40 Thoughts on Writing on My 40th

Today is my 40th birthday and to celebrate I assigned myself the task of compiling my top 40 pieces of advice and opinions on writing and comedy. Are any of these rules? Absolutely not. Do I ignore my own advice? Often. Who am I to blast out these takes as if I know what I’m doing? I’m a published author. I’m not Stephen King or Danielle Steele, but I’m also not…I can’t actually think of a writer who is less popular than me, so let’s just stick with: I’m a published author.

1. A great way to get better as a writer is to practice different forms. I didn’t make it as a novelist until I spent years writing sketch comedy at theaters in New York. Sketch comedy is great because it is all about characters and you get the bonus of being able to hear your work succeed or fail with an audience. Other novelists write poetry or plays. Different formats give you a different perspective and help you grow as a writer.
2. Don’t overplan characters before you’ve written a word of their dialogue. I hear people write out whole character bibles for their books, and maybe that works for some authors, but it is so much more fun to let the character talk and find out something interesting about them in the dialogue. (For fans of my Andrea Vernon books: A:) I never planned a romance between Andrea and The Big Axe, but as soon as I started writing their dialogue, it clicked. B:) I was writing Ms. Oh’s first bit and was trying to avoid using a cliché, and tried to think of how she’d say it, and discovered a fun character game to play).
3. Not everything has to be a secret. I mean this between characters and to the reader. If something’s a secret from the reader, it should really pay off. If a character is hiding something from others, there should be a reason, otherwise it’s just slowing down the story.
4. Competence can be much more fun than incompetence.
5. If someone is incompetent, the reason for it is the interesting thing. A bad birthday party clown does nothing for me. A birthday clown who is bad because he is a laid off stock broker? A birthday party clown who secretly wants to be a Broadway actor and only took this gig because he heard the father of the birthday girl is a famous director? Okay, these two ideas are also bad, but you see where I’m going with this.
6. When I get stuck in the plot, I think, “What is the most fun thing that could happen?” Of course, I write fun books, so this might not work for everyone.
7. “Lots of different kinds of jokes.” This is a quote by Eric Drysdale, who at the time directed a sketch team I was on, and I think about it every time I write a book.
8. Write characters to the height of their intelligence. This was something I heard a lot doing sketch comedy, and something I think about when I see a character say something that makes no sense for them to say just for a joke. If your joke requires you to sacrifice character development, it is probably not worth it.
9. “Kill your darlings.” I just looked this up and apparently this turn of phrase is credited to Arthur Quiller-Crouch. By this, I mean sometimes you have to look at something that you might love, but it doesn’t work, and cut it right out of the story. I wrote a chapter in Andrea Vernon 2 with a superhero named Deep Cowboy, who defeats a villain using his advanced nihilism. I liked it! I also realized I had another chapter that had something just similar enough and I deleted it.
10. Specifics drive character. If your teenage character is saving up to buy a car, what car and what does it say about them? Or does it have to be a car? A lot of kids wants cars, maybe your kid wants his own hot dog cart or to be able to rent office space or whatever. Someone brings roses on a date, or maybe it’s a bagels or a Buy One Get One Half Price coupons.
11. Your characters cannot constantly be shocked. I read a book once where every other page there was a line about the main character to the tune of “She saw who was behind the door and her stomach plunged down to her feet.” “She read the last line of the email and her blood turned to ice.” “She heard the door open and her heart leapt through her nose.” I was reading it going, “At what point does she just vomit? How long can this possibly go on?” I felt like at least once, maybe when she found out her husband was actually a mafia-controlled android, or whatever, she could just go, “Okay, sure. After everything else, sure.”
12. I am a strong fan of characters who make decisions. On a similar note, I rarely enjoy the part of the story when the hero doesn’t want to participate in the quest. I’m sure I can think of counter-examples, but generally speaking, your hero can just say yes. Let’s go!
13. Similar note: I get frustrated when there’s too much time between when the main character discovers the magical or alien thing and when someone finally believes them. “I swear, he was right here in this closet?” “Okay, sure he was, buddy!”
14. The main character doesn’t have to be wise-cracking. I love Peter Venckman, but I see a lot of Peter Venckmans, and you can still have a funny story with a lead who is earnest.
15. Every single character is an individual and an opportunity. The guy who delivers the pizza, the customer service rep, etc. If someone is going to have a line of dialogue, it can be more than “Thanks” or “Please hold.”
16. Questions can slow down a story. I made a rule that Andrea Vernon can never ask a question, because I’ve read too many books and seen too many movies where the main character keeps asking why and how. It becomes an FAQ. Just let things start happening and enough will get explained eventually.
17. Write what you want to know. I hear “Write what you know” a lot, and I don’t entirely disagree. I wrote a book about Orlando because I grew up there, but, writing is an opportunity to explore, and I don’t want to only write about the handful of places I’ve lived and jobs I’ve worked. I’ve written characters who are smarter than me and who do things I can’t, and that takes research. Because of writing, I know the smallest counties in Georgia by population, how glassblowing works, and the factors determining the price for cattle. I am zero fun to talk to parties. (I’m on deadline, but I swear there’s a better specific than parties for that joke)
18. Details matter. I wrote about electrical engineering, so I asked an electrical engineer to check my work. When I write about a city, I ask someone from there to tell me what feels off. I read a book about New York once and wondered by the end if the author had ever been here. Brooklyn was treated like a tiny neighborhood populated only by frappe drinking skinny jeans wearers and not a diverse borough full of millions of people. As a reader, I’d rather have stuff over my head than feel like the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I have no sense of the geography of Chicago, but I’d rather read the natives talk about their neighborhoods in a way that seems natural and not one that gives too much help to me to figure it out quickly.
19. Find people who will give you honest criticism. It’s great that all of your friends love your book, and it’s good to gain confidence in your writing by hearing what’s positive about it, but find a writing group, whether it’s online or in person. When I was getting people to read themy early drafts of Andrea Vernon and the Corporation for UltraHuman Protection, I would ask them, “What did you like best and what did you like least?”
20. Success in writing usually takes a lot of rejection. It’s tough! I got rejected by dozens of agents. I got rejected from writing jobs. I applied to write for Sesame Street, and the rejection letter came with a picture of Cookie Monster on it. That was over a decade ago and it still stings. I now think of rejection as exercise. Rejectercise.
21. Success often takes luck. When I was trying to find representation for my first book, I would read “How I found my agent” stories and all of them were maddening to me. Every one of them seemed to have some line like, “After one hundred and seventy six rejections, I sent off a query to an agent who turned out to be my long lost twin!” And then I got published and found an agent (in that order) in a series of lucky events that would make most aspiring writers want to kick dirt on my shoes. When I was doing sketch, I saw people I know get writing jobs on late night and get cast on SNL. There were people who worked hard and never made it, but no one ever made it without working hard. If you improve as a writer and keep putting yourself out there, you are setting yourself up to find that luck. And maybe you’re a better writer than me and you don’t need luck!
22. If you’re trying to find an agent for your book, keep writing while you query. I did not do this and when I shockingly sold my novel, I had nothing else ready to go. Keep writing, keep going.
23. I am a believer in reading lots of different types of books and also finishing books I hate. I like to ask myself why I hate it and whether I do the things I’m complaining about in someone else’s work. I read bad reviews of books I love and glowing reviews of books that I absolutely did not click with.
24. “Habit is more dependable than inspiration.” Octavia E. Butler. I am not a believer in waiting for that one brilliant idea. Maybe it’ll come, but I’d rather take a good idea and see if I can make it better in the writing or see if it leads to a whole other idea.
25. Honesty is great. When I get stuck in a conversation I’m writing, I find something honest for a character to say.
26. Write diverse characters, accept criticism. I am a cis-gendered white hetero male, and I have heard other cis-gendered white hetero dudes say they don’t want to write diverse characters because they’re worried they’d screw it up or it’s easier to write characters similar to themselves. I hate this. The world is full of lots of different types of people, and not representing that is a willful act.
27. I define my characters by their flaws. The more capable and successful they are, the more fun it is to write their flaws.
28. I’m not a “You have to write every day” person. I take days off. When I am writing, I plan my day, not just when I’m going to write, but when I’ll be able to think of ideas and visualize what I want to write. I have two kids and a full-time day job, so hoping to find that time is a dice roll.
29. On that note, being a parent has made me a better writer. Like I said, I plan better, and because I have less time, I spend less of it second-guessing myself. Trying to entertain small children is great for exercising creativity and the constant failures of parenting have toughened me to the publishing world. “Oh, someone rejected the manuscript? Well did one publisher pee on me while I was changing its diaper while another yelled at me for turning the TV off? No?” Also, children’s television is great. It just goes full speed all the time, doesn’t stop to explain the mechanics of anything, and just gets to the fun part. Who is funding the Octonauts? Does Masha of Masha and the Bear have parents or what? No one cares, let’s just go save that baby dolphin or whatever.
30. “You can’t treat it like a hobby if you want it to be your job.” Shea Serrano. I think about this quote all the time. I already talked about the hard work, but there’s also the confidence of trying to get your book published, of going all out. If you wrote a good book, and you believe in it, you’re not trying to win the lottery. You are trying to show others what you already know about you and your work. When you send out your book, you are saying you should be paid for what you created. Put the work in, make it as good as possible, and keep fighting for it.
31. I cut down on drinking before I had kids. I quit soda and started eating healthier this year. I’m not going to give health and wellness advice, but I do want to say that a lot of the things I told myself I needed in order to write, I have done fine without.
32. Funny names for things: Why? Not that you shouldn’t do it, I give things names to amuse myself in my books, but I try to ask myself if the name breaks the logic of the universe of my story. I give my superheroes names based on all kinds of things, but if I name something “The Scumbag Insurance Company,” a reader is going to get taken out of the reality of the book. Why would it be named that? (I totally broke this rule and tried to name a group of villains running a superhero corp DESTROY America because I thought it was funny and my editor called me out on it, and I admitted it should change. I changed it to DESTRON.)
33. Rewrites and edits are like time travel. “Oh, I can just make his cousin his best friend and then the scene at the wedding makes sense! And now he was his best friend all along and I saved the story through time travel!” Editing is great.
34. Listen to people’s suggestions. Knowing when to take someone’s advice and make a change and when not to is difficult, but if you trust someone enough to ask for their thoughts on your work, give their ideas at least a thinking over. Sometimes, I’ll get a note and think it’s great, but I don’t think it will work for some reason. Then I’ll ask myself why, and whether I can take that note and still preserve what I liked from the original version.
35. Not everyone who loves you will love your writing, for whatever reason. I have close friends who have read zero of my books. It’s fine.
36. Don’t get intimidated by what you struggle with as a writer, rely on your strengths. After years of writing sketch, I was terrified to write a novel. I love writing dialogue, but I have never had confidence in myself as a describer of stuff (probably a better way to phrase that, but I’ll keep moving). I cannot write a beautiful, poetic passage about what the sunrise looked like as the two main characters held hands and felt some ooey-gooey way about each other. Then I realized, I don’t have to do that. I write in third person close or first person and I describe people and places based on what the characters find interesting about them. A lot of things in AV1 look like animals because that was the quickest, cheatiest way I could think of too describe them. To my knowledge, no one has called me out on that.
37. When I started writing my first novel, I made a decision to avoid curse words until I got somewhere that it would be most effective. For me, cursing in comedy gets old fast. I’ve read books where people try to get really creative with their cursing and…it still gets old fast. Maybe it’s just me! Anyway, I got through my whole first book, and every time I thought I might use a curse word, I found something better and ended up not writing one at all. Yes, people curse in real life, and a four letter word might be perfect for a scene, but I’ve gotten away without it so far. Also, people still get mad at me because I use words like vagina and I acknowledge the existence of sex. I think the phrase “hand stuff” is in all of my books.
38. Bad reviews don’t really matter. I mean, maybe bad reviews in the NY Times do, I’ve never had one. Bad reviews in blogs and from readers on Goodreads don’t really matter. If they read your book, that’s great and it means you’re reaching a wider audience. I just checked and my favorite book of 2020 has a 3.64 rating on Goodreads. I used to read my user reviews, but it’s pointless. I saw reviews of my book that read something like, “Garbage. Just an awful garbage book. Three stars.” I also read ones like “Loved this book. Such a fun, light read. I laughed out loud. Three stars.”
39. I like to say, “The writing is the fun part.” Again, I write fun, light books that are meant to be funny, so that might not be applicable for everyone. My point is that the act of writing is the part that is most fulfilling. Most of what you’re going to get out of it, is from writing it. Trying to find an agent can be miserable. The publishing industry moves at a glacial pace. Writing a book, however, is all about you and what you want out of it.
40. If you love it, don’t quit. I write for myself. My stories are things that I find funny and experiences that I can only express by putting them in the context of telekinetics and aliens. My belief was that if it meant something to me, it might connect with other people. Luckily, that turned out to be true. Sometimes the only reward for writing something you love is getting to write a book you love. The process of getting it published can make you question yourself and what you created, but they cannot stop you from making something you are proud of. Keep going, keep writing, keep improving, and don’t let a rejection letter someone’s assistant copied and pasted from the last rejection letter convince you that your book doesn’t deserve to get published. One more Octavia E. Butler quote to close this out: “When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine.”