About three years ago I was working on an original screenplay called Black Rocket . It started life back in the mid-90s as a novel about a telepathy-enducing drug that gets loose and turns airborne on a small resort island in New England (okay so far) and is eventually manipulated by a team of FBI agents (hmmm...) one of whom is actually a serial killer (wait a second) who discovers that the drug is really designed to prepare the world for an alien invasion (stop, wait, arrgghh!)
In other words, about three too many ideas balled up into one semi-coherent freewheeling manuscript. Way too complicated, but the notion of a drug that prepares the world for some massive mind-bending event would not leave my mind. So I rewrote it as a horror screenplay, this time beginning in Iraq, about a drug designed by some terrorist faction (okay so far) as a way of bringing about a satanic apocalypse (hmmm...) In other words, still a lot of ideas, but I thought with a kind of Jacob's Ladder-meets-Angel Heart vibe, I might be able to pull it off. I showed it to a few people and eventually started developing it with this fellow out in LA. We reworked it a lot, and one of the consistent notes that he gave me on the various drafts of the script -- one that drove me absolutely batshit more often than not -- was, "You have to have rules."
Rules: such as, why does the drug work? When does it take effect? How long does it last? Are the results physical, or strictly in the protagonist's mind? Why does it happen some times and not others?
I struggled long and hard to create rules for the phenomena in Black Rocket, and eventually I ended up with a pile of exposition so convoluted that it made the small intestine look absolutely straight by comparison. The final result was such a complicated botch that it was ultimately tossed into a big Rubbermaid tub where all unfinished projects lanquish, waiting to be championed. I went on to write more fiction. The development executive went on to produce Black Christmas.
Yet the maddening advice remains: You have to have rules.
And obviously you do. Especially in horror and fantasy. The farther afield you venture from the realms what might loosely be termed reality, the more important it is establish boundaries of behavior and possibility. You don't have to spell these rules out, may not even have to mention them, but your characters must obey them, whatever they are, for the internal logic of the thing you're working on to walk right. If you don't, the reader will know and worse, you'll know, and the thing to which you're pouring all your heart and soul into will begin to feel slippery and amorphous in your hands.
The corollary to this statement is another note from Hollywood that drove me crazy, and that is, "Why is this happening to this particular protagonist now?" It's a somewhat generic note, but immensely valuable -- moreso when you're starting a project then when you're already six months into it and trying to fix the structural flaws that stand between you and publication. To receive this note on a finished product is to know genuine heartache and despair: you can wander far, far off your original path trying to find reasons to justify why your story is happening to your main character, and the results can be equally soggy.
The best case scenario is for both the rules and the reasons for your particular protagonist's involvement to emerge as organically as possible from the idea while it's still in the early incubation period.
For example, let's say that you just came up with a great idea for a thriller called, let's say, "Calm Like a Bomb." The basic thrust is that the main character is implanted with a thermonuclear device by a domestic terrorist cell, with the intention of blowing up a major metropolitan city. The twist: just before our walking time bomb goes off, something happens -- something as seemingly unimportant as a minor fender bender -- that jars the device, temporarily disarming it, and our main character goes off on a walkabout, ends up in some small town, gets involved with a group of everyday familiar people with readily sympathetic issues, and eventually we come to care about him (and them) knowing all the while that the terrorist faction that designed him will do whatever it takes to recover him. And all the while he is ticking...and ticking...and ticking.
Now this used to be the kind of thing that made me want to jump in and start writing. It's more than enough to get started with, right? Unfortunately, I've started previous projects with much, much less -- little more than my own enthusiasm -- only to find myself shipwrecked fifty, or a hundred, or two hundred pages later. All of a sudden you look around and you're the only one left at the party with no idea where everybody else went. That's because the narrative hi-test that got you this far has run out, and the go-go juice you need to create the suspense that will carry you and your readers through the rest of the story...the real guts of the story...relies on the rules and rationale that you didn't take the time to think through in the first place. There's nothing at stake because you haven't established the stakes. And now you are, in words of the British Navy, well and truly fucked.
I'm not proposing that you outline the entire project -- I don't outline, but that's a matter of personal preference -- or even make yourself write the rules and why-this-guy-now explanation before you start Chapter One or Scene One, or whatever. What is vital, really, is to keep these things in the forefront of your mind as you write, knowing that this continuous investment of mind and heart will pay dividends by the time you arrive in Act 3. Knowing the rules, and describing them as necessary throughout the work, creates a feeling of narrative anticipation, and will have the effect of building suspense in the minds of your readers as they intuitively come to realize what will be at stake as you approach the climax of your story.
In the case of our walking time-bomb, let's begin with questions: what is he, really? A robot? A human-machine hybrid? A clone with Terminator-style lack of affect? How human is he? And how does this relate to the bomb in his chest?
And the bomb...what initially disarmed it? Are we talking about a kind of toggle-effect that can be reversed in Act 3 to set the literal clock ticking again? How does Mr. Calm Like a Bomb feel about that...or how will he feel, after we've heightened the stakes by introducing a group of all-too-human secondary characters and made him a part of their lives and domestic problems? How much does our main character know and when does he know it?
These processes, as I said, don't have to be written out in any kind of timeline before you undertake the project, but if you don't think about them while you're writing, the finished product will be, at least in some large part, an exercise in futility and frustration. All the things that could go right with the story, all the fantasy elements that could serve to italicize and accentuate the human elements, will instead sabotage it and leave you with something that nobody -- not even you -- will want to read.
When you're writing fantasy and horror, enthusiasm isn't enough.
You have to know the rules.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Staying Alive
NOTE: This is a re-post of something that appeared briefly on my blog last week, then vanished. Now it's back.
I had a long talk with my editor Friday morning. Long talks are usually not great—the short ones are often way better—“Dude, you’re totally a genius!” “Dude, I totally agree!” That kind of thing.
This wasn’t quite that kind of talk.
What it came down to is that Eat the Dark is going to be released in trade paperback this fall, not hardcover, as originally planned.
Let me preface all this the way that Charlie Huston does when he talks about this exact same thing at greater length, and say, there are a lot bigger problems in the world, one might say, real problems, than this scenario I’m about to lay out. To paraphrase Charlie, I might very well be the only one on Planet Earth who gives a shit how the book comes out, and I ought to be grateful that I’m getting published at all. And I am, believe me. There were years and years where I couldn’t get anything published to save my life. There’s not a day that goes by, literally, that I don’t feel grateful for having my work in print, just like there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t thank God for my kids. I’m wired that way.
But there’s no getting around the fact that seeing your book in hardcover is very cool and very gratifying. At first sight a book is often treated with more gravitas because it’s a hardcover, both by buyers and readers, and there are people out there, I’m sure, who only buy hardcovers. I’m not one of them—I almost never buy hardcovers—but then again, all I seem to buy these days are groceries and the occasional bottle of Early Times if I can find some pennies under the sofa.
But I digress.
The point is that, while I had both hoped and assumed that Eat the Dark would come out in hardcover, just like Chasing the Dead did, the people who make these kind of decisions had already started steering the ship in the other direction.
The short, blunt, cruel explanation for this is that Chasing the Dead, despite good reviews, a great price, a grabbing cover and hard work from the publicity and marketing people, didn’t sell as well as Ballantine had hoped. Now that’s an ugly truth to have to face—it makes me feel a little queasy just to type it—but it’s a fact of the business, and not an uncommon one. First novels are tough. Horror is tough. Hardcovers are tough. There are probably lots of theories about how things could’ve gone better, but that kind of Monday morning quarterbacking always manages to make me feel worse rather than better and anyway, we did all we could, all of us. It just didn’t set the world on fire like we’d all hoped. There’s a fine line between learning from your mistakes and moping over what could’ve been and if I’m going to step over that line I’ll do it in private where nobody has to smell the results.
The even crueler and more blunt truth at the bottom of all of this, lurking down there like one of those brutal prehistoric looking fish, is that when buyers from chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble look at a new book and decide how many they want to order, they check the sales of the last one and adjust their orders accordingly, and these are the things that determine print run. In this case, the hardcover print run for a book like Eat the Dark (original retail price somewhere north of twenty-one bucks; now a bargain in trade paperback at 12.95) would be significantly less than Chasing the Dead. And when that hypothetic hardcover didn’t sell through its print run, the buy for my next book would be dropped even further. It’s a depressing pathway and it can lead straight down the crapper. An author can undersell himself right out of a career so fast that he doesn’t know what hit him.
So then the question: what the hell do you do? You can just throw the next hardcover out there and pray for a front page review on the New York Times, you can abort completely and go back to grad school, or you can get creative and try to find a way to get the author’s work into as many people’s hands as possible.
What my editor confirmed for me this morning on the phone—the most important part of the conversation, to my weak and easily addled brain—is that Random House/Ballantine/Del Rey is committed to growing me as an author. And that’s ultimately far more important than whether or not Eat the Dark gets published in hardcover, paperback or on the back of a box of Froot Loops, for that matter. My editor (let’s call him Keith, since that’s his name) also told me that he can’t wait to read my next book, which—I’m guessing—will probably also end up being released as a trade paperback. And that’s cool. Because honestly, who among us has twenty bucks to plonk down every time they find a book that looks promising? If paperbacks are what’s going to allow high school libraries, housewives and convicted felons serving hard time to read Eat the Dark, The Black Wing, or whatever’s next, then by all means so be it.
Because make no mistake. Publishing isn’t what it was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, or twenty seconds ago. Spend some time online and you’ll find out that everybody has ideas about how and why stuff sells or doesn’t. We’re adrift off the Islets of Langerhans. My point is that you need to survive as an author before you can hope to “break out” as one, and survival often means casting off things that seem precious and wonderful so that some sweet day you can hopefully turn some kind of profit for the good people who publish your work. In the meantime it would do all of us well to remember that, when the ship is adrift at sea, the cabin boy is usually the first one eaten.
In this case, the hardcover is the cabin boy.
So pass the salt.
I had a long talk with my editor Friday morning. Long talks are usually not great—the short ones are often way better—“Dude, you’re totally a genius!” “Dude, I totally agree!” That kind of thing.
This wasn’t quite that kind of talk.
What it came down to is that Eat the Dark is going to be released in trade paperback this fall, not hardcover, as originally planned.
Let me preface all this the way that Charlie Huston does when he talks about this exact same thing at greater length, and say, there are a lot bigger problems in the world, one might say, real problems, than this scenario I’m about to lay out. To paraphrase Charlie, I might very well be the only one on Planet Earth who gives a shit how the book comes out, and I ought to be grateful that I’m getting published at all. And I am, believe me. There were years and years where I couldn’t get anything published to save my life. There’s not a day that goes by, literally, that I don’t feel grateful for having my work in print, just like there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t thank God for my kids. I’m wired that way.
But there’s no getting around the fact that seeing your book in hardcover is very cool and very gratifying. At first sight a book is often treated with more gravitas because it’s a hardcover, both by buyers and readers, and there are people out there, I’m sure, who only buy hardcovers. I’m not one of them—I almost never buy hardcovers—but then again, all I seem to buy these days are groceries and the occasional bottle of Early Times if I can find some pennies under the sofa.
But I digress.
The point is that, while I had both hoped and assumed that Eat the Dark would come out in hardcover, just like Chasing the Dead did, the people who make these kind of decisions had already started steering the ship in the other direction.
The short, blunt, cruel explanation for this is that Chasing the Dead, despite good reviews, a great price, a grabbing cover and hard work from the publicity and marketing people, didn’t sell as well as Ballantine had hoped. Now that’s an ugly truth to have to face—it makes me feel a little queasy just to type it—but it’s a fact of the business, and not an uncommon one. First novels are tough. Horror is tough. Hardcovers are tough. There are probably lots of theories about how things could’ve gone better, but that kind of Monday morning quarterbacking always manages to make me feel worse rather than better and anyway, we did all we could, all of us. It just didn’t set the world on fire like we’d all hoped. There’s a fine line between learning from your mistakes and moping over what could’ve been and if I’m going to step over that line I’ll do it in private where nobody has to smell the results.
The even crueler and more blunt truth at the bottom of all of this, lurking down there like one of those brutal prehistoric looking fish, is that when buyers from chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble look at a new book and decide how many they want to order, they check the sales of the last one and adjust their orders accordingly, and these are the things that determine print run. In this case, the hardcover print run for a book like Eat the Dark (original retail price somewhere north of twenty-one bucks; now a bargain in trade paperback at 12.95) would be significantly less than Chasing the Dead. And when that hypothetic hardcover didn’t sell through its print run, the buy for my next book would be dropped even further. It’s a depressing pathway and it can lead straight down the crapper. An author can undersell himself right out of a career so fast that he doesn’t know what hit him.
So then the question: what the hell do you do? You can just throw the next hardcover out there and pray for a front page review on the New York Times, you can abort completely and go back to grad school, or you can get creative and try to find a way to get the author’s work into as many people’s hands as possible.
What my editor confirmed for me this morning on the phone—the most important part of the conversation, to my weak and easily addled brain—is that Random House/Ballantine/Del Rey is committed to growing me as an author. And that’s ultimately far more important than whether or not Eat the Dark gets published in hardcover, paperback or on the back of a box of Froot Loops, for that matter. My editor (let’s call him Keith, since that’s his name) also told me that he can’t wait to read my next book, which—I’m guessing—will probably also end up being released as a trade paperback. And that’s cool. Because honestly, who among us has twenty bucks to plonk down every time they find a book that looks promising? If paperbacks are what’s going to allow high school libraries, housewives and convicted felons serving hard time to read Eat the Dark, The Black Wing, or whatever’s next, then by all means so be it.
Because make no mistake. Publishing isn’t what it was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, or twenty seconds ago. Spend some time online and you’ll find out that everybody has ideas about how and why stuff sells or doesn’t. We’re adrift off the Islets of Langerhans. My point is that you need to survive as an author before you can hope to “break out” as one, and survival often means casting off things that seem precious and wonderful so that some sweet day you can hopefully turn some kind of profit for the good people who publish your work. In the meantime it would do all of us well to remember that, when the ship is adrift at sea, the cabin boy is usually the first one eaten.
In this case, the hardcover is the cabin boy.
So pass the salt.
New York Comicon
I spent Saturday at the New York Comicon meeting all kinds of terrific people, fans, readers, artists and other writers, among them China Mieville, Timothy Zahn, Drew Bowling and the always awesome Christopher Golden, who I finally got to thank for his generous blurb on Chasing the Dead. The evening finally came to an end at an Irish pub on 8th Avenue and 34th Street where I realized it was 10:30 PM and I had to drive back to central Pennsylvania. My editor, Keith, had graciously offered to let me crash at his place, but some small, semi-inert voice of logic inside me warned that if I stayed, I would be headed out for an even later night, and the morning drive would be even more difficult. So I guzzled coffee and headed home with bags of loot -- a stuffed were-rabbit, a scary mask, some Spiderman comics and some great memories of the day.
Cover Me
The cover art for Eat the Dark has arrived.
I think it looks great. In fact, as I told my editor, I think I like it better than the cover for Chasing the Dead. The Times quote on top is actually going to end up on the Chasing mass market this fall; there's an even better and more general blurb from the Rocky Mountain News that will probably appear there instead.
Also, I've been given a glimpse at what the interior design for Eat the Dark looks like, complete with a brain MRI image on the title page that looks creepy as hell. I can't say enough great things about the good folks at Del Rey and Random House for knocking this one out of the park.
I think it looks great. In fact, as I told my editor, I think I like it better than the cover for Chasing the Dead. The Times quote on top is actually going to end up on the Chasing mass market this fall; there's an even better and more general blurb from the Rocky Mountain News that will probably appear there instead.
Also, I've been given a glimpse at what the interior design for Eat the Dark looks like, complete with a brain MRI image on the title page that looks creepy as hell. I can't say enough great things about the good folks at Del Rey and Random House for knocking this one out of the park.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Start Spreading the Ooze
What am I doing this weekend? Hanging out the New York Comicon, that's what! You need to be there too! I'm going to be at the Del Rey booth for most of the day on Saturday. I'm trying to think of something cool that I can give out. Gummy body parts? Candy eyeballs? Deaths head baby dolls? 50-word personalized short stories while you wait?
Think of some easily transportable swag that I can distribute...and come rock out on Saturday.
Think of some easily transportable swag that I can distribute...and come rock out on Saturday.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
My Day in Court
People lie. They do it all the time. So why is that when we’re confronted with it, up close and personal, that it feels like such a kick in the guts?
It was a routine airport traffic ticket, fifteen bucks, not even worth contesting. You would have paid it without question, if you had actually known you got one. Instead a sheet of paper arrives in the mail two weeks later telling you that you’re now responsible for sixty dollars in fines for not paying a ticket that was never written to you in the first place.
So you go to court, not because you can’t pay the sixty bucks—you’ve already paid it, actually, as part of the appeals process—but because this is obviously just a misunderstanding. You go expecting to talk to a judge, clear up the confusion and get on with your life.
Instead the officer shows up that allegedly wrote you the ticket. She takes the stand and the judge swears her in. And she begins to lie. At first it’s just unbelievable, that someone would come up with these things and say them about you, in front of you. You’re speechless. Not only does she lie about giving you the ticket, she lies about the way you supposedly antagonized her, things you said and did, even the way that she saw you treating your own children. You begin to wonder if she’s remembering a completely different encounter with a completely different person but she stares at you calmly the whole time. And she lies and lies and lies, with the glib, offhand ease of someone who’s been here many times, and something else too, something you don’t recognize until afterward.
When it’s your turn to talk, the judge listens to you attempt to defend yourself, to explain that none of what was just said is remotely true. The only thing you have on your side is the fact that you’re telling the truth. That ought to be enough.
It’s not. He finds against you.
Why? Because he says he has a history with this particular officer. Because she’s been here in his court many times before. Because he believes that you actually must be the small-minded, moronic storybook troll that the cop just described. Because we live in a “post 9/11 society.”
And then it’s over. You leave, feeling like somebody just carved a hole in your belly and filled it with cold wet sand. And on the way out of the parking lot you realize what that other quality was in the cop’s voice while she was saying these things about you. It was confidence, the flawless and serene certainty that any bully or animal feels as it settles down to wait for its dinner to stop squirming. There was never any question that the judge would believe her. Apparently there was never any question in the judge’s mind either.
In poker they say you should look around the table and if you can’t see the sucker, then it’s you. Cynical or not, it’s not a maxim you would have immediately thought of applying to the justice system.
Apparently you were wrong about that too.
It was a routine airport traffic ticket, fifteen bucks, not even worth contesting. You would have paid it without question, if you had actually known you got one. Instead a sheet of paper arrives in the mail two weeks later telling you that you’re now responsible for sixty dollars in fines for not paying a ticket that was never written to you in the first place.
So you go to court, not because you can’t pay the sixty bucks—you’ve already paid it, actually, as part of the appeals process—but because this is obviously just a misunderstanding. You go expecting to talk to a judge, clear up the confusion and get on with your life.
Instead the officer shows up that allegedly wrote you the ticket. She takes the stand and the judge swears her in. And she begins to lie. At first it’s just unbelievable, that someone would come up with these things and say them about you, in front of you. You’re speechless. Not only does she lie about giving you the ticket, she lies about the way you supposedly antagonized her, things you said and did, even the way that she saw you treating your own children. You begin to wonder if she’s remembering a completely different encounter with a completely different person but she stares at you calmly the whole time. And she lies and lies and lies, with the glib, offhand ease of someone who’s been here many times, and something else too, something you don’t recognize until afterward.
When it’s your turn to talk, the judge listens to you attempt to defend yourself, to explain that none of what was just said is remotely true. The only thing you have on your side is the fact that you’re telling the truth. That ought to be enough.
It’s not. He finds against you.
Why? Because he says he has a history with this particular officer. Because she’s been here in his court many times before. Because he believes that you actually must be the small-minded, moronic storybook troll that the cop just described. Because we live in a “post 9/11 society.”
And then it’s over. You leave, feeling like somebody just carved a hole in your belly and filled it with cold wet sand. And on the way out of the parking lot you realize what that other quality was in the cop’s voice while she was saying these things about you. It was confidence, the flawless and serene certainty that any bully or animal feels as it settles down to wait for its dinner to stop squirming. There was never any question that the judge would believe her. Apparently there was never any question in the judge’s mind either.
In poker they say you should look around the table and if you can’t see the sucker, then it’s you. Cynical or not, it’s not a maxim you would have immediately thought of applying to the justice system.
Apparently you were wrong about that too.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Eat the Dark Available! Sort of!
Amazon just posted Eat the Dark available for pre-order, just in time for Valentines Day. And honestly, what better gift for the love of your life than a slip of paper reading, "Darling, I just pre-ordered you the scariest novel of the year, about a supernatural killer on the loose in a nearly abandoned hospital"? There's no cover art yet but my editor has described what the art department has in mind and it sounds really, really scary.
Speaking of scary, the edits on The Black Wing continue. My wife, my first reader, is making her way through the manuscript and, as usual, her comments are dead-on. So far the book has lost some serious weight and has dropped into the more svelte realm of 90,000 words. William Faulkner was one who said that when you write, first you must kill all your darlings. My hope is to create something like a streamlined nightmare rocket that plunges straight into the reader's imagination, ticks steadily with all the terror and grue you can bear, and then explodes.
Something to think about for next Valentine's Day...
Speaking of scary, the edits on The Black Wing continue. My wife, my first reader, is making her way through the manuscript and, as usual, her comments are dead-on. So far the book has lost some serious weight and has dropped into the more svelte realm of 90,000 words. William Faulkner was one who said that when you write, first you must kill all your darlings. My hope is to create something like a streamlined nightmare rocket that plunges straight into the reader's imagination, ticks steadily with all the terror and grue you can bear, and then explodes.
Something to think about for next Valentine's Day...
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Up for Air
Five months and 105,000 words later, the first draft of The Black Wing is finally done. Actually, the period over which this manuscript was written stretches much longer; I started it back in the autumn of 2004, long before the book deal for Chasing the Dead even existed, and eventually put it aside. I wasn't sure where to take it, but the characters whose lives I had setinto motion never left my mind. That is to say, they stayed alive for me, even though I wasn't actively working on the story. That, to me, was the sign of a story worth going back to, and I'm glad I did.
The last ten days were the most intense in recent memory. Working full time, parenting full time and going hell-for-leather to bring this story to its conclusion. I get weirdly superstitious in the home stretch: I would only write in my children's room with my green sweater on while listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, over and over. I must have listened to that CD fifty times in the last two weeks. For the record it's brilliant music to write to.
Anyway, I'm revising the manuscript now and it's going well. I'm very excited about how the edited version will turn out. Hopefully it will go out to my agent and editor at the beginning of next week. Stay tuned.
The last ten days were the most intense in recent memory. Working full time, parenting full time and going hell-for-leather to bring this story to its conclusion. I get weirdly superstitious in the home stretch: I would only write in my children's room with my green sweater on while listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, over and over. I must have listened to that CD fifty times in the last two weeks. For the record it's brilliant music to write to.
Anyway, I'm revising the manuscript now and it's going well. I'm very excited about how the edited version will turn out. Hopefully it will go out to my agent and editor at the beginning of next week. Stay tuned.
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