The stories of Bryan Young

The End of an Era and a New Beginning

2018-04-10T16:03:00.002-06:00

It's been a long time coming, but I think an upgrade to my web presence was long overdue. I began this blog in 2005 and it's served me well over the last 13 years. My goal in those early days was to write a short story every month. Back then, that was the only writing I was doing.

This website, then called "Bryan's Short Story Corner," got me into a regular writing habit. One that I still maintain today. I hoped it would help me get eyeballs on my words and, looking back at some of those early short stories, I shouldn't have wanted any of those eyeballs looking. Today, my Patreon fills that void. There is a dedicated group of supporters there that help subsidize my ability to write short stories on the regular.

After I started publishing books, this blog morphed into a place to talk about my projects and writing and it worked well enough for that for a long time. But now I have Twitter and Medium for those functions and they have much cleaner and easier interfaces, both for you as a reader and for me on the back end.

Then this place morphed into a spot for me to have a web presence as an author.

But this really wasn't the place for that. The user interface and templates for blogger were cutting edge in the early 2000s, but now? They just don't look professional. Or slick. And I would get embarrassed every time I had to send people to this spot.

So, I came up with a new, professional landing page at Swankmotron.com.

What does that mean for this space?

I'll leave it here as an archive, but the lights will dim. You'll be able to walk around the archives. Don't mind the dust or cobwebs or bad writing. And don't judge me too harshly for how dated this space will appear as the years go on.

If you want to follow me as I depart, here are your best options:

Thanks so much for sticking with me here for all these years. This space connected me with a lot of people I still communicate with over all these years and I'll be forever grateful for that. Thank you even more than that, though, for following me on my journey beyond this space.

Anatomy of a Scene: All the President's Men

2018-03-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

All the President's Men is one of those perfect movies. Based on a stunning true story with a brilliant screenplay from William Goldman (we've already gone through one of his scenes here with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), it's a movie that brings all of the elements of character, plot, and drama together in a way that makes me really love and admire it.

The scene I want to go through is one that comes during a particularly trying time in the film.

For those unaware, this film tells the tale of Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who cracked the Watergate story. And now, looking back on it, it all feels like one big victory, but it was marked by a number of defeats.

This is them reporting to their skeptical editor, Ben Bradlee (played brilliantly by Jason Robards) about where their investigation is at.

Immediately preceding Woodward and Bernstein walking in, a salesman is trying to sell Bradlee on features his papers doesn't need and the salesman in shooed out of the office. This might seem like just a funny bit of business but really helps establish that everyone wants Bradlee's attention. He's important.

And Woodward and Bernstein are literally nobodies at the paper and no one thinks the story they're working on is going to lead anywhere.

"Hey, what did you guys want?" Bradlee greets them. There's a warmth to it, but we further understand he's busy with no time for nonsense.

And when Woodward (Redford) drops what he clearly thinks of as a bombshell and it lands with a thud, the scene gains a tension to it. You can see it right there in the writing. Instead of reacting with a "Great, the story is going somewhere," he tells them to sit down, almost as though he's going to lecture them about something. His patience is wearing thin.

Then we get both Woodward and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) give us a dump of exposition. This isn't just them giving it to us as the audience, they're trying to assuage Bradlee's skepticism.

Bradlee is incredulous. "What else besides the money, where's the goddamn story?"

His patience is broken at this point and neither of our heroes are quite prepared for that. This revelation was their ace in the hole and it's not met with the enthusiasm they'd asked for this man's time for. They're skating on thin ice and share a pause and a look to exemplify that.

"The money is the key to whatever this is?"

"Says who?" Bradlee fires back. There's a lot of character work going on here. Woodward and Bernstein are the sorts of people unaccustomed to being challenged this directly. When they say something is important to each other, they mean it and understand it. But here, under the keen observation of their editor, they become unsure. But this says so much about the world of journalism as much as anything else, right?

They need to get the story right. And if he can't connect the dots, then the reader isn't going to be able to as well. And they're dealing with fire. They know what's at stake: either the paper or the fate of American democracy.

But then Howard Simons (Martin Balsam), the managing editor, breaks in with the story of Deep Throat, describing him as a garage freak and Woodward's source in the Executive.

And you can understand Bradlee's incredulity as he utters one of the best lines of the film: "Garage freak? Jesus. What kind of crazy fucking story is this? What did you say?"

In such a short space of time, the editor has gone from warm and friendly to really annoyed and skeptical faster than a Lamborghini going from zero to sixty. Then he hits them with the truth of the matter. He's defending them in public, but there's just nothing to their story yet.

There's something tender about his confusion and introspection that turns their revelation into a footnote and he looks up at them hopefully and says, "What else you workin' on?"

He doesn't want them to fail, but he doesn't see a way out of that.

Bernstein stumbles, looking for some hopeful avenue and offers a solution, but it's not good enough. Woodward's excuse is that they haven't had any luck yet.

"Get some," Bradlee tells them tersely. A perfect punctuation mark on the scene that's only enhanced by the curious pause followed by a return to a facsimile of Bradlee's kindly self. "Anything else?"

And that's it.

This is one of those scenes that function as something that is often overlooked in a lot of fiction I read and movies I watch. Those little moments that serve to spell out what it is the protagonists are doing while putting up more obstacles in their way and raising the stakes. The scene turns the emotion for them as well. The scene begins with a laugh and they think they've got something big and when they leave their determination has grown because they've been rebuked in the kindest way possible.

Too often I'll see scenes like this in books or movies and a character will literally say something like, "Let me get this straight...?" And the only purpose for it is so that the writer can restate the obvious for the audience, and that's boring. It's bad writing.

But in this context? They have to go to their superior who pokes holes in their arguments and meets what they think is solid information with incredulity they can't print. This is a minor defeat in their cycle of trying and failing. They wouldn't have even called this meeting if they thought they had something.

The scene also adds an undercurrent of trust in them, which adds a weight to their quest. Bradlee, this person they respect and fear, trusts them and has gone out on limbs to defend them. If they come up with nothing, they'll be letting him down as well.

Scenes like this can be throwaways in stories, but don't let them be. Add layers. This brings exposition, character building, an expectation of consequence, and a mini-defeat to our characters. All in such a short space. Think about moments like this and how you can bring more meaning to them.

--

As for my writing, I've had three columns come out in the last 24 hours and I'd love for you to check them out.

First was a piece for StarWars.Com about how the themes of Star Wars Rebels played out against the broader saga.

Second was a piece about how Star Wars Rebels was hiding all of the Force abilities we needed to know about to better understand The Last Jedi for Syfy.

And the last is a reemergence of my column about the links between Star Wars and classic cinema for /Film. This one was about how Rashomon influenced The Last Jedi.

--
As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

LTUE

2018-02-16T08:21:00.001-07:00

I've been MIA for a while and for that I apologize.

First, The Last Jedi sort of took over in December. And then I had surgery in January and spent a couple of weeks doing a whole lot of nothing but recovering. I'm back now. I'm getting things done and I hope to be back in this space regularly.

In the meantime, I wanted to let you know about my schedule for LTUE, the writing symposium held annually down in Provo, Utah. I'll be on a panel today, as well as doing a book signing, and doing two panels tomorrow.

Here is my schedule:

Friday:

4:00 pm - Podcasting: How Not to Screw it Up
Provo Marriott - Elm
I'll be joined with a couple of other podcasters to discuss the ins and outs of podcasting.

7:00 pm - Book Signing
Provo Marriott - Cascade C
I'll be signing and selling books for two hours.

Saturday:

10:00 am - How to Run a Killer Game Kickstarter
Provo Marriott - Amphitheatre
I'll be talking about my experience with Kickstarter in publishing and how to apply some of those lessons to games.

2:00 pm - Making the Most of NaNoWriMo
Provo Marriott - Arches
I've been doing NaNo for almost ten years. Want to know how to make the most of it? I'll tell you how.

As ever, I'd love to see you. Stop by if you can. I'll be around.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Learning From Your Previous Work

2017-11-21T14:45:00.003-07:00

It's hard for me to go back and look at my old work.

Like, really hard.

Sometimes, I try to block it out of my mind. It's not bad work, but I know I can do so much better now. I look back and think, "I'd change this. The prose could be better there. This description is a bit too much cliche. This bit of structure could have been more elegant."

Then I ask myself why I didn't see it all then. All the flaws seem so obvious. I understand that time helps you see those things. I make sure I put distance between myself and a book I've drafted and need to revise. But looking back at this old work it's somehow worse.

And I keep thinking about why it seems so much worse.

The only answer that I can come up with is because I'm learning more. I don't think the writer I am today would have made any of the mistakes that the writer I was then made so easily. And I got to thinking about Aaron Allston again. He was my mentor for a time before he passed away. We would have these annual writing critique sessions and at our last one, just a few months before he passed away, he said, "Bryan, I'm so excited to read your stories to see what new mistakes you've made this time."

I was a little aghast at this, but he explained further that he was excited because it meant I was learning. He'd help me identify a mistake and I wouldn't make it again. I feel like I've taken the advice he and others have given me over the years to heart and incorporated it into my writing. And I think this is the root of the reason I have such a hard time going back to the work I did in the past.

I've worked really hard to try to push myself with every new book I've written, to push me into learning how to do something new or to try out something weird or unconventional. I'm constantly learning. I'm taking classes and attending seminars. I'm seeking notes and edits on every manuscript. I'm reading about the craft constantly. I'm reading books in and outside of my wheelhouse to learn how other writers do things.

When I go back and read my stuff with that critical eye, all I can see are the things I've learned in the intervening years. I just didn't have the tools to craft things the way I wanted to. Looking back, I had the right ideas and I executed them to the best of my abilities then. Because I've set out to learn and remain always a student, they just don't sit as well with me.

And maybe that's not a bad thing.

I'm really proud of the work I'm doing now, but I hope that I continue my lifelong learning so that ten years from now when I look back on it I know enough to see problems that I don't even know to look for at the moment.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Thoughts on National Novel Writing Month

2017-11-02T16:20:00.001-06:00

We're two days into National Novel Writing Month. As I write this, I'm 10k words into my novel and it feels good to finally be working on it after a month of prep work.

But how can NaNo help you?

Well, it can do a lot of things.

Personally, I think the two most important aspects of NaNo are the community you can find and the encouragement into a daily writing habit.

During November, writers seem to come out of the woodwork like termites. They're everywhere. Some of these writers are only NaNoers, though, and they're not going to help you maintain your habits through the year and be part of your regular community. But you're going to be going to write-ins at your local area, mixing with others who are dedicated to at least write one book. You'll find people you click with. You'll be on the forums and in the chatrooms, finding that tribe of people near you that you need.

I feel like all writers need that tribe of creative people who know exactly what their affliction is because they're equally infected. NaNo is a great way to see who has the disease.

Then, it's in building a daily writing habit. And mileage varies on this. For me, writing every day is necessary for maintaining my moment and my sharpened edge. For others, writing every day is a drag and they need to recharge their batteries. If you know you're that kind of writer, then ignore this part. It wasn't until I'd done NaNo a lot that I realized that a daily habit would be the right course of action for me, but trying it out through NaNo was something I needed.

Today, thanks to the training wheels NaNo put on me, today is my 850th consecutive day of writing something. I've written well over a million words in that time, and more than a few books. I plan to write more. I want to keep going for the foreseeable future. But the value in NaNo for me was seeing that discipline in action. Now, I regularly do 50k words a month, spread across novels, short stories, columns, and the like. It's no sweat.

That's why I'm pushing myself to do 100k this month. I've come close this year before, but this month I'm dedicated. And I don't want to fall behind.

What can you do to help stay motivated?

Outline. Get yourself an idea about where you're going and write that out. Then go back to the beginning and take another pass, fleshing that outline out as you go.
Word Wars. With those other writers you've found in your community, in person, online, or wherever, compete. Set aside 15 minutes and see who can write the most words in that space of time. I guarantee that healthy competition is motivating.
Dedicate time and reward yourself for it. There is nothing more important to NaNo than dedicating the time to write. Hit your daily goal? Take yourself to lunch. Buy some chocolate. See a movie.
Plan for the future. If your book gets finished, you can actually query it (after heavy revisions, of course.) Think about who you might send your book to and how it might look bound.
Read. During NaNo, it's easy to focus so much on writing that you forget to read, but reading is what puts gas in your writing tank. Do it. Read lots.
Watch movies. Stories, in general, can help fill that writing tank. Consume stories.

I'd go on with that list, but I need to get back to my novel myself.

Good luck!

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Why You Should Write Short Stories

2017-10-27T13:55:00.001-06:00

In some of his books, Kurt Vonnegut lamented the diminishing magazine market because that's where you found short stories. And short stories were the best place for writers to hone their craft. There are a lot of ways this system helped writers do this, and, in a culture with allegedly dwindling attention spans reign, short stories can still be a great place to learn.

But what should you be doing? What should you be looking to get out of short stories? How can they help?

Well, here's a list of ideas I have about the subject:

Short stories are short - This might sound obvious, but there are a lot of layers to this one. In a format so short, it gives you a lot of room to stretch your creativity and try out new things without feeling chained to them. Sometimes, writing a novel or a screenplay, even one you love implicitly, can get to be sort of a slog. When you weigh taking new stylistic risks you might hate 20,000 words into a novel, you might not go for it. A short story, though, can get banged out in a day or three. Your time investment to try out an idea or a technique isn't as much, so you tend to allow yourself to experiment more.
They can help you grow as a writer - Like I said: because short stories are short, they can serve as a testing ground for your most bizarre ideas. I've had no less than two short stories I've written serve as the basis for novels I went on to write. I just needed to try the idea out and see how it worked. Conversely, there are a couple of novels I wanted to write and tried the ideas out in short story form and found that there was a lot less there than I realized.
A better understanding of scenes - Short stories are a completely different format from books, but that's because they need to do as much in such an abbreviated space of time. Honing your skills in this format is going to help you understand how to effectively and efficiently block a scene, and scenes are the building blocks of novels. If you master short story, your novel is going to benefit from it.
They're a good test run for novels - In a lot of ways, short stories are that first test run for how the business end of a novel is going to go. Submitting them, working with editors to refine them, taking them to publication, are good skills to practice before you take that step into novels. Maybe the concept you came up with wasn't great, but the character was fun to write, take them. Or maybe there's a detail or theme you hit on that you think could be expanded. There's no shortage of ways shorts can inform your novels.
Relationship Building- This one is important. As you're submitting stories to anthologies (of which there are many now) and magazines and online zines and wherever else they're getting published, you're building a name for yourself. Not just with readers, though that's important, but with editors. They're keeping track of people who turn in good work, on time, and without a fuss. An editor will come back to you with more invitations for the next thing if you're easy to work with, follow the process, and get your stuff in on time.
Portfolio Building - If your readers like you, they are going to want more material from you. If you produce a short story every month on top of your normal output, you have an entire collection's worth of material at the end of the year. As some of you might be aware, I've been running a Patreon for short stories. I put out one a month. Now I have a backlog of them. One turned into a novel I ended up writing. A couple of them were placed in anthologies. I'm submitting a couple more. And when an anthology editor asks me, "Do you have something like this...?" The answer is usually yes.
Palate Cleansing - Sometimes, you just need to write something outside of your usual comfort zone to stretch your creative muscles and a short story will do that. And try to write in different genres that aren't normal for you, because you can learn from them and smuggle that knowledge into your future projects. Sometimes, I just need to write something that feels vaguely like a romance. Or a horror. Or a comedy. Or a slice of dramatic Americana. This speaks partly to my second point, but this is also a good way to just get out of a rut before you embark on your next project.
The satisfaction of a completed project - Nothing boosts my confidence as a writer more than seeing completed projects rack up higher than my word count. Seeing a list of stories (like the one I keep mostly updated on this website) is a huge motivator for me. I've been adding to it since 2005. Start your own, now.
They're fun - That seems like a simple reason, but it's true. Fun has to be part of the reason we write.

Every time you write a story and finish it, you gain a level as a writer. The only way you learn is by writing stories and finishing them. Short stories help you gain levels (albeit shorter levels at higher increments) in a much quicker fashion than the novel. Try them out. Create.

As for my short stories, you can check out my Patreon. For a subscription of $1 a month, you get a brand new short story from me and access to a backlog of short stories. After a year and a half of doing this, it's a steal.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Hints for Revision

2017-10-18T07:38:00.002-06:00

Welcome back, everyone. I've had a lot of conferences and conventions over the last month and feel like I've been neglecting all five of you who faithfully read this space. I'm sorry. I'll try to let less time pass between each post.

Though I must admit, November will probably be light, too, as I'll be cranking on a book for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't been working on drafting a new novel in a few months. I did take a break and wrote a feature-length screenplay in the time between this post and my last.

But I've been doing a lot of revision lately. Like, a lot. I got into this cycle of just writing novels and then writing the next one. And then the next one. I literally have 11 manuscripts I'm sitting on. And I'm in the midst of editing my fifth one in this cycle. It's slow going work. I feel like it takes me longer to revise a book than write it. It's more thoughtful work. And it's more discerning. You're rewriting things from sentences all the way up to whole pages.

My philosophy is always to pack more story and detail into fewer words. It can be hard. But not insurmountable.

One of the conferences I did was the League of Utah Writer's Fall Conference. I did a really fun presentation there (that you can listen to on my Patreon) about how studying movies can make you a better writer.

I attended quite a few panels, too. One of the presentations I enjoyed the most was with Angie Hodapp, an agent at the Nelson Literary Agency. It was about great description, but she laid out a few strategies that I've been incorporating into my revisions that are worth repeating. I mean, the whole presentation was worth repeating, but this was what I found most helpful in my revision process. It's stuff I know, but it was a real kick in the pants to see it laid out like this and have a really smart person present it to you like Angie did.

First?

Punch up your verbs to avoid passive voice

This is one I struggle with a bunch in my first draft, but it's so easy to spot later on. Take this sentence for example.

The fish was caught by the shark.

This is super passive. How could you make this take up less space and say the same thing? It's all in how you use the verb and make it work more for its place in the sentence. Was is a good word to look out for. Delete it and fiddle with the verb and reorder the subject if you need to to make it work.

The shark caught the fish.

The shark swallowed the fish.

These are very basic examples, but I think you get the picture.

Do a search in your document for "with" and "ing."

This is another one that makes a lot of sense. In Angie's presentation, she offered two example sentences and asked everyone to rewrite them. Here they are, unchanged, and we'll take a few different cracks at them below.

He was tall and dark with a rugged face, and he had a dazzling white smile.

The piano was sitting in the corner of the room with a layer of dust and spider webs covering it.

So, how can we fix these so they're tighter and do more with less? Here are a few of my attempts at both sentences.

His bright, wide smile was a contrast to his tall dark features and rugged face.

That's reasonable, but it doesn't really sing. Is this a little too "telling" instead of showing? Maybe we do need more words.

A full head taller than everyone else in the room, his rugged face and dark complexion stood as a contrast to his dazzling, white smile.

Or:

From his height, he could look down on everyone, and if he wasn't smiling so widely, I'd have mistaken his grim, rugged face and dark features for trouble.

Here's the next sentence:

A layer of dust and the fine glisten of spider webs covered the piano in the corner.

But, again, how do we make this a little creepier?

Spiders crawled across their glistening webs strung across the dusty piano in the corner of the room.

Or:

A layer of dust and the fine glisten of spider webs coated the old piano resting in the corner.

Regardless of how we rework the sentences, the originals are problematic. Searching for "with" and "ing" in your document will help you highlight these cases and help give them special attention. That's not to say every use of "with" and "ing" are wrong, but it's not a bad thing to look out for them. In most cases, you can improve.

Do a search in your document for Have/Has/Had

Again, more passive voice work here.

Have, has, and had all imply a passive use of the word. Again, not every instance of them is wrong, but this is another great way to search your document and find places where you can punch up the prose.

Here's an example:

The long dark passageway had stone walls that were overgrown with moss and vines.

But what if we got rid of the the "had" and the "with?" Does the sentence work better this way:

Moss and vines covered the stone walls of the long dark passageway.

But, again. Is that too straightforward? What if we tried this:

A tangle of vines and moss gripped the stone of the long hallway, disappearing in the distance with the light.

Or:

Moss and vines clutched the walls of the stone passageway, disappearing into dark infinity where the light couldn't reach.

I don't necessarily think these are the right answers, per se, but they're definitely better than the original sentence.

These are just a taste of the work I'm doing on my revisions. And it seems like it's a lot harder to do it with your own words in the context of your story than it is in isolated incidents like this. Because you're paying attention to a lot more, too. For one, you're looking at how the individual sentence works in the paragraph, how the the pacing might be affected, what lyrical quality does the writing contain elsewhere on the page, etc.

Revising is hard. But maybe this sort of thing can help.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Salt Lake Comic Con 2017 Schedule

2017-09-19T17:59:00.002-06:00

It's time for another year of Salt Lake Comic Con and another hectic schedule for me. But! that doesn't mean it's not a helluva lot of fun. I hope you're able to join me at any of these panels. Especially if you like Star Wars. And please, please, please come to my signing and visit. Get some books signed. I'd love that enormously.

Here is my Thursday schedule:

Everything here is a highlight. That first panel about behind the scenes of the prequels is with Pablo Hidalgo and I'll be asking him questions about what it was like to be there on set for most of the prequels. Then I'll be asking questions of Michael Biehn, who I've been a fan of since I was a little kid. Aliens and Terminator were favorites. If you want to ask him a question, please hit me up on Twitter with it. I will ask it at the panel.

And you don't want to miss Fauxthentic History's Infinity Gauntlet live episode. It's going to be soooo good.

Here is Friday:

There's a lot to love here, too. That first panel, The Cinema Behind Star Wars is going to be Matt Martin and I talking about the influences of Star Wars and I've prepared a video presentation actually. The Thrawn panel will be great, too. It's me, Matt, Timothy Zahn talking about everyone's favorite Grand Admiral.

The rest are all great, too. If you like Star Wars, you'll see a lot of me.

I'm also, between the Star Wars animation panel and the Twin Journeys panel, I'll be participating in Patrick Rothfuss's Worldbuilders party. You can still get tickets here. I'll be playing Mysterium with people who buy tickets and auctioning off a signed copy of A Children's Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. Be there.

Here is Saturday:

Please, please, please, come to my signing. And these live shows. These will all be a great time.

--
As for my writing and creative life, I've been swamped with getting the short film for the Sundance Film Festival deadline. So, that's that.

I've had a lot of pieces come out, but I've been terrible at keeping track of them. But my Patreon story is done, I'll post it as soon as Salt Lake Comic Con is over.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

A Surprise Writing Award....

2017-08-26T10:01:00.001-06:00

Some of you may remember that I'm working on a short film. It's been a long process. We started filming in April. I'm still working on post-production. The film only clocks in at 19:11, even with credits, but there's a lot of work packed into those minutes. And I'm still doing it.

So you can imagine my surprise when I messaged a friend and said, "Do you know anyone who can help with audio?"

And he responded with, "Yes, but can you get a 10-minute version of your rough cut together and preview some scenes at a film festival? In a few weeks...?"

Imagine my surprise when I said yes.

I worked really hard to get a cohesive version of half the film together that would be worth the time of a festival going audience, something that would show what I was capable of if the film got finished and a taste of what the film would feel like.

I spent a great day in Helper, Utah, the most fascinating mining town nestled right up next to the mountains. I've always really liked Helper. My first novel (unpublished, probably will remain so) has a scene set there. And spending a day there as a visiting filmmaker was a treat.

Assuming that half a rough cut wasn't enough to put me in awards competition and feeling sick from breakfast, I figured I'd skip the awards ceremony. This was definitely a mistake. I ended up winning Best Writing at the festival.

I hope this is a good omen as we move forward and finish the film and submit it to larger festivals. Although I'm not expecting much, I can still hope that this is the first of many to come.

Also: If you happen to know someone who programs film festivals or buys short films... let me know... If you like what I've got of the short film so far, I'd love you to put me in contact with those people.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

My Dragon Con 2017 Schedule

2017-08-25T22:53:00.000-06:00

It's time again for another year of Dragon Con. This is one of my favorite conventions every year and they keep me busy.

Here is my tentative schedule and I hope to see you there. (Especially for my reading. There's nothing worse than reading to an empty room.)

Title: The Last Jedi Fan Speculation
Time: Fri 02:30 pm Location: A601-A602 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: *SPOILER ALERT* *PURE SPECULATION* We are not insiders. We are not members of the Star Wars StoryGroup. We know what you know, but we're not afraid to dream & speculate. Maybe we'll finally find out in December who Rey's parents are--and where has Luke been...?

Title: Reading: Bryan Young
Time: Fri 05:30 pm Location: Vinings - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: Author, geek, podcaster, magazine and comics writer; documentary producer reads from his works.

Title: Better Diversity for a Better Story
Time: Sat 11:30 am Location: Hanover AB - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: There are a lot of great reasons for including diverse casts & addressing legions of challenges in your stories. Perhaps the best is one of the most simple: considering and exploring diversity will make your stories better.

Title: Aaron Allston Memorial Kids' Writing Workshop
Time: Sat 01:00 pm Location: M106-M107 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: Silence in the Library Publishing's annual writing workshop targeted at kids. Designed for beginning writers, but all are welcome. Bring pen and paper to participate in the group exercise. NOTE: Parental supervision required.

Title: Remembering Carrie Fisher & Kenny Baker
Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Centennial I - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: Our world is dimmer now, but our icons left such a legacy for us. Join other fans as we remember our Princess & our favorite Droid and the impact they had on Star Wars & the world.

Title: Parenting in Fandom
Time: Sat 08:30 pm Location: M106-M107 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: Geek parents come together to talk about raising the next generation of geeks, nerds, & super-fans. Honest & sensitive conversations about parenting have become a hallmark of this annual Kaleidoscope panel.

Title: Disney & Star Wars
Time: Sun 02:30 pm Location: M106-M107 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: With the purchase of the Star Wars franchise by Disney, what does that mean for SW shows targeted at kids & families? What about changes at the parks? What has already been created, & what you would like to see? Our panelists & audience discuss. Discussion aimed at kids 13 & under.

Title: Star Wars' Iconic Chewbacca & Boba Fett
Time: Sun 04:00 pm Location: Imperial Ballroom - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: A Wookiee and a bounty hunter walk into a ballroom...to answer your questions.

Title: Bite-Sized Remakes
Time: Mon 01:00 pm Location: M106-M107 - Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)
Description: Many movies are being turned into TV series for kids. Fans share their thoughts on these small screen gems: Tangled the Series, Big Hero 6, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, and TMNT.

Anatomy of a Scene: The Third Man

2017-08-03T19:24:00.002-06:00

It's time again to break down a classic scene. One that's well-written and, in my view, a fine example of excellent craft.

I've done some of these articles from books (like The End of the Affair and Starship Troopers) and other movies (like Citizen Kane, City Lights, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but now it's time to take a look at a scene from The Third Man. It blends the best of Orson Welles (as he's in the film and drives this scene) and Graham Greene, who wrote this particular screenplay.

Before we get to the scene, we need some context.

The Third Man is a tale of the black market in Vienna, just after World War II. It's about a cheap, dime-store Western novelist named Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton) and his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles.) Lime offered Martins a job in Vienna, so Martins leaves America and arrives, only to find that Harry Lime is dead. Penniless, without a friend or reason to be in the country, he gets involved in the police (largely the British police, Vienna in this time is divided into four zones controlled by different countries), and investigates the murder of his friend.

Until Lime shows up alive. And he's wanted by the police (which is why he faked his death in the first place.) Martins gives chase but isn't able to catch Lime before he fades away into the Vienna underground at night.

But finally, they make contact and agree to a meeting. And they step aboard a Ferris wheel.

Now, watch the scene:

There's a lot going on here.

Let's start with the setting. We're on a Ferris wheel. It's high up and the shots are designed to give us a sense of dizziness. It's to put us off balance as much as it was a choice of Harry Lime's to put Holly Martins off balance. This is something you need to pay attention to when you're choosing settings for your scenes. How can the setting help add tension or interest to a scene?

In this case, we're being told a lot about the relationship between these two men based on the setting. And we're taught a lot about their philosophy in a way that's aided by the height.

Granted, this clip comes in a few lines into the scene (it was the only one I could find on YouTube), but it begins with the two of them being friendly. But the scene takes a turn when Martins tells Lime that he knows what happened. That he had passed bad penecilin off to the black market and many people died because of it.

That's what brings Lime to open the door of the Ferris wheel. This is supposed to have an air of menace to it.

Lime's speech about the "dots down there" really reinforces where his moral compass is at. He's taking a literal 300-foot view of the people whose lives he might destroy because they're not people. When they're people, it's much more real for him. But the setting is working with us to help tell that story.

Martins is shocked that his old friend would think such a way. We can see it in his face. And he responds by threatening jail for his old friend. There's a philosophical battle going on here.

Lime seems confident though and fires back with the idea that the jail is in another zone. The cops that are interested in him are from a different country, for all intents and purposes they ARE a different country. But the only proof is his friend. The pauses of breath and stares here build tension. "There's no proof except you..."

And we're shown Martin's reaction. He looks down, we know that he's looking down to consider the ground hundreds of feet below. We can imagine him being pushed right out of the window and falling to the ground, without having to see the ground again. The situation and tension has been set up with the setting that we don't need to waste time reminding the audience of that eventuality. It's doubly reinforced when Martins wraps his arm around the window, bracing himself.

Martins, being a writer, knows where things are heading. "I should be pretty easy to get rid of."

Then Lime doubles down with a sadistic charm. "Pretty easy."

With nothing left to lose, Martins offers one more card of information. Lime faked his own death, but someone was in the coffin they buried. Someone else had been murdered and that's who they found. These are new charges he'll be responsible for. It's one more layer to the scene where we discover so much just with the sparest hints of dialogue.

Then Lime turns again, trying to defray the tension. He closes the door, ending the death threats. He needs Martins now, he's the only one who might be able to help him get out of that particular situation, so his needs have changed with his demeanor. Now he's trying to convince Martins to join his side. First, he appeals to his friendship. Then logic.

But then Martins brings it to morality and religion with just six cutting words. "You used to believe in God."

Lime's tactics aren't working.

Pay attention to how much is being said in the dialogue with so little actually being spoken. How much of the situation is apparent even though we're not having every single situation or feeling narrated for us. This is the brilliance of this scene. That's where the tension arrives.

Then we're treated to some of the most interesting cognitive dissonances in Lime's character. He is justifying his callous murder streak by saying that the dead are happier dead while at the same time he's writing the name of Anna, the woman he left to fake his death and has been central to the story, in a bit of grime on the window. He does have a weakness, a soft spot, even if he isn't able to verbalize it.

Martins sees this, and Lime changes the subject again, imploring his friend to do right by this woman he clearly still loves. Lime realizes he's shown a vulnerability so he changes the subject. His heartburn, wishing he'd have had the forethought to ask Martins to bring some of the tablets that helped his condition from America. He's trying to humanize himself again. It's a brilliant tactic. It's difficult to kill or fight against a friend who is human and not some menacing faceless name. He's appealing to Martins friendship again.

But Martins doesn't even blink an eye. Threats didn't work. Appealing to humanity didn't work. So now Lime tries to bribe him. Martins is having none of it, in fact, he tries to leave before even offering an answer. But Lime stops him, explaining that he doesn't need an answer right then. When Martins has it figured it out, then they can talk again.

Then, on his way out, ending the situation on his terms and with the last word, Lime offers one more thought designed to appeal to Martins sense of justice for the benefit. "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly."

It just so happens that it also happens to be one of the best bits of a monologue ever written for a film, but it works so beautifully to cap off this scene.

There's a lot to be learned from this scene. There's a lot of work being done in setting to help bolster the tension of the scene. There's dialogue that says so more in the subtext than the actual text. It has a character who is trying everything to convince his friend to do the right thing, or, at least, the right thing as he sees it. As a filmmaker, it's a beautifully constructed scene. As a writer, it's also a beautifully constructed scene. And would it have had half the power if it wasn't set on a Ferris wheel?

Think about where your scenes are. Think about what your characters mean when they're saying things. Often, they can be saying things they aren't meaning, and it makes scenes that much better when you can do it right.

I would also recommend watching The Third Man in its entirety. It's one of the best films and comes straight from the mind of a novelist. And the zither music score is incredible. Watch it. Study it. There's a lot to love.

As for my writing, I started a new column at StarWars.com about the making of Star Wars called "Creating a Galaxy." The first installment is about tauntauns.

I also wrote a piece about using dice to tell a story in Star Wars RPGS. You can read it at Fantasy Flight Games's website.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Character Development

2017-07-30T11:08:00.003-06:00

After my last post about side characters, I was asked to write about main character development and I thought it would be useful to offer you some of the quirks of my process and how I think of characters.

For one, like anything in writing, this comes down to asking a lot of questions. We can assume you've answered the major questions like name, gender identity, sexual preference, job, home, physical etc. But how do you get deeper with your character than the surface?

Why don't we take a character I'm working with in the revision process right now and answer some questions I ask myself about her. As a bit of a primer, this is for a sci-fi noir book I've written and am preparing to query called The Fatal Woman.

Let's start with the basics. Her name is Monika Archer. She is a cis-woman who is attracted to women. She was a self-employed smuggler and pilot and lives aboard her ship because she lost her apartment aboard her home space station. She's lean and muscly, with wiry black hair and dark brown skin.

These are fine surface attributes, but let's go a little further.

What was her childhood like? She was an orphan and only had her twin sister to rely on. The two of them worked as crews on ships until they could afford their own. It was a hard life and they had to learn a lot about people before they were ready and they had to navigate the complex web of people on the underbelly of society. They fell through the cracks and learned to not only survive, but flourish.

Why did she lose her apartment? Mainly because she's a drunk. She's having a hard time keeping jobs nailed down or even caring about them.

What turned her into a drunk? The death of her twin sister.

What's Monika's goal? At the start of the story, it's to continue drinking herself to death and forget the loss of her sister.

What's her secret? This is something that I insist I give every character, a secret they keep from other characters, possibly even the reader. For Monika, it's that she feels like she's the one responsible for her sister's death.

How does that draw Monika into a story? Well, as threads of her sister's life continue to be dangled in front of her, she wonders if she really is the reason her sister died. Absolving that secret (but also overt) guilt is the unspoken and underlying motivation

What's her weakness? With Monika, it's her arrogance and anger. But this rage is a side-effect from what she's gone through. But she's also got the weakness of alcoholism. She needs a drink to just get through the day and the longer she goes without a drink, the more difficult tasks become for her. And since she's down on her luck enough to the point where she's lost her apartment, maybe she doesn't always have the money for a drink.

How does she see the world? Cynically. Everyone wants something and everyone has a price. Those who don't are naive.

Is there anything she actually likes? There's one thing. A lover who also works for the station's security force. They've been an off-and-on fling for years, but in her self-destructive spiral, she hasn't seen much of Officer Banner lately. And even then, in that spiral, she's more in a mood to tolerate Banner, rather than like her.

What will she fight to keep? What does she care about? At the top of her list at the moment is getting drunk. But when the chips fall a little harder, she's willing to fight to keep her ship. It's the only thing she has left and the last reminder of her sister.

What's her soft spot? She definitely has a soft spot for the vulnerable and people who are in situations that remind her of hers. She's also invested in caring about things her sister cared about.

How does she see herself? She feels she's pretty worthless, but used to think of herself as a valued member of a team and a family. How could she bring that feeling back?

How do others see her? Some see her as a shell of her former self. Others secretly wish the other sister had lived instead. Others look at her as a means to an end.

Other questions you might want to ask: Are they spontaneous or are their actions spur of the moment? Do they suffer from any medical ailments (allergies, mental health issues, etc.)? What do they like to do in their spare time? Who was their favorite teacher when they were young? What do they keep around to remind themselves of better times? What's their dream? What do they fear? Are they religious?

Once you have all of these questions, and dozens of others besides, answered, you need to ask yourself what these add up to in the context of the story. None of this means anything if it's not tested against the forces in the story. How would a person with these circumstances react to the forces arrayed against them with the minimal effort required? When that minimal effort fails, what would they do next? Once we've built a character, we need to kick them to see what they're made of. If you've done enough groundwork with their flaws and issues at the front end and have the antagonists kick them sufficiently through the story, you'll naturally see that character growth and development. Maybe they won't fall for the same thing twice. Maybe they overcome their fear in order to achieve their goal.

I'm not the sort who writes all of this down like this on a character sheet, but I know many writers who do. I seem to do okay keeping it all in my head and jotted occasionally in my notebook. But if you are the type of writer who wants those answers handy on a separate sheet, then absolutely go for it.

And this is only one way to build a character. When I first started out, I never thought about this kind of stuff (to my detriment), but I faked it pretty capably. I would write each character with an actor in mind. In my first draft, I'd write all their dialogue as though a dead actor from classic Hollywood was reading it. Cary Grant. Or Katherine Hepburn. People like that. I'd just imagine how I expected those sorts of characters would act in situations. Then in my rewrites, I'd pick a modern actor that was sort of the opposite of the original actor and see how that changed the character. Maybe the pairing would be Cary Grant and Yaphet Kotto. Or Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep. It would change the dynamic and give it a depth that I hadn't expected.

I don't think that works as well as really knowing your character, though.

And hopefully this has given you some ideas on how to really know your character. Not biblically, though. That would be weird.

--

As for my writing recently, one of my favorite pieces I've ever worked on came out. It's about Earring Magic Ken. During the course of writing this piece, I had Dan Savage email me a photograph of his sex-toy bearing Ken doll, which is a sentence I never imagined being able to write.

Here it is.

I also had a new short story come out for my Patreon. It's called Doctor Blackheart and is the fifth story I've written about the bounty hunter Sashsa Blackheart. She's the character on the cover of my collection of stories called Escape Vector, which would be well worth your money to pick up.

I'm working on some cool top secret stuff, too. And even have a top secret trip coming up. And am showing a piece of my short film at a festival in a couple of weeks. It's all going well, it seems. On paper, at any rate.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Side Characters

2017-07-11T17:04:00.001-06:00

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an expert in creating side-characters. I think those that I've created have worked well in my stories and part of that comes from a bit of a sixth sense. So, I wouldn't take any of this advice as anything but the ramblings of a person trying to figure it out on their own as well.

But, like every part of writing, creating a good side character is about asking a lot of questions.

What would be interesting? What purpose would they fill? What would their life be like without the conflict of the main character? How would they add to the conflict? How will they aid in the conflict?

I mean, a lot of it is instinctual. For the fantasy book I'm working on, the main trio of heroes are the way they are so that they can have different abilities and perspectives. Each of them is from a different spot on the map so they all have a different way of looking at things. And they don't always agree with each other. Having conflict between the side characters and the main characters is important, I think. They need to be able to challenge them a little bit, and they need to be able to smack them around and tell them when they're screwing up.

I think it helps to make them drastically different from the main character. In that fantasy, the lead is a young shieldmaiden who received her sword too soon. Her traveling and fighting companion is a much older dwarf. They're physically different, she's lithe and tall, he's short and stout (as dwarves are wont to be), and where she's hesitant but optimistic, he's surly and pessimistic. They need to be able to have personality traits that play off of each other.

Side characters can't be cartoons, either. So often I read books where I hate the side characters because they are nothing but a bundle of quirks. Quirks do not make a good side character. They need to feel every bit as part of the natural world you're building as anything. And they need to play a part in the story. Think about how useful Artoo and Threepio are to the story. There's no question that they're side characters (though, arguably, they're our main POV characters), but having them there matters. You couldn't get the victory over the Empire without Threepio's translation skills and Artoo's technical acumen. You couldn't get there without Chewie's brute force and piloting skills, either, or Obi-Wan Kenobi's mastery of the Force and sacrifice. Every meaningful side character in Star Wars matters.

These character traits are all archetypes Joseph Campbell spoke of in all of his research, and it would do you well to learn about how to use the sword master or the classic rogue or any one of these things to help build a side character.

But the most important thing is that they're important to the story and not just an add-on. Some of these characters will appear in your work organically. People have friends that orbit their lives, that's why there are always friends in movies and books. They're natural. But what circumstances lead people to be together? Too often I'll see stories and movies that suffer from that classic roleplaying game trope. "We have no idea why any of these people are in a tavern together, but they're all here and ready to go an adventure, so they will." Characters might seem just added on because the writer needed comic relief or a cannon fodder for when things get messy. You need to motivate these characters every bit as much as your main character. Otherwise, they'll just be limp and feel tacked on. And you never want that for your reader.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

Thoughts on Editing

2017-07-05T18:07:00.002-06:00

I've been swamped in edits on my fantasy novel lately and I've had some friends in the process of editing as well. Naturally, we've all been talking about things and one asked me if I would write a blog post about editing, specifically about word choice.

And that's a lot of what editing is, right? Word choice might be the single most important part of a manuscript. I mean, you have to choose every single word in your novel. How do you revise to maximize the impact of your word choice?

Well, there are different strategies I take for that. For me, editing is a pretty layered and long process, so take all of this with a grain of salt, too. But, as I go through drafts of a novel, I first have someone else read it and they'll be able to tell me what my bad habits are. For this novel I'm working on right now I had a few. First, I would use sentences that included phrases like "seemed to" and "began to." These are really passive and add extra words for no real reason. So as I make notes on my draft, I circle these sentences so I know to remove them. Sometimes they stay, but more often than not they leave.

The next thing I watch for are sentences where pronoun use is iffy. I always want to make every sentence clear, so I have to go through every sentence and think about how the pronouns are working or not working and how they might create confusion. If any confusion is possible, then I rewrite. I'm amazed at how often this is an issue. When you're in the heat of writing something, it can be easy to track who is doing what, but as you come back to it later and try to go over it as though you were reading it for the first time, you might find that the sentences just don't sing. They don't have the clarity they need and they don't say as much as they need to. Why would someone "seem to" be something? Unless you're talking about disguises and first impressions, then you should avoid the word. And "begins to?" This one is the worst for me. You either do something or you don't. If your character is completing a multi-step task and you say "they begin to" do something, signifying that first step, why not just break the action into definitive, miniature steps? It will give the audience a clearer picture.

Another thing to look for is adverbs. I'm not one of those sorts that believes that you have to excise every adverb, but more often than not you can find a better way to phrase something that adds to your story and gets rid of adverbs altogether. So, for example, we had a speech tag:

"Here I am, talking," Bryan said, angrily. "You're just going to have to do better.

What if we could illustrate that in a way that said angrily without actually saying it?

"Here I am, talking." Bryan pounded a fist on the desk and raised an accusing finger. "You're just going to have to do better.

Yes, it added some words, but didn't it give you a better picture than the first one? It creates anger. This is the sort of thing I try to be conscious of in the first draft, but sometimes those first drafts get away from you. But look out for it in the second draft and you'll find that there is plenty of room for improvement and you're going to make your novel a whole lot more vivid.

The other thing to look for is stale word choice. You'll be surprised how often you'll see a word twice in the same sentence. Or the same page. Or whatever. And the more common the word, the easier it is to get away with this. But if you're using a word like "foofaraw," the only way to get it into your book more than once is by putting it in the mouth of a character and that character happens to say it a lot. In the action, you get a word like that once. And if you open your novel with, say, a fire-breathing dragon attacking a village, you want to come up with different words for the carnage. You might be able to use flames and villagers once. You'll need to come up with a lot of different ways to say it so the scene doesn't seem stale or repetitive.

Read your stuff out loud to make sure you're not saying words too often. It's going to help you figure out where you need to switch things up. Do it. A lot, if you have to.

So, that's my small, blog-post-sized version of looking at word choice in revisions. If you have anything to add, feel free to do so in the comments.

--
I have a new piece in City Weekly about Salt Lake Gaming Con.

I will be at the convention on Saturday as well. I'll be on two panels. The first is about making Star Wars roleplaying games feel like Star Wars. The second is an interview with Steve Blum, who some might recognize as Zeb from Star Wars Rebels. Come out to the con, come play a game. See me. It'll be fun.

---

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this. When I hit 50 patrons, everyone will get a copy of Lost at the Con.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!

The Balance Between Reading and Writing

2017-06-30T09:30:00.002-06:00

I'm of the considered opinion that in order to be a good writer, you need to be a voracious reader. It's how we, as writers learn. There's no way an architect could become a better architect without inspecting the plans of other architects and keeping up on what's going on in advances in the industry. There's no way a doctor could stay up on current science and medicine if they didn't have to trade notes and do continuing medical education to keep their licenses. For writers, reading is our continuing education.

It's not something that's mandatory for us, either. And it's not just books about craft, we need to be reading all kinds of books. Because all of them, good or bad, within our genre or not, will teach us something about what we're doing. I love reading. And I am constantly analyzing what it is writers are doing in their texts. That's my version of pleasure reading. If you're not in love with that analysis and deconstruction, maybe you're a different kind of writer than I am, but I couldn't function without new input constantly.

I've been asked how to balance reading and writing, and I try to do both in equal measure. My goal is to average at least one book a week. And from different genres (and sometimes even different media.) Read a biography or history book, then follow it up with a fantasy novel written by a woman, then a Star Wars book, then a Vonnegut novel, or Graham Greene, then something totally out of my wheelhouse recommended by someone else. Then a graphic novel. Then a book on craft. Rinse, repeat. That's pretty much the pattern in when I'm not reading things for work. (Sometimes, four Star Wars books will come out at once and since I have to keep up, one book will turn into four in a row. It happens now and again.)

But you need to read writers that are different than you and writers that are the same as well.

I'm told averaging a book a week is ridiculous. In 2015 I averaged a book and a half a week. In 2016, only 1.03 books a week. This year I'm one week behind so far. Though I am in the middle of five books I plan to try to finish in the next week or so, which would put me back to three books ahead.

But how do you balance that time spent against your writing? For me, it's trying to create a set time and space where writing is the only thing I worry about. Usually, that's first thing in the morning for at least two hours. If I'm on a deadline, I might sneak in more time later, but that's usually my writing time. (When I'm a full-time writer, eventually, that time will probably triple, at least.) Then, I spend every other spare moment thinking about reading. Sometimes I'm better at it than others, but I try to keep books everywhere I'm likely to have five minutes. In the bedroom, in the living room, in my office, in the bathroom. That's kind of why I'm always in the middle of so many.

But I also have the Kindle app on my phone. That has been really helpful in reading digital tomes. Because it will sync to my Kindle Paper White, I can fall asleep reading the Kindle, then pick up on a work break on my phone at the same spot. It might not be a break long enough to get any writing done, or even anything else, but it's enough to get a chapter read. And that helps me cruise through the material.

I think part of the reason I'm so prolific is because I read so much. I'm constantly getting stimulating input that forces my writer's brain into action. It's not just books, either. Movies do that. Podcasts do that. Everything I do, really, can be a source to nourish my writing. But reading is the most important because it's the most similar to what I do.

I don't know what that balance is like for you. I don't know how much your speed of reading affects it. But for me, I've found a balance I can live with. I can't tell you how to find that balance for yourself, but I can tell you how I found mine. And it was a lot of trial and error. For me, the right balance is as much reading and writing as I can muster in a given day. Writing first, reading second. But for you it might be the opposite.

When I was talking to other writers about this, I was shocked to discover that people (not writers usually, but people in general) don't read all that often. And a book a week is a pace that some might only hold in their dreams. But that just makes it that more important. That's one thing that will give us an edge, right? After all, Mark Twain once said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

---

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

The Importance of Honest Advanced Readers

2017-06-22T17:08:00.002-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to read a book from an acquaintance. They'd been religiously promoting their book and I decided I would give it a shot.

Sadly, I never made it past the free sample that Amazon offered.

What I was most shocked by is that this book made it through editors and was published by a publisher. Which is a different lesson: watch out for scam publishers, though I'm not sure who got scammed harder here, the author or the publisher. The writing was largely incomprehensible, the repetition of words was the mark of a middle-school writer, the scene setups and action descriptions sounded more like a game master bluffing their way through a scene they have no idea about. The characters were paper thin, the diversity was lacking in every significant degree. In fact, the only female character in the preview was a victim of severe male gaze in a situation the author seemed to have no first-hand experience with, either. The preview was littered with errors on every page. It was obvious no one had gone over this book. They skipped editing and went straight to layout.

I struggled with reaching out to the author and the publisher and the authors who somehow blurbed the book. I wanted to write a review but felt like it wouldn't be welcome. (And no, I won't share the identity of the author or the book with you.)

But one thing that could have prevented embarrassment on the part of the author and the publisher would have been some honest feedback from advanced readers. This is something that would have allowed the author more time to work on the book (and scrap it, even, if it wasn't working) and would have given the publisher a better foundation to work with.

It's the very reason I use advanced readers. I have readers go through everything before I send it out. By the time I've sent my work out to a publisher or an agent, it's been through three or four different drafts (minimum) and I've had at least a half a dozen pairs of eyes on it. And it's not just friends and family (though there is some of that, too.) I try to make sure my peers are reading it. And I'm showing this work to peers whose taste and level of craft I trust. They'll be able to look at a sentence, a paragraph, a story, a novel, and say, "This is amateur hour, man."

Also, find people who have experiences vastly different than yours. Find people who don't look like your, or have backgrounds or lifestyles similar to yours. You'll be amazed at how many different things they'll point out that you would have never noticed.

They're all able to guide you. Or to confirm your suspicions. If half of your advanced readers report back that something you weren't quite sure about doesn't work, you know exactly where your work is. But if they all come back with the same complaint and it's something you didn't even realize, you've just been shown your blind spot.

You also need to be able to choose people to read who are well versed in what you're trying to do. If you're making a piece patterned after old pulp serials, make sure one of your readers is well versed in them. On the other hand, try the opposite as well. Try to find what makes sense and works for both audiences. Don't water down your story to meet anyone else's vision, I'm not saying that, but you definitely need a clarity to your prose that comes with understanding what readers are thinking when they get to any given point. Advanced readers will help you figure all of that out.

They're invaluable and just about every writer has them.

I can think of a couple who don't. And it's not good. Not good at all.

How do you find people like that? Well, start with a writing group local to you. Start attending. Find out if they do critiques. Find a friend who reads everything. Find a friend who reads nothing. But make sure you have readers who are also writers. They will be able to help you diagnose issues with much better precision. And expect to have them be brutally honest with you. Tip-toeing around your feelings will not do at this stage. And, frankly, you don't want people to pat you on the back. You want brutality. Because you want the best story you can get and this is one of the best ways to get there.

How much of their advice you take is definitely up to you, you're still the artist here, but they will certainly give you a roadmap worth looking at.

So think about it. Take that next step. Have someone read your work. Don't take it personally when they find things to fix. It's a rough draft. Of course, there will be. And don't rush to publish. You want the story right, not fast.

--

As for my writing, I've got three pieces I'm working on that should be out soon.

I'm also about to publish a short story on my Patreon that I can't wait to hear your opinion of.

AND: If I can get 100 backers on my Patreon, I'll start a science fiction serial every month. Help me get to that point.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

My Origins Schedule

2017-06-14T16:52:00.000-06:00

As many of you might know, Origins Game Fair is a convention I've been doing for the last four or five years now. Although the brunt of the convention programming is based in table-top games, there is a healthy writing track that includes people like Michael Stackpole and Timothy Zahn. Margaret Weiss is joining the "Library" this year. And then there's me.

I do a lot of writing panels (which you will see below) and I think it's one of the most fun conventions I've ever been to.

If you're in the Columbus, Ohio area and you're here for Origins, come by. I'll be signing and selling books at my table in the exhibition hall whenever I'm not on a panel. It starts tomorrow!

The schedule is also subject to change, so you might see me pop up where you might not expect!

THURSDAY 11 a.m.

Character Building, Heroes and Villains

Learn to craft a protagonist who will catch and hold your readers’ attention, not just with heroics, but with flaws, quirks, and secondary motivations. Learn to craft antagonists who are heroes of their own story, with realistic motivations and the intellectual, organizational, and leadership skills necessary to be worthy adversaries. They can help drive your plot, aid and vex your heroes, and make your story more complex, more subtle, and more interesting. Our panelists will even discuss some of their favorite characters and what went into building them. Bryan Young, Addie J. King, Dylan Birtolo, Aaron Rosenberg

THURSDAY Noon

No Humans Allowed

Elves, animals, aliens, dragons, robots, and monsters…oh my! How can you put them in your fiction without them reading as humans dressed in different skin? How do you effectively write “the other?” This includes a discussion of building your non-human characters’ society. Bryan Young, Thomas Gondolfi, James Daniel Ross

THURSDAY 4 p.m.

Burning the Envelope

You’ve heard the expression “pushing the envelope.” Is there a time a writer should go beyond that and burn the envelope into a little pile of ash? When does breaking writing taboos work? Can it have consequences? Can it affect your sales? When can a writer get away with it? And when should a writer pull back and leave the envelope intact? Our panelists talk about scenes where they burned the envelope…and where they chose not to. Lucy Snyder, Jaym Gates, Bryan Young

THURSDAY 5 p.m.

Smearing the Lines

Fantasy, science fiction, military, horror, mystery, steampunk, romance, westerns, and more. There are defined genres in fiction, and writing in a specific genre can make it easier to sell your manuscript. But sometimes a story crosses the lines…and you just have to write it. A steampunk-western, a military-urban fantasy, a science fiction-fantasy, a darkly comedic eco-thriller, or a cozy-horror. Our authors talk about how best to smear the lines and how to market your end product. Aaron Rosenberg, James Daniel Ross, Dylan Birtolo, Bryan Young

THURSDAY 7 p.m.

Reading: Bryan Young

FRIDAY 1 p.m.

Do It Yourself

Learn the joys and difficulties of self-publishing from finished manuscript to layout to copy edits and covers. Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Createspace, and more will be covered. Learn how crowdfunding works for publishing projects and what projects succeed while others fail. Donald J. Bingle, R. L. King, Bryan Young, Aaron Rosenberg, Jaym Gates

SATURDAY 11 a.m.

Collaboration Vs. Going Solo*

Working with a co-author can be awesome. It can also be agonizing. There are definite pros and cons to sharing a byline on a novel or writing tie-in fiction for someone else’s world. Our authors who have experience sharing discuss the fine art of collaboration and what you can do to help make it work. Donald J. Bingle, Aaron Rosenberg, Chantelle Aimee Osman, Bryan Young

SATURDAY Noon

Diversity and Stereotypes

Diverse readers demand diversity in science fiction and fantasy. In the past several years authors have made a conscious effort to sculpt stories with characters of all races, religions, and sexual persuasions. Is there a point when diversity becomes a stereotype…the strong woman-warrior who can out-fight any man? Our panelists cover how to do it right and how diversity plays a role in their own fiction . Addie King, James Daniel Ross, Bryan Young

SATURDAY 3 p.m.

Writing Tools

What’s in your office? Beyond the ideas and outlines and time spent at a keyboard, there are things that can help improve your writing. Our panelists discuss desk space, offices, word processors, software, desktops, laptops, reference books, and more…accoutrements for the serious writer. Gregory Wilson, R.L. King, Thomas Gondolfi, Bryan Young

SUNDAY Noon

The Past, Present, & Future of Fantasy Fiction

The genre has changed considerably in the past several decades, from paperbacks filled with two-dimensional characters on quests, to political intrigue, racy bedroom scenes, and dark themes with complicated protagonists. Our panelists explore the path the fantasy genre has taken, look at where it stands now, and theorize what likely will happen in the future. Sheryl Nantus, Bryan Young, James Daniel Ross

--
I've had a new piece come out for StarWars.Com, a new playlist, this one is about Cham Syndulla.

And I also wrote a piece for City Weekly about what artists owe you. It's called "Art on Demand."
--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Doing it Over Again

2017-06-06T15:53:00.000-06:00

Last night was a great night. It was the last official shoot for my short film. It was a reshoot, though, and that gave me the vague sense of deja vu.

It's expensive and time-consuming to reshoot something. There are a lot of balls to keep in the air. Not only do you have your cast and their schedules to juggle, you have your camera people, makeup department, sound person, etc.. You also have your own time you have to manage. It's a difficult thing to get a group of adults that large together for anything let alone something that even mildly resembles work.

So when you call everyone and ask to do something over, it's a big deal.

But the end product is going to benefit for it so much, even if it's hard, so you do it, right?

That's what this night of reshoots reminded me of in my writing. Sometimes it's just so hard to redo a scene or a piece of the structure. Every moment ripples toward others and, in a long book, a minor change at the beginning could have monumental consequences at the end. But you do it because you want a better book.

For this scene we reshot, it was to replicate all the work we did on the first night of shooting. The lighting wasn't quite right. It was too cold. The camera was having issues. One of the audio packs was being problematic. We shot until almost 3 in the morning and so the takes toward the end of the night were far more exhausted than the beginning, making them even harder to cut together. There was every reason to redo it, but for a brief time, I told myself it was good enough.

It's important to look at every scene of your book with an eye that critical. See what went wrong and see how you can address it. When I was editing the rough cut of the short film, the issues I had the most problems jumped out at me. So I tried to redesign the scene in ways that would allow me to address my issues and make the scene better. We changed the location and the lighting situation. We tweaked dialogue. We shot on a warmer night. We brought different audio equipment. And then we did it all over again.

The end result? A better movie, despite all the extra work.

And this taught me a lot about writing, too. It's much easier to tear the walls out in a novel than it is in a film. So why do I get overwhelmed and hem and haw about doing revisions that are "hard?"

Revision is a difficult part of the creative process. Things don't always work out the way you want them to and changing them can be difficult. But that's just part of molding the clay and refining the final form, right?

Ask yourself what advantages can you give yourself to make things better. Is it a change of location? Different players? A different crew? Think about what would help you accomplish your goal better and then make the call.

The only one stopping you at that point is you.

Or me, rather.

The only one stopping me is me.

--

The biggest thing I've written and had published is this piece on Wonder Woman and her importance for HowStuffWorks.

--
As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Not Quitting

2017-05-30T14:18:00.001-06:00

I'm not going to quit being a writer.

I've written 14 books so far. As many feature length screenplays. Hundreds of short stories.

I'm not going to just give up.

But for many writers, that's a thing that comes up in their mind. That they could quit. That they might. I mean, I'm not here to tell to stick with it or to leave. That's obviously a decision you'll know is right for you. But I read recently that the writers you see aren't the best, most talented writers. They're just those that didn't quit.

And I take a little bit of offense to that remark.

Not quitting is part of the talent. It might even be a talent of its own. But should you quit? Personally, I don't think so.

I read another article that's been making the rounds the other day. The headline? "If you want to write a book, write every day or quit now." I'm not sure how that advice helps anyone. I happen to write every day. That works for me. I'm not going to quit doing that any time soon. But I wouldn't presume that's the path every writer needs to take. I know people who write in bursts. Or they go six months writing and six months researching. Or they just write on weekends. Whatever. It doesn't matter, as long as you're putting the work in. The shape that work takes is up to your process.

There was another horrifying statement in the article and it implied that the author viewed other writers who didn't quit as competition and that he hated them.

Let me say this: This is NOT a competition among writers who have decided not to quit. We all need to help each other stay in the game. And get a leg up. Not eat each other alive.

If a writer would rather compete and not help fellow writers, that's their choice, but they're going to have a lonely time of their career.

So, really this all boils down to two things: don't quit and support each other.

Even if you don't get published, there's a lot of value in writing for personal reasons. If you find it cathartic, why quit even if you're not getting published?

It just doesn't make sense.

Ignore bad advice and keep writing at the pace that fits your process.

--

I've had a few pieces come out in the last few weeks, but the biggest might be for the 40th anniversary of A New Hope over at StarWars.com. I dove into a huge research project that got into the weeds on the original reviews of A New Hope.

The May Patreon story came out as well. It's called Dreamscape and I hope you enjoy it.

--
As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Collaboration is Good

2017-05-02T17:14:00.000-06:00

I'm in the midst of making my short film, which started as a story I wrote on my own. We've completed principal photography. I'm in the editing room and it looks like we were able to capture everything we needed. But in order for me to do that, I had to trust a lot of people with my story and my vision. I created the story, yes, but I had readers look at it and had them give me notes for revision. Then I turned it over to actors and they had to inhabit the parts and bend my vision to fit theirs, for their acting is their art. Then I had to bring in a cinematographer who I had to trust to get the images I'd described to him into the camera. I'll have to trust that the musicians who put together the soundtrack will apply their art to the best of their ability. And then my art, after the story is written, is to become the conductor and make sure all those collaborative artists plying their trades work together to synthesize into one piece of art.

For prose writers, this level of collaboration, on any level, can be hard. They want to be the final word on what is said and what isn't, but I find that writers who don't have any collaborative spirit are the sort of writers that no one wants to work with. I've been an editor and I've dealt with writers that don't have any of that collaborative spirit. They might be good writers, but they'd be too much of a headache to work with again. At least for me.

So what I'm proposing is this: get out of your comfort zone a little bit and try to work on something collaboratively. It's going to teach you a lot of things about yourself and your writing. This was really how I learned to write. I started in screenwriting and had at least one, sometimes two, screenwriting partners for most of the big stories I wanted to tell and it taught me a lot about how to be an artist who can defend his vision when he needs to but can acquiesce to necessary demands for the good of the story.

Working with a co-writer is a completely different game and it's a process I love. There are few things I find more exhilarating than those conversations you have with your collaborators trying to refine the story. To find it. To learn its shape and define its contours. You need to find out what excites the both of you about it. What this teaches you is to be able to argue for your ideas and back off when your idea isn't the best one. Now, this might not work for everyone if they have too much of an ego, but it's my belief that you can feel when your collaborator is right, even if you don't want to admit it. It will teach you how to flow with the story and make sure you come out with the best possible version. It will teach you how to back off and be humble when you need to be.

These collaborative skills will go a long way in teaching you things about being a writer. Because that's the relationship you'll need to have with your editor. You need to trust them to help make your art better, but you need to be able to articulate for yourself why a thing needs to stay or works better for the story. Because at that point, you're working to make the story better, even if it means you're wrong about something.

Giving collaboration a shot will also help you identify what might be a problem before it becomes one in the story. Two heads really can work out story problems you might not have noticed on your own.

I'm a big believer in trying new things every time I start a new story, something to challenge me into being a better writer and storyteller. Learning how to collaborate is one of those skills I wouldn't want to do without. If you haven't done it before, give it a shot. You might find you like it.

--

I've been working on more writing and turned a lot of stuff into editors, but nothing has hit yet. I'll keep you posted on that.

I've also been toiling on my short film like you wouldn't believe. I can't wait until you'll all be able to see it, but that might be quite a while yet.

--
As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Characterization

2017-04-26T18:48:00.002-06:00

I was asked by a fellow writer how to approach characterization in a way that allows one to express their personalities without putting it into plain text. And I think that's a great question. No one likes to read about how a character acts outright. They want to see it.

A lot of this will come down to the classic "show don't tell" advice.

No one wants to read a passage where you say something like, "Jason was a constantly nervous person who liked ice cream when he could get it. He had a short temper and was prone to large outbursts. He hated this about himself and would cry himself to sleep at night."

This is the sort of narration that might fit well in a Wes Anderson movie, but to make that character interesting without a person like Gene Hackman or Bill Murray sort to inhabit it, you need to show us all of these things. If your character is constantly nervous, how can you show that in other scenes? Are they constantly biting their thumbnails? Are they scratching their neck and sucking in a breath when things get uncomfortable? How can you show me that they're constantly nervous? What are their quirks of character?

Telling me a character has a short temper isn't as powerful as showing it. How can you craft a scene that's germane to the story that would illustrate this? Does this Jason character blow up at his wife because she disagreed with him about the television station? Or does he get into it with his boss over a mistake he made? What does his temper look like? Does he get quiet and passive aggressive? Or does he yell?

Then instead of telling us that they cry themselves to sleep, show us. What's their thought process as they're laying there in bed? Are they counted missed opportunities like sheep? Are they cataloging each of their failures and wondering which is going to be the one that descends them completely into depression? Do they have existential dreads that make them want to lament the short time we have on Earth? Show us what that looks like.

Have an idea of what your character is like and think about the story you're putting them through and think about how to craft scenes that will test them. Have a character that dislikes kids? Set a scene in a daycare that forces them to deal with it. It's great characterization and makes for great drama.

Really, what a story is designed to do is to show us what a character is made of. They might not quit biting their nails through the course of a book, but they might learn how to deal with their temper.

William Goldman taught me a lot about characterization in his book about screenwriting by describing his process of working on the opening of Harper. Paul Newman is down on his luck and probably poor. What better way to show me that than having him search around for coffee grounds, finding none, and putting day-old grounds back into the coffee maker for his morning cup?

You'll notice this a lot in great movies, too. Watch Marion Ravenwood's introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark. She is in a drinking competition against a solid tree-trunk of a man. And she wins. What does that tell us about her character? That she's going to hold her own against men for the rest of the picture? That she's feisty and can hold her liquor? What happens next, though? She's wearing this armor when she's talking to Indy when he comes in. But as soon as he leaves, as soon as she's alone, she's winsome. There's an incredible depth of character over those three scenes and we are never once told, "Marion is strong but has a soft side."

But these are decisions you have to make about the character at the outset and work on them. And you might need to refine them over revisions. The book I'm working on now, I wanted a character that was having a crisis of conscious, but I wanted her to be more of a rebel in the second draft, so going through and finding ways to combine those two things have been hard, but it's worth it and I think it's creating an interesting character that people will respond really well to.

It's not easy, but this is what your teachers meant when they told you to show not tell over and over and over again when you were learning the basic skills of writing.

--

As for my writing recently, there's been a ton of it over the last few weeks, but I've been gone so long that would just be a giant list. I did stuff for City Weekly, StarWars.com and some other places. The biggest thing, though, is the piece I wrote for my new Patreon story, which I'm really proud of. I've also been swamped on my short film, which I'll give you an update on once we're wrapped.

You can read "The Ghost Ship" now by backing my Patreon.

--
As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

The Road to Freelancing

2017-04-04T19:05:00.002-06:00

I've been freelancing for a long time now. I've written for websites ranging from my own like Big Shiny Robot! (and this space) to Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks, Fantasy Flight Games, and StarWars.com. I've written for magazines and newspapers. I still have a regular column at Salt Lake City Weekly, which is the alt-weekly here. I had a weekly column before that in IN This Week, a now defunct weekly from the same area.

How did I get to the point where I was getting paid for my writing on a regular basis?

Well, it wasn't easy, for one. For two, no two writers will have the same path to that point. What worked for me might not work for you. And the path you take might be completely wrong for me. But I can tell you what I did and how I started and you can see where that goes.

Let's start in high school, shall we? I was on the newspaper staff for three years in high school. My first year, we had to print out the text and wax it to layout pages and hand lay in gutters. It was a nightmare but so fun. After that, we moved to "Aldus Pagemaker," which no longer exists, but it was great. I learned so much about journalism and writing in compact formats in that arena and it was something I could see myself doing as a career. At the same time, I was taking all kinds of creative writing classes and history classes and you can see where my trajectory was heading. I wanted to tell stories, both fiction and non-fiction. And then I stumbled into filmmaking.

I made a movie. I crewed on all kinds of other movies. Then I was able to marry journalism and storytelling and film in documentaries. The first one I did, The Misbehavers, will never see release. The second one I worked on was called This Divided State. It ended up getting picked up by The Disinformation Company and on the path to getting it distribution was creating a blog while we did a tour of the film at colleges and at film festivals.

That blog forced me to use all of my journalism skills to talk about politics on a daily basis and we got the attention of a lot of places. This Divided State appeared in everywhere from the New York Times to the Washington Post and our blog got linked up everywhere from Crooks and Liars to Daily Kos and all points in between. It generated a lot of attention for the film and the filmmakers behind it and that was sort of my first step in becoming a freelancer.

This Divided State came out and we got another gig. I was now producing a documentary film with a $250,000 budget about the politics of obesity in America. It was called Killer at Large. Blogging worked as a platform for us and we knew we wanted to continue that. We were contacting press outlets and asking them to write stories about the film and I contacted the Huffington Post. This was in 2006 or so. And they said, "We're not going to report on it, but we'd love for you to write about it in your own words."

And that's how I got to be a contributor to Huffington Post. It was a great platform and it got a lot of eyeballs on my words, but I was still working on the film. I didn't want to just talk about politics, though. I wanted to talk about nerd stuff. Who doesn't want to talk about nerd stuff?

So that's when, in February of 2007, Lucas Ackley (who was working on the website for Killer At Large) and I decided we would start our own geek news site. Voila! Big Shiny Robot! was born.

This was really the key to me being a freelancer. I was writing an article every day for Big Shiny Robot! Sometimes I was writing two or three a day. I was reviewing things, I was covering news, I was doing it all. And we attracted a team of other writers to do it with me. I've written almost 3000 pieces for the website over the last 10 years and it's that practice that helped me move on.

I got my first newspaper gig when Big Shiny Robot! got attention here locally in Salt Lake City. I met the editor of one of the weeklies here in town and began to cultivate the idea that a nerd column every week would be a good idea. That's really what it came down to, was developing a relationship with an editor and pitching them an idea that worked for them. And, at this point, I was offering to do it for free. I think this was a bad move, generally, but I didn't know any better. I was convinced my writing wasn't worth paying for. Looking back at some of those old columns, maybe I was right.

But I moved on to the other, larger weekly when they offered to pay. (I'm still writing there now, I just turned in my 140th piece for them). The way that came about was the same thing. I met one of the writers there at a party, cultivated a relationship, floated the idea, and they liked it.

After a while on Big Shiny Robot!, Star Wars: The Clone Wars started. And I was the only writer on the internet who was reviewing every episode. That began my journey into being a Star Wars journalist. Those reviews put me on the radar at Lucasfilm's PR apparatus. I jumped on twitter so I could be in on the conversation, and I started cultivating relationships that way. Since I was writing for print newspapers, I figured Star Wars Insider was my next step.

I emailed the editor and told him who I was, linked him to some of my work, and asked if he'd accept pitches from me. He said he absolutely would and I persisted in sending him pitches that got rejected for two years before he finally bought one. I've written dozens of stories for them now, but it took a long time to have the right pitch at the right time.

When I heard that StarWars.com was looking for writers to write on the website, it was the same thing. That was how I ended up meeting Matt Martin. I wanted to write for the site and he was in charge. I kept going to conventions and haunting the Star Wars booth until I found him and introduced myself and told him what my aim was. We exchanged emails and I pitched some ideas and I've been a regular fixture at the website since.

Really, I think the key to being a freelancer is to have a body of work (sometimes that's hard to do when you're just starting out.) I started Big Shiny Robot! and willed a body of work into existence. (I'd be more than happy to take pitches from writers for that site and let you build that work there, too. Email me if you're interested.) Then I just kept learning how to do what I did better, made connections with people, developed them into relationships, and didn't just quit with the first pitch.

Will this path get you to where you want to be? I doubt it. This is highly specific and an odd path. But all it took was a lot of hard work (ten or fifteen years of it now) and I'm where I'm at. I'm still trying to crack that nut with novels. I wrote my first novel in 2006 or so and put that away. I wrote my next one in 2011. I've published four novels now and a non-fiction book and some collections of short stories. I'm supplementing my fiction with a Patreon. I'm just putting in the hard work and building relationships with people.

When it comes down to it, that's what it takes.

--

As for my writing recently: First off, I have a new short story for my Patreon that you can check out here.

I had another piece come out from Fantasy Flight Games about the Star Wars RPG. Read that here.

I did a piece about the new Flintstones comic for HowStuffWorks that I'm pretty proud of.

I took part in this point/counterpoint about the best design in Rogue One for StarWars.Com.

I also got to do an interview with Vanessa Marshall, the voice of Hera Syndulla, over there as well.

--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Bravery in Sharing

2017-03-21T16:34:00.002-06:00

I was asked to take a crack at explaining to other writers how to deal the vulnerability that comes with sending out your work.

I'm not sure what to do about that.

That's something that comes with every piece of your soul that you bare in writing. There's not much I can say to make you feel comfortable with sharing your work. This is a highly personal process. And all I can do is give you some advice on what to expect and what not to expect.

First, you're going to need to develop a thick skin. People are going to give you a lot of feedback on your writing and you need to understand that they are trying to help you. No one writes a perfect, clean first draft. And when you hand that first draft over, there are issues with it that you are completely blind to. People will point them out. It's nothing personal, they're trying to help you get better and help you see some of the things you've certainly missed in the blind fury of a first draft.

And there's always the chance that the person you hand it to won't like it at all. Maybe they won't understand it. Maybe they'll miss the point entirely. These are all things that will happen. Again, you can't take it personally. How you separate dislike for your piece from a dislike of you is a very personal thing.

How do I cope with it? I understand that they're coming from a place of wanting my book and my writing and my stories to be better. Even if I disagree with their notes, I try to understand why other readers might feel that way and I wonder if the problem isn't in what they pointed out, but somewhere else that effects that moment. I assume I bungled the construction of that moment somehow and look for ways I can make myself understood.

It is almost never a personal attack when an early reader doesn't like what you've done. You just need to work harder and polish the story.

There's another kind of rejection, though, and that's going to be a little bit harder to take. This is the rejection of editors and publishers. You've done your work, you've honed your story, you've made it as good as you can, but they reject it like it's a first draft.

You need to understand that much, much more goes into accepting a novel than just writing one. They might not feel like they can sell it. It might not be right for them. It might just not fit what they're looking for. They might like it just fine.

But that rejection still hurts. I'm in the midst of gathering up a whole bunch of rejections on three different novels and it stings, but I keep going. I know that I can adapt much of the feedback I've gotten and work on the books some more. But I also know that I've got other books to work on and have opened the door for more submissions.

Every writer you will ever talk to will have this mythical box of rejections. Or a spreadsheet. Personally, I keep a spreadsheet and keep track of every submission I've made and what the responses were. And I'll eventually crack that nut.

This is part of the process. Everyone goes through it. Embrace it.

I don't know if this helps. Everyone has a different level of comfort with sharing their writing, but if you're not writing for other people to read your work, what are you writing for?

--
I wrote a piece on the cinema behind Beauty and the Beast for Crooked Scoreboard...

I have some other stuff coming out later in the week and next week, too.
--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

Salt Lake Comic Con Schedule

2017-03-14T16:54:00.001-06:00

I will be doing a whole pile of panels. I'll be doing a signing and lots of live podcasts and I would love to see you. Stop by. Say hi. Ask questions, etc.

Friday

4:00 pm - Fauxthentic History: The Princess Bride - The History of Florin and Guilder
Room 150G

5:00 pm - Mysteries of the Force
Room 150G

6:00 pm - Carrie Fisher - To Me, She's Royalty
Room 250A

8:00 pm - Adventures in Podcasting
Room 150G

Saturday

11:00 am - Spotlight on Greg Grunberg
Grand Ballroom

1:00 pm - Author Signing with Bryan Young
Shadow Mountain Booth #401

4:00 pm - The Interconnected Star Wars Universe
Room 250A

5:00 pm - Inside Rogue One
Room 250A

7:00 pm - Full of Sith - Live!
Room 150G

There are a lot of cool things going on and I'll be a little busy, but I would still very much like to meet and say hello. These conventions are large, though, so if you don't catch me, don't feel too bad. But if you like Star Wars, my guess is you'll be seeing lots of me.

I hope to see you there!
--

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

The Aeronaut and Escape Vector are still out and still need your purchases and reviews. If nothing else, they can use you telling people about them. If you want signed copies, visit the shop here on this page.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!

The Villain's Tool Kit

2017-03-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I taught a panel at SaltCon, which is a gaming convention held each year in the Salt Lake City area. It's a lot of fun and there's always a lot of interest in the intersection between storytelling and roleplaying games.

The panel I gave was on worldbuilding, but I taught about a concept that makes for really great roleplaying game stories from the perspective of the game master, but it can also be a powerful tool when crafting certain kinds of stories.

If there were a style or mode of writing a book that's most like the way a roleplaying game, I would think it's the method of writing that Stephen King outlined in his book On Writing. He talks about how he doesn't do any outlining, he's very much working on the story by the seat of his pants, taking a premise and putting the character (or characters) through the paces. Every chapter he asks himself, "How would this character react to this situation realistically?" and that's the direction he heads.

In RPGs, the game master has to set the premise for the characters and they react however they're going to and the story unfolds in turn from there. As a game master, it's your job to array the forces of evil (or whatever) against the characters in a fashion that makes sense. Unfortunately, there are some GMs that want to tell the story they've devised and want to force the characters through those paces. If you're applying that to storytelling, you're going to have a story that feels very forced and none of the characters on either side of the protagonist/antagonist equation will be authentic or believable.

What do I recommend?

Don't worry specifically if your bad guy "has a plan." Maybe they do have a plan, maybe they don't. That's almost immaterial. They certainly need or want something. And what you'll do is fill up what I call a "Villain's Toolbox" to determine what they have at their disposable. It makes it a lot easier to react to what the hero does if you know what the villain has at their fingertips to change the game back in their favor.

What sort of things do you put in this Villain's Toolkit? Well, what do they have access to? Let's say they're a captain in the local constabulary. They would have access to a small force of police that would be able to do some of their bidding? Depending on the world, they might have access to horses, chariots, or cars. What is their political clout like? Are they well respected? Could they go to the mayor and have the mayor apply pressure to the characters with other means? Do they have a mistress? Or a sidekick? Or a family member that might do something on their behalf? Is there a way that these characters circling in the orbit of the villain could come in contact with the characters, both to give information to them and to take it for the antagonist? Depending on the world, maybe the villain has access to a helicopter, or a griffin, or a dragon. Perhaps they can get their hands on a tank. Perhaps they are just fabulously wealthy and can buy what they need and the escalation of technology arrayed against our poor heroes makes it difficult for them to compete.

The point is, you want to establish all that they have access to before you start your story.

Then when the protagonists make moves that might affect the villain, you can do some roleplaying on your own. "With all these tools at my disposal, what would I do...?"

And it's these sort of questions you want to ask yourself. "Would they keep this a secret at this point? Or would they involve others? Would they ride to the scene of the crime? Or would they send a subordinate?"

This kind of thinking is going to help inform your scenes, keep your story fresh, and help you reduce the number of plot holes you might otherwise let leak into your story.

It's important to put yourselves in the heads of all your characters, and building a toolkit like this for your villain is a really great way to make sure you're treating them with the respect and authenticity they deserve.

--
As for my recent writing, I started a new column examining the cinema you should check out after new releases for CrookedScoreboard.com. My first piece was on Logan.

Another piece I did for HowStuffWorks was about the times Wolverine kicked the most ass.

There's more stuff coming, too.

As a reminder: Please join my short story Patreon here. Your contributions to the Patreon help me write more like this.

Also! here's the full list of "rules and guidelines" I've been collecting over my years of studying writing advice and process.

As far as my work outside of all this: There's a lot of great stuff on Big Shiny Robot! and Full of Sith for you.

And please, please, please don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter and Facebook!