couldn’t do that.
It would be great to find a business idea that didn’t need customers.
This is not a sarcastic reply, btw.
It’s not needing customers that’s at issue. It’s directly interacting with them.
I have sketches jotted down for 4 books (a series, with titles “The Price of Redemption”, “The Coin of Sacrifice”, “Heavier Than a Mountain”, and “Lighter Than a Feather”), and a 5th percolating in my head (“Slaver”). My basic themes revolve, predictably, around duty and redemption.
I enjoy writing, but I write all day at the office and simply don’t have the energy for it when I’m not working. My plan is to continue jotting down ideas (it is interesting to see how these nascent stories evolve in my head over time), and when I retire, see if I really can write fiction. I have noticed that my stories seem to change in my head because the characters want to do what they want to do, not necessarily what I want them to do. I chalk this up to the fact that some of them are assholes, and none of them take direction well. No idea where that comes from.
Oddly, one of my hangups is coming up with acceptable names for fictional characters, since I’m thinking about, really, fantasy/heroic fantasy stories. “Bob the Barbarian” just doesn’t cut it.
Strat practicing now, or the “Oh my god, I suck” results of the first few drafts will discourage you when you do retire and cna’t distract yourself from it.
I know this is excellent advice, but I just can’t sit down at a computer and write after spending most of the day doing exactly that. Just need to nut up, I guess.
Try a speech to text thingy and just tell your story, then you can go back and write a second draft.
Hmm. Interesting.
I picture the Dean Beasts cowering at the far end of the house, and Mrs. Dean rolling her eyes non-stop, as I act out the dialogue (which I’m pretty sure I would do). I may have to give it a try.
Oddly, one of my hangups is coming up with acceptable names for fictional characters, since I’m thinking about, really, fantasy/heroic fantasy stories. “Bob the Barbarian” just doesn’t cut it.
Identify the real human culture that most closely resembles your fantasy culture and crib from there. Lists of ancient kings often have quite interesting, exotic names to choose from. Alternatively, no one really minds that Luke, Leia, and Han are barely more fantastical than Bob, so maybe you should just go for it.
I have this weird need for the “right” name to really feel right about my characters. Its really one of the first things I need to get squared away in my sketched-out “outlines”, which right now are notes on pivotal scenes rather than a proper outline. I notice when authors get names that feel right to me – Iain Banks does it with his Culture books (Diziet Sma, Cheradenine Zakalwe), and so do the authors of Malazan books (such as Anomander Rake, Silchas Ruin, who are, oddly, brothers). No idea why I like those names, but I do. Banks does an especially good job of naming his AI ships (the converted warship No More Mr. Nice Guy is a fave).
Those don’t look like names. I’m balking at just looking at them.
/says a guy who named a major character just ‘Jack’.
“Jack” works fine with your settings. It would feel weird hanging “Jack” on a guy fleeing the slave-trading syndicate he used to work for across an imaginary kingdom because he got drunk and butchered the guards for a convoy of slaves.
Not really, since (even with the name “Jack”) it’s already pretty close to the backstory for Pirates of the Caribbean.
-1 Count Dookoo
For historical period names, visit an old graveyard.
I write a lot of lyrics, and there are many tricks,
and features and no nos, and rewrites to fix,
sometimes it’s fun, others a bore,
sometimes it’s love, and others a chore,
Good to see you Yusef.
You too, UCS,
your article was good but depressing, I haven’t the patience for long pieces,
A novice writer will often have a vivid picture in their head, but the words on the page do not convey all of it. They will also know where everyone is going next but frequently fail to chain the scenes together in a manner that someone not privy to the contents of the author’s head could follow. It becomes a nightmare if they try their hand at non-linear storytelling, as you combine the problems above with a format that is inherently harder to follow. – Sounds like George RR Martin
What UCS describes there isn’t a novice writer, it’s a Hollywood screenwriter.
OT: LOL
https://imgur.com/a/ywz0zeS
Thanks for the article. This is good insight.
I’m good at character and plot. I’m terrible at having the discipline to write a long story. I have dozens of outlines for novels and I’ve written lots of short fiction. But the idea of sittng down and working on a novel every day for months after work is daunting to me.
Don’t jump straight to novel then. Write something mid-sized, like a novella.
I don’t write outlines because then I feel I have already written the novel and so why bother?
Are you me? Well, no, you write Romance, you must be mirror universe me.
It seems we have similar habits, yes.
Eh. Habit from my old RPG days. I’d GM and write an outline. And I mean a really bare outline with the dramatis personae. They are all simply bullet points of the 4-5 acts and what needs to happen at an extremely high level. They’d need lots of fleshing out, but there’s a conflict and character arcs.
I’m a fairly decent fiction writer. I use to do tons of online text-based role playing which isn’t the same as writing a novel. But I think I have a god grasp of character, dialogue, plot, and pacing. Counting that sort of back and forth I’ve written millions of words of fiction.
I think I will look back through those files and pick one that would make a good novella and give it a go. 20k-40k words seems much less daunting. That’s like a month worth of daily doing 1k words to get a 1st draft. Thank you both for the encouragement.
I think the only fiction I starter writing was a story about a werewolf living in Bucharest. Also I tried a short screenplay about some poker players trying to run away from the local orgnised crime. I got about 10 pages into both. I find it easier to write nonfiction I think. And I have a fear of being derivative without realizing. I know someone who wrote a short film based on something that was similar to a short he saw before but forgot and actually though it was original.
Every basic story has already been done at least once, if not many times. Do not worry if you have similarities to someone else work unless you are outright copying from them.
There is such a thing as collective consciousness. You can come up with an idea and execute it. Someone you don’t know a thousand miles away will come up with the same idea, roughly at the same time, and execute it similar to the way you did.
So you’re saying there may be TWO SugarFree’s out there? The HORROR!
Don’t be silly.
He’s the Id of the collective consciousness.
He’s that dark fantasy that only pops up in 3 am fever dreams. The one you’d rather die than admit. You know which one!
This is true. Years ago I created and played a character on an online role-playing game (a MUSH) that was a modern fantasy game.
Years later a series of highly successful modern fantasy novels came out that featured a character that was extremely similar who even had the same last name (Including an unusual ethnic spelling). I won’t name the series or give more detail cause I don’t want to throw shade. My wife and a couple of friends think the writer cribbed it because the writer moved in some of those circles at the same time online, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think it was parallel construction and I take it as a compliment that I had the same sort of idea of this particular author whose work I like.
At least you were writing what you know.
By the way, I saw some minivan commercial last night and the guy was wearing driving gloves!
I have no inclination to write a book, but I enjoyed your article.
I was one of those people who, at one time, wanted to be “a writer” but wasn’t especially interested in the coolie labor (Raymond Chandler’s term, I think) of writing. That, and I don’t have the faintest notion of what makes people tick, or why they do the things they do.
I have a fear of being derivative without realizing.
It’s all been done. Shakespeare was a plagiarist.
And a black woman
+1 “Nu-uh, you get the hell outta here you damn spot! You don’t be comin into my house. No, this ain’t happenin, get you ass outta here”?
“It turns out that a lot of those people who were expressing an interest in writing a book were not interested in the act of writing.”
Heinlein’s Rule #1: https://sfwriter.com/ow05.htm
Who cares what he said. He wrote the only book that I have ever chucked against the far wall with great force.
Now I am curious. Which one?
“The Cat Who Walked Through Walls”
It failed to get through the plaster, let alone the lath.
That was an unfortunate one to start with. It assumes some knowledge of several of the characters from other books. If you’re willing to give him another shot, I’d recommend Starship Troopers, Job: A Comedy of Justice, or The Moon is Harsh Mistress.
Start with Moon. If you don’t like it, you won’t like anything he wrote.
I read Starship Troopers.
It was ‘Meh’ at best.
…
I don’t know what to say to that.
That’s how I felt about Gaiman’s American Gods.
I really liked American Gods, but I haven’t read it in years and I wonder if I’d still feel the same about it. I generally like Gaiman. Like, not love.
^THIS
All the gushing – I didn’t get it.
“Stranger in a Strange Land”? Because that’s the only Heinlein I’ve read, and I’ve been reluctant to read anything else of his solely on the basis of my opinion of that book.
I assumed the guy had turned into an old perv when I read that one. Try Starship Troopers or the others Nephilium mentioned.
Honestly, the hippy-dippy shit turned me off. Because of the Martian angle, I couldn’t help compare it–unfairly–to The Martian Chronicles, which I really enjoy and read at least once a year. I’ll give Starship Troopers a whirl, I’ve heard that’s a good read.
the first 2/3rds of Stranger is good. I have never finished the rest.
+1 Dorothy Parker
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers are good.
Never much liked anything else he wrote.
I can see why Stranger was revolutionary for the time, but I could never get over the Utopian silliness of it.
“Utopian silliness” is a good way to put it. If I described the book to someone today I’d probably sum it up as, “A human who gets raised on Mars has superpowers…or maybe he’s just really tall…whatever, anyway, he comes back to Earth and this chick is all into him but then he’s all ‘free love, baby’ and she’s all jelly, then she gets over it because everybody just kinda moves into a hippy commune to start a cult, and then the squares kill him because they just can’t dig it, man.”
I can’t read too much Heinlein all at once because its too insidious. Nothing I consume flatters my priors more than his stuff, and I know what happens to people when they don’t challenge their priors. The modern day lotus eaters are the smug progressive listening to NPR gently coo in their ear, or my mother-in-law who’s built a social bubble around herself made of Focus on the Family and Joel Olsteen mailers.
But good god damn if Stranger didn’t make me go “what the fuck dude?” over and over and over again.
A rule that I’ve tried to hold to for most of my life is when trying a new author, I’ll get the oldest book of theirs that’s available (much easier now in the days of the internet). So my first Heinlein novel was Beyond This Horizon. Which is not that good of a story, but had some interesting ideas in it.
Heinlein is (kind of) a special case that doesn’t play nice with your rules. He started out writing what are called the Juveniles, and his first published works are pretty bad. Just filler the pulps. He didn’t really become the Heinlein that is worth preserving until he moved onto the big boy books. Some of the Juvies were good (Red Planet is great, especially in comparison with today’s YA stuff), but you can almost think of him as another writer entirely. Startship Troopers was the first big boy book, and marked a difference in style so great that you should start there.
Starship Troopers was originally planned to be another Juvie, but got rejected due to violence. So it got retooled into a book more for adults. You also had The Puppet Masters in the early books (basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers before Invasion of the Body Snatchers was written). Again, this was pre-internet and going with what was available on the shelves at the local library/bookstore. Now, the ability to read reviews and know where one should jump in with an author are huge.
The Puppet Masters! I’m pretty sure that was the first Heinlein book I’ve ever read, although I wouldn’t have remembered that if you hadn’t mentioned it.
Gepetto attends a convention?
UCS: Alien ship crash lands, people from a top secret government agency are sent to investigate. Strange things happen, and people are acting differently. Eventually you learn the aliens can control people by being in contact with them. Then you have a man vs. man and a man vs. monster (left out above) plot running for the rest of the book.
Tarran can give you a much more detailed take on this but…Heinlein’s post-juve novels can be divided, roughly, into pre-health problem and post. Pre he wrote really good 1950s sf; post he was much more concerned about life and death on a personal level and so his novels tended to go down that road.
UCS & Mojeaux, is anything you have published been carried in libraries? Would you even know if it was?
Just curious.
I doubt it.
And there would be no way to tell. If they bought the paperback, it’d just show up as a sale. But I have no idea what goes through Librarians’ heads when they pick stock. It’s never what I’d want to read.
Yes, I have been. No, I wouldn’t know unless I actively lobbied for it and was accepted, OR if a librarian tweeted me that a patron requested my book be bought by the library. That happened once.
I make sure my books are available through normal book-buying channels. Also my books are available on an Espresso machine (a book printing-and-binding machine) and those are generally found in libraries.
If you have access to FirstSearch/Worldcat, you can search quite a few libraries including public libraries and some school districts.
http://magaimg.net/img/6g7x.jpg
Ouch. No wonder the proggies are so worked up over the NPC meme.
Now I see why their media blitz isn’t working!
It should be “if (laugh == false) {”
With only one equal sign in their posted code, they are actually setting the value of laugh to false, not testing the comparison. NO WONDER NO ONE THINKS THEIR TRUMP JOKES ARE FUNNY!!!!
I might be wrong about this, but assuming that’s JS, then (laugh = false) is an expression that will evaluate to “false”, either assigning the value “false” to a “laugh” variable declared higher in scope or creating a global variable “laugh” and assigning “false” to it. So it would evaluate to “false” every time, but it would still work.
However, they declared “demeanor” as an array, but then they’re calling methods on it as if it’s an object. So unless they’ve added those methods to the Array prototype, it’ll kick out an uncaught exception.
But maybe it’s Python, because I think you can do weird stuff like create an object and then assign values to the object that just find the correctly-typed property to fit in.
NERDS
So, why do you hang around with us?
He aspires to be one of us.
Diversity. Like DUH
He’s angling for his MRS, everyone knows the nerds end up with the cash.
Don’t blow my cover!
That sounds like a Ruby hack. There’s a handler not shown off the top of the screen that responds to undefined method calls.
You can assign and call priorities and methods of objects using array notation in JavaScript; it can be very useful as array notation allows expressions to be evaluated, giving a large amount of flexibility. Since arrays are objects in JavaScript, you can access the values in an array using array or object notation. They will also have methods attached by default, however the “change” method isn’t standard and would have had have been added to the prototype chain at some earlier point.
Burritos are just tacoids in the category of enchiladafunctors
My 10 book opus – Detroit Rot City – has been jogging around in my brain since high school. I figure apocalyptic fiction isn’t going anywhere, and I just need to come up with 7,500 pages of words to really get it going.
You may have waited long enough that’s it’s historical fiction now.
OT: Don’t know if this has already been posted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-ban.html
TL;DR – The NPC meme had to be squashed because it hit way too close to home.
The part that would be funny if it weren’t sad is that the reaction of Twitter and the Times proves the underlying assumption of the NPC meme – that the left is dominated by programmed unthinking drones – is largely correct. The reaction is exactly what you’d expect from programmed unthinking drones.
Mockery only cuts when it cuts into the truth. That’s why the NPC (non-player character) meme cut the left so deeply.
“For a long time I have read the Yahoo! home page. I don’t read it for amusement or illumination, as the writing and reporting is humiliatingly insipid. I read it instead to see what instruction set is currently being communicated to the automatons.”
LOL.
Not just Yahoo.
This gives the distinct impression that most of the NPC accounts blocked by Twitter were not giving “false voter information”, making Twitter’s stated reason a pretext.
If the shoe fits…
That’s the best piece of journalism I’ve read in a while.
Oh, wait, he wasn’t serious?
Dunno anything about the NPC memers, but are they “Trump supporters”, or are they more “SJW mockers”?
From the standpoint of Team Blue, that’s a completely-overlapped Venn diagram.
Anyone who doesn’t #RESIST is a tacit Trump supporter.
And a Nazi who at best deserves a sucker punch and should probably just be killed.
(Mr. West said of his pre-Trump-supporting days, “I was programmed to think from a victimized mentality.”)
That’s why the left is freaking out about Kayne.
The new narrative is that he’s bipolar, and this is him basically having a mental breakdown, which strikes me as particularly insidious and vile.
Soviet-style psychiatry. Everything old is new again.
Really good article. Laziness is my biggest problem with writing, followed by self-criticism, with ignorance rounding up the rear. One of my big problems is having adequate words to describe the scene in my head. I could find them if I weren’t so lazy.
I always found Elmore Leonard‘s rules to be valuable:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
I have found that readers don’t really care about that stuff as long as the storytelling and author voice are good. Twilight didn’t sell a gabillion copies because it was good writing. It sold because it hit all the right feelz for a whole lot of people.
Snoopy has a sad.
So does my brother in law, who has written two academic texts about meteorology.
Snoopy was channeling Bulwer-Lytton. Here’s the full sentence:
Bulwer-Lytton has become the go to example for bad writing, and he definitely has some overly florid passages. He was a very successful writer in his day, though and probably doesn’t deserve all the scorn.
The writing style of that day was florid. He’s not out of line with what was fashionable then.
So Elmore wrote radio screeds? Because she’s just cut out everything but the actual dialogue.
In Short, All those rules are wrong.
There is one rule – Entertain the reader.
She?
Looks might effiminate to me.
Elmore Leonard was celebrated for the dialogue he wrote. Which is why so many of his books became great movies.
https://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/elmore-leonard-the-actors-and-dialogue-writers-friend
I have watched – none of those movies.
Also, by leaving out all visuals from the yarn it apparently makes it less troublesome to convert to film. Nothing to contradict the director.
Failing to watch both versions of 3:10 to Yuma is nothing to be proud of.
Aside from the fact that it’s not a failure.
Anway, the discussion of movies has nothing to do with the original point that he/she/it was wrong. Stamping out diktats on what one should or should not do is a guaranteed route to wrong.
Entertain the reader. If you don’t so that, it doesn’t matter what other strictures on composition you’ve followed. If you do, it doesn’t matter what strictures on composition you’ve broken.
Jackie Brown
Joe Kidd
Get Shorty
52 Card pick up
Haiku? No, the syllables are off.
Goddamn, did I love Justified.
I loved that series too.
Although by the end I was a Crowder man through and through. Wish he could have ridden off in the sunset at the end.
Loved it too. Some great characters in that series.
Elmore Leonard had a gift for carrying a story through dialogue. His descriptive passages are marvels of concision. If you are looking for audiobooks, his are some of the best; seemingly written to be read aloud.
I’ve listened to his entire catalog at Audible, including the Westerns, which are just excellent (it doesn’t hurt that they are set in Southern Arizona, where I now live). I about fell out of the car when I fired one of them up and it started about where I live, with the characters in and out of Fort Lowell, which I drive past at least once a week.
I have learned one thing from Heinlein – I will never enjoy an author or series that someone else recommends or is heavily pushed or hyped.
Why am I not surprised that you only follow lukewarm recommendations?
I don’t follow any recommendations. I specifically avoid them. I want to meander through the catalog, find something with no expectations and be pleasantly surprised. If I don’t like it, then there’s no residual animus towards the person who pushed it, because there’s no such person.
I have learned one thing from
HeinleinUCS –IHe will never enjoyan author or series that someone else recommends or is heavily pushed or hypedanything anyone else says they like because it makes him feel like someone influenced him.Reply
How the hell did I copypaste the reply button? LOL
I think that what I like about his books the most is that the crimes always seem to go sideways because the criminals are lazy and/or stupid. And the cops are usually just as lazy/stupid.
… the criminals are lazy and/or stupid. And the cops are usually just as lazy/stupid.
Agreed; that’s what’s so great about Get Shorty. Everyone’s just a dumbass.
“It was a dreary drizzly day out. I was inside, thankfully, the wetness didn’t help my ailment.” “Rain came to Neutharsis in torrents, sheeting off the angled windows and rinsing away the summer dust.”
“3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.” She commanded.
“4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.” she petulently repeated.
Punctuation is free. Go to eleventy.
The demons have a sad.
You must have hated Twain.
Scritching my pudge, sausage-like fingers through a scraggly beard I say, “How is the reader supposed to know what they look like? Or do you only ever use cardboard cut-outs to people your prose?”
Is your narrator blind? Details have plot relevence. Don’t leave the reader wandering in the fog you didn’t start the book with.
Like Everything by Ms. Leonard. Did she write anything I’ve heard of?
Probably not, just a Hollywood hack with no redeeming features.
Like, “3:10 to Yuma” – I’m supposed to believe the train always leaves on time?
Can’t tell if serious or sarc.
And I looked through the bibliography. I’ve read none of those. And aside from the aforementioned one movie that kept getting remade have heard of just as many.
Download and watch “Justified”. Fives seasons of the best fucking dialogue on TV. Lots of it copied verbatim from Leonard’s stories.
I’d rather be writing a book.
I’ve read none of those.
Then you are seriously missing out. He has a few recurring characters, but you can pick up just about any of his books and read it cold. He is a wonderful story-teller. Download one of his audiobooks for your next road-trip. I think you’ll like it.
3:10 to Yuma is one of the best westerns I’ve ever seen. And it’s just a good story. Knowing Elmore Leonard only through having seen Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, I had no idea that he was so well-known as a writer of westerns.
Those seem pretty close to Stephen King’s advice from “On Writing”, especially #4. #8 and #9 are in there, too, but more like, “Don’t give unneeded details; let the reader fill in the blanks.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing-easy-adverbs-exclamation-points-especially-hooptedoodle.html
Read the full story.
1. Never open a book with weather.
If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
The man had a wicked sense of humor and an amazing ability to let characters tell the story. So his writing style is bias towards dialog. His tens rules are in some way self-deprecating comments on his own style.
The man had 40 best sellers.
Bestseller by actual volume or bestseller as in getting on the ‘books the editors at the times want to push’? Don’t answer, It doesn’t matter. The argument doesn’t appear to have even originated with the guy.
You presented rules timmed down to short diktats in a manner as if delivered by a prudish victorian matron associated with a name one consonant removed from a perfect name for such a matron, and now turn around and say “but actually he was agreeing with you that the rules are not absolute the whole time!eleventy” and I lost track of where this run-on thought was going to go.
So sorry for wasting your time. As a professional writer, I thought you might actually be familiar with a famous writer and his famous set of rules for writing.
I am a very poorly read writer.
I point you to my comments on high school Enlgish class.
I started writing because it felt like there was nothing good to read.
And there’s no need to appologise whether sincerely or sarcastically.
As far as I can tell all the screaming came from a misunderstanding of intent.
I’m just a bored technical writer trying to contribute to the dialog. 😉
And here I am trying to be descriptive. We’re running at cross purposes. How are we ever going to get the esposition out without an infodump?
You set up in a bar with two guys saying really pithy things, and the story just falls out.
Of course, if I could do that, I wouldn’t be an engineer any more.
a name one consonant removed from a perfect name for such a matron
“Maron“?
Elnore.
I’ve been meaning to read his stuff. I’m trying to get out of the habit of just sticking to my “home” genres, like horror. I’ve discovered C.S. Forster and Bernard Cornwell for historical fiction. I’ve also got John Grisham on the list, just to mix things up a smidge.
It was a dark …. night.
It was a dark… knight.
I agree with #7 if only because it’s really difficult to get it “right”. Like as much as I love Twain, when he does it it’s jarring to me. Maybe it was accurate for its time and place – I can’t know.
I don’t actually disagree with that.
I just get very contrarian when I think I’m being told “You’re doing it wrong”.
And that’s the part I got wrong.
I linked to the wrong version of Leonard’s rules without any of the backstory.
Damn – Be careful out there or coincidental stuff could happen.
Mashal Saad al-Bostani of the Saudi Royal Air Forces, who was named by pro-government Turkish media as one of 15 suspects in the alleged murder of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, has reportedly died in a car accident on return to the kingdom.
In high school I wanted to write serious novels. Found out I don’t describe well enough for that. So in college I wanted to write serious screenplays. Everyone thought they were funny. If I write now, its funny screenplays. Gotta go with what works I guess (if emailing to a few friends and family is works)
OT: I dunno, I’d say that Common Core is working exactly as designed.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/thanks-common-core-act-scores-for-class-of-2018-worst-in-decades/
Has the ACT been dumbed down? I heard the SAT was.
In my day job, I write software for schools. We had to include common core in our product. I believe one of the big textbook companies got the contract to write the standards, and was paid handsomely for it. So once again, big government + connected business = the rest of us lose.
Fun article, UCS!
I used to do a lot of corporate fiction and took on the challenge of National Novel Writing Month many years ago. It was a few days in before I got rolling on a plot, but I worked on it every night after the kids went to bed.
I hit the 50K word mark by the end of the month but holy shit was it work! There were days where I started to hate the characters and wanted to kill them all off with the Yellowstone Caldera or something. After the month was over I gave it to my sister to read and she loved it and wanted me to finish the book. Since she was an editor and worked in publishing I was flattered.
But I never wrote another goddamn word for that story.
You mean like SEC filings?
Somewhere, Elon Musk gets a slight erection.
Oh, is he rolling his cigars in vasodialators now too?
https://www.medpagetoday.com/pulmonology/smoking/75664
Press releases, marketing materials, annual reports, SEC filings…you name it.
Don’t miss that.
Surely that junk just writes itself by now.
Thanks for the interesting article and considerate comments. My “retirement” plan is to write historical plays. No intent to publish or collect any money, but I do hope to stage performances at some point.
Seems like the long way around to set up the casting couch, but, hey, go for it.
#MeToo. No dreams of grandeur – more like a simple performance at the Senior Home!
Geriatrics need love too.
Off topic, but Vox has a new theory as to why a bunch of voters switched from Obama to Trump.
Spoiler warning: It’s racism.
To NPCs the answer is always racism.
Their AI really needs an upgrade.
The NPC meme is dumb, but Dems made it work because they’re even dumber about how they react to dumb memes.
That’s a new theory?
I have a new theory concerning apples falling from trees, it’s called “gravity”
The fact that vox is still somehow an ongoing entity has done more than any other event to make me question whether having a free market is really the right answer. Any system which can actually sustain that dreck for this long has got to be inherently flawed.
I’d be willing to bet that a significant amount of their revenue comes from NPOs that can be traced back to Steyer/Soros/et. al. You can sustain an awful lot of agitprop with a billion dollars.
Wikipedia so take is as you will.
Why this disbelief that major corporations don’t want to spend money on leftist websites? It’s peanuts to them and who’s going to stand up and demand they provide a justification for this one little line item on the marketing expense report? When the entire board wants a site like Vox to exist and Ezra Kleins of this world to be employed.
You’re assuming they’re intended as a profit-making enterprise vs. paid shills for someone’s worldview. I’d love to see their books.
Does it address the most blindingly obvious question about that “theory”?
That they voted for Obama before? Yes, they bring that up. And explain that Obama campaigned on post-racial themes, while Clinton campaigned on racial justice. Then they mention Black Lives Matter as a reason, and that people can be racist, but still like specific people of the race they hate. That’s in the paragraph that follows this lovely one:
Emphasis added. I thought we had already moved on to Romney being the kind of Republican the Democrats could work with?
So all those voters who voted for Obama and then Trump were bamboozled by Trump’s sweet sweet racist lollipops, just too good to resist.
That’s the takeaway. Now the real question, is how are the progressives going to counter this? Will they start trying to talk in racist dog whistles (I mean they hear them so well)? Or double down on calling the people they need to vote for them racists and bigots?
While attempting to unperson anyone “of color” who bucks the progressive yoke. That’s a good look.
Odd, that the referendum on race relations didn’t really include any races, just nationalities and religions.
I thought we had already moved on to Romney being the kind of Republican the Democrats could work with?
We would have, except Romney didn’t go away. He’s back, preparing to be the next Senator from Utah, and they’ve realized that he isn’t going to Washington to help the liberals. Ergo, he’s still Hitler.
they’ve realized that he isn’t going to Washington to help the liberals.
Unless something has changed and he is no longer an establishment Republican, isn’t that pretty much what he is going to do?
Or has he been caught up in the wave of testosterone sloshing through the Senate Republicans since McCain died?
I haven’t been following his career, so I can’t answer that definitively, but I read that linked article yesterday wherein the author outlines how leftists are disappointed that he has dialed back his Never Trump-er stance and apparently now adopts the position of “Trump’s an ass, but I like a lot of his policies” (not his exact words, obviously).
Remember: the dolt who wrote this believed that there is a bridge connecting Gaza to the West Bank.
No!
Oh wow, yes.
Should have known it was that moron Beauchamp. He gives idiots everywhere hope that they too can get a job where they don’t have to actually know anything.
OT: Failure to dismantle industrial society and return to the Stone Age is a crime against humanity.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/18/opinions/trumps-failure-to-fight-climate-change-sachs/index.html
Doncha just love how “Trump fails to fight climate change” while the US is reducing its carbon emissions more than any other country?
That’s only because the Deep State is standing athwart Trump’s army of Planet Destroyers.
*prolonged laughter*
JFC, any time there’s a bad hurricane we’re going to get this bullshit now, aren’t we? I can remember a ton of bleating about it after 2005….and then there wasn’t a major hurricane for five years.
2014: The End of Snow?
2018: Heaviest Snow in Decades Batters U.K., Ireland and the Continent
Without looking, I’m sure you can guess what the root cause is in both articles.
But these are MONSTER storms!
None of the alarmists have managed to answer my one real issue with the whole AGW hypothesis. We know we are in an interval between ice ages. So why is a warming trend so alarming? Shouldn’t we be happy to avoid ice sheets coming down to the Mason-Dixon line in N America and to the pyrennees in Europe?
Why can’t you just admit you’ve never seen an interval between ice ages like this one?
Similar to my question to them:
We know the climate is cyclical, and fluctuates over time. We know the planet has been warmer, and colder, than it is now, with greater, and lesser, atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Why is this not unusually warm stretch, with not unprecedented CO2 levels, a crisis?
So why is a warming trend so alarming?
Because both economic and cultural Marxism have failed to exorcise the demon capitalism, so perhaps a bit of apocalyptic doom-mongering will do the trick.
I write screenplays, which is akin to writing a book, without all that internal character thinking garbage …
I kid, I kid.
Here’s an old one: LEMONHEAD
I tried writing creatively for a while when I first got my law practice going. I had weeks (or months) of nothing to do, literally. So I designed a few chapters. Then I never went anywhere with that project. The end. / moral of the story: it took waaay more discipline than I ever anticipated. The end.
It helps if you have a compulsion to compose.