Sam Downing

Dear everyone who’s not into Twitter: please stop bashing Twitter.

Or at least stop bashing it via lazy criticisms which everyone’s sick of hearing, such as:

“I don’t know what Twitter is ‘for’.” You sound like an ignoramus when you say this. It’s like boasting that you don’t know what the internet is “for”.

“I don’t need to know what strangers are eating for breakfast.” If you’re following people who only tweet about what they ate for breakfast, you’re following the wrong people.

“140 characters isn’t enough to say anything substantial.” Sure it is. Try using the site.

“Hey, did you know that ‘Twitter’ sounds like ‘twit’ and ‘twat’? Let’s make puns based on this observation!” Oh ho ho. Important: The “twit”/”twat” jokes stopped being funny when vaudeville did. Joke about Twitter, but come up with  new material please. The existing stuff is as insightful as comparing Sarah Jessica Parker to a horse¹.

And when you write patronising articles like this, which treat Twitter’s users (in particular, Twitter’s female users) as superficial airheads who use the site  to gush about the trivial high-school details of their life, you sound foolish and deserved to be mocked by the internet.

Okay, sure, Twitter is a great place to gush about the trivial details of your life. But that’s not its only purpose. Much has been made about Twitter’s big-picture usefulness. But it’s a handy thing for everyday people to have in their everyday lives, too. For example: when I was slogging through the final chapters of My Book, it was nice to check into #amwriting and see that, hey, there are a lot of people working at this too, even if I don’t know any of them.

I think that’s kind of rad.

But after all these years I’m still reading articles in the MSM about “novelties” like online dating and adults who play video games – somehow I doubt the Twitter-bashing will end anytime soon.

1. Not that I think SJP is especially equine, but “She looks like a horse, hur hur” is a gag made about her that needs to be put out to pasture, pun intended. [↩]

I wrote this for a short-story contest held by Nathan Bransford, in which the criteria was to “Write the most compelling (fictional) teen diary entry [or] unsent letter” in a teen’s voice. SHOCKINGLY, I didn’t win. Possibly because none of the other entries were written by anyone who’s been overdosing on Lovecraft-inspired fiction lately…?

Dear J,

So I have no idea what my parents are doing in the basement but they are making so much noise down there. I am trying to study but all I hear all night are bangs and crashes.

Don’t you dare even suggest they’re “making love” or something, because that’s gross. Besides, it doesn’t sound like that. Not that I know what “that” sounds like, har har. But you know what I mean.

Last week I heard a scream coming from down there. It didn’t sound like Mum or Dad. Remember that time we went camping by Arkham Lake, and the wind howling through the trees was so loud we thought at first it was a huge cat-fight or something? It sounded like that.

So I rushed to the basement to see if they were okay but they wouldn’t let me in. Mum came out and told me I didn’t need to worry, but she was really pale and didn’t stop shaking till I made her a cup of tea. And the next morning Dad apparently left for some interstate anthropology convention before I woke up, and he hasn’t come back yet and he’s too busy to even bother calling, so I haven’t had the chance to ask him about it.

A few nights later Mum fell asleep in the living room (with all the lights on! I don’t know about you, but I need total darkness to get to sleep) so I snuck into the basement to see what’s going on. The door was deadlocked but everyone in the world knows where they “hide” the key in their study. And you know what I found down there?

Nothing. Not even any of the usual dusty relics they’re always bringing home from the university.

The basement was so dark, because for some reason the only light on down there seemed to be one of those weird ultraviolet ones, like they had at that lame dance we went to last winter. The whole basement was all purpley-black and hurt my eyes. And it reeked of fish like you wouldn’t believe.

All I saw was this enormous book propped open on the desk. I couldn’t make out much writing but it was all Latin anyway.

Last night Mum was back in the basement again, apparently messing around with the power because it made my alarm cut out and I was late to school. But the worst part? When I got home this afternoon, Mum had dyed her hair totally white. WHITE. I asked why on earth she would embarrass me by doing that, but she refused to answer and slammed the basement door in my face.

I’m really worried! This girl at school said her mum got an extreme makeover right before her parents divorced. I hope my parents aren’t getting a divorce! But when I asked Mum when Dad’s getting back from his so-called “business trip”, she started crying and locked herself in the basement again.

So I hope it all works out okay.

Anyway. How are you? Did you win your netball final?

Love, S

This work is licenced under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons Licence. Translation: you can share and adapt it, so long as you link back to me and don’t make any money from it.

World's dumbest genius serial killer, pictured with family

Anyone who consumes fiction must have some very high hooks on which to suspend their disbelief. This is especially true for fantasy and sci-fi aficionados – you can’t buy into that malarkey about magic and spaceships unless you’re willing to accept the impossible.

However. Suspension of disbelief only stretches so far.

I pondered this during the week while catching up on the fourth season of Dexter, which was pretty excellent (and horrifyingly bleak) – except for some sloppy writing which pulled me out of the world. Mildly spoilery examples follow.

So in one instalment, Dexter sets up a kill room in a hotel bathroom. Because cheap hotels, as we all know, are bastions of privacy. Later in the episode, Dex stalks his victim to a construction site and prepares to attack. Suddenly, the victim attempts suicide! But Dexter rescues him at the last second, aided by onlookers who rush in to help. Onlookers who Dexter apparently didn’t notice while he tracked his victim; onlookers who apparently would’ve done nothing had Dexter attacked the victim before the suicide attempt.

Contrast this with Avatar (WHICH I LOVED), a film populated with blue-skinned cat-eared aliens who live on a planet overhung by huge floating mountains. How did the aliens, who evolved on a world light years from Earth, evolved to be (for all intents and purposes) exactly the same as Homo sapiens? How do those rocks float in the air? You might ask a billion questions like these – but ultimately the answers don’t matter, because the little details serve the story. They aren’t its sloppy byproducts.

It goes back to that old saying: audiences will believe the impossible, but not the implausible. I can believe blue cat people live on floating rocks. But I can’t believe a so-called genius serial killer would make such dumb mistakes.

Elaine (aka the greatest female sitcom character OF ALL TIME) flirts with third-person aficionado The Jimmy

You know what strikes me as weird? That referring to yourself in the third person is generally considered douchey, yet Facebook statuses force you to write this way. (At least, traditionally formatted Facebook statuses do.) Facebook: making d-bags of us all since 2004.

My Book is written almost exclusively in the third person – sometimes omniscient, sometimes dipping into my MC’s POV (wow, bit of AO there¹) – with a bit of second-person stuff thrown in when I feel like giving you a more intimate perspective on what’s going on. (See what I did there?) Most of my fiction is written like this – I enjoy first-person, but if the Flying Spaghetti Monster descended from heaven and demanded that I choose only one narrative mode to use for the rest of my life, I’d pick third.

Most of what I read is third person too. A trend emerges!

Not sure why I prefer third, though it’s probably because it offers a bit more freedom – it allows me to duck out of a character’s perspective and insert broader information about the world I’m writing in.

1. That’s Acronym Overload, natch [↩]

This is the first image that came up when I googled "Chapter 12". Um.

Dear Chapter 12 of My Book,

Remember when you were just a scrappy little first draft? All cute l’il mismatched sentences just waiting to be polished up into nice shiny paragraphs. And remember when you had that exciting new subplot injected into you? Gosh, was that an exciting time!

Not so long ago I thought you were cool, Chapter 12. That there was no way you could possibly be more awesome. How wrong I was! Closer inspection reveals that you need some work. Boy oh boy, do you need some work. Did you realise that your sentences are awkward? Your dialogue weirdly leaden? Your pace strangely disjointed?

Not to mention all those adverbs you’ve scoffed.

Because I’m your pal, Chapter 12, I want to help you. What say we spent the next couple of days whipping you into shape? You’ll be as slim and trim as your writerly brethren in no time!

Yours sincerely,
Sam Downing

If My Book was¹ a shower, and if working on My Book was soaping up, I would be pretty filthy right about now.

Not pee-yew stinky, but a little on the ripe side.

The trouble with working full-time as a writer is that, when I come home at the end of the day, it’s hard to get excited about spending another several hours tapping away at a keyboard. Especially when I have tonnes of unread Google Reader subscriptions and unwatched television shows waiting to be consumed. And especially now that it’s summer – even on the weekends it’s hard to muster up writerly enthusiasm when bright sunshiney days are singing their Siren songs.

I suppose every fiction writer with a full-time job grapples with this dilemma. And I suppose that working on My Book for just 15 minutes a day is better than not working on it at all.

On an unrelated note, I walked by two magpies the other day, and they both glared at me very sternly with their beady black eyes. And, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but, like, magpies are really big, and super creepy, and stuff. (Two for mirth? I ain’t laughing.) So I ran the rest of the way home².

1. Yes, I am aware that technically this should be “were”, thank you grammar Nazis. But I am not a fan of the subjunctive when used in this fashion. It’s so – awkward. [↩]
2. This really happened. [↩]

Here’s a cheeseball-fabulous video I make a point of watching on the first day of summer each year, because I’m a huge lame-o. (But not as big a lame-o as you guys in the snowy, wintry, gloomy Northern hemisphere!):

December 1 marks the end of Nanorevismo for 2009. (Ditto Nanowrimo. Kudos to those who had a go – you have my respect, and my sympathy.) But just because the month has finished doesn’t mean my revisions have!

Last night, on the final evening in November, I pulled My Book’s word count back under 100,000 to a not-much-smaller-yet-somehow-more-manageable 99,919. Now I know how dieters feel when they manage to squeeze back into a pair of old jeans.

Let the wild rumpus countdown to 95k words start!

(Yeah, I saw Where the Wild Things Are last night.)

This is about a million times more likely than you becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Steph Meyer.

Occasionally I say to people things like, “I have written a book, and I hope it’s published someday.”

And occasionally they reply with things like, “Oh, I could write a book. I’ll do that someday.”

Good for you.  Wanting to write a book is a fine aspiration. But. Often when folks say “I want to write a book”, what they really mean is “I want to become fantastically rich and famous like J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer, and writing a book is an easy path to riches and fame.”

No, it isn’t. Writing a book is hard. (Seriously: it’s really, really hard. Mine took almost five years and it’s still not finished. It’s tough.) Writing a good book is harder. Landing an agent is even harder. Landing a publisher is harder still. Becoming a bestselling author is so hard that the previous steps seem no more difficult than plucking the petals from a flower by comparison. And becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer is not only hard, it’s so phenomenally improbable that you are literally more likely to stand on the moon someday than achieve their level of success.

So if you want to write a book: do it. Do it because you want to a story you’re passionate about. Not because it’s a get-rich-quick scheme any idiot can exploit.

Today I was chatting about our various writing projects to my friend Rachel, and she suggested that I don’t seem to be very fond of the actual book thing that I’ve written.

Fair enough. I admit to being a tad negative about it at times. (I may have even declared that “I. HATE. IT” at one point. Erm. I guess I felt dramatic that day.)

Part of that negativity comes from the fact that I’m revising it at the moment (well, not so much this week, but only because I’m working on a short story I’ve been plugging away at since, like, the 17th century), so I’m hypersensitive to everything that needs to be fixed; I need to be critical to improve it.

And yes, sometimes I have “dramatic moods” where I’m convinced it’s the worst 95,000(ish) words of drivel ever committed to paper a hard drive, and I’m tempted to drag it into the trash and permanently delete it. (However, I read today that a grumpy writer is a better writer, so maybe dramatic moods are a good thing?)

But you know what? Ultimately, I’m proud of what I’ve written. I’m proud that it’s complete, in the sense that I can give it to someone to read from A to Z and there aren’t any gaps in the storyline. And at the risk of sounding masturbatory, I enjoy reading it. There are bits that make me chuckle, and I like the characters. It’s not that I’m not fond of the thing – my book is like a sibling who I’m either comfortably close to or furiously frustrated with, but I always like that it’s there.

Even if it never ever gets published (which, let’s be realistic, is an uncomfortable possibility), at least I can say I’ve written something that I like. I assume (I hope) this sort of love/hate attitude is common among writerly types?

No, not the song from Hairspray.

This week my mum finished reading My Book. Which is rad (though it does make me feel strangely exposed, like she’s seen me in my underpants). She said she enjoyed it, but added it’s “no A.K. Rowling”.

Thanks?

I supplied Mum with a PDF which she printed out to read. Which is terrible for the environment, but I’ve now inherited this physical copy of My Book, the first time I’ve seen it printed and bound. I can hold it in my hands!

Unfortunately having the words there on an actual page makes every awkward sentence, every bloated stretch of text, stand out like it’s been highlighted in fluroescent blood. The thing still needs an arseload of polishing before it’s ready to send out. I already knew this (I didn’t spent the last several weeks revising it just for fun) (even though it has been kinda fun), but having a physical copy of Book holds it to a galactically higher standard than if I were just reading it on my Macbook’s screen.

One the bright side there are a lot of bits in there I’m really happy with – proud of, even! The less-than-spectacular bits will one day, fingers crossed, be equally rad. Head down; revise, polish, edit. I’ll get there. (more…)