One of my favorite places to get ideas for characters is Wal-Mart. Now, before you start throwing flames my way, let me say this: I am in no way demeaning that store or the people who frequent it. The reason that I like this particular store is because everyone shops there. If you go to a trendy mall, you’re only going to see a particular type of people at that mall. If you go to a salvation army store, the breadth of economic bracket of the typical consumer there is also going to be limited.

But, at Wal-Mart, you see everybody in one place – everyone from people on food stamps to a guy who drove up in a Benz. You’ll see mentally challenged people there with their case workers, struggling to maintain a hold on their independence and dignity in a world that shuns and degrades them. Single mothers (teenage or otherwise), bachelors, college students, parents with eight kids trying to save a buck here and there on the essentials, and of course, that guy who drove up in the Benz who wants to save a few bucks on the HDTV he’s putting in his 5th guest room.

If you want a reader to be able to sympathize and empathize with your characters, then you need to be able to do the same with actual, living, breathing human beings. People from different walks of life as you, people with problems you can’t possibly imagine, people with advantages you know you’ll never have.

What I’ve found really rewarding is going into a Wal-Mart and just watching, observing. Take a look around you, but not that cursory glance you normally give that is filtered with the blinders of your past experiences and your own preconceptions. Take the blinders off and look around you with fresh, objective eyes: the eyes of a reader waiting to be guided, thrilled, excited.

Take a look at the woman pushing the cart with her kid in it. What do you think her daily life is like? Is she happy? What do you think she daydreams about while she pushes that cart through the grocery aisles? What does she want out of life and what’s preventing her from getting it? Asking yourself these questions and filling them in with complete fiction is a great way to build your characters. If the fictional backstory you build for these people fits what you’re looking at, then it might also fit scenes you write for such characters.

Places like Wal-Mart (as well as thousands of other good places to people-watch) are endless fountains of ideas for characters. So, the next time you’re stuck looking for ideas for new characters or the ones you have lack dimension, then just get in the car and do some character shopping.

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I could sit here, comfortably shielded behind the walls of my blog, and rant and rave about the injustice of it all – how dare they reject my story? What’s wrong with those people? Don’t they know good fiction when they see it? I could do all of those things, but I won’t. I deserved the rejection.

The rejection letter from these folks was nice enough to tell me that my story was both interesting and well-written, but because of the overwhelming response to the call for stories, I just didn’t make the cut. Cue the scene with high-school-me standing on the edge of the soccer field while teams are called, all sad and dejected as I get picked last. So, if my story was both interesting and well-written, then what did I do wrong?

It all comes down to the word interesting. I thought about it and read through my story last night and the reason for the rejection was clear as a bell. I actually told my wife that it probably only made the short list on the merit of the writing, because the plot was absolutely terrible.

Sure, I opened the story with a bang, leaping right into the action. I had very little exposition, only sprinkled into the action in the cleverest of places. The story read quite quickly and, as the letter said, was actually written pretty well. The problem was with the plot. The story is about this woman who, after losing her mentor in an accident, suddenly defies the city leadership to go off and save a group of people she’s never met. She even uses her powers to fight her people just to save the strangers. While there is motivation in the story that makes her actions (mostly) believable and justified, there’s something missing. Can you spot it? Can you say antagonist? I just knew you could…

I went through the story again. The cave-in at the beginning that kills her mentor was random chance, so we can’t blame that on an antagonist. The city leadership is partially there as an antagonist, but they never directly oppose her actions, the protagonist just kind of cuts them off in traffic, as it were. The antagonist(s) would have gone from point A to point B with or without the presence of the protagonist. As we say in the software business, that had a bad smell. The result is a bit of conflict, some (well-written?) action, but again, there’s none of that obvious, crucial opposition that should be there.

It gets worse. I know, I couldn’t believe it either when I read it. I kept asking myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” The confrontation, the climax that is supposed to take the reader out of the middle of the story and throw them, gripping the story with newsprint-covered thumbs, into the ending, was nonexistent. The protagonist runs away from the admittedly deflated antagonists. She gets rescued, and then flees her rescuers when she finds out they want to put her in a lab somewhere. Even here, when given the chance to turn these people into truly confrontational antagonists, I left them flaccid and ineffectual as true sources of opposition.

So my story may have been well-written, but in terms of plot and structure, it was a complete failure. It might have been interesting to follow the protagonist through her various adventures, but it wasn’t compelling. People reading the story didn’t care, they didn’t have an uncontrollable desire to keep turning the pages; that need to see what’s lurking behind the next page because the opposition is doing it’s job – hurling obstacle after obstacle in front of a protagonist about whom the reader truly cares.

Had I to do it all over again (and I will), I would have made the cave-in at the beginning caused by the city leadership, through their own reckless endeavors. When she confronts them about it, she discovers all kinds of horrible things the city’s leaders have been planning to do, including possibly destroying the city itself to satisfy their own greed. She threatens to tell the citizens of the city about what they’re doing, and they throw her in jail. She then escapes and, … you get the idea.

By making it damned obvious, as obvious as a hammer to the face, who the antagonists are, the conflict is easy to spot. By amping up the level of conflict, increasing the danger, the stakes, and the consequences, the reader cares more about the outcome. With all this conflict around the protagonist, I can weave in exposition and character development in how she deals with the obstacles to further draw the reader in, make them care about her and sympathize with her. Had I written the story this way the first time, I still may have been rejected, but the response from the editors might have been that the story was compelling or better but they still didn’t have room.

To me, a rejection isn’t a reason to quit or a reason to wallow in self-pity (though I did that for a couple hours). It’s a reason to look back at the work I produced with a different, more objective eye. I can look at it and see all of its shortcomings as if someone had circled them in yellow highlighter. The next time I write a short story, I will make sure the obstacles are far more hard-hitting, the antagonists are far more antagonistic (har har), and rather than settling for interesting, will strive for can’t put it down.

To finish this up, I’ll quote Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work

Think of each rejection not as a rejection, but a little reminder that you can learn from the experience and use it to make your next submission better.

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This book contains a wealth of raw, deadly, zombie excitement and I’m pleased to have my short story, “On the Rocks”, in this collection of tales of the walking dead. I’m not really sure what prompted me to write a zombie story considering the novel I’m working on falls clearly into the fantasy genre. However, when I was a kid and would write short stories for the pure fun of it, without worrying about publishing or agents or editors, the zombie story was a tried and true favorite.

As I sat back and flipped through the book to see how the story turned out in print, it took all of 10 seconds before I started burning the pages with a laser-focused eye of criticism. I noticed every single edit failure. I noticed where I should have changed a phrase, where the dialogue was awkward, where some of the descriptions were just plain absurd. There are also some whitespace problems with the printed edition, and I’m pretty sure they came from my RTF file (yes folks, I hate MS Word as though it is my very own antagonist – always getting between me and my goals!).

The normal, human side of me can look at the story and think, “Say, that’s a pretty cool story about creating zombies with a computer virus!”. However, that part of me is usually very suppressed. I rarely let him come out and play. I’m sure all authors are like this – you spend what seems like an eternity editing a piece, you submit it, and then when you finally get to see it in print, its like someone has taken a big bold highlighter to everything you should have changed before you submitted it.

My personal take-away from this: After I think the piece is ready to submit, I’m going to leave it on disk and walk away for at least three days. Then, I will come back to it and edit it one more time. Then, I will walk away for one more day, then come back and edit it again. Remember, all of these revisions are after I think the piece is print-worthy and has been through the usual multi-round editing phases.

I’m not trying to trash the story, I’m really pleased that it has been published and am excited to produce more short stories for other venues and other genres, but I have learned a valuable lesson that what I think has been edited enough has at least 3 more revisions before it’s ready to be submitted. The other lesson I have learned is that no matter how good my story is, I will always find fault with it and I just need to learn to accept that.

Anyway, I hope you buy the book and enjoy the story!

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Also when I was young, I was really into writing stories. I wrote stories on my mother’s old blue Smith Corona type writer until she couldn’t stand the sound of the hammers smashing anymore and had to confiscate the thing. I went to summer school just so I could take the creative writing classes. When I got to college, my first year there I took creative writing, introduction to science fiction, greek mythology, and philosophy. Doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff a computer science major would be taking, does it? Sure, I also took Physics and Calculus and Linear Algebra and Discrete Math and a bunch of computer programming classes. I even ended up as a TA/exam proctor for a lower level computer science class.

As far back as I can remember, everyone expected me to go into computers. They certainly had good reason, I can say without ego that I’m incredibly good at what I do, among the best. I have presented at programming conferences, user groups, and written and co-written 14+ books on computer programming, some of which have ended up as dog-eared bibles on the desks of developers. Over the past 10 years, I have made it my goal to be among the top computer programmers in the world. So what’s the problem then? Why blog about this? The problem is that I have never been truly satisfied at any “day job” that I have ever had. Sure, there have been really great jobs, but even then those began to seem unsatisfying. I used to think it was because the job was getting boring (and sometimes it was).  But now I realize that there was a deeper cause to my unhappiness at work.

I didn’t want to work in a cubicle building stuffy, boring computer software all day long. Especially when it felt like there wasn’t a single creative step in the process of building this software. I wanted-needed- to build, create, let my mind free and imagine worlds and people and events that stimulated my imagination. The most fun I’ve ever had programming was when I was building MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Dimensions) – big, expansive, text-based worlds that let players roam around and solve puzzles, complete quests, and kill things in classic “infocom” style. I got to use the creative and analytical sides of my brain at the same time.

This past October, I decided that I’d had enough. I was done being a computer programmer. I made the mental switch to believe in the old adage that I am not my job. I forced myself to admit that I was a writer and that I was merely paying the bills with my job as a computer programmer. I was no longer a programmer, but instead a writer who knows how to write computer software. It was amazing what a difference that simple change in perspective made on my life. I have been “present” more in my life in the past few months than I have in the past few years. Not only that, but I’ve got a short story coming out in a published anthology soon, I’m writing a few more stories for other anthologies, and I’m finally moving forward on my fantasy novel with real, measurable progress. It’s amazing what a difference a little change in perspective and priority can make.

Part of me mourns the loss of my previous identity. Part of me feels guilty every time I choose to ignore some blog post about a new piece of software. Part of me feels the tug of stress and anxiety when a new development tool or platform comes out. The old me, the one obsessed with being one of the best coders on the planet, would rush off and absorb this new technology to the exclusion of all else – family, friends, responsibilities, hygiene. Now, I feel the tug and am aware of the call but I don’t answer it. I have decided that I don’t need to obsess about my career as a software architect. I have decided that because I just don’t obsess anymore. I will still bust my ass for my employer and give them 100%, I just won’t spend my nights and weekends obsessing about every new thing that comes along.

I now know what makes me happy. I know what I need. I know who I am.

I am a writer, for all the good and bad that entails.

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I was thinking about this and suddenly came to the conclusion that my college professor was an idiot. First of all, this same professor “taught” us that using said as a default attribution is a bad idea and taught us a whole bunch of other things that an editor recently told me were all wrong. I am now in the process of unlearning all the garbage I was taught by this particular professor.

When I was a kid I remember taking one of those aptitude tests, the ones designed to tell you, based on your scores, what sort of future career you to which you might be suited. This test told me that I should pursue a career in “sanitation”. That’s right, the aptitude test told me that I should be a garbage truck driver. The moral of the story: I’m done letting other people tell me what I can and cannot do.

I firmly believe that if you have that raw spark (neurosis?) within that makes you a writer, then you can hone your craft, learn your tools, and produce great fiction. I think it is foolish and the greatest form of hubris to think that one can be a writer and never once pick up a book on how to write.

Imagine a musical genius whose instrument of choice is the guitar. The man can hear songs in his head that are absolute gems, pure musical perfection. Now, ask that musical genius, who has never lifted a guitar, to go and play the songs in his head. With the exception of a few savant types, this musical genius is going to struggle to play “Happy Birthday” on the guitar, let alone the complex songs in his head. He needs to know how to use the tool, he needs to learn the chords.

Knowing that, in the heavy metal genre, an A chord with the distortion cranked up will make your audience want to punch stuff (a good thing) is essential if you plan to compose heavy metal songs. You wouldn’t know that, regardless of your level of creativity, if you didn’t know all of the chords, how they sound, and the emotions they produce.

The same is true for a writer. We can’t create a page turner without knowledge of plot and structure. We can’t make readers cry without knowledge of characters and character bonding. We can’t make readers so immersed by our fictional world that they ignore the pot of boiling water and the pets with full bladders begging to be let out unless we have a mastery of plot, structure, characters, description, setting, dialogue, and every other tool in the box.

So I picked up a bunch of books on how to write. I’ve already read a few, including those by Stephen King and David Morrell,  but these books were down and dirty technical manuals for how to convert raw inspiration into truly readable fiction. I must admit that I ate quite a bit of humble pie in reading those books. Rather than being upset about it, I ordered about 10 more books. Every speck, every tiny granule of knowledge that I pick up teaches me to better hone my stories. The end result is a work of fiction that is not only more fun to read, but much more likely to be published.

So, to summarize: You can’t create music on the guitar without knowing the chords. You can’t create good fiction without knowing the techniques available to writers. Learn your Chords and your readers will thank you for it.

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On the surface this looks like a nice deal, and it probably is, but you know that Amazon is in it to make money and dominate market share. Their M.O. has always been to make it financially irresponsible for anyone to compete with them in a market segment that they intend to dominate. If you’re  a Trek fan, think of Amazon like the Borg. Little shops are either assimilated (become Amazon partners and give a cut of their business in exchange for not being disintegrated) or they fail. There are obviously exceptions but overall this is how it works.

Amazon’s plan here looks a lot like a plan to cut Apple off at the pass.  Apple has been in talks with Harper that we know of, which means they’ve probably been in talks with other publishers as well. The iTunes store is currently the largest media distribution hub on the planet, and certainly the most profitable. Apple is about to unleash a Tablet on the world, a 10″ piece of technocandy that will have geeks fauning and eReader lovers drooling. If Apple is allowed to create eReader buzz with their tablet, hook it up to the iTunes store so that downloading books from the tablet is as easy as downloading stuff for an iPhone, and Apple gets a bunch of publishers on board with eBook distribution through the iTunes store – you can see where this might end: with Apple dominating the eBook market the same way they dominate legal music downloads. If this happens, then the Kindle will become 2nd fiddle in a market that is rapidly expanding and gaining in popularity. Amazon doesn’t want that.

So what do they do? They offer a 70% royalty deal that includes a clause to prevent you from offering digital copies of your book anywhere outside the Kindle store to intice people into their camp. Lowered eBook prices could generate a huge increase in sales volume for eBooks, which will make publishers see more profit potential in eBooks and the entire thing becomes a self-feeding, beneficial cycle, the “network effect” as it were.

A lot of people in the publishing industry might not know this, but 70% is what application developers get as royalty from sales in the iTunes store. What this really means is that for an indie developer, the entire production chain is taken care of for them – the only thing they need to concern themselves with is building the software. There is no distribution cost to them, and Apple only taking 30% is actually a bargain considering what the independent developer might have to pay otherwise to get their application out in the world.

The conspiracy theorist in me figures that since the developer royalty rate on the App Store for the iPhone is 70%, and Apple is about to unleash a Tablet, and Apple has been talking to publishers, and Apple is currently sitting on the biggest media hub on the planet, that Amazon figures Apple’s going to offer a 70% royalty rate as well. This is why I think they’re trying to cut Apple off at the pass. They get people to start coming up with plans to adopt Amazon’s DTP, Amazon gets their hooks in, and by the time people get ahold of the Apple Tablet, they’ve sold their souls to the Kindle.

This whole business reminds me of the HD-DVD/BluRay format wars. Do I get a Kindle and read only Kindle books? Do I get a Nook and read only Nook books? Do I get an Apple Tablet and read only iTunes eBooks? At some point the house of cards will fall and there will be one winner. Only time will tell if any of this is good for the consumer and how it will change the publishing industry as we know it. As I’ve said before, the bottom line is that if authors and publishers do not embrace change, adapt, and move forward they will be left in the dust.

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Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case?

Regardless of the answer to that question, that’s still the wrong question to be asking. Lots of people are worried that printed books are going to disappear the way CDs have “disappeared” (I use quotes here because you can still buy CDs in stores, they are just losing popularity). What happens to writers if printed books go away? Are we all just going to go extinct like the dinosaurs? From talking to some people and listening to their fear, one would think that one day all writers on the planet are simply going to sink into a tar pit and disappear, to be replaced by the proverbial “thousand monkeys” sitting in a room typing out Shakespeare (eventually).

We’re not looking at an extinction here. Everything evolves, including the art of storytelling. Writers can either put themselves on or ahead of this evolutionary change or they can be left behind. There will never cease to be a market for storytelling, the only thing that changes is the medium through which the story is told. Primitive cultures that had no written language told stories, including oral histories, to each other. Once people figured out how to paint on cave walls, stories depicting great hunts were painted on those walls. When people figured out how to write on papyrus, great stories were told on papyrus. When man invented the printing press, great stories were told to larger numbers of people. When man invented the eReader, great stories were told to people riding buses, sitting on trains, or wiling away the hours on a beach.

Writers will always write, and people will always crave a great story. The medium through which people crave those stories is going to evolve as technology evolves and people’s lifestyles change. It is my opinion that writers need to embrace these new mediums and be part of the evolution of those mediums, helping bring about fantastic new ways to tell stories. Historically, artists who cling to the “old ways” and refuse to accept new mediums are left behind.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think that our books are all going to disappear. I don’t think that we’re going to lose the pleasure in visiting a library that smells like books or visiting a big book store and spending hours just browsing. We are, however, going to have more options available to us that are tailored to our specific needs and lifestyle and that represents great new opportunities for writers, not a death knell.

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What all of this means is that readers will put the book down if they don’t identify with, sympathize with, or want to be like, characters in the book. If the reader has no emotional investment in any of the people in the book, then they don’t give a crap about what happens to your protagonist. They won’t want to see the antagonist get his (or hers) in the end. They won’t care whether the love interest blossoms into a relationship. They simply won’t care – no matter how good the plot is. You can have a fantastic plot driven by flat, unbelievable, caricatures (not characters).

One of the things that I see a lot, especially when reading the fantasy genre is that an author will fail to make their character real enough by making them too perfect or sometimes even the reverse: too flawed. When characters reach an extreme like that they cease to be people with whom the reader can form a bond and become nothing more than an archetype. You could easily replace “Character A”’s looks, personality, background, and name with an entirely new persona and the book would read the same way. This is because “Character A” is just that - generic and lifeless. They’re a placeholder, not a source of motivation or inspiration to the reader.

I’m not saying that this is a cardinal sin. No, if you look at the bookshelves of a Barnes & Noble on any given day, you’ll see countless popular books with archetype placeholders instead of living, breathing characters. Some readers can tolerate it.

If you think about your characters like real people then giving them a rich, full history filled with joys and sorrows, flaws and positive traits, becomes easy. Think about all of the things that motivate your character through the book – the history and life experience that pushes them to make the decisions they make. You could leave all of that stuff unsaid, or you could turn all of those motivations into chances to breathe real life into the character. What if your ultra-brave soldier protagonist suddenly has a burst of paralyzing fear because the sight of the enemy recalls some childhood horror? To me, that’s far more believable than a soldier who is brave and strong throughout the entire book. What if your main character has an addiction that they are constantly fighting and struggling with? Not only will millions of readers be able to identify with that problem on some level and immediately bond with that character, but it provides a wealth of opportunity for coming up with great struggles, climaxes, victories, failures, and plot twists.

The bottom line is this: think about all of your friends and family. Think about every single one of them. They all have flaws, dents, dings, cracks in the armor and skeletons in the closet. It could be an innocent skeleton like having a secret love of green frosting, or it could be the story of a childhood victim or someone who suffered through a terrible loss that effected them tremendously and changed who they are today. All you have to do is look around you and at the people you live with, talk to, love, and barely know and you will find a plethora of flaws, character traits, and histories that chisel your character into a real person instead of a bland, generic archetype.

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The three biggest offenders that will ruin your scenes are: Acts Against Motivation, Acts Against Rules, and Acts Against Soul.

Acts Against Motivation

An act against motivation is pretty self-explanatory. This is when a person (not a character, I hate calling them that. They are fictional people, characters are mockeries or shadows of people) does something in a scene either without visible motivation or worse, against their current motivation. Huge offenders in this category include a lot of fantasy. In many fantasy tales, characters go off on these world-saving epic quests without ever being properly motivated. For a lot of people this can be overlooked, but for some, seeing some farm boy leave home and everything he holds dear without proper motivation is a huge turn-off and enough to put the book down.

Every single thing every person in your story does needs to be motivated. They shouldn’t eat if they’re not hungry, they shouldn’t fight if someone in their position wouldn’t fight. When people move from scene to scene in a story without ever being properly motivated, what you have is a thin plot. Movies often take short cuts in the motivation area because they simply don’t have time to build up the proper motivation and most moviegoers accept that. A 700-page epic fantasy, however, should be rife with motivation and you, as the reader, should never ever doubt why a character did what they did (unless the author wants you to doubt it… but authors that can do that don’t have to worry about spinning motivation properly as they’ve already mastered it).

So next time you put down a book and have that strange, unidentifiable feeling of “this sucks but I don’t know why”, ask yourself if someone in the book just did something without any clear reason for doing so other than furthering the contrivance of a flimsy plot.

Acts Against Rules

This one is far more subtle. The more complacent the reader or viewer, the harder it is to spot these problems. Every world, fictional or real, has an internal set of rules that govern everything that can or cannot take place in that world. In the real world, these rules are simple:  the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, etc are the rules that everyone and everything must obey. In a fictional world, however, there is usually a second set of rules. These rules dictate how magic works, or what level of technology exists in the science fiction world, how strong people are, what the average person can do versus what the protagonists and other heroes can do. If someone in your scene violates the world’s internal rule set, everyone will immediately know it. The reaction may range from almost no reaction whatsoever to outright rage.

A standard plot tactic to enrich a story often involves hindering the protagonist somehow at the behest of the antagonist. The classic “villain traps the hero” scenario. This, unfortunately, is also where a lot of stories violate their own internal rules. Let’s say you have a character that is a master thief. This character is then captured and placed in an ordinary prison cell. Your brain expects that thief to break out of that cell and, if written well enough, you might even have been in suspense waiting for that thief to break out. However, if the author leaves the thief to rot in the cell while someone else breaks them out, you will feel disappointed. This is because the world rules were violated: thieves, especially protagonist thieves, can break out of ordinary confines.

Here’s another example. Let’s say J.K. Rowling throws Harry Potter with his wand into a locked room in a muggle house. If Harry were to spend more than 30 seconds confined in that room against his will, we would all feel disappointed because we know the rules, and we know that a muggle door is no match for a wand.

World rules can be an author’s worst enemy but they can also be a huge ally. Think about this: take that same ordinary prison cell and lock someone like Gandalf up in it. When the reader sees Gandalf not escape, the reader is likely to start thinking that something else, something bigger and more epic might be at play. The reader, knowing Gandalf’s true power and position in the universe, is probably thinking that Gandalf has something up his sleeve. None of that has to be explicitly told to the reader, the reader will guess that something is amiss because world rules were intentionally violated, or at least, appeared to be.

I’m going to leave this topic cut off here because I could spend several additional blog posts on the topic of world rules alone. Suffice it to say that if you trap superman in a wooden box and there’s no kryptonite around, your readers will stop reading.

Acts Against Soul

This one on the surface might look like an act against motivation but if you think about all of the times in all of the books where this comes up, a character often has to choose between the direction of motivation and the direction of their soul.

If someone in your story does something that is so completely against their true, inner nature then you run the risk of jarring readers out of your world and back into the real world. If you see a highly moral character turn and suddenly start butchering innocent women and children, there’s a problem. If a character who has consistently made choices to never sacrifice the innocent suddenly chooses a selfish path that hurts everyone around him, it can cause problems and halt the reader.

On the other hand, if you deliberately make one of your characters do something against their true nature, you can, if done properly,  use that to great effect. This is often called “hanging a lantern”. In other words, if you’re going to break a world rule (or commit one of the 3 illegal acts), you’d better hang a lantern on that fact so the reader knows you’re intentionally doing it and that it isn’t the result of you being a terrible author.

In my opinion, the scene in one of the (bad) Star Wars movies where Anakin kills all the kids in the school is a classic rule breaker. In fact, it breaks all three illegal acts in a single scene. First, it breaks the “Acts Against Soul” rule. I don’t care how much propaganda he’d been filled with, it should take a LOT more than we saw to convince a Jedi learner to murder innocent kids. Second, it violates the “Acts Against Motivation” rule. There is absolutely no clear motivation for him to kill the kids. You can tell in a blatantly obvious way that particular scene is nothing more than a contrivance to get the plot from point A to point B. Everything in that scene is a rule breaker. Finally, that scene also violates the “Acts Against Rules” rule. Given everything that everybody knows about Jedi, the Jedi homeworld, and everything they’ve seen up to that point, the fact that a pile of guards doesn’t immediately rip Anakin to bits once they discover what he’s doing is just inconceivable.

So, in conclusion, I always keep these three “illegal acts” in mind when writing a scene. Before I edit a single piece of grammar, spelling, or writing style, I double-check the scene to make sure that everyone is acting in accordance to the world rules, to their inner core, and to their motivation. If a character isn’t motivated or is otherwise breaking rules, I re-work the scene. To me, breaking any of these three rules means I don’t have a scene and I need to fix it immediately.

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The perfect is the enemy of the good.

There are several other variants of this quote, including the ever-popular “Perfect is the enemy of done.” which often shows up in leadership guidebooks, motivational tools, and other corporate propaganda. This quote has very special meaning for me because it sums up in the smallest amount of words possible the absolute core of the reason why so many writers fail. It describes the reason why it’s taken me ten years of waiting to finally start working seriously on my book.

As a writer, I am constantly plagued by feelings of self-loathing and I continually hurl insults at myself that one shouldn’t use against one’s own worst enemy. This is because the story that is in my head feels clean, pristine, and unmarred. When I allow this story to flow through my hands into the word processor, the end result is something that feels like a dirtying of the original story, as if I’ve somehow ruined it in the telling. This is perfectionism at its worst. The problem is that I feel that my narrative isn’t good enough, that my characters aren’t real enough, that my plot isn’t good enough, and I let that feeling paralyze me.

I sit in front of the word processor and I tell myself that what I’m about to write is going to suck. I tell myself that I’m a worthless, 2-bit hack who is just pretending to be a writer and then I slam the lid shut of my laptop and go off and do something else. You see, this is also a self-defense mechanism. If I am the one who tells me that I am a loser and a no-talent hack then I spare myself the inevitable vulnerability and crushing blow when someone else tells me that. The unwritten story cannot be criticized and if I am the source of the worst criticism, then I will not be hurt. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

At this point I’m at a crossroads. I can either continue to be sucked into the downward spiral or I can remember this quote,

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

And pull myself out of the pit of self-loathing. I can repeat that quote over and over again until I finally decide that it is more important to allow the story to escape my soul unhindered than it is to ensure that it is edited, pristine, and perfect upon release.

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