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Subconflict, and Lots of It

September 6, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

Novels are cool, but they’re tough to write.

I’ve been working on manuscript about a rock and roll star who inexplicably rises from the dead. Think Mick Jagger meets Jesus Christ. I think the premise is interesting and I like the characters, but once I really got into it, I found that the story was slowing down. It just wasn’t interesting to me anymore.

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my story until some time later, while I was reading Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (all hail his majesty). I got about a hundred pages in and realized the key difference between King’s book and mine: he had tons of subconflict, and I didn’t.

Of course, conflict is one of the cornerstones of story. If people aren’t fighting about something, then you don’t have much of a plot. I don’t think I quite realized just how much conflict you really need to sustain a reader’s interest for three, four, or five hundred pages.

Let’s look at Lisey’s Story for a moment. As you might’ve guessed, it’s a story about Lisey Landon, wife of late author Scott Landon. As I mentioned before, there’s a lot going on in Lisey’s life. She’s still coming to terms with the loss of her husband, while also figuring out what to do with his estate. In addition, her sister Amanda is on suicide watch. Also, a mysterious whacko is after Scott’s supposed lost manuscripts. Oh, and Lisey’s also being stalked by some kind of cosmic monster which only appears in reflective surfaces.

I count five separate conflicts in there. And those are just the most prominent ones.

Managing all this conflict can be pretty tough. On the one hand, once you set up your dominos, you should probably give them a push, right?

But here’s the tricky part: oftentimes, some conflicts should go unanswered. When books resolve all their conflicts neatly, you might feel like everything was a bit too easy.

For example, at the end of Lisey’s Story (spoilers ahead!), Lisey never defeats the monster that plagued her late husband and has now set its sights on her. In fact, by the end of the book, the creature might very well still get her at any time.

That might sound like a loose knot, but it really isn’t. It works because some of the best fiction mirrors life, and in life, there are some conflicts you’re just never going to solve. (Although hopefully if you’re being stalked by a cosmic horror, you can figure that one out.) Plus, I think it’s a mistake to answer all your readers’ questions. Don’t leave them satisfied—leave them wanting more!

When it comes to conflict, the challenge is to balance resolution with open-endedness. I think you’ll like the results.

Tips for Writers on Getting Started

August 15, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

For many writers, there are few things less inspiring than a blank page.

Filling that space is one of the most difficult parts of writing. I know I’m not alone in thinking this; a lot of folks do just fine once they have something written. The issue is putting words on the page in the first place.

So what are some ways to get started? Here are some suggestions.

Don’t Think, Just Write

One of my favorite kickstarter techniques is to write anything. Promise yourself that you’re going to start with a five hundred word piece that won’t be seen or read by anyone ever again. Don’t worry about whether or not it’s good—it probably won’t be. The purpose here is not necessarily to write something great. The purpose is to warm up for the main event.

How does one discover a topic for this warmup piece? Get it from anywhere. The other morning I was drinking coffee from a mug with a turtle on it, so my story was about turtles. Just look around, pick out something you like, and roll with it. Sometimes that gives you exactly the spontaneity you need to get some words down.

Try a Writing Prompt

While I don’t especially dig these, a lot of writers find them helpful. Just type “writing prompt” into Google and see what comes up. You’ll probably find something to the effect of this: “You woke up to find you’ve switched bodies with your pet turtle, Butterton. What do you do?” Find a prompt you like and start writing.

Again, these don’t need to be exceptionally great pieces you’re coming up with. The point is that you’re writing, and that you’re doing some form of cognitive stretching. Keep it up and you’ll be ready for the heavy lifting.

Keep An Idea Notebook

Yet another way to fill the blank page is to reuse your old ideas. My mom encouraged me to do this and I think it’s brilliant. Buy a pocket-sized notebook and take notes on anything (no really, anything) that interests you. Jot down an interesting phrase you heard someone use, an idea for a story that wanders into your head, a weird news headline that would make for a great book. Whatever it is, write it down before you forget.

Revisit these ideas later. Use them as your own personal writing prompts. They’ll oftentimes give you a great starting point, and maybe, if you’re lucky, a piece you can be proud of.

Defeating the blank page is all about choosing methods that work for you. Likewise, it’s just as important to determine what doesn’t work for you. Discover your process, write, and repeat. And don’t let that empty page scare you.

SEO for Bloggers: A Crash Course, Featuring Wombats

August 1, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

So you’ve decided to start a blog about wombats. I salute you.

It’s a great blog. You’ve got some killer costume ideas for wombats, your favorite baby wombat pics, your top 10 favorite songs by The Wombats. This site is amazing.

Only problem is, you can’t seem to get anyone to visit it. It’s not that the content is poor—everyone loves wombats. It’s just that no matter how good your content is, no one will ever know about it unless they can find it. That’s where SEO comes in.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s just a fancy term for improving your website so that it appears on the first few pages of search engine results. The better your SEO, the more likely folks are going to find your website when they search Google.

How Do I Get Started?

SEO might sound intimidating, but it’s actually pretty easy. Just use words on your website and in your posts that people are likely to search for.

In the case of your wombat blog, your top search term is probably going to be “wombat.” But what else are people searching for when they search for wombats?

As a shortcut, let’s head to Google and type your keyword into the search bar, then see what comes up.

Okay, now we’ve got some good data. Make sure to have some of these terms on the your pages, because these seem to be terms commonly associated with wombats.

Bonus: this is a great way to come up with some post ideas. For example: “Do Wombats Make Good Pets?” Or, even better, “What is Your Wombat’s Poop Telling You?”

Myth: SEO Is About Repeating the Same Words Over and Over

Allow me to digress for a moment. Once upon a time, I was fresh out of college and I was looking for a job—preferably one in writing. I found a company that defined themselves as “reputation management,” something like that. The basic idea was that clients hired them to flood the internet with positive content about the client in order to suppress negative stories that might be floating around the internet.

So yeah. Kinda shady stuff. I didn’t end up working for them.

Anyway, their SEO approach wasn’t the greatest. They were trying to get their stuff on the front page of Google results by packing each post with the client’s name and a few specific keywords repeated over and over again.

At one point, this might’ve worked—posts used to be ranked based on the number of relevant keywords they contained. But search engine sites quickly found that keyword packing generally yielded poor content. After all, one can only read the phrase “wombat poop” so many times before it becomes overwhelming.

The better approach is to find the right keywords, and then place them strategically throughout a webpage. Plus a little more. Let’s take a look at some other tips.

What Are Some of the Best Tools?

Google Trends is a great place to start. Just type in your topic and you’ll get a nifty graph that looks something like this:

This is perfect for tracking the popularity of searches throughout the year. Though nothing really jumps out from this graph, you can see that wombat Google searches were at their peak in August of 2014. That probably means this month will be a good time to post as many wombat stories as possible.

Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find related searches. This is another goldmine for keyword data—sort of like our search bar trick from before, only wombattier.

The more of these terms you include in your pages, the better your results will be. But remember: don’t force keywords into a post if they lessen the quality. SEO will help people find your content, but if they don’t like what they find, they won’t come back.

What Else?

Here are some other random SEO tips:

Use alt text on every image – As we know, Google indexes search results based on words. So if you’ve got an image with no words associated with it, Google won’t quite know what to do with it. When you upload your images, help Google out by entering alt text that describes the picture.
Link to Other Pages – Google places greater value on pages that have more links pointing to them. Obviously, you can’t force other people to link to your stuff, but if you write good content, they’re more likely to do so. Furthermore, if you link your own posts to each other, that still counts. Just don’t go overboard—at most three per post should do the trick.
Use search keywords in the title of your post – This is one of the first places Google looks when it’s indexing results for a search. It’s essential to have your top terms right there, front and center.

Try these tips and see how they work for you. Also, if you see a wombat, pet it.

Whatever’s Left

July 5, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

There’s an hourglass somewhere in the world with the rest of your life slipping through it. That’s what my friend Jib says, anyway.

He says he found his hourglass when he got lost out in the Dunes. Got to traveling out there and couldn’t find his way back. “Abandoned by my bearings,” is how he puts it. Jib’s got a lot of funny phrases like that.

The way he tells it, he came to a house as night was falling, a house all by itself out in the desert. The front door was locked, and there was someone standing next to it, smoking a pipe. A doorman.

He tells a lot of stories, does Jib. Always has. When we were kids, he told me fake ones and laughed about it later. Now that we’re older, I can usually tell when he’s lying. In this case, I can’t.

Jib doesn’t say much about the doorman—just that the doorman asked him for something. A bribe. Not money, though. It had to be something precious, a wedding ring or a watch handed down from his grandfather or a picture of his kids. In the words of Jib, “Something worth something to me.”

He never did tell me what he gave away. Must’ve been worth enough, though, because he was allowed in. He said the doorman turned a key in the lock on the front door, and pushed. And Jib stepped inside.

The house didn’t look like any house he’d been in before. There was no furniture, sparse light, many paintings on the wall. Each one was a portrait of a different person, though Jib couldn’t see any of their faces; they all had their backs turned. And he says he could hear music, the same four notes over and over again, though he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Also, everything was very clean. And there was a staircase.

He took that staircase up, and another, and a third, and another, and another, and finally he lost count of how many staircases he’d climbed. Jib asks me how it’s possible for a house to have two stories on the outside, yet room for ten, twenty flights of stairs on the inside. I can’t explain it. He can’t either.

At the top of the stairs, there was a room. An immense room, limitless, vast enough so that he couldn’t see the ceiling or the opposite walls. “A room that shouldn’t exist”—that’s how he puts it.

It wasn’t empty. There were hourglasses.

They weren’t little ones, these hourglasses. If you believe Jib’s story, they were as tall as him, some even taller. And no one would ever call Jib a short guy.

He claims that these hourglasses went on for miles, that each one had a name on it. Some had nice fat pockets of sand left in them, some didn’t. Some were all done running and sat there silently, like old bones.

Jib said it was quiet in that room, but not totally silent. The only sound you could hear, and only if you stood perfectly still, was the hiss of infinite grains of sand as they slipped through the narrow part of the glass, down into the chamber below.

He claims he walked through the rows of hourglasses for an entire day, just wandering around looking for his name. He says they weren’t in any kind of order he could figure. They were just there.

He came across a familiar name on one of the hourglasses, after a while. Lynn Graves. She was a friend of a friend of ours. I use the past tense because Lynn would still be our friend’s friend today, were she not deceased. She passed on not long after Jib came back from this supposed journey, of a busted belly. And Jib, the insensitive bastard, insists that the hourglass with her name on it was almost empty when he found it. So he thinks he knew she was going to die, or something.

He kept on wandering through the hourglasses, and by now he tells me his heart was thumping, was “rattling like a rock inside a can.” He was going to find out how much longer he had to live.

When he found his hourglass, it had his full name on it and everything, right down to the “Jib” in quotes between his first name and his last.

Even while he tells me the story, I can read the guilty relief on his face. His hourglass, he says, was almost as full as it could be. Which means that, according to him, he has a long, long time left to live.

And maybe that could’ve been the end of it. But I guess he didn’t leave quite yet. He found another hourglass with another name. Mine.

This search, he claims, didn’t take as long as when he was searching for his own. The search took no time at all, in fact, because my hourglass was right next to his. Like whoever had put them there knew Jib and I were close, or something like that.

Jib saw whatever’s left in my hourglass. He tells me he knows how much longer I’m going to live.

He says it’s a man’s right to know when he’s going to die. But it’s also his right not to know. So he leaves it up to me to decide. He’ll tell me if I ask him, and if I don’t, he never will.

And I wonder. And I think. And I ask myself, almost every moment of every day, I ask myself: Should I?

###

If you’d like to read more of my fiction, you can find it here.

There’s No Such Thing as Writing Too Much

June 27, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

A fact about writing: no one ever gets it right on the first try.

Trimming the fat is an essential part of the process. Every first draft has suboptimal word choices, hanging plotlines, bad dialogue, or even just too much writing. It’s this last one I’d like to focus on: if we know that we’re going to have to cut a scene, why even bother writing it?

Easy. Because cutting a few thousand words from a rough draft doesn’t mean the impact of those words won’t resonate in the final draft. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Pen and Paper For example, let’s say you’re writing a conversation between two characters. We’ll call them Roscoe and Winifred, because those names are fun to say.

Roscoe and Winifred decide to take a trip together, and they stop along the highway for dinner. Which reminds Winifred about this one time when she met an alien at a rest stop in Tucson. The alien informed her that an intergalactic fleet would be along on the first day of 2017, which just so happens to be the day Winifred and Roscoe are having this conversation. They pay for their meal, step outside, and boom…there’s the intergalactic alien fleet, waiting in line for milkshakes.

Success! You’ve set up a story—albeit a weird one.

But what if you extend Roscoe and Winifred’s conversation a little, just to see where it goes? Maybe Roscoe reveals that when he was a kid, he told all the other kids at school that an alien landed in his backyard, just so they would pay attention to him. He was lying, of course, but he confesses that it was nice to be popular, at least for a little while.

Is Roscoe’s confession entirely relevant to this chapter? Probably not—this scene is about Winifred and an alien landing, not Roscoe. But still, you’ve discovered something about your character that you didn’t know before: Roscoe was a shy kid longing for attention, and he was imaginative enough to manufacture it. Short Story Writer

As in this example, overwriting is a great way to flesh out supporting characters that might not get the attention your main characters get. Secondary characters are important, but there’s rarely enough space in a manuscript to lend to their backstory. So don’t be afraid to overwrite a little for the sake of supporting characters, and then cut it back later. The more you write about them, the more you’ll learn about them. And that will help them feel authentic to your readers.

Writing more than we think we need is never a waste of time. It’s like digging in the sand at a beach; there’s no telling what we’ll discover.

I mean, without Winifred and Roscoe, we’d never know that aliens like milkshakes.

New Flash Fiction Piece is Out!

June 20, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

Homer

I’m very happy to say that I’ve got a new flash fiction piece published with Five on the Fifth.

As the name suggests, Five on the Fifth publishes five pieces of short fiction on the fifth day of every month. One of my favorite things about them is their flexibility. Some publications have pretty rigid guidelines for the types of stories they’ll take, but Five on the Fifth publishes all different genres, subject matter, and length.

Also, they were nice enough to publish my stuff. So as far as I’m concerned, they’re the greatest online magazine of all time.

My story is called “Wings,” and it’s a little on the creepy side. It’s only about 600 words, though I hope it still tells a complete story. It’s about a character’s obsession with flight, a creepy doctor with a thing for Mozart, and, more generally, it’s about the lengths that people will go to to get what they want.

I wrote this one a while ago, so it’s a little darker than what I like to write now. Still, I think it has a nice atmosphere and some suitably creepy moments. Also, flash fiction is cool and everyone should read more of it.

Click here to read “Wings.” It’s only 600 words, so why not give it a try?

4 Books Writers Will Love

May 23, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

For anyone who wants to become a great writer, becoming a great reader usually comes first. And if you’re going to be reading, why not read about writing?

Here are four books on writing that I think you’ll really dig.

#1: On Writing by Stephen King

Four books on writing? See what I did there? Anyway…

My girlfriend makes fun of me for talking about this book so much, but it really is brilliant. King discusses so much with relatively little space: his beginnings as a writer, his process, some of his greatest successes, some of his biggest mistakes. He even delves into personal territory, discussing the accident that nearly took his life and made him consider retiring from writing.

One of my favorite parts of this book is the honesty with which King approaches the subject. His recurring message is that not all writers are brilliant, innately gifted people. Many writers, like King himself, just work harder than everyone else. They love writing, they do it every day, and that’s what makes them special.

For writers, I think this is a great message. Essentially, King argues that hard work (with a sprinkling of luck) is going to beat raw talent, more often that not.

#2: Walking on Water by Derek Jensen

Derek Jensen is an interesting guy, and he has a lot to say about writing. Framed by his tenure as a college professor, this is a book not just about the technical aspects of writing—it’s about the purpose of writing, and what good writing should do.

However, this book is not just about writing. It’s about our education system, it’s about identity, it’s about independent thought. Walking on Water has a lot of depth to it, and for writers, I think it’s especially appealing. Unlike On Writing, it doesn’t necessarily offer specific ideas about the process. Rather, this book invites the reader to think critically about what one puts down on the page.

P.S. My favorite part is Jensen’s number one rule of writing, which is “Don’t bore the reader.” Seems like good advice.

#3: Creative Writer’s Handbook by Philip K. Jason and Allan B. Lefcowitz

Full disclosure: this book was assigned reading in college. Neither of these guys were my professors or anything, though, and this book has a lot to offer. Though maybe not as eminently readable as our previous two books, the Creative Writer’s Handbook is still a must-have.

The best part about this book is the detail. The authors go in-depth on a number of the more technical aspects of writing, including point of view, word choice, narrative, drama, mood, and dialogue. And it’s not just for fiction writers, either—there’s a section on poetry, another on creative non-fiction, and even a brief chapter on play writing.

As far as educational books for writers go, this is one of the best I’ve read.

#4: Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donald Maass

Full disclosure, again: I haven’t actually finished this one. But hey, even if the book ended where I am, I’d still recommend it.

Donald Maass is a literary agent in New York, so you know he knows his stuff. His insights into modern fiction are outstanding. In particular, I love the way he outlines the debate between literary fiction and genre fiction.

Essentially, Maass argues that the line between the two has been blurred, and that they both borrow characteristics from the other. Literary fiction sells the way genre fiction is supposed to, and genre fiction now emphasizes prose the way literary fiction does. And that’s just one of his many excellent points.

If you’re looking for insights into the modern publishing industry, this is a great place to start.

In Conclusion…

Read these books! And feel free to let me know if you have any favorites of your own. After all, one can never have enough books on writing.

What’s the Purpose of a Blog, Anyway?

May 16, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

As part of the responsibilities of my job, I work on our company blog. I look for new bloggers, I edit the blogs we receive, and I map out our schedule. Since we post three times a week, we get a lot of blogs from a lot of different writers.

Among those numerous blogs, it’s amazing to see how many read more like sales pitches. The writers understand their products well, they know how to write, and they’re clearly intelligent people. The issue is, they seem to think that the purpose of a blog can be summed up in three words: “Buy my product!”

A good blog shouldn’t just be a sales pitch. A good blog should stand on its own as an interesting and readable piece of content. A good blog informs first, sells second.

So let’s say you’re an indie author who’s trying to sell your book. It’s tempting to pretty much only blog about the book—reviews, preliminary sales, your inspiration for writing it, all that.

But I would argue that that’s not a great way to handle your blog.

In my experience with content management, when bloggers just blab about their product, no one reads it. The bounce rate for this type of content (the percentage of people coming to the webpage and immediately leaving) tends to skyrocket. Or people just don’t read it at all. And it certainly doesn’t increase sales.

So if you’re trying to sell a product, what’s the point of blogging at all?

First of all, you can’t expect your blog to directly convert sales from every visitor. It just doesn’t work that way. The real purpose of a good blog is to build awareness about your brand (which is you, the writer). A good blog can establish you as an expert in the field, or at least as a pretty knowledgable guy or gal. Also, it’s one of the absolute best ways to get people coming back to your website, which in turn increases your chances of making a sale.

Now that’s not to say that you can’t add some hard sells. Just be careful with them, and use them sparingly. The biggest turn off for any prospective blog reader is constant requests to buy a product.

Try adding a call to action for your book in the sidebar, right where someone will see it when they read your blog. Oftentimes this is a much more effective form of marketing because you’re illustrating the value of your product rather than just saying, “Hey. You should buy this.” Kind of like showing instead of telling. If you write good content, your blog shows people that you have talent as a writer rather than just telling them to buy your book.

That said, don’t be disappointed if your blog doesn’t lead to direct sales. It’s not too often that someone will come to a site, read a blog, and then directly convert to a sale right then and there. You’ll usually find that customers discover your website from a search engine or social media (always share your blogs!), read it over, then maybe explore the rest of your site, just to get a feel for who you are.

And then they’ll probably leave. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be back!

Since there are so many products out there to spend money on, most people need something like ten to twelve positive interactions with a brand before they buy. So, on average, you can expect people to return to your site at least that many times before buying your book.

Blogging, like most worthwhile endeavors, requires patience. Your blog brings visitors to your site on a consistent basis, which increases your chances of making a sale in the future. It exposes readers to your writing when they might not otherwise have found it. For writers, blogs are also invaluable for building your mechanics and your credibility with your audience.

And, regardless of whether or not you’re trying to sell anything, blogging is an excuse to write. What could be better than that?

Five Cool Tools for Writers

May 9, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

Writing is hard.

It’s not just the actual process. Sure, that’s hard, but then there’s the editing that comes afterward, all the planning beforehand, all the hours spent trying to stay organized. And then there’s the matter of just getting your work in front of folks.

Sure, writing is hard. But luckily, like any difficult job, you can use tools to help. Here are five that I’ve found personally beneficial.

Scrivener

If you’re writing a novel, this might be some of the very best software imaginable. Scrivener allows you to do so much. You can set up a cork board to see your story from a high level. You can rearrange chapters at will, plus pack all your extra scenes into the same file as your main chapters. For the indie writers out there, you can export your completed draft directly to e-reader-compatible formats. It’s like its own writing toolbox.

I will say that I think it’s a little much for short stories. After all, you probably don’t need character profile sections if you’ve only got one or two characters. Still, it’s the perfect solution for novel writers.

A New Keyboard

If you write on a computer, I highly recommend finding a keyboard that you really like. Having the right keyboard allows you to type faster and with more precision (and also without fear of breaking keys during those exciting scenes). Nice keyboards make more of a difference than you might realize, and they’re also pretty darn cheap.

Mine, for example, is a USB hookup from Logitech. Picked it up at Target for ten bucks. The keys are big and sturdy—works for me since I can become an aggressive typer, on occasion. My Mac keyboard feels a little fragile in comparison.

A Whiteboard

There’s so much you can do with a whiteboard. You can storyboard on it, you can put inspirational quotes on it, you can write random ideas on it. You can doodle on it, if you’re feeling bored. I myself use my whiteboard for keeping track of my goals for the day.

Hang your whiteboard in your work area for easy accessibility. Lucky for me, mine’s actually attached to my desk. When a great idea pops into your noggin, you’ll want to write it down before it goes anywhere. Getting up to find a writing implement might break your concentration. Keep your whiteboard close so you can stay focused.

A Blog

Blogs aren’t physical tools, but they do give readers a reason to come back to your site consistently. This might be getting too much into marketing and sales, but if you have people returning to your site consistently, that means they’ll see your books more often, and that they’ll be more likely to buy. Plus, if you have a good blog, it serves as a sample of your product. People are more likely to buy your writing if they like what they’ve read from you already.

Also, blogging is great practice for any writer, even if you’re primarily writing fiction. You’ll be surprised at how much your writing improves when you simply commit to blogging once a week.

Also, blogging is fun.

A Writer’s Group

Though writers are often thought of as solitary people, you’ll find that few work completely alone; pretty much every writer works with other people to make their stuff better.

That’s why you need people you trust to look at your work and evaluate it honestly. Joining a writer’s group is the perfect way to find those people. They know how to help make your work better because they’ve probably struggled with the same issues.

I found my current group through Meetup, but there are plenty of other ways to discover fellow writers. Try Facebook or the classic Google search. There are even online communities, such as Scribophile, which allow you to critique and have your work critiqued from anywhere. Full disclosure: I’ve never used this service before, but good to know that it’s available.

Bonus Cool Tool for Writers: Coffee

This one needs no explanation.

Writers Are More Normal Than Movies Would Have You Believe

April 25, 2016 / Kyle A. Massa

Do you know any writers? Do you absolutely hate those people?

I ask because of a film I recently watched called Stuck In Love, a film which essentially posits that all writers are dark, moody substance abusers, and way smarter than you’ll ever be. Or, more generally, the kind of people nobody likes.

The brief rundown: a family of writers struggles with the ups and downs of being in love. There’s Bill Borgens, played by Greg Kinnear, a brilliant writer who hasn’t written anything since his wife Erica, Jennifer Connelly, left him (unsurprising). And then there’s his daughter Sam, played by Lily Collins, whose only two topics of conversation are death and herself. And then his son Rusty, played by Nat Wolff, whose most notable traits are loving Stephen King, wearing hoodies, and being sad all the time.

This movie could’ve been interesting. Instead, you just end up hating everyone.

Why? Because every character is cynical, moody, and generally unlikeable. No one talks about anything that real people would talk about. Instead, it’s all this philosophical esoterica that’s just meant to make the audience nod their heads and say, “Wow. These characters are so brilliant.” Or to just make us all feel dumb.

Sam, for example, has her first novel published at the age of nineteen. Okay, not completely impossible, but neither the actress nor the script convinced me to suspend my disbelief.

Also, Bill’s solution to missing his wife is to spy on her through the window whenever he happens to pass by (which is about thirty times, give or take). How is that a logical solution to the problem? Oh right, they’re writers. They’re too brilliant for us mortals to understand.

And whenever Rusty gets depressed about anything (which is all the time—the kid’s such a moper), his dad loudly asserts, “You’re a writer.” As if he should expect to be mopey all the time, like an occupational hazard. As if you can’t be a writer unless you’re unhappy.

The worst part about a movie like this, for me, is that it separates writers from normal people. The folks behind this movie seem to think that writers are, as a rule, douchebags. Yet I know a lot of writers, and the majority of them are perfectly pleasant, normal people. They aren’t misunderstood masterminds, they don’t talk about existentialism every second. Most writers I know are just people.

And I’m not just talking about my friends, here. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, happens to have a stammer when he talks. Virginia Woolfe was so good at cricket that her family began to call her, “The Demon Bowler.” Also, Stephen King’s favorite band is the decidedly unartistic AC/DC. They’re great writers, sure, but when you look past the work, you find normal people.

I’m not sure I can say anything more about this movie without puking, so let me just say this: give writers a chance. We’re not all annoying assholes. Most are pretty cool people.

Kyle A. Massa