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The Skeleton Key of The Zombie Apocalypse

The Skeleton Key of The Zombie Apocalypse

The Zombie meme has so penetrated our culture that that you can walk up to a perfect stranger and have a conversation about the Zombie Apocalypse as easily as a traveling salesman of the 1950’s could have talked about baseball.

We’ve passed some kind of strange, pop-culture milestone beyond which post-apocalyptic small talk has become acceptable. I think the war is over, and we geeks have won.

So I find it odd that there’s one answer to the In-The-Event-of-A-Zombie-Apocalypse questions that I have never encountered in fiction, film or casual conversation.

Mattock, double-barrel shotgun, flamethrower, armored personnel carrier, private island – these are all good things to have at the end of the world. But the first thing I’d reach for? The most useful thing I can think of? The seed from which the flower of a new civilization can blossom and grow amid the ashes of the old?

Bolt Cutters.

In the event of the Apocalypse, the first thing I’m grabbling is a pair of bolt cutters. With a pair of bolt cutters and a little persistence, you can get anything else you want or need. Here are some routine Post-Apocalyptic tasks at which bolt cutters excel.

  1. Cutting through fences.
  2. Cutting through padlocks.
  3. Bashing in windows.
  4. Bashing in skulls.
  5. Extracting information one finger at a time.

Sure, a tank is heavily armored, but the box in which the tank keys are kept is probably just padlocked. Sure, that box may be in a very big safe, but the hardware store where they keep the dynamite isn’t.

So why haven’t we seen or read more about bolt cutters? They are a supremely useful implement. One deserving of heroic names and songs of praise. I’m tempted  to prove this by writing a story how a boy and his pair of bolt cutters avert the end of days. And not magical bolt cutters, either, just ordinary bolt cutters, ’cause they’re magic enough all on their own.

The world will probably end before I write that story. If it does, remember: showing up to the end of the world without a pair of bolt cutters is a rookie move. I’ve got mine. Do you have yours?

StoryMap – Game of Thrones

StoryMap – Game of Thrones

This thing is a beast of a book. Really quite amazing. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of these, but I can’t say they are my favorite novels ever. Without question they are unlike anything else I’ve ever read. You can argue that War and Peace has a greater sweep in a single book, but since this story is five books already and is projected to go to for two more, it is easily among the longest, most complicated works of fiction ever written. The man’s endurance is incredible. To say nothing of his imagination.

I have no interest in making a companion guide, or plotting out the whole series in bullet points. But what I am interested is in his technique. How he achieves and sustains such long books. And generates such interest. Great characters are a kind of magic. But structure isn’t. So here, hopefully made easier to see, is some of the structure of the first book in the series, Game of Thrones.

There is also a breakdown of POV characters by series character in the Wikipedia Entry. I’ve also made a PDF version of the Game of Thrones Storymap in case you want better resolution for reading the fine print.

Announcing good words (right order)

As some of you know, in 2005 I started helping professionals with their writing. This work involves coaching individuals, designing instructional materials and teaching classes. I work primarily with VBHs (Very Busy Humans) at innovative companies. [1] In terms of corporate classification, this activity generally falls under Talent Development, Leadership Development, and/or Human Resources.

I’m happy to say that this really kicked into high gear in July of last year. I’ve added more coaches and have launched [2] a dedicated good words (right order) website.. The website is now ready for prime time (they aren’t bugs, they’re features!) so please check it out.

In keeping with my beliefs about how the world and the web works, I’m giving away everything I know. Most of what I’ve learned as a professional, rent-paying writer, I learned the hard way. Why not go to school on my mistakes?

My approach does not focus on grammar. While grammar is an excellent tool for studying language, it’s not well suited to teaching the task of writing. Writing is something that people do, so focusing on human performance (rather than linguistic mechanics) makes more sense to me. Thankfully, it also get better results.

At its most basic, the work I do helps people make the writing process easier and the writing product more powerful.

  1. Or in innovative parts of regular companies.  ↩
  2. Technically it’s a relaunch. The only way you would know this is if you have been with me for a while, or you just like reading footnotes.  ↩

A Story Map of The Hobbit

A Story Map of The Hobbit

 Story Map of the Hobbit

I’m going a little infographic crazy this weekend, but I think I’m on to something. It’s really hard to pay attention to the structure of a story while you are reading it. Especially if the story is any good. The whole point is for the reader to be seduced into the flow of the narrative. At any moment, if the reader is thinking “What nice way to handle that exposition” the illusion is shattered and the work falls flat.

HOWEVER, if you are trying to learn how stories are made, that’s exactly the kind of thing you have to pay attention to. The most important and least obvious choices are about pacing and timing — Where a story starts, how it jumps around with point-of-view and flashbacks, what the story includes and what it leaves out.  I know of no good source for this kind of information, so I’m making one.

I’m not much of a designer, but I’m trying to find a form with which to map stories. I’m sure that each one will have to be a little  different (stories can differ wildly in structure) as you can see from looking at my first attempt with Richard Stark’s The Hunter.

Visualizing the Hidden Structure of Stories — The Hunter

Visualizing the Hidden Structure of Stories — The Hunter

So I have just fallen in love with Darwyn Cooke’s graphic adaptations of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s Parker novels. If you are unfamiliar with any of those names, you will love every moment you spend finding out about them. I promise. Genius all the way ’round.

I found this great interview with Darwyn Cooke about adapting the stories. In it he talks about visualizing the story. This is particularly interesting to me because not only is he a brilliant illustrator, but he’s a great graphic designer. So he compresses a lot of the story into the awesome and stylish informational graphics. You don’t need to list everywhere a character drove and everything he did, when you can draw an annotated map.

Annnnway, in the interview he remarked about the discipline with which Westlake structured his stories. He switches perspective or jumps time every 7 chapters or so. And evidently he did it in ALL of his books. I had to go check it out for myself. So I mapped out the first Parker Novel, the Hunter, Like this:

It’s 64,000 words and it has 4 parts. The average chapter length is about 2,000 words and a graph of the chapter lengths is in the upper right hand corner. I’ve also indicated the major action that each of the parts is devoted to.

This kind of stuff is fascinating to me. I believe that the discipline of a form is one of the things that can help a creator make something great. All hour-long episodes of television, no matter what the content of the show, are all structured basically the same way. (either four or five acts, depending on how you slice it.) Think of it like this Tease (Act I) – Commercial – Act I – Commercial – Act III – Commercial – Act IV – Commercial – Close (Act V).

I can’t imagine what a similar diagram of Game of Thrones might look like, but if I ever write any epic fantasy, I’ll probably make one. XKCD made this interesting chart of movie narratives  but it’s pretty useless for my purposes. Where the characters were isn’t quite as important as how the story is parsed out. That’s what makes the plot-magic go.

Anybody else out there have a way  to visualize the structure of a story?

The Five-Minute Writing Pep Talk



This is my pep talk. This is my half-time speech. I know the truth of this deep in my bones and so do you.

Everything happens 5 minutes at a time.

In fact, most important things happen in even smaller intervals. Disagree? Go out and time a few marriage proposals, car accidents or heart attacks.

Big change is a myth.

The idea that you have to devote your whole life to do something great (or 10,000 hours) is a lie. If you look closely at big changes you can see that they are good PR (or whopping lies) around a collection of very small changes. You know what a mountain is? It’s a bunch of spoonfuls of dirt.

We focus on the mountains because they are big and sexy. But we don’t think much about the spoonfuls: those little packages of time in which the real work gets done.

Like training for a marathon. You know what the hardest part is? The marathon? Hell no. That’s easy. You’re amped up. People are cheering you on. And, if you’re not a complete idiot, you’re well-prepared. But the preparation? You know what’s hard? Early morning training runs. Especially when you’re cold and lonely and you just want to stay in bed.

In fact, it’s the five minutes it takes you get out of bed and pull your shoes on. That’s the five minutes that count. That’s the five minutes in which heroes are made.

For writing, the first five minutes when you sit down to write is what counts.

Those minutes when you clear everything else out of your head and soak in the suck. These are the five minutes of the blank page, the blinking cursor, of feeling hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. It’s the five focused, uninterrupted minutes it takes for your brain to catch up with your intention. What separates the writers who finish from the writers who don’t? You got it. Five uncomfortable minutes.

If you can take feeling like a hack for five minutes, then the words and the ideas will come. Sure, the next time you sit down to write you might think they suck. And they may suck. But the only way to get to the words that don’t suck is by going through the first five minutes again and again.

That feeling like there’s no hope? That’s there’s nothing you can do to make your pile of words better? Everybody has that feeling. And it’s only strong for five minutes.

The first five minutes always suck

Tolstoy wrote War and Peace five minutes at a time. J.K. Rowling wrote all those gigantic Harry Potter books five minutes at a time. And the first five minutes always suck. As the man said, “Writing isn’t hard, it’s the sitting down to write that kills ya.”

Normal people, civilians, the kind of people who stay in bed and away from keyboards, they cheer for the end, the last five minutes, the victory. Sure, victory is nice. But me? I cheer for the first five minutes. Because those are the minutes that count. The five minutes in which the game of writing is won and lost. The five minutes that always suck.

Sure, writing is a complicated skill. But all of the choices you can make and the skills you can employ bottleneck at the first five minutes. It’s just this simple: if you make it through the first five minutes you’re a writer. If you don’t, try again.

I’m a Dad.

I’m a Dad.

The most ordinary thing in the world. The most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me. I’m a Dad.

All my words are seem inadequate to this moment. Sure, I’ll write about it. (In fact, the KidPocalypse may be live blogged) But not just yet. I want to let this sink in for a little while.

More pictures here.

 

 

Why Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man” is remarkable.

I’ve been thinking about detectives stories a lot lately. In fact, I’m working on an idea for a series. So I’ve been revisiting the stories and novels from the genre that have had a great impact on me. As a writer, I think the genre is inescapable. And I think fluency with it makes one a better writer no matter what genre you work in. Take Asimov’s The Caves of Steel. It’s a brilliant detective story and it’s brilliant sci fi.

For me, what a mystery gives you is a number of ways to pull a reader through a book. And that’s an important thing to be able to do for all genres except crappy, postmodern literary fiction. And, as you might have guessed from that last sentence, that is not a genre I careto work in.

Here’s the review I posted on goodreads. I’ll add one more thing to it here. The other major influence on Edwin Windsor is Salvador Hardin from Asimov’s Foundation series. He’s kind of a blip in the whole thing, but I’ve never forgotten him. Especially his magnificent quote, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” If I was a great writer, I would have stolen the quote, word-for-word and put it in Edwin’s mouth. As it is, I’m just a good writer, and still have some sense of shame.

The Thin ManThe Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a lasting love of this book for several reasons. The relationship between Nick and Nora is wonderful, yes, the dialog sings, but there is a real relationship there. This is a guy solving a murder with his wife. Hammett has unlimited tough-guy noir cred (try his Red Harvest) but this is one of the only books that I know of that manages captures a relationship in this way. (and if you know of some more, please message me.)

The second thing I love about this book is how Nick operates as a social animal. There’s remarkably little violence. Nick handles himself with poise. He’s a tough guy, sure, but he’s doesn’t have to prove it. And most of the interactions he has, he gets the edge because he’s friendly, or respected or known. This is the detective as social animal. As opposes to the solitary, duty-bound detective of much (if not all) of Hammett’s other work, Nick is part of a fabric of larger society and is more effective as a detective because he is.

For those two reasons, I cite this book as something remarkable in all of detective fiction. And maybe all of literature. Seriously, how many stories do you know where husband and wife have a good and entertaining relationship.

For full disclosure, I have to say, that Nick Charles was one of the inspirations for one of my own protagonists. Edwin Windsor, from How to Succeed in Evil. He not a detective at all, nor is married, but he solves problems by being smart, rather than being strong or violent.

If you haven’t, read this book.

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