Posts Tagged "Prepare To Die"

• Sleeping on the job IS my job

  Balance
  

  Paul Tobin

  This week’s topic is about taking a day of rest from writing, and whether it’s a necessary part of writing or a horrible and wretched sin.

  Right up front, let me say that there is only one absolute sin when it comes to writing a novel. Not getting it done. That’s it. Beyond anything else, you must finish the first draft, and the first revision, and all subsequent revisions. However you go about it is up to you, but you must have that moment when you look at the file on the computer, or you look at the stack of papers, and you say, “Done.” There is no sin beyond not working for and having that moment. Anything else is just how you play the game.

  One of the questions that I get asked a lot is, “How do you do it?” It’s a fair question, and some people are actually asking exactly what it sounds like, but a far larger amount of people are actually trying to ask, “How can I do it?” And that’s an entirely different question. It’s also one I can’t possibly answer. Every person is unique, and every writer is even MORE unique, and a system of writing that works wonderfully for one person might actually kill another writer’s career, or even passion to write.

  So, when talking about taking a day of rest, I can only answer what works for me, and that is that I simply don’t do it. I write every day I exist. I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it. I’ve applied to no support groups. What does work for me is an occasional nap during the work day… a time where I sprawl out and read and then nod off for a half hour or so. Some authors would be horrified at the thought of losing an hour or two in the middle of the day, but for me it extends the day and refreshes my mind. Those horrified writers can toddle off with their own writing methodologies, and for those who do like to take naps in the middle of the day, I can only say that my bed is reserved between 4:00 and 5:30, so unless you’re very pretty and either have a permission slip from my wife or a reasonably decent forgery, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

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• I Got It Covered

  Cover Art
  

  (not) Paul Tobin

  One of the things that constantly amazes me about the book publishing world is how little control over the cover that most authors have. As a naive youth, I pictured authors strolling into art studios, looking over cover designs with a critical eye, cuffing artists on the back of the head in justified displeasure, then sketching out a few quick designs which the artists would fawn over, gathering around like koi when crumbs are spilled into a stream, and then running off to their drawing boards to do as they were told.

  Oh no. Not at all.

  In reality, it’s more along the lines of a marketer telling an artist what to do, and then the artist doing up the art, and then a designer honing it according to several unassailable principles, and then getting the publisher to okay it. There! Done! Around about this point, there’s generally a moment when a marketing intern, new to her craft, asks, “What did the writer think of it?” At that moment the marketer says, “Oh, yeah… I suppose we could email him a jpeg to let him know how it’s going to look.” They do so, and then everyone returns to their cocktails. Most writers aren’t very much a part of the process at all.

  This, of course, makes it very difficult to judge a book by its cover. Horribly horribly hard.

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• Bad to the bone… of the story

  Creativity
  

  Paul Tobin

  This week, the topic is villains, and just how bad these bad boys should be. And, as always in regards to “rules for authors,” the answer is… that depends.

  Like anything else, a villain is there to serve the story. This means that a villain and a story should be compatible. They should fit together. You don’t write a picture book where the villain collects the faces of dead children, and you don’t write a contemporary adult thriller about a villain who is trying to steal all of New York’s pudding. Divisions of “bad” play a very secondary role to the appropriateness of the villain.

  And these divisions aren’t as clear-cut as I make them seem, above. This is because a villain should also be appropriate to the protagonist, and to the reader. If the protagonist has established family troubles, then the villain can play against that… kidnap a family member, or simply in some way intrude in a very personal way on the antagonist, so that there is no sanctuary at any level. And this intrusion should also play to the reader’s fears and tension. Just because you have a hero who has a hobby of collecting vintage tobacco packaging doesn’t mean an author should have the villain play against that by defacing all the vintage tobacco pouches with magic marker drawings of anthropomorphic genitalia. Sure, it would be traumatic to a man who has dedicated his life to tobacco collecting, but that doesn’t mean it would resonate with the reader. The villain, the hero and the reader must all connect in order to create entertaining book.

  Only with all that in place can we move on to the second stage.

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• I Stand Alone! (maybe)

  Series vs. Standalone
  

  Paul Tobin

  Well, after saying goodbye last week, here I am again. Turns out that Night Shade had a wee bit more free space for my compatriots and I to share our thoughts, and I couldn’t pass up a chance to talk about this week’s topic of writing stand-alone books vs. writing a series. It’s something that’s been heavily on my mind as I consider how I’d like the path of my career to evolve, and it’s a monstrously huge decision.

  Let’s make up a series, here, for the benefit of this post. Maybe something with a werewolf. A female werewolf. In Regency times. A lesser noblewoman with a curse. Okay… the Hirsute Heiress. Boom. We’ve got our book. Now, as I plot out the adventures of the Hirsute Heiress, I’m envisioning an arc that lasts between five to seven books. The first book will be of how she’s sold into a form of slavery with a traveling carnival, and then how she grows to command them into an underground army of thieves and ne’er-do-wells. In the second book she tries to regain her family fortune, but the criminal Jonathan Wild has cheated them into the poorhouse. It’s time for a Newgate prison break! This will be great… I could write on this for years.

  But… should I?

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• Time Machine Wanted

  Managing promotion vs. writing vs. your personal life.
  

  Paul Tobin

  This week my fellow authors and I are all talking about managing time as a writer. That is we will all talk about it, if we have the time. You might note that some of us have missed a post here and there. Don’t judge us too harshly. When I became a professional writer, I had no idea how much of my writing time would be devoured by the day-to-day demands of being a writer. There’s a chunk of time that’s needed to write. A chunk of time needed to work on the business of being a writer. And there’s time for a personal life. I’m lucky enough to make my living as a writer… but most writers also have “daily job” thrown into the mix. I’m in awe of people who can do all of this. Jeff Salyards, for instance, has three daughters, and that he’s able to find time for everything marks him as superhuman as any of the characters in my Prepare To Die! novel. I myself have no children, no pets, and only one plant in the house… so my responsibilities are quite low, and I certainly don’t have to worry about teenage boys eventually wanting to date my African Violet, despite how it occasionally flowers in a delicate and alluring manner.

  

  When you got it, flaunt it.

  The fact of the matter is, I can easily put in a twelve hour day of writing, all without working on a single project. I’ve had weeks where I, barring only rewrites, didn’t have a chance to work on an actual project. Interviews and blogs take time. A lot of time. And emails chomp through my days like black holes. If I have a day when I write 30 emails, I consider myself lucky that I got off so easily. Even working on my twitter is a part of my professional life, because it’s as important for an author to remind readers that we exist as is it for Ford trucks to show television advertisements, and for Gillette razors to remind you that the mere act of shaving summons an aroused woman into your steamy bathroom.

  So, how does one organize time for everything? Frankly, it’s a question I wouldn’t mind solving myself. My own version of solving it involves scrambling. All the time. scrambling. It’s like all my various deadlines and responsibilities are whizzing around me at all time, like flies. If a particular fly gets too close, I’ll swat it. Smack! That’s one deadline solved.

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• It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s angst.

  Comics: Tights vs. existential angst
  

  Paul Tobin

  This week’s theme is on comics, and tights versus existential angst. It’s a topic I feel especially qualified for, as writing superheroes is rather my day job, having written two or three hundred comics in the past few years, including all of the “big” heroes, such as Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the Hulk, the Avengers, Wonder Woman, and so on. I know me some angst.

  In many ways, it’s superhero angst that drove me to write my Prepare To Die! novel. Comic books are normally twenty-two pages long. That’s not much room. In fact, recently, many comics went down from twenty-two to twenty pages long, and I can tell you those two pages make a huge difference. That’s suddenly 10% of possible storytelling vanished, and that can make the difference between a well thought out scene and a jumbled mish-mash of happenstance.

  Because of this lack of room, there’s not a lot of space to develop a character, to get into what is making a character tick… into just why he or she is doing what’s happening on the page. Comics tend to take to the school of “action and reaction” storytelling, even more so because comics are very much a visual medium, so it’s important to have visually interesting action. This is why Spider-Man is often thinking about his relationships, or having deep inner thoughts, even as he’s bouncing over rooftops and fighting a horde of ninjas. You wouldn’t think that a man who’s dodging 30,000 arrows and shurikens would be considering if he should take a date to a certain club, anxious over worries that his girlfriend might be there… but that’s what Spidey has to do, and for a very good reason. That’s the only place where the writer can put it. And, anyway, it makes for better copy than “Holy crap! I sure do hope I can dodge all 30,000 arrows and shurikens!”

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• Pro Tip: Do Not Drown A Man

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.
  

  Paul Tobin

  The thing about writing cultures that are not our own is that, I personally believe, we’re NEVER writing about our own cultures. We’re either reaching out to explore other cultures, or, as authors, we’re exploring aspects of our own cultures as we would like them to be, or we fear them to be, or a mixture of the two. Any two people will look at the same culture with different perspective. Hell… the same author will look at a culture differently on any given month, week, day, hour, minute, etc. It can depend on the weather, current state of employment, last time we were smart enough or dumb enough to check the news, how long it’s been since we’ve gotten laid, etc. If we’re happy, we see our own culture in one way, and if we’re not happy we see it in another, and of course we’re all prone to mood swings that take our thoughts and our writings into different directions. Bottom line, we are not documentarists; we’re authors, and our personal bias shapes our words as easily as our words shape our fiction.

  Beyond that, culture is shaped by identity. I live in Portland, Oregon. It’s my stomping ground, my nest, my life and my culture. I can write “Portland” with relative ease. Unless, that is, I decide I’m writing from the viewpoint of a 12 year old girl, or a seventy year old homeless man. Then, “Portland” becomes an entirely different culture. Some doors are opened. Some doors are closed. It’s important to remember, as an author, that “culture” should never be reduced to the simplistic equation of where a character lives in the world, or in the universe. Cultures thrive and die within other cultures.

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• The Thin Gray Line

  "Anti hero" doesn't mean "bad guy"!
  

  Paul Tobin

  The topic of this post is near and dear to me, because I’ve seen way too many outright bad guys portrayed as heroes… meaning absolute merciless killers considered as “anti-heroes” rather than as… well… merciless killers. When an author (for prose, film, comics, television, etc) wants an anti-hero, the most common (and laziest) way to portray that is by having the hero commit countless numbers of variably-leveled crimes, and that’s fine. But only to a point. For me, one of the quintessential anti-heroes is Dashiell Hammett’s “Continental Op” character, especially in Red Harvest. He’s always forced to lie in his reports to the agency… he has a string of petty crimes and a string of fairly major crimes as well. He’s broken a couple hearts he knew damn well he was breaking. He’s broken a few men that he took a measure of pleasure in breaking. He’s broken a few bottles after a long night of drinking. He’s broken the law and he’s broken nearly every moral code. But he has a line that he doesn’t cross. He’s not an outright murderer. He doesn’t torture. He’s doing a job that he thinks needs to be done. He’s moving the world in a direction that he thinks it needs to move and he’s willing to die not for the glory of it all, and not even because he necessarily thinks it’s the way of justice, but simply because that’s who he is. It’s what he does.

  And then there’s the other side of the coin.

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• Child Wonder vs. Adult Realization: FIST FIGHT!

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.
  

  Paul Tobin

  Having once been a child myself, and happily suffering through continual relapses, it’s obvious that my adult writings are influenced by the children’s fantasy stories that I once read, and that I continue to read. That said, I’ve never been a big believer in the saying of the “child’s sense of wonder.” I won’t deny that children have a sense of wonder regarding their world and the possibilities it contains, but the saying seems to deny adults our own sense of wonder, as if I and other adults were supposed to pack up our sense of wonder as soon as we grew hair on our genitalia or crashed our first car and realized we could not, sadly, fix it either by leaping back in time or by using nothing more than the exquisite power of our minds.

  Well… I refuse to pack up my sense of wonder. I won’t do that. I will hold my breath and pass out unless I’m told that it’s okay to be an adult and still make up stories in my mind. The stories that I make up might have a good deal more adult themes (my rescued alien princesses would be disappointed with a mere kiss) but the template for other worlds, for greater powers, for noble warriors and witches and so forth, it all stems from the scribblings I was doing way back when I was supposed to be studying geography, or when I was at the library, wondering what to read next, what world to explore. And children’s literature has so many worlds… so many universes where we can walk through wardrobes or land our spaceships or drink a shrinking potion and suddenly we get to play an array of new games with fantastical creatures.

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• The 500 pound gorilla named Envy

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?
  

  Paul Tobin

  The topic here is envy. Jealousy. The green monster that’s not the Hulk, but which can smash everything apart just as easily. Wikipedia notes that envy is also called invidiousness, which I believe is a word no one has ever used, and if they have used it, then they have a vocabulary of which I am envious. The philosopher Bertrand Russel said that envy is one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, while the poet Philip James Bailey said, “Envy’s a coal comes hissing hot from hell,” which makes me think that, despite how Bailey died in 1902, he would still be an excellent choice to be the head lyricist for InvidiouS & M, my new heavy metal band:

  So, have I ever experienced envy as a writer? Of course. I’ve had plenty of people envy what I’ve done, and I’ve certainly envied the writings of other authors. It’s simply not possible to avoid wishing to have a series of books as popular as the Harry Potter novels, and to bank a billion dollars for the efforts of gaining worldwide love and acclaim. Hell, I’m even envious of Stephanie Meyer… not that I think the Twilight novels are any great works of fiction, but

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