Knocking on the Glass: A Rejectee Copes with Rejection

August 6, 2013August 7, 2013 ~ Graham Milne

Fair warning for the squeamish – some NSFW language today. Don’t worry, I grawlixed it up for you.

Don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I had a pretty nice weekend – lots of quality time with the wife and kid, getting to see my best friend and his wife and kid for the first time in some months, eating too much, ramping up my vitamin D content by getting out in the sunshine. And starting to go running again, because yay exercise. So I’m feeling quite a sense of uplift as the long weekend comes to a close and I pop onto my laptop yesterday evening to check and see if another friend has posted any more updates from his Las Vegas wedding. Right off the bat I see a notification in my email. From a literary agent I queried recently.

It’s a rejection.

I’ve done enough research on querying and read enough tweets and blogs and other material by agents to recognize a form rejection when I see one. It has no salutation and is the usual canned rigmarole about the market being difficult and terribly sorry but this didn’t do it for them. My shoulders slump and my stomach hurls a tablespoon of acid against itself for about half a second and I sigh. Intellectual me says, yeah, you don’t really want anyone representing you who doesn’t think your work is so awesome that they would proudly stand between you and a mob coming after you with torches and pointed sticks. So thank you for your time, fare thee well, best wishes and all that. Onwards and upwards.

Emotional me thinks otherwise. Emotional me wants to channel this fictional character and yell, “@#$@ you, you @#$@ing literati latte-sipping snob, how DARE you dismiss my insightful yet entertaining BRILLIANCE without so much as a by-your-leave!!! DON’T YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU’VE MISSED OUT ON IN YOUR PEON-LIKE SHORTSIGHTEDNESS???” You know, the pitiful wail of the wannabe knocking desperately on the glass a la Dustin Hoffman in the last scene of The Graduate. They say you have to develop a thick hide in this profession, but what they fail to mention is that you only callus up by absorbing punch after punch. And a punch @#$@ing hurts. It’s not just a quick sting. It’s a body blow that rings down into your guts and slaps your confidence around like an angry frat boy wielding a wet towel with a bar of soap rolled into it. It’s the girl you’ve had a crush on for years friendzoning you after you finally summon the courage to ask her out – you question your competence, your very existence as a man. The same goes with your ability to write after a professional turndown, no matter how inconsequential it might seem.

Sunday night I put together something for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hitRECord about The Other Side. Here is an excerpt from that piece that seems topical given the subject under discussion today:

We will always come up against people who do things differently, who do them better, who are less successful or more successful than we are in our chosen vocation – even in the basic vocation of being human. In this case, the other side can be a construct of intimidation, a reminder of things we can’t and will never have, of charmed lives beyond our reach via accident of birth. It can warn us about things we never want, of pitfalls we risk falling into if we are not careful. It can be a source of incomprehension, a place that is totally abhorrent to our values and our morals. Yet it can also challenge us by beckoning, daring us to try to cross over. Forcing us to better ourselves to earn the right of passage. The choice we have to make is in how we will look at the other side, if it is to be defined, somewhat crudely, as an enemy to be vanquished, or instead as an opportunity to better who we are. If we are going to look into the depth of the mirror and bare our teeth, or smile and say, I got this.

As a writer, nothing is more intimidating than the blank page. But second to that is the success of other writers, particularly when you haven’t, at least from your sulky perspective as you pore over that single rejection email, had anything comparable. Most of us have run into the soul-splintering “That’s nice, dear” from friends and family who think it’s positively peachy that you’re writing a novel but kindly get back to them when you’ve accomplished something quantifiable with it, i.e., made a @#$@load of money. We’ve also, as we’ve begun to take part in an online community of fellow writers, happened upon that insufferably cheerful blog post that can be paraphrased somewhat like so: “I worked as a claims adjuster for twenty years and then thought it would be fun to try writing a book. Two months later I had SEVEN OFFERS OF REPRESENTATION for my story about a privileged yet endearingly goofy girl who just can’t find the right man!” Sometimes it’s enough to make you want to chuck the laptop against the wall and settle into a monotonous life of trying to accomplish nothing more than finding the last gnome in Fable III, elusive bastard that he is.

I’m glad I’ve started running again, because for me nothing is better for working through anger and frustration. You channel each pissy thought into a determined flail of your legs and arms and burn the petulance out with each increasingly agonized stride. @#$@ you, flabby body, @#$@ you, pedantic writing twits, @#$@ you, uncaring literary world, @#$@ you, unfairness of life in general. You tear through your neighbourhood as the sun rises and hope that the few folks you pass won’t notice the look of homicidal rage etched on your face and call 911. Finally the app tells you you’re done, and you slow to a cooling walk and realize as you reach your door, drenched from head to toe in eye-stinging sweat, that you have purged those thoughts in a cleansing, cathartic fire. And as intellectual you reasserts his dominance you realize, in the mode of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life or Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland’s Opus, that you are a successful writer, and here are a few reasons why:

1. You covered an election for the largest newspaper in Canada.

2. The leader of the Liberal Party and the potential future leader of the country liked something you wrote about him so much he shared it with his over 200,000 Twitter followers and thanked you by name.

3. Arianna Huffington invited you to write for her online news service. Pretty nice club to be in, given that your writing hero Aaron Sorkin writes for it too. And you’ve written 20 more articles for it than he has. A post of yours was featured over Kirk Douglas once. YOU WERE PLACED HIGHER THAN KIRK @#$@ING DOUGLAS, the man who broke the Hollywood blacklist for Christ’s sake. (UPDATE: And now Stephen @#$@ing Fry writes for it too.)

4. Rob @#$@ing Lowe thanked you for something you wrote about his character on The West Wing. This guy.

5. A fellow writer whom you’ve come to admire asked if she could quote you on the back of her debut novel. Um, yeah, holy @#$@ing @#$@balls.

6. Look at this map. Look at it. Every single color on the map represents a country where someone has read something you wrote. Some of these places don’t even have running water, and yet someone there knows who you are. (And you still suck, Greenland.)

7. You have fans. Honest to goodness fans. And they’re awesome and they are always there to prop you up, without fail, when you’re wallowing in a cesspool of self-doubt and flagellation.

8. A friend once told you that a post you wrote about your father made him want to be a better dad. And you cried when you heard that.

9. When you weigh the compliments, shares and positive feedback you’ve received versus the rejections, uninterested shrugs and outright insults, the ratio is still about 500:1. And when you’ve been insulted, it’s because they didn’t like something you said. Not one of them said you were a bad writer.

10. You’re still at it.

Sorry for the diversion down Ego Street there, but these are the kinds of affirmations that writers need to poke themselves with from time to time – that the very act of putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard is in itself a form of success. Even if nought but a single soul retweeted an otherwise ignored blog post, it should be another brick to add to the wall you’re building to shield yourself against the slings and arrows that will inevitably come as you continue to knock on the glass to The Other Side. So we beat on, boats against the current, as FSF would say. Of course I’m going to keep writing, and blogging, and querying, and if I can’t get a single nibble on this novel then I’ll write another one and push the hell out of that one until the glass cracks – lather, rinse, repeat. I might even query that same agent again someday if I have another project I feel might be more up their alley. A rejection can be many, many things, but what it NEVER should be is a reason to pack it in, or worse, lash out in anger at the futility of existence. So have your pity party but wrap it up after last call and get back to work. There are words to be written, bub.

What the @#$@ is next?

A dialogue on dialogue

June 25, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 3 Comments

From the new Bravo series, "Graham on Graham." — From the new Bravo series, “Graham on Graham.”

Graham (G1): Good morning Graham, how are you?

Graham (G2): Meh, pretty tired. The cat decided to wake us up at three in the morning again.

G1: That sucks. Frickin’ felines.

G2: Yeah.

G1: So I saw on Twitter last night you said you thought you might write a post about dialogue today.

G2: You must have been up late.

G1: I was.

G2: Couldn’t sleep either?

G1: What “either”? You and I are the same person.

G2: True enough.

G1: I’m just choosing not to be snippy and cranky about it this morning.

G2: “Snippy” and “cranky”? What are you, channeling our grandmother now?

G1: Do you think we could get on with this, Mr. Snarkypants?

G2: Fine. Where do you want to start?

G1: Well, it occurred to me that there is a lot of contradictory advice about dialogue floating around out there.

G2: I’ve noticed that too. Some people think too much dialogue is a bad thing.

G1: I don’t get that. I mean, obviously a novel is not a play and you need to create a balance of description and dialogue, but come on. I think that’s an excuse invented by people who can’t write dialogue well.

G2: And you accused me of being snarky.

G1: Well, if I didn’t think I was a good writer of dialogue, I would pare it back as much as I could. But do you remember when we were watching There Will Be Blood, how pretentious it seemed that there was no dialogue at all in the first half hour? Characters were going out of their way to not talk. It was forced and artificial. Real people are insatiable chatterboxes.

G2: Our son would certainly agree with you there.

G1: He’s kind of the singular example.

G2: Yeah. But you wouldn’t write a character like him, would you?

G1: No. Because a lot of what he says is just random stuff that pops into his head – half-remembered lines from TV shows, updates on the video game he’s playing, stuff he did at school that day. It doesn’t have a lot of coherence to it, or readability if you were to type it out word for word.

G2: Naturally. He’s twelve, and he’s a real person, not a character in a novel. We’re not expecting erudition and fully formed sentences with multiple clauses.

G1: No, no one would believe that, even in a novel. Unless you were portraying him as the most preternatural, linguistically-gifted twelve-year-old in the history of the human race.

G2: We love him very much, but no, that’s not who he is.

G1: Nope. So there’s a balance between the accurate portrayal of a twelve-year-old’s mentality and the need to establish a readable character, one who serves the narrative. People just don’t talk how writers need to write them. We yammer on about everything but what’s actually on our mind – we tell silly jokes, we blather about the weather. In a story you have to get to the point.

G2: That’s what you mean about serving the narrative.

G1: Yeah. Every conversation needs to push some aspect of the story, if only the slightest of nudges. The relationships between the characters need to develop, or the characters have to get closer to their goal. If your guys are going to stop for a five minute exegesis on hamburgers, there had better be some payoff to it.

G2: Hamburgers… you’re thinking Pulp Fiction again.

G1: You know me so well. That’s a really good example. That whole conversation between Jules and Vincent has nothing to do with the plot, but it helps establish their relationship, and shows us that these guys are interesting, endearing people we’re going to dig spending time with. Even though they are on their way to commit a series of murders. Would we have liked them if they’d devoted the conversation to the methodology of how they were going to kill the guys once they got to the apartment, or worse, said nothing at all?

G2: That would have been the insufferable arthouse version.

G1: So, I come back to this idea of balance. You can go too far the other way, where characters become plot explainers. I’ve seen this in fantasy a lot, where two people who have no real reason to talk to each other do an information dump about where they are in their quest, what happened over the last couple of days, and what has to happen next. There’s no nuance to the conversation – the characters just agree with each other for pages on end as they lay out the story so far. It’s the “As you know, Bob” problem. Or Basil Exposition, depending on your preferences. If the sole purpose of your dialogue is to tell your audience things they could learn another way, You’re Doing It Wrong.

G2: My eyelids sag at the mere thought. Of course, you and I are basically just agreeing with each other here. What did you mean by nuance?

G1: Characters should never talk about what they’re actually talking about. Concepts and pellets of information should be implied, not blatant.

G2: Oh, so we would talk about mochacinos in the guise of discussing dialogue?

G1: I like to approach conversations from oblique angles. Like yeah, maybe I would compose a scene of two writers (or two halves of the same mind, as it were) discussing dialogue and set it in line at a Starbucks while they wait for their lattés.

G2: Yeah, because you’d never find a writer at a Starbucks. Real original.

G1: You get my point, though?

G2: Not really. Please explain it to me with statistics and visual aids.

G1: You cribbed that line. You really need to get more sleep.

G2: I really need a lot of things and sleep gets in the way of them.

G1: Suit yourself. Picture it this way. When you’re building dialogue, you have a couple of elements to consider. You have the setting. You have the goal – the piece of information that you need to convey. Maybe it’s a simple fact, maybe it’s a clue to the mystery, maybe it’s the next step in a relationship. That’s where you’re heading, but you don’t start with it. You start in the wilderness and build towards it. Imagine a scene of a couple eating in a restaurant. The husband has to tell the wife that he’s lost his job, but he doesn’t know how to break the news. His first line, then, is not going to be “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I lost my job.” Is it?

G2: I guess it could be, but that seems a waste of a lot of potential dramatic tension.

G1: Exactly. Instead, you might start with them talking about the food they’re eating, other restaurants they’ve been in, you know, casual, everyday, innocent stuff. They might recall fond memories of when they were first dating. The husband will realize that losing his job means they won’t be able to have nights like this anymore. That will start to creep into what he’s saying to his wife. She’ll notice something’s wrong and she’ll ask him about it. He’ll deny it. She’ll ask again. He’ll deny it again, until he breaks down and confesses – or maybe doesn’t at all. You see how 95% of the conversation won’t be about the main piece of information that comes at the very end, right? Instead, you find your way in from the edges. Organically. The characters will lead you there on their own.

G2: Like the scene in our novel where the two leads talk about their respective parents. It begins with the heroine humming a stupid old folk song, and the guy noting that he recognizes it.

G1: Or the scene later on where a conversation about the role of women in the world begins with a chat about sandwiches.

G2: Pick the oddest thing and work your way back from it.

G1: You are learning, young padawan. The other thing to keep in mind too is that unless you’re writing a 1920’s silent movie, characters don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. Nor do most people. Subtlety and understatement are the way to go. A solemn declaration of undying love shouldn’t sound like it was scripted for daytime TV. In fact, avoid solemn declarations of undying love altogether.

G2: Something just occurred to me. We’re unpublished – where do we get off flinging rules around like so much confetti?

G1: There are no rules, only our interpretation of our own truth. There is every possibility that this exercise has been one in utter nonsense. We can only pass along what works for us in the hope that someone else might find it useful. And this is a rich topic that could go on for thousands upon thousands of words, but eventually, folks will want to tell us to shut up.

G2: Are there some resources we could point people towards?

G1: I think you just have to read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies written by great writers, listen to a lot of different kinds of people talking and process it all in the mind’s blender. And then try and fail a few times on your own before you figure it out.

G2: You were going to mention Aaron Sorkin, weren’t you.

G1: We both know he’s a big influence on us, it goes without saying. Look at him, look at people like David Mamet, Richard Curtis, and David Seidler, who wrote The King’s Speech, to name but a very few. Listen to their rhythms, listen to how someone like Mamet deconstructs patterns of speech to convey character. Glengarry Glen Ross is a terrific example of this. The scene between Moss and Aaronow “talking about” versus “speaking about” is fantastic.

G2: You haven’t mentioned any actual novelists.

G1: Well, funny you should bring that up, because we’re reading a book right now, Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which has an interesting approach to dialogue. It’s a western, set in 1851 California, but everyone speaks in very elegant, grammatically precise phrases that are probably not an accurate reflection of how people in 1851 California really spoke. Not the artistic choice I was expecting, but refreshing after plodding through Ian Fleming’s clumsy attempts at American slang which felt as artificial as nobody talking in the first act of There Will Be Blood did.

G2: Way to bring it full circle, dude.

G1: I know what you like. Anyway, how to portray dialect, how to vary word choices to denote different speakers, the value of repetition, talking it out to make sure it sounds right – like I said, a rich palette and worth discussing further at a later time.

G2: If you can persuade me to do this again. I feel like I didn’t get to say very much. You were doing all the talking.

G1: You’re tired. The cat, remember? Just looking out for you.

G2: Oh, yeah. Thanks. Cheers, mate.

G1: You too.

I Suck at Description

May 16, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 11 Comments

That’s my mea culpa for the day. If I had to rank my perceived strengths as a writer in descending order, description would linger odiously in the basement with the lawn furniture and the dresser my wife keeps reminding me we need to sell. I’m good at dialogue, at proposing ideas and batting them around, at the exploration of questions of human nature and our place in the universe, but, ask me to put any of these items in a setting that leaps off the page and I will curl up in the corner of that setting sobbing like an infant afraid of having his wooby taken away. Every time I go back through my novel for revisions and start to think, “hey, this isn’t so bad,” I encounter someone else’s work that blows me back through the wall and turns my confidence to lime Jell-O. I just can’t seem to crack that important element and it drives me bonkers.

I’ve devoted a lot of self-examination to trying to figure out why this aspect is so difficult for me. Some writers seem to be able to do it flawlessly. Within a few short, concise phrases you know exactly where you are – your imagination is triggered and the setting shimmers into existence around you as though you had stepped into the holodeck and announced “Run Program.” Writing, as someone famous whose name escapes me for the moment has observed (I think it was Joyce Carol Oates), is about creating atmosphere. My focus, however, has always been on character, though, and how the characters interrelate, and that usually means dialogue, and lots of it. (And of course, you run into plenty of writing advice that suggests too much dialogue is a bad thing. Can’t win, can’t even quit the game.) In a perfect world, this is how I would describe almost every scene, so I could get on with crafting conversations (from Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett):

A country road. A tree. Evening.

A few more words about Estragon trying to pull off his boot and we’re off to the races. Okay then, you’re asking, why don’t you just write plays then? I’ve written exactly one play, it was called Brushstrokes, a three-act examination of hidden love and the inability of men to admit their feelings tied together with a tenuous nail polish metaphor, and well, the less said about it the better. That’s not to say I’ll never try another one, but in writing it I missed the ability to digress into stretches of narrative, to get into the heads of the characters and figure out what they were thinking. It is not to suggest that novels don’t have to have structure, or limits for that matter, but they tend to be a freer place to play. You can linger on a particular thought, explore its depths and its reaches, without worrying too much about a foot-tapping, finger-drumming audience waiting in exasperation for the next line. It can be rather like the van that took forever to fall off the bridge in Inception without seeming to drag down the pace – again, depending on how you write it. So it helps if you’re really good at that.

Many great writers are poets and can bring that sensibility to details as slight as a flake of ash falling from a burning cigarette, or the single flap of a hummingbird’s wing. My description, by contrast, tends to be simple and straightforward. What you need to know and no more. Here’s an example from my novel:

Splinters of wood and crumbling brick from ramshackle buildings line the pockmarked street. Lampposts bent by storms and vandals stand eerie sentry. The rattle of broken window shutters is this rotting borough’s only tenant.

And another:

Dotted by whitecaps, the river is an icy gray. Brine and rotting algae poisons the air. The north side of the city lurks, cloaked, beneath frigid fog. At the end of the jetty, a flat barge with a water wheel at its stern strains against the grip of the ropes anchoring it in place. Creaking twin planks on its starboard side wobble under the boots of passengers laden with sacks and baskets who are shuffling aboard to claim a precious portion of the hard benches in the center of the craft.

One more:

A paved drive marked by a trail of brass lanterns on iron posts conducts us through spacious, garden-rich grounds, past a stone-rimmed lily pond watched by a gazebo, once-trim shrubs and dwarf trees grown wild with neglect. The secluded manse that presides is half-hidden by branches yet still exudes wealth and pretense, as if trying to compete with its neighbors. Long thin windows with black shutters adorn the exterior, while a portico supported by white columns protrudes over the front entrance. A terraced second floor is set back on the high roof of the first. A pointless relief of vine-entwined roses on the portico adds to the sense of superfluous money that permeates this place.

There is nothing technically wrong with any of these passages, but poetry they sure as hell ain’t. Even looking at them sitting here out of context I want to rewrite them from word one. One’s spirit crumples into crushed tinfoil at the possibility of being considered a candidate for a Bulwer-Lytton award, or as the latest Eye of Argon. But you do what you can with what you have and keep trying to do better. And though sometimes you gnash your teeth at the raw talent on display in some other people’s mere first drafts, you can’t let that stop you from moving forward.

The mistake that I tend to make and that many others probably do as well is in not having the description of the scene push the story forward in any way. Think of it in terms of the last time you related a funny anecdote to your best friend. You didn’t say, “So, I was at the grocery store. It was a massive, soulless building painted in black and brown and the floor tiles bore the smudges of the soles of a thousand tired mothers dragging screaming children who were unable to comprehend the simple nutritional logic of why it wasn’t a good idea to eat chocolate at every meal.” Your friend is sitting there saying “I don’t care! What happened at the store?!” You want to stage the scene and sprinkle in some color, but putting in that kind of description is like hitting the pause button. It breaks the momentum and adds nothing.

Those who know what they’re doing, even writers who are incredibly journalistic and fetishistic about detail, like the late Ian Fleming, use that information to push the narrative – to tell you about the character they’re trying to sketch in your mind. The sometimes excruciating manner in which Fleming waxes on about James Bond’s breakfast preferences still manages to tell you something important, that this is a man who defines himself very much by his tastes, and he is as much a social competitor with the villains he squares off against as he is a knight trying to slay the fearsome dragon. It works, though, because everyone knows how Bond likes his martini, and “shaken, not stirred” has become entrenched in the zeitgeist (even if Aaron Sorkin insists it’s wrong).

Also, as human beings, we tend to notice individual details rather than the big picture. This is crucial when you are writing first-person perspective as well because you can’t use that detached, “I SEE AND HEAR ALL” narrative voice. When you spot an attractive person coming towards you, there’s probably one specific trait that strikes you first; their eyes, their smile, what have you. And that characteristic will define them in your mind from then on. That girl with the long dark hair, the guy with the shark tattoo on his right forearm. (It does not have to be a visual characteristic either: the girl who sings like a parrot with laryngitis, or the guy who smells like apple cinnamon soap.) The same goes with scenery. The tall building with the broken window on the top floor. The car with the coughing exhaust pipe. If your character has a particular perspective on the world, what they notice will flow organically out of that perspective as well. Mine is accustomed to the peace of a silent forest, so the things she takes note of are what stands out to her as unusual – noise and artifice. If I’ve done my job correctly, that should tell you something about her and how she views the world. If not, then it’s back to the rewrite shed for another round of head-splitting angst and wondering why, despite people telling me contrary and often, I continue, in my own mind, to suck.

Anyone else struggling with this stuff? Let me know. Let’s help each other out.

Five things to hate about pop culture references in novels

March 5, 2013March 5, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 8 Comments

Aren't those the Spice Girls? — Aren’t those the Spice Girls?

Whether by coincidence or not, I’ve come across a few articles recently about the wisdom (or folly) of including snippets of song lyrics in your novel. The consensus seems to be that it’s a bad idea. Allen Klein is dead but those who adhere to his mantra are still far and wide squeezing the vice of legality against the temples of well-meaning, starving scribes who seek to pay a tiny bit of homage to that epic anthem that helped get them through a rough patch of their lives, or, more cynically, want to drop in an overly familiar reference point that will elicit immediate emotional identification without putting in the effort to craft their own.

I get it. It’s difficult, and even a bit scary, to risk originality in a self-referential culture where everything seems to link back to something else like a giant Wikipedia. Going where no one has gone before is even more daunting given that every time you think you’re venturing down a fresh trail, you find someone else’s bootprints on it. There are simply too many of us writers attempting to figure out the human experience. It’s inevitable that more than a few will reach identical conclusions – sort of the thousand monkey/thousand typewriter argument featuring mildly more intelligent monkeys.

In one of my more wrenching experiences as a gestating writer, I lent a draft of the novel that preceded my current opus to my best friend for his feedback. I can still recall with gut-churning anxiety the pregnant pause that hung between us one afternoon when I was forced to ask him the question that chills all writers’ bones as it spills across our lips: “So, what did you think?” I don’t think the word had entered the zeitgeist yet, but his reaction was the equivalent of “meh.” I should point out here that my friend is not evil nor inconsiderate of others’ feelings. But like the most ideal of companions he will never let you twist out in the wind with your pants down if he can help set you right. And his most germane suggestion, while wounding to anyone convinced of one’s own genius as most beginners tend to be (and I certainly was back then), was not only invaluable, but continues to inform me when I compose fiction. Paraphrased, it was simply this:

“Cut the pop culture references.”

Between the tears and the simmering hatred (which quickly subsided – we’re still besties, no worries folks), it was a cloud-parting Voice of James-Mason-as-God moment – and yes, Eddie Izzard fans, I am aware of the irony of using a doubly-meta pop culture reference to illustrate this point – that I could not believe I had not seen before. And it reinforced the notion that you can’t write in a vacuum. Because I never would have come to that conclusion at that time in my life, and yet it was exactly what I needed to move forward and become a better writer. Whether it’s in using song lyrics, referencing TV shows or framing your character’s predicament in terms of how much it makes them feel like Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, there are, to me, five main reasons why popular culture should be flung far from the pages of your book:

1. It dates you

And not the good dinner-and-a-movie type either. Pop culture’s shelf life is shorter than that of the mayonnaise you’ve been meaning to throw out of your fridge for the last few weeks. Your bon mot about your hero’s wisecracking best friend being a combination of Sue Sylvester and Honey Boo Boo is going to go way sour long before your book even makes it to the shelves. I remember a few years ago when Desperate Housewives premiered and every entertainment trade paper, magazine and website could not shut themselves up about it; every goddamned article about anything television-related found a way to work in some mention of Desperate Housewives and how it was a divinely inspired paradigm-shifting watershed point in the history of broadcast programming. Ask yourself whether in 2013 and beyond, anyone is going to view a witty Desperate Housewives reference as anything but sad. (Fair warning, Downton Abbey and Girls, it will happen to you too.) You want your story to mean something to people for decades and generations to come – timeless is preferable to timely.

2. It’s meaningless unless your audience gets it

In the realm of stand-up comedy, one of the worst offenders for dropping obscure references is Dennis Miller, with the result that even the most well-read of his audiences will only laugh at his material a fifth of the time (of course, ever since he was reborn as a Dubya-lovin’ right-wing pom-pom waver, he’s been considerably less funny anyway). A reference that a great number may not understand is not the most egregious violation of “good writer etiquette,” but a major beat should never hinge on it. If, at the moment of her deepest anguish, your heroine is compelled to confess that she feels just like Bitsie Tulloch’s Dylan on Quarterlife, that’s awesome for the three people out there who remember that show and completely baffling for everyone else (i.e. 99.9999% of your readers), and thus any hope you may have harbored for soliciting empathy will be lost to the winds like the passengers and crew of Oceanic 815 (see what I did there?)

3. It’s the last refuge of the unimaginative

Licking my wounds back then, I was compelled to ask myself why I was relying so much on what other people had created instead of forging ahead on my own. Writing moments that resonate is a lot like method acting: you have to look deep inside and wrench the truth screaming from your own gut, not rely on what you once heard or saw in something somebody else wrote. And it’s an opportunity that you should never pass up, even if it is intimidating. If you’re running down the field with no one in the way, why would you pass the ball to another guy for the final five yards? You should never abdicate the chance to be creative. If you’re writing about a group of characters who have bonded over their love of a favorite TV show, why not make up your own show? I’ll get you started: every show is about cops, doctors or lawyers, so have your guys quote lines from Sergeant Lawyer, M.D. Okay, I’m staking a claim to that one and writing a pilot. “FADE IN: INT. COURTROOM – DAY – CLOSE on SERGEANT LAWYER as he contemplates a scalpel in his right hand and a semi-automatic pistol in his right. CUE the opening chords of The Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes.’” Aw, crap, there’s Pete Townshend’s attorney on line one.

4. It’s giving away free advertising

I’ll invoke the mighty Aaron Sorkin and repeat his maxim that a writer’s job is to captivate you for however long he’s asked for your attention. And we writers are serious bear huggers. We don’t want to let you go. We want you firmly ensconced in our world, and not thinking about TV shows and songs that have nothing to do with the story we’re trying to relate. We certainly don’t want you thinking about other products you might like to purchase. Ever wonder why you don’t ever see commercials for handguns? Because there are enough glowing closeups of barrels and triggers and bullets flying in sexy slow motion, and irrelevant exchanges of dialogue about muzzle velocities and stopping power in movies to do all the advertising gun manufacturers will ever need. Walther probably owes a great chunk if not the lion’s share of the sales of its PPK to James Bond. Sex and the City and chick lit do more for Manolo Blahnik shoes than ten years of paid ad campaigns ever would. (If I can digress further into the cinemarr for a moment, one of the most vomit-inducing examples of this was the trailer for 10 Things I Hate About You – the ad trying to get people to see the movie, oh irony of ironies – which opened with a character saying “There’s a difference between like and love. I mean, I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack.” Spew.) If that’s truly your wish, then why not just publish a novel full of empty pages stamped with “Your Ad Here”? Or go to work writing advertising copy since it’s probably more up your alley.

5. And it will probably cost you

So not only will you not be paid for name-dropping all these lovely corporations and pushing their merchandise, but you’re just as likely to get dinged by the same people for using their content without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. This is an older article, but a good one from The Guardian where novelist Blake Morrison talks about how much it cost him to include fragments of popular song lyrics in his work. Don’t these people have enough money already without needing more of yours? And what’s worse, the money probably won’t even go to the artist who wrote the lyric in the first place – it’ll get split amongst various anonymous shareholders in the faceless publishing company that holds the rights to the song. If you really, desperately, achingly want to have your character sing “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to the extent that you’re more than willing to cough up whatever atrocious fee you’re invoiced for, Richard Ashcroft isn’t getting a penny, as much as he may be tickled that you quoted his signature composition. It’s going to whoever now controls ABKCO Music, the actual rights holder of that song. The thought of that should turn your stomach enough to lead you in another direction. Here’s a much better thought: Even if you can’t write chord progressions, you can probably make up your own original lyrics. Then one day, maybe someone will want to compose a song using those lyrics, and they can pay you for the privilege of doing so (or, conversely, you can sue their ass off when they steal it without acknowledging your authorship).

Having said all that, let’s make it about me again. Does any of this apply to my novel? Well, fortunately, when writing fantasy there’s less of a temptation to include popular culture since it makes no sense within the context of the story – or worse, pulls you out of the story when a grizzled medieval warrior makes anachronistic mention of the Seinfeld episode about Teri Hatcher’s boobs (argh! Desperate Housewives reference!) That isn’t to say you can’t or won’t slyly drop in semi-clever hints or vague references about the galaxy far, far closer to home. I’ve been pretty good about steering clear of that, with two or three arcane exceptions (in extremely non-consequential passages) that I won’t mention except to say that when you do read the book you get +1 Internets for finding them. I have, however, committed the faux pas of including allusions to songs as chapter titles. Not in all of them, but enough to be potentially embarrassing and/or expensive. So a quick trip to the rewrite shed is in order. But better to do it now than to get too far down the road and receive a sternly worded letter from Sergeant Lawyer, M.D. demanding recompense for what is, essentially, a throwaway gag that has no significant bearing on the greater narrative.

The moral? Make your story one hundred percent yours, soup to nuts and credits to navy beans. It’s like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman: cheaper, easier and more fulfilling too.

Do authors dream of electric typewriters?

February 22, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Where do you get your ideas? That’s a question that everyone who fancies him or herself a writer is asked by someone at some point, with either a look of wonder or disgust on the questioner’s face (hopefully, it’ll always be the former). The Muse can be an elusive mistress; Lynda, my writing teacher, once advised that waiting around for her was an exercise in futility as she was more likely to dance just out of reach, laughing at you, and that you had to force her to the table by sitting down and starting without her. In that respect, schedules and deadlines certainly help a great deal, as we all know that the easiest thing to do in the world is not write.

Finding a subject for a blog post is not terribly difficult, even if the writing of said post is. There’s always lots going on in the world that we can comment on. I’m of the “more flies with honey” and “current or future employers might read this” mentality, so I’ll usually stop myself from venting about whatever is pissing me off lately and try to either write something positive or find an optimistic take on a particularly frustrating news item. (On a side note, my wife and I are watching the political drama House of Cards these past few nights and I’m finding it difficult to glom onto completely, for the singular reason that it is an utterly cynical program wallowing happily in the most selfish aspects of government service, and I’m much more drawn to the hopeful take offered by The West Wing. But Kevin Spacey is still awesome.) The blog, essentially, is a snapshot of how you’re feeling on any given day. A novel, by contrast, is a long term exercise in exploring an idea to its every possible limit. But which ideas are more deserving of the in depth treatment as opposed to the casual chat? How do you know which is which?

The summer after my mother died, I chained myself to my computer and started writing screenplays. That was what I was into at the time; for more on what led to this check out this previous post. Like many, my first ventures into serious writing were fan fiction, and in my case, Star Trek fan fiction. Although, I never managed to finish any of it – there’s an old hard drive rusting in a landfill somewhere full of the first chapters of stories about the crew of the Enterprise doing… well, not very much, actually. I couldn’t plot worth a damn at the time; I always figured I’d get to that part later on. What was more of a passion in the teenage years was drawing comic books, even though my artistic skill was minimal. And those were always James Bond stories, because they were easier to plot out. Bad guy doing bad thing, Bond must stop him, there’s a girl, a car chase, a gadget or two. For a high school creative project I wrote and drew a 007-Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover, where Bond is beamed aboard the Enterprise-D to help solve a Romulan conspiracy that involves his old adversaries SPECTRE, and along the way he manages to fall in love with Dr. Beverly Crusher (although in a downbeat ending, they have to go their separate ways). My English teacher loved it, her only criticism that it was a shame that I wasn’t using my own original characters. My rationale (read: excuse) was that using established characters freed you from having to introduce and develop your own, and enabled you to get right into the story instead. I didn’t understand at the time that the key to solving my inability to plot was to instead let the story flow out of the characters themselves.

But back to that summer. By that point I was using original characters, even if the dialogue they were speaking was almost entirely borrowed. That was about the time Pulp Fiction had come out and, as a film student at UWO, you could not take two steps into your classroom without hearing someone invoke the mighty Tarantino. I’d like to think that I wasn’t as obviously pretentious as some of the goatee-stroking, beret-wearing pomposities I sat in lectures with, but my work was just as derivative. My first full screenplay was about a group of kids in film school, with exhaustive, profanity-laden monologues about the hidden sexual themes in Star Wars (which, if you’ve seen Clerks, sort of puts the lie to the idea that these were in any way original characters.) I was still convinced that someday, someone would make this movie and I’d be accepting my Best Original (heh) Screenplay Oscar for it (then again, I was 20, recently orphaned and extremely naïve). Once that one was done, I started another, and then another. But they weren’t anything of note or even interest. I began to realize that they had no lasting value – because they weren’t about anything; there was no there there. And they certainly weren’t in my own voice.

The final screenplay was about a group of four 20-somethings who lived in the same apartment building (cough… Friends… cough). I know, it sounds dreadful, but I really enjoyed spending time with these particular people. As bad as some of those other screenplays were, they were an opportunity to hone my skill; to develop dialogue and subtext, to cut the profanity, to shed the influence of His Holiness Pope Quentin. When I typed FADE TO CREDITS, I realized I hadn’t been able to develop the characters in the way I’d wanted – the screenplay was about 170 pages (most genuine ones top out at 120, maximum) and I hadn’t said everything I needed to with these people. I decided to abandon it at first draft and instead turn it into a novel. And for the next two years I labored on this thing on and off. A great deal of my days were spent thinking about the lives of these people: Bryson Reid, aspiring writer and perpetual smartass, Krista Piper, alcoholic figure skater, Scott Shipley, advertising executive on the rise, and Lauren Devaney, Irish barista homesick for her native land. Part of Bryson’s story involved him meeting an entrancing and successful fantasy author named Serena Lane. And interspersed between the chapters about Bryson, Krista, Scott and Lauren were meant to be “excerpts” of Serena’s bestselling novel. The whole enterprise was designed to lead to a “shocking” metaphysical twist (not in the earlier screenplay version) whereby Serena was the same person depicted in the fantasy portions, who had somehow managed to cross into the real world (and it was the Irish barista, Lauren, who had authored the book in the first place, only to have it stolen by a manipulative publisher who was herself the villainess from the fantasy story and had also escaped from page into reality. “Serena Lane” would turn out to be the name of the street on which Lauren grew up in Dublin.) Anyway, it got up to 350,000 words with no end in sight. As I was writing it, I found I was enjoying the fantasy portions significantly more than the real world stuff. Bryson, in particular, although ostensibly the hero, was fundamentally unlikable and there were times I just wanted to smack him upside the virtual head. But I still felt the need to finish it.

Then one summer, I signed up for a local adult education course called “Crafting a Novel.” Naturally I knew how to write a novel, this was just a chance to meet some people (i.e. attractive, single women) with a similar passion. The first night of that class was a smack to the head much larger than the one I had wanted to give my fictional hero – I knew nothing. And I was crestfallen when Lynda told us that even if we had a book we had been working on for years, we were to set it aside and start a new one. To borrow a phrase from William Goldman, this was the ensuing sound inside my head:

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

Surely she wasn’t serious? My epic of Proustian magnificence deserved nothing less than endless streams of voluminous praise followed by a seven-figure publishing deal and movie rights! How could anyone dare me to set it aside?

In retrospect, thank frickin’ Buddha, but we’ll get to that.

After picking my jaw up from the floor that night, I decided to think about things a little more rationally. I’d slowly developed this fantasy world and enjoyed playing around in it. Couldn’t I set another story in the same place? And since prequels were all the rage, why not one that took place fifty years prior – something that might serve as a setup to the brilliance that was to follow? That took care of the setting, but I still needed characters and a worthwhile story to tell.

A few days later, I’m in a video game store perusing the PlayStation titles, and I wander over to the PC rack. There’s a game there, probably a precursor to World of Warcraft or something similar, and on it is a bunch of sketches of the characters. One of them strikes me. It’s a beautiful woman holding a mystical staff. It’s nothing terribly original; do a Google Images search for “sorceress” and you’ll see thousands of variations on the theme – some gorgeous, half-dressed knockout hurling lightning from manicured fingers. But something about it strikes me. And I ask myself, what must it be like to be her? Truthfully, the magical babe is a pretty boring staple of fantasy stories, either as a love interest, a physically unattainable spirit guide, or a cackling villainess bent on total domination of both the world and the hero’s crotch. In anything I’d ever read or seen up until that point, she was always treated merely as an other to be conquered or otherwise overcome. (Remember the witch in the first Conan the Barbarian movie? Beautiful and exotic, as befits magical babes, but doesn’t get a name and is in the story for all of four minutes, three of which are spent rolling around on the floor with our favorite muscled Cimmerian.) But if what would go through your head if you actually were a creature like that – would you go around thinking to yourself, “I am so willowy and ethereal and mysterious”? Or would your head be occupied by the same mundane thoughts the rest of us have – what to wear tomorrow, whether you left the iron on, did you feed the cat? After appearing and disappearing at will and turning men into pigs for a few hundred years, would you eventually grow bored with your powers? What could the immortal sorceress who has everything possibly want? Anything at all? Or would she be subject to the same emotional needs and longings as the rest of us mere human beings?

And there was the seed of my new story.

Coming up in future posts – more on creating characters, developing the plot, struggling with description, crafting dialogue, the necessary pain of killing your darlings and how Aaron Sorkin helped me find my voice without even knowing I exist.

What’s the story, Graham?

February 15, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 16 Comments

Who is that guy? — And while we’re at it, who is that guy?

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. Perhaps you can chalk it up to formative years surrounded by people telling me keep quiet, don’t boast and give someone else a turn. Like most people, I enjoy attention, but excessive notice tends to turn my stomach inside out. It’s why I had to stop reading the comments on the stuff I submit to Huffington (that and the occasional threat from a pissed off Tea Partier). The problem is that these aren’t qualities that serve one well if one is attempting to establish a writing career. Publishing firms are tightening their belts and seem to expect their authors to do most of the legwork in marketing themselves. You see the results often on Twitter – writers following other writers in hopes of a follow-back, and relentlessly pushing their tomes through tweet after tweet. Seems to work for some; I follow a few who haven’t published a thing yet have managed to build up their own expectant and admiring fanbases. My attitude has always been that quality will find its own audience, but, after blogging for almost two years to a relatively stable but small (yet tremendously awesome) group of supportive readers, it’s clear that my modest approach isn’t working. I need to give you more.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ll know I’ve made some periodic and cryptic references to a finished novel that has been sitting on my hard drive for far too long. A few years back I sent out some queries for it, received polite rejections all around, and then set it aside for a while. (I had a nice one from a literary agent who represents a very famous series of books, who said that her decision to pass was not a statement on the quality of the writing, which, though it may have been a form letter, was still encouraging to a fragile ego.) About two years ago I went back and rewrote large portions of it while painfully hacking out almost 60,000 words to get it to a publishable length. Perhaps a dozen family & friends have read it from cover to cover; dozens more have seen excerpts and offered suggestions, some of which have been incorporated, while others have been welcomed but disregarded (you have to use your judgement after all). Long and the short of it is that at this point it’s in the best shape I can possibly get it into, at least from my perspective. And I have started sending queries out again. So why have I not shared more about it here?

Well, in a strange way, I have. There is a lot here about the book. And no, you haven’t missed it. Let me explain a little.

We live in a spoiler-addicted culture. Everybody wants their appetite sated immediately; we all want to flip to the last page to see who did it. I went through that phase myself – because I am fascinated by the process of film production (an interest that probably stems from wishing in idle moments that it’s what I did for a living) I devour news about scriptwriting, casting, principal photography, and yes, spoilers. I had to give myself an intervention of sorts this past summer when I ruined The Dark Knight Rises for myself by reading the Wikipedia plot summary before seeing the movie. I realized I’d become what I despised – I’d often railed about being able to figure out the ending of rom-coms simply by looking at the two stars featured on the poster. For Skyfall, I purposely kept myself spoiler-free, and as a result I enjoyed that movie a lot more than I would have had I known how it was going to end. Trekkers have been driven up the wall over the last several by J.J. Abrams’ refusal to offer specifics on the identity of the villain “John Harrison” played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness. Is it Khan? Gary Mitchell? Robert April? Harry Mudd? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? In promoting his projects, Abrams has always embraced the idea of the “mystery box,” never showing his hand until the night of the premiere. And controlling the conversation by keeping it where he wants it, in the realm of speculation, is, if managed properly, a great way to keep interest high. It’s a dance though – give away too much and you spoil it, but say nothing, or remain stubbornly evasive, and people grow bored and move on to the next thing. My more introspective nature simply lends itself better to Abrams’ way of thinking.

I’ll crack open the mystery box a little: My novel is a fantasy. It’s the first part of what will hopefully be a trilogy. The main character is a woman with magical abilities. She encounters a mortal man. An adventure ensues.

Whoa, you’re saying. Back up a sec. This is basically Beautiful Creatures, right?

Argh. As writers we need to support each other and rejoice in each other’s successes, so I’m very happy for Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. We all dream of seeing our epics translated to the big screen and I’m sure they’re bursting with joy at their enviable accomplishment, as would I. But privately I’m suffering a few gutfuls of agita. You can’t help feeling like the guy who was late to the patent office when Alexander Graham Bell released the first telephone, even though our stories are completely different. Theirs takes place in the modern day; mine is set in the past in a fictional world. Their lead characters are teenagers discovering themselves; mine are world-weary adults. And of course the supporting characters and indeed the plot bear no resemblance to one another. But to the casual observer, they’re treading similar boards, and even though I could have written a story about a lawyer or a doctor or cop without garnering so much as a whisper of comparison, I have no doubt that someone will now accuse me of trying to cash in on a trend, particularly if Beautiful Creatures does become “the next Twilight” and thousands of lesser imitators flood literary agents’ inboxes (I’m fortunate I didn’t choose to write about vampires. Luckily, I find them tiresome.) Indeed, witches are all the rage in pop culture at the moment – we had Hawkeye and Strawberry Fields hacking their heads off a few weeks ago and we’ve got Mrs. James Bond, Meg Griffin and Marilyn Monroe bandying their magical wiles with James Franco coming up in March.

Well, it is what it is and no sense sulking about it now.

I’m going to sidestep into politics for a moment. My beloved federal Liberals are conducting a leadership race right now, and candidate and former astronaut Marc Garneau has recently fired a shot across presumptive favorite Justin Trudeau’s bow by accusing him of failing to offer up concrete plans. But Garneau (and those who are praising this as a brilliant strategic move) should understand that people don’t respond to plans, they respond to ideas – the why, not the what. Our current PM came to power not because he had a thoroughly researched and scored eighteen-point economic agenda, but because his campaign message was that the previous government was corrupt and he wasn’t. It worked. His two subsequent election wins have been based on similar themes – I’m reliable, the other guys are scary unknowns. I go back to Simon Sinek’s brilliant observation that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. It was the “I have a dream” speech, not the “I have a plan” speech. The trick, when it comes to trying to pitch a book through a query letter, is that you’re required to try and hook the agent through what is more or less a 250-word encapsulation of the basic plot. But the plot isn’t why I wrote the book and it’s not why I want people to read it.

For argument’s sake, and I’m certainly not trying to make a comparison here, but let’s quickly summarize the life of Jesus Christ: A baby is born to a virgin mother and grows up to become a carpenter, lead a vast group of followers and spread a message of love to his fellow men. This offends the ruling powers who condemn him to torture and death, after which he is miraculously resurrected. If you had no knowledge of Christianity or the substance of Jesus’ message, you would never believe based on what you just read that these events would inspire a worldwide religious movement that would endure over two thousand years and counting. The plot doesn’t make you want to read the book. You get no sense of the why.

After an enormous detour, we now come back to my novel and its why. The why is here, all around you, in the archives of this site. It’s in my values, the things that matter to me and that I ponder as I type, post and share. My opinions on politics, conservatism, the Tea Party, faith, spirituality, organized religion, charity, economics, ecology, literature, women, love, the loss of our parents, the shifting nature of good and evil, even James Bond, the Beatles and the writing of Aaron Sorkin as a part of the entire human experience – they are all represented in some form or another in my novel. Gene Roddenberry taught me that a great story can’t just be a journey from A to B to C, it has to be about something more. So mine is an adventure story that is as much an exploration of my personal philosophy and observations on the human condition as it is sorcery, chases, narrow escapes, explosions and witty repartee.

It is written in first person, from the point of view of the sorceress. Why did I choose to write as a woman? Part of it was for the challenge, I suppose, to see if I could do it without falling into chick-lit clichés about designer shoes, the appeal of sculpted abs and struggles with mothers-in-law and PMS. But more to the point, if the story is to connect with an audience, its themes must be universal, as must its emotions. Men and women both know what it is like to feel alone, to be consumed by a longing for something or someone you cannot have, and to make any kind of connection, no matter how meagre. We can both crave intimacy so deeply that we don’t care who we receive it from – even if we know we are asking for it from a person who is absolutely wrong for us. My fictional leading lady has tremendous powers, yet she remains vulnerable to the stirrings of a long-closed-off heart and the desire to be accepted, even by a man who despises everything she represents – a married man, to complicate matters further. The evolution of their relationship is the absolute center of the plot, their interactions the driver of all the events that follow. I avoid a lot of the external mechanisms common to fantasy like endless prophecies, quests, magical objects, creatures, specific rules about the casting of spells and complicated mythologies. Sorry, no Diagon Alley or Avada Kedavra or Quidditch or even white walkers, folks. The progression of my story hinges on emotions, personal choices and consequences, not getting the Whatsit of Whatever to the Mountain of Something Else before the next full moon. The people are what matter and everything else to me is background noise.

Does it sound like something you’d like to read? I hope so. I hope if you’ve come with me this far you’ll want to come a little further, and maybe invite a few friends along. Over the next few months I’ll post periodic updates on how we’re doing submission-wise, and maybe a few more details like character names, excerpts of scenes, even (gasp!) the title. We’ll see if we can get a couple more folks interested to the point where we reach critical mass and something truly amazing happens. It’s a story I’ve put a lot of heart into and really want to share in its completed form. But as I said, if you’ve been following this site and listening to what I have to say, you already know much of what you’re in for. Think of it as a buffet table of themed appetizers leading to a sumptuous main course – one that I promise won’t leave you with indigestion.

As they used to say on the late night talk shows, More to Come…