C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

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05/20/2010 • 4:17 PM 2

WRITER’S BLOCK. EXPLODED.

Augusten Burroughs advises that when you’re stuck, write about the block itself and you’ll uncork. Or…

Maybe you need to take a break and recharge.

Maybe you need to go out drinking and start a fight and wake up on the floor of a bathroom covered in piss and puke and blood. It was good enough for Henry Miller.

Maybe you need to reevaluate if writing is really for you and if you gave it up, maybe you could, finally, be really happy.

Maybe you need to move to the desert for forty days and forty nights. Go naked but take extra socks and some weed. For more material, get there walking, from your front doorstep. At noon.

Maybe you need to walk down the road, Bill Bixby/Incredible Hulk-style with nothing but a backpack and dangerous gamma ray poisoning.

Maybe you should write something else. Anything. But not fan fiction. You toad.

Maybe you should write something short to build your confidence.

Shorter than that.

Maybe you need to stop being such a perfectionist. I mean, with your level of skill, perfect isn’t really achievable is it?

Maybe you need to channel an ancient God since the more current ones are so silent as you writhe in pain.

Maybe you should learn how to spell first. Or become a grammar fetishist so real working writers can come to your house at two in the morning and bludgeon you with ice axes. Then you shall be free. Dead. Whatever.

Maybe you should write like you don’t care who reads it. (Like I’m writing now. Just as an example.)

Maybe you should take a chance for once in your miserable life. You might finally write something fresh and unexpected.

Maybe you should write love poetry on bathroom stalls and make new friends in those stalls. Standing up and not getting caught add an exciting degree of difficulty and urgency to bad sex.

Maybe you should realize The New Yorker does not and will not give a shit about you until you don’t need them anymore. They publish people by soliciting their agents. Stop crying, strap on a pair and grow up.

Maybe you should realize you are not Stephen King. Sadly, you might be the next Dean Koontz, however.

Maybe you should get over yourself, College! Stop bagging on what’s popular. Your stuff is sensitive Oulipo MFA surreal writing exercise bullshit. Sure, your incestuous bunch of toadies loved it, but it’s only a writing exercise that’s so “inside” that, as for reading, it’s more than an exercise. It’s exhausting.

If you’re non-MFA –just one of the regular kinds–maybe you should go look up Oulipo. It’s fun, but please don’t send it anywhere. Please!

Maybe you should take up painting. When it sucks, call it abstract. Even if it’s good, call your representational art “ironic” to stave off batshit critics.

Maybe you should get an agent. Just stop saying you should get one.

Maybe you should garrote the agent you have.

Maybe you should give up for the good of society. At least give up on the great American novel and write something they’ll read. (Porn. Affidavits. Moronic websites about testicular torsion–for medical purposes or for fun and profit.)

Maybe you should get outside. You’re pasty and have forgotten the smell of roses.

Maybe you should stop breaking your parents’ hearts and get a real job.

Maybe if you worked on an oil rig you’d have something to write about.

Maybe if you had a brain in your head or were eight years older you’d have something to say.

Maybe if you were ten years younger–and prettier–you’d have a shot instead of a shit.

Maybe you should care less and write more. Maybe you should care about Swine Flu pandemics and write far less.

Maybe you should make a schedule and finally stick to it you whiny wannabe.

Maybe you should shoot up. A vein. A mall. Whatever. (You’d be much more marketable either way.)

Maybe you need to get the pipes cleared. Go have sex with somebody who you find vaguely detestable and then write about that. (Best if they’re a celebrity or a homeless person. In between? Less marketable.)

Maybe you should start a blog. Or a magazine. Or sleep with someone who does and then blackmail them so you can appear on same for far less money than you’d charge if you were a self-respecting whore.

Maybe you should have a baby and then complain it ruined your life and killed your ambition. Everybody will feel better when you’re on your deathbed. Next week.

Maybe you should have a baby and then live through them so they can do all the hard work of becoming a bestselling author someday and you’ll have a small smarmy piece of that, won’t you?

Maybe you should start a publishing house and give ’em what for.

Maybe you should look at your writing again, fall out of love with it and ask yourself honestly, what for?

Maybe you should procrastinate some more.

Maybe you should look again at character. There’s lots of action happening, but it’s clear you care about the characters about as much as you care about what happens to Mario on your Nintendo game.

Maybe you should get a plot. I’ve seen glaciers jump around with more frenetic energy.

Maybe you should read more of your genre. Don’t get me wrong! Steamships in different dimensions could sell…if you were much more talented.

Maybe you should call your mother and tell her how hard it is. If she’s a good mom who cares, she’ll tell you to shut the fuck up and get back to work cuz Mama’s ciggies don’t buy themselves. (On the other hand, a bad Mama will be so sympathetic, leaving you feeling better about yourself, simple and even more pathetic.)

Maybe you should call your Dad and tell him how hard writing really is. He can tell you (again!) how his leg was shot off in the war and today he was up on some prick’s roof, tarring it while the sun beat him senseless, getting skin cancer for minimum wage. You’re at Starbucks plotting out a really tough short story and he’s enjoying his golden years in so-called retirement plotting to kill your mom for the insurance money because she won’t shut the fuck up about what a genius you are despite the fact you dropped out of college and didn’t tell them for two years while you found yourself. (By the way, your great realization in the end? You’re half a smart as you thought you were, you’re a coward and weed sure helps you get really deep in the creative process. If only you could write it down. Also, you’re short.)

Maybe you should hang out with a friend. He’ll have lots of good ideas about the hilarious antics and paperwork snafus down at the Quantity Surveying Office that would make a great book. Sure.

Maybe you should compare yourself to JK Rowling again, except you still don’t even have a book to send out to be rejected. You are a single mom, so you have that in common…actually, any similarities pretty much stop right there. Yes, you both breath in oxygen, but she’s produced an industry worth billions and you’re still sitting there stupefied reading this shit and producing carbon dioxide.

Maybe you should feel sorry for yourself some more. That’s been very helpful so far.

Maybe you should join a writing group so you can get shredded by losers who aren’t published either.

Maybe you should trust the instincts of your acquaintance in publishing who’s very clear she hates everything and won’t tell you what on earth she might ever approve of. (And if she goes on for five more minutes about how you’ve captured “a sense of place” pull out your nickel-plated .38 with rubber-handled grips and the mercury-pointed bullets. Shoot her first, then you. Five bullets for her, one for you.)

Maybe you should reread something you wrote. Anything! Please! Do not put it in the envelope without doing this several times. Please! Please!

Maybe you should cut the five-page preamble and open the chapter in the middle of the action.

Maybe you should finish a chapter with a cliffhanger instead of boring us with your bullshit about “cheap tricks” and–God help us–your “integrity.”

Maybe you should whore yourself out to the greeting card industry. You’d have a better shot and, given the length, you could get a feeling of accomplishment every day! Imagine! (Agh, get over yourself. We’re all whores to somebody.)

Maybe you were meant to be a shoe salesperson. Admit to yourself that you’re really 90% foot fetishist and only 10% writer, not the other way around.

Maybe you should succumb to the lure of a regular paycheck. Your next high school reunion will come up fast. Saying you’re a writer is cool. Praying for an asteroid strike when your asshole high school buddy (who became a plastic surgeon) asks what you’ve published is distinctly uncool. Worse, he knows you haven’t published a thing and still live with your parents. Meanwhile he’s spending his days elbow-deep in tits, crotch-deep in sexy nurses and knee-deep in cash. You’ll be taking the bus home. He’ll be flying first class. “Poor Margaret/Josh/whatever. He/She is such a dreamer but never got it together. More tequila to lick off my nipples? Birgit? Heidi? Russel?”

Maybe you should finally get it that being a dreamer is great. In fact, before you’re expected to pay taxes, it’s fantastic.

Maybe you should stop thinking this list is too harsh. You’re too old for summer camp, too. Get serious and write your goddamn opus or stop pretending to try.

Maybe you should cut the last hundred pages. You know, the denouement. That part after all the action ends and the reader starts wishing you had left him wanting more.

Maybe you should become an editor. You’re already a frustrated writer so you’re halfway there.

Maybe you should forget about college and go to a library. Unless you want to major in being a conversationalist. That’s what a liberal arts degree and that expensive tuition is for, you know. After graduation you won’t be building bridges into publishing with your pissant thesis in Elizabethan poetry. You could build lattes, though.

Maybe you should go to a studio and get your author photos done now. You’re getting older and uglier and fatter by the week. If lightning strikes, you do want to be ready.

Maybe you should use that inheritance to splurge on a real author website. Your meteoric prose that could change the face of literature is useless since you don’t already have a platform. (Your child’s burst appendix can probably wait. Tell your adorable six-year-old to suck it up and walk it off. Daddy has to pay a web designer, not another doctor for every little boo-boo.)

Maybe you should do us all a favor and quit.

Maybe you need to begin again.

Maybe I should stop before I kill again.

You should definitely pick up a tangent from the above list of maybes, pick up a pen, and explode your writer’s block.

Oh, and gentle reader, leave a comment, please. I’d like your vote on your favorite of the Maybes…

Filed under: Rant, rules of writing, Writers, Writing exercise, rant, writer's block, writing exercise

05/19/2010 • 12:29 AM 0

The “I Want to Watch You Suffer” Rant

Sure, I don’t like you. In fact, sometimes I hate your guts. Sometimes I want to stab you in the eye with a Number 2 pencil and then slit you open with an Exacto knife, take a blow torch to your pancreas and, while you’re thinking about that, slowly strangle you with loops of your own intestines. Look up the word decerebrate. That’s what’s next. (Yes, I’m talking about your characters.)

The many reasons I despise you make you more interesting, so I’ll be glad to read about you or watch you on-screen. Gee whiz, I sure hope I get to watch you suffer! As somebody pithy said, “TV allows you to have people in your livingroom you’d never want in your livingroom.” Writers are often told that it’s important your protagonist is a likeable character. Ahem. Fiction is full of people, heroes and anti-heroes, who have traits that are unappealing. I want to read about people dealing with complications who are full of doubt–just like me. Their flaws make them believable. I prefer psychotic Batman to the perfect, impervious boy scout that is Superman. Superman’s too hard to kill. Shoot Batman in the face and he’s dead. (Why don’t they just shoot him in the face? He’s more vulnerable so he’s more interesting.)

I haven’t seen a better illustration of this than the anti-hero bound for quasi-redemption in District 9. Here’s a guy who is a nerdy bureaucrat who gleefully kills little alien babies. <SPOILER ALERT> You don’t actually make it all the way to liking him, but amid the action you begin to feel sorry for him as he literally becomes his victim.

But what do I know? All through Star Wars I was cheering for Darth Vader to cut that simpering Jedi school dropout Luke Skywalker into light saber-diced cheese. Or is it really Mark Hamill I loathe?

BONUS:

Is your book a happy story? Those tend to suck.

Filed under: publishing, Rant, rules of writing, characters, plots, writing

05/17/2010 • 11:43 PM 0

Research before you query an agent

I ran across an agent’s site proclaiming what they wanted and what they didn’t. They emphatically did not want any more novels about middle-aged white man angst.* Really? Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like all those declarations that the world can’t possibly stand one more book on vampires (declared variously in 1975, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009)?

No more male midlife crisis novels, huh? Goodbye to the next Updike! Hey, Roth! Apparently, you SUCK!

Uh-huh.

I know. The response would be that it’s not Updike or Roth writing this flood of manuscripts that they want to damn and dam up.

My answer? Updike and Roth weren’t always Updike and Roth. Once upon a time, they languished in slush piles, too.

At least when you do your research you can figure out which agents have silly prejudices and avoid them.

*No, you guessed wrong. My novel is about a sixteen-year-old (with angst.)

Filed under: agents, publishing, Rant, agents, publishing, queries

05/10/2010 • 9:46 PM 0

I love Fight Club. Read the book. See the movie.

Filed under: Rant, fight club rant

05/09/2010 • 11:35 PM 0

Two Twists (a favorite rant from awhile back)

The first time I read the piece in 2002, I wept.

Published soon after 9/11, the writer used simple language but conveyed his message so thoughtfully and eloquently. There were images of the twin towers turned to dust. There were images of firefighters climbing stairs. Victims fled and helped each other. Aircraft passengers fought back heroically against their captors. But it was the foresight and the language that captivated. The piece captures the horror of September 11 and the new resolve awakened in its aftermath. It was tragic and heroic and defiant and brave but romanticized nothing. Heroes were made that day and they came in many creeds and colors. His writing makes you want to reach. His message explored the soul’s wound with a surgeon’s even hand.

The writer acknowledged that on 9/11 Americans were awakened from self-involvement in American foreign policy. To the terrorists, he wrote “Point taken. Wait for your reply in thunder.” The piece made the point–long before history bore out horribly–that though prosecution would be relentless, caution should be more prized than vengeance. Husks of American constitutional ideals should not be sacrificed on the path to justice.

The writer, uncanny and prophetic, reminded us that in war “the most harmed are the least deserving.” The writer condemned any backlash of racism. He made us feel his repugnance at dangerous religious fundamentalism, either spoken from the mouths of terrorists calling for “death to America” or when uttered by Jerry Falwell, who said God “lifted His veil of protection” because America deserved it for allowing gays and the ACLU. As if God only made Americans and not humans.

The writer captured the grief imposed by terrorists and found inspiration from ordinary heroes. This writer saw the future. He warned us against excesses, terrible and inexorable. I am in awe of his foresight.

Twist #1: The writer is J. Michael Straczynski. You’ll find it in Amazing Spider-Man #36. Yes. It was a comic book. If you were so inclined, you’ll never look down on the form again after reading it.

Twist #2: All the elements are there in full color. Now, with history behind us, I’m bitter. Straczynski saw the future. He laid it out. He warned us what could happen if we pursued vengeance instead of justice. The angels of our better natures continue to weep at the loss of lives and of moral authority. We were supposed to better than torture. They said it wasn’t about greed or colonialism and we believed. We were once the righteous ones.

We needed that kind of ability to inspire for defensive action. We needed that caliber of foresight and wisdom and restraint. We needed a comic book writer in the Whitehouse. Instead, we got a comic book reader who had learned none of the best lessons the form can impart.

The first time I read it, I wept. Last night, it made me angry.