First, some housekeeping. Thank you so much to everyone who has upgraded to a paid membership for this newsletter — I am no longer on the hook for the cost of sending out all these emails, and I can afford the occasional donut. Y’all rule!

Secondly, my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out in paperback next week! You can still order a signed/personalized copy from Green Apple Books!

Finally, I’m writing a Star Trek comic book called Star Trek: Zero Point. Captain Raffi Musiker and Commander D’Vana Tendi team up to protect the galaxy from disasters that haven’t happened yet. The first issue is out Oct. 14, but please ask your local comics store to reserve you a copy before Sept. 7 so you can make sure to get one.

Starting a Novel Is Hard. This Might Help.

One of the biggest questions people always ask about writing is how to get started on a novel or other long-form writing project. Sometimes, instead, they ask how one goes about finding a good story idea. I kind of feel like both questions are the same, in that they relate to figuring out how do I identify a story that you're excited about telling, and how to get launched on your way. 

Right now, I'm working hard on starting a new novel — actually, it's a novel that I took a stab at writing last year, and now I'm back to take another stab. And I am experiencing all of the agony and stress of trying to find my way in to a new story. Inevitably, I have to write a bunch of lifeless scenes and try a bunch of different approaches before I eventually, painfully, find something that I can move forward with. 

Obviously, everyone's experience is different — but I do think that a lot of people have that experience of staring at a blank screen (or page) and feeling stuck, or writing pages of incidents and moments which in theory should be cool and exciting, but just feel kind of lifeless. This is the story of my life. It's why I always dread the comedown when I switch from polishing up a finished novel, where everything is more or less firing on all cylinders and working as it should, to starting a brand new project where things are just kind of a mess.

In my writing advice book Never Say You Can't Survive, I talk about the need to be curious — I get curious about my characters and their situation, and the world they inhabit, and this makes me keep writing so I can find out more. But I have another way of thinking about this, now that I'm in the middle of the beginning of another project.

I think that starting a new writing project from scratch is kind of like being a detective or a tracker — you need to pick up a trail and then keep following it. You have to find something in the story that seems exciting, that seems to be going somewhere, that seems to have a lot of potential or mystery that intrigues you. And then you need to chase it to see where it leads.

In practice, this really does feel like finding a clue, or evidence that your quarry was here and has gone in a particular direction. I will write and write with no particular success until I hit on a moment that feels like it opens up the characters for me and as though the story is coming to life, and then I will try to stay with that moment or that feeling and see if I can follow it all the way down. Often for me, it’s finding a relationship dynamic that feels like it’s throwing off sparks — but it could be anything that lets you write one scene where the characters are feeling alive.

I sometimes have to write twenty bad scenes, early on in a project, before I find the one good scene where my characters have the vividness I need them to have.

Sometimes you lose the trail and have to double back. In other words, sometimes you get stuck in the middle of a project, because you lost the thread you were following. The characters suddenly feel lifeless again, everything is aimless, there's no urgency to any of it. In those situations, I do sometimes have to go back to the last place where I felt like the trail was hot, and then figure out where I took a wrong turn. Likewise, sometimes the trail leads to a dead end and you have to find another way around.

As long as you are following the trail you will eventually get somewhere. Breadcrumb followed by breadcrumb will eventually add up to something that feels like a story — even if it doesn't necessarily have a three-act structure or a conventional rising action and climax type deal. Ideally, these bread crumbs you are following have something to do with your characters caring about something or someone, or getting into situations that feel interesting and fruitful. But the main thing is, they are moments when the characters feel alive and you give a toss about them.

Even if you have a plot in mind that is fairly well worked out — a secret agent gets pulled out of retirement to do one last job and has to impersonate a duke on an alien world — you still have to find the meat of the story, the stuff that makes it emotionally compelling and makes a reader want to spend a lot of time with these characters.

How do you find the trail? To some extent, you may simply have to write a bunch of bland, listless scenes — which, in many cases, will have felt so interesting and exciting in your head, but which fall totally flat on the page. It is very much a “know it when you see it” kind of thing. Personally, I look for heat, I look for signs that a struggle has happened or is happening in this place. 

Sometimes, the character I thought was the protagonist of my story turns out to be a blob of nothing, and some other side character has a perspective that excites me. In fact, more often than not, finding the spoor that you want to track means finding the character who is most dynamic and entertaining, or whom you desperately want to know more about — and in many cases, I have to write a character over and over until I find the version of them that creates a feeling of excitement.

Important: conflict is not necessarily heat. Western storytelling tropes have conditioned us to think that conflict is automatically the most exciting and fascinating thing. But in fact, heat can just as easily come from tenderness and kindness and community-building. I often feel more suspense during a gentle sweet moment than during a tense fight scene or argument, because I get super invested in the sweetness and desperately want it to endure. Ironically, the more media I consume, the less suspenseful most thrillers seem, versus romantic comedies and low-incident cozy hangouts. Things that are engineered on purpose to create suspense often just feel too mechanical for me to care about what happens.

I like scenes in which characters enjoy spending time together, and this makes me more invested in those characters and in their relationship. Conversely, I get frustrated reading about people who don't enjoy each other's company ever. (Although of course this can be done well and such situations do exist in real life. There are many unhappy marriages and unhappy marriages are worth writing about — but I'm not always in the mood to read about an unhappy marriage.)

Interpersonal conflict can actually be super boring, if it's not compelling and doesn't evolve over time. I would even argue that if you are writing scenes of conflict, you have more of a duty to show that something has meaningfully changed in each scene.

My personal feeling is that if characters are simply having a nice time and at the end of the scene you have a sense that they've gotten grown closer together, that's exciting in its own right. In a happy cozy scene, nothing needs to have "changed" other than the characters’ growing rapport — but when I read a scene of conflict in which nothing has changed by the end, except maybe that the characters are slightly more annoyed with each other than they were when the scene started, I get bored and frustrated. Part of this is just that meaningless conflict is unpleasant and not fun to read about. Nastiness needs to justify its existence, in my mind, whereas niceness can simply exist.

Your mileage, obviously, may vary.

In Never Say You Can't Survive, I talk about why it can be valuable for your main character to want something really intensely — and as a rule of thumb, I do try to write characters who have goals and dreams, because that feels automatically dynamic and interesting. That said, a character wanting something badly or having strong feelings isn’t always guaranteed to be a good source of heat that you’ll want to follow for an entire book.

Sometimes a character has a strong desire or a strong set of feelings, and it can still be kind of boring. What matters is whether their desire or their emotional investment is about something compelling, something that you, the author, can bring yourself to be concerned about. And the reverse is true as well: a character can be super ambivalent and yet super fascinating, if their ambivalence can be made interesting and fun to watch.

Final thought: you should try to find the trail that you are excited to follow down — this may not be the trail that seems objectively cool, or the one that makes for a perfect elevator pitch right off the bat. Distilling your story down to an elevator pitch can come later! For now, find the track that leads somewhere that you personally find fascinating and that makes you excited to sit down and write every time. After all, you're the one who has to write this fucking thing. Why would you write someone else's book, when you could write your own?

Music I Love Right Now

Lately I have been craving to find more music with political lyrics. It’s weirdly hard to find any music that discusses politics or current affairs explicitly, something I’m gonna address in a future newsletter. So recently, I went looking to see if literally anybody had written a decent song about hyperscale data centers. Most of what I found was honestly crap — ironically, almost all songs about data centers appear to be A.I.-generated. But I did find one song that I find both invigorating and delightful:

It’s a banger! Listen to the end for a surprise key change!

Noon Fifteen are a “prog soul” band from Ithaca, NY — hence the very keyboard-driven sound and noodly guitar. I’ve listened to some of their other music since finding their data-center song, and I like a lot of it. Their first album Volume 1, is pretty dope, and in particular the song “Knock Knock Knock” leans more soul than prog, so of course I love it. Anyway, Noon Fifteen has a new album coming out Oct. 16 called Finish What You Started, which is about facing your fears — including vampires, aliens, and politicians. I’m gonna pre-order it thru Bandcamp. I just hope they bring some of the same fuck-the-oligarchs energy that they show in the video above.