How Many Stories Does A Character Have To Tell?
When we got out of Star Wars, my daughter was ablaze with all the things she wanted to see in the Star Wars Universe. “We don’t know how {$CHARACTER} got Darth Vader’s helmet,” she said. “I bet that’s an interesting tale. And how did {$CHARACTER} get ahold of that lightsaber? Wow, how did that happen?”
I was quiet, because she was so excited. But deep down, I was thinking, That’s just logistics. Those aren’t stories.
And last night I watched Creed, the latest movie in the Rocky series, for the second time – and it’s amazing how much more attention to pay to sequels and reboots when you’re writing the third book in a series. Now, whenever I watch a sequel, I have that tickle in the back of my head, knowing that if sales hold up maybe they’ll ask for a fourth book in the ‘Mancer series.
And while I love Rocky with all my heart, every Rocky fan knows that there’s only two really good movies in the original series – the first Rocky, where our lovable lunk becomes a contender, and the third Rocky, where he suffers from PTSD after being beaten out of his comfort zone. (And arguably Rocky Balboa, which feels more like a fond coda than a series finisher.)
The other movies exist. Things happened in them. But they don’t stick in the fans’ minds because what happens in those films are retreads. Rocky II is basically Rocky I, except with a slightly happier ending. Rocky IV is Rocky III, except with an even more cartoonish villain.
Rocky learns the same lesson in II that he does in I. Rocky learns the same lesson in IV that he did in III.
There’s only so many significant lessons a man can learn in life.
And I think of Batman, and how many thousands of comics devoted to Batman stories have been written, and most of them were fine – they existed, Batman beat a villain, and they slid into the massive vat of Batman stories to be quietly forgotten. They were exciting at the time, but Batman either didn’t learn a lesson beyond Here’s How To Beat The Riddler This Time, or he learned a lesson very much like what he’d learned before – Batman Will Always Be Alone, or Batman Needs His Allies, or Batman Must Not Kill.
Stories that didn’t tell us anything new.
So we liked them when we were reading them, but they didn’t stick.
There are a handful of great Batman stories, and it’s not surprising that those are the ones the movies gravitate towards – Batman is crippled and must work his way back to greatness. Batman encounters a man who tries to seduce him into abandoning his world view. Batman battles old age as he struggles to remain relevant. And, of course, Batman’s origin.
Those are the real stories.
And the trick is, Batman can’t have too many of these significant lessons, because then Batman stops being Batman. If Batman learns that killing is, actually, more efficient, then he’s suddenly not the guy we can market on lunch boxes. If Batman learns that channelling his great wealth into social programs is more efficient, then Batman as we know him is over.
Truth is, most characters have only a handful of lessons they can be taught before they become something so different, they evolve into people who weren’t what we were drawn to.
Yet audiences want to hear stories about the people they love. They want to warm their hands by Batman, and Rocky, and Sherlock Holmes, and all the other great characters, and publishers want to make money, so they ask authors, “Hey, can you have them do something so the fans can tag along with this person for a while?”
So what you get are what I call potboiler tales – they exist because you’re happy to go back to see Spidey fighting Doc Ock again, but they’re just going to shuffle deck chairs around. Maybe Spidey will have lost a power or two, but he’s lost them before. Maybe Aunt May will be in trouble again, but that old biddy’s always been his boat anchor. Maybe Spidey will, once again, have some mundane commitment he’s missing out on while he saves the day, and will pay the price in his personal life for being a hero.
Again; nothing we haven’t seen before. And we’ll give Spidey new villains, and more events, and maybe a new girlfriend…
And once every decade or two, an author will stumble upon a tale that does teach Spidey a lesson we haven’t seen before, something fitting and new, and fans will talk about how brilliant it was, and it’ll revitalize interest in Spidey in a way that no crossover or revolving-door-death ever will.
That will be the next of Spidey’s significant stories. It’ll take its place in the pantheon.
And slowly, that will become another one of the Lessons Spidey Must Learn, and we’ll see the same endless churning of Spidey stories except that’ll be incorporated into the repertoire.
There’s nothing wrong with potboiler tales, naturally. I read a billion of ’em when I was a kid, and they did me just fine. And they’ll probably show {$CHARACTER} getting Darth Vader’s helmet, and they’ll bolt in some character arc somehow, and it’ll be a good story that will satisfy people who already liked Star Wars.
Yet as an author, I note that people respond to the significant stories much better. They’ll watch Rocky II. They’ll remember Rocky III. They’ll watch Star Trek III, but they’ll remember Star Trek II.
But as an author, at this point, I want only the significant stories. I want the ones where a character goes into the tale as one person, and comes out as another person entirely. And my point is that even the great characters only have a couple of those significant tales they can live through before they’re done evolving.
(And in some cases companies don’t want the significant tales to be written, because in the end with Star Wars the big changes have to happen on-screen, and you can’t have Rey’s big moments taking place on paper when the celluloid is what grabs the big bucks.)
My wife likes reading the potboilers. I support her in this. Yet I think in her heart of hearts, she’s searching for the next great significant story. One will provide nutrition to get you through the day; the other is a meal.
And I think that if you’re a writer, you can poison yourself on potboilers when it comes time to tell your own original stories. In general, the potboilers work for people who already liked this stuff. And stealing too many techniques from the potboilers risks telling a story that doesn’t have enough muscle to grab people by the lapel and lift them off the ground.
When you’re writing a tale, maybe consider whether this is potboilerish or significant for your main characters. Ask if this is the critical incident in their lives.
And if it’s not, maybe figure out what would be. Because god damn, people thirst for that significance, even if they don’t necessarily know they want it.
Some Advice To Middle-Aged Writers Who Wish To Make A Living Off Of Writing
Yesterday, Robert Jackson Bennett posted some pretty wise words for aspiring professional writers – advice that boiled down to “Get a full-time job, manage your career, and write part-time.” Because writing full-time a) takes years to pay off, b) is uneven with the cash flows even when it does succeed, and c) lacks health insurance.
However, he was then asked: “That’s for kids in their early twenties. What if I’m an old fogey?”
I am an old fogey, so let me speak.
I published my first novel last year at the age of 45 – I am now legally obligated to tell you that novel is called Flex, and Mr. Bennett was kind enough to read it and give it a nice blurb so I could sell it to people. I got serious about writing at the age of 38.
And yes, things are slightly different for you.
If you have reached late middle age without getting published in the ways you want, that’s likely due to one of two reasons:
1) You suck at writing.
2) You weren’t serious about writing.
The good news is, both can be fixed.
The “serious about writing” is a large issue – I wrote on and off for twenty years, leaving my stories in desk drawers because it was a lot easier hearing my friends tell me how awesome I was than actually, you know, getting rejected. After decades of writing just often enough that I could tell my coffee dates that I was a writer, I realized that it was time to shit or get off the pot – I could die in the nursing home with my relatives fondly lamenting how much potential I had, or I could see whether I was actually any good at this.
And if you’re middle-aged and just starting writing because it seems like A Nice Thing To Do, here’s my best advice for you:
Decide whether you want to write because it’s A Nice Thing To Do, or whether you want to hurl yourself bodily into the meatgrinder that is publishing.
Writing because it’s A Nice Thing To Do is awesome! The kids these days churn out tons of fanfic, and they have a lot of fun goofing around in someone else’s universe. It’s the equivalent of playing hoops in your buddy’s back yard during the summer – maybe you get a little competitive, maybe you’re way better than the average ball-tossin’ schmuck, but the main goal is to have fun.
Writing professionally is not always fun.
If you want to go professional, well, you’re likely gonna get rejected a lot, and hear some mean shit said about you from people who are right to say mean shit about you because your story wasn’t good enough yet, and you have to suck it down and agree with these very-rude-yet-very-accurate snarlbacks in order to make your writing better, richer, smarter.
It’s a lot easier to toss off Avengers fanfic to people with low expectations and happy thoughts.
(Which is not to say that all fanfic is low-quality – it certainly is not, and Seanan McGuire would beat me senseless if I said that – but a lot of fanfic is basically people enjoying themselves and not trying to sell their fiction for enough money to pay the rent. Which is a methodology I fully support.)
Older folks often forget that “writing for fun” is an acceptable option. This doesn’t have to be Career Part 2. You can get your poems published in magazines that pay nothing and have a hell of a time. Dork around and self-publish your first draft. Pay money for a nice cover. Who cares if there’s cash or success in it?
You care?
Okay. Time to get serious, then:
You probably suck.
This isn’t a fatal flaw; I sucked for decades. But if you’re older, and you’ve been working on your fiction for years and still that breakthrough eludes you, you’ve almost certainly got a couple of lazy habits clogging up your throat. You may not even be aware that they exist. But they’re stopping you from going further.
(And if me telling you that “you probably suck” gets your hackles up, holy God, let me tell you that this is perhaps the nicest thing you’ll have said to you when you’re starting out. Consider the Nice Thing To Do route if that seriously ruffles your wings.)
If you wanna start writing, don’t quit your job. Instead, learn to work in the time you have and figure out why you suck. (For me, it was stiff plotting and bad prose.) You need to find people who can be honest about your fiction in realistic ways, not the puff-pastry of your buddies who are just impressed you finished a story, and have them kick your ass like fighters at a dojo.
What worked for me was a Writing Workshop. I did two; Clarion, which was six weeks long, and Viable Paradise, which was a week long. John Joseph Adams, a bigwig sci-fi publisher, discusses the various workshops available in this post here.
These workshops are expensive. Hopefully, your middle age has been accompanied by middle class, and your sole advantage among these young whelps is that you have a paycheck to go into hock for this shiz. But they do help.
People will tell you that writing workshops are the only way to get good at writing, and those people are so full of shit their T-shirts are one big brown skidmark. But Tobias Buckell, another writer of some note, once told me that the Clarion Workshop was like a time machine – it can accelerate your career four years forward in a couple of weeks. Being critiqued heavily by professionals, and insightful students, will highlight all the issues in your text.
If you’re running out of time already, workshops help.
They are not panaceas, though. The dirty secret of every writing workshop is that the people who succeed are usually the most tenacious, not the most talented. I certainly wasn’t the best writer in either of my classes, but I got a novel published because I wrote every day and refused to stop.
But that’s the other beauty of a workshop; you get to spend a couple of weeks seeing what it’s like to be a Professional Writer. And some people look at all the work that needs to get done, and the rejection, and the heartache, and the crapshoot terror, and they say Fuuuuuuuck this. I’ve got better things to do with my life.
Which is great! Man, seriously, if you can pay a couple of thousand bucks to discover that you don’t have to waste the next decade chasing a dream that doesn’t suit you, do it. Sometimes, a workshop is a success because it’s shown someone that they could be a writer, but they would be miserable doing it.
Yet again, workshops aren’t necessary. (RJB did no workshop, and he’s doing all right.) They are merely convenient, assuming you can get into one. And if you can’t, well, let’s go back to the “You probably suck” phase – you’ll need to find some local writers’ groups or good online forums that will rip your fiction apart constructively…
And you have to listen. You’re not good yet. You have to be this bizarre blend of egotistic and humble – humble enough to accept the bodyblow of “Whoah, that was awful” when it’s true, egotistic enough to shrug off the complaints that would steal the uniqueness from your work. And that’s hard to know, man. It’s hard.
Which isn’t to say this is the only way. Writing is bizarre like that; some people pick up the pen at fifty, and they’re geniuses out the gate. Others find these alternative paths I’ve never considered, and they’re successes. When I say “Here is how to do it,” realize that it’s like climbing a mountain – this is the bunny trail I’m pointing out, but there may be a shortcut that gets you there faster, and if you’re super-dedicated you can probably scale the cliffs bare-handed. Don’t let anyone tell you this is the sole path to publication.
But yeah. You’re older. You can still do this. But you gotta put in the work. And you’ve got less time.
I’d start now, if I were you.
The Year Of Cutting Down
I remember that time, so many years ago, when someone first invited me to a convention.
It felt like a signal honor – and, in fact, it was one, because I was just this LiveJournal-bloggin’ schmuck. There was no real reason to have me there except that the man running the convention media track liked me, and wanted to meet me. The idea of going to a place and speaking in front of a room full of people as though I was somehow notable was intimidating.
I didn’t have any fans except, perhaps, for that one man. Gini couldn’t make it with me that weekend. But I battled down spasms of social anxiety and went, because when you got an offer like that you didn’t turn it down.
That was my first convention.
That was the first time I got up on stage and pretended to be somebody.
——————-
I was cleaning grout the first time someone hit on me as a married man.
I remember being in the tub, and hopping out to chat occasionally as my new friend and I tried out this “Gchat” thing that had just hit it big. We’d met for coffee – we both worked out of our home and were lonely – and we’d had the excitement of getting a Gmail invite, because back then it was invite-only and very prestigious.
She told me she was considering opening up her marriage.
She told me she was considering opening it up to me.
And I remember being on my knees, slathering in fresh grout after I’d stripped off some old unrepairable stuff, and thinking, This isn’t happening. Attractive, married women just don’t tell you they want to have sex with you.
That was my first polyamorous relationship.
That was the first time I got in someone’s bed and became their boyfriend.
——–
In the spring of 2015, I achieved a lifelong dream: My novel FLEX was released.
To my surprise, by then, I did have fans. Thousands of people followed me on Twitter and FetLife and LiveJournal – not crazy celebrity numbers, it’s a little hard to think of yourself as some kind of star when you’ve stood backstage with Neil Gaiman and seen what actual fame is like – but enough that I could travel up and down the West Coast and find a roomful in each town who wanted to shake my hand.
Lots of them had read my book already, and liked it. Not liked me; as a blogger, I’d long grown used to purveying my personality. They liked my fiction, which still is a concept I have problems dealing with: that idea that someone could be a fan of my works without having the slightest idea who I was like.
Lots of them were kinky, too. I’d written tons of essays on polyamory and kink, and so a lot of the folks were in open relationships. I had offers for fire dates. I had offers for cuddles. I had even deeper offers.
It seemed unreal. I was that guy in the bathtub scrubbing grout, I was that guy holding onto the tenuous fandom of one man at a Michigan convention – and yet I was someone who clearly had people enthusiastic to meet me, and sometimes to smooch me, and sometimes to read me.
It didn’t make sense.
It didn’t make any sense at all.
————-
In the winter of 2015, my world imploded.
I’d been invited to four conventions in six weeks, and I went to every last one of them. And in the weekends I wasn’t going to conventions, I was having sweeties over to visit for the weekend, so for two solid months I didn’t get a single weekend to myself.
Or to my wife.
Or to even my long-term girlfriend of seven years, who got locked out thanks to a convention appearance I’d forgotten about.
But I had a book to sell, man. People wanted me to go places, and if they’d pay my way, sure, why not show up? So I’d work extra hours during the week so I could leave at 3:00 on a Friday to drive a couple of hours to go visit another convention, or drive off to a hotel to see a new sweetie of mine, or to…
To exhaust myself. Because I was an introvert. And I wasn’t giving myself any recovery time.
And at the conventions, I’d meet new people who I wanted to see more of, so I’d try to fit time in for them, and everything was just snowballing.
Then the holidays came, and it was visiting the last of my sweeties and seeing my family and going on vacation and making time to ensure that I did see my girlfriend of seven years, and every weekend was locked down and God when would I get the time to wind down I never would I’d overbooked.
No individual weekend was bad, mind you. (Well, one was, but that led directly to a breakup.) I didn’t regret any of that time individually. But collectively, I started to feel like I was eating nothing but rich meal after rich meal and feeling like I was living life to the fullest and yet somehow feeling nauseated afterwards.
I wanted everything, because everything was so scarce. You didn’t get invited to conventions every day. You didn’t get to flirt with beautiful girls every day.
It would be an insult to turn any of that down.
I was dying rather than insult anyone.
————-
In November, I had a key insight – my Polyamorous Justice League, wherein I stopped seeing all the women I could date and started seeing the women I should date. That was a potent lens for me to view things through, because a model of scarcity made me feel like I should pursue every potential just in case I was leaving behind someone wonderful.
In truth, I am leaving behind wonderful people when I choose not to date. I know this. I know some of the people I’ve flirted with, and they’re absolutely amazing, and would be great to date, but…
I’m not that guy kneeling on the grout any more.
And there are some great conventions I could go present at, and it would be a lot of fun to do each of them, but…
There will be other conventions.
And what I’m learning is that my life is really sufficiently wonderful that I could make it not wonderful – and it’s sort of shameful what dismally low levels of celebrity can destroy a man, but holy God even a small abundance can choke you if you’re not paying attention.
I could go after everything I have access to now, in this new and freer world, and lose track of what I have.
Some of my friendships have suffered. I’ve lost connections with friends in town because I met this neat person at a convention and thought, “Well, why shouldn’t they come down for the weekend?” and so I inadvertently prioritized an unknown potential connection over an existing one. There’s been times I’ve ached to see my good buddies, but the weekends are taken and god the weekdays go so fast, don’t they?
And my wife has noticed a sort of plateau in what we do, too – because she’s been grieving, and not social, and letting me go off to other places alone. We haven’t been ignoring each other, but we haven’t been doing things together – we’ve merely been existing in each other’s company, her clad in the dim isolation of grief, me itching to get out but not quite wanting to push her. When we’ve hung it’s been the null kill-time of watching Parks and Rec in the living room instead of going out and forging new experiences together.
Some of my sweeties have suffered. Like my long-term girlfriend of seven years who got shorted on visits because whoops, I’d committed to something else interesting, and my other sweeties who I’d try to wedge into a calendar overstuffed with all these once-in-a-lifetime things that had actually become commonplace. Seeing me once every five months kinda sucks when we’re officially dating, doesn’t it?
And my writing has suffered. Like my wife, it’s not that my writing’s died on the plate – the third novel in the ‘Mancer trilogy is now out among its first wave of beta readers – but there’s been one too many weekends where I’ve been headed to a convention and too busy to write, two-sevenths of the week gone because I’m driving somewhere.
So when your wife and your friends and your Polyamorous Justice League and your writing suffer because you’re operating from a model of artificial scarcity where you’re grabbing at every opportunity because oh my God how often does this happen, then it is time to soberly assess just how often, in fact, this does actually happen a decade later.
———
Early 2016 is when my eyes got opened and I whispered, “Enough.
“I’m good.”
———–
Gearing down is going to take some staging. Because I’ve made good friends online, and I do want to meet them, when I can sanely do so. I don’t want to shrug and go, “PARK’S CLOSED, GO HOME” to some of the awesome nascent connections I’ve formed. I don’t want to reject every convention; I’m not planning on shoving folks I’m already talking to out the door.
But I’ve evolved to the point where my life holds more opportunities than I can rightfully seize. And it feels a bit like slapping other people who don’t get these opportunities to turn these awesome offers down, but…
What I have is wonderful.
Too much can poison a man.
I have to find some way to take what I have, and nurture it, and still allow for new growth. Shutting down entirely would be almost as bad. But I’m overbooked right now, and while I can make efforts to compress with better quality time – I’ve spent hours with Gini over the last six months, but the trick is to do something more than watching reruns – there’s a hard limit to all the places I can go and all the people I can see.
So I think 2016 is going to be the Year of Cutting Down. Not out. Not slicing people out of my life. But I need to figure out a way to achieve balance with what I have so I have time for me, and my loves, and my friends, and my travels, and my new connections, in a way that makes me feel energized and not drained.
It’s gonna be awkward.
But it’s a damn good problem to have.
How Can You Choose A Soulmate In Six To Eight?
The average person sleeps with between six and eight people in their lifetime.
I wonder how much that number skews people’s relationships.
See, when it comes to dating, I have the enthusiasm of a golden retriever – if I want to date you, I’m gonna run in circles around your feet and lick your face if you’ll let me. I’m not shy with my enthusiasms; I don’t know how to quash my affections.
I also get off on enthusiasm, which is a geek survival skill. I don’t know much about anime – but if you’re sufficiently fired up about it and willing to explain things instead of just blathering on as if I know this stuff already, I’m there. This stuff is interesting to me because you’re interested in it. And if you’re willing to sit me down and show me stuff, well…
I’m also a neophile. I am drawn to new experiences. Sure, I don’t know anime, or rap, or bungie-jumping, or parakeets – but if you take me by the hand to bring me to them, I’ll be all like Wow, look at that.
Which, combined with a ridiculously overpowered sex drive, makes me a dating fucking machine. The average is six to eight – and though I’ve lost track, I’m pretty sure I’m over 150 at this stage. Which is a number many swingers exceed – but for me, the majority of those conjoinings were within small relationships.
As I used to say, “I don’t do one-night stands. But I do three-day weekends.” And I had a lot of torrid “Oh hi, we met, this is lovely, let’s fall in the sack, wait this isn’t working, well, nice to know you”s. In and done in a week. No real regrets, but no lasting romantic connections. (Often friends. Friends who’d put me in touch with other people to date. But…)
It occurs to me I date riotously differently.
Because I enjoy dating.
…And at this point, I’ll cue in those who’d scoff “Sure, you’re a man, you can get away with being slutty in ways that women never could” – but the truth is, I know a lot of women who live their lives this way, and their lives are remarkably similar to mine. Truth is, dating widely and deeply is a lifestyle choice. The women I’m having these three-day weekends with have chosen pretty much to do as I do.
The net result is that for me, dating is a pretty trivial proposition. I date a lot. It doesn’t stress me out all that much to get out there, because I have this confluence of factors where, unbelievably, I enjoy the grind that so many sitcoms and movies tell me is a tedium.
And I try to imagine dating when it’s not fun.
I note that my most-loved pieces of relationship advice are usually the ones where I talk about “How to get someone different from you to love you.” That essay is a hydra that takes on a thousand forms – how to speak someone’s love language! How to know when a relationship needs fixing! How to handle conflict so things don’t fly apart! – but always, the underlying context is “You have this precious precious thing, how do you fix it?”
And I wonder. Because the average woman kisses fifteen people in her life, and I try to imagine finding your life’s partner in fifteen dates or under. That’d be like choosing your life’s career in fifteen interviews total.
Viewed through that lens, it’s no wonder my popular essays are “How do I fix this?” and most of the advice I get asked for is “This partner is abusing me, how do I make them love me?”
My sneaking suspicion is that people are dating so few people that when they land someone who’s even vaguely compatible, they start hammering this bent piece into shape because Oh God I don’t want to be alone and oh God I DEFINITELY don’t want to be out sifting through the dating pool again. I suspect they find keeping up with various flirtations to be an annoyance, a drain on energy, why do I have to be texting these people when really I’d rather be watching Netflix?
I wonder. Because in my lifelong experience, I’ve only had one person who legitimately changed styles for me – and I’m still married to her, thankfully. Everyone else who worked out well made small changes – accommodations, really –
– but the people who needed to switch up love languages or drastically alter communication patterns or adjust lifestyles to be with me, well… they didn’t.
You may note that “didn’t” tally is well over a hundred people – and considering I had a few breakups last year, that number’s still ticking upwards.
I suspect what I’m often selling is a lot like diet advice: we call out the triumphs of “THIS PERSON LOST 200 POUNDS AND KEPT IT OFF FOR LIFE!” and quietly ignore the ugly fact that most diets don’t work because changing dietary and exercise habits for life is like kicking an addiction, which also has depressingly low success rates we don’t want to hear about. Most diets fail – they work well for a while, but then we slip back up on the scale and try to murmur about what happened.
But the diets that do work?
God, everyone wants to hear about that.
Just like everyone wants to hear about how Gini and I managed to transition from “busted communication” to “happy marriage.”
And I do tell people: “Date more. Find people you’re naturally compatible with. Don’t try to change a water Pokemon into a fire Pokemon.” And those essays do okay, but they’re never as widely-shared as the ones where I tell you how to turn your snarling Beast into a handsome, library-stocked Prince.
I wonder whether that’s because for them, dating is something so pernicious that they’d rather stick with a marginally-successful relationship than go back out on the market. I wonder whether that six to eight is because most people have a hard time connecting with one another. I wonder how many folks would be happier if they dated wider, treating potential partners as something they didn’t have to work so hard to cling to because heck, there’s plenty of fish out there. You don’t have to turn a flounder into a salmon, you can go catch yourself a goddamned salmon.
But I don’t know. I dispense advice, but on some level I live in a different world than the people I’m giving advice to. And I hope it’s helpful.
Still, most of the folks I’m talking to are that six-to-eight range. Or they’re slightly sluttier, and in the eight-to-twelve range.
Regardless, to me, that’s a terrifyingly low number of people to pick your soulmate from.
I might date a little more, if I were you.