by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
Dan: That’s what I’m wondering now. It seems like we need a character who’s at least passingly familiar with the supernatural—
Brandon: —so he can identify a gremlin.
Mary: One of the things I was going to say is if this is an alternate history, but contemporary, it seems like you would have a branch of the military who specialize in this. You have your gremlin specialist.
Howard: I think that’s too big for this story.
Mary: I don’t. Please, I could do that in 500 words.
Dan: Whether it’s real world or alternate world, either way we need a character who can identify it as a gremlin, and then figure out how to bind it to a grenade.
Brandon: Now I would suggest, if I were writing this story, that the main character who figures out how to bind it to a grenade is not the expert in the gremlins. There is someone else in the team who acts as a sidekick information repository, because if you give your main character too much expertise in what’s going on, he or she won’t feel like a fish out of water in the same way that I think we want the reader to feel.
Howard: Another military trope is reading the field manual while under fire. If I’m under fire, there’s a problem. What the heck has gone wrong? This armor piece came open. There’s smoke coming out of this hatch, and now suddenly everything is broken. Let me look at the field manual.
Brandon: There’s a classified section.
Howard: What are these symbols here in the field manual?
Brandon: I would love that. “If this happens, break the seal on the back.” You say, “What?” You open it and says, “Your gremlin has escaped.” Then you say, “What!”
Dan: Please sit down to read Section 7.
Howard: “If you have a shoe leather MRE”—which is the chicken breast MRE, I think that’s the one they refer to as shoe leather—“please open packet number 3. The gremlins will totally go for this.”
Brandon: And they ask, “Who’s got—”
Howard: ”I gave all those away.”
Brandon: That would be a wonderful way to go.
Dan: Okay, that could work well. The other direction which I’ll throw out—I don’t know if it’s a better idea—is to actually have somebody there riding along with them, who’s part of the field test.
Howard: Yeah, that’s what I was going on about.
Brandon: The government spook, or the contractor, says, “Oh no.”
Dan: The little weasel guy.
Mary: Yeah. The other option would be to really just completely pop-culture it and have one guy on the team who’s a D&D guy. He says, “Dudes, this is a gremlin,” and everyone else says, “No, it’s not. What are you going to do? A saving throw?” And he says, “It’s a gremlin.”
Howard: Yeah, and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fistful of D6s and says, “Watch this,” and throws them, and they all come up ones. “Now watch again.” Ones.
Dan: It’s a gremlin.
Mary: Since we’re starting to move toward talking about cast, if your cap is 5,000 words, this has to be a tiny, tiny cast, which is one of the challenges with military fiction. You usually have a troop of people moving together, so you need to come up with a way to make sure that you only have probably no more than three characters.
Dan: A bomb going off could thin the ranks, but that’s horrible to do to the soldiers.
Brandon: Mary’s the expert here. I would say, can’t you have three named characters, and then the rest of the squad that you don’t name? There’s like eight of them, but three are involved in this, and the others are taken care of with “You two watch perimeter. You two do this—”
Howard: The other thing that works—the Humvee is part of a convoy, and a radio call comes in for the spook. “We need him back at base right now. Turn around and come home.” “How many do you want us to peel off?” “Just you guys.” “This is against procedure, we’re not supposed to do this.” “Look, you just cleared this road. You’re fine, come on home.” And so then we have an isolated single vehicle, five or six people, only two or three of whom are going to be carrying the plotline. The other guys are holding down the perimeter with weapons.
Mary: I want to go back to what Brandon said, because what he’s talking about with the unnamed characters is not keeping them in the scene, but giving them a reason to go someplace else, and that’s an important distinction. Sorry, I know you know that, Dan—but for our readers.
Howard: And for Howard.
Dan: Don’t assume that I know anything.
Brandon: I think this went really well.
Dan: I have a very cool story I can write now.
WRITING I.E.DEMON
DAN WELLS
This story went through four main iterations, each one homing in closer to the story I wanted to tell, in the way I wanted to tell it. The differences between the first draft and the second are massive; the differences in the latter three drafts are more subtle, but pretty interesting, so I wanted to include them all.
When we talked about this story in our brainstorming episode, I came away with a very clear sense of the story I wanted to tell; you can think of these as the “load-bearing” elements of the story, the basic skeleton that holds it all together:
A team of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan is sent out to field test a new piece of anti-bomb equipment.
The equipment fails, releasing a gremlin.
The soldiers are shocked by the sudden appearance of the supernatural, and their lives are in danger, but . . .
. . . they can’t get any help because an insurgent attack is keeping their backup busy.
The soldiers figure out how to contain the gremlin and use it against the insurgents, thus solving both problems and being heroes.
Starting with those points as a core to build around, there are a ton of different ways to go, so I sat down with my trusty Seven-Point Structure and outlined a story. I came up with something I liked, but as I was writing it the problems leapt out at me almost immediately.
FIRST DRAFT
As you can see, this draft was never finished, which is actually kind of fun to look at because it means I never went back to clean it up; it’s got a few weird half-sentences, from edits I made on the fly while writing, and it’s absolutely littered with all-caps placeholders like “four Humvees, a TRUCK, and a TANK.” The plan was to get the story down on paper, then go back later and fill in all the appropriate military equipment and jargon. This was part of my plan to make the military aspects of the story as accurate as possible, though you’ll see in the second draft that even this way I still made tons of mistakes. I use placeholders like this a lot when I write, though I’ve started putting them in brackets just to make them easier to search for. Placeholders help me write quickly, without getting bogged down in the details, and then I go back—usually within a day or two—and do the research and plug in the right pieces. I don’t like to wait until the project is completely finished, because what if the piece of info I find for that placeholder turns out to be interesting and cool, and inspires another idea for the story?
The major problem with this draft is how slow it is—and I could tell that right from the beginning, which is why I only made it four pages in before I abandoned the story and took everything back to the drawing board. More than anything, this is because I still tend to think and outline like a novelist, so I filled the story with too much stuff. On page four of the final story we’ve already seen the gremlin, and the characters are scrambling for their lives; on page four of the first draft we’re only halfway through the testing phase, and we’ve spent almost half that time in conversations about who should go back to base, who they should take with them, and so on. That’s there to set up Load-Bearing Plot Element #4, but it’s boring, and it’s the slowest possible way to do that setup. I was also introducing a ton of characters, most of whom were not essential to the story (though I have to say that “Rank James” is a hilarious name that I want to use again sometime). So instead of
throwing you into this cool story full of action and a fun magical puzzle to solve, I was wasting your time making you memorize names and laying the groundwork for way more story than I needed. It was a mess, and it was time to chuck it and start over.
SECOND DRAFT
I pared this draft back to the bare bones, cutting out a lot of the unnecessary business and characters in order to get straight into the actual plot. I took this so far, in fact, that I jettisoned the characters’ names altogether, mostly as an experiment; some of my readers didn’t like this, some of them did, but I thought it worked really well so I kept it all the way to the final.
Most of the changes I made for this new draft came from a close examination of the Load-Bearing Plot Elements, thinking long and hard about what I really needed to accomplish and what I didn’t, and what would be the best way of going about it. For example, #4 required them to be alone, but it didn’t demand that they get separated from a larger convoy; I had them in a large convoy in the first draft because it felt natural, but that’s not the same thing as load-bearing, so out it went. They leave the base on their own, and boom we’re done—no two pages of conversation required. That’s not to say that the convoy was a bad idea, just not a good fit for this situation and length.
The characters changed a bit as well, most notably by turning the spook into an engineer. The spook was kind of a fun, smarmy weasel to write about, but making him a weasel meant that I was adding a conflict I didn’t need: a personality clash between a military hero and a government villain withholding information. That kind of conflict would need an arc of its own, even a small one, and eventually a resolution; again, it was simply too much for such a short piece, so out it went. Making the government dude into a scared egghead allowed me to piggyback the “hero vs. outsider” conflict onto the core “holy crap how do we get out of this” conflict. It’s worth noting that all of these personality changes could have been made without altering the character’s profession—I could have had a weasel engineer or an egghead secret agent—but my research told me that equipment field tests are more typically overseen by engineers, so that decided it.
Making the government person less competent overall also helped my main character have more room to shine as a hero. Where the weaselly spook might have stepped up and tried to deal with the gremlin himself, the terrified engineer is completely out of his element, giving the main character a chance to make important decisions and come up with clever plans on his own. I also gave him a little boost by splitting the engineer into two guys and then killing one of them, so the team is left with some basic knowledge about how the gremlin works, but none of the expertise needed to deal with him; the main character gets to step into that gap and save the day. Last of all, I made the switch from third- to first-person specifically as a way of getting into that character’s head and showing more of his thought process, his anger at being hung out to dry, and his determination to make it all work anyway. I probably could still have done all that in third-person, but the previous draft convinced me that first-person was the way to go.
As you can see, this draft is very close to final. I was happy with the flow, the voice, and so on. There was still a lot of polishing to do, but it’s more subtle, which is why it’s important to do multiple revisions: the first pass took care of all the big-ticket problems, but the second one drilled down to some very specific stuff. In this case, most of that stuff was military: I sent this draft to two friends of mine, Ethan Skarstedt and Mike Kupari, both Afghanistan veterans, and they gave me pages and pages of incredibly valuable notes covering everything from the specific gear choices (the AT4 grenade launcher I have them using in the second draft is a single-shot, disposable weapon, so they would not have different rounds for it) to the personnel (the vehicle they drive would have a three-man team of leader, driver, gunner, without the extra bomb squad guy I’d thrown in). Most importantly, they let me know that the circumstances of my story were implausible to the point of being ridiculous: the idea that a Taliban insurgency force would directly assault a US firebase is laughable, and even if they did they wouldn’t have the kind of numbers, or present the kind of threat, that I described in this draft. Time to change it again.
THIRD AND FINAL DRAFTS
The major changes leading into the third draft were, as I said, mostly military in nature: I gave the characters different gear, adjusted the story to fit, and changed the ending so they used the gremlin to rescue a convoy instead of an entire firebase. The insurgent force presented in this version of the story is still huge, as Taliban forces go, but it’s more believable, especially because the sheer volume of IEDs in the story has primed us to expect a higher-than-average Taliban presence. Luckily, my Load-Bearing Plot Elements did not demand that the firebase be attacked, only that the characters use the gremlin to save somebody, so I could make these changes without altering the core story.
At this point the plot works, the characters work, the military details work, and I’m really happy with it. Peter Ahlstrom, a good friend and an excellent editor, ran through it for a final editing pass, cleaning up some of the proofing and consistency errors, and while I agreed with almost all of the changes there were a handful I didn’t like, so I said no. I want to make a point of this because I do it all the time, and I think most authors do. In this case, the only change I had any serious objection to was Peter’s attempt to de-capitalize my jargon terms like Bound Supernatural Entity and Rocket-Propelled Gremlin. It is, I admit, “correct” to have these terms in lowercase, but I could not possibly care less about that. I wanted these words capitalized because I think they add to the story and the world, and I liked being able to call attention to them not just as phrases but as specifically military terms. Military jargon is overflowing with acronyms, and my story relies on them heavily—even the title is an acronym joke. Choosing to ignore the copyeditor’s suggestions for meaningful stylistic reasons is an important part of the editing process. This is also good to remember the next time you find an error in a published book: don’t blame the proofreaders, because for all you know they found it and the author changed it back. We’re jerks like that sometimes.
I’m very pleased with this story. I think it’s hands-down my best piece of short fiction—which is maybe not a very impressive claim because I don’t write a lot of short fiction—but I’m working at it, and I think this one stands up proudly. I hope you like it as much as I do.
FIRST DRAFT: I.E.DEMON
DAN WELLS
“It’s like magic,” said the spook. The Humvee bumped wildly on the dirt road, jarring Private Harkness in the back seat, but the spook seemed unfazed. “We’ve tested this a thousand times back in the states, with every type of explosive you can think of—pressure mines, improvised mines, remotely triggered explosives, everything. The BSE stops them all.”
They were deep in the Afghani desert, about an hour from base, performing a field test on the BSE—Harkness didn’t know what the BSE was, only that it was installed on the undercarriage of their Humvee, and that it allegedly ‘stopped’ explosive attack. Not ‘shielded against them,’ not ‘detected them,’ but ‘stopped’ them. Harkness had no idea, and the rest of the team—four Humvees, a TRUCK, and a TANK—seemed to be just as clueless as he was. The spook seemed supremely confident, but then, didn’t they all? Harkness couldn’t decide if the man’s sublime arrogance was heartening or obnoxious, but he was leaning toward the latter. It was one thing to have faith in your mysterious new mine-killer, but it was just plain stupid to be this far from a forward base without a helmet.
And I’m supposed to protect him, thought Harkness. This guy’s one ambush away from Taliban-assisted suicide, and I’m the one who’s going to catch hell for it when he goes down. He offered the spook a helmet, the seventeenth time now that he’d tried, but the spook waved him away.
RANK Gomez, their Truck Commander, pressed the spook for more information. “You keep saying it ‘stops’ the explosions, but how does it stop them
? How does it work?”
The spook smiled. “Flawlessly.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“That’s the only answer you’re cleared to receive,” said the spook, and Harkness saw the man’s unflappable calm fade, just for a moment, revealing a steel-eyed coldness lurking just underneath the surface. Harkness shifted his position in the back seat of the Humvee. A year ago, a look like that would have made him shift defensively, moving himself away from danger, but six months in Afghanistan had changed him. Without even thinking about it, he’d shifted to give himself greater access to his sidearm.
“Hold up,” squawked the radio, “we found another one.”
“Another?” asked Gomez, his voice dripping with disbelief. The spook smiled triumphantly, and the driver brought the Humvee to a stop. The field test was almost brutally simple: the spook’s Humvee, equipped with the BSE, drove at the head of the column, followed by a TRUCK equipped with every bomb-detector and metal detector they could put in it, scanning the road for IEDs. In the past hour they’d turned up two, and now potentially a third. None had gone off. Harkness waited while the bomb disposal team got out and neutralized the device, and soon the bomb squad RANK approached their truck.
“It’s an IED alright. Completely non-functional, same as the others.”
The spook leaned forward. “What about the pattern you observed in the other explosives?”
“The pattern continues,” said the RANK. “Each bomb is less non-functional than the one before it: the first bomb looked like they’d built in wrong, the second had a fuse out of place, and this one just . . . didn’t go. It could have, but it didn’t; we don’t know why.”
“Thank you,” said the spook, and sat back in his seat.
“I assume you do know why it didn’t work?” asked Gomez.