On Writing

Are humans inherently good but sometimes led astray? Or are we inherently evil, with the occasional lapse into grace? The answer is a matter of personal faith, but we probably agree that we all have a mean streak. Therefore, any discussion of writing with authenticity requires that we acknowledge our worse angels.

All but the saints among us experience the delightful frisson of schadenfreude when a bratty kid bonks his head due to his own misbehavior or when the person who’s been tailgating you on the freeway gets caught by a speed trap. We are quietly delighted when an obnoxious co-worker calls out sick.

In worse cases, we might slip from observation into speculation. Would it be so terrible if that co-worker had something worse than the flu? And if that reckless driver spun out of control on a sharp turn ahead, wouldn’t that serve him right?

Do you get mad when someone crosses you, thwarts you, insults you? Your boss belittles your work or doesn’t give you adequate credit. A bully embarrasses you in public. Your neighbors let their dog use your yard. Someone cheats you out of money or betrays your trust. You might imagine a stronger comeuppance, something more vengeful than simple karma. Sometimes, we don’t want to wait for fate to step in.

And when those thoughts become action…?

There are many novels I could mine for today’s post—American Psycho, Lolita, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, The Picture of Dorian Gray—All stories about bad people running wild. Crime thrillers and murder mysteries provide ample examples of bad actors whose envy, anger, greed, or pride take them to bad ends.

On the other hand, mysteries aren’t told from the culprit’s POV. The reader is generally kept at a distance, ignorant of their thought processes and motivations until the end. And characters like Patrick Bateman and Humbert Humbert are so far removed from the bounds of decent human conduct, I doubt anyone reading this can see themselves in their shoes. We might be fascinated by them, those of us with a dark sense of humor might laugh at them, but we don’t really relate to them. We console ourselves with the thought that we are not like them.

But when we write, relating is the entire point. Nabokov may never have lusted after a child, but he lusted after someone. Creating a bad actor requires acknowledging our intrusive thoughts. Even if you don’t write about the uglier aspects of life, human nature contains multitudes, including anger, jealousy, vindictiveness. Nobody likes a Pollyanna.

And if you do plumb the depths of human behavior, your best path forward is finding the dark threads in your own nature and following them through the labyrinth to the monster dwelling at the center.

Patricia Highsmith is my go-to writer for characters residing in the dankest corners of the human experience. With her misanthropic reputation, Highsmith had an advantage over most of us, as her intrusive thoughts didn’t need much oomph to power to the surface, but we can still pick up a lot of lessons from her writing.

I love that her novels are written from the POV of the character we’d generally consider the villain. Some of her characters are sociopaths, taking advantage of people they consider inferior. Some are common con men or perverts whose bad conduct triggers a series of events that whips out of their control. Some are decent men who have a bad day, which leads them into temptation and danger.

While we’d agree that their results are evil, it’s difficult to paint Highsmith’s protagonists as the bad guys. We get a glimpse of their life before it goes astray. We watch a simple choice result in unintended consequences. We cringe when a protagonist continues down the wrong path instead of backtracking to safety. Best of all, we understand them, their hopes, their hurts, their unquenchable thirsts. Their choices make sense, and may even seem justified, even when their story ends badly. We may not see ourselves exactly, but we recognize their human emotions and needs.

In Deep Water, protagonist Vic Van Allen is no villain. He’s married with a child, lives in the suburbs, and runs a boutique publishing house with money from his family trust fund. A life many people would envy, except that his wife openly cheats on him. The neighbors know – Melinda drags her string of lovers to dinner parties and backyard barbecues – but maintain their relationship with her because they like Vic, who refuses to end either her conduct or the marriage. But by the time the novel opens, Melinda’s behavior is taking a toll.

He looked at her as she bent over her dressing table, gathering lipstick and keys, swaying in her cream-colored topcoat, and he suddenly felt that he didn’t care what happened to her tonight, because she was going out to denounce him again and it would serve her right to smash herself into a tree or to get stuck in a ditch on a fast turn. Then he thought of the hairpin turn on the hillside halfway between their house and the Mellers’. There was a cliff there, and the road would be slippery tonight.

At one of those dinner parties, the discussion turns to the recent murder of one of Melinda’s former lovers. Speaking to his wife’s current lover, Vic jokes that he was responsible. It’s a spur of the moment comment, intended to scare the man away from his wife, startle and upset Melinda, and retake some of his authority. In that instant, the pride Vic’s been swallowing gets the better of him and he lashes out.

And can you blame him? Melinda inflicts repeated public humiliation on Vic. She knows he’s still in love with her, but rejects him privately. It’s natural that he’d confront his wife’s next boyfriend. We might not blame Vic if he swung a punch. However, this time, his retribution is light; he responds with words, a joke. But that joke stirred up a private wish – that he’d been strong or ruthless enough to rid himself of his wife’s previous lover. The thought is intriguing.

As the days pass, Vic convinces himself that he would have been justified in killing Melinda’s last boyfriend, and his friends agree. No one believes Vic did it, or even could do it, but they couldn’t argue the man wouldn’t have had it coming. The more Vic toys with the fantasy, the more enticing it becomes. And when Melinda takes her next lover, Vic makes the natural choice, perhaps the only logical choice. What began as a joke, a comment made in response to public embarrassment and a threat to his family, takes on a life of its own.

He remembered a knot, a dark, hard knot of repressions and resentments in himself, and it was as if his murdering De Lisle had untied the knot. He was more relaxed now and, to be perfectly honest, happier…A discharge of repressed hatred, perhaps that was a better metaphor than the untying of a knot. But just what had pushed him across the line from fantasy to fact that night in the Cowans’ swimming pool? And would it happen again under the right circumstances? He hoped not.

Highsmith torments Vic through some one-third of the novel before his thoughts start to take their dark turn. The reader watches Melinda humiliate him in front of the neighbors. We hear Vic’s friends plead with him to put an end to her behavior, one way or the other. We follow Vic’s intrusive thoughts – which initially are only thoughts – until they guide him to his fateful choices.

And it all started because a husband wanted to bully the man sleeping with his wife. I can’t imagine circumstances in which I’d kill someone who had sex with my SO, but I know what humiliation and rejection feel like. I’ve wished ill on people. I can imagine being pushed up to the line. Would I cross it? Unlikely, but when a man is up against the line, crossing it only takes one step.

What makes you mad? When do you feel threatened, jealous, or vengeful? Pinpoint a moment of high emotion, not a mere inconvenience. Take that emotion through a dangerous path, as it becomes a thought, then a wish, then an idea, a plan, a choice, an action.

Can you imagine yourself in a scenario where violence is the wrong answer and yet remains attractive? Could you commit a murder that wasn’t in defense of your life or family? Could you kill for convenience or spite or to keep a secret? Because someone offended you or has something you want? Are you willing to spill that blood on the page?

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There’s something to be said for a hero who is flawed but still superior, like the job candidate who confesses his major weakness is caring too much, but most contemporary novels are lead by characters with personality tics you won’t find on a resume.

When writing gurus talk about complicated characters, they start with tragedy in the back story, a blind spot or mental block, a weakness that the hero has to overcome before they can achieve the tangible story goal. In addition to relationships woes and external obstacles, they want the protagonist to suffer from some good ol’ stinkin’ thinkin’.

And that is what most readers want – characters who are good but not too good. They may have unrealized dreams or be in the midst of a setback. They might be financially strapped, put-upon, or unpopular or unloved. Any hero who begins a novel with an orderly life is guaranteed to hit a rough patch, usually of their own making. We like characters who make bad decisions or cave in to family or take the safe route, because they remind us of ourselves. And we like watching them succeed, because that means maybe we can too.

But some of us aren’t satisfied with 101-level complicated characters. We want the master class.

We want the Hot Mess.

A hot mess is more than a degree of difference from flawed characters. Flaws can be fixed. Backstory trauma can be healed or resolved. Weaknesses can be shored up or even turned into strengths. In contrast, the hot mess simply is.

The hot mess has a journey but no destination. Rather than dreams, the hot mess has questions that have no answers. What is life’s purpose? Why are people cruel to those they love? Where is my true home? Who am I? Is there more to life than this?

I like these characters because they feel more true to life. In the real world, there are no easy answers. We don’t get mentors and sidekicks, and we can’t wrap up a story problem in 300 pages. Life doesn’t present us with pitch perfect challenges that will help us overcome an emotional weakness so that we can make all our dreams come true. That’s fiction.

Earlier, I wrote about being ugly on the page, but messy does not mean emotional cruelty or selfishness, or portraying yourself in the worst light. It can mean those things, but a person or character can be kind-hearted, generous, and well-liked, and still be a complete disaster.

Rather, messy is an acknowledgment that humans are complicated, contradictory, and often unknowable. No matter how adamantly we believe we know our purpose and desires, life and our own badly attuned emotions can confuse us, undercut us, and lead us astray. At times, we may not know what to feel or which emotion should take precedence. On paper, our lives may look orderly and on-track, but inside, we feel tired, disoriented, or lost. We look for answers that can’t be found.

Anne Tyler is a master of messy characters. Her protagonists long to find meaning in life, but are trapped by inaction. They want love, but avoid connection. They prefer solitude but are drawn to strange company. Their stories eventually resolve, but the reader is often left feeling something is amiss. A protagonist shies away from happiness, or chooses to find love with someone they don’t particularly like. A character abandons his own path to embrace family tradition. The hero turns left when everything up to the final moment suggested that her path led right. I could have rolled through almost any of her books for this post, but I chose the following pair of semi-pseudo-autobiographical novels for a closer look.

In his 1963 novel City of Night, John Rechy fictionalizes the years he spent as a male prostitute in various U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans. An unflinching look at men residing in a sexual underground, City of Night follows an unnamed hustler through his encounters with various johns, including a sickly bed-ridden old man, a masochist, drag queens, handsome studs, other hustlers, and the occasional guy next door type.

Some of his relationships are recurring, most are fleeting, none provide for any serious emotional attachment. And yet throughout the novel, there is an undercurrent of longing, for self-knowledge, for connection, even as its characters arrange for anonymous encounters with men who can’t provide their real names, much less a morning after. An evening concludes, the bars close, but there are no real endings.

In the same way that the characters’ lives in 1950s America would be bifurcated – public/private, socially acceptable/transgressive, daylight/twilight – so too are their emotions and desires in conflict. They seek out beauty only to degrade it, they live in community but savage it, they act indifferent but crave approval. They want love, but can’t give it. They buy sex but want the happy ending. Towards the end, even the protagonist starts to yearn for emotional connection, or a bit of permanence, if not love and a home, and acknowledges the contradiction between how he’s lived and what he’s drifting towards.

Much of this is portrayed in subtext, so your mileage may vary. What I intuit from a character’s mannerisms, questions, or unspoken words may differ from your interpretation. We see what we see. But in the end, the men in City of Night are wandering, a bit lost, complex, and yes, messy.

This next book, by a lesbian writer, couldn’t be more different from City of Night, but it’s characters and their emotions are both terrible and complicated.

In Bastard Out of Carolina, the much-missed Dorothy Allison fictionalized her childhood, including sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, as well as her own early sexual experimentation and same-sex orientation. While any of those individual topics would be a lot for most writers to handle on the page, Allison’s juxtaposition of abuse and awakening, childhood and adult-sized trauma, create a tortuous emotional experience. Messy doesn’t start to cover it.

Main character Bone wants to love and please her stepfather, and can’t understand why she doesn’t, even before his abuse starts. As his violence escalates, Bone’s desire to love transforms into loathing, and yet she still looks inside for what has triggered her stepfather’s anger and made her its target. Bone loves her mother, yet is angered and confused that she does nothing to protect her child from the horror she’s married. She worships the men in her family who could and would rescue her, but maintains her silence to protect her mother. She’s confused and terrified by her stepfather’s molestation, but when she’s a little older, gleefully engages in self-exploration. She engages in bad behavior that she knows could trigger punishment at home, because she wants to impress her cousins.

You might feel a bit of whiplash as the tone shifts from scene to scene, but the overall effect rings true. Life – especially life under the constant threat of poverty, abandonment, and domestic violence – is jagged. It’s messy and Allison dredged from the deep end to bring Bone’s story – her story – to the page.

I don’t know if current editions of the book contain a trigger warning, but here you go: Allison does not hold back, either from describing the abuse or from depicting Bone’s confusing, contradictory, and oft-times impenetrable emotions and thoughts. A child, Bone doesn’t yet know herself, much less understand adult choices and relationships, nor can she navigate the labyrinth of domestic violence nearly breaks her.

And yet, Allison doesn’t wallow in her depiction of the abuse or Bone’s despair. Bastard Out of Carolina isn’t poverty porn and it doesn’t linger within scenes of Bone’s abuse a word longer than necessary. She’s no messier than she needs to be, a master class in rawness with restraint.

I like City of Night and Bastard Out of Carolina because they leave more questions than they answer. Rechy’s hustler doesn’t find love or even decide he wants it. He’ll have to stop prostituting himself some day, but not today. Where is he going? We don’t know and neither does he. No one can tell Bone why her mother repeatedly chooses her stepfather over her own daughter, even after she given full witness to the abuse. Bone doesn’t get resolution or healing. We aren’t privy to her mother’s thinking or her stepfather’s backstory. We don’t learn why people are cruel to those they love, because there is no answer to that question.

Both books are worth reading, though each is tough in its own way, as they explore complicated sexual dynamics. City of Night revels in grody underground anonymous gay sex encounters, while Bastard explores the tangled feelings of a girl whose natural adolescent sexual awakening occurs amid horrible physical and sexual abuse. But if you want to explore messy, complicated characters on the page, these are fascinating examples. And if you want something a bit gentler on the palate, try something by Anne Tyler. You can’t go wrong there.

Do you have questions without answers? Don’t be afraid of putting them on the page. You may find that your readers are as messy as you are.

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Today’s topic may not appeal to you, and that’s ok. Many amazing writers strive to entertain, not convince. They want to help readers escape reality, not rub their noses in it. Not that you need it, but I approve.

This applies to me too, because frankly, while I love a story that stirs the pot or predicts the future, I don’t have it in me to write one. It requires a specific kind of insight, as well as an ability to balance passion and dispassion, plus a lot of emotional energy. If I get worked up about something to the point it threatens to come out in my fiction, I can’t be even-handed, and that makes for terrible stories. I admire this skill in others, though.

On the other hand, sometimes you can’t help it. Being authentic sometimes means you wear your heart on your sleeve. Writers observe the world and are passionate in our beliefs. We know what we know and feel what we feel, fully and deeply. With that in mind, it’s natural that we will identify social problems and want to write about them.

But what problems? That’s up to you. The environment, pornography, reproductive rights, the right to life, the breakdown of civility, the loss of traditional values, equal justice under the law, patriotism, privacy, foreign entanglements, economic disparity, racism, sexism, antisemitism, men’s rights, women’s rights, school choice, the Second Amendment, the First Amendment.

Even if you don’t expressly set out to write a political novel, your beliefs will find their way into your writing. If you have a strong preference between the traditional family and chosen family, we’ll see it. If you’re passionate about free speech, we’ll hear it. No matter what I write, the story question will never center on the benefits of conforming to group-think, or how the world would be better if we allowed a small group of elites to make all our personal decisions.

Consider Stephen King. He isn’t a political writer, but can you think of a novel where the government was the good guy? King hasn’t written a horror story called “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” – hat tip to Ronald Reagan – but he might as well have. Based on his public comments, I don’t think he hates the government, but deep down, he’d have to admit he doesn’t really trust it, either.

And what does King think of manhood and family? I can easily recall many side villains in his novels who were bullies, drunks, or wifebeaters, and the characters who came from broken, abusive, or dysfunctional homes, and how that early life trauma pulled them under or forced them to overcome. You would never argue that King writes family dramas, but his opinions about what makes a good man or a good family are right there on the page. You might not consider that a political opinion, but the personal is political. Our values form our view of the world and politics is one way we put those values into action.

And maybe that’s a better way to frame this realm of authenticity.

Politics have a bad reputation. We generally attach a negative connotation – lying, grifting, fecklessness, divisiveness, rage baiting, fearmongering – and we may hesitate to soil our creative work with it. Fortunately, the word values still calls us to our higher selves (at least for now).

Patriotism

Family

Courage

Justice

Charity

Freedom

Faith

Community

Law

Order

Sacrifice

Individuality

Equality

Responsibility

Honesty

Peace

Some of those may resonate more strongly inside you, others may feel more vague. Values are individual. Even when we use the same word to describe a core principle, its meaning will differ from person to person. My concept of freedom and yours are not the same.

You don’t have to write a political novel – I doubt I ever will – but do look for your values on the page. What’s important to you? What do those words mean? What’s at stake if that value falters? What happens when you act against your values or don’t defend them? What action would you take and what would you sacrifice in honor of them?

Tell us about it.

Do I need to share a list of political novels? It feels strange not to, but also superfluous. You can guess what I’m going to write here: 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, Les Misérables, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, To Kill a Mockingbird, Alas, Babylon.

But also: Woman on the Edge of Time, Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, The Trial, Things Fall Apart, The Parable of the Sower, Slaughterhouse 5, Elmer Gantry, On the Beach

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I could have titled this segment “Be a Geek” but I don’t want to give non-geeks the wrong idea.

But also, you’re a geek. Maybe you aren’t a traditional geek, immodestly obsessed with science fiction and fantasy books, films, and other paraphernalia, but you go hard for your hobbies, interests, and likes. You might be a sports or political geek, or a music or film geek. You might be a foodie or love gardening. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re pursuing some creative geekery.

Put simply, a geek is someone who loves what they love, passionately and unapologetically.

Some of my favorite books are those in which the writers put it all on the page, not only their passions or deep background knowledge, but all the fringe elements and garnishes that make the work uniquely theirs. The kind of inside knowledge that you can’t get from research; you have to live with it. The kind of book that could not have been written by anyone but that single author.

Today’s examples come from the world of comics, where, by definition, writers have to be comfortable indulging their interests. It’s easier now that superhero film franchises make multi-millions at the box office, but still – the people who write and draw comics aren’t doing it for the money or prestige. No one is writing about superheroes with a Pulitzer in mind.

Because I’m a Gen X writer, both of these examples also come from the 80s. I could have found more modern examples, but the surge of high-quality, independent comics publishers from the mid-80s – much of it self-published – is one of my geekdoms.

With Aztec Ace, writer Doug Moench created a comic that combined a vast range of interests: time travel, the Aztecs (naturally), Depression-era America, Sigmund Freud, comic books and pulp magazines, and philosophical paradoxes. The result is a compelling, intelligent, and yet action-packed science fiction/mystery adventure comic. It’s Dr. Who for conspiracy theorists, with gams and boobs.

The title ran for 15 issues in the 1980s, at the time a solid number for an offbeat non-superhero comic published by a small independent company. It ended rather abruptly, but 35 years later, it has been collected in a gorgeous hardbound edition, with a new story.

In Time², writer/artist Howard Chaykin explores an other-world where time is experienced at a different level, and where demons, advanced robotics, and zombies co-exist. Film noir mobsters, city politics, urban renewal, Jazz-era New York, and sex collide in Chaykin’s most personal work. Chaykin has said he did not expect Time² to find a large audience, either at the time of its creation or more recently, when the first two graphic novels were collected in hardcover, along with a new full-length story. He proudly affirms that – damn the torpedoes – these stories were for him.

In addition to zombie jazz musicians (above), the comic featured haunted horny police cars…

Sex robot serial killers…

…and legally binding wills that required a black widow murderer to cohabitate with her undead husband for five years before she could inherit his estate.

When he launched the series, Chaykin was coming off his very popular American Flagg! series, which itself was an amalgam of Chaykin’s interests in speculative fiction, late stage capitalism, pop culture, sex kinks, and soft-core porn, which formed the foundation for a series of stories that were part science fiction and part political thriller, with frequent interludes for quickie encounters between the protagonist and various side characters, and sometimes side characters with each other. Only Raul the talking cat missed out.

The 80s were a grand time for comic artists with vision, who were unafraid to indulge their interests and passions in their work. Aztec Ace and Time² are both well-remembered, but I wouldn’t consider either very well known. I’d love for them to find a wider audience, by whatever means.

Others I could have mentioned: Cerebus (sword and sorcery, religion, political satire, gender politics); Zot! (super-heroes, science fiction, art deco); Love & Rockets (science fiction, punk music, magic realism, South American politics, Archie comics). Yes, those are all from the 80s, too. With the exception of Zot!, they all wore their sexual proclivities on their sleeves. That probably says something about me, too.

What kind of novel or story would combine my multiple interests? If I were writing the most indulgent work imaginable, it would likely feature some combination of tough women and mean gays, exclusive clubs, kid gangs and chosen families, political intrigue, family dynasties, comic books, early 20th century European literature, ghosts, Nazis, writers and artists, time travel, talking apex predators, secret societies, conspiracy theories, Celtic mythology, alternate worlds, and doppelgangers.

It would explore themes of identity, purpose, individuality and authenticity, spirituality, alienation, belonging, and sacrifice, wrapped up with more questions than answers. There’d be awkward sex, casual violence, vengeance, loss, family secrets, love’s cruelty, passion for creation, and resistance and dignity in the face of life’s absurdity.

It would definitely mash up genres (SF, fantasy, horror, true crime, murder mystery, superhero, alternative history) and if I could work in an Excel spreadsheet, ice cream, and a dinosaur, I’d be in Heaven.

What about you? If you gave yourself, permission, what’s the most balls to the wall indulgent story you could concoct?

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Writers may find it difficult to bring attention to their work. Thanks to the internet, there are so many more people writing and places to publish and books available for free that it takes a lot of money, luck, or both to rise above the din.

Authenticity can help. In addition to being good for your soul, authenticity makes you more relatable and more memorable. Pursuing your passions – rather than chasing the market – can help you attract like-minded people, the very people who are most likely to enjoy, follow, and share your writing.

So be different. Take risks. Write what no one else is writing. If you follow as many blogs as I do, you’ve probably seen tips like “write a great premise!” and “create interesting characters!”, without any practical advice to back them up. Even when a blogger goes a bit deeper, their recommendations tend to come from the shallow end of what they personally find interesting and likely to sell well, rather than what’s truly unique.

Unlike this week’s look at being honest on the page, you can probably think of many examples of novels with attention-grabbing premises: A mystery told from the POV of an autistic boy (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); a boy goes on a quest to solve a puzzle left behind by his father, who died on 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); a group of residents in a retirement community solve cold case murders (The Thursday Murder Club); etc., etc.

But even the most interesting genre novels – and I love them – are written in a fairly straightforward manner. Characters are introduced, the action rises and falls, the hero falters but probably wins the day, even if the win is not complete or what he expected. The drapery is unique but the scaffolding is familiar. Rarer, though, are those books that play with structure or language.

China Miéville’s The City and the City plays with storytelling and reader experience in an interesting way. In the book, considered part of the New Weird genre, two Eastern-European city-states simultaneously occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each city can see and interact with their counterparts in the other, but are forbidden by law from doing so. From childhood, they are trained to “unsee” the residents and buildings in their sister city, on penalty of being disappeared by a secretive organization known as the Breach. Miéville recreates the eeriness of his setting, describing what his narrator sees and shouldn’t see and unsees, before he introduces the concept of the blended cities. Thus the reader is left to figure out what’s happening. It’s incredibly disorienting and takes time to get accustomed to. In effect, by dropping the reader into the story world without explaining how it functions, Miéville trains the reader to see the world in the same way its citizens are trained to see only their part of it.

Miéville also uses description in an interesting way in The Last Days of New Paris, an alt-history novel in which Paris is still occupied by the Nazis in 1950. Along with guns and hand grenades, weapons of war include living Exquisite Corpses, real-world manifestations of surrealist art. Exquisite Corpse was a parlor game in which images were created by multiple players – usually artists, because of course – each contributing an element in sequence, based on agreed-upon rules. Here’s a classic example.

Want to experience creative brain-freeze? Imagine coming into a novel cold and reading a detailed description of the above and trying to imagine it as a living creature attacking a band of French resistance fighters. The description makes no sense, even upon multiple readings. You might wonder if your copy of the novel is missing some words or if perhaps you’ve had a mild stroke.

When I say that most writing advice isn’t structured to encourage risk-taking and authenticity, this is the kind of work I have in mind. Presented with The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris in draft, the average writing guru would have argued for more context clues or backstory in the early scenes. While Don’t Confuse the Reader is great advice for novices, when that rule is set in stone, we risk losing our ability to surprise, challenge, and delight the reader as well.

Most of us will not rise to the occasion as well as China Miéville or my next inspiration, Alan Moore, whose personality, talents, intellect, and interests are uniquely suited to creative puzzles and complex plots and themes. However, if we’re going to learn, we might as well look to some of the best.

In his short story collection, Voice of the Fire, Moore creates 12 fantasy stories set in the same geographical location in England over the course of multiple centuries, beginning at the end of the Stone Age and continuing through medieval, Victorian, and modern times. Linked by geography, theme, and imagery, the stories are told through the points of view of various characters, including one that presents quite a challenge for the reader.

In “Hob’s Hog”, set in 4000 BC, the narrator is a stone age halfwit who is chased away by his tribe after the death of the mother who protected him. Whether Hob is developmentally challenged or merely an evolutionary left-behind we can’t know, but his vocabulary is extremely limited by modern times. Moore has said that he restricted himself to using some 1,200-1,400 words for the entire 45 page story, which required some creative combinations and permutations to convey what Hob sees and experiences in a way that a modern reader can grasp. Here’s how the story begins:

“A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I. Belly-air come up in mouth, and lick of it is like to lick of no thing. Dry-up blood lump is come black on knee, and is with itch. Scratch I, where is yet more blood come.”

You can see that Hob’s ability to describe himself and his world is constrained. He has no words for behind, atop, smell, stomach, taste, or scab, or even the self-referential me, my, or myself.

Try that on for 45 pages.

It’s not easy to read and there’s certainly no skimming any of its pages, not if you want to follow the whole story. It took me as long to read the first story as it did the remaining twelve. While the story was challenging, the reward was worth it, and I imagine Moore felt the same when he finished writing it.

Few of us will master our craft to the point where we can create a sense of disorientation in our readers or box in their worldview with a limited vocabulary, but we can be bold in our own ways and it never hurts to challenge ourselves. You don’t have to confess a dirty secret to put a lot of yourself on the page.

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For the next few weeks, I’m going to revisit one of my favorite themes and – in my opinion – one of the most important tasks facing any creative writer: Being authentic.

On the plus side, being authentic is as easy as being yourself. There’s only one you and you know that person from the inside out. And if you don’t know yourself, you should. You’re amazing. If you’re not sure where to start, I can recommend some books.

On the down side, writers are inundated by advice that can drain the personality from your work. The market demands such and such. Readers insist on thus and so. If you tried to implement the various have-to’s set forth by the hive mind, your writing might become technically more proficient, but also practically indistinguishable from the manuscript produced by the monkey to your left.

You’ll still find plenty of advice urging you to put yourself into your work – and God bless all of it – but even that guidance is often couched in terms that are intended to render you palatable to the market, whatever that might be this week. You will never read an article in…let’s say Writer’s Digest…urging you to ignore the desires of agents and publishers. No matter how good their advice may be, their articles are intended for writers who want to be steered into the publishing funnel.

I prefer writers who march to their own drum, who write what they want, in the genre and form they want, and who publish in whatever format they want. I would much rather read the interesting but imperfect output of a writer who poured their passion into their work, than a technically well-crafted novel constructed to reach the largest possible audience mass, which could have been written by any anonymous author who mastered the formula. A feature piece in Rolling Stone might be better written, but give me the folded and stapled DIY zine published by a couple of kids who are consumed by love for their favorite local band. One cinematic bomb like Megalopolis is worth 25 by-the-numbers summer blockbusters.

That doesn’t mean we eschew excellence. Excellence and authenticity are not mutually exclusive, but your first responsibility is to yourself. You can become the best possible version of your writing self without one whit of regard for what other people think about your thoughts, passions, dislikes, philosophies, experiences, and observations. In fact, I’d say that’s the latter provides you with the best route for achieving the former.

Of course, being authentic does not mean being half-assed. If you’re going through the bother of writing, you might as well have craft skills. Those skills will help ensure that your authentic self is presented in the best possible way and that your readers pick up what you’re putting down. You may still fail, but do so by ambition, not through laziness.

Let’s call it the Build it and They Will Come School of Writing. Be yourself. Pursue your passions. Avoid the easy answer. Be great. The people who will appreciate you for who you are will find you. They may be outnumbered by the crowd who want the book equivalent of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, but that smaller group is more valuable than rubies. Those are your people.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about some writers who did it their way, who infused their work with their idiosyncrasies, geek interests, intrusive thoughts, political POVs, and secrets Batman couldn’t beat out of most people. As always, your mileage may vary, but IMO, these are writers who did it dirty and got it right. I guarantee every one of them were told not to do it that way, and every one got blasted by critics for doing it anyway.

I have a half dozen or so books to discuss over the next few weeks. Today, I’m resharing a post from last year, about a writer who wasn’t afraid to be ugly.

Writers are told to write truthfully and to be authentic. Be brave. Don’t hold back. Put yourself on the page. I’ve given that same advice here on the blog a few times.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says that if people wanted you to write nicely about them, they should have behaved better. Notwithstanding issues of libel, your experiences, your emotions, your pain, and your successes belong to you. You can and should write about them, even if the particulars are disguised as fiction.

For all that advice, I don’t see too many people sharing examples of what it means to be raw and truthful on the page. Who’s done it successfully? How did they do it? What worked? Someone may throw out a villainous protagonist, like Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, or the unreliable narrator in Fight Club. But they’re not exactly what I’m looking for in this context. At heart, most of us can’t relate to such characters. I have no doubt that Patricia Highsmith lived vicariously through Tom Ripley, using his victims as stand-ins for people she would have liked to club in real life, but catharsis isn’t necessarily the same as emotional truth.

Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield may be a good example. J.D. Salinger portrays Holden’s crisis of faith in heartbreaking detail, showing how grief can render us irrational and unlikeable. That’s probably something Salinger experienced himself. Most people wouldn’t enjoy spending an evening around such an obnoxious boy, but by the end of his story, we understand the source of his anger. While he annoys many readers, the chip on his shoulder is shrouded in black crepe, ultimately rendering him sympathetic.

But what about truths that aren’t disguised as fiction? Could I find an example of a writer who didn’t distance themselves from their worst aspects via a fictional character? As I brainstormed this topic for the blog, this memoir leapt to mind, a book by someone bold enough to put her ugliest self on the page.

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell

In Cleaving, Julie Powell – most famous for her first memoir, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen – in part shares her obsession with learning to render butchered animals. After a few false starts, she lands an apprenticeship with Fleischer’s, a family-owned butcher shop in upstate New York. Powell’s experience at Fleischer’s takes up a good half of the book, and she doesn’t hold back on the details. A reader may be either fascinated or repulsed by her descriptions of the butchered and skinned animals, how they are rendered, and what’s left when the process is done, but the writing is sensual and compelling.

However, the story of Powell’s apprenticeship is merely the brown paper wrapped around the real meat of the memoir, the emotional butchery done to Powell’s husband, Eric, via Julie’s ongoing affair with a former lover.

Again, Powell doesn’t hold back. She does herself no favors in her writing. She gives no reason for the affair, other than physical obsession. She doesn’t pretend that it’s love. Her husband is aware of the affair throughout, yet doesn’t seek a divorce. Sadly – selfishly, cruelly – neither does Julie. Instead, she desires both the comfort of her marriage and the physical thrill of her affair, regardless of the emotional turmoil her husband suffers. Even when the affair ends, Powell waits for messages from her former lover, like a junkie craving a hit. When she’s gone from home too long, her husband suspects they are together, the trust in the marriage broken.

Throughout the memoir, I waited for a reversal – a reason for the affair, a realization on Powell’s part, or a change in her outlook that would lead her either to end or fix her marriage – but Powell doesn’t give herself that out. She remains unfathomably selfish and fails to identify what she’s missing or what she seeks.

And yet, I still rooted for her to figure it out. Even through the final pages of the memoir, I wanted Powell to share what she learned, what insight she gleaned from this years-long trainwreck she created from her marriage, but she withheld this from the reader. It would have been easy to craft a pat ending or convince the reader that she’d learned her lesson, but the final tone is a messy one, as life often is. She declines to rescue her reputation, which is brave AF.

Strangely, had this been fiction rather than a memoir, I’m sure I would have hated the book. Somehow, diving into the mind of a messy human is a much easier ask than following a selfish fictional narrator. In fiction, we crave resolution, catharsis, some lesson learned, or an emotional change. In this case, we might want a punishment.  We’d root for Eric to find the resolution Julie denies him. Powell doesn’t give the reader any of that, which is very true to life. We behave in ways we can’t predict, that contradict our morals and beliefs. We hurt people we love. We don’t learn lessons. We don’t find our motivation. We simply are, and sometimes that’s not attractive.

This wasn’t an easy read, especially as the version of Julie Powell in my head is the cute Amy Adams movie version. I was left with admiration for Powell as a writer, while disliking her immensely as a person. You don’t have to reveal yourself as fully as Powell does in Cleaving, but if you want a good example of a writer allowing herself to be raw and truthful on the page, you can start with this memoir, whose writer wasn’t afraid to be ugly with a capital Ugh.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

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Even if you don’t write science fiction, the Science Fiction Writers Association blog is worth an occasional glance. The association advocates for SF and its writers, shares industry news, and presents the Nebula Awards, if those things are of interest.

On its blog, in between obituaries, market reports, and writer-beware posts, SFWA sometimes publishes articles about writing craft. I find them hit or miss, honestly, but there are enough strong posts that it’s worthwhile for me to check in once in a while.

Recently I was rewarded with this post by Albert Zhang, who examines science fiction worldbuilding through economics. Rather than merely considering the what and why of your story world’s economic history, Zhang suggests asking the following questions:

• What is the payoff?
• What is the cost, and who is paying it?
• What are the main externalities?

Using the fictional example of the discovery of an asteroid containing $100 quintillion in gold, Zhang first examines the payoff. With that much available gold, demand would likely plummet, meaning mining companies would rush to get there first, while demand lasts. In contrast, what if the availability of that much inexpensive gold changes Earth culture? Perhaps mining or transporting is more difficult than expected or maybe demand shifts to different materials that weren’t considered valuable in the short term. Any of these scenarios could create additional layers of worldbuilding behind your main story.

Next, Zhang examines costs. Who is investing in asteroid mining and why? What is the payoff for people who take mining jobs? Are governments in charge or corporations? How do these dynamics intertwine or shift over time? What happens when the cost is too high?

Finally, Zhang examines externalities. “Externalities are the tangled patterns of cause and effect that spring from singular events, and they can be arbitrarily complex,” he explains. For example, who benefits from asteroid mining besides the investors and workers? What side businesses or economic cultures arise around this industry? Does the availability of this gold affect the cost and value of other goods? Who is losing out? Is the local area affected by the strip mining of asteroids or pollution? Does travel become more dangerous? Are residents displaced? What happens to the gold mines of Earth, which are now less attractive investments?

I don’t write much science fiction, and what I do write leans towards space opera, rather than hard SF. My worldbuilding tends to be wiggly. However, Zhang’s advice can apply to any genre of writing. Many fantasy novels rely on economic worldbuilding, and many a mystery hinges on who stands to gain from a financial matter.

In my backburnered novel-in-progress, the characters’ social status and the economic development of their community – and the structural changes that might result – serve as a backdrop to the plot and conflict. I found myself asking who is doing what and why, and who will benefit from the development, and how that can help me arrange my characters on the story board. Who is winning and losing and how do they feel about that? To what lengths will someone go to thwart a competitor, preserve the status quo, or ensure that their side of an argument comes out on top?

While I don’t need to imagine the economic ramifications of an asteroid belt containing trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals – old Earth newspapers suffice for my purposes –these questions are pointing me to what matters to my cast and how they feel about it and what they’ll do to preserve their way of life.

Are you a consistent writer? How do you define consistency?

You’ll hear a lot of advice on writing habits, often enunciated as things you “must” do. You must write every day. You must have a schedule. I don’t find that very helpful, and in fact, those kinds of dictates can be discouraging for anyone who enjoys writing but hasn’t the time.

Habits are helpful. Our brains respond to routine, and can be trained to respond to external signals – time of day, a specific chair. Some writers say that aroma – incense or tea, for example – triggers their creative shift.

But sometimes writers use habits less as a tool and more like a bludgeon. They become so committed to the habit, that they lose sight of other necessities. They become rigid, sometimes a little angry looking. Worse, missing a writing session or failing to hit a project goal can completely derail a creative person, and rather than jumping back into our habit the next day, we beat ourselves up for breaking it. For me, this defeats the purpose of embracing your creativity. If it ain’t fun, why are you doing it?

I consider myself a regular writer. My goal is to write 500 words every day, including weekends. At the beginning of the week, I aim for that 3,500-word weekly goal, and if I reach it early, I can take my foot off the gas.

However, reality doesn’t always line up to plan. Sometimes, I will write for 45 – 50 days in a row, and well exceed my 500-word goal. Some weeks I struggle to have even two writing sessions and barely squeak out a few hundred words. And sometimes, there are zeroes across the board. It happens.

But it doesn’t phase me. I view the good weeks as a word bank, and even when I need to skip a few days or even a few weeks, I can stay in line with my annual word count and project goals. If I fall a little bit behind, one or two good weeks is usually enough to get me back on track. And if I totally tank, I start a new spreadsheet and pretend the old one doesn’t exist. A fresh slate is a thing of beauty.

In one of his recent email newsletters, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, offered another angle on consistency, which I like enough to share.

Want to be more consistent in your habits? Stop focusing on being disciplined and unwavering, and instead focus on being adaptable.

“Don’t have much time? Scale it down. Don’t have much energy? Do the easy version. Find different ways to show up depending on the circumstances. Let your habits change shape to meet the demands of the day.”

In other words, be the water, not the rock.

In writing, we talk about putting our characters’ through the wringer. We build them up only to tear them down. We give them gifts and rip them away.

But deciding what to give and what to take away can be difficult. Our protagonist’s surroundings and possessions should have a personal, emotional meaning attached to them. They should also reflect the theme, help create the story world, and further the plot. How can you pick the right details that will help you add layers of symbolism to your story?

In a post on Writer Unboxed (one of my regular go-to sites for writing advice), Therese Walsh suggests an interesting path into your characters’ psyches:

What would they save in a fire?

“Moments of crisis can become a powerful lens that reveals character in a way few other situations can,” she says. “That’s because the pressure to choose has a way of calling everyone’s bluff—revealing core values and hidden attachments beyond the easier-to-explore surface of character. It calls the author’s bluff too, as pushing a character into the fire can illuminate for you what’s important to them.”

Imagine your hero is faced with a literal fire and has only minutes to choose what – if anything – to save. Ask:

• What’s the most revealing item your protagonist could choose to save? How does this represent their values?
• Is there an object that contributes to their sense of self? Rather than something of monetary value, consider what would be sentimentally or emotionally valuable. What is the one object that represents your character as a person?
• Can a character’s attachment to certain items become a subtle way to hint at deeper, hidden layers of their story?
• What do they leave behind? This can be as revealing as what they save. This might be something they forgot about, something they didn’t have time to choose, or something they left behind intentionally.
• Does the object represent unresolved conflict, either with someone else or internally?
• How might your character’s choices in a crisis highlight their arc over the course of your novel? Do they save an object they later realize they don’t need or abandon something they later wished they’d saved?
• What happens if they lose the item they save? Sometimes, what a character would save is exactly what the story needs to strip from them. How do they react to this second-layer loss?
• Does the loss create ripples or lead to another loss? Does the loss upset them emotionally and distract them? How does the character function without this symbol?

What would I save?

• Me, of course. My dog when I still had her.
• My car keys, wallet, and phone (mobility, financial sustenance, communication).
• My laptop, which has the rest of my life and all my writing on it.

Can I make two trips?

• The box with the deed to my house and my financial documents.

Do I have time to pack the car? In the case of the California wildfires, some people had a bit of warning and time to evacuate. But now, my choices get dicey. Do I pack up:

• A few irreplaceable keepsakes and mementos?
• Photo albums?
• My journals and notebooks?
• My favorite pieces of art?
• Some expensive comics I couldn’t afford to replace?

Only the first short list is non-negotiable. If my dog couldn’t go, I wouldn’t leave. My keys, wallet, phone, and laptop usually sit in the same spot, so it would take no more than a few seconds to sweep them up. Even without the car, I could easily carry all of that in a backpack.

I could leave everything else without a second thought, and moan about it later. In fact, having time to pack up a car would probably be more stressful for me than being forced to run at a moment’s notice. My fight or flight instinct is way keener than my executive decision making skills.

What does that say about me?

I prize living beings over objects, and would rather die than sacrifice someone I love. I have financial stability and people I can call for help. My writing is my heart, my voice, and my life.

I am resilient. I know I can start over with nothing because I’ve done it. I know I can survive a loss because I’ve had to let things go. I wouldn’t like to lose everything I own in a fire, but I’m confident in my ability to bounce back. Whatever I lose, I’ll get back, inch by inch if I have to.

At heart, I am tragically unsentimental. While that statement would seem comical to anyone who could see the amount of crap I hoard, stuff is just stuff. The question of throwing away something that reminds me of an old friend is very different from the question of what I need to survive.

And the answer to the latter is my writing, some cash, and someone to love.

Of course, your interpretation of my character may vary. And that’s ok, because it’s your story.

Honestly, I’d make a terrible protagonist. My hero’s journey ends with the Refusal of the Call. I have naps to take. However, your hero is likely a bit more dynamic. Does your hero save their father’s sword, the family Bible or recipe book, a deceased spouse’s photo or wedding ring, a trophy that symbolizes their one victory in life, an article of clothing intended for a special occasion, a piece of art they created, a plan for their dream business, incriminating photos they’ve been using to blackmail someone, the car they’ve been restoring? What is so important to the core of their being that they’d risk their life for it?

The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. – Flannery O’Connor

Writers love casting writers as their protagonists. Our heroes are usually novelists, but often playwrights and journalists, only occasionally poets, and these days I imagine there are plenty of stories about bloggers. We write what we know.

But what else do you know? In a guest post on the highly recommended Jane Friedman’s blog, Joshua Doležal says every writer should keep a list of topics on which we are an authority.

You may already keep a list of authorities in different areas – your co-worker who loves gardening or your friend the World War II buff. You might ask your doctor about certain diseases. I’m certain everyone reading this has a lengthy list of bookmarks to all kinds of websites on esoteric topics.

But what do you know?

Doležal recommends starting a list of topics that we could teach someone about. His list included parenting, songwriting, baseball, gardening, teaching, and wilderness conservation. (I imagine his future adult children might have something to say about that first topic, but I’ll let that slide.) “The more you add to your list, the more you’ll remember,” he says.

Once you begin that list, you might see scenes developing. When you identify an authority area, break it down into multiple discrete tasks that you must know well to be an authority. Then think about times you used these skills – What was the situation? Who was there? Did you gain or lose anything from the encounter?

Rather than making a list of topics to write about, your goal is to generate memories. Find what intrigues or captivates you and search for the nugget of knowledge or insight that you might share.

My list of things I can talk about ad nauseum with some intelligence:

Comic books, Mormonism, U.S. presidential politics, government contract law and regulations, pulp fiction magazines, the gay civil rights movement, mindfulness, podcasting and audio editing, libraries, U.S. history 1920-1945, self-publishing, publication design. And writing.

The makings of a real potboiler.