In my twenties, when I, too, was an angsty young writer, I had some advice. Back then (the late 2000s) I was much happier to be luxuriantly vitriolic in public than I am now.

Which is not to say that I'm not, now, just... I find it valuable to not let that be the default way I engage with the world, these days.

Back then, frustrated with a lot of commercially minded, cutesy, and cloyingly supportive-of-your-artistic-journey-aren't-you-special writing advice that was going around, I transmuted some of my anger into a little sparkling acid I offered around as though it were champagne. I like to think I didn't fling it at anyone, directly.

As such, keep in mind that this is a visit from a younger and angrier place. Nowadays I would attempt to be more sensitive and measured. Probably. I hope.

 But, back in the day, some folks found this material worthwhile, so it's worth keeping online, somewhere.

Gaid 2 riting gud: Srsly (episod 1)

Duz u want 2 rite gud? Laik teh bestest evar? al u hav 2 du is fOllOw dis gaid! Srsly!

1. iF u ever tink dat riting laik diz iz akkseptable u r fail

I could tell you all about how 'I' frequently goes before 'E', and split infinitives, l33t text and putting asterisks into your text for those all important *sigh*s. If I have to do that I've already lost the battle. There are other guides for that. This guide is not about these things. It is about you.

You're not writing for you. You are writing for the reader. You are coming up with plots, stories, characters, witty turns of phrase and excellent names for your own benefit. Putting prose to pixel is about communicating with your audience. If you fail to do this then you have failed to write something worthwhile. Key elements in communicating effectively are grammar, spelling, punctuation and clear phrasing. Learn these on your own, we call them 'craft'.

If someone points out that you've made a grammar error and you say 'Well it doesn't matter' then I sincerely hope you put the keyboard down forever and return to the rest of your regularly scheduled life. This goes double, or possibly triple, if you think someone else will edit it for you.

There is only one correct response to an error you've made, 'Yes, I agree, I made an error'. If you actually made an error, that is. Go get a book on grammar or find a web page you like for reference and generate your own personal usage of the English language. Discover on your own what is 'correct' because there is no English Law agency out there to put you in jail - there are just other people who can or cannot read your work easily. Feel free to argue the details of what is and isn't an error if you think you know what you're doing.

If you intentionally broke a rule, generally to try and achieve some kind of stylistic effect, that's fine. But it's still wrong. Don't pretend it isn't, but feel free to fight vehemently in favour of your intentional error, because if it's not worth defending in an argument it wasn't worth making intentionally in the first place.

Your audience is there to read something. Not to puzzle out Byzantine arrangements of commas. This also applies to fonts, pretty colours, ridiculous file formats and every other hoop you make your audience leap through. They don't leap through hoops to read your work, you leap through hoops so they read your work.

If an audience has to go through an obstacle course, don't whine about it when they refuse to read your work and bitch about it. You're the one who made them do it, after all. Take your punishment like a man.

You ARE a writer! : Srsly (2nd step on the road to success!)

Do you want to unlock the secret heart behind your writing? Take your reader on an emotional rollercoaster that'll leave them begging for more? If so, read on!

2. Your writing experience is special and advice is going to make you into a complete schlub of a writer nobody's going to read!

All advice (Including this.) is unmitigated bullshit. If this were your usual writing guide, would it be propping up your tiny writer's ego (I'll come back to this, it applies to us all.) and giving you some kind of hope that the path ahead is simple if only you do the right things? Would it be telling you that there is some formula to success, some tiny set of actions you can take to empower yourself and find your true potential?!

Has reading this text so far improved your word count? No. And just reading it never will. Writing advice is a gigantic pit that will suck up your time ineffectually. The same is true of the stark majority of creative writing courses, mentorship programmes, blah blah blah.

Here is your writing advice that actually works. Stop reading this immediately and start writing.

No, really.

Don't stop to think about this. Go write. Now.

Did you do it? Really? No? Well I guess writing advice doesn't really do much for any of us.

And there is no map, no path, no secret, no method that will make it easier. It will not help if you outline, use mindmaps, fill out character questionnaires or follow someone's step by step guide to adding emotional turmoil to your work. There is only you.

What can you do?

Avoid like the plague any writing advice that tries to make you feel good about yourself. Writing is not easy. It is very hard. There's a quotation from some guy I've never heard of, beyond the fact he said this, called Red Smith. It goes; "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

People will try and paint some kind of happy smiley face on this, tell you the lie that writing is good for the soul and it is your special unique happy place, blah blah blah. No. Writing is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

This is not like bricklaying or firefighting or accountancy or cooking. You don't wake up in the morning with an existential crisis if you do any of those. Our brethren who sling around paint brushes are perhaps the only ones who will understand that nagging feeling you have (Or should have, unless you are a deluded maniac - also your prose sucks and I hate you.) whenever you sit down at the keyboard. The little voice in the back of your mind, twittering away no matter how many words you wrote yesterday or the day before.

'You have no goddamn clue what you're doing, do you?' 'Can you really do this AGAIN? Sure you wrote that other thing, but that was just fluke.' 'You don't understand symbolism, the nature of man, or any of that stuff. You have no business writing seriously.'

In short, you desperately want to find some advice, some words, some anything to get past those feelings. Like a handy ten step guide to how symbolism works, or notes on how to understand the nature of man and the human condition of mortality.

Don't falter.

Here's what you do instead:

Read books. You hear this a lot, but the fact of the matter is every jerk with a library card and a wall full of books would obviously then be perfectly set up to become the next award winning author. There are a lot of people out there who read a lot. But they don't read.

Do you understand what reading is? Reading is not eating up text with your eyes, spitting it onto your brain, and experiencing a story. It is examining every turn of phrase, every exclamation point and period and trying to determine why the author wrote it like that, what imagery and concepts and meanings this conveys, and whether you could do it better.

It is hard as hell to do this regularly. I find it easy to do with shitty text and as a result I read - more frequently than I'd ever admit - things like movie and game tie-in novels. These are almost always crap. You will always find something in them you could have done better. If you start working up a good emotional head of steam and are about ready to throw the book against the wall, that's perfect. Get angry because the author missed so many opportunities to do something right. Keep reading.

If you can start applying this to your favourite and most admired books, you will come to understand how these things were written and why you love them so much.

If you must have a book on writing, examine it carefully. Does it pad your ego? Does it tell you things you want to hear?

Or does it cause you trauma? Does it make you question what you thought you understood, make you feel struck low as you realize you did not write as well as you thought you did? If it does this, buy it immediately.

The best places to find material of this nature are in serious literary criticism type books, doing things like dissecting the structure of the novel or discussing how the author brings their life experiences into their works. Typically these books will have been printed by a university press or Writer's Digest and be comparatively expensive - this doesn't matter, but you should be browsing through the book before buying it.

Go to your local book store and ask where they keep copies of the Writer's Market - books like this will usually be hiding somewhere in this area. (Beware - handy ten step guides live here too.)

You want to be challenged in your thinking, you want to discover the ladder you thought you were so high on has ten rungs above you that you never knew were there, you want to feel like you just got knocked off the ladder and need to climb back up. You need to have an introspective philosophical and psychological journey into the heart and soul of who you are, why you write, and why you read.

If this all seems a bit high brow for you, re-evaluate why you just spent a couple of minutes reading the above. It hopefully didn't make you feel better about yourself, and it sure as hell didn't improve your word count.

Guides won't mysteriously make you a better writer if you read them. Particularly not this one - all this one can possibly do is make you realize that you need to work hard and put in the effort.

Remember: There is only you. You have to improve yourself, the rest of us won't do it for you.

Poetry's Easy and Prose is Powerful: Srsly (My heart was 3)

Writing poetry is really easy, it's all about feelings! Everybody has feelings to express, right? So pick up that keyboard and...

3. Write formless shapeless purely expressive text that is complete dreck.

Poetry is an artform that is essentially about playing tricks with prose for a beautiful effect. The reason I bring it up is because it highlights something very interesting. People think they know how to write poetry. They go, 'ohh, I write in free verse! :3' and then everyone with half a clue just switches off, expecting them to hack up their text at random with no form or structure or anything and just call it 'Free Verse'. Free verse is the deconstruction of poetry's many forms and methods to produce beautiful text.

Going at free verse first under the assumption it's easy is like assuming that rollerblading is precisely like walking. The only difference is, poetry doesn't give you a broken ankle if you fuck up.

You wanna write pretty prose? You need to be on at least nodding terms with poetry. This won't tell you about poetry. Poetry is big and complex and you need to try writing it yourself, just don't gabble randomly and call it 'Free Verse'. Try to make it rhyme. Because rhyme is one of the very few things prose can do.

What prose cannot do is describe anything. Don't believe me? Okay. Let's assume I am describing something to you for the first time. You've never encountered this thing in your life, but somehow I will describe it to you with text. Here goes!

'Red.'

How about another one?

'Hot.'

One more!

'Pain.'

Golly. That's problematic. You know how people may have told you that anything film can do, a novel can do better? Well a film can definitely describe 'Red' to you, but it's going to have trouble with 'Hot' and 'Pain' - although it can show you people experiencing heat and pain.

There are plenty of things prose cannot ever do. Language is too limiting. But what it can do you want to exploit fully. Poetry's been trying for a few hundred - technically thousand - years, but if you're going to go 'All I need is Free Verse' you're about to rollerblade yourself into a dead end you will never drag yourself out of.

Prose, as a form, is intrinsically tied to language. Language is messy and organically developed. If you are going to use it effectively, you must learn the limitations and the various tricks. One is Synaesthesia - 'That's a loud shirt, Tom.' 'I'm feeling blue...' Why this works, nobody knows.

But you'll learn about that trick, and many more... in poetry. Or by paying attention to beautiful prose - which some would argue, even if it's in the form of a novel, is poetry.

Read Harry Potter, the Aenid of our times: Srsly (4 real!)

I love harry potter! ^-^ Do you love harry potter? SNAPE SNAPE OMG I LOVE YOU HAVE MY BABIES. YAY FANFIC!

4. Writing fanfiction is the best thing you can ever do (for me, because I don't want competition.)

Many people have knocked Harry Potter over the years, so all I am going to say on the matter is: We need to forget Potter and rally the troops against the evil influences of Twilight.

But broadly it's symptomatic of something else, which is people reading deeply into a single genre or author and assuming that by doing so they have not only discovered the best writing evar, but the single paragon whom to emulate. This is fatally stupid, and fan fiction is a related symptom.

If you're a furry author, you must read 'Of Mice and Men'. If you write romance, you must read 'Starship Troopers'. If you write science fiction, you should read 'Treasure Island'. If you write serious literary fiction, you should read 'Zig Zag: The Story'.

People will come along and be nice and fluffy and say, 'Oh, it's okay. You read whatever you like reading!' This doesn't apply to those of us who love slinging words around. Why is the popular conception that all SF is crap, all Furry Lit is crap, and all Fantasy is crap? It is because the majority of writers of SF, Furry Lit, and Fantasy, stick to their genre and chain themselves to it. This is true of all genres, actually, but Spec Fic - which SF, Furry Lit and Fantasy fall under - is particularly tarred by this brush.

Any insular artistic movement will generate concepts unique to it. But it will also be locking itself away from all the rest of human endeavour. Do not lock the door. You love your genre? That's fine, but there's a gigantic world out there waiting for you to explore it. Read outside your genre, write outside your genre. (This includes your favourite archetypes - do you write quiet fiction about a soccer mom? Read/write about delinquent children and spies. Only write about super-soldiers? Write about someone average trying to track down a childhood friend.)

Fan fiction is awful for this. Not only are you limiting yourself to the elements just in one given genre, you are limiting yourself to a given cast of characters and situations. Now writing fanfic - writing anything - now and then is absolutely fine. It's when you spend six years writing and discover that you've only really written material about four or five characters with maybe a dozen significant plot elements... that's when you'll start to realize why fanfic hurts more than helps. This is also why you should, particularly if you have a favourite couple of characters to write about, be willing to veer wildly off course and write stuff about different characters and in different genres.

This also applies to style - if you think Hemmingway Is It, write neat uncluttered prose all the time and never experiment with alternatives, that's all you'll be able to write. You need to branch out. Some stories want a different voice to tell them, and you need to learn how to switch voices. Write something in first person, write something in third person, write something in a tangled mix, write something in a perspective nobody's heard of before. Experiment.

Never, ever, look down on a genre as completely worthless. I dislike fanfiction because it seems like a particular time-sink to me, but it has valuable things to teach about working to another person's drum and from an established set of rules - and trying to find new things to do within those rules, or ways to break those rules.

Pornography is a genre people tend to look down on. Pornography, as a word, is basically Greek and at root means 'Writing about prostitutes.' (Or maybe, depending on your views, writing like a prostitute...) Written and visual pornography tends to suffer from major genre inbreeding. If art is there to reflect life, what pornography reflects must surely be the bloated egos and sexual appetites of the basest kind of man. Right?

Well.

If we view art as evoking feelings, pornography must lean pretty heavily on 'Horny', in the same way feel-good heartwarming films lean on 'Happy', or comedies on 'Funny'. So a pornography type movie dealing in 'Happy' rather than horny would look something like this:

'Joe comes home. Finds a birthday cake and a surprise party. He is voted awesomest guy in the universe. His favourite song is playing on the radio. Someone hands him fifty dollars. Someone else hands him a hundred dollars. Someone else gives him ten thousand dollars and his favourite kind of candy. Joe gets another cake celebrating his fantastic sense of style.'

In short, there's no artistic merit to it because - ultimately - nothing really happens. Or, if we are kind, something happens and nothing really changes what happened. A story is often about change, about the flies in the ointment of our happiness. About picking up the flies in the ointment and flicking them away. Pornography devoid of artistic merit isn't how it has to be, and there are people working with pornography in all its myriad forms - adult art, erotica, etc etc - trying to express something more. In short, they are going outside of their genre and bringing material back from the outside world to put into their works. Or alternately they are working in some other genre and exploring what pornography as a genre can offer them.

The point is, they explore and they experiment, and they do not treat any one work as the be all and end all of fiction or artwork. So read Harry Potter and the Aenid.

Other people are there for you: Srsly (Get 5 Beta Readers!)

When you start writing, be aware there's a large and well established community to help you out.

5. Because everybody is clearly there for your own personal use.

Have you ever sent someone a piece of writing filled with typos and grammar errors and expected them to fix it for you? Congratulations: You just gave up on learning how to fix them yourself and hence never make them again. Did you just ask people for a plotline? Isn't that kind of like giving up on one of the major points behind writing, expressing yourself? Yourself, not some other person? Did you read a writer's guide to firearms and now know that when you're describing a shooting or murder scene you should include vivid descriptive terms like 'the smell of cordite'? You do know cordite was primarily used in artillery shells, right?

Gosh. Maybe you should... rely on yourself more.

Other people are not there for your benefit. You are there for theirs. There is a concept that's been floating around SF circles for decades called 'Pay It Forward'. Piffle, you might say, but it is gospel. Do kindly unto others as you yourself have been kindly done to. There is a huge community out there, you should definitely interact with it, but never ever think you're entitled to anything from it.

Having people critique your work and edit it for you is, yes, very very handy. But don't make them edit it for you until you've fixed every potential error you can find. Asking for ideas is fun, sure, but you need to figure out the shocking truth. Ideas are absolutely worthless and there are trillions of them floating around, the only value in a good idea is how much work you yourself have put into it - so get into the habit of coming up with 'ideas'. Staring at a blank screen is one tried and true method. Going to museums - temples of the muse - is another good way to do it.

When you want to write something involving a little expertise, don't rely on other people to tell you how it is. They say 'write what you know', and what that means is if you're three feet tall and want to write something about tall people, watch tall people you know. Think about what being tall means. Maybe grab a pair of stilts for an afternoon.

And if anyone actually does do something useful for you? For God's sake, pay it forward. You'll learn more about your own writing than you could possibly realize by critting and editing other people's works, you'll figure out plenty about how plots sit together by trying to help other people develop theirs, and if someone's lost on some small bit of expertise you will know so much more about it by helping them out.

They're not there for you - you're there for them.

Red Roses mean love, White Doves peace: Srsly (6 Icons!)

Adding that elusive meaning and symbolism to your work is simple. All you have to do is...

6. Discover that white is a universally recognised colour for the goddamn blank page.

Big burly men are always sensitive, apparently quiet husbands with miserable wives are always wife-beaters, the littlest dog has the biggest bark and the protagonist will always turn to a wise bearded old man for advice and mentorship.

If a woman wears a slinky red dress to meet up with a business contact for drinks, she is thinking about very different kinds of mergers, the young dad with a baseball cap is inevitably coaching his son's little league team, and the author is always an intense, yet dreamy, person with one foot in their world of fiction at all times.

Archetypes. Can't get by without them. The skull and crossbones on the bottle means poison, the red heart on the envelope means it's a love letter. Those are symbols. These things are all part of an intangible part of language which people will inevitably rape and pillage in a desperate attempt to make something worthwhile. This is how cliches are born.

Everybody uses these things, and many of us are aware that while you wear black to mourn in the West, in the East you wear white. These things are intangible and seldom formally codified. This is not about all of these things. If you attempt to use them and fail, woe betide you. If you figure out how to use them well, fantastic.

This is about symbolism in fiction, which you can sneak into your work and people will misinterpret it, because readers are bastards. You can have been thinking of your quiet down on his luck bachelor whom ages disgracefully and yearns for his youth as a fallen Peter Pan figure, and some reader will come along and assume he's just a lecherous old man hanging around with kiddies because the author is a class A Pervo.

Nobody knows what the hell they're doing in inserting symbolism, but if we listen to the various disciplines of criticism typically there is so much to it any author who's successfully applied it has carefully spent weeks and years with an itty-bitty notebook making clever notes and laughing up their sleeve.

Then there's the reality of it.

You write your work. A reader interprets it. The reader takes what you have said - the little subtle touches like whenever it's autumn your characters start yearning for the year to end - and concludes that the fallen oak leaf one lover gives another is a hint that this relationship needs to be over. The reader takes what you have said - like the fact you mentioned a character has shoes twice in one scene - and concludes that the work is a subtle put-down on materialistic culture because they don't like that character and their goddamn shoes.

It's a gigantic crap shoot. It's not one you can easily pick up out of a guide. You will have to wing it, and you will have to be willing to try and come up with your own symbolism sometimes - like the oak leaves - and try and lean on the unwritten parts of society that will provide the rest - like the slinky red dress.

Deeper meaning is a function of interpretation. Readers interpret things based, most of all, on their own lives. If they had good experiences in school, tales of kids in school will strike them - at least initially - as more positive than it would strike someone who had very negative experiences in school.

Of course you can twist how people will interpret any given thing and that's a good skill to have, but ultimately when you try doing this there's a lot more hinging on your reader than before. So you need to understand your reader, how they think and what conclusions they'll draw from what they've seen. What experiences they have to draw from to make sense of your work.

Your reader can reasonably be assumed to know what it's like skinning their knee as a child, and maybe only half of parents (although this is dropping!) will know what it's like breastfeeding their baby - although the reader's imagination may just stretch to experiences they haven't had but can conceptualise. You never know.

They'll understand that skinning the knee and running to mom means reassurance and safety. They'll understand that having someone shove you down and make you skin your knee means quite the opposite. They'll know that a parent cleaning their kid's skinned knees while the child is uncooperative as to the cause is a dark portent of what's to come. This is symbolism too, of a sort.

And if half your audience doesn't 'get' what you wrote, but you feel you have a deeper meaning to convey to the other half of the audience... maybe you just need to be willing to make that sacrifice. Might just be worthwhile.

As you know Bob, show don't tell: Srsly (7 shows, no tells!)

You will hear this time and time again and it is very important you understand this; show, don't tell. If you tell you are clearly...

7. Leaning on the narrator, the worst thing that people have done continually since the dawn of storytelling. Over and over again. Because it works.

We used to tell stories like this: Once upon a time there was Jack. Jack had blue hair, from an unfortunate boating accident in a novelty children's lake when he was seven. It left him scarred and bitter.

Then we started telling stories like this: Jack sighed. He flipped back his wild shock of blue hair. "Before you ask, yes. It was an accident. Who in their right mind would do this to their hair?"

Except all those helpful people who tell you to show and not to tell are doing something weird They're telling you. Because they're trying to get information across. Which is a very difficult art that humanity have been working pretty hard on ever since Thog whacked Thog over the head with a tree branch and henceafter became 'Thog, that cockface with the stick' while 'Thog, with the bleeding head' went off to try and explain to people that they should really get some sticks of their own.

Narrators were - and are - a preferred option because they closely mimic the way people actually tell stories in conversation. This is useful, but text is not the voice. The idea that narration has ever been a preferred written form is, honestly, something I consider rather dodgy - the written form as you and I understand it, the novel, is horribly new. It's still wide-open to experimentation. Novel actually means 'the new thing'.

The novel has gradually evolved to various new and different perspectives, many of which make having a narrator in the classical old style look rather odd. For example, in something written in the first person, whenever your viewpoint character tells the audience something that he doesn't know at that point in the narrative - 'She'd taken an umbrella that day, and I told her she'd been foolish. Of course I was the fool, she'd always known which days it would rain, it was just her little gift. Never wrong before, and not wrong on that day when I set off confidently in the sunshine.' - you do a funny little something which informs your reader, subtly, that your viewpoint character is talking from a long, long way away from these events. Is that really something you want to do in a novel where you wish to try and make your readers paranoid about whether or not the character comes out of the events a whole man?

In a novel where you're writing in what is now a popular viewpoint - close third person - you are trying to write from your character's shoulder. "John walked down the street, hating every step. He kicked a can from his path, hurt his foot and ignored it. Damn cans, laying out in the road like that. Some kid would cut themselves and get tetanus." In that I'm using narrative techniques as soon as I start going on about 'Damn cans' and 'Some kid'. The difference is the narrator is, it would appear, John himself.

If I wrote it like this - 'John walked down the street, hating every step. He kicked a can from his path, hurt his foot and ignored it. John had always hated cans laying openly in the street. He always feared that some poor kid from the neighbourhood would cut themselves open while playing with it and perhaps get tetanus' - I would be doing what is generally understood as 'telling, not showing', or rather using an inappropriate voice and mechanism to give the reader information.

The classical example of inappropriate ways to get information across is 'As you know, Bob.' Lets say in your story you need to explain something that everybody knows, but you've been listening to these people who say 'Show, don't tell'. You will then write a conversation like this, because it fits your story's style of writing - '"As you know, Bob, since we've been friends of John for years and years, he's always hated cans littering the streets. He's afraid the neighbourhood children might hurt themselves." "Yes. Tetanus, that sort of thing." "Exactly."'

You're not breaking your writing style like this, but you are breaking the bounds of believability that anyone would assume to address Bob - a longtime friend of John - in that fashion.

You have information you need to get across to your reader. You want to do it as invisibly as possible. Sometimes that means telling your reader outright after leading your character into a quiet, expositionary moment - as if the character is trying to explain it to themselves to make sense of it all. Sometimes it means having your narrator directly address the audience, sometimes it means having a son walk into his estranged father's apartment, pick up a cigarette carton, a lung X-ray, and start weeping.

There are a lot of techniques. You are not looking to show or tell. You just want your reader to be struck by the same inspiration from nowhere you were while writing, to magically know every damn detail. Barring mysterious psychic mind transfers, however, your best bet is to experiment with your writing and find a way of addressing your readers without breaking the flow or style of what you've written.

Outlines, Mindmaps, Braincrutches: Srsly (I forgot 8 D:)

It is unfortunate, but man is a forgetful creature. He must always hence make notes and outline, for if he does not he shall...

8. Avoid being locked into an outline, then throw your toys out of the cot and give up.

We are told to plan out the minute details. To outline, to make notes, to dig deep into our organisational capacity and come out with perfect blow by blow accounts of our story. Or alternately we are told that this will stifle our creativity and that the outline is flexible. Sometimes we are told never to outline, sometimes to fill out little character forms asking you about what your character would do in the event they found fifty dollars in the street.

Truth of the matter is, no two people do this the same. You have to figure out your own method. Because the real reason you're doing this has nothing to do with organisation.

Writing is a lot like going mad. You sit down and imagine people in your head, places in your head, and hallucinate vividly about it until you've got enough to type a few words. Rinse. Repeat. This is inherently a strange, personal process. The trick is facilitating it and turning it into a skill.

Some people keep dream journals, writing down everything they remember when they wake up, learning to remember more of their dreams and have the details on hand for later, to help them remember what happened quite vividly. There are other techniques here, of course.

The point is, it's a tool for them to try and recapture the thread of those strange nocturnal imaginings. And that's all outlining usually is. Except the nocturnal imaginings are literary.

Will it help you if you know every detail of your character's personal hygiene? No. It won't. Maybe it'll help you remember more about the character, fix them more firmly in your imagination, but I have my doubts. The key factor here is that you are looking for methods to fix your characters and your plots firmly in your memory and to be able to recall them clearly in six months, with a little effort.

You do not want to draw out your writing infront of you like a blueprint for the sake of having a blueprint. Trust me on this, no matter how OCD you are, what you really want is something that will bring back that spark of inspiration you had while you first thought it up and focus that spark into something usable while you're trying to write.

So by all means. Try rigid outlines, try flexible outlines, try notes, try no notes, try writing flash fiction (under five hundred words), try whatever you want to try... but don't lose sight of the fact that what you're doing isn't planning. It's remembering your inspiration.

You should start at the beginning. : Srsly (Not chapter 9)

Once I started a story at the beginning. It began, 'There was a bang. It was pretty big'. I have not finished writing it.

9. So I thought I'd try in media res, but nobody I know speaks Latin.

Storytelling is an ancient art. Fiction is newer, because we told true stories. We told stories about the hunt, about our forefathers, about our gods - and at that stage, this was not fiction to us. So all stories had the same beginning - God created the world, Kronus jerked off his dad with a sickle, whatever - and the same end - Revelations, wolf eats the sun, some very nice white men give you smallpox, etc. These were known, and understood. So the tales that got told around the campfire did not have a start or an end, they were just events in the melange of life that went on around them. Events like Thog, that cockface with a stick, picking up a stick for the first time. Or the time Thog, who had a totally wicked scar, figured out how to sharpen rocks and tie them to a stick. (What can I say? Victors write history.)

The thing these all had in common were that they were based around events, interesting events. We don't have stories about how Finn Mac Cumhaill went to take a crap behind the beautiful rolling Irish green hills. Nor do we have stories about Caesar getting out of bed on a frosty morning and demanding someone get a fire going - unless this was the morning before killing a ton of Gauls.

We want to talk about what interests us, and in our community we all know how popular person A was prowling around with popular person B after dinner last night. We talk about that. Not popular person A's birth, life and times, and probable death. We can all be assumed to know that. So when we start telling a story about person A, we get right to the good stuff with as little as possible to just provide a little context. You can just yell out 'Hey, person A broke their leg getting out of bed!' or you can spin it out a bit, 'You know... person A was hanging around with person B last night. And you know what they've been up to. Person A broke their leg getting out of bed, ho ho!'

Very often we want to start writing at the beginning. The very beginning. The events that started to shape our character into the awesome person they are. This is a gigantic mistake. The second instinct is to start writing at the beginning of the plot, the point where our awesome character sets off on their awesome quest or when awesome character meets awesome love interest. Bigger mistake still. How about starting when there is a major event that is totally lifeshaking and- nope. Wrong.

You want to start where your narrative begins. This is completely different. The narrative is the expression of the story, it is where you begin to tell the tale. Oh ho, you utter fool, you can't Srsly believe that this is some kind of advice? Ah, but it is.

Working out where to start the narrative is an art, a science, and a dark voodoo all its own. Working out what parts of the narrative to tell are, possibly, more voodoo than art.

First you need to know what your story is about. Literally, what is it about? Is it about that one time Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon? Okay. You start with Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, and finish with Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. Your story is, 'One time, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon!'

Oh. You want to write a longer story than that?

Well. Lets look at the elements that make up these interesting things about humanity.

The first and most important is change. We are interested in what changes the path of this man's life, we are not interested in the periods where things are smooth sailing. We could write a detailed examination of his life, detailing every minute he spent in repetitive training over a span of ten thousand pages. We could also find the moment that changed Neil Armstrong from being a regular guy to an astronaut. Okay, let's assume (this is wrong) that one day as a child he looked up at the moon, had a sparkle in his eye, and said... 'I wanna go there.'

Okay, so we start the story there and go through his whole life until he got to the moon? No. No we don't. We just tell the audience about the change.

'Neil Armstrong, as a kid, looked up at the night sky and saw the moon, and his heart broke because it was so damn pretty. He swore he'd get up to the moon, and one day that's just what he did. He stepped on the goddamned moon, and became an American hero.'

Oops! We seem to be missing a few things. Well, we better add in other pieces of context so this will make more sense to people who don't know much about the space program - you don't just randomly step on the moon, you go through training and selection and get shot off in a rocket, and that's pretty dramatic. That's one hell of a change, although of scenery - rather than of heart.

'Neil Armstrong was one hell of a kid, he looked up at the pretty old moon and his heart broke because it was just so damn pretty. He worked hard growing up, was selected as an astronaut, and got shot off to the moon in a gigantic rocket. He'd had to travel an incredible distance to do it, make use of all the best technology we had in the world, but he actually stepped on the moon.'

Wow. What a hero. Except you don't have to do it like this.

'I was one of the ground crew prepping the rocket to launch Neil Armstrong to the moon for that famous first step he took, leaving a print in the dust. But I remember what he told me; as a child he'd always loved the moon, and swore one day he'd stand on it.'

That changes the focus a bit. Our story is less about Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, and more about him achieving a childhood goal - about him loving the moon from day one.

There are a million and one ways you could mix up these elements - let's start with him stepping on the moon.

'There he was, Neil Armstrong, putting his foot on the moon. He'd gone a long way to do it, been supported by NASA - the best scientists ever, flown a rocket off the earth, and finally he was here - achieving a goal he'd held since childhood.'

It's the same plot. It's - theoretically - the same story, the same elements. It's not the same narrative. You start your narrative... somewhere, God knows where, not me. It's different with each story, it's different depending on how you want to tell it. You don't tell the whole story, not every tiny scrap of information about a thing, but only the interesting parts - where things change, where things are achieved.

It's voodoo. Crazy voodoo.

The point is, there is a massive difference between plot and story and the telling of the story. If you tell somebody a mystery story, for instance, you do not want to start truly in the middle of the action - as they say, 'In Media Res', because the middle of the action is - ultimately - the resolution of the mystery. That is what the story is, ultimately, going to be about. How this mystery came about, how it was solved, how it was done. You want to start with the context in such a situation, you want to build up the mystery for the readers.

But if you're telling an action story, about how they did it and got away with it, starting in the middle could be a great idea - guns blazing and leaving a tantalising note to throw the investigators off the trail.

If you're telling a contemplative story about one of the robbers angry with how he wasted his life by committing that crime, maybe you want to start long, long after the plot's finished with - in his old age, looking back at the folly of youth, visiting the graves of those dead and getting in touch with those still alive - and probably in jail.

There's no set answer. None. It varies, you will seldom want to start at the beginning, and even when you think you should - because your story is set in a fantasy world where the world is a gigantic gherkin spat up by Nosey the Nose-fairy - you shouldn't, unless that's specifically what your story is about. If your story is about Peter the Gherkin miner finding a mysterious diamond... you write that. Because that's the part that's worth telling.

We gave up on starting our stories with a list of Gods giving birth to each other thousands of years ago. There is a reason - we're not interested in doing that anymore.

All readers are stupid: Srsly (IQ of 10 year olds!)

Okay, so, like. This thing I wrote? None of my readers got it! You know, got it? Not like got it like had it in thier hands, because I gave it to them, but like...

10. Clearly they just couldn't understand what I was saying. Because I was speaking clear, legible Swahili.

They say readers are getting dumber. It's true. Fewer and fewer people read books every year, sales are plummeting, and I hear the Anti-Christ is coming too. The world has always had its lower classes, its uneducated masses, its fifteen year olds who are not sure how to spell 'fifteen'. (Fiveteen? Fiftyn!)

So clearly if you want to write well, and reach a large audience, you should write with a very small number of short words and in small sentences so everyone can read what you wrote and like it a lot. Or you can say fuck that, use your vocabulary to the absolute limit of your ability and trust in the fact that people are smarter than you give them credit for. So smart they read things you didn't even write!

It's tempting to think of writing as a one-way interaction. You write, they read, the end. There is only you, there is only what you put on the page, and it had better be simplistic and clear cut and expansive or nobody's going to get it.

Because a line like 'Ow. God. Fuck. Toes.' will clearly not bring to mind someone raging in pain at a stubbed toe. Obviously not, I mean there is absolutely nothing there to suggest people at all! In fact in a literal reading we might assume that there is some kind of pain when God comes along to hump your toes for you. (Rule 34, anyone?)

This is broadly what people refer to when they mysteriously and airily say, 'Read between the lines.' Because that's what readers continually do, and you should let them do it.

When you write down 'The sky was grey-green at night with pollution and light' people who live in nice, pleasant, clean places will get a very strange mental image that may seem almost cartoonish. People who have lived in big polluted cities will immediately recall nights like that, the weird colours the sky turns over a city with a lot of light pollution on overcast nights. The smell of the air - maybe thick and foggy, maybe weirdly clean. The eerie sound of no traffic at all in the middle of the park they first observed this in, all quiet in a city that's usually thrumming with noise... or maybe the rowdy laughter of people around them all on the way home from a night clubbing, where inevitably they catch a glimpse of the sky.

So suddenly your statement about the sky's colour doesn't just tell them about the colour. It associates with every time they've encountered such a thing, every memory and concept sparked off by it. Maybe it reminds them of some old kid's television series with an acid green sky, and suddenly the 'grey' part doesn't matter, it's just ignored and they hold in their minds a bright burning green sky. For awhile every new character that pops up will share tangled, dream-like traits with the cartoon characters... or with the clubbers.

There is a set of common experience you can draw on - first loves, scraped knees, the taste of apples and the smell of soap. There are less common ones - the struggle to hold one's head upright while cornering an F1 racer, the weird, jolting pain of electrocution. But your readers will fill in the gaps with their imaginations and a melange of their own experience. Take two tablespoons of turning the car and having everything on the dashboard slide off, a small helping of falling over, and just a little pinch of headbanging at a concert. Of course people who've been there will remember the feel of the wheel in their hands and the racking vibrations coursing through the whole thing - but for everyone else, you want to describe those things so they can be imagined through a little holding the games controller way too tight and a little standing next to a concert speaker.

Another thing. If I describe a beautiful woman to you, curvy in all the right places, slinky red dress, high heels, perfume in her hair... you know what colour her hair is, don't you? It's blonde or brunette or a honey brown or red. I didn't tell you that, you supplied this information on your own. The moment I tell you her hair's stark white, you don't know that described woman as well as you did a second ago. The mental image you came up with was strong, and powerful, because I didn't give you all the details and you decided on them yourself.

The car's racing down the track at a hundred and forty, the left tyre blows, it spins out! What kind of car was it? A formula car, a stock car, a monster truck? Probably not a monster truck. But I bet that you had a much stronger mental image of that before I started forcing you to imagine it as something other than your default choice for 'car'. If I'd just left it at car, you'd never have been the wiser, and if you happen to be a racing fan I could've left you to concentrate on the terrible way the tyres wobble just heartbeats before they blow, the way the driver wrenches the wheel around. I didn't write any of that, but a reader can easily see it there anyway.

You're smart enough to tell me what kind of car it is, and what colour the beautiful woman's hair is. I just can't hear you. And when I leave a detail like that up to you, I need to know where I've done it and to avoid breaking the mental image you've carefully built up for us in this crazy dialogue we've got going between writer and reader.

Your readers are capable of bringing a lot to the table whenever you write. Of course you'll never know about it, but let them bring their own expertise and experience into play. Encourage it.