Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

The World’s Worst Story Opening (And How To Do It So It Works)

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wpid-1332031954368.jpgBack in May, Chuck Wendig did this post about breaking rules. I like Chuck. He’s a smart guy. Knows his shit when he talks about writing, too, which is why we flew him out as a guest for last year’s GenreCon. But I’ve gotta admit, when he put up his post saying, well, fuck the rules, and included the following list of rules worth fucking, it kinda made my testicles crawl into my body and seek refuge from the terror he’d unleashed upon the world:

Don’t open on weather.

Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror.

Don’t open on a character just waking up.

(Wendig, IN FICTION, NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED)

Oh, Jesus, I thought. Why in hell would you tell people that? Don’t you realise what you’re unleashing on the world? Those poor fucking editors. Hell, those poor writers. DAMMIT, WENDIG, WHY ARE YOU USING YOUR POWERS FOR EVIL?

Then I got distracted. ‘Cause deadline’s wait for no fucking man and I had a copy of Frost to turn in that wasn’t yet finished. But that last one on Chuck’s list, it stuck in my head. Don’t open on a character just waking up. It irritated me, ’cause I’ve got a real pet peeve associated with that particular piece of writing advice. It is, without a doubt, the worst possible way I can think of to open a story.

So bad, in fact, that I tend to wax lyrical on the subject when you give me an audience of writers.

RULEBREAKING 101: KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Here’s the thing: I’m generally all for breaking rules. I like breaking rules. There are no words that fire me up like you can’t do X in fiction. If you tell me I can’t write a story about unicorns and fourteen year old girls that a jaded, bitter horror writer will actually like, I’ll wonder off and write shit like Horn just to prove you wrong.

The way I look at it, there is no point in writing fiction if you’re not saying FUCK YOU to someone, somewhere.

But when it comes to writing rules, I’m a firm believer in knowing your enemy. It’s worth taking the time to understand the difference between rules that are designed to make your life easier when you’re starting out and know nothing, and rules that are just plain crazy and deserve to be broken. Both types are worth breaking, but the first are worth breaking in interesting, innovative ways. ‘Cause the prohibitions you’re given that make your life easier are generally designed to keep you away from well-trod cliches and things editors hate, even if it isn’t immediately apparent why they hate said things.

Rarely do people sit down and bother to explains the reason behind such things – they just drop some knowledge and bail on the conversation, trusting that you’ll pay attention. ‘Cause me and I woke up have such a special relationship, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to share my pain so you understand what you’re up against. Ready? Here it is:

THE “I WOKE UP” BEGINNING IS LOW-HANGING FRUIT

Actually, I take that back. It’s not the low-hanging fruit. It’s the rotten fruit. The stuff that’s fallen off the tree and been left to ferment in the grass below. It’s easy to gather, sure, but it’s not particularly tasty. One of the best things you can do as a writer is surprise your readers. Kicking off with the same beginning every other schlub falls back on isn’t going to surprise everyone.

The popularity of the I woke up opening is easy to understand once you think through the psychology of the situation: You’re a writer. You’re sitting in front of a blank page. You need to start telling a story and filling said blank page with words. Starting a story is actually pretty hard: You need a character; you need to introduce some conflict; you have to know the setting. Most importantly, you’ve got to understand how all three of these things fit together. And right now, in that gut-clenching moment of terror where it’s just you and the blank page, you have nothing.

So you reach for the four words that will buy you time: I woke up and…

It’s like a fucking magic trick. The moment you use those four words, you have routines to describe. You have a sense of direction. Your character gets up. They go about their morning. They have breakfast, shower, get the hell out of the house. You get to know your protagonist. Figure out what’s going on. The setting is easy. Familiar. Even if it’s not your house and your morning routine you’re describing, the familiarity is there.

What’s happened on a creative level is pretty simple: You needed a beginning, so you went for the beginning that every single one of us experiences, day after day. Then you started filling time until you know your character and setting well enough to introduce some conflict. ‘Cause conflict happens. It’s an everyday thing. We get to work and our boss asks us to do something we don’t want to do. We miss our train on the same morning we have a presentation due. We get into an argument with our flatmate over breakfast. Shit happens. If you stick with someone long enough, tracking the minutia of their day, you’ll uncover something that will actually be story-like.

Or, to put it another way: All the hard bits about telling a story are momentarily deferred, but you’re getting words on the page and it feels like you’re making progress ’cause you know the conflict is coming.

Why is this bad? Well, two reasons. The first is simple: you’re not actually telling a story yet. Nothing in the opening you’ve written is related to the conflict, which means your character is in motion, but they’re not in action yet. Actions have purpose. Motions…motions are just movement. They have no real purpose within the context of the story. They aren’t meaningful, and your reader trusts you to point out things that have meaning when you’re reading a work of fiction.

The second reason? Well.

LET ME TELL YOU A FUCKING STORY

Years ago, before I was a writer, I taught creative writing classes to first-year students at Uni. Lecture halls filled with hundreds of students, all packed in to learn the basics of writing essays, fiction, and poetry.

For the most part, I dug this job. The students were usually pretty interesting, the content was in line with what I wanted to do with my life, and the money…well, let’s just say working as a sessional tutor at a university can be a pretty sweet gig in terms of the compensation.

On the other hand, there was the marking. Two hundred short stories that appeared in your letter box one morning. Two weeks to get them all read, marked and commented on. Six weeks later, another two hundred stories would appear. Ask any university lecturer what they hate about their job, and marking will be top of the list.

And marking creative writing story assignments is the worst. Worse than marking essay assignments. Worse than marking poetry, which almost no-one did the readings for or bothered to understand, thus resulted in assignment after assignment of rhyming doggerel.

For eight years, “short story assignment” was a synonym for “dread” in my books and a big part of the reason is the stories that began with I woke up. In a pile of 200 student short-stories, I was pretty much virtually guaranteed that about 35% would start with some variation of a character waking up and getting on with their day.

This made it the most common short-story opening I read by a large margin. I know. I kept stats. The only trope that wore out its welcome faster than the dreaded I woke up and beginnings were the stories that revolved about suicide.

There is no way to read that many stories featuring the same beginning without coming to hate it a little. Actually, given the word count I’m devoting to this topic, lets say I came to hate it a lot. The kind of hate that leads to phrases like “punk, I will cut you” being hissed between clenched teeth.

Now keep in mind that I only saw a comparatively small percentage of submissions compared to your average short story or novel editor, who have likely seen this opening thousands upon thousands of times. They don’t publish these stories, which is probably why people don’t realise how prevalent the sickness is, but they’re coming in, day after day, making the slush reader’s life a misery.

SIDE NOTE: ADDING “AND DIDN’T KNOW WHERE I WAS” IS DOUBLING DOWN ON YOUR LAZY VILLAINY

I may hate the I woke up opening with a passion, but it’s got nothing on its close cousin, I woke up and didn’t know who/where I was. 

Rather than buying time to figure out the story, writers who bust out the mysterious location are doubling-down on an over-used opening and trying to make it the core conflict that drives the plot. On the surface, this actually seems kind of genius. Suddenly all that time you spend exploring routines and describing surroundings is germane to the story you’re trying to tell. It’s not filling time, it’s getting on with things, and—

Nope. Sorry. It’s still just another tired, dull beginning and we’ve all been there before. If I had a laser for every I woke up and didn’t know who/where I was story I’ve seen in draft form, I could equip my million-strong army of cybernetic death monkeys and take over the goddamn world already.

Please, please, don’t do this. If you do it, I will hunt you down and disembowel you with a rusty spoon.

THE GOOD NEWS: I PROMISE YOU, THE WAKE-UP SCENE ISN’T NECESSARY

“But wait,” you cry, “I’ve got this brilliant story I want to write, and it needs to start with exactly this scene. A character needs to wake up. It’s mandatory to the plot. The whole thing falls apart without that opening. It absolutely, positively needs to start with someone opening their eyes at the beginning of the day. You see, she’s a spy…or a vampire…or…”

Peeps, I’m sorry, I’m going to call bullshit on this one. I’ve done my time in the trenches. I taught first-year creative writing for eight years, which means I’ve seen stories open with someone waking up approximately 560+ times. I’ve seen all the variations. Watched people take the challenge and try to redeem this particular opening after I gave them a warning not-unlike this blog post.

Not once did it lead to a story where it was actually necessary. Hell, there were very few instances where that start actually led to a story that was in the top half of the work produced that semester. In almost every I woke up and story I’ve read, there was a lag between the beginning and the point where the story actually started. Things would often be improved by the elimination of an opening paragraph (or five) and getting on with things once the story got interesting.

THE CINEMATIC CAVEAT

If you’ve made it this far into this post, you’ve probably started thinking of all kinds of counter-examples that prove me wrong. I’m good with that. Like all rules, this one exists to be broken, so long as it’s broken in an interesting way.

One thing that I will note – and this is an important one – is that I used to have discussions about this opening with classes all the time, and the counter-examples that were normally brought up were from film or TV narratives where (Warning: TV Tropes link) YOU WAKE UP IN A ROOM is common enough to get its own entry in TV Tropes. And, honestly, I’m all about this trope in film. Dark City? Brilliant. The opening minutes of 28 Days Later? The only good bit of the movie. Momento? Well, lets be honest, I could never bring myself to watch the movie, despite renting it from the video store at least a dozen times, but I’m sure I’d enjoy it before Christopher Nolan got his Christopher Nolan on and started doing all those things that make me hate his films.

But there’s a reason film/TV writers get away with this opening and prose writers don’t: film and television is a visually-rich medium. You can show a character waking up in an unfamiliar bed and every single detail of their surroundings is immediately apparent in that same shot. Film is simulatory. A character is placed within a context the moment they appear on screen, because we can see every element of their surroundings. We can immediately interpret their actions based on that context, which makes setting up the I woke up and didn’t know… beginning a little easier to swallow.

Prose is suggestive. Nothing exists within the context of your story until you suggest that it’s there, either overtly or discretely. Your character exists in a landscape that you build up, detail by detail, until it exists within the reader’s mind. You’re constantly managing the reader’s attention, trying to point them towards a character trait, an element of the setting, another character’s action…and it just doesn’t allow you to convey details fast enough to do what a film is doing.

More importantly, in prose, your reader trusts you to direct their attention to the things that are important.You absolutely cannot fucking squander that trust and hope to keep the reader onboard.

MAKING IT WORK: KEEP THE FEELING, SKIP THE CLICHÉ

Despite spending nearly 2,500 words trying to convince you that starting a story this way is a bad idea, people have done it in prose and made it work. Usually the people who stick with the argument this long are those who really love the YOU WAKE UP IN A ROOM beginning and want to explore the common spy/sci-fi trope of a character without a memory trying to figure their identity.

The good news is, it’s not that hard to keep that sort of story running. You just keep the emotion and skip the cliché. The best YOU WAKE UP IN A ROOM story I’ve seen in recent years is Dan O’Malley’s The Rook. You can download the first four chapters off his website, and it’s probably worth looking at if you’re interested in breaking this particular rule. He does it by advancing things a little further along the character’s timeline – we open with his protagonist standing in the rain, reading a letter written by her forgotten, former self, with no idea where she is or what kind of trouble is coming.

This gives us the basics: Character. Context. Conflict. All in one neat bundle.

If you want to rock the mysterious wake-up in prose, the easiest way to do it is skip through the bit where you explore the setting and get on with the big where the story gets interesting. Focus on the emotions and disorientation while hitting the character with things that matter, rather than having them figure out the colour of the walls and the texture of the blanket.

If you really need your character to be in bed – say, if you’re writing a short-story about a man who discovers there’s an alligator lurking beneath his Queen bed, waiting to take off a leg – then skip straight to the stuff that matters.We don’t need to know about the protagonists struggle to wake up or how comfy his blankets are on a winter’s morning; we need to know a) what makes his bed feel safe, and b) what tips him off that the alligator’s lurking below.

I mean, really, which of these sounds more interesting:

I woke up and stretched my arms, the same as I did every morning, then thought about going to the bathroom so I could pee. Then I discovered the alligator underneath my bed, and…

or

I crawled to the far side of the mattress, to the part of the double-bed I never really slept on. This was no man’s land. Had been ever since Cole left. Still no good. Just three feet from the door to the bathroom, but still too far. With the gator hiding between the boxes underneath my bed, I didn’t trust myself to run for it. On the other hand, I didn’t want to pee in the bed either, and there’s nothing quite like the bladder-bursting urgency that comes with the first piss of the morning…

If you do do a wake-up scene, focus on the things that are important to the story. It’ll make a world of difference.

Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

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Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I re-watched Hellboy II: The Golden Army recently. Not, alas, as part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie series, which is on hiatus for the foreseeable future, but simply ‘cause I was in the mood for a certain type of movie and Hellboy II was in my DVD collection, waiting to be watched, and I found it before I found my copy of Blade: Trinity.

One of the nice things about re-watching movies—particularly movies that fit into the flawed-but-interesting category, such as this one—is the way it allows you to look for patterns. What starts out as a disappointing movie experience gradually mutates into a narrative puzzle; you take it apart, look at all the components, and figure out how you’d take an alternate route.

Somewhere at the core of Hellboy II is a brilliant genre film with mass-market appeal, a film that’s both pulpy and smart in equal measure. A film, quite frankly, that does exactly what Victor Shklovsky says all art should do—make us re-examine the familiar in a new light. Like its spiritual sister film, Speed Racer (great visual style, mess of a plot), it’s one of those pieces that’s all potential and no real payoff.

But there are always useful things to be learnt from films and books you don’t like, if only you’re willing to subject yourself to them again and again in order to figure out why, and I’ve chosen to take this bullet in order to give you the seven most important things writers can learn from watching Hellboy II.

ONE: THE MOMENT YOU SAY “IT’S FLAWED, BUT…” THE PROBLEM IS NARRATIVE

Let’s be honest, if a film like Hellboy II goes wrong, it’s almost always a problem based on narrative choices. The film has too much stacked in its favour for it to be anything else. Off the top of my head, the merits of the film include the source material of Mike Mignola, which is full of moody awesomeness; director Guillermo del Toro coming to the project straight off the back of Pan’s Labyrinth, a critical success that’s a masterpiece of visual imagery; Ron Perlman as Hellboy, which is one of those perfect casting choices; Selma Blair being…well, Selma Blair.

With a gun.

And pyrokinetic blue flames coming off her hands.

And just like XKCD teaches us that there’s a market for a film in which Summer Glau plays River Tam kicking the ass of everyone in the universe, I’d be perfectly happy watching an entire film of Selma Blair carrying a gun, being monotonally sexy and spontaneously combusting every couple of scenes.

Then there’s the fact that del Toro snuck a CGI Elder Thing into the background of the Goblin Market scenes (presumably as a warm-up for his now-defunct adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness), which just goes to show exactly how much of a nerdy confluence of joy and moody, shiny visuals this film has going for it.

This movie delivers pretty. It delivers it in spades. It’s like crack for nerds in every respect but the story.

The scriptwriting team has chops—there’s enough smart script-writing keeping it semi-coherent, and semi-coherent is enough when you’ve got other strengths going for you in performance, visuals, etc. It’s the reason I can adore this movie, but loathe visually spectacular films whose scripts are just outright bad (see Avatar, Suckerpunch).

But when you look at the components of the script, it should have been a knock-out punch of a movie. The potential is there, but the narrative choices let it down; stories finish too early, themes get lost, and characters… well, somewhere along the line, things get a little muddy regarding who the main character is.

TWO: THE MORAL CHOICE AT THE CLIMAX NEEDS TO MATTER

This is one of those tenets I picked up teaching the three-act structure in scriptwriting classes, and it’s a remarkable short-cut for figuring out why an ending doesn’t work. First up, identify your protagonist. Second up, ID the thematic moral choice they make. Third, look at the consequences.

It’s easy to miss that moment in a good movie, because they spend the entire film laying the groundwork for that choice, making sure you feel the sense of elation when it’s finally made. Also, it’s usually followed by pyrotechnics and explosions, just to make sure you realise the consequences of the choice, which means it’s easy to mistake the action as the pinnacle of the movie rather than the choice.

It took me a long, long time to figure this out, given that I write a passive breed of protagonist who isn’t big on making choices, but in genre terms, it’s right there in everything. You hit the end of the story and the protagonist makes a decision that chances their life forever and ensures victory: Hellboy rejects his destiny as the prince of darkness and kicks mini-Cthulhu’s ass in the first Hellboy movie; Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and puts his trust in the force at the end of Star Wars; after nine hours of Lord of the Rings films Frodo Baggins finally caves and elects not to throw the powerful Maguffin into the volcano of Mount Doom (upon which the universe fixes that decision for him via Gollum and he’s punished for making the wrong choice by the loss of a finger and the inability to be a normal, farm-loving hobbit ever after).

But when you examine the decisions being made at the end of the Golden Army, it’s basically a series of narratively basic decisions: Hellboy elects not to kill the faerie prince after beating him a fair fight and claiming control of the Golden Army; Princes Nuala elects to kill herself in order to save Hellboy when the defeated Prince tries to stab him from behind; Abe elects to tell Nuala how he feels as she lies dying.

These feel like they should be big decisions, because we’ve seen movies where they’ve been big decisions before and they signal “end of film climax” to the viewers, but within this context they’re weak. Hellboy, for example, loses nothing by playing the hero and not killing the bad guy; Nuala has basically been a cipher for most of the film, existing primarily to exposit and serve as a love interest for Abe; and Abe, well, his loneliness and alienation features in a single scene leading up to this point, so there’s nothing particularly transcendent about his reveal given that he’s a secondary character. In order for a decision to be big, the crux of it needs to be ingrained in the storyline somewhere.

THREE: IF YOU’RE GOING TO BLOW THE CLIMAX, DON’T PACK THE MOVIE WITH BETTER ALTERNATIVES THAT FIT YOUR INITIAL THEME

To be fair, Hellboy II isn’t exactly light on characters making meaningful moral decisions, it’s just that they’ve gotten them all well-and-truly out of the road by the time we hit the end of the movie when the biggest of big decisions needs to be made. Consider how much more impact any of these scenes would have if landed at the end of the movie.

At the MID-POINT, Hellboy kills the last Elemental while carrying a baby in his hand, thus destroying a piece of magic humanity will never get back.

Or JUST BEFORE THE CLIMAX, when Selma Blair and a dying Hellboy confront the angel of destiny, and Selma damns the world and bring a whole lot of pain down on her own head in the future in order to save Hellboy now and have him be a father to their unborn child.

Big decisions, big consequences, and entirely in keeping with the narrative theme of the mortal world versus the supernatural; all of which happens before the climax of the film, which only serves to highlight exactly how weak-ass the decisions being made there truly are.

FOUR: YOU ONLY GET ONE PROTAGONIST

It’s a strange problem to have when you name your film after a character, but there’s an inescapable feeling that this film really shouldn’t have focused on Hellboy as a protagonist.

There are a bunch of handy “rule of thumb” guides that writers can apply to figuring out who the protagonist of a story is: “Who hurts the most?” is a good one (note: in this film, it’s not Hellboy); “Who has the most to lose?” is another (note: also not Hellboy). My personal rule of thumb is this: who has to make the biggest choice at the climax (bonus points if said choice involves a moral conflict rather than or alongside the physical threat)?

The movie starts off with Hellboy as the protagonist, but by any reasonable measure, he’s passed the ball off to Abe by the midpoint. Abe is the isolated man who falls in love, and his isolation trumps Hellboy’s because Abe lives in a tank and Hellboy already has a love life.

This makes Abe the guy who hurts the most, the guy who has the most to lose, and…well, two out of three ain’t bad. And all the choices made at the end of the film are primarily about hurting Abe and his love interest, which rather makes them seem like they should be the folk’s front-and-centre on the movie cover, rather than the big red guy and his gun.

Should the movie not focus on Abe and his pain? No, that’s fine. Abe’s an interesting character and I’ve got no problem with him getting his fair share of screen time. The problem is that the emotional beats of the final moments of the story are all about him, which pushes him into the protagonist role right about the point where I’d like to see Hellboy making big, important decisions about his own internal conflict.

FIVE: ALSO, YOU ONLY GET ONE DOOM 

Here’s another mistake the movie makes that should have been easy to avoid – when Hellboy and Prince Nuada square off at the climax, engaging in a one-on-one slugfest for the fate of the world, Earth’s screwed either way. Either Hellboy loses, and Nuada emerges with the Golden Army to take his vengeance on humanity for wiping out his people, or Hellboy wins…

…and Earth’s still doomed, as we’ve just learned, because the Angel of Death told Liz that’s the price of bringing Hellboy back. She loves him and needs him, but his survival will hurt all of humanity and Liz most of all.

And so the climax of the movie hinges on a lose/lose fight for the bulk of the world.It’s a little thing, but it matters. Even if we’ll nominally be on Hellboy’s side for the rest of the fight, there’s a nagging voice in our subconscious saying, well, yeah, but…

Don’t feed that nagging voice.

You only get one doom.

SIX: THE LESSON – PICK YOUR THEME AND STICK WITH IT

Hellboy II starts with a morality play about power and exceeding boundaries, set-up as a bedtime story for its young protagonist. Pertinent, ‘cause Hellboy’s going to spend the rest of his life being a powerful entity protecting the powerless, in the form of humanity, and he’s going to need to make big decisions about that.

When we move forward, into the future, we get a bunch of other conflicts emerging: teething problems between Hellboy and his girlfriend (rarely explained well, but there are the seeds of an important decision coming because she’s pregnant and that’ll become pertinent in the plot); Hellboy’s growing discomfort with being an invisible hero, unknown by humanity at large, when he feels a stronger kinship with the creatures he hunts; Abe being lonely and in-love with the faerie queen; bad guys who should be heroes ‘cause, yo, they’re trying to stop their entire race from being wiped out.

If these tied into the morality play mentioned at the start, then Hellboy II would have been brilliant. Some come close, some don’t, but they all drop away and, as mentioned above, utterly cease to be relevant by the end of the movie.

The theme by the end of the movie? Tell the girl you love how you feel now, ‘cause you never know when she’ll kill herself to stop her twin brother from destroying humanity.

What I wanted to see? The equivalent of the elemental scene in the middle of the film, but turned up to fucking eleven.

SEVEN: ONE PLOT, THEN SUBPLOTS

Really, all the problems in Hellboy stem from a single problem: it’s all subplots, no through-line. At no point does it commit to a single idea of what the film’s about, and let everything else revolve around that.

I spend a lot of time arguing that there is a good movie in Hellboy II, hidden down beneath the poor structural choices. Move one of the big moral choices to the end of the film and make Hellboy the focus of the climax, and suddenly you’ve got a central plot and everything else can hang around it, creating complications.

Subplots are tricky things: they’ve got components that happen off-camera. You hit their major beats, but skip the quieter bits. Progression is often suggested rather than overtly shown. Characters can find themselves embroiled in more than one – Hellboy versus the Faerie Prince is (or should be) your main plot for Hellboy II, but big red is involved in several sub-plots including his rocky romance with Liz, his clashes with authority over his desire to be seen, and his role as a (admittedly crappy) mentor figure in Abe’s developing romance.

But if you’re smart, you use your subplots to build your main plot, and it doesn’t take long to get them firing on all cylinders. All you’ve got to do is remember which plot serves which. I mean, consider this simple change: Abe realises that Nuala and Nuada are connected and begs Hellboy to find another way to stop Nuada in order to preserve Nuala’s life.

It’s a simple thing, but it utterly changes the scope of the ending. Hellboy choosing not to kill someone ‘cause he’s a hero doesn’t mean much; going into the fight expecting to kill your opponent, but being unable to do it ‘cause of the pain it’ll cause your friend, is one of those bad decisions we love our heroes for making, especially if there’s someone else standing by to rectify things for them.

Weirdly, Hellboy choosing to kill Nuada and taking out Abe’s girlfriend would have been great at an earlier point in the film. If you’re building up a climax where Hellboy chooses humanity over the supernatural, then playing out the consequences of that decision informs his final choice and serves as a useful metaphor for the story as a whole.

THE TAKE-AWAY

For all that I’m critiquing the narrative choices, I dearly love this film. It’s beautifully shot and the actors are brilliant, and even a bad Hellboy film is packed to the gills with pulpy archetypes and characters that I love.

But every time I sit down and re-watch it, I find myself pondering how the structure got so tangled and whethere there was some outside interference (cough producers and test-audiencescough) which pushed the film to re-structure. Everything they need to tell a brilliant story is there, it’s just been mixed up and paced in an awkward way, with stakes growing smaller rather than larger as they approach the climax.

Jim Butcher on Scenes and Sequels

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So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole.

I still go out and learn to do stuff.

And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly fucking schooled and have the way I think about writing turned on its head.

Case in point: this one-two combination from 2006 or so where Jim Butcher talks about Scenes (which is stuff I know) and Sequels to Scenes (which blew my writer-brain in no uncertain terms).

The sequel stuff feels like someone just sat down and wrote a short essay that basically says, “hey, you, short story writer, this is why you struggle with novels.”

Go forth and read it.