Perils of the Writer: Finding Value in the Faceplant of Failure

Failing is important.

Not just failing, but the full-on, spectacular faceplant of FAIL.

Because that kind of failure can only be managed by really trying something.

Take, for example, the movies The Fountain or Suckerpunch.  Both of these movies are absolute fiascoes, don't mistake me.  But they are fiascoes of ambition: these are works that pointed to the fences and then struck out magnificently.

And to me, that's far more interesting, far more worthwhile, than something milquetoast that merely fails to offend.  Fails to try anything.

Fantasy writers, especially, should take heed of this idea. The genre is overwhelmed with "safe" cliches, tropes that can serve as a shorthand and allow lazy storytelling and uninspired worldbuilding.  I've read enough unpublished first chapters* through workshops and crit groups to see that.  It astounds me how many fledgling genre writers really aren't willing to expand past their narrow vision of what the genre is "supposed to be".  It astounds me how often I've gotten crit-comments from people regarding how something I wrote didn't fit into that narrow vision, and is therefore "wrong".  Not, "I didn't care for that" or "it didn't work for me", but empirically wrong, like writing fantasy is a math problem. 

Take, for a selfish example, the first chapter of Thorn of Dentonhill.  It starts in a fish cannery.  I've had someone tell me that's wrong because "they didn't have canneries in that era".  In other words, they didn't see the presence of the cannery as a definition of the worldbuilding and the level of technology, but rather already decided what the technology level ought to be, and defined what was anachronistic based on that decision.

Now, did I fail in that instance?  Possibly.  I'm going to say the jury is still out right now, but I can accept that what I wrote didn't work for them, and pointing out the cannery was really a symptom of a larger problem that they were not able to articulate. But, if nothing else, in writing it, it forced my examination of what is and isn't "right" in fantasy.  Over the course of writing Thorn and the other books in that setting, I busted through a lot of my own preconceptions. 

Back in one of the workshops I attended, John Scalzi gave a quick lecture to the students, telling us to "embrace the power of sucking".  I'm telling you something similar: accept the possibility of failure.  Accept that failing has worth. 

And when you fail, you get up, dust yourself off, assess what you may have learned from that failure, apologize to the appropriate parties if necessary**, and try again to do it better.



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*- And published, but let's not get into that.
**- Especially if said failure ties to, say, depiction of cultures or genders that are not your own.

The Long Journey of the Writer

My thirties are coming to a close, officially this Sunday.  So, needless to say, I'm getting a little introspective.  But when I think about what my thirties were to me, in the big picture, it was about the process of becoming a novelist.

I mean, I had been writing before that, of course.  In my twenties I had written a few plays, and made several false starts on novels, done a lot of worldbuilding work... but it was all still just dabbling.

So, we come to 2003.  Oddly enough, what flipped the switch in 2003 was NaNoWriMo.  Now, as I've said before, NaNoWriMo is a great way to learn how to write a novel, but it's not a good way to get a novel written.  NaNoWriMo, is, in essence, your Trunk Novel Workshop.  And for me, in 2003, it was Fifty Year War.  Of course, I didn't realize that at the time.  One never realizes they're writing a trunk novel when they're writing it. 

I "finished" Fifty Year War by the end of 2003, if you can call a 57,000 word plotless meander with no protagonist a finished novel.  I kept working on drafts of it, trying to send it out, somewhat clueless to its pointlessness.  Then in 2004 I tried another novel- a non-genre one called Long Night of the Pieman.  This didn't really come together at all. 

In 2005 I tried my first (failed) attempt at USS Banshee, which was a mess.  Mostly because this attempt to write it was semi-public, in that I was posting 3-5K chunks online every week, like it was a serial.  While that worked nicely on a motivational level, it again was a failure in terms of actually writing something good.  Over the years, I've kept coming back to that space-opera verse, trying to find the story... and I think I finally have.  But, along the way, everything except the main character and, tangentially, the name of the ship has been scuttled.  It's a completely different story than the first one I was doing.  And that's good, because again: plotless meander.

Also in 2005 I took my first shot at Crown of Druthal, which was, I was convinced at the time, going to be the Real Deal.    I even took the fist chapter of Crown to the ArmadilloCon Writers Workshop, my first time attending it.  It was shredded.  At the time, I was all, "What do these people know?", thinking they were fools.  In retrospect, they were right on the money, but I wasn't in a place to hear that at the time.

2006 didn't see much progress in any of these projects-- all of them, as well as a few other vague ideas, didn't ever coalesce into anything.  Frankly, it was a terrible year for me as a writer.  Nothing was coming together.  Not coincidentally, my day job at the time utterly depressed me, and my health and weight were probably at the worst in my life.

In 2007, I turned that around: I left that job, dropped 35 pounds, and put my nose to the grindstone, finishing the draft of Crown.  I also came up with the initial ideas that would evolve into Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, Maradaine Constabulary and Way of the Shield. 

In 2008, I worked on a new draft of Crown, and started attending SlugTribe meetings, bringing chapters of Crown with me.  I also wrote the first draft of Thorn, the first chapter of which I brought to ArmadilloCon.  This was the year when things started coming together.

In '09, I rewrote Thorn and wrote the first draft of Holver Alley.  I also started shopping Thorn to agents.  Now, one thing to note: this draft of Thorn was 70,000 words long.  I didn't think this was a problem, though most of my queries were getting form rejected or ignored.

But then there was one, at the end of the year-- an agent who said, in essence: I love this, but I can't sell it at this length.  Rewrite it to 90K and get back to me.

So 2010 was, in no small part, about adding 20,000 words to a novel that was already pretty tight, as well as cleaning up Holver Alley to a respectable draft.  I also wrote My Name Is Avenger Girl, which I sold to Paige Ewing's The Protectors, as well as selling my piece to the Hint Fiction anthology.  I also started the rough draft of Maradaine Constabulary.

In 2011, that same agent who advised me on Thorn loved the re-write, and agreed to represent me.  I then sent him Holver Alley as well, while getting the rough draft of Constabulary finished. I also started being on the Teacher's side of the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop.

Bringing us to last year.  Finished Constabulary and send it to the agent.  Started the rough draft of Way of the Shield.  Did another round of re-writes on Thorn, Holver Alley and Constabulary by my agent's request, which also helped me strengthen the worldbuilding ties between them all.  Wrote and sold Jump the Black to Rayguns Over Texas.  OK, technically, the Rayguns sale came in on January 1st.  Making a great start to 2013.

So where will 2013-- and with it my forties-- take me?  With three novels out there shopping, and a fourth one (and fifth, really) in process... I hopeful that this year will be a Big Year for me as a writer. 

Cross your fingers.

The Failure of Book Trailers, and the Rare Exception

As I've mentioned before, book trailers are something I'm of two minds about.  As a novelist with a film degree, I really like the idea of them.  But, also,  as a novelist with a film degree, I really hate, for the most part, what I've actually seen.

With rare exception, the best I've been able to say about any book trailer is that it didn't actively impair my interest in reading the book it was advertising.  Though I have seen several that did actively impair my interest.

But I don't agree with the premise that I've heard from some corners, that book trailers are just wrong; that since they are using one medium (audio-visual) to sell a completely different medium (text), they are intrinsically doomed to failure.

I think they are doomed because, at the heart of it, most of them are being made by people who don't understand the video medium.  Many of them use static images-- either cover art or stock pictures*-- and have some Ken Burns effect and kinetic typography to give some sense of motion.  If there's sound, it's public domain music or stock effects. Whatever text it uses is either blurbs from reviews, or synopsis boiled down to Twitter-length. That isn't filmic; it's attempting to make a dynamic experience out of reading the back cover.  Furthermore, since the people making them don't understand filmic language, they don't pace it properly at all.  Trailers take up to two a half minutes to give thirty seconds of information. Add to that the frequent use of stock images and sounds, and the net result is something painfully generic. 

An overlong, uninteresting commercial telling me how your book is so unremarkable, it can be reduced to key words and generic pictures?  Well, I'll run to the book store for that!

But then, there is that rare exception:

This trailer for Warren Ellis's "Gun Machine" is narrated by Wil Wheaton and illustrated by Ben Templesmith.  Right off the bat, it's loaded with some professionalism.  That helps a lot.  What else do we have here?  We've got a solid narration that comes straight from the text, and it's loaded with hooks.  I don't know if this is the very beginning of the book or not, but it feels like it is, and it's got me intrigued. 

So, key point number one: instead of telling us about the book, it uses what the book is.

Secondly, we have original imagery that is specifically created for this video.   Even though the images themselves are static, it is made dynamic by seeing them being created.   They tie directly to the text.  It enhances what we're hearing.  It's specifically engaging and relevant to the audio. 

It clocks in at 2:30, and at no point does it feel like it's wasting my time.

That's how it should be done.
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*- Which are often the same thing, sadly.

The Dark Side of Outlining

So, I was reading back through what I had written for Way of the Shield, trying to figure out what wasn't working, and why it wasn't.  I am still most likely to keep my attention focused on Banshee, but the problems with Shield are now becoming clear.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that I was thinking more about the long-game instead of this book as it's own standalone.  There were choices that, in essence, I wasn't letting myself make because they weren't fitting my predetermined plan.  It was the writing equivalent of not moving any chess pieces because I was saving them for later. 

And the real problem with that boiled down to this: that's not who Dayne was.  Dayne is the throw-himself-on-a-grenade type.  And in not writing the story with that same hell-bent care, it wasn't working.


This is, of course, the potential problem with outlining in general: letting it be a trap.  I know more often than not I've caught myself thinking, "I can't have that, because it goes against [future plot point that I haven't actually written yet]."  Why was I beholden to that?  Because I had a plan. 

Now, this tends to be the argument of those who prefer not to outline: if I outline, then I'm STUCK.  I'm LOCKED ON THE PATH. 

And this isn't true.  But it is sometimes challenging to see that straying from the path can lead to a clearer road once you're already lost in the woods.

The other problem I was having stems, to a degree, from the outline as well, in that in the outline, my antagonists were not well-defined.  So, at least in this work-in-progress rough draft, they were coming off as one-dimensional strawmen.  They were just wrong people who were wrong in thinking wrong things wrongly.  They were only the heroes of their own story if you accept that their story was about stupid people.  And that's not interesting. 

So that's my challenge, before diving back into that project (eventually): figuring out who the antagonists REALLY are, and from that, how they'll implement their goals, and what the consequences of them doing that are.  And to be willing to have real consequences hit my protagonists. 

Because, when it comes down to it, I was essentially protecting a "status quo" that doesn't really exist yet.  Why do that?

Archetypes, Rituals and Tropes

First of, let me say I'm going to be talking about Cabin in the Woods here.  So, because this is a movie that it matters for: there will be SPOILERS for Cabin in the Woods.

Really.

After watching this movie, it sparked a very specific memory from back in college.  No, I didn't go on a doomed camping trip.  But I did try my hand at writing a by-the-numbers horror script, just to see if I could do it.  The result was a script called Stacks of Evil.  This was in '94.  Watching Cabin in the Woods reminded me just how by-the-numbers Stacks of Evil was.  It hit every single point that is part of the Cabin in the Woods sacrifice ritual.  For the folks Downstairs in Cabin, the events of Stacks would have served perfectly.

Though it would have been a woefully mediocre movie.

But seriously: five college friends (A Good Girl, A Bad Girl, A Jock, A Brain and a Drunk, aka The Virgin, The Whore, The Athlete, The Scholar and The Fool) all decide they are going to sneak into the school's library to spend the night.  Why?  Because, that's why.  They press on despite the warning of the janitor (The Harbinger).  After some partying in the library, the Jock and Bad Girl split off, and the Drunk wanders off.  The Drunk, specifically, commits the Transgression.  He breaks into a locked room and knocks over a jar that houses a vengeful demon.  The Demon then kills the Bad Girl, the Jock and the Drunk, in that order.  The Brain and the Good Girl manage to figure out what's going on, and how to potentially stop it, until the Brain is killed, leaving the Good Girl alone to fight the good fight and survive to be the Final Girl.  Because that's how it's done. 

And I totally had it down that that is how it's done back in '94.

Because I knew my horror tropes.

Now, I'm not claiming that I wrote Cabin in the Woods first, because I didn't, because Stacks was nowhere near that clever.  Though I did have a meta- ending*.  But it does show how pervasive those tropes that Cabin plays with are.  It hits the notes perfectly because they are so well known.** 

After watching Cabin, I went into a TV Tropes hole for a bit, reminding myself about not only horror tropes, but sci-fi and fantasy ones.  One thing I love about the Tropes page is the reminder that "Tropes are not Cliches"-- these are the broad brushstrokes of storytelling archetypes.  Whether a writer makes them cliche is based on what they are doing with them.  With Stacks, I was pretty much trying to be as cliche as possible.  Cabin shows one can take those tropes and do something fresh and clever with them-- even with the fact that they ARE tropes in the first place. 

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*- Namely, after the Virgin "wins", there's a final "Jump Scare" where the demon comes back up, but then the film crew rebels and declares the whole thing ridiculous and goes home, leaving the demon decidedly unscary without special-effects backing him up.  Kind of dumb, really.
**- My wife, not being a horror movie fan-- at least, American horror-- was not familiar with these tropes, so much of the meta- aspect of the movie was lost on her.

Embracing the Spectacular Failure

'As if it matters how a man falls down...when the fall is all that's left, it matters very much.' - A Lion in Winter, James Golden*

 
Bear with me here, people, because I'm going to talk baseball for a second.  Which is really not my strong suit.  But it's just a metaphor.

What's more interesting in baseball?  When the batter makes a base hit, runs to first, but gets tagged out before they get on base?  Or when the batter steps up to the plate, points to the bleachers, and then swings as hard as humanly possible--- an strikes out? Both have the same end result: the batter is out.  But the latter, at least, has ambition.

I'm all for ambitious failures.  There are several that come to mind.  Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was certainly not lacking in ambition, as both its text and subtext was, "We are going to deliver extraordinary television that will raise the bar", which it utterly failed to do.  Now, that said, I enjoyed the show, even though the show-within-the-show completely failed to be the highly charged, cutting edge political satire that the show held itself up to being.  But you could consistently see a program trying to reach further than its grasp.

Another that sticks with me is last year's Sucker Punch.  I could probably write pages and pages about Sucker Punch, in terms of attempted messages of empowerment and feminism, and where it may or may not have succeeded and failed, and how it attempted far too much with its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink action sequences.  But one thing you can't say about Sucker Punch is that it didn't try to accomplish something big and bold.  In trying, it crashed, but on some level I think that crash was spectacular.  And you have to admire that kind of failure, at least over the failure of milquetoast sameness.

John Scalzi once gave me some great advice (and a roomful of Workshop attendees, so I'm not claiming it was a personal moment of exchanging wisdom) to "embrace the power of sucking".  That writers should constantly push themselves out of their comfort zone, and accept that what they are going to do could very well fail... and that's okay.  And as someone who has faceplanted more times than he could easily count, I totally agree: you learn a lot more from your failures. 

Especially the spectacular ones.

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*- Or, at least Aaron Sorkin credits it to A Lion in Winter in all the TV shows where he uses that quote.