About nails, mustaches, pants, unicorns, farts, ice cream, and relationships

I'm not kidding. I haven't gone cuckoo. No. I'm riding the wave of excitement of everyone doing NaNoWriMo. Everyone, but me. Well, there are a bunch of other folks who don't do it either (they told me). Why? People ask me. Why aren't you participating? Well, call me weird, but I like writing according to my own schedule. I can't just jump around and write several books at the same time like other people do, and I'm green with envy, of course. But I can't, simply can't. I set my mind on the course of one story, and I live it and breathe it, I can't think about anything else, until I finish it. Then I can start the next one, and the next, and the next. And so they go. Well then, yesterday I asked folks what they want me to blog about, and they kindly obliged, telling me to write about: the rise and the fall of a mustache, pants, unicorns, flying kangaroos, rainbow farts, boneless ice cream, glitches in sims 3, extraterrestrial life under our nails, and relationships between a writer and an editor. So I told everyone, okay, I will write about EVERYTHING.

How growing a mustache can help you write a novel. The topic of hair has always fascinated me. I mean, when we're young, we tend to want to grow hair in peculiar places, to seem older, but once it does, we start shaving it. Worse, a couple years go by, and hair starts growing in places we didn't want it to, and where we want it to, it starts falling out. Life is unfair. How exactly growing a mustache will help you write a novel? Patience. It can teach you patience. Here is how you do it (girls especially). You stand in front of the mirror and grunt. You grunt really loud and concentrate on hair sprouting above your lip, imagining a long and glorious streak of silky strands, flowing in the wind, flapping like the sail of a ship, glorious in its significance. Now, you have to do this every day for 1 hour. Try it. After you have tried it for a week, try to sit down and write a novel. Grunt. Type. It's much easier to do, isn't it? Doesn't life seem fair all of a sudden, doesn't the sun shine brighter, and you DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS STUPID MUSTACHE GROWING EXERCISE ANYMORE, YOU CAN SIMPLY WRITE? Yeah, there you go. This is the effect I was going for. Now, to the pants.

Pants can help you write a novel by their seat. There is a very simple thing you can do every morning, to get yourself to write. Put on some pants and glue them to the chair. Don't forget to have your chair positioned in front of your writing desk, with either your pen and paper on it, or your laptop, or computer. You will notice how easy is it to write when your every impulse to stand up is hindered by the simple fact that your ass is firmly attached to the chair. I suggest to use pants that you're not afraid to get dirty, to ruin, or to even rip, because your first attempt of struggle against this self-imposed prison will cause you to squirm, and struggle, and stretch, and, of course, tear the darned pants. Dare I mention the urge to relieve yourself, let's say, a couple hours into your torture? Remember, I said, select a pair of pants that you're not afraid to soil. Yeah, there you go. I hear there are adult diapers you can use, but I don't recommend it. Despite the fact that your writing space is your own, you might offend your neighbors with the unsightly smell. The solution is simple. When you reach the peak of frustration, rip those pants off, do your business, wash up, select the next pair of pants to suffer, put it on, glue them to the chair, and KEEP WRITING. 

Cutting your nails very short increases your word production. I know I was supposed to write about nails first, well, I was supposed to write about the entire universe of extraterrestrial life that exists under the nails of a writer, but because I'm a fantasy writer, I will leave this to sci-fi writers. I'm not good at imagining technological advances and stuff, I'm better at conjuring up complete nonsense and then dressing it up as reality. Here is your reality. Long nails hinder writing. Like, they click on the keyboard unpleasantly and get stuck in your hair when you need to scratch your head, to think, and overall they provide the perfect opportunity to procrastinate, whether it be chewing on them, or admiring your newest nail polish coat, or nibbling off that nail polish, or picking in your ear, or nose, or wherever else it is you like to pick on. Therefore, the simple solution to increase your word count is to cut your nails very short, to the roots. I hear pain adds to productivity. Good. I also hear that you're supposed to write until your fingers bleed. GOOD. Here is your opportunity. You know what, I just realized, if I keep going this direction, the rest of this blog post will turn very bloody. Let me stop right here. Let's talk about unicorns, shall we?

Unicorns can fart creativity, if you ask them nicely. Here is how you do it. At midnight on the night following the day you were born, go out into the field behind your house (if you have no field, a backyard would do), take twenty steps north, turn around three times, and stick your pen in the ground by your right toe (make sure you don't stab the toe). Now, close your eyes, concentrate really hard. Imagine silver mist of creativity issuing from your behind. If you have eaten a burrito the night before, or some other form of cooked beans, you might have better success. Soon, you will smell it, the approach of the unicorns. It is very important to bring them pickles. They like eating pickles. As soon as the warm air washes over your face, take the pickle out of your pocket and offer it in an outstretched hand. DON'T LOOK!!! You will feel soft lips touch your hand and snatch the pickle away. You must wait until all noise subsides and you can no longer hear the sound of the hooves, first on the pavement, then in the sky. Inhale, collect the unicorn fart, and open your eyes. If you see your neighbor staring at you, ignore him. Turn around, and walk back on your tippy toes. You can't walk back any other way, ONLY if you creep, will you reserve the fart. It's very fragile. Now, sit down in front of your computer. Creativity will flow. If it won't, you can send a letter of complaint to the Foreign Union of Creativity Knack, and they will get back to you within two months.

Anyway. I'm horrible. I have completely forgotten to address the issue of boneless ice cream, and, most importantly, the relationship between a writer and an editor, which is platonic, of course. It will have to wait for future blog posts. The point of this one was... I'm afraid, it had no point, or maybe it had a point that you can write about anything, the point is TO WRITE. Of course, one other point is also the fact that I'm starting 3rd draft of ROSEHEAD on Monday, and I'm scared shitless and I babble nonsense as a result. Oy.

Turns out, writing great dialogue IS EASY

Photo by Sophie Ellis

Writing dialogue is one of my biggest fears, partly because English is not my first language, partly because I never studied writing and I tried too hard at first. My dialogue sucked. Well, it still sucks, mostly, but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've been reading like crazy to try and crack the secret to great dialogue and why some of it flows and some is so utterly wrong that I'm tempted to put the book down. I've gotten a few ideas lately, one of them the pattern I noticed on any idea being broken down into 3 lines of dialogue, but still it wasn't very clear for me. Until this morning. And it all started with a tweet. Yeah, I know, don't laugh. Tomorrow is my birthday. I was thinking about what would I want for a present, but since I have most things I need, an image of a cat popped into my mind. Because I like cats. I wanted something funny, so the image changed into a flying cat. Because it was funnier than just a cat. Then an image of a capybara joined (because I learned about the existence of this animal a few days ago and am still obviously high on discovery). The resulting tweet sounded like this: "Cats. Flying cats. Flying cats and dancing capybaras. That's what I want for my birthday." And as soon as I posted it, I was, like, OMG! THIS IS IT! It's broken into 3 lines! Well, 4 lines! Anyway! I'll explain.

We don't talk. We try to describe our feelings. This is the simple truth that hit me in the head like a loaded wagon. It's not what we SAY say that matters in great dialogue, it's what the characters are FEELING. Here, hang on, I'll explain even better. Basically, whenever you want to communicate something, at first you feel it, then a thought forms in your head, and only then you shape it into words. And at first you might not get it exactly right, so it takes you a few tries. That's why we like to repeat things instead of just saying it all at once in 1 perfect sentence! (And that's why long perfect sentences read sp badly in dialogue.) Here is how it happened in my mind. I had a feeling. A feeling of something soft and fuzzy and cute. By some unknown association an image of a cat popped into my head. And that's the first thing that I wanted to say. CATS. I can imagine a scene in a book with a group of people staring into fire and this one girl saying: "Cats." Then I can imagine another character responding: "What about them? What cats?" See how the first line is something to respond with, and then, when the character has enough time to think, he (let's make him a he) realizes there are no cats, so what cat is she talking about? And she would say: "Flying cats. Flying cats and dancing capybaras. That's what I want for my birthday." I could write a whole page of dialogue between these characters right now. You know why? Because now I know how. The key is not to WHAT they say, the key is WHO they are. If I know how they form their ideas, I will know what images will pop into their heads and how they will try to communicate it. So I'll try this in my writing today.

We don't talk with words. We talk with our bodies. This is another thing I noticed in great books. Very often it's not what the character says that's important, and what they do and how they behave WHILE they say it. Why? Because that's how it works in real life. We might want to try to say things, but really we're reading each other's body language, because it's how we're wired to communicate. Language is just a medium that helps us, but we get much more from glancing at a person. So, if you read a whole page of dialogue without any description whatsoever as to how a character's pupils dilated, or he started to sweat, or he is averting his eyes, or he is doodling with his finger in the sand, whatever it is, it gives us clues about what's really going on in his head. And then it feels real. So I'm trying to break up my dialogue with descriptions of what is happening to my characters, sometimes not even bothering to spell out all of the dialogue, leaving lines out, and it reads much better.

We don't talk sense, we talk a lot of nonsense. Because it takes a while to be able to articulate a particular thought, it takes us a while to verbalize it, and that's okay. Same with the characters, it takes them several tries. Here, however, lies a crucial difference between real life and prose. In real life we sometimes take forever to figure things out, and we have all the time in the world to do it. Times flows differently in real life than in books. Because books are limited, it's like a concentrated min-life stuffed into approximately 500 pages (or so). Hence, you can't really write the way we talk. You have to throw away the water and leave the essence of it. It's why we read books, it gives us a glimpse into our humanity, into what we're made of, so trim, trim, trim. Be concise, say less than you would in real life, and move on. Basically, remember, it's all about the story. Propel it forward, the dialogue is only part of it, so don't get enamored too much with it. Throw in a few lines, and you're good to go. WE WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! 

The key takeaway from this for me is, it's all about the characters. I have to know my characters really well to be able to understand what my characters will feel, what they will think about that feeling, and what will they say. That's all there is to it. But it takes time to from complex characters that would behave like real people, that's why it tales forever to write books. So now I feel a little better, because it'll be almost a year by the time I finish Siren Suicides. What do you think? Got any secrets of your own to add for our collective knowledge? Come one, fess up. I won't patent them, I promise.