Author: Tom

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What Would 14-Year-Old You Say?

https://youtu.be/3zB9jSluOEA

 

Since becoming instructor of writing more than ten years ago, whether that is live at a conference or convention, or virtually, or through a book, has been to tell all of my students, regardless of their age, or experience, that they have stories.

 

That those stories are valuable and worth sharing.

 

When I was 14, I borrowed a VHS video camera from a neighbor friend of mine. I did everything with that camera that one might expect, making stupid short videos starring myself—the kind of thing that would be a low-view YouTube or TikTok video today. It didn’t take long to decide I needed to make a “real movie.”

 

One of my teachers in eighth grade happened to have a beautiful VHS editing system on campus. When I asked him if I could learn to use it, he showed me how. Now all I needed was a story or a script. I remembered some notes that I’d taken a year before, when I was home alone one night during a storm.

 

Yes: it was a dark and stormy night, just accept it.

 

Strange things were happening around the house: cats getting freaked out over things that weren’t there. Huge wind jangling tree branches and rattling wind chimes like bones. Strange, inexplicable noises. Being 13 and a fan of horror. movies and already having read most of Stephen King’s oeuvre up to that point, I naturally started thinking in terms of the supernatural and macabre. I wrote all these things down, and those notes and ideas coalesced into something shaped like a story: THE MOON DAEMON! (You can watch parts of it above.)

 

I asked two friends to be in my movie, and we improvised the film over the course of about three days, dragging the VHS section of the camera around on a skateboard and using a folding card table as our tripod. I edited it at school, and then got to show the final production to one of my classes during a Friday afternoon class. (I still have the original VHS tapes. Hell, I’ve even re-edited the movie once or twice since then.)

 

I tell you all of that to emphasize one crucial thing: If 14-year-old Me knew how much technology and access to viewers I currently possess in 2020, he would be furious at me for not having made a movie every single damn week.

 

“You mean to tell me you’re carrying a video camera in your pocket every where you go?”

 

“Yes, Tom. That is true.”

 

“You mean to tell me make a movie anytime you want to put it out for the entire world to see and it will not cost you any money at all?”

 

“Yes, Tom. That’s pretty much what I’m saying.”

 

14-year-old Tom looks at me quizzically, perhaps taking a drag of a Marlboro red cigarette, and says, “What the hell is wrong with you? ”

 

14-year-old Tom is right. What the hell am I doing? All this technology, all these people, and what have I chosen to do? Watch TV; reruns I’ve already seen a million time. Read lame stuff on the Internet. Make a ton of plans, but never follow through with them. 14-year-old Me has every reason to be pissed.

 

I don’t deny that 14 can suck, depending on your family and life circumstances. It can be challenging because you’re straddling adulthood and childhood. It’s also a time of wild exploration and dare-deviltry. Of absolutely not giving one solitary f*ck about much of anything if it doesn’t interest you. If you are an American teenager, you still have access to things right now that your parents couldn’t even conceive of when they were 14. But maybe you are in your 40s, or 50s, or 80s. What is stopping you? What’s your Moon Daemon?

 

It can be a true story about you and your relationship with your parents, or your neighborhood, or your country. It could be that terrible break-up story, or the beautiful story of how you met your spouse. It could be the tear-jerking story about your children, or a laugh-out-loud story about what happened when you got the flat tire on the way to get ice cream one night. Maybe it’s a horror story, maybe to superhero comic book, or maybe it’s a romantic web series starring you and your friends from high school. Maybe it’s a poem, or a song, or a one-panel comic strip that you post every day on Instagram.

 

Start now.

 

It’s not about money, and it’s not about Likes, and it’s not about Followers. Put your stuff out there, tell your truth—whatever it is—and people will find you. I will never, ever be one of these get-rich-quick, “How to make $1 million on Kindle!” type of writing teachers. (There’s nothing wrong with making $1 million on Kindle, but I can’t. If I knew how to do that, I would be doing it.) What I can teach you, and encourage you to do, is how to tell your stories.

 

Try multiple formats. I’ve tried most of them. Some come naturally, like novels. Others I have to work on, like comic books and screenplays. I like all of them in some way, shape, or form. Instead of consuming, take your stories out there. Have a sit down with 14-year-old You and explain to them why you are not doing that. This isn’t about being a published author, or a box office hit producer or actor in Hollywood. If that’s what happens, great. But that is not the measure of success. At least, it shouldn’t be. Trust me, I still struggle with those hopes and dreams and desires, too. I do not dismiss those goals. However, the only way to get there in my experience is to authentically tell those stories that burn deep inside you. Don’t think about the outcome, think about the process.

 

The Moon Daemon hasn’t exactly won any film festival awards, or landed me a Hollywood talent manager, or made any money whatsoever. But by God, we had an absolute blast. About two weeks before the pandemic really got underway here in Phoenix, I led a group of about 20  people in making an eight-minute short film based on a chapter of one of my recent novels. It was February, it was freezing cold by Phoenix standards; it was the one day we had rain in months. My wife and I were up and out of the house before dawn, driving across the city, to get set up before anybody else got there. I’ll never forget how cold my feet were, standing in puddles all day while my actors were nice and toasty inside my car as I filmed them.

 

It could have been miserable. It was exhausting, it cost me nearly a thousand bucks, but it got me into a film festival . . . and it was the most fun I’ve had in a while. Not only would I do it all over again, I’m going to do it all over again. We’re already in talks with some of the cast and crew to start a little production company so we can keep shooting films. Because we had a ball. The last time I had conversations like that, two different theater companies formed and ran for 16 years. That’s magic. You don’t dismiss that.

 

I have two children, and they run me ragged, especially during the pandemic. I have a part-time job. All kinds of other responsibilities to attend to. Just like you. But I love telling stories and I’m not going to let anything stop me. You make adjustments, sure. Maybe your life is such that you get one free hour a week. Great; use that hour. Protect that hour. That is your hour. One thing I can guarantee you: someone out there needs and wants your story. Maybe it’s 10 people, or ten thousand, maybe it’s 10 million. That number doesn’t matter. What matters is they need it.

 

You know right now about which stories touched you in the deepest part of your humanity. Probably it was a movie or a book, but maybe it was a comic book. Certainly we all have songs that touch us, and songs or nothing but poems set to music. Someone needs your story to have that impact on them.

 

So write songs, or scripts, or prose. Or just riff online; do a live stream on some topic close to you and share with the entire planet. There is absolutely no reason not to do that.

 

I don’t mean that you should be stubborn about your story. Absolutely learn to take criticism. Absolutely study your craft and practice it and get better and better and better. I have published nine novels with New York publishers and still consider myself an apprentice at this gig. But I’ve learned a lot, and I keep learning, and I hope to improve each time out. I also have started writing in new areas, like video games and comic books and television pilots; formats I am not schooled in, but that I enjoy learning about. I one-hundred-percent take comments and critiques on those formats, because I don’t yet know what I’m doing. So be open to that, but keep going.

 

Ask 14-year-old you, “What do you think I should be doing right now? Where am I falling short? How can I be doing things differently?”

 

I bet 14-year-old you will have some very pointed answers.

Categories
Craft

When You Doubt Your Story, Ask This Simple Question

There’s one simple metric to apply to all of your storytelling questions that will solve the bulk of your story-writing problems:

 

Do you have a character, who cares about other characters, facing a goal or a challenge that they will do anything to achieve?

 

If you have that, everything else is gonna work out.

 

I’m working on a project with a guy I met through Gary Vaynerchuk. I had the privilege of being on Tea with Gary Vee, and this particular artist reached out to me after the show with some ideas. We talked and hit it off, and now we’re developing a storytelling video game app—an animated “choose your own adventure” style text-based game. We’re basing the story off my novel Sick, which is already a known property; this is something I won awards for, so I know it’s a solid story.

 

But I can’t just cut and paste chapters into this game. It’s being written in such a way that there are multiple choices, not just the one ending that happens in the novel. I’ve worked on a “choose your own adventure” video game before, but in that game, no matter what choices you made, you’d still end up at the same ending. (It was based on a romance novel, and you do not mess with romance novel endings, lemme tell ya!)

 

This project based on Sick will have multiple possible endings and multiple possible storylines. (And, unlike the romance novel gig, we’re not going to charge people to get the good stuff.) You can play multiple times with different characters.

 

But as I’m working on this game, I find myself getting nervous. This is a brand new way of telling a story for me. I have to keep track of all the different characters and choices, how the story branches out. I’m starting to panic: what if this is way beyond my caliber? I’ve gotten myself into something I don’t think I’ll be able to do, because right now, in terms of marketing, we’re not doing anything new technologically. We’re not introducing a new app or a new way to play games. We’re banking on his artwork and my story. So I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out, “Oh my God, am I in over my head? What if I don’t know what I’m doing? What if I suck?” All the usual things.

 

When those questions hit it’s time to back to the basics.

 

No matter the platform, no matter the format, no matter the genre, every single story is going to come down to the same basic elements in the same basic structure.

 

Do you have a character who cares about other characters, and does she have a goal or a challenge that she will stop at nothing to obtain?

 

That’s it. If you have those two things, your story is really off to a great start.

 

Sometimes, what’s at stake is literally life or death, whether that’s the life and death of one person or an entire planet. But “life and death” still exists when we’re talking about asking a girl to prom, or confronting one’s own metaphorical demons. Those feel like life and death in the context of the setting and the story.

 

One of the tricks I’ve started using, and I’ll do the same thing with this game, is at the top of every chapter, I write myself a little note. That little note says:

 

“I’ll die if I don’t…”

 

That’s it. That’s just a little reminder that every single chapter, my character needs to want something so badly that she will (feel like she’ll) die if she doesn’t get it.

 

In my novel Zero, all she wants from page one is to go to her favorite art school. That’s the thing that she wants more than anything in the world. Other things happen on her quest to do that. She is aided and abetted by her new boyfriend Mike, and their developing relationship appears to be the story. But if you break down Zero piece by piece, you start to notice that Mike is not an obstacle, and not until like the last eighth of the book does he and their relationship become an obstacle. He’s actually, if you really want to get technical, a sidekick! He doesn’t offer obstacles for her to overcome until towards the very end, when Zero makes a choice that screws up the relationship. Instead, the backbone of the story is Zero’s relentless pursuit of the goal of getting to her favorite school.

 

She does not have to obtain that goal for the story to work. Our players won’t have to survive to feel like they’ve spent their time well interacting with the game.

 

One thing I learned from Todd McFarlane during my time working on Spawn was there’s always a “turn” in the scene. Every sequence or scene, something has to move forward. All of storytelling is about momentum, all the storytelling is about moving forward. It’s our job as writers and storytellers to excise anything that is not moving the story forward. Once you have that main goal, that “I’ll die if I don’t…” goal, it just becomes a question of moving that ball down the field.

 

That’s the thing I need to remind myself. Is it clear this character cares about something or someone, and are they determined to pursue a goal no matter what? If so, great; now do I show the character doing exactly that? If so, great.

 

Of course, there are many other techniques to talk about when it comes to developing your story, but if you’re stuck, if you’re not sure, if you’re worried, if you’re nervous…that simple question can answer a lot.

 

If you can’t answer that question, then there’s probably something else you need to work on. Without those things, the other tips and tricks and techniques and ideas about writing and storytelling don’t matter.

 

 

Categories
Craft

NaNoWriMo: Let’s Write Together!

 

NaNoWriMo: Let’s write together

 

The idea here is to start a novel from idea generation and go all the way (hopefully) through the agenting process, the publishing process, marketing . . . everything that happens along the way to your very first author event at your local independent bookstore.

 

I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen or not; we’re just getting started! But that’s the goal.

 

I’m going to be gearing everything we do toward that ultimate goal of finding representation from a literary agent and then hopefully traditionally publishing your novel. If that doesn’t happen, that’s okay, we will shift gears and we will self-publish it, and we’ll be talking about all those things every step of the way.

 

It seems like a good idea to write something accessible to more people if I’m going to do my job as an instructor, or as a mentor, or as a coach for writing. I need to make this process and story as accessible for as many novelists and aspiring writers as humanly possible.

 

Again, the idea is I’m starting from zero. I’m going to go to a couple of photo free photo websites (pexels.com and unsplash.com), look for an image that speaks to me—that I find compelling or that inspires me—and we’re going to write a novel based on that image. The final story may change and shift and morph throughout the writing process; that’s fine, that’s normal. But you’ll be along for the ride every step of the way as we talk about structure and plot and pacing and characterization and dialogue and description and white space and all those things that go into novel writing.

 

One question I do see a lot is, “Where do you get your ideas?” or “How can I get ideas to write?” This is one thing you can do: go to a free photo site and just surf around and see what compels you, see what grabs you. (The other advantage to doing that is if we end up going the self-publishing or independent publishing route, this image can become the basis of a great book cover.)

 

I found this shot of a girl sitting on a skateboard with sort of a do-rag thing going on:

 

photo credit:

Olia Danilevich

 

She’s got kind of this Mona Lisa smile going on. She is somebody I would write about.

 

I also like this girl by herself at a carnival or fair of some kind. She doesn’t look like she’s very happy, but there’s this prominent image of the ferris wheel in the background:

 

 

photo credit:

Hannah Busing

 

That’s interesting to me. Why is she there? Why is she by herself? What happened in the moment before?

 

 

Even as I scrolled through many images, I already started mulling ideas about these two images. How can how can they be related? How can they be in relationship?

 

As these posts continue, we will also talk about outlines: should you outline, should you not outline, should you be a pantser or an outliner . . . all these kinds of things we’ll discuss but right now, all I need is something to get the fires burning.

 

Here is the story idea I came up with:

 

I have decided that these two are friends, and they have been friends for a long time, but the girl in the carnival picture perhaps has depression or is struggling with something at home. Some external force is is acting upon her. They go to this carnival, she meets a boy and he’s a carney—maybe he operates the one of the games. She falls for him and decides she’s going to run away with him to the carnival, or follow him to the next town or whatever. Her friend on the skateboard is like, “Not by yourself, I’m coming with you!” She has her own baggage, but I don’t know what that is yet.

 

And it doesn’t matter, because now we have three characters and a story.

 

I have no idea where it’s going, but this is how it works. So that’s where we’re going to leave it for now. Thank you very much for reading, and we’ll see you soon!

 

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Review + Writer Takeaway: Midsommar

A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

A New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never one went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1h 23m or of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 

See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

 Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.