Secret Weapon Volume 3
Happening vs storytelling; Your words outlive you; Publishing and change
Welcome to the third issue of The Writers Secret Weapon. It’s great to have you here. I’m shaking up the format just a little this week, trying out a few smaller changes and giving myself a bit of challenge to see if I can produce something longform and informative without having Substack tell me I’m writing too much per installment. Let’s find out.
I - WRITING
I’ve got two made-up paragraphs this week. Let’s compare them.
The first, let’s call it Paragraph A:
He drank tea from the green mug. He sipped. He waited. He stared at the blank page. He knew he should write, he knew it was important to write, but every time he tried, he couldn’t settle on words he liked.
The second, let’s call it Paragraph B:
This wasn’t working. Not after three cups of tea, not after staring out the window for ten minutes. The blank page stayed blank, he stayed frustrated, and nothing was any closer to getting done whether his fingers hovered over the keys or not. He was stuck.
Both of these paragraphs are about the same person having the same problem, but they address the person and their problem in two different ways. This week I want to talk about the difference between happening and storytelling, and how these two concepts in writing aren’t mortal foes but they do accomplish two totally different things and you’re going to rely on each of them at different times for different reasons.
In paragraph A, things are happening, that is to say the reader reads each sentence and pictures the action and accomplishment told to them. It’s partly described through the specific word choice (“sipped” gives us a different mental picture than “chugged”). Paragraph A is a series of events and we’re taught/shown to understand that each event happened one after the other in the same way that one sentence comes after another sentence. There’s an assumed procedure here as well, the idea that one thing can’t start until the other is finished.
This creates two things the reader has to deal with when they read:
1. a number of things have happened and can/should be pictured
2. while a lot of things have happened or can be pictured, there’s a lack of development underneath them
That development is critical, and lacking that development is a problem if it continues through multiple paragraphs and pages. Yes, sometimes in the course of writing a scene some parts are going to just be things happening, but if your whole scene is just a list of things happening, you’re lacking the material underneath it to give the reader something to care about.
Compare that to paragraph B. Fewer things have happened, and more time and space is spent on how the person feels about what is or isn’t happening. There’s less specific things to picture, there’s less sense of momentum and it’s more about how the vibe is.
Taken in isolation, paragraph B lacks momentum. One thing is developed but it gets that development while suggesting that events happened (what the person did) though we don’t “see” them with the same clarity as we did in Paragraph A.
You might be thinking I’m about to tell you to do more B and less A, so long as you know that it’ll take more time to write more things in a paragraph-B-style. You might be thinking I’m about to tell you that paragraph A is weaker writing, that it’s more juvenile than B because B deals with an abstract feeling more than concrete action.
In both cases, you’d be wrong.
It’s not that you want all of one and none of the other, it’s that you want to do them both throughout your writing. Just having things happen and writing the story in such a way that a reader reads a list of stuff is simpler writing (think about a little kid telling you about what happened today at school), but going the other way where you’re only ever talking about the feelings or the abstract is going to drag the story quickly into hard-to-pace dull pretense where it feels like nothing ever happens and everything is so overwrought and weighty.
Storytelling is a combination of what happens and why it matters that something happened or that something happens as a result or consequence or follow-up. You need to write the whys to go with the whats and the pair of them dance throughout your story help the reader both know what’s going on and understand why you’re telling them what’s going on.
II - Thinking
I have a pretty intense temper. I can blow up easily, and I can be quite caustic and toxic when it happens. I feel a larger-than-you-expect amount of shame about this, and unfortunately it’s the people around me who bear the brunt of it when I go off. In the last year or so, it’s gotten worse, in that my fuse has shortened and I’m more sensitive to rejections and slights than I was before. This is probably my least attractive quality.
But twenty years ago, this exact some quality, explosive anger where I can viciously wield words and find hurtful things to express was praised. When I worked in the era shock-jock radio, the ability to create laughter out of anger, even if the anger was harmful or aggressive to someone, was valuable. It was how you kept your job. It was how you staved off the other hungry emotionally stunted jackals that served as producers and interns all vying for time in the spotlight so they could later launch their own careers (one of them now is very successful as a wrestling commentator, which is weird to watch).
Here’s why I’m thinking about this today - Those things we say, whether they’re dramatic statements about someone should perish in a house fire or how they should wake up to discover their spouse or child died in their sleep (both things I have said), or whether they’re statements of genuine care and concern, reflecting back on them is so often a mix of shame and shock and oddity.
I don’t know if the people I worked for sit now and reflect. I know two of my former immediate bosses are still out in the world, podcasting and trying to do the same shtick, even though they’re long past anything appearing like a prime and they’re bitter rivals that no longer have to hide their animosity. They’re both keeping the past kind of alive but it’ll never be like it was. One of them went full-throated fascist Nazi racist asshole, ducking pedophilia charges while stirring up gun-toting Proud Boys with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and tired impressions. The other is trying to grasp for relevance, podcasting and vlogging to an ever dwindling audience, as much avoiding the specter of irrelevancy as he is the responsibility of a wife and several children.
I say something awful and looking back now I’m rightfully ashamed and feel bad. I developed empathy in my sobriety and now I feel like that 22-year-old kid seems like a stranger, even if I do miss the money and the sex and the lack of responsibility.
Did other people who said really terrible things ever look back and think, “Shit, that was a really awful thing to say” ?
That’s Cato. Technically that’s Cato the Elder, Cato the Censor, Cato the Wise, Cato, or Marcus Porcius Cato if you’re nasty.
Cato was a conservative Roman politician who argued that Rome needed to be made great again by preserving “true Roman ideals” and resisting things like the encroaching of immigrant cultures, civilizations that weren’t Rome, anything Greek that wasn’t young boys as sex workers, this crazy set of ideas called philosophy, and any new forms of agriculture since the way things had been done for decades up to that point had been just fine, thank you very much, and there’s little reason to believe the lies of the foreigners that suggest that Rome needs to change.
Think of Cato as the fusion of Alex Jones and Mitch McConnell.
When Cato was a young man, about 22 or 23 (Cato used to lie about his age a lot to get sex workers and politicians to like him), he stood up in the Roman ampitheatre at Tusculum and said “Delenda est Carthago” or if you’re going to really do the whole sentence: “Videtur et hoc mihi, Carthagenim non debere esse, delenda est Carthago!”
In English, that’s “It seems to me, Carthage must no longer exist, Carthage must be destroyed.”
The rest of that speech was a lengthy and detailed description of how Carthage needed to be destroyed, including and not limited to how the women and children should be killed or enslaved, how the men should be tortured before being killed, how the lands must be razed and salted, how the buildings need to be destroyed and how every written record of Carthage needs to be burned as well.
Cato wanted not just genocide but genocide with a hefty side order of obliteration.
Why? He was a young guy, popular in his political space, by all accounts a competent but not extraordinary military leader, and a guy who really really cared about telling people how Rome is the only good place in all of existence. He had plenty of friends, plenty of people were reading his papers on the best way to run a vineyard. Dude was doing Roman aristocracy pretty well. So why, at 22, does he say that women should be fed to dogs and children need to watch their homes destroyed before they get shipped to Rome as all of Carthage needs to be wiped off the face of the earth?
I think it’s because Cato was afraid. I think Cato was afraid of things changing in ways he couldn’t control. I think Cato was afraid of discovering that his time at the forefront was fleeting. I think Cato was afraid of the possibility that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself or how to feel like himself if things changed.
It’s all a guess really. It’s me projecting onto some dead Roman prick. It’s how I felt and never admitted to anyone until you read this sentence. I was so scared. I was so afraid that everything good would be taken away and that when those things were gone, I wouldn’t have anything else. I didn’t know at the time how to have any kind of healthy relationship or any idea about what moderation was, so I lived to indestructible excess and daisy-chained my life from one bed or one party or one freelance gig to the next and tried my best to stay two steps ahead of what felt like terrible and cold oblivion.
For historical context, Cato’s animus toward Carthage and his death grip on “Rome for Romans” stemmed from the Punic Wars. The Punic Wars were the wars (there were 3 of them) between Carthage and Rome where Rome was jealous that Carthage was successful and wealthy and dominated maritime commerce (while also popularizing the alphabet, expanded accounting and census records, and an entirely different pantheon of magical beings.) “Punic” is the Roman word for the adjective Phoenician, since Carthage was a major city in the Phoenician empire.
Carthage had a good foothold on the African coast and it wasn’t all that far from Sicily, while Rome was looking to expand into becoming the Roman empire we think of when we picture dudes in togas with legions behind them. The wars were messy and are mostly only cool because of their highlights (the world’s largest naval battle; Hannibal and his elephants; the invention of the boat-to-boat gangplank), and they always resulted in Rome winning and Carthage capitulating.
At the time Cato popped off, Carthage was locked in a “treaty” with Rome where they had to pay thousands of tons of silver to Rome while also super duper promising not to attack anyone who attacked them, which sounds great until you realize that Rome sent its other vassal states to attack Carthage just to beat them up some more.
Imagine there was a US President who spent the majority of their time and energy spitefully undoing what a previous US President did, and then take that feeling of frustration and expand it to countries.
So Cato’s stoking the fire to get Rome to authorize a finally military campaign to obliterate Carthage, and while I know this is also the birthplace of the phrase “salt the earth”, all I can think about is what this kid said and how spiteful and fiery and wrong it was.
Just so we’re clear Cato was a piece of shit and never went on to regret his statements for the remaining 70-ish years of his life, but people’s words far outlive their bodies, and I don’t want the words of my 20-something self to be how I’m remembered.
That fear I talked about having? I see some flavor of that in publishing but we’ll talk about that in a second.
One last quick note that’s always interested me - the Third Punic War began in 149 BC and didn’t technically end until February 1985, making it the longest war in human history.
III - Feeling
I have a lot of clients this week who are starting to query. I’m nervous for them. I want them to do well, to not get stuck with weeks and months of queries and rejections, and I hate that I can’t exert a more direct hand in that process. They all deserve their books on shelves, they deserve rewards for all their hard work, they deserve to know what it’s like to feel accomplished as authors.
Hopefully I’ve done a good enough job helping them see that they’re good enough to succeed and hopefully they’ve taken my advice and put together their best chance at dream accomplishment. Hopefully.
Whenever I get a batch of clients querying, it makes me think about traditional publishing. Seldom are all of the thoughts good, although lately I’ve been working hard at not carrying so much of the resentment I have for either the industry as a whole or certain people in specific.
It was eye-opening every time I went to work at or with a traditional publisher. I remember having meetings about having meetings in the future. I remember sitting in weekly meetings where half the meeting was spent complaining about money being spent and the other half of the meeting was spent complaining about a lack of good submissions. I remember being told that it was bad I was faster than everyone else, that as a freelancer I was making the salaried staff look bad so maybe I should take three weeks off.
The best way to describe what all of that feels like is to imagine being on a very large cruise ship and then realizing that within the next 2 minutes you have to start slaloming through a series of checkpoints like you’re doing the aquatic level of a video game. Big ships do not have much agility, they’re not built to juke or weave, they’re great at going forward and shit at stopping.
Publishing is great at going forward, at doing the same things they’ve always done, and they’re shit at adapting or really radical transformation. Part of it is institutional momentum, the idea that things have been this way for a long time and they “work” so why change. Part of it is non-performative speech, where you say you’re totally invested in doing different and better but you’re actively making it impossible to change back behind the curtain.
I think about this stuff, a lot. The problem is, for all the faults and gatekeeping and hoops and general craptastic-ness of traditional publishing, they’re still one way to turn a writer into a published author and they have inserted themselves into the creative engine so deeply that for too many writers, they’re inextricably linked.
So traditional publishing isn’t the always-bad boogeyman eating our little brothers in the sewers. It’s not free from criticism, it’s still incredibly sexist, racist, phobic, unwelcoming, exclusionary, classist, patriarchal, and packed with white supremacy and white privileged feminism, but it’s still one way to get a book out.
Here are two things you need to get your head and heart around:
a. Being a writer is scary
b. Publishing is scared
Making that jump from writing your own thing, clicking and clacking away at it on your own time from the comfort of wherever you write to putting it out into the world where someone might see it and react to is scary. I think any writer who tells you that unknown-ness isn’t scary is lying. We’re looking for evidence that our work matters, that we aren’t making some huge mistake and exposing some vulnerable emotional underbelly to people who don’t know us and don’t know what we’ve been through. We want to feel like there was a purpose for this creative drive we have, that we’re able to do more than pass the time playing pretend and that we can make a thing that can affect someone else the way we ourselves are affected by what someone else makes.
There’s an absence of control, there’s a lot of “don’t know until you put it out there” and for a lot of writers (myself included) it’s hard to push past the fear and the doubt and all the ruminations on failure to get up and try again when things don’t go perfectly.
Publishing, putting anything out into the world, looks like some great mountain to climb, the way a flea feels about trying to scale a house. And it’s easy to put yourself in situations where you either hold yourself back so that you never have to be hurt by failing or you always start something new so there’s always excitement but not necessarily progress. Publishing doesn’t care about you. It’s an industry. It’s a machine. Its interests are purely whether or not whatever you’ve made can be sold to a certain number of people so as to require to write one more thing after that so it can be sold to a different number of people. That coldness is scary. A whole business model that dehumanizes art for profit, and then says the people of the world who are most driven by art and feelings are the best candidates for the dehumanizing grind, is scary.
I get why my clients are nervous. I understand why every time I sit down to write or record or stream I have to take 30-45 minutes before and after to tell myself that I’m safe enough to exhale and that I did a good enough job to at least be okay until tomorrow. I get it.
What I never really counted on was finding out that even though the machinery of publishing doesn’t care, the people at the helm do care and are scared. Things have changed, and continue to change. It’s weird to be talking about how making a PDF on your own is now something you can do without even getting up from your chair, as if that’s new technology and not something that’s been around 20+ years, but that remains something that publishers are scared of.
There’s software now, dressed up with scary names like “machine learning” and “AI” that can with bit of time and a prompt, produce a volume of text that isn’t exactly art but does meet the production requirements of publication. Publishers are terrified of that too.
There are more and more ways to produce and sell art that do not include large corporations who claim to be the best at determining what should or shouldn’t be a book. And more and more the old claims of legitimacy don’t hold up to scrutiny since you can sell books that you wrote, formatted, and made available for purchase from your phone and while you won’t have the same trappings of the past as in traditional publishing, you still get the same end result - someone’s given you money for a thing you wrote. The tenuous nature of making art transactional and the growing number of people becoming aware and interested in alternative paths to goals scares publishers deeply.
It’s up to us to put together our own routes to our goals. Maybe that means sticking with a long-held dream or trying something new. Maybe that means a lot of trial and error or a lot of hurry up and wait. Maybe that means being a little more disciplined more frequently. Maybe that means being willing to hear advice and criticism and challenging our beliefs and our thinking.
It’s always going to mean facing our fears though. Not just talking about them in a newsletter where you’re worried that every paragraph is a new opportunity for everyone to run away screaming and not just talking about them to yourself as you yell at yourself until you’re a nauseous anxious mess wanting to cry.
However you choose to come to terms with those fears, be it healthfully or unhealthily, be it short-term or decisively, I hope you know that I’m always going to believe in you and that you’re worth believing in. Nothing you write is truly a waste, and even if your art has an audience of one, it’s valuable and worth putting out into the world.
I’m stopping there today. I know the usual format is longer, but this got heavier than expected and I don’t have it in me to write some jarringly different ending about strong-style wrestling after talking about being a dumb kid and a scared adult.
We’ll get back on track next week.
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Love you. Talk soon.
Thank you for this newsletter. It was so spot on for me. Truly, almost uncanny. I had been wrestling (haha, that reference was for you!) with the idea of the A vs B writing style but even more so with that really scary writer stuff.