R. Lee Smith's Blog, page 18

Sheesh, how is it Saturday already? And why do I always leave these things until the last minute?

Anyway, it’s Saturday and that means a new chapter of my FNAFiction, Everything Is All Right, Part One: Girl on the Edge of Nowhere, has gone up at Fanfiction.net and Archiveofourown.org, so if you’re reading along, please check them out! Last week’s chapter ended on something of a cliffhanger, but this week, Ana finally gets up close and (extremely) personal with the animatronics…

The thing stopped moving at the sound of the name. Its head rocked back a little, as if surprised. When Ana moved toward him, it took half a step back.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh Bonnie…what happened?”

She never remembered running to him. She was just magically there, reaching up to touch the jagged edges at the side of his faceless head and explore the damage in a helpless, sorrowing way while he stood there, mechanical parts clicking and humming. His eyes were gone and only one of the cameras that fed him visual information was still in its socket. Tugging her wet sleeve over her hand, she cleaned his lens, then swabbed out the empty socket beside it and peered at the plug.

“BONNIE,” said Freddy from down the hall. His eyes were still flashing, although the music had stopped.

Bonnie raised a hand in a strange, unfinished gesture that started out looking like he meant to grab her and ended up showing Freddy a Give me a minute air-pat as Ana picked through the bent and broken pieces that had collected in the bottom of his head. That weird other-vision she had, the one that let her see how things fit together, mentally straightened, restored and reassembled the wreckage, but only up to a point. Too many pieces were broken, too many lost, to give him back the face she remembered.

There! The other camera, slipped from his broken eye-socket and buried in the rubble. She pried it out, wiped it off, and plugged it in. It whined to life while she was still looking for a wire to connect it to the main optical base and the dilated lens contracted to mirror the size of its mate. The red lights inside the cameras blinked off and came back white, giving him a brighter stare, but only a slightly less demonic one. The bits of metal that had survived the destruction of his eye-caps twitched and flopped as he tried to blink eyelids that weren’t there. He raised his hand again, holding it up before his ‘face’, lenses whirring as he waggled his fingers, then looked at her.

“BONNIE,” Freddy said again.

“I’M OKAY, FREDDY,” Bonnie replied, lowering his arm. Something inside him clicked several times. “HI.”

“Hi,” said Ana.

R. LEE SMITH’S SIMPLE EIGHT-WEEK SYMPOSIUM ON THE ART OF STORY-TELLING:

WAT R WERDS?

Lesson 7. Burnout, Blocks and Bad Reviews—The Pitfalls of the Writer’s Craft

Good morning, class! Welcome back! Hope you had a great weekend doing whatever it is you kids do for fun these days, going to the movies or the beach or just curling up with a good book. Anyway, I hope you’re all refreshed, because today, we’re going to cover some of the darker territory in the wonderful world of writing. Last week…

Oh. I see we have a new student. You’re joining us kind of on the late side, aren’t you? Well, it’s a free class, so you’ll still be getting your money’s worth. Welcome to the symposium. Go on and have a seat. There’s an empty chair over there. Hmm. Do I know you? Are you sure? You look…familiar…

Especially around the nose…

What did you say your name was? Coraline? What an unusual name. Well, have a seat and let’s start the lesson!

Last week, I mentioned the inspiration behind my book, Cottonwood. I won’t recap it—you know where to find it if you want to refresh your memory—I’ll just say that, a few months after the book was written, but well before it was published, a little summer surprise blockbuster called District Nine came out and dick-slapped me in the face.

If you haven’t seen District Nine, you really should. It’s amazing. It also makes Cottonwood look like weird, bug-loving fanfiction. I mean it. Every single element I had envisioned for Cottonwood is also in District Nine. The bug-like aliens, the internment camps, the Heaps, everything. I shit you not, the hero-bug even has a kid. The actual stories have nothing in common, but anyone who saw District Nine and then read Cottonwood probably did so snickering up their sleeves at how audaciously I tried to rip off a major theatrical release just by changing a few names and throwing in some sexin’.

As previously stated, I actually ripped off Alien Apocalypse.

I came home after watching District Nine, picked up my printed manuscript of Cottonwood, and dropped it in the trash. My long-suffering sister took it out again and told me to get over myself. She’s full of good advice like that. Always has been. Still, it took her about six months to convince me to publish it and even now, I can’t reread that book without cringing a little at what seems to me to be obvious, if wholly accidental, plagiarism.

Lest you think I’m being too cavalier about the P-word, let me tell another story. One of my betas was accused of plagiarism by a totally anonymous reviewer on Amazon, who claimed that the story had been copied from some other book she had read because, get this, it was a Time-Travel romance. And that was apparently so unique that every other Time-Travel romance in the universe was plagiarism. My beta’s initial reaction on reading this review was to roll her eyes so hard her retinas nearly detached and get on with her day. However, she was forced to reconsider said attitude when Amazon banned her fucking account.

It took her months, literally months, to clear her name and even so, she had to re-title, re-cover and resubmit all her books before Amazon’s search engine would allow them to be seen by casual browsers. And that, folks, is why people like me are perhaps a wee bit hypersensitive to possible plagiarism. I’m not James Cameron. I’m not even Shia LeBeouf. I can’t just swagger down the street, secure in the knowledge that my lawyers can handle any disputes while I’m back-stroking through a swimming pool full of cash McDuck-style. I’m an indie author; an anonymous, unfounded, patently absurd claim in a one-star review can kill my career.

As an ironic prequel to my beta’s plagiarism woes, a couple years before the Time Travel romance purist sewed the scarlet P to my Beta’s chest, some batshit crazy teenager took one of my beta’s books and turned it into Twilight fanfiction, then posted it on a fanfic site. I mean, she seriously changed just the title and the names. And the names, let me repeat, were Twilight characters, and the title was lifted word for word from another movie. So literally NOTHING in this book was her own work.

When this was brought to my beta’s attention and my beta told the site to take it down, all the plagiarist’s friends rallied to her support, calling my beta—the actual author—a ‘hater’ who ought to ‘be flattered’ that the plagiarist had taken her ‘unknown story and turned it into something wonderful’.

Something wonderful. Apparently.

Finally, one of the plagiarist’s loyal supporters actually read my Beta’s book and did an about-face, but let me repeat the keyword there: finally. As in, after weeks of drama and hate mail and an army of twi-fans bombasting every book she had published with one-star reviews.

This is the reality, folks. This is the world we live in—a world in which you are simultaneously beset by accusations of plagiarism against which you cannot defend yourself, whilst struggling to reclaim your work from plagiarists against whom you cannot defend yourself.

So what can you do about it, you ask? Well, you can protect yourself legally to some degree, but the bottom line is, in every job—heck, in every day—there is some risk. Writing is no different, so today, we’re going to look at some of the more common pitfalls that we writers may encounter in our career and how to combat them. And hey, since we’re already sort of on the subject, let’s talk about bad reviews.

For self-published authors like me (for all authors, I guess, but even more so for indies), waiting for that first review is nerve-wracking. Buying a book is like buying anything else in a consumer market—you want to know what you’re getting and you want your money’s worth. If you have a choice between two books and one of them has fifty 5-star reviews and the other has none at all, odds are damn good you’re going with the first one, even though we all know people’s tastes are different, and for that matter, those reviews might have been bought. The fact is, there aren’t a hell of a lot of ways to research a book without reading it, and not a lot of ways to read a book without buying it, and that brings us full circle to not wanting to spend your hard-earned money on a book unless you know it’s going to be good. Readers rely on reviews to help them make a determination, and so writers rely on reviews to help them net readers.

Now, everybody’s going to get a bad review now and then. And I’m certainly not going to tell you not to feel bad when it happens, since I have been known to sit in an unlit closet and cry into the warm purring side of a long-suffering cat when I get the slightest smear of shit in an otherwise rosy review, but I am going to tell you the secret to how to defend yourself against attacks by readers who either misinterpreted your story or flat-out wagged the dog for their own agenda. Are you listening? Got your pens? Good. Write this down.

Don’t.

Do not—absolutely, positively, under no freakin’ circumstances whatsoever—defend yourself. It does not matter what they say or how viciously they say it, you keep your mouth shut, pick up your cat, go into your closet, and shut the door.

Just make sure the closet is empty first.

You’re all reading this on the internet, so I think it’s safe to assume we’ve all seen flame wars erupt, either because strong opinions were challenged or a bored troll was having ‘fun’. Hell, one of the worst flame wars I ever personally saw was between two people (at first) who actually agreed with each other on the original issue, but just managed to misunderstand one another’s phrasing to the extent that suddenly, everyone’s a cocksucker. Because that’s the thing about flame wars. They’re really easy to start, and damn near impossible to put out. In researching this post, I just had to go to YouTube, click on the first video recommended to me and the top-rated comment was a flame war whose main opponent CAPSLOCK-yelled some variation of “I’m done arguing with you”—I counted—seventeen times, and since the last post was less than ten minutes ago, I seriously doubt he’s really done. No one is going to win that war. No one wins any flame war. And no one ‘wins’ a review war.

Look, the thing about publishing books instead of bricking them up in your basement with your crazy cousin Tibalt is that it’s a public forum. You invite public opinion. And opinions are, as I’ve said, subjective. So it’s really not about whether a reader ‘got it,’ but about whether they liked it. And not everyone’s going to like it. And—I can’t stress this enough—they don’t need a good reason. I don’t like caramel-flavored creamer in my coffee. Caramel is a perfectly good flavor. I like it on its own. I like it in my cookies and candy bars. I don’t want it in my coffee. If asked, I will tell you straight-up that caramel creamer sucks. Does it suck? Does it really? Probably not. My sister, Cris, loves caramel creamer. Is she wrong? Does she suck? No. We have two different opinions on the subject of caramel-flavored creamers and that’s all. If we were ever approached in a grocery store and asked to recommend a flavored creamer, she is entitled to recommend the caramel creamer and I am entitled to gag and make barfing noises, but I guarantee that if the creamer people were to get up in my face and tell me all the reasons I just didn’t understand their caramel creamer, they would look like the asshole. So if you don’t like bad reviews, don’t read them. And if you read them anyway and you come across a bad one, just say, ‘Hey, it’s a caramel creamer thing,’ and take your cat to the closet.

Continuing on with our theme of writers’ greatest fears, we come to a little thing called Writer’s Block. Or, to be more accurate, Writer’s Blocks.

As with so many things in life, finding the solution means figuring out just what the problem is first. There as many reasons why writers suddenly find themselves unable to word properly as there are reasons why they write in the first place, so I won’t attempt to list them all, just the ones I’ve either heard about the most or personally experienced, and of course, the biggest elephant in that particular room is Fear.

Not this kind. I actually find this kind fairly inspiring.

Probably the biggest reason an aspiring author never moves past the aspiring stage is fear about what other people will think. And I’m certainly not immune to it, even after nine (published) novels. In fact, I could list my books by the fears I had about publishing them and my readers could probably figure out which ones they are.

“No one is going to want to read a book about two people having the same argument for seven hundred pages.”

“No one is going to want to read this. It’s just The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe with sex and guns.”

“No one is going to like it if she doesn’t get with someone by the end of the book.”

“They’ll think I’m advocating rape.”

“They’ll think I’m dumping on religion.”

“They’ll think I’m weird.”

…Okay, that last one could have been any of them, but you get my point and the point is, you can’t allow your inner critic to become your only voice. There’s an old saying about singing like no one’s listening, dancing like no one’s watching and loving like you’ll never get hurt. To that, I add, write like no one will ever read it.

But sometimes it’s not about fear at all. You started the book when you had all these great ideas and now you’re sitting and staring at either a blank page or a blinking cursor, typing and erasing the same ten words for days on end.

And you’ll still never do it better than this guy.

There are a lot of reasons why a writer will hit the white wall, but I can tell you that every time I’ve personally done it, it’s been because I was trying to force my characters to act out of character or go somewhere they had no reason to be or wander away from the story just to sneak in a clever line. In short, it was always my fault and subconsciously, I always knew it. Over the years, I’ve developed what is for me a fool-proof means of breaking down the white wall, and that is to go all the way back to the beginning and start reading. I keep myself immersed in the world, build up my momentum again, and invariably feel that subtle shift when the story goes off the rails. Which is not to say that it’s always easy to reverse and put it back on track, but I will say it was always necessary, no matter how tedious or painful it might be at the time.

Now let’s say you’ve gone back and forth over your unfinished book a thousand times and the tracks lead nowhere but straight up to that wall. The characters you loved have become strangers; the plot that seemed earth-shaking when it came to you in the night now goes nowhere. You still want to write it, you still think you can, you just have no idea where your book went. What do you do?

Find it.

“But I’ve looked!” you wail. “I did just like you said! I went all the way to the beginning and followed it all the way here, and it’s just gone!”

Well, trust me, it’s not on Facebook or following you on Twitter, so don’t even bother checking there. And don’t wait until it feels inspired enough to show up on its own, because it won’t. If it’s gone, you have to find it. If you want to find it, you have to look.

So look. Go for a walk. Go for a drive. Pack a picnic and find yourself a waterfall. Take the dog swimming at the lake. Think about everything you see and how you would describe it in words. Forget your characters for now and think about the ones you see every day. Look at that guy over there, the one carrying a backpack in both hands. What’s in it? A bomb? A priceless Qing vase? A ceramic garden gnome? A living garden gnome? Write about it–not a story, not even a scene, just that guy and that backpack. Get outside of your comfort zone. Do you write horror? Try writing a short romantic scene. Do you write romances? Try your hand at horror. Write fanfiction for a source you love. Write fanfiction for a source you hate and find out what it takes to love it. Look at your husband/wife/cat and remember why you love him/her/it. Look at your story and remember why you love it. Start writing an outline if you don’t use one. Throw away your outline if you do. Set a routine. Break your routine. Make a playlist to use as a soundtrack for your book. Put on a movie you’ve seen so many times you don’t even need to look at it anymore, then sit with your back to it and start writing. One word. One sentence. One paragraph. One page. Just write and don’t worry about if it says everything you want it to say or even if you’re going to keep it. Write and keep writing until you find the book. No, it’s not easy. Who told you it was going to be? Just keep writing.

Real art comes from chipping away at that block, day after day.

But what do you do when you can’t even find the block, let alone the words inside it? What do you do if there is no white wall, no tracks to follow? What do you do when there’s just…no story?

When it comes to fears of a writer, just about nothing compares to the lurking midnight dread that one day, you’ll wake up and just be empty, all your tales told, all your voices gone silent. As I’ve said before, I have a number of story ideas tacked up on the old Story Board in my office and for now, it feels like there will always be more books in my head than my hands can write, but even I sometimes hear that dust-dry whisper that tells me it won’t always be that way, that I was given a finite number of stories to tell, that I’m burning through them and someday, I’ll burn out.

I’m an imaginative person, but I can’t imagine that–having nothing to think about on long drives, no witty banter to play out with myself in the shower, no ‘what if’ scenario to liven up a cheesy sci-fi movie. No, I’ll just be driving, showering, watching TV.

I imagine that’s what death must be like. Not a blackness, but a blankness.

They look like such big, strong hands…don’t they?

I confess that I believe Writer’s Block to be largely a state of mind, but Burnout is real. I’ve seen it happen. It’s happened, in some small shadowy way, to me.

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I used to ghostwrite for a epub site. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call it $oulkiller Book$, or $$ for short. At $$, my job was to finish books started by other people. I made a flat fee of, I think, seven cents a word; the original author made royalties. My name never appeared anywhere on the finished book and I’ll be honest with you, most of the time, I was glad. These were not fun books to write, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that they weren’t stories I wanted to tell. I did a good job, I think, and I made enough of a living to pay the bills, but in order to do so, I had to write, like, a LOT.

I wrote several hours each day, in someone else’s voice, with someone else’s characters, on someone else’s book. On rare occasions, I supplemented my payday by writing commissioned work for the site under a pen name, because I did not and still do not wish to be associated with those books. It was arduous, loveless, mostly mindless work, and when I sent off the finished product, I usually got the next assignment in my Inbox the same day.

I am very grateful still to the owner of the site for the opportunity to work there, but I can honestly say I’d rather sell my used underwear on Craigslist than ever do that again.  I have not added them all up, but I estimate I wrote over a hundred stories, including around two dozen novels, for $$, and there ultimately came a time when I realized that, apart from the $$ stories, I wasn’t writing anything. I had not, in fact, written one word on one of my own books, in over three years. I hadn’t even thought about them. The stories were gone, the characters were dead, and I was empty.

Through a lot of hard work, misadventures, and divine intervention, I was able to turn myself around, relight the spark, and start writing books that were not only profitable enough to allow me to do it for a living, but that I was proud to have my name on.

So I guess what I’m saying is, Burnout is real…but even it doesn’t have to be the end. You can’t just force yourself through it like with the old white wall, but you can clear away the ashes and start a new fire. It’s not easy. It’s not painless. But it can be done.

And the best part is, you can read by the light.

Well, we’ve about come to the end of it, class. Next week, I’ll leave you with some final thoughts and then it will be back to my usual schedule of blogging…which is to say, whenever I think about it, probably with at least one six-month block of silence, followed by a flurry of apologies.

Welp, it’s Saturday, so that means a new chapter of my FNAFiction, Everything Is All Right, has gone up on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org!

She tried first to raise the barricade, but only the lowest rungs moved even a little. The rest stayed frozen in their tracks, rusted shut or clogged with dirt or both. Still, she could lift that bottom rung as high as her knees, which was enough to slide under if she could get the doors open. Which she couldn’t. Although she could work her hands into the opening, just pulling at them didn’t budge them in the least.

Backing off (but not giving up, not yet), Ana worked one arm into the opening and tried to shine her light around, but all she could see was a smallish space, like any foyer in any restaurant, with another Out door dead ahead of her, blocked off with an enormous pile of junk, and part of the wall with a few posters still stuck to it. The opening wasn’t wide enough to let her get a better angle and the barricade kept her from getting any closer.

She had a prybar in her toolchest, but that was blocked off even better than that other door was. She might be able to reach it from the truck’s cab window, might even get the top drawer open, but there was nothing in there but screws and nails and bolts and shit of that sort. Her serious tools were in the bottom; they might as well be on the moon.

Ana hunkered down to stick an arm under the barricade and tug at the doors some more. Angle was wrong. No leverage. She shifted onto one knee, wedged her other foot between the doors, grabbed the opposite door in both hands and both kicked out and heaved back with all her strength. Her two-day-old tattoo protested, but her efforts were rewarded and the scraping shudders with which the old doors reluctantly prized apart made it easy to ignore something as insignificant as her body’s pain.

The doors gave up another foot or so and not one more inch would they release. Between that and the barricade, she’d won herself an opening a little bigger than the average doggie door.

She’d gotten through tighter spaces before.

How bad did she want to see the inside of this place?

“Fuck it,” said Ana, getting on her knees. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

R LEE SMITH’S SIMPLE EIGHT-WEEK SYMPOSIUM ON THE ART OF STORY-TELLING:

WAT R WERDS?

Lesson 6.  Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Good morning, class! Good morning! Come on in, take your seats, open your textbooks and let’s, ah…let’s just wait a little while. Go ahead, just…just talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

Hmm? No, I’m fine, I’m just waiting to be sure…you know, that everyone’s here. I, uh, I see an empty chair…

*sigh* Fine, let’s just start.

I know I said at the end of last week’s lesson on the writer’s work ethic that this week’s lesson would be on the pitfalls of writing, but some of the others in my group who are running this series on their blogs weren’t feeling it, so we decided to talk about inspiration and ideas instead. There’s a joke to be made somewhere in that.

Anyhow, I honestly don’t know what to say about inspiration in the general sense. The ideas for my books come from everything, everywhere, at any time. There’s no process. There’s no predicting it. There’s certainly no end in sight. At this very moment, I have half a dozen index cards tacked up to the old Story Board in the office, and the last two books never even made it up on the Board in the first place. There will always be more books in me than I can write.

So I guess what I’ll do instead of spinning the usual yarn about looking in your heart or listening to the river or painting with all the colors of the wind, I’ll just tell you where the ideas for the books I’ve already published came from.

OLIVIA

While Heat was the first book I ever published, I wrote Olivia first, so I feel it’s only right to begin there.

I got the first tickles of the idea that would eventually become Olivia while I was watching a movie (get used to hearing that, because you’re going to hear it a lot). The movie was The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Good movie. I highly recommend it. And I don’t say that just because it’s considered a ‘classic’. I don’t buy into the snobbery that blindly hails ‘classics’ as being superior to remakes just because they came first. The original House on Haunted Hill is widely lauded by reviewers who scorn the remake, but holy shit, that original is a hot mess of boring and the remake is gory, well-cast and just plain awesome. Not exactly intellectual fare, granted, but then neither is the original.

Right. I digress. I was watching The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and I had reached the part where the creature snags the pretty lamp of a woman who exists to be abducted and drags her away to his underwater cavern lair. Uh, spoilers, I guess? Anyway, this scene fascinated me and as I grew a little older, I began to wonder just what the heck the Gill-Man was up to with that little incident. He didn’t want to eat her—that was obvious even to a child, as it would have been much easier to drown her, and easier still to munch on the swamp’s other inhabitants rather than the humans who were obviously hunting him and who he was demonstrably avoiding. As a kid, I knew only that he wanted her; as a slightly older kid, I got the first inkling of what he wanted her for; a few years further down the road, I was back to wondering why he wanted her, since even if it was sexual, the girl’s scaleless, pale, finless, hairy body had to be repulsive to him. What had driven him to risk exposing himself to the enemy, risk his very life, to abduct her? That’s not the usual ‘you smell purty’ motive; he was desperate.

For years, the idea would grow and mutate until eventually, I realized I had a whole book in my head. It would begin with the abduction that, in movies, usually marked the climax of the final act. The hero would be the bathing beauty, a true everyman (or everywoman, rather), with no special abilities and no means of combatting the monsters that had taken her. The entire book would be from her point of view; she would start out as a captive and grow to become a kind of supernatural champion for the monsters that had destroyed her former life. And the ending…I had an amazing ending in mind.

There was no real plot beyond Olivia’s own character arc. I wrote without ever once imagining I would ever publish it, or that anyone beyond my immediate family and small circle of friends would ever read it. I was just having fun—building a monster and then slowly stripping away the monstrous elements, introducing a victim and then slowly transforming her into a hero, and best of all, creating a world, with magic and gods and demons and destiny, that did not exist on some other fantasy planet, but right here on Earth, hidden from human eyes. That was where the book really came from. Not from the plot and not really from the characters, but from the world I saw them in.

HEAT

When my sister, Cris, was reading Heat for the first time, she remarked that I had better brace myself for accusations of plagiarism. Rather over-casually, I asked her what on Earth she could possibly mean. She told me the alien hero and villain were physically very similar to the aliens in a terrible movie called I Come In Peace, the plot of which also concerned drugs that could be manufactured from human brains, which she claimed we had seen when we were children.

I was shocked. Now, I don’t doubt her. I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies and if she says we saw that one, I’m sure we did, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. What was shocking was that, although I apparently wrote I Come In Peace fanfiction (so much so, that I could have changed the spelling on one of those words and kept the title), it was NOT the movie I sure thought I had based my book on.

Heat was born one afternoon while I was watching another movie called K-Pax. For those of you who’ve not seen it, K-Pax was a good movie based on a much better book about a psychiatric patient who claims to be an alien. Through essentially the force of his personality alone, he begins to convince those around him that he just might be telling the truth. Great movie. Better book. Go see/read it at once. And once you do, you will see that my book would seem to have exactly nothing in common with it. Except it does.

It stems from one line, midway through the movie, in which the self-proclaimed alien, discussing his people, mentions that sex for his kind is not pleasant and is in fact, quite painful. That really hooked at me. By the end of the movie, I had begun to conceptualize an alien race in which procreation is at best inconvenient and at worst excruciating, a race in which fertility is stimulated by a seasonal temperature shift. They would come to Earth where, in the grand tradition of Wrong Place, Right Time, they would both go into heat, a condition which, in addition to complicating their respective goals, could actually prove physically damaging if their sexual needs were unmet. From there, my idea evolved to include a societal model in which adoption was the norm and the great debate of nature versus nurture as it impacts a child’s development is entirely unknown. I would give the villain a loving and attentive father; the hero’s own father would be more strict and emotionally sterile.

For the second time, the plot, such as it was, served merely as a vehicle for character arcs and world-building, and you know what they say—once is an accident; twice is a habit.

THE LORDS OF ARCADIA SERIES

This is going to be a tough one. I debated a long time about whether or not to include it, then on how honest I wanted to be. I decided to say it all, so…be warned. It’s not a happy story.

My parents, as I may have mentioned before, opened their home to foster and offer respite care for children with special needs for more than twenty years. I grew up in a household where kids came and went, often without warning, and where most of these were profoundly physically and/or mentally handicapped. We went to physical therapy the way other families go to soccer games. I thought every house came with a wheelchair ramp until I was in my teens. For a while, I genuinely thought the whole world fostered kids and I looked forward to the day when I would have to go live with another family with a mixture of resolve and trepidation.

When I was still very young, my parents took in an infant we’ll call Sunny. Sunny had been born ‘normal’, but meningitis and prolonged fever had left her so severely compromised that her doctors did not think she would live more than a few weeks. When she was finally released from the hospital, her parents were unable to provide her specialized care, so my parents were contacted and she came home with us. She was profoundly medically fragile in those early years; we were constantly being told that she would not live to the end of the year…year after year after year. When she got sick, complications invariably set in and those complications were invariably life-threatening, but when she wasn’t sick, she was fine. Well, you know, not the way most people think of as ‘fine’, but fine for Sunny. She was mentally infantile, with no speech or means of communicating beyond crying when she was hurt or laughing when she was happy.

For twenty-eight years, she laughed.

Us ‘kids’ had been for years taking on more and more of Sunny’s physically demanding care, so it seemed both natural and obvious that, as my parents had become unable to foster her, I should. After jumping through a number of truly obnoxious hoops for the state, I ceased to be Sunny’s sibling and became her guardian at a time when decades of chronic and recurrent health problems began to catch up to her.

It sounds silly to say that I never saw it coming. Sunny had been beating the odds for so long, that I had begun to think of her as immortal. I genuinely worried about what would happen if she outlived me. I really thought that could happen.

It didn’t.

During the last four years of her life, Sunny spent easily half her time in the hospital and I sat beside her, holding her hand to keep her from biting it from pain, writing The Lords of Arcadia and reading as I wrote so she could hear my voice. I know this entry is supposed to be about the little things that inspire a book, and God knows, I could have filled this page with little things. The stone library in Redmond is a real place, the book that Rhiannon and Taryn read of the Sluagh and the Wild Hunt was my grandfather’s book, and the Arkes had roots in stories my mother told of her travels in Peru. The Wizard’s cat, the Great Dragon, and Old Crook all had reasons for being, but that isn’t why I wrote the books.

My world was ending. I built another one and lived there until it was over.

THE SCHOLOMANCE

I’m sure I’ve told this story elsewhere on this site, but what the hey, I’ve picked up a lot of new followers since then. I’ll tell it again.

I have weird dreams. Bear with me, this is going somewhere. I’m a lucid dreamer, which I understand is an ability only about 1% of all people have cultivated. For those who may not know, a lucid dreamer is someone who is aware when they are dreaming and can consciously alter aspects of their dream. As such, I have very few nightmares, because as soon as things start to get hinky, I can literally say “Nertz to this noise,” and either wake up or just erase whatever’s scaring me and go on with the dream. For the most part, however, I choose not to influence my dreams because they are so darn interesting on their own merits that I’d rather sit back and see where they go than consciously direct them.

They don’t need my help to get weird.

Unusual even for lucid dreamers, I can read and write in my dreams, not just look at gibberish and ‘understand’ what it’s supposed to mean. I also have dreams that tend to be more detailed than those of my friends, as well as dreams that follow complete story lines. How complete, you ask? I’ve had several that included opening and closing credits (one of them, Beyond Butterfly, would have made a great book, if I wrote romances). I also have an unusual amount of recall for my dreams on waking. All of which I tell you so that when I tell you I have had a recurring dream (well, two, but this is the only one I’m going to talk about) that I could not control, you understand how unusual that is for me and why I would deem it remarkable enough to warrant the effort I went through to exorcise myself of it.

There are many versions of The Dream, but they all follow the same general outline and star the same main character. That character is not me, in that I share none of her senses, although the dream’s ‘camera’ stays fixed on her and her alone, so that I see only those same scenes she’s in. The character is never named; it took me forever to settle on the name ‘Mara’ in the book. The character in my dream is not a telepath, although physically, she and Mara are nearly identical: pale hair, white eyes, all angles, unsmiling. The setting of the dream is always different, but similar in mood—a formerly lavish hotel, a sprawling factory complex, a mine, a series of dry sewer-like tunnels beneath a city, an industrial-looking hospital. All are old, dark, decrepit. All are inhabited by two kinds of people: the first and most numerous are just people, albeit dangerous and predatory ones, who mill around in the foreground and serve mainly to distract the main character from what she’s really doing there. The second sort are a handful of monsters. Sometimes they look human, more often, they don’t. They are quieter, watchful. Sometimes they don’t even interact with the main character, but they are always aware of her. They know she is there. They know why she’s there. They want to stop her. And why is she there? Why, she’s there to find Connie.

Let me be clear on something. I don’t know anyone named Connie. To my knowledge, I’ve never known anyone named Connie. But in every version of this dream, it has always been Connie who is lost. She’s never seen, certainly never rescued. The dream begins with Connie lost and ends the same way. The next dream does not follow the previous one, which is to say, they are never connected. It is one dream, one endless search, a thousand different retellings.

Although the dreams were definitely sinister in atmosphere, they were not particularly troubling, so I lived with them for thirty-plus years before latching onto the idea that I might rid myself of them forever if I just freaking found Connie. As soon as I made the conscious decision to write the book, I knew exactly where it would be set.

The Scholomance. The Dark School. That hidden place of magical learning where the Devil claims one of every ten students as his due.

Now a Level 90 Heroic Dungeon!

I first read of the Scholomance in a book my grandfather left lying around where tiny little hands could get at it. He was a Harvard professor of anthropology and had traveled the world extensively in his thirties and forties, mostly in Africa and Europe; his house was filled with mementos of his journeys, including some highly un-PC artifacts from Ethiopia, and a treasure trove of books. One of these latter was an illustrated, leather-bound monster of a book, the sort you never see outside of the movies, in which myths and legends from around the world had been collected. In this book, I read of sluagh, naga, dragons, sirens, vordulak, adze, Baba Yaga, the Morai, Coyote and Raven, Jenny Greenteeth, Amazake-babaa, the djinn, the Black Book, and (shudder) the Scholomance.

I remember those illustrations vividly to this day. Upon my grandfather’s death, that book was the one thing I asked for, but of course, my deeply religious extended family thought it was Satanic or whatever and threw it out. They threw out his Wizard of Id cartoon books for the same reason. I hate to think what they must think of my books.[image error]

I had enormous fun writing The Scholomance. It was one of those rare books that just poured out of me. I don’t think I had an outline at all, just a notebook full of portraits of the various demons, each of whom were inspired by a different cryptid/demon/mythical witch. And while writing it did not cure me of the recurring dream, I certainly can’t call the attempt a failure when it led down such interesting paths.

COTTONWOOD

Anyone who’s read Cottonwood has seen my author’s note telling the story of its creation, so if you’re one of them, please feel free to skip ahead. For everyone else, here’s the story.

I have some health issues. I’m not going to get into it, except to say that while the symptoms can be managed, there is no cure and it is a condition that is, as one doctor memorably put it, “incompatible with life.” I have apparently had this condition since childhood, but it has been undiagnosed until about ten years ago, because I had to get to the falling-down-and-passing-out phase before doctors stopped dismissing my complaints as ‘stress’ or worse, ‘attention-seeking’, and started saying things like, ‘possibility of massive organ failure’ and ‘incompatible with life’.

I mention this solely so that you have some sort of context when I tell you both Cottonwood and The Last Hour of Gann owe their existence to me being literally too sick to get out of bed. There I lay, day after day, watching terrible sci-fi and horror movies for ten and twelve hours at a time in a desperate effort to distract myself from the fact that I felt like I’d been run over by a steam-roller, then folded into a beautiful origami crane, and then stepped on and set on fire. It sucked, is I guess what I’m saying.

So there was this one movie, a Syfy Original Picture. I don’t remember what it was called, but it had Bruce Campbell in it.

Found it! It’s called Alien Apocalypse.

The gist of the story is, a small group of humans land on either an alien world or Earth in the future, but in either case, there are humans who have been enslaved by these CGI insectoids. You’d think the aliens would be easily defeated, seeing as it was really bad CGI, but no. Those human slaves let themselves be completely subjugated by a bunch of pixelated bugs, and as so often happens when I watch movies and not enough blood is getting to my brain, I got to thinking…

I thought there’s really only two kinds of alien-encounter movies anymore: the kind where we land on their planet and promptly begin acting like huge aggressive veiny dicks, yet defeat the hostile and often socially primitive (even if technologically advanced) natives, solely because we’re the humans and humans have the God-given right to colonize any planet we land on, even if we landed by accident, and especially even if it’s already inhabited; and the kind where they come flying clear across the damn galaxy with their advanced technology and their superior intellects and unstoppable military force, targeting Earth for some ridiculously implausible reason, if they even have a reason, but we defeat them anyway because we’re the humans and the human will to endure and survive is indomitable. In short, humans rule, aliens drool.

Lying there in my bed of pain, watching Bruce Campbell win a fistfight with an alien that not only had a chitoid exoskeleton that should have broken his fleshy pink fist, not only that, but who also had a god-damned laser gun, I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m tired of seeing this shit.’ And then I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the aliens were the ones who crashed on Earth by accident and then had to deal with our illogical, Hollywood-fueled paranoia? Like, we’d be all, ‘Aliens!’ and they’d be all, ‘Look, dudes, we just need a minute to recharge our snarflux, and we’re gone.’ And I laughed, because when you don’t have a lot of blood getting to your brain, things are funnier. But I kept thinking about it and somewhere between that movie and the next one—I’m not sure anymore, but I think it might have been Transmorphers. Yes, you read that right. Trans-morphers—I had two ideas for a new book floating around in my head. In one, the aliens would come to Earth and spend most of the book trying to escape from the evil humans’ clutches. In the other, the humans would crash on the alien planet, where they would pit their indomitable human spirit against a hostile environment and discover for themselves just how well that would work in real life. Also, I wanted the aliens in both books to be just super alien. Not giant-clouds-of-pulsing-purple-light alien, but not able to pass as human just by wearing a trenchcoat and a hat either.

Looking at you, R. Lee…oh.

My first thought was to make the aliens in what would eventually become The Last Hour of Gann insectoids in homage to that Bruce Campbell movie and make the Cottonwood aliens giant, hulking lizardlike creatures. I changed my mind at the last minute, for reasons that now escape me, and wrote Cottonwood, complete with bug-like aliens, in a feverish two weeks. I mean it. I had a super-high fever. I typed it up over the next two months. Then I put it away, as is my wont, so that it could rest for a few months before my final edits and publication. And in the course of that final resting period, what should happen, but the movie District Nine came out.

*sigh* But that’s a post for another day.

THE LAST HOUR OF GANN

As I say, I had conceived LHoG as a kind of sister-story to Cottonwood. In Cottonwood, the aliens came to Earth; in LHoG, the humans would go to the alien world. I had no other real concept at the time, in part because I was focused on Cottonwood and in larger part because I was, heh, sort of kind of dying and didn’t have the wherewithal to think any further than that. So I wrote all the way through Cottonwood with no title for the next book, no characters, no nothing except a vague idea that the aliens would be lizards, and I only had that much as a kind of blowback from the creative process that went into Cottonwood.

So when I was done with Cottonwood and feeling a little more with it and ready to start LHoG, I went at it with practically a blank page, and as so often happens with me, I got my first inspiration from a dream. Or rather, two dreams.

The first concerned a small group of people, including one Amber Bierce and her little sister, Nicci, as well as a proto-Scott named (I think) Cameron, who pass through a magical portal and emerge on an alien planet. They soon encounter one of the natives—a lizardlike alien named Dumaka (I call Meoraq’s race in The Last Hour of Gann the dumaqs in homage) who leads them across the hostile land to a place where legend has it, other ‘alien wanderers’ reside. I didn’t think there was much of a story in that at the time, but I never forgot the characters or the way the group’s small society began to crumble. In the dream, Amber was just one face in the background, notable mostly for her relationship with her manipulative, perpetually crying little sister. The hero was a guy named Fergus, who may or may not appear in a later book. I liked him.

The finer points of what eventually became the world of Gann I culled from another dream, in which an alien world was inhabited by three races–the humans, who dwelled within the walls of great, round cities and did the industrial work; the Crawl, mutants or monsters or something vaguely humanish, swaddled in rags, who scuttled around outside the walls, ostensibly working fields and tending livestock, but possibly cannibalistic and really creepy; and the Haakoni, wolfish men (and women, maybe, although I never saw any) who are the only ones on the whole planet who are allowed to carry weapons and who can kill with impunity, who can demand anything they want of anyone they meet, and who act as conduits for the living gods of that world. That dream didn’t go anywhere either, but I loved the world and especially the cities, which were exactly as described in The Last Hour of Gann.

LAND OF THE BEAUTIFUL DEAD

I have already mentioned a few of the inspirations for LotBD, so if you are inclined to read about them, you may do so at your leisure. To avoid lengthy rehashing, I will simply say here that the book itself was created because I was ordered to produce a novella for the Freebie table at a romance writing convention, and I cannot write novellas, so my attempt to write a 40 page piece of romantic fluff rampaged out of control like a horde of zombies and turned into another (I think) 300 page book about the zombie apocalypse. And romance! I will also say that Azrael was inspired by equal parts Mary Shelley’s conception of the character of Frankenstein’s monster, and also by Shakespeare’s conception of Richard III. To wit, I wanted an eloquent, intelligent, truly monstrous monster who acted a dual role of hero and villain, and could be convincing as both.

Opposing and completing him, I had Lan, who was inspired more by what I didn’t want her to be than what I did—I didn’t want a damsel in distress or a kickass zombie-slayer, neither a ravishing beauty nor a hardcore survivor. Her personality had to be equal to Azrael’s own, a force to be reckoned with, able to look the Devil in the eye and see a man.

POOL

I realize this may be a sore point, considering my announcement that I won’t be publishing Pool, but this blog post isn’t about publication, it’s about inspiration. So in that spirit, the idea for Pool came to me the day I was watching a pretty bad subterranean monster movie with my sister (I told you this would be a recurring theme). And no, it was neither The Cave nor The Descent; it was something on the Syfy Channel. That should give you an idea of the quality of the plot. Anyway, when the brainy yet incredibly cute girl in the tight shirt killed a monster with a pickaxe, my sister said, “Poor guy.”

It made me think of something I admit I’ve thought before…that the humans broke in and started killing, often completely unprovoked, and the monsters were entirely justified in responding with perhaps a tad more hostility than the situation demanded. Things escalated. Mistakes were made. But no one ever sees it from the monster’s point of view.

It happens more often than you’d think.

So I started sketching. And once I’d drawn Pool, I realized I knew his whole story. The humans were harder to find. Ironically, the best friends–Hayley and Kyson–came before the heroine. The boyfriend came even later (I’m pretty sure he’s the same guy as Taryn’s boyfriend from Lords of Arcadia).

When I was researching Pool, I went to a number of caves (the kind you walk through; I am not a spelunker) and some mining museums. I was hugely inspired by nature’s amazing diversity in these underground places. It made it very easy to slip into Pool’s head and think in the very different way he thinks. He is, at heart, a peaceful man. When he isn’t, you know, biting the throats out of people as a means of impressing a girl.

EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT

On the surface, I suppose this one is obvious. I was inspired by Scott Cawthon’s game, Five Nights at Freddy’s. More than that, I was inspired by the tremendous detail he put into the backstory of that game, a backstory which he scattered around the scenery like so many gingerbread crumbs in a dark forest, never to directly address them. The horror of that game is not found in the admittedly creepy design of the animatronics or rundown look of the restaurant, and it’s not in the jumpscares (although I have to admit, the first time Foxy jumped the curtain and ran down the hall at me, I legit let out a yell and physically jumped back, actually falling off my bed—the first and only time in my entire horror game-movie-book-devouring life I have ever done that). The real horror is in that dark space between what Scott shows you and the little he tells you. It’s in guessing just what in the hell happened at that restaurant.

I was at the time still writing LotBD and I was in a pretty dark place, there at the end of the book. Anyone who’s read it will probably be able to guess why. Anyway, I needed a mental break now and then, so I would think about FNAF and try to suss out the timeline and backstory of the restaurant. One night, just for shits and giggles, I sat down and started writing the bulk of what would become the second part of Everything Is All Right—a long expositional conversation between Mike Schmidt, the security guard from the game, and my as-yet-unnamed character.

I wrote more than eighty pages in a single night.

Putting it aside so I could finish LotBD was possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done, harder than writing LotBD’s ending, harder even than reading it. Once I did finish LotBD, I sat down with Pool and started working on it again, but it wasn’t long before I realized…well, you all know what I realized. No need to rub lemon juice in that wound. The point is, I found myself looking at the old Story Board and trying to figure out which of the stories tacked up there on index cards was shouting the loudest, but although they were all talking, the thing I heard the clearest was the Toreador March.

After a short, clarifying chat with my sister, Cris, I decided to go ahead and write Everything Is All Right. And wow, am I having fun with this dark, unspeakably brutal book.

Updates every Saturday!

Well, it looks like I’ve come to the end of it. This has been a long post, so hey, gold star to you if you made it all the way to the end! I’ll see you next Wednesday for a hopefully shorter lesson on the pitfalls of writing, for real this time. Maybe.

Class dismissed.

*sigh* I miss Caroline.

Here it is, Serial Story Saturday, and I’m writing to let you all know my FNAFanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part One: Girl on the Edge of Nowhere has put up another chapter on Fanfiction.net and Archive of our Own. I don’t know how many of my usual readers are following along, but I’m getting a lot of positive feedback, so someone’s reading it, which is nice, because I sure had fun writing it, but I was also extremely nervous about posting it. Fanfic is seen by many as a step back on the ladder of authorial achievements. I’m glad so many people seem to be enjoying it.

Ana woke, not because it was morning and the sun was stabbing directly into her head through her ear-holes, and not because she was on the kitchen table using a loaf of bread for a pillow and Rider’s leather jacket for a blanket, but because she smelled coffee.

Raising her head did two things: Firstly, it showed her Rider, wearing nothing but his boxers, leaning up against the counter and rubbing his face as he waited for the coffee to make enough of itself to pour into the cup he held. The second thing raising her head did was to pull the muscles across her upper back, releasing pain like a banner unfurling from a tower window.

Her throat locked up against the scream that wanted out; her mother had been dead fifteen years now, but that old habit would not wear down. Gritting her teeth, Ana sucked in a breath and tried to look behind her, shifting the weight of Rider’s jacket so that its collar pressed on her skin just below the nape of her neck and it was like the damn thing was made of knives.

“What the fuck?” Ana managed at last, but she knew. Oh, she knew.

Rider looked around at her, grunted, and took down another coffee cup. “Morning.”

“What did I do?” Ana moaned, rolling her legs off the edge of the table and dropping onto her feet. She came out of Rider’s jacket like a pistachio pulled from its shell, dry and dusty and a little green. She had no shirt on, just her bra. Her back from just under her neck to just over her shoulderblades was both burning and throbbing in a special way. New pain, but oh so familiar. “Why did you let me do it?”

“Let you, huh?” Rider tried to snort, coughed instead, and scratched his ass. “I ain’t the boss of you, apparently. I ain’t your daddy. I ain’t…whoever the fuck you said I wasn’t last night. Don’t remember. Point is, I ain’t him so I ain’t stopping you. You can do what you want and you wanted a tattoo.”

“What is it this time?” Ana asked, limping over to the shiny glass face of his double-oven and trying without success to get a good look. The glass was clean, but her reflection was distorted anyway, like trying to see herself in an oil-slick. She could only make out the pale blur of her back, monstrous and hunched, with a ribbon of bright pink arching from shoulder to shoulder, interrupted by spidery black lines. Just knowing what it was made the pain more tolerable, but amped up the irritation until it was as good as a headache. “God help you if you let me put angel wings on, you son of a…What is that?”

“You really don’t remember.” Shaking his head, Rider poured himself some coffee, then her, sliding the cup toward her like beer on a bar. “You ain’t gonna want to hear this, but I told you so.”

“I don’t want to hear that,” she snapped. “Is that words? Those are words! What does it say?”

“Possibilities abound, don’t they? ‘More parking in the rear.’ ‘Pull my hair, bitch.’ ‘Don’t forget to sign the book.’” Rider sipped some coffee, watching her squint and contort in a futile effort to make sense of the calligraphy presenting itself backwards and dim in the surface of the oven’s door. “It says, ‘Everything is all right.’”

She stared at him. Her first thought, when she was capable of forming real thoughts again, was that she almost would have preferred, ‘Pull my hair.’

R LEE SMITH’S SIMPLE EIGHT-WEEK SYMPOSIUM ON THE ART OF STORY-TELLING:

WAT R WERDS?

Lesson 5.  The Greatest Job in the World (is Still a Job)

Good morning, class! Welcome back! Take your seats!

Gosh, it’s quiet in here this morning. And there’s Caroline’s chair…empty. Hm? No, I’m all right, I’m just…thinking.

The subject of today’s lesson is the Writer’s Work Ethic, which is particularly funny to me because I was supposed to write it yesterday, but I didn’t feel like it, so I didn’t. Heh. Irony.

Anyway, I wanted to start off by repeating something I first heard at a writer’s panel at a sci-fi convention many years ago and last heard at a panel at a romance writer’s convention just two years ago. It goes something like this:

90% of all people who have a great idea and want to write a book, never start. 90% of all people who start to write a book, never finish. 90% of all people who finish a book, never publish it. 90% of all people who publish a book, allow criticism to convince them never to write another one.

When I first heard this, I remember being confused. Want to write a book, but never start? What does that even mean? I was twelve at the time and had already written one (terrible) story, so naturally, I was an expert in the fine art of writersmanship. I knew exactly what my job would be like.

How right I was…

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to a deeper sense of understanding with just how ominous those statistics, inexact as they may be, truly are. I’ve met those people, those happy, hopeful, anxious people who tell me they have a great idea and would I be interested in hearing it, because it would make a great book, only they just don’t have time to write it. I’ve met the ones who are perpetually stuck on Chapter Two because they need to do more research. Self-publishing has thinned the numbers of the third group, but tho- endangered, they are not yet extinct. Hell, I was one of them for many years. And I’ve met the last, the ones who are the first to direct your attention past dozens of 5-star reviews to the one 1-star rant and read aloud all the most devastating points, peppered with comments like, “I guess there’s a reason the vast majority of writers die broke and unknown.”

After all these years, those numbers are just as true as they ever were, but now that I’m older, I think of them in a slightly different light. To me, they no longer point toward the diminishing odds of success, but rather, serve to illustrate the difference between a writer and an aspiring writer. An aspiring writer is one who waits for encouragement, for time, for acceptance, for validation. A writer writes. Success doesn’t enter into it at all. In writing, as in so many things, recognition has more to do with luck than perseverance or talent.

I write, and like a lot of writers, I know a lot of writers. So when the subject of how to write is invariably raised, I have the benefit not only of my own experience, but that of others. This is really something of a mixed blessing. I’m a competitive person, as I may have mentioned in the past, and although I know intellectually that writing a book is not a race—

That distant humming sound you just heard was every writer with a deadline screaming at me to shut my stupid smug face.

—I can’t help comparing myself to them at times, especially in those areas where I fall disastrously short. I know writers who can write multiple books at the same time, with different characters, different worlds, hell, different genres; I have a hard time even reading another book when I’m writing. I know writers who set daily quotas for themselves in excess of 5k, 8k, even 10k words a day; unless I’m doing a word-sprint, I don’t even notice my daily word count. I know writers who go to write like they’re going to work, as in, they have an honest-to-God writing room, where nothing happens except writing and where they go in at a certain hour and write until a certain hour and then come out; I keep the book I’m working on with me and write whenever the mood comes over me, and while that may be most days, it’s certainly not every day, nor is it only between such-and-such hours.

In short, we all have different ways of doing things, but one thing the writers in my group do have in common is that we take our job seriously. When I get up in the morning, I go to work. I just don’t always put on pants. You wouldn’t believe how many jobs out there require a person to wear pants just to work there. Bunch of fascists, stifling my creativity. Not to mention my grundle.

I don’t work every day, and as a matter of fact, if I’m having trouble with a scene, I will deliberately not work on it for at least a day and longer if I can stand it, just so I can go back to it with “fresh” eyes. However, this is one of those rare jobs when it’s actually very difficult not to work. Even if I’m not physically tapping away on keys, I’m frequently doodling characters or scenes, or just thinking about the book. Not about what to write, mind you, but just…off in Storyland, watching to see what happens. In all honesty, I expect I spend about half my waking hours living in my own head.

This is getting off the subject, but I often wonder what real people think about. No, really. What do you do with all that quiet time riding in a car or folding laundry or walking the dog if you don’t have a book to live in? Do you just…think about the scenery or the towels or the dog? Imaginative as I think I am, I literally cannot imagine that.

Granted, some dogs are more interesting than others.

There are a lot of people out there who seem to think that what I do isn’t a ‘real’ job. I guess I can kind of see their point. After all, I have neither a boss nor employees and I don’t interact with my customers. I have no office, no set hours, no uniform. I can take a coffee break whenever I want. No one steals my lunch from the company fridge. There’s no commute. I can sexually harass myself all day and the HR department can’t do anything to stop it. I have more freedom on the job than just about anyone else I know, but that doesn’t mean I don’t work. In fact…

In fact, let me show you what an average day in the life of R. Lee Smith looks like.

Yesterday, I woke up ridiculously early, at about 11 a.m. It’s—

Does anyone else hear that distant humming sound? It almost sounds like words. “Shut… your… stupid… smug…” Hmm. Oh well. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I woke up at 11 a.m. I realize how that sounds, but bear in mind, I got to sleep around 8 a.m. I’m nocturnal and have been as long as I can remember. Sleeping at night is just…just unnatural to me. So I woke up and it’s word-sprint day.

A word-sprint, for those who don’t know, is a fun little exercise in which a writer or group of writers is challenged to write as many words as they can within a certain span of time. My writer’s group tries to do one of these every week. We ante up by actually reading what we wrote afterwards, even though the work is in its roughest form. The idea is not to edit one another’s work, but to lose our own fear of writing something less than the greatest thing we’ve ever written. If you don’t write, this probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I can’t explain it. If you do write, you’re already nodding and I don’t have to explain.

So after a quick shower and the ceremonial putting on of pants, I met my group at the local IHOPs, where we drank copious amounts of coffee and ate pancakes and talked about books. Sometimes, this is where the writing actually begins. We all brought laptops just in case, but Fate wasn’t smiling and it was too busy to sit for hours and work at the diner, so we just talked instead, revving each other up for the sprint.

If you only knew how many sex scenes were written while this guy watched.

At noon, we drove to our writing space. Now, we are incredibly fortunate in that one of our group has access to a building that is only used for business on weekends. The building is quiet, has comfortable couches, a coffee maker, a fridge, no internet, no phones, very bad cell service, and an excellent stereo system. We can pop in our various story soundtracks (yes, we all do that), drink coffee and lounge on the couch, while unable to check Facebook or Tweet or watch TV or otherwise get distracted by the real world.

My goal for the sprint was to finish Chapter Five of the book I’m working on. I did, then went on to finish Chapter Six. Then, although the sprint was still on, I kind of bowed out and started editing some of my other chapters and breaking down future scenes. I worked like this until the rest of the group finished their goals.

At about 7 p.m., we’d all finished our sprints. Word counts were tallied. I came in last at 2400 words, but I had exceeded the goal I set for myself and I was happy with that. First place was around 5k words, if you’re curious. We all took turns reading what we’d written. Again, the point was not to edit or criticize, so we limited our feedback to issues of style or voice, not content.

By 9 p.m., I was back at home, editing my sprint. I read the entire chapter to my sister as a kind of beta run. She gave me some particularly brutal yet absolutely correct feedback and then we played video games until 2:30 in the morning. She went to bed and I went to my room to listen to creepypastas and edit my chapter until about 6. Then I goofed around on YouTube for a few hours and went to sleep. I woke up at the far more reasonable hour of 2 in the afternoon, made some coffee, and got right to work on this post. When I’m done, I’ll finish making those changes to Chapter Five and move on to Chapter Six. I should have the book done by the end of the month (I don’t write in sequence, so most of the latter half of the book is already finished), and be ready to move on to the next one.

Shameless self-promotion!

Now if you look closely, you’ll notice that’s seven uninterrupted hours of work, followed by almost five more at home. And yeah, that’s about average. Some days, I write for two hours; some days, twelve or more. Some days, I set my goal by words; on other days, by chapters or pages. Some days, I just edit. Some days, I just blog (and writing for the blog is so much harder, you guys. I don’t know why). Some days are for research, when I may not write at all, but instead read or travel or watch documentaries or otherwise work on notes. Very occasionally, I take a day off, but even then, I’m thinking about a book, whether it’s the one I’m supposed to be thinking about or not.

A lot of you out there are probably still thinking to yourself that this is not a real job. And you know what? You’re right. It’s not a job, at least, not in the same sense as the other jobs I’ve held down in my life, before I was lucky enough to stumble into this one. You know what it is?

It’s a habit. Hell, it’s practically an addiction. And you know how habits form? They form when you do them every day. So if this is the job you want, you need to make it a habit. Write.

“You say that like it’s easy,” some of you are muttering.

No, I don’t. It’s not always easy and it’s for sure not always fun, but it’s how the job gets done. Look, there are probably dozens of reasons why a person can’t write, but for every reason, there are at least a thousand excuses. You say you’re too tired? I say write a dream sequence. Those benefit enormously from being just a little loopy. Write it. You say you keep getting interrupted? I say a sentence here and a sentence there add up. Just five hundred words a day equals an entire 300+ page book by the end of the year. Write it. You say no one will ever read it, so what does it matter? I say you’re not writing a reader, you’re writing a story. Billions of people will never read my books or even hear my name in the whole of their lives, but I still matter. Write it. You say you’re waiting for inspiration? I say you’ll find it when you start writing. After all, how can you tell a story when you haven’t even met the people in it? Write it.

Next week, we’re probably going to touch on some of these points again as we talk about the pitfalls of the writing craft, but this week, I’d like to end this lesson the way I began, with a little truth in numbers. 90% of all people who have a great idea and want to write a book, never start. 90% of all people who start to write a book, never finish. 90% of all people who finish a book, never publish it. 90% of all people who publish a book, allow criticism to convince them never to write another one. But for the 10% of the 10% of the 10% of the 10% who stuck it out, those people, dear readers, are writers.

Just an update to tell those who are reading along with my fanfic on either fanfiction.net or archive of our own that the next chapter just went up.

Ana Stark woke in a cold sweat at half-past six in the morning. Her dream, something to do with spiders and maybe school, was already melting away and she made no effort to call it back. She did not think it had been a nightmare. She was cold because it was forty degrees at the most and she didn’t have the heat on. The sweat was because it had been almost eighty degrees when she’d gone to bed and, trapped beneath the blankets, it had never dried. Here, in the small town of Oxtongue, just outside sunny Death Valley National Park, winter weather was prone to be schizophrenic and waking in a cold sweat was nothing new.

Ana got up and shambled out to the kitchen in the very adult morning attire of underwear and a t-shirt purporting to be from the Mordor Charity Walkathon (One does not run, the shirt advised), only to discover the pump in the coffee maker had broken. A dilemma: she could either take the time to fix it or take a shower. She fixed the coffee maker, only to discover she was out of coffee. It was going to be another great day in the life of Ana Stark.

R. LEE SMITH’S SIMPLE EIGHT-WEEK SYMPOSIUM ON THE ART OF STORY-TELLING:

WAT R WERDS?

Lesson 4. You Can Research Anything!

(Just Open An Incognito Window First)

Good morning and welcome back to the Writer’s Workshop! I’d like to begin today’s lesson with a story. When I was sixteen—

Is that a phone, Caroline? In your hand. The other hand. Now your other hand…okay, you know what? I’m not doing this today. Out. Out of my classroom. Go on. Yes, I mean it, go.

…

Okay, then.

When I was sixteen years old, I wrote the typical teenaged book about a genetically-advanced supersoldier. You know the drill—hinky top-secret human experimentation, abused children transformed into killing machines by mad science, random incident leads to all but one being killed and that one escaping into the world, where she is then tracked down by a mercenary assassin on the government’s payroll, who then falls for her, and blah blah blah, guns, explosions, gore, sex and twist ending. It was the first of my stories I allowed my parents to read, leading to a frank and insanely awkward discussion between me and my father on the matter of sex (I had no experience and, boy, did it show. He had advice. I wanted to melt through the floor and die. Little did I know that years later, he would be reading a blowjob scene I wrote aloud to a roomful of betas. Life is funny). It also gave my mother nightmares for years, a fact of which I am inordinately proud.

Anyway, in the course of this book, I had to conduct an autopsy on one of the dead subjects. This was a long time ago, before you could just search for an autopsy on YouTube (our family didn’t even have internet service back then) or watch shows like Dr. G: Medical Examiner. So after checking out a few unsatisfactory books on forensic science from the public library, I did what any sixteen-year-old author would do: the next time I happened to be at the hospital (my family fostered several special needs children, so this was a fairly regular occurrence), I asked who did their autopsies. I can’t say the doctor did it without batting an eye, but he did give me a name and a phone number. To protect his identity, we’ll call him Dr. Death. Later that week, I called him up, told him who I was and explained the broad strokes of the situation, then asked him what an autopsy was like.

We talked about an hour that first time. I had never attempted to interview anyone before and, looking back, I don’t think he’d even given one before, but the two of us blundered through some questions and answers until I felt comfortable writing my scene. He gave me his direct number in case I had further questions and I gave him mine, mostly to be polite. Flash-forward about a week, and my mother hollers down the stairs, telling me Dr. Death is on the line asking for me. He’s got a body on the slab and wants to know if I’d like to hear an autopsy as it is performed. Well, hell yeah, I would! So he puts the call on speaker on his end and I sit down at the computer on my end, and I type as he talks. In-between cuts n’ such, he gets to chatting over the corpse, as one does in this situation. I remember laughing quite a lot. He asked about the book and we discussed science-fiction in general and cloning in particular. It was a great autopsy. For me, anyway.

It was probably still a pretty bad time for this guy.

Flash-forward even further, and I get another call in the middle of the night. Now I’ve been a night-owl all my life, so I happened to still be awake and close to the phone, but everyone else in the house was sound asleep. It’s Dr. Death again, first apologizing for the hour, and then inviting me to view an autopsy. It’s apparently his turn to break in the new med students or something, and he says if I can be there in an hour, he’ll sneak me in and throw a lab coat on me if I want to see one first-hand. With deep regret, I decline, saying I don’t have a car or even a driver’s license.

Next day, I tell the story over dinner, and both my parents damn near drop their forks. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” they exclaim in unison. “I want to see an autopsy!”

Ours is a…special family.

Anyway, I tell you this story for two reasons. First, because I think it says a lot about me that this is sincerely one of the great regrets in my life, that I never woke my parents up to drive me to a morgue in the middle of the night to watch a dead guy get cut up when I was sixteen (and may also be one of their regrets as well; my mother sure never let me live it down). Secondly, because it nicely illustrates the subject of today’s lesson. Sooner or later, every author has to struggle with the question of how far to go when researching their books, and the answer is, you can’t go far enough.

At the beginning of this series, I brought up the old adage about writing what you know, and while I stand by my assertion that no one should feel bound to write only about those subjects of which you have firsthand experience, I do think we, as writers and especially as writers of fiction, have a responsibility to learn everything we can about those subjects we’re writing about. The distinction is subtle, but significant.

When it comes to research, I think most authors fall into one of two categories: those who have to be forced into it and those who become so fascinated by the research that they forget to write the book. I fall into that second category so hard, they named the crater at the bottom after me. I binge-watch documentaries like most people do Game of Thrones. I plan my vacations around museums, not theme parks. I’m that person you heard in the back of the theater when you went to see Catch Me If You Can, Argo, or The Conjuring, saying, “Yeah, but that’s not what happened…” I research, is what I’m saying, and in my opinion, nothing beats first-hand investigation.

Case in point: The book I’m writing now is set in southern Utah, so back when I was still in the notes-phase of writing, I hopped in the car and drove to southern Utah. The town itself is made up and frequent mention is made of the town’s unusual topography and climate, so I didn’t feel a pressing need to clone an existing area, but I did feel and still feel that a basic familiarity with the general setting was in order. I know what trees would be growing in my character’s yard and what the view from her attic window would be. I know how the air smells and the way the mountains roll along the edge of the desert, with little green pockets full of people between vast stretches of burnt-red nothing and skies so broad and blue, they hurt the eyes. And while I understand not everyone has the option of taking a road trip every time they write a book, we are fortunate enough to live in the Information Age, with an infinite number of destinations waiting to be explored literally at our fingertips.

Never underestimate the value of desktop research. I could have seen those mountains on Google Earth. I could have walked through those trees at a national forestry service database. Because an accurate timeline was necessary, I made sure to have a calendar for the year in question, making notations of all my character’s major movements, as well as the actual sunset times for that location and date. I check through the recorded weather in the area so I know whether a heavy storm is, “the usual mid-March typhoon,” or whether a heat wave is, “infernal, even for July” and I can do it all without ever leaving the office.

Although, can you blame me? Can you imagine having to spend every day in this hellhole?

Having said all that, the internet is a fickle bitch and computers, even ficklier. Servers go down, hard drives don’t get backed up as often as they should, and sometimes the power goes out. So, and I realize I’m falling into my Luddite habits here, but if there’s a subject that really interests you or that you know you’re going to use on more than one book, you should really consider a more permanent, tangible reference. Yes, I mean books.

I know, I know. Print is dead, they say. They say there’s no reason to have more than one bookcase in your house and you should never keep any book you have not read in the last year. They say paper is unhygienic. You know what I say? I say buy books. And when you run out of shelves to put them on, buy more shelves. And then buy more books. And when your friends call you a hoarder, you will have lots and lots of heavy books to hit them with. Use their bones to make more shelves. You do not need friends like that in your life. You don’t need friends at all when you have books.

Seriously, though, the internet is a wonderful tool for research, but that doesn’t always make it the right one. If it’s something you need to know for this line of dialogue or that description, it’s quicker to look it up online, get what you need and get on with your book. Heck, easy access to information, that’s what the internet was made for, but if it’s a subject you know you’re going to come back to time and time and time again, having to sort through the haystack for that one shiny needle you only sort of remember (no, no, that’s not it…it had a blue banner…or was that the funguphilia website?), dealing with ads, clickbait, broken links and the ever-present threat of malware, may not be worth it.

But isn’t it more of a hassle to look things up in an analog format? God, you’ve got to get up and walk all the way over to the bookshelf, find the right book, then find the right page, and then actually sit and read, and meanwhile, there’s paper cuts and, I don’t know, bookworms? Where’s the advantage here?

Okay, first of all, bookworms? Really? What’s so scary about that?

GAH! Kill it with fire!

And secondly, just because there’s a lot of websites doesn’t mean there’s a lot of useful and/or applicable information. There are many, many, oh so many websites out there that discuss the middle ages, for example, but although some of them contain jewels of information that are not present in any of the reference books on my shelves, the vast majority merely parrot the same information as can be found on every other site, in a medium that is, let’s face it, tailored toward an audience with a short attention span. A website with more than ten pages is considered in-depth, and a page may only contain a few paragraphs and pictures, with links to other sites that do little better. Yeah, okay, a book doesn’t come with a search feature, but come on! We like to read, don’t we? If not, why the hell are we writing?

“But R. Lee!” you say. “That’s all well and good if you’re writing a book in a contemporary earth-bound setting, but what of us poor slobs who write sci-fi or fantasy? How do you research something that doesn’t exist?”

Well, look, even in a sci-fi setting, physics are still a thing, or at least, they should be. I am not a hard-science sci-fi writer. Far from it. But even I make a stab at realism when the situation requires it. When I wrote The Last Hour of Gann, for example, I saw that world as having a green sky (uh, spoiler? Maybe? Gann has a green sky), but I still made myself stop and research what affects a sky’s color. Not why is the sky blue, mind you, but what could make an alien world have a green sky and still have an atmosphere breathable by humans. I also did a lot of research on the various biomes that my characters would pass through over the course of the book. True, it is an alien world, but that world still has weather patterns and animals and plants and geography, all of which combine to form a realistic (I hope) environment. It should feel alien to the reader, who is, I presume, a human, but it should also feel natural.

And if I could direct your attention back just a hair, note that I said, “when the situation requires it.” Sometimes, it just doesn’t. In Land of the Beautiful Dead, I never really tried to explain the physiology that allows the dead to move around (uh, spoilers again?), let alone talk, think and teach grammar. It just isn’t important, in my opinion. Azrael exists well beyond the boundaries of Normal and whatever power he possesses to animate and imbue the dead with his will, it is equally beyond the scope of human understanding. Not important. As I’ve said elsewhere, you should only use science to explain stuff in your book if it can be explained by science. If it can’t, don’t.

One more thing before I let you go, and it is perhaps the most important point of all. I firmly believe that an author should know everything there is to know about his or her characters, their world, and all the fine details of whatever it is that happens to be going on in any given scene, but that does not mean the reader should be treated to a point-by-point breakdown of the action. I’ve been called out in the past for, and I’m quoting here, ‘nattering on about little details that interest no one but the author’. That was, I believe, in reference to the extensive ‘tanning scene’ in The Wizard and the Woods. Apparently the reader didn’t feel I needed to go to quite so much depth of detail in describing how to prepare and brain-cure a hide, which didn’t exactly stop me from doing it again in The Last Hour of Gann, but it is worth a warning. Is this information vital to the scene, the character, and the story? Or is it just a fascinating nugget of information you happen to be really interested in?

I have to admit, it’s probably the latter, in my case.

When in doubt, recuse yourself and put the decision in the hands of your betas (notice that’s plural). If the majority vote in favor of the scene, keep it in good conscience, but honestly, if any of them vote against it, go over that scene with an absolutely brutal editing eye. If your betas skim through a scene, so will your other readers.

But I might be getting ahead of myself now, so let’s just end the lecture here. Tune in next Wednesday, for Lesson 5, The Writer’s Work Ethic!

This isn’t a Writer’s Workshop post, but let me tell you, folks, the hardest part of writing isn’t the writing. It isn’t the editing. It isn’t even the marketing, although the marketing sucks. It’s figuring out all the different processes all the different websites want you to go through, vis a vis formatting, bundling and blocking, before your book goes live.

Which is my way of announcing that, yes, if you couldn’t tell just from the heading of this blog post, the first chapter of the first part of my five-part, 1000 (probably) page fanfiction novel, Everything Is All Right, has gone up on fanfiction.net and archive of our own. And, good grief, was that a hassle and a half! I have officially turned into one of those old dogs who can’t learn new tricks. I can’t friggin’ wait until I can afford to hire someone who will do this fidddly shit for me. Then I can just throw a manuscript at him/her and shout, “Minion!” (I shall call my assistants minions) “Minion! Post the first chapter!” and my minion will bow himself/herself away while I turn back to the computer monitor, slowly stroking my cat (not a euphemism) and contemplating the ruin of my heroine from the security of my underground lair at the heart of an active volcano, because as long as you’re daydreaming, dream big, right?

Until that day, I am my own minion, so I had to do it myself and it took just a ridiculous amount of time, and I probably did it wrong, but it looks like it posted, so here goes.

For all of those who participated in my little guessing game in the comment section, thanks! It was a real hoot to see your guesses. I hope you all enjoyed your sneak peeks!

For all those who didn’t, but are still curious, since the first chapter posted, I guess the mystery is over, so please enjoy (or don’t, I won’t judge) this excerpt!

Everything Is All Right
Part One: Girl on the Edge of Nowhere

“Welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life! Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon as property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced…”

PROLOGUE

November 5th, 1993

Ana Stark waited up all night, but he didn’t come, and when the grey glow of morning began to light her window, she slipped the knife back into its hiding place beneath her mattress and cried herself to sleep. In another hour, her mother’s shrill alarm clock woke her through the wall and she cried again, silently, because she could hear her mother thumping and swearing her way down the hall, still alive. But she didn’t cry long. It was Friday, a school day. She had only to get through this one last day and then she had the whole weekend with David over at Aunt Easter’s house to figure out what went wrong.

***

At this point, it is my plan to post new chapters weekly, every Saturday, on both sites. Hopefully, by the time Girl on the Edge of Nowhere concludes, the second part, Mike Schmidt and the Long Night, will be ready to begin, and so on down the line until the full book is complete, at which point, I will post the entire thing on Wattpad. That’s the plan, anyway, after which, it’s back to work on the next project. Hopefully, some of you will enjoy my little respite-from-actual-work and read along! If not, well, stay tuned and there’ll be something for you next year!

R. LEE SMITH’S SIMPLE EIGHT-WEEK SYMPOSIUM ON THE ART OF STORYTELLING:

WAT R WERDS?

Lesson 3. Coloring Outside the Outlines

Welcome back, class!…and Caroline. If you’ll just take your seats—hilarious, Caroline, now put your chair down and sit on it. Perhaps I could be allowed to begin, if the opening comedy act has concluded? Thank you. Ahem.

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

That up there is my second-favorite quote ever from the works of Mark Twain (my favorite, in case you were curious, is, “I always liked dead people, and done all I could for ‘em.” Both are from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is odd, because that’s probably my least favorite of his books) and the perfect way to lead off today’s lesson, which is about whether or not books are MADE or just happen, by which I mean it is about outlines.

Years ago, years before I started publishing or even thought about it…hell, years before I had written anything but fanfiction, I knew I wanted to write for a living. In fact, apart from a short phase in my early teens when I wanted to be a mortician, being a writer was all I ever wanted to be. From the moment I could read, I was writing stories of my own. My mother, bless her, kept many of my earliest works. They are adorably awful. And many are illustrated! Also awfully. That is neither here nor there, I only mention it so that when I tell you I have been attending lectures and panels on how to write fiction since I was twelve years old, you know I’m not kidding. Seriously, my mother took me to sci-fi conventions and let me off the leash, utterly unsupervised, and I went to the damn panels. Even the other nerds thought I was a nerd.

So while I cannot back this up with anything but my own experience, it has been the substance of that experience that aspiring first-time writers are under enormous pressure to outline their books. Being twelve the first time I heard this advice, I had no real idea of what this meant, so I went about it in the same way I’d outline an essay for school. I have lost the original somewhere over the long course of my misspent life, but my first outline would have looked something like this:

* * *

* * *

You may all recognize this as possibly the worst and most clichéd adventure story ever in the history of ever. I was twelve. To paraphrase one of my own characters, I cannot emphasize enough the twelveness of that whole situation. Anyway, moving on.

From that very first panel I’ve attended to the very last, I have heard it said that most writers fall into one of two categories—those who plan their books and those who just start writing. To wit, there are Those Who Outline Plots and Those Who Write By The Seat Of Their Pants. To put it even more succinctly, there are Plotters and Pantsers.

I fall somewhere in the middle and I’m sure I’m not alone. To be honest, it’s as difficult for me to imagine someone actually being able to adhere to a pre-written outline without deviation, from first page to last, as it is to imagine someone just sitting down and writing a book without a concordance or notes of any kind. This is not to say that I think either one of those ideas is wrong. If it works for you, it’s the right way to write. Period. But for those of you who are new to this path and perhaps struggling to sort through all the conflicting advice, let me lay out some Pros and Cons to both sides.

Let’s get the ball rolling with Outlines.

PRO: ORGANIZATION. The most obvious benefit to writing an outline is that it, well, outlines things. Certainly one of the biggest hurdles a new writer faces once they actually sit down to write for the very first time is to figure out how to take an idea and put it on paper. After all, when you have a 120k-word novel floating around in the ephemeral mist of your head (or a 270k-word novel, if you’re me), figuring out where to start can be a daunting task (hint: it’s not always the beginning). If outlines do nothing else, they help to get that tangle of anchorless thoughts, scenes and characters in order. It limits the possibility of continuity errors and helps a writer keep track of details that could easily get lost in oceans of text. The more world-building goes into a book, the more likely it is that a writer will contradict him- or herself: Are the flowers of the greeblefrond blue or purple? Are there one hundred fifty-one social castes within the Norblux culture or one hundred fifteen? How the hell long did it take Amber and Meoraq to walk from their meeting place nearish Tothax to the Shrine of Xi’Matezh anyway?

There’s a fine line between organized and crazy, though, so be careful.

PRO: DIRECTION. Once you’ve established a path for your story to follow, it’s important not to stray too far from it. Or at least, that’s what I’m told by authors who are a hell of a lot more successful than I am and therefore probably know what they’re talking about. And again, when you’re new to this and you’ve got ten thousand great scenes for the same book knocking around in your skull, it’s easy to get carried away. An outline acts as a stern governess standing just behind you with a yardstick in her fist, reminding you that your characters can’t get attacked by basilisks in Chapter Three because, a) they’re on a boat and basilisks can’t swim, and b) they’re attacked by badgers in Chapter Ten, and you wouldn’t want to get too repetitive, and c) they’re in the real world and basilisks are mythical.

PRO: MOTIVATION: Writing an outline at the beginning of your project gives you a physical visual means of tracking your progress, something that can be enormously encouraging, especially if you’re not fortunate enough to be able to sit down and just write for hours at a time every day because, you know, you have a life. When you are only able to write for ten minutes here, half an hour there, partly on the computer, partly in a notebook, sometimes on a napkin or the back of your arm, it’s easy to feel like you didn’t write anything. But when you have an outline, you can say, “I finished the jet ski chase and introduced the talking monkey, so tomorrow, I can get right to work on the volcano sacrifice.” Also, speaking from experience, I can tell you there’s a real sense of accomplishment that comes from updating a Work-In-Progress bar. Knowing at the outset that your book will have twenty chapters gives you an end-point, so that as you write, you can see at a glance when you are 5%, 40%, or 90% done. Whereas those of us who write without outlines can only guess how many words, pages or chapters we’re going to need and we’re usually wrong, so the end-point keeps moving and those percentages mean nothing. I know, ‘the struggle is real,’ right? Well, it is. Writing isn’t always easy or fun, and there can be weeks when you work at it all day and feel like you haven’t done anything. The word count may be going up and up and up, but that sure doesn’t mean the story is moving. There are always going to be days when you need a reason to keep at it and nothing beats the tactile satisfaction of crossing a scene off a list or updating a WIP bar.

PRO: COMPLETION. Probably the best reason to write an outline is that it forces a writer to actually sit down and really think about their book, from beginning to end and every part in between. And while this can spoil a lot of the spontaneity and mystery of the creative process, it cannot be denied that it is helpful to know how a book is going to end or even that there is an ending. Hands down, the most widespread reason given for why a book was not finished is some variation of “It ran out of steam,” which is obfuscated double-talk designed to avert the blame for not knowing what happened next. Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you books never run out of steam. Sometimes, there’s just not enough story in your story. It happens. But it’s a whole lot easier to spot when it’s down on paper and the weak spots, dangling threads and gaping void of an ending is right in front of you in black and white.

CON: INFLEXIBLE. The major problem with working with outlines is that they can lock you into a schedule the story doesn’t always want to follow. Now when I say ‘lock,’ obviously I don’t mean the Plot Police are going to bust in through your door and cuff you just because you decided the postpone the marshmallow fluff wrestling scene for a chapter so you can have one of the villain’s minions get eaten by a Utahraptor. Look, every book is going to have a Utahraptor sooner or later and minions are going to get eaten. No one plans these things, they just happen. And certainly having an outline doesn’t mean you must adhere to it at all times, no exceptions, and that for every scene you invent or omit, the Orc-Lord of Outline-land throws a puppy into a furnace. All I’m saying is, an outline provides a writer with structure, but structures are, by their very nature, rigid. Making a conscious decision to ignore your outline in order to pursue an interesting white rabbit can and does have consequences. You have to be able to grow or shrink to accommodate yourself to the size of the door you find on the other side of the rabbit hole, and if you can’t do that, you shouldn’t jump. It ain’t all tea and cakes.

I do likes me a metaphor, don’t I?

So if working with an outline is so advantageous and clarifying, why would anyone deliberately work without one, you ask? Oh…you didn’t ask? Someone should really ask. Anyone? Well, screw it, it’s on the lesson plan, so I’m just going to pretend someone asked. Why would anyone work without one, you ask? Well, let’s explore some reasons you might prefer to write blind.

PRO: FREEDOM. There’s a reason I write fiction and not reference books on funeral practices throughout history or the medical, magical and culinary uses of plants, both subjects on which I am damn well versed. You could be given the most interesting subject in the world—say, sexual symbolism in religious iconography—but, and maybe it’s just me, but as soon as I am told I have to write a paper on it, it becomes a chore and I become the world’s whiniest overgrown toddler, stomping my feet upstairs and throwing my Cheerios like I’d rather be writing my own damn epitaph instead of that. Meanwhile, in an alternate timeline, while researching religious iconography for my book, I will stumble on the subject of sexual symbolism therein and study it for the rest of the day in happy fascination, thinking, Why hasn’t anyone written a book on this? I need this book! I should write this book! And I really don’t think I’m alone. Fiction writers are inherently creative-types and creative-types have a natural resistance to authority, even their own. Maybe even especially their own. I personally have a competitive streak a mile wide and I love throwing down with the other writers in my groups on word sprints or challenges or NaNoWriMo pledges, but I simply cannot make myself be accountable to myself. An outline is just The Man, man. I gotta be free if I’m gonna be me.

PRO: DISCOVERY. When I was a very small child, I once heard it said (by whom, I no longer remember. If you recognize the quote, please let me know so I can give it proper credit, because I have spent two hours searching the interwebs to no avail), that the less you know, the more you get to learn. It made an impression on me, I think, because of that word “get”. I was small enough then to be in school, yet old enough to wish I wasn’t, and the implication that learning was somehow a reward has stuck in my head like the Chili’s baby-back ribs jingle is now probably stuck in yours. Heh heh. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand that quote a bit better. (babyback babyback babyback…I want my babyback babyback babyback CHILEEEEEES! Baby back riiiiiiiibs!) And there really is something exhilarating about taking that plunge, not knowing where it will lead, only that it will take you someplace new and wondrous. I suppose that outline-writers feel the same way to some degree babyback, in the same way that the Grand Canyon is majestic as fuck even if you set off to find it with a road map and a GPS navigator dictating every stop and turn along the way, I just happen to believe babyback babyback babyback that setting off on a road trip and ending up at the Grand Canyon purely by chance is even more amazing, because even if the destination is the same, the planner made a plan and knew where they’d end up, while the roadtripper could have ended up anywhere, as likely to end up at Prairie Dog Town as the Grand Canyon.

Which is also fun. I’ve been here. Did I get my picture taken with the giant prairie dog and pet the six-legged steer? Yes, I did.

PRO: MOMENTUM. If writing with an outline can be described as walking up a set of stairs, with each step clearly marked and landings at obvious and evenly-spaced intervals, then writing without one is a lot like jumping out of an airplane. I’ve done both, and I can attest that, while it is comforting to have a handrail to hold onto and see the numbers painted on the doors counting themselves off as you climb steadily higher, it can also be a bit of a slog. Whereas taking that jump, falling faster and faster until you hit that brilliant moment of terminal velocity, writing like the wind and watching the world grow huge before you, trusting that your chute will open and flutter you safely to earth, but always knowing it might not, it really might, and this wild, wonderful, nerve-wracking moment could all end with a bounce and a crack and a sharp cut to black. But no one pushed you out of that airplane, did they? You jumped. And you’d jump again, because that feeling is really addictive. I have, as I’ve said, written both with and without an outline. I think my personal best, as far as pages written in a single day, with an outline was about thirteen pages. And as I recall, they were pretty polished, as a first draft goes. Most of the time, my outlined-work averages five or six pages in a working day, and they’re usually pretty good pages. They may or may not make the final cut, but I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any outlined-scenes I cut because I was unhappy with the work that went into them. Without an outline, on the other hand, my personal best was an honest-to-God eighty-two pages. You read that right. Eighty-two rollicking, sloppy, out-of-control pages. I jumped from that plane and I fell hard. I think my second-best was about forty pages, I often do thirty, I usually do twenty, and I think I can honestly say I’ve never done less than thirteen, ever. Of course, with one noted exception (Cottonwood), all my outline-less work is rough as sharkskin and needs a lot of reworking to make it readable. Which brings me to the biggest Con of taking the Pantser-route.

CON: OH, JUST SO MUCH RE-WRITING, GUYS. LIKE, JUST SO MUCH. FOR SERIALS. So you’re writing your first novel and it’s going great. You’re two hundred pages in and still going strong. It’s just a roller coaster of a book, nothing but cover-to-cover marshmallow fluff wrestling, jet ski chases, and sizzling-hot Utahraptors.

Fuck Yeah! a new novel by R.Lee Smith

And there you are, on lucky Chapter Thirteen, as your heroine and hero are standing on a rocky outcropping in Nepal, as one does, when suddenly! An avalanche! How exciting! The hero is swept away by icy death and the heroine plummets through a crevasse into…a lost temple! Okay, but you really don’t want the hero to be killed, because introducing a new love interest two hundred pages in is obnoxious. So before exploring the temple, you’ve really got to go find him. Maybe he’s got GPS in his phone. That’s a thing now, right? Maybe not a given, though…you should go back and allude to it in some way so the reader knows it’s there. Okay, so you flip all the way back to Chapter Three and have the heroine find him in the crowded marketplace by the GPS in his phone instead of just seeing him over by the ferret vendor. That works. The heroine digs out the hero, exchanges a few quips and some sexual tension, and it’s back to the temple! Exploration! Discovery! Wait, it’s going to be dark in there. Do they have flashlights? Well, it’s okay, they have phones. They won’t work forever, but they’ll work long enough to find, I don’t know, a torch or something. Wait, how would they light the torch? It’s not like either of them planned to go temple-spelunking when they fell into this madcap adventure. Maybe one of them smokes. Okay, make a note and sprinkle a few cigarettes or, you know, “whatever one smokes” throughout the earlier chapters. Okay, torch is located and lit! The hero and heroine make their way through the temple to the relic chamber and there, in pool of unlikely sunlight, is the very thing they’ve come all this way to find! It couldn’t be, but yes, it’s…it’s Narselkin’s Cradle! Both rush over and fall to their knees. The hero excitedly reaches to open the relic, but the heroine quickly stops him. Reading the hieroglyphs—wait, does the reader know she can read hieroglyphs? Go back to Chapter Two in the research scene and throw in some hieroglyphs…

You get the point. While you probably already understood that writing by the seat of your pants means not having any idea what’s going to happen, you may not have realized that it also means you might not have any idea what’s already happened. Writing without an outline almost always means continuity hiccups, contradictions, dangling threads, dead ends and delicious Chili’s baby back ribs. By and large, I write books twice as long in half the time without an outline as I write with one, BUT! It takes easily three times as long to edit and polish (exception: Cottonwood).

At the beginning of this ridiculously long post, I made the statement that, despite what panelists so often tell us, there is a wide, grey line between the extremes of Plots and Pants. These days, I create a concordance for each book, in which I keep my timeline, all my character sketches and personality profiles, inspiring pictures, links to reference material, deleted and alternate scenes, and any little relevant doodles and notes. Some of you may be wondering how I can claim to ever write without an outline if I admit I do this. Well, most of this, I put together after the first draft, or at least, after I’ve written everything I “see” clearly. Essentially, I write without an outline for as long as it comes easily, then start making notes and constructing my concordance. Here, for the first time, I break the body of the book down into chapters, so it’s easier to identify which ones are complete and which ones are still missing scenes. I then flip back to the beginning and take each chapter one by one, filling in the blank spaces until the story is told. So, in essence, I jump down the rabbit hole, then take the stairs back up. Never quite as high, mind you, but still with a hell of a view of the Grand Canyon.

Congratulations. That is the most mixed metaphor of all time.

Welp, that’s it for another week, class! See you all next time!

…kind of hungry. Think I’ll stop at Chili’s on the way home. I don’t know why, but I’m really feeling the ribs tonight…