Tag Archives: chuck wendig

Peer Review: Double Dead, by Chuck Wendig

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One of the disadvantages of having lots of talented writers and designers as friends is that I end up with more books to read or games to play than I have time to read or play them. I know that one of the best ways to help a fellow writer out is to write a review, and I sometimes regret that I don’t always have the time to do that.

When I saw that I had a couple of dozen ebooks in my Kindle app on my iPad that I hadn’t read yet, I decided to try and do something about it. So I’m starting a new feature on my blog called “Peer Review.” These are highly biased reviews, because they’ll be of the work of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but it’s a chance to help some friends out, and a chance to expose some great work to people who might not otherwise have heard of them.

Let me start off with a quick story. When I was visiting my mom a couple of weeks ago, I met my stepsister’s boyfriend for the first time for dinner, and we fell into talking about vampire and zombie movies. He pointed out that he didn’t know of any movie or book which featured both zombies and vampires. I pointed out that there is one book where this is true.

Thus: Double Dead.

Double Dead is Chuck Wendig‘s first published novel. That seems weird to me, since I’ve been working with Chuck for years, and I feel like he’s always been more prolific than the rest of reality considers him to be — something, I will note, that he’s been rapidly working to correct the past year or so. And this book showcases some of the best of Chuck’s technique and narrative voice. A number of people know Chuck for his intensely surreal and foul-mouthed patter, but I’ve always known Chuck as a very subtle storyteller. The profanity and scatological humor are like a magician’s flourish: a distraction to draw your attention away from the real magic, the engaging story that’s dragging you along and making you care about the characters and the world he’s creating.

A perfect example of this is the protagonist: Coburn the vampire. He wakes up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and is pissed off that blood has basically stopped falling into his mouth. He is, to put it mildly, the worst kind of self-entitled asshole. And yet, by the end, I was rooting for Coburn (and his dog), even during the worst parts of the zombie apocalypse. Sure, there’s a lot of pure fun in the story, the kind of enjoyable ass-kicking and crass humor that makes for a good action film. For 80% of the book I felt I knew exactly where the plot was going, and I was enjoying it like a good road trip — the journey meant more to me then the destination. And then, a number of twists hit me like rabbit punches to the gut, and it was all over. I was down for the count, staring at the words THE END and wondering how in the hell I ended up on the floor.

… I lost the metaphor a bit there. I’m still recovering from the end of the book.

Go get Double Dead.

My Advice? Stop Listening To Advice

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stopsignYou.

Yes, you. The prospective writer or game designer. The one with over 500 unread blog posts in your RSS reader. You.

We need to talk. Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? No? Okay.

Look, this isn’t easy for me to talk about, but I think you need to hear it. I’m not sure how to break this to you gently, so I’ll just be honest.

You need to stop spending all your time reading advice on writing and game design.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally get it. It’s hard not to find joy in Rob Donoghue’s mellow vibe. You get caught up in the frank nature of Gareth Skarka’s blogs. You laugh at the dick jokes and poop references that Chuck Wendig sprinkles into mad ramblings about writing. You have Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball and dozens of others pumping into Google Reader or Twitter, and you love every word of their sparkling, wonderful advice.

But… well, let me tell you a story.

Back before Al Gore invented the Internet, I would collect books on writing advice. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had written a couple of things that got some attention, so I decided that I needed to prepare to be a Real Writer. I was poor, so I couldn’t buy many books off the shelf, but I would scour library sales and used book stores, and over several years I ended up owning dozens of them. I would read and re-read each one, knowing that if I inhaled their advice often enough, I would eventually reach a point where I would be ready. I could accumulate the lore of Those Who Had Come Before, and be able to stride among them, a giant among artists.

And yet, during the entire time I was collecting books, I wasn’t writing.

Now that we have blog and microblogs and Facebook and podcasts and whatever, it’s easy to get fresh advice every hour of every day. You could spend hours reading and listening to advice, also learning from Those Who Have Come Before.

But I’ve been skimming those sites too. A few months ago, I saw you post that the blog on characterization was perfect for the first chapter of the story you were working on. A couple of months ago, the Facebook thread on setting was also perfect for that first chapter. Just last week, you were thrilled to learn how world-building would be just the thing for… your first chapter.

When are you going to work on that first chapter?

If you want to write a book, do it. If you want to design a game, make it happen. If you want to just read advice and appreciate what others have to say, that’s cool, but stop deluding yourself that you’re just waiting for that one last piece of advice to make your story or your game perfect before you start.

Because that perfect advice doesn’t exist. It won’t happen. The only thing that will get you writing and designing is to close the browser and open the word processor.

Now, see, don’t look at me like that. I know you’re mad, but it’s for the best. Let me explain.

If you never start, all of this advice might be Important, with a capital I. You might need that piece on dialogue cues, or there might be a place for that thought on resource management. So you become paralyzed, trying to hold it all in your head, trying to absorb it all.

But really, advice is best used when you’ve already done something. You reread chapter four and find that the romance subplot feels tacked on. Your character creation chapter reads like stereo instructions. You’ve called one character Robert and a different one Bob. You have a specific problem, and you need advice on it. That is when you go to the Twitternets and the Faceblogs. You’ll find the right piece of inspiration, the right piece of advice for your problem at the moment. Or maybe you won’t, but you’ll figure it out. That’s when the collective wisdom of Those Who Have Come Before will propel you, instead of inhibiting you.

For now, though, I think you need a break. Cut all your advice-lurking cold turkey, and focus on creating. Rob and Gareth and Chuck and Will and Jeff (and I) will still be there, ready to help you. We like helping and sharing knowledge, but we can’t help you write your book or make your game. Only you can do that. And it’ll be brilliant and terrible and inspiring and hateful and innovative and derivative. But it’s yours.

And then, you can give us some advice.

Micro-Celebrity

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Image by eddyfate via Flickr
With the rise of the Internet, there’s also a rise in what I’ve come to think of as “micro-celebrity” — something that looks and feels a little bit like celebrity, but only with a very small group of people. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that my own personal stock has risen from non-celebrity to micro-celebrity. And I’ve not always done well with it. For example, I posted this in late 2008 in my LiveJournal:
I’ve never quite gotten used to people coming up to me who now who I am and what I do without me knowing them at all.

I then go on to say I’ve gotten better about it, and that’s true — I don’t think it’s some kind of elaborate put-on, nor do I feel that it’s somehow undeserved. But I still don’t think I’ve gotten used to it.

Moving from Blob to Blob

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Image of Chuck Wendig from Facebook

For a little over a week now, assassin dog robot Chuck Wendig has been trying to wrap his head around storytelling in games. He’s posted about it three times, in case you want to download his brainmeats: 1

Part I; Part II; Part III

This is something we’ve been talking about at work lately. While I’m certainly not going to say that I have the one true answer, I did write up a pretty lengthy email about my opinions on the matter, which I’ll paraphrase here. I should note that, in this case, I’m primarily talking about video games and balancing interactivity with a scripted narrative structure, but there might be some bits that might work for other interactive games (like those funny ones you kids play with the strange dice and the killing of orcs).

Continue reading →

  1. I’ve noticed that when I write about Chuck, my blog gets a certain Warren Ellis vibe. Maybe there’s a pill for that. ↩

More Awesome Internet Serials

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Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

One week until the launch of Whitechapel! If you’re looking for other free Internet serials to fill your time with while you wait, I have four other sites you should check out.

Jet Pack is a central point for the fiction of three extremely talented writers: Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch and Wood Ingham. I’m particularly into Wood’s sci-fi novella “Memory Sticks.”

And if you can’t get enough Chuck Wendig, he and Marty Henley just launched The Storyverse, a dueling serial that trades off between Chuck and Marty every week. It’s… well it’s… there’s kind of a sci-fi thing… with pirates… and pulp… kinda. It’s awesome, and they’re big supporters of the Project (they even changed their release date so as not to conflict with the launch of Whitechapel), so go check out their work.

I’ve always been a fan of Mur Lafferty, and she’s been doing some of her own serial work in a multimedia story called “Her Side.” I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably start catching up really soon. I understand it can be a bit disturbing, but if you’re waiting for horror goodness from me, you’ll probably like Mur’s work just fine.

Finally, I have been ordered by Filamena Young to go check out Tim Pratt’s Bone Shop. It’s a donation-funded urban fantasy novella that’s only a few weeks old, so now is a good time to check it out.

Once you’ve read all that, come back here and get ready for episode 1!

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