Telepathic Communication and Stephen King

Let’s say time travel was possible. Let’s say with the use of time travel, evil book-haters (your ‘proud non-readers’) could erase the memories of every book you’ve ever read from your brain.

If I had one book I would miss the most? It would probably be Stephen King’s On Writing. It may or may not be the best writing book out there. You may or may not even like Stephen King. But somehow this book hit me right at the beginning of a time when I seriously considered becoming a writer and it simply stuck in my head. Stories from King’s childhood blend with ideas on writing, his maturation and growth into an adult and professional writer teach valuable lessons about the realities of publishing, (as true as they were at the time, of course.) There’s also some weird, teaching moments that stick in my head.

Like how writing is telepathy.

Now, you should read the book, because King explains it better than I ever possibly could. Here’s my short version. Writing is a solitary practice where you sit alone in a room and bang away at keys, muttering to yourself, and moaning how no one understands you. But what you put on the page is telepathy. I write these words, evoking images and ideas, and somewhere, possibly on the other side of the planet, those images and ideas pop into your head. Voila! Telepathy!

I wonder how different King’s view of writings would be if he’d had the internet the whole time. (Oh, by the way, turns out he’s now ON TWITTER! If you twitter, you should follow him, because he’s kind of a brilliant crafty guy still full of great ideas.)

See, as a writer now, I’m writing alone in a room, but I’m also out in a vast network of readers, writers, and the occasional evil book-hater. Though, probably not at the same time or else I get NOTHING done. I can communicate with reviewers, agents, but most importantly, I can communicate with my readers directly. And depending on the road I’m walking, I can generate feedback immediately. I can gauge responses as I work. There’s a risk there, of course, in over exposing an audience. (That’s something I’ve addressed in other chaos fiction in different ways.) What I think is really interesting, with tools like Patreon, I can even take challenges from readers as I’m writing. In this way, the telepathy is now a two way street. I imagine a rubber ball, I hear from my readers what color they picture it as, the rubber ball becomes that color in my writing, and voila! Interactive, two way telepathy.

Best Practices, Getting Started

Advice, rules on writing, guidelines, demands at gun point… It’s only going to get you so far.

The straight up truth is this: you get better at writing by writing and reading.

That’s it. You can read techniques and advice and inspiration and tricks of the trade all day ever day, and yay you’re reading, which counts, but none of those magic tricks are going to work out better for you than gettin’ down and actually get intimate with the process. That means butt-in-seat and eyes-on-words.

So you’ll have to sort out for yourself what you’re going to be writing. (Or we can talk about it more later!) But what should you be reading? Everything, anything. Good, bad, in your genre, not in your genre, fiction and non fiction and poetry (FOR DOG SAKE read some poetry. Or listen to it read well if you don’t know how to scan.) Just make sure you’re branching out. There’s something for you to learn in any book, article, or even blog post you put your eyes on, even if it’s just ‘I will never ever do that in MY writing.’ Don’t read the same stuff over and over, don’t cling to one author, or one nationality, or one language or (Dog forbid) one genre! Likewise, if you only read nonfiction? Yeah… that’s going to show up in your writing. Just like everything else, luv, diversity or it’s crap.

Want more specifics to get started, okay!

Writing Advice. The practice of the craft, totally worth reading about so long as you don’t let yourself read these things instead of writing. Start here. Chuck Wendig’s The Kick-Ass Writer is easily digestible writing advice. Actually a thousand bits of digestible writing advice. It is brilliant and helpful and this guy is an inspiration for me personally. If you want a taste before you get his book, go poke around at his website TerribleMinds because it is SO good. He engages, he educates, he profanes in ways you didn’t even realize were possible. Fair warning, SO MUCH NAUGHTY LANGUAGE. That’s how you use the language, though, so even if you don’t personally cuss, you have to admire the way he’s experimenting and bends the language to his own needs is magical. Even if it’s usually poop-based magic.

Read Broadly. Also? Read women. Most people getting started don’t even realize how few women they’ve read compared to male authors. Most people wouldn’t even consider looking at the gender of the author unless they had a reason to. So, I’m giving you a reason! Currently, publishing leans very heavily toward praising male writers and tossing women writers into a genre ghetto to be profited off of, but rarely elevated or celebrated. Women have a harder time getting published, getting advertising money, or good shelving or reviews. (I’m not gonna debate this stuff, a hundred other authors have already gone over this phenomenon.) The important thing is this: you probably don’t have access to the same amazing women writers as you have access to amazing men writers.  Which means to read broadly, to listen to women’s voices, and learn from them, you’re going to have to put in extra work to find women writers.

And what is true of women writers? Is a million times more true for writers of color. You need to listen to the voices, stories, and language use of people of color. You really really do. It’ll make you a better writer and a better person because it will broaden your world view and that makes you a better writer.

Start with Octavia Butler. Really. Please. Go and read her to get started. As much of her work as you can get your hands on. THEN come back and I’ll have more recommendations for you. Or you can find more authors from all over on your own!

Read articles and stories by queer writers! Read articles and stories by trans* authors! Understand that the binaries many of us are raised with aren’t the only options. ESPECIALLY IF YOU WRITE FANTASY AND SCI FI! Here’s 41 YA titles by and about Trans* people. Don’t let the YA thing chase you off. It’s a term that doesn’t mean much anyway.  As for queer authors? Well, you may already be reading them, but go back and say, read Fight Club now that you know it’s author is gay. (If you haven’t read it before, and you’re over 17, you probably don’t need to, there are plenty of other options for queer reading!) Need more? Sure! CJ Cherryh, Audre Lord, Caitlin Kiernan as well as Alice Sheldon who’s expression is complicated and who’s stories are great.

Read books by authors who don’t speak English as a first language or at least speak it as one of many. Authors who don’t speak English as their primary language or are polyglots have such a beautiful take on language and really make a lot of demands of the language. I often find Umberto Ecco, for example, reads right on the line between prose and poetry because there is such a musicality to every sentence. It’s also kinda tough. But try it anyway.

There! Get out there! Read. We’ll talk about sitting down and writing next time. Yay!