Spider-Man and the Importance of Long-Term Consequences

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I just watched Spider-Man: No Way Home, and it got me thinking about the importance of long-term consequences in storytelling—and also about the chupacabra, mythical goat sucker.

I'll avoid major spoilers for the latest Spider-Man movie aside from what's now plastered on every poster and description, but if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, then it'll be best to stop reading now.

 

What the movie does shockingly well is form a cohesive narrative out of an unwieldly number of characters and events from various related stories. I think its success highlights how much people love it when one story affects another story, which affects future stories, and so on. In other words, long-term consequences make for better storytelling. 

The longer the investment, the more satisfying it can be. Spider-Man slings in threads from the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is now 14 years old. Then it weaves in elements from other stories that are up to 20 years old. The little spark of recognition from the continuation of movies we saw in a theatre (remember them?) as literal children is a bit of cinematic magic, but there's also the sense that what we're seeing on screen now could affect other stories 20 years from now. That continuity gives weight to everything that happens, as long as what's happening stands on its own as a good story.

 

It's less satisfying if the bits of old stories are just passing references, with no consequences of their own. Take Ready Player One as an example. We get the same hit of recognition from all the childhood 80s references, but it's like empty calories—the things we recognize flow right through us. Seeing a Delorean doesn't mean there are wider consequences for the Back to the Future Cinematic Universe. Maybe recognition alone is still enough for some, but I had to use Google to recall any references in Ready Player One, and never bothered with the novel's sequel.

The chupacabra: myth or reality?

This applies to writing a book, too. Not every writer can have their own cinematic universe, Dark Tower multiverse, or even a sequel, but if something comes up in the first paragraph, you better make people happy by giving that thing consequences later on. The latest Spider-Man shows that it doesn't even have to be planned to be effective. I'm sure every writer can relate with the strange magic of finding the perfect place in the plot for some character or detail that they cannot recall the purpose of writing in earlier, sloppy as it may feel at the time. If soulless Sony executives can throw characters from 20 years ago into a modern movie for critical acclaim and 2 billion dollars, you can make it work too.

 

So what does this all have to do with the chupacabra? Absolutely nothing! I put that in the first paragraph with no idea where I was going with it, and now you can see how deeply unsatisfying it for something early in a story to have no consequences. Learn from my mistake. Do better.

All Stories are Horror Stories

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I'm reading a book on writing: The Successful Novelist, by David Morrell, the guy who wrote First Blood and thus created Rambo. In it, he describes asking aspiring novelists "why do you want to be writers?" After getting the usual unobtainable goals out of the way (e.g., money and fame—yeah right!), he gets deeper into why writers write, and part of it is because we have terrifying ideas intruding on our thoughts that we need to get out.
 
"The difference between fiction writers and civilians," writes Morrell, "is that we make it our life’s work to put our daydreams and day-nightmares on paper."
 
He doesn't even mention the horror genre, but he describes how his process, and indeed the process for all writers, involves capturing vivid waking nightmares, each uniquely traumatic to a particular author.
 
No wonder writers don't like being asked where their ideas come from.

It's a thought that leads to an interesting conclusion: every great story is a horror store at its core. In order for a story to have the necessary conflict and personal meaning to make it a unique work from a unique voice, it needs to address a writer's greatest fears. Morrell even describes how the idea for his first short story came about while having a sudden waking vision of being stalked in a forest and feeling certain someone was going to kill him. Even when Morrell is not writing horror, his story ideas start with horror, and at their core are about overcoming fear and other types of trauma.

If every story is really a horror story, then what sets the actual horror genre apart? I suppose it's that, while all stories have some terrifying, hungry thing lurking below the surface, the horror genre lures that thing above the surface and lets it take a few nibbles. In the horror genre, fear is the point, not only a driving force.
 
I need to apply these lessons to my own writing. My writing has been stagnating, partly because of that pandemic thing, but I think also because I've been screwing around with stories that aren't deeply, intentionally personal, and if I'm going to take it to the next level, I need something more traumatic. The past year has uncovered a lot of fears in all of us, me included. Fear of isolation, fear of other people, fear of death, fear of losing people, fear of losing time, wasting the limited days we have on Earth pretending the universe is anything other than indifferent to the fleeting lives we spend chasing after little pieces of paper that we can trade for shelter and Starbucks. What a mess. I need to write some of this stuff down, and/or get therapy!
 
All writers in all genres, from action to romance to children's stories, should look for the horror underneath their stories. If there is no fear being addressed, some waking nightmare that the author and the reader can really identify with, then is the story's conflict compelling enough to drive the plot forward?
 
Maybe there are exceptions though. Let me know what you think. 

 

INTERVIEW: Renee Miller

Happy fuckin' Monday, ya'll. I'm writing this on a Thursday, so you can imagine how upset I am to have to already be thinking about the M-word. 

But I have good news! Renee Miller, of the Tweed, Ontario Millers, devourer of chiseled men, puncher of noses, first of her name, has agreed to answer some questions. Read on!

You’ve written in damn-near every genre under the sun. Lately, though, you’ve been hovering in the black hole of horror. What draws you to that?

I was drawn toward darker themes all along, and when I settled into horror, it was because it allows me to continue to dabble in almost every genre. I mean, everything can be horrific. A love story can go dark. Science, no matter how amazing, can spiral into a nightmare. History, comedy, fantasy… you get the idea. There are also endless ways to unnerve or scare a reader. I like to have those options available.

Given, well, *gestures widely* it seems especially strange that horror and horror-crossover seems to be having a moment. Why do you think people want books to scare them when all they need to do is go to the grocery store?

Nothing makes us feel more alive than when we’re afraid. It’s one of the most intense emotions a person can feel. In horror fiction, you can be scared, but in a safe way. No one’s going to actually kill you or feed you your own testicles (well, almost no one). I think that’s what draws people in. Well, that and the fact that nothing is more terrifying than our reality right now, so maybe people who previously didn’t enjoy horror see it as a nice escape.

You have a new book that just came out, BLOOD LAKE MONSTER. The cover is EXCELLENT, by the way. Tell us a little about it.

I’m so in love with Unnerving’s covers. I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed. For this book, when Eddie put out a call for the Rewind or Die series. When I saw “80’s/90’s slasher horror,” I knew I had to get in on it.

Blood Lake Monster is set in Tweed, where I live. It’s about a girl named Maribel, who is from a poor family in a very small town. She’s bullied right until her last breath but doesn’t let that stop her from getting revenge.

Also, I'm not great at the "tell me what your book is about" questions. 

If you wade through the blood lake that is Twitter, it seems a lot of writers are having a hard time making any creative headway in this pandemic environment. How has your writing routine changed, if at all?

Oh my god, my writing routine is shredded. I’ve been working as an assistant manager at our grocery store through it all, and it hasn’t been a good ride. Between the mental exhaustion caused by idiots who think they can act like assholes and get away with it, and the physical exhaustion caused by working more hours than I’m used to, it’s hard to find the motivation or the inspiration to write when I’m at home. I manage to get a bit in each day, but nothing like I used to. Before Covid, I could write a novella in two days. Now it takes a couple of weeks at least. I’m hoping that once things settle down, I’ll find my groove again. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away a few hundred words at a time.

What is the last great book you read? Do you find it harder or easier to fall into a story lately?

I just started reading THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS by Stephen Graham Jones, and I think it has the potential to be the last great book at this point. He is an amazing writer. I’m jealous.

For me it’s harder to fall into a story lately for the same reasons I’m struggling with writing. I have several unfinished books laying around. What I pick up to read and how much of it I get through depends on where my head is at. I find the days where I’ve been screamed at or threatened enough that I want to cut a bitch are the days I just turn on Netflix and let my brain recharge.

You write pretty regularly for Unnerving, an indie publisher. What do you like about the indie publishing world that the Big-5 and “traditional” publishing might not offer?

I like that it’s more personal. My success truly is their success, so we’re more of a team than I think I’d be in a larger publishing house. And indie publishers (or at least many of them) work their asses off. I know Eddie Generous (Unnerving) works harder than most authors I know, so when he takes on a project of mine (or anyone’s), I know he’s going to make sure it’s the best it can be or kill me in the process. (Just kidding. He’s really great and probably wouldn’t kill me.)

I’ve also worked with indie publishers like Aphotic Realm, Broadswords and Blasters, DarkFuse, Serial Magazine, and a few more. Next year, I have a novel coming out with Bloodshot Books. All these publishers are indie, and they’ve worked extremely hard on every book they put out. Sure, I’d love a big fat contract. Who wouldn’t? At the end of the day, though, if this is as high up the food chain as I get, I’m proud of what I have achieved and to have worked with these people.

If you could give one piece of advice to our readers, be they writers or not, what would it be?

I hate giving advice because we’ve all got something to learn. No one has all the answers. If you think you do, then you definitely don’t.  I guess the best advice I could give right now is less talking, more listening.

Renee Miller lives in Tweed, Ontario. She writes in multiple genres, but prefers dark fiction with strong elements of horror, erotica and/or comedy.

Advice from the Middle: The Fallacy of Listening to Successful People

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

There are two types of people you hear advice from:

• People who have been very successful—they'll tell you what to do.
• People who have failed spectacularly—they'll tell you what to avoid.

You hear less from those of us who are succeeding at some times, failing at other times, and coming out somewhere in the middle most of the time.

Take book marketing as an example. If an author strikes it big, they’ll sometimes share what they think helped, including their marketing efforts. It’s very generous of them, as long as they’re not charging too much for books or courses, and often there is some good advice in there. But it may not be good advice for everyone, both because there is a big element of luck to success, and because what works for an author who has already had some success and wants more success may not work for an author who has had no success and just wants to reach some, someday.

On the other side, you hear about the big failures, often following the big successes. If someone is caught reaching the New York Times bestseller list by buying 10,000 copies of their own book, taking out a full-page ad prominently featuring the n-word, and acting creepy at conferences*, well, you’ll probably hear about that. Maybe not from the authors themselves, but you'll hear about what not to do. That, too, is not much use for those of us in the middle, mostly because we were already pretty sure those things are bad ideas—only success and power can rot the brain enough for certain bad decisions.

Listening to these people is actually a kind of logical error. Survivorship bias is often explained with the idea of analyzing where airplanes coming back from a war were shot:

It's tempting to look at the places with the most damage, and add more armour to those areas. But these are the planes that survived and came back, so they're giving you some biased advice. It would actually make more sense to beef up the areas without damage, because that's where there were shots to planes that got destroyed and never made it back.

I feel like a lot of authors put their efforts into beefing up the areas recommended by the most successful survivors, ignoring the areas where the countless silent failures and middling successes have run into trouble. As a practical example, a successful author may be building a nice home office from which they can launch a multimedia marketing campaign, while the regular authors around them have weak points in their basic sentence structure and vocabulary, and as a result are getting shot down by editors left and right. Pew pew! Should've put armour on your starboard grammar hole, now you're diving into an ocean of rejection letters, dumbass.

Author David McRaney has said that the "advice business is a monopoly run by survivors." I'd just add that in business, you sometimes get advice by the most spectacular train wrecks too, but that is just as biased.

Fortunately, there's a solution to this biased thinking that leads to bad advice. We need to hear diverse voices representing the full spectrum of experience and success. Even non-exceptional people can speak up with "here's what I'm doing, and here are the results so far." We can all choose diversity in who we follow on social media, and be bold enough to share our experiences even if we're not exceptional. I guess that's sort of what I'm doing on this blog. Hi!

* Actually, maybe this one is more of an effect of success, and the near inevitability of successful authors (mostly male) acting creepy kinda makes me want to stay in the middle for a while.

In Which I Tell You What To Do

Hello! Hola! Bonjour! Pree-vyeht!

This here is my first post with Across the Board and I couldn’t be more excited to force my wisdom (for better or worse) down your eye-holes. I’ve been writing seriously (and I mean seriously in the loosest way possible) for close to twelve years, and in that time I’ve come across buckets of advice, most of which isn’t any good. Below you’ll find some of the best and worst of the bunch. As with everything, take it with a grain of salt. In the end, only you know what’s good for you.

(Chocolate. Chocolate is what’s good for you.)

Best/Worst: Write what you know.

I KNOW. I’m groaning looking at this one too. And that Best/Worst thing? What am I trying to do? CONFUSE YOU?

Maybe a little.

Here’s the thing: the value of this advice depends on what you do with it. If you’re a cattle farmer in Idaho and all you ever write about is cow-pats and the way little pebbles always find a way into your boots, well, your writing isn’t going to have much range. You might find an audience, but it’ll be small. More importantly, after a while, even you will get bored with describing the smell of manure as it rushes over the hill.

So how do you fix it?

KNOW MORE STUFF. Learn to play the flute. Take a clogging class. Read about the great monarch butterfly migration.

Because it is important to write about familiar things. Familiarity means you can ignore the surface and scratch below it. Find meaning in the migration. Bridge the gap between music and grief. But you don’t have to, and shouldn’t, limit yourself to your current life experience.

Best: Why is more important than what.

Characters are assholes. There, I said it. We were all thinking it anyway.
You want them to go here to do this thing, but it’s like they’re rooted to the spot, arms crossed and putting. Petulant children, the lot of them.

Except, maybe they’re not.

Often, our plots demand our characters do things, be things, say things, in order to keep the events of the story moving. The problem comes when we want them to do a thing they don’t want to. If you’ve created a good, well-rounded character, you know how they will react to certain situations. Lengths they are willing to go. Their limits. Their fears. If you try to push them too far out of themselves, even the most meticulously plotted outline falls apart.

PLOT TWIST: The murderer was the best friend!

Yeah, but why?

Writing, like in murder, needs three things: Means, Opportunity, and Motive. I would argue motive is the most important. Sure, Johnny has a perfectly good kitchen knife and Karen is just sitting there looking all Karen-y, but unless he has a good reason to stick it in her ice-cold heart, he won’t.

Worst: You have to outline before you draft.

The key part of this one is have to.

Some people plot. Some people pants. Some people plants.

I never outline.

WUT.

I know.

I journal. I dream. I answer questions I know will come up (see MOTIVE) so I don’t get stuck. I write snatches of dialogue to get a feel for each character’s voice. I know where it will start, where everything changes, the climax, and (sometimes) where it will end. Then I get writing.

I have never written a book that didn’t need at least 50% rewrites because I didn’t know what was really happening in the book until I reached the 30k word mark.

Would it be more efficient to plot? Maybe. Would it be more fun? Shut your mouth.

The point is that whatever works for you, works for you. There is no one way to write. Do it in the way you find the most satisfying because the writing is the easy part. Everything that comes after is hard.

Best/Worst: Show, don’t tell.

Oh, hell. Not another one of these.

YES.

Generally speaking, show don’t tell. Don’t tell me Frederico is angry; show him staring out the window at his cheating wife, eerily quiet, every muscle tense as a guitar string.

BUT –

Oh, yes. The big ol' booty.

But sometimes, less is more. If we’re writing about Frederico as a cuckolded husband and the events of his marriage that led up to this point, do we need to spend pages on his upbringing in a small house in Chile, describing his parents’ imperfect marriage, the fighting, the anger, only to stay together out of stubbornness? Probably not. In some cases, it’s more effective to tell with a line or two: Frederico, like his parents, didn’t believe in divorce. There was no argument too deep, no fight so vicious, that would justify breaking their vows to God and each other.

Worst: Writing is solitary.

This is SO the worst.

If you’re like me, and you have a significant other that not only doesn’t read fiction (GASP), but doesn’t read your work (GASP AGAIN), talking with them about the particular struggles (and successes) of writing and publishing can be like talking to a wall. Their eyes glaze over and they’re SO SUPPORTIVE but they don’t get it.

You don’t need a tribe, but you do need at least one person. They can be a cheerleader or a helpful critic or just another person on the other end of the phone or computer who understands how you feel. Who will squee right along with you when you finally figure out a way out of a plot hole, or you come up with the perfect title for your WIP.

Best: How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

No matter how small the bite, you’ll be slurping that trunk like spaghetti in no time.

(Yes, that metaphor got weird. No, I don’t regret it. Stop staring at me and go write something).