#WritingCommunity: That’s Why They Pay Me The Bigbucks

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok. So structure. Novel structure specifically. The biggest problem I have at the moment with this first novel is, well, I’m really struggling to figure out on a structural basis what this fucking thing is about. I keep moving scenes around the beginning of the outline because there are so many moving parts that it’s difficult to figure out how to make it clear to myself without too much reflection what the biggest cog should be.

How do I both give the story an interesting beginning AND give the reader an immediate indication of the story they’re about to read. It’s proving to be far, far harder than I want or need it to be. I know what I want to do, which is start the story getting right into the action…but.

There is a problem.

Any story you tell, you need to establish tone and setting while fleshing out the characters a little bit before you dive into the meat of the story. Think of it as the “story before the story.” In movies, you usually have a good 10 minutes or so that does all that while also providing people an opportunity to acclimate themselves to being in the theatre, etc.

The danger of just skipping all that and jumping straight into the story is it’s kind of like what happened that one time when I went on a trip in the Philippines to Lake Taal — I was just dumped on the side of the road to wait for my next bus. There was no terminal. I was just in the middle of a busy highway. Just as that was extremely disconcerting, there is a risk that if you don’t have at least some build up to the inciting incident that people just won’t care when it happens.

As such, I keep coming up with an outline that is structurally pleasing but a real bitch to figure out how to make interesting enough to not only get people to the inciting incident but to serve as the cornerstone of the broader novel. But that’s what they pay me the big bucks for, I guess.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The chatbot revolution is upon us and the Far Right is already staking out its talking points for the coming battle royale over the idea of chatbot “bias.” As chatbots grow more and more the center of human existence — because we’re all very lazy — the more people like malignant Canadian and faux-intellect Jordan Peterson will whine and complain about their “woke cancel culture mob” biases.

America’s era of hyper-partisanship has reached the point where even the very idea of equitable — if not objective — truth is considered an attack on one side or the other. To use the pet grievance of the fucking MAGA Nazi cocksuckers, if a chatbot doesn’t spit out a very narrow answer to “What is a woman?” then they scream bloody murder that they’re being “oppressed.”

All of this raises an interesting issue — it seems as though we’re in a sprint to see if we live in a Tech Bro dystopia or a government-mandated MAGA Nazi one. I totally validate the notion that members of the “woke cancel culture mob” don’t exactly help the cause of liberal democracy by having a very strict orthodoxy, but I’m of the general opinion that such abuses are the result of a very broken political system.

If we had the politics of a functioning liberal democracy the question of “what is a woman?” would be figured out pretty quick through consensus and we could go back to more important things like addressing income inequality.

But, no. It serves the overall aims of the MAGA Nazis for American politics to be completely broken and, as such, we’re fucked. Totally, completely fucked. We’re careening towards a very dark future where very soon “chatbot bias” will join “critical race theory” as something that is used as a political football whenever the MAGA Nazis need to juice the base before an election. The intellectual framework for this to happen is already all over Twitter. MAGA Nazis are coming for chatbots and their “bias” and it’s going to be a very nasty situation in the context of a potential “Petite Singularity” during the 2023 recession.

Anyway. I don’t write for Slate or VOX. I don’t know anything and don’t have a received English vocal fry in my videos.

Am I Too Bonkers To Get A Book Deal?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m of an age when I have to reflect on what I have — and haven’t — done with my life. And I also have to admit that obviously I can come across as something of an eccentric. Or, to use the phrase the late Annie Shapiro used on me when we at the height of our “divorce” over the fate of ROKon Magazine, I’m a “delusional jerk with a good heart.”

So me being bonkers combined with my age and general lack of having done anything with my life since I left South Korea a long, long, long time ago really is beginning to eat away at me as I realize I really do have a shot at writing a novel good enough that it deserves a book contract, all things being equal. But things aren’t all equal.

I’m a drunk, bonkers old man (in relative terms) that literary types (apparently) are unable to take seriously. How do you fix those problems? Of course, if I found any success, all my eccentricities would be quickly re-defined as “endearing” and “interesting.”

But there are no assurances of success ever coming my way and I have to prepare for that possibility. And, yet, this novel project is existential for me. Not only does this give me something to think about besides my inevitable demise one day, but I am innately creative enough that I have a lot of drive to be creative for the sake of being creative.

While there’s life, there’s hope — and creativity.

A Second Life For ‘Babylon?’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even though I walked out just about at the 80% mark because the plot had become way too trite for my tastes, I really did enjoy Babylon. It was very much a spiritual successor to “The Wolf of Wall Street” in the sense that if you liked one movie you are very likely to enjoy the other.

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

So, what happened?

What did the movie bomb so bad?

I guess marketing? But from the generally positive reactions to the movie I’m seeing from the hip-central that is Tik-Tok….I think you shouldn’t count Babylon out just yet. It’s possible that at some point the film will organically grow in popularity to the point that 20 years from now we’ll all assume it was a popular movie when it came out when, in fact, it definitely was not.

I don’t know when or how this transformation in fortunes might occur, but I do think that once people can watch the movie in the luxury of their own homes and it will likely grow in popularity. At least to a limited extent.

The movie is too good for it to be forgotten. It’s possible — not probable — that it might be a lot of Oscar nominations and maybe wins that ultimately save Babylon from itself.

On A Macro Basis, America Is Fucked

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Macro historical events are extremely difficult for the average person to process in real time. If you were living through WW2, you might have some general sense of the historical narrative happening around you but it wouldn’t be until it was all over that your mind could give any of it value.

The same with what’s happening with the United States at the moment.

We’re lurching towards some sort of climax around late 2024, early 2025 but at the moment none of us really know what that climax might be. Will we have a civil war or will we simply slip peacefully into autocracy? Or is even possible that we all may be punked by history and we manage to punt all of our macro problems down the road one more election cycle.

At this point, we’re too far out and I have no idea.

I have a hunch, but nothing set in stone that I really believe is going to happen one way or another. I say this because there remain way too many variables. Will Biden run again? Will DeSantis beat Trump? And if he does, will Trump bounce to the Patriot Party?

All of those things, and more, are very much up in the air at the moment. I generally believe at the moment that we’re going to slip peacefully into some sort of autocracy — be it Hungary-style or Nazi Germany style — and that will be that. Nothing will change at first, but soon enough the United States will no longer be a traditional Western democracy and millions of smug very online wealthy Twitter liberals who are the prime audience of Crooked Media podcasts will flee to the four corners of the globe.

Or not. I just don’t know yet. But I do think that the next 18 months or so could be very, very bumpy because of how many people the Republican House intends to impeach, if nothing else. Republicans just can’t govern and much of 2023 Republicans are going to do everything in their power to prove that they have no policy agenda other than riding the culture wars to ultimately seizing power and establishing permanent white Christian minority rule.

Time To Be Methodical

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even at this late date in the developmental writing process, I sometimes feel I have no idea what I’m doing. Sometimes, it feels like I invest a lot of energy into something and when it’s all over everything has collapsed and I’m back to square one.

As such, I think I’m going to try to be as careful and methodical with writing this second draft as I can be. Rather than rushing into things and potentially writing crap that will turn beta readers off, I’m going to really think and feel as I write this second draft in an effort to produce the best copy possible.

I’m so close to producing a good-to-great story I can taste it. But I really need to be at the top of my game each time I actually sit down to write. A lot has changed already with this second draft to the point that I don’t want to screw things up by writing what is essentially a really good first draft.

Anway, I’ve learned I produce my best copy when I don’t stress myself out too much. I may try to “graze” reading some in between developing and writing each individual scene.

A Storytelling Structure Deck Of Cards Moment…Then Recovery

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but I was facing a complete story structure collapse of this novel over the last 24 hours. Something dawned on me that forced me reimagine the first act on a structural basis to the point that I was kind of sweating it there for a moment.

But after a few hours of hard work, I managed to revolve the issue. I have come out the other side of this particular storytelling disaster with a much stronger, cleaner story. The problem was I don’t have a reader to help guide me through the internal logic of the story. I was so wrapped up in a particular set piece I had come up with for how a certain event occured, that I missed sight of how important it is to make the heroine the center of the story.

Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t worth it to defy logic so force a secondary character to be the one to do something that good storytelling would manadate the proganost probably should do.

I also really have a problem with my POV characters being way, way too passive in any particular scene. They keep reacting to events, rather than driving the plot — and the scene — along. If had a wife or a girlfriend to serve as my Reader I think this whole process would have gone by a lot quicker and been a lot more stable.

But, lulz, I have no friends and no one likes me. Wink.

Anyway, the story has its sea legs again. I hope. At least, I have a better sense of the new iteration of it gong forward.

Working On Character Development In Second Draft Of My First Novel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I’m really focusing on when it comes to this novel is fleshing out my characters. I have been so obsessed with plot that I have woefully neglected character. In fact, I think it’s how threadbare my characters are is the reason why my alpha readers haven’t finished the novel — they just don’t care.

With that in mind, I’m trying to build out a little bit of a “story before the story” that would give people some reason to invest in my heroine before the story begins. Hopefully — hopefully — this will be enough for them to actually care about the words on the page to the point that when I go through the beta reader process that readers don’t get bored.

I feel a bit sheepish that it’s taken me this long to realize the importance of character in writing this novel. Character and plot, at least in my own mind are kind of fused together and it really shows if one or the other isn’t developed and interesting.

As such, even though I pretty much recently finished the first chapter of the second draft, I am back to square one. I am trying to be as methodical as possible in fleshing out the individual characters in the novel so they’re engaging and interesting and you care when they begin to interact with events.

One thing I also have to work on is making my characters a lot less passive. That’s been a real problem for me. To the point that I will suddenly start when I realize that my heroine isn’t driving the plot, but rather reacting to it.

A lot of this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I wasn’t developing and writing it all in a vacuum. But dem’s the breaks. I can’t help who I am and I can’t help my lot in life at the moment.

People Continue To Think We’re Going To Have Another Civil War

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If my Webstats are any indication, a lot of people have come to believe that the United States is ripe for another civil war. At the moment, I lean towards believing this is not the case, especially if Ron DeSantis — or someone like him — is the Republican nominee.

But as long as Trump is a viable political force, there is the chance he, unto himself, could provoke a civil war. It could be that his historical purpose is ultimately not to just wear down democratic norms to the point that someone like DeSantis can finish our transition into autocracy, but to be the individual that literally destroys the United States by causing its collapse into Red and Blue.

I know how hysterical that sounds, but given Trump’s tendency to say the quiet part out loud and his very radical proposed second term agenda anything is possible on that front. It could be that Trump won’t even have to cheat that much in 2024 — it will be very similar to 1860 in the sense that Blue States, rather than Slave States will feel that their political foes are so politically ascendant that they have no choice but to attempt to leave the Union.

I only suggest such a thing because in my personal life, within my own family, macro trends are beginning to interfere with my ability to have any sort of political debate with people I disagree with. There is a real rage within the Red movement and if Trump’s radical second term policies are enacted, the country could collapse into two warring states because Blues begin to equal the rage of Reds.

This is all very speculative. Again, a lot hinges on Trump. If he’s out of the picture for some reason, then well, lulz, the chances of a civil war are significantly lower — if none existant.

We still have a long time between now and when all of this might happen, which would be between Election Day 2024 and Certification Day 2025. Most of the Biden Administration may be impeached by a Republican House, which will only serve to enrage Blues and, as such, when the time comes they my be primed and ready for a “National Divorce.”

Was It Something I Said?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to plow my way towards finishing the second draft of my first novel and as such I continue to dwell on why literary types don’t want to work with me — even if I’m willing to pay them. I suppose this fact goes hard against my self-perception and makes me question if they see something about me that I don’t.

You would think that being in the liberal arts that literary types would find me particular brand of colorful personality endearing and interesting. But, as it is, I may come across as overbearing and maybe a little bit creepy? And, yet, I honestly struggle to see how that is the case.

I have done everything in my power to come across as “normal” as possible but I am shocked at how quickly literary types have been dismissive or even snooty towards me when I ask them for help.

I suppose should I ever become any sort of success that, by definition, the very elements of my personality that they find so “distasteful” will be seen as intriguing and interesting. But I have to become successful first for that to happen and for that to happen…I need the assistance of the people who think I’m a creepy weirdo. Or, at least, their help would definitely speed the process up.

But all is not lost. This novel project is improving a great deal. I just have to believe in myself. Wish me luck.