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Well, I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m having trouble finishing my second novel. It’s been months since I worked it for any decent length of time and now I’m almost afraid of touching it and messing up what’s already written. Plus, each time I sit down to work on it I have to reread 65k words to get caught up with what’s going on, as well as to get into the character voice again. By the time I’ve read all that I’m out of energy to start writing. So I’ve hit a bit of a wall.

Now, the way I like to solve problems is with creative solutions that set up self-perpetuating systems, rather than solutions that rely on constant vigilance and unbounded effort. That is to say: I don’t like forcing a stuck door every time I want to open it. I’d rather take some time to study why the door is sticking and learn how to re-hang or trim the door so it opens smoothly thereafter.

Right now, for me, sitting down to work on my novel is forcing a stuck door. It takes too much effort and is a task that can only be performed via sheer willpower, which isn’t an easy thing, nor do I feel results in good writing. So I need a brainhack. I need to figure out what’s causing my stuck door and figure out how to rehang it to get back on track. I have a method that I plan to try. I don’t know if it’ll work yet, but it’s worth a shot and anything should be more effective than continually trying to force a stuck door. This post is a description of that method. It’ll take a bit to lay it all out, but once it’s done I’d like your input. If you’ve tried anything like this I’d like to know how it worked for you.

So, I’m a tech writer at my day job. This means that I regularly dip my fingers in lots of pies: graphic design, marketing, writing, training, web development, business development, and even a little light coding on occasion. I used to use a programming idea when I was teaching in grad school to teach students a problem solving method. The writing method in this post, what I like to call “Iterative Novel Development,” is also the result of adapting a programming technique to another field, in this case: writing novels.

Sometimes, when developing programs, there is a clear roadmap from the beginning. This is ideal. But sometimes when developing a program there is only a general idea of what needs to be accomplished and it’s up to the programmer to take that idea and translate it into exact instructions for the computer to execute.

In the latter case it’s sometimes necessary to sit down and plan all the features from the beginning. However, on other occasions it’s best to take the boiled down, core functionality of the program and develop that first, get it running and working, and then add more features on top. This method can cause some messy hacks if the initial code isn’t well written to begin with, or if too many “out of scope” features are crammed in later. But in general, developing something and making sure it works at each step is a better idea than trying to write a bunch of interdependent code to support all the features from the get go and then finding out it doesn’t work when it’s all linked together.

This is the idea: the idea of developing a program, getting the core working, and then adding more features. This is a method I’d like to try to develop a novel. I think it’ll be a successful brainhack to finishing the novel. Here’s my reasoning:

I’ve spent some time examining my stuck door on this one. First, I needed to answer why I don’t sit down to work on the novel like I sit down to work on other projects. That one is pretty easy to answer: I’m no longer excited about it. The magic is gone. There’s no joie de vivre. It’s old hat. I’ve solved all the problems in the story in my head and so all I have left to do is write it down and that’s the boring part. That’s an issue.

Now, before you protest (and I can already hear, even over the internet, the vacuuming breath intake that comes right before a lecture), I know that a good part of writing is ass-in-seat, pound it out, get it down, look up after the dust settles. There’s no other way to write a book than to sit down and type and type and type. I know that. That’s not a problem for me. I regularly write 10k+ words a week of documentation at work. (Hell, look how long this post is already and barely anything has been said.) Sitting down and pounding it out isn’t an issue for me.

I also hate hate hate the idea that an “artist” is this sensitive thing that only creates art when the mood takes him and the weather is right and he’s not hungry or thirsty or in a fragile emotional state and the Cubs are winning and it’s the 17^th Friday of the year and all the other bullcrap things that need to be on that list to get the project done. Besides, writers aren’t “artists.” Writers tell stories and solve problems. That’s not a sensitive emotional thing, even if the story is about a sensitive emotional thing. Writing is about calculating the best way to manipulate the reader into the desired emotional response. That’s science type shit, cloaked in the guise of art.

So believe me when I say that my stuck door here isn’t that I’m a sensitive artist who needs the stars to align to finish a project. However, I do need to be interested in it (or be getting paid). I need to have problems to solve and goals that are possible to complete quickly. I’m a gamer, too. Maybe games ruined me for this. Or maybe I like games because games operate in the way I need to work. I suppose it can be both. Can’t it be both?

So now I’m left with this: my stuck door is due to a lack of interest in the project. My only real motivation here is “finish the work” which is enough motivation for ass-in-seat of about 800 words every two months. That’s not a good timeline to finish the work in the next decade, let alone in the next year. Not to mention that the writing suffers because those 800 words aren’t in the correct voice, since it’s hard to pick up the correct voice for the character after a two month break.

So I know my stuck door is a lack of interest in the project for its own sake. I need to figure out a way to inspire interest in the project so I can get ass-in-seat and pound it out the remaining 30k words to finish the story and what I intend to be a 95k word book. That’s the problem I need to solve.

I’ve decided to test if a technique adapted from programming is the best way to renew interest in the project. I don’t know that it will work, but it’s worth a try to get this thing in the shipping bin.

Sometimes, when developing a program, first I’ll develop the minimum functionality and get it working. At that point, the project is complete. I experience the rush of finishing the project because I’ve created a working program. I like to use a Swiss Army knife as a metaphor for this. I have a Swiss Army knife with only a blade, but it’s useable as a tool. I’d done my job and I get the rush of completion after a minimum time investment. The other advantage, since the core didn’t take tons of time to develop, is that it’s easy to see if the program sucks. If I’d waited until I spent all the time adding all the features and fringe-scoped features that crept in before I actually got the program to work, and the program sucked, I’d have wasted tons more time. So I develop each section at a time, get it working, experience the rush, and then move on to the next feature.

This is a good method because my Swiss Army knife is useable from very early on in the process. It always has a blade. Later I can add a bottle opener, a file, a saw, scissors, and all the other features I want to add. Each feature is a new project that doesn’t take much time to develop. Each time a feature is added the program is complete and I experience the rush.

Of course, there can be issues that I have to be aware of as I develop. One: even though the project is complete after every feature, I have to be mindful as I develop that later I will probably want to add more features. This means writing code that is as general and expandable as possible as I go, otherwise I will run into issues as I continue to add features. Two: there is a max limit to how much a program can be expanded from a core, before the core must be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. This is okay with a small program, but can break the project if the scope grows too large.

Still, these issues can be mostly overcome with thoughtful programming and a firm stance against too much or the wrong kind of feature creep.

So I’d like to adapt this iterative programming method to writing a novel. Obviously this method isn’t needed for short stories or other projects that can be finished using the brute force (start to finish) method in one or two sittings. But for novels that require months of continued and renewable interest, this could be a good method to ensure that the zeal is refreshed on a regular basis by completing waypoints.

I imagine it would work something like this: write a first draft of the novel that is split into several chunks, whether it is chapters or sections or whathaveyou. Make each chunk one to two sentences long and tell the whole story of the book. My current novel is planned to be about 30 chapters and I’m sitting with a blinking cursor at chapter 22. Rather than trying to brute force chapter 22, I should write one sentence for chapter 22 and then move on to chapter 23. I’ll write one sentence for 23 and then move on to 24, etc.

Rather than think about this as an outline, which is what it seems to be at first glance, it seems better to think of each of these one sentence chapters as completed chapters, or at the very least, containers for chapters. Once they are done I’ve finished my book and experienced the rush of completion. Now it’s time to move on to iteration numbero dos.

In the second iteration I’ll take each of my one sentence chapters and make them into several paragraphs that expand what happens in those one-sentence events. I plan to think about this like I’m zooming into Google Earth. I start with a chapter that is the whole planet. On the second iteration my goal isn’t to now be able to read the writing on the newspaper held by the guy on 5^th Avenue in NYC. My intention is to zoom into a country, maybe. I’m not even ready for cities yet on this iteration.

Keep in mind that this is writing that is telling the story, not providing a framework to use to build the story, like an outline would be. I want to make sure that when I’ve finished iteration two that the story is again complete. I’ve added a bunch of features, but I haven’t broken the story or left parts where the story cannot be understood or suffers. This is very important. The story must be a usable Swiss Army knife at the end of each iteration.

Once iteration two is complete, I’ll move on to three, and four, and as many iterations as it takes to build in all the features I want. I suspect that each iteration will be easier than trying to develop the story from beginning to end via brute force. It’s much, much, much easier to flesh out a scene to get it to do exactly what I want it to do if I have a clear objective in mind before I finish the scene. It’s just like writing a function in a program. I know want a function that does a specific task. That’s the hard part. Now all I have to do is break that task down into specific steps for the computer to execute. It’s just logic and science, baby.

It can be the same with a scene. If my first iteration leaves me with a chapter 22 that says: “While looking for a job, Simon finds a local newspaper with an announcement that Lucian is coming to town for a book signing. Simon decides to visit Lucian at the book signing.” This works as a chapter because it tells the action, following from the previous chapter and leading into the action of the next chapter. In iteration two I can zoom in on the individual elements a little. Depending on if visiting Lucian at the book signing is in chapter 22 or in 23, I can start writing paragraphs to flesh out my scenes. I’ll have a paragraph wherein Simon is looking for a job through various methods and finds the ad about Lucian’s book signing. I’ll have a paragraph about Simon traveling to the book signing and thinking about Lucian. Finally, I’ll have a paragraph describing the book signing. Chapter 22, which was two sentences, is now three paragraphs and is feature complete. I’ll move on to Chapter 23, then 24, and on until the end.

Once I have all the chapters complete in iteration two I’ve finished the novel again. In a newly started novel (mine isn’t, but assume it is for this napkin math example), I’ve now taken my novel from 600 words (30 chapters at twenty words per chapter) to 9000 words (30 chapters at 300 words per chapter). Again, my novel is complete and I experience the rush of completion. I have a short story if I want to stop here. But I don’t. I want a novel with all the trimmings.

So on to iteration three, where I’ll break down each scene into sub scenes. I can break down the paragraph that broadly described the book signing into the needed elements: a paragraph explaining something weird Simon was thinking about in the parking lot, the people Simon noticed while standing in line during the signing, the brief conversation Lucian and Simon had during the signing where they made plans for later, the activities Simon did while waiting for Lucian to finish, the longer conversation Simon and Lucian had after the signing, and what Simon did once he came home from the book signing.

Since each expansion has a clear objective, these are much easier to writing than writing a scene with no clear objective. I know the entrance conditions of the scene (the state of the characters, the state of the plot, the state of the relationships, etc.) and I know the exit conditions (what changed in the scene, and how it changed). Now the only problems I have to solve are small, simple steps describing the exact method of what changed and how, or description problems (what are some thoughts Simon might have about standing in line? How would he express them?). This is much easier and allows me to control the pacing of the scene very precisely.  Since each node can be zoomed into (but not every node is necessary for zooming), more detail can be added with each iteration, until all the needed detail is in the story.

For the record I’ll restate that I haven’t used this method to write a novel, only brainstormed about how the method might work. But already I’m aware that I must be mindful of a few things as I write using this technique. One: each iteration will take more time than the last. The first few will be quick and easy. The later iterations will take longer. But, since the story is complete at every step, I think the excitement of adding more features will prevail over the additional time each iteration takes. This is something I plan to dispassionately observe when using this method, so I can see how it functions in practice.

Issue two: the first iteration will be dreadfully important, since it will be very difficult to change the story once the first few iterations are complete. Changing the story in the middle will require scrapping large blocks of content that’s already written. This needs to be avoided. It’s something I’m very frightened about. In general I’m not the type of writer who changes things midstream – I usually have the broad strokes mapped out in my head before I begin, but it does happen. For a writer who writes to “figure out the story” as she goes, rather than “tell a story” that’s in her head, this method would not work because of this immutability.

However, I feel like this issue can be minimized by writing a quality first iteration. Once the first iteration is done, the story can be examined for suck. If it sucks, I plan to change the first iteration before moving on, or scrap the whole thing. In a way, the first iteration is the story prototype. I stand by the notion that it’s impossible to determine if an unfinished story sucks, so a complete draft, even at 600 words, is needed. This is the first iteration.

Issue three: finally, it’s also necessary to be aware that if you are the type of writer who starts a story without knowing the ending, a writer who is writing the story to tell yourself the story as you write, this method seems very dangerous to the completion prospects. I’ve found that writers who write that way have a hard time finishing a story once they know the ending, unless they are within shooting distance of the ending and can brute force the writing of it. If this type of writer sorts out too much too soon, there is a weird thing that happens in the brain, this idea that the story has already been told somehow, and interest is lost in the story. I’ve seen this happen with people who talk about their novel too much, too. They tell the story while explaining the novel to people, and then have less interest in writing it down. This iterative method could be disastrous for that type of writer, since the complete story is told in the first iteration, the mystery is solved, and there is less reason to expand and add more features to the story.

So that’s the idea and I’m going to give it a shot to finish my second novel. Since I already have 65K words brute forced up to this point, I’m only going to try iterative novel development on the remainder of the story, rather than the whole thing.

I am aware that it may be easier to iterate the remainder of the story, since I already have a firm grasp on the characters and plot, than it would be begin iteration from the beginning. This may mean that when starting a third novel I should brute force the first 20k words while the excitement alone is enough to carry me, so I can get a firm grasp on the characters and plot, and then iterate from there. It’s something to be tested in the future.

Gosh. That took awhile to write. It probably took awhile to read, too. Now that it’s all out: has anyone used a method like this to write a long form work? How did it go? If you haven’t used it, what problems or advantages do you see with this method? Do you use something similar to this? Or do you use something else? If this isn’t your writing process, what is your writing process?

Please let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

So here’s a short description of the story (which incidentally is kind of important to the story… probably should have incorporated it into the body of the text, in fact); and then…  Well…  When you’re ready.

While the impossibility of describing anesthetic dreamscapes occupies the uneasy mind of an anonymous narrator, he is fortunate to have someone patiently waiting by his side for him to wade through the impenetrable metaphors that keep him from sustaining consciousness.

Download “Dream Transcription” (PDF)

I’ve collected Legos on and off since I was a kid, castles mostly, although I dabbled in the town, space, and pirate themes a little. When I was a kid my favorite thing to do was build castles and spend hours playing with them, inventing stories as I went, playing out new “episodes” with none of the adult terror of losing a good narrative to the ages. I didn’t need to write it down. I didn’t need to preserve it. Play was the end goal.

Now, as an adult, I enjoy building the sets and posing the mini-figures in battle scenes, but I don’t invent stories with them the way I used to. For one, it feels a bit silly to do the voices, but also there is this strange sensation that giving the mini-figures names and back stories somehow limits their possibility. It gives them a mythology that I’m either forced to preserve or continually revamp. I am never satisfied.  So I refrain from that. I resist the temptation, though sometimes it’s difficult. It’s a bit awkward to admit strong opinions and feelings about little plastic blocks, but there it is.

Lego Diorama Plan - click for full version

What I do enjoy, though, is building a world with them, creating a scale that allows for many different possibilities. Two years ago I planned a huge Lego Diorama, an epically scaled display that would incorporate my favorite Lego castles and something akin to war gaming terrain: Styrofoam mountains, rivers, and fields, covered in plaster of Paris, and painted. The thing was epic – 3 feet by 12 feet, with very rough plans for expansion into a 6 foot by 18 foot version.

Sorry for the awful iPhone picture, this is the only picture I have of it.

I even started building the first section of the thing, but decided to abandon it when I moved from one apartment to the next – aside from feeling very “adult” at the time, which always causes a purge in everything but “serious” creative things (which is a shame), this type of hobby is simply unsuitable for apartment living. I need a house with a basement, which is still a number of years away. So when I moved I tossed the thing into the dumpster. All I have left is a few pictures of my progress.

Still, I often think about it, with conflicted emotions, almost like one would think about an old girlfriend or missed relationship. It’s bittersweet, in an awkward way that you can’t really share with anyone else.  Certainly you can attempt to explain it, but no one ever understands. It just comes out sounding dumb or overly sentimental.

But lately I’ve been wondering, trying to sort out why this idea, this world building, these little plastic figures and bricks and castles matter so much to me. As a rule I hate the fantasy genre. It seems so stale and predictable to me, all those swords and spells that just can’t evoke any narrative magic. But Lego castle is still my favorite genre. There’s that quandary, too.

A long time ago, when I barely started writing here, almost two years ago now, I wrote about “universes.” Not the star-filled thing we live in, but universes in the world-building sense, the kind of universe someone would mean when they said something like “the Star Wars universe” or the “Lord of the Rings universe.” My complaint was that there is a certain point, once a story had been mythologized into “cannon,” that imagination and possibility is severely limited. After that, I had no interest in reading yet another story about Luke Skywalker’s adventures. I knew what he was capable of, and what the “universe” was configured to support, plot-wise.

That idea translates into my fear of giving my Lego mini-figures back stories or a permanent narrative arc. I don’t want to think of the gold-crowned king who came with my big grey castle as “Harold, the King of Mystasia.” Or whatever. I don’t want to know his personality, because it makes it less malleable. I would rather build the little plastic dudes a world where they could be anything I wanted them to be, at just that moment. Capture scenes, rather than characters and “lore” (god, I have such a powerful distain for that word as applied to the fantasy genre).

But could this characterlessness, this world building idea, still be applied to written narrative somehow? Could you write a good book or story with this as a driving force, building a loose structure but no specifics? I’m not sure. Good stories are usually about tying down the details of who the characters are, providing them with limits in hopes that they can overcome those limits. Would a story that was all action and no character be incredibly dull? Hemingway seemed to pull it off, sometimes, writing stories that were mostly just facts, but there was still some characterization there, too, not to mention that his stories took place in our world – he didn’t need to define the countries for readers. We understand the factions.

Okay, so my buddy and I might have actually played Brikwars one time. http://www.brikwars.com/

Now, mini-figures are pretty small. They have little painted faces and limbs with a single joint and holes in their feet so you can stick them to things. They are viewed by us as though they are small, insignificant things. To them we are gods. It’s funny, because some writers consider themselves gods of their own worlds, as well, but these writers still learn about their characters lives, create details for them, humanize them. Writers bring themselves down from heaven to interact with their characters.

But could it be done another way? Could the scale of the story be pulled backwards and upwards until the level of characterization was no more than mini-figures? Would that ruin the story? Could you write adventure or tragedy without major characters or “universe” building?

I don’t know.

But I’m curious to see someone try to tell a story without characterization, from a high, top-level view, with an emphasis on limiting the amount of details that removed possibility from the world. Is a story about “a knight” less interesting, inherently, than a story about “John Fighammer, Champion of the Kingdom of Nostro, Slayer of the Giant of Kroth, Weilder of the Basalt Battleaxe”?

My fear is yes.  My hope is no. Because I think there is something to this idea, that the addition of all those names and details and ridiculous “lore” takes something human from the characters that can’t be brought back, no matter how epic the world.

Of course, it could just be that most fantasy writers are hacks.

Hard to tell.

In a nutshell, the book’s thesis is basically this: In order to solve problems, societies must add complexity. Complexity is a valid method for solving problems, but increasing complexity comes with increasing energy needs.

Once a society is no longer able to sustain the energy costs of its level of complexity (i.e. when it reaches the unsustainable end of an unsustainable model) the society collapses. Tainter provides many examples of this model in previous societies including the Roman Empire. Specifically, he claims Rome collapsed because the level of energy and capital needed to maintain the empire was solved by the continual conquering of external societies. Once there was nothing close to conquer to acquire easy resources, the society became unsustainable and collapsed.

The idea the book presents fascinates me for several reasons, because the idea seems to easily extend itself into all complexities that could aptly named societies: personalities, gadgets, markets, businesses, and even our own current struggle with oil and energy in America. But the aspect that fascinates me most, as a writer, is narrative.

In this post I’d like to talk about the narrative as a society and see if it’s possible to apply Tainter’s ideas to building a functional narrative. I’d like to examine the idea of writerly resources, and also see if there are any lessons we can glean.

Why You Should Bother Reading This

But first, I’d like to get the “why” out of the way. (Feel free to skip to the next heading if the overzealous “why” doesn’t interest you.) Why apply Tainter’s ideas to an aspect of human creation that he did not intend? I absolutely loathe the tendency in literary theory to apply, with seeming random chance, the ideas of one thinker to a system of ideas for which those ideas were not intended.

There are so many dreadful examples of this type of thing in literary theory that I can’t even begin to address them all, but, in case you don’t know what I mean, the most egregious have titles like “A Marxist Application of Capital in Examination of Dr. Suess’ The Snetches” and “Horton Hears a Who: An Neo-ecological Critique in Seventeen Parts” and “The Lorax Versus Gwendolyn Brooks: A Jungian Microbattle” and so on. Obviously, these are all fictitious examples, but you surely understand the concept.

The problem with these types of analyses is twofold:  one – these types of articles are based on the understood premise that one must publish to gain and retain university tenure and one of the easiest ways to do this is by applying whatever thinker’s ideas happen to be in vogue at the moment to whatever fiction or nonfiction also happens to be in vogue at the moment, with the understanding that the combination of the two must not have been broached before. Of course, since the spread of the vogue is tumultuous, one is never short of topics. Whether this is a valid juxtaposition (aside from its use to build a career out of gibberish) is never considered.

Two, as an extension of one: these types of articles do nothing to extend human understanding of epistemology, literature, or anything else useful – they only do what they are intended to do, which it is to create a vortex of verbose verbiage so devastatingly complex so as to shame university colleagues to admit they had neither the time, interest, or capacity to delve into its dark, demonic depths to attempt to understand it, and will be happy thus far, to extend tenure if only, please, would the Professor kindly leave the room and never speak of the broken artifice of the system again. Or, at the very least, if it must be spoken of, maintain that the system is both a healthy and valid method for determining suitability for a teaching position at a place of higher learning and the apt self-aggrandizing pat on the backside in front of lesser-published colleagues.

So, why, then, knowing all that, must I persist in this seemingly random application of Tainter’s ideas to narrative structure if I’m not pursuing tenure and know that this post will be overlooked by 99.7% of the reader’s of this site because it also seems a dark, demonic vortex of verbose verbiage? To that I answer, with a bipartite bellow: “Screw you, you dissenting curmudgeons!” and “Well, I’m interested – please feel free to regard this as a type of mental masturbation in the worst possible way.”

But in all seriousness, I’m writing this because I believe there is actual gold to be mined here. There are lessons to learn and time to be stolen from writing fiction. And I am no one if I am not a writer who enjoys analysis, lesson learning, patronizing talk, and procrastination. So onward and upwards!

Narrative as a Society

With those shenanigans out of the way, we first have to examine narrative as a society. We need to determine whether this idea can function as an actual concept, not simply a metaphor that drops its screws and cracks once sat upon by a voluptuous mental concept (a poorly built chair under a fat guy, as it were). So is it? Can a narrative be looked at as a society?

Well, a society has many things: rules, people, a structured organization, a large number of dissenting parts sometimes working together and sometimes in opposition, a beginning and an end, a capacity for thematic ability (at least as reported by the media), and a system for resource management.

Narratives also have these things – rules for format and structure (don’t you post-modernists sass me now – even in your wacky BS exploratives you still create internal structure and rules, even if they are only internally consistent, not externally), characters, plots and subplots that sometimes work together and sometimes oppose each other, a beginning and an end, themes, and creation via resource management. So far, so good. We’ve passed the fat guy test, at least, and can happily move into further exploration – can Tainter’s ideas apply to narrative?

From here on in, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are willing to take my word on what it says (deity help you). If you’re the latter I’ll do my best to present his ideas with as much due diligence as possible, hoping not to misrepresent him in any fashion, with the exception of where it suits me to be polemical. If you have read his book and I misrepresent his ideas, feel free to call me out in any manner you see fit.

An Examination of Resources

The central tenet, as I understand it, of Tainter’s work is this: problem solving requires complexity and complexity requires energy.

Let’s take for an example a theoretical society that’s troubled by shit in the streets. They can solve this problem by adding a sewage system. However, adding a sewage system introduces complexity that requires energy: labor, capital, and the creation of some sort of regulatory body to manage the construction and maintenance of the system. If the society is able to sustain that level of energy, they can happily build a sewage system and reap the benefits. However, one of the benefits of a sewage system is the elongation of life, due to reduced disease.

Now, because members of the society are living longer, they have a new problem – they must solve the problem of a larger population of the elderly. They can solve this by building larger dwellings so old folks can stay with families, or retirement communities so they can live alone with the care they need, or by slaughtering everyone over the age of 65.

Separated from morality, these are all valid solutions, but each solution requires more complexity and energy, whether it’s more building materials, capital for some sort of social security, or the training of death-squads (not to mention an axe-sharpening program to sharpen their axes – they dull quickly). If the society is able to sustain the level of energy required, they move on, happy with their solution and onto new problems to solve. It continues until the society has introduced complexity but does not have the energy or resources to maintain that complexity.

Now, the main resource, or energy, as I see it, when it comes to building complex narratives is this: writer attention span. A writer can only build a narrative so long and so complex before she can no longer sustain the time and energy required to finish it. This resources contains all the constraints a writer must contend with, because they trickle down into all the aspects of writing a complex narrative: mastery of craft, mental attention span, time-management, monetary resources, artistic license, and everything else. With an unlimited amount of energy (understood to mean time, attention, and money) in the writer, a narrative of unlimited complexity can be sustained. Since this unlimited resource pool is a mere fantasy, not a reality, constraints must be introduced.

How to Structure a Narrative Based on Available Resources

The most obvious way to tailor narrative complexity is to put constraints on length. This is why so many budding authors are encouraged to begin with short-form narrative, such as the short story. Limiting the resources limit the complexity of the narrative to a sustainable amount – the hope is that the author will reach the constraints of the medium before exhausting all available energy (attention, time, money, etc).

This is, of course, assuming that the short story is compiled at a reasonable level of craft. A story can be anything, but remember, more complexity requires more energy, so the most ingénue authors should probably begin with one sentence stories. Flash fiction is the current term in vogue for this concept. Once flash fiction has been mastered, and indeed, this requires a mastery of sentence level grammar, pacing, and all those other tiny little rules that loom so monumentous on the dark horizon, other lengthier forms can be attempted.

That’s the idea, anyhow. But artificial constraints on length doesn’t really teach us anything about narrative structure, only narrative form, so perhaps it’s not the best place to limit our resources. We could, of course, focus on plot instead. Instead of limiting ourselves to 3000 words, limit ourselves to a single thread or plot, or two threads at most, and put upon ourselves the idea that every sentence in the narrative must advance either of those two threads – any sentence, or even word, that does not advance those threads must be trimmed so as to maintain sustainability. This is another obvious notion, once it’s considered.

So we have two limits so far – length and plot threads. Other constraints can also be applied – number of characters, length of scenes, length of sentences – aspects of the narrative can be limited forever until we can reach a sustainable medium. But how, exactly, does one determine what to limit? Maybe you’ve found no difficulty writing a 200,000 word magnum opus when given the chance, but the work never feels complete. Or maybe you can’t seem to write for more than 20 minutes without needing to eat, sleep, drink coffee, urinate, play with the thermostat, or see what the significant other is doing and whether she/he/it happens to feel particularly amorous at the moment.  What then?

The trick, I think, is to examine what exactly you were writing before your energy (attention) became unsustainable and simplify that aspect of your narrative. Please keep in mind that this does not have to be the last sentence you were writing, or even the last paragraph. The lesson to be learned from Tainter is that the issue is the problem that was solved that increased complexity to an unsustainable energy level. This is the thing that must be eliminated. Maybe this happened three pages ago when you introduced your third new character in as many pages and had to take a break because now all the characters are meeting for the first time and you can’t figure out how to make character three interesting. The issue is the addition of the character, not the meeting. It happened three pages ago. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be the character, it can be any of the constraints we previously mentioned or something else we haven’t considered.

Now, this lesson needs two important caveats that must be introduced right now, right before the protests comes tumbling out of your mouth. I can hear you mumbling under your breath already (or was that the cat in the other room? Can cats mumble? HEY! DON’T GET DISTRACTED!) – so I have to address these two things.

One, don’t use this idea as an excuse to not test yourself. That’s a gross misapplication. If you know that you’ve gotten messed up by adding a third character in the past, that doesn’t mean you always have to limit yourself to two characters. You don’t know with all certainly, unless you’ve performed extensive experiments, that it was the third character (and not just the third latte) that made your narrative unsustainable. Also, self-limiting in all circumstances is lame. Keep trying. Each narrative is a new society and you don’t know what limits that narrative has until you reach unsustainability.

Two – Tainter writes in his book that once a society has reached a level of complexity, even if that level is unsustainable, that the complexity can probably not be removed, because removing the complexity simply adds more complexity, which requires more energy, and speeds up the collapse of the society. What lesson can we draw from this?

Well, first we have to assume that he’s right. Second, we have to assume that he’s right even when applied to narrative as a society. Third, if we’re cool with those two assumptions, we should draw this lesson: finish the narrative as soon as possible.

The reasoning is this: societies become unsustainable (cue music: Danger Zone) before they collapse. The trick is to practice enough that you understand and recognize the threshold when your narrative crosses over into unsustainability and finish the narrative before that unsustainability requires the collapse of the narrative. There is a window there that can be exploited, and indeed, must be exploited with as much caffine, adderall, alone-time, and whatever else crammed into as short a timeline as possible.

Oh, and just in case you’re reading this, Stephen King, the Dark Tower series reached unsustainability at the beginning of book five, but you didn’t finish the narrative inside the important window, hence, the rest of the series sucked. I commend you for trying something absurdly grand, however, and I look forward to you trying again. Also, did you get the flowers I left on your doorstep, Stephen? I waited outside for three days, but left when I saw the cops coming. I hope you liked them!

Call to Action

Okay, let’s review, before this article becomes unsustainable, too. I’m in the window, folks. I’ve written this all in one sitting and my brain is starting to hurt, just a little. So let’s sum up, draw some conclusions, and get outta Dodge.

What have we learned here? Quick, let’s say it out loud before we get too distracted: one – narratives should be limited somehow to our level of sustainable energy. Two – we still need to determine the mechanism by which the unsustainable threshold can be identified so we can practice spotting it and know when to dial it back and finish the thing. Three – uh, is there a three?

Ummm…three…uh…crap.

My attention has just collapsed.

I haven’t done much woodworking, though I’m familiar with the general concepts and the tools. My old man is a carpenter, so he taught me the general stuff, and my step father growing up sold tools, so we always had equipment around to tinker with.

I decided to build a platform bed this summer because I’ve always thought they looked great – I like simple lines and clean woodwork – I’m not a big fan of fancy router techniques and antique-looking embellishments. Platform beds are simple – they almost have a Zen-like quality to them, and that’s an aesthetic that I dig, you dig?

The problem, of course, is that they are crazy expensive to buy for some reason, and on top of that, I couldn’t find one locally. Thus, I was faced with several options – spend 1500 bucks online (plus 300 bucks shipping), drive up to the nearest IKEA (4 hours away) with a borrowed truck to buy a crappy IKEA model, discard the notion altogether, or build my own. Obviously, building my own is what I elected to do. I wouldn’t really have a reason to write a post about just buying a bed, would I?

I live in an apartment, so I convinced my buddy to let me shanghai his newly-bought garage all summer long, for the price of helping him move into his new house. He agreed. I got started with the design.

This is only one quick sketch of the design, I didn't want to post them all. I coulda made better sketches, but it was just for me. I drew the whole thing out on my iPad, using a sketchpad program and a stylus. To help me design it, I looked at designs online, reverse engineering some and altering others. I knew I wanted my design to incorporate several things that made it a bit of a challenge – I wanted legs instead of the standard “smaller platform, then bigger platform on top” design – I wanted to be able to keep things under the bed. Also, because I read that mattresses need to breathe, I knew I couldn’t just build a solid top platform from plywood sheets – I’d need to leave air under the mattress somehow. Now, typically this isn’t an issue, since the box spring provides the necessary ventilation under the mattress, but I made things more complicated by deciding I wanted a low bed – that meant a supported-frame design instead of a rail-design that uses a box-spring. My mattress would sit right on the frame. It took a couple of hours of doodling on the iPad to get the design right. I ended up talking through it with my buddy once before completely retooling my design – the first would have cost over 300 dollars in lumber alone (not including hardware and finish) and would have been really overbuilt. The design I ended up going with is still probably overbuilt, but it’s better. In total I spent about 250 in materials for everything.

So, these aren't all perfect - a few things changed later. Once the design was done, we talked through the math and listed all the pieces and their measurements. In the end, our measurements for what we needed were spot on, with the exception of a few things – we originally started with the mistaken impression that the measurements marked on the racks were the actual measurements – 1″ by 8″ doesn’t really mean a 1 inch by 8 inch board – it actually measures out to a ¾ of an inch by 7 ¼ inch board. The measurements are based on the wood right after it’s cut while still wet, not the measurements of the wood after it dries, something that still pisses me off. I mean, I get it, but I kept forgetting it – so changes were necessary as the project went along to account for these slight discrepancies.

I dunno how this little flame head guy made it in here. Probably to explain the human torch reference later. Once the design was done, my buddy and I went to his father and borrowed his tools. I don’t have any tools of my own, with the exception of the standard “apartment” toolkit that includes a hammer and screwdrivers, so I needed anything I could get. In the end, my buddy’s dad didn’t have any high-end power tools (man, a router, drillpress, tablesaw, and mitersaw would have been awesome), so we elected to make do with simple tools – an old circular saw, a power drill, a hand saw, a plane, a hammer, a chisel, and a tape measure. Building it in this way taught me a bunch more about woodworking than I probably would have learned otherwise, since we had to come up with innovative ways to get the types of cuts we needed using these simple tools. This kit explains some of the design choices we made as the project went on – by this I mean that there were things that could have been mitered that aren’t mitered, but I’m okay with it. I like how it looks. After we got the tools, a trip to the lumberyard got us the wood and hardware we needed to get started. We didn’t buy everything all at once, but went back several times over the course of the summer to pick up additional materials. I chose standard framing 2×4′s for the main frame, since none of the frame would show on the finished piece, Douglas fir for the legs, since I could get a 4×4 and I wanted thick legs, and red oak for the outside of the bed.

Sorry for the terrible iPhone picture quality. We started with the legs. We wanted to notch the legs so the 2×4′s would rest into them and allow for additional support. This bed would need to hold itself, a mattress, and two people, so I wanted it to be as strong as possible. Cutting the feet with only a circular saw proved problematic – the blade only penetrated 2 ½ inches into the wood and we needed to go down 3 ½ inches – we made the cuts with the circular saw first and then finished the cuts with a handsaw. The end of the first real day of work saw us with only 4 finished legs – those alone took hours and hours of work. But hey, it was a start. And now I had all this wood, so I had to keep going.

It's a box! The next weekend we built the box. We decided to use bolts instead of screws to attach the box to the legs – this would make disassembly possible without damaging the wood, and it would also give a little play in the boards to make little adjustments to make sure the box was square. Again, we had a depth problem – we bought the longest drill bit that we could find, but we still weren’t able to get all the way through the 2×4 and leg in one go.

It doesn't look very flush here. We fixed that later. To solve this problem, we clamped the 2×4′s in place, drilled the holes in until the bit topped out, and removed the 2×4′s. From there, we finished the holes, crossing our fingers that we’d gone in enough to ensure straight holes. Our strategy must have worked – we had no trouble pushing through the bolts once the holes were drilled.

This joint isn't tightened yet - that's why it looks gapped. Note the sinks, though. As one final step before assembling the frame, we cleaned out sinks in the 2×4′s for the bolts. I knew I was going to cover the 2×4′s with red oak, so I needed the top of the bolts to be flush (or lower than) the 2×4′s. So we sunk them all before we put it together. Once everything was loosely together, we squared it before tightening down the bolts. You can easily square a rectangle by measuring from opposite corners and comparing the measurements. If the line from corners A to C is the same length as the line from corners B to D, you’re square. It’s a good trick for squaring large things. For us, it was the only real way to do it – we built this without a square (you can cringe if you want). The basic frame finished our work for that day. We were tired, sore, and covered with sawdust, so we started the grill, had some beers, and clapped each other on the back to congratulate each other for our overwhelming manliness. Surely, we were gods among men.

Frame on! (yeah, that was totally a Human Torch reference. yikes.) The next weekend, we built the inner frame. We flipped the whole bed over and used the floor to make sure our boards lined up. We cut four beams lengthwise – two measured on each side to line up so that half the board would be under the edge of the shelf that went all the way around the bed. Once that was done and screwed into the box, we added cross supports to support the mattress and keep the 2×4′s spread out. We assembled all this with 2 ½ inch screws and called it a day. Screwing all those screws took a long time. I was beat, but the internal frame was now finished, and I was all, like, yeah!

See the covering on the edge there? The next weekend we started adding the red oak covering. I wanted a screw-less look to the bed, which meant that all the sides had to be attached from the back. However, I also wanted to be able to disassemble the bed without unscrewing anything that I put into the hardwood. I was fine removing screws from the 2×4′s, but once a screw was in the hardwood, I wanted it to stay there. Because of this, I decided to use “L” brackets to hold on the sides, since I could take the screws out of the 2×4′s and leave the brackets attached to the hardwood if I needed to take them apart – I was concerned about disassembly because I was building this in my buddy’s garage and wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get it back to my apartment yet.

I'mma man who knows how to handle a chisel. To use “L” brackets, I needed to chisel down into the 2×4′s to leave slots for the brackets and make sure the sides and top shelves were still flush. Chiseling 12 channels for the brackets (3 per side) took awhile, but after it was done I was glad I’d gone that route.

You'd think because I do modest work that I'd be modest, but you'd be wrong. I'm awesome! I attached the “L” brackets to the backs of the hardwood sides and then down into the 2×4′s. Under each side, I also put two hidden brackets under the 2×4′s (not chiseled in), screwing them out into the sides and up to the bottom of the 2×4′s – this kept the boards from pulling out from the bottom. We put on three sides and called it a day. The next weekend we purchased the wood for the shelves and got ready to attach the last side (the top). This is where we ran into trouble when it comes to wood widths – I’d aligned the inner frame boards to fit 8″ boards, and found I actually had 7 ¼ inch boards. Not only did this throw off my total width by 1 ½ inches, it also meant that the inner sides of my shelves wouldn’t be supported. I was mad bummed, but I sat down and considered my options. I could put in a few small supporting blocks to support the edge of the shelf, but that still left me with an extra ¾ inch gap on either side of the mattress. With bedding added it probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but I plan to keep the bed for years and years, and I would always know it was built wrong. I knew it would always bug me. Aside from that, adding blocks to support the shelf would add extra weight to a bed that was already monstrously heavy, and I didn’t want to do that. On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly keen on taking the whole thing apart and trimming my top and bottom box boards down 1 ½ inches. Not only would that be a gigantic pain in the ass, I’d have to re-drill and re-sink the holes. That meant anything but a complete teardown wasn’t going to be feasible.

Here's a picture with the shelves just laying on the top. They aren't attached yet. But the rails line up, at least. It was a conundrum. But in the end, I decided I’d rather do it right. We spent the next couple of hours taking apart the bed, trimming the boards, re-drilling the holes, and reassembling the bed. The day ended in the exact same place we’d started, minus 1 ½ inches of width. I was bummed about the lost time, but I knew that it was better to do it right. The next weekend we finished building the bed. We cut and attached the final side, trimming out the corners so the top shelves would flush with the top side. I did it this way so there would be a small lip on the top edge of the bed to hold the mattress in place – I didn’t want it sliding around. This way there was a full ¾ of an inch lip all the way around to keep it in place – 3 sides from the shelves, 1 side from the top edge. After the top was in place, we attached the shelves by flipping over the bed and carefully aligning the shelves before locking them in place with more L brackets. Now the bed was built – but the next tasking was just as daunting – finishing. Good god, my right shoulder and elbow still ache thinking about it, even several weeks later. I planed all the corners and sanded all the exposed hardwood by hand, using a small hand plane and a sanding block. It took hours, I inhaled way more sawdust than is probably safe, and it was a painstaking job. But once it was done all the exposed hardwood surfaces were clean, slightly rounded, and baby-skin soft. That was a whole day of work, but since it was a long weekend, I was able to squeeze in another day. I came back the next day and swept the entire garage. Ideally I think you want to finish somewhere other than the place you build to minimize the chances of ruining your finish with sawdust, but I didn’t have that option, so I swept the place three times. Once that was done, I took the bed out into the driveway, swept all the sawdust off it I could, and spread out a plastic tarp so I wouldn’t stain my buddy’s garage floor. I brought the bed back into the garage and wiped down all the wood with tack cloth to make sure I got every bit of sawdust. The day before I’d bought stain and polyurethane and tested the stain on a small scrap of red oak before I started sanding. I okay with how the stain turned out (it was a little dark), but a little dismayed that the stain dried sticky somehow. So after seeing that, I went to the internet to learn more about stain. Apparently stain doesn’t work like paint – you spread it on, wait awhile, and then wipe it off. Luckily, the internet taught me that before I started on the actual bed, so, armed with knowledge, I set to work.

It's still wet here, but it'll be shiny like that once the finish is done. This was the first day my girlfriend actually helped work on the bed, so with two people starting at opposite corners, we were able to cover the bed in about twenty-five minutes. We took a break to let the stain set, then went back and wiped it all off. The color was good, but not quite dark enough, so we coated the whole bed again, let it set, then wiped it off again. This time, the color was perfect. We called it a day, satisfied that we were super awesome and no one was cooler than us, coz, really, we were so cool.

Top board is here, to keep mattress in. Also, note roll of mesh stuff in top left corner. Anyway, so that’s all that’s done so far. All that’s really left is the polyurethane finish coat and the metal mesh to support the mattress while still giving it a little flex and letting it breathe (man – how smart am I, man? Like whoa), which I will do tomorrow. I need to do some light sanding before the polyurethane in case the grain was raised by the stain (though it shouldn’t rise too much, since I used an oil-based stain, not a water-based stain. Then after a coat (or two, depending on how it looks) of semi-gloss polyurethane, I’ll staple on the metal mesh to prevent the mattress from falling through the holes. The mesh is kinda like chicken wire, but thicker and with square holes.

If I had a miter saw for everytime I wished I'd had a miter saw, I woulda mitered this corner. Alas. And then I’ll be done. I don’t want to disassemble the thing to get it home, so I’m going to spring for a U-haul and to bring it back to my apartment. Luckily, my apartment has a huge freight elevator (I measured to make sure it would fit in there – it barely will), so a furniture dolly trip later and I’ll have an awesome hand-built bed in my apartment to rock mah noise all night long (♫ all night long, all night ♫).

I totally designed and made this. All those grind marks and bad welds? That's on purpose. It's, like style, dawg. Also, it's the old bed that's not straight - not the headboard. I guess I still need to rig up a way to attach the headboard I built a few years ago, too. I was working in a metal shop over a summer and spent 8 bucks on metal and 20 bucks for the welder to put it together. It turned out pretty neat, though I need to re-coat it soon – the anti-rust coating is starting to peel off. I have to extend the feet into the middle somehow to attach the headboard – I have a decent idea of how I’m gonna do this – but then I’ll be all set up. Jeez – that’s the thing with projects, there are so many little details that come up as you go along – each time you think you’re close to done, there’s always more to do. And yeah, totally, I mean that with all the life-shaping gravitas that statement implies. Anyway, I’ll probably post again once the thing is DONE DONE and in place. Thanks for reading. And hey, if you want, drop me a comment and let me know what projects you worked on this summer. I needs ta know, yo. I need ideas for next year. -m. out.

perpetual autumn is about a married couple who learn a way to transition into Space-time 6, a reality that overlays our own (space-time four) with two more dimensions of time. After the transition they exist in all places and times at once. And yet…there is despair.

At its heart, perpetual autumn is a metaphysical romance. It was inspired by the video game, The Dig. If you’ve never played The Dig – go do it now. It’s in my top five games of all time and it’s available on Steam for just five bucks.

But anyway…

Download perpetual autumn from mispeled.net (PDF)

Download perpetual autumn from Feedbooks (mobile formats)

Read perpetual autumn on Scribd (HTML5 for web reading)

Thanks for reading!

But now it’s over – and after sitting down for an all day crunch session spent powering through the single-player campaign yesterday, I’d like to talk about the storytelling in Starcraft 2. There are some great moments and storytelling techniques in the game, but for the most part, the story and storytelling techniques are largely disappointing. If you haven’t played the single player campaign yet – don’t worry, I intend to keep this analysis spoiler free. I’m going to talking about the concepts, not the plot specifics.

So let’s start with what Starcraft 2 does well. There are some great techniques in the game that betray a real understanding of how gamers want to learn story in games.

The Good: Short, Punchy Cutscenes

First and foremost – the cutscenes are short, punchy, and don’t overstay their welcome. I know that some gamers love watching 30 minute cutscenes in RPGs, but most don’t – most are playing games to play them, not to watch them, and Starcraft 2 does a good job of getting gamers the plot and character information they need to know and letting them get back to the action.

The Good: Characters and Characterization

Starcraft does a lot with setting, mood, and nonverbal storytelling to get character details across without words. Instead of having a character saying, “I’m one brutal goddamn badass,” it’s shown through small actions instead: dark eyes in a cutscene, cigar smoking, facial expressions, etc. This is preferable – there are still so many games that forget storytelling in games is a visual medium – it’s not just about dialogue. The dialogue, for its part, is well done – filled with colloquialisms and interesting phrases – this is another plus. There are a few times where characters feel a bit stock, but the characters are pretty damn good for a video game.

The Good: Players Can Choose More or Less Story

Good God, I’ve been waiting for a game that did this effectively for so long, and finally Starcraft is an example of optional story done right. In between each mission players are sometimes shown mandatory cutscenes, but many of the cutscenes are optional – players can choose to talk to other characters in between each mission, or watch an ingame “news” segment, but they aren’t required to do this to still have a basic grasp of the story and the characters. If a player chooses, each mission can be started directly after the previous mission ends – all that optional story can be skipped. It’s about time that there was a game players could pick their level of immersion. Kudos, Blizzard. You did this right.

But now it’s time to talk about the flipside – there are a number of things I would have expected a game in development for as long as Starcraft  2 to have cleaned up, but these problems remain nonetheless.

The Bad: Nonlinear Missions Lead to a Weird Plot Arc

Many of the missions in the game, after the first few, can be undertaken in any order. This mechanic is fine – it’s worked in other games (like Dawn of War 2) – but for a game that really needs a consistent plot arc, it’s a poor choice. There are several subplot arcs in the game that take a few missions to complete, but the player can choose to undertake the missions interwoven with missions for other subplots. This is fine for the mercenary, go collect the Macguffin missions, but for missions that instill a sense of urgency (“OMG protect these people before they all die!”), it feels a bit silly to come back to them after taking a few side jobs.

Now, of course, the player can choose to power through and ignore the side jobs until the urgency is over, but this goes against decades of gamer logical progression. The side jobs are generally easier missions that give good upgrades, so doing them first allows makes the urgent missions easier. Plus, the way they are revealed to the player still gives the sense that missions revealed to the player first should be undertaken in the order they are revealed, so as to not get overwhelmed. Overall, it’s a poor mechanic that could have easily been remedied by allowing players to choose several mission arcs instead of individual missions. This would have made the plot hang together better.

The Bad: Not Enough Content? Hey – Throw in a Subplot

The other major problem with this choice is at least one major subplot with a player choice that doesn’t seem to matter all that much in terms of overall story – the subplot may carry to the sequels (via a save game or something) but it still feels strangely tacked on. Without giving too much away, I’m talking about the “Spectre” plot arc specifically. This arc only slightly impacts gameplay and feels like filler content. It doesn’t really fit into the overall story and just serves to compound the pacing problems brought on by a user-selected mission order.

The Bad: Mishandled Emotional Moments

This is a hard notion to discuss without spoilers, but I’m going to do my best. The plot mishandles several moments that could be interesting emotionally. It also relies way too heavily on a Macguffin that brings about a Dues Ex Machina ending in the worst way – instead of solving problems through character growth, the problems are solved by a particular item.

It’s strange, for a game that has great characters and great characterization, the characters don’t feel like they are fully explored in terms of their backstory and emotional reactions to situations. For a company that has created some truly beautiful emotion dilemmas in their Warcraft universe, I was disappointed that the story telling in Starcraft 2 didn’t live up. There are a bunch of missed chances for better character-driven story – the kind that elevates a cheesy plot to a good one – and I’m scratching my head as to why these opportunities weren’t exploited fully. I have specific examples for this, but I’ll save them for another post so as to not give away spoilers in this one.

So that’s the good and bad of the storytelling techniques in Starcraft 2, at least for the first installment. It’s a 3 part game, so maybe the story will get better as more expansions are released. But I’m not holding my breath.  The thing is, for as long as it takes Blizzard to release games, I should be salivating for more and cursing Blizzard for being so slow. I should be on the edge of my seat.

But I’m not really. In fact, I kinda don’t care. And that, really, is a huge mistake.

Not on trial here though. Come on. It's a metaphor.

In summer the need for genre reading grips me, stacks of fat squat books howling my name like newsprint-scented wolves. I love serious fiction. There are Great Books gathering dust unread on my shelf. But ultimately the call of the genre will get me, wrap me up in a quick-drawn world and plot-drive me where it will. The inevitability makes me wonder how bad a fate that is.

[Want to know what I mean by genre? Luckily I told you here.]

Most of genre is reading for entertainment—it’s choosing Saturday morning cartoons and blow-stuff-up movies instead of Citizen Kane or something poetic and subtitled. And let’s all say it together: “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

But literary empty calories do cost. When I’ve been reading genre, I speed through with barely a thought about whether I can trust the narrator, or whether all is what it seems—unless the author wants me to think something’s fishy, which is generally noted with a line like, “Samara thought something seemed fishy.” I don’t think about symbolism. The emotional weight of what happens to the characters doesn’t hit me—even if the murder victim is the sleuth’s dear ol’ grandma, I know she’s basically a blue-haired, peppermint-scented MacGuffin, nothing more than an excuse to push the plot forward.  I excuse clichés and flat characters and terrible writing with hardly a thought.

And then I find myself writing things like “with hardly a thought”—tied-up stiff phrases that mean next to nothing. It’s contagious. If you’re a writer, genre can cost more than time. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you’re an omnivorous reader, think of the bad reading habits genre forms—skimming, speed-reading, ignoring insignificant details, expecting side players to come from Stock Characters ‘R’ Us and avoid unnecessary movement. That hurts anyone who wants to appreciate what the written word can do for truth and beauty.

But there’s also something to be said for these plot-driven page-turners. Genre opens doors to other worlds, often wider and brighter-lit doors than the narrow crevices of Serious Fiction.

Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series of the 90s is definitely genre—but it’s edgy, political, and some of the best writing on contemporary African-American culture in the business. In 2000, Neely told Ms. magazine, “I thought I was writing a novel that happened to have murder in it… But when the book did so well, I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write.”

Science fiction genre entries usually involve ludicrous sexual politics and at least one scientific impossibility, but many books use the “speculative fiction” angle to tease out questions of morality and philosophy, or toy with the consequences of real developments. The Laws of Robotics are the classic example, but I’ve also read stories from midcentury discussing the backlash from an issue as seemingly modern as in vitro fertilization—before the first human test succeeded, of course. Then there are the books that blend mythology into their plotlines, passing on centuries-old folktales in a new guise.

As for romance, that behemoth of fiction sales, the genres within it break down in their own ways. But some of those bodice-rippers involve real history, accurate portrayals contemporary conditions and plenty of period research. Some are half travel log or Dirty Jobs episode. When the plotline and outcome of the story are basically a given, you’d better have some pretty great window dressing to control 60% of the fiction market. Legal and military thrillers, likewise, can use their platforms to educate as they titillate, competing between books for the most “authentic” issues as well as the most exciting.

And then there are the methods any decent genre writer has mastered—the kind of thing plenty of weightier wannabes could do well to learn. Pacing. Suspense. Tight plotting. Giving just enough of the big reveal to keep us one step behind the game. Those are not simple techniques, and yet read enough genre, and you can manipulate that familiar dance to whatever ends you can imagine. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose is a masterful exploitation of those cues—I really want to spoil it, but I won’t here. Read it.

There’s no point arguing, really. Genre is and undoubtedly will remain the silent bulk of books read and written, whether it’s classed as pure brain candy or some potentially redeemable sort of light snack. The pack is calling me regardless. But as I reach for my beach reads, I’m going to remind myself about all those mitigating circumstances.

Anybody have a recommendation?

Since then, I’ve come a long way – I’m using the program to lay out a comic book now and I use it to make all my book covers. Recently, Levi Montgomery even asked me to make a cover for one of his books and I used In Design for that, too.

Since I have at least a passing familiarity with the program, I thought I’d share what I know. This isn’t a comprehensive guide, just some quick tips to lessen the feeling of overwhelming awe the program gives you the first time you open it. Because, damn, it’s pretty complicated.

When you first open In Design you will be overwhelmed, especially if you’ve never used Adobe products before. The vast number is options is expected for a professional-caliber program, but luckily Adobe’s products have a great community – you can easily find any information you need with a little Googling. Beyond that, the real trick with learning any new software (or anything else) is to have a goal in mind before you start. When you’ve got a new project you need to lay out (like a book cover, for instance) – that’s the best time to start learning In Design.

Before you start, picture what you want in your mind’s eye or sketch it out on a piece of paper. Surely you will change your mind as you begin pulling it together, but this initial visualization will give you learning goals – if you want a drop shadow under your text, you know you need to learn how to do a drop shadow. If you want colored rectangles, you know you need to learn how to make colored rectangles. Coming up with a list of things you need to know, broken down into the smallest steps, is the best way to begin a daunting project.

Once you’re ready to start, open a new document and set up the size.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Paint or any other type of simple drawing tool before, at least some of the tools on the left side will be familiar to you – the brush and the rectangle tool and the text tool. That’s enough to get you started. However, be prepared for a bunch of different interface conventions that you’re not familiar with, especially if you routinely use Microsoft’s products. You can do all the same things you can do in other designing programs, but all the tools are renamed. Ladies and Gents, start your Googles.

Apparently you “Place” pictures, not “Insert” Them

If you’re designing a document that’s going to be spread over the web, especially for something as important as your book cover – use a picture you took yourself, or a picture you have rights to (as in, you paid for it or got it from a free photo website that has usage terms you’re comfortable with). For god’s sake, don’t just rip something off Google images. Now, with that in mind, there are times when Google images is useful, say, if you’re designing a concept draft or something like that. When I was putting together the first draft of Levi’s book cover, I ripped a picture straight off Google images for the concept. Once I found out he was happy with the basic idea, I found a created a picture I had actual rights to use. The lesson here: only use what you have rights to use.

Oh, and one more thing – inserting pictures into the document is under the “File” menu and it’s called “Place.” Don’t strain yourself for thirty minutes looked for the “Insert” command, because it’s not there. Adobe and Microsoft need to get together on this one and standardize some business, if you know what I mean. I mean BUSINESS.

Why won’t this damn picture just resize?!?!?!

One of the first major differences you’ll notice is that when you place a picture into the document, it comes with two outlines – a blue “cropping” outline and a brown “resizing” outline. I don’t know what these are really called, I just know how to use them. You can switch between these by clicking on the picture over and over until you have the one you want, but the important thing you want to know is this: if you want to drag and make the picture bigger, you have to make both outlines bigger. Or, you can make just the outside blue one bigger and then right click and “Fit Content to Frame.” But don’t get discouraged that it’s not as easy as resizing something in a program like Publisher or Paint. You’ve moved up now to the (East/West) side. Feel free to have more customization, effort, and the snobbishness to go along with those. You’re so cool.

Fonts and the People who Love Them

People who love fonts are called Fontophiles or Typophiles or some other word I can’t remember right now. And those people are crazy because they hate awesome fonts like comic sans and papyrus. Hell, I’m considering changing all the fonts on this website to be a combination of those two fonts, alternating every other word. It’ll be awesome. But anyway – font are kinda like pictures in that you can’t use some of them unless you pay, which is pretty stupid. But that’s something to be mindful of.

Second, fonts are really important – half of the time you design something, you’ll spend more time messing with the fonts as anything else. Luckily, In Design makes it pretty easy to flip through lots of fonts fast. Just put your text on the page, in a text box, in about the place and size you want it. Next, select the text and place your cursor up in the font box on the top menu. Then hit your up and down arrow keys – bam! Scrolling fonts.

Keep going until you find at least three you are happy with, then switch between those until you pick one you like. I don’t have time to talk about what makes a good font here, but know there are lots of rules or something. Go ask one of those fontophiles or just pick comic sans, which is the bestest font. God even wrote the Ten Commandments in it. In Hebrew. Like a billion years ago and comic sans has been ruling the house ever since.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Layers Panel

Now you have a bunch of pictures, colored rectangles, and text all your document. Stuff is all over the place, stacked weird and on top of each other and it’s pissing you off. Now’s a good time as any, I guess, to tell you about the Layers panel. The Layers panel is one of the main features that differentiate professional tools from amateur tools. By using the layers panel to create multiple layers in a document you can easily place an object or text on top of another object by simply putting it in a higher layer. Once you’re satisfied with the layout of a layer, that layer can also be locked.

A locked layer cannot be altered until it is unlocked, so you don’t risk accidentally screwing up your work. You can also layer objects inside a layer by selecting an object and using Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+], which will move things up and down inside a layer. It’s possible to use these “bring forward” and “send backward” tools instead of individual layers, but the visual advantage of seeing your layers in the layers panel makes your objects much easier to track. You can also name layers so you can see the ordering of your layers with a simple glance.

Man, I just said layers like a million times. I must have a lot of layers. I’m totally, like, deep. Like an onion. I also, make people cry, so that makes me even more like an onion.

Threading isn’t Just for Tailors Anymore

Aside from book covers, you can also use In Design to layout your entire book. It would be possible, I guess, to arrange the text on every single page by itself, but only if you felt like shooting yourself in the face with a rusty railgun. If you do, by all means, go do it, it sounds like a royal blast. But if you don’t, you can also lay out text using the Story editor and Threaded text tool, which will thread your text automatically between text boxes. Google how to do that – I’ll wait.

Links and Swatches are like Variables in Programming

The Swatches and Links panels are two of the the features that make In Design (and most Adobe products) more complicated than it first seems. These features act as menus that allow you to update all the pictures or colors in your document with just a few clicks, so they make a redesign of a document very easy and powerful. If you’ve ever used the Styles in Microsoft Word, these features work the same way.

If you place a picture in your document in several places and then decide to update that picture, updating it through the Links panel will update every use of that picture in your document. Similarly, using a Swatch to color several pieces of text or shapes makes it easy to change all the colors of those things by just changing the color of the selected Swatch. These things make it faster to quickly switch between different iterations and really speed up work once you get used to using them. Plus, Swatch is a really fun word to say. Go ahead. Say it out loud right now. I won’t tell.

HA! You did it! I lied! I’m totally gonna tell everyone!

Color me Medium (That’s, like, Pirate Talk! Arr!)

Whenever you’re designing a document – knowing beforehand if you plan to print the document or only view it on a screen is important, because the way colors are picked for both is different. Documents intended for print use CMYK colors and documents intended solely for onscreen viewing use RGB colors. There are slight differences in how they look on the screen, but it can make a major difference when printing. In a pinch, I usually stick with CMYK colors, since the Adobe algorithm for translating those colors into RGB for onscreen use is pretty good. The reverse, however, isn’t true. The other reason I stick with CMYK? I know it better. As more and more things move onscreen only, really it’s up to you. But you should still know the difference, just in case. If you want to know the science behind the two color schemes, go Google it. I’m not a textbook of uh…book learnin’…or whatever.

Noobin’ it up with Gangsta Flair

By now you have your book cover all laid out, in multiple layers, with cool fonts and pictures and it’s all in the color scheme you wanted and you feel really awesome. Except something’s missing. Your images all have white outlines around them and your junk is just laying there, all flat and boring on the page and you need it to really pop Pop POP, right? Right!

It’s time to add some flair. First, right click on those pictures, go to “Effects” and “Transparency.” Pick the “Multiply” mode. Make sure the “Preview” box is checked and adjust the slider. First, you’ll notice that all those white backgrounds on your pictures will go away. Second, you can fade your pictures in and out to make them like ghosts or something. Scary? No. Well, maybe SCARY AWESOME!

Next, get outta that and click on your text boxes. Don’t select the text. Select the boxes, otherwise you will be really annoyed that what I’m gonna tell you next isn’t working. Anyway, select the box, then go to the top menu. Select “Object” then “Effect” then “Drop Shadow.” Yeah, you know what this is. It’s drop shadows, man. They’re cool. They’re super cool. They’re like icebergs and shit.

Anyway, so mess with your options till you like it and make sure the Preview box is checked so you can see what you’re doing. Alright ? Alright.

So there you go. You’re all set – time to pump that thing out and put it on the web where my grandma can make fun of you for your design skills. Or not. Maybe you’re awesome at this.

Either way, I gotta go, because my English has somehow degraded into a lotta bad language. Don’t worry about me. I’m totally using all of it, like, ironically and junk.

Tune in next time when we’re gonna talk about the basics of Adobe Illustrator so you can learn how to add sweet lens flares to anything. AND EVERYTHING.

Programmers are familiar with algorithms, but for the rest of us: algorithms are the steps that a computer programmer must take solve a programming problem. Since computer programs must be laid out in exact steps so the computer knows what to do, writing algorithms is essential to planning a program.

It’s easiest to design algorithms in a tree structure, breaking down a major problem into smaller problems and those smaller problems into even smaller problems, and so on, down to the very last turtle holding up the program (even though it might be turtles all the way down).

For instance, if I were a programmer designing a Word Processor, I’d start with a big problem – Design a Word Processor. Boom. That’s the whole problem. Next, I’d list the sub problems underneath that problem.

For instance, my Word Processor needs a way to handle text input from the keyboard, it needs have a user interface with a menu system, and it needs a way to save documents. From there I can break down each of those problems into smaller problems. To save documents, my Word Processer needs to access the hard drive and know multiple saving formats. To save in multiple formats my Word Processor needs to know how to save in each format and each format needs access to specific API’s, etc, all the way down. You get the idea.

If done properly, before a programmer sits down to start actually writing anything, she already knows the thousands of smaller problems she needs to solve to build the program into the whole thing. Although it might seem counter-intuitive, solving a thousand smaller problems is much easier than solving one big one, because each of those smaller problems is just a tiny step – the tiniest possible if she’s done her work correctly.

So that’s how computer programmers use algorithms, but this method can be used to solve almost any task. When I talked my students through a research paper I we would always start by listing all the problems we could think of on the board as they yelled them out. These problems included:

How to stay awake to write the paper

How to come up with a research topic

How to research in the library and online

How to make the paper convey the information it needed to convey

How to write a “Works Cited” page

How to use transitions between paragraphs

Etc.

Once we’d listed all the major things they needed to know, we’d consider ways to solve those problems. They needed to know how to write a “Works Cited” page, so we’d spend 20 minutes covering that. They needed to stay up late writing their papers, so we talked about where on campus sold coffee late at night (bear in mind, I tried to stress that not writing it the night before on a caffeine high was better, but we tried to be as realistic as possible about what problems they would encounter), and so on. Once we were done, the students had an algorithm for writing the research paper. All they had to do was solve little problems one by one and the paper would be the output.

For the most part, my students enjoyed the method – they had fun coming up with problems to solve, brainstorming solutions to those problems, and found it easier to tackle overwhelming tasks. But this problem solving method isn’t just for computer programmers and freshman composition students – it’s useful for almost every problem. For instance, since I’m writing some tutorials for Adobe software right now, I want to talk about how I used this method to learn software.

The most important thing that this method needs is a learning goal, or a problem – you can use those things as synonyms for each other. I believe that learning things without a goal in mind is useless – you won’t be personally invested in the information you’re learning and there’s no goal to keep doing it. So let’s start with something the self-publishing community has to do all the time – designing a book cover for your self-published e- book.

First we have think about what a good book cover does. Don’t just parrot back what other people say about this – the most important part of this problem solving method is clearly identifying the sub problems. So what does a good book cover do? What’s the overarching, most important problem your book cover must solve?

Problem:  a book cover entices the reader into buying the book

I thought about it for awhile, and in the most general sense, this is why a book cover exists. If I’m wrong, please drop a comment after this post to call me out. But assuming that enticing a reader into buying the book is the cover’s job, what sub problems does that idea contain?

Sub Problem: The book cover must convey what the “spirit” of the book is about

Sub Problem: The book cover must be easy to read in all sizes, including full size and thumbnail

Sub Problem: The book cover must be visually interesting

Those are our sub problems, as far as I can tell. We’re still operating at a pretty high, vague, level here, but we’re getting closer to problems we know how to tackle. So let’s keep breaking this down.

Problem: The book cover must be easy to read in all sizes, including full size and thumbnail

Sub Problem: Need to use software that makes it easy to test multiple fonts quickly

Sub Problem: Need to select a font that you have legal rights to use

Sub Problem: Need to know how to pick ascetically pleasing fonts

So now we’ve broken down further and are rapidly approaching problems we know how to solve. These problems are all, for the most part, research questions. And we have resources to research these things– google searches and asking people on twitter. To be fair, you can also break these problems down further – into how to research, etc. The trick is to break down the problems into the smallest size you feel comfortable tackling in just a few minutes.

The same thing applies to learning the software that you’re going to need to make your book cover. As long as you have goals, learning the information you need isn’t difficult. If you know you want a drop shadow under your text, you can easily research how to make a drop shadow using the program you’re picked. If you know you want your cover to have a blood-red see-through rectangle over half your cover, you can learn how to do that by researching transparencies and rectangles. Good googling habits can solve these problems – you can search for transparencies or opacities, or even “see though” – there’s a good chance that with some effort you’ll find out what you want to know.

You might not know the language and menu items your program uses at first – most of the time a program’s users will know what they want to do, they just don’t know how to do it. Every program labels things differently – what one program might call “text flow” another might call “story editor” or “stringed text.” Finding out what the designers of the program labeled the feature you want to use is the first step to learning how to use it.

But more than anything, you have to know what you need to know. And that means having a goal in mind before you start and the willingness to break down the problem into sub problems until you have it busted into smaller pieces you can lick.