by Chuck Wendig
Darkness? Swearing? Violence? Me? Naaaah.
It actually troubles me sometimes how easy this was to write. Miriam's very comfortable to slip into as a character, and curiously that comfort is uncomfortable – "Hey, I can write this damaged, fucked up human being with no problem! It's like donning a suit tailor-made of bird bones and cancer sticks and the leathery skin of a snarky-yet-forlorn monster."
The action scenes are a whole other enchilada. I do find them fairly easy to write, but I don't choreograph them before hand. While Blackbirds represented a very important lesson for me as a writer (about outlining and planning), I don't find much value in sketching out every detail of a fight scene before it happens. In any of my preparatory notes I just write FIGHT SCENE in the ink brewed from the blood of my enemies and then, when I finally get there, I make it up as I go.
Which befits fight scenes, I think, especially ones that you want to feel brutal and surprising: they're going to unfold unexpectedly and it helps to kind of put yourself into that moment and see how it plays out. The bar scene, for instance, was very much that – you pause, consider the next action beat, put it into play, pause, consider the next action beat, and so on. Consequence tumbling after consequence with every knuckle-busting fist thrown or bottle broken.
Of course, like any scene, the fights are really forged in the rewrite.
When we were talking about my book Empire State, you asked me a very difficult question – what makes Empire State an Adam Christopher novel. Reading Blackbirds, I'm struck by the fact that this cannot possibly have been written by anyone other than yourself, and I'm sure readers familiar with your work – including your blog at Terribleminds.com – will feel the same way. So let me throw that question back at you: what makes Blackbird a Chuck Wendig novel?
I knew you were going to ask this, and yet, I don't have a good answer.
Voice is a tricky thing for a writer. If you work to develop a voice, you'll never have one. If you just… well, as the saying goes, lie back and think of England, the voice will come to you. Meaning, you write how you're going to write and do so to the best of your technical abilities and somewhere therein – in the smashing together of word choice, linguistic style, character, dialogue, story, plot – a book ends up being indelibly yours as an author. You claim ownership by not claiming ownership.
How is this book mine specifically? Well. Part of it has to be Miriam. We're nothing alike, she and I, and yet I can hear her stomping around my brain sometimes, chain-smoking and cursing her fate, your fate, everybody's fate, the fate of the soda machine that doesn't have any orange Fanta in it, and so on.
The other part of it has to be the profanity.
Because, ahh, as many of my readers know, I'm fond of profanity. Creative profanity in particular. (If I recall correctly, Miriam calls someone a "fuckpie" in this book. Which sounds like the most undelicious pastry one could find. What's in a fuckpie, exactly? Lubefroth and used condoms, topped with a latticework of pubic hairs?)
My love of profanity comes from my father. His ghost, rattling around in my head, too. See? More death. The motif ever-present! Death and birds and bad words and all that good stuff. We authors are who we authors are, built from our obsessions.
You've written a series of YA novellas, beginning with Shotgun Gravy. Blackbirds is very much not a YA book – so how do you switch between one "voice" and another.
I guess that's the nature of being a writer, right? Just as actors must hop from persona to persona, writers must ease into and out of dozens if not hundreds of characters.
That said, the voice – meaning, the authorial voice – is actually common ground between Blackbirds and a novella like Shotgun Gravy. Both explore similar themes and feature two female protagonists who have been changed by traumatic experiences and have chosen paths that are not particularly sane. Shotgun Gravy is more of a twisted, darker take on Veronica Mars or Nancy Drew, and the protagonist there – Atlanta Burns, a 17-year-old girl – is very different from Miriam, but they share a core darkness and both travel the same troubled road.
For a long time I was concerned about certain themes and ideas that keep popping up. But then I realized, that's part of me, part of my voice. As long as it's kept in check and doesn't end up redundant, it can be a good thing for one writer's body of work to traverse and explore the same themes and motifs.
Blackbirds is written in the present tense. Was that a conscious decision, or is that just the way you write?
It was conscious, but the book didn't start out that way. The first draft or two – which were largely incomplete – ended up in past tense.
But Blackbirds has a curious procedural journey that involves a screenwriting side trip – and scripts are, of course, written in the present tense. Very active, very direct. And it dawned on me that Blackbirds really needed that. Especially given the nature of Miriam's power which demands a certain timeliness in the plot – that way, the reader is seeing what Miriam is seeing as it happens.
Some have said present tense is more "cinematic," which I don't know is true – but it does ape how screenplays are written, and further, does force every moment of the plot and the action to pivot on the head of a pin given that everything is happening at that precise instance. Present tense for me creates a greater sense of tension and urgency. It's saying, things are not yet written. And with a story asking big questions about fate versus free will, that seemed apropos.
"Procedural journey?" Tell me more!
It's like this:
Blackbirds is… I want to say the sixth novel I wrote. (All five novels prior to this are, in fact, garbage and should not be spoke of lest they hear us talking about them.)
The big problem was, I couldn't finish it. I just kept writing myself into corners. Worse, even before I found myself nose to-narrative-corner, I took long circuitous routes to get to that blockage. Endlessly rambling plot. I convinced myself that this was a good thing because it was a "road novel," but this was just one of many writer-fed delusions that needed swift extermination.
The extermination came, though perhaps not swiftly. My sister wrote me one day to tell me she saw a screenwriting contest where you could win a year-long mentorship with a screenwriter – in this case, Stephen Susco, the guy who wrote both of the American Grudge adaptations (as well as Ketchum's Red adaptation).
His specialty was, in fact, adaptations. I thought, "Hey, it would be hilarious if I won the mentorship and then used it to workshop Blackbirds, thus turning the unfinished novel into a finished screenplay and then back into a finished novel." Of course, I had no interest in screenwriting and no talent in that regard and I expected nothing. Blackbirds – which then remained without a title – threatened to become just another useless junk drawer manuscript.
Except, oops, I won.
So, I got to spend the year workshopping the story into a script. Susco, it turns out, grew up like five minutes down the road from me and went to my high school, so we had that connection going for us, and I found his advice always spot on. His first and most critical piece of advice was the one I'd longresisted:
Outline your work.
Outline your work.
I thought, "Eeesh, that'll kill my story! It stomps on all the magic." Which is a lie, of course, a chumbucket brimming with gory gobbets of self-deception, and he made it clear that the business of screenwriting was very much about outlines. He told me to learn to write them and, even better, learn to love them.
A year later, the Blackbirds script was complete and the story was done and I spent time again turning it back into a novel. I followed the script (which was now itself a big giant outline) and deviated where appropriate, as films are not analogous to novels.
I think all told, between script and novel, Blackbirds went through eight or nine solid drafts. Some drafts operating as total rewrites.
And odd process, but it found its feet in the end. And now I know a lot more about writing novels (rather than thinking I knew a lot about wri
ting novels).
Okay, so outlining is key. But how do you do it? You're the king of online writing advice, so: what's Chuck Wendig's Official Guide to Outlining a Novel?
The king? I demand a crown! And a jester! And a throne made of the bones of failed writers! I shall sup from my goblet of ink and bark commandments at floundering penmonkeys everywhere! Fetch me my whisky, lackeys!
Ahem.
I do dispense what I call "dubious writing wisdom" at my website, terribleminds.com, but writers shouldn't hope to find any gospel there. That said, I think it's important that writers talk about what they do, and one of the things I talk a lot about is outlining. Some writers can get away with not outlining – "pantsing" is, I believe, the favored term – but some writers can't and then try anyway. I was one of those writers, as noted. Panster at heart, plotter by necessity.
Just the same, I don't outline in any one specific way. Every book demands a different outline. The one common technique between all my outlining is that I always like to identify my tentpoles – what five or ten plot points absolutely must happen for this whole thing to stand up? Plot points that, if I miss them, the whole tent falls down and smothers both writer and reader under a polyester death tarp.
Some books demand chapter-by-chapter outlines. Some ask for beat sheets or synopses. Every story is different and hungers for different preparation. Same as how the preparation of different meals demands a different mise en place.
What else did the scriptwriting workshop teach you? Something I find fascinating about scripts (whether they are for films, or television, or even comic books) is tha they're almost entirely dialogue. Do you think it is beneficial for writers of prose to at least make a small study of other forms of writing, such as scripts?
The best screenwriting workshop I attended was when I got accepted into the Sundance Screenwriting Lab with my writing partner, Lance. For several days we hunkered down with a number of top shelf screenwriters and incubated the very concept of story and character and what it all means. Very potent experience.
And what it taught me is that story is story. Whether we're talking games, novels, films, comics, whatever – story is story. It's still beholden to narrative ideas and rules and tradition. Sure, each format brings its own challenges and advantages, but at the end of the day a good story is a good story no matter the format.
It is beneficial, then, for writers to become more versatile and try other forms – from short stories to comic scripts to game material and back to novels. If anything, it teaches you to identify those things that work across the board, those things that speak to the heart of the reader and, even better, from the heart of the writer.
Consequently, what impact has the scriptwriting tangent had on your subsequent work after Blackbirds?
That's the funny thing – I kind of snuck into screenwriting through the back door hoping only to workshop a then-failed novel, and what happens? I end up a bonafide screenwriter, it seems. Had a short film go to Sundance (Pandemic in 2011), have a larger film from that transmedia storyworld in development (HiM or Hope Is Missing), took an original idea to pilot with my writing partner for TNT, had a transmedia project (Collapsus) nominated for a international digital Emmy award. Been a crazy ride. And all of it, really, thanks to stalling out with Blackbirds!
Each writer's journey is ever the crazy one. We all dig our own tunnels in and detonate the path behind us.
Chuck, thank you very much! Um… did you want me to detach the electrodes, or are you okay for a while?
No, no, I'm good here. The puddle of my own urine is somehow comforting. Like an old friend.
Adam Christopher is the author of EMPIRE STATE and the forthcoming SEVEN WONDERS, both from Angry Robot books. You can find him online at adamchristopher.co.uk and on Twitter as @ghostfinder.
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The death of me
An Angry Robot paperback original 2012
1
Copyright © Chuck Wendig 2012
Chuck Wendig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 85766 229 3
EBook ISBN: 978 0 85766 231 6
Artist: Joey HiFi
Set in Meridien by THL Design.
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Blackbirds
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
INTERLUDE
THREE
FOUR
INTERLUDE
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
INTERLUDE
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
INTERLUDE
TWELVE
PART TWO
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
INTERLUDE
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
INTERLUDE
TWENTY
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-ONE
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-TWO
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-THREE
PART THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
INTERLUDE
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
INTERLUDE
THIRTY-ONE
INTERLUDE
THIRTY-TWO
INTERLUDE
THIRTY-THREE
INTERLUDE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
INTERLUDE
FORTY-ONE
About the Author
Acknowledgments
CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher