Max Barry's Blog, page 10

Hello Max,

If memory serves me correctly, you wrote a blog about cement
being your prefered way to hide a corpse quite a number of years ago. But what would be your prefered (if not favorite) way to kill someone?

Atom

In order to get away with it, or maximize my enjoyment? Because if you mean the second one, you’re a sick puppy, Atom. Get some help.

I think there must be one layer of misdirection. You want the kind of murder where people’s first reaction is, “What the hell, how did that happen,” then a minute later, “Ohhhh.” They think they’ve figured out the secret. But they haven’t. That’s when people stop thinking. No-one wants the thing they figured out to be wrong.

For example, let’s say say I just strangled you to death, Atom. The first thing I’m going to do is strip you naked. Then I’m going to drag you to the bathroom, dip your head in the toilet, put a pair of tongs in your hand, roll you in flour, and throw you off the balcony.

So the cops are in an unfamiliar environment. That’s important, too. They’re more experienced with murder than I am. They know what to look for. But they won’t have dealt with too many naked wet flour-encrusted tong strangulations. That puts us back on even ground.

Now for the misdirection. I’m leaving a suicide note signed by you. I CAN’T LIVE IN A WORLD THAT WON’T ACCEPT
MY TONG-BASED SEX RITUALS. But it’s not convincing. The cops were already
going to be suspicious and here it is, the thing that justifies their feelings. That’s when they find your phone, with angry messages to your
girlfriend. WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT THE TONGS. I’M NEVER GOING TO DO THE TONG THING WITH YOU. Bang. Case closed. That girl is going to prison, because one twist is plenty.

Hey, one of the things my teachers are always telling me I need to improve on in my writing is setting. Even in this simple question, you can note the complete absence of any indications of time and space. Seeing as my teachers are all incompetent, you got any tips that could help me?

Adam’s Neighbour

Setting is very important. Without setting, your characters would float helplessly in a formless void. I definitely recommend setting your story somewhere, so that they can move about and order coffees.

I’m not a big setting guy. You probably knew that. Probably I am half your problem, since you think my opinion worth writing in for. Maybe you should stop reading books like mine. But if we’re separating stories out into their constituent parts (which kills them, but anyway), setting ranks very low. Here’s a list of some things that might be in a scene or story, from most to least important, according to me:

Someone wants something

One person says something that the other person can’t think of a good reply to

The feeling that something bad is going to happen soon

Guess what, something wasn’t like you thought

The feeling that something good is going to happen soon

Somebody dies

Where everybody is

How old they are

What they’re wearing

But setting is important. A good setting makes everything more believable. It’s just something I tend to leave until last,
once everything else is working. Because no-one loves a book for its setting, and it’s relatively easily changed. This
isn’t a film where you have to rebuild the sets. You can do it with a sentence here and there. Small details,
implying larger ones. Like if we’re in a hospital, you don’t want to describe the walls, or the color of the uniforms,
or say how many rooms there are. We’ve all seen plenty of hospitals; that stage is prebuilt in our heads.
But you can mention an old guy shuffling by in urine-soaked pajama pants, or a woman sitting up doing her
lipstick in her bed, or the bucket catching leaks behind the nurses’ desk. Something different and suggestive like that.

Hey Max, what are you angry about today?

Anonymous

My newspaper offered a “life hack” for better storage of food in zip-lock bags:
Put your germ-laden lips on the bag and suck the remaining air out.
They had a video of a woman doing her best not to exhale a mouth full of bacteria
into a bag, to demonstrate. That really enraged me. I’m no doctor but I’ll
take my chances with regular air over sealing in the escaped vestiges of whatever
just crawled back out of your lungs. Really, it’s the label “life hack” that put
it over the top. Like they think it’s so clever. Why don’t you go save some snakebite
victims by suckling at their open wounds, you barbarians.

hey buddy are you workin on anything new? i’m on the toilet right now at work and can think of no one i’d rather have in here with me.

davem

Thanks, Dave. I appreciate it. Later, when I answer my own call of nature, I will think of you, too.

Yes, I’m always working on something new. The funny thing about novels is the enormous lag time to publication. I cycle like this:

Stage 1: New novel is not working and everything is terrible. But my previous one was just published so people think I’m industrious and productive.

Stage 2: Several abandoned creative detours later, I’m still struggling to animate the stitched-together corpse of the new book. But the previous book is coming out in paperback so there’s still no pressure.

Stage 3: BWAHAHAHA. It’s alive. Progress is made. People ask me when the new book will be out because it’s been a while, dude.

Stage 4: OH MY GOD MAX WHERE IS YOUR NEW BOOK. I have a first draft, so am tempted to say, “Oh it’s basically done,” even though I know in reality there is a year of rewrites looming.

Stage 5: It has a publication date, so I can point to that. This is my laziest time creatively because it’s so tempting to polish up the thing that’s already fully formed, or work on its promotion, rather than pick up the shovel and head down to the cemetery to start sifting through body parts for the next book. And I can totally get away with it because no-one will say, “Hey, Max, I know the new book isn’t even out yet, but it’s time to start collecting body parts.”

Which dystopian horrors you’ve imagined have actually come true so far?

Meg

ALL OF THEM. Sometimes I think, “Well, at least THIS hasn’t happened,” then BAM, here’s
Trump’s first TV ad.
That thing is really something. It reminds me of why I got out of satire. I can’t do anything with that. It’s already a parody.

My favorite part is where it says we should ban Muslims from the US until we figure out a reason.
Because at face value, there’s no reason to tack on that last part. If you were at a party and trying to make the argument
for closing the borders, you would never say that, because it makes you look dumb. Instead, you would trot out some vague reason
and hope you didn’t get called on it. Right? Explicitly saying “until I figure out why” calls attention to the fact that you don’t actually have a reason.

But the ad does this on purpose! It explicitly validates the idea that we don’t need to waste time identifying problems, but can skip on ahead to the part
where we take action against people we never liked anyway. And this is smart, in a thoroughly amoral, civilization-eroding kind of way, because it’s so hard to logically justify racism. Xenophobia is a feeling, not a philosophy. You can’t really mount a solid, racist case for anything. But it’s a real feeling, so what you really want to hear, if you have that feeling, is that you’re completely right and don’t need to worry about why. We can just go ahead and ban Muslims. Until we figure out a reason.

And then the other side completely ignores all that and gets excited because the ad maybe unfairly implies that some footage from Morocco is Mexico.

Who in tarnation is Owen, and what in the world did he ever do to you to get cursed two Christmas-times in a row?

Concerned Citizen

I don’t see what the big mystery is. I have blogged about Owen before. It was ten years ago, but still.
Keep up, people.

Owen is my arch-nemesis because:

I liked a girl in high school and Owen sat with her under a tree during lunch a couple times. I don’t think they did anything but it’s the principle of the thing.

Later, a different girl I liked said she liked Owen. This was also a different Owen.

Owen’s surname—the first Owen, I mean—is Berryman, which is too similar to mine. People sometimes get my name wrong and call me Max Berry, so it’s like he’s laughing at me.

Children of Men is one of my all-time favorite films but it has Clive Owen in it, who I don’t like, so that’s annoying. The reason I don’t like Clive Owen is mainly that his surname is Owen. Similarly, I can’t enjoy Owen Wilson movies.

There’s this dude in my neighborhood who I cross paths with sometimes and he’s always doing something stupid, like looking the other way when I’m trying to get past. I bet his name is Owen.

So now you’re up to speed.

P.S. I just found that old blog post and his name was actually Scott. But I think that’s beside the point. It’s
a little late to stop hating him now. I’m pretty sure the second Owen was really an Owen, and that’s good enough for me.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re a hypothetical human being that, hypothetically, dabbles in writing short stories on Google Drive to kill the mindless boredom of hypothetical math classes. You need a snappy one-liner to kick off your short. Since your writing MO seems to include some pretty good starting sentences, what are your thoughts on how to achieve the perfect opening hook for a story?

Fish

I appreciate you saying my first sentences are “pretty good,” Fish. I can see why you came to me. I, too, seek wisdom from people who perform slightly above average. Some people say you should shoot for the stars, but I prefer to aim at about hat-height.

I believe in starting books from the front. When writing them, that is. Actually, reading, too. It’s important both times. But I mean I’d rather have a good first sentence and figure out the idea later than the other way around. An idea by itself isn’t much good. I have ideas for books all the time. They will be amazing, if I can ever get them onto paper, which I won’t, because they only sound good. Good-sounding ideas are actually terrible because they have no character and no heart.

An idea only becomes good with execution. A book can be anything, before you start, but by the end of the first sentence, it can only belong to a specific set of things. By then you have a sense of whether anybody is likely to die in it, or use the word “parsimonious,” or if it’s going to be funny, or have wizards. There is probably a tense and point of view and setting and timeframe. There’s still a world of possibility, of course, but you started with infinity, so this is smaller.

Anyway. I don’t have any tricks. I just think about it and see what tickles me. I like short first sentences. I try to write books that are interesting because things happen in them, not because I am an enthralling carpenter of words, so I think the first sentence should advertise that by getting to the point.

Here are my opening lines so far, just in case you don’t know them by heart:

I want to be famous.

Hack first heard about Jennifer Government at the water cooler.

Monday morning and there’s one less donut than there should be.

As a boy, I wanted to be a train.

“He’s coming around.”

And a few from novels that may never be published:

When Jason Hackman was four years old, he broke both arms falling out a second-storey window.

I want to help you.

So it’s 1346 and I’m hacking some guy’s arm off.

I’ll be honest: I did a bad thing.

Our job was simple.

Diego once killed a man by digging a hole.

When she was five, she was allowed to go to school.

I like those kinds of sentences because they make me want to read the next one. Or write it. That’s really all I’m looking for.

Hey Max, Could you remove my copyrighted image from the banner on your amphibian distribution page. It is the cool frog you lifted from the cover of the Journal of Biogeography (far right photo in your banner). If you are going to make money from your web site, you should pay the people whose content you steal. Also, that species does not even occur in Brazil.

Thanks,

Elizabeth Everman (the person whose copyright you are violating)

This is a NationStates question. I figured that out by asking myself, “Do I have any idea what this person is talking about?” Whenever the answer to that is “no,” it’s about NationStates.

You should know I tracked Elizabeth down on Facebook and we identified the frog in question and now everything is fine. But I’m posting because I’ve been meaning to tackle an ASK MAX question on what it’s like to run NationStates, and this one came along and gave me a good answer. It’s like trying to figure out what an amphibian distribution page is and why it has an illegal frog on it.

NationStates is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. I love NationStates. I made a little web site in 2002 and poured way too much time into it and now it’s this whole big thing. It just means there’s too much to keep track of. Also, the one percent of any group of people who are trying to do something stupid or psychotic at any given moment is big enough to be a significant number. Put those things together and you have people angrily contacting me about something I’ve never heard of but which they assume I was instrumental in bringing about.

So a disproportionate amount of time goes into a small number of extreme cases, like the guy last month who felt something on the site was racist so he contacted PayPal and lodged claims against us for credit card fraud. Or people who get banned from the site for whatever reason and decide to extract revenge in poorly thought-out ways, like threats or editing Wikipedia or DDoS attacks. The site has volunteer moderators, thank God, who deal with the vast majority of this kind of thing, but if it’s weird enough, it involves me.

There’s always something, so I know if I have a spare twenty minutes and want to grapple with a highly charged debate over something ridiculous, I can check in. This week, for example, there is a 100-post discussion amongst moderators over Angela Lansbury’s bosom. A player set his nation’s flag to a photoshopped image of Ms. Lansbury with one breast on display; this was removed, and the nation deleted for violating site rules, but then the player begged forgiveness based on his five-year clean record, and the image was more comedic than pornographic, so what to do? The discussion has so far traversed the nature of obscenity, art, rules consistency, and the specific weighting of player records.

What I like doing most on NationStates is making new stuff. Programming is really satisfying. It’s like fiction-writing plus puzzle-solving for me. This kind of programming, anyway, where I get to build whatever I feel like, and there’s a community giving instant feedback. That’s fun.

I don’t really play the game for enjoyment, in the same way I don’t read my own novels recreationally; it’s kind of spoiled when you’ve seen the insides. But I do have a secret nation no-one knows about, which I check into from time to time. Most of the daily issues nations encounter today have been written by volunteers—there were 30 when I launched the site and there are over 450 now—so they’re new to me.

Oh, so the frog. On NationStates, you can issue dispatches, which are official communications from your nation. Some people use these to write about their nation, describing its history or fauna or political stance or whatever they like. There are 402,000 of these, so you can see why I didn’t notice the frog. But it was there, a hotlink in a player-created dispatch, and that was what Elizabeth saw. There is a “Report” button on these pages, which I mention in the hope of steering similar issues to the moderators, but it’s small and easy to miss.

So that’s NationStates.

Hey Max, I see that there’s digital and physical versions of your books and I was wondering, which sell more copies, and which makes the more money for you?

Matt

If you’re asking because you want me to have more money, then I applaud that sentiment, but
you should buy whichever you prefer. You having a better reading experience is worth
more to me than the extra 75 cents.

Paper books sell more, for me at least. It’s around 2:1 on Lexicon.
But with each book, the electronic share gets bigger. Syrup (1999)
is 6:1.

Royalties vary, but ebooks usually sit somewhere between hardcover and
paperback. From the average Lexicon sale to date, I have seen:

Hardcover: $2.65

Ebook: $1.70

Paperback: $0.95

It’s less outside the US & Canada. And this only applies once the book has
earned out its advance, which is the payment authors get up-front. For example,
Penguin thought Syrup was going to sell its socks off and
paid me a big advance, and then it didn’t, so I’ve never seen any royalties.
But each sale is still good because it washes away a little more of my shame.

My ex-agent Todd once told me that publishers usually break-even on a book
before the advance earns out. I hope this is true.

If you self-publish and charge more than a few bucks, you get a much higher
return on your books. But you also have to persuade people to buy them, which is
hard. Publishers are pretty good at that.

Do you know what happened to Paul Neilan? You blurbed his book (deservedly, as it was absolutely brilliant), but then he disappeared.

-kd

That is a good question. I have no idea. I mean, I can guess: He probably fell into that bottomless abyss of despair and self-loathing where novels live sometimes. Again, just a guess. But it seems to me that any time you try to write a novel, you are a lot more likely to psychologically self-destruct than succeed, so probably that.

I mean, I’m not projecting or anything. This has nothing to do with me. And I’m not saying writing is hard; I mean, you just have to type stuff. How hard is that. I’m just saying maybe Paul found it tough to juggle the competing demands of blogging for eager readers awaiting his new novel and working on a literary hellspawn trying to devour his soul. So he probably pulled the plug on one or both, at least for a while.

If you are out there, Paul, I hope you’re still writing, and not worrying about how long it takes, and chasing the things that make you happy. Also hurry up, man, I need a new book.