Just Got The Invoice From Ceiling Man And

Me: *writes an amazing chapter*

Me: Ah yes. That is amazing. Can't wait to begin the next one. So many possibilities!

Me: *turns off my laptop and goes into a month-long depression*

Do you know if Sherlock was ever actually used as a name? Or did Arthur Conan Doyle make it up?

Yes! It was an actual name of Middle English origin, sometimes a nickname for a blond person. Shir meaning bright or fair (possibly related to the root word for shine? idk) and lock meaning hair. It was more commonly a surname before the Sherlock Holmes books came out but it was occasionally a first name. An adjacent name is Whitlock, meaning white haired (or blond) which is a pretty common surname too.

ohsweetcrepes replied to your post: Also. ALSO.

This essay. I would like to read it.

“Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not” by John Barth. I don’t know if it’s available online, but I read it in Creating Fiction (ed. Julie Checkoway), which is a book I highly recommend after having read about a third of its essays.

And here comes my plug for this book, because I’ve been arguing with every book but this one this semester, and I feel like it deserves some love.

Creating Fiction also contains the essay “The Lingerie Theory of Literature: Describing and Withholding, Beginning and Ending” by Checkoway, which uses Victoria’s Secret catalogues to demonstrate how much detail you need in a story, and “Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters” by Kim Edwards, which is just an all-around fantastic examination of characterization. I think it’s out of print, but you can get it for under $10 used or as a Google ebooks download. 

Whenever an artist who makes dark content gets outed as a sexual predator people will be like 'aha it was obvious something was up because their work was so dark and nasty' and whenever an artist who makes wholesome content gets outed as a sexual predator people will be like 'aha it was obvious something was up because their work was so aggressively wholesome' and it's like you know I think maybe you can't tell whether or not someone is a predator based on their artistic output.

something I’ve learned from querying: everything has a million subcategories, and it is crucial to actually learn then.

like when I first started, I thought an agent listing ‘speculative fiction’ in their interests was enough to give me a shot! but now it’s like ok. but does that actually mean fantasy (as opposed to science fiction or surrealism)? and if it does, is it constrained to one of the following:

high fantasy

low fantasy

grounded fantasy 

magical realism

etc.

and if fate is smiling on me and it is high fantasy, what sort do they like? because mine starts as a medieval George R R Martin clone before morphing into a post-apocalyptic sci fi, so they have to simultaneously be alright with a) cliched shit and b) experimental weird shit.

and say everything aligns, and that genre works for them - even then, they often accept it only in one or two age categories. there’s mg, ya, na (middle grade, young adult, new adult) and adult. mine is adult, which is a huge strike against it given the genre. 

AND THEN! AND THEN! say everything else is perfect. they love high fantasy with elves and unicorns, they want it for adults, they’re cool with genre bending, but in their profile is a phrase I’ve learned to dread: “HEA (which stands for happily every after) required”. I love my little book, but it is dark and full of terrible people.

and then I also have to hope that they’re into queer romance, on top of everything else! it’s a hard process.

currently I have 45 queries sent, 15 rejections, and 30 unknowns, and I think a good portion of those rejections are because I didn’t initially understand that ‘accepts speculative fiction’ shouldn’t be taken literally.

Fantasy writers should be more anthropology brained. More theology brained. More wacky intellectual history brained. You should be giving out interesting and novel but believable social structures. Oh they don't have monogamy they have some other thing and they're just as violent about it? Perfect. There should be religions that aren't just gods of x y z. Folio gods are out! And the theology shouldn't fall apart from a moderately intelligent person thinking about it for 4 seconds. Of it falls apart in five econds that's fine. Like just crazy enough to think that a real human society could get down with it. There should be like bizarre new architecture that ye oldifies modernist movements. Oh amd the thing where every city and region is somehow completely homogenous is crazy; do something else. Put people living together with a complicated history. Oh and you can just give them a completely different conceptual scheme for talking about gay and trans people. That would be fun. I should be saying "I never thought of it that way." Make up norms and then think what are all the ways in which this can go wrong. Tell me how people disagree on the interpretation of some doctrine. Create a parodying spectre of some constitutional arrangement. Go crazy

For some reason the versions of this where he gives two salutes is being deleted and replaced with a version with a quick cut to a cheering crowd so I’ll just share it here 🙃

Here are some thoughts about dialogue tags while I have my editor hat on:

It's fine to use said as a dialogue tag. 'Said' works the way jeans do. Jeans are so ubiquitous that they function as a neutral colour in an outfit despite the fact that they are blue. Said is so ubiquitous in fiction that it functions as a neutral tag to indicate the speaker in much the same way

Using 'said' where necessary will stand out much less than elaborate attempts to avoid it

It is possible to reduce the use of said by reducing the number of dialogue tags overall.

Other dialogue tags are not neutral; you can use them to get various effects. One of these potential effects is '4th grade English class exercise'. Sometimes that's what you're going for and I would not dream of stopping you.

"You can use dialogue tags in the middle of speech," they say, "to affect the perception of the pacing."

"Or," they add, "to give an impression of delivery and tone without resorting to direct descriptions."

"You can even..." They pause to consider how to convey this, toying with their water bottle while they think. "Break dialogue up with actions instead of tags to avoid having blocks of dialogue in which everyone stands stock still and speaks in a monotone. This also contributes to conveying tone without describing it and can add to characterisation."

alright, I’m annoyed with the class that I’m taking. it’s about writing novels, and I thought it would have cool stuff about balancing your narrative and developing themes etc, but instead she spent the first class talking about how every book fits into the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth template). and I was somewhat of a contrarian, and said “can you give us examples of books that don’t fit into this template?” and she said “no. because all books fit.”

but I dunno man, I just finished reading this Korean book where the plot is just the character having a string of hookups and reflecting on them without changing in any way. I don’t know if it’s possible to contort that into the Hero’s Journey.

yup, it's all a joke to me...

among the most enduring lessons i have ever received in screenwriting stands this one from glenn gordon caron…

(glenn created and ran the wildly successful, long-running “medium” - on which i worked for two seasons as co-executive producer - as well as one or two other things that have… you know… shaped the very face of popular culture as we know it)

…a legendarily tough grader who likes to do his master-level work without a lot of noisy fuss and bluster (and probably dislikes being singled out for public praise like this) glenn would set the table for every one of our story pitches to him with a single, and deceptively simple, request:

“tell it to me like it’s a joke.”

now, “medium” was several things - among them, one of tv’s best portrayals of a messy but functional marriage, as well as a crime procedural dotted with representations of unspeakable violence, usually perpetrated by serial killers in the psychic visions of its lead character - but “barrel of laughs” is most likely not in the top ten descriptors for that series…

…so how did “tell it to me like it’s a joke” fit into the equation?

a joke - for my money - is to storytelling what haiku is to poetry: the shortest possible distillation of formal intent. a set-up, brief development, and a punch line…

…short, sweet — and, if successfully told, climaxing in an explosive, involuntary emotional response.

for a story to work in any genre, every successful element from the macro to the micro - from the sweep of the story, to the shape of individual scenes, the arcs of the characters, and the very structure of individual lines of dialogue - should be reducible to the specific outlines of a joke.

set up, development, punch line.

as you have guessed by now, the punch line doesn’t have to be funny - it can be horrific (as it often was on “medium”) or tear-inducing, or a twist that sends the story into an unexpected direction - but it is the nexus toward which the set up and development need to work in absolute concert - there’s no room for fat on a joke, only specificity of purpose.

to this day, the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” principle guides me through story and scene development like a trusty compass: if you can tell your story in the most concise way possible and still deliver your emotional punchline, then all the adornments will fall into line as needed.

“tell it to me like it’s a joke” is neither a formula nor a cure all - it’s a test: if your concept survives on the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” touchstone, then at least you know that the gross anatomy is in place… there are still a thousand ways to mess it up, to be sure, but the airframe will fly - so long as you outfit it with all the necessary equipment.

you wanna know my favorite joke?

an aimless young artist is recruited by an organization that fights monsters… while at first she dislikes her employer and considers him a stuffed shirt, she ultimately finds in him the father she never had.